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Chronicling heritage with honesty

Book Title: History Men: Jadunath Sarkar, G.S. Sardesai, Raghubir Sinh and Their Quest for India’s Past

Author: TCA Raghavan

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M. Rajivlochan

Extraordinary energy, professional zeal and an acute sense of accuracy for historical detail strikes the reader about this remarkable book about a group of historians. These three men wrote about India’s past with great professionalism, care for historical accuracy, concern for finding meanings according to the context and rejected imposing their own morality on to the past. Jadunath Sarkar was a professor, GS Sardesai was a civil servant in the employ of Baroda, and Raghubir Sinh, the scion of a princely family, was an educationist.

Each struggled hard to maintain professionalism while writing their master-pieces of history which remain relevant till today. Sardesai even had to suffer a 60 per cent cut in his pension by Sayajirao Gaekwar for not toeing the line. Their researches were marked by a sensitivity to context and a desire to be accurate. “Modern writers have not reflected on how values changed with the passage of time,” wrote Raghubir Sinh. “Western historians in writing the history of India have evaluated Indian monarchs on the basis of Western values,” he would say.

Jadunath Sarkar (left) and G.S. Sardesai
Photos courtesy: HarperCollins

All three were very conscious of the need to be accurate and to cross-check every bit of information from multiple sources. They corresponded frequently. Finding unexplored historical sources was an obsession with them as did the sorting out of minutiae. Long treks into a difficult terrain were an integral part of their researches. Trekking for three hours, climbing up the difficult trail to Raigad in May 1935, to get a sense of what the Maratha warriors of yore did was just their way of experiencing the history of which they wrote. In November 1940 Sarkar wrote to Sardesai about the need to ‘comb the entire Tanjore district and not merely the district headquarters town’. Such ramblings across the country added to the intoxication of conducting research until age slowed them down. In September 1941, Sarkar ruefully wrote to Sardesai that “We both have turned 70 and you recently had a severe attack. And we have, therefore, sadly to discontinue our old pleasant practice of roving from place to place.”

All the energy and enthusiasm no doubt helped them sustain in the face of opposition and opprobrium that their dedication to detail earned. The government sought to restrict their access to the records of the Peshwa office lest they bring to light some dastardly act of the British in setting up their empire in India. Sarkar’s dispassionate assessment of Shivaji attracted a great deal of criticism from the nationalist lobby in Maharashtra when Sarkar refused to disguise the darker episodes in Shivaji’s career.

He showed that Shivaji, in 1656, had acquired the principality of Javli by getting the heads of the ruling Morè or Morey clan murdered. Historians associated with the Indian National Congress were livid but Sarkar did not care. Similarly, Sarkar’s writing about Aurangzeb’s religious policy in his monumental study of Aurangzeb and about the pressure on Hindus to convert, attracted much hostility at a time when maintaining the façade of Hindu-Muslim unity was important to claim India to be a nation fit for self-rule. “I would not care whether truth is pleasant or unpleasant, and in consonance with or opposed to current views,” Sarkar wrote.

What he wrote about the Jaipur state was stopped from being published by the Jaipur royals because of the details that he gave of the matrimonial practices of the Jaipur family. The nationalists at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) made life difficult for him when he pointed out the peculiarities of the negative attitude of the Sikhs towards women. Sarkar did not hesitate to point out that the Europeans succeeded in India because of their scientific temper and organisational abilities rather than better weapons or perfidy among Indians.

His student Qanungo was to say that ‘the irritating politics of a politician’s university’ made him leave the BHU. Sarkar himself minced no words in condemning interference from Indian politicians in the working of the university and its researches. He had a particular dislike for the overt politicisation of the proceedings of what was to become the Indian History Congress and the lack of professionalism in its researches. Sarkar, along with Sardesai and Sinh, worked for the creation of proper government-funded archives which could help future historians reconstruct the history of India.

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