The sense and sensibilities of history writing

How does one construct the history of ancient India if the people living in that period lived by the spoken words in preference to written documents? The historiography of ancient India cannot be meaningfully described because, as Megasthenes maintained, "Indian history is a history of invasions of India, but never by India".

The consequence of this statement by foreign visitors has been to demand from Indians: do they have a history of their ancient country and society?

Hundreds of Indians philosophers, scholars, linguists, archaeologists, Indologists and others jumped into the fray and effectively answered on the basis of inscriptions, excavations, written literary and religious literature, and artefacts that like other human societies Indians did not "lack a sense of both chronology and history".

Arvind Sharma, in his book of four well- researched chapters, has taken up the cudgels anew against those who have spread this impression that Indians are a people without history.

The meat of the Sharma's study lies in chapters two and four "" 'Implications of such a view for Indian Studies' and 'Does Hinduism Lack a Sense of History? Thesis Re-examined.' If such a view is accepted, then it will be maintained that there is no continuity of Indian civilisation, there is no concept of nation and state because "Hindu political existence presents us with a people, but no state".

Since history is a record of social changes, and if a society does not have such a record then, the writers on India concluded that "it was a changeless, static, stagnant caste society".

Further, they said, in the absence of a proper chronological history, ancient Indians lived by religion and mythology. This viewpoint has to be answered properly because if Indians are people without history, those societies that have their history are considered superior because they were progressing.

In chapter three, Sharma sums up Hindu responses and it is a rich fare because everyone and anyone who mattered in India of the 19th and the 20th centuries went back to the past to discover what Indian history was. While chapter three is devoted to Indians' responses, Sharma's own contribution is that he follows a different route from other Indians to refute the charge of the lack of a sense of history among Indians.

The key to unlocking the discovery of ancient India is not theological literature but inscriptions and epigraphic evidence. The Mauryas and the Guptas left enough material in the form of the edicts of Ashoka, or two well-known inscriptions: the Junagadh inscription of Rudhradaman (C.150 AD) and the Allahabad Pillar Inscription of Samudragupta (C. 350AD) to find the answer to the question: How did people live their lives and how were they governed?

It will come as a shock to Brahminicial Hindutva that the myth of 'the eternality of Sanskrit' is disputed by Vacaspati Misra who did not "believe in the eternity of words and sentences".

Another shock for the propagandists of Sanskrit is the tradition distinguished between 'divine' and 'human' Sanskrit. Further, the cultural history of ancient India has been constructed not only on the basis of literary evidence like the Vedas, the Puranas and so on but the core of historical tradition in India which are the genealogical records.

These have remained constant in the Indian scene throughout the centuries and in fact up to the present day. We also have evidence from Hixen Tsiang (Xuanzang) who came to India in the 7th century that detailed records were kept in each district during the reign of KingHarsa.

Sharma's otherwise competent work has a serious flaw. Outsiders described people living in India as Hindu, and he falls into the same trap and instead of entering into the dialogue on the terms of foreign writers, he should have concentrated on the very diverse and varied peoples of ancient India where many tribes that were participants in the making of ancient Indian society were not Hindus only.

Sharma has succeeded in the task he set before himself, but the rationale for writing one more book on this out-of-date problem of Indian history looks unconvincing.

HINDUISM AND ITS SENSE OF HISTORY

Arvind Sharma

Oxford University Press, 2003

Pages: 134

Price: Rs 345