Some further thoughts about India and the West: when I was about ten years old, people used to pass around a photocopy of an article written by one Mr Oak, an Englishman who said that India had once ruled a large empire in Central Asia. Like the other pseudo-historians of his type, he didn’t bother much with giving proof, apart from stating that the names of many countries of Asia end with “stan” ( “Kazakstan) which he said came from the sanskrit “sthan”, a place. I guess there were some other proofs of that type. I’m not sure if it was him or one of his kin who affirmed ( these people never propose anything, they always affirm) that the black rock in Mecca was a Shiva Lingam.

These kinds of pseudo-historians must be one of India’s biggest growth industries, given the rise of Hindu nationalism there. I remember my wife showing me an article in a Chinese newspaper, saying that archaeologists had found strong radioactive remains in the remains of Dwarka, (the sunken city off the coast of Gujarat, not the modern city). I was actually disturbed by the news until, on the following week, that newspaper carried an article about the remains of insect-like aliens having been found in Peru. Then I understood. While writing this paragraph, I ran a google search on Dwarka and came upon a Western occultist website which said that the sunken city had been proved to be 9 000 years old.

I don’t understand what comfort some people find, in writing books that talk of the vimanas having been real flying vehicles, and of the Brahmastra as a nuclear device. I think it just denotes a massive inferiority complex towards the West. Even more embarassing is the proposition put forward by Hindutva crowd, that the Aryans never invaded India, but started from somewhere near Punjab to conquer Iran, Russia and Europe.

Even if it’s true that the Aryans come from India ( nobody knows where they come from , but let’s just assume that somehow, a white race emerged on the hot plains of North India) what difference does it make ? What is clear is that they were a white people, who crushed the darker inhabitants of India ( who were civilised, given that the Vedas mention the Asuras holding great cities). And that they set up the caste system, which had a colour element ( Varna means colour). And the result of all this is a caste and skin colour consciousness which has poisoned the whole tree of Indian civilisation. Whether the Aryans come from the North Pole or from Chennai, that’s what really matters, to me: the deep fracture, the resentment I feel in Indian society , or Indo-Mauritian society, because of that caste and colour element.

I’m also puzzled by all the trouble people take in proving that our ancestors flew about in Vimanas and threw ICBM’s at each other. Why can’t they be satisfied with what we know of ancient India ? It seems there’s enough in it to have been proud of. Nice temples, nice music, medicine, speculative thought, mathematics, poetry ( from what I read in translations). Beautiful temples sprouting up in Indonesia and Cambodia, and the graceful dances there, playing scenes from the Ramayana. And Buddhism spreading out even to the steppes of Siberia.

We didn’t invent the printing press or the steam engine ? Too bad, but then, I don’t want to sound like I am saying “Sour grapes”, of course the inventions of West have brought tremendous benefits to humanity. But technology brings us diminishing returns. In its first phase, technological progress has made a hugely positive impact: running water, vaccines, the railway- this is the golden age of technology. But as it progresses, the returns become smaller. The car and television are proving to be mixed blessings. During this century, I’m afraid we’ll start seeing negative returns, especially if we keep fiddling with our genes and inventing thinking machines. In the 1950’s people thought of the 21st century as the time of space cadets venturing on to Mars, of plastic clothes, flying cars, helpful robot servants, and telepathic helmets – a sort of sequel to the American Golden Age of better houses, big cars and huge shopping malls. But by the nineties, we were having movies such as “Terminator”, “Blade Runner” and “Gataca”. Technology is becoming scary, while there’s nothing frightening about Sanskrit poetry or Carnatic music. In the arts, there is no progress ( T.S. Eliot is not “better” than Tennyson) but no diminishing returns either. So, I don’t see the point about the inferiority complex towards the inventions of the West.

