Definitely Pseudo Seculars and Leftists are negationists , they are distorting Indian History . There is no doubt that People are satisfying Muslim Community in India are Pseudo Sefculars aand Leftists . Why Large scale Butchery of Hindus by Muslim rulers are not mentioned in Indian History where as MUSLIM SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS HAVE CLEARLY WRITTEN MANY THINGS IN THEIR OWN BOOKS .
IN INDIA PEOPLE ARE PUTTING HINDUS DEFENSIVE WITH SUCH SICK ARTICLES. YOU PEOPLE DON"T HAVE RIGHT TO TALK ON THIS . ALL BJP IS DOING IS CORRECTION . SHAME THAT ROMILLLA THAPER DIDN't revised History books since 1966 . SHAME TO U ALL...
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Some observations on “Medieval India,”
History textbook for Class VII by Romila Thapar.

(Relevant also for “Medieval India,” History textbook for Class XI by Satish Chandra, which is simply an enlarged version of the first text and shares all its traits.)

Chapter 1

The year 800 AD cannot rightly be regarded as marking the beginning of the medieval period in Indian history. The ancient civilization of the land continued to flourish as before at this time and underwent no dramatic discontinuity or change to warrant the closure of one era and the heralding of another. The Indian creative genius scaled new heights in the period between the 8th and 12th centuries, as is evidenced in the profusion of religious thinkers (Shankara and Ramanuja, among a host of others), the hectic pace of temple construction (examples include the Rajarajeshwara temple at Thanjavur, the Kandariya Mahadeva temple at Khajuraho, the Jagannath temple at Puri and the Sun Temple at Konarak), and the spurt in the development of regional vernaculars.

A number of discerning scholars abroad have questioned the application of the western concept of feudalism to the Indian society of this period. In particular, they have refuted the Marxist contention that there was a paucity of money and coins in the post-Gupta period and that this triggered off feudal conditions in India. On the contrary, they say, India had a thriving money economy and the evidence in the shape of the abundant coinage found has been deliberately overlooked by Indian Marxists in order to fit Indian history in the Leftist mould.

Since all the processes that India was under going in this period in the realms specially of religion, language and literature were internally generated and internally rooted, it is difficult to comprehend the connection between this period (8th to 12th centuries) and the ensuing one (13th to 18th centuries), which clearly marked the ascendancy of external forces and culture.

Clearly the forced clubbing together of highly disparate eras has been motivated solely by the desire to downplay the cataclysmic nature of the Muslim advent in India.

In the circumstances, the second era in Indian history should properly begin with the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206 AD. Instead of focusing on the Hindu states of the 8th to the 12th centuries, which were in any case anathema to the Muslims, the introductory chapter should discuss the rise of Islam in Arabia, the basic tenets of the Muslim faith, the Islamic expansion, the Arab-non Arab tussle within the expanding Muslim polity, the status it accorded to its non-Muslim subjects, its treatment of the ancient civilizations and cultures in conquered Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Syria. The exclusivist nature of Islam and its rejection of pre-Islamic states, scripts, languages and cultures in the entire Middle East need to be adequately discussed.

Chapter 2

Since the Islamic advent was the real story of medieval India, it is wrong to forcibly bring the Cholas into the picture. The Cholas belonged neither to the feudal nor the Dark Age, nor did they share any features with Islamic states.

There is also a deliberate attempt to interpolate caste tensions into Hindu society as is evident in the off-hand reference to Shudras. In reality, the so-called Shudras were dominant castes in many areas, they controlled large amounts of land and were a force to reckon with. Ethnographic studies have also recorded the pride they took in their Shudra status till as late as the 19th century when caste underwent a series of changes as a result of colonial intervention. The noted historian, Burton Stein has alluded to the close Brahmin-peasant partnership in the extension of cultivation in the south.

In the discussion on religion, there is little attempt to highlight the fact that the reformist impulse came from within Hindu society and that many of its proponents were Brahmins.

Chapter 3

Misrepresentations about Indian society abound in this chapter as well. There are the standard stereotype references to the caste system with absolutely no appreciation of the elasticity that was its essential feature. In the context of the period under discussion, this elasticity is most vividly illustrated in the elevation of several nomad-pastoral communities into Agnikula Rajputs created by the Brahmins to specially defend the land against the invading mlechhas. Needless to say, this finds no mention in the text.

The inclusion of Mohammed Ghazni alongside the Rajputs in the discussion on the kingdoms of North India is surprising unless, of course, the intention is to blur the distinction between the two. The rest of the chapter is a continuation of the half-truth and untruths in which the book abounds. There are again the motivated statements on land grants to Brahmins, the intention obviously being to reinforce the negative stereotypes of the latter. The pertinent point, however, is what percentage of such grants were actually given to Brahmins and what percentage to other sections of Hindu society. The references to the miserable plight of the peasants and the assertion that it mattered little to them whether they were ruled by Rajput or Turk flies in the face of later statements made by the authoress herself wherein she concedes that the land tax increased from one-third to almost half of the produce by the later Mughal period. Romila Thapar’s views here seem to be colored by her commitment to the Marxist ideology of dividing the human societies to classes, real or imaginary, as a basis for all analysis.

The section on society presents a distorted view of the Indian social scene. It has long been conceded that the essential constituent of the Indian village community was its mutually dependent nature. The system was reciprocative in regard to services and redistributive in regard to agricultural produce. There was joint enterprise to raise the crops, to defend life and property from free-booters and natural calamities, there was even joint celebration of festivities. Outside observers, in fact, often noted with amazement that villages containing a sizeable number of caste groupings, could nonetheless exist as a unit. None of this finds mention in the text.

The section on religion creates the impression that it was only with the advent of the Bhakti movement that the lower castes were brought into the Hindu spiritual ambit. This is incorrect. From the outset, only Vedic literature was outside the purview of the common people but the philosophical truths contained in it were popularized and made easily comprehensible through the wide dissemination of the Agamas, Ramayana and Mahabharata which incidentally also contained the Gita.

Chapter 4

The momentous fact that for the first time in Indian history the religion of the rulers was different from that of the ruled is not mentioned in this chapter. Nor the fact that from thence on, the economic exploitation of the peasantry was systematized as never before, courtesy, the system of measurement of land and record of actual production.

The extremely closed nature of the governing class, with entry being restricted to immigrant Muslims, is also glossed over. There is no reference to Balban’s well-advertised repugnance for even Hindu converts to Islam, nor the fact that the first Indian-born Muslim to accidentally stray in was soon executed. References to Hindu participation in the system are misleading. The so-called Hindu involvement was restricted to the clerical level, much as it was under the British. If Indian participation at the lower levels of the administration did not make the colonial state an Indo-British venture, surely the same logic should hold good here as well.

The word jaziya does not occur even once in the discussion on the entire Sultanate period. Firozshah is described as interested in the ancient culture of India when the fact is that it was during his region that jaziya was levied on Brahmins for the first time.

The pan-Islamic dimension of the political philosophy of the Sultanate has not even been alluded to. All the Sultans, without exception, looked to the Caliph as the source of their legitimacy. Even after the Caliph has been murdered and the Caliphate abolished (1258), his name continued to appear on the coins of the Sultans of India. They continued to swear allegiance to a “hypothetical Caliph.”

The attempt to sanitize the activities of every Muslim ruler is particularly glaring in the case of Muhammad bin Tughlaq. The intensity of Hindu resistance is ignored, the savagery involved in the conversion of Kashmir is not even hinted at. Similarly, the religious dimension of the Vijaynagar-Bahmani dispute is totally missing in the narrative. The entire exercise is reminiscent of the attempts to white-wash Nazi history by their modern apologists.

Chapter 5

Despite the misleading assertions, there is simply no concrete evidence of Hindu-Muslim rapprochement in the Sultanate period. It is grossly improper to include Hindu princes, landholders and priests as constituents of the new aristocracy that arose at this time. The author should be asked to furnish the actual details of such participation. Leaving aside the ruling houses of Rajputana, Rajput resistance even in the neighbouring Katiher region (remained Rohelkhand after the Afghans) remained intense even throughout Mughal rule. Similarly, the participation of landholders in the ruling class remained restricted even under the Mughals, a point conceded by the late Prof. Athar Ali. To assert that the involvement of such groups was intense in the Sultanate period is a blatant form of dishonesty.

It is also grotesque to talk of the respect of the Delhi Sultans for Brahmins and to suggest that both Brahmins and the Ulema were equally permitted to spread their faiths in the subcontinent. Nor is there any mention of the infamous pilgrimage tax. Aside from the reference to Mohammed Ghazni, there is no mention of temple destruction in this period.

The talk of intermarriage between Turks, Afghans and Hindus who had been converted ignores the deep racialism of the rulers and the contempt they had for Indian Muslims. It is not mentioned that the non-Muslim partner of the marriage always had to convert to Islam.

There is similar dishonesty in the discussion on the Sufis. There is no evidence to suggest that the Sufis advised Hindus to be better Hindus as the authoress alleges. Indeed, in the popular Indian folklore, Sufis are viewed as pioneer Muslims who ventured out to claim fresh territory for their faith. “Warrior Sufis” were active participants in frontier warfare. Moreover, Sufis did not challenge any of the precepts of Islam and always remained within the Islamic tradition.

Contrary to the impression given, Muslims had no role in the development of the regional languages discussed here. Also, the architectural style remained distinctly Islamic and did not deviate from Islamic forms in the slightest, despite the addition of a few Hindu frills.

