India's Self-Perceptions

[Guest guest]

Tales about ourselves

Thursday August 25 2005 21:41 IST

 

Swapan Dasgupta

"To poison a nation", the African writer Ben Okri once said, "poison

its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to

itself."

 

Let me make an honest but terrible confession. My deep and abiding

interest in history began through reading Combat comics. My

favourites were the Battler Britain comics about a doughty Royal Air

Force officer who, almost single-handedly, took on a German army that

seemed incapable of doing much beyond spluttering "Achtung" and "one

Englander less." This interest in a war that ended a decade before my

birth was supplemented by films like 633 Squadron, The Guns of

Navarone, Operation Crossbow and Longest Day where the good guys

invariably prevailed over the baddies, despite heavy odds.

 

On entering my teens, an interest in India's past was nurtured

through historical novels, written in an era before it was obligatory

for Indian writers to reduce the country to one gigantic laboratory

of magic realism. First, there were the archaic but robust G A Henty

classics on the adventures of Clive and battles against Tipu Sultan.

They were written for schoolboys of another country and another

generation but they were a nice diversion from books of the Enid

Blyton kind. Henty was the original precursor to George Macdonald

Fraser's wonderfully educative books on the wicked adventures of Sir

Harry Flashman. I recommend the Flashman books to anyone who has any

interest in imperial history.

 

Then I graduated to Manohar Malgonkar, arguably the best Indian

craftsman of the historical novel. Malgonkar's The Devil's Wind

captured the romance of Nana Saheb and the 1857 uprising, and Bend in

the Ganges taught me more about the last phase of the freedom

struggle than all the textbooks available at that time. Oh yes, there

were also some black and white Bengali films of indifferent quality

on events like the Chittagong Armoury raid, the poet Mukunda Das and

the 1942 Quit India Movement. They weren't anything to write home

about but at least they conveyed a flavour of another time.

 

I delve into my own childhood in the context of the increasingly

silly controversies over Ketan Mehta's Mangal Pandey: The Rising, set

around the revolt of 1857. The film is a grand Bollywood

extravaganza, with epic battle shots in a Central Asian terrain,

realistic costumes and Englishmen who both look and sound like the

real thing. Aamir Khan is dashing in an Errol Flynn way as the rebel

Sepoy, who was immortalised by Veer Savarkar as the first martyr of

the India's first war of Independence. The film-makers add a nice

touch by weaving a parallel plot about the self-doubts of the Scot,

Captain Gordon, who befriends Mangal. And they combine a good

adventure story with a garnishing of Bollywood mirch masala.

 

In historical terms, as my friend Rudrangshu Mukherjee has shown in

his well-timed monograph on the real `Mungul Pandy', The Rising is

fantasy. Mangal, he concludes, after a study of the available

evidence, was quite an "accidental hero", completely impervious to

any winds of nationalism that may have been blowing across the plains

of Hindustan. If Mukherjee is to be believed, Mangal had no

connection with the subsequent Sepoy insurrection in Meerut and the

rising of the dispossessed princes, peshwas and taluqdars. He was, at

best, quite agitated by the greased cartridges. Looking at the

celluloid Mangal, any worthwhile historian would have little

hesitation in echoing what The Dean of Lincoln Cathedral had to say

about The Da Vinci Code: "a load of old tosh." Regardless of whether

the Brahmin Sepoy was a victim of bhang, as the court martial

suggested, or a symbol of patriotic defiance, as Savarkar claimed 50

years after the event, The Rising takes liberties with history. Dan

Brown did the same. So what?

 

In India, popular history — as opposed to academic history — is not

only about what exactly happened but what is believed to have

happened. The latter perception stems not from the East India

Company's detailed records but from the nationalist legends that grew

around the first Sepoy "martyr", some five decades after the event.

Whether it is Shivaji or Siraj-ud-Doulah, Mangal Pandey or Bhagat

Singh, popular history is always a blend of reality and folklore. It

is neither necessary nor desirable to contest it. In real life,

Shivaji and Maharana Pratap may have looked quite something else but

in the Indian imagination they will always be the dashing warriors

created by the imagination of Raja Ravi Varma. This has always been

so. The great Arab scholar Al Biruni came to India with the Ghaznavid

vandals of Mahmud in the 11th century. He was a keen observer and

what struck him was the fact that the Hindus did not share the sense

of history that prevailed in West Asia. The Hindus, he wrote, nearly

one thousand years ago, "do not pay much attention to the historical

order of things; they are very careless in relating the chronological

succession of their Kings, and when they are pressed for information

and are at a loss, not knowing what to say, they invariably take to

tale-telling."

 

It sounds an indictment but it also suggests that Indians never

believed that history rests in the archives. History is what we,

today, like to believe was our yesterday. This negotiable sense of

the past stems from another factor too.

 

For the past three decades, professional historians in India have

demonstrated their ability to destroy all interest in the subject.

First, the numbing prose of the likes of Bipan Chandra and other

Arjun Singh favourites has infected generations of school-children

with a history allergy. Secondly, from being exciting stories about

heroes, villains, kings and rogues, history has been reduced to a

series of deathly boring studies about social formations, modes of

production and ideological hair-splitting. The romance has been taken

out of history by kill-joy comrades, many of whom also double up as

film critics these days. The great thing about The Rising is that it

has helped rekindle some interest in the events of 1857, just as Sir

Richard Attenborough's Gandhi did about the Mahatma and Shyam

Benegal's The Forgotten Hero did about Subhas Chandra Bose. A country

needs heroes to nurture its sense of nationhood. Once upon a time

these values were imbibed in schools. Unfortunately, they only teach

science and mathematics in schools these days. It is left to Aamir

Khan to tell us about our past.

 

"To poison a nation", the African writer Ben Okri once said, "poison

its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to

itself." The reel versus real debate over Mangal Pandey is not really

about history. It is a debate over India's perception of itself. My

vote is unequivocally for The Rising.

http://www.newindpress.com/Sunday/sundayitems.asp?

id=SEC20050825121507&eTitle=Columns&rLink=0