Indian Perception Of History

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-Kaushal+Apr 11 2004, 01:14 PM-->QUOTE(Kaushal @ Apr 11 2004, 01:14 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->The protection of Pakistan by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), US and China for so many decades, a strategy that is otherwise inexplicable to the average Indian Ashok, begins to make sense when viewed in the light of the  force of history. Such a policy can then be rationalized as being consonant with the geo-political goals of the hyper power. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Kaushal,

It has indeed been a long time since I had some nice conversations with you on BRF. I always pegged you for a “realist”. So I am somewhat surprised!

Why do we need this “Force of History” to explain something that can be explained by understanding a realistic foreign policy pursued by US/UK/China etc. wrt TSP? A client state namely TSP was set up by the British, sustained by the US and given teeth by the Chinese. Each of these powers has their own reasons, the western powers would like to pursue a bi-polar/mono-pole world, and China of course would like a bi-polar world. Further where is the evidence that US/UK/China have done anything specifically to further the Islamization of the subcontinent? I thought we created Bangladesh despite serious US opposition.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Why do we need this “Force of History” to explain something that can be explained by understanding a realistic foreign policy pursued by US/UK/China etc. wrt TSP<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Welcome to IF .Pulikeshi. We trust you will find the environment at IF interesting and stimulating. In fact i do visit BR, perhaps not as often as before, to read penetrating insights by posters such as you.

The question you pose is a fair one. Historians have proposed the notion of 'force of History' to explain certain recurring events in the past. Such a viewpoint , is I suspect more current among those who have a more acute sense of history then we (as Indians) have been credited with. One example of the 'force of history' is the migrationof peoples from one region and country to another (regionand country). It is a recurring theme in the history of many nations. It is rare to find a nation on this planet from (or to )which there has been no migration. There are other examples of 'force of History'. When one bestows a 'force of history' categorization to certain events in History , it still does not explain why such an event happened., merely that such an event is a recurring event and has the 'force of History' behind it. The repeated invasion and colonization of india is perceived by many to be the result of a 'force of history. That there were structural reasons for such invasions still does not invalidate the use of the term 'force of history to characterize such invasions.

In the case of the Islamization of the subcontinent, the contention is not that China is abetting such a turn of events. Suffice it to say that a good percentage of the Ummah believes that islamization of the rest of the world is a inevitability. China merely finds it convenient to be on the side of 'force of History' and position herself as a protagonist of such events. China considers herself reasonably removed from the disturbances caused by Jihadi islamization to consider it a lesser evil than the preachy unctuousness of the Yindoo, However, irrational i may find this to be, I do not find it to be contrary to a realist perspective, given the assumptions that China makes about india's ambitions.

It is another matter that one can possibly explain away world events such as the colonization of India, without resort to artificial constructs such as Force of History.

Personally i do not find it absolutely essential to invoke the expression 'force of History' to explain away the incidence of recurring events in History. I merely draw attention to the incidence of such notions in the literature.

Further , the acceptance of the notion of a force of history does not condemn India to a passive role, of accepting her destiny however unpalatable it may be. On the contrary, it is up to the indian to create his/her own 'force of history'. India has been singularly adept at spreading her philosophical vision (values, knowledge, script, darshanas) without the use of coercive force. Theere is no reason to believe we have lost the 'touch' to do it again. A pre-requisite is that India must once again think and act like a confident nation and not be hesitant to promote her values. IOW, India is quite capable of giving as good as she gets.

The study of the causes as to why nations behave the way do is still in its infancy in India and it would behoove us as Indians to pay attention to such matters, because whether we do so or not , it is a certainty others will.

Once again a hearty welcome.

[Hauma Hamiddha]

I will comment on the above at greater length when the opportunity avails itself but for now I shall restrict myself to a contrarian view on Max Mueller (This does not mean that I entirely dispute what has been proposed above).

I am pasting below something I have parked elsewhere:

It is common these days to find many Indians stating that Max Mueller was an India-hater and a hand-maid of Macaulay.

Max Mueller was the son of a well-known German poet and influenced greatly by the German scholastic community of his era. His ideas should, hence, be viewed as a part of the continuum of the era. Secondly, he never visited India so he definitely had a poor grasp of the first-hand subtilties of India. His information was also being filtered through the English Raj, which was obviously the only source.

Let me point out what Swami Vivekananda, a great Indian reformer and patriot said about him: "Max Mueller is a Vedantist of Vedantists. He has, indeed, cought the real soul of the melody of the Vedanta." This is a peculiar statement regarding someone who is these days commonly regarded as detrimetnal to Indian interests. In 1897, when Tilak was charged of sedition by the English court he tabled a representation to the British government along with D. Nowroji to discharge Tilak. This move shortened his imprisonment by 6 months. If one reads his book 'India: What it can teach us' it is in large part sympathetic towards Indians (especially if Annie Besant, who supported the Jawlianwalla masscre can be considered sympathetic). It is interesting to note that the Indian freedom fighters themselves termed him mokSha mUla bhaTTa! Ironically his efforts to translate the vedic texts were critical in allowing many Hindus to get some idea of the vedic texts - we should realize that understanding the vedic language is not a joke, and only a small section of highly educated brAhmaNas, who were facing extinction, could really fathom its complexities. While it is good to study vedic in its original, it is not easy at all. Given this background MMs efforts ironically helped many Indians themselves to get a glimpse of the veda and start their new round of interpretations (including Vivekananda and Aurobindo).

So at the face of it there is no evidence that MM was a British agent trying to subvert Indian identity. This did happen but we have to look elsewhere. So what really happened?
If we look at the early stage of MMs career, then we see that he was sympathetic towards India. In the later phases of his life, he suddenly found himself making a U-turn (vide Rajiv Malhotra): In the 1860s he found himself actually refused professorship by the British because in part of his pro-Indian and Indian-influenced world views. This had it is effect on him and placed pressure on him to conform to the European norms. In 1880s he started translating Kant, here he started rediscovering his Western identity, which had been smudged by his dabbling with the "Orient". In the process he started making statements like:
"If I live for any purpose it is for this, that I will preach the union of Eastern and Western Theism, the reconciliation of Europe and Asia. The idea may seem absurd to many in the present age. It may provoke ridicule and angry reviling. But posterity will prove a better judge."

The synthetic phase, where he started becoming obsessed with his own ideas, set soon there after. This gradually completed the U-turn as he started placing things in his own occidental categories. Yet, he did not completely give up his attachment to India: It occasional showed up in works like Ramakrishna (which he wrote in his later life; compare with Kripal lurid depiction of RK as a homoerotic tormented soul) and Six systems of Indian philosophy that he wrote just before his death. So I think we have to look elsewhere to find the real subversionists of Indian identity and history.

[Hauma Hamiddha]

Now we shall actually look at MMs contribution to the force of history:

See the following quotes of his:
"The Hindus were a nation of philosophers. Taken as a whole, history supplies no second instance, where the inward life of the soul has completely absorbed all the practical faculties of the whole people, and in fact almost destroyed those faculties by which a nation gains its place in history. It might therefore be justly said that India has no place in the political history of the world''.
He cites Schopenhauer:
``In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life - it will be the solace of my death''.

His speech to the brown sahibs of the ICS:
``If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention of those who have studied Plato and Kant - I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life, not for this life only, but a transfigured and eternal life - again I should point to India''.

Here we see man who has never been to India. All information he gets is from the British. So:

1) He reads the Sanskrit literature and see the mark of a great civilization in it- in fact he recommends it as corrective for his own civilization.

2) We have him espouse the "Force of History" view that India had no history of its own- because it was nation of philosophers. This continued to be the western view for a long time. But at least he credited us with having a refined philosophical faculty (more on this below). He could not reconcile the glory of Hindu philosophical thought with the decadent state of India he saw through the British portrayal: a defeated nation that had been conquered by a hand full of white men. A nation which prior to the British conquests (according he British histories) had conquered by the Mohammedans. So he came up with his interpretation of India espoused in the first quote. Given the background, I would tend to interpret him as being taken in by the *British* propaganda of the "Force of history" where it was the natural destiny of a nation like India with no historical sense to fall into the hands of the whitemen.

Finally, note the elements of the newest round of Euro-American propaganda:

1) At least MM thought we had philosophy, but recently many Western scholars have been peddling the view that upaniShads never mattered to the Indians: it was only after the West (MM, AS etc) recognized it, did the elite Indians reading the English translations of the upaniShads consider them philosophical high points.

2) Modern Western scholars work hard to deny the civilizing role of India on the far East and Central Asia that earlier Western scholars noted. Instead they give this credit to China. Note Jared Diamonds "Guns, Germs etc" where he ignores the history of billion people and the sub-cultures influenced by them.

