Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat's History
By Utpal Kumar
BluOne Ink, 334 pages

Here is a groundbreaking work that aims to redefine the way we understand the history of Bharat. Utpal Kumar, opinion editor at FirstPost and Network18 whose debut, ‘Bharat Rising: Dharma, Democracy, Diplomacy’ (January 2024) was a bestseller, returns to an equally grand theme.

The book takes on widely accepted ideas such as the Aryan invasion theory, the legacy of Ashoka, and the nature of Bharat's ‘golden age’ during the Gupta period, presenting an refreshing view of the past. It highlights significant dynasties such as the Karkotas, Gurjara-Pratiharas, Pallavas, Cholas, and Ahoms, among others. It explores overlooked dynasties, reassesses the Islamic conquest, the Maratha-British conflict, and reexamines the roles of Gandhi and revolutionaries in India’s independence (the last being the subject of the excerpt reproduced below).

Bharat’s history is often written as a series of invasions starting with the Aryans knocking on the gates of the subcontinent followed by Central Asian tribes, the Arabs, Afghans, Turks, and finally Europeans. Mainstream history depicts Bharat as a barren land where various races and cultures arrived at different times. This country, we are told, belonged to each one of these migrants and invaders or to none of them. This work encourages historians and readers to see Bharat’s history from its own perspective, not through that of its invaders and colonizers.

Here is an excerpt from the last chapter of this book:

Freedom at Midnight: Gandhi, Gandhians and the Roles of Revolutionaries

In 1948, a year after Bharat gained independence, R.C. Majumdar, the country’s foremost historian, submitted a proposal to the government to write an ‘authentic’ and ‘truthful’ history of the freedom struggle, starting with the Revolt of 1857. His letters to the education ministry of Bengal and also the Union education ministry went unheeded. A couple of years later, he wrote to Rajendra Prasad, the then president of the country, who ‘heartily took up the idea and wrote a very encouraging letter’ to him. Maybe it was due to Dr Prasad’s intervention, the Ministry of Education, in 1952, appointed a Board of Editors.

Majumdar shares this saga in the preface to his book The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857. He writes:

It (Board) consisted of eight or ten (or more) members at different times, about one half of whom were historians, and  the other half, politicians of the Congress school, with two staunch Congressmen as its Chairman and Secretary… As the Director, I had to prepare a draft of the proposed history for the consideration of the Board… As soon as I was engaged in preparing the draft, I realised the difficulty of writing history on a co-operative basis in a non-academic environment… It did not take me long to find out that the Secretary held very definite views about the outbreak of 1857, and was determined to get them incorporated in the proposed history. He held that ‘in 1857 an organised attempt was made by the natural leaders of India to combine themselves into a single command with the sole object of driving out the British power from India in order that a single, unified politically free and sovereign state may be established. That attempt was conscious and deliberate’. We had frequent discussions on the subject, and though I could not induce him to keep an open mind on the subject, I did not mind very much so long as it was confined to a mere opinion. But then I found that he proposed to collect only those materials which support his point of view, as otherwise it would, to use his own words again, ‘thoroughly upset our purpose’.

Not long after this the Board of Editors was dissolved by the government on 31 December 1955. A year later, when the project was revived, Majumdar found himself removed from the board without being informed, and his place was given to a bureaucrat named Tara Chand.

Why was Bharat’s foremost historian treated so disdainfully? One finds the answer in Majumdar’s other book History of the Freedom Movement in India, Volume 1. In its preface, he writes:

The official history of the freedom movement starts with the premises that India lost independence only in the 18th century and had thus an experience of subjection to a foreign power for only two centuries. Real history, on the other hand, teaches us that the major part of India lost independence about five centuries before, and merely changed masters in the 18th century… Political exigencies gave rise to the slogan of Hindu–Muslim fraternity. An impression was sought to be deliberately created that the Hindus and Muslims had already shed so much of their individual characteristics, and there was such a complete transformation of both and a fusion of their cultures that there was no essential difference between the two. Though every true Indian must ever devoutly wish for such a consummation, it was, unfortunately, never a historical fact. Sir Syed Ahmad, M.A. Jinnah and other Muslim leaders who never believed in it entertained more realistic views in this respect than either Mahatma Gandhi or Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. To accept as a fact what is eminently desirable but has not yet been achieved, though perhaps attainable by prolonged efforts, is not only a great historical error, but also a political blunder of the first magnitude, which often leads to tragic consequences.

As we see, Majumdar had shown the moral courage and intellectual integrity to not just stand up against the Nehruvian bluff on Hindu–Muslim unity but also write matter-of-factly that the two communities ‘lived in two watertight compartments’, with their distinct cultures and different mental and moral characteristics. Even more importantly, the historian threatened to take the lid off the Nehruvian myth that Bharat’s independence was predominantly, if not solely, the handiwork of Gandhian ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha. Majumdar writes:

A number of revolutionaries had joined the Non-Cooperation Movement of Gandhi, but were disillusioned after its suspension. Many of them had rejoined the revolutionary groups whose main object was to keep alive the spirit of violence leading to armed rebellion against the British for achieving independence…

As a matter of fact, Gandhi fully realised the growing influence of revolutionary ideas over young men, and it is not without good reason that the revolutionaries claimed that they practically, though indirectly, forced Gandhi to renew the struggle for freedom, in 1930 and again in 1942; for he feared that otherwise he would lose the leadership of the country and the initiative would pass into the hands of the revolutionary young men, Gandhi himself admitted that one of his motives in undertaking non-violent Satyagraha or Civil Disobedience was to ward off the evils he apprehended from the growing strength of the revolutionary ideas. In other words, he regarded his movement as a safety-valve for youthful energy and patriotic ardour which would otherwise flow through a different channel of a violent kind.

Majumdar makes three big points: one, the country’s independence was not the handiwork of Gandhian ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha alone. Two, the revolutionaries not just worked in their revolutionary silos but also under the overarching Gandhian cover to fight for freedom. The revolutionaries would form the backbone of a Gandhian movement, such as the Non-Cooperation Movement, and when Gandhi would call it off, they would do what they did best—openly go the revolutionary way! Three, more often than not, Gandhi would start a movement to contain the growth of revolutionary fervour—a sort of ‘safety-valve for youthful energy and patriotic ardour’ so that it didn’t ‘flow through a different channel of a violent kind’.

[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]