Two ideas of history

I have not written on academic issues on my blog till date. That is for the simple reason that I do not want my blog to remain academic, that is, irrelevant. Professional academics, particularly social scientists, have a tendency to take themselves too seriously, conveniently glossing over the fact that that too few people actually read their works. They get fat salaries and perks, attend fancy conferences and fetishize a concept called peer review. I call it conceit of expertise.

Good works, I strongly believe, communicates to a range of readers. I shall try to illustrate this point with an example of two ideas on, and of, history prevalent in Bengal in early twentieth century. One of them was eventually taken up by the academia and glorified as more desirable and the other, although subsequently discarded to some extent, has again been picked up, mercifully, in recent times by the academics.

Let us begin with the one that has been championed by the mainstream academia for the better part of the twentieth century. You find a most lucid exposition of this method in Nirad Chaudhury's autobiography. This is the classical liberal method which assumes that the subject of history should ideally be political in the statist sense of the term such as the rise and fall of colonialism and nationalism. Second, methodologically, it assumes as though the writer of history actually stands outside history, like an observer walking by a river and watching the ebb and tide of time flow, without himself being influenced by the currents in any way whatsoever. Third, it focuses on the exceptional, and the definitive, at the cost of the uneventful and the everyday. Finally, it takes the truth claim of history very seriously, hoping that if the historian can, hypothetically speaking, leave all her biases out, the truth about the past can be reconstructed in an authentic manner.

I was under the impression that this positivist notion of history was perhaps the only one available in early twentieth century Bengal. It so turns out that I was horribly wrong. Advaita Mallabarman, the author of Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (A river called Titas) operated with a very different idea of history, one that is very close to what we call social history today. It is so powerful that I am tempted to translate the whole paragraph.

" Titas is a rather commonplace rivulet. It finds mention in no book of history, nor in any account of the rise and fall of dynasties. The blood of two warring parties has never tainted the calm waters of Titas. But is it really true that Titas has no history?

Titas indeed provides no material for treatises that swells one's chest in pride. However, many histories of maternal affection,fraternal warmth and the love of womenfolks, remain buried along its banks. Some of us are aware of these histories, most are not. Yet these histories are true. Titas' banks have seen many tales of humanity and inhumanity unfold along their length. The traces of these histories have lost themselves in the sands of time, superseded perhaps by new waves of stories piled up by Titas herself. The old tales, however, remain dormant within the deeper recesses of Titas. She may or may not decide to open them up for public display. The public may not even want to see them open up. But remain they do. They cannot be inscribed on banana leaves or papers, but remain engraved on a far more durable register. These histories are eternal, as secret as the truth but as sensitive as the wind. Who says the banks of Titas are bereft of history?"

I am not capable of bringing out even half of the force with which Mallabarman articulates a whole new notion of social history in this paragraph. Ritwik Ghatak, the filmmaker, made a whole movie based on the book and you'll do well to see it for yourself. The lyricism of the work is not even my focus here. I rather want to draw your attention to the kind of histories Mallabarman is talking about. Histories of affection, of fraternity, of love and of everyday life, of the people who do not take part in wars and stay far away from the fields of war and politics. Histories of emotion, in other words, and histories buried in layers, waiting to be dug out, heard out, not with institutional knowledge but with empathy and sensitivity of a friend, or a brother, or lover or a son.

The difference between these two ideas of history, and of doing history, could not have been atarker. Interesting isn't it, this process of these two entirely opposite versions of history vying for the attention of the informed Bengali mind in the early twentieth century and eventually one of them taking over the institutionalized academia, and the other being discarded for good? The positivist has clearly pushed the empathetic out of the professional academia that certifies what history, and history writing, is all about.

I do not have the knowledge nor the space to present a comprehensive account of this process. However, the end result has been there for all of us to see. We academics have turned ourselves into retailers of historical truths. I am ashamed of this painful legacy. Thankfully during the last few years some of my seniors have realized this and are trying to return to the empathetic. In doing so, however, they tend to uncritically discard the positivist and the factual altogether. I wonder whether we do not need a more balanced negotiation between the empathetic and the positivist. Let us wait and see how, and to what extent, they learn to live with each other.