What is more, some rich Indian businessmen have financed them liberally to bring out series based on Indian classics, rather than financing competent Indians. Their interpretations are biased and distorted.
It is only lately that people like Rajiv Malhotra and other Indians have begun exposing them. Books by Rajiv Malhotra like ‘Breaking India’, ‘Being Different’, ‘The Battle for Sanskrit’ are worth reading (please check Amazon).
Sanskrit, the most scientific language, and the mother of many Indian and European languages, could have been simplified and modernized (like Israel did with Hebrew), and taught in all schools, in addition to English. It would have revitalized India, and helped unify it.
The comments of Gurcharan Das are worth noting: “...an Indian who seriously wants to study the classics of Sanskrit or ancient regional languages will have to go abroad. ‘If Indian education and scholarship continue along their current trajectory,’ writes Sheldon Pollock, the brilliant professor of Sanskrit at Columbia University, ‘the number of citizens capable of reading and understanding the texts and documents of the classical era will very soon approach a statistical zero. India is about to become the only major world culture whose literary patrimony, and indeed history, are in the hands of scholars outside the country.’ This is extraordinary in a country with dozens of Sanskrit departments in all major Indian universities...The ugly truth is that the quality of teaching in these institutions is so poor that not a single graduate is able to think seriously about the past and critically examine ancient texts... Where is India’s soft power when there are fewer and fewer Indians capable of interrogating the texts of Kalidasa or the edicts of Ashoka?...To be worthy of being Indian does not mean to stop speaking in English. It means to be able to have an organic connection with our many rich linguistic pasts...What separates man from beast is memory and if we lose historical memory then we surrender it to those who will abuse it.”
Actually, Nehru wanted to carry on with the language he was comfortable in, and it is doubtful if he really cared for things Indian or Indian languages or culture.
Blunder–68 :
Being Creative with History
There has been little genuine work in Indian history after independence. No worthwhile books on Indian history come from the Indian academe. Those that have been authored by the “eminent” Indian court historians during the Nehru-Indira Dynasty era are generally insipid, superficial, distorted, wanting in serious research and insight, and driven by Leftist-Marxist ideological bias. There have been gross distortions. There are parts in Nehru's own books like the "Glimpses of World History" and the "Discovery of India" that contain distorted history (please read next “blunder”).
People like Nehru had strangely erroneous notions on how history should or should not be written. If writing of what actually happened in the past—even if it was a millennium or more back—could adversely affect (in their wrong opinion) the present, then give it a spin—that was their view. So, be creative with history—bury or bend or ignore facts, if so warranted.
First, it is a false notion to presume such adverse effects.
Second, if different writers presume or interpret differently, should each write a distorted history in his or her own way?
Third, what really happened would anyway be known through other sources, so why play with facts. When original sources and the writings by the contemporaries are available—those who actually witnessed what happened and wrote about them, like Alberuni and others—why would those who care for history be mislead by the creative writers of history?
Fourth, it is an insult to the intelligence of the general public and readers to be presumed to be gullible enough to swallow wholesale what these creative writers dish out.
Fifth, it is thoroughly unprofessional to take such liberties with writing of history.
It is unwise to try and mould history to suit one’s ideological bend or bias, or for political or religious or social or cultural purposes. Truth should not be fiddled with.
People should not be taken for granted or taken for fools that they would believe the junk written—like Nehru thought, or Nehruvian-leftist-Marxist historians or the rightists or the fundamentalists think.
There has to be professionalism in writing of history. If history is painful or unpalatable, so be it. It is better to know the truth, whether it is good or bad, palatable or obnoxious. People must learn to face the truth, and learn from history.
In fact, the sense of what is good and what is bad also changes from time to time: should history then keep getting re-written?’
It is a misunderstanding of what the history-writing is all about, and silly, immature socialistic-leftist-‘holier&wiser-that-thou’-Nehruvian notions of “what is good for the people”, and an arrogance that “I know better what people should know” that leads to writing of creative history.
