Predicaments of Secular Histories

Neeladri Bhattacharya

The professional history writing that developed in India in the early decades after independence was powerfully shaped by the intellectual culture of the time. New India looked forward to a future in which democracy would unfold, the rights of free citizens would be defined, and the commitments made during the national movement would be realized. Troubled by memories of the communal carnage and trauma of the Partition yearswhen thousands of Hindus and Muslims killed each otherthe intellectuals of this new India struggled to create a secular and democratic public culture. Inspired by the ideals of democratic citizenship, they hoped for a society where individuals would be emancipated from their religious and affective ties and reborn as secular citizens of a democratic state. Historians turned to the past to counter communal representations of history, question communal stereotypes, and write a secular national history. The critique of communal prejudice was seen as necessary for developing a history that was scientific and objective. To be authentic, it was believed, this new history had to be both scientific and secular. In the decades that followed, sectarian conflicts continued. New trends in historical writing emerged; historians became aware of the problems of both objectivism and the meaning of narrative truth; but the battle against communal histories continued to determine the way new histories were framed. In this essay I will look at the way this battle has shaped the agendas of secular historiesits terms of reference, its silences and erasures, its tropes of analyses, its fears and anxieties. I will reflect on the predicaments of doing secular histories: the need to simultaneously critique communal frames and transcend the limits that such a critique imposes. Through an inner critique of secular historiesfor I locate myself within the traditionthe essay will discuss the larger problem of writing history.1
1. There have been several powerful critiques of the concept of secularism. See Ashis Nandy, The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance, in Mirrors of Violence, ed.
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Beyond Boundaries

Communal histories of India are premised on one fundamental assumption: that India is a society fractured into two overarching religious communitiesHindus and Muslims. These communities are not only separate and distinct but also irreconcilably opposed. Their cultures, values, social practices, and beliefs have little in common. Their histories are histories of discord: of mutual hostility, hatred, conflict, battles for domination. The boundaries of their identities are well etched, firmly defined, and categorically drawn, the lines deepened by a long history of mutual antagonism.2 For many years secular histories have battled against these ideas and the histories through which they have been naturalized.3 Anxious about the growth of communalism and haunted by the fear of communal violence, secular historians have returned to the past to build the premises of a humane, secular, and democratic present. They have questioned communal assumptions, deconstructed communal stereotypes, mined the archives for alternate evidence, reread the texts, and presented secular counternarratives. But secular histories have been strongly defined by the history of their origin. The desire to argue against the constitutive assumptions of communal history has shaped the questions that have been posed, the narrative choices that have been made, and the way arguments have been elaborated. Secular historians have questioned communal stereotypes by turning them upside down and have countered communal assumptions by inverting them. Where communal historians can only see the hard lines of the boundaries that separate communities, secular historians have emphasized the porosity and open-endedness of these boundaries. Where communal historians look at the communities as homogenous and unitary, secular historians point to the heterogeneity and fragmentation within them. Where comVeena Das (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 6993; T. N. Madan, Secularism in Its Place, Journal of Asian Studies 46 (1987): 74759; and Partha Chatterjee, Secularism and Tolerance, in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 34579. For a nuanced and sophisticated defense of the concept see Rajeev Bhargava, What Is Secularism For? in Secularism and Its Critics, 468542. 2. An early assessment of these histories can be found in Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, and Harbans Mukhia, Communalism and the Writing of Indian History (New Delhi: Peoples Publishing House, 1969). For a discussion of communal stereotypes and frames of reference see Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modern India (Delhi: Vani Educational Books, 1984); Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Mushirul Hasan, Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 18851930 (Delhi: Manohar, 1991). 3. Chandra, Communalism. 58

