A historian who delved deep into India’s past

M Rajivlochan
Historian

PROFESSOR VN Datta, historian, newspaper columnist and an extremely kind person, would be sorely missed. Born in Amritsar in a very well-off business family, Datta was educated at the Government College (Lahore), Lucknow University and the University of Cambridge. Datta spent his working life at Kurukshetra University before settling down in Delhi.

Professor Datta was in the tradition of those great scholars who were also great teachers. He trained an entire generation of students, each of whom made a seminal contribution to history as a subject and to the history of Punjab particularly.

Datta’s writings opened up new vistas for understanding history. He examined the entire evidence of the Hunter Commission that was set up to look into the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Datta (who wrote The Tribune, 130 Years: A Witness to History), in an interview with another eminent historian, Nonica Datta, recalled his searches and his discovery that the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh was no error of judgement or a chance event. In this interview, which was published by The Tribune on April 14, 2019, Datta made it clear that the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh was the result of a well-planned conspiracy in which the British allowed — in fact urged — a huge gathering to assemble and then Brigadier General Dyer moved forward to teach Indians what he thought was going to be a lesson of a lifetime. A lesson it indeed was for after that, Datta would say, Indians resolved ever more firmly to get rid of British rule. An Indian named Hans Raj, who had collaborated with the British in ensuring the gathering, had his house at Amritsar burnt down, Datta reported.

Datta was unremitting in blaming Congress leaders for the manner in which they conducted their politics after coming to power in 1937. Similarly, Datta would be quite dismissive of any reconstruction of the history of the partition of India which gave too much value to inexorable forces of history that were supposedly driving the country towards Partition.

In 1996, Professor Datta presided over the Indian History Congress session at Madras University. The theme that he chose for his presidential address was one very close to his heart. Here and later, he talked at great length about the role of specific individuals in engineering Partition, either through action or inaction. Datta had no patience with those who made an effort to absolve individuals of the consequences of the history that they had created. Datta was firmly of the view that neither history nor its consequences would have happened the way they did had key individual participants taken care, risen beyond their narrow self-interests, and shown some wisdom while making choices. Such a view of history always put him at loggerheads with some of the leading historians of those times. The public spats between him and Professor Bipan Chandra were memorable. On more than one occasion, the heated exchanges between them would end in exasperation on the part of each. In one of the last such exchanges, as Professor Salil Misra recalls, each of them accused the other: “25 saal se kehta aa raha hun, par tum abhi bhi nahin sudhare.” It is anyone’s guess which of the two friends was supposed to reform himself.

This was the time when the historians of India were getting bogged down in filling up the micro-details of a picture about India’s history that they had put together in the troublous years of Indira Gandhi’s first regime. Datta insisted that this focus on micro-history was detracting historians from understanding the broader sweep of Indian history.

Datta was quite dismissive of historians who took memoirs and autobiographies too seriously. These were “third-grade evidence”, he would say, “usually peppered with tittle-tattle”, likely to mislead any historian who took them too seriously. When having recently entered the profession, I told him about my interest in Gandhi, Maulana Mohamed Ali and pan-Islamism, he warned: never use autobiographies and memoirs as key sources. Any historian who wrote history on the basis of such nonsense was likely to make serious errors. It pleased me no end when, many years later, he would tell me that I had heeded his warning. That was the sort of kindness that Professor Datta reserved for those who were young and inexperienced.

As a PhD examiner, he would rip into any thesis that came up for his scrutiny. Then just when the poor PhD candidate thought that the thesis might have to be rewritten entirely, he would turn kind and point out why many parts of the thesis were indeed quite unique and just for that he would recommend the candidate for the award of a PhD.

In the politics-riven world of academia, Datta had the unique distinction of not being partisan. In fact, many professors of history to whom I talked for putting together this obituary remembered him for having risen above petty departmental intrigue and insisted that the most deserving candidate be selected, politics, friendships and enmities be damned. Those he selected, who shall remain unnamed for the moment, went on to make important contributions to our understanding of India’s past, away from the establishment version of Indian history.