Chapter 6

Babur’s well-known dislike for Hindustan is not mentioned, nor his association with the Ayodhya temple. The Renaissance and the Reformation in Europe are not relevant here.

Chapter 7

There is no hint at the complex processes that went into the shaping of Akbar’s policies, nor the fact that he started his reign as a conservative Sunni Muslim monarch. He, after all, re-christened Hindu holy cities (Prayag being the most notable), imposed the jaziya and pilgrimage tax, and even indulged in forcible conversions in the early part of his reign. Though he ultimately did seek a more neutral legitimation, at least by way of supplement, the state under him remained unmistakably Muslim. 70% of his nobility consisted of foreigner-Muslims. The Hindu representation was confined to the Rajputs, there being just four other Hindus in the upper echelons of the nobility. These were Birbal, Todar Mal, his son, and another Khatri.

An alien tongue remained the court language and the language of administration. The translation of Hindu epics into Persian was intended to wean away the Hindu administrative elite from their own languages, and thrust Persian on them. Akbar’s so called patronage of Hindu writers also needs to be examined afresh, in view of the fact that the greatest Hindu writer of the age, Tulsidas, certainly received no state funding.

The section on the Mansabadari system is poorly formulated and incapable of being comprehended by the students.

The write-up on the Din-i-Ilahi smacks of total intellectual dishonesty. In the western world, it is by now generally accepted that the Ilahi was not influenced by, nor a concession, to Hinduism. In fact, nine of the ten virtues it enjoined were derived directly from the Koran, while the tenth was a commonplace basis of all Sufi thought. It should be noted that even his Hindu wife Jodhabai, was converted to Islam and buried with him in the manner of a Muslim at Sikandra.

The omission of Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, the leading revivalist thinker of the time, is also indicative of the political agenda of the writers.

Chapter 8

There is almost total silence on the growing powers of orthodoxy in the reigns of Jehangir and Shah Jehan. The intention is to present them in as favourable a light as possible. Thus, Jehangir’s revolt against his father, and his suspected involvement in the murder of Abul Fazl, who was a relatively liberal Muslim, find no mention in the text.

The lengthy treatment given to the mythical chain of justice at Jehangir’s palace further confirms the deliberately biased treatment of the subject.

The cursory discussion on Aurangzeb, which is also appended to this chapter, is not only a masterly exercise in evasion, but also incomprehensible on its own terms. After reading the text, it still remains unclear why according to the authoress herself, the Sikhs, Marathas and Jats revolted against the Mughal domain. She further talks of Aurangzeb having trouble with the Rajputs, rather than vice versa. Incidentally, the word jaziya is used for the first and last time here (page 109 of the book), but the reader is not even told what this tax was all about. To further confuse matters, Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi is discussed in the middle of Aurangzeb, while there is no mention of Shah Waliullah.

Chapter 9

The most important characteristic of the post-Aurangzeb period was that the successor states continued to uphold and propagate the Mughal system and its Muslim values, and made no attempt to link with the indigenous ethos. Needless to say, this finds no mention in this chapter.

A Review of
Romila Thapar’s ‘Ancient India, A Textbook of History for Middle Schools’
NCERT: New Delhi (1987)
by Vishal Agarwal
25 November 2002
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Opening Remarks -
This review deals with the withdrawn NCERT textbook on history for Std. VI authored by the eminent historian Romila Thapar.

When the text of the first edition of the book (published in 1966) is compared with its current edition (July 1987, reprinted 13 times till January 2000), we do not find any significant differences between the two. The changes are primarily cosmetic – sentences added here and there, a word or two changed, and so on. Some errors are corrected here, a subtle shift in emphasis made elsewhere, and so on. This means that in 34 years (1966 – 2000), Thapar does not see the need to revise completely her understanding as well as her presentation of history of ancient India to middle level school children of India.

As indicated in the ‘Foreword’ of this first edition of the book, we find that the Chief Editor is S. Gopal, whereas the other editors of the series are Romila Thapar, S. Nurul Hasan and Satish Chandra. Nurul Hasan is dead, S. Gopal passed away a few months ago, and Thapar, Gopal and Chandra have continued to be authors or editors for NCERT even 35 years later. It appears that India has not produced better or equally good historians who could write history texts for school children, in all these 3½ decades! The hegemony of this small group of Marxist historians (or their fellow travelers) in producing school texts for impressionable schoolchildren in India all these years is quite alarming.

Unless stated otherwise, this review pertains to the 1987 edition of the textbook that continued to be in use till 2001. A few references will however be made to the 1966 edition for various reasons.

Chapter 0: The Study of Indian History –
The introductory chapter alone in the current edition is quite different from the 1966 edition. It stresses the current trends in historiography of ancient India – such as a greater emphasis on the lives of common men rather than on aristocrats and kings alone in older texts of history. It discusses how history of ancient periods is reconstructed, the various sources of information for the same, and how civilization in ancient India could have begun. The chapter as such, makes very dry reading for a 6th Std. student, because there are so few illustrations. Study aids such as well-demarcated sections with section headings are missing in this chapter. A significant omission from the chapter is a map of India, which could have greatly facilitated the understanding of the essay type text.

The book makes no attempt to relate the present with the past, even though the author remarks (page 1) that one of the reasons for studying history is to understand our present.

Chapter I: Early Man –
The chapter opens with a remark of questionable accuracy -

“It took almost 300,000 years for man to change from a food-gatherer to a food-producer.” (page 9)

As even the Marxist historian Irfan Habib’s recent book points out, the Homo erectus had probably started gathering food 700,00 to 500,00 years ago, or even earlier. Since the Neolithic revolution involving large-scale production of food occurred less about 10,000 years before present, it is reasonable to suggest that man took 500,000 years or perhaps a longer time to switch from food-gathering to food-producing, and not a mere 300,000 years as the textbook teaches.

The chapter again makes very boring reading, due to the paucity of illustrations. The text differs from the 1966 edition only in a few sentences here and there. The only significant addition, in my opinion, is a section on the standard anthropological explanation for the rise of religious beliefs in primitive human societies.

Chapter II: Man Takes to City Life -
Chapter II of the book deals with the Harappan culture.

In her 1966 edition, Thapar had made an erroneous remark –

“The earliest city to be discovered in India was Mohenjo-daro on the river Indus in Sind. Further up the Indus valley another ancient city was excavated and this was Harappa near the modern Montgomery.” [THAPAR 1966:30].

This has fortunately been corrected in the latest edition to read [THAPAR 1987:24] –

“The earliest city to be discovered in India was Harappa in Punjab (Presently in Pakistan). Further down in the Indus valley another ancient city was excavated and this was Mohenjo-Daro in Sind.”

The present edition however still states the wrong reason for calling the Indus Valley Civilization as ‘Harappa culture’ –

“The archaeologists called the civilization of these ancient cities the Indus Valley Civilization, because both of these cites and other sites sharing the same culture were found in the Indus valley. But for the last forty years archaeologists have been digging in other parts of northern and western India and have found more cities that resemble those of the Indus valley. Therefore the Indus Valley Civilization is now also called the Harappa culture since the pattern of living in these resembles that of Harappa….” (page 24).

The correct reason for calling the Indus Valley Civilization alternately as the Harappan Culture or Harappan Civilization is the accepted model of naming archaeological cultures after the names of the sites where they are discovered or first identified. In other words, the Indus Valley Civilization is alternately referred to as Harappan Civilization because Harappa was first site belonging to the culture that was discovered.

The paragraph ends with a meaningless statement (page 24) –

“It is also called the Indus Civilization because it spread over areas beyond the Indus valley”.

Perhaps, Thapar intended to provide a rationale for distinguishing the term ‘Indus Civilization’ from the ‘Indus Valley Civilization’. The name ‘Indus Civilization’ was actually the title of the book on Mature Harappan Civilization (with its fully developed urban character), written by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, and first published in 1953 when the dense concentration of Harappan sites along the Hakra-Ghaggar plains and in Gujarat was not appreciated yet. In fact, there is a contemporary view that the name of this civilization should be changed to ‘Indus-Sarasvati Civilization’ or something similar. This view is dismissed by Marxist historians in India as a Hindutva fantasy, but its logic is nevertheless accepted by apolitical, sober American scholars such as Jane McIntosh –

“…Suddenly it became apparent that the “Indus” Civilization was a misnomer – although the Indus had played a major role in the development of the civilization, the “lost Saraswati” River, judging by the density of settlement along its banks, had contributed an equal or greater part to its prosperity. Many people today refer to this early state as the “Indus-Sarswati Civilization” and continuing references to the “Indus Civilization” should be seen as an abbreviation in which the “Saraswati” is implied.”

Listing the civilizations contemporaneous with the Indus Civilization, Thapar remarks (page 26) –

“In the region now called Iraq, there was the Sumerian Civilization.”

The nomenclature is wrong, and needs to be corrected as follows - Mespotamia comprises two parts – the northern part called Assyria, and the southern called Babylonia. The latter itself is subdivided into a northern region called Akkad and the southern remainder known as Sumer. Babylonia is normally taken to mean the flood plain of Tigris and Euphrates. In other words, ‘in the region now called Iraq’, only one of the civilizations was Sumer.

