Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 16:01:55 -0800
Subject: Re: "History vs Propaganda" by Romila Thapar
Apropos of Margaret Trawick's posting of Romila Thapar's newspaper
article, here's a review of "Eminent Historians" by Arun Shourie,
which focuses on the work of "professional" historians Romila Thapar
and others of her persuasion. Thapar's invocation of the adjective
"professional'' is as fatuous as that of Edward Said's who also
invoked it in his rather idiotic attempt at procatalepsis of V. S.
Naipaul's thesis of Islam as Arab nationalism. (Lacking the ability
to refute to V.S. Naipaul, Edward Said resorted to the phrases
"rather idiotic," "intellectual catastrophe," and "intellectual
suicide" in his ridiculous diatribe published in an Egyptian
newspaper. In that article, posted on this list couple of weeks ago,
Edward Said tried to argue that V.S. Naipaul thesis is "rather
idiotic" because Naipaul is not "professional" Orientalist!)
c. j. s. wallia
**************************************************
C. J. S. Wallia, Ph.D.
Editor, IndiaStar Review of Books
http://www.indiastar.com
(510) 848-8200; cjwallia-AT-indiastar.com
2707 College Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705, U.S.A.
**************************************************
EMINENT HISTORIANS:
Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud
by Arun Shourie
New Delhi: ASA Publications, 1998
Hardback, 271 pages
Reviewed by C. J. S. Wallia
Eminent Historians:Their Techniques, Their
Line, Their
Fraudis arguably the most important book
published in
India since 1947. Arun Shourie, a noted scholar and
columnist, is the author of 14 other
books, several of them
brilliant exposé of the Indian Communist party's
long-standing anti-national policies, the
foreign Christian
missionaries' covert activities in India,
and the Congress
party's corruption and pseudo-secular policies that
culminated in the massacre of thousands of
innocent Sikhs
in Delhi in 1984.
Shourie received a Ph.D. in Economics from Syracuse
University and has served as a consultant
to the World
Bank and the Planning Commission. He has
also served as
the editor of The Indian Express. His
writings have won
him major awards including the Astor, the
Magsaysay, and
the International Editor of the Year. Recently, the
Federation of Indian Publishers conferred on him The
Freedom to Publish Award.
"Eminent Historians," the ironic title of
his latest book
comes from the self-description a group of Marxist
historians, most of them academics, arrogated for
themselves while signing a newspaper
petition during the
Ayodhya controversy. Although the group is
not large in
number, (42 is the maximum), the same set has also
preempted for itself the titles of "prominent social
scientists" and "leading intellectuals" in
similar public
petitions. The Marxist party line is to
project Hindus as
exploitative feudalists and Muslims as
liberators! Arun
Shourie's major thesis: During the past
fifty years, "this
bunch of Marxist historians have been
suppressing facts,
inventing lies, perverting discourse, and
derailing public
policy" by seizing control of institutions
such as the Indian
Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the National
Council of Educational Research Training
(NCERT), large
parts of Indian academia, and nearly all of the
English-media newspapers and publishing houses.
Included as principals in this group of
Marxist historians
are Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, K.M. Shrimali,
K.M.Pannikar, R.S. Sharma, D. N. Jha,
Gyanendra Pandey,
and Irfan Habib. This group has, Shourie
charges, "worked a
diabolic inversion: the inclusive religion
[Hinduism], the
pluralist spiritual search of our people
and land, they have
projected as intolerant, narrow-minded,
obscurantist; and
the exclusivist, totalitarian, revelatory
religions and
ideologies -- Islam, Christianity,
Marxism-Leninism-- they
have made out to be the epitome of tolerance,
open-mindedness, democracy, secularism!"
By promoting
each other's publications and puffing up
their reputations,
this group has long been "determining what
is politically
correct." One measure of the insidious
control these "verbal
terrorists" have been exercising over the
English-medium
publishing industry in India is that Arun
Shourie, despite
his huge readership, had to self-publish his books.
