Stories and Nation Building #1: 1947

One of the main “superpowers” that humans have, as per Yuval Noah Harari, is the ability to tell stories. Not only of the fairy-tale variety, but also the grander ones that can unify people into massive groups based on some common theme (real or imagined), stretching in size from regional to national to global.

 

In Missing in Action, Pranay Kotasthane says the same:

            “Narratives have the power to make the unreal real.”

Narratives are critical when a nation is formed:

“Every newly formed nation has to define this imagination.”

This involved 3 steps: (1) Call for a new beginning, a fresh start; (2) if a region has a long history that can’t be wished away, then “use the trope of slumber and reawakening to represent a departure from the past”; and (3) use historians to “reframe history that show past events as serving the nation-building… objectives of the present”.

 

If you found some of the above offensive, guess what – India, like every new nation, did all that at her independence too. After all:

“India was the very definition of diversity – over 600 princely states, fourteen provinces, dozens of major languages, scores of castes, and six large religious groups.”

This created a massive challenge:

“It was impossible for such diverse people to have an imagination of its past that was common and uncontested.”

A new narrative had to be created.

 

When you have a history that dates as long back as ours, one has to pick which point is an “aberration”:

“Should it be restricted only to the period of British rule or should we go back to the founding of the Sultanate in Delhi?... We made a choice that British rule would be considered ‘colonial’ and ‘foreign’ and nothing beyond it in history.”

Why that point in history? Pragmatism is the one-word answer:

“That we felt would have the broadest consensus and foster long-term harmony in society. We must remember the horror of Partition was still unfolding at the moment.”

 

Two other factors played a key role in shaping the narrative of India. One, two towering personalities of the day who had a huge say over the narrative that would be picked, Nehru and Ambedkar both “viewed society with suspicion” (uneducated, ignorant of issues, superstitious, caste’ist, regionalistic) and therefore believe the State had to be “an agent of change”, i.e., reform society. Two, Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of a right-wing zealot “obliterated any opportunity for an alternative imagination to emerge”.

 

Nehru knew his citizens well and so he fully understood he could not call for a “departure from the past” (that would never pass with the masses) and instead called it a waking up from slumber.

 

The last step was to have the historians “speaking for the dead”. This meant:

“… a disproportionate attribution of our woes to British rule, labelling provincial wars against British armies as a struggle for independence, airbrushing contentious parts of our history, like Islamic invaders who plundered and left, that would muddy the imagination, and amplifying elements that furthered the chosen narrative.”

If you are upset by this, don’t be. To paraphrase Benedict Anderson:

“Once you have chosen a path, in good faith, your narrative that is a break from the past, you will need to rework history.”

 

Kotasthane fast forwards to present day India:

“The critical question though is this – how deep did this imagination seep into the consciousness of the society? Seventy-five years later, the evidence suggests, not a lot.”