On the storage of surplus food in the Harappan Civilization, she writes (page 26) –

“More grain was grown that was actually eaten by the people in the villages. This extra or surplus grain was taken to the cities to feed the people of the towns and was stored in large granaries or buildings specially made for storing grain.”

Later, in page 27 as well, Thapar speculates the existence of the granary at Harappa. She remarks –

“In the citadel at Harappa, the most impressive buildings were the granaries.”

While Thapar devotes several sentences to a hypothetical description of how grain was transported in boats along the river, the identification of certain structures at Harappa, Lothal etc., as granaries is purely speculative and tentative.

The chapter contains a few pointless statements, which would bore the reader by their flatness. For instance, in discussing the construction of Harappan homes, THAPAR [page 29] says –

“The roofs were flat. There were few windows but plenty of doors which were probably made of wood. The kitchen had a fire-place …..”

The monotonous discussion could have been made a lot more lively and memorable by relating it to modern housing patterns in India. As an example of this approach, let me cite an analogous passage describing Harappan houses –

“Despite the differences in size, the housing in the major Indus settlements was generally of a high standard, suggesting that even the least important individuals led a comfortable existence. There were many features that were common to all or most of the houses. Often, especially in the larger houses, a small janitor’s room faced directly on to the house doorway so that the visitor was first confronted and checked out by a doorkeeper. Once within the house, the visitor would turn immediately left or right into a passage that led into the courtyard, the center of the household, as it is in modern India.”
“A stair led from the courtyard to the upper part of the house – generally one and in some cases two upper stories. The stair probably continued upward to give access to the roof. Constructed of wooden beams covered by matting and plaster, the roof provided an additional space for the family to sit, talk, and sleep, as they do today….In some settlements, namely Kalibangan, Banawali and Lothal, the houses also included a room set apart as a domestic shrine, a feature also common in modern Indian homes, although such shrines have not been found at Mohenjo Daro.”
“Houses of any size at Mohenjo Daro would also have a private well, sturdily constructed of wedge-shaped baked bricks – those without a well of their own, however, were well served by the public water supply…Other cities were less generously provided with wells but also had an excellent drinking water supply in the form of reservoirs and cisterns. The area immediately inside the walls of the great settlement at Dholavira was taken up by enormous reservoirs that covered around a fifth of the enclosed area of the settlement. Water played an important – indeed a vital part in the life of the Indus people, and their management and use of the domestic and urban water supply were way ahead of those of any other civilization of their time. Not for another 2,000- odd years were hydraulic engineers of this caliber to reemerge, with the Romans in the Old World and Chavin in the New.”
“One of the most impressive rooms of the Indus house was the bathroom…Bathing would have followed the custom that still holds today, of pouring water over oneself with a small pot – but in some house-holds there was the refinement of a “shower”: a small stair along one side of the bathroom allowed another person to ascend and pour a steady stream of water over the bather. The bathroom floor, constructed of stone or sawn baked bricks, allowed the water to flow off into the efficient drainage system that served the city; via pottery drainpipes or drainage chutes..Wastewater was collected into small open drains in the lanes and from there flowed into the main drainage system. This ran along the main streets hygienically covered by bricks or stone slabs. At intervals there were inspection covers so that the free flow of the drains could be checked and maintained.”

Understandably, the description above might have been too long for a Std. VI textbook. Nevertheless, the repeated references to the similarity of the Harappan dwellings to modern Indian homes, and how the drainage system in the Harappan cities was well ahead of its times, makes the reading more interesting for students. On the other hand, Thapar’s book is replete with such dry passages which make for a tedious reading, and are difficult for the student to retain in his mind, or relate to his own immediate society and environment.

And on the fall of Harappan culture, she says [1966:40] –

“The Harappa culture lasted for about a thousand years. By 1500 B.C., when the Aryans began to arrive in India, the Harappa culture had collapsed. Why did this happen? The cities may have been destroyed by floods, which came regularly; or there may have been an epidemic or some terrible disease which killed the people. The climate also began to change and the region became more and more dry and like a desert. Or else the cities may have been attacked and were unable to defend themselves.”

The Aryan Migration Theory that Thapar alludes to is also contested. In fact, prominent archaeologists, anthropologists as well as Indologists now dismiss any large-scale migration of the ‘Aryans’ into India. Not only is the concept derived from nineteenth century theories of ‘races’, it is based on the assumption that languages spread only by migration of peoples speaking them, as Thapar seems to hold.

There is no description of various Chalcolithic cultures in the interior of India before she jumps straight to the Aryans.

It is a real pity that Thapar did not revise her book between 1987 and 2000, because the chapter could have greatly benefited from the reports on excavations at several new Harappan sites within India (such as Kunal, Malvan, Surkotada, Dholavira etc.). A prominent omission is the fact that the greatest concentration of these sites is found along the Ghaggar-Hakra river basin, identified by most archaeologists and non-Marxist historians today with the Vedic Sarasvati. Moreover, there is hardly any attempt in this chapter to correlate features of the Harappan culture with the present Indian culture.

Chapter III: Life in the Vedic Age -
It would be interesting to read Romila Thapar’s presentation of the Vedic Aryans, in Chapter III, titled “Life in the Vedic Age”, since historiography of this era has become highly politicized in India.

The very first paragraph of the chapter in the 1966 edition gave misleading information –

“Aryans came from outside India, from north-eastern Iran and the region around the Caspian Sea. Those that came to India are called Indo-Aryans to distinguish them from the other Aryans who went to various parts of western Asia and Europe.” [THAPAR 1966:43].

Fortunately, this has been modified in the present edition (page 37) as –

“It was during this period that a people speaking an Indo-Aryan language (which is the basis of Vedic Sanskrit) emerged in north-western India. We do not know where they came from; perhaps they came from north-eastern Iran or the region near the Caspian Sea or Central Asia.”

The central idea, that there were migrations of Indo-Aryan speakers into India from the North West remains, despite the absence of evidence for any such migration around 1500 BCE. Thapar then discusses the fact that the concept of race as applied to Aryans has been called into question, and so on. However, the entire description of Vedic peoples in her chapter is nothing but a euphemistic version of the colonial-racist Aryan Invasion Theory, showing how the ‘Aryans’ subjugated the ‘indigenous Dasas and Dasyus’.

Thapar continues (page 37)–

“They are called ‘Indo-Aryans’ to distinguish them from others who spoke various Aryan languages and went to western Asia and Europe.”

The statement is pointless, because the use of the word ‘Aryan’ to denote speakers of Indo-European tongues other than Indo-Aryan has been given up several decades ago. In fact, it is now held by scholars of historical linguistics that the ‘Indo-Iranians’ split into ‘Iranians’ and ‘Indo-Aryans’. Moreover, Thapar is completely wrong in asserting that there were no Indo-Aryans in Europe or in western Asia. Trubachev has recently written a book on the Indo-Aryans in Ukraine.

As for Indo-Aryan in western Asia, certain words which clearly belong to some Indo-Aryan dialect, are attested in archaeology even before the chariot driving manual. Even with regard to the Hittite texts, it should be noted that although they were written between the 16th and the 14th centuries BCE by and large, it appears that some of them are copies of the originals that were written between 17th and 16th centuries BCE.
Indo-Aryan names are also found in a tablet dating from the Agade dynastic period (2300 –2100 BCE). HARMATTA reconstructs two of the names in the table as ‘Arisen’ and as ‘Somasen’.

Even R. S. SHARMA, another Marxist historian like herself, has accepted the presence of Indo-Aryans in western Asia in the third millennium BCE.

Therefore, Thapar’s explanation of the term ‘Indo-Aryans’ is wrong.

Romila Thapar continues (page 38) –
“The Aryans at first settled in the Punjab. Gradually they moved south-eastwards into the region just north of Delhi. There used to be a river flowing nearby called Sarasvati but the water of this river has now dried up. Here they remained for many years, and here they prepared the collection of hymns known as the Veda. In the same region is the plain of Kurukshetra where, it is believed, the great battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas was fought. Sometime later, the Aryans moved still further eastwards into the Ganga valley, clearing the thick forests as they went along.”

The mention of Sarasvati as a river along whose banks the Aryans dwelt is very noteworthy. Currently, Thapar’s colleagues like Irfan Habib and R S Sharma brand anyone who mentions this river in north India as ‘Communal’, ‘Hindu fascist’ and ‘anti-Dravidian’!

Thapar equates the Painted Grey Ware Culture with the Vedic Age (page 38), and also adds (page 39) –

“Our knowledge of the Aryans is not based, as it is in the case of the Harappa people, mostly on digging up their habitation sites. We know about the Aryans from the hymns and the poems and stories which they composed and which were recited and passed on from generation to generation until they were finally written down. We call this “literary evidence,” and it provides the clues to their history. But recently digging in certain places such as Hastinapur and Atranji-Khera (in western Uttar Pradesh) has also supplied further information about their culture.”

It is clear that the association of Hastinapur and Atranji-Khera with the Aryans was apparently accepted by Thapar herself in 1960’s and right up to 1987 at least, on the basis of excavation reports by archaeologists like B. B. Lal. However, subsequent to the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992, Thapar has taken a somersault and she spares no efforts to lampoon B. B. Lal for searching for Aryans in archaeological records. Ever since Lal has taken the stand that the Babri mosque did stand atop a pre-existing temple, the entire gang of ‘Secular’ historians has been maligning him to no avail. Thapar’s criticism of Lal should be seen in this context as a subtle, politically motivated attempt to link Lal with the so-called Upper Caste Hindu fantasies of being superior ‘Aryans’. In other words, considering that Thapar herself linked the PGW culture at Hastinapur and Atranji-Khera with the Aryans earlier, even in school textbooks, it is hypocritical and and dishonest on her part to criticize B. B. Lal now on that score.

