Politics Of Indian History -2

[acharya]

<!--QuoteBegin-Viren+Sep 25 2006, 02:22 PM-->QUOTE(Viren @ Sep 25 2006, 02:22 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin--><!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->D.N. Jha<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
What a surprise. This guy is around working full time from California to Karnataka.
[right][snapback]57967[/snapback][/right]
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It should be Kaliforrnia to Karnataka!

[ramana]

This is really book review bu if you read it its about the politics of Indian history. From the Telegraph, 3 Nov., 2006
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->TIME’S SEPOYS
- Narrative history sans dullness 


The Last Mughal: The fall of a dynasty By William Dalrymple, Penguin, Rs 695

Writing to a free-floating man of letters in the summer of 1950, Hugh Trevor-Roper, then a young Oxford don, made a revealing confession: “I have been in Oxford incessantly, slowly — with infinite slowness — writing a book of infinite pedantic exactitude on a character of infinite dullness; but I must rehabilitate myself with the learned world after writing a best seller (The Last Days of Hitler).”

The yet-to-be Lord Dacre was only slightly guilty of caricature. <b>Even before the standard-bearers of ideological fashion — Marxism, deconstructionist theory and post-modernism being the more ridiculous examples — perfected writing in indecipherable code, many professional historians had abandoned the art of “pedantic exactitude”. The writing of Indian history was among the foremost casualties — particularly after the establishment Marxists made ‘empirical research’ a term of vitriolic abuse. History became the battlefield of grand theories centred on loaded concepts such as feudalism, imperialism and the mode of production.</b>

These skewed priorities may explain why it took some eight decades for a historian to requisition the huge bundles of the Mutiny Papers from the vaults of the National Archives in New Delhi and weave their contents into a compelling history of Delhi in 1857.

At a time when the government is devising plans to celebrate 100 years of an upheaval which began with the massacre in a Meerut church, it may sound awkward to express gratitude to a Briton — even if he is a Scot — for rescuing the annals of a bloody chapter of India from the pedants and pamphleteers. <b>William Dalrymple hasn’t allowed himself to be distracted by the silly debate over the label to be attached to the events that led to the formal demise of the East India Company and the Timurid dynasty — he has merely called it the Uprising. He has focussed on telling a gripping story as seen through the eyes of Britons and Indians who were caught in the maelstrom. The Last Mughal is narrative history at its very best.</b>

<b>At the same time, the book provides larger insights into the nature of the Uprising. </b>At the root of the sepoy disquiet was a real fear that their faith was being subverted by the rising clout of Christian evangelists who combined their contempt for native religions with racial high-handedness. There is little evidence in this study of economic deprivation or dislocation hardening native attitudes against the Company. <b>Dalrymple’s account of the shift in Anglo-Indian attitudes, from the nativism of the White Mughals to the Bible-thumping of individuals such as Padre Jennings, is telling. There is also the parallel story of a hitherto unknown subterranean jihadi current which, while motivating a clutch of sepoys and Muslim citizens into undertaking fanatical resistance, also undermined the unity of the opposition to British rule.</b>

The ambience of the Mughal court in decline and the personality of the last emperor are the two central themes of this book, and Dalrymple’s account is both evocative and sensitive. The meaningless intrigues involving the succession plans of the two principal begums of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the decrepitude of the salatins — the most appropriate translation would be royal trash — the dissolute life of the princes and the make-believe poetic world around the emperor, Mirza Ghalib and Zauq are wonderfully captured. In contrasting the ordered life in the British Civil Lines with the dissolute bohemianism around the Mughal court, Dalrymple paints a picture of two cities in an “uneasy equilibrium”. <b>It is a portrait of two very different worlds — one assertive and calculating, and the other, in the throes of terminal decline.</b> From a reading of the social life in Delhi before May 1857, it is easy to gauge why the military campaign against the beleaguered British army was marked by incredible ineptitude and why the Uprising ended the way it did.

One major shortcoming of Dalrymple’s narrative is that while the life of the British officials, civilians and the Mughal court is vividly documented, Delhi’s other half — the Hindus — appears as incidental extras. <b>There is, for example, hardly any attempt to comprehend the political and moral economy of the pillaging Gujars who surrounded the countryside around Delhi but rarely put in an appearance inside Shahjehanabad. Equally, Dalrymple is somewhat perfunctory in his treatment of the Hindu financiers who played such an important role in the economy of Delhi. What, apart from sullenness over unrealizable loans to the royal family, propelled them into becoming British informers? Why was there such a divergence of attitudes between the Hindu, moneyed classes in Delhi who preferred the “Company’s peace”, and the overwhelmingly upper-caste Hindu sepoys who imagined that self-respect lay in a resurrected Mughal empire?</b>

Part of the omission can be explained by the nature of the primary sources. The Mutiny Papers were collected by the officials of the Crown as offshoots of judicial proceedings against the rebels and an attempt to grapple with the “Muslim problem”. Yet, since the issue of future recruitment of upper-caste Hindus from the cow-belt into the British Indian army did occupy the minds of administrators, it is inconceivable that the “Hindu problem” wasn’t simultaneously addressed.

Dalrymple, it would seem, is engulfed by wistful nostalgia. Today, he writes with some bitterness and more than a touch of naïveté, “if you visit the Mughal city of Agra…note how the roundabouts are full of statues of the Rani of Jhansi, Shivaji and even Subhas Chandra Bose; but not one image of any Mughal emperor has been erected anywhere in the city since Independence”. <b>The ticklish consequences of installing a statue of any Muslim notwithstanding, Dalrymple’s gripe is that while the ancien regime suffered the barbaric consequences of the failure of the Uprising, it was a new Anglophone India which moulded the nation’s recovery of self-esteem.</b>

A melancholic lament for the world we left behind doesn’t detract from the richness of Dalrymple’s history. Indeed, it contributes immeasurably to its narrative force. Historians, like balladeers of yore, aren’t obliged to be either non-judgmental or treat their subjects as lifeless objects. <b>Dalrymple belongs to a line of writers outside academia — Sir Arthur Bryant, Isaac Deutscher, A.N. Wilson and Andrew Roberts are a few names that come to mind — who have rescued history from the professional practitioners of “infinite dullness”. We await his future writings on Mughal India with expectation. </b>

SWAPAN DASGUPTA
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[acharya]

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritche...sia_topics.html

About particular topics...


