Hindu Nationalists Undertake Effort to Rewrite History in India
reuters.com
reuters.com
The current government, under the façade of "Hindu Nationalism" is doing zilch (at least until now, nothing noticeable) to fix the education system that has been messed by the previous administration.
No matter how much you tweak with history, its not going to be effective if education system is left in shambles.Adding to that is the ministry of education, that knows how to troll bait international and Indian media, which tends to follow a certain ideology (thats not 'Hindu Nationalist').
With that said, having read more and more content from independent authors (not funded by an institution, publicly) I believe Indian history needs a thorough redo.
Problem is not with misinformation, but with lack of adequate information. The 1% of history gets 99% focus, whereas an equally amazing 99% is not mentioned, either due to laziness or due to scheming history writers, wanting to support a particular ideology.
Whats worse, is an Indian kid learns more about 200 to 400 yr old architecture around the world, but zilch about a 1000yr old fort or a temple in his/her own state.
Whatever the effort of rewriting history, as claimed in this article is, it is not going to have any serious effect, other than a few progressive-liberal news outlets hyperventilating on a non-issue that will be forgotten when Trump/Putin/KimJongUn et al throw a new troll-bait.
Could you please list these books, papers etc? I too am in hunt of more neutral, unbiased work.
The current history of India was rewritten by leftist who control Indian universities like JNU.
You will never find anything truly objective till you visit the country and explore its complex interwoven history by yourself and listen to many different perspectives. Even after that nothing can be compressed into a simple narrative.
The only difference is India is still a democracy unlike China so you routinely get exaggerated articles like these popping up.
1. Read translations of original Buddhist/Jain literature and the Puranas to get an idea of the founding of the Nandas, Pataliputra, Chanakya, Chandragupta Maurya, and Ashoka.
2. Read translations of Megasthenes, Hiuen Tsang, and Fa-hein.
3. Read translations of Harshacharita by Banabhatta to get a feel of Harshavardhana's empire. Read how Banabhatta tears into the practice of Sati - in 600AD. No modern history book will tell you about this.
4. Read "History of India by it's Own Historians" - Elliot to get an idea of the Muslim invasions and the Mughals. These are translations of biographies and works of Muslim historians spanning Ghazni to the Mughals.
Basically anything that tends to create a false dichotomy, is a red flag. And I'm not a big fan of books necessarily, because there's a financial incentive for the author to pander to certain ideology (irrespective of the ideology being something I believe in or not).
There is an assumption that the education system currently is in 'mess'. That is not true.
>>The 1% of history gets 99% focus
That is how school level education works. Do you think they teach 99% of physics or math in school? Or 99% of entire literature of whichever language you study? You can always opt for Masters or Doctorate in history, instead of other engineering or medicine courses.
>>whereas an equally amazing 99% is not mentioned
Feel free take up History as your specialization after 10th standard. You can go up to Doctorate and beyond.
>>either due to laziness or due to scheming history writers, wanting to support a particular ideology.
History is already well written and you can read if you wan to. And even study it full time. You just have to pick the right course. Don't expect to opt for Engineering and Medicine and then study history there.
>>Whats worse, is an Indian kid learns more about 200 to 400 yr old architecture around the world, but zilch about a 1000yr old fort or a temple in his/her own state.
As an Indian kid in the past, now adult. Who used to spend a lot of time in libraries, you can walk into any government library and pick up any book on any era and specialize on. There is mountains of work written. People just don't read it because the economic value of such knowledge is 0.
One less subject means we could add a 'History' elective to high school syllabus.
Those who are interested can opt for it. Others can opt for whatever they want(Math, Economics, etc etc).
Also, it's pretty hard to hide the clearly visible signs of destruction of idols, temples, and other hindu architecture, so a society would need to suffer from an extreme case of cognitive dissonance to accept what's in our history texts as truth.
1. https://www.books4jobs.com/ncert-books-history-class-6-12-ia...
Noon had not arrived when the Musulmans had wreaked their vengeance on the infidel enemies of God, killing 15,000 of them, spreading them like a carpet over the ground, and making them food for beasts and birds of prey.
...and twice that value was obtained from the necks of those of his relatives who were taken prisoners, or slain, and had become the food of the mouths of hyenas and vultures. God also bestowed upon his friends such an amount of booty as was beyond all bounds and all calculation, including five hundred thousand slaves, beautiful men and women.
with... (ncert text)
One of the best known of such rulers is Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, Afghanistan. He ruled from 997 to 1030, and extended control over parts of Central Asia, Iran and the north-western part of the subcontinent. He raided the subcontinent almost every year – his targets were wealthy temples, including that of Somnath, Gujarat. Much of the wealth Mahmud carried away was used to create a splendid capital city at Ghazni. He was interested in finding out more about the people he conquered, and entrusted a scholar named al-Biruni to write an account of the subcontinent. This Arabic work, known as the Kitab-al Hind, remains an important source for historians. He consulted Sanskrit scholars to prepare this account.
