Digging Literature

According to Collingwood, ‘[h]istory and memory are wholly different things […].’ He goes on to show that memory has no answer to a question like “what reason have you for remembering it?”, for it is ‘a question that can never be answered’, per contra, an historian can always give justifications for his state­ment saying “I find in my sources certain information which leads me to the belief”, and this answer, according to Collingwood, is the ‘characteristic of history’ (1993: 366–367 [ The Idea of History. Revised edition with ‘Lectures 1926–1928’ by Jan van der Dussen. Oxford: Clarendon Press]; cf. also, p. 58. However, he also writes at one place (ibid. pp. 293–294) that history is ‘not memory as such, but a peculiar case of memory. Certainly, a mind which could not remember could not have historical knowledge.’ And that ‘historical knowledge is that special case of memory where the object of present thought is past thought’.)

To continue with our argument, it is permissible to ask, then, if the histories of Herodotus and Thucy­dides, exampli causa, which incidentally also happen to be the first Greek histories, based as they are on memory, can be baptised as history at all. The writing of Herodotus is based on other people’s testimony, memory that is; and that of Thucydides, on his own (no wonder that he rarely if ever bothers to cite authorities. Cf. Mudrovcic 2005 [Mudrovcic, María Inés Historia, Narración y Memoria : Los Debates Actuales en Filosophía de la Historia. Madrid : Akal.]).

Indians were wise, in this case, not to consider memory as an instru­ment of knowledge (cf. Matilal 1981 [Matilal, Bimal Krishna 1981. Memory. In Dalsukh Malvania and Nagin J. Shah (eds.), Studies in Indian Philosophy: A Memorial Volume in Honour of Pandit Sukhlalji Sanghvi, pp. 125–133. Ahmedabad: L. D. Institute of Indology.), which would perhaps also explain the lack of historical writing in classical period in India. And that even when it came into being, it was called not a science (शास्त्र) but an art (काव्य), cf. Kalhaṇa, Rājataraṅgiṇī, 1.5. 

Collingwood claimed, and rightly at any rate from present-day standards, that the subject of history is ‘res gestae: actions of human beings that have been done in the past’ (1946: 9) And again when he establishes Herodotus as the father of history—obviously, not as Cicero had imagined him to be—, he says, the ‘Greeks quite clearly and consciously recognised both that history is, or can be, a science, and that it has to do with human actions’, for ‘the matters inquired into are not τὰ θεῖα, they are τὰ ἀνθρώπινα’ (ibid. pp. 17–18).

The problem is: Though the Greeks, or more accurately the single instance Herodotus, saw history, according to Collingwood, as a human science, the modern scholars-philosophers, ironically enough, did not deem history either a science or a Knowledge of Man.

For in the Middle Ages the position of science of history on the map of knowledge was precarious: metaphysical knowledge, that is, theology (or philosophy, since seldom a distinction was made between the two) was at the top, followed by the so-called worldly knowledge, that is, trivium, which included grammar, rhetoric, and logic—or, more precisely, dialectic; and the bunch of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, called the quadrivium. The category of Artes mechanicae incorporated the fine arts. As can be seen in this scheme ‘historia is not a science’. ‘Historical knowledge, as historical literature asserts, constitutes an area of its own which is functionally subordinated both textually to the trivium, and informationally to several other disciplines, which the histories “serve in a subordinate way”’ (Knape 2000: 16 [Knape, Jonathan 2000. Historia, textuality, and episteme in the Middle Ages. In Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen and Päivi Mehtonen (eds.), Historia: The Concept and Genres in the Middle Ages, pp. 11–27. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica.]).

Insofar as the functions of history was concerned, it was a ‘medium of social memory (memoria)’; it accumulated, documented, and arranged knowledge about past events and institutions. Be it noted that history was ‘not an antiquarian examination of the past’; past was evoked for the sake of present. Unlike the great Greek writers, who wrote their accounts primarily on the basis of testimonies of eyewitnesses, the mediaeval method of doing history was, due to the lack of archaeological methods, confined to the linguistic material, more often than not from the earlier sources by the method of what Collingwood disparagingly calls ‘scissors and paste’. Eyewitnesses too were sometimes exploited for writing historical accounts.

