TORTURED SOULS CREATE TWISTED HISTORY
It is now widely recognized that Indian history has been
distorted. The public too is gradually becoming aware of this fact. At first,
it was blamed on the British rulers, who distorted Indian history to divide the
people of India so it would be easy to rule. There is truth in this. Lord
Macaulay who created the modern Indian education system, explicitly stated that
he wanted Indians to turn against their own history and tradition and take
pride in being loyal subjects of their British masters. In effect, what he
envisaged was a form of conversion— almost like religious conversion. It was
entirely natural that Christian missionaries should have jumped at the opportunity
of converting the people of India in the guise of educating the natives. So
education was a principal tool of missionary activity also. This produced a
breed of ‘secular converts’ who are proving to be as fanatical as any religious
fundamentalist. We call them secularists.
Macaulay made no secret of his intentions. In a famous letter
to his father he wrote: “Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully. The
effect of this education on the Hindus is prodigious. ...It is my belief that
if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolator
among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. And this will be
effected without any efforts to proselytise, without the smallest interference
with religious liberty, by natural operation of knowledge and reflection. I
heartily rejoice in the project.”
Macaulay, and British authorities in general, did not stop at
this. They recognized that a conquered people are not fully defeated unless
their history is destroyed. It is best if this destruction takes place at their
own hands: British ‘scholars’ would assist it of course, but ultimately, the
Indians themselves should be made to destroy their past. So the plan envisaged
cultural suicide rather than cultural genocide. To this end, a new discipline
called Indology, and whole new tribe of scholarship called Indologists were
created and supported by the British. The most famous of them all was a German
by name Friedrich Max Muller who saw the opportunity and made a grand success of
it by working for the British according to Macaulay’s plan. The plan was to
translate, edit and publish Indian classics—especially the Vedas—in such a
manner that it would turn the educated people of India against their history
and tradition and make them take pride in being ruled by the British. It was
hoped that with this, many would also give up Hinduism and opt for
Christianity.
Max Muller is still regarded as a great lover of India and her
civilization but the reality is that he was a British agent paid to give a
derogatory interpretation of the Vedas. We have his word for it. There can be
no doubt at all regarding Max Muller's commitment to the conversion of Indians
to Christianity through his scholarly activity. Writing to his wife in 1866 he
observed: “It [the Rigveda] is the
root of their religion and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the
only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last three
thousand years.” Two years later he also wrote the Duke of Argyle, then acting
Secretary of State for India: "The ancient religion of India is doomed.
And if Christianity does not take its place, whose fault will it be?"
The facts therefore are
clear: like Lawrence of Arabia in the twentieth century, Max Muller, though a
scholar was an agent of the British government paid to advance its colonial and
Christian missionary interests. He was by no means the only one, but only the
most successful. Bishop Robert Caldwell who created the Dravidian language
theory once admitted his theory was “not only of considerable moment from a
philological [linguistic] point of view but of vast moral and political
importance.” By ‘moral and political’, he meant Christian missionary and
British colonial interests. He was the founder of the Dravidian movement, which
has proven to be highly disruptive. It is no accident that even today the field
of Dravidian linguistics continues be dominated by Christian missionaries.
Bishop Caldwell was the pioneer of this brand of political-missionary agenda
masquerading as scholarship.
It is entirely understandable that the British authorities
should have engaged in such tactics. They were only trying to make their own
life as rulers easy, for no imperialism can work without native collaborators.
Even Aurangazeb had to recruit Rajputs to run the Moghul Empire. The question
today is— why do these so-called secularist scholars, born and brought up in
India, continue to work within the framework handed down to them by their
former colonial masters? And many of these scholars were not even born when the
British left.
To understand this we need to see them as converted people who
transfer their loyalties from the land of their birth to the land of their
masters. This is compounded by their lack of confidence in their own generally
weak scholarship— a state of mind that constantly seeks both patronage and
protection. Before we examine this conversion phenomenon, it is worth looking
at the nature and the magnitude of distortion that these men and women are
engaged in.
