What is History?

History was an endlessly boring subject in school. We crammed sacksful of dates that related to distant events, none of which made any sense. Textbooks listed – never discussed – causes of these allegedly momentous events. They enumerated attributes of various civilisations, empires, and dynasties, not unlike properties of elements in Mendeleev’s periodic table - only more lifelessly. We were to consign these to memory and pour them out in examinations. History was a matter of dates, names of rulers and their kingdoms; not a narrative or an endeavour to understand past.

History and story come from the same Greek word historia, meaning enquiry, i.e., knowledge acquired by investigation. Many languages, like French and Italian, have the same word for both story and history. I am not suggesting that story, as is used in common parlance, is indistinguishable from history. I only stress that story had been missing from the history I read in school. This left the subject as dry as dust.

It was when I read books on history written for laypersons, much later in life, that my impression of history as a discipline of knowledge changed. William L. Schirer’s The Rise and Fall of Third Reich was the first book in this genre I read.

I picked up the fifteen hundred pages tome at a book shop in Delhi. I was then posted to a godforsaken unit on the outskirts of the city. I thought the book will alleviate, a little, the insufferable tedium for some time; Book held me captive for days. Those winter evenings, of more than three decades back, are etched in my memory as the time I read The Rise and Fall of Third Reich. After lunch I would pull a chair in the lawn to soak the warmth of a fading sun, book in my hands. Unconsciously I kept inching the chair forwards, chasing the swiftly shrinking circle of sunlight. I would wake up only when my feet hit the hedge at the far end of the lawn; my eyes transfixed on the book and my mind lost in the tumultuous events of 1930s’ pre-war Europe. Leave alone Nazi Germany or the second world war, I knew little of the history of my own country. I couldn’t believe that history could be as interesting as a well-told story – rather more, because of the aura of truth that surrounds it.

Over the years I read many such histories. Books by William Dalrymple, Ramachandra Guha, Lawrence James, Philip Mason, John Keay, Niall Fergusson, to cite only a few among many, stoke and maintain, my zeal for history. I learnt from them how scholarship, meticulous research, deep understanding of past, and a simple, conversational prose can be combined to narrate a nuanced past that is a joy to read.

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Today, I do not mean to write about any particular book. I want to put together few thoughts – rather doubts – on history which were occasioned by the winds of change blowing in my country for past few years. Nowadays, history is on everyone’s lips: politicians, diplomats, academicians, journalists, man in the street, sentinels of culture, religious gurus, and spiritual guides. A faction declares that being no more diffident in a surging country, it wants to correct historical wrongs. This view is countered by highlighting its alleged factual inaccuracies and its unconcealed political leanings.

Who were the original inhabitants of our country? Who were the Harappans? Did pastoralists from European steppes, the Yamanayas – now known as Aryans – migrate to India around 3000 BCE? Or were Aryans the original Indians, who migrated north around this period? Did Maharana Pratap defeat Akbar’s forces in the battle of Haldi Ghati? Was Tipu Sultan a patriot who single-handedly fought British Empire and died in a battlefield or was he a religious zealot who destroyed temples or was he both? Has history of India, till now, been written by the historians of leftist ideology? Have they deliberately suppressed the contribution of the followers of opposing philosophies in country’s growth? Are all the countless problems of present-day India due to the faulty policies of its first Prime Minister? Or was he a visionary who gave shape to much that is admirable in the country today as well to its many current predicaments?

Litany of claims and counterclaims obfuscate my understanding of past. I wonder – Is there an entity like historical truth? Or is it merely a mirage? I remembered a slim book on historical thought I had read many years back. More than the veracity of each assertion, I needed to know the meaning of history. I retrieved the book and read it again.

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E.H. Carr, author of the book, was a British historian and diplomat. He delivered a series of lectures in 1961 at the University of Cambridge, which were latter published as a book, What is History? Book is acclaimed as an important contribution to historiography and has sold more than a quarter of a million copies. In a thin volume of less than two hundred pages, Carr answers the question, 'what is history'.

Views I mention here are all from the book. To avoid monotony of repetition I do not always endorse this.

I have an unshakeable belief in the supremacy of facts. I believe that historian’s foremost job is to relate ascertained facts about past – ‘Simply to show how it really was’. Carr rejects this hegemony of facts in history. In his opinion this claim is akin to a statement that, ‘the facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions, and so on, like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.’ Facts pertaining to a situation are numerous. Historian does not and cannot record all. He collects only those facts which are relevant to his worldview, a view he favours as an explanation of the events he is writing about. These are the facts he finds worth preserving for the posterity. Thus, we see the past through the eyes of the historian, who saw the facts through the prism of his personality.

Purity of facts is a myth. Carr says, ‘the facts of history…cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder.’ History is not merely a collection of dead facts but is their interpretation by a breathing, thinking historian – ‘the facts speak only when the historian calls on them. … A fact is like a sack – it won’t stand up till you’ve put something in it’. We can understand past only ‘through the eyes of the present’. It is a necessary duty of a historian to ensure that his facts are accurate. But ‘the historian is neither the humble slave nor the tyrannical maser of his facts.’ Carr’s first answer to the question ‘what is history?’ is that 'it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.’.

