This chapter explores the American discourse surrounding three scientists/inventors: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Albert Einstein. All three are regarded as “great” in the areas of science and quantitative intelligence. Due to that, each is also elevated more broadly into wisdom curators, individuals who ought to possess great answers to questions beyond their expertise. These instances betoken Americans’ belief that greatness in one field ought to translate into some near-mystical sort of intuition in all others. In all three cases, greatness was remarkably compromised. America’s reaction and reassessment suggest something very important about the contours of great men in the United States.

Introduction

This chapter explores the question posed in its title: ‘Does populism challenge the expertise of academic historians?’1 It is well known that populists (or, to be more precise, people who have often been called populists, since at this point I have not suggested a definition of this term) make assertions about the pasts of their own countries and often about historical pasts more generally. In doing so, they are at least in part making knowledge claims about the past and not simply expressing feelings of attachment or aversion. To the extent that their claims have a cognitive content, one might think that this would put populists on a collision course with the narratives that academic historians produce. Moreover, it is well known that ‘the rise of populism in the West has led to attacks on scientific expertise’ (Collins et al. 2020: 1). One might think that this anti-scientific tendency, together with populists’ interest in making claims about the past, would lead them to challenge not just the narratives but also the expertise of academic historians.

But reality turned out to be quite different from what I originally supposed it would be. Although historians are interested in populists, populists rarely show interest in the academic work produced by historians. Even less are populists interested in, or even aware of, the expertise that academic historians claim, by which I mean the toolkit of methods and approaches by which academic historians formulate questions, search for and interpret evidence, evaluate that evidence, and construct accounts of the past well enough grounded to withstand the criticisms offered by their professional colleagues. The fact is, academic historians doing academic work rarely come into the range of view of populists. Even academic historians who step into an activist role and attempt to draw lessons for the present from their study of the past seem to have been barely noticed by populists. I think, for example, of Timothy Snyder's little book On Tyranny (Snyder 2017), written in the wake of the election in 2016 and Donald Trump's election to the presidency of the United States of America (USA), which circulated widely among academics and some other readers, but raised hardly a peep from populists.

This concluding chapter examines the phenomenon of list-making in the 1970s and beyond. In this period, Americans were no longer piqued by a single symbolic exemplar, a greatest of all time. Post-Vietnam and Watergate, Americans desired choices, not conclusions. The popularity of lists supported this cultural impulse. In this context, the cultural biography of Michael Jordan stands out as a curious exception. How Jordan served as the exception that proved the rule helps summarize the essential themes of the book.

Arguably, the Mahabharata is India's most influential political text. Kautilya's Arthashastra may seem a close contender, but it never attained the epic's social depth and was, in any case, forgotten for a millennium before its rediscovery in 1905. The Constitution of India certainly plays a more important role in shaping the modern Indian state, but, as a text, it hardly permeates popular consciousness in the way the Mahabharata does. For over two millennia, the Mahabharata has shaped Indian politics. It has nourished the statecraft of Hindu rajas and Mughal emperors, stirred anti-colonial nationalism and peasant rebellion, moulded Dalit–Bahujan and feminist activism. Beyond India, it has profoundly shaped political cultures across Southeast Asia, inspired pan-Asian thinking in China and Japan, activated the philosophical imagination of European and Arab thinkers, and conversed with Iranian nationalism.

Like one of its protagonists, the divine statesman Krishna, the Mahabharata exists in multiple avatars. The Sanskrit text, ascribed to Vyasa, coexists with versions in several Indian and extra-Indian languages. For many decades now, scholars have written about these textual traditions as well as about the popular appeal of Mahabharata stories. Historians, anthropologists, religious studies scholars, and philosophers have all written about the epic. Admittedly, much more has been said about the pre-modern lives of the Mahabharata than about its modern incarnations – but even on the latter the scholarship is rich and growing.

In this milieu, why is a new book needed about the epic? We offer two compelling reasons. First, there exists no single volume that engages with the Mahabharata's role in shaping modern social, political, and religious thought.