As just noted, these
historians calling themselves ‘secularists,’ are really colonial converts
hostile to the land of their birth. As a result, the colonial (distorted)
version of history continues to be taught in Indian schools and colleges. These
distortions fall broadly under the following categories:
Distortion of ancient
history through the ‘Aryan invasion’ and the Aryan-Dravidian conflicts,
presenting the Vedic Age as an ‘age of conflict.’
Distortion of medieval
history, by whitewashing the Islamic record and presenting it as the 'age of
synthesis'.
Distortion of the period of
the Freedom Struggle, by whitewashing Congress blunders and suppressing the
contribution of the revolutionaries, Sardar Patel and Subhas Bose.
Distortion of
post-independent India, by whitewashing the monumental blunders of Pandit Nehru
and his successors to bring about dynastic rule under the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty
at the cost of national interest.
We shall be looking mainly
at the first two, and touch upon the third. The first point to note: it was
the ancient period that gave India both its unity and its sense of the nation.
The Medieval period was a Dark Age, during which the Hindu civilization was
engaged in a desperate struggle for survival. In addition, the forces of
medievalism contributed nothing to Indian nationalism. They acted as a negative
force and held back progress, taking the country into a Dark Age. They continue
to act as a check against progress by holding on to medieval ideas and practices.
The important point to note
is that the ancient period was an age of synthesis, when people of different
viewpoints like the Vedic, Tantric, Buddhistic, Jain and other sects lived in
relative harmony. There was also free exchange of ideas and unfettered debate.
The Medieval period was the age of conflict when Hindu society was engaged in a
desperate struggle for survival against the onslaught of Jihad— something like
what is happening in Kashmir today.
What the Congress sponsored
Leftist (‘secularist’) historians have done is to exactly reverse this. They have said that the
ancient period was an age of conflict between Aryans and non-Aryans, while
trying to portray the Medieval period—dominated by Jihad (or religious wars)—as
a period of synthesis. Let us look at the record.
History books today still
begin with the Aryan invasion of India, which is said to have taken place in
1500 BC. Students are told that the ancient civilization of the Indus Valley or
the Harappan Civilization was Dravidian that was destroyed by the invading
Aryans. The truth now revealed by recent research from the discovery of the
Vedic Sarasvati River to the reading of the Indus script is there was no Aryan
invasion and no Aryan-Dravidian conflicts either. In Sanskrit, ‘Aryan’ simply
means cultured and not any race or language. As previously noted, the idea of
Aryans and Dravidians as mutually hostile people was created during the
colonial period, in which Christian missionaries like Bishop Caldwell played an
active role.
It was claimed by the
British, and faithfully repeated by the secularist intellectuals, that the
British unified India. This is completely false. The unity of India, rooted in
her ancient culture, is of untold antiquity. It may have been divided at
various times into smaller kingdoms, but the goal was always to be united under
a ‘Chakravartin’ or a ‘Samrat’. This unity was cultural though not always
political. This cultural unity was seriously damaged during the Medieval
period, when India was engaged in a struggle for survival— like what is
happening in Kashmir today. Going back thousands of years, India had been
united under a single ruler many times. The earliest recorded emperor of India
was Bharata, the son of Shakuntala and Dushyanta, but there were several
others. I give below some examples from the Aitareya Brahmana.
"With this great
anointing of Indra, Dirghatamas Mamateya anointed Bharata Daushanti. Therefore,
Bharata Daushanti went round the earth completely, conquering on every side and
offered the horse in sacrifice.
"With this great
anointing of Indra, Tura Kavasheya anointed Janamejaya Parikshita. Therefore
Janamejaya Parikshita went round the earth completely, conquering on every side
and offered the horse in sacrifice."
There are similar statements
about Sudasa Paijavana anointed by Vasistha, Anga anointed by Udamaya Atreya,
Durmukha Pancala anointed by Brihadukta and Atyarati Janampati anointed by
Vasistha Satyahavya. Atyarati, though not born a king, became an emperor and
went on conquer even the Uttara Kuru or the modern Sinkiang and Turkestan that
lie north of Kashmir. There are others also mentioned in the Shathapatha
Brahmana and also the Mahabharata. This shows that the unity of
India is ancient. Also, the British did not rule over a unified India. They had
treaties with the rulers of hereditary kingdoms like Mysore, Kashmir, Hyderabad
and others that were more or less independent. The person who united all these
was Sardar Patel, not the British. But this unification was possible only
because India is culturally one. Pakistan, with no such identity or
cultural unity, is falling apart.
