Tag indian history

Thaparite historians have reason to be afraid – Reshmi Dasgupta

VOI

Romila Thapar

Interested Indians cannot be left to the tender mercies of a coterie of like-minded professional historians who have so far not been able to make themselves accessible or intelligible to all those who have a yen to know. – Reshmi Dasgupta

Last week, at the launch of Sanjeev Sanyal’s latest book Revolutionaries, Home Minister Amit Shah spoke of the need to tell the “other side” of history, as it has for too long been seen through the prism of colonial historians. This week, historian Swapna Liddle, at the launch of her own new book The Broken Script, said history writing should be left to historians. These two contradictory views highlight an increasingly vexing question: Whose history is it anyway?

Many years ago, a venerated editor of a major national daily used to write a column that continued to be published long after he retired. His commentaries were not for the faint-hearted—or for the average newspaper reader. As a rookie journalist 30 years ago, I often heard the comment that “if more than five people read his column—and understood it—he would be offended.” He apparently believed that quality and popularity were inherently mutually exclusive.

Today’s “eminent” Indian historians concur. Think of a book on Indian history you found interesting—if you ever were enthused enough to think of reading a book on history, that is. The chances are that the one(s) you like are written either by non-Indians, or Indians who are not historians. Most professional historians here write books only for their peers and hapless students. Most would probably be annoyed—like that editor—if the hoipolloi read and understand them!

They, therefore, remain smugly unaware that they have been hoist by their own petard, as the rise of non-historians writing history is proof of the failure of the “professionals”. Had the writing of history not been left to these exclusivist historians all this while, non-historians like Sanyal (an economist by education and profession) would not have had to jump in to make history accessible and intelligible to the very people whose shared past forms its core focus area.

The presiding deity of the professional historian cult is, of course Romila Thapar. And her C.D. Deshmukh Lecture at the India International Centre last week was an impeccably enunciated excoriation of the “other” historians who have the temerity to tread on hallowed ground reserved for her ilk. The overwhelmingly grey-haired audience was told that the others were a bunch of ill-read, untrained, idiotic (saffron) flag-wavers who don’t know their ass from their elbow.

She talked of the professional historians’ loyalty to methodologies and processes, characterising the work of the “others” as flights of fancy based on hearsay, mythology and their own imagination. She obviously did not think it necessary to actually read any book by those “others” before attacking them, or else she would have been horrified to discover that most of them use the same sources, methodologies and processes she assumes are exclusive to her cohort.

The difference is that non-professional Indian historians use refreshingly non-academic language and present findings and arguments in a way lay readers can relate to, not turgid jargon-ridden treatises of “historians”. Yet professional historians abroad whether they lean left or right—let us not pretend historians anywhere are impartial—make the effort to write lucidly. So they appeal to wider audiences unlike their Indian counterparts, and even produce bestsellers.

Apart from her fellow “professional” historians and generations of unfortunate students forced to read Thapar as part of history syllabi in universities—myself included—few other Indians would willingly buy any of her two dozen or so books. Most other professional historians also wallow in the same shallow pool. Ironically, it suits this elite band to keep history—knowledge—confined to a select few in this way, just like the Brahmins of ancient India used to do.

But this elite group now has reason to be afraid—be very afraid—as a revolution is underway. Their superiority and monopoly are being challenged—not by the non-professional historians but by the people, by readers. Bestseller lists based on actual sales of books rather than the selections of interest groups consistently show that works by so-called amateurs are dominating the top ranks. So much so that even publishers are now looking beyond their previous elite favourites.

The redoubtable Arun Shourie had taken on this cohort in his 2014 book Eminent Historians showing how they have steered narratives in a particular direction via total control over the writing, researching, funding, guiding and teaching history. Those professional historians have achieved little apart from discouraging legions of students who may have been inclined to explore alternative—opposing—ideas or narratives and realigning them towards more “acceptable” ideologies.

Actually, historians like Thapar did notch up a success of sorts as the vanguard of today’s cancel culture: preventing bright minds from entering their hallowed portals in the previous 60-odd years. They could then confidently heap scorn on the “other side” for lacking people with the professional qualifications to write “credible” history. But those who have hogged the history space for decades and still seek to stave off others have good reason to be ashamed of themselves.

Because, as these gatekeeper-historians kept an iron grip on textbooks, the fact that so many, if not most, young Indians who finished from school under their watch deem history to be boring and nothing to be proud of is a damning indictment of their writing and teaching. They should have been made to explain their failure and reform. Instead, they were lionised, allowed to continue controlling access to history and even anoint themselves as ‘liberals’.

The damage they wrought on young Indian minds was not always via blatant twisting of facts; it was often through selection of facts, an accusation those “liberals” lob at non-professional historians today. Why, for instance, is it that the “important” battles students memorise are the ones that were “lost”—Porus in 326 BCE, the second battle of Tarain (1192), Panipat (1526, 1556 and 1761), Plassey (1757) and Seringapatam (1799)—rather than those that were won?

The fiery Ahom general Lachit Borphukan who defeated Aurangzeb’s Rajput general Ram Singh in 1671 at the Battle of Saraighat has only now been rescued from the footnotes of history, where he was consigned by historians for reasons no longer tough to figure out. As was the Gond Rani Durgawati, who defeated Mughal forces on the first day of the battle of Narrai Nala in 1564 before being wounded on the second day and killing herself to prevent being captured.

Last year Aneesh Gokhale, a merchant navy officer who has written three books on history previously, published a gripping account of Borphukan—Lachit the Indomitable. And this year, Rani Durgawati: The Forgotten Life of a Warrior Queen by Nandini Sengupta, a journalist and writer, has just been released. Both are non-professional historians and thus candidates to be “cancelled” by the cabal. Luckily they do not aspire to academic posts and can ignore patrician vetoes!

The fact that Sanyal’s books have been runaway bestsellers, whether about more recent times like our freedom movement or on ancient India, emphatically shows that many Indians are interested in our own history. Yet books by professional historians—whom Liddle thinks should have a monopoly over history writing—are evidently not the ones they want to pick up to read. That can only mean these professional historians are incapable of addressing this huge demand.

Interested Indians cannot be left to the tender mercies of a coterie of like-minded professional historians who have so far not been able to make themselves accessible or intelligible to all those who have a yen to know. History is always contested as facts can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. But like most things about India, there has to be diversity in approaches to discover, analyse and understand our past—and present it to Indians in a lucid, engaging way.

Having understood the zeitgeist, Amit Shah exhorts the unshackling of history. Liddle does not or cannot accept that history is too important to remain the exclusive preserve of “professional” historians. But why not let both sides flourish? There is enough material and space in Indian history for all types of research and writing. Democratise history writing so that different and differing approaches—not just Thaparite dogma—can be posited and understood by everyone. – Firstpost, 20 January 2023

› Reshmi Dasgupta writes on history and politics.

Romila Thapar Cartoon

Britain and Pakistan: India fails to learn from its past – Gautam Sen

VOI

Narendra Modi & Rishi Sunak

One must admire the gall of the British establishment which has taken to the most egregious slander against Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the BBC, trying to incite Muslim revolt in India with blatant lies, even as it is negotiating the Free Trade Agreement (FTA). – Dr. Gautam Sen

The background to Pakistan’s dire predicament today, economic and political chaos and unexpected clashes at the border with Afghanistan, need unsparing historical analysis. The hungry millions of Pakistan are already taking to the streets crying for atta, no different from Parisian mobs demanding bread on the eve of the French revolution. The emotions of Pakistan’s impoverished masses, converge with the visceral distaste of the TTP for Pakistan’s corrupt elites, whom they also regard as irreligious. There’s every possibility the mobs may turn on the homes of Pakistan’s elites as the TTP is doing with the nation’s security forces. It is reported members of the families of Pakistan’s wealthy chartered a plane, only three weeks ago, at vast cost, to fly to London to celebrate New Year while the leaders of the bankrupt country went begging for help in the capitals of the world.

This grim ground reality of Pakistan being encountered by millions of ordinary Pakistanis today originated in cynical British imperial intrigues, as it did for so many countries. It is Britain’s involvement and arbitrary creation of borders in the Middle East that left behind serious problems, which other imperial powers are still using to their advantage cynically. The most unjust and illogical partition was experienced by Iraq, which was left fundamentally unviable as an economy. The British drew a map around some oil wells and called it Kuwait, an area that would have legitimately been vital for a viable Iraqi polity. Not much needs to be said of British misdeeds in Palestine that have resulted in a homeless people and endless conflict. India too is a victim, with much of its continuing divisive domestic politics, stemming directly from British machinations that date back to the nineteenth century.

The creation of Pakistan was almost entirely the product of British geopolitical strategy to deal with a presumed Soviet threat from the north and associated aims in the Middle East. The fact that an intense debate was also occurring within the Indian Muslim religious and political community about partition, which was won by its proponents, was fortuitous and convenient for British plans. However, British political leaders at Westminster and its most senior military leaders were not collectively convinced at the outset that partition was altogether desirable. Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck was the most senior military officer who did not regard the partition of India as the best outcome for the withdrawing British. In fact, he refused a peerage in protest at the carnage that ensued with the hasty partition insisted on by Lord Louis Mountbatten. Shockingly, Jawaharlal Nehru made him India’s first Governor-General despite the man’s criminal role over partition. He even acquiesced to the destruction of the memorial for fallen INA soldiers, the first act of Lord Louis Mountbatten when he reached Singapore on victory over Japan.

However, the governor general and viceroy, Lord Archibald Wavell, Mountbatten’s predecessor until February 1947 and a field marshall himself, was convinced partition alone could address Britain’s geopolitical interests and was determined to see it through at all cost. In his view, the Soviet threat from the north and British interests in the Middle East could best be secured by a reliable ally through partition. Lord Wavell had correctly concluded independent India would not cooperate despite only achieving dominion status in August 1947. The request for the British navy to use the port in Bombay was refused and Karachi therefore became absolutely vital for the British navy. Lord Wavell’s concern with Britain’s geopolitical interests was shared by Winston Churchill. He opposed Indian independence and was a bitter antagonist of the “Hindu Congress” while he was wartime prime minister, conspiring assiduously with Mohammed Ali Jinnah to achieve British political aims.

Lord Wavell himself was not a man given to sentimentality, having served in the brutal Boer War, where concentration camps had first been invented, later copied by the Nazis for mass slaughter. However, Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife Edwina were to prove much more adept than the brusque Lord Wavell at manipulating the Congress leadership, especially Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. It is now known from the recollections of their daughter, Lady Pamela Hicks, nee Mountbatten, and CIA archives, that Nehru was involved with Edwina Mountbatten. He formed an enduring intimate relationship with her until her death in February 1960. This was to prove fateful for India’s history because the Mountbattens and British chiefs of India’s armed forces, shockingly retained by Jawaharlal Nehru after independence, plotted successfully to ensure Pakistan retained a strategically significant part of Jammu and Kashmir thanks to Nehru’s wanton cupidity. Their treasonous role has been recorded by Lt. Gen. L.P. Sen who commanded Indian forces in Jammu and Kashmir, as brigadier, during 1947-48.

