A Lover's Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading 9780857454850

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K A Lover’s Quarrel with the Past L

MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY Studies in Historical Cultures General Editors: Jörn Rüsen and Alon Confino Volume 1

Volume 10

Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate

Time and History: The Variety of Cultures Edited by Jörn Rüsen

Edited by Jörn Rüsen Volume 11 Volume 2

Identities: Time, Difference, and Boundaries Edited by Heidrun Friese

Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts Edited by Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas and Andrew Mycock

Volume 3

Volume 12

Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness

Historical Memory in Africa: Dealing with the Past, Reaching for the Future in an Intercultural Context

Edited by Jürgen Straub Volume 4

Edited by Mamadou Diawara, Bernard Lategan, and Jörn Rüsen

Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds Edited by Jörn Rüsen, Michael Fehr, and Thomas W. Rieger Volume 5

History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation Jörn Rüsen Volume 6

The Dynamics of German Industry: Germany’s Path toward the New Economy and theAmerican Challenge Werner Abelshauser Volume 7

Volume 13

New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century Edited by Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert Volume 14

Dark Traces of the Past: Psychoanalysis and Historical Thinking Edited by Jürgen Straub and Jörn Rüsen Volume 15

A Lover’s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading Ranjan Ghosh

Meaning and Representation in History Edited by Jörn Rüsen

Volume 16

The Holocaust and Historical Methodology Volume 8

Remapping Knowledge: Intercultural Studies for a Global Age Mihai I. Spariosu Volume 9

Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation Edited by Helga Nowotny

Edited by Dan Stone

A LOVER’S QUARREL

WITH THE Romance, Representation, Reading

Ranjan Ghosh

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

PAST

First published in 2012 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2012 Ranjan Ghosh

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Ghosh, Ranjan. A lover’s quarrel with the past : romance, representation, reading / Ranjan Ghosh. p. cm. — (Making sense of history ; v. 15) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-484-3 (hbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-85745-485-0 (ebook) 1. History—Philosophy. 2. Historiography—Political aspects. 3. Historiography—Social aspects. 4. Historiography—Moral and ethical aspects. 5. Romanticism. 6. Representation (Philosophy) 7. History— Study and teaching. I. Title. D16.8.G47 2012 901—dc23 2011052127 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-0-85745-484-3 Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85745-485-0 Ebook

For my mother and for a ‘loving soul’ who likes history a lot more than she lets on, who surely knows what the sense of her past can really mean and what making sense of our past can lead us to.

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Preface to the Series

xi

Foreword: Imagination and Fact: A Lover’s Quarrel Frank Ankersmit

xvii

Introduction: The Quarrel Begins …

1

1. Romancing the Past: Presence and Intangibilities of History

8

2. Reality of Representation, Reality behind Representation: History and Memory

28

3. Whose Mandir? Whose Masjid? The Historian’s Ethics and the Ethics of Historical Reading

71

Afterword: The Quarrel Continues … Mark Bevir and Ranjan Ghosh

131

Bibliography

146

Index

157

Acknowledgements

This book found its true measure during my stay at Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (Institute for the Advanced Studies in Humanities), Essen, Germany, as professor and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in 2006–2007. The circumambient serenity combined a utopic research milieu, a smart bunch of research students and scholars (Aaron Bustamante, Diana Brenscheidt, Michael Eze, Arthur Assis), perceptive and erudite colleagues in Joern Ruesen and Harald Welzer and an indefatigable librarian in Brigitte Blockhaus. The ‘quarrel’ through the pages of this book records with gratitude the invaluable readings and critiques it has been treated to by Frank Ankersmit, Ethan Kleinberg, John Arnold, Cara Cilano, Roger Simon, Derek Scott, Ian Almond and three anonymous readers at Berghahn Books. Among many interactions that contributed to the enrichment of the book, I remember with fondness the conversation that I had with Eelco Runia and Hans Ulrich Gumbretch over the issue of ‘presence’ and the potential career that it has had. I also thankfully acknowledge generous assistance from Antoon de Baets, Ewa Domanska, Susan Crane, David Carr, Paul Bahn, Joan Callahan, John Moreland, Julia Shaw, Sam Wineburg and Mark Salber Phillips. A shorter version of chapter 1 has appeared as ‘“It disturbs me with a presence”: Hindu history and what meaning cannot convey’, Storia della Storiografia, 55, (2009), 94–107; Chapter 2 is a revised version of my ‘Memory, narrative and the doing of History’, Storia della Storiographia, 54, (2008), 56–88. Chapter 1 has also fed generously into my ‘India, itihasa and Inter-historiographical Discourse’, History and Theory 46, no. 2 (May 2007): 210–17. Also many of the ideas in the book were left out to bask under the incisive feedback of people who heard me lecture at University of Groningen, School of History at Liverpool University and the Department of Sociology, University of Birmingham. I thank Frank Ankersmit, Karl Simms, Michael Hughes, Ross Abbinnett and John Holmwood for making this experience possible by inviting me. Thoughts

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exchanged and contested have gone into this book as revisions and have remained as certain ‘questions’ essential to the final configuration of the book. Finally, I cannot avoid mentioning the sweet-throated birds – ‘long after it was heard no more’ – that flitted across the KWI campus all through the day, the sudden nervy sprints of squirrels, a couple of darting rabbits, emerging, as it were, from nowhere and a green-necked duck that planted herself with sober majesty at a corner of the lush green lawn overlooking my apartment. The experience of writing drew upon their unobtrusive presence – a disquiet that gave me the solitude of writing.

Preface to the Series JÖRN RÜSEN

At the turn of the twenty-first century the term “history” brings extremely ambivalent associations to mind. On the one hand, the last decade has witnessed numerous declarations of the end of history. Whether in reference to the fundamental changes in the global political situation around 1989/90, or to socalled postmodernism, or to the challenge to Western dominance by decolonization and multiculturalism, “history” as we know it has been declared to be dead, outdated, overcome, or even a myth at its end. On the other hand, there has been a global wave of intellectual explorations into fields that are “historical” by their nature: the building of personal and collective identity through “memory”; the cultural, social, and political use and function of “narrating the past”: and the psychological structures of remembering, repressing, and recalling. Even the subjects that seemed to call for an “end of history” (globalization, postmodernism, multiculturalism) quickly turned out to be intrinsically “historical” phenomena. Moreover, “history” and “historical memory” have entered the sphere of popular culture, from history channels to Hollywood movies, becoming an ever more important factor in public debates and political negotiations (the discussions about the aftermath of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, European unification, or the various heritages of totalitarian systems, to name but a few). In other words, after “history” was declared to be, like god before it, dead, “historical matters” have come back with a vengeance. This paradox calls for a new orientation or at least a new theoretical expression. Indeed, it calls for a new theory of history; and such a theory should serve neither as a subdiscipline reserved for historians nor as a systematic collection of definitions, “laws,” and rules claiming universal validity. What is needed is an interdisciplinary and intercultural field of study. Hayden White’s deconstruction of the narrative strategies of the nineteenth-century historicist paradigm somehow came to be regarded by many as historical theory’s famous

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last words, as if the critique of the discipline’s claim to rationality could put an end to the rational self-reflection of that discipline—as if this critique were not a rational self-reflection in itself. In the late 1980s the “critical study of historical memory” began to be substituted for historical theory. Overlooked in this trade-off is the fact that any exploration into the ways that historical memory in different cultural contexts not only crosses over into the field of critical studies, but also contains the keystones for a more general theory of history. Analysis of even a simple instance of historical memory cannot avoid questions pertaining to the theory and philosophy of history. And vice versa: the most abstract thoughts of philosophers of history have an intrinsic counterpart in the most secular functions of memory (for example, when parents narrate past experiences to their children, or when an African community remembers its own colonial subordination and eventual liberation from it). As long as we fail to acknowledge the fundamental connection between the most sophisticated historical theory and the process of historical memory most deeply imbedded in the culture and the everyday life of people, we remain caught in an ideology of linear progress which regards cultural forms of memory simply as some intriguing objects of study instead of recognizing them as examples of “how to make sense of history.” The series “Making Sense of History” aims at bridging this gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory. It is not exclusively related to historical studies; contributors, from virtually all fields of cultural and social studies, explore a wide range of phenomena that can be labeled “making historical sense” (Historische Sinnbildung). As such, the series crosses the boundaries between academic disciplines as well as those between cultural, social, political, and historical contexts. Instead of reducing historical memory to just another form of the socio/cultural “construction of reality,” its contributions deal with concrete phenomena of historical memory: it seeks to interpret them as case studies in the emerging empirical and theoretical field of “making historical sense.” Along the same line, rather theoretical essays are also included with the aim of not only establishing new methods and theories for historical research but also to provide perspectives for a comparative, interdisciplinary, and intercultural understanding of what could be called the “global work of historical memory” or the “cultural strategy to orient human life in the course of time.” This does not imply the exclusion of critical evaluations of the ideological functions of historical memory; however, it is not the primary objective of this series to find an ideal, politically correct, ideology-free mode or method of how to make sense of history. The goal is rather to explore the cultural practices involved in generating historical sense as an extremely important realm of human thought and action, the study of which may contribute to new forms of mutual understanding. In an age of rapid globalization that manifests itself primarily on an economic and political—and, much less so, on a cultural level—finding such forms is becoming an urgent task.

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It is for this reason that the series begins with a volume documenting an ongoing intercultural debate. It is the aim of the first volume to question whether or not the academic discipline of “history”—as developed at Western universities over the course of the last two hundred years—represents a specific mode or type of historical thinking that can be differentiated from other forms and practices of historical consciousness. Subsequent volumes present history as a genuinely interdisciplinary field of research. Historians, anthropologists, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and literary theorists, as well as specialists in fields such as media and cultural studies, explore such questions as: What constitutes a specifically historical “sense” and meaning? How do different cultures throughout various historical periods conceptualize time? Which specific forms of “perception” inform these conceptualizations, and which general problems are connected with them? What are the dominant strategies used to represent historical meaning? What function does the generating of historical sense fulfill in practical life? Ranging from general overviews and theoretical reflections to case studies, the essays cover a wide range of contexts related to the question of “historical sense,” among them topics such as collective identity, the psychology and psychoanalysis of historical memory, and the intercultural dimension of historical thinking. Additionally, the books of this series address the place of history in the humanitites, and the humanities in general as an essential place for sense generation in modern societies. Even modes of sense generation that are not specifically historical can be dealt with, as long as they share with history the concern for coming to terms with time as it pertains to human life. For the most part, historical memory is not an arbitrary function of the cultural practices used by human beings to orient themselves in the world in which they are born, but covers, rather, those domains of human life that seek to orient existence temporally. These domains demand mental procedures for connecting past, present, and future that became generalized and institutionalized in the West as that specific field of culture we call “history.” The areas of human thought, action, and suffering that call for a specifically “historical thinking” include (1) the construction and perpetuation of collective identity, (2) the reconstruction of patterns of orientation after catastrophes and events of massive destruction, (3) the challenge of given patterns of orientation presented by and through the confrontation with radical otherness, and (4) the general experience of change and contingency. In accordance with the collective aim of the series “Making Sense of History” to outline a new field of interdisciplinary research (rather than to offer a single theory), the volumes in the series are not designed to establish a new historiographical approach; rather, they seek to contribute to an interdisciplinary study of historical cultures and related subjects. One focus, for instance, is on the notion of collective identity. General theoretical aspects and problems in this field are considered, most importantly the interrelationships among

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identity, otherness, and representation. But case studies of the construction of gender identities (especially those of women), of ethnic identities, and of different forms and politics of national identity are also included. The essays on this subject point out that any concept of identity as being disconnected from historical change not only leads to theoretical problems, but also covers over the fact that most modern forms of collective identity take into account the possibility of their own historical transformation. Thus the essays in this series that are concerned with identity suggest that identity ought to be regarded not as a function of difference, but as a concrete cultural and ongoing practice of difference. They show that the production of “sense” is an epistemological starting point, as well as a theoretical and empirical research-field in and of itself. Another volume focuses on the psychological construction of time and history, analyzing the interrelation between memory, morality, and authenticity in different forms of historical or biographical narration. The findings of empirical psychological studies (on the development of temporal and historical consciousness in children, or on the psychological mechanisms of reconstructing past experiences) are discussed in the light of attempts to outline a psychological concept of historical consciousness around the notions of “narration” and the “narrative structure of historical time.” This first volume of the series is dedicated to psychoanalytical approaches to the study of historical memory. It reconsiders older debates on the relation between psychoanalysis and history and introduces more recent research projects. Instead of simply pointing out some psychoanalytical insights that can be adopted and applied in certain areas of historical studies, this volume aims at combining psychoanalytical and historical perspectives, thus exploring the history of psychoanalysis itself, as well as the “unconscious” dimensions underlying and informing academic and nonacademic forms of historical memory. Moreover, it puts special emphasis on transgenerational forms of remembrance, on the notion of trauma as a key concept in this field, and on case studies that may indicate directions for further research. Cultural differences in historical thinking that arise from different concepts of temporality are the subject of another volume. With a view to encouraging comparative research, this volume offers general essays and case studies written with the intention of providing comparative interpretations of concrete material, as well as possible paradigmatic research-questions for further comparisons. In the light of the recent resurgence of ethnocentric world-views, this volume focuses on the question of how cultural and social studies should react to this challenge. It aims at counteracting ethnocentrism by bridging the current gap between a rapid globalization manifesting itself in ever increasing political/economic interdependencies of states and continents, and the corresponding lack of mutual understanding in the realm of culture. The essays illustrate the necessity of intercultural communication pertaining to the various historical cultures and their shared semblances as well as the differences

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between them. Such communication seems not only a possible, but indeed a necessary presupposition of any attempt to negotiate cultural differences on a political level, whether between states or within the increasingly multicultural societies in which we live. The special emphasis the series fixes on the problem of cultural differences and intercultural communication reveals the editors’ desire to aim beyond the realm of merely academic concern. Building intercultural communication represents a formidable challenge, as well as a great hope, to a project committed to general theoretical reflection on the universal phenomenon of “remembering the past.” Despite the fact that “cultural difference” has become something of a buzz phrase since the 1990s, the topic itself is characterized by a paradox quite similar to that underlying the current fate of the notion of history. The past fifteen years have witnessed escalating interference by the industrialized states in the political and economic affairs of the rest of the world, as well as an increased (if sometimes eccentric) appropriation of modern economic and political structures by developing countries, including the former or still officially “communist” states. But this process of mutual rapprochement on the political and economic fronts is characterized by a remarkable lack of knowledge of, or even interest in, the cultural and historical backgrounds of the respective nations. Thus, the existing official forms of “intercultural” communication lack an adequate cultural dimension, leaving the themes and problems analyzed in this series of volumes (identity, memory, cultural practices, history, religion, philosophy, literature) outside of what is explicitly communicated; as if such matters would not have powerful affects on political as well as economic agendas. On the other hand, the currently dominant approaches found among the cultural theorists and critical thinkers of the West either claim that an intercultural rapport concerning the common grounds of cultural identities is impossible—based on the assumption that they have nothing in common (the hypostatization of difference)—or they politicize cultural differences in such a way that they are relegated to mere stuff, out of which may be constructed various cultural subject-positions. Despite their self-understanding as “critique,” these approaches amount to the exclusion of culture on the level of national politics and economic exchange alike. Thus, cultural theory seems to react to the marginalization of culture by way of its own self-marginalization. The series “Making Sense of History” intends to challenge this marginalization by introducing a form of cultural studies that takes the term culture seriously again, without dissolving it into identity politics or into a hypostatized concept of unbridgeable difference. At the same time the goal is to reintroduce a notion of “historical theory” that no longer disconnects itself from historical memory and remembrance as concrete cultural practices, but seeks instead to explore those practices, interpreting them as different articulations of the universal (if heterogeneous) effort to make sense of history. Thus, the series

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relies on the idea that an academic contribution to the problem of intercultural communication should assume the form of an academic discourse newly awake to its own historicity and cultural background, as well as a fresh acknowledgement that other cultural, but nonacademic, practices of “sense-formation” are equally important forms of human orientation and self-understanding (in their general function, in fact, not much different from the efforts of academic thought itself ). Such a reinscription of the universal claims of modern academic discourses into a variety of cultural contexts, the objective of which is the providing of new starting points for intercultural communication, is an enterprise that cannot be accomplished or even outlined in a series of a few books. Consequently, “Making Sense of History” should be regarded as something like a first attempt to map out one possible field of research—the field of “historical cultures”— that might help us to achieve this aim. The idea of the book series was born in the wake of the successful completion of a research project on “Making Sense of History: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Structure, Logic and Function of Historical Consciousness—an Intercultural Comparison.” This project took place at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (ZiF) of the University of Bielefeld, Germany, in 1994/95. It was partly supported by the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI) Essen (Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Essen). The project’s conferences and workshops generated many of the chapters included in the books in this series. The arranging, revising, and editing of the different texts occupied the next several years, with the first volume coming out in 2002. In the meantime the series has enlarged its perspectives by bringing in other projects of the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut and of its partners all over the world. I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the Center for Interdisciplinary Study at the University of Bielefeld and of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Essen. I also want to thank the editors and coeditors of each of the volumes in this series and, of course, all the contributors for the effort and patience they expended to make these books possible. Finally, my thanks go to Angelika Wulff for her engaged management of this series and to my wife Inge for her intensive support in editing my texts.

FOREWORD

Imagination and Fact A Lover’s Quarrel FRANK ANKERSMIT

One aspect of the effect of India on the world outside is that India has always been searched for. India has been living in the imagination of the Europeans for many centuries as the country of miracles without one having any clear ideas of it.1

Introduction In Lover’s Quarrel with the Past Ghosh presents us with a fascinating account of Indian historical consciousness and of how India relates to its past. ‘Fascinating’, if only because India still often is the country of miracles (‘das Wunderland’) in Western eyes that Hegel already discerned in it. But fascinating above all since for most Western readers Ghosh’s book will be like the exploration of a strange and unknown territory. They will discover in this book the account of a relationship to the past that is wholly unlike anything familiar to them. To be sure, not all of the book will be alien to them. For example, in the second chapter of his book Ghosh discusses the destruction in 1992 of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya by Hindu activists.This mosque had been built by the Muslim conqueror Babar in 1528 on top of the remains of a Hindu temple erected in honour of Lord Rama, whom Hindus believe to have been a manifestation of the god Vishnu and whose exploits were so famously sung in the Ramayana dating back to the third century BC. Both Ayodhya and Lord Rama rank highest in Hindu mythology – and this explains why the mosque was resented so much by the Hindus and what provoked the riots of 1992.This will be only too

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recognisable to the Western historian, who will be able to supply hosts of other examples of how since the days of Horemheb in Ancient Egypt (wishing to erase the memory of Akhnaton) down to Soviet Russia and Communist China the remains of a hated past were mutilated or even destroyed. Alas! But this becomes different when we enter into the details of Ghosh’s account of how people in India remember their past and how they relate to it. The difference had best be expressed in terms of referentiality: in the West accounts of the past – however mythological or whimsical these accounts may sometimes be – all purport to refer to a past reality. The (tacit) assumption always is that there is, or rather has been a past, now outside our reach, but that is referred to in our histories of it. History in India, however, is predominantly self-referential. Stories focus here the listener’s or the reader’s attention on themselves rather than on what they are about. It need not surprise, therefore, that Ghosh often uses the term ‘presence’ to characterise the ancient tradition of Indian historical writing. For whereas in the West the historical text wishes to ‘efface itself ’ (think of Ranke’s wellknown ‘Ich wünschte mein Selbst gleicham au zu löschen’), the text is here the primary reality. So the text has here a peculiar ‘presence’ atypical of Western historical writing. Admittedly, at first sight this might remind readers of the so-called linguistic turn in contemporary historical theory. But one could hardly think of a more naive mistake. The linguistic turn is a highly sophisticated theory on how to define the historical text and the past and on how the two are related to each other. It is a most complex play with most complex philosophical notions. Ghosh, however, writes on how the past is experienced in India. And that is quite another kind of topic – as much different from all that is at stake in the linguistic turn as experiencing feelings of pain or pleasure is different from having a theory on experiencing feelings of pain or pleasure. However, there is a Western philosopher who constructed a solid bridge between these two so very different things. Self-evidently, I am thinking here of Hegel. In fact, it was Hegel’s main philosophical effort, right from his Phenomenology of the Mind of 1806 down to the very end of his philosophical career, to painstakingly explore this trajectory between direct experience and our conceptualisation of it. It need not surprise, therefore, that the issue is on the agenda in his writings almost permanently. And, indeed, it most prominently is in the lengthy account that Hegel happened to write on Indian historical consciousness, which shares a really surprising amount of common ground with what Ghosh has to say on that subject. Striking similarities there are, not only with regard to method, approach and conclusions, but also with regard to the topics discussed by both of them, such as Ayodhya. A most happy coincidence this is, to be sure, when we wish to comment on Ghosh’s analysis of Indian historical consciousness. So let us seize the opportunity and see where the combined effort of Ghosh and Hegel may bring us!

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Hegel on India Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History is divided into two parts. The first part, with the subtitle ‘Reason in History’ is the formal and theoretical part in which Hegel argues in what way ‘Reason’ can be said to determine the course of history. The second and far more voluminous part, with the subtitle ‘The Oriental World (Book II),The Greco-Roman World (Book III),The Germanic World (Book IV)’, applies the theoretical principles developed in the first part to actual historical data. The result is a kind of world history.2 Contemporary philosophers of history sometimes refer to the first part, though not often, for Hegel nowadays is out of fashion amongst philosophers of history. The first part is the obvious point of departure for any discussion of Hegel’s dialectical conception of history, of how philosophy and history are interrelated in his thought and when assessing the pros and cons of so-called speculative philosophies of history in general.3 But the latter part is always ignored, and I know of no monograph exploring it. The explanation undoubtedly is the existing communis opinio amongst philosophers of history according to which this part of Hegel’s oeuvre should be without any real value: it is believed not to add anything substantial to his more analytic argument in the first part. Worse still, Hegel’s account of world history is said to be ridiculously systematic, to ruthlessly sacrifice facts to theory (traditionally illustrated with Hegel’s notorious disdainful comment – ‘so much the worse, then, for the facts’ – when being criticised once for his factual inaccuracies), to be recklessly anachronistic, to lack historical understanding and any interest for ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ (thus Ranke’s criticism of his Berlin colleague), to repeat all the conservative political prejudices of his time, to be unashamedly on the side of the victors in history, to propose a kind of Social Darwinism avant la lettre, to display the crudest Machiavellism, to be guilty of hero-worship and of a truly outrageous Eurocentrism4 – even if measured against the standards of Hegel’s own time. Now, all these accusations are correct and I fully agree with them. Nevertheless, this book is absolutely fabulous (!) as I hope to show below; it has an originality, a freshness, a depth and audacity in its conception of the past testifying to an unparalleled historical awareness.5 Praising Hegel for his ‘historical awareness’ also suggests where the real achievement of the second part of his Lectures is to be found: namely, when he focuses on the historical awareness of the civilisations, cultures and historical epochs he discerns in the human past. For, a large part of his exposition of world history is devoted to the evolution of historical awareness and to a sketch of the different phases in it. As we might expect from a philosopher who so thoroughly and consistently historicised Reason and philosophical Truth; for such a philosopher an epoch’s historical awareness best expresses at what point Reason had arrived at that specific juncture in its long march through history. Historical understanding is the selfunderstanding of Reason.

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Self-evidently, when throwing myself into the breach for Hegel’s philosophy of history the onus probandi lies with me. When defending my case I could not think of a more unimpeachable witness than Ranjan Ghosh’s exposition of Indian historical awareness as presented in this book. For, there is a truly amazing similarity between Ghosh’s picture of Indian historical awareness and what Hegel has to say on the subject. Moreover, both accounts mutually reinforce and clarify each other – as I hope to show below.

Ghosh and Hegel To begin with, Ghosh disagrees with Naipaul when the latter categorically declares that Indians should have no historical awareness. Hegel would similarly have rejected claims like Naipaul’s, albeit with the qualification that the Indian historical awareness is basically different from the one we have in the West and that historicist open-mindedness requires us to acknowledge that there is not just one kind of historical consciousness but arguably as many of them as there have been civilisations in the human past and present. Furthermore, both Hegel and Ghosh insist that precisely this makes Indian historical awareness of all the more interest and importance to us. For, it may help us to escape from the limitations of the Western variant of historical consciousness and from Western parochialism generally. Both agree, next, that in large part the difference between Indian historical awareness, on the one hand, and its Western (and Chinese) counterpart, on the other, originates in a different attitude towards what we call ‘historical facts’. In both the West and in China it was and is considered to be of primary importance that the historian should record facts correctly; but this is different in India. As Ghosh explains in the first chapter of this book: So, polarisation of myth and history and secular distinction between ‘facts’ (and science) and ‘fiction’ (and literature), which are the characteristic features of European modernity, are not integral to early Indian historiography. Much of traditional Indian history has, in fact, been embedded within cultural forms such as myths – forms in which historical consciousness awaits to be prised out – making it, thereby, evident that the factors that have resulted in ‘modern historical consciousness’ were not present in traditional India … the unflinching commitment to the ‘factual’ is nonexistent in the (Indian) sub-continental culture. Hindus did not preserve records as diligently as the Chinese did; what the Hindus felt worth preserving was the meaning of events, not a record of when events took place. It is the particularity and meticulousness of historical details that do not bother the Indians much. They care more for the truth of the experience or the soundness of doctrine than the circumstances that gave it birth.

Part of the explanation is that, for Indians, there is no clear demarcation line between religion and history, so that the story of the gods may freely interact

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with that of humanity. The mythical story of how the world came into being can therefore not be distinguished from dry historical fact; the former is often seen as a metaphor of the latter and to express its real meaning – with the result that historical truth tends to disappear behind its mythical meaning. Hegel said much the same: ‘In the Indian texts historical epochs are often referred to in terms of high, sometimes astronomically high and of even wholly arbitrary numbers. Thus it is being said of kings that they ruled for seventy thousand millions of years or even longer (…). In poetry there is often talk of Kings; and they surely are historical figures, but they completely dissolve in the word of fables; for example, they retire from the world and then make their entry again in it, after having spent some ten thousand years in solitude as a penitent’6.

And Hegel then goes on to tell the sad story of a Captain Francis Wilford (d. 1824) who had invested all his money, time and energy in the collection of Indian manuscripts and in the attempt to achieve a reconstruction of Indian history on this basis. He selected a team of learned Brahmins to advise him in this ambitious enterprise, while being wholly unaware that these ‘experts’ simply dreamed up the answers to the deep questions he had asked them on Adam and Eve, the Flood etc. Finally Wilford found out about this and discovered that all his erudite treatises on Indian history had been the products of the Brahmins’ imagination. The discovery cost him his health. It was just as Ghosh writes: Unknown facts are filled in, and the accounts become richer as they pass from mouth to mouth and generation to generation. As every Indian would say, ‘Don’t confuse me with facts; the ones I don’t know, I will make up’. Hindus ‘make up’; Hindus know the subtle art of mixing fact with myth unlike their Western counterparts; Hindus choose to revel in diverse meanings and compose meaning out of their ‘affect’ relations with the past.

But, again, both Hegel and Ghosh agree that it would be terribly wrong to see mere fancy and arbitrariness here. Then we would fall into the trap of projecting our own prejudices onto another civilisation and, worse still, it would blind us to the possibility of an alternative relationship to the past. So let us take quite seriously Ghosh’s following observation: ‘More than deduction, differentiation, analysis and integration, most Hindus are happy to remain embedded in subjective conditions and believe in the advancement from one subjective state to another’ (my italics). This is an interesting observation for several reasons. In the first place, Ghosh’s suggests here both an opposition and a continuity between, on the one hand, deduction, differentiation etc. and, on the other, the kind of ‘subjective conditions’ that are involved in the Indian historical consciousness. Continuity there is insofar as in both cases no appeal is made to ‘objective’ reality: we move here from one subjective state to another without any immixture from objective reality. In the case of deduction, differentiation etc. an obvious explanation presents itself: this is how things go in logic and

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mathematics (as we know from ‘Hume’s fork’). But how to account for the opposition between the two? How do we move from one subjective condition to a successive one if logic or mathematics do not connect them? ‘Association’ is the self-evident answer. However, Ghosh did not speak of simple association in the way a certain memory may contingently be associated with a certain place or with some other memory. Mere association excludes newness since it ties together ideas that are present in the mind already. Whereas it is clear from Ghosh’s account that, for him, moving from one subjective state to another means a continuous play of the imagination, presenting us with ever new products of the mind. When asking ourselves the question how to conceive of these mental operations if they are neither logical nor merely associative, Hegel turns out to be surprisingly helpful. Contrasting Chinese and Indian historiography, he writes: ‘For the Chinese the writing of history is a highly sophisticated science; nevertheless it presents us with little more than a prosaic enumeration of individual facts, often combined with considerations showing what lessons can be inferred from them. However, with the Indians all of the present and the existing world evaporates in many-coloured dreams’7.

Hence, Hegel relies on the metaphor of the dream in order to characterise Indian historical awareness – and other aspects of what he refers to as ‘the Indian Mind’. And where it must be emphasised that Hegel takes dreaming here most seriously. For he develops here a philosophical account of dreaming; admittedly a sketchy account, but no less fascinating for that. Hegel’s argument is as follows. When we are awake we divide the world into a self and a not-self, while at the same time being well aware that we are related to all the objects contained by this not-self in exactly the same way that these objects are mutually related. So when we are awake we differentiate between two selves: the self that is to be situated on ‘this’ side, so to speak, of the demarcation line between the self and the not-self, and, next, the self that we know to be simply one more component of the world of the not-self along with all the other things of the world, such as trees, tables or trade deficits. It was Hegel’s deep insight that this is where dream and being awake differ from each other and where, consequently, the philosophical interest of the dream can be discovered: ‘In the dream however, this demarcation does not exists. Here the human individual does not distinguish his personality as such from what is external to him; all of the relationship to the external, and our understanding of the external, drops out of scope’8. Clearly Hegel was deeply fascinated by this realisation of actual historical reality of the philosophical parameters of the dream, and only a very narrowminded and prejudiced reader could remain insensitive to Hegel’s respect for what he sees as the Indian mind. So it would be unforgivably narrow minded to see in Hegel’s comparison of Indian historical consciousness with the dream an attempt to downgrade, or worse still, to ridicule Indian civilisation. More

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generally, there never was a more historicist thinker than Hegel, and the implication is Hegel took completely seriously each manifestation of Reason or Mind on its long course through history. It is true that within his system Absolute Reason will only realize itself at the end of history, but at each phase of history we will encounter what then is the highest manifestation of Reason – and surely this is how Hegel presents each such phase. So, again, when Hegel characterises the Indian mind in terms of the dream, the silliest thing one can do to see this as an effort to vilify India and what we may associate with it. Thus Hegel does not hesitate to discern in the Indian mind even a moment of the Divine. Since there is no confrontation with a reality outside the dream whereas at the same time, all the forms and figures of reality are present in the dream, the Mind has here a freedom of manoeuvre that is truly divine, ‘since in these dreams the abstract and absolute Idea announces itself as content. One might well say, it is God in the whirl (‘Taumel’9 ) of His thoughts that is presented to us here’10. The finite and the individual goes here together with what is absolutely general and without restrictions (what he considered to be specific of the Absolute Mind, hence, of Mind in its highest and ultimate manifestation). Hence Hegel’s recognition that the dream is here not mere fantasy and irrationality but the expression of a moment of Truth: ‘These dreams are no mere fairy-tales, mere games of the mind; the mind is not autonomous with regard to its dream-content, but lost in it; these dreams constitute the mind’s rational seriousness’11. So, in one word, the grandeur of the Indian mind is that it demonstrates what the Mind or Reason is capable of if freed from all concrete determinations. It shows us the powers of the imagination and of poetry – hence Hegel’s claim: ‘One can be quite clear about this: there is no profundity or beauty of thought that does not have its antecedents in Indian literature’12.

Hegel’s Historicism Throughout Hegel’s books on, successively, the Oriental, the Greco-Roman and the German world there is the subtext of the ‘already’ versus the ‘not yet’. For each phase in the history of the development of the mind Hegel indicates to what new heights in the perfection of the mind this phase has brought us. Here his account will tell us which perfections we can ‘already’ find at a certain stage in the self-development of mind and that would remain forever part of the later and higher stages of the mind and provoke the admiration of later generations. These are the triumphs and the victories of the mind never to be lost again on the mind’s pilgrimage all through history. And one can only be both deeply and favourably impressed by Hegel’s generosity when paying tribute to what each culture or civilisation contributed to humanity’s ‘ktèma eis aei’. Hegel’s critics

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have generally underestimated this aspect of his thought and put too much emphasis on what could be regarded as the shortcomings of some past if compared to the present. Within such an interpretation of Hegel there is room only for the ‘not yet’, for what was ‘not yet’ achieved at a certain moment in the past and would only be realised at some later stage of history. In the Hegelian system the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ must be each other’s exact mirror image; for there is always here a complete symmetry between history if read from beginning to the end and, conversely, if read from the end back again to the beginning – everything will then remain the same, with the only difference that all the ‘alreadys’ of the one will have to be replaced by the ‘not yets’ of the other (and vice versa). And precisely this symmetry enables Hegel to avoid the accusation of being guilty of ahistoricist prejudice. For any such accusation, if rephrased in terms of a ‘not yet’ or an ‘already’, can now be countered by the decisive argument that it is exactly the other way round if we look at its symmetric mirror-image. It follows from this that Hegel can afford to be as outspoken in his praises of a civilisation as in his comments on its shortcomings, without thereby compromising his historicism. Each civilisation (or epoch) has its own grandeurs no less than its miseries, and to be open to them is not in the least at odds with even the strictest historicism as long as one avoids discerning only grandeurs or only miseries in it13. In fact, it has usually been assumed that a consistent historicism allows no room for such a balance-sheet of grandeurs and miseries since this would necessarily blind us to the uniqueness of a civilisation or of a historical epoch. But it is not easy to think of a convincing argument to support this claim – and, in fact, the claim is empirically disconfirmed by Hegel’s philosophy of history. So it need not surprise nor worry us that Hegel also has his severe criticisms of the Indian mind. And such criticisms there are! To mention just one example (out of many): ‘List and slyness are the basic character of the Indian; deceit, stealing, robbing and murder are part of his habits; he creeps humbly and meekly before his lord and victor and lord, but deals cruelly and pitilessly with those he vanquished himself and are within his power. It is characteristic of the human feelings of the Indian that he kills no animals, establishes and entertains rich hospitals for animals, especially for old cows and apes, whereas there are in all of the country no hospitals for the sick or homes for the elderly and needy. But that their respect for animals is mere outward appearance is clear from the cruelty with which they deal with young cattle, apart then from killing it’14.

Self-evidently, this is the kind of outrageous sweeping generalisation that earned Hegel such a bad name as a philosopher of history – and that will probably provoke contemporary Indians to angrily point out what Hegel’s own countrymen made themselves guilty of during the Holocaust – just a mere century after his death.15 Surely, that surpasses by far anything that one might, rightly or

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wrongly, ever accuse the Indians of! Mentioning the Holocaust suggests, again, that our embrace of historicism need not and should not prevent us from being clear about the atrocities performed in the past. Who could write a history of the Holocaust without condemning it? And the very uniqueness of this ultimate crime in all of human history is further proof that moral indignation and historicism do not in the least contradict each other.

Agency, Self-reflection and Politics Anyway, of more interest is Hegel’s criticism that there can be no question in India of ‘politics’ in the true sense of the word (and let us not forget that Hegel spoke here of India as he knew it from the sources that were available to him in the 1820s).The main insight here is that the dream, as characterised philosophically by Hegel, leaves no room for agency and self-reflection. Recall Hegel’s claim that in the dream we do not differentiate between our ‘personality as such’ (‘die für sich seiende Persönlichkeit’) and the not-self; or, to put it in nontechnical terms, between the self thought of as being itself outside, or opposite to the world and the self as simply one of its more conspicuous components. Now, we cannot act (on the world) if we are merely one of its components. This is not to deny, of course, that there may be sources of agency outside myself – but recognising as much is tantamount to the recognition that I am not myself the agent here (somebody or something else then is). So, being aware of oneself as an agent requires this doubling of the self into a self that is outside the world and another one that is part of it, just like any other thing in the world. And exactly this doubling of the self is what you lose in the dream (according to Hegel), and, hence, why there could be no agency (and certainly no politics) in the dream. Of course, we do quite a lot in our dreams – and may lengthily entertain our psychoanalyst with an account of our doings – but this is not action in the true sense of the word. We then relate to our own actions as I may relate, when being awake, to your actions or to those of anyone else. In the dream my actions are not really my actions – since for them to count as such requires them to transcend, somehow, the demarcation line between these two selves so perceptively distinguished by Hegel. It also follows that there can be no true self-reflection here – for any ‘selfreflection’ that one might have here is a reflection on the self that is part of the world along with anything else in the world, but not on the self that is on ‘this’ side of Hegel’s demarcation line. Put paradoxically, it gives us a reflection on that self which is not our real self. And, finally, it will be clear that we can also reason the other way round, hence from the absence of self-reflection to the impossibility of agency. For agency requires that I should recognise my actions as my own and not as the

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result of some agency outside, or external to me, and needless to say, this needs self-awareness. In fact, it may well be that agency is the actual source of our self-awareness: we only learn to recognise ourselves as individual human beings because we discover that our actions may make a difference to the world. You may move your hand, or not move it; and then this book will find itself on a different place on the table, or not, in case you did not push the book. In sum, self-awareness is born from the experience that we may causally affect the world and that we may be the God-like first link in a long and perhaps unending causal chain (a kind of primum movens, so to speak). This may help us understand Hegel’s claim that you cannot have history if there is no self-reflection: ‘Only these people are capable of historical writing, as of prose in general, that came to the insight and recognize that that individuals conceive of themselves as beings-for-themselves, hence, as possessing selfconsciousness’.16 In the first place, we saw a moment ago that there can be no agency if there is no self-reflection (Selbstbewusstsein) and, next, it seems plausible to argue that there can then be no history as well. It might be objected, however, that we can meaningfully speak of the history of the solar system or of some geological formation, even though there clearly is no agency here. So we still need an argument for linking politics and history. And, indeed, Hegel most obligingly provides us with such an argument: ‘only the State gives us a content that is not only suitable for the prose of history, but that is also involved in the production of history. Instead of only subjective commandments of government that merely satisfy the needs of the moment, a community developing into a State requires rules, laws and universal and universally valid determinations and, hence, as well a proposal as an understanding of internally determined actions and events perpetuating themselves in their consequences’.17

Hegel’s point of departure here is the remarkable fact that in European languages the word ‘history’ may always mean both the past itself (res gestae) and the historical account of the past (historia rerum gestarum). Hegel infers from this that this semantic ambivalence can be no coincidence, and that there must be some deep, hidden wisdom in this systematic ambivalence of the word’s meaning. He explains the word’s double meaning by insisting that ‘political language’ – language used by the statesman for achieving some political purpose – is both a historical agent (to be located on the level of the res gestae) and the proper topic of all historical writing (to be situated on that of the historia rerum gestarum). So the mere fact that both political action and historical writing are a matter of speech is why history is for Hegel essentially the history of politics. And why you can have no history in the proper sense of the word if the nature of public reality is not determined by public speech. Hegel here repeats the deep insight of the Renaissance humanists that the spoken word – in the sense of ‘oratio’ (Valla) – both creates new political realities and is, therefore, the obvious object of all historical writing18.

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Consensus, Compromise, Politics and History Perhaps no one ever penetrated deeper into the secrets of history than Hegel; and each contemporary reader will be impressed by the depth, scope and daring of his insights. He wrote a philosophical oeuvre whose riches have not yet been fully exhausted and from which still a lot can be learned. Nevertheless, Hegel taught his courses on the philosophy of history in the 1820s – almost two centuries ago. Since then the world has become a wholly different one. To take just one example, whereas Hegel predicted that it was a mere matter of time before Europe would master India and China, Europeans now have good reason to worry that their own fate and that of their children will be decided by those same two countries. Whatever we may be willing to associate with Hegel’s Absolute Mind, we can be sure that it entertains no special relationship with Europe’s fate. In this way developments of the last twenty years and our expectations for the foreseeable future have decisively refuted Hegel’s speculations about the march of world history. So it might be concluded that we should dismiss his historical thought as being of no value for our present generation and as, at most, a useful compendium of all the prejudices characteristic of nineteenth-century European arrogance and self-infatuation. But, again, there is more to Hegel than just this. Let me start here by contrasting ‘consensus’ to ‘compromise’.19 At first sight the two notions seem to have almost the same meaning and to be interchangeable in most contexts. But there is a crucial difference between the two in politics. Consensus registers what we do all agree about – and undoubtedly such registration can be of the greatest utility in practice. For it may help us remove political obstacles arising from distrust or mere miscommunication and misunderstanding. We simply take for granted that we disagree with our political opponents on a number of issues. And then the search for consensus may show that, contrary to our expectations, there is much more shared opinion than we had assumed on the basis of previous conflicts with our opponents. We may then even continue by trying to find out to what extent shared opinion may function as the basis for achieving agreement on other issues where we still disagree. This is what John Rawls had in mind with his notion of ‘overlapping consensus’. However, there is no room for newness here. Consensus merely expresses or elaborates what is already there. It is wholly undialectical, as Hegel would put it. Put differently, consensus is essentially conservative; it never urges us to transcend existing opinion. And the same is true of Rawls’s ‘overlapping consensus’, for as the notion itself suggests already, we are not demanded here to move beyond, or rather against consensus. But in compromise we have to do with an essentially different (political) logic. Compromise has as its basis the agreement to disagree. That is to say, you recognise that you will never agree with your opponent on (a) certain issue(s), but that nevertheless some kind of deal has to be negotiated in order to prevent

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worse. And you are then willing to embrace this deal for the time being – not because it agrees with your own political principles (for it does not). Instead, you are willing to commit yourself to the deal since, once again, this simply is le moindre des maux. Because of this, the outcome of a compromise may have neither basis nor antecedent in your own political principles or in those of your opponent. Circumstances may force both you and your political opponent to transcend your political principles, since both you and your opponent recognise that some higher public good is at stake – in the name of which you are willing to sacrifice maybe even your most basic and most elementary principles. You are absolutely convinced of the truth and validity of your principles – but at the same time you also acknowledge that the stubborn refusal to negotiate them may, in a worst-case scenario, result in civil war and perhaps in the nation’s suicide. So you are willing to sacrifice your highest principles on the altar of an even more august goal. Such was the situation in Europe during the Wars of Religion and during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ titanic struggle between capital and labour, to take two very dramatic examples. In the first case compromise resulted in the wholly new idea of sovereignty and of absolute monarchy, and in the second case the outcome was the welfare state – neither had its ideological antecedents in its prehistory (i.e., in the ideologies of either capital or labour). This is the context where it all comes together: self-reflection, agency, politics and history. Compromise compels you to self-reflection since you have to question your highest and most deeply cherished moral, political and perhaps even religious principles in order to decide how far, and in what way you might be willing to abandon them for a higher goal. You are forced to go ‘beyond yourself ’, so to say, or to reinvent your political self as is required by present political circumstances. Consensus leaves your public or political personality intact: it merely invites you to see where you can agree with others, whereas compromise forces you to risk and question your principles. However, not in the sense that you would have to abandon them for yourself – for compromise is always arranged in the public domain and never touches the private domain, the domain of one’s innermost convictions. In fact, the division of our self into a private and a public self – which is undoubtedly the condition of all civil liberties – originates in compromise. For compromise compels us to accept for the public domain what we (may) find unacceptable or would condemn on the basis of how we define our private self. Reinventing one’s political self is something not to be left to others. Whereas we could delegate the task of establishing the basis for consensus to others, compromise involves a real decision – and these decisions we can only make for ourselves. Such decisions constitute the essence of political agency: we are political agents when redefining the nature of the public domain in terms of the decisions demanded from us by compromise. This is where the notion of compromise gives us a political philosophy radically different from the one

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proposed by Carl Schmitt in his Der Begriff des Politischen of 1932. Schmitt defined there the political and public domain in terms of the opposition between friend and enemy: The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy … The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship … The often quoted ‘love your enemies’ (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) reads ‘diligite inimicos vestros’ and not ‘diligite hostes vestros’. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than to defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or the Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy; i.e. one’s adversary.20

The basic mistake in Schmitt’s otherwise brilliant analysis is his assumption that there exist these two domains of the private and the public and that the demarcation line between the two should have somehow been fixed once and forever. The implication then is that there is, or should be a clear demarcation line between the public and the private; and he would have abhorred how contemporary neoliberalism deliberately made a mess of the distinction between the public and the private. Here Schmitt is undoubtedly right, and here we have every reason to agree with him. But the necessity to always distinguish between the public and the private still leaves us wholly free to discuss where the demarcation line between the two is to be drawn. And this is, again, where compromise comes in. For if we disagree, if you are my enemy in the sense meant by Schmitt, there exists an alternative to fighting it out and to see who is the strongest. Compromise may then compel us to shift part of our disagreement to the domain of the private where apparently it was not yet; for if it had been there already, we would have had no conflict, while, at the same time, we work out some kind of arrangement for practical problems that may arise around the public ‘outside’ of our now-privatised opinions. Doing all this is painful and unpleasant, and all parties involved will see themselves as the big loser in the process. But who ever promised us that politics should be pleasant and a permanent source of joy for its practitioners? Anyway, the pain and toil involved in it – and, above all, in compromise! – may make all of the difference between actual (civil) war and a situation in which people, albeit with the greatest aversion for each other, succeed in living together peacefully. This must be the politician’s consolation. War, civil war and the conflicts occasioning them have always been the most obvious topic of historical discussion. And quite rightly so; for what has more direct consequences for us than the wars people have fought, and the revolutions and civil wars that pitted one part of the nation against another in

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a deadly combat? So is it not the historian’s main task to inform his readers about what conflicts occasioned these wars and revolutions and about how they changed the face of the social and political world that we presently inhabit? To sum it all up into one formula: compromise compels us to self-reflection and to redefine ourselves politically. We then reinvent, or, rather, redescribe ourselves by rearranging the balance between the public and the private in such a way as to make social and political conflict innocuous and manageable – even though the origins of the conflict in question will never really be taken away if we do so. Our convictions are not changed by compromise, for the simple reason that compromise does not require us to do so. Nevertheless, the necessity to always discern between the important and the unimportant, and between what is urgent and less urgent, together with habit, sheer human dullness and lack of interest, may then gradually make us forget about these origins of conflict. In this way conflicts that once might have exploded into actual civil war will in course of time quietly recede into the background and, in the end, even be wholly removed from public consciousness. They then have become mere history and will be regarded as the strange obsessions of a previous and less-enlightened age. Next, we are political agents in the true sense of the word when participating in the debate about this redefinition of the balance between the public and the private. And, finally, it is the historian’s task to instruct us about how this balance between the public and the private developed in the past, how we arrived where we presently are and what conflicts of the past were condemned to oblivion thanks to our ancestor’s prudent redrawal of the map of the public and the private. So this is how self-reflection, political agency, politics and history all hang together. These are the wise lessons we may learn from Hegel.

Conclusion It follows from my argument that the more bitter conflict is, the deeper the bite of compromise must be, and the more radical interventions in the existing balance between the public and the private will have to be. One important implication is that we should never approve of efforts to blur the demarcation line between the public and the private, for we then gamble away our social and political capital needed for the solution of conflict. Or to use a different metaphor, the differentiation between the public and the private is the fuel we can feed in our political machineries when consensus is insufficient and a compromise has to be worked out. The neoliberal agenda – with its brainless celebration of the so-called public/private sector (PPS) – thus paves the way for a future uncontrollable escalation of social conflict.21 Perhaps religious conflict within one and the same nation best illustrates what was argued for above. Self-evidently, religious conflict leaves no room for

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consensus. Religions typically exclude each other – and it may well be that their future always depends on their very success in doing so. A religion not excluding other religions is stepping down from the stage of world history. So compromise is needed in case of religious conflict. But the very totality of the conflict then also requires quite total rearrangements in the balance between the public and the private. Only the complete reduction of religion to the domain of the private will then suffice – for each remnant of religion in the public domain may then prove to be the catalyst for (avoidable) political strife and disorder. So, the more serious religious conflict is in a nation, the more a radical separation between Church and State will be necessary. Indeed, the separation between Church and State will be little more than a constitutional ornament in a nation consisting of Catholics, Protestants or Muslims only. You may have it, or not have it, and it will not make much of a difference in practice. But in a nation where the believers of different religions have to live together, and where religion is still taken quite seriously, the strictest separation of Church and State, of religion and politics, is needed in order to prevent social and political disturbances. Religion can then be removed from the public to the private domain, and the compromise codifying this will ensure public peace and order.

Notes 1. ‘Die eine Seite der Wirksamkeit Indiens nach aussen ist, dass Indien immer gesucht worden ist. Es lebt seit Jahrhunderte allgemein, ohne dass man es genauer erkannt hätte, vor der Vorstellung der Europäer als ein Wunderland’. See G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Band II. Die orientalische Welt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1976), 344. 2. G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Welgeschichte. Band I. Die Vernunft in der Geschichte (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1976); Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte Band II – IV. Die orientalische Welt, Die Griechische und die Römische Welt, Die germanische Welt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1976). 3. See on this the still unsurpassed H. Fain, Between Philosophy and History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). 4. ‘Denn es ist das notwendige Schicksal der asiatischen Reiche, den Europäern unterworfen zu sein, und China wird auch einmal diesem Schicksal sich fügen müssen’. See Hegel, Orientalische Welt, 365. 5. This is where ‘the case Hegel’ must remind us of ‘the case Spengler’: just like the Hegel of the second part of the Verlesungen, the author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes is a nomen nefandum in contemporary philosophy of history. And just as in Hegel’s case, Spengler’s critics are at a loss about whether his historical shortcomings are worse than his political sins, or vice versa. 6. ‘Es werden in den indischen Schriften Zeitalter angegeben und grosse Zahlen, die oft von astronomischer Bedeutung und noch öfter ganz willkürlich gemacht sind. So heisst es von Königen, sie hätten siebzigtausend Millionen Jahre oder mehr regiert. … In den Gedichten ist häufig die Rede von Königen; es sind dies wohl historische Figuren gewesen, aber sie verschwinden gänzlich in Fabel, sie ziehen sich z.B. ganz von der Welt zurück und erscheinen dann wieder, nachdem sie zehntausend Jahre als Büszer in der Einsamkeit zugebracht haben’. Hegel, Orientalische Welt, 358. 7. ‘Bei den Chinesen ist die Geschichtskunde die ausgebildeste Wissenschaft; sie enthält aber nur ganz prosaische Aufzählungen einzelner Tatbestände, hin und wieder mit Nutzanwendungen

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verbrämt. Bei den Indern verflüchtigt sich alles gegenwärtige and Bestehenden zu bunten Träumen. (my italics). See Hegel, op. cit.: 352. 8. ‘Im Traume dagegen ist diese Trennung nicht. Hier unterscheidet der Mensch seine für sich seiende Persönlichkeit nicht von dem, was ihm äusserlich ist; der ganze Zusammenhang des Äusserlichen, dieser Verstand der Aussenwelt, fällt hinweg’. 9. This metaphor of the ‘Taumel’ of thought returns several times in Hegel’s text on India. The word does not have its exact English equivalent, but has the connotation of a whirl and of falling down from a height. 10. ‘Indem nun aber doch in diese Träume der abstrakte und absolute Gedanke selbst als Inhalt auftritt. So kann man sagen: es ist Gott im Taumel9 seines Träumens, was wir hier vorgestelt sehen’. See Hegel, Orientalische Welt, 352. 11. ‘Diese Träume sind nicht leere Märchen, ein blosses Spielen der Geist; er steht nicht über seinen Einbildungen erhoben, sondern ist darin verloren, und diese Träume machen seinen Ernst aus’ Ibid., 353. 12. ‘Man kann wohl sagen, es findet sich keine Tiefe und Schönheit des Gedankens, die sich nicht schon in der indische Literatur zeigte’ Hegel, Orientalische Welt, 391. 13. Recall how Ranke succeeded in reconciling universality with historical uniqueness with his well-known ‘jede Epoche ist unmittelbar zu Gott’. 14. ‘List und Verschlagenheit ist der Grundcharakter des Inders; Betrügen, Stehlen, Rauben, Morden liegt in seinen Sitten; demütig kriechend und niederträchtig zeigt er sich dem Sieger und Herrn, volkommen rücksichtslos und grausam dem Überwundenen und Untergebenen. Die Menschlichkeit des Inders charakterisierend ist es, dass er kein Tier tötet, reiche Hospitäle für Tiere, besonders für alte Kühen und Affen, stiftet und unterhält, dass aber im ganzen Lande keine einzige Anstalt für kranke und altersschwache Menschen zu finden ist. Dass auch ihre Schönung der Tiere ganz etwas Äusserliches ist, beweist die Grausamkeit, mit der sie ihr Jungvieh behandeln, nur dass sie es nicht töten. See Hegel, op. cit.: 391. Hegel also anticipates a more cheerful contemporary stereotype of the Indians: ‘Die Inder erscheinen wohl, wie schon gesagt, als ein unschuldiges Blumenvolk voll weicher und sanfter Empfindung’ (ibid.). 391. 15. In fact, I would not know of any domain of scholarly research where poor, unconvincing and mere intuitive argument is more readily taken for granted than the discussion of historicism. A good example is the so-called crisis of historicism of the beginning of the previous century that sounded, more or less, the death-bell over historicism. Historicism was then criticised – and rejected – since it does not leave room for timelessly valid moral imperatives (which is undoubtedly true). To begin with, not just historicist, but any variant of (contemporary) historical writing could be ‘criticised’ along these lines – with the implication that we would have to abandon all of historical writing. But, even more importantly, neo-Kantianism was responsible for this hangup with timelessly valid moral rules, whereas we should acknowledge that nothing necessarily is intrinsically wrong with moral (legal, or political) rules that are not timelessly valid. It is not part of the meaning of the phrase ‘moral imperative’ that it should be timelessly and eternally valid (and the burden of proof rests with anyone who prefers to argue differently). I may well be completely convinced of the rationality of certain moral rules that are presently adopted, while conceding, at the same time, that in the next century, under different circumstances, these rules would make no sense anymore. In fact, moral life would be utterly impossible if it could be guided only by rules whose timeless validity is indisputable. 16. ‘Der Geschichte, wie der Prosa überhaupt, sind daher nur Völker fähig, die dazu gekommen sind und davon ausgehen, dass die Individuen sich als für sich seiend, mit Selbstbewusstsein erfassen’. See Hegel, op. cit.: 357. 17. ‘Aber der Staat erst führt einen Inhalt herbei, der für die Prosa der Geschichte nicht nur geeignet ist, ondern sie mit selbst erzeugt. Statt nur subjektiver, für das Bedürfnis des Augenblicks genügender Befehle des Regierens erfordert ein festwerdendes, zum Staate sich erhebendes Gemeinwesen Gebote, Gesetze, allgemeine und algemein gültige Bestimmungen und erzeugt damit sowohl einen Vortrag als ein Interesse von verständigen, in sich bestimmten und für sich selbst in ihren Resultaten dauernden Taten und Begebenheiten’. See G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die

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Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Band I. Die Vernunft in der Geschichte (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 1955), 164. 18. See the last chapter of my Meaning, truth and reference in historical representation, Ithaca/ London 2012. 19. F.R. Ankersmit, Political Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 201–13. 20. C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, translation, introduction and notes by George Schwab, with Leo Strauss’s notes on Schmitt’s essay (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 26, 27. 21. The optimism of neoliberalism and its confidence that ‘the market’ will solve all social and political problems can be rephrased by saying that consensus is all we need and that compromise betrays an untoward belief in the State as problem-solver.

