H is for History

When I was in Kindergarten I learnt about Humpty Dumpty. When I was in class 2 I read about Hansel and Gretel. When I grew up I became interested in Hanuman. That is my history, and that in an allegorical way, is the history of India. 

Why did Humpty Dumpty appear? Because some 150 years ago, some British officers decided that English was the best medium for higher studies in India. Most Indians were happy to accept the decision. English then trickled down to high school and primary school—because if you need to learn a language, starting sooner rather than later is the best.

What about Hansel and Gretel? Europe is rich in fairy tales, no doubt, but India has no shortage of them either. Yet, a Baital Pachisi aside, we do not hear of them, and certainly do not use them in the school curriculum. When I last looked, six decades after my own experience, the English reader for class 2 still had the Hansel and Gretel story. What colonialism did was to make educated classes ignorant and indifferent about their immediate surroundings and at home in the far reaches of a global world. Once well educated, almost no Indian person went tramping into villages and hamlets to collect stories, as had the Brothers Grimm.

Why, finally, did I get interested in Hanuman? I had simply matured. I managed to understand the history of India in the context of world history with the insight that there was something not innocent in the process that had made me what I was: this universal man (sic) with a perfect grasp of English nursery rhymes, German fairy tales, English drama, American poetry, etc. etc., who looked kindly but bemusedly at my parents’ recitation of the Hanuman Chalisa.

I tried to tell myself that history was beyond us, that it was what it was, that we should accept it intelligently and move on in our lives with the identities we had inherited and which were, we should be smart enough to acknowledge, liberating and fun. Who would not want to be a universal man?

My telling myself did not work.  History has a way of coming back to bite us. As age progresses, it is human to ruminate on one’s past and analyse which thing led to where. On top of that I became a professional historian and understood with an undeniable clarity how colonialism and nationalism worked. I became an anthropologist as well and was trapped into the attractions of family histories and community identities. There was no way I could live simply as “Who I am, today, now,” and not worry about “Was the history that had produced me a fair and just history?” I became an educator and I had to grapple almost daily with the questions of what kind of history was I teaching, what kind of history were students learning, what was the relationship of the individual to the history they were taught. Finally, I became an activist and had to ask, “What do I want to do about the history that is written, taught and known around me?”

At the source of most of our problems in India today, I submit, is a faulty understanding of history. We waste and abuse one of our most precious resources when we teach history in the ways we do. Younger children, in elementary and middle schools, dislike the subject because they associate it with memorisation of dates and words (place? person? thing?) They should think of it as personal stories and narratives, all to be known through projects. Older children could learn the excitement of being spy, detective, and then an advocate, all rolled into one, as they investigated events in the past and put together the puzzles of half-known facts to present a case that was elegant and convincing. They could learn a historical approach. In High School they could learnt Historiography, or the political nature of all history-writing.

There is a huge gain in doing all this. By teaching smaller children history in exciting ways we secure their interest and lifelong allegiance to history, instead of boredom and dislike.  By teaching older students how to think more critically and actively about history we do not only come closer to the truth of history, we can actively help youth to think of their futures in open-ended ways. History can show how at every stage, big and dramatic changes have taken place. Almost all developments in the past are taught with hindsight as if they were normal events. But they were actually unpredictable! This could be taught to young intelligent people as a way of analysing their own societies to understand how change occurs. History then becomes not someone else’s story but our own. It is exactly people like us who have made every part of the story known as “history.” Sometimes they did it by leading, sometimes by following, sometimes by supporting and sometimes by opposing, sometimes with action and sometimes with indifference. But whatever they did, it was part of history. Thus, youth can get a sense of being important, of having to take decisions, and would be encouraged to eschew passivity and cynicism.

At present in India History has become the crutch for all the changes the government wants to undertake. The ideology of fighting a past dominated by Europe has trumped the need to fight the economic-political backwardness that is also our legacy from colonialism. Those who favour Hindutva are, regrettably, weak in their history. I am totally in sympathy with the desire to atone for the past. But by constructive action: researching, writing, teaching about India—which, logically, includes India’s hierarchies, prejudices, and problems. We cannot adopt an aggressive, vengeful stance that insists on our past grandeur. Or that categorises people in artificial ways.

One of the most artificial categorisation is by the term “Hindus.” The well-known diversity of beliefs, practices, gods and goddesses, philosophies and rituals that comprises Hinduism is the reality, not some unified belief in one god, much as I love my Hanuman and my Shiva, or a scripture or a holy place, much as I swear by the Gita and Banaras. The diversity is a strength, not a weakness. It is sheer ignorance, and if deliberate, sheer folly, to try to stamp it out.

Let me end with the school’s study of the subject of History. What “History” is in the best schools in India is: neatly covered exercise books with notes in correct English covering many facts; questions and answers and true or false exercises on these facts; memorisation of these facts and regurgitation of the memorised material in tests and exams. What “History” is in our less good schools is the same procedure, but with failure in the giving and writing of notes, the writing of answers to questions at home and in class, and the memorisation and then reproduction of the facts. The students of the good school get good grades and become empowered, and the students of the poor schools get poor grades and are left out of the competition. The potential resources of history are totally wasted in either case. 

But there is always hope. I, the professional historian and activist, spouting all these wise words, was myself educated in History by the late Mother John Baptist in the venerable missionary school, Loreto Convent, Lucknow. She would arrive with a copy of Mukherjee’s Notes, and proceed to read aloud page by page, in a steady drone: First Mysore War, Second Mysore War, Third….First Maratha War, Second Maratha War, Third…..Lists of Governors-General and Viceroys…compendia of treaties and trophies…dates, brown and white men… And yet, one day, History became exciting. It must have been all those battlefields and gore. May her soul rest in peace in Heaven. 

History teachers, all you have to do is to tell them the hundreds of unbelievable stories from the past, and then—give lots of Home-Work.