3) Modern Western scholars also present the view that upaniShads and Hindu philosophy have nothing to teach other than obscure hocus-pocus.

4) Having scrapped India of its philosophical achievements that their old predecessors were willing to concede, the modern Western scholars paint a new picture of India: "evil" of caste, poverty, lawlessness, "evil" of recognizing ones Hindu identity and rootless, ill-mannered techie slaves with a test for postive western influences.

These are often done by brown sahib sepoys for their gauranganAthas
Thus, I would imagine that the actual process of demonization has increased though shifted to subtle directions and this is what we need to concentrate on.

[Guest]

HH, I hope I have not gven the impression that I consider MM to be a dolt. he was a highly intelligent individual with a very impressive and handsome face. In fact i do not disagree with much of what you say and i am very familiar with the quotations that you make. The german Government used to call the Goethe Institutes (in every other country) Max Mueller Bhavans in India and i grew up on a pablum of Max Mueller as a great appreciator of Indic tradiition.

But the fact remains he was hired by Macaulay for very ignoble reasons(anarya), a fact that he corroborated in letters to his daughter. MM was a complex individual (neither a saint nor a sinner) beset with the foibles which all of us lesser mortals battle everyday of our lives. He was never made a Boden Professor despite the fact that he coveted the post immensely. Some suspect that was because of his german nationality at a time when the English were rather ashamed of their German born Royalty. The problem with the MMs of the world is that after stripping away the facade of admiration which he prefessed for the Vedas and other texts, he caused immense damage to a nation and a people who had done him no harm. There is a rather complete treatment of his life and work and scholarship in chapter 3 of 'Politics of history' by Rajaram . The chapter is titled Max Mueller's ghost, appropriately in my opinion, because his shadow bedevils the conventional wisdom on Ancient indian History to this day.. One should also read Trautmans "Aryans and British India'. Trautman is a professor at a American Unviersity (Wisconsin ?) and is a student of Alexander basham. Trautman's book lays out in great detail the development of the pernicious notion of an 'Aryan' in the supposedly enlightened Europe of the nineteenth century. Despite later protestations from MM that Aryan does not signify race, his initial pronouncements gave rise to the highly destructive notions of the superiority of the Aryan race., the unintended consequences of which resulted in a great war with 50 million dead.

I am afraid history will judge Friedrich Maximillian Mueller to be a weak human being vulnerable to material blandishments. But then , such foibles are considered par for the course today and from a comparative standpoint he may not have been such a bad fellow after all.

[Hauma Hamiddha]

<!--QuoteBegin-Kaushal+Apr 11 2004, 09:44 PM-->QUOTE(Kaushal @ Apr 11 2004, 09:44 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin--> HH, I hope I have not gven the impression that I consider MM to be a dolt. he was a highly intelligent  individual with a very  impressive  and handsome  face <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Not at all. "Handsome face" : never gave much thought to his looks <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->

Given that a forumite privately asked if I was lauding MM, I have to clarify that such was not my intention. The point I was trying to make was that MM may merely be an epi-phenomenon of the European fancies of the age and the dramatic impact that the conquest of India had on the Europeans. He was more of a sideshow of the subversion game than the cause. Shortly after MM underdated the vedas (a date steadfastly maintained by most modern mainstream western Indologists to this day), Tilak published his land mark work the Orion in which he basically demolishes all the Indological arguments for a late vedic date. On the basis of astronomical allusions he showed that the R^igveda was definitely older than 2200 BC and had allusions to dates as early as 4000 BC. This view was also supported by the German sanskritist Jacobi. Strangely, the Indians did not build up on Tilak's work but chose ignore it and stick to the classical indological line, which had long gone past MM but retained his date.

Why did our people not examine the texts afresh taking the cue from Tilak?

[Guest]

Shri. Hammidha,

Why did our people not examine the texts afresh taking the cue from Tilak?

By "our people" are you referring to Indians in general or Hindutva historians like Rajaram, Talageri, etc?

If it is the latter crowd, then dealing with Tilak would present a problem as he suggests an Arctic homeland for the Aryans. Tilakji is somebody that historians of this ilk generally steer clear off (ok, they acknowledge the dating bit), sort of like their "attraction" to Brahui and why it is spoken in a certain place to this day <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif' /><!--endemo--> .

BTW, nice writeups on Mueller. Certainly a different perspective of the controversial person.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Tilakji is somebody that historians of this ilk generally steer clear off (ok, they acknowledge the dating bit), <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

This is of course wishful thinking on the part of the good professor Tilaks dating of the Rg is acknowledged widely and certainly by Rajaram and Talageri. When Tilak talks about migrations from the arctic he certainly does not imply these were during 1200 BCE but much earlier referring back to an era when the ice age was advancing and to a period of interglacial migrations. Here is the verbatim quote from Talageri,p.363, the Rigveda , a Historical analysis, http://www.bharatvani.org/books/rig/ch8.htm

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->II.A. The Date of the Rigveda and of Vedic Civilization


B.G. (Lokmanya) Tilak, the earliest scholar belonging to this school of interpretation, proved on the basis of astronomical references in the Rigveda, that the composition of the Rigveda commenced around 4500 BC or so, and the bulk of the hymns were composed between 3500 BC and 2500 BC.


However, he was not satisfied with these dates, and he tried to find earlier astronomical references, but without success: “I have, in my later researches, tried to push back this limit by searching for the older zodiacal positions of the vernal equinox in the Vedic literature, but I have not found any evidence of the same.”70


<span style='color:red'>Tilak, therefore, tried to “push back” the date of the civilization represented in the Rigveda, if not of the actual Rigveda itself, by formulating his Arctic homeland theory, according to which Vedic civilization “did not originate with the Vedic bards, but was derived by them from their interglacial forefathers”71 who lived in the Arctic region in the interglacial period which ended around “10000-8000 BC” with “the destruction of the original Arctic home by the last Ice Age.” 1 </span>


Going even further back: “Aryans and their culture and religion cannot be supposed to have developed all of a sudden at the close of the last interglacial period, and the ultimate origin of both must, therefore, be placed in remote geological times… though Aryan race or religion can be traced back to last interglacial period, yet the ultimate origin of both is still lost in geological antiquity.”


Latter-day scholars of this school, however, are less discreet about these dates “lost in geological antiquity”.  S.D. Kulkarni tells us that “our civilization, Vedic or Hindu, has a continuity of more than 31092 years before present.” and he pinpoints “21788 BC as the period, at least, of the origin of the Rigveda.”


For sceptics, Kulkarni adds: “It appears that the scholars simply get awe-struck if any date for any event in the past is fixed to such remote antiquity.  They forget that the creation of this universe is some 200 crores of years old if not more, and the first man has set his foot on this mother earth at least some 60 lac years ago.”

1 AHV


The Arctic Home in the Vedas by B.G. Tilak, Published by The Manager, Kesari, Poona City, 1903.


Ch. 8:70-73, 82-84,1 03-110, 116, 120-122, 131-155, 259.


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


That migrations of the human species have happened in history should be of no sruprise to anyone and that Indians were inveterate travellers till about 1000 CE should also be of no surprise.

In any event none of this is to suggest that one person is right and another is wrong when it comes to ancient history. We have much to learn about the Ancients in general and the Vedics in aprticular. The only thing we know now is that Max Mueller pulled the dates of the Rg out of thin air without any justification whatsoever and those are the dates that are accepted as gospel by the unsuspecting youth of India

[Hauma Hamiddha]

Just to clarify: Mueller came up with his dates based on what he called the categorization of Indic literatures. He discerned the existence of approximately 5 early phases: 1)Indo-Iranian 2) R^ig Vedic 3) Later Vedic 4) brAhmana 5) sUtra
He was more or less correct in identifying the latter 4 are genuine Indic categories and that they preceded Buddha and the pAli cannon. He sort of implicitly assumed the first category. Next he assumed that the 4 Indic classes were sequential and went on to assign each an arbitary 200 year window and extrapolated the vedic date. While he was partially correct in this regard, he failed to realize that there were parallels for R^ig vedic, yajushes, brAhmaNa and sUtra structures even amongst the Iranians and that these formulation per say went back to proto-Indo-Iranian. So assign rigid dates to the sequential literary classes was flawed. Secondly, he had no information or basis to justify the arbitrary values he assigned to his steps in extrapolation.

However, this date stuck on in the minds of Indologists, who internalized it as sound reasoning. When finally challenged M.Witzel (and T. Elizarenkova) came to rescue of these dates by inventing new arguments with similar flaws. 1) He argued that the vedic texts were composed in India after the Harrapan civilization collapsed. Since the later collapsed around 1300 BC he placed the R^ig close to MM's date. He bases this assumption on the claim the Vedas know no cities. This later claim can be disputed especially for the later vedic layers.
2) He argued that I-Ir should be merely around 2000 BC based on remains of chariots in central Asia. But Central Asia is a vast area and the chariots recovered to date can hardly be the earliest chariot ever made.

