The Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) is set to begin work on a mega project of documenting a comprehensive history of Bharat that will run into many volumes, and could take many years, said people aware of the matter.

The project will be on the lines of the magnum opus, the ‘History and Culture of the Indian People’, a series of 11 volumes on the history of India, from prehistoric times to the establishment of the modern state in 1947, first published in 1951.

Freedom fighter and educationist-author KM Munshi, who was earlier with the Congress and later a founder member of the Swatantra Party, writes in his foreword to the first book on Vedic civilization that he had long felt inadequacies in the way Indian history was taught and hence an elaborate history of India was needed so that the world might get the glimpse of the soul of India as Indians see it. He writes that a large number of historians of repute contributed to the project that took almost 26 years to complete. Historian RC Majumdar was the general editor and most important contributor to this work, which had books on the Vedic age, age of imperial unity, classical age, the glory of Kannauj, Delhi sultanate, Maratha supremacy, Mughals, British paramountcy, Indian Renaissance and struggle for freedom.

ICHR chairman Raghuvendra Tanwar, a Padma Shri recipient and academic for more than 40 years, said the project has received approval and the body will soon put in place different committees to start work. “I started teaching at the age of 21, and by the time I was 30, the whole set of readings had disappeared. We could no longer find RC Majumdar, Jadunath Sarkar, Radha Kumud Mookerjee, and we had another set of historians that surrounded my students. We can't impose history on people. They have a choice to make,” said Tanwar.

History has always been a flashpoint between the left and right groups in India, with the BJP and Hindu groups seeking a re-examining of the way history was told in textbooks, alleging it was influenced by biased Marxist writers.

“We are not in the business of rewriting anything. We are here to support non-partisan, rigorous scholarship, not pass judgments on others’ work,” said Tanwar.

The premier institute of historical research is also working on another project to showcase the 2,000-year-long history of Jammu and Kashmir, to show how the erstwhile state and now a union territory changed over the years, starting from ancient times.

“I firmly believe that the way many people see Kashmir now is because of its story told in a very distorted way. Some of our own people, and a few western scholars, are to blame for this,” said Tanwar. “In India, we talk about centuries, not years. That is the legacy of our rich heritage. This deduction of J&K as a post-Islamic state, when it has a heritage enriched by the likes of Shankaracharya, Lalitaditya, and Sanskrit and Sharada script, is partisan which we seek to address.”

A history of southern ruling dynasties is also in the works, he said, to address the disproportionate push for Delhi-centric rulers in historical research.

The ICHR chairman said the body will bring out a vast collection of pictures to show the horrors of Partition, in an exhibition that will be inaugurated on August 14. Last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that August 14 will be observed as ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’ to acknowledge the pain undergone by Indians due to the partition of India in 1947.

The ICHR's exhibition on the history of India's freedom struggle not just chronicles the lives of revolutionaries but details the major events of 200 years of India's independence struggle, starting from 1757. Stories of nearly 12,000 revolutionaries who laid down their lives for the country have been documented in this exhibition, which has in the past two months been displayed in Parliament House, Rashtrapati Bhavan, and Puri, for the devotees of the Jagannath Yatra. The content is also being translated into 12 regional languages by the culture ministry to be disseminated in different states.

“Our freedom struggle has generally been portrayed as a political movement, but what we wish to bring out is that many of the people driving it, be it Lokmanya Tilak, Bankim Chandra, Aurobindo, or even Gandhi, were deeply moved by the cultural, spiritual ethos of the country. There is a consistent flow of a nationalistic spirit from the mid-18th century to the 2oth. This is why the idea of the fundamental unity of the country is central to the movement,” said Tanwar.

References:

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