REWRITING HISTORY BOOKS
APRIL 4, 2023
The removal of the history of Mughal Empire by the NCERT takes the political interventions in history writing from one extreme end to another. In post-independent India, the Congress along with the historians steeped in leftist ideology pushed a distorted history based on the ideas of secularism. Whitewashing the Islamic Empire’s crimes and severe iconoclastic activities in history books was a solution for them to achieve ‘communal harmony.’ This was a weird acknowledgement of the association of the present-day Muslims with the past Islamic rulers.
It was a disastrous move because the historical depictions in our textbooks went against a huge body of descriptions of contemporary historians of those times (mainly Muslims) which exist intact in the libraries. When true history comes out, faster and more effective in the globalized and connected world, the Hindu seethes in anger and the Muslim attempts to defend the indefensible. A far better way would have been a true depiction of the barbarities of the Islamic Empire (a blip of six or seven centuries in a 5000-year-old Indian civilization) and stressing that the present-day Muslims had nothing to do with the Islamic rulers.
India had an Islamic scholar as an education minister for ten long years after independence. This unique event in the history of any country would have certainly helped the implementation of these policies. Inappropriate ideas of secularism could not have the maturity of dealing with the problem between two communities whose frictions dated back to centuries. It grasped the definition of secularism as appeasement of ‘minority’ and liberalism as abuse of the ‘majority’ which managed to create a great disharmony unsurprisingly. The present decision to ban Mughal history is equally immature as the previous governments which is sure to aggravate the religious tensions in the country.
SRI SURVARAM SUDHAKAR’S PACKAGING OF HISTORY
SEPTEMBER 17, 2022
The detailed article by the former secretary general of CPI (THI, 17th September) on the Telangana struggle is a typical example of Communist doublespeak and self-aggrandizement. As examples of their uncomfortable history, they betrayed the nationalists by acting as informers to the British agencies in the 1942 Quit India movement; they supported the British authorities during the Bengal famine caused by Churchill; they were second only to the Muslim League in creating Pakistan; their brutalities on the hapless people of Telangana were equal to the Razakars and Nizams; they continued to fight the Indian state after liberation (which the author calls the second phase) in the hope of creating a Communist nation within India; and they painfully prolonged the Ayodhya issue with the flimsiest of arguments. Right from the days of MN Roy, the Communists worked with orders from China and Russia representing foreign interests in India. However, with a helpful ideologically driven academia on their side, they could distort the narratives. The greatest contribution of Gandhiji, their public enemy number one, was that he prevented their large-scale entry into India.
BREAKING INDIA ARYAN-DRAVIDIAN DEBATES
JULY 22, 2022
The Aryan-Dravidian debate has the unfortunate consequence of a false division in the country either by intention or by ignorance. It was simply a colonial narrative which our unthinking intellectuals have carried forward. The entire Dravidian politics, based on condemned concepts like ‘race’, creates unnecessary fissures in the great Indic civilization, an amalgamation of many cultures and traditions. Unlike the recorded history of migrations and invasions in places like America and Africa, ‘Aryan’ Indo-European languages arriving and driving the ‘original’ Dravidian inhabitants base themselves on speculations and cherry-picking of data. The Aryan proponents use selective evidence and convenient interpretations to deny the civilization roots of the country.
The Aryan theory has been responsible for vicious narratives of race and caste. Indic civilization, an inseparable mix of both Vedic and non-Vedic cultures, is an unbroken continuity for thousands of years. India is an amorphous homogenous mix of different cultures, subcultures, and traditions. Everyone of this land is a part and inheritor of this great culture irrespective of what tradition or religion they may be following. Instead of accepting our common and great civilizational past, the Aryan proponents are keen to show that some groups are ‘foreigners’ and perennially exploiting some other ‘indigenous’ groups.
Selective and convenient application of archaeological and genetic findings; torturing Vedic texts to find racially themed discourses on Aryans and Dravidians; selective linguistic analyses; closed circle of academic scholarships disallowing alternative voices; ad-hominem attacks; and prominent power positions have all helped in perpetuating this account of the Aryans across centuries. Selective genetic evidence now propagates for the Aryan theory even as archaeology solidly rejects the Aryans. In fact, equally valid genetic evidence shows a reverse migration to other parts of the world from India. Problematically, the Aryan theory has constructed a super edifice over decades, and if the foundational base rips out, the entire edifice collapses. Therefore, there is a huge resistance to discard the theory.
