To 'kluge' means to put together an ll-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfil a particular purpose. Historians who rely on secondary sources are either seeking to inform & entertain by writing well or they tend to be kluging for an ideological purpose.
Who Writes History?
Anyone can write history. Textbooks may be commissioned by the Education Ministry or a particular Exam board. We may say that history is rewritten on the basis of the use of advanced technology or statistical methods which reveal what was previously unknown.
Simply
Romila Thapar and the Textbooks of India
She was a Leftist. When Leftists were in power, she was one of the people tasked with writing boring History textbooks. When the Left lost power- it has more or less faded away from Indian politics- others wrote the textbooks. That's how Democracy works.
March 31, 2015
Posted by: Jason Steinhauer
When historian Romila Thapar first reviewed student textbooks in her native India, she was surprised.
She had to read Indian history textbooks to pass her School exams. After that she did a BA in English Literature in India. She only switched to History after she went to SOAS in London.
“I was appalled by the quality of the information that was being conveyed in these books,”
the books weren't Left wing enough. Also, they tended to show Hindus in a good light. This made Thapar very sad.
she wrote in a 2009 journal article recalling the experience. Particularly, she was struck by “an adherence to outdated ideas and generally colonial views of the Indian past”
e.g the view that Hindus were a great people. What had set it back was Muslim invaders & their ruinous rule.
that the textbooks presented.
Thapar's people had to run away from their native West Punjab. Why? Because Muslims kept killing them. This made Thapar very angry. Why should the Hindus of India not also have to run away?
It was 1961, and modern-day India was a young country seeking a national identity.
It was an ancient country with a Hindu identity. The US was a young country.
With the departure of the British colonial administration in 1947,
Power had been gradually transferred to elected Indian politicians from the time of the first General Election which was held about a decade before Thapar was born.
and the ensuing conflict between the newly formed independent nations of India and Pakistan,
Pakistan had a Muslim identity. India had a Hindu identity. Thapar may not have liked this but the fact is her people chose India because they were Hindus. They did not convert to Islam so as to remain in Pakistan.
such profound upheavals necessitated the formation of new historical narratives
Nope. Hindu historians had already constructed them. The first History Departments in Indian Universities date to before the Great War. Since there are diminishing returns to historical research, Thapar's generation contributed nothing. Still, because the country was moving to the Left, they became Professors. At a later point, Western campuses became infested with 'post-colonial theory' & Feminism & Queer theory etc,- i.e. moaning about White heterosexual people with dicks. But India didn't want that shite. History had been regarded as a subject fit only for stupid losers for the longest time.
–accounts that explained what collective pasts
Religion had united India. It is what keeps it united. Hindus don't want history to repeat itself. Either they hang together or submit to the salami tactics of Muslim or other foreign invaders.
united these societies and what religious, social and cultural shifts created dissension and division.
Invasions. Nothing else.
The unification of India itself created a political entity that needed to root its vast diversity in a richer understanding of its history and heritage.
Nonsense! History is bunk. Religion matters- more particularly if you are a kaffir & Muslims think you are deserving of death for that reason.
Thapar was of a generation of Indians who sought to define the new Indian identity.
No. She taught a low IQ subject to nice girls at Miranda House. Then she taught the same shite to the kids of bureaucrats who could no longer afford to send their kids abroad. JNU was set up after devaluation. Why go to Cambridge to become a Commie when you could do it more cheaply in New Delhi?
Though an established academic historian with scant familiarity with schoolbooks,
She had to read them in school.
she agreed to write two history textbooks for the government as part of a project for the newly formed nation.
No. She was asked to write them after Indira Gandhi lurched to the Left & broke with 'the Syndicate'. Since she needed Commie & DMK support in Parliament, the Left-wing/anti-Brahmin ideology was promoted.
These were targeted for middle school, and one was on the history of ancient India and the other on its medieval period. True to her academic rigor, however, she refused to perpetuate pious myths or distorted colonial interpretations of the Indian past.
She told modish lies instead. Muslims were a captive vote bank for Indira.
She insisted that her books would provide a kind of history that would contribute to the Indian child’s nuanced understanding of the past through critical interpretation and evidence-based research.
She made history more boring than previously. Nobody cared. If the Left had delivered economically, we'd all have been Leftists. But it fucked up. Mrs. Gandhi moved in a right-ward direction from the mid-Seventies. Everybody did.
It must be said, evidence-based research- scientific archaeology, statistical Economic historiography, &, later on, DNA studies- did have an impact. The Ayodhya case was decided against Thapar & Co precisely because they had no evidence for their crazy claims. But Sita Ram Goel did have evidence. He won.
