If there is a change of government in New Delhi, we will probably see many historical events presented in new garb. History is bunk, according to Henry Ford. It would be more accurate to say history is how the victor sees events and wants posterity to see them.
I came upon an instance of this here, on the Greek island of Kythera at the tip of the Peloponnesian peninsula. A 159-year-old episode that people still talk of in a community of relatively simple folk reminds us that one man’s freedom fighter can be another man’s terrorist.
The controversy concerns three brothers, Giorgio, Demetrio and Aristide Diacopoulos, from a village called Karavas who have left behind numerous descendants in Greece and Australia. The brothers were among 10 men to be arrested one night in 1855 for allegedly looting the wreck of a papal ship that had foundered off Kythera’s northern coast. The British, who had ruled the island since 1815, took a severe view of such transgressions. Moreover, the seniormost British official was convinced “the Karavas people are the most disorderly and lowly in the island, and notoriously addicted to plunder.”
British troops marched off the men to the ancient castle that dominates Hora, the island’s capital, and flung them into cells. However, seven of the men (including the Diacopoulos brothers) escaped when the jailer “forgot” to lock their cell door, and made their way to mainland Greece which had become independent of Ottoman rule by then. The colonial authorities brought the three remaining prisoners to trial but were forced to acquit them when the witnesses, who were also local men like the “absent-minded” jailer, changed their stories.
The incensed British then tried the seven fugitives in absentia and sentenced each to 23 years’ imprisonment — the maximum punishment the law allowed. A year or two later the men wanted to return home and approached the British ambassador in Athens for permission. The Kythera administration allowed four of them to do so but not the three Diacopoulos brothers. A British official reported that if they came back they “might take revenge on the men who betrayed them to the authorities” leading to the in absentia trial and 23-year jail sentence.
That is the official version you read in all colonial-era history books. But my host in Karavas, Demetrio Diacopoulos’s great grandson, was brought up on the family version that the British felt the Diacopoulos brothers, especially Demetrio, had to be punished. They were staunch freedom fighters who wanted to throw out the British and merge the island with Greece. That finally happened in 1864, ending a thousand years of turbulent history.
Every country’s chronicles are dotted with such incidents. India is not the only nation where historical truth, whether about Mughal secularism or the results of British rule, can take more than one form. But such differences become matters of acrimonious public debate in India because our historians are articulate, persistent and influential. They also profess particular ideologies, meaning they are aligned to individual political parties.
Arguably, it can be said that the people indicted by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal were supporters of the status quo in 1971 and defended the country’s legitimately constituted government. They would have been hailed as national heroes if the Pakistani commander, Gen. A A K Niazi, had not surrendered. Instead, Pakistanis still revile Gen. Niazi as the “Jackal of Bengal.”
To take an earlier example, global (especially Asian) history would have followed an altogether different path if Japan had won the Second World War. Radha Binod Pal, the Indian member of the International War Crimes Tribunal which tried and condemned Japanese leaders, is honoured with a plaque in Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine. He famously called the trials a “sham employment of the legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge.” The Japanese themselves believe their conduct was no different from that of the European colonial powers at the time.
Economically or militarily dominant nations like Germany and Israel have made it a crime to question the Holocaust. Their will is binding international law because of the power they enjoy. Iran’s then President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at once invited the severe condemnation of the entire Western world for daring to suggest that Jews exploit the Holocaust.
News of the latest possible revision of history comes from Turkey whose Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has thrown a cat among the pigeons with a reference to the death in 1915 of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in eastern Turkey. Although this happened under the Ottoman empire, all Turkish governments have so far taken serious exception to any mention of genocide. Mr Erdogan still insists the deaths were caused by the hardships and violence of World War I, and not by government-directed mass killings or death marches, as many historians say. But the fact that he expresses regret indicates a reconsideration of what successive Turkish governments have claimed all these years. Mr Erdogan seems to believe that a group of renowned international historians examining international archives might be able to ascertain the truth.
But what is truth? as Pontius Pilate asked in the Bible. My school history referred to the events of 1857 as the Mutiny. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s First War of Indian Independence now seems the acceptable term although Sikhs and Tamils claim the honour for their own battles against the British. Given this patriotic effusion, I wonder if NDA cadets are still taught that two separate uprisings took place in 1857. While sepoys rebelled against their officers, some Indian princes demanded independence. That version is never admitted publicly or officially. I am now waiting for history to be rewritten again after the election results.
