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Bollywood lyricist Manoj Muntashir argued that Indians have forgotten their ancestors — but he is being a dishonest archaeologist.
DILIP MANDAL 3 September, 2021 10:13 am IST
Graphic by Ramandeep Kaur | ThePrint
Text Size: A- A+
A week when Bollywood lyricist Manoj Shukla aka Manoj Muntashir’s viral video ‘Who are your ancestors’ chose to remind us of what Mughal rulers had done in medieval India, is a good time to talk about the role of memory in nation-building.
Religious politics thrives on reminding voters about an imagined ancient past that was perfect. Progressive politics tries to remind people about injustices of the past. Both rely on memory as an enabler of voter’s anger.
Novelist Milan Kundera once wrote that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.
Manoj Muntashir argued that Indians have forgotten their ancestors. For him, Mughals were “glorified dacoits” and Indians still kept on naming roads after them.
“Hamare ghar tak aane wali sadkon ke naam bhi kisi Akbar, Humayun, Jahangir jaise glorified dacoits ke naam par rakh diye gaye aur hum ribbon kat te hue maukaparast netaon ko dekh kar taliyan bajate rahe.”
The lyricist goes on to say that Mughals have done despicable things like creating Meena Bazar, but we call them Jille Ilahi (shadow of God).
The stated goal of making this video was to caution Indians about the people they choose to make their icons. The video has over 2.3 million views, 35.6K retweets and 81.2K likes at the time of writing this.
There may be some truth and half-truths in Muntashir’s song, but I would argue that asking for corrections based on backward transtemporal journeys can be detrimental to the process of nation-building and may harm the idea of the nation.
Also read: ‘Mughals were dacoits’: Bollywood lyricist trashes Indian history, nonsense, say historians
Nation-building is painful
Mughals, or for that matter any ruler, might have done many nasty things. But digging too deep into that history can bring up unforeseen results. Every nation has good and bad historical events. Nation-building has always been a painful process. Take the case of the United States or France or Italy. These nations have gone through wars, invasions and civil wars to reach where they are now. The US has seen one of the bloodiest internal wars that resulted in the killings of lakhs of soldiers. France became a nation only after almost a century of invasions, campaigns of terror and bloody battles.
Can you imagine the inhabitants of the confederate south in the US holding a constant grudge against the inhabitants of northern states for things their forefathers had done? Or, can you imagine the northerners still keeping alive the sense of victory over the southerners and celebrating it every now and then? Will keeping these memories alive help make America United States? Probably not.
Similarly, France had a bloody and hateful past, but no citizen of France talks about her or his great great grandmother’s rape by the invading forces of the 9th and 10th centuries. These are now things of the past and buried deep by the French citizens — wounds can’t constantly be pricked and reopened for them to heal.
Nelson Mandela and South African blacks suffered unimaginable hardships during the apartheid. But Nelson Mandela never asked for revenge or retribution. He went for a process of reconciliation. That angered many of his comrades in the African National Congress who labelled him a lackey of the whites. But Mandela’s project was to make a new nation and not settle scores.
Also read: Non-BJP Hindu writers are correcting Nehruvian history. With little space for modern Muslims
What is a nation?
Forgetting does not mean erasure of history. That is easy. It can be done by rewriting textbooks and through mediums of mass communication such as movies, songs, newspapers and periodicals. But that will not help. At least, not now. With the advent of digital media, memories have got unprecedented permanency. All good and bad things of the past are now documented and archived in some or other manner. So, if any group or government tries to erase events, real or imagined, it will not be an easy task.
Hiding or erasing will not work. We, as a nation, should keep those things and happenings in historical repositories. We must read the past and learn not to hate each other based on historical wrongs or triumphs.
Manoj Muntashir — who changed his surname from Shukla — wants to dig into Indian history to propagate an idea that is dominant today. But like a dishonest archaeologist, he is careful in setting the limits of his inquiry. He is not digging too deep, otherwise, he will stumble upon other facts/stories that will demolish his idea of history. Muntashir talked about “Mughal dacoits” but very conveniently ignored their partners and collaborators. His own caste men were part of Mughal courts, enjoying their benevolence.
If he goes on digging, Muntashir will find how Hindu kings invited and collaborated with Muslim invaders. Deeper down, he will find that the much-disputed Aryan intrusion theory was propagated by scholars like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Ram Mohan Roy because it was beneficial for them at that time to show proximity to the Europeans.
Muntashir may argue that the Aryan Invasion theory is not based on facts and that Tilak had erred while writing that the Aryans were inhabitants of the Arctic. But this is not yet a settled issue of history. If he believes that the Mughals were dacoits, then there are other people who believe that Aryans were invaders who plundered India and subjugated the original habitants.
Indians should forget the bitterness generated by both these ideas. If we want to make India a nation then we must believe that we have something in common in our historical journey and we will do great things together. This is the normative and idealistic idea of nation propounded by French Philosopher Ernest Renan. He said: “Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of every political formation, even those that have been the most benevolent in their consequences. Unity is always brutally established.”
We must not forget that after the Mauryan Empire, it was the Mughals who had a map of their empire that most closely resembles the current Indian map.
