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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

History Between Memory and Reconstruction

by Sumit Guha

Nothing seems easier than remembering. Each of us remembers a great deal – from the recent past and the remote past. And even if we cannot remember something it surely is recorded somewhere in a collective memory – perhaps in the vast ragbag of information, disinformation, and speculation to be found on the internet? But once we think of verifying what we remember, we find that we are all – including the most eminent – sometimes mistaken. As the forensic psychologists Loftus and Doyle describe it,

“Sometimes information was never stored to begin with. Sometimes interference prevents memory from emerging to consciousness. Sometimes witnesses wish to forget; sometimes they are temporarily unable to retrieve… Moreover, another force, known as a constructive force, is also at work. People seem to be able to take bits and pieces of their experience and integrate them to construct objects that they never saw and events that never really happened.”

With audiences of millions, true crime stories and celebrity criminal trials form the most widely consumed form of historical memory in the USA – and perhaps in the world – today. A criminal trial elicits and tests evidence to a standard that few historical narratives could consistently meet. Yet, as Loftus and many others have pointed out, they can generate false narratives, either though bad laboratory science or the frailties of eye-witness memory.

So where does that leave historians, they who deem themselves the custodians of authentic memory? Are we simply writing the most tedious genre of “magical realism,” as Alice suspected? Historians are not writing imaginary history, but they cannot transcend either the passage of time or the loss of knowledge. They must live in the society of their own time, with all the limitations that that implies.

Maurice Halbwachs (Wikipedia)

All thought on this must begin with the work of the great French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs who was murdered in Buchenwald in 1945. Halbwachs sought to integrate the then emerging science of social psychology with his concept of collective memory. He wrote that we can remember the past only by retrieving the location of past events “from the frameworks of collective memory.” Almost a century of psychological research after Halbwachs has solidly supported his claim. “Remembering” is not an act of retrieval, but of reconstruction within a social group.

The reconstructive process is where mistakes occur, such as the implanting of false memories. Experimental psychologists have long known about false or implanted memory. But obviously, demonstrating falsity depends on our capacity to recover authentic truth. So if the memory claims to be a statement of fact, then it is open to interrogation – even first-person eyewitness narrative may be questioned. These have failed scrutiny more than once.

A Tale from the Decameron by John William Waterhouse, 1916 (Wikimedia)

In reconstructing historical memory, scholars have often focused only on the high scholarship of the past, ignoring folk and popular modes of reconstructing pasts. The family estate, the clan, the village, up to the larger imagined communities of ordinary folk — these commonplace and everyday pasts also tell important stories  At various times and places, such narrations  occupied the whole space of historical practice: all history was non-professional history. It was also often consciously public, directed, for example, to establish present privilege through an inherited right. Only gradually was history that was based on claims to sanctity, honor, property, and taxation displaced by new histories written by professionals, at least in the confines of the formal educational system. That transition required the determination of the protocols of historical inquiry within the community of scholars.

Collective memory is defined by its public and societally monitored character. It is necessarily made and reproduced within a framework of social and political relations that create and bind a community of thought. It also follows that the disintegration of that framing community will also cause its social memory to vanish. Sometimes – usually in recent millennia, collective memory has left some legible trace in the historical record: more often it has not. That indeed, is what has happened to the greatest part of human collective memory: the bards and sages died and left no disciples. Inscriptions and monuments crumbled. Scribal traditions died out and scripts became illegible. In the past two centuries, that collective memory has increasingly, but not solely, been built by standardized and state-controlled education. It has also been deeply imprinted by any given state’s variety of nationalism.

Collective memory was not trivial: it affected political life, criminal justice, and property claims in concrete and specific ways. It is a reconstruction that is socially sanctioned and institutionalized. In 1658, the noble Raymond de Gigord who carried the armorial symbols shown above had to prove his nobility to avoid a royal tax (franc-fief).

But before and alongside the modern state, many smaller social entities also provided frameworks for the organization of memory. Some operated by the creation of ‘micro-histories.’

Hero-stone commemorating warriors who fought large numbers of enemies to protect their herds of cows. (Sagar Borkar’s Blog. Used with permission)

The descendants of an impoverished lineage revived their claim some sixty years after fleeing their village during an invasion. They told the tribunal their story and authenticated it by referring to a well-known village monument:

“Our ancestors maintained their lordship through the generations, but we cannot discover who first obtained the right. In the days of Bijapur rule [i.e. before the 1650s] Krishna-shet son of Yesa-shet ran the lordship. Krishna-shet’s brother Sona-shet died in the village, his wife immolated herself, her masonry memorial is still extant in the village. Then Bhāg-shet son of Krishna-set managed the lordship.”

