Arun Shourie on Historiography of India

“How does this concern square with the guidelines issued by their West Bengal government... - "Muslim rule should never atttact any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned?”

“But these are not just partisan ‘historians’. They are nepotists of the first order. I had documented several years ago the doings of some of them in regard to the appointments in the Aligarh Muslim University. Their doings in the ICHR were true to pattern. How is it that over twenty-five years persons from their school alone had been nominated to the ICHR? How come that Romila Thapar had been on the Council four times? Irfan Habib five times? Satish Chandra four times? S. Gopal three times?…”

“The West Bengal Board of Secondary Education had issued instructions in 1989 that ‘Muslim rule should never attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned. (...) With the sway which Marxists have ensured over the education department, each facet at every level will be subjected to the same sort of alterations and substitutions that we have encountered in Bengal – all that is necessary is that the progressives’ government remains in power, and that the rest keep looking the other way.”

“In a word, no forcible conversions, no massacres, no destruction of temples. ... Muslim historians of those times are in raptures at the heap of Kafirs [sic] who have been dispatched to hell. Muslim historians are forever lavishing praise on the ruler for the temples he has destroyed, ... Law books like The Hedaya prescribe exactly the options to which these little textbooks alluded. All whitewashed away. Objective whitewash for objective history. And today if anyone seeks to restore truth to these textbooks, the shout, "Communal rewriting of history."”

“Thus, there are two points to remember. First, our friends are not just Marxists, they are also Macaulayites. Second, they are Marxists in a special sense. They are Marxists in the sense that they have thought of themselves as Marxists, in the sense that they repeatedly regurgitate a handful of Marxist phrases and assertions. But more than being Marxist historians, they have been establishment historians. Their theories and ‘theses’ have accorded not just with the ‘classics’ of Marxism-Leninism, they have accorded with the ideology of, which in terms of their theory means, the needs of Congressite rulers.”

“Given what we have seen of Marxist historians even in this brief book, the brazen-faced distortions – to the point of falsehood – do not surprise me.... That these eminences were in control of journals, of history congresses, and university departments, had another immediate consequence: no one dared question their work. They hadn’t to explain their ‘theses’, they could serve up any concoction as ‘evidence’. In regurgitating the same assertions, they convinced themselves that they were being consistent; in arriving at the same reductionist explanations for diverse phenomena, phenomena millennia apart, they convinced themselves that they were fortifying the theory. In fact, all they were doing was repeating themselves. There was nothing new to be learnt as it had all been explained before! In a word, unquestioned, above being challenged, they slipped into shoddiness, and thus stagnation – Jha’s Address is an illustration of the kind of drivel that came to pass as scholarship.”

“Control had another, in a sense a final consequence. That they controlled journals, university departments, history congresses placed them in the controlling elite. They became parts, and very conspicuous parts of the very establishment that they had been traducing. They could not sustain the pose of martyrdom – they were not the ones who were defying censors and persecution. They were now the censors. They were the ones who were derailing and blocking the careers of others, they were the ones who were blackballing others, destroying their reputations. Everything about them and their positions spoke to their being part of the ruling establishment: the intertwining webs of connections with those in office; the manifest fact that they owed their positions and prominence to those connections; their membership of governmental committees and delegations; the schools and universities to which they sent their children; their perks and salaries. A professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University today gets around Rs 1,30,000 a month as salary with a dearness allowance. And there is the rent allowance (around 30 per cent of the salary if the person is not living on campus), and then the conveyance allowance. In a country where the poverty line is officially drawn at Rs 12 a day or Rs 360 a month, to get Rs 1,50,000 or thereabouts a month and write fiery essays on the immiserization of the poor comes across as a theatrical performance, the indignation is a bit too obviously worked up. Not the martyrs they would want us to take them to be, rather top dogs revelling in what Northcote Parkinson had called ‘underdoggery’!”

“The consequences were inevitable. As new central universities were set up – fifteen in the last few years – the protégés of these eminences are the ones who have been appointed to key posts. They have continued teaching the same stuff. They have perpetuated the same patron-protégé relationships. They have used the same techniques of networking, mutual promotion, blackballing and the rest to keep scholars of other hues out. But what is it that they have been perpetuating? More than the line, which is much enfeebled by now in any case, they have been perpetuating mediocrity all round – no one must be brighter than the patron, remember; the touchstone is not academic excellence but personal fidelity to and personal service for the patron, remember. That these eminences were in control of journals, of history congresses, and university departments, had another immediate consequence: no one dared question their work. They hadn’t to explain their ‘theses’, they could serve up any concoction as ‘evidence’. In regurgitating the same assertions, they convinced themselves that they were being consistent; in arriving at the same reductionist explanations for diverse phenomena, phenomena millennia apart, they convinced themselves that they were fortifying the theory. In fact, all they were doing was repeating themselves. There was nothing new to be learnt as it had all been explained before! In a word, unquestioned, above being challenged, they slipped into shoddiness, and thus stagnation – Jha’s Address is an illustration of the kind of drivel that came to pass as scholarship.... They controlled such publications, and others, that of the ICHR, say: but the abysmal quality of articles in them ensured that the control amounted to little.”

“Ideological commitment, or at least a predisposition towards the Left having become a necessary qualification for appointments, for prominence, the entire discipline came to shut its eyes to a pile of evidence on a whole range of issues. It was de riguer to declaim about ‘Hindu communalism’, ... Given their larger presence among the voters in West Bengal and Kerala, in a number of the constituencies that the progressives targeted, eyes had to be shut even tighter lest they spot communalism among Muslims: that had always to be portrayed as a reaction to Hindu communalism; it must never be talked of as something germane to the teachings or teachers of Islam. Even in regard to ‘Hindu communalism’, one had to make out that the ‘communalism’ among Hindus was the doing of one party, of one organization – the RSS – at the most of a few figures: it was not a characteristic of the mass of Hindus... Similarly, one may, indeed one must declaim about the inequities from which women suffer, but one must shut one’s eyes to what the Shariah provides in regard to women. How is it that while our feminists were so vigorous in denouncing the condition of women in Western societies, in India, they did not produce even a few worthwhile studies to explain the curious anomaly, one to which Maulana Wahiduddin Khan once called attention – that while Islam is said to give such high status to women, in every single Islamic society and country, women are in a pitiable condition? Yes, it was absolutely mandatory to denounce what was happening to the environment. But one must not see the incongruity of pouring scorn on the worship of trees, and rivers, on the veneration of nature in general, of such beliefs having been pilloried as ‘animism’ and superstition, and then lamenting the consequences when people began to look upon nature as others had been taught by their religions to do, that is, as something that had been created by God for the ‘enjoyment’ of man.”