#ZEEJLF2019 | 29. INDIA : THE HISORICAL IMAGINATION

kind of bias of course there was the old colonial bias but then we accumulated on top of that then the Marxist bias then in her ovn biases and so on and and the net result of all of that is that the history that we now have has become so contested and any attempt to try and now change it become so political that I think we now really need to begin to go literally back to looking at the original primary evidence in some way and begin to rethink this this is important and I'll tell you why firstly because there is a problem even in the way we look at our primary evidence but this primary evidence is not set in stone we are continuously accumulating new primary evidence from excavations from new genetic data from data for climate change and so on so the idea here is that history is not a narrative which is definitely true for all time history is a continuous interpretation of the best available information and that information keeps changing and of course their different interpretations as well you know somehow people think that historians must all agree but you know look at television any night and you see that you know we can't even even agree on what happened yesterday so why do you expect historians to agree on what happened 3,000 years ago so the most interesting thing about Indian history despite all this contestation I think the real thing that is happening is that and maybe a few but wouldn't learn anything about major kingdoms like the Chalukyas the sri vidhyaa so the vijayanagar empire you would learn very little about major characters in history like martin de varma or the holmes who ruled over assam for some 600 years so there's been serious problems with our history narrative in so I would argue that if you as you said but somebody who came from outside and wanted to get a perspective of history I would say you should really read widely discount much of the interpretation but if you're really interested in it go and pick out a lot of the original stuff that is there I mean the good thing is the lot of this thing is just freely lying around I mean you can actually literally go and see Ashoka's edicts yourself and make up your mind about him so before I come to the process of going back and how you do it since you're not a professional historian since you don't sit in an University and go through you know sit in the library what you just said the word rewriting you know you said that you being accused of some kind of right-wing conspiracy why does there have to be isn't the word rewriting somewhat problematic when you yourself is saying that this is all a question of interpretation and yes just but you stop arguing for broadly so I am arguing that it should be continuously rewrite written based on emerging new evidence like anything any other field of study after all when you find new information and ask any scientific field do you not revise your theories but history isn't it's not quite like science right why no is what I am saying that why is history not like any other field of study it is about evidence which by the way as I keep saying keeps changing why then should we not take whatever it is and different perspectives by the way even in science even the same evidence is contested in various ways and then a theory is proposed new evidence comes and it is tested against it why should it not be done in history as well I mean it is the process that of any scholarship should progress through so why not history and any attempt to do proceeded down this path somehow is taken as some sort of a great act of heresy so I actually have a real problem with this entire line of thought and I and of course this is not only true of history Max Planck once said science progresses one funeral at a time so in some ways perhaps that is true of history as well so what's your process then how do you as as I said not an academic historian what's your process of going about doing this how did you why did you tell us about how you start it down this I'm not an academic historian absolutely right I started down this path not because I I was particularly loved with history as a child or anything like that I was like many many other school kids who read the history because there today we lose battle of Buxar we lose now surely since we are still around we must have won some battles so I began to investigate this and I discovered that interestingly the colonial era historians had deliberately wiped out all mention of battles in which the Indians at one this has been actually done systematically and relentlessly people do not realize this because there many batteries in which Indians won over thousands of years of course so once I began to investigate this I began to see it's quite interesting so for example the European European colonizers wanted us to feel that we were always under some other ruler from outside who came and ruled us so you will get the impression that say the Mughals ruled us and then a little later the British ruled us they will not tell you that in the middle there were some 75 odd years when the Murat has ruled over most of India and they have been wiped out of the memory because it didn't fit this narrative so on the other hand if you travel around India you will see lots of evidence of Marathas everywhere even Delhi was ruled by the murat has for several decades so nobody talks about the Murata period of Delhi and of course you know they're scattered all over India so this is quite incredible that you have wiped out these things and then when I went to begin to cause certain amount of dissonance in my head so I began to go back and read the stuff myself and so as a result of this process I began to arrive at somewhat different view of things and this is also true by the way not just of recent events what we going back over time so you have for example Samudra Gupta who is one of the founders of the you know the second emperor of the Gupta dynasty you read in our history books that he was the Napoleon of India it's a wine Napoleon of India why not Julius Caesar of India why not Peter the Great of India after all he was one of the greatest generals of his time in the world I mean he fought many many battles and seems never to have lost it he basically conquered all of the subcontinent so I then discovered the reason he's called Napoleon is because British historians wanted to tell us that yes he was a great general but remember we defeated Napoleon so they were subliminally adding this into our memory and it is systematic and relentless now of course