The 125th birth anniversary of Swatantryaveer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar falls on 28 May 2008. It is a fitting occasion to remember the man and his manifold contribution to the Hindu Nation.
Savarkar was born when India was under British yoke. Savarkar was clear that a nation in bondage can never achieve her destiny. He was also clear that freedom cannot be attained through pleas and petitions but by self-sacrifice. Savarkar belongs to a rare breed of Indian patriots who pledged to serve their motherland while still in childhood. What is more, he stood by his pledge till his last breath. Savarkar was among the first to place the case for India's freedom at the international level. He established contacts with revolutionaries from different countries to achieve this goal. At a time when British rule was still widely regarded as a divine blessing and Dominion Status was discussed in hushed tones, Savarkar fearlessly proclaimed absolute freedom as his goal. Savarkar had a clear vision of independent India even as a youth. He put forth the vision of a sovereign republic with Sanskritised Hindi as the national language and Devanagari as the national script.
In Savarkar's time, there was a debate about the relative importance of political struggle and social reform. Savarkar held that freedom won without social reform would not last for three days. Savarkar's thoughts and actions in the field of social reform are radical even by today's standards.
To Savarkar, freedom did not merely mean replacing the colonial masters with their brown-skinned versions. He meditated deeply on India's identity. To him, Hindutva was synonymous with India's nationhood. To a very large extent, the credit for elucidating the philosophy of Hindutva and Hindu Nationalism in modern times goes to Savarkar. To this day, the Hindu Revivalist movement owes its intellectual underpinnings to Savarkar.
Savarkar had to fight on various fronts. His opposition to the British rulers did not waver even after immense personal suffering. His campaign for social reform put him at loggerheads with conservative Hindus. His reasoned stand on ethics, truth, non-violence and Hindu-Muslim relations placed him in conflict with so-called political saints and their bumbling followers. His relentless and almost solitary opposition to Partition meant that he was at war with Islamists. Even decades after his death, Savarkar continues to be reviled by assorted secularists and leftists. Possible loss of power, popularity and prestige never stopped Savarkar from putting forth his views. Welfare of the people and not merely their praise was his guiding principle in these matters.
The Hindu nation can become resurgent once again only if it imbibes Savarkar's thoughts on different aspects of national life. Ours is a humble effort in that direction.
Other Updates:
Savarkar's historic book 'The War of Independence 1857' (Marathi version) and our website www.savarkar.org were inaugurated by the Hon. Chief Minister of Gujarat Shri Narendra Modi at a glittering function held on 24 May 2008 (Savarkar's anniversary as per Hindu calender) at the Ganesh Kala Krida Manch, Pune. Noted litterateur Ram Shewalkar and Shivshahir Babasaheb Purandare were also present
Thanks,
Savarkar.org Team
www.savarkar.org
A tribute to Prophet Savarkar: Ashok Malik
The man who saw tomorrow
Ashok Malik (Pioneer, 28 May 2008)
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar would have been 125 today. In life, he was a demonised, marginalised 'political Hindu'. Yet, in contemporary India, Savarkar stands vindicated and Savarkarism is more accepted than ever before
In 2004, when the historian Ron Chernow wrote his eponymous biography of Alexander Hamilton, he was partly impelled by the sense that his subject had not been given his due. Hamilton was an American nationalist, a votary of federal institutions, a Republican, an advocate of limited Government and a patron of the industrial society before these terms were coined or at least entirely understood. He was also the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States and a widely influential figure in the early years of the new republic.
Yet, over the decades, memories of Hamilton's contemporaries overwhelmed his legacy. He was America's forgotten Founding Father, lost in the crevices between George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Hamilton had opposed slavery even while his great rival Thomas Jefferson had kept slaves; yet, it wasn't Hamilton who was remembered by human rights chroniclers.
What Hamilton lost in life, Hamiltonism won in history. By the 20th century, Hamilton's ideas had triumphed. His initial postulates continue to define American strategic thinking, foreign policy and economic philosophy. Every White House resident in the past 20 years has paid homage to Ronald Reagan; Reagan himself often evoked Hamilton.
It is tempting to see Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who would have been 125 this morning, as an Indian Alexander Hamilton. By the time he died in 1966, he had shrunk to a limited presence. Surrounded only by a few devoted adherents and members of the Hindu Mahasabha, his writings read mainly by his fellow Maharastrians, his heroic role in the freedom movement had been effaced by official historians.
Savarkar was the intellectual equal of Jawaharlal Nehru. Revisit the writings of the stalwarts of the pre-1947 period and you will encounter few besides these two with a grasp and informed assessment of contemporary world affairs. Yet, in the hard, harsh world of politics and political ideas, Savarkar, by the 1960s, had lost to Nehru's cult and charisma.
There were many reasons why the Left-liberal intelligentsia, most of whom are, in some form or the other, pensioners of the Nehruvian state structure, despised Savarkar. For a start, he was flesh-and-blood refutation of the charge that Hindu nationalism lacked an intellectual tradition. Second, he represented a cogent and coherent position that believed the political choices India and the Congress had made in 1947 (or 1950 or 1952, after the first election) were not necessarily correct.
These were inconvenient truths for Nehruvian fellow travellers, Savarkar the inconvenient man. There was astonishing virulence towards Savarkar. Some, like the perverse and bigoted Mr Mani Shankar Aiyar, even mocked the 10 years that Savarkar spent in Cellular Jail, Port Blair, in horrific conditions, alone in a tiny cell.
The antipathy to Savarkar has to be seen in a larger context. Post-independence, the Congress establishment sought to rewrite history in its own image. It determinedly underplayed the role of the early Indian elites -- the Poona Brahmins, Bombay's Parsi constitutionalists, Calcutta's Bengali and Brahmo activists -- who had dominated public life prior to the Mahatma's mass politics.
As the Congress set out to establish that there was no history and no freedom struggle before Gandhi, and no politics and no consciousness of modern India before Nehru, these pioneer groups became expendable. The Marxist historians who actually wrote the textbooks had their own theories. For instance, not just was Savarkar demonised, even the venerable Bal Gangadhar Tilak was painted in sectarian colours.
Even so, history has a strange way of getting back. Savarkar's idea of the political Hindu, of a polity and of political parties that would be sensitive to the Hindu cultural mainstay of Indian nationhood, that would, while eschewing ritualism and dogma, incorporate robust nationalism into policy-making, is more relevant than it has ever been. Nehruvianism is in retreat and, even though Savarkar has been dead 42 years, Savarkarism has never been more alive.
Written in 1923, Savarkar's slim tract, Hindutva, remains a remarkably contemporary articulation of organic nationalism. Indeed, it anticipates some of the ideas expanded upon by Samuel Huntington in Who Are We? (2004).
Leftist historians often divide Savarkar's life into two -- the supposedly "acceptable" first part, till the mid-1920s; and, his espousal of Hindutva after that. Actually, this division is bogus.
Admittedly, Savarkar's early life was one of a romantic revolutionary. As a student in London, he was in touch with Irish, Turkish and Chinese dissidents and rebels. In 1907, he wrote The War of Independence of 1857. The book was deeply researched and provided an interpretation of documents and events from the Indian perspective.
Admittedly, it is not the last word on the Indian Uprising. In hindsight, Savarkar could be accused of glossing over the differing motivations of the participants of the 1857 war and of being simplistic in believing that there was overwhelming consensus in re-establishing the Delhi throne as a Maratha protectorate -- as had been the case till 1803.
Nevertheless, this was a passionate young man of 24 writing the first non-imperial account of a dramatic struggle. It was passionate and pulsating, being smuggled to India wrapped in dust jackets saying Don Quixote and Pickwick Papers. The British Government arrested Savarkar and sought to send him to India to stand trial. At Marseilles, in a dramatic move, he squeezed out of the porthole and swam to the shore, claiming asylum from the French Government.
It was refused and he was re-arrested on French soil and handed over to the British. This was in breach of international law and among those who protested at Savarkar being denied asylum was Jean Longuet, French lawyer-editor and grandson of Karl Marx.
Savarkar was heavily influenced by Italian thinkers such as Mazzini. He saw Hindutva as an Indian Risorgimeto, conceptualising it as a reawakening of the national spirit and of a pride in, and understanding of, the territorial frontiers of India. He was not a religious sort and did not interpret 'Hindu' solely in terms of worship. He was an early opponent of Dalit exclusion, seeing a Hindu harmonisation process as essential to national unity.
Savarkar was often impatient with the RSS and it is piquant to compare him with MS Golwalkar, 'Guruji' as he is called and the man who made the Sangh the all-India institution that it is today. Savarkar was a thinker, Golwalkar a do-er; Savarkar was the rare Hindu mind who understood statecraft and the importance of state power, Golwalkar sought to change society by working bottom-up from grassroots communities. For Golwalkar (as for Gandhi), the Hindu was ascetic-exemplar; for Savarkar, he was warrior-ideal.
The two streams were not antithetical but clearly complementary. When they finally merged, consciously or otherwise, in the late-1980s, it changed Indian politics and moved the polity irrevocably to the Right. At its best, the BJP is a confluence of Savarkar and Golwalkar.
Savarkar had known it all along. Just before his death, in an emotional piece called "This, My Legacy", he had written: "If we are to live with honour and dignity as a Hindu nation -- and we have the right to do so -- that nation must emerge under the Hindu flag. This, my dream, shall come true -- if not in this generation at least in the next. If it remains an empty dream, I shall prove a fool. If it comes true, I shall prove a prophet. This, my legacy, I bequeath to you."
Savarkar is gone. Let us cherish his legacy, salute the prophet.
http://dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=oped&file_name=opd1%2Etxt&counter_img=1
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Shameless seeking of doles from a US foundation and UK, the colonial looter
Shameless seeking of doles from a US foundation and UK, the colonial looter
Two documents are annexed:
Annex 1 Taking foreign help to set up world class university
Annex 2 Taking foreign help to set up a museum
Both documents bring out an issue which should be treated as a matter of shame for swarajya bharatam. Globalization is one thing but to lose swaabhimaan is quite another.
Treasuring and cherishing Hindu civilization heritage should be done with a lot of pride in the quest for satyam and assuring reinforcement of national identity. The tragedy of the polity we are in is that the polity has been mortgaged to foreign interests with little concern for setting goals for the state to reach great heights, for example, realizing India Vision 2020.
Prof. Chakrabarti has permitted me to publish his open letter to Ms. Ambika Soni. I feel proud that Prof. Chakrabarti has taken up the issue of what he calls, ‘one of the most crucial dimensions of our heritage’ in right earnest. I wish more would join his clarion call for an honest study of the heritage, without the claptrap of motivated, academic dishonesty of many in a gang called ‘indologists.’ with little academic credentials.