Introduction

Political Islamism and Islamic reform in East Africa have many strands, but their most salient forms can legitimately be described as populist since they position Muslims in East Africa as ‘little people’ marginalized by a Christian establishment and rhetorically use this opposition for political mobilization (Becker 2006; Loimeier 2011; Mudde 2017). It is also evident that history matters to these populists since they have much to say about historical events. It is harder to decide whether this form of populism should be seen as right-wing or left-wing since it combines calls for economic justice with pronounced gendered inequality and extols political emancipation while remaining vague on its desired political dispensation (Becker 2016; Kresse 2007; Willis and Gona 2013). Moreover, the collective of marginalized Muslim ‘little people’ is internally highly diverse in its religious practices, cultural affiliations, and political views.

This chapter uses a mixture of interviews, sermon recordings, informal conversations, and participant observation to explore how Islamists define a place for Muslims in East Africa's difficult present using claims about the past, historical change, and the future. It examines claims about past greatness and present decline, the dangers and promises of the afterlife, and the difficulty of making futures in this world. While a sense of present hardship and loss of direction is practically omnipresent in this discourse, it contains diverse and sometimes contradictory tropes that different adherents combine flexibly. A distinctive feature is the attention to the domestic realm and gender relations as a site of struggle to live a good life.

This case study, then, seeks to complicate the notion that the appeal of populism lies in its ability to simplify societal problems, which sometimes comes close to suggesting that populism appeals to the simple-minded. It chimes with studies that emphasize tensions and slippages in religious populists’ claims and strategies (Hadiz 2014, 2016, 2018; Baykan 2019; Peker 2019). Populists do strive to use simple oppositions, but since they operate in a messy world, their attempts to simplify tend to create their own complexities. More fundamentally, the tropes of populism work because they can mean different things to different people; because they are polysemous, an effect that has been observed long before the current wave of populist mobilization (Dubow 1995).

The past few years have seen many kinds of inflation – among which there is an absolutely inflationary use of the word ‘populism’. Politicians, pundits, and, yes, also scholars tell us incessantly that we live in the ‘age of populism’ and that we are witnessing (or, for that matter, might be crushed by) a ‘populist wave’. The outcome of this inflation has been that many phenomena for which we have rather precise concepts – think of nativism, nationalism, and protectionism as obvious examples – are now labelled ‘populist’. This failure to distinguish impairs our political judgement. It has also arguably inflated the power of populism itself – it now appears that populism is omnipresent and that it is somehow an unstoppable political movement (after all, who can really stop a ‘wave’, let alone what Nigel Farage at one point called a ‘tsunami’?).

Against this background, one wonders whether looking for particularly populist approaches to history might not strengthen the unfortunate trend of conflating populism with all kinds of other phenomena. It is indeed problematic to label political positions that have, at best, an elective affinity with certain kinds of populism as populist as such; it is also misleading, in my view, to declare particular policies (let us say, on immigration or trade) populist as such. However, the case of history is different, and this volume shows why.

Populists, I hold, claim that they, and only they, represent what they often call ‘the silent majority’ or ‘the real people’. This appears to suggest no particular stance on policies nor, for that matter, commitment to any particular historical narratives. And yet this claiming of a monopoly of representation, usually phrased in moralistic language, does have two pernicious consequences, and these eventually also relate to the framing of history. First, and rather obviously, populists claim that all other contenders for power are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a disagreement about policies, or even about values, for that matter (which are, of course, normal and ideally even productive in a democracy); rather, populists say more or less directly that their political opponents are corrupt characters who are betraying the people (sometimes they label them outright as enemies).

Introduction

If, in writing history, we constitute the past and structure collective imagination, then the specific way we narrate the past becomes important in defining the shape of the national memory we produce and the vision of the nation that comes into being. This chapter looks at the way the Hindu right in India frames its history and envisions the nation. It suggests that we not only unpack the framing tropes of that historical imagination, but also the practices that reflect its attitude to the craft of history writing and the place of the historical profession within society. Populist regimes everywhere seek to refigure what counts as history.*

