Re: Partitioning of India
Sadanand Patwardhan
Sadanand Patwardhan
The general effect of Dharampal's work among the public at large has been intensely liberating. However, conventional Indian historians, particularly the class that has passed out of Oxbridge, have seen his work as a clear threat to doctrines blindly and mechanically propagated and taught by them for decades. Dharampal never trained to be a historian. If he had, he would have, like them, missed the wood for the trees. Despite having worked in the area now for more than four decades, he remains the quintessential layman, always tentative about his findings, rarely writing with any flourish. Certainly, he does not manifest the kind of certainty that is readily available to individuals who have drunk unquestioningly at the feet of English historians, gulping down not only their 'facts' but their assumptions as well. But to him goes the formidable achievement of asking well entrenched historians probing questions they are hard put to answer, like how come they arrived so readily, with so little evidence, at the conclusion that Indians were technologically primitive or, more generally, how were they unable to discover the historical documents that he, without similar training, had stumbled on so easily.
Dharampal's unmaking of the English-generated history of Indian society has in fact created a serious enough gap today in the discipline. The legitimacy of English or colonial dominated perceptions and biases about Indian society has been grievously undermined, but the academic tradition has been unable to take up the challenge of generating an organized indigenous view to take its place. The materials for a far more authentic history of science and technology in India are indeed now available as a result of his pioneering work, but the competent scholar who can handle it all in one neat canvas has yet to arrive. One recent new work that should be mentioned in this connection is Helaine Selin's Encyclopaedia of Non-Western Science, Technology and Medicine (Kluwer, Holland), which indeed takes note of Dharampal's findings. Till such time as the challenge is taken up, however, we will continue to replicate, uncritically, in the minds of generation after generation, the British or European sponsored view of Indian society and its institutions. How can any society survive, let alone create, on the basis of its borrowed images?
SADANAND PATWARDHAN
Eddie,
(1) Obscure has two meanings.
Unknown and unfamiliar} & {Not clear and difficult to understand or see.
Perhaps the first may be allowed with severe qualification, but not the second. The sources cited are unambiguous and simple to comprehend.
(2) Macaulay’s "Merit”:
All those who swallowed the British “colonial" Narrative about “Ignoramus Hindus or Indians” blindly and continue to remain blinded by it, Dharampal’s painstaking work has dealt a fatal blow. That too by using the very records that the English created for their internal administrative and record keeping purposes; NOT FOR HISTORY TEACHING.
Hindus flocked to Macaulay’s system because it gave them jobs and livelihood in the new Rulers scheme of things much as they flocked to learn Persian, Arabic and Urdu during the Mughal and earlier Muslim rule.
(3) Failure to Document.
This is true, but has little implication for the refutation based on British archives of what may be called “Macaulay Myths”. In Fact, Hindu archives, if present, may have been attacked as falsified or exaggerataed, which British archives are mercifully immune from.
##the Hindus seemed have no sense of history because they simply did not keep records##
or is it “Since Hindus did not keep records, they have no sense of history? What is sense of history? When Hindus constructed monuments, such as Kailash Temple at Ellora, which was completed over several decades in the reins of different kings, would it be without sense of history? of communicating architectural plans to next generations? Why should sense of History be seen only in “accounting or record keeping”?
Compared to Sumerian or Egyptian civilisations, another towering civilisation of the time, Indus Civilisation, has left few “physical” records of their “Book-Keeping”. But a civilisation that lasted anywhere from 5000 to 2500 years {depending upon who you hear}, didn’t it have a sense of history? Or did it have a completely strange method of “record keeping” like the QUIPU of the INCANS, which and who were destroyed by the Spaniards in 17th century? Are not shared imagination, myths, festivals or rituals also part of history, whether documented or not? Sensibilities and sensitivities are often culture specific and so or civilisational pursuits.
All the Europeans notions {or for that matter any or anybody's notions} about History or anything else {such as morality} must be interrogated and challenged to deepen understanding. This critical faculty seems to be have been widely destroyed during last 400 years of globalisation among the decimated or dominated nations.
(4) James Hill’s comment.
