How Jawaharlal Nehru and his Coterie

Ruined Prof R.C. Majumdar’s Career

Sandeep Balakrishna Follow
Jun 1, 2019 · 8 min read

R
amesh Chandra Majumdar’s life is one of the glowing showcases of a
full life lived productively, usefully, in the devoted pursuit of an ideal:
knowledge and national service. It reminds us of D.V. Gundappa’s evocative
line in his magnum opus, Mankutimmana Kagga: “ghana tattva ondakke
dinaratri manasotu…” (surrender yourself day and night to a grand
ideal…). He spent his ninety-six years-long life dedicating himself to the
freedom struggle of a far profounder and intensely penetrating sort:
rediscovering and recovering the true history of Bharatavarsha’s actual
greatness. The outcome was a wealth of magnum opuses totalling nearly 30
volumes apart from scores of solid research papers and even popular
newspaper articles.

If one has to describe the history of India after Independence in a word, it is

ingratitude. Nowhere is this more evident than in the manner in which the
career of this iconic historian, scholar and freedom fighter was set afire by
India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his perfidious cronies.

This is the full story of that national tragedy.

… It is an ominous sign of the time that Indian history is being viewed in

official circles in the perspective of recent politics. The official history of
the freedom movement starts with the premise that India lost independence
only in the eighteenth century and had thus an experience of subjection to a
foreign power for only two centuries. Real history, on the other hand,
teaches us that the major part of India lost independence about five
centuries before, and merely changed masters in the eighteenth century.”
[Emphasis added]

This is how R.C. Majumdar, one of the greatest and encyclopaedic historians
of the world described the state of history writing in India in the immediate
aftermath of attaining Independence. This quote appears in the preface to
the First Volume of the three-volume, definitive History of the Freedom
movement in India published in 1962.[i]

The last volume of the 11-Volume magnum opus The History and Culture of
the Indian People under his general editorship chronicles India’s freedom
struggle. However, his History of the Freedom movement in India (HFMI)
treats this great episode in world history independently. It has given us a
work of history that remains unsurpassed even today. It is a natural classic.
That it is the work of just one man is an extraordinary tale of inspiration and
a lesson of life in its own right.

The story of how the History of the Freedom movement in India came to be
written deserves multiple retellings not in the least because it was
deliberately, disgracefully suppressed and buried for more than sixty years
— that is, till the communist stranglehold on public discourse and history
was permanently shattered. Most importantly, the story needs to be told for
the sake of our children of today, and their children of tomorrow.

Roots of the Subversion

That our Marxists-Communists-Secularists-Progressives-Left-Liberals have
subverted our history among other things is largely well-known. However, if
you thought that they were the pioneers of this historical and intellectual
insurgency, think again.

The roots of the rot had begun to sink in deep and take shape elsewhere.
In 1948, R.C. Majumdar submitted a proposal to the Government to write
an authentic and truthful history of the freedom struggle, a fact that he
records in some detail in the Appendix of Volume 1 of HFMI.[ii] This first-
ever proposal on this much-needed endeavour was accepted.

What happened next is best narrated by Dr. B.N. Pandey in his review of
Volume 1 of Majumdar’s HFMI.[iii]

In 1952 the Ministry of Education appointed a Board of Editors for the

compilation of the history. Professor Majumdar was appointed by the Board as
the Director and entrusted with the work of sifting and collecting materials and
preparing the draft of the history.

However, the Board as consisting of politicians and scholars, was least

likely to function harmoniously. Perhaps this was the reason why it was
dissolved at the end of 1955. [Emphasis added]

This actually gives away the fact that political interference began on Day
One to the obvious detriment of scholarship, which must essentially rest on
truth and honesty. Dr. Pandey’s moderate language merely throws a hint of
what exactly had happened. His language is also a reflection of an era
where restraint in language and public life was highly valued. Yet this is not
the full story. The reason the Board was dissolved lies elsewhere. Dr. Pandey
continues,

In [the first] volume the distinguished author has shown ample courage and
sound scholarship in approaching some very controversial and delicate
questions. On the question of Hindu-Muslim relationship in pre-British India
he refutes the commonly held view that the Hindus and Muslims lived in
harmony before the advent of the British and that the Hindu-Muslim tension
was the outcome of the British policy to divide and rule. These two
communities, the author holds, lived as “two separate communities with
distinct cultures and different mental, and moral characteristics” (p. 33). He
argues that the Hindu leaders, including Gandhi and Nehru, deliberately
ignored the fundamental differences between the Hindus and Muslims
and made no serious efforts “to tackle the real problem that faced India,
namely how to make it possible for two such distinct units to live together as
members of one State (p. xix). [Emphasis added] [iv]

However, it was merely the board that was dissolved. The project was very
much alive. As Dr. Pandey notes, it remained “in balance for a year” after
which the Government entrusted it to a Nehru-bootlicking bureaucrat
named Tara Chand in the Education ministry who was India’s ambassador
to Teheran from 1951–56. Tara Chand’s spurious tract was published in
1967 by the Publications Division, Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting. This, tragically, remains the official (read: Congress
dynasty’s) history of the freedom struggle (the title is the same as that of
R.C. Majumdar’s volumes) till date.