The problem, maybe, comes from the way many Hindus try by all means to squeeze together mythology and history. They want to have the Mahabharata as the greatest battle in human history. They want to have Krishna as some kind of divine king , ruling over a Dwarka that would be an Indian Atlantis. They have an instinctive repulsion against the academic, conventional history of India because in the latter, there is no mention of Rama and Krishna, except as legendary figures. They feel that it is a Western conspiracy trying to disprove the existence of these two God-kings (1). I remember, once, talking to an uncle about Indian history, and I told him about the Guptas and Mauryas. Shaking his head impatiently at these unfamiliar names, he said : “Yeah, but all that stuff, how many centuries was it after Krishna ?” “Well… there’s no historical record about Krishna. He doesn’t figure in Indian history” I said “Doesn’t figure !” he said, and laughed contemptuously. “What do they know !” he added.

So, feeling hurt that the Ramayana and Mahabharata are not considered as historical texts, the Hindus start creating their own version of history. Since they will base themselves on ancient epics, they might as well take what is written in them as being literal truths. Hence the flying machines and atomic bombs.

Indian television series, based on the epics, give us a very interesting picture of how history and mythology get mixed up.

The first one, the Ramayana, which was produced about 20 years ago, was a no-nonsense series with actors immersed in the atmosphere of that profoundly serious epic.

Things started getting complicated with the Mahabharata, as they were bound to. The Mahabharata is a more human, political story than the Ramayana. In the latter, even Ravana is a somber, dignified figure, a sort of superhuman Don Corleone. In the Mahabharata, the boundaries between good and bad start to get blurred. Krishna orders the Pandavas to do things against their code of chivalry, to attain their goals.

Given the tricky, highly political atmosphere of the story, it was inevitable that the scriptwriters would be tempted to add in a modern touch here and there – the Mahabharata always “felt” modern, with its flawed, ambiguous characters. And they sure got carried away doing that: you had Bhishma and Drona agonising about “the nation” and “duty to the country”. It was so grotesque I stopped watching it after ten episodes or so. They had fiddled so much with the story that one couldn’t know anymore what was based on the text, and what was from them.

Not that this is bad in itself, because it shows that the story is alive, given that it is being rewritten to fit modern tastes. But to introduce modern ideas of nationhood in a classical text, and serve that to an audience which, for the most, believes the whole story to be Indian history, meant that there were really mixing up things in people’s heads.

The “Mahabharata” was shown about twenty years ago too, I think. During the next decades, if I do remember, things moved rather back to the realm of mythology, because we had stories from Krishna’s life, then we had “Maa Shakti” and “On Namah Shivaya”.

But then recently, we’ve had a new creature which maybe represents a new stage in India’s apprehension of its past. It is a television series called “Ravana”. Here, the fusion gets really complex because the scriptwriters have taken as point of departure that they accept that the Ramayana is an epic narration of what must have been a historical war (2).

So, they imagine a “real” Ravana and what “really” happened between him and Rama. There is an effort to give to the story an “India, 2000 BC” feel, in terms of décor and politics. It is a spectacular progress, because it acknowledges, for the first time, that there is “what is said in the epics” and ”what happened in the history of India”. It is a giant’s leap, even.

The only problem is that many people believe that this is “what actually happened”. Still, this kind of series could never have been made twenty years ago.

Despite all the grotesque impostures of Oak and the Hindutva crowd in general, I’m sure that there are a lot of people in India who are taking a honest, unbiased look at their history, which is a history they do not have to be ashamed of, even if, like in the history of any country, it has its dark moments.

(1) Just to make it clear where I stand about Rama and Krishna, in case anyone cares to know: I don’t believe in the idea of God made Man, which means I don’t believe in the divinity of Rama, Krishna or Jesus. I think there was a stage , in most civilisations, during which people had a tendency to divinise powerful kings and seers. This is made clear in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, in the chapter on Guan Gong’s death: “They ( the people) reflected on his extraordinary exploits as a warrior, and decided that he was no common man. They then started to worship him”. Valmiki’s Ramayana was written about 2 000 years ago. A few centuries later, the four Apostles wrote the Gospel. During that time also, the Romans were divinising their Emperors.

(2) No historian denies that the battle between Ram and Ravana, or the great battle of Kurukshetra ever happened. They probably did, just like the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans. The point of the historians is that we do not know much about them, apart from the florid retelling in the epics. So, their actual historical significance is unknown. Ancient Indians were incredibly averse to writing historical chronicles, so that there are large parts of Indian history, especially the period before the Buddha, which are left in darkness.