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The other side of history
HISTORY, like a coin, has a flip side to it. It's the historian's hand, which gives it a spin, and determines whether the head or the tail is going to win. There is a winner's side of history, and then there is a loser's side of it. There is a privileged side of history, and there is an underprivileged side of it. There is a ruler's side of history, and there is a subject's side of it. There is an oppressor side of history, and then there is an oppressed side of it. There is a gainer's side of history, and there is a sucker's side of it.
Think about the Spanish-American war. For months, it kept the Americans agog with patriotic zeal, and many people died on both sides. When the smoke was over, people realised that the real cause of the Spanish-American war was the consideration of the price of sugar. The lives, blood, and money of many people were used to protect the interests of the American capitalists.
Take the example of the Russo-Japanese war, which cost so much in blood and tears. Kuropatkin, who was the Russian Minister of War during that time, has revealed the true secret behind this war.
According to him, the Tsar and his Grand Dukes, having invested money in Corean concessions forced the war for the sole purpose of speedily accumulating large fortunes.
Read Hamza Alavi's "Misreading Partition Road Signs", and you will learn to your surprise that the roots of the movement that culminated in the creation of Pakistan lay in the crisis when English displaced Persian as the official language. Two components of the Muslim ashraf (upper class), the salariat or the salaried state offi-
cials and the ulama, were directly affected by the new language policy. The third component of the Muslim ashraf were the landlords, whose livelihoods were not affected directly by the new language policy.
Thus the rivalry that ensued wasn't between all Hindus and all Muslims, but only between the Muslim and the Hindu salariats, the Muslim ashraf versus the Hindu service castes, such as khatris, kayasthas and Kashmiri brahmins in northern India or the kayasthas, brahmins and baidyas in Bengal. The Indian nationalist historians played down the class aspect of the struggle and portrayed it as communalism.
Mind it that there is more to
history than meets the eyes. History loses a great deal of its nuances in the passage of time as it's told and retold from mouth to mouth. It starts as an overloaded cart, rushing through the memory lanes of people who witnessed the event. Over the period of time, onlookers take out old facts and put in new facts and by the time the cargo arrives many years later for the new generation, it has undergone transformation.
John Reed writes in the Ten Days That Shook the World, that when the Russian Revolution of
1917 took place, even the people of Petrograd, which was the flashpoint of the Revolution, didn't know that it had happened. A squad of British soldiers came to support a sentry who was being pressed by a heckling, snowballing crowd in Boston in 1770. Unable to cope with the situation otherwise, they let loose a volley of shots which killed three people on the spot and two other died later of their wounds. It became popularised in history as "The Boston Massacre", and Paul Revere's painting of that scene aroused the sentiments of the American Revolution.
History has the power to embellish facts, turning a mole into a mountain. Brajendra Nath
Banerjee writes in Begams of Bengal (based on state records) that Amina Begum, the mother of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula, knew nothing of her son's fate until his mangled body, thrown across the back of an elephant, was passing in front of her house. When she asked why there was so much commotion on the street, only then did she come to know what had happened, and ran out of the house to take a last look at her fallen son.
Yet historians sentimentaliSed it many years later, turning it into
a pervasive tragedy, as if it embodied the ethos of an entire race of people. But historical accounts has it that the peasants working in the fields on the day the ill-fated Nawab's body was paraded on the streets of Murshidabad, had shrugged off the incident as yet another feud amongst their rulers.
History is but an account of time relived through memories of those who witness it. The account often varies from one person to another, depending on the belief, location and intention of people, who give the account and keep its record. History often conflates truth with travesty, confabulated by passions and obsessions of people who write it, conjured by those who wish to change it, and
constrained by those who oppose it. Controversy disfigures memories, which distorts facts, which dilutes history, which diminishes truth.
Perhaps one of the reasons why history repeats itself is because the truth is always elusive. Santyana called history "normal madness" and Gibbon defined it as "a little more than a register of crimes, sorrows and misfortunes." But in the ultimate sense, it's one riddle that is never solved, which recurs periodically to repeat similar mistakes in the face of
similar motions.
Sadly though that is one truth which never changed. The strong never stopped dominating the weak, the rich never ceased exploiting the poor, the fortunate never stopped surpassing the unfortunate, and the winners never stopped neglecting the losers. Thus history has been an endless repetition of being the new label on the old bottle, the style differing from time to time, but the substance remaining unchanged all along.
Carlyle said, "War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with
guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other." When historians write the history of wars, they gloss over these unsavoury details, and hide them under moral garnish. One of the abiding legacies of history is that it is written by the victor, and not by the vanquished.
The slaves would have written the American history in a different way. So would have the American Indians. The Arawak Indians, who were decimated by Columbus and his army, wouldn't have been excited about the discovery of the new continent. Ask the aborigines about the democracy in Australia, and they would tell you harrowing stories of death and devastation.
There is the other side of history, which is seldom noticed but always forgotten. If history is meant to perpetuate memory, it's also meant to obliterate it. It's at once the fable of foibles, parable of paradoxes and paradigm of propensities. It's at once mnemonics and paramnesia, where remembering and forgetting go in lockstep.
Wonder if it was possible to have parallel history: the winner's history and the loser's history, history from the top and history from the bottom, history of, by and for the victorious and the defeated. You will see your shadow if you stand in the sun. That is true enlightenment. If we could see the history and its shadow at the same time, we could also see the truth. Then we could learn from history and prevent its repetition.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.