Michel Danino

Varying interpretations, even controversies, are common in the history of every nation, but India seems to have more than a fair share of them. In fact, Indian history appears to be as much a battlefield as the bygone wars it describes. In a 1942 article entitled " ‘Histories’ of India," K.M. Munshi wrote, "Most of our histories of India suffer from a lack of perspective. They deal with certain events and periods not from the Indian point of view, but from that of some source to which they are partial and which by its very nature is loaded against India."1

3. Indians have often been accused of having no historical sense. This colonial prejudice has been ably refuted, recently by Arvind Sharma,2 but it remains true that the Indian mind is more interested in a multidimensional reading of the past, in which what we call "facts" and "myths" are free to mix and enrich each other. This makes historical interpretations of Indian texts, such as the two Epics, a complex and delicate exercise, which has so far yielded widely divergent results.

5. Epigraphy presents a still more pathetic picture, with over one lakh inscriptions and millions of manuscripts3 from all parts of India waiting to be read and published. Injuries of time coupled with human neglect are relentlessly erasing what should have been carefully documented decades ago. With fewer and fewer young Indians opting for the laborious and ill-paid career of epigraphist, the profession is in its last throes.

6. Even as Indian philosophy, spirituality and literature enthralled many nineteenth-century Western thinkers, poets and writers, India’s colonial powers and a whole class of scholars and missionaries strove to belittle Indian civilization in order to legitimize the colonial rule (the "white man’s burden"). India was stereotyped as barbaric, stagnant, idolatrous, or at best otherworldly and therefore effete. This imprint persists subconsciously among some Indologists in the West, but also in India where Macaulayan education has effectively colonized the Indian mind and produced a class of scholars and academics who are either ignorant of or hostile to the idea and fundamentals of Indian civilization.4

In reality, this nineteenth-century theory was put forth in the background of triumphant colonialism. But as archaeology developed in the twentieth century, especially in the Indus and Sarasvati valleys, it became clear that no people invaded or migrated to India around the proposed date: the picture that emerged was one of transition in continuity, with no external disruption. Anthropology, too, through the examination of hundreds of skeletons, rejected the possibility of a new human type entering India around 1500 BCE, a conclusion more recently endorsed by several international genetics study.5 Many elements of Harappan culture (arbitrarily supposed to be "pre-Aryan") turned out to be quite compatible with Vedic culture: worship of fire, mother-goddess, trees and animals, the use of oil lamps, red pigment, conch shells, ritual purification through water, and most importantly, yoga and meditation. Therefore, there was also no cultural break of the sort implied by the Aryan invasion theory. Finally, the Sarasvati river was shown to have dried up around 1900 bce, at least 400 years before the supposed arrival of the Aryans, even though their Vedic hymns lavishly worship the Sarasvati as a "mighty, impetuous river flowing from the mountain to the sea"!6

Despite such overwhelming material evidence, most Indian textbooks continue to teach this divisive theory. Worse, various ideologies and political groups (self-styled Dalit leaders, Christian missionaries, Marxists, "Dravidian" parties, etc.) have made the theory one of their pillars, and are naturally unwilling to let go of it: rather than look straight at the evidence, they prefer to continue playing the game of "divide and rule" in new scholarly and academic garbs.7

(2) The myth of "Dravidian," Dalit or tribal separateness: A consequence of the Aryan invasion theory was the myth of a "separate" Dravidian identity and culture. While the South and especially the Tamil land does have a stamp of its own, from the beginning we see it wholly harmonized with Vedic and Puranic elements.8 Nowhere in the Sangam literature (the most ancient in Tamil) do we find a hint of a cultural clash with the North or with Vedic culture. On the contrary, Vedic gods such as Indra and Agni and all major gods of the Hindu pantheon figure in Tamil poems and epics, along with many concepts and legends drawn from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Bhagavatam etc. Archaeological and numismatic evidence also supports an ancient integration of Vedic culture in the South, as is visible from cultural artefacts found in the earliest cities (about the third century bce).

