In The Spirit of Indian Painting, BN Goswamy includes a light-filled, meditative mid-seventeenth century painting of a gathering of Sufis at the Mughal court.
He writes: “There are a number of paintings of Sufi saints from the Mughal period – men of learning and insight seated together, most often in a small circle with a little wooden chauki at its heart, on which some books are piled. Most often, these men are of different orders, belonging to different periods of time separated from each other not by years but centuries, and drawn from places that have nothing to do with each other.”
Today’s debates over history in India have become increasingly vociferous, intemperate and ugly; they revolve almost exclusively around history as a possession. For politicians and historians from the rightwing, particularly from the RSS, history is treated much like unclaimed forests -- not, unfortunately, as a shared resource to be preserved and tended for the greater national good.
The debates are over who owns history, what “corrective” measures need to be taken, which roads, rulers, schools of history or undervalued artworks must be erased or whitewashed. As the historian Irfan Habib said in an interview this week, “The desire is not to improve anything but to destroy what has been achieved.”
17th century India may have been more liberal than our times; it was certainly more inviting. It is easy to see what we might lose when you think of that unknown painter, beckoning figures from up and down the centuries to sit together in amicable debate, united by their mutual love of books and learning.
Aside from the obvious damage caused by the wilful wrecking of institutions, there is another problem with focusing on just one story about history, whether that story is Liberals versus Leftists, Leftists versus the Rightwing, The Rightwing versus the Rest of India, Brahmin history versus Dalit history, Hindu India versus Muslim/British India etc.
It might seem frivolous to argue that the great casualty of contemporary history debates is also the loss of pleasure in the past, but I would argue that this is actually the more serious loss.
There are two approaches to trying to understand the past. The first is the approach of the bigot, but it is also the path taken by the absolutist. Both are certain that they know from the present what the past should have been. In both cases, history ceases to be about real people, or complex political structures, or economic migration, or gender, or travellers crossing borders in medieval and ancient times. It becomes a minefield where you must explode the facts that do not fit your truth, and preserve the ones that do. There may be serious intent behind this approach – bigots are often voracious, if selective, readers – but there is no pleasure in it, only the grim urge to impose your story on others.
Anything that doesn’t fit with this narrative is either an annoyance or a threat, and this is true of all schools of history-as-certainty, from the Soviets to modern Hindutva extremists. But history is like memory: as malleable as it might seem to be, it is only useful when it rests on truth and accuracy, not a wishful imagining of how things should be.
Following history in the spirit of pleasure is another matter all together, and it leads to surprising discoveries. Postdoctoral fellow Audrey Truschke’s curiosity led her to study Sanskrit and Persian in the Mughal court, consulting archives in India and Pakistan. Her forthcoming book Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court is a fascinating look at exchanges between the Mughal, Jain and Brahmin elites in the 16th and 18th centuries.
Between the 1570s and the 1650s, she records, “dozens of Jains and Brahmins visited the central courts, and worked as resident scholars, musicians, political negotiators, intellectual informants and astrologers”.
This world is messy and complex, displaying neither the cartoon wickedness of the brutal invader crushing all before him or the equally blurry idea that everyone lived in an oversimplified harmony. In the 1590s, Tapa Gaccha Jains defended themselves against accusations of atheism from Akbar, prompted by his discussions with Brahmans at the court. Devavivmala had recorded a debate between Abul Fazl and Hiravijaya over the merits of Islam and Jainism – as Truschke points out, the story may have been apocryphal, but it is revealing that it should be recorded at all.
How much do we lose of ourselves and our own memory if we insist on a limited, narrow view of the past? Truschke’s research opens up another way of seeing the Mughal courts and how the debates of that time eddied and changed over the centuries, fuelled by the mutual, sometimes wary, sometimes open, curiosity between different religious groups. And this is what history is supposed to do, beyond the battles waged by one school against another: make the past more clear, and make it come to life.
In The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and his Empire of Truth, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty frames a correspondence between Sarkar (1870-1958) and his fellow historian, Rao Bahadur Gobindrao Sakharam Sardesai (1865-1959). The letters were mentioned in the appendix of a book he found in the Regenstein Library in Chicago; he was immediately intrigued: “Here were two of India’s pioneering historians writing to each other for decades about issues crucial to historical research…”
Chakrabarty acknowledges that the pursuit of truth Sarkar believed in is long since outdated, but what drew him to this material was perhaps just the understanding that the past is not a static thing, frozen in textbooks. It is built of human exchanges, like the one between Sardesai and Sarkar. For months, Chakrabarty sat in the National Library, copying some 1200 letters by hand.
“His was a clear and steady hand… After a while it was impossible not to feel the presence of a person who paid attention to every detail in front of him. It was as if Sir Jadunath reprimanded me from behind every sentence of his that I copied, for there was so much difference between his writing and mine.”
That is the biggest difference between the historian or the reader who follows history for pleasure, and the one who enlists history as a weapon in his cause: one sees the rich muddle of human lives, the other sees only ammunition. We need to recover the first way of relating to the past, before yielding our collective memory so easily.
Email: nilanjanasroy@gmail.com
Email: nilanjanasroy@gmail.com
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