I have gone and of course here I'm have been mocking colonial leader of historians but let me tell you this is also true of post independence history yes so you have this odd thing that the the the Congress politicians having come to power after independence essentially wiped out my memory the memory of alternative streams of the freedom struggle for example the revolutionaries and you know there is a story to be told that it was the revolutionaries and not the Gandhian non-violence that led us to freedom and there is many well-known commentators of that time in including very famously Ambedkar who made this case that you know it was really the revolutionary starting with the gutter movement and even before the got a movement through the interwar period the irony the naval revolt of 1946 that led to independence and that it had nothing to do with hanging around the beach making salt nothing to do yes very little anyway so isn't it's just that those who are in the ascendancy and those who are in power power in the academy power in government wherever they write yes nothing nothing unique with you nothing what's happening now yes so what Thank You is that concede a point I'm making is the history is or why is a introduction of a different narrative somehow scandalous where when the history that has been inherited is already full of these biases so let us agree on some things that the history that we have inherited is nothing sacrosanct about it the thing that we need to debate if you want to have a written is about the evidence and let that I think is a fair thing we have all got a right to our opinion and interpretation we do not have a right to our facts so I think it is a fair point that we have a debate about the evidence and so I am a great watery and I that's why I told you right in the beginning we need to have seriousness about the evidence then different any reasonable interpretation of that history is fair but to say that in any way interfering with this mainstream story is sacrilege I have a problem with that it's not sacrilege but you would admit that what is going on is because certain for you depends certain forces why why do you have to be so coy about it fact of the matter is there is a government to please me you have a different view but you there is the way you have framed it is by saying somehow that their view of history is somehow wrong and the view that we have inherited somehow right I am just saying to you know that why is that history somehow not kosher I'm not saying that at all I'm saying that so you would admit that the doctor admitting I'm saying what when you say when you say that you say when I and you say admit means that there's something wrong and I'm admitting to a sin you admit to sins I am just saying that there is a problem with the history I'm not sure about that so you admit that there is you began at the beginning by saying that this is not that you were accused of being part of some right-wing project and all I'm saying is that that yes you are and so there's nothing wrong with that no I'm saying that I am a part of rewriting it I may have a right-wing view which is fair I'm just pointing out you so what nothing at all I'm saying you distanced yourself from it earlier but so talking about that let's say you know the current moment that we're in if you were a historian a hundred years from now five hundred years from now how would you write the history of today that's a tricky one because there are two things about history and this is something by the way it goes down to the core of how I think about history so I'm not going to switch a little bit to think the philosophy of history that by the way is there very much Oh in all my writing that's something so I'm going to bore you a little bit with my philosophy of history so my view of the world is that it is inherently a complex system and those of you are familiar with complexity theory will know this that I look at the world as something that can go in multiple directions at any point in time so say unlike say a Marxist view of history which has a very much more a predicted path of history a deterministic part of history my view history that at any point it will go in different directions now when you have this view of history the problem is that history writing by its nature is that somebody later on tells you about the cause causes the the line of causation that led to a certain chain of events right that's what history writing is about now that's all very good when you're looking backwards when you're looking as you stand now looking forwards it's a very difficult thing to do and that's why I would be very very I would say I all I can say is we can't record what we thought is going on but we cannot actually write it through history and just to give you an example of this so if you were here in the Indian Ocean world in the 15th century what would happen is that you would take the view that the world was going to be taken over by the Chinese is why you had these massive voyages led by Admiral Jung her coming through from China into the Indian Ocean world and basically knocking out anybody else who was getting in the way so in if you were in 1430 or 1440 you would say you know the next several centuries would be Chinese dominated but what happens is that the the Admiral Jung ho incidentally was a eunuch and the eunuchs in the Chinese Court were very very powerful and a new emperor came to the throne and he was backed by the Mandarin bureaucrats who were suspicious of the eunuchs so what happens is that they'd been good bureaucrats do the obvious thing they switch off the money to the Navy and the Chinese Navy basically goes into nosedive and in fact its records are all suppressed till the end of the 20th century so the Chinese having come into the Indian Ocean in the early 15 century knocking out everybody else had suddenly withdrawn and this is the vacuum that was left when Vasco de Gama turned up in the in the Indian Ocean and this is the reason the Europeans managed to conquer the Indian Ocean region so quickly because the Chinese had been there and knocked it out knocked out everybody else and left a vacuum now why am I telling you this story because ex-ante it was impossible to have predicted that this was what was happening if I was sitting in 1430 1440 trying to predict forward what was happening I would simply not have guessed this and so that is the reason I am somewhat skeptical about the ability of those who are participating in the events being able to fully be able to gauge the purport of what they are