History Unpacked is for young adults. It offers a comprehensive and readable summary of events, personalities and institutions that marked Indian antiquity. The excellent illustrations transform the book into something more than a mere textbook or repository of facts with which we are already familiar. In fact, they provide a complementary and occasionally a counternarrative that is bound to pique the young reader’s curiosity.
The sections on the formation of the Harappan cities and their eventual degradation are very well done, bringing out important lessons for today’s urban catastrophe and the challenges of climate change. It highlights the silting of rivers and the changing of their courses, which students would otherwise read about without really understanding the phenomena as they happened in the past, or reflecting on them through the prism of today’s disasters. The author could, however, have avoided the quiz questions that accompany every chapter and in fact, make it tedious. Instead, there could have been suggestions for practical activities, helping the young reader to actually do history rather than simply see it as an enshrined memorial of the past. This is not to take away the work of the author and illustrator who must be commended for enabling a contemporary understanding of events of the remote past, which nevertheless continue to exert influence on our lives today, whether in the form of caste or yoga or the use of Sanskrit for ritual. The book broadens the scope of the discussion on what it entails to write an engaging but relevant history of antiquity for children. The section on South India and the Kamarupas in the Northeast is particularly useful because often we ignore the history of these areas and their salience in constituting the complex civilization of India.
The mandate for the book is clear. It tries to make history a subject of interest rather than treating it as a mere compendium of events and dates. In this it is successful to an extent even though the strategies it uses are not uniformly effective. One such strategy—the use of contemporary expressions like ‘OMG’—carries the risk in this reviewer’s opinion, of patronizing young readers and trivializing the human stories that constitute history, which is more than the recording of events but rather the interpretation and telling of stories. This practice of history writing is crucial for children and young adults to understand in order to develop their own critical skills and to understand how the telling of the past is a complex exercise mediated by several factors.
The fun in doing history responsibly and creatively comes through only in spurts. The historian as a detective and storyteller peeps in sporadically throughout the book and it is on those occasions that it becomes a fun read. Take, for instance, the arrival of Mortimer Wheeler and his efforts to overhaul the Archaeological Survey of India and his much-touted theory of the Aryan invasion as the cause for the collapse of the Indus Valley culture. We are told how prejudiced he was about Indians and Indian society, and held firmly but wrongly that all material advances came from outside (Mesopotamia in this case) and that a technologically superior fighting force was responsible for the calamitous collapse of the Indus cities. Wheeler was proved wrong, but the usefulness of providing details on his prejudiced attitude lies precisely in conveying to the young reader that history is about individual interpretation, which must necessarily be subject to constant scrutiny and verification. That ‘invasions’ or migrations constituted a key element in the making of ancient India is to state the obvious. It is a theme that finds recurrent mention in the book. While the author does not acknowledge the extraordinary degree of anxiety about invasions that runs through standard textbooks, she does review the dynamism of cultural encounters and gives these a light and even humorous touch.
History Unplugged is an important experiment. We do not as a rule treat history as a fun subject in school or indeed as an exciting genre to be read for its own sake, even though we have in India a rich and vibrant tradition of both storytelling as well as of popular history writing in the vernacular. Yet amidst the tyranny of modern and unimaginative pedagogy, history has suffered and is treated with boredom and ennui, seen as an endless litany of names and dates to be memorized and not as a record of human ingenuity as evinced by the ways in which people settled landscapes, practiced agriculture, planned and built towns, and structured their societies around different ideologies and organizing principles. The book brings back the drama of human achievements vividly in text and image, and is bound to generate some curiosity in the young adult and in the conscientious teacher who will find it invaluable in animating class room discussion and hopefully in creating a new generation of argumentative Indians.