The astronomical dates from different vedic texts are span quite a range from earliest dim allusions of 4000BC to latest of 1500-1300 BC. With several intermediate dates. This I would estimate as the core window which needs to be considered for any further studies.

As for Tilak's Arctic claim, I believe people have unduely made fun of him, without bothering to read the original. While he may have exaggerated the results, I believe, from personal analysis of the vedic texts, that he was correct in that there are echos of a far northern latitude than what may be expected of India, and a clear knowledge of snow and 6 seasons combined with the northern latitude. These suggest that the R^ig does preserve at least a *memory* of a more northern region. This combined with the linguisitic evidence strongly favoring non-Indian origins of the Indo-Aryans suggests that they indeed occupied a far more northerly latitude to start with. When exactly they moved into India is indeed a puzzling point, but I would give the range as between 3500-1500 BC. What this means vis-a-vis the Indus civilization is unclear to me as of now. I tend to accept that at least a later part of the Indus civilization had incorporated Indo-Aryans and they were *not* responsible for the demise of the IVC. I also believe that the IAs did not invade in small stream but as large mass with considerable diversity even within them.

Finally the Mueller date depends on the date of the Buddha- while recently Indian scholars (eg see Kalavai Venkat on IC list) have argued for a Buddha earlier than commonly believed. I can imagine earlier by say 100-200 years but otherwise feel that there is no strong reason to re-date buddha and the ashokan inscriptions.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Next he assumed that the 4 Indic classes were sequential and went on to assign each an arbitary 200 year window and extrapolated the vedic date<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

This is the kind of reasoning which can hardly be classed as scholarly and deserves the characterization of 'being pulled out of thin air'. Why 200 years and not 2000 . Apart from the fact that such a choice of intervals between each veda is entirely arbitrary, one must remember that the period of recorded history is only a very miniscule fragment of human history. There is enough reason to surmise that even a single Veda like the Rg might have spanned several hundred years( a fact that even Max Mueller emphasized) and that all the mandalas of the Rg were certainly not written during the same time interval spanning less than 100 years. In any event we should not be disputing max Muellers construction of the date for the Rg since he himself substantially repudiated his own dating at a later time.


Since we were on the subject of Tilak, i was merely pointing out that Tilak himself was inclined to a more distant past for the migrations, when he specifically alludes to interglacial migrations and had categrically rejected a later date. Incidentally, as HH has pointed out, the date that Tilak comes up with is substantially in agreement with that of Herman Jacobi. Koenraad Elst gives a good summary of the astronomical data and the authors who have alluded to the astronomical dating of the Rg.

http://www.bharatvani.org/books/ait/ch21.htm

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->2. Astronomical data and the Aryan question



2.1. DATING THE RG-VEDA


The determination of the age in which Vedic literature started and flourished has its consequences for the Aryan Invasion question.  The oldest text, the Rg-Veda, is full of precise references to places and natural phenomena in what are now Panjab and Haryana, and was unmistakably composed in that part of India.  The date at which it was composed is a firm terminus ante quem for the entry of the Vedic Aryans into India.  They may have come from abroad or they may have been fully native, but by the time of the Rg-Veda, they were certainly Indians without memory of a foreign homeland.


In a rather shoddy way, Friedrich Max Müller launched the hypothesis that the Rg-Veda had to be dated to about 1200 BC, and eventhough he later retracted it, that arbitrary guess has become the orthodoxy.1 It is forgotten too often that in his own day, other scholars rejected this extremely late date on a variety of grounds.  Maurice Winternitz based his estimate on purely philological considerations: “We cannot explain the development of the whole of this great literature if we assume as late a date as round about 1200 BC or 1500 BC as its starting-point.”2 Isn’t it refreshing to find how logical and unprejudiced the early researchers were?  You cannot credibly cram the complicated linguistic, cultural and philosophical developments which are in evidence in Vedic literature, into just a few centuries.


But since this argument of plausibility can always be countered with the argument that unlikely developments are not strictly impossible, we need a firmer basis to decide this chronological question.  The most explicit chronology would be provided by astronomical markers of time.
 
 

Footnotes: 
 

1The story of Max Müller’s chronology and its impact is told by N.S Rajaram: The Politics of History, Voice of India, Delhi 1995, ch.3.


2M. Winternitz: History of Indian Literature (1907, reprint by Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1987), vol. 1, p.288.

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


Elst concludes after a fairly exhaustive discussion'

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->2. Astronomical data and the Aryan question



2.5. CONCLUSION


The astronomical lore in Vedic literature provides elements of an absolute chronology in a consistent way.  For what it is worth, this corpus of astronomical indications suggests that the Rg-Veda was completed in the 4th millennium AD, that the core text of the Mahabharata was composed at the end of that millennium, and that the Brahmanas and Sutras are products of the high Harappan period towards the end of the 3rd millennium BC.  This corpus of evidence is hard to reconcile with the AIT, and has been standing as a growing challenge to the AIT defenders for two centuries.

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

[Guest]

Kaushal & HH,

I think Tilak's approach of using astronomical references is very important for dating the veda samhitas where any hitorical information is purely incidental and not intended.

Regarding six seasons and different kinds of snow, one doesn't have to venture far from Himalayas to have that. In fact in the arctic regions the seasons would be more like four in number ; summer, fall, winter and spring. The two rainy seasons found in the Indian sub-continent are the ones that properly complete the six season cycle. It is hard to comprehend how two extra seasons would arise in the arid north.

I suspect the reason behind Tilak's conjecture of arctic orgin could be the mention of the six month day and the six month night in the R^igveda. This can be interpreted as referring to polar regions where there is indeed a six month day and a six month night. But there are other explanations too.

Vedas are heavily loaded with astronomical references. The luminous ones in the sky were the "Devas" or the gods for the vedics. They were aware of the annual cycle of changes in the lengths of days versus nights. For six months the days are longer than the nights and for six months nights are longer than the days. For the first six months Sun is more northerly or "uttarayaNa" and fo the other six months it is southerly or "dakshiNayana". This can be observed easily. One dosn't have to be in a polar region to see this. The six month day and six month night could just be a beautiful poetical expression of this astronomical fact rather than a real description of an arctic year.

[Guest]

Warning: Following are highly random thoughts regarding the ice-age and the arctic homeland of aryans.

1. If vedics were living in arctic regions then it might have been warmer than usual. And less icy. It also means sea level must have been higher during that time due to melted snow/ice. That also suggest those northern regions where aryans were supposedly living should be high above the sea level.

2. IIRC the last ice age started receding around 20000 years ago. It doesn't make sense for people to live/move up north during the ice age. But we also have the story of the "jalapralaya" or the great flood. People date it to about 10000 years ago. Manu's story of "jalapralaya" and his going north to Himalayas for survival points to northward migration.

3. Well, it could also mean that aryans were originally from more southern latitudes and had to move up north due to global warming and the big flood around 10000 years ago. After that was over they started migrating back south with memories of a northern latitude.

[Hauma Hamiddha]

<!--QuoteBegin-Ashok Kumar+Apr 13 2004, 03:46 AM-->QUOTE(Ashok Kumar @ Apr 13 2004, 03:46 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin--> 2. IIRC the last ice age started receding around 20000 years ago.  It doesn't make sense for people to live/move up north during the ice age.   But we also have the story of the "jalapralaya" or the great flood.  People date it to about 10000 years ago.  Manu's story of "jalapralaya" and his going north to Himalayas for survival points to northward migration. 
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
AK,
we must keep in mind that some people have proposed a major Black Sea flooding event around 5600 B.C. This hypothesis suggests that there was a rise in the sea level of the Black Sea by about 100-150 m resulting in rather destructive consequences for the surrounding civilizations. The jala pralaya myth is clearly recorded in the vedic texts like the shatapatha brAhmaNa as old history. It re-occurs in pauranic mythology as the starting point of the current dashAvatara cycle. We see this specific mythic motif with the ship also in other cultures. Thus, the Black sea flood proponents claim that the origin of the myth was a result of those cultures being close to the actual event. Interestingly, the Iranian texts talk about a hima pralaya instead of the flood. Some Pauranic texts too mention the hima pralaya, though I do not remember which ones offhand. I am sympathetic to the Black seak flood idea though I do not entirely accept it.

But we may imagine the following:
-The Black Sea flood: 5600 BC
-The dispersion of the Indo-Europeans and the separation of the Greek+Slavic+Indo-Iranian branch from the rest
-4500 BC the Greeks and Indo-Iranians have separated from their home land and are diverging away with memories of Orion at the equinox.
-4500-3000 BC core R^ig composition begins.