In order to signal to London and others like Field Marshal Auchinleck, wavering over the idea of partition, Lord Wavell wanted to give them a stark demonstration of what might happen across the length and breadth of India if Muslims did not get their homeland. He hatched a conspiracy to precipitate bloodshed through the Great Calcutta Killings of mid-August 1946, followed by violence in Bihar and Noakhali. The actual instigation of the mass killings, horrendous rapes with naked women hung from meat hooks next to joints of beef were fronted by Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Calcutta and Bengal were chosen as the venue for the bloodletting because the Muslim League was in power in the state and its was a Bengali leader, Fazlul Huq, who had proposed the Lahore Resolution on partition. Bengal’s incumbent chief minister was the ruthless playboy confidante of Jinnah, Huseyn S Suhrawardy, who proved a faithful co-conspirator in the grim mayhem.

Governor Frederick John Burrows, the local police and the military commander were instructed by Lord Wavell to stand aside while the violence took place. It was organised by Huseyn Suhrawardy in a chilling public speech at the Calcutta Maidan after he had ensured the Muslims came to the public meeting armed and prepared. It was only possible to stage such an event in Bengal because Muslims were both in power in the state and also the majority population, unlike any other part of India, including the Punjab.

It is this contextual backdrop that accounts for the subsequent history of Pakistan and its evident unenviable and unsurpassable current predicament. Pakistan’s objective was, as Jinnah’s voluminous correspondence and records of his public utterances confirm, nothing short of inflicting permanent fatal injury to India and not merely the creation of a Muslim homeland. The aspiration was a corridor through the heart of India between West and East Pakistan as well as the attenuation of India into a patchwork of independent polities, an outcome that must have been music to the ears of the India-baiting Churchill and Wavell.

The insistence that Jammu and Kashmir be ceded and the war to snatch it from India, despite the hostility of its people towards the prospect under Sheik Abdullah’s leadership, was only the first step in the yearning to wage jihad against Hindu India. The intention was to replicate the genocidal wars waged by the Ghaznavids and assorted Turkic and Persian invaders like Timur and Nadir Shah, a fate which the Muslim League had actually threatened in 1946 if the demand for Pakistan was not granted.

The Pakistan that was established on the apparent basis of religious commonality proved to be a fragile artificial construct. It became the victim of the assorted conflicts over issues like language, political power and equity that bedevil most societies. In the case of Pakistan, Punjabi Muslim racism towards the darker-skinned Bengalis of smaller physical stature was to become an incendiary contributory theme that underpinned genocide in Pakistan’s eastern province in 1971. The disputes between the two halves of Pakistan began almost immediately with the caprice of imposing Urdu as a national language. It succeeded to a degree in West Pakistan, where historical regional mother tongues were virtually obliterated with even the dominant Punjabis abandoning it, whereas Bengalis rioted against the attempted imposition.

The denouement came when the Awami League won a majority in Pakistan’s first democratic elections in 1970, large enough for its Sheik Mujibur Rahman to become entitled to the premiership of Pakistan as a whole. This was unacceptable to the racially conscious Punjabi Muslim military caste that had usurped political power in Pakistan. Another dire specific fear also animated their animosity, which was the possibility of East Pakistani reluctance to fund the national defence budget for wars against India. The house of cards collapsed in short order with the single largest slaughter of Hindus in history that India and the world have striven to forget, not the least the upper castes of West Bengal.

Pakistan had become a garrison state at the outset, with formal military control seized in 1958 by Field Marshal Ayyub Khan. The Western powers came to regard Pakistan as a military cantonment, like other bases around the world, but much more substantial and with a dual purpose. It was a collaborator against Soviet Communism in the region and beyond and a useful constraint on India, unwilling to kowtow to the West and was friendly towards the USSR. Pakistan joined SEATO in 1954 and CENTO in 1955, the Baghdad Pact earlier, the latter along with Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Both these Cold War alliances operated under US leadership. These ties were to prove fateful because the Anglo Americans inferred that Pakistan’s role and military commitments in the anti-communist alliance needed to be insulated from the cut and thrust of any homegrown frivolous democratic political upheaval.

Although, in practice, the contingent raison d’etre for domestic public consumption was the alleged existential threat posed to Pakistan by Hindu India and its illegitimate occupation of Muslim Jammu and Kashmir. These were to become the overarching compelling justifications of the primacy of Pakistan’s military in the country involved in a permanent institutionalised conflict with India. Although the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir provided extraordinarily handy legitimacy, Pakistan’s armed forces must have baulked at any prospect of its resolution. The result was quiet Anglo-American welcome to the military coup of 1958 and inauguration of the absolute primacy of Pakistan’s military over its polity, economy and society, which has endured ever since. In the estimation of Pakistan scholar Christine Fair, elected Pakistani prime ministers are no more than the equivalent of the mayor of a city. But absolute power tends, as Lord Acton once averred, to corrupt absolutely.

The predictable outcome of military dictatorship, all outward fictitious appearances to the contrary, was the inevitable full-blown corruption of the officer corps of Pakistan’s armed forces. It was facilitated by organised plunder of national assets through over generous land grants to army officers and their gradual usurpation of most productive activities of the country as well. The corruption also acquired a parlous ethnic basis with the Punjab dominating the army officer corps, their relatives constituting the privileged landed gentry or recruits to the higher bureaucracy. The moral compass also ebbed in personal conduct with the astonishing sexual licentiousness among senior politicians and army officers alike.

The ordinary citizen was perfectly aware of the unspeakable rot and found nowhere to turn except to embrace religious motifs of protest. Such religious protest experienced a colossal boost when the Pakistani state, under General Zia-ul-Haq, sponsored the augmentation of militarised religious zealotry during the anti-Soviet intervention of the West in Afghanistan. These huge new militant religious assets were then found useful to deploy against India, especially in the aftermath of the nuclearisation of both countries. It seemed to diminish the threat of Indian retaliation against terrorist assault despite its superior conventional forces though that reverie has been disabused by Balakot.

The absence of democratic accountability has not unexpectedly proved to be the principal reason for the contemporary downfall of the entire artificial edifice left behind by the British and put to shameless use by the US, which armed and nurtured Pakistan over decades. Without the constant democratic feedback mechanisms that motivate politicians to adopt sane utilitarian policies for their own survival as public agents, corruption and looting reached catastrophic proportions. Pretty much all players in Pakistan’s public life are only exercised to increase their foreign assets and make retirement plans abroad, with London being a favoured destination. It is extraordinary that virtually everyone in Pakistani public life is a dual national and with their assets located abroad any commitment to national well-being cannot but be suspect.

In the meantime, the survival of the grossly mismanaged economy became dependent on handouts provided to Pakistan, as a useful military cantonment, by vulturine countries which barely regarded its citizens as human. As such, there was always a price to be paid and the recent entry of China into the equation is proving the most noxious. Chinese funding is always in exchange for physical assets or commitments to purchase costly services from Chinese firms allotted the task of creating utilities and infrastructure. Sovereign control of Gwadar port has effectively been surrendered to China, much like large areas of Gilgit-Baltistan in 1963 and now the idea of ceding it in entirety is the subject of much speculation. One wonders at the eventual fate of Karachi port too, which could prove extremely useful to China because of Western military threats to its imports through other routes.

The existence of Pakistan in its present form is surely in doubt unless it finds many hundreds of billions of dollars to reset the economy, which seems highly unlikely, and the military is decisively ousted from public life and confined to barracks. Perhaps only the Punjab will remain a functioning polity with most of the remainder of the country enjoying quasi sovereignty since Islam has proved an inadequate basis for solidarity and nationhood. Some of these newer quasi-independent entities might even look to India for succour and support. But it seems likely India will inherit a much more formidable foe, in the chaos of Pakistan’s disintegration. There is a danger China, not given to international norms and niceties, will occupy the whole of Gilgit-Baltistan and very likely, for strategic reasons, PoK as well.

Yet, the British are getting ready for a triumphant return to India despite ultimate responsibility for the dreadful situation for India’s borders, with China poised to surround it on several sides. Apart from placing India in an unenviable territorial quandary, Britain is the culprit which sowed the seeds of the festering wounds of Khalistan, Dravidianism as well as the poison of truculent Bengali Leftism. India is apparently intent on a free trade treaty (FTA) with Britain, though the benefits are uncertain and the negative consequences palpable. Yet, one must admire the gall of the British establishment which has taken to the most egregious slander against Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the BBC, trying to incite Muslim revolt in India with blatant lies, even as it is negotiating the FTA. Unfortunately, it seems some self-serving British Indian-origin Ugandans, well-connected in Delhi’s corridors of power, favour a FTA and may well have the final say irrespective of its intrinsic merits for India’s future. Their rapid and unexplained enrichment since 2014 will only grow. – FirstPost, 20 January 2023

› Dr. Gautam Sen taught International Political Economy and Political Science for more than two decades at the London School of Economics. 

BBC Hinduphobia and Indiaphobia

Contours of India’s civilisational fate – Gautam Sen

VOI

Narendra Modi

The dynamics of historical forces on the fate of a country is usually of greater significance than the actions of mortal politicians, though they might occasionally seek to redirect it. – Dr. Gautam Sen

An air of optimism pervades the perception of many educated Indians about their country’s place in the contemporary world. Yet others are dismayed at an alleged collapse of values of tolerance and plurality that supposedly informed India’s socio-political life during the early decades after Independence in 1947. Neither view is a truthful or realistic depiction of India’s history and how it has unfolded in recent times since the accession of Narendra Modi as India’s prime minister in 2014. The long hand of the inexorable dynamics of historical forces on the fate of a country is usually of greater significance than the actions of mortal politicians, though they might occasionally seek to redirect it. Events like Peter the Great’s decisive moulding of Russia’s future, its twentieth century revolution, or changes wrought by the earlier French Revolution and American Civil War or indeed the upheavals in China following the accession of Mao Zedong are rare.

India came into its own, not as most believe as an independent country that had suddenly severed the umbilical cord of British rule overnight in 1947, but with much of the past association intact. It remained a Dominion of the British empire, with a British head of state and its armed forces led by British officers. Of course it experienced the momentous event of Partition, imposed due to the brutal sleight-of-hand of British geopolitical purposes. It was a fateful outcome that has come back to haunt the world with serious dangers as Pakistan emerges as the axis of global terrorism. The principal conspiratorial aim of establishing a military cantonment in the shape of Pakistan in northern India has been frustrated subsequently owing to developments that have bequeathed the strategic territory of Pakistan to China, now the greatest rival of the Anglosphere. Only the original aim of its deployment by Britain and then the US to constrain and harass India remains unaffected.

