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7/27/2019 Secular Histories_Neeladri Bhattacharya

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Predicaments of Secular Histories

Neeladri Bhattacharya

The proessional history writing that developed in India inthe early decades ater independence was powerully shaped by the intellectual

culture o the time. New India looked orward to a uture in which democracy

would unold, the rights o ree citizens would be dened, and the commitments

made during the national movement would be realized. Troubled by memories

o the communal carnage and trauma o the Partition years when thousands

o Hindus and Muslims kil led each other the intellectuals o this new Indiastruggled to create a secular and democratic public culture. Inspired by the ideals

o democratic citizenship, they hoped or a society where individuals would be

emancipated rom their religious and aective ties and reborn as secular citizens

o a democratic state. Historians turned to the past to counter communal repre-

sentations o history, question communal stereotypes, and write a secular national

history. The critique o communal prejudice was seen as necessary or developing

a history that was scientic and objective. To be authentic, it was believed, this

new history had to be both scientic and secular.In the decades that ollowed, sectarian conficts continued. New trends in histori-

cal writing emerged; historians became aware o the problems o both objectivism

and the meaning o narrative truth; but the battle against communal histories con-

tinued to determine the way new histories were ramed. In this essay I will look at

the way this battle has shaped the agendas o secular histories its terms o reer-

ence, its silences and erasures, its tropes o analyses, its ears and anxieties. I will

refect on the predicaments o doing secular histories: the need to simultaneouslycritique communal rames and transcend the limits that such a critique imposes.

Through an inner critique o secular histories or I locate mysel within the tradi-

tion the essay will discuss the larger problem o writing history.1

Public Culture 20:1 doi 10.1215/08992363-2007-016

Copyright 2008 by Duke University Press

1. There have been several powerul critiques o the concept o secularism. See Ashis Nandy,

The Politics o Secularism and the Recovery o Religious Tolerance, in Mirrors of Violence, ed.


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Beyond Boundaries

Communal histories o India are premised on one undamental assumption: that

India is a society ractured into two overarching religious communities Hindus

and Muslims. These communities are not only separate and distinct but also irrec-

oncilably opposed. Their cultures, values, social practices, and belies have little

in common. Their histories are histories o discord: o mutual hostility, hatred,

confict, battles or domination. The boundaries o their identities are well etched,

rmly dened, and categorically drawn, the lines deepened by a long history o

mutual antagonism.2For many years secular histories have battled against these ideas and the his-

tories through which they have been naturalized.3 Anxious about the growth o

communalism and haunted by the ear o communal violence, secular historians

have returned to the past to build the premises o a humane, secular, and demo-

cratic present. They have questioned communal assumptions, deconstructed com-

munal stereotypes, mined the archives or alternate evidence, reread the texts, and

presented secular counternarratives.

But secular histories have been strongly dened by the history o their origin.

The desire to argue against the constitutive assumptions o communal history has

shaped the questions that have been posed, the narrative choices that have been

made, and the way arguments have been elaborated. Secular historians have ques-

tioned communal stereotypes by turning them upside down and have countered

communal assumptions by inverting them. Where communal historians can only

see the hard lines o the boundaries that separate communities, secular historians

have emphasized the porosity and open-endedness o these boundaries. Wherecommunal historians look at the communities as homogenous and unitary, secular

historians point to the heterogeneity and ragmentation within them. Where com-

Veena Das (New Delhi: Oxord University Press, 1990), 69 93; T. N. Madan, Secularism in Its

Place,Journal of Asian Studies 46 (1987): 747 59; and Partha Chatter jee, Secularism and Toler-

ance, in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi: Oxord University Press,

1998), 345 79. For a nuanced and sophisticated deense o the concept see Rajeev Bhargava, What

Is Secularism For? in Secularism and Its Critics, 468 542.

2. An early assessment o these histories can be ound in Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, and

Harbans Mukhia, Communalism and the Writing of Indian History (New Delhi: Peoples Publish-

ing House, 1969). For a discussion o communal stereotypes and rames o reerence see Bipan

Chandra, Communalism in Modern India (Delhi: Vani Educational Books, 1984); Gyanendra Pan-

dey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxord University Press, 1990);

and Mushirul Hasan,Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 1885 1930 (Delhi: Manohar,

1991).

3. Chandra, Communalism.


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munal historians look at the past as a time o communal discord, secular histori-

ans have sought to underline the elements o concord, harmony, and togetherness.Where communal historians hear only the voices o orthodoxy and sectarianism,

secularists have searched or histories o syncretism and tolerance.

Secular histories continue to be ramed within the terms o these oppositions.

In recent years the arguments have been nuanced, issues have been problema-

tized, new narrative strategies have been adopted, and the horizons o history have

expanded. Yet in the nest accounts we can still discover some o the recurring

tropes o secular histories that I am reerring to. Let me elaborate by discussing a

recent book, Muzaar Alams The Languages of Political Islam, c. 1200 1800.

