Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi
Najmul Hoda, for those unacquainted, is an Indian Police Service officer, an Urdu writer and scholar, and a man of many parts. He is also, it appears, the latest authority on what historians should and should not do. Who better to instruct the discipline on its proper limits than a policeman who once wrote that Indian Muslims must “rewrite their victim mindset”? After all, if you want to understand the complexities of historical evidence and public duty, who better than a serving IPS officer who moonlights as a literary critic?
Hoda’s thoughtful review of Shaan Kashyap’s Who Owns the Past? raises questions that go considerably beyond the merits of a single book. At its heart lies an argument about the place of the professional historian in the Indian republic. Should historians confine themselves to archives, classrooms and scholarly journals, leaving disputes over the past to politicians, religious organisations and the courts? Or does historical expertise carry with it a responsibility to intervene when assertions about the past are employed to legitimise political action in the present?
The review appears attracted to the first proposition, or at least to a considerably more restrained conception of the historian’s public role. That is where one must disagree.
The Politics Has Already Occurred
There is, to begin with, something misleading in the apparently even-handed proposition that historians became “political actors” once they entered controversies concerning textbooks, communalism or Ayodhya. The observation is formally correct but historically inadequate. It removes from consideration the circumstances that compelled historians to intervene in the first place.
When a political movement makes a claim about the past, mobilises people around that claim and seeks to transform the material landscape on its basis, the historian cannot be accused of politicising history merely because he or she asks whether the historical claim is supported by evidence. The politics has already occurred. The historian has entered a field that politics has invaded.
What a relief it must be to live in a world where politics and history never mix until irresponsible historians barge in with their inconvenient questions. Hoda offers us this comforting vision: a republic where scholars would have remained noble, untouched creatures of the archive, if only they hadn’t developed the unfortunate habit of opening their mouths whenever someone started demolishing mosques or rewriting textbooks.
Let us pause to salute the extraordinary self-restraint Hoda seems to admire. There stand our professional historians, surrounded by political movements making apocalyptic claims about the sixteenth century, politicians thundering about medieval temple destructions, crowds gathering with pickaxes, and what do our historians do? They have the audacity to ask: “Where is the evidence?” The sheer cheek of it.
The Category Mistake That Wasn’t
The centrepiece of Hoda’s argument, borrowed from Majid Hayat Siddiqi, is that historians made a “category mistake” by entering political controversies as historians rather than as ordinary citizens. Because, you see, historical evidence is always mediated by interpretation. Therefore, historians have no more authority to speak on the past than, say, a politician who has never read a primary source or a television anchor who has never seen an archive.
This is ingenious reasoning. By this logic, a cardiologist should not be consulted about a heart attack because medical diagnosis is also mediated by interpretation. A structural engineer should stay quiet when a building collapses because load-bearing calculations are, after all, a matter of professional consensus. And an archaeologist who has spent decades excavating a site should presumably defer to a priest who has spent decades reading scripture, because both are simply offering interpretations.
The false modesty here is breathtaking. It masquerades as intellectual humility – oh, we historians are so limited, so constrained by our methods, so unable to speak with certainty – while actually serving a deeply conservative purpose: silence the experts so that anyone with a microphone and a grievance can claim equal authority over the past.
Ayodhya: The Historian’s Original Sin
Consider Ayodhya. A political movement spends years claiming that a sixteenth-century mosque was built on the ruins of a temple marking Rama’s birthplace. It mobilises millions around this claim. It organises a rath yatra across the country. It finally demolishes the structure with the complicity of state authorities.
And according to the logic Hoda finds persuasive, the historian’s error was to say: “Let us examine the evidence.”
Not the demolition. Not the mobilisation. Not the violence. The historian’s intervention.
This is what passes for sophisticated critique in certain circles. The historian who asks for inscriptions, for archaeological strata, for contemporary chronicles, for documentary evidence, is the one who has “politicised” history. Never mind that the entire dispute was already political. Never mind that faith had already been weaponised. The crime is not the weaponisation; the crime is the refusal to accept that faith, once weaponised, can no longer be questioned.
One almost expects the next step: that historians should apologise for existing.
The False Equivalence of Textbook Interventions
The review’s treatment of textbook controversies is equally instructive. Hoda approves of Kashyap’s discovery that textbook controversies didn’t begin with the BJP in 1977. Indeed, Kerala had them earlier. Christians objected to representations of Jesus. Sikhs protested about the Gurus. Everybody, it turns out, demanded textbook changes.
The conclusion Hoda seems to draw? Everyone is equally guilty. Everyone politicised history. Therefore, no one is really guilty. It’s all just politics, all the way down. How wonderfully symmetrical. How satisfyingly balanced.
Notice what this argument does not do. It does not ask whether some interventions were more systematic than others. It does not ask whether some governments imposed changes through institutional pressure while others responded to grassroots mobilisation. It does not ask whether some demands were based on evidence while others were based on faith. It does not ask whether some changes affected one state textbook while others sought to transform the national curriculum.
No, no. That would be fussy. That would be looking for distinctions where none are required. The point, apparently, is to achieve a kind of moral equivalence by chronological proximity. If everyone has attempted to influence textbooks at some point, then no one can claim the higher ground.
It is a marvellous argument. It is also, to borrow a phrase, a category mistake. But let us not get pedantic.
The Disappearing Institution
And then there is the AMU episode. Irfan Habib complains about criminalisation and academic decline. He is assaulted. He is suspended before any inquiry. Intellectuals defend him. The review, following Kashyap, suggests that Habib won the battle but AMU lost the war, because the defence of the historian allegedly distracted attention from the institution’s problems.
One struggles to find words adequate to the absurdity of this logic.
