Project to ‘rewrite’ Indian history a milestone in 4 decades of RSS efforts

By asserting that it was it was time to focus on the “part of history (that) was intentionally suppressed” in a conspiratorial way, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 25 virtually endorsed the Indian Council of Historical Research’s (ICHR) recent decision to launch a project to “rewrite” Indian history.

The Prime Minister effectively justified the project by baring his displeasure at how India’s history has been studied so far when he alleged that what has been promoted so far is “just about slavery.” Modi said, “There are countless stories of victory over tyranny during the long period of repression. The mistake of not placing those events in the mainstream is being rectified now.”

The Prime Minister’s statements were preceded by Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s assertions a day earlier when he donned the garb of chief adviser to historians. He asked: “Who is stopping us from presenting history properly and in a glorious manner?…I request all students and university professors to get over with this narrative that history is not correct” and remove “distortions” in history.

Colonial view of Indian history

The Prime Minister, as well as the Home Minister, made these remarks at a special programme organised by the Assam government in New Delhi to mark the 400th birth anniversary of 17th-century Ahom general, Lachit Borphukan, who successfully marshalled troops to ward off advancing Mughal troops.

Modi and Shah’s statements were made days after the ICHR move became known, courtesy media reports. In fact, Modi foisted a new target to disparage — history as taught in the pre-Modi era was termed a “colonial conspiracy.”

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While evoking the memory of Borphukan and alleging that he has been ignored because of a planned design, the Prime Minister spoke of the “brave sons and daughters” who fought “oppressors” in “every corner of the country.”

Most of these valiant characters Modi and Shah referred to lived in the period the Prime Minister usually terms as “1200 years of slavery,” an allusion to the medieval period.

Peculiarly, while attacking India’s leading historians for being part of the colonial conspiracy, the periodisation of Indian history of Hindutva groups is on the lines of British historians led by James Mill, who, in the early 19th century, divided Indian history into Hindu, Muslim, and British, with a three-volume work, History of British India.

In fact, it is not wrong to say that Hindutva historiography is rooted in colonial view of Indian history.

Underlying sentiments are old hat

Modi and Shah are not the first Sangh Parivar leaders to aim to delete alleged “distortions” from history as it is currently presented, studied, and believed. The underlying sentiments in their statements at the event, conceptualised and mounted mainly because Borphukan clashed with Mughals (and thereby “foreign”), are old hat and have been stated several times by Modi and even Shah.

For instance, at an event in Banaras Hindu University in October 2019, the Home Minister called for rewriting history from an “Indian (read Hindu) point of view.” This underscored how important it is for the Hindu right wing to alter people’s perspective on the country’s history. The primary intention is to present Indian history as Hindu history and vice versa.

From the early decades of the 20th century, when Indian nationalist thought became more articulate, it split into two divergent and conflicting paths. The basic points of difference included how Indian history was viewed by the two groups.

Also read: Culture in Modi’s India: In reverse gear

For VD Savarkar, who in fact birthed the idea of Hindutva as a political credo, Hindutva was little but history.

One of the significant achievements of the Ayodhya agitation was the success in convincing a significant section of Indian people that mythology and folklore were history too.

That was, in fact, given a seal of official approval when Prime Minister Narendra Modi, after performing the foundation-laying ceremony for the Ram temple in Ayodhya in August 2020, made several sweeping statements, whose historical basis can be questioned if not forthrightly dismissed.

He asserted in a public address after performing the religious ceremony that the day marked the end of centuries of the Ram temple’s saga of destruction and resurrection. Although his claim was against the reading of history relied upon by the Supreme Court while hearing the sensitive Ayodhya case, Modi’s viewpoint prevailed and a politically-propelled belief was presented as legitimate truth.

The Sangh Parivar and other groups propagating the religio-cultural compact have weaponised history and used it as a tool to evoke anger and solidify their political hold in contemporary India. Anger has been festered essentially on events of the mediaeval past of the country, and this entire period — essentially the Sultanate and Mughal eras — is projected as the era of slavery to foreign rule.

