Whose History Is It Anyway?

‘But as history has shown us..’ is a common way in which arguments are begun and usually won. Right from our childhood, we have been told that history is a corpus of infallible, unquestionable facts, events and narratives. As we struggled through numerous pages describing the struggle of Independence, we took the information that was presented to us, as the ‘truth.’ The freedom struggle was a nothing but a series of chronological events with the Quit India Movement and Dandi March being landmark moments. Gandhi was a ‘Mahatma’ because of his non-violent beliefs and Jinnah was a manipulative, opportunist politician who wanted a separate state. That’s what the history books told us. And since we believed history to be the ultimate truth, these stereotypes and ideas were quietly absorbed and internalised.

But as we made the transition from school to college and vast vistas of knowledge opened up to us, our understanding of what constitutes ‘history’ underwent a sea change. As we read accounts of Muslim leaders encountering the same events as described in ‘canonical’ terms, we were unsettled to discover that history is not as one-dimensional as we thought. The events may be the same, but suddenly the author of those NCERT textbooks became important too. History was no longer a reserve of events, facts and people that we could assuredly look back upon. It was a culmination of multiple narratives wherein that which is creating that narrative was as important as the content of the narrative. Whose history are we talking about, we asked?

History as a branch of social sciences has always been a fairly controversial one. Political parties claim ownership over it, its relevance is regularly questioned, most people don’t want to believe in it and most people are unsure what it is. But therein lies the beauty and the inherent ambiguity of the discipline. You can never completely ‘know’ history, because there is no one history. There are narratives, stemming from different individuals that are shaped by different socio-cultural contexts. These narratives talk about their encounter with certain events that occurred in the past. The events are a certainty, but in the retelling of those events to those that are unfamiliar with them, certain narratives take precedence. Those narratives form what we know as ‘canonical’ history. But just because these other narratives are not given precedence, does not mean they don’t exist. For every Mahatama Gandhi, there is a V D Savarkar. For every historical ‘fact’, there is an alternative that we are not taking into account.

But then why cannot history focus on only events? So what if there are multiple versions of history? Why not focus on those that are common to most experiences? In his seminal work, ‘Orientalism’, Edward Said quotes Arthur James Balfour, a British MP and his address to the House of Commons on June 13, 1910. Balfour is justifying the British occupation of Egypt and the larger project of British colonialism to sceptics who are unsure about the profitability of such an enterprise. He uses a variety of manoeuvres, but in a particularly interesting argument, he uses the glory of Egyptian civilisation and history to justify British rule. For Balfour, the fact that the ‘greatness’ of Egyptian civilisation was now in the past, and Egyptians had to depend on the West to rescue them from barbarism, was an infallible argument. This argument he had gleaned from Egypt’s history, and from a Westerner’s perspective, it was justification enough to assume a paternalistic attitude. History was not only being capitalised, it was also being appropriated for material objectives. As Said later asks in the text, whose history was Balfour talking about?

The inherent danger in letting certain narratives dominate in our understanding of history is that these narratives can be adopted and used by certain interests for their own motives as Balfour does. But another more dangerous reason is that by acknowledging these narratives as dominant, the underlying, ‘alternative’ narratives may never get heard. The line between dominant narratives and truth may blur to such an extent that what we are taught in history textbooks or encounter in traditional historical accounts may acquire the status of truth. In her landmark book, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf charts an alternative history with Shakespeare’s fictional sister as the protagonist. The book apart from being an insightful critique of traditional male literary traditions makes an important point about the underlying ‘histories’ that never come to fore in traditional scholarship. The absence of women centric narratives on history shelves and the paucity of information on the everyday life of women in the Elizabethan period are pertinent questions that Woolf raises. Why do we not know as much about the Elizabethan woman as about the Elizabethan man? Why do dominant narratives operate in a certain framework? Why don’t we question them? What about ‘her’story? The importance of everyday narratives are also being emphasised lately. Why do only kings, emperors and politicians feature in traditional history? What about everyday histories? Indian Memory Project, a project started to document memories and stories of everyday people to trace the trajectory of India as a community is one such project. It shifts the focus of history from popular figures to everyday heroes. In doing so, it not only questions established notions about history but also redefines and remoulds the ‘canon’.

History has always been about multifaceted narratives, multiple truths and various perspectives. Ownership to such a fluid concept is not only problematic, it is inherently difficult. The fluidity of what constitutes canonical history becomes even more intense as we enter into a realm where the focus is now shifting from ‘histories’ to ‘stories’. Narratives and memories about everyday encounters. The alternative is slowly becoming the mainstream as the confused student at the back of the classroom looks beyond the words in the textbook to understand what may have been.