CHENNAI: Economist and 'alternative historian' Sanjeev Sanyal on Tuesday said that there has been a systematic effort to erase certain branches of India's history since Independence.
A member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Economic Advisory Council, Sanyal was in conversation during a session titled 'Lessons from Lost History' with Ravishankar, journalist and consulting editor of The Sunday Standard, at the Think Edu Conclave in Chennai.
The discussion explored what Sanyal described as deliberate obfuscation of certain parts of Indian history.
“This obfuscation of certain parts of Indian history was done by 'collaborators' of the Britishers who later became the intellectual elite after India’s independence in 1947,” claimed Sanyal.
To validate this theory, he discussed Mewa Singh Lopoke, a member of the Sikh Ghadar party in 1910, who had shot down the British Canadian WC Hopkinson. The Ghadar Party, an armed resistance group fighting for India’s independence, was among many revolutionary efforts, Sanyal argued, deliberately buried from mainstream narratives.
Another example Sanyal cited was about how the Communist Party of India (CPI) was birthed in the central Asian City of Tashkent and the role played by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in setting up a school to teach communism to Indian revolutionaries.
"British communists infiltrated the CPI in the 30s and supported Marxist ideas in Indian jails to cause a split among Indian revolutionaries," said Sanyal, adding that CPI even supported the British during the Second World War, against Netaji Subash Chandra Bose.
Evidence for these claims, Sanyal said, is "easily available", encouraging the audience to verify them online.
Ruing that none of these facts were told to Indians after 1947, Sanyal said that those who clandestinely supported the British emerged as important figures in post-independence India.
He cited the name of Yashpal, Hindi literature’s second most important figure, and claimed that he was a spy who had infiltrated the revolutionary movement against the Britishers and even been an informer to help in the capture of the revolutionary freedom fighter Chandrashekhar Azad.
"Collaborators became the ruling class and India’s history was what was told by the British earlier and later by these collaborators," he said.
In response to Ravishankar’s question on how these versions of history could be sanitised, Sanyal said that history has to be written using primary evidence to prove that the current official version isn’t true. “This doesn’t mean I am advocating a change in textbooks,” he said.
As an example, he highlighted that though the Indian National Congress indeed led the freedom struggle, the Gandhi-Nehru family weren’t the sole contributor, pointing to revolutionaries like Subhas Chandra Bose, who was once elected as Congress president, pointing to revolutionaries like Subhas Chandra Bose, who was once elected as Congress president.
Sanyal further alleged that attempts to incorporate the contributions of revolutionaries in Indian history had been curtailed. In the 1950s, he claimed, famous historian RC Majumdar had been deputed to write the official history of India’s freedom struggle, but he was thrown out after his first draft had detailed the role played by revolutionaries.
Sanyal also highlighted the physical erasure of sites significant to revolutionary history. He noted that the Cellular Jail in the Andamans and the Delhi Central Jail—where many revolutionaries were incarcerated—were demolished. The site of the Delhi Central Jail now houses Maulana Azad Medical College.
When an audience member asked about the underrepresentation of South Indian freedom fighters, Sanyal encouraged him to become a historian and write about such topics and said that a lot of material was now available online. He also invoked the role played by the Maruthupandi brothers in the fight against the Britishers and spoke about VVS Aiyar, an associate of VD Savarkar.