Scholars like Talageri, Michel Danino, Koenraad Elst, and Marianne Keppens show extensive evidence against the Aryan theory. They also show that the Aryan linkage to the ‘caste system’, propagated by political concerns mainly, are faulty and bogus. Today’s persistent conflation between race, language and culture is misleading and dangerous for the country. British anthropologist Edmund Leach (1989) sums it all up: ‘Even today, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history… The details of this theory fit in with racist framework. The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators to see themselves as bringing ‘pure’ civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but ‘morally corrupt’) kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. The Aryan invasions never happened at all…’ And yet we continue with the divisive narratives as we reach the 75th year of our independence.
DENYING THE ISLAMIC HISTORY OF INDIA
MAY 17, 2022
The ‘gyaanvaapi’ mosque and the Taj Mahal issues are challenging our secularism today. Germany traded peace with its past when the Nazi history became a part of its textbooks. After independence, our planners ignored thinkers like Sri Aurobindo who had a far more nuanced understanding of traditional Indian culture and also modern ideas like secularism or nationhood. The colonised west-looking politicians and the left-leaning academia could never fathom the nature of Indian past and simply imbibed western frameworks. This has only left a trail of disaster in our country where people stay divided in the name of anything and everything-mainly religion and caste.
A distorted writing of our history after independence failed to look at more profound solutions to deal with the clearly documented destroyed or altered temples. The philosophy of ‘secularism’ allowed the invaders to become benign and benevolent when all the invasions were brutal, inflicting great physical, cultural, and intellectual damage to India. Sadly, the solutions for preventing ‘communal strife’, for not offending the ‘minorities’, and encouraging ‘national integration’ was to dilute Hindu history and glorify or whitewash Islamic history.
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 dishonest approach 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. Muslim intellectuals, especially the Aligarh school of historians, played a key role in this exercise.
Starting from the early 8th century, the Islamic rulers successively attacked India till finally in 1210 CE, they settled in Delhi and became ‘natives’ as per our secular historical narratives. However, Muslim rule was a prototype of the succeeding British rule. No Muslim ruler ever learnt or spoke an Indian language except in the last days when Muslim power had almost collapsed. Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and later English had the pride of place. The positions of power and privilege were always for Muslims of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, or even Abyssinian descent, as they were for the white men. Their whole lifestyle had as little of the Indian in it as the lifestyle of the latter-day British. Muslim rulers of India perhaps have no connection with our Muslim brethren of today. Muslims, considering themselves as the descendants of those Muslim rulers, are only distorting history.
Muslim historians of medieval India left detailed accounts of destruction, killing, slavery, and iconoclasm which are available in original in libraries all over the world. Will Durant says that the Islamic conquest of India was the bloodiest in history. For example, Tuzuk-i-Baburi, Akbar-Nama, and Badshahnama respectively provide lurid details of Babur’s, Akbar’s, and Shah Jahan’s iconoclastic adventures and the killing of innocent citizens. Aurangzeb was the most brutal of them all. He was responsible for the destruction of temples in thousands perhaps as the listing in his official documents appear unending. ‘Hindu Temples: What happened to Them’ has a detailed and uncomfortable list of hundreds of mosques built on Hindu temples, based primarily on the books of Muslim historians of the period or inscriptions found on mosques.
India is a land of traditions and not religions. The characteristic feature of traditions is an ‘indifference to differences.’ Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and various others are simply traditions which the colonial understandings converted into proper religions. The post-independent thinkers did not question this misrepresentation and they perpetuated the story of many religions, sometimes even conflicting with each other like in the western world. At a basic level, religions divide and traditions unite. The different traditions always evolve by mutual give and take. The solution to multiculturalism in India was to ‘traditionalise’ the religions and not secularism; the latter applicable to the Christian European world at a specific time of its history. Presently, we are not only stopping this process but doing something more disastrous- to convert our traditions into religions and generating intolerance in the process.
We should be looking at solutions for the present scenario of claiming mosques and temples from this traditional philosophy. Mutual give and take and an honest acceptance of the past would be great starting points. But would our leaders (political and spiritual) and the intellectuals (academia, media, or judiciary) even try to break away from the colonial understandings of India in the first place? Muslims can well identify themselves with Indian traditions rather than trying to deny or justify the crimes done in the name of Islam by unrelated people. Muslim intellectuals choose mostly to defend the problematic documented history of the past. And as ‘Hinduism’ becomes more of a religion, the hard stances arise which makes the solutions difficult. There are many mosques which have a problematic history on the basis of documented records and archaeological findings but at some point, the Hindu and the Muslim groups have to sit together to decide which claims need acceptance and which to let go. The country deserves peace and the onus is on both Hindu and Muslim intellectuals; arguably a wee bit more on the latter who have largely remained mute to radical Islamic claims for decades.