==ALEXANDER THE GREAT== His world-conquering journey ended along the Indus: [site]
==ALPHABETS OF SOUTH ASIA== The personal website of Eden Golshani, who must be one remarkable eighteen-year-old: [site]
=="BANDIT QUEEN"== The life and death of the (in)famous Phoolan Devi: [site]
==BRITISH== The Imperial Gazetteer of India. W. W. Hunter, J. S. Cotton, R. Burn, and W. S. Meyer, eds. New edition, published under the authority of His Majesty's secretary of state for India in council. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1908-1931 [v. 1, 1909]: [site]. Particularly helpful are Vol. 1 [site] and Vol. 2 [site], with their extensive overview essays on many basic topics.
==BRITISH== An excellent archive of British colonial documents: [site]: an archive on education in particular: [site]; the Statistical Abstract of 1840-65: [site]
==BRITISH== "British Voices from South Asia"-- an archive of oral histories: [site]
==BRITISH== "The British Presence in India Before and After 1857" by Peter Marshall, on the BBC website: [site]
==BUDDHISM== The Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art-- a collection with great variety and depth: [site]
==CALENDARS== "India Through its Calendars," a lively and informative overview by Amartya Sen: [site]
==CARAVANSERAIS== An excellent UNESCO website about these widely distributed rest-houses for merchants and travelers: [site]
==CENSUS INDIA 1891== A searchable database of very interesting material: [site]
==CENSUS INDIA NOW == The latest, from an Indian government website: [site]
==CHILD LABOR== An informative overview article: [site]; and a recent example: [site]
==CHILD LABOR== A book by a remarkable young American who has been documenting and fighting this widespread problem: [site]
==CLOTHING== A women's artisan cooperative in Bombay makes jackets that I love, and many other items that you might love too: [site]
==COINS OF INDIA AND CENTRAL ASIA== A good site for comparisons: [site]
==COINS OF SOUTH ASIA== A really excellent, sophisticated research site [site]; and a more narratively organized one that might be easier to use: [site]
==COLONIALISM BEGINS== Robert Kerr, ed. General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Arranged in Systematic Order: Forming a Complete History of the Origin and Progress of Navigation, Discovery, and Commerce, by Sea and Land, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time (1811): [on this site]
==COWS, SACRED== Historian D. N. Jha presents evidence of cow-sacrifice and beef-eating in ancient India: [site]
==DALITS== "Broken People: Caste Violence Against India's Untouchables" [site], a Human Rights Watch report, March 1999
==DALITS== The most comprehensive single site I've found: [site]
==DALITS== "Untouchable." National Geographic, June 2003: [site]
==DALITS== A special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 18,1 (1998): [site]
==DIASPORA== On the South Asian diaspora in the United States: [site]
==DIASPORA== An overview issue on the subject, with many thoughtful opinions: Seminar 538, June 2004: [site]
==EDUCATION== An overview page of recent articles from Outlook India: [site]
==ELECTIONS== Phil Oldenburg of the Southern Asian Institute at Columbia University presents some of his slides of recent South Asian election scenes, with commentary and other useful information: [site]
==EMERGENCY== "Emergency Special" (1975), from the Indian Express: [site]
==EMOTIONS == Owen M. Lynch, Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990): [site]
==FILMS== Mary Anne Weaver, "India's Bandit Queen: A saga of revenge -- and the making of a legend of 'the real India'," The Atlantic, Nov. 1996: [site]
==FILMS== Philip Lutgendorf's delightful and increasingly comprehensive website on popular Hindi films: [site]
==FILMS== "Bollywhat.com," an overview site devoted to Bollywood film culture, maintained by Meredith McGuire: [site]
==GAY RIGHTS== An unexpected perspective on being gay in Pakistan: [site]
==GLOBALISM==Some intelligent thoughts on the cultural, political, and human-rights aspects of globalism from Amartya Sen: [site]
==GODDESSES== "Devi, the Great Goddess," a wide-ranging, beautifully organized exhibit sponsored by the Sackler Museum: [site]
==GODDESSES== "A Superhit Goddess: Jai Santoshi Maa and Caste Hierarchy in Indian Films," by Philip Lutgendorf: [on this site]
==HINDU-MUSLIM CONFLICT==PBS presents a show, "Soul of India," about the Bajrang Dal and violence in Gujarat; click on show title for more resources: [site]
==HINDU-MUSLIM RELATIONS== Many useful links on another page of this site.
==HUMAN RIGHTS== The UN Declaration of Human Rights, a special analytical website by CCNMTL, at Columbia University: [site]
==HUMAN RIGHTS== Links to relevant sites for all the countries of South Asia from the Univ. of California Library: [site]; and from Derechos: [site]
==HUMAN RIGHTS== Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia-- a useful research site full of links to good material: [site]
==INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT== Interviews with Princess Abida Sultan of Bhopal (d.2002), who knew everybody and remembered a lot: [site]
==INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT== Historical film clips of Gandhi and others, and much much more: [site]
==INDIA AT 50== Frontline 14,16 (Aug. 9-22, 1997): India Independent-- 50 Years. A special issue full of very significant articles: [site]
=="THE INDIAN OCEAN: CRADLE OF GLOBALIZATION== A lovely study site for teachers and students: [site]
==INDIRA GANDHI'S ASSASSINATION and its aftermath== "The Winter in Delhi, 1984," by Aseem Shrivastava: [site]
==INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION== The Harappa website, as good as it gets-- superb on the Indus Valley Civilization, early photos, and much more: [site]
==INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION== The famous "Horseplay in Harappa" controversy, exposing fraudulent Hindutva claims about the Indus Valley civilization: [site]
==INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION== An overview of the "Hindutva" approach, with many useful cross-cultural parallels (in PDF format): [site]; or [on this site]
==JAINISM== "Jain History-- an Outline": [site]
==JOURNALISM== SAJA, the South Asian Journalists' Association, maintains an extensive, wide-ranging, and very helpful set of links: [site ]
==JOURNALS== Himal, a magazine that takes an intelligent interest in all the countries of South Asia: [site]
==JOURNALS== Manushi, (Delhi) an indispensable "journal about women and society": [site]
==KRISHNA== An interactive exploration of his life from the Seattle Art Museum: [site]
==LANGUAGES== An overview of the "Languages and Scripts of India": [site]
==LANGUAGES== The Proto-Indo-European language site, with much information and many fascinating illustrations: [site]
==NGO information== "Pro-poor.org," the most comprehensive source, and documentation center, on the work of South Asian NGO's: [site]
==NGO information== "Social Movements in South Asia," an excellent site maintained by the U.C. Berkeley library: [site]
==OVERVIEW== "MANAS," an excellent general historical/cultural overview site: [site]
==OVERVIEW== An intricate, idiosyncratic website of great diversity and mixed quality, "Kamat's Potpourri": [site]
==PEACE AND SECULARISM== "South Asia Citizens Web, helping people connect across borders and work for social justice" [site]
==PEACE AND SECULARISM== "Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia" [site]
==PEACE AND SECULARISM== "Eqbal Ahmad." Many articles by him, including a tribute by Noam Chomsky to him as a "secular Sufi": [site]
=="PEASANTS AND MONKS"== William R. Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). An unusual and fascinating perspective on colonial social history: [site]
==PHOTOS== A collection of fine, well-organized 19th-century photos, and much else as well, at Harappa: [site]
==PHOTOS== Many wonderful photos by the first well-known Indian photographer, Lala Deen Dayal (1844-1905): [site]
==PHOTO TOUR== A well-captioned album of photos taken by Prof. Paul Brians and friends in a number of Indian cities in 1992: [site]
==PLATE TECTONICS== A wonderful site on plate tectonics, showing graphically how the South Asian plate travelled north and the Himalayas were formed in a huge collision: [site]
==QAWWALI== A good overview article about this very popular form of sufi devotional music: [site]
==REBELLION OF 1857== Much material *on this site*
==RELIGIONS: CENSUS DATA== Numerical data on Indian religions, from the census of 2000: [site]
==RELIGIOUS FREEDOM== The State Department's "International Religious Freedom Report" for the countries of South Asia, December 2003: [site]
==RELIGIOUS SITE VISITS== Short videos of visits to important South Asian shrines, from Emory Univ.: [site]
==RITUALS== "Cooking for the Gods: the Art of Home Ritual in Bengal": [site]
==ROCK ART== Many lovely examples of prehistoric rock art from all over South Asia: [site]
==RULERS== Worldwide listings of names and dates of rulers, from 1700 onwards: [site]
==SARIS== Such gorgeous garments-- here's some information about them: [site]
==SHIVAJI== Wry commentary on modern exploitation of his name, by Dilip Chitre: [on this site]
==TANTRA== A very comprehensive and scholarly website: [site]
==TEMPLES== A scholarly look at the Hindu and Buddhist temples of the Salt Range Mountains in Pakistan, dating from the 6th to the early 11th centuries: [site]
==TEMPLES== "Templenet," an encyclopedia of Hindu temples: [site]
==TIMELINES== A neat meta-historical timeline: [site]
==TIMELINES== A very convenient series of timelines at the Met, starting in 8000 BCE: [site]
==TIPU SULTAN== "The Tiger and the Thistle: Tipu Sultan and the Scots in India," a wonderful site by the National Galleries of Scotland: [site]
==TRADE AND ENVIRONMENT== A series of well-documented analytical case studies, including many South Asian ones: [site]
==TRIBES== Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Tribes of India: The Struggle for Survival (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982): [site]
==VEDAS== A site describing an elaborate "Vedic sacrifice" performed in 2003: [site]
==VEDAS== For a variety of scholarly materials, see the EJVS archives: [site]. One especially good introductory article by Michael Witzel about claims that the Vedic Aryans were indigenous to India: [in PDF format]
==VILLAGE LIFE== "A Virtual Village," an excellent website by Peter Gottschalk of Wesleyan University and Matthew Schmalz of Holy Cross, with much input from real North Indian villagers, both Hindu and Muslim: [site]
==WOMEN'S ISSUES== South Asia Women's Network, the best overview: [site]
==WOMEN'S ISSUES== The excellent Manushi, "a journal about women and society": [site]; and its archives: [site]
==YOGA== A classic text of hatha yoga (the kind most popular in the West) with illustrated English translation: [site]

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Detoxification is history </b>
Pioneer.com
Leftists and assorted 'pinkos' who criticised the NDA for rewriting history are silent when UPA does the same to gain politically, says JS Rajput

<b>The vindictive hype of 'detoxification', 'de-saffronisation' and 'de-Talibanisation' of education seems over. Those who fought against the removal of nine 'controversial, distorted and incorrect' passages from history textbooks in 2001 are in the process of removing 75 passages. History repeats itself. This unprecedented U-turn is not unexpected for those pronounced 'guilty' of 'communalising school education in India' like this writer.</b>

Within 24 hours of the Haryana Chief Minister calling on Minister for Human Resource Development, CB-SE issued an advisory to all the affiliated schools not to use certain portions from the history books concerning Jats. It was that simple. The Jats, predominantly from Haryana, and also from Punjab and UP, had threatened to launch an agitation if biased, incorrect, and derogatory portions in history textbooks concerning them were not removed.

The Chief Minister saw the political import of the issue and acted fast. The Union Ministry had no alternative but to act. The CBSE Chairman, working under instructions, pontificated, "This portion has been excluded from classroom teaching and no questions will be set in any internal tests or board examination to evaluate students' understanding of the content of the various portions in future."

<b>The deleted portion reported in the media reads: "After the death of Aurangzeb, they (the Jats) created disturbances all around Delhi. Though originally a peasant uprising, the Jat revolt, led by zamindars, soon became predatory. They plundered all and sundry... They took active part in court intrigues at Delhi, often changing sides to suit their own advantage." </b>

The UPA Government had launched a vigorous campaign against 'communalisation' and 'saffronisation' of education, consequent to removal of nine passages in 2001. Interestingly, the first shot was fired by Delhi Government, which removed a passage concerning Guru Tegh Bahadur. NCERT followed suit. In 2004-05, old history books were reprinted hurriedly, expunged passages duly protected, and distributed as 'reference books' to all the CBSE schools.

This was an unprecedented act in the history of school education in the name of 'secularism'. It was pointed out by NCERT in the<b> Delhi High Court on November 7, 2006, that out of 75 paragraphs pointed out as objectionable and derogatory, 46 have already been removed, 21 shall be removed in the next year and the remaining eight in the academic year 2007-08. </b>The much-hyped detoxification now stands mutilated.

<b>None from the self-proclaimed number ones in 'national print media' or 'the fastest and the best' in the electronic media even cursorily recalled the removal of passages in 2001. CBSE could have honestly informed the people why these were brought back in 2004 and how these are being deleted again, as "passages in respect of which there is some reservation and objection". If the deletions in 2001 were communal, and bringing it back in 2004 was secular, then how does one describe the fresh removal in 2006?</b>

<b>The double standards of Marxist-Stalinists are well documented. They enjoy enormous clout in the present Government. It is now clear that the Ministry was overwhelmed by the Leftist propaganda in its initial days and said 'yes' to practically every item on their 'wish-list'. </b>Can any one forget that in July 2004 they successfully got a book on Vedanta by Dr Karan Singh 'banned'? A book on Thirukkural, prepared for teachers, met with the same fate. They had shouted themselves hoarse that removal of paragraphs in 2001 was condemnable. Their quiet approval to the removal of passages from the much-loved history books in 2006 confirms their hypocrisy.

Mainstream print and electronic media, which brought out full-page supplements and conducted television debates on changes in history books in 2000-02, today appear to have forgotten all about distortion of history and the campaign launched against NCERT. The UPA's criticism of the educational changes initiated under the NDA was for its political survival. It reversed these in 2004. <b>Today, UPA is doing what the NDA had done in 2000. </b>In politics, they say, there are no permanent friends or foes. <b>UP local bodies election results have sent signals to both UPA and NDA. Are new alignments in offing</b>. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

<b>FABRICATIONS ON THE WAY TO THE FUNERAL</b>
<i>ARUN SHOURIE ON EMINENT HISTORIANS OF INDIA</i>

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Progress is both right and duty

*JS Rajput, Pioneer, Nov. 22, 2006*

The supporters of religion-based reservation have a great chance to wave the Justice Rajinder Sachar Committee report to further their movement. So will have their opponents. Political pundits will be busy assessing its impact on Uttar Pradesh elections. The contents of the report are sure to reverberate during the winter session of Parliament for days together, if not weeks. The debate is likely to follow the well-delineated political lines and shall certainly miss objectivity. Efforts to arrive at a national consensus may, in all probability, remain absent. Expectations and apprehensions would abound. Within the Muslim community, the report may generate hope.

Politically oriented individuals, groups and political alliances on both sides of the power-divide could use its contents as a new tool to play politics. This is not the first time since Independence that India has learnt about the inadequacy of the well being of the minority community. The essence of what the Sachar Committee has put on record is common knowledge.

Successive Governments have made promises before elections, leading to persistent accusations of 'appeasement' and vote-bank politics. Ironically, these promises have generally been forgotten post-elections, especially after a Government has been formed. The Muslim community got practically nothing. Lack of awareness, education and forward-looking leadership has accentuated stagnation.

The UPA Government owes its stint in power to the plank of the much-hyped fear of "communal elements", projected as the enemy No. 1 of the Muslim community. These well-wishers get power and pelf; the Muslim community in return gets insecurity and isolation. In the early years of Independence, "others" could be blamed. Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad said, "It must be stated that the debacle of Indian Muslims is the result of colossal blunders committed by the Muslim Leagues' misguided leadership."

