History As A Triangle

There are many ways of writing history. The commonest way was to base it on records made by court chroniclers (Waqa-i-Navees) employed by rulers. They noted down details of their master's daily routine, men to whom they gave audience, battles they fought, with dollops of praise for their paymasters. To make a proper balance, historians examined similar records made by other court chroniclers who had their own masters to please. Consequently, early history books concentrated on doings of kings and battles they fought. There was little mention of the middle classes or the poor, for whom one king succeeded another and the battles they won or lost made marginal impact on their lives. As if to redress this balance, we had a crop of Marxist historians who focused attention on the conditions of farm and factory workers, their agitations against being exploited by their employers and European nations building colonial empires in Africa and Asia. Colonists regarded imperialism as a sacred duty to carry the white man's burden; their black or brown subjects looked upon it as slavery. There were men and women who kept diaries, noting down all they saw and heard which were later published as personal memoirs. Anyone interested in the past had to read them to get an idea of what had transpired. History, like love, is a many-splendoured thing which has to be seen from different angles to appreciate its beauty in its fullness.

Mushirul Hasan, professor of Modern Indian History at the Jamia Millia Islamia, has struck on an ingenious idea of writing a three-dimensional history of the period known as British rule in India, India's freedom struggle, independence of the country, its partition and its aftermath. He has made up a trio of close friends: a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh who meet periodically in Lucknow or Delhi and discuss different episodes in the history of India from the time Britishers started coming to India to the present time. They question each other, argue over answers given over long sessions sipping cups of tea and nibbling samosas. Most of the questions are put by the Hindu and the Sikh, most answers given by the Muslim who is evidently the author himself. Being a Lucknavi, he sprinkles his monologue with apt quotations from Urdu poets: Mir, Ghalib, Zafar, Hasrat Mohani, Akbar Illahabadi, Iqbal, Josh, Faiz and others. They all go in making up the story of John Company, down to its dissolution, and the setting up of the independent Republic of India.

Prof Hasan is an erudite scholar. Whatever he has to say is refreshingly new. Specially worth noting are his views on the formation of the Indian National Congress and how it changed from being an organisation of conservative Indians patronised by British rulers to a revolutionary one determined to kick them out of the country. Also the different shades of opinion ranging from those of the Hindu orthodoxy represented by leaders like Tilak, Malaviya, Lajpat Rai and Savarkar to those of mainstream nationalism represented by Tyabji, Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, Maulana Azad, Dr Ansari and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. The divergence of opinion continued after independence between Nehru on the one side, and Sardar Patel on the other.

Equally illuminating is Prof Hasan's interpretation of Muslim separateness spearheaded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, founder of the Muslim University at Aligarh, later supported by the poet Allama Iqbal and crystallised by Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League's demand for a separate, independent Muslim state, Pakistan. There is no communal bias in his explanation of these divergent views.

There are lots of interesting asides in Prof Hasan's narration. Did you, for instance, know that Tipu Sultan's real name was Fateh Ali? He took the name Tipu from the Sufi saint Tipu Mastan Auliya after he took command of his army in the first Anglo-Mysore war in 1777. Had you ever heard of Wilayat Ali Bambooq? He was born in 1887 and belonged to the Kidwai gentry of Barabanki, a contemporary of Gokhale, Surendra Nath Bannerjea and Tilak in the formative years of the freedom movement. He was a humorist. As a student of Aligarh University, he started contributing a humour column to a journal called Comrade, then to Awadh Punch and Maloomat. His home became a meeting place of Muslim literati and politicians. Among those in attendance was Rafi Ahmed Kidwai. Bambooq's satires are still read by lovers of Urdu.

Now that the Sangh parivar has launched on a campaign to distort history to forward its political ambitions, it is worthwhile to read the version of a true scholar committed to the ideals of secularism and a strong, united India.