Why right-wing historians could learn from D D Kosambi

Actually, the Damodar I am talking about didn’t have “das” at the end of his name. He was plain Damodar.  Or to spell out his name fully, Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi, better known as D D Kosambi, one of the greatest scholars of India.

He was born in Goa in 1907 and died in Pune in 1966. In 2008 he was awarded the Padma Bhushan.

Kosambi was a mathematician who made several original contributions. He was a statistician, too. Also a philologist and a geneticist. And a Sanskrit scholar. To top it all off, he was a historian, too, who studied India’s ancient history in very precise detail.

I am writing about him now is because of an irony. The new breed of right-wing historians should have adopted him as he was a truly accomplished scholar of ancient Indian history. But, it hasn’t.

There can be two reasons for this neglect. One, the new boys who are all the rage now, haven’t heard of him or, if they have, they have not been told how important he was. Some of them are engineers, actually, so not being aware of Kosambi wouldn’t be surprising.

Two, because he was a Marxist in his academic method and because he said all ancient Indian history was driven by economics, the right-wing lot would prefer to ignore him because his interpretation of the evidence is inconsistent with the ideas of divinity that the right likes to imbue its historiography. Rishis, mythology and materialism don’t jell.

I could be wrong about both of these things. But even if I am, the right must tell us why it ignores Kosambi because one can perfectly justifiably wonder why such an important scholar finds no place in the ongoing intense discussion on Indian history. He is one of the most important students of ancient Indian history.

Dosas and uthappams: The right-wing historians want to present history differently from how it’s been presented till now. That’s fine.

So they have been coming up with themes that are to the liking of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. It is a perfectly genuine effort to correct the errors of omission up until recently.

But don’t they realise that this is just the mirror image of the leftist historians who sought to please the Congress when it was in command of academic thought in India? It’s even-Steven in that respect. After all, a little variation in the batter and a dosa becomes an uthappam.

The problem with writing history to please the piper, however, is that no one bothers with the whys. Much of the debate has, thus, been reduced to whataboutery.

Kosambi’s greatness was that he also told us why. Indeed, he made causation the central pillar of his history writing. Things happened, he said, for economic reasons. Nothing spiritual or metaphysical about it. Just garden variety materialism.

Kosambi should appeal to the right for another reason: He felt Indian history wasn’t what we had been told it was. Thus:

“The light-hearted sneer ‘India has had some episodes, but no history’ is used to justify lack of study, grasp, intelligence on the part of foreign writers about India’s past. The considerations that follow will prove that it is precisely the episodes — lists of dynasties and kings, tales of war and battle spiced with anecdotes which fill school texts — that are missing from Indian records. Here, for the first time, we have to reconstruct a history without episodes, which means that it cannot be the same type of history as in the European tradition.”

Isn’t this exactly what the right is saying now, that we must write our own history and not leave it to sundry foreigners and their Indian acolytes?

How Kosambi said it: Kosambi’s writing is tight, his adducement of the evidence impeccable and his conclusions completely convincing. He leaves no room for argument. You may reject him but you can’t disprove him.

It’s the method of a mathematician and a scientist. If you want to prove him wrong you have to do it just as conclusively. And that’s impossible.

That’s why the right-wing historians should emulate his method. His conclusions might be Marxist but the method is not polemical or political. 

If right-wing historians want to be taken more seriously they’d do well to adopt it.

It doesn’t leave much room for interpretation along preferred party lines. Everything must be explained rationally, not just by an appeal to emotions, patriotism and nationalism.