We had seen the spectacle of the Hon’ble PM of India going to UK to receive some honorary degree and lavishing praise on the erstwhile colonial regime, forgetting the economist lapel he wears and forgetting the colonial loot which occurred during that inglorious regime leading to the impoverishment of Hindusthana, genocide caused by Bengal famine and social upheavals by the divide-and-rule policies followed by the imperialists.
It is time for the politico-s ruling the state to start realizing that the nation is larger than mere bureaucratizing with mission-less institutions and at the minimum, we should stop seeking a few crumbs from a US foundation or from someone called Bill Rammell of United Kingdom.
What needs to be done is to make UK account for the colonial loot and pay up reparations to swarajya bharatam and to tell the US foundation: thanks for your benevolence, but we can do the Sarasvati Centre on our own.
kalyanaraman
Annex 1 Taking foreign help to set up world class university
Kolkata Telegraph, Issue Date: Wednesday , May 28 , 2008
India at foreign door for varsity - Appeal for help after half a century
CHARU SUDAN KASTURI
Role Models: Institutes set up earlier with foreign help.
IIT Mumbai, USSR, 1958
IIT Madras, W. Germany, 1959
IIT Kanpur, US, 1959
IIT Delhi, UK 1961
New Delhi, May 27: India has asked Britain for financial and technical assistance to set up a new “world class” university (WCU), nearly half a century after it last asked for foreign help in starting a premier education institution.
Junior higher education minister Purandeswari Devi has also asked her British counterpart Bill Rammell for assistance in upgrading facilities and teaching standards at the Indian Institutes of Technology, government officials told The Telegraph.
No post-Independence central university — the WCUs will be run from New Delhi — has been set up with support from a foreign country.
Some of the older IITs — like those in Mumbai, Kanpur, Chennai and Delhi — were set up in the late 1950s and early 1960s with assistance from the USSR, Cold War rival US, West Germany and the UK.
The human resource development ministry’s latest call for help has come at a time when other developing countries — especially in Asia and Africa — are increasingly turning to India for assistance in improving their education system.
IIT Delhi is helping Nepal’s Tribhuvan University develop its engineering wing. IIT Mumbai is working with the Nelson Mandela Foundation — an NGO — to start a pan-African institute of excellence. It is also helping Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries develop engineering schools.
Sources said Purandeswari told Rammell at a meeting in Delhi yesterday that India needed assistance in modernising teacher-training programmes in higher education.
Faculty support — a euphemism for greater participation of guest lecturers from the foreign country — was another request put forward by Purandeswari, the sources said, adding that she also dwelt on skill development — educating students for the job market — as a “key issue”.
Rammell is learnt to have told the minister that the UK was in the process of restructuring its own skill development process, and was willing to share its experiences.
The two ministers are expected to meet again in London on July 18 or 19.
The sources said India, at yesterday’s meeting, indicated its desire to firm up details of the plan before the end of the year. Higher education secretary R.P. Agrawal asked Rammell if the deal could be finalised by July, but the British minister evaded any commitment to a timeline.
“Since our academic session starts in July, we wanted an early conclusion to the talks,” an official said.
In March this year, education minister Arjun Singh had announced locations for 14 WCUs the Centre plans to set up during the eleventh plan.
The universities are set to come up in Bengal (Calcutta), Assam, Orissa, Bihar, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.
The universities will be controlled by the Centre but kept distinct from existing central universities, and will be nurtured to compete with institutions like Harvard and Cambridge.
http://telegraphindia.com/1080528/jsp/frontpage/story_9331088.jsp#
Annex 2 Taking foreign help to set up a museum
24 April 2008
To
Mrs Ambika Soni
The Honourable Minister of Culture
Government of India
Shastri Bhavan
Delhi, India
Sub: the proposed Indus Centre under the aegis of the American Global Heritage Fund in Vadodara
Dear Mrs Soni,
As one of the seniormost academic archaeologists of the country, I would be failing in my duty both as a professional archaeologist and as an Indian citizen if I do not draw your attention to the implications of the proposal to establish a centre for the study of the Indus Civilization in Vadodara under the auspices of the Global Heritage Fund, an American organization .
The Indian members of its Senior Advisory Board comprise the following persons :
(1) Dr Kalpana Desai, Director of the Chhatrapati Sivaji Maharaj Vastu Samgrahalaya, Mumbai (also listed as the Project Director) ; (2)Shri Hasmukh Shah, a retired bureaucrat, (3) Shri Sunil Parekh, a former chairman of the Gujarat Confederation of Industries; (4) Dr Madhu Mehta, an architect in the Nirma University; (5)Dr Rumi Mistry, Technology Promotion Board, Vadodara, (6) Professor K K Bhan , an archaeology professor of the M.S,University of Baroda; and (7) Shri Nitin Desai of a financial firm.
As Dr Kalpana Desai heads a museum of national importance in Mumbai, which comes within the purview of your Ministry, and has been listed as the Project Director of the proposed centre, I would assume that the proposal has passed through the Ministry of Culture under your care.
The American members include, among others, Professor Mark Kenoyer of the Anthropology department of University of Michigan, Wisconsin, USA.
The main point to note in this list is that the Indian advisors have only one archaeologist’s name, i.e. of K K Bhan, and similarly, the American list has one archaeologist in the form of M Kenoyer. I further point out that Professor Kenoyer , who had Professor Bhan as his Indian collaborator in his study of the beads of Cambay, has excavated as a part of an American team at Harappa in Pakistan and is known in print to have declared Pakistan a secular country and the Koran as a text providing inspiration to look for (archaeological) ‘mounds’( “Archaeology”, March-June issue, 2002, pp. 19-21). I have also argued in one of my publications (“The Battle for Ancient India, an Essay in the Socio-politics of Indian Archaeology” , Delhi, 2008, Aryan Books International, p. 96) that he has tried to give a Pakistani angle to the study of the Indus Civilization by repeatedly calling it, wilfully and without any justification, “ Indus Valley Civilization”. The term implies that this civilization was primarily limited to the Indus valley which is in Pakistan and undermines the role of the hundreds of sites of this civilization that we have in our Panjab, Haryana, Gujarat and western Uttar Pradesh.
Thus the first major point I am making is that it would be impossible to argue that the proposed foreign-sponsored centre for the study of the Indus Civilization in Vadodara has any substantive academic credential.
The second point to be noted in this connection is that this proposed ‘Centre’ is the first foreign-funded archaeological institute in India, ostensibly to take care of one of the most crucial dimensions of our heritage. It has serious long-term implications, and before the authorities apparently decided to give it a green signal, the matter ought to have been discussed openly and threadbare in the country’s professional bodies and “Societies” of archaeology. Indian archaeologists ought to have been given the opportunity of voicing their opinion before the Government apparently decided to ‘outsource’ as important a segment of the Indian past as the Indus Civilization.
My third point in this connection is that the study of the past is related to a range of delicate issues, the most important of which is the nation's sense of identity based on that past. This sense of identity is subject to manipulations of all kinds. The way these manipulations take place, is, in fact, a matter of extensive enquiry as a sub-branch of Archaeology - "socio-politics of the past".
On the basis of my research in this field I can say that the study of India’s ancient past has never been an innocuous scholarly matter. It has always been accompanied by political sub-texts of various kinds. For instance, the politics of the study of the Indus Civilization has been discussed at length in my aforementioned publication (pp. 51-102).
This civilization has had a very rich and distinguished history of research in India, and in no way can a patriotic Indian like myself condone the idea of setting up a foreign-funded institute for the purpose.
The Government of India followed, till recently, a fairly consistent attitude which was commensurate with national interests regarding foreign participation in Indian archaeology. The policy seems to have been abandoned in recent years, although even now, all applications for foreign collaborations should be subject to close scrutiny by a separate review committee, taking into view a wide variety of professional issues, including the background and history of research and publication of the applicants.
I do hope, Madam, that you will kindly look into the proposal of setting up this foreign-sponsored institute in Vadodara in detail, remembering all the time that the study of the past is not as innocent as it appears on the surface.
With best regards,
Yours sincerely,
Dilip K Chakrabarti
Professor of South Asian Archaeology
Cambridge University, UK
Two documents are annexed:
Annex 1 Taking foreign help to set up world class university
Annex 2 Taking foreign help to set up a museum
Both documents bring out an issue which should be treated as a matter of shame for swarajya bharatam. Globalization is one thing but to lose swaabhimaan is quite another.
Treasuring and cherishing Hindu civilization heritage should be done with a lot of pride in the quest for satyam and assuring reinforcement of national identity. The tragedy of the polity we are in is that the polity has been mortgaged to foreign interests with little concern for setting goals for the state to reach great heights, for example, realizing India Vision 2020.
Prof. Chakrabarti has permitted me to publish his open letter to Ms. Ambika Soni. I feel proud that Prof. Chakrabarti has taken up the issue of what he calls, ‘one of the most crucial dimensions of our heritage’ in right earnest. I wish more would join his clarion call for an honest study of the heritage, without the claptrap of motivated, academic dishonesty of many in a gang called ‘indologists.’ with little academic credentials.
We had seen the spectacle of the Hon’ble PM of India going to UK to receive some honorary degree and lavishing praise on the erstwhile colonial regime, forgetting the economist lapel he wears and forgetting the colonial loot which occurred during that inglorious regime leading to the impoverishment of Hindusthana, genocide caused by Bengal famine and social upheavals by the divide-and-rule policies followed by the imperialists.
It is time for the politico-s ruling the state to start realizing that the nation is larger than mere bureaucratizing with mission-less institutions and at the minimum, we should stop seeking a few crumbs from a US foundation or from someone called Bill Rammell of United Kingdom.
What needs to be done is to make UK account for the colonial loot and pay up reparations to swarajya bharatam and to tell the US foundation: thanks for your benevolence, but we can do the Sarasvati Centre on our own.
kalyanaraman
Annex 1 Taking foreign help to set up world class university
Kolkata Telegraph, Issue Date: Wednesday , May 28 , 2008
India at foreign door for varsity - Appeal for help after half a century
CHARU SUDAN KASTURI
Role Models: Institutes set up earlier with foreign help.
IIT Mumbai, USSR, 1958
IIT Madras, W. Germany, 1959
IIT Kanpur, US, 1959
IIT Delhi, UK 1961
New Delhi, May 27: India has asked Britain for financial and technical assistance to set up a new “world class” university (WCU), nearly half a century after it last asked for foreign help in starting a premier education institution.
Junior higher education minister Purandeswari Devi has also asked her British counterpart Bill Rammell for assistance in upgrading facilities and teaching standards at the Indian Institutes of Technology, government officials told The Telegraph.
No post-Independence central university — the WCUs will be run from New Delhi — has been set up with support from a foreign country.
Some of the older IITs — like those in Mumbai, Kanpur, Chennai and Delhi — were set up in the late 1950s and early 1960s with assistance from the USSR, Cold War rival US, West Germany and the UK.
