Hagiography and Hindu Historical Consciousness

Abstract

Abstract Naipaul seems to be harking back to a Western view more commonly and boldly stated in the nineteenth century-that India has no history. Even in a book published in 1900, the professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, A. A. Macdonell, could say, “Early India wrote no history because it never made any.”2 This charge picks up both sides of the usual Western concept of history: both the events that have happened and the recounting of these events in some connected way that brings out their meaning. To say that ancient Indians did not compose histories is a serious charge, suggesting a marked peculiarity of their civilization, but to say that early India made no history is to say that this was a human community among whom nothing significant happened. This is the most dismissive form of Western scholarly judgment, and it was made by a professor who knew perfectly well that there was a Sanskrit equivalent for “history.” Like the German word Geschichte or the Dutch word geschiedenis, the Sanskrit term itihasa stresses the objective side of history: it is “what happened.” Naipaul’s reaction to Indian history has a different emotional base. Indeed, the words I quoted come just after a statement that twenty years after British withdrawal from India, “India has almost faded out of British consciousness: the Raj was an expression of the English involvement with themselves rather than with the country they ruled.”3 He certainly thinks that something had happened in India and was continuing to happen, but he believes Indians have shielded themselves from contemplating the ruin of the past and the misery of the present in what he calls “fantasy and fatalism.”