I choose to ocus on this book because it is a brilliant account o the history o

Islam in India, destined to become a classic; yet even the nest texts on such sub-

jects, including Alams, are structured by the recurring tropes I am reerring to.

Alam sets out to counter the abiding image o Islam as a closed, dogmatic,

intolerant aith whose doctrines are xed and unchanging, their authority deriving

rom canonical sanctied texts that are not subject to interpretation and change. In

many ways produced and circulated by the West, this image haunts the West andis requently invoked to legitimate attacks on Islamic states. It oten even shapes

the way Muslims perceive their own religion and dene their own identity. And

in India it is a stereotype that is central to the Hindu communal representations

o the Muslim other and provides the counterpoint against which Hindus are pro-

jected as tolerant, open-minded, fexible, orbearing, and orgiving.

Alam eectively deconstructs the stereotype and questions each o its assump-

tions. Through a rich exploration o the languages o political Islam in India,

Alam shows how Islam evolved as it moved rom its Perso-Islamic context to

newer lands and conronted new cultures, new ideas, new societies, and new poli-

ties. This contact produced a dialogue that transormed both Islam and the local

cultures. Islam opened itsel to non-Islamic infuences, incorporating local prac-

tices, redening its original ideals. While at the elite level the connection with the

Perso-Turkish tradition remained powerul, at the popular level Islam was Indian-

ized. The Sus mystic saints refected on the mundane world in a language

steeped in syncretic ideas: they absorbed Hindu infuences, talked o removingmisery among those in distress, and underlined the need to create a common basis

or appreciating the ultimate reality. Alam shows, in a highly textured account,

how the vocabulary o Islamic politics itsel changed. Words like governance,

obedience, resistance, and victory came to acquire new meanings. Sharia the

Islamic legal code was reinterpreted. It was not treated as a xed text, rozen in


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time, refective o the power o Islamic orthodoxy, a code that all Muslims were

doomed to ollow. The sharia was continuously reworked in ways that could makeit adequate to the demands o governance in an alien culture. Consequently, it

came to acquire more than one meaning. So over the centuries, writes Alam, the

language o the Islamic East moved towards a syncretic mix: a legacy o coop-

eration and assimilation developed rom the days o the Sultanate to the end o

Mughal rule; and confict situations tended to be resolved along a pattern inormed

by this strong political tradition o accommodation within medieval Islam.4

Implicit in this account is a linear history o increasing assimilation and accom-

modation leading to an ultimate breakdown o rigidities, an erosion o dogmas,

a blurring o the boundaries o aith, a creative openness. Cultures and religions

open out to each other, absorb infuences, mutate. The pure is progressively

alloyed, the premises o understanding develop, orthodoxy is contained.

In Alams complex narrative, this teleology does not unold unquestioned

within a simple, untroubled time. He shows both the contradictions within these

ideas and the limits o Su assimilation. Many Su texts the miracle stories

and hagiographies begin with a plea or accommodation but end by arguingthe need to mark dierence. They talk o commonness and the importance o

understanding other religions but end by asserting the superiority o Islam. One

Su saint, Shaikh Abd al-Quddus Gangohi, wrote to Babar, the rst Mughal

emperor, pleading that only pious Muslims be appointed as government ocials

and that Hindus be excluded rom high oces and denied nancial assistance in

any orm: they had to realize that they were inerior to Muslims.5 Later we hear

the worried voice o Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, who lamented Islams ailure to

conront Hinduism.

How is this evidence to be narrativized, written into a story that is about the

process o assimilation o non-Islam into Islam? How does one write about such

conficting voices without disrupting the internal coherence o the metastory?

Alam contains this disruptive threat only by rearming at the end his belie in

a secular teleology. The counterreaction o the orthodoxy, the combative asser-

tion o Islamic superiority, could not derail the assimilative processes: A non-

sectarian and open ended cultural politics, with the aim o balancing the confict-ing claims o dierent communities, continued to assert its presence.6 Syncretic

4. Muzaar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, c. 1200 1800 (New Delhi: Permanent

Black, 2005), 141.

5. Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, 161.

6. Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, 168.


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traditions matured; a hybrid local language Hindavi became the language o

the court; collective estivities and rituals came to be celebrated regularly. Ulti-mately the orces that sought to contain the process o assimilation were them-

selves contained.

What we have here is a picture in which the history o accommodation marches

ahead, overcoming all constraints. It is a picture produced partly by the way the

narrative is constructed. The story begins with a discussion o assimilative pro-

cesses, then talks o assimilations limits, and ends by returning to the assimila-

tion story. The potential threat o the orthodoxy is thus narratively contained. The

contestatory voices the anxieties o the orthodoxy, the ears o Gangohi and

Sirhindi are underlined and then assimilated within the larger story o accom-

modation. Alams narrative is powerul and complex, but ramed within a secular

teleology.

