Bipan Chandra: Defence of History
In the last week of April, the late historian Bipan Chandra was attacked for denigrating Bhagat Singh. Why exactly does the Sangh Parivar dislike Chandra and other left-wing historians?
In the last week of April 2016, team Arnab staged another show, attacking academicians and historians at large at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). This time it was Bipan Chandra, and his book India’s Struggle for Independence (1987). The crime: calling Bhagat Singh and other revolutionaries “revolutionary terrorists” and “intentionally maligning the patriots” of the Indian freedom struggle. Chandra and his co-authors were accused of being court-historians of the Congress and being pro-Nehru and Gandhi to intentionally call Bhagat Singh a “terrorist.” Next day, Anurag Thakur, the Bharatiya Janata Party Member of Parliament raised the issue in Parliament and another “row” was manufactured, with JNU once again at the centre of it.
This is not the first time Chandra has been under attack by the right-wing regime. This has been happening to him and various other left-leaning historians from the late 1970s, 1977 to be specific, when the right-wing shared power for the first time at the centre. This article brings back those moments, taking help from the articles from the Times of India (henceforth ToI) archives,1 from late 1970s to 2006. It presents a chronology of all such attacks and debates on Chandra, along with Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, R S Sharma, and various such historians who have used Marxist interpretation as their tool of analysing past and the Indian history. It briefly expresses concern over the rising trend of attacking a section of historians and scholars by calling them anti-nationals, and dangers of (mis)appropriating the national icons as the icons of the Hindu right.
How It All Began
Freedom Struggle, the book written by Chandra, Amales Tripathi and Barun de, published by the National Book Trust, faced a ban and withdrawal during the Janata government regime in 1977. Several such books were under threat of banning and withdrawal. An article dated 21 September 1977 talks about a memorandum submitted by teachers and journalists,
The books should be judged on merit and on purely academic considerations, and not on spurious grounds fabricated by politicians who have no academic credentials. The reported move by the Prime Minister’s secretariat to ban the books is in favour of those who want to throttle academic freedom and impose communalist regimentation.2
Books written by Chandra, Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and other left-leaning historians were banned by the Morarji Desai government as the regime said that they were written in a Marxist style. The report of 28 September 1977 quotes Chandra asking, “Why do Indians get so upset if someone makes critical references to their past? Why do we like to worship our past?”3 “The purpose of studying the past is to study it critically and precisely so that we can find out what is wrong with our present and how we can improve it.”4
In the same year, amidst the textbook controversy, Chandra answered a few important questions in an interview to Narendra Panjwani. Chandra told Panjwani:
One of our main objectives [of writing these text books] was to write the books in such a way as to get students to take history seriously… We wanted to write history so as to show that it can be logical and scientific and capable of throwing useful light on the present.5
Comparing the content of Modern India with other books written so far, he said,
We have attempted for the first time to conceive and restructure the whole account in a nationalist spirit—where the people of India, their lives, their struggles and achievement occupy the centre of the historical stage. I would even claim that my textbook is the only one which tries to bring out the nature, the origins and mechanisms of colonialism at the school level.6
Answering why the communalists have got so angered by his books, Chandra gave examples:
In this ideological struggle, the crucial role has been that of history. Why? Because the whole rationale of communalism (as an ideology) derives from a certain interpretation of history. The heart of this interpretation is that Hindus were the greatest of nations and cultures in ancient times. The Muslim rule, meant decline and decadence. And the task now—according to this school—is to go back to the greatness of that Golden Past….no historical period can be scientifically explained merely as the march of a single religion which is allegedly inherently aggressive. Now this does not suit the communalists because they would like people to believe that Ghazni’s sole motive was religion—which would imply that there is something in Islam which leads its followers to plunder and destroy. Permit me, finally, to pose a question to you in this context. What if the writers of these five textbooks by chance happened to be Muslims? It is just an accident that all of us are Hindus by birth-can you imagine what an ugly furore there would have been had a Muslim written what we have, about Ghazni, Aurangzeb, Shivaji etc.?... This should give you an idea of the extent of communalism underlying the whole controversy.7
I want to make a special reference to a passage Chandra wrote in a letter to editor responding to N Ram’s attacks on him. In this passage, Chandra advises Ram:
It does not help anyone, least of all a young man, to brand and smear people through literary flourishes. It may produce the psychologically exhilarating feeling that one is joining the ranks of revolutionaries at one jump and thus making up for concrete and sustained political or intellectual work. In the long run, however, it neither develops the person concerned nor advances whatever intellectual or political cause one wants to see grow.8
Are the current batch of TV anchors listening?
