Indians need to reclaim their history.pdf

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French vs Taseer: Indians need to reclaim their historyby R Jagannathan May 1, 2012

Invading the Sacred, authors Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicolas, and

Aditi Banerjee explain how Hindu-phobic western academics have been

systematically undermining core icons and ideals of Indic culture and thought.

For instance, scholars of this counterforce have disparaged theBhagavad Gita asa dishonest book; declared Ganeshas trunk a limp phallus; classified Devi as

the mother with a penis and Shiva as a notorious womaniser who incites

violence in India; pronounced Sri Ramakrishna a pedophile who sexually

molested the young Swami Vivekananda; condemned Indian mothers as being

less loving of their children than white women; and interpreted the bindias a

drop of menstrual fluid and the ha in sacred mantras as a womans sound

during orgasm.

So when French grandly pronounces that Literature should not be constrained

by parochial rules of engagement, self-censorship or the pious, self-affirmingorthodoxies of social media. Creativity should not be stifled by finger-wagging,

we need to take it with a pinch of salt.


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But the ground reality is

He also says, Let the Who should write about India? question be consigned to

the dustbin of history. Let Xuanzang (Chinese monk who visited India in the

seventh century) go free, to write the books he wants. Let India accept the rest of

the world, as the rest of the world accepts India.

As a motherhood statement, no one can fault this. But the ground reality is that

Indias contentious past is already a battleground for various caste, communal

and regional points of view. Several narratives of Indian history from the

Brahminical to the Dalit to the gender versions of Indias past, present and future

are competing for legitimacy. It is this Indian retelling of Indian issues and

Indian solutions to these antagonisms that will solve the countrys problems, not

western interventions to take advantage of a countrys faultlines to maintain its

supremacy. An India that is undergoing several social, cultural and attitudinal

upheavals at the same time will be touchy till it comes to grips with its past.

This is why Frenchs cribs about India giving less than 1,000 foreigners

citizenship and comparing it to Britains 2,50,000 is completely wrongheaded. He

says: While there are millions of Indians in Canada, Europe and the USA,

comparatively few foreigners live in India. Immigration is nearly impossible.

Under post-26/11 visa regulations, many old-school Indophiles have been

chased out of the country. The home ministry gives citizenship to about 1,000

people a year, whereas Britain, for example, gives it to around 250,000.

There is no question India must welcome more foreigners to come and settle here.

But French should not compare apples and oranges. He cannot equate the


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diffidence of a former victim of colonialism, which is suspicious of the motives of

white-skinned foreigners to the confidence of a former colonial master inviting

the natives for some jobs back home. (In any case, these policies are now being

reversed on racial lines. Britain is hardly as welcoming of Indians as it once was.

And President Obama is busy denying qualified Indians their H1B visas. RacistEurope is fighting an imaginary Muslim invasion).

Moreover, the point is this: Indians going abroad are trying to escape the

countrys poverty and seeking better lives; foreigners trying to settle here may not

have the same uncomplicated motives. From fundamentalists who want to

convert idol-worshipping heathens to Italian do-gooders who get themselves

kidnapped by Maoists (causing immense trouble for the Odisha government), we

get our share of foreigners who only increase Indian insecurities. In any case,

India actually accepts millions of foreigners as settlers here Nepalis andBangladeshis, for example. It is only the occidental kinds that are viewed with

suspicion.

The recent case ofEnrica Lexie, where Italian gunmen on board the ship shot

dead two Indian fishermen off the Kerala coast and then claimed they cannot be

tried here, is a good example of the kind of racism that makes Indians naturally

suspicious of foreigners. If these Italians had shot two Americans off the coast of

Florida, would they have refused to be tried under US law? Unlikely. It is only the

dark-skinned Indian law they refuse to be judged by. The attempts to use priests

and religious identities to escape the clutches of India law is particularly

deplorable. The Supreme Court is not amused.

Aatish Taseer, in another article in theHindustan Times, offers the right riposte

to Frenchs valid, but not overly insightful, observations. To Frenchs call (Let

India accept the world, as the rest of the world accepts India) Taseer replies: I

would say that India, if anything, accepted the world too easily, too

unquestioningly; it allowed the world to shape its idea of itself. And if now, in a

different time, there is a pushback, it is only to be expected, and even welcomed,

so long as it is the accompaniment to intellectual labour.

That bit about intellectual labour is important, for Indians have been lazy about

controlling their cultural narratives, but more of that later.

