"How can any society survive, let alone create, on the basis of borrowed images of itself?" - Claude's preface to Dharampal's "Science and technology in the 18th Centure" (available online).
"The general effect of Dharampal’s work among the public at large has been intensely liberating. However, conventional Indian historians, particularly the class that has passed out of Oxbridge, have seen his work as a clear threat to doctrines blindly and mechanically propagated and taught by them for decades.
Dharampal never trained to be a historian. If he had, he would have, like them, missed the wood for the trees. Despite having worked in the area now for more than four decades, he remains the quintessential layman, always tentative about his findings, rarely writing with any flourish.
Certainly, he does not manifest the kind of certainty that is readily available to individuals who have drunk unquestioningly at the feet of English historians, gulping down not only their ‘facts’ but their assumptions as well. But to him goes the formidable achievement of asking well entrenched historians probing questions they are hard put to answer, like how come they arrived so readily, with so little evidence, at the conclusion that Indians were technologically primitive or, more generally, how were they unable to discover the historical documents that he, without similar training, had stumbled on so easily.
Dharampal’s unmaking of the English-generated history of Indian society has in fact created a serious enough gap today in the discipline. The legitimacy of English or colonial dominated perceptions and biases about Indian society has been grievously undermined, but the academic tradition has been unable to take up the challenge of generating an organised indigenous view to take its place. The materials for a far more authentic history of science and technology in India are indeed now available as a result of his pioneering work, but the competent scholar who can handle it all in one neat canvas has yet to arrive. One recent new work that should be mentioned in this connection is Helaine Selin’s Encyclopaedia of Non-Western Science, Technology and Medicine (Kluwer, Holland) which indeed takes note of Dharampal’s findings.
Till such time as the challenge is taken up, however, we will continue to replicate, uncritically, in the minds of generation after generation, the British (or European) sponsored view of Indian society and its institutions. How can any society survive, let alone create, on the basis of borrowed images of itself?"
Dharampal as quoted by Claude,
" Around 1960, I was travelling from Gwalior to Delhi by a day train, a 6 or 7 hour journey in a 3rd class compartment when I met a group of people and I think in a way that meeting gave me a view of India, the larger India. The train was crowded. Some people however made a place for me. And there was this group of people, about twelve of them, some three or four women and seven or eight men. I asked them where they were coming from. They said that they had been on a pilgrimage, three months long, up to Rameshwaram, among other places. They came from two different villages north of Lucknow. They had various bundles of things and some earthen pots with them. I asked, what did they have in those pots. They said that they had taken their own food from home. They had taken all the necessities for their food— atta, ghee, sugar— with them, and some amounts of these were still left over. The women didn’t seem to mind much people trampling over them in the crowded compartment, but they did feel unhappy if someone touched their bundles and pots of food with their feet. And then I said they must all be from one jati, from a single caste group. They said, ‘No, no! We are not from one jati— we are from several jatis.’ I said, how could that be? They said that there was no jati on a yatra— not on a pilgrimage. I didn’t know that. I was around 38 years old, and like many others in this country who know little about the ways of the ordinary Indian— the peasants, artisans and other village folks.
And then I said, ‘Did you go to Madras? Did you go to Bombay?’ ‘Yes! We passed through those places.’ ‘Did you see anything there?’‘No, we did not have any time!’ It went on like that. I mentioned various important places of modern India. They had passed through most, but had not cared to visit any. Then I said, ‘You are going to Delhi now?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘You will stop in Delhi?’ ‘No, we only have to change trains there.
We’re going to Haridwar!’ I said, ‘This is the capital of free India. Won’t you see it?’ I meant it. I was not joking. They said, ‘No! We don’t have time. May be some other day. Not now. We have to go to Haridwar. And then we have to get back home.’
We talked for perhaps 5 or 6 hours. At the end of it I began to wonder, who is going to look after this India? What India are we talking about? This India, the glorious India of the modern age, built by Jawaharlal Nehru and other people, these modern temples, universities, places of scholarship! For whom are we building them? Those people on their pilgrimage were not interested in any of this. And they were
representative of India. More representative of India than Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru ever was. Or I and most of us could ever be."
The encounter shook Dharampal then, as much as the memory of it bothers him even today. This particular experience, more than any other, drove him to look for the causes of the profound alienation of India’s new leaders from the preoccupations of the common people and to investigate whether this had always been so.
This is from "Science and Technology in the 18th Century"
No comments:
Post a Comment