The History of History: Politics and Scholarship In Modern India

321 Pages·2003·2.414 MB·English

by  Vinay Lal

History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India - Oxford Sc... https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/...
The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India AUTHORS
Affiliations are at time of print
Vinay Lal
publication.
ABSTRACT Vinay Lal, author
History and historians in India have gained prominence in the public sphere in recent years. The Associate Professor,
undisputed ascendancy of history in modern India may be briefly gauged by two developments. Department of History,
University of California, Los
The first was Amartya Sen's keynote address at the annual meeting of the Indian History Congress
Angeles, USA
in early January 2001. Sen warned against the manipulation of history in the service of sectarian
political interests, and the diminishing of India's ‘magnificently multireligious and heterodox
history’ at the hands of bigots. The second was the controversy over the overt politicization of the
Indian Council of H ... More
Keywords: history, India, historians, Amartya Sen, Indian History Congress, Indian Council of Historical Research,
Hindutva, politics
BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
Print publication date: 2005 Print ISBN-13: 9780195672442
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195672442.001.0001
Contents
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Front Matter
Title Pages
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
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History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India - Oxford Sc... https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/...
1 The History of Ahistoricity
2 Contours of the Past, Shape of the Future
3 History as Holocaust
4 Subalterns in the Academy
3 Aryavarta and Silicon Valley
Postscript
End Matter
Select Bibliography
Index
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Title Pages
The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in
Modern India
Vinay Lal
Print publication date: 2005
Print ISBN-13: 9780195672442
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195672442.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) The History of History (p.ii)
(p.iii) The History of History
(p.iv)
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Title Pages
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Dedication
The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in
Modern India
Vinay Lal
Print publication date: 2005
Print ISBN-13: 9780195672442
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195672442.001.0001
Dedication
(p.v) for Bernard S. Cohn
scholar extraordinary,
radical democrat,
teacher,
friend
and
for
Ishaan Satej and Avni Sunaina
in the hope that
as they grow up they will
not eschew ‘myths’ for ‘history’ (p.vi)
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Acknowledgements
The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in
Modern India
Vinay Lal
Print publication date: 2005
Print ISBN-13: 9780195672442
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195672442.001.0001
(p.ix) Acknowledgements
Through much of the substance of the five chapters that comprise this volume
has appeared in print before in various journals, some of which are with extreme
difficulty if at all available in India, the entire manuscript has been thoroughly
revised and much new material has been added. However, it is not the mere
inclusion of new information, or the greatly enhanced length of the chapters in
their revised form, as well as the new introduction to the volume, which lend to
the book, taken as a whole, an entirely different set of characteristics than what
is encountered in any of the single chapters, which show their origin as discrete
pieces of scholarship. Historiography has not developed as a field of inquiry in
India even down to the present day, and I am not aware of its inclusion in
courses of study in postgraduate programs in history at Indian universities.
Though there have been previous studies of Indian historiography before, they
tend to be collections of biographies of leading historians, or enumerative and
descriptive in their treatment of historical works. Needless to say, I believe that
the singularity of this present study arises from not only the wide scope of my
inquiry, which brings together under one rubric widely divergent strands of the
study of Indian history, but from the philosophical positions I have adopted and
from my insistence on giving full consideration to the politics of knowledge.
This book has been ten years in the making, though the earliest version of
Chapter I dates back to an earlier date, more precisely to the spring of 1988. I
remember the enthusiasm with which the core of what would later become
Chapter I was then received by Ashis Nandy, Roby Rajan, and my brother Anil,
and am grateful to them for their critical reading of the text. It was another
seven years before I endeavored to bring that paper into print.
(p.x) An earlier version of Chapter I was first published as ‘On the Perils of
Historical Thinking: The Case, Puzzling as Usual, of India’, Journal of
Commonwealth and Post-colonial Studies 3, no. 1 (Fall 1995):79–112; a more
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Acknowledgements
elaborate version, nonetheless considerably different from the present version,
appeared in the Journal of the Indian Council for Philosophical Research, Special
Issue: Historiography of Civilizations (June 1996):95–137, under the title of
‘History and the Possibilities of Emancipation: Some Lessons from India’.
