The battlefield of Indian history

[Guest guest]

>Rajeev Srinivasan

>The battlefield of Indian history

>August 16, 2004

>http://us.rediff.com/news/2004/aug/16rajeev.htm

>

>Indian history is once again centrestage. There is in some quarters a

>feeling that history is the most boring of subjects, consisting of

>long, dry lists of dynasties and the exploits of rather barbaric

>kings. This, unfortunately, is a result of the way history is taught

>in India. For it is fake history that has been manufactured by people

>with vested interests with the intention of keeping Indians enslaved.

>

>History is perhaps the most important of the humanities. There is

>nothing quite like history that can be used in positive and negative

>ways to affect the affairs of men. To paraphrase George Santayana, I

>would say, "Those who forget their history are condemned." Condemned

>to forever be second-class, to forever lack self-respect, to forever

>suffer loss of self-image.

>

>India's loss of knowledge of its history is a double disaster,

>because it turns out India's history is almost unimaginably lustrous:

>in fact, within the first order of approximation, one could claim

>that India invented almost everything worth knowing in the ancient

>world. India was, for millennia, the Empire of the Intellect, the

>civilization that with astonishing creativity generated more ideas

>than the rest of the world put together.

>

>The denigration of Indian history is a project originally put into

>action by colonialist Britons, who identified, correctly, that by

>controlling the past they would be able to control the present as

>well. After Independence, a cabal of Marxists has dominated the

>official version of history in India, and they too want to control

>India's present and future. They have managed to brainwash entire

>generations of Indians into believing that everything that originated

>in India is worthless.

>

>Through the miracles of "truth by repeated assertion" and the

>patronage extended to them by the Nehru Dynasty and its retainers,

>these self-proclaimed "eminent historians", many of them affiliated

>with the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, have manufactured a

>history of India that is widely at odds with the evidence on the

>ground. They are completely unwilling to accept new archaeological

>and other discoveries. They are dogmatic fundamentalists who remind

>me of the Catholic Church forcing Galileo to recant heliocentrism

>despite scientific evidence.

>

>The desire to re-infect history with the Marxists' pet shibboleths is

>seen in the unseemly haste with which the newly-anointed mandarins of

>culture in the UPA government have proceeded to change text-books.

>This is much like the instant histories that were popular in the

>Soviet Union, and are popular in China these days: every now and then

>it is rewritten to glorify whoever is the strongman of the moment.

>

>India's, however, is no instant history. It shows a tremendous

>cultural continuity of at least 5,000 years and possibly as much as

>10,000 years: there are identifiable methods and modes of activity

>that have not changed at all from the Indus-Sarasvati civilization to

>today. This fits in with the written and oral records of Indic

>civilization, which talk about the current age, the Kali Yuga, as

>beginning on a specific date in 3102 BCE.

>

>The Aryan Invasion Mythology, which Max Mueller created, was

>influenced by his Christian fundamentalist belief that the world was

>created in 4004 BCE, and therefore he arbitrarily assigned the date

>of 1500 BCE to the Indus-Sarasvati civilization (he allowed a

>millennium or two for Noah's floodwaters to recede and for Europeans

>to find their way to India!). This is utter idiocy. Mueller himself

>later disowned this date, but the "eminent historians" have yet to

>wake up, much like Galileo's tormenters took 400 years to accept his

>theory officially.

>

>There are a number of assertions made by nationalists that

>the "eminent historians" will and do fight tooth and nail.

>

>There is no such thing as an "Aryan" and a "Dravidian": the people

>who inhabited the Indus-Saraswati region were just Hindus; it appears

>increasingly likely that they in fact migrated out from India: this

>would explain the linguistic and other ties connecting India and

>points West, just as well as an invasion into India would

>Ancient Hindu civilization was already mature by 3102 BCE, the

>beginning of the Kali Yuga. At that time, astronomers observed a

>peculiar celestial configuration. Only an advanced civilization would

>have been able to observe and record such an astronomical phenomenon

>There is significant evidence of a continuous unbroken culture to the

>present day from the earliest known Indus-Sarasvati settlement at

>Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, Pakistan (6500 BCE)

>

>Indic, Sanskrit-knowledgeable Mitanni kings in Syria wrote treaties

>as early as 1400 BCE. One of the Mitanni kings, Tusharatha or

>Dasaratha, was the father of the famed Queen Nefertiti of Egypt

>There are enough astronomical clues in the Vedas and other ancient

>Hindu texts to indicate that they could not have been written later

>than about 2500 BCE

>

>Even minimal near-shore marine archeological investigations at Bet

>Dwaraka, Mamallapuram, Poompuhar and Kanyakumari have indicated the

>presence of man-made structures of great antiquity; one or two

>artifacts have been dated as early as 7500 BCE

>

>The obvious influence of India on Southeast Asia shows how Indian

>ideas and thus 'soft power' were irresistible to many cultures;

>similarly, a lot of Christian myths are derived from older Hindu and

>Buddhist myths. There was a 'Greater India' that was the India's

>cultural sphere of influence.

