Predicaments of Secular Histories

Neeladri Bhattacharya

The professional history writing that developed in India in

the early decades after independence was powerfully shaped by the intellectual
culture of the time. New India looked forward to a future in which democracy
would unfold, the rights of free citizens would be defined, and the commitments
made during the national movement would be realized. Troubled by memories
of the communal carnage and trauma of the Partition years — when thousands
of Hindus and Muslims killed each other — the intellectuals of this new India
struggled to create a secular and democratic public culture. Inspired by the ideals
of democratic citizenship, they hoped for a society where individuals would be
emancipated from their religious and affective ties and reborn as secular citizens
of a democratic state. Historians turned to the past to counter communal repre-
sentations of history, question communal stereotypes, and write a secular national
history. The critique of communal prejudice was seen as necessary for developing
a history that was scientific and objective. To be authentic, it was believed, this
new history had to be both scientific and secular.
In the decades that followed, sectarian conflicts continued. New trends in histori-
cal writing emerged; historians became aware of the problems of both objectivism
and the meaning of narrative truth; but the battle against communal histories con-
tinued to determine the way new histories were framed. In this essay I will look at
the way this battle has shaped the agendas of secular histories — its terms of refer-
ence, its silences and erasures, its tropes of analyses, its fears and anxieties. I will
reflect on the predicaments of doing “secular” histories: the need to simultaneously
critique communal frames and transcend the limits that such a critique imposes.
Through an inner critique of secular histories — for I locate myself within the tradi-
tion — the essay will discuss the larger problem of writing history.1

1. There have been several powerful critiques of the concept of secularism. See Ashis Nandy,
“The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,” in Mirrors of Violence, ed.

Public Culture 20:1  doi 10.1215/08992363-2007-016

Copyright 2008 by Duke University Press 57
Public Culture Beyond Boundaries

Communal histories of India are premised on one fundamental assumption: that

India is a society fractured into two overarching religious communities — Hindus
and Muslims. These communities are not only separate and distinct but also irrec-
oncilably opposed. Their cultures, values, social practices, and beliefs have little
in common. Their histories are histories of discord: of mutual hostility, hatred,
conflict, battles for domination. The boundaries of their identities are well etched,
firmly defined, and categorically drawn, the lines deepened by a long history of
mutual antagonism.2
For many years secular histories have battled against these ideas and the his-
tories through which they have been naturalized.3 Anxious about the growth of
communalism and haunted by the fear of communal violence, secular historians
have returned to the past to build the premises of a humane, secular, and demo-
cratic present. They have questioned communal assumptions, deconstructed com-
munal stereotypes, mined the archives for alternate evidence, reread the texts, and
presented secular counternarratives.
But secular histories have been strongly defined by the history of their origin.
The desire to argue against the constitutive assumptions of communal history has
shaped the questions that have been posed, the narrative choices that have been
made, and the way arguments have been elaborated. Secular historians have ques-
tioned communal stereotypes by turning them upside down and have countered
communal assumptions by inverting them. Where communal historians can only
see the hard lines of the boundaries that separate communities, secular historians
have emphasized the porosity and open-endedness of these boundaries. Where
communal historians look at the communities as homogenous and unitary, secular
historians point to the heterogeneity and fragmentation within them. Where com-

Veena Das (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 69 – 93; T. N. Madan, “Secularism in Its
Place,” Journal of Asian Studies 46 (1987): 747 – 59; and Partha Chatterjee, “Secularism and Toler-
ance,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1998), 345 – 79. For a nuanced and sophisticated defense of the concept see Rajeev Bhargava, “What
Is Secularism For?” in Secularism and Its Critics, 468 – 542.
2. An early assessment of these histories can be found in Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, and
Harbans Mukhia, Communalism and the Writing of Indian History (New Delhi: Peoples Publish-
ing House, 1969). For a discussion of communal stereotypes and frames of reference see Bipan
Chandra, Communalism in Modern India (Delhi: Vani Educational Books, 1984); Gyanendra Pan-
dey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990);
and Mushirul Hasan, Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 1885 –1930 (Delhi: Manohar,
1991).
3. Chandra, Communalism.

