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History is Always Being Rewritten
Written by Dr. David Frawley
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.
History books are always being rewritten and they should be, as new information comes in and our understanding of culture widens.
This does not mean that history should carelessly be rewritten to suit an ideology, as in communist Russia or in Nazi Germany, but that we must not turn old accounts of history into an unalterable dogma.
History is not a material science like physics that deals with hard facts and even physics textbooks are continually being updated.
The European treatment of India was the same as that of America and Africa, starting with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, who brought the cruel ways of the Inquisition to India.
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 independent India has not rewritten the record adequately.
Yet can one seriously imaginegiven all the colonial distortions of history worldwide which are only slowly being removed todaythat no real revision of the history of India needs to be made? Can we believe that somehow by luck, in spite of their prejudices, that colonial and European scholars got the history of India right and wrote it without any distortion or bias in their favor, though they failed everywhere else?
When ancient historical finds are made in China, as with the uncovering of the tomb of the first emperor dating to the third century BCE, there is great national pride even among the communists. But all the massive finds of the Harappan/Sarasvati culture, as well as the retracing of the once great Sarasvati River, bring no pride to the leftist-secular intellectuals of India.
They would ignore these, dismiss them as an invention of Hindu communalists, or imagine that they represent an unknown civilization that vanished mysteriously with no real connection to the later traditions of the region! Though the Vedic literature is the largest of the ancient world by all accounts, Indian leftists will have no pride in it and seek to denigrate it as best they can.
Though the Mahabharata at over two thousand years old is the world's oldest and longest national epic, Indian leftists don't even want it taught in the schools (even when the common people find great pride in watching the Mahabharata on television).
Actually the distortion of history has been done intentionally by many modern Indian historians, particularly covering over historical wrongs against Hindus. They believe that by correcting history that the 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.
India has not faced its past in order not to offend minorities in the country, who may not resonate with the older Hindu and Buddhist cultures of the country.
It has also been intentionally done in order to prevent the majority community from awakening from its colonial and religious oppression, fearing this would increase communal disharmony, even though distortions caused by this, like the image of Hindus as backward idolaters, continue in the world media today.
The result is that the country lacks a genuine national pride and a sense of its continuity to ancient times.
History and National Pride
One of the main purposes of history books, as taught in different countries in the world, is to instill a sense of national pride and honor. Whether it is the United States, Great Britain, 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 great leaders, particularly the founders of the 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 greatness and purpose, not only for the past but also for the future.
However, India is a strange and unique country in which history books are often anti-national in nature. India has largely kept in tact 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 they 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, older kings from the Rig Vedic Bharatas to Yudishthira of the Mahabharata period to the Marathas of the eighteenth century 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 Aurobindo and Ramana Maharshi is not given much attention.
It is true that history should not be a mere instrument of a destructive nationalism and should avoid instilling aggre