Understanding History: 2. Our Brainwashed Historians

Part 1. Colonial Constructs, appeared in October 2011.

Indian historians have internalized the European view of the Indian past without question.

The dada of colonial era Indian historians, R.C. Majumdar (1888-1980), even went to the extent of declaring the lack of historical sense one “of the gravest defects of Indian culture.”

In his widely read work, Ancient India, he wrote that “the aversion of Indians to writing history” defied “rational explanation.” Indians “applied themselves to all conceivable branches of literature and excelled in many of them, but they never seriously took to the writing of history, with the result that for a great deal of our knowledge of ancient Indian history we are indebted to foreigners.”

That assessment of Indian shortcomings was of a part with the British claim that they had brought the Indian past into the light of history. Indian historians have also generally accepted James Mill’s classification of their country’s past into Hindu, Muslim and British periods. (They seem not to have noticed that Mill’s decision to call the colonial era “British” rather than “Christian” highlighted the absurdity of religious labels on the complexity of India.)

The baroque British theory that a race of White “Aryans” invaded the country, bringing Vedic civilization with them, further mangled the conception of the “Hindu period.” With that theory, Europeans laid claim to the origins of Indian civilization, and as the “Aryans” were supposedly proto-Brahmins, it gave a racist spin to the caste system.

Indian historians have not responded coherently to these absurdities. The best of them have presented Indian perspectives – as K.M. Pannikar (1895-1963) did in Asia and Western Dominance (1959) – without subjecting Europe’s deeply flawed and dishonest historiography to a critical review.

In the absence of an alternative conceptualization, all Indian historians have worked within that alien framework or its narrower Marxist subset. D. D. Kosambi, for instance, declared on the first page of his much reprinted An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956), that he saw his task to be “the presentation, in chronological order, of successive developments in the means and relations of production.” That formulation was necessary, he said, because India lacked the historical source material available in Europe.

Echoing Hegel, he wrote: “India, for all its great literary heritage has produced no historical writers comparable to Herodotus, Thucydides, Polibius, Livy, Tacitus. Many Indian kings of the middle ages (e.g. Harsa, circa 600-640) were incomparably superior in their education and literary ability to contemporary rulers in Europe; they had personally led great armies to victory in heavy warfare. Nevertheless, not one seems to have thought of composing a narrative like Caesar’s Commentaries or Xenophon’s Anabasis. The tradition was of graceful court drama, an occasional hymn in praise of the gods, or a witty epigram.”

Amazingly, all those who have echoed such views seem to have missed the obvious reason why Indians did not write “history” in the European sense: their fundamentally different view of the nature of reality.

In Europe, the individual life has always been a singular one-act drama on the vast dark stage of eternity; those who achieved something of note wanted to leave a record of it. In India, which saw the individual soul journeying through successive lives, the Maya of material existence was not worth recording, for it was incidental to the overall moral progression.

Indian historians raised in the intellectual prison of colonialism did not see the need to formulate a historiography suitable to the ethos of their own civilization.

In elucidating India’s lack of appropriate historical source-material Kosambi wrote that in Europe the written record was “powerfully supplemented by archaeology;” the spade had substantiated even the Homeric account of Troy, once dismissed as pure myth. In contrast, the “desultory” archeology of India had made “numerous epigraphic finds” without being able “either to restore a reasonably comprehensive dynastic list or to define the regnal years and complete territorial holdings of those Indian kings whose names survive.”

He noted that although the Bible was a religious work, it had “far greater historical and archaeological value than any similar Indian book, because the people who transmitted it had continuous contact with the site and were used to describing places and events with a trader’s accuracy.” In India, it was “still impossible to say where the great theme battles of the two epics Ramayana and Mahabharata were fought, let alone when – if indeed they represent any historical event at all.”

That dismissive attitude towards the Indian epics has been characteristic of all Indian historians working within the Western framework. The most brainwashed among them, Ram Sharan Sharma, has even declared that his examination of “inscriptions and sculptural pieces found in Mathura dating back to 200 BCE and 300 AD,” require that “ideas of an epic age based on the Ramayana and Mahabharata have to be discarded.” He has also questioned if Rama and Krishna had any basis in reality.