Nowhere can we spot a separate "Dravidian" culture, much less civilization. On the other hand, the South has contributed much of great value to Indian culture in terms of music, dance and literature; the Bhakti movement, for instance, arose there. The South forms an integral part of India’s cultural continuum in time and space: distinctiveness is not separateness.9

A third prong consists in claiming that India’s tribes never had anything to do with Hinduism until it was "imposed" upon them by Brahmin "missionaries." Not only is there no trace of any such "imposition," what is loosely called Hinduism is in reality the result of a long and fruitful interaction and interchange between Vedic culture and tribal cults, with tribal deities enriching the Hindu pantheon and tribal practices, rituals and art forms getting absorbed.10

(3) St. Thomas’s visit to India and martyrdom: In order to push back Christianity’s presence in India and create an "Indian martyr," the legend of St. Thomas’s visit to India was created, for which there is no actual historical evidence. The only text on which the legend is based, the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, written in Syriac in the third century ce, points to Parthia (near the Caspian Sea) and to Bactria, not to India.12 This is confirmed by Persian and Bactrian names of kings (e.g., "Mazdai") and other characters (Iuzanes, Charisius, Mygdonia, Narcia, Siphor ...), also by physical features such as a "desert land" or a lion. None of this applies to south India, yet, by dint of sheer repetition, the legend has wormed its way from missionary tracts and tourist guidebooks into respectable reference books. As early as in 1773, Voltaire pointed out that it was another Thomas, a Syrian trader, who led his group of refugees to Kerala’s shores in the sixth century ce. Voltaire, in fact, ridiculed the legend of Thomas the Apostle being pursued by spear-brandishing Brahmans, they "who never speared anyone."11

Let us also point out that St. Thomas is reported in many other parts of the world, so that we can count, in all, twelve graves for this ubiquitous apostle: six between Kerala and Tamil Nadu and six outside India, from Brazil to Tibet to Japan—surely a feat that makes Thomas a greater miracle worker than Jesus himself. Such major problems with the traditional (rather, neo-traditional) account is what made several historians of Christianity, such as Rev. James Hough, depict it as "most improbable ... unsupported by the faintest vestige of authentic history".12

While this imagined martyrdom is actively propagated, the documented killing of Hindu priests and devotees and the demolition of temples by Jesuits and others (especially in Goa and Pondicherry) are not considered important enough to be remembered.13 This inversion is an integral part of the process of humiliation: the natural right to historical truth is denied, while the victim is made to look like an aggressor.

(4) Negationism of Islamic record: Similarly, the actual record of Islamic rulers in India has been eclipsed. Whether it is Mahmud of Ghazni, Timur or Aurangzeb, Islamic sources recorded the slaughter of lakhs of Hindus, forcible conversions, massive captures of slaves inflicted on Indian population for several centuries, besides great plunder and the demolition of thousands of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples, universities etc. Historians from Will Durant, Alain Daniélou or Koenraad Elst14 in the West to K.S. Lal15 or Sita Ram Goel16in India have documented this blood-soaked period of Indian history. Durant, for instance, wrote, "The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within."18

But it was not merely a matter of "slaughtering the idolaters" or "ending the conceit of the infidels by means of the sword and the spear,"19 as Firuz Shah Tughlaq put it in the fourteenth century; it was also the imposition of a tax (jizya) on the survivors and the practice of public humiliations: desecrating "idols", burying them "in front of the mosques" so that they may be "trampled by the shoes on the feet of the Muslims."20 Islamic chronicles faithfully record such practices and worse ones, and it would be all too easy to fill page after grisly page with excerpts from them.21

There is a watertight case for wide-scale victimization of Hindus by Islamic invaders and rulers, and no more reason to sweep it under the carpet than to conceal the genocide of American Indians by the Spanish, Portuguese and British, or that of the Jews by Hitler. While Timur’s conquest of Baghdad in August 1401 and the 120 pyramids he built with 90,000 severed heads of its inhabitants are not the object of any controversy, all hell breaks loose if mention is made of similar slaughters by him on his way to Delhi, by Mahmud of Ghazni at Bhimnagar, Mathura, Somnath and in Kashmir, by Alauddin and Tughlaq in Delhi, by Firuz Shah in Orissa, Rohilkhand and Kumaon, by Aurangzeb in much of north India, by many sultans and their governors in various regions—all deeds, again, carefully recorded by the perpetrators of those atrocities or their chroniclers, with vivid phrases such as "the sword of Islam being washed in the blood of the infidels."22 Inexplicably, drawing attention to such chapters of Indian history instantly raises colourful labels of "Hindu communalism", "chauvinism" or even "hatred mongering": other nations, it appears, have a right to know facts of their history, pleasant or repellent, but not India.

