The Indian past has never been more political. This newsletter questions the traditional (male, Hindu, dominant-caste, ‘secular’) orthodoxies presented in Indian schools’ history curricula. We investigate historical narratives by consulting sources and perspectives outside established media, and we review some of the most interesting academic books and articles currently languishing behind university paywalls.
There are no definitive answers here because we want to invite as many people as possible to an alternative conversation — on what it means ‘to do history’. If nothing else, we hope to convey that history matters, and to spark our readers’ interest in undertaking historical enquiries of their own.
Write to us with your thoughts and feelings at indianparallelcampaign@gmail.com!
Happy Sunday, friends!
Today is India’s 75th Independence Day, and The Parallel Campaign’s birthday! 🍰🎈✨
Both feel like momentous occasions, and a chance to reflect on why we started this newsletter and what we’ve learned along the way. That’s why we thought we would spend today’s issue looking back (as is our wont) — reflecting on our initial motivations for starting this project, how our inquiries have broadened and changed in the light of everything we learned writing to you this year, and what the future looks like for us.
We’re sorry, this is pretty much what passes for a birthday party these days. 🙃
Postage stamp issued in 1947 to commemorate India’s first Independence Day. Source: NDTV
Shoutout to Benny A
We began this yearlong project as a way of trying to question the distinction between an Indian ‘citizen’ and a ‘national’. The Constitution guarantees Indian citizens certain fundamental rights, but only ‘nationals’ are considered — especially, but not only, by this present government — to be entitled to or deserving of those rights.
How else do we make sense of a regime that, during the citizenship protests of 2019, called Indian citizens who were quoting from the Constitution — the document that is the very foundation of this republic — anti-nationals?
As many of us learned from the vicious persecution of those peaceful protesters, this distinction between citizen and national is of critical importance — when deemed anti-national, citizens that dare to exercise their freedoms can, at best, expect a callous disregard for their rights and, at worst, outright violence.
We chose to start on August 15 because Independence Day is the ultimate celebration of this fabled Indian national — a day about freedom for an abstract idea of India and its people — unlike Republic Day, which is about the Constitution that confers citizenship, and strives to translate the lofty promises of Independence into substantive guarantees. We are suckers for symbolism, and we felt that the timing could not be more fitting to kick off a newsletter on history — because this distinction between the national and the citizen, and indeed even the entire idea of a community of Indian nationals, has always been imagined with reference to the past.
Just look at the opening paragraph of Nehru’s inaugural address in 1947:
“Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment, we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity. At the dawn of history, India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and grandeur of her success and failures. Through good and ill fortune alike, she has never lost sight of that quest, forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of misfortunes and India discovers herself again.”
The unfurling of the National Flag by Jawaharlal Nehru at Red Fort, Delhi, August 1947. Source: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
The nation might be eternal, beginning at the very “dawn of history” — but the criteria of nationality are not. There is no objective characteristic that marks the “soul of a nation”, and so we turn to history to find a coherent basis — in theory, at least — on which to imagine who is part of this community. Based on your understanding of history — and your political agenda — you can assign importance to certain characteristics over others, and identify your imagined nation with those — be it religion, language, or ethnicity.
However, almost as soon as we began to puzzle out how the past can be used to legitimise regimes that prioritise national belonging over a robust notion of citizenship, we found ourselves contending with a sense of national self that perhaps too often imagines itself in relative terms.
In a world in which the nation-state is the hegemonic form, and where competition and comparison are intrinsic to how countries relate to each other, perhaps some version of this mental operation is inevitable (though worrying, given that our most alarming global challenge — climate change!!! — will require collective action.) But we think it is also because such competition and comparison have always been qualities inherent to history as a discipline — often to its detriment.
We compare ourselves both to other nations and to our own pasts in ways that can be reductive and lacking nuance or context. History becomes a race to see who was fastest and most enlightened, and reduces us to a posture of self-accusation and self-recrimination when the narratives don’t pan out to be as glorious as we would like.
In this form of comparison, we look to others to script our past and future selves — which is precisely the kind of lesson that nationalist history, in its own strange, perverse way, cements into our mindset.
