History — does it make sense?

I AM not a historian. I taught and researched in mathematics. Even in that discipline, I was allergic to the topic “history of mathematics.” My question has always been: why should we study history — somebody’s story of someone else’s past? What is the use of the information that 10,000 years back, the land on which I am now standing was owned by a person whose right hand was shorter than the left and was squint eyed? Qualitatively that seems to be the core content of history, besides one other issue which I will discuss later.

A few professors of History asked me: “How would you know from whom you have descended, from where they came and their culture?” My counter is: “Why should I bother? I am what I am and will be what I have to be. Further, when a politician with corrupt record comes to power, you silence his/her critics saying ‘past is past; we should look for what he/she does in future.’ Then, why should the historians dig up the past and produce juicy controversies?” I am not answered till today.

It is common knowledge that you can score well in the examination by remembering about a king of the 16th century without knowing anything about his predecessor or successor. All you need to know is how many wives he had — officially and unofficially — how he hunted, the wars and battles he waged, the taxes he imposed and the like.

Dynamic

If the storyteller, I mean the historian, favours this king, all these deeds (misdeeds) are glorified; else, condemned. It is a certainty that a few decades later the same king would be shown in a diametrically different colour by a new storyteller, again I mean historian. In that way, history is dynamic, maybe periodic and chaotic but surely dynamic.

In the study of dynamical systems in mathematics, physics, or economics, techniques like interpolation, extrapolation and regression are used based on sound theoretical foundations. In history too there is a lot of extrapolation but the application is arbitrary. A historian asks for evidence from others. For him evidence is an interpretation convenient to him.

While looking for evidence, he ignores the certainty that incidents of very distant past may not leave material evidence to this date — time consumes it. Thus historians make themselves notorious for their inability to see beyond their nose.

Apart from these deficiencies, history has proved harmful to humanity. Was not Hitler’s genocide a result of history — both pride (Aryan) and prejudice (Jewish)? In 1993, a Turkish Muslim friend of mine confided that the carnage on the Muslim community in Bosnia-Herzegovina going on at that time was a direct revenge for what the invaders of the Ottoman Empire did to the Christian population. I do not know the realities. History is far from them. I wanted the title to be ‘History is Myth.” But to my shock, I realised that the antonym of myth is history.

The following quote from The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown says it all:

…History is always written by the victors. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated; and the winner writes the history books — books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe.

When this is history, does it make sense?