munal historians look at the past as a time of communal discord, secular historians have sought to underline the elements of concord, harmony, and togetherness. Where communal historians hear only the voices of orthodoxy and sectarianism, secularists have searched for histories of syncretism and tolerance. Secular histories continue to be framed within the terms of these oppositions. In recent years the arguments have been nuanced, issues have been problematized, new narrative strategies have been adopted, and the horizons of history have expanded. Yet in the finest accounts we can still discover some of the recurring tropes of secular histories that I am referring to. Let me elaborate by discussing a recent book, Muzaffar Alams The Languages of Political Islam, c. 12001800. I choose to focus on this book because it is a brilliant account of the history of Islam in India, destined to become a classic; yet even the finest texts on such subjects, including Alams, are structured by the recurring tropes I am referring to. Alam sets out to counter the abiding image of Islam as a closed, dogmatic, intolerant faith whose doctrines are fixed and unchanging, their authority deriving from canonical sanctified texts that are not subject to interpretation and change. In many ways produced and circulated by the West, this image haunts the West and is frequently invoked to legitimate attacks on Islamic states. It often even shapes the way Muslims perceive their own religion and define their own identity. And in India it is a stereotype that is central to the Hindu communal representations of the Muslim other and provides the counterpoint against which Hindus are projected as tolerant, open-minded, flexible, forbearing, and forgiving. Alam effectively deconstructs the stereotype and questions each of its assumptions. Through a rich exploration of the languages of political Islam in India, Alam shows how Islam evolved as it moved from its Perso-Islamic context to newer lands and confronted new cultures, new ideas, new societies, and new polities. This contact produced a dialogue that transformed both Islam and the local cultures. Islam opened itself to non-Islamic influences, incorporating local practices, redefining its original ideals. While at the elite level the connection with the Perso-Turkish tradition remained powerful, at the popular level Islam was Indianized. The Sufismystic saintsreflected on the mundane world in a language steeped in syncretic ideas: they absorbed Hindu influences, talked of removing misery among those in distress, and underlined the need to create a common basis for appreciating the ultimate reality. Alam shows, in a highly textured account, how the vocabulary of Islamic politics itself changed. Words like governance, obedience, resistance, and victory came to acquire new meanings. Shariathe Islamic legal codewas reinterpreted. It was not treated as a fixed text, frozen in

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time, reflective of the power of Islamic orthodoxy, a code that all Muslims were doomed to follow. The sharia was continuously reworked in ways that could make it adequate to the demands of governance in an alien culture. Consequently, it came to acquire more than one meaning. So over the centuries, writes Alam, the language of the Islamic East moved towards a syncretic mix: a legacy of cooperation and assimilation developed from the days of the Sultanate to the end of Mughal rule; and conflict situations tended to be resolved along a pattern informed by this strong political tradition of accommodation within medieval Islam.4 Implicit in this account is a linear history of increasing assimilation and accommodation leading to an ultimate breakdown of rigidities, an erosion of dogmas, a blurring of the boundaries of faith, a creative openness. Cultures and religions open out to each other, absorb influences, mutate. The pure is progressively alloyed, the premises of understanding develop, orthodoxy is contained. In Alams complex narrative, this teleology does not unfold unquestioned within a simple, untroubled time. He shows both the contradictions within these ideas and the limits of Sufi assimilation. Many Sufi textsthe miracle stories and hagiographiesbegin with a plea for accommodation but end by arguing the need to mark difference. They talk of commonness and the importance of understanding other religions but end by asserting the superiority of Islam. One Sufi saint, Shaikh Abd al-Quddus Gangohi, wrote to Babar, the first Mughal emperor, pleading that only pious Muslims be appointed as government officials and that Hindus be excluded from high offices and denied financial assistance in any form: they had to realize that they were inferior to Muslims.5 Later we hear the worried voice of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, who lamented Islams failure to confront Hinduism. How is this evidence to be narrativized, written into a story that is about the process of assimilation of non-Islam into Islam? How does one write about such conflicting voices without disrupting the internal coherence of the metastory? Alam contains this disruptive threat only by reaffirming at the end his belief in a secular teleology. The counterreaction of the orthodoxy, the combative assertion of Islamic superiority, could not derail the assimilative processes: A nonsectarian and open ended cultural politics, with the aim of balancing the conflicting claims of different communities, continued to assert its presence.6 Syncretic
4. Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, c. 12001800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005), 141. 5. Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, 161. 6. Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, 168. 60

traditions matured; a hybrid local languageHindavibecame the language of the court; collective festivities and rituals came to be celebrated regularly. Ultimately the forces that sought to contain the process of assimilation were themselves contained. What we have here is a picture in which the history of accommodation marches ahead, overcoming all constraints. It is a picture produced partly by the way the narrative is constructed. The story begins with a discussion of assimilative processes, then talks of assimilations limits, and ends by returning to the assimilation story. The potential threat of the orthodoxy is thus narratively contained. The contestatory voicesthe anxieties of the orthodoxy, the fears of Gangohi and Sirhindiare underlined and then assimilated within the larger story of accommodation. Alams narrative is powerful and complex, but framed within a secular teleology. Within Alams story of the transformation of political Islam in India there may be an alternative suppressed narrative of continuous dialogue and conflict, of cultural assimilation and reaffirmation of difference, of the dissolution of older boundaries and the creation of new ones. The story of accommodation need not be a linear story of increasing open-endedness. Hybridization, the loss of original essence, does not imply the dissolution of boundaries of difference. While critiquing an anti-Islamic sectarianism that associates Islam only with the voice of orthodoxy, secular histories need not underrate the power of this voice.
Of Heroes and Villains