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munal historians look at the past as a time of communal discord, secular histori- Predicaments of
ans have sought to underline the elements of concord, harmony, and togetherness. Secular Histories
Where communal historians hear only the voices of orthodoxy and sectarianism,
secularists have searched for histories of syncretism and tolerance.
Secular histories continue to be framed within the terms of these oppositions.
In recent years the arguments have been nuanced, issues have been problema-
tized, new narrative strategies have been adopted, and the horizons of history have
expanded. Yet in the finest accounts we can still discover some of the recurring
tropes of secular histories that I am referring to. Let me elaborate by discussing a
recent book, Muzaffar Alam’s The Languages of Political Islam, c. 1200 –1800.
I choose to focus on this book because it is a brilliant account of the history of
Islam in India, destined to become a classic; yet even the finest texts on such sub-
jects, including Alam’s, are structured by the recurring tropes I am referring to.
Alam sets out to counter the abiding image of Islam as a closed, dogmatic,
intolerant faith whose doctrines are fixed and unchanging, their authority deriving
from canonical sanctified texts that are not subject to interpretation and change. In
many ways produced and circulated by the West, this image haunts the West and
is frequently invoked to legitimate attacks on Islamic states. It often even shapes
the way Muslims perceive their own religion and define their own identity. And
in India it is a stereotype that is central to the Hindu communal representations
of the Muslim other and provides the counterpoint against which Hindus are pro-
jected as tolerant, open-minded, flexible, forbearing, and forgiving.
Alam effectively deconstructs the stereotype and questions each of its assump-
tions. Through a rich exploration of the languages of political Islam in India,
Alam shows how Islam evolved as it moved from its Perso-Islamic context to
newer lands and confronted new cultures, new ideas, new societies, and new poli-
ties. This contact produced a dialogue that transformed both Islam and the local
cultures. Islam opened itself to non-Islamic influences, incorporating local prac-
tices, redefining its original ideals. While at the elite level the connection with the
Perso-Turkish tradition remained powerful, at the popular level Islam was Indian-
ized. The Sufis — mystic saints — reflected on the mundane world in a language
steeped in syncretic ideas: they absorbed Hindu influences, talked of removing
misery among those in distress, and underlined the need to create a common basis
for appreciating the “ultimate reality.” Alam shows, in a highly textured account,
how the vocabulary of Islamic politics itself changed. Words like governance,
obedience, resistance, and victory came to acquire new meanings. Sharia — the
Islamic legal code — was reinterpreted. It was not treated as a fixed text, frozen in

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Public Culture time, reflective of the power of Islamic orthodoxy, a code that all Muslims were
doomed to follow. The sharia was continuously reworked in ways that could make
it adequate to the demands of governance in an alien culture. Consequently, it
came to acquire more than one meaning. So over the centuries, writes Alam, “the
language of the Islamic East moved towards a syncretic mix: a legacy of coop-
eration and assimilation developed from the days of the Sultanate to the end of
Mughal rule; and conflict situations tended to be resolved along a pattern informed
by this strong political tradition of accommodation within medieval Islam.”4
Implicit in this account is a linear history of increasing assimilation and accom-
modation leading to an ultimate breakdown of rigidities, an erosion of dogmas,
a blurring of the boundaries of faith, a creative openness. Cultures and religions
open out to each other, absorb influences, mutate. The “pure” is progressively
alloyed, the premises of understanding develop, orthodoxy is contained.
In Alam’s complex narrative, this teleology does not unfold unquestioned
within a simple, untroubled time. He shows both the contradictions within these
ideas and the limits of Sufi assimilation. Many Sufi texts — the miracle stories
and hagiographies — begin with a plea for accommodation but end by arguing
the need to mark difference. They talk of commonness and the importance of
understanding other religions but end by asserting the superiority of Islam. One
Sufi saint, Shaikh ‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi, wrote to Babar, the first Mughal
emperor, pleading that only pious Muslims be appointed as government officials
and that Hindus be excluded from high offices and denied financial assistance in
any form: they had to realize that they were inferior to Muslims.5 Later we hear
the worried voice of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, who lamented Islam’s failure to
confront Hinduism.
How is this evidence to be narrativized, written into a story that is about the
process of assimilation of non-Islam into Islam? How does one write about such
conflicting voices without disrupting the internal coherence of the metastory?
Alam contains this disruptive threat only by reaffirming at the end his belief in
a secular teleology. The counterreaction of the orthodoxy, the combative asser-
tion of Islamic superiority, could not derail the assimilative processes: “A non-
sectarian and open ended cultural politics, with the aim of balancing the conflict-
ing claims of different communities, continued to assert its presence.”6 Syncretic

4. Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, c. 1200 –1800 (New Delhi: Permanent
Black, 2005), 141.
5. Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, 161.
6. Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, 168.

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traditions matured; a hybrid local language — Hindavi — became the language of Predicaments of
the court; collective festivities and rituals came to be celebrated regularly. Ulti- Secular Histories
mately the forces that sought to contain the process of assimilation were them-
selves contained.
What we have here is a picture in which the history of accommodation marches
ahead, overcoming all constraints. It is a picture produced partly by the way the
narrative is constructed. The story begins with a discussion of assimilative pro-
cesses, then talks of assimilation’s limits, and ends by returning to the assimila-
tion story. The potential threat of the orthodoxy is thus narratively contained. The
contestatory voices — the anxieties of the orthodoxy, the fears of Gangohi and
Sirhindi — are underlined and then assimilated within the larger story of accom-
modation. Alam’s narrative is powerful and complex, but framed within a secular
teleology.
Within Alam’s story of the transformation of political Islam in India there
may be an alternative suppressed narrative of continuous dialogue and conflict,
of cultural assimilation and reaffirmation of difference, of the dissolution of older
boundaries and the creation of new ones. The story of accommodation need not
be a linear story of increasing open-endedness. Hybridization, the loss of original
essence, does not imply the dissolution of boundaries of difference. While cri-
tiquing an anti-Islamic sectarianism that associates Islam only with the voice of
orthodoxy, secular histories need not underrate the power of this voice.

