One of the biggest challenges of the Narendra Modi government is education. The education that is imparted in India today, from kindergarten to universities, is Western in its outlook and does not teach Indians to be proud of themselves. If you are an American, even if you come from a non-white ethnicity, you are taught right from childhood about America’s great poets, painters, statesmen, and the glorious, short and mostly imaginary history of the Far West… In the same way, I was brought up to be a proud Frenchman: We learned, right from kindergarten, about the great French poets, writers, statesmen and warriors. Indeed, Napoleon, the Shivaji Maharaj of France, has been given a huge space, not only in French history books and curriculums, but also on national television, in newspapers, in hundreds of books, and so on.
I was born in the 7th district of Paris, near Napoleon’s Museum, in Les Invalides. It is not only a beautiful museum, right in the middle of Paris, where Napoleon’s remains are resting, but also a place of national celebration, where great ceremonies happen in the presence of the French President and Prime Minister. Compare this with Shivaji Maharaj, who is only given a few lines in Indian history books — and sometimes even called ‘a plunderer’. What is ignored, is the courageous, lone, daring, extraordinary side of Indian history, embodied by the outstanding Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaja, who, with a handful of men, stood up against — and defeated — the most powerful army of the world then: that of Aurangzeb.
Indian students need also to know the dark side of their history: There is no greater holocaust in the world than that of the Hindus, not only at the hands of Muslim invaders, but also due to British or Portuguese colonists. History remembers that 500,000 Hindus taken as slaves, died of cold on the Hindu Kush, or that Timur killed in one day 100,000 Hindus in Delhi — not a mean feat when they were no bullets then to finish a man quickly — or the 10 million Indians who died in the 19th and 20th century British-induced famines. Conservative estimates say that at least 100 million Hindus lost their lives brutally, from the first Islamic invasion to the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 26/11.
Very few students in India know that plastic surgery was invented by Ayurvedic doctors 4,000 years ago, that Vedic mathematics could do in three operations what it took ten at the same time in the West; that democracy existed in India long before America; that Kalidasa is one of the greatest poets ever, in the history of the world; that the Mahabharata or Ramayana are as intricate and far-reaching in their stories than the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, or Shakespeare’s immortal plays; or that the spirituality that props-up Hinduism from behind is universal in its outlook; that India never invaded other countries to impose its religion; and that its wonderful tools, like meditation, Pranayama or Hatha Yoga, are owed to Hindus.
After ten years of the BJP government at the Centre, young Indians are still clones good for export — and indeed the greatest brain drain in the world is that of Hindus going to study in the United States and eventually settling there and their children and grandchildren becoming more American than the Americans, more British than the British, as Macaulay had wanted. Whenever I give lectures in the United States on the urgent and absolute need to rewrite Indian History — and mind you, there are tens of thousands of Indian students in American universities — it evokes very little interest in them. It’s a paradox: in the US, out of ten white Americans, seven practice Hatha Yoga, under one form or the other. Indeed, Hatha Yoga and some Pranayama are now taught in some US preschools and used in companies to de-stress their executives during three-day workshops. How is it that in India, which gave the world Hatha Yoga, Pranayama, meditation and Ayurveda, these extraordinary tools of education are not only not utilised in schools and universities, but even frowned upon as sectarian?
Yet all Hindus swear by ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ (The World is One Family) and recognise that the divine manifests Himself or Herself at different times of our history, using different names and scriptures. Isn’t that a universal non-sectarian spirituality that can be taught in India to Hindus, but also Muslims, Christians or Sikhs? As Sri Sri Ravi Shankar said about Pranayama: ‘Does the air that we breathe around us have a religion?’
We remember that when Murli Manohar Joshi tried to reform education, there was such an outcry that the then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had to backtrack. But the thing is, the more you wait, the more difficult it is going to be, because religions other than Hinduism have radicalised themselves in the last two decades. It is a must that in his third term, if PM Modi comes back to power, he Indianises education to stem this huge brain drain, and keep in India the best minds, so that the country benefits from their intelligence.
What we need is a revolution. When I say revolutionary, I’m thinking, for instance, about the Aryan invasion/migration theory, which has been proven wrong long ago, but is still the foundation stone of every history book, Indian and Western, as well as all the school curriculums in India and abroad. I have shown, in my most recent book, An Entirely New Indian History of India (http://garudabooks.com) that recent genetic studies have even proved that most Indians, whether they are from the South or the North, whether they are Brahmins or Dalits, men or women, have more or less the same genomes. Yet, what does the Aryan invasion/migration theory say? That white people came from the West, and brought the caste system, Hindu mythology, the Vedas, etc, to the tribals and the darker Dravidians, whom they enslaved and slowly pushed down south.
Every saint, from Swami Vivekananda to Sri Aurobindo to Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, has rubbished this theory. Yes, it still divides India: Dravidian parties use it to hound Brahmins. I have seen when I went to Maharashtra to do a feature on the Warlis (indigenous tribe of western India, which are famous for their paintings), that Christian missionaries convert them by saying: “You are not a Hindu, you are the original inhabitants of India, convert to the true God.”
If there was only the Aryan invasion/migration theory to change in history books! But, in another example, they mostly speak about the Mughals, who reigned for only two hundred years, whereas the Cholas ruled for 2,100 years, the Ahom kingdom for 700, the Vijayanagar empire for 400. We all know that Humayun was Babar’s son, and the father of Aurangzeb was Shahjahan, but how many Indians know the name of the father of Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the first true revolutionary of India with Sri Aurobindo, who advocated the eviction of the British — by force if necessary — long before Mahatma Gandhi?
Time is ripe for the government to Indianise the education system. Only when Indians are proud of their roots, not in a coarse or superficial way, but with the precise and knowledgeable consciousness of why India is ancient and great, the country will never become a true superpower. As Swami Vivekananda rightly said, ‘No nation can move forward unless it looks squarely at its own history.’
Excerpt from Francois Gautier’s new book, ‘India, Hindus and Narendra Modi’, published by Garuda publications.
The author is a French journalist and author of ‘A History of India as It Happened’ (Garudabooks.com). He is also building a museum of true Indian history in Pune. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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