INTRODUCTI O N

The Quarrel Begins . . .

‘History does not exist’, writes Susan Crane, ‘apart from our thinking it. Clearly, there are as many ways of experiencing history as there are histories to experience’.1 Such an experience and understanding of history, however, was never a part of my growing up; history books meant an immersion in drudgery, a laborious saunter down a thick slush of facts and a wrestle with the imminent prospect of comeuppance in the event of forgetting some details while writing tests. History lessons meant an effort to fight back a yawn, a survival cry against a mounting stockpile of information that almost always threatened to entomb me. Much later, I realised that reading history was not a soporific act; hence, the interregnum between the days when my parents read me to sleep with mythological tales and the discovery, later, that history was not just an insipid catalogue of facts best forgotten. History grew upon me as poetic enthusiasm, as explorative energy, giving me a consciousness of creation. History, for me, had permanently arrived. Historical knowledge descended in a new thoughtline. As I walked into history, ‘a foreign country’ (L.P. Harley in his The Gobetween could not have imagined what epistemic tremor this phrase has created), I was nudged and knocked about to do things ‘differently there’. I was lured into a quarrel, a lover’s quarrel with the past, miffed by her lack of honesty, like a woman who could not be trusted without imperilling oneself and yet whose enticement I could not really overcome. This quarrel triggered in me a revolution in miniature that saw history costumed in kaleidoscopic intertextuality, an intersubjective allure, inaugurating profound interest in the philosophy of history, discourses and other generative infections and inflections that historical writing has never been able to slough off. Marc Bloch reminded me that historians ‘are in the predicament of a police magistrate who strives to reconstruct a crime he has not seen; of a physicist who, confined to his bed with the grippe, hears the results of his experiments only through the reports of his laboratory technician’.2 History came to be understood as a ‘stratified’ Notes for this section begin on page 6.

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or laminated discourse, unremittingly producing certain ‘residues’; Rickert’s Logik der Geschichtswissenschaft combined with what Droysen helped me to see as ‘the ghostly presence of past events’, incidents from the past as traces (Überreste), representations (Auffassungen), memories, touching upon problems of criticism, interpretation and presentation; Hayden White’s aestheticisation of the past consorted with the strongly invested Beckerian reminder that it is ‘the perceiving mind of the historian that speaks’;3 historical facts, facts per se, opened an arena of strong ideological and sociocultural debate, as history was inscribed with the spirit of interrogation. History thus became the tensional site anchored in both certainty and unpredictability, revisionism and relativity, a site in which the ‘constructive activity of the narrator’ remained in permanent discord with ‘history’s professed aim to tell truths about the past’.4 As Edward Carr would say, ‘study the historian before studying the facts’.5 Historians no longer emerged for me as porters from the past carrying bags of straw-dry facts for delivery; rather, historians enquire about what they do (what history is for) and historical meaning does not always enjoy a placid refuge in their hands. History now read differently, and this difference stifled the memories of the ‘yawn’. Instead, it brought back nostalgia for the things missed, the ‘huge, unrecorded hum of implication’6: it was the past saga of ‘unnoticed’ and ‘unimagined’ history. Writing this book was a self-enhancing experience in which a variety of readings came alive through the combination of the archival with the documentary and the narrative with theoretical history. Reading was an exercise in transformation, in beyonding, in threshold jumping, as it braided romance, drama and imagination with rigour, factuality and documentariness. Installing a sense of agency, a Geist, a historical consciousness, history, both as ‘resorbed’ and ‘moving’, brought before me a moment of ‘risk’ and ‘openness’ and what Jean-Luc Nancy would ascribe as ‘the suspension of history’ in the ‘sense both of a certain rhythm and of uneasy expectation’.7 Ban Wang writes, ‘In its genuine vitality, history is not an autopsy lab where a historian dissects corpses to find the predetermined causes in the anatomy of the dead. History is an imaginary horizon of what is possible. If the past is not reimagined as crisscrossed by forking paths of trajectories and road maps, intermittently shut down and reopened, both the present and future are magically sealed with death marks in the teleological end of lines culminating in liberal democracy’.8 Indeed Clio being both the muse of history and epic poetry for Greeks (not to forget that she is the daughter of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory) is a pleasant reminder of the duality that she is purported to incarnate: combining historical truth with poetic fiction. The name Clio comes from the verb κλειʹω, the poetic form of κλέω, which means ‘to glorify’, ‘to celebrate’. The Greeks clearly admitted the contagion of subjectivity in the writing of history, the intrusion of values as an unavoidable phenomenon in making sense of the past. Can we then leave history as just a kind of research or in-

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quiry, an interpretation of evidence, whose object is ‘res gestae: actions of human beings that have been done in the past’?9 The combination of historical realism and moralism demands that we lend ears to as many voices of the dead as of the living, attending upon the ritual of retrieval, muteness (obfuscation of more things than what Descartes meant by ‘les plus basses et moins illustres’) and speaking facts. Historians today, in comparison to their predecessors, have been thrown into plenitude—technology and other methods of investigation and corroboration have resourced and bolstered them with more records, artefacts, arts, archaeological evidences and documentary sources of the past than was seen before. But does mastery of techniques and sources guarantee the production of great history? It has been rightly observed that ‘mastery of techniques’ alone ‘will not produce great history, any more than a mastery of metrical technique will produce great poetry’.10 So dallying with the notion that normative historiography is like ‘Old Man River’ who ‘just keeps on rolling’ along, and, that New History ‘burns up like a spent rocket’, is to entertain lazy thoughts.11 History cannot be either absolutism or relativism. The past is a text, a network of revelations, truths and resistances; it is a dialogic platform that calls for patient formal attention to details, interpretation, listening and empathy. Historical description owes as much to the presentness of the situation as it is indentured to the pastness, its mutism and performativity, to the reality of ‘unveiling’ and talkative silences. Nietzsche observes that ‘a historical phenomenon, completely understood and reduced to an item of knowledge, is, in relation to the man who knows it, dead’.12 So knowing the past, though not always, ‘is as astonishing a performance as knowing the stars’; George Kubler finds this in common between astronomers and historians: ‘both are concerned with appearances noted in the present but occurring in the past’.13 But again the authority of silences, a relentless bristle of contradiction, ‘virtual discourses’, do not determine the course of history. The terrain of history contends with forces that always threaten the poise of a centre, the ‘order’ that I have argued in the book; these are forces that centrifugalize to trouble historical understanding with differential vibrations. History is a nailing of the past to some definitiveness, a sensitisation to our demands from the past, an awareness in ‘practical realism’, which requires faithfulness to facts and an acknowledgment of the values we bring to historical inquiry.14 History is nostalgia for the past that tantalises to divulge, is a surrender to an agency that ‘thinks’ and, in thinking, turns the past into history. But the apprehending ‘I’ is never Arthur Danto’s ‘ideal chronicler’; the ideal chronicler ‘knows whatever happens the moment it happens, even in other minds. He is also to have the gift of instantaneous transcription: everything that happens across the whole forward rim of the Past is set down by him, as it happens the way it happens’.15 The ‘I’, rather, at one level, is what disturbs the centre, provokes an anarchic regime to prosper at its peril. But this anarchy, this accent on transcendence, is the source of a ‘surplus’ that provides

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history with more meaning, conveys more sense than we thought possible. This book and the reading that went into its making left me covenant with a ‘freedom’, the freedom to alienate myself from top-down thoughts, the pressure that master discourses have always cranked up on me. The ‘surplus’ was empowering to the point where the reading ‘I’ refused to collapse easily into a tyranny of consensus, culture’s ‘common sense’, setting off an intertwined ‘set of feelings about oneself ’. It is a matter of what Michael Lerner calls ‘surplus powerlessness’16 and at the same time of empowerment that is not a license for recklessness. Knowing the limits is not sliding into despair. Michel Foucault conceived of a life that is ‘an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’.17 In fact, the ethos of history is a matter of being caught among possibilities, concretisation and transcendence. Historical cognition is the ‘not yet’, what has not yet become history and that which ‘yet can become history’. Werner Hamacher rightly notes that ‘the true historicity of historical objects lies in their irrealis. Their un-reality is the store-place of the historically possible’. The historian’s retrospective self is about both unveiling of the past and revealing the past’s dialectical relation with the present. Walter Benjamin sees the past as carrying a ‘secret index’ with it, acknowledging the resurrectionary and regurgitative potential of the past in the present. His question, ‘Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that which came before?’ implicates a ‘secret protocol’, Verabredung, between the past and the present. As Hamacher observes, ‘The possible stored in un-reality is not an abstract or ideal possible in general and for all times but a possible always for a particular future … It is we who could have talked to people but didn’t; it is we who did not seize an opportunity—and now have to enviously admit that we have missed a possibility to speak that only we could have taken, for it was our possibility, which already now is no more’.18 Benjamin makes a detour around ‘once upon a time’ history by deaffiliating from a historicism that believes in a totalised past. He evinces a belief in a historical materialism that, as ‘a consciousness of the present’, explodes ‘the continuum of history’. This is about exploding notions that cannot see the past beyond their linearity, that refuse to invest any further resonance in our conceptions of historical temporality. Benjamin advocates a dialogism where the past, ceasing to be autonomous, establishes a ‘constructive’ communication with the present subject, the historical object-world. The past, present and the future constellate around monads and experiences, negotiating aporias and courting alterity. At another level, though not divorced from the past-present dialectic, ethics of historical discourse combine in its unfoldment the tolerance to lend ears to ‘others’ and the patience to interpret history from present-day insights and situations. All striated, laminated and colligated historical explanations or descriptions fence out a space for the ‘other’ and its addressivity, obliging the

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historian to be responsible and responsive. Historical representation begets an ethical space; our acts of reading preserve ‘ethical saying’. The engagement of the historian can be at the level of the historical text, the concrete situation that he finds himself in and the responsibility that the institutionalised historical writing evokes within a public space. So the ambiguity that informs the historian’s understanding of the past, his portentous acts to instrumentalise history, his notions of reason and justice, his understanding of the limits that public use of history usually impose on historical configurations, deepen the historian’s ligatures with contemporary discourses and the sociopolitical milieux in which he has to operate. Historians are functional not merely in their role to narrate the past; integral to their operation exists also the intention to cultivate tolerant and sensible understanding of the present—the breeding of a ‘historical attitude’ through a public use of history. The ‘prism of the changing present’ provides new ways of seeing things, new tools, new perceptions of human motivation or economic forces that help us to gain a surer sense of past generations.19 History of the past links us with the politics of the present, and historians are expected to configure this connection. Unmoored from a near ‘primitive faith in facts’, a historian can avoid being simply a ‘servant of truth’.20 Richard Evans notes that ‘historians have to make an attempt to recreate a sense of what it was like living in the past and what people were like in the past’. History, he rightly observes, ‘is not simply an abstract cerebral enterprise; it has a creative, imaginative side to it as well. But understanding and explanation are the key things that make history different from chronicle’.21 Historians, refusing to ‘sleep the dogmatic slumber of historical facts’ in a deterministic world where ‘the past has already caused the future and the future is just like the past’,22 turn a part of their self into interpreters who cast doubt on the supposed insularity of disciplinary boundaries and try to unhinge cognitive elitism and authoritarianism of knowledge. As dissident thinkers, historians demystify and deformalise several areas of our understanding. It is rightly observed that in democratic societies history is not only an ‘impartial, multiperspectival empathy with the past’, but is also a productive linking of past, present and future. Historical descriptions and narratives are more than collections and presentations of documents. They produce ‘meaning’ or ‘relevance’ and ‘moral and affective evaluation’ for the successors and the contemporaries.23 Our attitude towards history—the appreciation and contemplation of the past—is what problematises our political situatedness and changing socioreligious configurations. The responsibility no longer ends with knowing ourselves, but, as Richard Rorty points out, in ‘creating ourselves’.24 Refusing to limit itself to knowing the past, history seeks to link our knowledge with the persuasions of the present urged on by a greater expectation to create a sensible future. So a historian is committed to deepen our understanding about human beings and society. His commitment is in the ‘hope that a profounder knowledge, a profounder awareness will help to mould human at-

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titudes and human actions’.25 But he is not a judge in a trial; unlike a judge who condemns or acquits, he does not praise and reward. Dom Knowles notes: The historian’s task is very different, he contemplates the whole of his world; he does not apportion guilt; he considers the quality of the whole man, seen, it may be, during the passage of many years. The man’s acts will reflect this quality, they may help to confirm or change it, but a man acts by reason of what he is; as the scholastic axiom has it: agere sequitur esse. The historian, when conditions are favourable, can see the act and the man, sometimes more clearly than most of his contemporaries saw them, and he describes what he sees. He neither condemns nor acquits, he neither censures nor praises, but he presents what he sees.26

He represents, reenacts, revives, retrieves and reflects. So the almost endless ‘quarrel with the past’ stubs out all possibilities of reading history as a ‘yawn’; residing in romance,27 representation and reading the lover’s quarrel becomes an experience in ‘fun’, a fun that is life enhancing, investing deeper meanings into our understanding of life and as rewarding as a fine novel.28 John Demos reminds me of the way my mother, disturbed by the way history books limply tumbled out of my satchel, wanted me to view history: They [students] say to me that history is ‘dry’, by which they seem to mean that it has no connection with anything they are interested in or care about. Yet that’s not history, as such, but the dry way it is taught or written. I ask the students to give history a chance. Don’t prejudge it as dull, and don’t imagine that it’s just about ‘facts’. History is about problems and ideas, just as math is about problems and literature is about ideas. If we can get others to see that, then I think historians have a chance to make the past humanly valuable.29

The fun of writing this book was in finding a sense of incompleteness that an embattled, seductive, prescriptive and superintending past has left me to struggle with. Doing history became fun. The quarrel was generative, contagious, an arresting blend of reaching an agreeable end in dispute and once more being thrown into the loop of continual seduction.

Notes 1. Susan A. Crane, ‘(Not) Writing History: Rethinking the Intersections of Personal History and Collective Memory with Hans Von Aufsess’, History and Memory, 8, no. 1 (1996): 20. 2. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 40. 3. C.L. Becker, Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics (New York: F.S. Crofts, 1935), 251. 4. Andrew Norman, ‘Telling It Like It Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms’, History and Theory 30, (1991): 119. 5. E.H. Carr, What Is History? (London: Palgrave, 1987), 30. 6. See Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1951), 206.

Introduction: The Quarrel Begins …

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7. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 144. 8. Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory and History in Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 7. 9. See R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 9–10. 10. See Christopher Dawson and John J. Mulloy, The Dynamics of World History (London: Sheed and Ward, 1957), 293. 11. Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 8–9. 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins, 2d rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 11. 13. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 19. 14. See Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 249, 247, 261. 15. Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 149. 16. See Michael Lerner, Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), 112. 17. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 50. 18. See Werner Hamacher, ‘“Now”: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Walter Benjamin and History (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2005), 39–40. 19. Lawrence W. Levine, ‘The Unpredictable Past: Reflections on Recent American Historiography’, American Historical Review, 94, (1989): 671. 20. See Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Lees, vol. 1 (London: John Lane, 1911), lxi. 21. See Donald A. Yerxa, ‘An Interview with Richard J. Evans’, Historically Speaking, 4, no. 5, (2003): 23. 22. See Kelly Oliver, ‘Witnessing Otherness in History’, in Howard Marchitello (ed.), What Happens to History:The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought (London: Routledge, 2001), 47. 23. Joke van der Leeuw-Roord (ed.), History for Today and Tomorrow, What Does Europe Mean for School History (Hamburg: Korber-Stiftung, 2001), 285. 24. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 69. 25. J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 85. 26. Dom David Knowles, The Historian and Character and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 13. 27. The implication of ‘romance’ here is different from what David Scott means in his book Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). I thank Cara Cilano for this reference and also for alerting me about the association that a reader might bring to my use of the word ‘romance’. 28. The pregnant history-literature interface wears a different, yet interesting, configuration in Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel, trans. William Weaver (New York: Vintage, 1984). Does history put individual lives and suffering into obscurity? Does the novel become more historical in its differing ability to reflect and re-create? Is it more alive with the complexities of life? The tenor of the argument here, however, is different from what Hayden White understands as the ‘poetic historian’ who is interested in the familiar that dwells in the strange and the ‘strangeness of ordinary things’. See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 50, 257. 29. See Roger Adelson, (ed.), Speaking of History: Conversations with Historians (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), 78–79.

CHAPTER

1

Romancing the Past Presence and Intangibilities of History

Soleo enim et in aliena castra transire, non tamquam transfuga, sed tamquam explorator. I am in the habit of crossing over even into alien camps not as a deserter but as an explorer.1 And when you and I talk about history, we don’t mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.2 To be born is not to have been born, and to have been born. It is the same with all verbs: to think is not yet to have thought, and already to have thought. Thus ‘to be born’ is the verb of all verbs: the ‘in the midst of taking place’ that has neither beginning nor end. The verb without a presence of coming to presence.3 Romancing history is a projection of sympathy and indulgence into a past age; history in its invocation of the past is a ‘museum of held reverberations’4; this can lead to excesses, transgressions, instabilities summoning up a delicate consortment of imbalances between the past and the present. It is a poeticisation of the past, a kind of sin that ‘imbalances’ generate, a sin that ‘imagination’ promotes, a sin that spurts a creative gush. Ann Rigney, in her delight of a book Imperfect Histories, argues that the ‘very possibility of historical knowledge implies the possibility of ignorance’. She writes: Every historical work thus generates its own “residue” or what Arlette Farge, in an evocative turn of phrase, has called ‘l’échappée,’ that which has escaped. The flip Notes for this section begin on page 25.

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side of historical knowledge is ignorance about topics not treated or the historiographical paths not taken. It is in this sense that I understand Norman Hampson’s admission that ‘one might almost go so far as to say that all historical explanations are confessions of ignorance’. Or, as Michelle Perrot wrote with respect to the history of private life: ‘light produces darkness. The unsaid, the unknown, the unknowable … increase apace with the knowledge that digs vast chasms … beneath our feet’. In contrast to fictions, therefore, all historical works (again including historical novels) have a ramifying hors-texte made up of all those phenomena that have escaped the representation. If historical inquiry is premised on the real existence of an object of knowledge beyond the persons doing the inquiring, it also springs from the sense that existing representations are incomplete and that there is more to be known and said on the matter.5

Historians meet the pleasures of ignorance in a contemplative brooding, reflecting on a past that makes ignorance an experience and ‘lost knowledge’ a provocation to wrestle with. The historian’s lack of understanding does not lead him to sit sluggishly shame-faced, giving up the game with a foreclosed notion of an inevitable defeat; instead, it makes him try his intelligence with greater enthusiasm and power to make deeper and varied sense of the past. What stands registered is a ‘historical power’ out of an ignorance that frustrates to inspire, that defeats without dousing a cry for another fight to knowledge. This is the agony of history, a ritual emerging from description of events as contrasted with discourse, an act of silence and retrieval. It is an acknowledgement of a ‘powerful feeling that history is simultaneously there and not there, real and illusory – a ghost forever trailing behind, which vanishes when we turn around’.6 History does not become a mere investigation but is also a ‘thinking’, a specificity built with the mortars of the past combining a ‘performative’ bedrocked in imagination and intangibles. The past is both the ‘other’ and a self that sees the present as its other, at once as reification and as slithery, transmutative everyday. Jean-Luc Nancy writes that ‘the characteristic of representational thought is to represent, for itself, both itself and its outside, the outside of its limit. To cut out a form upon the fundament, and to cut out a form of the fundament. Thereafter, nothing more can come, nothing more can come forth, or be born from any fundament’.7 In our ‘formations’ of history, the representable, the irrepresentable and the unrepresentable work within a tension of meaning and an anxiety of sense – not simply in understanding ‘intentionality condition’, ‘recognition condition’ and principle of ‘aboutness’.8 Moving beyond the ‘suspension of history’ is moving with the intangibilities of history. It inaugurates and then terminates itself to reinaugurate a pace, a passage, suturing a coming forth or ‘presencing’ of sense that distinguishes meaning in a form that is not merely cut of the fundament. There is the ‘ghost of Hamlet’s father’ in historical representation – the ghost being a ‘problematic phenomenon, less substantial than flesh and blood, but much more powerful’. Even when it is invisible, it ‘creates a queasy unease in the land’.9 It gives rise to what Eelco Runia would argue

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Lover’s Quarrel with the Past

as mastering of the historian by the past when all efforts have been made to master the past. The unpredictability of the ghost’s emergence, its protean form and existence in a surplus makes for ‘a luminosity in which the past comes to our assistance and supplies our work with the life we ourselves couldn’t provide. You may call it “inspiration”, an “Aha-Erlebnis”, or just plain “insight”, but the point is that it is a kind of gift from regions whose existence we normally do not recognize’.10 But presence is in the absence and is not a kind of taxonomic opposite of absence. Absence, like Sartre’s négatités enables presence, making it move out of a simple binarism of being and non-being and investing it in a relational context involving a heterogeneity of values and philosophies. The inherent activism and intentionality in absence surface as presence that, in its ‘intense quietness’, then takes an originary position informing ‘different senses’ into our orders of understanding and complexities of discursive manifestation. Absence becomes presence and, hence, a determinant in the formation of discourses, in constituting forms of subjectivity. Such formations are not held by a rule, unchangingly choreographed; most often in a flux and motile, the changes are understood both in its abstract and concrete expressions and in a dialectical fecundity that problematises borders separating myth and history. Presence is not always a surfacing of the repressed; rather, it lubricates out of the persistent ‘translogical’ quarrel with the past, out of a negation of efforts that threaten to lobotomise the past and, also, grows out of a negativity and apprehendability in historical representation and description. Presence leaves history on trial, motivating it as a process that never nihilates the past. Presence influences even in absence; it is a force and a power that absence inscribes among the existent and the registered. Runia argues, ‘Presence is not the result of metaphorically stuffing up absences with everything you can lay your hands on. It can at best be kindled by metonymically presenting absences’.11 Presence is a state of pre-narration; it is also implicated in post-narration. It is caught in the interstices of historical narration; it is an active resident in a prison-house of historical representation. It challenges and questions the limits of representation in a variety of discourses. All forms of representation bear the promise of a presence mothered by an absence. This absence can be conscious when the subject chooses to put something at the other end of the line or, without an alarm to the subject the absence can simmer unwarily in the backyard and then ambush with a meaning under circumstances where factors required to judge its legitimacy are too feeble to question it. Presence can be positive when, for instance, parliamentarians in arguing on the floor of the House keep the ‘absent’ electorate in mind. It can be perilous when narratives of ethnic or communal glorification are mismapped and malappropriated to aggrandise the particular needs of a community at the exclusion of the ‘other’. Ideas from the past that can never be pinned down to strict objectivity and incidents from the past that are more a part of popular consciousness and products of our cultural inheritance than possessions attested to by archaeologists

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become naturalised residents of our daily existence. The past becomes immovable; it affects and influences the way we think of our present; it loses its pastness and chimes with the breath of our everyday existence. This, thus, rescribes our everyday discourse with the affect and pull of ‘presence’. Presence succeeds in introducing a tension in the way we perceive the limits of representability. The relationship that presence is seen to have with the past is problematised by the way we define the past in relation to the present. When the past is recorded and grounded in facts and has the sanction of historians and archaeologists, the ambiguities about our ways of representation are sparse. But since not all past is recorded history, the unrepresentability of the past encourages certain experiences and formations that a proper historian cannot be comfortable with. The language of representation changes as a historian is forced to enter the zone of speculative inferences; stepping across the line of certainty that scientific methodologies can provide, representation is often buttressed by imagination and the sublimity in historical experience is allowed to peek over its shoulder. To an extent, presence determines a historian’s language, his choice of subjects, what he wants to represent and what he cannot but leave unrepresented; on some occasions it has the misfortune of being the enemy of historical representation, but on other occasions it is the strength and support in our understanding of things that the rationality and reason traditionally expected of history cannot always explain. Do historical representations become typically more ‘present’ than what they represent? Where does this ‘presence’ come from if the represented, if reality itself, does not endow it with its credentials? Could there be anything that is more ‘real’ and more present than even reality itself? And, if so, what, then, is this ‘anything’ and where should we locate it?’12 Presence is the ‘effectual’ angel who can entice and also be the victim of its own enticement, for when historians fail to clip her wings, the pseudo-nonhistorians outrage her by manipulating her uniqueness to serve their own partisan ends. In fact, Hindu history is one such domain that teases us to think out the vicissitudes of presence’s angelic flighty presence. Presence conceived as the surfacing of the absent or of what is perceived to be absent or of what has existed without stirring the consciousness has influenced our understanding of Hindu history in many ways. Presence is complicit in the understanding of Hindu history and the unfolding ramifications of the contemporary essentialist and sectarian Hindu attitude towards the ‘other’. How can we render a different dimension to the concept of the ‘presence’ in relation to the shifts and turns of communal history? To what extent can it be appropriated to argue the current crisis in Hindu-Muslim relationships in India? How does ‘presence’ render distinctness to the Indian concept of history and help explicate some areas in our understanding of religion, tradition and historiography? What has presence managed to convey when meaning under the Western principles of historical understanding have failed to comprehend certain aspects of what Hindus understand and have argued as itihasa?

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An Indian Approach to Itihasa The charge, framed within a Western historiographical model, that Hindus lack a sense of history is both contentious and misleading. Narratives of the past in South Asia have too often been dismissed as ‘myth’ simply because they did not conform to certain historiographic standards. V.S. Naipaul leaps forward to note this alleged area of darkness: ‘Indian interpretations of their history are almost as painful as the history itself; and it is especially painful to see the earlier squalour being repeated today … people with a sense of history might have ordered matters differently … this is precisely the saddening element in Indian history; this absence of growth and development. It is a history whose only history is that life goes on. There is only a series of beginnings, no final creation’.13 Although this chapter does not intend to run a counterdiscourse against these allegations of achronicity and evinces no desire to reframe the categories of Indian historiography within the prescriptions and paradigms of the Western/Hegelian model of world history, it tries to draw attention to the ways in which history has been perceived by the Hindus, the frames and processes in which history has been practised and understood. Rabindranath Tagore summarily dismisses as ‘superstition’ all efforts that try to see history as being tied to the dictates of world history; he believes that history cannot be practised in the same way in every nation. One hears despairing sighs when inroads into archives fail to bless historians with sufficient resources to write about India; they would quip, ‘How can we find history here when there is no politics?’ Tagore wisely notes, ‘When one tries to search for brinjals in the rice field he is destined to meet with frustration and this disappointment makes him conclude that rice is not an agricultural crop’.14 If Hindus are endowed with a sense of history, what, then, is the nature of their historical sense-generation? How has the Hindu way of doing history provoked and made possible the emanation of ‘presence’? How has this distinctness allowed presence to run its own course and influence the ways in which Indians have staked out their tryst with history, their ‘quarrel’ with the past? An understanding of the distinct Indian approach to itihasa and historiography will perhaps gives us a moderate clue as to the easy capitulation of most Hindus to the mythic and religious appropriation of the past. One may note that on most occasions religious faith for this community is usually independent of objective fact; rather, it is something that is attainable through mystical introspection. Religious consciousness is akin to a deeper spiritual reality where transrational faith and discursive intellect are not in dissonance with each other. More than deduction, differentiation, analysis and integration, most Hindus are happy to remain embedded in subjective conditions and believe in the advancement from one subjective state to another. One cannot ignore the luxuriance of popular imagination, the high emotional pitch in popular

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worship and the intense connection between mythology and philosophy. Since the long history of such a civilisation has resulted from many extraordinary processes, even a small mythological story or a folk tale (for instance, the story of the Indian epic Ramayana and the myth encircling Ayodhya) exhibits in a crystallised form all the vicissitudes of these periods. In general, the essence of old and new happenings is brought out by precisely such earthy, native traditions that are specific to place and time. So, the polarisation of myth and history and the secular distinction between ‘facts’ (and science) and ‘fiction’ (and literature), which are the characteristic features of European modernity, are not integral to early Indian historiography. Much of traditional Indian history has, in fact, been embedded within cultural forms such as myths – forms in which historical consciousness awaits to be prised out – making it, thereby, evident that the factors that have resulted in ‘modern historical consciousness’ were not present in traditional India. Dwelling on the ‘distinctness’ of Indian historiography, N.A. Nikam writes: What is history but a ‘regressive’ perspective of time; and, every culture has a sense of history; every culture has its ‘golden age’ and a memory of the deeds of its heroes, and has its tradition. But as a regress into the past is always possible so there is ‘history’ behind history, and so the paradox of history is that in human culture the beginnings of history are not in history but in ‘pre-history’, and pre-history merges into the myth. Indian culture, Hinduism in particular, is the forgotten memory of the beginninglessness of an undated tradition sanatana dharma alive to look back upon its own past in order to live in a changing time.15

Hindus, in general, cannot avoid collapsing into ritual, fantasy and myth and have always cultivated an allegiance to sanatana dharma (the eternal law); deeming it as sacrosanct, Hindu ethos, thus, commands an unstinted fealty from all members of its community. At one level, ‘progress’ for the Hindus means a movement towards achieving the heights of the ‘glorious past’ (mythicised, for instance, in the notion of the Ramrajya) and at another level ‘there is always an attempt in modern India to interpret the present in terms of past and the past in terms of present’.16 Although Kalhana (in the mid-twelfth century) exclaimed that a ‘virtuous poet alone is worthy of praise who, free from love or hatred, ever restricts his language to the exposition of facts’,17 Indian history plays a good deal looser with the notion of fact than that found in either Chinese or Western historiography. Unlike the ancient Chinese who left behind for posterity well-attested historical treatises, Aryans are said to have left behind myths, and in several cases of transmutations, we have history as a blend of fact and ‘imagination’. Though the court of every important king in India is said to have been endowed with a chronicler (Arthasastra points out the existence of official records and the importance of officers responsible for maintaining them), and despite the fact that a strong oral, literary and writing tradition in

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ancient India was somewhat informed by a sense of preservation, the unflinching commitment to the ‘factual’ is nonexistent in the subcontinental culture. Hindus did not preserve records as diligently as the Chinese did; what the Hindus felt worth preserving was the meaning of events, not a record of when events took place. It is the particularity and meticulousness of historical details that do not bother Indians much. They care more for the truth of the experience or the soundness of doctrine than the circumstances that gave it birth.18 They were more tradition minded than history minded, but this is the way they generated meaning out of their interface with the past.19 In India, unlike in the West, neither philosophy nor religion has ever been considered in isolation. Indeed, the Indian concept of history can be seen as a combination of the two. Hence, a strong mythic structure undergirds the concept of history, and there is no denying that the history for the Hindus is lived-in reality, and that Hindu culture has both a paleocentric and a mythopoetic character.20 This distinct sense of fact, in a certain indulgent frivolity with the strict terms of historical representation and in a living conformity to tradition that is ritualistic and sacrosanct makes ‘presence’ a core constituent of Hindu historiography. Hindus revere the past but not always in the religious sense; the past has come down to them as inspiration and prescription of social and personal conduct. Ancient Vedic literature, the later epics, and the medieval tales of the past (Puranas) illustrate through myth-making the essential relationships between humans and institutions. Whether in a family or a classroom, in politics or the work place, ancient heroes and their deeds are recalled, and the present is compared with the past. Presence determines our ways of ‘recall’; presence throws its weight, at times unconsciously, behind what we choose from the past and how we make the past talk to us; having a hand at resurrections, it makes old myths change and gives birth to new ones. Unknown facts are filled in, and the accounts become richer as they pass from mouth to mouth and generation to generation. As every Indian would say, ‘Don’t confuse me with facts; the ones I don’t know, I will make up’. Hindus ‘make up’; Hindus know the subtle art of mixing fact with myth, unlike their Western counterparts; Hindus choose to revel in diverse meanings and compose meaning out of their rather ‘affect’ relations with the past. History is not sure of the character of the baggage that presence puts on her back. Reconstructionism leaves enough room for ‘presences’ to keep crawling in and debouch in ways that take the narrative by ideological twists, bias and inventive bursts of historical interpretation.21 The space that the Hindus have inherited to manoeuvre their past and to restructure and reinterpret forms of knowledge and items of history has given a certain pliancy to the rules of ethical and moral conduct. Old stories about ancestors are given new forms; stories gleaned and inherited from the past are adapted, moulded and welded together to suit the needs of the present. Presence has futurised the past. Different versions of ancient texts exist, and different texts always tell

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slightly altered accounts of particular events. Such accomodationist tendencies and manoeuvrability challenge our understanding of the mental constructions of the Hindus; more important than the hard crust of facts are the emotions and ideas orbiting round myths that spring from the Hindu way of life, which knows little history and much philosophy and literature. These are the basis of the unique cultural formations that still dominate the nation’s socio-religious consciousness. Central to Indian historiography is the storytelling ability of the Hindus. In the act of storytelling the predominant role of ‘experience’ is discounted, unlike in the long European tradition of storytelling. The immediacy of personal experience does not make up the story for itihasa. As Ranajit Guha ably argues, Itihasa as the repository of the tales told by tradition and bequeathed from one generation to the next since antiquity has little to do with the immediacy of experience. To the contrary, recursivity rules, as in the Mahabharata, the most outstanding example of the genre. Everything in this epic is an exercise in retelling. Even the very first narrator tells it as told by his guru, Vyasa. It is hard to improve on that as an instance of repetition. As for the audience, the stories they want to hear are stories they have already heard. In fact, there are numerous occasions when the storyteller is asked to follow up the shorter version of an episode immediately by a more elaborate one. And this is not a matter of any individual listener’s caprice. Convention allows itihasa to be narrated in abridgement as well as at length, and one is as good as the other.22

The charans or traditional minstrels, Brahminic barots and bhats who composed eulogies of their royal employers, revelled in the dialectic of history and story; they worked on the soil of facts with the ploughshares of imagination. The emergence of the charans expresses an attitude that ‘subordinates the historical reality of past individuals and individual events to the process of cultural continuity and cultural renewal’.23 The narratives of these Hindu storytellers have their own share of legends, fairy tales and myths. It is a different way of conceiving history and its function: In traditional Indian historiography, the data produced and the statistics used are often unique. A king is mentioned as having sixty thousand children, and the heavens are mentioned as being inhabited by three hundred thirty million gods, not only to make the point that the king is potent and gods are many, but also to wipe out what many would consider the real data, and obviate any possibility of verification or empirical treatment … In other words, in this type of historiography data are important only so far as they relate to the overall logic and cultural symbols that must be communicated.24

Ancient Indian views of history put greater accent on the processes of thought and cultures than on the flow of events. The emergence of the concept of yugas is one such dimension of the cultural process, for Indians found more interest in eternity than in temporal linearity. Referring to the Puranas, Ainslie Embree notes that ‘human existence must be seen against a background of an almost

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unimaginable duration of time’. Compared to other civilisations that view history in term of thousands of years, the Indians – Buddhists, Jains and Hindus – narrated it in terms of billions of years, and the historical process in its temporal manifestation becomes a part of a ‘vast cyclical movement’.25 So Hindus are expected to have ‘durational expectancies’ (in the words of Alvin Toffler), culturally induced assumptions about temporal processes. Different cultures have different time biases depending on the importance each culture assigns to the tensional and negational relation among present, past and the future. In fact, ‘Indians have a deep sense of time’, argues Agrawal. ‘Some of their mythical figures had millions of years of life-spans. The age of some Bodhisattvas was 1032 years – far beyond the age of the universe. Puranic descriptions of historic dynasties are so confusing that they provide ample ground for controversies. In contrast, Chinese time-keeping was so accurate that even the dates for their kings of the third millennium BC are correct to one year. Such accurate records have helped to date supernovas and the reappearance of comets. Indians were traditionally more concerned with the nature of time than with its direction, except where the Yugas were concerned. The Yugas were cyclical and represented cycles of birth and destruction of the universe’.26 Presence has come to nestle in such an unquantitative approach to history. Presence has also crept in through the fuzzy zones provided by the lack of sufficient evidence: cataclysmic dynastic clashes, waves of invasion, and marauding political bands destroyed important documents and other material, with the result that several junctures of Indian historiography have become unclear to us. This means that several strands of Indian history that would otherwise have been sufficiently chronicled suffer from factual inadequacy. This has rendered certain crucial events in Hindu history as ‘black holes’, holes that serve as temptations for intrusive misadventures and are conducive to ultra-religious incursions.27 Also, manuscripts in India have not been able to battle the climatic factor successfully (failing most often to survive anything more than five hundred years) except in the arid parts of western India. ‘Most of the Sanskrit books’, writes Vincent Smith, ‘were composed by Brahmans, who certainly had not a taste for writing histories, their interest being engaged in other pursuits. But the rajas were eager to preserve annals of their own doings, and took much pain to secure ample and permanent record of their achievements. They are not to blame for the melancholy fact that their efforts have had little success. The records, laboriously prepared and regularly maintained, have perished almost completely in consequence of the climate, including insect pests in that term, and of the innumerable political revolutions from which India has suffered’.28 The archival tradition also lost steam and fell prey not just to climatic changes or political violence but also perished on account of certain sudden changes of administrative centres that each dynasty created; preservation also suffered owing to the emergence of other local or regional powers who scarcely exhibited interest in archival preservation, preoccupied as they were, with warfare.

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Ayodhya and the Presence of Myth A section of historians sees tradition as a decisive source of information in India because religion, they contend, holds a preponderant sway over the lives of most Indians. Tradition, it is argued, helps preserve historical information, and historical archaeology, at times, fails to hold its ground before the immovability and inviolability of tradition. Sites believed to be associated with religious heroes, related to sacred figures from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and identified with incidents that have dropped anchors in public memory mostly through word of mouth, have crossed ‘sharp’ swords with the methodological enquiries of the archaeologists. What has come down through the years as lived tradition remains firm and deep although, on occasions, it is dissonant with the historical findings endorsed by rational-scientific modes of investigation. In India, the ancient is never past; the ancient past is very much the present substance of India, demographically as well as culturally.29 Myth is something that the nation or the civilisation can never successfully objectify. The myth of Ayodhya is one such phenomenon. Ayodhya, the birthplace of Lord Rama and where Rama’s kingdom is said to have thrived, has, I would like to argue, forefronted the problem of ‘presence’. Frank Ankersmit observes that ‘myth incarnates the parallel processes of civilizations, nations, and so forth, hence, and is the place where actions represented will continuously repeat themselves in the action of representation. “Presence” is an appropriate term for referring to this stubborn persistence of the past in which it remains a presence in the present. In this way myth can also give meaning to “presence”, that is to say, suggest where we may expect to find presence in a civilization’s cultural repertoire’.30 Ayodhya is a part of ‘sacred history’, a deeply chested narrative truth in the ‘cultural repertoire’ of the Hindus. It exists as a reminder to what Hindus understand as sanatana dharma that is symbolic of the religious sentiments about a sacramental past; it is timeless and instrumentalises a synchronic unity. It is this distension of myth into history that makes Ayodhya turn into a Hindu city that is claimed to have its ‘authentic’ roots in the glorious past under Lord Rama’s reign. Ayodhya’s past, clarifies Julia Shaw, is ‘inscribed in a myriad of contradictory texts, literary, archaeological and countless others derived from oral sources, or from temporal spheres such as the dates upon which certain sites are supposed to be visited. Like all texts, none can be read in purely objective terms, especially since they are tied up with issues of invention and legitimation’.31 There is blurring of borders between archaeological and ritual time, space and topography, which thus legitimises the basis of invented biography. Even though archaeologists have not found anything of note that would have made them enthusiastic about any claims to the history of Ayodhya, the narratives of Ramayana have grown on most Indians; there is no denying the temptation to see myth lost in an embrace with history that, most often, is an uneasy one. Ayodhya remains sacred in the heart of most Hindus; Lord Rama is invoked in various communal festivals

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with conviviality and religious ardour; idols of Rama find a revered place in the prayer room of most god-fearing Hindus. Rama and his kingdom in Ayodhya have a presence in the consciousness of most Hindus, evoking the benignity of a dharmic life that communicates the need for a peaceful neighbourhood free from all forms of inhumanity. With anxious persistence, secular historians have demonstrated the preponderance of religious belief and, consequently, the etiolation of historical evidence in efforts that try to render a sacrosanct status to the phenomenon of Ayodhya. Most Hindus have been happy to see Ayodhya in a shroud of myth. They are content to consider it as part of their unrecorded history: folklorish, oral and, hence, unquantifiable, having a sublimity of its own. Nestled outside the claims of the scientific paradigms of historical investigation, Ayodhya enjoys a living presence both in Hindu consciousness and in India’s unhistoricised and achronic past. It has an authenticity that ‘is clearly not the kind of authenticity that one attributes to a document from the past whose provenance one has verified. Rather, it is authenticity in the existential sense, deriving its force from the alleged fact that it emerges directly and immediately from the subject’s encounter with the world’.32 Strangely, history in the Indian subcontinent is not authoritative enough to dictate a divorce from this slice of Hindu past; quaintly, myth, too, is not formidable enough to have an undifferentiated existence of its own. For Indians presence links the two – presence has inspired Indians to both mythicise and historicise their encounters with the past; the midwifery of presence has compelled Indians to revel in a bemusement, and even the authority of consensus has most often failed to rescue them from this state. Hindu fundamentalist leaders who juggle myth and history in their own astute ways can lend a vicious spin on this discourse of presence. Religious maximalists and Hindutva historians argue that Indians have never bothered to question the space that myth and history should legitimately hold against each other in their engagement with Ayodhya. Taking advantage of how most Hindus get consumed by ‘moments of intensity’33 and knowing how such moments fortify collective consciousness that does not care much to rationalise its purposes, they have made presence serviceable to the ministration of the Hindu right. It is important to see how myth and history hide beneath the skin of each other in a pontificatory discourse that censors, suppresses and mismaps events to domesticate a portion of the past to the service of the present. Let me cite an instance to understand the nature of this discourse. This is how it runs: In AD 1528 Babar came to Ayodhya (Aud) and halted for a week. He destroyed the ancient temple and on its site built a mosque, which is known as the Babri Masjid. Around seventy-six battles had to be fought in the defence of the Janmabhumi, the birthplace of Rama. The first aggressor was the notorious king of Lanka, Ravana, who destroyed Ayodhya during the time of the ancestors of Shri Ram. The second attack came from the Greek king Milind or Menander; the third assault was commandeered by Salar Masud, a nephew of the much-

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maligned Muslim plunderer, Mahmud Ghaznavi. All this followed till Babar arrived. Such a description can certainly provoke the Hindus to put an ear out for an unknown part of the story of their civilisation. But, ironically, this selective prodding does not inspire them to investigate the validity of these statements; cocooned in an uncanny satisfaction, most Indians even today have a somnolent attitude toward the past that refuses to pick a ‘quarrel’ up with both the unrepresented and the represented. The politics of the ‘represented’ is lost in moments of intensity, in a mythogenic construction that works on mechanisms of distortion. The lugubrious charm and seductive aura that presence knits around Ayodhya are lost when they are tailored to form a part of the stereotypes for ultra-religionists; the strategic carpentry of representation forces Ayodhya to lose all that it beatifically stood for; it is lost to the ruckus of nationalist blarney. Presence has indulgently allowed history to love and hate myth at the same time; it has made the domain of historical objectivity patient not to begrudge the footfalls of popular belief, legend and folklores. But caught in the loop of presence, communal historiography in India has become the enterprise of a consolidated historical practice that subordinates historical discourse to the behest and politics of myth. Myth undergirded with historical details is, thus, represented as historical knowledge and in such representations, presence is seen to confound fact with fiction. It insidiously turns history, religion and politics into a collective where each covertly gains out of the other’s presence. It endows a collective with emotional and normative underpinning as well as a common language and set of understandings about how a particular society-community functions and how it ought to function. Ayodhya as a special segment of the viscous Hindu past is zealously privatised and politicised, spawning a feeling of participation mystique, and ‘presentified’ with a heritage. Presence, thus harnessed and instrumentalised, is found to lend a specific identity to a community and, in the process, unfailingly empower a group of people who self-style themselves as moral custodians of an entire community’s way of existence. So, presence in Indian historiography cannot avoid the stranglehold of Brahmin priests, sadhus and the political scolds who, revelling as public intellectuals, labour hard on this festering nexus. As explicators of certain issues of Indian history to most of the poor and semi-literate Hindus, these people have been communicators of a particular set of messages to the youth. They establish their role as arbiters of the nation’s fate; it is in their hands that the definition of Hinduism is modified and the concept of the Ramayana and Ram undergo a paradigm shift. In fact, the centrality of Brahmins in the explication and legitimation of Indian history is all too well known to expatiate here. The influence of Brahmins and the elitist projection of the Sanskrit language (devabhasa, the language of the gods, as it was called) peripheralised several narratives and events in Indian history; it constructed an institutional power that helped inscribe the epistemological preference of the Brahmins into the mainstream

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discourse of Indian history. The sources, particularly those in Sanskrit, points out Romila Thapar, ‘were in the main the works of the brahmans, as keepers of the ancient classical tradition, and expressed the Brahminical Weltanschauung’. Thapar cautions us by saying that ‘the reliance on “pandits”, those learned in Sanskrit and supposedly the guardians of the ancient tradition, was not the most reliable – although undoubtedly the most convenient – access to ancient history. Many of the contemporary ideological prejudices of the pandits were often incorporated into what was believed to be the interpretation of the ancient tradition.34 Evidence exists of Brahmans wielding political power in ancient India but it is conceivable that to a creative Brahminical mind, history – when accuracy predominates over imagination and fancy, and diligence over talent – proved to be less attractive than philosophy and literature; it, thus, provided ample scope for the display of creativity and merit. In fact, British Orientalist scholarship availed the services of learned Brahmans who would substantially accentuate at once the concepts that were true to the Brahminical points of view and facts that were subservient to their sense of interpretation of the past. Several spaces of Indian pasts have been strategically exscinded; several discourses springing from non-Brahminical ways of perceiving the past are silenced or at best relegated to second-order knowledge. This is one potential way of encouraging the play of presences. Most often, it is in the strategic contemporanisation of a discourse that ‘presence’ makes it presence felt. The Brahminisation of Indian history is, to an appreciable extent, about presentification of past, about ‘presencing’, about finding a character amidst the chiaroscuro of historical understanding.

Presence as a Problematising Catalyst Presence has made it difficult for Indians to see history as a representational art, an art that is predominantly objective. The genesis of ‘presence’ is in the limits of historical representation. It is the power that constructs the vestibule between what historical representation can convey and ‘what meaning cannot convey’; it is an experience, a generation of meaning that cannot always be strictly ‘material’ or contingent, what Hans Gumbretch would call ‘materialities of communication’. So history is pressed into service to work on the huge capital of mythic knowledge; presence, which so subtly demarcates the pulls and pushes of myth and history in the lives of the Indians, is seen to catalyse this operation. Presence tantalises most Indians with what they know and do not know, with what they know as truth and what they accept as truth because they are trained to be lazy to investigate its validity. There exists a conspicuous indifference to what they see as history, the objective manifestation of historical investigation, as against what has remained with them for long as part of a received tradition. By way of its unrecorded, unstructured continuities with

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the ‘ancient past’, the issue of Ayodhya compels the historian’s attention to it. Perhaps there is more to history and myth in the moments of ‘silent intensity’ and ‘extreme quietness’ in the ringing bells and aromatic garbagriha of scores of temples that dot the landscape of this small and sleepy town.35 A typical Hindu concept of life places the ultimate reality and goal of life outside the pale of history and encompasses the mundane experiences of human beings.36 But this attitude coupled with the vile advantages that political scolds have drawn out of it force Indians to confront the vulnerabilities and intangibilities of history in their lives. So presence problematises the ethics of historical writing and representation. Presence in history is the ‘sense of beyonding’; it is the provocation to unsettle what epistemic fossilisation can do. It is the charm of interrogating a reified discourse, a temptation and, sometimes an inspiration, to probe into what one has come to accept as ‘mandir’ and question what one has come to think of as the appropriate place to offer one’s nawaz. It is the temptation to know truths that the nation is fearful of making a clean breast of; presence can sometimes give the historian the handle to investigate hypostatised corridors of past; it can arm the historian to unearth ‘hidden tubers’ that have been tucked away in the cold storage of a nation’s past. It becomes an abiding charm to tease history out with a thought, nibble at the strict disciplinary borders and work outside the button-down epistemological fences. So presence is an intangible and aggregatory quadrant that the past never consciously records and whose emergence affects the way people negotiate with their present. It has an invisible presence. In 1990 the Bharatiya Janata Party leader Lal Krishna Advani triggered a ceremonious nation-wide chariot march as a prelude to the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya. During the course of his journey through the Indian villages, people flocked to take a look at the extravagantly decorated chariot and the garish entourage. It is highly unlikely that the poor tribals and village folks who thronged and cheered the march in droves shared the ‘cultivated and educated’ reasons that goaded Advani to undertake the Rath Yatra. Cutting across religious affiliations, people milled around to catch a glimpse of an extraordinary phenomenon. How much of history did these people know? What kind of history were they indoctrinated with? What kind of historical consciousness jells these people together? It is perhaps what Eelco Runia would ascribe as the metonymic access to ‘common knowledge’. Caught in a ‘focussed intensity’, this becomes an undifferentiated and uncritical convergence on a point in history, in the premise of historical reality that is out of step with our understanding of history as ‘ongoing process’. Presence, as Runia would like to argue, is ‘being in touch’ with ‘people, things, events, and feelings that made you into the person that you are’. It is a ‘whisper of life breathed into what has become routine and clichéd’.37 Runia observes further that ‘like effective slander, “presence” (for that’s what we’re talking about) is almost impossible to

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track down. It is an active force, we do not know it is there, it neither is, nor connects to, a story, and because it cannot be remembered, it cannot be forgotten either’.38 Also it requires no hard debate to conclude that most Indians are not aware of the formal meaning of secularism, leave alone its deeper implications. Complexities apart, what binds them together? The villages in India where most of her people reside do not need constitutional experts and social theorists to explain the art of peaceful and harmonious existence. There is something undefined, something uncategorised, something sublime, something outside the law that keeps various people believing in a variety of customs and belief systems together. ‘India’s redemption’, notes Arundhati Roy, with her characteristic irony, ‘lies in the inherent anarchy and factiousness of its people, and in the legendary inefficiency of the Indian state’. This anarchy need not be mistaken as lawlessness; it is a way of life that denounces strict structuration and regimentation. Stewed in dissent, India cannot be expected to behave all the time in conformity with the principles and preferences of Western societies. Roy wisely observes that India is ‘too old and too clever to be made to jump through the hoops all over again’. India is too diverse, too grand, too feral, and too democratic to be lobotomized into believing in one single idea.39 Whether it be the moments of intensity involved in Rath Yatra or the ‘immeasurable and incalculable’ in rural India’s understanding of the ‘secular’, we encounter the invocation of the non-linguistic levels of being: the appreciation of ‘thingness’, the experience of the ‘naïve’ idea of ‘unmediated material reality’ that these people encounter and fail to explain under any heuristic substantialist principles of understanding. Human experience and historical meaning are informed by people’s understanding of the presence of the past in material objects, and also by a belief in the contributory power that any direct encounter with physical sites can have on our historical sense-generation. This is understanding history by relating our bodies to certain objects ‘if we had encountered them in their own historical everyday worlds’, rather than questioning what those objects ‘mean’.40 It is knowing history by ‘contact’, feeling out through sensory encounters, engagement with ‘aesthetic intensity’, a non-Cartesian space that makes space for ‘concepts that would allow us to point to what is irreversibly nonconceptual in our lives’.41 History, in the words of Jacques Derrida, has become a ‘movement of a summation of history’, making it live on the possibility of meaning. Presence supports and shelters such possibilities. Presence contradicts dialectics in our idea of history and allows an existence ‘outside history’. It rescues us from the immobilisation of telic historicality, the imperium of historia. Presence is born, and in its birth can efface itself and be born into other incarnations of sense. It contradicts the edges of history, straggles the borders of disciplined historiography in a kind of ‘indefinite comebacks’. In its metonymic incarnation, presence, thus, has the ‘inordinate ability to spring surprises’ on ourselves. The meaning representation designates

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is queered by the imminence of sense that arrives, departs, reemerges, pales out in a disturbing continuity. It inscribes a discontinuity in the mechanism of continuity that representationalism has come to establish. The ‘discontinuity’ is in springing surprises, in detonating wonder, and continuity is in acknowledging the suddenness of such vertiginous emergences. Naming Advani’s march as ‘historic’ is a poor, indefensible way of trying to live outside discontinuities. Presence may not have the ‘pre-venience of the flower in the fruit’. It exists as sense of a seemingly inexhaustible meaning-sphere. Has presence helped Indians to make a more varied sense of history? It is difficult to respond to this negatively. Fastened to the apron strings of British Orientalist historians, Indians have looked at their past acting on instructions from the other. But the history of the nation and its people solicit an internal position that urges Indians to look at their history in precisely the way they want. Views from without have long afflicted the nation; hermetic views that have made Indians see their own country through the eyes of the outsider blind them eventually to the abiding charm of the discontinuities and achronicities. Caught in the ‘waiting room of history’, there has been some self-consciousness in countries like India, notes Amit Chaudhuri, that ‘asks to be judged and understood by universal standards. It isn’t possible to begin to discuss that self-consciousness, or sense of identity, without discussion in what way that universalism both formed and circumscribed it’.42 If presence has provincialised the subcontinent, if being provincialised means vanquishment from the theatre of world history, Indians need not mind.43 What is important for Indians to realise is that presence has added an interesting dimension to the way in which they have conceptualised history, making claims to a form of indigeneity, a sort of critical nativism. Vinay Lal writes, ‘Though modernised and civic minded Indians deplore the indifference of their countrymen and women to museums, historical monuments, and other relics of the “national heritage”, the ahistoricism of the Indian sensibility remains one of the most attractive intellectual, spiritual, and cultural features of Indian civilization’.44 Rabindranath Tagore believed that historical knowledge could be imparted through Katha and Jatra, and the role of imagination in the acquisition and dissemination of this knowledge could scarcely be ignored. Understanding the ‘past’ does not emerge merely from a subservience to the dictates of ‘facts’; imagination, in its own peculiar and unenviable way, contributes to our pool of understanding. It is the compelling, though precarious, liberty to ‘sentimentalise’ the past – like the freedom to smile, as it were, that one experiences in the comfort of an anticipated rain by merely smelling the sudden gust of wet breeze on a sultry afternoon. A lover’s quarrel between imagination and fact has never deserted the discourse of historical knowledge in India, and history, in its candid methodological unfoldment, has come to nestle close to the heart. Tagore writes, ‘My

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proposal is that it is through the modes of Katha and Jatra that history with its glowing description of places and events in time should get promoted’.45 It is myth that has encouraged a kind of open-endedness, an intrusive freedom, the lurid vice of ‘choice’ to open a portion of history up. It provokes explanation, writes James Carse, where ‘explanation absorbs the unspeakable into the speakable, myth reintroduces the silence that makes original discourse possible’.46 It is through this silence that ‘presences’ drop like paratroopers from the dark night sky. So commitment to historical veridicality cannot be clearly defined; the factual bedrock is not always the premise from which historians should choose to make all discursive inaugurations. Reconstructive endeavours are built around some strength of sublimity, imponderables, impossible and irrecuperables. The past as sublime and the sublimity of historical ignorance submit to a discourse of violence – uncontrolled and mimetic – and presence can be cited as one of the causes for its emergence. Presence resides in the interstices between historical representation and sublimity. Sublime is also the discourse of domination that makes people both consciously and unconsciously aggregate around a moment, sparking off a response that can often be violent. This becomes a moment where conviction and persuasion do not listen to the voices of debate and, hence, refuse to be enframed within discourses of rationality and informed understanding. Memory, as we shall see in the next chapter, is as much mimetic as it is a ‘participation’ in a moment of sublimity; it is collectivisation wrapped in a sheath of unconscious that collapses memory, victimage, group-identity into a violent combination, into a violence that builds on the moment of the sublime. Sublime brings blame; it invites risk; it prospers on shock; it rides adventure. Presence intangibly resides close by. It is the power of ‘presence’ that has been building up for long on the Indians that make them asymmetrical, inconsistent and idiosyncratic. Presence has lent a ‘fascination’ to the character of itihasa; the subcontinent ceaselessly, in the words of William Wordsworth, is ‘disturbed with a presence’. Presence agitates; it stimulates our sensations, frustrates by being elusively indescribable, and it is compelling for it makes the present wrestle hard to subjugate it. Runia observes, ‘It is as presence, then, that the past is more dramatically present than naïve historical realists assume. And it is as presence, too, that the past is more radically absent than historical constructionists claim. For, as presence, the past is terribly close, though it can never be reached. As presence, the past is the exact opposite of what historians think it is’.47 So when the categories of understanding the past and the present become a ‘step-careful’ to define the premises of ‘presence’, presence defeats their intent by making them a ‘step careless’. Hindu history has this ‘step careless’ streak temptingly on offer, making for an oscillation between ‘meaning effects and presence effects’.48 Hindu history conveys sense when meaning fails to convey.

