Rethinking India's past

The Indians: Histories of a Civilisation

Editors: G N Devy, Tony Joseph, Ravi Korisettar

Publisher: Aleph

Pages: 619   

Price: Rs 1,299

The story of India is complicated and messy; its civilisational history stretches across a cavernous and labyrinthine landscape and stumbles through an assorted mix of cultures that are as different from each other as light from dark. The people who claimed this land as their own have created a medley of genetic and cultural groups and their story, like the rivers that drew them to the region in the early days of human settlement, flows from countless sources and carries the imprint of multiple influences.

How and where does one begin to understand this history?

In the 100-odd essays in  The Indians: Histories of a Civilisation,  experts across disciplines pick their way through this question. Historians, geologists, political scientists, linguists and a host of writers from various disciplines open up the past, using the multiple tools at their disposal in remarkably innovative ways. Be it reports and data on climate change, geological and genetic evidence, migration studies, linguistic research or archival material about India’s colonial history, the essayists in the book walk the serpentine pathways of the past in their search for credible answers.
 

The collection of essays has been edited by Ganesh Devy, Tony Joseph and Ravi Korisettar. Devy, whose work with the denotified tribes of India and the largest-ever survey of languages in history is well known, embarked on this project because he was horrified at the polarisation of all debates on India’s past and the hatred spewed against its traditions of diversity and religious pluralism. He writes in the introductory essay that this book was written to combat the misinformation that has been seeded into present-day discussions about India’s past.

For Devy and his fellow editors, the inability to engage critically with the past is spreading an epidemic of disinformation. And it has reduced what is an otherwise rich, layered narrative of the people of the region into a unidimensional account that parcels the ancient world into neat binaries of race, superiority and patriotism. The book was born out of a contestation, Devy writes, between the scientific view of history and the ideologically charged attempts to distort the history of South Asia. It is important, under such conditions, to present a meaningful counter narrative.

One such essay in the book is by the late Rajesh Kochhar, an astrophysicist who has worked extensively on the Vedic civilisation on the river Sarasvati. He traces the various possible routes that the river could have taken in the ancient world and, using diverse sources, drills down to the potential geographical terrain it once inhabited. Kochhar’s remarkable eye for detail and ability to make measured arguments, without ridiculing those who may disagree with him, is a lesson on how such studies should be carried out.

The essay by Tony Joseph on migratory patterns is another fascinating read. It takes readers beyond the usual, reductive arguments about invaders and original residents and helps understand what the author terms “the metaphor of the Indian demographic pizza”. Free from the usual jargon, it sets out the arguments simply, without exaggeration or sensationalism.

The book also highlights many biases that mar research on the region’s political and cultural past. For example, an essay by urban historian Narayani Gupta challenges the way in which historians and archaeologists have explored the idea of cities. Unlike the Greek polis or city, there is very little understanding about urban settlements in this corner of the world.

The oversight could be deliberate or because archaeologists have been more focused on fieldwork than textual research in this region, or both. Gupta points out that evidence for the “city” is scattered in multiple primary and secondary narratives. From the grama  of the Vedas to the nagara that Panini wrote about and the rajdhanis of later literature, there is a lot that scholars of urbanisation can draw upon in their studies of the region.

Other essays offer a fresh twist to familiar arguments. The idea that climate change was responsible for the rise and fall of civilisations in this region, for instance, may be an old one. But the essays on the subject — one on climate variables by bio archaeologist Gwen Robbins Schug and another on weather patterns, by genetic archaeologist Sridhar Vajapey — add perspective to knowledge about the inherent fragility of human existence.

The well-known historian Vinay Lal, in the afterword to the book, writes about the politics of history in India and how we are close to demolishing the civilisational ethos that has been developed over thousands of years. The idea of the nation-state, Lal writes, “has been the most potent of poisons that Europe has shared with the world, not least of all India”. He argues that the nation-state abhors diversity. It has always been birthed in violence, by forcibly suppressing or alienating people opposed to the idea of being defined by a single language, religion, or colour.

When the past is held ransom to the ideological principles of one political party, or stowed away inside the box of patriotism and national interest, it destroys the essence of being Indian. Lal’s essays demonstrate the power that well-researched and energetically argued ideas can wield in a world that has developed a growing distaste for complexity.

Not all essays hit the perfect pitch. Some fail to convert the novelty of the ideas being explored into a cogently argued piece of writing and some get tangled in the circuitous wheels of their own reasoning. The book would have also benefited from a more diligent language editor. Names have been misspelt and there is no consistency in the spelling used for common words — one word is spelt in four different ways within the span of a page. Also, the formal academic style employed by some essayists needed rewriting. The multiplicity of voices also seems cacophonous at times.

This does not take away from the monumental effort that the team that conceptualised the book has undertaken. Apart from providing readers with an abundance of ideas, they have helped recreate the experience of ancient town squares, where debate and dissent were used to further arguments and not as reasons for incarceration. Even if the book establishes the importance of such spaces, it would have served its purpose.