ABC of pseudo-secularism
Vijay Kumar Malhotra
January 3

A tribe of pseudo-secularists in India have arrogated to themselves the right of expressing their views even in the textbooks for children.

It does not bother their conscience if the subject of their writings is history relating to events of national importance. They float on intellectual pride on an assumed self-righteousness. They smugly close their eyes on the monstrous lies perpetrated by sadist elements among our erstwhile imperial rulers or the prejudiced communal minds of past historians, whose overpowering desire was to distort our legacy, denigrate our social norms and destroy our national pride.

As part of the same tradition, some of our recent so-called historians and over-rated intellectuals tried to repeat the myths in our textbooks, which had the potential of poisoning the young minds with wrong assertions and blurred interpretations of the otherwise poignant episodes in our chequered history. The Romila Thapars, Satish Chandras and their clan, refused to budge from their arrogant versions and insisted on the correctness of their prescriptions as an inscription on the wall. On wider inquiry and deeper scrutiny, it could be found that they were misguided by superficial sources and did not have any unimpeachable historical authority to rely upon.

Perhaps, they were too keen to appear liberal among the present generation of Indians to ingratiate themselves to a class of people inside and outside the country so inimical to us. It did not matter to them that as ‘historians’ it was their duty to correct the past mistakes and to put things in the correct perspective. Their social conceit stood in the way of taking remedial action which could have easily been done without raising so much dust of controversy.

It is in this context that the NCERT had to remove certain portions from the textbooks to clear the cobwebs of prejudice and ignorance. One of the gems of Satish Chandra related to the martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth guru of the Sikhs, in 1675. He is a saintly figure in the Sikh faith, who made the supreme sacrifice to save the much-oppressed Hindu community from the bigotry of Aurangzeb. Many a chronicle has been written about the inextinguishable thirst of the Mughal ruler to forcibly convert Hindu droves. Even the tenth guru, Guru Govind Singh, in his autobiography, Bachittar Natak, has ascribed the execution of his holy father in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk to his noble effort to protect the frontal mark (tilak) and the sacred thread (janeyu) of the Hindus.

And look at Satish Chandra’s version in his history book on medieval India for Class XI. According to him, after the return of the guru from Assam, in association with one Hafiz Khan, he resorted to plundering and raping, laying waste the whole province of Punjab. And he attributes this to some unspecified Persian source. He adds that according to Sikh tradition, the guru’s execution was due to intrigues of some members of his family.

Chandra mentions the cause of Aurangzeb’s annoyance with the guru to his act of converting a few Muslims to Sikhism! He does not say a word about the countless conversions carried out by the fanatic ruler. It is for the people of India to assess such historians, who unwittingly or deliberately, impose their interpretations on the masses.

According to Romila Thapar in her book (Class VI), for special guests, beef was served as a mark of honour. According to Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev (Modern India, Class VIII), Jats founded their state at Bharatpur from where they conducted plundering raids in the regions around and participated in court intrigues in Delhi. Some other diseased minds of the so-called historians have denied the existence of Lord Rama at Ayodhya and Lord Krishna in Mathura around 2000 BC and 200 BC-300 AD respectively. These are not only attempts to create confusion, but to strike at the roots of the Hindu heritage.

Who are the protagonists of such theories to demolish the faith in Hinduism? The communists — whose atheism takes them to the portals of hatred for the Hindu way of life. They were against the freedom of India from foreign rule. And when freedom came, the Communist Party of India sent a delegation to Stalin of the Soviet Union to help them in a coup against the government of India, as they perceived the Hindu ethos as the single biggest bulwark against communism in this country.

Everything that the NDA government does for the nation is dubbed as an effort at ‘saffronisation’. And this effort may be aimed at only removing the vestiges of falsehood in the history books for our children.

It is paradoxical that even after the Supreme Court has dismissed a petition filed by some misguided persons, the latter have dug their heals in refusing to accept the verdict. Sonia Gandhi has gone on record saying that her party would not accept the curriculum developed by NCERT and the schools in states ruled by the Congress would continue with the old curricula. That hits the nail on the head of a party which has been claiming to be the conscience-keeper of the nation and a tool for progressive change.