Communalism and History Teaching
Chandra strongly believed that government concessions do create communal fever. Citing the example of the Punjab crisis in 1986, he pointed out how the concessions given to the Akalis first and then to the Hindus “resulted in creating a feeling of hatred and distrust between the two communities.”9 During a lecture he delivered in Lucknow on communalism, the way out, he also said that “the teaching of history had been one of the major instruments for spreading communal ideology. Certain largely circulated language magazines were also responsible for infusing communalism.”10 Recently, we had come across a statement by the Rajasthan state minister for education on how major changes are being made in the school curriculum so that “no one like Kanhaiya Kumar is born.”11
The period 1988–89 is regarded as that of Mandal and Kamandal, referring to the caste and religious resurgence in India. Govind Nihalani adapted Bhisham Sahni’s Hindi novel Tamas as a lengthy feature film to be serialised on Doordarshan. The Hindu right-wing strongly objected to it and multiple court cases were filed and a debate ensued on artistes’ freedom and hurt-sentiments. Chandra was consulted by Doordarshan before the serial was approved for telecast. In an article printed in January 1988, on the eve of the Republic Day, Chandra observed, “If ‘Tamas’ had been stopped, it would have become impossible to criticise even sati on television.”12 He told the ToI news service that the serial does not open old wounds, rather it might help prevent future wounds as it shows how communal riots break out. He is reported to have said that the serial supports the fact that the ideology of communal organisations was not based on the “profoundly humanist” Indian culture but was rather borrowed from Nazism.13 Deriving two lessons from Tamas, Chandra said that it is very important to act fast and diffuse the tension once communal tension is in the air, and Tamas also shows that the basic Indian culture has been anti-communalism, as is shown by people who tried to save the victims, irrespective of their religion.14
In March 1989, while visiting Bombay, he spoke with ToI on issues like casteism, democracy, and regional chauvinism.15 Talking on the connections between textbooks, education and the rise of communalism and racism, he said,
Education in several parts of the country is intellectually backward for there are few books in regional languages which do not portray regional chauvinism. Our peasants were far more secular for they were illiterate. Our students are fed on wrong history and are less secular. West Germany, a country with the highest number of PhDs and a high overall level of education, was also the country which put forward the racial theory of Nazism.16
Emphasising the need for responsible mass writing by academicians, he said it is important because through a study of history “not just the statesman but also the citizen learns what we have become and how. It enables individuals to make a choice, whether the individual is the Prime Minister or average citizen.”17 Chandra strongly encouraged, almost forced, historians like Romila Thapar, to write textbooks as he believed that “writing textbooks is a national duty of academics.”18
In March 1992, Chandra wrote a comment in support of the Indian History Congress (hereafter IHC), after the controversies over the Ujjain session in December 1991 when the Hindu right-wing tried to capture the history congress by using money power to enrol wholesale or in bulk life members. Answering the critics for whom the IHC is a pleasure trip to its participants, he wrote,
Most of the delegates travel at their own expense by second class. They stay in student hostels, bring their own beddings, stand in long queues before the latrines, often bathe without hot water, and eat meals which are Gandhian in their simplicity.19
He also highlighted the point that IHC had to take steps “to ensure that history teaching, writing and historical research remain the business of historians while political groups and parties confine themselves to making history, good or bad.”20
During the NDA-I regime, Murli Manohar Joshi, the Minister of Human Resource and Development, had called such historians and academicians “intellectual terrorists.” Most of the NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) textbooks written by left-leaning historians, like Thapar and Chandra, were taken back from the shelf and major changes, suiting the needs of the fascist regime, were made in the school textbooks, particularly history. In 2002, the saffron brigade crossed all limits when they handed over a seven-year-old boy to the police for being an “intellectual terrorist.” The event occurred at the Bhopal session of the IHC in January 2002.21 The crime of this seven-year-old “terrorist” was that he was trying to sell an “objectionable” booklet titled Communalization of Education: The His tory Textbook Controversy. The book contains articles by Thapar, Chandra, Habib, Sharma, Satish Chandra and Arjun Dev. Reprints of newspaper articles by Vir Sanghvi, Dileep Padgaonkar, and others, and the text of deletions made from NCERT’s history textbooks were included in this booklet. Srikanth, the seven-year-old “terrorist,” is the son of Sucheta Mahajan, a student and colleague of Chandra, and a co-author of India’s Struggle for Independence. He had accompanied his parents to the congress.
The saffron brigade has always used intimidating tactics to “expose” the Marxists and the people/organisations who they consider as threats to their existence in India. The tactic continues.
Notes and References
1 These articles have been accessed through the Proquest Times of India archive available on the JNU library website.
2 A Staff Reporter, “Teachers, Journalists Assail Move on History Books,” Times of India, 21 September 1977, p 4.
3 A Staff Reporter, “Author Denies Marxist Style of Interpreting History,” Times of India, 28 September 1977, p 3.
4 Ibid.
5 “Historians under Attack: Narendra Panjwan Talks to Controversial ...”, Times of India, 27 November 1977, p SM2.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid. I was reminded of a similar question asked by Umar Khalid in his comeback speech in JNU, what if he was a Namazi, a believer, a practising Muslim, what if he was from Azamgarh and not a student at JNU? How would the judiciary and police and intelligence agencies have dealt with him then?
8 Bipan Chandra “Crucial Test,” Times of India, 29 January 1978, p 4.
9 “Govt Sops Feed Communal Fever,” Times of India, 28 April 1986, p 16.
10 Ibid.
11 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/Changing-textbooks-so-no-... 51451274.cms, accessed on 20 March 2016.
12 Historian defends “ ‘Tamas’ Telecast,” Times of India, 25 January 1988, p 4.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Manjula Sen, “Historian Decries Regional Chauvinism,” Times of India, 22 March 1989, p 9.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Joshua, Anita, “Politicians Mourn Bipan Chandra,” Times of India, 31 August 2014, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/politicians-mourn-bipan..., date accessed 5 May 2016.
19 Chandra, Bipan, “Of Those Who Write History,” Times of India, 1 Mar 1992, p 15.
20 Ibid.
21 Sakina Yusuf Khan, “7-Year-old Targeted at History Congress,” Times of India, 13 January 2002, p 7.
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