Chapter 2
Western Studies of the Indic Civilization
“Since Independence in 1947, it is this question
of reconstruction of self and society on the foundation of our priorities,
values, tradition and culture that seems to have completely eluded us,
particularly our scholars, administrators and politicians. We appear to have
forgotten that we can look back and learn from our own past. And based on that
experience, construct our own unique identity within the context of our own
affairs as well as that of the rest of the world. What do we as a nation -
without leaning on others' ideological and material crutches - want? Do we have
ingenuity or not? Can we make our points-as against aligning with one sort or
another? I have a point to make as Indians? “
Dharampal on the Uses of History
All
histories are elaborate efforts at mythmaking. Therefore, when we submit to
histories about us written by others, we submit to their myths about us as
well. Mythmaking, like naming, is a token of having power. Submitting to
others' myths about us is a sign that we are without power. After the
historical work of Dharampal, the scope for mythmaking about the past of Indian
society is now considerably reduced.
If
we must continue to live by myths, however, it is far better we choose to live
by those of our own making rather than by those invented by others for their
own purposes, whether English or Japanese. That much at least we owe ourselves
as an independent society and nation.
Eurocentric study of Indian History
The first histories of
India
in the English language were written by officials of the British Raj. In the
20th century,'' administrator-historians' gave way to academics, but with The
British Conquest and Dominion of India
by Sir Penderel Moon, himself a senior civil service officer, they return for a
swan song. It tells the story of the British in India from 1748 (when the French showed the English the path to power
over Indian rulers, and hence to trading privileges) to independence in 1947.
The book has no central argument, but there are several themes. The dominant
one is the part played by Indians in supporting the British Raj, established by
Indian soldiers, saved by them during early disasters and the Mutiny of 1857,
and run until 1947 by Indian officials, whose efficiency belied British claims
that Indians could not rule themselves. To quote Sir Moon”The British conquered the country
with the assistance and connivance of Indians themselves, and then ruled it for
over a century with their collaboration and tacit consent. The empire was from start
to finish far more of a joint Anglo-Indian enterprise than either party has
usually been inclined to admit. As early as 1795 one of the company’s servants,
Sir John
Shore, wrote ‘Our dominion of India
has been established and is maintained by the natives themselves’
“. The story of the Indian Civil Service
(ICS), the part they played in facilitating the administration of this vast
land, and the motivations of the Indian members of this elite group makes for
interesting reading but would require a book of
its own to do justice to the subject. The point to be made here is that without
the able participation of the British Indian army and the tacit consent of the
Indian members of the ICS, and later the Indian members of the Judiciary, the
British would have been unable to rule India in as facile a manner as they did,
Another theme that
recurs in the book is the change that occurred in British goals in India:
first it was the unabashed aim of getting rich, then it was transformed into
the idea of ruling well, and then finally it was thought judicious to settle on
the ennobling concept of civilizing the unwashed and uncouth hordes of the
subcontinent. The Mutiny changed all this, and whatever excuses were thereafter
offered, the truth was simply that Britain
kept India because it made her a world power. The
main theme in the latter part of the history is the Indian demand for
self-government, and ''the cautious, tardy British response' with grudging
reforms that only alienated Indians. Moon rescues from obscurity such men as
Thomas Adams, who really won Bengal for the British. He shows that expansion was not
always profitable for the East India Company
(under Wellesley, who conquered more territory than any other governor general,
the company's debts almost doubled). He explains that in 1917 conservative
ministers in Britain agreed
to promise India ''responsible government' because,
ignorant of dominion history, they
thought they would be able to interpret the phrase to mean whatever they
wished.
However we are getting
ahead of ourselves. We need to look at the manner in which the ancient period
of Indian History has been treated. The remarkable fact is the cursory manner
in which this period has been dealt with by most English authors. The
reasonably comprehensive treatment by A. L. Basham
leaves us asking for more. To get a complete picture of ancient India
one has little choice but to study the Puranic literature
in its original
The study of India in the West has long been overshadowed by
the concerns of Euro-centric historians, who, to the extent that they studied India at all, did so in a manner that gave a
privileged position to Europe as the
motivating force of world history. India
has, ever since the classical Greeks make contact with the Persians to the
East, been an object of curiosity for Europeans, although until recently their
knowledge of India
was largely second-hand and imprecise. As Europeans gained greater access to India,
it was under the context of the British conquest and colonization, and this
significantly affected the resulting portrayal.
India has been represented as
lacking historical agency, and serving a role in history that is subservient to
the agenda of Europeans. Despite the many recent critiques of colonial
orientalist historiography, elements of this tradition linger on in
contemporary studies of India.
India,
so characterized, makes the Western colonial aggression and resultant theft of
resources appear as an essential and inevitable stage of history; this indeed
is the ulterior motive, conscious or unconscious, in constructing what we would
term as an essentialized version of Indian history. The conclusion of this
passage, which portrays the colonization of India as something practically
every "great nation" has done, is also clearly an attempt at the
legitimization of the colonial enterprise. It is now widely recognized that
such theories of history are basically ethnocentric justifications of European
colonialism.
