The Indian past has never been more political. This newsletter questions the traditional (male, Hindu, upper-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!
“It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England…
The question now before us is simply...whether, when we can patronize sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense...history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of butter.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute on Education (1835)
Happy Tuesday, friends!
Long time, no see—we’re sorry! 2021 so far has been something. The farmers’ protests have now been ongoing for over a hundred days, and the question of agrarian reform has captured mainstream political attention in a way that it rarely has since Independence.
While still remaining one of India’s most complex policy challenges, the farm bills have also become inextricably linked to party loyalties and how one feels about the central government. This has made them a hot-button issue even for people who paid agrarian reform scant attention before. As a result, many Indians, us included, have looked to experts to inform ourselves, often adopting positions based on their opinions.
But in our own efforts to make sense of this debate, we were struck by a particular narrative around the legitimacy and validity of these protests, especially as framed by this government and an overwhelming number of (especially English language) opinion pieces—that the protesting farmers are andolanjeevis, reactionary agitators who live only to complain. They are resisting necessary change, the line goes, because they are scared, beholden to entrenched interests, and misled by toolkits and certain good girls gone bad.
In this telling, the protesting farmers don’t know what’s good for them, and are on the wrong side of History: that grand narrative of objective facts and universal progress, History with a capital H.
We are not economists or agriculturalists, and so we will refrain from getting into the actual merits of the three farm laws in question (though, full disclosure: we are both sceptical of ‘silver bullets’, and you’re generally unlikely to find us rushing to high five that famous Invisible Hand).
As students trained to think historically, however, it is hard for us to ignore certain colonial parallels. People who have no sense of History also have no sense, in turn, of how to properly plan or understand their future. This is why they must be ruled, instead of being given rights to determine the laws and institutions that impact their lives. Indeed, many of India’s anticolonial nationalists saw themselves as fighting to overcome the labels and judgements of History.
Farmers’ unions have already explicitly drawn the colonial connection, responding to the Prime Minister’s andolanjeevi comments by pointing out that “it is andolans [protests] that have liberated India from colonial rulers”. And initiatives such as Article14’s sedition database have made clear that this government does not hesitate to deploy the same authoritarian—dare we say it—toolkit that the British designed to prosecute independence activists.
But we want to go a little deeper, and discuss the “authority” that underlies any authoritarianism.
In a manner similar to the present debate, the British Empire justified its authoritarianism to itself for generations by insisting that it knew better than the ‘natives’ themselves what was good for them.
The modern discipline of History was crucial to this assumption of authority over Indian people—in large part because it allowed the British to convince themselves that they had developed more accurate and advanced ways to understand the truth about society.
History emerged as a social ‘scientific’ discipline—a theory of change over time, governed by universal laws—right around the time that the British East India Company began to experiment with different approaches to governing India by looking at its past. And as Tommy Macaulay—the reason this newsletter and so many of those opinion pieces are in English—so unabashedly makes clear in the quote above, the British were not impressed by what they found.
They cast indigenous modes of history-writing—itihasa, as distinct from History—as inferior sources of knowledge. As we will see, the intellectual practices of the colonised were dismissed and erased so effectively that they could no longer be used authoritatively by Indians themselves.
Because History’s verdict held that Indians were primitive, backward, and unchanging, the British maintained that imperialism must drag them—kicking and screaming if necessary—into modernity, especially when it came to agrarian reforms such as the Permanent Settlement.
This enduring understanding of the Indian past as ‘stuck’ and somehow unfinished has immense consequences for political projects and policy choices in the present. One example, we will show, is the idea that some Indians are ‘modern’ but others are not, and that modern Indians have the ability to speak for—and legislate upon, even without consultation—their compatriots who exist physically in the present, but are stranded developmentally in the past.
Accusations such as Macaulay’s, of treacle history and butter geography, can work equally effectively as a charge of creamy economics—because colonial habits of knowing can assume that the ordinary Indian cannot be expected to understand the rarefied laws of advanced social science that determine her existence.
But undoing these habits will not be easy. They are endlessly convenient to those who wish to conserve power for themselves—that is the nature of authority, in any age past or present. Gandhi, this country’s most famous andolanjeevi, consciously distinguished between itihasa and History, aligning the former with his politics of protest. It is no coincidence that the farmers have repeatedly invoked Gandhi’s satyagraha as both an example and ideal for their own movement—perhaps itihasa deserves a closer look.
Gandhi at the Champaran satyagraha, 1917. Source: The Wire.
The past is a foreign country
The deepest and oldest layer of the history of any society is mythological. In the Indian subcontinent, it was story cycles recited by bards at lavish and expensive yagnas—religious sacrifices held by rulers and elites—that often formed the core of epic texts (like the Mahabharata) which were compiled centuries later.
