Haul 2: Goalless exploration

Here, There Be Monsters: Why We Need to Know Our History

Where we come from

If we don’t know where we come from, can we know where we are, or where we’re going? If we don’t know who our ancestors were, can we ever understand others and, perhaps most importantly, understand ourselves?

Because as much as contemporary culture valorises the individual, and as much as we’re seduced by the romance of the lone wolf, we are relational beings. We all have ties, strong ones and weak ones, that bind us together for better or worse. We have families and our own groups, which are in turn embedded in a community, a state and a nation. Our fate is inextricably entwined with the fate of the people around us.

As I write this, I’m reminded of that profoundly evocative passage in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (opens in a new tab), where he writes:

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea.

So how do we know ourselves? Slavoj Žižek would tell us not to bother looking inside, because all we’ll find in there is, to use his word, shit. He may have a point. Knowing oneself is the odyssey of a lifetime, a long journey full of grand adventures and battles with monsters.

But if we’re made by our ties to the people around us, we’re also made by the people who came before us. Which means the other way of knowing who we are is to know our history.

And by history I don’t mean the mechanical accumulation of facts, dates, events and biographies. That’s not what knowing history is. I mean an intellectually honest and open exploration of the past. Though I’m starting to realise that being honest and open isn’t enough. The story of our species has its good, bad, ugly and downright horrendous chapters. It’s a story written in blood, and for some people the blood is a lot darker than for others.

Which is why learning history takes a certain bravery. Because, to quote another one of my favourite philosophers, Captain Hector Barbossa:

You’re off the edge of the map, mate! Here, there be monsters!

Why I’m writing this

The reason I’m writing this is the historian Margaret Macmillan. I don’t remember exactly when, but more than a year ago, on one of those morning commutes with a friend, I listened to a lecture of hers on what history can teach us. And it’s one of those talks that, to put it mildly, fucks you up. There’s such a gravity to it that you keep coming back to it. I’ve listened to it several times since, and what she said only feels more urgent, because we live in truly treacherous times.

At Davos in 2023, sharing a panel with Adam Tooze, the historian who popularised the word “polycrisis,” Niall Ferguson waved the term away (opens in a new tab). The word, he said, “makes me think of polystyrene and polyester, things I never much liked.” A financial crash, a populist backlash, a new cold war, a pandemic, a war in Europe: to him, that’s just history happening. And he might be right. But as a creature of this era, it doesn’t feel like just history happening. It feels discordant and discombobulating.

Part of it is that there’s a profound sense of otherness in the air. Nationalism is on the rise, and with it the so-called strongman leader, a term doing a lot of heavy lifting. Like such leaders throughout history, they’re concocting an edited version of the past to stoke our deeply ingrained us-versus-them instincts. They promise a racially, ethnically and culturally pure society that puts the “rightful inheritors” of the land back on top, and appeal to our basest instinct: to shut people out. More often than not, that means immigrants, refugees and naturalised citizens, people who came from somewhere else and made a home.

We’re fed a steady diet of this stuff, designed to pit us against one another and make us forget that, wherever we live, there are more ties that bind us than separate us. We’re being turned against our fellow cosmopolitans. And I don’t mean cosmopolitan in the sense of urban and sophisticated, but in the truest sense of the Greek word kosmopolitēs, a citizen of the world. (Diogenes the Cynic, asked where he came from, supposedly answered just that.)

It’s a dark and depressing time. There’s a fetishisation not only of the strongman, but of an imagined past in which some people are purer and superior to others. We are the same creatures who painted the Mona Lisa, carved the temples of Ellora, went to the moon, invented the mRNA vaccine and taught sand how to talk. And yet we still shun our fellow humans for the colour of their skin, the sound of their tongue, the place of their birth and the choice of their faith. This dichotomy of world-altering genius and base stupidity is something I’ll never stop being amazed by, even on my deathbed.

So how do we deal with this moment? Apart from lots and lots of therapy, psychedelics, a fair amount of alcohol and other assorted substances, I think the answer is history.

Why? The sharp-eyed reader will have noticed I’ve been rambling a fair bit, and might ask, rightly, why we need to know history at all. The best answer I’ve found comes from one of my all-time favourite essays, the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel’s piece in Aeon (opens in a new tab) on why asking “Why?” is what makes us human:

Often, our best success is only to better appreciate the shape of our ignorance.

