Linking the past and the present_Romila Thapar
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RANABIR CHAKRAVARTI
Romila Thapar: "There is always something to look forward to in the excitement of reading the past in order to understand the present."
Interview with the historian Romila Thapar, Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University. By RANABIR CHAKRAVARTI
Romila Thapar, Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, is one of the most celebrated historians of India, internationally acclaimed particularly for her immense contribution to the interpretative studies of early India. Her untiring efforts have largely enabled the shift of the study from what is known as Indology to early Indian History with a strong orientation to social sciences. Her untiring engagement with the study of the history of this subcontinent are marked by interrogating and interpreting the past, not merely on empirical richness, but by integrating the study of ancient history with several social and human sciences such as sociology, social and cultural anthropology, geography and political science. The result has been the transformation of the study of ancient/early India from dynastic detail and dates to introspective readings of the past. In these ventures she repeatedly reminds us of the changing patterns of historiography and analyses the questions raised by historians, their methodologies of and approaches to the study of the past, which, as she rightly points out, is intimately linked up with the present. She has unravelled how a particular enquiry of the past has a bearing on the current social, cultural and political situation.
Professor Thapar obtained her PhD (1958) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, under the supervision of Professor A.L. Basham. Her thesis on the Mauryan period came out subsequently as her famous book, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, in which she situated Asoka and the Maurya rule in the context of the socio-economic, political and cultural milieu of the period on the basis of a critical reading of primary sources. This work left lasting impacts on early Indian historiography. Professor Thapar’s major contribution to the study of early Indian social history is writ large in many of her works, notably Ancient Indian Social History and Interpreting Early India. From the 1980s, Professor Thapar’s enduring interest in the study of the early state (From Lineage to State, The Mauryas Revisited) opened up new areas of historical research. In these works, she offered new insights into the history of state formation in early India by highlighting the complex sociopolitical and ideological factors in the making of a state society. Though Professor Thapar’s principal interest lies in the social history of early India, she has also written extensively on the economic history (on forests, professional guild-like bodies, and trade). In recent decades, her growing interests in cultural history (however, not cultural studies, following the current trend in postmodern and postcolonial studies) will be evident from her Sakuntala and Somanatha : Many Voices of a History. Another area of her pioneering work is the study of the Itihasa-Purana tradition vis-a-vis the modern discipline of history. She has ably contested the archetypical Eurocentric notion that early India lacked a sense of history and critically analysed the notions of cyclical time and linear time. Among the most read of her works is Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, a magisterial overview of early Indian history. This book is actually an elaboration of her earlier book, History of India, Vol. I. The modifications, elaborations and additions (which she elegantly described as “autobiographical”) she incorporated in this later book amply demonstrate her keenness to accommodate new data, new interpretative models and fresh perspectives. In that sense, Professor Thapar is ever alert and ready to revise her position. This highlights her firm commitment to her subject and demonstrates that a historian may also change—a point that shows the liveliness of the subject called History. An indefatigable and outspoken critique of the obscurantist, chauvinist and communal interpretations of the past, Professor Thapar has been awarded many academic honours in India and abroad, including the Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the field of History (2005). Professor Thapar was elected the General President of the Indian History Congress (1983). She is the recipient of the Honorary Fellowships of the School of Oriental and African Studies (London) and Lady Margaret Hall (Oxford University). In this interview, Professor Thapar discusses at length how the past—remote and/or recent—is intimately connected with the present. How and to what extent the situations in the present influence and determine the choice of the study of a certain phase of the past also figure prominently. Her statements are likely to create greater awareness of and sensitivity to the study of the past, which, like many other disciplines, stands on professional expertise and rigour and is vastly different from amateurish forays into history. She categorically warns against attempts at homogenisation of the past in the name of cultural nationalism and unequivocally stresses the sustained pluralist traditions in India. The interview has brought out her repeated encouragement of raising new questions to understand the past with a view to developing a comprehensive appreciation of the present.
Ranabir Chakravarti: When one reads your latest book, The Past as Present, one gets an impression that you are a little sad about the state of the study of history, and the general perception of history, in India. You don’t sound very optimistic about it. You are not pessimistic either—that you wrote very clearly. Could you elaborate on the scenario?
“ We are still using a completely outdated understanding of history and methods of teaching it. The emphasis is on dates and events.”
Romila Thapar: Your question is about where history has gone in the last few decades in India. Let me say that there are two levels on which history is being read and studied or being spoken about. One is the level of the scholarship of academic historians where I think that the kind of history being written is impressive, at least among those historians who work at the better universities and colleges. When I consider how history was taught fifty years ago, and the kinds of struggles that we had in those days to give a new direction to historical writing, and the kind of direction that is now being taken, it is in fact an impressive change. I am pleased with the way things have gone, although admittedly the change is not universal in the universities and most have still not caught up with history as it is taught in the best centres. Nevertheless, there are a number of historians who not only treat history as a social science but also recognise its intellectual foundations. And this approach, one hopes, will spread.
However, my feeling about the other way in which history is being projected is actually the opposite. This is with reference to the popular history with which the general public is familiar. This suffers from its being either out-of-date history of the kind taught more than a century ago, or not history at all. Often pointless questions are asked, and all kinds of generalised statements are made about the past, generally reflecting a lack of knowledge about history. This history in the public sphere, propagated by people who are not professional historians, has much to do with the way history is taught in school and even college. We are still using a completely outdated understanding of history and methods of teaching it. The emphasis is on dates and events and treating history as just a body of information that has to be memorised. As somebody said, looking at the notes given to students, they are like a telephone directory with a list of numbers on one side and a list of people on the other.
THE HISTORICAL METHOD
What is sad is that people still think that history is only information about the past. This attitude is now seen as being too limited when doing research into history. What we emphasise is not just getting information from known sources but also tapping new varieties of sources and checking even more carefully than before the reliability of the evidence before proceeding to use the information for understanding and explaining the past. These two aspects of exploring the past for information and then explaining what happened in the past contribute to what we today call the “historical method”. This is not something that was taught to us when we were students because few thought in these terms. But today it is absolutely essential.
Unfortunately, there is not enough emphasis on how this method is to be taught to students—whether at the high school or undergraduate college level. What it essentially means is that the first step is to collect evidence and data. The second step is to test the reliability of the data and make sure that what one is using is reliably tested information and not something that is casually picked up from here or there or just someone’s fantasy. The third step is to see the causal relationship between events where it exists. Did event “B” result from event “A”? Is there a linkage between the two if the event happened at the same place, but only a little later in time? So the causal relationship becomes an important element in a reasoned, logical analysis. There are those who are professionally trained as historians and yet don’t take the next step, which is that every analysis has to be based on a critical assessment of the data. Fantasy doesn’t come into play and that is often the big difference. In popular history, it is often more fantasy than actual reasoned, logical analysis.
Once you have gone through these steps, then you can make a statement that we call a historical generalisation. So this procedure of treating historical information as a body of facts that needs to be analysed, considered logically and rationally is something much more recent in the historical research of the last few decades. It did exist earlier but was confined to the better historians. Today it is required of all students of history. Since it is rigorous, not all students qualify.
By that you are also perhaps suggesting that what we understand by historical information is itself a very rigorous process of analysis and data collection and that requires proper training and cannot be picked up by amateurish interest. And there is something distinctly different between an amateurish public interest in something of the past and a historian’s understanding on the basis of rigorous collection of information and its methodical explanation on a rational basis.
You are right, absolutely right. The point is with reference to all history. But it is more complicated with reference to ancient Indian history, given the range of sources that have to be consulted. It is not enough to read a dozen books on ancient Indian history, for that doesn’t make you a specialist. You have to know the sources and how to analyse them. You have to know what the sources are and in the languages that were used at that time. For example, you have to know the language of the inscriptions of the Mauryan kings, which was Prakrit, and analyse them. You have to know other texts that were written in Sanskrit, such as the Arthashastra of Kautilya. You have to know something about archaeology, and archaeology is today becoming increasingly technical and dependent on the use of scientific methods and knowledge. There is more and more science being introduced into archaeological research, so much so that sometimes when reading contemporary archaeological reports I can’t fully understand them because they require training in science. Then there is linguistics. It is not enough to know the language of the source one is using. One has also to understand the rules of linguistics when examining change in a language—different formations of vocabulary, grammar, and phonetics—and the way in which, and why, languages can be segregated or can interact.