Of Heroes and Villains

Each genre of historical narrative constructs its own heroes and villains. The
heroes embody the ideals affirmed in the narrative; they become the bearers of
all that is celebrated. The villains symbolize evil; they stand for values and norms
that are being critiqued. In simpler teleologies, the heroes reveal the essence of
history; their actions point to the future, to the telos toward which history moves,
and they enable this forward march, this unfolding. In this sense heroes are often
seen as born before their time, presaging the time to come. Critiques of particu-
lar frameworks of histories therefore inevitably seek to resymbolize persons and
identify new individuals who could become the bearers of an alternate history, an
alternate vision. The heroes of one history often become the villains of another.
So a battle over persons becomes important in the wars over history. In this
war, the personification of ideals goes hand in hand with the idealization of per-
sons. Heroes are uncrowned and “villains” are rehabilitated. To understand the
politics of secular history, we need to look at these processes through which indi-

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Public Culture viduals are personified and repersonified. I seek to do this by drawing on some of
the debates on medieval Indian history.
In Hindu communal representations, as we have seen, the medieval ages were
a dark time for India. During this period Muslims invaded the country and estab-
lished a tyrannical rule, destroying Hindu temples, devastating the land, oppressing
the people, and forcibly imposing their religion. For Hindus it was a tragic time:
their religion was under threat; their culture was being undermined, their women
were being dishonored, and their men were being humiliated. It was a time of pil-
lage and rape, intolerance and violence. The figure of the Muslim came to person-
ify the evils of the time. As agents of this history and bearers of this past, Muslims
could never escape the qualities inscribed on their body: they were — everywhere
and forever — to be associated with brutality and religious fanaticism.
The coherence of this stereotype was threatened by figures like Akbar, the
Mughal emperor who ruled between 1556 to 1605. Even Hindu communal histori-
ans had to concede that Akbar was no religious bigot. But his reign was seen as only
a temporary interlude within an otherwise cruel and tragic era. For Hindu commu-
nal historians, it is not Akbar but Aurangzeb — the last of the Great Mughals — who
embodied the essence of Muslim rule in India. Aurangzeb was seen as a bigot and
a fanatic: he imposed a rule of sharia, declared a religious war (jihad) against infi-
dels, reimposed jizyah (a tax on nonbelievers), and adopted a puritanical lifestyle
dictated by the sharia.7 So tyrannical was his rule that the Hindu population rose in
rebellion, creating a crisis that ultimately led to the collapse of the empire.
How were secular historians to counter this image of Mughal rulers? Clearly
it was linked to the politics of communalism in the present. It sought to villainize
Muslims, categorize them as a homogenous community, mark them with collec-
tive guilt, and transform them into objects of Hindu anger and hatred.
Secular historians found in Akbar a figure they could celebrate. As a ruler,
Akbar sought to marginalize the orthodox elements, undercut the power of the
theologians, appoint Hindus to high offices, and integrate different sections of
society. The ideal of sulh-i-kul that he believed in saw different religions as paths
to the same god and emphasized the need for the state to be impartial: the state
was not to discriminate between followers of different religions, for all of them
had some merits as well as faults. To secular historians it seemed that Akbar
symbolized all the values that were dear to them — the values of secularism and
liberalism. In an ethnocentric move, categories of the present were mapped onto