actually doing because since my theory is complexity theory is all about unintended consequences butterfly effects etc I have no idea which butterfly is flapping its wings right now you need time you need distance you can only know with distance so one of your books is called Indian Renaissance and we were talking about the panel earlier we talked a little bit about this the the way you present it is that you use the word rewriting bringing broadening the lens and ushering some kind of Renaissance in this area isn't there a worry that Renaissance of the word to which we attach positive connotations but there's also revivalism which sometimes finds its expression in some very violent political movements as well isn't there a worry that that's what happens with this sometimes how do you it because I know it's not black and white it's not but that what you do in the project you are setting out on so one of the things that I am interested in is and this is relates to my very first book I think you're talking about is the Indian Renaissance the point I'm making there is a moment comes in a in history when it basically that's the intellectual milieu of that society begins to liquefy and begins to break out and interestingly this happened at multiple points and time in other countries histories the word Renaissance is very often used for the European Renaissance coming out of the Middle Ages so let's take that as an example and then I'll come come to more recent times one of the interesting things that happens at that time is of course that coming out of the sort of the caged intellectual milieu of the middle age controlled by the church and so on these are sudden expansion of knowledge because of printing for example and you see this happening in multiple places 'im so what is interesting about a renaissance is that doesn't happen in any silo so today we think of you know Venice or you think of Florence as places to go and look at art but in fact Florence and Venice was not about art they were about Commerce the Florentines were basically bankers the Venice was a place of Commerce the great invention if you had gone at that time to Venice in the in the 14th century and asked them what was their great invention they would have talked about joint stock companies or gone to Florence they've talked about a double entry bookkeeping rather than art so what happens is that there's multiple areas it's sort of an opening of mind that happens and a lot of energy shows through in commerce it happens in art it happens in politics it's also new kinds of writing happens in literature in you know in in warfare as well so it is a time of energy and yes it manifests itself in all kinds of things so my argument is that this is a energetic period how it again pans out I have no way to predict because I am myself of the view that it history is inherently unpredictable but I do feel that we may be living through one of those periods where this is happening that after maybe a thousand years maybe a little bit less than that maybe 800 years of being sort of and it's not a straight line but certainly in decline certainly is economically being in decline but in many other ways is also being in decline we are now going through a period in recent decades of rapidly opening out in multiple fields so you are seeing that in literature new kinds of writing are beginning to happen you know something like even this festival is a part of that we are seeing that in the economic field we are seeing that new kinds of films that are coming out and experimentation and that energy is there and yes that energy can manifest itself in multiple ways I have no way ex-ante to predict it but do you think I mean have you been surveying what has happened I'm not asking you to look forward so I as I said my entire theory of history is the inability of humans to predict forward but I am a great believer that that is one of the key reasons and I have tweeted about is written about as well is the ad constitutional set of rules of game are very very important as a result because this is about the churn and and one of my books is called ocean of journalism since I am a big believer in continuous churning whether it's in the economic field or social field or of ideas I believe that we need to have some agreed rules of the game and at this point in history in our country that agreed rules of the game is the Constitution now obvious the Constitution is not entirely set in stone it also evolves but by and large it is something that a slow-moving is by and large agreed-upon democracy is another way in which through which we go through the journey the ideas flow through and that's why I am very suspect suspicious of attempts by for example established elites to stifle arguments that they feel uncomfortable with and we have seen that in India particularly over the last 70 years ideas that were that that they lead found uncomfortable that was uncomfortable in in the International Center was consequently thought of being something that has to be brushed aside and demonized in many ways and I have a problem with that I think I'm by and large except for incitement of violence I am a believer in freedom of speech but do you think I mean but coming back to the question quite the distinction between Renaissance and revivalism revivalism is often accompanied by that sort of violence because the D is revivalism means what if you are thinking of revivalism as some attempt to go back to some pristine ancient past and imagined an imagined past or whatever you may say maybe there is a problem with that but on the other hand to say at this but in the same breath that somehow one cannot be proud of one's ancient past is also a problem so let me take you down the path you're probably hinting at I have a real problem with going and making arguments about flying vedic chariots especially since as far as I can tell there is no proof of any but on the other hand I also have problem with the equivalent on the other side of the political divide which is to deny that the achievements of ancient India which is true for example in surgery or you know much of modern surgery actually turns up in schroot plastic surgery is genuinely an Indian in mention modern plastic surgery in Europe is actually directly derived and this matter is fully documented from Indians surgery there is a large amount of mathematics just derived from Indian surgery there's a huge amount of contributions in ancient India genuinely had in terms of navigation and spreading Indian ideas to the rest of the world all the way from Rome