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Notes 1. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, L. Annaei Senecae Ad Lucilium Epistularum Moralium (Charleston, SC: Bibliolife, 2009), II, 5. 2. Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (New York: Harper and Row Perennial Library, 1989), 6. 3. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 2. 4. See Frederick Maurice Powicke, Modern Historians and the Study of History. Essays and Papers (London: Odhams, 1955). 5. Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 100–101. 6. John Vernon, ‘Exhuming a Dirty Joke’, New York Times Book Review (12 July 1992), 1, 35. 7. Nancy, Birth to Presence, 2. 8. See James O. Young, Art and Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2001), 24–25. 9. Norman Austin, Meaning and Being in Myth (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 154. 10. Eelco Runia, ‘Spots of Time’, History and Theory 45, no. 3 (October 2006): 310. 11. Ibid., 309. 12. I thank Frank Ankersmit for letting me read his work on presence, historical experience and representation. He is responsible for my initial interest in the concept of presence. 13. V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 213. Why should ahistorical features of Indian sensibility be seen as a ‘lack’ and not as part of an ‘Indian’ way of approaching and conceptualising history? 14. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Bharatbarsher Itihasa’, in Rabindra Rachanavali, vol. 13 (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1989), 123. 15. N.A. Nikam, Some Concepts of Indian Culture: A Philosophical Interpretation (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1967), 10–11. The Vedic dharma signifies the teachings of the Vedas in regard to philosophy, rituals and discipline in life. It is also known as the Sanatana Dharma that is followed by the Hindus. It protects one from falling down or ruining oneself in any manner. It provides one with welfare, progress and success, both spiritual and material in life. It appears that Sanatana Dharma alone existed before the birth of other religions of the world, and still continues to exist. See Pranab Bandyopadhyay, The Hindus, A Noble Race (Calcutta: United Writers, 1993), 19–20. 16. Madhav Despande, ‘History, Change and Permanence: A Classical Indian Perspective’, in Gopal Krishna (ed.), Contributions to South Asian Studies (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), 11. 17. Quoted from R.C. Mazumdar, ‘Sources of Indian History’, in R.C. Mazumdar (ed.), The Vedic Age (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952), 49–50. 18. See D.S. Sarma, Hinduism Through the Ages (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1956), 1. 19. Troy Wilson Organ, The Hindu Quest for the Perfection of Man (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1970), 30–31. 20. Prakash N. Desai, Health and Science in the Hindu Tradition: Continuity and Cohesion (New York: Crossroads, 1989), 10. 21. Nehru puts the matter in proper perspective: ‘This lack of historical sense did not affect the masses, for as elsewhere, and more so than elsewhere, they built up their view of the past from the traditional accounts and myth and story that were handed to them from generation to generation. This imagined history and mixture of fact and legend became widely known and gave to the people a strong and abiding cultural background. But the ignoring of history had evil consequences, which pursue us still. It produced a vagueness of outlook, a divorce from life, as it is, credulity, a woolliness of the mind where fact was concerned. That mind was not at all woolly in the far more difficult but inevitably vaguer and more indefinite realms of philosophy; it was both analytic and synthetic, often very critical, sometimes sceptical. But where fact was concerned, it was uncritical, perhaps it did not attach much importance to fact as such’. See J.L. Nehru,

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The Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946), 93. This woolliness of the mind has confused history with presences, and this messy ground has often been richly harvested by politicians in collusion with religious leaders. 22. Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 61. 23. See Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists in Return from Exile (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5. 24. Ibid., 6. 25. Ainslie T. Embree (ed.), The Hindu Tradition (New York: Random House, 1972), 220. 26. See D.P. Agrawal, V.Bhalakia and S. Kusumgar, ‘Indian and Other Concepts of Time: A Holistic Framework’, in Tim Murray (ed.), Time and Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1999), 31. Velcheru Narayana Rao writes in ‘Purana as Brahminic Ideology’ that an ‘earlier concept of time and space is that of Brahmanic civilisation which coexists with what might be called, for want of a better name, a “folk” concept of time and space. Thus, India has had three different ways of conceptualising time and space, all of which are still at work in the lives of Indian people’. He sees the low caste having a folk concept of time/space; upper-caste, Sanskrit-educated Brahmins have a Puranic concept of time/space; and Western-educated Indians have a modern concept of time/ space. He observes that folk time is ‘repetitive and regenerative. It shares some of the features of a cyclic view of time, such as the return of similar events like seasons, phases of the moon, and so on; but it does not deteriorate and therefore does not spiral backward’ (88) See Wendy Doniger, ed., Pura¯n.a Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina texts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 27. A gust of breeze is reported to have blown away several pages of Babar’s memoir. So contrary to what we know Babar as – the meticulous recorder of daily occurrences – the memoir provides a lacunae in the narrative (there is no account of what happened between 2.4.1528 and 18.9.1528). All historians agree to the fact that there is no way of finding out whether in the missing pages Babar had referred to either the Ram temple or the mosque in question. Questions remain as to the intent and politics behind the loss of pages: did Babar want to suppress the fact of his visit to Ayodhya for posterity so that he came through innocent of all charges related to the alleged demolition of the Ram temple? Why can’t we accept the loss of papers as a mere accident? On the basis of the parallel drawn between the alleged demolition of the Ram temple, the building of the Babri mosque at the ruined site and this particular vacuum in Babar’s memoirs, can we assume that it is a mere coincidence of history? However, it is through such yawning holes in history that presence slithers in to rake up the cicada of controversy, teasing the past out with more stories that simmer and shimmer, stories that, most often, tantalise and avoid being dangled from the peg of hard, proven facts. 28. Vincent A. Smith, The Oxford History of India from the Earliest Times to the End of 1911 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), xviii–xix. 29. Gerald James Larson, India’s Agony Over Religion (Albany: State University New York Press, 1995), 144. 30. Frank Ankersmit, ‘“Presence” and Myth’, History and Theory 45 (October 2006): 335. 31. Julia Shaw, ‘Ayodhya’s Sacred Landspace: Ritual, Memory, Politics and Archaeological “Fact”’, Antiquity 74 (2000): 698. 32. Allan Megill, ‘History, Memory, Identity’, History of the Human Sciences 11, no. 3 (1998): 47. 33. See Hans Ulrich Gumbretch, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 96–99. 34. Romila Thapar, Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1978), 3–4. 35. Gumbretch, Production of Presence, 151. 36. D.K. Ganguly, History and Historians in Ancient India (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1984), 7–8. 37. Eelco Runia, ‘Presence’ History and Theory 45 (February 2006): 5.

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38. Runia, ‘Spots of Time’, 314. 39. Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), 31. 40. Gumbretch, Production of Presence, 124. 41. Ibid., 140. Italics in the original. 42. See Amit Chaudhuri, ‘In the Waiting-Room of History’, London Review of Books (24 June 2004), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n12/chau01_.html 43. On several occasions it has been difficult to explain what makes a religious festival for a particular community in India turn into a rendezvous for the rest and what makes our social fabric sustain itself within a hugely fragile communal network. Perhaps, it explains, to an extent, the nature of Indian civilisation in general outside the methodological appurtenances of rationalist historiography. In the pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 where a minority community was put to sword, the fires of communal animosity, interestingly, did not spread beyond the borders of this state. This cannot be fully explained as administrative efficiency. An indeterminate factor kept people united. 44. Vinay Lal, ‘Gandhi, the Civilizational Crucible, and the Future of Dissent’, Futures 31 (1999): 210. 45. See Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Itihasakatha’, in Rabindra Rachanavali, vol. 14 (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1989), 453–54. 46. J.P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), 165. 47. Runia, ‘Spots of Time’, 316. 48. Gumbretch, Production of Presence, xv.

CHAPTER

2

Reality of Representation, Reality behind Representation History and Memory

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed, exactly as often as was necessary.1 Their dream sequences scorn the banal existence of well-known facts. Their imaginations work overtime concocting febrile memories: horsedrawn chariots thousands of years before their invention. Hymns packed with occult allusions to high-energy physics and calculations of the speed of light. All part of a hoary, unashamedly golden past.2 Memory ‘is not an instrument for exploring the past but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging’.3 ‘Memory does not form an Opposition with oblivion’, notes Tzvetan Todorov. The two terms that form a contrasting pair are effacement (forgetfulness) and conservation. Memory is, always and necessarily, an interaction between the two. The complete restitution of the past is terrifying and a clear impossibility (one, however, that Borges imagined in his story of ‘Funes, the Memorious’). Memory is essentially a selection: certain traits of an event are conserved, others immediately or progressively set aside and forgotten. Hence it is baffling that the ability Computers have to save information is termed memory, since they lack a basic feature of memory, the ability to select.4

Precise recollection is a rarity in the life of memory, and incidents are mnemonically culled from the welter of past experiences based on the emotional value that they generate and the biases they are endowed with. The train of Notes for this section begin on page 60.

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thoughts put on recall works on the emphasis that memorialisation as a process administers and distributes. John Dewey is clearly convinced about the ‘selective’ and discriminative underpinnings in memory constructions, claiming that ‘the revivals of memory are rarely literal’. He writes, ‘We naturally remember what interests us and because it interests us … The primary life of memory is emotional rather than intellectual and practical’.5 How can memory be configured through the abuse of myth or a certain constellation of historical knowledge that is born out of strategic selection? To what extent does a myth help represent the past meaningfully? Who should judge the meaningfulness of such representation? What implications will it have when narratives of varying ideological-epistemic cut and thrust vie at the crossroads of state power, institutional authority and group legitimacy? The past for Indians is uniquely alive in the present. I say ‘unique’ for a few specific reasons. Most Indians, somehow, develop the mechanism to believe in an isolated stretch of the past without being troubled by the urge to tap into the documents and resources in the archives in support of their belief. Most Indians do not rise to the call of preservation of history and heritage unless it is tangled with religion and certain beliefs that are close to the community’s consciousness. Most Indians will not bother cerebrally and probingly with history; will not prefer to be alerted to their laziness to museums, historical relics and rare species of antiquity; will offer themselves to indoctrination; will allow their freedom of historical understanding to be grabbed and snatched by certain centres of power and ideologue. So with the emphasis, somewhat self-indulgent at times, on tradition, religious essence and cultural heritage, the idea of the past is seen to congeal around ‘few bits of the past’; this makes historical representation a difficult task to perform. On several occasions the past for them becomes captive of mythic exegeses that make it intelligible only through selection and, in the process, these shards of past acquire ‘permanence, relevance’ and ‘universal significance’.6 Andreas Huyssen argues that looking back and remembering have ‘to confront some difficult problems of representation in its relationship to temporality and memory. Human memory may well be an anthropological given, but closely tied as it is to the ways of a culture constructs and lives its temporality, the forms memory will take are invariably contingent and subject to change’.7 The implications of transience, transference and transition in memory open up the fissure between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation, a split that Huyssen would see as ‘a powerful stimulant for cultural and artistic creativity’.8 Memories are predominantly constructions, not authentically recalled experiences, and can be central to the consciousness of the community and group-identity. Mieke Bal writes that the ‘memorial presence of the past takes many forms and serves many purposes, ranging from conscious recall to unreflected reemergence, from nostalgic longing for what is lost to polemical use of the past to reshape the present. The interaction between present and

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past that is the stuff of cultural memory is, however, the product of collective agency rather than the result of psychic or historical accident’.9 Within the space of issues like the myth of Ayodhya (the birthplace of the Hindu cultural icon Lord Rama), the momentous demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the ceaseless nationalist socio-cultural mobilisation to build a Ram temple at the site of destruction, this chapter tries to develop a critique of collective memory and historical consciousness. In what follows I have also tried to show how memory is polemically constructed and religiously and politically generated through the ‘selective mediation’ of historical facts, influencing, thus, the ‘doing’ of the history in the present. It speaks of a ‘quarrel’ with the past caught in the vexed ‘camaraderie of the trenches’ involving representation, memory and narrative.

The Production of History and Myth The ‘well of the past’ is ‘very deep’. Thomas Mann in Joseph and his Brothers would call this ‘bottomless’. And retrieving, establishing and recognising myth are anchored in ‘talk’ as Paul Valery would prefer to argue; they are talked out of their existence, spoken about, speechified and subjectivised. This is a consciousness of living in an order that is instinctual and made intricate through ‘an ever-enlarging incoherence’ (in the words of Wallace Stevens) of the poetic, the political and the economic dimensions of existence. Myths are difficult to eradicate; they recede but never vanish; they are not emphatically decisive in structuring our consciousness, but certainly configure some activities of our existence. Roger Caillois in Le mythe et l’homme observes that ‘it is in myth that one best grasps, in action, the collusion between the most secret and virulent assumptions of the individual psyche and the most urgent and troubling pressures of social existence’.10 It is in such entanglements that myths talk, becoming the ‘collective sign in an invertebrate world of a sense of continuity, a fragile clue to the precarious spiritual potentiality of human life’.11 The common perception of myth is that contrasted with reality, it is always considered untrue. Myth inheres in an aesthetics of lying. But in the history of religions, Wendy Doniger points out that ‘the term myth has far more often been used to mean “truth”’. Myth unfolds a ‘story’ whose truth-value makes it enter people’s minds through fabulation based on sparsity of documentary evidences. Myth has a truth-regime that commands an unbending communal filiation – populations turn into ‘peoples’ and accidents into ‘histories’. It exists as a question to which the response is never given in the form of a final answer. For example, notes Doniger, Sudanese storytellers often begin with this formula: I’m going to tell a story. [Audience] Right!

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It’s a lie. Right! But not everything in it is false! Right!12

Myths survive on a commonly held truth about a past over which a group of people chooses not to quarrel. As an enduring status from the past, myth in its configuration holds up important meanings and combines a privacy of thought with a reception and effect that is public. Myths exist as aesthetic devices that closely bind the imaginary to the objective. We make sense of the ‘quarrel with the past’ working around the ‘past as myth’ and ‘past as history’. An agonistic past does not always put the mythologisers and the historians at loggerheads, but their starts off the blocks are frameworked in differing versions of truth, objectivity, variables and tradition. Where historians are nuanced, differential and discerning, mythologisers are, on most occasions, monadic and monochromatic. Paul Cohen observes, If the quest of historians for past truth is unavoidably imperiled, to a greater or lesser degree, by their rootedness in the here and now, mythologizers, however unembarrassed they may be about their present-mindedness, are seldom wholly indifferent to the credibility of the myths they frame about the past. To begin with, they may not view their reading of the past as mythologized at all – or themselves as mythologizers. But even when mythologization is at its least innocent (and most premeditated), it achieves its effect typically not through out-and-out falsification but through distortion, oversimplification, and omission of material that doesn’t serve its purpose or runs counter to it. The mythologized past need not be historically accurate.13

Believing in how ‘true myth issues in significant history’, Peter Munz finds in the emergence of historia rerum gestarum a location of single parts of a myth in space and time that is intruded upon by factual elements. The distension of myth by factual accretion is a process where the ‘myth is gradually broken up into a number of parts and each part is assigned its proper place in time and in space’ and ‘through that process the myth becomes a much longer story’.14 It is this distension of myth into history that makes Ayodhya turn into a Hindu city that has its ‘authentic’ roots in a glorious past15 under Lord Rama’s reign; Ayodhya becomes an ‘archetype’ and hence incapable of being irrigated with fresh critiques of its timeless validity. This has leached a false consciousness out of a hypostatisation existing aseptically ‘outside history’. On such lines of restorative myths, the Hindu community, in its microcosmic reach and tenuous understanding, has become the ethnie – Hindu identity as ‘invented’ ethnie – working around both the primordialist and instrumentalist perspectives.16 This owes in part, as Sushil Srivastava shows us, to some of the British writers of the nineteenth century17 and, also, overwhelmingly to the community of Hindutva historians, pamphleteers and religious leaders. In fact, it does not

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require much effort to see a kind of perverse continuity between the interests among a section of the local population, the literature sponsored by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) on the Ramjanmabhumi-Babri Masjid issue and the segment on Ayodhya that are made available in Ayodhya and several parts of Northern India, and what we encounter in the writings by British chroniclers and administrators in the latter half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Little shy of hitting the high emotional tone, some articles and public addresses available and delivered in the streets of the Ayodhya resort heavily to a group of British writers – feeding purposively in parts and telescoping myths into histories – and argue, with a pretence to historical objectivity, the rightful place for Hindu umbrage against the Muslims and how shocking is the iniquity-inequity symbolised by the Babri Masjid demand that the disputed site be handed over to the Hindus. In fact, this myth of Ayodhya and Lord Rama had steadily muscled up under the ‘imperial eyes’ and the subsequent reference and citations in this chapter are, on most occasions, excerpted from the original texts to manifest the ideology and political intent that lie concealed in the rhetoric and the enclaves of arguments. H.R. Neville points out that Ayodhya is intimately connected with the mass of legend referring to Ram Chandra and the Solar race, and was certainly the capital of several reigning dynasties … From the seventh century AD for a long period the place appears to have been almost deserted, though it rose again in importance under the Musalmans, who made it the seat of government for a large province. That it was still regarded as a holy spot by the Hindus is clear from the fact of its desecration by Babar and Aurangzeb, but it would appear that the presence of a Muhammadan governor and his court kept the Hindu shrines continually in the background.18

The mention of the ‘desecration by Babar and Aurangzeb’ makes most Hindus doubt the intention of the Muslim aggressors and makes some of them easy meat for radical religious leaders. Very easily, the understanding of Ayodhya overwhelmingly proceeds from the production of a memory of injustice. It is worthwhile to quote Neville to appreciate this connection: Presumably the order for building the mosque was given during Babar’s stay in Aud (Ayodhya) in AH 934. At which time he would be impressed by the dignity and sanctity of the ancient Hindu shrine it (at least in part) displaced, and like an obedient follower of Muhammed he was in intolerance of another Faith, and would regard the substitution of a temple by a mosque as dutiful and worthy. The mosque was finished in AH 935. But no mention of its completion is in the Babar Nama. The diary for AH 935 has many minor lacunae; that of the year AH 934 has lost much matter, breaking off before where the account of Aud might be looked for.

He further adds, It is locally affirmed that at the time of the Musalman conquest there were three important Hindu shrines at Ajodhya and little else. These were the Janamasthan temple, the Swargaddwar, and the Treta-ka-Thakur, and each was successively made the object of attention of different Musalman rulers. The Janamasthan was in

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Ramkot and marked the birthplace of Rama. In 1528 AD Babar came to Ayodhya (Aud) and halted a week. He destroyed the ancient temple and on its site built a mosque, still known as Babar’s Mosque … The mosque has two inscriptions, one on the outside, and the other on the pulpit; both are in Persian and bear the date 935 Hijri.19

Montgomery Martin, who under the aegis of East India Company had the responsibility to compile the historical and topographical statistics of Eastern India, and W.H. Sleeman, who had the job of preparing a report on the situation in Avadh, represented Ayodhya as the Hindu city.20 There had been efforts to restore Ayodhya from the neglect that it had suffered at certain periods of time in history. W.C. Benet notes that the credit of restoring the ‘neglected and forest-concealed Ajodhya’ is universally attributed to Bikramjit. His main clue in tracing the ancient city was, of course, the holy river Sarju, and his next was the shrine, still known as Nageshwar-nath, which is dedicated to Mahadeo and which presumably escaped the devastations of the Buddhist and Atheist periods. With these clues and aided by descriptions which he found recorded in ancient manuscripts, the different spots rendered sacred by association with the worldly acts of the deified Rama were identified, and Bikramjit is said to have indicated the different shrines to which thousands of pilgrims from afar still in thousands half yearly flock.21

Corroborating Benet’s views, H.C. Irwin sees Hweng Thsang, the Chinese Buddhist, who traveled in Hindustan between 629 and 642 AD, as maintaining that ‘a Vikramaditya, of the Brahmanical and antiBuddhist tendencies, was reigning in Sravasti (Ajodhya) at about that period, and it is to him that General Cunningham, of the Archaeological Survey, attributes the restoration of the city. Hindu tradition asserts that he found the site of the old city a jungle, but discovered all the spots sacred to Rama by measurements made, according to ancient records, from a famous shrine known as Nageshwar Nath, and built three hundred and sixty temples in honour of Rama and Sita, Rama’s three brothers … and his famous monkey ally, Hanuman.22

These writers observed a resurgence of nationalist feelings – be it through the tyranny of Aurangzeb or the success of the Marathas or by the translation of the Ramayana into popular language – and in such a revivalist mode tried to see Ayodhya as growing back into its pristine, sacrosanct stature. Ayodhya was pointed out to have grown in favour with each passing year, and the magnitude of the Ramnaumi celebration in this small town could only be matched by the Jaggannath festival. In their excursus on the history of Muslim domination in India, the British writers persevered with the underlying narrative of ‘threat’ that Muslim colonisation created for the Hindu identity. The attack on and the damage to the temples at Ayodhya vindicated this claim by the British writers. For instance, in 1855, the Hindus and Muslims fought aggressively against each other over the Janmasthan where the Muslims suffered reverses and the Hindus defended tooth and nail to hail the sanctity of Ayodhya. Again, the character of the description provided by Neville is worth noting:

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This desecration of the most sacred spot in the city caused great bitterness between the Hindus and Musalmans. On many occasions the feeling led to bloodshed and in 1855 an open fight occurred, the Musalmans occupied the Janamasthan in force and thence making a desperate assault on the Hanuman Garhi. They charged up the steps of the temple, but were driven back with considerable loss. The Hindus then made a counter attack and stormed the Janamasthan, at the gate of which seventy-five Musalmans were buried, the spot being known as the Ganj Shahidan or the martyrs’ resting place … Shortly afterwards Maulvi Amir Ali of Amethi in Lucknow organized a regular expedition with the object of destroying the Hanuman Garhi; but he and his forces were stopped in the Bara Banki district. It is said that up to this time both Hindus and Musalmans used to worship in the same building; but since the mutiny an outer enclosure has been put up in front of the mosque and the Hindus, who are forbidden access to the inner yard, make their offerings on a platform which they have raised in the outer one.23

The disturbing fact of temples being pulverised by the ‘unholy assault’ of the Muslims gains ground when H.M. Elliot – the ‘blue eyed’ historian of the Hindu fundamentalists – points out that Vikramaditya came to Ayodhya and erected temples in 360 places that were rendered sacred by their association with Rama. In fact, after Elliot everyone came to consider the rediscovery of Ayodhya as a historical fact.24 Most of the British writers of the nineteenth century observed that all the 360 temples were destroyed by the Muslim zealots and new temples were raised after the period of Aurangzeb on the ruins of the old ones.25 Writing about Oudh, Edward Thornton in his A Gazetteer of the Territories under the Government of the East India Company and of the Native States of the Continent of India pointed to the legend and trace of Rama and his kingdom as being inextricably intertwined with the history of Oudh. The Muslim intrusion was reported to have wiped out whatever temples this place originally had. There was no Hindu temple in that region whose existence was not connected with the history of Ayodhya, and ‘it would appear that almost all the ancient shrines were destroyed by Aurangzeb and other Musalman zealots’. Close to the town on the east, and on the right bank of the Ghogra, are extensive ruins, said to be those of the fort of Rama, king of Oudh, hero of the Ramayana, and otherwise highly celebrated in the mythological and romantic legends of India. Buchanan observes that the heaps of bricks, although much seems to have been carried away by the river, extend a great way; that is, more than a mile in length, and more than half a mile in width; and that, although vast quantities of materials have been removed to build the Mahomedan Ayodhya or Fyzabad, yet the ruins in many parts retain a very considerable elevation; nor is there any reason to doubt that the structure to which they belonged has been very great, when we consider that it has been ruined for above 2000 years. The ruins still bear the name of Ramgurh, or ‘Fort of Rama’; the most remarkable spot in which is that from which, according to the legend, Rama took his flight to heaven, carrying with him the people of his city; in consequence of which it remained desolate until repeopled by Vikramaditya, king of Oojein, half a century before the Christian era, and by him embellished with 360 temples. Not the smallest traces of these temples,

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however, now remain; and according to native tradition, they were demolished by Aurungzebe, who built a mosque on part of the site. The falsehood of the tradition is, however, proved by an inscription on the wall of the mosque, attributing the work to the conqueror Babar. The mosque is embellished with fourteen columns of only five or six feet in height, but of very elaborate and tasteful workmanship, said to have been taken from the ruins of the fanes, to which they had been given by the monkey-general Hanuman, who had brought them from Lanka or Ceylon … Ayodha or Oudh is considered by the best authorities to be the most ancient city in Hindostan.26

So this spot, according to Hindu mythology, despite being battered by marauding hordes of infiltrators at several points of time in history, ‘represents the forehead of Vishnu and is the seat of learning and the chief of the seven tiraths’. It was reported to be ‘undoubtedly the most important centre of Vishnu worship in Oudh, if not in the whole of upper India, and claims precedence over Muttra and Hardwar. It is only natural therefore that the sacred places connected with Vishnu in his various incarnations and especially that of Ram Chandra, the best known of all, should be many in number and should extend beyond the immediate precincts of the city’.27 In 1902 a local committee was formed with the aim to commemorate the coronation of His Imperial Majesty King Edward VIII, and on that occasion a sum of over Rs 1000 was collected and expended on the erection of the stone pillars marking the sacred spots in Ayodhya and its neighbourhood. What bears mention is that under the ‘imperial eyes’ the historical representation pertaining to this segment of Hindu past was biased: it favoured the Hindus and created a discourse that did not legitimise the Babri Masjid as an original construction; rather, it projected the narrative of a subversion of sanctity by the Muslim ‘other’ and authenticated the sense of anguish and subjugation around this issue. These narratives that trawl the past with certain indulgent engagement with myths melded with the local narratives to create a stranglehold on the common Hindu mind in these parts of both pre- and postcolonial India. In fact, a splurge of local stories had consolidated around these events and Ayodhya became a sacrosanct point of Hindu hero worship. (In 1902, the district magistrate of Faizabad formed a local committee to mark the religious places of only the Hindus. Hindu claims over the Babri Masjid were strengthened by the erection of a marker in front of the mosque. This stone marker read ‘No. 1 – Ramjanmabhoomi’.) The local stories draw on these tracts to endow themselves with a historical basis and a bias, and the fact about the impossibility of these two communities to see eye to eye on this issue is consciously and convincingly driven home to muster a fair political capital. History is rebuilt; memories are constructed; myths are given a fresh lease of life. As a consequence, the wedge between the two communities is driven deeper and the memory of discrimination and nepotism that the Mughal rule is alleged to have bequeathed to the Hindus is made to take

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root and gather momentum.28 The underlying note here is that Ayodhya has always been significant in Hindu history (especially in some parts of central India) and it is the British who creditably lent further credence and credibility to this sacred segment of Hindu memory. It creates what Peter Burke would call ‘memory communities’. The mythogenic construction – ‘mythographies’ – around Ayodhya and Lord Rama owes to the ‘mechanisms of distortion’ that psychologists ascribe as ‘levelling’ and ‘sharpening’. ‘These mechanisms’, Burke explains, ‘assist the assimilation of the life of the particular individual to a particular stereotype from the repertoire of stereotypes present in the social memory in a given culture’.29 In fact, the public space in and around the small town of Ayodhya has been conquered by such a ‘repertoire of stereotypes’: monochrome depiction and stories of brazen Muslim misrule and hapless Hindu subjugation. It has been made the ‘voice’ of the Hindu nation whose origins, as it were, lay rooted to this place. The process of memorialisation and monumentalisation have worked through the univocity and particular gravitational logic of this public space, which does not have a room for ‘dissent’ and is mostly awash in notes and queries about Hindu victimisation and Muslim hegemony. The public sphere is agog with profanisation of Hinduhood that awaits resurrection.

Remembering and Knowing Promiscuous memory, Geoff Eley argues, has held prominence in the landscape of ideas that by encouraging narrative regime and visualising of history bespeak an ‘architecture of continuity’. He writes, ‘Representations of the past – personal and collective, private and public, commercial and uplifting – become both therapy and distraction, a source of familiarity and predictability while the actual ground of the present turns unstable. Such nostalgia spells the desire for holding onto the familiar, even as it dwindles from view, for fixing and retaining the lineaments of worlds in motion, of landmarks that are disappearing and securities that are unsettled’.30 Playing on this consciousness, there has been a proliferating body of literature31 whipped up in recent times to drive home the validity of a collective memorialisation of Ayodhya. This mass of literature converges on issues of depredation and desecration by the Muslim ‘other’, the religio-cultural rights of the Hindus in the making of a Hindu nation and the romanticisation of the past informed by essentialism and ethnicity to rediscover the Hindu identity. Phenomenologically, this calls for a configuration within a new ‘space time’ where investigations of historicity are taking place in literary practices. The problem of textualisation of a historical issue is undertaken with the intent to popularise, which, however, is not always a democratisation of a particular segment of social memory. This difficulty in democratisation speaks

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about the past as an ethical problem, the problem arising from an ideological aestheticisation of the past, a strategic ‘decoding’, clamping of a categorical order emerging from violent legitimation. Attention may be directed to the controversy centring around the representation of Bodhgaya as a purely Buddhist site. It denies the fact that Hindus have been visiting this place since at least Buddha’s own time and discounts the sacerdotal contribution of a lineage of Saiva priests extending over a period of five hundred years since the beginning of the fifteenth century. Jacob Kinnard points out that the ‘whole issue of who ought to have proprietary control over Bodhgaya was informed by, and in significant ways actually created by, the opinions of a select group of Orientalists who were engaged in a prolonged and diffuse anti-Hindu polemic’.32 Anagarika Dharmapala, for instance, with an intent to ‘restore the Buddhist Jerusalem into Buddhist hands’ harped on Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia as a source book for Buddhist sentiments and laboured hard with his vicious anti-Brahminical writings on the ineliminable wedge between the two communities. Dharmapala wrote about Bodhgaya being run down by mercenary Saiva priests who were aversive to their religious commitment and desanctified themselves in the lure of money. Insincerity and manipulation gnawed at the heart of Buddhist religious culture. Buddhist shrines were contumaciously treated, as the image of Buddha was stoned, scowled and spat upon. Such representations of Hindu ire against Buddhism can only be seriously doubted. ‘He [Dharmapala] mirrored’, writes Kinnard, ‘the most egregious sort of Orientalist essentialism, to him all Hindus could be reduced to an unambiguous image of the Other’.33 The ambiguity, the unknowability inherent in ‘acts of knowing’, is stubbornly negated in favour of a veridic narrative. The complexities involved in social and cultural production of memory are consciously ignored in a materialist-discursive approach that reads woefully inappropriate. In fact, the experience of the present is fomented by the warmth of tradition, the ‘repetition of the ancestral’ and the silent inevitability of customs and mores that authenticates the dialogic nexus of memory and history.34 Working within a devious and intriguing network of arguments that unfailingly draws upon British historiographical representation of Ayodhya, the ever-amplifying mass of literature commits itself to attenuate the borders that separate myth from history; it, in fact, makes a claim for the centrality of myth in the Hindu consciousness. Firmly anchored in myths, the imagents, and their relation to history, this corpus proclaims a ‘link’ that Hindus might have to nature-civilisation and dramatically vindicates their right to the ‘sublime moment’ (Ayodhya as the point of origin for the Hindus) that in being ‘out of history’ is also a part of the Hindu sense and appropriation of the past. The historical reality of the present owes to an unchanging dimension in the past that Hindus revere as the ‘myth’ – the shaping phenomenon of its civilisation and existence. M.V. Kamath says:

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Take away Myths from religion and what is left behind is empty theology. Man lives by myths; the myths provide him with the emotional security that he needs. Take away from him the emotional security and he is reduced to a shivering mass of jelly. In the Riddles of Hinduism Dr. Ambedkar has merely challenged Hindus to give fresh thought to the divinity of Shri Krishna and Shri Rama. Those of us who don’t want to heed his advice can forget him. But he is entitled to his opinion, however sacrilegious he may sound … to fight arguments and propositions on their own grounds and to examine it dispassionately. Does his reasoning bear analysis? Are his presumptions questionable? The greatness of Hinduism is its flexibility, its ability to question its own dearly-held beliefs. Neither Rama nor Krishna is likely to disappear from our temples merely because Dr. Ambedkar has challenged their divinity. Rama and Krishna remain what they are because they are seen to represent certain cherished value systems. And isn’t that good enough reason to continue worshipping them?35

So for Hindus and the communalists myth becomes a ‘sacred tale about past events’ that they use to justify their action in the present.36 There are many versions of the history of Ramjanmabhumi that are in popular circulation. Their details differ in important ways, but being ingrained in a sense of inevitability and removed from any consideration of ‘counterfactuals’, the narratives in their broad outlines are similar. (Rama was born in Ayodhya in the Treta Yuga, and after having spent his childhood and part of his life there, he moved his capital to Saketa. This signalled the decline of Ayodhya, which was lost in the limbo of anonymity. It was Vikramaditya who miraculously discovered the city again and built a temple at the Janmasthan. After Vikramaditya’s reign, Ayodhya again descended into oblivion but retained the temple and its sacredness. The sacrilege began with the advent of the Muslims in India and climaxed during the reign of Babar who pillaged and demolished the temple to build a mosque at the site of destruction. The Janmasthan remained a hostage in the hands of the Muslims even during the British rule, for repeated efforts to retrieve it were all in vain until, in 1949, a Ramamurti was discovered in the masjid that sent out the message that Rama himself had finally appeared to remind the Hindus of the sacredness of the place. And so their unflinching responsibility would now be to liberate the site from the infidels.) Such ‘academic memory’ (if I may coin the term), historiographically generated and socially stereotyped, infuses a sense of betrayal among the Hindu communalists; stories about ancestral tribulations at the hands of ‘other’ (though the historicity of such records have come under persistent fire) have given birth to a narrative that points out that around seventy-six battles had to be fought in the defence of the Janmabhumi. The first aggressor was the notorious king of Lanka, Ravana, who destroyed Ayodhya during the time of the ancestors of Shri Ram. The second attack came from the Greek king Milind or Menander; the third assault was commandeered by Salar Masud, a nephew of the much maligned Muslim plunderer, Mahmud Ghaznavi. All this continued till Babar arrived:

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This ungrateful plunderer [ungrateful in that he had been given refuge, food and shelter by people in different parts of India] responded to India’s native tolerance and hospitality by ordering his Commander-in-Chief, Mir Baqi, to destroy the huge, palatial Shri Ram Janmabhoomi temple that had stood in Ayodhya since Vikramaditya’s time, in order simply to please two evil Muslim ‘faqirs’. But … the people [the country] rose in fierce opposition to this vile attack on their national honour. The historian Cunningham writes: ‘At the time of the destruction of the Janmabhoomi temple the Hindus sacrificed everything and it was only after 1 lakh, 74 thousand Hindu lives had been lost that Mir Baqi succeeded in bringing down the temple with his cannons’.37

The surge in historical writing worked strategically towards the formation of a public memory largely governed by communal discrimination and prejudice that radicals claim has emerged since the advent of Islam in the Indian subcontinent. The political-cultural stress and scuffle around Ramjanmabhumi is fed by this ideology of retribution. Since temples have been brought down in the past, Hindus are morally and ethically urged to mete out the same treatment to the mosques. If Babar was responsible for the temple demolition, the guilt of the individual, it is argued, should be transferred to the shoulder of the entire community. In a reenactment of medieval politics, the liberation of the Janmasthan is seen as a tribute to the collective allegiance to a sacred memory that all Hindus keep close to their chest. Deference to this timeless sacramental item of their memory is what integrally constitutes the socio-cultural paradigms of Hinduhood. This logic of discrimination and maltreatment (the issue of Ayodhya is being projected as the symbol of Hindu subjection) has been kicked up systematically and encouraged as a veridic discourse to seep through the community; it imposes a memory that speaks about how the Hindus and Muslims are perennially – belligerently too – lined up against each other and trying, most often thoughtlessly, to outdo the other on the basis of the past wrongs perpetrated by a particular community or a select band of people. The operation to ‘create’ a collective or public memory around these issues successfully led to the bromidic categorisation of the Muslim as the ‘archetypal villain’ and the Hindus as the ‘victim and the deprived’, the Muslim rule as nothing but tyrannous, oppressive and disorderly and the struggle for Ramjanmabhumi as ‘a long struggle between these forces’. This fosters ‘delegitimation’ that Bar-Tal would argue acts as ‘the categorization of groups into extreme negative social categories which are excluded from human groups that are considered as acting within the limits of acceptable norms and/or values’. This involves means like dehumanisation, outcasting, trait characterisation, use of political labels and group comparisons.38 Memory, heritage and inheritance around Ayodhya are buttressed through such coterie writings as ‘Sri Rama Janmabhoomi or Babri Masjid?’ and ‘Historical Documents & Babar’s Autobiography – Babarnama’, which purport to put to rest all ‘sabre rattling’ over the issue of ownership and forestall what they claim as the invidious endeavour by the Babri Masjid Ac-

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tion Committee to ‘confuse public opinion’. Under the title ‘History Speaks’ we encounter references to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Skandapurana (it ‘mentions that Ayodhya or the city of Vishnu [Rama] is in the shape of a fish, and mentions the temple at Ramajanmasthan situated therein’)39, the Lucknow Gazetteer, the District Gazetteer of Faizabad, and S.R. Sharma’s Mughal Empire in India. With the strength of the evidences provided in these documents it is proved conclusively that Babri Masjid has been built at the site of a destroyed Rama temple, and despite repeated efforts by Hindus to regain control of things that justifiably and historically belong to them, the Muslims have always denied them their rightful possession. Interestingly, there has been a tradition of associating Hindu kings with Rama since the twelfth century. In Rajasthan, royalty and Rama are mentioned in the same breath, and we unfailingly encounter a temple next to the royal palace. Vergati draws our attention to a document conserved in the city: ‘This document is a map of the town of Ayodhya (ref. N 179) that shows the temple of Rama, the Royal Palace of the kings of Jaipur State and the temple of Galta, which is an important place of pilgrimage in Rajasthan and the centre of the sect of Ramanandi. This map was published in Rajasthan in a number of local newspapers (e.g. Patrika) and magazines to prove the existence of the Rama temple in Ayodhya. It was considered as a historical document … the map clearly shows the link between the king, the god Rama and the chief priest of the temple of Galta, the spiritual leader of the sect of Ramanandi’.40 ‘The Hindu histories of Ayodhya,’ writes Gyanendra Pandey, ‘which serve as our reference point … are marked by a similarity of structure and language, a tenacity of purpose (that is, a sharply and repeatedly underlined argument), and a repetitiveness that is so obvious that one is justified in dealing with them together, noting only the more important variations. The corpus as a whole seems exceedingly repetitive: many of these histories are no more than hurried copies of statements that have appeared before, or entirely derivative in making exactly the same argument about different sites and people’.41 This repetitiveness, which is more than the ‘compulsion to repeat’ phenomenon, is purposeful because through repetition communalists establish a kind of ‘spurious consensus’ and this ropes in the common people into their fold. Pandey shows us how Hindutva historians have made most people believe in a chronology of events in Ayodhya from the earliest times (nine lakh years ago when Sri Ram was born) to the present (the mid-1980s when the movement to build a grand, celestial temple in place of the mosque was started) and developed a remarkable ‘unanimity’ on the exact number of battles fought at the Janmabhumi site. The crucial aspect here is the problematic of ‘remembering’ and ‘knowing’. Those ‘remembering’ as a collective ritualistic act may not have the enthusiasm or the training to know the truth that is inherent in it. The patience to ‘know’ involves a certain cultivation of methodologies that are usually shut out from common men. Hence, ‘remembering’ facetiously collapses its barrier

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with ‘knowing’. In fact, ‘knowing’ here becomes the accumulation of information, which is distinctly removed from investigation or critical inquiry. But the information processed and packaged out on offer is intended to validate the vestibule between remembering and knowing – the vestibule where what is remembered or asked to remember or made to remember becomes invariably an objective part of history and, hence, knowing it is the transference of truth from the past into the present. The knowledge, thus, gets circulated as authentic memory and as texts that validate the ‘remembering act’ of a community. Ayodhya is a case of the dialectic between knowing and remembering. The narrative, at once incremental and sacramental, about Ayodhya reminds us of the narrative aggregation forming around the myth of German racist superiority and consequent justification for the liquidation of the ‘other’. It is a narrative construction of a sacral, mythic, yet well-discoursed past, which has its foundations in persistent memorialisation and a mimetic and auricular memory. George Williamson points out that the question ‘What is German’? goes back in time to the late eighteenth century when ‘Johann Gottfried Herder and other scholars developed a concept of myth as a distinctive fusion of poetry and religion that expressed the essential spirit of a nation’. The call for a ‘new mythology’ in the 1790s would supplant both ‘the biblical and classical mythologies and transform a fragmented modern society into a unified whole’. After 1800, scholars and amateurs ‘scoured through medieval verse, church libraries, and peasant villages for evidence of forgotten German deities or lost knightly epics’, foregrounding a ‘longing for myth’ that ‘would animate the thoughts of the early romantics, the Grimm brothers, Wagner, Nietzsche and a host of lesser known writers and scholars and it would remain a feature of German culture well into the twentieth century’.42 In fact, Gottlob Heyne’s notions of myth were developed and extended by Herder ‘who treated myth as the expression of the spirit of a nation or Volk. Myth for Herder was an irreplaceable cultural substrate which bound the language, literature, religion, and customs of ancient societies into an organic whole’.43 Religion played a decisive role in fostering cultural memory and influenced the configurations set off by ‘framing strategies’ and ‘historical gazes’. Williamson notes that ‘identities and memories could be multiple, and so it is possible to imagine a “national memory” that existed alongside several different “religious” memories. But, in most cases, the understanding of the national past was framed within a narrative that built on, transformed, or inverted traditional Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish self-understandings’.44 Also, representations of exclusivism, a collective longing, marked out through a mythic organicity did not hollow out later in time as we continue to notice through Count Gobineau’s four-volume Essai sur l’inegalité des races humaines (1853–1855) with its appeal to Nietzsche, Wagner and Chamberlain (his The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 1899, works around these motifs of German resurgence and romantic past although shot through with less virulence than most others), a deep engagement with the cult of ‘pure blood’.

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Paul de Lagardie (1827–1891) gloriously ideated a ‘Germania’ with inputs from Friedrich List to establish Mitteleuropa (popularised by Friedrich Naumann and others during the First World War), which was later made serviceable to the ministrations of Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg and Henrich Himmler. Also Julius Langbehn maintained his conviction of the superiority of the minority to rule the majority, and many of his ideas anticipate the fatal doxism of the Hitlerjugend; A. Moeller van den Bruck and Hans Grimm cannot be oversighted as much as Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century and Goebbels’s novel Michael. Perhaps, more than the rest, it was Richard Wagner who impacted on this unilinear, ideological and predilective growth through his musical ingenuity that appropriated legends and forked out an acolytic allegiance (like in Cosima Liszt von Bülow Wagner, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and others). Hailing Gobineau’s ‘cult of the pure blood’, Wagner’s hope for a racial cleansing was thoroughly implicated towards the end of Jewishness in Music. Producing a disabling discourse – projection of a mythohistory – with strong persuasiveness and ideological formidability can also be experienced in the historical reconstructionist agenda of the Dalits. Dalit history – jati biradari ki katha – deeply opposed to Brahminical notions of historical practice, instrumentalises historical imagination, folklores, mythic tales from the past inflected with folk idioms, the ‘story telling’ in powerful and popular folk lyrical metres such as doha, chaupai, chaubol or lahara and intercalated gobbets of narratives to evolve an alternative version of the past and inaugurates a counter-socio-cultural history. Badri Narayan writes: The narrative histories (stories or katha¯ s) invented by the Dalits constitute an alternative history and language, much of it oral. They tell of Dalit aspirations, dreams and ambitions, and are intended to create more coherent identities among the groups and communities making up this community. The term katha¯ is different from both ‘history’ as established by Western(ised) academic historians and itiha¯ s (history) as defined by Indian traditionalist historians as a peculiarly Indian way to know the past through the dominant Pauranic tradition of ancient religious texts of the Hindus. Rather, the ‘story’ of the katha¯ is a form of liberation for marginalised groups of Indian society that enables them to enter the domain of knowing, inventing, creating and telling the past (including their own past) as a constant dialogue with the present’.45

Religious texts and scriptures – the Vedas, Puranas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – are obdurately contested making claims for the intervention of the Dalit perspective to make sense of them. Narayan observes that today ‘pasmangta geet (song) has become a generic term for the songs sung by bards among the Dalits. These songs are used by BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party) to transmit the glory of various castes so as to arouse their caste pride and help construct their identities’. The BSP deploys old bards of specific Dalit communities, folk singers and political poets as part of the Cultural Squad ( Jagriti Dasta) to celebrate the stories of heroic feats through ceaseless narration and repetition’.46 Myth and politics insidiously combine to create a ‘cultural memory’, a narrative truth

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in historical reconstructionism, that underlines the dominant role of the Dalits in the formation of the nation; it is a truth fostered further through books like Swatantrata Sangram Mein Achhuton Ka Yogdan, Jhooti Azadi, Pasi Samaj ka Swatantrata Sangram Mein Yogdan, Dalit Dastavej and other documents to which the whole community is made to affiliate. New histories of this nature are disingenuously born, and they powerfully stake out ideologically divisive modes of understanding and deeply inflected ways of making sense of the ‘quarrelling’ past.

Collective Memory and Collective Identity Presently, in the Indian subcontinent, religion has become the madness of the many for the benefit of the few. In addition to the erasure of information, an easy celebration of forgetfulness born out of contentment with ‘vain gratifications of the moment’, there lies generated an abundance of memory. This abundance produces greater occasions for confusion and more opportunities for forgetfulness. It also becomes easy to bring over collective consensus on some selected issues of memorialisation. In fact, the valorised representations of the Hindu past have sunk their teeth deep by riding the political abetment that is part of a deft, well-ministered homework.47 This is what I call the ‘instrumentalist view’ of memory: it is the product of the tension between ‘normal frame’ and ‘crisis frame’. The crisis frame is grounded in the experiences and memories of past riots and communal tensions and it can be said to lie dormant during the ‘normal frame’ (the peaceful times of communal harmony and cohabitation). Ayodhya is the subject of fear and insecurity that has been instilled by the Hindu Right: the fear of a recrudescence of Muslim domination and the fear of being a victim again as in the past. This instrumentalisation initiates the ‘crisis frame’, and the projected fear is gradually transformed into hatred.48 Sampling the views of local youths during the course of my visits to Ayodhya, I gathered the impression that the Babri Masjid could not have, under any conditions, existed at a place where Rama is claimed to have been born for it exposed the Hindus daily to the uncomfortable reality about their subjugation under the Muslims. It is made out to have a disturbing presence. So the ‘crisis frame’ consolidated the consciousness around Ayodhya that was easy fodder for the local-public intellectuals and Hindutva historians who could make their voices heard in the media and at certain levels of political hierarchy. Working within the ‘crisis frame’ they cultivated their own strategies of communication, persuasion and repetition. It was turned into a political game where Ayodhya came to symbolise the ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ that Muslims can easily inspire in Hindus (it has certainly been whetted by what kept on happening in Pakistan through the inflammatory rhetoric of the politicians and the academic irresponsibilities of historians); also, the documented experiences of Hindu-Muslim

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rivalry (the partition in 1947, the three wars in the post-independence period, countless riots) caught on the amorphous, partisan sentiments around Ayodhya with an ideological slant and strategic mission. Egged on by British scholarship on this subject, we can see historians like Ram Sharma contributing to this widening divide between the two communities and the generative discourse on a Hindu memory orbiting around Ayodhya. He writes: In order to conform strictly to the Muslim law he [Babar] absolved Muslims from paying stamp duties thus confining the tax to Hindus alone. He thus not only continued, but increased, the distinction between his Hindu and Muslim subjects in the matter of their financial burdens. One of his officers, Hindu Beg, is said to have converted a Hindu temple at Sambhal into a mosque. His Sadr, Shaikh Zain, demolished many Hindu temples at Chanderi when he occupied it. By Babur’s orders, Mir Baqi destroyed the temple at Ayodhya commemorating Rama’s birth place and built a mosque in its place in 1528–9. He destroyed Jain idols at Urva near Gwalior. There is no reason to believe that he did anything to relax the harshness of the religious policy which he found prevailing.49

Sharma points out that a document, alleged to be Babar’s will, was brought to the notice of scholars by the Government of Bhopal (Central India) and was exhibited at one of the meetings of the Indian Historical Records Commission. He claims that all the known facts of Babar’s death and Humayun’s accession to the throne do not authenticate the genuineness of the message in the document. It has been argued that in March 1527 after the battle of Khanwah, Babar assumed the title of ghazi and wrote the following quatrain: For Islam’s sake I wandered in the wilds, Prepared for war with pagans and Hindus, Resolved myself to meet the martyr’s death, Thanks be to Allah!