The sole reason for equating the PGW with late Aryans is the assumption that the late Vedic literature is contemporary with this ware, dated archaeologically in the first half of the first millennium BC. Archaeologists however find nothing particularly ‘Aryan’ about PGW. If PGW represents the Indo-Aryans then, according to accepted theories, similar or antecedent/precursor types of pottery should be located west of the Ganga-Yamuna region on the Iranian Plateau. But, B. K. THAPAR has noted the absence of any PGW antecedent types of pottery anywhere along the route supposedly taken by the Aryans, and he has outlined the chronological problems associated with accounts. Similarly, Dilip CHAKRABARTI points out that the traits of PGW indicates an eastern, rather than a western origin –

“The Painted Grey Ware culture, thus, with its traits of rice cultivation and the use of domestic pig and buffalo seems to suggest a culture distinctly eastern in bias and not a western one as its suggested Aryan authorship would indicate.”

Jim SHAFFER states some additional objections against relating PGW with late Aryans. According to Shireen RATNAGAR, it is even debatable if the PGW constitutes a ‘culture’.

We see here how the failure to revise textbooks in a timely and regular manner has resulted in teaching of outdated theories to students.

Thapar obviously does not fail to mention that Vedic Aryans ate beef, even in her brief discussion on their foot habits (pp. 40-41)–

“The cow held pride of place among the animals because the Aryans were dependent on the produce of the cow. In fact, for special guests beef was served as a mark of honour (although in later centuries, brahmanas were forbidden to eat beef).”

The assertion that only Brahmins were forbidden to eat beef, and not other sections of the Indian society seems to be politically motivated, because it promotes anti-Brahminism, and would tend to discredit any modern day anti-cow-slaughter movements in India as ‘Brahminical’. Thapar has obviously not offered any proof that other sections of the Indian society, the Kshatriyas and Vaishyas for instance, were allowed to eat beef in ‘later centuries’.

And then, Thapar perpetuates this Aryan fantasy of their love for horses (Page 41) –

“The horse is an animal which was not native to India and was brought in by the Aryans from Iran and Central Asia. The horse was used largely for drawing chariots. Chariot racing was a favourite amusement. The chariot-maker was a respected member of the society.”

The notion that the horse was brought to India only by the Aryans has been controverted by archaeology. Remains of horses have been found in several Harappan sites and have been identified as such by competent zoologists at Kuntasi, Shikarpur, Malvan etc.

The statement that the chariot maker was a respectable member of the Vedic society is inaccurate, because by the later Vedic age, his ‘twice-born’ status was certainly brought into question. Clearly, Thapar has confounded the early Vedic Age (i.e., the time of Rigveda) with the later Vedic age.

The assertion that chariot racing was a favorite amusement of the Aryans, is also questionable, despite the fact that many antiquated books mention it. In fact, the impression one gets on reading the mention of chariots in the Vedas is that it was reserved for gods, for the elites and for ritual and military purposes. Its use for recreational chariot races was rather rare.

The author then proceeds to describe the Aryan invasion in a fully blown manner for impressionable young students (page 41)–

“The Aryans and the Dasyus – The Aryans, when they settled in various parts of north India, were hostile to the indigenous people whom they referred to as ‘Dasas’ and ‘Dasyus’. The Dasas and Dasyus did not worship the same gods as the Aryans and spoke a language which was different from Vedic Sanskrit. Some Dasa chiefs were treated with great respect, but many of the Dasa people were enslaved so that eventually the word ‘dasa’ came to mean slave. The Dasas who were enslaved had to do the most difficult and lowly work and were not treated kindly. But the Aryans also mixed with local people and married into local families. The word ‘Aryan’ came to refer to any person who was respected.”

In reality, the Vedic texts do not offer any evidence that the Aryans were migrants or invaders in India, nor do they suggest or state that the Dasas were indigenous Indians. Such an inference can be drawn only from the prior assumption of the Aryan Invasion Theory.

There is also no evidence that the Dasa were the native Indians who were enslaved, and forced to do all the menial work. The use of the word ‘slave’ to describe them in the Rigvedic context is most unfortunate, as it creates the impression the economy in the Vedic Age was based on production by enslaved people. Rather, at best, the impression one gets from the Vedic texts is one of dasas being domestic servants. Many Indologists also equate Dasas with earlier Indo-Aryan migrants in India and Iran, or with the old Iranians.

The statement that the Dasas spoke a language that was different from the Vedic Aryans, is also based on tendentious and erroneous interpretations of Rigveda.

Thapar’s description is therefore crude and draws too much on antiquated colonial-racist theories.

It would be interesting to reproduce here the parallel passages of the earlier edition of her book -

“The Aryans and the Dasyus When the Aryans first arrived in India, they had to fight for land with the people already living in India. These people were called the Dasyus or Dasas. The Aryans were fair-skinned and the Dasyus are described as being dark-skinned with flat noses. The Dasyus did not worship the same gods as the Aryans. They spoke a language which the Aryans did not understand, because the latter spoke Sanskrit. The Aryans who fought and defeated the Dasyus did not treat them kindly and enslaved many of them. The Dasyus had to work for the Aryans and were made to do the most difficult and lowly work. The Aryans made it a rule that no Aryan could marry a Dasyu.” [THAPAR 1966:48].

The differences between the two versions are too obvious to be repeated here.

According to this older edition of the textbook, the Aryans even practiced apartheid –

“Society The Aryans and the Dasyus lived in separate parts of the same village and in the beginning they were not allowed to mix with one another. The Aryans were also divided amongst themselves into three classes. The most powerful people were the king and his warriors who were also called kshatriyas. Equally important were the priests or brahmans; and then came the craftsmen and cultivators or vaishyas. There was in addition a fourth group called the shudras. This consisted of Dasyus and those Aryans who had mixed with the Dasyus and married Dasyus; so they were looked down upon…” [THAPAR 1966:48].

In the current edition, the last sentence is presented in the following edited version (page 42) –

“This consisted of Dasyus and those Aryans who were looked down upon”.

Although this version is more correct, it still relies on the twin equations of ‘Aryans = foreigners’ and ‘Dasyus = indigenous Indians’.

Every possible opportunity is availed of by Thapar to ridicule or mock Vedic learning. For instance, she picks up 1 out of more than 1000 hymns in Rigveda, and then misinterprets it (page 42)–

“…Young boys stayed with the priests who taught them how to recite the hymns of the Vedas. There is an amusing description of the pupils in one of the hymns. It is said that the pupils repeating the lesson after the teacher sound like frogs croaking before the coming of the rains.”

The view that Rigveda VII.103, alluded to by Thapar above, is somehow ‘amusing’ is refuted by current scholarship, which sees a fairly serious rain-charm here. In fact, no derision of Veda reciting Brahmins is implied in this hymn at all.

It is unfortunate that as a specialist in ancient Indian history, Thapar is ignorant of the language of the original texts (such as the Vedas) or even of significant secondary literature on them.

The description of the Vedic religion is quite reductionist (page 43-44) and might well have been taken from a Christian Missionary propaganda booklet. There is no attempt to related Vedic religion with modern Hindu religious practices, an omission which contributes to dullness of reading the chapter.

Chapter IV- India: From 600 B.C. to 400 B.C. -
The fourth chapter deals with the rise of the Kingdom of Magadha. Unfortunately, here also we see no description of culture and civilization in Peninsular India and the focus is still the Ganga valley.

Contrasting Vedic religion with Buddhism and Jainism, Thapar (page 57) says –

“Buddhism and Jainism had followers among the craftsmen, traders, peasants and untouchables, because they felt that these religions were not difficult to practice. The brahmans on the other hand had made their religion difficult to practice because of the many ceremonies and rituals…..”

The statement has a subtle bias against the Brahmin community. It could have been ignored as a statement of a historical fact, but alarmingly, the subtle bias appears so often in the text that the student can scarcely miss her emphasis on the Brahminical hegemony. Thus, the Brahmins are mentioned as recorders of laws that promoted casteism and discrimination against lower castes (page 53), they bestowed divine right to rule upon kings only if they submitted to Brahminical ceremonies (page 50), their influence was great because they were king’s advisors and without them the king could not rule (page 50), the king collected taxes for various reasons among with the support of Brahmins is mentioned (page 50), as priests they became messengers between gods and men, and ‘so were naturally powerful’ (page 43), the Brahmins became more important than other castes, and the kshatriyas in particular, by ‘making religion very important’ (page 42), only the Brahmins were forbidden to eat beef in later ages (pages 40-41) and so on.

It is surprising that there is hardly any worthwhile discussion of Upanishadic doctrines in the book although much space is devoted to Jainism and Buddhism. One would expect that after frequent criticisms of Vedic ritual in subtle and not so subtle ways in her textbook, Thapar would have dwelt upon the advantages or the positive aspects of Upanishadic thought. However, any positive presentation of any aspect of Hinduism and Hindu spirituality as such has no place in Indian ‘secularism’, and therefore the omission is not surprising.

