historiography

"The best representative of Marxist historiography in India is D.D. Kosambi."

"But the best representative of the Marxist historiography in India is D.D. Kosambi , the father of Indian feudalism ."

"Nationalist and Marxist historiography in India have tended to assume that British colonial policies of land tenure, taxation and commercialization laid the preconditions for popular movements against the British."

"This is in sharp opposition to the orthodox Marxist or non - Marxist historiography in India , which represents the subaltern , and particularly the peasantry , as mere ( unconscious or unaware ) objects to be integrated ...."

"Sumanta Bannerjee lamented 'this habit of being taken in by internationalist postures and mouthing of Western liberal ideology has become almost a tradition in Marxist historiography in India'."

"Marxist historiography in India got off to a limping start in the hands of the political activists whose main purpose was to fit some half - baked data in a preconceived mould ."

"Since some ignorant dupes of these Marxists denounce as “McCarthyist” anyone who points out their ideological inspiration, it deserves to be emphasized that “eminent historians” like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib are certified as Marxists in standard Marxist sources like Tom Bottomore's Dictionary of Marxist Thought . During the official historians' Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute in 1991, the pro-mosque team's argumentation and several other anti-temple pamphlets were published by the People's Publishing House, a Communist Party outfit. One of the recent textbook innovations most furiously denounced as “saffronization” was the truism that Lenin's armed seizing of power in October/November 1917 was a “coup d'état”. And in early 2003, while they were unchaining all their devils against glasnost , the Marxists ruling West Bengal deleted from a textbook a passage in which Mahatma Gandhi's biographer Louis Fischer called Stalin “at least as ruthless as Hitler”. Such are the true concerns of the “secularists” warning the world against the attempts at glasnost in India's national history curriculum."

"It is of course possible to take the view that “great men” are mostly the products of circumstance. In the late 1790s the French had just lived through a revolution that left the country bitterly divided and the political class mostly discredited and ineffective. The only thing going well for France was a European war in which a mass of fervently patriotic citizen-soldiers regularly routed their opponents. Generals enjoyed far more prestige than politicians, and the latter came to rely on the former for political support. Under these circumstances, was it not extremely likely that someone like Napoleon Bonaparte would seize control of the nation, even had it been a military leader less brilliant and charismatic than the diminutive Corsican officer? Was it a stroke of extraordinary good luck that Nelson Mandela, a shrewd, widely revered, and generous leader, was at hand to oversee South Africa’s transition out of apartheid in the early 1990s, or was the historical moment just right for such a figure to emerge? “Personality or circumstance?” is a traditional topic for classroom debate, an ultimately unanswerable question that is good for getting students to line up social and political conditions on one side and personal traits on the other, and to think about the connections between them."

"Nationalism seeks legitimacy from the past and history therefore becomes a sensitive subject."

"[R.C. Majumdar restricts the term ‘nationalist historians’ to those Indians who in reconstructing their country’s history aimed at examining or reexamining] some points of national interest or importance...which have been misunderstood or misconceived or wrongly represented. Such an object is not necessarily in conflict with a scientific and critical study, and a nationalist historian is not, therefore, necessarily a propagandist or a charlatan."

"All archaeological stories—be they classical, biblical, nationalist, or evolutionary—can be read as narratives of the inevitability of certain lands to be conquered and the right of certain people to rule."

"As Trigger (1995) notes, the main impact of nationalism has been to influence the questions about the past that archaeologists are prepared to ask (or not to ask) and the amount of evidence that is required to sustain a particular position. This has had positive and negative effects. On the positive side, nationalist archaeology has stimulated asking questions about local cultural and ethnic configurations that would not have occurred to colonially oriented archaeologists. It has brought different assumptions, perspectives, and concerns to the data, exposed colonial predispositions and imperial biases, forced a reevaluation of old dogmas, and provided resistance to racism and colonialism. .... On the negative side, nationalism has encouraged the misinterpretation of archaeological data for political purposes and ignored important aspects of human history.... Kohl and Fawcett (1995a), note that the relationship between nationalism and archaeology seemed so natural and close at so many levels that it remained largely unexamined and subconscious throughout the nineteenth century."

"Indo-European linguistics and archaeology have been exploited to support openly ideological agendas for so long that a brief history of the issue quickly becomes entangled with the intellectual history of Europe."

