Record Audiences At Separate Venues For Two Historians In their 90s
Saeed Naqvi
New Delhi witnessed two extraordinary events, on successive days, at different venues by two of the country’s celebrated historians – Prof. Irfan Habib and Prof. Romila Thapar, both in their 90s.
What they said was important enough but what could not escape notice were the multitudes who thronged to the venues much in advance and yet found themselves unable to enter. Even the aisles were packed with students balancing their notebooks on their knees.
The human spillover must be seen as evidence of an enormous hunger for alternative discourse, along with multiple other reasons.
Prof. Thapar read an elaborate paper at the India International Centre, on a theme identified with her – Present colonizes the past: future forsaken.
Prof. Habib’s talk was circumscribed by the occasion – death anniversary of CPM General Secretary, Sitaram Yechury. His theme was Communists and the national movement. The points he dwelt on will be discussed within CPM of which he remains a life member. That the venue, Harikishen Singh Surjeet Bhavan off Rouse Avenue could accommodate so many was, to me, a revelation.
“The Communist party asked Muslim members to join the Muslim League; Hindus to join the Congress.” Prof. Habib dismissed this party line of the 1940s as “an enormous error.” The line, enunciated by the Party General secretary, P.C. Joshi, “divided communists on communal lines” he said. It also cast the Congress as a “Hindu party”, which was a faulty appreciation of the INC.
The issue will surely be debated both, within the party and outside. A Joshi loyalist would probably defend the line as a tactic to advance the cause of communists in both the parties at a critical moment in history.
Prof. Habib quoted Rajni Palme Dutt’s India Today. There is a whole chapter (written in 1945) in which Dutt “laid out why India should not be divided on communal lines.” Dutt was, after all, “a major communist spokesman of the time in both England and India.” Prof. Habib’s anger was most pulpable when he attacked the communist leadership of the day. “Either our leaders did not read Dutt or there were other reasons why the communist party at the time decided to treat the Congress and the Muslim League in the same way?”
Trust a historian of Habib’s vintage to enunciate with such passion the “grievous mistake” his party made (then the CPI) in the 40s. He insisted, the issue “be debated and corrected by the party.”
It turns out that great historians too, in their lighter moments, fall back on anecdotage. His father Prof. Mohammad Habib was in 1960 visited by his former student, who had reached the highest echelons of Pakistan’s public life. Because of his training as a communist, the Muslim League found him exceptionally capable. His rise, first in UP and subsequently in Pakistan was meteoric. He visited Irfan Habib’s father to ironically complain of the absence of a soul in his post communist, pure Muslim experience.
Also under his scanner was the CPI’s shift in its attitude to World War II, at a time when the Congress had given notice to the British in 1942 – Quit India. There were two issues involved. First, it was an intra-imperialist war until Hitler launched operation Barabarosa in 1941. The world’s principal Fascist power had attacked the world’s only socialist power, the Soviet Union.
It was no longer an intra imperial war, Habib argued. It had become a peoples War, the criticism heaped on the Communists for this “shift” notwithstanding.
What complicated matters was the Congress call to the British in 1942 to Quit India. Habib questioned Congress sagacity in asking the British to Quit just when the Japanese army was “knocking at our door.”
“If you look at Jawaharlal Nehru’s own papers, far from opposing the British at the time, he was worrying on how the Japanese invasion would be tackled by Indians.”
Japan was the enemy in Nehru’s mind at the time. Habib expressed surprise that “Nehru concurred” when the Congress passed the Quit India resolution. The communists needed to question the wisdom of the Congress giving a clarion call to the British to Quit India when the axis power, Japan was about to invade India.
A compromised judiciary being a theme of contemporary saliency, Habib’s story of Justice Suleiman, one of the judges for The Meerut Conspiracy case of 1920 deserves mention. He told the British lawyer for the prosecution that “what you are saying is absurd. “What you are alleging the communist did was physically not possible.”
The English Chief Justice summoned Justice Suleiman. “Your name has been sent up for appointment to the “Federal court”, today’s Supreme Court. The hint was -don’t mess up “your future” by making an error in the crucial conspiracy case.
Justice Suleiman took the hint. He salved his conscience by reducing the sentence, but he kept his eye on the main chance by “not exposing the fraud.” He became a judge of the federal court and, later, Vice Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim university duly rewarded for being a compromised judge.
Prof. Thapar kept a steady gaze on history written by a professional historian i.e. sifting the evidence and rigorously analyzing it. She was anguished at historical research being discounted in favour of history by social media.
Two theories in particular are in favour and which were deeply ingrained in Indian history. These were the Aryan theory of race and the two-nation theory. The Aryan theory assumes that history began when the subcontinent was settled by the Aryans. The other theory was, of course, the much better known two-nation theory initially set out by James Mill in 1817. India consisted of two nations, the Hindu and the Muslim, and that they were permanently hostile to each other. This theory ignored the fact that a nation depends on drawing diverse people together whereas religion segregates them according to belief. There are these two contrary processes but they've been bundled into one by James Mill. “Can nationalism therefore be qualified by a religious identity?”
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