Last updated:November 16, 2024, 1:02 PM IST

Dalrymple recently argued that the cryptic academic language used by Indian historians for decades is why average Indians believe the often wild theories put forward by “WhatsApp University” about controversial aspects of history

All controversy is good publicity, so Dalrymple’s broadside with India’s historians is well-timed and well-directed. (Reuters)

It won’t be long before the ultimate insult will be leveled at William Dalrymple – being an agent of the regressive forces that extol the greatness of ancient India and seek to “rewrite” history to conform to the supposedly controversial idea. It would mark the ultimate humiliation of the Scot who won his laurels as a chronicler of India’s Mughal and British pasts but has now ventured down The golden road to rediscover the ancient glories of the subcontinent.

All controversy is good publicity, so Dalrymple’s broadside with India’s historians is well-timed and well-directed. In his characteristically down-to-earth style, he recently argued that the cryptic academic language used by Indian historians for decades is why average Indians believe the often wild theories put forward by “WhatsApp University” about controversial aspects of history. That observation hurts, but Dalrymple cannot be accused of inaccuracy on this point.

India’s “professional” historians are proud of their sesquipedal treatises and rise indignantly at criticism. And they hit back at the few of their ilk who actually enjoy prose by calling them “popular” historians, making a kind of pop-crooner-versus-classical-vocalist comparison. The subtext is that those who write that way lack gravitas and may actually be inferior given their need to be understood by others than just their academics.

Dalrymple, a “qualified” historian even if he has never taught the subject – not that it is a requirement to be called one anyway – has clearly touched a raw nerve. But Dalrymple identified only part of the problem. The lack of engaging prose is a definite put-off, but so is the choice of content. The contemptuous attitude of the “professional” historians towards aspects of India’s past bordered on contempt, so people turned to other sources of information.

The pedestrian prose of the Indian historians is a subset of a larger problem. Clarity of language largely ceased to be valued around the same time that the older generation of teachers, particularly Anglo-Indians, retired and were replaced by products of a school system that downgraded English. This also coincided with the increasing prevalence of poorly written school-level textbooks for all subjects, including history, which students were mandated to memorize.

The result was that banal prose became entrenched in the system, which was then overlaid with Marxist vocabulary by the next generation of academics. As the ideological wagons circled, abstruse language added another barrier to the entry of new voices with possibly new ideas. Now “professional” Indian historians believe that writing in cryptic academic code has been the norm and that they are merely following an accepted international practice.

But a perusal of the works of some of the most revered Indian historians of an earlier era belies such claims. They did not bury their arguments in unfathomable prose and notes. Significantly, many of them were also not of the same ideology as the group that dominates Indian academia today and have therefore been sidelined as obsolete. And their place has been taken by practitioners of jargon-filled, dense writing in the name of a kind of academic Esperanto.

However, many Western historians manage to maintain a balance between academic rigor and accessible prose. Nor is their “popularity” unequivocally seen as a disadvantage unlike how “professional” Indian historians use that word. Historians such as Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson, for example, not only hold professorships at top universities but their books are also bestsellers. And, horror of horrors, they even spread the story on TV.

A review of the left Guardian magazine of Schama’s latest TV series The story of the Jewsis however telling. It reads: “Idiosyncratic, approachable, but always authoritative – just like the man himself.” Note that the word “available” is followed by “but”, indicating that it is not meant as a compliment. The same adjective might well be used to describe Dalrymple’s book, which promises to satiate the general Indian population’s new appetite for ancient history.

Only in the last 25 years or so have some historians here bravely reached out to the general public—and been eagerly welcomed. This new breed of “populists” could have taken the heart of Dalrymple’s own journey from history-based travelogues such as In Xanadu, the city of Djinn and From the Holy Mountain to academically sound dissertations on the eponymous Last Mughalthe first Anglo-Afghan War, the East India Company and this year ancient India.

Why ‘professional’ historians are upset by the rise of this new cohort is not entirely inexplicable despite their supposed disinterest in being ‘popular’. If they were content to simply address and appreciate each other in a language that only they could decipher, they wouldn’t care who the hoi-polloi read. But the new “popular” historians are effectively destroying academic shibboleths with their sound research, thus posing a real existential danger to academics.

“… the purpose of the historian… is not to collect all possible information about the past. While historians focus individual research on particular places, times, and events, historians seek to understand the processes by which changes have taken place… What the periods or places they choose to focus on, and the questions they seek to answer, are questions influenced by each historian’s own time and place, personal inclinations, and particularly current trends and movements in historiography,” wrote Swapna Liddle recently.

Liddle is a rare ‘professional’ Indian historian with a lucid writing style (and a significant ‘popular’ following) but two phrases in her explanation stand out: ‘not collecting all possible data’, and ‘influenced by every historian’s… personal inclinations.” The first indicates selectivity and the second, bias. Impartiality and a comprehensive view of historical events are not always the basis of their “professional” analysis and conclusions.

It is well known that ideological leanings have long influenced the research, writing and teaching of history in India, especially in the ancient period, which has been considered an area of ​​darkness by leftist historians for decades. The study of Sanskrit was suspended, ancient manuscripts lay untranslated decades after independence (which cannot be blamed on the British), and scholars who tried non-Marxist approaches have been barred from research grants.

No wonder readers interested in, say, ancient India, decide that “WhatsApp University” claims, however biased or half-baked, are as valid as those of “professional” historians who are under no obligation to “collect all information about the past” and is influenced by his “personal inclinations” as Liddle wrote. Also, many of those with significant domain knowledge have not written books, so social media is often the only way to access their information.

Now that a ‘popular’ historian like Dalrymple has fired a salvo at the ivory tower of his ‘professional’ contemporaries in Indian academia, will the latter retreat even further into the mystical world? Or will they scorn his claim in the name of defending the sacred “craft of history writing”? Would they not be wiser to demystify and disseminate their academic findings in light of the larger struggle to capture the hearts and minds of people?

The author is a freelance writer. Opinions expressed in the paragraph above are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of News18.