>

>India was also the Empire of the Intellect, although the "eminent

>historians" are loath to admit it. Some of the greatest achievements

>in the sphere of pure thought came out of India. And it is not that

>it was all idle speculation: for, the invention of zero and the

>decimal system, of algebra and calculus, as well as the creation of

>accurate astronomical tables, all had practical uses in calculation

>and in navigation. To take just a few examples:

>

>The so-called Pythagoras Theorem is discussed in the Sulba-sutras

>circa 800 BCE by Baudhayana. He also showed how to square the circle

>Panini's Sanskrit grammar ca. 500 BCE is arguably the greatest

>achievement of a single human mind in all of history, for he was able

>to capture the infinity of expressions in language in a finite set of

>4,000 rules. See also

>

>http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/t_es/t_es_rao-t_syntax.htm

>

>Aryabhata's astronomy ca. 499 CE is of the highest order, for he

>realized that the earth is a rotating sphere and quite accurately

>calculated the diameter; and he predicted eclipses, in addition to

>providing a value for pi accurate to six decimal places and producing

>an accurate table of sines

>

>Algebra was known to Aryabhata; and it is discussed in detail in

>Bhaskara II's "Lilavati" ca. 1150 CE

>

>Parameswara and Nilakantha of the Kerala School of mathematics and

>astronomy ca. 1400 CE proposed a heliocentric theory for the solar

>system, displacing the earth as the center of the Universe. Madhava,

>another member of the Kerala School, invented the theory of infinite

>series and the basis for calculus (it is now believed that Jesuit

>missionaries took this material back to Europe, and that Leibniz and

>Newton possibly got their ideas on the calculus therefrom). See Ian

>Pearce's website.

>

>In addition, there are astonishing facts about the prosperity of the

>advanced civilization:

>

>As late as 1750 CE, India accounted for 24.5 per cent of all

>manufactured good in the world. England accounted for 2%. (A century

>later, the numbers were reversed)

>

>The Thanjavur delta in Tamil Nadu and the Brahmaputra delta in Bengal

>were two of the world's four greatest centers of industry till 1750

>CE (why do you think the British got their paws into Bengal and Tamil

>Nadu first?)

>

>India was the only source of diamonds in the world till the late

>1800s, when diamond-bearing ore was discovered in South Africa and

>Australia

>

>Indian metallurgy was remarkable. The famous 'damascene' steel used

>to make the finest swords (Muslims in the Crusades had these: Saladin

>is known to have had one) came not from Damascus, but from India: it

>was called 'wootz' here. Similarly, the rust-free Iron Pillar in

>Delhi was an amazing feat

>

>India had some of the best textiles and designs in the world; a large

>number of terms used for textiles come from India, such as muslin,

>calico, seersucker, cashmere, gingham, madras, dungarees,

>the 'paisley' design, khaki, pyjamas,...

>

>India was a center for specialty services, such as medicine and

>surgery

>

>Sushruta practiced plastic surgery and did Caesarian sections; he

>invented 101 surgical instruments named after animals, some of which

>are still used

>

>Charaka wrote treatises on digestion, anatomy, metabolism and immunity

>Ayurveda and the related science of pressure points were taken to

>East Asia by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma; East Asian martial arts,

>as well as quite possibly acupuncture, are derived from these

>According to the research done by Dharampal based on first-hand

>colonial reports in the British Museum (see his book The Beautiful

>Tree) there was a school in every village, and children of every

>caste were taught therein, before the British invasion of India.

>Illiteracy was a British gift, as in Burma (see Amitav Ghosh's Glass

>Palace)

>

>As late as 1750 CE, the average Indian agricultural or industrial

>worker was better off than his equivalent in England

>

>Then there is a great deal of very interesting information about the

>Indus-Sarasvati civilization as well (see Michel Danino, The Invasion

>That Never Was):

>

>It has been shown that the Sarasvati dried up circa 1900 BCE as the

>result of a series of earthquakes. The entire course of the

>Sarasvati, a broad and mighty river, has been identified from

>satellite imagery, showing that it flowed from the mountains to the

>sea

>

>The geographical area of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization was greater

>the areas of the contemporary civilizations of Egypt and Mesapotamia

>put together!

>

>Across this huge area, there was a startling uniformity of town

>planning techniques, weights and measures (in the binary system ratio

>1:2:4:8:16:32:64), and in the sizes of bricks used for construction

>They used a decimal system of measurement as well.

>At Lothal, an ivory scale was discovered that has precise markings 1.70mm

>apart;

>

>and the pier walls at the port of Lothal are 1.70 meters thick

>

>An analysis of the sites in the civilization shows that there are far

>more of them clustered around the Sarasvati than the Indus:

>Kalibangan, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi, Lothal...

>

>Comments welcome at Rajeev.srinivasan

>

>

>

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