SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

There is no need to resort to the excuse of Covid-19. The deletions relating to the Mughals, the RSS and the Gujarat riots are justified in themselves. Schoolchildren mustn’t be burdened with complexities

- MAKKHAN LAL

People often wonder why history, once written, is not cast in stone-why it undergoes revisions at all. But philosophers of history have always understood it to be a dynamic process. R.G. Collingwood, for instance, wrote these words in The Idea of History: "Each age writes its own history"; and "each age must reinterpret the past in the light of its own preoccupations".

The problem with Marxist historiography and its relationship with history is much more curious than what that interpretive latitude grants naturally to historians of every epoch. Since the 1960s, textbooks in India were written by Leftist historians like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma, Irfan Habib, Satish Chandra, Bipan Chandra and so on. Most of them were card-holders of one Communist Party or another. For Marx and his followers, i.e. Marxist historians, the problem of history is not just understanding 'what happened', 'how it happened' and 'why it happened'. For them, the problem is how to change the world' by the use of history. Marxist historians have failed to understand and appreciate the fact that the society we live in has evolved through a complex historical process, very different from the Marxist formula of the rise of feudalism over slavery and the bourgeoisie overthrowing the feudal aristocracy.

Further, we have to acknowledge that the experience of colonialism around the world has shown that domination by a more powerful culture-which defines reality in ways quite different to the subjugated culture - either totally destroys, or at least drives, the less powerful ones into a subservient role. What was considered culturally 'valid' can be rendered 'invalid', and the politically weaker ones are somehow required to modify their reality to fit within the constraints of the new codes.