A Short History of Meddling with History
Before you turn over a new leaf in your history books, it just might get rewritten.
Back in 2004, right before the Tsunamis hit the coastal regions surrounding the Indian Ocean, I was in school. Sixth standard in the (what I like to call) junior wing. I can imagine that September day with such crisp clarity as if it were yesterday.
We had our history books open, and along went a dry and monotonous reading on the Harappan Civilization. The sun was beating down the courtyard outside, washing away the cement greys with a strange, blinding, vinegar-y glow. The class was silent, thanks to our strict teacher who’d keep us boisterous boys on a straight leash. On and on we read the piece—of which I have no recollection—with the hopes of the bell ringing to free us from this despair into the quaint afternoon freedom outside.
The bell tolls. The memory vanishes. All I’m left with is a faint sentiment of “what if?” What if I were as interested in history back then as I am now? Would that have altered the course of my story?
The page, however, flipped. I don’t think I even remember the cover design of our history coursebook. It’s all part of my history now, and of my classmates. But is it being taught the same way, even now, to the new recruits of St. Paul’s covenant? Or have the ripples of time shifted?
History is fascinating that way. One moment, you’re taught that it is written by the victors. Another, you come across a memorial of those who were brave, written by those in mourning. Turn left and you’ll find architectural multilayered scribbles of every story on the fabric of time: Indo-Saracenic gothic-dome mixes, Buddhist stone carved complexes, massive Kalinga shikharas topping 12th and 13th century temples, and intricate sandstone Rajput and Mughal blends of a grandeur lost. From here, if you take a left, it’s death again, immortalized in grey tombs, pearlescent mausoleums, a carving on massive gates, and stems of civilizations that were either cut away by conquerors or weathered by the sands of time.
Some histories were geographical mishaps. Some were simple accounts of just what happened. Some were forced by imagined rules of superiority onto others. Some, well . . . they just didn’t transpire the way the people—hellbent with their quills wet—wanted to.
Clearly, it is not just the victors who define or shape what history is.
But there’s a new force in these archeological plazas, wanting to retell the beads of sandstone, marble, basalt, igneous, and limestone pasts. By no means is this force new. Nor is it a hypothetical fabrication.
And it is ramping up its efforts in every part of the world.
Use the Discourse, Luke
A little detour on my recent relationship with history: Today, I find the subject unputdownable. It is a thrill unlike any other—to seek, explore, and dive into apple-creamed pages penned by a few and thumbed by many—that I’ve come to admire with various tomes adorning my bookshelves. I love to excavate books and discover something old and brand it “new” to my personal library of historical facts.
Fiction, I do admit, is a portal into lives or worlds yet unexperienced. But history? It’s the stories of this very world, experiences by those who came before, and written to inform posterity, whether the good, the bad, or the ugly.
But the force I mentioned previously is heading in a new direction. It’s derailing the narrative in an entirely new way. These days, it’s easy to find myself diverted from facts into a territory that’s more about perception of events and what they represent, especially for those who sit their historical hindquarters on golden thrones.
And it disturbs me to see how they brush away the motes collected between the pages of time, chiseling away at the layers of rust to reveal a new face of the clocks that have chimed their last, with a few feathery touches here and there. They then peddle their fabrications as the new truth. A new history.
Is it, though?
I was reading The Bells of Old Tokyo by Anna Sherman—a mournful, fresh travelogue that unearths established principles of travel writing and centres the history of Tokyo around its old timekeeping implements—when I came across a passage that hit a nerve.
In it, Sherman describes how Emperor Hirohito, in 1930, congratulated rebuilding efforts in Tokyo after the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. But not a drop of ink was spared to acknowledge the massacre that broke out in its wake. In the days of the incident, false rumours against Koreans had been spread by the establishment, leading to nearly 6,000 Koreans slaughtered along with some hundred Chinese—anyone who wasn’t ethnically Japanese or misidentified as non-Japanese. And all this was hush-hushed.
Later, the keepers of Japanese history sat down to weave a new narrative that was circulated heavily to mask the truth: Taisho Shinsai Giseki, or the Taisho era Collection of Heartwarming Stories, compiled and presented on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake. Of course, any support or record that revealed the truth was crushed to maintain the national image. There’s a lot to read on this systematic erasure of Koreans, and I’ll leave a few sources for you to peruse this topic at the end.
Japanese history has some select flashpoints, such as the Nanjing incident or the one I just discussed, where wrapping the dust of political fuss was done to keep a particular image in the spotlight.
But Japan isn’t the only one rewriting history for political benefit.
Faux Excavators on Prowl
Take China, for example. Erasure and suppression of the events of 1989 has been such a passionate drive that anything remotely related to the Tiananmen Square massacre, such as license plates, is forcibly squashed in order to suppress any dissenting voice.
Meanwhile, Indonesia’s current government was all set to release a ten-volume official history, but it found extreme backlash from historians and activists. So “official” it was that it completely sidestepped the major human rights violations: killings of nearly half a million suspected communists and mass rapes of ethnic Chinese under the former dictator Suharto, whom the current president wants to deify as a national hero. The current president also happens to be his ex-son-in-law.
