I have lot of doubts on accuracy of history, of India, about all kings – about all kingdoms! Something does not seem right to me, except British Raj! During their time they had press running in the country, which made things bit transparent. Apart from that there were other secret publications run by freedom fighters. With all these records we have a clear idea of bloodthirsty rulers of British East India.
History of Older kingdoms, on the other hand, was mostly based on travelogues of a few visitors and other delicate records. Travellers certainly had the pleasure of King’s hospitality, then, would definitely write something neat on him. Stone encryptions, again, are commissioned by royals. There are also palm leaf scriptures (in Pali, Sanskrit etc) which were written by the elite (educated) crowd of King’s court. Obviously, their education (and living) was funded by king himself. Now why wouldn’t we expect plain old asslicking praise on king and his kingdom? If these go on making history, how accurate is our history?
Talking about history and its accuracy, I would like mention about a post I came across on desicritics by beingCynical. It was about Aurangzeb and his misdeeds, especially his intolerance. This post presents a beautiful argument on this Mughal emperor, and claims that history is inaccurate about his rule. I am pasting a Para from that post:
What drives us to be so judgemental and conclusive without knowing the facts? Is it the bad and wrong history that been taught via the millions of government supplied history books, where truth is far fetched as history is fabricated to support someones ego and wants? The fact is good history is rarely about good guys and bad guys but unfortunately we follow this simplistic logic while going over our history, resulting in putting on a perception pair of glasses while engrossing it. I believe that history should be presented as it is, no biasing, no fabrication or no forced conclusion and the readers should be left to decide the good or the bad for themselves. I was sure that our text books are being pathetically modified, God knows for what and whom, so I always had a fascination for all those controversial & bad characters or so being pictured in books.
This part is 100% true; we certainly have omitted a large portion of history for our convenience (or likings). It could be due to several reasons, most probably to make our history look good, simple “tidy up”.
Anyways, my claim here is that our kings were not great, tolerant and merciful, leave alone Aurangzeb. I feel, being ruthless is natural for a king and it could be easily anticipated in a kingdom which is external to the society with a background of different culture, religion and ideology. Ruthlessness comes in package with power.
Let’s just have a look around to see what power has done to the present world, which talks about peace and stuff…
Burma keeps democratically elected victor in house arrest for decades. China repeatedly violates human rights and this doesn’t reach rest of the world. Few countries in Middle East ignore everything about women rights. African countries prioritise religious rules over hunger and decease. Let’s go backwards, there were Pol Pots and Hitlers who killed millions, for their beliefs. Before that, Roman church (as a state) killed many for not agreeing with them. There were crusaders Salahdeens, Gengis Khans and Huns. Persian kings were Gods and they wanted whole (known world) to bow to their king. There were Aryan tribes where tribal leader Indra was their God. I can go on and on…
Our guys were butchers too, it’s not registered in history properly, that’s all; say Asokas, Kaniska, Guptas etc. Were they good rulers, impartial, respecting human rights and tolerant? History books say they all were fantastic rulers. They laid roads, built schools, eased taxes etc etc endless songs. Text books are all in praises for all the rulers of India except couple of names here and there. This doesn’t make any sense to me, when the whole worlds have fought each other like barbarians, how can Indian rulers possibly be that great?
Among all these examples let’s pick something in the middle, not too old or new. Mughals! How great were Mughals? Mughal era is sandwiched between British Raj and few invaders from Afghanistan. British raj was notorious for taking the wealth out, and same were Afghani invaders, Ghori and Ghazni repeatedly attacked Indian places of worship and looted wealth away. They had power to do so and had no moral and religious obligation to hold back. Now, did Mughals do it? They did not have anything in common with India religion, culture and language plus they had army to loot. Still, nothing is registered in our history, why? It does not sound logical. Overriding someone’s culture with their own has ranged between Aryans till British, why do our Mughals stand out?