This measure, argues S.M. Banerji, is so unlike Babar’s usual tolerance of views and geniality of temper (something that historians like Sharma, however, do not concur with) that one feels surprised at its very existence. By resorting to religion he intended to rejuvenate the spirits of his discontented army – largely battered by skirmishes and losses – and make them believe that they were fighting for Islam. Imbibed by the spirit of the quatrain the soldiers found themselves miraculously out of the despair and discontent; they were fired by the idea of staying in the land and carrying on God’s work. But Banerji notes that such resuscitation of religious fervour inspired them in a wrong way. Mir Baqi, the chief divine of the state, took advantage of the newly aroused religious frenzy among the Muslim soldiers and demolished the main temple of Ayodhya during his march to the East. Later on, he obtained sanction from the emperor and built the mosque. ‘The words’, writes Banerji, ‘inscribed in the mosque, speak as much of his orthodoxy in religion as of his philosophy of life. He was content to be only a qalandar, a perfect devotee. This resignation would be

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inconsistent with the bigotry shown by the demolition. Thus our contention is that it is Mir Baqi, who was responsible for the demolition of Rama’s temple and obtaining sanction, afterwards, for the erection of the Masjid, from the Emperor’.50 Referring to Babarnama it has been pointed out that Babar always had the desire to ‘possess’ Hindustan and did not hold the people of Hindustan in high esteem: ‘Far from sense and wisdom, shut off from judgment and counsel must people in Hindustan, be, the Afghans above all’.51 The accusation that Babar bore a persistent disdain for the Hindus and allegedly inspired dastardly assaults on temples has found persistent support from several Hindu scholars (radical in intent), for instance, Sita Ram Goel who would argue that a mosque did stand on the site of the Ramjanmabhumi. Quoting Edward Balfour’s Encyclopaedia Asiatica,52 Goel makes us see that in ‘Ajudhya’ three mosques were located on the site of three Hindu shrines – ‘the Janmasthan on the site where Rama was born, the Swarga-dwara (Mandir) where his remains were burnt and the Treta ka Thakur, famed as the scene of his great sacrifices’. In the context of the construction of the Babri Masjid, he quotes Maulvi M. Ashraf Hussain to drive home his point: ‘It was not built by Mir Khan as stated by him. The order for building seems to have been issued during Babar’s stay at Ayodhya in A.H. 934 (1527–28 A.D.), but no mention of its completion is made in the Babur Nama. However, it may be remembered that his diary for the year A.H. 934 (1527–28 A.D.) breaks off abruptly and throws the reader into the dark in regard to the account of Oudh’.53 On such lines, several historians and scholars have provided documentary evidence – researching the European, Persian, Arabic and the Sanskrit sources – to support the existence and demolition of the temple in question. The list runs rich and long: an unexaggerated mention of Ayodhya and speculations about Babar’s visit in E.V. Joshi’s U.P. District Gazetteers-Faizabad (1960); a gloss on Aurangzeb’s demolition of the fortress called Ramkot in Joseph Tieffenthaler’s Description Historique et Geographique de L’ Inde (1786); a travelogue of William Finch (1608–11); Avadhavilasa Mahakavya (1675) by Sant Laladasa, which finds Ayodhya as equivalent to heaven; the Ram temple finds mentioned in Maulana Shams Tabriz Khan’s Hindustan Islami ‘Ahd mein; the Catalogue of Historical Documents in the Kapad-Dwara collections of the City Palace Museum in Jaipur; the reference to the existence of the Ram temple in Tarikh-i-Awadh (1919); the Tawarikhi Awadh (1896), which locates the mosque in question in Sita ki Rasoi temple; Haji Muhammad Hasan’s Diya-i Akhtar (1878), which explicitly mentions the destruction of the temple at the behest of Babar.54 As mentioned earlier, the public space in Ayodhya and in most parts of North India where these issues are debated do not have much of a nontendentious existence for Hindutva historians, and intellectuals have taken authoritative control of the flow of information, the character of ‘remembering’ and the frontiers of ‘knowing’. The civil society born out of such a well-integrated programme makes people enter it without much reasoned cognizance of things

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and issues; they are, thus, sucked eventually into a complacent consensus. It thus produces a common language and a definite set of understandings about how the community should function in its relationship with the ‘other’. There is indeed a circular relationship between collective memory and collective identity – a link that is established by a discriminating ideology-led attitude towards the past wherein something is remembered and others are forgotten. Forgetting, forgetfulness, remembering and remembrances form the complex matrix where the usability of the past holds promises for alteration, redefinition, selectivisation and constructivism. For the construction of Hindu collective memory and identity the past is prepared as a ‘screen’ on which ‘desires for unity and continuity, that is identity, is projected’.55 It is an ongoing process in the making of which the politicians, journalists and historians are seen to cast their decisive weight. Michael Ignatieff has pointed out that ‘societies and nations are not like individuals, but their leaders can have an enormous impact on the mysterious process by which individuals come to terms with the painfulness of their societies’ past. Leaders give their societies permission to say the unsayable, to think the unthinkable, to rise to gestures of reconciliation that people, individually, cannot imagine’.56 They foster an impervious fortress of knowledge that is conducive to the creation of ‘artificial memory’. Having turned hostage to the claims of a certain group of intellectuals and politicians, the public space formed around the issue of Ayodhya is made to function in a way that demands individuals to cultivate a ‘collective’ interest for a cause, which, thus, provokes them to define their personal experiences on the ‘screen of the past’ in a new matrix of meaning; it works on an ambiguity of a historical moment that remains unaffected even if it is morally dubious. There is, as I have argued earlier, a repetition and repeatability of the issues afloat in the public space that are crucial to this mobilisation of memory around Ayodhya. The repetition suggests to the superficial observer that there is a ‘force of history’ at work and that history can somehow repeat itself. The alleged breakdown of the temple by Babar is projected as the blueprint for greater ‘repetition’ in history where the Muslims can continue to do similar damage if Hindu revivalist aggression does not surface in time. The present needs to change so as to avoid the past being repeated. Myth, thus, becomes the point of reference to amend the past, to justify the present and bury the possibilities of disinterested and dispassionate analysis of the new situation. Public reactions, indeed policy decisions, are then made not in relation to an actual situation or development, but to the myth that is projected onto reality. So when sadhus were jettisoned into the public sphere it became easier to influence the laity. Ashok Singhal, the colossus of the Visva Hindu Parishad, argues that history is witness to the fact that whenever such a crisis has come on the country sadhus such as Vishwamitra, Bhardwaj, Valmiki, Agastya, etc. in Sri Rama’s time through their organised efforts protected the identity of the nation. Similarly, during Sri Krishna’s time Vyasa, Jamini, Maitreye, Asti, etc. brought about a colossal change

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through their efforts. During Shivaji’s time great saints like Samarth Ramdas protected dharma. Today, society expects a similar intervention from mahapurusha like you who are bearers of the rishi parampara – legacies and tradition of sages.57

The involvement of the sadhus introduced a kind of authenticity to the tradition that the VHP-RSS combine wanted to promulgate and develop. It went down well with the semi-literate masses as sadhus were urged to give messages and instructions to the youth; they established their role as arbiters of the nation’s fate arguing that ‘dharma’ is irreverently peripheralised by some politicians who govern the country from the centre. It was a legitimisation of the change of role. Thousands flocked to listen to sadhus like Murari Bapu and Asaram Bapu. The definition of Hinduism was modified and also the concept of Ramayana and Ram underwent a paradigm shift.58 This emerged as a ‘calling’ that seeded an operation of the ‘mystique’; this ooze of the mystique resulted in ‘notional freeze’ that inclined one segment of the society to act conservatively, resisting change, but convulsively when threatened by change. In fact, the mnemonic aggregation owes to the kind of sociation that they have been able to bring about by defining these events subjectively as consequential and, hence, stubbornly impervious to the efforts of individuals to escape them. Jeffrey Olick points out that ‘it is not just that we remember as members of groups, but that we constitute those groups and their members simultaneously in the act (thus re-member-ing)’.59 They thus help form a ‘community of perception’ and foster a ‘political culture’ in the sense of a nurturant environment that is intersubjective, instrumentalist and embodied in symbolism and imposed patterns of meaning. It makes claim making as constitutive of interests and identities; it forms a ‘collective unconscious’ and its concomitant utopic thinking.60 Inheritance and tradition are interpreted on such lines that hoist memory as a ‘symbolic power’; here memory is related to policy making, which becomes powerful enough to influence the construction, legitimisation and even contestation of domestic politics. It would not be unfair to claim that the political-cultural memory around Ayodhya and the mission of templeconstruction traverse beyond domestic politics and establish the key connection between the legitimacy of existing institutions, their historical roles and the question of representation. As we have already seen, memory takes on a certain importance when claims of legitimacy rest on claims of representativeness. Memory matters because it involves our ‘interests’.61 In fact, historical representation and the argumentative domain in the public sphere have turned the memory around Ayodhya – its sanatan pabitrata (pristine purity) and dharmic exclusivity – into a shared experience, constitutive of an identity that leads the laity to a kind of moral absolutism. The public space has made sure that something called ‘Hindu memory’ is fashioned at the anvil of a viscous historic past that no one is authentically sure of; it is ‘privatised’ sacramentally and communally to look intergenerational with collective obligations. So memory of a certain slice of Hindu past is zealously privatised, politicised and expressed

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in civil society which is not shorn of its claims on political resources and state power. The Hindu Right has settled for what has been called ‘cultural strategies’, which make a travesty of our genuine liberal-democratic convictions, trust and persuasions; the alternative modes of historical interpretation, emerging from the plurality of competing memories, which challenge the unilaterial ‘Hindutva’ discourse, are considered distrustful and framed as abusive; it, thus, forces a substantial number of the population into one shared history for the sake of ‘national pedagogy’. Here it is interesting to see the connection that individual memory has with social or collective memory, figuring, thereby, what I would like to perceive as the vestibule between Pierre Nora and Maurice Halbwachs. Even if we leave aside the communal conflagration that tore the nation apart through her traumatic partition and the several flashpoints of communal tension in the run up to Indian independence, the shameful number of riots in the post-independence era has had its impact on the individual mind: personal memory of such communal squabbles is not hard to locate. Individual memories then, despite the diverse ways in which they are constituted, cannot avoid drafting their shaping presence in the memory generation, and real experience, academic writing, historical narrative, media-genetic formulations and group mentality have eventually combined to create the power of collective-cultural memory. Here we do not find the complete subsumation of individual memory under the ‘frameworks of social memory’ in the Halbwachsian sense of the term.62 At the initial stages, it does not simply become an imposition of the modes of thinking of one individual over the other members of his community. Rather, it evokes the ‘memory chain’ where the consciousness of experience rallies around a ‘concretion of identity’ and nourishes the roots of the subconscious that then gets formed through forces – inherited notions, traditional reified knowledge formations, cultural stereotypes – over which we scarcely have any control. This can be emphasised as ‘memory generation’: the nebulous spots of time are gradually appropriated through the emphatic encoding of certain trains of thought that are peculiar to the development and cultural manifestation of a community; it, thus, results in a public memory. What is interesting about Ayodhya is that it demonstrates at one level, quite uniquely, the cultivation of memory through the annexation of knowledge and socio-cultural forms and, at another level, sanctions it as part of a larger discourse where Ayodhya never existed beyond a ‘myth’. Here memory generation is a kind of conceptualisation (indeed a function of society) that works towards the whittling down of the much-debated divide between history and memory. Ayodhya, I would argue, is, at times, a subject that has less to do with what Babar supposedly did to the temple and more with the memory of what one community has done to the other – it is ‘telling’ as action and inventorying knowledge through the support of experiences that have a powerful embedding in the present, in history-as-lived. Memory needs recurrence to lend a

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certain authentic connection to actions in the present. What I mean is that an isolated piece of good memory will always have the temptation to coax a repetition; a brush of bad memory is exhorted to be forgotten as an accident but can be seen to grow as legitimate and authentic as it starts repeating itself. The repetition, which could be in various forms, keeping the essential nature of its exfoliation more or less the same, thus concretises a certain agency and helps in fostering a ‘connection’ between the past and the manifestation of the past in the present. The present is subsumed in the past and the act of narrating the present is seen as the continuation of the past. Ayodhya is constructed as a continuation of the past and also as the present that is operant through the modes of thinking available in the realms of our historical past.

Community, Memory and Historical Distance Raphael Samuel notes: ‘Memory is historically conditioned, changing colour and shape according to the emergencies of the moment; that so far from being handed down in the timeless form of ‘tradition’ it is progressively altered from generation to generation. It bears the impress of experience, in however mediated a way. It is stamped with the ruling passions of its time. Like history, memory is inherently revisionist and never more chameleon than when it appears to stay the same’.63 It also leaves spaces of ‘silences’, leaves room for ‘forms of forgetting’ and ‘forms of remembering’ in a liminality that is disturbing. The loss of detail renders memory vague. The past recedes into a chamber where nostalgia mixes with memory, where tradition and not history is imbued with moral purpose. This makes the serviceable past available to us and, through censorship, suppression, cover up and mismapping of events certain portions of the past are domesticated to the service of the present.64 Ayodhya is built up as a specific ‘act of remembering’ where the past is the remembered present – shallow in terms of chronology but emphatically topocentric. Memory is made ‘the handmaiden of nationalist zeal, history its high counsel’.65 Ayodhya then becomes a strategic campaign to create a common memory, a feeling of participation mystique, and thereby a ‘heritage’. It promotes a degree of ‘creative freedom’ in the use and interpretation of contents. Here it is worthwhile to address the politics of Jewish reconstructionism.66 Yael Zerubavel shows us how the story of Masada, which was unknown to modern Jews until the late nineteenth century, has suddenly, through a concerted and well-endowed move, become the ‘turning point in Jewish history, a locus of modern pilgrimage, a famous archaeological site, and a contemporary political metaphor’.67 The commemoration of Jewish heroism is coterminous with a well-sanctioned license for the ‘inhabitants of the Promised Land’ to exclude the non-Jews from the ‘world of moral concern’. This operation of ‘recovering roots’ and constructing and maintaining national tradition come

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through a triumphalist Jewish history that, in principle, leaves the Cannanite Palestinians as defeated and displaced – ‘corrupt, backward, irrelevant’. Harping on the cultural immiscibility of the Palestinians the historical discourse legitimises an Israeli’s traditional tie to the land and his ‘unimaginable history of suffering’. Zionist ideology and biblical studies collude to aver that Jerusalem as a city represented three thousand years of unbroken Jewish dominance, a claim whose veracity is seriously under question. The intent is to occlude a historical presence for the Palestinians.68 The dramatic transformation of Ayodhya that has been generously trumpeted to shake the nation’s psyche, the sudden spasmodic spurt in writings and confabulations centring on the Masjid and the authenticity of its survival, merely point to such a reconstructionist bid that is buttressed explicitly and subliminally with communal sentiments and ethical legitimation. The new Jewish identity can be read correspondingly with this new-found resurgent Hindu identity where both insist on the ‘suffering’ that claims a kind of uniqueness; this ‘suffering’ is embedded in unparalleled victimisation and inspires them to find an end in redressive justice. It promotes a certain image of the past that forces some facts of history to appear ‘intelligible’: this crystallisation of consciousness and reprocessing of the past, thus, cannot evade the cultural-political fall-out. Alon Confino argues that ‘the crucial issue in the history of memory is not how a past is represented but why it was received or rejected. For every society sets up images of the past. Yet to make a difference in a society, it is not enough for a certain past to be selected: It must steer emotions, motivate people to act, be received’.69 The Ayodhya phenomenon has been worked up to canalise emotions that successfully carved out a certain ‘scheme of acceptability’ among the people and have gone on to motivate them. It is the projection and consolidation of stereotypes.70 Settling with a specific intent on the ‘stereotypes’, the Hindu cultural custodians manipulate themselves into a position from where they can envisage restructuring the religious traditions in India. The diversity and differences within religious traditions are interpreted as a sign of weakness for Hindus. It is argued that after years of somnolence and subjugation, Hindus must wake up at this hour of their civilisation with an aggression; the time has come to be belligerently assertive.71 The strategic projection of Rama as a fully armed warrior was a way to ‘rememorialisation’ built on the political need to initiate the change of image from the beatific to the bellicose. Ram became rashtrapurusha and also maryadapurshottam and santarasa was replaced by ugra bhava as Anuradha Kapur rightly observes.72 It was a carefully engineered ‘identity transition’. In fact, as part of this strategic mechanism on shifting identity, we encounter a manipulative working on the ‘historical distance’ also, a strategy to create an ‘inheritance’ of an event (the issue of Ayodhya, for instance) that is usually separated by a large swathe of time and is large enough to challenge historical evidence supporting it. To develop a collective memorialisation that would validate a political-religious agenda and help build a community of unflinching believ-

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ers, one needs to shorten the ‘historical distance’; this foreshortening deepens the affective and ideological consciousness that make one’s acceptance of history with mythic underpinnings easy and convincing. It is a way to motivate the community to rally around an event of the past. Ayodhya is one such potential instance. Gaming on the ‘past-retrieval’ scheme, Hindutva historians and religious preachers have successfully familiarised the distance separating the three events: the birth of Rama, the supposed demolition of the temple in the sixteenth century and the almost existential need to rebuild it. As an artificial reconstructionist mechanism, it, thus, projects ‘the present back, the past forward’. As an act of religio-political cunning, it ‘produces’ heritage; the past is clarified and classified so as to ‘infuse’ it ‘with present purposes’.73 Clamouring against any claims to objectivity, it inspires a sanctioned unilinear discourse and an affect that denies the historicity of events. In fact, to create what I may call a ‘consolidated memory’ around Ayodhya has been difficult. Engagements with the past are undergirded with religious passion, generating the abiding discourse with mythic archetypes. For instance, a booklet as well circulated as Sri Ram Janmabhumi ka Romanckari Itihas (The Horripilating History of Sri Ram Janmabhumi) triggers a historical discourse that points to a time – back in time by nine hundred thousand years – when Sri Ram, the first in the line of Hindu kings, began to rule Bharatvarsha. Under the pressure of a series of invasions Ayodhya was neglected and it fell out of reckoning only to be retrieved by Emperor Vikramaditya who, eventually, erected the Ram temple at the holy site. Then came Babar who brought down the temple; after him, Hindus continued to attack the mosque to liberate the Ram Janmabhumi in a holy war until, on 6 December 1992, Hindu pride and honour was ‘crowned with success’ (in the parlance of Hindutva historians) by the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The language and the narrative have skilfully collapsed the historical distance and generated a kind of ‘retrospective continuity’. The temporal vastness of the past is reconciled with the finite ‘lived’ time of the Hindu individual in a kind of promotion and authentication of what Paul Ricoeur would ascribe as ‘narrative identity’.74 It is an identity that is constitutive of both space (that is, the location of the city in history) and time that bridges the ‘them-then’ with ‘us-now’.75 Making it less of an intellectual problem, this memory-building programme interprets history simplistically and fomented the zones of private sympathies that made history a stooge of well-carpentered ideological-impositional modes of representation. It consolidates ‘memory generation’ by working on fusing distances – what the past means and the present wants it to mean; it engages the distant with a desire, promotes emotional homogenisation that makes the past collapse into the present and, making good of the historical distance, separates the ‘target’ event in the past from the present with an attitude that is informed by exclusionist fundamentalist assumptions. Memory would also call for the character and viability of ‘distances’. The memory around Ayodhya is not the disengaged or impartial historical position but a commitment to a discourse of

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possible religious emancipation; it is narrated as a contrived historical necessity, a form of historical reasoning that tries to resurrect a particular race against the venal wrongs of an imperial and historically sanctioned, oppressive ‘other’. The incremental discourse around Ayodhya is constructed both to make the communities converge on one point of common memory that speaks in the unimpeachable language of deprivation and discrimination by the ‘other’ and to develop it as the inspiration to essentialise one’s cultural existence, which would eventually serve the ends of partisan sentimentalities in power.76 This fusing of distances is a way of ‘spacing time’, ordering the flow of ‘happenings’ that will run common to a community. Cutting back on historical distances is evolving the possibilities of being in common. Declaratively, it is about history belonging to a community, and community to history. This ‘communitarian’ or ‘communist’ aspect of history is empowerment – the cultural endowment – within a temporality that emerges in the phenomenon of being-in-common. So the usability and knowability of the past are preyed upon to allow memory to grow on a community, and it is, most often, in conflict with objective recording of the past. History and memory do not necessarily have to go hand in hand and claims of their persistent cohabitation can spell danger (as it does in the case of Ayodhya). Memory massed up around Ayodhya configures Hindu identity as the dominant identity that, then, is made available to the people with the emphatic exhortation to participate in it. On some occasions, it is thrust on them without the alternative of ‘exit’ – it becomes a situation of no choice. It becomes acquiescence to the ritualistic celebration of a mnemonic confederation. Identity, as I have noticed with the institution of ‘Ayodhya’, does not come before reason. For, most often, with people belonging to the semieducated class – not the educated, middle-class, urban section of the population – this reason is not what we can identify as ‘non-aggressive argumentation’; rather, it is the reason of a hegemonic discourse that entraps individual volition into a narrative of common subjectivity, common empathy and persuasion that is dissonant with the Indian tradition of heterodoxy.77 The constraints of individual identity are ‘reasoned out’ and subsumed under the greater discourse of power and knowledge. People are made to believe that reclaiming Ayodhya is the ineluctable choice without which the entire Hindu identity will be thrown open to the sinister appropriation of the ‘other’. Fundamentalists know that mere accent on ‘faith’ or religious belief might not bring too many people into their fold; they need to make people aware of the threat of cross-border terror (Pakistan’s anti-Indian rhetoric in particular) knowing fully well that this evocation of fear and insecurity will make many of them seek common identities in the greater arch of anti-Muslim Hinduhood. Both fear and faith, thus, work to create a wider federation. Ayodhya then, in the words of Amartya Sen, becomes a subject of ‘cultural disharmony’ and cultural specificity.78 As part of ‘cultural disharmony’ we notice that the politics of ‘redress claims’ and the politics of ‘victimisation and regret’ are on the ascendance.

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This is, properly speaking, a kind of memory of power, namely, the memory of past injustices and traumas inflicted by the state or groups abusing their power. Beyond ‘redress claims’, in response to the memory of power, certain communities advance the recovery of unrecorded history and the cultural and political recognition of their particular collective experience. Memory is marshalled both as a grievance and a claim on political resources, and groups are eager to have the dignity of their individual historical experience recognised – precisely in the way they have lived through it and present it now. Here memory, like identity, is always in danger of giving rise to absolute moral claims and to becoming non-negotiable. Historicisation through memories and, thus, through reconfigured identities, becomes the communalists’ agenda to ‘normalise’ the past and make it settle congruently with the present. There is an invitation to boundless mnemonic subjectivism that tries to avoid the confrontation with traditional, ‘hard’ historical approaches and truths. In this interpretation, memory turns into a new religion of power and authority that feeds on a new emotionalism: it gives rise to endless grievance-claims that are couched in the language of ‘private’ community-incarcerated memories. The memorialisation of history is at the same time its moralisation, and the stakes of historical inquiry are no longer wie es eigentlich gewesen (however flawed Leopold von Ranke’s goal of historicist reconstruction might have been), but the mobilisation of memory to stake out moral claims. In fact, the past is replacing the future as the key place of reference in political debate today. We cannot avoid arriving at the new politics of the ‘memory of victimage’. It is interesting to dwell somewhat on the German self-perception as victims of the Second World War – a ‘new victim feeling’. For the ultraconservative and the radically right-wing Neo-Nazi organisations, German victimhood has remained a cause for celebration and sustained projection. They have successfully brought into prominence the agonising devastation caused by the air war carried out by Anglo-American forces. It is argued: The frequent proclamation that taboos on discussing Germany’s own victimisation have been broken ignores the historical precedence of German discourse on suffering as well as the divergent political realities of East and West that resulted in different silences. The persistent reference in current discourse to the existence of such taboos seems instead to highlight the widespread perception of a ‘second victimisation’, a censorship of the real hardships of the experiencing generation. As German suffering re-enters public discourse, it is accompanied by voices from the political Left and Right that call for addressing the entire spectrum of German experiences in the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century; this allows space for stories of German pain as well as those of perpetration. Although Germany’s status as a perpetrator nation during World War II and the Holocaust does not change, the history of German suffering through Allied bombings, expulsion or rape becomes the focus of public discussion in the Federal Republic.79

Suddenly, the story of German victimhood is thrown open to public debate and moralisation. Who would speak up for the German women raped merci-

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lessly in the Second World War? How long should the national trauma of the air war remain a taboo with postwar generations? Who speaks for the trauma and anguish of living through Allied bombings, the German ‘healing’ from the traumatic memory of the air war? Abutting the Holocaust, is there not the necessity of a discourse that views Dresden as the German Hiroshima, something that we come to acknowledge as the Dresden discourse of victimisation? The idea of Hindu victimhood, however, differs from the German phenomenon in its persistence with the event of sustained victimisation by the Muslims and in seeing the Muslims as perpetual perpetrator. Contrary to the Germans, who celebrate both the perpetrator role and the victim role, the Ayodhya lionisers celebrate the saga of ceaseless Hindu suffering at the hands of the ‘outsiders’ and legitimise their reprisal as perpetrators who did not act out of vengeance as the Russian Red Army or British and American war planes’ strafing did, but as a historic necessity to render ‘justice’. In the growing industry of victimisation, Hindu radicals are keen on basing their communal identity, in the words of Ian Buruma, ‘almost entirely on the sentimental solidarity of remembered victimhood’. And in ‘that way lie historical myopia and, in extreme circumstances, even vendetta’.80 The demolition of Babri Masjid is argued out as an act of ‘restorative justice’, owning of a restitutive space that they feel was long overdue and was needed to prove a point about resurgent, unshackled, autonomous Hindu identity. Besides Ayodhya, this ‘memory of victimage’ brings us to see in a similar way the build-up of historical consciousness around the Somnath temple in Gujarat, a state in the western part of India, which is described as having been attacked seventeen times by Mahmud of Ghazni (1026) – a ‘spot of time’ that Hindutva historians claim inaugurated the near-irreconcilable schism between the Hindus and Muslims. In fact, under the binding jargon of ‘victimhood’, the issues of Ayodhya and Somnath are linked together as evidence of a continual Muslim bestiality and Hindu socio-cultural enervation. The first home minister of independent India, Sardar Patel, put it on record in the 1950s that the ‘Hindu sentiment in regard to this temple is both strong and widespread. In the present conditions it is unlikely that the sentiment will be satisfied by mere restoration of the temple, or by prolonging its life. The restoration of the idol would be a point of honour and sentiment with the Hindu public’. Despite recent challenges to such narratives by Romila Thapar,81 the myth, memory and history around Somnath have been careful telescoped. K.M. Munshi’s novel Jaya Somanatha (1927) and his book Somanatha, the Shrine Eternal set the tone for a consciousness that is difficult to dislodge and easy to perpetuate.82 Hindu historians have feistily jumped on to H.M. Elliot’s description of Mahmud’s invasion of Somnath and, to my surprise, I discovered that the public space in an otherwise soporific town of Ayodhya was reasonably informed about the tribulation that the Hindus had to face in the teeth of this marauding invasion.

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The accent on Hindu suffering and victimisation is clearly evident in Elliot’s description: In short, when Mahmud encamped at Somnat, he saw a large fort on the shore of the sea, and the waves reached up to the earth underneath that castle. Many men having come upon the top of the rampart, looked down upon the Musulmans, and imagined that their false god would kill that multitude that very night … The army of Ghaznin, full of bravery, having gone to the foot of the fort, brought down the Hindus from the tops of the ramparts with the points of eye-destroying arrows, and having placed scaling ladders, they began to ascend with loud cries of Allah-u Akbar (i.e. God is greatest). The Hindus offered resistance … The next day, having returned to the strife, and having finished bringing into play the weapons of warfare, they vanquished the Hindus. Those ignorant men ran in crowds to the idol temple, embraced Somnat, and came out again to fight until they were killed. Fifty thousand infidels were killed round about the temple, and the rest who escaped from the sword embarked in ships and fled away. Sultan Mahmud, having entered into the idol temple, beheld an excessively long and broad room, insomuch that fifty-six pillars had been made to support the roof. Somnat was an idol cut out of stone, whose height was five yards, of which three yards were visible, and two yards were concealed in the ground. Yaminu-d daula having broken that idol with his own hand, ordered that they should pack up pieces of the stone, take them to Ghaznin, and throw them on the threshold of the Jama Masjid. The sum which the treasury of the Sultan Mahmud obtained from the idol-temple of Somnat was more than twenty thousand dinars, inasmuch as those pillars were all adorned with precious jewels.83

The discourse of continuity in the ‘suffering-victim mode’, which broadly underpins the relation between the two communities, makes the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) link the two issues in a persuasive rhetoric. The BJP’s ‘White Paper on Ayodhya and the Rama Temple Movement’ (April 1993) emphatically notes that ‘the evolution from Somanath was suspended after the death of Sardar Patel and … Ayodhya is the recommencement from the point where the spirit of Somnath stood suspended’.84 Ayodhya, it is argued, is not an isolated point of history invoking a spasmodic, agitated burst. It is a ‘stream that has been unbroken through centuries, one that predates by centuries all the persons and organizations which are today associated with the Ramjanmabhumi movement’.85 This closely corroborates my earlier arguments on ‘historical distance’. The myth of Ayodhya or Somnath and whatever history has to say on it are part of a tradition that has an ineluctable sway over the Hindu mind at different levels of its unfoldment. Given the persuasions and formative distinctness of the common Hindu mind and his/her attitude to itihasa, there is a certain unconscious absorption of this process of historical narration; most Hindus do not realise that they become a part of this narration where the paradigms of reliability and objectivity become easy casualties. In fact, memorialisation of history is also a product of hominisation when the ‘participation mystique’ becomes mimetic. The mimetic desire enforces a common identity. The root meaning of identity – from Latin, idem – is same-

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ness. The collective memory project harps and builds on sameness. Memory is mimetically consolidated through the victimage mechanism and an espousal of the ‘sacred’. This is a source of violence that discounts historical rationality and interpretation. Mythic writing is textual archaeology that ontically unveils the ‘sacred’ mediating between peace and violence.

Media and Public Memory Modern media and the contemporary politics of memory are entwined in a mutual embrace. There are critics who would conflate the modern media with memory on the basis that its simulated images of the past have colonised our memorial consciousness. Nancy Wood would treat the ‘media as one “vector” of memory – a pre-eminent one, but by no means the only cultural practice that is charged with “anchorage” and representing and transmitting a society’s relationship to its past’.86 Media has the moral responsibility to stimulate public debates about memory but in trying to render representational form to cultural memories it often treads beyond the domain of conventional historical narration, inducing a sort of ‘banalization’.87 History in trying to be ‘popular’ and mediagenic resorts to ‘flicks’ and ‘twists’ that can go down well with common viewers who would have neither the training nor the patience to judge its validity and veracity. The production and distribution of memories become ambivalent and differentiated, and this problematises the process of historical verification and authentication. The media can, at times, substitute history with entertainment – evident in the unprecedented response to the broadcast of the Hindu epic Ramayana – and through a pretence to historical reconstruction resort to sweeping generalisation. This badly impairs the growth of rational historical sensibility and sense-generation. The Ramayana serialised on India’s state-run television system (it ran from January 1987 to September 1990) drew on myth and devotionalism – a sort of Hindu cultural essentialism whose appeal cut across diverse social groups to proclaim an assertive Hindu way of life that is superior and uncompromisingly exclusionary. Arvind Rajagopal perceptively notes: The indigenous language press, notably the Hindi press, carrying on debates older than the Ram Janmabhumi movement but gaining intensity during it, of the inseparability of the Hindu religion from the Indian nation, and of the inadmissibility of any challenges to that idea. The historical cleavage between English as the language of command and the indigenous languages was accentuated with independence and the new elite … to summarize a complex argument here, the English language, by virtue of being subsumed as the Nehruvian language of command, continued a colonial practice of aloofness and unfamiliarity with local traditions. This was a lack that had to be made up in the indigenous languages, and it led to a division with obvious political dangers, as a nationalist intelligentsia, arguably the dominant intelligentsia, was only poorly capable of dialogue with sentiments

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emerging in the course of debates amongst the majority population. The BJP perceived and was able to utilize this deep cultural fault line, building sympathy for their cause through a compliant Hindi language press and allowing friction to be generated in the English language press through their militant postures. With an intricate sense of existing cultural fields and their patterns and limits of reach, Hindu nationalists strategically crossed certain boundaries and maintained others, gathering and distributing the energies from particular fields in other, designated zones across society for an orchestrated total effect.88

So Ayodhya is constructed as a Hindu-Hindi memory, the weight of which can be experienced only in some particular parts of northern India but the thrust and projection of which have always been nationalist. Riding piggyback on such megamediatisation-serialisation of the Hindu cultural past – the flow of cultural memory with its ‘entangledness’89 in televisuality and popular culture – Hindu radicals win the major part of their battle by controlling public memory. The media facilitates the process of memory generation and assists the covert cohorts of the Hindutva brigade to unearth national pasts, imagine traditions and write certain groups out of their history. Romila Thapar feels that the version selected for serialisation is the Brahmanised Valmiki version, which has its roots in the Vais.n.ava sect. It is the Tulsi version that, with its ‘millenarian appeal for peasants’ and discourse of the oppressed, is obviated in favour of the text that is undergirded by the message of ‘universalising Hinduism’. So it is the Hindu Vais.n.ava text that pivots around the worship of Rama and is familiar to north Indian Hindi speakers and broadly to the literate few elsewhere. ‘The choice of this version’, writes Thapar, therefore makes a specific social and political statement, and this statement becomes all the more significant given that television is part of the government-controlled media. With such powerful backing the serial comes to be seen as the national culture of the mainstream. This tends to eliminate the range of folk and popular versions or alternative versions. There is a very deliberate choice of one tradition and the elevation of this tradition (remoulded in accordance with contemporary tastes and values) to national status. The differences, the debates, the discussions implicit in the interplay of variants are thus nullified. Inevitably this is also part of the attempt to redefine Hinduism as an ideology for modernization. Hinduism, proving indirectly a possible ideology for middle class concerns, a version which is linked to what is seen as the strategy of the ruling elite.90

So the media-genetic discourse makes a ‘claim to totalize the world of possible utterances’. Media, in this case, has inspired founding myths and has pitchforked Hindutva historians into the public space with a mobilising voice. Controlling memory means controlling dynamism, as Foucault, perceptively, points out.91 Controlling dynamism results in controlling the experiences and the ways of action and thought. This control to influence and transmit the popular memory works more efficaciously when the institutional mechanism is allowed to function conjunctively. Media, thus, reprograms popular memory and gives a revisionist stir to our historical knowledge.92 Michael Frisch is right

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to claim that the significance of memories does not lie in authenticity but in their functionality, for ‘what matters is not so much the history that is placed before us, but rather what we are able to remember and what role that knowledge plays in our lives’.93 It is the functionality and the strategic ‘transmission of history’ of Ayodhya that have made the myth of Rama and the Rama temple hold an indelible centrality in popular consciousness; it has made the ‘public use of history’ a more contestable site than ever before. If public use of history is an activity that governs and defines the relationships between memory and oblivion, then who decides what is worthy of being retained and what is not? The paradox lies in confronting two contradictory phenomena where, on the one hand, there is an accentuated and widespread eradication of the past and, on the other hand, a hypertrophy of historical citations in public speech and discourse. Close to what we are arguing and, certainly of abiding interest, is the phenomenon of ‘Padania’. The Italian populist movement Lega Nord once famously claimed that the north of Italy was a nation (Padania) that should be given its due independence. Identities were redefined and history was strategically reinvented to tie this claim to the symbolic rubric of a communal assertive myth of a ‘nation within a nation’. It is a comparable instance (with Ayodhya in particular) of promoting and establishing strategies of reappropriation in political and cultural propaganda. Padania and Ayodhya are both ‘virtual nations’, products of populism and nationalism, but the difference is that Padania is completely invented while Ayodhya is not. Daniele Albertazzi explains that the ‘case of Padania remains interesting (and possibly unique) insofar as it makes it possible to assess to what extent identities can in fact be established and communities “imagined” through a well-orchestrated deployment of symbols and rituals and by means of political propaganda. The Lega has exploited all the usual paraphernalia of nationalism by manipulating myths, exhuming heroes and exploiting the power of persuasion of the media’.94 The case of Ayodhya is no exception to such manipulative, reconstructive enterprise as we see the ‘mythomoteur’ with its deep anchorage in an unmixed Hindu past – a malicious mix of religion and politics – argue the establishment of Hindurashtra, which is ethnoscopic and irredentist too. Ayodhya has come down silently and sacrally as part of a tradition and, being pegged on to a mechanism of ‘programmed’ memory, easily becomes a prisoner of political reductionism and functionalism. The project of representing the past is informed by an act of controlling the reception: it is this control that, in turn, creates the uncontested zone of collective memory. From the symbolic and mythic networks is created the consciousness that turns a ‘community memory’ into a national memory, which takes advantage of repressed consciousness and the historical legacy of recorded and mythicised animosity; it rescribes unwritten narratives into the discourse that, surprisingly, inspires ‘collective belief ’. Ayodhya is projected as a whole-

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some memory by the Hindu radicals and the ‘transmission strategy’ seemingly leaves no room for ambiguity and contradiction. This strategically produces a national memory that succeeds in representing a common destiny for the Hindu majority. In fact, such evocation of national memory, notes Confino, ‘overcomes symbolically real social and political conflicts in order to give the illusion of a community to people who in fact have very different interests’.95 Wang observes: ‘Memory has its own historical unfolding, but in contrast with modern historical sensibility, it shows its tardiness and is not so prone to change. In pushing for change, history comes as a critique and revision of what cultural memory has taken for granted as natural, timeless, self-evident. In rewriting the past, history performs a critical interpretation on memory’.96 However, the politics of interpretation within a fundamentalist discourse inverts the logic of a memory in need of being historicised: cultural memory, sometimes, untried, polarised and sacral, enjoys a sanitised existence that no historical interpretation can dare to critique. Ayodhya promotes an ‘authenticity’ that, in the words of Allan Megill, ‘amounts to a species of validity, overriding any problems of accuracy arising from an original misperception or from distortions introduced in the lapse of time. But the authenticity in question is clearly not the kind of authenticity that one attributes to a document from the past whose provenance one has verified. Rather, it is authenticity in the existential sense, deriving its force from the alleged fact that it emerges directly and immediately from the subject’s encounter with the world’.97 So Ayodhya lies at the intersection of official and vernacular memory; in this intersection we have a well-generated body of public memory that has grown by feeding on the existing tradition, cultural symbols and the interpolated facts and interpretation. It has built a distinct mode of patriotism, a love for the country that is primarily constructed on notions of ‘dispossession by the other’ and assertions of ‘communal rights to power’. John Bodnar notes that ‘negotiation and cultural mediation do not preclude domination and distortion. Usually it is the local and personal past that is incorporated into a nationalised public memory rather than the other way around. Local, regional, class, and ethnic interests are sustained in one form or another in the final product, but the dominant meaning is usually nationalistic’.98 The discourse of Hinduism that turns Ayodhya into the nerve centre of mass mobilisation smothers ethnic and regional interests to evolve a common pervasive master discourse – the strategic assimilation of splinter interests into a collective one and, finally, to the grid of nationalism. Ethnic memory, hence, comes to stay. The progeny of elite manipulation, public memory around Ayodhya remains a contested site where leaders – be it the sadhus, politicians or historians – subtly conquer common minds by a discourse that sees love for the country as a covenant with communal consciousness and Hinduisation.99 The unavoidable open spaces formed out of the intermeshing claims of historical objectivity, intrusive mythic formations, archaeological truth-claims and ideological impo-

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sitions make ‘community designations’ and ‘identity’ constructions easier and manipulative. For a country where religion is deeply informed by superstition and where rituals form a significant portion of the existential pith, history and memory cannot function without the transformative pressures of religion. Religion creates identity, influences our understanding of history and constructs a historical bias and aggravates community consciousness. So the understanding of Ayodhya and, significantly, what we are made to understand of it, straddles both communicative and cultural memory.100 Ayodhya will continue to survive as a tract, an experience, a phenomenon, that allows realities of and behind representation to ‘quarrel’ with a fascinating, symbolic allure.

Notes 1. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1949), 42. 2. Gita Hariharan, In Times of Siege (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003), 94. Italics mine. 3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Excavation and Memory’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 576. 4. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Abuses of Memory’, Common Knowledge 5, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 8. ‘We all have the right to recover our past, to be sure, but there is no cause to erect a cult of memory for the sake of memory; sacralizing memory is another way to render it sterile. Once the past is reestablished, we should ask ourselves: in what way will we use it and to what end?’ (15). 5. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 2–3. 6. See M.I. Finley, ‘Myth, Memory, and History’, in The Use and Abuse of History (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 13. 7. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), 2. 8. Ibid., 3. 9. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (eds.), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1999), vii. Also see Sirkka Ahonen, ‘Forming a Collective Identity through Historical Memories’, in Joke van der LeeuwRoord (ed.), History for Today and Tomorrow, What Does Europe Mean for School History (Hamburg: Korber-Stiftung, 2001), 93–94. 10. Roger Caillois, quoted in David Bevan (ed.), Modern Myths (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 3. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 2. 13. Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 213–14. 14. Peter Munz, ‘History and Myth’, Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 22 (1956): 3. Munz’s observations are pregnant with several implications as to one’s appropriation of myth and the consequent emergence of history from it: ‘A myth is a story; if one is familiar with myths, one knows what sort of story one might expect to have happened. One will have an expectation of a certain pattern, of a certain type of structure of events; and one can begin one’s observation of a span in time and space with such a criterion of selection in mind’ (6). 15. It is interesting to reflect on Alain Delivre’s concepts of ascending and descending anachronisms in relation to Ayodhya. When an event is seen to occupy a place in the past, a space back in time, and, thus, removed from the present, it becomes ascending anachronism. This occupancy

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in the past sanctions a sort of sanctification that is not disputed in the present. It remains as a point of general approval or legitimacy from which the present can think of drawing some of its strength. But descending anachronisms work to push events forward in time; it is when events are held in proximity to our living present that, thus, enables and tempts us to initiate and claim some innovations and changes in them. It is through these two modes of anachronism that history is written or narrated and it is what makes history serviceable to the desires of certain groups. It is such a manipulation in time that is at work in the understanding of and writing about Ayodhya. The idea of the ‘glorious past’ emerges substantially from such chronic movements. The glorious past points to the construction of a ‘tradition’ that has an unchanging core of traits following one generation to the next in a sort of ceaseless, unchallenged continuity. It is this understanding of tradition that is critiqued by Handler and Linnekin as being constructed on a ‘nature’ metaphor: ‘Tradition is likened to a natural object, occupying space, enduring in time, and having a molecular structure … modelled after a natural object – bounded, discrete, and objectively knowable’ [Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘Tradition, Genuine or Spurious’, Journal of American Folklore 97 (1984): 385, 286]. This uncontested dimension of tradition that is deemed as ‘glorious’ works on the present through descending anachronism and invokes reinvention in an ongoing present. The phenomena of ‘Ram Rajya’ in the Indian socio-political milieu can be explicated along this line of argument. Anthony Smith sees in the ‘glorious past’ a combination of ‘genuine shared memory’ with ‘exaggeration, idealization and heroization’ (see Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 263). In this context Smith’s ideas about a ‘golden age’ being its ‘suggestion of potential through filiation’ sounds relevant. He writes: ‘The emphasis is always on the descendants of heroes, sages, saints and poets having within themselves, in virtue of their blood relationship, the inner resources to become like their glorious forefathers and foremothers; and hence the inherent capacity of grandsons and granddaughters and their descendants to give birth to a civilization and culture worthy of the golden age. So the community will be purified of alien accretions, and by returning to its former faith and purity will be renewed and restored “as in the days of old”. In this respect, the golden age reveals to the latter day community its “authentic” (usually pre-industrial and rural) self and bids it rediscover and realize that self under quite different conditions … the memory of a golden age is closely linked to a sense of collective destiny. The road that the community expects to take in each generation is inspired and shaped by its memories of former heroic ages. Their values and symbols form the basis and spur to heroic feats of communal self-sacrifice in the future, a future that can become as glorious and fulfilling as the days of old’ (264). A collective awareness of ‘ethno-heritage’, partially extant and largely simulated and carpentered, renders history into ethnic myths and a discourse of shared memories. Most Hindus have always taken pride in the myths of a glorious past. Surendranath Banerjee in ‘The Study of Indian History’ writes: ‘Hindus keep referring to their glorious past to invoke a pride: I ask, what Hindu is there who does not feel himself a nobler being altogether, as he recalls to mind the proud list of his illustrious country-men, graced by the thrice-immortal names of a Valmiki and a Vyasa, a Panini and a Patanjali, a Gautama and a Sankaracharya? I ask, what Hindu is there whose patriotism is not stimulated, whose self-respect is not increased, as he contemplates the past history of his country? For ours was a most glorious past. We were great in literature, in science, in war, but above all great in morals’. See Elie Kedourie (ed.), Nationalism in Asia and Africa (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 235. 16. See Anthony D. Smith, ‘Ethnic Myths and Ethnic Revivals’, Archives European Journal of Sociology xxv, no. 2 (1984): 287–88. Also see his ‘Chosen Peoples: Why Ethnic Groups Survive’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 15, no. 3 ( July 1992): 436–57. 17. See Sushil Srivastava, The Disputed Mosque: A Historical Inquiry (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1991). 18. H.R. Neville, Fyzabad: A Gazetteer Being Volume XLIII of the District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (Allahabad: Govt. Press United Provinces, 1905), 172. 19. Ibid., 173–74.

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20. Montgomery Martin, The History, Antiquities, Topography, and Statistics of Eastern India (London, 1838) in six volumes. Also see W.H. Sleeman, Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude (London, 1856), in 2 volumes. 21. W.C. Benet (ed.), Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh, (originally published London, 1877, Indian reprint Delhi: B.R. Publishing, 1985), vols. I-A to G-3. Benet notes: ‘It is locally affirmed that at the Muhammadan conquest there were three important Hindu shrines, with but few devotees attached, at Ajodhya, which was then little other than wilderness. These were the “Janamasthan”, “Swargaddwar mandir” also known as “Ram Darbar”, “Treta-ke-Thakur”. On the first of these the Emperor Babar built the mosque, which still bears his name, A.D. 1528. On the second, Aurangzeb did the same, A.D. 1658–1707; and on the third, that sovereign or his predecessors built a mosque, according to the well-known Muhammadan principle of enforcing their religion on all those whom they conquered. The Janmasthan marks the place where Ram Chandar was born. The Swargaddar is the gate through which he passed into paradise, possibly the spot where his body was burned. The Treta-Ke-Thakur was famous as the place where Rama performed a great sacrifice, and which he commemorated by setting up there images of himself and Sita. According to Leyden’s Memoirs of Babar, that Emperor encamped at the junction of the Serwa and Gogra rivers two or three kos east from Ajodhya, on 28th March, 1528, and there he halted seven or eight days, settling the surrounding country … It is remarkable that in all the copies of Babar’s life now known, the pages that relate to his doings at Ajodhya are wanting. In two places in the Babri Mosque, the year in which it was built, 935 H., corresponding with 1528 A.D. is carved in stone, along with inscriptions dedicated to the glory of that Emperor’ (6–7). Also see H.C. Irwin, The Garden of India (London, 1880), 62–70. 22. H.C. Irwin, The Garden of India, vol. 1 (Lucknow: Pustak Kendra, 1973), 55. 23. Neville, Fyzabad, 174. It is quite interesting to see how the sacredness of Ayodhya in Hindu memory grew in time and how the tide of religiosity often did not demur to put history on the margins. Great fairs at Ayodhya drew vast throngs of pilgrims from all parts like Ramnaumi in Chait (pulling some 400,000 people around it), Jhula or swinging fair in Sawan heaving high with 300,000 souls congregating across the week. (Neville, Fyzabad, 47). Even Benet corroborates this bloody incident of 1855 between the Hindus and the Muslims and adds, ‘Nothing has been done by the Hindus to restore the old mandir of Ram Darbar’ (7). 24. See H.M Elliot, History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, vol. 1 (London, 1866). 25. Montgomery Martin writes: ‘The people of Ayodhya imagine that, after the death of Vrihadbala, their city was deserted, and continued so until the time of Vikrama of Ujjain, who came in search of the holy city, erected a fort called Ramgar, cut down the forest by which the ruins were covered, and erected 360 temples on the places sanctified by the actions of Rama, of his wife Sita, of his brother Lakshmana, and of his general Mahavira’(vol. 3, 333). Even A. Fuhrer in Report of the Archaeological Survey of India (new series, Allahabad, 1891) mentions how the Muslims destroyed the temples of Ayodhya (vol. 2, 295–300). 26. Edward Thornton, A Gazetteer of the Territories under the Government of the East India Company and of the Native States of the Continent of India, vol. 4 (London: Wm. H. Allen, 1854), 45–46. 27. Ibid., 176. 28. Neville wrote in 1905: ‘Since the mutiny an outer enclosure has been put up in front of the mosque and the Hindus who are forbidden access to the inner yards, make their offerings on a platform which they have raised in the outer one’ (Fyzabad, 174). Neville, by pointing to a strict demarcation whereby Hindus are not allowed to enter the mosque, clearly indicates the helpless state of the Hindus. 29. Peter Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, in Thomas Butler (ed.), Memory: History, Culture and the Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 107, 104. 30. Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2005), 149. 31. For instance, Pratap Narain Misra’s Kya Kahati Hai Sarayu Dhara (1985) triggered the surge in such essentialist writings; Sri Ramjanmabhumi ke Bare me Tathya, The Truth about Ram-

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janmabhumi (New Delhi: Suruchi Prakashan, 1989); Ram Gopal Pandey, Sri Ram janmabhumi ka romanckari itihas, The Exciting History of Sri Ramjanmabhumi (Ayodhya: Pandit Dvarikaprasad Sivgovind Pustakalay, 1976). Also see Acharya Gudunji Sharma’s Ayodhya ka Prachin Itihas. 32. Jacob N. Kinnard, ‘When Is the Buddha Not the Buddha? The Hindu/Buddhist Battle over Bodhgaya and its Buddha Image’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 817–18. 33. Ibid., 824. 34. See Pierre Nora, ‘Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989): 13. It is interesting to note the views of Ibn Khaldun in Muqqadimah where he discounts blind faith in tradition (taqlid) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1969). 35. M.V. Kamath, ‘Myths and Reality’, Organiser (13 December 1987), 4. There are a set of articles in Organiser (21 October 1984; 12 May 1985; 23 June 1985; 18 August 1985; 22 December 1985; 27 April 1986; 4 May 1986; 7 December 1986; 24 August 1986) where the story of the destruction of the Ramjanmabhumi temple dissolves into a more general narrative of temple destruction by the Muslim rulers, and the mythic story of the decline of India from the age of civilisation to the age of barbarism. 36. See Edward Leach, ‘Anthropological Approaches to the Study of the Bible during the Twentieth Century’, in Edward Leach and D. Alan Aycock (eds), Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 8. 37. See Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Modes of History Writing, New Hindu History of Ayodhya’, Economic and Political Weekly (18 June 1994), 1524. 38. Daniel Bar-Tal, ‘Delegitimization: The Extreme Case of Stereotyping and Prejudice’, in Daniel Bar-Tal et al. (eds), Stereotyping and Prejudice: Changing Conceptions (New York: Springer, 1989), 170, 172–73. 39. See ‘Sri Rama Janmabhoomi or Babari Masjid’, Organiser (29 March 1987), 9–10. There is no document to support the claim that Lord Rama’s Ayodhya and the present town of Ayodhya are in the same place. It is interesting to see how the Sanskrit text Skanda Purana has been cited by the Visva Hindu Parishad (VHP) to validate their claim. Researches show that Ayodhyamahatma, a part of the Purana that recounts the benign advantages of a pilgrimage to Ayodhya, is an eighteenth-century insertion. Perhaps, one can see through the inauthenticity of the VHP’s claim when we find that the core of the Purana was compiled not before the second half of the fourteenth century. So the declaration that Ayodhya occupies the pith of Hindu imagination and has come to reign in the Hindu psyche for ages does not hold ground. 40. See Anne Vergati, ‘The Construction of Tradition: The Cult of the God Rama in Rajasthan, North India’, History and Anthropology 15, no. 3 (September 2004): 269–70. 41. Gyanendra Pandey, ‘The Appeal of Hindu History’, in Vasudha Dalmia and H. von Stietencron (eds), Representing Hinduism, The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (New Delhi, London: Sage, 1995), 371–72. Pandey writes: ‘Hindu history goes on to describe how, through supernatural grace and powers acquired by the two Muslim faqirs from their teacher Baba Shyamanand, Babar was able to go back and defeat Rana Sanga in battle … When Babar returned to Ayodhya, the two faqirs extracted from him a promise to destroy the Janmabhumi temple and construct a mosque in its place. Having ordered his Vazir, Mir Baqi Khan Tashkandi, to do this, Babar returned to Delhi. Mir Baqi was a fanatical and easily aroused Muslim. [Without any delay] … he ordered his soldiers to destroy the temple … By Jalal Shah’s orders, the four priests of the temple were beheaded, and their corpses thrown to the crows and kites, while the temple was razed to the ground by canon-ball fire’ (Rakta ranjit itihasa) (381). 42. George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 3. 43. Ibid., 8. 44. Ibid., 16. 45. Badri Narayan, ‘Demarginalisation and History: Dalit Re-invention of the Past’, South Asia Research 28, no. 2 (2008): 172. For instance, Jhalkaribai, the maidservant of Rani Laxmibai, the queen of Jhansi, gets represented as the Dalit heroine of the 1857 revolt against the British;

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myth, memory and history are constructed around Udadevi, a Pasi chivalrous lady (v rangana) who was a close associate of Begum Hazrat Mahal in her involvement in India’s first war of independence’. Also see Badri Narayan, Documenting Dissent: Contesting Fables, Contested Memories and Dalit Political Discourse (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2001). 46. See Badri Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India: Culture, Identity and Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 2006), 79. 47. Soon after the army intervention at the Golden Temple (Amritsar) in June 1984, Mrs Indira Gandhi openly declared in a speech at Garhwal that Hindu dharma was under attack and made an appeal to save Hindu sanskriti (culture) from Sikh and Muslim attack. See Rajni Kothari, State against Democracy: In Search of Human Governance (Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1988.) And for further enunciation of the political manipulation of religious sentiments of the Congress party see Achin Vanaik, ‘The Rajiv Congress in Search of Stability’, New Left Review 154 (Nov/Dec. 1985): 55–82. A few years ago, the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Kalyan Singh, kicked off the BJP heartland election campaign by saying, ‘We have to light the flames of a virulent form of Hindutva, put an end to Islamisation of politics and intensify the sense of nationalism … Temple construction is my ultimate goal. But this is not a political issue. It is linked to the identity of the nation’. In Ayodhya, campaign posters screamed ‘Azad Hind’, ‘Azad Vatan’ and ‘Azad Ayodhya’ (liberated country, liberated homeland and a free Ayodhya). See the Telegraph, 27 September 2006. 48. See David Lake and Donald Rothchild, ‘Containing Fear: The Origin and Management of Ethnic Conflict’, International Security 21, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 41–75. 49. Sri Ram Sharma, The Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1988), 9. The book, originally written in 1940, is, interestingly, dedicated to Sir Jadunath Sarkar. 50. S.K. Banerji, ‘Babur and the Hindus’, Journal of the United Provinces Historical Society 9 (1936): 82–83. There is another story that runs thus: ‘When Babar arrived in Ayodhya, he heard about two Fakirs (ascetics) who were extremely weighty spiritual men with divine power. At that time, Babar was fighting the Rajputs and the Pathans. While he contained the Rajputs, he was facing difficulties suppressing the Pathans, which gave him a disenchanted feeling. As a last resort, he met the two fakirs and asked them to bless him so that he could defeat the Pathans. The fakirs, Musa Aashikan and Jalal Shah, agreed on one condition. The fakirs said that if he destroyed the Ramjanmasthan temple and built a mosque on the spot, they would help him. Babar agreed and so destroyed the Rama temple and built the Babri mosque’. See Iqbal Ansari Khan, In Depth Look at the Babri Mosque (Dhaka: Iqbal Ansari Khan, 1994), 70. 51. See Babur-Namah (Tuzuk-i-Baburi) (Memoirs of Babur), trans. A.S. Beveridge (New Delhi, 1970), 385. Talking of Rana Sanga, Babar points out how Chanderi was stormed by his men who humbled Rana Sanga’s trusted man Medini Rai into submission. He writes, ‘We made general massacre of the Pagans (Hindus) in it and, as will be narrated, converted what for many years had been a mansion of hostility, into a mansion of Islam’. See R. Nath, India as Seen by Babur (New Delhi: M.D. Publications, 1996), 51. Babar also had a low opinion about the Hindus. ‘Most of the inhabitants of Hindustan are pagans; they call a pagan a Hindu. Most Hindus believe in the transmigration of souls. All artisans, wage earners and officials are Hindus … Hindustan is a country of few charms. Its people have no good looks. Of social intercourse, paying and receiving visits, there is none; of genius and capacity none. In handicraft and (such) work there is no form or symmetry, method or quality. There are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, muskmelons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked food in the bazaars, no baths (hammams), no colleges, no candles, torches or candlesticks’ (57). Such lowbrow commentary on Hindu life and manners adds effectively to the discursive potential of the argument that Babar could not have had the casuistry and moral inhibition to assault a mere temple belonging to a community for whom he held the scantest respect. Also descriptions such as this – ‘Near the garden of Rahimdad there is a grand mosque and a still more lofty idol temple. This edifice and the fort are visible from Dhulpoor. Near Gualior, in a valley on the west, there is a place called Adwa, defended by ramparts sixty feet high on one side. On three sides there is a perpendicular cliff of