all the way to China and Japan so my view is that this is the real problem is there's this debate is happening without evidence and I keep coming back to this business of evidence because if you do not anchor this argument with evidence then it is up in the air but to say that oh we should ignore the evidence because oh it will be revivalist and so on is itself in fact leads to a in fact it feeds both not just that yeah this is exactly what leads to these claims of Vedic flying chariots it is it's driven by by the other side so so I mentioned at the beginning that you haven't just written non-fiction books you also had a book of fiction short stories given your preoccupations as a historian how did that inform your fiction I'm not preoccupied as a historian at all let me just point out my books come in all kinds I've written extensively on economics I've written an urban design in fact did my very latest book which is called Indian the edge of ideas is one-third about culture one-third about urban design and one-third about economics so I'm not preoccupied in fact I I tend to have a problem with the whole idea of dividing fields up into silos because of this complexity theory view of the world because I everything impacts everything so coming all right in fact so yeah so when I come into fiction I would argue the fiction in in its own way tells the truth in a different way so incidentally I write satire so the way satire works is that you take you you take real life and you try and present it in a super real way to the extent that begins to look absurd so that is why I I have attempted to use so in that sense you could argue that my satire is a record of my times I'm mocking it but the only reason that mocking works is because in some way I have tried to be more true to real life than real life itself is that's a satire would work so in that sense it is also not nonfiction I mean it is not fiction entirely it's it is in some ways non and it also true or by the way other writers I mean even think and think about Victorian England and Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle are in some ways more true of the feel of the Victorian era then maybe if you just read newspaper reports or something so how do you think that's informed the historical imagination in India fiction yeah well of course it has I mean when we think about the Gupta period for example we read Kalidasa now one doesn't have to literally take everything Kali does it is writing as true but we get a sense of what was their aesthetics what was their attitudes towards various social issues the same thing come out of the epics for example and you know et hafsa the word if the hustle literally means this is as it happened while I do not literally think that the facts as the epics today we have are literally true they may have been inspired originally by actual events very difficult to tell how much because the texts that we have inherited have lots of interpolations so but they are et husana in a different way because they record our thoughts our attitudes at various points in time and so in that sense they are also informing our history so reading kalidasa also informs our history reading Charles Dickens also informs our history if for example I think in some ways the best feel story about partition is Montrose story called overtaxing right it is completely fiction it it's also satire incidentally but it captures the complete absurdity of that moment beautifully so fiction here is in many ways more true than nonfiction except if you begin to take it too literally that's a different matter but certainly the essence of it can very often be more true and so I mean and how do you think that's evolved so there's this professional history project that you've been talking about you know sort of going back rewriting do you see that in fiction you mean rewriting fiction well not rewriting but the way fiction is approaching this country the realization a way too serious I think point is most important thing about fiction is to read it to have fun I am highly suspicious of literary criticism because my view is that that has literary criticism creates critics it doesn't create writers in fact those of you read read one of my satire books called the intellectuals sorry one of my stories called the intellectuals where it mocks Kolkata intellectuals sitting in a coffee shop dissecting the world and you know presenting these absurd papers on post colonialism and I find that kind of strange because they are sort of trapped in this universe so I would say the most important thing about fiction is to read it to enjoyed and incidentally that is also taken about our history we need to understand our history to understand ourselves yes but again I think the most important thing about reading history is to enjoy reading it like with everything taking it too seriously has its own drawbacks and other story mocks festivals such as this that's right so so so I do expect somebody to stand up in the end and to ask a question so to speak as a question so so tell me about your your your next project you talked you mentioned it a little bit earlier the revolutionaries in the independence movement tell us a little bit about a little bit more about elaborates on how you're going about writing it so we'll have to project one of them is to try and actually get some of my writings and maybe the writings of others into Indian languages one of the problems of and I'm going to come so there are two projects one is my own writings where one is to actually get more translations into Indian languages you know Indians are very proud of the Indian language of their languages but one of the things they do is to want to somehow fossilize them into some site the Academy kind of thing now this is killing our languages I'm telling you because there is no new material in our languages so if you read I mean read textbooks of your kids for example although those were young enough actually have suffered them recently I mean how many times can you read Prem Chen's yoga so I am very interested in creating new material in Indian languages well one step into that is to actually get my own books translated into Indian languages and with the help of Westland Amazon which is my and absolutely yeah will give me some of my books the print is a crime told and this is a Hindi translation of month of ocean of churn it's called month incur saga but I've it's in Hindi I've got in Marathi it's several of my books are now in Malayalam Tamil and so on and the idea here is to get new material into Indian