Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Rani Padmini and four other Hindutva history myths exploded


As it turns out, some commonly held stories about our 5,000-year-old past simply aren't true.

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Tejaswini Lonari in Chittod Ki Rani Padmini Ka Johur | Sony TV

Dec 31, 2014 · 05:45 am

Girish Shahane

The biggest news story coming out of India in 2014 was the triumph at the polls of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Led by the charismatic Narendra Modi, the BJP achieved what many considered impossible: an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha. Modi and a number of his colleagues subscribe to ideas I have described in a previous column as Raving Loony Hindutva History. The BJP’s misreading of history, however, is also underpinned by versions of history that circulate as truth within the mainstream. Here, in reverse chronological order, I list five major myths that have gained mainstream acceptance in India.

1. The Myth of Rani Padmini

In 1303 AD, Alauddin Khilji, the Turkic Sultan of Delhi, captured Chittorgarh after a long siege. Two hundred and thirty-seven years later, an Awadhi poet named Malik Muhammad Jayasi composed a poem titled Padmavat about the fall of Chittor. The tale was picked up in succeeding eras by historians such as the chronicler of Akbar’s reign Abul Fazl.

The story of Padmini varies from one writer to another but the basic contours are similar. A sorcerer banished by the king of Mewar Ratan Singh finds refuge in the Khilji court, where he fills the Sultan’s ears with tales of the beauty of Ratan Singh’s wife, Padmini. Alauddin manages to get a glimpse of her, and is enraptured. He captures Ratan Singh by deceit, and offers to release him in exchange for Padmini. The Rajputs hatch a cunning stratagem to free their king, but lose several warriors in the process. Alauddin defeats the weakened Rajput army, only to discover that Padmini and all other women in Chittor fort have committed jauhar.

Rani Padmini is not mentioned in any Rajput or Sultanate annals, and there’s absolutely no historical evidence she existed. Alauddin Khilji, one of the finest generals in India’s military history, certainly required no treachery to subdue Chittor. He repelled successive Mongol invasions while conquering much of Rajasthan and Gujarat. But what has survived of him is the image of a lustful, deceitful, tyrant pitted against chivalrous Rajputs.

2. The Myth of Prithviraj Chauhan

History, they say, is written by the winners. The best poetry, though, is often composed by the losers and, in India at least, outweighs historical accounts. Prithviraj Chauhan ruled Delhi in the late 12th century AD. In 1191, the Afghan ruler Muhammad Ghuri took the fortress of Bhatinda on the border of Prithviraj’s kingdom. Prithviraj advanced towards the frontier, and met and defeated Ghuri’s army at Tarain. The next year, Ghuri returned with a stronger force, defeated Prithviraj, and had him executed.

Pretty standard give-and-take for that age. In the hands of Prithviraj’s court poet Chand Bardai, and several later writers who embellished the narrative, the chivalrous Prithviraj defeated and imprisoned Ghuri, but generously set him free. The foe returned, attacked unfairly at night, captured and blinded the Rajput king, and took him back to his capital. Prithviraj’s companion convinced Ghuri to let the blind king demonstrate his skill as an archer. Instructed by the companion, Prithviraj killed Muhammad Ghuri before ending his own life in a suicide pact.

I grew up believing this to be historical truth, thanks to the volume of Amar Chitra Katha about Prithviraj’s life. I suppose children today watching television serials about Prithviraj and Padmini swallow the same fictions. It is noteworthy that no cases have been filed in any Indian court against these erroneous retellings of Indian history.

3. The Myth of a Non-Violent India

“…our religion is truer than any other religion, because it never conquered, because it never shed blood.” Swami Vivekananda, who assiduously propagated the myth of peaceful India, often used “religion”, “nation” and “race” interchangeably. In Colombo in 1897, he said, “India has for thousands of years peacefully existed… We, of all nations of the world, have never been a conquering race, and that blessing is on our head.” Ironically, Sri Lanka is one of the countries that Indian kings (Hindu ones at that, for in such a reckoning only Hindu kings count) have repeatedly invaded. The Cholas also launched naval expeditions against towns and regions across South-East Asia in the 11th century AD.

Hindu rulers rarely hesitated to invade neighbouring domains, with all the killing and plunder associated with the business. If they rarely ventured outside the subcontinent, it had less to do with a reluctance to shed blood or invade foreign lands than with the juicier targets close to home. A simple cost-benefit analysis explains why it made sense for Afghan and Turkic cavalry to raid the fertile Indian plains, and no sense for Indian kings to transport their elephants, thousands of foot-soldiers, and complicated supply lines into the mountains to conquer a land of sheep herders. Shah Jahan tried invading Samarkand, out of a sense of duty to his forebears, and his army paid a terrible price.

4. The Myth of Sanskrit

Sanskrit has produced a marvellous quantity of hymns, philosophical meditations, poems, epics, plays, and treatises. It is without a shadow of a doubt one of the most culturally significant languages in the world. What it is not is the “mother of all languages”, or even the foundational tongue of the branch to which is belongs, known as the Indo-European family of languages.

The first person to discover this language family, William Jones, suggested back in 1786 that Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, “have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists”. He was exactly right. That source is now called proto-Indo-European, and is considered to have been spoken in the vicinity of the Black Sea around 5,500 to 6,000 years ago.

In India, though, the idea is anathema that an ancestor of Sanskrit was spoken by pastoral nomads living in what is modern-day Turkey and Ukraine. For that would make Sanskrit essentially a language like many others. Which is what it is.