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red stone, in which I was scandalized to see sculptured in the rock idols of colossal size entirely naked. I gave order for all to be destroyed’ – consolidate the belief in the Hindus about Babar’s temple-breaking propensities, which again, though indirectly, lends another ounce of conviction to his being seen as the architect behind the Ram temple demolition. See R.M. Caldecott, Life of Baber, Emperor of Hindostan (London: James Darling, Clerical Library, 1844), 217–18. 52. Edward Balfour, Encyclopaedia Asiatica Comprising Indian Subcontinent, Eastern and Southern Asia, Commercial, Industrial and Scientific, vol. 1 (1858, Indian reprint, New Delhi, 1982). For elaborate references to M. Ashraf Hussain and his book see R. Nath, Baburi Masjid of Ayodhya (Jaipur: Historical Research Documentation Programme, 1991), 14–17. 53. See Epigraphia Indica – Arabic and Persian Supplement (Delhi, 1965), 58. 54. Mark this piece of information and the consequent inferences: ‘Mirza Jan, Hadiqah-I Shuhada, Lucknow, 1856. Mirza Jan was an eyewitness as well as active participant in the Crescentade (Jihad) led by Amir Ali Amethawi during Wajid Ali Shah’s regime in 1855 for recapture of Hanumangadhi (a few hundred yards from the Babari mosque) from the Hindus. The fight spread to the Babari mosque, which came into repossession of the Hindus for a while, it seems. From a private letter of the Governor-General, Coonoor, October 6, 1855, it appears that the work was banned immediately as one of the most inflammatory pamphlets on the Mussulman side … being circulated throughout the country, notwithstanding the seizure of them wherever they can be found … under the Governor-General’s ordinances. Does it still lie in anyone’s mouth to assert that the temple story is a creation of the British with a view to setting Hindus and Muslims against each other?’ See Harsh Narain, The Ayodhya Temple-Mosque Dispute (Delhi: Penman Publishers, 1993), 35–36. It is conclusively adumbrated that Muslims led by Babar demolished the Ram temple and built a mosque instead. 55. See John R. Gillis, Commemorations, The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 9. ‘Today packaged forms of both memory and history have proved so profitable that we must be wary of the results of commodification and commercialization as much as the consequences of political manipulation’ (19–20). It is argued that ‘in this era of plural identities, we need civil times and civil spaces more than ever, for these are essential to the democratic processes by which individuals and groups come together to discuss, debate, and negotiate the past, and through this process, define the future’ (20). But is the construction of memory and history around Ayodhya a product of negotiating the past through debate? How much of argumentative steam will the fundamentalist machine allow? For instance, it is interesting to see right-wing politician K.R. Malkani’s book The Politics of Ayodhya & Hindu-Muslim Relations (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 1993). Strategic excerpts from what allegedly Nirad C. Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul, Elie Wiesel and others have written (books of this kind do not care much about bibliographical details) invade Malkani’s narrative, which help build the argument in favour of the illegitimacy of the masjid’s existence. Nirad Babu is quoted as having said that ‘what happened in Ayodhya should not have happened is another matter. But I say that the Muslims do not have the slightest right to complain about the desecration of one mosque. From 1000 A.D. every Hindu temple from Kathiawar to Bihar, from the Himalayas to the Vindhyas has been sacked and ruined. Not one temple was left standing all over Northern India. They escaped destruction only where Muslim power did not gain access to them for reasons such as dense forests. Otherwise it was a continuous spell of vandalism. No nation with any self-respect will forgive this’ (41). 56. Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), 188. Also interesting is Roy L. Brooks (ed.), When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (New York: New York University Press, 1990); Peter Digeser, Political Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). Politicians and journalists can persuade people quickly: ‘This quick appeal makes historical myths attractive as instruments of journalism and political rhetoric. They catalyse consensus where the slow and difficult process of persuasion through rational argument might not produce the same result. They deliberately, through their elliptical quality, forestall logical questioning of the supposed historical parallel’. See Cyril Buffet and Beatrice Heuser (eds), Haunted by History (Oxford:

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Berghahn Books, 1998), 266. It is argued that ‘in a very complex environment, people seek simple explanations, using historical analogies to establish (supposedly) rules which help decide on a certain course of action. By invoking these historical experiences, with the implication that there is one (and only one) “lesson” to be drawn from each, and that this in turn is generally known to the audience or readership addressed, a pseudo-consensus is created in the minds of readers or listeners on the “lesson learnt”. It this thus very useful for politicians in particular to be the first to define the terms of any contemporary policy debate by invoking particular interpretations of the past. The historical experience and its “lesson” invoked thus form a shorthand (or symbol) that takes the place of a rational justification of a policy recommendation in a new situation’ (266–67). 57. ‘The Dharma Sansad conference at Prayag’, Hindu Vishva (March–April 1989): 16–17. Also articles in the Hindu Chetna contributed to this conceptual and exegetical build-up. Citing Golwalkar it is noted that the political rulers were never the standard-bearers of our society. They were never taken as the props of our national life. Saints and sages, who had risen above the mundane temptations of pelf and power and had dedicated themselves wholly for establishing a happy, virtuous and integrated state of society, were its constant torch bearers. They represented the dharmasatta (power derived from possession of spiritual knowledge). The king was only an ardent follower of that higher moral authority. 58. Valmiki’s Ramayana and Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas are projected to be the authentic versions of the Rama myth, ignoring in the process the other narratives that ‘form part of the broader cultural idiom of the country’ on this subject. This authentication legitimises Ayodhya as the birthplace of Rama, while very few people know that Valmiki borrowed the story from Dasharatha Jataka of the Buddhist literature. Such a calculated move sacralises Valmiki’s Ramayana and makes Ayodhya throb at the centre of the Hindu revivalist surge. 59. Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures’, Sociological Theory 17, no. 3 (November 1999): 342. 60. Karl Mannheim’s observations are quite pertinent to my concerns: ‘The concept “ideology” reflects the one discovery … that ruling groups can, in their thinking, become so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain facts which would undermine their sense of domination. There is implicit in the word “ideology” the insight that, in certain situations, the collective unconscious of certain groups obscures the real condition of society, both to itself and to others, and thereby stabilizes it’. These groups, myopic in nature, are only interested in the ‘destruction and transformation of a given condition of society’ that they unwittingly see as opposed to their ideology and inimical to a certain utopic eventuality. Their understanding and decisions can very rarely become proper diagnosis of the situation. It is only used ‘as a direction for action’. The nature of the claims to Ayodhya is symptomatic of a utopic mentality, ‘the collective unconscious, guided by wishful representation and the will to action’, which invariably obfuscates and conceals certain aspects of reality. Mannheim is right to note that ‘it turns its back on everything which would shake its belief or paralyse its desire to change things’. See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936), 36. 61. See Joshua Foa Dienstag, ‘“The Pozsgay Affair”: Historical Memory and Political Legitimacy’, History & Memory 8, no. 1 (1996): 60. 62. What I suggest is that there is not a ‘perpetuum mobile of memory and institutions, continuously reproducing each other, not only undistinguishable but by definition unchangeable’. See Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Past.The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 105. Where I regress is that the milling around Ayodhya is not merely institutional and socially mobilised but in a certain way individualistic too. It becomes also an effect of complex subjectivity where the self is seen in correspondence with political ministration and the pressures of ‘strategic’ social existence. There is a kind of ‘socialisation’, as Tonkin points out, which is not necessarily Halbwachian. Memory, in the context of Ayodhya, cannot be untaintedly a social one. 63. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1994), x.

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64. See Michael Schudson, ‘Dynamics of Distortion in Collective Memory’, in Daniel L. Schacter (ed.), Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Schudson writes that the ‘Dutch have wrapped themselves around a book by a thirteen-year-old girl, The Diary of Anne Frank, as proof to the ages of their national heroism in saving Dutch Jews from destruction. But the Dutch were in fact among the strongest collaborators with the Germans. And while their historical tradition demonstrates much less anti-Semitism than in Austria or France or many other countries in Europe, the widespread rule-following, order-obeying, well-mannered behavior of hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens made the Netherlands perhaps the easiest of all occupied countries for the Germans to administer’ (357). 65. See Jeffrey K. Olick (ed.), States of Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 1. Olick notes, ‘Even those like Nietsche and Renan who critiqued memory’s ambitions understood its centrality.’ 66. See Amos Funkenstein, ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness’, History and Memory 1, no. 1 (1989): 9–11. Tom Segev shows us that the Holocaust was consciously used by the Israeli government as a way of consolidating Israeli national identity after years of not paying much attention to it. See The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). Ayodhya, too, is built into a tradition freighted with past suffering and intervened in for purposes in the present. 67. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 63. Also see Barry Schwartz, Yael Zerubavel and Bernice M Barnett, ‘The Recovery of Masada: A Study in Collective Memory’, Sociological Quarterly 27 (1986): 147–64; Yael Zerubavel, ‘The Historic, the Legendary, and the Incredible: Invented Tradition and Collective Memory in Israel’, in John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 105–23. 68. See Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens (eds), Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (New York: Verso, 1988), 161–78. Also, for some interesting details on this strategist and exclusionary historiography and the perils of a serviceable past see Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). 69. Alon Confino, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’, American Historical Review 105, no. 2 (December 1997): 1390. 70. Stereotypes ‘are an indispensable part of our cognitive mechanism, rational patterns according to which our impressions are molded. They are not made to be affected by our impressions; on the contrary, they are made so as to protect us from impacts of the outside world, to ensure that our internal ordered world does not crumble under every new message of the external world. Stereotypes are kinds of pictures or descriptions of states of affairs which for us have meaning and a promise of controllability. Stereotypes are kinds of generalizations; but the main difference between them is that while generalizations are supposed to be affected by contingency, stereotypes can remain immune’. Ayodhya, for me, is one such socio-cultural stereotype. See Noa Gedi and Yogal Elam, ‘Collective Memory – What Is It?’ History and Memory 8 (1996): 46–47. It is projected as an adroit blend of the mundane and the monumental – a ‘creative imagining of the past in service of the present and an imagined future’, a continual refurbishing of the ideology of a tradition, a surrender to the problems of social imagination when the nuances of historical investigation are wilfully compromised by the few and the truth is made to establish itself in the larger domain of the public through such acts of compromise. See some interesting interventions in Dan Ben-Amos and Lilliane Weissberg (eds), Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). 71. I cannot avoid mentioning Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York: Basic Books, 1990). This book brilliantly demonstrates the changing image of the Jews through newly excavated memories from a wise, though not very alert and nonaggressive community, into a warrior and intense fighter class revelling in the assertiveness of a triumphal Israeli identity.

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72. Anuradha Kapur, ‘Deity to Crusader: The Changing Iconography of Ram’, in Gyanendra Pandey (ed.), Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today (New Delhi: Viking, 1993), 85. 73. David Lowenthal, Possessed by Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Free Press, 1996), xi. 74. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 246–48. 75. An interesting instance can be cited to explain this collapsing of historical distance. The Iranian ulama who put up serious resistance to the shah’s rule in Iran made considerable reference to the Battle of Karbala in which the Prophet’s grandson, Husain, died a martyr opposing the government by Yazid. Ayatollah Khomeini’s comments are indicative of a strategic construction of spatio-temporal collapse in historical distance: ‘It is as if the blood of our martyrs were the continuation of the blood of the martyrs of Karbala, and as if the commemoration of our brothers were the echo of the commemoration of those brave ones who fell at Karbala’. See Imam Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley, CA: Mizab, 1981), 249. 76. For some excellent discussions on historical distance see Mark Salber Phillips, ‘Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography’, PMLA 118, no. 3 (2003): 436–49, and ‘Distance and Historical Representation’, History Workshop Journal 57 (2004): 123–41. 77. Amartya Sen writes, ‘There is no escape from reasoning just because the notion of identity has been invoked. Choices over identities do involve constraints and connections, but the choices that exist and have to be made are real, not illusory. In particular, the choice of priorities between different identities, including what relative weights to attach to their respective demands, cannot be only a matter of discovery. They are inescapably decisional, and demand reason – not just recognition’. See The Argumentative Indian (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 352. But over the issue of Ayodhya this decisionality is more a captive of popular imagination, of the allure of the conspiratorial breath of history, of a well-carpentered production of memory than an outcome of rationality and pragmatism. 78. Ibid., 281. 79. See Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Dagmar Wienröder-Skinner, Victims and Perpetrators, 1933– 1945: (Re)presenting the Past in Post-unification Culture (New York: W. de Gruyter, 2006), 1–11. 80. See Ian Buruma, ‘The Joys and Perils of Victimhood’, New York Review of Books (8 April 1999). 81. See Romila Thapar, Somanatha:The Many Voices of a History (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2004). 82. Munshi writes, ‘I can assure you that the “collective subconscious” of India today is happier with the scheme of reconstruction of Somnath sponsored by Government of India than with many other things that we have done and are doing’. See his Somnatha, the Shrine Eternal, quoted in A.G. Noorani, ed., The Babri Masjid, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2003), 15. Munshi emphasises that Mahmud vandalised magnificent shrines, enforcing an ‘alien religion’ at the point of his sword. He abducted and killed thousands and sold women and children as slaves in the markets of Ghazni and other Central Asian markets. See his Struggle for Empire (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1966). 83. H.M. Elliot and John Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, vol. 4 (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 181–83. Elliot points out Tabakat-i Nasiri as saying that ‘the fragments of the idol were thus distributed, one at the gate of the Jami Masjid, one at the gate of the royal palace, one was sent to Mecca, and one to Medina’ (183). Even Alberuni notes, ‘Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions’. See Alberuni’s India, trans. Edward C. Sachau (New York: Norton, 1971), 22. Emphasizing an ‘affirmative continuity’, the fundamentalist discourse would raise all other issues except the question: If Mahmud can, why is it that Babar has to as well? Since Mahmud is the perpetrator, how does it justify that all Muslim rulers will have to be so?

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84. See Noorani, Babri Masjid, vol. 1, 12. 85. Ibid., vol. 2, 180. 86. Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 5. 87. See Mary Ann Doane, ‘Information, Crisis, Catastrophe’ in Patricia Mellencamp (ed.), Logics of Television (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 228. Television has the tendency ‘toward the leveling of signification, toward banalization and nondifferentiation – a way of saying, in effect, “Look, this is important,” of indexically signaling that its information is worthy of attention’ (225). 88. Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 16. Barbara Stoler Miller notes, ‘It was not uncommon for television sets in towns and villages to be freshly garlanded as a sign of worship before each Sunday broadcast. Despite the apparent interest of Muslims and Sikhs in the series, it was the Hindu audience to whom Sagar’s [Ramanand Sagar, the director of the megaseries] godly Rama played and it was Hindus who sent sacred bricks to Ayodhya for the Rama temple’. See ‘Contending Narratives – The Political Life of the Indian Epics’, Journal of Asian Studies 50, no. 4 (November 1991): 790; also see Philip Lutgendorf, ‘Ramayan: The Video’, TDR (The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies) 34, no. 2 (1990): 127–76. 89. See Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 5. Sturken sees cultural memory and history as ‘entangled rather than oppositional’. She writes: ‘Indeed, there is so much traffic across the borders of cultural memory and history that in many cases it may be futile to maintain a distinction between them. Yet there are times when those distinctions are important in understanding political intent, when memories are asserted specifically outside of or in response to historical narratives’ (5). 90. See Romila Thapar, ‘Epic and History: Tradition, Dissent and Politics in India’, Past and Present 125, no. 1 (1989): 23. Also see Romila Thapar, ‘Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity’, Modern Asian Studies 23, no. 2 (1989): 209–31. 91. See Michel Foucault, ‘Film and Popular Memory’, Edinburgh Magazine 2 (1977): 22. 92. For an interesting view on the appropriation of history and the politics of media representation and ‘televised history’ see Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 109–80. In ‘Entertaining Catastrophe’, Kansteiner writes: ‘Germany’s most prominent TV historian, Guido Knopp brought a very ambitious Holocaust documentary to prime time (Holokaust, 2000) … but his productions were much appreciated by viewers but dreaded by historians. Knopp’s staff often found spectacular new footage in the archives of the former Soviet bloc, but whenever such finds did not materialize, they staged their own visions of important events in the lives of their subjects. The resulting hybrids of fact and fiction did not reflect the current state of historical scholarship, and they depicted the German military in a relatively favorable light. Because of all these shortcomings, which weighed heavily on the minds of critical and perhaps somewhat jealous historians, Knoff was accused of producing irresponsible “Nazi kitsch”’ (109). 93. Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 16. 94. Daniele Albertazzi, ‘“Back to Our Roots” or Self-confessed Manipulation? The Uses of the Past in the Lega Nord’s Positing of Padania’, National Identities 8, no. 1 (March 2006): 24. 95. Confino, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’, 1400. 96. Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past:Trauma, Memory and History in Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 6. 97. Allan Megill, ‘History, Memory, Identity’, History of the Human Sciences 11, no. 3 (1998): 47. 98. See John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 17.

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99. For a highly interesting debate on issues related to patriotism, identity and democracy see Joshua Cohen (ed.), For Love of Country, Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996). 100. See Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique 65 (1995): 132. Assmann’s characterisation of cultural memory fits, to an extent, the manner in which I have tried to conceptualise the memorialisation of Ayodhya. Ayodhya, as both a historical and memorial construct, can be seen within: ‘1) “The concretion of identity” or relation to the group … 2) capacity to reconstruct … Cultural memory works by reconstructing, that is, it always relates its knowledge to an actual and contemporary situation … Cultural memory exists in two modes: first in the mode of potentiality of archive whose accumulated texts, images, and rules of conduct act as a total horizon, and second in the mode of actuality, whereby each contemporary context puts the objectivized meaning into its own perspective, giving it its own relevance … 3) Formation. The objectivation or crystallisation of communicated meaning and collectively shared knowledge is a prerequisite of its transmission in the culturally institutionalized heritage of a society … 4) Organization. With this we mean a) the institutional buttressing of communication … b). the specialization of the bearers of cultural memory … 5) Obligation. The relation to a normative selfimage of the group engenders a clear system of values and differentiations in importance which structure the cultural supply of knowledge and the symbols’ (130–31).

CHAPTER

3

Whose Mandir? Whose Masjid? The Historian’s Ethics and the Ethics of Historical Reading

We tell stories with each other and against each other in order to speak to each other.1 Whosoever honours his own sect or disparages that of another, wholly out of devotion to his own, with a view to showing it in a favourable light, harms his own sect even more seriously. Therefore, concord is to be commended, so that men may hear one another’s principles and obey them.2 Even bare discernment of facts, much more their arrangement with a view to inferences, must carry a bias: human impartiality, whether judicial or not, can hardly escape being more or less loaded.3 The fantasy, faith, fanaticism and furore over several cases involving the ‘romance’ and ‘representation’ of history drive the historian into the eye of the storm and, unavoidably, beg an interrogation into the politics of writing history, the ethics of reading and the impact that multiple discourses ranging across several disciplinary domains and contemporary existential aggravations can engineer on a historian’s commitment to his discipline. Doing history is inflected by the deeply invested milieu in which a historian finds him- or herself continually exposed to a farrago of conflicting propositions and positions. This gives rise to the need to grow a distinct ‘historical attitude’ towards issues that are both of historical, socio-cultural and national concern. Repercussive discourses emerging from the politics-history-religion problematic, mythic inroads into our understanding of history, the unavoidable peek of folklore and tradition over the shoulder of narrative history solicit a reassessment of our Notes for this section begin on page 120.

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regnant ‘historical attitude’. Deep questions are inescapably flung at historians as to their ways of grappling with the discipline.

History, Facts and Objectivity Frank Ankersmit argues how moral and political values have the ‘unnerving capacity’ to dissolve the otherwise solid boundaries between subjectivity (the historian and his world) and the objective (the past itself ) in historical writing. Usually, the historian’s ethics about dealing with the past would put an injunction on moral and political values as determining the direction of historical interpretation and objectivity in historical description. But Ankersmit sees a continuum between subject and object where these values can be found to have ‘their unperceived anchors in ourselves as well’. Historians, on most occasions, cannot avoid writing their moral values into the understanding of the past; the past, by its own nature of existence and the ways in which it throws itself open to the present, has always struggled to exorcise moral-political values from its domain; such values have contributed to what the past has been like. Historians may have enough reasons to fear the intrusion of such moral and political values into their engagement with the past and the present – the fear of dissolution of the usually sturdy boundaries between the subjective and the objective – but, most often, historical interpretations comport with these values and falter in trying to become completely void of them, coming close, thus, to a category mistake. It is difficult to admit historical studies as having inhered insularity to such valuational infiltrations. Ankersmit brilliantly explains the paradox which he terms the ‘double-bind of objectivity’, a paradox that the historian cannot evade facing. Pointing to the nuanced relationship between ‘conditions’ and ‘criteria’, Ankersmit shows us how the historian who in his or her understanding of the past has the injunction of historical objectivity to honour will end up submitting to the gesture of subjectivity. The historian, by persistently claiming that he or she would under no conditions become subjective, draws the attention of all to this ‘announced’ status. ‘It is like somebody’, as Ankersmit revealingly observes, ‘crying out: “Don’t look at me! I’m not here! I do not exist!”’ He notes, ‘Indeed, this comedy of self-aggrandizement by alleged self-obliteration contains a large part of the truth about the pretensions of contemporary so-called “scientific” historical writing’. So the paradox, explains Ankersmit, ‘is that within the traditional view of historical objectivity the strongest effort at objectivism will result in the most staggering variant of subjectivism’. This proves his idea of the double bind of objectivity, ‘for within the traditional conception of objectivity the conditions of historical objectivity (that is, the effort to achieve historical objectivity) are incompatible with the criteria proposed for the achievement of historical objectivity’.4 The complete defiance to subjectivism or pretence of absolute objectivity is clearly difficult,

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for historical studies are anchored in the continuum between subject and object at the level of the moral and political values. The connection between present and past, notes Richard Wilk, ‘is a source of power, the power to offer legitimacy or attack’. Having a ‘neutral, value-free, or non-political past’ is a difficulty reality, and ‘if we take the present out of the past we are left with a dry empty husk’.5 Paul Valery is right to note that history and the historian are asunderable.6 The quintessence of the whole process of historical criticism is contained in Heinrich von Sybel’s memorial address on Ranke,7 where it is pointed out that a narrator does not report the events themselves but the impression that he or she has received of them: historical experience tries hard to ward off the ‘subjective element’ when the task of historical criticism is to eliminate it. Alejandro Korn’s pointing out that of all the children born on 15 August 1769, Napoleon Bonaparte is the most interesting, shows the kind of value that historians ascribe to facts. This is a reminder of what E.H. Carr notes in What is History? It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor … The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but which it is very hard to eradicate.

Carr, echoing Alfred Housman, believes that, for a historian, accuracy is a duty but not a virtue, and so praising ‘a historian for his accuracy is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber’. The ‘element of interpretation enters into every fact of history’ and a historian’s interpretation becomes unavoidably dependent on the ‘auxiliary sciences of history – archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, chronology, and so forth’.8 Mere Gradgrindery reliance on facts is strictly out of reckoning and, in fact, it is difficult to disagree with the contention that a historian ‘alone must accept the word of others before he even begins to devise his account’.9 Carl Becker, by moving a few steps further away from objectivity, opposes Heinrich Rickert’s consideration of facts as unique, their causal connectedness and power to reveal unique change. Working on the indeterminacy related to the question whether ‘fact’ ascertains ‘concept’ and vice versa, Becker talks about ‘selection’ in historical process. He argues that if knowledge has to be directed, we must know the purpose or the end of it: if the past has to be exploited in the interest of ‘advance’, we must be cognizant of what we mean by ‘advance’. So the importance of facts, since it cannot be measured by the fact itself, allows a judgment based on ‘values’, bringing hypothesis and a moral quality into our conceptions of the past.10 But Becker becomes difficult to accept when, by considering the past to be an abstraction, he thinks that facts convey no intelligible meaning and they only come into existence when a historian creates such meaning. This is principally different from ‘reconstruction of facts’, which leads to a unique historical actuality based on the strength of a certain set of sources. Becker does not see the relatedness and

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attainability of facts yielding into a reconstructionist process because, for him, facts simply cease to exist outside the mind of the historian and are creatable only out of a historian’s current and present experiences. This leaves the issue of ‘order’ in historical representation a bit removed from consensual certainty. Hewing to the commitment to be ‘history-minded’ does not manifest an inflexible obligation to objectivity. History-mindedness does not owe to an immurement in past, to an enchainment, as it were, which keeps believing in shooing off all influences of the present. Jack Hexter clearly notes that history-minded assertions about what historians ought to do are met with present-minded assertions of what – the history-writing animal being what he is – the historian is certain to do. The harsh fact of life is that, willy-nilly, the present-day historian lives not in the past but in the present, and this fact cannot be altered by any pious resolve to be history-minded. What we say about any historical epoch in some ways reflects our experience; and that experience was accumulated not in the fifteenth, in the sixteenth, or in any other century than the twentieth. When we look back on the past, we do so from the present. We are present-minded just as all earlier historians were present-minded in their day because for better or worse we happen to live in our own day. Indeed the very horrid examples cited by the proponents of history-mindedness afford irrefutable evidence that the best of former historians were in their day present-minded, and we can hardly hope to be different. So the best thing for us to do is to recognize that every generation reinterprets the past in terms of the exigencies of its own day. We can then cast aside our futile history-minded yearnings and qualms and deal with the past in terms of our day, only mildly regretting that, like all the words of man, our own words will be writ on water. By this intellectual stratagem the present-minded turn – or seek to turn – the flank of the history-minded.11

This understanding of the past as somehow guided by the prepossessions of the present prepares the space for the influx of values; history-mindedness cannot rise above it without being knocked off the perch. The accessibility bred between being history-minded and present-minded feeds on the scientific infrastructural support that the present provides, granting superior ways of investigation and, hence, greater proximity to ‘truths’ that await unconcealment at the hands of the historians. But this argument renders the relation between the two dimensions less problematic and innocuously uninteresting because every age, with its advancement in scientific techniques, will lend smoother handles to the historian to approximate truths chested in the past with greater efficiency and success. So the historian’s boat is different from the physicist’s or the geologist’s, for it is more leaky and insecure. Hexter draws the line well: The present-minded contend that in writing history no historian can free himself of his total experience and that that experience is inextricably involved not only in the limits of knowledge but also in the passions, prejudices, assumptions and prepossessions, in the events, crises and tensions of his own day. Therefore those passions, prejudices, assumptions, prepossessions, events, crises and tensions of the historian’s own day inevitably permeate what he writes about the past. This is the crucial allegation of the present-minded, and if it is wholly correct, the issue must be settled in their favor and the history-minded pack up their apodictic and

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categorical-imperative baggage and depart in silence. Frequently discussions of this crucial issue have got bogged down because the history-minded keep trying to prove that the historian can counteract the influence of his own day, while the present-minded keep saying that this is utterly impossible. And of course on this question the latter are quite right. A historian has no day but his own, so what is he going to counteract it with? He is in the situation of Archimedes who could find no fulcrum for the lever with which to move the Earth. Clearly if the historian is to be history-minded rather than present-minded he must find the means of being so in his own day, not outside it.12

So different categories of experience influence the ways in which historians think. ‘Inner experience’, in the words of Raymond Aron, is built on a reconstructive mode with the undertow of certain ambiguities.13 The ambiguity generated from reconstruction has clear linkages with the historian’s intention and ambient claims of universal validity, what Jacob Burckhardt would ascribe as ‘independent possession’. The personality of the historian makes its own inroads countenancing, to an extent, historical knowledge formation. A truth valid for the historian jostles for space against consensual truth-claims. Knowledge for a historian can be an act of faith, a belief emerging from certain agglomeration of documental evidence. A part of it is a ‘build up’ on areas of possibilities. We encounter ‘historian’s time’, which is different from the timesense others grow and settle in with in their quotidian interface with events and situations. History-mindedness comes with a peculiar insight where history gets interpreted as ‘becoming’ and where the plexus of data is recharged and allowed a circulation that preceding elaborations have missed out. Hexter observes, He would be bold indeed who would insist that all historians should follow one and the same line of experience in their quest, or who would venture to say what this single line is that all should follow. He would not only be bold; he would almost certainly be wrong. History thrives in measure as the experience of each historian differs from that of his fellows. It is indeed the wide and varied range of experience covered by all the days of all historians that makes the rewriting of history – not in each generation but for each historian – at once necessary and inevitable.14

But in this seeming knowledge transformation (umbildung), the intrusion of ‘personality’ (like the sovereign thrust of a Kantian Ego) and construction of ‘historian’s time’ cannot risk wrecking damage on certain principles of historical objectivity. The historian’s ego is not liberated from principled historical consciousness. The past is not produced in individuation – individuals colligate; rather, the past is collectivised and collated. The historian’s freedom of the ego is interceded by external forces as he finds himself ‘casted’ ( geworfen, as Heidegger would term it) within certain historian limits and situations. So history, to a large extent, is contemporary in the sense that it is ‘grasped in the present, and thus responds to the latter’s interests’. Le Goff points out that ‘since history is lived time (duree), the past is both past and present. It is the

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historian’s task to make an “objective” study of the past in its double form. To be sure, since he is himself implicated within history, he cannot attain a true “objectivity”, but no other history is possible. The historian will make further progress in understanding history by putting himself in question in the course of his analysis, just as a scientific observer takes into account the modifications he may make in the object he is observing’.15 In no uncertain terms, the reality of having a historian bereft of all values simply looks implausible. It is his or her failure, on most occasions, to disengage from values that brings scrutiny. It is unpragmatic to consider the historian as always ensconced in a seat of judgment, pontificating morally on the nature of events, the characters and the consequences. Judge, they must; but, the judgment cannot always be conclusive and normative, for the historian can never be in complete grip of everything that happens in the past.16 Historians dealing with issues of controversial nature may confound the whole rationale of objective historiography by making a choice to begin from an already selected moral premise and, thus, marshalling the arguments towards an inference that is deterministic and foregone. Richard Vann is quick to point out that ‘Partis pris should always be avoided, especially when they configure the entire research and writing process before any of it has actually been done’. So history cannot be silent about passing moral judgments and being judgmental and, indeed, ‘unless the tribunal of history is phantasy and a myth, it must pass judgment’.17 Vann argues further that the impediment for most historians is reconciling the historicism with which they have been indoctrinated – emphasizing the differences between past epochs and our own – with moral evaluations that are believed to be necessary but must be made in the moral climate of the twentyfirst century rather than, say, the nineteenth or the twenty-third. But the argument that we must not make moral evaluations because subsequent exculpatory evidence might turn up, or that we can never know enough to make them, would prove too much. Believing this would stop historians making any judgments at all, for every judgment – or, for that matter, every theory in the natural sciences – must be made in the awareness that subsequent generations will know more and that the future may hold some surprises for us. To claim we must withhold every judgment, provided we have done the best we can with all the evidence at hand, is a counsel of self-stultification.18

Rather, the historical discipline sustains itself by its espousal of ‘curiosity’, the energy to know more about its own questions, and by avoiding an uncritical exposure to slices of the past. Daniel Gordon puts it well: The deepest curiosity – the desire to know more than what is readily available to know – emerges from the sentiment of perplexity about the nature of things. The child of divorced parents, for example, may be exposed to different accounts of ‘what really happened’ when the marriage degenerated. The child thereby develops an acute sense that the reports about the past that circulate in his or her immediate milieu cannot all be true, because they are mutually contradictory. From this discordance comes the awareness that the past can be understood only through a critique of the most readily available sources and through a method that is nor

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held hostage by the self-serving memories of the participants … To give another example, a member of a minority group … may be exposed, in school or through the media, to derogatory accounts of the history of the group’s past, whereas at home or in religious services they hear more positive accounts. Again, it is the discordance among accounts, and the perplexity that results, that will stimulate the wish to know more and possibly the wish to become a historian. More generally, anyone sensitive to the competing accounts of national, religious, ethnic, and sexual identity in our world, so many of which are historical in character, cannot fail to be at least a little confused as to what it means to the particular type of person one is. This confusion is responsible for the enormous and unprecedented degree of interest which people today take in the past, and it particularly explains why so many people are curious to learn more about the history of those groups with which they personally identify, but whose identity remains ambiguous – ambiguous precisely on account of that discordant overabundance of interpretations of the past which makes the problem of identity a problem of historical consciousness to begin with. To escape from this circle of ambiguity, some will latch onto visions of the past that are simplistic, one-dimensional, and charged with accusations against others.19

This problematises the historian’s ethics of knowing and curiosity and, so, once we accept the unavoidable mix of emotion, values, historical judgment and interpretation, the ethics of historical studies becomes the sparring arena of dissent. It is a dissent that is born out of conflictual opinions, ambiguity and relativism, marking the disturbing difficulties that lie central to a historian’s practice and the struggle to execute control over them. If remnants of a temple are supposed to remain beneath the mosque or vestiges of a mosque are claimed to reside underneath a temple, what ‘real-life’ difference do they cast on our everyday configurations? They, however, create a difference in our understanding of history, in our engagements with the fibres of historical discourse that revel in their potential to challenge much of the accepted domains and norms of historical knowledge. Doing history is about providing a license to connect things that exist in an apparent disconnectedness. Dissenting, riding on a pervasive connectedness, gives more thought to ‘rearrangement’. What harm does the discipline face if a group of dissenters chooses to reclaim an issue and work away at some hitherto established notions on the basis of proactive evidence, adding, thus, more wind to their sail through ideological distinctions and self-assertive historical subjectivity? It is no good always having a history to tell you what to do. It is no good either to resort always to previous decisions as if they could provide a sort of unflinching foundation. It has been argued that facts are theory-laden, and for the historians they are doubly so. So engagement with the ‘loaded’ past need not always essentialise meaning to the point of significatory monochrome, where all past events graduate as self-immured atoms of reference. The act of rewriting – the masjid as mandir and the mandir as masjid – is, to an extent, rooted to the couplet of the empirical-analytic and the aestheticliterary-figurative. History as writing experiments self consciously and reflexively with forms that are not deterministic, for writing can be performative in ways where it engages and goads us to revaluate the conditions under which we

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create knowledge. It is difficult to imagine historical writing beginning with an ‘open mind’ if by openness we come to mean emptiness. The historian’s mind cannot be divested of all values just as ideologies cannot be roundly sponged off. It may begin in a fluid hypothetical burst without being prepossesive so as not to fasten onto a judgement. Being hypothetical is a mental attitude ‘to wit, of inventing a mental content, of holding it in suspense, of taking it as a possibility, not as an assured fact, of assuming it experimentally for the argument’s sake and in order to test its value by its consequences’.20 Each hypothesis will have its own criteria, its own argumentative method, which in their contrasted strength will compass the subject on all sides, making for a richer outcome and varied historical experience. Historians, Behan McCullagh points out, draw inferences from the past and efforts to test them are coloured by a ‘heap of beliefs about nature, society and history’. Knowledge is determined by their perceptions of evidence and presuppositions are ‘corrected by historical discoveries’. McCullagh writes, ‘The point is that historians cannot possibly establish the credibility of all the information they draw upon in making new inferences about the past, and in testing them. The rationality and credibility of their conclusions is always relative to that of the assumptions they employed in reaching them. This is a matter of no concern, so long as those assumptions are themselves well supported by other perceptions, scientifically validated you might say. If the assumptions are rationally credible, then so may be the historical inferences which depend upon them’.21 But for assumptions or hypotheses to be plausible, a historian needs to judge them with explanations and to find among them the best that accounts for the creation of evidence in question. So the hypothesis, McCullagh argues, ‘(i) … must be as plausible as possible; (ii) the hypothesis must imply the probable existence of a great quantity and variety of the available data, that is it must have great explanatory scope; (iii) it must imply the existence of the data with a strong degree of probability, thus having great explanatory power; (iv) there must be no data which either imply that such a hypothesis is improbable, or which the hypothesis implies that are improbable, so that it is not disconfirmed by other reasonable beliefs; and (v) it must not include additional ad hoc components, designed simply to accommodate data which appear to disconfirm it’.22 Historical writing, thus, on most occasions, cannot avoid being ‘performative’ for its hypothetical beginning runs through reflective thinking that, again, is kedged in predilective, probative and probic modes. The reflexive mechanisms of intervention can remain fraught with values that are, at times, inimical to historical realism and the principles of rational-analytic methods of historical research. There are also reasonable concerns over what Elton saw as the secret of the historian’s success: it is ‘in hindsight and argument backwards’. The historian’s knowledge about what happened next involves a risk where the ‘the historian will fall victim to the false old proposition, post hoc ergo propter hoc, the succeeding event being read as a necessary consequence of the earlier event’.23 However our sense of the past is not always imprisoned in causality but rather

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in reading beyond sequentiality and, hence, giving birth to possibilities. History, at times, in its professed inability to mitigate ‘disputes’ – consequences emerging from historical possibilities – is keyed to some unpleasantness, the threats that vested interests or weighed paternalism can pose and the inordinate mandates that historians can strut out to ‘put the lid on’ the secret, the unanswerable and the questionable. Conflicting arguments are expected to confront historians and their ethical responses are directed to appreciate whatever stands expressed, to ensure that every voice is subjected to ‘scrutiny’; this response does not encourage quashing some voices before they can be raised. Ethics of history demands historiographical contextualization that, however, may be varied and, that, thus, by refusing to be monocausal, influences our understanding of history. This is expected to be the nature of ‘secular’ historiographical practice: a discourse that is not simply about a Hegelian synthesis amongst irreconcilables. It is about complexity, negotiations within aggressive and dissenting oppositions, of maintaining coexistence among dissident factors without being uncritically redemptive. Here Luise White’s interrogation is quite pertinent: Not only are there all these historians of various races, classes, and genders running around writing histories both for and against specific audiences, but they have expanded the base of source material quite remarkably. We can no longer read historians and assume they read sources the way we do for the reasons we read them. Is this a bad thing? If we lose a sense of shared purpose and common goals in the historical profession, is this so bad? What if we gain some suspicion and a wider sense of what constitutes history, how people understood their own past and what constituted an idea of past times? What if we allow skepticism – not distrust – to determine how we read other historians, to begin with the idea that the position from which many in our profession write is so substantially different from our own that the insights they produce are revealing, not only about the past but the present? Can we, as historians, possibly begin to think that we are, in conception and practice, at odds with each other, writing from different positions and arriving at different histories and that the resulting tensions makes us aware not only of the complexities of the past but of the present?24

This avoids boredom in historical practice and generates its life-giving, or should I say, life-saving debate.

Empiricism, Relativism and Historical Ethics Dissent, being thoughtfully different and meaningfully dissenting, prevents the discipline of history from getting narrowed and attenuated. Endowed with a sensible impulse, a feeling to be ‘indignant’, dissent can infuse a sense of discovery to our historical studies. Dissent keeps the circulation going in its arteries, actuating it to newer forms of knowledge and insights. The ethics of history, thus, should encourage a struggle for thought, a struggle of thought-strains, sticking the head out of history to question the level of submergence and

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avoiding being a rudderless tourist who would endlessly prowl around among pictures in a gallery.25 It is this dissent and the attendant complications it generates that inscribe the responsibility in the historian. Dissent generates ambiguities, not for the sake of interpretive confusion, but because it is foundational to the survival of the discipline. Dissent over an issue may manifest in a welter of conflicting and discordant interpretations; but this must act as the prelude, a sort of provocation, to prepare the ‘order’ among contrasting evaluations. All dissent cannot promise a consensual discourse and dissent that breeds ceaseless anarchic responses is an ineffectual one – for if there is no single point of agreement among several interpretive discourses, the discipline has nothing to look up to. Dissent is welcome but not when it is lurid harrumphing, which betrays forms of exclusivism and ideological inveteracy. It, thus, cannot legitimise a relativist euphoria. ‘The real issue’, writes James Malin, ‘lies in the goal which is set – the possibility of adequate representation of ordered past reality, the reconstruction of past situations, with such a degree of wholeness as to meet the requirements of sufficient reason, or reasonable grounds to believe. In a significant sense subjective relativism, with its denial of the validity of that goal, is not only defeatist, but escapist as well – escape from the responsibilities of a task that is difficult’.26 Ultra-relativism in historical positions or points of view is difficult to negotiate: it is a form of recalcitrant irrationalism caught within which history fails to initiate dialogue. Historical attitude is about ‘talking’ to the other. Historical truth cannot be ‘enthroned by acts of violence’.27 Hegemonic one-sidedness of historical reading (one can encounter such an approach in the Hindu fundamentalists’ understanding of the Ayodhya issue) is removed from good sense and rationality as it straddles an aggressive belief that approves the survival of competing bodies of knowledge only in the decisive triumph of one mode of understanding over the rest. It is an arrogant triumph; it is coercing others into a difficult consensus where others are compelled to relinquish their beliefs and biases in favour of the overpowering view; it is the non-negotiable method to historical understanding. Alan Spitzer argues, Relativists who cite the failures of objectivity in historical works assume the authority of their own inference from publicly accessible evidence. The classic response to this objection has been to embrace the contradiction, to affirm that historical relativism is itself historically relative. It is, however, difficult to find anyone willing to push historical skepticism to the point of a nihilism that would put us all out of business. The motives for drawing back from the solipsistic abyss are partly pragmatic: no one wishes to relativize out of existence the arsenal of argument against deplorable – racist, sexist, and so forth – histories.28

As to the rub between the relativists and the empiricists, Patrick Finney points out that the two groups conceptualise their ways of doing history differently: the factors ‘governing the acceptability of histories’ are different. Empiricists, notes Finney, ‘view them as natural and necessary, incarnating the tried and tested methodologies which guarantee historians access to objective

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truths about the past. Relativists, conversely, see them much more as arbitrary constructs, setting up regulatory procedures – some overtly prescribed, others implicitly ingrained, powerful yet fluid – to facilitate production of particular types of historical knowledge according to the requirements of particular ideological forces and social formations’.29 The incommensurabilities between the relativists and empiricists deny the prospect of a genuine dialogue that, however, becomes possible when the former stops indulging the infinite unfixation of meaning and the latter, acknowledging room for ambiguity, is prepared to think beyond crusty empiricism. Ethics of historical writing and understanding build on the dialectic of legitimacy of evidence and the license that emerges from the lack of regimentary evidential and factual stringency. All disputes from the past cannot be definitively resolved, which means our socio-political responsibilities towards what is indisputable become different by few shades from those that are lashed to the spearhead of dispute. Historical ethics makes allowance for both and directs us to a space that calls on our responsibilities as political actors, articulators and social functionaries in the framework of a democratic polity. In the critical context of ethical responsibility that affiliates us to the close connections existing between our lived reality, our history and the sociopolitical dimensions as emerging from our existence in the confines of a nation, the encouragement to respond to different voices in historical discourse cannot survive entirely in an untainted undecidability. Even if, at times, we are faced with the difficulty to accept the prescriptive weight of universalised ethical system, ethics cannot merely be subjective, contingent and aleatory as Keith Jenkins would persistently and distractingly argue.30 In the dialectic between ‘the demands of history’ and ‘our demands of history’, the demands on history cannot be wisely realised if the ethics of ambiguity is stretched to a level of illusory radicalism. It is to understand the relationship between ethics and politics that we need to understand the ‘demands of history’. It is difficult to accept the argument that past contains nothing of intrinsic value, ‘nothing we have to be loyal to, no facts we have to find, no truths we have to respect, no problems we have to solve, no projects we have to complete; it is we who decide these things knowing – and if we know anything we know this – that there are no grounds on which we can ever get such decisions right’.31 Our sense of history need not be undergirded by this kind of extreme relativism, which would subject a historical discourse to the pitfalls of fiction, the inordinately circuitous and abstract mode of reasoning and an entirely anti-essentialist notion of facts. Relativistic totalitarianism would import the denial of the fixity of the past, rebutting the reality of a past outside the historian’s selection and construction. The task of logic is to determine the valid grounds for premising objective truth. Even Charles Beard recognises the necessity of a scientific method in history based on logic. This method would involve certain fundamental axiological ideas determining the limits of historical investigation. This is not a weakness

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of historical studies. Rather, Max Weber would see a ‘power’ in the dialectic between certain fundamentals and selectivisation – die Unausschöpfbarkeit ihres Inhalts – the fecundity of context and interpretation leading to newer aspects of stimulating interest.32 Relativism then, as Christopher Norris points out, is ‘inherently self-defeating to the extent that, by advancing these generalized statements (“all truths are relative”, “all translation merely a species of mistranslation”) it undercuts the very possibility of showing how and where such obstacles occur. For if we are all floating around in a sea of ontological relativity – or (to vary the metaphor) casting about for just one among the open-ended range of interpretative options – then there is nothing that could possibly count for us as a demonstrable instance of failed understanding or of paradigm-incommensurability’.33 Marie Swabey makes her point clearly: For to the complete relativist, who rejects the a priori, all knowledge is historical. Yet if no historical assertion is in any respect unconditionally true, and all assertions are historical, there is no truth in his saying so. His view, being on its own terms but the product of local, changing conditions and circumstances, cannot claim to be binding on others. By confessing itself as wholly relative, historical relativism negates its own pretensions to proof and to establish validity. The difficulty is ancient and unanswerable. Psychologically, of course, the historical relativist wishes to suggest the relativity of all views save his own as to the absoluteness of relativity. In labelling other outlooks as partisan, he insinuates his own views as non-partisan, that while other accounts reflect mere local attachment, his has a kind of overarching detachment. Yet this tacit exception in his own favour destroys confidence in him and his rule. If all judgments are biased, his is also; if all outlooks are attached and exclusive, his cannot be detached and inclusive. In the attempt to discredit others, the relativist discredits himself, exposing by the force of his argument the untenability of his assumptions.34 It declares the point of anxiety for the historians. Historians bear the responsibility to see that certain ambiguities that are clearly inconclusive are not straightened under the heft of bias and ideologue (the mistake that communal historians easily make); this responsibility also covers the historians’ commitment to clearly decidable truth, foundational and conclusive, which, in the teeth of theories that mindlessly see all historical knowledge as dependent on language, subjectivity and constructions of culture, are thrown into the abyss of ambiguity. Carl Hempel and Ernest Nagel negotiate this positional crisis by meriting a middle course.35 Norman Cantor explains, Granted that historians examining the same era of the past may have profound differences in interpretation, may see some very different patterns of cause and effect in the events they examine, they will still agree on many things. And as history has developed as a science in the past century, historians have arrived at many common conclusions on the interpretations of the past, while still disagreeing on others. There is, therefore, a universe of discourse among historians, a hard substratum

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of commonly agreed-on truth about the past as well as a continuing debate on other aspects of the past upon which agreement may and probably will be reached eventually.36

So the past cannot exist without a level of ‘agreed-upon’ facts. This is what I term as ‘order’. McCullagh is right to note, ‘That some historical descriptions are disputed does not imply that none can be proved true beyond reasonable doubt. In fact thousands can’. He argues, ‘Many historical descriptions are rationally justified by saying that they best explain certain available evidence. To judge which is the best of several different explanations of evidence, a historian takes into account several different features of the available explanations, especially their explanatory scope, their explanatory power, their plausibility, their adhocness, the extent to which they are disconfirmed, and the degree of relative superiority of one with respect to the others’.37 It calls for the competence and responsibility of historians. Within the premises of both the ethics of ‘dissensus and a certain unknowability’ and ‘consensus and knowability’, history can ‘deliver up its meaning or its secrets’ and, thus, jack up the dialectic of contradiction and concurrence. The Auschwitz negationists, for instance, have problematised the matrix of historical knowability and representability in their own extremist way. The denial of the Holocaust is a version of historical reconstruction where the very nature of truth is imperilled. Omer Bartov argues it as the ‘peril of losing control over truth, of not being able to distinguish between what is false and what is true, of plunging into a dangerous abyss of open ended relativity, where there is no objective reality, but a multitude of subjective views, all legitimate’.38 In fact, under obsessive agent intentionality or subjective promiscuity, it gets difficult to responsibly figure out the nuanced connections between ethics and politics. This issue can be explored at another level. A historian caught amidst the process of interrogation may, for the fear of lying, on several occasions choose to desist from saying and narrating some portions from the past, because he or she realises that the complete truth about the past will perpetually be unreachable. The temptations to lie are rife as much as the provocation to disacknowledge the ignorance of a certain historical past that one finds insuperably difficult to ignore. The historian may remain unsuspecting of the truth inherent in a set of facts pared down from a wider field of investigation, but upon being urged to ‘speak’ – the art and the limitation of ‘speaking’ make an ethical claim on the historian every time he or she chooses to discourse the dead other – might eventually beat up few details into a froth of fiction or broth of interpretative excess, stirred up in values peculiar to him or her. However, since, historians engage with the past not in separation from the spurs of the present and the callings of the future, ‘what the historian narrates’, notes Edith Wyschogrod, ‘is that which occurred surrounded by a shadowy halo of negated possibilities, each of which is expressed in the form: “X was possible but X did not occur”’. Wyschogrod explains further that ‘the historian in retrieving the past need not

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include these negated possibilities in her narrative. For example, before Hitler invaded the former Soviet Union, he could have honoured his pact with Stalin and refrained from initiating this action; before the landing at Normandy in June 1944 the Allied command could have decided upon a later assault or a landing at some other point. If the past is to be retrieved, the not, the envisaging of that which could have but did not occur, is intrinsic to determining that which is to be recovered’.39 The interpretative inroads on these lines as also the effort to check the past through ‘negative determination’ – ‘It might have been X or Y, but I am sure it could not have been Z’ – intertwines the threads of authenticity and moral values, approximating the space that lies between the historian’s facing the behemoth of unflinching objectivity and the license to kill all historical truths merely on account of the theoretical ‘impossibility’ of their existence that he so readily and uncritically believes in. The problem does not end there. That it could have been different from what history has in record is a prediction that does not enjoy scientific sanction. It may be hypothetically approving but empirically indefensible. Also, hypothetical constructions working around the ‘absences’ (the ‘putative consequences of antecedents’) in history are multiple, which invoke more valuational intrusions (probative value of fact) and imaginative reconstructions than scientist determinations. Science is projective, history retrospective; science builds on experiments to predict the future (what will happen), history looks back at ‘those already happened’ and ascertains their validity. The ‘looking back’ determines the ‘looking forward to’. Allan Megill points out that the historical noumenon amounts to a principle of historiographical humility. He explains, ‘the notion of the historical noumenon implies that there is indeed a Truth behind the stories, testimonies, memories, material traces and the like, even though one may be blocked from knowing that Truth. More specifically, the historical noumenon can be conceived of as a domain that is inhabited (1) by that which is too traumatic to be put into language (2) by that which is too foreign to be understood in the present and (3) by that which cannot be constructed or reconstructed because adequate evidence is lacking’.40 Megill is right to point out that ‘there is no such thing as pure evidence’ and efforts to ‘de-emphasize the epistemology of evidence and instead stress its erotics’ would encourage ‘subjective’ intrusions. But ‘unless there are checks on desire, the past envisaged becomes a projection of the subjectivity envisaging it. In the fundamental sense nothing is learned from the exercise: only if subjectivity is checked can it learn to engage itself with opposing subjectivities and with the social and material worlds within which those subjectivities operate’.41 It is the ‘checks’ that finally serve the discipline productively. But if history exceeds its mere status as a general project that concentrates on knowing the past, it cannot be left, as David Carr suggests, to merely ‘exist at any given time, for any individual who step into it, as a set of problems, interests, tendencies and a stock of knowledge embodied in the existing literature and the general accumulated wisdom of the field’.42 The

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social responsibility of the historian demands that issues are seen, ‘checked’ and interpreted within the forces responsible for its origination, subsequent formation and development. The ethics of history is not merely about incessant interrogation but an act of trying to question the foundations of truth that are not always victims of shifting anchorage. So there is a strong link between historical knowledge and historical understanding, a link that cannot be built exclusively on zones of ambiguity, not exclusively on the argument that supports the impossibility of reaching any point of concreteness and indubitability in historical discourse. Such tendencies are out of nature with ‘secular’ historical practice. With the accent on standard and conventional historiographical techniques, I would like to see a ‘proper’ historian commit to the norms of meticulous research and be patient and sensitive to the careful test of conflictual propositions. History of all times faces some ambiguities that are difficult to resolve, but there are several others that can be clarified and accounted through the ardour of historical research. Alerted to the phenomenon of naïve ‘historical positivism’ and facile ‘linear progression of narration’, historians cannot rule out the problems of ‘excess of history’, ‘traps of memory’ and the presence of the ‘indeterminate, elusive and the opaque’ in historical representation – ‘fidelity tormented by infidelity’. The culture of historical writing should not pass into the hands of fundamentalists, myopic statist historiographers and jaundiced archaeologists who would refuse to see history beyond a certain ideology and power. The fascination with conflicting versions of the past and the excitement over legitimately revisionist interpretations of once settled and consensual accounts, writes Michael Schudson, come precisely from the fact that even trained historians (or perhaps especially trained historians) retain strong beliefs in a veritable past. If interpretation were free-floating, entirely manipulable to serve present interests, altogether unanchored by a bedrock body of unshakable evidence, controversies over the past would ultimately be uninteresting. But in fact they are interesting. They are compelling. And they are gripping because people trust that a past we can to some extent know and can to some extent come to agreement about really happened.43

Such an agreement – faith in objectivity – is common to historical studies not because history cannot do without it but because ambiguity cannot be so widespread and consuming as to negate all possibilities for some agreement among differing positions. So dissent as interrogation directed from without and within the discipline cannot to be conducted in perpetuity. The complicity generated from such contestation does not rule out ‘ambiguities’ but, in working out the ways to uncover the past, it snatches the unbarred license from the hands of the historians who, taking a leaf from Keith Jenkins, might leap into annihilating the past in an anarchistic, apocalyptic manner. So it becomes difficult to concur with the idea and character of ‘inheritance’ as seen by Derrida, who finds the radical and necessary heterogeneity of an inheritance ‘as never fully gathered, never at one with itself ’. He argues:

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Its presumed unity, if there is one, can only consist in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. You must (if faut) sort out among several of the possibilities which inhabit the same injunction. And inherit it around a contradictory fashion around a secret. If the legibility of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not simultaneously call for and defy interpretation, one would never have to inherit from it. One would be affected by it as by a cause – natural or genetic. One always inherits a secret which says ‘Read me: will you ever be up to it?’44

Inheriting a ‘secret’ is what makes history interesting, but inheriting it forever and, thus, never being up to deciphering conclusively any secrets whatsoever, means jeopardising the practice of the discipline itself. Some truths of history are univocal that do not pass down ‘secrets’ every time one tries to understand them; a secret need not be a ‘given’, a kind of prior assumption that it is what we are in for. Historical explorations might lead us to such a secret, and the surprise generated from it is what invigorates the discipline. So the issue of Ayodhya and many such instances in world history are reminders to ‘secular’ historians to wisely invest in the closely sensitive association between research and reconstruction. This sensitiveness solicited from the historians carves out the premises of the ‘limit’ within which reconstruction, agent-intentionality, empathisation with the past (the question of transference), affect, self-implication and empiricity can contest among each other.