Muslim invasions of India are often glorified by Marxist scholars, such as M.N. Roy who claimed that Islam brought a welcome "message of hope and freedom."23 If at all a few instances of destruction are acknowledged, we are told that temples were plundered only because they were centres of wealth, or sometimes for "political motives."24 A clumsy excuse to avoid facing the real driving force behind the above depredations, apparently for fear of offending today’s Muslim Indians—who are, however, no more responsible for them than today’s Germans are responsible for Nazi atrocities. The difference is that Germany has fully accepted this dark phase of its history (and made reparations for it). Indeed, it is only by acknowledging the past, however unpleasant it may be, that it can be healed; clumsily trying to deny it will only ensure that wounds continue to fester. No self-respecting nation would want its victims to be denied remembrance.

(5) British rule – denigration of Indian civilization: To legitimize her "civilizing mission", Britain needed to portray India as barbaric and uncivilized—a standard colonial practice from America to Africa and Asia. Ancient accomplishments were therefore obscured or, as in the case of science and technology, portrayed as the result of Mesopotamian, Persian or Greek influences. Even more recent, pre-colonial advances, such as India’s remarkably developed indigenous system of schooling,25 extensive medical traditions or efficient village administration, were systematically eclipsed.

Indian academia has not been able to fully shake off this framework, despite the accumulation of much valuable material from the early historical to the pre-colonial era. In particular, India’s socioeconomic stability, her contributions to world civilization in science, technology, art, philosophy, religion, spirituality, literature, scripts, and much else continue to be underemphasized: the average Indian student, for instance, learns almost nothing of them, and so is unable to form a proper estimate of Indian civilization and its place in the history of humanity.26

(6) British rule – concealment of colonial barbarity: In the early nineteenth century, Britain declared that "India must be bled" and inflicted a more severe wealth drain than even Islamic invaders had. Europe’s industrial revolution was largely fuelled by India’s wealth (the "Bengal plunder"). But taxes were imposed so cruelly that, according to British sources, 30 to 50 million deaths were caused by famines between the late 18th century and the 1940s, mostly in the peasantry. Respected Indian figures such as Dadabhai Naoroji,27 Romesh Dutt28 or S.G. Deuskar29 added their voices to British historians like William Digby30 in recording this large-scale tragedy. Its full extent, however, finds no place in our textbooks, despite more recent studies, such as those by Mike Davis31 or Madhushree Mukerjee32.

(7) Freedom struggle: Official and mainstream histories of the freedom movement lay emphasis mostly on Gandhi and the Congress, at the expense of those who really prepared the ground. Among other glaring omissions from Indian textbooks, we must mention Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the Maratha leader who ignited the Independence movement late in the nineteenth century, Lala Lajpat Rai, the powerful Punjabi leader, Bipin Chandra Pal, the inspiring Bengali orator, and Sri Aurobindo, the Bengali leader whose incisive pen and high vision of India’s destiny wielded so much influence in the first decade of the twentieth century that India’s Viceroy, Lord Minto, regarded him as "the most dangerous man we have to deal with at present".33

Strangely, most books continue to use the terminology coined by the British master for such leaders: they are still "extremists", while some of their followers, who advocated violence to overthrow the British rulers, continue to be "terrorists."34 Of course, there is no excuse for using this term in a modern textbook without a suitable explanation: India’s freedom fighters did not explode bombs in public places with a view to causing as many deaths as possible, did not take hostages or use suicide bombers—the current implications of the word "terrorist".

