
Hindu Nationalists Undertake Effort to Rewrite History in India - hownottowrite
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/india-modi-culture/
======
calvinbhai
This is a clickbait article.

The current government, under the façade of "Hindu Nationalism" is doing zilch
(at least until now, nothing noticeable) to fix the education system that has
been messed by the previous administration.

No matter how much you tweak with history, its not going to be effective if
education system is left in shambles.Adding to that is the ministry of
education, that knows how to troll bait international and Indian media, which
tends to follow a certain ideology (thats not 'Hindu Nationalist').

With that said, having read more and more content from independent authors
(not funded by an institution, publicly) I believe Indian history needs a
thorough redo.

Problem is not with misinformation, but with lack of adequate information. The
1% of history gets 99% focus, whereas an equally amazing 99% is not mentioned,
either due to laziness or due to scheming history writers, wanting to support
a particular ideology.

Whats worse, is an Indian kid learns more about 200 to 400 yr old architecture
around the world, but zilch about a 1000yr old fort or a temple in his/her own
state.

Whatever the effort of rewriting history, as claimed in this article is, it is
not going to have any serious effect, other than a few progressive-liberal
news outlets hyperventilating on a non-issue that will be forgotten when
Trump/Putin/KimJongUn et al throw a new troll-bait.

~~~
krtkush
> having read more and more content from independent authors (not funded by an
> institution, publicly)

Could you please list these books, papers etc? I too am in hunt of more
neutral, unbiased work.

~~~
msravi
I really suggest that you dig into original references.

1\. Read translations of original Buddhist/Jain literature and the Puranas to
get an idea of the founding of the Nandas, Pataliputra, Chanakya, Chandragupta
Maurya, and Ashoka.

2\. Read translations of Megasthenes, Hiuen Tsang, and Fa-hein.

3\. Read translations of Harshacharita by Banabhatta to get a feel of
Harshavardhana's empire. Read how Banabhatta tears into the practice of Sati -
in 600AD. No modern history book will tell you about this.

4\. Read "History of India by it's Own Historians" \- Elliot to get an idea of
the Muslim invasions and the Mughals. These are translations of biographies
and works of Muslim historians spanning Ghazni to the Mughals.

~~~
vixen99
It's probably "History of India by its Own Historians".

~~~
cholantesh
And it's worth noting that it was written specifically to advance the view
that British colonialism was okay because, apparently, the Mughals and the
Central Asian Sultans were worse.

~~~
msravi
It's a translation of various Muslim historians. So you can go read the
original text. You can completely ignore the "British commentary" if you so
wish.

~~~
cholantesh
Even if you don't read his commentaries, you have to contend with his
selection of source material - texts and translations. They don't exist in a
vacuum, they have purpose and context.

------
sun_n_surf
Not more of this pearl-clutching sensationalist reporting. India has shown no
signs (any more than before) of the Hindu nationalism that was supposed to
sweep the nation once Modi came to power. He is no more Hindu nationalist than
Shashi "Why I am a Hindu" Tharoor (one can't give it away, the other can't pay
for it).

Modi will fall, oh sure, Modi will fall. But mostly because he did not deliver
on all his promises of economic miracles, which really, being a pragmatic
people, is mostly what Indians care about. Indians are either too smart or too
busy (or both) to care about the nuances of history as written in text books
for children (which they only read before the exams to regurgiate).

~~~
thewarrior
Because they are preparing to roll out their agenda in their second term. They
cannot jeopardise it by being too open about it now before the next elections.

There are working committees in the RSS already drafting amendments to the
constitution.

~~~
warmcat
How do you know about this? Do you know people working on it?

~~~
kamaal
I think he is talking about this article: [https://thewire.in/43846/rss-
ideologue-govindacharya-we-will...](https://thewire.in/43846/rss-ideologue-
govindacharya-we-will-rewrite-the-constitution-to-reflect-bharatiyata/)

Doesn't mean anything at all. But its not like the news is alien. This sort of
thing just keeps coming up in the news all the time.

