NO DE-FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY
“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’… The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed.”
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
History is not written by the hunted, losers and colonised—it is written by the hunters, winners and colonisers. It is meant to serve their purpose.
The British, rich in their knowledge and experience of barbaric colonisation, knew well how to prolong their oppressive colonisation and prolong their rule on India. Physical control, control through force of arms have their limitations. But, mental control can go a long way. If you have to exploit nations and subjugate their people on a long term basis—for decades and centuries—you can’t do it by brute force alone. You have to shake the confidence of people in themselves. You have to make them feel they are nothing—and that they were nothing—before the aggressors. To this end you have to rewrite and reinterpret their history, religion and culture to show how worthless it is in comparison to that of the exploiter. This is what the British politicians, bureaucrats, army-men, writers, novelists and historians did. Hammer into the colonised they are inferior, that they are nothing, that they are meant to be ruled. How? Control and change their education system, their books. Concoct, re-write, distort history. The British had so depicted Indian history and civilisation over the almost two centuries of their dominance that anything Indian had been shown in bad light, and anything of West as something superior. And it had been so skilfully done that foreigners or English do not have to do it anymore, it is the Indians themselves who have become self-abusive, and appreciators of all things English or Western.
Part of the reason is that the economy did so badly under the Nehru- Gandhis and India became so pathetic that people felt there was something intrinsically deficient about India and the Indians. Rather than blaming Nehru or Indira Gandhi or the Dynasty for their disastrous policies, people began to feel anything Indian was bad, and anything foreign was good. Had India done well after independence the impression would have been diametrically opposite.
You say what you read, and are taught and told. Many books were written by the English and the other foreigners, like Max Mueller, a German, parts of which were either incorrect, on account of limited or deficient research, or deliberately biased and false to serve the imperial or the religious, proselytizing interests. In the absence of books depicting correct position, these books came to be read widely, and some of them became text-books too. Indians have been taught and told what the English and the Christians desired and manufactured to serve their interests. Indians came to believe it. So did others—people abroad in other countries also read these books. Down the generations all started believing the lies as truth. Many Indian writers too based much of their contents on these books written by foreigners, rather than on new research. So, the writings of the Indian authors also started suffering from the same deficiencies, including that of Nehru.
Here are perceptive comments from a genuine scholar Dr KM Munshi in his foreword to his book ‘The History and Culture of the Indian People’:
“Our available sources of information…, in so far as they are foreign, are almost invariably tainted with a bias towards India’s conquerors… The treatment of the British period in most of our histories is equally defective. It generally reads like an unofficial report of the British conquest and of the benefits derived by India from it… The history of India, as dealt with in most of the works of this kind, naturally, therefore, lacks historical perspective. Unfortunately for us, during the last two hundred years we had not only to study such histories but unconsciously to mould our whole outlook on life upon them… Generations after generation, during their school or college career, were told about the successive foreign invasions of the country, but little about how we resisted them and less about our victories. They were taught to decry the Hindu social system…”
If the British came across something remarkable, which showed India far ahead of the West in the past, they “discovered” its link with the West. If there was something very distinguished about the Aryans, well, they came from the West—India was subject to Aryan invasion and so on. There have been many research-findings and writings to the contrary since, and yet that false impression is allowed to continue in India even today. Apart from further archaeological revelations, an inter-continental research in cellular molecular biology has debunked the AIT: Aryan Invasion Theory. Of course, there is no last word on such things, but there are good reasons to believe that both the so-called Aryans and the Dravidians belonged to India only, and did not come from outside: that has now been proved through DNA studies also. Further, “Dravid” referred to a geographical region, and not to a race.
When that racist Aryan-Dravidian theory was propagated, there were many takers for it among the educated Indians themselves, for they felt it enhanced their status—they were not the wretched “natives”, their ancestors came from the West! Such was the level of inferiority complex, thanks to
successful British propaganda! Even Mahatma Gandhi, during his South African days, pleaded with the British authorities there that the Indians be treated on par with the British, and not like the native South Africans, for Indians too after all belonged to the superior race, the Aryans—from the West!
