Hindutva pseudohistory

Hindutva is a political ideology that seeks to justify the Hindu nationalism and the belief in establishing Hindu hegemony. Hindutva ideologues and figures have engaged in numerous instances of disinformation since the genesis of Hindutva movement.

According to Jaffrelot, the Hindutva ideology has roots in an era where the fiction in ancient Indian mythology and Vedic antiquity was presumed to be valid. This fiction was used to "give sustenance to Hindu ethnic consciousness" ^[1] Hindutva organizations treat events in Hindu mythology as history. ^{[2] [3] [4] [5]} Hindutva organizations have been criticized for their belief in statements or practices that they claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. ^{[6] [7]}

According to Anthony Parel, Savarkar and his 1929 work Hindutva, Who is a Hindu? regarded as the fundamental text of Hindutva ideology, presents the "Hindu culture as a self-sufficient culture, not needing any input from other cultures", which is "an unhistorical, narcissistic and false account of India's past". ^[8] Writing for the New York Times, Thapar states that Modi's government and the BJP have "peddled myths and stereotypes", such as the insistence on "a single uniform culture of the Aryans, ancestral to the Hindu, as having prevailed in the subcontinent, subsuming all others", despite the scholarly evidence for migrations into India, which is "anathema to the Hindutva construction of early history". ^[9]

An investigative report by Reuters, based on testimonials from scholars, including Mahesh Sharma, the creator of the committee, claimed that Modi government had established a committee of scholars to promote certain narratives, such as linking evidence of Indian history with ancient scriptures, establishing a view that Indian civilization is older than currently believed, proving the existence of the mystical Saraswati river, mapping and excavating sites of battles mentioned in the Mahabharata. Sharma also stated that his ministry had organised workshops and seminars to “to prove the supremacy of our glorious past.” ^[10]

Examples

Audrey Truschke states that Hindutva followers have fabricated evidence such as the Indus horse seal in order to equate the Indus valley civilisation with the Vedic culture and that they have also propagated the Out of India Theory (OIT) which claims that Aryans originated in India and spread out to the rest of the world. According to Tony Joseph, OIT has no support from "“a single, peer-reviewed scientific paper” and that it is nothing “more than a kind of clever and angry retort". ^[5]

According to Truschke, Hindu nationalists in the U.S. have attempted to censor historical references to Hindu practices such as the caste system and untouchability, from history textbooks. In India, they have also attempted to erase references to Muslim figures, such as Akbar the Great, or secular figures, such as Nehru, replacing them with icons such as Shivaji whom they falsely imagine "to have been seeking to establish a Hindu Rashtra in premodernity". Truschke concludes that Hindutva efforts at altering history textbooks have been successful in the US and India and with their attempts at subverting academic views to political narratives, they have succeeded in limiting dialogue on Indian history. ^[5]

Truschke further elaborates that Hindutva ideologues want to promote a view that Hindus alone are indigenous to India and therefore Hindu as a social group can be considered as the definition of Indian, in an attempt to exclude groups such as Muslims from the said definition . ^[5] She also states that Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist claims that Islamic rule of India was “1,200 years of slavery". Hindu nationalist websites also propagate a narrative about a “Hindu Holocaust” perpetuated by Muslim rulers. ^[5] French journalist and Hindutva ally, François Gautier has in past proposed the idea of a "Hindu Holocaust Museum"'. ^[11]

The BJP government has taken the initiative to "saffronise" history textbooks ever since taking to power through exclusion of Muslim rulers and their contributions from Indian history. ^[12] This is part of a larger effort to promote and reshape Hindutva, often leading to actions that sideline minorities. Examples include changing the names of places to Hindu ones and attempting to claim centuries-old mosques as Hindu religious sites. ^[13]

According to The Print, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has revised the engineering curriculum to introduce an Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) course textbook which makes claims about ancient Indians pioneering the aviation and credits the Vedic period for inventing batteries, electricity production, maritime engineering and discovering the phenomenon of gravity based on certain interpretations of Hindu scriptures such as the Vedas. ^{[14] [15]} Critics such as Jaheer Mukthar, an assistant professor of economics at Kristu Jayanti College in Bangalore, have stated that "One can say that the government is clearly using the textbook as a tool for propagating the Hindutva agenda" ^[16]

Shivkar Bapuji Talpade was an Indian instructor who has been claimed to have flown a heavier-than-air aircraft in 1895, before the first successful flight by Wright brothers. The contemporary evidence about a successful flight does not exist and no reliable sources report this account. The pseudo-historical narrative about Talpade was propagated in the early 2000s by the Hindu-nationalists, who claimed that Talpade had "invented the modern aircraft". ^{[17] [18]}

