Politics Of Indian History -2

[acharya]

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The distortion of India’s past by western historians

V. Lakshmikantham & J. Vasundhara Devi; What India Should Know, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, pp 308, Rs 250.00
By Manju Gupta

The deep-rooted prejudices about the qualities, traditions and religions of the East have been a pervasive and marked characteristic of Western thought of centuries. It was a thought reinforced in the 19th century by industrialisation and imperialism, and which resulted in identification of the East with backwardness and ungovernability.

We also agree that today scholarship means being at home with what is written by Western scholars, who have more than often discredited the ancient past of Indian culture and distorted the history and chronology of events.

The book under review, written by mathematicians Dr V. Lakshmikantham and Dr J. Vasundhara Devi, begins by throwing light on the confusion till today between Gupta Chandragupta and Maurya Chandragupta. They point out that actually Gupta Chandragupta flourished in 327 BC and was the contemporary of Alexander, while Maurya Chandragupta lived in 1534 BC. “But the Western historians wrongly identified Alexander’s contemporary with Maurya Chandragupta, thus affecting more than 1,200 years in the history of ancient India. This colossal blunder upset the whole scheme and brought terrible chaos into the Puranic dates of India.” They point out that it was Sir William Jones, “the first historian of India”, who changed this date to effect a sort of similitude between the Biblical and Indian conceptions of time and they add, “twelve centuries of time after the Mahabharata war (3138 BC) and 10 centuries before that are struck off like this and the history the Indians got to know is put upon this wrong base. The Western scholars have not only bungled facts and tampered with texts, but even gone to the extent to hurling abuse at ancient Indian historians and sages.”

The authors feel that colonisation had affected the Indian mind in certain aspects. Through Macaulay’s education policies, the British ensured that they left behind an inferiority complex among the Indians by constantly denigrating Indian culture. “<span style='color:red'>This is why the intellectuals of India today repeat what their masters said before and ape them after having hated them,” say the authors.</span>

They add that another masterstroke of the British was the propagation of the “absurd” theory of Aryan invasion according to which India was invaded by a tribe called Aryans who originated in western Russia and imposed upon the Dravidians of India, the hateful caste system. They continue, “To the Aryans are attributed Sanskrit, the Vedic religion, as well as India’s greatest spiritual texts, the Vedas and a host of writings like the Upanishads. The Aryan invasion myth has shown that the Indian civilisation was not that ancient and that it was secondary to the cultures that influenced the Western world. Also, whatever good thing India had developed has been a consequence of the influence of the West.”

The book deals with the general prejudice about the East, the distortion of Indian history and the superficial translation of the Vedas by Western scholars. The authors comment ironically that the “supposedly enlightened writers” such as Edward Gibbon who never set foot east of Switzerland, in his History of the Roman Empire, loved to make play of the “despicable people of the East”, and Voltaire, who never travelled beyond Berlin, “fantasised about the misery and bigotry of the Eastern nation”. They add, “The most conspicuous example was Lord Macaulay, who carried his all-consuming racist hatred of the East to ridiculous depths by asserting that the entire corpus of knowledge that the Orient possessed could be contained in half a thimble.” They add that the world is but one and the East and West bifurcation is a mythical boundary.

The catastrophic event of the formation of a Mediterranean Sea resulted in the loss of culture and civilisation existing in Europe. The history of the Greeks, Roman and the British are traced briefly and so is the awakening of Europe from the “dark ages”.

The book ridicules the theory of Aryan invasion and gives in points the reasons for its dismissal. It says that the Aryans spread from the Bharatavarsha in different directions to spread the Aryan culture. “There was never any Aryan invasion of India or any Aryan-Dravidian war. The cradle of civilisation was not Sumeria in Mesopotamia, but the Sapta Sindhu, the land of seven rivers in north-west India.”

Then it expounds on the misrepresentation of the two Chandraguptas and tries to set right the chronology of events in India.

It points out that the Aryan invasion theory was aimed at dividing India into factions. It explains that the Aryans were extremely sensitive to the high walks of life, righteousness and nobility, both in thought and action. That is, the Aryans followed the Vedic Dharma, also called the Sanatana Dharma. Dharma is “that nature which makes a thing what it is.” Thus Manava Dharma implies that human beings “should be true to their own essential nature, which is divine; therefore, all efforts in life should be directed towards maintaining the dignity of the atma (the self) and not plodding through life like helpless animals. Thus Dharma is the ‘law of being’.”

The book exposes the deliberate distortions wrought by Orientalists in their efforts to write the history of India.

The book traces the great traditions laid down by Sanatana Dharma throughout the world that endured in Bharatakhand in the 12th century.

And the authors try to synthesise India with its glorious heritage and the present technological advances ready for taking India into the twenty-first century. The chapter ends on a positive note that this entry “will have a new awakening and the humanity will be much more spiritual than it has been.”

The book concludes by saying that the Sanatana Dharma “is much more open than any other religion to new ideas, scientific thought and social experimentation. Many principles basic to Sanatana Dharma initially appeared strange to the West, such as yoga, meditation, reincarnation and methods of interiorisation, but these principles have now found worldwide acceptance. Sanatana Dharma is, of course, a world religion…”

(Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Kulpati Munshi Marg, Mumbai - 400 007.)