While such theories
are rooted in the very real hegemony achieved by the Europeans of most of the
world during the nineteenth century, they err in assuming this achievement was
due to an intrinsic superiority of the Europeans. Euro-centric historians have presented Indian
history in a manner that portrays a privileged Europe
as the motivating force. India
has been considered as a passive, unchanging entity ("nothing of
consequence happened in India"
argument) that underwent historical changes only when motivated by outside
forces (read invaders – the Turks, the Mongols, the Afghans, the Persians, the
Arabs, and the British). Typical of the view of Europeans of his era was that
of Hegel
Although the overt
Euro-centric bias has become somewhat
diminished, it nevertheless persists in attenuated and subtle manner even in
contemporary history writing (and that includes the writings in last 40-50
years). The colonial perspective lingers on today in what might be termed the
"invasion theory" of Indian history. This narrative assumes (usually
implicitly) Hegel's idea that India
is an intrinsically static, passive civilization, incapable on its own of
having a history. Indian history then is taken as the result of a long series
of invasions, beginning with the mythical "Aryans" and culminating in
the invasion by the British. While there was at times warfare between India and her neighbors, sometimes culminating
in invasion, India
here is no exception to the general trends of ancient and medieval history. To
assume that invasions are the motivating force in Indian history is to fall
into the self-justifying theory of Indian history developed by the British to
legitimate their exploitive colonization of India.
The questions that
arise and the resulting anomalies are enumerated by Feuerstein, Kak, and
Frawley. First and foremost, is the fact that there
never has been any archaeological evidence of any invasion among the ruins of
the Saraswati Sindhu Civilization. Such invasions were posited based on highly
ambiguous passages in the Rig-Veda. There are passages in the Rig-Veda
referring to internecine warfare between various tribes with known
affiliations, such as the Battle
of the Ten Kings, but these can hardly be construed as invasions by the
mythical Aryans arriving from the Russian steppe. The arguments against the AIT can be summarized as follows
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1. The Aryan invasion model is largely based on linguistic
conjectures, which are unjustified (and wrong). Languages develop much more
slowly than assumed by nineteenth century scholars. According to Renfrew
speakers of Indo-European languages may have lived in Anatolia
as early as 7000 BCE
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2. The supposed large-scale migrations of Aryan people in the second
millennium BCE first into
Western Asia and then into northern India
(by 1500 BCE) cannot be
maintained in view of the fact that the Hittites were in Anatolia already by
2200 BCE and the Kassites and Mitanni
had kings and dynasties by 1600 BCE
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3. There is no memory of an invasion or of
large-scale migration in the records of Ancient India-neither in the Vedas,
Buddhist or Jain writings, nor in Tamil literature. Neither is there any
record of such an invasion in the historical narrative of the kingdoms of the
Middle East or any region of the world for
that matter. The fauna and flora, the geography and the climate described in
the Rigveda are that of Northern India.
4. There is a striking cultural continuity between the archaeological
artifacts of the Indus-Saraswati civilization and subsequent Indian society
and culture: a continuity of religious ideas, arts, crafts, architecture,
system of weights and measures.
5. The archaeological finds of Mehrgarh (copper, cattle, and barley) reveal a
culture similar to that of the Vedic Indians. Contrary to former
interpretations, the Rigveda shows not a nomadic but an urban culture (purusa
as derived from pur vasa = town-dweller).
6. The Aryan invasion theory was based on the assumption that a nomadic
people in possession of horses and chariots defeated an urban civilization
that did not know horses, and that horses are depicted only from the middle
of the second millennium onwards. Meanwhile archaeological evidence for
horses has been found in Harappan and pre-Harappan sites; drawings of horses
have been found in paleolithic caves in India; drawings of riders on
horses dated c. 4300 BCE have
been found in Ukraina. Horsedrawn war chariots are not typical for nomadic
breeders but for urban civilizations.
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7. The racial diversity found in skeletons in the cities of the
Indus civilization is the same as in India today; there is no evidence
of the migration of a new race.
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8. The Rig-Veda (Rg) describes a river system in North India that is
pre-1900 BCE in the case of the Saraswati River,
and pre-2600 BCE in the case of
the Drishadvati
River. Vedic literature
shows a population shift from the Saraswati (Rigveda) to the Ganges (Brahmanas and Puranas), also evidenced by
archaeological finds.
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9. The astronomical references in the Rg are based on a
Pleiades-Krittika (Taurean) calendar of c. 2500 BCE
when Vedic astronomy and mathematics were well-developed sciences (again, not
a feature of a nomadic people).