It is distasteful because he conflates “Record Keeping” with “Progress of civilisation”. Europeans did keep record of GENOCIDE of Native Americans {called “Indians” because of stupidity of Columbus}. Should that genocide be called therefore progress of civilisation? However, not even a faint smell of this record of genocide appeared in popular history or mainstream narratives, which falsified history like around the hoopla of THANKSGIVING.
(5) Comments on Dharampal:
**In contrast, D found no native narrative or personal commentary of the colonial experience. Was it lack of the requisite intellectual resources and rational frame of mind necessary for this undertaking? D’s lack of academic credentials may explain why he preferred to work alone and not in a team… Scholars would cast doubts on the accuracy o his transcriptions by hand. And if some of the facts and figures were fudged who was to know? **
Do the above comments have any merit? Why accuse him of FUDGING {not possibility of his having made mistakes while note taking} without EVIDENCE? Isn’t it a case of discrediting the message by attacking the messenger?
I believe you stay in England. Why don’t you check out some selected sample of facts he has produced in the British Archives? That would make a lasting contribution.
(6) Dharampal’s Relative “unpopularity":
I hazard my conjecture on this. Indian “Nationalism” in the 19th century evolved along two bitterly contested versions. Hindu Right {notably upper castes} coalesced around the idea of Ancient Glory of Bharat before the Muslim “invasion” and had dreams of restoring that “old order” {read the same for Muslim Right that wanted to create “land of the Pure” based on the past glory of Islam}. And the Indian left and depressed classes saw India’s past as an unmitigated disaster sunk as it was in the morass of stratified feudalism and horrors of casteism. {Marx: the ruin and devastation caused by British colonial rule was a terrible but necessary price for “the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia}.
Unfortunately India’s academia and scholarship {for whatever it is worth} had been hostage to this bitterly fought narrative during freedom struggle and continues to be even afterwards.
Neither the Right, Nor the Left had any use for INCONVENIENT FACTS painstakingly put together by Dharampal.
RIGHT would have been askance at his book: The British Origin of Cow Slaughter in India. The crime for which they wished and wish to hold Muslims and Muslims alone responsible.
{ just to dispel notions of Dharampal’s obscurity: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/Muslims-not-perpetrators-of-cow-slaughter-in-India-Dharampal/articleshow/26601129.cms}
LEFT would balk at his “The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century” and “Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century”, which destroyed their seamless narrative that Hindu past is junk.
Therefore, there is possibly the deliberate neglect of Dharampal by Indian “scholars”.
{Confession: I too ran into Dharampal just 2 years ago, when someone quoted him to say “India had far superior education system than the Britain”. That claim turned out to be purely fanciful, but reading his book shook my perspective on India’s history profoundly. Luckily I was freed of a dogma}.
(7) Regarding the state of science and other studies today.
Less said the better.
Sadanand
Hi All,Sadanand is one of the few scholarly members of the B-C group and backs his claims with evidence.
I fear that he is a bit hard on Macaulay. If his was an evil scheme, why didn’t the Indians reject it outright and continue with their Sanskrit & Arabic sytem?The Indians obviously found merit in Macaulay’s and growing numbers were keen to learn the English way. Macaulay’s views and speeches (or many of them) are available for all to see. In contrast, it is hard to find documentation from a single Indian (Hindu) in the 17-19th centuries. So one like Sadanand has to dig up obscure sources (some of them British writers) to support his case. But the average interested reader wants the evidence on India to be readily available.This failure to document whatever they did is characteristic of the Hindus and is acknowledged by Dharampal himself.He wrote: “We in India do not have the habit of documenting good work” and adds, “this probably comes out of the fact that humility is taught of a great virtue and any man would rather not document about himself.” Absurd justification, isn’t it?In fact, the Hindus seemed have no sense of history because they simply did not keep records. So people have to read accounts on Hindustan by Muslim or British writers. This absence of a Hindu record of events must be most frustrating to today’s Hindus. Even Amartya Sen noted this failing in his book The Argumentative Indian (Penguin 2005). Here, he fails to cite a single Hindu scholar or theoretician. Instead we have examples of Muslims (including Emperor Akbar), the Persian scholar Al-Buruni (who came with Mahmud Ghazni the invader), Ashoka (a little known pre-Christian ruler who took to Buddhism) and even Chinese visitors to Hindustan.It was Claude Alvares, a Goa-resident scholar who discovered Dharampal and popularised him in a 10-page narrative about him. Claude writes in his book Dharampal: Collected Writings (Other India Press 2000):
”While there was certainly no dearth of historical material and scholarly books as far as Chinese science and technology were
concerned, in contrast, scholarly work on Indian science and technology seemed to be almost non-existent. What was available seemed rudimentary, poor, unimaginative, wooden, more filled with philosophy and legend than fact.”