Undaunted Courage of a Lone Warrior

But R.C. Majumdar was undeterred and unflinching in his quest to author
the most authentic history of the freedom struggle of his own countrymen:
to keep their pains, tears, sacrifices, struggles, spirit, and hopes alive and
fresh, and to preserve the dignified forest of their heroic memories watered
and evergreen. This proud son of Bengal did not approach this work merely
as a project: it was akin to working towards the same goal with the same
spirit that animated our freedom struggle. R.C. Majumdar had lived it as
witness, participant, and chronicler. It was National Service in the truest
sense of the word. In his own[v] words,

I have been a witness to the grim struggle from 1905 to 1947, and do not
pretend to be merely a dispassionate or disinterested spectator; I would
have been more or less than a human being if I were so…Without denying this
possibility…I have tried my best to take a detached view. On the other hand, I
possess certain advantages … in having a first-hand knowledge of the
important events and … impressions and sentiments they left behind on the
minds of the people. It is difficult to form a proper idea of these by one who,
living at a later period, has only to rely on the record of the past in order to
reconstruct its history.

How many historians and scholars in the present time possess this kind of
honesty?

With meagre resources, Majumdar worked alone and completed the

majestic three-volume work in just seven years. It is still the most
comprehensive, authoritative and unchallenged work on India’s freedom
struggle.

Three Observations
Three crucial observations emerge from this saga.

First, the seeds for the politicisation of the history establishment were sown
when politicians were appointed to a scholarly/academic Board, a place
they had no business to be.
Second, the precedent for slaughtering historical truths was set because
Majumdar had declared that he would critically examine the roles played by
Mohandas Gandhi, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru in the Independence
struggle. This was a taboo and would certainly infuriate the first and more
crucially, the socialist Prime Minister Nehru. In the words of Dr. N.S.
Rajaram, “What was Majumdar’s crime? He refused to bend history to suit the
interest of the Congress.” [vi] Thus, the stage was set for rampant historical
distortions at the hands of Marxist pamphleteers for the next fifty-odd years
at all levels: school to the university. The distortions remain even as we
speak.

The third concerns the timeline. On the one hand is the “official” project
whose trajectory is as follows: it begins at the dissolution of the Board in
1955, restarts in 1956–57 and is finally published by the Government in
1967. This project has the complete backing of the Government and
resources on demand. On the other hand, we have the illustrious example
of a dedicated scholar working alone, who publishes the grand three-
volume HFMI five years before the “official” version. This point too, has an
important bearing on what follows.

he Education Minister back when the project’s proposal was conceived and
submitted by R.C. Majumdar was Jawaharlal Nehru’s Man Friday, the vile
Maulana Azad. He was succeeded by three equally, dynasty-friendly
Education Ministers. It was during the tenure of another awful dynasty
lackey, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed that Tara Chand’s sanitized bundle of
historical lies was finally published. The same Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed who
signed Indira Gandhi’s Emergency proclamation.

Romesh Chandra Majumdar

T
hus came about the systematic marginalisation and banishment of a
towering historian, scholar and patriot which went hand in hand with
the construction of a Marxist Grand Narrative of Indian history that was
elevated to vile levels and has come to be the mainstay of not just our
history but our public discourse. It is precisely the teaching of this
fraudulent “history” to at least three generations of our children that the
disgusting spectacle of say, the maniac Mamata Banerjee arresting people
for chanting “Jai Shri Ram” has occurred. Or why for example, we don’t bat
an eyelid at the routine public abuse and vandalism of Hindu deities,
traditions, and institutions.

The Story Must be Told and Retold

This is the reason that the story of heroes like R.C. Majumdar and the
realities of his time must be told, at least now, to build a nation based on
accepting and digesting even the harshest of historical truths. It certainly
takes courage and a thick skin but it’s preferable in the long term than
pretending that these realities and truths don’t exist.

Think about it.

Our Marxist stenographers and pen-pushers wearing the makeup of

historians would have correctly remained in the fringes — like the
Holocaust deniers in Europe — had honest scholars like R.C. Majumdar not
been shunned and hounded out solely because they didn’t agree to become
Nehru’s slaves. This also reveals the truth about the person of Jawaharlal
Nehru: that he felt threatened by an honest assessment of one of the most
important episodes of India’s long history.

But the truth remains no matter what: R.C. Majumdar was yet another…of
the hundreds of such Himalayan scholars who were victimized by an
insecure autocrat. But he, and not Jawaharlal Nehru has been vindicated by
time as a hero, and Nehru’s true legacy is a national joke named Rahul
Gandhi. The proof of the blood is the brood.

. . .

Note: This is a slightly modified and abridged version of the full essay
published on The Dharma Dispatch.

. . .

Notes
[i] R.C.Majumdar: History of the Freedom movement in India, Vol. I: pp. xii-
xiii