Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History Read online

  Concern about what investigation of the past might reveal is by no means confined to Japan. In 1992 when a couple of spectators at hydroplane races on the Columbia River near Kennewick in the state of Washington stumbled on a human skull, their discovery set off a decade-long tug-of-war over the skull itself and the accompanying bones which were subsequently discovered. The remains turned out to be prehistoric, approximately nine thousand years old. Interestingly, the features of the skull appeared to be Caucasoid rather than aboriginal. These findings challenged what had until then been the widely accepted view that aboriginals were the first and only indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. The federal government, which would have preferred to avoid dealing with the issues raised, was prepared to hand over the bones to Native American tribes, but scientists sued for the right to do research. The Umatilla tribe argued that, according to its own myths, it had been near Kennewick since the beginning of time. “I have oral histories within my tribe that go back ten thousand years,” said one member. “I know where my people lived, where they died, where they hunted, where they fished and where they were buried, because my oral histories tell me that.” Kennewick man was an ancestor and must be properly buried. Furthermore, by letting the bones be investigated by scientists, the U.S. government was showing contempt for the tribe’s sacred beliefs. After an eight-year legal battle, the courts ruled that the bones stay in the possession of the Army Corps of Engineers, on whose land they were found, and that scientists be given access.

  History that challenges comfortable assumptions about a group is painful, but it is, as Michael Howard said, a mark of maturity. In recent years, Ireland has witnessed a major revision of its history in part because it is prosperous, successful, and self-confident and the old stories of victimhood no longer have the resonance they once did. As a result, the old, simple picture of Irish Catholic nationalists versus the Ulster Protestants and their English supporters and the two separate histories that each had is now being amended to show a more complex history, and some cherished myths are being destroyed. In World War I, it used to be believed, only the Protestants fought. The nationalists were engaged, depending on which way you looked at it, either in treason or in a struggle for liberty. In fact, 210,000 volunteers from Ireland, a majority of them Catholics and Irish nationalists, fought for the British against the Germans. The Easter Rising was not the unified movement of all Irish patriots of nationalist myth but the result, at least in part, of internal power struggles. As the president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, said in a recent lecture in London, “Where previously our history has been characterized by a plundering of the past for things to separate and differentiate us from one [another], our future now holds the optimistic possibility that Ireland will become a better place, where we will not only develop new relationships but will more comfortably revisit the past and find there … elements of kinship long neglected, of connections deliberately overlooked.”

  Distorted history, suppressed evidence—there is worse still, and that is the history that is simply false. Sometimes it is done for the best of motives, to build pride among those who have suffered much and who live with a deep sense of powerlessness and humiliation. In 1923, Marcus Garvey the black American leader, wrote a stirring polemic titled “Who and What Is a Negro?” He tried to give his people back what slavery had stolen from them—a past as other peoples had, with a sense of who they were and what their achievements had been. He went further, though, and made claims which could not be substantiated. “Every student of history,” he said, “of impartial mind, knows that the Negro once ruled the world, when white men were savages and barbarians living in caves; that thousands of Negro professors at that time taught in the universities in Alexandria, then the seat of learning; that ancient Egypt gave the world civilization and that Greece and Rome have robbed Egypt of her arts and letters, and taken all the credit to themselves.” His argument, which still keeps surfacing, was that civilization was like a torch which had passed from sub-Saharan Africa to Egypt, then, in an act of theft, on to Greece and Rome. It is a curious and static view of civilization as something that can be moved from one people to another—or that there is only one “civilization.” In reality, there are and have been many civilizations, and they are fluid and changing. The forces that shape them come from within and without. Of course, Greek civilization had outside influences, but they were as likely to come from the East as from Egypt. And there is little evidence that Egyptian civilization was derived largely from south of the Sahara.

  More recent scholars have tried to bolster the claim by using linguistic and archaeological evidence. “Athens,” it is claimed, is originally an African word, and Socrates was black because one sculpture shows him with a flat nose. Scholars in the field have dismissed such evidence, but for some of the more committed supporters of the Garvey thesis that is simply proof that Europeans ever since the Greeks have been engaged in a massive conspiracy to conceal their theft and the fact that they could not create civilization on their own. According to Cheikh Anta Diop from Senegal, the Europeans even laid a trail of false evidence down through the centuries. Such stories bear the same relationship to the past as The Da Vinci Code does to Christian theology. They may help for a time to instill pride, but at a cost.

  In India in the 1990s, the growth of Hindu nationalism brought extraordinary attempts to eliminate parts of India’s heritage and to rewrite Indian history. In 1992, fundamentalists, supported by right-wing Hindu politicians, destroyed a sixteenth-century mosque at Ayodhya in northern India on the grounds that it was built over the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. Encouraged, they declared that they would move on to destroy other Muslim sites, including the Taj Mahal. This was part of a larger drive to peg India’s identity as exclusively Hindu or, in the word used by the Hindu nationalists, “Hindutva.”