7. S. R. Sharma, The Religious Policy of Mughal Emperors (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1940).

62
the past; ideals of the modern age were discovered in earlier times. Even as sensi- Predicaments of
tive a historian as Satish Chandra characterizes the state that Akbar established as Secular Histories
polyreligious, tolerant, open-ended, liberal, and secular, as if there is no problem
in describing individuals or states in the sixteenth century as secular and liberal.
It was easier to celebrate Akbar as a hero, but more difficult to repersonify
Aurangzeb. How was it possible to explain the seemingly overwhelming evidence
of his bigotry and oppression? Did he not impose the tax on the Hindus, destroy
Hindu temples, and execute Hindu rulers? Did he not succumb to the pressures
of the theologians and allow the sharia to determine his actions? For many years,
among secular historians, there was an embarrassed silence regarding Aurangzeb,
or a grudging admission that his long reign of forty-nine years (1658 –1707) was
in fact a time of bigotry and oppression. But these historians attempted to see this
period as a temporary interlude, a deviation, and not characteristic of Mughal
rule. The strategic move was to minimize the larger significance of his rule, iso-
late him within the Mughal lineage as the bad guy, and turn the historical gaze
on Akbar, underlining his greatness and representing him as the key figure of the
time. The expansion and consolidation of the empire was linked to the politics of
Akbar, and the disintegration was seen as the natural consequence of Aurangzeb’s
bigotry. The efficacy of secularism, its universal relevance, was thus reaffirmed
through the narrative of the past.
But then from the late 1960s a new picture of Aurangzeb emerged in secular
histories.8 The reinterpretation that followed featured two strategic moves. First,
the unitary and flattened image of Aurangzeb as a hardened bigot was questioned.
His life and actions, it was suggested, could not be captured through this simple
stereotype. Aurangzeb acted in different ways and implemented different policies
at different points in life. The politics of his early reign needed to be differentiated
from that of the later period, and the conflicting policies within each phase had
to be understood. Second, a distinction was made between the personal and the
public, the religious and the political. Actions and policies that were seemingly
dictated by religious considerations, it was suggested, were in reality determined
by political expediency. One had to unravel the real behind the apparent, distin-
guish the rhetorical from the causal.
In a series of important essays published since 1969, Satish Chandra has
offered a rereading of Aurangzeb.9 Chandra accepted that on the personal level
8. One of the earliest reassessments was in Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (Bom-
bay: Asia Publishing House, 1966).
9. See the following articles by Satish Chandra: “Jizyah and the State in India during the Sev-
enteenth Century” and “Religious Policy of Aurangzeb during the Later Part of His Reign — Some

63
Public Culture Aurangzeb was undoubtedly orthodox — that he wanted to conform to the dic-
tates of the sharia and respect the theologians. But like the emperors before him,
he was a realist and did not wish to destroy the social support of his rule. In 1679,
he did reimpose jizyah on the “infidels,” but this action was not dictated by the
pressures of the ulemas or the dictates of the sharia or even his personal bigotry.
It was determined by political expediency: a desire to unify a segmented ruling
class, to control the growing conflicts and tensions that were pulling them apart,
in order to confront the rebellions against Mughal rule. If Hindus were killed and
Hindu temples destroyed, it was again not because of any fanatical hostility of
Aurangzeb toward the infidels; it was for political reasons. Only when confronted
with resistance from Hindu rulers did Aurangzeb demolish the temples in their
land, humiliate them, impose jizyah, and execute Hindu rulers in a symbolic show
of power. Even in his most intolerant phase, his most Islamist phase, Auragnzeb
was prompted primarily by political concerns and pragmatic calculations.
What this narrative does, first of all, is temporally delimit the phase of intoler-
ance. The narrative of Aurangzeb’s reign begins with a period of laxity, enters
a phase of rigidity, and ends with a return to laxity — when all the institutions
and practices of religious autocracy were dismantled. Aurangzeb’s emphasis on
Holy Law and Islam lasted no longer than a decade within a long rule of fifty
years. Framed within such a beginning and ending, the story of Aurangzeb’s life
acquires a new meaning. Second, within this narrative, causality is sifted in such a
way that religion is inevitably displaced and never appears constitutive of action.
My argument becomes clear if we look at the way conflicting evidence is
narrativized. When Aurangzeb captured the Maratha leader Sambhaji, a non-
Muslim, in 1689, there was disagreement among the nobles about the way he
should be treated. Some said his life should be spared and he should be kept
in confinement, while others recommended harsh action. Aurangzeb decided to
execute him. Why? Chandra quotes Khafi Khan to argue that the decision to
execute Sambhaji was political, an attempt to punish rebels: “The Emperor was
in favour of seeking the opportunity of getting rid of these prime movers of strife,
and hoped that with a little exertion their fortress would be reduced.”10 Having

Considerations,” Indian Historical Review 13 (July 1986 – January 1987): 88 –101; “The Deccan Pol-
icy of the Mughals (II) under Aurangzeb,” Indian Historical Review 5 (July 1978 – January 1979):
135 – 51; and “Society, Culture and the State in Medieval India: An Essay in Interpretation,” Nihar-
ranjan Ray Memorial Lecture, Delhi, 1991. Most of these essays are now collected in Chandra,
Essays on Medieval Indian History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).
10. Statement of Khafi Khan quoted in Chandra, Essays on Medieval Indian History, 333.

