Taking History to Masses: Films, Digital Media Are The Answer

Recently, well-known author William Dalrymple outraged many historians by claiming that the inability of Indian academics to engage with the general public had led to the growth of the ‘WhatsApp University’ where masses were constantly fed with pseudo knowledge. Some academics and historians disagreed with him, more so as they felt that Dalrymple himself had built a career as a best-selling author of populist history by using the research carried out by the very historians he criticises.

Some authors, such as Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav, also think that this issue is not as straightforward as it seems, and academic historians must push for structural change, and engage more publicly. Otherwise, the spread of pseudo-history will continue.

While I am not a historian, I would like to share, as a filmmaker and media practitioner, some experiences of dealing with the growing Hindutva propaganda as well as creating films and digital content on history and heritage.

To begin with, I feel that we are living between two extremes. On one hand, the past decade or so has seen the emergence of a gigantic propaganda machine by the Sangh Parivar to defame and abuse Muslims, Islam, Christians, Congress or any other opponents of the Bharatiya Janata Party/Sangh ideology and to project the ancient/Vedic India as an era of scientific advancement etc.

This machinery disseminates not only the fake news and provocative messages over social media, but also produces well-funded movies and TV shows that propagate fear and hatred for Muslims and Mughals etc.

Political parties have invested huge resources to build teams (often called IT Cells) for propaganda, fake news and attack or abuse their opponents online. This phenomenon is also coupled with a general and growing dependence of the new generation on the Internet and mobile devices, which constantly bombard them with information, distancing them from conventional and more authentic sources of knowledge, such as books or lived experiences.

On the other hand, there is the academic world, with researchers producing new knowledge and theories, sometimes to fulfil their career goals, and usually writing in a language too difficult to be understood by a lay person (although it may be needed to express the complexities and subtleties of their research). Their institutional or administrative duties, too, do not give them the spare time to write in a language lucid enough for the masses.

One has also noticed a sense of intellectual elitism and distancing from the reality among the academia as quite a few of them tend to look down upon populist writings. The rigour and training of their research places them in a bubble of jargon. If you cannot ask a long-winded, undecipherable question at the end of every conference paper, you are considered an outcast in academia. If someone says more or less the same thing in simple, easy-to-understand language, it may be seen as dilution of knowledge.

Most often, when a popular author writes history for lay readers, they omit many details and make a lot of generalisations to keep the reader engaged. But many academics dislike the omitting of details because that’s where lies the real understanding of the subject. This is the reason why they seem hardly ever satisfied with popular history or historical fiction, unless it's very well-written.

On top of that, when ‘celebrity’ historians like Dalrymple hog the limelight at Lit Fests and media interviews, it irks some academic historians since many of them remain side-lined despite having worked hard. Some even responded to Dalrymple’s recent statement by saying that historians have been writing more accessible history, but the masses don’t read those books anyway.

This is where lies the fundamental crux of this issue: why are we talking about popularising history in the form of books only, that too in English? There is already more than enough good historical literature available for an English reader. But the masses, who are exposed to the ‘WhatsApp’ forwards, are most often not the typical readers of books, although this doesn’t mean they are not interested in history or other serious subjects. Most youngsters today are curious and hungry for cultural content, but maybe not in a book form. They only have the attention span for short audio-visual information and maybe some easy text.

One obviously can’t expect academic researchers to create memes and video reels on history for a youngster who is hooked on to canned laughter and jokes on his/her smartphone. It is the job of the media, the filmmakers, and digital content designers to fill the gap between the scholar and the people. Even the book publishers and Lit Fests can’t do it.

Let me share some of the work that I and other media practitioners have been doing for some decades on popularising history and heritage. The idea is not to add to the ‘textbook’ discourse of history that students may find boring, but bring history to life through living examples of heritage packaged in the form of attractive videos.

Recent years have seen the emergence of several online portals, such as Sahapedia, Karwaan, Ektara, Indian Culture, Peepul Tree and others (including YouTube and Instagram channels) that promote history and heritage in audio visual formats. Several groups have been organising popular lectures and interview series besides heritage walks in many Indian towns. I have been giving training on how to counter fake media and produce good quality digital content. But even before that, I started my career as a documentary filmmaker in the 1990s, working on educational themes, including science and arts.

A major emphasis of the Right-wing propagandists is to show that before the arrival of the Muslims and Mughals, India lived in a utopian era of the Vedas with advancements in science and technology, which were destroyed or subdued by Muslim invaders who demolished Hindu temples and killed Hindus etc.

