History
History has become the vengeful god. History has become the divine judgment, always accurate, unassailable, providing no avenue of appeal. History has become the all-knowing all-powerful all-right final word. The one common afterlife. Every day I see exhortations that say: “don’t be on the wrong side of history!”, “they’re on the wrong side of history”, “choose the right side of history” even “history is watching”.
Who is persuaded by this, inspired, threatened?
What is this “side” of which they speak? At what point is this judgment made? How can people go on using this trope this tripe over and over. Seek its debunking, it makes no difference, someone’s using it again. How righteous they sound, smug even, calling upon the infallible sanctified Judge. Friend going “he’ll go down in history!” about some particularly reprehensible politician, as if it were a satisfaction to say so, to have faith in a future where this “history” decides on eternal hellfire or beatific reward. And all who chose the right side are vindicated, if not exactly rewarded.
Is History now what “Posterity” used to be? In his letters Flaubert talks about the judgment of posterity in similar terms. As if a set point in ceaselessly flowing time might be declared the posterity whose judgment is of most consequence.
Part of the absurdity of the threat of history, this appeal to history, this prayer to history, is the fact that there is no end to the ways of telling about anything in the past. And if there’s one thing the word history signifies, it is the past. But it’s an ever-changing present that seeks to understand the past. To judge it even.
History can be seen as a matter of “competing narratives”.
* * *
Halide Edib goes to Delhi in 1935.
In 1935 the most famous building in Halide’s home town, the Hagia Sophia/Aya Sofya, was made into a museum. I don’t know if Halide ever said anything about this. She had fought for the creation of a secular republic, so this might please her. It’s her old comrade now the ruler who makes sure it happens. She won’t see it very soon, her exile lasts until 1939.
The glorious building, completed in 537, began as an Eastern Orthodox Church, became a Catholic Church, then Eastern Orthodox again and then a mosque with the fall of the Ottomans until the period of Ataturk’s modernist reform.
Ha, history like fate keeps on happening and, unforeseeable (or the faintest ambition) in 1935, Aya Sofya was made into a mosque again in 2020. It’s not now as it actually used to be in the currently favoured historical era. Apparently, the edicts on what is proper for a mosque, proper for Islam, are not the same for the new victors as they would have been in 1453. History is invoked but not consulted.
* * *
In Delhi in 2023, I go to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. I take the necessary papers, find the helpful librarian I have corresponded with. I’m shown the ropes and set about reading all the English-language Indian newspapers and journals from 1934, 1935 that are available. Some paper has been preserved in large folders. After some days I have to go to another area of the library, as other publications of the time are available only in as micro-fiche. A lot of it is blurry, more smudges than print, requiring constant adjustment of the focus; less assistance is provided here. You could go down this path forever. I have some pages of notes by now, they’re probably adequate. I’ve got a feel about 1935, and don’t necessarily have to “use” all this.
Outside, in the library grounds, there are pleasant lawns and trees and flowerbeds. Birdlife. One of Delhi’s pleasant green spaces. Researchers and students relax on shaded verandahs, some drinking tea, or eating food brought from home. This building used to be some kind of British command centre but was taken as his residence when Jawarharlal Nehru became the first Prime Minister of the newly Independent India. Then it became the Museum in 1964.
Sad to learn that considerable forest area in this complex was recently demolished, trees slaughtered, bird habitat destroyed[1].
Later in 2023, I read that this treasured institution has been renamed the Prime Ministers Museum and Library. Controversially, of course. More history. More overwriting of history.
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1935 was one hundred years after the infamous Macauley’s Minute of 1835. A starred item in the history of modern India. This is where the British historian and politician declares it’s in the Empire’s interest to create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste and character, in mortals and intellect”.
Ahmed Ali in 1993 wrote a new Introduction to his novel of 1940 Twilight in Delhi, that begins:
>>The damage done by colonial powers to the heritage of conquered peoples is irreversible, yet racial memory is a collective storehouse that time and history cannot eradicate.<<
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I found some footage of [New] Delhi in 1935 in a YouTube video. Note the spaces, the bicycles. It moves onward from Delhi, as Halide herself did.
* * *
This kind of thing from the English-language newspapers, from Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Lahore:
“Muslims now in strong position” refers to a cricket match. Cricket is often on the front page. Muslims is a cricket team.
Many advertisements for Hollywood films —Mae West, WC Fields, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin. Fluffy little reviews of the films. Someone must have done a study of who goes to these films.
There’s an exhibition in London of the art of modern India
There are social pages, with photographs. Some show British only events, some events with Indians.
A front page editorial says “India does not need gurus today. They are greater menace to rational outlook than modern dictator.”[2]
A teasing question heads another piece in an Indian paper: “the worst job in the world?” Read on: Food taster for Mustapha [sic] Kemal Pasha the Turkish dictator [sic].
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A front-page report on the Australian Dictation Test. (Forgive me this irrelevance. This is the country of my citizenship. It loves to know what derisory things people say about it. The supposedly independent British colony’s policy then was “White Australia” and not everyone there gave up that object or ambition in my lifetime.) “Man who speaks 10 languages fails Gaelic. Man who knows Gaelic fails Dutch”. The ill-famed dictation test— it literally could be given in any language— was a polite/mendacious way of telling certain aspiring immigrants the [White] government doesn’t want them. Here’s a long front-page story in the Times of India[3] mocking this — even if the hopeful immigrant knows the dictated language they won’t understand the Australian accent har har.