languages any language is alive if the idea is coming into it there are ideas expressed in that language so unfortunately Indian writers and writers in Indian languages are particularly excited about having their languages taking a translated into say English but that's great for English that doesn't do anything for their own language if they are not enough material coming into that language there is not enough new ideas coming into that language that language will not thrive so go I mean try this out yourself go into any Indian language section of any bookshop first of all they are very very limited and but the places where you may see somewhat larger selections will be like railway stations H wheeler in Allahabad which I just visited and the thing is almost all the books were written years ago 50 years ago so the same preemption the same gospel is still being so unless there is new writing so I am very very keen on this and that has to be that new right has to be something interesting and fun it has to be science-fiction it has to be detective novels I mean being early for example my mother done you had a great tradition of writing detective novels it's a tg3 by the way was a great writer of detective novels and many other things of fun poetry father was of satirical poetry but now who is today's a 33 who's today's Tagore who's today's mento and you'll be amazed I asked this of Indian language writers very often and I they'll name yah he's a great writer in that right I said no no no wait named me in your language since you're the expert in that language who is the writer below the age of 40 who is likely to become mentor to go after all when Tagore was 40 years already famous so who is your to go today or likely to become and I have so far in five or six years of asking this question not managed to get an answer which really worries me about Indian languages so this is one project that I am and now my answer says a the independence project yes the other project that I have is to write the and yes I'll use the word rewrite the history of the independence movement from the perspective of the revolutionaries and by the way the revolutionaries were not the only other alternative to the to the Indian National Congress they were peasant revolts there were many other movements going on as well and they were interacting with each other this too was a complex interaction but I'm going to talk specifically about the revolutionaries because you get the impression from our conventional narratives that they were these brave individuals maybe Bhagat Singh or Raj Bihari boss or Chandra Shekhar Azad or Subash boss whoever and they did some individual acts of bravery along the way and that didn't really add up to anything so yes brave act but frankly not didn't really contribute anything to freedom this is absolutely not true because they were actually a part of an organized movement that survived and sustained itself over half a century and it was not just in India they had embassies internationally so in the first world one the Second World War in the First World War the revolutionaries had embassies in California in Berlin in Tokyo and many of these same characters can pop up through this 50-year period so I'll give you the example of Rashmi harrybo's in the First World War Rashmi harrybo's and a grand uncle of mine called Sachin rod Sanyal they both attempted to cause a revolt in the Indian Army called the gutter movement it failed now these guys then turned up in the Second World War and they attempted to do the same thing and this same thing was the Indian National Army and Singapore and this Indian National Army that was set up in Singapore was not set up by NATO G it was set up by the same guy Raj Bihari Bose who had fled to Tokyo in the interwar period had turned up in the second world war and set up this this so he was very old by this time so he handed over control to Netaji but I'm just telling you that this was a very large movement with huge international linkages and in fact even understanding the actions of the Indian National Congress can only be understood in the context of how they were reacting to these these characters and of course it all culminates into a major revolt in the Indian Navy in Mumbai in 1946 again I actually didn't know about this this revolt till I was an adult it's only in my 20s happened to be living in Colaba in Mumbai I bumped into this very small Memorial and began researching it and then I suddenly realized oh my god this is a major major event or of course at that time you couldn't Google things up quite so easily so I actually had to learn about it the hard way but then it suddenly many many things begin to fall in place and so I think this story needs to be told I think it's a valid story and it's a perspective that is different and just going back to the point you were making after independence unfortunately almost all the top leaders of this movement would had been killed or died and so or at least in the case of Netaji he had disappeared and so consequently the power came to one group and they wrote their story in one way now my view is why can that story not be challenged so since we've gone back to the beginning of our conversation this is a question which I guess I could have asked then as well but I'll ask you this and then we'll ask the audience for questions just the idea of India when we talk about India you you talked about we need to revisit our history rewrite it that itself is contested isn't it that that what do you that India is India India post 47 wait where do you date that from how do you approach so I think the idea of India is an old one and I have a problem with some people who come up with this somehow this thing that there is an idea of India and here ruvi an idea of India and any break from that is somehow a bad form now I I mean that is ridiculous did the people who were sort of sacrificing themselves to for the independence movement dying for India that didn't exist obviously not they had a conception of India true this conception of India has changed over time and at every point in time there be many ideas of India there's been a civilizational idea of India there is your geographical idea of India there is a political idea of India the way it has manifested itself today is the Republic of India as it stands but even there there is a civilization illini idea of India that exists together with it so if you look at our Constitution it says India that is Bharat it starts with those words why it is not the case that the word para is merely a Hindi translation