History: Re-imagined vs Re-told

 George Orwell begins an essay in his column ‘As I Please’ with an arresting apocryphal tale.

When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent inquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about: whereupon, so it is said—and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be—he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.

Story seems to imply that objectivity in history is unachievable. This was not Orwell’s opinion. He wrote further in the same essay that ‘a certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it’.

Cynicism about historical truth, apprehension that history’s relation with objective truth is, at its best, only tenuous, grew with the rise of strong ideologies in public sphere. Everyone now had strong reasons to obscure, obfuscate, rewrite, and appropriate truth.

An event invites many explanations. These are not evaluated against the yardstick of truthfulness but how they agree with the ideology expounding them.

I learnt recently, with unnerving dismay, that my understanding of Indian history was heavily influenced by one such ideology.

Modern writing of Indian history began with arrival of colonial rulers. English historians saw Indian past through the prism of their sensibilities coloured by Enlightenment. Western concept of time was linear that moved in a straight arrow from a perceived beginning to a stipulated end. Against this, Indians believed time to be cyclical. English had little patience with the Indian concept of history and characterised the country a-historical. 

English scholars understood India as a Hindu country with Sanskritic civilisation. The only Indian history they endorsed was the twelfth-century history of Kashmir, Rajatarangini, by Kalhana. Numerous chronicles written in Persian by court poets and chroniclers, as well as other sources in Sanskrit such as local chronicles and lengthy inscriptions issued by various rulers were short shrifted.

Western history had been compartmentalised in ancient, medieval, and modern periods. A similar periodization was forced on the study of Indian history where none had existed. The three invented periods were the glorious Hindu past, a middle dark-age dominated by Muslim invaders, and the modern era of awakening that began with the arrival of English. This created the binary of Natives and Invaders in Indian history. Resemblance with the ancient magnificence of Greko-Roman civilisation, the medieval age of superstition and ignorance, and the modern era of enlightenment in Europe is unmistakable.

Imperial history was used to justify colonial rule, at home and in the colonies.Thus, the abject poverty of life – spiritual and material – of Indians under the yoke of cruel Muslim rulers, for more than half a millennium was exaggerated and newer aspects of it invented. Indians, allegedly, were relieved of this misery only with the arrival of English.

Western world had since ancient times portrayed Asian rulers as despotic. This has its root in Greek perception of Persian Achaemenid empire of mid-first millennium B.C. This belief was enhanced by the crusades in the middle-ages. Christopher Marlowe’s portrayal of Taimurlang, the Central Asian monarch of fourteenth century, as a brutal cold-blooded mass-murderer in his hugely successful eponymous play, Tamburlaine, that opened in London in 1587, furthered the image.

It was English who gave a religious colour to Indian history; the Hindu age of resplendence eclipsed by the Muslim period of mid-second millennium. Nationalists, both Muslim and Hindu, found this division useful to propound their ideology.

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A few months back I fumbled on Richard M. Eaton’s book, India in the Persianate Age, that covers this period of Indian history, i.e., 1000-1765. Book helped me in acquiring a new understanding of this tumultuous time in our history.

Eaton challenges many stereotypes in the extant Indian history of this period. The most important, as I mentioned earlier, is that India was a self-contained Hindu and Sanskritic civilisation that remained aloof from the world-influences. 1000 A.D. – 1800 A.D. is seen as the period of clash of this civilisation with the invading Mohammedan civilisation. 

In sixteenth century, Spanish conquistadors established large empires in Central and South America. The culture and the religion of the land was massively transformed. Natives became Roman Catholics en masse. This is not known as the ‘Catholic conquest’ of the Americas, but ‘Spanish conquest’. Only in India, where the native culture and religion were not obliterated but grew synchronously with the new culture, is this period known as ‘Muslim conquest’ of India.

Eaton sees this period as the amalgamation of two great ancient cultures of the world, Sanskritic and Persian. This was not a stagnant period in Indian civilisation, but one marked by much growth, in the realms of economy, religions, literature, and metaphysics. He says culture is not bound by geography; Unlike Western civilisation, Dar-al-Islam (the abode of Islam), the Christendom, the Third World, the Promised Land that are rooted in a place. 

Sanskritic culture extended from Afghanistan’s Kandahar (Sanskrit Gandhara) to South-East Asian Singapore (Sanskrit Singhapura) in 4th to 14th centuries. It spread not by the sword of the conqueror, but through the power of the Sanskrit texts. Sanskrit, unlike many languages, was not a language of a place. It was a language that travelled. Sanskrit texts embraced rules of grammar, ways of living, rules for society and governance, purpose of life, accumulation of wealth, and even the pleasures of sex. Similiarly Persian culture was not confined to Persia, i.e., Iran. Like Sanskritic culture, persian culture too did not have one geographical or political centre.  It grew in the 7th century Persia, imbibed the pre-islamic Persian culture, and then flowered in central Asia in 9th – 10th centuries, in Bukhara, in today’s Uzbekistan, under the Samanid Kings. From here it spread to Mediterranean region in west, India in south, and along the silk-road to China in east.

Title of the book alludes to this approach to Indian history – India in the Persianate Age, and not in the Muslim age.

