RECOUNTING FIVE MILLENNIA OF INDIA

India: A History by John Keay

HarperCollins, Hardcover, ISBN 0 00 255717 7 £25.00

The last decent and readable history of India written by a Westerner was a masterpiece which is still read by serious-minded readers around the world was titled WONDER THAT WAS INDIA by A.L.Basham.

Mr Basham’s main interest was archaeology. The author of this new volume is neither lays claim to being a historian nor does he wear any other academic garb. He is a lay Englishman who caught a fascination for history since his undergraduate days at Magdalen College , Oxford. And this non-historian has produced a highly readable account of our history, first comprehensive work on the subject since Penguin came out with that two-volume History of India, co-written by Romilla Thaper and Percival Spear.

Very early in this book, John Keay points out the excuse behind historians and scholars researching into our past have been hiding their failure in producing such an account for the past hundred or so years. This excuse has always been, to quote a prominent Indian historian, R.C.Majumdar, a total lack of any evidence of our history prior to 13th century: "we possess no historical texts of any kind". [Most textbooks on the history of India that we come across are not just drab and lack-lustre jobs produced by disinterested scholarship. It is unbelievable really that none of our historiographers could draw a map or find any relevant illustrations to highlight any parts of our history, even the presenters of that 11-volume tome produced by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan under their dedicated team of scholars who covered various periods and parts of India’s history.

That excuse of ‘no evidence’ has often resulted in books on the history of India where in Ancient India is lost in haze of guess-work, Medieval India is merely a prologue to the rise of Mughal Empire, Mughal Empire is merely recounted in the words of contemporary sycophants and court recorders, and ‘history’ becomes alive with the dawn of the British Raj over India. John Keay rightly points out that over the past fifty years or so techniques of historiographic research have improved considerably: Study of coins, architecture and monuments, random inscriptions, folklore, works of literature and religious texts…. All tend to shed light on the past, past which is presumed to be lost or forgotten. Evaluated from this angle, John Keay’s book is not just a book of "history of India; it is also to some extent a history of Indian history."

Looking at this volume, we work out that the author has to allocate roughly a page to each ten years of India’s history, and means a narrative at a rattling speed. He treats the British period with the same sense of deference as he accords other periods. Considering that most British historians tend to treat the period of the Raj with utmost reverence, adorning it as the "most glorious", "unifier of India"….. and such like epithets, Keays words resound with sense of evaluative justice: "The British rules India briefly— for 150 years. It did not make that much difference to India."

Keay’s verdict on Jallianawala Bagh episode is notable> He says—"On an April afternoon in Amritsar, in a few minutes of vindictive folly [many would call it ‘savagery’, but in the court of history perhaps the judgement will be ‘folly’] the moral pretence for the British Rule had been riddled into transparency, and all hope of peaceful post-war collaboration blown away in the maelstrom of killing".

Keay’s book, perhaps for the time in the field of writing history books, brings India uptodate. He reaches 1998 with a serious disapproval of India’s nuclear tests quoting Arundhati Roy who called Pokharan-II "the final act of betrayal by a ruling class that has failed its people". Those are strong words. This is a robust book. And to my mind, that is a good enough reason to read it.

My only regret is that no Indian scholar, even all those St Stephens College and St Xavier’s College walls gathered the courage and the energy to produce such work

-Shreeram Vidyarthi

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