SCIY.Org Archives

This is an archived material originally posted on sciy.org which is no longer active. The title, content, author, date of posting shown below, all are as per the sciy.org records
the argumentative indian and historical revisionism

Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Sun 12 Mar 2006 05:56 PM PST  

The Argumentative Indian is a new book from Amartya Sen (nobel prize winner of economics) and is a reflection on the role of the skeptical (argumentative, rational) tradition in India. It sheds light on the important role of rational argument in the formation of Indian civilization over the centuries, and eschews the notion that an anti-intellectual religiosity has been the primary driver of Indian Culture over the centuries. He does this not by disparaging the religious traditions of India, but rather by providing vivid examples from the great texts of India e.g. Upanishad, Mahabharta etc. of the constructive role which argument and reason play within them. A student of Santiniketan, Sen remains loyal to Tagore's liberal vision of the greatness found within the diversity of the subcontinent. As Tagore states: the idea of India itself militates “against the intense consciousness of the separateness of ones own people from others”

Sen therefore disparages the notion of political and social Hindutva which seeks to turn India into a fundamentalist Hindu State, and in the process rewrite the history text of India, to portray Hindus as the victims of an Islamic holocaust. Such an attempt of rewriting the nations school history was attempted when the BJP ( the mainstream political arm of Hindutva) governed from 1999 -2004. The rewritten history books were replete with many gross factual errors such as that: Madagascar was an island in the Arabian sea ,and Lancashire was a fast growing industrial town, and disregarded heavy anthropological evidence that Sanskrit and the Vedas were unknown to the earliest civilization found in Indus valley of Harappa. The history books even neglected to mention that Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist (RSS) Nathuram Ghose.

Sen laments the fact that an India whose traditions which were mentioned by Marco Polo as one in which speaking the Truth was paramount: “ they would not tell a lie for anything in the world and do not utter a word that is not true” has been superseded by the political rhetoric of the Hindutva in their revision of Indian history. It is therefore discouraging to see the attempt of those in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville to peddle as authentic Kittu Reddy's revisionist The History of India: a new approach. Reddy who is on record as calling for the military invasion and occupation of Pakistan both disparages the great tradition of diversity and tolerance in India and the name of Sri Aurobindo himself, with his revisionist interpretations of historical events.

The notion of a Hindu holocaust at the hands of various warlords and rulers of Turkish, Persian and Arabic origin, - many of whom themselves were fleeing the slaughter and destruction of their own homeland wrought by the invasion of the Mongol hordes -, is one of the more egregious offenses against historical scholarship which Reddy commits. The equating of hundreds of years of Islamic invasions and the looting and pillaging of Hindu India with the five year slaughter of millions of European Jews by Nazi Germany is misplaced and not even metaphorically correct.

Reddy also leaves out some pertinent facts in his account of Hindu victim hood in medieval Indian history. Among the many things Reddy overlooks is the culpability of some Hindus in these attacks. It is a fact that Hindus often served in the armies of the Muslim invaders and some were indeed high ranking officers. For example Reddy makes much of Mohamed of Ganzi attacks and plunder of Hindu temples during his conquest in the 10th century. In fact the attacks, especially the one against Somnath on the Indian ocean by Mohamed of Ganzi were devastating to Hindu culture, and the beginning of a pattern of invasions which were followed by other Muslim armies. What he fails to mention is that Mohamed of Ganzi had many loyal Hindus in his ranks, and when succession fell to his son Masud, Masud entrusted many of his campaigns to a Hindu general named Tilak. In fact, so confident was Masud in Tilak that he gave him command of his armies which were tasked to put down insurrections involving large Muslim populations such as the rebellion of Ahmad Niyaltigin.. e.g. He trusted a Hindu general to enact a brutal military campaign against an Islamic population. Moreover, in the battle of Kirman a "Hindu army formed half of the cavalry, there being two thousand Hindus, one thousand Turks and one thousand Kurds and Arabs" (Ikram).

The tracing of the invasion of Islamic armies from the Middle Ages to the present need to force Pakistan down in a military ambit as Reddy advocated in his article on the Kargil crisis is the outrageous consequence of  his interpretive framework. That Mr. Reddy's attempts to stamp Sri Aurobindo's name as the authoritative source for his peculiar insights and interpretations of Indian history  is the frightening result of his line of ideological thinking

Mr. Reddy's militaristic advocacy of what course present subcontinent or world polity should take are certainly in conflict with much that is in Aurobindo's major treatises on social and political thought such as, the Ideal of Human Unity and The Human Cycle. To be sure Aurobindo advocated the unity of the subcontinent and believed in the renaissance of Vedic culture however, its renaissance like the greatness of Hinduism itself was seen in its wide embrace of life and transcendent realization of unity within multiplicity. In my reading, while Sri Aurobindo was not a Gandhian pacifist, and even advocated resistance by whatever means necessary to ensure truth and justice persevered in the evolutionary advance of the species, he  was  simultaneously integral and global in his thinking and  envisioned the placement of  all nations and cultures within a harmonious world order.

Mr. Reddy's source material for his militaristic interpretations are often suspect. The taking of statements which Sri Aurobindo made (outrageously often taken from conversations and unpublished letters), prior to his death regarding world events in 1950 as proclamations of eternal truths, and prescriptions for actions to be taken now, during current world crisis, is an affront not only to political science and hermeneutics but to Sri Aurobindo's  skills as a critical thinker as well. 

Such ideological interpretations attempt to turn Sri Aurobindo from an integral yogi into an integral ideologue. The support of such revisionist position by high level figures in the Ashram and even Auroville speak more to personal political agendas and lack of critical thinking skills than to the legacy of Sri Aurobindo's social and political thought. It appears odd that there is little formal debate within these institutions regarding such historical revisionism.

One does not openly find in these institutions any longer the vibrant tradition of argument and skepticism ( which certainly were present during Sri Aurobindo's lifetime) which Sen hails as having served India so well over the centuries in trying to arrive at a view of society that speaks to the grand tradition of pluralism and tolerance which has constituted Indian society for millennium; a tradition that eschews communal hatred. The choosing of revisionist sides in the history debate by the Ashram and to an extent in some Aurovillian corners places both institutions at risk of sliding back into a reactionary religiosity, rather than moving toward the integral spirituality it's founders intended.

.


Attachment: