The tangled web of history

Some historians, politicians make linear connection and assert it was language that drove East & West Pakistan apart.

“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive,” wrote Sir Walter Scott. I have been reflecting on those words lately and how history sometimes deceives us. This started, I suppose, when I purchased a new book on the ideas of the great political theorist, Hannah Arendt, who taught the undergraduates of my generation (the 1950s) to think differently about history. Arendt taught us, among other things, to look beyond conventional historiography which sees history in trends and behaviour that can be linked to the past, and to determine the roots of ideas that have been the basis of human political behaviour, and particularly the nature of politics.

In her first and groundbreaking work, On Totalitarianism, she wrote of the horrors of 20^th century totalitarian regimes — the Stalinist/Leninist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany — as having made quantum leaps beyond anything that could have been imagined by looking back to the history of previous tyrannies. There was not clear historical line from the kind of tyranny seen before and that seen in the 20^th century. Her argument was that the tyrannies of previous centuries used terror and violence as an instrument of state power. For the 20^th century totalitarian regimes, she thought, terror and violence became ends in themselves. These regimes were based on ideas that essentially required terror and violence to accomplish what they believed was their destiny — either the triumph of a classless society or the triumph of a chosen people over what they defined as the degenerate races.

In the 21^st century, however, while the threat of new totalitarian systems developing is remote, the lesson that history is not necessarily a well-defined path that predicts the future is still very relevant. History is still written by historians, and they get to pick and choose the facts they want to emphasise and those they want to de-emphasise. Some historians select their facts to fit a political agenda; most probably just do not look deeply enough into the context and possible alternative meaning of a fact. And when politicians get into the act of using history to support their arguments, distortion is inevitable and sometimes dangerous.

Sufia Uddin’s 2006 book, Constructing Bangladesh, is instructive in this regard. She paints a fascinating picture of what we might call the Bengalisation of Islam in what was then East Bengal. The Islamic missionaries of the day made strenuous and sincere efforts to bring Islam to the East Bengalis, beginning about the 15^th century, and in doing so, caused an alienation not between East Bengalis and Islam, but between East Bengalis and most of the rest of the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. This unforeseen consequence came not so much from incorporating local customs as is sometimes asserted (not primarily Hindu customs as she points out but customs of a culture that had taken root in that area over a number of centuries), but primarily because their primary tool — which also developed over the centuries — was the use of the local language, Bengali, to bring the sacred Islamic texts to East Bengal.

At about the same time, most Muslims of South Asia were in the process of adopting Urdu as the language of Islam in India. Urdu came to define a Muslim in most of the subcontinent while East Bengalis were quite happy to be Muslims who spoke Bengali. Some historians and politicians make a linear connection and assert it was the language issue that drove East and West Pakistan apart. But history is a tangled web, not a straight line. A study of the press during the run-up to the war of separation shows that it was the denial of political rights and economic equality, not the language issue, that dominated East Pakistani minds.

Some Bengalis may have understood this at the time of the 1947 Partition. The great Bengali leader, Hussain Suhrawardy, seems to have been apprehensive about The Two-Nation Theory early on and spoke out against it in the early days of the new Pakistani republic. His prediction of serious problems for a united Pakistan, if the still fragile state clung to this notion, proved true — eight years after his untimely death.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 27^th, 2014.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.