Handling History: How our understanding of the past can cultivate our actions in the present
In his seminal work, The Rise And Fall
Of The Third Reich, William L. Shirer
writes of an encounter between Adolf
Hitler and his High School History
teacher, Dr Leopold Poetsch. Describing
his experience as a student, Hitler had writ-
ten, in his Mein Kampf, The teacher made
history my favourite subject. And indeed,
he had no such intention, it was then that
I became a young revolutionary. Decades
later, while touring Austria in triumph, in
1938, Hitler stopped to see his old teacher.
He conversed with him alone for an hour,
and later confi ded to members of his party,
You cannot imagine how much I owe to
that old man.
Poignant in hindsight, it is worth noting
how our understanding of the past can cul-
tivate our actions in the present. We usual-
ly consider ourselves part of a continuum,
a current in the larger river – how far we
take that river, depends both on our ability
and ideology. Present, as the English His-
torian, E.H.Carr says, can only be under-
stood in the light of the past.Or, its mirror
version, by the French Historian Marc
Bloch, which states that Misunderstanding
the present is an inevitable consequence of
ignorance of the past. As humans, we have
a proclivity to associate with larger causes,
with transcending ideas, and with the
herds of our choice. As a direct result, we
adhere to a version of offi cial history that
serves the larger purpose of the herd. When
Eric Hobsbawm famously drew an analogy
between Historians and poppy-growers,
this is precisely what he meant; to further
the cause of an ideology and its ideologues,
we need History. If there exists none, we
need to invent one. History, whose conclu-
sions are foregone. History, which upholds
regional and cultural biases. History, that
pronounces judgement, before the trial.
History, that most of all, serves the herd
narrative.
As a subject, History is fascinating – like
the Time Machine of H.G.Wells, it takes us to
places in the past; like trekking through for-
ests and mountains, we discover new lands,
and with every new discovery, a hundred
more doors open. As a propaganda tool, his-
tory is unbearably boring; even if we see a
river, we have to call it a waterfall, if we have
been ordered to do so. The former drives
from curiosity, the latter from conformity.
The former results in fascination, the latter
in bigotry. The former aligns one to the
larger cause of humanity, the latter confi nes
us to the small niche of partisanship.
Partly due to intellectual laziness,
mainly a consequence of ideological fealty;
a lot of what goes around as History is as
an exercise in intellectual Knighthood.
Such a history cannot be read through
and through. It must be made certain
that it is neither read well, nor read wide.
Rather, it is understood through snip-
pets – ill devised screenshots of the past,
that cherry-pick premises, for foregone
conclusions. Were I a Sports Historian,
writing biographies of great players, with
extraordinary careers and many a record,
but bent on to write only about the games
they did not score - while factually true,
my work would be contextually horren-
dous. This reading of history, as stale as
it sounds, is a fairly common occurrence.
With extreme ease, snipping our way
through history, Gandhi can be proved a
fascist and Hitler a pacifist, marauders as
heroes and heroes as villains. For people
in active political life for half a century,
for intellectuals with thousands of publi-
cations, for civilizations with hundreds
of years under their belt; snipping is as
easy, as it is horrible. Put to use by the
protagonists of a particular narrative, it
is also often amplified as an official doc-
trine, with the twin whips of blasphemy
and sedition, at constant disposal. With
his usual brilliance, George Orwell,
in 1984, epitomizes it thus:
Who controls the past, controls the
future, who controls the present controls
the past.
A reading of history as it is, and not as
we wish it to be. History, wherein provi-
dence does not take any particular inter-
est in my herd – which is the common
heritage of humankind; is a panacea to
many an evil confronting the world. My
people, right under the heavens, centre
of creation, founders of every good that
we have hitherto seen, sometimes falter-
ing from envious enemy conspiracies, in
an otherwise infallible civilization - is an
obsolete fabrication that we must bid fare-
well. As humans, fi rst and last, all history
is our history, its successes are ours and
its failures are on us. The common bond of
humanity shall ever evade us if history is
made to serve ulterior motives and perform
the work of polemical cannons. History,
read well and wide, on the other hand, shall
surely make us acquire what Bertrand Rus-
sell terms as, Citizenship of the intellectual
commonwealth.
