|
Page < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 >
Voices of Dissent
"All history becomes
subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
in Essays:
History.
***
All kinds of
divisive forces have jumped on to the Aryan Invasion theory as the perfect tool
to cut slices out of Hindu society and out of the Indian state. This
theory became the basis of attempts to pit "Dravidians" against
"Aryans", high castes against low castes, tribals against mainstream
Hindus, Vedic orthodoxy "imposed by the foreign invaders" against
heterodox sects "which emerged as a native reaction against the Aryan
occupiers". It was also used to neutralize Hindu criticism of the Islamic
occupation, as "Hindus themselves have entered the same way the Muslims
have". Till today, Christian, Islamic, Marxist and
"secularist" forces continue to promote the theory and make
propagandistic capital out of it.
(source: Indigenous
Indians : Agastya to Ambedkar - By Koenraad Elst p. 1-2). Refer to Communist
Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette
Rosser.
The French archaeologist Salomon
Reinach (1858-1932) a Hebrew scholar and critic, first published work
was a translation of Arthur
Schopenhauer's Essay on Free Will
(1877).
Writing in 1892 at the height of the Aryan myth, was perhaps
the first to reject the very notion of an Aryan race:
"To speak of an Aryan
race of three thousand years ago is to put forward a gratuitous hypothesis; but
to speak of it as if it still existed today is quite simply absurd."
(source: Saloman Reinach,
quoted by Leon Poliakov in The Aryan Myth, p. 344 (French original). The Invasion That Never Was
- By Michel Danino and Sujata
Nahar p. 50 - 51).
 Mountstuart Elphinstone
(1779-1859) was one of the first dissenters. He was aware of the kinship in language between
Sanskrit and European tongues, but found the theory of their "spread from a
central point...a gratuitous assumption." In his History of India, 1841, he
observed, "Neither in the Vedas, nor in any book...is there any allusion to
a prior residence ....out of India...There is no reason whatever for thinking
that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one."
(source: Quoted by Devandra
Swarup in "Genesis of the Aryan Race Theory and Its Application to Indian
History" op. cit. p. 33. The Invasion That Never Was
- By Michel Danino and Sujata
Nahar p. 50-51).
Lord Elphinstone,
one of the early historians of India, writes exploding the myth of the Aryan
culture:
"It is opposed to their foreign origin, that
neither in the code of Manu nor I believe in the Vedas, nor in any book that is
certainly older than the code, is there any allusion to a prior residence or to
a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India. Even mythology
goes no further than the Himalayan chain in which is fixed, the habitation of
Gods. It is unthinkable and beyond all canons of logic
and common sense that the Hindus had forgotten their original home even at the
time of the composition of the earliest Vedas. Christians look to
Jerusalem for the origin of their religion, Muslims to Arabia, and Jews to
Palestine, but the Hindus have all their sacred places within India itself. If
they really had come from outside India, they should have some place of
pilgrimage like Mecca or Benares."
"To say that it (emigration) spread from a
central point is a gratuitous presumption and even contrary to analogy for
emigration and civilization have not spread in a circle but from east to
west."
Sir Walter Raleigh
(1552-1618) English sea captain, writer and court favorite of Queen Elizabeth I,
in his 'History of the World' strongly
suggests that the Paradise of the Bible was in India,
as according to Hindu hypothesis regarding the locality of the nursery for
rearing mankind, 'India was the first planted and peopled countries after the
flood (p. 99). This book was held in high esteem at that time. Both Cromwell and
John Locke recommended his book.
(source: The
Aryan Hoax: That Dupes The Indians - By Paramesh Choudhary
p.226 and Hinduism
in The Space Age - By E. Vedavyas p. 82-83 and 108-109).
Two years later, the German Sanskritist Hermann
Jacobi based his objections on astronomical data in the Rig-Veda,
which he found pointed clearly to a date between 4500 and 2500 B.C. Jacobi
inferred that the Rig-Veda could not be more recent that this last date, in
contradiction with the invasionist school. A later German scholar, Moritz
Winternitz, agreed with the date of 2500 BC on literary grounds:
"We cannot explain the development of the whole of this great (Sanskrit)
literature if we assume as late a date as round about 1200 BC or 1500 BC as its
starting point."
