INEVITABILITY OF REWRITING INDIAN HISTORY FROM A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE
Keywords:
Indian History, FeminismAbstract
It was Voltaire who for the first time put forth the idea of history as philosophy. Since then even this idea of what does History as Philosophy mean has been debated. As a result there can be no single answer to the question what is history. The nature of history as a body of knowledge and the nature of the sources of history make it difficult, if not impossible, for all of us to have one common understanding of history. For we see the past through someone else’s eyes, someone whose knowledge of the past depends on her own views, her own ‘present’. Besides, the whole past cannot be recovered, it is only fragments of it as has been recorded by the then historians, or what has been discovered and unearthed that can be compiled and interpreted. Every fact can be interpreted in many ways depending on what we are looking for and why. While historians do not invent facts, they prioritise facts and ignore others. Since, to a great extent, history is an interpretation of such evidences that have come down to us, history that we read is the interpretation of the historian. Therefore, the idea of history that any people hold is a reflection of their view of society at that particular time in history. This explains why even the very focus of history has varied from age to age. This also explains the absence of women in history. After all who has written history so far? What has been the dominant view of history? What has been the object of the history written so far?
References
E. H. Carr, What is History? New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1964, 133.
Jean Chesneaux, Past and Futures or What is History For? London: Thames and Hudson, 1978, 2-3.
Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History, London: Routledge, 1991.
Leandre Bergeron, preface to the Petit Manuel D’histoire du Quebec, Montreal 1972, cited in Chesneaux, Past and Futures. 26.
Rosalind Miles, The Women’s History of the World, London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993, 16.
Bipan Chandra et al., India’s Struggle for Independence 1857-1947, Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990, 88.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Ranajit Guha ed., Subaltern Studies IV, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, 357.
Kamala Visweswaran, “Small Speeches, Subaltern Gender: Nationalist Ideology and Its Historiography,” in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty ed., Subaltern Studies IX, OUP, 1999, 88.
Malkapuram Stone Pillar Inscription of the time of Rudramba, Saka year 1183 (1261 A.D.), no. 15, D. C. Sircar, Select Inscriptions Bearing on Indian History and Civlization, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983, 574ff.
Jaya Madhav Kalavani v. Manjunath Tai Chandu AIR 1916 Bombay 64 (2) Shanmugathammal v. Gomathi Ammal and others in AIR 1935 Madras 58.
Nagamuthu Pillai and another v. Dasi Sundaram AIR 1917 Madras 472 (1).
