History is not just about villains and heroes

History is not just about villains and heroes

An amusing, but also instructive, moment of the recently concluded Karnataka elections was the ease with which politicians on both sides relied on Indian history to make a case for their party’s political future. Congress leader Siddaramaiah invoked the Chalukya ruler Pulakeshin II as a mascot of Kannada pride, while BJP president Amit Shah asked where the Congress stood on the question of the power struggle between Hyder Ali and the ruler of Mysore, Krishnaraja Wodeyar II. Seen from the outside, there is an element of the absurd in this invoking of premodern, non-democratic personalities in today’s India. More subtly, what these historical excursions reveal is that the kind of history that Indian politicians tell us is indistinguishable from an archetypal 19th century style of history writing filled with great men, stinging betrayals and memorable sacrifices. In contrast, within the academy, the answers to fundamental questions — what is history and how to tell it — have undergone substantive re-evaluations.

Intentions, time and truth

For much of the 19th century, when history was professionalized as a discipline in the university system, historiography — the study and documentation of history — was under the influence of the methods formalised by the influential German historian Leopold von Ranke. Amongst these Rankean innovations were methods such as archival research, analysis of primary documents, and eventually a change in teaching methods that included seminars. What remained unchanged, since the days of Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War, in the Rankean world, was how history was understood: intentions were followed by actions, time was unidirectional (events followed a causal stream), and there was a universal truth of events that history writing was hoping to apprehend. For Ranke, who lived before the industrialisation of Germany, the history of politics of the Prussian state (and not its society or economics) was supreme. Implicit in this stress was also the belief, as the American historian Georg Iggers later wrote, that “history possessed an inner coherence and development”.

By the late 19th century, when mass industrialisation across Europe led to the emergence of a middle class, new urban centres and economic-colonial interests, a new generation of historians emerged — such as the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne — who sought to turn history into a form of social science. Their concerns were less the story of great men or events but rather the histories of social and economic pressures, the arrangements of capital, cities, and labour. In the shadow of the influence of Marxist historians and moral abomination of the Holocaust, from 1960s onwards, when decolonisation was in full effect and Western society in social tumult, history writing underwent a period of self-questioning and transformation.

No longer were “grand narratives” of history tenable. More fundamentally, an understanding of historical time itself underwent a change. For the great French historian Fernand Braudel, any historical moment was concurrently pregnant with effects of different forces that operate with different time lags — from geology to social institutions to the histories of individuals. By the end of Braudel’s illustrious career, however, in contrast to the ambitions of Ranke who wanted to make history a science, history took a linguistic turn under the influence of works in other social sciences — Claude Levi Strauss in anthropology, Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics, and the iconoclastic Jacques Derrida who declared that “there is nothing outside of the text”.

In this milieu of ferment, the great American anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued that entire cultures were texts, which meant, like great books, there was no irreducible way to interpret a society. He wrote: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” The language used by historians was now understood to be both a mirror and a prison, and any historical text was imbricated, like petals in a flower, in negotiations with power structures within a society. By the 1980s and into the 1990s, coinciding with postmodernism, a new set of histories — on culture, everyday practices, and “microhistories” of women, gender, class, and so on — burst forth. What was gained from the decades-long internal tumult was that an old idea of a homogenous, pristinely birthed narrative of a history of heroes and villains was permanently cast aside. We have returned to an understanding of events, perhaps not dissimilar to what the ancient Jain seers had called anekantavaada: a theory of non-one-sidedness.

Our understanding of the past

Meanwhile, as our societies grow complex, the irony is that our democratic politics continues to treat history in a monochromatic, 19th century style with villains and heroes. The result is an elevation of identity politics often at the cost of other phenomena with their own specific histories — environment, gender, social justice, etc. Arguably, democratic politics is a competitive bloodsport where only winning matters.

The consequence, however, is that thanks to the overwhelming focus on the retelling of unimaginative political histories, our people can no longer conceive of themselves in anything but political terms. It is not hard to imagine that many of the social ruptures in India, including a lack of compassion, is perhaps because our descriptions of our past do not correlate with our intuitions about empathy, each other, and ultimately ourselves.