This hero stone commemorates a “sati,” a woman who burned herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. (Sagar Borkar’s Blog, used with permission).

Such episodes were recorded on the landscape in thousands of monuments, like the memorial shown immediately above and below, and at the top of the page.  The local community would have preserved their hero’s memory and associated it with the stone. After the community is long since dispersed, the stones remain.

Original memory has worn away but stone still survives (Wikipedia)

Historical memory is not only lost: it is also made anew by emerging communities. For the past two centuries and in a growing part of the world, such communities include emergent nations struggling against colonial empires. Nationalists sought to shape various alternative memories to fit their own future projects. The departure of the British Empire from South Asia left its apparatus of schooling and research in new hands. That is the frame in which modern practices of historical memory were shaped in nineteenth and twentieth-century South Asia and elsewhere. But they exist as bubbles in the stream of other narratives, some concocted for entertainment, some for more sinister purposes.

For more on history and memory in India, see Sumit Guha’s new book: History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000.

Suggestions for further reading:

Maurice Halbwachs On Collective Memory. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. (1992).
This was written in the 1930s and essentially founded the study of historical memory. It contains a particularly important study of the remembered and imagined topography of Jerusalem that later Christians sought to find and sometimes implanted.

Yosef H. Yerushalmi Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. (1982).
This book studies not only the textual record of a community that preserved and expanded it for 2500 years, but also develops an elegant explanation of why it took the shape that it did.

Prachi Deshpande. Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960. (2007).
Tracks a continuous tradition of historical memory in Western India and illustrates the leakages from tradition to historical text to theatre and novels in a major Indian language, Marathi.

Christian L. Novetzke. Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India. (2008).
Novetzke tracks the many textual traditions and performative oral memories of a pan-Indian religious figure through seven centuries.

Indrani Chatterjee. Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India. (2013)
Shows how a religious tradition and network were erased under the pressures of colonial conquest and a new set of identities and memories were implanted under the joint pressures of Western anthropology and Protestant missionary enterprise.

Header photo credit: Shreyans Vasa, Memorial in Chhatardi, Bhuj, India (Wikipedia)

The Public Archive: Mercenary Monks

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Jonathan Seefeldt’s digital project “Mercenary Monks” provides a glimpse into the lives and continuing legacy of the Dadupanthi Nagas—an early modern monastic community from the semi-desert region of western India. Poems, photographs, and other documents illuminate a monastic world of raising mercenary armies, caring for widows and child brides, providing credit and other banking services, collecting tax revenue from farmers, providing merit and prestige to an emerging merchant class, and asserting a (short-lived) form of political independence.

More on Seefeldt’s project and The Public Archive here.

You may also like:

Indrani Chatterjee on Monasteries and Memory in Northeast India
Indian Revolt of 1857, a digital project by Anuj Kaushal
Victoria & Abdul: Simulacra and Simulation by Gajendra Singh

The Public Archive: Indian Revolt of 1857

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Also known as “Sepoy Mutiny,” the Indian Rebellion of 1857 represented a major, although unsuccessful, challenge to British colonialism. Anuj Kaushal’s digital project, titled “Indian Revolt of 1857”, considers the question of Indian nationalism during the rebellion and British response through blogs, lesson plans, and digitized issues of Illustrated London Times and New York Daily Tribune.

More on Kaushal’s project and The Public Archive here

You may also like:
On Women and Nation in India by Indrani Chatterjee
Sundar Vadlamudi reviews Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India by Gauri Viswanathan (1989)
Isabel Huacuja discusses A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924)

 

The Public Archive

Doing History Online and In Public

by Joan Neuberger

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer.

Links to their projects can all be found below on this page.

We built these digital, public projects in four main steps.

First, with the help of UT librarians, the students identified collections related to their research that were not yet available to the public. These collections of documents come from the many wonderful archives on our campus: the Harry Ransom Center, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Perry-Castañeda Library, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Then we digitized them.

Second, we each wrote a series of blog-essays to share our archival finds with the public. Each blog is meant to show something historically significant about our documents and to open them up in ways that any curious reader, without any background in the subject, can understand and appreciate.