British scholar F. E.
Pargiter in his Ancient Indian
Historical Tradition yet his inquiry into historical data from the
Puranas led him, in 1972, to conclusions opposite to the accepted theories. With
a rare commonsense, he first noted that
"there is a strong
presumption in favor of (Indian) tradition; if anyone contests tradition, the
burden lies on him to show that it is wrong."
He also observed, with dry humor: " Indian
tradition knows nothing whatever of the Aryans' invasion of India through the
north-west....All this copious tradition was falsely fabricated, and the truth
has been absolutely lost, if the current theory is right; is that probable? If
all this tradition is false, why, how, and in whose interests was it all
fabricated.?"
Pargiter went even further,
for he was convinced that Indian tradition clearly recorded "an outflow of
people from India before the fifteenth century BC." and thought
that the Iranians may have been an offshoot from India." He
pertinently observed that in the famous nadi sukta,
the Rig Veda lists rivers of the subcontinent from east to west, and remarked:
"If the Aryans had entered India from the north-west, and had advanced
eastward through the Punjab only as far as the Saraswati or Jumna when the
Rigvedic hymns were composed, it is very surprising that the hymn arranges the
rivers, not according to their progress, but reversaly from the Ganges which
they had hardly reached.
" Imam me gange yamune
sarasvati sutudri stomam sacata parusnaya asiknya marudvrdhe vitastayarjikiye
srnuhya susomaya " (x 75.05)
O Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati,
Sutudri (Sutlej), Parushini (Ravi), hear my praise!
Listen to my call, Asikni (Chenab),
Marudvridha (Maruvardhvan), Vitasta (Jhelum) with Arjikiya, Sushoma (Sohan).
 Sir
Julian Sorell Huxley (1887-1975), British biologist and
author, who achieved renown both as a scientist and for his ability to make
scientific concepts clear to the public through his writings. He served as the
first director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Huxley was knighted in 1958.
He warned
against the Aryan Invasion Theory long ago:
"In
1848 the young German scholar Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900) settled in
Oxford. ...About 1853, he introduced into English usage the unlucky term Aryan
as applied to a large group of languages. ...Moreover, Max Muller threw another
apple of discord. He introduced a proposition that is demonstrably false. He
spoke not only of a definite Aryan language and its descendants, but also of a
corresponding 'Aryan race'. The idea was rapidly taken up both in Germany and in
England."
(source:
Caste
and Science: Hot Air and Cold Fusion - By N. S. Rajaram).
 Writing as far back as 1939,
Huxley, one of the great natural scientists of the century, observed:
"In
England and America the phrase 'Aryan race' has quite ceased to be used by
writers with scientific knowledge, though it appears occasionally in political
and propagandist literature. In Germany, the idea of the 'Aryan' race received
no more scientific support than in England. Nevertheless, it found able and very
persistent literary advocates who made it appear very flattering to local
vanity. It therefore steadily spread, fostered by special conditions."
(source: Origins
Of The Aryan Dravidian Divide - By N. S. Rajaram).
Yet
one of the loudest European voices against the whole Aryan construct was none
other than Max Muller,
one of its chief creators! In 1888, forty years after he had first
hammered the concept of an Aryan race, he conceded that "the home of the
Aryans" could not be pinpointed more precisely than "somewhere in
Asia."
He flatly denied having ever spoken of an Aryan race:
"I have declared again and again
that if I say Aryas, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean
simply those who speak an Aryan language...To me an ethnologist who speaks of
Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is a great a sinner as a linguist
who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar."
Max Muller also disowned the
short chronology he himself had arbitrarily fixed for Indian scriptures, a
chronology still in vogue today among Western Indologists.
(source: The Invasion That Never Was
-
By Michel Danino and Sujata
Nahar p. 29-30). Refer to Communist
Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette
Rosser.
Watch
Scientific
verification of Vedic knowledge
Indian
Protests
"In the dogmatic rigid world of Western academic philosophy, rarely are outsiders
(namely Indian scholars) fully appreciated."
