Contested Indian History #1: Intro

Shaan Kashyap’s Who Owns History? is an interesting read that goes over the writing of Indian history from a particular angle:

“The book is not a history of India – it is the history of how Indians have argued over, contested and even reimagined history itself.”

The same point, from a different angle:

“It traces the moments when historians stepped the safe confines of universities and found themselves in the public sphere.”

 

In the polarized India of today, one set believes such contested history is a recent (aka Modi era) phenomenon. Another believes what is happening today is a backlash against the Left’ist version of history from before that. But no, says the book, in India, such clashes pre-date both of the above by a long time!

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Yuval Noah Harari said we’re hardwired to love stories and (mis)apply it to everything around us. Including history. We like clean narratives. Good and bad. Nothing grey, nothing messy. As Kashyap puts it:

“If people can choose their sides in a fictional battle between the Avengers and Thanos (superhero comic/movie characters), they will surely choose sides between Aurungzeb and Shivaji, or Gandhi and Savarkar.”

 

He cites an example of the kinds of topics the book looks into. A well-respected historian said that the destruction of temples was “not necessarily on account of religious bigotry, but also due to political rivalry”. How should one approach this argument? Surely, not all temple destruction was only for political reasons? Besides, such an approach ignores the “symbolic significance such acts carried”.

“Does the frequent use of a rationalistic lens to interpret past actors flatten the lived experience of religion and emotion in history?”

 

As the author puts it:

“A spectre is haunting us – the spectre of history.”

In the remaining blogs in the series, we’ll see the tales of such contested history from British times to Nehruvian times to state specific controversies to Vajpayee to present Modi era.