The Culture of Difference A historian, Alan Badiou argues, is convoked to have ‘something extra’, the ethical subject who, making use of the public space, may think outside the regular laws of situation, compelling many people to rethink their placid subordination to the ways of the status quo. The historian can work into the situation ‘from the perspective of its evental supplement’.45 It is honestly the possibilities of finding a ‘supplement’ in historical description and understanding – the ‘fidelity to an event’ – that make a historian slough off previously held views that were found limiting and, hence, seen as effecting a closure on him. It is an ‘evil’ that historians need to be alerted to. But the nature of the ‘radical’ and the ‘evental’ cannot accommodate anything that reads and sounds revolutionary. It is another ‘evil’ that historians need to battle against and be vigilant about. Uncritical and undifferentiated dissent that conjures all historical meaning as evolving from opposition to instituted structures of knowledge and provokes historians to continually sunder from conventional forms of discourse to establish their authenticity can head off to this evil; it forgets finessing and nuancing. Historians are caught in the acuity of the situation where the Scylla of unmitigated ‘plenitude’ and eventality can terrorise them as much as the Charybdis of safe conformity. It is not easy, as Badiou notes, to become the subject of a new truth for, in the responsibility that it entails, the ethics of the historian as the intellectual is problematised. To vanquish opinions in order to establish the valid-

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ity of an issue is as much evil as a challenge to an issue constructed by inventing opinion so as to dislodge the proven coherence of a historical truth. Either way, such absolutisation organises evil, and within the confines of such potential irrecuperability historians as subjects are no better than writhing prisoners. But the culture of difference has a component of creative and positive suffering and also a method about it. Mark Bevir wisely notes that difference does not entail incommensurability. Any two conflicting positions might incorporate a number of overlapping positions by reference to which they can begin to justify themselves to one another. Thus, if we turned our attention from an attempt to construct one universal epistemology to an analysis of different epistemological practices, we might find these practices typically include a number of overlapping themes. Moreover, because the practices would share various norms, there would be a point of agreement from which they might embark on a dialogue.46

It is this agreement on certain points of understanding and interpretation that makes for objectivity in historical studies. Also agreement cannot always determine truths in history because some truth, like the truth of gassing the Jews or the Hindu-Muslims riots during the partition of India in 1947, for instance, are indisputable in their own right.47 However, the contesting bodies of historical interpretation and understanding (rather, contrasting epistemological practices) are examined on the basis of ‘how well they fit the facts, the number and range of the facts they fit, their internal coherence, how many hypotheses they generate, how well later studies confirm their hypotheses, and the boldness of the hypotheses they generate’.48 Traces of the past in the form of written and material data cannot be senselessly doomed to epistemological failure. Traces continue to exist and, as John Arnold points out, ‘what we choose to do with them, and the kinds of lesser truth-claims that we make on the basis of that praxis’ is what concerns most historians. Arnold observes that ‘the notion of provisionality can, for example, be played out in more than one register: realist empiricism posits a certain provisionality, one that is revised towards ‘Truth’ through the ongoing cycles of research’.49 Historians meet with some ambiguities that are difficult to resolve, but do contentedly take some indubitable areas of understanding in their strides that have come down to them through well-argued consensus. So a historian’s ethics declares an engagement with some unassailed ‘historical truths’ alongside a ‘wise’ relaxation to accept some possible failures in his or her historical understanding and inadequacies in historical description hitherto considered as universally circumscribing. Historians allow themselves to be provoked to form decisions without being too aleatory, espousing a certain freedom to challenge a doxic level of acceptability through creativity, imagination and insight that do not disrespectfully promote the singular substitution of one view for the other. Values aside, the historian’s work has an archival beginning: seeding in artefacts and even memories. It is a way to prise out structures that underlie the

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past under examination and imbibe ‘thought experiments’ to make processural deductions that have led to their origination. Joern Ruesen has argued that agreement on difference can be brought into a methodological rule to which every historical narration can be submitted. Such a rule would commit the sense-generating process of historical consciousness to the principle of mutual acknowledgement and the recognition of differences concerning the identity of self and of others as thematised by the narrative. It is however, difficult to admit that such a principle as a regulative idea can be true for all forms of historical narration.50 Some historical knowledge, under the rigour of rational-scientific enquiry, becomes institutionalised. This is not epistemological hegemonisation; rather, this alerts and prepares us to examine subjective knowledge-formations that, sometimes, can feistily ride the ethno-cultural essentialism and, thus, mortgage scientist and objectivist historiography. Ruesen observes: The historian’s responsibility to realize culturally pregiven sets of values and norms in their interpretation and representation of the past is now replaced by their responsibility to follow methodical rules of research which give their work the logical status of intersubjective validity, which often has been called ‘objectivity’. Historical knowledge has to be true despite and beyond different and contradicting standpoints in social and political life and their corresponding value system and perspective. Ethical commitment is an extra-disciplinary matter of personal decision, social convention and cultural attitudes of the historians and their audience. The emphasis of rational method points into a completely other direction: to use clearly defined notions and even theoretical concepts, to relate historical statements in a systematical and checkable way to experience of the past (pregiven in the source materials), and to form historical narratives in an argumentative discourse.51

So a historian’s work is informed by both theoretical and practical reason – a systematic approach supported by the soundness that research provides and ethical principles of intersubjective validity. So a dialogue is mediated and checked by exchanges among inquirers investigating a similar subject or object; but such a web of communication cannot avoid being problematised through powerpotential, the obscurity of the object and other projective and identificatory tendencies. With respect to the impact that a social environment can have on the ideas and methods of the historian, Le Goff finds Wolfgang Mommsen’s explications of the components of social pressure duly pertinent to a historian’s orientation and, hence, relevant to his or her ethics of historical representation. The historian’s own image of the social group and depth of affiliation to any particular group or community will colour his or her description of the group. Pressure can also be generated through his or her understanding of the ‘causes of social change’ and the possibilities of change envisaged in the future, which, thus, in the process, sets up the historical discourse. The threat of ‘presentism’ is what we must guard ourselves against. The quality of a historian’s work is not necessarily judged by the paradigms that make a poem or a novel good to some and bad to others. But ‘when a

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historian criticizes the work of a “colleague”, he may certainly be mistaken and his judgment may reflect in part his personal taste, but his criticism is based at least to a degree on “scientific” criteria’.52 A certain espousal of ‘scientific criteria’ in historical studies calls for an ‘intersubjective character’, a working together, not under the influence of opportunism and partisanship (as is the case with communal historians), but in the sharing of facts, evidences and inferences to reach a commonly acceptable and agreeable notion of a past – a workshopping of a variety of ideas to find an ‘order’. Raphael Samuel argues that history succeeds as an intellectual discipline in its ability ‘to draw contrasts and make connections, to discover a principle of order in the midst of seeming chaos, to explain, or attempt to explain, the whys and wherefores of apparently mysterious acts, to think the unthinkable’.53 It is the finding of the principle of ‘order’ – born from and based on some scientific criteria – that, ultimately, lends the discipline its dignity. It prevents the abuses of historical inquiries that take depraved advantage of dissent. It is through the establishment of order that knowledge, springing from the trident of history, politics and religion, is considered useful and obviously less harmful. But this order is not easily achieved. Living within the discipline, historians, as a ‘community of inquirers’, are expected to share certain goals that, by the nature of their existence in history and on the basis of sound historical investigation, cannot be taken at ransom by relativists: historians, forming a community of investigators and interpreters, are obliged to imbibe the same training and are expected to agree on the outstanding importance of certain matters that are menaced by potential abusers. David Carr argues: It is the discipline in this sense which determines, at any given time, what counts as interesting, as useful, as an advance, as a novel perspective of things. As in the natural sciences, a certain relationship obtains between ‘the’ discipline and its various subdivisions, a relationship involving the existence of subcommunities, their dependence on each other for results and methods, and notions of expertise. The existence and role of these communities is indicated in the historian’s use of the term ‘we’ to apply variously to the interlocking and overlapping groups she and her work belong to.54

So comparison, contrast and critical evaluation arm the historian in his battle to make sense of the past. Joern Ruesen rightly proposes the need for historians to join an intersubjective community of readers (some of them experts) who are prepared to appraise their work before it is ready for publication. In the appraisal, the readers are disposed to point out the trace, if any, of plagiarism, garbled references that put a gloss on evidence and manipulate the construction of events. I think that there must be some idea of some ‘standard for fair, modest, and accurate moral evaluations’ so that there would be no basis for charges of bias and the like. Ruesen has shown that historians make a moral choice when they assume the responsibility of writing honestly and submitting their work to their peers.55 A historian writes for other scholars too, exposing him- or

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herself, under this comparative gaze, to the critique of peers who might detect excluded facts, wrongheaded interpretation, the overdose of values and emotions, self-delusion and lack of diligence. Vann is right to note that ‘no single opinion can decide a case unless at least four other justices share or concur with it, and that presumably can happen only after mutual discussion and criticism. Historians’ opinion on moral evaluations are similar proposals; they are not edicts’.56 The historian is expected to understand the ethics of tolerant disagreement, the ethics of solidarity in differential reading, the ethics of ‘encounters’ among opinion-loaded communities that teach us to live peacefully in ‘dispute’. Homi Bhabha points out that the ‘act of respect is not somehow to keep quiet when confronted with different views or to assume that there is some kind of peaceful or specific middleground, which one would inhabit quietly, or there is some kind of contentious ground between people that should not be occupied’. Bhabha argues that ‘you would be respecting your colleagues most if you strongly argued with the very best effort you can make about what you think to be right so long as no one felt intimidated by your arguments, but that people felt invoked or provoked to make a response to you. In a community of different views, the discouraging way is to read quiescent middleground; that is not respect. Respect for me is to be able to actually “engage” with somebody whom you might find profoundly problematic but to “engage” fully and attendantly’.57 But dissent and alternative views must combine evidence with motivation so as to provide due character to academic freedom. The awareness that such historical practice might generate conveys a respect for historical evidence and contexts; it breeds a sensitive approach to historical processes unfolding in our time and inspires a deeper understanding of the various contemporary traditions. It is a sensitivity and alertness to interconnections, the intercontextual dialogues – the necessity to know where we stand in relation to the past, with respect to our predecessors and in being contrasted with others. It is not merely pedagogic, because to limit it to such a purpose is tantamount to defeating the discipline integrally; it is instilling historical consciousness, which is not simply about knowing the present in isolation but knowing it deeply with its varied motifs and ramifications in conflation with the past. The links are subtle, diverse and strategic that, thus, scream for alternative forms of understanding and are opposed to predisposed obdurate affiliations to sombre historical veracity. So objectivity can stem from comparisons between ‘rival webs of interpretations’. Mark Bevir argues: the basis for such a comparison of rival views exists because historians agree on a wide number of facts which collectively provide sufficient overlap for them to debate the merits of their respective views. For instance, even if Peter’s view entails theoretical presuppositions in which Mary disagrees, and even if Mary’s view entails theoretical presuppositions with which Peter disagrees, Peter and Mary still might agree on enough facts to make debate worthwhile, and perhaps to enable

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them to reach a decision as to the merits of their respective views. Because they agree on numerous facts, the facts constitute an authority they can refer to in their attempts to justify their views and compare their alternative interpretations.58

The ethics of historical interpretation springs from this ‘authority’ that agreement-following-argument among differing views provide; also, historical studies cannot lose sight of some facts – unchallenged by dissent – that lend ‘authority’ and, eventually, become the starting premise for the historians to flag off their critical survey. It is reasoned allegiance to such an authority that speaks for intellectual honesty. Bevir points out that ‘because we should respect established standards of evidence and reason, we will prefer webs of interpretations that are accurate, comprehensive, and consistent. Our standards of evidence require us to try to support our interpretations by reference to as many clearly identified facts as we can. An accurate web of interpretations is one with a close fit to the facts supporting it’.59 However, it is difficult agreeing with Bevir when he writes that ‘historians make sense of the past as best they can; they do not discover certainties’. What this means is that the ‘authority’ that a pool of facts – proven, widely agreed upon and, hence, spoken with certitude – can provide is seen to have no meaning. History is grounded as much in certainties as in uncertainties. Bevir, however, is right when he points out that ‘just because certain facts are generally accepted does not make them true’. But objectivity in historical studies cannot spring solely from this principle of agreement or acceptance; there are some irrefutable truth claims that cannot be challenged simply by claiming the nonexistence of pure facts and pure experience; the reliability of the historians is seriously under question if all findings are subject to incommensurability and webs of conflicting interpretations. Working through a debate and promoting the milieu for dialogue are the ways to make sense of the past that must not obliterate the possibilities of certainty and factual veracity in which historical studies are supposed to be discoursed. The ethics of dispute among historians are, thus, premised within the criteria of ‘accuracy, comprehensiveness, consistency, progressiveness, fruitfulness and openness’.60 So, ‘if historians disagree about the relative merits of different webs [of interpretations]’, observes Bevir, ‘they should draw back from the point of disagreement until they find an acceptable platform – consisting of agreed facts, standards of evidence, and ways of reasoning – from which to compare these webs’.61 It is from these premises that historians are expected to work, encounter dissent, dispute rival webs of interpretations and try to establish a viable ground of historical meaning that cannot be easily spooked by irrationalism and ultra-radicalism. In How We Think, John Dewey argues that our beliefs may rest on tradition, authority and imitation but the foundations for important beliefs must be evidential, emerging from a ‘conscious inquiry into the nature, conditions, and bearings of the belief ’. Dewey argues for ‘active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds

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that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends’.62 Anchored in a reflective thought, Dewey suggests encountering an issue as a problem, a kind of felt difficulty, some perplexity, confusion or doubt that can lead to inferential and decisive premises of thought; this can also throw up alternatives that demand being tested by available evidences. This has a scientist basis to it, but history and chemistry are not of similar nature. The degree to which the historian can push the level of ‘identification’ and demarcate, at the same time, the extent of ‘critical distance’ that enables the unearthing of interpretative ‘possibilities’ out of his or her engagements with the past cannot have a formulaic underpinning. Despite conformity to certain codes of ethics, historians are plainly troubled by this unformulaic nature of identification with and distanciation from the past. In the event of a clash of rival opinions that compete for the throne of a ‘possible’ truth, historians need to enshrine the enthronement with some doubt – the doubt that attends the espousal of a opinion to the complete exclusion of the other. It is here, in such a difficult zone of historical interpretation and moral responsibility, that historians must show the extent to which truth can be shared, must evince argumentatively a level of acceptability among conflicting camps within a space of mutual tolerance and approval. Ethics in historical studies demand what Thomas Haskell calls the ‘vital minimum of ascetic self discipline that enables a person to do such things as abandon wishful thinking, assimilate bad news, discard pleasing interpretations that cannot pass elementary tests of evidence and logic, and most important of all, suspend or bracket one’s own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers’. Enabled by such ‘possibilities’ of intersubjectivity and intercommunity communication, historians learn to lasso the past. It comes with ‘self-control’, not ‘self-immolation’, where the demand is for ‘detachment and fairness, not disengagement from life’.63

Imagination and Science, Certainty and Relativism Imagination moots its inclusion in historical reconstructionism because a historian cannot fasten himself to imagination as perhaps a novelist would. There is a line that divides the logic of a historian’s creativity from that of the novelist or the poet. The imagination of a historian has lesser mobility and more fealty to evidence that builds, as Macaulay would argue, on a contentment derived from available materials and on an abstention from supplying deficiencies by additions of one’s own. Historians are expected to disciplinise their imagination, lending a distinguishable method to its accomplishment that is removed by several notches from the ways in which a novelist usually employs it. An excellent way of judging this logic of imagination, and, hence the metier of historical

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writing, is by putting the historian in an ‘across-the-table’ conversation with the archaeologist. The productive links between history and archaeology, the materiality and textual representation of the past, remain an issue of great concern in our debate around the ethics of the historian. Historical archaeology is a combined by-product emerging out of the inputs of the historian, archivist and the archaeologist. The rapprochement between the disciplines leads to generative premises of knowledge where the historian cannot afford to act the master who has traditionally demanded subservience from the archaeologist.64 Archaeological excavation is no mere arbitrary digging through the layers of earth; it is a meticulous, scientific and sensitive act of working on historical remains. It is a skilful act of recording the materials from the excavated sites and subjecting them to close interpretation, exploring possibilities beyond antiquarianism and ceasing, as Clark Wissler would argue, ‘to strive for the mere collection of fine objects or curios’.65 Archaeologists wrestle with what Dray describes as ‘a certain metaphysical anxiety … about the task of coming to know what literally does not exist’.66 Cultural-historical archaeology, which brought additional interest into interpretations of the past, could not ignore the tangled intervention of technology, the evolutionary approach and interpretative values. Conceptual formations continued through the writings of Leslie White (The Evolution of Culture, 1959), Julian Steward (Theory of Culture Change, 1955) and Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips (Method and Theory in American Archaeology, 1958). Data-recovery techniques, statistical mechanisms pioneered by Albert Spaulding, numerical analysis and Leslie White’s thermodynamic formulae contributed to the emergence of ‘New Archaeology’. Archaeological investigations combined anthropological, evolutionary and ecological dimensions to evolve a functionalist view of the past that brought over a diversity of interest implicated in an intense exploration of cross-disciplinary relationship. Even Binfordian positivism acknowledges that archaeological records ‘are linked through laws of cultural or behavioural functioning to past conditions or events’. Systems thinking that fights hard against its reputation to lapse into ideologically controlled set-ups combines culture process, scientist foundations and other taphonomic factors. Hypothesis testing, both deductive and nomological, became the norm without turning insular to transdisciplinary intimations. Process and system find difficulty in surviving away from each other. But postprocessualism implicates areas beyond Binford’s often inelastic formulations and unbending adherence to objectivity: Successful explanation and the understanding of process are synonymous, and both proceed dialectically – by the formulation of hypotheses (potential laws on the relationships between two or more variables) and the testing of their validity against empirical data. Hypotheses about cause and effect must be explicitly formulated and then tested. Only when this is done are we in a position to judge what facts might be relevant, only then can we objectively evaluate the implicit propositions which underlie ‘plausible’ historical interpretations of archaeological data.67

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The reading of the past has its emergence in structural anthropology, ethnoarchaeology and other means of understanding ‘material culture’ with a clear movement towards what Colin Renfrew would term as ‘archaeology of mind’: this seeks to lessen the divide between mind and matter, homing in on cognitive archaeology. Postprocessualism takes into account the relationship between the individual and the social norm and, also, structure, mind, meaning and historical approach. Ian Hodder notes: Post-processual archaeology, then, involves the breaking down of established, taken-for-granted, dichotomies, and opens up study of the relationships between norm and individual, process and structure, material and ideal, object and subject. Unlike processual archaeology it does not espouse one approach or argue that archaeology should develop an agreed methodology. That is why post-processual archaeology is simply ‘post-’. It develops from a criticism of that which went before, building on yet diverging from that path. It involves diversity and lack of consensus. It is characterized by debate and uncertainty about fundamental issues that may have been rarely questioned before in archaeology. It is more an asking of questions than a provision of answers.68

Questioning and reflexivity are what both historians and archaeologists must encompass in their quarrel with the past. The ethics of a historian stand to feed on the turns and departures in archaeological reasoning and concepts. For instance, the recent discovery of archaeological remains in Bangarh (a historic place in West Bengal) puts the historian and the archaeologist in a generative interface that can benefit from Hodder’s contextual archaeology frameworked within structuralism and semiotics. Using Hodder we may read the ‘material culture’ of recently unearthed remains from the site of excavation as ‘text’ where pottery may not provide the information of the group employed in this trade but can semiotically foreground rather, decode gender relations. Mounds discovered and pillars found on the site cannot limit our understanding only to a knowledge of the form and structure of human settlement but, on being explored further, they can articulate interpretively relationships at different levels of organisation and cohabitation. This interface cannot rule out the premise of ‘values’ from which such conjunctural investigations determine the ethics of understanding. As Philip Kohl notes enthusiastically: How refreshing today to see a thousand alternative approaches to the past blooming! Since subjectivity and the bias of the observer can never be eliminated let us not insist upon mathematical rigor for its own sake, but form impressionistic, qualitative judgments; the intuitive, gut feelings of traditional archaeologists often resulted in great discoveries, and we should emulate them as much as the unimaginative scientific drones who succeeded them.69

No doubt intuitive and scientist ways have combined in ‘great discoveries’. But being wary of how sectarian appropriations can lead to perverse discoveries, I would, alongside Richard Gould, sound a note of caution. ‘Before any one idea of the past is accepted as the “real thing” by archaeologists’, notes Gould,

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it must pass a series of tests involving the congruence of results, presented as the constructions of particular cultural-historical traditions, with ‘first-order’ variables related to basic considerations of ecology, economy, and technology. Without such testing, archaeology in the postprocessual era runs the risk of degenerating into a kind of literary or aesthetic criticism, wherein internal consistency and ingenuity count for more than the real thing.70

Doubts cast on cultural relativism prevent the occurrence of a state that Gould calls ‘archaeological know-nothingism’; this clearly affects the nature of historical representation that draws upon certain zones of archaeological certitude. The effects of presentism determine archaeological motives and findings, but the caveat remains as to the overpresentist propensities that can perversely influence the understanding of the past. Postprocessualism should begin pressing the alert button of relativism, for undoubtedly the ethics of a historian owes its formation to the ethics of an archaeologist deeply networked in a complicated plexus of photographic and artefactual record, diaries, photographs, field notes, unpublished manuscripts, artefacts, field equipments and other remains from past archaeological work. The past awaits unconcealment at the hands of the archaeologist-historian, locked in this deeply impregnated hyphen. Also, David Meltzer rightly suggests that archaeology ‘must involve constant critical self reflection to understand the cultural basis of scientific knowledge of its created past’. This takes into consideration the limiting effects that culture places on our understanding of external reality; it improves the level of understanding working on the contexts within which ideas have developed and are embedded. The distance from the past lends a certain disinterestedness making the context more readily available and accessible, but it cannot overrule the ‘immediacy’ problem that problematises certain notions in archaeological ethics centring around the ‘manner in which interpretive frames are embedded in historical precedent’ and ‘of the manner in which collection techniques are likewise embedded in beliefs about the nature of the record or questions concerning that record’.71 Undeviating linearity proceeding from premises to conclusions or facts to generalisations builds around a tendency to collect and systematise data neutrally. But orientations that are free of theoretical presuppositions are about reasoning enthymematically. Postpositivist philosophers of science would not agree that collection of data is a neutral act, that data is entirely free of the theoretical framework that produces them.72 So Richard Bernstein would argue for ‘multiple strands and diverse types of evidence, data, hunches, and arguments to support a scientific hypotheses or theory’.73 Bernstein’s emphasis on the ‘cumulative weight of evidence, data, reasons, and arguments’ leading to rationally decisive premises is what approximates ‘intersubjectivity’ as discussed in the earlier pages. Reconstructive inference and cross-framework interpretive tacking do not easily allow fact and theory to exist antinomically. But Renfrew would hasten to add that ‘when the chips are down, however, it is the data

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which have the last word’.74 The argument that fact can have meaning only in the context of a conceptual scheme is as true with a historian as it is with an archaeologist. Systematizations of archaeological data can, most often, be hypothetical constructs and typologies and classifications must be regarded as ‘abstractions which are really bundles of testable hypotheses about the nature of correspondence of cultural objects to the dynamic culture-historical pattern which bore them’.75 It involves analysability in a network that combines formal relations of entailment, subsumption and inductive arguments with synthetic assertion and judgments that are cognitively significant and verificationist. The interpretive acts of the archaeologists emerge from the contextualised past of the objects, the surroundings amidst which they have grown and flourished, and the relationship that they have had with other socio-cultural elements. Interestingly, the reading of archaeological evidence in isolation from its context has been the problem with Ayodhya; this lack of contextuality makes it easy prey to political manipulation. Julia Shaw sees that the ‘stream of deep seated polarities underlying the entire dispute have largely been informed, and to a certain extent reinstated, by an unreflexive archaeological rhetoric whose own limitations have played directly into the hands of the VHP’.76 This particular attitude to readings in archaeology – ‘situating the chronologies of archaeology against the backdrop of a cyclical temporal framework’ – ends in polarised appraisals and inferences and, in its trenchant opposition to the more ‘scientific’ school of analysts who would ‘submit the original field reports to vigorous reappraisals, relocating every detail to its correct stratigraphic context’, disables the space for dissent; this rules out all possibilities of effective archaeological counterarguments. The information flowing out of the archaeologists genuinely affects the discourse of historians, and the sharp clangourous line of a non-negotiable divide in archaeological understanding not only rankles the ethics of historical writing but also queers the pitch of archaeological debates over data that usually sponsors interpretation and discussion among archaeologists before a conclusive premise is reached. Postprocessual position renders diversity to interpretation but cannot discount the possibility of consensus on some points of explanation. Principally, this consensus is achieved not out of a common adherence to a certain ideology and, obviously, not because some archaeologists belong to a particular ethnic community. This consensus is built on the strong ‘scientific criteria’ that archaeology has seriously benefited from. Swabey rightly notes, Were discontinuity and dissimilarity the key to the past, history would resolve into myth and superstition. While admitting no duplication, we must yet suppose that yesterday, today, and tomorrow are of a piece, parts of a totality in which current clues may suffice to trace the lineaments of other times. Far from being incongruous with belief in change, this assumption merely recognizes that some background of unchanging conditions is necessary to make the detection of change possible. For instance, through comparing rock implements used by savages today with

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stone relics found in fossil beds of inferred geologic date, the archaeologist claims to penetrate prehistory. By assuming constant relations in change (that things alter in orderly ways according to decipherable laws), he deduces from similar artifacts the activities of our early ancestors. Were this supposition illusory, and were it impossible to infer from conclusions got under certain conditions to conclusions under others, because no functional dependency held between them, then indeed the basis of historical knowledge would be open to question.77

The historian’s acts with words cannot survive without a correspondence with the archaeologist’s acts involving material remains. It is primarily left to historians (the interpretative role of the archaeologist is not discounted either) to lend a voice to the physical objects that, if left in isolation, cannot communicate a meaning. The intention written behind their presence awaits discovery at the hands of both. The relationship between the sources ‘includes the use of one as an empirical control for the veracity of the other, the use of archaeology to add “texture and dimensionality” to the laconic references in the texts, and the use of written sources to fill in absences from the archaeological record’.78 This endorses the point about intersubjectivity, the need for discussion, interpretation and comparison of reading among professionals and specialists. The disquiet lies in trying to give historicity to what began as a belief. ‘Where anyone has the right to his or her beliefs,’ writes Romila Thapar, the same cannot be held for a claim to historicity. Such a claim has to be examined in terms of the evidence and it has to be discussed by professionals. Even after such discussions there may not be unanimity of opinion. Historicity cannot be therefore established in a hurry and furthermore, has always to be viewed in the context of possible doubt. Archaeology is not a magic wand which in a matter of moments conjures up the required evidence. Such ‘instant’ archaeology may be useful as a political gambit, but creates a sense of unease among professional archaeologists.79

It bears mention that the dispute around Ramjanmabhumi-Babri Masjid has not remained confined to the Hindus and Muslims, for a Jain forum has staked claims to the site of the demolished mosque, declaring the site to have belonged to a sixth century AD Jain temple. Buddhist organisations decided not to be left behind in this race for heritage ownership. They petitioned the court with the claim that the mosque was built on the ruins of a Buddhist monastery and, now that the mosque does not exist, the site should belong to them and not to the Hindus. Surprisingly, the hope to find a common point of agreement among such dissenting views through the report of the Archaeological Survey of India (2003) was not fulfilled as people found to their dismay that their findings did not evoke much trust and confidence among disputant factions. Arguments were raised as to the sincerity and professionalism of the archaeological findings, the bias that was said to have informed its investigation and the vested interests that seemed to have coloured the ostentatiously objective inquiry. Under the directions of the court it was meant to be an inquiry to put to rest the contesting claims of warring communities – historians, ar-

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chaeologists and religious leaders and their cohorts – and help regain the credibility of historical quest and findings in the face of interpretive abuse, political instrumentalisation and disciplinary manipulations and laxity. Such betrayal of impartiality and objectivity by professional bodies makes us rethink the efficacy of encouraging a culture of unbarred dissent and reconsider the divide separating dissent from ‘responsible criticism’. It leaves us appalled at the unethical and partisan appropriation of archaeological findings and the eventual influence it shall have on historical description. Archaeologists have often failed to conduct their enquiries responsibly, courting exaggerated, misleading and unwarranted statements that have propelled people to unpleasant actions. We are impelled to take stock of the fructifying connections between research, methodology and interpretation.80 Gustaf Kossinna’s culture-historical approach to prehistory and his studies of German origins were appropriated by interested communities to lend support to the thesis of Aryan superiority. This generated an enthusiasm riding high on which neighbouring countries were invaded to restore Teutonic ownership and extirpate inferior races like the Jews, Slavs and gypsies. Archaeologists pitched in with their strategic findings to buttress such a reconstruction with more credence and political bite. A close link was forged between archaeology and political, ethnic and political nationalism. W. J. McCann leads us to an interesting reference in Friedrich Alfred Beck’s 1944 book Der Aufgang des Germanischen Weltalters where, in trying to provide an exposé on Germanentum or Germanic-ness, he makes us arrive at some crucial sanitised concepts like the importance of the race, the Germanic race, its superiority, the concepts of ‘order’ and the Reich, volk (the people) as the essential community and ‘the Germanic world-age as the fulfilment of world history’. The Jews were considered as intransigently opposed to the Germanic race, and the Second World War in particular can be attributed to the essential opposition and irreconcilable differences between the values of the two communities. This deep wedge was informed by a strong belief in the inherent power of Germanentum with its order and creativity and the power of Jewry, by contrast, to produce chaos. This declares a belief in the glory of a great culture that by its purity of ‘blood’ and nobility of ‘descent’ must determine people’s ways and beliefs in the present.81 To Henrich Himmler, for whom ‘Germanic’ was an extraordinarily pertinent word, ‘the racial character of the Germanic peoples’ was a ‘basic precondition of their superiority’; his firmly entrenched conviction made him establish the SS-Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Inheritance) in 1935. Himmler did not have the rigorous patience that informs traditional scientist investigations; his starting premises were axioms, rather than hypotheses based on evaluation of evidence, and evidences had to be found to corroborate these axioms. He ensured that the SS undertook excavation projects that indexed cultural greatness of the German past. Archaeological methods – dating and classifying of settlements – were pressed into service with clear political motivation. McCann notes:

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All Ahnenerbe archaeological work had ulterior political or propagandistic motives, but some of their archaeological activities can only be described as looting. Besides Jankuhn’s Sonderkommando, other Ahnenerbe groups operated throughout occupied territories in the East. They appropriated not simply museum objects of Germanic provenance, but whole libraries, works of art, and, according to documents permitting confiscation from private Polish and Jewish sources, valuables of every kind.82

So history and archaeology in a perverse partnership influenced the emergence and perpetuation of a narrative truth – prejudicially selectivised and imaginatively reconstructed. Things are no less complicated in our understanding of the controversy in Ayodhya. Archaeologists need not be influenced by the claims of a minority and communities eager to parade their subordination. This is the trap of the ‘other’, the uncritical acquiescence to seeing a uniform entity devoid of internal differences and hierarchical antinomies. Reinhard Bernbeck and Susan Pollock note that ‘while it is certainly a salutary lesson for Western archaeologists to accept that we can no longer claim to be single, dominant, legitimate source of knowledge about the past, it is also pointless and indeed detrimental to renounce entirely our claims to the production and evaluation of knowledge’.83 Archaeological testimony, through tangible evidences – the physicality of material remnants – remains as the major authentic tool that may convince the sceptical other. Production of archaeological knowledge is not about producing a popular discourse – strategically informed and pretentiously rigorous – and certainly not about ceding the stage to others who are less powerful. This is archaeology of knowledge characterised as critical, dissenting, problematised, disciplinised and intersubjectivised. The ethics of an archaeologist does not readily permit a search for pure knowledge and, in fact, no knowledge is pure – rather, all knowledge is political, as Edward Said has argued. Archaeological knowledge rests on funds released by state machinery, the politics of governance, private autonomy over personally acquired resources, consensus histories and interpretation. One may doubt the neutrality and objectivity of such purportedly transcendent institutions like Archaeological Survey of India.84 But ‘secular historians’ would know what it means to preserve the fragile bond between ethics and knowledge; they have the intellectual wherewithal to cultivate the pregnant, though perceptive, balance between historical enquiry and public use of history. This archaeology of knowledge ensures a zone of ‘supervision’ where ‘dissent’ cannot run amuck as much as institutionalised knowledge cannot be allowed to be tutelary and, thus, exempted from scrutiny in a metatopical space. Finally, some questions remain as to the legitimacy of disturbing the dead. Do the dead demand being disturbed by barrow-diggers and archaeologists? What can be the politics behind the dignity shown to the dead? Should archaeology be avoided because it would ‘disturb the peace of the dead for the sake of some trifling gain?’ If the dead are not disturbed by ‘spade-turning’ and

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disturbing the dead becomes a ‘mummy’s curse’, what would a historian rely on? Accidental discovery, tomb-robbery and spurious strategic digging are different from the rationale and philosophy of systematic excavation of the earth, and the latter remains as a scientific study required to bring a ‘variety of benefits and a wealth of information’. There must be a right to also some set of limits and, hence, a niche of values, to disturb the dead for the sake of understanding the ‘living’. The will of the dead and the demands of the present cannot be perpetually and deontologically held against each other claiming an inviolate privacy for the dead. The values and the rights of the dead can alter with time, and the argument that things thought as sacred and best left disinterred in the past cannot be challenged does not stand valid. Paul Bahn notes that the ‘archaeologist’s dilemma is to reconcile the duty to respect the implicit promise undertaken by a group of living human beings (to preserve the remains of their ancestors from molestation) with the duty to advance our knowledge of past societies and their practices’.85 The materiality of the past cannot uncritically listen to the ‘dead’, their rights and values; rather, an axiological attitude must respond to the intrinsic value of different elements in a situation of complex mutuality and impingement, keeping in mind the solemnity of some aspects from the past, the epistemic worth of archaeological pursuits and sensitivity towards the living people. It is what I would argue as understanding the living through the dead; rather, the dead have a responsibility towards the living. Paul Bahn admits that the deceased speak to the living but, interestingly, notes through a comment of Worsaae the positive advantage of ‘sounding the dead’ which is not about disturbing their peace but endeavouring towards a conversational stir – the meaningful shake-up not undertaken ‘from unreasonable or superficial curiosity; they should be carried out with care and by persons of intelligence, who will know how to apply the objects discovered to the positive advantage of science’.86

Archives ‘Records frequently provide the scaffolding for the stories relayed and sometimes they even play central roles’, argue Richard Cox and David Wallace, yet they are rarely explicitly surfaced as objects receiving concentrated attention, especially in what has long been described as the Information Age, with its stress on the effective and efficient creation, management, and use of information. The importance of records and especially archives is often obscured. The authors’ focus on the broader narrative they are constructing, while entirely appropriate, serves to obscure recordkeeping dimensions that can profoundly shape social interactions and memories of them. When teased out, the recordkeeping dimensions – such as control and access, preservation, destruction, authenticity, and accuracy – demonstrate time and again that records are not mute observers and recordings of activity. Rather, they often actively constitute an activity in themselves and are frequently

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struggled over as objects of memory formation. They are often at the heart of struggles over what ‘memory’ will be produced and socially validated, issues that have become more essential in the postmodern age with its varying emphases on texts and contexts.87

A historian’s constructive conversation with records informs the modes of representation lending value to the ability of the documents to provide glimpses into the social, cultural and political configurations; it forms a road that leads from appraisal to description and access. Record-keeping and evidence-gathering methods have changed and developed over the years leading to greater and diverse understanding of the past. Technologies have problematised relationships among acquisition, reference and processing archivists and historians to a point where analysis, classification and organisation of materials are anchored in selection and certain skills that may have a bearing on the ethics of historical description. ‘Documents are voices’, writes Francois Hartog, which make demands on us as well as bearers of a debt to be paid. But, in order to hear these testimonies, the historian must go to the archives, that is to say, must plunge into the depths of a period. He must ‘cross and re-cross the river of the dead’, deliberately transgressing the boundaries of past and present. Then, he must make these voices heard, which, in no way, means effacing himself. It is precisely this operation, according to Michelet, which distinguishes the true historian.88

Records exist as facts and await being read, constructed and deconstructed. And archives become a mechanism and a space where ‘physical evidence can tell us as much or more about a document and its context as the informational content itself ’.89 Archives are sites where information is garnered, where knowledge is processed, ‘a tattooed body, an institutional library, a person’s memory, a person’s entire life’.90 It exists as ‘traces of the past collected whether intentionally or haphazardly as evidence’.91 An archive is a contested site caught amidst the tension of a ‘variety of tangible and nontangible elements that help construct a sense, an image, a theory, or a representation of a particular past’.92 It is a vexed space where the past is unravelled through the processing of facts, classification and exhibition of information and textualisation of documents – a space open yet enclosed, ‘membranic’, allowing for ‘the infusing and exhaling of values which are embedded in each and every activation’. An archive is, for Carolyn Steedman, not the fathomless and timeless space in which nothing goes away that is the unconscious. ‘The Archive is made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also from the mad fragmentations that no one intended to preserve and that just ended up there’. It is ‘a name for the many places in which the past (which does not now exist but which did actually happen, which cannot be retrieved but which can be represented) has deposited some traces and fragments, usually in written form’.93 In their settled existence amidst a superstructure of arranging rationale – institutional, tutelary and professedly scientific94 – in their aged, muchthumbed and dust-rich state, archives can betray an illusion of passive temporal

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and documental deposition. Instead, an archive is an active, alert space for historians, waking them up from a mere encounter with a static collection to a dynamicity that is constructive and democratic in its epistemic ramifications. A visit to the archives is no easy pathway; rather, it is a quaint experience where meanings tightly held in the documents vie with meanings that documents in their inherent lack to communicate unconceal, where the politics of arrangement of records has profound implications for the historian, where mining information that is often obscure and scattershot is closely allied with interpretation, scepticism and doubt, where the outcropping of long hours of visitation can be pathologically disastrous, where dusting off data is scarcely left without the accompaniment of a flickering imagination and prying sensibility. There is a living, buoyant ligature between a historian and the archival milieux where one encounters the recorded past as much as a ‘history of loss’,95 where the dust rests as no mere squalid accretions but animated particles that can waft into the historian with differential vibrations. Steedman writes, ‘Dust is the immutable, obdurate set of beliefs about the material world, past and present, inherited from the nineteenth century, with which modern historywriting attempts to grapple; Dust is also the narrative principle of that writing; and Dust is the joke’.96 Dust speaks; dust makes us aware of a past that is absent and present at the same time, a temptation to the historian’s reconstructionist desires and a reminder of his or her affiliation to grounded evidence. In a kind of sensory encounter with the past, dust, as a materiality, awaits mediation, conjuring up the ‘presence’ of the past. Susan Crane puts it well: ‘Breathing in the dust, getting sick from it, getting sick of it, exhaling slowly in the face of yet another pile of records – these are the authentic experiences of the historical researcher. The researcher breathes, and this ordinary act is not irrelevant to the production of history. She also reads under and through the dust, and insofar as her belabored breathing continues, she interprets as she reads, concatenating new knowledge with old, new details with larger frameworks’.97 This dusty experience builds centrally on the ethics of a historian for whom roads conventionally lead to the archives. A certain encounter with a speaking void and disciplinary empiricism make for a difficult writing space. Cicely Wedgwood writes elegantly: There is a peculiar pleasure in the mere contact of the hand with the paper. I can speak with assurance only for that epoch to which most of my manuscript researches have been confined, the seventeenth century. Nothing seems to bridge the gap of the years so much as the unfolding and reading of ancient letters; the minute particles of sand which had long adhered in some thick down stroke where the ink had been wet, and which detach themselves after three hundred years to blow away and join with modern dust, seem to symbolize the telescoping of the years between then and now.98

Archives have remained at once an authentic, legitimating and oneiric space that has a lot to do with ‘longing and appropriation’.99 For Foucault it becomes

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a ‘regime of practices’ that varies in any given time and in any given place.100 People create, process, appraise and use archives, influenced consciously or unconsciously by cultural and social factors. Foucault, in his Archaeology of Knowledge, provocatively warned that an archive is neither the sum of all texts that a culture preserves nor those institutions that allow for that record and preservation. In a historian’s effort to access, transfer, arrange and weed documents and inventory archival materials, the character keeps shifting as much as the evidential and informational value. No longer can we regard the record as an artefact with fixed boundaries of contents and contexts. We are brought before the politics of citing and the aesthetics of managing records that are not true of library materials.101 In a posttraditional view – reinforced by the challenges of the electronic records – the record then is a ‘mediated and ever changing construction’. Data has been the ‘key’ to history, argues Robert Rosenstone. ‘And yet there has always been another kind of contribution to our understanding of the past, one that depends less upon data than upon what we might call vision, upon how we look at and think about and remember and make meaningful what remains of people and events. This is the vision that explains why historians like Edward Gibbon, Jules Michelet, and George Bancroft affect our sense of the past long after their data has been superseded’.102 We are confronted by ‘imaginative leaps’. So every interpretation of the archive is an enrichment that Derrida would ascribe as an ‘extension of the archive’. In such extensions the archive cannot be considered as ‘closed’. It is not a sheltering of the past, rather an anticipation of the future. Foucault’s archival fever, after reading about Mathurian Milan placed in the hospital for the insane at Charenton, 31 August 1707, is interesting: It would be hard to say exactly what I felt when I read these fragments. These stories, suddenly emerging from two and a half centuries of silence, stirred more fibers within me than what is ordinarily called literature, without my being able to say even now if I was more moved by the beauty of that Classical style, draped in a few sentences around a character that was plainly wretched, or by the excesses, the blend of dark stubbornness and rascality, of this life whose disarray and relentless energy one senses beneath the stone-smooth words.103

Several questions stick their heads out in an archival romance: who arranges the information, where it is housed, what principles influence its orientation, what political surveillance fosters such preservation and what contagion of bias directs the assemblage. Bruno Latour’s observations about the politics of a bureau are relevant in the sense that he finds in its construction a similarity to a ‘small laboratory’ in which several elements are connected because their ‘scale and nature has been averaged out: legal texts, specifications, standards, payrolls, maps, surveys’. It is through the ‘backdoor of file’ and not through the ‘grandiose entrance of interdisciplinarity’ that economics, politics, sociology and hard sciences come into contact. The ‘cracy’ in bureaucracy is mysterious, notes Latour, for it is hard to study. But, he observes that a bureau

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is something that can be empirically studied, and which explains, because of its structure, why some power is given to an average mind just by looking at files: domains which are far apart become literally inches apart; domains which are convoluted and hidden, become flat; thousands of occurrences can be looked at synoptically. More importantly, once files start being gathered everywhere to insure some two-way circulation of immutable mobiles, they can be arrayed in cascade: files of files can be generated and this process can be continued until a few men consider millions as if they were in the palms of their hands. Common sense ironically makes fun of these ‘gratte papiers’ and ‘paper shufflers’, and often wonders what all this ‘red tape’ is for; but the same question should be asked of the rest of science and technology. In our cultures ‘paper shuffling’ is the source of an essential power, that constantly escapes attention since its materiality is ignored.104

The ‘allure of the archive’ puts a historian at risk, a risk that challenges obduracies about historical truths, bailing the archival space out away from squawky empiricists who would refuse to see the poetics of this space in an alchemy of testimony and transcendence. It is a ‘history house’, not a panopticon, woven around ‘made’, the ‘unmade’ and the ‘in the making’; but histories are also built with extra-archival sources that, as Antoinette Burton points out, might look like a ‘subspecies of evidence because they cannot pass the test of verifiability’. Such critiques, Burton argues, are often accompanied by a call for a return to the archive – conventionally understood as an institutional site in a faraway place that requires hotel accommodation and a grueling nine-to-five workday. It is here that the hands-on, hard work of history evidently takes place and that historians get their professional credibility by breaking into a sweat, if not a fever. Of course, it is possible to respect and even valorize the traditional archive on the one hand and to be cognizant of its horizons, wary of its distortions, skeptical of its truth-claims, and critical of its collaboration with state apparatuses on the other.105

Also gainsaid is the proposition to see archives as ‘society’s collective memory’.106 There are occasions where archives can ‘provide material for the extension of human memory’ leading to the constitutive effect of transactional records and archivist’s propensities to ‘public programming’ that relates to the examination conducted by historians about public memory.107 Submitting to the ‘feverish gaze’ of the archive is not what always determines historical credibility and demarcates the serious minded from the nontrained. The rigour of academic thinking legitimises at once what the archives make historians see and what their failure to project and establish does to the historian’s ethical responsibility to meaningfully problematise the disjunctions, disabilities and discontinuities of this highly invested space. Steedman may see significant little in archival masses – ‘Your archive is just a tiny flotsam that’s ended up in the record office you are at work in’ – but the rule of evidence reigning in historical inferences and description against invasive relativism is what lends form on prospective chaos. The historian in the archive is knocked about in a space that, in the plurality of its voices, is distinct from spaces that usually impinge on his or

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her being, has legality, a sanction, an opportunity of judgment, a curtsy before a past that speaks in letters. Mark Poster writes, reinforcing Michel Foucault’s argument on the ‘power of writing’, that collecting information constitutes individuals.108 Archives for a historian just do not provide disabling analytic frameworks of understanding and knowledge, but archivisation ‘produces as much as it records the event’, like a photograph that is not valued merely for what it records and but also for what it constitutes. Historical insight coupled with good judgment comes from a broad familiarity with a vast number of archival documents. ‘With that experience’, Helen Nader observes, ‘you can trust your hunches, even when they go against the standard interpretations’.109

State Expression and Public Memory Whether archive or archaeology, reified modes of the state apparatus have a panoptic character resulting in disciplinary surveillance by the government who uses mechanisms to control the flow and volume of knowledge and information: working on technologies and ideologies that decide the amount and quality of information that its citizens, employees and consumers can acquire, share and disseminate. It is through such statist superintendency that access to both the materiality and psychology of understanding is controlled and coordinated. As James Scott argues in Seeing Like a State, ‘Builders of the modern nationstate do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation … there are virtually no other facts for the state than those that are contained in documents’.110 Threats such as this do not allow any tradition of reading and doing history for its own sake – a tradition in which history is not expected to fulfil any moral or practical role. Historians in the public space cannot continue practicing their trade without relating it to the greater world, humanity and other forces that impinge on everyday existence. Historians fail themselves if their art is simply underpinned by disinterestedness, a dispassionate commitment of a narrator. The past is a composite of diverse interests, purpose, propositions, agendas, vying narratives, political complicities and many other factors, and historians are expected to make sense of it. Caught in the whirl, historians feel the pinch of fragmentation, of difference and disagreement; what is credited in their favour though is the consciousness of the roots that bound them to their profession, to the vocation and honesty of the discipline. Historians are credited for imparting more sense to people’s understanding of the past, arrogating more rationality to people’s actions and motives and sounding the alarm bell against any move that heads towards reductionist appropriation and inferences. So the ethics of historical writing and the role of the state are fractious siblings who can very often discommode each other.