"The mere fact that the author of this book happens to be a Bengali should not stand in the way of expressing this truth out of a false sense of modesty. It is a truism that parochialism should not influence an author’s judgment. What it really means is that parochial feeling must not lead him either to exaggerate or to minimize the value or importance of the part played by the narrow geographical region to which he might belong. Both are equally wrong. His views and statements should be judged by the normal canons of criticism and must not be discredited off-hand on the gratuitous assumption of partiality for his own people or province. I leave it to the readers to judge for themselves whether the role attributed to Bengal is right or not. I may be wrong, due to ignorance, particularly of the language and literature of other parts of India, or error in judgment, and I shall be the first to admit it if I am convinced by facts and arguments ; but I shall fail in my duty as a historian' if I desist from stating what I believe to be true, simply out of the fear that it will be set down to parochialism. If I have laid an undue stress or emphasis on any point or aspect, I shall welcome a challenge which, if supported by facts and arguments, is bound to advance or correct our knowledge of history, and there- by do a great deal of good. (xviii - xix)"

"Jadunath wrote to him on 19 November, 1937:, “National history, like every other history worthy of the name and deserving to endure, must be true as regards the facts and reasonable in the interpretation of them. It will be national not in the sense that it will try to suppress or white-wash everything in our country’s past that is disgraceful, but because it will admit them and at the same time point out that there were other and nobler aspects in the stages of our nation’s evolution which offset the former.. . . In this task the historian must be a judge He will not suppress any defect of the national character, but add to his portraiture those higher qualities which, taken together with the former, help to constitute the entire individual.”"

"The emotional power of archaeology in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece and the regions of the former Yugoslavia, for example, is that they all link the present to a particular golden age."

"[H]istorians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to the heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it. So my profession, which has always been mixed up in politics, becomes an essential component of nationalism."

"Modern history was born in the nineteenth century, conceived and developed as an instrument of European nationalism. As a tool of nationalist ideology, the history of Europe's nations was a great success, but it has turned our understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump, filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism, and the poison has seeped deep into popular consciousness."

"[In] the act of denying this historical truth [of the Holocaust], the deniers denigrate the Jewish people and memories of historical occurrences, suggest that those who accept the truth of the Holocaust lie, and relativize the suffering incurred. Thus, the act of Holocaust denial is not simply an expression of belief in what did or did not happen historically, given that the Holocaust has been historically verified. It is an act of vilification that denigrates and harms."

"Following the physical destruction of a people and their material culture, memory is all that is left and is targeted as the last victim. Complete annihilation of a people requires the banishment of recollection and suffocation of remembrance. Falsification, deception and half-truths reduce what was to what might have been or perhaps what was not at all.""

"My grandfather’s often-uttered phrase echoes in my ears: "There’s no question the Nazis were evil monsters, but I blame the bystanders." My grandfather felt profoundly betrayed by the people who had a voice and did not use it. He understood the existential evil of the Nazis, but felt most betrayed by the neighbors, the shop keepers and the friends who stood silent. He never accepted that humanity was unwilling to help."

"The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews."

"Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941–45, also known as the holocaust (Greek: complete burning) or the Shoah (Hebrew: disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in such a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted."

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind."

"I don't think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was."

"The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity, like Pol Pot or Idi Amin, unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them."

"To this day, the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. This is strange, since the historical evidence of what happened is plentiful. Western observers like the US ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, wrote detailed reports about what was being done - including the telling statement of Mehmed Talaat Pasha, the Interior Minister, that all the Armenians had to perish because 'those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow'. Western missionaries too wrote harrowing accounts of what they witnessed. Their testimony formed an important part of the wartime report on 'The Treatment of the Armenians' compiled by Viscount Bryce, who had also investigated the German atrocities in Belgium in 1914. It might conceivably be argued that the citizens of Christian powers already - or later to be - hostile to the Turks had an interest in misrepresenting them. The Young Turks themselves insisted that they were merely retaliating against a pro-Russian fifth column. That was also the line taken by the Sultan in his reply to Pope Benedict XV's intercession on behalf of the Armenians. Yet agents of the Turks' own wartime allies gave the lie to these claims. Rafael de Nogales, a South American mercenary who served as Inspector General of the Turkish forces in Armenia, reported that the Governor-General of the province had ordered the local authorities in Adil Javus 'to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over'. A German schoolteacher at Aleppo was appalled by what he saw of the 'extermination of the Armenian nation' and wrote urging his own government to 'put a stop to the brutality'."

