HISTORY AS IDEOLOGY:
THE BHARATIYA VIDYA BHAVAN SERIES AND THE ATTACK ON HISTORIOGRAPHY
In the years immediately after the Independence of India in
1947, a collective multi-volume history of India was published by the Bharatiya
Vidya Bhavan. This organization was headed by Dr K M Munshi, a Minister in the
cabinet of Jawaharlal Nehru. The purpose underlying this gigantic venture was
to showcase the achievements of Indian historians who sought to publish a
History of India on the same lines as other multi volume Histories such as the Cambridge
Modern History. Spread over eleven volumes the BVB series attempted a
synthetic and comprehensive History of India from the earliest period till the
transfer of power from the British Government to their nominated successors in
the Interim Government. Meticulously edited under the stewardship of Professor
R C Majumdar, the doyen of Indian historians, the series represented the State
of the Art in terms of historiographical achievement and canons of historical
methodology. Surprisingly this splendid achievement became a victim of its own
success in that it was relegated to obscurity as the tides of politics ebbed
and flowed in the post Nehruvian dispensation. In this paper we examine a set
of issues pertaining to the reception of this Series. First we study the scheme
of the entire series with a view to uncovering the logic underlying this
series. Aspects of periodization which have remained contentious are studied
herein with the aim of explicating the overall schema. Secondly we examine the
criticism leveled against this Series by Dr Romila Thapar who in her various papers has accused the Series of
providing “intellectual justification” for “Hindu Communalism” by invoking the
‘historical past”. In the now famous pamphlet Communalism and the Writing of
Indian History Romila Thapar and her colleagues are at pains to
delegitimize the entire pre Independence achievement in Indian Historiography
on the grounds that it (a) glorified the past
(b) does not address the issue of social and economic change and (c) advancing the notions of Hindu identity
politics. Given the leftward drift in
intellectual life in India, it is no wonder that this litany of criticism was
not subjected to scrutiny or examined for its inherent validity in terms of
valid principles of historiographical criticism. It is totally inadequate to term
this pioneering enterprise as a “communal” venture and consign it to the
“immense condescension” of the historical profession.
A fact that is
often ignored by Historians is the late beginning of the Historian’s profession
in India. The first post graduate Department of History was opened in India
only after the end of World War I in 1919 to be precise. The Imperial Records
Office which became the National Archives after 1947 opened its record for
research only after Independence. Seen against the background of these facts,
it is certainly very encouraging that soon after Independence such a stupendous
task was undertaken and realized. It is worthwhile to recollect that none of
the rival Series of collective scholarship which were meant to challenge the
BVB Series have seen the light of day in their entirety. The flagship journal
of the emerging profession of History, the Journal of Indian History was
founded at Allahabad in 1922 and within a few years was shifted out.
The intellectual context in which History as a discipline
emerged in India was vastly different from Western Europe. In both England and
France, and perhaps elsewhere, the research into and the reconstruction of a
National Past, went hand-in hand with the assertion of popular sovereignty
which now imagined itself as the Nation. As Sovereignty came to be associated
with and embodied in the will of the people as Natio or Nation, the State
became the agency that sought to legitimize itself by appropriating the past
and historians obliged by casting the past as a prologue for the emergent
nations. Therefore the assertion of popular Sovereignty and the deployment of
History as a vehicle for its imagined continuity with the past was a powerful
intervention and made Historiography a new and powerful tool of Nationalism.
A
particular strand of Nationalist Historiography is unspooled as “Communal” and
one of the reasons for the Bharatiya Vidhya Bhavan Series faring poorly in the
market place of Indian Historiography is the criticism that it represents that
tendency. There has been no attempt hitherto made to understand and explicate
the implications of this interpretation. At its most general level the concept
of “communalism” has become for historians a compass that governs questions of
interpretation, explanation and method. Yet there is virtually no discussion
either on the concept or its use as a category of historiographical criticism.
Apart from the naivety of assuming that Independent India was unencumbered by
its past and as Romila Thapar stated in her Past and Prejudice, “In a sense,
the coming of Independence terminated that debate in its overt and recognizable
form”. Did it? Were the issues raised by
the earlier historians laid to rest or silenced.