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Each genre of historical narrative constructs its own heroes and villains. The heroes embody the ideals affirmed in the narrative; they become the bearers of all that is celebrated. The villains symbolize evil; they stand for values and norms that are being critiqued. In simpler teleologies, the heroes reveal the essence of history; their actions point to the future, to the telos toward which history moves, and they enable this forward march, this unfolding. In this sense heroes are often seen as born before their time, presaging the time to come. Critiques of particular frameworks of histories therefore inevitably seek to resymbolize persons and identify new individuals who could become the bearers of an alternate history, an alternate vision. The heroes of one history often become the villains of another. So a battle over persons becomes important in the wars over history. In this war, the personification of ideals goes hand in hand with the idealization of persons. Heroes are uncrowned and villains are rehabilitated. To understand the politics of secular history, we need to look at these processes through which indi61

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viduals are personified and repersonified. I seek to do this by drawing on some of the debates on medieval Indian history. In Hindu communal representations, as we have seen, the medieval ages were a dark time for India. During this period Muslims invaded the country and established a tyrannical rule, destroying Hindu temples, devastating the land, oppressing the people, and forcibly imposing their religion. For Hindus it was a tragic time: their religion was under threat; their culture was being undermined, their women were being dishonored, and their men were being humiliated. It was a time of pillage and rape, intolerance and violence. The figure of the Muslim came to personify the evils of the time. As agents of this history and bearers of this past, Muslims could never escape the qualities inscribed on their body: they wereeverywhere and foreverto be associated with brutality and religious fanaticism. The coherence of this stereotype was threatened by figures like Akbar, the Mughal emperor who ruled between 1556 to 1605. Even Hindu communal historians had to concede that Akbar was no religious bigot. But his reign was seen as only a temporary interlude within an otherwise cruel and tragic era. For Hindu communal historians, it is not Akbar but Aurangzebthe last of the Great Mughalswho embodied the essence of Muslim rule in India. Aurangzeb was seen as a bigot and a fanatic: he imposed a rule of sharia, declared a religious war (jihad) against infidels, reimposed jizyah (a tax on nonbelievers), and adopted a puritanical lifestyle dictated by the sharia.7 So tyrannical was his rule that the Hindu population rose in rebellion, creating a crisis that ultimately led to the collapse of the empire. How were secular historians to counter this image of Mughal rulers? Clearly it was linked to the politics of communalism in the present. It sought to villainize Muslims, categorize them as a homogenous community, mark them with collective guilt, and transform them into objects of Hindu anger and hatred. Secular historians found in Akbar a figure they could celebrate. As a ruler, Akbar sought to marginalize the orthodox elements, undercut the power of the theologians, appoint Hindus to high offices, and integrate different sections of society. The ideal of sulh-i-kul that he believed in saw different religions as paths to the same god and emphasized the need for the state to be impartial: the state was not to discriminate between followers of different religions, for all of them had some merits as well as faults. To secular historians it seemed that Akbar symbolized all the values that were dear to themthe values of secularism and liberalism. In an ethnocentric move, categories of the present were mapped onto
7. S. R. Sharma, The Religious Policy of Mughal Emperors (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1940). 62