The India of Jawaharlal Nehru and his immediate successors was never quite so pluralist and tolerant as claimed by some. It was easier to rule since it was a more politically quiescent and less turbulent country during the first two decades after 1947.Yet, during Nehru’s premiership the democratically-elected communist government of Kerala was ejected and journalists and other critics were highhandedly incarcerated for offending his government. Of course it reached the unprecedented high water of a suspension of Indian democracy itself in the mid-1970s under the rule of his daughter, Indira Gandhi. By contrast, contemporary India continues with its raucous traditions of rivalry without pause. However, two distinctive changes of idiom are taking place, which are a genuine transformation of India’s socio-political landscape. Long established political parties are experiencing an apparent abiding decline in popularity and fortunes and that alone provokes accusations of autocratic misrule. There is also a willingness under the current dispensation to use the full force of the law to curb the illicit political funding of predecessors and rivals, which incumbents would previously ignore.

All the indicators suggest India has recently begun the surge of an historic economic trajectory that has its roots in changes first initiated more than thirty years ago. The list of indicators is long and intricate and include a major transformation of the nation’s infrastructure, a prerequisite for broader economic advancement, regulatory reform, the growing digitisation of the economy and the emergence of new commercial agents that promise to dominate India’s economic future. There is also an apparent change in political consciousness in important areas of the country, with more concern among voters about the quality of governance than parochial identity politics. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is still uneven and remains a potentially significant challenge to stable governance. The upshot of these economic and political developments has been evidence of India coping with the on-going global economic disruptions better than most. It has also managed to deal, so far, with the serious Covid pandemic with an impressive display of political self-confidence and organisational prowess.

Yet, such changes, of the kind being witnessed in contemporary India and accelerating since 2014, after a decade-long hiatus, are embedded in a significant political context. Its importance cannot be underestimated nor is there any guarantee that this arguably positive political context is inevitably durable. A major factor of the present political setting is the primacy of prime minister Narendra Modi in Delhi and his wider political role. He has been the driving force of contemporary change in India with a focus that is unique and, likely, problematic to replicate. There are some other examples of economic transformation within India that are also notable, for example, in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra for a period, the latter perhaps experiencing a possible renaissance now too. But the phenomenon of Narendra Modi’s is probably unique and the principal reason for the change in the quality of governance and the economic transformation that have been unleashed in India nationally. Weighty foreign policy successes have also been registered and these two layers of change, domestic and foreign, have reinforced each other.

How the ongoing current transformation of India will likely impact its longer-run historical evolution is not easy to anticipate despite confident predictions about its global economic status within the next twenty-five years. As far as one can infer, the political economy of prime minister Narendra Modi’s strategy seems, in the main, to be the delivery of a whole range of essential public services to the mass of ordinary people, combined with effective methods for doing so. These have been unequivocally spectacular and unprecedented and clearly the reason for the high esteem in which voters hold him. There have also been a host of symbolic religious gestures and social policies that have inspired the majority community. These economic and political measures have combined with major foreign policy accomplishments that are carrying an appeal for many. Yet, no far-reaching and durable attempt has been made to mobilise India’s majority and especially in the imperative BJP heartland, by adopting policies that would galvanise them and inhibit the possibility of their electoral defection indefinitely.

On the contrary, Hindu temples remain under the occupation of hostile secular forces. They are systematically destroying the heritage of India’s ancient civilisational identity with alarming long-term consequences not achieved by earlier iconoclasts. In addition, there has only been a dismayingly feeble attempt to alter India’s dangerously corrosive prevailing national narrative without imaginative countermeasures, forcefully implemented. There are also apparently two startling ideas that hold sway over the current political dispensation as well as the leadership of its wider national socio-political base. The first is that good governance will conquer the political terrain across the religious divide, which appears to be a case of triumph of hope over experience. The second seems to have been somewhat unthinkingly adopted out of perceived contingent necessity. It entails a conviction that India’s historic transformation can be achieved through the existing bureaucracy, with the help of American management consultants. These are staggeringly optimistic beliefs and one searches in vain for a convincing rationale. The potential consequences if the NDA falters as a result of such missteps would be a threat to India’s very survival as a sovereign polity, with the catastrophic electoral triumph of a fractious coalition national government, compromised by foreign interests.

While a mood of jubilation, even triumphalism, has overtaken much of India’s chattering classes they seem largely oblivious to ominous signs of structural forces unfolding relentlessly within their polity and society though adversaries of Indian nationhood have quite clearly understood them. One immediate contingent issue that has potential to destabilise India’s painfully won progress is Narendra Modi’s succession. There is a strong likelihood of an unholy struggle to become his successor and that could descend into a deadlock that anti national political forces will eagerly exploit, turning any drama into crisis for India. Such a scenario is what India’s foreign adversaries are awaiting, in order to intensify the internal subversion of India and the effective seizure of its domestic process. This will occur through assets already created by global evangelists, their Jihadi allies and others, who are clutching a MoU with India’s most dangerous enemy close to their chest.

Key Indian border states remain in virtual revolt and all the clever strategies to secure their stability will turn to dust the moment coalition opportunism and horse trading are normalised again in Delhi. The Punjab, West Bengal and Kerala sporadically turn their face against Indian federal obligations and their sullen acquiescence to them could suddenly become an open challenge to Indian political unity itself. Separatist sentiment remains fully alive south of the Vindhyas and their alliance with Anglo American evangelists acquired deep roots in the decade before 2014. At an opportune moment, the indissolubly entrenched soldiery of a Kashmir Caliphate will once again look to the neighbourhood for resolute help to recommence rampant jihad. Others, not excluding Turkey further afield as well as China, will find taking advantage of any fresh Indian troubles an irresistible temptation.

Most importantly, the accelerating demographic transformation of India will only compound any intractable eventual predicament. It is likely to bring the problems closer to the chic salon life of Delhi, with a whole swathe of territory across the heart of India already only nominally governable by either legitimate state or central authority. Delhi’s own recent internal communal violence ought to have already been a foretaste of things to come. Parts of one city alone, Meerut, only a short distance from Delhi, typifies the acquisition of the embryonic elements of concrete self-rule by a single community that derives from demographic pre-eminence. The demographic checkmate has already resulted in the de facto loss of authority in swathes of Indian territory, where the sovereign writ of the central government is barely enforceable. It was most graphically and egregiously evident in West Bengal where a 1,000 or more Hindu women, where sexually assaulted without redress and many others fled the state for having voted for the wrong political party. The killings of nationalists continue unabated in Kerala and threaten to spread elsewhere in the wider region.

India’s domestic vulnerabilities are embedded within a vortex of faithless predatory international intrigue in which opportunism alone rules. Its neighbourhood remains a cesspool of festering resentment and loathing camouflaged only by India’s oversized regional economic and military footprint. The three international players of significance to contemporary India are becoming hazardously unreliable and potentially inimical towards its fundamental national interests. India continues to remain afloat and able to assert its sovereign autonomy in a world of precarious cross-cutting conflictual cleavages and shifting mutual interests by virtue of an accident of fate that the gods alone could have decreed. Contemporary India has sufficient material resources to spend unconscionable sums on military hardware to deter adversaries and adequate balance of payment reserves to swim in the shark-infested waters of the international economy. That India has done so with a degree of adeptness is also fortuitous. It is due to a team of capable ministers and advisers around the prime minister as well as officials running the foreign ministry and supervising the nation’s finances and, of course, the heaven-sent gifts of its prime minister himself.

The US can hardly be regarded as anything other than a duplicitous peril to India’s integrity and autonomy. It only cares for Indian manpower, and infrastructure facilities as a signal to China for a highly unlikely actual military engagement with it, while the contours of their condominium are defined to the accompaniment of militarised tensions. India’s growing middle class market and its technically skilled domestic manpower are an important subsidiary additional attraction for the US. India has become a destination for outsourcing production of US consumption needs for digital services, with or without temporary rights of presence for Indians in the US for delivery. But virtually open war has been declared against India by US government agencies like USCIRF, its shameless arms-length media proxies and a malicious American academia.

The US refurbishing Pakistani F-16s while its national military planning, including nuclear strategy, are fully integrated with China’s war plans against India, is nothing short of treachery. This episode will no longer be dismissed as minor, as some in India have done, if China helps arm Pakistani F-16s with advanced missiles and India’s border standoff with China turns into real combat. The abiding US attempt is regime change in the hope of implanting the kind of accommodating political elite every other US ally is apt to become. If there are any doubts, the willingness of Europeans to contemplate national suicide to comply with US injunctions over the Ukraine should be a wake-up call for complacent Indians.

India’s new-found intimate friend, France, is ruthless in calculating national interest and immediate advantage though there is an absence of any obvious conflict between their respective contemporary national goals. But the bonhomie is essentially actuated by Indian purchase of French military hardware that lowers the average cost of exorbitant R&D commitments through larger production runs that exports to India allow. The rationale of overdone Israeli solicitude for India is not dissimilar since nothing apparently holds back its global cosmopolitan intellectual elite from unsparing attacks on India and its civilization, from the sanctuary of media houses and by vicious academics in the West. Both countries have relatively small markets for their own defence output and exports are an essential aspect of reducing average costs and ensuring affordability for domestic use. One only hopes the evident cynicism underlying the dynamics of the situational logic of their relationship with India has dawned on its own decision-makers.

The Indo-Russian relationship has long antecedents that justify indulgence in some sentimentality about its allure. Russia has been a reliable friend since the early 1950s, Stalin dispatching food grains to India when Russia’s own post-war situation was still appalling beyond imagining and the US response to India’s plea for supplies had been humiliating. The USSR could not offer succour to India in 1962, having already fallen out with China earlier and preoccupied with the climactic Cuban missile crisis. It rose to the challenge in 1971, mobilising forty divisions at the Sino-Soviet border as a warning against any intervention during India’s liberation war in East Pakistan and the rest is history. But India’s alleged strategic partner, the US, has managed to undermine this imperative partnership with Russia and the reliance on it to keep the mainstay of its air force flying, by forcing Russia into the arms of China in recent months.

