Situation Vacant: Needed – an Indian Zinn

As I finished the last page of Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States”, I felt instantly that I wanted to read something similar but this time, on India and about India and about its people.

First about the book, a book that I have been wanting to read for the last 2 years but only got hold of it a month back.

The most radical aspect of Zinn’s book is how it completely circumvents the standard history that we have been taught in school and told to learn by heart as the only events of importance that happened in the United States. I remember how the history of landing of Columbus was almost celebrated in the text-books as a landing that changed civilization. To realize that it did but that the change was the genocide of a people started by Columbus and his soldiers is to fully realize the adage that “History has been written by men who have killed heroes”, a statement which seems hackneyed but maybe it is so because it is so true….though in this case, there were no heroes, no saints….only victims.

In fact it is the first lines of the book that is emblematic of all that follows. The first lines describe the Columbus landing and how the Arawak Indians came to greet him with presents and how Columbus’s reaction to this was to comment that the people here are so naïve and “They would make good slaves”. It is exactly this view of the mentality of the “explorers” (as Columbus so Vasco de Gama) that has been denied to future generations of people. And that is why this view of history hits you right in the middle of your eyes…..

All the things we have been taught, since we have been taught world history is slowly but irrevocably re-taught…if unlearning-relearning is tough, I did not feel much, perhaps because I anyway had my doubts on many of the issues that most people accept implicitly, but the well articulated and the concise way in which the true nature of events is made visible by Zinn is something that would surely rattle people, even with prior doubts.

From the well known events like the American War for Independence (the myth of the Founding fathers and their pious declarations was finally broken for me), the Civil war (ostensibly for ending slavery – a line which I could never accept; a nation that commits genocide on indigenous people going to war on moral issues??) to the Civil Rights movement (always portrayed as a moralistic and peaceful fight under Martin Luther King as the undisputed leader), the Vietnam war (the details of which are made sketchier by the day) to lesser known events (made lesser known, in fact) like the Haymarket massacre to the great Railroad strikes to the various other people movements (blacks, native Americans, women, immigrants), the anti-war movements, the GI against war movements, the long drawn feminist movement (which for most people somehow ended with the winning of votes), the Mexican war, the Philippine war, every issue is dealt with a candor and sympathy and understanding of the root causes and its causal relationships (with a dash of occasional ironic humour thrown in) that is usually absent from most works of history.

And what makes this book intensely readable is the fact that there is no moralizing and the only judgment and the only critique passed is self evident through the evidence produced throughout the book, evidence collected through hundreds of journals, books and clippings (the bibliography at the back of the book is impressing, to say the least)…..

The most complete thing about this book by Howard Zinn is that the book is by no means complete. The incompleteness is not of the gap-in-narration or gap-in-coverage type. Almost nothing is left out of the ambit of the books (except that the coverage of the South American people and the fight for dignity of the homosexuals is a bit sketchy as Zinn himself admits in the end).

No, it is incomplete because it gives a hunger to the reader that cannot be sated by a single book and a hunger which can only be sated in part (but never completely, as it keeps on growing with every new revelation) only by reaching out and trying to understand how things were and how they impinge on today (history is never really history is it?).

In other words, it provides a springboard for us to understand more, all over again, the identity of the world. It provides glimpses into a world which has almost always been denied to us by the mainstream education imparted to us. It, in its way, tells us that our education is by no means complete, no matter how many degrees we get and frame them up on the walls. That the ability to constantly judge our judgments is perhaps the greatest favour we can do to ourselves.

Eugene Debbs, Huey Newton, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Riley, Fredrick Douglass, Amelia Bloomer, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X are not names which elicit instant responses (except the last one perhaps) but names like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Roosevelt, Nixon, Reagan, Martin Luther King, Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller on the other hand, are instantly recognizable names. It is exactly this view of history that we have that this book rebels against. In the end, perhaps we realize that it is the kind of people whose names are in the former set who have actually influenced our thinking and forced many changes from the establishment. The changes which are now freely attributed to politicians who for the most part played, well, politics.

