‘Idea of a non-violent ancient India is a myth’

India’s independence movement was built on the principle of non-violence but a new book by noted historian Upinder Singh, also the daughter of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, suggests that the idea of a non-violent ancient India is a myth that Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru “helped create” while driving the independence movement on the principle of non-violence.

In “Political Violence in Ancient India”, Upinder Singh, head of Delhi University’s History Department, documents the “dynamic tension between violence and non-violence in ancient Indian political

Ancient India boasts the icons of ahimsa like Mahavira, the Buddha and Ashoka. But what people need to realise is that their strong pleas for non-violence indicate that these men were very troubled by violence all around them. So, the idea of a non-violent ancient India is indeed a myth. –Upinder Singh

Head of History Dept, DU

thought and practice over twelve hundred years”.

“I think that the great value attached to non-violence in Gandhian nationalism (of which Nehru was also an important part) lulled us into thinking of a non-violent ancient India. This is a myth. This is why the problem of political violence has hardly been noticed, let alone studied (till my book!). Ancient Indian history is full of episodes of bloody wars, succession struggles, patricide, fratricide, conflicts between states and forest people, and the killing of animals.

“These things are well known, but we have somehow not joined the dots. Ancient India boasts the icons of ahimsa like Mahavira, the Buddha and Ashoka. But what people need to realise is that their strong pleas for non-violence indicate that these men were very troubled by violence all around them. So, the idea of a non-violent ancient India is indeed a myth. This pleasant myth can perhaps offer some comfort in our desire for peace and harmony in our present violent, intolerant, conflictridden world. It can be used as a basis to argue for a return to a golden age of nonviolence. But such a golden age never existed. Such myths are not history and it is necessary to demolish them,” Singh told IANS in an email interview.