The swamp of the false information being spread by the Marxist and the Communist historians in India has been alarming. The Indian Leftists of all hues have an inherent fault in their intellectual programming. An attempt to visit the roots of them in the blinkered ideology
Siddheshwar Shukla Eklavy
Question: Who discovered India? Answer: Vasco da Gama discovered India in 1498.
As a student of class III standard, I was reciting these lines again and again to mug the answer when my grandfather interrupted. What are you mugging? How can a person discover India which existed centuries before he was born? He took the book from me, crossed ‘discovered’ and wrote ‘reached’ above it. “I will not get the marks,” I doubted. “You will write ‘reached’ in your answer sheet and tell me if your teacher does not award marks,” he assured. He was not a historian but I followed his words and got marks. This was the first incident in my life when I was saved from slipping into the swamp of the false information being spread by the Marxist and the Leftist historians in India. I had faith in my grandfather whose understanding of Bharat was based on Sanskrit literature but what about those children who follow the European frame of reference? The centre of gravity of the knowledge we are being fed with through our so called modern education system; falls in Europe.
The deadly ideologyBlack Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, first published in France in 1997, was edited by noted European academician Stéphane Courtois that documented the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.
|
Therefore, the Indian leftists of all hues have an inherent fault in their intellectual programming. They look India from the viewpoint of the western thinkers, philosophers and historians. Therefore, whatever Indian data is fed to them is automatically synchronised and rearranged according to the western intellectual programming.
The New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853Just as Italy has, from time to time, been compressed by the conqueror’s sword into different national masses, so do we find Hindostan, when not under the pressure of the Mohammedan, or the Mogul, or the Briton, dissolved into as many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns, or even villages. Yet, in a social point of view, Hindostan is not the Italy, but the Ireland of the East. And this strange combination of Italy and of Ireland, of a world of voluptuousness and of a world of woes, is anticipated in the ancient traditions of the religion of Hindostan. That religion is at once a religion of sensualist exuberance, and a religion of self-torturing asceticism; a religion of the Lingam and of the juggernaut; the religion of the Monk. I share not the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindostan. —Karl Marx We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow. India, then, could not escape the fate of being conquered, and the whole of her past history, if it be anything, is the history of the successive conquests she has undergone. Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton. |
Karl Marx’s Bharat
I feel lucky to be born in Independent Bharat that too around 480 years after the first European Vasco da Gama reached India. But imagine this incident from the European frame of reference. For Europe, it was a discovery of a new country. The descriptions of Gama and his followers were used as reference study material by European scholars and transferred to the entire world through their education system. These descriptions were the only study material about India for the students enrolled in their universities and training centres across the countries. Those having an iota of doubt on this inference should read ‘History of British India’ authored by James Mill (1773-1836) for whom Indians were barbaric and uncivilised people without any glorious history. Mill never visited India but used all the secondary sources in his book.
William Jones (1746-1794), the father figure for Indian Marxist and Leftist historians and thinkers, was the first European scholar to understand Bharat through Sanskrit literature. The great knowledge regarding social system, politics, jurisprudence, philosophy, economics, spirituality and historical evidences in Sanskrit literature gave the first blow on the intellectual superiority of European thinkers. These literary evidences compelled Jones to admit the existence of a glorious history of India but he could not give up superiority complex of the European intellectuality. In his dating system for Indian history, he introduced devilry in the name of scientific methodology. His dating theory – The information in Indian literature in conformity with Biblical literature will be accepted as ‘historical evidence’ while those in contradictions are ‘myth’. The arguments for the theory were not scientific but based on Biblical traditions which proclaim that no human history was in existence before 4004 BC, the birth of Adam. On the basis of this theory, the description of Saraswati River in Rigved was proclaimed as a myth. In this way, almost entire historical evidence based on Sanskrit literature were declared myth. By this time, the Mughals were the greatest rulers of India. The brute majority of the knowledge about India available for scholars and students was limited to the medieval period. This was the knowledge base available for Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his contemporary European scholars on the basis of which they made conclusions and drew inferences.
Marx’s conclusion that Indian society was bereft of any internal social change before the British conquests is based on the knowledge available in his lifetime. “Indian society has no history or at least no known history. Indian history is mere chronology of invaders who conquered India and established their rule on inactive, non-resistant, and peaceful (read coward) Indians. Therefore, the question is not whether British had the right to conquer India or not. The question is whom the Indians would accept as their rulers – Turks, Iranis, Russians or the British. England has two liabilities – destructive and constructing a new society on the ancient Asian society,” opined Marx on 22nd July 1853.
Brahami Script: A death knell
Karl Marx was not aware of the glorious history of Maurya dynasty because by the time Europeans were not able to discover it as it was written on stones, pillars and caves in Brahmi script. He was not aware of the Great emperors, Chandragupta Maurya and Ashok. Marx was also not much aware of the Gupta dynasty and the Great Chandragupta Vikramaditya. The discovery was in nascent and the credible publication on Brahmi script – “On the Origin of India Brahmi Alphabet”; came in 1895, around 12 years after Marx was dead.