It was nothing short of blasphemy on the part of another Congress boss, Salman Khurshid, who said on TV that Sita was not from India. One wonders if there is a coordinated plan among the Congress bigwigs to distort Hindu mythology and history. They seem to be taking their ‘secularism’ a bit too far, as they are trying to trample over the Hindu tradition.

It would be best to let the Congress and their cohorts stew in their own juice. With the verdict of the apex court, the ghost of saffronisation has been laid to rest. A new dawn is beginning in the horizon of school education. It would now be possible to give the students an insight into multiculturism, social rights and human values. A new initiative is in the offing to build scientific temper among children. The anchor of education would be the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi and the thought of our national leaders.

One can only hope that the present Congress president would not claim exclusive rights to the philosophy of the Mahatma. Her party has done enough to denigrate what Hinduism stands for.

Recounting the Supreme Court verdict, ‘value education’, based on the good points of all religions, will contribute to the building of a secular ethos. But the Congress thinks otherwise. They are calling the verdict just a legal victory and not a real one. Their convoluted minds view every good thing done by the NDA government as furthering the ‘Hindutva’ agenda, as if it were a hoodoo.

The coming elections are not going to take place on the Hindutva plank. What the BJP believes in is to strengthen the nation’s unity on the basis of undivided loyalty to the nation, adherence to its territorial integrity and the agreed economic reforms. But the pseudo-secularists try to exploit even a tragic event to reap a short-term advantage.

It would be pertinent to ask the Leftists to set their own house in West Bengal in order, where the education policy is highly backward. Let them rewrite their books full of jaundiced information on India’s past. Let them rectify their own blunders before upbraiding the NDA government’s efforts to rationalise education.

If the Congress and the Communists have the good of the nation at heart, let them remove their blinkers and see the direction in which the country wants to go. Let them eschew obscurantism and megalomania and be humble to strengthen the nation’s unity and well-being.

The writer is a BJP MP

Historians Versus History
Ram Swarup

Wole Soyinka, African Nobel Laureate, delivering the 20th Nehru Memorial Lecture on November 13, 1988, made an important though by no means a new observation - that the colonial histories have been written from the European viewpoint. Speaking about Indian histories, he said that “there is a big question mark on everything that the British historians have written”. He added that serious efforts are being made by historians back home “to rewrite African history.”


We do not know what this project involves and how it is faring in Africa, but in India efforts in this direction have yielded meagre results. Not that there has been a dearth of rewriters, but their talent has not been equal to their zeal.


The phrase “re-writing of history” leaves a bad taste in the mouth and it is offensive to our sense of truth. Recent instances of rewriting have not helped to improve the image of the task and they inspired little confidence. In most cases one did not know where legitimate rewriting ended and forgery began. In practical terms, it has meant that history is written to support the latest party line, or the latest dictator.


What does, therefore, the rewriting of history mean? How far can we go in that direction? Does it mean saying good-bye to all sense of truth and objectivity, or does it mean only restoring some neglected truths and perspective? Some have looked at our present through the eyes of the past, but will it be any better to look at our past through the eyes of the present, or even go further and write about our past and present-in the spirit of “socialist realism”-in terms of the future, in terms of tasks conceived and planned by our avante garde for the future of the country?


There are other related questions. Is the European history of Asia and Africa all wrong and does it need wholesale replacement? Or does it also have some valuable elements, particularly in its methodology if not in its conclusions, which should be retained and even further developed? In the Indian context, is the British history of India monolithic, all painted black by motivated historians? Or, is it also pluralistic and contains many views, some of them highly appreciative of the country’s culture, philosophy and artistic creations?


And also, looked at objectively, apart from the intentions of the writers and even in spite of their jaundiced views, have not their histories sometimes helped us to become better aware of our past and made us in some ways rediscover ourselves in the limited sense in which the words ‘past’ and ‘rediscovery’ are understood today?


