Historiography and Myths
The western intellectual tradition has bemoaned the fact that the Indians never indulged in history-writing (or historiography). In this tradition, there is an obsessive need for collecting “facts” about the past. This is partly the result of how Judaism, Christianity and Islam (the three Semitic religions) look at themselves and their own past: everything they claim about their past (the Flood, the temple of Solomon, the coming of Christ, etc.) should not only be true but proven so beyond all doubt. They have to be true (in the sense that their recounting of the past should also be confirmed by research) because these religions live or die accordingly as whether it is also true what they say effectively happened on earth. These facts (like the existence of, say, the Temple of Solomon in the Israel of today and the Judea of yesterday or the existence of Jesus of Nazareth), in their turn, prove the truth about Moses and his tablet and the truth of the promise of God to the children of Israel. If the recounting of their past turns out to be false (like, say, the absence of any of the above two) would destroy their existence: if there was never a historical Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity would collapse like a house of cards. (In fact, Julian the Apostate, the nephew of the Emperor Constantine, set out to rebuild the Temple of Solomon at its original site precisely in order to do this. His early death, viewed both by the Jews and the Christians as an act of God, put an end to this project.)
In the Ancient Greek culture, they encountered two things: both historiography (Thucydides, for instance) and an abundance of stories about the Greek past. The Greeks called these stories as “muthos ” (the English “myths” comes from this Greek word) and their culture had an ambiguous relationship to these stories. To the Jews and the Christians, quite obviously, these myths could not be “true” claims about the past of the Greeks. “Quite obviously” because these Semitic religions possessed “the true” account of the human past. Consequently, “myths” could not be true. By the end of the sixteenth century, a very firm framework had been set to interpret myths. They were obviously false. If not true, why did the Greeks compose myths and what did they “really” want to say? Multiple answers were provided: one of them was that they were “disguised” historiography. The poetic imagination transformed historical facts into exaggerated myths. So, one needed to “interpret” these myths to find out what the historical facts were and discard the rest as “poetic exaggeration”.
By the time Europe encountered India, this was the framework for looking at myths. Most of the multiple theories of myth we have today make the same point: myths require interpretation because poetic imagination has transformed facts into myths (falsehoods). These facts could be moral in nature (myths are allegories of moral virtues), historical in nature (myths are disguised historiography) or whatever else that takes one’s fancy. Whatever the theory, the consensus is unanimous: historiography is the only way of dealing with the past and cultures that did not know of history-writing take to producing myths.
Most of us in India have accepted the Semitic framework. Some have taken the direct Semitic route of wanting to say that our myths are history: the Hindutva movement exemplifies this trend. They want to show that Ayodya existed on earth, there is a “rama sethu” and so on and so forth. In the process, they are doing what Christianity wants to do: destroy the Indian traditions and culture. If left unattended, the Hindutva movement is going to kill our traditions, irreparably and irrevocably. The others have taken the indirect Semitic route: look at myths as falsehoods and seek their symbolic interpretations. These attempts are no better.
For more, check these articles:
What do Indians need: history or past?