See URL for recent conference on the Black sea flood

[Guest]

Are there not flood myths amongst Native australians and Americans.

[Guest]

Suppressing Indian History -François Gautier

[Guest]

<!--emo&:flush--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/Flush.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='Flush.gif' /><!--endemo-->

<b><i>Coming to terms with the past: India: Latha Menon deplores the effects of religious extremism on Indian society and the writing of history.(Today's History)</i></b>

History Today; 8/1/2004; Menon, Latha

ON JANUARY 5TH, 2004, a group of thugs ransacked the renowned Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, India, destroying priceless manuscripts and artefacts. Their 'protest' stemmed from the involvement of some of the Institute's academics in translating manuscripts for the book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India by the American historian James W. Laine, in which Laine allegedly made insulting remarks against their hero. Though partly driven by regional tensions, this attack illustrates several points relating to history, historiography, and recent socio-political developments in India.

First, it highlights the central role of irreplaceable material evidence in history. Second, it underlines the role of perceptions of the past in the concerns of the present, particularly those relating to identity. Shivaji was a Hindu king who successfully fought the forces of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, declaring himself king and establishing the powerful Maratha Confederacy; His story has become legendary.

The story of the Hindu Maratha hero's defiance and success against a Muslim king has taken on its own part-mythical life, so much so that the actual historical evidence seems secondary, troublesome and inconvenient. The past is dead and can be manipulated or, if necessary obliterated; the myth must live.

The final point concerning the Bhandarkar raid--is the extreme, whipped-up response against a Western historian. The history of India has for too long been interpreted, written, and thus, as Edward Said pointed out, in some way owned and controlled, by the colonialists. They, now widened to encompass all modern Westerners, cannot possibly be trusted to understand or interpret our history. There is no doubt that the Orientalists of the nineteenth century did frame and periodise Indian history in accordance with certain assumptions concerning the other, which coloured and constrained their otherwise impressive achievement in building a vast corpus of knowledge about aspects of Indian history and culture. Yet Indology has moved on since then. Western scholars of Indian history today are Far more sensitive to such assumptions, while remaining appropriately rigorous and critical in their analysis. Yet in the intensely Hindu nationalist climate that has pervaded India in recent years and that continues to flourish in sections of the Indian diaspora, <b>even distinguished Indologists such as Wendy Doniger have been attacked in a knee jerk response for daring to critically evaluate Hindu texts</b>. Those Indian historians who dared question the agenda of Hindutva or 'Hindu-ness' fared even worse. Internationally respected historians such as Romila Thapar have been threatened and vilified.

The origins of Hindutva go back to the early twentieth century. The term refers to the <b>Hindu chauvinistic nationalist agenda </b>of a number of interconnected organisations, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, that range from the paramilitary to the cultural. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the broad political front of this movement, and was the leading party, in the ruling coalition that was defeated in the recent elections. The other two major bodies are the cultural arm of the movement, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the openly militaristic Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Sangh Parivar has taken to itself the colour saffron. <b>Once associated with renunciation, it is flaunted now as a symbol of Hindu pride and power</b>.


Over the past dozen years or so, the growth and spread of Hindutva has been remarkable. Aided by a powerful propaganda machine and the wealth pouring in from <b>Indians abroad, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom</b>, the 'saffron brigade' sought to replace the secular, pluralist vision of Jawaharlal Nehru and other earlier nationalists with their own Hindu chauvinist concept of the nation and its past, and to indoctrinate the young with this conception. The unexpected defeat of the BJP in the 2004 elections is an encouraging reminder of the power of democracy, and of the resilience of Indian secularism. But the influence of Hindutva runs deep. To understand the nature of the challenge facing the new Congress-led administration, it is necessary to review the impact of Hindutva on the interpretation and teaching of Indian history.

Material evidence is of vital importance to historians. It plays an anchoring role, preventing political groups from legitimising their agenda by taking control of the past. To argue that the past cannot be seen in any objective light, that it is a mere battleground of present ideologies in which the most persistent will win, is not only unwarranted but constitutes a dangerous concession to the extreme right. In a climate of postmodernism, of discourses floating free, Holocaust-deniers can thrive with impunity, as Richard Evans has noted.

History, as conducted by professional historians, is a rigorous and objective field, a social science in which knowledge accumulates over time. As well as from texts, inscriptions, and artefacts, studies of ancient India have utilised evidence available from archaeology, from linguistics, from indications of climate change and alterations to water courses, and sometimes from population genetics, anthropology, and the study of myth (used notably by the late distinguished Marxist historian D. D. Kosambi). Techniques of textual analysis have become more rigorous and faster, with much use of computers.

<b>By contrast, Hindutva offers little more than assertions and poor scholarship, suffused with a lavish helping of mythology. The Sangh's 'indigenism' lacks the fundamental characteristics of any reasoned approach to history. In the words of Romila Thapar, indigenism </b>

<i> attempts to invent a 'tradition' and retain it as
something essentially different from other cultures
and societies, and to build an ideology on
such a tradition. But it fails to provide a theory of
historical explanation or a method of historical
analysis. </i>

Ironically for a movement anxious to remove all trace of colonialist perceptions, the vision the devotees of Hindutva espouse is one anchored in the simplistic periodisation of the nineteenth-century Orientalists: that of an ancient and glorious Hindu 'golden age', followed by a 'dark' period of crushingly oppressive Muslim rule, and a modern period of less oppressive British rule. They continue the old British colonial view of India as constituted by two essentially antagonistic religious communities, the Hindus and Muslims, a view that, abetted by both the RSS and the Muslim League, led to partition. Of course one of these communities is seen as forever the outsiders.

The real history of Hindu-Muslim relations in the history of the subcontinent is much more complex. As Asghar Ali Engineer has pointed out, the relationship of the two has varied not only with ruler, but with the social groups being considered, with particular sects (the Sufis, in particular, became considerably Indianised), and the way in which Islam entered the area. In Kerala, for example, with its strong and ancient trade links with the Mediterranean, the Muslim community grew from Arab traders, and was primarily assimilationist, compared to the undoubted confrontations and military conquest in the north. Yet here, too, cooperation existed, both among the elites, and among the poor of both religions. The situation cannot adequately be described in terms of any simple polarisation between two monolithic religions. This was true even during the rule of the notoriously intolerant Aurangzeb. The historian K. N. Panikkar has remarked, 'Aurangzeb's chiefs and courtiers were more Hindus than Muslims. And the person who fought against Shivaji was Raja Jaisingh, a Hindu.'

The recent sensitivity over this period of Indian history is linked to the Sangh's highly effective campaign to mobilise Hindus trader the banner of Ram Janmabhoomi ('birthplace of the god Ram'). More than a decade after the Sangh incited mobs to demolish the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, built by Babur over, as they claim, a Hindu temple at the supposed birthplace of Ram, the pressure to allow the building of a temple on the site continues. So far, the courts have not relented.

The way in which Hindutva has been able to exploit and promote the image of the god Ram is interesting in itself. <b>By effectively focusing on a single god, and transforming him into a warrior god, they have given the polytheistic Hinduism the sleekness and muscle of a monotheistic faith. India becomes the land of Ram. </b>
The historicisation of Ram, his presumed epiphany in historical, as opposed to mythical time, has been the mainstay of the Hindutva project. This brazen mixing of history and mythology to suit political ends runs throughout Sangh ideology. To the masses, the mythological elements are simply asserted as history. To the intellectuals, this unholy 'interpenetration' is presented with a suitably postmodern flourish: 'The fact is that there is often more history in myths and more myth in history.'

Hinduism is far from the monolithic belief system projected by Hindutva as enduring from time immemorial. With no founder, no single canonical text, and no ecclesiastical structure (through it has priests), its development has been distinct in pattern from that of Semitic religions. It is worth quoting Romila Thapar again:

<i> The evolution of Hinduism is not a linear progression
from a founder through an organisational
system, with seeks branching off. It is
rather the mosaic of distinct cubs, deities, sects,
and ideas and the adjusting, juxtaposing or distancing
of these to existing ones, the placement
drawing not only on belief and ideas but also on
the socio-economic reality. </i>

This brings us to the other historical period of high sensitivity to Hindutva: the nature of ancient India and the Hindutva assertion of an indigenous 'Aryan race'. The philologist William Jones identified the connections between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek, and first proposed that they all derived from a single language, Indo-European. What should have remained a linguistic category was altered to that of a race in the race-conscious late-nineteenth century. European scholars, including even Max Muller for a time, built up the idea of an 'Aryan race' that swept into India as invaders from the north-west, bringing their language with them, and establishing superiority over, and hermetic separation from, the indigenous 'Dravidian race' through the caste system.

