Admiring India undermines the Hindu spirit behind it – Firstpost

William Dalrymple suddenly became the darling of a section of the Right. A leading right-wing think tank even invited him to talk about his new book. Golden Road. The book highlights “how ancient India transformed the world”, a topic close to those with their hearts in the ‘Right’ place.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with engaging in a dialogue over a book; In fact, this culture of dialogue with opposing views needs to be encouraged. The problem, however, can be that this intellectual work leads to the legitimation of the other point of view without the necessary deliberation and critical investigation. This is what people are afraid of Golden RoadThe book, which became a bestseller shortly after hitting bookstores, could become a cover for spreading blatant historical lies.

It needs to be clear from the outset that this is a good book that moves India’s narrative forward. Dalrymple cannot and does not claim that what is written in the book was not told in the past. The author’s point is his writing style: A history book is written better when the author thinks like a historian and writes like a novelist. After all, history is about stories and the lessons that can be learned from them.

Dalrymple is undoubtedly a “gifted historian” who writes engaging prose. The research work he does for his books is nearly flawless. And one finds a closeness and warmth towards oneself in it. karmabhoomiIt is India.

But Dalrymple is a double-edged sword and often cuts both ways. Born in Scotland, this 59-year-old British writer is an unapologetic fan of Delhi, but his affection is limited to the “Djinns” era; Other non-Islamic features of the city rarely attract his attention. The same partisanship is evident in his writings on the Mughals, especially the late Mughals. What excites Dalrymple the most is the collapse of the last Mughals, which Sir Jadunath Sarkar laments in his comprehensive works and lists among the main reasons for the decline of the Mughals.

Inside Last MughalFor example, Dalrymple writes: “While Zauq lived a quiet and simple life, writing poetry from dusk until dawn, rarely leaving the small yard where he worked, Ghalib was very proud of his reputation as a broker. Just five years before the wedding, Ghalib had been imprisoned for gambling and later wore what was at the time deeply embarrassing as a badge of honour. Once when someone praised the poetry of the pious Sheikh Sahbai in his presence, Ghalib replied: ‘How can Sahbai be a poet? He never drank wine, never gambled; ‘He was neither beaten with a slipper by his lovers, nor did he ever see the inside of a prison.’ Elsewhere in his letters he makes great play with his reputation as a lady.”

Similarly, AnarchyDalrymple writes about the brazen plunder and pillage carried out by the East India Company. He begins this book by saying that “one of the first Hindi words to enter the English language was Hindustani slang for plunder: booty.” He then takes readers to Powis Castle, a “craggy castle” built in the 13th century during the Welsh Marches. According to him, Powis is “filled with imperial plunder, room after room, with plunder from India mined by the East India Company (EIC) in the 18th century”.

However, the same Dalrymple made a public appeal last year asking England not to return the loot to India! According to him, Mughal treasures looted by the British may never be displayed if they are returned to India, which is currently governed by “a Hindu nationalist government that does not display Mughal items”. (Dalrymple’s biased mind prevented him from seeing the obvious: The stolen wealth belonged to India, not the Mughal.) He said: “When you go to Delhi you may not see any exhibition of Mughal art at this time. But it is displayed beautifully there, in the British Library, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum.”

Dalrymple’s penchant for running with the hare and hunting with the hounds is evident in the narrative of his 2009 book: Nine Livesmore. In one of the stories, Hari Das, a Dalit from Kerala, is a “part-time prison guard for 10 months of the year”, but during Theyyam, the “Dancer of Kannur” narrates his story with empathy. During the dance season between January and March, he is “transformed into an all-powerful deity”, to be worshiped even by upper-caste Brahmins. But in the same book, his reverence for the sacred is lost as he invokes Romila Thapar’s idea of ​​“united Hinduism” to intellectually discredit the Hindu resurgence in India. Dalrymple rather mischievously calls this the “Rama-fication of Hinduism”.

