Every generation or so, in study courses in the Humanities, writers and works are discarded and replaced with new ones. When the English literature and language were first introduced in Indian colleges and schools, a fierce debate raged in Britain between the Orientalists who knew something about our classical languages such as Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic and the Evangelists who had gained a strong foothold.
The latter group saw our own literature as something to be avoided — what with gods fighting humans and animals and demons prevailing occasionally and all of them going through birth after birth. Even in the choice of writers from English literature they were careful to prescribe only those works that they felt would “elevate” the natives, were sure to “civilise” them and give them some “moral polish”. “No” to Keats’s Eve of St Agnes and “yes” to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Fifty years ago, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and Charles Lamb were prescribed in the BA English Literature syllabus, but some time in the 1980s, they disappeared. Rare is the student of English literature today who has read William Hazlitt or even heard of him.
Literary writers and their concerns fall out of fashion, but should history be viewed in the same way? When my brother and I were 14, my father handed us a heavy hardbound book. It was Nehru’s Glimpses of World History, a second reprint of the second edition published in India as a single volume in 1962. Its first printing in India was in 1934, and comprised 196 letters written by Nehru to his daughter, Indira Priyadarshini. Written more than 80 years ago from various prisons of British India, he opens by saying, “I am writing these lines while I have the chance to do so, before events forestall me…I do not know when or where these letters will be published, or whether they will be published at all, for India is a strange land today and it is difficult to prophesy.” He goes on to say that he is sad about not being able to send her any “material” gift from prison, so he would try to give her something he could “afford”, a series of letters from his heart.
Based on notes kept about books he had read and relying heavily on H.G. Wells’s An Outline of History, these letters are one-on-one history lessons: highly personal, emotional and written with the depth and perception of a true humanist who rarely condemned but strove to understand the psychology of social leaders, thinkers, tyrants and princes. He wanted his daughter to know why people did what they did and how events in one part of the world gradually affected what happened elsewhere — sometimes very rapidly, sometimes much, much later.
The first letter is dated October 26, 1930, on Indira’s 13th birthday. Though according to our modern calendar, her birthday falls on November 19, her father’s greetings follow the Samvat almanac — therefore, the date of October 26. The style and passion of Nehru’s letters inspired me to read on my own and explore world history in books that I was too immature to have located on my own. Indeed, he himself says that he was going to write about history because he was not happy about the way it was taught in schools.
Some of the letters are like milestones in my memory: A thousand years of China; The village republics of India; A famous conqueror but a conceited young man; South India overshadows the North; A jump back to Mohen-jo-daro and many others. Considered one of the first attempts at historiography from a non-Eurocentric angle, his chapter on Genghis Khan and the Mongol invasion overturned the prevailing European views of his time. If I could wish something for every Indian child, it would be that they each receive a copy as a birthday present because one of the lines from the book is both relevant and significant even today: “It would be foolish not to recognise the greatness of Europe. But it would be equally foolish to forget the greatness of Asia.”
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