Yet with the growth of archaeological evidence, and supporting evidence from linguistics, the <b>story that is emerging is not one of invasion but of gradual migration and settlement </b>of peoples speaking an Indo-European language, following the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The subsequent growth of a caste system is also now regarded as having been a rather more complex process than previously thought.

In contrast to this careful and maturing view, the assertion of Hindutva is simple: the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans were neither migrants nor invaders, but were indigenous to India. The ancient Harappan civilisation is regarded as part of a great Vedic Age, and the dates of the Vedic texts set so far back in time (up to 9000 BCE) as to confirm that India must have been the first centre of human civilisation (and even of human origins), with subsequent migration of Aryan peoples into Iran. Needless to say, during this glorious Vedic Age, India was a land of wisdom, peace, and knowledge; it was a time of the profoundest discoveries in mathematics and science, boasting a well-knit and harmonious society, with no oppression of women or of lower castes.

It would scarcely seem worth taking the effort to <b>repeat Hindutva's nonsensical claims, but for the fact that they have been widely and effectively propagated as Hindu history and culture by the saffron brigade</b>. This is the interpretation of the nation's history that is being perpetrated through the Sangh Parivar's wide network of sectarian schools and that has even infiltrated in part into the fabric of the country's national curriculum and school textbooks.

From the late-1990s, national education became a battleground, drawing in many distinguished historians, scientists, and other academics who refused to tolerate any move away from a secular education system, who have protested against the mingling of myth alongside history, and pseudoscience alongside science. India has too robust a secular intellectual community to take such measures without a fight. The dissenting academic voices, it should be noted, were those of postmodernists, and their attempts at loosening history's firm mooring in objective reality have caused untold damage.

The chief architect of the saffronising of academia and national education was the BJP Union Human Resource Development Minister, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi. Following his appoint merit in 1998, Joshi, who has been associated with the RSS from 1944, spearheaded the takeover of academic institutions and committees by those sympathetic to Hindutva, the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) among them.

All almost immediate casualty was the 'Towards Freedom' project sponsored by the unreconstituted ICHR--a compilation of archival documents from the period leading up to Independence, under the General Editorship of the late distinguished historian Sarvepalli Gopal. Two volumes of this work have been withheld from publication. No reasons were given, but the sensitivity of the pre-Independence period for the militaristic RSS is well known.

In school education, a takeover of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) by Hindutva sympathisers was followed by the adoption, despite wide protests and court challenges, of a Hindutva-infused National Curriculum Framework. NCERT history textbooks by leading historians were purged of small but significant passages, including references to the eating of beef by Brahmins in ancient India, and to the lack of archaeological evidence for settlement in Ayodhya during the purported reign of Ram. New textbooks were produced which, according to the prestigious Indian History Congress, include errors, omissions, and misleading emphases that distort history.

These moves were widely reported in the media and aroused fierce controversy. Opposition party leaders refused to adopt the new texts in states in which they were in power. Despite government moves to manipulate research and education bodies, the Indian History Congress remained defiantly committed to the continuance of sounds historical study in India. Indeed, its 64th session, held in December 2003, was one of the biggest ever conducted by the body.

Such defence of reason and objectivity is inspiring, but the damage done to academia and education during the past decade should not be underestimated. <b>Nevertheless the new Human Resource Development Minister, Arjun Singh, has announced moves to restore autonomy to academic institutions and research bodies, and to bring back the original history textbooks. There is real hope that the trend of saffronisation will now be reversed. </b>

In the aftermath of the recent election, the forces of the Hindu right have blamed defeat not on the BJP leaders' efforts to promote Hindutva, but on their failure to do so more forcefully. With the saffron brigade still powerful and waiting in the wings, it is as well to remember that the consequences of perpetrating narrow perceptions of nation and history have been felt far beyond universities and schools. The ultimate cost of Hindutva's success must be measured in lives. Nearly 2,000 Muslims, including children and babies, were hacked and burned to death in Gujarat in the riots of 2002. <b>This is what happens when the Sangh's 'children of the soil' go on the rampage. It is a lesson not restricted to India alone. </b>


Latha Menon is a freelance writer and editor.
COPYRIGHT 2004 History Today Ltd.

[acharya]

x posted from politics of history

<!--QuoteBegin-ramana+Oct 30 2006, 10:15 AM-->QUOTE(ramana @ Oct 30 2006, 10:15 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->If you read most accounts of Indian history you do not get a sense for the driving impulse of the various kingdoms and the dynasties that come and go. As an example no book mentions why the Nizam was able to create a kingdom in Telangana region of modern day Andhra Pradesh, that his was a successor state to the Shia Qutb Shahi state which in turn was a successor to the Kaktiya Kingdom which could trace its origns to previous rulers like the Ikshvakus and Satavahanas. Again we can see same pattern with Delhi. Why did Delhi become the political center of the India throughout ages?

Why is this so?


The end result is that Indian rulers come and go without purpose across the canvas of Indian history and it all appears ahistorical. By not mentioning hte continuity in Indian history across dynasties and religions the history writers have made sure that there is no sense of unity of purpose and the people get considered as without a sense of history ie sheep to be slaughtered or ruled. This is important to understand as the AIT.
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Why did Delhi become the political center of the India throughout ages?

Why is this so?

The end result is that Indian rulers come and go without purpose across the canvas of Indian history and it all appears ahistorical. By not mentioning hte continuity in Indian history across dynasties and religions the history writers have made sure that there is no sense of unity of purpose and the people get considered as without a sense of history ie sheep to be slaughtered or ruled.

[acharya]

http://voiceofdharma.com/books/acat/ch10.htm

10. Mohammed Habib’s history-rewriting

It is but rarely that a secularist or a Muslim actually takes issue with what I have written. Mostly they resort to swearwords and the use of institutional power to deny me access to important forums. So, when someone does take the trouble of reading a book of mine and even writing a rebuttal, I will gladly oblige and take my turn to comment on the comment.

10.1. Mohammed Habib’s revolutionary project

“The writings of the Dutch historian Koenraad Elst have recently become popular among the Hindutvavadis of India. He claims that official (or officially sanctioned) history in India is subject to ‘negationism’ - the denial or playing down of Muslim crimes in the past, as well as of a history of Hindu-Muslim conflict.” Thus writes Amber Habib in an article titled “Elst on Habib”, published on his private website.1

My attention was drawn to it by a friend in 1999, but it may be a few years older, being a reaction to my 1993 book Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam. According to his homepage, Amber Habib turns out to be a Communist, son of Prof. Irfan Habib, grandson of Prof. Mohammed Habib, as well as grandnephew of Badruddin Tyabji, a leading Congress Muslim. The young mathematician living in Model Town, Delhi, has married a young lady with a Hindu name and Hindu looks, and after that he has started neglecting his website. Well, happiness is a sleeping website.1

He seems to be a jolly good fellow, but having grown up with a reverence for Nehru and Lenin, his view of the Hindu-Muslim conflict is rather unfair. That is to say, by sounding balanced when commenting on a highly asymmetrical conflict, it does injustice to one of the parties. He sums up his view in this verse from Kabir: “Hindu says Ram is the beloved, the Turk [Muslim] says Rahim. Then they kill each other. No one knows the secret.” Kabir belonged to a breed of Hindu converts to Islam who had retained their Hindu spiritual consciousness but poisoned it by imbibing categories of Islamic monotheism. He was the founder of the Santa-mata which had Hindu Bhakti of the Purans as its stock-in-trade but which paraded a monotheistic facade and poured contempt on the Hindu Pandit and the Muslim Mullah without knowing even the ABCD of Islam. That explains his great popularity in Nehruvian circles who know their Islam quite superficially but have developed contempt for Hinduism about which they know even less. Anyway, picking up a quarrel in the middle is pretty safe and mentally undemanding. But Kabir’s symmetry is false. No Hindu ever killed a Muslim simply for not worshipping Rama, but numerous Hindus were killed by Muslims purely for not worshipping Rahim.

Let us come to the point. Amber Habib has better things to do than to argue with me: “Due to the volume of charges thrown around by him, I cannot enter into a lengthy discussion of his views.” This is convenient for the author, but I readily agree that life is too short and too precious to spend it on polemics. Habib jr. is willing to make one exception, though: “However, I feel his discussion of Prof. Mohammad Habib’s writings provides a useful example, by which his worth can be judged. The quotes below are from his book Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam. The readers who care, may make some judgments for themselves by reading excerpts from Prof. Habib’s writings.”

Here we go: “Elst begins with: ‘Around 1920 Aligarh historian Mohammed Habib launched a grand project to rewrite the history of the Indian religious conflict. The main points of his version of history are the following.’ Prof. Habib’s specialization was the history of the Delhi Sultanate. Therefore he did write about what Elst sees only as ‘Indian religious conflict’. But this was not part of a larger ‘grand project’.”