The quintessential version of this perversity, of course, is our failure to see that we have internalised colonial standards of national progress even as we blame colonialism for the failures of India’s institutions — a venerated tradition within Indian politics, regardless of the political party in question. Our issues on the police and public health in particular critiqued this notion of an eternally culpable colonial legacy.
While every institution has been indelibly shaped by India’s colonial past, colonialism was not a historical period in suspended animation, divorced from what came before and after. Our occupiers interacted with, and often reinforced, prejudices and power dynamics that both preceded colonialism and have survived it — often with the violent sanction of an ostensibly democratic state. It is convenient — perhaps even comforting — to ignore this, but we think that is to prevent meanginful reform that may give the Indian state the ability to keep its promises to its own citizens.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, in this regard, recently wrote a thought-provoking piece on the concept of humiliation in Indian nationalism, arguing that a psychological sense of humiliation is an unarticulated but important part of India’s post-colonial trauma.
Contrary to V. S. Naipaul’s belief that “out of the encompassing humiliation of British rule, there will come to India the ideas of country and pride and historical self-analysis”, Mehta makes the point that humiliation was deployed not in the service of national unification and regeneration but, especially in light of Partition, a divisive tactic directed against India’s own citizens. (We think this is one crucial lens through which to interpret yesterday’s declaration that 14 August — Pakistan’s Independence Day — is now “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day”.)
Mehta goes on: “The loud declamations of India being a Vishwaguru and a new aggressive nationalism, are not signs of a new confidence. They are signs of a repressed sense of humiliation that is unable to confront its true sources: India’s relative powerlessness and its inability to give most of its citizens a dignified life. So it engages in a fantasy of overcoming humiliation, in history, in culture, in internal division.”
What is compare-and-contrast, then, but another kind of divide-and-rule?
Perhaps that is why possibly our favourite comment that we received all year was on our piece about love jihad, that epitome of insecure comparison, which argued that there has been a long tradition — famously including V. D. Savarkar — of using the Hindu woman’s body to foment religious conflict. A user named ‘hindu warrior’ had this to say: “this is a propaganda website for pakistans ISI. i will be reporting this to the authorities post haste”. Well, at least the ISI is investing in historical research even if no one else is.
Source: Twitter / Daak
While this insecurity can sometimes be amusing to witness, it can also be terribly cruel. These past few weeks, for instance, as India has celebrated its best-ever showing at the Olympics and cheered at the resurrection of an old dominance in hockey, there has also been a vicious rejection of poor, female, North-Eastern, or Dalit athletes who ‘humiliated’ us by failing to deliver us our ‘promised’ medals — reminding each and every member of these groups how precarious the conditions of our belonging and inclusion under such a nationalism can be.
Deploying history in service of an imagined ‘national’ community, playing upon this instinct to compete and compare, creating historical divisions to distract from present shortcomings: these are not the sole preserve of Hindutva or this present government. It is true to varying degrees of all nationalist histories and political agendas, and in every country.
In fact, we named this newsletter The Parallel Campaign because we were inspired by Robert Musil’s exploration of how any single, simple, narrative of national history — no matter whose, or how empowering or comforting it may seem — dooms us at the outset to fail at resolving the hatreds and divisions that plague us. It is our normative bias, at least, that these should be resolved.
But even setting aside (to the extent that this is possible) our normative bias, we did often tend to focus our work on the narratives favoured by this government and Hindutva — especially in our issues on the schism between Hindi and Urdu, and love jihad. This is because we think that there is no power more ascendant in India today, and because it is one that cares more about history — and the tight control of historical narratives — than any that have come before it. (Here’s an open-access article by the ever-combative Audrey Truschke about how Hindutva is investing in ‘remaking’ the past as a means of advancing a modern political project.) As we’ve said at the start of every single one of our issues, the Indian past has never been more political.
You need to calm down
Intellectual rationales aside, however, the driving force of this newsletter has always been an extremely personal and emotional one. In the wake of the first lockdown, we really struggled — and honestly, still do — with how our systemic and personal privileges could exist alongside our feelings of powerlessness, especially given how thoroughly the pandemic hollowed out the promises inherent to the very idea of independent India.