Who shall the Union Government now blame for the sad state of affairs of the Muslim community? Logically, it has to be the party that has held the reins of power for most of the years at the Centre and States. During the last 30 months, what have Indian Muslims got except the announcement of minority status to the Aligarh Muslim University, a ministry for minority affairs and a couple of committees and commissions, and reports of some of them?

Four decades of professional experience in a multi-religious educational system of the country, besides working in educational institutions at various levels, does entitle one to claim some acquaintance with the issue at hand. Last month, delivering a lecture in the Zakir Hussain College of Education, Darbhanga, I asked the audience of professors and students: Why have things remained stagnant with the minority community during all these years? The sum and substance of the answers was, "Because of the politicians and us."

<b>I referred to a specific study conduced over 25 years ago, a reference to which is relevant at this stage. Titled "Equality of Educational Opportunity and Muslims", it was a doctorate-level research completed under my guidance in 1980. A senior faculty member of the NCERT, Mr BS Gupta, conducted the study in 111 schools of four districts of Western Uttar Pradesh that had a high Muslim population. Mr Gupta was a sociologist hailing from the region and familiar with its social dynamics. The districts were Etah, Etawah, Muzaffarnagar and Moradabad. The researcher interviewed 100 students along with 100 parents. Data was collected by using school information 'blanks' and two interview schedules. Students were from classes VI to X. Mr Gupta collected all the data personally, leaving no scope for ambiguity.

The findings of the study are summarised below:
The distribution of Hindu-Muslim population was 79:21; enrolments were in the ratio 93:7. The dropout rates were higher for Muslim children.
The pass percentage of Hindus was much higher than that of Muslim children.</b>
The textbooks in Hindi, compulsory Sanskrit and social studies had contents with religious overtones, not to the liking of the minority community. A sense of their religion being ignored was evident.
Parents and children from the Muslim community wanted Urdu as the medium of instruction while the schools were all Hindi medium.
Only 10 out of 111 schools had facilities for teaching Urdu.
No Hindu student offered Urdu as a subject.
The prayers, the dramas, use of pictures and paintings, the writings on the walls in Hindi, the invitees and visitors to the schools indicated a cultural bias towards the majority community.
The contents of textbooks, the school culture, lack of facilities for learning Urdu and the absence of mother tongue as the medium of instruction created disinterest in students, leading to lower enrolment and rates and higher dropout rates.
No such empirical data indicating the present position is available. Based on intensive interactions and impressions, one can infer logically that nothing in the above context has changed in favour of the Muslim community.

Yes, they are now more intensely identified as vote-banks and suffer that stigma for no fault of theirs. Those in the thick of things could simply brush aside the above findings as nothing new. I wish it were so to those who formulate policies for minority education and are always talking about the need to initiate more action in the interest of Muslims. They shall be doing so again as an Action Taken Report (ATR) has to be prepared on Sachar Committee report following certain procedures. The issue of quota will now shift from OBCs to religion-based reservation. In his autobiography, Government from Inside, NV Gadgil refers to the initial draft of Nehru-Liaquat Pact which was presented to the Cabinet by Jawaharlal Nehru:
"Final two paragraphs in the agreement accepted the principle of reservations for Muslims in proportion to their population in all the services and representative bodies in the constituent states of India." It goes to the credit of Nehru that these were dropped, as the Cabinet did not approve of it. Even a peripheral perusal of the discussions of the Constituent Assembly would indicate why religion-based reservation was rejected and not included in the Constitution. Gadgil himself said in the Cabinet meeting, "These two paragraphs nullify the whole philosophy of the Congress." Has this statement lost its relevance?

Reservation or no reservation, Muslims or not, all those who lag behind deserve an extra-foot forward from those in power, as also from community leaders. They deserve primary school, a healthcare centre, a corruption-free public distribution system and sustained initiatives to provide public education to the opinion leaders of communities. This one step can do tremendous good to the beneficiaries.

http://tinyurl. com/txeuv
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[Guest]

came in email:
Delhi High Court judgement of 7 Nov. 2006 on 75 objectionable passages in NCERT textbooks

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->IN THE HIGH COURT OF DELHI AT NEW DELHI

WRIT PETITION (CIVIL) NO. 17909-13 OF 2005 (PIL)





IN THE MATTER OF:

SH. DEENA NATH BATRA & OTHERS                                          …PETITIONERS



            VERSUS

UNION OF INDIA & OTHERS                                                        ….RESPONDENTS





WP © NO. 17909-13/2005 AND CN NO. 13216, 13404, 13169, 11534/05, 13884-85 OF 2005



Present:            Sh. R. P. Bansal Senior Advocate with

                        Mr. Rakesh Mahajan, Mr. Prabhat Ranjan Advocates

                        For the Petitioners

                        Mr. Virender Sood Advocate for UOI

                        Amit Bansal for respondent No. 2

                        Ms. Manisha for Amit Bansal for CBSE

                        Rohit Kumar Singh for respondent No. 3

CORAM

HON'BLE MR. JUSTICE DR. MUKUNDAKAM SHARMA

HON'BLE MS. JUSTICE HIMA KOHLI



ORDER

07.11.2006

<b>It is stated by the learned counsel for the NCERT that out of 75 objectionable passages in the text books which are pointed out by the petitioner, 45 of them have already been removed by the NCERT. It is also stated that 21 objectionable passages will be removed from the text books with effect from 1.4.2007 in view of new curriculum introduced and the remaining 8 passages shall also be taken out from the texts with effect from 1.4.2008.</b>

In respect of one of the paragraphs of page 2 of Professor Bipan Chandra's Modern India, textbooks for class XII, the NCERT has suggested changes to the existing paragraph in view of certain objections from certain quarters. The new passage which is replacing the existing one has been set out in the letter dated 3/06.11.2006. On consideration of the contents of the new passage which would replace the existing one, we grant permission to NCERT to issue circulars for bringing changes by6 inserting the new passages and replacing the existing one. An advisory letter to the said effect shall be issued by the NCERT.

So far as the remaining, 20 objectionable passages which are being with effect from 1.4.2007 are concerned, in our considered prima facie opinion curriculum should be aimed to give positive education and since those 20 objectionable passages are being taken out by the NCERT from the text books, effective from 1.4.2007, they should give instructions to the appropriate and concerned authorities not to set any question from such passages in respect of which there is some reservation and objection. We are not deciding the validity of the same at this stage but we shall be informed about the response of the NCERT within four weeks.

We are also shown the opinion expressed by the NCERT Director, Krishan Kumar and statement of CBSE Chairman, Ashok Ganguly which is reported in the "Express News Service" dated 24.10.2006. The said statement indicates that there have been some consideration and guidance was also issued to the schools that the students should not be tested on the basis of objectionable passages in the curriculum in which some sweeping statements are made against a particular community.

Learned counsel for the CBSE shall also obtain instructions from the CBSE in respect of the aforesaid suggestion.



Renotify on 11th January, 2007.

Copy of the order be given dasti to the counsel appearing for CBSE and NCERT.



                                                                        Dr. Mukundakam Sharma, J.

                                                                       

                                                                                    Hima Kohli, J.



November 07, 2006

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[acharya]

http://www.sacw.net/India_History/index.html

Looking for a Hindu Identity
by D N Jha
[Presentation at the 66th Indian History Congress, Shantiniketan, January 28, 2006]

http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory...sid=167217

Review Article
India: The War Over History
by William Dalrymple [April 7, 2005]

The Rediff Interview / Romila Thapar
[February 10, 2005]

A scathing indictment
by T.K. Rajalakshmi
The exoneration of the historians involved with the "Towards Freedom Project" in the interim report of the Bandopadhyay Committee is evidence of the BJP-led government's communal agenda. [January 29, 2005]

Forgotten themes
R. Champakalakshmi talks to historian Romila Thapar [December 19, 2004]

History Textbooks in India: Narratives of Religious Nationalism
by K N Panikkar [October, 2004]

Caught in historical cliches
by Praful Bidwai [September 11, 2005]

"Learning History Without Burden" - the Advisory prepared for India's National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) on how teachers could teach using the pre-2000 and the existing textbooks, which are flawed and biased, and endeavour to work towards more child friendly books in future. [August 2004]

Report of the Panel of Historians submitted to Ministry of Human Resource
Development, Government of India [August 2004]

India considers historic rewrite
by Scott Baldauf [July 16, 2004]

India's Battle Over its History
by J. Sri Raman [June 4, 2004]

One nation's many pasts
by Romila Thapar [April 2, 2004]

Saffron Infusion: Hindutva, History, and Education
by Latha Menon [?, 2004]

Historians plan 'parallel textbooks' [December, 2003]

Myth and History
by AndrÉ BÉteille [October 11, 2003]

Text-Books, Politics and the Practice of History
by Tripta Wahi [September 2003]

Bulldozing the Past into Existence
by Janaki Nair [2003]

Romila Thapar: Her Struggle for a Non-Sectarian History Continues
by Richard Barnett and B. P. Giri [Fall 2003]

'The Problem' in: Rewriting History
by Neeladri Bhattacharya [2003]

In Defence of the Indian Historian Romila Thapar
by SACW Alert [April 28, 2003]

'Paradigm shift' in history? - I
'Paradigm shift' in history? - II
by Michael Witzel [April 1 and April 8, 2003]

A new brand of history - II
by Vishwa Mohan Jha [March 1, 2003]

A critique of NCERT texts - I
by Vishwa Mohan Jha [February 15, 2003]

History As Told By Non-Historians
by Anjali Modi

Teaching against Communalism: Role of Social Science Pedagogy
by Ananya Vajpeyi [December 21, 2002]

"Communalization of Education: The History Textbooks Controversy"
by the Delhi Historians' Group [2002]

Communalising Education
by Bipan Chandra, Yogendra Singh, Namwar Singh, G S Bhalla, Annie Koshy, Kamala Menon, Sumit Sarkar and a large number of others.
Delhi [March 9, 2002]

Communalisation of Education: Fighting history's textbook war [January 28, 2002]

History and community sentiment
by Rajeev Bhargava [Jan 02, 2002 ]

History and the enterprise of knowledge
by Amartya Sen
The text of inaugural address at the 61st session of the Indian History Congress. [Jan 20, 2001 ]

Hindutva and history: Why do Hindutva ideologues keep flogging a dead horse?
by Romila Thapar [October 13, 2000]

Horse Paly in Harrapa: The Indus Valley Decipherment Hoax
by Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer
(report on media hype, faked data, and Hindutva propaganda in recent claims that the Indus Valley script has been decoded. Ever since the publication of this article, the Hindutva Far right has consistently attacked and derided the work of Witzel and Farmer)
[October 13, 2000]

History and interpretation: Communalism and problems of historiography in India
by Irfan Habib

Rightist history is communal history
The Rediff Interview/ K N Panikkar

To reduce history to religion is distorting history
The Rediff Interview/ K N Panikkar

Communalism And History Textbooks
by R.S. Sharma

Does Indian History Need To Be Rewritten?
by Sumit Sarkar (December 2, 2001)

