Modi’s mythologies
Suffering from jaundice several decades ago, sick to death of the constant imbibing of sugarcane juice and bored out of my skull, my eyes fell on an interesting volume on my parents’ bookshelf: Some blunders in Indian historical research by a P.N Oak.
It started off innocently enough, with assertions about how the Taj Mahal was a Rajput building appropriated by the Mughals. Similar claims were made about the Red Fort and the Qutub Minar.
Reading this up until now I experienced a slightly ‘blasphemous’ trill, the kind you get when faced with views that go against everything you have ever believed in.
Could it be that the history I had been taught all these years was in fact false?
Apparently not. According to Oak, Alexander the Great had actually been defeated by Raja Porus (an ignominy suppressed by lying Greek historians).
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He also claims that Christianity is actually derived from ‘Krishna-neeti’ (the way of Krishna), but then in his world most other religions are also corruptions of, or derived from, Hinduism.
That in turn leads Oak to profess his belief in the existence of a globe-spanning Hindu empire somehow ignored or wilfully suppressed by every single serious historian ever. This influence, he claims, stretched from Korea in the East to Britain in the West and ancient Hindu explorers also reached the Arctic Circle.
Myths are now to be found in Gujarat’s textbooks.
His historiography is of course impeccable, citing proofs like the use of ‘India’ in ‘Indianapolis’ and ‘Red Indians’. The place name ‘Arabia’ is said to originate from ‘Arvasthan’, meaning ‘land of the horses’ (horses didn’t actually exist in Arabia at that time) while ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is said to derive from ‘Angulisthan’ which means ‘finger-land’ in a possible reference to the residents of Great Britain flashing the reverse victory sign.
It was as if someone had written a Pak Studies book while on a cocktail of potent hallucinogenic drugs after having undergone a lobotomy.
But it turns out that there are a significant number of people on the Hindutva fringe (Oak is considered a Sangh historian) who take him seriously.
Dig a little and you’ll find many similar and very earnest pieces detailing how aeroplanes and nuclear weapons are referred to in the Vedas and so on and so forth.
This is pretty standard stuff, of course, and you’ll also find lots of books arguing how the pyramids were built by aliens (along with Stonehenge). By and large, these aren’t taken very seriously. By and large.
The book went back on the shelf as an interestingly hilarious piece one might dig out on a day when the funny pages weren’t available, and there it stayed until quite recently a news item caused me to exhume it.
This was a speech by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Mumbai where he claimed that Lord Ganesh having an elephant’s head on a human body was proof that advanced genetic engineering existed in ancient India.
He also claimed that Lord Rama travelled in an aeroplane and that the legend of Karna who “was not born from his mother’s womb” meant that “genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb”.
Modi, while he is also prime minister of a country making some serious strides in space technology, is also quite clearly a believer in the Dinanath Batra school of thought. This latter worthy, a RSS ideologue, is the man responsible for getting Penguin India to pulp Wendy Doninger’s book The Hindus: an alternative history.
That’s not the sum total of his achievements, however. Mr Batra, a prolific writer, is known to rail against the blowing of birthday candles as being against ‘Indian culture’ and also proposes that Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka be included in an Akhand Bharat.
His version of history, like Oak’s, is part of a long-standing attempt to remove the sting of centuries of ‘foreign rule’ by harking back to a past that was not only glorious, but almost entirely manufactured.
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Just like the Lord Macaulay quote that research-averse nationalists in both India and Pakistan love to refer to.
Now we have no shortage of rabid hate-mongers and cultural fascists on our side of the border. But what’s important to note is that Batra’s books, in which he propagates the kind of magical-mythical thinking detailed here, are now part of the primary school curriculum in Gujarat, Modi’s home state, and even carry a foreword from the prime minister himself.
It may seem hypocritical for a Pakistani to write about this. After all, we’ve been fed pseudo history, a gift that keeps on giving, and have been fed ‘jinn-to-electricity’ pseudo-science as well. But here we have the unmatched spectacle of the prime minister of India openly declaring his belief in both. It’s hard to look at that with anything but a jaundiced eye.
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro
Published in Dawn, November 17th, 2014