Third, we wrote lesson plans based on our documents to allow educators at the K-12 and college levels to bring our archives into their classrooms.

Finally, we each built a website to introduce our topics, to share our digitized documents, and to make our blogs and lesson plans openly available.

Here are the results:

Qahvehkhaneh: Reading Iranian Newspapers: by Andrew Akhlaghi

The coffeehouse, qahvehkhaneh, was an important political and cultural institution in Iran. As men drank coffee, played backgammon, and discussed business, they also listened to impassioned pleas for democracy and reform from newspapers published in the Ottoman Empire, Russian Caucasus, and British India, smuggled into Iran and read aloud. This qahvehkhaneh is meant to spread the issues of one newspaper, Etella’at, to those curious about Iran.

Bureaucracy on the Ground: the Gálvez Visita of 1765:  by Brittany Erwin.

This project examines the localized consequences and on-the-ground implications of the royal inspection, or visita general, administered by José de Gálvez in New Spain from 1765-1771.

After the Silence: María Luisa Puga and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake by Ashley Garcia

María Luisa Puga (1944-2004) was a talented Mexican novelist from the Post-Boom movement whose personal notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, and related documents are held in the Benson Latin American Collection. On this site you will find digitized selections from Cuaderno 118, which contains both Puga’s coverage of the earthquake that struck Mexico DF (now Mexico City) in 1985 and her reflections on those original pages, written in 2002.

Building a Jewish School in Iran: The Barmaïmon-Hamadan Manuscript by Isabelle Headrick

Where do you go when you want to change the world? For Isaac and Rebecca Bassan in 1900, the destination was Hamadan, Iran, to establish a French-language, Jewish school for the small Jewish community in that city. About  fifty years another teacher at the school, Isaac Barmaïmon, wrote an 81-page manuscript that describes the first twenty years of the school’s existence.

Food Migrations: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions by Tracy Heim

Texans with Czech heritage have been able to preserve their culture in America through organizations, cultural events, church groups, and especially through food.  Two books of recipes and other documents contextualize the process of migration into life in Texas and create a framework for understanding the Texas Czech culture.

Indian Revolt of 1857 by Anuj Kaushal.

South Asia witnessed an event during 1857 which altered the history of India, Britain, and the British East India Company. The event, known as a mere “mutiny” by the British and as an anti-colonial revolt by Indians, was reported in the English language press around the world.

The Road to Sesame Street by Peter Kunze

The Road to Sesame Street features government documents tracing the development of the Public Broadcast Act of 1967, the landmark legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR. Using materials from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, this project provides a behind-the-scenes view of the power players, interest groups, and decisions that laid the groundwork for American public media.

Animating Italian Immigration: Sicilian-American Puppetry by Megan McQuaid.

Attending a puppet theatre performance with familiar characters acting out well-known stories gave some Italians living in New York City a regular taste of the homeland they had left behind.

Frederic Allen Williams: Citizen-Artist with a Magic Lantern by Jesse Ritner

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider based in New York City, where he became known for his talks on Native American art, illustrated with magic lantern slides, which he gave in his midtown studio near the then recently built Museum of Modern Art.

Woven Into History: Living Cultural Fabrics by Alina Scott

The nineteenth and twentieth-century Navajo rugs in this collection aims to provide a platform for respectful collaboration and discourse to recenter the discussion of Navajo culture and commodity production around them and to diversify traditional conversations about Navajo textiles and their communities.

Mercenary Monks by Jonathan Seefeldt

These texts are windows into a thriving monastic world whose varied activities included: raising mercenary armies, caring for widows and child brides, providing credit and other banking services, collecting tax revenue from farmers, providing merit and prestige to an emerging merchant class, and asserting a (short-lived) form of political independence.

Guards and Pickets: The Paperwork of Slavery by Gaila Sims.

The documents in this collection provide a glimpse into the paperwork created to control the movement and relationships of the enslaved, as well as the financial documentation used to make money off the institution of slavery.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following people for sharing their expertise in digital and public history with us: Dale Correa, Liza Talbot, Ian Goodale, Stephanie Malmros, Christina Bleyer, Albert Palacios, Andrea Gustavson, Elizabeth Gushee, Astrid Ruggaldier, Penne Restad, and Stacy Vlasits.

Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we have been posting their suggestions throughout the month. This is our last set of book recommendations; this week we feature books on women and gender in East Asia and South Asia. 

chinese womens books

Huaiyin Li recommends:

Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (1999)

Focusing on the life stories of five prominent women activists in twentieth-century China, this book examines Chinese feminism in the Republican era and its fate under the socialist state.  Its depiction of the feminists’ pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation contrasts sharply with the Chinese Communist Party’s master narrative of women’s liberation under its leadership.

Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011)

Based on interviews with 72 village women in Shaanxi province, this book shows how the Chinese Communist Party’s policy reshaped women’s agriculture work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting from the 1950s through the 1970s.  It also addresses the intriguing questions of how memories are gendered and how gender figured in the making of socialism in Chinese agriculture. (Reviewed on Not Even Past).

asia womens

Nancy Stalker recommends:

Jan Bardsley, Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan (2014)

(Bloomsbury, 2016) is an engaging new work that reveals gender roles and gender politics in the 1950s through close readings of diverse popular media.  Focusing on newsworthy events centered around women, such as the wedding of the imperial prince to a commoner and Japan’s first Miss Universe title, Bardsley reveals the media construction of the “housewife” embedded within discourses on postwar democracy, Cold War geopolitics, and US – Japan relations.

Cynthia Talbot recommends:

Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India (2012).

This book combines historical research and ethnographic fieldwork to track the fate of South India’s devadasis, originally Hindu temple dancers who came to be regarded as prostitutes as India was transformed by colonial modernity.  Typically unmarried and residing in quasi-matrilineal communities, devadasis often served as concubines or courtesans for elite men but came under increasing condemnation by social reformists beginning in the mid-nineteenth century; they were officially outlawed in 1947.  Soneji goes beyond the standard narrative of social change in colonial India by including an extensive examination of the role of dance in Indian royal courts and a sensitive exploration of the memories of ex-devadasis in this innovative, well-written work.

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For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Great Books (US)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations:  New Books on Women’s History

 

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Indrani Chatterjee on Monasteries and Memory in Northeast India

By Indrani Chatterjee

European monasteries were segregated by sex — for men or women only — and the inhabitants were expected to be celibate. In South Asia, where many different religious traditions grew up side by side in the same terrain since the earliest times, monasticism neither insisted on absolute celibacy for men, nor did they exclude women. Many monastic men moved from site to site collecting food and exchanging information. Those who were not ordained as monks but were simply followers or tenants on lands that belonged to a monastery, took herds out on seasonal cycles, traded in goods, and transported goods on behalf of their monastic teachers. Women held these monastic centers together and were central to their everyday lives. They cultivated the land, provided the food and maintenance services, and often, their sons or brothers joined the order or served it in some military or diplomatic task. The functions these little monastic communities carried out make it possible to call them “governments.”

These monastic governments were connected to each other across vast territorial expanses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – before the borders of the modern state of independent India, Pakistan, Bangladesh were carved out. From the mountains of Nepal to the Manipuri Valley to West Bengal,  monasteries of diverse religions – Buddhists, Saiva and Vaisnava Hindus, Sufi Muslims, Bonpo Tantriks – shared many political, economic, military, and gender practices.  Communities formed around a central leader, who was considered both a teacher and a “friend.” Initiates who wanted to join a monastic community agreed to submit to that teacher’s legal, moral, and disciplinary leadership.  They would provide personnel for religious practices for artisanal production and military protection. The monasteries were also centers of economic activity. All students paid the monastery, in cash gifts or in labor. Sometimes local authorities transferred to the monastic teacher such secular powers as collecting taxes or punishing criminals. Wealthy women were active as patrons of monasteries up and down the economic hierarchy. They both offered gifts of gold, valuable manuscripts, lamps, and herds, and they worked in the monastery’s fields.  Marriages were central to establishing lines of alliance and power. In many of these communities, multiple spouses – polyandry as well as polygamy – strengthened political and economic power. Long-distance relationships between monastic communities were nourished by the mobility of ordained men and laymen who moved about as soldiers, pastoralists, itinerant merchants and peddlers, and diplomats working on behalf of particular disciples and patrons.