Let me give you an example that is currently much talked about. When we were students, we were told that the language of the Rig Veda was Indo-Aryan and only that. Whereas today if you made that statement, not all Vedic scholars would agree because with the application of linguistics it has been argued there are some elements of Dravidian in the language of the Rig Veda, although the substantial language remains Indo-Aryan. Does this then change the perception of it as a source by the historian? It changes because one can’t say, “Here is a text in a single language spoken by people who used only that language.” Now the historian has to say, “Well if there are other linguistic features which do not belong to that language category, and Dravidian is different from Indo-Aryan, then it means that there was an interface between the speakers of one language with others speaking another language.” You have to ask whether there might have been bilingualism—or is there not enough evidence for that? Is this the result of the proximity of different language speakers? This puts the Rig Veda into a rather fascinating historical context of not just a single culture but reflecting its domination in the midst of other co-existing cultures. So the historian has to uncover these other cultures.
Studies of this period today have to consider the evidence from other categories of sources not known a few decades ago. For instance, there are studies of the hydrology of the rivers in the area, and more so now with the Sarasvati river having become a subject of debate. Its identity is not definitively known, nor its history. Was it substantially monsoon-fed or glacier-fed? Were its waters captured by the Yamuna and the Sutlej, leading to its decline? Other sources that might throw light on this history are reports from genetics now being brought into the debate. Were there migrants into the area at particular points of time or did the composition of the population remain relatively static?
These are controversial aspects of the evidence, and I am referring to them in order to explain that historical questions do not always have “Yes” or “No” answers as the evidence can be diverse and controversial. (That, by the way, is one reason why “objective-type questions” in history make no sense.) Historians have to depend on the logic of their explanations. These may well have to change when the evidence changes. What was argued in the 19th century may have to be argued differently in the 21st century. Historical explanations are conditioned by the degree of knowledge about a subject known at a particular point in time. Such explanations can also be coloured by the purpose for which they are intended.
DENIAL OF DIVERSITY
May I now move to a broad issue? The public in general, not always trained in historical studies, are being fed a dangerous and wrong understanding of the past by looking at some homogenised versions of certain groups, certain religious tendencies, certain ethnic identities—everything is seen as a homogeneous entity. And we know that the past is not a homogeneous representation of events. You were saying that the Rig Veda cannot be just Indo-Aryan? It is not composed in a single language and it contains multiple languages and therefore suggests multiple cultures as well.
I am not going into the details of the argument being propagated at a public level. Again, one of the differences is that at the level of scholarship, nationally and internationally, scholars working on ancient India have maintained that the Aryan language came possibly via Iran from Central Asia. But the one view that is now being propagated in India by various people is that the Aryan speakers were all indigenous. Some even argue that the authors of the Harappan civilisation were Aryans, thus suggesting that there was no non-Aryan element in the origins of Indian civilisation. This is an argument I, for one, cannot accept for a variety of reasons.
Sanitised!
Sanitised Aryanism, where everything is simplified and has a single source. The complexities of the problem are set aside. Clearly, there is a strong difference of opinion and the evidence quoted in support of the two views is unequal. What is being suggested is for some of us linguistically and archaeologically not feasible. We argue that the Rig Veda is post-Harappan in date, so naturally it would not reflect the earlier culture. The Harappan culture had settlements in Oman and contacts with Mesopotamia, none of which is reflected in the Rig Veda. By the end of the third and early second millennia, the Harappan culture was contemporary with various non-Harappan cultures in the vicinity. In the mid-to-late second millennium, B.C., generally taken as the date for the composition of the Rig Veda, the presence of a range of cultures is registered, such as the Painted Grey Ware culture, the Black and Red Ware culture, the Megalithic culture, and so on. These are diverse. They are not a single culture. And in their spread the Aryan-speakers would have met these diverse cultures and settled in their midst.
And let’s not forget that the big difference between the Harappans and the authors of the Rig Veda is that the Harappan cities host essentially sophisticated urban cultures, with a knowledge of writing, whereas the society of the Rig Veda is agro-pastoral and unfamiliar with urbanism and literacy.
Especially what was happening in the Megalithic culture of the southern peninsula is hardly reflected in the text.
The Megalithic culture is not recorded as such in the texts. But different groups are discussed even in these texts, such as the asuras, the dasas, and the dasyus. Let’s look at the texts more realistically. The Rig Veda refers to two varnas— the arya and the dasa. Who were the dasas? They are described in the Rig Veda as people who practise rituals and customs that are different, they worship different gods, and they appear not to have spoken the same language as the authors of the Vedic corpus. They are wealthy and envied for their cattle wealth and they live in separate settlements. Some scholars therefore think they were of a different culture. So we have to ask “Who were they?” and why were they mythologised?
Then there are the dasi-putra brahmanas, unacceptable at first, but when they display their powers they are accepted as brahmanas. The term is an oxymoron in one sense, as dasi-putra (literally the son of a slave-woman or a woman of inferior status or culture) would contradict the status of a brahmana. The Vedic texts mention that devas and asuras were often in conflict. So yes, at one level it is mythology, but mythology is not totally divorced from the assumptions of a society, although it may not describe the reality. The assumptions they have about themselves usually creep into the myths they create. So if there is an insistent emphasis on “Us” and “Them”, then clearly there must be more than just one category of culture. That is why historians are arguing that the Vedic corpus refers to the period from the post-Harappan up to the urban cultures of the historical cities of the fifth century B.C. If seen in terms of interacting cultures, it raises a variety of possibilities in terms of the interaction of societies such as are excluded if the focus is only on a single culture. Would it be possible, for instance, to argue that the texts of the Vedic corpus are attempting to present themselves as an evolution of one pattern of culture out of an amalgam of many? Even today, despite five thousand years of historical activity, we still have diverse cultures.
It is neither single nor monolithic and it consists of definitely multiple sets of cultures. Since you raised this issue of archaeology and Vedic texts, I am reminded of a particularly interesting discovery made about five or six years ago. This is the archaeological site called Sintashta. I was fortunate to interact with the excavator, David Anthony, and he found out that it was a bronze-age culture. About 2500 BC, that is the possible date, the inhabitants were manufacturing bronze items, but they were not yet fully sedentarised. What is fascinating is horse bones being ritually buried, along with human remains that were buried. The striking fact is that the horse skeletons bear marks of mutilation with remarkable anatomical precision. It is something of a ritual back in the third millennium BC in the heart of Central Asia. Far away from India, there is some sort of a horse sacrifice. I am not saying it is Asvamedha, but some kind of ritual killing of the horse and ritual burial of the horse and chariot is visible. Maybe, it has a later reflection in the Vedic corpus. One cannot see everything coming out of this claim for Indocentric Vedic/Indo-European culture, which, once again, is a case of homogenisation. Also it breeds a chauvinistic attitude.
That is the intention.
That we are the greatest of all civilisations.
And that is the popular argument—that the Aryans are indigenous and they went from India to the outside world and took civilisation to Europe. This theory was invented in the 19th century and became popular, as it still is. It was first expounded by the Theosophist, the American Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, and was adopted by the Theosophists. For a while the Theosophists were close to the Arya Samaj, although Dayanand Saraswati, who founded the Arya Samaj, believed the Aryans came from Tibet.
These are the theories that have formed the grist of historical debates referring to the earliest past in India. They began in the 19th century. They seem unable to move out of that groove. And we have to keep in mind that this was the time when European supremacy, drawing from Aryan origins, was being discussed as part of what was called “Race Science”. Some of these theories led to the disastrous direction that Aryanism took in Europe in the 20th century. Historical theories coupled with extreme nationalism and the politics of identity can have severe consequences, which is why it is essential to debate these theories.
Questions that are historically debatable should be treated as such, with scholars holding variant views and each one’s views being weighed in terms of the evidence. Unfortunately, the issue of “the Aryans” in India has been so politicised that those who question the indigenous Indian origins of “the Aryans”, and its corollary of the supremacy of Aryan culture, are viciously abused in the social media and the Internet, apart from being treated with hostility in publications. This reduces the possibility of a historical debate.
And we get quite agitated in the public sphere. When we look at these chauvinistic pronouncements, this urge to present everything in a homogeneous neat past that is being presented as an unbroken continuum, is there also the fear of the different? Do you perceive that in the political culture there is an increasing tendency to stash out anything perceived as different from the homogenised norm?
I think the fear of having to see the past differently, that is, of seeing it as complex interactions of diverse cultures rather than a simplified single dominant culture, is a fear. To that I would add that it also suggests that we don’t have the confidence to admit that our cultures, like all cultures all over the world, are multiple in origin and have been evolving over many centuries and will continue to do so. Every period in history sees the evolution of particular cultures and there is more than one culture of importance in every period. So we have to study the degree of difference or similarity in their evolution and why it was so, as well as the interaction between cultures. Only then can we ascertain common features. We as historians at least recognise that there could be more than one culture existing simultaneously. This means that we have to ask if there was communication between these cultures and what their interface was. These are the questions that we are interested in now. But where there are those who want nationalism to be based on a single dominant culture, and who regard their culture as the political identity of the country for all time, there we run into a problem given that we are a society of multiple cultures.