Historians such as R.C. Majumdar,35 who showed in a glaring light the considerable shortcomings of Gandhi and the Congress and attempted to give due place to other freedom fighters, suffered discrimination and were labelled "communal." Historical truth once again became a casualty. As a result, India’s Communists, who actually collaborated with the British, now claim to have been at the forefront of the struggle for Independence. The Congress, which fiercely opposed early demands for independence (made by Tilak and Sri Aurobindo36 before anyone else between 1905 and 1907) has of late been building a new myth that Nehru was the first, in 1929, to voice such a demand. Worse, the whole spirit of the Independence movement, which was to restore India’s greatness and revivify Indian culture on a spiritual basis, is obscured and the fight for freedom "secularised": looking at India as the Mother, which was initially regarded as a supreme virtue, is now portrayed as unacceptably "communal"37 —of course by ideologies that opposed the very idea of Independence in the first place.

Our real ties are with the Bharatavarsha that lies outside our textbooks. If the history of this tie for a substantially long period gets lost, our soul loses its anchorage. After all, we are no weeds or parasitical plants in India. Over many hundreds of years, it is our roots, hundreds and thousands of them, that have occupied the very heart of Bharatavarsha. But, unfortunately, we are obliged to learn a brand of history that makes our children forget this very fact. It appears as if we are nobody in India; as if those who came from outside alone matter.38

Other terms such "barbarism" and "feudalism," often used in the context of ancient or "medieval" Indian society, were also introduced by Marxist scholars to make Indian history appear to follow the same phases as Europe. Ancient Indian society, as any other, might not have been perfect, but it reached enviable heights in many fields and was certainly not "barbaric." Several scholars (such as U.S. historian André Wink recently) have also objected to the insistence by Marxist historians on finding "feudalism" in the pre-Muslim period (seventh to tenth centuries ce) and shown how they bungled their data to reach foregone conclusions.39

3) Marxist models of Indian history: The current models of Indian history, responsible for most of the above distortions, are broadly Marxist40 and tend to look upon India’s history as nothing but a history of invasions, which was Marx’s express view:

India could not escape the fate of being conquered [by England], and the whole of her past history, if it be anything, is the history of the successive conquests she has undergone. Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.41

Moreover, the Marxist view is based on a purely materialistic, social and economic definition of man. The Vedic religion thus becomes "primitive animism" (Romila Thapar42), the Gita promotes "feudalism"43 (again!) and its "fundamental defect" is to attempt "to reconcile the irreconcilable" (D. D. Kosambi44). Here, Marxist dialectics simply belittles what it cannot comprehend: the supra-intellectual synthetic spirituality peculiar to the Indian genius. It omits all deeper cultural and spiritual elements, replacing them at best by psychoanalysis (e.g. recently of Sri Ramakrishna or Lord Ganesha), or giving a grotesque overemphasis to caste: Indian history is worth studying only to understand the "gross social injustice" of the caste system and to stop those who "clamour for the restoration of ancient culture and civilization" because they want "to prevent [India’s] progress," a progress based of course on "the achievements of modern science and technology."45

The result is a de-Indianized academic teaching of Indian history, from which the foundations of Indian civilization are simply missing. Indian society is presented as basically retrograde, afflicted by a constant "class struggle" between castes, with no binding cement and no common identity: the logical outcome can only be the atomization of India, which some Marxist historians occasionally predict publicly.46

The central purpose of a history must be to investigate and unfold the values which age after age have inspired the inhabitants of a country to develop their collective will and to express it through the manifold activities of their life. Such a history of India is still to be written.47

R.C. Majumdar’s 11-volume series, The History and Culture of the Indian People, published a few decades ago by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan under Munshi’s impulsion, is what came closest to this goal, but has long been in need of extensive revision in view of much new material. There have been, meanwhile, a number of recent publications by fine historians, such as Upinder Singh,48 Himanshu Prabha Ray or Nayanjot Lahiri, to name only a few, who have been careful to avoid both extremes: the Marxist perspective at one end, and the excessively nationalist at the other, which views everything in ancient India as glorious and is obsessed with a high antiquity (usually a result of a literalist reading of the Epics or Puranas).

India, as she is, is a problem which can only be read by the light of Indian history. Only by a gradual and loving study of how she came to be, can we grow to understand what the country actually is, what the intention of her evolution, and what her sleeping potentiality may be.49