The Right Way to Revise History

All history is revisionist history. Unpacking and understanding that is crucial to illuminating what historians do. A fundamental feature of historical practice is shaping a distinction between “the past” and “history.” Once “the past” as “what has happened” occurs, it ceases to exist—beyond repetition, replication and reliving. It is recoverable only by the incomplete evidence it leaves behind. Individuals, primarily historians, must interpret that evidence, but also archaeologists, anthropologists, epigraphists, and others, who have differing outlook and strategies.

Many professionals deem revisionist history and rewriting history as undesirable, but it goes back to Ancient Greece. We can think of Herodotus and Thucydides, for instance. Thucydides dismissed Herodotus’ path-breaking work as “a prize essay to be heard for the moment… attractive at truth’s expense.” He advocated a strict focus on warfare, statecraft, leadership, and politics in history. Its chief method? A reliance on written texts and the direct observations of participants. Its aims? To instruct and, only secondarily, to please its readers. Lithuanian-born American historian Donald Kagan wrote a great deal on this aspect, calling Thucydides the “first revisionist historian”. These words of caution were necessary to rescue the term revisionist from the witch hunt of ideology, politics, and misbegotten negativism.

Shonaleeka Kaul is one of our best revisionist historians. Her first scholarly work examined Sanskrit kaavyas over a thousand years to understand India’s early historic cities as living entities. She studied ideologies, attitudes, institutions, and practices in ancient urban areas, showing how they often formed a worldview. Her second work on Kashmir’s history, origins, and identity significantly impacted the current discourse on regional selfhood in Kashmir. The work reinterpreted Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, arguing that the text was history, not despite being traditional Sanskrit poetry but because of it. The book, much to the chagrin of many professionals, remarkably jettisoned the image of an isolated and insular Kashmir and bolstered the cultural and political connectedness of Kashmir to the rest of India. In between, she kept researching and writing on several aspects of the cultural and social histories of early India while producing readable and engaging translations of texts like Narayana’s Hitopadesha. She even brought together scholars to contribute towards a rethinking on themes of ‘alternative temporalities’ and ‘myths and history’.

New Essays, New Departures

Kaul’s latest is a collection of expressly written essays. Several of them appeared as columns; others appeared elsewhere. They are readable and accessible. They are a warm reception to those readers who enjoy reading history but are​ shy of academic mannerisms. Totalling seventeen, these essays sum up the historian’s academic and public lives so far. They illuminate the readers on the idea of Bharata before the British, Kashmir, Shakti worship, Lal Ded, architecture as Advaita, Sanskrit and society, Indic visions of history, politics of time and place to reclaim poetry and myth, Krishna in Mathura, Kama culture, and so on. Most of these essays are simultaneously self-contained and aggregated as far as the larger thrust of the book is concerned.

The reader glances at the contents only to realise that the book’s keyword is decolonisation. The same decolonisation that has lost its shape as a hat because everybody wears it now. With Kaul’s hands-on approach and her quarter-century old professional hat, decolonisation looks hands-down. In her work, it is not merely a polemic but rather serious business.

For instance. A seemingly simple yet deceptive question: ‘How far back does the idea of India go?’ The answers are polarised. At one end, we have an eternal and unexamined India that just exists. On the other end, India appears only as a ‘nation in the making’ via colonization.  The difficulty is one of categories: nation, nation-state, rashtra and so on.

Kaul begins with what she does best. She takes on Partha Chatterjee’s gnome that “All nations (rashtra) are modern…” We are told how rashtra is a very ancient term. It occurs several times in later Vedic texts from the 10^th to 5^th century BCE. Texts? Vajasaneyi Samihta, Shatapatha Brahmana, Atharvaveda Samhita, Mahabharata, Arthshastra, Manusmriti, and so on. Kaul contends that unlike the formal and political characters of a nation-state, “a nation is first and foremost a notion: The jointly held sense of belonging to a common territorial and cultural entity that a people name and assert.” Think of Mahabharata and alone in the Bhishma Parva’s tenth chapter details in more than 70 verses the historical geography of India. Kaul adds how the text also documents the ethnography of the janapadas and janas. From Kharvela, Shri Pulumayi, Devapala, Asoka, Govind IV, Someshvara IV to Akbar, and from Megasthenes, Ptolemy, Xuan Zang, Abu Raihan Al beruni, Amir Khusrau, and Abul Fazl, Kaul enmeshes so much evidence on cultural geography of India that it seems overwhelming. In the end, she punctures a crucial historiographic make-believe that Indian unity is only a “retrospective thrust of hegemonic [modern] nationalism.” The book documents India’s ancient ideas’ vastness and pluralism.