HINDUISM AND HINDUTVA
This cultural nationalism, doesn’t it imply a nationalised culture? In other words, the claim that there is only one type of culture; everything is homogenised.
The construction of cultural nationalism can be rooted in colonial interpretations of a culture, rather than in interpretations that might have existed in pre-colonial times. What did the Mauryans take to be their culture, and how did the concept of culture differ in the time of the Guptas, the Cholas, and the Mughals? This is something we don’t think about, because its reconstruction is not easy. But this is something all ex-colonies have to consider, namely, how much of their acceptance of traditional culture is, in effect, drawn from colonial constructions. This is as true of India as it is of Indonesia, and is even more heightened in places such as Peru and Mexico where many of the old records were destroyed by the Spanish.
Traditions, as we know from history, are invented through the generations or on particular occasions, so it is difficult to insist that a contemporary tradition of today is pristine and goes back millennia. Even those traditions that seemingly go back have been tampered with in the interval. I remember attending the performance of the lengthy agnichayana Vedic ritual in Kerala, specially performed by Namboodiri brahmanas in 1975. They were reciting from the established Vedic texts and one would have thought everything would be acceptable to all. But there was a fierce debate among the Vedic scholars present, who had gathered from various centres of Vedic studies in India and abroad, debates that went on for the full two weeks of the ritual and after, as to how authentic the rituals were and how correct the pronunciations of the Vedic texts were.
This also applies to the history of terms. If one traces the references to “arya” in the Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Pali texts and observes how the meaning and identity of the “arya” changes in history, the information does not entirely support the 19th century interpretation of the concept. One has to ask who is addressing whom as “arya” and why. How is the term being used? In the Pali texts, some social categories are addressed as “arya” because of their exalted status, such as Buddhist monks, irrespective of their ethnic origin, caste, or earlier occupation. Yet the same people are dismissed as nastikas or non-believers and castigated as deceivers in the Vishnu Purana. Today the popular perceptions continue to be rooted in colonial ideas, and these are often thought of as ancient usage.
“ Historians have to depend on the logic of their explanations. These may well have to change when the evidence changes.”
The concern with indigenous Aryanism is, in part, a by-product of religious nationalism—the search for the foundations of Hindu culture. The obsession with a single culture does not go back to early times. Inscriptions of the post-Gupta period claim an ancestry and history in their prashasti sections—in praise of the dynasty. The histories of their ancestors and their community are diverse and they have varying sources of legitimacy. Religious nationalism moves away from the multiplicity of cultures. It picks one religious culture and makes that the central “national” culture. This is a typical feature of nationalism all over the world, irrespective of whether it is anti-colonial, religious, linguistic or ethnic nationalism. National movements tend to assume the superiority of one culture that then becomes the “national” culture.
Religious nationalism underlines the exclusiveness of one religion, culture, language, and such like. This is often deliberately constructed to help mobilise political support, a case in point being Hindutva. As has been often stated by various scholars, Hinduism and Hindutva are not identical. Hinduism is a religion and Hindutva is a political ideology. Hindutva is a modern ideology derived from some aspects of Hinduism but is substantially different. The concept came into existence in the 20th century and its purpose is the political mobilisation of Hindus towards a Hindu Rashtra. In creating an ideology based on religion, the fundamentals of the religion can be reconstructed should there be a need to do so. Such a construction often draws from the elite and conservative expressions of those following the religion. Hindutva speaks of a defined territory, a single culture and ethnic origin, a single religion and language. Hindus must have the same pitribhumi and punyabhumi, ancestors and religion. All others are foreigners. The religious aspect has been reformulated along the lines of the Semitic religions in its focus on historicity and a monolithic religion, a single sacred book, and attempts at ecclesiastical organisations, all of which make it easier for social and political mobilisation. I have therefore called it Syndicated Hinduism.
Yes.
Drawing on the past, national cultures also bring in the epics familiar to large numbers of people. Where there are multiple versions of the epics, there a problem arises because one version has to be chosen as the “correct” version. This is the problem we face with the Ramayana in India. This comes in multiple and sometimes somewhat contradictory versions created over the centuries. Religious nationalism has to project one as the correct version—an attempt that historians find unacceptable. And let’s not forget that in the many versions of the Ramayana in South-East Asia, where these have also been integral to a cultural identity, the versions can differ significantly from the version of Valmiki. A text that becomes sacred is composed initially in one region for one community, but if it becomes acceptable for various reasons to others, they restructure the text or sections of it to suit their requirements. Some people can certainly place their faith in the sanctity of a particular version, but this should not debar the study of the other versions.
Exactly.
Sometimes a particular period of history is chosen and described as Classical, or as exaggeratedly positive and with a single dominant culture. This becomes a core idea in the national movement. Then when the nation state comes into existence, problems arise as the single culture is frequently the culture of a dominant majority community. It is no longer required to the same degree as before. The nation is a secular democracy, or trying to become one, as we are, and many other cultures demand equal status. The group that is supporting the dominant culture would like to continue as the dominant culture, but there are other cultures that wish to be adequately represented. And if one is talking about national culture, it must include all cultures. So in the Indian situation various cultures have to be included and given status—Adivasis, Dalits, middle castes, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsis and others who had not been given adequate status before in the initial stages of nationalism. And in creating a national culture, the multiplicity and plurality has to be conceded and there has to be a shared history.
DIVERSE NATIONALITIES AND IDENTITY POLITICS
In many cases, we find this tendency to seek a single strand of culture, a particular brand that is being voiced by the powerful or those who are aspirants for some kind of power. This power means political power and not any cultural message or expression. It is pure political power with political aspirations. This is only the viewpoint or position of a particular segment of society, which may have the ability to put itself on a very powerful and dominant position. It is a self-proclaimed claim. That is harming the study of history.
Yes, it does harm the study of history by limiting it, except that in our times, and at the level of quality scholarship, the multiplicity is being explored. This is not to say that in every period of history all the communities that exist today have to be sought out and given equal status. What it means is that the historian should not focus on one community to the neglect of the rest unless the intention is to write the history of that single community. There have, of course, always been inter-linking factors in this multiplicity. In the 19th century, we can see this in the social reform movements. Their authors came from similar social backgrounds and the changes they introduced into the nature of the Hindu religion were not too different from region to region, but the selection and formulations were tied to the regional cultures. This has to be brought into the historical picture.
The social reform movements of the 19th century changed, to some degree, the format of Indian religions. In the 20th century, when scholars started identifying the changes, and the social groups supporting them that had also changed as a result, their attention was naturally directed mainly to the upper castes, because these social reform movements had largely affected the upper castes. They do refer to the other castes, but the real thrust is at the upper-caste level. This was the category in society that had, in a sense, captured the leadership of the initial stages of the movement. It was aware of nationalism and was groomed later on to take over when the colonial masters had gone. Some historians also began to investigate the nationalist orientations of groups further down the social scale. It started with subaltern studies and this received much public attention as well, but it was soon recognised that many more at even lower social levels, such as Dalits and Adivasis, were also participants in the national movement in various ways.
“ The issue of 'the Aryans' in India has been so politicised that those who question the indigenous origins of the Aryans are viciously abused.”
Other questions were asked, such as which groups had turned nationalism into religious nationalism with its sequence of the identity politics of today? And which were the ones that opposed this, arguing that nationalism has to be secular? So what followed was a kind of diversity in what was claimed as nationalism, and the study of the different facets that went into the making of what we call by the umbrella term of “nationalism”. This is being discussed at the level of scholarship.
But it is not reflected at the popular level partly because analytical and critical studies of nationalism tend to be treated by politicians and the public as a lack of patriotism. If a distinction is made between “religious nationalism” and “secular nationalism”, then a clearer definition of secularism is required than what we generally assume it to mean.
Historical research at this point gets complicated by another feature. If history is an essential ingredient of nationalism and fundamentalism (and Eric Hobsbawm makes a comparison with the poppy and the heroin addict!), then these diverse nationalisms of religion or language or ethnicity begin to claim diverse histories. And soon identity politics makes the same demands.
DEFINITION OF SECULARISM
In that sense, the understanding of secularity in post-colonial India becomes an element in the recognition of multiple cultures and plurality, because the recognition reduces the chauvinistic claims of other groups. One of the problems, however, is the way in which we use the term secularism. The Indian view of secularism generally speaks only of the coexistence of religions. That I find inadequate. What are often quoted are the Asokan edicts where Asoka speaks about the need for all the sects to honour each other and, specifically, to honour the other person’s sect. And in recent times therefore, it is often said that Indian civilisation is a civilisation where all religions were and are honoured. However, it is not enough to say that the coexistence of all religions means a secular society unless there is also an insistence on the religions having equal status. If we associate religions with a majority community and minority communities, as we invariably do, then these distinctions assume a lack of equal status.