By “grand project”, I did not mean a grand research project, only a grand project of launching a new interpretation of the behaviour of Muslim conquerors in India. Given its far-reaching implications and its role as a model emulated by the dominant school of Indian historians, I believe that it is fair to call Prof. Habib’s project “grand”.

Amber Habib continues: “From the prefaces to his essay on Mahmud of Ghazni, it is also clear that Prof. Habib meant mainly to criticise the image of Mahmud as a religious hero among certain Muslims, and not to defend him in any way: ‘There has recently grown up a tendency among some Musalmans of India to adore Mahmud as a saint, and to such [people], a scientific evaluation of his work and his policy will appear very painful. There is only one thing I need say in my defence. Islam as a creed stands by the principles of the Quran and the ‘Life’ of the Apostle. If Sultan Mahmud and his followers strayed from the ‘straight path’ - so much the worse for them. We want no idols.’”

But that was exactly my point. The consensus view, shared by Muslims (not only recently), Hindus and Westerners, was that Mahmud acted as a Muslim, implementing the code of the mujahid as laid down by the Prophet. Habib’s new view was diametrically opposed to the centuries-old consensus: he claimed that Mahmud’s behaviour “strayed from” the properly Islamic path. That he innovated by describing Mahmud’s behaviour as un-Islamic is what I wrote, and Amber Habib has now confirmed it.

Habib jr. correctly relates: “His first critics, therefore, were the self-same Muslims.” And he quotes from Habib sr.’s foreword of a reprint of his essay: “The book was hailed by a storm of criticism in the Urdu press. But as this criticism - vindictive, bitter, hostile - was based on a complete’ ignorance of the originals, I took no notice of it. I reprint the book as it was written.”

So, here we have it from the horse’s mouth: the Muslims applauded Mahmud’s behaviour and they considered it impeccably Islamic. I only disagree with the professor’s claim that their conviction was due to ignorance.

10.2. Absolving Islam

Amber Habib then quotes me: “Firstly, it was not all that serious. One cannot fail to notice that the Islamic chroniclers (including some rulers who wrote their own chronicles, like Teimur and Babar) have described the slaughter of Hindus, the abduction of their women and children, and the destruction of their places of worship most gleefully. But, according to Habib, these were merely exaggerations by court poets out to please their patrons. One wonders what it says about Islamic rulers that they felt flattered by the bloody details which the Muslims chroniclers of Hindu persecutions have left us. At any rate, Habib has never managed to underpin this convenient hypothesis with a single fact.”

This is followed by the rebuttal: “Prof. Habib made no such claim. Again, it is best to quote him directly: ‘No honest historian should seek to hide, and no Musalman acquainted with his faith will try to justify, the wanton destruction of temples that followed in the wake of the Ghaznavid army. Contemporary as well as later historians do not attempt to veil the nefarious acts but relate them with pride.’ He does say that much of what was written about Mahmud, was written hundreds of years after the fact, by a group seeking to legitimize itself by first canonizing Mahmud and then using him as a prior example setter.”

Here, Amber Habib may have a point. The quotation given should not be used to represent the whole of the eminent historian’s writing on Mahmud and the Sultanate, but judged all by itself, it does indeed acknowledge as factual the atrocities committed by Mahmud. In that respect at least, he did better than some of the later secularists, with whose more crassly negationist claims I seem to have confused Habib’s position. As for those who glorified Mahmud centuries after the fact, they based their stories on contemporary accounts, of which Habib sr. himself admitted that they accurately described Mahmud’s atrocities and destruction.

Next, my turn again to be quoted: “Secondly, that percentage of atrocities on Hindus which Habib was prepared to admit as historical, is not to be attributed to the impact of Islam, but to other factors. Sometimes Islam was used as a justification post factum, but this was deceptive. In reality economic motives were at work. The Hindus amassed all their wealth in temples and therefore Muslim armies plundered these temples.”

That Habib sr. made this claim concerning Mahmud, is already clear from the quotations given above. His whole point was to absolve Islam and attribute the crimes Mahmud committed to other factors such as, here, the desire for booty. Habib jr. comments: “Prof. Habib says this for the example of Mahmud of Ghazni. If he has made a more general claim to this effect, I have not been able to find it in his Collected Works. Which brings up the matter of Elst’s method - one should note the lack of direct quotation or reference.”

It is funny how often I, as a writer of heavy books overburdened with quotations and footnotes, have been attacked for not providing footnotes in my book Negationism in India, which had been started as a mere review article (of Sita Ram Goel’s book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them) and was retained in that format even after growing to the size of a book in its own right. I referred to Habib’s writings purely from memory, having read some of them in India months or years before penning that review.

Professor Habib, described here as a specialist on the Delhi Sultanate, had to deal with many more Muslim fanatics and iconoclasts, the Delhi Sultanate being one of the most violent regimes in history. Invariably, sultans oppressing Hinduism invoked the tenets of Islam as justification. If we are to believe Amber Habib, it was only in the case of Mahmud Ghaznavi that the august professor disconnected behaviour from religion. So in all the other cases, say Malik Kafur, Alauddin Khilji or Sikander Lodi, Habib admitted their Islamic motivation? Habib can be quoted as confirming the Islamic injunction to idol-breaking as demonstrated by many Muslim rulers in India?

That is still not what I recall, but, not having Habib’s Collected Works handy even now, I am willing to take Habib jr.’s word for it. Let us assume that I wrongly extrapolated Habib sr.’s view of Mahmud Ghaznavi to Muslim rulers in general. Note, however, that this extrapolation would be accurate for most of Habib’s followers among today’s AMU and JNU faculty, and even foreign scholars like Richard Eaton, who do make these exonerating claims about Islam in the case of Muslim conquerors in general.

10.3. The ethnic factor

The next quotation from my own text is this: “Thirdly, according to Habib there was also a racial factor: these Muslims were mostly Turks, savage riders from the steppes who would need several centuries before getting civilized by the wholesome influence of Islam. Their inborn barbarity cannot be attributed to the doctrines of Islam.”

I readily admit that my choice of the word “racial” was cheap and demagogic. Nowadays, racism passes for the ultimate mortal sin and I could not withstand the temptation to insinuate an allegation of racism against my opponents. Given the looseness with which the term “racism” is used nowadays, the massacres of Hindus by Muslims and the concentrated hatred of secularists for the Hindus could easily qualify as “racist”. But coming back to reality, the fact remains that Habib and many others have described the pre-Islamic and freshly-islamized Turks as barbaric, and used that classification to explain some of their behaviour without implicating Islam.

Amber Habib sets the record straight: “Prof. Habib did talk about relatively ‘uncivilized’ Turks, but this was in the context of their conflicts with the Persians. In his descriptions, these are not the Turks who made it to India - and further the first Muslim invaders of India were not Turks in any case. Phrases such as ‘inborn barbarity’ seem quite foreign to Prof. Habib’s world-view and writing style and are more likely a projection by Elst of his own weird classifications of peoples. Prof. Habib’s argument is quite the opposite of what is presented here. He did not describe barbarians who were not yet soothed by Islam - but a sophisticated ruling class that perverted the ideals of Islam to its own ends.”

Before replying, allow me to quote one more round of Amber Habib’s argument. I am quoted as writing: “Mohammed Habib’s exercise in history-rewriting cannot stand the test of historical criticism on any score. We can demonstrate this with the example of Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi (997-1030), already mentioned, who carried out a number of devastating raids in Sindh, Gujarat and Panjab. This Ghaznavi was a Turk, certainly, but in many respects he was not a barbarian: he patronized arts and literature (including the great Persian poet Firdausi, who would end up in trouble because his patron suspected him of apostasy, and the Persian but Arabic-writing historian Albiruni) and was a fine calligraphist himself. The undeniable barbarity of his antiHindu campaigns cannot be attributed to his ethnic stock.”

Habib jr. comments: “Prof. Habib does not attribute Mahmud’s behaviour to his being a Turk ‘barbarian’, but (to the extent that background can be blamed) to the spirit of the ‘Persian Renaissance’ and the subsequent submission of the Islamic ideal to the whims and desires of the rulers. To say Mahmud patronised Alberuni is a bit of a stretch - for Alberuni was a captive from one of Mahmud’s western campaigns and, while he travelled in Mahmud’s train, he enjoyed no special privileges. (his bitterness towards Mahmud is quite explicit in his Kitab-al-Hind.)”

