A Novel Way: Historians Don’t Cry…?
In Anjum Hasan’s latest novel History’s Angel, there is a moment when the protagonist Alif, a high school history teacher, is apprehensive if he is really a historian, as the Partition still agitates him to the point of tears. The protagonist is still confronted by the wounds of those historical events in the subcontinent. In the wake of being emotional, his self-doubt about his status as a historian, uncovers the presumption that history as a discipline is beyond emotions. One can’t afford to muddle one’s objectivity with a tearful perspective on history. So, are the historians supposed to be robotic?
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It is ingenious of Anjum Hasan to place her protagonist Alif in the contentious realm of high school history teaching. Although history as a discipline is highbrow, the subject becomes a part of everyday life through high school, in the lives of almost everyone privileged enough to complete matriculation. This quotidian nature of history as a discipline in the setting of the high school is set wide open for dissection, through the surgical vision of the novelist. The novel as an art form has the extraordinary potential of layering historical moments with emotions. While the novel mirrors the long-form narrative textual practice of history writing, beyond the various genres of novels from historical fiction to alternate history, the novel can do something that history writing can’t. Novelists do cry!
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Nobel-prize-winning Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago once said, “The truth is that history could have been written in many different ways and this idea of infinitude and variation are the essence of my writing. The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.” The very fact that history could have been written in many different ways, makes it a double-edged sword – and the two edges of that sword are truth and falsehood. History could very well be rewritten as a narrative of falsehoods. We are living in a time period when high school history textbooks are written by text-manufacturers, whose narratives are informed by retro-futuristic potentials of mythology, distorted as history writing. It is ironic that these high school history textbook writers also don’t cry.
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Alif, the high school history teacher in the novel has to fight misinformation among high school children. There are high school kids who are misled by ‘toxic parenting’, as in parenting that is toxic towards minorities. Moreover, high school students are stubborn, when asked to correct their misinformed views on historical facts. The figure of the high school history teacher is painted as a hapless figure, similar to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, which inspired Walter Benjamin’s essay on the ‘angel of history’, that Anjum Hasan’s novel is named after. Walter Benjamin wrote Theses on the Philosophy of History at a time when he wanted to escape from the Nazi regime. Alif, the high school history teacher is caught in a cycle of historical events, not very different from the unceasing cycle of despair, as in the Nazi regime.
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It is impossible to think about high school education today, without worrying about the dangers of WhatsApp University. As everyone knows, there are perverse instances of “historical fiction” and “alternate history”, circulated by WhatsApp uncles, through poisonous family groups, and idiotic high school reunion groups, who have managed to distort an entire generation’s views on history. The nonsensical snippets peddled by WhatsApp uncles, of falsehoods and malicious misinformations, venomous anti-minority hatred, also reflect on the dangers of history-writing gone wrong. At a time, when high school history textbooks start to resemble venomous WhatsApp forwards, in intent and content, we realize that it is high time historians started to cry.
(A Novel Way is a series by John Xaviers Arackal which is about reading contemporary life through books, especially novels. John Xaviers Arackal is an arts professional who is serving as a Programme Officer of the Arts Practice programme at the India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore.)
