As it happens now and then, papers
published in reputed scientific journals receive media attention because the
findings impact politics. Last month, two papers published in Cell and
Science reopened
debates about the origins of Indian civilization and consequently the cultural
identity and belonging of contemporary Indians. The bone of contention was the
‘Aryan migration’ theory. In other words, the debate was whether Indian culture
was indigenous or a result of foreign influence thousands of years ago.
Surprisingly, while the written, peer-reviewed papers did not dispute the said
migration theory, two of the authors, in
a press conference, claimed otherwise. As embarrassing
as the contradictory
statements were for the professional reputation of
the scholars, the incident also suggests the misuse of history and archaeology
for political gains.
That India’s history is being misused for
political gains is a concern that is as old as the nation—which is to say,
about 70 years. Scholars, public intellectuals, and lay citizens worry that communal
readings of history may compromise the secular credentials of the Indian
nation-state. For these intellectuals committed to secularism-as-religious-equality,
the idea of belonging—that is, what makes one person ‘Indian’ in relation to
other Indians—rests on fealty to a multicultural past. Even if it is true that
the history of the subcontinent witnessed prolonged episodes of multicultural
tolerance, the linking of this diversified history by scholars and pubic
intellectuals to the present-day Indian nation-state may be hasty. While it may
be true that ancient and pre-colonial history of India witnessed episodes of
great cultural efflorescence in addition to tolerance, it is also equally valid
that this history was marked by violence of various sorts.
That is why the present-day Indian
nation-state, or, the
Union of India, to use the technical term,
was a political project aimed at extending civil liberties without the
hindrances of religion, caste, class, creed, and ethnicity. Thus, the
Constitution of India emerging out of an experience of anti-colonial struggles
took its inspiration
from models of western liberal democracies.
The idea, then, was not to go back to an ancient and glorious past but to
rectify centuries of injustice suffered by the marginalized through
colonialism, caste, creed, and gender.
Many scholars forget the recentness of the
democratic project in India when they suggest that the proper way to understand
contemporary belonging in India depends on an accurate understanding of ancient
history. In the last five years scholars such as Jonathan Gill Harris (The
First Firangis, 2015) and Audrey Truschke (Aurangzeb, 2017), and
writers like Manu Pillai (Rebel Sultans, 2018) and Siddhartha Sarma (Carpenters
and Kings, 2019) write, in elegant and accessible
prose, that pre-colonial India which contained persons of different identities
and belonging did not depend on narrow religious or sectarian conceptions like
today. The lesson, therefore, is that contemporary India should emulate
pre-colonial India. These writers are partly right, and the lessons they teach
have value.
One of the key ways in which many recent
authors talk about belonging is through the figure of the migrant. It may be
the European migrant ‘who became Indian’ in Harris’ work or the Persian or
Central Asian migrants (or invaders as they are popularly called) who
established the Mughal and Deccani sultanates in the works of Truschke and
Pillai, or it could be a ‘migrant’ religion like Christianity in Sarma’s book.
The figure of the migrant provides historical evidence of a malleable
pre-colonial culture, one that contemporary Indians need to emulate. Though, the
extent of the malleability of this pre-colonial Indian culture is still open to
debate.
While these authors are not wrong in
making such an assertion, they run on the wishful hope that the political
vision of the Indian nation-state must also be the political vision within
pre-colonial polities, such as the Mughals or the Marathas. Only Truschke’s
work departs from such a view. This thinking is patently inaccurate as the
political agendas of various polities of the past, separated by vast amounts of
time, were different from the political agendas of the Indian nation-state.
Merely by arguing that a secular and welcoming culture existed in the past does
not strengthen the political vision of the Indian constitution, neither does it
excuse shortcomings of the nation-state. On the contrary, such arguments only leave
history vulnerable to misuse.
To understand the problems with
present-day disputes regarding belonging, one needs to look no further than the
various amendments to India’s Citizenship Act, 1955. While the Act initially
granted citizenship to all based on birth or jus solis, subsequent
amendments have restricted this right to citizenship only if one’s parents,
either one or both, are Indian citizens. The amendment of this act, to the best
of my knowledge, has so far hardly been part of debates on belonging in India. To
state it simply, an eminently modernist project of granting citizenship under
the nation-state is being eroded for several decades.
Debates about belonging or the ‘Aryan’
migration theory always contain an immediate political purpose, as seen in the
politics surrounding the National Registry of Citizens across India. The
observation that pre-colonial realities and belonging are different from the
way belonging is conceptualized in present-day India, should make historians
and public intellectuals ask different questions. Not so much “what makes an
Indian Indian?” in a cultural sense but “why does religion or ethnicity
or any other marker become the rallying point for conflict and legal exclusion
at various moments in time?” By asking different questions, one would guard against
the misuse of history – whether Indian or Goan.
(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 2 October, 2019)