Harshavardhana was the last
great Indian ruler of North India. Several empires continued in the south like
the Chalukya, the Rashtrakuta and finally Vijayanagara. Islamic invasions into
India began in the 8th century or about a century after Harsha’s
death. Iran (or Persia) collapsed within a single generation to the Islamic
armies, as did the eastern part of the Byzantine Empire of Constantinople.
Arabs intruded into Sind, but their hold did not last. It took the Islamic
forces more than 300 years before they could defeat the Hindu kingdom of
Afghanistan. Then the invasion of India began in earnest with the Mahmud of
Ghazni in the 10th – 11th centuries.
It should be understood that
what Islam brought to India—and other parts of the world—was a new kind of
warfare that was unknown in ancient times. It was called Jihad. The idea was
not merely to conquer a country but to totally destroy its history and
civilization. Iran and Egypt had great civilizations going back thousands of
years, but they have been totally wiped out. This is what is happening to
Afghanistan today and also what the Jihadists are trying to do to Kashmir.
This is the true picture of
Medieval India, which was a long Dark Age. As the distinguished American
historian Will Durant says, "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the
bloodiest story in history." Fortunately, Hindu learning survived in
places like Sringeri, Benares, Kanchi and a few other places. Also, Indian
rulers, especially in Vijayanagara, Mysore and several others protected
scholars and artists.
The problem today is that
Leftist historians (‘secularists’) claim that none of this happened even though
there are literally thousands of ruined temples and monasteries all over India
to prove it. One has only to go to Hampi, the former capital of Vijayanagara to
see the evidence. Even Akbar allowed Rajputs and other Hindus into his
administration only because he could not find enough foreigners. Otherwise, the
policy of the Delhi Sultans and the Moghuls was to import officials from
outside the country— just as the British did. All this is whitewashed in Indian
history books written by the secularists. For example, students are taught that
Babar was a tolerant ruler who loved India. But here is what Babar himself says
in his autobiography, the Baburnama.
Chanderi had been in the
daru'l-harb [Hindu rule] for some years and held by Sanga's highest-ranking
officer Meidini Rao, with four or five thousand infidels, but in 934 [1527-28],
through the grace of God, I took it by force within a ghari or two, massacred
the infidels, and brought it into the bosom of Islam.
And what did he find
interesting in India? "Hindustan," he wrote, "is a place of
little charm. ... The one nice aspect of Hindustan is it is a large country
with lots of gold and money." In other words, he came to India attracted
by loot. For the better part of three hundred years, the Moghuls ruled North
India as foreign occupiers, using a foreign language — Persian — in their
administration.
This record of Medieval
India has been whitewashed in history books in use today. One of the clearest
examples of history distortion can be seen in the Ayodhya-Ramjanmabhumi
controversy. Secularist historians repeatedly asserted that no Ram Temple had
been destroyed at the site of Babri Masjid. The first point is that Muslim
writers have made no secret of the fact that they destroyed the temple. Here is
what Aurangazeb’s granddaughter wrote in 1707, in her Persian work Sahifah-i-Chihal
Nasa'ih Bahadurshahi:
... keeping the triumph of
Islam in view, devout Muslim rulers should keep all idolaters in subjection to
Islam, brook no laxity in realization of Jizyah, grant no exceptions to Hindu
Rajahs from dancing attendance on 'Id days and waiting on foot outside mosques
till end of prayer ... and 'keep in constant use for Friday and congregational
prayer the mosques built up after demolishing the temples of the idolatrous
Hindus situated at Mathura, Banaras and Avadh.
In addition to the matter of
fact admission of the destruction, what is striking is the fiery tone of
intolerance. She was after all Aurangazeb’s granddaughter. In addition, we have
archaeological evidence showing that a temple existed at the site. After the
demolition of the Babari Masjid by karsevaks on December 6, 1992,
archaeologists found a temple under it and also a stone inscription. Here is
what an important part of the inscription has to say:
"Line 15 of this
inscription, for example, clearly tells us that a beautiful temple of
Vishnu-Hari, built with heaps of stones... , and beautified with a golden spire
... unparalleled by any other temple built by earlier kings ... This wonderful
temple ... was built in the temple-city of Ayodhya situated in Saketamandala.