Dry administrative record-keeping can in many cases be said to be older than myth, because writing evolved first and foremost to keep track of revenues, taxes, tariffs, and payments. But merely keeping records is not the same as a narrative of the past that tries to explain—and often, depending on who is doing the explaining, justify—why society is the way that it is. That is the stuff of itihasa, a word we now use in many Indian languages as synonymous with ‘history’, but which originated as an early genre of writing in the form of “thus it was”.
Itihasa is a shorthand for genres—and philosophies—of great diversity. Indian societies developed a vast array of forms of historical consciousness, be it viewing the rise and fall of kings as the product of lila—divine play—or categorizing the vast expanse of time, kala, into categories that were both chronological and cosmological (like Kaliyuga, the degenerate epoch that portends the destruction of the universe).
One of the most distinctive features of these worldviews was that their concept of time was often cyclical, not linear: it’s no coincidence that in many northern Indian languages, the word kal means both today and tomorrow. Unlike linear time, cyclical time doesn’t easily lend itself to a view of history as one direct march from the past to the future—and therefore of people as being “behind” or “ahead” relative to one another.
However, ‘thus it was’ is often a useful base for ‘and so this is how it should be’. Stories about why people came to live in a particular place or governed themselves in a particular way, or why certain groups had the right to make laws or rule over others, became useful material for rulers trying to establish legitimacy and authority in the present. In this, ithasa is similar to History—regardless of the approach, it is true across cultures that often what leads us to look to the past is a vindication of our own place in the present.
But, unlike History, itihasa does not claim to be ‘objective’. The notion that ‘objective facts’ are universal and self-evidently valuable arrived with History—indeed, it was a weaponization of objectivity that enabled colonisers like Macaulay to portray their opinions about the past as expert estimations of “true history”.
Instead, Itihasa was ‘history’ as an ethical tradition—a series of normative mutual commitments and debates—and not an objective social science. There is a recognition, in the very form and constitution of itihasa, that there can be no ‘objective’ narrative of the past—because we are human, and our stories differ depending on who is telling them, to whom, and why.
Creative scholarship has made ample use of these traditions to help us understand the past better. Medieval vamsavalis—a kind of family chronicle—entwine mythology, astrology, and genealogy. They contain detailed accounts of state administration, political intrigue, and military conflict—listing marriages, adoptions, gifts, grants, titles, and privileges. A fabulous new open-access book by Nandini Chatterjee uses the family archives of a single zamindar family in Malwa to showcases how they used personal ties and relationships to establish the legitimacy of their claims to power over the course of three centuries of changing regimes—Mughal, Maratha, and British.
Similarly, genres like dana-stutis recorded acts of philanthropy with an explicit eye to praising (and exaggerating) a patron’s generosity. But they also contain a huge amount of information about the lives of everyday people like merchants, sailors, and courtesans. Indrani Chatterjee, for example, has used monastery records in the North East to demonstrate that women in the medieval period likely possessed far more independent wealth and sources of income than had been previously assumed.
Many ancient texts, like Banabhatta’s Harshacarita, or Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, can neither be read literally nor help us understand the ‘truth’ of what might have happened in these periods. But they can tell us how societies made meaning, reproduced memories, and established collective ideals.
This doesn’t make the information we get from these texts any less valid—in fact, it leaves us with more to talk about, more perspectives to piece together, and more sides of a debate to consider.
The British, of course, turned up their noses at almost all of it.
Colonial Cliffsnotes
Eighteenth-century British administrators like William Jones—who often worked as both scholars and soldiers—depicted India as a place with a long past, but with no equivalent History of that past.
Itihasa did not fit the supposedly rigorous standards of ‘rational’ historical writing that the new philosophies of the European Enlightenment promoted. In particular, positivist theories expounded by 19th century thinkers held that the very purpose of History—and therefore of British scholars working on India—was to separate ‘what happened’ from ‘what was imagined’.
Rudyard Kipling, for instance, derided the Mahabharata for its “monstrous arrays of nightmare-like incidents, where armies are slain, and worlds swallowed with monotonous frequency”—somewhat spectacularly missing the point of the epic. Not to be outdone, the author of The History of British India and our old friend James Mill proudly declared, “I am ignorant, and I am careless, of the blind mythology of the Barbarians”. (Oh, Jimmy. The first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one.)
But in separating ‘what happened’ from ‘what was imagined’, these theories of history also divided and reduced the entire diverse universe of available sources into the only two possible options the British could conceive of. The ‘Hindus’ produced fanciful epics that were no history at all, and were incapable of thinking historically. The ‘Muslims’ were ‘invaders’ who did have their own tradition of History-writing—such as the expansive genre of texts called tarikh—but a flawed, unreliable one.