Such lack of respect for the central realities of Indian existence has led our historians to applaud the deductive archeology developed by Europeans to piece together complex stories from mute stone and shard, but reject the world’s oldest and most continuous oral and written tradition as “historical material”. Ironically, they have accepted the concept of the mythical “Aryan race” that Europeans have extracted from the same oral and written record.

The outraged response to all this from Hindus who take their faith seriously has been captured by an illiberal and fascist Hindutva element in Indian politics (first developed by the British as a foil to the Muslim League). 

The results have been  generally disastrous. On the one hand it has brought to the surface a monstrous religious violence entirely alien to Hindu tradition; on the other, the dismissive response of so-called “Left/Secular” historians to the Hindutva phenomenon has obscured the need for a serious examination of what happened under colonial rule. In fact, the need to oppose the political scum that rode to power on the Hindutva wave has made the Secular/Left actively anti-Hindu.

Coming in Part 3: An Indian Historiography

What Role for Indian Think Tanks?

According to an Edit Page article in The New Indian Express on 6 February, a global ranking of Think Tanks has found not one of India's 292 institutions good enough to be in the global top 30. In terms of number of TTs we rank third, behind the US with 1815 and China with 425,

The writer, Amitabh Mattoo, billed as a JNU professor and Director of the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne, admitted that the criteria used in the ranking had been widely criticized, but nevertheless, urged remedial action by the government to avoid a “mushrooming” of American and European franchises with Indians as “junior partners.” His “guesstimate” was that some 50 percent of projects run by Indian Think Tanks were already funded from abroad.

Mattoo saw three factors as most responsible for the weakness of Indian Think Tanks: lack of adequate and steady funding, government suspicion of “truly independent” organizations, and the tendency of “idealistic founders” to become “feudal patrons.”

To deal with the situation, he urged the government to create four new TTs, each with an endowment of Rs. 1000 crore, dealing with Economics; Security; Politics/Governance; and Social Change. He recommended that they be given unconstrained “freedom to hire the best global talent to work on critical areas of policy” and work without “interference.”

Strangely for a piece titled Unthinking Think Tanks,” Mattoo said not a word about the quality of thought that has emerged from Indian Think Tanks.

If he had looked at that issue, it might have become quickly apparent that pots of money will not help, and that the “best global talent” might make things worse. For the basic problem with Indian TTs is not lack of money or access to foreign talent; it is the hangdog "Bollywood" state of mind, reflecting the belief that our reality is second-class, that it gains meaning only from association with that of the West.

Remember NDTV's maddening crawler "India's 9/11" that disfigured its coverage of the 2008 attack on Mumbai? It was as if Indian loss of life and blood lacked authenticity without a Western reference.

That syndrome is widely evident in India, including in areas of marked success.

"Bollywood" has been followed by the equally silly (and confusing) Tollywood, Kollywood and Mollywood.

 "Silk" is "India's Marilyn Monroe."

The Jaipur Literary Festival is "India's Cannes."

Jug Suraiya is "India's Art Buchwald."

Indian cuisine, traditional fabrics and costumes are referred to as "ethnic." (This might be mere ignorance: the usage originated in the United States, where the non-ethnic default was WASP: White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant.)

If we look at more considered manifestations of thought, for instance, at the books that have come from our post-1947 political and corporate leaders, there is the same unquestioned kowtowing to the dominance of the West. Paranoia about American intentions in India does not qualify as evidence to the contrary; it is an attitude fostered by a political "Left" slavishly imitative of the British model.

The slavishness can be traced back to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's hugely influential attitudes to the West (and his fundamental differences with Mahatma Gandhi on that count). Perhaps the crux of his attitude was captured in his declaration to Gandhi during their 1928 exchange of letters: "You misjudge greatly, I think, the civilization of the West and attach too great importance to its many failings. ... I think that Western, or rather industrial civilization, is bound to conquer India."

Nehru's staggering presumption has become general today. The fact that industrial civilization has proved to be unsustainable and is in a state of terminal crisis has made hardly a dent on the views of Indian acolytes. For instance, former President Abdul Kalam's several books and numerous speeches present a vision of a "developed India" entirely in technological terms. He hardly ever mentions Gandhi's vision of how India could progress, and ignores the great problems that beset industrial development.

An ancillary to the worship of technology seems to be ignorance of Indian realities. Nandan Nilekani's "Imagining India" is a good example of that phenomenon. Consider his explanation of why newly independent India was mistrustful of free-market economics: "Nehru saw Britain as a hard, repressive State, and the market-friendly systems it had established got tarred with the same brush." (Colonial rule, established and maintained with violence, grossly discriminatory towards Indian business, was "market-friendly"!!!) Other examples of ignorance are rife. At one point he refers to Sita's "Kush" as "the son of Vishnu."

I could give numerous other examples from a wide range of writers, but will desist for fear of boring the reader. The evidence is overwhelming that the Maya of the West has come to suffuse the disordered view of our thought leaders. We have not had since Gandhi a leader who comprehended clearly the challenges facing India.

To understand how Mattoo's hankering after the "best global talent" is rooted in post-colonial confusion, consider how ridiculous it is to have a global ranking of Think Tanks.

In the United States, Think Tanks are instruments of a variety of interest groups, making the arguments to be taken on board by legislative processes minutely overseen by political lobbyists. Chinese TTs are meant to facilitate, strengthen and on occasion hide the Communist Party’s brutal grip on power. In India, as Mattoo notes, TTs are founded by idealists who then become invested in keeping control of their creations and turn into “medieval patrons.”

Given those differences, what is the basis for comparison?

This is not to deny Mattoo's point that we stand in danger of a foreign takeover of our policy space.
But money and foreign talent are not an appropriate response to that danger.

Indian reality, more than that of any other nation, is sui generis. We Indians are its best judges.

Perhaps the way forward would be to reorient our Think Tanks so as to generate on every major policy issue, a national discourse rooted in an understanding of our post-colonial situation. The overall aim must be to understand contemporary global realities within the frame of India’s historical experience.

The difficulty in undertaking such an effort will lie in surmounting the enormous distortions that colonial rule introduced in our understanding of Indian history. Perhaps a National Truth Commission about the colonial period, examining what the British did to India would be a good way to begin. Once the past is clear our policy options will clarify themselves.

End of the Kali Yuga: 2

The Kali Yuga will not end because a great cycle in the ancient Mayan calendar draws to an end in 2012 or the heavens signal to astrologers that epochal change is afoot.

It will end because of a concerted global effort by people sick of the malignant reality we now endure.

There are three prerequisites to such an effort: a general awareness of the need for change, an understanding of what must be done, and a realistic hope of success.

The first condition has already been met: the varied economic, social, environmental and political crises of the last decade have created a global awareness that the world order is violently and grossly unjust, inefficient to the point of criminality, and increasingly dangerous to all life on the planet.

The second condition has not been met. As the broadcast debates about Capitalism at the recent World Economic Forum at Davos made clear, even the leaders of the existing world order don’t have a clue about what must be done. The problem is complex and profound but simply stated: corporate capitalism as a business model is obsolete. Just as the invention of the automobile pushed the horse and buggy into history, the Information and Communications revolutions have pushed into obsolescence the once formidable power of centralized, hierarchically managed corporations.

This has happened because the Network has dethroned Capital. The perennially corrupt grip of corporations on “other people’s money” that Adam Smith fulminated about has been broken and the “invisible hand” he conceived of is now, at long last, able to guide the Free Market to serve the greater good. (The "invisible hand" has been much derided by ignorant people, but Smith, who first rose to fame with The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was undoubtedly correct: human beings are inherently moral, and a free market would reflect that quality.) 

To understand the new economic realities of the Information Age we have only to consider the Eurozone Crisis. It exists only because the small corporate elite that created and profits from the problem of sovereign debt is holding everyone else hostage to its own interests. European bankers have the temerity to insist that millions of ordinary people be thrown out of work and societies as a whole be subjected to austerity so that they can continue to rake in obscene profits; but like cartoon characters that run off a cliff and do not realize it until they look down, they no longer have the ground under them.

