HVK Archives: The three disinformations
The three disinformations - Hindustan Times
Francois Cautier
()
5 July 1996
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Title : The three disinformations
Author : Francois Cautier
Publication : Hindustan Times
Date : July 5, 1996
A few years ago, the West was able to celebrate the
discoverer of the ``New World'' with fanfare and pomp.
But the New world was already quite old when it was
discovered by the young Barbarians, much older in fact
than the fledgling Western civilisation. And Columbus,
however, courageous and adventurous, was ruthless man,
whose discovery of the New World triggered an unparalled
rape in human history.
Yet, not only does the West still deify Columbus, but no
one in the Third World has been capable of challenging
coherently that undeserved status.
The truth is that today, not only in the Western world,
but also in the entire so-called developing world, we are
constantly looking at things and events through a prism
that has been fashioned by centuries of western thinking.
And as long as we do not get rid of that tainted glass we
will not understand glass we will not understand rightly
the world in general and India in particular.
For the stamp of Western civilisation will still take
some time to be eradicated. By military conquest or moral
assertiveness, the West imposed upon the world its ways
of thinking; and it crated enduring patterns, subtle
disinformations and immutable grooves, which play like a
record that goes on turning, long after its owner has
attained the age of decline. The barbarians who thought
they had become civilised, are being devoured by other
barbarians. But today, the economic might has replaced
the military killing machine.
The First Disinformation on India: Aryans vs Dravidians
When the early Christian missionaries arrived in India,
they found it very hard to convert Hindus. Not only did
Hinduism have a broad, well-structured base, but it was
also so multi-faceted that it accepted in its fold creeds
which sometimes ran contrary to its mainstream
philosophy. How do you go about converting a religion
which says that God takes as many shapes to manifest
Himself as there are forms on this earth? The
missionaries could not, as the Muslims had done, convert
under threat of death; and they quickly realised the
hopelessness of their task and soon turned towards more
fertile ground: the Tribals and the Dalits. By financial
incentive-- and also by immense good work, because the
unflagging spirit of missionaries can never be denied,
particularly in the field of health and education-- and
partience, the missionaries managed to make important
inroads, specially in the border states of East India,
Goa and Kerala. This they achieved in great part by
pitting the downtrodden tribals and Harijans against
the``arrongant'' Brahmins and Kshatriyas. But there was a
flaw in their policy: all belonged to the same Hindu fold
and--even when converted-- recognised its laws,
particularly the reincarnation theory, which could make
them Harijans in this life and Brahmins in the next.
(Even today, this is visible in Velankani for instance,
the miraculous Mecca of all Indian Christians, which
practises, a blend of Hinduism and Christianity)
So the missionaries, and particularly the Jesuits, who
are great dialecticians, took up a new historical theory
which had already been floated around by a few western
historians. ``Once upon a time'', they said, ``there was
a great civilisation called Bharat, or Hinudstan, where
lived good-natured, peaceful, dark-skinned shepherds,
called the Dravidians, adoring good natured pre-Vedic
gods, such as Shiva. They had a remarkable civilisation
going-- witness the city of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistani
Sind-- were educated democratic and possessed a highly
refined culture.''
``But around 2000 BC,'' they continued, ``the villans
entered the scene : fair-skinned, ruthless and barbari,
nomadic Aryan tribes, adoring the haughty Indra,
originating from somewhere in the Caucasus. These people
colonised the entire peninsula and to foreever mark their
social boundaries, they devised the caste system, whereby
they the priests and princes, ruled over the merchants
and labourers''.. And to drive the wedge even deeper, the
Jesuits added: ``but you the aborigines, the tribals,
were there in India, before the Aryans, even before the
Dravidians. You are the original inhabitants of India,
you are the true Indians...''
Thus was born the great Aryan invasion theory, of two
civilisations,that of the low caste Dravidians and the
high caste Brahmins and Kshatriyas, always pitted against
each other, which has endured till today and has been
used by all Western historians, and unfortunately by most
Indian text books too.
Sounds preposterous? Simplistic? Impossible? Yet this
theory not only helped the missionaries to play the
Untouchables against the hated Brahmins who, let it be
said, managed single-handedly to preserve orally Hindu
culture and religion for five millennia. It also suited
the British, who found it an ideal channel to push
forward their divide and rule policies. It also served
the Muslim invaders, who used it to convert Harijans (and
they still capitalise on that theory today). It even
suited Nazi supremacy, even though they only borrwoed the
inverted Aryan cross from India and did not even take
pains to read Hindu philosophy, which is one of the least
racist and most tolerant creeds in the world.