I am coming Golden RoadDalrymple’s newfound love for ancient India may remind one of the American Sanskrit scholar Sydney Pollock, who was recently targeted in New York by a group of wealthy non-resident Indians (NRIs) and the country’s top administrative leaders. Representatives of Sringeri Peetham in India and Sringeri Peetham in the USA will head a newly established American university chair in the name of Adi Shankara. By 2014, they had raised $4 million for the chair at the prestigious Columbia University. There was great enthusiasm and support for Pollock, who was seen as an ardent advocate of the revival of Sanskrit. What these people didn’t understand was that Pollock’s idea of ​​reenactment was, as Rajiv Malhotra writes in The Battle of Sanskrit, “a reanimated study of Sanskrit as if it were the embalmed, mummified remnant of a dead culture.”

Pollock tried to revive Sanskrit studies but did not want any connection with the Sanskrit language and culture. He loved Sanskrit but it had no sacred cultural (Hindu) identity. Likewise, Dalrymple acknowledges India’s contribution but seems less keen on its Hindu origins. He spoke with great pleasure about the Buddhist connections of Central Asia, but the same enthusiasm was missing from Hinduism. Dalrymple’s love for India is obvious, but his cultural/civil ties are lacking. He wants to preserve the physical infrastructure but works hard to destroy its spirit.

Dalrymple tells the story of the great Buddhist scholar Kumarajiva (AD 344-413). Born to a Kashmiri father, who was probably a minister in the royal court of Takshashila, and a Kuchean mother, Kumarajiva learned Buddhism in Kashmir; farewellsHe chose to go to Kashgar in the Xinjiang region. The land where Kumarajiva went to work farewells It was the center of Buddhism, which challenged the dominant narrative of Hindu-Buddhist conflict put forward by colonial-Leftist historiography. Further revealing the Hindu-Buddhist cultural continuity in the region is that, as Dalrymple himself writes, it was “not far from” a monastery at Miran. Golden Road“some of the earliest surviving fragments of the text Mahabharata recently excavated”.

A few quotes from Golden Road It should reveal the author’s true intention. In the last chapter of the book, Dalrymple writes: “The fate of Nalanda is much disputed: it had been in decline for centuries, and archeology shows that it was burned several times; some of these fires clearly pre-date the arrival of the Turks. In both cases, the Tibetan who visited Nalanda in 1235 The monk Dharmaswami describes Nalanda as Turushka soldiers prowled through the ruins while he and his guru hid in a deserted monastery. There is some evidence that it continued to function in a much reduced form until the early fourteenth century, when the last Tibetan monks are described as having come to study philosophy in the ruins.

Nalanda was “burned several times” before the wrath of Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1193 AD! The ancient Indian university “operated in a much reduced form until the 14th century”, surviving the Muslim attack! Therefore, two evaluations emerge from the above lines: While Muslims burned Nalanda once, Hindus had done this “several times” in the past; and also because the university was able to survive for the next two centuries, the attack by the Muslims wasn’t bad enough! How does Dalrymple’s assessment differ from that of Romila Thapar and DN Jha?

In the same chapter, Dalrymple offers another valuable assessment that reveals the mood. He writes: “During the days of Nehru’s rule in the 1950s and early 1960s, most Indian school textbooks and academic histories were written by left-leaning, Congress-supporting individuals. These historians argue that ‘in part after the horrific inter-religious violence that occurred during the partition’ In the interests of what they see as ‘nation-building’, they have tended to downplay the violence and iconoclasm that came with the Turkish invasions, and today, under the current right-wing BJP government, the opposite is true, and what many in India believe is the history of Indo-Islamic history. “Almost all he knows about the complex but fascinating medieval period is the destruction of Hindu temples.”

Given this line of thinking promoted in the book, in which India’s physical superstructure is celebrated but the innate Hindu spirit is denied and condemned, it is surprising to see a section of the Right excited about this. Golden Road. Perhaps the excitement is a result of intellectual obscurity and laziness: no one bothered to read between the lines and was instead excited by the book’s tagline: “How ancient India transformed the world.” Perhaps the colonial hangover is still going strong in India. It may still be a heady moment for some of us when a British historian highlights the “greatness” of ancient India. Perhaps the more things change in Indian history, the more they stay the same.

The views expressed in the above article are personal and belong solely to the author. These do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.