***
 Swami Dayananda
Saraswati (1824-1883)
was perhaps the first Indian to
dispute the Aryan myth:
"In none of the Sanskrit of history
textbooks," he wrote, "has it been stated that the Aryans came from
Iran, vanquished the aborigines...and became rulers."
He stressed that the
word arya referred in the Veda to a moral or inner quality, not to any race or
people, and insisted that India was Aryavarta, the home of the Aryans- a word he
used purely in its original sense of "Vedic Indians."
 Swami
Vivekananda (1863-1902)
was the one who was quick to
see through the gaps in the Aryan edifice. In a lecture in the U.S.A., he
remarked scornfully:
"And what your European Pandits say about the Aryans
swooping down from some foreign lands snatching away the land of aborigines and
settling in India by exterminating them, is pure nonsense, foolish talk. Strange
that our Indian scholars too say "Amen" to them."
In another
lecture, this time in India, he was in a more sarcastic mood, but mercilessly to
the point:
"Our European archaeologist
dreams of India being full of dark-eyed aborigines, and the bright Aryans came
from - the Lord knows where. According to some they came from Central Tibet,
others will have it that they came from Central Asia... Of
late, there was an attempt made to prove that the Aryans lived on the Swiss
lakes. I should not be sorry if they had been all drowned there, theory and
all."
(The contrast between civilized and
barbaric is known in ancient Greece, where the term barbaroi was coined, -
meaning "babblers" semantically akin to Sanskrit, mrdhravak and
mlechchha. Similar concepts existed in imperial China, in colonial Europe, and
also in Hindu India: arya, "civilized,
participating in the Vedic culture", vs. anaraya or mlechchha).
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950)
- The
first systematic refutation of the Aryan invasion theory had to wait until Sri
Aurobindo.
"So great is the force of attractive generalizations and widely
popularized errors that all the world goes on perpetuating the blunder talking
of the Indo-European races, claiming or disclaiming Aryan kinship and building
on that basis of falsehood the most far-reaching political, social or
pseudo-scientific conclusions." How prophetic, if we consider that this was
written some twenty years before the growth of Nazism with its claims to
"Aryan kinship."
"...the Teutonic sin of forming
a theory in accordance with their prejudices and then finding facts or
manufacturing inferences to support it."
(source: On
the Mahabharata - By Sri Aurobindo - Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry. 1991
p. 10).
Refer
to Invading
the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America
- By Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicolas and Aditi
Banerjee.
In his Secret of the Veda,
Sri Aurobindo called on Indians not to be
"haunted by the unfortunate misconstruction of the Veda which European
scholarship has imposed on the modern mind." "The indications in the
Veda on which this theory of a recent Aryan invasion is built, are very scanty
in quantity and uncertain in their significance. There is no actual mention of
such an invasion..."
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891
- 1956) also offered his views:
He concluded:
"the Brahmins and the Untouchables belong to the same race."
 Only
one among our great political leaders saw through the hollowness of the Aryan
theory.
In his book Who were the Shudras? in 1946 B. R.
Ambedkar
famous for his work on the Indian Constitution, as well as
his campaign in support of the Harijans, studied the Vedas. He devoted
a complete chapter - Shudras versus Aryans -to an examination of the issue.
Citing
extensively the Vedic sources which suggest that the distinction between an Arya
and Dasa/Dasyu was not a racial distinction of color and physiognomy and thus
the origin of Sudra could not have anything to do with race, Ambedkar
conclusion are
unequivocal, though regrettably they are largely ignored. This is what he said:
"The theory of invasion is an invention. This invention is
necessary because of a gratuitous assumption that the Indo-Germanic people are the purest
of the modern representation of the original Aryan race. The theory is perversion of
scientific investigation. It is not allowed to evolve out of facts. On the contrary, the
theory is preconceived and facts are selected to prove it. It falls to the ground at every
point. '
Dr. Ambedkar concludes:
- "The Vedas do not know any such race as the
Aryan race.
