Why we like to believe the Taj Mahal was built on a temple. And oh, that 36 percent of NASA scientists are Indians.
What these persistent myths say about what we feel about our place in the world.
But have you ever tried to verify any of these facts? If you have, that makes you a skeptical patriot, like me. So is any Indian who listens to the received wisdom from anyone – parents, family, school, social or political leaders – but also demands, “show me the data”. I think it’s good for a country to have lots of young people who are skeptical (not cynical), and this election season is the perfect time to ask such questions.
I examine a handful of these ‘India facts’ in my book, The Sceptical Patriot: Exploring the Truths Behind the Zero and other Glories. Facts that many Indians love to brandish to justify their country’s wonderful past. While their truth varies, the interesting question these ‘facts’ raise is what they say about us, and how we see ourselves in connection to our history.
In the course of writing this book I have amassed a list of 50 or 60 ‘facts’ in my notebooks. Only a few of them found their way into The Sceptical Patriot, but one India fact I was sad to leave out was the number of Indians working in NASA. It’s impossible to prove or disprove the 36 percent (or whatever the latest figure is that people throw around), because NASA doesn’t release data on the nationality of their employees. It’s incredible how many people believe it anyway
And the Taj Mahal being the ‘Tejo Mahalaya’ – it’s been repeated so many times it’s a bit of a joke. I really wanted to look into the origins of this urban myth, but it was something I couldn’t do because I didn’t have the time to go to Agra or speak to people in the Archaeological Survey of India about it.
But for me, the most interesting India fact by far – and one that did make it into the book – is the idea that for the last 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 years (depending on who’s telling you the story), India has never colonized or invaded another country.
The popularity of this fact speaks volumes of the modern Indian approach to history, the idea of nationality, and the idea of India. When it comes to India, we’ve just decided that all internecine warfare (the repeated Chola invasions of Sri Lanka, for example) doesn’t count as invasion – a somewhat convenient reflection of a post-colonial Indian mindset towards history. It also captures very well the bitterness that a lot of people have about stuff that happened centuries before they were born. I’ve often seen this being held up as a certificate to justify what India’s doing today, or to justify why everyone else should be nice to India – “Look, please be nice to us, we’ve never invaded anybody else”.
It’s wonderful how these India ‘facts’ can be found everywhere, from blogs on the Internet to government reports to investment proposals to books by eminent politicians and public figures. A particular dubious quote by Macaulay (one that I analyze in the book) appears in numerous government reports and books. For instance it features prominently in ‘India Vision 2020’, a document published by the Planning Commission in 2004. Each time this quote is parroted over and over again, without any attempt being made to verify its truthfulness or provenance. It must be true, the authors seem to say, because it simply is.
It also says something about the quality of academic research – while researching for a chapter on the origin of plastic surgery in India for instance, I found many journal articles on the subject in which the sourcing was circular, dubious and full of mistakes. It’s clear that the authors haven’t bothered to look at the original sources – they’ve simply cut and pasted things from the Internet. It’s more common than you think, and it makes finding facts phenomenally difficult.
People you might normally think of as having brains functioning perfectly well believe in some of these India facts with a devoted passion. Sometimes I meet people saying things like: India was perfect until the British came, if they hadn’t imposed a western way of living on Indians, we would have been as great a power as the Japanese. I don’t call these things myths – because some of them might be true. But one of the reasons I think they work so well, and that intelligent people repeat them, is because they slot very easily into how we’d like our narrative of history to flow.
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I’ll make a frank admission – when I started writing it was with the idea of ‘debunking’ these myths. But when I’d started to write the book, my wife suggested that if I started off with the idea of ‘debunking’ them, then I wouldn’t do justice to them because I would only look for facts to confirm my biases. It was very important that I tried to approach them as neutrally as possible, and in the process I discovered something completely different, fascinating and new at every step – I had lightbulb moments in almost every chapter. Did you know the Chola navies used public-private partnerships? Who the heck would have guessed? (By the way, the Cholas were around for 1,600 years. I probably know more about the last Chola king than he ever knew about the first Chola king. Just think about that. Imagine how much the idea of being Chola would have changed in 1,600 years! It’s mindboggling.)
This is the kind of thing that’s so widely written about in academia but doesn’t cross over into the realm of public knowledge. A lot of people pooh-pooh pop history books for not being academic enough, but if you ask me, I’ve read a lot of science books in my life, but nothing works as well as Bill Bryson’s A Brief History of Everything. Quick snapshots of history that tell you enough but encourage you go out and look up more on your own – that’s the kind of book I’d love to see more of, not another 1,000-page tome on the reign of Akbar.
We don’t engage enough with our history, or do enough to preserve it. The Chaturbuja temple beside the Gwalior fort that I mention in my book, which dates back to the 9th century, contains an inscription proving the existence of zero. If this were the West, there’d be a museum to the zero, a gift shop on the zero, evening concerts at the venue. Heck, there’d be a volunteer organization – ‘Friends of the Zero’ – supporting the temple.
I also think our history is nuanced, and requires a careful look. On examining the India facts in my book, I found them too complex to dismiss as true or false, so I rated them at the end on scale of 1-10. That’s because I’m 100 percent certain people will read the book, and disagree with me. Especially fans of Jagdish Chandra Bose – according to an India fact, he is supposed to be the real inventor of the radio, and not Marconi – who has a massive following online that defends him at every turn. I know how a lot of Indians are going to read the book, and somebody somewhere is going to be outraged by something. India is not a country that celebrates skepticism (I’m making a broad generalization here). That’s why I decided to include a section with additional questions, so people could pursue their own lines of inquiry.
We need to question what it means to be Indian. We often have it defined for us in school and college in an extremely shallow sense, and for many, it boils down to one thing – this overwhelming feeling that “India’s always got a raw deal because (insert various conspiratorial reasons)”.
We could have been great if only the British hadn’t invaded. We could have been great if only Sardar Patel had become prime minister and not Jawaharlal Nehru. We could have been super great if in 2004, the BJP had won instead of the Congress. There is no end to the ‘if only’. For a lot of people, it is genuinely couched in a sense of inferiority, that we’re a lesser nation, and we haven’t achieved as much as other nations. So we pick up the few scraps of glory we can and completely blow them out of proportion.
The sad thing about this is in the rush to defend against anyone questioning this history or notion of greatness, we’re actually killing curiosity, and refusing to let young people figure out for themselves what it means to be Indian. You can’t tell them today that they should feel Indian in the same way that somebody did in the Gupta or Mauryan empire did. A person in the twentieth century may not want to feel Indian because the zero was invented – they might want to feel Indian because polio has been eradicated here, or because the economy is now booming. Knowing one’s history is important, but you cannot let it define who you are as an Indian citizen today. If my book provokes more people to ask questions, I’ll be a very happy man.
Sidin Vadukut is an editor and columnist with the Mint newspaper. He also contributes to a variety of international publications. He lives in London, blogs at www.whatay.com and tweets with the handle @sidin. (Courtesy)
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