 5The Myth of a 5,000-year-old civilisation

Our Foreign minister Sushama Swaraj recently attended a function celebrating the 5151st anniversary of the Bhagavad Gita. That dating belongs to Raving Loony Hindutva History, but the 5,000 year mark is commonly used to describe everything connected with Hindu culture. The Vedas? At least 5,000 years old. Ayurveda? 5,000 years old. Yoga, 5,000 years old, or a little more. Indian art? 5,000 years old. Mathematics, astronomy, grammar, you name it, it is all 5,000 years old.

In truth, almost nothing in India is 5,000 years old. The ruins of the Harappan civilisation come closest, but the artefacts that have survived, aside from a few pot shards, don’t date earlier than 2500 BC. The earliest literature we have was composed about 3,500 years ago, and there’s precious little art that’s datable to a period before 500 BC. India’s major mathematical achievements originated almost exclusively in the medieval era, while the asanas used in contemporary yoga have, in a majority of cases, an illustrated or descriptive history going back little over a century.

The fake 5,000-year figure plays into the hands of those who believe India once enjoyed a golden age before it was corrupted by, take your pick, the Kalyug, Muslim invaders, British imperialists, all of the above.
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Monday, December 30, 2019

New soil study confirms 1943 Bengal famine was caused by Winston Churchill’s policies, not drought



A group of Indian and American researches simulated soil moisture content during major Indian famines to come to the conclusion.

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Wikimedia Commons 

Mar 30, 2019 · 02:50 pm


The 1943 Bengali famine was caused by then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s policies and not drought, a group of Indian and American researchers have found in a study published in the journal, Geophysical Research Letters.

The researchers came to this conclusion by using weather data to simulate the amount of moisture present in the soil during six major Indian famines, those of 1873-’74, 1876, 1877, 1896-’97, 1899 and 1943. Deficit of soil moisture is a key indicator of poor rainfall and high temperatures.
According to the study, the first five famines were a result of drought, as concluded by the soil moisture study, but not the one that happened in 1943.

“There have been no major famines since independence,” Vimal Mishra told CNN, “And so we started our research thinking the famines would have been caused by drought due to factors such as lack of irrigation.” 

Mishra, an associate professor of Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, has co-authored the study, along with Amar Deep Tiwari, Saran Aadhar, Reepal Shah, Mu Xiao, DS Pai and Dennis Lettenmaier. 

The 1943 Bengal famine led to the deaths of an estimated three million people, and is widely believed by several historians to have been caused or made worse by British policies of the time.
The study showed that though the eastern region of India experienced severe drought in the early-1940s, the amount of rainfall was above average in late-1943, a period considered to be the peak of the famine.


The British policies alleged to be the cause of the famine were the heavy distribution of food and vital necessities to the military during the second world war, halting import of rice, and the British government not declaring famine in India.

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A destitute mother and child on the sidewalk in Calcutta during the Bengal famine of 1943-44. Courtesy Kalyani Bhattacharyee, and Sj. Manoj Sarbadhikar/Wikimedia Commons.

According to the study, another factor that exacerbated the mortality count of the 1943 famine was the Japanese capture of Burma (now Myanmar), which was a major source of rice imports in India. The study noted that in the past, famines, despite being deadly, could not cause much damage due to rice imports from Myanmar and the British government’s relief aid.

Speaking to CNN, Mishra said that during the 1873-’74 famine, the Bengal lieutenant governor, Richard Temple, saved many lives by importing and distributing food. But the British government criticised him and dropped his policies during the drought of 1943, leading to countless fatalities.

That the 1943 Bengal famine was a result of wilful negligence by the British government was accepted and believed strongly across India for quite a while. In 1981, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said that supplies should have been in abundance during 1943 to control the deaths brought about by the famine.


Winston Churchill and the 1943 Bengal famine.

Madhushree Mukherjee’s 2011 book, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, notes that the famine was caused by heavy exports of food from India. As the famine got worse, she wrote, 70,000 tons of rice were exported from India between January and July, 1943.


Despite Churchill’s War Cabinet being warned about the famine at the time, Mukerjee wrote, the British Prime Minister was reluctant to devote time and resources to fix the Indian problem, and instead, strengthen his military operations and accumulate stocks at home.

“A concession to one country at once encourages demands from all the others,” Churchill commented in a memo on March 10, 1943, as quoted in Mukerjee’s book. “They must learn to look after themselves as we have done. The grave situation of the UK import programme imperils the whole war effort and we cannot afford to send ships merely as a gesture of good will.”

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Image of Midnapore famine victim from Chittaprosad's Hungry Bengal, five thousand copies of which were burned by Indian police. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

In 2017, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said about Churchill, “This is a man the British would have us hail as an apostle of freedom and democracy, when he has as much blood on his hands as some of the worst genocidal dictators of the 20th century.” He chronicled the havoc wreaked by the British empire on India in his book, Inglorious Empire.

Since independence, India’s population has increased manifold, but famine deaths have been brought under control. “Expansion of irrigation, better public distribution system, rural employment, and transportation reduced the impact of drought on the lives of people after the independence,” Mishra’s study said.

The revelations of Mishra and his fellow researchers’ study vindicated several Indians as well as others, as seen on Twitter. One user questioned the validity of a study complimenting Churchill as a human rights crusader.















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