There is an
interesting and thought provoking post
in Dharma Dispatch. The post discusses the agenda of the left and how Sitaram
Goel sought to destroy the same. He perhaps could not in his lifetime but
certainly with passage of time, the reputation of the left as custodian of
Indian history has become discredited. The monopoly which Romila Thapar and her
ilk enjoyed for more than four and half decades is on its final legs. The Supreme
Court judgment on the Ayodhya Ram Temple issue was the final nail in the coffin
of the left historical agenda in creating deracinated India.
Unlike China,
India let control of the history be dictated by a cartel controlled by the
Europeans. The modern historical scholarship if one might term it so began from
Max Muller and his successors. Post-independence they handed their baton to
their Indian followers. These followers essentially of the left persuasion
began dominating the narrative which was consolidated with suppression of any
dissent by Romila Thapar and her team post 1970. To Indira Gandhi, then
dependent on political support of the Left, it was an opportune moment to execute
a trade-off. The trade-off was in exchange of political support, the left would
get a free hand to run their projects and experiments in history and other
social sciences without interruption. Nurul Hassan as the Education Minister
was the gift they received from Indira Gandhi. Scholars like RC Majumder and
their works were sought to be discredited and side-lined. Sitaram Goel and
others were discredited as fringe historians or worst as pseudo-historians with
no understanding of history. History was what the Romila and gang said irrespective
of it being factual or not.
The above post
by Shankar Saran brings to fore few curious points. The Islamic invaders
destroyed numerous temples across the country and built mosques on their sites.
This is nothing new and has been known for centuries and India is not the only
country to suffer. Yet India perhaps the only country that wants to be denial
of the same or at least a section of so-called intellectual scholarship wants
to remain in denial. To this, Romila and gang wanted to bring a false equivalence,
Having to accept that Islamists destroyed temples, they set out to prove Hindus
too did the same and hence nothing unusual about it. They sought to project
temples or religious centres of Jains, Buddhists, and Animists etc. were
destroyed by the Hindus and sought to be replaced by their own structures.
Implied was many Hindu temples, the South in particular were built by
destroying the religious structures of Jains, Buddhists, Animists etc.
It was on this
issue that Sitaram Goel presented his challenge. In fact, it was the weakest
point for the left eminent historians. It was sought to be presented by them as
something of a familiar fact without evidence. To borrow from James Boyle from a completely
unrelated context, to the left Indian history was an evidence free zone and
anyone seeking evidence were sought to conveyed as someone totally unfamiliar
with history. Romila Thapar’s reply to Goel’s questions smacks of arrogance and
contempt towards anyone daring to challenge them. Her treatment resembles
someone of a royal patronage seeking to dismiss a proletarian vassal. The reply
manifests perhaps a caste system that exists in the academic circle where the
pecking order has to be respected lest be treated as an outcaste.
At no point,
Romila and team seek to answer the points of alleged destruction of non-Hindu
temples by the Hindus. This was because there were no such structures and such
structures were invented to demonize Hinduism. In fact, western religion was
essentially binary in nature. It was monotheist and thus was antagonistic of
polytheism propounded by the Pagan religion. One suspects with reasonable
certainty that the historians of recent vintage invented these stories to
create sameness with the historical trajectory of the Christian and Islamist
expansion. The Western religions were the religions of the book and monotheist.
They supplanted polytheism. Hence something was needed in Indian context. Therefore,
the invention of Brahminism and its purported suppression of the lower castes
and Dravidians was played out irrespective of it being a fact or a myth. Little
evidence was given or worse so cherry-picked. Furthermore, there needed to be
invented a book to build the uniformity with the Abrahamics. Therefore,
Manusmriti filled that gap. It is a different matter that Manusmriti was hardly
known to the Indians and was a fringe book and hardly commanded any position in
the Hindu religious scriptures pecking order. Yet the left said, it did and
everybody was expected to follow that.
Interestingly,
since the pagans were replaced by the Christians and the Islam, the Brahmin led
Hindus ostensibly replaced the Animists. In the left version of history, the
Dravidians were the original animists who were supplanted by the Aryan
invasions and the consequent growth of Brahminical practices. Yet what they
failed to answer was how did each Hindu custom was animist in itself. There is
hardly any evidence other that in the imagined minds of the left of Hindus
replacing animist practices. The worship of Hanuman is itself a classic example
of animism in the Hindu religious practices. Almost every Hindu festival is
linked to the worship of nature and sort of thanksgiving to the nature. While
the American version might have been secular, the Indian version was millennia old
and represented the societal-nature balance at its best. Hindu worship of
animals, birds, reptiles insects, trees, plants and each aspect of nature reflects
the continuity of animism than a replacement. Further, the Indian traditions rooted
in Tantra or Shakti represent the continuation of ancient Indic models of
Shamanism thereby effectively killing the left contention of the animist
practices of traditional Indian tribals and Dravidians having been destroyed.
The contributions
of scholars like Sitaram Goel, Arun Shourie, BB Lal, Koneraad Elst among others
lay in building the first challenges to the leftist hegemony on Indian history
and society. While there was a space for non-left versions, the left
effectively dismantled those spaces by the early to mid-1970s. With the help of
the establishment and the media, the Hindus have been guilt tripped and sent on
conscience pricking trips. This had to be countered and as one is into the third
decade of the 21st century, the leftist hegemony is no strong as it
used to be.
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