Chapter V – The Mauryan Empire:

While discussing the Ashokan edicts, a subtle bias is created in the minds of students by stating that while Prakrit was spoken by the common people, whereas Sanskrit was spoken by the educated upper classes (page 62) where there is actually no need to say so. Thapar’s own ideological and political slant becomes obvious when one notices how she fails to mention that the Buddhists and Jains themselves composed their texts in Sanskrit in later times, even when she could have done so later in Chapter VI.

Rather, in Chapter VIII of the textbook, Thapar does not fail to mention that -

“The Vedic religious texts were in Sanskrit which only the priests and the few who were educated could understand…..Writers such as Dandin wrote in Sanskrit, since they were writing for the court circles and the upper castes.” (page 114)

She never asks how many Buddhists and Jains continued to understand Pali and Prakrit in later centuries, or how many Muslims in India understood Arabic, the language of Koran. This constant linkage of Sanskrit with ‘upper castes’ and ‘Brahmins’ is designed to create hatred against the beautiful language in the impressionable minds of students.

The lengthy description of the rule and policies of Ashoka is inspiring. After all, he along with Emperor Akbar, are the two greatest royal heroes of the ‘secular’ historians. No Hindu ruler even comes close to them in greatness.

Chapter VI: India from 200 B.C. to A.D. 300 –

The chapter has a misleading statement towards its beginning (page 71)–

“India, South of the Vindhya mountain and the Narmada river was known in ancient times as Daksinapatha; now it is called the Deccan. South of the Deccan is the land of the Dravidian speaking people.”

The statement is false because there are crores of speakers of Dravidian languages (Kannanda and Telugu) even on the Deccan plateau. Anyway, it is still an improvement over what she wrote in the first edition, where she seemed to subscribe to the Aryan-Dravidian binary with regard to Indian culture and population. For instance, she said [THAPAR 1966:83] –

“India south of the Vindhya mountains and the Narmada river was known in ancient times as Dakshinapatha; now it is called the Deccan. South of the Deccan is the land of the Dravids or Tamils. Form ancient times these lands were the homes of Indian peoples of non-Aryan origins….”

On page 78, she makes an anachronistic statement –

“The southeast region came to be the land of the Tamils, because Tamil was the language spoken there”.

In reality, Tamil and Malayalam did not become two separate languages till the end of the first millennium A.D., so that even the southwest region was very well a part of the ‘land of Tamils’ in the period of time under discussion.

On page 83, Thapar unnecessarily pays credence to the legend that Christianity arrived in India in the first century A.D. As a historian, she should have been a little more skeptical because competent scholars reject this legend and place the arrival of Christianity into India at least 3 centuries later. Apparently, excessive skepticism must be practiced by secular historians when Hinduism is discussed, but the standards can be relaxed a little for other faiths.

Chapter 7: The Age of the Guptas -

The 1966 edition of the textbook mentioned that the Gupta period has been referred to sometimes as the “Golden Age” because this period saw great achievements of Indian culture [1966:101]. The present edition however omits the phrase, consistent with Marxist historiography of D. D. Kosambi, D. N. Jha and other Marxist historians who find all kinds of pedantic reasons for downgrading the evaluation of this period, and reject the term ‘Golden Age’.

Unlike Jha, Thapar does not discuss in detail why the period should not be termed as the ‘Golden Age’, since this very phrase is missing in the text. Rather, she summarizes some of the reasons against this nomenclature (page 103, last para) that are found in Jha’s books on ancient India. An obvious but unstated reason that prevents Thapar et al from labeling the Gupta Age as the Golden Age is their phobia of Hindu pride and Hindu Nationalism. These historians think that they could promote Hindu fundamentalism in India even by remotely alluding to the greatness and glory of any period of Indian history that could be linked with Hinduism.

Nor surprisingly, Thapar now includes the following ‘disclaimer’ type statement in her textbook, a statement that was absent in the first edition of the book -

“In the Gupta period, Hinduism became a powerful religion. The word ‘Hindu’ was however not used until a later time by the Arabs when they referred to the people of Hind, i.e., India. The Hindus were worshippers of Shiva, Shakti and Vishnu. Since the worship of Shiva and Vishnu became very popular at this time, we refer to it as Hinduism even during the Gupta period.”

Thapar is wrong in sating that the word ‘Hindu’ was used first by Arabs. It was first used by the Persians, and is used to refer to people of India in the inscriptions of the Persian Emperor Darius I as early as 6th century B.C.E. Cognates of ‘Hindu’ and ‘India’ also occur in Chinese and Greek writings several centuries before Arabs used the words.

One wonders why Thapar is so extra- cautious here to point out the anachronistic usage of the word ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’ by her, when her entire textbook is so full of such anachronistic terms? Was the ‘Kashmir valley’ termed as such in prehistoric times (pg. 12)? Did ‘India’ exist as an entity (religious, cultural or political) in pre-Harappan times (pg. 13)? Is there any evidence for the existence of ‘Jainism’ and ‘Buddhism’ before 400 B.C. (chapter 4) more than there is evidence for the existence of ‘Hinduism’ in the Gupta Age? Did the Kushanas arrive from the ‘Chinese Turkestan’ (pg. 85) in the first century A.D.? Did Zoroaster really preach ‘Zoroastrianism’ (pg. 111) in ‘Iran’, ‘sometime before 600 B.C., as the textbook claims?

My point is that the ancient past is necessarily described with the help of modern terms and names, and this is obviously the case with Thapar’s textbook also. However, the selective manner in which Thapar makes a special case of the late nature of the word ‘Hinduism’ clearly indicates that she wishes to indoctrinate the Hindu students that their faith is not as old as they believe it to be and that their religion as such did not exist as such before the Gupta Age.

It is really amusing to see how Thapar and other Marxist historians first accept the hegemony of Protestant Christian terminology in defining religious ‘isms’ and then proceed to declare that the religion ‘Hinduism’ did not exist till recent centuries. From an orthodox Hindu perspective, one could assert even today that the Semitic religions are nothing more than ‘panthas’ or sects in relation to Sanatana Dharma. So why impose Western and Eurocentric concepts on Indian students? One could argue that the very category ‘religion’ is inappropriate to describe the sacred traditions of India and China, just as the category ‘dharma’ may not apply to Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Chapter VIII: The Age of Smaller Kingdoms –
Thapar states (page 111) that Zoroaster preached sometime before 600 B.C., a date that is clearly rejected by most Indologists and Iranists. Most now settle for 900 BCE or even a few centuries earlier.

Chapter IX: India and the World -
The 9th chapter, which is the last one in the book, has a 3 page long section on Islam which summarizes the historical evolution of the religion as well as its religious tenets. This was totally unnecessary as it does not have much of a bearing on ancient Indian history. It will be noted that while long sections in the book have been devoted to Buddhism, Jainism and Islam, the references to Hinduism are perfunctory or incidental. There is absolutely no meaningful description of doctrines of the Upanishads, the Gita, the Darshanas, or of the rise of Vedanta. There is not even a mention of Adi-Shankaracharya, who lived in the period covered by the text. Or even a brief summary of the contents of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, except a statement that they are records of battles between Aryan chieftains and that they were redacted in the Gupta period.

Thapar presents the advent of Islam to Indiar singularly as an enriching experiencing. The destruction brought by Islamic armies is totally blacked out. In fact, the advent of Islam to India is balanced with the advent of Buddhism/Hinduism in South East Asia in the following words (page 125) –

“The Arabs not only introduced Islam but also a number of new cultural influences to India, which were to grow and develop in later centuries. Thus, on one side, India was exporting its culture and, on the other side, it was importing a new culture.”

Need I even comment on this false equation?

Closing Remarks –

I would like to end this review with the confession that as a sixth grade student in 1981-82, I too read an earlier version of the textbook at school, because it was mandatory reading. I was a good student, and have a clear recollection that I had found the text boring, verbose, tedious and also difficult to relate to my surroundings. There was practically nothing in the text that enthused me to study more on the subject. The story in the text was quite detached, dispassionate to the extent that it was dejecting, and demotivating. The prose was stilted, and dense. There was just too much material that a student of Std. VI could grasp and retain. When I read the textbook as a much mature person today, I can articulate my impressions much better, and add a critique of the text as well.

When the two editions (1966 and 1987/2000) of the textbook are compared, as I have done here in a partial manner, one is simply amazed to see how similar they are, as if NCERT history is more sanatana than Hinduism. The instances of errors (not all of which are listed in this review) are more in the first edition, but a considerable number continued to exist in the 1987 edition that continued to be used at least till 2000.

The textbooks have a very subtle slant against Brahmins, Hinduism, Sanskrit, Vedas and Hindu Philosophy and religion as such. The bias, which is certainly related to the author’s Marxist affiliations, appears in the form of

· A selective overemphasis of certain aspects of ancient India (such as Brahminical hegemony, or the elitist status of Sanskrit),
· Misrepresentation of certain facts or blatant errors (notably in the treatment of Vedic Aryans), suppression of inconvenient facts (such as the devastation brought by Islamic armies),
· A one sided presentation (such as excessive dwelling on the negative aspects alone of Vedic ritual)
· A lack of discussion on aspects of Hinduism (such as Upanishadic philosophy, or the themes of Ramayana and Mahabharata), other than the sectarian worship of Vishnu and Shiva.

There is no significant attempt in the textbook to relate India’s past with our present. The illustrations in the book are too few, to begin with. They are not chosen judiciously (some instances are pointed out by me in notes on earlier chapters) and are often not referred to directly in the text as such.

