The destruction of ancient cultures is caused by insecurity and arrogant ignorance that impose an alien god’s law on vanquished populations. Rookie religions are predatory and political. – Ravi Shankar
History isn’t always written by the victor. It is rewritten by vandals and murderers, too. Today, the Great Indian Cultural Debate has Leftist scholars scoffing at the classical authenticity of the scriptures and the Right claiming spiritual provenance as proof.
But there could be more credible answer for the absence of written records detailing post-Vedic India. Islamic holocausts perpetrated by waves of invasions burned down libraries and condemned native knowledge as heresy.
The writings of Chinese explorer Hiuen Tsang who visited India between 627 and 643 CE reveal a highly sophisticated civilisation.
He wrote of people wearing clothes of cotton, silk and wool, were well educated and loved literature and the arts. Students between nine and 30 years of age went to school.
The written language was Sanskrit. Very little evidence of this lost era exists in India, but they do in Chinese records.
Hence, it would be correct to presume that the drafted history of India was obliterated by Islamic raiders like Bakhtiyar Khilji who burned down over nine million manuscripts at Nalanda.
The story goes that he claimed that libraries which did not stock the Koran offended god and if they did have it, there was no need for any other book.
The ISIS has followed Khilji’s template across the Middle East. The destruction of ancient cultures is caused by insecurity and arrogant ignorance that impose an alien god’s law on vanquished populations. Rookie religions are predatory and political.
In the days before Hiroshima and Chernobyl, neophyte converts weaponised faith to conquer nations and loot their resources—all in the name of God. Sure, there were benefits, too. Great art, music, dance and cuisine were born from the Mughal experience.
The British brought English and technology. But both diminished India’s cultural reserves and brutalised its religious, linguistic and artistic heritage. It was cultural imperialism with a divine discount.
But the Islamic invaders were simply following their Christian counterparts. For over 1,000 years, early Christians in different countries continued to follow their local traditions which threatened the power of the Roman Catholic Church.
It ordered a savage cleansing of “heretics and agnostics” like the Cathars in France and Italy. They were a highly evolved Christian cult which followed the New Testament, believed in gender equality and refused to convert to Catholicism, calling the Church corrupt.
The only information on Cathars lies in Vatican records, which would naturally be highly biased. After the Church’s attempts to bring Cathars into its fold failed, Pope Innocent III ordered a crusade in 1208, promising that killing a Cathar would assure the murderer a place in paradise. Sounds familiar? Only the 72 virgins are missing! – The New Indian Express, 29 September 2019
› Ravi Shankar is an author, columnist and cartoonist in New Delhi.
Filed under: india | Tagged: albigensian crusade, indian history, marxist historians, nalanda university, vedic tradition | Comments Off on Burden of proof lies in past cultural transgressions – Ravi Shankar