The Sino-Russian engagement continues to deepen daily and casts a cloud over the Indo-Russian relationship. India has embarked on deft diplomacy to ensure the continuation of friendship with Russia, but it can no longer be taken for granted in a moment of crisis. Such a crisis will involve China whose covetousness of Indian territory has only grown over time, whetted successively by its dramatic economic advance since the late 1980s. China first seized Tibet formally in 1950, followed by Aksai China in 1962 and has since added Tawang to its list of demands as well as Arunachal Pradesh in its entirety. Demands for the strategic prize of J&K will likely follow if the Chinese economic and military gap with India continues to widen. India has deterred the insolence of the Middle Kingdom by mobilising militarily and it must remain constantly prepared for this challenge, the greatest historic direct and indirect threat to its integrity. – Firstpost, 30 November 2022

› Dr. Gautam Sen taught international political economy for more than two decades at the London School of Economics. 

Indian and Chinese troops face-off along the LAC.

Why a nation and its people must know their true history – Makkhan Lal

VOI

India History Cartoon

No country can become a great nation, a world guru and a world leader on borrowed ideas, borrowed cultures and borrowed systems. The greatness and leadership is built upon the solid foundation and the pride of their own past. – Dr. Makkhan Lal

History, history writing and history teaching have, indeed, become newsworthy not only in India but also in most other parts of the world. The reasons may be varied—construction of a national history curriculum in India, England and Wales, the design of national history standards in the US, the content of history textbooks in Japan, China, Korea, Pakistan, Israel, and Germany, the approach to invasion of Latin American countries by the Europeans, the development of new curricula in the successor states of the former USSR, or even the rewriting of history textbooks in Russia after the collapse of the former USSR. Issues of identities, heritage, and citizenship, all rooted in the past, have become the hot stuff of politics.

Similarly, an issue can be raised about the conquest of peaceful people belonging to Inca, Aztec and Maya civilisations by the gun-trotting Europeans. Whether the victory should be viewed as the discovery of a new world and new economic resources for Europe, as is generally viewed by European and North American historians, or it should be seen as the destruction of the independently developed three native civilisations by technologically more advanced nations that have an unending lust for looting others’ treasures and making other people subservient.

A South American historian may well say: “It may be a subject of celebrations for Europeans but for us it is a subject of mourning because just in a few years the Europeans destroyed our civilisation developed over several thousands of years!”

Why study history

Questions have often been raised that when there are so many problems and differences of opinions among historians why should we study history at all.

History is all about the past. In almost every country, city, town and village throughout the world, a large number of existing buildings were built in the past to meet the needs and aspirations of people, now dead. This is most obvious in existing temples, churches, mosques, fireplaces, houses, public buildings, and so on. The systems of governments, political ideas, religious beliefs, art, architecture, cultural practices, educational systems, customs and behaviours are all products of the past, recent or remote.

The past is all-pervasive which, indeed, means that we cannot escape from it. The past signifies what actually happened—events that have taken place, societies that have risen and fallen, ideas and institutions, eating habits, dressing habits, etc. History is precisely the study of this human past. The past is our heritage; we are part of it and the past is part of us in all aspects: Be it culture, behaviour, religious faith and practices, be it rituals, be it the tradition of political, social and economic systems. It is reflected in our day-to-day living.

History is also about roots. It provides societies and individuals with a dimension of longitudinal meaning over time which outlives the human life span. It connects us with our past. History also allows us to peep into the future by providing precedents for contemporary actions and forewarning against the repetition of past mistakes. From its sense of continuity, history offers the apparent form and purpose to the past, the present and the future. In the words of E.H. Carr: “The past is intelligible to us only in the light of the present, and we can fully understand the present only in the light of the past.” He further says that history is needed “to enable man to understand the society of the past and to increase his mastery over the society of the present.” There is a need for history. It has a deeper social value and meaning.

The study of history is not a luxury. It is a necessity. This necessity has been best summed up by Arthur Marwick. He writes: “Individuals, communities, societies could scarcely exist if all knowledge of the past is wiped out. As memory is to the individual, so history is to the community or the society. Without memory, individuals find great difficulty in relating to others, in finding their bearings, in taking intelligent decisions—they lose their sense of identity. A society without history would be in a similar condition. … A society without knowledge of its past would be like an individual without memory. … It is only through a sense of history that communities establish their identity, orientate themselves, understand their relationship to the past and to other communities and societies. Without history (knowledge of the past), we, and our communities, would be utterly adrift on an endless and featureless sea of time.”

We all move ahead through the past of our own cultures, own civilisations, and values and it is this accumulation of ideas and experience, transmitted through education and sheer daily living that gives our thoughts meaning and the patterns and purpose of our actions. It is not that we live in the past but we are defined by it, and so the success of even the most forward-looking developments must inevitably rest on their relation to the ideas and practices of the society they are meant to serve. Science may forget its own history, but a society cannot.

History is neither a simple chronicle of the past nor a list of rulers and kings and the narratives of their rules. The past is not simply a collection of distinct ages or a hotchpotch of facts. History is an extremely complex discipline. Another point that needs to be emphasised is that a historian’s job is not that of a cook who prepares dishes as per the liking of his customers and adds spices accordingly. It is not the job of a historian to write politically correct history. His obligation is to write factually correct history.

It will be helpful if all historians remember what Sir Jadunath Sarkar wrote about the job of a historian: “I would not care whether the truth is pleasant or unpleasant, and in consonance with, or opposed to, current views. I would not mind in the least whether the truth is, or is not, a blow to the glory of my country. If necessary, I shall bear in patience the ridicule and slander of friends and society for the sake of preaching the truth. But still, I shall seek truth, understand truth, and accept the truth. This should be the firm resolve of a historian.”

This brief discussion on the nature of history as an academic discipline should make it abundantly clear that history is neither a static discipline nor can the writings on and of history be put into a set mould. Each generation views and writes about the past in the light of its own experience. Therefore, all interpretations and explanations are and must be as temporary and provisional as the descriptions. But in all these endeavours the sanctity of truth and facts should not be forgotten. Unanimity or one’s efforts to make others surrender is a recognisable characteristic of dictatorships, and not that of a free state. Open and continuing discussions and debates are the essence and strength of history and, for that matter, a great strength of an open society of an intellectually vibrant nation.

And now a word of caution! There is a tendency among historians to act as judges and give moral sermons. Historians must write and rewrite history. They are not supposed to be moral judges. Benedetto Crose has rightly said: “Those, who on the plea of narrating history, bustle about as judges, condemning here and giving absolution there, because they think that this is the office of history … are generally recognised as devoid of historical sense.”

Problems in history writing

Historians recognise that they are all culturally and socially influenced in their endeavour to write history but make all efforts to deny that their work is culturally, or socially, determined or constructed. As has been discussed briefly in the Introduction, EH Carr in chapter two of his book What is History provides a useful summary on this aspect of history writing. He quotes Donne Devotion that society and individuals are inseparable. “No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Like any other individual, a historian too is a social phenomenon, both the product and the conscious and unconscious spokesperson of the society to which he belongs. It is in this capacity that he approaches the facts of the historical past.

Therefore, we must not forget that we cannot fully understand or appreciate the work of a historian unless we have first grasped the standpoint from which he himself approaches it, and that standpoint is itself rooted in social and historical background. It is, therefore, essential that before we study history, we must study the historian and study his historical and social environment. When some historians claim that they are writing scientific history, or that only their version of history is correct, one must conclude immediately that the historians are not only being untruthful but are also hiding their political agenda under the garb of a “scientific” history. There exists nothing like scientific history. On similar lines, Benedetto Croce also spoke with his characteristic bluntness:

“The historian must have a point of view, … an intimate personal conviction regarding the conception of the facts which he has undertaken to relate. … It suffices to read any book of history to discover at once the point of view of the author if he is a historian worthy of the name and knows his own business. … Absolutely historical historians do not and cannot exist. Can it be said that Thucydidus and Polybius, Livy and Tacitus, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Giannone and Voltaire were without morals and political views; and in our own time, Guizot or Thiers, Macaulay or Balbo, Renke or Mommson? … If the historian is to escape from this inevitable necessity of taking sides, he must become a political and scientific eunuch; and history is not the business of eunuchs. … Historians who profess to wish to interrogate the facts without adding anything of their own, are not to be believed.”

Karl Marx buried among the crosses of Highgate Cemetery, London.

The problem with Marxist historiography and its relationship with history is much more curious. For Marx and his followers, i.e. Marxist historians, the problem of history is not just understanding “what happened”, “how it happened” and “why it happened”. For them, the problem is “how to change the world” by the use of history. At the core of this view lie two fundamental beliefs. Firstly, the Marxists believe in five universal stages of history.

These five stages are:

  1. Primitive Communism
  2. Slavery
  3. Feudalism
  4. Capitalism
  5. Communism

Secondly, they believe that the society we inhabit is a bad bourgeois society and, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis. The good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only “we” work systematically to destroy the language, the value, the culture, the ideology of this “bourgeois” society. This necessitates a massive, radical left-wing political programme, and everything the historians write, every criticism they make, is determined by that overriding objective. In this, the post-modernists are exceptions. They are fully convinced of the utterly evil nature of the “bourgeois” society but have lost all hope of change and have fallen back into destructive nihilism. They assert that the only way to achieve Marxism is to destroy society if it cannot be changed.

Marxist historians have failed to understand and appreciate the fact that the society we live in has evolved through a complex historical process, very different from the Marxist formula of the rise of feudalism over slavery and bourgeoisie overthrowing the feudal aristocracy. It is highly complex with respect to the distribution of power, authority, and influence. Just as it was not formed by the simple overthrow of aristocracy by the bourgeoisie, so, in its contemporary form, it does not consist simply of a bourgeois ruling class and a proletariat. The idea that we are now in the final period of the late-capitalist crisis is simply absurd. Marxists have been looking forward to the final capitalistic collapse for over a century—in 1848, 1866, 1918, 1946, 1963 and 1968, to mention just a few dates, but as fate would have it, they are themselves doomed forever.

Statements like “The pursuit of history is, whether practitioners choose to acknowledge it or not, a political occupation,” indeed, is not only exceptional but also far-fetched. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the experience of colonisation around the world has shown that domination by a more powerful culture—which defines its reality in quite different ways—either totally destroys, or at least drives, the less powerful ones into a subservient role. What was considered culturally “valid” can be rendered “invalid”, and the politically weaker ones are somehow required to modify their reality to fit within the constraints of the new codes.

We, as historians, must learn to recognise: “The past is perceived in different ways by different cultures. Methods of interpreting, recording, managing and protecting the past also differ between cultures. … The way people define their existence, their world view and their creation stories, and how they value, interpret, manage and transmit their past will continue to be handed on from generation to generation.”

Conclusions

Let us remember that no country can become a great nation, a world guru and a world leader on borrowed ideas, borrowed cultures and borrowed systems. The greatness and leaderships are built upon the solid foundations and the pride of the past; deeper the foundations, taller are the superstructures. Even globalisation is built upon this foundation. Many countries are part of globalisation on a much larger scale than India without abandoning their history, culture and heritage. It is on this basis they are able to assert their authority and influence the world order. – Firstpost, 6 January 2022

› Prof. Dr. Makkhan Lal is a historian and the founder director of the Delhi Institute of Heritage Research and Management.

