If we take a long view of history, we shall see that all human beings and their social forms have certain fundamental characteristics which are more primary than the differences which seem to dominate our minds. Yet the differences are distinctive and these give form and flavour to a culture which gives to its members a poise and an assurance derived from a delicate balance of forces striving in contrary directions. Indian culture, for instance, is "a long and varied tradition, a great uninterrupted endeavour in philosophy and religion, in art and literature, in science and humanities." When we speak of a historic or national culture, we refer to the norms and beliefs which sustain it, the spiritual forces which determine its social framework. The very names-Hindu India, Buddhist Asia, Western Christendom, or Islamic Society-suggest that spiritual traditions and philosophies of life underlie each society. The social institutions, economic arrangements and scientific beliefs are all bound together by certain ideals by which men overcome the dualism of their nature-the animal and the human, instinct and intellect, individual and society. As long as a society lives by its ideals, its tools, forms and institutions have meaning; if the faith fails, the society loses its direction and guide. India has had its own ideals. As Father Heras said: "The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria have been blotted out from the map of the world. But that of India, the first lights of which have been discovered in modern times along the banks of the Indus, is still alive." And, Professor Frankfort goes a step further: "It has been established beyond a possibility of doubt that India played a part in that early complex culture which shaped the civilized world before the advent of the Greeks."
There is a definite Indian view of man, creation, progress, change and history which I have sought to identify in this work. This view is so distinct and its voice so clear that one can hear it forever sounding across the centuries making clear the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, dynasties come and go, creeds rise and fall, but the basic message is written on the tablets of eternity, making it evident that history is the development and revelation of providence, even though we may read it through our prejudices. Logos (Word of God) is in the facts of history as truly as it is in the march of seasons, the revolutions of the planets or the architecture of the world. That perhaps explains why the best thing which we derive from history is the enthusiasm (from "theos", ie, God) that it raises in us. That also explains why in Indian view of history, religion holds the mystery of existence. The Indian religions, as Arnold Toynbee has noted, are not exclusive--minded. They are ready to allow that there may be alternative approaches to the mystery. The Rigveda is a classical illustration of this. This catholic-minded Indian religious spirit is the way of salvation for all religions in an age in which we have to learn to live as a single family, if we are not to destroy ourselves. The Indian view of history warns man that the choice before him is either cooperation in a spirit of freedom and understanding or conflict in an atmosphere of fear, suspicion and jealousy. The future of religion (let it be noted by all fundamentalists and terrorists) and mankind will depend on the choice man makes. While discord leads to destruction, concord would lead to life. As Asoka advised: Samavaya eva sadhuh.
The Indian view of history insists that while an historian ought to be exact, sincere, and impartial, free from passion, and unbiased by interest, fear, resentment or affection, and faithful to the truth, which is the mother of history, the preserver of great actions, the enemy of oblivion, the witness of the past, and the director of the future, the impartiality of the historian is not that of the mirror which merely reflects but of the judge who sees, listens and decides.
In the course of this work, I have referred to a large number of works to whose authors I must record my gratitude. I acknowledge with thanks the permission accorded to me by my publishers to reproduce a few portions of their title: Contemporary Social and Political Theories. I also thank Dr MG Gupta, former member of the faculty of Political Science and History, Allahabad University, who after retirement has settled down to academic work in a spirit of dynamic tranquillity and with whom I have discussed quite a few problems of historical interpretation. My son, Sugam Anand, a young lecturer in history at the Agra College has read through the typescript and has otherwise helped me in checking references.
While I am grateful to those with whom I have discussed various issues threshed out in this work, the views expressed here are my own, and I am alone responsible for any error of fact or interpretation that might have crept in.
During the last about eighty years, lot of serious work has been done on the question, "What is History'? At one time, it was universally held that history is a corpus of ascertained facts which are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, "like fish on the fishmonger's slab." The historian, it was supposed, collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him. Lord Acton, whose "culinary tastes" were austere, wanted them served plain. Even Sir George Clark, although critical of Acton, contrasted the "hardcore of facts" in history with the "surrounding pulp of disputable interpretation",2 perhaps forgetting that the pulpy part of the fruit is more rewarding than the hard core. The ultimate wisdom of the empirical, comm-on sense school of history was: First get your facts straight, then plunge at your peril into the shifty sands of interpretation As CP Scott put it: "Facts are sacred, opinion is free."
Indeed, the first challenge to the doctrine of the primacy and autonomy of facts in history came from Germany. Dilthey was one of these challengers. From Germany, the torch passed to Italy where Croce began to propound a philosophy which proclaimed that all history is "contemporary history". What he meant was that history consists essentially in seeing the past through the eyes of the present and in the light of its problems, and that the main work of the historian is not to record but to evaluate, for, if he does not evaluate how can he know what is worth recording? This view was expressed by Carl Becker, an American historian, when he declared that the "facts of history do not exist for historian till he creates them." After 1920, Croce became more vocal and he materially influenced Collingwood who made considerable contribution to the philosophy of history. He reasoned that the philosophy of history is concerned neither with "the past by itself", nor with "the historian's thought about it by itself" but with the two things in their mutual relations. The past which a historian studies is not a dead past but a past which, in some sense, is still living in the present. But a past act is dead, meaningless to the historian unless he can understand the thought that lay behind it.
Hence all history is the history of thought all history is the re-enactment in the historian's mind of the thought whose history he is studying. The reconstitution of the past in the historian's mind is dependent on empirical evidence. But the unravelling of this empirical evidence is not a mere recital of facts; it involves the selection and interpretation of facts which alone makes facts historical facts. In other words, history is "the historian's experience; it is made by nobody except the historian. To write history is to make it." In this context, therefore, nobody now accepts seriously Goethe's characterization of history as "the most absurd of all things, a web of nonsense for the higher thinker",5 or Napoleon's less charitable and more sceptical indictment that history is nothing but a fable agreed upon.
Despite such lofty disdain, historians and readers of history proceed on the assumption that history and the sense of the historical have profoundly influenced human thought and action, and that historical fact of which history is made can be studied and evaluated in terms of reasonable objectivity, and a consistent pattern of intelligibility. True that the facts of history cannot be purely objective, since they became facts of history only in virtue of the significance attached to them by the historian. Objectivity in history cannot, therefore, be an objectivity of fact but only of relation, of the relation between fact and interpretation, between past, present and future. The concept of "absolute truth" is not appropriate to the world of history or perhaps even to the world of science. It is only the simplest kind of historical statement that can be adjudged absolutely true or absolutely false the first nuclear bomb was used on 6 August, 1945-but to say that Iraqi defeat in the Gulf War in February 1991 was due to the stupidity of Saddam Husain or the genius of Bush is so inadequate as to be altogether misleading. But it cannot be called absolutely false. In any case, the historian does not deal in absolutes of this kind.
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