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The Tainted Glass: A Look at Western Civilization to Understand the Vision We Have of India Today |
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A civilisation is like the human soul: it has a childhood, where it struggles to learn; an adolescence where it discovers - sometimes painfully - the hard facts of life; an adulthood, where it enjoys the fruits of maturity; and an old age, which slowly leads to death and oblivion. In this manner, since the dawn of human history, civilisations have risen, reached the top where they gravitate for some time, achieving their enduring excellence -and then slowly began their descent towards extinction. Usually, old age for these civilisations meant that they fell prey to barbarians, because they had lost the vitality and the inner obedience to their particular genius, which they had possessed at the time of their peak and which had protected them. This has been a natural process and barbarians have played an important role in the evolution of humanity, for they made sure, in the most ruthless manner, that civilisations did not stagnate; because like a human being, a civilisation must die many times before it realises the fullness of its soul and attains divine perfection. There have been many such great civilisations which rose and fell throughout the ages: Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Africa, China, Greece, or Rome. Human nature being what it is, most of these civilisations established their might by military conquest and thus imposed their order and their views upon others, a process which some have called civilisation, others colonisation. The advent of Jesus Christ heralded the rise of the European-Western civilisation, whose forerunners were the Greek and Roman cultures. For long, Europe was only a disunited lot of barbarian tribes fighting each other. The Crusades signalled the earliest attempt at unity, although the French and the British, for instance, kept warring each other long after them. Some of these nations were great seafarers. Thus Spain and Portugal for instance, reached out to the far world and colonised huge chunks of territories in the Americas from the 14th century onwards. But it can be safely said that with the industrial revolution, European civilisation started reaching its maturity at the beginning of the 19th century and that a great civilisation, whose genius was consciousness in the material, developed henceforth. Simultaneously, of course, as all other civilisations had done before, Europe started expanding outwards and imposed its own civilisation on other cultures, which had lost their vitality and were open to conquest. England, particularly, because it mastered the seas, went farther, faster and acquired more territories than other European nations, such as France, who often had to settle for the crumbs. And certainly, Great Britain's prize possession, the jewel in its colonies, must have been India, whose mighty borders extended then from Afghanistan to Cape Comorin. Western civilisation must be intimately associated with Christianity, even though Christianity took different forms over the ages : Protestantism, Lutheranism, Russian Orthodoxy... According to the Hindus, Jesus Christ was an "avatar", a direct emanation from God. Christ was surely a great avatar of love (*).And Christianity certainly had a softening influence on the Western world, where, let's face it, barbarism was the order of the day for many centuries. In the Middle Ages for instance, Christianity was the only island of sanity in a world of rape, black plague, murders and chaos; and as the Brahmins did in India, it was the Christians who preserved the oral and written word for posterity. There have been many great saints in Christianity, men of wisdom, who strove for divine vision in austerity. Such were Saint François of Assisi's, who reached high spiritual experience. Saint Vincent de Paul, who practised true Christian charity. Or Saint Gregory, who attained authentic knowledge. Unfortunately, Christianity, got somehow politicised and fossilised under the influence of corrupt popes and has often become a magma of dogmas, rites, do's and don't. Generally, because all Christians believed - like the Muslims - that only their God was the true one, The Christian colons sought to impose upon the people they conquered their own brand of religion - and they used the military authority of their armies to do so. It is true that this was done in good faith, that the " soldiers of Christ " thought that the civilisations they stumbled upon were barbarous, pagan and incomprehensible. True also that they sincerely believed that they brought upon these " savages " the virtues of western civilisation: medicine, education and spiritual salvation. But the harm done by Christian missionaries all over the earth will never be properly assessed. In South America, the Spanish soldiers and priests annihilated, in the name of Jesus, an entire civilisation, one of the brightest ever, that of the Incas and the Aztecs. Everywhere the Christians went, they stamped mercilessly on cultures, eradicated centuries old ways of life, to replace them with totally inadequate systems, crude, Victorian, moralistic, which slowly killed the spontaneity of life of the people they conquered. They were thus able to radically alter civilisations, change their patterns of thinking. And three generations later the children of those who had been conquered, had forgotten their roots, adapted Christianity and often looked upon their conquerors as their benefactors. Yet a few years ago, the West was able to celebrate the anniversary of Columbus, discoverer of the "New World" with fanfare and pomp. But the New World was already quite old when it was discovered by the young Barbarians, much older in fact than the fledgling Western civilisation. And Columbus, however courageous and adventurous, was a ruthless man, whose discovery of the New World triggered an unparalleled rape in human history. Yet, not only the West still deifies Columbus, but no one in the Third World has been capable to challenge coherently that undeserved status. The truth is that today, not only in the Western world, but also in the entire so-called developing