vedik HISTORY....IS WRONG AS WRITTEN BY WESTERN CIVILIZATION....TRUE HISTORY IN puraaAN AND itihaas....
Posted by Champaklal Dajibhai Mistry on January 11, 2003

 

UNITED STATES, January 2, 2003: This lengthy article by Hari Chandra is a well-written rebuttal in response to "Hijacking India's History," an Op-Ed piece by Kay Friese, published in the New York Times on December 30, 2002.

Mr. Chandra writes: "India's Hindu nationalists have a rightful quarrel with the official history, which has for long been guided by colonial masters with their own agendas, racial, regional, religious and otherwise."

Among the many issues Mr. Chandra takes exception to is the Aryan Invasion Theory. He says, "The Aryan Invasion Theory, a favorite of professional secularists, is largely based on philology of Indo-European languages, and was dated around 1500 BCE by Max Mueller. The dating of the theory was arbitrary, and was acknowledged as such by Max Mueller himself later. Surprisingly, the roots of Aryan Invasion Theory are not found in any oral, written or archeological record of India, but in the European political discourse and more specifically, the German nationalism of the 19th century. There is no way to reconcile the philological assumptions and the anomalies and inconsistencies that crop up with the Aryan Invasion Theory.

The alternate Indus-Saraswati civilization theory, on the other hand, posits that the Aryans were indigenous people, and the original habitants of the townships along the Indus, Ravi and Saraswati rivers, and that no invasion from outside took place during the Vedic times.

Post-Vedic invasions did occur, and are well documented and are backed up with substantial evidence. This theory is backed by evidence, which is at least consistent, scientific and can stand up to critical scrutiny." Mr. Chandra also addresses issues of religious freedom and the Godhra riots.

To read Mr. Chandra's remarks in full and the original Op-Ed piece, please click on the next line........PVAF invites your comments by clicking on POST A COMMENT in the header of this posting....


 

Dec 31 2002 : Hari Chandra comments on Hijacking India's History (NY Times)
Following is my rejoinder that I sent to NY Times.

Resurrecting India’s True History
By Hari Chandra


This is with reference to “Hijacking India’s History” Op-Ed piece by Kay Friese published in The New York Times of Dec 30, 2002.


India’s identity battles are nothing new, but recent archeological evidence seems to be unnerving quite a few of yesteryear history gatekeepers and their apologists – the so-called secularists, who have for long enjoyed the establishment backing up until the mid-nineties. Kay Friese’s ranting Op-Ed is typical of the paranoia that has gripped the self-appointed history gatekeepers in India in recent months - more so after the riots that followed the Godhra carnage in Gujarat, where a train car full of Hindu women and children were burnt alive by fanatic Muslims.


India’s Hindu nationalists have a rightful quarrel with the official history, which has for long been guided by colonial masters with their own agendas, racial, regional, religious, and otherwise. Post-1947 after the partition of India and the end of the British rule, the mantle was passed on to the Congress party, which under the Nehruvian socialistic order dominated the society for 45 of the last 55 years.


Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, was an agnostic and a Fabian socialist. He never cared about India’s Hindu identity, and was more interested in the social engineering that was to accompany his socialistic ideal, which proved to be nothing but an illusion. His vehement opposition, despite popular Hindu sentiment, to the rebuilding of the Somnath Temple as resurrection of civilization pride after India’s independence is a case in point. Somnath, one of the most revered pilgrimage sites of Hinduism was plundered and destroyed by Mohammed Ghazni as many as 17 times between 1001 A.D and 1027 A.D., and evokes civilizational trauma as well strong nationalistic feelings across India even today.


Despite being a suave and sophisticated intellectual, Nehru and the Congress Party fully exploited the dynamics of vote bank politics, which tended to divide Hindu vote into caste/region based categories, while keeping the Muslim vote unified by pointing an accusing finger at the Hindu society - this despite the fact that India retained its multi-religious and pluralistic character after Partition in 1947, while Pakistan became an authoritarian Islamic republic.


It is under this setting that historians of the socialist, communist, and the neo-Macaulay variety came in handy for the ruling Congress Party to cover-up, distort, and pervert Indian history out of its geographic, cultural, religious, social, and political setting. The aim was to ensure that the Hindu votes do not consolidate under one political umbrella, even as Muslims are courted as a ready-made vote bank. Also, to use history to show that the Hindu culture is itself was an outcome of invasion by Aryans, who displaced the indigenous people. A perfect cover to justify subsequent barbaric invasions by Islamic plunderers and the rapine British rule by comparing them to the Aryans, and in projecting Indian culture to be an outcome of benign outside influences rather than the uniquely indigenous Hindu cultural traditions.