~~~
newyankee
TheWire is a known propaganda machine. Just look how much in cahoots with the
old Govt their founders Siddharth Varadarajan and the other guy were in. They
were paid by funds from the previous Vice President for absolutely nothing

------
msravi
India's history has _always_ been written to suit a political purpose. The
Nehru family (and their cabal of left historians - ideologically influenced by
the former USSR) has deliberately tinkered with our history since
independence, and the holier-than-thou stance of the article is extremely
hypocritical. You only realize how much is manipulated when you start
ploughing through the original reference material. The evidence of a
whitewashed history we've been fed all these years is damning.

~~~
gumby
"History has always been written to suit a political purpose. " It's not just
India.

That being said, the RSS is a malign organization, and their official view of
history is loony.

~~~
sbmthakur
Yup. They do a lot of damage by helping people after natural calamities.

~~~
cholantesh
Yeah, surely there's no history of right-wing organizations gathering support
by engaging in public welfare operations.

------
seagullz
‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future; who
controls the present controls the past.'

\-- 1984 (George Orwell)

~~~
newyankee
I can assure you the previous Govt. which rules for 60+ years did the same and
i feel a lot of this changed the character of the country. We need to reverse
some of these changes so that we are proud of our heritage.

------
r_singh
One of the qualities of India that I've appreciated growing up in modern India
is how welcoming it is to all religions despite being super racist /
castetist. As a Sikh who has cut his hair, I'm not sure what religion I belong
to from an official standpoint (in the sense that what box I should tick on a
Govt. form).

However, I can see how this could make a lot of people happy with BJP given
their biases (and fear) against the Muslim population that is popularly
perceived as the most rapidly growing religion in all neighborhoods across
India.

~~~
lotsofpulp
It's not just perception, the data states that Islam is experiencing the most
growth:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth)

Not surprising, they have tons of children which you can easily see if you've
been to various countries.

~~~
thewarrior
Disappointed to see this on HN . They are among the poorest and most
marginalized communities in the country . Their population growth when
correcting for their economic status is not that much higher than the rest.

~~~
lotsofpulp
What could be disappointing about data? Poor or rich, population changes can
cause changes in lifestyle and the social order in general, hence the
relevance of knowing that it is real and not just perceived or bias.

~~~
bildung
I think the point is that this muslim population growth isn't real, in the
sense that the implied causation is wrong. Those people don't get more
children because they are muslim but because they are poor, as poor people
generally get more children all over the world (e.g. African Americans in the
U.S. are both over-represented among the poor and grow as a share of the
overall population in the U.S.)

~~~
lotsofpulp
There are tenets of Islam that encourage increasing their population and/or
having multiple wives (see Saudi Arabia and some of the countries around it).
So I would not postulate that they have more children only because they are
poor. Also the data shows a higher childbirth rate for wealthy Muslims also.

There is a similar belief for evangelical Christians and hasidic Jews, and
those populations also have more children than average.

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
Economic reforms and getting the government away from as much as possible
should be their priority which I was hoping to see with Modi. This other stuff
is not important. Also, I thought this (that Hinduism had been around in India
long before Islam, the same way Zorastrianism was in Iran) was already
accepted knowledge, I am surprised to hear it's not.

~~~
arnsholt
That Hinduism is older than Islam is an absolute no-brainer. Islam dates to
the 8th century, whereas the oldest layers of the Vedas are likely 3000 to
4000 years old. The question is the origins of the Vedic religion and its
adherents. For Hindutva, it's of vital importance that Hinduism originate in
India, but as I understand the scientific consensus it's quite clear that the
Aryans came into India from the outside and subjugated an extant population
(likely Dravidian-speaking).

~~~
why_ask_why
The “Aryan Invasion Theory” that you refer to has been thoroughly refuted by
all serious historians. I can’t believe there are still people who propound
such nonsense. There were no Aryans and no Dravidians. The Vedas originated in
what is present day India and it is the original indigenous culture of that
land.

