A famous African adage avers that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. This, in a sense, is the crux of the current controversy over which School of historians should legitimately write history textbooks for secondary and senior secondary school students.
Unlike most nations of the world, India’s native people, culture and civilization have a unique, unbroken continuity with their geographical homeland, and do not suffer the ethnic or religious ruptures that have ravaged other lands and disconnected their past from the present. India’s past runs perennially into the present, so that its history is truly the history of a civilization, perhaps the oldest civilization in the world. Its keynote is unity and continuity, which it has maintained despite a millennium of turmoil and torment.
India’s true history is in danger on account of a State-supported ideological war that seeks to sever society’s link with the past, using history as a tool to pervert national memory and destroy cultural and national identity. The battlefield is the minds of school-going children, who are sought to be poisoned with an unparalleled contempt for the past, especially India’s civilizational verities and values.
The NCERT History textbook controversy is a contest between civilizational India versus non-Indic historiography. Though clubbed under the generic term ‘Marxist,’ this school of thought generously accommodates the anti-Hindu biases of Islamic and Western-Christian academics. Its principal objective is to deny the violent entry of Islam into India and negate the horrors perpetuated by Islamic rulers, especially the extensive massacres of natives; destruction of temples and religious persecution; the bitter oppression of the people through extortionist land revenue, jaziya, deportation to slave markets abroad, and the constant use of armed might to quell restive subjects.
Marxist historians worked assiduously to achieve these objectives. However, to whitewash the thorny events of the medieval era, they needed to pervert the preceding epoch as an age of darkness and non-achievement. This explains Marxist fidelity to the colonial claims of an Aryan Invasion, and their refusal to acknowledge the proven synchronicity between the Harappan Civilization and the Vedic Age. To add insult to injury, they now proclaim that beef was eaten in the Vedic period, though little credible evidence has been adduced in this regard.
Discerning readers may wonder how motivated historians pervert the past. As an example, I shall discuss the case of Shri Rama, currently regarded as the foremost symbol of Hindu bigotry. I urge readers to dissociate themselves from a controversial movement to build a temple at Shri Rama’s birthplace, and to consider only if his story has a legitimate place in history books, as a major part of our national heritage.
Most readers would know that the Hindu tradition has always maintained that the Ramayana of Valmiki was older than Vyas’ Mahabharata. For several decades, however, archaeologists could only establish Mahabharata sites, and seriously wondered if the Mahabharata could be the older epic. Archaeologists like Prof. B.B. Lal struggled valiantly to establish a genre of “Ramayana sites” that could not be wished away, but Marxist scholars had the power to scuttle excavations at critical points, until the court case over the title suit to the Ram Janmabhoomi gave the Archaeological Survey of India a unique opportunity to excavate the site without hindrance in 2002.
It is well-known that the ASI’s brief was to examine if the disputed Babri structure was built over a pre-existing temple. The ASI found a tenth century temple complex that had probably been destroyed by floods, of which period a circular Shiva temple remained. The materials of this temple were reused in a grand twelfth century temple, of which fifty pillar bases and a 150-feet long and six-foot wide wall were excavated. The Babri Mosque was found to cut into the pillar bases of this temple. When the Babri structure was pulled down on 6 December 1992, a shilalekha (inscription) was found in the Nagari script, which stated that King Govind Chand of Kanauj built and dedicated a temple of unparalleled beauty to Vishnu Hari, who had slain Bali and Dashanan (Ravana). This clearly indicated that the temple was a Ram temple, as Rama alone killed Ravana.
But the most significant aspect of the ASI dig was the finding of human habitation at Ayodhya from 1500 BC, which is seven hundred years earlier than previously thought. The Ayodhya excavation thus settled the controversy about the antiquity of the Ramayana vis-à-vis the Mahabharata, and vindicated the Hindu practice of preserving history through civilizational memory. My question is whether this memory of the Prince of Ayodhya legitimately deserves to be honoured with a place in history books or consigned to oblivion as an expression of Hindu communalism?
Of course, our Marxist friends have had no compunctions in shocking young school students with the claim that our Vedic ancestors, particularly the wily Brahmins, were voracious eaters of cow meat. Undeterred by inconvenient facts like the veneration of the cow in the Vedas and the prohibition on its slaughter, they have continued to perpetuate a colonial falsehood that was invented to facilitate the conversion agenda of Christian missionaries. Discerning readers would have realized that the sudden vehemence with which Marxists are now propagating that Vedic Hindus ate beef is nothing but a crude attempt to de-sacralize the cow and assist the conversion agenda of evangelizing faiths.
Finally, we come to what Prof. Shiva G. Bajpai of Wisconsin University calls “the burden of bad ideas.” In October last year, an international academic consensus at California State University, CA, USA, stated that there was no Aryan Invasion of India. Hindu civilizational memory always maintained that its spiritual-cultural tradition began with the Vedas centred round the region of the river Saraswati. For Hindus, ‘Arya’ simply meant ‘noble,’ and denoted adherence to an elevated culture; it had no ethnic connotations. Though evidence of an Aryan Invasion was always slim, Sir William James floated the theory to establish that India was a land that passively submitted to successive foreign rule and conquest; that its great Vedic civilization was itself an alien graft; and that British rule was merely the last of such a sequence.
Normally, such a view should have been scrapped once the British departed and subsequent excavations established that the geo-cultural areas of the Harappan and Vedic cultures were historically overlapping and identical. But Indian Marxists and Islamic intellectuals (the two often overlapped) joined hands and secured patronage to propound the view that the builders of the Harappan civilization and the composers of the Vedic hymns were different people.
The idea, of course, was to deny the indigenous origins of Hindu civilization long after it had become impossible to sustain this myth. The objective was to place Arab-Turk-Afghan invasions in “perspective” as a recurrent theme in Indian history, somewhat like the annual floods in the Brahmaputra. We thus have the ultimate irony that the organizers of the California conference are writing to school textbook writers all over the world to ensure that future writings on Indian history assert that there was no Aryan Invasion of India. NCERT has also received such a letter; one shudders to think what its new political masters intend to do with it.