the past; ideals of the modern age were discovered in earlier times. Even as sensitive a historian as Satish Chandra characterizes the state that Akbar established as polyreligious, tolerant, open-ended, liberal, and secular, as if there is no problem in describing individuals or states in the sixteenth century as secular and liberal. It was easier to celebrate Akbar as a hero, but more difficult to repersonify Aurangzeb. How was it possible to explain the seemingly overwhelming evidence of his bigotry and oppression? Did he not impose the tax on the Hindus, destroy Hindu temples, and execute Hindu rulers? Did he not succumb to the pressures of the theologians and allow the sharia to determine his actions? For many years, among secular historians, there was an embarrassed silence regarding Aurangzeb, or a grudging admission that his long reign of forty-nine years (16581707) was in fact a time of bigotry and oppression. But these historians attempted to see this period as a temporary interlude, a deviation, and not characteristic of Mughal rule. The strategic move was to minimize the larger significance of his rule, isolate him within the Mughal lineage as the bad guy, and turn the historical gaze on Akbar, underlining his greatness and representing him as the key figure of the time. The expansion and consolidation of the empire was linked to the politics of Akbar, and the disintegration was seen as the natural consequence of Aurangzebs bigotry. The efficacy of secularism, its universal relevance, was thus reaffirmed through the narrative of the past. But then from the late 1960s a new picture of Aurangzeb emerged in secular histories.8 The reinterpretation that followed featured two strategic moves. First, the unitary and flattened image of Aurangzeb as a hardened bigot was questioned. His life and actions, it was suggested, could not be captured through this simple stereotype. Aurangzeb acted in different ways and implemented different policies at different points in life. The politics of his early reign needed to be differentiated from that of the later period, and the conflicting policies within each phase had to be understood. Second, a distinction was made between the personal and the public, the religious and the political. Actions and policies that were seemingly dictated by religious considerations, it was suggested, were in reality determined by political expediency. One had to unravel the real behind the apparent, distinguish the rhetorical from the causal. In a series of important essays published since 1969, Satish Chandra has offered a rereading of Aurangzeb.9 Chandra accepted that on the personal level
8. One of the earliest reassessments was in Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1966). 9. See the following articles by Satish Chandra: Jizyah and the State in India during the Seventeenth Century and Religious Policy of Aurangzeb during the Later Part of His ReignSome 63

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Aurangzeb was undoubtedly orthodoxthat he wanted to conform to the dictates of the sharia and respect the theologians. But like the emperors before him, he was a realist and did not wish to destroy the social support of his rule. In 1679, he did reimpose jizyah on the infidels, but this action was not dictated by the pressures of the ulemas or the dictates of the sharia or even his personal bigotry. It was determined by political expediency: a desire to unify a segmented ruling class, to control the growing conflicts and tensions that were pulling them apart, in order to confront the rebellions against Mughal rule. If Hindus were killed and Hindu temples destroyed, it was again not because of any fanatical hostility of Aurangzeb toward the infidels; it was for political reasons. Only when confronted with resistance from Hindu rulers did Aurangzeb demolish the temples in their land, humiliate them, impose jizyah, and execute Hindu rulers in a symbolic show of power. Even in his most intolerant phase, his most Islamist phase, Auragnzeb was prompted primarily by political concerns and pragmatic calculations. What this narrative does, first of all, is temporally delimit the phase of intolerance. The narrative of Aurangzebs reign begins with a period of laxity, enters a phase of rigidity, and ends with a return to laxitywhen all the institutions and practices of religious autocracy were dismantled. Aurangzebs emphasis on Holy Law and Islam lasted no longer than a decade within a long rule of fifty years. Framed within such a beginning and ending, the story of Aurangzebs life acquires a new meaning. Second, within this narrative, causality is sifted in such a way that religion is inevitably displaced and never appears constitutive of action. My argument becomes clear if we look at the way conflicting evidence is narrativized. When Aurangzeb captured the Maratha leader Sambhaji, a nonMuslim, in 1689, there was disagreement among the nobles about the way he should be treated. Some said his life should be spared and he should be kept in confinement, while others recommended harsh action. Aurangzeb decided to execute him. Why? Chandra quotes Khafi Khan to argue that the decision to execute Sambhaji was political, an attempt to punish rebels: The Emperor was in favour of seeking the opportunity of getting rid of these prime movers of strife, and hoped that with a little exertion their fortress would be reduced.10 Having

Considerations, Indian Historical Review 13 (July 1986January 1987): 88101; The Deccan Policy of the Mughals (II) under Aurangzeb, Indian Historical Review 5 (July 1978January 1979): 13551; and Society, Culture and the State in Medieval India: An Essay in Interpretation, Niharranjan Ray Memorial Lecture, Delhi, 1991. Most of these essays are now collected in Chandra, Essays on Medieval Indian History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). 10. Statement of Khafi Khan quoted in Chandra, Essays on Medieval Indian History, 333. 64

