A wag once complained that whereas history repeats itself, historians repeat each other! We may thus be destined to see adherents of the sidelined Marxist school of historiography reproduce the old discredited dogmas in ‘parallel’ textbooks aimed at competing with NCERT’s new course books. A fresh round of bloodletting amongst Left and non-Left historians seems inevitable following the decision of the December 2003 session of the Indian History Congress to officially counter NCERT’s ‘distorted’ history books.
In one sense, the decision is welcome; it ends the shadow boxing over ‘communalism’ and brings the ideological and political perspectives of NCERT critics into the open. Discerning citizens, teachers and students alike will now have the opportunity to assess the manner in which historians of rival perspectives select, delete, or interpret ‘facts’ regarding various historical dynasties and eras, and the overarching framework through which they view the events of successive millennia.
Being addicted to old ideological obediences, Marxist scholars must be aghast to find the banished ghost of India’s native civilizational ethos enter the groves of academia and challenge the entrenched orthodoxies of socialism, secularism and composite culture, erected under the heady hegemony of the Nehruvian age. Engagement is inevitable as Indian scholarship emerges from the shadows of political, ideological and psychological submission to Islamic and Western-Christian-Marxist intellectual domination.
The present conflict over the ‘right’ to write history from the perspective of the nation’s core community has raised the hackles of Leftist academics. The principal charges against Marxists include a mean-spirited denial of the glories of pre-Islamic India; a dishonest obliteration of the bloody chapters of India’s encounter with Islam and the continuing element of iconoclastic fury in that faith, as witnessed in the destruction of Hindu temples in neighbouring countries and the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas; and an inadequate appreciation of the anti-Hindu bias of so-called ‘secular’ western ideologies. The list is by no means exhaustive.
At the same time, this indictment does not negate the fact that Marxist methodology has made a lasting contribution in exposing the utterly exploitative nature of Sultanate and Mughal rule, which ruined the populace by appropriating the bulk of agrarian produce. It also behoves me to acknowledge that the eminent historians of this school have maintained decorum while responding to the most potent challenge to their worldview, in the form of NCERT’s Medieval India for Class Eleven.
Nation-building, however, is a pitiless affair; those engaged in the struggle to recover the soul of India and restore her foundational ethos in national life cannot shy from articulating unpleasant truths. This involves exposing the Marxist schools’ strenuous attempts to deny or downplay the sustained native resistance to Islam from its very advent in the sub-continent. Marxists have unjustly obfuscated Islam’s intolerance of temples and image-worship, and its sustained assault on both. Far more unforgivable is the fact that they have tried to equate the iconoclasm of Muslim rulers with isolated instances of intra-Hindu conflict, and to pretend that concessions made by Muslim rulers to Hindu temples or holy men during times of their own political need are synonymous with the eternal catholicity of the sannatan dharma.
The current Marxist offensive is triggered by their loss of control over State-sponsored institutions through which they imposed their one-dimensional version of history. Some glimpses of Prof. Satish Chandra’s Medieval India (old NCERT textbook) will suffice to show the general reader the objections of non-Marxists to Marxist history. At stake is the future of History as a discipline, for if History cannot be an honest record of the past, it loses its very raison d’etre.
As part of the attempt to downplay India’s glorious past, several major kingdoms rising between the death of Harsha (647 AD) and the founding of the Delhi Sultanate (1206 AD) have been erased from the narrative. These five hundred-odd years saw an unparalleled efflorescence with the building of gigantic temples, and the writing of great literary and philosophical works, which left an indelible imprint on subsequent Indian culture. It seems inexcusable that the youth who are the nation’s future should be denied knowledge, and legitimate pride, in such a defining period of national history.
Dynasties thus withheld from student memory include the illustrious Gahadavalas, who played a sterling role against the Turkish invasions. Their dynasty is credited with the construction of the Rama temple found below the Babri structure at Ayodhya, and they probably owe their historical eclipse to their association with that infamous city.
Others who got short shrift include the Chandellas of Bundelkhand, who fought Mahmud of Ghazni and built the grand Khajuraho temples; the Paramaras of Malwa who fought the Turks and set up a Sanskrit college in the Bhojashala at Dhar; the celebrated Chauhan kings who vanquished the Turks; the Kalachuris of Tripuri; the Karkotas of Kashmir; famous Gujarat rulers and eminent Sena kings of Bengal; and renowned Orissa dynasties like the Shailodbhava, Kara, Kesari, Eastern Ganga and Later Eastern Ganga; to list only some of the most obvious.
The intense social dynamism of Indian society in the centuries before Islam, with tribal groups transiting from forest and pastoral settings to settled agriculture and contributing to state formation, the integration of tribal-local gods in regional and pan-India traditions, the economic integration of the country through itinerant merchants, are all totally ignored. The multiple roles of Hindu peasants as farmers and warriors is deliberately negated, in order to portray Hindu society as rigidly opposed to mobility.
There is deliberate suppression of the flourishing economy and growth of urban centres in the Pratihara, Paramara, Chahamana and other kingdoms, in order to sustain Prof. R.S. Sharma’s false hypothesis that Indian trade and economy fell into doldrums for three centuries after Harsha’s death. This falsification is linked to another blatant lie – that economic revival came with the advent of Islam.
Regarding Muslim rule, the old NCERT book ignores the Arab invasion of Sind and the four centuries of stiff resistance by the Hindu rulers of Sind, Kabul and Zabul. The blood-curdling numbers in which Hindus fell prey to Islamic invaders – fifty thousand defenders died in just one attack by Mahmud of Ghazni on Somnath – is never acknowledged. Akbar’s massacre of thirty thousand peasants seeking refuge in the Chittor Fort is, of course, unmentionable. The awesome numbers in which peasants and warriors were sold as part of a burgeoning slave trade throughout Muslim rule in India (continuing even as the East India Company was establishing itself) has simply failed to register on Marxist consciousness. The unilateral aggression of Mughal emperors from Jahangir to Aurangzeb against the Sikh Gurus is also downplayed.
This is by no means a wholistic critique. Yet discerning readers would have realized that Marxists’ ideological compulsions to whitewash the horrors of India’s Islamic encounter has led to unacceptable falsification of the pre-Islamic golden era as an age of feudal darkness. Marxist purging of the bloody conflicts of several centuries, which some Indians now dare designate as ‘the Hindu Holocaust,’ has also led them to misrepresent modern history by papering over Muslim separatism and insisting that the medieval age created a ‘composite culture’ that survived the Partition of the country on religious lines. It will be interesting to see the extent to which the new Marxist history books meet the expectations of the conscious citizen.
The Pioneer, 13 January 2004