of India no then if that was the case then the Hindi version of the Constitution would have started with Bharat and the English version would have had only India that is not the case it starts with India that is Bharat clearly this idea of a republic of india and and simultaneously a civilizational india coexist and have existed in some ways for a very long time and we are not even unique in this so if you go back and look at Greek history for example now the ancient Greeks were fighting with each other all the time there were small kingdoms and republics that doesn't mean that they didn't have a sense of civilizational history so can you give us an example from the past that exemplifies yes so for example you take the Puranas Vishnu Quran clearly mentions the idea of India it says south of the snowy mountains but north of the great deep ocean live there live the descendants of the bharatas so it has a conception then it then describes the rivers and the mountains and in those mountains it describes the mountains not just of the Himalayas but also the eastern hearts the Western hearts it mentions the Vindhyas and so on it mentions the reverse kaveri but it also mentions the indus mentions the ganga there is a landscape that it mentions and this landscape is a civilizational idea very much embedded in many many places so for example when you do a haben or you take a holy dip there is a chant which mentions the seven rivers the sub the Sindhu now thats up the Sindhu is interesting and I'll come back to it why this is interesting that septa Cinda mentioned seven rivers and those are seven rivers from it mentions Kaveri it mentions Ganga it mentions Saraswati which had disappeared which has disappeared it mentions Narmada so there is a geography of India and Diana also talks about it how India is a is linked through its pilgrimages Shankar Acharya for example eighth century he said he crisscrosses India and he sets up these mutts they are not randomly scattered around - there's one the east this one in the West there's one in the North one in the south so this conception of India is a civilizational unit is a very old one why should we deny it that doesn't mean that it is an unchanging idea of India that idea of India has changed over time in fact it has change right from the beginning the term bharat originally comes up in the Rig Veda only alludes to a one tribe in Haryana and when they were talking the sub the Sindhu they were talking about the Saraswathi and it's tributaries so very small area over a period of time it had expanded over a much bigger area now if you come to the medieval period when people are talking about they began to talk about Jambu deeper the jumbo Reaper became then the conception of a subcontinent but it's quite interesting that when the the Indian word for barbarians or somebody who's outside of the Sevilla Indian civilization is the word nature okay now Indians were trading with Southeast Asia it's quite interesting they call these people the Nagas but the Nagas and never called them leeches they are clearly within the civilization so it is very interesting that they're for a medieval Indian would have considered Southeast Asia as part of India and this is not something that we are only thinking if you go to Southeast Asia look at Indonesia it's a Muslim majority country becomes independent in 1949 what does it do it calls itself Indonesia it's named after us it calls its currency rupiah it's national symbol is the Garuda so even they they may have changed their religion but they have continued to have very strong links to our civilization and in fact I asked an Indonesian how they thought about this and they gave him he gave me a very interesting answer is a Indonesian Muslim who told me this look we have changed the way we pray but we have not changed our ancestors so on that note can I ask for questions from the audience does anybody have questions for Sanjeev yeah I you talked in the beginning about how history has been written about all the wars that we have lost and you've also covered that you would like to retell or rewrite the the way the revolutionaries have you know created history what about military history what do you have to say about that and why isn't it been so popular you know because we have one to worse we've liberated a country well well I'm not the expert on military history so I write my history from much more an economic in geographical perspective than from a military perspective I'm not the expert on military there but it obviously it pops up everywhere in my writings but I agree there are many problems with our military history one of them is that we simply wiped out in the colonial period all the military history which was inconvenient so it is only because of this recent movie that we began to learn about bajirao he is one of the great generals of the 18th century in fact was a far more successful general than the Polian some of the group that certainly was a more successful but I'll tell you about they were Indian generals which are unknown in India who had major impact on world history and I'll give you one example martin de varma okay now Martineau varma is important for the following reason you see in the early 18th century the Dutch East India Company was the most powerful global economic military machine and they had basically taken over what is now Indonesia they've taken over Southern Africa they have taken over Sri Lanka and there was very good reason that they were going to take over India and they were in fact attempting to take over Kerala when they came upon a local King called martanda Varma in Kerala and who defeated the Dutch in a battle called the battle of colossal in the early 1730's and as a result of the defeat the Dutch East India Company went into decline and the English East India Company in the French East India Company came to the fore so he had a major impact on world history not just that after that defeat no Asiatic power would defeat a European part in 1905 when the Japanese defeated the Russians now everybody in the world who has any interest in history knows that the Japanese defeated the Russians in 1905 and that had major political connotations but nobody remembers poor martanda Varma who had been the last guy to have done and had actually changed the course of history in fact but for Martha never my would perhaps we're giving you this talk in Dutch so there is a lot to be said but of course you Allah alluded to post independence history and even there it's quite interesting that just now we had have one movie on the