Why “Itihasa” means “history”

(India Facts, 10 Feb 2023) Physician Pankaj Seth’s article “Myth, History, Itihaasa, and the Hindu Dilemma” (India Fact, 7 February 2023) raises the question: “So how old is the Mahabharata, or the Ramayana, or the Vedas? Does it matter that we find out? Can we really find out? Should one even think about it?” The historian’s answer to each of these questions is unambiguously yes. Each of these texts is a human artefact. This may sound a little controversial because we have a great many scripture-thumpers who swear that at least the Vedas, but in many respects even the epics (certainly parts of them, like the Bhagavad Gita), are divine revelation standing far above history. But if we stop talking about them and start looking into them, we notice their unmistakable historicity. Human, all too human Their language changes, from Vedic Sanskrit evolving through successive layers of the Vedas down to the Classical Sanskrit of the epics. They relate human events like weddings, wars, and the artists’ never-ending search for patronage, all far below God’s dignity. Their technology evolves, with the Rg-Veda squarely in the Bronze Age, which archaeologists date between the mid-4th and the mid-2nd millennium BCE. The Mahabharata is centred around a chariot battle, which points to a specific historical window. The first war-ready chariots found by archaeologists hardly date beyond 2000 BCE (so a Mahabharata battle beyond 3000 BCE is out of the question), and by Roman times, chariots had become a plaything, used for entertainment in the arena. But in between we have, in the later second millennium, wars involving the Mitanni kingdom, the Hittite empire and Pharaonic Egypt fought with war chariots. Recent finds point to India as the homeland of this technology, so here it may be centuries earlier, but only a few. We are also helped by contingent discoveries like the desiccation of the Saraswati river, dated to around 1900 BCE: the Rg-Veda still knows it as a mighty river, so it must be older; while the Mahabharata has Krishna’s brother go on pilgrimage to the Saraswati rivulet’s disappearing-point, so it must be younger. Another less-than-divine aspect of Hindu scriptures is that, like all human endeavours, they are located somewhere. It mentions elephants but no kangaroos or giraffes, and describes mountains, rivers and forests of northwestern India. In the case of the Ramayana, a debate is ongoing since the 1950s (and has recently been poked up again by Jijith Nadumuri Ravi’s book Geography of Ramayana) whether the sites usually located in South India are not more to the north, such as Kishkindha near present-day Bhopal and Lanka on an island in the Narmada river’s mouth near present-day Surat. The question is still open and we won’t decide it here, but the point is that it presupposes one specific geographical location rather than another,-- like any other human event. There is no reason why we should exempt these literary compositions from the treatment given by scholars to other books: asking where and when, as also why. The why behind the epics is fairly clear: they have a didactic value, they want to teach through illustration certain virtues: Sita’s loyalty to her husband, Rama’s loyalty to his father and to his people, Vidura’s practical wisdom, Arjuna’s overcoming his all-too-human doubts. This they would do even if the events described in them had been pure fantasy. But they also have a historical value, basing themselves on events that really happened in the lives of characters that really existed. Whether the whole story of Rama’s itinerary (to comply with his father’s forced promise to his youngest wife, and next to recover his own abducted wife) is historical, we don’t know for sure. These are events that have happened to many (e.g. young Genghiz Khan had to go and recover his abducted bride), so a generic narrative could arbitrarily have been applied to Rama. Then again, this is unlikely, for why would they have projected someone else’s life-story upon Rama? At any rate, Rama’s very existence can be deduced from his placement in the king-lists. Genealogies The king-lists? Of Egypt and Mesopotamia, no history could have been reconstructed without recourse to their king-lists, yet in the case of India, many scholars pooh-pooh these as another case of chaotic Hindu fantasizing. But no, upon scrutiny, they prove to be very consistent, interwoven with and corroborated by many other data in Hindu literature. All the prominent characters in the Vedas, the epics and e.g. also the early Buddhist sources fit neatly in these genealogies. Inconvenient for mainstream historians is mainly how far back they go. In Egypt, pre-pharaonic kings have been mentioned (e.g. the “Scorpion king”), and in India, a similar thing happens, but far deeper into the past. The oldest ancestors mentioned in the king-lists are patriarch Manu, his daughter Ila who becomes the foremother of the Lunar dynasty (including the Rishis, the Bharata dynasty and Krishna), and his son Ikshvaku who starts the Solar dynasty (including Rama, Mahavira and the Buddha). They predate the first beginning of the Rg-Veda by dozens of generations, easily beyond 4000 BC. Historians have their work cut out for them if they care to sit down and systematize the fragments of knowledge dormant in this source. In his introduction to this article, editor Ramesh Rao laments that Hindus are constantly told how “the accounts of our past in our epics and other texts are unreliable, a mixture of myth and hagiography”, so that the only serious sources about Indian history are those by foreigners: Arrianus (Greek), Xuan Zang (Chinese), Al-Biruni (Arabic-writing Persian). This negative comment is correct in so far that there is no clear chronological system behind Indian historiographical fragments, a remarkable weakness for a civilization that was at the forefront in so many other fields. This contrasts with the situation in China, where we know the exact date of every major event from the 9th century BCE onwards. But on the other hand, where the king-lists have only a relative but no absolute chronology, they have the merit of going back much deeper in time than any comparable source in other civilizations. No, India is not that backward. Embellished, but facts-based In the process of writing, the narrative was ideologically streamlined and embellished with supernatural feats, but its basis was purely historical. Indeed, it was instrumentalized as a framework for teaching Dharma and Yoga precisely because the stories about momentous events were popular and thus a good vehicle for reaching the people’s minds with any ideological message you wanted to propagate. The 19th-century scientist skepticism among academics towards ancient narratives, as if Homer’s Troy had never existed and Jesus had never lived (still popular among India’s secularists when applied to “superstitious” Hindu scripture), is an obsolete paradigm. Now we know that Homer (ca. 700 BCE) based himself on various stories about a real war over Troy that had taken place some five centuries earlier (the heyday of chariot warfare, prominent in the Iliad). And few scholars today will deny that Jesus, of whom we may doubt that he was born from a virgin or raised from the dead, had nevertheless been a really existing wandering exorcist-healer who fancied himself the Messiah/Christ (the “anointed” crown-prince, predicted to revive king David’s throne) and died on the cross. So similarly, the Kurukshetra war really happened, though the epic report on it has grown richer and more dramatic in the endless retelling. Even before seriously investigating Pankaj Seth’s question whether “the Mahabharata war [was] a small skirmish between two branches of a family or something bigger [that] involved people and regions beyond the immediate family fiefdom”, this basic insight into the common process of magnifying events in the retelling gives us an outline of an answer. Of course the historical core of the narrative was a more modest affair than the pan-Indian war that it has become in the final version. Thus, the involvement of the South-Indian dynasties (Chola, Chera and Pandya, non-existent at the time of the Bharata war) and of the foreign Yavanas (Ionians, known in India only since Alexander) and Chinas (used as a name for the Middle Kingdom only since the 3rd century BC) are clearly an attempt by the ultimate editors, writing centuries after the actual war, to give a pan-Indian significance and a relevance for their contemporaries to what had originally been a local affair of the Saraswati-Yamuna area. “Itihasa” In their book Sanskrit Untranslatables, Rajiv Malhotra and Satyanarayana Dasa Babaji make much of a difference between “itihasa” and “history”. Seth does the same: “Here we must distinguish between ‘History’ and ‘Itihaasa’. The former is the modern way and its obsessive winding the clock backwards towards some mythic t=0, some big bang, some absolute creation event. This is problematic because our origins have been being wrongly portrayed and we cannot find those origins nor identity significant markers by going this route. By contrast, Itihaasa points to ‘Satya’ as our origin and identity, and which reflects reality. So, Itihaasa, by pointing away from a merely materialist history, does a very important thing.” We venture to disagree. This is a case of over-interpretation, of reading far too profound contents in an ordinary translation challenge that professional translators would classify as a routine matter in their trade. Malhotra and Babaji think Itihasas “also contain historical facts, but are neither merely books of history, nor tales of fantasy”. Well, is “history” any different, in the premodern age? When Herodotus coined the term in the present meaning (it originally meant “investigation, inquiry”), he too produced history that falls far short of the academic requirements in today’s History Departments (or in Indian languages: Itihasa). It contained elements that we now would call fanciful or even mythical. So the difference is not between an Indian and a Western term, but between the premodern and the modern use of both the Indian and the Western term. “Trying to force fit historicity onto the itihaasa is to misunderstand what itihaasa means. One should not literally translate ‘it was thus’ and think/believe it refers to a material history.” Oh yes, it refers to “material” history. When, in the fourth generation after the Pandavas, sage Vaisampayana recited the brief first version of the epic (called Jaya, “Victory”), it is because he wanted to eternalize the facts of what had transpired on the Kurukshetra battlefield. It was the job of ancient poets to administer “undying fame” to their heroic employers. This is not Indian or Western, not cyclical or linear, just glory. Itihasa means Iti-ha-asa, “thus indeed it was”, and this is practically synonymous with the definition given by the 19th-century father of modern historiography, Leopold von Ranke: to reconstruct matters “as they really have been”. It all started as a historical account, “itihasa” in the modern academic sense. As the epic got bigger, more fantastic elements were added, but also very worldly elements spawned by an evolving self-interest of the class to which the editors belonged. This distorting of history has always been an occupational hazard. Thus, we see Rama fraternizing with the tribals (“monkeys”) without being troubled by any caste taboo. But in the younger seventh book of his epic, we see the blatantly casteist episode of Shambuka getting hung around the