Hindutva propaganda

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Much scholarship associated with the Hindutva movement or in agreement with Hindutva claims has been described as Hidutva propaganda. Its claims are generally disregarded by mainstream scholars as consisting of pseudoscience, pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology. It has been suggested that such scholarship is associated with the religious fundamentalism or ethnic nationalism, and is a product of Indian politics.[1][2][3] Some of the criticized authors accused this allegation as being anti-Indian.[4]

Contents

History

Claims regarding "Vedic Science" originate from Hindu reform movements in the late 19th century. Of notable influence were the writings of Swami Dayananda Sarasvati and Swami Vivekananda. Dayananda Saraswati rejected the older commentaries of the Vedas by Sayana, Mahidhara and Uvata as medieval corruptions "opposed to the real meaning of the Vedas",[5] renouncing the academic philological work of western scholars summarily as either misinformed by such corrupted Indian commentators, or as consciously misrepresenting the texts due to a colonialist agenda, partly in reaction to the incipient editorial activity of Hindu scripture by western Orientalists.[citation needed] For example, the first volume of the Sacred Books of the East series, containing editions of some Upanishads, appeared in 1879. Dayananda's writings are recognized as having an element of religious fundamentalism.[6]

Dayananda's Arya Samaj experienced a gradual renaissance in the 1980s in conjunction with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, culminating in the 1998 to 2004 BJP control of the Government of India. It has been said that pseudoscience was unwittingly helped into being in the 1980s by the postmodernism embraced by Indian leftist "postcolonial theories" like Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva who rejected the universality of "Western" science and called for the "indigenous science".[7] According to Sokal:

any traditional Hindu idea or practice, however obscure and irrational it might have been through its history, gets the honoric of "science" if it bears any resemblance at all, however remote, to an idea that is valued (even for the wrong reasons) in the West.[2]

Vedic Science

In 1900, Vivekananda said that "the conclusions of modern science are the very conclusions the Vedanta reached ages ago; only, in modern science they are written in the language of matter."[8] In one lecture he claimed that: "Today we find wonderful discoveries of modern science coming upon us like bolts from the blue, opening our eyes to marvels we never dreamt of. But many of these are only re-discoveries of what had been found ages ago. It was only the other day that modern science discovered that what it calls heat, magnetism, electricity, and so forth, are all convertible into one unit force. But this has been done even in the Samhita."[9]

Some of the scholars describe Hindutva as "an ultranationalist and chauvinistic movement that seeks to modernize India by recovering the supposedly pristine Vedic-Hindu roots of Indian culture" revived these notions.[7] while others believe that:

"By postulating interconnections and similarities across Nature, they [the Vedic thinkers] were able to use logic to reach extremely subtle conclusions about diverse aspects of reality."[10]

In response to criticism to the effect that this is essentially the magic worldview prevalent in pre-Reformation Europe overcome by the scientific revolution of the 18th century (Nanda 2003:116), Hindutva authors answer that the distinction of science and pseudoscience (or proto-science) is Eurocentric and unapplicable to Vedic Science:

"Western scientic thought draws on the traditions of Greek rationalist thinking according to which only what is within the purview of the five senses is taken cognisance of. Scientific methods follow some kind of closed scientific reasoning which insulates itself against facts that its methods cannot account for. How else can they [scientists] dare dismiss Jyotisha [astrology] which sees a level of existence beyond the purview of the five senses?" (Vasudev 2001)[11]

Or even that in India, science and religion are fundamentally identical:

"The idea of 'contradiction' is an imported one from the West in recent times by the Western-educated, since 'Modern Science' arbitrarily imagines that it only has the true knowledge and its methods are the only methods to gain knowledge, smacking of Semitic dogmatism in religion." (Mukhyananda 1997:94)

"Indigenous Aryans"

Main article: Indigenous Aryans

Witzel (2006:204) traces the "indigenous Aryan" idea to the writings of Golwalkar and Savarkar. Golwalkar (1939) denied any immigration of "Aryans" to the subcontinent, stressing that all Hindus have always be "children of the soil", a notion Witzel compares to the Nazi blood and soil mysticism contemporary to Golwalkar. Since these ideas emerged on the brink of the internationalist and socially oriented Nehru-Gandhi government, they lay dormant for several decades, and only rose to prominence in the 1980s in conjunction with the relativist revisionism outlined above, most of the revisionist literature being published by the firms Voice of Dharma and Aditya Prakashan.

