Guest guest Posted October 24, 2005 Report Share Posted October 24, 2005 >India's heritage is in peril>Sandhya Jain>The Pioneer>October 18, 2005>>India is in serious danger of losing ownership and control over its>civilisational heritage due to the machinations of an insidious combine of>Left-wing academics, Page Three authorities on culture and urban development,>and an architects' lobby posing as experts on archaeology and conservation.>>Looming behind them is UNESCO, a body whose financial scams makes the United>Nations oil-for-food programme smell of roses, which wishes to commodify Indian>civilisation in the name of world heritage and detach it from the life of the>Indian people. Complicit in these shabby manoeuvres is the Left-dependent>United Progressive Alliance regime.>>India, with its internationally acknowledged expertise, as demonstrated at>Angkor Vat, does not need UNESCO to decide its top heritage sites (a very>manipulative game), how they should be preserved, and how its living>civilisation and culture should be interpreted.>>We must realise that the mindset behind declaring some monuments as 'world>heritage' is alien to our culture, and eventually extremely harmful. In fact,>India should stop funding UNESCO, force a discussion on the Canadian>Government's audit of that body some years ago (it was condemned as an>international sinecure for wives and mistresses!), and press for its closure.>Allow me to explain.>>Those who have seen the pyramids of Giza are moved by their eternal beauty and>mystery. In a deep sense they are part of world heritage and deserve to be>saved from the fate of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Yet it is the Egyptian Government>which protects and preserves the antiquities of Egypt.>>The flip side of this picture is that the civilisation that created the great>monuments along the Nile is dead and gone. Egypt is culturally alien to its>historical past, and it has been left to Western experts to excavate and>interpret that epoch. In the absence of continuity of civilisation and culture,>the experts are free to make any interpretations and present them as>established truths.>>Foreign scholarship is never free of bias and cultural baggage; I am personally>aware that some Western countries are teaching school students about 'hunger>and poverty' in ancient Egypt (god alone knows on the basis of what evidence).>There is no one to counter that poor and hungry people could not have built one>of the greatest civilisations of the ancient world!>>Mercifully, the Indian diaspora in America has woken up to the denigration of>Hindus through viciously written textbooks, and the battle for a fair depiction>of Indian history and culture has been joined on that continent. Yet India>remains the primordial battlefield for the Soul of India. Can we allow a bunch>of self-proclaimed experts to cannibalise our culture and heritage, declare it>dead and preserve it in museums, where Western experts can freely pontificate>about feudalism in pre-Islamic India?>>I became acutely conscious of the danger of academic monopolies in July 1993,>when Sir Vidia Naipaul spoke to a national daily about the importance of a>sense of history. He said: "I recently received a document, the text of a>lecture given by some sort of an expert on India who teaches at Trinity>College, Cambridge. The lecture was on fundamentalism. In it we are told that>Islam was brought to India by traders and merchants and that places of Hindu>worship became absorbed into Mohammedan places of worship. Well, all this is>absurd and it is said by a serious scholar...">>Naipaul endorsed the demolition of the Babri structure on December 6, 1992, as>part of a "sense of history that the Hindus are now developing". It was a>fascinating observation.>>Readers may wonder why I have chosen to write about heritage at a time when>jihadis have slit the throats of Hindus in Kashmir and Hindus in a Bharat Milap>procession in Mau, Uttar Pradesh, have been attacked by culturally intolerant>persons.>>The UPA Government and the Congress party have maintained a stoic silence on>both the episodes, which have happened in quick succession. But my objective is>larger: Since the keynote of Indic civilisation is unity and continuity, we>will not be able to preserve the people if we do not fight for the civilisation>that once made them world leaders without reliance upon the barrel of the gun.>>While Left-Congress split over the NCERT curriculum has received some media>attention, there is complete ignorance about the September 2, 2005, meeting of>the Central Advisory Board of Archaeology (CABA). A discordant note was struck>with a notification dated 11 August 2005, appointing Dr Suraj Bhan, Dr D Mandal>and Dr Sitaram Roy as members (all served Babri Masjid Action Committee during>Court-ordered excavations at Ayodhya in 2003), when they did not figure in>three previous notifications.>>Their agenda was soon apparent. One worthy wanted rules changed so ASI could be>headed by archaeologists from outside! This would open the way for Marxist>historians to takeover this august body as self-styled archaeologists. The same>expert wanted to delink ASI's explorations from conservation activities, to>help Page Three Cultural Czars and their NGO fronts to grab public funds.>>The political nominees exposed their non-academic agenda by making adverse>remarks upon ASI's report to the Allahabad High Court on the Ayodhya>excavations of 2003. Given the paucity of time and the pressure under which the>team worked, with the court being asked to ensure 'communal representation' of>even the labour force, the report was commendable.>>Indian academics lack the honesty to appreciate evidence which contradicts their>ideological fantasies, and we need to question the integrity of a regime that>appoints such persons to premier institutions preserving national heritage.>>The Ayodhya excavations established the occupation of the site from at least>1250 BC, through successive historical periods. ASI found the remains of a>monumental building of the Medieval-Sultanate period (twelfth to sixteenth>century AD), over which the disputed Babri structure was constructed during the>early sixteenth century. This truth is indigestible to Marxist historians, who>are determined to choke the ASI, which alone has the power to overturn the>mythologies peddled by them.>>Another episode that angered them and figured in CABA was the accidental>discovery of vandalised medieval Jain temples during restoration work at>Fatehpur Sikri in 2001; they insisted such 'discoveries' must never be made>again! Yet, true art lovers are eternally indebted for the unearthing of some>of the most beautiful statuary in Indian history, especially a breath-catching>Devi Saraswati.>>Jains have a fascination for the Goddess of learning, and it is an endearing>irony of the Indic tradition that all famous Saraswati images found in India>hail from Jaina temples. To my mind, only an iconoclast would wish to keep such>an image from detection in order to protect the exposure of medieval>vandalism.>>Sadly, the Saraswati, honoured in Indian tradition as "best of mothers", became>one of the first political casualties of the UPA, with the Ministry of Culture>declaring there was no evidence of the river, even though it is being revived>in Haryana, Gujarat and Rajasthan! Decades of work by Government organisations>(and an accidental picture by NASA) have established the course of the 1600-km>long river from the Himalayas to Gujarat; excavations along the route would>establish the cultural chronology of the Vedic people. We must fight for our>roots if we are to preserve our trees.>>>>------------------------------->This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.>> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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