BY E. J. BINGLE ¹

Why history? And why a new history? Surely the old history was bad enough. Most of us suffered from it at school or elsewhere; being drilled in dates and battles and odd facts seemed to be its beginning and end. Not that we remembered much anyway. The schoolmasters in England argued recently that history is ‘what is memorable,’ and tested English school boys as to what they remembered: the result was two dates, both of battles. Indian schoolboys, I am sure, have better memories than that, but it amounts to much the same thing–dates and battles. And that, they say, is history.

Of course it is not, and I want to suggest in what ways history is something more than the business of Kings and battles and dates. But let us be fair; dates and battles are not wholly Evil–they have their uses, taken in strict moderation. Dates–they are arbitary, abstract, but they do set things in a sequence. I once saw in a calendar that a certain great man was born in 1703 and died in 1701. A printer’s error, a mere matter of dates, it is true; but it may remind us that dates do keep us on the right track. Then as to battles, is it not wise to recall that battles do sometimes decide great issues? Those who can remember the battle of the Marne in September, 1914, may think of that as the decisive battle of the Great War it certainly turned what seemed likely to be a very short war into a very long war; it almost certainly turned a German victory into ultimate German defeat. But we must be very sparing of our dates and battles: there are other things like art and science and religion and politics which are equally human history.

Where does our new history begin? It begins as all good history must begin, with the present. We think of history as belonging to the past, which is true enough, but it is always the past of our present. What we think of as the past was always contemporary history to those who were living in it. Our past is always a past looked at through contemporary spectacles, conditioned and determined by the problems and paradoxes and difficulties set for us by the age in which we live.

Let me illustrate that by reference to the origin of one of the greatest works of historical writing, Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’ In 1764, Gibbon, then a young man of 27, visited Rome. He tells us in his autobiography of how "it was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the capital, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing about the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind." The paradox of Christian monks carrying out their worship in one of the pagan glories of the Roman Empire suggested to Gibbon’s mind the panoramic sweep of time which covered the great age of the Roman Empire, the triumph of the Christian church and the invasion of the barbarian hordes into Europe all that vast movement of 2000 years which represented in Gibbon’s biting phrase, ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion.’ To execute that laborious work, as he termed it, he needed all the wealth of historical learning and scholarship which he could bring to it; but he also needed that depth of imagination which, starting with the paradox of the present, saw the wealth of the past suddenly revealed in it. The result, good history though it was, was also deeply coloured by Gibbon’s eighteenth century nationalism.

To use a parallel nearer to us, we might imagine a man of great historical imagination who visited the city of Madras and saw some of its notable buildings–the temple at Mylapore, the cathedral of San Thome, Fort St. George. For those who have eyes to see, there is the past of South India reflected into its present. Equally, there are some of our present problems, symbolized by these buildings. which can only be grasped and possibly solved by an understanding of the past. The religion and culture of Hinduism represented by the great temple in its lovely setting, the religion of the west, western imperialism, its commerce and its parliamentary forms of government–how are we to begin to understand these things unless we look backwards. However far we look back, it is well to remember that we can only look back from our standpoint in the present. Our present outlook will almost inevitably determine our perspective, what we are looking for. Equally, when we have looked back, we shall see things differently even in the present. For the historically-minded, the present is never quite the same thing as for others. It presents new values, new emphasis, new perspectives which will serve to change our attitude.

Each generation looks back and in a sense each generation constructs its own history. The history books which served our fathers will not do for us. That is so for two important reasons: one is that the historical materials available change from generation to generation; the other is that our outlook even on the same materials as our fathers had is subtly changed by the circumstances of our own time.

Our age is one which has seen such a rapid increase in historical material as has not happened at any other period in the past. I can still remember some men whose notion of recorded time was that history began in the year 4004 B.C. That made history seem a more comfortable and reasonable period to grasp–history was easier for the boys of that generation. For us there is no such limit. Almost every year the spade of the archaeologist turns up some more ancient civilisation than we had thought conceivable. If we add to the work of the archaeologists the discoveries and explorations of anthropologists, geologists and the rest of the scientific tribe, we begin to think back first in terms of thousands of years and then of millions, till we become dizzy. History turns out to be a much longer business than we ever thought of it. It is true that you did not get much of that in your school books. The schoolmaster still drops up that great expanse of time into little bits which can be managed in an examination paper–Tudor periods, British and Mahommedan periods and the like–but that is falsification of history as it really is, as we have come to know it in our time. In fact it takes a scientist to write history on that scale, and a novelist to imagine it in anything like its vivid reality. That is why many grown up people have learned more history from Mr. H. G. Wells than from the text-book writers of their school-days.

