<!--QuoteBegin-"ramana"+-->QUOTE("ramana")<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>I think the defining moment was the defeat in the 1857 war. With it the idea of old India died. </b>The old India was the one that thought that as long as the English allowed the Mughal Emperor his place in Delhi, they were their own masters. With the Mughal Emperor went the old India.
The Brahmins who had hitherto fore resisted the old invaders decided to take up the New Education (naya talim) and joined the British system and did very well. Taking up New Education by the Brahmins devalued the old system as nothing else could.
It was not enough the menfolk took up new education but actively disparaged the old system. It is this that has given the Brutus blow and not the Macauleyite education.
However some folks retained the old values in their homes but accepted the new system outside their homes. Mark Tully remarks on this in his book "Forty Years of Independence" how modern educated Indians revert to traditional values in their homes. But others do not and they are the core of the earlier Well Off Modern Indians(WMI Of Naipaul) and a superset of them became the DeRacinated Indian Elite(DIE) of present day.
<b>
Since Independence others too took up the new education as there was more access and dislodged the Brahmins from their primacy. There is double jeopardy now for the old adherents of the New Education- they cant go back as they have successfully disparaged and devalued the old system and thanks to the new education the masses think they are the oppressors and should be denied any say.</b> A true Trishanku swarga situation.
one of my uncles, a highly placed bureaucrat agonised in the early 90s about the IPR issues- that it was contrary to the ethos of Indian culture. A Indian/Hindu learned man is supposed o acquire all the knowledge that he can and give it away to his shisyas and in return he is given token guru dakshina for his merit is in how much he has transferred to his shisyas and he is known thru them. So how can he put limits on the knowledge that was given to him by Goddess Saraswati?
He retired way before the WTO came into effect.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Good report.
You have omitted what happened After Independence . This is crucial to understand.
At independence there was a chance to change the education to recover all the old tradition which was degraded and bring out the best into the system. But the generation at independence was already into the modernism culture and neglected the Indian traditional system. The western groups were able to influence the Indian intellectuals to disparage the Indian traditions and thought process deeply. India in true sense did not get real independence since the ruling elite was still connected to the colonial thinking and identified with the western elite.
This debate inside the Indian intellectual elite is still raging and has not ended. But the decline of modernism and failure of post modernism to reconcile with multiculturalism is making sure that grip of the marxist/modernist in the Indian intellectual space will wither away.
http://www.indiastar.com/wallia19.html
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->"Eminent Historians," the ironic title of his latest book comes from the self-description a group of Marxist historians, most of them academics, arrogated for themselves while signing a newspaper petition during the Ayodhya controversy. Although the group is not large in number, (42 is the maximum), the same set has also preempted for itself the titles of "prominent social scientists" and "leading intellectuals" in similar public petitions. The Marxist party line is to project Hindus as exploitative feudalists and Muslims as liberators! Arun Shourie's major thesis: During the past fifty years, "this bunch of Marxist historians have been suppressing facts, inventing lies, perverting discourse, and derailing public policy" by seizing control of institutions such as the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the National Council of Educational Research Training (NCERT), large parts of Indian academia, and nearly all of the English-media newspapers and publishing houses.
Included as principals in this group of Marxist historians are Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, K.M. Shrimali, K.M.Pannikar, R.S. Sharma, D. N. Jha, Gyanendra Pandey, and Irfan Habib. This group has, Shourie charges, "worked a diabolic inversion: the inclusive religion [Hinduism], the pluralist spiritual search of our people and land, they have projected as intolerant, narrow-minded, obscurantist; and the exclusivist, totalitarian, revelatory religions and ideologies -- Islam, Christianity, Marxism-Leninism-- they have made out to be the epitome of tolerance, open-mindedness, democracy, secularism!" By promoting each other's publications and puffing up their reputations, this group has long been "determining what is politically correct." One measure of the insidious control these "verbal terrorists" have been exercising over the English-medium publishing industry in India is that Arun Shourie, despite his huge readership, had to self-publish his books.
<b>
For several decades, these "eminent historians" have striven hard to continually denigrate Hindu cultural history, the oldest surviving civilization in the world, by "blackening the Hindu period and whitewashing the Islamic period." Indeed, Shourie should have challenged them to refute American historian Will Durant's assertion in hisThe Story of Civilization:Â "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within." Or that of French historian Alain Danielou's statement, in his Histoire de l' Inde : "From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoilations, destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilisations, wiped out entire races."</b>
As the book's subtitle promises, Shourie succeeds in unmasking these self-proclaimed eminents of "their technology, their line, their fraud" by focusing on specifics as exemplified below: his own television debates with some of these "eminent historians"; their failures to respond to published challenges by historians and scholars of persuasions other than Marxist; their documented efforts at distorting established historical evidence.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The timing of the year 1857 is very important since that is the beginning of the modern age and also middle of the intellectual revolution in the western world. Educated Indians after that were caught up in the modern age and by 1947 the entire elite educated in the western world was 'modern' and was ready to discard the traditional system. Into this situation the marxist philosophy and socialism/leftism etc was added to create an entire generation which started believing in all these manufactured perception. Several writers and 'intellectuals' still show their education and world view even today.