Thank you, Amber, for this detail about Alberuni’s life story. It is most interesting to learn that one of the greatest scholars of the Muslim Golden Age, an admirer of India moreover, was not honoured in proportion to his exceptional merits, but was actually a captive and treated as one. But to return to the main point: as I already admitted, it is possible that at some points I have conflated Habib’s views with those of other secularists. It is very common in those circles to explain away the misdeeds of Muslims with ethnic factors of barbarity, e.g. numerous modem publications on the Prophet justify his use of violent means in imposing Islam as a regrettable but inevitable effect of the prevalent barbarity of the Arabs. The allegation of ethnic barbarity against Arabs or Turks is not my “own weird classification of peoples” but standard fare in pro-Islamic apologetics. My point is that this ethnic-cultural explanation of Islamic behaviour is wrong, for the Arabs were not at all barbaric. They had many tempering conventions concerning warfare, and Prophet Mohammed’s novel contribution was precisely to break these and wage a total war.

Mohammed Habib and Amber Habib have certainly not convinced me that Mahmud’s crimes are in any way due to the Persian Renaissance. Firdausi was the prime exponent of this trend, and he was never guilty of such crimes. And it was precisely because he took the Persian heritage too seriously that he got in trouble with the Islamic establishment including Mahmud.

But even if we accept the Habib theory, and if we agree that Habib’s line in exonerating Islam of Mahmud’s crimes is unrelated to considerations of ethnic barbarity, we still maintain that his line was wrong. The explanation of Mahmud’s behaviour as un-Islamic, whether from savageness or from decadent oversophistication, is wrong in any case. The “sophisticated ruling class” in Mahmud’s kingdom has not “perverted the ideals of Islam to its own ends”. Those who cultivated the Persian heritage did not destroy Hindu temples, while those who did persecute Hindus and destroy their cultural treasures have not done more than to faithfully apply the Islamic ideals. They emulated the precedents set by the Prophet of Islam himself.

10.4. Conversion by force, or was it by fraud?

Amber Habib has no quarrel with my following paraphrase of Mohammed Habib’s position: “Finally, the violence of the Islamic warriors was of minor importance in the establishment of Islam in India. What happened was not so much a conquest, but a shift in public opinion: when the urban working-class heard of Islam and realized it now had a choice between Hindu law (smriti) and Muslim law (shariat) it chose the latter.” There, I was merely paraphrasing a very famous phrase of Prof. Habib’s, one not pertaining to Mahmud Ghaznavi but to Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants.2

Amber comments: “Prof. Habib did believe that the sword failed to win any significant number of converts to Islam. In his view, the sword-wielders were only out for gain in this world and were not interested in conversions. Nor does he believe they would have succeeded had they tried. He gives credit instead to the Sufis and such preachers who spread a more egalitarian version of Islam through the country.”

In Prophet Mohammed’s biography by Ibn Ishaq, we find that practically all Arab conversions to Islam were the fruit of the sword. When Pagan tribes saw that their chances to hold out against Mohammed’s military onslaught had become very small, most agreed to acquiesce in the lesser evil, viz. to give up their culture rather than their lives. Others had joined Mohammed earlier for another sword-related reason: as fellow fighters in Mohammed’s Jihad, they would be entitled to a share in the war booty. Yet others, typically unthinking youngsters including the daughter of the leading family of Mecca, were eager to join what seemed to them to be the wave of the future, the army that went from victory to victory. It was only a very small minority that joined Mohammed because of a heartfelt belief that his claim of hearing Allah’s own voice was genuine.

In India and other countries, the percentages of the different categories of converts may have been divided differently, but the military superiority of Islam was practically always the overriding factor, directly or indirectly. Many were literally converted at swordpoint, but the largest number of converts were probably those, mostly in the urban artisanal castes, who wanted to escape the jizya tax and the numerous other disabilities imposed on non-Muslims, - a legal discrimination which supposed the existence of an Islamic regime, and this regime was invariably established by force. But I will concede that in some cases, gullible people were taken in by Muslim preachers or sufis who managed to link Islam with certain virtues or mystical experiences in the minds of their audiences. Even today, absolutely any self-styled prophet or cult leader manages to get a following, so why not in the Middle Ages?

But that does not mean that an opinion poll was held in which the Indians were given a reasoned choice between the Smriti and the Shariat (Hindu c.q. Muslim law) and then decided on the basis of their preference between these two. In any event, the law governing their day-to-day lives didn’t change much upon conversion, for most recent converts retained their Hindu customs (which in turn were generally not determined by the abstract Smriti but by caste tradition) for generations. To most converts, their first bite into beef, the classic test of abandonment of Hinduism, tasted very bitter, but they judged it was worth the nausea because it would increase their chances in life under an Islamic regime. The key fact here was not any “egalitarian” pretence of Islam, but precisely the inequality which it imposed between Muslims and Hindus of comparable social standing.

10.5. Ghaznavi vs. other Muslim conquerors

About Mahmud Ghaznavi, I am quoted as writing: “There is no record of his being welcomed by urban artisans as a liberator from the oppressive Hindu social system. On the contrary, his companion Albiruni testifies how all the Hindus had an inveterate aversion for all Muslims.”

Amber Habib comments: “No such claim is made for Mahmud by Prof. Habib. Let us quote him again: ‘It was inevitable that the Hindus should consider Islam a deviation from the truth when its followers deviated so deplorably from the path of rectitude and justice. A people is not conciliated by being robbed of all that it holds most dear, nor will it love a faith that comes to it in the guise of plundering armies and leaves devastated fields and ruined cities as monuments of its victorious method for reforming the morals of a prosperous but erratic world ... the policy of Mahmud secured the rejection of Islam without a hearing.”

Amber Habib’s whole argument hinges on a supposed contrast in behaviour between Mahmud and the other sultans. But that contrast is in most cases false. The real conqueror of India for Islam, Mohammed Shihabuddin Ghori, has left a trail of destruction behind him of entirely similar proportions. The same thing is true, on a geographically smaller but otherwise similar scale, for other Muslim conquerors, including Timur, Babar, Ahmad Shah Abdali and down to the Pakistani irregulars who conquered parts of Kashmir in 1947. If Mahmud could not win the hearts of the Indians, then neither could his successors. They all set the Hindus firmly against Islam, precisely because they did ensure that Islam got a proper hearing. They showed Islam in the true colours of Prophet Mohammed. But for their military superiority, they would have welcomed extremely few Hindu converts into the Muslim fold.

But what about Mahmud’s chief predecessor, Mohammed bin Qasim? I am quoted thus: “His [Mahmud’s] massacres and acts of destruction were merely a replay of what the Arab Mohammed bin Qasim had wrought in Sindh in 712-15. He didn’t care for material gain: he left rich mosques untouched, but poor Hindu temples met the same fate at his hands as the richer temples. He turned down a Hindu offer to give back a famous idol in exchange for a huge ransom: ‘I prefer to appear on judgement Day as an idol-breaker rather than an idol-seller.’ The one explanation that covers all the relevant facts, is that he was driven to his barbarous acts by his ideological allegiance to Islam.”

Amber Habib comments: “Prof. Habib points to many significant differences between Mohammed Qasim and Mahmud. The former was interested in setting up a fair government and in obtaining the consent and approval of the local population. He dealt harshly with opposing soldiers but left the civil population alone. It is not clear why Elst refers to mosques being left untouched. Mosques contain no riches - so this would be entirely in consonance with Prof. Habib’s view of Mahmud as a grand looter. Further, there could not have been many mosques at this time in India, let alone ‘rich’ ones. Perhaps he is referring to Mahmud’s western campaigns. Prof. Habib’s thesis is that Mahmud’s desire was to expand his empire to the west, and the raids in the east were to provide finance as well as the mantle of a religious warrior. It is quite consistent with this that he would be more destructive in the east than the west. The story of the ransom is likely a latter day fabrication by those seeking to enhance Mahmud’s status as a religious hero - it makes little sense for Mahmud to be bargaining with those he has just utterly defeated. Further, there are accounts of other occasions when Mahmud left a town alone on receiving a ransom.”

It is true, as I discovered later on, that the story about Mahmud refusing the ransom is a. later fable retailed by the sufi poet Attar. I mentioned it at that time as I found it in almost all books on Mahmud and very popular among Muslim in praise of Mahmud as an idol-breaker. But even if it was true, the secularists would have ignored it or called it another bit of court poetry. Whenever the secularists find historical testimonies inconvenient, they fatally hear words like “myth” or “fabrication” crossing their lips. In this case it happens to be true that a later poet dramatized Mahmud’s well-known religious zeal into this story of his refusing the ransom and preferring to break the idol. But it is only an extra to a sizable body of evidence, and declaring it a fabrication won’t alter our solid knowledge about Mahmud’s Islamic zeal.

