“The left historians” fiasco
When you can’t compete, malign! That seems to be the motto of the neo-nationalists of India today, enthused by the large numbers that they have in parliament, they have decided to run a campaign to slander everything that they don't agree with. The abuses hurled at the so-called “left historians” is the latest addition to the long list of smear campaigns that they have been running.
So I decided to go over this “classic” text by Arun Shourie, “Eminent Historians, their technology, their like, their fraud”. I partly agreed with what was written, after all, Arun Shourie — a Padma awardee, is no doubt a man of considerable erudition. But all I got from the book is personal ad-hominem attacks. In the first hundred pages, Arun Shourie recites how left historians had taken grants from the government and other bodies and had not delivered the manuscripts on time. That to me sounded like a performance review of an IT engineer, than a criticism of scholarly work.
Then I went through the “news” reports published about the latest archaeological evidence in the Ram Temple-Babri Masjid sites. (Yes the ones published, shared, and circulated when the cyclone had devastated Bengal. Priorities you see !) And all of them said that the historians had put out a version of the history of the JanmaBhoomi issue which has now proven to be false. Hence the eminent historians are an evil group of people who are always contriving against India. But wait a minute, isn’t that always the case? In physical sciences and in social sciences alike there are theories and there are counters. And often theories are proven to be wrong. It proves nothing of the evil design of any individual. Have you ever considered abusing Isaac Newton or Neil Bohr because their theories don’t exactly match the advanced theories that hold today?
Secondly, History is a subjective field of study. Inferences need to be drawn from archaeological texts and ancient manuscripts. In that context, there is no right history or wrong history. It is a view of the world marred by the color of your rear-view mirror. It is hilarious to believe that historians were under any obligation to write a “Sanghi” version of history even though they did not believe in it. In fact, they wrote what they truly believed in and what they thought was best for the country.
Thirdly for the sake of argument, even if we agree that indeed these eminent academics had indeed done a great disservice to the nation, there is a question that we often forget. Where were the right historians? Why did they not write counters to the existing maxims? Well, the sad truth is that if you ignore the periphery, there were no right or right-leaning historians in academia. None!. The reason thereof is not hard to find. If the predominant narrative in the right-wing is to deride people who take-up the study of humanities alleging that they “waste” the exchequer’s money, it is obvious that a lack of intellectual acumen will be found in the academia.
In a truly free society, a case cannot be made for restrictions on freedom of speech. No, not even “reasonable” restrictions can be imposed on it and it cannot be subjected to “public law and order”. Censorship is barbaric, criticism is welcome. Academia in a free society must be like a courtroom where the prosecutor and defendant get to lay out the case in whichever fashion he chooses to see the world and the reader acting as the judge can use his wisdom to good effect and arrive at his own conclusions. The case in hand is therefore akin to a convict, who having denied making any argument in defense accuses the prosecutor of foul play on the grounds that she/he was lopsided !
