by AJOY ASHIRWAD MAHAPRASHASTA
Professor Irfan Habib PHOTO/The Hindu
In the last few months, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Union government has stepped up its efforts to steer the Sangh Parivar’s Hindutva agenda by changing the nature of public institutions. Prominent scholars have come forward and said that the government is pushing autonomous institutions, such as the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) and the Lalit Kala Akademi, to carry out research only on topics that are in line with the Sangh Parivar’s doctrines. Many scholars claim that in the process the government is high-handedly promoting unethical and unscientific research practices in various disciplines.
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Many initiatives of the present political dispensation suggest that the BJP-led government is on a mission to reinterpret Indian history. Some of the areas that it has identified as core subjects for research are various aspects of the Vedic Age, the Aryan question, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and Hindu epics. These are topics that have already been examined thoroughly by professional historians in academic debates. How do you see this development?
I have read some general “historical” pronouncements of the leaders of the present regime, topped by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim that Lord Ganesha’s elephant head shows that plastic surgery had already been invented in India in remote antiquity. Statements of similar mental calibre by lesser figures in his flock have since multiplied. The present chairman of the ICHR has been announcing to all who would listen the need to construct Puranic history, that is, I suppose, a combination of Ramayana and Mahabharata narratives, holding it to be the premier task of the historian today.
The renaming of Aurangzeb Road and the strident declarations by RSS-aligned organisations against “1,000 years of foreign rule” are indications that the periods of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire are likely to receive a treatment similar to what they received in the National Council for Educational Research and Training’s [NCERT] history textbooks, issued under the first NDA regime. This time, the school textbooks to come forth will probably outdistance their predecessors in the realm of myth and prejudice.
This being the case, it is unlikely that there could be any real encounter between history as an academic discipline and such shoddily inventive fiction as the RSS projects. There is hardly any room for “academic debate” here. Thankfully, history itself will not change however much it may be falsely presented. But the nation’s mental make-up may grievously suffer thereby.
How has the controversial “Origin of the Aryans” question been resolved by historians? The position of the Hindu Right has always been that the Aryans are from India. Does historical evidence prove that? What is the generally accepted theory on Aryans within the discipline of history?
Indeed, owing to extensive research over a long period now, much has been clarified about the “Aryans”. The word “arya”, and allied forms, meant “noble” in Indo-Iranian languages. “Iran” itself is a mere territorial plural of the word “arya”. But its application to the entire body of speakers of Indo-European languages was the work of the Nazis, who claimed for the Germans the status of purest “Aryans”. It is clear that “Indo-European” language relationships have nothing to do with race or religion. The term simply represents speakers of allied languages. Secondly, linguistic studies have established a rough picture of the sequence among languages, those close to the hypothetical ancestor, the “Proto-Indo-European”, and others much more distant from it. Rig Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan, from which one can reconstruct “Proto-Aryan” or “Proto-Indo-Iranian” are placed much down the ladder compared with Hittite or Albanian. It is, therefore, most unlikely that India was ever the home of the original Proto-Indo-European language. It is, indeed, childish to make an issue out of it and claim without proof, very much like the Nazis did, that we, as Aryans, went out and civilised the world, as if “Aryan” or “Indo-European” is synonymous with civilisation. Proto-Indo-European lexical reconstructions, in fact, reveal a very primitive level of society.
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