Now sample this….names like Surya Sen, Khudiram Bose, Profulla Chaki, Ganesh Ghosh, Ananto Singho, Jatin Das, Lala Hardyal are meaningless to most Indians but names like Gandhi, Nehru, Patel are shining icons in our books. As I write this, I struggle to name people whose lives should have been chronicled, both in the pre-independence era and the post-independence period. So many people have died for causes which are now simplified and attributed to a few well-known modern icons; so many people have spoken out against injustice - social and economic and initiated revolutionary changes which are now attributed to a handful of people.

Its almost shameful that today, we cannot look at history with more depth than what our NCERT books have drilled into us. That history for us is a series of events almost progressing linearly with a handful of people endowed with extraordinary powers of perception, leaders with almost no human failings, a history where it would almost seem that a lone person gifted us independence by marching to the sea and making salt, a modern day Moses with a twist, as it were.

But Moses never parted the Red Sea, nor did freedom come raining from the blue sky (or the blue sea). The struggles never ended with the independence, another factor never revealed in our text books where it would seem once India got independence from the white invader, all was well and country marched along just fine. Hidden in this country’s history are the stories of countless men and women who have toiled for their dreams, making untold sacrifices for their beliefs. There have been many movements – landless peasant movements, Trade union movements, feminist movements (and no, not only the chic feminism of the cities but the movements of the unglamorous, non-media focused rural kind), movements for people who would not bow to the diktats of the state wanting to steal their land in the name of progress, armed rebellions.

We need somebody to tell us the truth, the truth about the independence movement, speak fearlesslessly about the bungling of our haloed icons, the truth about the young men and women with commitments no less than their leaders (if not more) who laid down their lives willingly, who endured torture in Mandalay and Andamans and in reward were betrayed by the “national leaders”, the truth about the peasant rebellions against the British, the truth about the Chittagong Armory Raid (which shook the Empire so much, they had to physically black out the news); somebody to chronicle people who have spoken out, had become conscientious objectors like the editor of the newspaper who brought out a blank newspaper to protest against throttling of speech when the Emergency was declared. We need somebody to tell us of the soldier who had qualms about the atrocities that the army commits in the north-east, in the Kashmir valley. We need somebody to tell us the story about the social worker whose hands were cut off when she protested against a child marriage. We need to hear the voices of the Dalits who are battling untouchablity decades after it was made a legal crime. We need to understand the lives of the mill workers of Mumbai in the era of the 70’s, perhaps one of the few times that labour had reached anywhere near a stage of mass consciousness. We need someone to put up for us the human face of the person who lost his land so that an expensive and potentially useless dam might come up ostensibly for our benefit. We need the full blooded account of the people who circled the trees with their bodies so that they could not be cut down, the story of the two social workers who were murdered in Bihar because they wanted the villagers to have a terror free life from the local warlords. We need someone to tell us intimately the story of the man whose name was Satyendra Dubey.

I could perhaps go on and on….but the point I want to make is this….we need someone who can connect the different threads of the story because after all, everything is connected. What is today fleeting images and disjointed events happening randomly need to pinned down and given shape to put in our memory. The memory of the real history of India.

The usual intellectual (“antel” as we call in Bengali) argument to my proposition is that we should all be chroniclers in our own right, doing our own memory retention. I believe that only partly. With most of our lives moving into a fast forward mode every day (and somebody godamn is pressing the button even tighter), we need an Indian Zinn passionate enough to delve into our hidden pasts and make the connections, to bring to flesh phantoms who have perhaps shaped our thinking more than a single leader could ever have. There are many limitations to what an individual unconnected to the field of history might achieve in this sphere. Our contribution would be of acceptance and I never doubt of its overwhelming acceptance. If Arundhati Roy’s set of essays can invigorate so many, imagine what a well-connected, well thought, alternative history book can do. The thirst for knowing is there and if anything growing by the minute in our information overloaded society (most of it commercial and useless anyway). The market is there, the future Indian Zinn readers are there. Have always been here I guess.

India might be the wonder that was. Modern India is no less but the wonder is the people who refuse to be taught but instead strive to learn. That history has yet to be told.