64
dissociated the action from any religious motivation, Chandra writes: “However, Predicaments of
Aurangzeb tried to give a religious gloss to a political decision by referring the Secular Histories
matter to ‘masters of Holy law and Faith’ and ‘the dignitaries of the Church and
state’ who, in turn, decreed Sambhaji’s execution ‘in consideration of the harsh-
ness and insult that he had practised by slaying and imprisoning Muslims and
plundering the cities of Islam.’ ”11
What is it that allows us to consider Khafi Khan’s statement the real clue to the
intentions of Aurangzeb? How do we say that Aurangzeb’s attempt to consult the
theologians was in some way inauthentic, that it was only to “give a religious gloss
to a political decision”? My aim here is not to understand Aurangzeb’s intentions.
I only wish to see how facts are emplotted within structures of narrative, how
conflicting evidence is negotiated, how causal connections are made through nar-
rative strategies, and how the narrative truth emerges in the process. What we see
at play here, yet again, is a process of secularization of the past, a mode of nar-
rativization in which the religious is consistently separated from the political and
the political is persistently seen as untainted by religion.
Chandra’s essays on Aurangzeb are highly nuanced; they grapple with a range
of conflicting evidence and seek to arrive at a balanced reading of a controversial
historical figure. But they are torn by an inner tension that often characterizes sec-
ular histories. The conflicting voices from the past that Chandra seeks to reconcile
refuse to merge into any simple coherence. Confronted with communal stereo­
types, and aware of the urgency of countering them, secular historians have too
often framed their arguments within problematic binaries. To critique the com-
munalist valorization of the religious, secular historians have tried to see in every
action only the play of nonreligious interests — either political or economic.
Does secular history have to focus only on the political and underestimate the
shaping power of religion? Is it not possible to look at the mutual articulation of
the religious and political? Can the narratives of religion and power in premodern
times be so easily separated?

The Rhetoric of Facts

The battle over histories is often fought through a rhetoric of facts. Communal
historians in India have sought to counter the facts of secular histories, while
secular historians have questioned what communal historians have produced
as facts. Can secular histories adopt such a strategy of critique? Can we really

11. Chandra, Essays on Medieval Indian History, 333.

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Public Culture counter a framework of an argument by demonstrating that some of the “facts”
within the argument are “wrong”? Is this not to surrender to nineteenth-century
positivism?
Many critics have pointed to the empiricist premises of such a mode of argu-
mentation. These critics are right, but not entirely. A debate over “facts” remains
important even when we take the narrativist thesis seriously. What is implied
when we say our understanding of the past depends on how we narrativize the
past, on what stories about the past we choose to tell or not tell? It clearly means
that the meaning of our narrative would depend on how we build our story, how
we embed the events within a plausible plot structure. If this is so, then the “facts”
and events we choose to focus on and the significance we imbue them with become
important. The facts then are not “mere facts”; they have signifying functions.
If the narratives within which they are plotted lend events their particular his-
torical significance, then the mode of emplotting the events in turn structures the
meaning of the narratives. Thus the events exist as constitutive ingredients of a
narrative.
To question a narrative, therefore, we can demonstrate how it is constructed
through specific kinds of erasures and attribution of significance; how certain
events are talked of and not others, and why certain “facts” are foregrounded
rather than others. A seeming questioning of facts may call into question an entire
narrative, its claim to meaning and understanding.
Let me elaborate through an example. Communal narratives of ancient India
are constructed around two parallel, yet contradictory, theses. The first is the
claim that Hindus have a pure Aryan descent. In these narratives, the Vedas — 
the sacred texts of the Aryans — are imbued with authenticity, and the time of the
Vedas is seen as a time of creativity, growth, and development. The origin of all
valid knowledge, all true values, norms, laws, religious ideals, and social prac-
tices, is traced back to Vedic times. Second, these communal histories are also
narratives of indigenousness. They claim not only that the Aryans were the origi-
nal ancestors of Hindus but that Hindus are the original inhabitants of India. Only
through such a claim could Muslims be represented as outsiders, foreigners who
came and imposed their oppressive rule in India. But such an argument could be
made only through a series of other assertions. If Hindu descent was to be traced
back to the Aryans, and if they were to be presented as the original inhabitants,
then it was not possible to accept that the Aryans came from outside or that there
were flourishing local cultures within India before the coming of the Aryans.
Within this narrative, the Harappan civilization could not be celebrated and yet