Time, Chronology and History: the Indian Case
by Harbans Mukhia

The history project
The reconstitution of the Indian Council of Historical Research points to a continuing drive to project a certain ideological agenda.
by Sukumar Muralidharan

Historians flay bid to communalise history (News report) Nov. 2001

The Communal Offensive and the Indian Council of Historical Research
by Tanika Sarkar [April 2000]

The falsification of history
by Parvathi Menon [March 18, 2000]

Righting or rewriting Hindu history
by Ann Ninan [February 2000]

Against Communalising History
by D. N. Jha [March 1999]

History Writing Takes a Strong Hindu Turn
by Ann Ninan [1998]

Hindu zealots altering history: scholars
by Deepshikha Ghosh, New Delhi

Project on history terminated
[The Hindu, 3 November 1998]

[acharya]

India: The War Over History
By William Dalrymple

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17906

In India, and among the Indian diaspora, a passionately contested battle is taking place over the interpretation of Indian history. Debates about rival versions of Indian prehistory or the struggles among the religions of medieval South Asia—the sort of arguments that anywhere else would be heard at scholarly conferences—have in India become the subject of political rallies and mob riots. Parallel with this there has been a concerted attempt by politicians of the Hindu far right to rewrite the history textbooks used in Indian schools and to bring historians and the writing of history under their direct control.[1]

On January 5, 2004, an incident at one of India's leading centers of historical research, the Bhandarkar Oriental Institute in the town of Pune, southeast of Bombay, demonstrated how serious things had become. Just after 10 AM, as the staff were opening up the library, a cavalcade of more than twenty jeeps drew up. Armed with crowbars, around two hundred Hindu militants poured into the institute, cutting the telephone lines. Then they began to tear the place apart.

The militants overturned the library shelves, and for the next few hours they kicked around the books and danced on them, damaging an estimated 18,000 volumes before the police arrived. More seriously still, they severely damaged a first-century manuscript of the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata, as well as a set of palm leaf inscriptions, some important relics from the prehistoric site of Mohenjodaro, and a very early copy of the Rig Veda—the world's oldest sacred text —once used by the great German scholar Max Mueller.

The cause of this violence was a brief mention of the institute in the acknowledgments of a short scholarly book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India by James W. Laine, a professor at Macalester College in Minnesota. The book, which had been praised by scholars when it appeared in the spring of 2003, was a study of Shivaji Bhonsle (1627–1680), the Hindu guerrilla leader from western India who successfully challenged the Mughal Empire and eventually had himself crowned as Chatrapati ("Lord of the Umbrella") of an independent Maratha state. Shivaji is now regarded as a near-divine figure by many Hindu nationalists. He is also the particular folk hero of Maharashtra, the region around Pune and Bombay, whose airport, station, and museum have all been renamed in his honor.

In his book, Laine wrote that Shivaji's parents "lived apart for most if not all of Shivaji's life," adding that "Maharashtrians tell jokes naughtily suggesting that his guardian Dadaji Konddev was his biological father." This was interpreted as a suggestion by Laine that Shivaji was illegitimate; after a horrified review was published in a Marathi weekly magazine, a series of protests began. In October an elderly Sanskrit scholar whom Laine had thanked in his acknowledgments was beaten up and had his face smeared with tar. To forestall further violence, in November the book was withdrawn from the Indian market by Oxford University Press, and an apology for causing offense was issued by the author.

The Indian newsmagazine Outlook ran its story of the attack on the institute across two pages under the banner headline "A Taste of Bamiyan," and most of the leading Indian papers carried editorials attacking what one referred to as the "Talibanization" of India. "We cannot have the mob write our history for us," said Indian Express.

Unluckily for Professor Laine, the attack took place in the months leading up to India's general election and the book soon became an election issue. The militants who carried out the attack held public meetings announcing that they wanted every Indian named in the book's acknowledgments to be arrested, questioned, and tried. Opening his campaign in Maharashtra, the then prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, issued a "warning to all foreign authors that they must not play with our national pride. We are prepared to take action against the foreign author [Laine] in case the state government fails to do so."

Leaders of the normally moderate Congress Party, which was in power in Maharashtra, not wishing to be outflanked on the issue, took an even harder line, and announced that they had instructed the CBI (the Indian equivalent of the CIA) "to arrest Laine through Interpol," adding: "Do you think the government will tolerate insults to national figures like Shivaji?"

Yet in the land of Mahatma Gandhi and the tradition of nonviolence, this was not the only case in which an obscure scholarly work on Indian history and religion has produced violent responses from India's Hindu nationalists. An increasing number of scholars both in India and abroad have found themselves the targets of hate campaigns from Hindu extremists and the "cybernationalists" of the Indian diaspora.

When an Indian edition of Ganesha: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings[2] by Paul Courtright, professor of religion at Emory University, was published in 2003, its cover—which Courtright had neither seen nor approved—showed a nude image of the elephant-headed god. Courtright promptly found himself the target of an e-mail petition that was signed by seven thousand people in one week as well as sixty threats of violence. One person wrote that the professor should be burned, another suggested that hanging might be more appropriate, and a third wrote that he would like to "kill the b@st@rd...shoot him in the head." As with the Shivaji book, Ganesha was promptly withdrawn by its Indian publisher and an apology issued.

In November 2003, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, I was acting as moderator of a lecture on the great Hindu epic the Ramayana given by the celebrated Sanskrit scholar Professor Wendy Doniger, who was once Courtright's teacher. Midway through the lecture, a man stood up, walked threateningly toward the podium, and threw an egg at Doniger, which narrowly missed her. During the questions that followed the lecture, Doniger faced a barrage of insults from a group who had come with the egg-thrower, and who maintained that as a non-Hindu she was unqualified to comment on their religion. Other lectures on India have since been broken up in similar circumstances. Within India, mobs mobilized by the Hindu right have occasionally attacked art exhibitions, libraries, publishers, and movie houses for their alleged unpatriotic and anti-Hindu bias; but for the first time the campaign now seemed to be spreading onto campuses worldwide.

Nor is it just foreign scholars who have been targeted. The historian D.N. Jha, who wrote The Myth of the Holy Cow, which pointed out the considerable historical and archaeological evidence that beef was routinely eaten during the Vedic period in the first millennium BC, received many death threats; his book was withdrawn in India. "This is terrorism," he told the press after he heard about the plan to arrest Laine. "The entire community of scholars and liberals have to fight it together. People have been frightened into silence—and politicians seem to encourage it." Romila Thapar, the most celebrated historian of early India, who has also received death threats for her historical work, was equally incensed: "The scope for a dispassionate look at history and scholarship is growing less in the country," she said. "It is frightening."
2.

The roots of the current conflict can be traced back to two rival conceptions of Indian history that began to diverge in the 1930s, during the struggle for freedom from the British Raj. While the Indian Congress Party, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, tended to emphasize national unity and sought to minimize historical differences between Hindus and Muslims in order to form a united front against the British, a rather different line was taken by India's more extreme Hindu nationalists. Some of these formed a neofascist paramilitary organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or the Association of National Volunteers.

Like the Phalange in Lebanon, the RSS was founded in direct imitation of European fascist movements. Like its 1930s models, it still sponsors daily parades in khaki uniforms and requires militaristic salutes; in fact, the RSS salute differs from that of the Nazis only in the angle of the forearm, which is held horizontally over the chest. The RSS aims to create a corps of dedicated paramilitary zealots who will bring about a revival of what it sees as the lost Hindu golden age of national strength and purity. The BJP, the Hindu nationalist party which ruled India from 1999 until last May, was founded as the political wing of the RSS, and most senior BJP figures hold posts in both organizations. The BJP is certainly much more moderate than the RSS—like the Likud in Israel, the BJP is a party which embraces a wide spectrum of right-wing opinion, ranging from mildly conservative free marketeers to raving ultra-nationalists. But both organizations believe, as the centerpiece of their ideology, that India is in essence a Hindu nation and that the minorities may live in India only if they acknowledge this.

Madhav Golwalkar, the early RSS leader still known simply as "the Guru," was the man who first formulated what later became the official RSS/BJP position on Indian history. He broke with conventional Indian views and the consensus of scholars in two ways. One was in his understanding of Indian prehistory. Most archaeologists, then as now, took the view that India had been settled during the second millennium BC by a group of peoples who spoke Indo-European— or Aryan—languages, and who arrived in India in an eastward migration from Iran.[3] Golwalkar disagreed. He believed that the Aryan ancestors of the Hindus were indigenous to India— in contrast to India's Muslims, who invaded India and still looked to Mecca as the center of their faith.[4] As he wrote in We, or Our Nationhood Defined: "The Hindus came into this land from nowhere, but are indigenous children of the soil always, from times immemorial."[5]

Golwalkar also diverged from the usual Indian consensus about India's successive medieval Muslim conquerors. The invasion of Hindu and Buddhist India by Central Asian Muslim Turks and Mughals between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries tended to be seen by historians associated with the British Raj essentially as a long sequence of pillage, in clear contrast, so the British liked to imagine, to the law and order that the British colonizing mission allegedly brought to India in the nineteenth century. In reaction to this British view, the Congress Party tended to emphasize that Hindus and Muslims were one people, ethnically indistinguishable from each other, whose culture had come to fuse over centuries of coexistence; any differences between the two were said to be the result of colonial policies of divide and rule. Golwalkar took a different line. The real enemy according to him was Islam: "Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindusthan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting to shake off the despoilers."

Golwalkar looked for inspiration to the Nazi thinkers of the 1930s. He believed an independent India should emulate Hitler's treatment of religious minorities, which he thoroughly approved of: "To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging of its Semitic Race, the Jews," he wrote admiringly soon after Kristallnacht:

Race pride at its highest has been manifested there. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures having differences going to the root to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.... The foreign races in Hindusthan [i.e., the Muslims] must adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture [...and] may [only] stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing—not even citizen's rights.

During Partition in 1947, the RSS was responsible for many horrifying atrocities against India's Muslims, and it was a former RSS member, Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi for (in RSS eyes) "pandering" to the Muslims. In the aftermath of this murder, Nehru decided to deal with the threat he believed the Hindu Nationalists posed to the nation and denounced the RSS as a "private army...which is definitely proceeding on the strictest Nazi lines."[6]

Partly as a result of Nehru's firm action, the Hindu nationalists were an insignificant political force during the first decades of Indian independence. With the RSS in disgrace, the triumphant Congress Party was able to disseminate its view of history without any interference. From the early 1960s, government-issued history textbooks accepted that the Hindus' ancestors had come to India from West Asia and that they arrived as migrants. The textbooks also emphasized the creation in medieval India of a "composite culture."[7]

The coming together of the great civilizations of the Middle East and South Asia under Muslim rule produced new hybrids in all spheres of life, and this was something that the textbooks concentrated on. In both Urdu and Hindi languages of great beauty mixed the Persian and Arabic words of the Muslim new incomers with the Sanskrit-derived vernaculars of northern India. In music the long-necked Persian lute was combined with the Indian vina to form the sitar. In architecture the monumental buildings of the Mughals—such as the Taj Mahal—reconciled the indigenous styles of the Hindus with the arch and dome of Islam, to produce a fusion more beautiful than either.

