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A Marxist Medievalist in India's Stone Ages1

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A Marxist Medievalist in India's Stone Ages1 A Marxist Medievalist in India's Stone Ages1 Vishwa Mohan Jha In this essay I shall seek to discuss the more important of the academic and professional issues raised by Irfan Habib’s books on ancient India,2 pub­ lished as a part of A People’s History of India, a series sponsored by the Aligarh Historians Society. The series as a whole (and not just the ancient India part of it) is committed, in the Society’s words, to ‘the cause of pro­ moting the scientific method in history, and resisting communal and chau­ vinistic interpretations’. Any discussion of this important commitment must be based on the series as a whole and in tandem with a range of themes of a very different order than those being covered here. Irfan Habib (who is also the General Editor of the series) has so far authored/co-authored four books on ancient India in the series: Prehistory (2001); The Indus Civilization (2002); The Vedic Age (co-authored with the late Vijay Kumar Thakur, 2003); and Mauryan India (co-authored with Vivekanand Jha, 2004). Here we focus on the first three works, on the pre­ history and protohistory of India; Mauryan India would be better appreciat­ ed, in our opinion, in the light of the volume in the series by K.M. Shrimali, The Age of Iron and the Religious Revolution, c. 700-c. 350 b c {2007), that comes between it and The Vedic Age. These are no school textbooks, as is thought by Martha Nussbaum in an important study she did soon after they came out. A number of circumstan­ ces appear to have contributed to this impression. The books came at a time when the assault on history by the ruling National Democratic Alliance (led by the Bharatiya Janata Party) was in full swing in India. The ‘old NCERT textbooks’ of history (authored individually by Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and others, and published by the autonomous government organization, National Council of Educational Research and Training [NCERT]) had been removed after a slanderous attack, and replaced by ‘new NCERT text­ 1 This essay owes its birth to the persuasion and inexhaustible patience of Rajendra Prasad, Managing Editor, Social Scientist. 2 India will be used interchangeably with South Asia in this essay. A Marxist Medievalist in India’s Stone Ages 67 books’ (authored individually by Makkhan Lai, Minakshi Jain and others). A textbook controversy followed that was spearheaded on the secularist side with distinction by Habib and his collaborators, which Nussbaum natu­ rally could not afford to miss. The People’s History of India project, with its commitment to scientific as against communal and chauvinistic history, had received generous funding from the Madhya Pradesh State Textbook Corporation which is generally concerned with school-level textbooks alone. It is therefore understandable why Nussbaum viewed Habib’s books as school textbooks - ‘a commercially published set of alternative textbooks’; an al­ ternative, that is, to the ‘new NCERT textbooks’ that replaced the ‘old NCERT textbooks’. The slimness of Habib’s volumes (a mere 88 pages for Prehistory, for example) - which has tended to create the impression that these books, intended to be ‘popular’, provide less than adequate coverage for college- and university-level studies - may also have strengthened the view that they were brought out as rivals to the ‘new’ school textbooks.3 In Nussbaum’s analysis, while the ‘new’ textbooks, like Makkhan Lai’s, are no patch on Habib’s textbooks, the latter, ‘pedagogically, too . may be superior to the old NCERT books, which, by all accounts, were heavy and uninviting’.4 However, in neither length nor level of treatment of the 3 It is important to keep in mind the intended meanings of ‘new’ and ‘old’, because by the time Nussbaum’s study was published, the swing in the political pendulum had led to yet another replacement of the ‘new’ books by newer ones that shared Habib’s opposition to communal history, though not his particular vision of scientific history. 