THE NATIONAL NEED ... 4

THE NATIONAL NEED ... 4

The history of India must be continuously rewritten with suitable adjustments and amendments made to earlier versions and there must be a plethora of such accounts from different perspectives available for all to read. The earlier and the latter versions must all be there, and equally so, for comparative study to be possible, for often what is termed as a biased version, favouring a certain political dispensation, contains germs of truth that the modified versions do not. Above all this constant carping against leftist historians having dominated the chronicling of history does the country no good, for, in a democracy, nobody prevents the rightist historians from doing likewise. But if ignoramuses masquerading as modern historians think that political propaganda is rightful representation of past events, which goes by the name of history, they are living in a fool's paradise. Their imaginary accounts or misrepresented narratives will be rejected by the historical fraternity of the world as so much puerile prattle to please political masters and will merely be deemed perfected propaganda and no more.

There are means and measures by which trained historians weigh their narratives, never completely accurate in point of fact but tending to be so on account of compliance with the approved historical methods. When such stringency in recounting of history is adhered to, it lends to advancement of knowledge. Else, it becomes romanticising of past events in the colour of one's ideological preference and does not approximate to concrete facts and their due comprehensive analyses.

Propaganda is not history. Perspectives there may be but they must be grounded on fact, selective no doubt but wisely so to be limited to pertinent data and not unnecessary factual accumulation, for history cannot accommodate all inconsequential happenings which may be valid in the domain of factual reality but become irrelevant in a lean edition of essential events. The emphasis and the weightage of chronicled data matters for it lends the reader the desired perspective so as to view the past in as dispassionate a manner, and, so, as accurately as possible. Ultimately, the reporting of an event refracts factual communication, and invariably so, even at close quarters in time and in space. How much more will then be reporting at a distance of decades and centuries and often millenia? And this has to be understood well and, in accordance, scientific tools in the discovery of facts and scientific methods in their due analyses must be taken recourse to. Wishful thinking, slanted to a particular political ideology, must not replace it. Truth in every sense must prevail, truth that can stand the test of reason, truth that is based on empirical evidence and truth that is testified by ample witness to its happening. The analyses thereof may vary but not by a margin that is mischievously large by Machiavellian manipulation.

Written by Sugata Bose

Photo : Eminent historian Dr. Ramesh Chandra Majumdar