For several decades, these "eminent historians" have
striven hard to continually denigrate Hindu cultural
history, the oldest surviving civilization
in the world, by
"blackening the Hindu period and whitewashing the
Islamic period." Indeed, Shourie should
have challenged
them to refute American historian Will
Durant's assertion
in his The Story of Civilization: "The
Islamic conquest of
India is probably the bloodiest story in
history. It is a
discouraging tale, for its evident moral
is that civilization is
a precious good, whose delicate complex
and freedom can at
any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from
without and multiplying from within." Or
that of French
historian Alain Danielou's statement, in
his Histoire de l'
Inde : "From the time Muslims started
arriving, around
632 AD, the history of India becomes a
long, monotonous
series of murders, massacres, spoilations,
destructions. It is,
as usual, in the name of 'a holy war' of
their faith, of their
sole God, that the barbarians have
destroyed civilisations,
wiped out entire races."
As the book's subtitle promises, Shourie succeeds in
unmasking these self-proclaimed eminents of "their
technology, their line, their fraud" by
focusing on specifics
as exemplified below: his own television
debates with some
of these "eminent historians"; their
failures to respond to
published challenges by historians and scholars of
persuasions other than Marxist; their
documented efforts at
distorting established historical evidence.
In July 1998, Manoj Raghuvanshi, host of a
popular ZEE TV
program called Aap ki Adalat, Aap ka
=46aisla (Your Court,
You Judge) invited Arun Shourie and one of the
"eminents," K. L. Shrimali. Raghuvanshi posed the
question first to Shrimali whether Aurangzeb was a
religious bigot. Despite Raghuvanshi's repeating the
question, Shrimali gave no clear answer,
only asserting that
Aurangzeb's court had many Hindu nobles. Shourie
countered this by pointing out that there were many
Indians among the persons honored by the
British with
titles - - and both for the same reason.
In Shourie's words:
"How does this wipe away the destruction of Hindu
temples by Aurangzeb? Aurangzeb had entertained no
doubt about the fact that his primary
impluse was the
religious one. And that he faithfully implemented an
essential element of his religion, Islam,
that is to destroy the
places of worship of other religions." As
evidence, Shourie
read out several passages from Sita Ram Goel's book
Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, The Islamic
Evidence. All Shrimali could mumble was
that it was a
"questionable source." When Shourie
pressed the point
that the source was the Akhbarat
(Newsletter) of the Court
of Aurangzeb himself written on the very
day the news
reached the court, the "eminent" historian
merely repeated
"questionable source." Shourie comments:
"So, when an
'eminent' historian says that the sources
were questionable,
they must be questionable" - - this is
their technology when
cornered."
Sita Ram Goel's book is the focus of one
of Shourie's
chapters that carries the ironic title
"The Policy of 'Broad
Toleration'!" Shourie quotes extensivley
from this 400-page
work regarding it as a "meticulous and unimpeachable
study": "We have cited from eighty
histories spanning a
period of more than twelve hundred years.
Our citations
mention sixty-one kings, sixty-three
military commanders
and fourteen Sufis who destroyed Hindu
temples in one
hundred and fifty-four localities, big and
small, spread from
Khurasan in the West to Tripura in the
East, and from
Transoxiana in the North to Tamil Nadu in the South,
over a period of eleven hundred years. In
most cases the
destruction of temples was followed by
erection of mosques,
madrasas and khanqahs, etc., on the temple
sites with
temple materials. Allah was thanked every time for
enabling the iconoclast concerned to
render service to the
religion of Muhammad by means of this pious
performance. All along, the iconoclasts remained
convinced that they were putting into
practice the highest
tenets of their religion. They also saw to
it that a record was
kept of what they prized as a pious performance. The
language of the record speaks for itself.
It leaves no doubt
that they took immense pride in doing what
they did. It is
inconceivable that a constant and
consistent behaviour
pattern, witnessed for a long time and
over a vast area, can
be explained except in terms of a settled
system of belief
which leaves no scope for second thoughts.
Looking at the
very large number of temples, big and
small, destroyed or
desecrated or converted into Muslim monuments,
economic or political explanations can be
only a futile, if
not fraudulent, exercise."
Goel's scholarly work was published in
1993 - - six years of
opportunity for the "eminent historians"
to refute his
work. Quite the contrary, it is the Indian
Marxist historians
who now stand discredited on many issues in Indian
history. Interestingly, Shourie cites from
a standard Soviet
work A History of India by K. Antonova, G.