Within Alams story o the transormation o political Islam in India there

may be an alternative suppressed narrative o continuous dialogue and confict,

o cultural assimilation and rearmation o dierence, o the dissolution o older

boundaries and the creation o new ones. The story o accommodation need notbe a linear story o increasing open-endedness. Hybridization, the loss o original

essence, does not imply the dissolution o boundaries o dierence. While cri-

tiquing an anti-Islamic sectarianism that associates Islam only with the voice o

orthodoxy, secular histories need not underrate the power o this voice.

Of Heroes and Villains

Each genre o historical narrative constructs its own heroes and villains. Theheroes embody the ideals armed in the narrative; they become the bearers o

all that is celebrated. The villains symbolize evil; they stand or values and norms

that are being critiqued. In simpler teleologies, the heroes reveal the essence o

history; their actions point to the uture, to the telos toward which history moves,

and they enable this orward march, this unolding. In this sense heroes are oten

seen as born beore their time, presaging the time to come. Critiques o particu-

lar rameworks o histories thereore inevitably seek to resymbolize persons and

identiy new individuals who could become the bearers o an alternate history, an

alternate vision. The heroes o one history oten become the villains o another.

So a battle over persons becomes important in the wars over history. In this

war, the personication o ideals goes hand in hand with the idealization o per-

sons. Heroes are uncrowned and villains are rehabilitated. To understand the

politics o secular history, we need to look at these processes through which indi-


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viduals are personied and repersonied. I seek to do this by drawing on some o

the debates on medieval Indian history.In Hindu communal representations, as we have seen, the medieval ages were

a dark time or India. During this period Muslims invaded the country and estab-

lished a tyrannical rule, destroying Hindu temples, devastating the land, oppressing

the people, and orcibly imposing their religion. For Hindus it was a tragic time:

their religion was under threat; their culture was being undermined, their women

were being dishonored, and their men were being humiliated. It was a time o pil-

lage and rape, intolerance and violence. The gure o the Muslim came to person-

iy the evils o the time. As agents o this history and bearers o this past, Muslims

could never escape the qualities inscribed on their body: they were everywhere

and orever to be associated with brutality and religious anaticism.

The coherence o this stereotype was threatened by gures like Akbar, the

Mughal emperor who ruled between 1556 to 1605. Even Hindu communal histori-

ans had to concede that Akbar was no religious bigot. But his reign was seen as only

a temporary interlude within an otherwise cruel and tragic era. For Hindu commu-

nal historians, it is not Akbar but Aurangzeb the last o the Great Mughals whoembodied the essence o Muslim rule in India. Aurangzeb was seen as a bigot and

a anatic: he imposed a rule o sharia, declared a religious war (jihad) against in-

dels, reimposedjizyah (a tax on nonbelievers), and adopted a puritanical liestyle

dictated by the sharia.7 So tyrannical was his rule that the Hindu population rose in

rebellion, creating a crisis that ultimately led to the collapse o the empire.

How were secular historians to counter this image o Mughal rulers? Clearly

it was linked to the politics o communalism in the present. It sought to villainize

Muslims, categorize them as a homogenous community, mark them with collec-

tive guilt, and transorm them into objects o Hindu anger and hatred.

Secular historians ound in Akbar a gure they could celebrate. As a ruler,

Akbar sought to marginalize the orthodox elements, undercut the power o the

theologians, appoint Hindus to high oces, and integrate dierent sections o

society. The ideal osulh-i-kul that he believed in saw dierent religions as paths

to the same god and emphasized the need or the state to be impartial: the state

was not to discriminate between ollowers o dierent religions, or all o themhad some merits as well as aults. To secular historians it seemed that Akbar

symbolized all the values that were dear to them the values o secularism and

liberalism. In an ethnocentric move, categories o the present were mapped onto

7. S. R. Sharma, The Religious Policy of Mughal Emperors (Delhi: Oxord University Press,

1940).


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the past; ideals o the modern age were discovered in earlier times. Even as sensi-

tive a historian as Satish Chandra characterizes the state that Akbar established aspolyreligious, tolerant, open-ended, liberal, and secular, as i there is no problem

in describing individuals or states in the sixteenth century as secular and liberal.