Why ‘eminent historians’ still swear by the debunked Aryan theory – Makkhan Lal

VOI

Image depicting the imaginary Aryan invasion of India from the Caspian Sea.

“It is difficult to say that all the earliest Aryans belonged to one race, but their culture was more or less the same type. Originally the Aryans seem to have lived somewhere in the steppes stretching from Southern Russia to Central Asia. On their way to India the Aryans first appeared in Central Asia and Iran. A little earlier than 1500 BC the Aryans appeared in India.” – R.S. Sharma

“By 1500 BC when the Aryans began to arrive in India, the Harappan culture had collapsed. We do not know where they came from; perhaps they came from north-eastern Iran or the region near the Caspian Sea or Central Asia.” – Romila Thapar

The two quotations from India’s two “eminent historians” sum up their approach to the Aryan Invasion Theory. Just look at expressions “difficult to say”, “seems to have”, “somewhere in steppes”, “we do not know where they come from”, “perhaps they came from north-eastern Iran or the region near Caspian Sea or Central Asia”. Despite so many probabilities, they are certain that Aryans came from outside. When and from where? No idea!

Despite all evidence to the contrary, why does the Aryan invasion/migration theory (AIT) continue to remain the lifeline of Indian Marxist historians? Let us now look at the AIT in historical perspectives.

Linguistic Evidence

Florentine merchant, Filippo Sassetti, who lived in Goa from AD 1583 to 1588, was struck by similarities between Sanskrit and European languages, especially Latin and Greek. Later, the relationship between Sanskrit and European languages was further elaborated by William Jones and many other scholars in the service of the East India Company. The efforts made towards understanding these linguistic similarities between Sanskrit on the one hand and Greek, Latin and some other modern European languages on the other gave rise to a new discipline called ‘comparative linguistics’. Its birth had questionably motivated considerations and in the last 200 years the discipline (if at all it is a discipline) of ‘Comparative Linguistics’ has shown a far greater variety of gymnastic exercises than the sport of gymnastics itself.

Since the earliest books (i.e. the Vedas) of the Aryans and so also all human beings are written in Sanskrit, it came to be recognised as the language of the Aryans. In the beginning, all European languages, along with Sanskrit, came to be clubbed as Aryan languages, and Sanskrit got identified as not only the oldest of all but also the mother of all European languages. Lord Monboddo was convinced that “Greek was derived from Sanskrit”. Frederick Schlegel, a highly respected German linguist wrote, “The Indian language is older and others [European languages] younger and derived from it.” Thus, Sanskrit came to be recognised as the mother of “all the less ancient Indo-European languages, as well as the modern European tongues and dialects”.

But these opinions did not last very long. Local pride, racial complexes and Evangelical considerations overshadowed everything as a part of a shift from ‘Indo-mania’ to ‘Indo-phobia’.

Though William Jones could not accept the earlier view that Sanskrit is the ‘mother’ of all Aryan languages. He advocated that Sanskrit is just a ‘sister’, i.e. a co-descendant of an earlier ancestor language. Following the lead provided by Jones, F. Bopp wrote: “I do not believe that Greek, Latin and other European languages are to be considered as derived from Sanskrit. I feel rather inclined to consider them together as subsequent variations of one original tongue, which however, the Sanskrit has preserved more perfect than its kindred dialects.”

So, a search for the original homeland of a language, namely ‘Proto-Indo-European’, led different scholars to different places. This search for the imagined original language homeland also meant the search for the ‘Original Homeland of Aryans’. This also gave rise to forging labels such as the ‘Indo-Aryan’, ‘Indo-European’, ‘Aryan languages’, ‘Indo-Aryan languages’, and the ‘Indo-European languages’. Sometime around the 1820s, the word ‘Aryan’ began to be dropped and it simply became ‘Indo-European’. Some German scholars even started using the term ‘Indo-German’ on the presumption that the Sanskrit and German languages, between them, covered the entire Indo-European speaking area—the farthest language to the east being Indic and German to the west.

Sanskrit, even today, may be “the greatest language of the world” or even if it “is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin and more exquisitely refined” but so what? How could a language spoken by ‘niggers’ have been once the mother of languages today spoken by Europeans, i.e. white people? This position could not be accepted even by William Jones and Max Mueller, who have been so wholesome in their praise for Sanskrit.

Sanskrit was first demoted from mother to the position of a mere sister of all the ancient and modern European languages, but later on, with further building-up of the language tree, it came to be demoted to the position of grand-daughter, when it got linked to the so-called Indo-Iranian family. Thus, the position is: Proto-Indo-European language gave birth to the Indo-Iranian, which in turn produced Sanskrit. It’s already almost 200 years and the search for the grand-mother of Sanskrit (i.e. the Proto-Indo-European) is still on. We still do not know what she (the Proto-Indo-European Language) may have looked like, of what colour she may have been, or what may have been her physical and metaphysical structure. She still remains formless even in dreams. Quite often, these practitioners of philology were so illogical, so incoherent, so absurd, so adamant and arrogant, but, indeed, their impact has been so devastating that it has aptly been termed as ‘linguistic tyranny’.

Central Place Argument and Aryan Invasion

Once Sanskrit was demoted from the honoured status of being mother to all Indo-European languages and made a mere sister or niece of the European languages, a search started for the ‘original tongue’ i.e. the ‘Proto-Indo-European’. This cleared the deck also for legitimising the Aryan invasion of India; a theory which suggested that Sanskrit was brought here from the place where this imaginary language called ‘Proto-Indo-European’ was spoken. In 1842, A.W. von Schlegel claimed: “It is completely unlikely that the migrations which had peopled such a large part of the globe would have begun at its southern extremity (i.e. India) and would have continually directed themselves from there towards the northwest. On the contrary everything compels us to believe that the colonies set out in diverging directions from a central region.”

And for Schlegel this central region consisted of the areas around the Caspian Sea.

With the increasing hold of the British on India, the colonial and the Evangelical interests soon became a force in shaping Indian history for the rest of the academic world. Following the lead provided by A.W. von Schlegel, Max Mueller reiterated his position on the issue of the Aryan invasion and said in 1887: “If an answer must be given as to the place where our Aryan ancestors dwelt before their separation … I should still say, as I said forty years ago, ‘somewhere in Central Asia’ and no more.”

However, Srinivas Ayengar wrote in 1914: “The Aryans [in their entire literature] do not refer to any foreign country as their original home, do not refer to themselves as coming from beyond India, do not name any place in India after the names of places in their original land as conquerors and colonisers do, but speak of themselves exactly as sons of the soil would do. If they had been foreign invaders, it would have been humanly impossible for all memory of such invasion to have been utterly obliterated from memory in such a short time as represents the differences between the Vedic and Avestan dialects.”

It must be reiterated that it does not refer to a single name of flora and fauna found in Central Asia, Russia and Europe. If Rig Vedic people came from Central Asia how come they have no memory of it. Historically, linguistically and as per the oral traditions it is simply impossible.

The fallacy of this central-place theory as the origin of an imaginary language and then spreading all around can be explained with a contemporary example—English. Consider a situation wherein after a couple of thousand years, people forget that England was the place where the English language developed and spread from, and start looking for the place of its origin. The Central Place Theory will exclude England in the very first instance, as it is located on the outskirts of the world of the English language. The United States of America would be the natural choice from where it spread to Europe and Asia in the east, and Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, etc, in the west and Canada in the north.

Lexicographic Evidence

Lexicography (the vocabulary of spoken/written words) is another area which was pressed in the service. Besides collecting a large number of the common words in various languages to prove their affinity, a number of words were chosen to prove the location of the language. For example, it has been argued that since there is no common word for the ocean in the Indo-European language, we can safely conclude that the Indo-European people were not aware of the ocean.

Varadpande rightly presses the points: “If we carry this reasoning further we shall have to suppose that ‘Indo-Europeans’ were living in a region where there was no air and no water, since there are no common words for air and water in all the ‘Indo-European’ Languages.”

The whole situation is that first a conjecture is turned into a hypothesis; to be later treated as a fact to be used in support of a new theory. For instance, language like Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Dravidian are no more than hypothetical constructions, which may or may not have really existed; and yet these modern creations are often imposed on populations that lived thousands of years ago, to prove migrations theories.

Shaffer writes: “The Indo-Aryan invasion(s) as an academic concept in 18th-19th century Europe reflected the cultural milieu of that period. Linguistic data was used to validate the concept, which in turn, was used to interpret archaeological and anthropological data. What was theory, became an unquestioned fact that was used to interpret and organise all subsequent data. It is time to end the ‘linguistic tyranny’ that has prescribed interpretative frameworks of pre-and proto-historic cultural development in South Asia.”

The question of Aryan invasion/Aryan migration vis-a-vis philology has always been questioned. In the beginning of the last century, Aurobindo, while commenting on the philology, wrote: “Comparative philology has hardly moved a step beyond its origins; all the rest has been a mass of conjectural and ingenious learning of which the brilliance is equalled only by the uncertainty and unsoundness. … The very idea of the science of language is chimera.”

It is important to point out that in the last 30 years renowned linguists like Ram Bilash Sharma, S.S. Misra, S.G. Talgeri, N.S. Rajaram and Koenraad Elst have proved, on the basis of linguistic evidence itself, that this whole theory of Aryan invasion/migration is a fallacy.

Aryans, Racialism and Rig Veda

Subjugation of India by the British filled the masters with a desire to prove their all-round superiority. Racialism was one angle of it. Writings of Grant, Mill, Marx, Macaulay and their accomplices denigrated Indian people, culture, civilisation, society, history and religion.

Trautmann has traced the emergence of racialism and the development of physical anthropology as a resolution of the inescapable philological reality with the colonial need for cultural superiority over the natives of India. One of the most striking types of evidence of such an attitude is best seen in the writings of ACL Carlleyle. In 1879 he wrote: “We, British Europeans are Aryans, and far more pure and genuine Aryans than the Hindus, and no talk of the Hindus can alter our race, or make us any less or any different from what we are. It is the Hindus who have altered and deteriorated, and not we. The Hindus have become the coffee dregs, while we have remained the cream of the Aryan race. The Hindus are like the monkey.”

Some scholars think that the linguistic affinities of Indians and Europeans were also responsible for the development of physical anthropology leading the whole debate towards racialism. Most of the European scholars could not accept the view that Indians (‘niggers’, that is how most of the time Indians have been referred to in those writings) could have been once related to them and could have, indeed, been their forefathers, a conclusion which comparative linguistics was suggesting.

