French vs Taseer: Indians need to reclaim their history

Should firangs be allowed to write about India, Indic culture and Indian history?

The answer, of course, is a big and unambiguous yes. How can anyone ban anyone from writing about what they want?

But let’s nuance this question differently: should Indians control their cultural artifacts and historical narratives or non-Indians?

In recent weeks, we got two interesting perspectives from Patrick French, author of a recent India book (India: A Portrait), and from Aatish Taseer, son of slain Pakistani governor of Punjab Salman Taseer, both published in Hindustan Times (Read here and here ).

French, who was apparently upset with recent Indian carping about firangs writing India books, set it off by proclaiming that “the denouncers of the foreign hand on the keyboard are more often than not vigilantes in search of a crime.”

Now, that’s a bit rich, considering that French also agrees that the Indian wariness “arises out of a justified sentiment, namely that for too long India had to endure books by foreigners which distorted its culture and history.” Even so, he hits out at the “growing antagonism towards the idea of foreigners engaging with India, a latter-day literary swadeshi predicated on the theory that Indians should be doing it for themselves, rather than listening to what outsiders have to say.”

The problem is with French’s assumption that the distortion of Indian history and culture is a thing of the past. If it was colonial vested interests that distorted India in the past, today a form of neo-colonialism is very much visible where almost every major Indian text or cultural artifact is studied and dissected in western academies rather than in India. Sanskrit is studied more in the west that in India; Wendy Doniger writes about The Hindus without being a part of the Hindu ethos; neo-cons are rewriting early Christian history in south India and floating Aryan-Dravidian racist theories to accentuate the faultlines of caste, religion and regionalism that are already threatening to tear the country apart. Indian rejoinders are dismissed as crank calls or overly defensive.

In Invading the Sacred , authors Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicolas, and Aditi Banerjee explain how Hindu-phobic western academics have been “systematically undermining core icons and ideals of Indic culture and thought. For instance, scholars of this counterforce have disparaged the Bhagavad Gita as “a dishonest book”; declared Ganesha’s trunk a “limp phallus”; classified Devi as the “mother with a penis” and Shiva as “a notorious womaniser” who incites violence in India; pronounced Sri Ramakrishna a pedophile who sexually molested the young Swami Vivekananda; condemned Indian mothers as being less loving of their children than white women; and interpreted the bindi as a drop of menstrual fluid and the “ha” in sacred mantras as a woman’s sound during orgasm.”

So when French grandly pronounces that “Literature should not be constrained by parochial rules of engagement, self-censorship or the pious, self-affirming orthodoxies of social media. Creativity should not be stifled by finger-wagging,” we need to take it with a pinch of salt.

He also says, “Let the ‘Who should write about India?’ question be consigned to the dustbin of history. Let Xuanzang (Chinese monk who visited India in the seventh century) go free, to write the books he wants. Let India accept the rest of the world, as the rest of the world accepts India.”

As a motherhood statement, no one can fault this. But the ground reality is that India’s contentious past is already a battleground for various caste, communal and regional points of view. Several narratives of Indian history – from the Brahminical to the Dalit to the gender versions of India’s past, present and future – are competing for legitimacy. It is this Indian retelling of Indian issues and Indian solutions to these antagonisms that will solve the country’s problems, not western interventions to take advantage of a country’s faultlines to maintain its supremacy. An India that is undergoing several social, cultural and attitudinal upheavals at the same time will be touchy till it comes to grips with its past.

This is why French’s cribs about India giving less than 1,000 foreigners citizenship and comparing it to Britain’s 2,50,000 is completely wrongheaded. He says: “While there are millions of Indians in Canada, Europe and the USA, comparatively few foreigners live in India. Immigration is nearly impossible. Under post-26/11 visa regulations, many old-school ‘Indophiles’ have been chased out of the country. The home ministry gives citizenship to about 1,000 people a year, whereas Britain, for example, gives it to around 250,000.”

There is no question India must welcome more foreigners to come and settle here. But French should not compare apples and oranges. He cannot equate the diffidence of a former victim of colonialism, which is suspicious of the motives of white-skinned foreigners to the confidence of a former colonial master inviting the natives for some jobs back home. (In any case, these policies are now being reversed on racial lines. Britain is hardly as welcoming  of Indians as it once was. And President Obama is busy denying qualified Indians their H1B visas. Racist Europe is fighting an imaginary Muslim invasion).

Moreover, the point is this: Indians going  abroad are trying to escape the country’s poverty and seeking better lives; foreigners trying to settle here may not have the same uncomplicated motives. From fundamentalists who want to convert “idol-worshipping” heathens to Italian do-gooders who get themselves kidnapped by Maoists (causing immense trouble for the Odisha government), we get our share of foreigners who only increase Indian insecurities. In any case, India actually accepts millions of foreigners as settlers here – Nepalis and Bangladeshis, for example. It is only the occidental kinds that are viewed with suspicion.

