History, Literature, Beliefs: Sudhir Chandra
Over the years I have come to believe increasingly in the truth of Jacques Lacan’s formulation that each mode of discourse has its underlying fiction, and that the discourse collapses the moment the fiction is removed. The difference between literature and history rests on the supposition that history is a referential discourse while literature is non-referential. Those aware of the difficulties of non-referentiality in relation to a humanly created discourse prefer the term auto-referential. Whatever the description chosen, it serves to separate literature from history and the social sciences.
However, except to some extent for ‘facts’ like names and dates, what is it in history that can be corroborated by appealing to a ‘reality’ existing outside of the discourse of history? A man called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi can, with some measure of certainty, be said to have been born on 2 October 1869. With greater certainty he can be said to have been assassinated on 30 January 1948. What, for understanding the phenomenon the man came to represent, will these facts add up to? For any discussion of the phenomenon, which is necessarily a matter of interpreting ‘facts’ and not of facts, what referentiality is available other than the disciplinary discourse?
I cannot understand why Emmanuel La Roy Ladurie, the ‘historian’, has never been recommended for the Nobel Prize for literature. What is his Montaillou if not a great work of fiction? Nearer home, I am yet to read a more fascinating and perceptive history of modern Bengal and the Indian Renaissance (to rehabilitate that discredited term) than Tagore’s Gora.
This is a position that, summarily rejecting all disciplinary tyrannies, facilitates a wide range of reading possibilities. It accepts the institutional reality of disciplinary divisions in our world without accepting their respective ontological claims. In doing that, it makes possible, and legitimises, a whole range of readings and interpretations within and across existing disciplinary boundaries.
I once chanced upon the case of a remarkable woman in 19th century India, Rukhmabai, who refused to live with her husband because she disliked him. So powerful was the impact of this chance encounter on me that I decided to read more about her. One discovery led to another, as one source led to another. I managed to gather a large body of material about her. That done, my first instinct was to write a novel about her. Soon, fortunately, I realised my want of requisite imagination, and ended up writing a work of history on her case.
Clearly, I had believed that in a novel I would have greater freedom to make the woman and her times come alive. That the novel would better capture the reality lying within and beyond the ‘facts’ I had gathered from different sources. The monograph I ended up writing on Rukhmabai’s case was my second, reluctant choice. I do realise, though, that if I had possessed La Roy Ladurie’s kind of ‘historical’ imagination, even in the monograph I could have achieved what I was hoping to do in a novel.
Why, then, does a writer choose one as opposed to another mode of expression? And in choosing that particular mode, can the writer claim immunity from being judged in the light of the ‘field’ into which (s)he has ventured through her/his chosen ‘field’?
There can be no literature without literary licence. Also, a case can be made for the non-referentiality of literature in the sense that there can be kinds of literary works that it would be puerile to judge and falsify on the ground of correspondence with reality as we claim to know it. But, then, a work cannot claim to be inspired by an actual historical event and disregard all the essentials that history has to tell about the event. Even less can a literary work claim to be about a historical event and mock the existing historical knowledge about it.
It can overturn received historical wisdom by reading between the lines, or against the grain. It can alter the dominant disciplinary understanding of an event by adopting a radically different perspective. But, then, that is something which keeps constantly happening within history writing itself. In any case, never ever is there just a single perspective in history. Not just the coming to light of ever new evidence, but interests, beliefs, intellectual fashions, and a variety of other factors keep ensuring more than one and mutually conflicting accounts of the same event. Yet, there must be criteria for determining how something different can be said; no matter whether it is done in historical writing or in literature.
It must be admitted, though, that even a work that purports to be based on an actual historical event and completely disregards history can be excellent on literary grounds. Though it is improbable that a writer capable of producing excellent literature will take the trouble of invoking a historical event only to flout history. Should that amazing work be produced, its reliance on history would at best be inconsequential, and its merit would rest elsewhere.
Moving from these general observations to a work appearing here, the poem on 1857, I can understand the provocation that must have inspired its writing. The hypocrisy of the government funding the celebration of the 150 years of the event can infuriate a sensitive soul, as must much of what was done with that money. What I cannot understand is the kind of simplistic radicalism that portrays whole generations of post-1857 English educated middle-class Indians as self-seeking lackeys of the alien dispensation. Going by the equally simplistic radical view the poem takes of a much-maligned speech by Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh, an impression is created of the continuation of that lackeyism even after the country’s political independence.
What is being done? ‘Correct’ radical posturing, bad history, indifferent literature, questionable morality, or what?
History, like all social science discourse, knows only the language of binary opposition. Having perforce to use that language of either-or, it has to attempt to bring out the never-missing complexity of real life, a complexity that invariably comprises an inextricable mix of what – to that language and to the cognitive generated by that language – appear to be opposites. Literature – good literature, if you insist – possesses the language to make that complexity, that fluidity come alive.
If history, despite that structural handicap, has managed some understanding of that complexity, if it has persuasively shown that the generations so categorically maligned in the poem on 1857 were, indeed, moved by what we have got used to seeing as binary categories of ‘nationalism’/patriotism on the one hand and ‘loyalism ‘on the other hand, there is little justification for literature to reduce that nuanced understanding to card-board portrayal.
And, at least to my mind, there is also a question of morality, combined with psychological blindness, involved here. Forget for a moment the impossibility of there ever being a universally accepted notion of propriety, those expecting earlier generations to conform rigidly to a later code of propriety in public life need to ask themselves: Have they in their own lives ever managed that uncompromised fidelity? Have they ever known one who has done that? Casting the first stone is not just a teaching in morality. It is also a lesson in human understanding.
As against this, the long poem that relives that stirring and nearly forgotten event in a remote village of Rajasthan manages, even if not on that grand scale, something successfully done in Montaillou. Ostensibly dealing with thirty years in the life of a medieval European village, that masterpiece can also be read as a work on totalitarianism in our own day.
That is what makes history writing – not just history – truly contemporary.
The Other Pieces of this Issue’s Lead Story
1857 – Search for Material: Asad Zaidi
‘१८५७ – सामान की तलाश’ की एक पढ़त: राजेश कुमार शर्मा
A Preface to Mourning: Chandra Prakash Deval