The human resource development ministry’s latest call for help has come at a time when other developing countries — especially in Asia and Africa — are increasingly turning to India for assistance in improving their education system.
IIT Delhi is helping Nepal’s Tribhuvan University develop its engineering wing. IIT Mumbai is working with the Nelson Mandela Foundation — an NGO — to start a pan-African institute of excellence. It is also helping Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries develop engineering schools.
Sources said Purandeswari told Rammell at a meeting in Delhi yesterday that India needed assistance in modernising teacher-training programmes in higher education.
Faculty support — a euphemism for greater participation of guest lecturers from the foreign country — was another request put forward by Purandeswari, the sources said, adding that she also dwelt on skill development — educating students for the job market — as a “key issue”.
Rammell is learnt to have told the minister that the UK was in the process of restructuring its own skill development process, and was willing to share its experiences.
The two ministers are expected to meet again in London on July 18 or 19.
The sources said India, at yesterday’s meeting, indicated its desire to firm up details of the plan before the end of the year. Higher education secretary R.P. Agrawal asked Rammell if the deal could be finalised by July, but the British minister evaded any commitment to a timeline.
“Since our academic session starts in July, we wanted an early conclusion to the talks,” an official said.
In March this year, education minister Arjun Singh had announced locations for 14 WCUs the Centre plans to set up during the eleventh plan.
The universities are set to come up in Bengal (Calcutta), Assam, Orissa, Bihar, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.
The universities will be controlled by the Centre but kept distinct from existing central universities, and will be nurtured to compete with institutions like Harvard and Cambridge.
http://telegraphindia.com/1080528/jsp/frontpage/story_9331088.jsp#
Annex 2 Taking foreign help to set up a museum
24 April 2008
To
Mrs Ambika Soni
The Honourable Minister of Culture
Government of India
Shastri Bhavan
Delhi, India
Sub: the proposed Indus Centre under the aegis of the American Global Heritage Fund in Vadodara
Dear Mrs Soni,
As one of the seniormost academic archaeologists of the country, I would be failing in my duty both as a professional archaeologist and as an Indian citizen if I do not draw your attention to the implications of the proposal to establish a centre for the study of the Indus Civilization in Vadodara under the auspices of the Global Heritage Fund, an American organization .
The Indian members of its Senior Advisory Board comprise the following persons :
(1) Dr Kalpana Desai, Director of the Chhatrapati Sivaji Maharaj Vastu Samgrahalaya, Mumbai (also listed as the Project Director) ; (2)Shri Hasmukh Shah, a retired bureaucrat, (3) Shri Sunil Parekh, a former chairman of the Gujarat Confederation of Industries; (4) Dr Madhu Mehta, an architect in the Nirma University; (5)Dr Rumi Mistry, Technology Promotion Board, Vadodara, (6) Professor K K Bhan , an archaeology professor of the M.S,University of Baroda; and (7) Shri Nitin Desai of a financial firm.
As Dr Kalpana Desai heads a museum of national importance in Mumbai, which comes within the purview of your Ministry, and has been listed as the Project Director of the proposed centre, I would assume that the proposal has passed through the Ministry of Culture under your care.
The American members include, among others, Professor Mark Kenoyer of the Anthropology department of University of Michigan, Wisconsin, USA.
The main point to note in this list is that the Indian advisors have only one archaeologist’s name, i.e. of K K Bhan, and similarly, the American list has one archaeologist in the form of M Kenoyer. I further point out that Professor Kenoyer , who had Professor Bhan as his Indian collaborator in his study of the beads of Cambay, has excavated as a part of an American team at Harappa in Pakistan and is known in print to have declared Pakistan a secular country and the Koran as a text providing inspiration to look for (archaeological) ‘mounds’( “Archaeology”, March-June issue, 2002, pp. 19-21). I have also argued in one of my publications (“The Battle for Ancient India, an Essay in the Socio-politics of Indian Archaeology” , Delhi, 2008, Aryan Books International, p. 96) that he has tried to give a Pakistani angle to the study of the Indus Civilization by repeatedly calling it, wilfully and without any justification, “ Indus Valley Civilization”. The term implies that this civilization was primarily limited to the Indus valley which is in Pakistan and undermines the role of the hundreds of sites of this civilization that we have in our Panjab, Haryana, Gujarat and western Uttar Pradesh.
Thus the first major point I am making is that it would be impossible to argue that the proposed foreign-sponsored centre for the study of the Indus Civilization in Vadodara has any substantive academic credential.
The second point to be noted in this connection is that this proposed ‘Centre’ is the first foreign-funded archaeological institute in India, ostensibly to take care of one of the most crucial dimensions of our heritage. It has serious long-term implications, and before the authorities apparently decided to give it a green signal, the matter ought to have been discussed openly and threadbare in the country’s professional bodies and “Societies” of archaeology. Indian archaeologists ought to have been given the opportunity of voicing their opinion before the Government apparently decided to ‘outsource’ as important a segment of the Indian past as the Indus Civilization.
My third point in this connection is that the study of the past is related to a range of delicate issues, the most important of which is the nation's sense of identity based on that past. This sense of identity is subject to manipulations of all kinds. The way these manipulations take place, is, in fact, a matter of extensive enquiry as a sub-branch of Archaeology - "socio-politics of the past".
On the basis of my research in this field I can say that the study of India’s ancient past has never been an innocuous scholarly matter. It has always been accompanied by political sub-texts of various kinds. For instance, the politics of the study of the Indus Civilization has been discussed at length in my aforementioned publication (pp. 51-102).
This civilization has had a very rich and distinguished history of research in India, and in no way can a patriotic Indian like myself condone the idea of setting up a foreign-funded institute for the purpose.
The Government of India followed, till recently, a fairly consistent attitude which was commensurate with national interests regarding foreign participation in Indian archaeology. The policy seems to have been abandoned in recent years, although even now, all applications for foreign collaborations should be subject to close scrutiny by a separate review committee, taking into view a wide variety of professional issues, including the background and history of research and publication of the applicants.
I do hope, Madam, that you will kindly look into the proposal of setting up this foreign-sponsored institute in Vadodara in detail, remembering all the time that the study of the past is not as innocent as it appears on the surface.
With best regards,
Yours sincerely,
Dilip K Chakrabarti
Professor of South Asian Archaeology
Cambridge University, UK
History battle over historic battles
History battle over historic battles
Fwd the article of Ramaswami in Livemint (22 May 2008). Prehistory of Bharatam and the grand narrative of the peopling of Hindusthana, will continue to be a free-for-all until a clear framework of analysis is worked out after two great desiccations caused by primeval events: supereruption of Mt. Toba (ca. 74k yrs. ago) and desiccation of River Sarasvati (ca. 1900 BCE) controlled by the ongoing plate tectonics and dynamic Himalayas. Gangavatarana – evolutionary history of River Ganga and River Brahmaputra -- also has to be studied afresh. Why doesn’t the author talk of the earlier dasaraajna battle?
See the contra article at http://indiapost.com/article/communitypost/2090/
kalyan
Posted: Thu, May 22 2008. 11:57 PM IST (Livemint.com)
A battle about history
History reveals that around 2000-1800 BC, all along the Euro-Asian west-east axis, a horde of invaders, from above the 50N latitudes called the horse-people, pushed down
T.R. Ramaswami
When exactly did India’s most famous battle — Kurukshetra — take place? My search uncovered some intriguing details. Historians disagree on the date. It ranges from around 3200 BC to 700 BC — a period of 2,500 years! Curiously, historians unanimously agree that Kurukshetra did not take place between 2500 BC and 1500 BC. This is the period when the Indus Valley civilization “collapsed”.
History reveals that around 2000-1800 BC, all along the Euro-Asian west-east axis, a horde of invaders, from above the 50N latitudes called the horse-people, pushed down. Every civilization — China, India, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Greece — was overcome as they had the most powerful weapon known then — the horse chariot. Who were the invaders and who were the displaced?
Think why no one wants to place the Kurukshetra battle in that gap of 1,000 years. It would tantamount to admitting that the Pandavas and/or the Kauravas were the “invaders” or “outsiders” — the Aryans who displaced the then flourishing Indus Valley civilization and pushed it south to become the Dravidian culture. This aspect has assumed political overtones and, hence, the denials and silence over it.
Here’s what happened. There was an Indus Valley civilization which belonged to the Vedic culture. The Aryans, the horse-chariot people, displaced and pushed it south. The horse-people with no culture of their own adapted the Vedic culture and the Vedic Indus Valley civilization had a second innings.
Both the epics, Ramayan and Mahabharat, talk of battles involving horses and chariots. There is no evidence of any horse in present-day India and Pakistan till 2000-1800 BC. The horse came carrying the invaders from the northern latitudes. Next, take a globe. Put your thumb at the point where the 55 degrees east longitude and 55 degrees north latitude intersect. This will be just south of the Urals, above the mid-point between the Caspian and Aral Seas, north of Kazakhstan. With your thumb as the fulcrum and your little finger on Gujarat, draw an arc. It will end in Spain. This entire swathe of land shares the Indo-European group of languages. Of course, there are exceptions — Arabic, Basque, Turkish, etc.
But the most startling exception lies in the Kalat region of Baluchistan, Pakistan, and its border with Afghanistan. Nestled there today are more than two million people who speak Brahui, a Dravidian group language! But they did not “get” there. They were already there and became the typical “pocket” when invasions swept the majority away. That’s why Tamil is the oldest of all present Indian languages and Tamilians were perhaps the first Sindhis! After all they drank jhalam (Tamil for water) from the river that has this name. Will someone explain this paradox — if the Indus Valley civilization is the oldest in India, how is Tamil the oldest language? Unless the Dravidian civilization predates the Indus Valley.
Look below the 55E-55N point and at the routes by which you can reach the extremities of your arc. Every point can be reached by continuing along rivers or shores of lakes, i.e., the invasion-cum-migration had the most important resource necessary to travel such vast distances — water. The most famous rivers in Central Asia are the Syr Darya and Amu Darya! The “oldest” DNA found in an Indian was in Tamil Nadu, near Madurai. How about a DNA survey of those in north/north-west India, the present inhabitants of the steppes and those living between 25 degrees and 45 degrees north latitudes in West Asia and Europe?
The biggest give-away is the “18-day” war. Military historians will tell you man’s ability to sustain a battle proper (sieges are not battles) for more than a day came only when railways made logistics feasible. Waterloo (AD 1815), probably the last big battle before railways, took just one day. The “day” in the Kurukshetra battle is evidently metaphorical. For, it was oral history. It was more likely to have been 18 months or even 18 years — just the time needed for a migration-cum-invasion to displace a culture and a civilization 3,500 years ago.
