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| March 6, 2000 | ||
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| RIGHT ANGLE A Phoney Controversy Marxist historians have never concealed their political agenda By Swapan Dasgupta
To Sarkar, the foremost task is to confront what he calls "manufactured common sense" on history. He is quite clear what that means. "Through the media and the majority of schools, the message that has been constantly broadcast is that history is valuable because it stimulates pride in one's country." To him, that's not kosher because "after Independence ... narratives of the freedom struggle ... became a major means of legitimising ruling groups in the post-colonial nation-state through claims of continuity with a glorious past".
Lest this is construed as a professional lament against politicisation, Sarkar puts the record straight. The "explorations of the social conditions of production of history cannot afford to remain a purely intellectual project. It needs to become part of wider and more difficult efforts to change these conditions ..." In plain language, that implies scholarship and pamphleteering must go hand in hand. Historians have hitherto interpreted the past. The point, he says, is to change the present. Not that Sarkar denies progress in that sphere. There was, he writes, "considerable scope in modern Indian history for a kind of Left nationalist-Marxist consensus, a rough counterpart perhaps in historiography to the Nehruvian consensus". This "new history", he admits, has made headway. "Today in leading universities as well as in the Indian History Congress it has been functioning as a kind of establishment for almost a generation." So much so that there is a "sheer distance that separates the post-Kosambi or post-Irfan Habib historiography from what preceded it". Cut out the fluff and Sarkar bluntly admitted well before the BJP was in power that it was the Congress-communist alliance forged by S. Nurul Hasan that was the original revisionists. It ensured Sir Jadunath Sarkar was out and Comrade Sumit Sarkar in. The problem was that the progressives overdid it. There is, Sarkar concedes, "a certain legitimate impatience about the occasionally simplified and restrictive applications of Marxism ..." Now that this "impatience" has spilled over to the wider world, the Left historians are angry. "What is their expertise?" they ask in press conferences at the SAHMAT office about those who demand accountability. Perhaps none. But wasn't it Sarkar who advocated greater interaction between academics and "activists"? "History, surely is a subject in which intelligent interest does not demand great professional knowledge," he wrote. Unless he meant that "intelligent interest" can only be cloaked in a red flag. |
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There is something faintly disagreeable
about India's preoccupation, not with its past, but with its squabbling historians. For
the past fortnight, there has been renewed indignation over the BJP-led Government's
alleged attempts to "rewrite" history and impose academic censorship. The
kangaroo court of the Left intelligentsia has arrived at its predictable verdict. But
before the country is pilloried by the stigma of intolerance, it would be instructive to
consider the self-confessions of one historian at the centre of the present controversy.
Sumit Sarkar's "The Many Worlds of Indian History" -- a chapter in his Writing
Social History (OUP 1997) -- presents the most lucid and honest insight into how the
ICHR's Soviet-style 1972 mandate to give a "proper direction" to historical
research in India has been appropriated by those who are now craftily feigning victimhood.