To point out some of their larger than life qualities…
Tolerance: This looks almost impossible. Tolerance can be achieved in a society only if everyone (Rulers/subjects minority/majority) belongs to same group, Look at India, Pakistan and Srilanka for nearest examples, Are we tolerant?. Religious tolerance is not something a 15th century emperor can achieve when still holocausts run in the 20th. Rulers simply can’t resist it, to let live other tribe peacefully. But we have convinced ourselves that somehow a whole batch of emperors were tolerant. Is it not a valid argument that, this part of the history was not written, or erased deliberately?
Human rights: Indian history does not talk about this anyway, about any kingdoms as a matter of fact. I would like to see history registering all the details, along with laid roads and built schools and stuff. It should also describe burnt widows, killed witches, married infants, erased a tribes. History conveniently omits all these details and still sings “the most merciful”. We are talking about these emperors who cut the hands of thousands of workers who built Taj Mahal, just to make sure that they don’t build another of this kind. What is so merciful about this?
Do you want to know about mercifulness of Kings? Watch Caligula, you will see how pervert Cesar (entire society in fact) was. Read Fairy tale Arabian nights, where every night the Caliph executes his newlywed wife (of that day) for not satisfying him with a story. Apparently this is children’s book, on morals! Coming to the point, yes this is how kings behave.
On women rights: If this statistics make any sense to you, India has one of the biggest honour killing states till date. Its mainly happens in five to six major states where major kingdoms ruled, just extrapolate these numbers to get a picture of those days. One more fact I read, we had notorious zenana system running in Mughal kingdoms, where dozens of wives won in a battle were “stored” like cattle.. There were eunuchs guarding these rooms so that “queens” can’t do anything even if they get human urges.
Our history text books don’t talk about any of these, just because they look bad on our “glorious” past? How can history be “history”, if they talk only half truth? I hope one day a serious unbiased research will be done on Indian history to provide us with complete picture on our Shahenshahs.[tweetmeme]
The Bach 
hey Mr.Bach 🙂 lol ..dude seems like u got a tad riled 🙂 it def was not about ur post..and really did not intend to be condescending about juicy blogs 🙂
i reiterate..that was not t intent 🙂 sumne timepass 😛 .. n dude , I know u decently enough for u to be pedaling any right wing propoganda :)lol..they would infact welcome u very warmly if u decided to change colors 🙂
naa..my comments hardly got anything to do with history if you noticed 🙂 hence I apologised for digressing …the funniest part is you ve taken offence to my juicy blog statement..sorry for the cockiness ! 🙂
I was just amused by how little indian got stuck to one section of ur post and went on to produce some precious pedagogy on vandalism n genocidal traits of islam 🙂 thought time to get some semblance 😛 had half the mind to quote few historical nuggets from Amebdkar’s Riddles of Hinduism , or Ram Swaroop’s ‘Islam and Christianity through the eyes of Hinduism’ …also Shadow lines of Gosh anyways 🙂 jobless after long time…post something good soon !
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Dilip, No offence taken.. I do have a juicy blog.. but at least I make a point .. my point!
Please don’t worry about offending me, If you think you did.. then you can continue to do that 🙂 I welcome it. 🙂
Alright, here, I am gonna do a deal with you.I will search for Ram Swaroops book and read it. and in return you need to read Koenraad’s (link below) ..
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/article.html
Then we will have this discussion. I really don’t think either of us are going to change our stands.. but at least, we cant throw each other, with the ideas the other hasn’t read 🙂
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and sorry for inundating my comments with smiley…bad habit of chat , will get rid of tht hopefully
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Thats alright .. good to see you stand by your point and argue.. that wasnt your style.. that was Kaushik’s 🙂
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hey..btw no one speaks of the vandalism of Pulikeshi and Mahendravarman…its me who picked it off from books.. its not in our regular syllabi..dude..we cant load those kids with too much history 😀 poor guys…they will hate us for burdening them further
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Back to point again.
do you recall 9th std. text books ? We were bombarded with tax systems of British Raj .. “montego chelmsford” .. and other monte.. reports etc etc. Do you think we needed them ? Our text books filled with junk information which no one is ever going to use it .. never. remove these junk and fill it with something useful and interesting to learn.