‘No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,’ wrote John Donne. Man is shaped by his society. Society gives him his mind and his voice. Historian’s society makes him see the past from a particular angle – ‘Great history is written precisely when the historian’s vision of the past is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present’. Historian is himself the part of the history. He is the product of his age. Time and historian are thus in a continuous flux. Changing time changes the relative historical significance of facts and history appears altered. When a disgraced leader, under barrage of unrelenting criticism, laments that history will be kinder to him than the media, he is invoking this protean nature of history vis-a-vis evanescence of context-sensitive journalism. Belief in an eternal place in good books of history reflects poor historical sense. History of India, as written by a British citizen of the imperial regime; or by an Indian, a subject of colonial India; or by a historian in the heady days of Nehru’s socialism; or by a young intellectual seeped in liberal-democratic ethos and a proud citizen of a confidently striding nation, are bound to be markedly different. History reflects the society in which it was written – ‘There is no more significant pointer to the character of a society than the kind of history it writes or fails to write’.

To attribute history to whimsical behaviour of few great men like Hitler, Lenin, Gandhi, Nehru, is only intellectual sloth. These people did what they did under the influence of certain inescapable social forces. And these forces were the result of unconscious actions of millions of people. Each individual lives consciously for himself, but unbeknownst to him, the ‘hidden-hand’ of times, guides his actions. Tolstoy in War and Peace says, ‘Man lives consciously for himself but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historical universal aims of humanity’. An astute historian reads these guiding tides of society. It is these forces that shape history and not great men. ‘The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and essence of his age; he actualizes his age.’ Seen in the light of the relation between an individual and the society, function of history is ‘to enable man to understand the society of the past, and to increase his mastery over the society of the present’.

Is historian obliged to or should he offer moral judgements on the actors in history? These were the inhabitants of a past with a different system of moral values. It is incorrect to judge them through the touchstone of today’s moral standards. Historian B. Croce’s views, as quoted by Carr sum up this conundrum well – ‘Our tribunals (whether juridical or moral) are present-day tribunals designed for living, active and dangerous men, while those other men have already appeared before the tribunal of their day, and cannot be condemned or absolved twice. … Those who, on the plea of narrating history, bustle about us as judges condemning here and giving absolution there, because they think that this is the office of history…are generally recognised as devoid of historical sense’.

But this caution to abstain from moral judgement is only for individuals and not for a group of men, society, events, institutions, or policies of past. Changes in collective values aid historians in interpreting the historical fact. Denunciation of Hitler provides an alibi to the people of Germany in early twentieth century, who had slipped in their moral judgements. But a wise historian expresses his judgements on past society ‘in words of a comparative nature like progressive and reactionary rather than in uncompromising absolutes like good and bad’, because ‘history is movement; and movement implies comparison’. Every society has its own values that are rooted in history. ‘Hypothetical absolutes like equality, liberty, justice, or natural law varies from period to period’. Abstract values divorced from society and history are but an illusion.

One attribute I assign to good history is objectivity. But can history be objective? Perhaps, I confuse facts for history. Facts can be said to be true or untrue. But their interpretation, which is history, cannot be measured on the yardstick of objectivity. History is the subjective reading of facts by a historian. ‘Objective in history – if we are still to use the conventional term – cannot be an objectivity of fact, but only of relation, of the relation between fact and interpretation, between past, present, and future.’ Learning of a historian enables him to unravel this relation between actions of men and their condition. This relation helps him to understand not only the past but also the future. This coherency of relationship between past, present, and the future is the objectivity of history. Carr says, ‘The historian of the past can make an approach towards objectivity only as he approaches towards the understanding of future.’

Does historical-truth occupy an independent existence in a stratosphere detached from society, time, and men? Everything that is true is not truthful. Word truth has allusions to morality inherent in its meaning. It straddles the world of facts and values. The statement that India won freedom on 15^th August 1947 is a fact. While, none will deny that in these words of Nehru, ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom’, value content predominates over the factual content. Historical truth in Carr’s opinion ‘lies somewhere between the north pole of valueless facts and the south pole of value judgements.’

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Facts on their own do not make history. Historian’s view of life is reflected in the history he writes. Objectivity in history is an illusion. Historical truth is not absolute. Moral judgments on individuals of past are arbitrary. These thoughts are diametrically opposite to the beliefs I have held about history till now. But they suggest a means to understand the present times. Changing ideologies lead to altered views on history. History written by previous historians may now seem inadequate or reflect an unacceptable bias of its author. Or it may not appear to incorporate the newly discovered realities of a past now being investigated in the light of new opinions.

These are valid reasons to present alternate histories. But history must begin with interpretation of historical facts - facts with all their desirable attributes and their many inadequacies. History should not be made a tool for political rabblerousing, poster boy of a political ideology. History influences political thought but politicians of a nation should not attempt to manoeuvre its history for their immediate gain. These are lofty demands from a discipline that is an inseparable part of society.

History is often made in the streets, in the backrooms of the citadels of power, or in a battlefield – by the common men, rulers, or the fighting armies. And though the desire to influence it in some manner is strong in the hearts of every people, it is best written in the study of an historian who is trained to read the significance of facts in the chaotic swirl of events.

After quoting Carr unabashedly throughout the piece, I can do no better than to end it with his advice.

‘You can, if you please, turn history into theology by making the meaning of the past depend on extra-historical and super-rational power. You can, if you please, turn it into literature – a collection of stories and legends about the past without meaning or significance. History properly so-called can be written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in history itself. The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere. A society which has lost belief in its capacity to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the past.’