neck of a by then already divinized Rama, clearly interpolated to give divine sanction to the newly emerging caste discriminations. Similarly, the other epic starts with the caste-free love affair of sage Parashara and ferry-maiden Satyavati (a case of what would later be called varna-sankara, “caste-mixing”), from which the sage par excellence is born: Krishna Dvaipayana a.k.a. Veda Vyasa, the “editor of the Vedas”. Yet shortly thereafter, princess Draupadi refuses to let Karna compete for her hand because she thinks he is of low caste, clearly a later interpolation from the age of emerging casteism. These two seeming contradictions are not because of some uniquely Hindu mental property, but are very down-to-earth cases of projection of a later social concern onto ancient history. Such back-projection is bad history, it is a well-known ever-looming threat to good history, but does not put these passages outside the field of history. Myth-making But those all-too-human elements were not the only thing that was added. Seth correctly finds cases of “mythopoesis”, myth-making in the epics. For the people who had lived through the events, these were generally the most earth-shaking experience of their lives, so they saw them through lenses of the supernatural. The next thing they did was newly apply elements from older myths to fill gaps in the story or provide causal explanations for strange developments. Thus, a well-known mythical motif from pre-Vedic, proto-Indo-European days is the “narrowly-failed attempt to become invulnerable”. We know it is that old because we see it also appear in branches of the language family (annex literary traditions) far removed from India, too far to be explained by borrowing. Among the Greeks, Achilles is dipped in a magic potion but is held by his heel, so there he remains vulnerable and there he later gets killed. Similarly among the Scandinavians for Baldr and for Siegfried. Now, in the Mahabharata, this same motif makes two appearances: to become invulnerable, Duryodhana appears naked before his mother, whose eyes have acquired magic power after years of wearing a blindfold, but he is prevailed upon to wear a loincloth, and in that part of his body (euphemistically his “thigh”) he later gets killed. And Krishna receives an ointment from sage Durvasa, but while applying it to his skin, he remains standing on the soles of his feet, and that is where he is later lethally pierced by an arrow. These candidly mythical motifs, originating in the imagined world of the gods, are added later to make more sense of extraordinary historical events. We see the same in the Iliad, where for example the interactions of humans are explained as moves on a divine chessboard where the gods in a heavenly conference decide the fate of the mortals below. Likewise in the Bible, otherwise a source of remarkably good historiography for its time, we see the flood getting explained by God’s wrath. In fact this must be one of the most common mythical motifs of the ancient world: that behind dramatic storms lies the unchained wrath of a thundering Indra or other god. This way, the historical narrative based on a report of a real war, whether Homer’s collection of hearsay stories on the Trojan war or Sanjay’s eyewitness report to the blind king Dhrtarashtra on the Kurukshetra war, gets interspersed with mythical themes. These do not belong to the realm of history but are, indeed, “something which never was but always is”, as Joseph Campbell called it. Therefore neither the Iliad nor the Mahabharata can be called history in the modern sense, though they can be analysed into an approximative history plus a subsequent overlay of mythical themes. Down with decolonization! Finally I would like to dissent from Seth’s “decolonizing” concern: “We should not end up turning these grand epics into historical events for it would be a kind of vandalism that I hope we grow out of, something we engage in because we are trying to prove a point to westerners. We want to project history onto ‘Itihaasa’ because we have been stung by accusations that we do not have an ‘historical consciousness’.” The decolonization paradigm, now wildly popular, greatly exaggerates the importance of the colonial role division between the West and India. As a writer of the book Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, we confess guilt in contributing to this fashionable discourse. More than 75 years after Independence, we now think it unbecoming to pose as an adolescent rising in revolt against a colonial father who, in the real world, has long gone. Genuine freedom fighters like Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel achieved the real decolonization in 1947 and never spoke of India’s later problems in colonial terms. For them, from then on, India was responsible for itself. If India still gives a central role to English or follows a Constitution partly based on the British Government of India Act 1935, this is not because the British or any other outsider is imposing it on you, but because Indians have chosen it that way. Indian Nehruvians who carry an idealized West in their heads all the better to disparage the culture they try to “emancipate” themselves from. So likewise here, the critique that the epics fall short of the exacting criteria of modern historiography, is not a problem that Westerners are inflicting on you. India today has a whole corps of professional historians trained in the historical method, and they too can discern where the epics fall short of being history. Among them, nobody will insist that the epics are to be taken as literal history (though some Sanskrit professors will affirm this much). If you insist that the historical method was developed in the West and imported into India during the colonial period, we trust that it does not form part of the colonial legacy that you feel you have to rebel against and annihilate. Nor will you dismiss Indian historians who applied the historical method, like the formidable RC Majumdar, as merely “Westernized”. If Westerners really look down on your epics for falling short of the standards of modern history (which I doubt), or if Indians really feel inferior because of this (which is an attitude fostered by the West-oriented Nehruvians), it just shows a common misunderstanding: you are comparing apples with lemons. A Western (or indeed any) history textbook may contain a chapter on emperor Charlemagne’s campaign in Muslim-occupied Spain (ca. 800) but this will not be the epic Chanson de Roland (French: “Song of Roland”, about an officer in Charlemagne’s army), though the latter is based on (essentially) the same primary reports as the former. The West deems its own epics just as much different from history textbooks. To be sure, the standards of what counts as history-writing have improved, but that too is common between India, the West and other civilizations. So any normally educated Westerners will not expect from the Mahabharata that it be a history book. But he may distinguish between different parts of the epic. The first and most basic one, necessary to make the addition of the others possible, is the historical core. The idea that a story like that can be pure fantasy, is a modern notion, with novelists like JRR Tolkien inventing entire histories of civilizations, while in the old days stories were (at least dimly) based on real events. But then you have several types of later addition. The most profane is the cases of “presentism” by later editors: this projects data valid during the editors’ time onto the protagonists’ time. In reality, “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. This presentism, deemed the cardinal sin in historiography, can be a case of poor intellectual rigour, but it can also be a mendacious distortion in order to create a semblance of antiquity or of the blessings by a venerable figure like Rama or Krishna to strengthen a social institution in the editors’ own time. We have given examples of the projection of later emerging caste taboos on an older and less caste-conscious society. A possible case could also be the projection of later technologies onto ancient events (the way medieval paintings about Jesus in Palestine unselfconsciously have the house types and landscapes in the background that are typical of the painter’s own West-European location). But in the centre of the story this is very unlikely, e.g. that the Kurukshetra warriors use horse-drawn chariots can’t be a later interpolation. A glaring example of an anachronistic interpolation is the “horoscope of Rama”. While the Vedic age had its own notions of astrology, the specific discipline of individual horoscopy was brought from Babylon into India by the Greeks in the first centuries of the Common Era. The birth chart attributed to Rama gives to the perfect man the fitting planetary positions: the planets are in “exaltation” as per the rules of Hellenistic astrology. It must have been added at the very end of the editing process, many centuries after Rama and Valmiki. That some Hindus use it to establish Rama’s birth time is tragi-comical. The other type of addition concerns the mythical contents. These may be the fruit of the poet’s imagination, e.g. in the Ramayana the flying Vimanas (a kind of helicopter, though originally a word for tower); partly borrowed from an existing array of mythical motifs shared by the editors’ culture. The above-mentioned almost-achievement of invulnerability is one example, Arjuna’s profitable son-father relation with Indra another, Sita’s similar daughter-mother relation with the Earth yet another. Finally, we have purely didactic additions. We all know of the insertion of the Bhagavad Gita, which after its initial motivation of Arjuna concentrates on explaining the Sankhya-Yoga philosophy. It takes the form of the oldest core of the epic, with Sanjay doing his reporting to Dhrtarashtra; this could be a device by its writer to give it more authority, but the Gita happens to be very interwoven with the rest of the text. At least this reminds us of the unavoidable problem of a chronology of all the layers of a text composed over more than a millennium. Another didactic addition is the Anugita, yet another the long explanation of the Sankhya worldview in the Shanti Parva. The epic was used as the best possible conduit for a message deemed important by its writers, since the narrative had become popular shortly after its emergence. So… Seth asks: “How can we respond to our critics and to those who mock us as ‘ahistorical’ nonentities?” Answer: by telling the truth about yourself. Next to the pioneering contributions of India in geometry, calculus, astronomy, hydraulic technology etc., and its unique foundational work in linguistics, it ought not to be insurmountably difficult to practise modesty and face the fact that India was less than average in history-writing. Its clumsy history-writing nonetheless goes deeper into the past than that of any other country, which is not bad at all, but its absolutely chronology is indeed disappointingly vague. What would you want? Only Allah is perfect. But the fact that your epics are something else than history manuals, that on top of a historical foundation they built a literary masterpiece including fanciful and mythological elements as well as profound philosophical teachings, that is not something in need of special justifications, let alone self-depreciating apologies. Arise, Arjuna!
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Sita Ram Goel: The man who exposed Nehruvian fallacies and won our hearts with his mind

