👍👏👏… What an amazing video-clip! You must watch it! And how true and so very well said!
If one thinks deeply about it, it would be very clear that the very idea and so-called “Study of History” as well as the art and craft of history-writing as we know it today is a 💯 % White Man conception that was thrust upon the rest of the world.
In India at least before the White Man came and taught us how History is made (or rather how it ought to be made up) , our peoples had only oral traditions of Itihasa and Purana retold to generations after generations by sages, bards and priests called “pauraanikar-s”… But then thosecoral traditions were not intended to be or serve so much as “historical accounts” as ethical (Dhaarmic) manuals or chronicles for mainly bringing about the edification of mankind.
The White Man then came and upbraided and humiliated us all as a people telling us severely that we all lacked even what he called as even a “modicum of a sense of history”. And it was because we had no “real sense of history” being written down or documented, and measuring up to the White Man’s own standards of historiography , that we were not really a people with an identity, a nation or a culture worth recognition.
Very soon thus in India we proudly began to embrace in fact as our own the History that history which was conceived by and made to be written by the White Man .
So that was pretty much how the White Man brought enlightenment to us. He began writing our History for us as he saw it and not exactly as how we had lived it. He taught us to understand and believe and then be utterly convinced why our Puranas, Itihaasas, Smritis and Dharmasaastra literature were all not History at all but ridiculous, priestly mumbo-jumbo and anachronistic obscurantism.
A new Dawn of Enlightenment descended upon we Indians … and for a whole new Post-Independence generation of “historians” that came thereafter in nearly 75 long years, Indian History became “A Discovery of India” of sorts … i.e. a view of India’s past seen through the lens of the White Man and then documented and constructed per the White Man’s norms and perspectives on History —- as it should be written, read, learnt, understood and embraced.
That was how the White Man’s History of India became the holy catechism of India’s acolyte-generation of historians too and whose copious output works then soon filled up the school children’s History text-books, the syllabi of History Faculty in universities across the length and breadth of India…. and yes, of course, filled up the minds and hearts of millions of educated Indians in tide after tides of brainwashing waves.
Then in 2014 … something strange and dangerous happened . The Modi Government seized power. With power comes the will to change the prevailing perspective and narratives of Indian History and rid it off its White Man bias and supplant it with a bias of a post-modern, new-fangled Indian ideology called Hindutva.
And so post -2014, a new breed of Hindutva historians sprang up and began to see urgent need to remove the crusty old patina the White Man had for so long been assiduously applying as taint upon India’s History and then rewrite it all over again … repaint it, rather … in iridescent, so-called vibrant “Saffron” colour and hue, all intended to make a new generation of young Indians proud of their real past and authentic heritage.
The old “Discovery of India”-generation of historians suddenly today finds itself besieged. All their own works of a lifetime suddenly are being challenged and threatened of being systematically invalidated and dismantled. The Marxist “scarlet red” monochrome of Marxist hue that they had succeeded so well in painting so painstakingly over India’s History suddenly now was going to be given a complete makeover by what they complain are a new parvenue breed of rabid “Hindutva historians” out to give it a brazen, brand new “saffron” sheen.
And that precisely is the truly existential moment that is shaking up the very roots of the stranglehold that they have been so used to be firmly holding hitherto in the seminar-halls and Dean-hoods of India’s vast academia … Should they now quietly accept the wind of change blowing all over them or should they fight it tooth and nail, hammer and tongs? To Be or Not to Be” is indeed the dramatic Shakespearean question for all of them to deal with.
Please do take time to read this link given below to understand much more about this epic Hamletian many-act drama:
https://frontline.thehindu.com/the-nation/education/college-draft-syllabus-ugc-messing-with-history-continuation-of-sangh-parivar-attempts-to-saffronise-history/article34799051.ece/amp/
And that in short is the History of Historians in India today. It is the history of what in the popular imagination is called metaphorically, “Culture War”. It heralds a Dharma Yuddha. For both the combating champions of “White Man Scarlet-Red History” and the “Pure Saffron-hued Hindutva History” it has become a moment of ultimate reckoning… It has become indeed a titanic clash of Weltanschauung!
Sudarshan Madabushi