 These connections among monasteries were dramatically reconstituted after 1765, when the English East India Company established its control over the subcontinent. After the 1830s, most lands of monastic governments located in the hills east of the Ganges Delta were taken over by European-funded tea plantations. Officers who worked for a soon-to-be-defunct English East India Company also used some of these lands to settle groups favorable to colonial control – gifting lands to Christian missionaries, settling some Vaishnava lineages in the Manipuri valley and ousting others. So they did not entirely dissolve the monasteries but made them give up their privileges.

By the 1850s, a harsh regime of work arrived to make tea plantations here a profitable enterprise for European planters. Large numbers of women and female children were brought from parts of central India to pick tea and work in these plantations. In 1869-70, some older monastic lineages pooled resources to liberate the predominantly female laboring population from the brutality of some of these plantations. The British-led military fraternity responded with an ideological war followed by a military war. The administrative aftermath was to isolate the entire belt of tea-planting lands from the monastic order.  After 1871, when the Buddhist monks and Vaisnava-Saiva teachers were prohibited from working on or holding lands in the tea-planting regions, Christian missionaries took over.

This extension of colonial control radically dispossessed the monastic daughters and widows of the rights to landed property and authority that they had previously enjoyed. Yet this dispossession, along with the similarities of monastic communities among diverse religions, has gone unnoticed by modern historians of India. The intervening century has created other investments in the land, and none of the present investors wants the past owners and cultivators remembered. And of course, Christian missionizing has also authorized the erasure of the past because it is designated as  “barbarian.”

Professional historians of India (and Bangladesh after it was founded in 1971), even when they were not trained in missionary-funded schools and colleges during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, looked upon the complex history of the terrain through lenses similar to the colonial authorities. Pre-colonial societies were “feudal” and colonial rule was equated with modernity and industrialized progress. These historians were extremely faithful to the spirit and letter of the colonial records. Their interpretation of the records echoed the colonial officials’ descriptions of once-resistant monastic subjects and adherents as “tribals” at best, and “savages” at worst.

After the 1970s, a younger group of historians expressed greater sympathy for the anti-state resistance movements they found in the same records. Better known as the Subaltern Studies scholars, these historians were, however, hampered by their lack of training in the multiple languages and literary traditions essential for uncovering the story of the multiple dispossessions practiced in the region that came to be called Northeast India. The result was therefore the same: postcolonial historians too failed to see through existing categories of “forest” or “tribal” rebels. If I had to sum it up, I would say that the cultural and financial successes of tea-drinking since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have ensured a collective and permanent failure of memory among postcolonial historians. That amnesiac disregard of the past is especially dense around the various women who supported monastic governments in the past.

So when post-colonial, independent, democratically elected Indian governments allow their own military or paramilitary officers to evade judicial process after they rape and torture women from these eastern communities, they betray the extent to which such governments continue the practice of the dispossession of women and the erasure of women’s important roles in the history of the region and of the links that joined the people living in Northeast India as “friends.” Historians can refuse to be complicit in this dispossession by telling their stories

Indrani Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memory in Northeast India

Further Reading

Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (1999). Written by a political scientist attempting to explain the ethnonationalist (and anti-refugee) movement that sprang up in late 1970s in Assam, one of the seven provinces of Northeast India. The movement lasted for at least two decades. The author departs from other political scientists in taking a longer view of the politics, beginning with the colonial formation of the province of Assam from 1874.

The women missing from that discussion are heart and center of the work of a historically trained journalist writing non-fiction, Sudeep Chakravarti. I found many of the young girls at the center of his travel account, Highway 39: Journeys Through a Fractured Land (2012) simply heart-breaking. The societies described here are in another set of provinces — Nagaland and Manipur — that make up Northeast India.

The police-state described in those stories is encapsulated in the Government of India’s Armed Forces Special Powers Act that is operative in Manipur. A women’s peace movement has grown up against the violence that marks this model of governance there. One woman, Irom Sharmila, has been the symbol of that peace movement and is the subject of a biography by Deepti Priya Mehrotra, Burning Bright: Irom Sharmila and the Struggle for Peace in Manipur (2009).  Irom Sharmila went on a fast-unto-death asking for the repeal of the AFSPA since 2001, was arrested, force-fed, released, and has been rearrested again.

A broader history of the women’s struggles of the twentieth century can be found in Geraldine Forbes’ Women in Modern India (1995).

Feature Photo:
Kamakhya Temple, Guwahati, Assam. A famous site of goddess-worship known as Sakta Hinduism, on the river Brahmaputra.

Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, by Gauri Viswanathan (1989)

by Sundar Vadlamudi

Gauri Viswanathan provides a fascinating account of the ideological motivations behind the introduction of English literary education in British India. She studies the shifts in the curriculum and relates such developments to debates over the objectives of English education both among the British administrators, as well as between missionaries and colonial officials. 

maskofconquest_0Viswanathan argues that British administrators introduced English literary study in India in the early nineteenth century to improve the moral knowledge of Indians. Since Britain professed a policy of religious neutrality, Christian teachings could not be used in India, unlike the situation in Britain. In order to resolve this dilemma, colonial officials prescribed English literature, infused with Christian imagery, for government schools. Initially, Indians studied English literature using poetical devices, such as rhyme, alliteration, and reduplication. However, missionaries decried such secular practices and insisted upon a more religious reading of English literature. As a result, between 1830s and the mid-1850s, government schools in India used English literature to explain Christian teachings and emphasize the higher levels of historical progress and moral standards of English society. By the end of the 1850s, however, British administrators again changed their stance and advocated a secular reading of English literature to encourage commercial and trade literacy. This reversal of stance occurred as British officials realized that a religious reading of English literature did not provide Indians with the proper knowledge to join the colonial administrative services. Besides, after the 1857 Indian revolt against foreign rule, British officials did not wish to adopt policies that might ignite fears of conversion among Hindus and Muslims.

775px-Pandit_Bapudeva_Sastri_1821-1900_Professor_of_Astronomy_teaching_a_class_at_Queens_College_VaranasiBapudeva Sastri, Indian Astronomer and Professor, teaching a class at Queen’s College, Varanas, 1870

La_Martiniere_1858La Martiniere, a British private school in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, 1858

Viswanathan gives a detailed account of the various debates that influenced the introduction of English literary study in India. While she minutely examines the stances of Utilitarians, Anglicists, and missionaries, the absence of chronological benchmarks at regular intervals prevents the reader from fully understanding the shifts in education policies in British India emerging from such debates. However, her work changes our way of studying British educational policies in India. Previously, scholars merely studied the transformative effects of British education to understand the historical function of educational policies. Viswanathan ably proves that it is necessary to examine the discourse and the context of the formulation of educational policies to better understand educational history.

Photo Credits:
All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Voices of India’s Partition, Part V

by Amber Abbas

Professor Mohammad Amin is a distinguished professor of History who spent his entire career in St. Stephen’s College, one of the founding colleges of Delhi University.

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During his years at Aligarh, he was trained by Professor Mohammad Habib (Father of Professor Emeritus Irfan Habib). He remarked that Aligarh was known for its liberal History Department, which “later turned completely red.” His own priorities were in writing narrative histories of the medieval period. He described his own position as a skeptic, “History is not neat and tidy.  If you find that you have an answer, I am very skeptical about it. How can there be a rational explanation for the irrational acts of irrational people?”

In this interview, Professor Amin reflects on his experiences at Aligarh during late 1940s, when the Muslim League was dominant and “Aligarh really was bristling with the movement for Pakistan.” Students were being dispatched into the hinterlands to spread League propaganda in 1945 and 1946 as India prepared for elections. Aligarh was considered so important as a center of Muslim opinion-making that, he tells me, if a meeting was taking place in the Union (the seat of student government), stores would close in towns and villages nearby as the community awaited news of Aligarh’s pronouncements on the important issues of the day. This centricity to Muslim opinion was key in placing Aligarh at the heart of the Pakistan movement. Amin, like narrator Masood ul Hasan, describes an atmosphere of youthful enthusiasm in which students were caught up in the political excitement of the time.

During the partition, however, as Amin’s story reveals, Aligarh became a site of suspicion; Muslims were targeted as potential traitors to the state, and Aligarh was especially vulnerable because many students had been active in calling for independent Muslim statehood.  Amin mentions that as he returned to Aligarh in late summer 1947, he had been advised to carry a book with the name of a Hindu inscribed inside, so as to distract attention from his own Muslim identity. Trains, as he reminds me, were sites of massacre during the communal unrest that accompanied partition and on both sides of the border trains pulled into stations full of dead bodies.  His return to Aligarh in 1947 was tense, but uneventful.