So the intellectuals who defended a scholar from physical assault and administrative victimisation are now to be blamed for not simultaneously solving the structural problems of a university? They were expected, presumably, to mobilise for Habib’s safety and also reform AMU’s admissions policy, regulate its hostels, address its governance crisis, and perhaps settle its funding disputes, all in the same press release.
It is the most demanding critique of intellectual activism ever formulated. If you defend a colleague from a beating, you have apparently forfeited the right to discuss institutional reform. If you sign a petition, you cannot also write a paper on university governance. If you fight for academic freedom, you are somehow preventing the institution from recovering.
One imagines the ideal historian under this dispensation: someone who, upon learning of a colleague’s assault, would say, “Yes, but have we considered the administrative challenges of the institution as a whole?” and then go back to the archive, satisfied that neutrality had been preserved.
The Myth of the Contaminated Field
Underlying all this is a curious nostalgia for a time when history was pure, uncontaminated by politics, when historians simply wrote their monographs and nobody bothered them about the past. The tragedy, according to this view, is that secular historians allowed themselves to become associated with the state, and now everyone suspects them of being part of the establishment.
How odd. How very odd.
Because what actually happened was that a colonial historiography – deeply communal in its structures, explicitly hierarchical in its assumptions – was challenged by historians who believed that evidence, method, and critical inquiry could produce a more adequate understanding of India’s past. They did not simply parrot a state ideology. They produced scholarship that was genuinely new: economic histories of Mughal India, social histories of early India, analyses of colonialism that did not simply reproduce nationalist pieties, studies of caste and class that went beyond dynastic chronicles.
And the response? The response is that they became too powerful, too influential, too … monopolistic. As if intellectual influence were something to be dismantled rather than earned. As if the answer to powerful scholarship were not better scholarship but the dissolution of the very idea that some scholarship is better than others.
The False Heroism of the Withdrawn
The oddest part of the review’s argument is its implicit heroisation of the historian who does not intervene.
Here is a discipline that has produced some of the most consequential intellectuals of modern India. Historians who shaped the understanding of the republic. Historians who testified before courts. Historians who were summoned by governments. Historians whose arguments were debated in newspapers, in political rallies, in legislative assemblies.
And we are asked to believe that their greatest virtue would have been a dignified silence.
Consider what that silence would have meant in Ayodhya. Consider what it would have meant in the textbook controversies. Consider what it would have meant when the Constitution’s vision of a secular republic was being challenged by claims about an ancient Hindu civilisation, a Muslim despotism, and an essentially communal Indian past.
The historians who spoke did not always win. They were sometimes wrong. They sometimes overreached. Their scholarship has been revised, corrected, and in some cases superseded. That is how knowledge progresses.
But to suggest that their error lay in speaking at all, that is not a critique. It is a counsel of despair.
The Unbearable Lightness of Neutrality
At the end of the review, Hoda endorses the proposition that history is not an inheritance but an argument. It is a fine sentiment. Everyone can agree on it. It allows everyone to feel virtuous without committing to anything.
But the proposition is incomplete. An argument implies a method. An argument implies standards. An argument implies that some participants have actually done the work of examining evidence while others have simply asserted their beliefs.
To say that history is an argument is not to say that every argument is history. That distinction is not mere pedantry. It is the entire point of the discipline.
The historian who enters public debate is not claiming ownership of the past. The historian is claiming that the past can be known, if imperfectly, through the application of method and the examination of evidence. That is a modest claim. It is also an indispensable one.
In a republic where the past is increasingly invoked to justify every political project, where historical claims are repeated until they acquire the force of fact, where monuments are destroyed and textbooks are rewritten without reference to evidence, the historian who remains silent is not being neutral. The historian who remains silent is being complicit.
The Sad and Hilarious Spectacle
And yet, the truly remarkable spectacle is not Hoda’s review itself, but the reverence with which some historians are sharing it. Yes, you read that correctly. Professional historians, people who have spent decades in archives, who have built careers on the careful evaluation of evidence, are circulating this critique as if it were a revelation. As if an IPS officer lecturing historians on their “category mistakes” were some profound new insight, rather than a deeply ironic case of the pot calling the kettle black.
It is, quite frankly, both sad and hilarious. Sad, because it reveals a peculiar insecurity within the profession, a willingness to genuflect before any critic, no matter how ill-equipped, who confirms their own self-doubt about public intervention. Hilarious, because the very historians who spent the Ayodhya years insisting on the primacy of evidence are now sharing a review that suggests they should have stayed silent. One imagines them nodding sagely at Hoda’s argument, perhaps murmuring, “Yes, yes, we should have just let the demolition happen. Much more dignified.”
The logic, if it can be called that, is breathtaking. Hoda, following the book’s author, suggests that the error of the Ayodhya historians was to believe that historical evidence could settle a political dispute. The fact that the dispute was already political, that the evidence was being mobilised by one side to justify the destruction of a mosque, apparently does not matter. The crime is not the weaponisation of history; the crime is the refusal to accept that weaponised faith cannot be questioned. It is a prescription for professional suicide dressed up as intellectual humility.
One can only marvel at the spectacle of some historians falling over themselves to endorse a critique that essentially tells them to shut up and leave the past to the politicians, the priests, and the policemen. Perhaps they find it refreshing. Perhaps they are simply tired. But the rest of us, who still believe that evidence matters, that expertise has a place in public life, and that silence in the face of falsehood is not neutrality but complicity, can only watch in disbelief.
The Historian’s Duty
The historian has no right to own the past. But the historian does have a duty to defend the procedures by which we know it.
And in a republic increasingly crowded with those who claim certainty about history without submitting themselves to the discipline of historical evidence, that duty has rarely been more important. The next time a monument is demolished or a textbook is rewritten, we will know whom to thank for the historians’ newfound commitment to restraint.
ASHA: Blast From The Past 