The out of India hypothesis of Indo-European linguistics is a priori unrelated to Aryan mysticism, but has been conflated with pseudoscholarship.

Bhan (1997) traces the rise of state-sponsored Hindu nationalist archaeology to the 1977 to 1980 Janata Party government. Formerly kept in check by Archaeological Survey of India scholars like A. Ghosh, Bhan (p. 24) sees a rise in pseudo-scientific conclusions in emotional subjects like the "Archaeology of the Ramayana" by archaeologists such as B.B. Lal and S.P. Gupta. After 1990, "tradition-based archaeology" intensified, with scholars such as B.B Lal, S.R. Rao and B.K. Thapar attempting to identify excavations of the Indus Valley Civilization with accounts in the Puranas, the Mahabharata or the Rigveda. (R.S. Sharma, Looking for the Aryans, 1995). At the same time, Hindu nationalst forces began to embrace the idea of an "Aryan Harappan culture". The Manthan magazine of Deendayal Shodh Sansthan in 1994 was entitled Genesis of the Aryan Myth; A Historiographical Review and in the editorial proclaimed that

"The Aryan Race and Invasion Theory is not a subject of academic interest only [...] it has a strong bearing on the contemporary Indian politics as well as the future of Indian nationalism."

Guha (2005) sees a rise in exploitation of archaeology for nationalist purposes in the wake of the 1992 destruction of the Babri Mosque and the ensuing "Ayodhya debate", and the related demand for "proof by archaeology" of the primordiality of Hinduism, co-inciding with a string of "anti-invasionist" publications by Voice of India, beginning with the 1993 Aryan Invasion of India: The Myth and the Truth.

Voice of India and Aditya Prakashan are at the center of the allegations a cottage industry indulging in historical revisionism put forward by Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer in their debunking of the "Harappan horse seal" hoax of The Deciphered Indus Script (by N. S. Rajaram and N. Jha, Aditya Prakashan, 2000) in 2000:[12]

“ In the past few decades, a new kind of history has been propagated by a vocal group of Indian writers, few of them trained historians, who lavishly praise and support each other's works. Their aim is to rewrite Indian history from a nationalistic and religious point of view. Their writings have special appeal to a new middle class confused by modern threats to traditional values. With alarming frequency their movement is backed by powerful political forces, lending it a mask of respectability that it does not deserve. Unquestionably, all sides of Indian history must be repeatedly re-examined. But any massive revisions must arise from the discovery of new evidence, not from desires to boost national or sectarian pride at any cost. Any new historical models must be consistent with all available data judged apart from parochial concerns. The current "revisionist" models contradict well-known facts: they introduce horse-drawn chariots thousands of years before their invention; imagine massive lost literatures filled with "scientific" knowledge unimaginable anywhere in the ancient world; project the Rigveda into impossibly distant eras, compiled in urban or maritime settings suggested nowhere in the text; and imagine Vedic Sanskrit or even Proto-Indo-European rising in the Panjab or elsewhere in northern India, ignoring 150 years of evidence fixing their origins to the northwest. Extreme "out-of-India" proponents even fanaticise an India that is the cradle of all civilisation, angrily rejecting all suggestions that peoples, languages, or technologies ever entered prehistoric India from foreign soil - as if modern concepts of "foreign" had any meaning in prehistoric times.

[...] Whole publishing firms, such as the Voice of India and Aditya Prakashan, are devoted to propagating their ideas.