Specific to the issues raised by Kay Friese, rewriting history is nothing new, and is nothing wrong particularly in light of new facts that can be ascertained with the help of science.


The Aryan Invasion Theory – a favorite of professional secularists – is largely based on philology of Indo-European languages, and was dated around 1500 BC by Max Mueller. The dating of the theory was arbitrary, and was acknowledged by Max Mueller himself later.


Etymologically, according to Max Muller, the word Arya was derived from ar- "plough, to cultivate" - meaning an agriculture background and indicating a more settled, peaceful, and civilized society rather than a conquering people of nomads and hunter-gatherers that the Aryans were projected to be.


Surprisingly, the roots of Aryan Invasion Theory are not found in any oral, written, or archeological record of India, but in the European political discourse and more specifically, the German nationalism of 19th the century.


Using philological basis, a theory was constructed, whereby a homeland of the Aryans was posited to be in the southeastern Europe or Central Asia. This homeland concept was further buffeted with a supposed invasion on horses and chariots that was then tied up domestication of horse referenced in Vedic literature. As a coup de grace, the Aryan Invasion Theory was considered proven by claiming that the domestication of the horse took place at around 1500 B.C, and that the horse provided the military advantage that enabled the Aryans to conquer the indigenous people of India.


A major flaw of the invasion theory is that it is all based on philology and has nothing to support in terms of archeology. Oral traditions were posited in a time, place, and setting of the secularist historian’s choice, but there was nothing in terms of physical evidence to support it in India or elsewhere. Second, the Harappa/Mohenjadaro civilization excavations with large amounts of physical evidence that point to a highly evolved people are posited as belonging to the indigenous people, but there seems to be nothing that can be said of them in philological terms. Third, if the Aryans destroyed the indigenous civilizations, there seems to be no evidence of this in the Harappa and Mohenjadaro excavation sites, which largely appear to be abandoned than destroyed. Fourth, geographical as well as astronomical references in Vedic literature are largely confined to India and match with events in the third millennium B.C and earlier, and not circa 1500 B.C as per the Aryan Invasion Theory. Fifth, there is no reference in the Vedic or the Post-Vedic literature of any conquests of Dravidians, the indigenous people who were supposed to have been driven out by Aryans. More importantly there appears to be no Aryan-Dravidian divide in the historical, cultural, literary and religious traditions that can be brought to evidence.


That the Aryan Invasion Theory was no more than a figment of colonial imagination seems to be troubling the professional secularists given their intense politicization of the debate and complete obfuscation of evidence that has been unearthed in recent years. So great is their aversion to reality and Hinduism that a tribe of secularist historians led by Romilla Thapar issued a declaratory statement that no more archeological excavations be done lest they confuse history, and hurt the feelings of the minority community - a case of acute paranoia to say the least.


There is no way to reconcile the philological assumptions and the anomalies and inconsistencies that crop with the Aryan Invasion Theory. The alternate Indus-Saraswati civilization theory on the other hand posits that the Aryans were indigenous people, and the original habitants of the townships along the Indus, Ravi, and Saraswati rivers, and that no invasion from outside took place during the Vedic times. Post-Vedic invasions did occur, and are well documented and are backed up with substantial evidence. This theory is backed by evidence, which is at least consistent, scientific and can stand up to critical scrutiny.


The archeological evidence is quite wide in range: satellite remote sensing and infra-red imagery of the long lost Saraswati river; Radio-isotope confirmation of the water from underground aquifers that fed the Saraswati river; carbon dating of the archeological evidence of numerous human settlements along the Saraswati river tracing along Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat in North India; forensic archeology of the Harappa Horse seals; and the philological connections of the Vedas with the archeological evidence. Enhancing further these findings are the discoveries of the submerged cities at Dwarka and Gulf of Cambay in Gujarat, excavation sites at Lothal and Dholavira in Gujarat, and Ropar in Punjab, underwater archaeological sites off Mahabalipuram and Poompuhar in Tamil Nadu, and off Musiris in Kerala, among others.


Instead of casting aspersions on Hindu nationalists via civilization history, religion, and politics, it would have been prudent if Kai Friese did his homework not just about Aryan Invasion Theory but also about India’s medieval as well as contemporary history.