This, of course, ignored vast bodies of historical evidence. But setting up this false binary also allowed the British to ignore, even erase, the significant overlaps and interactions that existed—regardless of religious affiliation—between the various historical traditions of South Asia. It divided (and, for Hindutva, still does) Hindus and Muslims into fundamentally different, antagonistic, primitive races with rigidly separate origin stories.
A page from the Razmnamah, the 1598/99 Persian translation of the Mahabharata, depicting the fight between Arjuna and Tāmradhvaja, while the gods enjoy the spectacle. Source: British Library (because, of course)
In any case, regardless of the tradition to which they belonged, indigenous accounts of the past were depicted as flawed sources that required expert European interpretation to be understood. Unsurprisingly, in their translations and commentaries, British scholars disparaged the worldview and traditions within which these texts were written and removed any details they didn’t like.
Instead, by interpreting indigenous knowledges ‘properly’, they could correct the course of the historical engine that had been set in motion backwards by the previous, ‘bad invaders’, and turn it around in the direction of ‘progress’, which they identified with Western civilization.
Even so, sadly, despite what we know about their prejudices and political interests, we are inescapably reliant on these long-ago ‘experts’, because they were the only ones in their time who had the material resources to collect, catalogue, and preserve our texts and artifacts. And, in that sense, they did give us our history. But they also made sure that our relationship with it was an abusive one.
The British conquest of the Indian subcontinent therefore did not just involve the capture of territories and revenue. As Manan Ahmed has noted in his new book The Idea of Hindustan, this conquest also involved the capture of texts and knowledges.
Alex and the angel
One of the most spectacular examples of this kind of intellectual capture is the story of Alexander Dow’s translation of the Tarikh-i-Firishta.
The history-writer Muhammad Qasim Firishta Astarabadi lived a hundred years before colonialism. A former captain of the palace guard, he wrote the thousand-page Tarikh-i-Firishta in Persian around 1610, at the court of the sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah II in the Deccan kingdom of Bijapur. Firishta’s history is widely considered the first comprehensive history of the subcontinent, and was so well-regarded and popular that it inspired almost fifty copycat histories in Urdu and Persian between the 18th and 19th centuries.
Source: Rare Books Society of India
Why so? The value of Firishta in his own time, Ahmed argues, lay in three things.
First, he made extensive use of older Indian texts like itihasa-puranas and the Mahabharata. He accepted these sources as having historical and moral meaning, putting to paid any notion that ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ knowledge traditions had no contact with each other. (Firishta’s own title for his tarikh was the ‘Naurasnama’, a name that deliberately salutes the Sanskritic aesthetic concept of rasa.)
Second, instead of writing from the narrow perspective of the rise and fall of a single line of kings or warlords or invaders, Firishta tried to write from the perspective of the subcontinent as a whole. He used his sources to open up the idea of Hindustan as a cohesive place: a political stage upon which multiple actors belonged, played, and interacted. His approach was diametrically opposite to the assumptions many make about ‘Islamic’ texts today: invaders writing about themselves, paying no attention to the natives, and seeing the land as something to loot and exploit.
Finally, Firishta, building off of many generations of indigenous thought, wrote about history as an ethical and philosophical discipline—historians were important because they checked political power, forecast and prophesied patterns, looked at the big picture beyond flattering elites, and imagined a community of readers and writers who were building upon a shared project for the future.
Cut to 1768. Alexander Dow, a lieutenant-colonel in the East India Company’s infantry division, rewrote and translated Firishta’s tarikh into the two-volume History of Hindostan. As the first major history of the subcontinent to emerge in English, it was massively successful upon publication. Dow was read and widely admired by David Hume, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Hegel—thinkers who were all crucial to the emergence of History as a modern discipline that could compare and rank the progress and advancement of different nations and groups of people through time. Indeed, Firishta’s tarikh is an unacknowledged but crucial source of many of the fundamental concepts of European social science.
But Dow got a lot wrong. He didn’t even know that Firishta was from Bijapur, let alone anything else—he assumed that his source was writing in Delhi. He made a lot of grand claims that didn’t hold up to investigation (he claimed falsely, for instance, that the Mughal emperor in Delhi had approved of his project). He also tried to undercut the value of Firishta’s history in and of itself, puffing up his own importance as a translator, by claiming that the tarikh tradition—far from being a kind of itihasa—actually contained no useful information about the majority of India’s people.
“It is for this presumed lack in Firishta”, Ahmed notes, “that Dow inserted before his rendition of Firishta his own dissertation on the ‘customs, manners, language, religion and philosophy of the Hindoos.’” This dissertation—a kind of preface—used Dow’s ahistorical and ill-informed observations about Hindus in his own time to argue that Hindus had always been meek, helpless, and backward. They were an unchanging race of people who were naturally disposed to authoritarian government. They lacked the ability to rule themselves.
Dow’s History of Hindostan with the 1768 dissertation.