world, we are constantly looking at things and events through a prism that has been fashioned by centuries of western thinking. and as long as we do not get rid of that tainted glass we will not understand rightly the world in general and India in particular. For the stamp of Western civilisation will still take some time to be eradicated. By military conquest or moral assertiveness, the West imposed upon the world its ways of thinking; and it created enduring patterns, subtle disinformations and immutable grooves, which play like a record that goes on turning, long after its owner has attainded the age of decline. The barbarians who thought they had become " civilized ", are being devoured by other barbarians. But today, the economic might has replaced the military killing machine. THE FIST DISINFORMATION ON INDIA: ARYANS VS DRAVIDIANS When the early Christian missionaries arrived in India, they found it very hard to convert Hindus. Not only Hinduism had a broad, well-structured base, but it was also so multi-facet that it accepted in its fold creeds which sometimes ran contrary to its mainstream philosophy. How do you go about converting a religion which says that God takes as many shapes to manifest Himself as there are forms on this earth? The missionaries could not, as the Muslims had done, convert under threat of death; and they quickly realised the hopelessness of their task and soon turned towards more fertile ground: the Tribals and the Dalits. By financial incentive (and also by immense good work, because the unflagging spirit of missionaries can never be denied, particularly in the field of health and education -but is it not another clever way to attract innocent souls in its fold ?) and patience, the missionaries managed to make important inroads, specially in the border states of East India, Goa and Kerala. This they achieved in great part by pitting the downtrodden tribals and Harijans against the "arrogant" Brahmins and Kshatryas. But there was a flaw in their policy: all belonged to the same Hindu fold and -even when converted- recognised its laws, particularly the reincarnation theory, which could make them Harijans in this life and Brahmins in the next. (Even today, this is visible in Velangani for instance, the " miraculous " Mecca of all Indian Christians, which practises, to the irritation of the priests, a blend of Hinduism and Christianity) So the missionaries, and particularly the Jesuits, who are great dialecticians, took-up a new historical theory which had already been floated around by a few western historians. "Once upon a time, they said, there was a great civilisation called Bharat, or Hindustan, where lived good-natured, peaceful, dark-skinned shepherds, called the Dravidians, adoring good natured pre-Vedic gods, such as Shiva. They had a remarkable civilisation going, witness the city of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistani Sind, were educated, democratic and possessed a highly refined culture. But around 2000 B.C., they continued, the villains entered the scene: fair-skinned, ruthless and barbaric, nomadic Aryan tribes, adoring the haughty Indra, originating from somewhere in the Caucasus. These bad people colonised the entire peninsula and to forever mark their social boundaries, they devised the caste system, whereby they the priests and princes, ruled over the merchants and labourers"...And to drive the wedge even deeper, the Jesuits added: "but you the aborigines, the tribals, were there in India, before the Aryans, even before the Dravidians. You are the original inhabitants of India, you are the true Indians"... Thus was born the great Aryan invasion theory, of two civilisations, that of the low caste Dravidians and the high caste Brahmins and Kshatryas, always pitted against each other, which has endured till today and has been used by all Western historians, and unfortunately by most Indian text-books too. Sounds preposterous? Simplistic? Impossible ? Yet this theory not only helped the missionaries to play the Untouchables against the hated Brahmins, who let it be said, managed single-handedly to preserve orally Hindu culture and religion for five millenniums, it also suited the British, who found it an ideal channel to push forward their divide and rule policies. It served also well the Muslim invaders, who used it to convert Harijans (and they still capitalise on that theory today). It even suited Nazi racism with its theory of Aryan supremacy, even though they only borrowed the inverted Aryan cross from India and did not even take pains to read Hindu philosophy, which is one of the least racists and most tolerant creeds in the world. Of all the Western historians who wrote historical treaties on India, Alain Danielou from France, is probably one of the most enlightened. Danielou had a great love for Hindu culture, which he felt is the backbone of Indian history and people - and we shall later quote extensively from his " Histoire de l'Inde ", which shows a real insight in post-vedic Indian history. Yet Danielou errs like other historians when dealing with the Aryan invasion theory and enters in the same historical controversy: he attributes Vedic religion to the "Aryans", who he says, originated from Turkestan and the plains of Russia. " These original Aryans he remarks, first migrated to Iran and then moved on towards India, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, from 2800 BC onwards. They were intellectually and materially backwards and had no great artistic culture to boast-off. " And Danielou adds: 'the disaster that represents the aryan colonisation of India can be compared to the conquest of the Incas by the fanatical and illiterate Spanish adventurers and like in South America, the entire dravidian population was reduced to the status of slaves ". Yet, a few voices have been raised against the Aryan theory, which let us emphasise, has no archaeological evidence: nowhere has there been found traces of a struggle between the Dravidians and the Aryans - and an immense clash is bound to have happened. Contrary to Danielou, the Dutch sociologist Konrad Elst, for instance, holds the theory that it is possible "that the Aryans were originally from North India and the Dravidians from the South, kept in a separate mould by the