These remarks of mine should be considered in the context of the recent controversy over the recall of the old NCERT history textbooks by the NDA government, and their replacement by texts written by a different set of authors. Naturally, the particular set of historians (Thapar, Satish Chandra, Bipin Chandra etc.) whose hegemony lasting over than 3 decades has been terminated thereby, are quite upset and have launched a secular Jihad against the Government of India. In this political controversy however, an important question that needs to be considered is this – “How are the new textbooks?”

As soon as the new textbooks were released by the NCERT, the old authors predictably went on an error finding spree and a media blitzkrieg with the help of their younger Marxist cohorts like D. N. Jha and K. Shrimali, and Communist institutions like SAHMAT. They did manage to find a few errors. Unfortunately for them, the NCERT Director Mr. J. S. Rajput promptly offered to correct them. As I have noted in review above, Thapar’s book has not been free of errors either. In fact, many errors continued to occur all through 34 years (1966-2000). So, we must ask the students how the new textbooks fare, with regard to readability, presentation of the material, the volume of facts presented and so on. In this regard, I will merely reproduce an assessment of the new textbooks that appeared on the Internet soon after they were released –

Friends,
I borrowed from a friend of mine, two of the new textbooks released by NCERT - "India and the World," Social Sciences Textbook for Class VI and "Contemporary India" for class IX The best part is that I didn't fall asleep while browsing through them! (which was the distinguishing feature of many of the works of our eminent historians).
Thanks mainly to the lively and copious illustrations throughout the books and the straightforward and simple manner in which concepts have been explained.
Glancing through them it will not be difficult to understand why there is such a hue and cry about these new textbooks. Many are busy right now picking as many errors as they can from these textbooks (see for example the recent article in Hindustan Times). There are errors of course, I myself found two significant errors. But who has written a book without having to make a list of errata later?
I am confident that students will welcome these books whole-heartedly, provided our politicians and eminent historians stop sitting over them.

I will leave it to the reader to read the new textbooks, compare them with the old ones, and form his own independent opinion.

Romila Thapar ‘revised’ the textbook assigned to her in 1987 with only a few minor, primarily cosmetic changes to the 1966 edition. This ‘revised’ textbook, already outdated in 1987, was then allowed to continue in thousands of schools without any further revision for at least 14 more years, till the year 2001.

The task of imparting quality education to intermediate school children is a very important building block in the creation of any progressive nation. It is a very important responsibility vested with the authors of these study materials. Textbooks should be revised and updated periodically and regularly, at least once every five years. The revisions should be guided by advances in the field of study concerned, not by one’s political affiliations. The fact that Romila Thapar has failed to revise textbooks authored by her in a timely fashion, and has continued to brainwash generations of impressionable school students with slanted versions of history is a serious dereliction of duty. Writing textbooks for school children in one’s country is a privilege, a privilege that Thapar has abused severely to promote her own political agendas, and to indulge in a subtle hate-mongering against Hindus and their faith.

One hopes therefore, that at the present political dispensation will take the task of educating Indian school- children more seriously, and the new authors will revise their own textbooks more frequently, and keep them free of ideological slants and political propaganda.

Whenever the history of the many thousands of temple destructions by Muslims is discussed, the secularists invariably come up with the claim that Hindus have done much the same thing to Buddhists, Jains and "animists". In particular, the disappearance of Buddhism from India is frequently explained as the result of "Brahminical onslaught". Though extremely widespread by now, this allegation is very largely untrue.

As for tribal "animists", numerous tribes have been gradually "sanskritized", acculturated into the Hindu mainstream, and this never required any break with their worship of local goddesses or sacred trees, which have found a place in Hinduism, if need be in what Indologists call the "little traditions" flourishing in the penumbra of the "great tradition". The only break sometimes required was in actual customs, most notably the abjuring of cow-slaughter; but on the whole, there is an unmistakable continuity between Hinduism and the various "animisms" of India's tribes. Hinduism itself is, after all, "animism transformed by metaphysics" (as aptly written in the introduction to the 1901 census report in a discussion of the unfeasibility of separating Hinduism from "animism").

As for conflict with the Jain and Buddhist sects, even what little evidence is cited, turns out to prove a rather different phenomenon on closer inspection. The very few conflicts there were, were generally started by the sectarian Buddhists or Jains. This way, a few possible cases of Shaiva (esp. Virashaiva) intolerance against Jains in South India turn out to be cases of retaliation for Jain acts of intolerance, if the affair was at all historical to begin with. If there was a brief episode of mutual Shaiva-Jaina persecution, it was at any rate not based on the religious injunctions of either system, and therefore remained an ephemeral and atypical event. Likewise, the well-attested persecution of Brahmins by the Buddhist Kushanas remained exceptional because it had no solid scriptural basis, unlike Islamic iconoclasm and religious persecution, which was firmly rooted in the normative example of the Prophet.

Judging from the evidence shown so far, I maintain that Hindu persecutions of Buddhists have been approximately non-existent. The oft-repeated allegation that Pushyamitra Shunga offered a reward for the heads of Buddhist monks is a miraculous fable modelled on just such an episode in Ashoka's life, with the difference that in Pushyamitra's case, as per the hostile Buddhist account itself (Ashokavadana and Divyavadana), no actual killing took place, because an Arhat with miraculous powers magically materialized monks' heads with which people could collect the reward all while leaving the real monks in peace. Art historians have found Pushyamitra to have been a generous patron of Buddhist institutions.

Next to the Pushyamitra fable, the most popular "evidence" for Hindu persecutions of Buddhism is a passage in Kalhana's history of Kashmir, the Rajatarangini (Taranga 7: 1089 ff.), where king Harsha is accused of looting and desecrating temples. This example is given by JNU emeritus professor of ancient history, Romila Thapar, in Romila Thapar et al.: Communalism in the Writing of Indian History, p.15-16, and now again in her letter to Mr. Manish Tayal (UK), 7-2-1999. The latter letter was written in reply to Mr. Tayal's query on Arun Shourie's revelations on the financial malversations and scholarly manipulations of a group of historians, mainly from JNU and AMU. The letter found its way to internet discussion forums, and I reproduce the relevant part here:

"As regards the distortions of history, Shourie does not have the faintest idea about the technical side of history-writing. His comments on Kosambi, Jha and others are laughable -- as indeed Indian historians are treating him as a joke. Perhaps you should read the articles by H. Mukhia in the Indian Express and S. Subramaniam in India Today. Much of what Shourie writes can only be called garbage since he is quite unaware that history is now a professional discipline and an untrained person like himself, or like the others he quotes, such as S.R. Goel, do not understand how to use historical sources. He writes that I have no evidence to say that Buddhists were persecuted by the Hindus. Shourie of course does not know Sanskrit nor presumably does S.R. Goel, otherwise they would look up my footnotes and see that I am quoting from the texts of Banabhatta's Harshacharita of the seventh century AD and Kalhana's Rajatarangini of the twelfth century AD. Both texts refer to such persecutions."

Let us take a closer look at this paragraph by the eminent historian.

JNU snobbery:

Most space of the para and indeed the whole letter is devoted to attacks ad hominem, much of it against Mr. Sita Ram Goel. In his book Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them, vol.1 (Voice of India, Delhi 1990), Goel has listed nearly two thousand mosques standing on the debris of demolished Hindu temples: nearly two thousand specific assertions which satisfy Karl Poper's criterion of scientific theories, viz. they should be falsifiable: every secularist historian can go and unearth the story of each or any of the mosques enumerated and prove that it was unrelated with any temple demolition. But until today, not one member of the well-funded brigade of secularist historians has taken the scholarly approach and investigated any of Goel's documented assertions. The general policy is to deny his existence by keeping him unmentioned; most publications on the Ayodhya affair have not even included his book in their bibliographies even though it holds the key to the whole controversy.

But sometimes, the secularists cannot control their anger at Goel for having exposed and refuted their propaganda, and then they do some shouting at him, as done in this case by Romila Thapar. It is not true that Sita Ram Goel is an "untrained person", as she alleges; he has an MA in History from Delhi University (ca. 1944). And he has actually practised history, writing on Communism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. I never tested Shourie's knowledge of Sanskrit, but as for Goel, he is fluent in Sanskrit, definitely more so than Prof. Thapar herself. Having gone through Urdu-medium schooling and having lived in Calcutta for many years, he is fluent in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, English and Sanskrit, and also reads some Persian, elementary Persian being traditionally included in Urdu-medium education. In Hindu Temples, vol.2, a book of which Goel sent Prof. Thapar a copy, he has discussed the very testimonies she is invoking as proof (esp. in the second edition in which he reproduces Prof. Thapar's reply with his own comment),-- yet she maintains that he has not bothered to check her sources.

Note, at any rate, Romila Thapar's total reliance on arguments of authority and status. No less than seven times does she denounce Shourie's alleged (and unproven) incompetence: Shourie has "not the faintest idea", is "unaware", "untrained", and "does not know", and what he does is "laughable", "a joke", "garbage". But what exactly is wrong in his writing, we are not allowed to know. If history is now a professional discipline, one couldn't deduce it from this letter of hers, for its line of argument is part snobbish and part medieval (relying on formal authority), but quite bereft of the scientific approach.