To hold that all British history of India was wrong will be highly unrealistic and will have few buyers. True, many British, historians were prejudiced. But there were also others who had genuine curiosity and in spite of their pre-conceived notions, they tried to do their job faithfully in the spirit of objectivity. In the pursuit of their researches, they applied methods followed in Europe. They collected, collated and compared old manuscripts. They desciphered old, forgotten scripts and in the process discovered an important segment of our past. They developed linguistics, archaeology, carbon-dating, numismatics; they found for us ample evidence of India in Asia. They discovered for us much new data, local and international. True, many times they tried to twist this data and put fanciful constructions on it, but this new respect for facts imposed its own discipline and tended to evolve objective criteria. Because of the objective nature of the criteria, their findings did not always support their prejudices and preconceived notions. For example, their data proved that India represented an ancient culture with remarkable continuity and widespread influence and that it had a long and well-established tradition of self-rule and self-governing republics, and free institutions and free discussion.


However, while admitting these positive factors, it is also true that the British historians distorted Indian history on some most essential points. The distortion was not conscious but was unconscious; however, it was not less real and potent on that account.

British Historians


The mind of British scholars was shaped by their position as rulers of a fast-expanding Empire and by its need to consolidate itself ideologically and politically. As rulers, they felt a new racial and cultural superiority and, reinforced by their religion, developed a strong conviction of their civilizing mission. Many of them also felt a great urge to bring the blessings of Christian morals and a Christian God to a benighted paganhood, as long as the attempt did not endanger the Empire.


The rulers had also more palpable political needs. The subject people should have no higher notion of their past beyond their present status, which they should also learn to accept without murmur and even with thankfulness. The British rulers had an interest in telling the Indian people that the latter had never been a nation but a conglomerate of miscellaneous people drawn from diverse sources and informed by no principle of unity; that their history had been an history of invaders and conquerors and that they had never known indigenous rule; and that, indeed, they were indifferent to self-rule and that so long as their village-life was intact, they did not bother who ruled at the Centre. All these lessons were tirelessly taught and dutifully learnt, so much so that even after the British have left, these assumptions and categories still shape our larger political thinking and historical perspective. That India is multi-racial, multi-national, multi-linguistic, multi-cultural painfully trying to acquire a principle of unity under their aegis is also the assumption of our own new leaders and elite.


These were the basic attitudes and unspoken interests that shaped the minds of the British historians, but within this framework there was room enough for individual preferences and temperamental peculiarities. Some of them could show their genuine appreciation for Hindu language, grammar, architecture, and other, cultural achievements, but this appreciation would not go beyond a certain point, nor in a direction which began to feed the people's wider national consciousness and pride in themselves as an ancient nation. In this respect too, our intellectual elite follow the lead of the British scholars. Many of them-unless they are Marxists or Macaulayists - are not without a measure of appreciation and pride for some of our old cultural creations. But this appreciation does not extend to that larger culture itself which put forth those creations, and that religion and spirit in which that culture was rooted and those people and that society which upheld that religion and that culture.


We are told that the British highlighted Hindu-Muslim differences. They certainly did. But they had no interest in telling the Indians that their forefathers shared a common religion, that some of them got converted under peculiar circumstances, that those circumstances were no longer valid, and that they should not lose their consciousness of their original and wider fold. On the other hand, the way the British wrote their history perpetuated the myth of a Muslim rule and a Muslim period which could not but accentuate Hindu-Muslim differences and promote Muslim separatism.


The main interest of the British was to write a history which justified their presence in India. They were imperial rulers and by their situation and function they felt a bond of sympathy and affinity with the rulers that had preceded them. They held India by the right of conquest; therefore, they had to recognise the legitimacy of this right in the case of the Moghuls, the Afghans and the Arabs too.


But this justification was too crude and naked for the British conscience. To assuage it, the British offered a legal and moral alibi. They held that they were legitimate successors of the Moghuls and represented continuity with India’s past. The Moghuls were presented as empire builders, those who united India and gave it law and order, peace and stability - the natural blessings of an Imperial order. And the British themselves were merely the successors of the Imperial rights of the Moghuls and upheld the Imperial authority of Delhi. Whatever elevated Moghul authority at Delhi, elevated their imperial authority too.