Knowing the shape of your ignorance is a humbling thing, and that, for me, is what history does. It shrinks our ego. It situates us in the vast sweep of time and shrinks our existence to almost nothing. It makes us realise the true density of reality, past, present and future. And in doing that, it helps us understand the people around us better, and in the process we get to know ourselves a little better too. Because as much as we like to think of ourselves as enlightened individuals, we are profoundly relational creatures.

But knowing history isn’t only a way to know others, and through them, ourselves. It’s also our best defence against the siren songs of those who bastardise our histories, the very histories that bind us together, and use them to divide us, to pit us against one another, and to conjure up enemies where there should be none.

History, the pitiful creature

But learning history isn’t as easy as it seems. You can’t just pick up a book and read it. Well, that’s part of it, but history is told by human beings, and we are flawed creatures, to say the least.

And history itself, if I can anthropomorphise it, is a pitiful creature. It’s forever being forced to do other people’s bidding, constantly victimised by people in power for their own greedy and nefarious purposes. To try and understand your history is to run into bewildering facts: often incomplete, often paradoxical, often painful.

History is never neutral. There’s always an imbalance in the way it’s told. It’s easy to dismiss history as just a story told after the fact, and I’ll admit that’s a line I’ve used myself, many times, with friends and colleagues. But it’s a myopic, impoverished way of understanding it. The way I think about it now, history is a dim light in an ocean of darkness. It can’t show you everything. What it does show you is just how much darkness there is out there.

And we live in a moment where everyone has a claim on that light. People across the political spectrum, all over the world, are mining the past for grievances and causes to legitimise whatever brand of opium they’re peddling. The historian Eric Hobsbawm put it brilliantly: history is to nationalist and fundamentalist ideologies what poppies are to heroin addiction. It’s the raw material.

They mine history for complaints, for wounds, for a sense of victimhood that can be weaponised to legitimise their authority, and then, in doing so, to nakedly grab power. For a lot of people, history serves the same purpose as a religious creation myth. It’s the wellspring of their power and legitimacy, and they enslave it in their quest to reclaim some imagined glory. And so many of history’s greatest tragedies were preceded by exactly this: people mining the past to legitimise the evils they went on to commit.

Why does it work? I don’t want to say we’re hardwired for it, but we do end up looking up to people in positions of authority. We trust them, and somewhere along the way we cede some of our agency to them, whether out of a need to belong, blind allegiance, or plain admiration. And with history, that trust matters even more, because most of us can’t check the past for ourselves. We can’t read ancient inscriptions or dig through archives. We have to take someone’s word for it, which means whoever tells the story holds almost all the cards.

The stories we tell ourselves

Our sense of identity is tied to the stories we tell ourselves, and those stories are usually comforting ones. They come in two flavours: “we were great” and “we were wronged.” Rarely are we brave enough to tell the discomforting ones. But it’s exactly this need for comfort that gets weaponised, and gets us to do the very things that end up as history’s cautionary tales. As important as these stories are to our sense of place and belonging, refusing to grapple with the events that violate them is the ultimate act of intellectual dishonesty.

So, as unfashionable and as psychologically painful as it might be, dig into the stories you’ve been sold and the stories you bought into. Look underneath the visions your leader or your group has handed you. You’ll be shocked at how many things don’t stand up to scrutiny. And you’ll realise that we’re all sheep in one giant flock, following a shepherd who’s getting us to do his or her bidding in the quest for power and wealth.

And I should add, I’m part of the same flock. I’m not writing this from some place of superiority, looking down on anyone. I’m writing this as someone who’s realised how important it is to question every single bloody thing peddled by the people in power, the people to whom we outsource the job of giving us a good life.

I’ll give you my own example. I grew up imbibing the same prejudices about religion and caste as many other Indians. It took me a very, very long time to see the folly of it, and I had to unlearn a lot of conscious and unconscious prejudice I’d soaked up growing up amongst my people. It’s not a comfortable story to tell about yourself. But stepping aside and questioning things gave me a far more nuanced view of reality than I’d ever have arrived at otherwise. Questioning isn’t just a way of seeing the world outside. It’s a way of knowing yourself from within. Turns out Žižek was wrong, or at least half wrong. Look inside honestly enough, and you’ll find history in there too.

And questioning doesn’t mean cynicism or perpetual doubt. It means an honest exploration of the context and nuance that permeate everything that happens in the world. Context is everything. And context is just another word for history.

No one survives history’s judgement

Coincidentally, I’ve also been reading Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial India After Gandhi, and one of the things it’s changed for me is how I think about Jawaharlal Nehru. Like most Indians, my understanding of Nehru was limited to the flimsy nonsense in our social science textbooks and the caricature of the socialist who kneecapped India’s economic rise. After reading Guha, I realised how foolish that understanding was. I was historically blind. I didn’t have the facts to understand the man.

That doesn’t mean the criticism is wrong. His enchantment with socialist planning probably did hold India’s economy back. The writer Gurcharan Das tells a story (opens in a new tab) from the mid-1970s, when he was working for the company that made Vicks VapoRub. A flu epidemic sent sales through the roof, past the production limit in the company’s licence, and a summons arrived from Delhi. At the hearing, a joint secretary treated him like a criminal and pronounced him guilty, even though his product had been easing the misery of millions during an epidemic. On his way out, Das asked the official to imagine how India would look when The New York Times reported that it punished a company for exactly that. The government quietly dropped the inquiry. But the lesson stuck. As Das puts it, “Nehru’s License Raj has snatched economic freedom.” He gave up on socialism that day.

But Nehru also had an unenviable job. He had to hold together a country that plenty of clever people were sure couldn’t be held together. As Guha shows, the doubters go back a long way. Speaking at Cambridge in the 1880s, the senior Raj official Sir John Strachey told his audience that the first and most essential thing to learn about India was that “there is not, and never was an India.” After independence, the prophets of doom just changed accents. In his 1960 book India: The Most Dangerous Decades, the American political scientist Selig Harrison concluded that Indian nationalism would most likely survive only through a series of authoritarian regimes. And in early 1967, ahead of the first elections after Nehru’s death, the Times of London ran a series by its Delhi correspondent, Neville Maxwell, called “India’s Disintegrating Democracy.” He called them the fourth, and “surely last,” general election.

They had their reasons. This was a country deeply divided along ethnic, linguistic, religious and caste lines. A country healing from the scars of colonial subjugation, but also still living under the darkness of caste and religion, and that hadn’t yet grappled with the horrors of its own history. Holding that together was no small thing.

So I still judge Nehru. I just do it with context now instead of a textbook caricature. Understand first, then judge. (And yes, I’m aware Guha is broadly sympathetic to Nehru, so I may well be swapping one framing for another. That’s the trap.)

The same goes for the Father of the Nation. As Guha recounts in Gandhi Before India, the young Gandhi in South Africa held deeply racist views, and you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it. It’s there in his own letters. In 1893, writing to the Natal parliament, he complained of a belief in the colony that Indians were “a little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa.” In 1904, he asked a Johannesburg health officer to move Africans out of a slum where they lived alongside Indians:

About the mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly.

That same year he wrote that the Indian, unlike the African, had no “war-dances, nor does he drink Kaffir beer.” And during the 1905 plague in Durban, he objected to Indians and Africans being “herded together indiscriminately at the hospital.” (BBC (opens in a new tab))

He believed in a racial hierarchy, one in which Indians, as fellow Aryans, deserved to be treated on par with Europeans while Africans were lesser. Guha’s view, which he lays out in his latest book, Arguments with Gandhi (he talks it through in this podcast (opens in a new tab)), is that Gandhi outgrew these prejudices. By the 1930s and 40s he had embraced antiracist principles and was scolding fellow Indians for disparaging Africans. On caste, Guha points out that Gandhi was almost alone among Congress leaders in fighting untouchability, and was viciously attacked by orthodox Hindus for it. But even that is contested. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed argue in The South African Gandhi that his racism ran deeper and lasted longer. And Ambedkar would flatly reject the idea that Gandhi fought caste, given how long Gandhi defended the varna system. Even the story of Gandhi’s growth is contested history. As Guha himself concludes, “the arguments shall continue.”

Which is my point. No one, king or commoner, survives the judgement of history unscathed. We are deeply human, and so were the people who shaped our history. History shows us there are no pure heroes and villains. Most of us are both Jekyll and Hyde.

The Aryan question

Gandhi’s “Aryan” kinship claims lead straight into one of the biggest fights over Indian history today.

Hindu nationalists have staked a claim on India’s past by rejecting the “Aryan invasion theory” and insisting that Indians were always here: the immaculate people of the soil, pure and virtuous, the rightful inheritors of this land. But here’s the thing. Most historians reject the invasion theory too. The 19th-century picture of a conquering race sweeping into India is largely dead. What most scholars hold now is a migration theory: speakers of Indo-European languages moved into the subcontinent gradually, over centuries, and mixed with the people already here.

