Handling History: How our understanding of the past can cultivate our actions in the present

 Handling History

How our understanding of the past can cultivate our actions in the present

In his seminal work, The Rise And Fall 

Of The Third Reich, William L. Shirer 

writes of an encounter between Adolf 

Hitler and his High School History 

teacher, Dr Leopold Poetsch. Describing 

his experience as a student, Hitler had writ-

ten, in his Mein Kampf, The teacher made 

history my favourite subject. And indeed, 

he had no such intention, it was then that 

I became a young revolutionary. Decades 

later, while touring Austria in triumph, in 

1938, Hitler stopped to see his old teacher. 

He conversed with him alone for an hour, 

and later confi ded to members of his party,

You cannot imagine how much I owe to 

that old man.

Poignant in hindsight, it is worth noting 

how our understanding of the past can cul-

tivate our actions in the present. We usual-

ly consider ourselves part of a continuum, 

a current in the larger river – how far we 

take that river, depends both on our ability 

and ideology. Present, as the English His-

torian, E.H.Carr says, can only be under-

stood in the light of the past.Or, its mirror 

version, by the French Historian Marc 

Bloch, which states that Misunderstanding 

the present is an inevitable consequence of 

ignorance of the past. As humans, we have 

a proclivity to associate with larger causes, 

with transcending ideas, and with the 

herds of our choice. As a direct result, we 

adhere to a version of offi cial history that 

serves the larger purpose of the herd. When 

Eric Hobsbawm famously drew an analogy 

between Historians and poppy-growers, 

this is precisely what he meant; to further 

the cause of an ideology and its ideologues, 

we need History. If there exists none, we 

need to invent one. History, whose conclu-

sions are foregone. History, which upholds 

regional and cultural biases. History, that 

pronounces judgement, before the trial. 

History, that most of all, serves the herd 

narrative.

As a subject, History is fascinating – like 

the Time Machine of H.G.Wells, it takes us to 

places in the past; like trekking through for-

ests and mountains, we discover new lands, 

and with every new discovery, a hundred 

more doors open. As a propaganda tool, his-

tory is unbearably boring; even if we see a 

river, we have to call it a waterfall, if we have 

been ordered to do so. The former drives 

from curiosity, the latter from conformity. 

The former results in fascination, the latter 

in bigotry. The former aligns one to the 

larger cause of humanity, the latter confi nes 

us to the small niche of partisanship.

Partly due to intellectual laziness, 

mainly a consequence of ideological fealty; 

a lot of what goes around as History is as 

an exercise in intellectual Knighthood. 

Such a history cannot be read through 

and through. It must be made certain 

that it is neither read well, nor read wide. 

Rather, it is understood through snip-

pets – ill devised screenshots of the past, 

that cherry-pick premises, for foregone 

conclusions. Were I a Sports Historian, 

writing biographies of great players, with 

extraordinary careers and many a record, 

but bent on to write only about the games 

they did not score - while factually true, 

my work would be contextually horren-

dous. This reading of history, as stale as 

it sounds, is a fairly common occurrence. 

With extreme ease, snipping our way 

through history, Gandhi can be proved a 

fascist and Hitler a pacifist, marauders as 

heroes and heroes as villains. For people 

in active political life for half a century, 

for intellectuals with thousands of publi-

cations, for civilizations with hundreds 

of years under their belt; snipping is as 

easy, as it is horrible. Put to use by the 

protagonists of a particular narrative, it 

is also often amplified as an official doc-

trine, with the twin whips of blasphemy 

and sedition, at constant disposal. With 

his usual brilliance, George Orwell, 

in 1984, epitomizes it thus: 

Who controls the past, controls the 

future, who controls the present controls 

the past.

A reading of history as it is, and not as 

we wish it to be. History, wherein provi-

dence does not take any particular inter-

est in my herd – which is the common 

heritage of humankind; is a panacea to 

many an evil confronting the world. My 

people, right under the heavens, centre 

of creation, founders of every good that 

we have hitherto seen, sometimes falter-

ing from envious enemy conspiracies, in 

an otherwise infallible civilization - is an 

obsolete fabrication that we must bid fare-

well. As humans, fi rst and last, all history 

is our history, its successes are ours and 

its failures are on us. The common bond of 

humanity shall ever evade us if history is 

made to serve ulterior motives and perform 

the work of polemical cannons. History, 

read well and wide, on the other hand, shall 

surely make us acquire what Bertrand Rus-

sell terms as, Citizenship of the intellectual 

commonwealth.