Biography and the Making of Indian History

The place of biography in Indian historiography is often relegated to the sidelines, as most historians prefer to take an overarching view of a subject, rather than tell it from an individual’s vantage. But the biography can tell a story from ground-up suggested professors of history, Nayanjot Lahiri and Seema Alavi. The former has authored a biography on Ashoka, and the latter, on five 19th century Muslim intellectuals.
“Individuals are at the underbelly of states and empires,” said Alavi, whose own work, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire, tracks the lives of five Muslim scholars who fled British India after 1857, for different cities in the Ottoman Empire, from where they contributed to a pan-Islamic intellectual network that spanned continents. She pointed out that individual stories often tell a different truth from official scripts, and pointed as example the fact that British intelligence referred to her subjects as terrorists, while they were lauded as scholars by Muslim intellectual community. “Taking a non-state-centric view of history enables us to capture a wide swathe,” she points out, adding that biographies are like micro-histories that can be strung together to give you an alternative history. “They’re an emotional topography of a time and place,” she concluded.
Lahiri suggested that one’s understanding of history deepened when one knew more about the lives that were central to it. Apart from Ashoka’s own epigraphs – of which 50 continue to survive – Lahiri attempted what she calls an archeological biography, where she studied the archeological discoveries of the places Ashoka was said to have inhabited, and used the artefacts unearthed from that time to corroborate Ashoka’s story, even when written after his time. “An example is his claim that he had turned the whole of Afghanistan vegetarian. Bones recovered from the region in that time prove the hollowness of this claim,” Lahiri pointed out.
The biography, Alavi admitted, was the most challenging of genres. “You need to balance the micro-macro narrative and make it credible,” she said. The reason there are comparatively fewer biographies in Indian history compared to the West she added was that the discipline isn’t encouraged by academia itself. “Teachers should get their students excited about juxtaposing a person with a historical context and humanizing history,” she said. Listing another challenge, she added that culturally, we treat our heroes as holy cows and write nothing but adulatory accounts of them. “One is worried of the consequences of writing a warts-and-all account of a famous person, like say, Gandhi. Although a biography written by a relative is better accepted.”