A few voices have been raised against the Aryan theory,
which let us emphasis, has no archeological
evidence:nowhere have traces of a struggle between the
Dravidians and the Aryans been found-- and an immense
clash is bound to have taken place. The Dutch sociologist
Konrad Elst, for instance, holds the theory that it is
possible ``that the Aryans were originally from North
India and the Dravidians from the South, kept in a
separate mould by the great Deccan plateau, which seems
to have also sheltered the South from later Muslim
invasions'' (Indigenous Indians, p.25). Evidence of the
view that Vedic culture and Harappan (Dravidian) culture
and Harappan (Dravidian) culture were instances of one
and the same civilisation, he declares, has ben
accumulating, while on the other hand, the traditional
arguments for the Aryan invasion theory have been
discarded after close scrutiny.
Sri Aurobindo, one of India's greatest yogis, poet,
philosopher --and surely its most ardent
revolutionary--spoke against the Aryan theory: ``We shall
question many established philological myths, --the
legend for instance of an Aryan invasion from the North,
the artificial and inimical distinction of the Aryan and
Dravidian which an erroeous philology has driven like a
wedge into the unity of the homogeneous Indo-Afghan
race... Like the majority of educated Indians, I have
passively accepted without examination, the conclusion of
European scholarship'' (India's Rebirth, p.103)
Sri Aurobindo recalls that during has first stay in South
India, he realised that although the racial division
between the Northern Aryan and the Southern Dravidians is
presumed to rest on a supposed difference between the
physical types of Aryans and Dravidians and a more
definite incompatibility between the Northern Sanskritc
and the Southern non-Sunskritc tongues, he was impressed
by the general recurrence of the northern or ``Aryan''
type in the Tamil race.
How is it possible, he questions, that a handful of
barbarians, entering a vast peninsula occupied by a
civilised people, builders of great cities, extensive
traders, not without mental and spiritual culture, could
impose on them their own language, religion, ideas and
manners. Such amiracle, he maintains, would be only
possible if the invaders possessed if the invaders
possessed a very hightly organised language, a greater
force of creative mind and a more dynamic religious from
and spirit.
Lastly, he also shatters the myth of the difference of
language to support the theory of meeting of reaces:
``But here also my preconceived ideas were disturbed and
confounded. For on examining the vocabulary of the Tamil
language, in appearance so foreign to the Sanskrit from
and character, yet I found myself continuously guided by
words, or families of words suposed to be pure Tamil in
establishing new relations between Sanskrit and its
distant sister, Latin, and occasionally between the Greak
and the connection but proved the missing link in a
family of connected words. And it was through this
Dravidian language that I cam fist to perceive what seems
to me now the true law, origins and, as it were, the
embryology of the Aryan tongues... The possibility
suggests itself that they may even have been two
diversions, or families derived from one lost primitive
tongue'' (India's Rebirth, p.104.)
But when will the world realise the wrongness of their
historical theories on the beginnings of Indian
civilisation? History would have then to be rewritten and
the consequences of this new theory applied out only to
Asia, but also to the entire history of the whole world.
For if Vedic civilisation is indeed at least 5,000 years
old, (some say 7,000 years old) if it is a unfied
culture, them it means that it not only influenced other
civilisations in the neighbourhood, Iran, or even the
Gulf, in pre Muslim times, but also indirectly the whole
planet; witness the slow migration of some Aryan tribe
towards Europe, of which the wandering Gypsies emerging
in Eastern Europe by the 14th century, may have been the
descendants.
The Second Disinformation: The Vedas, the second piece of
disinformation concerns the Vedic religion. Ah, the
Vedas! So much misconception, so many prejudices, so
much
distort on have been spewed about this monument of a
book, this unparalleled epic. Danaielou for
instance maintains that the original Vedas "werean oral
Dravidian tradition, which was reshaped by the Aryans and
later putdown in Sanskrit." But the real disinformation
started with the missionaries, who saw in the Vedas " the
root of the evil", the source of paganism and went
systematically about belittling it. The Jesuits, in
their dialectical cleverness, brought it down to a set
of pagan offerings without great importance. Henceforth,
this theory was perpetuated by most Western historians,
who not only stripped the Vedas of any spiritual value,
but actually post-dated them to approximately 1500 to
1000 years B.C. It is very unfortunate that these
theories have been taken-up blindly and without trying to
ascertain their truth, by many Indian historians and
sociologists.