dissociated the action from any religious motivation, Chandra writes: However, Aurangzeb tried to give a religious gloss to a political decision by referring the matter to masters of Holy law and Faith and the dignitaries of the Church and state who, in turn, decreed Sambhajis execution in consideration of the harshness and insult that he had practised by slaying and imprisoning Muslims and plundering the cities of Islam.11 What is it that allows us to consider Khafi Khans statement the real clue to the intentions of Aurangzeb? How do we say that Aurangzebs attempt to consult the theologians was in some way inauthentic, that it was only to give a religious gloss to a political decision? My aim here is not to understand Aurangzebs intentions. I only wish to see how facts are emplotted within structures of narrative, how conflicting evidence is negotiated, how causal connections are made through narrative strategies, and how the narrative truth emerges in the process. What we see at play here, yet again, is a process of secularization of the past, a mode of narrativization in which the religious is consistently separated from the political and the political is persistently seen as untainted by religion. Chandras essays on Aurangzeb are highly nuanced; they grapple with a range of conflicting evidence and seek to arrive at a balanced reading of a controversial historical figure. But they are torn by an inner tension that often characterizes secular histories. The conflicting voices from the past that Chandra seeks to reconcile refuse to merge into any simple coherence. Confronted with communal stereo types, and aware of the urgency of countering them, secular historians have too often framed their arguments within problematic binaries. To critique the communalist valorization of the religious, secular historians have tried to see in every action only the play of nonreligious interestseither political or economic. Does secular history have to focus only on the political and underestimate the shaping power of religion? Is it not possible to look at the mutual articulation of the religious and political? Can the narratives of religion and power in premodern times be so easily separated?
The Rhetoric of Facts

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The battle over histories is often fought through a rhetoric of facts. Communal historians in India have sought to counter the facts of secular histories, while secular historians have questioned what communal historians have produced as facts. Can secular histories adopt such a strategy of critique? Can we really
11. Chandra, Essays on Medieval Indian History, 333. 65

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counter a framework of an argument by demonstrating that some of the facts within the argument are wrong? Is this not to surrender to nineteenth-century positivism? Many critics have pointed to the empiricist premises of such a mode of argumentation. These critics are right, but not entirely. A debate over facts remains important even when we take the narrativist thesis seriously. What is implied when we say our understanding of the past depends on how we narrativize the past, on what stories about the past we choose to tell or not tell? It clearly means that the meaning of our narrative would depend on how we build our story, how we embed the events within a plausible plot structure. If this is so, then the facts and events we choose to focus on and the significance we imbue them with become important. The facts then are not mere facts; they have signifying functions. If the narratives within which they are plotted lend events their particular historical significance, then the mode of emplotting the events in turn structures the meaning of the narratives. Thus the events exist as constitutive ingredients of a narrative. To question a narrative, therefore, we can demonstrate how it is constructed through specific kinds of erasures and attribution of significance; how certain events are talked of and not others, and why certain facts are foregrounded rather than others. A seeming questioning of facts may call into question an entire narrative, its claim to meaning and understanding. Let me elaborate through an example. Communal narratives of ancient India are constructed around two parallel, yet contradictory, theses. The first is the claim that Hindus have a pure Aryan descent. In these narratives, the Vedas the sacred texts of the Aryansare imbued with authenticity, and the time of the Vedas is seen as a time of creativity, growth, and development. The origin of all valid knowledge, all true values, norms, laws, religious ideals, and social practices, is traced back to Vedic times. Second, these communal histories are also narratives of indigenousness. They claim not only that the Aryans were the original ancestors of Hindus but that Hindus are the original inhabitants of India. Only through such a claim could Muslims be represented as outsiders, foreigners who came and imposed their oppressive rule in India. But such an argument could be made only through a series of other assertions. If Hindu descent was to be traced back to the Aryans, and if they were to be presented as the original inhabitants, then it was not possible to accept that the Aryans came from outside or that there were flourishing local cultures within India before the coming of the Aryans. Within this narrative, the Harappan civilization could not be celebrated and yet