- There is no evidence in the Vedas of any invasion of
India by the Aryan race and its having conquered the Dasas and Dasyus
supposed to be the natives of India.
- There is no evidence to show that the distinction
between Aryans, Dasas and Dasyus was a racial distinction.
- The Vedas do not support the contention that the
Aryans were different in color from the Dasas and Dasyus....."
"If anthropometry is a science which can be
depended upon to determine the race of a people...(then its) measurements
establish that the Brahmins and the Untouchables belong to the same race. From
this it follows that if the Brahmins are Aryans the Untouchables are also
Aryans. If the Brahmins are Dravidians, the Untouchables are also
Dravidians...."
Ambedkar was aware of the hold of this theory
over the masses and scholars alike. He offered a succinct explanation.
"why
the Aryan race theory is not dead because of the general insistence by European
scholars that the word varna, means color and the acceptance of that view by a
majority..."
"The British were visualized as being the last of
the invaders in a chain beginning with the Aryans. He could clearly see the
implications of such ill-founded hypotheses which colonial Indology imposed on
India and which Indian scholars went on repeating ad nauseam.
(source: The Invasion That Never Was
-
By Michel Danino and Sujata
Nahar and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar
Writings and Speeches. Reprint
of Pakistan or The Partition of India. Education Department. Government of
Maharashtra 1990 Vol. 7 p.302). Refer to chapter on First
Indologists and European
Imperialism.
Ramchandra Bapuji Jadhav Rao
(1880) voiced his incredulity at the opinions of his day in the Theosophist
(Puzzles for the Philologists,1880 volume 1 March p
161):
“We are told that the Aryan family, which lived in Central
Asia, were a civilized people; and that their religion was that of the Vedas.
They had chariots, horses, ships, boats, towns and fortified places before the
separation took place. They were therefore not nomads. Max Muller adds that the
younger branch left first and emigrated into Europe ….the oldest quitted its
ancestral abode last of all, for a new home in India. The inference to be drawn,
then, is that the old home was abandoned by every soul, and left to become a
dreary and a desolate place as we now find it…the efforts of philology….can
hardly succeed in metamorphosing a vague theory into real Simon Pure, but must
remain as they are – a hollow farce.” (306 – 307).
In his opinion, the whole Aryan invasion theory was
“nothing but a varnished tale ..utterly undeserving of the name of traditional
history."
(305).
Similar misgivings were voiced in 1901 by one Aghorechandra
Chattopadhyaya in Calcutta. In his book, one can sense the author
seriously struggling to make sense of the conclusions of Western scholarship,
yet unable to conceal his own bewilderment at the theories that he was
encountering:
“Whatever might be the credibility the scholars are blessed
with, we can hardly reconcile ourselves with such an easy faith on a manner like
this.” Commenting on the spectacular achievements of the sub branches of the
Indo-European family, such as the Vedic Indians, Greeks, Romans, and Persians,
he wondered, with remarkable acumen for his time and sources, how the main trunk
of the Indo-European tree could have produced such conspicuous fruits that
survived for millennia, and yet leave no trace of itself:
“While the major branches of the main trunk gathered
strength, looked healthy, and spread far and wide, the latter, at the same time,
withered, shriveled, and failed to show any indication of life and vitality and
disappeared from sight and was lost for ever without leaving any trace or mark
that might lead to its identification, nor could nay fossil remains of it be
detected or found out, so that it could be inferred that such a society in such
a stage of development existed at one time, on the surface of the earth…A
story so imperfect in every important respect is put forward seriously for
people to believe in and accept as an authentic account of the ancient history
of the Indo-European race.” (59).
Chattopadhyaya also struggles to make sense of what appeared
to him to be the contradictory proposals that the Indo-Europeans were wandering
nomads and yet were held to have originated from a specific abode, and that they
were primitive tribesmen and yet were able to formulate and utilize a language
as intricate and complex as Indo-European.
The first prominent notes of discord between traditional
exegesis and Western scholarship was sounded because of the lack of explicit
mention, in the Vedic texts, of a foreign homeland of the Aryan people. This
conspicuous silence was noted even by 19th century Western scholars (eg.