~~~
kamaal
Cite your 'all serious historians' and feel free to edit:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-
Aryan_migration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migration)

Also every one comes from some where. No one ever fell from the sky, or
sprouted from earth.

~~~
why_ask_why
Read Breaking India by Rajiv Malhotra. Not everything you find on Wikipedia is
true.

~~~
cholantesh
Conversely, almost everything written by unqualified hacks is probably false.

------
r_singh
This maybe too far fetched, but I wonder if rewriting Indian history textbooks
to make India appear more Hindu could somehow potentially increase our pace
towards adopting Uniform Civil Code in our constitution?

~~~
asif8qureshi
For Uniform Civil Code to be adopted, it is the Hindu marriage act which has
to be supplanted as all the other communities have already opted for Special
Marriage Act to register their marriages.

~~~
kamaal
That's just the tip of the iceberg. You also have to navigate through all
sorts of laws related to crime, food regulations, civil rights and bazillion
other categories and basically get a society so diverse to agree on deeply
conflicting issues.

Easier said than done. In many cases it might involve undoing a lot privilege
in many sections of society.

------
amriksohata
Rewrite history in India? Isn't that what Christian and Muslim invaders did
for the last 500 years? They are not Hindu nationalists, they are just normal
Indians taking back the narrative in their country.

------
tom_hack
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen outlines in his book 'The Argumentative Indian:
Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity', what the incumbent party
did in its previous stint i.e. when ruling India during 1998-2004:

... What is its specific relevance in contemporary Indian politics, and why is
Hindutva politics so keen on redescribing the past? I would argue that the
answer lies in two specific features of contemporary Hindu politics

... The first is the need for the Hindutva movement to keep together its
diverse components and to generate fresh loyalty from potential recruits...
The second reason for focusing on India's past is the large support for the
Hindutva movement that comes from the Indian diaspora abroad, particularly in
North America and Europe, for whom it is quite important to be able to retain
their general Indian nationalist attachment while embracing any other loyalty
they may be persuaded to have (such as Hindutva)

... The rapidly reorganized National Council of Educational Research and
Training (NCERT) became busy, from shortly after the BJP's assumption of
office, not only in producing fresh textbooks for Indian school children, but
also in deleting sections from books produced earlier by NCERT itself ( under
pre-BJP management), written by reputed Indian historians. The
'reorganization' of NCERT was accompanied by an 'overhaul' of the Indian
Council of Historical Research (ICHR), with new officers being appointed and a
new agenda chosen for both, mainly in line with the priorities of the Hindutva
movement

... School children were to be taught, in one of the textbooks, that
Madagascar was 'an island in the Arabian sea' and that Lancashire had been 'a
fast-growing industrial town' . The newly devised history of India in the new
textbooks prepared by the Government of India received sharp criticism in the
media and in public discussions that followed. The reviews in the major
newspapers were almost uniformly disparaging. 'Bloomers Galore in the NCERT
Texts', was the news headline in the Hindusthan Times

... one of the textbooks that was meant to teach Indian school children about
the events surrounding India's independence failed to mention the
assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, the Hindu political fanatic
who had links with the activist RSS (the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh) - an
omission of very considerable moment

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10310.The_Argumentative_...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10310.The_Argumentative_Indian)

------
thisisit
I don't understand why was this upvoted at all? This topic is as divisive as
NRA or Trump in USA.

