Seize the initiative

Founded a decade ago in memory of Safdar Hashmi, the Sahmat, acting as a bulwark against a certain variant of cultural nationalism, has kept alive the secular and composite values of our cultural and intellectual life.

Whenever the voices of dissent have been stifled by authoritarian structures and religious orthodoxies, Sahmat hasoffered its platform for creative writers, poets, artists and musicians to express their creative energies and anxieties. It has defended, without being tied to the establishment, the values of tolerance, freedom and dissent in our society.

Why has the media, then, not taken adequate notice of the assembly of hundreds of historians at the History Congress at Patiala and the five-day Sahmat convention in New Delhi? Why is their considered stand on national issues not analysed in newspaper editorials? We want social scientists and creative writers, the heart and soul of our intellectual and cultural life, to intervene in civil society, mould public opinion and share their individual and collective experiences.

If so, it is imperative that their voices are heard loud and clear through the media. I also assume that the national media, regardless of its links with business and industry, is wedded to broadly liberal and secular perspectives. If so, the activities of the History Congress and Sahmat must commandserious attention.

The History Congress and Sahmat can do much more in terms of supporting persecuted individuals and wounded souls, providing an effective forum for the marginalised and suppressed voices of women, dalits and the minorities, whose past is yet to be recovered in the pages of history, and occupy the public spaces that have been captured by the communal and obscurantist forces. At the same time, we will do well to remember that there are limits to what they can accomplish.

The artist and the scholar, operating outside party structures and the political establishment, can at best sensitise the intelligentsia to the values that are dear to them and lay down the parameters of a healthy and creative debate. They cannot be expected to strictly define the thought-processes of the young and impressionable minds.

History seeks to discover causal laws connecting different facts, in the same sort of way in which physical sciences discover interconnections among facts. It is a question for anenhanced understanding of the past, “ever devouring the transient offspring of the present”, in the words of Bertrand Russell, and not just a record of individual men, however great. It relates the present to the past, and thereby the future to the present.

Indeed, history has been a desirable part of everybody’s mental furniture, because it makes visible and living the growth and greatness of nations, enabling us to extend our hopes beyond the span of our lives. In all these ways, added Russell, a knowledge of history is capable of giving to statesmanship, and to our daily thoughts, a breadth and scope unattainable by those whose view is limited to the present.

Though the study of history is often recommended on the ground of its utility in regard to the problems of present-day politics, it is necessary to limit and define the kind of guidance to be expected from it. More so in the Indian subcontinent with its mixed legacy of colonialism, Hindu majoritarianism and Mus-lim nationalism. The story of thecolonial construction of our past is too well-known to be recounted here.

Equally well-known is the fact that colonial knowledge created and perpetuated myths and conjured up images of peoples and countries as part of an imperial design to fortify the ideological edifice of the Empire. What needs to be underlined is the independent and autonomous discourse among Indian social reformers, religious preachers and publicists on certain themes. At the same time, the reference point for several major debates was provided by the knowledge produced during the colonial era by the colonialists themselves. Among the leading Indian thinkers, Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Gandhi were acutely sensitive to this reality.

The nationalist discourse on the Muslims and on inter-community relations illustrates my point. We learn, for example, how the British homogenised Muslims like `castes’ and `tribes’ and accommodated them within political and bureaucratic schemes as a separate and distinct community. We also know that itsuited the Muslim leaders to represent an `objectively’ defined community and contend with others for patronage, employment and political assignments. What is, perhaps, not too familiar is the ambiguity and fuzziness in nationalist thinking about the corporate identity of Muslims.

Most scholars and politicians readily endorsed the colonial view that the Muslims were historically separate and distinct from the other communities and, for that reason, required special concessions. So that the political language within which the Congress sought accommodation with Muslim political activists rested largely on British perceptions and political calculations. The energy derived from recognising Muslims as a distinct religious and political unity implied that the basic terms of reference precluded any lasting solution of the communal tangle.

Today, a professional historian is faced with the uphill task of setting the record straight by challenging many of the colonial and `nationalist’ assumptions. The realchallenge is to popularise historians as creative performers echoing the collective experiences of our people. For this and other reasons, the liberal-left historians would need to change their role, more so when history is being made more accessible and immediate by political and religious orthodoxies whose principal project is to colonise the minds of the people. They can no longer wait and watch and allow the initiative to be wrested by the protagonists of conservative nationalism.