BY PRATAPAGIRI RAMAMURTI, M.A.

It is our object in the following article to discuss the validity of certain assumptions on which historians have attempted to construct narratives of our past. There is no desire to get acquainted with the technique and theory of history. With inadequate equipment our writers sit down most confidently to the task of describing events exactly as they have happened. Their only anxiety is to fit out a real past. There is a haunting terror of shadows.

The consequence has been that our histories are generally one-sided. They give us no insight into the true nature of our past, of the content of its life as such. For the story of India's past is unlike that of any other country known to the world's history. To understand it, it is not enough to watch the destinies of royal dynasties, the rise and fall of great kingdoms and empires. The perusal of mere events, of wars and crimes, leaves behind the impression that our history is a mausoleum of dead issues. We fail to realise that it abounds with ideals and beliefs, with the achievements of the soul. India has revelled in the things of the spirit, and her history is the record of the mind, of the thought that expresses its endless quest: "Ever old, ever new."

It is necessary, hence, to dive below the surface of the so-called facts or events of history to understand the spirit that determined the content of life. We conceive that the mission of history is to give us the content of life. The world of fact is to be appraised in terms of value, for the historian must try to reach the subterranean sphere of the soul, the inward of which the outward humanity is but the expression. What we wish to understand is not the dead man, the fossil in itself, but the living being he once was, his hopes and aspirations.

History, that is to say, is not the dead past, a past that has ceased to be, but a "living past," a past transfused into the living actuality it once was. To think of the past as simply the past, an aggregate of facts finished happening, is as hopeless as the meta-physician's search after things-in-themselves. The past as a thing-in-itself has no existence. It must be related to our present experience. It must not only be capable of being remembered but also experienced. We could live all history in our own person, for history is the continuous attempt at the adventure of living."

We must, therefore, turn our backs on our realistic historians who are too much influenced by the temporal aspect of Time to realise the Eternal in its unity. As Benedetto Croce has truly oberved;¹ every true history is contemporary history, and it is not fanciful to consider the past as perpetually present. It is unfortunate that we try to differentiate between different periods of time and thus miss all that is of human interest.

History, thus, is not simply the past. Neither is it the ‘event.’ The dominance of the ‘narrative’ spirit has vitiated the whole outlook of our historians. The construction of narratives, chronologicall arranged, is not history. It is something more. Facts are mere dross, as both Ruskin and Macaulay hold, and it is from the thoughts, the abstract truth that the events and happenings embody that history derives its value. History is the thought that expresses itself, the mind that records, and mind is prior to the fact. All history, that is to say, is, in a sense, in the mind of man; not as pre-composed symphony, we hasten to point out, as our statement may be misunderstood. Lotze has truly maintained that it is the irresistible demand of the human spirit that history must be more than the translation into time of an eternally complete content.² What we mean is that history is the law of man's being, the idea in its potentiality, the universal in its spirit, even as Hegel would have it. ³

The past, therefore, simply regarded as the past in the crude realistic sense, is wholly unthinkable. The past that we try to reach is not a world of things-in-themselves, a world that has ceased to be, and so an isolated fact. Such a fact can never be related to the present; the chain of linkage is severed into its links. To us the past of India is the living relic in the present; for the past has resulted into the present. The India of the past is a projection of itself into the India of the present. Or to express it in other words, the past of India is the present experience of it, taken in as a unity,– "synthetic unity" as Croce would put it, a unity which may reveal sequence, in space and time; each unit of the sequence, however, not as an isolated fact, unrelated to others; but in organic relation manifesting the rhythm of the flow of real life.⁴ And whatever of the past goes into our present experience, that is history in the largest sense of the word.

To us, therefore, the Rig Veda or the Buddhist Jatakas, the Epics, the Smritis and the Srutis are as much history as any other relic now possessed by us which professes to describe the political events of bygone days. For what we want to know, as already said, is not the fossil itself, but the living, thinking man of whom the relic before us is a dead representative. In the search after the so-called authentic facts, we are apt to run into the danger of missing the human touch. The most formidable obstacle to a proper understanding of our past is just the tendency to restrict history to the construction of narratives, and where such a construction is impossible to assume a sceptical attitude and dissipate effort in trying to sift what is supposed to be the unquestionable fact from myth and legend. Where there are no records, it is usually assumed that there is no history either; as if historical truths are lost because their memory is not preserved in the form of chronologically connected narratives.⁵ "The essence of history," as Ratzel has well put it, "consists in the very fact of happening, not in the recollecting and recording what has happened."⁶

How true is H. G. Wells's complaint that "historians are for the most part very scholarly men nowadays. They go in fear rather of small errors than of disconnectedness; they dread the certain ridicule of a wrong date more than the disputable attribution of a wrong value!" It is held by philosophers like Radhakrishnan and historians like V. A. Smith that "in the absence of accurate chronology, it is a misnomer to call anything a history," and that a "body of history strictly so called must be built upon a skeleton of chronology, that is to say, in a series of dates more or less precise." Evidently there is a serious confusion between the office of the annalist and the function of the historian. History is not putting bits of information, chronologically arranged together like beads on a string. Everything depends on our understanding history, not as a past, but as a present interest.