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The recent case of Enrica Lexie , where Italian gunmen on board the ship shot dead two Indian fishermen off the Kerala coast and then claimed they cannot be tried here, is a good example of the kind of racism that makes Indians naturally suspicious of foreigners. If these Italians had shot two Americans off the coast of Florida, would they have refused to be tried under US law? Unlikely. It is only the dark-skinned Indian law they refuse to be judged by. The attempts to use priests and religious identities to escape the clutches of India law is particularly deplorable. The Supreme Court is not amused.

Aatish Taseer, in another article in the Hindustan Times , offers the right riposte to French’s valid, but not overly insightful, observations. To French’s call (“Let India accept the world, as the rest of the world accepts India”) Taseer replies: “I would say that India, if anything, accepted the world too easily, too unquestioningly; it allowed the world to shape its idea of itself. And if now, in a different time, there is a pushback, it is only to be expected, and even welcomed, so long as it is the accompaniment to intellectual labour.”

That bit about “intellectual labour” is important, for Indians have been lazy about controlling their cultural narratives, but more of that later.

The paradox of India is that we have had a 5,000-year unbroken civilisational history without producing even one authentic historian worth the name who has written about India and Indians in the sub-continent’s own terms.

Says Taseer: “Few places in the world have as long a history as India’s and so few historians. Fifty-odd centuries, full of big impulses and no one we can describe as an Indian Herodotus. No Tacitus. No Ibn Khaldun. No equivalent of the Chinese annals. As someone whose primary motivation for learning Sanskrit was to form an idea of the classical past - through the epics, charitas and the Kavya literature of the first millennium, a little bit of Kalhana - let me say that the void is real enough. And probably no country has had to depend as much on foreigners, and later its conquerors, for historical information as India.”

What this absence of domestic scholarship on India’s history has meant – the fairly coherent histories produced by Indians in the 19th and 2oth centuries have been dismissed as communal versions by Left-wingers and even western scholars – is a deep sense of humiliation, says Taseer. “It is humiliating not to know one’s history; and that humiliation, when one meets a foreigner with a more intimate knowledge of your past than you possess yourself, can turn to wretchedness and anger.”

He observes: “When you don’t study your past, you expose yourself to people distorting it.”

Taseer does not blame western authors like French, whose wife is Indian, for writing their books, but says Indians have only themselves to blame for allowing the void to be filled by others. He concludes by pointing out that “Patrick French… is right: there is defensiveness these days, there is over-sensitivity and perhaps a degree of xenophobia too. But in a country which has bended so easily to the will of foreigners in the past, and where foreigners are still invisibly able to occupy positions of great power, both politically and intellectually, a little xenophobia is not such a bad thing.”

The question, though, remains: why has India not produced scholarship of its own, whether in history or any social sciences? Why, as Taseer asks, has there been no Indian Herodotus?

Rajiv Malhotra, who reverses the gaze from East to West in his book Being Different, suggests that the Judeo-Christian faiths are history-centric – in that all their central tenets come from a historical figure, and a book that results from that historical event. He implies that since their entire faith depends on a historical “fact” they guard and treat their histories like the crown jewels. They also have dual standards: their history is fact, ours myth.

Indic faiths like Hinduism, Buddhism or Jainism (Malhotra calls them dharmic traditions) don’t require any such zealous guarding of facts or events, since the emphasis is on embodied learning and personal experience. If all of history were, one day, to become falsified, the dharmic traditions would have no trouble rediscovering their old truths through “inner and outer engagement”, but the west would not know the meaning of what it is to be religious at all. For all of it comes from history and holy books.

This is why history is not just an academic preoccupation, but central to the state and its power. Malhotra quotes historian Ranajit Guha as observing that “in the west, state and historiography came to form the strategic alliance known as world history…the control of the past is essential to that strategy…more significantly, the story, as history, was dislodged from civil society and relocated in the state…”.

This possibly explains why in India “itihasa” – that blend of history and popular narrative created to convey an essential truth – has been given primacy over history-writing. But the drawbacks of this are clear. Says Malhotra, “a lack of political consciousness is more characteristic of dharmic practitioners, in part because of the deficiency of institutions and associations that foster collective and historically rooted religious identities.”

There is, however, another reason why even after independence Indians have not taken to scholarship. Thanks to the excesses of Brahminical and upper class orthodoxy in the past, post-colonial India has developed an acute anti-intellectual bias. Upper caste arrogance has made the victims of caste prejudice intensely suspicious of intellectual pursuits - which is why we went to the IITs and IIMs, eschewing the study of the humanities and social sciences.

This is the intellectual gap that western scholars have rushed to fill for their own narrow ends - fuelling resentment in India. That fact that there may be a Patrick French with no narrow agenda of his own is the exception that proves the rule. (Note: I have not read French’s book, and so I can’t pronounce on his writing).

However, Malhotra and other Indians have been trying to plug this gap and reclaim scholarship on India and Indian culture from the stranglehold of western academics, who have been prone to abuse their power to denigrate Indian traditions.

If Patrick French were more conversant with this use and abuse of Indian culture in western hands, he might have realised what the sensitivity is all about before cutting loose.

But there’s no doubt: Indians need to get more serious about their history, culture and literature. If they don’t, they’ll soon be history themselves.