  India’s history inevitably became a key component of this. The standard view, based on the evidence available, had been that the fertile Indus valley had housed the Harappan civilization between about 3000 and 1700 B.C. It was gradually absorbed or disappeared when horse-borne Aryans moved down from the north, perhaps as peaceful migrants or possibly as warlike invaders. This did not suit the Hindu nationalists, because it implied that an indigenous civilization had given way to one from outside and that their own culture might have foreign elements. As Madhav Golwalkar, the spiritual father of today’s Hindu nationalists, wrote in the 1930s, “The Hindus came into this land from nowhere, but are indigenous children of the soil always, from times immemorial.” Of course, this was an absurdly simplistic view of the ways peoples and civilizations develop and commingle. They are not flies stuck forever the same in amber but much more like rivers with many tributaries.

  When the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, won power at the center in 1998, it immediately set to bringing the past into line with its views. Harappan civilization was, it declared, actually Aryan. A terra-cotta seal from a Harappan site had been found which showed a horse. (This conclusive piece of evidence, unfortunately, turned out to be a fake.) Harappan civilization was also, the government confidently pronounced, much older than previously accepted. Indeed, Murli Manohar Joshi, the BJP minister in charge of education between 1998 and 2004, announced that he had discovered an even older indigenous Indian civilization, which he and his supporters named the Sarasvati. “The evidence for this,” said Romila Thapar, one of India’s most respected historians, “is so far invisible.” Nevertheless, it was quite clear, at least to the BJP and its supporters, that India had housed the world’s first civilization. Not only had it been responsible for all manner of inventions and advances long before all others, but it had civilized the rest of the world. The Chinese may have been startled to learn that they were in fact also the descendants of Hindu warriors. Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language, was, it was claimed by the Hindu nationalists, the mother of all other languages. The Vedas, the oldest texts written in Sanskrit, were the foundation of most modern knowledg
e, including all of mathematics.

  To make sure that Indian students absorbed all this, Joshi introduced new textbooks, which stressed such “Indian” subjects as yoga, Sanskrit, astrology, Vedic mathematics, and Vedic culture. He packed school boards and research centers with Hindu nationalists whose credentials as historians mattered far less than their adherence to a simplistic view of India’s past and culture. The respected Indian Council of Historical Research in Delhi was told that its historian for early India was to be replaced by an engineer. That appointment at least did not go through, because there was a public outcry about both the appointee’s credentials and his attacks on Christians and Muslims.

  Behind these often laughable attempts to remake Indian education lay a more sinister and political agenda. The BJP and its supporters conceived of India as a Hindu nation and, moreover, one that reflected the values of upper-caste Hindus, including their reverence for cows and their hostility to beef eating. Their India had little room or tolerance for the large religious minorities of Muslims and Christians, and precious little for lower-caste Hindus. The BJP view of the past was one in which Indian civilization had been, from its inception, as Hindu as they were today. Even the merest suggestion that ancient Hindus had been different, that they might have eaten beef, for example, had to be taken out of the record. It was true, one Hindu nationalist admitted, that the evidence suggested that upper-caste Hindus ate beef in ancient times, but to let schoolchildren know that would confuse them and quite possibly traumatize them.

  The BJP’s India was one where Hindus had lived in harmony with one another until outsiders—Muslims and then the British—had arrived to damage and divide up Indian society through pillage, plunder, and forcible conversions. The new textbooks dwelled on the sins of the outsiders but were largely silent on the often brutal deeds of Hindu rulers. Moreover, the texts ignored the copious evidence that down through the centuries, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs—indeed, adherents of all religions—had for the most part lived peaceably side by side, borrowing and learning from one another. While Muslim invaders had brought Mogul and Persian styles in the arts into India, those had been absorbed and influenced by those already existing in India. The great Mogul emperor Akbar had been fascinated by other religions and had tried, unsuccessfully, to found a syncretic religion which incorporated elements of Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity. In independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, had stood firmly for secularism and tolerance in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith India. None of this appeared in the Hindutva version of India’s past. Rather, Muslims had always been enemies of Hindus and always would be until they were converted or otherwise dealt with.

  Historians who pointed out the manifest flaws in this picture of India’s past were condemned as Marxists or simply as bad Indians. It was a pity, said one fundamentalist, that there was no fatwa in Hinduism. In fact, extreme Hindu nationalists behaved as though there were. Scholars, including Romila Thapar, who published work that was at variance with the Hindutva orthodoxy received hate mail and even death threats. Expatriates, as is so often the case, were particularly vociferous in their defense of what they claimed was India’s true history and culture. Thapar was hounded when she gave lectures in the United States. At a lecture in London, a Hindu activist threw an egg at Professor Wendy Doniger because she was daring to lecture on the great Hindu epic the Ramayana. In California, Hindu parents appeared before the state school board to demand that textbooks be purged of the errors propounded by “India-bashers” such as Thapar and scholars such as Michael Witzel of Harvard University. The errors they listed included, not surprisingly, the Aryan movement into India.