66
seen as pre-Aryan. It had to be presented as contemporary with the Vedic times, or Predicaments of
as part of the Aryan culture. Secular histories have countered each of these claims Secular Histories
and suggested that the Aryans were pastoralists who migrated into India from
outside — possibly Central Asia — and that there were highly developed settled
cultures in India before the coming of the nomadic Aryans and that the sources of
dynamism in ancient India could not all be traced back to the Vedic age.12
It is undoubtedly true that in critiquing communal representations, secular his-
torians have too often used a rhetoric of facts. They have sought to show that the
claims of communal historians are unsupported by research — that their facts are
wrong and their arguments untenable. Such a mode of argumentation inevitably
rests on the belief that historical truths are established by examining the verac-
ity of facts. This way of thinking still shapes the language of many who other-
wise recognize that facts and events acquire their meaning only through acts of
representation.
But can we get away from these debates over “facts”? If the communal narra-
tive of the Aryan past was produced through specific silences and erasures, and if
the communal representation of the Aryan age could be constructed only through
a narration of certain types of events, then we need to look at the politics of this
narration, the politics of these choices. We need to scrutinize the types of events
selected for narration and the strategies through which these events are inscribed
with meaning: how the meanings of events are refigured and how they are brought
together, emplotted within a narrative structure. This forces us to examine not just
the structure of the narrative but also its constitutive ingredient elements. What I
am trying to suggest is not only that the question of “facts” (in the form of, e.g.,
documents, evidence, archives) becomes important in the politics of histories but
also that the meanings of these categories need to be reconceptualized.13

Reconstituting Memories

Secular histories in India have sought to counter the memories that communal
perspectives seek to normalize. If sectarian discourses authenticate their claims
by referring to history, by arguing that history stands witness to the truth of what
they say, secular histories return to the past to counter these claims, to build an

12. Romila Thapar, Early India: From Origins to AD 1300 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002); R. S. Sharma, Looking for the Aryans (Madras: Orient Longman, 1995); Thomas
Trautman, The Aryan Debate (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).
13. Paul Ricoeur helps us rethink these categories. See Time and Narrative, vols. 1 – 3 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990).

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Public Culture alternate social memory. But how? In this section I will look at the different strat-
egies deployed by secular historians over the years to constitute memories that
would make intercommunity dialogues and understanding possible.
The image of the Muslim iconoclast and plunderer is central to the Hindu com-
munal imaginary. The individual who epitomizes this image most dramatically is
Mahmud of Ghazni. Every schoolchild in India is told how Mahmud carried out
seventeen plundering raids in the eleventh century, culminating in the infamous
sack of the Somnath temple in 1026 CE. It is said that all the wealth of the temple
was plundered and its idol mutilated. So traumatic was the experience that the
event was indelibly etched in the Hindu mind, in the collective memory of the
nation. Memories of the sack of Somnath, we are told, nurtured a profound feel-
ing of anger, shame, and hurt and legitimated retributive violence in the centuries
to come.
The great historian Mohammad Habib was among the first to confront this
social memory of Mahmud’s invasions.14 In the 1930s, Habib adopted a threefold
strategy for demystifying the image of a rampaging Muslim iconoclast destroying
Hindu temples. First, he proceeded to explain what really happened. Mahmud
was driven by greed and lust for wealth, said Habib, not religious fanaticism
and bigotry. The rhetoric of religion was only to legitimate his actions within an
orthodox Sunni Muslim social milieu. Second, Habib suggested that such memo-
ries of Muslim rule were produced by a colonial education system in which the
textbooks inevitably represented Muslims as violent, intolerant, and fanatical in
order to project the British as open-minded and sensitive to other cultures. Third,
in opposition to the narratives of Muslim violence, Habib traced a long history of
syncretism, tolerance, and intercommunity exchanges. Muslim Sufis were located
within an even longer tradition of Hindu cosmopolitanism.
Inspired by secularism and Marxism, Habib proceeded by displacing religion
as a determinant of social action and referred to economic and “material” motives
as the real explanation of what happened.15 Having demonstrated the logic of the
“real events,” he then showed how colonial propaganda had produced a false image
of the past and nurtured intercommunity hatred. Hindus and Muslims needed to
return to a different past and tap the resource of a different memory, to eliminate

14. See K. A. Nizami, ed., Politics and Society during the Early Medieval Period: Collected
Works of Professor Mohammad Habib, vol. 1 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1974).
15. See also the discussion of Habib in Shahid Amin, “On Telling the Muslim Conquest of North
India,” in History and the Present, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh (Delhi: Permanent Black,
2002), 24 – 43.