The position of history remained unchanged even during the Enlightenment, in that, it was still not accorded the appellation of science. In the Encyclopédie (1751–76) of Diderot and D’Alembert knowledge was organised in the following fashion: understanding was divided into three faculties: the first was Memory, the second, Imagination, and the third, Reason. (Bacon also divided learning into History, Poesy, and Philosophy (Advancement of Learning §§ 2.1.1 ff.). In any case, the Encylopédiei classification of learning was inspired by, if not copied from, that of Bacon’s.) Reason was equated with philosophy and consisted of two main categories: ‘Knowledge of Nature’ (Physics and Mathematics), and ‘Knowledge of Man’ (Logic and Ethics). Imagination was of course literature or poetry. Memory was nothing but history with all its aspects. (It was Voltaire whose article on ‘histoire’ in the Encyclopédie made a clear distinction between history and memory (cf. Mudrovcic 2005 [Mudrovcic, María Inés Historia, Narración y Memoria : Los Debates Actuales en Filosophía de la Historia. Madrid : Akal.]). No wonder that he dubbed all ancient history based as it was on memory as ‘accepted fiction’.)

That history is not considered as a science in this scheme may not be very important, but that it is not associated with the ‘Knowledge of Man’ is really a matter of serious concern.

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Michael Witzel in his paper on ‘On Indian historical writing: the role of the vamsavalis’ (1990. Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies 2: 1-57) has, as usual, made a point to criticize Indian scholars. First is R. C. Majumdar. He says (1990: 1 and note 2 on p. 41) that writers like R. C. Majumdar “forgot” Ceylonese and Nepalese chronicles while dealing with the problem of historiography in ancient India. It is therefore worth seeing if Majumdar really ‘forgot’ these chronicles. Majumdar says, ‘[W]ith the single exception of Rajatarangini (History of Kashmir), there is no historical text in Sanskrit dealing with the whole or even parts of India’ (History and Culture of Indian People, vol. I, The Vedic Age, 1951: 47; my emphasis). I think, and hope Witzel might agree with me, ‘the well-known Dipavamsa, Mahavamsa and the many consecutive chronicles of me­dieval Sri Lanka’, which according to him Majumdar “forgot”, are written in Pali, and not in Sanskrit. The Nepalese “sources” are written in Sanskrit, to be sure, but they do not make a text like Rajataragini. I also wonder if any writer will dare to concur with Witzel in regarding Sri Lanka and (now Maoist) Nepal as “parts of India”. In spite of quoting Majumdar Witzel astonishingly failed to appreciate its content; he seems to be more interested in finding faults with that “firmly nationalistic writer”.

Majumdar maintains that the Indians did have a sense of history and also that narratives of historical nature were produced, but the discipline of history was absent. To put it in Western jargon, this is the difference between the consciousness of res gestae (what actually happened) and historia rerum gestarum (the investigation of what actually happened). R. C. Majumdar, after carefully appraising the historical materials of ancient India, propounded this view: “We may thus presume that neither historical sense nor historical material was altogether wanting in ancient India. What was lacking was either the enthusiasm or the ability to weave the scattered raw material into a critical historical text with a proper literary setting, which the people would not willingly let die.” (ibid. P. 48; my emphasis).

In short, Witzel’s remark stems from his failure to perceive the fine distinction Majumdar was making between the awareness of res gestae and historia rerum gestarum (also cf. Majumdar’s ‘Ideas of history in Sanskrit literature’. In C. H. Philips (ed.), Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, 1961: 13-28.).

Secondly Witzel takes Romila Thapar (he does not have, perhaps justly so, a very high opinion about Thapar’s scholarship anyway). Casting an eye of doubt on the endeavours of Thapar to read linear history in the Puranic gene­alogies, he writes, ‘it can safely be said that virtually no such genealogy, in India or elsewhere, is free from tinkering, interpolation[,] etc. Instead, they have frequently been used to bolster the claims of minor local chiefs and kings to a high rank, and if no such prestigious link was in sight, it has been manufactured.’ (1990: 3) To support this commonplace statement he digs up a “European” example of some ‘local duke of Carinthia, in S. Austria’ (note 9, p. 42). He seems to have remarkably forgotten the Greek heroes, kings, chieftains, and even the victors of Olympic (cf. Pindar’s poems). Witzel’s example shows how the deep-seated Hellenomania (unconsciously?) conditions the Western writers who are wont to tolerate nothing against the almost godly Greeks. By the by, the point at issue that Thapar wants to emphasize is the very change of timeframe from a cosmological to a genealogical one; it has nothing to do with if the genealogies were genuine or invented as in Greece. Witzel has missed the point here.