The Nehru-era school textbooks were the work of the greatest historians of their day, among them Professor Romila Thapar and R.S. Sharma, who tended to come from the left-leaning elite. Their work emphasized that Islam was spread in India not by the sword—there is no evidence of forced mass conversions—but by the example of the mystical Muslim Sufis, the holy men of Islam, some of whose teachings fused with those of the Hindu devotional Bhakti movement. They also emphasized the religious tolerance of many of the Mughal emperors, especially Akbar (1542–1605), who patronized Hindu temples and visited Hindu holy men. The same was also true of his great-grandson, Dara Shukoh, who had the Gita translated into Persian and who wrote The Mingling of Two Oceans, a comparative study of Hinduism and Islam which emphasized the compatibility of the two faiths and the common source of their divine revelations. Many other great Mughal writers showed similarly syncretic tendencies: Mirza Ghalib, a Muslim and the greatest of all Urdu poets, wrote praising the Hindu holy city Benares as the Mecca of India, saying that he sometimes wished that he could "renounce the faith, take the Hindu rosary in hand, and tie a sacred thread over my shoulder."[8]

Such examples of tolerant collaboration were impressive. Yet they were only one aspect of a more complex picture. Large-scale desecration of Hindu monuments had undoubtedly taken place when Turkish warlords first swept into India in the twelfth century. Indeed several of the first Muslim sultans were energetic iconoclasts and made a point of building their mosques from the rubble of destroyed temples, in some of which you can still see the defaced sculptures of their Hindu predecessors. This iconoclasm continued intermittently as regional sultanates sprang up across India during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.[9]

In slightly overstating the case for Hindu–Muslim amity the Nehruvian textbooks gave the Hindu nationalists an opening as they began to gather strength during the 1970s. The first stirring against the existing orthodoxy was felt in the aftermath of India's Emergency of 1975, during which elections were postponed and civil liberties were suspended. When the Congress Party was defeated in the elec-tion that followed, losing power for the first time since Independence, Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, was replaced by Moraji Desai, who famously used to begin his day by drinking a glass filled with his own urine. The RSS found Desai's government more receptive to their ideas than Congress had ever been, and Desai indicated that he was prepared to withdraw from circulation several history textbooks that the RSS objected to—though his government fell before it could do so.[10]

During the 1980s, the Hindu right rose slowly to power, partly as a result of a dispute that focused attention on the destruction of a temple. The argument turned on whether Mir Baqi, a general of the Mughal emperor Babur (1483–1530), had built his mosque at Ayodhya over a temple commemorating the birthplace of the Hindu god Lord Ram. Although there was no evidence to confirm either the existence of the temple or even the identification of the modern town of Ayodhya with its legendary predecessor, Hindu organizations began holding rallies at the site, campaigning for the rebuilding of the temple. Finally, during the 1992 rally, a crowd of 200,000 militants, whipped into a frenzy by BJP leaders and shouting "Death to the Muslims!" attacked the mosque with sledgehammers. One after another, as if they were symbols of India's traditions of tolerance, democracy, and secularism, the three domes were smashed to rubble.

Over the next month violent unrest swept India: mobs went on the rampage and Muslims were burned alive in their homes, scalded by acid bombs, or knifed in the streets. By the time the army was brought in, at least 1,400 people, almost all of them Muslims, had been slaughtered in Bombay alone. It was a measure of how polarized things had become in India that this violence apparently augmented the BJP's appeal to the electorate. In 1992, the BJP won 113 seats in parliament, up from 89 in the previous election. In 1996 that proportion virtually doubled, and the BJP became the largest party. After the 1999 general election, with 179 seats, they were finally able to take power.

The new BJP government moved quickly to take on India's historical establishment, and lost no time removing left-leaning historians from positions of power. On November 31, 1999, less than three months after the election victory, Romila Thapar was blocked from reelection to the Indian Council for Historical Research, which sponsors the work of scholars. Soon afterward she and several colleagues were removed from the Prasar Bharati, a group charged with reviewing the historical content of what is broadcast on the state-run Indian radio and television. They were replaced by political appointees, nonhistorians from the ultra-nationalist far right, who also took over India's major academic funding bodies. One of the appointees, K.S. Lal, was quoted as saying, "People who were labeled communalist are now in power. Now it's our turn to write the history."[11]

From the mid-1980s, BJP-ruled states had begun to issue, in regional languages, new textbooks that followed the party line on India's history and generally demonized Muslim rulers. The RSS also issued "saffronized" textbooks (saffron being the holy color of Hinduism) for use in its own nationwide network of schools, the Shishu Mandirs.[12] When the BJP came to power nationally, they extended this pattern across the country. In 2000, as an interim measure, numerous deletions were made from the existing history textbooks. A passage pointing out that cows were eaten in the Vedic period was, for example, removed from Thapar's Ancient India without her permission. Any suggestion that medieval Indian civilization might have developed its extraordinary richness specifically because of its multiethnic, multireligious character was suppressed.

The following year the syllabus was modified and several million copies of a new set of history textbooks were distributed nationally. They were all written by right-wingers who were not known as serious historians. As Romila Thapar pointed out in the Hindustan Times, the fact that the BJP failed to recruit any reputable historians from within Indian universities showed that the confrontation was not "between Leftist and Rightist historians but between professional historians and politicians sympathetic to the Hindutva persuasion [Golwalkar's term for Hindu nationalism]."[13]

Academic historians were horrified, and the organization representing them, the Indian History Congress, passed motions calling for the withdrawal of the textbooks. They also produced a booklet listing over one thousand errors, typos, and illiterate statements in the new books[14] : a textbook on modern India, for example, omitted any mention of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, allegedly because of "space constraints."[15]

Most controversial of all, however, was the medieval textbook by Meenakshi Jain. Her work was strongly criticized for depicting medieval South Asia as a paradise laid waste by barbarous Muslim invaders. Page after page is filled with atrocities as a succession of Hindu kingdoms engaged in "yet another glorious chapter of struggle" to resist the "Turkish yoke" before succumbing in a bloodbath of corpses and desecrated temples:

Everywhere [the Muslim ruler] ravaged temples, pillaged cities and collected untold wealth.... The defenseless residents fled to the temples for refuge. The city was taken, its temples destroyed and denuded of their treasures and great numbers of the fleeing inhabitants slain.[16]

While some of the massacres and desecrations described in the book undoubtedly did take place, others seem far-fetched. Just as the writers of the Old Testament thought it appropriate that their patriarchs should live for several hundred years, so medieval chroniclers tended to flatter the rulers for whom they wrote by exaggerating their potency in battle. Professor Narayani Gupta of Jamia Milia University in Delhi, who has vigorously campaigned against the new textbooks, told me:

Reading Jain's work, you get the impression that there is one homogeneous group called Muslims who ride around India doing terrible things, looting, pillaging, and building piles of skulls, and another group called Hindus who suffer silently under the Muslim yoke. It's totally unhistorical. The word "Hindu" was not used as a religious term until the nineteenth century, and in medieval sources there is no one term for Muslims. There are over thirty pages of temples being destroyed, and no sense at any point that Hindus and Muslims were living side by side, interacting on a daily basis, on every level. The book is deeply and distastefully anti-Muslim.

It is not just that the textbooks are historically invalid: in the aftermath of state-sponsored pogroms in Gujarat in April 2002, when over two thousand Muslims were hunted down and murdered, Indian historians fear that the propagation of such divisive myths can only lead to yet more violence; and they point out that it was in Gujarat that the state's history textbooks were first rewritten.[17] Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya of Jawaharlal Nehru University has written that the new textbooks are so inaccurate that they represent nothing less than

declarations of war against academic history itself, against the craft of the historian, against practices that authenticate historical knowledge.... When history is mobilized for specific political projects and sectarian conflicts; when political and community sentiments of the present begin to define how the past has to be represented; when history is fabricated to constitute a politics of hatred and violence, then we [historians] need to sit up and protest. If we do not then the long night of Gujarat will never end.[18]

In May 2004, to the amazement of everyone, and in defiance of every opinion poll, the BJP-led coalition was narrowly voted out of office, and the Congress returned to power for the first time in six years.

One of the first actions of the new government was to fire J.S. Rajput, the man who had supervised the preparation of the BJP's textbooks, and to authorize schools to return to the old textbooks if they wished, pending a full review of the entire question. In the meantime, government schools are allowed to use their own judgment in choosing between the two sets of books which give, in many cases, mutually contradictory accounts of the same events. This seems a very Indian compromise.

At the moment, following Congress's surprise election victory, the BJP is in disarray. But there can be little doubt that this only a temporary truce: both sides are passionate about their cause and believe that the other is guilty of deliberately distorting the truth. The last election result was more about the economic complaints of the rural poor than a referendum on Hindutva, and the BJP has recently shown every sign of hardening its position on such religious matters.

Exacerbating the problem in the long term is the absence of accessible, well-written, and balanced histories of India.[19] The most widely available introductions to the subject—the two Penguin histories, one covering the period up to the arrival of the Muslims by Romila Thapar, the other by Percival Spear, who takes the story up to Indian Independence—are both fine scholarly works, but somewhat dull and hard-going.[20] This as much as anything else has allowed myths to replace history among the members of India's middle class, who are keen consumers of fiction, but have surprisingly little home-grown nonfiction to interest them. One of the remarkable features of the recent spectacular burst of creativity among Indian writers has been that few writers are drawn either to serious biography or narrative history. Though Indian historians produce many excellent specialist essays and numerous learned journals, it is impossible, for example, to buy an up-to-date and accessible biography of any of India's pre-colonial rulers.

Here perhaps lies one of the central causes of the current impasse. It is not just up to the politicians to improve the fairness and quality of India's history. Unless Indian historians learn to make their work intelligible and attractive to a wider audience, and especially to their own voraciously literate middle class, unhistorical myths will continue to flourish.

[Bharatvarsh]

This retard despite writing tomes of articles always fails to give any examples of how these massacres done by Muslims are myths, that tells us a lot about his credibility.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->If this sounds bad, that night, William Dalrymple was beyond all hope. An acclaimed writer, it is a shame that anti-Hindu thinking is standard in his work. A man strangely obsessed by the phenomenon of Hindu fundamentalism (which does not even exist), and conspiracy theories where the BJP travel thousands of miles just to throw an egg at him. A man who claims that Indian nationalist and Hindu reformer Veer Savarkar was a pro-Nazi, when that man had actually urged support for the Allied cause in the war, and later was the solitary voice in independent India to demand recognition of the newly created state of Israel. A man who then turns his back when told the truth to speak to his white audience and his Indian slavish admirers who have a weakness for his white skin and the fact that he wears a cotton kurta (Indian style shirt). A man who does nopt give his email address out to anyone who disagrees with him just so he does not have to debate the venom he writes. A man who not content with fanning hatred of Hindus, has to then cross what was once the forbidden line, and has now started fuming at “Israeli bullying” and even defend the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl as an act by a person who was the victim of racism. Well not all victims of racism travel to a foreign land to behead innocent people, and the term “Israeli bullying” is perhaps the perfect euphemism for “Jewish arrogance” which would not at all be out of place on David Duke’s website. A man so degenerate in thinking, he can somehow find some justification for the terrorist bombs that go off with deadly frequency in Israel and India. A man who would no doubt act as some apologist of the terrorist bombs were to eventually go off in London, as they did in Madrid.

http://www.hinduhumanrights.org/articles/hatred.htm<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

came in email:

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->It is not unusual for ICHR luminaries to wobble in a drunken state, supported by volunteers, to the venue of ICHR annual conferences. (I have heard about this behaviour from many old-time members of ICHR).