"He was interested in finding out more about the people he conquered, and entrusted a scholar named al-Biruni to write an account of the subcontinent"
No. He was not interested in finding out more about the people he conquered. The biographical works of his time are very clear - he wanted the loot and he wanted to get rid of the infidels and idol worshippers.
There are many areas in Karnataka that have suffered from their plunder, and all we see in text books is that they are heroes, because they fought against British.
Now, if you are a muslim in S.India, you'll not speak out against this portrayal. If you are a Kodava (people from Coorg), you'll be seething red with any such portrayals of Tipu and Hyder Ali, because they plundered, massacred, raped and forcefully convereted hundreds of thousands after every attack.
Now if Osama Bin Laden was a figure from pre 18th century India, I bet he'd be revered as a hero in Indian school textbooks and movie industry.
How do you think Ashoka built his empire? Techniques weren't any different than what Aurangzeb used. Or what Romans used, or what the Persians used or what the Greeks used.
Wars work that way.
Also there is a reason why 'foreign culture' gets acceptance in any culture. If you deny education, commerce and other social opportunities to your masses for millenniums they are bound to be attracted to other cultures even if they are foreign. If anything they get a divorce for their unbearable current affairs. A foreign ruler comes across way more acceptable than the existing domestic ruler who doesn't let you study, doesn't let you participate in war, doesn't let you trade and large looks down on your as some sort of slave labor whose sole purpose is tax revenue. Easiest escape from these scenarios is to change your identity- Change language, religion, culture, residence etc.
If this is what troubles you, then the solution to this is not rewriting history, but pushing for equality and upliftment of those who have been suffering for thousands of years. And that of course involves dismantling social structures and privileges that have existed for all thousands of years.
Otherwise all this is just an exercise in futility. You can rewrite what you like, and if the conditions on the ground don't improve, people will toss out whatever their current identity is and just move on to whatever works for them. And don't blame them, its not exactly wrong to want to live a good life.
Oh please stop with that attitude. You must have gone to a good private school with good teachers and expensive tuition classes after school to get to where you are today. Just look at the schools that economically backward children go to today and try taking their classes. This comes from someone who has personally gone to some classes in those schools (especially in rural areas). Ground reality is that the education system is really a mess. This is not an assumption.
Its just the scale. There aren't enough tax payers, or the scale of the economy to collect that much taxes to fund these sort of policies. The population is mind boggling. At the state level there are still many policies to solve these which are being chased. But its not a easy problem to solve for our population numbers.
There is an even deeper problem of tax accountability you need to fix and go on to these things. This mostly a policy problem.
The parent is trying to imply a problem with the content of education syllabus.
' India is a street shitting, rapist, poor , illiterate and nothing better can be expected'.
I think it is impossible for any westerner to understand the history of India looking at it from their distance lens and trying to classify politics as left v right or rich v poor.
It is very interesting to note that with this kind of assertion the impact of the previous Govt's ecosystem can be seen. You are on the back foot defending your stance all the time instead of calling out problems right away.
HackerNews seems to quite resilient to such clickbaity condescending articles, but this one still made through.
I think there are many outside India who want to understand it genuinely, but are deluged with agenda based news with no other source of information they can rely on.
Let me try.
India is a big country. And being a tropical heaven, rich with water, abundant sunlight, lack of extreme weathers, fertile soil and perennial rivers was the country to be in pre-renaissance/industrial age world. As you can see with these favorable conditions, it was easy to grow food India. Hence it was a attractive destination for a lot of people to settle/immigrate/invade.
Given these luxuries, India got a massive head start over other countries in the world when it comes to thinking and developing various cultures and philosophies. Over time many people immigrated/invaded India. They bought in their own things, most of which were absorbed in local cultures and have evolved for ages. There fore many religions, languages, festivals, food habits, clothing habits, literature, science etc etc came into being in India. In short the history got very diverse.
Recent one being British rule of India, and before that the Mughal empire. These events have deep cultural, literary, food, festivals and other influence on the masses. And as you can see these are associated with people following religions other the ones that existed in India several centuries back. Now this altered the way country itself is made up of. Every one in India is a minority of some sort, except on religious lines.