The other problem is to ascertain what actually is meant by the concept of secularism. In Europe, it involved questioning the authority of the Catholic Church over civic activities and institutions, and the extension of the political control of the Catholic Church. It was said that institutions should not be governed by the Church and should preferably be run by the state or by civil society. This aspect we do not bring into our definition of secularism because we have not had a church controlling our institutions with reference to any of our religions. But there has been a religious control over social institutions both via ritual and via caste, and particularly in the case of the upper castes.
Scholars have advocated putting “secularism in its place”, meaning there are limits to excluding religion and secularising our society. I would say that secularism in the same sense means putting religion in its place, and maintaining that religion is not to be the single dominant factor in politics and in society and its institutions. The identity of society has to be an open identity.
You mean multiple identities?
I am using the term “open identities” because in a proper democracy there cannot be the dominance of a permanent majority community or identity. Who constitutes the majority changes with each issue that is being discussed. On one issue, say land reform, a group of people will come together and form the majority opinion. On another issue, say education in schools, the majority can be constituted by a coming together of different groups. Some may overlap, but there will be other people also joining in. So the concept of majority is not a concept that is pre-determined. It is fluid and has to be so in a democracy. When one talks about democracy and secularism, one is talking about a system in which various identities coexist but are fluid and are multiple, and they come together as the occasion demands over the issue being discussed. And in a secular society, these identities are not the dominant religious identities.
Unfortunately, nowadays the moment you talk about identities, it is only religious identity. The Census records provided a combination of religious identity and community identity and they got merged in the 19th century. The trend seems to continue.
You can’t talk about secularism if you are still talking about majority communities and minority communities. This is a contradiction that is not recognised.
When we claim we are a secular democracy, the practice should be strongly inclusive. But there are alarming tendencies towards being chauvinist and exclusionist.
But the concept of a religious community, that is, a community identified by its religion, is automatically a community that excludes those of other religions.
DEFINITION OF RELIGION
And at the same time we take for granted that we have been very civilised from hoary antiquity and we Indians are tolerant. At the same time, by the branding and ostracising of the achhuts or untouchables, a vast number of Indians have been excluded from their rights, dignity, and denied the basic human levels of existence.
This is my problem also with the definition of religions. When one gives a definition of a Hindu, it is generally in terms of members of upper castes since the basis of the definition is from the texts of these groups. Whether it is a Hindu or Muslim or Sikh or Christian, one is seldom conscious that the larger number in each religion have little familiarity with their texts, even though they have been formally identified with these religions. For them, religion is a different matter. In actual practice, they tend to create their own religion, worship their deities in a manner of their own choice. They may return themselves in the Census as Hindu or Muslim or whatever, but they are essentially identifying with their own religion. I suspect this has always been so in history. It would be worthwhile for historians of religion to assess the degree of dependence on texts or on practices to determine their religion and belief.
The hard-core, formulated religious ideas are usually associated with the upper echelons of society. Only in very recent times have we become more alert to the aspiration and social condition of Dalit groups. We also tend to boast that we are the most tolerant society, but we are not. We are not a non-violent society.
Both the concepts of ahimsa and tolerance achieved popularity as slogans with the coming of nationalism, when there was an emphasis on traditional values. These became preeminent and were quoted as the values that distinguished us from those who came to rule over us. It was argued that Indian spirituality expressed itself in tolerance and non-violence whereas the materialism of the West could be seen in the lack of these in their culture. Yet, when one goes through Indian history, from period to period, searching for what was going on within the subcontinent, there was intolerance and violent contestation, as there was in many other parts of the world in the past. And this is well before the coming of the Arabs, Turks, and Mongols. The figures that are quoted for the size of the armies in pre-Islamic times in India, even if they are exaggerated, indicate that large armies were required to face violent confrontations from the neighbouring kingdom. There is also a large body of literature that glorifies war.
When we talk about religious groups of the past, we always think these were very neat, homogeneous groups. They were not. There were many sects. If I recall correctly, even Ramakrishna Paramhansadev, when he mentioned Hindu, he spoke of the sampradayas. There were contestations and mingling and interactions among these sectarian groups. This image of multiplicity of sects is ironed out in popular perceptions. How to present this image of multiple sects to people in general? History can help disseminate this information.
You can only teach the reality of how religion functioned in society if you teach the history of religion within the history curriculum. As a discipline, the history of a religion is different from the theology of a religion. History does not focus on texts alone, as theology often does, but includes the actual practice, performance, and patronage of a religion. And it examines the sociology of its supporters and the structure of its institutions and explains why it received support. This we do not teach as a subject.
But we should, because the nature of the inter-dependence of religion and society is fundamental to understanding both. Once that kind of course on the history of religion is taught, people will understand the social, political, and economic dimensions of religion as well. They will realise that religion and understanding religion is not limited to texts, and to abstract values, but also involves seeing how the teaching has been used by political factions in royal courts, in the authority given to certain social institutions, in places of pilgrimage, by renouncers, and in economic activities such as land ownership and commerce.
Religion is not something distinct and different from the lives of people. It is a vibrant, pulsating part of the emotional lives of many and less assertive in the lives of others. In its social and political manifestation, however, it frequently determines the behaviour of one religious group towards another. This is part of history, and the social and political motivations should receive as much attention as the religious since behaviour is more often determined by causes other than religion. Ultimately, religions have to learn to live together as equal partners with other religions and refrain from claiming special status. Admittedly, this is not easy where a religion has been dominant for centuries or where it is now claiming that it has been victimised in the past. But surely the fact that modern societies now assert that they have a greater understanding of how societies function should make us think of how best we sort out these relationships.
QUESTIONING NORMATIVE TEXTS
Questioning normative texts
You have particularly shown that for understanding early India you do not merely pick up normative texts. Several other historians too have demonstrated this. You have very clearly brought out the difference between the normative and the descriptive categories of sources. This is the professional approach of a historian to the nuances of the sources. There is also a need for the non-specialist to appreciate and be aware of these nuances of professional historical studies.
And the fact is that historians today are questioning the normative texts and asking why these norms were created. Manu, for example, mentions eight entirely distinct and diverse forms of marriage, from kanyadana or gifting a daughter, to rakshasa or abduction of the woman and therefore demonic. It is unlikely that all eight would be practised in any one society. We all know how careful every culture and caste is about kinship relations and these are implicit in forms of marriage. So if eight forms of marriage are listed, what is the function of such a listing, or is it only a fantasy on possible ways of marrying? Who are these forms of marriage being related to? There must be multiple cultures at play and therefore the attempt is to legalise them all. In the Pandava family alone, there are three distinct forms of marriage in three generations—bride-price, fraternal polyandry, and cross-cousin marriage. The historian has to explain the meaning of this unusual situation if the argument is that it reflects not the normative but the reality. Or were the Pandavas merely inventing puzzles for future historians?
Often Sanskrit normative texts accommodate the local level variations into the main text by adding a cha (and) or adi (etc.) to apparently strict and inflexible norms.
Yes, that is one way of indicating the plurality. But there are other indications, too, some of which become evident from the inscriptions of the late first and early second millennium A.D. I have been reading the Chamba inscriptions—a hill state in the lower Himalayas—and comparing them with the Chamba Vamshavali, the chronicle from the area. In some of the earlier inscriptions, the brahmanas are referred to with titles like Sharma, making it quite clear that their caste is brahmana. Then a few centuries later, inscriptions in poorer Sanskrit include a few words of the Chambyali language, and the brahmanas are referred to as Badu—that is the locally used word for a brahmana—as in the name Badu Lena. It seems that when these kingdoms were set up, some brahmanas were brought there, particularly to perform the rituals of legitimising status. They claim to have come from Gauda and Kanauj, and such like. But it would seem that local priests were also inducted or else the migrant brahmanas gradually settled into the local community and took on the local terminology...
…who perhaps helped the normative texts develop and put them into an order.
The local priests were functionaries of the local religion of the region. The brahmanas controlled the religion of the ruler, the court, the elite, the samantas or intermediaries of the area, and taught the Vedas and the Puranas as texts to the upper castes. But this did not exclude worship at the local shrines to folk deities, most likely conducted by local priests. The latter could not be set aside, so they were probably associated with the brahmanas in some of the temple worship. This would have enlarged the category of brahmana.http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/linking-the-past-and-the-present/article7599425.ecehttp://www.frontline.in/cover-story/linking-the-past-and-the-present/article7599425.ece
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RANABIR CHAKRAVARTI
Romila Thapar: "There is always something to look forward to in the excitement of reading the past in order to understand the present."