Bongard-Levin, G. Kotovsky (Progress
Publishers, Moscow,
1979), which, for example, on Aurangzeb,
is free of the
inverted concoctions of the Indian Marxist
academics and
agrees with the evidence presented by
Goel: "Aurangzeb
was a cold, calculating politician, and a
fanatical Moslem,
who stripped Hindus of their rights.
Between 1665 and 1669,
he gave orders for Hindu temples to be
destroyed and for
mosques to be erected from their debris."
Several of Shourie's chapters appeared
first as columns.
One of his readers sent him a copy of a
circular sent by the
West Bengal Government Secondary Board ordering
revisions of Class IX History textbooks to
conform with the
views of Indian Marxist "historians." The
accompanying
pages contained two columns: Aushuddho (errors) and
Shuddho (Corrections). Shourie provides numerous
examples from these pages. In Bharuter Itihash by
Shobhankar Chattopadhyaya, published by Narmada
Publishers, page 181: Aushuddho - - "To
prevent Hindu
women from being seen by Muslims, they
were directed to
remain indoors." Shuddho - -Delete. In
Bharater Itihash
by P. Maiti, published by Sreedhar
Prakashini, page 139:
Aushuddho - - "There was a sense of aristocratic
superiority in the purdah system. That is
why upper-class
Hindus adopted this system from upper-class Muslims.
Another opinion is that purdah came into
practice to save
Hindu women from Muslims. Most probably, purdah came
into vogue because of both factors."
Shuddho - - Delete. In
Swadesho Shobhyota by Dr. P.K. Basu and S.B.Ghatak,
published by Abhinav Prakashan, page 145:
Aushuddho - -
"Because Islam used extreme inhuman means
to establish
itself in India, it became an obstacle for
the coming together
of Indian and Islamic cultures." Shuddho -
- Delete. In
Bharatvarsher Itishash by Dr. Narendranath
Bhattacharya,
published by Chakravarty and Son, page 89: Aushuddho
--"Sultan Mahmud looted valuables worth 2
crore dirham
from Somnath temple and used the Shivling as a step
leading up to the masjid in Ghazni."
Shuddho-- Delete
'and used the Shivling as a step leading
up to the masjid in
Ghazni.'
In West Bengal, the Marxists have long
held the state
government. However, similar revisions of history
textbooks were implemented at the national
level under
the aegis of the National Council of
Educational Research
and Training. For example, Satish Chandra's Medieval
History, a textbook for Class XI students,
asserts that
"sometimes Sufi saints also played a role
although they
were generally unconcerned with
conversions." Shourie
comments: "If this eminent historian were
to read the
accounts of these Sufis, he would learn
how they acted as
the advance scouts of the armies of Islam!" In NCERT
sponsored books, notes Shourie, "Two
sentences from the
Koran: 'To you your religion, to me mine,'
and 'There is no
compulsion in religion' which are flatly
over-run by the
text itself, to say nothing of the entire
history of Islamic rule
over 1400 years, those two sentences are flaunted as
proof-positive of Islam being not just
committed to peace
and tolerance, they are proof that it is
The Religion of Peace
and Tolerance!"
Recently, Sita Ram Goel challenged the
dean of the Marxist
Indian "historians," Romila Thapar, to
produce evidence to
substantiate her assertion about the violence Hindus
perpetrated on the Buddhists, supposedly destroying
Buddhist viharas and constructing Hindu
temples on the
ruins. None. Shourie observes: "They
traduce, they abuse,
they denounce, they spit and run, but if
you so much as ask
them to substantiate what they are saying,
they are deeply
offended. A highly personalised attack,
they scream."
The largely Marxist membership of the
Indian Council of
Historical Research appointed by the
socialistic Congress
party, which was in power for nearly all
of the fifty years
since independence, was reconstituted in
July 1998 by the
Bharatiya Janata Party, currently ruling
at the center.
Unfortunately, it will take a long time
for undoing the
harm done by the Marxist historians to the
Indian psyche:
"they have used these institutions to sow
in the minds of
our people [the Hindus] the seeds of self-hatred=2E"
For anyone interested in contemporary
India, this is a
must-read book.
=2E.........................................................................=2E..
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