Film TouchFocusing on the Maratha King Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, it has given rise to debate about the imagery of history. Still, instead of just asking whether the movie is right or wrong, we should probably ask: Why is such a distortion?
The answer to this question lies in understanding the result of a fundamental raft between the ideas of history beyond its academic boundaries, as contrary to its academic counterpart, who strives to the decoration. Many historians working in universities and archaeologists have the general distrust of the national population towards the educational process, which refuses to engage in the pursuit of a ‘magnificent Hindu nation’. Any other historical move will inevitably lead to derogatory tags such as ‘Urban Naxal’, ‘Lotions Gang’ or ‘Left Liberal’.
The politics of history in India return to the end of the nineteenth century, when nationalist movements first demanded that Indians get their history from British colonial accounts. Until then, the British colonial framework was dominated by Indian history, with the influential James Mill’s influential example. History of British India. Mill clearly divided Indian history into three opposing stages – Hindus, Muslims and British – presented Muslims as aggressive foreigners who destroyed a pure and ancient Hindu civilization.
In doing so, the colonial history justified British rule as the freedom of Muslimism, and embedded the Hindu Muslim binary in historical consciousness. This easy binary can be further detected by the Orientalist scholarship at the end of the 18th century. The British Orientalist, who primarily works with the upper caste Hindu lottery, called for the original texts (‘UR-TEXTS’) to codify Indian traditions. As the essence of the authentic Indian civilization, his elected focus on Hindu religious texts clearly makes Muslims backward as historical pests.
Presenting Hindu culture as the everlasting and original heritage of India, Orientalism (ironically used jointly with nationalist history) established the basis of sectarian discrimination that continued to continue permanently in the next decades, through a census such as governance mechanism. In addition, the colonial management methods did not allow the archive access to the colonies, thus banning the use of archives from increasing investigation.
In the 19th -century colonial India, British administrators treated the archive record primarily as bureaucratic performance, tax collection, and ground revenue management instruments. Unlike the UK, where the archives have become the accessible symbol of government accountability, in India, archives and historical records are undergoing administrative neglect.
This neglect laid the foundation for the contemporary archive of India, where invaluable documents rotate, dispersed or completely eliminated. The economic dynamics of the British Imperial Roll further shaped the nationalist historical project. After the economic crisis such as the termination of the Union Bank in Calcutta (1848) and the elimination of the British Crown India (1857), the Indian commercial class, especially in Bengal province, lost significant power. The economic and political agency took away, the colonial middle class in India turned to cultural domains, especially history, as a source of resistance to colonial domination. In the cities of India’s presidency, the intellectuals in India’s presidency created a nationalist ‘history’, and blurred the difference between the two.
Anyone who is familiar with the Thakumar swing of Akshinjan will feel resemblance to him. Graeme’s fairy tales – Both collections of folk tales protecting cultural memory against modern attacks. In the European Imperial Metropolites, folk tales remained a literary pursuit, since ‘scientific history’ as the elimination of enlightened civilization, ‘scientific history’, natural modernity. On the contrary, Indian intellectuals, tied to colonial subordinate, turn to legendary paste, imagine the restoration of nationalists through excavation, record recording and thus recover it.
Bank Chandra Chatopadhyay typed this nationalist history. In 1880, through its Bengali magazine Bangladesh, the Bank demanded the Bengalis to re -claim their martial heritage as historical sources like Mahabharat, such as Mahabharata.
However, instead of rejecting Orientalist types, Banium and other nationalist writers embraced them and reinforced them. Muslims were clearly presented as foreign invaders, which deepened the sectarian division and further embedded the Hindu Muslim binary within Indian nationalism of colonial history. This trend brought to the colonial period, which is formed, how the new Republic imagined its history.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s history vision India’s discovery He also contributed to the identity of India through epidemic such as Vedas, Upshands, and Mahabharata and Ramayana. In these texts, he searched for a ‘romantic’ vision of India, which is regrettable with the Hindu nationalist claims of cultural continuity, which are believed to have been influenced by the Muslims and the British. These Hindu nationalists claim that one of the ‘secular’ institutions investigating history has also been affected – the Indian Archaeological Survey (ASI).
The institute continued its inheritance of the initial Orientalist scholarship: he gave the search for texts ‘scientific’ truth, which revealed the ‘originality’ of Indian civilization in the earth and excavated to reveal the ‘ancient truths’. Later in India, it clearly became the search for ‘Hindu past’ in the service of the ‘Hindu nation’. While the academic date, despite the ‘Decolonised’ (incomplete), through the intervention of Marxists, sublime studies and a rehabilitation Cambridge School, ASI never shed its orangal roots. In addition to efforts to identify the aforementioned places in Mahabharat and Ramayana, along with the Saraswati Heritage Project, which aims to expose archaeological sites along the Purniak Saraswati river in Ragewaya – explain this phenomenon.
Therefore, it is not a coincidence that former Director ASI, Bibi Lal, who is a part of the archeology of the Ramine Sites Project (1975-1985), argued that there was a Ram temple under the Babri Masjid. Its intellectual millions have long been the nineteenth century that has shaped ‘ours’ historical thinking – a large number of this community, and not necessarily the educational historian. One of the reasons is that fake WhatsApp history is much more dominant in social consciousness than educational history. This is not just because educational historians are not engaged in the public sector. In fact, on the contrary, it is often the case.
Therefore, re -claiming history from a community that bravely puts itself, excluding others. To save India’s national imagination, we have to save the shrinking world of Indian history.
This story was originally published in the Statemate, which is an ANN partner Don.
