Like Jean Chesneaux, the French historian, I believe that history and historians are not above the class struggle. As he put it, our knowledge of the past is a dynamic factor in the development of society, a significant stake in the political and ideological struggles of today, a sharply contested area. What we know of the past can be of service to the Establishment or to the peoples movement. In class societies, he said, history is one of the tools the ruling class uses to maintain its power. The state apparatus tries to control the past at the level of both political action and ideology. The revision of official history, therefore, is regarded as one of the essential points of departure for the peoples struggles. -- Suniti Kumar Ghosh in the preface to the second volume of India and the Raj.
Posted on: Wed, 14 May 2014 09:08:06 +0000
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