Indian
Nationalism and its “tryst with destiny” as an early Prime Minister of
Independent India triumphantly proclaimed on the day the transfer of power was
effected, was a poisoned chalice. The objective of Indian Independence was
belied by the tragedy of Partition and questions about the shadow cast by the
events of 1947 have lingered on. The boundaries of the debate have been set in
a manner that effectively excludes questions about the responsibility for
Partition and the air of supreme triumphalism inherent in the speech just
alluded to set the tone for historians to follow. Perry Anderson in his Indian
Ideology has alluded to the Barbara Cartland streak in the Discovery of India and
the general tendency to avoid real issues about the convoluted road to the
Transfer of Power. The Khilafat Agitation, the Quit India Movement and the
boycott of the Cripps Mission were all important staging posts and in each of
these the conduct of the dominant faction within the Indian National Congress
was untenable and therefore questions about the road to Independence and
Partition remained extremely uncomfortable for historians writing in the shadow
of 1947.
The Plan and Scope of the BVB Series
The Bharatiya Vidhya Bhavan Series consist of XI Volumes each
of which addresses a significant aspect of Indian history. The general view
that it mimics the periodization of Indian history first suggested by James
Mill is not correct as the Series does not characterize the early period as
Hindu Period nor does it speak of the Medieval as Muslim Period. These terms
are not used in the text and therefore to argue that Mill’s scheme of
periodization was preserved in this work is not only incorrect but can easily
be disproved. As Javed Majeed argues in his Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s
The History of British India and Orientalism, the Utilitarian doctrines
underlying Mill’s work hardly had any impact on the subsequent study of India.
In any event, the cautious policy prescriptions of Mill were soon superseded by
Lord Macaulay’s Minute of Education, May 2 1835. Over interpreting Mill is
responsible for exaggerating his influence on subsequent Historiography of
India.
Empire and Statecraft
The study of recurring patterns of imperial political
formations and their transmutations into variant forms, is an important theme
in Indian historiography. The BVB series addressed this particular issue in
three major volumes: The Age of Imperial Unity, The
Classical Age and the Age of Imperial Kanauj. Stretching
from the Mauryan Age till the fall of the Pushyabhuti Empire towards the close
of the 8th century AD the three volumes are structured around the
unification of India under the rule of dynamic and charismatic dynasties led by
powerful chakravarti personages whose political fortunes were buttressed
by a series of fortuitous matrimonial alliances with clans and lineages in
their territories. The organizational scheme employed is certainly founded on
narrative political history, but it’s conceptual topos is predicated on the
longue duree of Indian history, the alternate rhythms of political expansion,
contraction and eventual replacement by another set of political arrangements
initiated by a rival clan or lineage which nested under the previous imperial
carapace. The Gupta Dynasty is generally regarded as the archetypal instance of
Indian imperial history in that its history illustrates the transformation of
the kingdom under a maharaja in the third century AD into a powerful empire
embracing the entire territory of India south of the Himalayas represents the
apotheosis of an idea of kingship expounded in the texts known as the
Dharmasastras that contain the informing principles of Rajadharma. The Gupta
Era, appropriately inaugurated by the establishment of a new Era starting in AD
320, was marked by a steady pace of territorial expansion and the articulation
of an imperial ideology that was to be the template for most of the early
medieval period of Indian history. The Allahabad Pillar inscription of
Samudragupta (AD 330-380) is the earliest expression of the new grandiose
vision. The Bharatiya Vidhya Bhavan volume entitled the Classical Age does not
refer to this period as a Golden Age and much of the polemic directed against
this idea seems misplaced. The title maharajadiraja assumed by Samudragupta and
proclaimed in the Allahabad Inscription presupposes the very existence of a
substratum of little kings whose presence in the imperial polity sustained its
legitimacy. If we look at the distribution of the territories enumerated in the
Inscription –the Malavas, Arjunayanas, Yaudheyas, Madrakas, Abhiras, Prarjunas,
Sanakanikas, Kakas and Kharaparikas—we find that some of them were among the 16
Mahajanapadas of the Buddhist texts. Most of these janapadas were once part
of the territories of the Indo-Greek rulers and were brought into the imperial
framework for the first time.
The
Classical Age which was volume III in the BVB Sries frames the entire period as
one of recovery and resurgence: recovery from the ravages of foreign invasions
of the Greeks, Huns and others and the emergence of an indigenous polity that
reunited and re gathered the territories traditionally regarded as part of
Aryavartta, a concept explicitly mentioned in the Samudra Gupta Inscription.
