Indian History ?

[Guest guest]

of the growing political muscle of Indian immigrants and the rising American

interest in Asia. The foes - who include established historians and Hindu

nationalist revisionists - are familiar to each other in India. But America may

increasingly become their new battlefield as other US states follow California

in rewriting their own textbooks to bone up on Asian history. At stake, say

scholars who include

some of the most elite historians on India, may be a truthful picture of one of

the world's emerging powers - one arrived at by academic standards of proof

rather than assertions of national or religious pride. Some of the groups

involved here are not qualified to write textbooks, they do not draw lines

between myth and history, says Anu Mandavilli, an Indian doctoral candidate at

the University of Southern California, and activist against the Hindu right.

Speaking of one of the groups, the Vedic Foundation in Austin, Texas, she adds,

"On their website, they claim that Hindu civilization started 111.5 trillion

years ago. That makes Hinduism billions of years older than the Big

Bang." (The assertion has since been pulled from the site.) It would be

ridiculous if it weren't so dangerous. Communities use history to define

themselves - their core ideals, achievements, and grudges. Small wonder, then,

that history is frequently reevaluated as political pendulums shift, or as

long-oppressed minority groups finally get their say. History, and efforts to

revise it, have touched off recent controversies between

Japan and its neighbors over its World War II past, as well as between France

and its former colonies over the portrayal of imperialism. Here in India,

Hindu nationalists have pushed forcefully for revisionism after what they see

as centuries of cultural domination by the British Raj and Muslim Mogul Empire.

Instigating the California debate were two US-based Hindu groups with long

ties to Hindu nationalist parties in India. One, the Vedic

Foundation, is a small Hindu sect that aims at simplifying Hinduism to the

worship of one god, Vishnu. The other, the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF),

was founded in 2004 by a branch of the right-wing Indian group the Rashtriya

Swayamsevak Sangh. This year, as California's Board of Education commissioned

and put up for review textbooks to be used in its 6th-grade classrooms, these

two groups came forward with demands for substantial changes. Textbooks did

have glaring mistakes Some of the changes were no-brainers. One section said,

incorrectly, that the Hindi language is written in Arabic script. One photo

caption misidentified a Muslim as a Brahman priest. But instead of focusing

on such errors, the groups took steps to add their own nationalist imprint to

Indian history.

Roman" size="3">In one edit, the HEF asked the textbook publisher to change a

sentence describing discrimination against women in ancient society to the

following: "Men had different duties (dharma) as well as rights than women."

In another edit, the HEF objected to a sentence that said that Aryan rulers had

"created a caste system" in India that kept groups separated according to their

jobs. The HEF asked this to be changed to the following: "During Vedic times,

people were divided into different social groups (varnas) based on their

capacity to undertake a particular profession."

Roman"> The hottest debate centered on when Indian civilization began, and by

whom. For the past 150 years, most historical, linguistic, and archaeological

research has dated India's earliest settlements to around 2600 BC. And most

established historical research contends that the cornerstone of Indian

civilization - the practice of Hindu religion - was codified by people who came

from outside India, specifically Aryan language speakers from the steppes of

Central Asia. Many Hindu nationalists are upset by the notion that Hinduism

could be yet another religion, like Islam

and Christianity, with foreign roots. The HEF and Vedic Foundation both lobbied

hard to change the wording of California's textbooks so that Hinduism would be

described as purely home grown. Textbooks must mention that none of the

[ancient] texts, nor any Indian tradition, has a recollection of any Aryan

invasion or migration, writes S. Kalyanaraman, an engineer and prominent

pro-Hindu activist, in an e-mail to this reporter. He and other revisionists

refer to recent studies that don't support an Aryan migration, including

skeletal anthropology research that claims to show a continuity of record from

Neolithic times. Such research has not convinced top Indologists to abandon the

Aryan theory,

however. The final changes in California's textbooks are expected in the next

few weeks, but in the meantime, mainstream academics, both in America and

abroad, are setting off alarm bells. It was a whitewash, says Michael

Witzel, a Harvard University Sanskrit scholar and Indologist, who testified

before the commission in Sacramento. "The textbooks before were not very good,

but at least they were more or less

presentable. Now, it is completely incorrect." Aryan invasion a British-era

theory Early proponents of the "Aryan Invasion Theory" proposed in 1850 by

philologist Max Mueller may have had political agendas to justify the

subjugation of the subcontinent, Mr. Witzel says, but the preponderance of

evidence shows that Aryans came to India, with their horses, their chariots,

and their religious beliefs, from outside. Unquestionably, all sides of

Indian history must be repeatedly re-examined, wrote Witzel and comparative

historian Steve Farmer, in an influential article in the Indian magazine

Frontline in 2000. "But any massive revisions must arise from the discovery of

new evidence, not from desires to boost national or sectarian pride at any

cost." On the other side of the debate, the historian Meenakshi Jain, a

self-described nationalist, says that history is meant to be rewritten,

depending on the perspective and needs of the present time.

TEXT-ALIGN: justify"> Indic civilization has been a big victim of

misrepresentation and belittling of our culture, says Ms. Jain, a historian at

Delhi University and author of a high school history textbook accepted by

India's previous government, led by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party.

Pride has its place in history? Like many Hindus, Jain is proud of the

accomplishments of Indian history, such as the fact that three small

Hindu kingdoms - Kabul, Zabul, and Sindh - were able to hold off invading Muslim

armies for 400 years. She also thinks that students should learn that some of

India's most famous temples were commissioned not by upper caste Hindu kings

but by aboriginal tribes, who in modern times have been relegated to "backward

status." There is no such thing as an objective history, Jain says. "So when

we write a textbook, we should make students aware of the status of current

research of leading scholars in the field. It should not shut out a love for

motherland, a pride in your past. If you teach that your country is backward,

that it has no redeeming features in our civilization, it can damage a young

perspective." But no matter which version of Indian history California adopts

for its 6th graders, it is bound to aggravate someone. The Board of Education

has already heard from South Indians who argued that the HEF and Vedic

Foundation represent a North Indian upper-caste perspective. We were saying,

'These groups don't speak for us,' says Anu Mandavilli, herself a South Indian.

When groups like the

Vedic Foundation try to simplify Hinduism as the worship of a single god, "they

have their own agendas."

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