 ”

Asko Parpola, Helsinki professor of Indology and expert on the Indus Valley Civilization and the Samaveda in connection with the "Indus horse" hoax of N. S. Rajaram stated that[13]

“ India has a truly glorious past. It is sad that India's heritage should be exploited by some individuals — usually people with little or no academic credentials — who for political or personal motives are ready even to falsify evidence. In order to vindicate their ideology and promote their own ends, these persons appeal to the feelings of the 'common man' who, with full reason, is proud of his or her country's grand heritage. [...] the scholarly community has not considered this work [Rajaram's] worthy of consideration: it has been taken more or less for granted that any sensible person can see through this trash and recognize it as such. However, the escalation of this nonsensical propaganda now demands the issue to be addressed. [...] To conflate the identity of the Vedic and Harappan cultures and to deny the external origin of Sanskrit and other Indo-Aryan langauges is as absurd as to claim, as Dayananda Sarasvati did, that the railway trains and aeroplanes that were introduced in South Asia by the British in the 19th and 20th centuries had already been invented by the Vedic Aryans. ”

Influence on education

Further information: Saffronization

On February 23, 2001, the then BJP-controlled University Grants Commission (UGC) announced that

"there is an urgent need to rejuvenate the science of Vedic Astrology in India, to allow this scientic knowledge to reach to the society at large and to provide opportunities to get this important science even exported to the world [...] the Commission decided to approve in principle [the] setting up of a few departments of Vedic Astrology in Indian universities leading to certicate diploma, under-graduate, post-graduate and Ph.D. degrees."

This plan provoked a storm of protest from Indian scientists and rationalist intellectuals (Sokal 2006:34). Controversies with a similar background include the 2002 NCERT controversy and the 2006 Hindu textbook case fought before Californian courts. Following the 2004 defeat of the National Democratic Alliance, the new UPA government pledged to "de-saffronize" textbooks and curricula nationwide and restore the secular character of education. In March, the UPA Government released new NCERT textbooks, based on the texts used prior to the controversial 2002 updates. The Ministry of Human Resource Development, which oversaw this project, stated that it had made only minor modifications to the books that predated the "saffronized" era.[14]

Reference

  1. ^ Nanda 2005
  2. ^ a b Sokal 2006
  3. ^ Witzel 2006
  4. ^ Frawley, David (2002-08-20). Witzel's philology. Retrieved on 2007-03-31.
  5. ^ Saraswati, Dayananda. Introduction to the commentary on the Vedas, 443. 
  6. ^ Ruthven (2007:108)
  7. ^ a b Nanda (2003)
  8. ^ 1970, vol. 3, p. 185, cited after Sokal (2006), chapter 3.2 "Hindu nationalism and 'Vedic science'")
  9. ^ lecture on The Vedanta delivered at Lahore on 12 November 1897; 1970, vol. 3, pp. 398f.
  10. ^ Feuerstein, Kak and Frawley in their 1995 In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (p. 197)
  11. ^ Vasudev, Gayatri Devi. 2001. Vedic astrology and pseudo-scientic criticism, The Organiser (an English-language publication of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), reprinted in The Astrological Magazine, cited after Sokal (2006:38)
  12. ^ Witzel, Michael and Steve Farmer. 2000. Horseplay in Harappa, Frontline, 17(20), September 30-October 13.
  13. ^ A. Parpola, Of Rajaram's 'Horses', 'decipherment' and civilisational issues, Frontline, November 2000 [1].
  14. ^ India: International Religious Freedom Report 2005

Literature

  • Suraj Bhan, Recent Trends in Indian Archaeology, Social Scientist, 1997
  • T. Jayaraman, On Science And Secularism (1993) [2] [3]
  • D. N. Jha, Against Communalising History, Social Scientist (1998).
  • S. Guha, Negotiating Evidence: History, Archaeology, and the Indus Civilization, Modern Asian Studies 39.2, Cambridge University Press (2005), 399-426.
  • Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, Rutgers University Press (2003), ISBN 0813533589.
  • Meera Nanda, Response to my critics, Social Epistemology Vol. 19, No. 1, January–March, 2005, pp. 147–191. [4]
  • Subroto Roy, Assessing Vajpayee: Hindutva True and False, The Statesman, Nov 14 2005 [5]
  • Alan Sokal, 'Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?' in: Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public Routledge (2006), ISBN 0415305934. [6]
  • Michael Witzel, 'Rama's Realm: Indocentric rewriting of early South Asian archaeology and history' in: Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public Routledge (2006), ISBN 0415305934.

See also

External links

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