Facts sometimes compelled the British historians to speak of cruelties and vandalism of the Muslim rule but this did not stop them from upholding its authority. For they knew that the myth of Imperialism is one and that the glory of the Moghul rulers and the myth of their invincibility added to the glory and the myth of the British Empire itself.


Thus all these factors made the British give a new boost to the Muslim rule in India. While trying to legitimise their own rule, they also gave to their predecessor a kind of legitimacy which they never had in the eyes of the Indian people. In fact, in the larger national consciousness, the Muslim rule had as little legitimacy as the British rule had later on. Both were considered as foreign impositions and resisted as such as far as time, opportunity and the prevailing power equation allowed it.


But by the same token and for the same reason this resistance, long and stubborn, was underplayed by British historians and presented as “revolts” or “rebellions” against the legitimate Imperial authority of the Centre. They felt, and quite rightly from their viewpoint, that Indian history should have nothing to show that its people waged many battles and repulsed many invaders. Thus, in this way, India came to have a history which is the history of its invaders, whose dominion its people accepted meekly.

Muslim Historians


Even before the British came on the stage, Muslim historians had written similar histories. Those histories were mostly annals written by scribes or munshis employed by Muslim kings. The task of these annalists was to glorify Islam and their immediate patrons, a task which they performed with great zeal and rhetoric. In the performance of this task, they resorted to no moral or intellectual disguise. The glory of Islam and the extension of Darul-Islam (the Muslim equivalent of the British “Empire”) was self-justified and needed no artificial props. They spoke of the massacres of the infidels, of their forcible conversions, of their temples raced and of similar tyrannies perpetrated with great rejoice, as Sir H.M. Elliot points out.

“Hindu” Historians


The results were no better when the annalist employed happened to be a Hindu. Elliot again observes that from “one of that nation we might have expected to have learnt what were the feelings, hopes, faiths, fears, and yearnings, of his subject race,” but this was not to be. On the other hand, in his writing, there is “nothing to betray his religion or his nation… With him, a Hindu is an ‘infidel’, and a Muhammadan ‘one of true faith’,… With him, when Hindus are killed, ‘their souls are despatched to hell’, and when a Muhammadan suffers the same fate, he ‘drinks the cup of martyrdom’… He speaks of the ‘light of Islam shedding its refulgence on the world’.”


But what comes next intrigues Elliot even more. Even after the tyrant was no more and the falsification of history through terror was no longer necessary (Elliot quotes Tacitus : Teberii ac Neronis res ob metum falsae), he finds that there is still “not one of this slavish crew who treats the history of his native country subjectively, or presents us with the thoughts, emotions, and raptures which a long oppressed race might be supposed to give vent to.”


This tribe of Hindu munshis or the “slavish crew” of Elliot have a long life and show a remarkable continuity. Instead of diminishing, their number has multiplied with time. Today, they dominate the universities, the media and the country’s political thinking.


They were reinforced by another set of historians - those who carry the British tradition. One very important thing in common with them is that they continue to look at India through the eyes of Muslim and British rulers even long after their rule has ceased.


Elliot regards the problem with moral indignation but the phenomenon involves deep psychological and sociological factors. It is more complex than the question of patronage enjoyed or tyranny withdrawn.


Hindus have lived under very trying circumstances for many centuries and during this time their psyche suffered much damage. Short term tyranny may prove a challenge but long-term, sustained tyranny tends to benumb and dehumanize. Under continued military and ideological attack, many Hindus lost initiative and originality; they lost naturalness and self-confidence; they lost pride in themselves, pride in their past and in their history and in their nation. They learnt to live a sort of underground life, furtively and apologetically. Some tried to save their self-respect by identifying themselves with the thoughts and sentiments of the rulers. They even adopted the rulers’ contempt for their own people.


These attitudes imbibed over a long period have become our second nature, and they have acquired an independence and dynamism of their own. We have begun to look at ourselves through the eyes of our rulers.

Post-Independence Period


One would have thought that all this would change after we attained Independence, but this did not happen. It shows that to throw off an intellectual and cultural yoke is far more difficult than to throw off a political yoke.