4 Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 271- 72, 289. As Habib’s books are so far from being school-level textbooks, Nussbaum’s judg­ ment raises interesting questions about the way the argument of pedagogy has been used in the textbook controversy in India, across ideologies. Her charge that the old NCERT books were dull and boring seems to feed on a curious bag of propaganda. The issue of writing ‘interesting’ textbooks - a pedagogical question - was raised only for the history textbooks, just as these books alone were targeted for hurting the sentiments of various communities. Books on other subjects were never subjected to this type of questioning. In other words, the same history books were sometimes said to be so dull that no one wanted to read them, and at other times so provocative that they could not be tolerated for a moment: dull books would normally pass unnoticed, unprovoked. Unlike the vociferous attack of the sentiments- getting-hurt issue, the other was mainly a whisper campaign (though it is possible to provide references). It was heartily fanned by a rival professional spirit on the hither side of the ideological divide as well. Thus one sees why a Teesta Setalvad, in a meeting organized against the ‘new’ books, mentioned the need for removing or reforming the ‘old’ ones on the ground that they were heavy reading, or why Nussbaum too underlined the point (though it was not very pertinent to her argument). It is doubtful, or at least debatable, that in read­ ability or accuracy, pedagogically or otherwise, the old books have till date been superseded (for all the advice solicited of me and that I had to offer in the production of the newest textbooks!). There has no doubt been a great improvement in the quality of illustrations, but this is mostly due to technological changes in book production; quite rotten books these days would score in this respect over excellent ones of yesteryears. Plainly, advances in knowledge due to progress of research should have been reason enough to go in for a revision or 68 EXCURSUS IN HISTORY subject are the People’s History books anywhere near the school textbooks. They have been composed with a ‘commitment to conciseness’, so much so that the author felt required to offer an explanation when, as compared to 88 pages of Prehistory, he offered a bulkier second volume of 124 pages!5 This conciseness, it is seen, is accomplished, apart from through a certain economy of style, by avoiding surveys of historiography and descriptions of individual sites (instead of referring to tools and artefacts at every import­ ant, individual site of an archaeological culture, you save a lot of space if you describe them at one place for the culture in general). To judge from the explanations offered,6 it was apparently for the same necessity of concise­ ness that the bibliographical notes at the end of chapters had ‘necessarily to be very selective’. Yet, for the time-span covered by them, the three volumes, with a combined total of 320 pages, compare not too unfavourably with the standard monographs in the field over the last quarter century or so.7 And, as we shall see, Habib says it differently from any of the authors he has consulted. Prehistory, The Indus Civilization and The Vedic Age invite com­ parisons of a very different order than with the NCERT textbooks. Habib points to students and general readers as the intended readership. There is every reason - one being the space and attention given to biblio­ graphical notes - to think that by the former he does not mean school- but college-level (undergraduate and postgraduate) students. And while the People’s History series aims to be comprehensible at the popular level, it seeks to be equally satisfying and stimulating to the specialist. Surely, a specialist reader is being addressed when Habib offers the following expla­ nation for his preferred spellings of ‘Rigveda’ and ‘Ashoka’: replacement of the older books. Going by the rave reviews of Romila Thapar’s Early India by younger scholars from 2003 onwards, the decision in the immediately following years not to request her to write a new book for NCERT, i.e. to replace her by new authors, could hardly have been prompted by doubts about her ability to meet the needs occasioned by ‘shifts in thinking about history’ (Neeladri Bhattacharya, ‘Teaching History in Schools: The Politics of Textbooks in India’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 67, No. 1, 2009, p. 105) that her previous N CERT textbooks, among others, did not reflect, and which became the basis for writing new textbooks. If the scholarly reception of Early India is any criterion - and that should have been among the foremost for the decision-makers - Thapar was the fittest person around for the task. 5 Irfan Habib, The Indus Civilization, A People’s History of India 2, New Delhi: Tulika Books, in association with Aligarh Historians Society, 2002, p. ix. 6 Irfan Habib, Prehistory, A People’s History o f India 1, New Delhi: Tulika Books, in associa­ tion with Aligarh Historians Society, 2002, p. ix; Habib, The Indus Civilization, p. x. 7 Puzzlingly, Nussbaum (The Clash Within, p. 272) also complains that the books ‘have few illustrations (presumably because of economic factors)’. Actually, with a total of 65 figures (23+39+3), aided by 12 tables (4+5+3) and 23 maps (8+9+6), the books teem with them, though one may complain about the poor quality of the photographs.
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