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10. The Indus
cities were not destroyed by invaders but deserted by their inhabitants
because of desertification of the area. Strabo (Geography XV.1.19) reports
that Aristobulos had seen thousands of villages and towns deserted because
the Indus had changed its course.
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11. The battles described in the Rigveda such as for instance the Battle of the Ten Kings were
not fought between invaders and natives but between people belonging to the
same culture.
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12. Excavations in Dwaraka have lead to the discovery of a site larger than
Mohenjodaro, dated c. 1500 BCE
with architectural structures, use of iron, a script halfway between Harappan
and Brahmi. Dwarka has been associated with Krishna
and the end of the Vedic period.
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13. There is continuity in the morphology of scripts: Harappan, Brahmi,
Devanagari.
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14. Vedic ayas, formerly translated as 'iron,' probably meant copper or
bronze. Iron was found in India
before 1500 BCE in Kashmir and Dwaraka.
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15. The Puranic dynastic lists with over 120 kings in one Vedic dynasty alone
fit well into the 'new chronology'. They date back to the third millennium BCE. Greek accounts tell of Indian royal lists
going back to the seventh millennium BCE.
There are now comprehensive and objective historical analyses of the Vedic
Age, of the Vedas and in particular the Rig. . Typical of such expositions
are those by Srikant Talageri
, P.L. Bhargava
and by David Frawley.
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16. The Rig-Veda itself shows an advanced and sophisticated culture,
the product of a long development, 'a civilization that could not have been
delivered to India
on horseback' (p.160) by warlike nomads who in turn transformed themselves
into rishis, sages who composed the highly introspective discourses to be
found in the Upanishads .
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17. Painted Gray Ware culture in the western Gangetic plains, dated
circa 1100 BCE has been found
connected to (earlier) Black and Red Ware etc.
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There is also one other interesting remark to be made. The Saraswati
Sindhu civilization is a civilization with archaeology but no literature
while the Vedics were representative of a people with a vast literature but
ostensibly no archaeology. It would therefore be a reasonable deduction to
make that the two were contemporaneous or that the Saraswati Sindhu
Civilization was simply a continuation of the Vedic era.
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Following the Greeks, the invasion theory timeline moves on to the
Mauryan dynasty, and then to the invasions of the Kushans and Scythians. The
Gupta dynasty is then covered, only to move on to the devastation caused by
the invasion of the Huns. Following the Huns, India is usually portrayed as
undergoing a political decline characterized by fragmentation and
decentralization, as well as a cultural decline, resulting in the rise of
"unorthodox" religious traditions such as the Tantric schools of
Buddhism and Hinduism. India
was then purified by the violence of the Islamic invasions, resulting in the
re-establishment of centralized rule under the Moghals.
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This narrative
framework is found in many histories of India, including some quite modern
ones. The classic version of this history is Vincent Smith's
The Oxford History of India (1919),,
which has been duly deconstructed by Inden,
who makes quite clear the ideology underpinning the "invasion"
narrative. Inden wrote that “To have
represented the kingdoms of India as relatively autonomous agents, as complex,
interrelated polities that could unite through pacts as well as 'force' within
a single imperial formation and create new centers not determined by a fixed
military topography, would have undermined this whole orientalist project.”
So Smith dispatched cruel Huns to prepare the way for the still worse advent of
Islam, which would in turn, clear the way for the miraculous arrival by sea of
the better Aryan, the Western or European. He could clip the Dravidian jungle
and prevent the Russians setting fire to the whole green expanse. The history of
medieval decline did not stop, however, by preparing for the modern. If Smith's
history of ancient India
was, in effect, a history of its present, his narrative of medieval India was really a parable of the future, of
what would happen in India
if the British withdrew.
The first
comprehensive history of India
entitled History of British India (1818), was attempted
by James Mill. He believed in the superiority of the British people over the
Indians. But there were other scholars thinking on different lines. The work of
Sir William Jones and other European scholars unearthed a volume of evidence on
India’s
glorious past. However, despite the European discovery of India’s past greatness and well-developed
civilization, the British, having become the paramount power in India,
remained generally convinced of their own superiority over Indians, and
continued to feed themselves on Mill and Macaulay. They held Indians and their
literature in low esteem, insisting on accepting the degenerate conditions of
the eighteenth century Muslim India as its normal condition.
Seeley
declared that nothing as great was ever done by Englishmen as the conquest of
India, which was “not in the ordinary
sense a conquest at all”, and which he put on par “with the Greek conquest of
the East”, pointing out that the British who had a “higher and more vigorous
civilization than the native races” founded the Indian Empire “partly out of a
philanthropic desire to put an end to enormous evils” of the “robber-states of
India”. European philologists "discovered" the rich literary
Sanskrit tradition at the end of the eighteenth century; and during the
nineteenth century constructed the theory of the Aryan Invasion based on their
study of the etymology of common roots of words, which they claim came from a
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) parent language. Indologists mined Vedic literature
looking for clues that could prove the Aryans originally came from outside of
the Subcontinent. It was reasoned that such a sophisticated language, related
to but more refined than Latin, must have come into India
from a common PIE source or to put it in more stark terms, could have
originated anywhere but from India
itself. According to this line of thinking, from its pristine Vedic form,
Sanskritic culture gradually degenerated into Hindu idolatry and ritual.
