Updating History

THERE IS MUCH brouhaha about the new NCERT history books. But few people are aware that the British-created history of India, which originally began in 600 BCE, has changed several times. It started with the Buddha and Alexander; the Vedas were designated as religious poetry and the epics and Puranas as myths. Indian civilisation, they said, started with the Greeks and Persians. When the Muslims came, Hindu kingdoms collapsed.

Until Mohenjo Daro was discovered. Overnight, India became the home of an ancient, highly developed ur­ban civilisation, as old as Egypt and Mesopotamia, which went back to 2500 BCE. Gradually, the antiquity went further back to 7000 BCE with the discovery of Mehrgarh in Balochistan and the beginnings of agriculture. The civilisation ex­tended from Balochistan in the west to western Uttar Pradesh in the east, from Afghanistan in the north to Maharashtra in the south.

British historians theorised that the Vedic people were marauding Aryans from Central Asia who packed off the Dravidians of the Indus to the south and took over north India. Max Müller, a Christian zealot, calculated the date of the Vedas from 4444 BCE when God, according to the Bible, created the earth. He fixed 1200 BCE as the date of the Rig Veda. This suited the British, whose goal was to denigrate Indian civilisation and play divide and rule—Aryan versus Dravidian, Hindu versus Muslim.

This history continued to be taught in independent India, where left-leaning historians spread the theory of Aryan invasion and Muslim domination. Unfortunately, every Indian child was fed this history, invented by the British and nurtured by the Indian Left.

Archaeology was the game-changer. Indian civilisation had gone from 600 to 7000 BCE. There was more. BB Lal excavated Mahabharata sites and discovered com­mon Painted Grey Ware locations, including Hastinapur, in the northern plains. They were all dated scientifically to 1000 BCE. If the events of the Mahabharata took place in 1000 BCE, surely the Rig Veda was much earlier? He ex­cavated Indus civilisation sites, identified the Ghaggar- Hakra as the River Saraswati, rejected the Aryan conquest/ migration theory, and maintained that the Rig Vedic and Harappan people were the same.

Meanwhile, marine archaeology was also developing. SR Rao discovered the lost city of Dwarka in the Gulf of Khambhat, while excavations off the Tamil Nadu coast at Mamallapuram and Poompuhar led scientists of the CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography to discover the ruins of ancient ports at both sites.

The newest source of Indian history is the study of DNA. Examining a female skeleton from Rakhigarhi, Vasant Shinde discovered that from hunter-gatherers to modern South Asians, all were indigenous people with no genes from either Steppe pastoralists or Iranian farm­ers. Facial reconstruction of the skel­eton revealed a startling resemblance to modern Haryanvis, or any Indian.

Sanskrit and folk literature had been dismissed as myth. Talking an­imals were unacceptable. Then an­thropology suggested a vista of totem­ic humans represented by animals. One gradually learned that much of our history was in the memories of villagers and tribals who guarded them as zealously as the classicists. People learned of south Indian em­pires with naval fleets and rich, powerful cities. It was no longer about people who came “from somewhere… fights and bloodbaths occurred… and when one group somehow left, another came—Pathan, Mughal, Portuguese, French, British,” as Rabindranath Tagore deplored. Muslim dom­ination, limited to the region surrounding Delhi till the Mughal period, shrank in importance.

Schoolchildren are still fed outdated and wrong information about Aryans and Dravidians. They are inundated with dates. As a result, history is boring

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Unfortunately, none of these developments was passed on to schoolchildren. They are still fed outdated and wrong information about Aryans and Dravidians, about invad­ers who blinded their siblings and murdered their fathers. They are inundated with dates. As a result, history is bor­ing and a subject to be hated for the average schoolchild, whereas it can be very interesting if new fields like the his­tory of the environment, art and science are introduced.

I do not know why the Mughals were discarded, al­though the Sultanate period is worth jettisoning. But the history syllabus must be updated regularly, and new dis­coveries mean sacrificing some of the old. Otherwise, it will go the way suggested by a DMK education minister in Tamil Nadu some years ago, someone who wanted to abolish history completely.

About The Author

Nanditha Krishna

Nanditha Krishna is a historian and an environmentalist, and director of the CPR Institute of Indological Research in Chennai. She has co-written Madras Then Chennai Now (2014)

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