As for religious freedom, Article 25 of India’s constitution guarantees free profession, practice and propagation of religion. However propagation does not automatically mean conversion, and religious conversion via force, economic inducements, fraud or allurement robs this very freedom to choose. This issue was specifically addressed by the Supreme Court of India in a 1977 verdict, whereby it held that the word "propagate", in the context of religion would mean to transmit, carry forward, diffuse or extend a particular religious belief or practice. But there is no fundamental right to convert another person to one's own religion.


Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, which are native to India, Islam and Christianity originated in a foreign land, with a cultural and philosophical tradition that is inimical to Hindu tradition, which believes in the brotherhood of all humanity irrespective of region, race or religion. Islam came into India on the cutting edge of a sword with unheard of barbarity that saw plunder, destruction, rape, slavery, and forced conversion in its wake. While there is a belief that Jesus Christ visited India during his missing years, and it is a fact that Christianity came to India via St. Thomas in 52 A.D., Christianity’s growth in India was largely due to missionaries, who had the backing of colonial rulers be they French, Portugese, or the British.


With respect to Gujarat, the Congress Party, secularist historians as well as the secularist media refuse to acknowledge what happened at Godhra was uncalled for, and also that the ensuing bloody riots for all the violence were brought under control within three days with the deployment of the Indian Army. Instead of having a balanced approach, and taking the state administration to task for the security lapses as well as relief efforts, they chose the ruling BJP party, and more specifically the party’s chief minister in Gujarat, Narendra Modi, and demonized him to no end. Additionally, Hindu Gujaratis were portrayed as arsonists, bloodthirsty killers, and rapists, and only the Muslims as hapless victims. This secularist appeasement of the minorities resulted in a fierce backlash that resulted in the BJP getting two-thirds of the legislature seats in the December 2002 state elections by appealing to Hindu pride, and targeting Islamic terrorism in Gujarat, Jammu & Kashmir as well as other parts of India.


No wonder India Today magazine, a leading journal, in its Dec 30, 2002 issue rightly observed in its editorial: Gujarat “election was held in the backdrop of two riots, one bloody, the other pure sophistry. In the latter, professional secularists and the conscience-keeping industry sought out the darkest entries from the glossary of hate to describe the crime of the Hindu – Holocaust, fascism, Hitler…They rhapsodized the ghettos of victimhood, and, forever scavenging for a cause, they found a self-serving monster in Modi. The election exposed their pretence.


“Secularism doesn’t mean a repudiation of religion. In this country, secularism in practice meant romancing the minority and demonizing the majority. The professional secularist always needed a bogeyman, the usurper of the ideal and a ghettoized victim. Gujarat provided a perfect situation. The Hindu was the bogeyman. The post-Godhra Hindu to be precise. Godhra itself couldn’t have provided the stereotypes – there the victim was the Hindu. So Godhra was just a crime. No adjectives from the history of hate were required to magnify it. The anger of the majority is as much a reality of the times as the anguish of the minority. The so-called secularists refuse to admit it. This election has corrected them.”


Unlike many countries, India’s civilization heritage as well memory transcends several millennia and is a product of its timeless and peaceful coexistence of the Hindu society. And unlike other religions, Hinduism is a religion without any fundamentals – the concepts of exclusivity, chosen people, racial superiority, conversion, religious head, and religious dogma via a book, edict or revelations are alien to Indic tradition. Hinduism is more of a philosophy with full freedom of thought and action, with each individual pursuing liberation of the soul via the medium of truthful self-discovery. In a true sense, Hinduism is more a way of life than a religion, a notion that has been attested to by the Supreme Court of India as many as three times in recent years during the Hindu versus the professional secularist legal battles.


Kay Friese’s shoot-and-scoot allegations against Hindu nationalists do more harm than good as they distort the identity and ideological debate currently underway in India. Let India and its people decide who and what they are rather than get judged by an amateur and immature outsider.

 


Original Op-Ed article from The New York Times.

Hijacking India's History
By KAI FRIESE


NEW DELHI
While some of us lament the repetition of history, the men who run India are busy rewriting it. Their efforts, regrettably, will only be bolstered by the landslide victory earlier this month of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Western India state of Gujarat.

The B.J.P. has led this country's coalition government since 1999. But India's Hindu nationalists have long had a quarrel with history. They are unhappy with the notion that the most ancient texts of Hinduism are associated with the arrival of the Vedic "Aryan" peoples from the Northwest. They don't like the dates of 1500 to 1000 B.C. ascribed by historians to the advent of the Vedic peoples, the forebears of Hinduism, or the idea that the Indus Valley civilization predates Vedic civilization. And they certainly can't stand the implication that Hinduism, like the other religious traditions of India, evolved through a mingling of cultures and peoples from different lands.