It was easier to celebrate Akbar as a hero, but more dicult to repersoniy

Aurangzeb. How was it possible to explain the seemingly overwhelming evidence

o his bigotry and oppression? Did he not impose the tax on the Hindus, destroy

Hindu temples, and execute Hindu rulers? Did he not succumb to the pressures

o the theologians and allow the sharia to determine his actions? For many years,

among secular historians, there was an embarrassed silence regarding Aurangzeb,

or a grudging admission that his long reign o orty-nine years (1658 1707) was

in act a time o bigotry and oppression. But these historians attempted to see this

period as a temporary interlude, a deviation, and not characteristic o Mughal

rule. The strategic move was to minimize the larger signicance o his rule, iso-

late him within the Mughal lineage as the bad guy, and turn the historical gaze

on Akbar, underlining his greatness and representing him as the key gure o the

time. The expansion and consolidation o the empire was linked to the politics oAkbar, and the disintegration was seen as the natural consequence o Aurangzebs

bigotry. The ecacy o secularism, its universal relevance, was thus rearmed

through the narrative o the past.

But then rom the late 1960s a new picture o Aurangzeb emerged in secular

histories.8 The reinterpretation that ollowed eatured two strategic moves. First,

the unitary and fattened image o Aurangzeb as a hardened bigot was questioned.

His lie and actions, it was suggested, could not be captured through this simple

stereotype. Aurangzeb acted in dierent ways and implemented dierent policies

at dierent points in lie. The politics o his early reign needed to be dierentiated

rom that o the later period, and the conficting policies within each phase had

to be understood. Second, a distinction was made between the personal and the

public, the religious and the political. Actions and policies that were seemingly

dictated by religious considerations, it was suggested, were in reality determined

by political expediency. One had to unravel the real behind the apparent, distin-

guish the rhetorical rom the causal.In a series o important essays published since 1969, Satish Chandra has

oered a rereading o Aurangzeb.9 Chandra accepted that on the personal level

8. One o the earliest reassessments was in Athar Ali,Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (Bom-

bay: Asia Publishing House, 1966).

9. See the ollowing articles by Satish Chandra: Jizyah and the State in India during the Sev-

enteenth Century and Religious Policy o Aurangzeb during the Later Part o His Reign Some


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Aurangzeb was undoubtedly orthodox that he wanted to conorm to the dic-

tates o the sharia and respect the theologians. But like the emperors beore him,he was a realist and did not wish to destroy the social support o his rule. In 1679,

he did reimposejizyah on the indels, but this action was not dictated by the

pressures o the ulemas or the dictates o the sharia or even his personal bigotry.

It was determined by political expediency: a desire to uniy a segmented ruling

class, to control the growing conficts and tensions that were pulling them apart,

in order to conront the rebellions against Mughal rule. I Hindus were killed and

Hindu temples destroyed, it was again not because o any anatical hostility o

Aurangzeb toward the indels; it was or political reasons. Only when conronted

with resistance rom Hindu rulers did Aurangzeb demolish the temples in their

land, humiliate them, imposejizyah, and execute Hindu rulers in a symbolic show

o power.Even in his most intolerant phase, his most Islamist phase, Auragnzebwas prompted primarily by political concerns and pragmatic calculations.

What this narrative does, rst o all, is temporally delimit the phase o intoler-

ance. The narrative o Aurangzebs reign begins with a period o laxity, enters

a phase o rigidity, and ends with a return to laxity when all the institutionsand practices o religious autocracy were dismantled. Aurangzebs emphasis on

Holy Law and Islam lasted no longer than a decade within a long rule o ty

years. Framed within such a beginning and ending, the story o Aurangzebs lie

acquires a new meaning. Second, within this narrative, causality is sited in such a

way that religion is inevitably displaced and never appears constitutive o action.

My argument becomes clear i we look at the way conficting evidence is

narrativized. When Aurangzeb captured the Maratha leader Sambhaji, a non-

Muslim, in 1689, there was disagreement among the nobles about the way he

should be treated. Some said his lie should be spared and he should be kept

in connement, while others recommended harsh action. Aurangzeb decided to

execute him. Why? Chandra quotes Kha Khan to argue that the decision to

execute Sambhaji was political, an attempt to punish rebels: The Emperor was

in avour o seeking the opportunity o getting rid o these prime movers o strie,

and hoped that with a little exertion their ortress would be reduced.10 Having

Considerations,Indian Historical Review 13 (July 1986 January 1987): 88 101; The Deccan Pol-

icy o the Mughals (II) under Aurangzeb, Indian Historical Review 5 (July 1978 January 1979):

135 51; and Society, Culture and the State in Medieval India: An Essay in Interpretation, Nihar-

ranjan Ray Memorial Lecture, Delhi, 1991. Most o these essays are now collected in Chandra,

Essays on Medieval Indian History (New Delhi: Oxord University Press, 2003).