The power of bankers has been rooted in their capacity to concentrate and command the money that greases the wheels of commerce: Main Street, as the saying goes, is dependent on Wall Street. However, the Network has transformed that equation. The capital necessary for businesses to function can be raised from millions of ordinary people rather than from small groups of rich money lenders. If bands of entrepreneurs organize networks to do that, they can replace Wall Street and revolutionize the world.

It is not just banks that will feel the revolution of Democratized Capital. The entire housing industry can be made self-financing and the very concept of a “mortgage” – the word is of French origin, and literally means “engaged to the death” – rendered archaic.

To understand how this can be done, consider the United States “housing crisis.” It is essentially a crisis of liquidity: in the aftermath of a “real estate bubble” that drove up house prices beyond the reach of most people, the banks responsible for the situation went bust and had to be bailed out with taxpayer money. Prices are still too high for most people to buy, and banks unwilling to put themselves at risk again; as the housing sector stagnates, the rest of the economy has also slowed.

The simplest solution to the problem would be to create an online housing lottery, with arrangements for winners to sell houses they did not want to occupy; the United States has a licensed and regulated brokerage industry that should make such an arrangement relatively easy. This will have two quick results: housing prices will dip to realistic levels without sellers who paid inflated prices taking a hit; and the market as a whole will revive, with a tonic effect on the rest of the economy.

Such a solution would be impossible without the Internet and the Worldwide Web, which have made the market for housing as liquid as those for stocks and bonds. They have also flattened the playing field. If the lottery system of housing finance is properly institutionalized the whole concept of “low-income housing” would become meaningless. Further, the money generated by the lottery could be used to improve existing housing stock and modernize urban areas that are now languishing from lack of investment.

Networks of entrepreneurs and activists have the potential to transform every aspect of the national and international affairs. They could vastly accelerate the economic and social development of poor countries by creating an accessible global architecture for knowledge-sharing and technical support. Funding development could become much less bureaucratic, much less prone to the "leakage" that is now a major problem. The delivery of aid, both financial and technical, could be finely targeted.

More broadly, the entire United Nations System could be reformed and the processes of international cooperation brought down to the community level. In a networked world tyrannical governments would be at a huge disadvantage and could not survive. In every aspect of global affairs, the vicious cycles of special interests using violence to achieve narrow ends would be replaced with virtuous spirals benefiting societies as a whole.

As this process gets under way, people will be able to see that the end of the Kali Yuga is not an idle hope but a realistic prospect, and that will spur transformations that today we consider Utopian.

In Part 3: the profound possibilities for personal transformation as we exit the Kali Yuga.

End of the Kali Yuga

Two years ago I was disbelieving when Dadi Janki, the head of the Brahma Kumaris, told an invited group at a retreat at Mount Abu that the Kali Yuga is coming to an end.

Little has happened since then to advertise a trend towards such a moral transformation – in fact, if we go by the daily headlines the world is sinking deeper into the darkness – but I have come to think that she is right. This is not a matter of good spiritual vibes or astrological predictions. There are rational indicators that a process of significant change has been occurring, and that it could lead to a radical global transformation is real.

Two revolutionary processes are primarily responsible for the positive changes that have already taken place and others that wait in the wings. One is the centuries-long process of the Indian Renaissance; the other is the Information and Communications Revolutions of the late 20th Century.

The Indian Renaissance, essentially a spiritual and devotional upsurge that sustained the country through half a millennium of confusion and deepening crisis, found its modern political expression in the movements against European dominance led by Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa and India. They set in motion the human rights and nationalist revolutions that ended four centuries of European dominance of world affairs, closing the bloodiest, most violent and depraved chapter of human history. In retrospect, that era qualifies unreservedly as the nadir of the Kali Yuga.

