Michael Wood on attempts to rewrite history
Watching the Indian elections this summer has been an astounding spectacle. More than 600 million voters going to the polls; 29 states, seven of them with populations of more than 70 million each; 22 official languages. The sheer scale is incredible. And for the winning Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), victory came out of an idea of the past, the product of a deep fissure in Indian history going back even before partition just over 70 years ago.
It set me thinking once more about the power of myth in modern politics, made even more potent by the ability of social media to reach hundreds of millions in a click. These days the myth is often dominant because it offers a clear narrative rather than the ifs and buts of real life. To quote John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
With India, the legend has become the fact. The Hindu nationalist movement began in earnest in the 1920s. It was inspired by the idea of a glorious Hindu past, which nationalists argued had been submerged by medieval Muslim conquests and persecutions, and then by British colonialism and secularism. These nationalists wanted to build a modern Hindu identity by projecting back to an imagined one in the past. For them, history was a source of identity, with roots in India’s oldest myths.
I remember some years ago interviewing a Hindu priest who had been a driving figure in the BJP’s campaign to erect a temple to the god Rama on the site of a demolished mosque in Ayodhya. “The soil of Ayodhya has been sacred for nearly 1 million years,” he told me. “We can only see the divine setting of the story with an Indian eye. The knowledge of Europe is of no avail to reach the depth of ancient India.”
The mere historian felt powerless in the face of such certainty. But these stories were at the heart of the BJP’s campaigns in the 1990s, galvanising the poor with a sense of their historic identity – and emphasising historic grievances. Since the BJP gained power in 2014, this view of history has led, for example, to the rewriting of school textbooks to popularise demonstrably false theories about the prehistoric ‘Hindu’ roots of Indian civilisation.
Rewriting history, of course, has been a part of post-colonial history everywhere, and not just by those who were colonised. Here in Britain, think of our current debates on Europe to see how enduring myths can be. Look at our obsession with Britain’s role in the Second World War, which too often downplays the part played by the USA, the Soviets and the peoples of the empire – those from Australia, Canada, India, Africa and the Caribbean – in securing victory. The recent spate of Churchill films, Dunkirk, and the host of D-Day anniversary documentaries are part of that zeitgeist. Future historians, I daresay, will look at all this as part of the reaction to the loss of an empire that shaped the lives of all of us, for good and ill.
I suspect it is the postwar baby-boom generation, the ones who didn’t fight in the war, who did the main mythologising. In the 1950s and 1960s, they imbibed the Second World War in books, comics and cinema, and on television. But as the many moving interviews with D-Day veterans showed this summer, the generation who fought, the ones who really remember, are much more wary of such mythologising than their children and grandchildren. It seems possible too that more recent introspections brought on by industrial decline and the shedding of the last territorial remnants of empire have disproportionately affected the baby boomers. Historians in 50 years will perhaps see the 2016 Brexit vote as a line drawn under the whole astonishing imperial adventure when Britain went out to the world.
We shape narratives to create and support our sense of identity. We rewrite those narratives as the world changes around us. But unless grounded as far as possible in the real ascertainable facts – with a continuous thoughtful and humane engagement with what actually happened, warts and all – we can all be prey to myths that can lead to setting one group against another. For this reason, history can be dangerous. The exiled Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote that history is a battle of memory against forgetting. The key to remembering is good history.