But what is unsual is the letter received on 30 Nov. 2006 from Indian History Congress (Signed Prof. Bhairabi Prasad Sahu, Secretary, Delhi University). It says:

<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> URGENT Dear Colleague, I regret to inform you that the Kurukshetra University has now expressed its inability to host the 67th session of our Congress on 28-30 December 2006 or any later dates. The University authorities have given no reason in writing as to why they took this decision which itself was finally communicated to us on 13 November...A fresh venue and date (probably in February 2007) would be notified to all members, as soon as arrangements are made...[unquote]

Not unusual for an entity which indulges in suggestio falsi and suppressio veri, a trademark of communists and p-secs of Bharatam.

It is learnt from reliable sources that the Secretary ICHR is not telling the whole truth. An attempt was made to prepone the meet to 21 to 23 December since the earlier announced dates were not acceptable to Madame Antonia Maino (Natural, considering the christmas season). It is also learnt that ICHR learnt to their dismay that maamsam is banned in the pilgrimage, sacred city of Kurukshetra under the orders of Haryana Government. It is after all the trademark of many history luminaries to revel in enjoying maamsam and cite with joy that maamsam was eaten even during vedic times (pace RS Sharma, DN Jha). Hungry things, how can ICHR conduct its proceedings effectively, without eating maamsam?

I suggest that a reason why ICHR ran away from Kurukshetra is because of the successful adhives'an of Akhila Bharatiya Itihasa Sankalana Yojana (ABISY) from Nov. 17 to 20 where a Sarasvati Dars'an exhibition was unveiled and where all the 450+ delegates from all parts of the country, adopted an unanimous resolution that all archaeological sites along Vedic River Sarasvati should be fully explored and excavated to document the heritage of Bharatiya civilization and culture.

The Presidential address of ABISY 7th adhives'an (held every 3 years), delivered by Prof. Shivaji Singh, President, ABISY is a must read for ICHR luminaries and all students of history. I venture to suggest that just this one brilliant, forthright, remarkable speech made ICHR run away from Kurukshetra. (A website will be unveiled containing the deliberations of ABISY with particular reference to River Sarasvati findings).

Sure, there is a mating dance ongoing between communists and UPA (chaired by Madame Antonia Maino -- AK). But little would have Prakash Karat or even Irfan Habib foreseen that the dates of Dec. 28 to 30 are NO, NO for someone from Orbassano. And, what credentials does AK have to preside over the ICHR annual conference?

Members of ICHR may like to ponder, abandon ICHR and join ABISY to document Itihaasa Bharati, the contribution of anusoochit jaati, anusoochit janajaati, backward and downtrodden classes to Bharatiya ethos, traditions and civilization. 
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[acharya]

Looking for a Hindu Identity
Dwijendra Narayan Jha
I
am deeply beholden to the Executive Committee of the Indian
History Congress for electing me its General President for its 66
th
session. In all humility I accept the honour conferred on me, but,
conscious as I am of my limitations, I treat it as encouragement to
one who has been involved in the ongoing battle against jingoist,
communal and obscurantist perceptions of India's past. I therefore
propose to draw your attention, first, to the distorted notion that
Indian national identity can be traced to hoary antiquity, and then
to the false stereotypes about Hinduism which have no basis in
history and yet feed Hindu cultural nationalism.
I
The quest for India's national identity through the route of Hindu
religious nationalism began in the nineteenth century and has
continued ever since. In recent years, however, it has received an
unprecedented boost from those communal forces which brought a
virulent version of Hindu cultural chauvinism to the centre stage of
contemporary politics and produced a warped perception of India's
past. This is evident from the indigenist propaganda writings which
support the myth of Aryan autochthony, demonise Muslims and
Christians, and propagate the idea that India and Hinduism are
eternal. In an effort to prove the indigenous origin of Indian culture
and civilisation it has been argued, though vacuously, that the
people who composed the Vedas called themselves Aryans and were
I am thankful to K.M. Shrimali for his considered comments on my original
text, to Mukul Dube for editorial help, and to Malavika, Sabita, Manisha,
Narottam, Mihir and Shankar for bibliographical assistance. _____+
3
the communal lexicon!) civilisation is older than all others and was
therefore free from any possible contamination in its early formative
phase.
In this historiographical format India, i.e., Bhrata, is timeless.
The first man was born here. Its people were the authors of the first
human civilisation, the Vedic, which is the same as the Indus-
Saraswat. The authors of this civilisation had reached the highest
peak of achievement in both the arts and the sciences, and they
were conscious of belonging to the Indian nation, which has existed
eternally. This obsession with the antiquity of the Indian identity,
civilisation and nationalism has justifiably prompted several scho-
lars, in recent years, to study and analyse the development of the
idea of India.
5
Most of them have rightly argued that India as a
country evolved over a long period, that the formation of its identity
had much to do with the perceptions of the people who migrated
into the subcontinent at different times, and that Indian nationalism
developed mostly as a response to Western imperialism. But not all
of them have succeeded in rising above the tendency to trace Indian
national identity back to ancient times. For instance, a respected
historian of ancient India tells us that "the inhabitants of the
subcontinent were considered by the Purnic authors as forming a
nation" and "could be called by a common name--Bhrat".
6
Asser-
tions like this are very close to the Hindu jingoism which attributes
all major modern cultural, scientific and political developments,
including the idea of nationalism, to the ancient Indians. Although
their detailed refutation may amount to a rechauffe of what has
already been written on the historical development of the idea of
India, I propose to argue against the fantastic antiquity assigned to
Bhrata and Hinduism, as well as against the historically invalid
stereotypes about the latter, and thus to show the hollowness of the
ideas which have been the staple diet of the monster of Hindu
cultural nationalism in recent years.
5

http://www.sacw.net/India_History/dnj_Jan06.pdf

[acharya]

K.N.Panikkar*: recasting the past in india

Since coming to power three years ago, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has actively sought to impose a new history curriculum. This attempt has nothing to do with new trends or methodology within the discipline. By restructuring educational institutions, rewriting curricula and textbooks, and making major personnel changes, the government is attempting to recast the past by giving it a strongly Hindu religious orientation.
The right-wing party now controls the Ministry of Human Resource Development (which includes Education) and the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) which produces most school texts. These, along with other public institutions like the Indian Council for Historical Research, are rapidly losing their academic freedom, as renowned historians are replaced by bureaucrats and academics willing to toe the political line.
The current rewriting of Indian history is part of a larger long-term political plan aimed at reordering the secular character that has informed the educational and cultural policies of the country since its independence. The BJP seeks to redefine the character of the nation as Hindu, and to lend legitimacy to the politics of cultural nationalism. To inculcate a sense of national pride, Indian history is seen through stereotypes rooted in religious identity. <b>No aspect of history has been spared, be it social tensions, political battles or cultural differences. The achievements of ancient Indian civilization are identified only with Hinduism and are grossly exaggerated.</b> The BJP would have us believe that humankind and all scientific discovery, from bronze-casting to printing and aeronautics, originated in northern India, the original home of the Aryans.
The period of the Rig Veda (a religious treatise) has been pushed back to 5000 B.C. against the general scholarly consensus of 1500 B.C. in order to associate the Aryans with the Indus Valley civilization which flourished in Harappa and Mohenjodaro, now in Pakistan.
These distortions are not limited to the past. The more recent history of the national movement has been altered to glorify leaders of staunch Hindu organizations, even if they were collaborators of colonial rule.
The Hindu view attempts to exclude all those who migrated to India and their descendants as foreigners or the enemy. In reality, India’s demography reflects the coming together of a variety of groups–racial, linguistic and ethnic–during the course of the last two millennia and raises the question of who the “outsider” really is.
Fortunately, there is a strong resistance from academics and historians against this trend. They are doing all they can to fight the gradual introduction of new textbooks and to uphold the country’s long tradition of “scientific” history.
Ed. note: The government has defended its recently introduced National Curricular Framework for School Education which suggests that textbooks be revised. Denying that “any religious bias” had been introduced into history textbooks, the Human Resources Development minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, insisted that his government was “merely following the changes recommended by the NCERT...We have prepared the frame in the most democratic manner,” he said.

* Former professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. One of several eminent historians whose two-volume treatise on Modern Indian history, “Towards Freedom”, was summarily withdrawn by the Indian Council of Historical Research.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Organiser, Dec. 10, 2006

National convention of Itihas Sankalan Yojna in Kurukshetra
Indian history not complete without Saraswati Civilisation

"Saraswati was not a myth but a live flowing river. It symbolises the glorious past of our civilisation. The revival of the river's flow would not only strengthen our civilisation culturally but naturally also," said RSS Sarsanghachalak Shri K.S. Sudarshan while inaugurating the national convention of the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojna in Kurukshetra on November 17. <b>He said the British distorted our history under a well-planed conspiracy and the conspiracy continued even after independence. "The time has come when we should rediscover our glorious history so that our new generations could feel pride over their history," he said while expressing happiness over the Saraswati River Research Project. He said our scientists and archeologists through this achievement have proved that Saraswati river was not a myth but a reality. </b>

Shri Suresh Soni, Sahsarkaryavah of the RSS, requested the historians to bring fourth true history based on Indian thinking and remove the distortion of the history. Noted scholar Shri Dharmpal Maini said the study and research of history is very important in the context of human values. He stressed the need to pass on the rich legacy of the country to the new generation.

Dr Shivaji Singh, president of the Itihas Sankalan Yojna, came down heavily on the leftist historians and said they damaged the Indian history more than the British. He said the leftists have arrested Indian history in their myths and called upon the historians to liberate it from their clutches. He said work on Saraswati river project has presented a unique and encouraging example.

Noted columnist, Smt Sandhya Jain inaugurated an exhibition on Saraswati Civilisation and the first war of independence of 1857. Dr K. L. Mehra, former director of the Pusa Institute, New Delhi, presented a paper on this topic. Dr Anil Kumar Gupta, a scientist from the Indian Space Research Organisation, Jodhpur and Dr Vidyut Bhadra presented a researched report on the old flowing route of the Saraswati river. Dr Kalyan Raman, director of Saraswati River Research Project, moved a proposal for preserving 2,000 archeologically important places related to the Saraswati river. The proposal, which was adopted unanimously, said the 2,000 places, which lie in the route of the flow of the river should be excavated so that new facts could be found related to the origin of Indian Civilisation. The convention also adopted another resolution on first war of independence of 1857. A total of 80 research papers were presented at the convention.

