Immanuel Wallerstein, a famed historical sociologist once wrote, with a touch of irony, that “history is the record of the past as it is.” The conventional definition of history, however, “is the record of the past as it was.” Wallerstein’s emphasis on the present is to highlight the role of the circumstances of the present in defining the past.
George Orwell wrote, those who control the past, control the future, and those who control the present also control the past. Thus, controlling the past has direct political bearing on the present. Politics is largely about power. Those who wield power tend to control history in real time.
Eric Wolf’s famous book: Europe and the People Without History, published in 1982 shows how the mainstream social science knowledge denied the history of the people outside of the West. Wolf criticized Eurocentric history.
With imperialism and colonial expansions, imperial powers denied the colonized people their past, their history. By denying their past, the imperial powers could impose their own categories, their own viewpoints of history, and even their methods of writing history. By denying their past, you can throw the subjugated in a vacuum. Without the past, people lose their sense of identity, and such people are easy to dominate.
Jack Goody’s book Theft of History (2006) is another critique of Eurocentrism. Goody’s writings simply illustrate how the West stole the history of the East with the dominant, Western narratives, that include the uniqueness of the West which serves a double purpose. On the one hand, it gives the Western people a false sense of superiority, and the people of the East a sense of inborn inferiority.
But it is not so recent that the traditional history has been questioned. History is not the story of the kings and queens and their exploits, wrote Karl Marx. History, Marx and Engels wrote, is the history of the class struggle. And following Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the Subaltern studies group in India under the legendary Ranajit Guha began to write the people’s history, the history as seen and experienced by the subalterns or the subordinates. In the West, especially in Britain, E P Thompson and others began to tell the history of the common people, especially the working class, from the early 1960s.
Questioning the dominant narratives of history is common among historians, thus we see a variety of historical expositions, from the history of sugar or coffee to the history of coziness to the history of underground literature in pre-revolutionary France.
There is always an official narrative, a mainstream history. Yet, in the liberal democracies, there is room for alternative histories.
However, historical pluralism is not to be confused with revisionism in history. That credit goes to the socialist world. In the socialist country, revisionist history has a long career.
Ever since Vladimir Lenin took charge in the Soviet Union, some compromises had to be made that were seen by the puritanical communists as deviation, thus, the charges of revisionism. A clearer example was de-Stalinization of Soviet Russia by Khruschev in the 1950s following the death of Stalin in 1953. As the leadership changed in the former Soviet Union, much of Stalinist history was junked and a new narrative was launched.
A friend who is domiciled in Ukraine told me how surprised he was seeing only a few pages of history of the Soviet days in Ukrainian school textbooks. Educated in the former Soviet Union and fluent in Russian, he posed this question to one of his historian friends in Kiev: Why deny the history of the Soviet days, and why re-write history? To which the historian answered: If history is not re-written how would we make a living?
But it is not always financial motivation that prompts historians to change the narrative. Politics is the driving force. Historians change history, but not under the circumstances chosen by themselves.
In China, following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the rise of Deng Xiaoping from 1978 onwards, “Communism with Chinese characteristics” became the popular slogan and the new ideological roadmap of the country. In the socialist world, revising history was always related to ideological revisionism. Yet, no one denied the role of Vladimir Lenin in the Soviet Union, and he fell only when socialism collapsed. Yet, Lenin’s name in history remains indelible.
During my first visit to China in 1996, I was at Tiananmen Square facing the Forbidden City, the wall of which adorned the image of Mao Zedong. I was engaged in a lively conversation with my English-speaking guide about Chinese politics and economic transformation highlighting the role of Deng Xiaoping in China’s economic transformation. I told her, why not replace the image of Mao with that of Deng. No way, the jovial young lady turned serious and told me in no uncertain terms, that place is for Chairman Mao only.
No matter who declares or “undeclares” national holidays in Bangladesh, and no matter what sort of ignorance or opportunism guides history writing in Bangladesh, the place of Bangabandhu Shiekh Mujibur Rahman, his historic March 7 address, and the tragedy of August 15 -- alongside March 26 and December 16, will remain indelible in the history of Bangladesh.
Habibul Haque Khondker is a sociologist and columnist.
