Let Every Truth Become Suspect

PM's speech questioned the certitudes of history

Harbans Mukhia The Times of India Saturday, July 23, 2005

History in the end gives you a way of looking at things. Ways, in fact, with no finality and no ultimate objective truth vesting in any of them. Time was when the predominant perspective was constituted in adversarial categories: Class versus class, imperialism versus colony, dark versus white races, one religion versus another, and more recently women versus men, or for that matter, continuity versus change. Each of the categories comprised a complete unity in itself standing in total opposition to its other, with no shared spaces between them.

But times change and so does one's historical vision. Today, the certitudes embedded in the oppositional categories have become vulnerable and interaction in lieu of opposition has become a far more seductive proposition. Prime minister Manmohan Singh's speech at Oxford is indeed attuned to this interactive perspective, regardless of whether or not he is keeping abreast of developments in the academic discipline which is not his own.

The significant mutation that has occurred does not quite eliminate the old antagonisms between imperialism and colony, between continuity and change and does not wish away the exploitation that had hitherto explained history. But the relationship has begun to be seen as a process in which both sides affected each other deeply. And this happens independently of the intentions of either side. Karl Marx's famous observation about the enormous suffering being inflicted on Indian people by the British colonial regime, yet breaking down the shackles that had kept India in a state of complete stagnation for all its past, is derived from a very flimsy knowledge of Indian history; it makes a methodological departure in looking at historical processes not in terms of intentions of dramatis personae but in terms of the results of their actions, or objective results as devout Marxists will fondly describe it.

It, therefore, becomes unimportant that the British built the railways with the intention of intensifying their exploitation of India (Did they ever claim that the railways were built to promote national integration?) or that they introduced English language education to create a stratum of babus for keeping the costs of running the admi-nistration low; what remains important is the long-term consequences of these actions. One of the effects of the changing perspective on history is that the decline and fall of empires is seen not so much as the result of a catastrophic collision with an outside force but as a culmination of acculturation within.

Thus the Mughal empire collapsed not because of the dogmatic religious policy of Aurangzeb and the devastating Hindu reaction to it, as Jadunath Sarkar had taught us, nor owing to the rebellion of the impoverished peasantry against the ever-exploitative state, as Irfan Habib had so eloquently argued in 1963. It collapsed when the mansabdars and zamindars, integrated within the empire, mobilised resources thus obtained and sought to carve out their own independent regimes, much as deputy CEOs of corporate organisations set up their own businesses today.

Much of the parent institution inheres in the new set-up even when new mores and methods evolve. The leaders of India's freedom struggle, too, had mobilised organisational, legal, ideological and intellectual resources imbibed from their education in England to bring the empire to its knees. The issue is not of continuity versus change but one of continuity and change.

Historians today have raised serious questions about the earlier dividing lines, in particular 1765, that had marked the traditional date for the onset of colonialism. They visualise the decades bet-ween 1750s and 1830s as a period of flux when a lot of adoption, adaptation and appropriation of each other's assets and values occurred. William Dalrymple has also shown, with great diligence, the same phenomenon in the cultural arena in the same period in his White Mughals.

Indeed, the very title of his book seeks a shared space between two opposing categories. The British dominance in the relationship is dateable to a long century after this period. The institutions that still run a major part of India's political, judicial, military and bureaucratic administration and even its economy and academia were also created in this period, accompanied at the same time by the highest intensity of exploitation.

Manmohan Singh's Oxford speech thus has the finesse of not counterposing one aspect of the consequences of colonialism in India against the other, but taking all of it as an ensemble the way Marx had done in 1853. Knowingly or unknowingly, the PM was also treading the path that historians of various hues have been exploring recently. As the eminent Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, said: "Har haqeeqat majaaz ho jaaye" (Let every established truth become suspect). It is only through this self-questioning that we shall be able to renew ourselves. The writer was professor of history and rector at JNU.