Chapter II is a revised version of a chapter that appeared in India Briefing,
edited by Philip Oldenburg and Marshall Bouton (New York: M. E. Sharpe for
Asia Society, 1999), under the title ‘History and Politics’; the opening section, in
particular, is considerably altered. I am grateful to Philip Oldenburg for his
incisive remarks on this chapter in its earlier incarnation, and I have followed
many of his concrete suggestions. Dipesh Chakrabarty kindly shared with me
some of his thoughts on the political debates over history that took place in India
in the 1960s and 1970s.
Chapter III was first published under the title of ‘The Discourse of History and
the Crisis at Ayodhya: Reflections on the Production of Knowledge, Freedom,
and the Future of India’, in Emergences, nos. 5–6 (1993–4):4–44. I am grateful to
my friends, especially Teshome Gabriel, Jim Wilgten, and Patrick Malloy, in what
was then the ‘Emergences’ collective at UCLA, for fruitful discussions on
portions of this chapter; and I would also like to express my gratitude to one of
the anonymous readers for Oxford University Press who alerted me to the
necessity of placing the debates between historians over Ayodhya in their wider
context. I would like to thank my student, Mitch Numark, for a careful reading of
Chapter IV, an abbreviated version of which was first presented by invitation at
an international conference, held in Buffalo in August 1999, on ‘Turning Points
in Historical Thinking: A Comparative Perspective’. It has since been published
as ‘Walking with the Subalterns, Riding with the Academy: The Curious
Ascendancy of Indian History’;, Studies in History (New Series) 17, no. 1 (2001):
101–33, and I am grateful to the journal's editor, Neeladri Bhattacharya, for his
comments.
The final chapter first took shape as a paper presented at the annual conference
on South Asian studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in February
1999; at the invitation of Stephan Astourian, holder of the William Saroyan Chair
in Armenian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, a lengthier version of the
paper was presented at a conference at Berkeley on ‘Diasporas: Transnational
Identity and the Politics of the Homeland’, November 1999. I am (p.xi)
extremely grateful to David Palumbo-Lin, and in particular Khachig Tölölyan,
who offered a learned commentary, for incisive comments on Chapter 5. Yossi
Shain's enthusiasm for my work on diasporic internet histories is still fresh in my
mind. The financial assistance of the Asian American Studies Center, UCLA,
which helped in the completion of Chapter V, is gratefully acknowledged.
The intellectual friendship of Frederique Apffel-Marglin has also meant a lot to
me in recent years, and she offered a perceptive commentary on the entire
manuscript. My friend, Henry Ranjeet of Kolam Travels; Chennai, is an
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Acknowledgements
intellectual maverick and iconoclast, and his unflagging interest in my work
prodded me to move on with this book. No words are adequate to describe the
intellectual support that I have received from Ashis Nandy over the course of the
last decade and more. He has always displayed the keenest interest in the
arguments put forth in this work. Some of his writings have been critical in
helping to shape my thoughts on the enterprise of history in India, and those
familiar with his writings will at once recognize the intellectual debt I owe to
him. I had been familiar with Gandhi's writings long before I encountered the
work of Nandy, but Nandy offered a fresh perspective on Gandhi, one that was
immensely desirable in an India where many Gandhians and politicians had
succeeded in transforming one of the few great dissenters of our times into a
dull, pious, sanctimonious, moralizing ‘role model’, the very ‘Father of the
Nation’. Gandhian studies took the politics out of Gandhi. Of contemporary
Indian intellectuals, no one has contributed more than Nandy to putting a spark
back in Gandhi.
I hope this book will resonate with Shiv Viswanathan, Ramchandra Gandhi,
Douglas Lummis, Gustavo Esteva, Claude Alvares, Ziauddin Sardar, and other
deprofessionalized academics and dissenting intellectuals whose writings have
also been inspirational, or whose friendship has sustained me in the belief that
the insights of this book are not without some promise. I am hopeful that this
book will endear itself as well to people outside the profession of history, indeed
outside the academy, but expect that its demonstrable engagement with a broad
swathe of historiography will also persuade professional historians to take its
arguments seriously.
