India's history and the architects of obfuscation

A press report of September 14, 2020 stated that an Expert Committee had been constituted by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India to conduct a holistic study of the origin and evolution of Indian culture. The committee had been set up with the intention of “conducting holistic study of the origin and evolution of Indian culture since 12,000 years before present" and to study its interface with other cultures of the world.

This was not the first committee formed for this purpose. A similar committee was appointed in 2017 when Mahesh Sharma was the Union Minister of Culture. Both committees had the same or similar experts as members. The panel lacked diversity— there was no woman in it; none from the Northeast, only one member from the South, no scholar from the scheduled castes or scheduled tribes and no non-Hindu at all. Just the composition of the two committees was enough to raise concerns about the motive of the ministry.

Suspicions were confirmed by a Reuters report on March 6, 2018 by Rupam Jain and Tom Lasseter. The report stated, on the basis of interviews of members conducted by a team of journalists, that “interviews with members of the 14-person committee and ministers in Modi’s government suggest the ambitions of Hindu nationalists extend beyond holding political power in this nation of 1.3 billion people — a kaleidoscope of religions. They want ultimately to shape the national identity to match their religious views, that India is a nation of and for Hindus.”

While normally, the history of India is plotted within the time frame of the last 2,500 years and all the earlier past is designated as pre-history or proto-history, why did the government decide to set 12,000 years as the time-frame for the committee’s work? This particular timeline indicates that the official report wanted to cover the entire time-span since the Holocene (9,500 years before the Common Era).

But why is the right wing interested in pre-history? Here one has to get into what Dr B R Ambedkar termed as ‘riddles’ in his book ‘The Riddles in Hinduism’. Ambedkar’s focus in the book was to show how the general impression about the Vedas as ‘god-given word’ does not stand the scrutiny of historical logic. There are other riddles too; other as yet not fully answered questions of Indian past. For instance, what was the language used by the people of the Indus civilisation (2500 to 1900 BCE)?

What exactly led to the rise of Purohits as a ‘varna’ distinct from the ruling ‘kshatriya’ class? Why and how did the Sanskrit language replace the previously existing languages, which came to a culmination point during the times of Buddha and Mahavira? And, indeed, did Sanskrit come from outside — as all linguistic and archaeological evidence indicates, or did it flow out from India to other continents?

In Genetics, Archaeology, Linguistics and History, scholars have already conducted a massive amount of research on these issues. Yet, doubts have loomed over the scientific conclusions because a branch of linguistics, towards the end-nineteenth century, had proposed a hypothesis which imagined Aryans to be a community with imagined extraordinary qualities of the mind and the body.

In Europe, this hypothesis gained currency before Adolf Hitler rose to power and he used these hypothetical premises to fuel eugenics or his brutal social engineering ideas. The RSS, which was a newborn organisation then, has imbibed those as ‘scientific’ ideas. It is trying hard to place them in the main discourse of ‘history’.

Even though history is forever in the process of restructuring and no single version can admit the test of absolute authenticity, the established conventions of scientific discourse of history expect conversations about the past to keep a safe distance from fantasy, hallucination and wishful nostalgia.

The openness of history as a field of enquiry allows majoritarian politics and autocratic regimes to replace the narrative of history with irrational and untenable claims. They tend to raise the pitch of hatred for perceived injustice at the hands of ancestors of the people against whom the sentiment of revenge is sought to be invoked.

It was, in this context, that the setting up of the two committees created concern among the community of scholars dealing with India’s past.

In view of the likely damage to India’s polyphonic and diverse society that such a depiction of our past becoming the mainstream historical narrative could have, I felt that it would be necessary to appeal to scientists and historians to come together to prepare a comprehensive report on India’s past based entirely on scientific and logical conclusions. Towards that end, I invited a large number of experts from the field of Human Genetics, Anthropology, Linguistics, Archaeology, History and Social Sciences.

In all, 88 eminent experts drawn from some of the very best universities in the world and known for their life-long study of their respective areas of special interest came together and compiled an alternate Report on the Civilisation and Histories of India.

The field is vast, to say the least, the challenges involved are many. To work on such a project in a very limited time was nothing short of lunacy. I persisted, however, in the hope that an appeal to restore reason may find adequate response among the academic community.

We decided to divide the entire field in 100 sub-themes. A report on each of those themes was prepared after elaborate mutual consultations. The report is designed to provide a comprehensive picture of the population movements, emergence of social and political organisations, development of philosophies and metaphysics, the diversity of languages and expression, major social movements, impact of colonialism on Indian ideas and culture, the long freedom struggle and the making of India since Independence.

It covers a very large temporal span, beginning with the arrival of the Homo sapiens and ending with the onset of the third millennium in the year 2000 CE. It is conceptualised to provide adequate space for the histories of various regions, faiths and languages that constitute the ‘idea of India’.