Conveniently, the Aryan Invasion provided a pattern of conquests by outsiders,
which helped to justify colonial rule over a land that had always been
subjugated by foreigners – first the Central Asian Aryans followed by the Turks
and Afghans, and finally the Europeans. In this way, India was seen as a derivative
civilization, always in need of stimulation from outsiders to progress.
Professor D. P.
Singhal
asserts that, contrary to the general belief, Indians in ancient times did not
neglect the important discipline of historiography. On the contrary, they were
good writers of history. He states: “Ancient
India
did not produce a Thucydides, but there is considerable evidence to suggest
that every important Hindu court maintained archives and genealogies of its
rulers. And Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, written in twelfth century Kashmir, is a remarkable piece of historical literature.
Despite his lapses into myths and legends, Kalhana had an unbiased approach to
historical facts and history writing. He held that a true historian, while
recounting the events of the past, must discard love (raga) and hatred
(dvesha). Indeed, his well-developed concept of history and the technique of
historical investigation have given rise to some speculation that there existed
at the time a powerful tradition of historiography in which Kalhana must have
received his training.”
To understand what has
led to the current portrayal of India,
one has to examine and expose various intellectual agendas, which are a grim
reminder to Indians not to abandon the field of the humanities to others;
German nationalism was
based on the Aryanization of its identity, by combining (i) the appropriation
of India's
civilization and (ii) the rejection of Indians as inferior.
Britain's agenda to control a population one
thousand times more than its own men based in India was through mental
subjugation - the well-known Macaulay plan.
India's own post-independence
intellectuals turned to the leftist model, partly out of the success with
Macaulayization by inculcating a inferiority complex in their own heritage,
thereby worsening this self-image. From copying the colonial West it became
copying Soviet and Chinese socialist models, in each case at the expense of
indigenous heritage.
Many Western thinkers
have gone through four stages of scholarship: (1) Learn, respect and
appropriate from India; (2) Distance
oneself from the Indic source to 'clean up the know how'; (3) Rename it as
Western and/or Christian; (4) Trash the source as world negating, primitive and
backward in comparison to the 'scientific and progressive' west, thereby
justifying the appropriation. Skillful use of cultural language can and is used
routinely to define a belief, subtly denigrate a community, appropriate
another's ideas by clever renaming and re-mapping, and assert cultural hegemony
over others. Indian historiography in the post-independence phase has been
characterized by the remarkable similarity between Western scholarship on India
and the works of Indian historians, whether Marxist, secular or liberal.
Writings of this genre present Hindustan as
the aggregationist story par excellence namely a patchwork of communities,
dialects and religion from time immemorial. This view of history, largely
uncontested so far, is now facing its first serious challenge.
One typical piece of
western analysis, which found fertile ground in Indian historiography,
reads..."within the one society and
culture there are ... alternative representations, each pretending to
universality... Intra-culture translation therefore becomes a central problem
for anthropological investigation, because it is a central problem within the
Hindu world itself. To ignore this by privileging one representation at the
expense of the others is to reduce complex multiplicity to misconstrued
uniformity to reduce the sociologies of India to a single sociology."
Colonial scholars reinforced the missionary attack by providing their own self
serving rationale. They taught that India was not one country that it
was a miscellany of people that it had never known independence that it had
always been under the rule of foreign invaders. The colonial rulers had a clear
motive, a clear goal. They wanted an India, which had no identity, no
vision of its own, and no native class of people respected for their
leadership. They were to be replaced as far as it lay in their power by a new
class of intellectual compradores. Meanwhile, the concerted attacks succeeded.
They were internalized and Indians made them their own. There was a crop of
"reformers" who wanted India to change to the satisfaction
of its critics. Above all, there appeared a class of Hindu-hating Hindus who
knew all the bad things about Hinduism. Earlier invaders ruled through the
sword. The British ruled through "Indology". The British took over
Indian education and taught Indians to look at themselves through their eyes.
Original Indian narration of Indian history was discarded. They created a class
Indian in blood and color, but anti-Hindu in its intellectual and emotional
orientation. This is the biggest problem that a rejuvenated and revitalized India
faces today, namely the problem of self-alienated Hindus. Even today in Post
Independence India
, the worst detractors of the Indic traditions are the Macaulayized Indians
themselves.
There has been a
significant sprouting of South Asian studies in many American and European/UK
universities after 1971 after separation of Bangladesh
from Pakistan.
