India’s Great History Debate

At the center of India’s intense, ongoing debate about its history are numerous claims made by nationalists, mostly from the Hindu-right, about India’s “real” pre-modern history. These claims range from subjective, but at least debatable, statements made about India’s Golden Age, to completely wild statements claiming that ancient Indians developed atomic technology over 5,000 years ago.

Why are Indian nationalists, most of whom are not professional historians, making such claims? Exaggerated and inaccurate ideas about India’s history are not merely the result of right-wing propaganda; on the contrary, quite a sizable portion of India’s educated population believes in a variety of myths about India’s ancient past and its alleged scientific achievements. This perception arose because many educated Indians in the 20th century began to suspect, with some justification, that Indian history, as written and taught by Western academics, had been distorted by the British.

This distortion can be seen as both deliberate, in order to justify British supremacy, and subconscious, the result of Western cultural and religious biases against India and Hinduism. While ancient Hindu scriptures such as the Mahabharata, the Puranas and the Vedas describe human civilization as occurring in cycles that were hundreds of thousands of years long, some literalist Protestant interpretations of the Bible believe that the world began in 4,004 BCE. Many Hindus believe that in order to fit Indian history within a Western and Christian framework, Indian narratives were deemed myth rather than history in academic eyes. This sort of thinking was taken up by left-leaning, Marxist-influenced Indian historians in post-colonial India.

As a reaction to perceived Western distortions of Indian history, Indian nationalists began to push the idea that their scriptures are factually correct, and only need be interpreted properly to reflect accurately the true glories of Indian civilization. Ironically, this led to the belief, in common with Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, that if something is in the scriptures, it must be true or justified. Moreover, to demonstrate that Indians are not backward or primitive, miraculous events in ancient Hindu scriptures should be interpreted to be the product of science and not magic. This historical debate burst fully into the mainstream with the election of the right-leaning Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014. Revisionist history has been declared factual by many ministers in the BJP government, many of whom also wish to adjust India’s history curriculum in schools to reflect this “reality.”

Some of the claims made in the course of India’s public discourse concerning its history involve the shoehorning of the supernatural into instances of pre-historical advanced science. First, the Hindu god Ganesh, who has the head of an elephant, is described as an example of plastic surgery being performed in ancient India. Plastic surgeons supposedly attached the head of an elephant to a humanoid body. Second, a character in the ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata was said to have been born outside his mother’s womb. This is allegedly proof that the ancient Indians had developed genetic or in-vitro technology, according to Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself. Third, ancient destructive weapons used by deities and described in the Hindu epics are proof of ancient atomic weapons. Finally, at a recent scientific conference in Mumbai, several figures claimed that the Vedas, an ancient Indian scripture, contained plans for aircraft as early as 7,000 BCE. No evidence was provided.

Even more historically sound ideas are the subject of fierce revisionism by nationalists. For example, India’s Golden Age of science and math is said to have been roughly contemporary with the Gupta Empire (320-550 CE) of north India. As Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen points out, this clearly indicates that Indian math was built off of previous Babylonian and Greek work, an idea that is controversial since it implies that Indians did not, in fact, originate the field of mathematics.

The full implications of these statements do not seem to have been thought through by their advocates. If modern technology like the aircraft and advanced sciences like in-vitro fertilization and the atomic bomb were, in fact, discovered by ancient Indians what happened to that knowledge? How and why was it lost? Further questions arise when one considers the mythologies of other civilizations with similar stories concerning deities with extraordinary powers. Finally, isn’t it as disparaging to non-Indian civilizations to hear that India was superior to them as for Indians to hear that their history and mythology were wrong or useless from Europeans?

The Indian mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik argues that all these claims are missing the point. Ironically, by trying to justify their history, Indian nationalists have fallen into the same trap they accuse the 19th century British of: literalism.

According to Pattanaik, it is ultimately irrelevant as to whether the Indian epics are factually verifiable or not, since the ideas they articulate are timeless and beyond history. It is better, in fact, to ascribe supernatural or allegorical explanations to the stories of religion in order to avoid having one’s faith becoming dependent on materialist interpretations of history and religion, which can always change based on the evidence. This way, what actually happened can be treated objectively in a scientific fashion.

What many Indian nationalists fail to understand is the methodology of the discipline of history. Present day academic history in the West and its practitioners do not generally have an agenda. The description and construction of ancient Indian history is admittedly a hard task as compared to European or Chinese history because of the paucity of ancient records due to India’s climate, numerous invasions, and the general lack of an Indian tradition of historical writing. This may be corrected in time as more scholars use archival research, archaeology and epigraphy (the study of inscriptions) to piece together ancient Indian history. It is important to understand that although history, by its nature, contains an element of selection and interpretation, the presentation of facts follows a procedure that can only be described as scientific. The work of historians and archaeologists is just as scientific and objective as that of physicists and biologists, with the possibility of new information correcting existing theories.

We must take the middle ground. While extraordinary claims that reveal only a lack of knowledge should not be entertained, the genuine achievements of India’s history are a deserving subject of research. It is quite possible that many aspects of Indian history have simply been buried in the dust of time and with diligent study may once again be unearthed. Remember Troy. The city at the center of Homer’s Iliad was widely believed to be only a myth until it was rediscovered in the 19th century by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Likewise, the ancient Indian city of Dwarka in Gujarat was said in the Mahabharata to have been swallowed by the sea. Recently, archeologists have discovered some evidence of an ancient port in the area. References in ancient works ought not to be dismissed out of hand as they may reflect an element of truth, the wisps of real history. This does not mean that ancient works or scriptures are literal descriptions of history. Stories like the Mahabharata and the Iliad likely represent elements of real events, though distorted by time and imagination. The important thing is subjecting history to objective, scientific principles, and not using it to promote one ideology over another. This is a lesson that must be learned in India. As with all nations, India’s history is filled with the extraordinary and the mundane, rife with triumphs as well as tragedies; there is no need for nationalists and revisionist historians to make wild claims – India’s history is vibrant enough.