Rudrangshu Mukherjee, the chancellor of Ashoka University and an internationally acclaimed historian on the Revolt of 1857, is an intellectual who appears quite comfortable with the growing demands for revisiting history, if newer facts emerge. In an interview, he says history and mathematics are among the worst taught subjects in most Indian schools. Making an interesting analysis between history and physics, he suggests history is no poor cousin to physics, chemistry or mathematics. Excerpts:
Q: Being a historian is tough as what you record today could well be questioned decades later. So, what is it that you find most difficult as a historian?
A: I believe that views of historians should be revisited, even the same historian can revisit his/her own views. That’s why history is a living subject because history is constantly open to debate and argumentation. When we write and certainly more when we speak, we tend to put a stamp of definitiveness, but the difficult thing is to not suggest that but to rather indicate to the reader/listener that whatever I am doing is open to review and that it is somewhat tentative.
Q: How comfortable are you to demands calling for revisiting history?
A: Questions about historical analysis should be raised, discussed and debated. But there are certain professional norms that historians use to make their analysis and one of them is “anchor of verifiable facts”. Any review/re-analysis must proceed on this. One can’t just say this is wrong without citing a reason and without giving verifiable counter facts
Q: So, have you ever revisited your own work?
A: Yes. The work I most seriously revisited and changed my views on is a book I wrote on the massacres of Kanpur [The 1857 Kanpur Massacres (1998)]. In the first edition of the book, there was a very definite attempt on my part to actually glorify and even justify the massacres that the Indians carried out of the British in Satti Chaura Ghat … I think that glorification was misplaced on my part. As I would become a stronger advocate of ahmisa than I earlier was … In the second edition, I wrote a foreword, that I have reviewed my own views and that they have changed.
Q: Are historians comfortable revisiting their work?
A: I don’t think there are any serious historians who would not be open to debate, discussion.
Q: But isn’t it a personal thing?
A: Any analysis is a personal analysis. I don’t think all of history writing is objective. A lot of it is subjective. There is lot of interpretative flesh that is put on it and that is subjective … So new facts can always be added. And then, the questions that are being asked out of those facts can change and therefore questions asked out of those facts can change and thus interpretations too can change.
Q: When you wrote “The Begum and the Rani: Hazrat Mahal and Lakshmibai in 1857”, you certainly had a different view of Rani Lakshmibai than what was portrayed by the British.
A: (Intervenes) Not just what the British wrote of her, even what the nationalists wrote of her … my views are different from them too …
Q: So, are we comfortable with divergent views on a subject, all moving in a parallel track?
A: Yes! This is the stuff of history. This is how history writing moves from one generation to another…one historian to another…
Q: What fascinates you the most as a historian?
A: The many unanswered questions that the past throws up … and how we can attempt to answer those questions … sometimes we can’t answer them or we aren’t in a position to answer them due to nonavailability of facts and sources. That’s what fascinates me and takes me from subject to subject… that here is something that previous historians haven’t addressed and let me see if I can provide an answer.
Q: Interesting … And how exactly do you do that?
A: Well, all my previous books have something to do with issues that hadn’t been previously addressed. Nobody had written about the scale of the popular resistance in Oudh in 1857-58. I was the first to do it as it appeared to me there was a gap. Nobody had written about the massacres in Kanpur. And this whole idea that the 1857 uprising started with Mangal Pandey. I was always very sceptical about this idea and so I investigated and came up with an answer that was against the conventional wisdom. That’s how it happens.
Q: When one historian runs against the “conventional wisdom” of another, does it pit one against the other?
A: Yes, it does! We discuss, agree to disagree … this is why public reasoning is so important.
Q: Much of your work revolves around 1857. Any specific reason?