. A 100 years ago, Sita Ram Goel was born in a poor family, and through his sheer hard work and intellect, exposed the hollowness of the Left at a time when it seemed invincible Koenraad Elst October 16, 2021 10:58:16 IST Sita Ram Goel: The man who exposed Nehruvian fallacies and won our hearts with his mind Sita Ram Goel was born on 16 October in the Haryana village of Chhara. Image Courtesy: http://indiafacts.org/ On 16 October 1921, at 8:34 pm, in the Haryana village of Chhara, Sita Ram Goel was born. Though belonging to the merchant Agarwal caste, his family was quite poor but found sustenance in Vaishnavism and especially the devotional poetry of the local 18th-century Sant Garib Das. Possibly this is what made him such a friendly and generous man, always attentive to the needs of others. When growing up, he came under the influence of Arya Samaj reformism and of Mahatma Gandhi. During his student days he was a Gandhian activist. He obtained an MA in History from Hindu College, Delhi University. In the last years of the freedom struggle, he became friends with a group of young intellectuals with a great future, from Times of India editor Girilal Jain and philosophy author Daya Krishna to Planning Commission member Raj Krishna and arts tsarina Kapila Vatsyayana. But the most important and lasting influence was economics graduate Ram Swarup (whose centenary we celebrated last year), who in 1944-47 led the debating forum Changers’ Club. Though they were “progressives” at the time, we find in their pamphlets already some themes that would become prominent in Goelji’s writing career. In 1948, Goel had almost become a Communist Party member, but under the influence of Ram Swarup and of reading the communist classics, he swiftly evolved into an articulate anti-communist. In Kolkata he set up the Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia, which during the 1950s was the leading anti-communist think tank in the Third World. It published a series of factual studies about the atrocities and the dismal socio-economic performance of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic, much appreciated (but, to lay a nasty rumour to rest, never financed) by prominent foreign anti-communists and by Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Chiang Kai-shek. Meanwhile, he rediscovered Hindu-Buddhist spirituality and also found the time to write several historical novels in Hindi, as well as preparing Hindi translations of classic works of philosophy and history. In 1957, he stood as an independent candidate on the Jana Sangh (later BJP) ticket for the Lok Sabha elections in the Khajuraho constituency. This was an arrangement with Chakravarti Rajagopalachari’s budding anti-Communist Swatantra Party, India's main opposition party in the 1960s. It had wanted Goel in Parliament because he had the mettle to stand up to then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, but the election gods were not favourable. In 1961, Goel published a series of articles critical of Nehru in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh weekly Organiser. It was discontinued on orders of the RSS high command, which feared a backlash against the RSS if anything were to happen to Nehru, as had been the case after Mahatma Gandhi’s murder. It was not the last time he got disappointed in the Sangh Parivar. In the 1960s and ’70s he left the political struggle behind to build up his own publishing business. But after retiring, in 1981 he started writing several series of articles in Organiser and its Hindi counterpart Panchjanya. These were then published as booklets by a new publishing outfit he created, first of all as a conduit for Ram Swarup’s books, but also for his own ideological writings: Voice of India. He opened the very first one, Hindu Society under Siege, with an analysis that said it all: “Hindu society is the only significant society in the world today which presents a continuity of cultural existence since time immemorial. Most other societies have undergone a traumatic transformation due to the invasion and victory of latter-day ideologies — Christianity, Islam, Communism. Hindu culture can meet the same frightful fate if there were no Hindu society to sustain it. This great society is now besieged by the same dark and deadly forces. And its beneficiaries no more seem interested in its survival because they have fallen victims to hostile propaganda. They have developed towards it an attitude of utter indifference, if not downright contempt. Hindu society is in mortal danger as never before.” Or in his Defence of Hindu Society (1983): “Hindus have become devoid of self-confidence because they have ceased to take legitimate, well-informed and conscious pride in their spiritual, cultural and social heritage. The sworn enemies of Hindu society have taken advantage of this enervation of the Hindus.” This outlines a task that would determine the remainder of Ram Swarup’s and Sita Ram Goel’s writings: Detailing the history and ideological motivation of Hinduism’s enemies, and showing the contrast with what Hinduism has to offer. This work is fascinating through its combination of fearless analysis of unpleasant questions with a passion for the benefits of ancient dharma and of the contemporary real-life Hindus. It takes up the ideological struggle so as to avoid the physical struggle, and is thus humane par excellence. As Goel’s son Pradeep said after Goel’s passing in 2003: “They won our hearts with their minds.” Goel himself would soon become a victim of this Hindu loss of nerve. In 1985, the RSS leadership again intervened to have his article series in their papers banned. This time it was Islam that they wanted to spare. Not because they feared a terrorist attack in revenge (they already had an anti-Muslim reputation), but because any Islam-critical writing might “keep Muslims from coming to us”. At the time, the Sangh Parivar still clamoured against “minority appeasement” in public, but in private the rot had already set in. Goel’s best-known work will remain his two-volume Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them? (1990-91). In it, he gives a very incomplete but already impressive list of nearly 2,000 forcible displacements of temples by mosques, of which not one has been challenged since. But its most important part is the summary and analysis of the theological justification of this centuries-spanning (and continents-spanning, think of Istanbul’s Aya Sophia or even Mecca’s Kaaba) record of iconoclasm. This was the key to understanding the Ayodhya controversy, but remark that in the Ayodhya campaign and its judicial proceedings before the UP High Court, it was kept out of view: The RSS-BJP campaigners preferred superficial emotions about the temple to a serious understanding of the theological background. Today, Sita Ram Goel’s work is without influence on government policy. Thus, his critique of the many falsehoods in the Nehruvian history textbooks have not made Narendra Modi’s Cabinet take up the need of correcting them. But his influence on the new crop of online Hindu media is profound. This outreach to the Hindu mind and to a new generation is an important step, but a civilisation under siege can ill afford to leave it at that.
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A case of good nationalism: DK Chakrabarti on historiography