See the cunning of the British in propagating the Aryan-Dravidian theory. It helped create divisions—North vs. South— among Indians. It helped them show that if there was something superior about the Aryans, it was because they came from the West. It also helped them show that India had been ruled by different groups who came from the West. First, the Aryans, then the Muslims, and then the British. If British were foreigners then so too were Muslims and Aryans. So why crib about foreign rule, that is, their rule—especially, when they had come only to “civilise” the natives and do good for the country! One can understand the purpose and the motivation of the British and other foreigners; but for Indians to talk like them!!
“The general effect of Dharampal’s work among the public at large has been intensely liberating. However, conventional Indian historians, particularly the class that has passed out of Oxbridge, have seen his work as a clear threat to doctrines blindly and mechanically propagated and taught by them for decades… Certainly, he does not manifest the kind of certainty that is readily available to individuals who have drunk unquestioningly at the feet of English historians, gulping down not only their ‘facts’ but their assumptions as well. But to him goes the formidable achievement of asking well entrenched historians probing questions they are hard put to answer, like how come they arrived so readily, with so little evidence, at the conclusion that Indians were technologically primitive or, more generally, how were they unable to discover the historical documents that he, without similar training, had stumbled on so easily.
“Dharampal’s unmaking of the English-generated history of Indian society has in fact created a serious enough gap today in the discipline. The legitimacy of English or colonial dominated perceptions and biases about Indian society has been grievously undermined…”
—Claude Alvares
One of the tasks after independence should have been honest and faithful re-writing of Indian history, that had been thoroughly distorted by the West, by taking the following steps: Setting-up of a large, multi-disciplinary, competent team, free from Marxist, “secular” and biased historians to engage in intensive research, and writing of history and social and economic life of India through the ages in as unbiased a manner as possible, pointing out of flaws and gaps and errors in the existing historical works, and supplementing them; and making available the new researched material and the corrected works in various forms: detailed, academic work, for further research; text-books for schools and colleges; books for general reading in an interesting form; and illustrated books for children. All necessary support should have been given to them—academic encouragement, financial help, incentives, ample opportunities, rewarding career for collection and compilation of all available source materials. Historical fiction too should have been encouraged: we need quality books like that from Amitav Ghosh.
Yet, thanks to Nehru and his Dynasty, there was no attempt to write the true history of India post-independence. There has been little genuine work in Indian history after independence by the Establishment. No worthwhile books and text-books on the Indian history have come from the Indian academe. If some genuine work has been done, it is mostly by those outside the Establishment—notably from historians like Jadunath Sarkar, RC Majumdar, Sita Ram Goel, Dharampal, and so on.
The school and college text-books, and many of those by the establishment historians are a shame. They keep peddling the non-sense of the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT); Aryan-Dravidian Divide; Indian history as a series of invasions and defeats of the natives, hiding and ignoring the many triumphs and valiant resistance of the Indians. From Babar to Aurangzeb (1526 to 1707), the Mughal rule lasted for less than two centuries, but the school-texts highlight the Mughal period, ignoring or compressing to just a para the far more grand and longer period of the Vijayanagara Empire of over 300 years (1336 to 1646), or the grand kingdom of Raja Raja Chola, or giving far lesser importance to the Shivaji’s and Bajirao’s reign. Nor is there coverage of India’s maritime prowess, and expansion into Southeast Asia: Bali, Indonesia, Cambodia, Ankor Vat either don’t find a mention, or are given miserly references. India’s ancient prowess in Maths and science and industry and agriculture, and what India gave to the world is also not highlighted
There has been no attempt post-independence to weave India’s grand narrative based on India’s unparalleled rich heritage, which all students and Indians could be justly proud of. Instead, thanks to the western historians (whose books are still main stream), Nehruvian and Marxist historians, India’s “grand” narrative is pathetically negative: losers, succumbing to invaders, faction-ridden, divided, casteist, exploitive, oppressive, condemned to be ruled!
It was expected that Nehru would be concerned about all the above aspects, and would promptly take corrective steps post-independence. But, alas, the writer of ‘Glimpses of World History’ and ‘Discovery of India’ was himself a slave to the western thought and interpretations, topped with the distorting Marxist-Negationist lens! Net result: Not only the distorted Indian history remained unchanged and colonial, it actually became further worse with Marxist-Negationist interpretations and distortions, as the next three blunders/sub-chapters bring out.
