India – 5000 Years of History on the Subcontinent

Title: India – 5000 Years of History on the Subcontinent
Author: Audrey Truschke
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9780691221229
Pages: 687

At the outset, let me openly confess that Audrey Truschke is an author I very much love to hate. Such is her oeuvre which was reviewed many times earlier on these pages. The misfortune with Indian culture and civilization is that the country had been under colonial occupation for too long – first under the Islamic from eleventh to eighteenth centuries and then under the British thereafter till 1947 – while the world started waking up from slumber in the medieval period and began to give prime importance to knowledge. Colonial masters put down any kind of creative or revivalist instinct among the colonized. The Ghuris, Tughluqs, Khiljis, Lodis, Mughals, and Dalhousies were extremely successful in crushing the Indian spirit. As a consequence, India's classical literature was introduced to the world by orientalist scholars who were mostly British/European. As exemplified by Macaulay, they approached Indian texts with a mixture of contempt and disdain. Of course, not all of them, but most of them were. Since Britain collapsed financially after World War II, the haughty oriental scholars migrated to the academic institutions in the USA who continue to churn out reams and reams of books and papers filled with the agenda of their sponsors and are usually unanimous only in their hatred over India's political unity and attempts to wreak the harmony among communities in modern India. Audrey Truschke is a perfect example of this genre. Her hostility to India is so visceral that I sincerely doubt that she might have been foaming at the mouth while writing many sections in this book. The author is a professor at Rutgers University and is supposed to be a historian specializing on India.

The author's hypocrisy begins to manifest from the title itself. As it rightfully implies, it’s an effort to catalog 5000 years of history on the Indian subcontinent. However, the text inside refers to the region as South Asia, but she cleverly brings up India in the title because she knows very well that the other one will not sell. Many inconsistencies and loose ends are visible in the structure of the narrative. The author claims that Indian history is a series of discrete stories like the Panchatantra that do not feed into a grand, singular narrative. She clearly misses the wood for the trees with this admission beforehand. Whatever worthwhile in the Indian culture and history was developed by or during the British rule. That's the distorted image this book conveys to the readers. What she does is that instead of offering a new history crafted to be relevant in the twenty-first century, a perspective warped by contemporary, divisive ideas is produced. The author confuses caste with varna and reaches erroneous conclusions which puts her credibility as a scholar at risk. It's a common misconception of foreigners, but a learned professor of Indian history harbouring such amateurish notions is shocking news. She stresses that the slave trade was common in South India in the first millennium CE, both inward and outward. This is doubtful and the author herself admits that this is 'an unstudied feature of the South Asian past'. Would these academic vultures have left it at that, if they thought they had a chance to malign it? Atrocious acts mentioned in Indian texts – even polemics – is taken at face value and bandied about in the text in a calculated way to provoke and inflame the modern descendants of the wronged party. But when it comes to similar atrocious references against India and Indians in Muslim texts of the invaders, they are claimed to be exaggerating or not telling the truth. Here she proposes the truism that 'we must be critical of pre-modern sources and not blithely assume that they are always accurate' (p. 165). This book is part of a calculated neo-colonial effort to take away the pride Indians feel about their country and its past. She mentions that 'villagers in medieval southern India worshipped at small local shrines and probably never set foot inside a Chola imperial complex' (p. 167). This is crafted to regurgitate itself when the readers cast a look in admiration at a grand Chola temple!
Truschke's treatment of the Indus Valley civilization (IVC) lacks consistency and agreement with accepted facts. She proposes that the Pashupati icon of IVC is not native to the place and is borrowed from a common Eurasian motif from Elam in Iran. This is a clever trick to unhinge the theory that it was some kind of proto-Shiva. A simple Google search will reveal the folly of this argument and so she does not reproduce the pictures in this book. However, she dumps the Aryan invasion theory by claiming that IVC fell because of climate change and desertification. Later, she specifically states that the Aryan Invasion Theory is now rejected (p. 415). Instead, she suggests that Indo-European speakers migrated during 1700–1200 BCE, mingled with people already residing there and in any case, 'did not disrupt life for most Indians' (p. 18). Regarding the Mauryas, the author makes two observations out of which one concerns Ashoka's dhamma which is said not to be coterminous with Buddhist dhamma and that the articulated ideas are broader than standard Buddhist teachings. This is normal fare, but the next claim that Kautilya was a post-Mauryan author who wrote Arthashastra in 50–125 CE (p. 66) is highly unusual. She does not present any justification for this startling conclusion. In spite of the remarks on mutual antagonism between the religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, the author grudgingly concedes that they flourished side by side and that many early temple sites feature Hindu and Jain spaces in the same place, such as the caves of Badami and Ellora, which also include Buddhist sites (p. 116). A deliberate attempt to downplay the role of Sanskrit in Indian history is seen at this point that follows the fall of the Mauryas. Had it not for Rudradaman's inscription in Sanskrit around 180 CE, it is likely that the author would have claimed that the language came to prominence with the arrival of British Orientalists! With this background, she is unable to explain the sudden flowering of Sanskrit because she admits that from the second century CE onward, people began to use it to write a huge range of material (p. 112). Her bafflement is palpable because in the previous chapter she had asserted that Sanskrit was confined to the Vedas while Buddhism and Jainism used Pali and that Vedic rituals were not practised in any royal dynasties like the Mauryas. Sanskrit in fact grew dominant even in overseas centres of Indian culture too. In the 670s–690s, Chinese monk Yijing travelled to India by sea and stopped in Sumatra to study Sanskrit before coming to Nalanda (p. 145).