... Line 19 describes god Vishnu as destroying king Bali ... and the ten-headed
personage (Dashanana, or Ravana)."
In the face of this, no one
can argue that no temple was destroyed. The distinguished archaeologist
Professor B.B. Lal who carried out the excavation at Ayodhya wrote a sixty-page
report on his findings. But this was suppressed, thanks to influential
secularist historians like Irfan Habib, Romila Thapar and R.S. Sharma. These
secularists then put out a propaganda pamphlet on Ayodhya denying that there
ever was a temple at Ramjanmabhumi.
Just as ancient and medieval
history has been distorted under Congress patronage, the history of the Freedom
Movement has also been dressed up to favor the Congress and the Communists.
This distortion has the following parts: (1) Building up the role of Gandhi and
Nehru while suppressing the contribution of others, notably Subhas Bose. (2)
Whitewashing Gandhi’s terrible blunder of supporting the Khilafat Movement and
the atrocities of the Mopla Rebellion that followed. There are others like the
Nehru family dynastic blunders that need not detain us here.
History books in use today
tell us that it was the Congress Party through its various movements like the
Quit India Movement of 1942 that brought freedom to India. This fails to
explain the fact that the British granted independence only in 1947 while the
Quit India Movement had collapsed by the end of 1942. The question is— why did
the British leave in such great hurry in August 1947? Clement Attlee, the
British Prime Minister at the time of Indian independence provided the answer.
Here is the story.
When B.P. Chakravarti was
acting as Governor of West Bengal, Lord Attlee visited India and stayed as his
guest for three days at the Raj Bhavan. Chakravarti asked Attlee about the real
grounds for granting independence to India. Specifically, his question was,
when the Quit India movement lay in ruins years before 1947, where was the need
for the British to leave in such a hurry. Attlee’s response (given below) is
most illuminating and important for history.
In reply Attlee cited
several reasons, the most important were the activities of Netaji Subhas
Chandra Bose which weakened the very foundation of the attachment of the Indian
land and naval forces to the British Government. Towards the end, I asked Lord
Attlee about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was
influenced by Gandhi’s activities. On hearing this question Attlee’s lips
widened in a smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly, putting emphasis on each
single letter — "mi-ni-mal."
The crucial point to note is
that thanks to Subhas Bose’s activities, the Indian Armed Forces began to see
themselves as defenders of India rather than of the British Empire. This, more
than anything else, was what led to India’s freedom. This is also the reason
why the British Empire disappeared from the face of the earth within an
astonishingly short space of twenty years. Indian soldiers, who were the main
prop of the Empire, were no longer willing to fight for the British. What
influenced the British decision was the mutiny of the Indian Navy following the
INA trials in 1946. While the British wanted to try Subhas Bose’s INA as
traitors, Indian soldiers saw them as nationalists and patriots. This scared
the British. They decided to get out in a hurry.
The secularist historians are enjoying a privileged life in India.
Unlike Indian scientists, engineers and other professionals, there is little
interest in their work outside India. They owe everything to India. Why do they
go to such lengths to demean and distort everything about India’s past so there
is nothing left for Indians, Hindus in particular, to take pride in their
heritage? Now that their version of ‘history’ is beginning to unravel, the
state of mind that led these privileged members of society to turn against
their country and their ancestors is beginning to attract the attention of
scholars.
Part of the hatred can be attributed to the
Macaulayite system of education that was specifically designed to turn the
English educated Indians into loyal servants of the British rulers. If it meant
accepting a second class citizenship in their own country, there were
compensations enough to satisfy their material and emotional needs: they could
always look down upon their brethren as beneath them. This privileged class continued
and expanded after independence— thanks to a succession of Congress Governments
that patronized them for political reasons.