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the forces of discord in the present and unify against British rule. Once again we Predicaments of
see the argument framed within the familiar tropes of secular histories. Secular Histories
In recent years historians have returned to the same events to tell a different
story. In a fascinating book titled Somnatha: Many Voices of a History, Romila
Thapar seeks to move beyond the attempt to explain what really happened in
Somnatha.16 She juxtaposes different texts from the past, different records, to
question the authenticity of the received version, and she looks at the way the
events were recorded in different genres of text. The epic of conquest, recorded
in the Turko-Persian sources, glorified Mahmud as a defender of faith. But the
local traditions within the region do not dwell solely on the theme of violence and
plunder, and they do not all say the same thing about what happened. In Thapar’s
sensitive analysis the focus shifts from an explanation of the event to an under-
standing of how the event was perceived and represented and how its memory was
constructed over time. Her object is not to get behind the intentions of Mahmud
but to understand how his raids entered historical imagination. What are often
considered the facts of the raids, argues Thapar, are in fact the products of a
long process of historical fashioning and encoding of memories. From among the
various versions, colonial officials chose to fix one version as authentic. Keen on
underlining the violence and fanaticism of the Muslims, they found in the account
of Muhammad Ibrahim Firishta a description of the event that confirmed their
own prior picture of Muslim invaders. Canonized by the writings of Alexander
Dow, this colonial story of Somnatha was generalized and reaffirmed in subse-
quent nationalist and communal writings. It came to constitute the accepted truth
and shaped the memory of the event in collective imagination.
Thapar’s account thus proceeds by peeling off layers of historical memories
and locating them in the context of their production. Then, by unraveling the
politics that lay behind the construction of the standard story, she seeks to subvert
its claim to truth. In showing the heterogeneity of memories, she questions the
processes of homogenization and universalization that went into the making of
the canonical version.17
16. Thapar, Somnatha: Many Voices of History (New Delhi: Viking, 2004).
17. For an exploration of the constitution of different memories on the Muslim conquest see the
fascinating essay by Amin, “On Telling the Muslim Conquest.” The relationship between historical
memory and community identity has been explored in a number of recent works. See Shail Mayaram,
Against History, Against State: Counter Perspectives from the Margins (New Delhi: Permanent
Black, 2004); Sumit Guha, “Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in
Western India, 1400 –1900,” American Historical Review 109 (2004): 1084 –1109; Yasmin Saikia,
Fragmented Memories: Struggling to Be Tai-Ahom in India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2004); and Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India,
1700 –1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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Public Culture Thapar’s account shows how secular histories now operate with new narra-
tive strategies. From an earlier concern with facticity — whether or not the spe-
cific event happened, whether its memory was true or false — historians have
now turned to exploring the politics of memory, attempting to understand what is
remembered and what is forgotten, showing how collective memories of trauma
and humiliation are often shaped by the histories that we read.
But does Thapar entirely break away from the framing tropes of earlier secular
histories? Do we not see once again an effort to dissociate Mahmud’s actions from
the play of religion? Is not the rhetoric of religion in the epic of conquest being
seen primarily as “rhetoric” meant to soothe the Sunni orthodoxy?

The Realm of the Popular

Secular histories have always been intimately connected to the politics of the pub-
lic sphere. The public appeared as incitement to discourse and was the invisible
addressee. Historians wrote for the public with a desire to shape public imagi-
nation. As we have seen, the project of secular history was to critique sectar-
ian beliefs, demythologize historical consciousness, and constitute a new secular
common sense.
This transformative vision could be sustained in the early decades after inde-
pendence. Over those years the discipline of history was gradually being profes-
sionalized, and secular historians acquired symbolic authority and institutional
power. University syllabi were changed, new textbooks were introduced, and
innumerable research projects were initiated. Yet by the 1980s it was clear that
there were limits to the transformative vision.
As political groups of the Hindu Right mobilized social support and the lan-
guage of communal hatred circulated within the public sphere, optimistic visions
of the construction of a secular public eroded. It became increasingly clear that
people’s conceptions of the past were very often shaped not by what historians
wrote but by the popular tracts that circulated in the bazaar.
For a long while historians ignored these tracts, since their form of representa-
tion did not conform to any norm of the professional discipline of history. The
tracts operated with rhetorical strategies common in mythic modes of narration
but were unacceptable to professional historians. Let me illustrate by means of one
example. Kya Kahati Hai Saryu Dhara, a tract written by Pratap Narain Mishra
and sold commonly on the streets of Ayodhya in the 1980s, recounts the familiar
sectarian Hindu narratives of Muslim tyranny and Hindu suffering. But it tells the
story through the voice of the river that flows through Ayodhya. Within the text,

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the voice of the author is repressed: he does not tell the story; he hears it being Predicaments of
told. The river becomes the living link with the past, a witness to history. The Secular Histories
text authenticates itself through this rhetoric of presence: the story about the past
is to be believed because it was witnessed; the events narrated are true because
they were seen to have happened. Thus belief itself becomes a basis of authority.
When the knowledge of the past comes down as tradition to be believed, it is not
subject to questioning, not constituted through the power of reason. Tradition is
knowledge that is hallowed, that is true because it was believed for generations
to be true.
Cheaply produced and sold on the streets, such tracts were widely read. It was
through tracts like these that sectarian groups sought to reach out to people, cap-
ture their imagination, and shape their idea of the past. The recurring elements of
communal narratives are woven into local stories that people can identify with.
The spaces peopled by the actors in the story are familiar to the inhabitants of
the locality. The local landscape thus becomes a stage for the enactment of epic
histories, transformed into an enchanted space where mythic heroes live their
extraordinary as well as ordinary lives.
How are professional historians to engage with the social imagination that
these tracts produce? One response has been cast in the objective language of
truth. The effort here is to unmask and demystify the misrepresentation of truth
within such narratives of the past by demonstrating their premises. The convic-
tion is that facts will reveal, that truth will make things clear and allow reason to
prevail. There has also been a second way of relating to these popular narratives
of the past. Historians have argued that if people believe in a myth, in a story, in
a specific representation of the past, we need to try and comprehend the premises
of that understanding, the nature of the myth, the structure of representations.18
We have to see how specific conceptions come to be accepted as true and get
inscribed in public imagination. We must look at the production of these stories
and the politics of that production. If we wish to understand the public life of his-
tory, we cannot ignore the variety of ways in which history comes to acquire a life
within different realms of public imagination. We have to take more seriously this
realm of the popular.19
But the problem runs deeper. On closer scrutiny, the distinction between the

