Controversy Is Always Welcome

“Taj Mahal is a mispronunciation of Tejo Mahalaya!” Another declaration is that “Christianity is Krishna Neeti”. Somebody added “Australia is ‘astralaya’ where Pandavas kept their weapons.” Another popular claim on social media is about Thomas Babington Macaulay’s address to the British Parliament on February 2, 1835, where he allegedly claimed to have never seen a beggar in India. The substance is that even Macaulay glimpsed the “sone ki chidiya” that India once was.

All these claims and more are cock and bull stories. They require fact-check. Macaulay was not present in London on 2 February 1835 to make any statement to the British Parliament. He was in Calcutta. As far as “Tejo Mahalaya”​ and “Astralaya” are concerned they are what one commonly refers to as “WhatsApp History” these days. We will get back to what it means. But first, let us dive into contemporary history.

On 6 March 1969, Santha Rungacharya interviewed Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib for a major English daily. The discussion was on ‘The Writing of History’. Habib was perplexed that a question about PN Oak was asked in one of the higher secondary examinations. Habib informed readers about Oak stating, “He is the one who has put forward this theory that the Taj Mahal is a Rajput Palace.” He raised further alarm about Oak “already being invited to lecture in schools in Delhi.” Thapar and Habib agreed that “history teaching has become a reactionary activity. It encourages casteism and regionalism.”

From 1969 to 1989. Speaking at the DD Kosambi Memorial Lecture in 1989, another historian Bipan Chandra said something telling. He reminded the audience that education in most parts of the country is intellectually backward for there are few books in regional languages which do not portray regional chauvinism. On another occasion in 1994, as the Chairman of the National Steering Committee on Textbook Evaluation, Chandra reaffirmed that no unauthorised textbooks be allowed to be used in schools, whether government-aided or private. The Committee recommended constituting state boards for writing textbooks. It also submitted with a deep concern that History textbooks in the country were being written by “incompetent persons”. It was deliberately injecting communalism into the narrative and spreading it across.

Dalrymple and Friends

Recently, William Dalrymple set the cat free among the pigeons. The Scott Sahib ruffled the “nationalist” and “Marxist” feathers of many academics. At the Indian Express’s Idea Exchange, he stated that Indian historians who failed to disseminate history to the masses are largely responsible for the surge of WhatsApp history in India. A range of rejoinders have appeared. Taking stock of them would be a futile cut-and-paste job. It is enough to outline that these rejoinders in their “Right” and “Wrong” positions have failed to show us a way forward.

Dalrymple is no stranger to courting controversies. That means he has both intent and power to speak his heart out; a privilege that eludes many of us. In 2006 when Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal came out, he was headlined in a national daily saying “Indian historians are lazy.” Dalrymple disavowed and called the misunderstanding the handiwork of an enthusiastic sub-editor. However, Dalrymple stood by the truth that before him almost 75 per cent of Mutiny Papers (1857) were never requisitioned and remained “virtually unused”. Even then nobody was interested in the nuances. Irfan Habib wrote a two-page long refutation in Outlook on a non-issue.

Countering Dalrymple on something he never said, Habib reasoned that a few Urdu scholars had already accessed the Mutiny Papers and that one reason they had been used so little was not because of laziness but because the documents were in old Urdu and Persian, written in an almost undecipherable cursive hand (shikasta). The only problem with that argument is historians are expected to work with primary material. Definitionally primary sources are those that are produced closer to an event and we can’t complain why scribes wrote awfully. Anyway, in India where the greatest historian of Early India never worked with materials in primary languages and relied only on translations, perhaps anything goes.

Dalrymple in the past has his full duels with Ramachandra Guha, Shobhaa De and Farrukh Dhondy, and half with Dipesh Chakrabarty among others. The last one was not a confrontation. Chakrabarty reviewed The Last Mughal for The Times of India in December 2006. Chakrabarty, as one of the most identifiable figures of the Subaltern Studies Collective, suggested that both popular and academic histories have their places. “Shouldn’t all historians write in a style that is accessible and attractive to lay readers?” Chakrabarty agreed adding the question itself is unfortunate and “any dogmatic answer to this question will land us in intellectual dead-ends.”

WhatsApp History: For Whom?

Chakrabarty explained that an Amartya Sen has no stake in writing on the Great Bengal Famine like a “thriller”. Similarly, Irfan Habib may not feel like making his “Agrarian History” a fun read for semi-literate peasants. There are aspects of the past in which general readers often have an acute factual interest that academicians might not share. Could Gandhi have saved the lives of Bhagat Singh and his Comrades? Was Gandhi a racist? Did Netaji really die in a plane crash? Did Suhrawardy really control the police during the Calcutta riots of 1946? Who was responsible for the Partition of India? Who was the real liberator of India? There are many readers still interested to find out the simple answer to these puzzles. Historians would enjoy roaring sales at airports and railway stations if they could write a detective story-like book on these topics..

However, in the times of “easy answers” and “top news in just 60 words” do we have enough time for nuances, understanding and engaging with something called “Historical Thinking”? A rejoinder on the Dalrymple controversy lauded the fact that their online initiative focuses on condensing “lengthy academic writing into 300-word passages for our readers on Instagram, with our posts reaching 100,000+ history aficionados each month.” Congratulations? Other online initiatives that have been lauded by many prominent academics for making academic history “accessible, engaging and inclusive” have never reconsidered what do they do? If a range of closely selected academics appears for an online lecture reiterating their already published works in a language that is no different from the printed word, what else do they bring to the table to stand the promise of accessibility and inclusivity? Does inclusivity mean dumbing down? Or does it mean transporting the elite IIC and Habitat Centre of Lutyens Delhi to YouTube and Facebook Live?

