Indians Have Little Sense of History

The other day a friend of mine made a casual remark that we should know the contribution of our elders in the development of society and its institutions so that we may draw inspiration from their dedication towards the well being of the people and the country. This remark stirred my mind and I began to think whether we, as a nation, have ever learnt any lesson from history. Unfortunately our entire history reveals that we have learnt little from our past. It is said that history is a mirror of the past and a lesson for the present. But history has taught us nothing and we continue to repeat the mistakes of the past even to this day. We have never looked at history in the right perspectives, objectively and critically and so have failed to draw any lessons from it. Besides our mythical way of looking at history in terms of the four yugas, Satya, Treta, Dwaper and Kali, which are distinguished by different characteristics and each is believed to be lasting one million years, restricts our understanding of the historical events. Every yuga is marked by a progressive decline in the vitality and morals of men. In other words we are living in Kaliyug, the last and the worst of yugas, full of evil and little of truth and morality in the relations of men. Indians consider it a divine dispensation over which man has no control. People are resigned to their fate as something inevitable in the scheme of things. Naturally it cripples their vision and they never, as a people, try to find out the reasons for their fall from grace and never genuinely think how to cope with their problems, historical or otherwise.

Nirad C. Chaudhuri who lived for long in England as a grand old man of 100 years or more says: “I do not know of any nation besides my own which is held so relentlessly in the clutches of the past and yet is so incapable of contemplating and understanding it, and consequently profiting by its lessons.” For this quotation and a few ideas I am indebted to Swapna Das Gupta’s article in India Today, Millennium series, vol. 2 June 2000.

Little wonder that in the long turbulent history of India there have been no historians save in the last century. Even those who travelled to other countries have hardly left any records of what they saw and experienced in those countries, as did the Chinese travellers Hiuen Tsang and Fa Hien, a contemporary of Chandra Gupta II, or the Arab travellers Al Baroni in the XIth cent, and Ibn Battutah, a XIVth cent, wanderer who between 1333 and 1342 witnessed a triple sati. Even the Italian traveller Marco Polo who travelled to India has left some invaluable records of his travels. In this respect it is worth mentioning that the Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), called the father of History, is famous for his dealing with the causes and events of the wars between the Greeks and the Persians (490-479 B.C.). The British had their Gibbon (1737-94) who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-78) The Moghul Emperor Babar wrote his autobiography, Babar Nama and Akbar, the Great, had his autobiography written. So they have left some records of their rule and times. But when the Indians took the Buddha’s message as far as China and in the 10th and 11th centuries took Indian culture to the Far East, to Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Cambodia etc. they hardly made any attempt to record their exploits and experiences, may be they left some stray literature and temples, like Angkor Vat in Cambodia as a record and little else. Indonesian names, like Aditya, Sukarno, Ratna Sari Devi, bear Hindu influence even though they are Muslims.

We had a sort of pathological disregard for historical order of events. Al Baruni rightly observes that Indians are very careless in relating the chronological succession of their kings. As we are accustomed to looking at events in the light of yugas we tend to ignore the importance of the exact span of time relating to a ruler or rulers. Little wonder that we have no regard for our ancient monuments. We allowed them to be ravaged and vandalized by thieves and unscrupulous people. Lord Curzon, the Governor General of India, at the beginning of the last century, thought it essential to enact a law, the Archeological Survey of India Act 1904, for the preservation and maintenance of our ancient monuments. It is significant to note that Curzon was no lover of India and the partition of Bengal in 1905 is a testimony of the fact. But he rendered great service to India by getting this Act passed which has helped to awaken considerable awareness among the people to maintain and preserve our ancient treasures which were fast decaying and disappearing and going to foreign museums and private collections.

We never thought deeply why we lost to a succession of invaders from the Huns to the Mohammedans and to the British. The Chinese built the Great Wall to save themselves from the invasions of the Mongols. But we did nothing and never seriously thought of any scheme to protect our borders. We faced every attack as it came without any plan to defend ourselves. Mohammad Ghaznavi made 17 incursions into India but we could not shake off our sloth and suffered indignities ad infinitum. Our greatest problem remains disunity and selfish ambition that is why Alexander, the Mohammedans and the British could subdue us. Had we analyzed objectively the causes of our defeat in numerous battles against the invaders we might have drawn positive lessons and might have emerged stronger in every sense of the term. Some of the lessons that we missed are glaring. We were always engaged in mutual bickering and narrow self-interest and failed to meet the greater challenge of outside invasions and became slaves for centuries.

Bin Qasim defeated Dahir in 712 and conquered Sindh and Multan, the city of gold. From the port of Debal he advanced to Nerun. It was then in the hands of the Buddhist priests. The Buddhists surrendered without a fight. They argued thus: We are a priestly class, our religion is peace. According to our faith fighting and slaughter are not allowable.” In 1026, Mahmud of Ghazni in his 17th expedition plundered and destroyed Somnath temple. The feeble resistance that the people somehow put up was ruthlessly crushed.

The most important reason for this has been that we gave undue importance to our petty differences than to the larger issue of liberty. We remain miserably divided even after the vivisection of the country on communal lines. We as a nation never made a sincere and concerted effort to overcome these differences.

The Hindu psyche is conditioned by its religious beliefs. They think that this world is ‘Maya’ and that material things possess no real value. In our ancient literature in Mahabharata, we fight a ‘Dhanna-yudh’. That is the warring factions observe certain norms, which could not be flouted. The concept that everything is fair in love and war was unthinkable. Only Shivaji understood the true meaning of the tactics of war. It was Chanakya who helped Chandra Gupta Maurya to come to power by his diplomatic sagacity. Chanakya was like the ancient Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu who laid great stress on surprise as an important element in warfare. His writings were followed by the Mongols and in modem times by Mao Ze Dong. The Americans employed this strategy in the recent Gulf War. The Italian Machiavelli influenced the Western political thought. But we in India never followed Chanakya. We stick to our ‘sanskar’ of Dharam yudh or fought only when we had to. People and the rulers had more faith in gods to save them from the invaders than to stand united and determined in the face of war. When Mohammad Ghaznavi attacked Somnath the priests believed that their gods will strike at the enemy and save them. Instead of trying to sink their differences and work out a strategy for battle they depended upon prayer and the divine intervention to rescue them. God helps those who help themselves. They never tried to overcome their caste differences with the result that there could not be that kind of cohesion that a fighting army should have.

There is an apocryphal story that exposes the weakness of Hindus. Once some Muslim ruler came out to observe the enemy forces on the battlefield at night. He saw several small fires burning at the enemy camp. He asked his aides what was the reason for it. He was told that as Hindus generally do not eat food cooked by non-Brahmins and even then differences remain and so many soldiers cook their own food. The ruler was very pleased to hear it and said that in that case there won’t be much difficulty in winning the battle.