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Introduction
The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in
Modern India
Vinay Lal
Print publication date: 2005
Print ISBN-13: 9780195672442
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195672442.001.0001
Introduction
History in the Ascendant Mode
Vinay Lal
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195672442.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This book explores the politics underlying the rise of history to prominence in
modern India. It offers an account of the nationalist obsession with history in
nineteenth-century India, examines the relationship between nation-building and
the making of Indian history, and discusses the emergence of subaltern history
in relation to strand of Indian historiography known as the Cambridge School. It
also looks at the debate between historians over the origins of the Babri Masjid,
recent attempts to communalize such figures as Vivekananda, the attempted
legitimization of ‘fringe’ historical scholarship, and the revisionism of those who
purport to establish Aryanism as the only foundation of Indian civilization.
Finally, this book extends the discussion of Indian histories to those being
generated in cyberspace in the North American Indian and specifically Hindu
diaspora.
Keywords:   history, India, politics, nation-building, subaltern history, Cambridge School,
historiography, Babri Masjid, Hinduism, cyberspace
Almost nothing must appear more remarkable to a student of the social sciences,
or of the wider intellectual scene, in India than the recent ascendancy of
‘history’ and the elevation of historians to a position of public recognition if not
eminence. Outside the hard sciences, as well as those disciplines, such as
economics, which have self-consciously fashioned themselves after the sciences
and mathematics, and in all of which Indian achievements have acquired
something of an international dimension, no discipline has gained as much
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Introduction
visibility as has history in the course of the previous two to three decades. Its
prominence in the public sphere in recent years may be briefly gauged by two
developments. Amartya Sen, whose Nobel Prize in Economics conferred on him
not merely instant recognition but the kind of celebrity that is generally reserved
only for Bollywood stars, cricketing heroes, ‘colourful’ Indian politicians, and
authors of multi-million rupee scams, consented to deliver the keynote address
at the annual meeting of the Indian History Congress in early January 2001.
Meetings of the Indian History Congress in recent years have not been without
some excitement, and it may also well be the case that Sen, who has lately
acquired something of a habit of uttering oracular pronouncements on a diverse
array of subjects—from the films of Satyajit Ray, the humanism of Tagore, and
Indian calendrical systems to secularism, the mode of scientific reasoning, the
virtues of reason, and the perils facing democracy—and shows no disinclination
to distance himself from the reputation gradually accruing to him as the
repository of wisdom, relished the opportunity to speak from yet another
platform of authority. But that he would at all consent to give the keynote
address for a profession to which he is (p.2) a relative outsider points to the
public visibility of the profession just as much as it suggests the importance that
someone such as Sen has come to attach to the discipline of history. Warning
against the manipulation of history in the service of sectarian political interests,
and the diminishing of India's ‘magnificently multireligious and heterodox
history’ at the hands of bigots, Sen made himself heard: his remarks were
reported widely in the press and received profuse circulation in cyberspace.1
Only some months before Sen's lecture, the most intense controversy raged over
the overt politicization of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), a
national body formed to promote historical thinking and research. Less than a
week after Murli Manohar Joshi was appointed Union Minister for Human
Resources Development, he promoted B. R. Grover, an historian of no great
standing, to the chairmanship of the ICHR. Having previously served in the
ICHR for twelve years and then gone into retirement, Grover was plucked from
near obscurity and again nominated to its membership in June 1998 after the
Bharatiya Janata Party's ascendancy to power. His political predilections,
according to one commentator, can be surmised from his voting record at the
Indian History Congress, the most prestigious association of professional
historians: he apparently opposed a resolution against communal strife in 1984,
and likewise voted, in 1987, against a resolution which objected to the
politicization of history in the media. Grover only came to be known to a
somewhat wider public during the controversy over the Babri Masjid, when he
affiliated himself with the position advocated by the VHP and other proponents
of what might be termed ‘the temple theory’.2 Thus, considering Grover's
background, it cannot have been a complete surprise when the ICHR, with
Grover at the helm and the BJP government looking over its shoulder, announced
in early 2000 its decision to withdraw from publication two volumes, by the well-
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