Indian History and Culture Society: Difference between revisions

When the [[Janata Party|Janata]] government of 1977-79 (including the former [[Jan Sangh]]) was elected, it blocked the ''Towards Freedom Project'' of the [[Indian Council of Historical Research]] (ICHR) claiming that the history textbooks promoted by the ICHR suffered an ahistorical Marxist ideological distortion. After the [[Indian History Congress]] endorsed the textbook writers affiliated with the ICHR, the Janata government funded the then new ''Indian History and Culture Society''. According to scholars L.I. Rudolph and Sussane Rudolph, it attracted a variety of historians, some sympathetic to the [[Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh]] (RSS) and others disaffected from the textbook "establishment."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Rudolph |first1=Lloyd I. |last2=Rudolph |first2=Susanne Hoeber |title=Rethinking Secularism: Genesis and Implications of the Textbook Controversy, 1977-79 |journal=Pacific Affairs |volume=56 |number=1 |year=1983 |pp=15–37 |JSTOR=2758768}}</ref>

The IHCS offered a forum for a dialogue among quarrelling Indian historians and organised a number of seminars to discuss fundamental problems of Indian historiography. According to its chairperson Prof. D. Devahuti, "one had to free oneself from Western categories like, for instance, that of class struggle, and resume 'indigenous frameworks of interpretation'." She characterised Indian history, including medieval Indian history, as one of consent: 'emphasis appears to have been on consensus, i.e. adjustment, give and take, synthesis or at least an active acceptance of coexistence'.<ref>{{citation |last=Gottlob |first=Michael |title=History and Politics In Post-Colonial India |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HoAyDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT24 |date=2011 |publisher=OUP India |isbn=978-0-19-908849-2|p=24}}</ref>

The group's first publication, the 1979 ''Problems of Indian Historiography'', is essentially the proceedings of its seminar in 1978. The book sought to free itself from 'imperialist and Marxist' approaches while simultaneously avoiding Hindu or Muslim communal biases in order to foster writing a more 'objective history' from a postcolonial, nativist, and an Indian point of view rather than a foreign one. Historian Pratap Chandra criticised British historians of India and their Indian disciples for their idea that nation states were deemed to be 'intrinsically desirable', which he argued led to an overstatement of the historical unity of India. Historian D.P Singhal further vehemently criticised Marxists, finding them a growing and unhealthy influence on Indian universities and their history departments.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Pearson|first=M.N|title=Problems of Indian Historiography.|url=doi:10.2307/602607|journal=Journal of the American Oriental Society|volume=3|issue=101|pages=381}}</ref>