Elphinstone 1841).This absence of any mention of external Aryan origins in
traditional Sanskrit sources is, to this day, perhaps the single most prominent
objection raised by scholars claiming indigenous origins of the Aryan culture.
The Vedas
themselves make no mention of any Aryan invasion or
immigration reveals a major epistemological concern in this debate.
Srinvas Iyengar
in 1914,
was not convinced of this theory:
“One solitary word anasa applied to the Dasyu has been
quoted by…Max Muller…among numerous writers, to prove that the Dasyus were a
flat nosed people, and that, therefore, by contrast, the Aryas were
straight-nosed. Indian commentators have explained this word to mean an-asa,
mouthless, devoid of fair speech….to hang such a weight of inference as the
invasion and conquest of India by the straight nosed Aryans on the solitary word
anasa does certainly seem not a very reasonable procedure…”
Lord Vishnu
on the serpent of Infinity.
The Vedas themselves make no mention of any Aryan invasion or
immigration reveals a major epistemological concern in this debate.
"With
all their orientation towards “culture” the Western Indologists positively
dislike Hinduism when it stands up to defend itself. They prefer museum
Hinduism, or an innocent Gandhian kind of Hinduism, and they readily buy the
secularist story that an assertive Hinduism is not the “real Hinduism”.
Watch
Scientific
verification of Vedic knowledge
(source:
Ayodhya
and After: Issues Before Hindu Society - By
Koenraad Elst p 83).
***
Iyengar is equally unimpressed by
the racial interpretations of other passages in the Veda that
had been given by Western scholars.
“The only other trace of racial reference in the Vedic
hymns is the occurrence of two words, one Krishna in seven passages and the
other asikini in two passages. One of the meanings of these two words is
“black”, but in all the passages, the words have been interpreted as
referring to black demons, black clouds, a demon whose name is Krishna, or the
powers of darkness. Hence to take this as evidence to prove that the invading
Aryans were fair-complexioned as they referred to their demon foes or perhaps
human enemies as black is again to stretch many points on behalf of a
preconceived theory.” (6-7).
Iyengar makes some more penetrating and well researched
arguments:
“The word…Arya occurs about 33 times (in the Rig
Veda)…the word Dasa occurs about 50 times and Dasyu about 70 times…The word
Arya occurs 22 times in hymns to Indra and 6 times in hymns to Agni, and Dasa 50
times in hymns to Indra and twice in hymns to Agni and Dasyu 50 times to Indra
and 9 times to hymns to Agni. This constant association of these words with
Indra clearly proves that Arya meant a worshipper of Indra (and Agni)…The
Aryas offered oblations to Indra…The Dasyus or Dasas were those who opposed to
the Indra Agni cult and are explicitly described thus in those passages where
human Dasyus are clearly meant. They are avrata without (the Arya) rites,
anyavrata of different rites, ayajavana, non-sacrifices, abrahma without
prayers, also not having Brahmana priests, anrichah, without Riks, brahmadvisha,
haters of prayers of Brhamnans, and anindra without Indra, despisers of Indra.
They pour no milky draughts, they heat no cauldron. They give no gifts to the
Brahmana…Their worship was but enchantment, sorcery, unlike the sacred law of
fire-worship, wiles and magic. In all this we hear but the echo of war of rite
with rite, cult with cult and not one of race with race.” (5-6).
Others have voiced just as penetrating critiques:
Bhupendranath Datta, in Vedic
Funeral Customs and Indus Valley, part I and 2, Man in India writes:
“In the attempt to ransack the latter-day Sanskrit text for
proofs of Nordic characteristics…we forget that if in latter day Sanskrit
texts sentences such as “Gaura (white, yellowish),…pingala (reddish, brown,
tawny, golden), kapikesa (brown or tawny hair)” are to be found in
Patanjali’s Mahabhasya (v.1. 115) and if Manu has said that a Brahmana should
not marry a girl with pingala hair (38) there are other sentences in previous
ages which contradict the strength of these characteristics. But with the help
of these two sentences attempt is being made to prove the existence of Nordic
characteristics amongst the Indian people….The God Rudra is described to have
possessed golden hair…yet we cannot make a Nordic Viking out of him, and he
had brown-hued skin-color and golden-colored arm….Surely we cannot take the
god Rudra as a specimen of race miscegenation…we beg to sate that these
allegories should be accepted as poetic fancies. They cannot be used as
scientific data, for the anthropological purpose. (Datta 1936. 248 – 252).
