Past Forward
With Hindu-Muslim tensions rising in the past year due to the Ram mandir issue, protests against CAA and the Tablighi Jamaat being blamed for the spread of Covid, historians feel that making peace with the origins of such tensions could help defuse them. However, what is the truth that people should be exposed to and how can history be kept from being used for political mileage? According to historian and author Vikram Sampath, “History is always the handmaiden of the ruler. It is the victor who writes the story.” For Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, on the other hand, people deserve the right to be given all versions of the story and then be allowed to determine for themselves the narrative they wish to believe. “History for today’s political misuse is what I have a problem with,” he says. “Let people have their own understandings but no monopoly of one version of the truth. I have talked about memorialising the atrocities of colonialism not because today you want us to revolt against the British because that’s history, but because we must forgive and not forget.” One thing is certain, though—simply looking ahead is not the answer. The scars of the past, when not selectively picked to suit political ends, could help heal historical differences by being a strong reminder of grief and suffering. SHASHI THAROOR Congress MP “When you ask, rightly, why is today’s Muslim feeling offended when Ghazni or Ghori are denounced, the answer is because it is instrumentalised to demonise them today”
“I am all for reclaiming forgotten voices on all sides. If we allow voices to come forward, what are these voices saying? If the voices are saying Muslims were bad 500 years ago and therefore today’s Muslims should suffer for it, then I have a problem” “Now, we have a different ethos in power, which argues that India is fundamentally a Hindu country and everybody else here is either a guest or an interloper and that the institutions and laws of the state must ref lect an allegiance to a certain cultural civilisational understanding of India which has nothing to do with the idea of India enshrined in the Constitution”
“You cannot and should not deny college students the right to be exposed to a wide variety of views and come to their own conclusions. That is what education is about, to give you the intellectual equipment to discern for yourself” “We have far too much history to be able to consume it. We use history as a battleaxe to hit each other with. I love reading history, but history should belong to the past and multiple understandings of the past. If you look only at pillage and violence of the past, you have only one kind of truth; if you look only at examples of how Muslims and Hindus have helped one another in the past, then you have a different truth; and if you read both accounts. maybe you’ll arrive at a third truth”
VIKRAM SAMPATH Historian and author
“Let people read the truth, stare at it in the face and make peace with it. We will keep having fissures in Ayodhya or some other place until these are settled for good” “India needs to reclaim her history from Delhi and these are constant battles in historiography. There is also a refusal to acknowledge the darker aspects of history, particularly medieval India with the Islamic invasion”
“Our wounds haven’t healed. World over, history offers these spaces where people can speak uncomfortable truths, heal from it, learn from it. We have not made peace with our past and that is why it keeps resurfacing as a cancerous growth” “Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it. During Partition, two million people died, 15 million displaced; it is one of the largest displacements in human history. By remembering, you don’t have to celebrate. I don’t know the political motivations, but world over, are Holocaust museums celebrating the Holocaust? Or is it a reminder that history gives that this should never happen again?”