If the Mahabharat involved the horse-people, then what about the more antiquated Ramayan, which talks not only of horses, but also the famed Asvamedha yagna? Was Ram a Cossack, the most famed of all horse-people? Doesn’t “Valmiki” sound Russian, perhaps a corruption of Vladmikhailovich, who lived in the present Russian town named Sverdlovsk, formerly perhaps Swargalok? If we don’t accept the invasion theory, then the only other explanation is that both Mahabharat and Ramayan took place outside India, on the Russian steppes, and their stories have come down to us as oral histories through the horse-people, which were then refined to suit cultural and later ethnic, social and political agendas.
T.R. Ramaswami is a former commercial and investment banker. Comments are welcome at otherviews@livemint.com
http://www.livemint.com/2008/05/22235723/A-battle-about-history.html
Fwd the article of Ramaswami in Livemint (22 May 2008). Prehistory of Bharatam and the grand narrative of the peopling of Hindusthana, will continue to be a free-for-all until a clear framework of analysis is worked out after two great desiccations caused by primeval events: supereruption of Mt. Toba (ca. 74k yrs. ago) and desiccation of River Sarasvati (ca. 1900 BCE) controlled by the ongoing plate tectonics and dynamic Himalayas. Gangavatarana – evolutionary history of River Ganga and River Brahmaputra -- also has to be studied afresh. Why doesn’t the author talk of the earlier dasaraajna battle?
See the contra article at http://indiapost.com/article/communitypost/2090/
kalyan
Posted: Thu, May 22 2008. 11:57 PM IST (Livemint.com)
A battle about history
History reveals that around 2000-1800 BC, all along the Euro-Asian west-east axis, a horde of invaders, from above the 50N latitudes called the horse-people, pushed down
T.R. Ramaswami
When exactly did India’s most famous battle — Kurukshetra — take place? My search uncovered some intriguing details. Historians disagree on the date. It ranges from around 3200 BC to 700 BC — a period of 2,500 years! Curiously, historians unanimously agree that Kurukshetra did not take place between 2500 BC and 1500 BC. This is the period when the Indus Valley civilization “collapsed”.
History reveals that around 2000-1800 BC, all along the Euro-Asian west-east axis, a horde of invaders, from above the 50N latitudes called the horse-people, pushed down. Every civilization — China, India, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Greece — was overcome as they had the most powerful weapon known then — the horse chariot. Who were the invaders and who were the displaced?
Think why no one wants to place the Kurukshetra battle in that gap of 1,000 years. It would tantamount to admitting that the Pandavas and/or the Kauravas were the “invaders” or “outsiders” — the Aryans who displaced the then flourishing Indus Valley civilization and pushed it south to become the Dravidian culture. This aspect has assumed political overtones and, hence, the denials and silence over it.
Here’s what happened. There was an Indus Valley civilization which belonged to the Vedic culture. The Aryans, the horse-chariot people, displaced and pushed it south. The horse-people with no culture of their own adapted the Vedic culture and the Vedic Indus Valley civilization had a second innings.
Both the epics, Ramayan and Mahabharat, talk of battles involving horses and chariots. There is no evidence of any horse in present-day India and Pakistan till 2000-1800 BC. The horse came carrying the invaders from the northern latitudes. Next, take a globe. Put your thumb at the point where the 55 degrees east longitude and 55 degrees north latitude intersect. This will be just south of the Urals, above the mid-point between the Caspian and Aral Seas, north of Kazakhstan. With your thumb as the fulcrum and your little finger on Gujarat, draw an arc. It will end in Spain. This entire swathe of land shares the Indo-European group of languages. Of course, there are exceptions — Arabic, Basque, Turkish, etc.
But the most startling exception lies in the Kalat region of Baluchistan, Pakistan, and its border with Afghanistan. Nestled there today are more than two million people who speak Brahui, a Dravidian group language! But they did not “get” there. They were already there and became the typical “pocket” when invasions swept the majority away. That’s why Tamil is the oldest of all present Indian languages and Tamilians were perhaps the first Sindhis! After all they drank jhalam (Tamil for water) from the river that has this name. Will someone explain this paradox — if the Indus Valley civilization is the oldest in India, how is Tamil the oldest language? Unless the Dravidian civilization predates the Indus Valley.
Look below the 55E-55N point and at the routes by which you can reach the extremities of your arc. Every point can be reached by continuing along rivers or shores of lakes, i.e., the invasion-cum-migration had the most important resource necessary to travel such vast distances — water. The most famous rivers in Central Asia are the Syr Darya and Amu Darya! The “oldest” DNA found in an Indian was in Tamil Nadu, near Madurai. How about a DNA survey of those in north/north-west India, the present inhabitants of the steppes and those living between 25 degrees and 45 degrees north latitudes in West Asia and Europe?
The biggest give-away is the “18-day” war. Military historians will tell you man’s ability to sustain a battle proper (sieges are not battles) for more than a day came only when railways made logistics feasible. Waterloo (AD 1815), probably the last big battle before railways, took just one day. The “day” in the Kurukshetra battle is evidently metaphorical. For, it was oral history. It was more likely to have been 18 months or even 18 years — just the time needed for a migration-cum-invasion to displace a culture and a civilization 3,500 years ago.
If the Mahabharat involved the horse-people, then what about the more antiquated Ramayan, which talks not only of horses, but also the famed Asvamedha yagna? Was Ram a Cossack, the most famed of all horse-people? Doesn’t “Valmiki” sound Russian, perhaps a corruption of Vladmikhailovich, who lived in the present Russian town named Sverdlovsk, formerly perhaps Swargalok? If we don’t accept the invasion theory, then the only other explanation is that both Mahabharat and Ramayan took place outside India, on the Russian steppes, and their stories have come down to us as oral histories through the horse-people, which were then refined to suit cultural and later ethnic, social and political agendas.
T.R. Ramaswami is a former commercial and investment banker. Comments are welcome at otherviews@livemint.com
http://www.livemint.com/2008/05/22235723/A-battle-about-history.html
Madarasa student cracks civils -- thanks to an RSS Centre.
NEW DELHI, MAY 18: It's easy to miss Samkalp Bhavan in Paharganj's Aram Bagh, on a narrow street dotted with small buildings. The white plaque announcing its existence is inconspicuous.
UPSC Delhi
But residents say the Bhavan, run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is always buzzing with activity, especially during that time of the year when young Civil Services aspirants, having cleared the two stages of the examinations conducted by the Union Public Service Commission, throng here for mock interviews and later for orientation camps.
"We serve free food to students while they train here for the interviews. Even the fees are nominal. It's a social service initiative to help students from disadvantaged sections," Anand Kumar, coordinator, Samkalp, says.
For the exams in 2007, as many as 825 out of 1,875 examinees called for the final interviews enrolled at Samkalp for mock viva voce classes. On Friday, when the final results came out, 295 of them students had made it to the Civil Services.
Besides mock interview sessions, Samkalp, set up in 1986, also offers coaching for the Civil Services Mains examination for a paltry sum of Rs 5,000 in its RK Puram branch and hostel facilities for the aspirants in its three hostels spread across Delhi. For the interviews, it charges a nominal fee of Rs 500.
"It is indeed the hub for IAS aspirants who are preparing for final interviews. The fees are minimal and the guidance is imparted through seasoned bureaucrats and academicians," explains Ranjan Kumar Singh, an ABVP activist and Samkalp student who ranked 257 on this year's UPSC list.
The enrolment figures at Samkalp, set up in 1986, have over the years translated into an impressive success rate for the non-governmental organization, which has Santosh Taneja, working committee member of the RSS as one of its founding members. According to the Samkalp website (www.samkalp.com), about 895 students, associated with Samkalp, succeeded in Civil Services examinations up to 2006.
Says AR Kohli, former Mizoram governor and BJP leader, who is actively associated with Samkalp as one of its mentors since the beginning: "Back in 1997 when we began coaching for the Civil Services, 84 of our students appeared for the final interviews and 59 made it."
The other mentors include columnist Narender Kohli, Dr Jagdish Shettygar, member of the BJP's economic cell and senior RSS leaders like Madan Das Devi and M G Vaidya.
Besides Delhi, Samkalp is also active in Mathura, Meerut, Kanpur, Kurukshetra, Bhiwani, Nainital, Gohana and Pathankot. Kohli insists Samkalp classes that include "nation building" as one of its most important goals are aimed at identifying and guiding students who can contribute towards social welfare through civil services and helping them inculcate true Indian values and ethos.
And, a decade later, with the efforts of Samkalp, the bureaucracy would change for the better, Kohli hopes. "Our students are going t take care of people. We teach them to be loyal to the nation and also work towards development of the society at large. We are open to everyone who needs help and guidance. And, we do not want any publicity for the work we are doing," he says.
Madrasa student cracks civils
Mateen Hafeez | TNN
Mumbai: At a time when eyebrows are being raised about education standards in madrasas, a maulana from the Darul-Uloom-Deoband in Uttar Pradesh has passed the country's most elite examination, the civil services exam, in his fourth attempt. For his interview, the maulana took training from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-run institute Samkalp at Paharganj in New Delhi.
Maulana Waseem-ur-Rehman, 31, is the first student from a madrasa to clear the civil services exams. Rehman comes from a poor family in Siddharth Nagar, Basti, UP. He stood 404th among 734 successful candidates. Rehman, who took history and Persian as optional subjects, wrote the exam in Urdu. He told TOI that he worked for four years. "In three earlier attempts, I failed in the prelims. As this was my last chance, I worked harder," he said.
Rehman completed five years of schooling in a madrasa, Ahyaul Uloom, before joining Darul-Uloom-Deoband. He did a threeyear course in Islamic studies, Hadith, the Quran and Shariat laws.
"Our Deoband certificate is equivalent to graduation and I joined a bachelor degree in unani medicine and surgery, at Jamia Hamdard, Aligarh. I realised that students from madrasas don't consider joining the civil services and becoming part of the system. I discussed this with my friends and teachers and started studying," said Rehman. He later took up and passed master of surgery, MD.
He did not know there was a syllabus for the civil service exam. "I had to collect books and notes from several places and would study at night and early morning as I had to attend MD classes during the day."
Was studying for the civil services exam difficult, since he came from a different academic background? "Yes, but madrasa education has given me the power to think and I have good knowledge of philosphy since it was explained properly in the madrasa," he said.
About his experience at the RSS-run Samkalp, Rehman said, "I did not feel any bias. They are doing a good job," he said.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Puranas -- the source of ancient Indian history : V. Sundaram
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3104917/puranas
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Whitewashing of Indian History -- 3 washes: Nithin Sridhar
The Whitewashing of Indian History, by Nithin Sridhar (May 1, 2008)
The history of India has been whitewashed and distorted, first by European rulers, and after independence by eminent historians of India and their supporters the Leftists, Seculars and self-claimed Progressives of India to meet their own ends. They have painted the pre-Islamic invasion period as a Dark Age and have glorified the Islamic period to be very peaceful and prosperous.