surgical strikes but there are no movies made of 1971 war it's incredible why why is this and why just about the victories we can also have story telling about our defeats why not about 1962 and one of the problems there is that those unfortunately who came to become our intellectual sort of the those who became the intellectuals after independence unfortunately the intellectual space of India was not interestingly captured maybe with some contributions from the ANC but for the most part the intellectuals the space of India after independence was captured largely by people who had been collaborators with the British it'll shock you actually this is a history to be written in its own right and in many ways they were not particularly comfortable with revivalism as you said so one has to look at who are the historians after independence who were the intellectuals after independent independence and many very often you will find that those who were writing our histories had very troubled links to that to that history including military history so the fact that prana hopper was an army chief during the 1962 debacle has a lot to said about the fact that that entire episode cannot now be written about cannot be written about anymore yeah so I have a question related to ancient Indian history so we see mention of the yavanas or the Indo Hellenistic Greek tribes who were I think offshoots of Alexander the Great's invasion we see their mention till the mauryan empire or say even the early goodthe period after that they just vanished so do you think the invasion of Islam the rising photo of Islam was responsible for that and why did India cut create ties with the transaxle plane in Central Asia first of all they didn't there was a lot of trade going on right up to now until 18th century if we go to Baku there is a Ithaca there where people were trading right up to the ninety Indian traders were there through the 19th century so there was a lot of trade happening all through with Central Asia right into modern times but what was the first question sorry I blinked oh ah the use of the word Yavana yes the word Havana which by the way derives from the term Ionian and means Greek general in a very rough sense is widely used in up to the medieval period but it means many things at different points in time in the very early period it means literally the Greeks then later on it is more loosely used to deal with the Indo Greeks but it continues to also be used for the Greeks remember well northern India may have been dealing with invasions with the Indo Greeks much of southern India was trading with the Greeks of the Mediterranean so these are generically used and so this term continues to be used and also interestingly here I'd like to say that if one of the things you learned from reading ancient history is that people identified people by their civilization and linked not by their racial link it's quite stunning so people would say that these people are Greeks when they said they're Greeks they meant that they were people not necessarily Greek origin but of culturally Greek in some fashion so for example when the eastern Mediterranean gets taken over by the Greek Orthodox Church this term begins to mean people who believe in the Greek Orthodox yvonna means those were those Greek Orthodox Church shows now when the Ethiopians become Greek or have become Orthodox Church at take the Greek Orthodox Church the term Krishna yavana or black Greek is used for the Ethiopians so this term Ethiopian means many things at different points in time and it continues to be used as long as there is this exchange of some stuff some sort with them but by the late medieval period the there is almost the the the Arabs basically almost put a blockade of information and flow between the European world and the Indic world and so consequently the term Havana becomes a term of memory rather than of current usage at the front I will come to you next if you don't mind you have said about Indonesia and our culture spread to Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Bali and other places but there is no [Music] history in the real sense written so far about all these things and culturally we were soul but we became weaker and weaker in this idea there is history written about them those countries write the history very clearly lots of inscriptions are there and as it happens to be since you're interested in it you can read about it from an Indian perspective in my book called ocean of churn which explicitly gets into this whole issue about the these empires of Southeast Asia whether of the charms the uncor or Sri Vidhya in and and the majapahit there's plenty of history written this so I don't think it's true that this this history has not been written it's not been written in India but let me say even if I have to plug my own book I have written extensively on it in my own books yeah yes it has not been taught in schools because it doesn't fit the narratives that need to be told and this is one of the points I'm trying to make this speech you know somebody give a speech in some way question I hope you don't we mean triangular base addresses that point now history is always written by the victors that all of us know where you spoke about Greece where you have been recently it's the same thing out there there the point I'm trying to make is you cannot rewrite history from the new when a new political party comes into power in democracy tomorrow you might have you know Congress party coming back and then saying whatever the BJP has written because the how do we look that even though you may not be hanging the hue of BJP or Congress or any particular party or such and your question the question is this kind of rewriting of history may not last long if it's going to have a political tint you know whenever I hear the question yeah like it's only the you talked about only the victors of victory of co-writes history well only all military battles you said only when they are won they are written like the British for example they love yeah so my question is political point is one to the second point they are trying to rewrite your point about you know some countries they do glorify losses like the charge of Light Brigade Dunkirk things rather my primary question is if we try to rewrite history in this year new party comes into power the whole thing would be washed out so my own view is why should we perpetuate since we are afraid that new views will come in why should we perpetuate the lies of the past the first point is why should we perpetuate the lies of