The reason being that after the split of the Pakistan there was concern among
the western policy makers that the political center of Islam in the
subcontinent was going to be split and weaken and get merged into the Indian
statehood and eventually into a Hindu nationality. One of the main aims of the
academic chairs after 1971 was to recreate a Muslim political history and to
negate and undermine non-Muslim history and studies in the sub-continent. The
emphasis was more on revising the Mughal rule and whitewashing their rule in
the South Asia.
The other goal of
academia in the West was to determine the weakness in the Indian political
structure and society in term of dissent and local revolution. After the 1971
war and the subsequent Pokhran atomic test in 1975, containing India was subcontracted to Pakistan and every effort was made
to help it support itself. Cold War exigencies helped in the transfer of
nuclear weapons to Pakistan,
which was transforming itself to a Islamized state. A major fear after 1971 was
that Punjab, Sindh and (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir) POK would merge with India, NWFP with Afghanistan
and Baluchistan would merge with the Shah’s Iran. Islamization was undertaken
to prevent this. Another fear of Pakistan
was that it would be culturally assimilated in India just as the 500 other states
had been. Once again a new culture was propagated and new history was created.
So, the Pakistan
of present times is not that created at Partition. The west just started what
they were working on for the last 150 years to negate the Hindu/Indic
civilization and replace it with Islamic history and country.
Dr. Hoernle, thern
Profesor of Sanskrit at Benares Hindu Uiversity met Swami Dayananda in 1926 and
remarked - He (Dayananda) may possibly convince the Hindus that their modern
Hinduism is altogether in the opposition to the Vedas....... If once they
became thoroughly convinced of this radical error, they will no doubt abandon
Hinduism at once...... They cannot go back to the Vedic state; that is dead and
gone, and will never revive; something more or less new must follow. We hope it
may be Christianity,.....
It
is no accident that Michael Witzel was offered the Prince of Wales chair in
Harvard for Sanskrit studies. In fact Witzel is not half as egregious as some
of the others such as Wendy's children named after Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade
Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School
at the University
of Chicago. These
universities were indulging in extrinsic trivialization of Hinduism and were
attempting to reduce its hold on the Indian masses through the propaganda of
the secularists and the leftists. This is pernicious to India, because however much one may try to deny
it and no matter how controversial the view, the real fabric of India's
unity lies in its Hindu ethos and Indic traditions. In fact, destruction of the
Hindu ethos of India
is an appropriate means to employ should the goal be the dismantling of the
Indian republic as it stands today.
Ever since
independence the focus of this effort starting with the India office in London
has been to contain a resurgent India.
It is unfortunate that so many Indians have succumbed rather comprehensively to
this stratagem, so much so that a large educated mass has turned to the west
for methodologies and hypothesis and even their assumptions while at the same
time negating all Indian traditions. To assert anything good about Indian
traditions is suspicious in the eyes of some in India, and is immediately denigrated
as being saffron. It was a brilliant masterstroke on the part of Atlee and
Mountbatten to co-opt the Congress as the most palatable of all the
alternatives in India for
independence, dominated as they were by England educated politicians and
thereby delay the inevitable resurgence of the Indic civilization. But this
tradition is slowly but surely asserting itself and one day it will be realized
that a great portion of Asia from the Tarim basin to the Indonesian Islands
owes its civilizational ethos to the ideas originating in the Indian
subcontinent.
Methodology of False portrayal of India
In
a recent article rebutting such a false portrayal of Indic traditions, Rajiv
Malhotra
has identified some common techniques that have been brought into play. One
such technique is selective branding. Whenever a person defends the Indic
tradition, he/she is immediately branded as a Hindu activist or even worse a
Hindu fundamentalist. It is almost never explained what they did to deserve
such a sobriquet. At the same time, rarely is it mentioned that those making
such charges are invariably from the left of the spectrum. Second there is rarely any mention of the
role of evangelism in the denigration of Hinduism. Third there is little
mention of the large scale collusion between leftists and the Christian right
when working towards their common goal of dismantling the Indic traditions of
the Indian Republic.
After the Iran revolution and the Soviet attack on Afghanistan,
Western capitals took the initiative and started extensive research on Sunni
Islam. This initiative created university centers and a lobby for Islam in US
with the money and support of Saudi
Arabia and Pakistani Ashrafs. Such Chairs as
the Quaid-e-Azam Chair of Pakistan Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley, endowed by the Ashrafs of Pakistan,
are ubiquitous by their presence at several campuses across America. It is important to mention
here that Ashrafs of the sub-continent are the descendents of the rulers of the
Islamic Empire in the Indian sub-continent and they are of Turk, Mongol,
Afghani and Iranian origin (anything but Indian) and have an exalted position
among the Muslims of the sub-continent. Such caste distinctions are accentuated
in Pakistan
despite the fact that the Pakistani takes pride in the notion that caste is not
part of the official Islamic theology. Caste is alive and well and thriving in Pakistan and it is here, rather than in India
that Caste distinctions are not easily bridged
Getting back to our
narrative, the policy makers in the West were working on a political center for
Sunni Islam, which could oppose the Shia Islam in Iran. That policy undertook a
larger study of Islam in the subcontinent including the Deobandi, Sufi,
WaliUllah and others. The Indian sub-continent may have been a long-term choice
for the Islamic political center but the non-Muslims and the Hindu religions
posed a problem for this policy. Hence the notion of negating the non-Muslims
of India was started with
the final goal of creating a center of political Islam inside India. This was accelerated during
the early 80s and with the help of leftists inside India it reached a crescendo in the
early 90s. The CPI took a stand
regarding the Ayodhya dispute before any other party took any notice of it and
created a wedge in the society that in turn caused fissures in the polity and
the society. It snowballed out of all proportion to its intrinsic importance to
Indian society, and may have been intended that way by the western policymakers
to watch the social and political splits inside India.