Reliance on authority and especially on academic titles is quite common in academic circles, yet it is hardly proof of a scholarly mentality. Commoners often attach great importance to titles (before I got my Ph.D., I was often embarrassed by organizers of my lectures introducing me as "Dr." or even "Prof." Elst, because they could not imagine an alleged expert doing without such a title), but scholars actively involved in research know from experience that many publications by titled people are useless, while conversely, a good deal of important research is the fruit of the labour of so-called amateurs, or of established scholars accredited in a different field of expertise. Incidentally, Prof. Thapar's pronouncements on medieval history are also examples of such transgression, as her field really is ancient history.

At any rate, knowledge of Sanskrit is not the issue, for the Rajatarangini is available in English translation, as Romila Thapar certainly knows: Rajatarangini. The Saga of the Kings of Kashmir, translated from Sanskrit by Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, with a foreword by Jawaharlal Nehru, Sahitya Akademi, ca. 1960. With my limited knowledge of Sanskrit, I have laboriously checked the crucial sentences against the Sanskrit text, edited by M.A. Stein: Kalhana's Rajatarangini or Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir (1892), republished by Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi 1960. I could not find fault with the translation, and even if there were imperfections in terms of grammar, style or vocabulary, we can be sure that there are no distortions meant to please the Hindu nationalists, for the translator was an outspoken Nehruvian. If I am not mistaken, he was the husband of Nehru's sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit.

S. Subramaniam's account:

Let us check Prof. Thapar's references, starting with the review article on Shourie's book by S. Subramaniam: "History sheeter. Bullheaded Shourie makes the left-right debate a brawl", India Today, 7-12-1998. This article itself is quite a brawl: "Shourie has nothing to say beyond repeating the Islamophobic tirade of his henchman, the monomaniacal Sita Ram Goel who is referred to repeatedly in the text as 'indefatigable' and even 'intrepid'. Goel's stock in trade has been to reproduce ad nauseam the same extracts from those colonial pillars Elliott and Dowson and that happy neo-colonialist Sir Jadunath Sarkar."

It is, of course, quite untrue that Shourie's book is but a rehashing of earlier work by Goel. As can be verified in the index of Shourie's book, Goel's findings are discussed in it on p.99-100, p.107-108, and p.253-254; that leaves well over two hundred pages where Shourie does have something to say "beyond repeating the tirade of his henchman". Goel may be many things, but certainly not "monomaniacal". He has written a handful of novels plus essays and studies on Communism, Greek philosophy, several aspects of Christian doctrine and history, secularism, Islam, and of course Hinduism. His writings on Islam are much richer than a mere catalogue of atrocities, and even the catalogue of atrocities is drawn from many more sources than just Elliott and Dowson. I am also not aware that he has repeated certain quotations ad nauseam; to my knowledge, most Elliott & Dowson quotations appear only once in his collected works. Finally, Goel's position is not more "Islamophobic" than the average book on World War 2 is "Naziphobic"; if certain details about the doctrines studied are repulsive, that may be due to the facts more than to the prejudice of the writer.

So, practically every word in Subramaniam's evaluation is untrue. No wonder, then, that he concludes his evaluation of Shourie's latest as follows: "But serious thought of any variety has been replaced by spleen, hysteria and abuse." That, of course, is rather the case with Shourie's critics, including Subramaniam himself who keeps the readers in the dark about Shourie's arguments as well as about his own rebuttals. If Romila Thapar refers to his review, it can only be for its "treating Shourie like a joke", but by no means for its demonstrating how history has now become a scientific discipline; all it demonstrates is the bullying rhetoric so common in the debate between the scientific and the secularist schools of Indian history. As a reader (one K.R. Panda, Delhi) commented in the next issue (India Today, 21-12-1998): "The review of Arun Shourie's Eminent Historians ironically hardly mentioned what the book was about. It read more like a biographical sketch of the author with a string of abuses thrown in."

Harbans Mukhia's account:

In his guest column "Historical wrongs. The rise of the part-time historian" (Indian Express, 27-11-1998), JNU professor Harbans Mukhia surveys the influence of Marxism in Indian historiography, highlighting the pioneering work of D.D. Kosambi, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib in the 1950s and 60s. He argues that this Marxist wave began without state patronage, in an apparent attempt to refute Shourie's account of the role of state patronage and of the resulting corruption in the power position Marxist historians have come to enjoy. This is of course a straw man: Shourie never denied that Kosambi meant what he wrote rather than being eager to please Marxist patrons. The dominance of Marxist scholarship started with sincere (though by no means impeccable) scholars like Kosambi, followed by a phase where the swelling ranks of committed Marxist academics got a hold on the academic and cultural power positions, and then by a phase where being a Marxist was so profitable that many opportunists whose commitment was much shallower also joined the ranks, and hastened the inevitable process of corruption.

Anyway, the only real argument which Mukhia develops, is this: "To be fair, such few professionals as the BJP has in its camp have seldom leveled these charges at least in public. They leave this task to the likes of Sita Ram Goel who, one learns, does full time business for profit and part time history for pleasure, and Arun Shourie who, too, one learns, does journalism for a living, specializing in the investigation of non-BJP persons' scandals".

It is not clear where Mukhia has done his "learning", but his information on Goel is incorrect. Goel was a brilliant student of History at Delhi University where he earned his MA. In the period 1949-56 he was indeed a "part-time historian", working for a living as well as doing non-profit research on the contemporary history of Communism in the framework of the Calcutta-based Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia. He did full-time business for profit between 1963, when he lost his job after publishing a book critical of Nehru, and 1983, when he handed his business over to younger relatives. Ever since, he has been a full-time historian, and some of his publications are simply the best in their field, standing unchallenged by the historians of Mukhia's school, who have never gotten farther than the kind of invective ad hominem which we find in the above-mentioned texts by Romila Thapar, S. Subramaniam and Mukhia himself.

As for Shourie, Mukhia is hardly revealing a secret with his information that Shourie "does journalism for a living". The greatest investigative journalist in India by far, he has indeed unearthed some dirty secrets of Congressite and casteist politicians. His revelations about the corrupt financial dealings between the Marxist historians and the government-sponsored academic institutions are in that same category: fearless and factual investigative journalism. Shourie has an American Ph.D. degree in Economics, which should attest to a capacity for scholarship, even if not strictly in the historical field. When he criticizes the gross distortions of history by Mukhia's school, one could say formally that he transgresses the boundaries of his specialism, but such formalistic exclusives only hide the absence of a substantive refutation. Thus far, Shourie's allegations against Harbans Mukhia's circle stand unshaken.

Kalhana's first-hand testimony:

Now, let us look into the historical references cited by Romila Thapar. Of Banabhatta's Harshacharita, concerning Harsha of Kanauj (r.606-647), I have no copy available here, so I will keep that for another paper. Meanwhile, I have been able to consult both the Sanskrit original and the English translation of Kalhana's Rajatarangini, and that source provides a clinching testimony.

Harsha or Harshadeva of Kashmir (r.1089-1111) has been called the "Nero of Kashmir", and this "because of his cruelty" (S.B. Bhattacherje: Encyclopaedia of Indian Events and Dates, Sterling Publ., Delhi 1995, p.A-20). He is described by Kalhana as having looted and desecrated most Hindu and Buddhist temples in Kashmir, partly through an office which he had created, viz. the "officer for despoiling god-temples". The general data on 11th-century Kashmir already militate against treating him as a typical Hindu king who did on purely Hindu grounds what Muslim kings also did, viz. to destroy the places of worship of rival religions. For, Kashmir had already been occupied by Masud Ghaznavi, son of Mahmud, in 1034, and Turkish troops were a permanent presence as mercenaries to the king.

Harsha was a fellow-traveller: not yet a full convert to Islam (he still ate pork, as per Rajatarangini 7:1149), but quite adapted to the Islamic ways, for "he ever fostered with money the Turks, who were his centurions" (7:1149). There was nothing Hindu about his iconoclasm, which targeted Hindu temples, as if a Muslim king were to demolish mosques rather than temples. All temples in his kingdom except four (enumerated in 7:1096-1098, two of them Buddhist) were damaged. This behaviour was so un-Hindu and so characteristically Islamic that Kalhana reports: "In the village, the town or in Srinagara there was not one temple which was not despoiled by the Turk king Harsha." (7:1095)

So there you have it: "the Turk king Harsha". Far from representing a separate Hindu tradition of iconoclasm, Harsha of Kashmir was a somewhat peculiar (viz. fellow-traveller) representative of the Islamic tradition of iconoclasm. Like Mahmud Ghaznavi and Aurangzeb, he despoiled and looted Hindu shrines, not non-Hindu ones. Influenced by the Muslims in his employ, he behaved like a Muslim.

And this is said explicitly in the text which Romila Thapar cites as proving the existence of Hindu iconoclasm. If she herself has read it at all, she must be knowing that it doesn't support the claim she is making. Either she has just been bluffing, writing lies about Kalhana's testimony in the hope that her readers would be too inert to check the source. Or she simply hasn't read Kalhana's text in the first place. Either way, she has been caught in the act of making false claims about Kalhana's testimony even while denouncing others for not having checked with Kalhana.