 

 

A case of good nationalism

 

(Pragyata, 5 February 2021)

 

Outside India, and in India’s secularist circles, “nationalism” counts as a bad thing, a kind of collective self-centredness, a refusal of solidarity with the rest of the world. In the 19^th century, it counted by contrast as a form of generous solidarity with people you didn’t know, simply because they belonged to the same nation. The Great War of 1941-18 saw the highest tide of nationalism. Thus, in my native Belgium, an artificial state without a soul, it was the war that first created a national feeling, focused on war leader King Albert I. In the inter-war years, all manner of associations for trade-unionism, sports or even music affected military mannerisms with parades and uniforms, an atmosphere in which the emerging authoritarian-nationalist movements could flourish. India’s newly founded mass movement RSS (1925) followed this same fashion, and has kept it up till today, long after it disappeared abroad.

At the same time, the war was followed by the emergence of a pacifist and internationalist spirit, embodied at the highest level by the creation of the League of Nations. A number of writers expressed this weariness of the nationalist passions that first had led to the war and then been exacerbated by it, such as Goodbye to All That by frontline veteran and famous classicist Robert Graves.  After World War Two, when the Axis powers had profiled themselves as fervently nationalist (and in spite of the fact that the Allies and the Resistance movements had done likewise), nationalism definitely went out of fashion. Intellectuals developed a keen eye for the distortive influence that nationalist (even more than other) passions had on history-writing.

 

Nationalism in the British period

But now Dilip K. Chakrabarti, emeritus professor of Archaeology at Cambridge UK, defends nationalism as a research framework: Nationalism in the Study of Ancient Indian History (Aryan Books International, Delhi). Not the fanatical nationalism of some Hindutva trolls, but the modest and quiet nationalism visible in the colonial-age and Nehru-age Indian historians. Their historiography simply and unsensationally paid proper attention to the scientific and cultural achievements of Hindu civilization and to its already ancient search for unity.

This nationalist tendency marked itself off against the rival tendency of colonialist history. The latter would deny any originality or agency to Indian culture, all inventions and important doctrines borrowed from Greek or other foreign sources. This tendency persists among today’s dominant anti-nationalist or self-described “secularist” school, for political reasons out to belittle India’s achievements. Yet, we get to see that the great British historians (discussed on p.76-156), as distinct from non-historians like TB Macaulay, rarely gave signs of belittling India.

At the other end we find the traditionalists, who were then and still are scornful of the canons of academic history. They derive history from sources like the Puranas and take the epics literally.  Ridiculed but persistent, they are impervious to scholarship. There is for any reader of this book, or any other by Chakravarti, no occasion for confusing him with these far-fetched chauvinists.

Chakrabarti surveys the British-age Indian historians at length. (p.157-250). An interesting example was Rajendra Lala Mitra  (p.157-173) We may quote him here for disturbing the common Hindu chauvinist allegation that the alleged Indian lack of historical sense is but a colonial concoction meant to belittle India. No, it is a fact based in common observation, also by Indians themselves. Mitra is quoted as lamenting his own civilization’s lack of historical sense: “India never produced a Xenophon or a Thucydides, and her heroes and their mighty exploits, her greatness and her early civilization, where they live, live but in song (…) there are few ancient books which bear authentic dates”. (p.159)

Not that the Indians lacked a calendar system – they had too many of them: “It was held to be a distinguishing mark for a great sovereign to establish an era (…) But unfortunately Indian writers never brought their systems of chronology to bear upon history; and in the absence of chronology their history degenerated into the most inconsistent fables and legends. (..) Almost every date is doubtful.” (p. 167)

Same remark by the greatest historian of the 20^th century, RC Majumdar, whose voluminous work is discussed in detail. (p.226-8 and p.273-287) He is quoted as diagnosing the “almost all-encompassing absence of historical texts from the earliest times to the Muhammadan conquest” and the “absence of a definite chronology”. (p.380) Like Mitra and Majumdar, Chakrabarti is clearly not a nationalist in the sense of a blind glorifier of his country. But acknowledgement of India’s weak points is all the easier as the said flaw is compensated by the many achievements of Indian civilization. And moreover, the admitted weakness has a silver lining: India’s record of its early history is a bit garbled, but on the other hand it reaches deeper in time (with very pre-Vedic histories of Manu and his successors) than comparable records in the other great civilizations.

 

Indo-European

Another pioneer was Ramesh Chandra Dutta, who “like many of the period [= late 19^th], was an avid supporter of the Aryan theory”. (p.182) He is quoted as considering the results of the “industry, perseverance and genius” of early Indo-Europeanists like “Bopp, Grimm, and Humboldt” as “one of the noblest and most brilliant of the century”: the Indo-European language family. (p.183)

Today, many nationalists including Chakrabarti himself reject the notion of Indo-European, but he concedes that back then, far from being resented by the Indians of the day as an imperialist concoction, they generally welcomed it, because: “The Aryan hypothesis implied that the ruling Anglo-Saxons and the ruling Indians (at least the higher castes among the North-Indians) belonged to the same stock and could claim a cousinship, however removed, with their rulers.” (p.183)

But he himself is not convinced: “To the present author, the Aryans are a historical non-issue because this is nothing more than a historical concoction to imagine a group of all-conquering dominating people on the model of the Europeans in the 16th-20^th centuries.” (p.9)

Like a very large number of Hindus, Chakravarti assumes, following the AIT school, that “comparative philology” necessarily implies the AIT; and is therefore to be shunned. He rejects not only the Aryan Invasion/Immigration Theory but the Out-of-India Theory as well: “The so-called ‘out-of-India’ theory postulated for the Aryan origin, which is current among a section of Indian scholars, should not mean anything historically tangible or verifiable because the whole Aryan issue is irrelevant to the rational understanding of ancient India.” (p.9-10)

