Unpacking the ICHR

The quality of a funding body is best measured by the research that it supports rather than the political dispensation that supports it. So, how does one explain why the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) — which funds research projects and fellowships, which supports students and seminars —  inevitably figures in the news for the wrong reasons?  

Why do we hear about the ICHR when there is a new government at the Centre? Why have such changes frequently coincided with the articulation of suspicion that a particular kind of history writing will now be leveraged? The answer to this lies in how the ICHR was conceived and set up four decades ago.

But, first a word about Professor Y Sudershan Rao, whose appointment as chairman of the ICHR is under intense media scrutiny. It is ironic that a young minister from a political party that projected youth power in the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign, decided to appoint a retired professor to this post. That there was a glass ceiling for women in that organisation was well known, with no government having appointed any of the excellent historians of India who happen to be women to the post of chairman. The number of women scholars in the governing council of the ICHR, including what the UPA put in place, has also remained pathetically low. Now, it seems that, along with being a man, an important qualification for the post of chairman is that one should be past the age of employment.

But more than his age, it is Rao’s calibre that should matter. It is this which is under question and the ICHR is to blame for this. It has not made his curriculum vitae available. Instead, its website provides a link to his blogs. Since I teach in a university where a teacher does not get  her annual increment if an updated CV is not dispatched to the university website, why the scholarly credentials of the new chairman of a national funding body are being treated like a State secret, completely escapes me. So, if the ICHR wants the mudslinging to stop, it should make Professor Rao’s CV public. 

One can only hope that there is scholarship there. While those who have headed the ICHR have almost always been appointed because of their political or personal connections, many such individuals have also been scholars. RS Sharma had a string of publications to his credit before he became the founder chairman of the ICHR, including his Sudras in Ancient India and Indian Feudalism.  

But coming back to where I began, the ICHR has actually  been a flawed project from its inception. In 1969, after the Congress party split, Indira Gandhi leaned heavily on the Communist Party of India to secure a majority in Parliament. Consequently, in 1971, when a history professor of Marxist leanings, Nurul Hasan, became Gandhi’s education minister, it did not surprise anyone. It was Hasan who successfully pushed for the creation of the ICHR in 1972. 

That this followed in the aftermath of the Bangladesh war and during the silver jubilee year of India’s Independence may well be coincidental but certainly, in that time of national pride, there was a much more proactive approach by the State towards the past. 1972 was the year when the government made a concerted effort to counter the narratives on surviving British memorials. At the Mutiny Memorial on the Ridge in Delhi, for instance, two plaques were put up — to remember the Indian martyrs of 1857 and to challenge the British message inscribed there, where they had been described as the ‘enemy’. This was also the year when Gandhi held a midnight session of Parliament on Independence day, imitating the meeting of the Constituent Assembly in 1947. And in the same year, Gandhi’s government decided to found the ICHR with the stated intention of guiding history writing. The new organisation was meant ‘to give a national direction to an objective and scientific writing of history and to have rational presentation and interpretation of history’. Amazingly, it did not strike anyone that giving ‘direction’ to historical research smacked of how a totalitarian regime worked. The Soviet Union was known to ‘direct’ research, with the expectation that historical and archaeological work followed the Marxist model.

The 1970s marked the apogee for historians with Left leanings in India. With Hasan as the minister,  RS Sharma became the founding chairman of the ICHR while the head of the University Grants Commission, Satish Chandra, was also a historian. It was not surprising that the average college teacher of those days used to view the historians of that era as part of India’s ruling class. It was also not surprising that the ICHR was seen as a powerful State-sponsored patronage dispenser which, when  the government changed, was considered worthy of capture by the new ruling class. 

The government’s interest in capturing the ICHR, then, has little to do with the calibre of the institution. In reality it is not an institution of excellence but a bloated bureaucratic ‘daftar’, where the administrative and establishment expenses are far more than what it disburses as research funding. One  cannot think of any first rate historian who has made her reputation because of funding from the ICHR. First rate historical writing cannot be done under the aegis of this kind of State-sponsored institution because it doesn't have what it takes to nurture such research.

What the ICHR has done well under the UPA government is expanding funding for young scholars. At universities, there are PhD students who receive a reasonable monthly stipend from it for pursing their research. Those of my generation who pursued research without any contribution from the coffers of a research institution can only imagine what it means like to be able to trawl libraries and pursue field work without fretting about finances. 

So my advice to this government would be: downsize the ICHR so that more money is allocated for researchers and less for paying salaries and electricity bills. And also put up a CV of the new chairman with a full list of his publications.

The author is winner of the 2013 Infosys Prize for Humanities (Archaeology). She teaches archaeology at the Department of History, University of Delhi