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Framing History:
Context and perspectives
The modern discipline of history is a peculiarly western creation. It acquired a supposedly scientific form only in the nineteenth century. Soon enough researches in history were put into the service of the state, especially in providing certain guidance to the making of foreign policy. Historians like von Ranke insisted that their reconstructions of the past were without bias and that they were only showing how things happened and hence they were ‘scientific’. Some coeval revolutionaries like Karl Marx turned to history in order to determine the order of things in the world so that they could find a theory of change. If historical change was inevitable then surely it should be possible to speed it up a bit by having a superior understanding of history? That belief set many a revolutionaries to double up as historians. In thrall of the scientific discoveries overwhelming the nineteenth century world, historians too claimed themselves as ‘scientific’. The sobriquet eluded them but the hope continued for a very long time till it was punctured for good by the passing trends of post-modernism. It took over a century and a half, though and the efforts yielded ever superior and reliable ways of understanding the past. It is this story that Bhupendra Yadav tells in an engaging manner through this book. As books of telling the history of history go this one is rather bulky. It would have been bigger had the author included a bibliography and the story of history as it was practised in other cultures too. Here there is a complete absence of history writing as it was practised in Asia before that region came under the cultural and educational influence of the West. Also missing is any significant contribution to history writing as the craft was practiced in Russia. But what we do have is engrossing enough. Yadav quickly takes us through the standard pathways of history as they were evolving in America, Europe and England. Public enthusiasm for history happened much after the public enthusiasm for the sciences. While there were a number of voluntary associations for the spread of the sciences there was none such for history till the nineteenth century. Even then it seemed as if the discipline had difficulty in finding an adequate number of professionals to fill up these associations. The initial enthusiasm for history writing was mostly in the hands of tyros. The first dozen or so of the Presidents of the American History Association were amateurs. Even while writing scientific and highly regarded books of history many of the historians were sans any professional degree or training. Eric Hobsbawm never had a PhD neither Keith Thomas. The great E H Carr, much revered in the circles of historians, was essentially a diplomat in Russia. This enthusiasm of the amateur for history continues to this day. Even the latest history sensation in India who is also going to be the President of the Contemporary History Section of the Indian History Congress, Ramachandra Guha, is not a trained historian. If anything, it seems amateurs continued to write the better regarded books on history while historians filled up the libraries with their stodgy tomes. Those tomes did serve the important function of unearthing important facts from the past. They provided a more reliable sense of how the past was constructed and the manner in which it impacted the future. This book tells us of all this and much more. It brings together the story of the enterprise of history writing as it changed with transformations in political life and the discovery of reliable sources of history other than the written word. The strong autobiographical strand that carries forward the author’s narrative made for interesting reading and shows in a most direct manner how the historian’s personal experiences change their understanding of history. For that unique self-reflective quality too one would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to read history in India in a professional manner.
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Finally