Doubting History

‘History is the historian’s experience. It is “made” by nobody save the historian; to write history is the only way to make it.’ – Professor Oakeshott.

When I was in school learning history I wasn’t much interested in the fact, figures and the timeline which were handed over to me to learn without thinking. It always seemed significant to know about the civilizations that existed before, their kings, how they ruled their empire, what they did during their time as kings, how the people lived in that time, what kind of resources they had, how was the society so different from what we have now and the evolution of the culture we have inherited now. Then and now was the only thing that had me intrigued in this subject.  

I never thought what am reading has been brought to me in the purest form. History as we know it has been passed on from one human mind to another interpreted in a different way everytime, ofcourse keeping in mind the loss of information on its way to us. Everyone likes to boost their ego. No one will ever leave behind a piece of evidence which wouldn’t make him/her sound impressive. How is that we can believe that the evidence he have found about our history is in the purest form? How can we be so sure about the fact that the information that we have collected by hasn’t been tampered with? It is just not possible that no one else ever found it except for us. The books we find about kings and their empires were usually written under the consent of the king. We can never be sure of our findings. I can write a book about our time and make everything sound really nasty 1000 years down the line maybe except for my book people couldn’t recover anything. Would they assume our society to be like the way I have portrait it to be.

Yes one can argue that there were other facts supporting the big picture of how things were then but we can never be certain can we, since it is the historians job to decide which fact to consider more important as compared to other. Our history is basically dependent on the choices the historians make. The way he decides to craft it. He might find Caesar crossing a small river significant. I might not. I can call myself a historian. I can get all the books I need on the subject I wish to write on, derive my own theory from the facts and the figures as I wish and come to a conclusion as per my will. I see no reason for them to disagree with me. It was my decision to decide what was relevant or not. It might turn out to be extremely different from what most people agree with. What am trying to say is that our history is defective. Even from whatever we have people tend to interpret it in their own way. They make their own assumptions. Some feminist find Ramayana to be very offensive to women from the way Sita was treated. They claim Valmiki was a man and that he wanted to show mans control over women and that’s why position of women Indian society is so bad. Well it is their point of view.

History has always been amended from time to time. It has always been a subject of interpretation and change. As we find more facts what was written already is ignored and the new version is incorporated. Simply to show how things were seems like an impossible task, plus a historian is necessarily selective. It all depends against what background a historian wrote. In the end it is just an experience crafted by the historian.