Ruby Lal has an article in the pages of Scroll.in titled
Why the imagined opposition between academic and public historians needs to be questioned?
There is no such opposition. Academics writing about the theory of history are not historians. Anyone one whose writing on history is publicly available and who makes a living by such writing is a public historian. However, she may not be popular. But that is a separate question.
The elephant in the room that no one talks about is who is the ‘public’ and what is ‘history’.
Nonsense! The public means members of the general public. History means an account of past events.
Why the imagined opposition between academic and public historians needs to be questioned
An academic historian teaches. A public historian does not. There may be some exceptions. A popular historian may be given a University Chair as a P.R exercise and an academic might write a racy book for the mass market- e.g. 'Sex secrets of the Sumerians'. There is no need to question what is blindingly obvious.
In an interview with William Dalrymple,
a public historian whose books sell well. He has one or two honorary academic appointments because of his fame as a popular author.
historian and co-director of the Jaipur Literary Festival, Devyani Onial, National Features Editor at Indian Express, asked him,“While India hasn’t been able to tell their story to the world,
They have. They just haven't done it in a particularly readable fashion. I suppose, if Nehru had been sent into exile, he would have gotten round to writing proper history books rather than the impressionistic 'Glimpses of World History'.
do you think Indians tell it to each other a bit too enthusiastically, especially on WhatsApp?”
Crazy people do so. Did you know that Brahmins stole penises from women with the result that they now have to sit down to pee? Dr. Ambedkar proved this while doing PhD in Germany.
Dalrymple responded: “My personal bugbear is that the study of history in academia entered a long phase from about the ’50s through to the beginning of the present century, where academics only talked to themselves…
In Britain there was a great vogue for medieval history. But there was a trickle down to popular culture more particularly after metal detector became available. As regards India, there was an ideological element and so there was wider interest in that worthless shite. A good example is Sonia appointing Romilla Thapar her Guru on all things Indian.
As a result, you’ve got the growth of ‘WhatsApp history’ and ‘WhatsApp University.”
Which is a reaction to the ideological biases of stupid, gerontocratic, Leftist nutters who consider Hinduism very evil. There is a caste element to this. Thapar is Khattri so she hates Brahmins. Guha was Kayastha and thus hates Baidyas, Brahmins and everybody else.
Since then, arguments have been raging over the role of history and historians in India.
Not really. History had some importance when it was supposed to give you an advantage in the UPSC exam. But that was long ago. Now, history is considered a suitable subject for the very fucking stupid. The role of historians is to say Modi is Hitler.
Who is doing the real work of history; who is reaching the general public? Those in the academy?
Sure- if they find out something interesting. They can publish a paper on-line and edit the relevant Wikipedia or History Stack Exchange page. If the thing is newsworthy, journalists might pick it up.
Or those outside the academic institutions, so-called public historians?
They can spot gaps in the market and supply it well enough. Thus has it always been. Churchill was a public historians because he needed money.
A torrent of passionate claims in opinion pieces and essays cataloguing the work of Indian academic historians has emerged in the last few weeks.
Illiterate shite.
Widely read and important textbooks are cited.
Crazy polemics by senile nutters.
The serious service of academic historians on curriculum committees is noted.
They make the subject yet more stupid and useless.
Several social media buffs have tweeted the names of academic historians writing for a wider public.
Sadly, they are shit. Dalrymple is English. His English is good. Ours tends not to be.
The work of historians in Indian languages has been underlined.
The better to ignore it.
Still, an (imagined) opposition between academic and public (or so-called “popular”) history blights what can be a productive conversation.
How? When a popular book is written, experts can get articles clarifying the facts published. This is a win win. Both
We’re getting what looks like two divergent tracks, both certain in their beliefs about the nature of “public” and “history,”
There always were divergent tracks. Some wrote entertaining texts with a historical backdrop. Others wrote scholarly tomes.
and living in their own make-believe worlds.
History is about what happened in our world, not a make-believe one.
The elephant in the room that no one talks about is who is the “public” and what is “history”.
No! The Elephant in the room is Lord Ganesa who pervades the Universe.
‘Public’ as a verb
Publish is a verb. Public isn't.
In most comments and online conversations, the “public” is perceived as passive, a docile recipient.
Nonsense. The public has limited time and money. It will spend both on some things- e.g. 'Sex secrets of the Sumerians'- but not on others- e.g. 'Sewers in the Sumerian age'.