It was by the time of Max Muller (1823 – 1900) that the European intellectuals started to admit the existence of a glorious history and civilization in India before British and Islamic invaders. But Muller too applied Jones’ Biblical theory to declare the Saraswati River a myth. He ,too, was a Sanskrit scholar, authored several books on Hinduism and fixed 1500 BC as the date of Vedic Age. Thereafter, the Marxist and leftist historians of all hues kept following the footsteps of Jones to declare ‘myth’ to all such scientific historical evidences which were in contradiction to biblical history.
However, the arguments of Karl Marx were proved wrong by nationalist historians during the freedom movement by writing scientific history of democratic republics in ancient India and glorious history of kingdoms during Buddha period. The stone writings and pillars of Ashoka posed a big challenge to colonial intellectualism.
Sindhu Civilisation: Crisis for European Theories The thinking of entire Europe about India got another setback when the first archaeological site of Indus Valley of Civilisation was discovered in Harappa in 1920, around 37 years after Karl Marx’s death and 20 years after Muller’s death. These excavations again challenged the very understanding of Marxist and Leftist intellectuals about Bharat. The archaeological evidences compelled them to date back Indian civilisation from 1500 BC to 3,300 BC. But here too they followed Jones’ pug marks and proclaimed Indus Valley Civilisation as “Pre-Vedic” and “without language, script and written history”. Thus this civilisation was declared as ‘pre- historic’ civilisation to suit the interests Jones’ historical dating system and defend biblical history.
Saraswati Cilivilisation
The next blow to Marxist and Leftist historians came from the archaeological evidences in Mehargarh which dates back up to 7,000 BC. The Marxist and Leftist historians have been neglecting the natural sources of fresh water from Hindu pilgrimages at Adibadri in Bilaspur and Pehowa in Kurukshetra districts of Haryana. In a recent excavation of a canal at Mughlawali (now Saraswati Nagar) in May, 2015 a fresh water source was found at just three feet depth. Furthermore, the satellite images have revealed the entire channel of Saraswati River between Sindhu and Yamuna as was described in Rigved. The National Museum has been assigned to distinguish the Saraswati Civilisation from the Sindhu Civilisation. Furthermore, the ASI has been assigned responsibility to conduct excavation at Kunal in Fatehabad while geologists have been engaged with ONGC for tracing and mapping water channel of the Saraswati River.
Like the Sindhu Civilisation in 20th century, the Saraswati River is providing the strongest ever evidence in the 21st century for understating Bharat which are conformity with Vedic literature. The brain children of Gama, Mill, Jones, Marx and Muller are still stuck to the false knowledge of their forefathers. If those European scholars were living today, they would have definitely apologised for their comments, inferences and conclusions regarding Bharat and its glorious history.
If Marxists and Leftists really have any respect for scientific history, they should immediately discard the Biblical dating system of William Jones and discontinue it from the syllabus in universities. Furthermore, they should contribute to developing a new dating system for world history based on scientific methodology. Such a scientific dating system will automatically admit Rigvedic description of Saraswati River and also the fact that the Vedas were written on her banks. This will establish the Vedic Age from existing 1500 BC to 7,000 BC or more.
The basic premise of Marx that Indian society bereft of social change has already been rubbished by nationalist historians and social thinkers with scientific history writing of the Maurya Dynasty, the Buddha Age, the Gupta Dynasty, the Vedic Culture, and the Sindhu Civilisation. Marx’s stages of history may be applicable in Europe but they are a farce in the Indian context. The Europe too rejected the Jones dating system immediately after Charles Darwin proved him wrong.
The title ‘Discovery of India’ of Jawaharlal Nehru’s book seems in relation with Vasco da Gama with an aim to provide ground knowledge of India to Europe. However, the dominance of the Mughal and medieval Muslim rulers in naming the roads and public properties in Lutyens’ Delhi is strong enough to conclude that even Nehru was not much confident about the glorious ancient history of Bharat. This inferiority complex of Nehru was one of the reasons of his ideological conflict with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Nehru, however, chose Emperor Priyadarshi Ashok as his ideological guide and even named his daughter Indira Priyadarshini. In his first speech in the JNU campus after his release from the Tihar jail, Kanhaiya Kumar, the combined poster boy of Marxists and Leftists of all breeds; started reciting preamble of the Constitution of India. After hearing the name of Baba Saheb Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the journalist in me was expecting the entire preamble.
I was shocked when he started from secular and finished at socialist. He, perhaps, did not know these two words were included 20 years after Ambedkar’s death and 25 years after internal Emergency without any debate in the Parliament. It would be interesting to conduct a survey in JNU on how many students knew the complete preamble of the Constitution.
Bharat is passing through an unprecedented phase wherein Sanatanis and rightists seem to have lost faith in knowledge, writing, research and innovations. Today, the political environment is most favourable to decolonize the English literature about Bharat.
(The writer is a Delhi-based freelance journalist)
Comments