Allah Baksh Versus Savarkar

This article was published on May 14, 2003 on the 60th anniversary of Allah Baksh's assassination. The article is critical of Anglocentric scholarship for its bias by elimination, devaluation or deprecation of Indian Muslims who opposed separatist trends among their own community. Some causes and consequences of Indian scholarship not having squarely challenged this bias are also discussed. Generally, progressive Indian history scholars have produced high quality work on ancient and medieval Indian history. The quality declines sharply when they deal with the period after the birth of the Communist movement in India. This scholarship, barring such exceptions as essays by D D Kosambi and Irfan Habib, tends to run close to the "party line" of the undivided Communist Party of India in pre-independence India. As a consequence it suffers from sectarianism and struggles and contributions of the Indian National Congress and the Socialists receive shoddy treatment. In this scenario, even doubtful Anglocentric dogmas and biases in historiography often tend to have a field day particularly with respect to interpretations directed at the Congress-led freedom movement.