  In a particularly bizarre series of incidents, James Laine, an American scholar at a small college in Minnesota who wrote a book investigating the myths surrounding the life of the seventeenth-century Hindu king and hero Shivaji, found himself the target of nationalist rage. Laine had dared to suggest that among the many stories was one that could be taken as a joking comment that Shivaji may not have been his father’s son. The Shiv Sena, a right-wing political movement in Shivaji’s home province of Maharashtra, ran a successful campaign to get Oxford University Press to withdraw the book. Early in 2004, a gang of toughs beat up and tarred a venerable Indian scholar whose name was mentioned in Laine’s acknowledgments. Another mob broke into a research institute in Pune where Laine had done some work and, ironically, destroyed ancient Hindu writings and paintings and smashed a statue of the Hindu goddess of learning. The Pune police force responded by charging Laine and Oxford University Press with “wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause a riot.” Indian moderate opinion was outraged and warned against the “Talibanization” of India.

  The impetus behind the attacks was, of course, as much about the present as it was about the past. It reflected competing views of Indian society—the Hindu versus the secular—and attempts by the politicians to appeal to Hindu nationalist sentiment. India was due to have a general election in the spring of 2004, and the Laine book became part of the campaign as politicians competed to show how Hindu and how Indian they were. There were calls for Interpol to arrest Laine. The BJP prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, said foreign writers must learn that they could not offend Indian pride.

  Of the many ways in which we can define ourselves, the nation, at least for the last two centuries, has been one of the most enticing. The idea that we are part of a very large family, or, in Benedict Anderson’s words, an imagined community, has been as powerful a force as Fascism or Communism. Nationalism brought Germany and Italy into being, destroyed Austria-Hungary, and, more recently, broke apart Yugoslavia. People have suffered and died, and have harmed and killed others, for their “nation.”

  History provides much of the fuel for nationalism. It creates the collective memories that help to bring the nation into being. The shared celebration of the nation’s great achievements—and the shared sorrow at its defeats—sustain and foster it. The further back the history appears to go, the more solid and enduring the nation seems—and the worthier its claims. Ernest Renan, the nineteenth-century French thinker who wrote an early classic on nationalism, dismissed all the other justifications for the existence of nations, such as blood, geography, language, or religion. “A nation,” he wrote, “is a great solidarity created by the sentiment of the sacrifices which have been made and those which one is disposed to make in the future.” As one of his critics preferred to put it, “A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours.” Renan saw the nation as something that depended on the assent of its members. “The existence of a nation is a plebiscite of every day as the existence of an individual is a perpetual affirmation of life.” For many nationalists, there is no such thing as voluntary assent; you were born into a nation and had no choice about whether or not you belonged, even if history had intervened. When France claimed the Rhineland after World War I, one of the arguments it used was that, even though they spoke German, its inhabitants were really French. Although ill fortune had allowed them to fall under German rule, they had remained French in essence, as their love of wine, their Catholicism, and their joie de vivre so clearly demonstrated.

  Renan was trying to grapple with a new phenomenon because nationalism is a very late development indeed in terms of human history. For many centuries, most Europeans thought of themselves not as British (or English or Scottish or Welsh), French, or German but as members of a particular family, clan, region, religion, or guild. Sometimes they defined themselves in terms of their overlords, whether local barons or emperors. When they did define themselves as German or French, it was as much a cultural category as a political one, and they certainly did not assume, as modern national movements almost always do, that nations had a right to rule themselves on a specific piece of territory.

  Those older ways of defining oneself persisted well into the modern age. When commissions from the League of Nations tried to determi
ne borders after World War I in the center of Europe, they repeatedly came upon locals who had no idea whether they were Czechs or Slovaks, Lithuanians or Poles. We are Catholic or Orthodox, came the answers, merchants or farmers, or simply people of this village or that. Danilo Dolci, the Italian sociologist and activist, was astonished to find in the 1950s that there were people living in the interior of Sicily who had never heard of Italy, even though, in theory, they had been Italians for several generations. They were the anomalies, though, left behind as nationalism increasingly became the way in which Europeans defined themselves. Rapid communications, growing literacy, urbanization, and above all the idea that it was right and proper to see oneself as part of a nation, and a nation, moreover, which ought to have its own state on its own territory, all fed into the great wave of nationalism which shook Europe in the nineteenth century and the wider world in the twentieth.

  For all the talk about eternal nations, they are created not by fate or God but by the activities of human beings, and not least by historians. It all started so quietly in the nineteenth century. Scholars worked on languages, classifying them into different families and trying to determine how far back into history they went. They discovered rules to explain changes in language and were able to establish, at least to their own satisfaction, that texts centuries old were written in early forms of, for example, German or French. Ethnographers like the Grimm brothers collected German folktales as a way of showing that there was something called the German nation in the Middle Ages. Historians worked assiduously to recover old stories and pieced together the history of what they chose to call their nation as though it had an unbroken existence since antiquity. Archaeologists claimed to have found evidence that showed where such nations had once lived, and where they had moved to during the great waves of migrations.