What happened centuries ago is no reflection on people now. Notions have changed. You insult people by twisting the facts. Should the plunder that Qasim, Ghazni, Ghori and other Islamic hordes carried out be swept under the carpet lest it should hurt the Muslims.
If Hindu kings did something atrocious in the past, does it mean it should be suppressed, lest it should hurt the Hindus. Christians engaged in terrible atrocities during their campaigns of conversion, inquisitions and colonisation. Do they now sweep it under the carpet? No. There have been mountains of books from the West detailing the atrocities committed. Germans teach their children on Nazi atrocities. Truth must be known. Then only can one come to terms with the reality and ensure the mistakes are not repeated in the future.
Blunder–69 :
Distortion of History by Nehru
Wrote Perry Anderson, a British historian and political essayist, and Professor of History and Sociology at UCLA: “Nehru had enjoyed the higher education Gandhi didn’t have, and an intellectual development not arrested by intense religious belief. But these advantages yielded less than might be thought. He seems to have learned very little at Cambridge, scraping a mediocre degree in natural sciences that left no trace thereafter, did poorly in his bar exams, and was not much of a success when he returned to practise law in his father’s footsteps. The contrast with Subhas Chandra Bose, a brilliant student of philosophy at Cambridge, who was the first native to pass the exams into the elite ranks of the Indian civil service and then decline entry to it on patriotic grounds, is striking.
“But an indifferent beginning is no obstacle to subsequent flowering, and in due course Nehru became a competent orator and prolific writer. What he never acquired, however, was a modicum of literary taste or mental discipline. His most ambitious work, The Discovery of India, which appeared in 1946, is a steam bath of Schwärmerei [sentimental enthusiasm].
“It would be unfair to compare Nehru to Ambedkar, the leader of the Untouchables, intellectually head and shoulders above most of the Congress leaders, owing in part to far more serious training at the LSE and Columbia. To read Ambedkar is to enter a different world. “The Discovery of India”… illustrates not just Nehru’s lack of formal scholarship and addiction to romantic myth, but something deeper, not so much an intellectual as a psychological limitation: a capacity for self-deception with far-reaching political consequences.”
For a glimpse of the distortion of Indian history by Nehru let us take an example.
Somnath Temple is the most sacred of the twelve Aadi Jyotirlings. The temple was destroyed and looted six times: by Junayad, the Arab governor of Sind, in 725 CE; by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1024 CE; by Sultan Allauddin Khilji in 1296 CE; by Muzaffar Shah I, the Sultan of Gujarat, in 1375 CE; by Mahmud Begda, the Sultan of Gujarat in 1451 CE; and by Aurangzeb in 1701 CE. But, each time it was rebuilt.
Mahmud of Ghazni destroyed the temple in 1024 CE in his 16th of the 17 raids into India over a period of about 30 years, and carried away camel-loads of jewels and gold. It is said that Mahmud personally hammered the temple’s gilded idol to pieces and carted it to Ghazni where they were in
corporated into the foot-steps of the city’s new Jamiah Masjid. Thousands of defenders were massacred, including one Ghogha Rana, who had challenged Mahmud at the ripe old age of 90.
Wrote Zakariya al-Qazwini, a 13th-century Arab geographer:
“Somnath: celebrated city of India, situated on the shore of the sea, and washed by its waves. Among the wonders of that place was the temple in which was placed the idol called Somnath. This idol was in the middle of the temple without anything to support it from below, or to suspend it from above [might have been so, thanks to magnets]. It was held in the highest honour among the Hindus, and whoever beheld it floating in the air was struck with amazement, whether he was a Musulman or an infidel. The Hindus used to go on pilgrimage to it whenever there was an eclipse of the moon, and would then assemble there to the number of more than a hundred thousand...
