MYSORE SESSION OF THE IHC

Asserting Rational Approach To Indian History

From Our Correspondent

THE Indian History Congress (IHC) held its 64th annual session at the Mysore University, Karnataka, on December 28-30, 2003. The session, one of the biggest held so far, assumed considerable significance in view of the government of India’s mounting attacks on sober, serious historiography in order to pursue its agenda of saffronisation of education and culture.

ASSERTION OF ACADEMIC RIGOUR

The IHC session was thus important for an assertion of academic rigour and rational approach to Indian history. The tone was set by the address of the general president, Professor S Settar (former chairman, ICHR), on “Footprints of Artisans in History”, in which he brilliantly used epigraphic sources, linguistics and paleography to reconstruct the role of ancient Indian artisans in intercultural communication between India’s different regions. Presiding over the Ancient India section, Professor B P Sahu (Delhi University) raised the issue of “Legitimation, Ideology and State in Early India.” Dr Vijaya Ramaswamy (JNU) devoted her address as president of the Medieval section to “Crafts and Artisans in South Indian History.” Professor Suranjan Das (Kolkata University) in his presidential address, at the Modern India section, spoke on “Ethnicity and Nation-building in India”, and analysed the way the Naga question arose and has been handled by the Indian leadership since Independence: he argued that “ethnic assertions” should not have been treated as “potentially anti-Indian nation-state.” Dr V K Mishra (Magadh University), in his address as president of the section on History of Countries other than India, discussed “New Dimensions in the Study of the Thai Civilisation.” Professor K Padayya (Director, Deccan College, Pune) in his Presidential Address to the section on Archaeology, took “Artifacts as Texts”, for his theme, reporting on his own work on early stone age (Acheulian) settlements and interpreting them in terms of current archaeological theory.  The IHC session basically comprises meetings of its five sections, where members present research papers according to their fields.

In the Mysore session more than 600 papers were presented, and three of the main sections had to be divided into subsections to enable papers to be properly discussed. A remarkable feature of the IHC is that a very large number of papers are printed in the annual proceedings, which are edited and published within the year to be given free to members. In the Proceedings volume of the previous session at GNDU, Amritsar, as many as 126 papers were published in full, with abstracts of others, the volume running into over 1450 pages. The volume is a very good representative of the present state of research in history and archaeology in India.  Some papers presented at the Mysore session were topical in the light of the saffronised rewriting of history.

Zahoor Ali Khan by a meticulous examination of topography showed what fantasies are involved in the claim (made among others by the union culture minister Jagmohan) that the Saraswati was once a great Himalayan river within the past 10,000 years. Professor Pushpa Prasad scrutinised the inscriptions “found” at Ayodhya; her discovery that what the Lucknow Museum has represented as a temple inscription discovered at Ayodhya by Fuhrer 115 years ago really consists of broken slabs of two different inscriptions brought together, so as to deceive people into believing that it is the same as the Fuhrer one. This raises the question about where the latter has gone: into the hands of the VHP which planted it at the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992? That inscription too, significantly, has 20 lines.  Such topical papers apart, there were numerous papers on economic and social history, popular resistance, national movement, and gender history. Professor J V Naik introduced a ‘historic memorial’ against marriage of infant girls to gods, and Chilla Ghosh analysed the Marxist debate on the Middle Class in Bengal in the 1940s. Professor V N Datta had a charming piece on Ghalib’s Delhi. Professor Shireen Moosvi read an interesting paper on domestic service in medieval India. Among so many papers it is of course impossible to mention even a big sample of those which drew special attention of members.

In addition to the three prizes (of  Rs 4,000 each) already instituted for best papers from younger scholars, three more have now been instituted in the names of Professor J C Jha, B B Chaudhuri and S R  Das. These prizes are expected further to improve the academic quality of papers submitted.

