Introduction

This is unlike my other book reviews, which typically could be accommodated in the space of a single post although there’s no such thing like an “acceptable or ideal” post length. I know this review will, if I put in a single post, need endless scrolling–something I despise personally–remember, I need to reread it for fine tuning. The other and more important reason is that it is impossible for me to make sense because the range of topics and issues is extremely wide and requires me to use extensive quotes from the book. So suffer me while the spread this review over a series of posts.

The book, as its title suggests deals with deception used as a political tool; nothing new there but what is of alarming concern is its contribution to the present state of affairs where the Indian society is hopelessly pitted against itself. And of even more concern is its almost violently anti-Hindu character and by corollary, its support for fundamentalism of the worst sort.

Written by N.S.Rajaram, it analyses in parallel, the profiles in deception surrounding two events that have enormous historical and contemporary significance. The first is the Ayodhya episode and the other, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The author’s dedication of the book to the victims of holocausts Hindus, Jews, Native Americans, Armenians, and his mention of its theme in the preface as the symbol of an ongoing battle between rising nationalism and residual imperialism sets the tone for what follows.

The prototype for deception in the Indian context he says, was set by one John Marshall, the Director of the Archelogical Survey of India (ASI) in 1922. This prototype continues to be used to this day. The subject: covering up archelogical evidence and perpetuating the colonial model of Indian history. More on this later. As he piles up evidence upon evidence, it becomes clearer and clearer that what passes off as “history” is plain fabrication. There’s an “official” term for this model of writing history: the Colonial-Missionary model. This model seeks to perpetuate the theory that everything that in India’s hoary heritage worthy of pride and respect was a Western import, that the Aryans were not Indians, and that the idea that India has all along been one nation is false. The roots of this as Rajaram demonstrates have their origin in:

… notably German nationalistic aspirations and British colonial concerns. German ideas about the “Aryan race”… formed a . potent combination in sustaining the theory of the Aryan invasion. (page 7) [...] The key feature of the colonial-missionary model is its Eurocentric orientation, seeing Christianity as the most “progressive” religion. It sees European civilization as the pinnacle of humanity’s rise from its primitive state; it similarly sees Christianity as the culmination of mankind’s search for spiritual truth … Germany with its recent history of.. holocaust is considered civilized while the pacifist Tibet is primitive … that Germany is situated in Europe and its population has been Christian guarantees its being civilized. This is the intellectual frame of reference within which much of the debate takes place, in India by Secular scholars, as well as among Indologists in the West.(page 8-9)

This model stood threatened by what John Marshall and his team lead by R.D Banerji and Sahni discovered at Harappa.

The sites discovered by Banerji and Sahni… Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro… were part of what is known as the Harappan civilization… more than twice the size of Mesopotamia and Egypt combined; and all this dating to more than a thousand years before the supposed arrival of the Aryans.. This meant that Indo-Europeans were not the originators of the Indian civilization but native Indians. (page 9-10)

(emphasis mine)

John Marshall did the most obvious thing anyone in the service of the Empire would do:

… he suppressed evidence.. and then, by publishing an article in the Illustrated London News, he managed also to take credit for the great discovery. (page 10)

Eight years later, Marshall returned the field reports to Banerji after editing out some crucial parts and photographs.

… He did not return the original report by R.D. Banerji… but a typed copy… the photographs submitted along with the report were retained by Marshall. Despite several requests, neither the full and original report nor the photographs were returned to Bannerji. (page 10)

(Italics in original)

Thus writes Bannerji’s publisher. Aside: it is also worthwhile to peruse what Bannerji has written but was published as late as 1984: Mohenjo-daro: A Forgotten Report.

The history that communists masquerading as historians later spewed is really, both an extension and perpetuation of Marshall’s monumental fraud. However, the AIT if accepted as genuine leads to what Rajaram calls Frawley’s Paradox:

The Harappans have left us archaelogical remains that are the greatest in the world but no literature; the invading Aryans… (have left us) the Vedas… the Epics… but no history or archaelogical records . what we have…is a literature without history, archaeology or even geography for the Aryans, and a history and archaeology for the Harappans but no literature … It becomes doubly paradoxical… that the invading Aryans were said to be illiterate, while the Harappans we know were literate, having left behind many seals with writing upon them. Yet it is the literature of the illiterate Aryans that has survived while the literate Harappans have vanished without a trace. (page 14)

The footnote on page 15 also gives further proof of the absurdity of the AIT:

… the construction of Vedic altars was the work of the Harappans, while the instructions for building them was part of the Vedic literature of the invading Aryans who went on to destroy them!

(italics in original)

It is largely owing to the AIT that we’re ashamed to take pride about our past. Some do exhibit genuine pride but when questioned about the object of their pride, they fumble for coherent responses. A large section of mostly educated (urban) Indians continue to believe in this version of what is essentially hagiography not history. Hammered into our brains from childhood, we have not bothered to really understand what ancient India has to offer not just to us but to the whole world. We dismiss it as a large body of myth, superstition, occult incantations [add your own here]. The result is obvious: ignorance breeds shame and because we’re ignorant, we join the band of outsiders who condemn our heritage as worthless to hide this shame: we condemn something about which our knowledge is next to nothing. This state of affairs is partly the result of historical forces outside our control and to a very great extent, the result of deception which this book talks about.

(Continued in Part 2)