Why the imagined opposition between academic and public historians needs to be questioned

In an interview with William Dalrymple, historian and co-director of the Jaipur Literary Festival, Devyani Onial, National Features Editor at Indian Express, asked him,“While India hasn’t been able to tell their story to the world, do you think Indians tell it to each other a bit too enthusiastically, especially on WhatsApp?”

Dalrymple responded: “My personal bugbear is that the study of history in academia entered a long phase from about the ’50s through to the beginning of the present century, where academics only talked to themselves…As a result, you’ve got the growth of ‘WhatsApp history’ and ‘WhatsApp University.”

Since then, arguments have been raging over the role of history and historians in India. Who is doing the real work of history; who is reaching the general public? Those in the academy? Or those outside the academic institutions, so-called public historians?

A torrent of passionate claims in opinion pieces and essays cataloguing the work of Indian academic historians has emerged in the last few weeks. Widely read and important textbooks are cited. The serious service of academic historians on curriculum committees is noted. Several social media buffs have tweeted the names of academic historians writing for a wider public. The work of historians in Indian languages has been underlined.

Still, an (imagined) opposition between academic and public (or so-called “popular”) history blights what can be a productive conversation. We’re getting what looks like two divergent tracks, both certain in their beliefs about the nature of “public” and “history,” and living in their own make-believe worlds. The elephant in the room that no one talks about is who is the “public” and what is “history”.

‘Public’ as a verb

In most comments and online conversations, the “public” is perceived as passive, a docile recipient. Yet, the public and public squares are hardly given – already fully developed – at any point in history, let alone for all time. India today provides a remarkable example of an emerging and forceful counter public. With the state-sponsored erasure and sidelining of any idea of a rich, multi-faceted and contested history in our schools, colleges and prescribed textbooks, new intellectual forces are coming together in informal organisations and online platforms to provide a more reflective portrayal of India’s past.

Notable among these are student-led history collectives that feature open conversations with established historians in widely attended seminars and online conversations. A multi-generational repository of thought.

In short, the “public” is, always, a verb – active, shaping and reshaping itself and others. It is not a fixed, abstract entity, upon which academic and public historians deliver “history”, which “the public” simply absorbs.

The imagined opposition between the figure of an academic and a public historian also needs to be questioned. Not every academic historian sits in an ivory tower, removed from sites of engagement and politics. Especially not in India, where the opposite has been the case. Nor is every public historian tramping the country, fully attuned and responsive to the non-elite. Again, many times, the opposite.

What might be the task of both “academic” and “popular” histories, written for different audiences, but presumably with similar goals of reaching a wider public and unearthing a dynamic, multivalent history?

Academic (and public) historians need to recognise that narrative history (at the heart of “popular histories”) is a craft. Stellar public intellectuals have challenged prevalent ideas of “popular history.” Vibrant debates are taking place on the form and content of creative non-fiction, wider-intellectual histories and public scholarship. The linguistic range embedded in these descriptors should indicate that people writing for the “public” are struggling with methods, forms, structure of history.

The genre of public history is not already established. That is a fundamental point. A craft needs learning – for narrative histories as well as academic ones. We cannot assume that just because we have read some histories and know what the official archive is, we know the craft of history writing. Nor that, because we have a PhD in history, we are automatically poised to shift our narrative stye, create a lovely new voice and write public history. “Oh, just reduce the footnotes,” as I have been told many times.

On the contrary, narrative history demands the slow, patient work of learning how to craft a history based on serious research and analysis. It requires learning how to weave the complex findings and debates around the archive into storytelling. It requires pondering the very art of telling stories, probing historical practice and its immense potential, and its relationship to the past. And learning how each landscape that we compose, each moment that we enliven, must be backed up by evidence. “You cannot make up that stuff,” as a great teacher of non-fiction writing put it.

The same applies to academic writing as well. Many of the habits we learn in scholarly writing serve us poorly in public scholarship. We craft our prose defensively and constrain our thoughts by constant qualification – to ward off possible attacks from colleagues.

De-historicised tidbits

Historians outside the academy need to acknowledge the long work of their colleagues in the academy: people learning non-familiar languages over decades, going through the rigor of locating and reading the archive. Archives are not just books and manuscripts – or paintings and architecture – out there, which you simply get hold of to write your history. Much is folded into the hard labour academic historians undertake on the nature of evidence, the philosophy of history, the politics and the forms of erasure and oblivion.

The emergence of “WhatsApp history” and the “WhatsApp University” that Dalrymple pointed to, which set off the current debate on the role of Indian historians, is a grave, universal problem. All sorts of self-proclaimed history buffs, including academic and non-academic historians, active on social media, constantly post de-historicised tidbits: the exotic beauty of such-and-such manuscript, that bizarre animal, a nice view from that balcony. Entertainment takes over. Hard questions are sidelined. The grounds of history thus become irrelevant.

The politics of asking questions, reflecting and debating, is precisely the work of history, and it is vital. This is slow and demanding work, done by looking where others don’t habitually look. And, above all else, by serious engagement and dialogue with a wide constituency of readers, writers, students and scholars.

Ruby Lal is an award-winning historian of India and professor of South Asian History at Emory University. Her highly acclaimed recent book, Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan, is longlisted for the Cundill History Prize. Lal's previous biography, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her illustrated remix of Empress for young adults, Tiger Slayer, will be published in August. More about her here.