18. See Neeladri Bhattacharya, “Myth, History and the Politics of Ramjanmabhoomi,” in Anat-
omy of a Confrontation, ed. S. Gopal (New Delhi: Penguin, 1991), 122 – 40.
19. Partha Chatterjee has emphasized this need in some of his recent writings. See “Introduction:
History and the Present,” in Chatterjee and Ghosh, History and the Present, 1 – 23.

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Public Culture “popular” and the “academic” tends to break down. It is not as if mythic stories
and popular tracts have an appeal only within the “popular” domain, nor is the
“popular” untouched by ideals of modernity, insulated from the world of Enlight-
enment Reason. Conversely, the public that reads academic histories may also
believe in the image of the past that appears in popular tracts. People operate
through different codes; they simultaneously believe in seemingly contradictory
things, images, and notions; they struggle to negotiate this contradiction in differ-
ent and innovative ways. People may respect the authority of professional history
and yet believe in the idea of a hallowed tradition, seeing no conflict between
these convictions.20 It is through such negotiations that people define the specific
form in which they inhabit the modern, constituting in the process the very nature
of that modernity.21
How does one make possible a conversation between worlds that coexist within
public imagination but are incommensurable, conflicting, and yet seemingly com-
patible?22 If secular historians have to see themselves as public intellectuals, then
they will have to confront this realm of the popular, not only to understand it,
but also to engage more actively with it. They have to develop a language for this
engagement.

Conclusion

We secular historians are haunted by a deep anxiety, a paralyzing fear of reaf-

firming somehow the founding assumptions of communal perceptions. We see
violence on the street, the endless cycles of communal riots, the spectacles of
blood and gore. We return to the past in search of humanity, tolerance, openness;
we discover histories of syncretism, assimilation, and accommodation; we reas-
sure ourselves with histories of intercultural dialogue and understating. We hesi-
tate to dwell on the histories of intolerance or sectarian conflicts. We are reluctant
to recognize the role religion plays in the politics of everyday life.
How can we transcend the limits that the politics of the present seems to
impose on us? Do we need to delink our lives as citizens from our work as his-

20. Belief in conflicting premises of intellectual authority is not, of course, a peculiarity of the
history of modernity. See Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Con-
stitutive Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
21. On the more general issue of such negotiations with modernity, see the essays in Timothy
Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
22. I have explored the issue elsewhere. See “Notes towards a Conception of the Colonial Public,”
in Civil Society, Public Sphere and Citizenship: Dialogues and Perceptions, ed. Rajeeva Bhargava
and Helmut Reifeld (New Delhi: Sage India, 2005).

72
torians? Should we stop returning to the past in order to rethink the present? We Predicaments of
have been reminded that historians do not have to provide “correct solutions” to Secular Histories
present problems. This is true, but only partly. We do not have to provide solu-
tions, but political practices of the present are not so easily delinked from ques-
tions of memory and history. The way we imagine the past shapes our identities,
our conceptions of self. Reconstitution of self — of nations, communities, classes,
genders — is premised on a refiguration of the past, a questioning of earlier nar-
ratives. Every social group’s demand for recognition is inevitably linked to a plea
for a reconstitution of historical imagination, a plea that the erasures and silences
of earlier histories be recognized, confronted, and overcome.
What, then, do we do? I do not think we can ever escape the pressures that
recurring analytical tropes exercise on our imagination. We need to continuously
reflect on the narratives of the past we produce, understand their framing struc-
tures, and look at the way these frames tend to define the form of knowledge we
affirm. Only through a critical perspective on our practice can we continue to
devise new ways of writing. This essay is a plea for a reflexivity that will allow
us to scrutinize the premises of our secular narratives. Over the decades, within
secular histories, newer ways of seeing and narrating have emerged, allowing
us to look at the problems within the earlier frames; but this critique needs to
be pushed further, even if it will not ultimately ensure our transcendence of the
problems of representation.

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