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The battlefield of Indian history

By Rajeev Srinivasan
August 18, 2004

Indian history is once again centrestage. There is in some quarters a feeling that history is the most boring of subjects, consisting of long, dry lists of dynasties and the exploits of rather barbaric kings. This, unfortunately, is a result of the way history is taught in India. For it is fake history that has been manufactured by people with vested interests with the intention of keeping Indians enslaved.

History is perhaps the most important of the humanities. There is nothing quite like history that can be used in positive and negative ways to affect the affairs of men. To paraphrase George Santayana, I would say, "Those who forget their history are condemned." Condemned to forever be second-class, to forever lack self-respect, to forever suffer loss of self-image.

India's loss of knowledge of its history is a double disaster, because it turns out India's history is almost unimaginably lustrous: in fact, within the first order of approximation, one could claim that India invented almost everything worth knowing in the ancient world. India was, for millennia, the Empire of the Intellect, the civilization that with astonishing creativity generated more ideas than the rest of the world put together.

The denigration of Indian history is a project originally put into action by colonialist Britons, who identified, correctly, that by controlling the past they would be able to control the present as well. After Independence, a cabal of Marxists has dominated the official version of history in India, and they too want to control India's present and future. They have managed to brainwash entire generations of Indians into believing that everything that originated in India is worthless.

Through the miracles of "truth by repeated assertion" and the patronage extended to them by the Nehru Dynasty and its retainers, these self-proclaimed "eminent historians", many of them affiliated with the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, have manufactured a history of India that is widely at odds with the evidence on the ground. They are completely unwilling to accept new archaeological and other discoveries. They are dogmatic fundamentalists who remind me of the Catholic Church forcing Galileo to recant heliocentrism despite scientific evidence.

The desire to re-infect history with the Marxists' pet shibboleths is seen in the unseemly haste with which the newly-anointed mandarins of culture in the UPA government have proceeded to change text-books. This is much like the instant histories that were popular in the Soviet Union, and are popular in China these days: every now and then it is rewritten to glorify whoever is the strongman of the moment.

India's, however, is no instant history. It shows a tremendous cultural continuity of at least 5,000 years and possibly as much as 10,000 years: there are identifiable methods and modes of activity that have not changed at all from the Indus-Sarasvati civilization to today. This fits in with the written and oral records of Indic civilization, which talk about the current age, the Kali Yuga, as beginning on a specific date in 3102 BCE.

The Aryan Invasion Mythology, which Max Mueller created, was influenced by his Christian fundamentalist belief that the world was created in 4004 BCE, and therefore he arbitrarily assigned the date of 1500 BCE to the Indus-Sarasvati civilization (he allowed a millennium or two for Noah's floodwaters to recede and for Europeans to find their way to India!). This is utter idiocy. Mueller himself later disowned this date, but the "eminent historians" have yet to wake up, much like Galileo's tormenters took 400 years to accept his theory officially.

There are a number of assertions made by nationalists that the "eminent historians" will and do fight tooth and nail.

India was also the Empire of the Intellect, although the "eminent historians" are loath to admit it. Some of the greatest achievements in the sphere of pure thought came out of India. And it is not that it was all idle speculation: for, the invention of zero and the decimal system, of algebra and calculus, as well as the creation of accurate astronomical tables, all had practical uses in calculation and in navigation. To take just a few examples:

Then there is a great deal of very interesting information about the Indus-Sarasvati civilization as well (see Michel Danino, The Invasion That Never Was):

Comments welcome at Rajeev.srinivasan@gmail.com

Part II: The campaign against Indian civilization 

 

 

Rajeev Srinivasan

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