Well, some of the historians he discusses contradict this view. Mountstuart Elphinstone was the Governor of Mumbai  Presidency before he became a historian, which makes him formally an out-and-out colonialist. Yet, he was in two minds about the Aryan invasion thesis. In his day (1841), the Aryan Invasion Theory was still young (August van Schlegel posited a Caucasus homeland in 1834) and disputed. He simply notes the dilemma whether the high castes had been invaders or “merely a portion of one of the native states (a religious sect, for instance) which had outstripped their fellow citizens in knowledge”.  (p.115)

Then he proceeds to give a cautious answer. Even if conquest was at the origin of the power equation in caste society, that doesn’t make it a foreign conquest: “It is opposed to their foreign origin that neither in the code [of Manu], nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any book that is certainly older than the code, is there any allusion to a prior residence”. (p.115)

To be sure, there is no such recorded memory among the other Indo-European branches either, e.g. the Germanic Edda of ca. 1200 CE  knows nothing of an immigration whereas the Out-of-India Theory (and even the still-common peri-Caucasus homeland theory) posits their immigration into Northern Europe ca. 2500 BCE, obviously because the long time-lapse made this forgetfulness a natural outcome. The Aryan Invasion Theory, by contrast, posits an immigration ca. 1500 BCE and immediately thereafter the composition of the Rg-Veda, including (at least in the AIT school’s reading) descriptions of battles between invaders and natives. So unlike in the Edda, especially in the Vedas we ought to find references to very recent foreign origins, given the importance that ancient peoples in general and Indians in particular attached to origins.  

Where I completely agree with Elphinstone but Chakrabarti does only partly, is this: “The common origin of the Sanscrit language with those of the west leaves no doubt that there was once a connection between the nations by whom they are used; but it proves nothing regarding the place where such a connection subsisted, nor about the time, (…) To say that it spread from a central point is a gratuitous assumption (…) Where, also, could the central point be, from which a language could spread over India, Greece and Italy, and yet leave Chaldaea, Syria and Arabia untouched? The question, therefore, is still open. There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present.” (p.115-6)

Indeed, we agree that the Hindus came from India. As for the Europeans, we say that the linguistically decisive part of their ancestry came from India, whereas most Indians including Chakrabarti say it didn’t; though essentially they don’t give a damn about these non-Indians, as their horizon stops at the Khyber Pass. Here, persuasion will have to come from Chakrabarti’s own field: archaeology. So far it has shown a complete absence of indications of Aryans moving into India (as opposed to  Europe, where both archaeological and genetic evidence of the Aryan invasion is plentiful), but much less work has been done to identify Indian emigrant traces in the Central-Asian record. These will give more body to a scenario of Aryan expansion via a secondary homeland on the steppes, then into Europe.

 

Negationism

One great merit of this book is the insider’s account of the Leftist take-over of the education establishment, mainly during Indira Gandhi’s 1972-77 tenure, with PN Haksar as her political secretary, Saiyid Nurul Hasan as her Education Minister, and card-carrying Communist Prof. RS Sharma as the first chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research, newly founded in 1972. (p.3-20, p.293-311, passim) Sharma’s textbook Ancient India, the ICHR’s first, with the protest against it by archaeologist Swarajya Prasad Gupta, was the first salvo in the ‘textbook controversy’ that has never really died down ever since.

As for his own experience:  “In several Indian universities that I can think of – Delhi University, for instance -- students were positively discouraged to read those ‘nationalist’ writings” (p.4), i.e. sober India-minded historians like RC Majumdar. Chakrabarti himself served at Delhi University for a while, and was the target of Communist slander there. Editing A History of Ancient India in 2013, he found that major publishers refused, slated contributors withdrew etc.: “cancel culture”.

After SP Gupta, a very small handful of minor publications dealt with this Communist coup against objective historiography. Then “the first major criticism of the ‘left-liberal’ or ‘progressive’ historians was made by Arun Shourie with special reference to the state of the ICHR in their control.” (p.11, referring to Shourie’s 1998 book Eminent Historians. Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud) The title Eminent Historians refers to how they call each other to pull rank against the non-conformist historians mostly excluded from an academic career; it is also pun on a colonial-age book title, Eminent Victorians. The book documented the eminent historians’ misuse of the lavish subsidies they received, and focused on their systematic history manipulation.

Though “these earlier scholars never transcended the limits of objective historical research in their championing of some nationalist premises” and “in no case did they try to glorify ancient India at the expense of objectivity”, yet “the communists launched a propaganda war against the earlier scholars by styling themselves ‘progressives’ as opposed to the ‘revivalist’ and ‘regressive’ Indian scholars of the earlier generations. They did not find the necessity of citing facts to support their contention”. (p.381) The Left purposely conflates Bhāratīya Vidyā Bhavan (that published RC Majumdar’s magnum opus) historians with the eccentric Bhāratīya Itihās Saṇkalan Yojanā history-rewriters. They also portrayed themselves, though power-wielders, as oppressed.

Thus, DN Jha’s Myth of the Holy Cow (Verso, 2002) tried to shock the Hindus, who protested. So Jha roped in worldwide sympathy by presenting himself as a victim of Hindu fanaticism. Yet the case of historian Rajendra Lala Mitra’s 1881 book Indo-Aryans, with the same message, had not led to any persecution. (p.169) The Hindu public had had no problem with the message that Hindu norms had been different 3000 years ago compared to today; only with the Hindu-bashing that Jha added to it.

Did the scene change under Narendra Modi, the supposed Hindu fanatic? Not quite: under BJP rule, no counter-strategy was developed, and the much-discussed problem of “Right-wing history rewriting” remains a figment of the feverish Leftist imagination: “The communists had a free run so far, their opponents being no match in the psychological warfare launched by the communists. These opponents have had the control of the ICHR uninterruptedly since 2014 but they have basically been unable to neutralize the communist lobby in Indian historical studies. They are not motivated enough and focused enough. They regrettably are not even professional enough to realize where the communists have to be hurt to their disadvantage. They remain content by merely uttering platitudes about the Aryans or the Sarasvati. In the latter entreprise they regrettably have been joined by a large number of people who have never taken a day’s course in historical studies on a professional level.” (p.382)

                To sum up: this book is a very good overview of the main trends in Indian historiography. It introduces the main conflicts within the field, marking these for future in-depth studies. The Left would have liked us to ignore their motivated power-grab, but after this book, this will become impossible.

 

Dilip K. Chakrabarti: Nationalism in the Study of Ancient Indian History, Aryan Books International, Delhi 2020, 398 pp., ISBN 978-81-7305-648-2, Rs 995.

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A Marxist critique of the Modi government’s ICHR nomination

 

 

 

 

Retired historian Romila Thapar has written an opinion piece (“History repeats itself”, 11 July 2014, India Today) giving the standard secular reaction to the appointment of equally retired historian Y. Sudershan Rao as chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research. It gives the predictable (indeed, predicted, see K. Elst: “A Hindutva historian in office”, 11 July 2014) show of indignation hiding an inside reaction of satisfaction at the BJP’s renewed display of incompetence in reforming the field of history.

 

   

Status

 

“The appointment of a historian whose work is unfamiliar to most historians shows scant regard for the impressive scholarship that now characterises the study of Indian History and this disregard may stultify future academic research. Given that the writing of history in India over the last half-century has produced some of the finest historians, recognised both nationally and internationally, one is surprised at the appointment of Professor Y. Sudershan Rao as chairperson of the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR). Professor Rao's work is unfamiliar to most historians, with little visibility of research that he might have carried out. He has published popular articles on the historicity of the Indian epics but not in any peer-reviewed journal, and the latter is now a primary requisite for articles to be taken seriously at the academic level.”

