Continued from: A test of progressives.
The time has come now to reread our history, to catch the miss between the lines that have haunted our minds for half a century. The facets hitherto hidden from common knowledge and facts that had been deliberately and tactfully made to subside without notice need to be dug out to the fore. Truth never decays – how long and how deep it may be buried. Once it starts coming to the front, new light on our knowledge of our people, of institutions, of events and ideas got to us, with no time lost.
Here is one interesting question in my mind, which I am hopeful, I will get a reply to not very late now: it is, how has Hinduism, as an idea and in practice, survived for one millennium or so despite the fact that the lost great Hindu king Harshavardhan’s reign came to an end in as back as 647 AD followed by the first ever invasion in Sindh by Arabs in 712AD? Mahmud of Ghazni first invaded India in 1001 and marked the end of the Hindu era and the import of Islam into India, exactly one thousand and twenty years back now. Our history books as of now, gave no inkling about this as they rampantly scribe on and on about the Sultanate period transforming into a Mughal India and from here into a British India.
I have no doubt about the truthfulness of these facts but I sincerely believe, at the same time, that this is not all about our great past and heritage. There is much more beyond these, like the facts which hold the potential answer to my question. Why are our history books so maliciously silent about the great cultural heritage of India which is undoubtedly the core string that holds all the beads of varied events and incidents in such a well-knit, connected and continuous fashion that it makes for a happening national life?
Unless conscious researchers, thinkers and policymakers cater to this need of revamping our old, flawed, incomplete and biased sense of writing, analyzing and interpreting history, the new generation is destined to be doomed in the darkness of ignorance, of illusion and of the void of an indifferent and crippled heritage, or an absence of it. Thus, it is provident and prudent to reread history.