Writers and orators like Manoj Muntashir, Pushpendra Kulshreshtha and others with a large following have been aggressively depicting Muslims and Mughals as villains in history. But there are enough studies to show a counter argument - that (a) the violence and wars occurred even between the local kings and dynasties in India, not necessarily only brought by ‘outsiders’ and (b) the confluence of Central Asian and Indian culture and languages led to a vibrant composite culture that allowed a peaceful coexistence of Hindus and Muslims for centuries. Enough examples of this coexistence can still be found in South Asia that could change the perception of this divisiveness.

I have tried to document some of these positive stories of cultural syncretism and co-existence through my video work, such as my 1997 short film, Basant, that looks at how the supposedly the ‘Hindu’ festival of Basant Panchami is celebrated at the Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin Aulia in Delhi with great fervour:

Basant (1997)

Today, there is a lot of emphasis on separating what is Indian and foreign - “this community is foreign, that language is from outside, or this dress is not Indian” and so on. But the people making such divisions do not realise that there is no pure culture or language - everything is affected by influences from all around. This is what this short video essay tries to portray as it discusses the evolution of ‘Indo-Persian culture’ in South Asia through centuries of amalgamation:

Ancient Indians surely made some advancements in mathematics, astronomy and medical sciences, with the development of the number system, zero, decimals and the use of Pythagorean theorem etc. But one also needs to understand that these developments are universal and many other ancient societies could and did arrive at similar results. This is what has been explored in the documentary The Ganita Story about the history of mathematics, which also won two awards in a science film festival in 2019:

The Partition of India is always a subject of debate wherein the Right-wing blames Muslims for the division of a country based on the ‘two-nation theory’ which believes that Hindus and Muslims cannot live together. But my research and documentation in Pakistan in 2005 on the classical music tradition led to the making of a feature-length documentary Khayal Darpan that looks at how the Partition couldn’t really divide our shared music tradition as the same songs and ragas continued to be sung and performed on both sides of the border:

One of the detriments of the Partition was an artificial division of Urdu language itself - many people assumed that Urdu belonged to Muslims only and hence was not needed in India. But I found out that Hindus and Sikhs who migrated from the Pakistan side did not know Devanagari and could only read Urdu. Even their religious books, like Mahabharata, Ramayana, Hanuman Chalisa and others, were printed in Urdu script. Documenting a lot of these religious books, this short video breaks the stereotype of Urdu’s association with Muslims only:

India has rich historical monuments or built heritage from the past that their appreciation itself could help reduce the negative image created through propaganda. Many scholars and cultural activists are conducting heritage walks around historical monuments to enhance their appreciation. One of my documentaries about the making of the Mughal monument Taj Mahal tries to bust many myths about its construction:

History does not always come from monuments, archaeological sites and manuscripts. A lot of social and cultural history is also obtained from the oral sources - memory of the people who have lived a certain era at a certain place. I have been documenting a lot of oral history with senior citizens in different cities. For instance, one of my films looks at the history of Delhi through the memoirs of about 20 scholars and senior residents of old Delhi who talk about the shared culture, food, language and buildings of their beloved city:

India’s old towns or qasbas may have been forgotten by the modern progress of big cities, but many qasbas still carry the old traditions of architecture, literature, craft, industry and religious syncretism. A series documenting some old towns of Uttar Pradesh, features Amroha, a small qasba east of Delhi and how it maintains the traditions of Hindu-Muslim cohabitation:

Sometimes, the story of a city can also be told by poets, saints and authors who lived there centuries ago. Khusrau Darya Prem Ka is a docu-drama about the poetic works and memory of Delhi’s 14th century poet Amir Khusrau.

History can also be told through food and traditional recipes of local regions. Dartarkhwan-e Rampur (A Feast in Rampur) is my recent film that records the preparation of traditional dishes and cooking methods in the nawabi or princely town of Rampur in Uttar Pradesh:

Besides some of the above films, I have also been recording interviews and lectures by many historians, scholars and senior residents who carry the memory of our rich past. Some of these have been made available online for all to see. But all of this work needs to be scaled to a much bigger level to counter the negative propaganda machine.

What we need is a network of tech-savvy historians and smart content creators who can together create a series of quality videos and graphics that counter the fake and pseudo-history prevalent around us. At the same time, we need our educators in schools and colleges to inculcate among students the habit of watching longer and good quality films, besides developing a critical mind to detect what is real and what is fake.

Also remember that as a sensitive content maker, one will be at odds with giant corporations that own and operate the Internet and social media. So, the fight against the ‘Whatsapp university’ and pseudo-knowledge is a difficult one and needs the cooperation of genuine historians and media practitioners who work together for a common goal rather than argue about each other’s intentions.

The writer is a New Delhi-based independent filmmaker and archivist whose films have been shown in film festivals worldwide. He is also the author of publications on art and culture and a visiting fellow in many international universities. He runs Tasveer Ghar, a digital archive of India’s popular visual culture. The views are personal.