The author is the former managing editor of India Today Hindi Magazine, and has written books on media and sociology. Views are personal.
DILIP MANDAL 3 September, 2021 10:13 am IST
Graphic by Ramandeep Kaur | ThePrint
Text Size: A- A+
A week when Bollywood lyricist Manoj Shukla aka Manoj Muntashir’s viral video ‘Who are your ancestors’ chose to remind us of what Mughal rulers had done in medieval India, is a good time to talk about the role of memory in nation-building.
Religious politics thrives on reminding voters about an imagined ancient past that was perfect. Progressive politics tries to remind people about injustices of the past. Both rely on memory as an enabler of voter’s anger.
Novelist Milan Kundera once wrote that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.
Manoj Muntashir argued that Indians have forgotten their ancestors. For him, Mughals were “glorified dacoits” and Indians still kept on naming roads after them.
“Hamare ghar tak aane wali sadkon ke naam bhi kisi Akbar, Humayun, Jahangir jaise glorified dacoits ke naam par rakh diye gaye aur hum ribbon kat te hue maukaparast netaon ko dekh kar taliyan bajate rahe.”
The lyricist goes on to say that Mughals have done despicable things like creating Meena Bazar, but we call them Jille Ilahi (shadow of God).
The stated goal of making this video was to caution Indians about the people they choose to make their icons. The video has over 2.3 million views, 35.6K retweets and 81.2K likes at the time of writing this.
There may be some truth and half-truths in Muntashir’s song, but I would argue that asking for corrections based on backward transtemporal journeys can be detrimental to the process of nation-building and may harm the idea of the nation.
Also read: ‘Mughals were dacoits’: Bollywood lyricist trashes Indian history, nonsense, say historians
Nation-building is painful
Mughals, or for that matter any ruler, might have done many nasty things. But digging too deep into that history can bring up unforeseen results. Every nation has good and bad historical events. Nation-building has always been a painful process. Take the case of the United States or France or Italy. These nations have gone through wars, invasions and civil wars to reach where they are now. The US has seen one of the bloodiest internal wars that resulted in the killings of lakhs of soldiers. France became a nation only after almost a century of invasions, campaigns of terror and bloody battles.
Can you imagine the inhabitants of the confederate south in the US holding a constant grudge against the inhabitants of northern states for things their forefathers had done? Or, can you imagine the northerners still keeping alive the sense of victory over the southerners and celebrating it every now and then? Will keeping these memories alive help make America United States? Probably not.
Similarly, France had a bloody and hateful past, but no citizen of France talks about her or his great great grandmother’s rape by the invading forces of the 9th and 10th centuries. These are now things of the past and buried deep by the French citizens — wounds can’t constantly be pricked and reopened for them to heal.
Nelson Mandela and South African blacks suffered unimaginable hardships during the apartheid. But Nelson Mandela never asked for revenge or retribution. He went for a process of reconciliation. That angered many of his comrades in the African National Congress who labelled him a lackey of the whites. But Mandela’s project was to make a new nation and not settle scores.
Also read: Non-BJP Hindu writers are correcting Nehruvian history. With little space for modern Muslims
What is a nation?
Forgetting does not mean erasure of history. That is easy. It can be done by rewriting textbooks and through mediums of mass communication such as movies, songs, newspapers and periodicals. But that will not help. At least, not now. With the advent of digital media, memories have got unprecedented permanency. All good and bad things of the past are now documented and archived in some or other manner. So, if any group or government tries to erase events, real or imagined, it will not be an easy task.
Hiding or erasing will not work. We, as a nation, should keep those things and happenings in historical repositories. We must read the past and learn not to hate each other based on historical wrongs or triumphs.
Manoj Muntashir — who changed his surname from Shukla — wants to dig into Indian history to propagate an idea that is dominant today. But like a dishonest archaeologist, he is careful in setting the limits of his inquiry. He is not digging too deep, otherwise, he will stumble upon other facts/stories that will demolish his idea of history. Muntashir talked about “Mughal dacoits” but very conveniently ignored their partners and collaborators. His own caste men were part of Mughal courts, enjoying their benevolence.
If he goes on digging, Muntashir will find how Hindu kings invited and collaborated with Muslim invaders. Deeper down, he will find that the much-disputed Aryan intrusion theory was propagated by scholars like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Ram Mohan Roy because it was beneficial for them at that time to show proximity to the Europeans.
Muntashir may argue that the Aryan Invasion theory is not based on facts and that Tilak had erred while writing that the Aryans were inhabitants of the Arctic. But this is not yet a settled issue of history. If he believes that the Mughals were dacoits, then there are other people who believe that Aryans were invaders who plundered India and subjugated the original habitants.
Indians should forget the bitterness generated by both these ideas. If we want to make India a nation then we must believe that we have something in common in our historical journey and we will do great things together. This is the normative and idealistic idea of nation propounded by French Philosopher Ernest Renan. He said: “Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of every political formation, even those that have been the most benevolent in their consequences. Unity is always brutally established.”
We must not forget that after the Mauryan Empire, it was the Mughals who had a map of their empire that most closely resembles the current Indian map.
The author is the former managing editor of India Today Hindi Magazine, and has written books on media and sociology. Views are personal.