India has become a giant
experimental laboratory for a small group of academics and policymakers in the
west to play and tweak remotely for the last 50 odd years or more. Western
academics are dismissive about Indian historians of the indigenous kind. Quote
from Edwin Bryant (from Harvard
University) : Some Indigenous
Aryanists are professionals scholars and publish their research in professional
publications in a professional manner. Quite commonly , however, their
contributions are seized upon with great enthusiasm, taken out of context, and
rearticulated-sometimes in ways that are quite comical from the perspective of
critical scholarship-by nonprofessional people in publications that would be
quite appropriate to label communalist( some blatantly so). Such publications
abound in India.
It is essential for scholars to point out and condemn such abuses of
scholarships.
Most of the people of India
are seen as object of study for these academics to analyze and come to
conclusion (mostly wrong) just as the colonial Europeans did few centuries
back. As objects of
study Indics are not supposed to
talk back or argue with them about these matters and in fact become
irate when some of us do indulge in debate with them. Finally when they are
about to lose the argument, ridicule and scorn is poured upon them. They employ
native informants to get information about subset of cultural behavior and
negate or ridicule such behavior. Advertisements for native informants can yet
be found in the Internet pages of universities, which have South Asian studies.
They use the native informants for information and then groom them to be true Macaulayites
who will look at fellow Indians as subject of study.
This doctrine asserts that a certain evolution
of history is always ongoing in a
particular direction and that there is a historical order of things. In the
case of India
and the sub-continent it means that the process of Islamization going on from
1000 years will continue to its logical end. Hindus do not pay much attention
to the historical order of things," wrote Al Biruni in 1030 AD. "They
are very careless in relating the chronological succession of things." The
millennium-old censure of the Hindus' lack of historic sense by a medieval
Muslim historian appears to still apply, particularly to the Indian historians
of the present day.
Such a cavalier approach to History has been
exploited by the Islamists, British and modern day communists in India
for the last 200 years and continued by the western academics. The Islamist
believes in this doctrine of history since it is part of the Islamic history as
represented by Islam and is read by all the students who train under the ulema
and madrassas. Islamic history has been preserved for a long time with accuracy
and also has been presented with a sense of the inevitability of the force of
history. This makes the faithful believe that faith alone will take them to the
destination that they strive for. This is the reason why the Pakistan army and the Islamic parties are
confident in the long run of changing the history of South
Asia to their advantage. By projecting Islam as a winning religion
in the sub-continent, the non-Muslim tradition could be totally wiped out of
the sub-continent or made a minority. According to such a doctrine of the force
of history, creation of Pakistan
and Bangladesh
is part of the evolution from the Middle Ages (a third phase of expansion of
Islam) and the entire sub-continent will also one day will be a Islamic
country. During the cold war the US
and Pakistan forced this
history upon the subcontinent as the final destiny of south Asia.
The hatred of Hindus and in particular the Brahmanas amongst the Ashrafs and
sections of the Anglo Saxon world (the British credited the independence of
India in 1947 to the Brahmana community) created a powerful pact between them
along with Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which resulted in a cold war plan to change
the history of South Asia forever to their advantage.
The
protection of Pakistan by
the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia (KSA), US and China for so many decades, a
strategy that is otherwise inexplicable to the average Indian Ashok, begins to
make sense when viewed in the light of the force of history. Such a policy can
then be rationalized as being consonant with the geo-political goals of the
hyper power. The reason is that by supporting and protecting the center of
Islam inside the sub-continent the force of history will work its own way to
force change with the population. This process of evolution is still going on
for the last 35 years even after 1971 and the collapse of the FSU. The US
with its vast resources and control of the world media is providing the
powerful push to this force of history to become a reality. The latest
development in US Pakistan relations as we write this chapter in the spring of
2004, namely the designation of Pakistan
as a major non-NATO ally by the Secretary of State Colin Powell is consonant
with the scenario that we have hypothesized. It is clear that the aim of the US
continues to remain the creation of a Islamic political center in the
subcontinent. What is particularly galling from the Indian point of view is
that the US seems to imagine
that India will be happy
with purely symbolic acts of friendship designed merely to salve the ego, while
the US is busily aiding and
abetting those who would dismantle India.
