The Historian and the Sauti

What is history? What is the relationship between history and meaning, history and identity? Can truth be ahistorical truth? Is Itihasa history? If it is not, can it have any validity at all? These questions are not only central to historiography; they have enormous implications for our civilisational identity and self-understanding. This series hopes to unravel some of these knotty questions by reading in parallel the figure of the ancient Greek historian who recounts traditions and conversations of the past with the Sauti, who is the collector and narrator of the Ithihasas and Puranas. Through this, we seek to articulate a response to the historical criticism that often plagues the reading of our Itihasa Puranas by showing the limits of the notion that history is the ultimate validator of truth.

History itself was done differently once; by the ancient historian who bears a striking resemblance to the Sauti. In recollecting the journey of history, one may discover once again how writing the past was a quest for meaning making for society.

History, Then and Now

Our story begins in Ancient Greece. About three thousand years ago, in the Mediterranean islands, a historian tells us the travails of his time. We hear of the rulers who battle, cultures that flourish and the tribulations of the common folk. He is weaving a rich tapestry of life as it is in the Greek peninsula where many have come and gone, adding to the broad philosophical strokes of the civilisation, their own details of lives lived. He writes, for his public, for it is they who are his sources and his readers. He is in conversation with his audience, retelling legends and refreshing collective memories.

He trusts those he reads. A historian in Ancient Greece is not one who looks upon the past with critical magnifiers and wishes to find the tiny speck of truth. He sees himself placed in a long line of historians, people who have a sense of wonder about the world. After all, the word history finds its roots in ‘Historia’, meaning inquiry. His first principle then is not inherent suspicion, but inherent curiosity. Seeing himself as yet another storyteller, he is not a skeptic first. He is the one who observes, collects and writes in the hope that one day, judged by his audience who read his work, posterity accords him the respect of a historian. He will talk to the people, write for them, and wait for his text to be authenticated over a time that could well surpass his lifetime.

But this is not the story of ‘history’ as we know it today. Concepts such as history along with the method of doing them change over time. They are fluid, and human beings constantly add and drop meanings to such concepts. Greek history was vast enough to include histories of war, politics, places and, crucially, what today we call ‘imaginaries’ or myths in the Greek understanding of the word. For the ancients, retelling the past was a rich, detailed exercise of creating both grand narratives and detailing specific themes. It was a seamless confluence of the mystical and the real to make meaning. Tales carried authority and stories taught people how to live. History was not merely confined to texts. They were the stuff of folklore; tales like the Siege of Troy were enacted and reenacted in theatre and street performances; histories were a central theme of the voluminous discussions on the good life in the agora(public square); they inspired the songs sung by the lone passer-by. The distinction between truth and falsehood then was not one based on sources and facts. The collective quest was to find meaning through such an exercise.
History then, and history now are in no way alike.

“Did the Greeks Believe their Myths?”

Modern history is entangled in the process of fact-finding, thriving on its citations and finding validity solely from academic rigour. ‘Historia’ was not any of these when Pausanias lived, and well until the 15th century in Europe. Why does history become the quest for producing facts and literal truth-finding based on evidence? When did it shift from being a collective quest for meaning making to a closed conversation among experts who could speak and make it a ‘Science’? Why has modern history made us we look back at cultures of the past (some, like India, that are only relegated to the mythic past that formal history constructs while they actually flourish on) and judge them as incomplete and inadequate?

Modernity will look back at the Greeks and ask the question, “Did the Greeks believe in their myths?”, captured aptly by Paul Veyne in the title of his book. This question speaks to the misplaced predicament of the modern reader. To the Ancient Greeks, the question is immaterial. Myth and logos are not opposites, like truth and error, Veyne reminds us. Cultures have had ways of navigating the complexity of truth, often with the ability to hold contradictory things comfortably, an idea that appears strange to the Modern Western mind. This, however, isn’t strange to the Greek or the Indian psyche. Sociologist A.K. Ramanujan describes the Indian way of thinking as highly complex and context-sensitive in nature. It is not as straightforward as using objective facts to arrive at universal truth. The Indian mind is capable of holding multiple contradictions easily, and reconciling them. This may appear to a Western thinker as inconsistent, or worse, hypocritical. On the contrary, this is a deeply contextual and plural approach to truth.