A: Well, even as a schoolboy I was fascinated by the massive uprising that had taken place and that historians had such large areas of disagreement over it … particularly over what to call it … some called it mutiny, to some it was the First War of Indian Independence .. I was initially taken up by this debate on nomenclature … what to call it? Then as I began to read, much of the stuff that existed on 1857 in books, I realised that most of what was written was done with a British point of view and the voice of the rebels was being lost. Now at this point in time, when I was caught midstream as it were, and this was puzzling me about the loss of the rebel voice, I came across a particular document, an ‘ishtihaar’, a proclamation that was issued in August 1857 by one of the rebel leaders … and reading that, it struck me, well, here is a rebel voice … so it is not all lost …
So may be, I thought, if one could recover, or retrieve what the rebels themselves wanted to do, why they were fighting the British … I set about doing that and I chose Oudh, as to narrow it down, not look at the whole north India but Oudh and see if I could reconstruct the rebellion from the rebel point of view, rather than the British point of view … that was what the first book was about …
Q: And yet, you say, you revisited …
A: That was about the Kanpur massacre .. I had no occasion to review, re-analyse my views on 1857 … so far as my first book is concerned … But I might have to … if newer facts/documents emerge at some point.
Q: How do people like you get to connect with GenNext, get them to understand history?
A: That’s a very important point. I strongly feel that mathematics and history both are among the worst taught subjects in most Indian schools, both suffer from same lacunae. Nobody or very few convey to students what is the underlying and internal logic of mathematical thinking. They are taught certain formulaes and then to apply them to solve sums set to them. History, too, is taught as a series of facts that are learnt by heart and regurgitated on the day of the examination. So, history has no logic, history has no pattern … I think this is a completely, not only wrong, a perverse way of teaching history. The intention of a good teacher should be to convey to the students the logic of the past. And this is not done by most school teachers and even in most undergraduate levels as well. We are trying to remedy it a little at Ashoka University but it is an uphill task. Once students get into this, are taught history in this fashion, they begin to like it. That history is not a feat of memory, history is a feat of understanding, interpretation as much as physics is a feat of understanding.
Q: You putting history at par with physics?
A: Yes, because just as physics helps you understand the material world, history helps you understand the past.
Q: You mentioned about “logic of the past”. Is that then the missing link and how should it happen?
A: Because we are not enabling students to think. We are only enabling them to memorise. I might remember something word for word and don’t know what it means. I would rather have a student, get a date or two wrong but convey to me that they have understood something about the past. What is the relationship between cause and effect.
Q: How are you trying to remedy the situation?
A: By teaching like that.
Just take an example. Cities like Mohenjodaro, Harappa … people lived there, ate to survive. Where did the food come from? The countryside? So let’s ask the question what was the hinterland like?
Obviously, the food was coming from the hinterland. There must have been agricultural production, movement of agricultural produce into the city, there must have been a supply chain.
So, from a simple elementary fact that a city existed and a population of that city survived, we already can paint a picture of countryside that was producing grains, fruits and had the necessary mechanism to bring them into the urban settlements. Even, a non-historian, could apply common sense to work it out. You train the students to think logically.
Q: But how does this affect one’s understanding of Mohenjodaro or Harappa?
A: So, I can now explain how artisans in Mohenjodaro and Harappa who built houses, who made utensils, all of which have been found … how did they survive, how did they have the resources to make these … because their food supply, so essential to their survival was being maintained. What we don’t know precisely, and this is again where your previous question becomes relevant, the next generation or next era of historians would perhaps open up new vistas on what was the precise mode of agricultural production. Enough archaeological evidence has been found about the nature of urban life in the cities of the Harappan civilisation. What surrounded those cities, the rural economies, rural environment … now people are asking these questions. We are acquiring new dimensions, new depths. But, they all are following from certain logical assumptions, which is what I was trying to sketch to you a little while ago.
Q: How do you deal with the dilemma of parents for whom history is way behind, a poor cousin to physics, chemistry and mathematics?
A: Oh, yes! Parents do come to me all the time and tell me … oh, my son came to Ashoka to study computer science … but now, he has done your classes and now he wants to study history! He is fascinated by it … Will he get a job? What about his career? Some have even gone to the extent of saying, “You have ruined our son’s life!” My answer to that is jobs are given increasingly today to bright minds, capable of thinking for themselves and not on the subject they graduate from. This is our experience too during placements as top companies today are looking for young minds that are capable of thinking for themselves and of articulating clearly what they are thinking. In that sense, they are subject agnostic. We want to develop critical thinking, lucid communication.