The US
with the help of proxies inside India
is also engaging in social re-engineering and religious conversion to break the
Indian society (kinship and old traditions) and accept an Islamic government.
The US
policy to treat the entire Indian subcontinent as one consisting primarily of Muslims
and non-Muslims is to ensure that non-Muslims do not gain dominance, both from
a cultural standpoint as well as in a leadership sense over the Muslims. In due
time over the course of history the expectation is that all the people will be
of the same religious ethnicity.
The communists have been a willing and
enthusiastic partner in this process, since they believe in this doctrine and
since they consider revolution as the modern version of the process of the
evolution of history. Revolution in the communist world is similar to Jihad in
the Islamic world and employs the same vocabulary and much the same metaphor.
Hence Indian leftists and communists have a similar weltanschauung as do the
Islamists when it comes to the future destiny of India and are collaborating with
various external organizations to bring about such a change.
Why do such disparate groups as the foreign
policy establishment (by no means monolithic) of the US
and the leftists of India
desire the demise of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Indian Republic
with such fervor and single minded purpose? The answer to this question is
multifaceted and one can only speculate, listing the obvious reasons. We have
already alluded to some of these reasons. There is the commonality of the
Abrahamic faith. Much of the weltanschauung of the western world is one that
they share with the Islamic Ummah namely the concept of a monotheistic
ideology, the aggressive proselytization of their belief systems, and the
facile resort to violence, crusades and Jihad for purely religious
reasons. In contrast, the Sanatana
Dharma is regarded as a pagan and moribund faith bedeviled by exotic forms of
idolatry and steeped in superstition or worse. Politics makes for strange
bedfellows and in this instance the Indian left, under the tutelage of China, has made common cause with influential
sections of the media, church, and the State Department in the US in undermining and preventing the maturation
of democratic institutions in the Indian
Republic. It is difficult
at this point in time to gage the depth of this relationship. Writes Rajiv
Malhotra, alluding to the analogy of the Stockholm Syndrome in the link
mentioned earlier “Hinduism is squeezed
both from the American right and from the Indian and American left. The right
backs the Christian fundamentalist goals of converting India and targets Hinduism as the
last remaining and most resilient bastion of pagan culture in the world. The
intelligentsia of the left is more complex and diverse in its reasons for the
thoroughgoing bias against Hinduism and Hindus: (i) there is a holdover from an
era of allegiance to pro-Communist movements; (ii) there are fifth-column
opportunist double agents; (iii) there is a fundamental discomfort due to
misunderstandings that Hinduism runs counter to modernity; and (iv) there are
social stigmas that article's such as the Post's promulgate. The net effect of
this is that many Hindus are intimidated into accepting every insult that is
hurled at them, for fear of being subjected to further harassment. This may be
viewed as a sort of societal
Stockholm Syndrome. “
There is one other point to be made. The
relationship between the Hindu and Muslim during the insurrection of 1857 was
by and large amicable. Immediately after
the quelling of the rebellion in 1857 and the initial orgy of recrimination and
revenge against the Muslims of Delhi and other urban centers, the British realized
that a unified India, with a harmonious relationship between Hindus and Muslims
would make their job of holding on to their ill gotten gains and conquest, that
much more difficult. There was also the tacit assumption that the educated
Hindu was far from being as malleable and pliable as the inhabitants of some of
their other possessions, or even the reputedly aggressive Muslim. Ergo, if
there were no differences to be found, they would have to be manufactured. It
was imperative that the cultural unity of the subcontinent be ridiculed and the
differences accentuated. The plan to institutionalize a ‘divide and rule’
strategy was therefore executed with efficiency and a single-minded focus. The
completion of the 1881 census with the extensive enumeration of the Schedule of
Castes and Tribes was the first step among many to diminish and trash the
cultural unity of the subcontinent, and to replace her Puranic Itihasa
(History) with one that was more consonant with the notion that there was no
indigenous civilization in the Indian subcontinent. Max Mueller was hired by
Macaulay with the express intent of devaluing the Vedic tradition and to invent
a chronology for the Vedas in order to dethrone them from their premier
position as the source of Indic traditions. Max Mueller was a student of Roth,
who was one of the first Germans to study the Vedas. Besides his teacher's
stamp on him, Max Muller's interview with Lord Macaulay on the 28th December, 1855 A.D. also
played a great part in his anti-Indian views. Max Mueller had to sit
silent for an hour while the historian poured out his diametrically opposite
views and then dismissed his visitor who tried in vain to utter a simple word :
"I went back to Oxford", writes Max Muller, "a sadder man and a
wiser man."