Yet, the public and public squares are hardly given – already fully developed – at any point in history, let alone for all time.
No. They are always given. People exist. Some have money and time and appropriate preferences for a market to exist. Dalrymple, French, Keay etc. knew their market and served it well.
India today provides a remarkable example of an emerging and forceful counter public.
No. India, like Britain, has always had a segmented market for History books. Muslims will buy books praising Muslim rulers. Hindus will buy books praising Hindus. We will read books by English people about Indian history because, quite frankly, they took the trouble to study it properly. Also, their English is good.
With the state-sponsored erasure and sidelining of any idea of a rich, multi-faceted and contested history in our schools,
There it is! Modi is Hitler!
colleges and prescribed textbooks, new intellectual forces are coming together in informal organisations and online platforms to provide a more reflective portrayal of India’s past.
They failed when they had a monopoly on institutional power. They will fail now they are a ragtag bunch of nutters. Trump may uproot or defund their safe spaces in American academia. The Grievance Studies Ponzi Scheme will go bust.
Notable among these are student-led history collectives
i.e. illiterate cretin-led circle jerks featuring 'Professors of Brahmin Studies'- right?
that feature open conversations with established historians in widely attended seminars and online conversations.
Stupid people who talk to each other remain stupid.
A multi-generational repository of thought.
if by thought you mean shit- sure?
In short, the “public” is, always, a verb – active, shaping and reshaping itself and others.
Ruby is a noun not a word even though Ruby does stuff- stupid stuff, I grant you- but that does not mean that Ruby is a verb or even an adjective.
It is not a fixed, abstract entity, upon which academic and public historians deliver “history”, which “the public” simply absorbs.
No. Like Ruby, the public, is a fixed entity- tied to living bodies- to which Pizzas and History Books are delivered.
The imagined opposition between the figure of an academic and a public historian also needs to be questioned.
Why? It is obvious that a guy who teaches history for a living may also write a book for the mass market. His colleagues may be envious, but he raises the prestige of his discipline. But this is also true of Physicists- like Steven Hawkins' 'Brief History of Time'.
Not every academic historian sits in an ivory tower, removed from sites of engagement and politics.
Some engage in gesture politics. So what? They are useless.
Especially not in India, where the opposite has been the case.
I suppose Leftist Indian historians pushed the Anglophone elite to the right because of their Muslim bias and hatred of the upper castes.
Nor is every public historian tramping the country,
None are.
fully attuned and responsive to the non-elite.
Historians aren't elite. They have no power.
Again, many times, the opposite.
They are trying to emigrate.
What might be the task of both “academic” and “popular” histories, written for different audiences, but presumably with similar goals of reaching a wider public and unearthing a dynamic, multivalent history?
Saying 'Modi is Hitler. Boo to Neo-Liberalism!'
Academic (and public) historians need to recognise that narrative history (at the heart of “popular histories”) is a craft.
Public historians know this. That is why they have a fucking public.
Stellar public intellectuals have challenged prevalent ideas of “popular history.”
Why not challenge Death? That would cause the Grim Reaper to fuck off- right?
Vibrant debates are taking place on the form and content of creative non-fiction, wider-intellectual histories and public scholarship.
Sadly, they are taking place between very stupid and useless people.
The linguistic range embedded in these descriptors should indicate that people writing for the “public” are struggling with methods, forms, structure of history.
Nope. Just look at what worked before and do the same thing.
The genre of public history is not already established.
Yes it is. You don't need to reinvent the wheel.
That is a fundamental point. A craft needs learning – for narrative histories as well as academic ones.
Churchill learned it quickly enough. He got the Nobel for Literature and made a lot of money.
We cannot assume that just because we have read some histories and know what the official archive is, we know the craft of history writing.
You can assume, if this is the case, that you are as stupid as shit.
Nor that, because we have a PhD in history, we
have a brain
are automatically poised to shift our narrative stye, create a lovely new voice and write public history. “Oh, just reduce the footnotes,” as I have been told many times.
Also tell us more about Nur Jahan's vagina. You can skip the historical stuff.
On the contrary, narrative history demands the slow, patient work of learning how to craft a history based on serious research and analysis.
Only if you are retarded. Churchill was a soldier politician who needed money. He read Macaulay, did a bit of research- or had assistants do it for him- and wrote informative books which sold well. He hadn't been to Collidge and, no doubt, this proved an advantage.