The West has its own clouds of Holocaust denial despite clear evidence of Nazi wrongdoings during World War II. Yet we find many proponents, including those from Allied powers such as the United States of America, who find a bold voice in the Neo-Nazi movements, revising history and declaring Nazi Germany a victim.
The process is laborious and time-consuming, yet quite effective. Cherry-pick your arguments from historical records and build a rhetoric that only allows a shadow of truth. Then create an alternative narrative and keep hammering your ideas until they form a base of “truth seeking” that wants to look at the bigger picture using a straw.
That, however, is only one part of what’s going on in America. Trump’s regime has been riding the bandwagon of revising everything that stands against his MAGA sloganeering. That includes reshaping U.S. history and changing the narrative of the U.S. South to not be slavers and racists, urging people still supporting the Confederacy to not bow down and become apologists.
This has, of course, bled into classrooms. Flush out any analysis of race, gender, and slavery—with pretentious labels of radical indoctrination slapped against each—and bring in patriotism. The presidential action ordering this is written with chalk as white and pale as the men and women who cannot stand another colour.
School textbooks are, undeniably, the first casualties of meddling with history.
Textbook Example of Textbook Revision
The Harappa in my textbooks was only a window into the ancient past. A window through which I gawked with no understanding of the world. A window so innocent that a then-sixth grader would never understand how much its forgotten language and script would come to define the political landscape in modern India.
That script, however, hangs in a delicate balance. Its decoding is not as important as defining whether it is proto-Sanskrit or proto-Dravidian. Both camps want their own claim on a civilization whose ghosts don’t even haunt its ruins. But much is at stake, you see. Because either outcome can decide the battle of supremacy between North and South India. Supremacy of the leaders driving these movements, that is. The common man will have to send their common child to study uncommon ripples of change in their textbooks.
A recent change is rather present-focused. The National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT)—the premier body governing school textbooks and materials—unfolded a new education policy that conveniently forgets to discuss the Mughal history of India, a nearly six-hundred-year chunk that shapes the India that is today.
Now, let’s get some things straight: Were the Mughals bad? Inasmuch as any conqueror is on the native population. They broke the local cultures, left death in their wake, and established a new rule. But they lived here. The India that is today cannot be what it is without that history.
NCERT’s focus should have been on balancing education to represent every aspect of Indian history, before the Mughals, during the Mughals, and after the Mughals. It should focus on presenting facts impersonally, no matter how ugly or pretty they look. India’s history is rich. It’s culturally diverse. It is documented, and hence, a fact. What is not needed in textbooks is opinionated revisionist meddling that keeps away fact but brings in feelings of the good, the bad, and the ugly. No compass to navigate the moral greys.
In a similar discourse by Delhi University, two texts—Manusmriti and Baburnama—were dropped from the Bachelor of Arts syllabus. The former was protested against for being discriminatory towards women and Dalits, while the latter was seen as a glorification of an invader that wreaked destruction upon India.
But if the students are robbed of ever discovering history for what it is, then how will they know what it caused?
Will the dark wounds inflicted during World War II be lightened a few shades with Hitler’s Mein Kampf and rising Neo-Nazi sentiments?
Will the removal of Mughal conquests change medieval India from what it was to mollify Hindu-Muslim conflicts?
Will Emperor Ashoka ever be absolved for his razing wars, only because he took to Buddhism and turned a saintly figure?
Will the British occupation of India be softened to appease the UK and European trade deals and make anglophiles happy?
Here’s what all these blindsided revisionist and suppression acts forget: History is not a rose-bubbled aperitif you can sip one afternoon and digest it out of your system. Nor is it a declaration of war on all things present, with old graves and ash-dusted urns standing in as witnesses.
It is a lesson. A lesson that’s uncomfortable. A lesson that does not take to you kindly. A lesson that, when you don’t ask, punctuates your silences with ugly, dead reminders.
Opinions have no home here. They can be present, but only within discussions and thought experiments once history, with all its hues, has been studied. Studied with only one objective: to remember the truth—whether it was good, bad, or ugly.
History might be written by the victors. It might even get tampered with by the usurpers. But it is only rewritten by the dictators. Whether the good, the bad, or the ugly of our collective histories repeats or not is up to you.
It can only happen if you know it.
PS: If you enjoyed reading this essay, do leave a like. It’s the motivational engine that keeps me going. And if you want to share your views on something that’s written here, go ahead and leave a comment.
Further Reading:
The Tongue That Divided Life and Death. The 1923 Tokyo Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans. Sonia Ryang. September 3, 2007. Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus.
The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923: Materials from the Dana and Vera Reynolds Collection. Mai Denawa. Brown University Library.
"But if the students are robbed of ever discovering history for what it is, then how will they know what it caused?"
An intelligent question. One that scholars and self-nominated historians on gilded thrones don't bother to ask themselves or answer if someone asks it of them.