The historian must note that the past has many layers

‘The past has other layers not susceptible to evidence from the archives, texts, manuscripts or archaeology’
| Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

It is of course the historian’s professional responsibility to bring knowledge of the past back to life academically for which a rigorous training in the norms and the methods of the discipline is imparted in institutions like universities. The discipline requires the historian to imbibe its basic premises: evidence is the primary basis of one’s research; each statement must be supported by evidence which itself has to undergo a critical evaluation for its authenticity, its proximity to the event or phenomenon under review, and its context and compatibility with other bits of evidence which might be corroborative or contradictory. The inferences drawn from the evidence must conform to the test of reason rather than providence or any explanation outside the realm of reason.

The other layers

So far so good. But the past has other layers not susceptible to evidence from the archives, texts, manuscripts or archaeology. One such layer is memory not captured in texts, manuscripts, documents or on the dug up field. It survives in popular memories of events, persons and happenings, often at variance with the accounts given by professional history. The crucial difference is that while the historian has bestowed an image of a person, event or phenomenon meticulously sticking to the prescribed modes and methods of research, popular memory is not bound by any such constraints. It does not have to adduce empirical evidence or even follow it up with an inference that is subject to rational analysis. Yet, its power as an image of the past remains undiminished.

Let us take some examples. Have we not heard of Emperor Akbar’s court adorned with the nine jewels (Nav Ratnas)? No one had in Akbar’s time. The ones counted in the group of nine included some fake ones, but the notion of Nav Ratnas is a much later popular creation, perhaps not before the 18th century. It does not alter history very much but lends some colour to the past. But some other memories do alter history as well, a little or drastically The story of Jodha Bai, for instance. One can shout oneself hoarse, as historians might, that there was no Jodha Bai in Akbar’s harem and that Jahangir’s mother was Harkha Bai, a princess of Amer, but Jodha Bai does not disappear from sight.

But these memories are mere colourful diversions from the rather dry narrative of historical ‘facts’. There are others that have proven to be far more powerful than the historians’ version. The Babari masjid case is an outstanding instance of this power.

The example of Ayodhya

Several historians, with help from archaeologists, had argued during the 1980s that there was no evidence of the existence of a Ram temple which was demolished to construct the Babri Masjid. Evidence from a large number of sources from the 16th century on was unearthed to strengthen the argument. The first authentic evidence of a link between Lord Ram and the construction of the masjid dates to 1822 in a Persian-language court document which mentions a small platform within the four walls surrounding the masjid as Ram Janmasthan; although no temple is mentioned but Sita Ki Rasoi is. A lot of accretion to this bare mention occurs during the 19th century — some violence is recorded as is the intervention of the Awadh state.

Clearly, some sort of the memory of the association of the site of the masjid with Lord Ram had begun to grow, perhaps a few decades before it got recorded in 1822, and a lot was added on to it — some by its own evolution and some by deliberate action.

In the end, the Supreme Court of India, in its final judgement of 2019, put its stamp on the historians’ evidence that no Ram temple, indeed no temple of any kind was demolished in 1528 to construct the masjid, and recorded the masjid’s demolition on December 6, 1992 as a heinous crime and recommended prosecution of those guilty. Yet, going against its own finding, it gave away the small piece of land where the masjid stood for the construction of a Ram temple. In the end, memory proved far more decisive than ‘history’.

On a holistic reconstruction

Historians have, in the pursuit of their reconstruction of the past, insulated the memory recorded in archives, texts documents and archaeological data, from popular memory and popular versions of history — which, in reality, extend to an age, besides persons and events. A holistic reconstruction of the past requires the historian to concern herself with popular memory as much as with archival data to investigate the social/cultural/political context of the origins of this memory, the process of its evolution, including its manipulation for given ends.

If history and social memory had been evolving through their own dynamics in the past, the present is a watershed moment when social media has created a massive space for, on the one hand, real common people’s intervention in recollecting the past as well as for the grossest distortions of both the historian’s version of the past and inflicting similarly distorted versions of memory.

Thus, today’s historian, the professional custodian of the past, must engage with ‘facts’ as much as with what she has habitually dismissed as ‘fiction’ comprising the vast array of layers of the past. She must treat these as historical data: popular cultures of the past, gossip, conversations, silences, absences… History speaks most eloquently and consequentially only when it speaks in its entirety.

Harbans Mukhia taught history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University