We are thankfully a little aware of Krishnadevaraya, a great king of India who contributed much to Indian culture and language during his reign. Sadly, our history books turned him and others like Marthanda Varma, Lachit Borphukan, the Cholas, the Pandyas, the Sikh Gurus, and the Marathas, to name a few, into footnotes while we imbibed the Delhi-centric history with great passion and vigour. The most obscure and transient rulers of Delhi go deep into our conscience as we can rattle off their names decades after we finish our school.
Following independence, it was unfortunate that the history given to our school children was heavily controlled by the Nehruvian Congress which had a distorted sense of Indian past and heritage. The dominant philosophy was equating the Indian past to primitive and not worth emulating even as the vision fixed to a ‘golden’ future represented by Europe. The left-liberal brand of politicians and powerful academicians writing our textbooks, in a great symbiotic relationship, completely distorted the historical narrative as at least two generations consumed and internalised this history. The country’s up and coming generation came to be ashamed of themselves as truth took a severe beating.
For India after Independence, history should have served a specific purpose. When we are at our lowest in confidence and self-respect, there was a need to teach something positive and uplifting about ourselves. The teaching should have been that we were one of the richest and the most culturally advanced countries in the world with wonderful achievements in various domains. The purpose of history, finally, for children is to instill a sense of pride and respect for the country. Perhaps, only the Germans chose to clearly depict their Nazi past in the history books after the war. The Britishers went one step further by obliterating their colonial history. European countries like France, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark Spain, sparingly mention, if at all, the colonial brutalities. The Americans did not stress too much on the atrocities perpetrated on the native American Indians. A huge positive spin allows a youth growing up in these countries to feel that his or her country is the best in the world. It is a different kind of white-washing, but the citizens believe that they are the best in the world.
We, on the other hand, just grew up being ashamed of our country, its religion, its culture, and its arts. Today, there is a disconnect in the youth with the idea of India. In fact, a twisted ideology is out to convince people that any idea of patriotism is fanatical. Sadly, in the darkest chapters of post-Independent India, the academia simply continued with the colonial story about India and continued the discourse of shame. Sanskrit became an exploitative language; Ramayana and Mahabharata were trivialised; and Indians, of course, became misogynistic, casteist, socially exploitative, and hostile. Indian kings were wicked if at all they got a mention. Of course, all this on a background of a popular liberal discourse that India did not ‘really exist’ before the colonials. The depiction of the evils of indigenous people or the benevolence of foreign invaders finally projected through the prism of religion. Hinduism was a template to show that everything was wrong in Indian culture.
The history writers achieved this by using every trick in the book for brainwashing: lies, appealing to authority, appealing to prejudice, cherry-picking, disinformation, euphemisms, exaggeration, glittering generalities, guilt by association, half-truths, intentional vagueness, labelling, loaded language, oversimplification, third-party technique, unstated assumption, thought terminating cliché, and so on. Neeraj Atri and Muneishwar Sagar explain this in detail in their wonderful book Brainwashed Republic. A crucial period of two generations entered colleges and built their lives believing sadly that nothing good came from our country.
Our history became a history of invaders (the mythical Aryans, Islamic rulers, the Europeans, and the British in succession) instead of the land and its people. There was never an elaboration of reasons why greedy rulers needed to come to India in the first place when the reverse never happened. The distorted philosophy of ‘secularism’ allowed the invaders to become benign and benevolent. All the invasions were brutal, inflicting great physical, cultural, and intellectual damage to India. The ‘colonial consciousness’ infecting most of our educated elite today is a continuation of intellectual violence. Hence, there is a persistent refusal to acknowledge Indian heritage and contributions (unless of course, a Westerner acknowledges and validates it). We grew up ashamed of our history and have ended up even hating ourselves. Today, our country has deep divisions and fissures. There is no feeling of nationalism or a sense of genuine pride. Every single individual and community feel alienated with a sense of injustice.
The purpose to not offend the minorities in the name of secularism led to complete whitewashing of facts. The Hindu contributions to Indian historical narratives became footnotes even as Islamic positives soared high. To please or protect, our thinkers in all relevant fields inappropriately associated the present-day Muslims to the past Islamic invaders when it was quite unnecessary. The textbooks went against a huge body of contemporary descriptions of the invasions by chroniclers and historians. Our thinkers could have set a narrative by detaching the present Muslims from the crimes of the past Islamic invaders. In this far better method, there would have been no need to falsify our history and at the same time carry the country forward with better harmony. The lies and whitewashings of the past caused immense damage to both Indian Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu now seethes in anger when he comes to know the historical narratives beyond the textbook teachings and the Muslim goes into a protective mode trying to defend the indefensible. Both the responses are unnecessary.
Unfortunately, the Muslim intellectuals also became a part of this exercise, especially the Aligarh school of historians. Falsifying and distorting the history of the Islamic invaders has damaged both Muslims and Hindus; the fissures have only deepened across decades. The ruling class for a long period could not see any justice in the Hindu consciousness of its pre-Islamic past, nor any injustice in the Muslim insistence on glorifying an inglorious period in Indian history. Sadly, the inappropriate solution for preventing ‘communal strife’ and encouraging ‘national integration’ was to dilute Hindu history and glorify or whitewash Islamic history.
We were the richest and the most prosperous country in the world. India and China were contributing more than 50% of the world GDP for 17 centuries from the start of the millennium. The UK was contributing 2% of the world GDP when the East India Company landed in India and became 18% in a period of 150 years of sheer loot and plunder. India reduced from 30% to 2%. The exact numbers were not known for a long time but still, the facts were truly clear about the tremendous economic and scientific growth of India in the pre-invasion period of India.
There is an urgent need to tell the truth without trying to offend or please. The basic purpose of history should be to instill a sense of pride in ourselves. However, there is no need for false stories. India does not need it either. Unfortunately, any attempt to correct the truth meets with wholesale abuse and shouting, accusing of ‘saffronisation’ or ‘militant revisionism.’ The past needs telling as it is without ruffling the present feathers. It is an immense talent and art which was beyond the agenda filled immature minds of our textbook writers. Band-Aid solutions, propagated unfortunately by generations of intellectuals and politicians over decades, do not lead to genuine bonding, integration, and pride.
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