India is in serious danger of losing ownership and control over her civilizational heritage due to the machinations of an insidious combine of Left-wing academics, Page Three authorities on culture and urban development, and an architects lobby posing as experts on archaeology and conservation. Looming behind them is UNESCO, a body whose financial scams makes the UN oil-for-food programme smell of roses, which wishes to commodify Indian civilization in the name of world heritage and detach it from the life of the Indian people. Complicit in these shabby manoeuvres is the Left-dependent UPA regime.
India, with its internationally acknowledged expertise, as demonstrated at Angkor Vat, does not need UNESCO to decide its top heritage sites (a very manipulative game), how they should be preserved, and how its living civilization and culture should be interpreted. We must realize that the mindset behind declaring some monuments as “world heritage” is alien to our culture, and eventually extremely harmful. In fact, India should stop funding UNESCO, force a discussion on the Canadian Government’s audit of that body some years ago (it was condemned as an international sinecure for wives and mistresses!), and press for its closure. Allow me to explain.
Those who have seen the pyramids of Giza are moved by their eternal beauty and mystery. In a deep sense they are part of world heritage and deserve to be saved from the fate of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Yet it is the Egyptian Government which protects and preserves the antiquities of Egypt. The flip side of this picture is that the civilization that created the great monuments along the Nile is dead and gone. Egypt is culturally alien to its historical past, and it has been left to Western experts to excavate and interpret that epoch. In the absence of continuity of civilization and culture, the experts are free to make any interpretations and present them as established truths. Foreign scholarship is never free of bias and cultural baggage; I am personally aware that some Western countries are teaching school students about “hunger and poverty” in ancient Egypt (god alone knows on the basis of what evidence). There is no one to counter that poor and hungry people could not have built one of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world!
Mercifully, the Indian Diaspora in America has woken up to the denigration of Hindus through viciously written textbooks, and the battle for a fair depiction of Indian history and culture has been joined on that continent. Yet India remains the primordial battlefield for the Soul of India. Can we allow a bunch of self-proclaimed experts to cannibalize our culture and heritage, declare it dead and preserve it in museums, where Western experts can freely pontificate about feudalism in pre-Islamic India?
I became acutely conscious of the danger of academic monopolies in July 1993, when Sir Vidia Naipaul spoke to a major national daily about the importance of a sense of history. He said: “I recently received a document, the text of a lecture given by some sort of an expert on India who teaches at Trinity College, Cambridge. The lecture was on fundamentalism. In it we are told that Islam was brought to India by traders and merchants and that places of Hindu worship became absorbed into Mohammedan places of worship. Well, all this is absurd and it is said by a serious scholar…” Naipaul endorsed the demolition of the Babri structure on 6 December 1992 as part of a “sense of history that the Hindus are now developing.” It was a fascinating observation.
Readers may wonder why I have chosen to write about heritage at a time when jihadis have slit the throats of Hindus in Kashmir and Hindus in a Bharat Milap procession in Mau, UP, have been attacked by culturally intolerant persons. The UPA Government and Congress party have maintained a stoic silence about both episodes, which have happened in quick succession. But my objective is larger: since the keynote of Indic civilization is unity and continuity, we will not be able to preserve the people if we do not fight for the civilization that once made them world leaders without the barrel of the gun.
While Left–Congress split over the NCERT curriculum has received some media attention, there is complete ignorance about the 2 September 2005 meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Archaeology (CABA). A discordant note was struck with a notification dated 11 August 2005, appointing Dr. Suraj Bhan, Dr. D. Mandal and Dr. Sitaram Roy as members (all served Babri Masjid Action Committee during Court-ordered excavations at Ayodhya in 2003), when they did not figure in three previous notifications.
Their agenda was soon apparent. One worthy wanted rules changed so ASI could be headed by archaeologists from outside! This would open the way for Marxist historians to takeover this august body as self-styled archaeologists. The same expert wanted to delink ASI’s explorations from conservation activities, to help Page Three Cultural Czars and their NGO fronts to grab public funds.
The political nominees exposed their non-academic agenda by making adverse remarks upon ASI’s report to the Allahabad High Court on the Ayodhya excavations of 2003. Given the paucity of time and the pressure under which the team worked, with the court being asked to ensure ‘communal representation’ of even the labour force, the report was commendable. Indian academics lack the honesty to appreciate evidence which contradicts their ideological fantasies, and we need to question the integrity of a regime that appoints such persons to premier institutions preserving national heritage.
The Ayodhya excavations established the occupation of the site from at least 1250 BC, through several historical periods. ASI found the remains of a monumental building of the Medieval-Sultanate period (twelfth to sixteenth century AD), over which the disputed Babri structure was constructed during the early sixteenth century. This truth is indigestible to Marxist historians, who are determined to choke the ASI, which alone has the power to overturn the mythologies peddled by them.
Another episode that angered them and figured in CABA was the accidental discovery of vandalized medieval Jaina temples during restoration work at Fatehpur Sikri in 2001; they insisted such “discoveries” must not be made again! Yet true art lovers are eternally indebted for the unearthing of some of the most beautiful statuary in Indian history, especially a breath-catching Devi Sarasvati. Jainas have a fascination for the Goddess of learning, and it is an endearing irony of the Indic tradition that all famous Sarasvati images found in India hail from Jaina temples. To my mind, only an iconoclast would wish to keep such an image from detection in order to protect the exposure of medieval vandalism.
Sadly, the Saraswati, honoured in Indian tradition as “best of mothers,” became one of the first political casualties of the UPA, with the Ministry of Culture declaring there was no evidence of the river, even though it is being revived in Haryana, Gujarat and Rajasthan! Decades of work by government organizations (and an accidental picture by NASA) have established the course of the 1600-km long river from the Himalayas to Gujarat; excavations work along the route would establish the cultural chronology of the Vedic people. We must fight for our roots if we are to preserve our branches.
The Pioneer, 18 October 2005