Interview with the historian Romila Thapar, Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University. By RANABIR CHAKRAVARTI
Romila Thapar, Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, is one of the most celebrated historians of India, internationally acclaimed particularly for her immense contribution to the interpretative studies of early India. Her untiring efforts have largely enabled the shift of the study from what is known as Indology to early Indian History with a strong orientation to social sciences. Her untiring engagement with the study of the history of this subcontinent are marked by interrogating and interpreting the past, not merely on empirical richness, but by integrating the study of ancient history with several social and human sciences such as sociology, social and cultural anthropology, geography and political science. The result has been the transformation of the study of ancient/early India from dynastic detail and dates to introspective readings of the past. In these ventures she repeatedly reminds us of the changing patterns of historiography and analyses the questions raised by historians, their methodologies of and approaches to the study of the past, which, as she rightly points out, is intimately linked up with the present. She has unravelled how a particular enquiry of the past has a bearing on the current social, cultural and political situation.
Professor Thapar obtained her PhD (1958) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, under the supervision of Professor A.L. Basham. Her thesis on the Mauryan period came out subsequently as her famous book, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, in which she situated Asoka and the Maurya rule in the context of the socio-economic, political and cultural milieu of the period on the basis of a critical reading of primary sources. This work left lasting impacts on early Indian historiography. Professor Thapar’s major contribution to the study of early Indian social history is writ large in many of her works, notably Ancient Indian Social History and Interpreting Early India. From the 1980s, Professor Thapar’s enduring interest in the study of the early state (From Lineage to State, The Mauryas Revisited) opened up new areas of historical research. In these works, she offered new insights into the history of state formation in early India by highlighting the complex sociopolitical and ideological factors in the making of a state society. Though Professor Thapar’s principal interest lies in the social history of early India, she has also written extensively on the economic history (on forests, professional guild-like bodies, and trade). In recent decades, her growing interests in cultural history (however, not cultural studies, following the current trend in postmodern and postcolonial studies) will be evident from her Sakuntala and Somanatha : Many Voices of a History. Another area of her pioneering work is the study of the Itihasa-Purana tradition vis-a-vis the modern discipline of history. She has ably contested the archetypical Eurocentric notion that early India lacked a sense of history and critically analysed the notions of cyclical time and linear time. Among the most read of her works is Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, a magisterial overview of early Indian history. This book is actually an elaboration of her earlier book, History of India, Vol. I. The modifications, elaborations and additions (which she elegantly described as “autobiographical”) she incorporated in this later book amply demonstrate her keenness to accommodate new data, new interpretative models and fresh perspectives. In that sense, Professor Thapar is ever alert and ready to revise her position. This highlights her firm commitment to her subject and demonstrates that a historian may also change—a point that shows the liveliness of the subject called History. An indefatigable and outspoken critique of the obscurantist, chauvinist and communal interpretations of the past, Professor Thapar has been awarded many academic honours in India and abroad, including the Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the field of History (2005). Professor Thapar was elected the General President of the Indian History Congress (1983). She is the recipient of the Honorary Fellowships of the School of Oriental and African Studies (London) and Lady Margaret Hall (Oxford University). In this interview, Professor Thapar discusses at length how the past—remote and/or recent—is intimately connected with the present. How and to what extent the situations in the present influence and determine the choice of the study of a certain phase of the past also figure prominently. Her statements are likely to create greater awareness of and sensitivity to the study of the past, which, like many other disciplines, stands on professional expertise and rigour and is vastly different from amateurish forays into history. She categorically warns against attempts at homogenisation of the past in the name of cultural nationalism and unequivocally stresses the sustained pluralist traditions in India. The interview has brought out her repeated encouragement of raising new questions to understand the past with a view to developing a comprehensive appreciation of the present.
Ranabir Chakravarti: When one reads your latest book, The Past as Present, one gets an impression that you are a little sad about the state of the study of history, and the general perception of history, in India. You don’t sound very optimistic about it. You are not pessimistic either—that you wrote very clearly. Could you elaborate on the scenario?
“ We are still using a completely outdated understanding of history and methods of teaching it. The emphasis is on dates and events.”
Romila Thapar: Your question is about where history has gone in the last few decades in India. Let me say that there are two levels on which history is being read and studied or being spoken about. One is the level of the scholarship of academic historians where I think that the kind of history being written is impressive, at least among those historians who work at the better universities and colleges. When I consider how history was taught fifty years ago, and the kinds of struggles that we had in those days to give a new direction to historical writing, and the kind of direction that is now being taken, it is in fact an impressive change. I am pleased with the way things have gone, although admittedly the change is not universal in the universities and most have still not caught up with history as it is taught in the best centres. Nevertheless, there are a number of historians who not only treat history as a social science but also recognise its intellectual foundations. And this approach, one hopes, will spread.
However, my feeling about the other way in which history is being projected is actually the opposite. This is with reference to the popular history with which the general public is familiar. This suffers from its being either out-of-date history of the kind taught more than a century ago, or not history at all. Often pointless questions are asked, and all kinds of generalised statements are made about the past, generally reflecting a lack of knowledge about history. This history in the public sphere, propagated by people who are not professional historians, has much to do with the way history is taught in school and even college. We are still using a completely outdated understanding of history and methods of teaching it. The emphasis is on dates and events and treating history as just a body of information that has to be memorised. As somebody said, looking at the notes given to students, they are like a telephone directory with a list of numbers on one side and a list of people on the other.
THE HISTORICAL METHOD
What is sad is that people still think that history is only information about the past. This attitude is now seen as being too limited when doing research into history. What we emphasise is not just getting information from known sources but also tapping new varieties of sources and checking even more carefully than before the reliability of the evidence before proceeding to use the information for understanding and explaining the past. These two aspects of exploring the past for information and then explaining what happened in the past contribute to what we today call the “historical method”. This is not something that was taught to us when we were students because few thought in these terms. But today it is absolutely essential.
Unfortunately, there is not enough emphasis on how this method is to be taught to students—whether at the high school or undergraduate college level. What it essentially means is that the first step is to collect evidence and data. The second step is to test the reliability of the data and make sure that what one is using is reliably tested information and not something that is casually picked up from here or there or just someone’s fantasy. The third step is to see the causal relationship between events where it exists. Did event “B” result from event “A”? Is there a linkage between the two if the event happened at the same place, but only a little later in time? So the causal relationship becomes an important element in a reasoned, logical analysis. There are those who are professionally trained as historians and yet don’t take the next step, which is that every analysis has to be based on a critical assessment of the data. Fantasy doesn’t come into play and that is often the big difference. In popular history, it is often more fantasy than actual reasoned, logical analysis.
Once you have gone through these steps, then you can make a statement that we call a historical generalisation. So this procedure of treating historical information as a body of facts that needs to be analysed, considered logically and rationally is something much more recent in the historical research of the last few decades. It did exist earlier but was confined to the better historians. Today it is required of all students of history. Since it is rigorous, not all students qualify.
By that you are also perhaps suggesting that what we understand by historical information is itself a very rigorous process of analysis and data collection and that requires proper training and cannot be picked up by amateurish interest. And there is something distinctly different between an amateurish public interest in something of the past and a historian’s understanding on the basis of rigorous collection of information and its methodical explanation on a rational basis.
You are right, absolutely right. The point is with reference to all history. But it is more complicated with reference to ancient Indian history, given the range of sources that have to be consulted. It is not enough to read a dozen books on ancient Indian history, for that doesn’t make you a specialist. You have to know the sources and how to analyse them. You have to know what the sources are and in the languages that were used at that time. For example, you have to know the language of the inscriptions of the Mauryan kings, which was Prakrit, and analyse them. You have to know other texts that were written in Sanskrit, such as the Arthashastra of Kautilya. You have to know something about archaeology, and archaeology is today becoming increasingly technical and dependent on the use of scientific methods and knowledge. There is more and more science being introduced into archaeological research, so much so that sometimes when reading contemporary archaeological reports I can’t fully understand them because they require training in science. Then there is linguistics. It is not enough to know the language of the source one is using. One has also to understand the rules of linguistics when examining change in a language—different formations of vocabulary, grammar, and phonetics—and the way in which, and why, languages can be segregated or can interact.
