A sense of irony grips me as I recollect the late Ramesh Thapar’s contempt for family members who served the British Empire; “toadies,” he would sneer. Impressed by what appeared a rare display of courage, I never forgot the word, partly because it formed part of Thapar’s unique repertoire and partly because it rolled so convincingly off his tongue.
‘Toadies’ now comes to mind as one sees Left historians bending backwards to wrest legitimacy for a discredited interpretation of Indian history, one supported by Western universities that patronize the self-same scholars with fellowships, seminar invitations, and other freebies. This is a tightly controlled intellectual circuit, and regardless of the party in power in these Western nations, the political-intellectual establishment subscribes to a specific view about non-Western and non-Christian countries like India. Communists, Leftists, assorted socialists and minority intellectuals opposed to the rise of an autochthonous intellectual and civilizational framework are thus natural allies of Western establishments.
It is India’s tragedy that the regime that assumed power at independence elected to sponsor a sectarian history and disallowed reinstatement of the autochthonous civilization as foundational ethos of the fledgling modern nation-state. Decades of State patronage gave India a version of history that negated the greatness of the ancient past in which seekers from the known world came to genuflect before our sages; equated Islamic iconoclasm with ordinary banditry; deleted the sustained Hindu resistance to the invaders; purged the sheer scale of massacres of soldiers and ordinary citizens in every military encounter; and expunged all mention of the flourishing slave trade in Hindu men, women and children for several hundred years.
As such a history was mandated by political calculations and the political ideology of its chief patron, Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru, its rectification, especially at the level of school textbooks, required the presence of a non-Nehruvian dispensation. Although the BJP has shown far less sensitivity to civilizational issues than desired, it did permit the writing of new history textbooks, if only because the prevalent ones were badly written and hopelessly outdated.
Today, the NCERT textbooks have emerged as the principal ideological battlefield as they are in a sense even more important than Ayodhya. The writing of history free from Leftist biases and control has brought India’s civilizational struggle to the forefront of the intellectual arena. This has given the contest a piercing immediacy, accentuated by the fact that non-Left historians will not accommodate Marxist denials of historical truths. At the same time, the growing popular demand for a more honest chronicling and interpretation of the past has forced the Left to recognize that it has lost its old hegemony and credibility. It now retains audience only with the virulently anti-Hindu media and Western academic circles. Here too, the returns are diminishing as events queer the pitch for those determined to promote an imagined past.
It is poetic justice that Ayodhya has emerged as a major area of denouement, despite Marxist desperation to maintain the hegemony of the invader Babur in defiance of common sense. Last year, the Archaeological Survey of India not only uncovered a Gupta era temple structure beneath the old Babri Masjid floor, but found evidence of human habitation at Ayodhya from 1500 BC. In one stroke, this took the history of Ayodhya back by seven hundred years and convincingly settled an old academic mystery about the antiquity of the Ramayana vis-à-vis the Mahabharata.
Hitherto, archaeologists had speculated that the Mahabharata might possibly be the older epic as all findings related to a period identified with it. Yet Hindu tradition was adamant that the Ramayana was older, and this civilizational memory was finally vindicated in 2003. Ayodhya presents a salutary lesson to honest historians about how ancient civilizations preserve the memory of their past. To demean or disown one of the single-most important archaeological and historical discoveries of the modern world merely because it imperils a discredited ideology is an insult to the intellectual quest for truth. To try to dismiss it as an expression of religious nationalism (whatever that means) is intellectual chicanery at its worst.
A corollary of the unilateral exoneration of Islamic atrocities by Marxist historians is their sustained denial of the glories of pre-Islamic India and their rabid insistence – despite convincing evidence to the contrary – that an alien race of Aryans (who came from God knows where) are the ancestors of today’s upper caste Hindus. Currently, some White racists are working overtime to prove that upper caste Hindu men have descended from White Aryan men and native (presumably Dravidian) women. I fail to understand how such an obscenely sexist and racist proposition can be sustained even theoretically, and this may explain why it has not been adopted by our intellectual peddlers.
Excavations over far-flung sites of the Indus-Harappa-Saraswati civilization prove beyond doubt that there was neither an Aryan invasion nor migration to India, and that the civilization was entirely indigenous in its origins. Its Vedic roots have been established by distinguished archaeologists like Dr. R.S. Bisht and Dr. Gregory Possehl, and cannot be denied by low level quibbling. The Indus-Saraswati culture has continuity with our contemporary culture, and as its authors called themselves Arya (noble, not a race), we owe it to ourselves to spurn Hindu-baiters and honour ourselves with the epithet. Those unfit for inclusion in this category are, of course, mleccha (uncultured).
It bears repetition that the primary identity of a nation will necessarily derive from the culture and traditions of the indigenous people (Gaul in France, Saxon in Germany). This is particularly so when this culture survives and continues into the present, and its adherents remain – despite the entry of other groups – the majority community in the land. Hence there can be no legitimate dispute, much less grievance, that what is today known as ‘Hindu’ is the primary identity of India, Bharat, Hindustan.
The land of Bharat has ever existed as a distinct idea and entity in the primordial memories of its people. Vedic poetry resounds with deep love for the land. The Vedic seers, however, linked the terrain with pride in a unique culture, the acceptance of which conferred upon one the membership of both land and community. In other words, Arya culture involved territorial assimilation through cultural integration. As Sukumar Dutt argued, our ancestors expanded not so much by political conquest as by amalgamating with Arya culture. The mother country was thus built through spiritual and cultural affinities, which bestowed a special uniqueness and unity to what would otherwise be only a political or geographical unit.
Over the centuries this spiritual unity welcomed into its fold even immigrant groups willing to accept Arya culture. For here, as Dutt asserted, culture, and not race or language, was the passport for admission. Cultural assimilation could thus transform even foreign origins into birthright, granting the immigrant community even a leadership role in the socio-spiritual-cultural polity. It was in this manner that the Gurjara Pratiharas evolved into the Agnikula Rajputs at Mount Abu, and earned their spurs in the defence of dharma.
Centuries later, this same spiritual-cultural impulse produced modern-day nationalism and the anti-colonial movement. Historians who equate the mainstream national movement with the pro-colonial behaviour of the Muslim League need to be sent back to grammar school.
The Pioneer, 9 March 2004