IMO, these politically charged discussions should be kept off HN.

~~~
m_ransing
I agree with this. The topic is vast and number of opinions will be equal to
number of people. And exactly what is getting discussed here? Hindu
propaganda, patriarchal hierarchy, education system, Muslim and British
attacks? No point in discussing such issues on HN. At least create different
threads for different topic.

------
tom_hack
In the book 'Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture', author Alan
Sokal, Math Professor at University College London, writes under the heading
'Hindu nationalism and Vedic-Science' in 'Pseudoscience and Postmodernism'
chapter:

On February 23, 2001, the University Grants Commission (UGC) — the central
government body overseeing the funding of higher education in India —
announced that

 _" there is an urgent need to rejuvenate the science of Vedic Astrology in
India, to allow this scientific knowledge to reach to the society at large and
to provide opportunities to get this important science even exported to the
world ... [Accordingly,] the Commission decided to approve in principle [the]
setting up of a few departments of Vedic Astrology in Indian universities ...
leading to certificate diploma, under-graduate, post-graduate and Ph.D.
degrees."_

The plan provoked a storm of protest from Indian scientists and rationalist
intellectuals. But what on earth prompted such a bizarre decision in the first
place? The answer, not surprisingly, is politics: more precisely, the Hindu
nationalist politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which governed India
between March 1998 and May 2004. The BJP is the political expression of a
multifaceted mass movement for Hindutva, or “Hindu-ness”, “an ultranationalist
and chauvinistic movement that seeks to modernize India by recovering the
supposedly pristine Vedic-Hindu roots of Indian culture”.As part of its
program for the Hinduization of Indian education, the BJP rewrote school
history textbooks to excise the contributions of Muslims and other non-Hindus,
and promoted university-level courses not only in Vedic Astrology (Jyotir
Vigyari) but also in karmakanda (Hindu priestly rituals), vastu shastra
(sacred architectural rules), “human consciousness and Yogic science”, and
“Vedic mathematics”

... Contemporary Hindu-nationalist intellectuals, many of whom are trained
scientists and engineers, have brought this art to an even higher level of
refinement. For instance, Subhash Kak, a professor of electrical and computer
engineering at Louisiana State University and one of the leading intellectual
luminaries of the Hindu-nationalist diaspora, claims to find “astronomical
codes” in the Rig Veda's descriptions of ritual fire altars, using a method
that, as Nanda wryly observes, “is breathtakingly ad hoc and reads like
numerology 101”.Even more ludicrously, #Raja Ram Mohan Roy asserts that “the
Vedas are a coded book ... of particle physics and cosmology”: thus, verses
referring to wild and domestic animals are really alluding to fermions and
bosons, respectively; passages recounting the destruction of black-skinned
people are in fact “about annihilation of anti-matter”; and the phrase “ten-
finger form” in the Purusa hymn gives us “compelling evidence of [the]
universe being considered ten-dimensional in Vedic cosmology”, just as in
modem superstring theory.

#A contemporary author, not to be confused with the early-nineteenth-century
Indian reformer of the same name.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2036727.Beyond_the_Hoax](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2036727.Beyond_the_Hoax)

------
newyankee
Wow, the west remains as clueless of Indian politics as ever and the media
continues its hit jobs and agenda

------
known
The Arabic countries led by Muslims were the most advanced
scientists/engineers in the world until they let religious bigots/radicals
take over. Just saying Modi/RSS/BJP...

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_science_and_engi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_science_and_engineering_in_the_Islamic_world)

~~~
seagullz
The Wikipedia page doesn't seem to support the thesis. One can plausibly argue
for quite the contrary, IMHO. In fact, many outstanding scholars in STEM of
that era, including a few names in the cited Wikipedia page, were also
religious scholars (jurisprudence, theology, hadith etc.). Arabs were so much
lost before the advent of Islam that the neighboring Persians and Romans
apparently had little to no interest in them. History is more
complicated/nuanced of course, but these are important points.

~~~
Brakenshire
Early Islamic philosophy was positive towards scientific principles, later
Islamic philosophy actively hostile:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philoso...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philosophers)

~~~
seagullz
Agreed mostly. But again the picture is more complicated than what a single
sentence or two can convey.

Curiously, many of the lethargy, idleness and sense of pointlessness came
through sufism. Sufism itself has also many roots (including Greek, and later
Andalusian twists), and has a wide spectrum. Ghazzali (the author of The
Incoherence) himself was heavily affected by Sufi themes before he wrote 'the
Incoherence'; but that book, a rationalist attack on some form of rationalism
itself, has many valid points though.

------
known
Modi/RSS/BJP will not appreciate democracy/diversity

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29)

They promote hierarchies
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_in_Hinduism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_in_Hinduism)

~~~
newyankee
What nonsense