the past because you are scared that the new biases will come in so I don't think that is a tenable argument of any kind what I will say is that let us allow for different views to be there let us at least agree on the evidence so the debate so let me be debate why should they not be debate after all we debate what happened yesterday on television channels every night so if we cannot agree on what happened yesterday why do you expect historians to agree on what happened a thousand years ago I am therefore comfortable with different views being there all I am trying today let us be honest about two things one that what is the evidence and the fact that this ever what what is the evidence let's be honest about it we can interpret it differently and I have a problem in India unfortunately there is no honesty about the evidence either to let us also be honest about the fact that history can be seen in different ways from different lenses and by the way you're spending a lot of time thick talking about political lenses by the way there are other lens - you can take geographical lenses for example why are we writing eye history only from the perspective of Delhi that's a problem I have I have written maritime history why should history only be written from a land perspective you can take history from a science scientific perspective how about writing the history of the science how about writing history as a geographical sense one of my books is called the land of salmon rivers it's a geographical history of India which talks about history from the perspective of how cities rose and fell how a rivers changed how our wildlife changed so history can be written in multiple ways this is none of those are any more true than the other I am just saying let us first give up this primacy of one political narrative just because it happens to be the one that's in our textbook I don't see why that is somehow sacrosanct I'm challenging that too I want to say that there are different ways of life let's accept it 3 we need to have a serious debate about evidence and by the way we need to invest in evidence gathering I mean it's extraordinary how few of our archaeological sites are being properly looked after or are being read up we are still running most of our engine is still running on you know the fact you know for all my criticism of colonial period the fact is those fellows at least developed things and looked at them let's have one more quick question how do you think comics and graphic novels and from the historical imagination because as children seen India you read a much it ricotta that Kindles an interesting history and that may not be fact factual at a later stage or subject to academic rigor and second I attended a session by mr. Blake Dubrow so he was talking about the Puranas now you mentioned John booth we now in some piranhas that John booth we covers the geographical expanse of the entire world so can that be considered a legitimate source thanks so of course you have got to be take a reasonable view of things by the way comics are an important part of historical imagination and you'll be surprised how much it's rocket Aza actually better research than you think I have found very often that many of our very well-known historians make mistakes that I have corrected them using references I found a normal cheater katha in the first page they used to give their references we remember and I used those references so don't sniff you know put your nose up at emerge to toccata it is an important source of historical memory for an entire generation as indeed may maybe movies be or videos be in the future so I have no problem with that there are many ways of knowing about history the he actually had another question sorry what was the other question yet is about piranhas now again you have to be careful you see the piranhas have some historical evidence they have King lists they're also a philosophical expand talks one cannot take it all literally one has to triangulate to see figure out how much of it is true and incidentally we do this all the time in other parts of the world for example if you take Herodotus who's taken by Western historians as the father of history writing right now I read his Herodotus is full of absurdities for example and he talks about India and he says India has these gigantic and that dig for gold that's completely absurd now obviously but that doesn't mean Herodotus doesn't have any historical interesting in hearsay historical evidence in it so we have to dig in there triangulate with archeology and other sources and what seems absurd and what seems reasonable and make some guess at what may be the case and then we have to test it a test that those theories or whatever hypothesis against new evidence as it turns out as we do in indeed in science so my view is that this is a perfectly interesting source of history to look at the Puranas as long as you don't take them completely literally but at the same time I have some problem with the old approach that we in from the Europeans who said all of this as Buncombe there is nothing interesting in there that is also not true there is a lot of interesting stuff there in the Puranas that we can and in fact it has distinct King lists and the later ages of those King lists are known fact one of the reasons we discovered who Ashoka was that he was the grandson of general Gupta is from a piranha King list and then we extrapolated and triangulated using other source of information so do not write off our own indigenous sources and I have a real problem with this obvious dismissing of indict sources when we are very happy to take say xuan zang who was a Chinese pilgrim as being a gospel truth whereas if we reach Wang Zhang he's full of fantastical things as well and in fact he was a as it happens to be those he was a Buddhist bigot and he saw everything from the perspective of extreme Buddhism why do we take him as being the gospel truth either okay on that note and if there's one last question from the gentleman we have to stop okay sorry so thank you everyone and thank you sanjeev for this chanc you very much okay great thanks for thank you so very much maybe they'll be there

Channel: Jaipur Literature Festival

Views: 9,803

Keywords: jaipur literature festival 2019, jaipur literature festival, festival, literature festival, jaipur lit fest 2019, authors, books, writer, literary event, novel event, JLF 2019, #ZEEJLF2019, INDIA : THE HISORICAL IMAGINATION

Id: vGeaxHl5t6E

Length: 58min 55sec (3535 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 26 2019