The India of my Dreams
Sunday, 16 December 2012
Sunday, 2 December 2012
The importance of having people’s histories
Sukumaran C. V.
“There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.” — Howard Zinn.
Never have I read a book which tells the history from the viewpoint of the victims till I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zinn shows us history from the viewpoint of the Native Americans, from the standpoint of the African American slaves, from the perspective of the workers and he helps us to see history through women who are always ‘intimately oppressed’ and conspicuous in all history by their absence. Never have I read a book which has made me sleepless as Zinn's People's History has.
“Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades. Las Casas tells how two of these so called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.”
Can you sleep peacefully after reading such passages of cruelty committed upon a people “who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing.”?
Can anybody of us continue to be unperturbed after reading passages like the following?
“(The Africans) were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins, they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs… one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the huge profits made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into the holds like fish… Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be multiplied for black women, who were often one third of the cargo. Slave traders reported: ‘I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed…”
But all histories we read claim that the Europeans were a civilized lot and the Africans and the Native Indians were savages! All histories speak about the 'Whiteman’s burden', about their ‘civilizing mission’. Even we the Indians were ‘civilized’, we were ‘modernized’, and we do have ‘democracy’, only because we have been 'fortunate' enough to have British Colonialism, we are told both by the European historians and by our own historians!
In an article titled The British Rule in India, written in 1853, Karl Marx says: "England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?"
But, as Howard Zinn tells, ‘it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.’ And Zinn continues:
“So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. …Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property.”
In India we are in dire need of writers like Howard Zinn to search and find the people who are not seen in our histories—the Adivasis who were displaced and annihilated by our ‘machine of progress’ (which we borrowed from the West), the people of Niyamgiri Hills, of the Narmada Valley, of the Dhandakaranya. We want histories written from the standpoint of manual scavengers, from the viewpoint of untouchables, from the perspective of the farmers, Dalits, children (especially girls) and women.
And we also want histories from the viewpoint of the Environment, the flora and fauna. Zinn is too much preoccupied with the cruelty of the so called civilized race against the fellow beings to give attention to their cruelty against the environment and other animals. Look at a mild sample of the savagery of the ‘civilized’: “Dismemberment was provided for in the Virginia Code of 1705. Maryland passed a law in 1723 providing for cutting off the ears of blacks who struck whites, …About twenty-five blacks and two Indians set fire to a building, then killed nine whites who came on the scene. …(all the twenty-seven) were captured by soldiers, some were burnt, others were hanged, one broke on the wheel, and one hung alive in chains in the town…one had been burned over a slow fire for eight to ten hours.”
Can the Environment expect a better deal from such a ‘civilized’ lot?
Once in the North America, the passenger pigeons were greater in number than all other birds. They lived together, nested together, and flew together in large numbers. In summer these birds nested in the vast forests of the northern frontier regions of the continent and in winter they migrated into the comparatively warmer forests in the south. In the breeding time, flocks of these birds would land on the trees and would make hundreds of nests even on a single tree. Each flock consisted of at least a minimum of 300,000 birds!
When the white men reached North America, they started hunting the pigeons for their meat and feather. Even after these birds have been continuously hunted for five decades, a flock that flew over the Cincinnati town in 1870 consisted of 20,000 lakh pigeons! The flock had been 510 kilometer long and 1.6 kilometer wide!! In 1878, from the 64 kilometer long and 16 kilometer wide nesting area of the passenger pigeons in the Michigan state, the hunters killed 10,000 lakh of the defenseless birds.
Today there is no passenger pigeon to fly in the skies. If the fate of the passenger pigeon, that could fly, was to disappear within decades of contact with the white man, what could have been that of the poor Giant Moa that couldn’t fly? Somewhere in the time of evolution, the Moas lost their wings. They grew up to four meter in height and weighed more than 275 kilograms. These wingless birds lived 1000 lakh years in New Zealand, till the 12th century when the humans entered the Pacific island. Hunting started for the bird's meat and eggs, yet the Giants survived till the Europeans arrived and in the 1850s, they were wiped out.
Let me once more quote Howard Zinn: “John Collier, an American scholar who lived among Indians in the 1920s and 1930s in the American Southwest, said of their spirit: “Could we make it our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace.””