See also

• 2015 Indian Science Congress ancient aircraft controversy

References

1. Jaffrelot, C. (1996). The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. Columbia University Press. p. 77. ISBN   978-0-231-10335-0 . Retrieved 2024-12-04.
2. Ramachandran, R. (2019-01-17). "Science circus". Frontline. Retrieved 2024-12-04.
3. Salam, Ziya Us (2018-06-20). "Age of unreason". Frontline. Retrieved 2024-12-04.
4. Meera Nanda (2 January 2004). "Postmodernism, Hindu nationalism and 'Vedic science'". Frontline. Archived from the original on 12 August 2020. Retrieved 4 December 2024.
5. Truschke, Audrey (2020-12-14). "Hindutva's Dangerous Rewriting of History". South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (24/25). OpenEdition. doi: 10.4000/samaj.6636 . ISSN   1960-6060.
6. Nanda, Meera (2016-08-31). "Hindutva's science envy". Frontline. Retrieved 2024-12-04.
7. Daniyal, Shoaib (2018-01-21). "From dissing Darwin to yogic farming: A short history of the BJP's brush with pseudoscience". Scroll.in. Retrieved 2024-12-04.
8. Parel, A. (2006). Gandhi's Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony. Cambridge University Press. pp. 42–43. ISBN   978-0-521-86715-3 . Retrieved 2024-12-04.
9. Thapar, Romila (2019-05-17). "They Peddle Myths and Call It History". The New York Times. Retrieved 2024-12-04.
10. "By rewriting history, Hindu nationalists lay claim to India". Reuters. 2018-03-06. Retrieved 2024-12-04.
11. Chatterji, Angana P. (2009). Violent gods: Hindu nationalism in India's present: narratives from Orissa. Gurgaon, India: Three Essays Collective. p. 43. ISBN   978-81-88789-45-0. In 2003, the idea of a 'Hindu Holocaust Museum' was proposed by French journalist and Hindutva - ally, François Gautier.
12. Bhattacharya, N. (2009-03-01). "Teaching History in Schools: the Politics of Textbooks in India". History Workshop Journal. 67 (1): 99–110. doi:10.1093/hwj/dbn050. ISSN   1363-3554.
13. Singh, Amit (2024-02-02). "Hindutva is at war with secular democracy in India". Religion and Global Society. Archived from the original on 2024-06-02. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
14. Sharma, Kritika (2018-09-26). "In engineering courses soon: Wright brothers didn't invent plane, batteries existed in Vedic age". ThePrint. Retrieved 2024-12-05.
15. "The Modi Government's Pseudoscience Drive Is More Than an Attack on Science". The Wire. 2018-03-30. Retrieved 2024-12-05.
16. Thomas-Alexander, Tiya (2023-06-27). "Mandatory 'Indian knowledge' course seen as 'indoctrination'". Times Higher Education (THE). Retrieved 2024-12-05.
17. "The aviator?". Business Standard. 2015-01-10. Retrieved 2024-12-04.
18. Mazur, E.M.; Taylor, S.M.F. (2023). Religion and Outer Space. Taylor & Francis. pp. 25–33. ISBN   978-1-000-90469-7 . Retrieved 2024-12-04.

Further reading

• Jha, D. N. (October 1998). "Against Communalising History". Social Scientist . 26 (9): 52–62. doi:10.2307/3517941. ISSN   0970-0293. JSTOR   3517941 – via JSTOR.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. (2007). "The Assault on History". The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future. Harvard University Press. pp. 231–284. doi:10.2307/j.ctt13x0k4v. ISBN   978-0-674-02482-3. JSTOR   j.ctt13x0k4v . Retrieved 2024-12-15.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe (2010). "Education" "The Diaspora and Hindu Nationalism"". Hindu nationalism: a reader. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. pp. 269, 361. ISBN   978-1-4008-2803-6.
• Thapar, Romila (2015). "Fallacies of Hindutva Historiography". Economic and Political Weekly. 50 (1): 68–69. ISSN   0012-9976. JSTOR   24481243 . Retrieved 2024-12-21.
• Humes, Cynthia Ann (2012). "Hindutva, Mythistory, and Pseudoarchaeology". Numen. 59 (2/3). BRILL: 178–201. doi:10.1163/156852712X630770. ISSN   0029-5973. JSTOR   23244958 . Retrieved 2024-12-21.