The central question is not one of truth versus belief as modern history makes it out to be. Different societies arrive at truth differently over time. What modernity relegates to the realm of ‘myth’ are ways of constituting truth itself. Was it ‘true’ factually, then, is the wrong question to ask. Mythic pasts create ideas of truth and being, help us make sense of the world and illustrate multiple ways of living in it. The locus of truth is not in the text or the method; none of them give truth its validity. These are but methods of transmission, quite often scraps one finds to substantiate something broader and far more philosophical. It is the philosophical truth in the Greek tradition, like the Indian, that gives validity to any of these methods. Going the other way around is putting the cart before the horse.

The Role of Sources and Citations

But it is not that the Ancient Historian does not refer to what we would call sources. There are occasional references to inscriptions, texts, scrolls and material artifacts that are used to embellish what a historian has to say. These only shine a brighter light on the truth, and do not validate it. Fundamentally, it is the historian himself who is the authority. He is the source whose word has to be taken seriously. It is in him that credibility and consistency are sought and checked. In being vulgate, history also took seriously the word of people- verbal testimonies, accounts beginning with ‘As I have heard’ are as legitimate, and more common than texts.

Modern history fundamentally relies on the distinction between primary and secondary sources. Citation is the central act of setting one’s work apart from mere extrapolation or a mythical flight of fancy. Texts like those of Aquinas, well into the 13th century in Italy do not cite Aristotle, but take the responsibility of reading and re-interpreting him. Scholars wishing to revive old Greek schools of philosophy latch on to the eternal truth, the essence, not texts or figures of days past. There is reliance on orality, on what is remembered by the people, on what gives meaning to life and eases its pain that is the core of both history and philosophy.

A Moment of Fracture

What Aquinas does cite, however, is Scripture. The emergence of modern history that rests on references takes place, not due to the changing mind of the historian, but the theological and juridical practices that strengthen and become institutionalised. It is the jurist who cites, along with the legal historian. Both of them refer as they do not carry the burden of truth. They merely speak to the scientific community, or their own closed professional groups. This shift in writing history is the result of the emergence of the university as a new site of knowledge production. According to Mahmud Mamdani, the Latin word ‘universitas’ means a corporation, because they started as “small corporations of students and teachers” who got “the privilege of teaching” from the Church and “exemptions from financial and military services” from the state in medieval Europe. It is only now, in Europe that the historian speaks to his fellow academicians, not the people, and follows the juristic format to validate his work. His relationship with his audience changes fundamentally.

This is a moment of fracture. Here occurs the split between the popular history of the people as it is remembered and the formal history of the academic historian. The latter becomes tied up in fact-finding, textual preponderance, and linearity of time and truth. The former, of the Greek kind, become myths and popular histories that have to be purified by logos or marginalised to the corners of the history department.

It is in modernity that the job of the historian and the critic become one; that is where the enterprise of modern history begins. This figure of the clean academic who does history is recreated in societies where formal Western education replaces indigenous learning systems. There is an export of this figure from Europe, a process accompanying epistemic violence and imposition of Western historiography on colonised societies. Indigenous forms of remembrance are erased and people are rendered mute, their voices overtaken by academic historiography and philology.

The historian was a figure of the people, recounting the past to the public, for whom traditions were retold and conversations were recollected. His language does not follow the distinction between mythos and logos and the hierarchy between them. These conceptions lie outside his language. This form is available to us in the figure of the ‘Sauti’ in the Mahabharata and the Indian itihasa-puranas, as we shall see in this series.

Post-script: Keeping in line with the tradition, I shall not cite and refer sources for this piece. I reassure the reader that I offer my interpretations of my reading of history and the authors mentioned to the best of my abilities.