While the assertions of Modi, Shah, and several other leaders of the Sangh Parivar are made on the political stage and aimed at maximising electoral support for the Bharatiya Janata Party, the ICHR’s decision marks a successful milestone in concerted efforts over more than four decades in making the Sangh Parivar’s view of Indian history as the officially recognised past of the nation.

A watershed

The development, however, has to be considered a watershed in the political tussle over the perspective with which history is approached, taught, taken to people as popular tales, and most importantly, as absolute truth.

The Sangh Parivar has aggressively campaigned for more than four decades that history, as taught in schools and colleges, was prejudicial to India’s actual past and effectively demeaned the majority of its people.

Also read: Burden of centuries-old history weighs heavily on current Indian politics

It alleged that the pedagogy of history suffered from pro-communist bias, because adherents of this “foreign” ideology successfully infiltrated important research and academic institutions with the aim to alienate people from their actual heritage. These organisations included those responsible for preparing curriculum, text books, and other course material from the 1970s.

This campaign, which started gingerly, along with the gradual rise and spread of cultural nationalism in the 1920s, first gathered pace from the mid-1980s, when the agitation to construct a Ram temple in Ayodhya after demolishing the Babri Masjid began securing people’s support. It never petered off thereafter, but received added impetus in 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed office.

ICHR’s RSS links

Within weeks of this important political transition, a former chief of the RSS-linked Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana (ABISY) was appointed chairman of the ICHR, the apex government-funded body that oversees history research and historiography in the country.

Since then, media reports have demonstrated that this body, established by the Indira Gandhi regime in 1972, was packed by people connected with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and other pro-Hindutva affiliates. The two top officials of the institution, Chairman Raghuvendra Tanwar and Member Secretary of the Governing Council, Umesh Kadam, are known for links with the RSS and other ideological affiliates.

In September 2021, Modi received a copy of Tanwar’s book published by the government’s Publications Division on India’s partition. The Prime Minister posted a photo of the two of them on his Twitter handle besides sharing the picture and a longish photo caption on Facebook.

Also read: DMK leaders hail Tipu Sultan, criticise BJP of distorting history

At a seminar hosted by the ICHR in November 2019, Tanwar joined other pro-RSS historians to protest Rajasthan government’s decision to remove the “Veer” prefix from Savarkar’s name in the textbooks. The seminar harped on the Hindutva codifier’s “sacrifices” and Tanwar stated that Savarkar was “a trained legal mind who was aware of his rights” and that “essentials of Hindutva were the essentials of nationalism.”

Kadam, too, has participated in RSS-backed seminars — for instance, when he joined RSS Sah-Sarkaryavah Arun Kumar in an “intellectual conclave” last week. At this conference, the emphasis was on India’s homogeneity and not its diversity.

Question mark on ICHR’s autonomy

The open linkage between the RSS, the ABISY, and historians appointed to the ICHR has flagged a question mark on the continuing autonomy of the institution.

It is important to note that ABISY initially devised a programme last year to change the periodisation of Indian history. One of the objectives of this effort was to equate “Hindu” with “Indian” and “Muslim” with “invader/foreigner.”

As it could be discerned from statements made by leaders of the ABISY, the intentions included elevating the corpus of Sanskritpuranas (myths, legends, stories) to the status of historical sources.

It also became evident that this project would aim to show Brahmanical Hinduism as the original religion and civilisation of the subcontinent. Local and tribal gods and legends were also to be incorporated into the national and Brahmanical structure of history and sacred geography. The effort was to ensure the interface between religion, historical characters, and culture.

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Efforts to alter history curriculum and textbooks have been made for several decades since 1978 when the RSS mounted an anonymous campaign against existing text books by petitioning then Union Education Minister, PC Chunder. But this is the first time a framework of what constitutes Indian history is being prepared under the aegis of the government.

The ICHR project will run for four years, and the first volume is expected to be released in March 2023 (indicating that considerable work has already been done). If the institution manages to put together the entire corpus of 12–14 volumes, we will soon have a “New Indian History” in line with “New India.”

(The writer is a NCR-based author and journalist. He tweets at @NilanjanUdwin)

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