James Hill, author of The History of British India (1817) declared bluntly: "These people are perfectly destitute of historical records... (they have taken) only a few steps in the progress to civilisation."So where are to find about earlier Indian achievements in science? No record and no mention of any Hindu engineer or scientist of the time.Dharampal was a solitary scholar without a formal academic qualification. He noted that “Details of every occurrence in India, which came to the notice of British authority had to be communicated, at least till 1858, to London in order to obtain instructions or the approval of London on the individual issue. The British archival record therefore informs us of each and every such event."
In contrast, D found no native narrative or personal commentary of the colonial experience. Was it lack of the requisite intellectual resources and rational frame of mind necessary for this undertaking?D’s lack of academic credentials may explain why he preferred to work alone and not in a team. He failed to confide in and coopt established historians (whether in Britain or India). A sympathetic academic would have collated and presented selected findings in the proper format in reputed academic journals and hereby advance indigenous knowledge. Apparently, no national institution has come forward to work on a revisionist version of the history of the British period and then challenge the Brit establishment, which has been busy concocting its own version of colonial history.In early 1966, Dharampal travelled to London and began a detailed study of the Indo-British encounter during the 18th - 19th centuries. He stayed on in London till 1982, but visited India in between. He became a regular visitor to the India Office and the British Museum and spent most of his time pouring over the archives. Photocopying required money. Oftentimes, old manuscripts could not be photocopied. So, he copied them in long hand, page after page, millions of words, day after day. Thereafter, he would have copied notes typed. He thus retrieved and accumulated thousands of pages of information from the archival record. When he returned to India, these notes - which filled several large trunks and suitcases - proved to be his most prized possessions.
Scholars would cast doubts on the accuracy o his transcriptions by hand. And if some of the facts and figures were fudged who was to know?
He first started writing based on his archival material in 1967 and by 1980 - 81, he was able to complete THE BEAUTIFUL TREE (cited by Sadanand).------------------------------------------------
Regarding the state of science and other studies today, let me quote from Ananya Vajpeyi, now at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. She did her doctorate in Sanskrit at Chicago under Prof Sheldon Pollock and laments the state of Sanskrit studies in India:- creative writing and systematic thought have dried up
- India in the last 20-30 years has lost the intellectual resources and institutional infrastructure necessary for the preservation of Sanskrit
- English proficiency has declined across the board in the education system
-Glorified trolls, who have political patronage but no scholarly qualifications whatsoever have brought the conversation around Indian history to a grinding halt. Since the Hindu Right has no public intellectuals to speak of among its sympathizers, it conducts its cultural warfare through poorly-written blogposts (in English, of sorts), illiterate tweets, and cringe-worthy misspelled abusive ‘comments’ that appear after articles on the websites of newspapers and magazines.5
Bigotry, propaganda and lies are rampant, and no one bothers to respond to the patently senseless diatribes against Muslims, minorities or the West constantly emanating from the Sangh. Instead of an honest and difficult debate between liberals and conservatives, left and right, religious nationalists and progressive secularists, intellectual life in India these days has become a choice between noise, nonsense and silence.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now to the Sciences: here is a comparative table on researchers (Source: UNESCO)
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Indian Science Congress
At the 2015 Congress, those attending were told about interplanetary planes from the Vedic age. This year, a researcher was to present a paper on Shiva the greatest environmentalist. But luckily he got delayed . Nobel prize winning biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was appalled and vowed not to attend again.
Another Nobel winner David Gross said “India will never be able to invent anything, if things do not change. The way you perform, act, teach and conduct yourselves must change. The bureaucratic, rigid system must go,"
According the World Intellectual Property Org, domestic and foreign patents filed per million people stood at 4451 (South Korea), 3716 (Japan), 541 (China) but just 17 (India).
One can go on but India clearly has not advanced far in Science.
Eddie
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