“There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.” — Howard Zinn.
Never have I read a book which tells the history from the viewpoint of the victims till I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zinn shows us history from the viewpoint of the Native Americans, from the standpoint of the African American slaves, from the perspective of the workers and he helps us to see history through women who are always ‘intimately oppressed’ and conspicuous in all history by their absence. Never have I read a book which has made me sleepless as Zinn's People's History has.
“Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades. Las Casas tells how two of these so called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.”
Can you sleep peacefully after reading such passages of cruelty committed upon a people “who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing.”?
Can anybody of us continue to be unperturbed after reading passages like the following?
“(The Africans) were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins, they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs… one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the huge profits made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into the holds like fish… Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be multiplied for black women, who were often one third of the cargo. Slave traders reported: ‘I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed…”
But all histories we read claim that the Europeans were a civilized lot and the Africans and the Native Indians were savages! All histories speak about the 'Whiteman’s burden', about their ‘civilizing mission’. Even we the Indians were ‘civilized’, we were ‘modernized’, and we do have ‘democracy’, only because we have been 'fortunate' enough to have British Colonialism, we are told both by the European historians and by our own historians!
In an article titled The British Rule in India, written in 1853, Karl Marx says: "England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?"
But, as Howard Zinn tells, ‘it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.’ And Zinn continues:
“So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. …Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property.”
In India we are in dire need of writers like Howard Zinn to search and find the people who are not seen in our histories—the Adivasis who were displaced and annihilated by our ‘machine of progress’ (which we borrowed from the West), the people of Niyamgiri Hills, of the Narmada Valley, of the Dhandakaranya. We want histories written from the standpoint of manual scavengers, from the viewpoint of untouchables, from the perspective of the farmers, Dalits, children (especially girls) and women.
And we also want histories from the viewpoint of the Environment, the flora and fauna. Zinn is too much preoccupied with the cruelty of the so called civilized race against the fellow beings to give attention to their cruelty against the environment and other animals. Look at a mild sample of the savagery of the ‘civilized’: “Dismemberment was provided for in the Virginia Code of 1705. Maryland passed a law in 1723 providing for cutting off the ears of blacks who struck whites, …About twenty-five blacks and two Indians set fire to a building, then killed nine whites who came on the scene. …(all the twenty-seven) were captured by soldiers, some were burnt, others were hanged, one broke on the wheel, and one hung alive in chains in the town…one had been burned over a slow fire for eight to ten hours.”
Can the Environment expect a better deal from such a ‘civilized’ lot?
Once in the North America, the passenger pigeons were greater in number than all other birds. They lived together, nested together, and flew together in large numbers. In summer these birds nested in the vast forests of the northern frontier regions of the continent and in winter they migrated into the comparatively warmer forests in the south. In the breeding time, flocks of these birds would land on the trees and would make hundreds of nests even on a single tree. Each flock consisted of at least a minimum of 300,000 birds!
When the white men reached North America, they started hunting the pigeons for their meat and feather. Even after these birds have been continuously hunted for five decades, a flock that flew over the Cincinnati town in 1870 consisted of 20,000 lakh pigeons! The flock had been 510 kilometer long and 1.6 kilometer wide!! In 1878, from the 64 kilometer long and 16 kilometer wide nesting area of the passenger pigeons in the Michigan state, the hunters killed 10,000 lakh of the defenseless birds.
Today there is no passenger pigeon to fly in the skies. If the fate of the passenger pigeon, that could fly, was to disappear within decades of contact with the white man, what could have been that of the poor Giant Moa that couldn’t fly? Somewhere in the time of evolution, the Moas lost their wings. They grew up to four meter in height and weighed more than 275 kilograms. These wingless birds lived 1000 lakh years in New Zealand, till the 12th century when the humans entered the Pacific island. Hunting started for the bird's meat and eggs, yet the Giants survived till the Europeans arrived and in the 1850s, they were wiped out.
Let me once more quote Howard Zinn: “John Collier, an American scholar who lived among Indians in the 1920s and 1930s in the American Southwest, said of their spirit: “Could we make it our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace.””
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