Interestingly, almost a full century after Indian scholars
started objecting to the racial interpretations imposed on the Arya-Dasa
dichotomy, Western scholars have recently also started drawing attention to 19th
century philological excesses. Michael Witzel comments on the same term that
“while it would be easy to assume reference to skin color, this would go
against the spirit of the hymns: for the Vedic poets, black always signifies
evil, and any other meaning would be secondary in these contexts.”
(source: The Quest for the Origin of Vedic
Culture
- By Edwin F Bryant p. 51 – 62). Refer to Communist
Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette
Rosser.
The Knowledge Filter
David Lewis
in the book
Forbidden History– Edited By J Douglas Kenyon
has observed that:
“India epic poem the Ramayana, dated
by non-Westernized Indian scholars to five thousand years before Christ,
contains references to its hero Rama, gazing from India’s present-day west coast
into a vast landmass now occupied by the Arabian Sea, an account supported by
the recent under water discoveries. Less celebrated Indian texts even mention
advanced technology, in the form of aircraft used to transport the society’s
elite and wage war.
The writings describe these aircraft
in detail and at great length, puzzling scholars and historians. The great
Indian epics, what’s more, vividly describe militaristic devastation that can be
equated only with nuclear wars. Was there, at one time, not just an ancient
civilization in India, but an advanced ancient civilization?
Flying machines…lost continents…are these
mythical tales of mythological lands or do these ancient references provide us
with a historical record long forgotten and then dismissed by Western science as
fantasy?
Since the
19th century Western scholars have dismissed the historical
significance of the cultural traditions of ancient peoples, those of southern
Asia included. With a decidedly ethnocentric bias, the expert’s
reinterpreted history as it was taught in the East. Having found, for example,
that root words of India’s ancient Sanskrit turn up almost universally in the
world’s major languages, Western scholars devised an ethnocentric scheme to
explain the phenomenon – one that modern Indian intellectuals have come to
accept.
A previous European people must have
once existed, the scholars imagined – an Indo-European race upon which the
world, including India, drew for its linguistic roots and genetic stock. The
scholars also expropriated the Aryans of ancient India to flesh out this
scenario. This Aryan race, they told us, derived from Europe and then invaded
the Indus Valley in the north of India – making Sanskrit and Vedic culture
relatively young and a product, rather than a progenitor, of Western
civilization.
The “Aryan
invasion” theory has since fallen into disrepute. Southern India, a
land whose cultural roots are said by some to stretch into an even more profound
antiquity than do those of the north, suffered a similar fate. Speakers of a
proto-Dravidian language, the forerunner of a family of languages spoken in the
south – and some say of Sanskrit itself – entered India from the northwest, the
Western scholars insist. Both invasion theories were necessitated by Western
beliefs, at first about the Garden of Eden theory of origins and the, with the
arrival of the Darwinists, beliefs about the worldly held out-of-Africa theory.
But the Aryan theory has been
debunked. No skeletal evidence shows any difference between supposed invaders
and the indigenous peoples of India. And satellite imagery now shows that the
ancient Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley, and Mohenjo-Daro, probably
declined and disappeared due to climatic changes, the drying up of the mythical
Saraswati River, rather than to the descent of imaginary invaders. The demise of
the Aryan invasion theory, though, and the recently discovering underwater ruins
opens a Pandora’s box for orthodox scholars regarding the past – not just
India’s past, but that of the human race. If
Sanskrit predates the world’s other languages, and if
ancient civilization existed where there are now seas, how can prehistory be
explained in modern Western terms?
And how much of the actual history
of India is still obscured by ethno-centrism, colonialism, or scientific
materialism? The demise of the Aryan invasion theory may represent only the tip
of the iceberg of misconception about the age and nature of ancient India, her
culture, her people, and her accomplishments.