And even when more enlightened foreigners like Max
Mueller, whose Sanskrit scholarship cannot be dennid,
took up the Vedas, they only saw "that it is full
of childish, silly, even monstrous conceptions, that it
is tendious, low commonplace, that it represents human
nature on a low level of selfishness and worldinness and
that only here and there area fairer sentiments that come
from the depths of the soul" (foundations of Indian
Culture, p. 262).
If ever there was one who disagreed with the Western
view, be it of Donnelly or Max Mueller on the Vedas, it
was Sri Aurobindo: "I seek not science, not religion,not
Theosophy, but Veda - the truth about Brahman, not only
about His essentiality, but also about His manifestation,
not a lamp on the way to the forest, but a light and
aguide to joy and action in the world, the truth which is
beyond opinion,the knowledge which all thought
strives after- 'yasmin vijnate sarvam vijnatam' (which
being known, allis known). I believe that Veda be the
foundation of the Sanatan Dharma; I believe it to be
the concealed divinity within Hinduism, - but a veil has
to be drawn aside,a curtain has to be lifted. I believe
it to be knowable and discoverable. I believe the
future of India and the world depends on its discovery
and on its application, not to the renunciation of life,
but to life in the world and among men". (India's
Rebirth, p.90)
The Third Disinformation: The Castle System
Even more that the AryanDravidian divideand the Vedas the
caste system has been the most misunderstood. If one
wants to understand the truth, the original purpose,
behind the caste system, one must go back to the Vedas.
"Caste was originally an arrangement for the distribution
of functions in society, just as much as class in Europe,
but the principle on which this distribution was based
was peculiar to India. A Brahmin was a Brahmin not by
mere birth, but because he discharged the duty of
preserving the spiritual and intellectual elevation of
therace, and he had to cultivate the spiritual
temperament and acquire the spiritual training which
alone would qualify him for the task.The Kshatriya was
Kshatriaya not merely because he was the son of warriors
and princes,but because he discharged the duty of
protecting the country and preserving the high courage
and manhood of action,and he had to cultivate the
princely temperament and acquire strong and lofty samurai
training which alone fitted for his duties, So it was for
the Vaishya whose function was to amass wealth for
therace and the Shudra who discharged the humbler duties
of service without which the other castes could not
perform their share of labour for the common good".(Sri
Aurbindo, in India's Rebirth, p.26).
Many Indian sage shave gone even father than Sri
Aurobindo, arguing that in the occult relation India had
with the Universal
Force, each one was born in the caste corresponding to
his or her spiritual evolution. There are accidents,
misfits, errorsm they say, but the system seems to have
worked pretty well until modern times when it got
perverted by the vagaries of materialism. Can one accept
such a theory? Sri aufobindo, while praising the original
caste system does not spare it in its later stages: "it
is the nature of human institutions to degenerate; there
is no doubt that the institution of caste degenerated. It
ceased to redetermined by spiritual qualifications
which,once essential,have now come to be subordinate and
even immaterial and is determined by the purely material
tests of occupation and birth .... By this change it has
setitselfagainstthe fundamental tendency of Hinduism
which is to insist on the spiritual and subordinate the
material and thus lostmostofits meaning, the spirit of
caste arrogance, exclusiveness and superiority came to
dominate it instead of the spirit of duty,and the change
weakened the nation and helped to reduce stair present
condition.... (India's Rebirth, p.27)
But finally, have the people who dismiss caste asan aryan
imposition on the Dravidians, or as an in human and Nazi
system, ever attempted to understand its original
purpose and genius? Is it really worse that the huge
class differences you can see now a days in Europe? And
can you really exclude it today, when it still survives
so much in the villages- and even in more educated
circles, where one still marries in the same caste,with
the help of an astrologer?
At any rate, Hindus should not allow it to be exploited
shamelessly against them, as it has been in the last two
centuries.
Thus, once these three disinformations that of the
Aryans,the Vedas and the caste system, have been set
right, one can begin to understand ancient India in its
proper perspective.
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