Moreover, WhatsApp History is specific. It should not be equated with rumours, fake news, the false and the fictitious as many have done. WhatsApp History is not even pseudo-history. They are just a set of claims that could be easily falsified by a basic fact-check. Take an example from the top. To believe that TB Macaulay said something about Indian wealth and prosperity to the British parliament on a specific date, what do we need? Perhaps a way to find out if he was in London that day or not. Or a solid reason to express doubts about the veracity of a claim? Simple!

In the binaries and false opposition of “popular” and “academic” that simple reasoning of either finding out the truth or expressing doubt about the veracity of a claim has been lost. It is called “Historical Thinking”. It is a set of literary skills that helps us engage with the evidence on which historical truth is based. Asking questions, supporting answers with evidence, examining historical records, creating historical arguments, and reading historical narratives created by others are central to it. Have we taught these skills to our school-goers in the last seven decades? The answer is a resounding NO!

Dalrymple is not grumbling about the writing style or making someone’s Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture accessible to the people through cheap paperbacks from the National Book Trust. He seems to be raising questions about the collective academic failure of historians in India about not inculcating “Historical Thinking” in Indians.

Dalrymple is quite right. The false opposition between “popular” and “academic” does not exist in India. Academic historians for the longest years led the popular, at least, through official textbooks. They have failed, miserably.

Historical Thinking: More Examples

The question is if Habib and Thapar were aware of the dangers of PN Oak in 1969, what did they do about it? How come the pseudo-histories of PN Oak still survive and thrive? After years of experimenting with solo-authored “official” school textbooks with unilateral interpretations, why did historians like Romila Thapar, RS Sharma, Satish Chandra, Bipan Chandra, Meenakshi Jain, Makkhan Lal and others collectively fail to create textbooks that encourage learners to understand history through change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency? Why, as a nation-state, are we still discussing who the real liberator of India was? Have our textbooks succeeded in convincing their readers that asking a question like who between Albert Einstein and Mao Zedong changed the 20th century more dramatically is not suitable for those who study history?

When NCERT textbooks started appearing in the late 1960s to foster national integration, only 34.45% of Indians were literate. Even today, India is home to the largest number of illiterate people numbering to 280 million. The whole debate around written history seems way too big for its boots. The grand project of whitewashing troubling facts by creating a composite culture in Medieval India didn’t last long. Most people who do not and cannot wait for 10 years of university education to learn the nuances of history writing, and get done with textbooks during school, seem to be seeking an alternative historical narrative. Where would they get it from? Are the 700 million smartphone users in India who are almost half of the total population all involved in the “WhatsApp History” project of the “Hindu Right Wing” as a few suggest? How do we understand the rising stars of Vikram Sampath, J Sai Deepak, Anand Ranganathan, Sanjeev Sanyal, Manu Pillai, Anirudh Kanisetti, Chandrachur Ghose and the sustenance of old-timers like Ramachandra Guha and William Dalrymple who are selling more books than a Ranajit Guha or Romila Thapar, for instance? What is happening? Is it just about a writing style, accessibility or politics?

At the heart of the issue, some difficult questions remain unanswered. A semi-literate Banarasi peasant who is unaware of the scholarly writings on Kashi Vishwanath and Gyanvapi and archaeological findings believes that the temple was desecrated by Aurangzeb. How should we deal with him? More so, if he is in a majority; if his belief takes the shape of a truth-claim; if the truth-claims are denied by certain scholars because they think they are involved in nation-building by compromising truth claims at the altar of national integration, secularism and peace.

The debate that Indian historians who failed to disseminate history to the masses are largely responsible for the surge of WhatsApp history in India, one is afraid, is sketchy and incomplete. The comprehensive discussion should be on how a WhatsApp message inspired Dalrymple to write The Golden Road (2024). One could argue that his 100 pages of endnotes and 50 pages of bibliography were all there. One could argue that the sources that Vikram Sampath employed for writing his fine book on Tipu Sultan were there for others to consult and use. Academics—Indian and others–have written about many of these themes. Why are we still discussing many well-known facts again to impress them as new? Perhaps because WhatsApp History is synonymous with an urge for alternative facts and new histories. There is no reason to be frightened of the new.

History is always rewritten. We have come a long way from the days of Leopold von Ranke, Edward Gibbon and James Mill because we rewrote our histories. Therefore, could we use the “WhatsApp History” moment as an urgent excuse to write more histories rather than vilifying and belittling those who seek new information? If someone seeks information on Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, what is wrong with writing 1,000 pages on him in lucid prose? Why should an author who undertakes that project be stigmatised by other professionals? Our Marxist historians should recall that nobody left the Party in India in 1956. Something else happened in that fateful year. On May 2, 1956, Mao in China gave the classic slogan: “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Can they learn from Mao if not from Gandhi or Ambedkar?

Indian historyJames MillNCERT textbooks William DalrympleTaj MahalVinayak Damodar Savarkar