The entire book is an endless ejaculation of anti-Hindu rhetoric, in some cases totally unwarranted. The premise behind this planned hate-mongering is to claim that most of ancient India's glories do not belong to the lower castes and this book is the latest in the line of racial, neo-colonialist research work trying to drive a wedge among modern Hindu communities. This 'othering' of the lower castes is clearly visible in other contexts also. Truschke finds the Mahabharata to be a cultural product of ancient 'north India', furnishing 'upper caste views' on the 'vicious state violence' in the transition from clans to kingdoms (p. 75). However, she is unable to digest the origin of Valmiki as a tribal and spitefully remarks that Ramayana uses a tribal person as a foil for elaborating 'upper caste' values (p. 111). The book notes that as Brahmins interacted with local communities, North Indian and Dravidian deities became fused. Such harmonious melding is rare in history, but this great feat of syncretism is not praised in the text (p. 121). It also admits that Hindu pilgrimage networks sometimes overlapped with Buddhist ones (p. 145). Coming to the medieval period, Shivaji's Bhonsle dynasty belonged to shudras and he is claimed to have observed some rituals to transform into a Kshatriya. Truschke concludes wrongly that the fact that he went to such lengths to project himself as a Kshatriya attests to the importance of caste. But, doesn't it prove that caste was not a barrier for a talented and resourceful person who could become a celebrated king even though he belonged to the shudra varna? There are several other lineages which were shudras. The Mauryas and the Nayaka kings of Tamil Nadu are some notable examples. These instances attest to the truth that the author has a very poor judgment of facts and lacks any sense of proportion. In her frantic bid to downgrade the Indian culture, she ridiculously points out Panchatantra stories in which the animal theme is focussed as indicative of oppression of lower castes based on their birth.
Feminism is the other favourite trope of the author and tirades against patriarchy is frequently encountered in the text. Despite the examples of female philosophers like Gargi and Maitreyi in the Upanishadic texts, the author claims that Brahminical social conventions excluded women. Mahabharata's Draupadi is a strong character in the literature of the world. The epic describes the attempt of her enemies to disrobe her in public and how Lord Krishna miraculously provided her with robes that continued appearing one after the other was taken off. Truschke rejects this literal interpretation and states that Draupadi's internal power was so fierce that she could not be disrobed (p. 91). This magnanimity is not displayed by her in the previous paragraph where Truschke takes the literal meaning in the torching of the Khandava forest and calls it a genocide of the forest dwellers.