The 'history wars' didn't greatly matter. The growth of political Islam scared the shit out of Kaffirs. This is because they could hear these guys saying 'killing Kaffirs is a good thing. Even if you yourself get killed while doing it, you will get plenty of virgins in paradise'.
Hindutva- i.e. a unified, ecumenical, Hinduism which rejects caste & regionalism- became vital to preserving Hindu hegemony in areas where they were the majority. Other areas could be as anti-Hindu as they pleased.
Thapar’s textbooks were published in the late 1960s and quickly sparked controversy.
Nobody gave a fuck. India signed a Defence pact with the Soviets. Everybody agreed this was vital for national security. Thus, so long as the Soviet Union survived, the pretence of 'Socialist Secularism' had to be maintained.
In 1969, members of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee insisted that Thapar’s textbook state categorically that Aryans were indigenous to India.
Some did. Others were all like 'why great sin in a previous life was I guilty of to get stuck in this dead-end committee? It's not like textbook publishers have money to bribe you. They won't even send around a couple of hookers or a case of whiskey to get my vote.'
Thapar could not find sufficient evidence to support the claim and the demand was ultimately rejected.
Nothing wrong with saying- 'I'm Aryan. My ancestors were from Europe. Unfortunately, my Mum dropped me into a bucket of ink when I was a baby. Otherwise I'd look like Arsulla Undress.'
More controversies followed. Thapar’s textbooks were accused of not doing justice to regional personalities.
Fair point. But State Governments could have their own textbooks written in the vernacular language.
Religious organizations felt their respective religions and religious teachers had not been properly glorified.
Because Brahmins would vote for the dynasty in any case.
In her textbook on ancient India, Thapar noted that ancient Aryans venerated the cow, but like all cattle-herders, ate cow meat on ritual occasions or when honoring a guest.
But the cow was believed to gain Heaven by being sacrificed.
Hindu organizations protested, arguing that not eating beef was, and always had been, essential to Hinduism.
Why alienate the high castes? Do you want the RSS to get more recruits?
A lengthy article in a leading newspaper argued that there was no mention of eating beef in ancient Sanskrit sources, to which Thapar responded by quoting a text that unambiguously refuted the claim.
Sadly, there are no ancient texts which aren't ambiguous. There's no way to prove 'sacrifice a goat' doesn't mean 'provide parched grain for the sacrifice'. Archaeological evidence can give us information about what people ate. Thapar's problem was that she was neither a Sanskritist nor trained in archaeology. Thus, she relied on secondary sources. But this meant, she was adding noise, of an ideological sort, to signal.
This did not stop her critics; Thapar was further castigated, and told she was questioning orthodox opinion and encouraging students to do likewise.
No. She was labelled a Marxist- which wasn't quite true. Still, the fact is her elder brother was close to Indira. If not influential herself, she was related to people with influence. But such people had grown disillusioned with Marxism & wanted a bigger role for Markets. Would Thapar adjust to this new reality? No. Why? It is because Western campuses had become a safe-space for Virtue Signalling or Grievance Studies. Thapar- a Hindu from a family rendered refugees by Muslims- was consistently anti--Hindu. This type of 'moral inversion' meant she was like the Jewish Professor who keeps moaning about the sufferings of the Palestinians. In any case, Thapar was posh. True, she hadn't been to Oxbridge but that was only because she was a thicko.
Even more attacks followed. In the 1970s, officials lobbied for her textbooks to be proscribed.
Janata came to power in 1977. The Jan Sangh was part of that coalition. Marxists too weren't keen on Thapar. She was a 'bourgeois idealist' misleading students by pushing a reformist agenda.
Attacks came again in the late 1990s,
when the Sangh Parivar was able to form a government
as her books were accused of being anti-Hindu and anti-Indian, charges for which she received death threats.
All kaffirs are under threat of death by reason of being kaffirs.
Through it all, Thapar argued for the legitimacy of independent historical interpretations based on reliable evidence.
She failed to provide it when it counted most- viz. the Ayodhya trial.
She asserted that textbooks should not merely recite cherished myths but provide researched and rational explanations of the past.
This is where she & her chums fell down. Why spend years studying boring shite if all you can do at the end of it is tell stupid lies same as any nutter with a blog.
Thapar’s lifelong study of the nearly 2,000 years of history
Indian history is much older. The Indus Valley civilization was discovered a few years before she was born. Sadly, independent India couldn't afford to spend very much on Archaeology. History was merely shite duffers mugged up to pass an exam and, hopefully, get a clerical job.
revealed an Indian past that was more fluid, both temporally and spatially, than the periods delineated in textbooks or the boundaries drawn on maps.