Edwin Bryant expresses it in the following words: “Even during the earlier phase of the homeland quest, when India was still a popular candidate, many scholars were uncomfortable about moving the Indo-Europeans too far from their biblical origins somewhere in the Near East. There were those among the British, in particular, whose colonial sensibilities made them reluctant to acknowledge any potential cultural indebtedness to the forefathers of the rickshaw pullers of Calcutta, and who preferred to hang on to the biblical Adam far more than their European contemporaries.”

Max Mueller himself was sad to note the mood of the day: “They would not have it, they would not believe that there could be any community origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called niggers of India.”

The newly developing science of physical anthropology was pressed into service to project Aryans as tall, white-skinned, blue-eyed, with sharp and high nose, and dolichocephalic. The non-Aryans came to be identified as natives with dark skin, flat nose, short stature, and so on. The dasas mentioned in the Rigveda were made to represent non-Aryans, i.e., the indigenous local population of India. Thus, the frame of the invasion of Aryans and the subjugation of the non-Aryan local population got corroborated with the evidence from Physical Anthropology.

The racial theory had a devastating impact on European polity. Each nation/state started claiming to be the real descendent of the Aryan race and considered others as inferiors. Max Mueller tried to intervene by declaring again and again: “If I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull. … How many misunderstandings and how many controversies are due to what is deduced by arguing from language to blood-relationship or from blood-relationship to language. … An ethnologist who speaks of an Aryan race, Aryan eyes and hair, and Aryan blood is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or brachycephalic grammar.”

Alas! It was too late. The djinn created by Max Mueller had now grown up and was no longer under Mueller’s command. In the twilight years of his life, Max Mueller realised the devastating impact of distortions that he had made in Indian history in order to please his employers and the newly acquired faith. He died a sad man, preaching at the end of his career things like India: What Can It Teach Us.

He described India as: “The country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow, … a very paradise on earth, … [a place where] human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life.”

Racialism and DNA Evidence

In this context it will be useful to recall the studies carried out by K.A.R. Kennedy and his colleagues. For almost five decades they carried out a detailed study of a large number of pre- and proto-historic skeletons found in excavations from a large number of archaeological sites from all over the Indian sub-continent.

On the basis of their research, Kennedy and his colleagues concluded: “As for the question of biological continuity within the Indus valley, two discontinuities appear to exist. The first occurs between 6,000 and 4,500 B.C. The second occurs at some point after 800 B.C. but before 200 B.C.”

Both discontinuities exclude any adjustment for Aryan Invasion.

Besides the studies of Kennedy and his colleagues on ancient skeletons, an important study has come out recently on modern humans. Keeping in mind the AIT, Kivishield and his colleagues carried out a detailed study on gene pools of Western Eurasians and people of the Indian subcontinent. They studied the ‘genetic inheritance aspect’ of genes through the Mitochondrial DNA Test. It may be mentioned here that the mitochondrial DNA test can reveal the whole history of genetic changes and mutations that may have taken place even in the remote past i.e. several thousand years ago.

Kivishield and his colleagues have reached the conclusion that the Mitochondrial DNA, typical of Western Eurasians, is present among Europeans up to 70 percent whereas among Indians it is only up to 5.2 percent. The DNA gene pool of Western Europeans is very different from that of Indians. It has been very clearly stated that if there was any Aryan invasion of India a few thousand years ago, it must be visible in the mitochondrial DNA tests in terms of a splash in percentage of Western Eurasian genes. But this is not so. Further, the percentage and types of Western Eurasian genes present among south Indians and north Indians are almost the same. This fact establishes that there is no difference between the south Indian and north Indian gene pools, and the same goes against the Aryan invasion theory.

Conclusions

Now over a period of 200 years, the meaning of ‘Aryans’ has been constructed and reconstructed as being nomadic, pastoralists, sedentary agriculturists, dolichocephalic, brachycephalic, blond and fair, and from brown-haired to dark-haired. The Aryan homeland has been located and relocated everywhere, virtually from the North Pole to the South Pole, and from the shores of the Atlantic to Chinese deserts—South India, North India, Central India, Tibet, Bactria, Iran, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, Lithuania, the Caucasus, the Urals, the Volga Mountains, South Russia, the Steppes of Central Asia, Western Asia, Palestine, Anatolia, Scandinavia, Finland, Sweden, the Baltic, western Europe, northern Europe, central Europe, and eastern Europe.

The Aryan homeland, however, still remains elusive. J.P. Mallory has put the whole thing very succinctly: “One does not ask, ‘Where is the Indo-European homeland?’ but rather ‘where they put it now?’”

Anthropologist Edmund Leach of Cambridge University has most aptly summed up the whole question of the Aryan Invasion Theory. In 1990 in his article, Aryan Invasions over Four Millennia, Leach wrote: “Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasion? Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of Sanskrit come so dogmatically associated with the Aryan invasion? The details of this theory fit in with this racist framework. … The origin myth of British imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing ‘pure’ civilisation to a country in which civilisation of the most sophisticated kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here, I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of an independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history. … The Aryan invasion never happened at all.” – Firstpost, 20 July 2022

›  Prof. Dr. Makkhan Lal is a well-known historian and the founder director of the Delhi Institute of Heritage Research and Management.

Rig Veda

Time to reclaim India’s history – David Frawley

VOI

Greater India Map (US 1864)

The existing historical accounts of India starting with the Aryan Invasion Theory, reflect political and religious biases by groups who have sought to politically control or convert India, exploit it commercially, or divide India into smaller countries they can more easily dominate. – Dr. David Frawley

There remains a crucial need to correct the history of India from distorted accounts that have prevailed since the British era. As a New India arises with confidence in its own civilisation and global stature, this reductionist view of India as primitive, divided, politically incorrect and lacking in continuity is suspect and appears as India seen through the shadow of foreign rule and hostile ideologies.

India so far has not adequately reclaimed its history in the post-Independence era in a way that shows the true stature, duration and influence. Even after 75 years of Independence, the main history of India taught is coloured by derogatory interpretations of those with little respect for India’s great traditions, though a new movement to counter it is steadily rising.

The history of India as commonly given in textbooks and media accounts worldwide is the view of scholars who have little direct knowledge of India’s way of thought and view of culture, who prefer to interpret India according to their own cultural biases as if these were unquestioned truths.

Such a view of India’s history reduces India’s profound 5,000-year dharmic civilisation and its vast cultural, yogic and intellectual traditions to a mere footnote to Western culture and politics of the last few centuries, in which India has little relevance, and is often a subject of abuse and hoped for reformation.

The new reduction of India to South Asia

Recent views of India’s history add a new negationism. For them there was no India, but only a few temporary, disjointed cultures and kingdoms, with outside dominated empires like the Mughals or the British, and no enduring or characteristic Indic civilisation behind these.

Such scholars see only a nebulous South Asia region, without much cohesion or contribution to world civilisation, so no separate or unique place in history is required for India apart from the diverse groups and cultures of the region. This is a contrary position as compared to China, which is given its historical identity and cultural continuity, even though China borrowed much of its philosophy and spirituality from India through Buddhism.

The Greek author Megasthenes at the time of Alexander over two thousand years ago wrote a book called Indika about India, which the Greeks honoured. There was extensive trade between Rome, the Middle East and China with a land called India for many centuries. Note terms like Hindusthan for the region, or Bharat Varsha and its sixteen regions or Janapadas found in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain texts. Geographical terms like Indian Ocean, Indo-Pacific, Indochina and Indonesia have long been used and show the importance of India but are similarly now being rejected.

India’s contribution to science, medicine and philosophy, for example, though India gave much more than just decimal mathematics to the world, is similarly seldom highlighted. Rather the British view of Macaulay, who tried to destroy India’s extensive educational system, or the communist views of Karl Marx, are given precedence, as if India’s contribution to world civilization was minimal in all respects.

Contrary to such views, India in its Sanskrit and regional dialects has produced the largest and oldest literature in the world, replete with historical references, names of kings, kingdoms, peoples, geographical regions, sages and cultural practices. Note the many Vedas, Agamas, Puranas, Jatakas, Sutras, and local accounts for such literature.

The influence of modern India

In addition to this negation of ancient India is an attempt to negate modern India and its influence. Since Swami Vivekananda, Indic-based traditions of Yoga, Vedanta, Ayurveda, Tantra, Sanskrit, Indian music and dance have spread globally and gained a dedicated following in almost every major country and region of the world. Great yogis and gurus from India have travelled and gained followers globally

Yet in accounts of modern India the role of Indic civilisation in spiritualising the world, is hardly mentioned. Nor is the fact that Indian immigrants to the US or UK have wonderful temples and a thriving community contributing to the peace and welfare of the countries where they now arise. The youth in the West after their studies of history can scarcely name any figures of civilisational importance from ancient or modern India.

The contrary idea is given that India as a nation was created by the British and only gained its identity with India’s Independence in 1947, which can be attributed largely to Jawaharlal Nehru who was an Anglophile. Meanwhile India’s history books have largely been written by Marxists and reflect their political agenda. The idea of a superior Socialist/Nehruvian India arose to counter or even erase ancient Bharat Varsha.

The effort to reclaim India’s history

Yet sadly today, when Indian thinkers try to correct this slanted history, they are accused of political, nationalistic and religious biases, as if they had no credibility. The fact is that existing historical accounts of India starting with the Aryan Invasion Theory, reflect political and religious biases, but coming from outside of India, by groups who have sought to politically control or convert India, exploit it commercially, or divide India into smaller countries they can more easily dominate.

Certainly, independent India, for its 75th anniversary, needs to reclaim its history, just as many countries free of colonial influence are doing. An Indic criticism of Western civilisational influences should also have its place in the discussion. There should be no monopoly on history by one group or another, though efforts to control history have long occurred among colonial, communist, leftist and fascist regimes.

The fact is that a history of India without an Indian voice or point of view, given India as one the cradles of civilisation, remains incomplete and presents a distorted view not only of India but also of the history of humanity, which has an inner yogic dimension, not simply an outer political expression.

India’s textbooks need major changes providing an Indic/Bharatiya view of its place of respect. This is part of an open pursuit of truth, in which all sides must be heard. Today there seems to be an apartheid in academia and the media in which an Indic view, particularly a Hindu view, will not be given a voice.

India’s view of civilisation as the pursuit of dharma and higher consciousness, cannot be reduced to materialist concerns or to those of exclusivist beliefs. Indology has perhaps been the worst aspect of Orientalism. Time for it to be put in the dustbin of history. India’s civilisation has the most in depth cosmic dimension to its view of world and Self, which transcends all such outer historical theories, and must be examined accordingly.

Howsoever we view history, it is clear that the human race remains an unevolved species in terms of consciousness, still caught in massive violence and prejudices, which we find throughout the world.