In a similar vein, in the essay titled ‘Kashmir and the Rest of India: A Forgotten History’, Kaul problematises the stark absence of Kashmir from historical discourse. She reminds us that the country is more invested in Kashmir’s politics and not her history. This reminder seems urgent, especially because even when Kashmir’s history is invoked, it gets lost in the tales of the Cold War, armed insurgency and its unfortunate geopolitics. Kaul takes us back on a guided tour of ‘Bharatavarsha’ and recalls how, in Mahabharata, the people of Kashmir (Kashmirah) were named. More evidence adds up, be it Shankara Digvijaya or Amir Khusrau’s Nuh Sipihr. Unearthing a plethora of textual testimonies, Kaul drives home her historical narrative through a highway of rock-solid evidence. It is not a word-of-mouth description. Her earlier work The Making of Early Kashmir (OUP, 2018) rounded off a method, an approach for many who were crying ‘Indic!’ out loud from their dwellings but had no clue how to write such a history in the first place. No wonder many insights and textual testimonies that Kaul has amassed in her scholarship are freely (ab)used by many champions of Indic histories without proper citations.

Moving on, think of Shakti worship. It is iconic in Bengal, but Kaul shows how “the Goddess has been central to the definition of regional identity and selfhood” in Kashmir. Again, more founding texts like Nilamata Purana (7^th century CE), Kalhana’s Rajatarangini (12^th century CE) and Bhringisha Samhita (17^th century) are discussed in detail, and three paramount devis of Kashmir, namely, Sharada, Sharika and Ragnya, have been focused on.

Indic Visions of History

Kaul also intervenes in the nineteenth century. Much to the surprise of her “lay readers”, much of “Ancient India” was (re)discovered in the “Modern Times”. It is crucial to understand why someone like Kaul, who is a Sanskritist and a historian of Early India, should be concerned with an English orientalist named HH Wilson, who was elected the first Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University. The puzzle easily solves itself when Kaul reminds us how Wilson in 1825 famously remarked that Rajatarangini was “the only Sanskrit composition yet discovered, to which the title of History, can with any propriety be applied.” Kaul throws sufficient light on the statement to her readers understand that this “apparent adulation” was “in fact indictment of an entire literary culture and civilisation for its lack thereof.”

Imagine that you believe that there is still a strong hold of colonial and neo-imperial approaches on the profession of history. Marxism and Hindutva have made the issue moot and fiercely contentious. It’s all well-established. What’s next?

How do we rescue an entire literary culture and civilisation from the enormous condescension of colonial and Marxist perspectives and an uncritical and glorified celebration of it? In this fierce battle of polarities, we need warriors like Shonaleeka Kaul who reclaim the encroaching spaces in the discourse to remind us that we have Indic concepts of time that “reflected an idea of history that spanned anthropic specificity or precision on the one hand and cosmic vastness or unreckonability on the other.” We sail through lots of terms and walk through esplanades when the historian describes puranas, itihasa, charita, kavya, and much more.

More decolonisation occurs gradually. Kaul informs us that “the presence of myths in the Epics has led historians to deny them the status of history, thereby defying the tradition’s self-understanding.” What could be the logical next step? A reclaiming of time and place! Kaul does the same when she makes the readers aware of the alternative temporalities in Sanskrit poetics. She compellingly argues for redressing history’s chauvinistic binary by reinterpreting it through myth, viewing it as a uniquely expressive historical mode.

Popular History and Historians

The historian gives us an absorbing glimpse of many themes. Kama Culture, for example, has been portrayed as an ethos centred on pleasure or eros. Kaul illustrates how kavyas depict the city with themes of love and sensual pleasure, explicitly stated, implied, or insinuated. Another fresh reading of Hitopadesha highlights thriving animal histories in early India, emphasizing the individuality of non-human lives and their interdependence with humans.

The last two essays in the book are both intimate and public. Historians, especially in India, hardly write about themselves. If we are dealing with histories which involve Indian historians as subjects of enquiry, the limitations of sources become acute, necessarily because many historians have not made their private papers available for public, nor have they written any memoirs. It is surprising because, as Jaume Aurell shows, professional historians have produced some 450 works of autobiography or memoir, and the bulk of them in the last few decades. Kaul’s openness about her adventures in history, therefore, is like a palliative. She explains how her interests and work took shape and evolved, and thereby how a historian negotiates with her world, “both within and without”.

Kaul signs off with a reminder to her students and fellow academics that “language is a skill, not a liability”, and it cannot be given more weight than just a “medium for trans-cultural conversations.” Moreover, apart from the Colonial ‘Other’ she alerts us against “the warring twin camps of Left and Right politics.” She calls on her readers to sidestep the “disdain, name-calling and power-lust” that both extreme camps have championed and emancipate the India academia from “the tyranny of these labels.”

Such a call is that one of a concerned and caring academic who is not content within the silos of academia and who doesn’t look at the growing demand for a new history with disdain and contempt. Kaul represents those exceptions within our universities who would present their people with a readable history that does not compromise the rigour. Bharata Before the British and Other Essays (2024) is an essential reading for all those who wish to write new histories while reclaiming and retrieving those fragments of the past that have been subjected to disdain or outright neglect.

The book is a guiding light for those who wish to ‘decolonise’ without a clue as to what to do and how. The book is an illuminating reading for those who wish to study Early India but are unsure of the training and skill components. Historians like Kaul exemplify the best practices of history writing and stand for a free and vast space of dialogue that has been persistently encroached by ideology. One hopes that the book will earn more support for her revisionist cause among the educated and concerned Indians.

BharatabooksBritishDonald KaganIndic historyIndology