History of Ancient India

                   

 History of Ancient India: Distorted and Mutilated 

The national history taught in schools has tended to encourage the most general and terrifying of existing evils, “human presumptions and particularly intellectual arrogance,” or in other words self righteousness. Wrong history is being taught in all countries, all the time, unavoidably; while we have great need of history, our first need is to unlearn most of what we have been taught.

HERBERT J. MULLER (1958: 28) writes that on a national scale, history becomes the kind of prejudice and conceit that led Paul Valery to call history the most dangerous product ever concocted by the chemistry of the brain. Muller says that Valery wrote: “It (History) causes dreams, it makes nations drunk, it saddles them with false memories, it exaggerates their reflexes, it keeps their old sores running, it torments them when they are at rest, and it induces in them megalomania and the mania of persecution. It makes them bitter, arrogant, unbearable, and full of vanity.”

One will finding history all of this – prejudice, conceit, false memories, exaggerations, absurdities, arrogance, vanity – when one reads what European historians have said about the age and authorship of the Vedas, Sanskrit, Swastika, Dravidians and their languages, origin of the Aryans, Hindu gods, etc. It becomes apparent that these historians have been successful in crafting confusion by distorting the dates of significant events related to the ancient history of Bharat, the West envied. It seems, European scholars have knowingly ignored what is written in Vedic scriptures, saying that they are mythological and not historically worth believing. They claim they know better than India’s native scholars and scriptures know. The East India Company brought in missionaries and introduced them as Sanskrit scholars to translate Vedic scriptures who with the help of bribed poor Pundits to translate our scriptures to fit in their hidden ethno-political agenda.

This has happened not only with India, but with several countries, colonized by the West, particularly by the Britain. Histories have been written by victors. Their pen had colonial power to write what they wanted to, with the purpose to infuse in the Indian psyche ethnic inferiority complex. They succeeded. Impressions, implanted by first histories, become too deep to get erased. Post-independence sixty years are not enough for a nation, particularly for India has been under bondage for over a millennium to wake up from colonial soothing anesthesia. 

Thus history, particularly of ancient India, has been obscured and confused. This has been more adversely affected because of the attitude of indifference towards history on the part of ancient Hindu historians. Lieut. Col. F. Wilford, in the Asiatic Society of Bengal’s research series, led by William Jones (1746-94), section: “On the Ancient Geography of India” (Vol. XIV, pp.374-376), says that some Puranas have information about the names of some mansions, geographical tracts, mountains, rivers, etc., but without any explanations about them. Wilford also describes his difficulties and frustrations in collecting relevant data, mainly because of lack of adequate cooperation from Pundits and Hindu historians.

If Wilford had received full cooperation and if historians, over the years, referred to the ancient names of the rivers and towns in addition to their respective modern names, we would have been able to get clearer picture of ancient India’s geographical spread. The history of ancient India, therefore, has been erroneous and infected with several gaps.

Unfortunately, still there are many who believe that it is because of Britain India has a long network of railways, universities, drainage system, etc. They think India would have not uplifted herself if Britain were not there. They, being great angrezraj-bhagta, refuse to realize what India – who has technologically achieved so much during sixty years of her independence – would have achieved if she had independence of more than a millennium. Bharat would have soared through the roof to touch the sky. We should know that the Britain did not allow India have industries except textile. Raw material was exported to Britain for importing back the products manufactured thereof.

In order to know what India would have been if she had independence long back, they should read books on the five thousand year old Indus Valley civilization to know that its two main cities, Mooanjodaro in Sindh and Harrapa in the Punjab, had parallel broad avenues, great drainage system, public swimming pool, brick houses with a well inside, etc. The people were literate and had know how about architecture and city planning. They knew technology of ship building and navigation because of which they had maritime links with Egypt, Mesopotamia (present Iraq), Asia Minor, Bahrain, etc. Bharat had Nalanda Vishwa Vidalaya in her ancient times. Sanskrit dictionary had “Vishwa Vidalaya” word for university.

Temple of History has been maligned
 E. Pococke, in his “India In Greece” or “Truth in Mythology” (preface, p. vii), seems helplessly rebuking the European scholarship for destroying the temple of history: 

“A gigantic mass of absurdities now lies exposed, for a sifting examination. It remains for the patient sagacity of European scholarship, working upon both Occidental and Oriental materials, to re-build, I trust, upon no unstable foundation, that Temple of History which national vanity has destroyed, and whose ruins national Bud’hism has obscured.” 

Pococke further writes (p. ix): “Our ignorance it is which has made a myth of history; and our ignorance is an Hellenic inheritance, much of it the result of Hellenic vanity.” Why Pococke, it seems, has titled this book also as, “ Truth in Mythology”. European scholarship ignorance or rejection of the oriental history is the product of their belief – unconscious or deliberate – that oriental mythologies as contained in their respective traditional scriptures are sentimental and do not give history. Ironically, it reflects their double standards. They themselves consider their own Biblical mythologies as reliable history.

Should one be called a scholar who is shy of admitting his errors?

In light of recent research, including excavations, pointing to the previous inaccuracies, the example of Donald Foster comes to my mind. Foster admitted that his work to establish Shakespeare as the author of an obscure poem was incorrect. Foster candidly admitted his mistake, and gave a very important message of professional ethics to scholars, particularly historians: 
“No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar.”