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seen as pre-Aryan. It had to be presented as contemporary with the Vedic times, or as part of the Aryan culture. Secular histories have countered each of these claims and suggested that the Aryans were pastoralists who migrated into India from outsidepossibly Central Asiaand that there were highly developed settled cultures in India before the coming of the nomadic Aryans and that the sources of dynamism in ancient India could not all be traced back to the Vedic age.12 It is undoubtedly true that in critiquing communal representations, secular historians have too often used a rhetoric of facts. They have sought to show that the claims of communal historians are unsupported by researchthat their facts are wrong and their arguments untenable. Such a mode of argumentation inevitably rests on the belief that historical truths are established by examining the veracity of facts. This way of thinking still shapes the language of many who otherwise recognize that facts and events acquire their meaning only through acts of representation. But can we get away from these debates over facts? If the communal narrative of the Aryan past was produced through specific silences and erasures, and if the communal representation of the Aryan age could be constructed only through a narration of certain types of events, then we need to look at the politics of this narration, the politics of these choices. We need to scrutinize the types of events selected for narration and the strategies through which these events are inscribed with meaning: how the meanings of events are refigured and how they are brought together, emplotted within a narrative structure. This forces us to examine not just the structure of the narrative but also its constitutive ingredient elements. What I am trying to suggest is not only that the question of facts (in the form of, e.g., documents, evidence, archives) becomes important in the politics of histories but also that the meanings of these categories need to be reconceptualized.13
Reconstituting Memories

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Secular histories in India have sought to counter the memories that communal perspectives seek to normalize. If sectarian discourses authenticate their claims by referring to history, by arguing that history stands witness to the truth of what they say, secular histories return to the past to counter these claims, to build an
12. Romila Thapar, Early India: From Origins to AD 1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); R. S. Sharma, Looking for the Aryans (Madras: Orient Longman, 1995); Thomas Trautman, The Aryan Debate (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). 13. Paul Ricoeur helps us rethink these categories. See Time and Narrative, vols. 13 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 67

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alternate social memory. But how? In this section I will look at the different strategies deployed by secular historians over the years to constitute memories that would make intercommunity dialogues and understanding possible. The image of the Muslim iconoclast and plunderer is central to the Hindu communal imaginary. The individual who epitomizes this image most dramatically is Mahmud of Ghazni. Every schoolchild in India is told how Mahmud carried out seventeen plundering raids in the eleventh century, culminating in the infamous sack of the Somnath temple in 1026 CE. It is said that all the wealth of the temple was plundered and its idol mutilated. So traumatic was the experience that the event was indelibly etched in the Hindu mind, in the collective memory of the nation. Memories of the sack of Somnath, we are told, nurtured a profound feeling of anger, shame, and hurt and legitimated retributive violence in the centuries to come. The great historian Mohammad Habib was among the first to confront this social memory of Mahmuds invasions.14 In the 1930s, Habib adopted a threefold strategy for demystifying the image of a rampaging Muslim iconoclast destroying Hindu temples. First, he proceeded to explain what really happened. Mahmud was driven by greed and lust for wealth, said Habib, not religious fanaticism and bigotry. The rhetoric of religion was only to legitimate his actions within an orthodox Sunni Muslim social milieu. Second, Habib suggested that such memories of Muslim rule were produced by a colonial education system in which the textbooks inevitably represented Muslims as violent, intolerant, and fanatical in order to project the British as open-minded and sensitive to other cultures. Third, in opposition to the narratives of Muslim violence, Habib traced a long history of syncretism, tolerance, and intercommunity exchanges. Muslim Sufis were located within an even longer tradition of Hindu cosmopolitanism. Inspired by secularism and Marxism, Habib proceeded by displacing religion as a determinant of social action and referred to economic and material motives as the real explanation of what happened.15 Having demonstrated the logic of the real events, he then showed how colonial propaganda had produced a false image of the past and nurtured intercommunity hatred. Hindus and Muslims needed to return to a different past and tap the resource of a different memory, to eliminate

14. See K. A. Nizami, ed., Politics and Society during the Early Medieval Period: Collected Works of Professor Mohammad Habib, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Peoples Publishing House, 1974). 15. See also the discussion of Habib in Shahid Amin, On Telling the Muslim Conquest of North India, in History and the Present, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), 2443. 68