This brought tangible material benefits also. Just
as the British rewarded their loyal Indian servants with titles like knighthoods,
Rao Bahadur, Khan Saheb and so forth, the present day West rewards also these
anti-Hindu, pro-West scholars willing to pander to the sense of superiority of
their chosen masters. Racism may be illegal in most Western countries, but the
racist impulse still lurks in the breasts of some Western academics, especially
in the humanities. This is what has kept alive such overtly racist creations
like the Aryan invasion theory in various guises. Naturally, Indian scholars
who are willing serve them are rewarded with fellowships, travel or even an
occasional visiting professorship. While Sanskrit illiterates like Romila
Thapar have been showered with invitations from prestigious centers, has anyone
heard of a Western university inviting a truly great Vedic scholar from India?
In fact, Western Sanskritists avoid real scholars like the plague. It was the
fear of facing scholars like Dayananda Sarasvati that made Max Muller avoid
visiting India.
(Maharshi Dayananda said of Max Muller: “In a desert
where nothing grows, a castor plant looks like an oak.” And of his Sanskrit and
Vedic scholarship: “He is like a toddler trying to walk.”)
To comprehend the state of
mind that animates these people it helps to recognize that they still behave like
imperial subjects with an almost religious attachment to their beliefs. Just as
many Muslims still live in an Islamic Empire of their imagination, these
secularist scholars also live in an imaginary world of permanent inferiority
ruled over by masters they always have to please. When faced with a problem,
like the revision of history books that is currently taking place—and which
they dub “saffronization”—they don’t take their complaints to the people of
India. They run to Europe or America to cry about it. They still believe that
the West can or at least should solve their problems.
This kind of behavior is
typical of converted peoples. Speaking of converted Muslims in non-Arab lands
V.S. Naipaul noted in his book Beyond Belief that Islam does not just require
a different form of worship. It makes imperial demands. In his words:
“A convert's world view
alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His
idea of history alters.” Naipaul might also have said that this is accompanied
by an inveterate hatred of one's ancestors and the culture into which they were
born. A hatred deep enough to want to destroy one's own land and join the ranks
of the violators of the ancestral land and culture, at least in spirit.
Pakistan is an example. Its heroes are not the Vedic kings and sages who walked
the land, but invading vandals like Ghaznavi and Ghori who ravaged them. Again
as Naipaul puts it: "Only the sands of Arabia are sacred."
It is no different with the secularists. They have succumbed
to the imperial demands of Macaulayism, even though the empire that created and
sustained it has disappeared. They must be loyal to their empire and destroy
everything sacred about their past. This idea of the destruction of the sense
of the sacred is not widely recognized. The pagan spirit, especially the Hindu,
attaches great significance to his sense of punya-bhumi,
to tirthas made sacred by
association with heroes and sages from the hoary past. Conversion entails
giving up this attachment to one's sacred land and symbols and even turning
against it with destructive zeal. This is movingly chronicled in Naipaul's Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the
Converted Peoples. (Naipaul,
whose ancestors were from India, was born and grew up in Trinidad.) Its
original pagan inhabitants along with their sacred places had been obliterated
by European invaders. It was only after he had left the island, some forty
years later, that he began to notice this lack. What brought this realization
was his coming into contact with India, the original punya-bhumi.
It is this sense of sacredness that
Christianity and Islam have destroyed wherever they have gone. This anti-sacred
feeling is particularly virulent in lands converted to Islam. Again, as Naipaul
observes: "...in the converted Muslim countries—Iran, Pakistan,
Indonesia—the fundamentalist rage is against the past, against history, and the
impossible dream is of true faith growing out of a spiritual vacancy." I
have noticed the same rage, though perhaps more subdued and certainly less
violent, among the converted Christians in India, many of who have never
reconciled to the loss of colonial patronage. They are blind to sacredness
around them, still clinging the impossible dream of Western 'Christendom'
coming to their aid in their hopeless, unnecessary struggle against the pagan
Hindus who they deride as heathens.
It is the same with the secularist converts— the remaining
loyal servants of European imperialism. The result is rage without end. Having
lost one's own identity, the convert must destroy everyone else's. Secular
converts, like every other convert, can never be at peace with themselves or
with the world. This feeling has been made all the worse by the rising tide of
Indian nationalism, which their imagined masters in the West are doing nothing
to stop. The result is men and women with tortured, twisted souls who can only
distort and destroy as much as they can before eventually destroying
themselves.