By and large we have retained our old history written by our rulers. The leaders of the nationalist movement are quite content with it, except that they have added to it one more chapter at the end which depicts them in a super-heroic role. The new leaders have no greater vision of Indian history and they look forward to no greater task than to perpetuate themselves.


In fact they have developed a vested interest in old history which propagates that India was never a nation, that it had not known any freedom or freedom-struggle in the past. By sheer contrast, it exalts their role and proves something they would like to believe - that they are the first nation-builders, that they led the first freedom struggle India has ever known and, indeed, she became free for the first time under their aegis. This highly flatters their ego, and to give themselves this unique status we find that their attacks on India’s past are as vicious and ignorant as those of the British and Muslim historians. No wonder histories continue to be written with all the contempt we learnt to feel for our past, and with all the lack of understanding we developed for our culture during the days of foreign domination.


A new source of distortion was opened during the period of the freedom struggle itself. Nationalist leaders strove to win Muslim support for the Independence struggle. In the hope of achieving this end, Indian nationalism itself began to rewrite the history of medieval times. Under this motivation, Muslim rule became ‘indigenous’, and Muslim kings became ‘national’ kings, and even nationalists, those who fought them began to receive a low score. R.C. Mojumdar tells us how, under this motivation, national leaders created an “imaginary history”, one of them even proclaiming that “Hindus were not at all a subject race during the Muslim rule,” and how “these absurd notions, which would have been laughed at by Indian leaders at the beginning of the 19th century, passed current as history… at the end of that century”.

Marxist Distortions


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. But this is a large subject and we would not go into it here, even though it is related intimately to the subject under discussion.


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. Some of the British had an orientalist’s fascination for the East or an administrator's paternal concern for their wards, but Marxists suffer from no such sentimentality. The very “Asiatic mode of production” was primitive and any, “superstructure” of ideas and culture built on that foundation must be barbaric too and it had better go.


Not many realize how thoroughly European Marx was in his orientation. He treated all Asia and Africa as an appendage of the West and, indeed, of the Anglo-Saxon Great Britain. He borrowed all his theses on India from British rulers and fully subscribed to them. With them he believes that “Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history,” and that what “we call its history, is the history of successive intruders.” With them he also believes that India “has neither known nor cared for self-rule.” In fact, he rules out self-rule for India altogether and in this matter gives her no choice. He says that the question is “not whether the English bad a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.” His own choice was clear.


Indian Marxists fully accept this thesis, except that they are also near-equal admirers of the “Turkish” conquest of India. Indian Marxists get quite lyrical about this conquest and find quite fulfilment in it. Let us illustrate the point with the example of M.N. Roy. We are told that he gave up Marxism but he kept enough of it to retain his admiration for Muslim Imperialism. He admires the “historical role of Islam” in a book of the same name and praises the “Arab Empire” as a “magnificent monument to the memory of Mohammad.” He hails Muslim invasion of India and tells us how “it was welcomed as a message of hope and freedom by the multitudinous victims of Brahmanical reaction.”


Earlier, Roy had spoken of “our country” which “had become almost liberated from the Moslem Empire.” But that was long ago when he was merely a nationalist and had not come under the influence of Marxism. Marxism teaches a new appreciation for Imperialism; it idealises old Imperialisms and prepares a people for a new one. Its moving power is deep-rooted self-alienation and its greatest ally is cultural and spiritual illiteracy.


Marxist writers and historians of a sort are all over the place and they are well entrenched in the academic and media sectors. They have a great say in University appointments and promotions, in the awarding of research grants, in drawing up syllabi, and in the choosing and prescribing of text-books. No true history of India is possible without countering their philosophy, ideas and influence.

Indian Express, January 15, 1989

Nature
and
Indian Tradition

By Michel Danino

A guest editorial in Tahr, newsletter of the Nilgiri Wildlife and Environment Association, Ootacamund (Tamil Nadu), January-March 1999 issue.

Recently, a retired Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, on a private visit to a Shola[1] forest in the Nilgiris, came across a few local residents and engaged in a conversation about forest preservation, in the course of which he made a few startling statements. “Overprotection,” as he called it, could be undesirable, and some degree of woodcutting was not necessarily bad ; also, forests sometimes needed fires to induce regeneration, sprouting of new seeds, clearing of undergrowth, etc. He then revealed the source of his information to be a programme he had watched on Discovery Channel.

