Notes on the history of Modern India - Note 1

Prologue

The recording of history in all fairness should tell us how the events happened the way they did and why they happened so and ideally without the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’.  However, undeniably, all political or philosophical theories, ancient, whether modern or post-modern, currently dominant, subdued or extinct, of Western breed or indigenous based on our own traditions of reflections, being what they are, have their own ideological roots and class moorings. This is generally the case in spite of the usual claims of balanced and non-partisan rendering as the basic perspective underlying such recordings are seldom acknowledged openly. The renowned astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, had once commented in an altogether different context, very poignantly that "We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers".  Simply put what this implies that, when we are dealing with very vital issues, there is a definite need to organize our questions more sharply and go about trying to find reasonably precise answers to them. In practice, leaving aside few exceptional cases, we rarely find this aspect being addressed to with as much scientific rigour and factual candour as possible or with the earnestness it deserves, in the academies, in political circles and also in the many research studies done so far. If indeed some of the very fundamental issues are taken up in raising some valid question, in the initial spurt of enthusiasm or as a smoke-screen for reiterating non-partisan approach, the momentum gets lost while probing the underlying causes; which is starkly evident particularly in the case of recorded history of our freedom struggle and the historical, political or writings on other aspects of independent India. So, the history as is generally handed down to us through various sources, barring some few rare exceptions can be considered at best as a mixture truths, half truths and sometimes even outrageous untruths; and ipso facto history as etched in the general consciousness of our people is also weighed down by these inputs. This is rarely surprising for history is part of the terrain of contest and confrontation in the undeclared but seldom acknowledged ‘war of position’ between the ideologies dominant and emerging classes in our society.  As the African proverb goes, truly, ‘Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.’

To dispel the possibility of being either overwhelmed by such induced distorted perceptions or just succumbing to the collective amnesia; we need to begin to asking probing questions and try to find the answers, peering through all the accumulated gloss to bring into relief some basic, rough-cut propositions, in a way like the images embedded within the stones that came into relief with just the touch of an expert sculptor’s tools working with his/her hands. With this end in view I propose to share with you some of my notes on the history of modern India.

At the outset, it needs to be stressed that the Indian sub-continent is one of the nodal points on planet Earth where the homo sapiens first began to gather in small groups of food gatherers and hunters, gradually resorting to shifting agriculture, domesticating animals, then moving on to settled agriculture, contemplating the rudiments of science, framing its grammar and thus gradually embarking upon the process, which we have now come to term as civilization.  The other nodal points of contemporaneous beginnings of human civilization and science are the regions, which now go by the nomenclature of China, Middle East-Africa and South America.  Alongside this continuing quest in pursuit of science and progress, the human race had to contend with wars of conquests, violent oppression and exploitation engendering conflicts among numerous tribes and also internecine strife within tribes. From all accounts, this is the perception we gain from the hitherto history of the human race.

We, the peoples of India, are heir to very complex evolution and history of the collective humanity at large.  India, as is often said, is a nation of continental proportions – a region of acculturation of original inhabitants, immigrants and invaders. We are also heir to the legacies of the sub-continent, in particular, which is a region of multiple hues in terms of its troubled history, diverse geography, where its people belonging to multi-racial ancestry have now evolved in to multi-ethnic, multi-national groups of communities, speaking a host of languages and dialects, reposing their faith in numerous religions and faiths, following customs handed down from ancient times as also those very modern.

What is more specific to India and its peoples is the fact that in our case the caste formations, originally based on an elementary division of labour within the community, later came to be defined by birth, as collective ownership gave way to private proprietorship in land.  With the intrusion of industrializing nations in search of colonies, the subsequent formations of classes based on private proprietary ownership of the means of production have been superimposed upon these erstwhile caste divisions. The emerging newer class divisions of the colonial era inexorably absorbed the underlying demarcations of castes of the bygone spewing yet newer forms of indelible divisions. The peoples of our country, as peoples elsewhere in other parts of the world, have all along been striving to unite around some common cause for their common good and this, in fact, is our defining element.

The trajectory of the struggles of the peoples of the Indian sub-continent over the ages and more particularly the struggles of the past few centuries or so hold many valuable lessons for us. All these form a rich patrimony for all of us as also for all other peoples across the world.  So when we indeed begin to analyze what our significant achievements are and what are our failures over the last few centuries, our assessment shall have much to do with how we analyze the history of our immediate past, or what we perceive as our goals and how we have gone about achieving those goals.