Last month the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the central government body that sets the national curriculum and oversees education for students up to the 12th grade, released the first of its new school textbooks for social sciences and history. Teachers and academics protested loudly. The schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward facts, like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist in 1948.

The authors of the textbook have promised to make revisions to the chapter about Gandhi. But what is more remarkable is how they have added several novel chapters to Indian history.

Thus we have a new civilization, the "Indus-Saraswati civilization" in place of the well-known Indus Valley civilization, which is generally agreed to have appeared around 4600 B.C. and to have lasted for about 2,000 years. (The all-important addition of "Saraswati," an ancient river central to Hindu myth, is meant to show that Indus Valley civilization was actually part of Vedic civilization.) We have a chapter on "Vedic civilization" — the earliest recognizable "Hindu culture" in India and generally acknowledged not to have appeared before about 1700 B.C. — that appears without a single date.

The council has also promised to test the "S.Q.," or "Spiritual Quotient," of gifted students in addition to their I.Q. Details of this plan are not elaborated upon; the council's National Curriculum Framework for School Education says only that "a suitable mechanism for locating the talented and the gifted will have to be devised."

More recent history, of course, is not covered in school textbooks. So we will have to wait to see how such books might treat this month's elections in Gujarat. They were held in the wake of the brutal pogrom of last February and March, in which more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered and at least 100,000 more lost their homes and property. The chief minister of Gujarat, who is among the leading lights of the B.J.P., justified this atrocity as a "natural reaction" to an act of arson on a train in the Gujarati town of Godhra, in which 59 Hindu pilgrims lost their lives.

The ruling party's subsequent election campaign was conducted against the rather literal backdrop of the Godhra incident: painted billboards of the burning railway carriage. The murdered Muslims were not accorded the same tragic status, although their pleas for justice created a backlash that played neatly into the campaign theme of Hindu Pride. It was, of course, a great success.

The carefully nurtured sense of Hindu grievance has been nursed rather than sated by acts of mob violence: the destruction of the 15th-century mosque in Ayodhya, for instance, or the persecution of Christians in earlier pogroms in Gujarat's Dangs district. The B.J.P., along with its Hindu-supremacist cohorts, the R.S.S. (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the V.H.P. (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), has a seemingly irresistible will to power. (The R.S.S. and the V.H.P. are not political parties but "social service organizations" that have served as springboards to power for B.J.P. leaders like Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat.)

In vanguard states like Gujarat, thousands of students follow the uncompromisingly chauvinistic R.S.S. textbooks. They will learn that "Aryan culture is the nucleus of Indian culture, and the Aryans were an indigenous race . . . and creators of the Vedas" and that "India itself was the original home of the Aryans." They will learn that Indian Christians and Muslims are "foreigners."

But they still have much to learn. I once visited the bookshop at the R.S.S. headquarters in Nagpur. On sale were books that show humankind originated in the upper reaches of that mythical Indian river, the Saraswati, and pamphlets that explain the mysterious Indus Valley seals, with their indecipherable Harrapan script: they are of Vedic origin.

After I visited the bookshop I stopped to talk to a group of young boys who live together in an R.S.S. hostel. They were a sweet bunch of kids, between 8 and 11 years old. They all wanted to grow up to be either doctors or pilots. Very good, I said. And what did they learn in school? Did they learn about religion? About Hinduism, Christianity?

They were silent for a few seconds — until their teacher nodded. A bespectacled kid spoke up. "Christians burst into houses and make converts of Hindus by bribing them or beating them."

He said it without malice, just a breathless eagerness, as if it were something he had learned in social science class. Perhaps it was.


Kai Friese is a journalist and magazine editor in New Delhi.



Post Your Response | View Responses | Coffeehouse | Forward

Write a Letter to the editor of NY Times
 



There are 3 additional comments.

#1 Posted by jgkg on 10/4/2003
gmvjk


#2 Posted by vijay kundalwal on 10/14/2003
addresses of prajapati and kundalwal families living in delhi and rajasthan


#3 Posted by vijay kundalwal on 10/14/2003
addresses of prajapati and kundalwal families living in delhi and rajasthan


 

Send your news items to be posted to news@prajapati-samaj.ca.


If you have any questions or comments about this web site, send mail to Bhavin Mistry.    
© 1997-2003 Prajaapati Vishva Aashram Foundation.    
Site Design by Helios Logistics Inc.