It is possible but by no means certain that Mahmud only came to India to plunder, not to conquer. This thesis is put forward by historians who want to avoid the impression that Mahmud was, in a way, defeated by Hindu strength and hence unable to incorporate India into his kingdom. Habib, though critical of Mahmud because of his poor public relations job for Islam, seems to have been among those eager to uphold Mahmud’s military reputation. The effort seems to be in conflict with elementary logic. Since Mahmud saw India as a source of wealth useful in financing his western campaigns, it would have been more logical to conquer India and enjoy a regular supply of its wealth. In fact, he did annex those parts of India where Hindu resistance could be overcome, that is, Gandhar (northern Afghanistan and Panjab upto Sindh), and western Punjab upto Lahore from which parts he was able to drive away the Hindu Shahiyas after a series of tough battles. In the rest of India he encountered unyielding resistance and we can surmise that though (like Mohammed Ghori) he intended to conquer India, he settled for mere material plunder and religious destruction simply because he wasn’t strong enough for a durable conquest.

But for now, let us go with the convenient secularist theory that he merely came to India with a limited agenda of plundering. In that case, pray, why did he have to break stone idols? These cannot be melted and turned into gold coins or iron swords. Why did he have to desecrate temples in all kinds of ways apart from merely taking out their golden objects? Clearly, his concern was not merely financial, it was also religious.

I am quoted thus: “The contention that Hindus stored their riches in temples is completely plucked out of thin air (though some of the richer temples contained golden statues, which were temple property): it is one among many ad hoc hypotheses which make Habib’s theory a methodologically indefensible construction. In fact, Habib is proclaiming a grand conspiracy theory: all the hundreds of Islamic authors who declared unanimously that what they reported was a war of Islam against Infidelity, would all have co-ordinated one single fake scenario to deceive us.”

And Amber Habib comments: “Even in present times, temples are recipients of considerable donations. Certainly, the writers of the time describe the temples as sources of immense wealth. Prof. Habib gives the following quote about Mahmud’s sacking of Somnath: ‘Not a hundredth part of the gold and precious stones he obtained from Somnath were to be found in the treasury of any king of Hindustan.’”

Habib jr. does not answer my main point, viz. that Muslim conquerors including Mahmud destroyed many Hindu religious statues and buildings regardless of financial value. Numerous Muslim sources testify to the religious motive. Alright, some religious objects in temples were made-of precious material, but they were not the only ones targeted by Muslim iconoclasts; stone and terra cotta sculptures were also destroyed.

Finally, the distinction which Mohammed Habib and Amber Habib keep on making between plundering and Jihad, between material gain and religious zeal, is a false one in the case of Islam. For a Muslim, emulating the Prophet Mohammed it is the religious act par excellence. The Prophet himself organized numerous raids on caravans and Jewish as well Arab settlements, 82 according to an oft-quoted count. Looting the wealth of the merchants, taking the passengers as hostages and raping the women among them: all this was performed by the Prophet and his most trusted companions. Mahmud Ghaznavi accomplished a very pious mission when he repeated all these prophetic precedents.

10.6. Not the Muslims are guilty, but Islam

My conclusion about this topic is quoted thus: “Habib tried to absolve the ideology (Islam) of the undeniable facts of persecution and massacre of the Pagans by blaming individuals (the Muslims). The sources however point to the opposite state of affairs: Muslim fanatics were merely faithful executors of Quranic injunctions. Not the Muslims are guilty, but Islam.”

But Amber Habib disagrees: “On the contrary, Prof. Habib drew a careful distinction between the original Islamic ideal, and the corrupted version adopted by the Muslim invaders and ruling classes in India. He spared no effort in taking the latter to task, while espousing the former as a worthy ideal.”

Well, that is exactly my point. Mohammed Habib tried to convince his readers that a consistent behaviour pattern of Muslim conquerors was un-Islamic eventhough it was nothing but an application of the precedent set by Prophet Mohammed himself. On that understanding of his position, at least, we seem to be in agreement. We only differ in evaluating the eminent historian’s opinion: Amber thinks he was right, I have argued that he was mistaken.

About my essential conclusion, Amber Habib writes: “Elst’s distinction: ‘Not the Muslims are guilty, but Islam’, is a perplexing one. What does this mean in practice? Is the religion of Islam to be tried and convicted but its followers left in peace? It is clear this cannot be. His distinction therefore is mere sophistry.”

The word “therefore”, which implies that a reasoning is being concluded, is a little too much honour for the lone sentence: “It is clear this cannot be.” Someone who is on his own admission “perplexed” by a statement, should not go on to claim that its meaning and implications are “clear” to him. It seems to me that he hasn’t understood my position that “not the Muslims are guilty, but Islam”.

My position is exactly the one which in Amber Habib’s opinion “cannot be”. Yes, I think that “the religion of Islam is to be tried and convicted but its followers left in peace”. Just as geocentrism should be tried and thrown out but its believers should be left in peace. Galilei didn’t think his opponents should be burned at the stake or otherwise troubled. All they needed was some exposure to free thinking about their cherished but untenable belief.

Amber Habib concludes: “To summarise, it is clear that Elst’s case against Prof. Habib rests mainly on a wholesale fabrication of his views and arguments - these are distorted till they become less feasible, and then attacked using rather questionable ‘facts’. Why does Elst need to take recourse to such tactics? it would suggest an attempt to hide the weaknesses and gaps in his own arguments, by shifting attention to the ones he has constructed in his opponent’s.”

I will not try to snatch the last word from my worthy opponent. By now, the reader is sufficiently informed to judge the matter for himself.

It is usual for Muslim apologists of Islam to proclaim that Islam was and is being misrepresented by the mujahids of the past and the present and that true Islam stands for peace and tolerance. But they never tell us where to find the “true” Islam they are talking about. Let them proclaim once for all that true Islam has nothing to do with the Quran and the Sunnah of Prophet Mohammed. Surely they cannot claim a monopoly over studying and interpreting Islamic scriptures. The world has not yet become an Islamic theocracy; kafirs are still and most likely to continue to be in majority and they have freedom to find out what lot those scriptures prescribe for them.


Footnotes:

1Vide www.geocities.com/a_habib/Dada/elst.html. Not that it is important, but I am Flemish, i.e. Dutch-speaking Belgian.

2Quoted e.g. by Prabha Dixit: “Prof. Mohammed Habib’s historical fallacies”, in Devahuti, ed.: Bias in Indian Historiography, D.K. Publ., Delhi 1980, p.202, from K.A. Nizami, ed.: Politics and Society in the Early Medieval Period (Collected Works of Professor Mohammed Habib), Delhi 1974, vol. 1, p.72.

[Guest]

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/artic...348263.cms
<b>Dalrymple goes after 'lazy' historians</b>
Bhaskar Roy

NEW DELHI: Before actually giving an account of the Mutiny in Delhi's summer of discontent, <b>William Dalrymple has declared war on Indian historians, virtually accusing them of lethargy in accessing source material in the archives on 1857.</b>

The Mutiny Papers a <b>treasure trove of information on the 1857 Uprising have been gathering dust without any researcher bothering to take a look at them</b>, Dalrymple bitterly complains in the introduction of his just published book The Last Mughal .

"It is a commonplace of books about 1857 that they lament the absence of Indian sources and the corresponding need to rely on the huge quantities of easily accessible British materials...yet all this time in the National Archives there existed as detailed a documentation of the four months of the Uprising in Delhi as can exist for any Indian city at any point of history," he writes.

He even pokes fun at the <b>Indian historians' obtuse style and tendency to use jargon</b>. Dismissed by some Indian writers as the "Bollywood historian" for a perceptibly simplistic and facile approach, it is clearly his turn to give it back.

"...lists of casualties, predictions of victory and promises of loyalty, notes from spies of dubious reliability and letters from eloping lovers all neatly bound in string and boxed up in the cool, hushed, air-conditioned vaults of the Indian National Archives," he goes on, stressing the flaw of the local historians.

However, historians well respected in academic circles reject Dalrymple's contention that he has accessed such documents for the first time.
Professor Irfan Habib of Aligarh Muslim University points out that way back in 1957, Athar Abbas Naqvi brought out a six-volume history of the Mutiny using Urdu and Persian documents.

Asked about Dalrymple's claim that such sources are being tapped for the first time, Habib says, "This is not correct". He claims that Naqvi's seminal work "helped change the perspective". Shireen Moosvi, another historian of the Aligarh school, points to a major project of the Indian Council of Historical Research to bring out the documents on the Mutiny from all available sources.

As for Dalrymple's claim of hitting a treasure trove, she says, "This is just an academic flourish every author says things like that." She does not seem to have been impressed by his writing either. "I have not taken him very seriously as a historian," Moosvi says.

[ramana]

Why are they mad at him? He has looked into the hitherto unseen archives. That muchis clear while the Indian hisotrians were busy creating dialectic narrative of Indian history to justify the Muslim rule.
Habib's father started teh grand histroy of Islam in India project.