Focus on silent resistance, historians told

By Our Special Correspondent

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, NOV. 9. Dr. K. N. Panikkar, historian and Vice-Chancellor of the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, has called for a new approach to historiography focusing on the silent forms of resistance evident mostly in the nation's cultural history.

Delivering the Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai Lecture, organised by the International Centre for Kerala Studies of the Kerala University here on Thursday, Dr. Panikkar pointed out that while the nationalistic historiography has totally ignored the silent forms of resistance in Indian society, Marxist historiography has focused on more articulate forms of resistance such as movements, revolts and protests.

"Recovering the meaning of silence, along with the articulate, and contextualising it in relation to the social forces should form the agenda of a new alternative historiography, distinct from textual analyses that currently crowd cultural studies," Dr. Panikkar said.

He debunked all claims to `neutral history' as nothing but a myth and said historiography is a field of power play and there is politics behind all writings of history. The construction of history, whatever the interpretative structure or however serious the blurring of disciplinary boundaries in social sciences, has necessarily to respect the fundamental tenets of the discipline in order to qualify for the status of history. Communal history, an early example of which can be found in the writings of V.D. Savarkar, is far removed from this principle and, therefore, belongs more to the realm of myth than history. In fact, it is a denial of history, he said.

Tracing the various streams of historiography in India, Dr. Panikkar said the growth of historiography in the country during the last 200 years comprehends within it the changing contours of power and politics in Indian society. While the colonial historiographers sought to de-ligitimise the pre-colonial despite colonial strategies of domination incorporating in it appropriation of the `native' past, the nationalist historiography tried to underplay the internal differences in the Indian society in order to unify the people in their fight against colonialism. The concept of unity in diversity was a construct invoked to serve this need, he added.

Dr. Panikkar said the cultural past that the nationalist historiography tried to reclaim was clearly Brahmanical and upper caste. The culture of those outside this circle did not attract any attention. The oppressed and the marginalised did not enter into its reckoning and their voices were conspicuously absent. This was an indication of the power perspective inherent in the nationalist historiography. Unlike the nationalist historiography, the Marxist historiography seeks to disaggregate the nation in terms of its class components, highlighting thereby the contradictions within the society.

However, the base-superstructure model, for instance, considerably restricted, at least at the beginning, the study of cultural and ideological issues. The Marxist historiographers, thus, suffered from a reductionist perspective, relegating problems of ideology and culture to the status of epi-phenomena. This weakness of the Marxist practice led to an assumption and criticism that the Marxist method was incapable of interrogating the complex Indian social reality constituted by overlapping, complementary as well as contradictory structural categories.

A positive trend in Indian historiography in recent times, he said, is the emergence of Dalit and women's history. The former contests the social power of the upper castes and the latter the patriarchal authority of the male. "In fact, the entire history of India has been written as the saga of the upper castes and the male heroes. The history of the Indian Renaissance, for instance, has been encapsulated in the socio-religious efforts of upper caste leaders from Rammohan to Dayanand.

"For long time, people like Jyotibha Phule, Sree Narayana Guru, Ayyankali or Ramaswamy Naicker did not figure in it. Pandita Ramabhai and Tarabhai Shinde are still not included. This is true of national movement as well. Ambedkar has only begun to be noticed, thanks to the attempts to recover the role of the Dalits in order to gain their rightful place in the national life. In the light of the recent assertion of the Dalits, it is not surprising that the ideologues of the upper caste interests like Arun Shourie have tried to denigrate Ambedkar and Periyar,'' Dr. Panikkar said.

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