It is long been claimed that
Mother India was born in a time before all
myth began, when rishis, men of great wisdom and
phenomenal spiritual attainment, walked on Earth. This ancient India
dates to the times out of which the epic poems the Ramayana, and the
Mahabharata, and the ancient traditions of Tamil Nadu in the south grew. The
Tamil Nadu was a land whose culture is said by some to predate that of the
north, having once existed as part of Kumari Kandam
and dating to a staggering 30,000 B.C.E.
The Knowledge Filter
Since the 19th century
Western scholars have routinely dismissed the historical significance of ancient
peoples, those of southern Asia included. With a
decidedly ethnocentric base – the intellectual
step-child of Western colonialism – the experts
reinterpreted Eastern history, casting whole systems of ancient philosophy and
science, in the experts mind, into the historical dustbin. This
historical dustbin is the repository of all things conflicting with European
models, such as biblical Christianity and scientific
materialism. Here we find the very inception of the “knowledge
filter,” now well known to students of alternative archaeology, geology, and
other disciplines involved with the search for lost origins.
India, with
her treatment by the West and her acquiescence to that treatment, typifies the
way in which Western intellectualism conquered the world. Call it the
“West is best” model: a strict adherence to
European doctrines that deny traditions and attempt to offer decidedly more
ancient theories regarding the origins of civilization than those of the Western
scholars. On top of this, add a scientific materialism that denies all
nonmaterial theories regarding the origins of man, life, and reality.
(source:
The Enigma of India’s Origins – By David Lewis
in the book
Forbidden History– Edited By J Douglas Kenyonp. 78 - 188).
Aryan Invasion Theory: Neo-colonial captive minds
“India is a prime example of a once great civilisation with an incredibly rich
spiritual, literary, artistic, cultural and intellectual heritage … a heritage
that Indian academic and political leaders honour more in the breach than in the
observance.”
The age of colonialism may be over, but not that of neo-colonial captive minds
in India as elsewhere in the former colonial territories. Nations struggled for
and won political liberation from imperialist thraldom. But their tertiary
institutions of higher learning hardly ever (with rare indigenous exceptions)
displayed any compelling urge to free themselves from the restrictive,
Eurocentric disciplinary paradigms inherited from western universities, or to
delve into their own unique native spiritual, cultural and intellectual
resources that, even if not altogether annulled, were rendered more or less
obsolete. And it was precisely from the corridors of domestic academia that the
dangerous and divisive infection of captive minds spreads to all fields of the
public life of a once subject nation.
To give just one illuminating illustration, we might mention the nearly
universal and quite uncritical acceptance by both Indian politicians and the
generality of national and international academics, of the 19th Century myth of
the “Aryan invasion of Dravidian India” and of the arbitrary classification of
the population into Aryan and Dravidian ethnic types. The damage inflicted on
the political perceptions of the population poses a threat to the very integrity
of India as a unique political and cultural entity. Witness the two most
dominant political parties of Tamil Nadu, the DMK and the AIADMK (the ‘D’
standing for ‘Dravida’). They swallowed hook, line and sinker the shallow,
ill-researched “findings” of 19th Century European Indologists. Even India’s
present national anthem perpetuates the Aryan/Dravidian divide by referring to ‘Dravida’.
It was a wrong-headed decision to discard the original national anthem Vande
Mataram (“Salutation to the Mother”) for the land of Bharatmata was originally
conceived, not as a merely secular/geographical abstraction, but as Mother India
Herself). It was the mantric potency of Vande Mataram that ignited the fiery
beginnings (1905-1910) of the Indian aspiration for complete independence from
British rule after Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal. And the man who picked it
out from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s classic Bengali novel Anandamath was
no less a leader than Sri Aurobindo himself. To the surprise and consternation
of the British Viceroy and his officials, thousand-throated cries of Vande
Mataram rent the skies of India during the inspiring beginnings in those
dramatic years of the national independence struggle.
(source:
Aryan Invasion Theory: Neo-colonial captive minds
– By Devan Nair).
Page < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 >
|