Dr Kalyan Raman said the revival of Saraswati river has not remain the question of just history and archeology but it is now related to the life of over 20 crore people. It can now quench the thrust of crores of people. He said the project would be completed at any cost.

<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>He wondered why the eyes of Shri Sitaram Yechuri and Shri Nilotpal Basu could not see what the satellite can see. </span>Despite the fact that a number of research institutes from Mansarovar to Gujarat are working on the project, Shri Sitaram Yechuri as president of the Cultural Ministry's Standing Committee has recommended the government to close the project. Shri Nilotpal Basu too had earlier made a similar recommendation. He said the scientists of the ISRO have discovered a dozens of places from Bikaner to Barmer in Rajasthan where the sweet water of Saraswati river has been found. He said after the earthquake in Pakistan last year a water resource developed at Kalayat in Haryana. This whole water indicates to the hidden flow of the Saraswati river, he said.  (FOC)

http://www.organise r.org/dynamic/ modules.php? name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=160&page=22

-- <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

Plea to detoxify books of anti-Islam references
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->LUCKNOW: Saffronisation of education, it seems, has not phased out with the BJP government in UP. With compilation of anti-Islamic references in 31 text books prescribed for from class V to class XII, Deeni Talimi Council— the oldest and largest of madrasa in the state— has petitioned chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav for detoxing school syllabus.

The books identified are duly approved by the Uttar Pradesh Basic/ Higher Secondary Board of Education.

"Insidious attempts to impart a biased and jaundiced information to young impressionable minds needs to be strictly discouraged," says the petition as it demands setting up of a government text book review committee for the purpose.

Talking to TOI on Thursday, general secretary of the Council, Masoodul Hasan Usmani, said that Yadav was apprised of existing anomalies on July 24 2005.

The Council, he said, had then published a review of school text books carried out by its in house committee. The event was attended by the president of All India Muslim Personal Law Board and head of Nadwatul Ulema Maulana Rabe Hasan Nadwi. who is also the head of the Council, besides other scholars, he added.

But the glaring distortions and derogatory undercurrent he said continue even after one year. For instance the history book "Bharat Ka Vrihat Itihas" for intermediate contains a lesson titled ascendance of Islam.

On page no 266 it says, "When residents of Mecca began to oppose Mohammed Saheb and there was a threat to his life, he ran away to Madina. ...Mohammed Saheb propagated Islam on the strength of sheer military power".

"Instead of an objectionable 'he ran away to Madina' (woh Madina bhag gaye) they could have written, he went away to Madina," corrects Usmani. The same lesson says that the "Muslims had a very low moral character and they did not think twice before humiliating Hindu women".

Another history book for intermediate, Madhyamik Bharat Ka Itihas, maintains that "Shah Jehan was a fanatic (kattarpanthi Muslim) and greatly intolerant of Hindu religion. He demolished three temples in Gujarat and five temples in Banaras and Allahabad." There are no details of the temples demolished.

Then page 150 has a reference claiming that "mosques at Ayodhya, Varanasi and Mathura by their architecture indicate that they were built after demolishing temples".

The book also accused Emperor Humayun of temple desecration. In fact the list of questions at the end of the lesson also has anti-Muslim undertone like Aurangzeb ke do Hindu virodhi karya bataiye (narrate two anti Hindu measures taken by Auragzeb.)

Similarly, Samajik Vigyan the text book for class X credits Sir Syed Ahmad for political awakening among Muslims but adds "however on the flip side this led to the rise of communalism in India, (Page 168).

The Council has demanded a compulsory screening of all text books by a committee comprising all sects and religions, says HU Azmi, secretary of the council. Justice Rajendra Sachar had taken note of our findings, he declared. "Now we wait for Yadav to prove his secular credentials by washing off the saffron streaks," he added.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/Ci...show/739111.cms
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->NCERT taken to court for messing with Indian history 

On Tuesday, December 12, Krishna Kumar, director of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), will make a personal appearance in the Punjab and Haryana High Court, in the latest twist to the "history textbooks" saga.

Kumar has been summoned to Chandigarh by the High Court following NCERT's "highly casual" approach in response to a petition filed by one RK Sethi against the re-introduction of historian Bipan Chandra's Modern India for class XII pupils. <span style='color:red'>In its order asking the director to make a personal appearance, the court said: "There is no denial to the fact that the 'Book' in question contains highly objectionable and distorted version of Indian history."
 
In a separate case before the Delhi High Court - resulting from a petition filed by educationist Dinanath Batra of Vidya Bharti - NCERT had, in November 2006, committed itself to removing from its prescribed history textbooks all 75 passages that the petitioner has held objectionable.
</span>

Forty-six passages have already been removed, the Court order of November 11, quoted NCERT as saying: "It is also stated that 21 objectionable passages will be removed from the textbooks with effect from 1.4.2007 in view of new curriculum introduced and the remaining eight passages shall also be taken out from the texts with effect from 1.4.2008."
 
The story of the history textbook war actually goes back to 2000, when the Delhi Assembly passed a resolution calling for the removal of an NCERT textbook that allegedly made offensive remarks about Guru Tegh Bahadur.

Following a scrutiny of history books from classes VI to XII, then NCERT director JS Rajput recommended the deletion of nine passages that were deemed deliberately hurtful. These books had been prescribed under the curriculum of 1988. Over 2000-02, NCERT devised a new curriculum and syllabus, and commissioned new social science textbooks.

This was challenged in the Supreme Court by activist Aruna Roy and journalist BG Verghese, who alleged that the new books taught a "communal" history. They called for the old textbooks to be retained. The Supreme Court, in September 2002, upheld NCERT's right to bring in a new syllabus and new books.

When the UPA came to power in 2004, HRD Minister Arjun Singh began a "detoxification" drive. NCERT devised a new curriculum and pending its total implementation - over a three-year period - brought back the "secular" history textbooks.

These reintroduced textbooks were challenged by social organisations in at least four courts - the high courts in Chandigarh, Delhi and Allahabad, and a local court in Alwar. In a verdict earlier this year, the Alwar court asked NCERT to remove passages that disparaged Lord Mahavira and had been objected to by Jain groups.

<span style='color:red'>Now NCERT has told the Delhi High Court that it is ready to remove not just the nine paragraphs Rajput had excised in 2000, but 66 others as well. </span>This includes the passage on Jats (detailed above), which was blue-pencilled following a meeting between Haryana's Chief Minister BS Hooda and Union HRD Minister Arjun Singh in late October. Hooda is a well-known Jat leader.

<span style='color:blue'>As a senior official, who worked with National Democratic Alliance-era Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, puts it, "It is amazing that intellectuals who were upset by the removal of nine paragraphs in 2000, calling it political censorship, are not reacting to the erasure of 75 passages today, including some under political pressure." For Joshi and Rajput, it must seem a vindication. </span>

http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?m...t&counter_img=2
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

Post 72 gave link to a paper written by DN Jha on 'Hindu Identity'.

Does this guy "Dwijendra" Jha even know some basic Sanskrit? In paper, he says Mundakopanishad is showing down Vedas by calling them "Apara vidya" (he interprets "Apara Vidya" to "lower knowledge"!)

"Para" and "Apara" come from the base word 'par'. 'par' obviousely means 'the other'. Para means through other and Apara means through no-other. Vidya comes from 'vid' dhatu which basically means 'to see' (visio of latin or vedeo of greek derive from this dhatu), and by extension 'vid' means 'know first hand' (similar to expression "I see!"). In India, that is why we have the word for philosophy as Darshan (= to see comprehensively)

So, Para Vidya means "knowing or perceiving through a reference, or seeing through some 'without' ", and on the contrast Apara Vidya means "knowing through within or in seeing in absence of any reference".

Vedas are Apaurusheya, they were not created but experienced, "heard", or witnessed by those who codified it. They are not 'learnt from outside' but 'experienced within'. That is what Mundakopanishad means when it calls Veda the 'Apara Vidya' and devotes one third of its content to Vedas.

Likewise the author claimed that Kabir, Dadu, Nanak and other Bhakt-Saints have 'rebelled against Vedas'. What idioticity! The Shabds of these saints (and Siddharta Gautama's deshanas before them), have only targeted the tendency of dogmatic dependance upon shastras without personal experience and Sadhana, and not the shastras themselves!

But I think this guy has good writing style, which a reader of common understanding can easily relate to and get impressed with. I wish we had some of that skill.

[acharya]

<!--QuoteBegin-Bodhi+Dec 11 2006, 05:14 AM-->QUOTE(Bodhi @ Dec 11 2006, 05:14 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->
Likewise the author claimed that Kabir, Dadu, Nanak and other Bhakt-Saints have 'rebelled against Vedas'.  What idioticity!  The Shabds of these saints (and Siddharta Gautama's deshanas before them), have only targeted the tendency of dogmatic dependance upon shastras without personal experience and Sadhana, and not the shastras themselves!

But I think this guy has good writing style, which a reader of common understanding can easily relate to and get impressed with.  I wish we had some of that skill.
[right][snapback]61998[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Can you expand this and write a longer article and refute his assertions.
we need to keep refuting this kind of psy ops in a logical manner.
Please do it and IF will publish it.

[Guest]

Recently, D N Jha lent his support to Witzel and FOSA in California case.



2.0 The `Sanatana' Nature of D N Jha's "Ancient India" –

The back side of the title cover page states that the book was first
published in 1977, and reprinted 9 times till 1997. A Hindi
translation was first published in 1980, and this was reprinted 8
times till 1997. The book was even translated in Chinese in 1984,
when that country was thoroughly Communist.