Genetics has only made this more interesting. A 2019 study of a roughly 4,500-year-old skeleton from Rakhigarhi, a Harappan site in Haryana, found no steppe ancestry. But Indians today do carry steppe ancestry in varying amounts, which suggests the mixing came after the Indus Valley Civilisation. And here’s the delicious bit: the same study was read in completely opposite ways. Some hailed it as the final nail in the coffin of any Aryan migration; others read it as evidence that the migration simply happened later. One skeleton, two stories, each side mining it for what it wanted.

As Romila Thapar explains in Early India, “Aryan” was originally a linguistic and cultural label, not a racial one. In the ancient texts, she notes, it refers to “persons of status who speak Sanskrit and observe caste regulations.” So not a race, but not exactly innocent either: it was a marker of status and caste. The man most associated with popularising the word in the West was Max Müller, a scholar who never set foot in India yet wrote volume after volume on its Sanskritised past. To be fair to him, he later insisted the word was linguistic and mocked the idea of an “Aryan race.” But by then 19th-century Europe had already turned it into a race, and we know where that ended.

Hitler sold Germans exactly the kind of story I’ve been describing: a glorious, pure Aryan past waiting to be reclaimed. The conservative elites who helped him into power thought they could control him. What followed was a period of unimaginable brutality, and the starkest reminder of the price we pay for the abuse of history.

Back home, the colonial scholar who did the most damage to how we understand our own past was probably James Mill. His History of British India (1817) was hugely influential, and like Müller, he never visited India. In fact he had the gall to argue that this made him more objective.

Mill gave us the neat periodisation that still haunts us: a Hindu period, a Muslim period, a British period. In his telling, India was a stagnant land ruled by despots, an idea that ran from Montesquieu through to Marx and is known as Oriental despotism. Which brings me to a rich irony. Today’s nationalists reject the Aryan migration as a colonial invention, but happily embrace Mill’s Hindu-Muslim-British periodisation, which is every bit as colonial: a glorious Hindu past, a dark Muslim age. They throw out one colonial story and keep the other, because it suits them. The same history Indians once rebelled against is now being peddled back to us.

And it isn’t one side’s game. The racial reading of “Aryan” cut both ways. As Thapar points out, it appealed to some scholars of Dravidian languages, who proposed a distinct Dravidian race that came before the Aryans, pointing to how differently the two language families build their words. Echoes of that idea are still around. Look at Keeladi in Tamil Nadu, the Sangam-era urban site near Madurai. Its excavator, Amarnath Ramakrishna, dates its earliest activity to around the 8th century BCE. The Archaeological Survey of India has asked him to revise his report and suggested the earliest dates are no older than roughly 300 BCE. He refused. Tamil Nadu’s ruling party accuses the Centre of suppressing Tamil antiquity; the ASI says it’s just following due process. I genuinely don’t know who’s right. But I do notice that both sides already know which answer they want.

What all of these claims forget is that there are no immaculate people anywhere. As much as we are children of our parents, we are children of history. We’ve always been shaped and reshaped by its tides, by trade, by war, by conquest, by our interactions with people within and beyond our shores. What we think of as ours very rarely is. The language we speak, the food we eat, the songs we sing, the stories we tell: all of it is inherited from centuries of influences from all over the world.

What history can and can’t do

Which brings me back to Margaret Macmillan, and the point I really wanted to make. History can’t give us answers. It can’t tell us what will happen. What it can do is show us the patterns of the past. As she put it in the lecture (opens in a new tab) that started all this:

History, therefore, I think is hugely important in understanding. It’s also, I think, very important in helping us to formulate questions about the present. As we look at what’s happening, we can use history to help us at least formulate the questions. I don’t believe that history is going to give us very clear answers. I think if you want very clear answers about what the future is going to be, you are much better off going to an astrologer. History is not going to give us a blueprint for the future, but it will give us warning signs. I think that history can be, in a very simple way, like the sort of signs you see on a road which warn you that there’s a bad corner coming up ahead, or there’s a narrow bridge, or that the road gets very icy in the winter and you probably need a particular kind of snow tire if you’re going to drive on that road. And I think that’s what history can do: it can help us at least to formulate the sorts of questions we may want to know, because what history does, among other things, is offer alternatives.

It reminds us that there were other ways of organizing societies, other ways of seeing the world, other ways of doing things. There’s a tendency always in the present to assume that what we’re doing is the right thing, that we have somehow got human wisdom at our fingertips, that we know better than anyone in the past. I think what history does is remind us that what we think of as perfectly normal was not thought of as normal in other pasts, in other societies. It doesn’t mean that we want to emulate them, because they are after all in a very different world. The past, as an English writer said, is a different country, and I think we have to remember that.