Since Independence and in later decades there has been a rise of a political ecosystem, which wishes to assemble a vote bank on the lines of religion. This is of course in direct conflict with the affairs as they are. I mean existing cultural and other aspects(Which are diverse). Since both British and Mughal periods are recent history you can see their influences in every thing from Bollywood songs, to Kurta pyjamas to Chicken Tandoori. And of course if you want people to aggregate on religious lines you want to undo that influence.
I don't know if the end goal is to make people sing Bollywood songs in Sanskrit. But stressing upon the identity that existed several thousands of years back definitely is the goal. If you get to aggregate people under one identity then may be you can make them vote as a block.
With such variety, in addition to the great percentage of users on HN being from India (this is just a guess), it's a difficult task to have a good debate without getting the conversation/topic/comment flagged.
While much of the popular international media (CNN, NYT, WSJ, WaPo, BBC, Reuters etc) sitcks to a certain ideology, it is near impossible to expect a fair debate based on the India specific content published in these sources of news, which often tend to view everything from Right/Left or Liberal/Progressive/Conservative POV.
Currently, the issue is that the history of India is written from the British POV, which has been tweaked later by Russian and American POVs. None of them really glorifying anything that is native to India. In fact a movie glorifying Winston Churchill just won 2 oscars in 2018, while people across the world, including many Indians are not aware of the artificial Bengal Famine orchestrated by Churchill, that lead to the death of 3 million Bengalis. Try inserting this in school texts, and similar uproar will occur.
Similarly, contribution of ancient India to the field of science, maths, astronomy and astrophysics is almost non-exsitent. Even now, none of the school texts in India do any justice to this, nor do modern (past 19th century) literature outside India.
Example: Many basic mathematical concepts like pythagorean theorem, the current numerical system etc are considered innovations/inventions from Europe and Arabian peninsula (respectively). In India, there's been enough proof available (as cited by those who believe these are Indian inventions) for many to think these are innovations from India and if not the world, at least kids in India should learn that these are Indian innovations and that Indians need to be proud of it.
Now based on which side of the debate you are, you'd either dismiss this thought, or hold on to it very dearly, or take a step back and say there needs to be more research on this, and in either case, present both the cases to students who are studying in schools.
Many thousand years of scientific understanding remain hidden in plain sight, because of such meddling with history, that draws many many students away from even exploring the real Indian history, from the lens of an Indian, and that is why this is a highly contentious issue.
With a Left/Left-liberal/Socialistic/Marxist type of a government India had for ten years (until 2014), enough meddling with history was done at school level, and now the Right of Center / kind of Capitalist govt wants to undo that, and make up for the tweaked history in India over the last few centuries.
The moment any such move is made in this direction, we have the world media of certain ideology hyperventilating on such issues and publishing clickbait articles.
Curious. which country are you from and whats your opinion based on what you have read about issues in India till now?
From the tooth brush in the morning to the mosquito mat in the night. AntiBiotics to Cancer treatments. Electricity to Internal combustion engines. You could even breath and there would be some Western innovation that would be driving it.
They invented it, so we study about them. If we had invented all this we would be studying about our people inventing it.
>>Many basic mathematical concepts like pythagorean theorem
These low hanging fruit science achievements were done by everyone, you could pull a Amazonian tribe randomly and there will be fairly decent algebra going on, because you if you have to live you have to do basic arithmetic and math.
And then of course 0. Guess how people in the past, say 100000 years back, who hunted two deers and eat them, counted the remainder? You got it right. 0 comes to existence that moment you start counting things.
India didn't produce a Euclid, heck it didn't even produce a Pythagoras, Newton or even a Al-Jabr.
Let alone achieving anything, most people here didn't even have the rights to study for thousands of years. We are the only nation on earth, with all these favorable and luxurious weather and agriculture conditions, with a civilization continuity over several millenia which has nothing to show for.
I believe there's enough to be questioned, and want the govt to fund research that ask these questions, and provide its findings to the public.
Neither you, nor I are asking for the govt to change the history blindly. Where we disagree is whether to question the history as we have been taught or not.
Looking at your responses, I think we better agree to disagree and keep this comments pyramid of doom short! :)
Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_mathematicians
I think what you meant is that Euclid and Pythagoras are more well known.
To be sure, 'administrations' would be better word, given what the current ruling party did to school text-books, in its earlier regime during 1998-2004. See this snippet from 'Argumentative Indian' by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen:
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=gcGiwyBS3YwC&lpg=PT29&vq...
