By Col (retd) Anil Athale
Col. (retd) Anil A Athale is a Fellow at the Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research. A former Joint Director (History Division) and infantryman, he has been running an NGO, Peace and Disarmament, based in Pune for the past 10 years. As a military historian he specialises in insurgency and peace process.
The roots of slavish mentality of our so-called intellectuals goes deeper to the British days. On December 1, 1783, while speaking on the India Bill in British Parliament, the British liberal, Edmund Burke, launched a scathing attack on the English rule in India. Virtually saying that we are trying to enslave people who are far more civilised than us. As the British empire in India expanded, the English became aware of the rich Indian cultural heritage and its ancient past. Any memory of that past was an obstacle for the British to spread and sustain their rule. There began a systematic campaign to deny Indian antiquity.
Lord Macaulay once famously stated that ‘the entire literature of India cannot fill but a single shelf in a respectable European library’. Either uneducated or devious, Macaulay thus rubbished Indian heritage from vedas to astronomy to ayurveda to mathematics (algebra, calculus and the numbers). Since then the vast Indian middle class intellectuals have been groomed in the Macaulay tradition of being good clerks with no independent thinking faculties. It is this that enabled the handful of British to rule millions of Indians. Indian historians deny any credit to the great Indian oral tradition. They ignore folklore, physical evidence and available Indian sources. Most Indian histories are written based on foreign sources.
The organised Semitic faiths proclaim monopoly of truth and have labelled all pre-history (that is all that existed before the time of their favourite Prophet) as mythology. It would interest the readers to know that right till 1990 when existence of the city of Troy was decisively proved (Times News Network, June 24, 2004). Homer’s Iliad was regarded as pure mythology with no proof! Valmiki’s Ramayan and later Raghuvansh by Kalidas seems to be meeting the same fate as Iliad at the hands of grandchildren of Macaulay and Marx. It would interest readers that in the ‘Bible belt’ of the US, historicity of Buddha is not accepted so Ram stands no chance in our Anglophile community of historians.
The project to deny the existence of Ram and his historicity began way back even before 1992 (Ayodhya demolition). As usual the ’eminent’ historians of JNU were in the forefront. There is a very close parallel with the Afghan Taliban and our home-grown Taliban (secularists). The Afghan variety deny any other past except Islamic and demolished the Bamiyan Buddha while the Indian variety wants to deny Ram’s historicity and demolish Ram Sethu. There is of course much in common between the two, blind faith in a book (the Das Capital), prophet Marx and his close followers (kind of companions of the Prophet) like Engels, Lenin, Stalin the mass murderer and Mao Ze Dong. There is very little to choose between them and religious fundamentalists. Indian rich heritage is an inconvenient obstacle in their path of ushering in Marxist utopia and must be fought at all times. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, they have no knowledge of Indian past and are not only proud of the Indian heritage but are ashamed of it. Even practice of yoga or ayurveda is anathema to them. Some time ago the yoga guru, Baba Ramdev, was the target of their ire and an attempt was made to ‘fix’ him by instigating some workers in his establishment.
It is undoubtedly true that the original story of Ram and his times has seen many interpolations and mythification, like the tribal army being described as vanar (monkeys). But any historian with an open mind can find enough evidence to prove the essential historicity of Ramayana. In the year 1992, a surgeon, late Dr. SV Bhave of Pune, flew over the entire path of Ram’s journey from Lanka to Ayodhya as described by Rishi Valmiki and Kalidas. He was no historian but far more innovative than our bookish historians. He found every single place described in Ramayana. Finally one wishes to ask a simple question, did Valmiki and countless others merely conjured up a fiction! If that is so then he was possibly the greatest fiction writer of all times, since his book has survived over two thousand years.
When our Supreme Court deliberates on this issue (I really pity our honourable judges who have to decide on issues ranging from whether Ram existed to cricket team selection) they would consult a wide body of persons from diverse fields and not the JNU mafia.