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‘Education, then’, as Peter Fowler argues incorporating an element of history, inevitably raises questions of ‘What history?’ Any answer in practice is as much to do with the politics of the day as with absolutes of scholarship or current educational theory. A place for history in the core curriculum of the British state educational system has now been confirmed so, although that place is not so central or large as many would have wished, attention can now turn to the working-out in the schools of the content of the curriculum itself. The use of the past in practical terms can be crucial, not just to the mindset formulated by the pupils during a minimum nine years of exposure but also to the nature and shape of ‘schools history’ as it actually emerges.111

But the politics of finding a ‘place’ for school history and the concomitant refigurative role of a historian become difficult under the threat of the ‘subtle subversion’112 that history textbooks, on most occasions, cannot avoid in their making. A rational and poised approach to historical writing is seriously affected if textbooks can offer something as heinously schismatic as this: Muslims and Hindus are completely different in their way of life, eating habits and dress. We worship in mosques. Our mosques are open, spacious, clean and well-lit. Hindus worship inside their temples. These temples are extremely narrow, enclosed and dark. Inside these the Hindus worship idols. Only one man at a time can enter these temples. On the other hand, inside our mosques, all the Muslims can pray to God together.113

The historical exposition predicates on an irrevocable divide and unfolds within a set of unflinching presumptions. Spare a look at the following instructions to social studies teachers in a teachers’ guide produced by the Punjab Textbook Board (Pakistan) in 1975: Teach the children the history of the Punjab in such a way that the following facts become absolutely clear: 1) The complete difference between the way of life, customs and traditions, beliefs and culture of the Hindus and Muslims, 2) Give special emphasis to those aspects which forced the Muslims to create a separate country for themselves; here especially emphasise the economic, educational and social exploitation of the Muslims at the hands of the Hindus; the favourable and friendly attitude of the British towards Hindus as compared to Muslims; the unequal and discriminatory attitude of the Hindus towards the Muslims.114

The emphasis on the ‘complete difference’ forecloses all community negotiations and the ceaseless labour on the irreconcilable divisiveness in the construction of a nation called Pakistan abrogates the communitarian approach in the evolving discourse. It is potently problematic in that differences are not generated to foster toleration but are meant to underscore superiority and racial hegemony – a self-imposed unimpeachable space to dictate the course of history. Historians in their toadyism before the ruling elites forsake the glorious right of independent inquiry; imprisoned within curriculum-space and redactive modes effected under the whip of the statist pontifications, the perceptive and perspicuous perspective on historical writing suffers. It is irresponsibility

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with the power of knowledge; it is laxity with the principles of historical rationality.115 Nocola Gallerano anxiously writes: History is used above all as an instrument of the day-to-day political battle: but it is a dialogue that takes place strictly within the ruling political class. History does not appear here as the construction site of great coherent and ideological narratives or at least as constructions of meaning. It is more a pool in which people fish for more or less fortuitous examples, useful for the latest polemics. The object is no longer to educate a people but to reach an audience, through history but not only, with the spectacle of politics.116

Indeed, state partronage to textbook committees has always been a feature of the Indian polity, and statist intervention in efforts to institutionalise historical knowledge has never lost momentum in the nation’s post-independence journey beginning with the Congress Party, through the Janata Dal, the Indira National Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the united front that is ruling India now. How easily Romila Thapar’s Medieval India, which has been the textbook for school children in India for long, comes under fire for not being sufficiently anti-Muslim; how death threats and hate mails keep harrying her for not portraying, for instance, Mahmud of Ghazni as an anti-Hindu iconoclast, a religious zealot who unremittingly plundered the Somnath temple in the twelfth century.117 So who would judge what knowledge is valid and which evidence should form the basis of our understanding of history? If Thapar’s or Irfan Habib’s writings are made victims in the prison-house of textbook politics owing to their dissonance with the ideology of ‘majoritarian politics’, are we not obligated to review the dynamics behind, for instance, R.C. Mazumdar’s The History and Culture of the Indian People that betrays a pro-Hindu stance or Sita Ram Goel’s Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them? If the Aryan invasion theory needs revision, so also does the ideological obduracy in history textbooks from Pakistan – books that see the birth of Pakistan as a telic finality because it could not have continued gestating contaminated by the Hindus and Christians – demands rethinking. Historians are history teachers too. In a significant way historians need to be wary of the kind of temptations that students have been made the victim of. Rather, historians become the conduits of hope around ‘radical pedagogy’ – the hope that Henry Giroux would argue in his discussion on Paulo Freire as a practice of witnessing, an act of moral imagination that encourages progressive educators and others to stand at the edge of society, to think beyond existing configurations of power in order to imagine the unthinkable in terms of how they might live with dignity, justice and freedom. Hope demands an anchoring in transformative practices, and one of the tasks of the progressive educator is to unveil opportunities of hope, no matter what the obstacles may be.118

Richard Evans finds a three-stage progression in historical writing in Germany since the Second World War. It was ensured, just in the wake of the war, that crimes and embarrassments from the Nazi regime were elided until people,

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not happy with the way history has hitherto been written, demanded a probe forcing inquiries upon the government. Yoder, referring to Richard Evans’s Hitler’s Shadow. West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (1987), points out, More recently, the return of the Christian Democrats to power under Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his coalition has brought on a more conservative mood. With that change, Evans believes, has come a resurgence of historical nationalism. The controversial Bitburg affair – Ronald Reagan’s hurried ceremonial visit to a military cemetery where some former SS troopers were buried – was symptomatic. Among the latest urges, Evans writes, are attempts to ‘relativize’ Hitler’s crimes – not by denying them or minimizing their evil but by framing them in the perspective of other great twentieth-century atrocities, such as the Turkish massacre of Armenians during World War I and the recent bestialities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or by comparing them to the monumental if different crimes of Stalin, or suggesting that they were a wicked but understandable response to the provocations of others.119

This triggered a ‘battle among the historians’, which saw a resurgence of historical nationalism. The nationalist historians, the so-called political Right, feel the urge to assimilate the mootable past by drawing up their inferential premises from the disappearance of the ‘guilty generation’, the obfuscation of hereditary or collective guilt. The Left historians feel the danger involved in amnesiac past, the egregious misuses of historical argument that is dismissive of Nazi criminality. Interestingly, both make for a strong case – the problematic of ‘knowing truth’, ‘telling truth’ and sufficiently trained to represent truth – that question across the fences the validity of historical truth and the combative patina of lying. Both the ‘direct’ method and ‘blank pages’ method of ‘lying’ in history intensify the moral responsibility of the historian. With a focus on Stalinist historiography Andrus Pork shows us how the story of secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty of 23 August 1940 is a case of a direct lie and Soviet historiography that deals with the incorporation of Estonia is fraught with instances of ‘blank pages’ lies.120 Margaret Macmillan has shown in her The Uses and Abuses of History how Vladimir Putin sponsored the writing of ‘patriotic’ history textbooks that downplayed Stalin’s crimes and projected him as a leader protecting Russia from its enemies.121 John Gray points out that ‘when the secret police chief Lavrenti Beria was shot in 1953, libraries were ordered to cut out the pages of the Soviet encyclopaedia that dealt with him and expand the section on the Bering Strait. As far as official Soviet history was concerned Beria had never existed and the events in which he had played a part had to be rewritten’. Narrating instances of misleading analogies, Gray observes that Anthony Eden invoked the failure to resist Hitler at Munich when defending the Suez adventure in 1956, while some supporters of the Iraq war were ready to portray Saddam Hussein as a threat to world peace on a par with that posed by Hitler. Whatever their sins, neither leader possessed Hitler’s vast industrial and military

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resources, or harboured his global ambitions. Yet misguided analogies of this kind recur in liberal democracies in much the same way that the outright falsification of history does in totalitarian regimes.122

At a different level, Mary Lefkowitz shows us versions of extreme Afrocentrism practiced in the name of Egyptology by citing the instance of Yosef A.A. ben-Jochannan who claimed that Greek civilization was stolen from Africa and Aristotle robbed the library of Alexandria.123 In fact, Aristotle never went to Egypt and ‘while the date of the library of Alexandria is not known precisely, it was certainly built some years after the city was founded, which was after both Aristotle’s and Alexander’s deaths’.124 Radical Afrocentrist views refuse to credit the Greek civilisation for what it was and what it had bequeathed; any measure in defence of such overblown claims are seen as a cover-up on behalf of the ancient Greeks. Proclaiming a historical methodology that favours their ways of historical understanding, the Afrocentrists are tethering the course of history to their own strategic, propagandist gains. Molefi Asante finds in Eurocentrism a potential threat for the blacks in America, an endangering and overpowering phenomenon that would never allow the growth of the appropriate space to appreciate the cultural, social, economic and political survival of the blacks. Hence, Asante proposes ‘Afrocentricity’ that entails the consolidation of black American knowledge and awareness of their African historical and cultural heritage by making Africa the foundation of black American epistemology. The objective is to instill in black Americans an awareness of their African identity and culture as a defensive weapon against a pervasive and domineering Eurocentric world view. Afrocentricity is projected as a process of re-education and re-socialization designed to rid Black American consciousness of the ‘tragic conception’ of their history, culture and heritage, imbibed from Eurocentrism. It is supposed to bring Black Americans closer to Africa as they develop in their knowledge of their African history, identity and heritage.125

It has been argued that the emotional element in modern African studies has fostered the inspiration to replace old myths by new ones that are distinctly patronising and celebratory. Stanley Alpern writes, ‘in an effort to show that blacks are as good as anyone else, a point that had to be emphasized given the legacy of pseudoscientific claptrap to the contrary, many serious Africanists (as distinct from the latest mythmakers) have been tempted to claim too much. What we have seen, in effect, is historiography as ego massage’.126 Lefkowitz, thus, evinces serious concern: What will happen some years from now, when students who have studied different versions of the past discover that their picture of events are totally incomparable with what their classmates have learned about their own ethnic histories? Will students of one ethnicity deny the existence of other “ethnic truths,” with dire consequences akin to the ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia? Perhaps they will be reassured that the differences do not matter because all history is a form of rhetoric, and narratives of the past can be constructed virtually at will. When

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that time comes, and I hope it never will, our students will be no better off than the Jews who claimed that Plato was a disciple of Moses: they will have no respect for evidence, no concern with chronology, no understanding of the differences between languages and cultures. In other words, they will have overlooked everything that has been learned about history since Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. began his famous inquiry into the human past.127

The precariousness of such a situation cannot be minimized, for what is ‘wrong’ and grossly overrepresented needs articulation through the ‘public space’. The erroneous premises of the flat earth theory, for instance, require a well-reasoned articulation under the gaze of public scrutiny, which obviously involves pain and polemical disquiet. But to learn and teach, as Lefkowitz appropriately observes, the tough questions need to be asked. Searching questions involve pain, and it is through a tryst with such exacting investigations that certain truths are reached. The lessons of history are complicit in values that are born out of our beliefs, practices and the inherited institutions and traditions. Historical studies cannot do without the intellectual patience to account for historical changes that are, on most occasions, overdetermined. The historical basis of our understanding demands precision that, however, is not always an easy thing to achieve. Falsity can have a career, though a transient one, in our historical understanding, projecting its greater usefulness against the claims of truth. Putting a moratorium on ‘story telling’ as part of historical narration, truth can often be shown as less practical – ‘making sense’ becomes inseparably allied with ‘being true’. David Carr rightly notes that ‘getting the story straight’ is a ‘value at all levels of individual and social existence, not just at the level of science or scientific history. Methods of evaluating sources, notions of objectivity, injunctions of impartiality, are ways of trying to do better what we often do poorly in ordinary life. Thus the historian’s concern with the truth about the past is ultimately practical, too. And to say that it is practical is to say that it has value for the future’.128 So historians need to rescue history by acknowledging the importance of their tribe in the public space – the zone of nonaggressive argumentation. It is an acknowledgment of the necessity to avoid intellectual laziness that may come from an insipid engagement with Clio within the walls of the classroom and the enervation generated from ‘debate deficit’ that may afflict young minds. Working on judgment, experience and tolerance, historians are obligated to shape the public’s sense of ‘what makes the people we are and have been and the kind of future that we are evolving into’. Giroux and Aronowitz critique Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and E.D. Hirsh’s Cultural Literacy to problematise issues related to the politics of textual authority and cultural subversion and aggression. They argue that both Bloom and Hirsh ‘disdain the democratic implications of pluralism, and each argues for a form of cultural uniformity in which difference is consigned to the margins of both history and everyday life. From this perspective, culture, along with authority

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it sanctions, is not a terrain of struggle: it is merely an artefact, a warehouse of goods, posited either as a canon of knowledge or a canon of information that has simply to be transmitted as a means of promoting social order and control’. A historian’s wariness of such issues ensures the success of the ‘secular space’ embedded in ‘dialogue and struggle’ where history cannot afford to be a ‘museum of information that merely legitimates a particular view of history as a set of sacred goods designed to be received rather than interrogated by students’.129 In fact, the dictates of political society can often subsume the public space and largely limit the operative efficacy of civil societies that are expected to participate in issues broadly concerning nonpolitical bodies and extra-statal institutions. What is the fate of ‘knowledge’ then? Knowledge, unfortunately, is used as a power – a kind of despotisme doux – to obfuscate and cripple the efficacious potential of its impact within the public sphere. The ability of knowledge to create ‘difference’ that would contribute to the consolidation of the contested relation between civic and political societies in modern democracies is smothered; such a fate of knowledge settles us within the dynamics of a state that shuts us out from epistemic empowerment largely written into our current concerns in situations of inter-cultural dialogue. We are left to encounter a fate where the power of knowledge to reinscribe ‘dissent’ within our situatedness in multiple modernities is arrested and, hence, the claim that unanimity is not always an unambiguously good thing (in the words of Charles Taylor) is neutered.130 At a certain level, the public memory that is constructed over an issue – say, the memory narratives related to Ayodhya and Ramjanmabhumi – solicits a historian’s intervention to appraise and examine the character, politics and validity of its construction. This recognises the responsibility to ensure that a ‘hearing’ is given to contesting voices. And, as an interpreter and pedagogicalperformative authority, a historian alerts us to the radical and tangled potential of public space and memory that, as Roger Simon points out, ‘may make apparent the poverty of the present, its (and our own) insufficiency and incompleteness, the inadequacy of our experience, and the requirement that we revise not only our own stories but the very presumptions that regulate their coherence and intelligibility’.131 The public memory, carefully built and then allowed strategically to take its course as if it existed in tradition and heritage and was awaiting discovery and validation, blanks out the differing intimations from the past, the variegated repercussions emerging from a ‘quarrel’ with the past. Simon sees the necessity of creating the public memory as a pedagogical space by ‘making evident and supporting the critical exploration of the questions, uncertainties, ambiguities, and failures that arise in the process of trying to be responsive to the testament that speaks to these forgotten or unknown histories’. He considers, very appropriately though, that the public is not an unproblematic ‘we’; rather, the idea of a people is built around a heteroge-

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neity that involves the responsibility of responding to the account of others. Historians are obligated to make sense of the ‘public voice’, the voice that is an admixture of competing voices: ‘a never-ending, turbulent, competitive, euphonious cacophony of debating perspectives contributing to some semblance of a marketplace of ideas’.132 Taking measure of this voice by endowing it with more values, knowledge and awareness and gainsaying ‘omnicompetent’ citizens, historians can redeem, to an extent, the ‘deliberation deficit’ of the public sphere. Public space should ground itself as ‘a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state’ and being a participatory space through the ‘medium of talk’, ‘it is one of discursive relations, a theatre for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling’.133 By turning the masses to the public sphere, historians need to problematise ‘talk’ as a phenomenon that is integral to this space. Vinay Lal rightly points out that ‘our very dissent is incomplete if it does not allow others to partake in the dissent, and if it does not create the conditions for further dissent. There is an egalitarianism in dissent, too’.134 And dissent characterizes the public space within which historians are often expected to perform, allowing for historical writing to develop. ‘Talking’ requires avoiding the society – with its associations, groups, professional organizations, families and corporations – from being hypostasized in a way that John Dewey worries might lead to ‘magnified idealization of the State’. It is about forming the premises and holding onto the sanctity of the space, the legitimacy of ‘talking’. On what basis can the historian form the boundaries of sanctity, avoid ‘eclipse of the public’ and bring sanity to the prospect of competing voices? How should a historian deciding the scopic and critical dimensions of this space ensure a reasonable communicative praxis among alternative commentaries on historical issues, agencies of power and control and socio-political fallouts? No antecedent universal propositions determine the ‘reality’ of situations that demand ‘talk’, because conditions of communication vary and the tenor of situations involving the institutions and the individual are scarcely fixed. Riding on the back of massive modern-day complexities involving consequences both direct and indirect, this is not as well defined as the Greek polis or Winthrop’s commonwealth or Jefferson’s agrarian republic, but rather an amorphous amalgam of people whose credibility as a viable democratic participatory force remains under a cloud. The reality of a phantom, narrow, diffuse and distracted public cannot prevent the dangling of bristling issues in a public space from scattershot, prejudicial consumption. The isolated individualism of a historian seldom renders a dissenting situation open to critical communication, stultifying the prospects of a ‘community’ that, indeed, forms around concerns for improving conditions of debate, judgment of knowledge affecting common concerns and disciplinary integrity and underlying differentiation that supply a means of accounting the prevalent discourses critically. This is renewal of consciousness in communities-in-

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deliberation – communication built not merely on shared ideals and congeries of thought but in humanist reason, in vibrant dissidence that in their hands gets a direction, discipline, shape and meaning. Issues played out in the public sphere, most often, require well-informed, specialized inquiry that a balkanization of interests and self-promotion emerging from a distracted public does not allow taking over. Bernard Williams notes that in institutions that are expressly dedicated to finding out the truth, such as universities, research institutes, and courts of law, speech is not at all unregulated. People cannot come in from outside, speak when they feel like it, make endless, irrelevant, or insulting interventions, and so on; they cannot invoke a right to do so, and no-one thinks that things would go better in the direction of truth if they could.135

Historians would know the ‘possibilities for active participation’, build ‘social intelligence’, inform the system, inform the people who are made to be a part of the system and question the validity of information, its source, its definition and its consequence. They are explicators, interpreters, producers and mediators in the ‘information society’, proposing and performing in a problematic space hung between intense extremes of elitism and populism. Historians in their trained and incisive arbitration are expected to turn the inchoate ‘masses’ into ‘effective publics’. Charles Taylor notes that Tocquevillian decentralization is necessary in the public sphere as well. Indeed, one can support the other. The fact that important issues are decided locally enhances the importance of local media, which in turn focus the debate on these issues by those affected. But it is not only a matter of bringing certain issues down to the local level. The national debate can be changed as well by effective local public spheres. The model that seems to work here is one in which smaller public spheres are nested within larger ones, so that what goes on in the smaller ones feeds into the agenda of the national sphere.

Taylor is right in observing too that in ‘modern democratic polity, the boundary between political system and public sphere has to be maximally porous’.136 The character of the secular space for me, makes for a considerate and empathetic appraisal of ‘localism’ – its socio-cultural-linguistic formations, its situatedness as the ‘other’ with respect to what we get ourselves to frame as the nationalist discourse – and not a forcible prodding on the idea to integrate it into the coils of a centralist unidimensional discourse. The responsibility of the historian extends to the local public sphere – a local public ‘will be alive and flexible as well as stable, responsive to the complex and world-wide scene in which it is enmeshed’137 – where established writings are translated into the vernacular for local or regional distribution and circulation. This can be put into operation, as I have argued elsewhere, through little magazines. Without making the pursuit for its own sake where the discipline becomes interesting only to the pursuers,138 a historian as a public intellectual needs to

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shorten the hiatus that the average person experiences when engaging with the establishment that can often grow into an impervious, overpowering machine. Working out the challenge through constructive opinionated action, the historian makes the citizens, who feel largely enfeebled by such centralised machinery, a part of a protestation that can run up to the highest echelons of power. It is here that a historian’s action facilitates the chafing of a political society by bringing issues that would otherwise have remained impervious to the dissenting public into the whirl of well-meaning discussion. Such an act also prevents the malaise of disenchantment accrued through the controlling functions of the state and stymies actions that are largely deleterious in discourses of ‘differential persuasions’ within a functional public space. Historians opposing the ‘singularity’ of public space try to look into the emancipatory alternative sites of publicity and counterpublicity, leading a critique of the immobilisation that usually afflicts the public. Multiple publics, a plurality of publics, cannot be confounding but are, significantly, modes of engagement that a historian uses to make greater sense of ideas thrown about ‘riskily’ for circulation and debate. Risk involves courting danger and concomitantly an immediate reaction to mitigation that eventually is about finding a key to minimise risk. The entrenched tendency to obliterate risk is invoked to produce a system of non-subversion, a non-disruptive system, perpetuating a circulation that becomes easy to account for. A historian in the public sphere is the one with an attitude towards ‘risk’ that cannot be considered in isolation and whose evaluation is anchored in the aesthetic of the political and the moral. Risk is equivocative growth of knowledge, production of sense fringed by danger and disquiet and parsed as blame. It is risk that abets dialogue by reversing its nature, which, most often, is about claiming and making a point to the exclusion of the other; it keys dialogue into emancipatory registers. ‘At bottom, the intellectual, in my sense of the word’, writes Edward Said, ‘is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, or what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public’.139 Historians, as conscious intellectuals with ‘critical sense’, need to see through the veneer of ideological discourses that are unjustly impositional. The historian’s responsibility is to find the contradiction in discourses, find the energy to walk out of the aseptic narration of facts, promote a space that is earthed in dissent without being impertinently abrasive, making a case for the nonexistence of ‘pure scientific’ historical exposition because ‘all discourses and expositions have political implications’.140 Herbert Butterfield, reflecting on the vexatious linkages between governmental secrecy and official history, wrote: ‘First, that governments try to press upon the historian the key to all the drawers but one, and, secondly, that if the historian can only find out the thing which govern-

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ment does not want him to know, he will lay his hand upon something that is likely to be significant’.141 I have argued elsewhere about the Japanese historian Saburo Ienega’s embattled voice against the statist manipulation of history and the insidious politics of representation. He was locked in an overextended legal battle with the government that lasted for three decades. Japan has had a dominant tradition of centrally controlled surveillance of historical writing, which culminated in the Meiji period. The Meiji emperor-centred constitution did not acknowledge freedom of education and, thus, it was left to the state to decide about the ‘manner of education’ of its people. This meant, as Ienaga argued, that the citizens could not work out their development independent of national policy and their status as autonomous human beings was left perilously compromised. Consequently, education was informed by an agenda of uniformity and a dour preachiness that ensured fealty to the emperor and respect for the imperial system, making a casualty of democracy. Nothing slipped past the gates of the Ministry of Education unless it conformed to its unyielding ideology and revisionist diktats. Ienaga found himself hurtled into this power plexus of strategic hegemonic uniformisation when he was commissioned by the Ministry of Education to write a history of Japan. Subjected to vetting and consequently instructed to revise, Ienaga found his intellectual position and the rationale of historical writing in general perilously threatened by a statist highjack. No less than three hundred modifications were suggested, and the book would only be certified for publication if the author acquiesced to these. Claiming constitutional violation, distortion of historical knowledge, infringement of the right of the historian and people’s right to knowledge and information, he filed a textbook certification against the government, the first of its kind in the world, which turned out to be a fight to wrest the right to education, the choice of knowledge, from the peremptory establishment and pass it down to the people. Working against what Edward Said calls the ‘discipline of detail’, Ienaga took the matter directly to the public sphere with all the responsibility of an ‘outsider’ intellectual who was in no mood to closet with a manipulative and propagandist state machinery. His challenge as the critical intellectual has inspired the revision of the landscape of Japanese historiography. As a direct result of Ienaga’s lawsuits, ‘comfort women’, the Rape of Nanjing, and Unit 731 can now be mentioned in school history texts in Japan. Thus, he leaves behind a legacy of informed and critical opposition. Partly through his example, resistance has become the indicator of democratic legitimacy in a nation where democracy exists mainly in the space that divides society from the state. Ienaga in his uncompromising freedom of opinion is the secular intellectual. He walks around to furrow the space in which a historian–intellectual can stand and talk back to authority. Unlike the passive collaborators in power, Ienaga has been able to show the social responsibility that the historian, as an intellectual, carries with him in the vibrant neighbourhood of education, research and writing.142

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A secular historical practice encourages the growth and assimilation of multiple voices – contentious and censorious – but this is what empowers the historian to have the authority that is linked to authoritative research and take sufficient cognisance of interpretation (‘Historical knowledge is neither eliminated, muted, nor given undue emphasis in response to parochial pressure’), significance (‘basic concepts and major turning points, events, and people are treated in sufficient depth’), context, representativeness (pluralism and a full sense of identity need to be noted and comprehended, which means avoiding stereotypes and simplism), perspective, engagement (it would reveal ‘a genuine intent that students think with facts, think about interpretations, and enter into the world of others’) and appropriateness.143 Such an attitude without being normative and simplistic gives rise to alternatives of knowledge formations that demand ‘talk’ in the public sphere. Arthur Schlesinger’s observations are pertinent when he finds that the ‘purpose of history is to promote not group self-esteem, but understanding of the world and the past, dispassionate analysis, judgment and perspective, respect for divergent cultures and traditions, and unflinching protection for those unifying ideas of tolerance, democracy, and human rights that make free historical inquiry possible’.144 Making a probing and perceptive use of the ‘public space’, historians are trusted to put the varying morass of claims on ‘trial’, a trial by principles of rationality, scientific inquiry and discriminating intelligence. Concluding with Yerushalmi’s observations would perhaps be appropriate: Historiography … cannot be a substitute for collective memory … But the essential dignity of the historical vocation remains, and its moral imperative seems to me now more urgent than ever. For in the world in which we live, it is no longer merely a question of the decay of collective memory and the declining consciousness of the past, but of the aggressive rape of whatever memory remains, the deliberate distortion of the historical record, the invention of mythological pasts in the service of the powers of darkness. Against the agents of oblivion, the shredders of documents, the assassins of memory, the revisers of encyclopedias, the conspirators of silence … only the historian, with the austere passion for fact, proof, evidence, which are central to his vocation, can effectively stand guard.145

Historians and Codes of Ethics Jonathan Gorman writes, Even if we think of historical writing as ‘representing’ the past, as photographs were once imagined to represent reality ‘without lying’ it does not just represent the past. Historical writing addresses an audience, and there is a moral to-and-fro here that is essential to the subject and that gives point to historical truth, which may be taken to be what it is independent of that moral to-and-fro. Readability requires the reader engage with the author, and what the historian may imagine to be a value-free expression may nevertheless make a moral or emotional impact on the reader. The historian ought not to be ignorant of the likely relationship

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of historical knowledge with the reader’s overall understanding which inevitably includes elements of the contemporary moral and political realm. Being a historian is essentially is a matter of searching for historical knowledge as part of an obligation voluntarily undertaken to give truth to those who have a right to it. Factual knowledge and judgment of values are both required whatever philosophical view we might have of the possibility of a principled distinction between them.146

So how do we configure a historian’s code of ethics? Does historical practice need a set of codes – instructions and mechanism – which would determine the dialogic merit of factual knowledge and judgment of values? Would the merit of historians’ work, loyal to certain ethics of reading and writing, be different from their counterparts for whom an ethical code of conduct may seem debilitatingly tutelary? Should historians subscribe to a code of ethics based on certain principles by which their operation becomes less controversial? Do such ethical codes of doing history make better sense of the public sphere in which a historian has a pivotal role? Antoon De Baets provides a conglomerate of different historians – protesting, inner-exile, Aesopian, opposition, underground, refugee – who are united by their resistance to all forms of tyranny and dictative, impositional norms of historiography. Despite ‘mutually incompatible historiographies’ that divide them, an alive, dissenting conscience jells them together as also resistance against overpowering censorship.147 Codes might give the illusion of a ‘society of historians’ writing ‘community’ history, planting the flag of interpretive scholarship in the vicinity of sectarian propaganda. On the contrary, codes emerging from a society of historians adjudicate and gather ‘documentation about the current state of ethical issues in history, about affairs of an irresponsible use and abuse of history, and about unethical conduct that comes to its attention’. Controversies and dilemmas configure the society of historians at the ‘intersubjective’ level where opinions and suggestions are sought and revalued among different groups of historians. This enables one group of historians to verify what another has claimed and proposed. This does not engender a sense of superiority but inaugurates instead a culture of historical understanding that believes in verifiable sources, scientist methodologies and dissenting notions of historical truth. Moral awareness, thus born and perpetuated, claims indisputable induction into the curriculum – to be inculcated, discussed and instructed. Indeed, an ethics of historical writing forms not only a set of inflexible principles but also a set of mutually dependent hypotheses – continually interrogated and weighed under changing circumstances for further revaluation and improvement. Codes of ethics clearly cannot remain inalterable in response to changing situations and circumstances. Many of them should submit to revision and solicit periodic galvanisation, which prevents codes from falling into the hands of abusers who might wring deleterious implications out of them. Contrary to what relativists think, codes for historians can help define their freedom more rationally – the intent, the character and the responsibility attending their free-

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dom. Though historians are faced with the difficulty as to the moot divide that separates the use of history from its abuse, the spirit and rationale of the codes can still hand them a premise to begin with, a premise that can stall the overbalance of emotions and self-reflexivity from ingressing on historical description and interpretation. We may find different codes of ethics in different countries, but the universal outlook cannot be easily ignored. Principles may overlap. Baets underscores the need to work further in unifying the differing region-specific and country-dependent approaches. For instance, codes for Indian historians might make demands on local particularities but some universality in approaches, a transcendent grid, cannot be overlooked. The ethics of history, William Lecky notes, ‘teaches men to weigh conflicting probabilities, to estimate degrees of evidence, to form a sound judgment of the value of authorities’.148 Codes of ethics can bring them closer to some agreement about the ways of making meaning out of their individual quarrel with the past. ‘Historical truth’, as Baets argues, is searched for not imposed, and that we should use the force of arguments, not of coercion to further our aims. I see three valid reasons for such a code: it enhances the autonomy and self-regulatory function of our profession; second, it creates clarity about its foundations for members and of history students and judges potential complainants holders of historical data or sources, and society at large; third, it enhances the confidence of others in our work. It is our professional expertise – our access to and possession of expert knowledge about the past – that distinguishes us form others interested in the past.149

A historian’s trained and informed understanding of the past raises promises of transnationality when reading history starts to become less closely confined to national boundaries itself. Transnational, intercultural and comparative history is being more widely practiced than ever before; the globalisation of publishing and media coupled with the internet have brought about a separate critique of historical information and, consequently, knowledge that makes room for greater urgency in the formation of ethical codes. But can knowledge be confidential or be made private through protective and debarring mechanisms? How would matters be judged by a wrap of confidentiality and, hence, shut out from public space? Can there be a universal rationale of data protection and data dissemination? In fact, restricted accesses to records and selective occlusion of information from the public or the masses are delicate issues that fringe the uses of history. Allen Bogue notes that ‘the position that we should close records to protect individuals is much less in the interests of the historical researcher and the public than is the principle that there should be appropriate penalties for the misuse of information derived from personal records. We should work for the latter principle and its amplification in law, rather than meekly acceding to the creation of a society dominated by the paper shredder and the incinerator’.150 Questions are raised

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as to the ethics of historians when the future and fate of issues in discussion depend on their ascriptions and assertions, urging them to consider the measure of ‘public hurt’, ‘individual pain’ and ‘national embarrassment’ in historical pronouncements and representations – responsibility for and to the public. This is one form of the ‘risk’ of history: the risk of historical practice where historians forge varying agreements with facts, data politics, involving some self-policing and building a situation that communalizes the historians over rights and responsibilities towards state depositories and archival ‘untouchables’ (my discussion on the temple-masjid controversy clearly exemplifies this ‘risk’). The risk of history conjuncturally engages with the fact of a historian’s inability to understand the past completely and the disability before a state-imposed opacity to data. Historians are caught in a ‘foldedness’ that betrays a complicity in statist silences and secretiveness, something that their ethics can challenge but often fails to overcome. This risk emerging from deficiencies of ‘openness’ infects historians’ discipline and can be a sort of ‘betrayal to the public’. Codes for historians on these lines of privacy of documents may lessen the difficulties involved, but the different definitions of ‘openness’ and ‘privacy’ that various states and governments provide leave the ‘risk’ aporetically rife. As the world ages so does society, and, with this comes newer perplexities that affect the ethics of the historian’s performance. At another level, the doing of history succeeds in the effort to find a ‘connection’ with the central discourses of the time we live in and live by, allowing for various discourses to form a part of the common world and the common humanity. ‘History above all’, writes David Carr, ‘is not merely situated within the academy of our culture, as one among other cognitive disciplines. Only relatively recently has it acquired this status. As a mode of discourse and a form of writing it relates directly to society at large, especially to politics, morality and art, first because it writes about them, secondly because it produces texts that become part of the culture to which they also belong’. The practice of the historian can be connected to the life and the life-world of all of us as individuals and communities. As Carr observes, Looked at in this way history as a disciplined inquiry, resulting in organized knowledge of the past that is written down and published, turns out to be a very specialized refinement of social life. Just as physics is a very specialized response to our need to grapple with the physical world, so history responds to our need to make sense of our past and thereby to constitute and preserve ourselves and communities. To meet these needs as communities we delegate to specialized historians, as we delegate to physicists, the execution of these tasks.151

This alerts the historian to prevent his discourse from tailing off into neglect and irrelevancy, something that he or she can certainly avoid by honouring and figuring the ‘connection’. The ethics of historical scholarship is for knowledge accretion and historical sense generation, and its umbilical cord remains connected to the understanding of our moment in history, the tradition, the waves

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from our past that ceaselessly impinge on our social, political and religious life, our suffering and transformation. As an ongoing cognitive discourse, history seeks more sophisticated understanding of complexities that the past reveals and is understood to be, the involute ‘connection’ between a past that does not change, the present that is always on the move and the past that refigures caught, as it always is, in the whirl of the quarrel. Sam Wineburg argues for an ‘intellectual charity’, an understanding that counters narcissism. He writes that the narcissist sees the world – both past and the present – in his own image. Mature historical knowing teaches us to do the opposite: to go beyond our own image, to go beyond our brief life, and to go beyond the fleeting moment in human history into which we have been born. History educates (‘leads outward’ in the Latin) in the deepest sense of the subjects in the secular curriculum, it is the best at teaching those virtues once reserved for theology – humility in the face of our limited ability to know, and awe in the face of the expanse of human history.152

How much then does a historian own his or her scholarship? The ethics of historical writing calls for such a responsibility, which must account for the consequences of a certain historical statement and analysis. Historians add to the richness of ‘human experience’ by growing an understanding across cultures and belief systems that results in tolerance; in the effort to make sense of the human condition, a historian works through empathy (Verstehen) with and explanation of (Erklaren) the past. There is a ‘morality’ in our historical consciousness that cannot be considered as relative and, hence, shifty. Lying central to historical consciousness, it deals with the past qua experience; moral-ethical consciousness works its way into historical consciousness. Quite rightly, the historian bears a responsibility ‘toward his contemporaries and future generations, to whom this world will one day be given over. It is, by the way, also a responsibility toward the dead’.153 In a way, it is in keeping the past alive, both by itself and in relation to the present, that the past is futurised. Historians need not limit themselves to the mere explication of the past and not least in the expatiation of the present. History is networked in the delightful and quarrelsome entanglements of the three ‘tenses’: it is caught in an insurgence that is sourced out of an instability in the present that has less to do with our weakness and more with narration generated from our romance, representation and reading of the past.

Notes 1. W. Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative’, Journal of American History (March 1992): 1373. 2. Quoted from the Twelfth Major Rock Edict of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka (3rd century BC). 3. George Eliot, Felix Holt (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 375. 4. Frank Ankersmit, ‘The Ethics of History: From the Double Binds of (Moral) Meaning to Experience’, History and Theory 43 (December 2004): 87–88.

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5. R. Wilk, ‘The Ancient Maya and the Political Present’ Journal of Anthropological Research 41 (1985): 319. 6. P. Valéry, ‘Discours de l’histoire’, Variété IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 132. 7. See Heinrich Von Sybel, Gedächtnisrede auf Leopold v. Ranke, in Historische Zeitschrift (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1886). 8. E.H. Carr, What Is History? (London: Penguin, 1987), 10–13. Alun Munslow notes, ‘Most do realize the medium is important to the message. But still there is, even among the most aware of historians, a deep-seated desire to reconstruct the past as it really was – to ‘tell the truth about history’ in the famous but unhelpful title of a best-selling book on the nature of history – instead of acknowledging that you cannot reveal the truth about a representation, for that, plainly, is what history actually is’ (8). Munslow refuses to believe that historians have the precise, enviable ability to ‘gauge the intentions behind human actions’ and ‘discover not merely what happened but most likely what it means’. Planting the flag deep for postmodern historiography, Munslow observes further: ‘The specific object of experimental free fall is to force us to understand the past in new and different ways. To do this, the routine thinking and practice of “proper” epistemological History have to be made strange. And this can only be done by foregrounding the form of history as representation – literary, poetic, dramatic, filmic, and performative. Experimental History thus exists in the fissures between what once was and what it can mean now. The central point is simply this. Since what we think about the past can only be understood as we write it, then experiments with narrative become decisive. As dancers choreograph their performance, historians historiograph theirs. History is as much about the “historian’s performance” – the way he or she constructs or stages his or her narrative and invites a responsive understanding from the audience – as it is about the past itself ’ (11). See Robert A. Rosenstone and Alun Munslow (eds), Experiments in Rethinking History (London, New York: Routledge, 2004). 9. See H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 5. He writes: ‘Historians – in contrast to investigators in almost any other field of knowledge – very seldom confront their data directly. The literary or artistic scholar has the poem or painting before him; the astronomer scans the heavens through a telescope; the geologist tramps the soil he studies … The historian alone is wedded to empirical reality and condemned to view his subject matter at second remove’ (4). 10. See Carl Becker, ‘Detachment and the Writing of History,’ Atlantic Monthly 106 (October 1910): 425–536. 11. J.H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), 2–3. 12. Ibid., 5. 13. R. Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 90. 14. Hexter, Reappraisals in History, 13. 15. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 130. 16. See David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Fisher does not see the possibility of a historian ever coming to know the whole of the past, and hence such holistic reliance would never produce historical writing. Writing must begin from an ‘incompleteness’, from embracing an accepted absurdity of knowing the past, from an impossibility that is, however, no inspiration to be eternally indeterminate (65). 17. See George Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian (London: Heinemann, 1967), 208. Gorman notes: ‘There is not a correct moral theory that historians need to apply, but there is nevertheless a morally educated way for historians to reflect on and carry out their duties. I call for this moral education’. See his ‘Historians and Their Duties’, History and Theory 43 (December 2004): 116. 18. Richard T. Vann, ‘Historians and Moral Evaluations’, History and Theory 43, no. 4 (2004): 28, 18. Hayden White notes, ‘Every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats’. See his ‘The Value of Narratives in the Rep-

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resentation of Reality’, in The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 14. 19. Daniel Gordon, ‘Review essay of Patrick H. Hutton’s History as an Art of Memory’, History and Theory 34 (1995)L 350–51. Italics are mine. 20. Allen Johnson, The Historian and Historical Evidence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 163. 21. C. Behan McCullagh, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2003), 43–44. 22. Ibid., 52. Italics in original. 23. G.R. Elton, Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7, 65. 24. Luise White, ‘Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History’, History and Theory 39, no. 4 (December 2000): 21. 25. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 68. 26. James C. Malin, On the Nature of History: Essays about History and Dissidence (Ann Arbor, MI: J.W. Edwards, 1954), 10. 27. See Nikolas Rose, Inventing our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55. 28. Alan B. Spitzer, Historical Truth and Lies about the Past: Reflections on Dewey, Dreyfus, de Man, and Reagan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 3. 29. Patrick Finney, ‘Ethics, Historical Relativism and Holocaust Denial’, Rethinking History 2, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 364. 30. See Keith Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London, New York: Routledge, 1999), 1–33. Also see his On ‘What is History?’ From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (London: Routledge, 1995). To say that ‘the historicised past itself thus contains nothing independent of us that we have to be loyal to; nothing we have to feel guilty about, no facts we have to respect; no truth we have to find, no problems we have to solve’ is to sponsor a vitriolic radicality that would disown all historical truth in a welter of factual mayhem. Zagorin writes that the demise of foundationalism in epistemology is one of the major achievements of twentieth-century philosophy but that ‘does not leave us with relativism as the sole alternative or compel us to abandon the notions of knowledge and truth. Even without an incorrigible and absolute foundation for knowledge such as Descartes and later Bertrand Russell sought, most philosophers would still probably consider truth to mean correspondence with the facts and regard true knowledge as the principal goal of any inquiry; and it still remains the case that we continue to appraise all knowledge-claims for their degree of truth; and to require good arguments, conformity to logic, sound evidence, objectivity, reasons that can withstand criticism, and, in general, rational support and justification for beliefs and propositions about the world and the human past, as well as for statements of moral and political values concerning what is the good, right, or just thing to do’. See Perez Zagorin, ‘Rejoinder to a Postmodernist’, History and Theory 39, no. 2 (May 2000): 207. 31. Keith Jenkins, Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline (New York: Routledge, 2003), 29. 32. M. Weber, Gesammehe Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tiübingen, 1922), 183, 184. 33. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 105. If we are to go by what Nietzsche asserts – there are no truths, but only interpretations – what happens to the responsibility of the historian in the teeth of unassailable relativism, to the foundations on which a future could be prepared? Intellectual life cannot be fashioned in a medley of values and beliefs, amidst the wreckage that perpetual interpretation can bring. 34. Marie Collins Swabey, The Judgments of History (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), 11. 35. See Carl G. Hempel, ‘The Function of General Laws in History’, Journal of Philosophy 39 (1942): 35–48; Ernest Nagel, ‘Some Issues in the Logic of Historical Analysis’, Scientific Monthly 74 (1952): 162–69.

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36. Norman F. Cantor, Medieval History (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 3. 37. C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History (London & New York: Routledge, 1998), 22. He writes, ‘All descriptions, even true ones, are vague, though not necessarily so vague as to prevent their truth from being decidable’ (16). 38. Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 134. 39. Edith Wyschogrod, ‘Representation, Narrative, and the Historian’s Promise’, in David Carr, Thomas R. Flynn and Rudolf A. Makkreel (eds), The Ethics of History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 41. 40. Allan Megill, ‘History, Memory, Identity’, History of Human Sciences 11, no. 3 (1998): 54. 41. Ibid., 51. 42. David Carr, ‘Getting the Story Straight: Narrative and Historical Knowledge’, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 41 (1994): 127. 43. See Michael Schudson, ‘Dynamics of Distortion in Collective Memory’, in Daniel L. Schacter (ed.), Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 361. 44. See Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994), 16. 45. Alan Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2001), 42. 46. Mark Bevir, Review Essay, History and Theory 35, no. 3 (1996): 394–95. I do not agree with Bevir that objective knowledge can be only provisional. Some truths in history are given. There is some historical knowledge that historians know as firm truths, stable points of reference, around which they might construct their epistemic edifices. But prejudice, presentist inclinations, ‘will to power dynamics’ integral and incidental to the historian’s act and performance make room for criticism and, concomitantly, produce diversity that spurs the greater uncovering of historical meaning. Criticism and the limits inherent in methodologies of investigation that process objects of study help the historians to become self-critical: to doubt their role as purveyors of past, the past that historians cannot claim to know completely. It is argued that no paradigm can master the richness of reality. So if the past reveals to us (without accenting on what we want the past to reveal) its ‘story’, how do we access the ‘larger past’ that does not have the right essence to narrate itself? 47. The gas chambers are a rude reminder that every historical interpretation and description cannot be equally right in itself as postmodernists would have us believe. Holocaust deniers and holocaust historians cannot be enthroned in the same pedestal of truth. LaCapra is right to note that ‘historiography may combine its modes of empirical research and analysis with a more dialogic engagement with the past that furthers the attempt to work through problems that remain alive as forces in the present’ (Dominic LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998], 68). History does provide objective, truthful points of reference that historical inquiries, despite their proliferation into intricate webs of interpretations, cannot avoid remaining faithful to. These are positive deterrents against lurid postmodern indulgences. So the historian’s ethics needs to keep itself on guard against what LaCapra calls ‘empathetic unsettlement’ where ‘identificatory acting-out’ with respect to objects of investigation can lead to ‘excess’. In fact, the historian’s performativity draws up the scrutinising board where a rapprochement with the constative or representative or reconstructive dimensions of understanding may assist us in appraising the historical subject to a considerable extent. 48. Bevir, Review Essay, 393. 49. See John Arnold, ‘Responses to the Postmodern Challenge; or, What Might History Become’, European History Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2007): 119. Arnold rightly notes: ‘In confronting the absence of the past, something present is at stake, in the perceived relationship between now and then. All but the most parochial of historians know that, whether they hail from the political Right or Left … historians are very much in tune with Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and any other serious theorist one might mention. We should not be content to clap our hands with glee at the indeterminability of the sign; something more is at stake’ (120).

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50. See Joern Ruesen, ‘Historical Objectivity as a Matter of Social Values’, in Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (eds), Historians and Social Values (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 57–66. 51. See Joern Ruesen, ‘Responsibility and Irresponsibility in Historical Studies: A Critical Consideration of the Ethical Dimension in the Historian’s Work’, in David Carr, Thomas R. Flynn and Rudolf A. Makkreel (eds), The Ethics of History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 207–12. 52. Le Goff, History and Memory, 112. 53. Raphael Samuel, ‘The Return of History’, in Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London, New York Verso, 1998), 223. Italics are mine. 54. Carr, ‘Getting the Story Straight’, 128. 55. Ruesen, ‘Responsibility and Irresponsibility’, 26. I thank Joern for sharing his work with me. 56. Vann, ‘Historians and Moral Evaluations’, 28. 57. See Homi Bhaba and Grant Farred, ‘Postcoloniality, Reading and Theory’, in Ranjan Ghosh (ed.), (In)fusion Approach: Theory, Contestation, Limits (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006), 40–41. 58. Mark Bevir, ‘Objectivity in History’, History and Theory 33, no. 3 (1994): 334. 59. Ibid., 336. Mary R. Lefkowitz rightly notes: ‘Diverse “truths” are possible only if “truth” is understood to mean something like “point of view.” But even then not every point of view, no matter how persuasively it is put across, or with what intensity it is argued, can be equally valid. I may sincerely believe that Plato studied with Moses (like the Jews in Alexandria in the second and first centuries B.C.) and speak eloquently about all that Plato learned from him, but that will not mean that what I say corresponds to any known facts. Moses lived (if indeed he lived at all) centuries before Plato; they spoke different languages, and the Torah (or Pentateuch), even though it contains admonitions and legislation, has little in common with Plato’s Laws. In order to be true, my assertion about Plato would need to be supported by warranted evidence. And it cannot be. The notion of diversity does not extend to truth’. See Not out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 162. 60. Bevir, ‘Objectivity in History’, 337. 61. Ibid., 342. 62. John Dewey, How We Think (New York: D.C. Heath, 1910), 5–6. 63. Thomas L. Haskell, ‘Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream’, History and Theory 29, no. 2 (1990): 139. 64. See John Moreland, Archaeology and Text (London: Duckworth, 2001), 10–11. ‘The basic facts of history, the historical framework, and the ‘important’ questions about the past were all established by historians from the written sources … The role of archaeology in the reconstruction of the past was restricted to presentation – it provided the objects which illustrated the pages of history … This subservient relationship was articulated by historians and largely accepted by archaeologists’ (10). 65. C. Wissler, ‘The New Archaeology’, American Museum Journal 17 (1917): 100–101. 66. W. Dray, Perspectives on History (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 29. 67. L.R. Binford, An Archaeological Perspective (New York: Seminar Press, 1972), 117. 68. Ian Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 181. 69. Philip L. Kohl, ‘Limits to Post-Processual Archeology (or, The Dangers of a New Scholasticism)’, in Norman Yoffee and Andreew Sherratt (eds), Archaeological Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 14. 70. Richard A. Gould, Recovering the Past (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1990), 3. Also see M. Shanks and C. Tilley, Re-constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). They argue ‘we cannot afford the essential irrationality of subjectivism or relativism as this would be cutting the very ground away from under our feet’ (110).

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71. See David J. Meltzer, ‘A Question of Relevance’ in Andrew L. Christenson (ed.), Tracing Archaeology’s Past:The Historiography of Archaeology (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 12. 72. See Colin Renfrew, ‘The Origins of Indo-European Languages’, Scientific American 261 (October 1989): 106–14. 73. R.J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 69. 74. See Colin Renfrew, ‘Comments on Archaeology into the 1990s’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 22 (1989): 33–4, 39. 75. C. Kluckhohn, ‘The Conceptual Structure of Middle American Studies’, in C.L. Hay, R. Linton, S.K. Lothrop, J. Shapiro and G.C. Vaillant (eds), The Maya and Their Neighbors (New York: Dover, 1940), 41–51; also see J.W. Bennett, ‘Empiricist and Experimentalist Trends in Eastern Archaeology’, American Antiquity 11 (1946): 198–200. 76. Julia Shaw, ‘Ayodhya’s Sacred Landscape: Ritual, Memory, Politics and Archaeological “Fact”’, Antiquity 74 (2000): 697. 77. Marie Collins Swabey, The Judgment of History (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), 19. 78. John Moreland, ‘Archaeology and Texts: Subservience or Enlightenment’, Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 138. M. Leone (see his ‘The Relationship between Archaeological Data and the Documentary Record: Eighteenth Century Gardens in Annapolis’, Historical Archaeology 22 [1988]: 29–35) is shown to argue that we ‘construct different organizational frameworks (contexts within which acts, customs and behavior took place and must be understood) for texts and artifacts, that we bring these together, and that we seek out (and focus on) the discrepancies between them. These discrepancies will, they argue, encourage the researcher to return to both the texts and the artifacts in search of new insights with which to resolve the ambiguity’ (138). The constant struggle to steal a march over the other cannot lead to well-reasoned historical discourse. 79. See D. Mandal, Ayodhya:Archaeology after Demolition (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003), xiv. Quite truly, acts of vandalism as was evidenced through the demolition of the Babri Masjid negate the constitutive principles of archaeology; historical retribution and, in fact, repossession, become the most dangerous of arguments for the country’s vast architectural inheritance. 80. K. Paddayya writes: ‘A non-partisan understanding of the past on the part of the ordinary citizen, and his/her ability to appreciate the universality of human culture behind the façade of its spatio-temporal diversity, are the best insurance against any abuse of the past … The question of the social relevance of the study of the past is one which historians and archaeologists in India can no longer overlook. Public attitudes towards the study of the past, the role of the mass media and museums in bringing knowledge of the past to society at large, and the use of the study of the past for discussion and the display of power in professional institutions are other questions which sooner or later Indian archaeology will have to confront’. See K. Paddayya, ‘Theoretical Perspectives in Indian Archaeology’, in Peter J. Ucko (ed.), Theory in Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1995), 139. The debate over archaeological ethics brings the Society of Professional Archeologists (1995) to specify some code of ethics. See Karen D. Vitelli (ed.), Archaeological Ethics (London, New Delhi: Altamira Press, 1996) for more details. 81. W.J. McCann, ‘Volk und Germanentum’: The Presentation of the Past in Nazi Germany’, in Peter Gathercole and David Lowenthal (eds), The Politics of the Past (London: Routledge, 1994), 74–75. 82. McCann, ‘Volk und Germanentum’, 83–84. McCann notes further, ‘In their attempt to use archaeological and anthropological material to support the myth of Germanic racial superiority, some of the Ahnenerbe staff went to extremely fanciful lengths. In 1941 Himmler saw some pictures of the ‘Venus’ figures of Willendorf and Wistcrnitz (Vcstonicc). Assuming them to be to some extent realistic, he was struck by the similarity of their apparent steatopygic development with that of ‘some tribes of savage peoples’ such as the Hottentots, and asked the Ahnenerbe to produce a distribution map for the figures, as well as to see if there was any evidence that people

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‘like the Hottentots’ had then lived in those areas, or if those people and the Hottentots were of similar descent, and whether these people had been driven out or made extinct either by a change in climate or by the Cro-Magnon or later Nordic peoples’ (85). 83. Reinhard Bernbeck and Susan Pollock, ‘Ayodhya, Archaeology, and Identity’, Current Anthropology 37 (February 1996): 141. 84. Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 171. 85. Paul G. Bahn and R.W.K. Paterson, ‘The Last Rights: More on Archaeology and the Dead’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 5, no. 3 (1986): 268. 86. See Paul G. Bahn, ‘Do Not Disturb? Archaeology and the Rights of the Dead’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 3, no. 1 (1984): 138. 87. Richard J. Cox and David A. Wallace, Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2002), 2. For more systematic understanding of the importance of archives see T.R. Schellenberg, The Management of Archives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). 88. ‘The Witness and the Historian’, in Solvi Sogner (ed.), Making Sense of Global History (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2000), 333. 89. Carolyn Heald, ‘Is There Room for Archives in the Postmodern World?’ American Archivist 59 (1996): 101. 90. J.B. Wolford, review article on Antoinette Burton’s Archive Stories, Oral History Review 34, no. 1 (2007): 161. 91. Antoinette Burton, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 3. 92. See Kathleen Marquis, ‘Not Dragon at the Gate but Research Partner: The Reference Archivist as Mediator’, in Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg (eds), Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 37. Martha Cooley’s fictional archivist admits, ‘As an archivist I have power over other people. I control access to materials they desire. Of course this power has limits … A good archivist serves the reader best by maintaining … a balance between empathy and distance’. See Martha Cooley, The Archivist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 246. 93. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 68–69. 94. ‘There is no political power without control of archives’, writes Jacques Derrida. See Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 4. Record keepers are, according to Brien Brothman, ‘creating value, that is, an order of value, by putting things in their proper place, by making place(s) for them’. Numerous tacit narratives are hidden in categorisation, codification and labelling. See Brien Brothman, ‘Orders of Values: Probing the Theoretical Terms of Archival Practice’, Archivaria 32 (1991): 82. The boundary keeper is the archivist. He or she decides what is to cross the boundary and what not. Tom Nesmith rightly notes that ‘as they contextualize their records and work, archivists shape what may be known from archival materials. As these contexts themselves change, they change the records by altering how they are viewed, and thus also what “event” may be known with them, to use Derrida’s word. Rather than being rendered inert in archives, records continually evolve. If they are to be preserved at all, they must change. Archivists help change or re-create them in order to preserve them’. See ‘Seeing Archives: Postmodernism and the Changing Intellectual Place of Archives’, American Archivist 65 (Spring/Summer 2002): 31. Also interesting is Preben Mortensen, ‘The Place of Theory in Archival Practice’, Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999): 1–26. 95. Antoinette Burton, ‘Thinking beyond the Boundaries: Empire, Feminism, and the Domains of History,’ Social History 26, no. 1 (200l): 66. 96. Steedman, Dust, ix. 97. See Susan Crane, ‘Historical Subjectivity: A Review Essay’, Journal of Modern History 78 (June 2006): 444. 98. C.V. Wedgwood, The Sense of the Past (London: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 8.

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99. Steedman, Dust, 80–81. Also see Carolyn Steedman, ‘Archival Methods’, in Gabriele Griffin (ed.), Research Methods for English Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). 100. ‘Practices being understood here as places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken for granted meet and interconnect’, according to Michel Foucault, ‘Government Rationality: An Introduction’ [original French version published in Esprit 371 (May 1968): 850–74], in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 75. 101. See David Bearman, Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations (Pittsburgh: Archives & Museum Informatics, 1994), 237. The power of archives is as old as the concept of archives. Indeed, the word derives from the Greek archè, meaning power or government. 102. Robert A. Rosenstone, Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 6. 103. Michel Foucault, ‘Lives of Infamous Men’, in The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: New Press, 2003), 279–80. 104. Bruno Latour, ‘Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands’, Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): 25–26. 105. Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 139–40. 106. Kenneth E. Foote, ‘To Remember and Forget: Archives, Memory, and Culture’, American Archivist 53 (Summer 1990): 379. 107. See Terry Eastwood, ‘Towards a Social Theory of Appraisal’, in Barbara L. Craig (ed.), The Archival Imagination: Essays in Honour of Hugh A. Taylor (Ottawa: Association of Canadian Archivists, 1992), 74. 108. Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 96. 109. Roger Adelson, Speaking of History: Conversations with Historians (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), 198. 110. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 82–83. 111. Peter J. Fowler, The Past in Contemporary Society: Then, Now (New York: Routledge, 1992), 112, 113. 112. I have borrowed the term from the report by A.H. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim, The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan (Islamabad: Sustainable Development Policy Institute, 2003). 113. Rubina Saigol, ‘Interface Between the Curriculum, Gender and Nationalism’, in Nighat Said Khan, Rubina Saigol and Afiya Shehrbano Zia (eds), Locating the Self (Lahore: ASR Publications, 1994), 57. 114. Ibid., 68. An interesting reference can be drawn to the investigations that K.K. Aziz conducts by scrutinizing sixty six school textbooks on social sciences, Pakistan studies and history in use in the schools and colleges of Pakistan. This results in amazing revelations about distortions and irrelevancies. See The Murder of History: A Critique of History Textbooks Used in Pakistan (Delhi: Renaissance Publishing House, 1998), 119–74. For a wider perspective on this issue see Gilmer W. Blackburn, Education in the Third Reich (Albany: SUNY, 1985), 34–64. Also of relevant interest is William J. Griswold, The Image of the Middle East in Secondary School Textbooks (Tucson, AZ: Middle East Studies Association of North America: 1975), 1–32. 115. ‘During the quincentenary celebration of Columbus’s invasion of the Americas’, writes Herbert Kohl, ‘I received over a dozen children’s books on Columbus for review. While cleaning out my library I came upon the books and had to decide what to do with them … However, I found all of these books objectionable, glorifying Columbus as they did. In most cases Native Peoples were either totally absent or represented as grateful for the arrival of civilization. It was astonishing to me, given the amount of attention supposedly paid to the sensitivities of Native Americans in current publishing, how like the old books even the newest and most elegant Co-

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lumbus books were. I read some of them with parents of a few of the Native American youngsters I worked with, and they were offended and wouldn’t show them to their young children, who already knew enough about being stereotyped by White culture. So, should I burn these books?’ See Should We Burn Babur? (New York: New Press, 1995), 26–27. What should Kohl as the ‘intellectual’ do? How should historians react to such texts? How do we interpret ‘intellectual responsibility’ then? Also see Christine E. Sleeter, ‘How White Teachers Construct Race’, in C. McCarthy and W. Crichlow (eds), Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 243–56. 116. Nicolla Gallerano, ‘History and the Public Use of History’, in Francois Bedarida (ed.), The Social Responsibility of the Historian (Oxford/Providence: Berghahn Books, 1994), 100. 117. See Romila Thapar, Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2004). One is astonished to find that in the textbooks in Pakistan, Mahmud of Ghazni is seen as a jihadi with an aim for Islamisation, which, thus, justifies his depredatory modes of sectarian violence. ‘Mahmud of Ghazni was undoubtedly an enthusiastic Muslim who believed in Jehad’. See A. Qayum Sher, Pakistan Studies (Lahore, 1991), 93. Also for some amazingly partisan historiography see J. Husain, An Illustrated History of Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997). Harsh Narain, ignored for being a nonsecular historian, argues, ‘It is a pity that, thanks to our thoughtless “secularism” and waning sense of history, such primary sources of medieval Indian history as referred to above are presently in danger of suppression or total extinction. Instead of launching sustained search and research in this behalf, “secular” historians are going about dismissing relevant data out of hand, imputing unfounded motive to the recorders themselves. The state in general and the universities in particular must do something to protect and retrieve such invaluable documents from unscrupulous hands’. The Ayodhya Temple-Mosque Dispute: Focus on Muslim Sources (New Delhi: Penman Publishers, 1993), 78. Swearing lack of historical credibility and authenticity against each other, these two groups of historians have, in fact, carried the dispute to the public sphere. Much to their chagrin, Harsh Narain, Sita Ram Goel, A.K. Chatterjee, Ram Swarup, Arun Shourie and Jay Dubashi find their works excoriated as shoddy and unprofessional, underpinned by a pretense to scholarship that is soft centred and never deemed legitimate by the standards of historicity set by the other group comprising Ashgar Ali Engineer, Romila Thapar, S. Gopal, Sushil Srivastava, R.S. Sharma, D.N. Jha and others. Ethics of historical representation and research looks into this ‘anatomy of confrontation’ with a scientific and rational cast of mind, walking through the thickets of dissent and allaying doubts that have always stalked historical inquiry. Under such circumstances and conditions of contestation it is difficult to see the triumph of the former over the latter. 118. Henry A. Giroux, ‘Counter-Public Spheres and the Role of Educators as Public Intellectuals: Paulo Freire’s Cultural Politics’, in Mike Hill and Warren Montag (eds), Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere (London: Verso, 2000), 258. 119. Edwin M. Yoder, The Historical Present: Uses and Abuses of the Past ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 101. 120. Andrus Pork, ‘History, Lying and Moral Responsibility’, History and Theory 29, no. 3 (October 1990): 322–325. 121. See Margaret Macmillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (New York: Modern Library, 2009). 122. See John Gray, ‘What Will Happen Yesterday?’ Guardian, 18 April 2009. 123. See his Africa, Mother of Western Civilization (Baltimore: Alkebu-lan Books/Black Classic Press, 1988). Also see M. Garvey, ‘Who and What Is a Negro?’ (1923) where the white world is accused of being a robber, discrediting the blacks of their history. It is claimed that many ‘Negro’ professors taught in the universities in Alexandria, ancient Egypt was the seat of learning and Greece and Rome have robbed Egypt of its cultural and civilisational superiority. Also on similar lines see G.G.M. James, Stolen Legacy: The Greeks Were Not the Authors of Greek Philosophy, but the People of North Africa, Commonly Called the Egyptians (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954, 1973; reprinted, San Francisco: Julian Richardson Associates); see M.K. Asante, Kemet, Afrocentrido, and Knowledge (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990).

