Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

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Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud is a book by Arun Shourie, published in 1998 with ISBN 81-900199-8-8.

Contents

[edit] Summary

Arun Shourie asserts that Marxist historians have controlled and misused important institutions like the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the National Council of Educational Research Training (NCERT) and a large part of academia and the media. He criticizes well-known historians like Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib. Shourie argues that Marxist historians have white-washed the records of rulers like Mahmud of Ghazni and Aurangzeb.

School books were rewritten in West Bengal, Kerala and other Indian states. In the chapters about Aurangzeb, "every allusion to what he actually did to the Hindus, to their temples, to the very leitmotiv of his rule - to spread the sway of Islam - are directed to be excised from the book." For Shourie, the rewriting of the history books is in stark contrast to the historical realities:

"In a word, no forcible conversions, no massacres, no destruction of temples. ... Muslim historians of those times are in raptures at the heap of Kafirs [sic] who have been dispatched to hell. Muslim historians are forever lavishing praise on the ruler for the temples he has destroyed, ... Law books like The Hedaya prescribe exactly the options to which these little textbooks alluded. All whitewashed away. Objective whitewash for objective history. And today if anyone seeks to restore truth to these textbooks, the shout, "Communal rewriting of history.""

Shourie presents examples to further his argument of how many of these text books describe in great detail foreign personalities like Karl Marx or Stalin, while they often barely mention important figures of India or of the Indian states. Shourie writes that this is in contrast to Russian Marxist text books. The standard Soviet work "A History of India" (1973) is according to Shourie much more objective and truthful than the history books written by the Indian Marxists.

Arun Shourie also alleges that "eminent historians" have on several occasions promised to write books, and been paid for them by the government, without ever actually producing the books.

According to Shourie, the "eminent historian" Tasneem Ahmad obtained a Ph.D. and published a book where "the entire manuscript has been lifted word for word from the work of Dr. Parmatma Saran." The foreword to this plagiarized book was written by the "very eminent" Irfan Habib, who according to Tasneem Ahmad "encouraged and guided me at every stage of the work" and examined "with care every intricate problem , arising out [sic.] during the course of work."

[edit] Quotations

  • They have made present-day India, and Hinduism even more so, out to be a zoo - an agglomeration of assorted, disparate specimens. No such thing as "India", just a geographical expression, just a construct of the British; no such thing as Hinduism, just a word used by Arabs to describe the assortment they encountered, just an invention of the communalists to impose a uniformity - that has been their stance. For this they have blackened the Hindu period of our history, and, as we shall see, strained to whitewash the Islamic period. (p. x)

[edit] Academic Reception

Eminent Historians has received little attention from historians. Professor C.J.S. Wallia, president of the Society for Technical Communication at the University of California, Berkley[1], endorses the books thesis that a great deal of what passes for history in India is little more than militant Communist revisionism and propaganda, intentionally rendered to portray Hindus in a negative and dehumanizing manner and whitewashing the Persecution of Hindus by Islamic extremists [1].The Arts and Humanities Citation Index contains only one citation, in which it is cited as an example of "reactionary orientalists' reaction against a perceived attack on Indian spiritual values". [2]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Review by CJS Wallia, indiastar.com
  2. ^ "Shades of orientalism: Paradoxes and problems in Indian historiography", Heehs P, History and Theory 42 (2): 169-195, May 2003

[edit] External links