If Lord Macaulay set out to create a class of persons who
were Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals,
and in intellect I have no doubt in my mind that he is smiling in his grave. Our
history books that are taught in our schools have seen to it that his dream
comes true.
Why do you think is
history taught to children all over the world? It is done to instill a sense of
national pride and honor. Whether it is the United States, Great Britain, France,
Russia, Germany or China, this is certainly the case today and has been so as
long as these countries have existed as modern nations. The lives of their great
leaders, particularly the founders of their country are highlighted, the
continuity of the nation’s history is emphasized, and the importance of the
nation in the history of the world and the greatness of the national culture
are stressed. Students are expected to come away from reading accounts of their
history with a sense of national pride, greatness and purpose, not only for the
past but also for the future.
In India however we
see a strange phenomenon. Written by the British, who ruled for 200 years or
the Left and Left of Centre Thinkdom (LLCT remember!) our history books are
nothing but apologetic about our glorious Hindu cultures and traditions. These
historians have largely kept intact the British approach to Indian
history devised in the colonial era. History books in India try to ignore the
dominant Hindu ethos of the country and its history before the Islamic period.
India’s greatest historical and cultural document, the Mahabharata, is hardly
given any attention in the schools. So too, the Vedas, Ramayana, Puranas,
Buddhist Jatakas and other prime historical and cultural documents of the
country are ignored because of their religious overtones. If our history books
do address India as a nation, it is only India of the independence movement
that they acknowledge, as if prior to 1947 India did not really exist. While
Nehru is made important, despite his political defeat in Kashmir and military
defeat in the Indo-China war, older kings from the Rig Vedic Bharatas to
Yudishthira of the Mahabharata period to the Marathas of the eighteenth century,
the Chandraguptas and the Vikramadityas are hardly mentioned. There is no real
sense of any historical continuity to the culture, much less to the country.
While Mahatma Gandhi is emphasized, the greater spiritual traditions of India
and its great teachers from the Vedic rishis, Vedantic, Buddhist and Jain sages
to modern savants like Sri Rama Krishna Paramhansa, Sri Aurobindo and Guru
Nanak are not given much attention.
What is even worse is that textbooks in Marxist ruled states
of India like Bengal and Kerala leave their students with a sense of the
greatness of communism and communist countries like China or even Russia which
is no longer communist, rather than any real regard for India and its great
traditions. The fact of the matter is that Marxism and communism in India were
largely anti-national movements. Marxists in India sided with China against
India during the Indo-Chinese war of 1962 and raised no criticism of China for
its attack. They sided with the British during the independence movement. As
against this, communism in Russia, China and Vietnam were part of larger
nationalistic movements. This is because Indian Marxists came mainly from a
British Marxist background and did not participate in anti-colonial struggles,
as did the followers of Mao and Ho-chi-minh. They were largely intellectuals
from wealthy families, educated in England, not workers in the field, much less
freedom fighters. They were the fore fathers of our LLCT.
The distortion of our history has been done intentionally by
many modern Indian historians belonging to the LLCT with the sole purpose of covering
up historical wrongs against Hindus. They came to the conclusion that if
independent India, fresh from a religious divide, and claiming to be secular, faced
its past of Hindu oppression by the Muslim invaders, there may be a Hindu
backlash that may offend minorities in the country. Also these minorities may
not resonate with the older Hindu and Buddhist cultures of the country and may
not feel the pride. The Indian mutiny of 1857 occurred because the British
brought in aggressive and intolerant missionaries and had the country in the
grip of a cruel economic exploitation. Yet such oppression has been left out of
the history of India as told by the Europeans and the LLCT has not rewritten
the record adequately. The destruction wrought during the Islamic period, which
was worse than the British period in terms of religious and economic
exploitation as well as genocide, has been similarly ignored or downplayed so
as not to offend minority communities. So a false history was orchestrated to
prevent the majority community from awakening from its colonial and
religious oppression, fearing this would increase communal disharmony. The
result is that our country lacks a genuine national pride and a sense of its continuity
to ancient times. Even today our greats from Gurudev Rabindranath Thakur to
Kailash Satyarthi are first discovered by the world and then by us!
The Left and left of Centre Thinkdom believes that by altering
our history our present can be changed. They pretend that the generally cruel
Muslim rule in India was benign and secular so that this account will serve to
make modern Hindus and Muslims more benign and secular and help them bury the
past. But the opposite is true. If a nation does not face its true history, it
has no future and its present remains confused. And that is what we are today.
That is why we have a Ram Janma bhoomi and Babri Masjid smoldering fission
reaction, waiting to burst.
Only now the LLCT
has been vanquished and the alternative thinkdom has annexed power. In
recent years, the government of India and several state governments have
decided to revise history books, particularly relative to the ancient period,
bringing up recent data that calls into question the Aryan invasion and the
many theories that have arisen from it. Over the past few decades numerous
archaeological finds have been made throughout North India, considerably
widening the civilization of the region and uncovering its continuity through
time, rendering the Aryan Invasion idea obsolete.
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