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In remembering this, Amin moves directly to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. He connects Gandhi’s assassination to the atmosphere at Aligarh by describing it as particularly “telling.” On the day of the assassination, Amin was headed into the city—the predominantly Hindu city of Aligarh separated from the precincts of the Aligarh University by a railway line and a bridge.  By the time they reached the city, now a few kilometers distant from their university and its protective walls, people shouted at them to “Go back!” Though they simultaneously heard that Gandhi’s assassin had been a Hindu, the students felt the threat of violence in the city, and those around them sternly directed them to return to the right side of the tracks.

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Amin remembers how important Gandhi had been in preserving a tenuous peace in Eastern India during the chaos of 1947. Having gone on a fast to the death, he refused to break it until leaders of the three major faiths of the region: Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs came together to make a joint pledge to stop the fighting. In the moments after Gandhi’s death, Amin and  his friends reaped the benefit of his magnanimity- they returned safely to their school- but they knew, as did those around them, that the situation remained tense enough to go either way.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo credits:

Amber Abbas, untitled portrait of Professor Mohammad Amin 

Author’s own via Not Even Past

Jama Masjid, “AMU-Aligarh,” Decemer 23, 2009

Author’s own via Flickr Creative Commons

Unknown author, Untitled Portrait of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawharlal Nehru, July 6, 1946

AP Photo/Max Desfor via Flickr Creative Commons

 

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Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV: Interview with Professor Masood ul Hasan

Voices of India’s Partition, Part III: Interview with Professor Irfan Habib

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider

Voices of India’s Partition, Part V: Professor Mohammad Amin

Interviewed by Amber Abbas

D-25, Oxford Apartment, Patpar Ganj, New Delhi (November 5, 2009)

Transcript: 

Context Notes:  During our interview Professor Amin was suffering from allergies and his nose was running constantly. He also had several attacks of sneezing.  But he was patient and generous enough to continue speaking with me despite it all.

Professor Mohammad Amin: Going back to what we were talking about Aligarh. At that time, there was a euphoria that Aligarh was so powerful, that it will decide the destiny of the country and the partition of the country and whatnot. And people were carried away. It is a fact that if the meeting was called in the Union, and the bell rang here, shops in Hattras used to get closed. Aligarh mein ho raha hain, Aligarh mein ho raha hain. (Something is happening in Aligarh, something is happening in Aligarh) Pir, ooske bad, kya hogaya?Ooske bad, yeh ho gaya ke (Then what happened? What happened then was–) everywhere people were afraid for their life because it was rumored that people were going to attack Aligarh.

AA: Before partition or after?

MA: (0:05:31.5) After partition. After partition.

MA: (0:05:53.8) We were instructed to carry a book or something like that. And in the book, write the name Mahavir Prasad or Raghav Lal or something or the other. (laughs)

AA: Were you frightened?

MA: Anybody would be frightened! Because there were cases where people were being thrown out of the train. And killing them. Because, after all, there was that, kya nam hain (what do you call it?) spell of madness all over the country. And when people were coming from the other side, compartments full of dead bodies of Sikhs and Hindus. And here, this was going on on mass scale. I mean, I think one thing that tells you most is the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. I was present at Aligarh at that time. We were going to kya nam hain, the shaher (city). [When we reached there] Tho, is vakt jo hein, log bata rahein the “Vapis jao! Vapis jao!” Vahan se ho gaya tab thak avaz har jagey hein, “Mahatma Gandhi ko katal kar diya gaya, mar diya gaya, Godse ne, Hindu ne mara, Hindu ne mara, Hindu ne mara! Ek Hindu, pagal, oos ne, kya nam, mara!”  (By this time, people were telling us, “Go back! Go back!” from there. By that time the sound was coming from everywhere, “Mahatma Gandhi has been murdered, has been killed by Godse. A Hindu killed him, a Hindu killed him, a Hindu killed him! A Hindu, a madman, he killed him!”)

Radio also kept on, every five minutes, repeating it. So that was a time. And then before that, leading to that, when the riots were in Delhi, you had Mahatma Gandhi had gone on a fast to the death. And he refused to take anything “Aisa nehin, aap kijiye, you, all the people, Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, they should come hand-in-hand to me and pledge that they will stop this.”

