Redefining Indian History and Historical Consciousness in Ancient Indian

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Till quite recently it was an accepted truism that early India had no sense of history. Among the ancient civilizations, India was practically the only one to be conferred this negative distinction. Greeks and Romans of course had an abundantly developed sense of history, the Greeks, in fact, fathered the very notion of history The Chinese, the Christians, the Islamic all had heightened history consciousness and traditions of history writing. Whatever bits of muted historical enterprise could be detected in India, for example, in Kashmir or Assam, were obviously the gift of foreign influences, and not really indigenous. This was the accepted wisdom.

It now looks rather perplexing that such a view could be entertained about a civilization that produced two of the greatest and most massive epics the world has ever known, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and that both of them unequivocally declare themselves as Itihasa'. And, then there was an enormous genre of literature called Purana. Further, there were copious bodies of Buddhist and Jain narratives of past events. Besides, early India left behind a huge quantity of historical records in the form epigraphs and literary narratives like caritas, vamsas, etc. Obviously, a huge misapprehension and misunderstanding were at play here.

It was only natural that this view would come to be contested and the misunderstanding clarified. It is interesting that one of the earliest and sharpest rebuttals of the lack of sense of history' of early India and a deeply perceptive exposition of the Indian point of view came from Tagore, the poet, in two seminal essays.

Two essential features of history as a discipline of knowledge are the past-consciousness and the centrality of man. While past- consciousness in a theoretical extension paves the way for the demand of evidence to authenticate the truth of past making history develop a fact-based form, the centrality of man in this discipline presupposes a sense of value as the distinguishing feature of man establishing his superiority over the other living beings of the world that after shaping and reshaping things in a cultural context, develops a value-system providing a scale of value to judge a past as a 'historical' past or not making history a value-based form. Thus there are two forms of history having essential features of past-consciousness and humane element common to each but due to the difference between their preferences for the 'fact' and the 'value' respectively as the dominating factors, these two forms develop differently in their different cultural frameworks representing 'history' as the product of western experience and endeavour and 'Itihasa' as the Indian discipline of Past- study. History and Itihasa are the two schools of the discipline of past-studies which have been developed differently from two different cultures having two different value-systems. They are conceptually not one and the same nor are synonyms to each other as has been commonly understood giving rise to a number of fallacies regarding form and features of Indian Culture at the top of which is that Indians had no sense of history for a number of reasons. Yes, Indians had no sense of history because they had the sense of 'Itihasa' to express their past-consciousness and the preservation of the past in their own specific way.