For a person given to leftist political persuasion, I follow an unusually large number of Indian right-wing accounts on platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter. Much of what happens over there is of little interest to me, yet I follow them – to keep abreast of the development taking place in the Hindutva school of history writing.
Time and again, I have noticed a strange and stubborn insistence on assigning primacy to the ‘primary sources’ for the reconstruction of the past. Consequently, what follows is a very interesting – flawed nonetheless – approach to history: a scholar proves his ‘mettle’ only by having perused a huge swathe of archival documents.
This archival fetish is not a post-2014 phenomenon. Much earlier, when Arun Shourie made the case for ‘the great communist betrayal in 1942’ in a series of articles in the Illustrated Weekly of India, his perusal of no less than 800 documents was the talk of the town.
As Sumit Sarkar in his response to Shourie argued, an unwary reader might be tempted to regard this flashy clickbait with genuine historical research. But why is it so?
For those not trained in the social sciences and/or humanities, ‘primary sources’ tend to warm the cockles of their hearts. Primary sources, they are given to think, exist in a pristine and untainted form. Secondary sources, on the other hand, don’t qualify for such fetishisation as they involve the biases and subjectivity of the scholar(s).
What this also entails is this: if a work is replete with fine, granular empirical details, it is undeniably a great work of history.
Now, before we begin to challenge this widely held popular belief, we must be cognisant of the fact that these ideas have been long refuted in academia. Today, no serious scholar believes that primary sources should be taken at face value; there’s a prevalent consensus that all sources exist in a certain context and tend to be power-laden.
In his essay, The Prose of Counter Insurgency, Ranajit Guha made a compelling case for reading the archives against the grain. By analysing many texts produced by colonial administrators during peasant insurgencies, he demonstrated how the interpretative (explaining) segments sort of wormed into a text and together with the indicative (factual reporting) segments conferred a specific meaning to a text.
It is this analysis that led Guha to conclude: “… our texts are not the record of observations uncontaminated by bias, judgement and opinion. On the contrary, they speak of a total complicity.”
It is then indeed an unpleasant surprise that such outdated ideas still continue to resonate in the popular domain. Hindutva’s philosophy of history – if at all it can be called that – resembles the empiricist and positivist schools of thought heralded by Leopold von Ranke and Thomas Babington, only in a much crude and vulgar manner.
Ranke was of the view that historians should base their findings solely on contemporary, primary sources, and disregard those written after the event they focus on in order to be as objective as possible.
This provided the impetus to what is today known as the ‘archival fetish.’ These ideas were in vogue in the 19th century and have been rendered obsolete for many decades now. The fact that scholars of the Indian Right still find these ideas fascinating is a monument to the poverty of imagination in Hindutva circles.
The reason why it becomes important to challenge this narrow, crude approach to history writing is because of the specific nature of the historiography we are dealing with. It is not merely a scholarly exercise; it is deeply tied to an obscurantist and exclusionary political project.
Communalism and history share an interesting dialectic. While the burgeoning of communalism influences how history is written, a skewed and distorted representation becomes a powerful instrument to spread communal consciousness. Both communalism and communal history writing are mutually reinforcing: an unscientific view of history is both a component of communal ideology as well as a product of the same, as Bipin Chandra tells us.
In order to arrive at a desired conclusion about the past – ancient and medieval particularly – these writers uncritically read the sources produced by the Muslim emperors. More often than not, these sources narrate the destruction of temples or persecution of the infidels in pornographic detail.
However, unless and until those sources are read in their context, a comprehensive picture will not emerge. To flesh out this argument, we can consider an inscription dated 1455 found in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh.
This 42-verse Persian ghazal mentions the destruction of a Hindu temple by ‘Abdullah Shah Changal’ during the rule of Raja Bhoja. This is accepted at face value as evidence of temple destruction by Sita Ram Goel in his work, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them? Richard Eaton, on the other hand, critically analyses the inscription, and argues that the inscription was not an objective account but a narrative that was shaped by oral traditions.
Such sources are reflective of the memory of the community and ideological framing, and they don’t represent historical fact per se. Any scholar seriously interested in understanding the past must exercise caution while interpreting such sources.
That is why we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that a work of history solely based on primary sources and replete with empirical evidence is necessarily a rich work of history. Here, again, we can borrow some insights from Sumit Sarkar:
“… but going through and quoting from a set of documents … is only a preliminary step in the craft of the historian. A piece of historical reconstruction has to be judged ultimately by the degree and the nature of the grasp it reveals over the total historical perspective relevant to the events being examined, the setting against which the motivations and relative significance of particular documents are being necessarily evaluated.”
While we are discussing the pitfalls of fetishising the archive, we must, however, be nimble enough not to throw out the baby with the bath water, as much of the historical writings informed by the postmodernist turn are wont to do. Underlying many anti-positivist writings is a certain – latent perhaps – thrust towards unfettered, free-for-all relativism, which robs history of all objectivity. The works of Jacques Derrida, the renowned French philosopher, provide impetus to such tendencies.
Derridean deconstruction basically posits that any text – literary or otherwise – abounds in ‘rhetorical surplus’, as Sumit Sarkar calls it. This does away with the generic distinction between literary and non-literary writings, since this ‘rhetorical surplus’ is found in other forms of writing – philosophical, historical, and even scientific – their purport or authorial intent to be non-literary notwithstanding.
At the risk of oversimplification, this would, in the context of history, mean that there is not much difference between a work of history and a historical novel. Our approach, it must be emphasised, is different from this. The aim here is to demonstrate the perils of archival fetish whilst also emphasising the need to be true to the archive.
Although academic history writing has grown by leaps and bounds since the times of Ranke, the imprints of Rankean positivism are still intact in the popular domain. This glaring gap between the academic and the public also throws light on the need for academic works to be bereft of unnecessary jargon hankering for them to be more accessible. Historians and academicians need to engage with the public to bridge this gap.
End of the day, what matters is how you, as a historian, speak to non-historians. Such an endeavour does not entail compromising on rigour and nuance; it simply means presenting your work in a manner that can be read and enjoyed by a wider audience. There have been many brilliant historians like Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson in whose works this dichotomy between the public and the academic was, by and large, absent.
Shashi Singh is reading for a master’s degree in the Department of History at the University of Delhi.