The Brahmins who had hitherto fore resisted the old invaders decided to take up the New Education (naya talim) and joined the British system and did very well. Taking up New Education by the Brahmins devalued the old system as nothing else could.
It was not enough the menfolk took up new education but actively disparaged the old system. It is this that has given the Brutus blow and not the Macauleyite education.
However some folks retained the old values in their homes but accepted the new system outside their homes. Mark Tully remarks on this in his book "Forty Years of Independence" how modern educated Indians revert to traditional values in their homes. But others do not and they are the core of the earlier Well Off Modern Indians(WMI Of Naipaul) and a superset of them became the DeRacinated Indian Elite(DIE) of present day.
<b>
Since Independence others too took up the new education as there was more access and dislodged the Brahmins from their primacy. There is double jeopardy now for the old adherents of the New Education- they cant go back as they have successfully disparaged and devalued the old system and thanks to the new education the masses think they are the oppressors and should be denied any say.</b> A true Trishanku swarga situation.
one of my uncles, a highly placed bureaucrat agonised in the early 90s about the IPR issues- that it was contrary to the ethos of Indian culture. A Indian/Hindu learned man is supposed o acquire all the knowledge that he can and give it away to his shisyas and in return he is given token guru dakshina for his merit is in how much he has transferred to his shisyas and he is known thru them. So how can he put limits on the knowledge that was given to him by Goddess Saraswati?
He retired way before the WTO came into effect.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Good report.
You have omitted what happened After Independence . This is crucial to understand.
At independence there was a chance to change the education to recover all the old tradition which was degraded and bring out the best into the system. But the generation at independence was already into the modernism culture and neglected the Indian traditional system. The western groups were able to influence the Indian intellectuals to disparage the Indian traditions and thought process deeply. India in true sense did not get real independence since the ruling elite was still connected to the colonial thinking and identified with the western elite.
This debate inside the Indian intellectual elite is still raging and has not ended. But the decline of modernism and failure of post modernism to reconcile with multiculturalism is making sure that grip of the marxist/modernist in the Indian intellectual space will wither away.
http://www.indiastar.com/wallia19.html
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->"Eminent Historians," the ironic title of his latest book comes from the self-description a group of Marxist historians, most of them academics, arrogated for themselves while signing a newspaper petition during the Ayodhya controversy. Although the group is not large in number, (42 is the maximum), the same set has also preempted for itself the titles of "prominent social scientists" and "leading intellectuals" in similar public petitions. The Marxist party line is to project Hindus as exploitative feudalists and Muslims as liberators! Arun Shourie's major thesis: During the past fifty years, "this bunch of Marxist historians have been suppressing facts, inventing lies, perverting discourse, and derailing public policy" by seizing control of institutions such as the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the National Council of Educational Research Training (NCERT), large parts of Indian academia, and nearly all of the English-media newspapers and publishing houses.
Included as principals in this group of Marxist historians are Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, K.M. Shrimali, K.M.Pannikar, R.S. Sharma, D. N. Jha, Gyanendra Pandey, and Irfan Habib. This group has, Shourie charges, "worked a diabolic inversion: the inclusive religion [Hinduism], the pluralist spiritual search of our people and land, they have projected as intolerant, narrow-minded, obscurantist; and the exclusivist, totalitarian, revelatory religions and ideologies -- Islam, Christianity, Marxism-Leninism-- they have made out to be the epitome of tolerance, open-mindedness, democracy, secularism!" By promoting each other's publications and puffing up their reputations, this group has long been "determining what is politically correct." One measure of the insidious control these "verbal terrorists" have been exercising over the English-medium publishing industry in India is that Arun Shourie, despite his huge readership, had to self-publish his books.
<b>
For several decades, these "eminent historians" have striven hard to continually denigrate Hindu cultural history, the oldest surviving civilization in the world, by "blackening the Hindu period and whitewashing the Islamic period." Indeed, Shourie should have challenged them to refute American historian Will Durant's assertion in hisThe Story of Civilization:Â "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within." Or that of French historian Alain Danielou's statement, in his Histoire de l' Inde : "From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoilations, destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilisations, wiped out entire races."</b>
As the book's subtitle promises, Shourie succeeds in unmasking these self-proclaimed eminents of "their technology, their line, their fraud" by focusing on specifics as exemplified below: his own television debates with some of these "eminent historians"; their failures to respond to published challenges by historians and scholars of persuasions other than Marxist; their documented efforts at distorting established historical evidence.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The timing of the year 1857 is very important since that is the beginning of the modern age and also middle of the intellectual revolution in the western world. Educated Indians after that were caught up in the modern age and by 1947 the entire elite educated in the western world was 'modern' and was ready to discard the traditional system. Into this situation the marxist philosophy and socialism/leftism etc was added to create an entire generation which started believing in all these manufactured perception. Several writers and 'intellectuals' still show their education and world view even today.