LIBERATING INDIAN MIND -15

THREAT OF REVISIONISM

“You are so obsessed with the rigorous study and frank admission of the shortcomings of the past that you fail on three counts: firstly you become intemperate in your choice of words and prefer strong words for miner failings; secondly, you fail to see the threat posed by the crude versions of history in their waiting; and thirdly, you level all the blame on the Marxist historian while they only followed consensus. Their fault lies in the fact that they are a bit more rigorous than others, but that is what a historian is required to be.”

“I was confused, not able to decide as to which of the charges be neutralized first. I shared my predicament with him and added, the words that you find strong are equal in measure to the default. That is what intellectual honesty demands. Being soft or stern amounts to digression.”

“Then there must be something wrong with your perception of reality. You call us culturally castrated at a time when the world is emulating yoga. How funny!”

“You see it as a recognition of our past achievements but fail to see that while appropriating it, these clever guys are denying the credit due to India. They dilute it to show that it was borrowed by Indians from the Chinese and to deprive the Chinese in turn, they try to prove that it was practiced by many of the primitive societies including the Negroes. While they are doing so, your red-hot historians shall either sit silent or, if someone tells them that it spread to China and Japan through the spread of Buddhism and to Africans through the Ethiopians who were in direct touch with India, some five thousand years back, when we imported some aridity friendly seeds such as ragi, millet from them, and it formed Indian outpost to trade with Egypt, they will cry in chorus that it is revision of history, because it restores the shine rubbed off by them in the name of austerity. In a word, they shall rise to support western denial. I am not unjust to them when I weigh them and show their real worth and recount the damage done by them. I am not well versed in English, you may suggest more apt a term than cultural castration used by me.”

“I am not a man of history, you know. But the little that I know about Egyptian history gives me courage to say that Indians or say Harappans did not have direct contact with Egypt. Only recently, your rightist friends have started making ridiculous claim that even the pyramids were built on the principles of shulbsutra.”

“I myself do not know much about the pyramids or the shulbsutras to settle the issue. But I definitely know that Indian goods were supplied to Egypt from Punt, the Ethiopian port; that Ethiopia got civilized through this intercourse; that Indian artisans like Indian goods and curiosities – monkey, sugarcane, peacock, sandalwood – were in hottest demand in Egypt; that the Egyptians were autocratic and so rough in their behavior that Indian traders did not send their ships direct to Egypt, and remained stationed at a safe distance where they could avail the opportunity to bargain and exchange at their advantage; that the Egyptians paid the workers and artisans employed to built palaces and pyramids in cowries and these cowries were of Maldivian origin, understandably exchanged by the Indian counterparts stationed at Punt ; that cowriy happened to be the first international currency, accepted from Egypt to China; that circumstantially there is nothing to reject the suggestion that these artisans could have applied the principles of shulbsutras in erecting and building whatever they built.”

He appeared disheartened. I knew it in advances . After a brief moment of dismay he came out with a query, “It means you stand with those who call for revision of history.”

“I am in support of those who are opposed to revised history by the professionals, as they called them, and demand that history must be written on scientific basis, supplying concrete evidence in support of anything you claimed. I gave my version, each bit of which is evident, that is supported by facts and evidence. But I doubt that those who wrote our history to force it down three generations, themselves knew it or not. One thing is certain. Such accounts could not find place in their books, nor could be tolerated by them.”