http://www.tehelka.com/story_main30.asp?filename=hub190507For_right.aspFOR RIGHT HISTORY, ‘TURN LEFT’‘The Left has not merely been arrogant, it has been stupid and has helped the bigots of the RSS and the BJP, ’ historian Ramachandra Guha told Tehelka in an interview last week. ‘Even the textbooks. There is no doubt that, like the Right, the Left distorted too.’ Provocative jibe or factual assessment? Shyama Haldar passed the question to three prominent thinkers and social commentators‘We never saw the real teeth of the Left in this country’
André Béteille, SociologistThe Left’s lasting contribution, not just in India but anywhere during the 20th century, was the critical approach it brought, in a very convincing, persuasive way, to the understanding of the societies we live in, the sources of the contradictions, tensions and conflicts underlying social life. Some of these still hold: for instance, I think that more than caste, class and the conflicts of interest arising out of inequalities of wealth, income and occupation are still very important in our society today.
I think the Left was particularly inept, however, in coping intellectually with the problem of religion. Left intellectuals were inclined to wish it out of existence, and they ran the danger of trying to bring in a kind of aggressive, mindless secularism to undo the mischief done by the radical Right. It is also probably the case that they did distort a great deal in the writing of history textbooks — students in the 1980s would read discussions of the contradictions and evils of capitalism, but not a bleat about what was happening in the great land of Socialism, the Soviet Union. There was no parity, and in that sense I think they distorted historiography. With this difference: Left intellectuals have played a much more creative role in the history of the 20th century than those of the Right. The Left may have filled up State-run institutions with those of its own kind, but at least it could always draw upon people who were intellectually credible, who could be taken seriously. Who did the Right have? But, on the other hand, here in India the distortions of the Left are, to an extent, more forgivable than those of the Right because India has never had a Stalinist Left. They are more forgivable for the simple reason that we have not seen the real teeth of the Left in this country. The Left in India could never do what it could in the Soviet Union under Stalin. In comparison with that, what the Right did in India pales into insignificance.
I believe that Left intellectuals were not able, for reasons of party discipline, to speak about the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s. But the world has changed in Eastern Europe. What party discipline prevents them from asking themselves what went wrong in the Soviet Union, not in terms of the cult of personality but in terms of the theory which they tried to apply? Nobody asks this question among Left intellectuals. But if you’re serious about Socialism, you must ask yourselves, at least after the event, what went wrong — no Left intellectual in India, as far as I know, has done so.
Time and place are very important in understanding the Left’s contribution — I think it was very creative in opposition; it played a very important role when it was critical. And that in fact is the image that Left intellectuals have had of themselves. But what happens when a Left party is in power and insists that it has a monopoly over the truth? It becomes dogmatic and arrogant, and this arrogance carries over to Left intellectuals in places where they are not in power.
In our country, and to some extent in Western Europe, the Left intellectual as a living category is a very dim presence, where it had been a very important one only a short time ago. I cannot think of anyone in any of the Left parties with whom one could have a serious intellectual debate. I remember talking to EMS Namboodiripad — there is nobody in the party now remotely of his stature. There were others in the party in the 50s and 60s who would make mincemeat of you if you took a false step in an argument — I don’t know if there is anyone now who has anything like the dialectical skill of several of the leaders of the old Communist lot.
‘The Left was crippled by its subservience to mass murderers’
Ashis Nandy, Political thinkerHistory is a highly over-rated discipline. It has become central to modern life because we have lost access to alternative ways of accessing and constructing the past — legend, myth, folk tale, epic. Historians have a deep ambivalence towards those who falsify history or who do not go by standard historiographical methods; to the historian, it seems they represent a lower order of cognitive existence. They forget that these people use history because every issue under the sun has been historicised, but intuitively they sense that no history is an absolute history, every history represents a particular construction shaped by time and place and above all by the human psyche.
The Left made us aware in many ways of forms of suffering and oppression which other formations tried to sweep under the carpet. But they were intellectually crippled by their subservience to killers who perpetrated some of the worst massacres of the 20th century. There has been no acknowledgement of the fact that most of the roughly 120 million killed in organised massacres in Russia and China were innocent, even by the Marxists’ own theories. This will remain denied because of a fear of confronting other worldviews which may no longer be Satanic presences but may even stand as true cognitive alternatives. In such a world, the place of the kind of theories they live by will shrink dramatically and they will have to yield to others who do not use their language or interpretive models of the world.
The sense of a generalised fear of the Other that has begun to occupy a significant public space in this country today has a lot to do with the fact that the Indian nation state, irrespective of the party in power, has lived in a culture of paranoia from the beginning. The unity of the country is a slogan used to abridge intellectual freedom and create conformism, and the BJP has only taken advantage of that. I don’t deny the Left’s contributions to Indian political culture, but their way of giving centrality to the State and its language and ideology also played into the cult of violence which has grown in India today.
The BJP’s brand of paranoiac sentiment is very much part of the modern nation state; indeed, the modern nation state presumes some degree of hatred and cultivated fear. As a pathological product of modernity, the BJP’s arguments against Muslims are all secular ones — they constitute a threat to the Indian State, they are against family planning, they are out to marry four times, appeasing Muslims has prevented us from arriving at a uniform civil code. Yet they don’t have to succeed, they can be handled democratically, as they have been in this country.
‘India could do with a little more Marxism’
Irfan Habib, HistorianIf the issue is of whether the ncert textbooks the BJP withdrew contain distortions of history, I think that is a complete misperception. These histories were not Left histories or Marxist histories; they were written as textbooks and their major authors were by no means all Communists. And what was wrong with the textbooks? We are told they contained historical distortions, but where? Is it possible to write, say, of the first half of the 20th century in any other way than how Arjun Dev has? Has one even defined what precisely is meant by Left and Right historians? Does one differentiate between them as between communal and anti-communal historians, or nationalist and anti-nationalist historians or historians who accept the way of the market, as opposed to those who write from certain ideas of public welfare?
In studying history, you have to have rigour. Rigour means you are willing to put almost anything to question. This is not a feature of Left history alone, this is professional historiography. This is what history is about and it is something that those with religious biases are not capable of — those, for example, who might say that one can only write a history of Islam if one accepts the tenets of Islam. Each generation must question the facts discovered by the previous one, and that can only be done through critical analysis, something which the rss and its like totally reject. They think that whatever has been laid down in past ages must be accepted because it increases national status. But national honour is secondary for history. National honour is not augmented by wrong history — on the contrary, wrong history is bad for a nation.
The purpose of writing history is not to distribute heroisms, but to analyse what contribution was made by whom. Just because a particular party comes to power, does not mean that all its heroes must be extolled. To glorify Savarkar, for example, just because we have put his picture in the central hall of Parliament is not a historically correct position to take.
The intellectual life of a country will always be varied and rich, and the Marxist stream of thought must only be a part of it. But it certainly has a right to be heard. It is possible that many of Marxism’s propositions were too optimistic. But I think the judgement of Karl Marx and his followers stands in their analysis of the essential structure of society, and of the causes of difference in rights and income. I don’t see any reason to change that. Much of history is well explained in terms of those systems of exploitation whose principles Marx first sketched. If we want to remove poverty here, improve our collective lives and have a more scientific outlook, I think India could do with a little more Marxism. How much more is up to the Indian people.
AuthorTopic: Do we care for our history? (Read 484 times)
August 06, 2006, 04:06:17 AM