Honouring the sages of India can help all humanity. But to truly appreciate these great yogis, rishis and gurus, we must recognise their enduring role in India’s civilisation and history, and their influence on the whole of Asia and beyond that is spreading globally today to the entire planet.

› Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) is the director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies and the author of more than 30 books on yoga and Vedic traditions. He recieved of the prestigious Padma Bhushan award in 2015.

Indian History Timeline

Sita Ram Goel Vindicated: ‘Eminent historians’ no longer deny Islamic iconoclasm – R. Jagannathan

VOI

Sita Ram Goel

If the “eminent historians” now can acknowledge the reality of Islamic iconoclasm, surely they can promote Hindu-Muslim amity by getting Muslim groups to accept that damage was done in the past, and some remedy is called for in the present to let bygones become bygones. – R. Jagannathan

Our “eminent historians”, mostly from the Left, are showing signs that they are not beyond all education when hit repeatedly on their heads with facts and evidence. The late Sita Ram Goel, who was among the first to debunk the whitewashed versions of India’s Islamic history, stands vindicated.

Before the Babri was demolished, they repeatedly asserted that there was no temple below the mosque. Once the archaeological survey ordered by the Allahabad High Court established beyond doubt that there indeed was a temple below the Babri, their story-line changed from “no temple below the mosque”, to bland assertions that what was under the Babri was another mosque or even a Buddhist stupa. (Read some of what they said then here.)

When evidence kept surfacing of multiple temple demolitions under Islamic rule, the party line was that this was done not for religious reasons but political reasons. False equivalences were drawn between consistent and bigoted Islamic iconoclasm and the occasional damage done to temples or Buddhist and Jain places of worship. The latter were aberrations rather than the norm.

Now, with a survey seeking to establish the presence of Hindu carvings (and possibly a Shiv Linga) inside the Gyanvapi Mosque, these eminences are slowly abandoning the claim that no temples were destroyed.

In The Times of India today (24 May), there is a clear acceptance that Mughal rulers destroyed temples, though the argument has changed.

Irfan Habib, professor emeritus at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), is quoted thus: “Mughal emperor Aurangzeb destroyed temples in Varanasi and Mathura to raise mosques. However, the question today is whether what was done in 1670 should be repeated, despite the existence of the Indian Monuments Act. Should we do the same things as Mughal emperors did in the past?” (Read the details here.)

This is progress. Big progress. If we should not do what Aurangzeb did, it is an indirect admission that the Mughal emperor was a bigot. Facts are no longer denied, or conveniently misinterpreted as mere political acts of rulers in the past, though that is not entirely gone.

Shalin Jani of the Delhi University department of history is quoted as saying: “As far as Mughal India is concerned, we know about the politics of temple desecration during those times. We can’t resolve our contemporary problems by looking at the past.”

Well, maybe the Germans got it wrong when they refused to airbrush history or deny Hitler and the Nazi past. Without acknowledging the past, and making some amends, we cannot move forward.

The unwillingness to see religious bigotry behind temple desecration is not entirely gone, but the facts are no longer disputed.

Nadeem Rezavi, professor of mediaeval history at AMU, is clearer. “No one can justify what Aurangzeb did. However, we can’t behave like him and keep demolishing mosques to restore temples. What difference remains then between the Mughal ruler and rulers of today?”

Clearly, Audrey Truschke, who has tried to whitewash Aurangzeb’s reign in her book Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth, clearly needs to hear what Habib and Rezavi now have to say. Aurangzeb was a bigot. Full stop. His temple desecrations were real, not just political fallout.

Clearly, the work done by Sita Ram Goel in volume two of his two-volume work on Hindu Temples: What Happened To Them  (Vol. 1 & Vol. 2), which examines both the Hindu and Muslim evidence, should now be required reading in all history departments, including AMU.

Later books by Meenakshi Jain (Rama & Ayodhya, The Battle For Rama, Flight of Deities & Rebirth of Temples, Vasudeva Krishna and Mathura, have also completely sealed the evidence in favour of the Hindu version of Islamic destruction of key temples. It is also time to revisit the older historical works of R.C. Majumdar and Sir Jadunath Sarkar and not just junk them as “communal historians”.

The only way forward from here is not to live in the past, but to acknowledge it, and negotiate a deal to hand over the Kashi and Mathura temples back to Hindus fully in return for Hindus allowing the rest of the temple desecrations to remain as acknowledged facts of history with no recompense due.

If the “eminent historians” now can acknowledge the reality of Islamic iconoclasm, surely they can promote Hindu-Muslim amity by getting Muslim groups to accept that damage was done in the past, and some remedy is called for in the present to let bygones become bygones. – Swarajya, 4 May 2022

› R. Jagannathan is a senior journalist and editor and the Editorial Director of Swarajya Magazine.

Gyanvapi Mosque back wall being the front wall of the ancient Vishwanath Temple.

Gyanvapi Mosque: A lesson in history that should lead to justice – Praful Goradia

VOI

Kashi Viswanath Temple replaced by Gyanvapi Mosque ( James Princep 1834).

Should not a crime be punished commensurately? If the criminal had got away at the time of commission of the crime, should he not be apprehended and punished when it is possible to do so later? If the wrongdoer has passed away, at least the act of crime should be reversed. What is the meaning of justice otherwise? – Praful Goradia

It was 1927; one Abdul Rashid murdered Swami Shradhanand, the successor of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, in his sickbed. The killer was arrested and tried. The British Government then had no qualms about the religions of the two men. Jawaharlal Nehru’s friend Asaf Ali, a distinguished advocate, took up Rashid’s brief. The court, nevertheless, sentenced him to death as it was a cold-blooded murder. The janaza (funeral) was attended by thousands of Rashid’s sympathisers but there was no riot or communal disturbance. Had any riot taken place, the Government would not have flinched from suppressing it. If the British were inclined to be soft, they could not have ruled an Empire for 190 years. That Empire had 40 crore Indians, with the white men from the British Isles being never more than one lakh.

Take the case of Ayodhya. The All India Muslim Personal Law Board eventually lost its long litigation in the Supreme Court; not a single Muslim stabbed a Hindu. In Ayodhya itself, everyone favoured the temple, including the local Muslims, on the grounds that it would vastly increase the number of inbound pilgrims and the city’s economy would flourish. If at all any violence took place, it was because of the firing earlier by Mulayam Singh’s police in 1990. The Mulayam regime resorted to indiscriminate shooting, not sparing even boys. No violence occurred owing to any mischief by a Muslim. It has been my consistent experience that when confronted with facts, most Muslims are willing to accept them. A member of the AIMPLB confided to me that the Board contested the Ayodhya issue in the courts for so long merely to stall the Hindus’ demands on other temples-turned-mosques.

Some years ago, the chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami visited Delhi for a few days and happened to spend a couple of hours at my place. His explanation for Islamic conquerors replacing temples with mosques was that they wished to declare to the area that a change of regime had taken place. A Hindu raja had been replaced by a Muslim sultan or badshah. In response, I asked that when a Hindu prime minister takes over in a Hindu-majority country, would it be fair to reverse the situation? Should not the mosque be replaced by a temple? Again, as a true Muslim, the Jamaat chief promptly replied that if it was the prime minister’s and his people’s desire, so be it.

In 1961, while delivering the Azad Memorial Lecture, British historian Arnold Toynbee, especially invited by Jawaharlal Nehru, said: “In the course of the first Russian occupation of Warsaw, the Russians had built an Eastern Orthodox Christian Cathedral in the city that had been the capital of the once-independent Roman Catholic Christian country, Poland. The Russians had done this to give the Poles a continuous ocular demonstration that the Russians were now the masters. After the re-establishment of Poland’s independence in 1918, about 100 years later, the Poles pulled down this cathedral. I do not blame the Polish government for having pulled down the Russian church. The purpose for which the Russians had built it had been not religious but political, and the purpose had also been intentionally offensive.” Before reaching Delhi, Sir Arnold had taken a boat ride on the Ganga and had noticed Aurangzeb’s mosque on the bank with two tall minarets. He said at his lecture that he was surprised that this mosque was standing even after the partition of India.

Gyanvapi Mosque as seen from the Ganga (1909).

To come back to the point, should not a crime be punished commensurately? If the criminal had got away at the time of commission of the crime, should he not be apprehended and punished when it is possible to do so later? If the wrongdoer has passed away, at least the act of crime should be reversed. What is the meaning of justice otherwise? And where would be the rule of law? Since 2014, quite a few intellectuals have been protesting that democracy in India is in danger and that liberals have no future here. Well, here is their opportunity to firm up democracy whose first foundation is the rule of law. One only has to read the Magna Carta of English King John, 1215 AD.

Some scholars have expressed the fears of communal riots. How many riots have taken place since 2014? It is true that recently there have been a few skirmishes in Bangalore and there was a major riot in northeast Delhi when President Trump was on a visit to India. Otherwise, the score book as far as riots are concerned has been negative over the last seven years. In any case, how can a court of law or a government shun the enforcement of justice merely due to the fear of riots?

It is well recorded that the Kashi Vishwanath Mandir was destroyed on the orders of Aurangzeb after his crowning. Fortunately, a portion of its front has survived as part of the masjid (see image below). Where people now worship Lord Shiva was built by the great Holkar Queen Ahilyabai in the 18th century. If, therefore, the Gyanvapi Mosque underwent some changes according to historical facts, no Muslim would have any objection. – The Pioneer, 30 April 2021

› Praful Goradia is an author, columnist, and a former member of the Parliament of India representing Gujarat in the Rajya Sabha.

Emperor Aurangzeb reading the Quran.

Auranzeb's firman ordering the destruction of the Kashi Vishwanath Temple (Sept. 1669).

Maasir-i-Alamgiri: A History of the Emperor Arangzeb-i-Alamgiri by Saqi Mustaʻidd Khan.

What the Maasir-i-Alamgiri Says

The book Maasir-i-Alamgiri was written in Persian by Saqi Musta’idd Khan and was translated by historian Jadunath Sarkar during British era.

According to the book, on April 8, 1669, the Emperor came to know about the teachings by “misbelievers” in Benaras (See Ch. XII, Pg. 57).

“The Lord Cherisher of Faith learnt that in the provinces of Tetta, Multan and specially in Benaras the Brahman misbelievers used to teach their false book in their established schools and that admirers and students of both Hindu and Muslim used to come from great distances to these misguided men to acquire this vile learning,” a passage in the book reads.

“His Majesty eager to establish Islam orders to the governor of all the provinces to demolish the schools and temples of the infidels and with the utmost urgency to put down the teachings and public practice of the religion of these misbelievers,” reads the book.