The second major decision the British made during
the later half of the nineteenth century, was to systematically appease the
Indian Muslim to discourage him from being absorbed into the Indian cultural
ethos. This was the beginning of the conscious policy of preferentially
recruiting Indian Muslims, especially from the Punjab,
for the Indian Army. Simultaneously, the British manufactured the myth of the
martial races, in order to emphasize that the vast majority of the people in
the subcontinent did not fall into this category.
The perception of the leftists and communists
about non-Muslims in the subcontinent is the same as that of their earlier
colonial masters. The force of history is believed to change the non-Muslims
and reconcile them to their final destiny.
Doctrine of Phases
This doctrine proposes
that a series of events and sequence in time will lead to a course of history.
It may take few days or many months and years even decades but the course of
events (history) is such that it will move in a particular direction. One example is that used by the Palestinians
in their sequence of actions against the Israeli state. The ultimate goal is to
make the state a Palestine
one and the Jews second-class citizens of that state. There is an analogy to
events in Kashmir. First the protests, next
the killings, next the political dialog and then the international attention.
The killings transformed the society into a nizam-e-Mustafa, which implies
supremacy of Islam in the Kashmir valley, a
supremacy to be imposed on the non-Muslims. So every action was constructed as
a jihad and for the benefit for Islam.
When the population in
a predominant Islamic society gets radicalized they opt for jihad to change the
status quo and this is done in stages. In Kashmir
the madrassas were radicalized in the 70’s. So by early 80’s many Kashmiri
youths were fighting in Afghanistan
as mujahideens. This gave them sufficient support to start a jihad for their
old nationalistic grievances in their hometown. By 1989 the jihadis had started
the jihad in Kashmir and reached the peak by
1994. Pakistan increased the
scope of this jihad after 1992 for the entire country with the intent of
radicalizing the entire Muslim population within India and start a bigger phase in
its doctrine. The aim was to weaken the state and make it easy to spread Islam
throughout India.
What should be the principles on which a History of India
be based ?
There is no single
answer to this question. But some ideas for such a historiography suggest
themselves.
Primary among such
considerations is the notion that the Indic civilization not unlike other
civilizations characterized by longevity, was a substantial net exporter of
ideas and values in addition to being a recipient of ideas originating
elsewhere. Cultural influences should be regarded as the result of a complex
interplay of ideas, languages and religions. For example, instead of
concentrating on migrations to India,
one can ask how the Indo-European languages spread over such a vast area of
Europe and Asia with a common substratum of
words. Could it have been the result of significant commerce and/or academic
exchanges, such as occurs today? It is important to remind oneself that unlike
the India
of the 19th century, the Ancients of the Indian subcontinent were in
the top rungs of the Maslow hierarchy of needs, and had the time and
inclination to pursue what they believed to be essential ontological
issues in relation to the human species.
It is conceivable therefore that such academic exchange was more than likely
over vast regions even considering the more primitive modes of travel prevalent
during that period. After all, Adi
Sankara was able to traverse the entire subcontinent more than once on foot
without much difficulty
Another principle in
developing a historical narrative for India
that suggests itself is the notion that Indian History should not be subject to
reductionist arguments and be boxed in or essentialized into a watertight
compartment such as South or South East Asia. India
has much in common with various disparate cultures and is in fact the
quintessential melting pot of cultures and the Indic civilization is one with a
Universal Weltanschauung. The reason that Indic philosophies have appeal is
because of the Universalist principles on which they are based and the resort
to ontological arguments. It is in this context that Indians find exhortations
to secularism to be particularly incongruous. The secularist imperative of
Indian society is merely a subset of ontological principles celebrating the
universality of the human spirit. The Indic civilization has always welcomed a
catholicity of views and ideologies as alternate paths suitable for human
beings at different stages of their development. Reminding the Indian to be
secular is as redundant as reminding the Chinese to revere their ancestors.
Grammar School
education in India in general and the teaching of History in particular must be
undertaken with a great degree of deliberation and seriousness, comparable to
that which is done in most European countries. A history of an entire nation
should never be relegated for the most part to the subjects of another power or
nation, much less a colonial power. In
developing a curriculum for History education in India, we must be far more
accepting of our oral tradition of transmitting knowledge which predates the
development of scripts by several millennia
Last but not least the
Indian must once again be encouraged to have pride in his/her historical
tradition, regardless of religious affiliation. The current practice where all
activities remotely considered nationalistic are immediately ridiculed, as
jingoism is a practice that appears peculiarly Indian. Under no circumstances
should the modern Indian let the History of India be driven and directed by a
small group of people alien to the traditions of the subcontinent and who are
accountable to no one in the subcontinent.
Again the point here
is not to concoct a history that speaks only of glowing terms of the past
accomplishments of India while
ignoring the inevitable blemishes which certainly India was not immune to. The
purpose is to avoid broad generalizations and to accept as fact, events in
history without any evidence whatsoever that they occurred and merely because
it was asserted by a European.