From another aspect, the new history has a breadth which is lacking in the older histories. Our history must take in the whole world; nothing less will do for our time. That leads to some curious results. A few years back, two historians set out to describe the growth of what they called western civilisation. In order to do that, they had to go far back in time before anything existed which might be called eastern or western or any other civilisation. They had also to spread themselves, as time developed, so far that they had to describe all the other civilizations of the world as well. The growth of western civilisation had become ‘World History,’ and they adopted a double and contradictory title. ‘World History’ is not merely the growth of western civilisation’; on the other hand, you cannot nowadays understand western or any other civilisation except against a background of the world as a whole. Now that is a stupendous, perhaps an impossible, task. There are no good histories of the world as a whole. The task is beyond the competence of any single scholar; where scholars have co-operated in composite histories, the results have been for the most part disappointing. Nevertheless, we must have a world history. We live in a time when each part of the world acts and reacts on all the other parts and we cannot think or act except in relation to a total world situation. If that sounds fantastic, look at your daily newspaper: think of China, Spain, Africa. Our histories must somehow match the world in which we live. With due respect to Mr. H. G. Wells, we still look for, and since our need is so pressing, we anxiously await the coming of the genius, the historian of the world.

Still another aspect of our problem confronts us. If dates and battles are not history for us, what is new history to be? Quite simply, our new history is whatever interests us. History, like all other knowledge, is a process of selection, and we select according to our dominant interests. That is obvious enough in the history books of the past. Men who were interested in power and achievement turned to the great conquerors, and their battles and conquests. Later, those who thought in terms of politics have concentrated on statesmen and the rise of governments. Men obsessed by the economic confusions and problems of their own time regarded the past as a process of economic development, catastrophe and reconstruction. That point of view is still popular because the economic problems of our generation press so heavily upon us. The economic interpretation of history has become such an obsession that history is still for many the narrative of economic determinism. The vast increase of scientific knowledge and the amazing changes which have resulted from it thrust another kind of history upon us. Culture, art, literature, the things of the spirit–these are for some the greatest achievements of the human race; such persons demand another kind of history. There are plenty of separate histories of each of these various human activities, but we need and demand more–some synoptic view of human activity as a whole. Once again, the man and the book have yet to appear; the more general histories which try to include all these things are for the most part very flat and insipid. Nevertheless, once again, the attempt has to be made, since our present cultural situation presses heavily upon us. How are we to evaluate a Newton against a Cromwell, a Gautama Buddha against a Napoleon? You may say, it cannot be done; in fact, we have to do it. Einstein has been weighed against Hitler, with results that we all know. History becomes a reflection of our scheme of values, a branch of philosophy, if you like.

It is all very confusing, but that is precisely our situation, our world–a world of such radical confusion as leaves us bewildered and helpless. Can the depraved historian help us? What can his history books do for us? His history demands a clear vision of the world in which we live; that is hard enough yet, his history will change our vision of the contemporary world. History demands, requires imagination; yet it is not mere romance. History demands a philosophy yet it is not philosophy, it cannot be achieved by philosophic speculation. History rests on the belief that we are the products of our past, and that it is desirable and necessary that we should know how we have come to be what we are, how the world got into its present sorry state. Against that we have to place the fact that each generation creates its own past; historical unity is a species of mythology. Under the stress of the new nationalisms, in the fascist States and in India and elsewhere, the past is being re-written in accordance with new interests, new national and racial myths. Some of that is bad, some of it is merely natural. Is it genuine history? The only appeal is to facts as we can discover and test them, in our documents and ancient monuments, coins, remains–any bit of the past which has survived. What is wrong with the new nationalist and racial histories is not that they are mythological–all history is a tale that is told. But it is a tale that can be tested, checked–and that is where the new nationalist reconstructions of the past tend to break down.

What may we hope from our new history of the world? Not too much, or we shall be grievously disappointed. It will not solve our problems, but it can throw some light on them. We may understand the present a little better, we may come to see it in a different light. It may serve to remind us that man has a much longer past than we used to think possible; it may well be that the future stretches out to equally long periods of time. The new history (like the new signs) may serve to make us humble; it may also provide us with a measure of hope in these desperate days.