Ritwik Agrawal

unwittingly, yes, it ends up sounding like an imperial apologist stand. but knowing him personally, i don’t think that was the desired intention.

where he loses the plot, for whatever reason, is his construction of the article. the way he calls the achievements of the indian civilisation as the ” india shining ” variety tends to create the picture that most, if not all, heights of the indian civilisation were over-hyped or wrongly credited. and this is where the article only begins.

in fact his argument on the famines seems wholly unnecessary. that space could’ve gone to criticising some other obfuscation in the manifesto.

sadly it became a partial picture which really has no debate. joshi said, we were abundant. dreze says, no we had famines all along. the simple point being that every geographical zone on this planet has had a share of both. simply because in the pre-modern years, everything depended on the strictly natural course of rainfall.

additionally, what is good and needed is the tone of criticism, that is necessary in a popular newspaper like the TOI. but he seems to be too swept away by the tone, given that he’s clearly decided his political stand. and this results in a dilusion of necessary well-framed criticism.

the last paragraph is highly contentious. as you rightly said, the freedom struggle was due to the hurt pride of everyone, not just upper castes. everyone feels bad that foreign powers hold so much sway over our minerals and natural resources. and then this – “..their coping strategy is that we were ahead all along..”

only, it’s not a coping strategy at all. we were definitely ahead in so many ways. keeping achievements like literary epics, architecture et al aside, as far as simple traditional wisdom goes, we had greatly different ideas. in fact, before the IRRI forced countries to use puddling for the cultivation of rice, we grew rice like most other crops… and practically the whole country had rice until the central asian conquerors came along. so in crude terms, keeping famines aside, we had massively huge harvests.

it is important to recognise that in a localised setting, social innovations and traditional wisdom play a huge role. it may be unequal, but to make it more equal there has to be an evolutionary process initiated from within these traditions. these traditional customs, wisdom and organic ideas need to be accepted and then questioned. this allows for radicalism to grow deeper roots and thus the progressive trend retains the good parts of the old order. it only serves to keep us grounded in reality.

if we start homogenising everything that existed within a broadly feudal system, across all continents, then we end up with a direct conflict of the homogenised perceptions of modernity versus the same ones of traditionalism. all this, within a similarly homogenising sphere. this is the exact reason why indian tribal regions find it so hard to come to terms with the modern developmental nation-state. they see no link between what is really indian and what is broadly an adulterated discourse of modernity that prevails due to western ideas badly enforced upon us.

one rule doesn’t fit all. it may well be argued, therefore, that the indian civilisation’s achievements can be extolled in a different light, which is a healthy mix of due credit and due self-criticism. one can’t suffice by succinctly calling everything feudal and discriminatory.

sadly, he suggests the above mildly only once…” their agenda is to restore india’s glory, as they perceive it”

this shows that they have a biased perception that is homogenising every part of indian history with the labeling of a great artistic edifice. dreze ends up mirroring the exact opposite bias. the lost glory is much more than just another social order.

by utathya on July 8, 2009 at 3:51 am. #

Its something so humiliating that it forced me to leave every other work aside and criticize propaganda by anti-national ,neo-colonialist forces within the country.
As those who are close to me know that I asked my newspaper supplier at hostel to stop giving me Times of India and I replaced it with Hindu ( Even Hindu has dissapointed me).
But I again started reading TOI to see whether they have improved or not

Although Britishers have left the country but some “brown skinned britishers” continue their proganda and myth of “White man’s burden”.

They are perhaps not able to digest the fact that 5000 years when their ancestors were roaming without clothes(reading and writing was far away) every Indian child was reading Bhavadgita.

I hope that some of you must have read the editorial in TOI today by Jean Dreze

A person sent by west to destroy Indian Pride.

let me come to the point and expose the propanganda by neo-colonialists.

this is what he wrote:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Editorial/TOP-ARTICLE–Interpretation-Of-Dreams/articleshow/4455896.cms

Now let me put some light on the truth

derez wrote

a series of myths (of the “India Shining” variety) about Indian history and civilisation. According to this preamble, India used to be “a land of great wealth and even greater wisdom”. It was not only the most fertile land but also far ahead of other countries “in the technical and educational fields”, with “a well organised health-care system” as early as 400 AD. Even “plastic surgery” has been “practised for centuries” in India according to Joshi. These achievements had their roots in the “Bharatiya or Hindu world view” of ancient sages and Vedic rishis.

REALITY:
The person is perhaps not aware of indian medicinal system and Sushruta who wrote about surgery many years back and even western doctors and scientist recognize his work.I dont need to tell anyone about ayurveda and yoga.

More info about Sushruta’s original work can be found in the book

“ANCIENT INDIAN SURGERY SYSTEM BASED ON SUSHRUTA SAMHITA”
10 Volumes.
http://www.saujanyabooks.com/details.aspx?id=379

Not just in medicine Indians were experts in other fields like mathematics,chemistry,physics,musics,linguistics.latest research has shown that ancient researchers in India had discovered principles of mordern maths much before newton did and you can check out here
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=&id=6012bc3f-d22a-4eb8-9399-d6ae622fe41a&&Headline=Kerala+scholars+beat+Newton:+report&strParent=strParentID

Indeed it was passed by missionaries from india to newton,who claimed that the work was his own.

This is not what any Indian is saying but is found by a western scholar Dr George Gheverghese Joseph, an Honorary Reader of the University of Manchester, says the ‘Kerala School of Mathematics and Astronomy,’ identified the ‘Infinite Series’ — one of the basic components of calculus — in about 1350. ( But it was even before Christ,some more research will tell Dr. George)

How jealous western people are !!!!