We were infuriated by the vainglorious fog of satisfaction that seemed to descend upon our WhatsApp groups every time you-know-who was reported to have executed a ‘masterstroke’ — even as vast numbers of Indians experienced a devastation that analysts are still struggling to fully reckon with. We were frustrated by an implicit consensus for social and political change that seemed to say: “Your role in this nation’s glorious history is to sit back and cheer (oh, and don’t forget to donate to a temple — or else!)”
As people who love this country, we were enraged by the sheer staying power of historical narratives that sought to justify government apathy, cruelty, and aggressive, exclusionary visions of nationalism — and that were clearly failing all but a minority of Indians, with the worst betrayals reserved for those most oppressed by history.
And so we set out, in our own limited way, to challenge the control of these narratives. There are other, much more urgent, demands on the country’s attention, but we think that this sort of reimagining is important to do alongside — for our ability to participate in our own public welfare, and to feel at home in our own homes.
Ultimately, and above all else, we wanted to state for the record things that we felt should not be forgotten.
Our most recent issues, on the pandemics and public health failures of India’s past, focused particularly on this duty not to forget. We wondered how any of us, in the face of such devastation and grief, would be able to hold on to our memories and articulate a path forward at the same time. After all, it matters not just that we remember, but how we do so — given that our present government is nothing if not masterful at redirecting remembered feelings of humiliation and resentment at convenient, imaginary targets, and calling that history.
Dominant narratives have always aimed to ‘make’ history out of thin air in this way. They privilege political speculation at the expense of detail, and delight in filling evidentiary gaps with hateful screeds. The founding myths of rightwing nationalism in particular have nothing to do with painstaking and close work upon records, artefacts, or even other less conventional (but we think equally valid) historical sources like poetry and painting.
But these narratives survive because of how history has always been understood and discussed in schools and public life more generally. We are taught that good Indian students in history class — and, when we grow up, good Indian citizens — don’t question authority.
This is why, when we think of much of Indian history, we imagine the badgering, know-it-all uncles that so many South Asians have encountered all our lives. The drunk uncle of Indian history assumes authority for himself as natural and inevitable — often on the basis of little more than personal prejudice and a passing familiarity with the news. He cannot distinguish irreverence and questioning from rebellion and disrespect, and lashes out at anyone who opposes him.
That lashing out, we think, is the particular quality of a power that is both insistent and insecure, both forceful and fragile — built as it is on incredibly shaky foundations, it works especially hard to crush dissent and critical thinking in the name of not ‘hurting sentiments’. This can make it extremely difficult to resist and defend against.
In part, that’s because simplicity — what happened, who to blame, who to hate, what to do next — is so entrenched as an assumed virtue. We don’t want the past to remain a foreign country; we want it to tell us exactly who we are and exactly where we’re headed. We want to skip over the present, with its contradictions and uncertainties, entirely, because if we pay attention to who we are and where we are now, the desired future suddenly becomes that thing we all want to avoid — a consequence of our own actions.
The protests at Shaheen Bagh in 2019. Source: National Herald
But equally, it is also because — as we pointed out in our issue on the farmers’ protests — modern India’s elite, and its self-consciously ‘middle-class’ identity, shares many of the automatic assumptions of our colonisers, especially about the ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’ parts of India. Indeed, many owe their elite status to historic collaboration with the British — and we definitely don’t want to think about that too hard, or even talk about it. There is in much of independent India’s history a sense that the ‘masses’ don’t know what’s good for them, and should only be represented — intellectually and politically — through the efforts of the relatively ‘advanced’ classes.
In these and other beliefs — like those of an Indian state that sees and prioritises “community” interest rather than individual, particularly when that individual is a woman, as we discussed in our issues on inter-faith marriage, and on the gender tropes that characterised the Hindi-Urdu divide — it is clear that we have lived in and with certain Orientalist ideas for so long that they feel natural to us.
Paying attention to complexity and structural factors in history — setting our ‘great founding fathers’ aside and studying movements, actors, ideas, and forms of society and politics that are alien to us, that have no place in contemporary India’s aggressive, 56-inch chest-beating model of patriotic citizenship — can help us to reset these habits of mind.
It allows us a reprieve from an unendingly hysterical, amnesiac news cycle, and to instead situate politics and culture within a broader context that helps us to better understand our complex and often messy present — and which may in turn make it possible for us to imagine other possible futures for our society in ways that are fresher, deeper, fuller, richer, kinder.
