How India’s historians have reflected on the country’s history, culture and heritage

THE term ‘Indian history’ is deceptively simple at first sight, so much so that we take it as a given rather than as a point of reflection: it assays a study of the past of the Indian subcontinent. As early as in 1935, Shafa’at Ahmad Khan, in his presidential address to the first All India Modern History Congress, warned of the dangers lurking in the background for the discipline of history, of potentates and dictators seeking to control the writing of history, and luring the historian away from a scientific and impartial history. Connected histories Coming back to the issue of diversity and the different levels at which the past can be understood, the movement of religious ideas and institutions outside the subcontinent is so well-attested and irrefutable, and we can clearly see that there are streams of connectivity that enrich ideas of Indian civilisation and identity, be they pilgrims’ accounts in the land of the Buddha, and the development of Buddhist knowledge in Sri Lanka, Tibet, South-East Asia and China. Bipan Chandra and Mridula Mukherjee, historians of modern India, have repeatedly drawn our attention to the vision of the Indian national movement, articulated by so many great women and men in different tongues and emphasising specific elements more than others, but all very clear that equality, dignity, freedom of expression and diversity were to be the pivot on which the idea of India rested. It becomes imperative then that we do not allow our histories to be yoked to the ‘chariots of sectionalism’ that Shafa’at Ahmad Khan warned us about in our seeking of the idea of India, or, as Shireen Moosvi cautioned, get swept by the hostile winds in the form of distorted interpretations of India’s past, but instead follow in the wake of serious scholarship, whether to take forward or critique earlier interpretations.