Ram Swarup says, “Marxists have taken to rewriting Indian history on a large scale and it has meant its systematic falsification. They have a dogmatic view of history and for them the use of any history is to prove their dogma. Their very approach is hurtful to truth…. The Marxists’ contempt for India, particularly the India of religion, culture and philosophy, is deep and theoretically fortified. It exceeds the contempt ever shown by the most die-hard imperialists.”1 Some of the common claims of these eminent historians are:
1] The Aryan Invasion Theory is true2
2] Large scale destruction of Buddhists and Jain temples was done by Hindus in pre-Islamic India.3
3] The Muslim rulers were religiously tolerant and Islamic rule was prosperous. The eminent historians deny the destruction of Hindu temples or the killing of Hindus at the hands of Muslim rulers. They also deny the religious motive behind the killing of Hindus at the hands of Muslim rulers.4
Let us examine the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT).
The AIT was introduced to justify the presence of the British among their Aryan cousins in India as being merely the second wave of Aryan settlement there. It supported the British view of India as merely a geographical region without historical unity, a legitimate prey for any invader capable of imposing himself. It provided the master illustration to the rising racialist worldview: “The dynamic whites entered the land of the indolent dark natives and established their dominance and imparted their language to the natives; they established the caste system to preserve their racial separateness; some miscegenation with the natives took place anyway, making the Indian Aryans darker than their European cousins and correspondingly less intelligent; hence, for their own benefit they were susceptible to an uplifting intervention by a new wave of purer Aryan colonizers.”5
Dr. Koenraad Elst, in “The Vedic Evidence,”6 after examining the Vedic corpus for any evidence of Aryan invasion theory proposed by the Marxist school, concludes, “The status question is still, more than ever, that the Vedic corpus provides no reference to an immigration of the so-called Vedic Aryans from Central Asia….” He further provides astronomical and literary evidence against the AIT in his other essays.
Jim Shaffer in “The Indo-Aryan Invasions: Cultural Myth and Archaeological Reality,” wrote, “Current archaeological data do not support the existence of an Indo-Aryan or European invasion into South Asia any time in the pre- or protohistoric periods. Instead, it is possible to document archaeologically a series of cultural changes reflecting indigenous cultural developments from prehistoric to historic periods…”7 Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, a U.S. expert who has extensively studied such skeletal remains, observes, “Biological anthropologists remain unable to lend support to any of the theories concerning an Aryan biological or demographic entity.”8
David Frawley, while commenting on the political and social ramifications, asserts, “First it served to divide India into a northern Aryan and southern Dravidian culture which were made hostile to each other… Second, it gave the British an excuse for their conquest of India. They could claim to be doing only what the Aryan ancestors of the Hindus had previously done millennia ago. This same justification could be used by the Muslims or any other invaders of India. Third, it served to make Vedic culture later than and possibly derived from the Middle Eastern… Fourth, it allowed the sciences of India to be given a Greek basis… Fifth, it gave the Marxists a good basis for projecting their class struggle model of society on to India, with the invading Brahmins oppressing the indigenous Shudras (lower castes).” He further concludes, “In short, the compelling reasons for the Aryan invasion theory were neither literary nor archeological but political and religious, that is to say, not scholarship but prejudice.”9
Archaeological evidence in no way contradicts Indian tradition, rather it broadly agrees with it (except for its chronology). Whether from North or South India, tradition never mentioned anything remotely resembling an Aryan invasion into India. Sanskrit scriptures make it clear that they regard the Vedic homeland to be the Saptasindhu, which is precisely the core of the Harappan territory. As for the Sangam tradition, it is equally silent about any northern origin of the Tamil people. These show that AIT which Marxists have been propagating is based on assumptions and pre-conceived notion, rather than hard evidences.
About the alleged destruction of Buddhist and Jain temples by Hindus, Sita Ram Goel observes,10 “It is intriguing indeed that whenever archaeological evidence points towards a mosque as standing on the site of a Hindu temple, our Marxist professors start seeing a Buddhist monastery buried underneath. They also invent some Saiva king as destroying Buddhist and Jain shrines whenever the large-scale destruction of Hindu temples by Islamic invaders is mentioned. They never mention the destruction of big Buddhist and Jain complexes which dotted the length and breadth of India, Khurasan, and Sinkiang on the eve of the Islamic invasion, as testified by Hüen Tsang.” He asks the historians to produce epigraphic and literary evidences to suggest the destruction of Buddhists and Jain places by Hindus, the names and places of Hindu monuments which stand on the sites occupied earlier by Buddhist or Jain monuments. Yet, till today no concrete evidence has been given by historians to substantiate their claim.
But, there is enough evidence to show that Buddhist and Jain temples and monasteries at Bukhara, Samarqand, Khotan, Balkh, Bamian, Kabul, Ghazni, Qandhar, Begram, Jalalabad, Peshawar, Charsadda, Ohind, Taxila, Multan, Mirpurkhas, Nagar-Parkar, Sialkot, Srinagar, Jalandhar, Jagadhari, Sugh, Tobra, Agroha, Delhi, Mathura, Hastinapur, Kanauj, Sravasti, Ayodhya, Varanasi, Sarnath, Nalanda, Vikramasila, Vaishali, Rajgir, Odantapuri, Bharhut, Champa, Paharpur, Jagaddal, Jajnagar, Nagarjunikonda, Amravati, Kanchi, Dwarasamudra, Devagiri, Bharuch, Valabhi, Girnar, Khambhat Patan, Jalor, Chandravati, Bhinmal, Didwana, Nagaur, Osian, Ajmer, Bairat, Gwalior, Chanderi, Mandu, Dhar etc were destroyed by the sword of Islam.11
It should be noted that though Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jain sects and sub-sects had heated discussions among themselves, and used even strong language for their adversaries, the occasions when they exchanged physical blows were few and far between. The recent spurt of accusations that Hindus were bigots and vandals like Christians and Muslims seems to be an after-thought. Apologists, who find it impossible to whitewash Christianity and Islam, are out to redress the balance by blackening Hinduism.
The Islamic conquest has been described as the “Bloodiest,”12 “monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations, and destructions,”13 as well as “bigger than the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese.”14
Irfan Husain in his article “Demons from the Past” observes, “While historical events should be judged in the context of their times, it cannot be denied that even in that bloody period of history, no mercy was shown to the Hindus unfortunate enough to be in the path of either the Arab conquerors of Sindh and south Punjab, or the Central Asians who swept in from Afghanistan…The Muslim heroes who figure larger than life in our history books committed some dreadful crimes. Mahmud of Ghazni, Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, Balban, Mohammed bin Qasim, and Sultan Mohammad Tughlak, all have blood-stained hands that the passage of years has not cleansed..Seen through Hindu eyes, the Muslim invasion of their homeland was an unmitigated disaster. Their temples were razed, their idols smashed, their women raped, their men killed or taken slaves. When Mahmud of Ghazni entered Somnath on one of his annual raids, he slaughtered all 50,000 inhabitants. Aibak killed and enslaved hundreds of thousands. The list of horrors is long and painful. These conquerors justified their deeds by claiming it was their religious duty to smite non-believers. Cloaking themselves in the banner of Islam, they claimed they were fighting for their faith when, in reality, they were indulging in straightforward slaughter and pillage…”
Dr. Koenraad Elst, while summarizing the Hindu losses at the hands of Muslim invaders, concludes,15 “There is no official estimate of the total death toll of Hindus at the hands of Islam. A first glance at important testimonies by Muslim chroniclers suggests that over 13 centuries and a territory as vast as the Subcontinent, Muslim Holy Warriors easily killed more Hindus than the 6 million of the Holocaust. Ferishtha lists several occasions when the Bahmani sultans in central India (1347-1528) killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which they set as a minimum goal whenever they felt like “punishing” the Hindus; and they were only a third-rank provincial dynasty. The biggest slaughters took place during the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (ca. 1000 CE); during the actual conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192 ff.); and under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). The Moghuls (1526-1857), even Babar and Aurangzeb, were fairly restrained tyrants by comparison. Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the Indian population declined by 50 million under the Sultanate, but that would be hard to substantiate; research into the magnitude of the damage Islam did to India is yet to start in right earnest.”
From Mohamud Quasim to Tipu Sultan, every Mohammedan invader killed, converted, took as slave or put Jiziya on Hindus. Entire cities were burnt down and the populations massacred, with hundreds of thousands killed in every campaign, and similar numbers deported as slaves. While describing the conquest of Kanauj, Utbi, the secretary and chronicler of Mahmud Gahzni, sums up the situation thus: “The Sultan[Ghazni] levelled to the ground every fort, and the inhabitants of them either accepted Islam, or took up arms against him. In short, those who submitted were also converted to Islam. In Baran (Bulandshahr) alone 10,000 persons were converted including the Raja”. The conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still called the Hindu Kush, i.e. Hindu slaughter. The Bahmani sultans (1347-1480) in central India made it a rule to kill 100,000 captives in a single day, and many more on other occasions. The conquest of the Vijayanagar empire in 1564 left the capital plus large areas of Karnataka depopulated.
About the conversion of Hindus to Islam, K.S.Lal observes, “The process of their conversion was hurried. All of a sudden the invader appeared in a city or a region, and in the midst of loot and murder, a dazed, shocked and enslaved people were given the choice between Islam and death. Those who were converted were deprived of their scalp-lock or choti and, if they happened to be caste people, also their sacred thread. Some were also circumcised. Their names were changed, although some might have retained their old names with new affixes. They were taught to recite the kalima and learnt to say the prescribed prayers”.16
When Mahmud Ghaznavi attacked Waihind in 1001-02, he took 500,000 persons of both sexes as captive [This figure is given by Abu Nasr Muhammad Utbi, the secretary and chronicler of Mahmud Gahzni]. Next year from Thanesar, according to Farishtah, the Muhammadan army brought to Ghaznin 200,000 captives [Tarikh-i-Farishtah, I, 28]. When Mahmud returned to Ghazni in 1019, the booty was found to consist of (besides huge wealth) 53,000 captives. The Tarikh-i-Alfi adds that the fifth share due to the Saiyyads was 150,000 slaves, therefore the total number of captives comes to 750,000. In 1195, when Raja Bhim was attacked by Aibak, 20,000 slaves were captured, and 50,000 at Kalinjar in 1202. Sultan Alauddin Khalji had 50,000 slave boys in his personal service and 70,000 slaves who worked continuously on his buildings. In the words of Wassaf, the Muslim army in the sack of Somnath took captive a great number of handsome and elegant maidens, amounting to 20,000, and children of both sexes. Iltutmish, Muhammad Tughlaq and Firoz Tughlaq sent gifts of slaves to Khalifas outside India. To the Chinese emperor Muhammad Tughlaq sent, besides other presents, 100 Hindu slaves, 100 slave girls, accomplished in song and dance and another 15 young slaves. Firoz Tughlaq collected 180,000 slaves.17
About the destruction of Hindu Temples, Sita Ram Goel writes -“Mahmûd of Ghazni robbed and burnt down 1,000 temples at Mathura, and 10,000 in and around Kanauj. One of his successors, Ibrãhîm, demolished 1,000 temples each in Ganga-Yamuna Doab and Malwa. Muhammad Ghûrî destroyed another 1,000 at Varanasi. Qutbu’d-Dîn Aibak employed elephants for pulling down 1,000 temples in Delhi. “Alî I ‘Ãdil Shãh of Bijapur destroyed 200 to 300 temples in Karnataka. A sufi, Qãyim Shãh, destroyed 12 temples at Tiruchirapalli. Such exact or approximate counts, however, are available only in a few cases. Most of the time we are informed that “many strong temples which would have remained unshaken even by the trumpets blown on the Day of Judgment, were levelled with the ground when swept by the wind of Islãm”.18
Some of the Temples converted into Mosques are:19
Epigraphic evidences:
1. Quwwat al-Islam Masjid, Qutb Minar, Delhi by Qutbud-Din Aibak in 1192 A.D.
2. Masjid at Manvi in the Raichur District of Karnataka, Firuz Shah Bahmani, 1406-07 A.D
3. Jami Masjid at Malan, Palanpur Taluka, Banaskantha District of Gujarat: ?The Jami Masjid was built? by Khan-I-Azam Ulugh Khan, The date of construction is mentioned as 1462 A.D. in the reign of Mahmud Shah I (Begada) of Gujarat.
4. Hammam Darwaza Masjid at Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh, Its chronogram yields the year 1567 A.D. in the reign of Akbar, the Great Mughal
5. Jami Masjid at Ghoda in the Poona District of Maharashtra, The inscription is dated 1586 A.D. when the Poona region was ruled by the Nizam Shahi sultans of Ahmadnagar
6. Gachinala Masjid at Cumbum in the Kurnool District of Andhra Pradesh, The date of construction is mentioned as 1729-30 A.D. in the reign of the Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah.
Literary evidences:
7. Jhain[name of the place], Jalalud-Din Firuz Khalji went to the place and ordered destruction of temples, mentioned in Miftah-ul-Futuh.
8. Devagiri, Alaud-Din Khalji destroyed the temples of the idolaters, mentioned in Miftah-ul-Futuh.
9. Somanath, Ulugh Khan, mentioned in Tarikh-i-Alai
10. Delhi, , Alaud-Din Khalji , Tarikh-i-Alai
11. Ranthambhor, mentioned in Tarikh-i-Alai
12. Brahmastpuri (Chidambaram), Malik Kafur, Tarikh-i-Alai
13. Madura, mentioned in Tarikh-i-Alai
14. Fatan: (Pattan), mentioned in Ashiqa
15. Malabar: (Parts of South India), Tarikh-i-Alai
16 The Mosque at Jaunpur. This was built by Sultan Ibrahim Sharqi
17 The Mosque at Qanauj it was built by Ibrahim Sharqi
18 Jami (Masjid) at Etawah. it is one of the monuments of the Sharqi Sultans
19 Babri Masjid at Ayodhya . This mosque was constructed by Babar at Ayodhya
20 Mosques of Alamgir (Aurangzeb)
According to the reports of Archeological survey of India:
21 Tordi (Rajasthan)- early or middle part of the 15th century
22 Naraina (Rajasthan)- The mosque appears to have been built when Mujahid Khan, son of Shams Khan, took possession of Naraina in 1436 A.D
23 Chatsu (Rajasthan)- At Chatsu there is a Muhammadan tomb erected on the eastern embankment of the Golerava tank. The tomb which is known as Gurg Ali Shah’s chhatri is built out of the spoils of Hindu buildings. The inscription mention saint Gurg Ali (wolf of Ali) died a martyr on the first of Ramzan in 979 A.H. corresponding to Thursday, the 17th January, 1572 A.D.
24 SaheTh-MaheTh (Uttar Pradesh)
25 Sarnath (Uttar Pradesh)- the inscriptions found there extending to the twelfth century A.D
26 Vaishali (Bihar)
27 Gaur and Pandua (Bengal)- The oldest and the best known building at Gaur and Pandua is the Ãdîna Masjid at Pandua built by Sikandar Shãh, the son of Ilyãs Shãh. The date of its inscription may be read as either 776 or 770, which corresponds with 1374 or 1369 A.D? The materials employed consisted largely of the spoils of Hindu temples and many of the carvings from the temples have been used as facings of doors, arches and pillars
28 Devikot (Bengal)- The Dargah of Sultan Pir, The Dargah of Shah Ata are the Muhammadan shrines built on the site of an old Hindu temple
29 Tribeni (Bengal)
This whitewashing of history, the policy of “Suppresio Veri, Suggestio Falsi” followed by ‘eminent historians’ of India is not only dangerous to national integration but also the future of the entire nation. It is time that the self interests are kept aside and the facts of history is made known to the masses.
Footnotes:
1 Indian Express, January 15, 1989, quoted in book “Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Vol. 1” by Sita Ram Goel
2 For example, JNU historian Romilla Thapar.[Article titled “Romila Thapar Defends the Aryan Invasion Theory!” by Vishal Agarwal published here- http://www.india-forum.com/articles/60/1 ]
3 In letter published in The Times of India dated October 2, 1986, Romilla Thapar had stated that handing over of Sri Rama’s and Sri Krishna’s birthplaces to the Hindus, and of disused mosques to the Muslims raises the question of the limits to the logic of restoration of religious sites. How far back do we go? Can we push this to the restoration of Buddhist and Jain monuments destroyed by Hindus? Or of the pre-Hindu animist shrines? [ Quoted in book- Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Vol. 2 The Islamic Evidence by Sita Ram Goel]
4 In his book Medival India [NCERT 2000], Satish Chandra writes- “The raid into India (by Timur) was a plundering raid, and its motive was to seize the wealth accumulated by the sultans of Delhi over the last 200 years… Timur then entered Delhi and sacked it without mercy, large number of people, both Hindu and Muslim, as well as women and children losing their lives.”, but Timur repeatedly states in his memoirs, the Tuzuk-i-Timuri, that he had a two-fold objective in invading Hindustan. “The first was to war with the infidels,” and thereby acquire, “some claim to reward in the life to come.” The second motive was “that the army of Islam might gain something by plundering the wealth and valuables of the infidels.” He further says “Excepting the quarter of the saiyids, the ulema and other Musulmans, the whole city was sacked.”
5 Koenraad Elst, in “The Politics of the Aryan Invasion Debate”
6 “The Vedic Evidence - The Vedic Corpus Provides no Evidence for the so-called Aryan Invasion of India” by Koenraad Elst
7 Jim G. Shaffer, “The Indo-Aryan Invasions : Cultural Myth and Archaeological Reality,” in Michel Danino “The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization and its Bearing on the Aryan Question”
8 Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, “Have Aryans been identified in the prehistoric skeletal record from
South Asia ?” in Michel Danino “The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization and its Bearing on the Aryan Question”
9 David Frawley, in “Myth of Aryan Invasion Theory of India”
10 Sita ram Goel, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Vol. 2-the Islamic Evidence
11 Sita ram Goel, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Vol. 2 -the Islamic Evidence
12 Will Durant in “Story of Civilization” observes- “The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”
13 “Histoire de l’ Inde” - By Alain Danielou; he notes- “”From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations, and destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of ‘a holy war’ of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire races.” Mahmoud Ghazni, continues Danielou, “was an early example of Muslim ruthlessness, burning in 1018 of the temples of Mathura, razing Kanauj to the ground and destroying the famous temple of Somnath, sacred to all Hindus. His successors were as ruthless as Ghazni: 103 temples in the holy city of Benaras were razed to the ground, its marvelous temples destroyed, its magnificent palaces wrecked.” Indeed, the Muslim policy vis a vis India, concludes Danielou, seems to have been a conscious systematic destruction of everything that was beautiful, holy, refined.”
14 Francois Gautier
15 Dr. Koenraad Elst in “Was There an Islamic “Genocide” of Hindus?”
16 K.S. Lal in “Indian Muslims Who Are They”
17 K.S. Lal in “Muslim Slave System in Medieval India”
18 Sita Ram Goel, in “Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Vol. 2 The Islamic Evidence”
19 It is taken from the large list of places documented by Sita Ram Goel in his magnum Opus “Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Vol. 1- The Preliminary Survey”
The author of this article, Nithin Sridhar, is studying civil engineering in Mysore, India. You can contact him at nkgrock@yahoo.co.in.
http://www.hinduyuva.org/tattva-blog/2008/05/the-whitewashing-of-history-by-nithin-sridhar/
The history of India has been whitewashed and distorted, first by European rulers, and after independence by eminent historians of India and their supporters the Leftists, Seculars and self-claimed Progressives of India to meet their own ends. They have painted the pre-Islamic invasion period as a Dark Age and have glorified the Islamic period to be very peaceful and prosperous.
Ram Swarup says, “Marxists have taken to rewriting Indian history on a large scale and it has meant its systematic falsification. They have a dogmatic view of history and for them the use of any history is to prove their dogma. Their very approach is hurtful to truth…. The Marxists’ contempt for India, particularly the India of religion, culture and philosophy, is deep and theoretically fortified. It exceeds the contempt ever shown by the most die-hard imperialists.”1 Some of the common claims of these eminent historians are:
1] The Aryan Invasion Theory is true2
2] Large scale destruction of Buddhists and Jain temples was done by Hindus in pre-Islamic India.3
3] The Muslim rulers were religiously tolerant and Islamic rule was prosperous. The eminent historians deny the destruction of Hindu temples or the killing of Hindus at the hands of Muslim rulers. They also deny the religious motive behind the killing of Hindus at the hands of Muslim rulers.4
Let us examine the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT).
The AIT was introduced to justify the presence of the British among their Aryan cousins in India as being merely the second wave of Aryan settlement there. It supported the British view of India as merely a geographical region without historical unity, a legitimate prey for any invader capable of imposing himself. It provided the master illustration to the rising racialist worldview: “The dynamic whites entered the land of the indolent dark natives and established their dominance and imparted their language to the natives; they established the caste system to preserve their racial separateness; some miscegenation with the natives took place anyway, making the Indian Aryans darker than their European cousins and correspondingly less intelligent; hence, for their own benefit they were susceptible to an uplifting intervention by a new wave of purer Aryan colonizers.”5
Dr. Koenraad Elst, in “The Vedic Evidence,”6 after examining the Vedic corpus for any evidence of Aryan invasion theory proposed by the Marxist school, concludes, “The status question is still, more than ever, that the Vedic corpus provides no reference to an immigration of the so-called Vedic Aryans from Central Asia….” He further provides astronomical and literary evidence against the AIT in his other essays.
