Resurrecting the all-too-familiar battle of our historical establishment
Contempt for history comes in two basic flavours. First, there’s the Henry Ford dictum, gleefully recycled by schoolboys the world over: History is bunk. Closely allied to it is the apparently opposite dictum enunciated in Orwell’s 1984: He who controls the past controls the future. The past has no real existence, it’s wholly malleable, and inconvenient bits can be consigned to the "memory hole". History is plastic.
This latter view is, of course, very much a la mode. All the best people—ambitious students, trendy professors—frequently subscribe to some version of it. And there is a great deal to be said for the plurality of truths, for the view that things are "true" from particular perspectives, and within particular axiomatic universes. But the multiplication of truths has had one unfortunate, and perhaps unintended, consequence—the implicit notion of falsehood, of untruth, of lies, has acquired a vicious, destructive energy, particularly in the hands of political "intellectuals", (barely) caricatured in Hariharan’s Itihas Manch. One may reasonably be tentative about truth-claims, but one needs a firm notion of lies in order to deal with the current gang.
What is at issue here? Neil Postman described the purpose of education in earthy terms: to endow the student with a "crap-detector". Lewis Namier, the great conservative historian, said it more sedately: the reward of a lifetime of doing history, he said, was not necessarily a knowledge of how things happened, but a sure sense of how they couldn’t have happened. This is the real target of the semi-literate tampering that now passes for educational policy. History teaching, ideally, should consist of familiarising students with ways of interpreting the known record in any instance—and seeking to equip them with analytical and forensic skills that enable them to make sense of it for themselves. Instead, the poor fellows—your children and mine—will be force-fed a diet of "facts", duly certified by anonymous historians of the NCERT, and by the archaeologists who supervised the destruction of the Babri Masjid.
What is at issue, perhaps, isn’t history at all. After all, history will continue to be studied, researched and debated by real historians. But the analytical skills a study of history might ideally provide—the old NCERT textbooks were far from ideal, but were infinitely better than their dumbed-down replacements—will, as ever, be available only to an elite. As for the great mass of the people, they will have been conned once again, and deprived of a crucial means of intellectual advancement. But perhaps other kinds of "advancement"—through the political application of simple-minded violence, a la Gujarat—will become more readily available. After all, as a character in Hariharan’s novel asks poignantly: "What kind of country poisons the minds of children, of its youth?" I fear that we are about to find out.