Q14 Right Wing Politics

- The Hindutva challenge to the historiography of India G N Devy, APR 22 2023, https://www.deccanherald.com/specials/the-hindutva-challenge-to-the-historiography-of-india-1212105.html  No representation of history can ever capture the complexity of all that happened in the past. Various civilisations have seen the rise of a large variety of writing about the past. These range from hagiographies, mythical accounts of heroes, fantasised depictions of conflicts, vaguely remembered memoirs of large migrations and natural calamities, as well as well-reasoned reproduction of facts, events, lives, regimes and transitions in a given people’s past..... a scientific method was proposed for history writing in the 19th century. This post-Hegelian understanding of history (as a discipline) is firmly based on the law of causality and veracity. Since then, a sensible history is expected to say “x happened because of y circumstances” and also provide evidence drawn from archaeology, texts, archives or testimonies.
V D Savarkar’s essay, The Essentials of Hinduism (1923), and book Bharatiya Itihasatil Saha Soneri Pane (The six golden pages in India’s history) written in his last years, sought to eulogise the ‘sanatana’ tradition. In the book, Savarkar portrays Buddhism as an obstruction to the progress of Hinduism. In the essay and the book, he depicts the Mughal empire as an undesirable episode in history. He argues that Aurangzeb and Tipu, despite being born of ‘Indian’ mothers, had to be seen as ‘foreigners’ and not ‘loyal’ to India. It is common knowledge that Savarkar considered Mahatma Gandhi with scorn throughout his life, and was placed in the dock in relation to Gandhi’s assassination.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) move to purge history texts of some historical accounts has its roots in the historiography proposed by Savarkar. The argument that this is to ‘purify’ the history of the colonial impact and the works of ‘leftist historians’ is just a convenient argument to cover up the agenda of institutionalising the Hindutva historiography proposed by Savarkar.
The current worrisome context of an agenda-bound and aggressive rewriting of history makes it necessary to reassert that the interpretation of the past cannot be made fodder for any vindictive political ideology. During the 20th century, the world faced a holocaust because pseudo-history was used to sway the emotions of the masses and generate scorn and hatred. A repeat of that experience is unaffordable for humanity in times when the technologies of destruction have moved many grades higher. Hopefully, the discipline of history is so rich now in its knowledge of the past that Hindutva’s speculative historiography, though imposed upon learners through the NCERT, can hardly make a dent in it.