India and Israel Against Islamic Terror

242 INDIA AND ISRAEL CHAPTER 1t
people, and the people understood him. That was great- t

spread the ideas quickly and made them reach far an!

wide, but, along with that, Sanskrit ought to have spreac.

Knowledge came but the prestige was not there, culture ws

not there. It is culture that withstands shocks, not a simpb

mass of knowledge. You can put a mass of knowledge ino

the world, but that will not do it much good. There mut

come culture into the blood. We all know in modern time

nations which have masses of knowledge, but what of them1

They are like tigers, they are like savages, because culture s

not there”.
It is hardly surprising that almost all contributions in ell

branches of knowledge and facets of civilization such as arts ard

music, architecture, literature, grammar, medicine, astrolog/,

astronomy, mathematics, science and physics, botany ard

chemistry, human biology and science of health (Ayurveda), ,11

came down from these scribes of Vedic knowledge.
Two greatest sons of India during the late nineteenth ard

early twentieth century were Swami Vivekananda_and Mahatna

Gandhi. Both were deeply imbued with the spirit of Hinduisn

and both served Mother India in their own way. Whle

Vivekananda dedicated himself to religion and awakened cur

people to their greatness and inspired them to greater endeavou-s,

Mahatma Gandhi sacrificed his all to enter politics in order to

lead us out of slavery to freedom. Both were deeply conscicus

of their religiosity and proud of being Hindus. Vivekanarda

made religion the foundation of a successful temporal word,

Gandhiji made spirituality and truth the essence of his politi;al

philosophy. Both succeeded beyond measure in their G>6

ordained mission.)
In Young India his weekly journal, Mahatma Gandhi wrtte,

that nothing could be further from his thought than that ”,ve

(Indians) should become exclusive or erect barrier. Bu

respectfully contend that an appreciation of other cultures

follow, never precede an appreciation and assimilation ot our

own”. His views on borrowing foreign values were very exp’Cit,

and he said, ” I do not want my windows to be stuffed. I wn
PT^PTER 16 TRUTH ABOUT HINDUISM 243
the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house, as freely

as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet.”
And then Swami Vivekananda declared, ” The old religion j

said that he was an atheist who did not believe in Cod. The new (

re|jgion says that he is an atheist who does not believe in himself. \

It is the coward and the fool who says this is his fate. But jtjs \

thejtrong man who stands up and says I will make my own i

fate/’” ”””” \
The process of learning never stops. I was amazed to learn

how scanty was my knowledge about our urban English speaking

elite. On a chat show ” We the People” compered by Barkha

Dutt on NDTV programme on 21st July, 2002, at 8.00 p.m.,

everytime the speaker who attempted to speak of Hindu

nationalism or tried to put Gujarat riot tragedy in its proper

perspective was booed down by the crowd. These youngsters

were either totally alienated from our cultural roots or completely

under the influence of New Delhi’s English..chatterati, or what

seemed more likely, was a crowd of camp followers

gerrymandered by the NDTV staff. The very mention of the

word ’RSS’ ”Rastriya Swayam Sevek Sangh” or Hindu nationalism

was met by sniggers and jeers by some of these social upstarts.

Hinduism and the Sangh Pariwar were targeted as the social

pariahs. To my horror, i realised that what medieval Muslim

rulers, Macauley, Max Muller and Marxists could not achieve in

a millennium was accomplished by our own nationalist

governments since 1947, their Marxists friends and the English

educated elite. Although the medium of discourse in the above

show was both Hindi and English, I did not find even by mistake

a single speaker except one from the B.j.P and that too, a

Muslim, who could speak a single word of Hindi or express

himself in our cultural medium.
Now a look at the strength and weakness of Hiaduism, the

b’ggest strength is its power of assimilation, open endedness,

continuous evbTutibrTand eclectic response to all that is progressive

and new. Hinduism can_absprb and co-exists with people of any

fS!.th as long as they owe allegiance to this mother country. Even

a Hindu converted to Islam who shares the same collective
244 INDIA AND ISRAEL CHADT
CHAPTER i/-
memories with the Hindus is welcome in its fold. Hindu’

being progressive,, the genius of its people can be seen •

entrepreneurial skills, business acumen, technological expert’’0

and excellence in all forms of human activities. Unfettered jn!i

uncontrolled by a tyraneous state Hjnduism encourages seif

actualization, and abjures acquisitive or imperialistic tendencl?”