Jim Shaffer in “The Indo-Aryan Invasions: Cultural Myth and Archaeological Reality,” wrote, “Current archaeological data do not support the existence of an Indo-Aryan or European invasion into South Asia any time in the pre- or protohistoric periods. Instead, it is possible to document archaeologically a series of cultural changes reflecting indigenous cultural developments from prehistoric to historic periods…”7 Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, a U.S. expert who has extensively studied such skeletal remains, observes, “Biological anthropologists remain unable to lend support to any of the theories concerning an Aryan biological or demographic entity.”8
David Frawley, while commenting on the political and social ramifications, asserts, “First it served to divide India into a northern Aryan and southern Dravidian culture which were made hostile to each other… Second, it gave the British an excuse for their conquest of India. They could claim to be doing only what the Aryan ancestors of the Hindus had previously done millennia ago. This same justification could be used by the Muslims or any other invaders of India. Third, it served to make Vedic culture later than and possibly derived from the Middle Eastern… Fourth, it allowed the sciences of India to be given a Greek basis… Fifth, it gave the Marxists a good basis for projecting their class struggle model of society on to India, with the invading Brahmins oppressing the indigenous Shudras (lower castes).” He further concludes, “In short, the compelling reasons for the Aryan invasion theory were neither literary nor archeological but political and religious, that is to say, not scholarship but prejudice.”9
Archaeological evidence in no way contradicts Indian tradition, rather it broadly agrees with it (except for its chronology). Whether from North or South India, tradition never mentioned anything remotely resembling an Aryan invasion into India. Sanskrit scriptures make it clear that they regard the Vedic homeland to be the Saptasindhu, which is precisely the core of the Harappan territory. As for the Sangam tradition, it is equally silent about any northern origin of the Tamil people. These show that AIT which Marxists have been propagating is based on assumptions and pre-conceived notion, rather than hard evidences.
About the alleged destruction of Buddhist and Jain temples by Hindus, Sita Ram Goel observes,10 “It is intriguing indeed that whenever archaeological evidence points towards a mosque as standing on the site of a Hindu temple, our Marxist professors start seeing a Buddhist monastery buried underneath. They also invent some Saiva king as destroying Buddhist and Jain shrines whenever the large-scale destruction of Hindu temples by Islamic invaders is mentioned. They never mention the destruction of big Buddhist and Jain complexes which dotted the length and breadth of India, Khurasan, and Sinkiang on the eve of the Islamic invasion, as testified by Hüen Tsang.” He asks the historians to produce epigraphic and literary evidences to suggest the destruction of Buddhists and Jain places by Hindus, the names and places of Hindu monuments which stand on the sites occupied earlier by Buddhist or Jain monuments. Yet, till today no concrete evidence has been given by historians to substantiate their claim.
But, there is enough evidence to show that Buddhist and Jain temples and monasteries at Bukhara, Samarqand, Khotan, Balkh, Bamian, Kabul, Ghazni, Qandhar, Begram, Jalalabad, Peshawar, Charsadda, Ohind, Taxila, Multan, Mirpurkhas, Nagar-Parkar, Sialkot, Srinagar, Jalandhar, Jagadhari, Sugh, Tobra, Agroha, Delhi, Mathura, Hastinapur, Kanauj, Sravasti, Ayodhya, Varanasi, Sarnath, Nalanda, Vikramasila, Vaishali, Rajgir, Odantapuri, Bharhut, Champa, Paharpur, Jagaddal, Jajnagar, Nagarjunikonda, Amravati, Kanchi, Dwarasamudra, Devagiri, Bharuch, Valabhi, Girnar, Khambhat Patan, Jalor, Chandravati, Bhinmal, Didwana, Nagaur, Osian, Ajmer, Bairat, Gwalior, Chanderi, Mandu, Dhar etc were destroyed by the sword of Islam.11
It should be noted that though Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jain sects and sub-sects had heated discussions among themselves, and used even strong language for their adversaries, the occasions when they exchanged physical blows were few and far between. The recent spurt of accusations that Hindus were bigots and vandals like Christians and Muslims seems to be an after-thought. Apologists, who find it impossible to whitewash Christianity and Islam, are out to redress the balance by blackening Hinduism.
The Islamic conquest has been described as the “Bloodiest,”12 “monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations, and destructions,”13 as well as “bigger than the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese.”14
Irfan Husain in his article “Demons from the Past” observes, “While historical events should be judged in the context of their times, it cannot be denied that even in that bloody period of history, no mercy was shown to the Hindus unfortunate enough to be in the path of either the Arab conquerors of Sindh and south Punjab, or the Central Asians who swept in from Afghanistan…The Muslim heroes who figure larger than life in our history books committed some dreadful crimes. Mahmud of Ghazni, Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, Balban, Mohammed bin Qasim, and Sultan Mohammad Tughlak, all have blood-stained hands that the passage of years has not cleansed..Seen through Hindu eyes, the Muslim invasion of their homeland was an unmitigated disaster. Their temples were razed, their idols smashed, their women raped, their men killed or taken slaves. When Mahmud of Ghazni entered Somnath on one of his annual raids, he slaughtered all 50,000 inhabitants. Aibak killed and enslaved hundreds of thousands. The list of horrors is long and painful. These conquerors justified their deeds by claiming it was their religious duty to smite non-believers. Cloaking themselves in the banner of Islam, they claimed they were fighting for their faith when, in reality, they were indulging in straightforward slaughter and pillage…”
Dr. Koenraad Elst, while summarizing the Hindu losses at the hands of Muslim invaders, concludes,15 “There is no official estimate of the total death toll of Hindus at the hands of Islam. A first glance at important testimonies by Muslim chroniclers suggests that over 13 centuries and a territory as vast as the Subcontinent, Muslim Holy Warriors easily killed more Hindus than the 6 million of the Holocaust. Ferishtha lists several occasions when the Bahmani sultans in central India (1347-1528) killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which they set as a minimum goal whenever they felt like “punishing” the Hindus; and they were only a third-rank provincial dynasty. The biggest slaughters took place during the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (ca. 1000 CE); during the actual conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192 ff.); and under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). The Moghuls (1526-1857), even Babar and Aurangzeb, were fairly restrained tyrants by comparison. Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the Indian population declined by 50 million under the Sultanate, but that would be hard to substantiate; research into the magnitude of the damage Islam did to India is yet to start in right earnest.”
From Mohamud Quasim to Tipu Sultan, every Mohammedan invader killed, converted, took as slave or put Jiziya on Hindus. Entire cities were burnt down and the populations massacred, with hundreds of thousands killed in every campaign, and similar numbers deported as slaves. While describing the conquest of Kanauj, Utbi, the secretary and chronicler of Mahmud Gahzni, sums up the situation thus: “The Sultan[Ghazni] levelled to the ground every fort, and the inhabitants of them either accepted Islam, or took up arms against him. In short, those who submitted were also converted to Islam. In Baran (Bulandshahr) alone 10,000 persons were converted including the Raja”. The conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still called the Hindu Kush, i.e. Hindu slaughter. The Bahmani sultans (1347-1480) in central India made it a rule to kill 100,000 captives in a single day, and many more on other occasions. The conquest of the Vijayanagar empire in 1564 left the capital plus large areas of Karnataka depopulated.
About the conversion of Hindus to Islam, K.S.Lal observes, “The process of their conversion was hurried. All of a sudden the invader appeared in a city or a region, and in the midst of loot and murder, a dazed, shocked and enslaved people were given the choice between Islam and death. Those who were converted were deprived of their scalp-lock or choti and, if they happened to be caste people, also their sacred thread. Some were also circumcised. Their names were changed, although some might have retained their old names with new affixes. They were taught to recite the kalima and learnt to say the prescribed prayers”.16
When Mahmud Ghaznavi attacked Waihind in 1001-02, he took 500,000 persons of both sexes as captive [This figure is given by Abu Nasr Muhammad Utbi, the secretary and chronicler of Mahmud Gahzni]. Next year from Thanesar, according to Farishtah, the Muhammadan army brought to Ghaznin 200,000 captives [Tarikh-i-Farishtah, I, 28]. When Mahmud returned to Ghazni in 1019, the booty was found to consist of (besides huge wealth) 53,000 captives. The Tarikh-i-Alfi adds that the fifth share due to the Saiyyads was 150,000 slaves, therefore the total number of captives comes to 750,000. In 1195, when Raja Bhim was attacked by Aibak, 20,000 slaves were captured, and 50,000 at Kalinjar in 1202. Sultan Alauddin Khalji had 50,000 slave boys in his personal service and 70,000 slaves who worked continuously on his buildings. In the words of Wassaf, the Muslim army in the sack of Somnath took captive a great number of handsome and elegant maidens, amounting to 20,000, and children of both sexes. Iltutmish, Muhammad Tughlaq and Firoz Tughlaq sent gifts of slaves to Khalifas outside India. To the Chinese emperor Muhammad Tughlaq sent, besides other presents, 100 Hindu slaves, 100 slave girls, accomplished in song and dance and another 15 young slaves. Firoz Tughlaq collected 180,000 slaves.17
About the destruction of Hindu Temples, Sita Ram Goel writes -“Mahmûd of Ghazni robbed and burnt down 1,000 temples at Mathura, and 10,000 in and around Kanauj. One of his successors, Ibrãhîm, demolished 1,000 temples each in Ganga-Yamuna Doab and Malwa. Muhammad Ghûrî destroyed another 1,000 at Varanasi. Qutbu’d-Dîn Aibak employed elephants for pulling down 1,000 temples in Delhi. “Alî I ‘Ãdil Shãh of Bijapur destroyed 200 to 300 temples in Karnataka. A sufi, Qãyim Shãh, destroyed 12 temples at Tiruchirapalli. Such exact or approximate counts, however, are available only in a few cases. Most of the time we are informed that “many strong temples which would have remained unshaken even by the trumpets blown on the Day of Judgment, were levelled with the ground when swept by the wind of Islãm”.18
Some of the Temples converted into Mosques are:19
Epigraphic evidences:
1. Quwwat al-Islam Masjid, Qutb Minar, Delhi by Qutbud-Din Aibak in 1192 A.D.
2. Masjid at Manvi in the Raichur District of Karnataka, Firuz Shah Bahmani, 1406-07 A.D
3. Jami Masjid at Malan, Palanpur Taluka, Banaskantha District of Gujarat: ?The Jami Masjid was built? by Khan-I-Azam Ulugh Khan, The date of construction is mentioned as 1462 A.D. in the reign of Mahmud Shah I (Begada) of Gujarat.