Modi will fall, oh sure, Modi will fall. But mostly because he did not deliver on all his promises of economic miracles, which really, being a pragmatic people, is mostly what Indians care about. Indians are either too smart or too busy (or both) to care about the nuances of history as written in text books for children (which they only read before the exams to regurgiate).
There are working committees in the RSS already drafting amendments to the constitution.
Doesn't mean anything at all. But its not like the news is alien. This sort of thing just keeps coming up in the news all the time.
The plan is for a long term and organic growth. You cannot not congratulate him for making gutsy decisions. The hugely unpopular demonetization.
>>The hugely unpopular demonetization.
Pick one.
Excluding Taj Mahal really!!!
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/ta...
I see a bubble here. There have been plenty of killings in the name of "beef"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Dadri_mob_lynching) etc., for starters.
The social media/MSM discourse is more polarized than ever. The actions (or more importantly, inactions) of this government have given a clear indication that spreading venom of hatred is cool, and that "Hindu vs. Muslim" debate is still important and relevant.
I am not sure if "X-1 used to do this too" is a valid argument to "X is using it's power to rewrite history to suit their beliefs".
That being said, the RSS is a malign organization, and their official view of history is loony.
-- 1984 (George Orwell)
However, I can see how this could make a lot of people happy with BJP given their biases (and fear) against the Muslim population that is popularly perceived as the most rapidly growing religion in all neighborhoods across India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth
Not surprising, they have tons of children which you can easily see if you've been to various countries.
There is a similar belief for evangelical Christians and hasidic Jews, and those populations also have more children than average.
Imagine this happening in Tamil Nadu.
So Tamil Nadu, has its own rich history, literary heritage, food habits, clothes, festivals etc etc. Going back to thousands of years. Same with Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka or Kerala.
Why do you expect they study Maharashtra's history?
So sufficient enough history is being taught.
That should settle the discussion.
History goes as back it as it can go. Unless you wish to transform the entire school syllabus into a kind of a history specialization there is no way you can teach all of Indian history. At the same time, you have to teach history whose effects are relevant to you.
This is the biggest dilemma that Indians face throughout. You have to learn in which language? Most likely in almost everybody's case that is 'English'. So you have to talk about that bit of history in great details given the effects of colonization reflect on the masses and their culture even now.
North India relishes Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani poetry, movies, songs and all based on literary legacy of the Mughals. Heck even to a great extent food and clothing habits come from that era. So you have to talk about them.
Then you go as far as you can go and talk a little about people like Ashoka etc. But then again, it makes no sense to keep talking about era of bygones which doesn't influence the current state of affairs in any real way. Or like I said, you just have to toss out other subjects and just teach history.
>> it makes no sense to keep talking
Indian flag has Ashoka chakra in middle.
There are totally 3 text books that you can teach as a part of serious history in high school. Then there is also a part related to world history and other civics education which is very important.
How much history do you think be stuffed in those 3 books? Then you have to also divide between contemporary, middle and ancient history. You could cut any century in Indian history and you could come up with 10s to 100s of kings with tons of history for each of them. Want to study it, don't go into Engineering or Medicine or Law or whatever. Opt for a B.A/M.A etc and study history full time.
Contemporary history is always easy to relate to current times than something 5000 years back.
In the words of B B Lal, director of the Archaeological Survey of India:
...the application by married Hindu women of vermilion (sindūra) in the partition line of the hair on the head, the wearing of multiple bangles on the arms and of pāyala around the ankles; practice of yogic exercises; worshipping Lord Shiva, even in the form of liṅga-cum-yoni; performing rituals using fire-altars, using sacred symbols like the svastika; and so on. Indeed, be not surprised if I told you that the way you greet each other with namaste goes back to the Harappan times. Above all, even some of the folk tales, like those of ‘A Thirsty Crow’ or ‘The Cunning Fox’, which grandmothers narrate to the children while putting them to sleep originated in the Harappan times.
https://www.newsgram.com/vedic-and-harappan-are-respectively...
To clarify, I thought this was widely accepted already, that Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism all started in India. Islam and Christianity being started elsewhere.
Also every one comes from some where. No one ever fell from the sky, or sprouted from earth.
I vaguely remember coming across a study based on genetics that implied the flow of migration was probably from east to west.
FWIW, I find it amusing that the term used is Invasion and not Migration. Reminds me of the asymmetric application of the term expat instead of immigrant when people move to different countries.
Easier said than done. In many cases it might involve undoing a lot privilege in many sections of society.
