Historical Dilemmas

Historical Dilemmas appeared in The Hans India, an up and coming English newspaper published from Hyderabad and other centres, in its issue dated November 5, 2011. Click here to see the original: Historical Dilemmas

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‘Which one of us is an Aryan and which a Dravidian?’ whispered my cousin Krishna. He and I were together in the same class till Class VIII and in the same school till Class XII. Krishna was always inquisitive and used to question almost everything that was put to him. But it was difficult to dismiss his question out of hand. We were in the ‘Social Studies’ class in Class VI at the time and our teacher was teaching us about ‘Aryans’ and ‘Dravidians’. He explained, ‘the Aryans were fair, tall and well-built’ and the ‘Dravidians were dark, short and lean’. Our confusion was because Krishna was fair, short and plump and I was dark, tall and lean. Additionally our community was known as ‘Dravidian-Brahmin’. Wasn’t it an oxymoron if Brahmins were ‘Aryan’ by origin?  We owe the prefix ‘Dravidian’ to our emigration from Tamil Nadu. History was therefore a dilemma to us then and the question ‘are we Aryan or Dravidian’ continued to nag.

My father who was a member of the ‘Praja Socialist Party’ and an avid fan of the poet Sri Sri added to the confusion by making me read his ‘Desa Charitralu’ (Histories of Nations) when I was ten. Weren’t these lines, “An account of the amours of a queen or the expenditure on a siege does not make the essence of history” confusing enough?  For the history we were taught was full of incursions and battles: Ghazni and Ghori and Panipat and Plassey etc. If that were not enough we studied Tennyson’s ‘The charge of the light brigade’ (“Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die!”), as an English lesson.

To be frank, we used to like ‘History’ because it was easy from an examination point of view. All that we had to do was remember, “… had roads laid; trees planted along the roads; built rest houses for travellers and dug ponds for providing drinking water and irrigation”. This generic statement was as applicable to the Mauryas and the Guptas as to Kanishka, Sri Harsha, Akbar or Sri Krishna Deva Raya. We had to pad it up a bit to suit individual emperors and we were done. The more the padding the more marks one got!

Coming back to the confusion Sri Sri caused, he did not stop with his questions about the ‘amours of queens’ and ‘expenditures of sieges’. He wanted to know, “Who were the bearers of the King’s palanquin; who the coolies that carted the stones for building Taj Mahal?”

I could not question this as my father introduced the lyric to me. In those days, we never questioned our parents’ or other elders’ wisdom, much less a father’s. “Ours not to reason why; ours but to do and lie!” True, as children, we had to lie at times of what we did or what we did not do. In fact, recalling my childhood, I do not remember ever to have stood directly before my father to speak to him but did so only standing beside grandfather or grandmother. So I put it to my cousin Krishna. He could question Sri Sri’s lines. He could not have questioned his father nor my father in his presence but it was a different matter when neither of them was present.

Krishna pondered over the question, “…who [were] the coolies that carted the stones for building Taj Mahal?” He said introducing all those coolies into history would pose problems. Firstly, even if we had collected the names of all the 20,000 workers who toiled for twenty two years to build the Taj Mahal, which was well nigh impossible after four hundred years, publishing a book with all those names would make a four hundred page book, at fifty names a page. Secondly, we could not use the generic statement mentioned above to answer questions in history examinations. For whoever had heard of a coolie, who “had roads laid; trees planted along the roads; built rest houses for travellers and dug ponds for providing drinking water and irrigation?” It was a different matter with kings and emperors!

Krishna and I separated when we finished school and joined college but the ‘Aryan’, ‘Dravidian’ question continued to haunt me. This was much before the ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’ (or ‘Aryan Migration Theory’) divided historians along ideological lines. It had nothing to do with whether some colonial or evangelical interests planted the AIT/AMT in our history text books. It had to do with the origins of our community as depicted by my great-grandfather in his incomplete auto-biography. According to him we fled from Saurastra at the first wave of Mohammedan invasions around the tenth century, traversed the west coast and entered Tamil Nadu through the Palghat gap in the Western ghats. We remained in the lush Tanjavaur delta for about five hundred years. However if the community felt that it was safely settled there it was mistaken. Five hundred years after it arrived there it had to be on the move again this time because nature intervened in the form of a famine. The community had to migrate again in search of greener pastures and to cut a long story short, moved north to settle in various places of Andhra. So, are we ‘Aryan’ or ‘Dravidian’; Sanskrit speakers (which we presumably were in the distant past) or Gujaratis or Tamilians or Telugus? And to add to the muddle, are we now Telanganites or Andhras?