"Humans are not going to create an egalitarian society that lives in harmony with nature. The best chance of that happening is by people living in groups no larger than the Dunbar number (~150), within a greatly reduced overall population. The 'authorities' are always doing their best – the road to modernity was paved with good intentions. All attempts at 'solutions' only dig the hole deeper. 'Rewilding' is a drop in the massively overfished ocean compared to the damage that has been (and is being) wrought. Does anyone still buy the story of human 'progess'? Perhaps Nature progresses – it produces ever more complexity yet, due to the timescales, organisms fit into that complex ecosystem. But man's attempts at 'progress' have produced a too-complicated, machine-riddled hell, and have been an unmitigated disaster for the non-human world (and for many humans as well)."

"The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalized, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society."

"To be unaware of the putrefaction of the modern world is a symptom of contagion by it."

"One wonders whether a generation that demands instant satisfaction of all its needs and instant solution of the world's problems will produce anything of lasting value. Such a generation, even when equipped with the most modern technology, will be essentially primitive — it will stand in awe of nature, and submit to the tutelage of medicine men."

"Every conquered culture around the world, when given a taste of modernity, grab[s] it with both hands."

"The modern soul is a lunar landscape."

"The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this,—that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances; nay, that the strength and dignity of the mind within us is itself the creature and consequence of these. Were the laws, the government, in good order, all were well with us; the rest would care for itself! Dissentients from this opinion, expressed or implied, are now rarely to be met with; widely and angrily as men differ in its application, the principle is admitted by all."

"Certainly, what nowadays we understand by personality is something quite different from what the biographers and historians of earlier times meant by it. For them, and especially for the writers of those days who had a distinct taste for biography, the essence of a personality seems to have been deviance, abnormality, uniqueness, in fact all too often the pathological. We moderns, on the other hand, do not even speak of major personalities until we encounter men who have gone beyond all original and idiosyncratic qualities to achieve the greatest possible integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the supra personal."

"As Lewis Mumford … explained at length, the modern world has developed a cult of technology. We look to technology to solve basic human problems that were formerly addressed by family, community, or personal toil. Machines inform us, connect us, transport us, feed us, and entertain us. Not only do consumers love their gizmos, but manufacturers do, too, since gadgets produce profits; so do workers and politicians, who benefit from jobs created by industrial expansion. Shopping for the latest smartwatch, drone, or mosquito zapper is a sacred ritual of consumerism. And we worship inventors and industrialists like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk."

"Modern man does not love, but seeks refuge in love; does not hope, but seeks refuge in hope; does not believe, but seeks refuge in a dogma."

"People discovered new energy sources – coal, then petroleum – in the nineteenth century, and then invented all sorts of new technologies to make use of this freshly released energy. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, lighting, heating – all were revolutionized, and the results reached deep into the lives of everyone in the industrialized world. Everybody became utterly dependent on the new gadgets; on imported, chemically fertilized food; on chemically synthesized and fossil-fuel-delivered therapeutic drugs; on the very idea of perpetual growth (after all, it would always be possible to produce more energy to fuel more transportation and manufacturing – wouldn’t it?). Well, if the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the upside of the growth curve, th[e twenty-first] century has been the downside – the cliff. It should have been perfectly obvious to everyone that the energy sources on which they were coming to rely were exhaustible. Somehow the thought never sank in very deep."

"Philosophy—reduced, as we have seen, to philosophical discourse—develops from this point on in a different atmosphere and environment from that of ancient philosophy. In modern university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a way of life, or a form of life—unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy."

"Through industrialism, humanity set out to accomplish great things. And we have accomplished great things. Unfortunately, we have obviated ourselves in the process."

"The office is to the modern world what the cloister was to medieval Christendom: a chaste arena with an unrivalled capacity to excite desire .If these two institutions have imposed harsh penalties on those who display signs of transgressive behaviour, it is because each is, or was, the locus of its society’s most cherished values: the teachings of Christ on the one hand, and money on the other. Money is to the office as God was to the nunnery."

