Nov 23, 1998

Controversy and Arun Shourie are inseparable. He has taken on governments, politicians and corporate houses, championed contentious causes and assumed the role of India's permanent gadfly. After questioning the mythology centred on Babasaheb Ambedkar and offending Dalit activists, Shourie has now targeted Left historians. Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (ASA, Rs 350), released last week, is a characteristically robust attack on India's history establishment. He has accused it of shoddy scholarship, wilful distortion and even milking the exchequer. He spoke to Deputy Editor Swapan Dasgupta on his latest battle. Extracts:

Let me start with a question you accuse communists of constantly asking. Why now?
It is what the Gita calls a war unasked for. We should never shirk work that has been brought upon us. Some magazines published reports that the BJP Government had changed the resolution of the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) by converting "rational" into "national". It was a concoction by some CPI(M) members and I learnt from the ICHR staff that the letter circulated to the newspapers was typed in the ICHR office. A staff member told one of these so-called historians that it was not true. He replied, "Who cares? Let it go." That was the origin. And every newspaper just swallowed it. I contacted the editors but none of them retracted the story. Even the story carried by India Today was about the eminent historians not having accepted one penny as if there was a genuine other side to it.

So you believe that in this controversy there is no other side?
Not yet. Not in the three limited matters which I have touched upon in the book. Which are: the technology by which they acquire these institutions and the uses to which they put it to; the pickpocketing that they do; the complete and systematic perversion of facts. I don't think there is another side.

It's curious that it took a non-historian to question some of these assumptions. Why hasn't this challenge come from within the discipline of history?
There are too many establishments in India, the Indian journalists service, the Indian intellectual service, the Indian historians service. They capture institutions. There is a great timidity in India in all intellectual circles. You want a promotion in the history department, increase in research funds, funds for travel, promotion, everything depends upon certificates from these persons. If you want to challenge the accepted notions, you not only need a person who is outside the discipline but one who is deaf to the reproaches of these persons.

Your interventions in history have aroused claims and counter-claims that you are waging a proxy political war?
These are allegations. Have they found anything wrong with my facts? When they quote a source, I look it up and I find it is the opposite. Then they say that he did not look up the correct one. Whatever they write is politics. So why are they so surprised that an honest man may also write?

Part of the problem in your view has been caused by shoddy scholarship and shoddier journalism.
Yes. That, as well as slavish scholarship and journalism. One and a half paras from Stalin's Short History of the CPSU(B). Just look up any one the books of R.S. Sharma, Satish Chandra, Romila Thapar or D.N. Jha. It is the slavish mentality, providing examples that substantiate those one and half paras on periodisation. Even the Soviet historians have liberated themselves from those categories. We got stuck in the categories of the 1920s and 1930s.

But you haven't stopped at mere intellectual slavishness. You have actually accused these "eminent histor-ians" of milking the state.
Yes. It is a pitiable milking by current standards -- all for just Rs 12,000 or Rs 6.5 lakh. But it is a gross misuse of authority and position. If the NBT or NCERT send a proposal that R.C. Majumdar's edited Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan series on the history of India should be translated into Indian languages, these people would pass a resolution saying that it was not worth translating into any Indian language. And lo and behold -- they will recommend their own works or that of EMS (Namboodiripad), the great historian. The deputy director of ICHR gives a project to Dr Paramatma Saran, one of the great medievalists in India. He translates and sends it to ICHR. After his death, the deputy director takes that manuscript and gets a PhD for himself from Rajasthan University without changing anything and publishes the book dedicated to Nurul Hasan and thanking Irfan Habib who wrote a laudatory foreword to it. In his office there is a picture of him presenting his book to the then President Shankar Dayal Sharma, another great scholar. So it's not just milking the state. Some people in ICHR have told me that well known sociologist A.R. Desai had been given a project to compile the history of the trade union movement in India in 15 volumes. He completed the task before he died. Then it mysteriously disappeared. The current ICHR chairman has succeeded in tracing these manuscripts inspite of non-cooperation. By doing so, he has deprived 15 people of their mock PhDs.

None of these details have been seriously contested. But your detractors say they will not give you the pleasure of a defamation suit because you are beneath contempt?
Why aren't they replying through the newspapers. They are always issuing statements, these six eminent historians, 10 leading intellectuals. They put on lofty airs because they have no answers.

How should people, governments and public spirited individuals approach the question of teaching history in schools?
I feel that each time their books are recommended, mine should be too. The students should see what great perversity they are being made to swallow. There is no sufficient professional scrutiny, no professional discourse on what has been published. The same thing gets repeated. Nobody goes back to the sources. Also, it is a bad idea for governments to get into the business of preparing textbooks just as it is a bad idea to have institutions like ICHR. It only leads to the patronage of intellectuals. This is the bad legacy of Indian socialism.

Will the book be of assistance to the BJP governments which have also been accused of doctoring history?
Firstly I do not know what changes have been brought about by them. I have asked them (Left historians) to show me those textbooks which they think have been changed. But they haven't. It can't be that you set one standard and any departure from that stand is communal. The cure is that if someone perverts the next set of history text books then they should also be subjected to professional scrutiny.

Has the spirit of inquiry completely gone out of Indian intellectuals?
Yes, I think so. By and large our work is very derivative in most subjects. I find this in the case of many subjects. In history it is slavishness to the verbiage of the 1920s and 1930s. There is a lack of creativity even in activist movements in India. When an issue became prominent in the West, five years later you'll see it prominent in India like feminism, human rights, big dams, child labour and child prostitution. We are so blind that someone has to yank our eyelids open for us. I am considered disreputable if I depart from the standards of political correctness set by the establishment.

Why does it fall on you to yank open the eyelids, whether it is on Ambedkar, Ayodhya or ICHR?
First, I'm deaf, and secondly, I'm shameless. I am not looking for a job and find it quite easy to survive without a job. Of course, they will say he is not a historian, that it is part of a political agenda. It starts with allegations and smear and will not stop till they say facts are not as important as social revolution. It doesn't affect me. I hope readers will see through it.

© Living Media India Ltd