Let me give you an example that is currently much talked about. When we were students, we were told that the language of the Rig Veda was Indo-Aryan and only that. Whereas today if you made that statement, not all Vedic scholars would agree because with the application of linguistics it has been argued there are some elements of Dravidian in the language of the Rig Veda, although the substantial language remains Indo-Aryan. Does this then change the perception of it as a source by the historian? It changes because one can’t say, “Here is a text in a single language spoken by people who used only that language.” Now the historian has to say, “Well if there are other linguistic features which do not belong to that language category, and Dravidian is different from Indo-Aryan, then it means that there was an interface between the speakers of one language with others speaking another language.” You have to ask whether there might have been bilingualism—or is there not enough evidence for that? Is this the result of the proximity of different language speakers? This puts the Rig Veda into a rather fascinating historical context of not just a single culture but reflecting its domination in the midst of other co-existing cultures. So the historian has to uncover these other cultures.
Studies of this period today have to consider the evidence from other categories of sources not known a few decades ago. For instance, there are studies of the hydrology of the rivers in the area, and more so now with the Sarasvati river having become a subject of debate. Its identity is not definitively known, nor its history. Was it substantially monsoon-fed or glacier-fed? Were its waters captured by the Yamuna and the Sutlej, leading to its decline? Other sources that might throw light on this history are reports from genetics now being brought into the debate. Were there migrants into the area at particular points of time or did the composition of the population remain relatively static?
These are controversial aspects of the evidence, and I am referring to them in order to explain that historical questions do not always have “Yes” or “No” answers as the evidence can be diverse and controversial. (That, by the way, is one reason why “objective-type questions” in history make no sense.) Historians have to depend on the logic of their explanations. These may well have to change when the evidence changes. What was argued in the 19th century may have to be argued differently in the 21st century. Historical explanations are conditioned by the degree of knowledge about a subject known at a particular point in time. Such explanations can also be coloured by the purpose for which they are intended.
DENIAL OF DIVERSITY
May I now move to a broad issue? The public in general, not always trained in historical studies, are being fed a dangerous and wrong understanding of the past by looking at some homogenised versions of certain groups, certain religious tendencies, certain ethnic identities—everything is seen as a homogeneous entity. And we know that the past is not a homogeneous representation of events. You were saying that the Rig Veda cannot be just Indo-Aryan? It is not composed in a single language and it contains multiple languages and therefore suggests multiple cultures as well.
I am not going into the details of the argument being propagated at a public level. Again, one of the differences is that at the level of scholarship, nationally and internationally, scholars working on ancient India have maintained that the Aryan language came possibly via Iran from Central Asia. But the one view that is now being propagated in India by various people is that the Aryan speakers were all indigenous. Some even argue that the authors of the Harappan civilisation were Aryans, thus suggesting that there was no non-Aryan element in the origins of Indian civilisation. This is an argument I, for one, cannot accept for a variety of reasons.
Sanitised!
Sanitised Aryanism, where everything is simplified and has a single source. The complexities of the problem are set aside. Clearly, there is a strong difference of opinion and the evidence quoted in support of the two views is unequal. What is being suggested is for some of us linguistically and archaeologically not feasible. We argue that the Rig Veda is post-Harappan in date, so naturally it would not reflect the earlier culture. The Harappan culture had settlements in Oman and contacts with Mesopotamia, none of which is reflected in the Rig Veda. By the end of the third and early second millennia, the Harappan culture was contemporary with various non-Harappan cultures in the vicinity. In the mid-to-late second millennium, B.C., generally taken as the date for the composition of the Rig Veda, the presence of a range of cultures is registered, such as the Painted Grey Ware culture, the Black and Red Ware culture, the Megalithic culture, and so on. These are diverse. They are not a single culture. And in their spread the Aryan-speakers would have met these diverse cultures and settled in their midst.
And let’s not forget that the big difference between the Harappans and the authors of the Rig Veda is that the Harappan cities host essentially sophisticated urban cultures, with a knowledge of writing, whereas the society of the Rig Veda is agro-pastoral and unfamiliar with urbanism and literacy.
Especially what was happening in the Megalithic culture of the southern peninsula is hardly reflected in the text.
The Megalithic culture is not recorded as such in the texts. But different groups are discussed even in these texts, such as the asuras, the dasas, and the dasyus. Let’s look at the texts more realistically. The Rig Veda refers to two varnas— the arya and the dasa. Who were the dasas? They are described in the Rig Veda as people who practise rituals and customs that are different, they worship different gods, and they appear not to have spoken the same language as the authors of the Vedic corpus. They are wealthy and envied for their cattle wealth and they live in separate settlements. Some scholars therefore think they were of a different culture. So we have to ask “Who were they?” and why were they mythologised?
Then there are the dasi-putra brahmanas, unacceptable at first, but when they display their powers they are accepted as brahmanas. The term is an oxymoron in one sense, as dasi-putra (literally the son of a slave-woman or a woman of inferior status or culture) would contradict the status of a brahmana. The Vedic texts mention that devas and asuras were often in conflict. So yes, at one level it is mythology, but mythology is not totally divorced from the assumptions of a society, although it may not describe the reality. The assumptions they have about themselves usually creep into the myths they create. So if there is an insistent emphasis on “Us” and “Them”, then clearly there must be more than just one category of culture. That is why historians are arguing that the Vedic corpus refers to the period from the post-Harappan up to the urban cultures of the historical cities of the fifth century B.C. If seen in terms of interacting cultures, it raises a variety of possibilities in terms of the interaction of societies such as are excluded if the focus is only on a single culture. Would it be possible, for instance, to argue that the texts of the Vedic corpus are attempting to present themselves as an evolution of one pattern of culture out of an amalgam of many? Even today, despite five thousand years of historical activity, we still have diverse cultures.
It is neither single nor monolithic and it consists of definitely multiple sets of cultures. Since you raised this issue of archaeology and Vedic texts, I am reminded of a particularly interesting discovery made about five or six years ago. This is the archaeological site called Sintashta. I was fortunate to interact with the excavator, David Anthony, and he found out that it was a bronze-age culture. About 2500 BC, that is the possible date, the inhabitants were manufacturing bronze items, but they were not yet fully sedentarised. What is fascinating is horse bones being ritually buried, along with human remains that were buried. The striking fact is that the horse skeletons bear marks of mutilation with remarkable anatomical precision. It is something of a ritual back in the third millennium BC in the heart of Central Asia. Far away from India, there is some sort of a horse sacrifice. I am not saying it is Asvamedha, but some kind of ritual killing of the horse and ritual burial of the horse and chariot is visible. Maybe, it has a later reflection in the Vedic corpus. One cannot see everything coming out of this claim for Indocentric Vedic/Indo-European culture, which, once again, is a case of homogenisation. Also it breeds a chauvinistic attitude.
That is the intention.
That we are the greatest of all civilisations.
And that is the popular argument—that the Aryans are indigenous and they went from India to the outside world and took civilisation to Europe. This theory was invented in the 19th century and became popular, as it still is. It was first expounded by the Theosophist, the American Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, and was adopted by the Theosophists. For a while the Theosophists were close to the Arya Samaj, although Dayanand Saraswati, who founded the Arya Samaj, believed the Aryans came from Tibet.
These are the theories that have formed the grist of historical debates referring to the earliest past in India. They began in the 19th century. They seem unable to move out of that groove. And we have to keep in mind that this was the time when European supremacy, drawing from Aryan origins, was being discussed as part of what was called “Race Science”. Some of these theories led to the disastrous direction that Aryanism took in Europe in the 20th century. Historical theories coupled with extreme nationalism and the politics of identity can have severe consequences, which is why it is essential to debate these theories.
Questions that are historically debatable should be treated as such, with scholars holding variant views and each one’s views being weighed in terms of the evidence. Unfortunately, the issue of “the Aryans” in India has been so politicised that those who question the indigenous Indian origins of “the Aryans”, and its corollary of the supremacy of Aryan culture, are viciously abused in the social media and the Internet, apart from being treated with hostility in publications. This reduces the possibility of a historical debate.
And we get quite agitated in the public sphere. When we look at these chauvinistic pronouncements, this urge to present everything in a homogeneous neat past that is being presented as an unbroken continuum, is there also the fear of the different? Do you perceive that in the political culture there is an increasing tendency to stash out anything perceived as different from the homogenised norm?
I think the fear of having to see the past differently, that is, of seeing it as complex interactions of diverse cultures rather than a simplified single dominant culture, is a fear. To that I would add that it also suggests that we don’t have the confidence to admit that our cultures, like all cultures all over the world, are multiple in origin and have been evolving over many centuries and will continue to do so. Every period in history sees the evolution of particular cultures and there is more than one culture of importance in every period. So we have to study the degree of difference or similarity in their evolution and why it was so, as well as the interaction between cultures. Only then can we ascertain common features. We as historians at least recognise that there could be more than one culture existing simultaneously. This means that we have to ask if there was communication between these cultures and what their interface was. These are the questions that we are interested in now. But where there are those who want nationalism to be based on a single dominant culture, and who regard their culture as the political identity of the country for all time, there we run into a problem given that we are a society of multiple cultures.