“When the Sultan Yaminu-d Daula Mahmud Bin Subuktigin [Mahmud of Ghazni, who was son of Subuktigin] went to wage religious war against India, he made great efforts to capture and destroy Somnath, in the hope that the Hindus would then become Muhammadans. As a result thousands of Hindus were converted to Islam. He arrived there in the middle of Zi-l k’ada, 416 A.H. [December, 1025 CE]... The king looked upon the idol with wonder, and gave orders for the seizing of the spoil, and the appropriation of the treasures. There were many idols of gold and silver and vessels set with jewels..."
In his book ‘The Discovery of India’, Nehru writes about ‘Mahmud of Ghazni and the Afghans’ in ‘Chapter-6:New Problems’. A sentence in it goes, “He met with...on his way back from Somnath in Kathiawar.” That’s all. There is nothing more on Somnath!
But, what Nehru totally omits in ‘The Discovery of India’, he does mention a little bit in his other book which he wrote ten years earlier in 1935—‘Glimpses of World History’. In ‘Chapter-51: From Harsha to Mahmud in North India’, Nehru writes, “But it was in Somnath that he [Mahmud of Ghazni] got the most treasure...” He further writes, “He is looked upon as a great leader of Islam who came to spread Islam in India. Most Muslims adore him; most Hindus hate him. As a matter of fact, he [Mahmud] was hardly a religious man. He was a Mohammedan, of course, but that was by the way. Above everything he was soldier, and a brilliant soldier. He came to India to conquer and loot, as soldiers unfortunately do, and he would have done so to whatever religion he might have belonged... We must therefore not fall into the common error of considering Mahmud as anything more than a successful soldier.”
Nehru is labouring to convince the reader that the havoc that Mahmud wrought was not because he was a Muslim, and that a person of another religion would have also done the same. Further, Nehru does not dwell on what all destruction Mahmud wrecked.
Real history is what historians of that time— contemporaries of Mahmud—themselves wrote. As per the contemporary history, when Mahmud of Ghazni was carrying away the Shiva idol of gold from the Somnath temple, many rich traders came together and offered him even more wealth if he returned the idol. Mahmud’s retort was: “I am an idol-breaker, not an idol-seller!”
Nehru further writes: “Mahmud [of Ghazni] was far more a warrior than a man of faith...” Then about Mathura, Nehru writes, “Mahmud was anxious to make his own city of Ghazni rival the great cities of central and western Asia and he carried off from India large number of artisans and master builders. Building interested him and he was much impressed by the city of Mathura near Delhi. About this Mahmud wrote: ‘There are here a thousand edifices as firm as the faith of the faithful; nor is it likely that this city has attained its present condition but at the expense of many millions of dinars, nor could such another be constructed under a period of 200 years.’”
What is interesting and intriguing is that nowhere there is any mention by Nehru of how this Mahmud, the lover of buildings as he calls him, mercilessly destroyed Mathura and Somnath!
Wrote Al Utbi, an aide and secretary of Mahmud of Ghazni, in Tarikh-e Yamini: “The Sultan gave orders that all the temples should be burnt with naphtha and fire and levelled with the ground.” Utbi wrote that Mahmud first wanted to go to Sijistan, but subsequently changed his mind for “a holy war against Hind”, and details how Sultan “purified Hind from idolatry and raised mosques”. He also states that the “Musulmans paid no regard to the booty till they had satiated themselves with the slaughter of the infidels and worshippers of the sun and fire.”
In Tabakat-I Nasiri, Minhaju-s Siraj hails Mahmud for “converting as many as a thousand idol-temples into mosques”, and calls him “one of the greatest champions of Islam”.
It is not for nothing that Pakistanis name their missiles Ghazni and Ghori.
Nehru further wrote: “Of the Indians, Alberuni [who came with Mahmud of Ghazni] says that they ‘are haughty, foolishly vain, self-contained, and stolid,’... Probably a correct enough description of the temper of the people.” Nehru seems comfortable and fine with anything negative about Indians, but has little negative to comment on the massive destruction wrought, and its wrecker, Mahmud of Ghazni!