After amplifying the caste-related dichotomy, the author moves on to Islamic invasions of the subcontinent. She bails out the temple and idol destroyers with a sweeping comment that 'South Asian temple plundering was undergirded by a widely shared idea that Hindu temples and icons were expressions of political authority' (p. 162) and hence fair game for any adventurer. The author virtually dances with joy like a courtesan in the court of Mahmud of Ghazni in glorifying that ruthless invader of India whose only real achievement is the plundering of India and destruction of temples. Such is her obsequiousness and respect for this bigoted warlord. By the way, Truschke shows respect only towards three personalities in this book on Indian history – Mahmud of Ghazni, Aurangzeb the Mughal and Jawaharlal Nehru! She justifies his invasion of Somnath with a comparison to Rajendra Chola's attack on the Ganges which is not even historically proved. She stoops so low as to praise the system of slavery practised by Muslim sultans as a virtuous thing because a few of the slaves were well-trained and claims that it was rather different than the unskilled, undiligent enslavement we have encountered elsewhere in pre-modern India (p. 183). In her bid to make Islamic colonialism, which was as exploitative and burdensome to India as the British one, the author cleverly employs blatant falsehood, made so nonchalantly as to look like a tongue-in-cheek comment when she says of temple destruction and their conversion to mosques thus: "The Ghurids constructed mosques, re-using pillars from Jain and Hindu temples. Such reuse was common and suggests Hindu-Muslim collaboration" (p. 185). But she soon drops the charade and talks about a Rajput destruction of a mosque somewhere in Rajasthan whose source reference is given as her own book on Aurangzeb (p. 186). Apart from all these, Truschke's choice of material to present to the readers is awful. The selection from Amir Khusrau, who was a celebrated poet of the Sultanate period, is one praising homosexuality (p. 191). The author's flagrant duplicity and proclivity to mislead the readers fill the pages of this book. She claims that the Vijayanagara and Bahmani royalty intermarried and presents a list of such instances. However, by an omission that can only be attributed to wickedness, she fails to notice that all of them – yes, every one of them – were one-sided, that is, involving Muslim princes and Hindu princesses. This was nothing more than a case of concubinage and possibly an early proof of what we now call Love Jihad. The fanatical Aurangzeb is affectionately termed as 'the most successful exemplar of pre-modern Indian kingship' (p. 290). The funny part is that even though Mughal texts openly speak about hitting against the 'infidels' and praise the spread of Islam through 'jihad' (p. 298), our author refuses to accept the quite straightforward message, claiming them to be exaggerations. But no such leniency is shown to Hindu texts. Aurangzeb re-imposed the religious tax of jizya in 1679 which was suspended by Akbar 115 years ago. Even this blatant outrage is justified as his attempt to address the Mughal Empire's 'financial difficulties' or 'to employ the ulama' who served as special tax collectors for it.

This book is a representative piece of the genre of colonial revivalism which attempts to re-examine aspects of colonialism in a favourable light. The problem with Truschke is that she extends it to such impossible lengths as to brand the whole project as absurd. One such instance is her claim that Varanasi rose as a pilgrimage site only in the eighteenth century under British tutelage because some Brahmins 'consciously advertised Benares as a pilgrimage site where devotees could engage in religious activities that required the oversight of Brahmin priests who benefitted financially’ (p. 321). Not only that, Indians came to know of ancient Sanskrit texts from colonial era English translations which were limited by narrow selections and translation decisions. She argues that even today, many Indians are surprised at the embrace of eroticism in pre-modern Sanskrit poetry. It is noted that sati was rare in colonial India, but it captured British imaginations because they perceived it as a gruesome practice (p. 350). The First War of Independence in 1857 was the greatest armed resistance Indians ever posed to the British colonial enterprise, but the author disparages it as 'sepoy rebellion' throughout the text. This was exactly the derogatory term devised by the British to refer to it. She even trivializes the cause of the conflict by claiming that 'nobody has ever worked out if the rumours of the presence of beef tallow and pig lard held any truth' (p. 361). This is only because her research was of such poor quality. In a shocking assault on Indian sensibilities, this karen accuses Mangal Pandey of taking up arms against the British under the influence of bhang (canabis) (p. 361).