Mark your calendars
There is something fundamentally important about the nature of power and authority in the works of Dow and his ilk—they established that precolonial texts, of any kind, could not speak for themselves, just like the colonised natives of that time could not speak for themselves. The things these texts said—and the culture they came from—had to be prefaced by gatekeepers, “authorities'' telling you what they really meant.
The impact of this cannot be overstated. History—that capital H—influences our administrative structures, our legal system, and even our calendars. The universal adoption of BCE—Before Common Era—across the globe is convenient, but the colonial process of adapting India’s past to the linear Christian view of time also became an occasion to rank and serialise groups of people as primitive, backward, or modern. It collapsed much of the subcontinent’s history into inaccurate comparisons (Chanakya as India’s Machiavelli, for instance).
Perhaps most damagingly, it has shaped our education system. There’s a reason the first thing that regimes do when they come into power is change school history textbooks and exam syllabuses. Authoritarian regimes, especially, strive to control citizens’ access to knowledge, their ability to think for themselves, and to come to their own conclusions. They may move on to more general censorship of news and media, but they begin with academic spaces (even if there are initial false starts). It feels significant that both “authority” and authoritarian” come from the Latin “author”, which can—depending on context—mean master, leader, or teacher.
The reforms following Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education and the all-consuming importance of the Indian Civil Service exam syllabus served to effectively displace itihasa approaches in favour of accounts of the past that served to justify British rule—obscuring our traditions and entrenching an educational ethos that characterises how history is taught in India even today. It is one that insists students accept the authority of their school textbooks—and which conflates irreverence and questioning with disrespect and rebellion.
Colonial ideas about history and progress still affect many of the automatic assumptions we make about how time passes, how different kinds of people inhabit the same space, and how we judge and compare the lives and experiences of others with our own. We have lived in and with these ideas for so long that they feel natural to us.
The waiting room of History
The colonial argument had always been that any relationship between peoples at different stages of History—other than purely economic transactions, conveniently—would degenerate into disorder and violence. India’s elite and middle classes—from which the country’s first anticolonial nationalists arose—largely appeared to internalise this.
The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that nationalists believed that India existed in the “waiting room of history”, struggling to catch up with Europe. Believing that their past lacked something crucial, they viewed the “Indian” as incomplete. “There was always…room in this story for characters who embodied, on behalf of the native, the theme of inadequacy or failure.”
Prathama Banerjee calls this the problem of the “primitive within”, with the country’s adivasi population bearing the worst brunt. Defined as ‘exceptional subjects’ by the British, hill and forest peoples such as the Santals, Bhils, Gonds, and Nagas were placed under direct and repressive government rule because they were deemed incapable of unmediated encounters with more advanced populations.
But this ‘primitivity’ was—as it often is—a product of policy, not a premise for it, even if History convinced many elite Indians otherwise.
To these self-consciously modern middle classes, the primitive and backward parts of India—the untaught and unwashed masses—could only be represented in the national present through the efforts of the relatively advanced classes. Not just intellectually, but also politically. Viewed against this context, it becomes possible to understand why Gandhi’s insistence on a mass politics of satyagraha proved so empowering for many Indians.
You can still see this thinking in how the contemporary Indian state treats adivasi populations as other and, often, lesser. And it is difficult to ignore the resonances with caste—Dalit scholars such Gopal Guru and Susie Tharu have been amongst the most prominent critics of such modes of thinking. (It does not help that most historical sources say little about adivasis, Dalits, or women, because their presence was systematically erased and distorted.)
Why are we still stuck with this narrative? We think it’s at least in part because Indian elites still hang the entire tapestry of “Indian history” between the simplistic and increasingly rickety poles of “medieval/modern” and “feudal/capitalist”. In post-1991 India, we’d add rural/urban to that list. We see similarities in the narrative around the farmers’ protests: agrarian populations presented as backward, stubbornly rejecting the ‘progress’ that their elite and expert representatives have prescribed for them.
Source: PTI
Times we can live in
Democracy is not just about forms of government, but also about the values that inform how we acquire knowledge. It is about questioning narratives, devolving authority, respecting lived experience, and listening to differences of opinion—all while we negotiate the shared project that is India.
Is there a danger that in internalising the colonisers’ linear notions of historical progress—and that those who claim ‘modernity’ can assume authority over those they deem ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’—we are repeating their mistakes? Does the narrative that farmers are resisting change that is ultimately good for them dismiss their lived experiences in favour of economic theories—much like the British dismissed what itihasa had to offer in favour of positivist theories that served to justify their own authoritarian rule?
We think it is helpful to see that people protesting against the farm bills aren’t necessarily trying to present their perspective as the singular and ultimate answer to India’s agrarian crises. They’re not pretending to an economic theory, and they don’t need social scientific validation of ‘progress’. They’re responding tactically to the specific reality in front of them, and trying to tell us how they can live. That’s exactly what many historical texts did, too.