Civilization: The perceived difficulty of navigating through the Left and Right Histories in India

I have often heard from many of my friends about the difficulty of sifting through the myriad versions of historical accounts, often of the same incidents or period or characters, one contradicting the other. Upholding the right version from this chaos is perceived as complex. Worse, when these versions are often leading to perceived social conflicts, indulgence becomes a bigger challenge. People who value harmony above everything else are tempted to dismiss all these versions and live in a history-less world or they tend to balance it out through an artificial average terming that there is truth in all these contradictory versions and that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. This is understandable response. However, I have some objections to this line of thought.

1. We can no more ignore history. History is a school subject. All of us are forced to read an account of history which then enters our subconscious mind at an early age and plays a role - either a constructive or a destructive one. We are all responsible towards this history that we teach our children and the implications. 
2. Indian civilization wisely created mythology as humanities subject to learn from the past. It ignored factual history as an academic discipline or a guide towards life. Even when the Sultanate was busy employing court historians to carve an artificial glory of their self, the larger India ignored this discipline because the society did not have bear the burden of historical accounts written by the court historians. 
3. However, with the advent of British modernity, life has unmistakably changed. Apart from colonialism, the British brought a sense of historical consciousness hitherto absent in India for good reasons. For the British, such a consciousness was of bigger importance than the Sultanate. Starting from 4th century AD, they have used it to make societies intellegible to their world view and through that create frameworks to manage those societies often forcibly transform such societies to conform to their own understanding of such societies. This is far more complex with large humanitarian implications.
4. Initially, the British used historical accounts to genuinely understand the society. However, as the colonial project progressed, they realized the needed for bigger instruments to subjugate the country. They had three kinds of collaborators
• The Intellectuals who were bred in the philosophies of the west and who viewed India through their biased lenses
• The Missionaries who needed to create accounts of India to portray the society as inferior and use that to further the cause of proselytization
• The Colonials who wanted to economically benefit and hence needed artificial justifications to rule the country that would assuage the morality of the British society.
• Using this, they turned historical accounts upside down within a short time. They used these accounts to manipulate future generations and made them co-collaborators of the larger colonial project.
5. Post independence the academic establishment and intelligentsia has largely built on those foundations whereas the traditional accounts are largely different. In this way, they succeeded in their mission beyond imagination. With this foundation and power as the background, the Indian intelligentsia and academicians successfully sidelined the right and largely built their future accounts on the foundation laid by the colonial era - creating huge conflict in the society.
6. The genuine right wing has deep concern. This author shares the views of the genuine right-wing of India.

• On the one hand, the colonial accounts are academically incorrect. Anybody who is seriously concerned with knowledge and truth is obliged to investigate those accounts, much less use it blindly educate the future generations.
• These inferiority infusing historical accounts are creating havoc in the self-confidence of the nation and coming in the way of collaborating and making progress. It is coming in the way of being genuinely patriotic.
• These incorrect accounts are designed to deepen existing fault-lines and create more fault-lines and they have been hugely successful in this so far and hence pose a great danger to the society. 
• This last point is the most important. A civilization is not a discrete sequence of generations. Things dont stop and start. A civilization is like a river flowing seamlessly in time. The flow has its own current, its genius, its worlpool, waterfall etc., It has its own character that determines the health of its flow. Each generation has to appreciate the correct nature of its flow in order to navigate itself successfully. However, the historical accounts are suppressing the genius of our civilization. We are not able to access our own experiences through our own intellectual instruments, we are accessing them through faulty instruments gaining faulty knowledge. Hence, we are travelling in towards somebody else's destiny and not our own, unable to solve our own problems, floating directionless under the onslaught of some other force. This civilizational problem can be corrected through a correct understanding of our past, capabilities that our ancestors have left for us and evaluating true directions that are possible in front of us for the future.
• To this last claim, the right-wing has produced prima-facie evidence in favour as well as productive and compelling hypothesis explaining various phenomenon.

Thus, the problem goes well beyond the realm of academic correctness and nationalistic pride with respect to our civilization. It has an implication on the larger health of our society across sections and in realizing meaningful solutions to problems that we are unable to resolve for decades. It then becomes our fundamental responsibility to investigate this until we reach a different plateau of understanding. The educated India has enough intellectual tools to investigate this. We are all far more objective and rigorous in our professions and minimally trained in logic, which we can productively apply to this discipline and investigate whether the claims of the right wing is correct or not. If we do not this, we may be doing serious injustice and harm to future generations and they may not forgive us.

After this long prologue - explaining how we cannot runaway from this indulgence - let me come to the actual problem of the difficulty of resolving the contradictions in these historical accounts. It is true that the history is written by the winners as they get to choose the resources based on which history is written. Worse, in our education, we are never told how histories are written, although even a highschool student knows how scientific instruments are made and used. Wish there was a history lab where people wrote their own accounts using some resources - matters would be more clear. Nevertheless, let us list a few sources and what are the problems.

• Literary works of the past and information within those accounts that help us decide the times to which they belong.
• Stone edifices and inscriptions and information within those accounts that help us decide the times to which they belong.
• Oral accounts
• Material created in the past and their signatures

Histories are written by weaving connections through these accounts. Histories become different when 

• Different connections are made between these accounts
• Words and passages are interpreted differently
• Different assumptions are made
• One account is dropped and another chosen
• ...

Hence, when a version is refuted, it is not very difficult to ascertain whether the refutation is meaningful at all or not. Let us look into some examples.

1. Often Vedic passages are interpreted differently by the colonialists and such interpretations are not part of any traditional account at all. Such interpretations are hugely suspect. For eg., Arya is word to denote respect in most traditional accounts but the british era created the term Aryan Civilization, hence that is a suspect interpretation.
2. In the Sultanate history, much of what we know is written by Court historians. For eg., most of what we know about Akbar is from the accounts of court historians Abul Fazl or Badayuni. The oral bards of the times have been largely ignored. 
3. Worse, Akbar's greatness is largely a portrayal of his life after the age of 40 when he supposedly went through a spiritual transformation. His life before that - even by the accounts of Abul Fazl - is quite savagery in nature and not worthy of appreciation if not denouncement. A  simple re-reading of Abul Fazl will put Akbar in his rightful place.
4. Portrayal of Buddha for eg, if his entire works are read in the original, it becomes clear that he was in conflict with the Brahmins in parts but he was still part of the larger civilization in harmony. He described himself as a Kshatriya, as a proud descendant of Rama, did not denounce the so called caste system etc.,
5. Many historical inferences have been drawn from the Vedas. Dasyus for eg., have been described as Dravidians - which is more of an assumption. The right wing has successfully interpreted the meaning of DAsyus from the Vedas to show that it was a conflict between different communities in the same region and that the Dravidians have nothing to do with it. The colonial and the post colonial historians have not been able to refute that. Rakshasas have been described as Dravidians, however all puraanic accounts show that Rakshasas as brahmins.

We can create an endless list. In the light of this, way forward is simple and clear. 

• Read the objections raised by the genuine right-wing. 
• Ascertain that their portrayal of the colonial and post-colonial accounts are not without manipulation
• Ascertain that their refutation of the latter is sound from the stand-point of formal logic.

You will never know if either the right wing or the left wing is comprehensive in its portrayal. However, you can always check if every account is sound. That we cannot verify the comprehensive nature of portrayal should not force us to abdicate from the very responsibility of validating accounts. Do we even have a choice? Because there is already a version of history running in the school and we owe it to our future generations that the history is as close to reality as possible. The other option is to altogether eliminate the discipline of history from school and academics, but are we ready for such a radical proposition.