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Here’s Sarojini Naidu, the “illustrious poetess”, honoured at a literary reception in Lahore. She pleads for unity and cultural regeneration. [December 1934]
Cultural regeneration might include the Indian women’s movement. There are stories about its progress. One says, Women search for new freedom: witness their make-up, costume, and manners at a cocktail party. There are more serious stories, relating small triumphs of efforts in education, women’s committees for political causes.
* * *
Gandhi is found in the pages of all the various newspapers. Of course. Over and over. Often in the headlines: “Why is Mr Gandhi in Delhi? Suspicions …”
He is called Gandhiji in the Lahore Weekly: “Gandhiji’s last day in Congress”.
This was when Gandhi left the political party he had been part of since his return from South Africa in 1915. When Halide first met him a few months later he was immersed in his project of village-based industries.
Sometimes he’s referred to as Mahatma. A headline declares “Mahatma Frontier Plans Cause Nightmare / Officials Believe In His Sincerity But Fear Tribes Will Be Upset.”
By the time Halide meets him Gandhi has become a type, a genre, a symbol, a sign. A brand. A way of referring to others who are not actually him: “Frontier Gandhi gets two years rigorous imprisonment for seditious speech”[4]. Gandhi’s magnetism reaches through all the decades. I could spend a lot of time just reading the coverage on Gandhi. I could spend a lot of time just revisiting material about him. But snap out of it.
He is the person that Halide spends most time with, pays most attention to, is most changed by. He is inescapable. He is arguably central to her memoir. Halide’s India is Gandhi’s India and Halide’s India memoir has a great deal in it about him. That doesn’t mean I have to also write more about him.
The focus has to be Halide’s experience of Gandhi. Since then we’ve had nearly a hundred years more of Gandhi. Vast volumes, entire libraries, whole conferences, just on Gandhi, a 1980s biopic. All the statues all over the country. An MG Road in every town. Everything they can name after him or invoke him for. No, that is over now. In the present era the ruling regime denigrates Gandhi and makes a hero of his radically fundamentalist Hindu assassin.
* * *
“Goering declares desires to be friendly with Britain.” Another front page, a month before Halide’s visit to India.
The newspapers say the next War is inevitable. The newspapers say the War is not inevitable. It mostly is. Europe is heading for disaster again. This inescapably is the ambience of this decade. Everywhere. This reality necessarily colours Halide’s consideration, back in Europe, of what India has taught her.
* * *
Halide Edib is one source of something Gandhi said that has been repeated elsewhere. Listening to an impressive patriotic speech in the Indian Parliament, she reports …
>> Every line of the speech bore witness to the permeating influence of English thought on the Indian mind. I asked Mahatma Gandhi: ‘What is the greatest contribution of the English to India?’ He answered without hesitation: ‘Nationhood.’<<[5]
At another opportunity, Halide asks Sarojini Naidu what the British will leave behind. The prompt reply: “A nation”.
During Halide’s time in Delhi, there’s a newspaper headline[6]: “Making India United Nation “Greatest Achievement of British Rule” concludes session”.
This idea is often recycled: that the British will leave behind a nation — that will be their long-term legacy, possibly their only one, making of the sub-continent’s disparate parts a single People. That they left behind them a nation by making people unite, to the extent they did unite, in opposition to their rule, their Raj, is not exactly a thank you to the Empire.
Different readings of history, looking at the tendencies and directions derailed by the colonisation, conclude that a national unity was already being developed, not formed but interrupted by the foreign occupation.
Possibly a more genuinely united one than how it turned out. Though really, at what point do you say, it has turned out, there will continue to be new points at which you can say, this is how it’s turned out.
Who will write the alternative history of an India that might have had trade and cultural exchange with the British or other foreign powers but— fantasy writers build this world— was not colonised by them.
The value of invented, alternative histories is to make you wonder what this thought experiment (the what if, the suppose that) might show you.
* * *
In the country of my citizenship, its modern nation’s beginnings as a British prison on stolen land, racist opponents of Indigenous rights claim that without colonisation people would be living in the same conditions as the British found them in (in this view, abject) and to this day would not have the use of hot running water and electric lights, the benefits of churches, schools, supermarket specials. It’s absurd to pretend the imaginary thought experiment choice is: either the invasion and occupation, or remaining without any contact ever even as inter-continental travel and with it cultural exchange developed. Who will write the alternative history of peaceful, respectful meetings and trade instead of invasion …?
[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/pm-modis-house-revamp-debris-leads-to-slaughter-of-teen-murti-woods-311687-2016-03-03
[2] Bombay Sentinel; December 5th, 1934.
[3] Ibid. December 25th, 1934
[4] Ibid. December 1st,1934.
[5] Inside India, pp. 89-90.
[6] The Pioneer; January 24th, 1935.
Soul Climate is forthcoming from Speaking Tiger Books.
Inez Baranay is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Soul Climate is her tenth novel. Born in Italy to Hungarian refugee parents, Inez grew up in Sydney, Australia, where she currently lives. Website: https://www.inezbaranay.com/
minor literature[s] 