Lines 20 and 21 refer to dakshinapatha-raja and anek-aryyavartta-raja.
These terms are mere geographical expressions and so it would be churlish to
make them carry the burden of identity driven ideologically weaponized meaning.
Importantly the Dharmasastra texts such as the Gautama text refers to Yavanas
and this may give us an indication of the time or period in which it was
composed. Patrick Olivelle dates the text to the third century BC and has
identified the yavanas with the Greeks who formed part of the population of
North West India.
The creation of an
intellectual structure to underpin an expanding political system was the
achievement of the three centuries of Gupta rule. Sheldon Pollock has drawn
attention to an important feature of the Gupta Period when he argued that the
shift from Prakrit to Sanskrit as the preferred language of political communication
and the deployment of kavya as the rhetorical trope for articulating issues of
genealogy, descent, political ideology and social form are to be viewed as
innovations introduced in the cultural milieu that created the Gupta Age. There
is absolutely no suggestion that anywhere in the Series that the Gupto Epoch
constituted a Golden Age and hence the invective directed against R C Majumdar
and his work seems not only misplaced but tendentious.
Just as the
James Mill scheme of periodization, was at best a flicker in the long course of
Colonial Historiography, the idea of a Golden Age too remains a convenient straw
man against which the brave Don Quixote can lead their progressive charge. The Dharmasastra texts as Oliville has argued
are codifications not of ritual but of custom, acara, and historians who use
the texts as sources of past practices are confusing theology with History.
Therefore the entire construction of the Golden Age nostalgia attributed to
some Historians is in reality a chimera as neither U N Ghoshal nor R C Majumdar
have made such a claim.
Historical Change and Society
One of the most frustrating features of early Historiography
of India is the vexed question of change in Society and Economy. Political
change reflected in dynastic upheavals are clearly visible and hence provide a
reliable chronological framework and this has been the scholarly practice in
professional Historiography. The
Bharatiya Vidhya Bhavan Series follows the standard practice of using dynastic
labels as markers of larger cultural and social transformations. This
understanding of temporality is predicated on the assumption that while
politics and military events bubble and froth at the surface there are deeper
and profound forces at work that our sources tend to give at best a partial
view. Therefore while the narrative informing the BVB Series is informed and
structured by political events, there is certainly considerable discussion on
the economic and social changes taking place beyond the political.
Foreign
invasion and its impact on India has been an important, almost a perennial
theme of Indian Historical writing. Partly due to the fact that the past was
viewed as a prologue to the National Movement which sought to create a united
India without allowing identity divisions based on language and religion. Of course
this pious hope was belied and Partition based on religious identity did happen
and this reality has shaped Indian Historiography is a powerful way. The Indian
National Movement was essentially a failure as it did not lead to a unified
India and saw the triumph of identity based politics. The Bharatiya Vidya
Bhavan Series was written under the shadow of those momentous cataclysmic
developments that some have regarded as the substantial redemption of the credo
of the Movement.
It is possible to
study each Volume in the Series and make a critical investigation of the
characterization of indigenous society. In Struggle for Empire which covers the
critical period from AD 1000 to AD 1300, there is considerable discussion on
the Social reality prevalent in India, particularly North India during this
period. There is neither glorification nor admiration for Indian social customs
and the often repeated charge that the BVB Series is “communal” as it glorified
Indian social practices stands refuted on the basis of the evidence presented
in the book.
Temple Patronage, Violence and the
State
The Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Series was a pioneering attempt at
re gathering the scattered strands of the Indian past and making it
intelligible in an highly volatile atmosphere of Partition, State sponsored
patronage of a usable Past, attempts at viewing the medieval period as an
example of a “secular polity” and an assertion of identity politics based on
language set forth by the Linguistic Reorganization of States in 1956. The
Nehruvian State was actively promoting a version of Indian History which
eventually became the orthodox view and was seldom challenged. The BVB stood as
the lone outpost of a nuanced and balanced history which the Establishment
decried and the Historical profession ignored.
Two
examples may be cited to illustrate the contradictions inherent in the approach
taken to the study of Indian history. The emphasis on State in the study of
early India has led to the neglect of other institutions that were embedded in
society. While Caste has received some attention, particularly as part of the
larger agenda of identity and ideology infused studies, the religious
institutions have not received adequate attention/