the forces of discord in the present and unify against British rule. Once again we see the argument framed within the familiar tropes of secular histories. In recent years historians have returned to the same events to tell a different story. In a fascinating book titled Somnatha: Many Voices of a History, Romila Thapar seeks to move beyond the attempt to explain what really happened in Somnatha.16 She juxtaposes different texts from the past, different records, to question the authenticity of the received version, and she looks at the way the events were recorded in different genres of text. The epic of conquest, recorded in the Turko-Persian sources, glorified Mahmud as a defender of faith. But the local traditions within the region do not dwell solely on the theme of violence and plunder, and they do not all say the same thing about what happened. In Thapars sensitive analysis the focus shifts from an explanation of the event to an understanding of how the event was perceived and represented and how its memory was constructed over time. Her object is not to get behind the intentions of Mahmud but to understand how his raids entered historical imagination. What are often considered the facts of the raids, argues Thapar, are in fact the products of a long process of historical fashioning and encoding of memories. From among the various versions, colonial officials chose to fix one version as authentic. Keen on underlining the violence and fanaticism of the Muslims, they found in the account of Muhammad Ibrahim Firishta a description of the event that confirmed their own prior picture of Muslim invaders. Canonized by the writings of Alexander Dow, this colonial story of Somnatha was generalized and reaffirmed in subsequent nationalist and communal writings. It came to constitute the accepted truth and shaped the memory of the event in collective imagination. Thapars account thus proceeds by peeling off layers of historical memories and locating them in the context of their production. Then, by unraveling the politics that lay behind the construction of the standard story, she seeks to subvert its claim to truth. In showing the heterogeneity of memories, she questions the processes of homogenization and universalization that went into the making of the canonical version.17
16. Thapar, Somnatha: Many Voices of History (New Delhi: Viking, 2004). 17. For an exploration of the constitution of different memories on the Muslim conquest see the fascinating essay by Amin, On Telling the Muslim Conquest. The relationship between historical memory and community identity has been explored in a number of recent works. See Shail Mayaram, Against History, Against State: Counter Perspectives from the Margins (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004); Sumit Guha, Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India, 14001900, American Historical Review 109 (2004): 10841109; Yasmin Saikia, Fragmented Memories: Struggling to Be Tai-Ahom in India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004); and Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 17001960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 69

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Thapars account shows how secular histories now operate with new narrative strategies. From an earlier concern with facticitywhether or not the specific event happened, whether its memory was true or falsehistorians have now turned to exploring the politics of memory, attempting to understand what is remembered and what is forgotten, showing how collective memories of trauma and humiliation are often shaped by the histories that we read. But does Thapar entirely break away from the framing tropes of earlier secular histories? Do we not see once again an effort to dissociate Mahmuds actions from the play of religion? Is not the rhetoric of religion in the epic of conquest being seen primarily as rhetoric meant to soothe the Sunni orthodoxy?
The Realm of the Popular

Secular histories have always been intimately connected to the politics of the public sphere. The public appeared as incitement to discourse and was the invisible addressee. Historians wrote for the public with a desire to shape public imagination. As we have seen, the project of secular history was to critique sectarian beliefs, demythologize historical consciousness, and constitute a new secular common sense. This transformative vision could be sustained in the early decades after independence. Over those years the discipline of history was gradually being professionalized, and secular historians acquired symbolic authority and institutional power. University syllabi were changed, new textbooks were introduced, and innumerable research projects were initiated. Yet by the 1980s it was clear that there were limits to the transformative vision. As political groups of the Hindu Right mobilized social support and the language of communal hatred circulated within the public sphere, optimistic visions of the construction of a secular public eroded. It became increasingly clear that peoples conceptions of the past were very often shaped not by what historians wrote but by the popular tracts that circulated in the bazaar. For a long while historians ignored these tracts, since their form of representation did not conform to any norm of the professional discipline of history. The tracts operated with rhetorical strategies common in mythic modes of narration but were unacceptable to professional historians. Let me illustrate by means of one example. Kya Kahati Hai Saryu Dhara, a tract written by Pratap Narain Mishra and sold commonly on the streets of Ayodhya in the 1980s, recounts the familiar sectarian Hindu narratives of Muslim tyranny and Hindu suffering. But it tells the story through the voice of the river that flows through Ayodhya. Within the text,
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the voice of the author is repressed: he does not tell the story; he hears it being told. The river becomes the living link with the past, a witness to history. The text authenticates itself through this rhetoric of presence: the story about the past is to be believed because it was witnessed; the events narrated are true because they were seen to have happened. Thus belief itself becomes a basis of authority. When the knowledge of the past comes down as tradition to be believed, it is not subject to questioning, not constituted through the power of reason. Tradition is knowledge that is hallowed, that is true because it was believed for generations to be true. Cheaply produced and sold on the streets, such tracts were widely read. It was through tracts like these that sectarian groups sought to reach out to people, capture their imagination, and shape their idea of the past. The recurring elements of communal narratives are woven into local stories that people can identify with. The spaces peopled by the actors in the story are familiar to the inhabitants of the locality. The local landscape thus becomes a stage for the enactment of epic histories, transformed into an enchanted space where mythic heroes live their extraordinary as well as ordinary lives. How are professional historians to engage with the social imagination that these tracts produce? One response has been cast in the objective language of truth. The effort here is to unmask and demystify the misrepresentation of truth within such narratives of the past by demonstrating their premises. The conviction is that facts will reveal, that truth will make things clear and allow reason to prevail. There has also been a second way of relating to these popular narratives of the past. Historians have argued that if people believe in a myth, in a story, in a specific representation of the past, we need to try and comprehend the premises of that understanding, the nature of the myth, the structure of representations.18 We have to see how specific conceptions come to be accepted as true and get inscribed in public imagination. We must look at the production of these stories and the politics of that production. If we wish to understand the public life of history, we cannot ignore the variety of ways in which history comes to acquire a life within different realms of public imagination. We have to take more seriously this realm of the popular.19 But the problem runs deeper. On closer scrutiny, the distinction between the
18. See Neeladri Bhattacharya, Myth, History and the Politics of Ramjanmabhoomi, in Anatomy of a Confrontation, ed. S. Gopal (New Delhi: Penguin, 1991), 12240. 19. Partha Chatterjee has emphasized this need in some of his recent writings. See Introduction: History and the Present, in Chatterjee and Ghosh, History and the Present, 123.

