05.12.2020
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They Peddle Myths and Call It History
India’s governing party rewrites the
country’s history to justify its Hindu nationalist ideology.
By Romila Thapar
The election of Narendra Modi and his
Bharatiya Janata Party, or the B.J.P., in 2014 led to renewed efforts to
rewrite Indian history so as to legitimize Hindu nationalist ideology. These
efforts had begun when the B.J.P. first governed India between 1999 and 2004.
Under Mr. Modi’s government and various
state governments run by his party, the attempts to change history have taken
many more forms, such as deleting chapters or passages from public school
textbooks that contradicted their ideology, while adding their own make-believe
versions of the past.
They have peddled myths and stereotypes
through pliant media networks — and have been teaching these versions as
history in schools run by the Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sangh, the parent body of
Mr. Modi’s party, which he served as an outreach worker and organizer for
numerous years.
Why is history so important to the
Hindu nationalists?
Nationalists are known to construct an
acceptable history to identify those they claim constitute the nation; extreme
nationalists require their own particular version of the past to legitimize
their actions in the present. Rewriting Indian history and teaching their
version of it is crucial to justifying the ideology of Hindu nationalists.
Secular anticolonial nationalism, a
primary organization of which was the Indian National Congress led by Mohandas
K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, won independence for India by basing itself on
the equal and inclusive participation of all citizens as constituents of the
nation.
This approach was challenged in the
1920s by two specific and at that time relatively minor forms of nationalism:
the Muslim League, a party established by Muslim landowners and the educated
middle class, which claimed to represent Muslim nationalism; and the Hindu
Mahasabha, created by upper-caste, middle-class Hindus, which asserted that it
represented Hindu nationalism. It later morphed into the Rashtriya Svayamsevak
Sangh, also known as the R.S.S.
The Muslim League spearheaded the
creation of Pakistan in 1947. The R.S.S. and its affiliates are still waiting
to convert India from a secular democracy into a Hindu religious state. Their
ideology, which attempts to legitimize the politics of Hindu majoritarianism,
goes by the name of Hindutva (Hindu-ness).
Both Muslim and Hindu nationalisms were
rooted in Britain’s colonial understanding of India. Policymakers endorsed the
two-nation theory proposed by James Mill, author of the influential “The
History of British India,” published in 1817. He maintained that there have
always been two separate nations in India — the Hindu and the Muslim —
constantly in conflict.
Linked to this idea was Mr. Mill’s
division of Indian history into three periods — Hindu, Muslim and British. Both
these theories, initially accepted by Indians, were later questioned by
historians and discarded half a century ago. However, they remain the bedrock
of Hindutva.
To establish a Hindu state, democracy
has to be replaced by a state where the fact of Hindus being in a majority in
itself gives them priority. The Hindutva definition of the Hindu is that both
his ancestral homeland and the Hindu religion’s place of origin are within the
boundaries of British India. This makes the Hindu distinctly different from
those that came from elsewhere, as well as from those of other religions —
Christians, Muslims and Parsis are therefore aliens.
The origin of the Hindus is traced back
to Aryan culture. Aryan identifies a language and a culture, not a biological
race, whose emergence historians date to the second millennium B.C. But the
Hindutva version of history is frantically pushing the date back to include the
Indus civilization, a sophisticated urban civilization that preceded the Aryans
by a millennium, as part of the Aryan origin of the Hindus.
The word is derived from “arya,” which
means “those regarded with respect.” If the Hindus are of Aryan origin,
therefore, they feel they can claim superiority over all others. This reflects
not just the 19th century European obsession with Aryanism, but also the
imprint of German and Italian Fascism of the 1930s on the founding members of
the R.S.S., easily found in their writings.
Whereas historians are exploring the
obvious interface between various communities and cultures of the second and
first millenniums B.C., Hindutva ideologues insist on a single uniform culture
of the Aryans, ancestral to the Hindu, as having prevailed in the subcontinent,
subsuming all others.
Recent genetic evidence from
archaeological sources has pointed to a mixture of populations in northern
India at that time, with people of Iranian and Central Asian origin. Historians
see this as evidence of migrations into India, but the idea is anathema to the
Hindutva construction of early history.
To assert that the pre-Islamic period
of Indian history was a golden age, claims are repeatedly made that this “Hindu
period” from 1000 B.C. to 1200 A.D. was so scientifically advanced that Hindus
were already using many modern scientific inventions, such as airplanes,
plastic surgery and stem-cell research. These statements are applied to the
activities of gods and men from the ancient past.
The other equally insistent Hindutva
argument is that the Hindus were victimized by the Muslims and were slaves for
the thousand years of Muslim rule. In demanding a Hindu Rashtra, or Hindu
state, they claim to be asserting their historical rights and avenging their
victimization. The history of the “Muslim period,” the second millennium A.D.,
is seen solely from this perspective and remains a mechanism for fueling
hatred.
Historians find no evidence for such
sweeping generalizations, but their views are dismissed. There certainly were
conflicts between Hindus and Muslims, just as there had been conflicts between
Hindus and Buddhists in pre-Islamic times. Some powerful Muslims did attack
Hindu temples, both to loot their riches and to direct aggression against the
religion. But this again was known in pre-Islamic times when some Hindu kings
looted and destroyed temples to acquire wealth. There was more than religious
prejudice involved in such actions.
The claim to victimization is ironic
given that the worst form of victimization — declaring the lower castes to be
so polluted as to be untouchable — was practiced by upper-caste Hindus for
2,000 years, including through the period when they were supposedly being
victimized.
It is striking that remarkable new
ideas surfaced in Hinduism during the period of Muslim rule, such as those
developed by its many devotional sects, which enriched the religion and gave it
a form that is currently observed by some Hindu devotees. But these are treated
as isolated incidents. Nor is there reference to some of the most exquisite
religious poems in praise of Hindu gods that were composed by Muslim poets, and
that continue to be sung in repertoires of classical music. That the higher
administrative offices of this period were manned largely by Hindu upper castes
is conveniently ignored.
In contemporary India the concerted
attacks on Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister and a symbol of
the anticolonial movement who understood the centrality of secularism in Indian
society, is a covert way of attacking secular democracy. The antipathy and the
effort to diminish the achievements of Mr. Nehru also stem from the R.S.S. not
being part of India’s anticolonial struggle.
The most dangerous aspect of the
implanting of the Hindutva version of history across Indian society is that the
divide between professional history and the version of the past used to
legitimize Hindu majoritarianism is increasing. The latter has the patronage of
the government, is well financed, and is popularized in a variety of ways.
Those critical of this Hindutva history are already being labeled anti-national
in an attempt to subvert historical research.
May 17, 2019
Courtesy : The New York Times
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