Nehru further quotes Alberuni writing about the havoc caused by Mahmud, “The Hindus became like the atoms of dust scattered in all directions and like a tale of old in the mouths of people. Their scattered remains cherish of course the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims.” Nehru then comments, “This poetic description gives us an idea...” So, Nehru found Alberuni’s description of terrible misfortune wrought on India and Hindus poetic!!
Incidentally, Alberuni had travelled to India with Mahmud of Ghazni during the first half of the eleventh century CE. The book “Alberuni’s India” is Alberuni’s written work on India, translated by Dr Edward C Sachau.
Here is an extract from what Alberuni, who was a witness to what Mahmud did in India and to India, and who is referred to by Nehru in the quote of Nehru above, had to say: “This prince [Sabuktagin] chose the holy war as his calling, and therefore called himself Al-ghazi (i.e. warring on the road of Allah)... afterwards his son Yamin-addaula Mahmud marched into India during a period of thirty years or more. God be merciful to both father and son! Mahmud [of Ghazni] utterly ruined the prosperity of the country [India], and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people...”
Interesting thing is what Nehru chooses to quote from Alberuni, and what he chooses to ignore.
Blunder–70 :
Rise of the Parasitic Leftist-‘Liberal’ Class
In India, you just have to get familiar with the “leftist, anti-American, pro-Arab, anti-Israel, ‘secularist’, Hindu-baiting, Muslim-apologist, Nehruvian, JNU-type” refrain and jargon to qualify as an intellectual. It’s that easy. No serious knowledge or expertise or research work or analytical ability or originality or depth or integrity is required.
Besides, it is safe. Others won’t heckle you. Because, these typical Indian leftists have an invisible, informal brotherhood. They support, defend and promote one another, ensure their predominance in the academe and government bodies, and stoutly defend their turf. They are also “eminent” invitees on TV and public functions, seriously ventilating their hackneyed, stale ideas. These windbags have not come up with a single original idea in the last six decades.
This parasitic cabal has its origin in the Nehruvian era with its debilitating socialism and deformed world-view. It still thrives on that discredited ideology, and has spawned the academe and sarkari establishments. It has infested the opinion-making arms including the media, and has become a major stumbling block in progress, for it has managed to pervert sensible discourse.
Thanks to the sowing of Marxist, socialistic, leftist seeds by Nehru in the academia and media, sidelining of alternate streams and of people associated with them, the academia is so compromised that we witness shocking anti-national incidents in our premium universities like the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Jadavpur University (JU), and so on, and there is a powerful section
of the media and intellectuals who have been supporting them directly or indirectly. It is “liberal” and fashionable to be anti-national!
Blunder–71 :
Mental & Cultural Slavery
We managed to break the shackles of economic and political slavery. But mental and cultural slavery—that we have willingly adopted!
That Gandhiji had done much to counter that slavishness is well-known. But, what is strange is that little was done in the post-independence period by Gandhiji’s chosen protégé Nehru to carry forward Gandhiji’s legacy, and rid Indians of their mental and cultural slavery. If anything, it increased, in no small measure to the examples set by Nehru himself, and the policies that flourished under him.
“...several ministers who used to squat on the floor and eat off brass plates or plantain leaves in their homes were now trying to ape Western ways. They contended that Nehru considered only Westernised people modern...”
—Durga Das, ‘India from Curzon to Nehru & After’
Gandhi had once told: “Jawahar wants Englishmen to go but Angreziat to stay. I want Angreziat to go but Englishmen to remain as our friends.” Knowing this, why Gandhi chose Nehru as prime minister is a mystery.
Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), a British historian and politician, notorious for his ‘Macaulayism’ as a conscious British policy of liquidating indigenous culture through the planned substitution of the alien culture of a colonizing power via the education system, had proposed rearing a class of elitist Indians who could act as interpreters between the British and the colonised millions they governed who would be “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
Nehru's 97 Major Blunders Page 16