In the early 2nd millennium, North India was invaded by two armies. In 1022, Chola army, under the authority of the king, Rajendra I, travelled from the southern tip of India, to invade the great Mahipala of the Pala empire. After defeating him, they carried away the bronze image of the deity of Shiva, seized from a temple that Mahipala had patronized. Invaders also looted idols of Bhairava, Bhairavi, and Kali from Kalinga rajas of Orrisa. Three years after this invasion, in 1025, Mahmud of Ghazni, from eastern Afghanistan, marched on India with 30,000 cavalry. His target was the wealthy temple of Somnath. Like the temple of Mahipala, this too was dedicated to Shiva. Mahmud of Ghazni plundered the temple of its riches and hauled these to Ghazni.

These two raids had much in common: both invaders travelled about 1400 kms to target specific North-Indian sites, neither sought to establish permanent occupation, both plundered the royal temples and siphoned off the riches and idols to their native kingdoms.

Contemporary Persian chroniclers hailed Mahmud of Ghazni as a great iconoclast responding to pious call of Islam to abolish idol-worship. But in the Sanskrit texts of this period there is no mention of his attack on the Somnath temple. An inscription of 1169, mentions repairs carried out in the temple due to usual wear-and-tear without mentioning Mahmud’s raid at all. In 1216, Somnath overlords fortified the temple, against attacks by the neighbouring kings of Malwa, and not from the plunder by the Afghan rulers.

First account of the attack on Somnath temple as assault on Hindu religion by Muslim invaders occurred in 1840. In 1816, British suffered a humiliating defeat in the first Afghan war, when the entire English army of 16000 was annihilated. To save face among Hindu subjects, and to malign Afghans, who had so crushingly defeated them, British knit the tale of cruel Muslim warlords intent on destroying Hindu culture. From this time on, Mahmud’s 1025 attack on Somnath temple acquired a distinct infamy in India. Chola king’s raid of Bengal remained largely unknown outside the Chola country. Nationalists leaders, in the early twentieth century, drew on these narratives to paint clear images of heroes and villains. 

Contemporary Sanskrit texts and court-chronicles of this period mention the Ghaznavids - who never established empire in India and thus were a neigbour-kingdom - not as Muslims, but as the ‘lords of horses’, because of their unparallelled prowess in cavalry warfare. But even later Turks like the Ghurids and the Slave-dynasty rulers, who established kingdoms in India, were not referred in the Sanskrit texts of the period by their religions. They were called barbarians (malecchas) or demon-men (nararaksasam) - pejorative, but not religious, labels.

In the Hindu Sanskritic culture of ancient India, sovereign lord of kingdom was a patron deity, a form of either Shiva or Vishnu. King was a mere servant of this cosmic overlord. He constructed massive temples where idol of the deity was consecrated. These royal temples were the most conspicuous sign of a ruler’s sovereignty and consequently were targeted by the invading monarchs. Since at least eighth century many instances are recorded where a Hindu ruler destroyed the temple of the defeated Hindu king.  

Invading kings came to India looking for wealth as Mahmud of Ghazni in twelfth century, Nadir Shah in eighteenth century or in search of a kingdom as Muhammad of Ghor in late twelfth century and Mughals in early sixteenth century. Their culture and religion followed them. These prospered in their newly captured kingdom. They sought the wealth of new territories and not acolytes for their faith. Persian culture spread widely in South Asia after the thirteenth-century Turkish conquest of North India. 

Styles of architecture, dress, music, courtly comportment, cuisine, and vocabulary, all were substantially influenced by this synthesis. One of the founders of the Deccan kingdom of Vijayanagara, Marappa, called himself  hindu-raya-suratalah, ‘sultan among Indian kings’. Coins issued by Muhammad Ghuri carried image of a bull or even Luxmi on some - against Islamic edict banishing use of image in any form -  and name of the sultan in Devnagari preceded by a sri, an honorific in Sanskrit. These Turkish conquerors had found a new kingdom and home in India. Indians were employed in their army, held important ranks in bureaucracy, and daughters of eminent Indian rulers were taken as brides by the Turkik rulers.

Works of iconic Persian poets like Firdawsi, Jami, Nizami of this era were translated into Sanskrit. Revered Indian epics such as Mahabharat, Ramayan, Vedas, and Puranas were rendered in Persian. This work was commissioned by the ruling Kings.

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History seems to affirm the common origin of the people of a country, a shared ancient culture, and vicissitudes suffered alike by their ancestors. Incessant narration of re-imagined past-glories and tribulations gives the nation a goal. History thus, informs the people who they are, where they have come from, and where they should be headed. A synthesised history is employed as a glue to herd the people of a nation under a monochromatic awning and others the rest who are perceived not to have shared a similar history. The division of we and they is ineluctably fostered on the nation. 

Eric Hobsbawm, the renowned English historian of twentieth century wrote about the reliance of extreme right ideology on history. 

History is the raw material for nationalism or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction. The past is an essential element, perhaps the essential element, in these ideologies. If there is no suitable past, it can always be invented.

It is ironic that the right-ideologists in our country, the sloganeering, chest-thumping hyper-nationalists, and the jingoists, who claim to have exorcised people's minds of the ghost of colonial mindset, have founded their assertions on a history patronized by colonial masters, neglecting the accounts of the contemporary native writers.

Historical truth is an early victim in a clash of political ideologies. Totalitarianism, because it aspires for total control of every aspect of public life, seeks to dominate the truth completely. None could articulate this better than Orwell - “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits atrocities but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

Eric Hobsbawm in his essay ‘Outside and Inside History’ writes that ‘history is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books and compilers of magazine articles and television programmes.’

Control of history has been an ancient persuit of rulers. In Orwell’s chilling words - ‘Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.’

Onus to foil these dishonest efforts lies as much on people who consume history, as on the professionals who curate it.