Truschke's polarizing agenda is all the more exposed in her treatment of twentieth century Indian history. This book maps the freedom struggle from a Dalit perspective, clearly omitting all efforts to reconcile their differences with the mainstream. Due to her poor research, no ideas worthy of serious consideration in this regard is presented. This book somewhat disparages the architects of India's constitution with the comment that 'its core is rooted in British colonial law, reproducing parts of the Government of India Act and retaining the emergency powers to the state to abrogate the Constitution and all its liberal rights' (p. 464). Regarding partition violence, she shamelessly paints Pakistan's viewpoint and quotes excerpts from Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai, two Pakistani Urdu writers. The book lists only the violence committed by Hindus and accuses the RSS of committing genocide. The post-partition narrative is so outrageously partisan that it looks like it was lifted entirely from a school history textbook in Pakistan. It also condones Islamic terrorism by bracketing terrorists killing artists in Pakistan's Northwest with peaceful protests against the pseudo-Islamist painter M.F. Husain in India. The book alleges manual scavenging as still prevalent in India. It demands that the Adivasis be categorized as a separate community in the next census. Regarding the causes of pollution in India, this American simpleton can think of nothing other than Diwali fireworks as 'especially harmful and difficult to curb in Indian cities'.

The book is built on a shaky ideology that is inconsistent with any objective historical paradigm. It twists facts and jumps to conclusions to suit its prejudices. For example, it argues that 'Indus Civilization people distinguished themselves internally through death rituals, even if we have a poor understanding of this' (p. 9). If the understanding is so poor, how could she judge? As seen in most of her books, Truschke takes great pains to show that ancient Indians ate beef. This insistence to be vocal on this point, sometimes even out of context, is jarring as it exposes nothing but her agenda for the present. This text is marked by mediocre creativity and imagination. The author could find no justification for sati in Hindu religious texts but states that 'this economically benefitted surviving sons, who were then left without an elderly dependent to support' (p. 134). Truschke either doesn't know or refuses to tell us that sati, whenever it occurred rarely, happened in financially affluent and socially higher families where the support of a human being was not much of a concern. Is she really a professor in a reputed American university? The author's research, as evidenced in this book, lacks any depth or focus. For the readers, the experience is like learning the cultural history of a place from the billboards put up on the roadside for advertising products and services. Now let us turn to exposing some of the double standards and duplicity exhibited in the book. Truschke cites ecological concerns in events happened in the early first millennium CE. She notes that 'some land grants to Brahmins had environmental implications in that they required forest clearing' (p. 169). The same thing, when exercised by Muslim sultans, cause the author to make a volte-face, when it is noted that 'Delhi sultanate rulers altered the landscape around Delhi through forest clearing, thus making the city more accessible' (p. 186). Hindus are castigated for not empowering women in the middle ages in statements like 'gender inequality was a feature of medieval temples and associated religious activities' (p. 169). However, polygamy even in the twenty-first century in some communities is no concern to her. She alleges that Indian art forms, including dance and music, are recent products of the twentieth century nationalism and are modern (p. 488). Truschke thankfully acknowledges inputs from several libraries and museums in various countries, even including the Lahore Museum in Pakistan, but no Indian institution is in the list (p. 544). It's only when we encounter the chapter on historiography that we realise that what the author had attempted to write is history and not hateful political propaganda against India and Hinduism. It is once again noted that the quality of Truschke's research is abysmally sub-standard. The only saving grace is that she has categorically rejected the Aryan invasion theory.   

This book is a terrible waste of time and not recommended.

 

Rating: 1 Star