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV

by Amber Abbas

Professor Masood ul Hasan was born in Moradabad in 1928. He completed high school from Hewat Muslim High School.  His father was an employee of the Municipal Board. He completed his F.A. (Intermediate) from Government Inter-College, Moradabad. He studied in the Aligarh Muslim University from 1943 to 1947 where he completed his B.A. and M.A. in English Literature.  He completed his Ph.D. in Liverpool while he was appointed as a Reader in the Department of English at AMU.  He retired from AMU in 1988 after serving as Professor of English, Chair of Department of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts.  He also served as the Proctor of the University.  He continues to live in Aligarh, in Sir Syed Nagar.

Professor_Masood_ul_Hasan_Photo_by_Amber_Abbas_1I met Professor Masood ul Hasan first in July 2008, and I interviewed him a total of three times in 2008 and 2009 while I was living in Aligarh to conduct my dissertation research on the role and experience of Aligarh students in the freedom movement and the movement for Pakistan. He was extremely supportive of my project, and frequently introduced me to other senior and retired professors who had been his friends and colleagues for generations. I always looked forward to a visit and a cup of tea at his home during my stay in Aligarh!

Professor Hasan was also one of only a few students of the 1940s who was willing to speak about his involvement with the Muslim League in the 1945-46 elections. He frequently made sure that I understood that he regretted his involvement with the League and chalked it up to youthful enthusiasm, a desire for adventure, and naivete.  He chose not to leave for Pakistan despite his involvement with the League and remained his entire career at Aligarh University as a professor of English.

In this interview he describes his experience on the day of Gandhi’s assassination, a mere five months after the partition of the country. On that day, Masood ul Hasan was traveling from Aligarh to his home in Bhopal. He took a train from Aligarh to Agra and was to buy his onward ticket in the Agra Cantonment Station.  When he sat in the train, he made a deliberate choice to avoid the “minority compartment,” a concession made by the railways to protect Muslims and other minorities in the wake of the partition violence when trains became sites of massacre.  It was his “little assertion of self-confidence” to ride in the general compartment, clad in a sherwani – a typically Muslim coat that was a gesture of pride in his heritage but marked him as a minority. These choices would have been only slightly risky on any other day. On this day, however, as he stepped onto the train platform at Agra and found it deserted, Masood ul Hasan felt afraid. The news of Gandhi’s assassination created a difficult position for him. If a Muslim had killed Gandhi, all Muslims would be held responsible, and the violence of partition could be reignited. As he stood on the platform, terribly alone, in the city made famous by Shah Jahan’s majestic Taj Mahal, a monument to India’s Muslim heritage, he feared what might happen if he were unable to leave.

image

Luckily, the ticket collector took pity on him, arranged for a ticket and Hasan was able to depart for the safer environment of his home in Bhopal. He did not become a victim of violence on that day, but the fear he experienced speaks to the uncertainty that Muslims in India felt, especially when traveling through unfamiliar environments, in the early years after India’s independence. Whereas they were supposed to have the same rights and privileges as other Indian citizens, the trauma of 1947 was still fresh, and, especially when traveling, Muslims often feared for their safety.

image

Hasan’s narrative picks up on some familiar themes from other stories Muslims tell about this day. It is singular, it stands out in the memory; he, like others, is able to tap into his emotions and experience with remarkable clarity.  Muslims almost without exception feared a Muslim assassin. After everything they had been through in 1947 and Gandhi’s selfless efforts to protect Muslims in places they were threatened, a Muslim assassin would unseat in one shot the tenuous but safe position of Muslims in early 1948. Everyone knew this, not just Muslims.  And when it was revealed that the assassin was a fundamentalist Hindu, Muslims heaved a collective sigh of relief. No conservative Hindus were targeted or held responsible for the actions of Nathuram Godse. Muslims were spared, but one of their staunch allies was lost.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo credits:

Amber Abbas, untitled portrait of Professor Masood ul Hasan

Author’s own via Not Even Past

Yann, Gandhi in Noakhali, 1946

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

Unknown author, “Group photo of Hindu Mahasabha, the group accused of successfully staging Gandhi’s assassination. Standing: Shankar Kistaiya, Gopal Godse, Madanlal Pahwa, Digambar Badge (Approver), Guruji M.S. Golwalkar. Seated: Narayan Apte, Vinayak D. Savarkar, Nathuram Godse, Vishnu Karkare.” via Wikimedia Commons

You may also like:

Voices of India’s Partition, Part III: Interview with Professor Irfan Habib

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider

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