This calls for two kinds of comment.

The first is that, quite obviously, the programme the retired PCCF had watched must have been referring to coniferous forests, some of which have in the course of time learned to turn fires (caused by lightning, etc.) to their advantage—conifers being eminently inflammable, those forests could not have survived if they had not learned that lesson. But that has no bearing on tropical rainforests such as Sholas, which thrive in a perpetually moist milieu (provided their canopy is in good shape) ; any forest fire there would be irreversibly destructive. As for “overprotection,” anyone familiar with the conditions in the Nilgiris will be hard put to show where that is taking place. Shola forests have evolved over millions of years, and till the last century or so, had to suffer almost no human interference—which is the same as absolute protection. It would be standing facts on their head to assert that illicit cutting, the kind of which has led many of our Sholas to their present degraded condition, especially near densely populated areas, has done them any good.

Our second reflection is of a deeper nature. No one will deny the quality of some programmes on Discovery Channel, the beauty of the images, their informative and educational value. But no amount of such programmes will help us cultivate a real contact with Nature : you cannot “learn” Nature as you learn English or science or the latest news. Moreover, such programmes can only, at best, reflect the minds of Western environmentalists of scientific bent. They have no doubt done a remarkable and often courageous work in the last few decades, but they do not have the monopoly of an understanding of Nature. They forget that science is not necessarily the best tool to understand Nature—if it were, why should it have caused so much destruction to this earth, that too in the span of two centuries, a mere flash in the planet’s life ?

In fact, since the start of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the West broke away from Nature and began regarding her as so much inanimate matter to be exploited (a polite word for plunder). That unfortunate attitude, which has resulted in the ruthless abuse we see all over the world, can be traced all the way to the Old Testament and to the Genesis. On that fateful sixth day, Jehovah proclaims, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let him rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground....” And he said to newborn man, “Fill the earth and subdue it” (1:26 & 1:28). Jehovah does not stop there ; for some mysterious reason, he seems to hold the earth responsible for man’s sins. After generously cursing various nations through a succession of fire-spewing prophets, he turns his wrath to our poor planet : “Say to the southern forest : ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says : I am about to set fire to you, and it will consume all your trees, both green and dry. The blazing flame will not be quenched’ ” (Ezekiel, 20:47). “I will make the land of Egypt a ruin and a desolate waste among devastated lands” (ibid., 29:10, 12). “See, the Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it ; he will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants.... The earth will be completely laid waste and totally plundered” (Isaiah 24:1, 3). “Cursed is the ground because of you” (Genesis 3:17). And so on, Book after ranting Book.

The contrast with the ancient Indian attitude is as stark as could be. Indian tradition regards the earth as a goddess, Bhudevi ; her consort, Vishnu, the supreme divinity, incarnates from age to age to relieve her of the burden of demonic forces—sometimes of humanity itself. This he does out of love for the earth, his companion. Sita means “furrow,” and she returned to the earth whence she came. Shiva too is bound to the earth through Parvati, daughter of Himavat, i.e. the Himalayas. Earth and Heaven are therefore inseparable : “Heaven is my father ; my mother is this vast earth, my close kin,” says the Rig-Veda (I.164.33). Earth is as sacred as Heaven, since she is our mother, not a dead heap of “natural resources.” Nature, rather than an adversary to be conquered and despoiled, is our best defence : “Blue water, open space, hills and thick forests constitute a fortress,” says the Kural (742). Rivers from Ganga to Sarasvati and Cauvery are goddesses, mountains from the Himalayas to the Vindhyas are gods ; many trees are regarded as sacred (the pipal has been so since the Indus Valley civilization at least) ; so are many smaller plants and flowers too, such as those still used in rituals, and a number of animals, from the cow to the peacock. The whole of Nature is seen as pervaded with the divine Spirit. This was of course the view of most of the ancient world, from the Greeks (for whom the earth was Gaia and Demeter) to the Norsemen, the Mayas and Aztecs, and the Red Indians. But all those cultures were wiped out by the steamroller of the Judeo-Christian advance, to which any worship of Nature was “idolatry” (that is also the attitude of Islam).