10. Statement o Kha Khan quoted in Chandra,Essays on Medieval Indian History, 333.


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dissociated the action rom any religious motivation, Chandra writes: However,

Aurangzeb tried to give a religious gloss to a political decision by reerring thematter to masters o Holy law and Faith and the dignitaries o the Church and

state who, in turn, decreed Sambhajis execution in consideration o the harsh-

ness and insult that he had practised by slaying and imprisoning Muslims and

plundering the cities o Islam. 11

What is it that allows us to consider Kha Khans statement the real clue to the

intentions o Aurangzeb? How do we say that Aurangzebs attempt to consult the

theologians was in some way inauthentic, that it was only to give a religious gloss

to a political decision? My aim here is not to understand Aurangzebs intentions.

I only wish to see how acts are emplotted within structures o narrative, how

conficting evidence is negotiated, how causal connections are made through nar-

rative strategies, and how the narrative truth emerges in the process. What we see

at play here, yet again, is a process o secularization o the past, a mode o nar-

rativization in which the religious is consistently separated rom the political and

the political is persistently seen as untainted by religion.

Chandras essays on Aurangzeb are highly nuanced; they grapple with a rangeo conficting evidence and seek to arrive at a balanced reading o a controversial

historical gure. But they are torn by an inner tension that oten characterizes sec-

ular histories. The conficting voices rom the past that Chandra seeks to reconcile

reuse to merge into any simple coherence. Conronted with communal stereo-

types, and aware o the urgency o countering them, secular historians have too

oten ramed their arguments within problematic binaries. To critique the com-

munalist valorization o the religious, secular historians have tried to see in every

action only the play o nonreligious interests either political or economic.

Does secular history have to ocus only on the political and underestimatetheshaping power o religion? Is it not possible to look at the mutual articulation o

the religious and political? Can the narratives o religion and power in premodern

times be so easily separated?

The Rhetoric of Facts

The battle over histories is oten ought through a rhetoric o acts. Communal

historians in India have sought to counter the acts o secular histories, while

secular historians have questioned what communal historians have produced

as acts. Can secular histories adopt such a strategy o critique? Can we really

11. Chandra,Essays on Medieval Indian History, 333.


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counter a ramework o an argument by demonstrating that some o the acts

within the argument are wrong? Is this not to surrender to nineteenth-centurypositivism?

Many critics have pointed to the empiricist premises o such a mode o argu-

mentation. These critics are right, but not entirely. A debate over acts remains

important even when we take the narrativist thesis seriously. What is implied

when we say our understanding o the past depends on how we narrativize the

past, on what stories about the past we choose to tell or not tell? It clearly means

that the meaning o our narrative would depend on how we build our story, how

we embed the events within a plausible plot structure. I this is so, then the acts

and events we choose to ocus on and the signicance we imbue them with become

important. The acts then are not mere acts; they have signiying unctions.

I the narratives within which they are plotted lend events their particular his-

torical signicance, then the mode o emplotting the events in turn structures the

meaning o the narratives. Thus the events exist as constitutive ingredients o a

narrative.

To question a narrative, thereore, we can demonstrate how it is constructedthrough specic kinds o erasures and attribution o signicance; how certain

events are talked o and not others, and why certain acts are oregrounded

rather than others. A seeming questioning o acts may call into question an entire

narrative, its claim to meaning and understanding.

Let me elaborate through an example. Communal narratives o ancient India

are constructed around two parallel, yet contradictory, theses. The rst is the

claim that Hindus have a pure Aryan descent. In these narratives, the Vedas

the sacred texts o the Aryans are imbued with authenticity, and the time o the

Vedas is seen as a time o creativity, growth, and development. The origin o all

valid knowledge, all true values, norms, laws, religious ideals, and social prac-

tices, is traced back to Vedic times. Second, these communal histories are also

narratives o indigenousness. They claim not only that the Aryans were the origi-

nal ancestors o Hindus but that Hindus are the original inhabitants o India. Only

through such a claim could Muslims be represented as outsiders, oreigners who

came and imposed their oppressive rule in India. But such an argument could bemade only through a series o other assertions. I Hindu descent was to be traced

back to the Aryans, and i they were to be presented as the original inhabitants,

then it was not possible to accept that the Aryans came rom outside or that there

were fourishing local cultures within India beore the coming o the Aryans.

Within this narrative, the Harappan civilization could not be celebrated and yet


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seen as pre-Aryan. It had to be presented as contemporary with the Vedic times, or

as part o the Aryan culture. Secular histories have countered each o these claimsand suggested that the Aryans were pastoralists who migrated into India rom

outside possibly Central Asia and that there were highly developed settled

cultures in India beore the coming o the nomadic Aryans and that the sources o

dynamism in ancient India could not all be traced back to the Vedic age.12

It is undoubtedly true that in critiquing communal representations, secular his-

torians have too oten used a rhetoric o acts. They have sought to show that the

claims o communal historians are unsupported by research that their acts are

wrong and their arguments untenable. Such a mode o argumentation inevitably

rests on the belie that historical truths are established by examining the verac-

ity o acts. This way o thinking still shapes the language o many who other-

wise recognize that acts and events acquire their meaning only through acts o

representation.

