32 "Presenting" the Past
stantly converging towards a single goal—the defeat and dispersal of the
Muslim mlechha raj."^66 Goel laments the fact that "Hindu history inspires
us no more towards daring deeds and high heroism" because the history
taught today is not the same history Narada, Bhishma, and Sri Krishna
recited to Yudhisthira, or the history preserved in the puranas.^67 Conse-
quently, the long heritage of continual heroic history is being rekindled.
Situating this development in its own historical context would reveal that
communalism has more dimensions than mere historiographical ones.
Communal narratives related to the familiar elements of religion in the
daily lives of the people, and many nationalist leaders appealed to this old
consciousness. While the soft and hard varieties of communalism domi-
nated the national mainstream politics, the "fascist communalism" was
lurking behind. While the national movement based on Hindu religious
imagery, theology, and practices turned off many Muslims, Muslim lead-
ers such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah drove the wedge deeper by arguing,
"It is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common
nationality."^68 The Muslim separatism of the 1920s and the communal
politics of the 1930s and 1940s made the Hindu-Muslim separation even
sharper. With the partition and the holocaust, communalism became "a
consciousness which draws on a supposed religious identity and uses this
as the basis for an ideology" and political action.^69 History is just the initial
instrument in this long journey of fear, passion, prejudice, and hatred.
The tense Indo-Pakistan relations plagued by mutual insecurity and sus-
picion and the common trend across the border of inciting fears of "foreign
threat" or "foreign hand" among the respective citizens have contributed
to the nurturing of the communal ideology also. In India, however, the
state's ambivalence, acquiescence, and built-in Hindu bias have encour-
aged Hindu communalism. Owing to Indira Gandhi's and Rajiv Gandhi's
drift toward the exploitation of Hindu sentiments for electoral purposes,
the weakening of the leftist political forces, and the proliferation of hosts
of other social pressures, the Indian nationhood became contingent upon
several internal identity claims competing with each other in a fissiparous
social setup.
In the final analysis, however, it is both erroneous and misleading to
craft a primordial ancientness onto this modern hate, and we must discern
the human inducements and political calculations involved in the com-
munalized stories of the past.^70 The precolonial and early colonial peri-
ods may not have had perfect peaceful relations among major religious
groups, but there was not "any unilinear or cumulative growth of com-
munal identity before I860."^71 The medieval Hindu-Muslim encounter,
which could be seen "as a process occurring in a frontier zone," had both
denigrating and tolerant representations, and the conceptions of the Mus-
lim were never monolithic or uniform.^72 Even during colonial times, "the
baneful impact of communalism was less pronounced in princely India