HISTORIANS HIT OUT AT BJP PLANS TO PROVE INDIA’S ANCIENT HINDU IDENTITY
▶ Government-led study is not impartial, say academic researchers
Historians are accusing the government of manipulating research to suit its political agenda, by constituting a panel to prove that ancient India was a recognisably Hindu nation.
Convened by the Culture Minister, Mahesh Sharma, the panel of 14 academics and bureaucrats is looking for evidence that the Hindu epics are not myths but fact, and that the earliest Indian civilisations gave rise to the Hindu faith.
“I worship the Ramayana and I think it is a historical document,” Mr Sharma said of the Hindu epic. “People who think it is fiction are absolutely wrong.”
He said the panel’s conclusions would eventually be added to school textbooks.
Among the aims are to find traces of the Saraswati, a river mentioned only in scriptures that are at least 3,000 years old, to use archaeology and DNA testing to prove that today’s Hindus are descended from the earliest residents of India, and to establish that “Indian culture” is 12,000 years old.
But the prevailing theory among most historians is that migrants from Central Asia streamed into the Indian subcontinent between 2000BC and 1500BC, bringing with them elements of modern Hinduism.
These populations are thought to have mixed with older indigenous populations in India.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has always disagreed with this theory and it puts Hinduism at the centre of its idea of India.
Hinduism was there all along, the BJP has insisted, and built an advanced civilisation thousands of years ago, before outsiders came to India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi shares this view. In 2014, speaking at a hospital in Mumbai, Mr Modi referred to Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu deity.
“We worship Lord Ganesha, and maybe there was a plastic surgeon at that time who kept the head of an elephant on the torso of a human,” he said.
“There are many areas where our ancestors made large contributions.”
The formation of the Culture Ministry’s committee, which was revealed by Reuters would only “appropriate and promote a certain version of the past for its ideological ends”, said Srinath Raghavan of the Centre for Policy Research, a think tank in New Delhi.
“The work of professional historians is rooted in evidence, interpretation and argument,” Mr Raghavan said. “The exercise being undertaken is the antithesis of these. It’s an attempt to impose a view of the past by government diktat.”
The committee’s plans present problems. Religious texts can be studied “to understand the society, culture and politics of the time in which they were written”, said Aparna Balachandran, who teaches history at the University of Delhi.
“But historians do not look for actual empirical truth value in these texts.”
These texts also vary widely from region to region, said Ishita Banerjee-Dube, a historian of India at El Colegio de Mexico.
“Hindu texts can be treated as sources only if we approach them keeping in mind their several versions and variations, interpolations and appropriations,” Ms Banerjee-Dube said.
Giving a committee the task of “proving” something also makes “a mockery of serious research”, she said. “If one already knows what one wants to establish, what is the purpose of the study?”
For decades, the Hindu right has complained that the study of history in India has been dominated by academics with leftist views.
To depict the country as a composite of ethnicities and religions, these academics played down the glories of Hinduism and ignored the cruelties of invading armies, BJP ideologue Arun Shourie wrote in his book Eminent Historians in 1998.
“They have blackened the Hindu period of our history and strained to whitewash the Islamic period,” Mr Shourie wrote.
But there was no “Hindu period” at all, no stretch of time in which all of India was under the rule of a single Hindu power, Ms Banerjee-Dube said.
Ms Balachandran said: “For some time now, we have all kinds of perspectives that question and even contest leftist orthodoxy.”
India has “many fine historians today” who cannot be classified as leftists, she said.
By using its power to insert its views into the mainstream, the BJP is trying to strengthen its nationalist agenda.
“In the narrative they uphold, the Hindu tradition is entirely indigenous, unlike Islam or Christianity,” Ms Balachandran said. “It fits neatly into their paradigm of insider and outsider.”