Title: Eminent Historians – Their
Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud
Author: Arun
Shourie
Publisher: ASA
Publications, 1998 (First)
ISBN: 8190019988
Pages: 271
The cover says it all. An ostrich made of the hammer and sickle burying
its head in sand to gloss over inconvenient facts! But there is more to it, as
Arun Shourie narrates in very fine detail. Scholars having strong bias towards
the Left control our premier institutions and media even to the level of
hijacking it. They produce history of India in conformity to Marx’ ideas stated
way back in the 19th century such as the human past is a long story
of class struggles. This has gone to ridiculous lengths as when one historian
lamented that the hardships of village folk were not reproduced in the
paintings of Ajanta caves! This book flays them alive, showing their true colours
and how they have lost anchor when the socialist system humiliatingly collapsed
in the 1990s in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This book attempts a
three-pronged approach to isolate the politicized historians – Shourie calls
them ‘eminences’ derogatively, always in inverted commas – for their misuse of
public funds earmarked for research, whitewashing of the medieval period in
Indian history and reviling the ancient period and thirdly, for blindly
following the outdated political ideology of Marx and Lenin. None other than
Shourie can produce a work of this sort, which is full of vitriolic but effective
diatribe against opponents. Having served as an economist, journalist,
parliamentarian and a minister, Shourie’s credentials are impeccable.
The leftist historians and academics act as a clique to malign the
country’s cultural heritage and the author tries to expose their stranglehold
on the nation’s academic institutions and media. They unabashedly produce work
committed to Marxist theories that reek of totalitarianism and irrelevance to
Indian conditions. The leftist academics became fashionable during the time of
Nehru. Our first prime minister was overly susceptible to the latest
intellectual ‘fashions’ in Europe. Unfortunately for India, the latest fad
going on in the thinking circles of London was Fabian socialism. So, Nehru
anointed these people on the higher echelons of state organizations concerned
with education and historical research. The historians thus appointed found it
expedient to propagate Marxian propaganda through the text books taught in
India’s schools and colleges, thereby poisoning the minds of impressionable
childhood and adolescence. The Jawaharlal Nehru University in the capital
became a hotbed of armchair revolutionaries in this way. The masters selected
and pruned their descendants carefully. Meanwhile, the Congress party which continued
its rule in Delhi chose to ignore this contentious phenomenon as the party
didn’t have an alternate ideology to put before the people. All this changed
with the advent of BJP to power. For right or for wrong, the party has an
ideology that is diametrically opposite to that of the communists. The Sangh
Parivar wanted to control those institutions which the leftists had made their
personal fiefs.
Shourie exposes a typical element
of the leftist tirade that may be labeled misinformation. The guiding principles
contained in the Memorandum of Association of the Indian Council of Historical
Research (ICHR) propose to ‘give a
national direction to an objective and rational presentation and interpretation
of history’. When the BJP reconstituted the ICHR in 1998, the notification
was found to include the word ‘national’
appearing for a second time in place of ‘rational’.
This was trumpeted as an affirmation of the Sangh Parivar’s ‘wicked’ attempt to
saffronise history. On the first look, it looks like what the critics say is
correct. Omission of the word rational
could only come about by a deliberate attempt. However, Shourie made a detailed
analysis of previous notifications and comes up with the startling observation
that the term rational was changed to
national in 1978 as the result of a
typing error. For two decades, nobody paid any attention till the time when the
leftists raised a hue and cry. Communism thrives by selectively masking
information or withholding it in its entirety from the public eye.
The so called ‘eminent
historians’ show a reverential attitude to Islamic fundamentalism. Shourie
produces copies of instructions issued by the West Bengal government’s
education department asking teachers not to mention in the classrooms the
brutalities committed by medieval sultans and their soldiery like forced
conversions and destruction of temples. Historians follow a set procedure to
deal with acts of a violent kind. If the sultan had destroyed a temple, it is
obviously to get at the jewels and gold heaped there and not for religious
reasons. If he imposed Jizya on the
Hindus for the right to live as second class citizens in their own motherland,
it is for economic reasons the tax would bring to the state treasury. If he
forcibly converted Hindus, it is because in a battle, the sultan cannot afford
his enemy ranks to swell and not for any religious motives. Thus, the
historians find all of their actions quite justified. But what about the wanton
destruction of temples and placing the smashed remains of stone idols on the
walkway in the nearby mosque so that believers can tread on it everytime they
worship there? What about desecration of the temples of the defeated by
butchering cows inside them? This carnage cannot be explained by economic
reasons, so the ‘eminent historians’ choose to censor them and teach a
sanitized version. The author reproduces numerous quotes from texts with the
original and sanitized versions which prove his case.
Besides these, the ‘eminent
historians’ are experts in the grand old art of financial embezzlement. Several
occurrences are pointed out where they collected considerable sums from ICHR
for producing books on various projects, but end up with neither doing the work
nor returning the money. Foreign seminars and conferences form another milch
cow for the unscrupulous politicized historians. Since these people form the
cream of the hierarchy, such theft could be concealed effectively. It is only
when the government effects a major overhaul of the apparatus on radical lines
do the chance of exposure arises. One of the reasons for raising the slogan of
saffronizing may be this secret agenda of keeping their embezzlement secret.
When the project for translating the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan series on the
history and culture of India was initiated, the committee of ‘eminent
historians’ distributed the task among themselves and appropriated many lakhs
of rupees in the bargain. Even the work of EMS Namboodiripad, a Marxist
politician from Kerala was masqueraded as learned opinion, showing the
ideological tilt of the nation’s premier institutions on historical research
which are expected to steadfastly remain impartial.
The book sums up the issues by
revealing the real motive behind such deliberate falsifications. Shourie coins
the term ‘religiofication’ to explain the curious case of even intelligent
people making a dumb following of the teachings of Marx and Lenin. They
demarcated five stages of social development that every society must pass
through, such as primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and
socialism before it reaches the promised land of communism where milk and honey
flow. Everywhere in the world, left-leaning historians attribute the history
under their study to follow this dictum by the Master, just as in a religious
discourse. It has been established that Marx’ observations themselves were on
many occasions – such as the extent of slavery in ancient Greece – found to be
in error or based on insufficient material, since many later findings from the
field have supplemented the edifice of knowledge on this issue. Scholars who
follow the party’s official line are not expected to express any divergent
opinion, however slight the differences may be. Opinion of those who are
believed to be against the party is not taken into account at all. This blind
adherence to commands from authority figures is the hallmark of religion and
hence the word ‘religiofication’. Shourie hints that the striking resemblance
in obedience to the Master may be what prompts the leftists to defer to Islamic
hardliners who follow their religious precepts with equal ardour.
A serious drawback of the book is
that it has assumed that whatever is severly criticized by the ‘eminent
historians’ is inherently good. The charge against them is that they unduly
berates the ancient period while keeping mum on the acts of violence
perpetrated during the sultanate and Mughal periods. But the remedy to this
malfunction is not to eulogize the ancient past, but to continue the
investigation with the same critical sense during the medieval period as well.
The enquiring mind should be free of slavery to any political or economic
ideology. Historians use the term Brahmanic
to the ancient period, that is also being taken offense of. However, this may
be treated as an attempt to distinguish it from modern Hinduism. Shourie’s
assertion that Buddha, like the tenets of Islam, asked the idols of other
faiths to be pulverized (p.89) does not seem to be based on solid evidence.
The book is highly recommended.
Rating: 3 Star
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