Indians don't have history

Dates terrified me in school, and though I loved history then and still do, you can never get me to answer when exactly was the second battle of Panipat fought (though I know it was fought between Akbar and Hemu) or when did Queen Victoria ascend the throne (though as student of English literature I have been studying "Victorian age" for years). I don't know about people in other parts of the globe but for Indians I think this is a common symptom. We all hate dates!

To say however that Indians are a date-less people whose histories are recorded in timeless myths rather than in precisely dated chronicles is not to be original. One curious Muslim traveller who visited us some one thousand years ago had said something to the same effect. More recently Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay had spent essays lamenting over the fact that Indians/Bengalis (as a true blue Bengali he used the two terms interchangeably) do not have a history--a history with verifiable dates that is. He had even urged us to start writing our histories but we, more truly blue in our Bengaliness/Indianness have refused to enter the chronological prison-house.

Now I don't want you to get me wrong here. I am not suggesting that we haven't produced any historians. In fact there has been a surfeit of them in the recent years. But still on the whole we Indians have largely stuck to our aversion of precise dates and accurate timings. It is not for nothing that we have the acronym of our time zone IST often interpreted as Indian Stretchable Time. We have believed all through that dates and times are always negotiable. Nothing is fixed...nothing should be fixed!

Take the example of my mother...she has two birthdates! One official and one unofficial. The unofficial birthdate is of course her "real" birthdate, whereas the official birthdate is most definitely "unreal". The explanation behind her being twice-born is a bit intriguing to me though I guess it can make perfect common sense to others. When she was born, one of her uncles in his wisdom concluded that the baby girl was sure to fail in her school or in her college. To avoid her the calamity of one wasted year  her date of birth was shifted to the next year just in case she proved to be a late bloomer. Though quite considerate of her uncle, she did not benefit much from the decision as she kept on passing her classes with monotonous regularity. Now she grumbles for having to work for one more year before she could retire--one year after she was actually supposed to retire. It is however not only my mother...even the chief of our Army has two birthdays--one real/unofficial and another official/unreal and I can sympathise with the poor guy for getting it all mixed up. Thus with almost the whole of our previous generation having at least two birthdates it is no wonder that we as a people have developed an aversion to dates in our history books. We cannot trust them you see. If I am not sure about my own mother's birthday is it ever possible for me to remember the birthday of Babur!

As for me, though I have an officially recorded birthday which is also putatively my original birthday I have come to suspect the connection. One of my maternal grandmothers who brought me up has told me that I am the reincarnation of her son whom she lost quite early. This son was in turn the reincarnation of my grandma's grandfather (or was it great-grandfather) who was a veritable saint...a true sadhu... and we all know that every Hindu holy-man worth his salt is a reincarnation of someone. Thus you see, fixing my birthdate is a rather delicate matter. The whole science of transmigration of human soul should have been taken into calculation before my father rushed to the birth registration office to fix forever my date of birth!

Moving out from the egocentric domain of me and my family into the big bad world, I notice that even our national heroes are dateless. Try and convince us Bengalis that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose actually died on a particular date and you would be fought tooth and nail. He might have been born but he can never die. He is in fact our only remaining hope...the grand old patriot who is forever on the verge of returning and beating to a pulp all those incorrigible politicians who we have had to suffer since independence. Long live Netaji and murdabad to all those conspirators who would have us remember dates!