Rambhakts: Defining "Us" and Depicting "Our Story" 31races, and Brahmin domination.^58 The Hindu communal historians wor-
shipped their heroes and painted the Muslims as villains, and the Muslim
communalists defended the Muslim rule from British and Hindu interpre-
tations and projected the two-nation theory.^59
Communal historiography is a genre that engages in a manipulative
discourse by employing a whole array of diversionary tactics and political
exigencies. Harping on emotive polemics rather than a systematic exege-
sis of historical accounts supported by documentary and other evidence,
political figures and bigoted believers in a faith collate populist arguments,
worrying little about objectivity or balance. Hence the speeches and writ-
ings of political figures such as V. D. Savarkar, M. S. Golwalkar, and M. A.
Jinnah contribute more substantially to communal interpretation of his-
tory than the writings of their cohorts such as R. C. Majumdar, Z. A. Suleri,
F. K. Khan Durrani, and others.^60
Hindu communal historiography, or any other communal narrative for
that matter, is a positivistic and simpleminded truth claim that dons the
objective lens but doffs the subjective frame. "History is of little worth,"
claims R.C. Majumdar, "if it cannot give the truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth."^61 This kind of positivistic approach to history
leads to all sorts of absurd truth claims. The Hindutva publications are
replete with such "historical" claims that tend to mock basic human intel-
ligence. There have been several "historical accounts" published recently
on the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi issue alone. The Hindu communal
historiography assumes that "the Hindu has lost his sense of history,"
"his cultural capacity to punish his tormentors and exploiters," and as a
result Hindusthan has become a soft state where non-Hindus spread their
influence quite freely.^62 It claims that history writing had been as much
an Indian practice as Western, insists on uninterrupted continuation of
the Hindu history, and emphasizes a rather deliberately active and even
heroic reading of it.
Seeking to popularize Hindu history writing, V. D. Savarkar wrote on
"How to read and write history—particularly by a Hindu Sanghatanist
(Hindu Organizer)" and persuaded the "organizers" to do exactly that.
Such an exercise need not be dry and bereft of all emotion, and he advised
his readers to take a broad sweep of historical account from the earliest
times to the present.^63 One of many such undertakings is a series of articles
written by Sita Ram Goel in mid-1962 in the Organiser under the title "High-
lights of Hindu History." According to him, Mandhata, Ambarish, Yayati,
and Bharata may be mere myths for a modern mind, but for the Hindus,
they are "more real than Alexander or Caesar or Ashoka or Akbar."^64 Thus
the Mahabharata is "one tremendous turning point in their [Hindus'] hoary
history which, they regret, has never been the same again."^65 The Hindu
history is a "long and interesting story of how dynasty after dynasty of
Muslim rulers disappeared in the storm of Hindu heroism which was con-