The Gift of The Ancients

History, and the writing of it thereof, is perhaps among very 

Konark Sun Temple - Fresco

few areas where creative freedom can be exercised to just about any length. History is what its writer or maker makes it to be and being the most malleable of subjects, can be contoured to serve the dictates of time and ruler. Thus if the ‘Badshahnama’ was written by Abdul Hamid Lahori – a paid chronicler to sing peans on Shah Jahan’s rule at the peak of Mughal power in India, so do you have the Chinese traveller Fa-Hien leaving a detailed chronicle of his travels. In each case, what they saw and what ultimately appeared in print (!) had colourations that the author brought on, either because they had to earn their kudos and thereby the green bucks or what they saw was always seen in sharp contrast to what they had been exposed to in their countries or cultures.

Ancient Indians were a much smarter lot. They were quick to see through the game and while they excelled in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and all kinds of literature and arts – areas that left strong evidences, they never took to documenting their histories – leaving it to later generations and foreigners to do their work, but here came the master stroke – leaving enough evidence strewn across the land, of its customs, religion and intellectual prowess to prevent later historians from doing a wholesale distortion of facts. Indians thus, in the absence of any written documentation and thereby bereft of any colourations, clung on dearly to their culture, with ‘knowledge’ being passed down orally and later through their religious texts and tomes.

Ashokan Rock Edict

The greatest gift that our ancients left for us was to school us in the art of assimilating diverse thoughts, religions, cultures etc., into our fold, without distorting what we had. Indians, it is oft lamented, have no sense of history – almost all travellers coming to this land will vouch for this; contemporary figures like Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul included.  Indians look at the circle of life – the continuous cycle of creation and destruction followed by yet more creation and destruction - with a passivity and acceptance that confounds most thinkers. The ability to live in the present while cocooned in its shell of customs and beliefs (go to Banaras to see this aspect at its liveliest, where the nuclear physicist stands jostling for space with the matted Sadhu to offer obeisance to Mother Ganga) is something that the outside world can hardly fathom. Indians, perhaps, are the only race that saw such a lively procession of kings and emperors, raiders, marauders, conquerors, imperialists, priests and religious zealots carrying on their unending dance of destruction and creation, while succumbing to none but instead allowing them to assimilate within it.

If we are to look back into time, religion is and has, by far, been the single largest distorter of history; layering history upon history; wiping away entire cultures; superimposing alien values on whole peoples, while denying all that was old and existing. Take for instance what Christianity did to Africa. In one giant sweep Christians wiped away entire cultures and out went traditional religion, customs, medicine, and a myriad other things. The historians meanwhile recorded the salvation of the savages; how the white man lifted an entire continent out of darkness. The Africans got caught on the wrong foot…they fell prey to the white man and his shenanigans and rapidly eroded their own systems. Today, while trying to painfully piece back their history they are ending up living in multiple worlds with the church, the mosque and the traditional system at loggerheads - not being able to fit in with what historians today describe as the modern world!

The Romans of old no longer exist nor do the Egyptians or neither do the Persians nor the Incas and the list is endless – all victims of either Christianity or Islam carried at the point of the sword. Even avowed pacifist religions like Buddhism have wiped away traditional forms of religion in the Far East, Japan and China.

So if the only function of History is to record the past…a past with which current people have scarcely any connections, then to what avail a sense of history?