Sandhya Jain has an interesting op-ed about the endless debate on history rewriting. She says that Indian history is now in the hands of the “hunted” that is, Indian history has till now, been written from the victor’s perspective which naturally glorifies the victor and paints the victim as bad, or deserving the fall.

What’s even more dangerous is that the present government supports the hunter’s version of Indian history.

India’s true history is in danger on account of a State-supported ideological war that seeks to sever society’s link with the past, using history as a tool to pervert national memory and destroy cultural and national identity. The battlefield is the minds of school-going children, who are sought to be poisoned with an unparalleled contempt for the past, especially India’s civilisational verities and values.

Which is very true. I’ve blogged in a separate entry about Indians being notoriously inept at recording their history. Indian history, till it became recognized as a formal academic discipline was maintained largely through cultural celebrations such as festivals, and folklore, and written records existed scarcely if at all. Written records did exist in the form of inscriptions made by kings; however, these were merely eulogies of the king’s accomplishments, sprinkled with generous exaggerations of the said king’s achievements.

This has made it really tough for modern historians to separate fact from fiction, and has made the task of anti-India/Hindu forces easy.

Today there exists an entire generation fed on colonial biases about India–it’s nothing new if I say that a lot of Americans still think that India is an exotic land where elephants roam around the roads freely and sadhus climb ropes at traffic junctions.

In this context, I shall pose just one question: what do you think is the true Indian heritage bequeathed to us by our forefathers? I do not want clichéd answers such as, the Vedas, Hindu-tolerance, spirituality, etc. Of course, your answer can contain all these, but I’d like to know your understanding of them.