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India's heritage is in peril

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>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.>>

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