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124. Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 3. She writes: ‘Anyone who is willing to look into the matter can see that it is utterly absurd to state (as some Afrocentrists have done) that Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul was derived from the Egyptian “Book of the Dead”’. Similarly, that Socrates was black does not emerge from firm historical evidence. Another line of argument in favor of Socrates’ African ancestry has been offered by Martin Bernal: ‘Socrates was said by eyewitnesses, his pupils Plato and Xenophon, to have resembled a silenus – an imaginary creature like a bearded man with a horse’s tail and ears. In portrait sculptures dating after his lifetime, Socrates is shown with a snub nose, broad nostrils, and a wide mouth, features that may also be found in portrayals of Ethiopian types on vase paintings. Athenians appear to have identified these facial characteristics with Ethiopians, because on a vase from the fourth Century B.C. the faces of an Ethiopian and a white satyr (a creature with a man’s body, except for pointed ears, and a goat’s legs and a horse’s tail) are made from the same mold’ (29); also see Mary R. Lefkowitz, ‘Combating False Theories in the Classroom,’ Chronicle of Higher Education (19 January 1994). 125. Quoted from Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 7. 126. Stanley B. Alpern, ‘The New Myths of African History’, Bostonia 2 (Summer 1992): 35. 127. Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, 8–9. 128. See David Carr, ‘Reality of History’, in Joern Ruesen (ed.), Meaning and Representation in History (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 135. 129. Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, ‘Textual Authority, Culture, and the Politics of Literacy’, in Michael W. Apple and Linda K. Christian-Smith (eds), The Politics of the Textbook (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 225, 233. 130. See his ‘Invoking Civil Society’, in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 205. 131. Roger I. Simon, ‘The Pedagogical Insistence of Public Memory’, in Peter Seixas (ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness (Toronto, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 198. 132. Michael Salvador and Patricia M. Sias (eds), The Public Voice in a Democracy at Risk (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998), 4. 133. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 70. 134. Vinay Lal, ‘Gandhi, the Civilizational Crucible, and the Future of Dissent’, Futures 31 (1999): 213. 135. Bernard Williams, Truth & Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 217. 136. Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 279, 280. 137. See John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1954), 216. 138. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, History: Professional and Lay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 14. 139. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 23. 140. R. Kühnl, Die Weintarer Republik (Hamburg: Rowolth Taschenbuch, 1985), 7–8. 141. H. Butterfield, History and Human Relations (London: Collins, 1951), 186. 142. See my ‘Representations of the Intellectual: The Historian as “Outsider”’, in Ranjan Ghosh (ed.), Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political World (New York, London: Routledge, 2009), 191–94. 143. See O.L. Davis Jr., ‘Religion in School History Textbooks: Evidence of Neglect and Agendas for Reform’, in John G. Herlihy (ed.), The Textbook Controversy: Issues, Aspects and Perspectives (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1992), 63–64. For some interesting and rational suggestions see Krishna Kumar, What Is Worth Teaching? (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1992. 144. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 99.

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145. Yosef Yerushalmi, 1988, 19–20. Quoted in English in the second edition of his book, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (originally 1982) (New York: Schocken, 1989), 116. 146. Jonathan Gorman, ‘Historians and their Duties’, History and Theory 43 (December 2004): 115. 147. See Antoon De Baets, ‘History under the Auspices of Power: Political Control and Manipulation of the Past’, Nieuw Tijdschrift van de Vrije Universiteit Brussel 15, no. 4 (2002): 17–43. 148. W.E.H. Lecky, The Political Value of History (London: Edward Arnold, 1892), 47–48. The effort to know the history of the other, communities and societies that are different from our very own, is a part of implanting more ‘emotion’ to our sense of history. Emotion has always run through the veins of historical discourse and, most often, been prevented from being an indispensable element in what we make out of history and expect it to be for. Intersubjectivity in historical discourse has taken note of this emotion in a positive way without allowing it to be misconstrued as something fundamentalist and sectarian. 149. See Antoon Baets, ‘A Declaration of the Responsibilities of Present Generations towards Past Generations’, History and Theory 43 (December 2004): 159. Also see Antoon De Baets, ‘The Swiss Historical Society’s Code of Ethics: A View from Abroad’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift fur Geschichte/ Revue Suisse d’ Histoire/ Rivista Storica Svizzera 55, no. 4 (2005): 451–62. 150. Allan G. Bogue, ‘Data Dilemmas: Quantitative Data and the Social Science History Association’, Social Science History 3 (1979): 213–14. 151. See David Carr, ‘Phenomenological Reflections on the Philosophy of History’, in P. Blosser et al. (eds), Japanese and Western Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 405–6, 408. 152. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 22. 153. Bedarira, Social Responsibility, 28. As Peter Mandler wonderfully puts it, ‘Remembering is something the dead demand of us’. History and National Life (London: Profile Books, 2000), 2.

Afterword The Quarrel Continues … MARK BEVIR AND RANJAN GHOSH

Ranjan Ghosh Hayden White, speaking to me, mentioned that ‘history’ refers ‘both to investigation of the past by professional specialists in different areas of study and to consideration of the relations between present and past and the process by which the present becomes past or the past intrudes itself into the present. The former notion belongs to the specialist, the latter one belongs to everybody – because everyone has a right to work out what he or she will make of this relationship for oneself ’.1 This ‘everyone’ is the agency I have become an embodied part of, a space that triggered the ‘quarrel with the past’, a lover’s quarrel. Commenting on the effect of professionalisation in history, Frank Ankersmit points to the microscopic and field-glass view of history. He notes with characteristic brilliance that in the writing of history one has almost always to do with the fieldglasses variety of interdisciplinarity. He observes that ‘unlike interdisciplinarity in the sciences (which will ordinarily be of the ‘microscope’ variant) interdisciplinarity in history will always have to take into account changes in our worldview – changes, that is, that do have their origin outside the writing of history. And this entails, again, that much is to be expected for history from literature, and from the study of literature’.2 In fact, through transdisciplinary ‘quarrel’ – constructive and informed – I see a ‘giving back to history’ programme that enriches our engagements with the discipline. So disciplinary asepticism or departmental proprietorship does not necessarily work in the creation of history as an agonistic discipline, as a territory that always provokes a quarrel with the past. Ankersmit convincingly argues that interdisciplinarity of the miscroscopic variant ‘will, in history, always have to be rounded off and completed by the Notes for this section begin on page 145.

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question of how this fits into our existing world-view – hence, by what we have learned to associate with the field glasses variant of interdisciplinarity. And the conclusion should be that the historian has more to learn from literature and the study of literature than from the social sciences’.3

Mark Bevir One way of tackling the question would be to challenge the extent to which it seems to buy into conventional – but now commonly rejected – notions of disciplinarity. We would do well, I believe, to give up thinking about history and historians in the largely institutional and personal terms that inspire such notions of disciplinarity. Surely it is impossible to define clear-cut boundaries to history as a discipline. We cannot say that history is unambiguously defined by its location in departments of history, for if we did so, we would exclude those literary historians, historians of philosophy, and so on, who are employed in other departments but who clearly write and teach on historical matters: I myself am in a department of political science. It is worth noting, moreover, that some of what goes on in departments of history can be described as, say, philosophy or sociology just as much as history. We also cannot say that history is unambiguously defined by its subject being the past, for if we did so, we would exclude contemporary history and include natural history in ways that would be at best contentious. My point is that the boundaries of history are fuzzy ones. Hence we might say history necessarily includes all kinds of transdisciplinary themes and spaces. Similarly, because we cannot define clearcut boundaries to history as a discipline, we can not specify who is and who is not a historian. Some people will do clearly historical work at one moment and other work at other times. Other people might constantly do work that itself occupies some kind of transdisciplinary space bridging, say, sociology and history. Still, there obviously are institutions and people who seek to appropriate the label ‘history’ or at least to claim a privileged right to speak on behalf of historians. Another way of tackling your question would thus be to consider the merits of having a strong, tightly knit profession of this sort. Personally I see little merit in such a guild. I do so partly because, as I have just been arguing, the boundaries of such a guild are fuzzy and even arbitrary. More importantly still, I would suggest that once we recognise that historians always in part construct the past in accord with their particular prior theories, then we cannot hope – and should not want – to insulate the guild of historians from other guilds that are concerned to interrogate such theories. Historians rely, whether tacitly or explicitly, on, say, theories about the form of explanation appropriate to actions, models of political economy, and concepts of textuality. They often will benefit, therefore, from encounters with philosophers, sociologists,

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literary critics and others who evoke and debate just such theories, models and concepts. Historians make sense of the past against the background of a range of theories that are transdisciplinary. However, I think we should be careful not simply to equate these theories with literature. No doubt some historians will draw especially upon formal or informal theories associated with literature. But many have been inspired more by the social sciences. Again, many historians have drawn primarily upon formal or informal philosophical theories, and I suspect that the question of which theories they should draw on is primarily a philosophical one. That said, the main danger of simply equating the relevant background theories with literature is that it sets up literature as some kind of master discipline. I was trying to suggest, to the contrary, that there is something amiss in dividing our beliefs, theories or knowledge up into apparently discrete disciplines. In this view, we should not focus too much on any one discipline; rather, we should see our theories as forming a web without a base or apex. The image of a web suggests that there is something akin to what you label the history-literature dialectic. As many theorists have noted, this dialectic raises issues about how we represent the past. In my work, I have tried to emphasise at least three literary aspects of the generation of meaning.4 The first literary aspect of history is the textuality of the past. An emphasis on textuality follows from recognition of both the constitutive relationship of meanings or beliefs to actions, and the holistic nature of meanings or beliefs. Historians characteristically study human actions and the events or practices that arise out of them. People act for reasons, albeit that these reasons can be unconscious, subconscious, habitual, irrational or ones that they are unwilling to express. Hence history characteristically concerns the reasons or beliefs that were constitutive of people’s actions. What is more, the rise of various forms of meaning holism – especially in postfoundational and postanalytic philosophy – implies that we can give content to meanings or beliefs only if we locate them in the wider web of beliefs of the relevant actor or actors. Hence history characteristically unpacks beliefs or meanings in relation to one another. Historians confront the past as a text. An action is like a sentence; it can be grasped only as meaningful, and to grasp its meaning, we have to locate it within a larger set of meaningful actions. The second literary aspect of history is that it deploys a narrative form of explanation. An emphasis on narrative explanation follows from recognition of the textuality of the past. The key idea here is that when we explain a belief by locating it a wider web of beliefs, or when we explain a web of beliefs by locating it against the background of a tradition, the kind of explanation we offer differs from those in the natural sciences that appear to pick out something like a physical necessity. Again, to explain an action by reference to the reasons the actor had for performing that action is to adopt a form of explana-

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tion that ascribes a kind of choice to the actor. Hence history characteristically relies upon a distinctive narrative form of explanation – a form of explanation that picks out contingent, conditional connections between actions, beliefs and their contexts as these change through time. This concept of a narrative form of explanation evokes the language or theories in terms of which we experience and discuss the past. It differs, therefore, from a concept of narrative as various plot structures from among which we might select to offer a literary figuration of what appear to be more or less pure historical facts. The third literary aspect of history is the importance of imaginative creativity in the crafting of aggregate concepts with which to narrate the past. When historians offer us narratives of practices, events, actions and beliefs, they deal with particulars. Indeed, if narrative explanations are in some sense contingent, then the fact that they hold in one particular case does not mean that they also apply in other similar cases. History, with its use of narrative, rarely deploys aggregate concepts that pick out natural kinds defined by essences that explain other features or effects of all objects of that kind. To the contrary, historical concepts are typically pragmatic: they constitute just one of several ways of clumping together particular actions or beliefs, and the justification for clumping things together in one way rather than another can be only that doing so explains the particular set of actions that is of interest to us. The pragmatic nature of historical concepts means that there is no unique vocabulary to describe or explain any given aspect of the past. Hence historians often have to rely on imaginative creativity to craft aggregate concepts that explain broad patterns or movements. It is often the presence or absence of just such concepts that makes a work of history powerful or disappointing. Discussions of the literary aspects of history are often too abstract to follow easily. Let me try to make my views easier to follow by pursuing a particular example. All across Europe governments are pursuing a range of policies in the name of good governance, social inclusion and political legitimacy.5 First, a principle of textuality prompts historians to explore these policies by reference to the spread of a particular discourse or web of beliefs. The policies should not be reduced to allegedly given social facts about policy makers or the world. Instead historians might perhaps show that the relevant web of beliefs hangs together as a hodgepodge of institutionalism, social capital theory and communitarianism. Second, a narrative form of explanation encourages us to explore the spread of these beliefs as a contingent historical development of languages or traditions. The beliefs did not arise as a natural (or inherently rational) response to given problems or policy issues. Instead historians might perhaps show that the relevant beliefs appealed to centre-left policy makers because they offer a social alternative to the ideas of the New Right while appearing to create distance from the old Left; for example, they promote networks in contrast to both markets and bureaucracy. Historians also might show how the beliefs arose among social scientists as they attempted to defend various mid-

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level approaches from purportedly universal theories such as behaviouralism and rational choice. Third, we need a certain kind of imaginative creativity to come up with suitable aggregate concepts to tell this history. Historians might perhaps craft a concept such as ‘modernist empiricism’ to describe kind of social science that inspires midlevel approaches; they thereby would locate such approaches within the rise at the end of the nineteenth century of modernist modes of knowing – atomisation, analysis, classification and correlations – as alternatives to the kind of developmental historical narratives that had dominated for much of the previous century.

RG This shows that history is impinged on by a multiplex of forces and is invested in different concepts of ‘reason’ that eventually problematise the notion of ‘responsibility’. Working this out in the course of my writing, primarily in the third chapter of this book, I have homed in on what constitutes a ‘historical attitude’ and, concomitantly a ‘historian’s responsibility’. Amidst the backdrop of cultural essentialism, religious nationalism and institutionalisation of knowledge, our ‘doing’ of history is closely monitored. This, in a large way, ‘responsibilises’ the space a historian is expected to inhabit and, thereby, make sense of. Questions remain as to what regimes of reason – the pragmatics – a historian needs to engage with to assay an action or validate a mode of expression.

MB You are right to say that recognition of the role of theory in historical writing raises questions about responsibility. In the nineteenth century, many historians told stories of the progressive development of character, liberty, people and nation. The modernist empiricism of which I just spoke undermined these stories. Its exponents emphasized what they took to be the impartial, painstaking analyses of the facts. In Britain, historians such as Sir Lewis Namier and Sir Geoffrey Elton wanted to transform history from the romantic artistry of the nineteenth century into a professional discipline. Some of them pioneered quantitative modes of analysis. Others adopted all sorts of cross-temporal theories and approaches from the social sciences. In France, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie apparently declared that the historian of the future would be a computer programmer. All the modernist empiricists typically elided questions about responsibility with ones about factual accuracy and analytic impartiality. In their view, the responsible historian was one who stuck to the facts, made it clear when the facts were inconclusive and relied on rigorous analysis to explain the facts. Today many of us are, in contrast, suspicious of claims about

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the given, neutral nature of facts. We believe that facts always rely on theories. Facts are, in an important sense, always inconclusive and up-for-grabs. For us, the straightforward identification of responsibility with factual accuracy and theoretical neutrality has thus become problematic. We need to think again about the responsibility of the historian. The principle responsibility of the historian is to something like truth, objectivity or intellectual honesty.6 As historians, our responsibility is to do our best to ‘get it right’ (although, of course, as I have been trying to emphasise, there is room for debate about the epistemological theory by which we define ‘getting it right’). Of course we are not only historians. We are also citizens, family members and so on. In these other roles, moreover, we might have responsibilities that we take to be more important than those we have as historians. Nonetheless, as historians, our main responsibility is to offer the best accounts of the world, and especially the past, that we can. If historians could make the world a better place by inventing evidence and telling a load of lies about the past, they might face a conflict between their responsibility as historians (i.e. not to tell such lies) and as citizens (i.e. to make the world a better place), and they then might choose to neglect their responsibility as historians. They might neglect their responsibility to try to ‘get it right’ for good reasons, but – and this is the point I am trying to make here – no matter how good the reasons, they would be neglecting their responsibility as historians. In my opinion, then, the responsibility of the historian is largely epistemic. It consists of standards of intellectual honesty. If facts are always in part theoretically constructed, we cannot declare a history to be true or objective simply by reference to the facts. Instead we have to think of objective knowledge as the product of a social practice. A narrative stands as objective only as a result of a comparison with other rival histories. To say that a history is objective (or true for us) cannot be to claim that it is undeniably true; it can be only to claim that it is the best one available to us. Now, because objectivity arises from a social practice – a comparison of rival narratives – the epistemic responsibility of the historian consists in conducting themselves appropriately in such a practice. The ways in which they should conduct themselves can be offered as standards of intellectual honesty. The importance of such standards appears in our language with its contrast of objective and biased behaviour or judgements. There is room, of course, for debates about what standards constitute intellectual honesty. Personally I believe that the best way to arrive at an appropriate analysis of intellectual honesty is by drawing out the implications of a rejection of the idea of pure facts. Nonetheless, I also hope that the outcome of such an analysis will strike people as intuitively reasonable. Perhaps, therefore, I might mention some of the features of what I consider the appropriate concept of intellectual honesty. One feature surely remains something like a concern with factual accuracy. Although no fact is simply and incontrovertibly given, historians have

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a responsibility to stick to what they take to be the facts, and especially to the facts upon which we collectively agree. It would be irresponsible to fabricate evidence. Intellectual honesty is also associated with the attempt to operate with consistent and defensible standards of reason and of evidence. Yet another feature of intellectual honesty is a willingness to take criticism seriously. Because historians can reject any fact or argument that counts against their views, they have a responsibility only to do so for good reasons, not merely to defend their views. Intellectual honesty requires that historians try to avoid purely face-saving responses to criticism. Historians have an epistemic responsibility to respond directly to criticisms instead of relying on personal retorts, ideas of political correctness, vacuous waffle, special pleading, or makeshift apologetics. I have placed much weight on intellectual honesty because it is sometimes argued that anyone who challenges the modernist cult of the fact thereby gives up ideals associated with objectivity. This assumption is false: to reject the incontrovertible givenness of facts can be to try to recast concepts such as truth and objectivity, not to deny their importance. The weight I place on intellectual honesty also has implications for how I would respond to your justified concern with cultural essentialism and religious nationalism. I have to allow that if historians believe in cultural essences, or if they believe the past somehow lends support to the claims of religious nationalists, then they should say so. Although I will think them mistaken, I cannot argue – or at least I cannot if I am to be consistent – that incontrovertible facts prove them to be mistaken. Rather, I have to say something like: their primary epistemic responsibilities are to present their views and to respond honestly to criticism, for only then will we in a position to compare rival views and try to reach an objective judgment. That said, I would also add that historians who reject cultural essences and religious nationalism might write histories in accord with their views.7 One way of getting at this issue is to return to my earlier suggestion that historical concepts are typically pragmatic; that is to say, the justification for clumping things together one way rather than another can be only that doing so explains the particular set of actions that is of interest to us. This pragmatic view of aggregate concepts stands in stark contrast to any attempt to present such concepts as natural kinds with an essence. Hence it leads us to oppose, on theoretical grounds, any attempt to write histories around cultures, nations or groups that are conceived in essentialist terms. Hence also it might lead us to rethink the ways in which we might approach national histories. In my view, it might lead us, in particular, to privilege critiques and also narratives that foreground dispersals, differences and discontinuities. To begin, historians who reject essentialism might offer critical accounts of essentialist histories: they might denaturalise essentialist histories by showing them to have arisen contingently not as natural expressions of natural facts; they might show how various

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imaginaries are crafted by particular groups who then seek to impose them on others. In addition, historians who reject essentialism might craft histories that point to the cultural flows, differences, and ruptures that fragment supposed cultural unities; they might tell the histories of, say, networks of peoples rather than allegedly fixed groups.

RG Ad hominem arguments and leaps of logic combine to reconfigure a poetics of history that has a different habitation in the public sphere. It is the space that has a ‘qualitative’ relation with the growth of a historian’s responsibility or what I have argued as ‘historical attitude’. Public space owes a lot to a historian’s abilities to constantly critique the false analogies and rhetorical sleights of hand in validating discourses of knowledge that have the consensus of the rational-scientific majority. (The Japan textbook controversy or the California school textbook controversy or the saffronisation of history in India are instances of power dialectics that seriously responsibilise this space, demanding our greater interaction and deeper involvements.) The space is for ‘self-correction’ and ‘propriety’ and historians need to understand the politics and legitimacy of these terms. The properties of the space foster, maintain and interrupt communication and interaction. Within the circulation that it generates – the ‘spatial heuristic’8 – historians determine the domains of the sociopolitical experience. It is not merely about respecting inherited codes and perpetuating rigid norm making. The responsibility is in the agonistic pluralism and mutual responsiveness.

MB It is certainly the case that history occupies an important place within the public sphere. Historical memories and narratives are integral to all communities. At times they are so much a part of the fabric of our daily lives that we barely recognise them: they appear in street names, monuments and public holidays, as well as canons, curricula and the holdings and activities of libraries, archives and museums. At other times they become topics of debate or discussion, often debates about a community’s identity, its borders and its relation to others. Historical memories and narratives define everyday practices of hostility, civility, friendship and citizenship. They can fuel violent pogroms and wars, and they can inspire attempts at reconciliation and justice within and across borders. The place of history in the public sphere raises several overlapping questions. One is: what sort of public sphere should historians seek to promote? I doubt that the answer to this question differs at all from the general one of

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what kind of public sphere we should all seek to promote. That is to say, I think whether one is a historian is irrelevant to the normative commitments one should hold – and that is so even if it influences the normative commitments that one does hold. In my view, all of us – whether or not we are historians – should be concerned to promote a robust public sphere characterized by critical inquiry, responsible debate, respect for others and, of course, intellectual honesty. This vision of the public sphere is one that hopefully maps onto a broad commitment to an open democratic community. Nonetheless, we might allow that an open democratic community is just one substantive vision, and that it cannot be grounded on certainty any more than can the more dangerous alternatives. An open democratic community is still a particular community characterised by a particular identity with boundaries (that exclude or marginalise fundamentalists and others who repudiate the relevant identity). An open democracy has to confront questions about how it justifies itself to, and deals with, those who do not share the relevant identity and so do not believe in it. My point is that we should be cautious of suggesting that our visions of a critical-rational history and a robust public sphere are somehow above the fray, as if they were absolutely certain or inherently rational positions that all sensible people would accept if only they could shake off their inherited cultural prejudices. As it happens, I do believe that there is much to be said for the idea that a spirit of open tolerance is neutral in a unique manner. Nonetheless, I do not think it is above the fray. To the contrary, when we insist on a critical history and robust public sphere, we exclude fundamentalist, communalist and essentialist identities, and we do so even though our commitments are not foundational truths. Personally I believe that the justification for such exclusions consists, first, in recognition that we have to make decisions and decisions always entail exclusions, and, second, in arguments about what a rejection of foundational truths implies about the kinds of decisions we should make. Although that justification can sound complex, my aim is pretty straightforward: I want to retain a commitment to a critical democratic ethos even though that ethos must place democracy itself in question. As I said earlier, I believe that whether one is a historian makes no difference to the importance of a normative commitment to an open democratic community. However, even if normative questions about desirable and undesirable public spheres are ones that have no special significance for historians, historians might have a special responsibility for the creation and maintenance of certain types of public space. Your own comments seem to suggest that they do. My own views are rather more ambiguous. It is important, of course, that we have a robust public sphere – a public sphere characterised by vigorous and yet responsible debate. But I am ambiguous as to whether historians bear any kind of special responsibility for fostering such a public sphere. On the one hand, I do think that certain types of history are conducive to an open democratic community whereas others are actively dangerous. Historians are

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obviously particularly able to challenge dangerous myths, ideologies and political misappropriations. They have a unique ability – and so a role and, I guess, responsibility – to play in exposing the dangers and distortions that go with fundamentalist, communalist and essentialist narratives and identities. On the other hand, I am reluctant to insist that this responsibility is that of historians. I am reluctant, I think, for two reasons. First, historians, like everyone else, have all kinds of desires and responsibilities and there are limits to what they can do. Most historians live the lives they do in large part because reading, teaching and writing gives them pleasure, and I think that is as it should be. Some historians might want to be public intellectuals, and, if they succeed, they might gain a prominent place on the public stage. But other historians might not want the lights of the public stage, and I do not think that they have a particular responsibility to speak out in an accessible voice on topical issues. Second, I hold back from suggesting that historians who do not share my commitment to an open democratic community have a responsibility for promoting it. My emphasis on intellectual honesty and my recognition on the particularity of the vision of an open democratic community imply, rather, that such historians have something more like a responsibility to promote that in which they believe, albeit that they should do so through just the kind of critical inquiry, responsible debate and respect for others that would characterise an open democratic community. Debates about history are often debates about identity and justice. Everyone has a right to get involved in those debates, and to express their own beliefs within them. Equally, nobody has a responsibility to get involved in those debates, or at least they do not if we take a responsibility to imply censure on those who do not fulfill it: historians might have other responsibilities that they put first, or they might not want to get involved in public debates. In so far as historians choose to engage public debates, I hope they will promote an open and democratic community. I have followed one of the cases you mention particularly closely. In April 2006, the California courts rejected the request of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) for an injunction against the publication of a new sixth grade history textbook. I followed the news story with special interest because my younger son would be entering sixth grade in the California public school system that next fall. When the time arose to review the sixth grade material on ancient India, organisations such as the HAF proposed an array of changes. Some of the changes were uncontroversial, but others seemed to propagate a chauvinistic agenda. Critics argued, with good reason, that the proposed changes largely equated the history of India with the history of Hinduism and, more particularly, a conservative Brahminical variant of Hinduism rather than its diverse contemporary forms. These critics included not only community organisations such as the Friends of South Asia but also historians and other scholars who sent a formal letter to the California School Board. The formal letter was arranged by Professor Michael Witzel (Harvard University) who, about three

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or four years earlier, had contributed a number of pieces to The Hindu on the saffronisation of history in India itself. Perhaps I should say right away that although I have done some work on South Asian history, that work concerns the modern period, so I am not really qualified to debate the historical merits of the historical views of groups such as the HAF. My way into these debates passes instead through the theoretical issues that we have been discussing. So, I would again emphasize that the primary responsibility of historians is to something like intellectual honesty. If they genuinely believed in the truth of the version of the past presented by the HAF, for example, I would have to suggest that they should espouse it. Equally, of course, if they hold other beliefs, then they should express those, and if they believe that the HAF is expressing an ideologically distorted version of the past, then they might also provide critical narratives that seek to expose the ideological nature of that historiography. The more general issue you raise is, however, the role of the state in sponsoring one version of the past over another – what you describe as the nexus between the state and writing of history. What kind of history should the state support at sites such as public schools? This question is especially pertinent for people, like myself, who are meaning holists or postfoundationalists. Postfoundationalism undermines the idea of neutral facts; it implies that all ‘facts’ presuppose background theories. Hence postfoundationalists cannot consistently hold that the state can sponsor a neutral, factual history. They can argue that the state should sponsor the best histories currently on offer or something of that sort, but it would seem that they have to allow for the legitimacy of objections to these histories and demands that alternatives also be taught. My point is that because we postfoundationalists have given up on strong concepts of truth and neutrality, we suffer doubts about what have been historically the main justifications for the secular, liberal state. We need to recognise the contingent and contestable nature of any justification we might offer for a secular, liberal state that sponsors a secular, liberal education. I worry, however, that recognition of the contingent and contestable nature of secular and liberal values gets confused with a type of multiculturalism that gives far too much room to communalism. Multiculturalism encourages communalism in so far as it incorporates the following three moves. First, cultural groups are associated almost exclusively with racial and religious identities. Second, the racial and religious identities are conceived in essentialist terms: each group is defined in terms of specific histories, beliefs or practices that distinguish its members from outsiders. Third, each group – or its representatives – is allowed to define norms or policies that have public applicability or visibility for the relevant race or religion. These three moves transform a praiseworthy desire to tolerate and respect other ways of life into a dangerous communalism. They lead respectively, for example, to a privileging of ‘Hindus’ as a group, to an identification of this group with a particular heritage and to a

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vociferous self-identifying clique coming perilously close to taking upon itself the mantle of spokespeople for this heritage. We need to be much clearer, for ourselves as well as those we address, that recognition of the contingent, contested nature of secular and liberal values does not entail a rejection of such values in the name of other marginal cultures. We surely need to rethink and modify our ideal of a secular and liberal state. But we should be careful about doing away with it. After all, multiculturalism slides rapidly into communalism unless it is constrained by secular and liberal values such as toleration, free speech and a focus on individuals rather than cultures as the unit of our concern. These latter values encourage us to oppose any clique that attempts to foist a shared, essentialist identity on every member of a race or religion. These values encourage us to consider the members of a race or religion who might reject the identity thus being foisted upon them.

RG So, secularist historiographical practices admit of a space for ‘dissent’ that must be informed and not self-blinding. History cannot avoid consorting with religion and politics and this invariably leads the ‘quarrel’ to a different level. Secularism must ‘rationalise’ the acceptance of the roiling, manipulative dimensions of religion and politics or the frequent malicious attempt to replace history with myths or the ideological policies of the state that make allowance for ‘moderate religion’ or the strategist swapping between nationalism and religion. Secularism is the perceptive attitude to critique the power centres that drive the state to manipulate its citizens within a centralised unified system; it is this system that often fails to isolate the ‘differences’, the differences that are irreducible and ‘relational’ involving hierarchy and ‘differentials of power’. Joan Scott argues that ‘conflict and contest are therefore inherent in communities of difference. There must be ground rules for coexistence that do not presume the resolution of conflict and discovery of consensus. Communities cannot be based on conformity but on an acceptance and acknowledgment of difference’.9 Differences call for a variety of quarrels in the public space that must become the zone of ‘nonaggressive argumentation’. Only then it becomes possible to shift the secular struggle from its defensive position to a more positive agenda, transcending the innate condescension of ‘tolerance’ and arriving at new modes of respecting and living with ‘difference’.

MB I would suggest that although secularism is especially associated with a critical stance toward religion, it might evoke a broader critical stance toward all doc-

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trines that ignore their own historicity. I also think that this broader concept of secularism reinforces the views on historical responsibility and multiculturalism that I expressed earlier. It is important to begin, though, by asserting a critical, secular view of religion. We live in a time when religious ideologies are becoming increasingly influential in large parts of the world. Few people still cling to the once widespread idea of an ineluctable process of modernisation eroding religious faith. Little evidence today supports this empirical thesis of secularisation. Yet, the resurgence of religious ideologies also gives a new urgency to the assertion of secular ideals. Secularism involves – and we should cling to this idea even if we rethink it – a critical scepticism toward religious doctrines. Secularism is not the same as atheism: it not need entail a rejection of God. Secularists do argue, however, that religion should not provide the basis for morality, education and the public sphere in general. Hence secularists emphasise the importance of restraining religious ideologies. Although we have been talking mainly about historians, secularists do not have to base their argument on a claim that the historical impact of religion has been overwhelming negative. Secularists also might justify their belief in restraining religious ideologies by philosophical arguments or by an assessment of contemporary politics. Indeed, I think the need to rethink secularism derives less from the evidence of history than from the implications of postfoundational philosophy. Historically secularists often justified their belief in restraining religious ideologies by foundationalist arguments against the existence of God, or for a neutral, liberal polity. They tended to assert a clear, given alternative – atheism or liberalism – to religious ideologies. Atheism or liberalism was thereby held up as a kind of certain truth. It is arguable, moreover, that these foundationalist concepts of secularism arose, albeit only in part, from an Enlightenment distinction between an irrational religious Orient and a rational and scientific West, and this distinction helped to justify Western imperialism as a way of spreading the benefits of a secular culture and secular institutions. Postfoundationalists, in contrast, are likely to be wary of setting up atheism, liberalism or Western rationalism and science as absolutely certain truths. Indeed, I want to suggest that postfoundationalism might prompt us to adopt a broader concept of secularism as a critical stance toward any truth-claims that seek to locate themselves outside of the changing history of this world. (Edward Said seems to me to have thought of the secular as just such a kind of historicist critique.10 ) Postfoundationalism implies that rationality, experiences and so beliefs are always infused with prior theories: we can come to hold beliefs only against the background of a tradition that then influences their content. All beliefs (or truth-claims) are thus located in history. Postfoundational secularism could build on this analysis of belief. It could foreground contingency and historicism so as to offer a critical perspective on all beliefs – whether religious

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or not – that appeal to idols of reason, experience or insight that are allegedly outside of this world. Postfoundational secularism would emphasise the historical and contingent nature of all belief: knowledge is always part of a human culture. Hence postfoundational secularism challenges those ideologies that misconceive themselves as natural or divine. It might inspire studies that reveal the contingent and historical development of such ideologies, thereby undermining their account of themselves. So, postfoundationalism might lead us to rethink secularism as historicist scepticism. This historicist scepticism echoes the way ‘the secular’ refers to contingent objects of this world in contrast to a timeless religious world. It suggests that secularism entails an insistence on the place of a contingent history in the formation of all beliefs and ideologies. It leads to a critique of any belief or ideology that purports to be a timeless truth. A postfoundational secularism informs many of my comments on the transdisciplinary or literary nature of history, the responsibility of the historian and an open and democratic community. What I have been saying on these issues arises in part from a self-reflexive postfoundational secularism, that is, from the application of historical scepticism. To begin, we might argue that history is transdisciplinary precisely because our sense of the past always arises against the background of a contingent historical context. Our grasp of the past depends on all kinds of literary, philosophical and other ideas that we inherit as a tradition that then influences the beliefs we come to adopt. In addition, the responsibility of the historian to intellectual history arises in part because postfoundationalism implies that we cannot equate objectivity with Truth, only with the product of a reasonable and honest dialogue. Intellectual honesty is also important because it is a way of owning up to the contingent history of one’s own beliefs. Finally, we might justify the defence of an open and democratic community in the face of nationalism and communalism on the grounds that nationalism and communalism are examples of the kind of ideologies that purport to base themselves in the natural or the divine, thereby eliding their own historical contingency. The open community preserves what we might call a liberal emphasis on the individual as the unit of concern: it challenges essentialist views of culture, and even attempts to define allegiances in terms of allegedly objective characteristics such as nationality, class or religion, rather than on voluntary deliberation and choice. Yet, the open community also tries to encourage a pluralism that would allow for the contingent and contestable nature of liberal norms, values and political institutions.

RG To conclude, let me ask: Can we say here that the open community opens out onto the quarrel with history? Does a simultaneous commitment to pluralism

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and secularism combine the romantic and the representational functions of historical writing?

MB Yes, I think we can say that. I am using postfoundationalism to reimagine both the romance and rigor of history. On the one hand, my postfoundationalism challenges essentialist concepts and reified explanations. It liberates an imaginative and romantic attempt to craft novel and fruitful aggregate concepts. And it also prompts us to be more aware of the diversity and plurality of modes of life. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to assimilate postfoundationalism to a relativism according to which anything goes. My postfoundationalism retains an account of warranted belief and objective knowledge as the best available theory based on shared facts and canons of evidence. Postfoundationalism thus involves a rigorous commitment to standards of intellectual honesty. And it also prompts us to defend secular historicism and liberal pluralism against fundamentalist alternatives.

Notes 1. Ranjan Ghosh and Hayden White, ‘“Thinking” History: Some Reflections’, Journal of the Interdisciplinary Crossroads 1, no. 3 (December 2004): 399. 2. See Ranjan Ghosh, ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Doing of History: A Dialogue between F.R. Ankersmit and Ranjan Ghosh’, Rethinking History 11, no. 2 ( June 2007): 228. 3. Ibid., 229. 4. See especially Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 5. See Mark Bevir, New Labour: A Critique (London: Routledge, 2005); and more generally Mark Bevir, Democratic Governance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 6. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 78–126. 7. Mark Bevir, ‘National Histories: Prospects for Critique and Narrative’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 1 (2007): 293–317. 8. Margaret Kohn, Radical Space (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 4. 9. Joan W. Scott, ‘The Campaign against Political Correctness: What’s Really at Stake’, Radical History Review 54 (Fall 1992): 77. 10. Edward Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, in The World, The Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). More generally still, secular criticism overlaps with a historicist commitment to genealogy. See Mark Bevir, ‘What is Genealogy?’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2008): 263–75.

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Index

A Absolute Mind, xxiii, xxvii Absolute Monarchy, xxviii Absolute Reason, xxiii Academic freedom, 90 academic memory, 38, Advani, Lal Krishna, 21, 23 Affirmative continuity, 68 Agastya, 46 agency, xxv, xxvi Akhnaton, xviii Alberuni, 68 Albertazzi, Daniele, 58 Alpern, Stanley B., 109 Alterity, 4 Ambedkar, B. R., 38 Ankersmit, Frank, 17, 72, 131 anxiety, 43, 82 aporias, 4 Archaeology of Knowledge, 103 archaeology of mind, 94 Archimedes, 75 Aristotle, 109 Arnold, John, 87 Arnold, Edwin, 37 Aron, Raymond, 75 Aronowitz, Stanley, 110 Arthasastra, 13 artificial memory, 46 Aryan Invasion Theory, 107 Asante, Molefi, 109 ascending anachronism, 60 authenticity, 59

Ayodhya, xvii-viii, 13, 17–19, 21, 30–41, 43–44, 46–52, 54, 58–64, 66, 69–70, 80, 86, 96, 99, 111 B Babar, xvii, 38, 44–46, 48, 62, 64–65 Babarnama, 39, 45, 64 Babri masjid, xvii, 18, 30, 32, 35, 39–40, 43, 51, 54, 62, 64–65, 97 Bad memory, 49, Badiou, Alan, 86 Baets, Antoon de, 117–18 Bahn, Paul, 100 Bal, Mieke, 29 Balfour, Edward, 45 banalization, 56, 69 Bancroft, George, 103 Banerji, S. M., 44 Bapu, Asaram, 47 Bapu, Murari, 47 Baqi, Mir, 45 Bartov, Omer, 83 Beard, Charles, 81 Beck, Friedrich Alfred, 98 Becker, Carl, 73 being-for-themselves, xxvi Benet, W. C., 33 Benjamin, Walter, 4 Ben-Jochannan, Yosef A. A., 109 Bernstein, R. J., 95 Bevir, Mark, 87, 90, 91 Bhabha, Homi, 90 Bharatiya Janata Party, 55

158 bharatvarsha, 51 Binford, L. R., 93 Bloch, Marc, 1 Bloom, Allan, 110 Bodhgaya, 37 Bodnar, John, 59 Bogue, Allan G., 118 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 73 Brothman, Brien, 126 Burckhardt, Jacob, 75 Burke, Peter, 36 Burton, Antoinette, 104 Buruma, Ian, 54 Butterfield, Herbert, 114 C Carr, E. H., 2, 73 Carr, David, 84, 89, 110, 119 Caillois, Roger, 30 Chaudhuri, Amit, 23 Chaudhuri, Nirad C., 65 Chinese historiography, xx, xxii, 13–14, 16 cognitive archaeology, 94 Cohen, Paul, 31 Collective memory, 30, 39, 43, 46, 48, 56, 58 common knowledge, 21 common sense, 4 communis opinio, xix community memory, 58 comparative history, 118 compromise, xxvii–xxxi, xxxiii, 67 Confino, Alon, 50, 59 connection, 5, 22, 119–120 consensus, xxvii–xxviii, xxx–xxxi, xxxiii, 4, 18, 43, 46, 66, 75, 80, 83, 85, 96, 99, 114, 138 consolidated memory, 51 continuity, xxi counterpublicity, 114 Crane, Susan, 1, 102 crisis frame, 43 critical intellectual, 115 critical sense, 114 cultural disharmony, 52 cultural essentialism, 56, 137 Cultural Literacy, 110 cultural memory, 30, 42, 59, 60, 70 cultural specificity, 52 curiosity, 76, 77

Index

D Dalit history, 42, 43 Danto, Arthur, 3 debate deficit, 110 deliberation deficit, 112 Delivre, Alain, 60 Demos, John, 6 Der Begriff des Politischen, xxix Derrida, Jacques, 22, 85, 103 Descartes, René, 3, 22 descending anachronism, 60 despotisme doux, 111 devabhasa, 19 Dewey, John, 29, 91–92, 112 Dharmapala, Anagarika, 37 dharmasatta, 66 dialectical conception of history, xix difference, xxvi, 2–3, 77, 87–88, 99, 105, 110–111, 142 dissent, 22, 36, 77, 79–80, 85, 89–91, 96–99, 111–114, 117, 128, 142 Doniger, Wendy, 30 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 2 ‘durational expectancies’, 16 Dust, 102 E effective publics, 113 Eley, Geoff, 36 Elliot, H. M., 34, 55 Elton, Geoffrey, 78, 135 Embree, Ainslie, 15 empathetic unsettlement, 123 Encyclopaedia Asiatica, 45 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 40 entangledness, 57, 69 erklaren, 120 erotics, 84 ethical saying, 5 ethics of solidarity, 90 ethnic memory, 59 ethno-heritage, 61 Evans, Richard, 107–108 evental, 86 excess of history, 85, 123 F Finch, William, 45 Finney, Patrick, 80 flat earth theory, 110 force of history, 46

Index

forgetting, 49 Foucault, Michel, 57, 102–103, 105 Fowler, Peter J., 106 Freire, Paulo, 107 Frisch, Michael, 57 G Gallerano, Nocola, 107 garbagriha, 21 Gautama, 61 German Hiroshima, 54 geworfen, 75 Ghaznavi, Mahmud, 38, 54, 107 Gibbon, Edward, 103 Giroux, Henry, 107, 110 glorious past, 13, 61 Gobineau, Count, 41, 42 Goebbels, Paul Joseph, 42 Goel, Sita Ram, 45, 107 golden age, 61 good memory, 49 Gordon, Daniel, 76 Gorman, Jonathan, 116 Gould, Richard, 94 Gray, John, 108 Guha, Ranajit, 15 Gumbretch, Hans Ulrich, 20 H Habib, Irfan, 107 Halbwachs, Maurice, 48, 66 Hamacher, Werner, 4 Harley, L. P., 1 Hartog, Francois, 101 Hasan, Haji Muhammad, 45 Haskell, Thomas, 92 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xvii– xxvii, xxx, xxxii, 12, 79 Heidegger, Martin, 75 Hempel, Carl, 82 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 41 Herodotus, 110 Hexter, J. H., 74–75 Heyne, Gottlob, 41 Himmler, Henrich, 42, 98, 125 Hindu consciousness, 18 Hindu- Hindi memory, 57 Hindu history, 11, 14–16, 24, 36 Hindu identity, 31, 33, 36, 50, 52, 54 Hindu memory, 44, 47 Hindurashtra, 58

159 Hindu Temples,What Happened to them? 107 Hindutva discourse, 48, 57 Hindutva historians, 31, 40, 43, 45, 51, 57 Hirsch, E. D., 110 historia, 22 historia rerum gestarum, xxvi, 31 historical attitude, 5, 71–72, 135, 138 Historical consciousness, xviii, xx, 1–2 Historical distance, 50–52 Historical materialism, 4 History minded, 74–75 Historical narration, 10 Historical noumenon, 84 Historical positivism, 85 Historical power, 9 Historical rationality, 107 Historical realism, 3, 78 Historical representation, 29 Historical truth, 2 Historical sense, 25 Historical sense-generation, 22 Historicism, xxiii-xxv, xxxii, 4 Hitler, Adolf, 42, 84, 108 Hodder, Ian, 94 Holocaust, xxiv–xxv, 54, 67, 69, 83, 123 Horemheb, xviii, How We Think, 91 humanist reason, 113 Hume, David, xxii Hussain, M. Ashraf, 45 Hussein, Saddam, 108 Huyssen, Andreas, 29 I Ideal chronicler, 3 Ienega, Saburo, 115 Ignatieff, Michael, 46 Imperfect Histories, 8, Indian historiography, xxii, 16 Indian historical consciousness, xxii, 13 Indian literature, xxiii Indian mind, xxii–xxiv Individual memory, 48, information society, 114 instrumentalist view of memory, 43 Intercultural history, 118 irrealis, 4 Irwin, H. C., 33, 62 itihasa, 11–12, 15, 24, 42, 55

160 J Jaya Somnatha, 54 Jatra, 23–24 Jenkins, Keith, 81, 85 Jewishness in Music, 42 Joseph and his Brothers, 30 Joshi, E. V., 45 K Kalhana, 13 Kamath, M. V., 37 Kant, Immanuel, xxxii, 75 Kapur, Anuradha, 50 katha, 23–24, 42 knowing, 37, 40–41, 45, 77, 83 Knowles, Dom, 6 Kohl, Helmut, 108 Kohl, Herbert, 127 Kohl, Philip, 94 Korn, Alejandro, 73 Kossinna, Gustaf, 98 Krishna, Sri, 46 Kubler, George, 3 L Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 135 Lal, Vinay, 23 Langbehn, Julius, 42 Latour, Bruno, 103 Lecky, W. E. H., 118 Lectures on the Philosophy of History, xix Lefkowitz, Mary, 109–110 Le Goff, Jacques, 75, 88 Le mythe et l’homme, 30 Lord Rama, xvii, 17–18, 30–32, 34–35, 38, 40, 50–51 Lying, 83, 108, 116 M Macmillan, Margaret, 108 Mahabharata, 15, 17, 42 Mahatma, 63 Mahmud Ghaznavi, 19, 38, 128 Malin, James C., 80 Mann, Thomas, 30 Martin, Montgomery, 33 maryadapurshottam, 50 Masada, 49 Mazumdar, R. C., 107 McCullagh, C. Behan, 78, 83 Medieval India, 107

Index

Megill, Allan, 59, 84 Melzter, David, 95 Memoirs of Babar, 62 Memory, 24, 28, 101, 111, 116, 138 memory of victimage, 53 Menander, 18, 38 Michelet, Jules, 101, 103 Mimesis, 24, 55 modernist empiricism, 135 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 88 Munshi, K. M., 54 Munslow, Alun, 121 Munz, Peter, 31 Myth, 18–19, 29–31, 36–37, 41, 46, 48, 51, 55–57, 60–61, 71, 76, 142 mythohistory, 42 mythomoteur, 58 N Nader, Helen, 105 Nagel, Ernest, 82 Naipaul, V. S., xx, 12, 65 Namier, Lewis, 135 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 2, 9 Narayan, Badri, 42 narrative identity, 51 national memory, 41, 58–59 national pedagogy, 48 nativism, 23 natural history, 132 Naumann, Friedrich, 42 Nehru, J. L., 56 neoliberalism, xxix, xxxiii Neville, H. R., 32–33 New Archaeology, 93 new history, 3 new mythology, 41 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 41–42 Nikam, N. A., 13 Nora, Pierre, 48 Nord, Lega, 58 normal frame, 43 Norris, Christopher, 82 nostalgia, 36 O Official memory, 59 Olick, Jeffrey, 47 onus probandi, xx opposition, xxii, 28 orientalist essentialism, 37

161

Index

outsider intellectual, 115 overlapping consensus, xxvii P Padania, 58 Pandey, Gyanendra, 40 Panini, 61 panopticon, 104–105 participation mystique, 49, 55 Patanjali, 61 performative, 78 Perrot, Michelle, 9 Phenomenology of the Mind, xviii philosophy of history, xxiv, xxvii political capital, xxx political culture, 47 political language, xxvi popular memory, 57 Pork, Andrus, 108 postanalytic philosophy, 133 Poster, Mark, 105 postfoundational secularism, 144 postpositivism, 95 postprocessualism, 93–94, 96 Presence, xviii, 8–27, 97, 102 presentism, 88, 95 private domain, xxxi profane, 36 public consciousness, xxx public debate, 53 public domain, xxviii–xxix public hurt, 119 public intellectual, 113 public memory, 39, 56, 59, 104–105, 111 public programming, 104 public self, xxviii public sphere, 36, 47, 105, 117, 138–139 Pundits, 20 Puranas, 14–16, 26, 42, 63 Putin, Vladimir, 108 Q Quarrel, 1, 6, 10, 12, 19, 23, 30–31, 43, 60, 94, 111, 118, 120, 131, 142, 144 R Radical pedagogy, 107 Rajagopal, Arvind, 56 Ramayana, xvii, 13, 17, 19, 33–34, 42, 47, 56, 66 Ramdas, Samarth, 47

Ramrajya, 13, 17, 61 Ranke, Leopold von, xviii, xix, xxxii, 53, 73 rashtrapurusha, 50 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 32 Rath Yatra, 21 Rawls, John, xxvii Reagan, Ronald, 108 Reason, xix, xxiii Relativism, 3, 77, 80–83, 89, 95, 117, 122 religious nationalism, 137 Remembering, 40–41, 45–46, 49 Renfrew, Colin, 94–95 Repetition, 40, 42–43, 46 Responsibility, 5, 135–138, 140, 143 Riddles of Hinduism, 38 Rigney, Ann, 8 Risk, 114, 119 regulative idea, 88 Rickert, Heinrich, 2, 73 Ricoeur, Paul, 51 rishi parampara, 47 Rorty, Richard, 5 Rosenberg, Alfred, 42 Roy, Arundhati, 22 Ruesen, Joern, 88–89 Runia, Eelco, 9–10, 21, 24 S Sacred, 56 sacred memory, 39 Sadhus, 19, 46–47, 59 saffronisation of history, 141 Said, Edward, 99, 115, 143 Samuel, Raphael, 49, 89 sanatana dharma, 13, 17 sanatan pabitrata, 47 Sankaracharya, 61 santarasa, 50 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 10 Schlesinger, Arthur, 116 Schmitt, Carl, xxix Schudson, Michael, 85 Scott, Joan, 142 Scott, James, 105 secular historicism, 145 Secularism, 22, 85–86, 99, 111, 142–145 Seeing Like a Statue, 105 self-reflection, xxv, xxvi Sen, Amartya, 52

162 Sharma, Ram, 44 Sharma, S. R., 40 Shaw, Julia, 96 Simon, Roger, 111 Simplism, 116 Singhal, Ashok, 46 Skandapurana, 40, 63 Sleeman, W. H., 33 Smith,Vincent, 16 Social Darwinism, xix Social memory, 36, 48 Somnath temple, 54–55, 107 Somanatha, the Shrine Eternal, 54 sovereignty, xxviii, Spaulding, Albert, 93 Spitzer, Alan B., 80 Srivastava, Sushil, 31 Steedman, Carolyn, 101–102, 104 stereotypes, 19, 36, 38, 48, 50, 67, 116 Stevens, Wallace, 30 Steward, Julian, 93 subjectivity, xxi, 2, 72, 77, 84 sublime, 11, 18, 22, 24, 37 subtle subversion, 106 suffering, 50, 55 surplus, 3, 4, 10 Sybel, Heinrich von, 73 Swabey, Marie Collins, 82, 96 T Tagore, Rabindranath, 12, 23 talk, 14, 30, 80, 112, 115–116 taqlid, 63 Taumel, xxiii, xxxii Taylor, Charles, 111, 113 televised history, 69 telling, 48, 110 Thapar, Romila, 20, 54, 57, 97, 107 The Garden of India, 62 The Gobetween, 1 The History and Culture of the Indian People, 107 The Uses and Abuses of History, 108 Theoretical history, 2 Thornton, Edward, 34 Tieffenthaler, Joseph, 45 Todorov, Tzvetan, 28 Toffler, Alvin, 16 Tolerance, 4, 92, 106, 120, 142 transference, 86

Index

transnational history, 118 trauma, 54 truth regime, 30 Tulsi, 57 U ugra bhava, 50 umbildung, 75 V Valery, Paul, 30, 73 Valmiki, 46, 57, 61 Vann, Richard T., 76, 90 Vedic literature, 14 verabredung, 4 vernacular memory, 59 verstehen, 120 victimisation, 36, 52–55 Vikramaditya, 39, 51 Virtual discourses, 3 Vishwamitra, 46 Volk, 41, 98 Vyasa, 61 W Wagner, Richard, 41–42 Wang, Ban, 2 Weber, Max, 82 Wedgwood,V., 102 What is History? 73 White, Hayden, 2, 7, 79, 131 White, Leslie, 93 Wiesel, Elie, 65 Wilford, Francis, xxi Williams, Bernard, 113 Wineburg, Sam, 120 Wissler, C., 93 Witzel, Michael, 140 Wood, Nancy, 56 Wordsworth, William, 24 World history, xix, xxvii, 12, 23, 98 Wyschogrod, Edith, 8 Y Yerushalmi,Yosef, 116 Z Zagorin, Perez, 122 Zerubavel, Yael, 49