But can we get away rom these debates over acts? I the communal narra-

tive o the Aryan past was produced through specic silences and erasures, and i

the communal representation o the Aryan age could be constructed only througha narration o certain types o events, then we need to look at the politics o this

narration, the politics o these choices. We need to scrutinize the types o events

selected or narration and the strategies through which these events are inscribed

with meaning: how the meanings o events are regured and how they are brought

together, emplotted within a narrative structure. This orces us to examine not just

the structure o the narrative but also its constitutive ingredient elements. What I

am trying to suggest is not only that the question o acts (in the orm o, e.g.,

documents, evidence, archives) becomes important in the politics o histories but

also that the meanings o these categories need to be reconceptualized.13

Reconstituting Memories

Secular histories in India have sought to counter the memories that communal

perspectives seek to normalize. I sectarian discourses authenticate their claims

by reerring to history, by arguing that history stands witness to the truth o what

they say, secular histories return to the past to counter these claims, to build an

12. Romila Thapar,Early India: From Origins to AD 1300 (Berkeley: University o Caliornia

Press, 2002); R. S. Sharma, Looking for the Aryans (Madras: Orient Longman, 1995); Thomas

Trautman, The Aryan Debate (New Delhi: Oxord University Press, 2005).

13. Paul Ricoeur helps us rethink these categories. See Time and Narrative, vols. 1 3 (Chicago:

University o Chicago Press, 1990).


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alternate social memory. But how? In this section I will look at the dierent strat-

egies deployed by secular historians over the years to constitute memories thatwould make intercommunity dialogues and understanding possible.

The image o the Muslim iconoclast and plunderer is central to the Hindu com-

munal imaginary. The individual who epitomizes this image most dramatically is

Mahmud o Ghazni. Every schoolchild in India is told how Mahmud carried out

seventeen plundering raids in the eleventh century, culminating in the inamous

sack o the Somnath temple in 1026 CE. It is said that all the wealth o the temple

was plundered and its idol mutilated. So traumatic was the experience that the

event was indelibly etched in the Hindu mind, in the collective memory o the

nation. Memories o the sack o Somnath, we are told, nurtured a proound eel-

ing o anger, shame, and hurt and legitimated retributive violence in the centuries

to come.

The great historian Mohammad Habib was among the rst to conront this

social memory o Mahmuds invasions.14 In the 1930s, Habib adopted a threeold

strategy or demystiying the image o a rampaging Muslim iconoclast destroying

Hindu temples. First, he proceeded to explain what really happened. Mahmudwas driven by greed and lust or wealth, said Habib, not religious anaticism

and bigotry. The rhetoric o religion was only to legitimate his actions within an

orthodox Sunni Muslim social milieu. Second, Habib suggested that such memo-

ries o Muslim rule were produced by a colonial education system in which the

textbooks inevitably represented Muslims as violent, intolerant, and anatical in

order to project the British as open-minded and sensitive to other cultures. Third,

in opposition to the narratives o Muslim violence, Habib traced a long history o

syncretism, tolerance, and intercommunity exchanges. Muslim Sus were located

within an even longer tradition o Hindu cosmopolitanism.

Inspired by secularism and Marxism, Habib proceeded by displacing religion

as a determinant o social action and reerred to economic and material motives

as the real explanation o what happened.15 Having demonstrated the logic o the

real events, he then showed how colonial propaganda had produced a alse image

o the past and nurtured intercommunity hatred. Hindus and Muslims needed to

return to a dierent past and tap the resource o a dierent memory, to eliminate

14. See K. A. Nizami, ed., Politics and Society during the Early Medieval Period: Collected

Works of Professor Mohammad Habib, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Peoples Publishing House, 1974).

15. See also the discussion o Habib in Shahid Amin, On Telling the Muslim Conquest o North

India, inHistory and the Present, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh (Delhi: Permanent Black,

2002), 24 43.


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the orces o discord in the present and uniy against British rule. Once again we

see the argument ramed within the amiliar tropes o secular histories.In recent years historians have returned to the same events to tell a dierent

story. In a ascinating book titled Somnatha: Many Voices of a History, Romila

Thapar seeks to move beyond the attempt to explain what really happened in

Somnatha.16 She juxtaposes dierent texts rom the past, dierent records, to

question the authenticity o the received version, and she looks at the way the

events were recorded in dierent genres o text. The epic o conquest, recorded

in the Turko-Persian sources, gloried Mahmud as a deender o aith. But the

local traditions within the region do not dwell solely on the theme o violence and

plunder, and they do not all say the same thing about what happened. In Thapars

sensitive analysis the ocus shits rom an explanation o the event to an under-

standing o how the event was perceived and represented and how its memory was

constructed over time. Her object is not to get behind the intentions o Mahmud

but to understand how his raids entered historical imagination. What are oten

considered the acts o the raids, argues Thapar, are in act the products o a

long process o historical ashioning and encoding o memories. From among thevarious versions, colonial ocials chose to x one version as authentic. Keen on

underlining the violence and anaticism o the Muslims, they ound in the account

o Muhammad Ibrahim Firishta a description o the event that conrmed their

own prior picture o Muslim invaders. Canonized by the writings o Alexander

Dow, this colonial story o Somnatha was generalized and rearmed in subse-

quent nationalist and communal writings. It came to constitute the accepted truth

and shaped the memory o the event in collective imagination.