Opening up our imaginations to possibilities—to the possibility, among other things, that we’re not always going to be right, that we don’t always know everything—I think is very important. Among other things, such opening up can teach us a sort of humility, and I think a humility as we approach the very complexities of human affairs is in fact a good thing. What the past teaches us, among other things, is that there were plenty of people in the past who were very clever, very powerful, had all sorts of information at their fingertips, and they got it very, very wrong.

That last point, about alternatives, matters. History doesn’t only warn us; it can show us what’s possible. Think of the patronage that nurtured the Da Vincis and the Michelangelos, or the poets and scholars of India’s royal courts. That’s not a recipe, and the patrons had their own motives, but it’s proof that the right conditions can bring out the best in us.

But perhaps the most important thing history does, and Macmillan says this beautifully, is teach us to ask better questions. If it does nothing more than teach us humility, skepticism and awareness of ourselves, she writes, it has done something useful. Her book on 1914 makes the point brutally. The men who steered Europe into the First World War “were not fools,” she says. They were clever and experienced, and they were completely wrong, because their assumptions were so deeply ingrained they couldn’t see them. That’s why you read history. Not to find comforting stories or conclusions. That’s the bastardised version of history, told by people who’ve never outgrown their own prejudices.

And in saying all this, I don’t mean that history is some rarefied truth handed down from the heavens by objective historians who’ve transcended the rest of us flawed humans. It isn’t. Maybe it’s a quirk of how we perceive things, but we often feel that history bends inevitably towards progress, that it runs on laws, as Marx believed. It doesn’t. The future is unknowable. All of us, humanity as a whole, are always standing at the edge of the map, staring into a darkness pregnant with a million branching possibilities, all of them gestating, none of them certain.

Historians aren’t innocent bystanders either. Some of history’s worst atrocities were abetted by historians who told twisted, imagined versions of the past. Historians are creatures of their time, and they can only know what can be known in that time. When I say history shows us the shape of our ignorance, that goes for historians too. The good ones aren’t the ones who are sure about everything. They know what is known and, more importantly, what isn’t. To borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase, they respect the unknown unknowns, and they know that what they’ve found is only a small glimpse of a much richer past.

So the way to engage with history isn’t to read one take or one interpretation. It’s to read the dizzying variety of versions out there, make up our own minds by leaning on the best evidence available at the time, and change them when better evidence comes along. We won’t get everything right. That isn’t possible. But we’ll end up a little less ignorant.

History, in other words, is never settled. It’s always being questioned and contested, and in that crucible you find the confusing, paradoxical facts that force you to resist easy conclusions and easy judgements. And you realise that what we know of history is a handful of recorded facts, mostly told by elites and the privileged, ignoring the perspectives of the marginalised.

That realisation hit me reading a review in Frontline (opens in a new tab) of A Shudra Life by the scholar Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd. Turning Gandhi’s language on its head, Ilaiah argues that what the dominant nation state calls “truth” is really a series of calculated “untruths.” From the standpoint of the people he calls the Dalit-Bahujan, the religious texts, chronicles and nationalist myths we grew up on erase the history of the people who actually produced things and did the labour. And telling that other history comes at a price. As the review notes, he’s been celebrated abroad as a pioneering political theorist, while at home he’s been shut out of elite academic circles and hit with lawsuits, surveillance and death threats.

Remember the blood I mentioned at the start, the blood that’s darker for some people than for others? Most of it was never written down. And those who try to write it down are made to pay for it.

History isn’t meant to give us answers. That’s the role of fairy tales. What history is meant to do is help us ask better questions, often ones that don’t have answers yet. It leads us into doubt and uncertainty, and that’s where it earns its keep. Not because we’re meant to live there, but because we have to pass through it. As Schwitzgebel argues, creating doubt where there was none can itself be progress, as long as that doubt honestly reflects what we don’t know. It shows us that there aren’t always answers, and that even when there are, they’re rarely black and white. And, going back to where I started, it shows us the shape of our own ignorance: how messy and incomplete our knowledge is, and always will be.

We are as much the children of history as we are of our parents. We’re the offspring of the holy and unholy union of the histories of our families, communities, regions, nations and humanity as a whole. We are, in a very real sense, marinated in history. The least we can do is have the courage to look at it honestly.

I could keep going on and on, but in the interest of preserving your sanity, I’ll stop here. B.