... What is its specific relevance in contemporary Indian politics, and why is Hindutva politics so keen on redescribing the past? I would argue that the answer lies in two specific features of contemporary Hindu politics
... The first is the need for the Hindutva movement to keep together its diverse components and to generate fresh loyalty from potential recruits... The second reason for focusing on India's past is the large support for the Hindutva movement that comes from the Indian diaspora abroad, particularly in North America and Europe, for whom it is quite important to be able to retain their general Indian nationalist attachment while embracing any other loyalty they may be persuaded to have (such as Hindutva)
... The rapidly reorganized National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) became busy, from shortly after the BJP's assumption of office, not only in producing fresh textbooks for Indian school children, but also in deleting sections from books produced earlier by NCERT itself ( under pre-BJP management), written by reputed Indian historians. The 'reorganization' of NCERT was accompanied by an 'overhaul' of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), with new officers being appointed and a new agenda chosen for both, mainly in line with the priorities of the Hindutva movement
... School children were to be taught, in one of the textbooks, that Madagascar was 'an island in the Arabian sea' and that Lancashire had been 'a fast-growing industrial town' . The newly devised history of India in the new textbooks prepared by the Government of India received sharp criticism in the media and in public discussions that followed. The reviews in the major newspapers were almost uniformly disparaging. 'Bloomers Galore in the NCERT Texts', was the news headline in the Hindusthan Times
... one of the textbooks that was meant to teach Indian school children about the events surrounding India's independence failed to mention the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, the Hindu political fanatic who had links with the activist RSS (the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh) - an omission of very considerable moment
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10310.The_Argumentative_...
IMO, these politically charged discussions should be kept off HN.
On February 23, 2001, the University Grants Commission (UGC) — the central government body overseeing the funding of higher education in India — announced that
"there is an urgent need to rejuvenate the science of Vedic Astrology in India, to allow this scientific knowledge to reach to the society at large and to provide opportunities to get this important science even exported to the world ... [Accordingly,] the Commission decided to approve in principle [the] setting up of a few departments of Vedic Astrology in Indian universities ... leading to certificate diploma, under-graduate, post-graduate and Ph.D. degrees."
The plan provoked a storm of protest from Indian scientists and rationalist intellectuals. But what on earth prompted such a bizarre decision in the first place? The answer, not surprisingly, is politics: more precisely, the Hindu nationalist politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which governed India between March 1998 and May 2004. The BJP is the political expression of a multifaceted mass movement for Hindutva, or “Hindu-ness”, “an ultranationalist and chauvinistic movement that seeks to modernize India by recovering the supposedly pristine Vedic-Hindu roots of Indian culture”.As part of its program for the Hinduization of Indian education, the BJP rewrote school history textbooks to excise the contributions of Muslims and other non-Hindus, and promoted university-level courses not only in Vedic Astrology (Jyotir Vigyari) but also in karmakanda (Hindu priestly rituals), vastu shastra (sacred architectural rules), “human consciousness and Yogic science”, and “Vedic mathematics”
... Contemporary Hindu-nationalist intellectuals, many of whom are trained scientists and engineers, have brought this art to an even higher level of refinement. For instance, Subhash Kak, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Louisiana State University and one of the leading intellectual luminaries of the Hindu-nationalist diaspora, claims to find “astronomical codes” in the Rig Veda's descriptions of ritual fire altars, using a method that, as Nanda wryly observes, “is breathtakingly ad hoc and reads like numerology 101”.Even more ludicrously, #Raja Ram Mohan Roy asserts that “the Vedas are a coded book ... of particle physics and cosmology”: thus, verses referring to wild and domestic animals are really alluding to fermions and bosons, respectively; passages recounting the destruction of black-skinned people are in fact “about annihilation of anti-matter”; and the phrase “ten-finger form” in the Purusa hymn gives us “compelling evidence of [the] universe being considered ten-dimensional in Vedic cosmology”, just as in modem superstring theory.
#A contemporary author, not to be confused with the early-nineteenth-century Indian reformer of the same name.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_science_and_engi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philoso...
Curiously, many of the lethargy, idleness and sense of pointlessness came through sufism. Sufism itself has also many roots (including Greek, and later Andalusian twists), and has a wide spectrum. Ghazzali (the author of The Incoherence) himself was heavily affected by Sufi themes before he wrote 'the Incoherence'; but that book, a rationalist attack on some form of rationalism itself, has many valid points though.
A classical example is that Arabic numerals were essentially Indian numbers (including zero) that were introduced to the West by Arab traders. If one purely talks about timelines there are many unappreciated parts of Indian history and contributions created locally that predate Islam and Christianity.
This is not a contest but just trying to highlight the facts. Some Indians do not like the pride taken in these things but that is a separate issue
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29
They promote hierarchies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_in_Hinduism