"That teaching of modern metaphysics ... exhorts man to feel comparatively little esteem for the truly thinking portion of himself and to honor the active and willing part of himself with all his devotion."

"As more people become disillusioned with the relentless march of modernity—no longer buying into its deluded destiny and suspecting a mindless march toward a cliff edge—they may simply stop participating in the expected ways. Institutions will suffer a crisis of faith. Young people may have no interest in pursuing a career that straps itself to modernity. Modernity tastes sweet to many people right now, but it could increasingly develop a bitter aftertaste, and atrophy as more people find meaning in different ways. That’s the best case for modernity’s end: a peaceful fading away. More likely, it won’t go without a fight."

"It is easy to get caught up in the heady whirlwinds of modernity. We have accomplished amazing feats in these past few centuries, and our extrapolative minds envision a continued acceleration. Given that our life span overlaps only a portion of the tale, it is easy to lose the context that our boom (the Industrial Revolution and what followed) is almost entirely due to fossil fuels. This energy surge in turn powered a surge in material access and economic activity (and human population) in what is perhaps fittingly described as a fireworks show."

"The effects of the automobile in the 1950s not only gave us dating, it also destroyed our communities. Resources were no longer grouped together, as walking from place to place became impossible and automobiles became a requirement for existence. Face-to-face interaction died off, and so did the habit of walking — resulting in our current obesity crisis. This doesn’t mean that cars and dating are bad — what it means is that we now live in a context to which we are not adapted."

"It is entertaining to muse about what we might not have today if fossil fuels had never been available or utilized. Would we have computers or lasers? Would we have skyscrapers or photovoltaics? Would we have understood nuclear energy or fundamental physics that relied on high-energy experiments? Would we even have bicycles? It is, of course, impossible to say with any certainty. But since all of these things first emerged after fossil fuels took hold, and built upon each other in ways that at least had access to the benefits of fossil fuels, it is plausible that most of what we see around us in the developed world owes its existence to fossil fuels. In fact, one might say that it is a much tougher case to argue the counterfactual that we would still have comparable technology today had fossil fuels not burst onto the scene."

"One could say that the process of science opened the door to fossil fuels, but science and fossil fuels might be best described as a dynamic duo. Fossil fuels gave us the power to advance our science-amplified degree of control to an entirely new level. Resources that had been previously inaccessible became available. It became far easier to clear land for agriculture and other uses. We learned to make fertilizer from methane, unleashing unprecedented agricultural surpluses that inevitably resulted in a human population overshoot. Fossil-fueled furnaces led to steel, concrete, and other materials on a massive scale, paving the way to megacities and global trade. Science itself was amplified by having access to fossil fuels, via a flood of new devices and capabilities invented with—and powered by—cheap energy. Advances in science and technology in turn allowed greater access to buried fossil energy. This positive feedback arrangement facilitated runaway expansion of the enterprise, leading to a battery of hockey stick curves."

"Modernity is not time-tested, evolution-approved. It will fail. The question becomes: how do we respond to the failure? Should we cling like mad to modernity and let the failure escalate to even greater violence? Or should we encourage the bold among us to arrange a quiet, early exit to start exploring new ways to live?"

"Because so many elements of modern lifestyles are completely in the context of fossil fuels—how we feed people, how we manufacture cities and roads and consumer goods, how we extract materials from far-flung places and move them around the world, how we impose hegemony and “peace” through military might—we can’t surgically remove fossil fuels and pretend that the system would look anything like what actually developed."

"One of the prevailing narratives of our time is that we are innovating our way into the future at break-neck speed. It’s just dizzying how quickly the world around us is changing. Technology is this juggernaut that gets ever bigger, ever faster, and all we need to do is hold on for the wild ride into the infinitely cool. Problems get solved faster than we can blink. But… this is an old, outdated narrative… [and] we have a tendency to latch onto a story of humanity that we find appealing or flattering and stick with it long past its expiration date. Many readers at this point, in fact, may think that it’s sheer lunacy… to challenge such an obvious truth about the world we live in. Perhaps this will encourage said souls to read on—eager to witness a spectacular failure… to pull off this seemingly impossible stunt."