Dattatreya Hosabale | Image: PTI
Ex-President Trump in his heyday used to relish use of such phrases as ‘alternate truths’, though he probably had a vague idea of alternative discourses or narratives. The conflation with truth is the crux of the matter. There is, it suggests, no such thing as truth and there is no point in searching for it. Truth, it further implies, is whatever we can make it to mean. This is just naked worship of power of the strong against the weak as they find themselves in the social arena. In our country it ranges from reckless assaults on Muslim vendors or Christian places of worship by bigoted Hindu mobs with impunity to fundamental inversion of results of painstaking research in fields like history.
Dattatreya Hosabale, one of the top ideologues of RSS, used the occasion of the Independence Day to launch a solemn sermon on history. Though phrased in measured language, it unveiled a far-reaching project of alternative History as and when power and occasion may help to establish it. The leading theme is that “there are other histories than the current ones about the freedom movement in India.”
He pays routine homage in passing to Gandhi as the most influential leader in the later phase of the movement for freedom, but dwells longer on the exploits of Hedgewar, Savarkar and other icons of Hindutva like Har Dayal. He invokes the contributions of Hindutva luminaries like Raj Narayan Basu for organising ‘Hindu Melas’ in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Subhas Chandra Bose is always a favourite only for the reason that he had differences with Gandhi, though he had called Gandhi ‘the father of the nation’ and had brigades on Azad Hind Fauj. After Gandhi and Nehru, Ambedkar is credited with uniting (Hindu) society, though many believe he had exposed its ugly hidden fissures. The breath-taking attempts at appropriating icons of social reform movements of modern India and the hosannahs on many who are marginal or controversial figures adopt the tone of recapitulating familiar facts. Bhagat Singh gets a mention for taking the initiative of publishing Savarkar’s book on the ‘First Indian War of Independence’ and circulating copies, but Savarkar’s own turn-about on the Hindu-Muslim unity celebrated in that book is passed over in silence. All important figures of modern Indian cultural Renaissance, from Tagore to Dada Saheb Phalke and scientists like Jagadish Bose and P.C. Ray are swept in. But not a single Muslim name is uttered even in a whisper. As though Badruddin Tayyebji, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Maulana Azad, Maulana Hazrat Mohani had not even existed.
But this apparent factual amnesia has an implicit ideological rationale. For early on it is implied that it is not the British alone who had robbed India of her freedom, but waves of foreign invaders who stayed on to exploit and enslave Indians. This, chimes with the reported erasure of an eminent and influential historical figure like Akbar from history courses of a curriculum recommended by the UGC. And renaming Muslim-sounding names with Sanskritised ones.
So the freedom movement is more than a millennium old and from the nineteenth century onwards there has been a protracted struggle to regain the land and the culture for its ‘true descendants’. Facts get bent on such aspects as the real character of native kingdoms who had nominal freedom in exchange for unqualified loyalty to the British Raj. The leaders of the freedom movement had bewailed the social backwardness and prevalence of superstitions in those ‘native states’. Hosabale
claims these preserved India’s native culture intact, whereas with two or three exceptions these had the notoriety of fossilised feudal institutions and mores.
This casual flouting of facts is supported with evidence from ‘neglected folk memory’ and suppressed traditions. This overlooks the fact that in such sources plenty of chaff gets mixed up with the grain. This is no innocent amateur bungling but a deep-laid plot to makeover the very concepts of Indian nation and state, part of an agenda to rebuild everything from the scratch. Therefore, it should alarm everybody committed to the constitution. Further, it rejects the contribution of science to the development of the methods of history as a discipline, and paves the way to a tidal surge of prejudice and mythology into the consciousness of a modern nation.
Though some people might dislike it, the motor of history is social and cultural contradictions both internal and external. It is the task of history to lay them bare and throw light on their impact in forming new institutions and traditions or renovating them.
Any kind of seamless history is just a one-sided and potentially dangerous cultural retreat into obscurantism and despotism.
*The author is a highly respected Assamese intellectual, a literary critic and social-scientist from Assam. Views expressed are the author’s own.
Other pieces by Dr. Hiren Gohain:
The Spectre of Opposition Unity