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Public Culture

popular and the academic tends to break down. It is not as if mythic stories and popular tracts have an appeal only within the popular domain, nor is the popular untouched by ideals of modernity, insulated from the world of Enlightenment Reason. Conversely, the public that reads academic histories may also believe in the image of the past that appears in popular tracts. People operate through different codes; they simultaneously believe in seemingly contradictory things, images, and notions; they struggle to negotiate this contradiction in different and innovative ways. People may respect the authority of professional history and yet believe in the idea of a hallowed tradition, seeing no conflict between these convictions.20 It is through such negotiations that people define the specific form in which they inhabit the modern, constituting in the process the very nature of that modernity.21 How does one make possible a conversation between worlds that coexist within public imagination but are incommensurable, conflicting, and yet seemingly compatible?22 If secular historians have to see themselves as public intellectuals, then they will have to confront this realm of the popular, not only to understand it, but also to engage more actively with it. They have to develop a language for this engagement.
Conclusion

We secular historians are haunted by a deep anxiety, a paralyzing fear of reaffirming somehow the founding assumptions of communal perceptions. We see violence on the street, the endless cycles of communal riots, the spectacles of blood and gore. We return to the past in search of humanity, tolerance, openness; we discover histories of syncretism, assimilation, and accommodation; we reassure ourselves with histories of intercultural dialogue and understating. We hesitate to dwell on the histories of intolerance or sectarian conflicts. We are reluctant to recognize the role religion plays in the politics of everyday life. How can we transcend the limits that the politics of the present seems to impose on us? Do we need to delink our lives as citizens from our work as his20. Belief in conflicting premises of intellectual authority is not, of course, a peculiarity of the history of modernity. See Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 21. On the more general issue of such negotiations with modernity, see the essays in Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 22. I have explored the issue elsewhere. See Notes towards a Conception of the Colonial Public, in Civil Society, Public Sphere and Citizenship: Dialogues and Perceptions, ed. Rajeeva Bhargava and Helmut Reifeld (New Delhi: Sage India, 2005). 72

torians? Should we stop returning to the past in order to rethink the present? We have been reminded that historians do not have to provide correct solutions to present problems. This is true, but only partly. We do not have to provide solutions, but political practices of the present are not so easily delinked from questions of memory and history. The way we imagine the past shapes our identities, our conceptions of self. Reconstitution of selfof nations, communities, classes, gendersis premised on a refiguration of the past, a questioning of earlier narratives. Every social groups demand for recognition is inevitably linked to a plea for a reconstitution of historical imagination, a plea that the erasures and silences of earlier histories be recognized, confronted, and overcome. What, then, do we do? I do not think we can ever escape the pressures that recurring analytical tropes exercise on our imagination. We need to continuously reflect on the narratives of the past we produce, understand their framing structures, and look at the way these frames tend to define the form of knowledge we affirm. Only through a critical perspective on our practice can we continue to devise new ways of writing. This essay is a plea for a reflexivity that will allow us to scrutinize the premises of our secular narratives. Over the decades, within secular histories, newer ways of seeing and narrating have emerged, allowing us to look at the problems within the earlier frames; but this critique needs to be pushed further, even if it will not ultimately ensure our transcendence of the problems of representation.

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