<b>The translation of Jha's books into various languages is not due to
their intrinsic merit, but due to the hegemony of a coterie of Left-
Liberal propagandists (=historians) over government institutions that
give out research and travel grants, fund translation projects and so
on. </b>Arun Shourie (In "Fabrications on the Way to the Funeral", India
Connect, 26 June 1998) specifically mentions D. N. Jha's name in this
regard:

xQUOTE
"But these are not just partisan "historians". They are nepotists of
the worst kind. I had documented several years ago the doings of some
of them in regard to the appointments in the Aligarh Muslim
University. Their doings in the ICHR have been true to pattern. How
is it that over twenty five years persons from their school alone
have been nominated to the ICHR? How come that Romila Thapar has been
on the Council four times? Irfan Habib five times? Satish Chandra
four times? S. Gopal three times?.... The same goes for the post of
Chairman.
Not only are these "historians" partisan, not only are they
nepotists, they are ones who have used state patronage to help each
other in many, many ways. Let me give two examples, and make four
specific proposals for the Ministry -- that "nodal Ministry",
remember -- which has been their instrument in all these
entrepreneurial ventures.
By a brain-wave a milch-cow was thought up: it is no use having books
only in English, these worthies, dedicated as they were to the cause
of the illiterate downtrodden Indians, argued; we must have the works
of leading historians translated into our regional languages. And
which were the "historians" whose books -- old, in many cases out-of-
date books – got selected for translation? R. S. Sharma: five books.
Romila Thapar: three books. Irfan Habib: two books -- one being a
collection of articles. Bipan Chandra: two books. Muhammad Habib:
three books. D. N. Jha: two books. S. Gopal: four books. Nurul Hasan:
two books.... In a word, the "historians" discovered, I am sure much
to their embarrassment, that they were themselves the leading
historians! All these, but not Professor R. C. Majumdar! Even sundry
leaders of the Communist parties got the honour -- E. M. S.
Namboodripad, P. C. Joshi, even Rajni Palme Dutt, the leader of the
British Communist Party who functioned as the controller and director
of the Indian Communists in the forties. As a result, the books and
pamphlets of these fellows are available in all regional languages,
but the works of even Lokmanya Tilak are not available except in
Marathi! And that too because of the Kesari Trust, no thanks to the
ICHR."
UNQUOTE

The ICHR spend around Rs. 4.1 million in this translation project,
and the authors got paid for the `translation rights'. More important
than the tiny payments involved however was the fact that the
coterie, of which Jha is a member, got a chance to propagate their
ideology using official government machinery.

The first edition of the book was published in 1977. Unfortunately,
this first edition of the book and its translations are now all
outdated, as the author finally brought out a revised, enlarged
second edition in 1998 – i.e., more than two decades after the first
edition was published.

Apparently, despite their frequent digs at the continuity of
the `Sanatana Dharma' (= The Eternal Dharma', a designation used by
Hindus for Hinduism), there is something `Sanatana' about the books
of eminent historians. Which is why these Historians seem to update a
some of them only after decades, if they revise them at all. My
review here ignores the 1977 edition, and is restricted to the 1998
edition, which is already outdated, in my estimation.


3. The 'Secular' Babri Historian -

In the opening chapter, while discussing Nationalist Historiography
in pre-independent India, JHA [p. 23] brings in Hindu communalism
although there is no context for it, and as expected, leaves out
Islamic communalism completely – a classic example of selective
mention and negationism. He says –

xQUOTE
"The pernicious role of the RSS in spreading the virus of communalism
in the body politic of India can hardly be exaggerated. The
assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by RSS- trained Godse on 30 January
1948 and the demolition of the Baburi Masjid at Ayodhya on 6 December
1992 are two important and unforgettable milestones in the unfolding
of the backward-looking Hindu revivalist and fascist politics of
contemporary India."
UNQUOTE

Jha crying foul at the demolition of Baburi Masjid is like pot
calling the kettle black! He was actually one of the four 'Babri
Masjid' historians who openly came out in support of Islamists, and
even represented their case when Prime Minister Chandrashekhar
invited the two disputing parties to present their respective
evidence from historical and archaeological sources in order to
decide whether the contented site belonged to the Muslims or to the
Hindus. The other three Leftists who represented the Islamists were
the Communist Historian Ram Sharan Sharma, Athar Ali and the Leftist
archaeologist named Suraj Bhan.

Commenting on the machinations of Jha and his ilk, Shourie
[in 'Eminent Historians'; 1998, pp. 8-9] writes –
xQUOTE
"They were the intellectual guides and propagandists of the Babri
Masjid Action Committee. They represented it at the meetings Mr.
Chandrashekhar's Government had convened for settling the matter by
evidence. That was an outstanding initiative of Mr. Chandrashekhar:
for such contentious issues ought to be dissolved in the acid of
evidence. These leftist "historians" attended the initial meetings.
They put together for and on behalf of the Committee "documents". It
is a miscellaneous pile. It becomes immediately evident that these
are no counter to the mass of archaeological, historical and literary
evidence which the VHP has furnished, that in fact the "documents"
these guides of the Babri Committee have piled up further
substantiate the VHP's case, these "historians", having undertaken to
attend the meeting to consider the evidence presented by the two
sides, just do not show up!
It is this withdrawal which aborted the initiative that the
Government had undertaken of bringing the two sides together, of
introducing evidence and discourse into the issue. Nothing but
nothing paved the way for the demolition as did this running away by
these "historians". It was the last nail: no one could be persuaded
thereafter that evidence or reason would be allowed anywhere near the
issue.
Not only were these "historians" the advisers of the Babri Masjid
Action Committee, its advocates in the negotiations, they
simultaneously issued all sorts of statements supporting the Babri
Masjid Committee's case – which was the "case" they had themselves
prepared! A well-practiced technique, if I may say so: they are from
a school in which members have made each other famous by reviewing
each others books and "theses"!
Not just that. These very "historians" are cited as witnesses in the
pleadings filed by the Sunni Waqf Board in the courts which are
considering the Ayodhya matter!……
Their deceitful role in Ayodhya -- which in the end harmed their
clients more than anyone else -- was just symptomatic. For fifty
years this bunch has been suppressing facts and inventing lies. How
concerned they are about that objective of the ICHR -- to promote
objective and rational research into events of our past. How does
this square with the guidelines issued by their West Bengal
Government in 1989 which Outlook itself quotes -- "Muslim rule should
never attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers
and invaders should not be mentioned"? But their wholesale
fabrications of the destruction of Buddhist vihars, about the non-
existent "Aryan invasion" -- to question these is to be communal,
chauvinist!"
UNQUOTE

The destruction of the Babri Masjid plunged the nation into Hindu-
Muslim rioting which left over 2000 people dead. In the years
preceding the demolition, Jha and his fellow comrades had been
propagating from every medium under their influence, that the Hindu
stance, that the site marked an ancient temple that was demolished to
pave way for the mosque, was historically untenable. The meeting
called by the then Indian Prime Minister, Mr. Chandrashekhar, offered
a unique window of opportunity to these `historians' to demonstrate
the veracity of their claim, from the perspective of history.
Considering that these historians had claimed omniscience so far with
regard to the history and archaeology of the site in dispute, it was
therefore shocking that they reneged on their duty. All along, they
had falsely buoyed the Muslim side that its claim to the site was
historically correct, for the Muslim leaders were themselves
incompetent to argue their own case in an academically sound manner.
And now, suddenly, Jha and his ilk pulled the rug from beneath their
feet. The entire exercise also convinced a section of the Hindu
community that these political propagandists masquerading as
historians cannot ever be relied upon for a fair, equitable solution
to the problem. The inevitable happened, and the mosque was
demolished by a mob of charged up Hindus. When the incidents of
November 1992 – January 1993 are viewed in this manner, Jha and his
comrades are clearly responsible to a great extent for the mayhem
that lead to the destruction of the mosque and also the communal
rioting thereafter. And yet, Jha has the gall to blame others for it!

In fact, even 10 years later, he still maintains that same unethical,
dogmatic stance about the whole affair. An announcement was made on
the Liverpool Indology list about the on-line availability of the
document submitted by the VHP to the Indian Prime Minister in support
of their view that the Babri Masjid was constructed after demolishing
a pre-existing temple. Jha responded to that announcement by saying,
in the August company of Indologists around the world, that the
webpage containing the document was infected with "communal viruses"!

I would like to point out here that with the demolition of the
mosque, and recovery of tell tale fragments of an ancient Vaishnavite
temple from beneath the rubble of the mosque (including an
inscription mentioning its Ramaite affiliations) and from within its
walls, the controversy is closed.

Not surprisingly, the same historians who alleged that the other
scholars who disagreed with them were abusing history politically,
have now suddenly gone 'philosophical'. They no longer discuss the
academic aspects of the controversy, and confine themselves to giving
politically loaded sermons. Jha is also one of them.

The hypocricy of the Eminent Babri Historians in the entire
controversy has prompted even a neutral archaeologist like Dilip
CHAKRABARTI [Colonial Indology; 1997:21-22] to complain –

xQUOTE
"A controversy certainly erupted about the presence or absence of a
Hindu temple below the level of the mosque at the site in Ayodhya.
Those historians and archaeologists who were unwilling to let go this
opportunity to add to their `secular and progressive' image used the
occasion fully to harangue us on how to interpret archaeological
remains. The fact that the same set of historians and archaeologists
have, to our knowledge, been always silent about, or ignorant of, the
destruction of hundreds of archaeological sites and monuments all
over the country only adds to the piquancy to the whole issue. That
the same bunch of `mainstream historians', some of whom were
reputedly inducted in the Indian committee for the organization of
the World Archaeological Congress-3, stood in the way of developing
science-based archaeological research in the universities they serve
(or served) makes any attempt on their part to speak of archaeology
dowbright sordid and sleazy."
UNQUOTE

A review of 'Colonial Indology' in the Italian Journal 'East and
West' concurs with the above assessment.

Jha's characterization of the destruction of Babri Masjid as one
of "two important and unforgettable milestones in the unfolding of
the backward-looking Hindu revivalist and fascist politics of
contemporary India" begs the question - 'What would one call the
preceding destruction, damage and desecration of more than 50 Hindu
temples in Kashmir then? One can almost hear this Babri historian
give the following reply -

"Do not even dare to compare the destruction of Babri Masjid with the
alleged demolition of thousands of temples in the world by Muslims.
Do not even mention the alleged ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Kabul
to Srinagar, or the alleged marginalization of Hindus in Christian
Meghalaya or the alleged ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Christian
Mizoram or the alleged killings of Hindu priests by church backed
terrorists in Tripura or the bomb blasts at Churches by the Islamic
Deendar Anjuman. All these were caused by Hindu cunning, and none of
these events is more heinous than the destruction of the Babri
Masjid. The murder of Graham Staines is a close second. All other
crimes in India are not even a distant third. Besides, don't you know
that you could promote Hindu communalism and fascism by even
mentioning the alleged destruction of temples at Kashmir? Knowing
this, if you protest against the alleged destruction of temples or
the alleged killings of Hindus anywhere and anytime, you become a de-
facto dirty Hindu fascist and Hindu Talibans, and we can charge you
with carrying out with public amputations, of subjugating women, of
abetting international terrorism, of sheltering Osama like terrorists
and of carrying out airplane hijackings. In any case, all Hindu
organizations are Talibans of India. They are all Fascists.
You really cannot compare the destruction of the great Babri with the
alleged destruction of countless temples in the world. Why? First,
and most important, Babri is Babri. Its destruction cannot be
compared to the alleged destruction of any temple. Secondarily, there
could be economic or political motives at work in the alleged
destruction of temples, as shown by Western academic Richard Eaton on
our party organ (`Frontline') whereas, the demolition of Babri Masjid
was clearly the handiwork of fascists, fanatics, anti-Dalit, anti-
Minority, revanchist, totalitarian, majoritarian, khakhi
knickerwallas. In any case, we reiterate again that any attempts to
highlight the excess of Islamists without taking into account the
larger secular picture is only promoting Hindutva fascism and lands
the critic into the camp of fascists."

[Guest]

Some D N Jha related posts: here and here