It requires learning how to weave the complex findings and debates around the archive into storytelling.
It requires being able to convey information in a cogent manner. If you can speak well- Churchill, a superb Parliamentarian, could speak in this manner. Writing history books was a piece of cake for him.
It requires pondering the very art of telling stories, probing historical practice and its immense potential, and its relationship to the past.
Also it requires pondering the very process of respiration. Did you know that if you don't breathe in after you breathe out, you could suffocate due to lack of oxygen?
And learning how each landscape that we compose, each moment that we enliven, must be backed up by evidence.
No. Probability (i.e. compossibility) is good enough. However, new evidence might turn up thus necessitating a rewrite.
“You cannot make up that stuff,” as a great teacher of non-fiction writing put it.
Sure you can. Indeed, you have to. What matters is whether you are able to imaginatively reconstruct the relevant decision space for the agents concerned. This is where Indian historians fall down. They don't understand the 'opportunity cost' of decisions they chronicle. Why did the Brits conquer India? The answer is obvious. Previously, the Prince or Zamindar feared his son or nephew most because murder was the usual way of inheriting power or wealth. With the Brits you got a pension and your murderer would get the noose. Why did the INC turn dynastic? Was it because only Nehrus can protect Secularism? No. It is because of factionalism. Primogeniture reduces rent contestation and dissipation. True you can split off from the Dynastic party but then there will be more and more splits.
The same applies to academic writing as well. Many of the habits we learn in scholarly writing
i.e. shitting higher than your arsehole by pretending Foucault wasn't as mad as a hatter.
serve us poorly in public scholarship. We craft our prose defensively and constrain our thoughts by constant qualification – to ward off possible attacks from colleagues.
No you don't. You say nothing because you have nothing to say though you will always include the obligatory denunciations of Modi, who is a Nazi, and Neo-Liberalism and peeps wot don't have to sit down to pee.
De-historicised tidbits
Historians outside the academy need to acknowledge the long work of their colleagues in the academy: people learning non-familiar languages over decades,
why decades? A year or two is quite sufficient.
going through the rigor of locating and reading the archive.
Dalrymple's point is that Indian historians won't consult the Delhi archives. They gas on about Gramsci or Foucault instead.
Archives are not just books and manuscripts
Archives are a store of documents. This lady is thinking of libraries.
– or paintings
found in galleries or museums not archives
and architecture
found outside archives and libraries or galleries.
– out there, which you simply get hold of to write your history. Much is folded into the hard labour academic historians undertake on the nature of evidence, the philosophy of history, the politics and the forms of erasure and oblivion.
They are too stupid to do any such thing. They should just stick to finding something interesting in the archives.
The emergence of “WhatsApp history” and the “WhatsApp University” that Dalrymple pointed to, which set off the current debate on the role of Indian historians, is a grave, universal problem.
No. Indian historians are shit as are all exercises in 'Grievance Studies'. This is a nuisance rather than a 'universal' problem. Xi's China has no such thing.
All sorts of self-proclaimed history buffs, including academic and non-academic historians, active on social media, constantly post de-historicised tidbits:
like Lal's own work which, as I said, did not spend enough time describing Nur Jahan's vagina.
the exotic beauty of such-and-such manuscript,
which is interesting
that bizarre animal,
e.g. Shah Jahan's one-eyed trouser snake?
a nice view from that balcony. Entertainment takes over. Hard questions are sidelined.
Was Shah Jahan's one-eyed trouser snake hard? I suppose so.
The grounds of history thus become irrelevant.
They are irrelevant to the sort of shite Ruby writes.
The politics of asking questions,
is politics
reflecting and debating,
is beyond the scope of shitheads who teach History to imbeciles
is precisely the work of history, and it is vital.
Nope. It is useless. Medicine is vital. Engineering is vital. History is bunk.
This is slow and demanding work, done by looking where others don’t habitually look.
This could also be said of a constipated person trying to take a shit. But, constipation matters. Writing history books does not.
And, above all else, by serious engagement and dialogue with a wide constituency of readers, writers, students and scholars.
Would Ruby want to engage with me? No. She wants to talk to people stupider and more bigoted than herself. The problem here is that Universities, even in India, may stop wanting to cater to such students. The big money is in tech spin-offs from STEM subject research. Why cheat imbeciles for a paltry sum while having to listen to them complain about racial and sexual and transgender harassment?
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