The internal dynamics of the Hindu right have always been shaped by a contradictory dialectic between constitutional politics and extra-constitutional activism, between the seemingly moderate and the aggressively militant voices. This conflict has unfolded differently over the decades. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the Hindu right could not expand its electoral base, though it continued its work at the popular level, opening schools where Hindutva history and Hindutva culture were popularised, doing social work, forming cultural and social organizations that were committed to the ideals of Hindutva. Even as late as 1984, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was not able to win more than two parliamentary seats. Disappointed with electoral politics, desperate to expand its social base, many within the Hindu right felt the need for a militant movement to forge an aggressive Hindu identity. L. K. Advani emerged as the aggressive face of the right – leading the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the late 1980s to build a temple for Rama, a major Hindu deity, in Ayodhya – and Atal Bihari Vajpayee appeared as the moderate voice. While Advani's efforts helped forge an assertive masculine Hindu identity, Vajpayee managed to form a coalition government in 1996.

In the early years of this century, during the time that Vajpayee was managing an embattled central coalition, Narendra Modi was fine-tuning a new militant Hindutva in Gujarat as the chief minister of the province. By 2014 he appeared as the unchallenged populist right-wing leader of India.

In the Sufi Islamic tradition, shrines are a physical point for commemorating awliya’. Generally constructed around the tombs where these holy persons’ bodies lie buried, they are considered sacred and powerful because they are believed to be animated by saintly presence and offer access to their blessings (Ortis 2017). These shrines are a ubiquitous presence in the metropolitan landscape of Pakistan's second-largest city, Lahore. While their exact numbers are unknown, thousands of such shrines dot the city's mohallas, streets, markets, and graveyards. Some of them serve as iconic monuments of the city, featuring grand complexes that draw millions of visitors and pilgrims from across the globe and attract the patronage of governments and elites. On the other end of the spectrum, small, marked-off corners in residential lanes that are only known to a few are also revered as shrines.

While some of these shrines are recognized as historical relics dating as far back as the early years of Islam in India, their numbers are continuously bolstered by the establishment of new ones. The old and dense localities of Lahore, where their concentration is already greatest, are especially fertile grounds for their proliferation. During a conversation with a pirand one of his disciples in Ichra, which is one such locality, I asked them to estimate the number of shrines within a 2-kilometer radius of where we were seated. After consulting for around 10 minutes, both threw up their hands in exasperation. Though they came up with an estimated number of two hundred, they seemed frustrated by the futility of this exercise. It was virtually impossible to know all the places where a saint had chosen to distribute their blessings, as some of them could be hidden or even be inside people's homes. In relating this exchange, my purpose is essentially not only to demonstrate the pervasiveness of Sufi shrines in Lahore but also hint at the challenges involved in mapping them to the satisfaction of all concerned.

Introduction

In his speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem in 2015, Benyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, purported to describe a meeting between Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler in November 1941:

The past is a rich resource for populist exploitation as it is directly linked to moral boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter focuses on the questions of how national memory and moral remembrance have an effect on populism's moral and ethical relations to the past. According to Cas Mudde (2004), probably the most influential scholar on populism, morals are central to the populist appeal. Populism is a political stance that juxtaposes ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’. Populism relies on morals that determine ‘the pure’ and ‘the righteous’ values; hence, it is directly linked with disputes over the interpretations of the past. The rise of populism, which began in the 1970s and grew considerably in the 1990s and onwards, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. This is because the populist revelations on what are ‘pure’ and ‘righteous’ values always lean on allegedly ‘true’ and so far ‘hidden’ understanding of what transpired in the past. Hence, as we will see, historical revisionism and claims over victimhood and suffering are the bread and butter of every populist appeal.

Though the term ‘populism’ was first reported in American newspapers in the 1890s in the context of the rise of the People's Party (Kaltwasser et al. 2017), the scholarship on populism has grown considerably since the 1970s creating a dense and fertile field. One of the first definitions of populism was offered by Gino Germani, an Italian intellectual referring to it as a multi-class movement, which ‘usually includes contrasting components such as the claim for equality of political rights and universal participation for the common people, but fused with some sort of authoritarianism often under charismatic leadership’ (Kaltwasser et al. 2017: 5).

This short introduction establishes the argument of the book: namely, that “greatness” in American culture is a useful tool to address “change.” The introduction also situates the importance of this history in contemporary discourse and situates the research in the fields of American Studies and Fame Studies.