The weaknesseses, though endemic, are curable. There i

an excessive stress on the individual which led to his neglect of

organized effort. Lack of development of social institutions

community alliance and collectivism has led to the weakening of

our polity and social fabric. Proverbial Hindu tolerance has oten

verged on cowardice and projected an image of weakness leading

to foreign invasions and defeats in battles. Indian history from

700 A.D. onwards with a few exceptions is a monotonous s:ory

of defeats. In spite of Kautilya’s Arthshastra Hindus took little

interest in military methods and political sciences. The caste

system though well intended in its inception degenerated in:o a

cruel caste divide and led to internal conflict an enfeeblement of

the Hindu nation. And last but not the least is the ”crab in the

can” mentality of Hindu individuals who cannot see their brot’iers

rise to excellence and often attempt to drag them back to their

level of incompetence.
To conclude we can do no better but quote what Sri

Aurobindp had to say about Hinduism:
”Something has been shown to you in this year of seclusion

something about which you had your doubts and it is the

truth of the Hindu religion. It is this religion that I am raising

up before the world, it is this that I have perfected and

developed through the rishis, saints and avatars, and nc« ’

is going forth to do my work among the nations. I am rasinp

this nation to send forth my word... When therefore ’

said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatana Dharma that’ ^

rise. When it is said that India shall be great, it is the Sana.on?

Dharma that shall be great. But what is the Hindu rell^”has

It is the Hindu religion only, because the Hindu nation

kept it, because in this peninsula it grew up in the sec’Larl(j

of the sea and the Himalayas, because in this sacred
Q^PTER 16 Tiw/rw /4sot/r HINDUISM 245
tne ancient land it was given as a charge to the Aryan race

to preserve through the ages. That which we call the Hindu

religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal

religion which embraces all others. Ifjjfiii^ojilsjipVuniyersal,

it_cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectaraian ”religion,

an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and

limited purpose.... I say no longer that Sanatana Dharma .is

for us nationalism.,... Sanatana Dharma is nationalism.”
C2 ]h. SLfy t e ar

1 V
Ancient Indian Civilization
&

The Myth of Aryan Invasion
In the long march of Indian civilization a historiographic disaster

overtook our people in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Flying in the face of all textual and scientific evidence and for

reasons that have more to do with politics than science and

scholarship, a colonial missionary construct was foisted on our

ancient history to subserve the interests of colonial rule Christianity

and Europe. An Anglo-German, phi lologist and ’scholar’ Frederick

Max Muller worked out a chronology and thesis, unquestioned

by the academia till today, and actively supported by the leftist

historians, that hangs more on fatuous fancies than facts. This is

the myth of the Aryan invasion and the story of the Vedic

civilization as retold by these worthies.
A deep study based on a comb-ination of astronomic, literary,

ecological, mathematical, scientific and meteorological data will

establish that the Rigvedic civilization formed an earlier layer ot

world civilizations that flourished before the rise of the civilizations

of Indus Valley, Sumeria and Egypt, and can be dated back well

before 7500 B.C., approximately about the date when silver

was separated from natural brass casting. Rigvedic period would
CHAPTER 17
ANCIENT INDIAN CIVILIZATION 247
, even earlier. The theory of Aryan invasion invented by Max

Muller nas ’ts ro°te m tne nineteenth century political concerns

f Germany and British colonial India. The Aryan theory has its

genesis not in India but Europe. Let us examine the facts. People

Of North and South India speak languages from different families,

-rhe two are derivatives from the Aryan and Dravidian families

of languages. We shall soon realize that separating the two people

on linguistic basis is a gross distortion of facts. First a look at the

motivation of Max Muller’s theory in the nineteenth century

Europe, and the political, racial, religious and nationalistic forces

at work at that time. There was no Indus archaeology and there

was no known co-relation between Indian and European

languages. The two important pillars of the Aryan theory were

European racism, mainly anti-Semitism and German nationalism.