Thapars account thus proceeds by peeling o layers o historical memories

and locating them in the context o their production. Then, by unraveling the

politics that lay behind the construction o the standard story, she seeks to subvert

its claim to truth. In showing the heterogeneity o memories, she questions the

processes o homogenization and universalization that went into the making o

the canonical version.17

16. Thapar, Somnatha: Many Voices of History (New Delhi: Viking, 2004).

17. For an exploration o the constitution o dierent memories on the Muslim conquest see theascinating essay by Amin, On Telling the Muslim Conquest. The relationship between historical

memory and community identity has been explored in a number o recent works. See Shail Mayaram,

Against History, Against State: Counter Perspectives from the Margins (New Delhi: Permanent

Black, 2004); Sumit Guha, Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices o Historical Narration in

Western India, 1400 1900,American Historical Review 109 (2004): 1084 1109; Yasmin Saikia,

Fragmented Memories: Struggling to Be Tai-Ahom in India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,

2004); and Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India,

1700 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).


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Thapars account shows how secular histories now operate with new narra-

tive strategies. From an earlier concern with acticity whether or not the spe-cic event happened, whether its memory was true or alse historians have

now turned to exploring the politics o memory, attempting to understand what is

remembered and what is orgotten, showing how collective memories o trauma

and humiliation are oten shaped by the histories that we read.

But does Thapar entirely break away rom the raming tropes o earlier secular

histories? Do we not see once again an eort to dissociate Mahmuds actions rom

the play o religion? Is not the rhetoric o religion in the epic o conquest being

seen primarily as rhetoric meant to soothe the Sunni orthodoxy?

The Realm of the Popular

Secular histories have always been intimately connected to the politics o the pub-

lic sphere. The public appeared as incitement to discourse and was the invisible

addressee. Historians wrote or the public with a desire to shape public imagi-

nation. As we have seen, the project o secular history was to critique sectar-

ian belies, demythologize historical consciousness, and constitute a new secular

common sense.

This transormative vision could be sustained in the early decades ater inde-

pendence. Over those years the discipline o history was gradually being proes-

sionalized, and secular historians acquired symbolic authority and institutional

power. University syllabi were changed, new textbooks were introduced, and

innumerable research projects were initiated. Yet by the 1980s it was clear that

there were limits to the transormative vision.As political groups o the Hindu Right mobilized social support and the lan-

guage o communal hatred circulated within the public sphere, optimistic visions

o the construction o a secular public eroded. It became increasingly clear that

peoples conceptions o the past were very oten shaped not by what historians

wrote but by the popular tracts that circulated in the bazaar.

For a long while historians ignored these tracts, since their orm o representa-

tion did not conorm to any norm o the proessional discipline o history. The

tracts operated with rhetorical strategies common in mythic modes o narration

but were unacceptable to proessional historians. Let me illustrate by means o one

example. Kya Kahati Hai Saryu Dhara, a tract written by Pratap Narain Mishra

and sold commonly on the streets o Ayodhya in the 1980s, recounts the amiliar

sectarian Hindu narratives o Muslim tyranny and Hindu suering. But it tells the

story through the voice o the river that fows through Ayodhya. Within the text,


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the voice o the author is repressed: he does not tell the story; he hears it being

told. The river becomes the living link with the past, a witness to history. Thetext authenticates itsel through this rhetoric o presence: the story about the past

is to be believed because it was witnessed; the events narrated are true because

they were seen to have happened. Thus belie itsel becomes a basis o authority.

When the knowledge o the past comes down as tradition to be believed, it is not

subject to questioning, not constituted through the power o reason. Tradition is

knowledge that is hallowed, that is true because it was believed or generations

to be true.

Cheaply produced and sold on the streets, such tracts were widely read. It was

through tracts like these that sectarian groups sought to reach out to people, cap-

ture their imagination, and shape their idea o the past. The recurring elements o

communal narratives are woven into local stories that people can identiy with.