 

Here we have, at some length, the usual status-mongering. It says, in short, that Prof Rao is not “eminent”. It is a rather sophomoric argument: outsiders (such as politicians) and beginners imagine that academic status has a whole lot of meaning, and that you can’t be a serious scientist unless you have this kind of status. Insiders, however, have a far lower opinion of this academic status. Sometimes, indeed, it is only given to people of exceptional merit. From these highly visible cases, outsiders extrapolate to all others. But in many more cases, it is the mediocre minds and the faithful followers who get promoted, while the really talented people are blocked or are encouraged to seek more lucrative employment outside academe.

 

The mechanics of the presence or absence of status is as follows: the Indian Left jealously guards its power position in academe and decides who gets status within the Humanities, or who is blacklisted and kept out. Then the politicians select their sources of authority or their interlocutors by the status they “have” (i.e. which the Left has conferred on them), which is turn enhances their status. And then the India-watching circles abroad go by the status which individuals turn out to have acquired in India, and further increase their “eminence”. Thus, Romila Thapar’s own nomination to American chairs after her retirement in India crowned her career of being an ever more eminent historian in India.

 

The focus on status is a long-standing practice of the Indian Left, and for a good reason. As Sita Ram Goel already remarked in his anti-Communist days, the Indian Communists made sure to create status for those loyal to them. If you were a writer, they would arrange for you to be invited to a writers’ conference in Moscow and get an award there, and then you would be introduced in India as an “internationally acclaimed writer”. This was all the more important because people in general base their judgment on status, but no one more so than the Hindus. Indeed, the fabled Hindu moneybags will rather sponsor an enemy with status than a friend without it. The BJP will rather nominate a “secularist” with status than a proven Hindu loyalist without it. So, in the case of our Communist writer, they will honour him for his status, not realizing that this status has purposely been created for him by their declared enemies. And they will shun a pro-Hindu writer because he has no status, ignoring or disregarding the fact that he has been denied any avenue that might have led to status. The last thing they think of is to make an effort and create status for people who are perceived as belonging to the Hindu camp.

 

 

The BJP role in education

 

To be sure, there are provincial universities where the Leftist lobby’s power in limited. Education is largely a matter for the States, so BJP State Governments control a fair number of second-rank but nonetheless real nominations. Indeed, if they had meant business, they could have created a centre of excellence developing a more objective counter-narrative to the dominant Leftist version of history. Still, they do get to fill vacancies for history professors once in a while. These do not confer the kind of status that Jawaharlal Nehru University can offer, but they should at least be sufficient to groom a set of historians outside the Left’s sphere of influence. And indeed, even as an outsider, I can off-hand enumerate a handful of credible and competent non-Left historians, among whom a new ICHR chairman might have been picked. India is a big country, and non-Left historians may be seriously underrepresented, but in absolute figures they are still a force to be reckoned with. Prof. Rao himself is a veteran of one such little-known university in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh.

 

As for the process of peer review, upheld by Romila Thapar as a key to academic status, it has come under criticism for being highly susceptible to corruption. Thus, Indians might think of Northwestern Europe as much cleaner than awfully corrupt India, but right on my doorstep, Tilburg University in the Netherlands has been through a sensational fraud scandal in 2011-12. Social psychologist Prof. Diederik Stapel had built a whole career on much-applauded papers, nicely peer-reviewed, and in their conclusions very welcome among the “progressive” crowd. But then it transpired that he had a long-standing practice of making his research data up, so as to suit his preconceived “conclusions”. The investigative commission appointed for the case not only discovered large-scale fraud affecting the work of other researchers as well, but specifically reprimanded the reviewers who had okayed Stapel’s work so often. This was but an extreme case of a general phenomenon: papers get easy acceptance from peers if they support the dominant view, but are held to far more demanding standards if  they are at odds with it. In India, just imagine what it would take for a history paper with “communal” conclusions to be accepted by a Leftist-controlled review panel. So, of course Prof. Rao cannot boast of many peer-reviewed publications, but that says little about the quality of his work.

 

A serious look into his output, however, reveals that he is indeed not the man from whom we can expect an overhaul of the Indian history sector with respect for the normative methods of history scholarship. Here we have to concur with Romila Thapar: “Rumour has it that since he is working simultaneously on various projects, a recognised monograph has still to emerge. The projects are linked to spiritualism, yoga, the spiritual contacts between India and Southeast Asia, and such like. Whatever connections there may be between these themes and basic historical research, they are at best tenuous, and it would require a mind of extraordinary insight and rigour to interweave such ideas.”

 

For a professor teaching lessons about historical method, it is rather poor to base herself on “rumours”. I have remarked before that the dominant scholars are often “fishwives”, who believe and then propagate mere gossip. Nevertheless, an internet search and our limited findings there give a first confirmation of her impression.

 

Historicity of the Epics

According to the eminent historian: “The two issues that he has highlighted in his statement to the press as the agenda for his chairmanship are also prominent in the Hindutva view of Indian history. One is that of proving the historicity of texts such the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and establishing the dates of the texts and their central event.” At least in the case of the Mahabharata battle, we are on fairly solid ground in assuming that it was a historical event. The same is true of the Trojan war, although Ilias enthusiasts also have had to struggle against skepticism before this was generally accepted. On the other hand, many embellishments as well as unrelated stories and discourses are of other dates.

She observes: “This is a subject on which there has been endless research for the last two centuries. Indologists and historians have covered the range of possible investigation discussing philology, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and even astronomy to try and ascertain a definitive chronology for these texts. But to no avail, as a precise date eludes them. To go over the ground again in the absence of new hard evidence would merely be repeating familiar scholarship- but it may not be familiar to Professor Rao.”

The available investigations have brought us much closer to a serious chronological assessment than she seems to assume. Only, it does not favour the historicity of “the” Epics. They confirm that traditions were collected and expanded over centuries, and additions made even after a redaction meant as “final”. Only believers treat the Epics as a divinely revealed text that has to be dated as a single whole. From the wording in the newspaper’s rendering of the interview, it seems that Prof Rao belongs to the believers rather than to the historians, but then again, most Indian papers are not above manipulations.

After her defeat in the Ayodhya controversy, she still uses the present ICHR discussion to fool the world once more with her negationist thesis: “Professor Rao's other statement to the press of there being archaeological evidence to support the theory that there was once a temple where the Babri Masjid later stood, is largely a political statement as the report of the excavation at the site in Ayodhya is not publicly available. Those few who have had the chance to read the report may not agree with the statement.” Are we to suppose that her own interventions in this debate were not political? The negationist stand against the pre-existence of the Ayodhya temple was an extreme example of how the Humanities often serve to provide a scholarly veneer to theses that arise purely from political motives.

 

The ICHR’s chairmanship

An interesting point is this: “Again, according to what was published in the newspapers, Professor Rao's second comment was regarding his objection to the introduction of Marxist tools of research by the ICHR during the chairmanship of Professors R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib. Professor Rao should be more familiar with the ICHR since he was appointed to the Council by the first BJP government of 1999-2004. He should know that for the most part of its existence, the ICHR has been under the chairmanship of non-Marxists such as Lokesh Chandra, S. Setter, MGS Narayanan and so on. So if they had wanted to remove the so-called ‘Marxist tools of research’, there was nothing to stop them from doing so.”