Comparative linguistics and archaeology did not exist at this time

and the fact is that Sanskrit was the source of most European

languages. Instead of the ’theory’ being the result of archaeology

and comparative philology the position is the other way round.

Indus archaeology itself contradicts the invasion theory. The

invasion of the dark skinned people by the light skinned ones

was really a replay of the European strategy of colonizing Asia

and Africa. Substituting European for Aryan, and Asian and

African for Dravidian, you have the leit motif of the European

colonial campaigns in the two continents. This makes the Aryans

a replica of the European colonizers. The archaeological finds of

the Indus Valley civilization were made to fit the Aryan invasion

theory which was supposed to have come later and destroyed

the’former. In fact, the ruins of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro

were interpreted as the result of the destruction caused by the

Aryan invasion. The myth of the invasion was thus invented to

corroborate the tautology or a circular argument, as a proof that

the Aryans came after the Indus civilization, which they destroyed.

This effort totally ignored the fact, as we shall see later, that most

of the artifects found in the Indus valley excavations were in use

much earlier in the Vedic period. The destruction of the Indus

valley civilization was not due to any invasion but the drying up

of the river Saraswati, which flowed across the Thar desert and
248 ^
INDIA AND ISRAEL CHAPTER 17
watered this civilization to prosperity. Later, as the river dried un

the civilization too came to an end/ but this happened much

later after Rigveda perjod. Certain Shaivic remains found in
I-I ^ii--i«-i.-i.-.,..:»-L’ •! ’ .. _ ’’I
m
Harappa with simil^r finds in Cujarat; and the phai|us Wor$h
of Dravidian Shaivit^s |ed to the belief that the people of Harappa
were Dravidian, corv,p|ete|y ignoring the fact that the stronghold
of Shaivites is not th^ Dravjdian south, but the Himalayan regions
of Nepal, Kashmir ^nd the northern parts of Uttar Pradesh and
Himachal Pradesh. T his was the crad|e of the ear|jer Vedic people
whose legacy was p*assed |ater to the Harappan civilization. To
quote the famous h jstOrian, Talageri, ”The negative evidence in
the form of absence ^f the horse and rice in the [ndus civilization,
which was taken as evidence of its Dravidian origin is no more
tenable in view of -^he occurrence of horse bones and rice at
Lothal, Kalibangan, ^urkotada and Ropar in India and Mohenjodaro
in Pakistan. O^-, tne otner nand( tnere js enough positive
evidence in support of the re|igiOus rites of the Harappan being
similar to those of th^ Vedic Aryans. Their religious motifs, deities
and sacrificial altars bespeak of Aryan faith...” The word Druids
1 of England sounds : strange|y like ’Druhyus’, who were driven
out of India in susta jnecj campaigns and had their Asian origins
in the early fourth millennium B.C. Thus there have been so
many Indo-Europear^, mjgrations and this points to India as the
original home of th e speakers of Indo-European dialect, who
migrated to the Wes^t and North-West in pre-historic times, the
exact reverse of the . facts of the Aryan jnvasion theory. I have
discussed the subjec^ of the Aryan invasion in some detail in my
book on Nehru. The^ Aryan invasiOn theory requires a negation
of a substantial bodtiy of |iterary and archaeological evidence.
How could the Ary^a^ who were basically supposed to be
nomads, evolve suoch a refined language as Sanskrit, its
sophisticated texts ar^d generate a vocabulary that spread to the
rest ot the world, influencing Greek, Latin, Sumerian and Egyptian
languages. The sophi- stication of Panini’s grammar three thousand
years ago, the Astadf\hyayj and Patanjali’s Mahabhasya will maKe
one wonder how suc^h. a linguistic perfection can be achieved oy
a nomadic people s»-o (ate to arrive on the historic scene, m