Brown Pundits

Across the internet, and even in the broader public discourse, Indian history is a point of contention in a way that not many other civilization’s past is. Whether it is the question of early Central intrusions and their links (or lack thereof) to Hindu synthesis and propagation, or the era of Muslim political rule, narratives of history in India carry get emotional valence.

However, there is a bigger question here. In what way does Indian history matter ? The past is literally that, the past. To matter, history must continually provide relatable reference points and rich contexts to understand the present and beyond. On first glance, as a record of a civilization that failed to industrialize and reach enlightenment values autonomously, Indian history might not seem to hold much intrinsic value.

Where Indian history becomes more relevant for today and tomorrow is when it starts responding in a innovative and creative ways in response to the industrialized West. There is a reason why the Indian Constitution out enlightens most Western founding documents. This response comes from India’s specific cultural and moral values, but these attributes are totally divorced from genetic profiles and who had the throne in Delhi, when. They rely instead on deeper currents of folklore

http://<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Important to note – the weaponry found in Sintashta burials is unprecedented and not found in 

Not just that, we were always colonizers. The logic of de-colonizing makes little sense and replaces real conversations about the distribution of power in a society with pretensions of ameliorating imaginary ethnic injuries.

Anti-Torture Bill

It is an undeniable fact that the last 1000 years of its history has not been great for the Indian civilization. We have seen the steady erosion of Indian cultural influence across Central Asia, East Asia and South East Asia. Within the subcontinent itself, the native Sanskritic high culture was replaced over the vast majority of its expanse by a Persian high culture imported from Central Asia & Iran. And this has never really been reversed up until now. When the Persian high culture was swept away, the Sanskritic or Hindu high culture did not come in its wake but what we had instead was the imposition of another foreign high culture, that of the English.

That we have had such a mighty fall is often not emphasised or even brushed aside by some intellectually dishonest historians. They even try to disingenuously argue that the destruction and plunder, often of great Indian temple cities, by Mahmud of Ghazni, was just par for the course in Indian history since apparently Hindu kings also invaded the kingdoms of other neighbouring Hindu kings and took away the idols of their presiding deities from their main temples.

But what the invasions of Mahmud Ghazni did to India is rather glowingly mentioned by the scholar Al-Biruni himself,

Yet read as per this post on Encyclopedia Brittanica,

Maḥmūd’s conquest of northern India furthered the exchange of trade and ideas between the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world.

 

I did not expect America to start pulling its international operations together so quickly after the arrival of the occasionally cognizant Joe Biden, but the political operative who became Barack Obama’s Vice-President does mostly shine through. The problem is that the old coot talks like a slow old coot. His ideas are fine, it’s just that he’s slowed with age and it’s obvious when he talks..so…slowly.

However, a month into Biden’s presidency, India and China began to publically speak about disengagement on their Himalayan front. Then, Pakistan and India, the enfant terribles (French for fucking brats) announced that they were beginning their ceasefire across the LoC, in the spirit of the Musharraf-era ceasefire of 2003 (that had been preceded by a nuclear standoff) and has been honoured more in the breach than in observance.

The benefits of not having an ignorant asshole in power

The last week has been quite an unnerving and unsettling experience for the Hindus in Bangladesh who make up about 9 % of the total Bangladeshi populace.

Some unidentified miscreants apparently put a copy of the Quran at the feet of an idol of Hanumanji. In the days of social media, the news spread like wildfire and egged on by incendiary speeches by some Muslim clerics, the Mullas as they are called, a huge number of Muslims took to the streets in Bangladesh. They ransacked, desecrated and destroyed many Durga Puja pandals and even houses of many Hindus. Officially only a handful of Hindus have been confirmed to have been killed in the targeted attacks but it is possible that many more may lost their lives.

There has been condemnation of the targeted attacks from different quarters across the world including from the US and the UN. Several Hindu groups have led protests against the attacks, the primary one being ISKCON.

It has been alleged that the attacks were part of a conspiracy to inflame communal tension in Bangladesh and destabilise the Sheikh Hasina govt and the country at large. Whatever may be the underlying causes, it is time for the Hindus across the world to start thinking and think long and hard. The time for sleep-walking is over.

It is important for Hindus to come together and back up each other. Hindus, especially from India but also all over the world need to cultivate a spirit of belonging to the larger Hindu cause.

As is the old cliche – United we stand, divided we fall.

Hindus need to understand one thing quite clearly – no one cares for you but yourself. The Non-Hindus would rather focus on their own concerns. So let us stop expecting and start doing things. We are after all more than 1 billion strong and most of it concentrated in a single relatively strong nation. Contrast this with the fact that the Muslims are divided into more than 50 countries, the largest of which, Indonesia, does not even have a population of 250 million i.e. 1/5th of India’s population.