The ICHR chairmanship is largely a ceremonial and administrative post. If the holder of the title is not particularly dynamic, not much power inheres in it. That is why the Left didn’t mind giving it to non-Leftists once in a while. They themselves are interested in real power, i.e. the power to change things according to one’s own designs, whereas most Hindus are only interested in office. (I thank Arun Shourie for correcting me when I once parroted the usual complaint that most politicians “only want power”. The right expression was: “they only want office”.) Office means you get all these photo opportunities and TV appearances, a fat salary and glittering perks to show off. A child’s hand is easy to fill.

I doubt that the enumerated ICHR chairmen ever had the instruments to remove the Marxist influence from their institution. But at any rate, there is little signs that they ever tried. The Marxists, by contrast, only desire office to the extent that it is an avenue to real power. Indeed, the history of their acquisition of cultural and educational power is one of a division of labour: Congress politicians, originally around Indira Gandhi, would get the glamorous offices, whereas their Communist allies would do their long-term moles’ work in the less conspicuous cultural-educational sector.

The good element in this sobering assessment of the ICHR chairmanship is that Prof. Rao may perhaps not be the best historian, but he can still do a fine job is what the post in meant for: put the right people in the right places and inspire them to do the research needed. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is known for having a low opinion of diplomas and having more respect for achievement. That is why he nominated Smriti Irani, underqualified but a proven hard worker, to the Human Resources Development ministry, who in her turn thought of Prof. Rao as the right choice for the ICHR. Let us hope that she knows of qualities of his that we have yet to appreciate.  

 

Real Marxism

The eminent historian, who is not known to have protested when Tom Bottomore’s Dictionary of Marxism describes herself as a Marxist, takes issue with the loose use by Prof. Rao and many others of the term Marxism: “It is perhaps worth pointing out that the kind of history that is often dismissed by Hindutva ideologues as Marxist is not actually Marxist but bears the stamp of the social sciences. The distinction between the two, despite its importance to the interpretation of history, is generally glossed over by the proponents of Hindutva. This is largely because they have scant understanding of what is meant by a Marxist interpretation of history and therefore fail to recognise it. For them, a Marxist is simply someone who opposes the Hindutva ideology. Consequently, a range of historians unexpectedly find themselves dubbed as Marxists.”

It is not just Hindutva ideologues who point to the preponderant influence of Marxism on India (which is simply a fact), and neither is it only them who use the term Marxism a bit inaccurately. And here, she does have a point. What she calls “the social sciences” is her name for the scholarly veneer that the Leftists in academe give to their own ideology, but that ideology is indeed not always Marxist, and these days less and less so. Marxism was one specific school of thought in the Leftist spectrum, and after it has been abandoned in the Soviet Union and more gradually in China, it has had to give way in India too. Nothing ever dies in India (as Girilal Jain observed), and Indian Marxism will take a long time to wither away, but it is a fact that postmodernism, potcolonialism and other forms of egalitarianism are taking over where Marxism once flourished. To the average Hindutva observer, whose understanding of these ideological distinctions is blurred at best, these remain all the same.

Let me give a single example of the difference between Marxism and the more current forms of Leftism, one that Prof. Thapar will certainly recognize. The Marxist historian Shereen Ratnagar asserts: “if, as in the case of the early Vedic society, land was neither privately owned nor inherited by successive generations, then land rights would have been irrelevant to the formation of kin groups, and there would be nothing preventing younger generations from leaving the parental fold. In such societies the constituent patrilineages or tribal sections were not strongly corporate. So together with geographic expansion there would be social flexibility.” (in Romila Tapar, ed.: India: Historical Beginnings and the Concepts of the Aryan, National Book Trust, Delhi 2006, p.166)

Nowadays it has become fashionable to moralize about the caste system, with evil Brahmins inventing caste out of thin air and then imposing it on others; Neo-Ambedkarites give a lead in spreading this view. But hard-headed Marxists don’t fall for this conspiracy theory and see the need for socio-economic conditions to explain the reigning system of hierarchy or equality. In particular, it is pointless to lament the inequality of “feudal”, pre-modern societies, as the socio-economic conditions for equality didn’t prevail yet. Socialism (or, to name a fashionable instance of egalitarianism: feminism) simply couldn’t exist or emerge in a feudal society. However, the pastoral early-Vedic society did have the conditions for a far more equal relation between individuals. In the later Vedic period, the caste system emerged, first with mixing of castes (caste was passed on in the male line, but the father was free to marry a woman of another caste, see the Chandogya Upanishad or still the Buddha), then with endogamy. So, the Marxist, materialist and “scientific” analysis is quite distinct from the “petty-bourgeois” idealistic view.

 

Real history

Prof. Thapar feigns bad memories of the AB Vajpayee government, when the established historians laughed without end at the sight of the Hindutva crowd’s incompetence: “During the BJP/NDA government of 1999-2004, there was a frontal attack on historians by the then HRD minister M.M. Joshi. (…) The present HRD minister, who unfortunately is unfamiliar with academia beyond school level, gives the impression that in this case she may be doing what she perhaps was appointed for: Carrying out the programme of the old history-baiters of the BJP who now have a fresh innings.”

It should not surprise us that the august professor, in spite of her Marxism, so openly disdains the proletarian HRD minister. It is the old glorification of status all over again. While her Marxist school has waged a very long attack on real history, so that a lot is to be cleaned up now, she is right to have a low opinion of MM Joshi’s tenure and initiatives. Marxists were at least sophisticated in their distortions, and hence could win over most of the India-watchers abroad, but the Hindutva history-rewriters were clumsy and disdainful of quality control. It is as yet too early to know whether Mrs. Irani or Prof. Rao are willing and able to do better.   

Her final point sums up her judgment of the new situation, and I need not comment on it: “Again, rumour has it that the ICHR did send a shortlist of its recommendations for chairmanship to the HRD ministry. The list had the names of historians who had helped construct the ICHR into a viable research body. But that list seems to have conveniently got lost in the ministry. Therefore, a different name was pulled out of another hat and the person appointed. If this is so, then the prognosis is both predictable and drear.”

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"1200 years of slavery"

 

In an opinion piece in Outlook (“Chaining 1200 years”, 7-7-2014), Hasan Suroor takes issue with PM Narendra Modi’s diagnosis that Indians suffer from a slave mentality due to “1200 years” of oppression. He thereby defends the central falsehood that the Marxist historians have introduced into Indian education, viz. that British rule was colonial oppression while he preceding Muslim regimes were somehow indigenous. Fortunately he makes no secret of where he himself stands: by classifying Makkhan Lal as “ pro-RSS historian” but praising his opponent Mushirul Hasa as a “noted historian”, he plays the well-known Leftist game of denouncing the other as ideologically biased but their own as wearing the mantle of objectivity.

The respective language policies already give the true story. The British are remembered for imposing English as language of administration and partly of education. But firstly, this was introduced against a faction of administrators, the Orientalizers, who had preferred the use of native languages (a faction unknown in the Muslim regimes), and secondly, every British official had to take an exam of “Hindustani” before even being posted to India. The Muslim rulers had mostly not even bothered to learn an indigenous language and at any rate kept on using Arabic and then Persian as medium to administer India. Muslim rule was even more colonial than British rule.

To be sure, though Muslim regimes typically started out as based in Central Asia and then expanded into India, they all lost their basis outside India to their local competitors and then had to make do with India. But that doesn’t make them less foreign. The White regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa were also nominally independent from the European motherland but were nonetheless treated as hold-overs of colonialism.