HINDUISM AND HINDUTVA
This cultural nationalism, doesn’t it imply a nationalised culture? In other words, the claim that there is only one type of culture; everything is homogenised.
The construction of cultural nationalism can be rooted in colonial interpretations of a culture, rather than in interpretations that might have existed in pre-colonial times. What did the Mauryans take to be their culture, and how did the concept of culture differ in the time of the Guptas, the Cholas, and the Mughals? This is something we don’t think about, because its reconstruction is not easy. But this is something all ex-colonies have to consider, namely, how much of their acceptance of traditional culture is, in effect, drawn from colonial constructions. This is as true of India as it is of Indonesia, and is even more heightened in places such as Peru and Mexico where many of the old records were destroyed by the Spanish.
Traditions, as we know from history, are invented through the generations or on particular occasions, so it is difficult to insist that a contemporary tradition of today is pristine and goes back millennia. Even those traditions that seemingly go back have been tampered with in the interval. I remember attending the performance of the lengthy agnichayana Vedic ritual in Kerala, specially performed by Namboodiri brahmanas in 1975. They were reciting from the established Vedic texts and one would have thought everything would be acceptable to all. But there was a fierce debate among the Vedic scholars present, who had gathered from various centres of Vedic studies in India and abroad, debates that went on for the full two weeks of the ritual and after, as to how authentic the rituals were and how correct the pronunciations of the Vedic texts were.
This also applies to the history of terms. If one traces the references to “arya” in the Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Pali texts and observes how the meaning and identity of the “arya” changes in history, the information does not entirely support the 19th century interpretation of the concept. One has to ask who is addressing whom as “arya” and why. How is the term being used? In the Pali texts, some social categories are addressed as “arya” because of their exalted status, such as Buddhist monks, irrespective of their ethnic origin, caste, or earlier occupation. Yet the same people are dismissed as nastikas or non-believers and castigated as deceivers in the Vishnu Purana. Today the popular perceptions continue to be rooted in colonial ideas, and these are often thought of as ancient usage.
“ Historians have to depend on the logic of their explanations. These may well have to change when the evidence changes.”
The concern with indigenous Aryanism is, in part, a by-product of religious nationalism—the search for the foundations of Hindu culture. The obsession with a single culture does not go back to early times. Inscriptions of the post-Gupta period claim an ancestry and history in their prashasti sections—in praise of the dynasty. The histories of their ancestors and their community are diverse and they have varying sources of legitimacy. Religious nationalism moves away from the multiplicity of cultures. It picks one religious culture and makes that the central “national” culture. This is a typical feature of nationalism all over the world, irrespective of whether it is anti-colonial, religious, linguistic or ethnic nationalism. National movements tend to assume the superiority of one culture that then becomes the “national” culture.
Religious nationalism underlines the exclusiveness of one religion, culture, language, and such like. This is often deliberately constructed to help mobilise political support, a case in point being Hindutva. As has been often stated by various scholars, Hinduism and Hindutva are not identical. Hinduism is a religion and Hindutva is a political ideology. Hindutva is a modern ideology derived from some aspects of Hinduism but is substantially different. The concept came into existence in the 20th century and its purpose is the political mobilisation of Hindus towards a Hindu Rashtra. In creating an ideology based on religion, the fundamentals of the religion can be reconstructed should there be a need to do so. Such a construction often draws from the elite and conservative expressions of those following the religion. Hindutva speaks of a defined territory, a single culture and ethnic origin, a single religion and language. Hindus must have the same pitribhumi and punyabhumi, ancestors and religion. All others are foreigners. The religious aspect has been reformulated along the lines of the Semitic religions in its focus on historicity and a monolithic religion, a single sacred book, and attempts at ecclesiastical organisations, all of which make it easier for social and political mobilisation. I have therefore called it Syndicated Hinduism.
Yes.
Drawing on the past, national cultures also bring in the epics familiar to large numbers of people. Where there are multiple versions of the epics, there a problem arises because one version has to be chosen as the “correct” version. This is the problem we face with the Ramayana in India. This comes in multiple and sometimes somewhat contradictory versions created over the centuries. Religious nationalism has to project one as the correct version—an attempt that historians find unacceptable. And let’s not forget that in the many versions of the Ramayana in South-East Asia, where these have also been integral to a cultural identity, the versions can differ significantly from the version of Valmiki. A text that becomes sacred is composed initially in one region for one community, but if it becomes acceptable for various reasons to others, they restructure the text or sections of it to suit their requirements. Some people can certainly place their faith in the sanctity of a particular version, but this should not debar the study of the other versions.
Exactly.
Sometimes a particular period of history is chosen and described as Classical, or as exaggeratedly positive and with a single dominant culture. This becomes a core idea in the national movement. Then when the nation state comes into existence, problems arise as the single culture is frequently the culture of a dominant majority community. It is no longer required to the same degree as before. The nation is a secular democracy, or trying to become one, as we are, and many other cultures demand equal status. The group that is supporting the dominant culture would like to continue as the dominant culture, but there are other cultures that wish to be adequately represented. And if one is talking about national culture, it must include all cultures. So in the Indian situation various cultures have to be included and given status—Adivasis, Dalits, middle castes, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsis and others who had not been given adequate status before in the initial stages of nationalism. And in creating a national culture, the multiplicity and plurality has to be conceded and there has to be a shared history.
DIVERSE NATIONALITIES AND IDENTITY POLITICS
In many cases, we find this tendency to seek a single strand of culture, a particular brand that is being voiced by the powerful or those who are aspirants for some kind of power. This power means political power and not any cultural message or expression. It is pure political power with political aspirations. This is only the viewpoint or position of a particular segment of society, which may have the ability to put itself on a very powerful and dominant position. It is a self-proclaimed claim. That is harming the study of history.
Yes, it does harm the study of history by limiting it, except that in our times, and at the level of quality scholarship, the multiplicity is being explored. This is not to say that in every period of history all the communities that exist today have to be sought out and given equal status. What it means is that the historian should not focus on one community to the neglect of the rest unless the intention is to write the history of that single community. There have, of course, always been inter-linking factors in this multiplicity. In the 19th century, we can see this in the social reform movements. Their authors came from similar social backgrounds and the changes they introduced into the nature of the Hindu religion were not too different from region to region, but the selection and formulations were tied to the regional cultures. This has to be brought into the historical picture.
The social reform movements of the 19th century changed, to some degree, the format of Indian religions. In the 20th century, when scholars started identifying the changes, and the social groups supporting them that had also changed as a result, their attention was naturally directed mainly to the upper castes, because these social reform movements had largely affected the upper castes. They do refer to the other castes, but the real thrust is at the upper-caste level. This was the category in society that had, in a sense, captured the leadership of the initial stages of the movement. It was aware of nationalism and was groomed later on to take over when the colonial masters had gone. Some historians also began to investigate the nationalist orientations of groups further down the social scale. It started with subaltern studies and this received much public attention as well, but it was soon recognised that many more at even lower social levels, such as Dalits and Adivasis, were also participants in the national movement in various ways.
“ The issue of 'the Aryans' in India has been so politicised that those who question the indigenous origins of the Aryans are viciously abused.”
Other questions were asked, such as which groups had turned nationalism into religious nationalism with its sequence of the identity politics of today? And which were the ones that opposed this, arguing that nationalism has to be secular? So what followed was a kind of diversity in what was claimed as nationalism, and the study of the different facets that went into the making of what we call by the umbrella term of “nationalism”. This is being discussed at the level of scholarship.
But it is not reflected at the popular level partly because analytical and critical studies of nationalism tend to be treated by politicians and the public as a lack of patriotism. If a distinction is made between “religious nationalism” and “secular nationalism”, then a clearer definition of secularism is required than what we generally assume it to mean.
Historical research at this point gets complicated by another feature. If history is an essential ingredient of nationalism and fundamentalism (and Eric Hobsbawm makes a comparison with the poppy and the heroin addict!), then these diverse nationalisms of religion or language or ethnicity begin to claim diverse histories. And soon identity politics makes the same demands.
DEFINITION OF SECULARISM
In that sense, the understanding of secularity in post-colonial India becomes an element in the recognition of multiple cultures and plurality, because the recognition reduces the chauvinistic claims of other groups. One of the problems, however, is the way in which we use the term secularism. The Indian view of secularism generally speaks only of the coexistence of religions. That I find inadequate. What are often quoted are the Asokan edicts where Asoka speaks about the need for all the sects to honour each other and, specifically, to honour the other person’s sect. And in recent times therefore, it is often said that Indian civilisation is a civilisation where all religions were and are honoured. However, it is not enough to say that the coexistence of all religions means a secular society unless there is also an insistence on the religions having equal status. If we associate religions with a majority community and minority communities, as we invariably do, then these distinctions assume a lack of equal status.