Romila Thapar on Mahmud Ghaznavi:

It is not the first and only time that Romila Thapar is caught tampering with the sources. In her article on Somnath and Mahmud Ghaznavi (Frontline, 23-4-1999), she questioned the veracity of Mahmud's reputation as an idol-breaker, claiming that all the references to Mahmud's destruction of the Somnath temple (1026) are non-contemporary as well as distorted by ulterior motives. It's the Ayodhya debate all over again: when evidence was offered of pre-British references to the destruction of a Ram temple on the Babri Masjid site, the pro-Babri Masjid Action Committee historians replied that the evidence was not contemporary enough, but without explaining why so many secondary sources come up with the temple demolition story. Likewise here: if there was so much myth-making around Ghaznavi's Somnath campaign, even making him the norm of iconoclasm against which the Islamic zeal of every Delhi sultan was measured, what momentous event triggered all this myth-making?

Anyway, in this case the claim that there is no contemporary evidence, is simply false. Though she does mention Ghaznavi's employee Alberuni, she conceals that Alberuni, who had widely travelled in India and was as contemporary to Ghaznavi as can be, has confirmed Ghaznavi's general policy of Islamic iconoclasm and specifically his destruction of the Somnath temple. Alberuni writes (Edward Sechau, tra.: Alberuni's India, London 1910, vol.1, p.117, and vol.2, p.103) that the main idol was broken to pieces, with one piece being thrown into the local hippodrome, another being built into the steps at the entrance of the mosque of Ghazni, so that worshippers could wipe their feet on it. Mahmud's effort to desecrate the idol by all means shows that his iconoclasm was not just a matter of stealing the temple gold, but was a studied act of religious desecration.

He thereby smashed to pieces yet another pet theory of the Romila Thapar school, viz. that the Islamic iconoclasts' motive was economic rather than religious. It is precisely the primary sources which leave no stone standing of the edifice of Nehruvian history-writing.

Non-ideological newspaper readers may be forgiven for wondering if there is more than meets the eye in the high-voltage Leftist hysteria over moves to re-examine the contents of NCERT history textbooks. Indeed, by raising the bogey of 'saffronisation' before an academic review could even begin, Leftist historians have shown nervousness that the biased nature of their work, and their political agendas, may well be exposed.


That their history is both partial and partisan is evident from even a cursory reading of the Medieval India textbook for Class VII, a rough summary of collective Leftist scholarship on the subject. The Leftist claim to historical objectivity suddenly appears vulnerable as well-known historical facts are found deliberately obliterated or undervalued.


The arbitrary pre-dating of the medieval period by a couple of centuries, for instance, and the forcible application of the concept of feudalism to this period, seem inspired by political considerations. The intention, in both cases, is clearly to draw attention away from the cataclysmic northern invasions and focus instead, on the alleged political, economic, and cultural decay in India on the eve of the Muslim advent. Credible Western scholars have questioned this methodology and cast serious aspersions on the Indian Marxists' understanding of history as well as their fidelity to facts.


The problem of historical accuracy is compounded as we proceed into the medieval era. Key civilizational issues raised by the Islamic arrival are not even hinted at. While the Dark and Feudal Ages in Europe are mentioned, there is deafening silence on the basic tenets of Islam, the nature of the Muslim polity, the status it accorded to non-Muslim subjects or its treatment of ancient civilizations and cultures in conquered Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Syria. In the entire discussion on the Delhi Sultanate, the words dhimmi and jaziya are deliberately omitted, though they are crucial to understanding the dynamics of that epoch. There is a complete glossing over of the closed nature of the governing class and the extreme racialism of the rulers.


Instead, there are innumerable misleading references to Hindu participation in the governmental process. If Indian involvement at the lower levels of administration did not make the colonial state an Indo-British venture, surely the same logic applies here as well? Yet the text insists that Hindu princes, landholders and priests of the time became constituents of the 'new aristocracy' that arose. The fact, however, is that leaving aside the ruling houses of Rajputana, Rajput resistance even in the neighbouring Katiher region remained intense till the last days of the Mughal Empire. The participation of landholders in the ruling class was, likewise, extremely restricted even under the Mughals. Hence, to assert that involvement of these groups was the norm in the Sultanate period is taking liberties with truth.


Overlooking all forms of Hindu persecution, the book states that Brahmins and ulema were equally permitted to propagate their respective faiths. References to the infamous 'pilgrimage tax' are conveniently dropped.


A crucial feature of the political philosophy of the Sultanate was its pan-Islamic aspect. All Sultans, without exception, looked to the Caliph as the source of their legitimacy, and even after the Caliph was murdered and the Caliphate abolished, his name continued to appear on the coins of the Sultans of India. Yet the phenomenon of pan-Islamism is neither mentioned nor discussed anywhere in the text. The section on the Sufis is of a piece of this deception. There is no mention of "warrior Sufis," their participation in frontier warfare, or their role in bringing fresh territory under Islam. Instead, we are blithely told that the Sufis advised Hindus to be better Hindus!


The Mughal period, too, is selectively purged of its unpleasant facets. Akbar's early measures like the re-naming of Hindu holy cities, the imposition of the jaziya and forced conversions are ignored, as also the fact that as much as seventy percent of his nobility consisted of foreign Muslims. The limited Hindu participation in the upper echelons of the nobility (besides the Rajputs, just four other Hindus) is not alluded to.


Much is made of the translation of Hindu epics into Persian on the orders of the Emperor, but it is nowhere mentioned that the objective of this enterprise was to wean away the Hindu administrative and political class from its own language and script. The so-called patronage of Hindu writers needs to be examined afresh in view of the fact that the greatest Hindu writer of the age, Gosain Tulsidas, certainly never received any state patronage, either before or after the Ramcharit Manas.


The discussion on Din-i-Ilahi is similarly misleading. It was not intended to dilute the Islamic content of Akbar's regime, and in the words of a leading non-Marxist scholar, showed "a surprising indifference of Hinduism." Predictably, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi is not mentioned in the narrative on either Akbar or Jehangir (through whose successive reigns he lived); his name only crops up later in the midst of a discussion on Aurangzeb!


The brief treatment of the half-century reign of Aurangzeb, who is merely appended to the chapter on Jehangir and Shah Jehan, is a masterly exercise in evasion. That is why the reader (and presumably also the poor student) is unable to comprehend the Leftist explanation for the sustained revolts of Marathas, Sikhs and Jats against Mughal rule. Incidentally, the word jaziya makes its appearance here for the first and last time (page 109 of the 123-page book), though the reader is even now not told what the tax was about. If this is objective history, subjective history might be something to look forward to.

This fifth pair of labels has attained the widest currency of all political words. We face a peculiar problem here. The meanings which these words have acquired in India's political parlance are not even remotely related to the meanings which the dictionaries assign to them. It would not be an exaggeration to say that although these two words belong to the English language, their meanings in India have become exclusively Indian.
The word secular is defined in the dictionaries as "the belief that the state, morals, education, etc. should be independent of religion." But in India it means only one thing -- eschewing everything Hindu and espousing everything Islamic.

Every one who wants to qualifying as secular should subscribe to the folowing articles of faith :


the Muslims in India after independence have become a poor and persecuted minority;

they are being deprived of their fair share in the fruits of development;

their religion and culture are not getting legitimate expression in public life and media;

they are not being given employment in public and private sectors in proportion to their population; and

the preponderance of Hindus in the security forces puts in grave peril the lives, honour and properties of Muslims.

Every Hindu politician or pen-pusher who aspires to pass the test has to

proclaim that Islam stands for equality and human brotherhood;

celebrate the prophet's birthday with fanfare and throw an iftar dinner at the end of Ramzan;

attend Urs of sufis and Urdu mushairas;

support the claim of Urdu to be the second state language in all states where Muslims are in a minority;

admire whatever passes for Islamic art and architecture;

relish Muslim cooking and appreciate Muslim dress and demeanour;

abuse Israel and applaud Arab countries.
He should also keep quiet or look the other way when Muslims

breed like rats;

refuse to give modern education to their children;

push their women into purdah;

practise polygamy;

start street-riots at the slightest pretext;

rejoice over every Pakistan victory and every Indian defeat in sports; and

invite and protect infiltrators from across the borders. And he should not whisper a word when Arab governments pour petro-dollars and professional preachers of Islam into this country in order to convert the weaker sections of Hindu society.

Even these positive services rendered to Islam are not sufficient for a Hindu politician or pen-pusher out to earn the secular certificate. One is not secular unless one harbours and expresses a pronounced anti-Hindu animus. One should lodge an immediate protest against the least little expressionm of Hindu religion or culture in public media and at government functions. One should frown upon every government dignitary performing a pooja in a Hindu temple or going to Hindu place prilgrimage. One should accuse all educational, cultural and research institutions of hiding Hindu communalists. One should put the blame squarely on the RSS for every communal riot. And so on, the list of one's grievances against Hindu society should be as long as one's love for Islam and Muslims.
The definition of communal is a logical corollary of the above definition of secular. The dictionaries define the word communal as "pertaining to community, owned in common,, shared." But Hindus in India have only to say that they belong to a community and that they share a culture in common. They immediately provoke secularists of all hues to come down upon them. In fact, the word Hindu itself has become a dirty word, almost an obscenity in India' political parlance. Woe betide the Hindu who dares say that India is his ancestral homeland and that his religion and culture also have a case. He will be immediately denounced as a Hindu chauvinist. A Hindu who blunders into reading Indian history with his own eyes who finds that his society has suffered immeasurably at the hands of Islamic imperialism, and who cries out that this aggression should now stop, makes the Leftists mad with fury. They brand him as an enemy of public peace and national integration. They find in him a fiend who is plotting a genocide of the "poor Muslim minority