great Deccan plateau, which seems to have also sheltered the South from later Muslim invasions (Indigenous Indians, page 25)." Evidence for the view that Vedic culture and Harappan (Dravidian) culture were instances of one and the same civilisation, he declares, has been accumulating, while on the other hand, the traditional arguments for the Aryan invasion theory have been discarded after close scrutiny. In fact, Mr Elst's great theory, which he calls "Urheimat", goes exactly opposite from Danielou's: Aryans were originally in India, Elst claims and they migrated outwards, to Iran for instance, where Zoroastrian religion and culture was a watered down version of Vedic religion and Sanskrit culture; then to Turkestan, and hence to Europe: "To the South, not to the East; rather than Indo-Iranians on their way from South Russia to Iran and partly to India, these may as well be the Hitites, Kassites or Mitanni, on their way FROM INDIA, via the Aral Lake area, to Anatolia, or Mesopotamia, where they show up in subsequent centuries". Sri Aurobindo, too, India's greatest yogi, poet, philosopher- and surely its most ardent revolutionary- spoke against the Aryan theory: "We shall question many established philological myths,-the legend for instance of an Aryan invasion from the North, the artificial and inimical distinction of the Aryan and Dravidian which an erroneous philology has driven like a wedge into the unity of the homogeneous Indo-Afghan race... Like the majority of educated Indians, I has passively accepted without examination, the conclusion of European scholarship"(India's Rebirth, page 103)... Sri Aurobindo recalls that during his first stay in South India, he realised that although the racial division between Northern Aryan and Southern Dravidians is presumed to rest on a supposed difference between the physical types of Aryan and Dravidians and a more definite incompatibility between the Northern Sanskritic and the southern non-sanskritic tongues, he was impressed by the general recurrence of northern or "Aryan" type in the Tamil race: "Wherever I turned, I seemed to recognise with a startling distinctness, not only among Brahmins but in all castes and classes, the old familiar faces, features, figures of my friends in Maharashtra, Gujerat, Hindustan, even though the familiarity was less widespread, of my own province Bengal. The impression I received was as if an army of all the tribes of the North had descended on the South and submerged any previous population that may have occupied it". (India's Rebirth 104). Sri Aurobindo also wonders if the so-called Aryan invasions were but incursions of small bands of a less civilised race who melted away in the original population. " How is it possible, he questions, that a handful of barbarians, entering a vast peninsula occupied by a civilised people, builders of great cities, extensive traders, not without mental and spiritual culture, could impose on them their own language, religion, ideas and manners ". Such a miracle, he maintains, would be just possible if the invaders possessed a very highly organised language, a greater force of creative mind and a more dynamic religious form and spirit. Lastly, he also shatters the myth of the difference of language to support the theory of meeting of races: "But here also my preconceived ideas were disturbed and confounded. For on examining the vocabulary of the Tamil language, in appearance so foreign to the Sanskrit form and character, I yet found myself continuously guided by words, or families of words supposed to be pure Tamil, in establishing new relations between Sanskrit and its distant sister, Latin, and occasionally between the Greek and the Sanskrit. Sometimes the Tamil vocable not only suggested the connection but proved the missing link in a family of connected words. And it was through this Dravidian language that I came first to perceive what seems to me now the true law, origins and, as it were, the embryology of the Aryan tongues...The possibility suggests itself that they may even have been two diversions, or families derived from one lost primitive tongue".(India's 104) Recently, the decipherment of the Harappan script by Dr Jha, a scholar of West Bengal, has shown that this script is not proto-dravidian, as most linguists thought, but Sanskrit- related. Which means in effect that there never was any Aryan invasion, which " destroyed " the dravidian cities of Mohenjo-Daro or Harappa. It shows on the contrary that the Aryan influence went from East to West: from India to Iran; from Iran to Greece; from Greece to Europe, where it moulded its philosophy and culture. Here goes Mr Basham's pet theory of an Aryan invasion, which constitutes the first piece of disinformation on India. But when will the world realise the wrongness of their historical theories on the beginnings of Indian civilisation? History would have then to be rewritten and the consequences of this new theory applied not only to Asia, but also to the entire history of the whole world. For if Vedic civilisation is indeed at least 8000 years old, (some, as the mathematician N.S. Rajaram say 10.000 year old), if it is a unified culture, then it means that it not only influenced other civilisations in the neighbourhood, Iran, or even the Gulf, in pre-Muslim times, but also indirectly the whole planet, witness the slow migration of some Aryan tribe towards Europe, of which the wandering Gypsies emerging in Eastern Europe by the 14th century, may have been the descendants. (*) There is some indication that Christ came to India for spiritual initiation and borrowed from Buddhism for his teachings. According to Alain Danielou, the French historian who wrote " Histoire de l'Inde ", Many sects which developed in the first century before Christ in Palestine, had a strong Hindu and Buddhist influence and a great number of legends surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ, are strangely similar to Buddhist and Krishnaites stories. He adds that the structures of the church resembles those of Chaitya Buddhism and that the early Christian asceticism seems to have been inspired by Jainism " |
To continue with Chapter 2.... |
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Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 |