The other problem is to ascertain what actually is meant by the concept of secularism. In Europe, it involved questioning the authority of the Catholic Church over civic activities and institutions, and the extension of the political control of the Catholic Church. It was said that institutions should not be governed by the Church and should preferably be run by the state or by civil society. This aspect we do not bring into our definition of secularism because we have not had a church controlling our institutions with reference to any of our religions. But there has been a religious control over social institutions both via ritual and via caste, and particularly in the case of the upper castes.
Scholars have advocated putting “secularism in its place”, meaning there are limits to excluding religion and secularising our society. I would say that secularism in the same sense means putting religion in its place, and maintaining that religion is not to be the single dominant factor in politics and in society and its institutions. The identity of society has to be an open identity.
You mean multiple identities?
I am using the term “open identities” because in a proper democracy there cannot be the dominance of a permanent majority community or identity. Who constitutes the majority changes with each issue that is being discussed. On one issue, say land reform, a group of people will come together and form the majority opinion. On another issue, say education in schools, the majority can be constituted by a coming together of different groups. Some may overlap, but there will be other people also joining in. So the concept of majority is not a concept that is pre-determined. It is fluid and has to be so in a democracy. When one talks about democracy and secularism, one is talking about a system in which various identities coexist but are fluid and are multiple, and they come together as the occasion demands over the issue being discussed. And in a secular society, these identities are not the dominant religious identities.
Unfortunately, nowadays the moment you talk about identities, it is only religious identity. The Census records provided a combination of religious identity and community identity and they got merged in the 19th century. The trend seems to continue.
You can’t talk about secularism if you are still talking about majority communities and minority communities. This is a contradiction that is not recognised.
When we claim we are a secular democracy, the practice should be strongly inclusive. But there are alarming tendencies towards being chauvinist and exclusionist.
But the concept of a religious community, that is, a community identified by its religion, is automatically a community that excludes those of other religions.
DEFINITION OF RELIGION
And at the same time we take for granted that we have been very civilised from hoary antiquity and we Indians are tolerant. At the same time, by the branding and ostracising of the achhuts or untouchables, a vast number of Indians have been excluded from their rights, dignity, and denied the basic human levels of existence.
This is my problem also with the definition of religions. When one gives a definition of a Hindu, it is generally in terms of members of upper castes since the basis of the definition is from the texts of these groups. Whether it is a Hindu or Muslim or Sikh or Christian, one is seldom conscious that the larger number in each religion have little familiarity with their texts, even though they have been formally identified with these religions. For them, religion is a different matter. In actual practice, they tend to create their own religion, worship their deities in a manner of their own choice. They may return themselves in the Census as Hindu or Muslim or whatever, but they are essentially identifying with their own religion. I suspect this has always been so in history. It would be worthwhile for historians of religion to assess the degree of dependence on texts or on practices to determine their religion and belief.
The hard-core, formulated religious ideas are usually associated with the upper echelons of society. Only in very recent times have we become more alert to the aspiration and social condition of Dalit groups. We also tend to boast that we are the most tolerant society, but we are not. We are not a non-violent society.
Both the concepts of ahimsa and tolerance achieved popularity as slogans with the coming of nationalism, when there was an emphasis on traditional values. These became preeminent and were quoted as the values that distinguished us from those who came to rule over us. It was argued that Indian spirituality expressed itself in tolerance and non-violence whereas the materialism of the West could be seen in the lack of these in their culture. Yet, when one goes through Indian history, from period to period, searching for what was going on within the subcontinent, there was intolerance and violent contestation, as there was in many other parts of the world in the past. And this is well before the coming of the Arabs, Turks, and Mongols. The figures that are quoted for the size of the armies in pre-Islamic times in India, even if they are exaggerated, indicate that large armies were required to face violent confrontations from the neighbouring kingdom. There is also a large body of literature that glorifies war.
When we talk about religious groups of the past, we always think these were very neat, homogeneous groups. They were not. There were many sects. If I recall correctly, even Ramakrishna Paramhansadev, when he mentioned Hindu, he spoke of the sampradayas. There were contestations and mingling and interactions among these sectarian groups. This image of multiplicity of sects is ironed out in popular perceptions. How to present this image of multiple sects to people in general? History can help disseminate this information.
You can only teach the reality of how religion functioned in society if you teach the history of religion within the history curriculum. As a discipline, the history of a religion is different from the theology of a religion. History does not focus on texts alone, as theology often does, but includes the actual practice, performance, and patronage of a religion. And it examines the sociology of its supporters and the structure of its institutions and explains why it received support. This we do not teach as a subject.
But we should, because the nature of the inter-dependence of religion and society is fundamental to understanding both. Once that kind of course on the history of religion is taught, people will understand the social, political, and economic dimensions of religion as well. They will realise that religion and understanding religion is not limited to texts, and to abstract values, but also involves seeing how the teaching has been used by political factions in royal courts, in the authority given to certain social institutions, in places of pilgrimage, by renouncers, and in economic activities such as land ownership and commerce.
Religion is not something distinct and different from the lives of people. It is a vibrant, pulsating part of the emotional lives of many and less assertive in the lives of others. In its social and political manifestation, however, it frequently determines the behaviour of one religious group towards another. This is part of history, and the social and political motivations should receive as much attention as the religious since behaviour is more often determined by causes other than religion. Ultimately, religions have to learn to live together as equal partners with other religions and refrain from claiming special status. Admittedly, this is not easy where a religion has been dominant for centuries or where it is now claiming that it has been victimised in the past. But surely the fact that modern societies now assert that they have a greater understanding of how societies function should make us think of how best we sort out these relationships.
QUESTIONING NORMATIVE TEXTS
Questioning normative texts
You have particularly shown that for understanding early India you do not merely pick up normative texts. Several other historians too have demonstrated this. You have very clearly brought out the difference between the normative and the descriptive categories of sources. This is the professional approach of a historian to the nuances of the sources. There is also a need for the non-specialist to appreciate and be aware of these nuances of professional historical studies.
And the fact is that historians today are questioning the normative texts and asking why these norms were created. Manu, for example, mentions eight entirely distinct and diverse forms of marriage, from kanyadana or gifting a daughter, to rakshasa or abduction of the woman and therefore demonic. It is unlikely that all eight would be practised in any one society. We all know how careful every culture and caste is about kinship relations and these are implicit in forms of marriage. So if eight forms of marriage are listed, what is the function of such a listing, or is it only a fantasy on possible ways of marrying? Who are these forms of marriage being related to? There must be multiple cultures at play and therefore the attempt is to legalise them all. In the Pandava family alone, there are three distinct forms of marriage in three generations—bride-price, fraternal polyandry, and cross-cousin marriage. The historian has to explain the meaning of this unusual situation if the argument is that it reflects not the normative but the reality. Or were the Pandavas merely inventing puzzles for future historians?
Often Sanskrit normative texts accommodate the local level variations into the main text by adding a cha (and) or adi (etc.) to apparently strict and inflexible norms.
Yes, that is one way of indicating the plurality. But there are other indications, too, some of which become evident from the inscriptions of the late first and early second millennium A.D. I have been reading the Chamba inscriptions—a hill state in the lower Himalayas—and comparing them with the Chamba Vamshavali, the chronicle from the area. In some of the earlier inscriptions, the brahmanas are referred to with titles like Sharma, making it quite clear that their caste is brahmana. Then a few centuries later, inscriptions in poorer Sanskrit include a few words of the Chambyali language, and the brahmanas are referred to as Badu—that is the locally used word for a brahmana—as in the name Badu Lena. It seems that when these kingdoms were set up, some brahmanas were brought there, particularly to perform the rituals of legitimising status. They claim to have come from Gauda and Kanauj, and such like. But it would seem that local priests were also inducted or else the migrant brahmanas gradually settled into the local community and took on the local terminology...
…who perhaps helped the normative texts develop and put them into an order.
The local priests were functionaries of the local religion of the region. The brahmanas controlled the religion of the ruler, the court, the elite, the samantas or intermediaries of the area, and taught the Vedas and the Puranas as texts to the upper castes. But this did not exclude worship at the local shrines to folk deities, most likely conducted by local priests. The latter could not be set aside, so they were probably associated with the brahmanas in some of the temple worship. This would have enlarged the category of brahmana.http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/linking-the-past-and-the-present/article7599425.ecehttp://www.frontline.in/cover-story/linking-the-past-and-the-present/article7599425.ece
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