Historian and the Changing
Society
Lal Dena
It may sound
paradoxical that the historian, who is concerned professionally with the study
of the past, plays a crucial role in the building of a stable future society.
The historian tries to understand the emergence and evolution of a society in an
historical perspective. To him, the term society includes every aspect of a
people’s life- social, economic, political, cultural, religious, scientific,
etc. The historian tries to understand the mutual interaction of these different
aspects and how the interaction of these forces contributes to the process of
change of a society.
Historian is
concerned not merely with events, but more with the processes of change of
society. His main business is to study and understand these processes through
which a society changes and evolves to
its present stage. As the noted historian, R.G. Collingwood has aptly pointed
out, “processes are things which do not begin and end but turn into one
another. There are, in history, no beginnings and no endings. History books
begin and end, but the processes they describe do not end”.
What we are
today is the outcome of the continuous processes of what we were yesterday.
Beneath the current of changes, we still carry within ourselves and within our
societies innumerable relics of the past. We may carry with us many monumental
follies of the past. The past cannot sanctify these follies, nor does the
present. At the same time, every civilized society, however, imperfect it may
be, seeks to impose new values on the living generation. These new values, if
found lasting, are sought to be carried forward for the new generations yet
unborn.
The real test
comes when the historian is to pin-point what are to be discarded and what are
to be retained. It is for this reason that the role of an historian has become
all the more crucial and important. One noted French historian has said that “Quand
les societes revent I’ historien doit rester eveille ( when societies dream
historian must keep awake)”. This beautifully sums up the importance of historian
in a society in which he is an inseparable part. The historian is supposed to
be a thinker as well as a doer. He must preach and practices what he preaches.
It is true that
the historian is concerned himself with the study of the past. But the past
which the historian studies is not a dead past, but the past which is still
living in the present. His interest is limited to the relevance of the past to
the present and the future. Can we draw a dividing line between the past and
the present; and for that matter, the present and the future? Can one be really
involved in the past without being involved in the present? Can one make a
worthwhile reconstruction of the past without in any way contributing to the
construction of the present and then to the future? What is today becomes
yesterday tomorrow. He who confines his thought to the present time only will
not be able to understand present reality. For the origin of things present are
to be found in things past. The past and the present are closely bound in the
same causal sequence. The historian’s duty is to diagnose these causal
relationships existing among the past events in their relations to the present.
The simple logic is this: to understand the present, we have to understand the
past. The present society does not come from blue. It has evolved out of the
past. The historian’s task is to study this evolution from the remote past to
the present which are causally connected. Taken in their causal sequence,
history thus illuminates the present life of any social group in all its
aspects- social, economic, political, cultural, etc. In studying these causal
relationships, the historian tries to develop general laws which should
regulate the behavior of the phenomenon under investigation. The development of
the laws necessarily introduces system or order in the knowledge gained. Unless
such laws are developed, the phenomenon under study cannot be fully understood
and the knowledge gained cannot be utilized for the benefit of mankind.
The present
society can, therefore, be best understood in the light of the past. The past
also can best be understood in the light of the present. “To learn about the
present in the light of the past means also to learn about the past in the
light of the present. The function of history is to promote a profounder
understanding of both past and present through the interrelation between them”(
E.H.Carr). But the historian is not to love the past. Nor can he made himself
free from the past. But he has to understand and master the past as the key to
the understanding of the present. Misunderstanding of the present is the
inevitable consequence of the ignorance of the past. You cannot know the dead
men if you do not know the living men. The faculty of understanding the living
is, in fact, the master quality of the historian. The very names we use to
describe old ideas or old forms of social organization would be meaningless if
we do not know the living men. In short, in any historical interpretation as
Prof. Romila Thapar has rightly pointed out “the needs of the present are read
into the past; and the image of the past is sought to be imposed upon the
present. The image of the past is the historian’s contribution to the future.”
No human
society is static. It goes on changing and will continue to change. The
historian lives and swims in the stream of this changing society. History is
meaningless in a static society. History in its basic sense is change, movement
and progress. It is progress towards the goal of the perfection of man’s estate
in society. In such a fast-changing situation, the historian cannot afford to
be a silent spectator. He has to watch the men, the things and the events
around him. He must recognize the direction in which society is moving. He must
have the moral courage to rise above the limited vision of his own situation in
society. At times, the historian can be a prophet born before his time.
What is,
therefore, required of a historian is alertness. He has to develop scientific
temper to know the nature of the change of society. It is necessary not only to
discover things as they actually were but also to know why they have changed in
one particular way and not other-wise.
In the final
analysis the historian puts his feet upon the past with the present before him.
Then he looks forward to the future. His subject-matter belongs to the past.
Yet his attention is on the present and his vision on the future. His ultimate
goal is to lay a sound foundation because he wants to build a stable future.
The historian can guide a society to avoid past mistakes and to manage better
in similar circumstances next time. He can also guide a
society to anticipate a future course of events. Of course, this
anticipation of future will not be a blind anticipation. It will be based on
the past and present experiences. The capacity to project his vision into the
future is, therefore, dependent upon his mastery of the past.
To conclude,
the historian is both backward-looking and forward-looking. He imagines the
past. He looks at the present. Yet he thinks for the future; to quote E.H. Carr
again, the historian thus:
“peers eagerly back into
the
twilight out of which he
has come,
in the hope that its faint
beams
will illuminate the
obscurity into which
he is going; and,
conversely, his aspirations
and anxieties about the
path that lies ahead
quicken his insight into
what lies behind.
Past, present and future
are linked together
In the endless chain of
History”.
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