opinion | The past is a wonderful thing and should be seen through the widest lens possible
I love to see the circular with which certain issues are re-circulated on social media. Like last night’s leftovers got hot for lunch. And dinner too. When elections are approaching anywhere in the country, there is a sudden flurry of challenges for the reading of history. The same doubts about how a historical character or event is portrayed. Same question about why streets or towns are named after some leader or the other. Or why history textbooks focus only on the Mughal period.
None of this will usually be problematic – questions and challenges are the lifeblood of democracy. But these questions are not based on facts, but on wishful thinking and colorful, rather painful, retellings. History is another subject, like mathematics or chemistry, and is based on some verifiable facts. Of course, choosing sides in an algebraic equation is difficult as is often the case in history, but one still needs to be objective, to set aside personal feelings of humiliation or pride or vengeance and focus only on that. That’s how events played out in the past.
There are many amazing achievements in the ancient civilizational past of India. From philosophy to literature, grammar, art, mathematics and even sexuality, the subcontinent produced highly enlightening and researched texts at a time when the West was still grappling with daily baths. And while it’s well and good to be proud of this remarkable past, I wish we could do so without constantly dragging it into the present. value of Sushruta Samhita The unprecedented work in medicine has happened not least because it does not have a cure for covid-19, but try saying this to a WhatsApp warrior. You will have two ppts and a pie-chart.
This means that at some point, someone obsessed with “traditional” remedies will arrest anyone to the extent of questioning the efficacy of cow dung as a treatment for COVID. Or we have hooligans burning copies Kamasutra Because they claim profanity like sex is not “our tradition”. This mix of false pride and false shame is a deadly concoction, guaranteed to trap us in a debilitating, exhausted, and completely unnecessary cycle of low self-esteem that in turn leads to aggressive self-affirmations. what next? Are we going to demolish the walls of Khajuraho temples to prove it? cultured it is us?
The leader of the Moplah rebellion of 1921 has now become the main villain and wipeout candidate. The rebellion involved farmers who were mostly Muslim, landlords who were largely Hindu, and a British administration that was Christian – a tinderbox at the best of times. Add to this exploitative labor conditions and oppressive colonial laws and you get outrage, anger, bloodshed. When the rebellion took place, there were many things at once – peasant revolts colored by religious fanaticism, anti-colonial struggles colored by labor issues, class struggles compounded by caste and religious categories. We have to step back and look at this moment, and throughout history, with the widest angle lens possible and that lens is definitely not whatnot.
Akbar with a syncretic religion called Din-i-Ilahi, which merged all religions, is as much a past of India as a joyless Aurangzeb who insisted on Sharia law. The British and railways they brag about are as real as the destruction of indigenous industries, of which they claim very little. A messy mix of all this constitutes India today, and we don’t have to pick and choose which bits we’ll accept or not – it’s all ours. There are no convenient heroes and villains and very few unspoken legacies of good or bad.
While it is not in fashion to say anything good about Nehru and his associates, one thing he did in 1947 was to acknowledge and respect the filth he had inherited and realize that it mixed The conflicting, conflicting history was the foundation on which they were to be built. . And for such a socially, culturally and religiously diverse country, messy compromise is the only thing that can work going forward. It’s time to make peace with it instead of fabricating a monochromatic past that we imagine will also have a monochromatic future.
Where the author tries to understand the society with seven hundred words and a little taut
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