The spaces peopled by the actors in the story are amiliar to the inhabitants o

the locality. The local landscape thus becomes a stage or the enactment o epic

histories, transormed into an enchanted space where mythic heroes live their

extraordinary as well as ordinary lives.How are proessional historians to engage with the social imagination that

these tracts produce? One response has been cast in the objective language o

truth. The eort here is to unmask and demystiy the misrepresentation o truth

within such narratives o the past by demonstrating their premises. The convic-

tion is that acts will reveal, that truth will make things clear and allow reason to

prevail. There has also been a second way o relating to these popular narratives

o the past. Historians have argued that i people believe in a myth, in a story, in

a specic representation o the past, we need to try and comprehend the premises

o that understanding, the nature o the myth, the structure o representations.18

We have to see how specic conceptions come to be accepted as true and get

inscribed in public imagination. We must look at the production o these stories

and the politics o that production. I we wish to understand the public lie o his-

tory, we cannot ignore the variety o ways in which history comes to acquire a lie

within dierent realms o public imagination. We have to take more seriously this

realm o the popular.19

But the problem runs deeper. On closer scrutiny, the distinction between the

18. See Neeladri Bhattacharya, Myth, History and the Politics o Ramjanmabhoomi, in Anat-

omy of a Confrontation, ed. S. Gopal (New Delhi: Penguin, 1991), 122 40.

19. Partha Chatterjee has emphasized this need in some o his recent writings. See Introduction:

History and the Present, in Chatterjee and Ghosh, History and the Present, 1 23.


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popular and the academic tends to break down. It is not as i mythic stories

and popular tracts have an appeal only within the popular domain, nor is thepopular untouched by ideals o modernity, insulated rom the world o Enlight-

enment Reason. Conversely, the public that reads academic histories may also

believe in the image o the past that appears in popular tracts. People operate

through dierent codes; they simultaneously believe in seemingly contradictory

things, images, and notions; they struggle to negotiate this contradiction in dier-

ent and innovative ways. People may respect the authority o proessional history

and yet believe in the idea o a hallowed tradition, seeing no confict between

these convictions.20 It is through such negotiations that people dene the specic

orm in which they inhabit the modern, constituting in the process the very nature

o that modernity.21

How does one make possible a conversation between worlds that coexist within

public imagination but are incommensurable, conficting, and yet seemingly com-

patible?22 I secular historians have to see themselves as public intellectuals, then

they will have to conront this realm o the popular, not only to understand it,

but also to engage more actively with it. They have to develop a language or thisengagement.

Conclusion

We secular historians are haunted by a deep anxiety, a paralyzing ear o rea-

rming somehow the ounding assumptions o communal perceptions. We see

violence on the street, the endless cycles o communal riots, the spectacles o

blood and gore. We return to the past in search o humanity, tolerance, openness;we discover histories o syncretism, assimilation, and accommodation; we reas-

sure ourselves with histories o intercultural dialogue and understating. We hesi-

tate to dwell on the histories o intolerance or sectarian conficts. We are reluctant

to recognize the role religion plays in the politics o everyday lie.

How can we transcend the limits that the politics o the present seems to

impose on us? Do we need to delink our lives as citizens rom our work as his-

20. Belie in conficting premises o intellectual authority is not, o course, a peculiarity o the

history o modernity. See Paul Veyne,Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Con-

stitutive Imagination (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 1988).

21. On the more general issue o such negotiations with modernity, see the essays in Timothy

Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press, 2000).

22. I have explored the issue elsewhere. See Notes towards a Conception o the Colonial Public,

in Civil Society,Public Sphere and Citizenship: Dialogues and Perceptions, ed. Rajeeva Bhargava

and Helmut Reield (New Delhi: Sage India, 2005).


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torians? Should we stop returning to the past in order to rethink the present? We

have been reminded that historians do not have to provide correct solutions topresent problems. This is true, but only partly. We do not have to provide solu-

tions, but political practices o the present are not so easily delinked rom ques-

tions o memory and history. The way we imagine the past shapes our identities,

our conceptions o sel. Reconstitution o sel o nations, communities, classes,

genders is premised on a reguration o the past, a questioning o earlier nar-

ratives. Every social groups demand or recognition is inevitably linked to a plea

or a reconstitution o historical imagination, a plea that the erasures and silences

o earlier histories be recognized, conronted, and overcome.

What, then, do we do? I do not think we can ever escape the pressures that

recurring analytical tropes exercise on our imagination. We need to continuously

refect on the narratives o the past we produce, understand their raming struc-

tures, and look at the way these rames tend to dene the orm o knowledge we

arm. Only through a critical perspective on our practice can we continue to

devise new ways o writing. This essay is a plea or a refexivity that will allow

us to scrutinize the premises o our secular narratives. Over the decades, withinsecular histories, newer ways o seeing and narrating have emerged, allowing

us to look at the problems within the earlier rames; but this critique needs to

be pushed urther, even i it will not ultimately ensure our transcendence o the

problems o representation.

secular histories_neeladri bhattacharya

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