Everybody already knows this.
People and their beliefs migrated, mingled, interplayed and intersected to create the richness and uniqueness of India.
Nehru gassed on about this when Thapar was a kid. He was greatly enthused by his visit to Mohenjodaro in 1936. By then, people saw History as an exciting tale of vast migrations. Thapar's job was to make it as boring as fuck. People who get excited by history might want to change it so they themselves benefit. But this would mean quitting non-STEM subjects & getting a fucking job. Mamta Bannerjee has degrees in History. But she spent her life battling Commies in the streets. For the last 15 years her goons have beaten them so thoroughly they now vote for the BJP. Some say Mamta will lose the elections because she is seen as too pro-Muslim. But Mamta, even in opposition, is still Mamta. She is the fucking Terminator and will be back.
Thapar challenged the purported singularity of Indian heritage,
Why bother? Her native Lahore had rejected it when she was 15 years old.
and the timeline of a Hindu golden age followed by a Muslim period of decline that facilitated British conquest.
The Marathas, Sikhs, Gurkhas etc. had reasserted them before the British conquest. The problem was that they kept fighting with each other. But that's why the Muslims had been able to invade in the first place.
She argued against the notion formed by historians within the British colonial structure that Indian civilization was static and lacked a sense of history,
No historian said any such thing. James Mill worked for John Company. He was pushing the Company line that India's laws & customs had never changed. Thus it was mischievous to demand reform- e.g. the law banning Suttee. Some Indians knew this even in the 1820s.
an inertia broken only by British colonial administration legislating change.
That's what they didn't want to do. Raja Ram Mohun Roy went to London to try to get Parliament to embrace more such change- e.g. permitting unlimited immigration of White Christians (to keep the Muslims in check).
Even in the United States, history textbooks are not infrequently a battlefield for controversy.
Some claim that George Washington wasn't a Lesbian of colour.
On the one hand, they are often assumed to convey a generally-accepted version of the past, one that allows students to comprehend basic concepts as well as grand narratives.
If you need to be taught to do this, you probably also have trouble tying your shoe-laces.
But history is concerned with change, and as circumstances change, and new sources come to light, historical interpretation evolves.
The market determines what is supplied- though no doubt some senile Professors with tenure can continue to churn out shite.
When fresh research challenges received opinions, the reaction can precipitate dismay and rejection.
A storm in a teacup. Nobody greatly cares unless rampaging mobs start toppling statues & looting shopping malls. Then, some politician or other will point the finger at some 'woke' bunch of historians who 'brainwashed' kids. But mobs like looting & toppling statues. The solution has to do with policing, not whining about wokeness.
Thapar is a scholar who has defended the methodology of the historian
her methodology is to repeat stupid lies.
even in the face of the most virulent criticism.
Some people thought she & her pals might be helpful in keeping the Congress-Left alliance under Manmohan. This wasn't true. She & they were useless. At the margin, they help the BJP just as the US visa ban helped Modi.
At the award ceremony for the 2008 Kluge Prize, which Thapar shared with historian Peter Brown, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington thanked John W. Kluge for enabling the award as a “pinnacle recognition of the kind of scholarship that the country needs – the world needs.”
The US was killing Muslims on an industrial scale. They needed to pretend that it was actually the Hindus who were doing so. Since Manmohan was doing the 123 nuclear deal with the US (even threatening to break with the Left on the issue) the Americans were happy to give a prize to Romilla who was believed to be Sonia's advisor on Indian culture & history.
Thapar’s work exemplifies scholarly courage summoned to the interest of her country as it grappled with the legacy of its own history – even a history 2,000 years old.
It had cities 5000 years ago.
As Thapar writes in reflecting on the present-day effects of our ancient past on today:
Thapar didn't write about American or European history. Still, she was probably pleased lots of Muslims were being killed by the Yanks & their NATO allies.
“Ancient history in particular has a special significance for contemporary times, especially in developing societies.
It really doesn't. America developed pretty well. It doesn't give a fuck about its ancient history. Iraq has a very ancient history. That didn't stop the Yanks from conquering it and enabling things to actually get worse there.
In part this is because so much of the ancient past is still visible and evocative.
Not in Washington.
But more importantly, identities, and the heritage linked to nationalism, still hinge on the interpretation of early history.
They are wholly unconnected. Economics matters. Armies matter. Ancient history is just ancient history.
In any broader understanding of the present it helps to be informed not only about the recent past but also about the remote past:
If you have data-sets for long term climactic trends- sure. But that's smart stuff done by STEM subject mavens.
the citizens of the future need willingness to distinguish critically but also to explore connections.”
They can do this well enough by Googling or asking Copilot.
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