On a strangely quiet Wednesday afternoon on the 28th of August, 2024, having braved the desolate streets and triumphed over apprehensions of unrest in the city, teachers gathered at the Seagull Foundation for the Arts to discuss, on a rather troubled day, the tough task of teaching history in troubled times. Sudipta Sen, professor of History and Middle East/South Asia Studies at the University of California, Davis, the facilitator for the session, took the teachers on a journey traversing the nebulous grounds of what we call ‘Indian’ history.
Sen’s first task was to question what we understand as ‘Indian’ drawing attention to our origins out of Africa and emphasizing the profound role played by migrations in the rich tapestry of civilizations and cultures that comprise the current geographic contiguity we define as India. Sen shared maps and images which showed the vast expanse of the Harappan Civilization, stretching to what we would presently identify as Afghanistan, Gujarat, and, towards the latter half of the Mature Phase of the Harappan civilization, it began to create settlements close to the Upper Gangetic valley. Evidence of this expansion and satellite images showing a dried up river bed in the vicinity of the Hakra river has allowed for much speculation that this is the Saraswati River (mentioned in the Nadistuti hymn of the Rig Veda). However, traces of such evidence, albeit acknowledged by many scholars, does not warrant the renaming of the Harappan civilization to ‘Sarasvati/Sindhu-Saraswati Civilization’. Further the same has fuelled many popular theories connecting the people of the Harappan civilization and early Vedic civilization. However, the evidence, which is sparse, refuted and challenged by scholars, is insufficient for the proclamation of an Indus-Saraswati civilization or claims that the Harappan civilization was clearly connected to the early Vedic people. Following the decline of the Harappan civilization, another wave of migrations––of the Yamnaya pastoralists and their intermingling with indigenous populations created the base for a new group of people that spoke the Arya language. Sen pointed out that the Indo-European family not only shows the connections between Ancient Persian and Vedic Sanskrit but also bears memory of its affinity with Old Steppe. However, what we understand as Sanskrit was also a refined tongue as the word samskrita literally shows and it often obfuscated the rich linguistic landscape on the way to carving a cosmopolis of its own.
Sen also looked at the emergent religious landscape i.e the importance of fire and rituals and the earliest vestiges of a varna order. Sen argued that the varna-jati system evolved, especially when the orthodox had a heterodox tradition to compete with that is the shramanic orders like Buddhism and Jainism. Sharing the images of aniconic depictions of the Buddha, many of which were early representations derived from tree and serpent worship, Sen remarked on the assimilative power of Buddhism. Iconic depictions of the Buddha, Sen showed, began to feature around the Kushana era with the rise of the Gandhara and Mathura schools of art, each with its distinctive features evolving to create an image of the Buddha. This school of art also influenced some of the earliest representations of Shiva. Similarly the Buddhist stupa that preceded the earliest temple created the scaffolding for temple architecture and motifs.
Sen repeatedly tried to emphasize that histories––religious, cultural, political and social––as we read them through a myriad sources, are shared histories that speak of one tradition borrowing from another, influencing another and even engaging in conflict with each other. The existence of violence in the history of the subcontinent, rapacious onslaughts and pillaging is not to be understated but it is far more important to recognize that it existed alongside dialogue. The Arabs in Sindh had been interacting with the subcontinent through trade far before Mahmud of Ghazni made his presence felt. Ghazni, motivated by trade, minted coins featuring Lakshmi on one face and venerating Allah on the other in Sanskrit. Similarly, Sen shared images of the Qutb Complex to highlight the presence of Puranic, Jain and Buddhist iconography. According to Sen, these were not simply prizes of conquest but spolia. Ritual acts of iconoclasm were accompanied with the inclusion of local designs and motifs to make them more appealing or as Sen put it, to say ‘I am you’ and invite locals to participate. The Mughals, whose faint shadow remains in the NCERT textbooks still, also patronized Hindu beliefs. Akbar’s fort at Allahabad relocated the Akshay Vat in the Patalpuri temple, as he projected himself as a protector of Hinduism. Placing images of Rajput temples and Mughal architecture alongside each other, Sen argued that the two, in the absence of context, were nearly impossible to distinguish.
Sen’s presentation was punctuated by important moments of discussion where teachers shared the challenges they faced in the classroom, the race to complete the syllabus and the ticking bell to prepare students for examinations. Echoing some of the themes from this year's annual conference, Sen and the teachers discussed the importance of teaching shared histories to foster a sense of belonging in the present. With the curious phenomenon of missing phases of history in the new textbooks, teachers recognized the importance of filling those absences, using classrooms as a space for having conversations about the troubled times, and using history as the soothing salve to heal wounds of the present.
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