Strangely, even in India the sages of old had foreseen a waning of this communion with Nature. During the Kali Yuga, says the Shiva Purana (II.1.23), one of the many signs of growing chaos is that the merchant class “have abandoned holy rites such as digging wells and tanks, and planting trees and parks.” Note that planting trees was then a “holy rite.” Today’s relentless wave of utilitarianism is the cause of this steep decline, yet we can see something of that deep reverence subsist in many aspects of Indian life, from the “sacred groves” still found in some villages to the “bhumi puja” at the start of any construction. Even some borewell contractors will perform a small puja before drilling the earth.

So if to Westerners Nature is a “discovery,” and often a shallow one, we Indians have nothing to discover there : we only need to revive the old spirit and infuse it into modern methods, including scientific ones. In doing so we must remember that science is no more than a tool, and a dangerous one as we now know. We will be able to use it rightly only if we keep alive in our hearts our deeper relationship with our material mother. And if we should certainly take a leaf out of Western ecologists’ book as regards their sense of commitment and organization, on the other hand they could also imbibe with great benefit something of the ancient Indian approach. The two together could work wonders.

*

In a letter to the Tahr’s editor, a British missionary residing at Ootacamund complained that the above guest editorial “distorted the meaning” of the Old Testament ; to her, the “ruthless abuse of Nature” condemned in the editorial had to be traced not to Jehovah but to “man’s disobedience of his creator” and to his “sinful ways,” which compelled God to drive him out of the Garden of Eden. The only hope, she concluded, lies in Jesus, “the promised Redeemer, the one who came to take the punishment for all our sin” and who can alone lead us to “everlasting life.” We reproduce below Michel Danino’s reply to this letter, published in the April-September 1999 issue of the Tahr.

I welcome Ms. Edith Powney’s comments on my guest editorial, but I wish they had been more focused on the central points at issue. In trying to avoid them, I am afraid she has only reinforced my argument.

First, I cannot agree with Ms. Powney’s accusation that I have distorted the meaning of the passages I quoted from the Old Testament. I am not interested here in the Garden of Eden : as a myth, Eden is certainly not without interest, but I am not prepared to believe it physically existed on this earth ; if it did, what happened to it ? Did Jehovah fold it up in disgust to take it back to heaven along with himself ? We know, at least, that man is the result of a long evolution of primates, themselves the result of a long evolution of mammals, themselves ... and so on back to the Big Bang. Adam was not created in a day (or a few, if we add poor Eve), and the Genesis account can at best have symbolic and mythical value, which is a different question altogether.

My point about the Bible’s distorted world-view was simpler, and twofold :

(1) In the Old Testament, Jehovah explicitly, and on several occasions, makes man the master of all other species and asks him to “rule over all creatures” ; Ms. Powney does not dispute this. Yet this “mastery” is undeniably the seed of his aggressive “smash-and-grab” attitude towards all other species, something he does as a matter of course, obviously believing it to be a God-given right (except that he should call it “Jehovah-given” to avoid confusion).

(2) Jehovah, always prompt to cursing humanity for its supposed sins, seems to hold the earth responsible for them—else, why should he so constantly threaten to bring desolation, plunder, ravage etc. upon it ? Again, Ms. Powney does not explain Jehovah’s inexplicable fury for the earth, which he claims is his own creation. Instead, she repeats the old story of the original sin, implying that man’s rebellion against Jehovah fully justified the latter’s divine “wrath.” But she does not tell us why poor Earth should suffer for man’s supposed sins. Nor does she realize that the very notion of original sin admits of a gulf between the creator and the creation. In the Indian Vedic conception, which goes back at least six thousand years, there is no “original sin,” no fall, no rebellion against the creator, no cursing of mankind or of the earth ; there is only one divine universe : “Truth is the base that bears the Earth,” says the Rig-Veda (X.85.1).

