Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

The Significance of K.D. Sethna

In the Context of the Problem of Aryan Origins

“ HERE is the book I was looking for," I had said to myself aloud as I finished the first edition of The Problem of Aryan Origins soon after it was published in early 1980. It was no outburst of passing enthusiasm for what was undoubtedly a brilliant piece of research. I had seen in this book the birth of a new dawn on the horizon of Indian historiography.

Scholars had so far used the modern lore - linguistics, comparative mythology, archaeology, and the rest - for denigrating and dismissing India's indigenous historical traditions.  Here was a scholar at last who had employed the same lore for vindicating and sustaining those very traditions. People who had stood by and taken pride in India's indigenous historical traditions had had to rest content with no more than mere patriotic rhetoric. Now they could say that unimpeachable evidence made available by modern research methods and incisive logic was solidly on their side.

Sri Aurobindo was the first in modern times to bridge the gulf between modernity and Indian traditions in many fields, particularly as regards the spiritual vision of Sanatana Dharma, taking modernity as well India's heritage at their highest. India's history could not escape his penetrating eye. Here too he had seen through the "wild conjectures based on wilder conjectures" and passed as "scientific" history. But his was a bird's-eye view, a broad vision, sometimes in the form of a mantra. Meticulous scholarship was needed for working out the details, period by period, on aspect after aspect. Now we had a pioneer who had worked out the details for the earliest period, the very first culture in India's hoary history. Students who were aware of India's indigenous traditions vis-à-vis this period and this culture could see for themselves the difference between what he had uncovered

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and what was being dished out by the established scholars.

What was India's history as presented in the learned tomes and treatises as well as in school and college textbooks ? By and large, it was a history of conquerors coming from the outside and establishing regimes of long or short durations in this country - the Iranians, the Greeks, the Parthians, the Scythians, the Kushans, the Huns, the Arabs, the Turks, the Mughals, the Portuguese, the Persians, the Dutch, the French, and the British. The scenario had been given a finishing touch by converting the authors of India's earliest civilization into Dravidian and Aryan invaders. In the process, India had been converted into an empty space with no society or culture of its own.

It was obvious that this version of India's history was only a mix of various versions floated by imperalist ideologies - Islam, Christianity, White Man's Burden, and Marxism - which had flocked to this country in the wake of foreign invasions. The message which this "history" conveyed was also loud and clear, namely, that there was no such thing as India's indigenous society, that there was no such thing as India's indigenous culture, that India at any time belonged to those who could occupy it by means of armed might, and that the independent India that had emerged in 1947 was a cockpit of many races, many religions, many cultures, many languages, and many other things. The most sinister aspect of this version was that Indian heroes who had fought and finally defeated every foreign invader were to be found only in footnotes, if at all. Most of the time, the heroes that India was being asked to cherish, particularly in the post-1947 period, were chosen from among the invaders themselves.

What was India's history according to the indigenous historical traditions, on the other hand ? A connected and coherent version had not been available for a long time. But the broad outlines were not in doubt.

1. Indian civilization was the dominant civilization of the world for a long time before the birth of Jesus Christ, the same as the modern Western civilization has been since the last two-three centuries;

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2. India's presence world-wide could be seen in the language and literature, religion and philosophy, and science and technology of many peoples, east and west, north and south;

3. A long spell of unrivalled power and prosperity made India self-centered and complacent so that she neglected the art of warfare and invited invaders from far and near to flock towards her borders;

4. While the early invaders were beaten back from India's frontiers, the later ones who succeeded in storming in were absorbed rather speedily into the vast complex of India's society and culture so that instead of weakening or dividing India in any manner, they added to her vitality and vigour;

5. The Islamic invaders who had overrun large parts of: Asia, Africa, and Europe and converted whole populations to the new creed in the short span of a hundred years, took five hundred years to reach the heartland of India due to the stiff and persistent resistance they met at every step;

6. Although the armies of Islam which came in wave after wave succeeded in imposing alien rule over large parts of India and converting some sections of the Indian people, they continued to face a war of resistance, which became a war of liberation in due course and broke the back of Islamic imperialism in the eighteenth century;

7. Christian-Western imperialism intervened at the critical juncture when India had just started recovering from the havoc caused by Islamic barbarism, but met the same fate in a much shorter span of time;

8. While India reciprocated readily with the rational and humanist part of the modern West, it rejected its Christian and chauvinist aspects which it fought tooth and nail till it freed itself from their spell.

This indigenous version of India's history had started coming to the surface in the works of Maharshi Dayananda, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and some other stalwarts of the Hindu Renaissance during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But it met a vehement

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opposition from the powerful Marxist-Muslim combine which had international support - ideological, political, and financial -, and which had crystallized inside the Indian National Congress under the leadership of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. With the coming of Independence in 1947, this combine received state patronage on a grand scale so that it came to control all institutions concerned with researching, writing, and reaching of Indian history. The result was a wide prevalence of the mix of imperialist versions of India's history outlined above, and an almost total eclipse of India's indigenous historical traditions.

Today the entire academia and media in India are under the stranglehold of this state-sponsored version of India's history which is eulogised as the secular version, and is supposed to promote national integration. Voices of dissent are not with solid evidence or straight logic but with a swearology coined by subversive politics. Many scholars have been hounded out. Many others have been silenced.  

It was in the midst of this stifling atmosphere that K. D. Sethna's work came like a breath of fresh air. To start with, his was a lonely voice. But now a whole school of historians is coming forward for a scholarly defence of India's indigenous historical traditions. All of them recognize K.D. Sethna as the forerunner in the field. Future generations are bound to hail him as the harbinger of a new dawn.

SITA RAM GOEL

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