The paradox of India is that we have had a 5,000-year unbroken civilisational

history without producing even one authentic historian worth the name who has

written about India and Indians in the sub-continents own terms.

Says Taseer: Few places in the world have as long a history as Indias and so few

historians. Fifty-odd centuries, full of big impulses and no one we can describe as

an Indian Herodotus. No Tacitus. No Ibn Khaldun. No equivalent of the Chineseannals. As someone whose primary motivation for learning Sanskrit was to form


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an idea of the classical past through the epics, charitas and the Kavya literature

of the first millennium, a little bit of Kalhana let me say that the void is real

enough. And probably no country has had to depend as much on foreigners, and

later its conquerors, for historical information as India.

What this absence of domestic scholarship on Indias history has meant the

fairly coherent histories produced by Indians in the 19th and 2oth centuries have

been dismissed as communal versions by Left-wingers and even western scholars

is a deep sense of humiliation, says Taseer. It is humiliating not to know ones

history; and that humiliation, when one meets a foreigner with a more intimate

knowledge of your past than you possess yourself, can turn to wretchedness and

anger.

He observes: When you dont study your past, you expose yourself to people

distorting it.

Taseer does not blame western authors like French, whose wife is Indian, for

writing their books, but says Indians have only themselves to blame for allowing

the void to be filled by others. He concludes by pointing out that Patrick

French is right: there is defensiveness these days, there is over-sensitivity and

perhaps a degree of xenophobia too. But in a country which has bended so easily

to the will of foreigners in the past, and where foreigners are still invisibly able to

occupy positions of great power, both politically and intellectually, a little

xenophobia is not such a bad thing.

The question, though, remains: why has India not produced scholarship of its

own, whether in history or any social sciences? Why, as Taseer asks, has there

been no Indian Herodotus?

Rajiv Malhotra, who reverses the gaze from East to West in his bookBeing

Different, suggests that the Judeo-Christian faiths are history-centric in that all

their central tenets come from a historical figure, and a book that results from

that historical event. He implies that since their entire faith depends on a

historical fact they guard and treat their histories like the crown jewels. They

also have dual standards: their history is fact, ours myth.


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A Yogi feeding a peacock. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Indic faiths like Hinduism, Buddhism or Jainism (Malhotra calls

them dharmic traditions) dont require any such zealous guarding of facts or

events, since the emphasis is on embodied learning and personal experience. If all

of history were, one day, to become falsified, the dharmic traditions would haveno trouble rediscovering their old truths through inner and outer engagement,

but the west would not know the meaning of what it is to be religious at all. For all

of it comes from history and holy books.

This is why history is not just an academic preoccupation, but central to the state

and its power. Malhotra quotes historian Ranajit Guha as observing that in the

west, state and historiography came to form the strategic alliance known as world

historythe control of the past is essential to that strategymore significantly,

the story, as history, was dislodged from civil society and relocated in the state.

This possibly explains why in India itihasa that blend of history and popular

narrative created to convey an essential truth has been given primacy over

history-writing. But the drawbacks of this are clear. Says Malhotra, a lack of

political consciousness is more characteristic ofdharmic practitioners, in part

because of the deficiency of institutions and associations that foster collective and

historically rooted religious identities.

There is, however, another reason why even after independence Indians have not

taken to scholarship. Thanks to the excesses of Brahminical and upper class

orthodoxy in the past, post-colonial India has developed an acute anti-intellectual

bias. Upper caste arrogance has made the victims of caste prejudice intensely


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suspicious of intellectual pursuits which is why we went to the IITs and IIMs,

eschewing the study of the humanities and social sciences.

This is the intellectual gap that western scholars have rushed to fill for their own

narrow ends fuelling resentment in India. That fact that there may be a PatrickFrench with no narrow agenda of his own is the exception that proves the

rule. (Note: I have not read Frenchs book, and so I cant pronounce on his

writing).

However, Malhotra and other Indians have been trying to plug this gap and

reclaim scholarship on India and Indian culture from the stranglehold of western

academics, who have been prone to abuse their power to denigrate Indian

traditions.

If Patrick French were more conversant with this use and abuse of Indian culture

in western hands, he might have realised what the sensitivity is all about before

cutting loose.

But theres no doubt: Indians need to get more serious about their history, culture

and literature. If they dont, theyll soon be history themselves.

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Indians need to reclaim their history.pdf