See I will show you how it is done..
a) Ashoka was a great powerful king and he ruined a perfectly good democracy called Kalinga
b) Akbar won lot of kingdoms and he became related to the rest. In order to ensure they don’t rebel later, he held eldest son (crown prince)hostage..in prison (source wikipedia)
c) Tipoo sultan asked help from Portuguese and French to fight against British. When Portuguese couldn’t keep their promise of sending troops Tipu got angry. In vengeance he held 1000s of Mangalore Catholics in dark dungeons of Srirangapattanam(source wikipedia again)
Simple sentences.. no big deal for a 12 year old. 🙂
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Why do discussions about history have to turn into vitriolic religious/communal violence issues?
Makes me wonder if it is better that our history books are kept ‘clean’…attempts to explain communal violence today with, ‘but their ancestors hurt our ancestors’ should be firmly dealt with.
Or else – in a country where we live by what an ancestor thought was right centuries ago (who heard that ancestor?) – I fear we will find the likes of Sri Ram Sene jumping to take us back to ‘the glorious era of Ashoka and Bharat’ if they have their way.
🙄
You may find some who will agree with you except ,
//There were Aryan tribes where tribal leader Indra was their God. I can go on and on…
Our guys were butchers too, it’s not registered in history properly, that’s all; say Asokas, Kaniska, Guptas etc. Were they good rulers, impartial, respecting human rights and tolerant? History books say they all were fantastic rulers.//
It was totally acceptable that kings should ‘conquer’ – what did conquering mean?
Religion sanctioned it with yagyas and all – and who controlled religion? The king and the priests made the rules – the priests must have been like the media of today.
I feel basic history in school is about conquests and wars – a small para about administration, another small para about the life of the common people (which interests me the most).
Have you read Delhi by Khushwant Singh?
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IHM,
Thanks for the comment and promoting post 🙂
My point was give people with truth, both good and bad, but complete truth. Lets not worry about how they take it, it is entirely up to them. If they feel disgusted (in most cases) , it is actually kind of whole idea, to learn from history.
I have read him, long back though. Is there anything specific you want to stress from that book ?
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What I know about History of India is that that we’ve always wanted to adjust and adopt. We’re conservative, but not in the straight sense. It’s always been this way.
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Hmm, I need to think about it on conservative part.
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well, it is human tendency to talk only about the good about themselves and the bad about others
history too is the same,
http://simplybanking.wordpress.com/
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Well, that’s not right and somehow we need to set it right. Thanks for the comment.
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dunno actually i never minded with mughals…I mean we all know shah jahan was out of control romeo, aurangzeeb a crazy bigot(but hey that guy was a raider not an emperor, there’s a difference). Personally speaking I think Babur or Humayun were pretty good rulers. It really takes a lot to enter a completely different culture and blend it like the mughals did. If they wanted they could’ve simply raided and pillaged india, which would be far too divided to stand up to the attacks, but instead they decided to settle in….and also had they been so eeevil as little indian says there’d definitely be substantial evidence. Either way being under mughals beats being under british raj anyday. At least mughals didn’t give us huge-ass famines killing of 1/3 rd of bengal….
Oh and on the matter of islam being a terrorist religion, no religion is perfect, Assuming you are a hindu, even hinduism has it’s faults, In the hands of a master conqueror any religion can be modified as a tool of war, so shut yer trap. Just because hitler killed jews in WW2 doesn’t mean we can go around killing Germans…and that was a GENOCIDE!!! not even terrorism.
there were 300 muslims dead in world trade centre at 9/11. How many indians were there? EXACTLY! No sane man kills his own people, actually no sane man kills people anyways…
BUDDHISM FTW….only religion that’s still peaceful…too bad i’m not one
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J, thanks for stopping by.
I understand where the first para is coming from. Its based on facts registered in Indian history books. My question is, what if they are wrong, deliberately and purposefully wrong ?
No you are wrong assuming me a Hindu. “About me” has it all 🙂
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