On September 2, 1669, it was reported that according to Emperor’s command, his officials had demolished the Temple of Vishwanath at Varanasi, mentions the book. – Excerpted from India Today, 19 May 2022

Plan of the ancient Kashi Vishwanath Temple. Fine dotted line in the plan image indicates the Gyanvapi Mosque build over the temple's foundation (James Prinsep 1832).

Gyanvapi Mosque Area Plan (1936).

Gyanvapi Mosque

Lost rights and setting it right – S. Mukherji

VOI

Junípero Serra

We would like to ask how a process of historical truth-telling set into motion in the US is applicable to India, which was brutalised over a millennium by a long line of ruthless foreign invaders, rulers and their local collaborators? – Dr. Saradindu Mukherji

Driving by the township of Camden in north-eastern America, I saw the banner headline, “Enslaved Africans Once Sold Here”. Drawn by this nugget of history, I came closer and found the following description: “African slavery in New Jersey began with early European settlement. By 1766, circa 800 captive people had been sold here at the Federal Street Ferry and two other nearby ferry landings. In Africa, approximately 24 million captured men, women and children marched to coastal prisons. Only half survived the journey. These 12 million survivors then endured deplorable conditions on the Middle Passage ocean crossings, where an additional 2 million died from disease, malnutrition, dehydration, drowning, suicide and abuse.”

It is an impressive way of informing people about some of the most tragic episodes in American history—a message from the later generations about the brutalities and irreparable damage inflicted on their ancestors. This gesture, it is felt, might act as a balm for the descendants of the victims!

Robert E. Lee

In recent times, there have been several well-publicised events around such issues in the US related to various types of gross injustices committed in the past. From the signages standing in front of well-known historical monuments, museums, seaports and vast stretches of farm land to political-cultural narratives, one can notice this. There is no escape from such much-needed reminders. Well-publicised photographs depicting the removal of the equestrian statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee from its high pedestal in Richmond Va in September 2021 was a major milestone in this process of looking back at such acts of gross injustice and atoning, even if symbolically a perversity. The ongoing practice as pursued by some American institutions—local governments to universities, to name the native people deprived of their landed properties by force—called “land acknowledgements”, is a sign of sagacity and maturity that call for appreciation and emulation by all the right-thinking people cutting across national/racial boundaries. Every passing day, more skeletons tumble out of the cupboard. Hence, people were not surprised when the name of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th US president (1913-1921), famous for his 14+4 points, and his stellar role in facilitating the end of World War I was dropped from Princeton University’s International Affairs Department for his racist past. Even the iconic George Washington was found to be a slaveholder owning 317 black slaves. It is indeed a pretty long list.

Be that as it may, one is likely to ask as to how it is relevant for other countries? The underlying principle is certainly applicable to various countries with a similar past. Here, we would like to ask how such a process set into motion in the US is applicable to India, which was brutalised over a millennium by a long line of ruthless foreign invaders, rulers and their local collaborators?

Beginning with the Arab invasion of Sind in the 7th century, Indian society was pulverised by these religious zealots seeking to impose by savagery a different world order—establishing a dar-ul-Islam on a polytheistic India they tauntingly called dar-ul-harb. It is most regrettable that Jawaharlal Nehru described Babar, an alien invader, as “renaissance prince”, a man of culture, in his Discovery of India! In a vivid description, famous historian Arnold Toynbee said, “The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history.”

In recent times, the movement for the liberation of Ramjanmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya was one such example of claiming back a holy piece of land/temple from illegal occupiers, who were also guilty of desecrating a sacred spot. That thousands of such desecrated temples over which mosques had been erected still remain under illegal occupation is not a classified secret. Several scholarly studies have been done on this aspect (Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, Vol. I & Vol. II). Much, if not most, of what goes on in the name of Wakf property happens to be located on such landed properties now under unauthorised occupation [as are some Christian churches built on temple lands – Ed]. It is perhaps time to ponder over it, and set right such blatant cases of gross historical injustice!

From desecrated temples, marketplaces for selling Hindu slaves and their export, places of conversion to Islam, Jihadi battles won by “holy” ghazis, museums, political-cultural narratives and finally the all-important history books are now very much expected to see some drastic changes regarding how society must look back at the past. Victims of history from Kandahar to Khulna, Kashi to Kohat and Kashmir Valley, Mathura to Multan to Malabar want more than an acknowledgement of the sufferings: They seek immediate restoration of their habitat and holy places. The victims have waited far too long.

For any society claiming to be civilised, genuinely secular and democratic that wants to avoid the pitfalls of the past, such a moment of reckoning has to come. This generation is expected to witness many healthy debates and acrimonious battles over many such historical experiences people have gone through. It is high time to heal their wounds. – The Pioneer, 13 April 2022

› Dr. Saradindu Mukherji is a historian and a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research. His most recent publication is The Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019: Some Reflections.

Francis Xavier

What value is ‘genetic evidence’ for Aryan Invasion Theory vs. Out-of-India Theory? – Shrikant G. Talageri

VOI

Rigveda

The Rigveda proves incontrovertibly that the oldest parts of the text hark back to a period around 3000 BCE, and certainly long before 2000 BCE, and that the Vedic beginnings were in Haryana. – Shrikant G. Talageri

Every few months, in the last few years, different groups of “scientists” announce “results” of some “new genetic/genomic study”, “proving” the old colonial theory of an Aryan invasion of India. It is often cloaked in ambiguous terms, but not ambiguous enough for its target audience — political and academic groups committed to the theory that India was invaded by a race of people, popularly known as “Aryans”, who brought the Indo-European languages into India.

The latest study, “The genomic formation of South and Central Asia”, co-directed by Dr David Reich and an “international team of geneticists” is the latest in this series, which has enthused supporters of the Aryan Invasion of India Theory (AIT) and galvanised them into action in the media and social media in India. This latest paper echoes and substantiates with military precision the exact points enunciated by AIT scholars and activists since two centuries, especially on the chronological angle.

The very concept of an “Aryan” people—even as an entity, let alone as an invading race from outside India—arose from the revolutionary discovery by colonial scholars that Sanskrit and the languages of northern India and the languages of Europe, Iran and Central Asia, are related to each other and given the name “Indo-European” (formerly also “Aryan”). This led to the academic quest for the “Original Homeland” of this family of languages.

This was a question which arose solely from a linguistic fact (the linguistic relationship between all these languages), and three fields or disciplines of academic study have been involved for over two centuries in the elucidation of this problem: linguistics, archaeology and textual/inscriptional data (mainly the Rigveda and the oldest recorded Indo-European language inscriptions and documents from West Asia). The latest entrant in this field is genetics/genomics. The central factor in the debate is the date of the Rigveda, a text which the invading people are supposed to have composed in their first settlements in the northwest:

1. The Rigveda is the oldest recorded major text in any Indo-European language. As Ralph T. H. Griffith puts it in the preface to the first edition of his translation of the Rigveda: “in its original language we see the roots and shoots of the languages of Greek and Latin, of Kelt, Teuton and Slavonian, so the deities, the myths, and the religious beliefs and practices of the Veda throw a flood of light upon the religions of all European countries before the introduction of Christianity.”

2. It shows absolutely no extra-territorial memories and shows ancestral attachment to the geographical area extending from Haryana to southern Afghanistan, and particularly and originally to Haryana.

3. It does not refer to any linguistically “non-Indo-European” entities at all.

4. Even the rivers and animals in this area have purely Indo-Aryan (Indo-European) Sanskrit names, which is unparalleled in world history in respect of any conquered or invaded area.

The AIT scholars are compelled to locate the Rigveda between two known dates: a) The linguistically determined date of 3000 BCE, which was the date when all the 12 Indo-European branches were together in their Original Homeland (which was assumed to be South Russia) and started dispersing around that time. b) The Buddhist period in Bihar from around 600 BCE, when it is definitely recorded that the whole of northern India was covered mainly by speakers of Indo-Aryan languages, and which definitely followed the periods of composition not only of the Rigveda but also of the three other Vedic Samhitas, the Brahmanas, Aranyakas, Upanishads and Sutras.

Therefore it is a life-and-death requirement for the AIT to date the Rigveda between 3000 BCE and 600 BCE, ideally around and after 1500 BCE.

If the Rigveda is proved to go beyond 2500 BCE or even 2000 BCE, the entire AIT structure collapses like a pack of cards. The archaeological consensus in western academia is totally against the AIT.

The text proves incontrovertibly that the oldest parts of the Rigveda hark back to a period around 3000 BCE, and certainly long before 2000 BCE, and that the Vedic beginnings were in Haryana in the east.

The unchallengeable evidence for this is given in the full version of this article on my blog. I challenge anyone to disprove this date, which is based on the Mitanni data, found in securely dated records in West Asia, and can be exactly dated: the Mitanni kingdom flourished from around 1500 BCE onwards in Syria and Iraq, and the Mitanni (and a related people, the Kassites), who were descendants of the Rigvedic Aryans, are found in West Asian records from around 1750 BCE.

In this circumstance, what is the value of these “genomic” claims by “scientists” who speak of an “expansion of pastoralist[s …] from the Steppe to Turan in the Middle Bronze Age (2300-1500 BCE)” and claim that these “Steppe communities integrated farther south throughout the 2nd millennium BCE” leading to “the formation of present-day South Asians” and identify these genomic ghosts with “the populations that almost certainly were responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across much of Eurasia”? By trying to fit in their “genomic” data into the now completely discredited chronology of outdated Indologists, this “genomic” evidence stands totally exposed.

Human beings have been migrating from every conceivable area. Certain areas, indeed, like Central Asia, are seething hotbeds of ethnic migrations. India has seen countless migrations and invasions in the last many thousand years: we have Scythians, Greeks, Kushanas, Hunas, Arabs, Turks, Afghans, Ethiopian slave-soldiers and Persians invading, and other Persians and Syrian Christians taking refuge in India, and none of them retained their language, all of them adopted the local languages, but their foreign genes remain in the genetic record.

The “scientists” have only released preliminary trailers of their “report”. The full report is yet to come. And it will be answered in full by the appropriate people. However, many new strands of different foreign “genes” are discovered to be embedded in the genetic structure of different sections of Indians. All this has nothing to do with the question of the “Aryan languages” in India, and of the Original Homeland and the migrations of the ancient Indo-European tribes, since all this has already been answered: the Original Homeland of the Indo-European languages was in northern India, and the migrations of the other eleven branches of Indo-European languages from India is a matter of recorded history. – The Asian Age, 22 April 2018

» Shrikant G. Talageri lives and works in Mumbai. He is a meticulous researcher of the Vedas and has authored four books to date: Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism, Aryan Invasion Theory: A Reappraisal, Rigveda: A Historical Analysis and Rigveda and Avesta the Final Evidence.