HISTORY AND THE SENSE OF PRIDE
OCTOBER 19, 2021
Madabhushi Sridhar has written a wonderful article on Krishnadevaraya (THI 19th October 2021), 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. 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 true facts 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 do not lead to genuine bonding, integration, and pride.
BE WARY OF INDOLOGISTS
DECEMBER 18, 2021
There was an interesting news item on an online seminar held on Dharmashastras by Mahindra University school which had a prominent American Indologist speaking. There might be a few genuine exceptions but we simply need to be careful of Indologists who study India without involving the traditional scholars of the land. Indology looks superficially flattering to us but whether it was German Indology of the past or the American variety of the present, there remains always an element of deconstruction and undermining of the cultural integrity of the country. Scholars, from Herder through Schlegel and beyond, accepted the Enlightenment legacy of identifying the living heathens with the ancient pagans. Writers repeatedly stressed that the ancients, living in another part of the world, represented the childhood of Man and India was the cradle of world civilization. It is no credit when it can only mean that those who live in this culture are still in their cradles – and have been there during the last thousand years, unlike their European counterparts. The main reasons: the geographical climate; the psychological character of the Hindus; the characteristic property of that race; or the social structure. For a twentieth-century liberal (or Marxist) the choice boils down to the social structure as a cause for the stagnation- the ‘caste system’, of course, sanctioned by a primal religion which dominates all aspects of human life.
The evolutionist conception of the history of religions (from ‘heathenism’ or polytheism, through Judaic monotheism, to Christianity and then peaking in the Protestant variety) operated in the background for scholars across centuries. This authorized a critical interrogation of any text from any tradition as to which elements are ‘reaching forward’ and which ‘reaching backward.’ Adluri and Bagchee show how German Indology, with racism ruling supreme, was more to define Germany’s own intellectual history, philosophy, politics, and religion. Today, Indologists in American Universities and their followers in India produce complex theories in dense language attacking our stories, cultures, and traditions. The mutual give and take; the patting and applauding of each other in a closed circle of researchers; academic posts; travel grants; and granting of awards give an eerie resemblance to the dreadful scholarship of German Indology. The discourses of Aryan-Dravidian divide; the caste-system with the evil priests at the top; the existence of religions in India with later morphing of ‘Hindu’ into ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Hindutva’; the falsification of history to exonerate past invaders; the persistent bashing the so called ‘forward-castes’ has not changed across centuries of Indology.
Living pagan Asian civilizations showed a persistent unity of philosophy and religion which had brought forth unsurpassed intellectual achievements impossible for Westerners to suppress entirely. These vast nations were able to sustain their cultural integrity in the colonial encounter to a degree that indigenous peoples in many parts of the world could not. Their suppression, therefore, had different means. The modern disciplines, Indology among them, accordingly worked to tame these traditions through their texts. Dr Balagangadhara says: ‘Indologists use discredited theories from earlier social sciences to put across outlandish claims regarding a culture about which they are ignorant. Contemporary social sciences draw upon these ignorant claims to put across equally outlandish claims about human societies and cultures, again in ignorance of what the Indological claims rest upon.’
The western narratives have become true descriptions of our world in many areas. The Indologists, Sanskritists, and the social scientists depending on each other deserve credit for accomplishing this incredible feat of making ‘the’ caste system synonymous with ‘discrimination’ and ‘oppression’ and so effortlessly supplant the British ‘class’ hierarchy, American ‘racial’ inequality, the ‘apartheid’ policy, the Nazi ideology, and so on. Indology is not a viable route for improvement of the different domains (anthropology, sociology, political science). Each exacerbates and aggravates the other’s problems by importing ‘facts’ from each other. Anthropologists spent about 100 years attempting to get rid of a pernicious and incoherent concept like ‘tribe’ only to see it sneak back in, via Indology and other social sciences, into the Indian Constitution, Indian legislation, and their administration. It becomes impossible to see ignorance coming as knowledge with the form of presentation involving moralizing talk and a normative language. ‘Inequality’, ‘discrimination’, ‘injustice’, and such other notions determine the alleged talk about society, culture, and people by Indologists of all hues. Adluri shows what is ultimately at stake in their entire rebuttal of Indology: freeing the ancients from being subjects of interrogation, and permitting the ancients to question us moderns instead. We just need to be wary of ‘scholars’ and ‘intellectuals’ at American Universities indulging in India studies. Exceptions only prove the rule.
RANDOM MUSINGS 