At its best, history can help us to remember better — to think and to feel. And hopefully, it can help us to develop a sense of national self that is not too insecure or fragile to truly reckon with the frailties of our past, so that we may do and be better in our future.
Aaj jaane ki zidd na karo
What next for us? We are both set to enter a more rigorous phase of our respective academic follies — one of us now has to actually write her PhD dissertation (alas), and the other is about to begin an MPhil in political science! Sadly this means that, erratic as we were even at the best of times in this dark and confusing year (though we did just about manage to average one issue a month!), we will be taking a step back and posting things on this newsletter even more infrequently in the coming months.
Above all else, self-awareness. Source: The New Yorker
But post we will — we promise. For one thing, we didn’t get to write about everything we wanted to. And for another, the historical scholarship coming out of South Asia gets more exciting by the day (a history of how caste operates in the city; a work on the origins of ‘merit’ in our elite institutions; an exploration of how the global concept of ‘the child’ influenced Indian child marriage, just for starters). Stay tuned especially for a jhakaas little item-number we’ve been planning about the history of Hindi cinema’s relationship with censorship!
There is also the disgraceful state of our archives and state-managed libraries to contend with — especially as the pandemic has disrupted research and publishing everywhere, and the Centre is moving to demolish a part of our National Archives in Delhi. It costs less than you’d think to digitize and preserve ancient manuscripts — see this recent grant from the British Library to the Raja of Mahmudabad to help restore the more than 80,000 rare Arabic and Persian documents stored at his ancestral estate in Uttar Pradesh.
The National Archives of India. Source: Scroll
But, as with so many of our institutions, there is an utter lack of will to take on this work or to support those who do. This even as vast swathes of India’s history remain unstudied or understudied — sometimes because new information is being subject to deliberate repression or neglect (check out this fantastic longform read about how excavations in Tamil Nadu are challenging the idea of ancient India having been a ‘Vedic civilization’).
In the meantime, there are a number of other platforms that are doing wonderful work popularizing scholarship on South Asia. To name just a few: Chapati Mystery, Himal Mag, India Ink, Brown History, South Asian Legal History Sources, borderlines, and Frances Pritchett’s South Asia Study Resource. And our own work will remain as a little archive on Substack!
We really can’t thank you enough for all of your feedback and support. It would be no exaggeration to say that writing this newsletter got both of us through this past year. There have been many, many, wonderful and clever humans who have been kind enough to make time to engage deeply with our work — and so many more readers than we’d ever dared to hope. Please, write to us and let us know how you think this project should evolve in the coming months and years — and if you know of anyone whose historical writing deserves a lovely audience, get us in touch! We hope reading about history has made you as happy as it did us.
Thank you for your efforts in producing such an eminently readable newsletter about what it means to be "Indian". Many aunties and uncles have been upset by what I have learnt from the Campaign. Some have even had their views changed for the better! I hope that you can continue to write these well into the future because it is fun, and even inspiring, to see young people write about our history in such an accessible manner. Good luck with your academic pursuits! And even better luck with adding to our understandings of the past, present, and future. :D
Tanvi and Niya, yet again, thank you for all the work you've done on this to bring us closer to our past. Your unending thoughtfulness, reflected in all the issues, continues to make its presence felt even in how you say your temporary byeee, capturing the essence of the newsletter and reminding us of the enemies at the gates of our perception that are likely to doom us. I really hope you continue to do so in future in ways that are exciting for you--yeah, not suggesting a podcast, but a Netflix special may be? If that does happen, I'm greatly looking forward to you pulling off a Bo-Burnham-Inside-Star-Picture-in-Picture and reflecting on these issues in future again, helping us understand where we would be at that moment in time. I'm excited for what you'd say in 2024, and in 2050, and in between, when we'd have to continue contending with our past and with what it means for our future--something we might need even more as we listen to someone arguing on television that climate change was a good thing, after all. May be it will be a debate about about giving a peace prize for using blockchains to melt the arctic icecaps completely and bringing down the cost of global shipping all-year-round to allow low income families to consume cheaper products within their means. Or may be--more likely(?)--it will continue to be a daily plebiscite about what it means to be Indian.