The S C Misra Memorial Lecture was delivered on December 28 by Professor J S Grewal, who dealt with religious sects in medieval India. His lecture was followed by that of Rajeev Sethi, noted architect and designer, who reported on the recent official vandalism at the Red Fort, Delhi, on which the IHC at its Business Meeting passed a resolution as well.

IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

The IHC symposium on December 29 had “Imagined Communities” as its theme, and Professors M G S Narayanan, Mushirul Hasan and Bhaskar Chakraborty spoke on different ways in which countries, nations, religious communities and classes have been “imagined”.  The IHC session also had special panels on “History of Information Technology in India” (sponsored by the Directorate of Information Technology, Government of Karnataka), “Religion and Material Culture” (organised by the Aligarh Historians Society), and “Freedom Struggle in Karnataka.”

Distinguished scholars from all over the country contributed papers, including Professors D P Chattopadhyaya (the famous philosopher of science), S Settar, Amiya Bagchi, Utsa Patnaik, and others. There was, in addition, a special panel on “History in School Education”, where the new NCERT curriculum and textbooks as well as the History syllabus in Karnataka schools were discussed. Resource persons including Professors Irfan Habib, Arjun Dev, Suvira Jaiswal, Aniruddha Ray, Aditya Mukerji and some 30 teachers from Karnataka schools participated. In his inaugural address at this panel, B Chandrasekhar, minister for school education, Karnataka, criticised the communal bias of the new NCERT textbooks, and said that the Karnataka school syllabus was being duly improved and modernised, with the guidance of Professor S Settar, General President of the Congress.  Indeed, S M Krishna, chief minister of Karnataka, himself, while inaugurating the General Session of the IHC on the morning of December 28, especially underlined the need to counter the saffronisation offensive of the NDA government and decried the communal orientation and falsifications of history found in the new NCERT textbooks. In his Report to the Business Session, Professor Ramakrishna Chatterjee, secretary of the IHC, noted the good response that the IHC’s own published critique of the new NCERT History textbooks, (Index of Errors) had received, the Report already having gone through two printings.  On the recommendation of the Executive Committee, the General Business meeting attended by over 300 members unanimously passed three resolutions (see Box). The first resolution deplored the present government of India’s policy of undermining the autonomy of academic institutions, of which the arbitrary removal of the chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) is the most recent example.

The second resolution sounded alarm over the irreparable and wanton damage inflicted on the “priceless legacy” of the nation that the Red Fort, Delhi, represents. It is clear, the resolution implies, that the urge to create a tourist attraction has superseded all care for proper respect and preservation of works of art of the past. In the third resolution the IHC called on the Archaeological Survey of India to properly safeguard ancient Buddhist sites in Bihar. Professor Sabhyasachi Bhattacharya (JNU) was elected the general president of the next session. Professor Vijay Thakur (Muzaffarpur) was elected to succeed Professor R Chatterjee, whose term as secretary would now end. Professor K K Sharma (Muzaffarpur) would be the next treasurer, Dr R C Thakran (Delhi) and Professor A Bobbili (Warangal) would be joint-secretaries.

The executive committee of twenty members for the next year was also elected by members by secret ballot. The RSS camp put forward a panel of twelve, all of whom were soundly defeated. The new executive committee includes a number of senior historians representing all the different regions of India. These include Professors R Chatterjee (the retiring secretary), O Anantharamaiah (Mysore), Irfan Habib (Aligarh), Suvira Jaiswal (Hyderabad), K M Shrimali (Delhi) and J B Bhattacharjee (Shillong), among others.

SAHMAT organised an exhibition of posters and original paintings of artists on the theme of the “Idea Of India”. It drew considerable numbers of visitors as also Rajiv Sethi’s exhibition of photographs on “The Red Fort, Delhi- A Tale of Official Vandalism”. There was also a very brisk sale of books at the distributors’ stalls, especially at the IHC’s own sale desk and the sale counters of Aligarh Historians Society, Tulika and other publishers.