There are many other things also which will make this letter lenghty and “boring” for you so I am keeping this letter short showing only evidences against the attempts by anti-nationals.

Derez wrote:
Joshi describes pre-colonial India as a “land of abundance”, with an “economy as flourishing as its agriculture”. Hunger and famines, in his perception, were obviously unknown in that period. But the fact is that famines have a long history in India. They are mentioned in the Jatakas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Arthashastra and Manu’s Dharmashastra, among other ancient texts. As historian Romila Thapar notes: “Famine was common and is mentioned in Indian texts. We do not have to go looking for certificates of merit from foreign visitors.”

REALITY:

No one can stop famines caused by natural reasons and they took place in ancient India also but they were rare and Hindu scriptures unambiguously that the welfare of people is the supreme duty of the administrators.He further mentions Romila Thapar ,what a kind of historian she is????
I remember Romila Thapar claiming during Ram Setu controversy that “LANKA” was perhaps an island in “Caspian Sea”,What a Weird Idea to save congress party.

Indeed it was man made famines during British Raj days due to which crores of INDIANS DIED. The number of people died in India because of British Policies exceeded the number of jews killed by NAZIS and British Raj was far more brutal than nazis.

This is not what I am claiming but recent research in history has shown.
Viceroys like Lytton,Curzon were wasting money holding luxorious durbars and took no interest in relief work for famine victims
Lord Lytton arrived as Viceroy of India in 1876. In the same year, a famine broke out in south India which claimed between 6.1 million and 10.3 million people

some British and American historians recently argued the famine was man-made due to Lytton’s policies

Here is what historians say about Lytton.

1. The British Created an Indian Holocaust, by Kathakali Chatterjee, University of Wisconsinm 17 July 2007
2. ^ Mike Davis, 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, London

DEREZ WROTE:
In a similar vein, Joshi states that Gandhi was “absolutely right in saying that India was more illiterate in 1931 [than] in 1870”. The fact, however, is that Gandhi was wrong on this. We know that from census data. Perhaps Joshi considers Gandhi as a more authoritative source than the census. But Gandhi, for all his wisdom, was not infallible, and this is not the only occasion when he was carried away. Elsewhere, he touchingly described “the Indian shepherd” as “a finely built man of Herculean constitution”, at a time when the vast majority of the Indian population was wasted and stunted, with a life expectancy of less than 30 years. His hasty comment on literacy belongs to the same genre wishful thinking.

REALITY:

Another bunch of lies by Derez.It is well known that nearly every village in India had a Pathshala or Madrassa before bristishers destroyed traditional indian education system.

DEREZ WROTE:
This “quote” (abridged here) is a wonderful prop for Joshi’s arguments. But there is a catch Macaulay never said this. The quote is a well-known fabrication, which has been the subject of many comments and articles. This does not prevent it from being publicised on numerous Hindutva websites. On a dissenting note, one of these websites advises against using this quote, as it “has a bad reputation amongst scholars of Indology who generally ridicule it”. Joshi is evidently not among these “scholars of Indology”, despite his emphasis on the need for the nation to “understand itself”. Incidentally, Macaulay was in India on February 2, 1835, making it rather unlikely that he would have addressed the British Parliament that day.

REALITY:
Macaulay like derez was jealous of ancient India’s achievements , he had said that Indians are so much proud of themselves that they treat us as “MALLECHCHAS” or untouchable meat eaters .So he had advocated introduction of british education in India to destroy their pride and produce Indian “clerks”.
Unfortunately the system to produce clerks is still in place and must be replaced.
APJ Abdul Kalam had also criticised Macaulay Education systems .
You can check what he said about Macaulay. Well I am gathering some proof of what Macaulay said exactly but one thing is clear and unambiguous that he wanted to attack Indian Education Culture to conquer India thats why he wanted to introduce an education system with aim of producing mindless clerks.

Unfortunately we have many “Macaulay’s Children” here in India.

DEREZ WROTE:

Behind this fairy tale are useful insights into the psychology of Hindutva leaders and the political strategy of the BJP. The dominant theme of Joshi’s preamble is the hurt pride of the higher castes (or “of India” as he calls it). Humiliated by foreign dominance in so many fields today, their coping strategy is to claim that “we were actually ahead all along”. Their agenda is to restore India’s lost glory as they perceive it. This lost glory is nothing but the traditional, exploitative social order dominated by them. Over the centuries, this domination has been achieved partly through force, and partly through deception. The BJP manifesto’s preamble continues this tradition of “deceive and rule”.

REALITY

Caste system in India was not hereditary.Shrila Prabhupada ,founder of ISCKON,who wrote “Bhagvadgita as it is” has clarified that castes (whether brahmins ,kshatriya,vaishya or shudras ) are not hereditary but allotted on basis of one’s ablity and interest.In scriptures there is no mention of “birth” in brahmin family to be a brahmin,any intellectual can be a brahmin.
However in medieval india, with decline in our knowledge of scriptures,caste system became hereditary.for more details you may read “science of self realization” by Prabhupada.

Neo colonialists are still trying to humiliate us by shameless propaganda and we must be aware of this.

I hope that all of you will lodge your protest with times of india to publishing this editorials…..

If neo-colonialist and Macaluay’s children will try to control India again then its the duty of every patriotic Indian to wipe them off………..

Thanks and regards

by ppandey on July 10, 2010 at 5:32 pm. #