4. Hammam Darwaza Masjid at Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh, Its chronogram yields the year 1567 A.D. in the reign of Akbar, the Great Mughal
5. Jami Masjid at Ghoda in the Poona District of Maharashtra, The inscription is dated 1586 A.D. when the Poona region was ruled by the Nizam Shahi sultans of Ahmadnagar
6. Gachinala Masjid at Cumbum in the Kurnool District of Andhra Pradesh, The date of construction is mentioned as 1729-30 A.D. in the reign of the Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah.
Literary evidences:
7. Jhain[name of the place], Jalalud-Din Firuz Khalji went to the place and ordered destruction of temples, mentioned in Miftah-ul-Futuh.
8. Devagiri, Alaud-Din Khalji destroyed the temples of the idolaters, mentioned in Miftah-ul-Futuh.
9. Somanath, Ulugh Khan, mentioned in Tarikh-i-Alai
10. Delhi, , Alaud-Din Khalji , Tarikh-i-Alai
11. Ranthambhor, mentioned in Tarikh-i-Alai
12. Brahmastpuri (Chidambaram), Malik Kafur, Tarikh-i-Alai
13. Madura, mentioned in Tarikh-i-Alai
14. Fatan: (Pattan), mentioned in Ashiqa
15. Malabar: (Parts of South India), Tarikh-i-Alai
16 The Mosque at Jaunpur. This was built by Sultan Ibrahim Sharqi
17 The Mosque at Qanauj it was built by Ibrahim Sharqi
18 Jami (Masjid) at Etawah. it is one of the monuments of the Sharqi Sultans
19 Babri Masjid at Ayodhya . This mosque was constructed by Babar at Ayodhya
20 Mosques of Alamgir (Aurangzeb)
According to the reports of Archeological survey of India:
21 Tordi (Rajasthan)- early or middle part of the 15th century
22 Naraina (Rajasthan)- The mosque appears to have been built when Mujahid Khan, son of Shams Khan, took possession of Naraina in 1436 A.D
23 Chatsu (Rajasthan)- At Chatsu there is a Muhammadan tomb erected on the eastern embankment of the Golerava tank. The tomb which is known as Gurg Ali Shah’s chhatri is built out of the spoils of Hindu buildings. The inscription mention saint Gurg Ali (wolf of Ali) died a martyr on the first of Ramzan in 979 A.H. corresponding to Thursday, the 17th January, 1572 A.D.
24 SaheTh-MaheTh (Uttar Pradesh)
25 Sarnath (Uttar Pradesh)- the inscriptions found there extending to the twelfth century A.D
26 Vaishali (Bihar)
27 Gaur and Pandua (Bengal)- The oldest and the best known building at Gaur and Pandua is the Ãdîna Masjid at Pandua built by Sikandar Shãh, the son of Ilyãs Shãh. The date of its inscription may be read as either 776 or 770, which corresponds with 1374 or 1369 A.D? The materials employed consisted largely of the spoils of Hindu temples and many of the carvings from the temples have been used as facings of doors, arches and pillars
28 Devikot (Bengal)- The Dargah of Sultan Pir, The Dargah of Shah Ata are the Muhammadan shrines built on the site of an old Hindu temple
29 Tribeni (Bengal)
This whitewashing of history, the policy of “Suppresio Veri, Suggestio Falsi” followed by ‘eminent historians’ of India is not only dangerous to national integration but also the future of the entire nation. It is time that the self interests are kept aside and the facts of history is made known to the masses.
Footnotes:
1 Indian Express, January 15, 1989, quoted in book “Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Vol. 1” by Sita Ram Goel
2 For example, JNU historian Romilla Thapar.[Article titled “Romila Thapar Defends the Aryan Invasion Theory!” by Vishal Agarwal published here- http://www.india-forum.com/articles/60/1 ]
3 In letter published in The Times of India dated October 2, 1986, Romilla Thapar had stated that handing over of Sri Rama’s and Sri Krishna’s birthplaces to the Hindus, and of disused mosques to the Muslims raises the question of the limits to the logic of restoration of religious sites. How far back do we go? Can we push this to the restoration of Buddhist and Jain monuments destroyed by Hindus? Or of the pre-Hindu animist shrines? [ Quoted in book- Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Vol. 2 The Islamic Evidence by Sita Ram Goel]
4 In his book Medival India [NCERT 2000], Satish Chandra writes- “The raid into India (by Timur) was a plundering raid, and its motive was to seize the wealth accumulated by the sultans of Delhi over the last 200 years… Timur then entered Delhi and sacked it without mercy, large number of people, both Hindu and Muslim, as well as women and children losing their lives.”, but Timur repeatedly states in his memoirs, the Tuzuk-i-Timuri, that he had a two-fold objective in invading Hindustan. “The first was to war with the infidels,” and thereby acquire, “some claim to reward in the life to come.” The second motive was “that the army of Islam might gain something by plundering the wealth and valuables of the infidels.” He further says “Excepting the quarter of the saiyids, the ulema and other Musulmans, the whole city was sacked.”
5 Koenraad Elst, in “The Politics of the Aryan Invasion Debate”
6 “The Vedic Evidence - The Vedic Corpus Provides no Evidence for the so-called Aryan Invasion of India” by Koenraad Elst
7 Jim G. Shaffer, “The Indo-Aryan Invasions : Cultural Myth and Archaeological Reality,” in Michel Danino “The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization and its Bearing on the Aryan Question”
8 Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, “Have Aryans been identified in the prehistoric skeletal record from
South Asia ?” in Michel Danino “The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization and its Bearing on the Aryan Question”
9 David Frawley, in “Myth of Aryan Invasion Theory of India”
10 Sita ram Goel, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Vol. 2-the Islamic Evidence
11 Sita ram Goel, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Vol. 2 -the Islamic Evidence
12 Will Durant in “Story of Civilization” observes- “The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”
13 “Histoire de l’ Inde” - By Alain Danielou; he notes- “”From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations, and destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of ‘a holy war’ of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire races.” Mahmoud Ghazni, continues Danielou, “was an early example of Muslim ruthlessness, burning in 1018 of the temples of Mathura, razing Kanauj to the ground and destroying the famous temple of Somnath, sacred to all Hindus. His successors were as ruthless as Ghazni: 103 temples in the holy city of Benaras were razed to the ground, its marvelous temples destroyed, its magnificent palaces wrecked.” Indeed, the Muslim policy vis a vis India, concludes Danielou, seems to have been a conscious systematic destruction of everything that was beautiful, holy, refined.”
14 Francois Gautier
15 Dr. Koenraad Elst in “Was There an Islamic “Genocide” of Hindus?”
16 K.S. Lal in “Indian Muslims Who Are They”
17 K.S. Lal in “Muslim Slave System in Medieval India”
18 Sita Ram Goel, in “Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Vol. 2 The Islamic Evidence”
19 It is taken from the large list of places documented by Sita Ram Goel in his magnum Opus “Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Vol. 1- The Preliminary Survey”
The author of this article, Nithin Sridhar, is studying civil engineering in Mysore, India. You can contact him at nkgrock@yahoo.co.in.
http://www.hinduyuva.org/tattva-blog/2008/05/the-whitewashing-of-history-by-nithin-sridhar/
Monday, April 28, 2008
Hindu cremation rites (including pitru-medha)
S’raaddham (archaeological evidence)
See notes on s’raadham, Hindu cremation rites (given below).
What has been found in Sembiyan Kandiyur is consistent with the practice of Pitru-medha described in As’valayana Grhya Sutra.
Post cremation Burial (Pitr-medha)
During the Vedic and early Grhya periods it was common to bury the incinerated bones of a deceased person in an urn. This was the pitr-medha ceremony. The Grhya-sutras of Asvalayana describe how the burned bones were to be collected on the third lunar day (tithi) after death. In the case of a man who had died, the bones were to be collected by elderly men and placed into a male urn. In the case of a woman, the bones were to be collected by elderly women and placed into a female urn. Urns were designed by their shape to be male or female. The performers of this ceremony were to walk three times in a counterclockwise direction around the bones while sprinkling milk and water from a particular kind of twig (sami). The bones were then placed into the urn as they were picked up individually with the thumb and fourth finger. First the bones of the feet were to be gathered and then successively the other bones were to be gathered working toward the head. After the bones had been purified and gathered they were sealed and buried in a secure location.
Megalithic period pottery found
T.S. Subramanian (The Hindu, 27 April 2008)
Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department leads excavation
— Photo: M. Srinath
http://www.hindu.com/2008/04/27/images/2008042757322001.jpg Significant finds: Pottery with graffiti marks found at Sembiyankandiyur village in Nagapattinam district.
CHENNAI: Pottery items including bowls, dishes and urns, from the Megalithic period, have been excavated at Sembiyankandiyur near Kuthalam in Mayiladuthurai taluk of Nagapattinam district by the Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department.
An important finding: eight urns aligned in a particular manner, three of them with human bones inside. These might be of members of one family, according to department officials. The pottery included black-and-red ware, black ware and red ware.
The site yielded a rich collection of pottery with graffiti marks. A few iron pieces were also found.
Archaeology Department officials estimated that the pottery belonged to the Megalithic period or the Iron Age, which can be dated between 300 B.C. and A.D. 100.
Earlier discovery
The discoveries were made at the site where in 2006 school teacher V. Shanmuganathan found a polished Neolithic celt (tool) that had engravings resembling the Indus script. This celt caused a stir in archaeological circles. It was T.S. Sridhar, then Special Commissioner of Archaeology, who noticed the engravings on the polished celt. A semi-polished celt was found nearby without engravings.
The Archaeology Department decided to excavate the Sembiyankandiyur site to find out its antiquity and fix the chronology. The excavations began on February 6. Four trenches were laid at the place where the celt with the engravings were found. The first trench was laid in the garden of Mr. Shanmuganathan, the second trench at Thoppumedu which belonged to Shanmugam, a retired physical education teacher, another in the backyard of the house of Muthappa and the fourth at Padayachi Kollaimedu.
Important findings from the trenches were bowls, dishes, broken urns, full-size urns and so on. Eight urns were found to be aligned in a particular manner, three of them with human bones. Some urns had ritual pots inside. Some pots and sherds have thumb-nail impressions on them.
Designs and markings
Full-shape pots had the graffiti depicting a fish, a ‘damaru’, sun, star and a swastika. Geometric designs and marks depicting fish, sun and star and graffiti marks are often found on black-and-red ware and black ware, with the symbols sometimes repeated.
The excavations at Sembiyankandiyur were done under the guidance of Dr. S. Gurumurthi, Principal Commissioner of Archaeology; Dr. S. Vasanthi, Archaeologist; M. Muthusamy, Curator of Tranquebar Museum; S. Selvaraj and P. Gowthamaputhiran, Archaeological Officers of Thanjavur and Coimbatore respectively.
http://www.hindu.com/2008/04/27/stories/2008042757322000.htm
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2676491/sraaddha1
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