And when we talk of interest or experience, we are aware that we may be told that history "is a hybrid form of experience, incapable of any considerable degree of ‘being or trueness’;" ⁷ for, the ‘being or trueness’ of history is held to be its verified and verifiable certainty. The discussion of historical veracity will lead us again into the realistic meshes of the world of things-in-themselves. For, we ask along with Benedetto Croce: "How could that which is present producing of our spirit ever be uncertain?" It is only by effecting a divorce between life and thought in history that we are led to irrelevant positions. For the question itself becomes irrelevant viewed from our conception of history. The word ‘history’ originally meant ‘inquiry’, and only secondarily came to be applied to the embodiment of the results of inquiry in the particular form of narrative. The Greek word for history is ‘historia’ meaning; ‘search after truth’. In unravelling the threads of the working of the human mind in the past, we cannot help playing the part of the judge.

Annals, therefore, are not history. To deserve that title they must be inspired by conviction. Truth in history is that which is accepted by the intellect and approved by conscience, not that which in the empirical sense the realists would have as something which had actually happened. Historical truth is concerned with human values. The facts of history are those that satisfy our sense of right and justice. It is perhaps in this sense that Guizot speaks of civilisation, in its widest sense, as a fact.⁸ Historical truth does not exclude earnestness of conviction if it is to serve as our common tribunal. To be impartial, it must be certainly above contention, but the impartiality of the historian is not that of the mirror which merely reftects. ⁹ The attitude of detachment is psychologically impossible and untenable. Open minded we shall be, but "open-mindedness does not mean mental vacuity." ¹⁰

In short, the historian has to make use of hypotheses as much as other investigators; he must select his theme, and start with his theory. He must see, even as Darwin did, that all observation must be for or against some view if it should be of any use. Bacon's advice that we should renounce our conceptions for a while and try to acquaint ourselves with the things themselves is absurd, as it would land us into the world of things-in-themselves. We should not, indeed, commit ourselves to a pre-judgment, and then fit in the facts to suit our theory. We only point out that it is impossible to have any idea of ‘things themselves’ without our own view of them.

When we attempt, therefore, to write the history of our country, we feel that there is an urgent necessity to set aside received notions and begin with a novel approach. It is so much time wasted if we simply duplicate the narratives already extant. As Goethe has said: "History must from time to time be rewritten, not because new facts have been discovered, but because new aspects come into view, because the participant in the progress of an age is led to standpoints from which the past can be regarded and judged in a novel manner." Perhaps this is due to an unconscious factor which affects all historians, ancient and modern. The younger generation usually finds delight in tearing down the idols of the old; ideas are bound to change from age to age. Each age demands, therefore, that history must be re-written from its own point of view.

By this we do not mean that history does not reveal continuity of purpose, that its processes are not the embodiments of reason, because constantly changing. History is not a perpetual sifting about, like the rolling of the waves. In spite of appearances even change itself is not fortuitous, because purposive. What we do mean, however, is that the historian dare not be blind to the truth that through history we obtain, as Flint says, "a veritable increase of our knowledge of God's character and ways." We discern the design of Providence, the fulfillment of God. The story of mankind is the record of the eternal quest to solve the problem of life by seeking to comprehend it in its spiritual unity. This is more especially true of India. The spiritual unity that the history of our past presents to us is, as Das Gupta truly observes, "essentially one of spiritual aspiration and obedience to the law of the Spirit, which were regarded as superior to everything else."

We, therefore, plead that it is very necessary for the historian of India to interpret the spirit of historical movement as such. He should primarily seek to give us the content of life, and should enable us to form a coherent idea of it so that we could relate it to our present consciousness. Only then could we be in a position to judge the ‘facts’ of history and assign them rank in the scale of human progress. It is time, therefore, to realise the fallacy of our old conceptions of historiography.

So long as our histories continue to be written from the standpoint of the mere ‘past,’ of the mere ‘event’, our narratives would always lack the tone of reality, because divorced from life. Our plea is that history must hereafter be written from the standpoint of ‘life.’ For history is the human epic, and nothing less.