I would also like to point out that the idea of a fatal divorce brought about by the Bible between God, on one side, and his creation, on the other, is nothing new ; all I did was to present it starkly, as it deserves to be. A number of Western thinkers have said as much, from Voltaire to Jefferson or from Thomas Paine to Gore Vidal, and have pointed out that no such divorce existed in “Pagan” or pre-Christian conceptions. Let me quote just one recent instance, that of Pierre Thuillier, a respected French historian of science ; in his book published in France in 1995, The Great Implosion—Report on the Collapse of the West 1999-2002, he writes :

Christian theology defined a conception of nature perfectly adapted to technicist ambitions. As a matter of fact, in Paganism, natural realities were perceived to be living, inhabited by “souls”.... A spring (or a tree) was not reduced to a physical reality, a material reality. It was something more, an entity with a life of its own. It was therefore perfectly natural for a spring to be respected and even revered. It was seen as a marvellous manifestation of Nature, herself regarded as living. The Earth, let us recall, was also perceived as one great organism ; the Greeks called her “Mother Earth.” Even minerals appeared endowed with a certain life, and all individual existences mysteriously associated with one another amidst the Whole, of which humanity itself was but one fragment.

With Christianity, a supposedly “superior” religion, that attitude towards nature was totally disqualified. Henceforth, it was forbidden to revere springs as if they had a dignity of their own. People’s whole adoration had to be turned to the Christian God and to him alone.... It is true that nature, created by God, retained a certain spiritual value. But a radical transformation had taken place : earth, air, water and fire, now theologically stripped of all “soul,” were no more than objects which Homo technicus was free to manipulate as he wished.... Through its doctrine, the Judeo-Christian tradition somehow legitimized officially the most daring technical enterprises.[2]

As for Ms. Powney’s faith in Jesus as the Redeemer, she is certainly free to have it, just as I am free to have no use for the Christian heaven and hell. But I do not see what bearing that has on our discussion about Nature.

Finally, I have to note that Ms. Powney does not say a word of India’s (and the whole pre-Christian world’s) deep reverence for the Earth as a sacred, divine being of which we are all a part. The omission of this central point in my editorial only goes to show that this notion—which our “modern” world badly needs to rediscover before it is too late—is foreign to her mentality. I would request Ms. Powney to kindly read through the whole Bible (and the whole Koran if she can) and tell us whether she can find there a single passage showing a similar attitude of treating the Earth as our very own divine Mother. It is a pity that Ms. Powney, living in India as she does, has no use for this country’s rich ancient culture. I am tempted to try my luck with another culture, that of the Red Indians. Let me quote a few sentences from Chief Seattle’s 1855 speech to a White governor who had come to “purchase” (in reality to grab) huge tracts of the Red Indians’ lands :

What is it that the White Man wants to buy, my people will ask. It is difficult for us to understand.

How can one buy or sell the air, the warmth of the land ? That is difficult for us to imagine. If we don’t own the sweet air and the bubbling water, how can you buy it from us ? Each pine tree shining in the sun, each sandy beach, the mist hanging in the dark woods, every space, each humming bee is holy in the thoughts and memory of our people.... Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people....

We are part of the earth, and the earth is part of us. The fragrant flowers are our sisters, the reindeer, the horse, the great eagle our brothers....

We know that the White Man does not understand our way of life. To him, one piece of land is much like the other. He is a stranger coming in the night taking from the land what he needs. The earth is not his brother but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on.... He treats his mother the Earth and his Brother the sky like merchandise. His hunger will eat the earth bare and leave only a desert....

Your God is not our God ! ... Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The White Man’s God cannot love our people, or he would protect them....

But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people ? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of Nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will certainly come, for even the White Man ... cannot be exempt from the common destiny.

We may be brothers after all. We will see.

I sincerely wish my critic could quote for us such lofty thoughts and feelings from the Christian tradition ; but she cannot, for they do not exist.

Unlike Ms. Powney, I cannot end with “May God bless you,” as that formula raises some thorny questions—for instance, Which god ? an earth-cursing, self-confessed jealous and angry god, or an earth-loving and earth-saving one ? But let me hope simply that Mother Earth will not, in turn, curse us too harshly, deserved though her curse would be.