Historytelling

OVERLEAF

At the American university history department where I spent a few years, Professor James A Henretta every year offered a course in “narrative history”. It was for graduate students at dissertation-writing stage, so I never got to it — but what strikes me is that it was needed at all.

Historians write. It’s the main thing they do. By the time they sit down to write their PhDs they’ve already been reading and writing history for perhaps a decade, and are well past the professionalisation threshold.

So why, after all that training, do they still lack fundamental tools?

It’s because many don’t believe that narrative is fundamental to their work. In fact, there were people — nice people — in that history department who believed and wrote as if what was written was more important than how it was written.

They turned out papers on topics that to me were thrilling, in perfectly serviceable (and professionally correct) prose that told me no stories.

Professor Henretta’s writings are a useful comparison, even if we allow for his several decades’ head start on my fellow grads. His sound and economical words actually look beautiful on the text-heavy, foursquare pages of history books. And they are really easy to read.

He was lead author of a textbook of American history for high-schoolers which is now standard reading across the nation. It is a wonderful book; in the library one day I opened it at random and then found it unputdownable. A textbook!

It’s a rare social scientist whom the average reader can make sense of and enjoy reading. There aren’t many in India, and fewer still who are young scholars. This bodes ill for the future of popular history.And that’s the point: history sells.

It sells very well — look at the bestseller lists, fiction or non-fiction, look at the newspapers, which every day have some history-inflected article prominently displayed (“Modi turns destroyer of temples”; “Navy takes battle to pirates”). But someone has to make good history mass-market yet respectable.

Today, that is done by historical novelists. In the West, an army of them produce historical fiction for all ages and tastes. Even when there is no history, writers use what little we do know about how Stone Age people (for instance) lived, and create stories to fit.

As a result, history, for the Western literate, is not a matter of textbooks but a functioning department of the imagination. If, as Indians, we had a better imaginative acquaintance with our own history, having encountered in fiction characters from various moments of our enormous and still unexplored past, perhaps we might be less inclined to extremes in our political opinions, and less inclined to think ourselves uniquely persecuted.

So if the taste exists, book-stores are blooming, and new publishers are competing for the Indian market, it’s an opportunity for history that should not be missed. Our schools and universities have shed orality and narrativity, even in the liberal arts like history, in favour of what academics used to hope was the level platform of “science” and method. But the platform isn’t quite level, and it’s too high up.

What to do? For a start, bring writing back to the core of learning (and not just in history: where are our great science writers?). In each college history “paper”, ask students to write a short story, picking real characters from history and fictionalising them (say, Muhammad bin Tughluq) or inventing their own (bin Tughluq’s body slave). Such “narrative training” is a far better introduction to the nitty-gritties of history than, say, “Discuss the importance of the Kushanas”, and is far more likely to win lifelong converts.