The world continues to experience the bitter legacy of that time, but we have seen the once potent materialist philosophies of Europe -- the root cause of moral blindness and global misery -- lose their rapacious and seductive energy. Only deluded bands of terrorists in the pay of mining companies in the poorest parts of India now tread the Marxist path, and in the Western citadels of Capitalism – or more correctly, “Corporatism” – the “99 percent” have lost faith in a system run by and for the rich.

Although the votaries of corporate globalization continue to put on a brave front at their conclaves at Davos, the World Bank and the IMF, there is no denying that the world economy is in a profound systemic crisis. If by some miracle they avoid a major depression and get back to business as usual, it will surely precipitate a much worse crisis by collapsing the planetary ecosystem that supports all life.

As I see it, we have two choices. One is to continue down the current path into deepening economic, political and environmental crisis. It will bring climate change, radical shifts in patterns of agricultural productivity, and in all probability, genocidal turf wars. If weapons of mass destruction come into use, that could make much of the planet unfit for life. (The hands of the Doomsday Clock at the office of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in Chicago have just been moved forward: we are now five minutes from midnight.)

The other choice is to move towards a sane world order through a broad-based process of global cooperation that is now possible by using the Internet and the Worldwide Web. We have seen in the movements that have rocked the tyrannies of the Middle East and called into question the legitimacy of corporate elites in Western countries the potential of the new information and communications technologies. We have in Mozilla and Kickstarter the beginnings of a new age driven by a force stronger than the profit motive: the “soul force” that Gandhi hailed as the primary element of human survival and welfare. In effect, such a cooperative effort will bring to global affairs the spiritual impetus of the Indian Renaissance. It will most certainly end the Kali Yuga and usher in a new age.

Coming in Part 2: practical measures to end the Kali Yuga.

Creep With Many “Passhons”

The devilishly handsome character leaves his office early: “Monday” he twinkles to a secretary who says his boss wants to see him.

He heads out for a stint of surfing, partying on the beach and a lap dance with a girl in a cowboy hat.

As the sound track drones on about a man with “many passhons” the commercial ends with our hero arriving back home, where an elderly person is waiting up; “Sorry” he says, “too much work at the office.”

He winks at the camera with an impish smile.

The admen who made the commercial for After Dark – whatever that is, for the product remains unmentioned – seem to think a creep who scants attention to work and lies to his family is admirable.

The images they use to convey the idea of “many passions” further reveal the poverty of their mental/moral landscape.

Time to send them back to school for a refresher course in Advertising 101.

Salman Rushdie and the Jaipur Literary Festival

Salman Rushdie’s no-show at the opening of the annual Jaipur Literary Festival has received much media attention, almost all of it focused on objections to his presence raised by a number of Muslim groups. There has been almost nothing about the value and significance of his work, which should surely be the focus in a literary context. To remedy that insufficiency, I give below a short rundown on Rushdie and the works that have made him notorious.


He was born in Mumbai and sent off at an early age to be educated in one of Britain’s famously oppressive Public Schools (they are actually Private and very elitist). He emerged as a pucca Brown Sahib,  contemptuous of his own country and traditions, a type the colonial British created to help keep India enslaved.


His first novel was the weak little-noticed 1975 novel Grimus, described by one British critic as “a ramshackle surreal saga based on a 12th-century Sufi poem and copiously encrusted with mythic and literary allusion,” which “nosedived into oblivion amid almost universal critical derision."


That was followed in 1981 by Midnight’s Children, so brilliantly different from his first effort as to suggest that it was by a different author. It presented the British view of India as a gigantic freak-show of dissipation, hysteria and comic mangling of English.


The novel’s central conceit is that all babies born at the moment when India became independent were magically gifted in some way. Its main character has two such gifts, a powerful sense of smell and the capacity to serve as the telepathic medium for all the other 1001 magical children who are, says the hero, either “the last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth ridden nation” or “the true hope of freedom.”

By the sour end of the story that freedom is seen to be “forever extinguished.” All communication among the children has ended, and the hero is using his nose to track and kill intellectuals in East Pakistan during its struggle to become Bangladesh.


The shelf-life of Rushdie’s 1981 work has been extended by being judged “Best of the Bookers” at the 25th and 40th anniversaries of the award; it is now being made into a Hollywood movie.


In two subsequent novels, Shame! and The Satanic Verses, Rushdie lavished his raw contempt on Pakistan and Islam.


These grim tragicomic pictures of his putative homelands and ancestral faith have in common one pronounced characteristic: they ignore the long British role as the puppet-master of South Asian and Islamic politics. In ridiculing Pakistan Rushdie avoided mentioning that Britain created the country to be its violent proxy in South Asia – at the cost of over a million lives in undivided India.


In casting scorn on Islam Rushdie took no note of the prolonged British effort that manipulated key segments of the Ummah from peaceful quiescence into suicidal extremism. That manipulation involved four main elements: supporting Ibn Saud to become the ruler of Arabia, fomenting the Arab-Israeli conflict in Palestine, sponsoring the Muslim Brotherhood, and creating Pakistan.


Each of those factors had a potent effect. Saudi control of Islam’s holy places gave global influence to the family’s extremist Wahhabi creed. The dispossession of Palestinian Arabs outraged and radicalized Muslims all over the world. The Muslim Brotherhood, a violent secret society that German Nazis had used in anti-Jewish campaigns during World War II, became the fountainhead of “Islamic terrorism” under British and then American tutelage during the Cold War. Pakistan served not only as a proxy against India but as a pliable tool to manipulate the rest of the Islamic world.


By ignoring this explosive background Rushdie invites the charge of being a British propagandist, continuing in the Brown Sahib tradition of helping to manipulate the "lesser breed."


The rest of Rushdie’s literary oeuvre consists of fey stories reminiscent of Grimus and is not worth serious comment.


These are the facts that any discussion of Rushdie's contribution to an Indian literary festival must take into account. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen at glitzy celebrity meets such as the one in Jaipur.

How Not to Interview Joseph Stiglitz

The interview of Joseph Stiglitz aired by CNBC TV-18 on 14 January belongs in every Journalism School's How Not To Do It List.

Stiglitz, perhaps the most intellectually stimulating economist since John Kenneth Galbraith, has been travelling through India. He began by saying what he found interesting in his forays through the coutryside: it was peaceful, "bucolic," but man and beast were in "confrontation". There was a considerable increase in prosperity.

The interviewer flashed a grin and ignored those observations.

Obviously going down a pre-written list of questions, she asked about the slowing growth of Indian GDP, the level of government deficit spending, the wisdom of official "big ticket entitlement programmes" like the one offering a minimum guarantee of employment to the rural poor, the Eurozone problems, and the state of the American economy.

To each question, Stiglitz offered a comment that merited further discussion, but the interviewer seemed not to understand what he was saying. He was firmly in support of the rural employment guarantee scheme; she did not ask why.

It was like watching a journalistic version of Johnny Depp's Ed Wood, the director who produced what is widely recognized as Hollywood's very worst films. She went cheerfully down her list of questions until time ran out and the interview ended abruptly. With a farewell flash of teeth she wished him well on his trip through India.

Perhaps I exaggerate how bad the interview was, but having just returned from a two-week trip through India that allowed a glimpse of the reality that Stiglitz was exploring, it seemed to highlight the generally mindless quality of much of Indian journalism.

My trip to Bangalore, Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Varanasi and Goa was purely as a tourist, but on view everywhere was the stark inescapable reality of massive poverty, almost chaotic disorder, and conditions of filth that indict those of us who are educated and well-off of basic political incompetence.

It was infuriating at one level, ennobling at another. There is nothing worse than seeing little children beg, or working at menial jobs. How could so many of our so-called leaders and minders steal the money meant to help them, as indeed, they have been doing for over six decades? It is a crime worse than any other in our statutes, yet those responsible are allowed a pretended honour.

What was humbling was that poverty lay so lightly on people, that they had a grace I have not found anywhere else in the world. In affluent countries the poor are wretched, degraded. In other poor countries, whether in Africa, the rest of Asia or the Americas, the endurance of the poor is bitter; in India, they seem to have a glow of faith, a connection with divinity that uplifts the observer.

It would have been interesting to hear what Stiglitz had to say.