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And yet we seem to have fairly reasonable discussions about other contentious issues like vaccination, race, and sex. But somehow discussions of Indian politics turn into flamewars and get flagged off the front page within minutes. As an outsider, I don't get to hear the parties in these debates have the kind of civil discussion this site is generally known for, and I'm left in the dark as to what's even at issue, let alone what the truth might be. This is disappointing, because India is a large, populous, and influential country, and it behooves all of us to understand what's happening there.

>>I'm left in the dark as to what's even at issue, let alone what the truth might be.

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.

Thanks for a thoughtful response!

Country with ~1.3 billion people which is crazy diverse (in terms of number of languages, number of scripts, history, culture, cuisine, arts, religion and geography), is guaranteed to have groups of people with many different views.

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.

Interesting, thank you for representing the argument in favor of making revisions.

Thanks.

Curious. which country are you from and whats your opinion based on what you have read about issues in India till now?

>>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.

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.

The current narrative suits your beliefs well, and you have no incentive in questioning it.

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! :)

>> India didn't produce a Euclid, heck it didn't even produce a Pythagoras, Newton or even a Al-Jabr.

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.

Calvinbhai , in the meantime it is the task of informed people like yourself to call out these things in the nick of time to take it to a more meaningful debate instead of the routine:

' 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.

Agree.

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.

> having read more and more content from independent authors (not funded by an institution, publicly)

Could you please list these books, papers etc? I too am in hunt of more neutral, unbiased work.

there is no such thing as unbiased in the case of India. The history is rife with many different issues.

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.

I really suggest that you dig into original references.

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.

It's probably "History of India by its Own Historians".

And it's worth noting that it was written specifically to advance the view that British colonialism was okay because, apparently, the Mughals and the Central Asian Sultans were worse.

It's a translation of various Muslim historians. So you can go read the original text. You can completely ignore the "British commentary" if you so wish.

Even if you don't read his commentaries, you have to contend with his selection of source material - texts and translations. They don't exist in a vacuum, they have purpose and context.

cant cite here, but I usually look for twitter people who challenge the current narrative, or even my own understanding. Most often, these are articles and long form blogposts that show up on my time line.

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).

>>fix the education system that has been messed by the previous administration.

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.

While i agree Indian history cannot be taught properly in a history text book i think each state introduces its own biases and the CBSE textbooks do a big disservice to Indian icons like Shivaji and their contribution to the country especially at the expense of Muslim rulers. The well documented atrocities of a despot like Aurangzeb are whitewashed

Sure, if we are talking about this sort of stuff, let's do away with Hindi language being mandatory. We already have English as a common language. And you guys are suggesting local culture and its history comes first. So local state language and english should be enough.

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).

Why English?

In my schooling in New Delhi in the 80s -- when the Congress-ization of the NCERT was at its peak -- I clearly recall being taken on a school trip to see a film about Shivaji, and also learning about the cruelty of Aurangzeb to everyone including his own family. So I'm not sure what sort of whitewashing you're referring to. Where did you go to school?

There's a difference between what history textbooks/syllabuses teach, and the history that you learn from your parents, amar chitra kathas, films, and even your teachers. The whitewashing happens in the syllabus and textbooks, but fortunately, it's very difficult to whitewash the collective memory of a society that has been subject to a brutal rule and that has been transferring knowledge from generation to generation by word of mouth.

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.

Is there some reference you can point to about this whitewashing in the textbooks? Because I don't recall it being so.

Yes, of course. Just get the NCERT history texts of Grade 6 and 7[1]. Grade 6 deals with ancient india till Harsha (6xx AD). Grade 7 starts with Delhi Sultanate (12xx AD). 600 years of history that included the brutalism of Ghazni and Ghori gone. Poof. Just like that.

1. https://www.books4jobs.com/ncert-books-history-class-6-12-ia...

Also, try reading the account of historians of the period and compare the description of brutality - mountains of skulls, 100,000 infidels (taken as slaves) put to death overnight, etc. with the description in your favorite history text which probably says "Timur ransacked Delhi".

Opened the Class 7 book, immediately found multiple references to Ghazni, one to Ghori. For perspective, Maharaja Ranjit Singh also gets one passing mention. So I guess I'm not seeing the systematic effort so far; perhaps there is more in other textbooks but my attention span is limited.

Compare:

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.

Sorry, the former is simply too graphic for a textbook intended for 11/12-year-olds, and I'm not sure why you chose the latter passage vs: "During his campaigns in the subcontinent [Ghazni] also attacked the temples of defeated kings and looted their wealth and idols. Sultan Mahmud was not a very important ruler at that time. But by destroying temples – especially the one at Somnath – he tried to win credit as a great hero of Islam. In the political culture of the Middle Ages most rulers displayed their political might and military success by attacking and looting the places of worship of defeated rulers."

I chose the passage to highlight the gross distortion:

"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.

An example of meddling with history, at least in South India, is how Tipu Sultan and Hyder Ali are portrayed.

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.

You can look at any area in India and you would see these stories, because that is how Kings work.

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.

>> There is an assumption that the education system currently is in 'mess'. That is not true.

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.

Universal health care, education and food security are long shot problems. Impossible to solve to solve on the short term problems in India.

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.

>> to fix the education system that has been messed by the previous administration.

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...