The British exploited India? So did the Muslim regimes. Land tax was very high under the Delhi Sultanate and peasant famines as frequent as under the British. Moreover, apart from their negative effect on Indian society and the economy, the British cloud also had the silver lining of modernization, as physically represented by the railway system. They “enslaved” India but also brought the abolition of slavery (which they forced the Moghul and Ottoman empires to abolish as well). The Muslim regimes cannot boast of such contributions. On the contrary, they destroyed the Indian universities and brought only the sterile dogmatism of Islamic theological academies in return.  

As for “1200 years”, Suroor rightly considers this inaccurate, as Muslim rule started in Sindh 1300 years ago, in most of India centuries later, and in some pockets never at all. He also has the merit of pointing out that it was effectively over in the 18^th century, as not the British but the Marathas broke the back of the Moghul empire. So, he is right on this, but then, a political speech is not a Ph.D. dissertation. At any rate, the fuss about the exact number of years is only meant to belittle Modi’s message, which is in essence that Muslim rule deserves to be classified as oppressive and colonial.

Suroor’s article is part of the “secularist” attempt to keep control of Indian history. Not just the institutions, where the Modi regime will have a hard time introducing more objective historians against the anti-Hindu lot presently ruling the roost. But more importantly, the general public’s perception of Indian history, which his own kind has tried to slant communally.

In fact, experience teaches that the Marxists have little to fear from the BJP. The textbook reform by Murli Manohar Joshi of ca. 2002 was a failure. Subsequent Indologist conferences which I attended all had sessions on history-rewriting, where the mood among the mostly anti-Hindu scholars was upbeat and in expectation of a further decline of any Hindu activism. The conclusion came down to: “The Hindu nationalists are unspeakably evil, but fortunately, they are also abysmally stupid.” The Hindu movement has never bothered to invest in scholarship and even after Modi’s accession to power, it simply lacks the historians equipped to effect the glasnost (openness) which a Marxist-controlled sector urgently needs.

Regardless of this power struggle between contending views of history, however, at a deeper level the established historians have already lost the battle. Of course, the anti-Hindu school has the key positions both in the relevant Indian sectors (including Bollywood) and in the foreign India-watching institutions, so they still keep the lid on this development. But they have suffered some embarrassing defeats.

On Ayodhya, for more than twenty years they have managed to make the world think that history is being falsified by Hindu extremists asserting that the Babri mosque there had been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple. This was in defiance of the preceding consensus among all the parties concerned that there had indeed been a Hindu temple at the site, as still asserted in the 1989 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But suddenly the consensus reversed, not because of any scientific discovery, but because of political compulsions. Like babes in the wood, all the India-watchers world-wide started toeing this new line and lambasting the Hindus for “falsely” staying true to the old consensus. One Dutch professor who had personally registered evidence for the temple, felt compelled to eat his own findings and parrot the new consensus. Unfortunately for all of them, the Archaeological Survey of India (2003) and the Allahabad High Court (2010) reconfirmed the old consensus: of course, a Hindu temple had stood at the site and had been forced to make way for the mosque. So, all these Leftist efforts to impose a rewritten version of history had been in vain. Moreover, in her recent book Rama and Ayodhya, Meenakshi Jain has documented what a sorry figure these supposed “experts” have cut when they were questioned in court during the Ayodhya proceedings. One after another was forced to admit that he didn’t really know, that he hadn’t been to the site though pontificating on its archaeology, that is was all just a hypothesis. So, those were the people who had been cited as authority by all the politicians, journalists and India-watchers. If the truth of their politically motivated deception is given proper publicity, their game will be over.    

On Nalanda, the Left has staged a really daring history falsification. This Buddhist university, then the biggest in the world, was destroyed by Bakhtiar Khilji’s mujahedin in 1194, and has recently been refounded under tight Leftist control. Today, the Buddha is being used as a weapon against Hinduism, so the anti-Hindu forces would like to take possession of the memory of Nalanda. Unfortunately, that would normally force them also to memorize the way in which the historical Nalanda University had disappeared. What to do? Well, in 2004, the then president of the Indian History Congress managed to put the blame on the Hindus and simply ignored the true story, though as usual it had been proudly proclaimed by the Muslim perpetrators themselves. As Arun Shourie has shown (“How history was made up at Nalanda”, Indian Express, 28 June 2014), he violated all the norms of his discipline by citing a hearsay foreign document of five centuries later, and only giving a manipulated quote from it, all while keeping out of view the real, immediate and contemporary testimony. The historical fact that Nalanda was destroyed by warriors for Islam still stands, but the reputation of this prominent Leftist historian among his many parrots should be revised.

The anti-Hindu bias taught by the History professors also translates into a bias on contemporary matters, where it has not fared better. In autumn 1996, I attended the Annual South Asia Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The NDA alliance led by the BJP had been in power for 13 days and was widely expected to accede to government for real. The Indian, American and Indo-American academics at the conference outdid each other in doomsday predictions: Fascism was going to be installed, the Muslims were going to be thrown into the Indian Ocean, the Government was going to come down on Dalits/women/artists/journalists, India was going to attack Pakistan, and so on. The BJP did come to power in 1998 and led the government till 2004, yet nothing at all of these dire forecasts came true. The BJP observed all the democratic procedures, Pakistan attacked India (Kargil) but not the reverse, and on the social front nothing sensational happened, except that the economy boomed. Rarely has an army of accredited “experts” been proven so completely wrong.

In 2002, in spite of BJP rule, Muslims felt confident enough to start a pogrom of 59 Hindus in Godhra. Hindus had not reacted to a series of Islamic terrorist acts including attacks on the Parliament buildings in Srinagar and Delhi, but this time they finally did. Communal riots ensued, killing some 800 Muslims and 200 Hindus. Bad enough, but by Congress standards not that unusual: the 1984 massacre of Sikhs by Congress Party activists killed 3.000, and afterwards Congress leader Rajiv Gandhi had only seen fit to minimize the issue. This time, however, the man in charge had the wrong political colour: Gujarat CM Narenda Modi. He was accused of being complicit in the riots, or even of having organized them. Though he was campaigned against and scrutinized like nobody before him, he was repeatedly cleared by the courts. All the Indian and foreign “specialists” who go on accusing him, are simply in contempt of court.

Moreover, he has been accused of piloting history textbooks that praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust. Naturally, this propaganda offensive too has been copied in media around the world. However, investigation of the textbooks showed that these did not praise Hitler, did mention the Holocaust, and had been issued by a previous Congress government anyway. But this follow-up did not get any attention in the world media. The slander may have been successful in the short run (e.g. I heard it cited and discussed in all seriousness in a session on Hindu-Jewish relations at the American Academy of Religion Conference in 2009), but truth has a way of prevailing in the end.

Modi’s accession to power and the respect he clearly enjoys among the neighbouring governments (and even in the US, which has to rescind its visa ban against him, in spite of the pressure by Indo-American Leftists) may well be an apt occasion to rethink our attitude towards the ideological power struggle in India. So far, Indians and foreigners, and even many inside the BJP, have looked at India through the glasses which the wrongly-named “secularists” have put on their noses. Millions of people busy with other things have relied on the “experts” to decide for them what is what, not realizing that the positions normally associated with expertise have been cornered by a politically motivated school. It is time to change this power equation.

Meanwhile, we can already free ourselves from this school’s exceeding sympathy for the Muslim regimes in Indian history. These regimes were part of a long intermezzo of oppression, which has conditioned the minds of the Indians (especially of those people loyal to the native civilization) to attitudes of servility. It remains to be seen whether Narendra Modi’s government will live up to the expectations. But by publicly redefining the intermezzo of colonization as including the Muslim period, he has already changed the terms of discourse.

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