– BBC proves Vivekananda right after a century!

Last updated on: November 2, 2005 at 9:48 pm by Desh Kapoor

– BBC proves Vivekananda right after a century! 2005-11-02T21:48:11-06:00 Desh Kapoor

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Here is a validation of the fact that the Aryan-Dravidian theory was all screwed up to begin with!! Sent by a friend

“Do not believe such silly things as there was a race of mankind in South India called Dravidians differing widely from another race in northern India called the Aryans. This is entirely unfounded”. This is not from a saffron scholar of the 21st century. But Swami Vivekananda said it before an audience in the then Madras city as the 19th century was drawing to a close.

Not knowing where the bright Aryans came from, “off late, there was an attempt made to prove”, he laughed and said, “Aryans lived on the Swiss lakes”. Yet the theory trotted out by F Max Mueller in 1848 tracing the history of Hinduism to the invasion of indigenous people by Aryans around 1500 BC has obsessed India since then.

It is now well known that the scholarly work of Max Mueller, once considered independent, was bought by the East India Company, and was thus a colonial view. Even as Swami Vivekananda dismissed Max Mueller’s theory as silly, he lauded Mueller’s work on Indian scriptures as next only to that of Shankaracharya.

Max Mueller’s theory dominated the Indian academic and intellectual debate and politics of the 20th century and wrought havoc in the national psyche since then. It divided and disturbed the national mind; even threatened to sever southern India from the rest. Any dissent towards this view is even now castigated and isolated, as a sort of intellectual terrorism holds sway. But sustained and strenuous work by dedicated scholars has decimated this silly theory over the last hundred years.

Yet, billions of pages of instruction in schools and colleges have, since Max Mueller expounded this view, enduringly poisoned and damaged the Indian psyche. And here comes a confession from a source linked to the very perpetrators of this intellectual crime, the ex-colonisers, that the theory, which Swami Vivekananda dismissed as silly, seems silly after all!

Weeks back the BBC website came out with the startling disclosure that “there is now ample evidence to show that Max Mueller and those who followed him were wrong”. Answering, “why the theory is no longer accepted”, the BBC says, “the Aryan invasion theory was based on archaeological, linguistic and ethnological evidence and later research has either discredited this evidence or provided new evidence that combined with the earlier evidence makes other explanations likely”.

More important, the BBC admits that “modern historians of the area no longer believe that such invasions had such great influence on Indian history”. Even more important, it says, “it is generally accepted that the Indian history shows a continuity of progress from the earliest times to today”. More, “the changes brought to India by other cultures” are no longer thought to be a major ingredient of the development of Hinduism.

The confession is an honest one. For the BBC does not only agree with Swami Vivekananda, it also points to the ‘dangers’ of the theory. It says that the theory ‘denies the Indian origin of India’s predominant culture’; “gives credit for the Indian culture to the invaders from elsewhere”. It “teaches that the most revered Hindu scriptures are not actually Indian” and “devalues India’s culture by portraying it as less ancient than it actually is”.

It goes further and says that the ‘theory was not just wrong’, but ‘included unacceptably racist ideas’. It suggested or asserted that Indian culture was not a culture in its own right but a synthesis of elements from other cultures; that Hinduism was not authentically Indian in origin, but the result of cultural imperialism; that Indian culture was static and only changed under outside influence; that the Dravidians were a nobody and got their faith from the Aryan invaders; that the indigenous people could acquire new ideas only from invaders or other races; that race was a biological, not a social, concept and thus rationalised ranking people in a hierarchy and the caste system; that the north Indian people descended from invaders of Europe, and so socially were closer to the British, thus rationalising colonialist presence; that the British were reforming India like the Aryans did thousands of years ago, thus justifying the role and the status of the Raj. Finally it says, “it downgraded the intellectual status of India and its people by giving falsely a later date to the elements of Indian science and culture”. Believe it?

This confession of wrong done to India and high praise for India’s endogamous antiquity from an unlikely source approves of not just what Swami Vivekananda said over a century ago, but validates the ‘saffron’ view. This endangers the ‘secular’ scholarship whose bread and butter is now under threat. How will they continue to assert that India is more a khichadi than a continuity of undated antiquity?

How will they go on asserting that there is nothing Indian about India; that there was never anything called India at all; that there is today an India thanks to invaders like Aryans, Turks, Moghuls or the British; and thanks again to British that we are a nation….

Yes, the secular scholarship is in deep trouble. But they have a solid reason to feel assured that it will take decades for this truth to overcome the billions of pages of falsehood printed and circulated so far. For the grains of truth to emerge from this mountain of falsehood will take a life’s time.

… read more

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