===== HISTORY WRITING IN THE POST-INDEPENDENCE PERIOD: =======
DIFFICULTIES IN THROWING OFF THE INTELLECTUAL YOKE:
...................One would have thought that all this would change after we attained Independence, but this did not happen. It shows that to throw off an intellectual and cultural yoke is far more difficult than to throw off a political yoke.
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LEADERS DEPICTING THEMSELVES IN THE HEROIC ROLES:
By and large we have retained our old history written by our rulers. The leaders of the nationalist movement are quite content with it, except that they have added to it one more chapter at the end which depicts them in a super-heroic role.
The new leaders have no greater vision of Indian history and they look forward to no greater task than to perpetuate themselves.
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VESTED INTERESTS IN PROPAGATING OLD HISTORY:
In fact they have developed a vested interest in old history which propagates that India was never a nation, that it had not known any freedom or freedom-struggle in the past.
By sheer contrast, it exalts their role and proves something they would like to believe - that they are the first nation-builders, that they led the first freedom struggle India has ever known and, indeed, she became free for the first time under their aegis.
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CONTEMPT FOR THE INDIA's PAST:
This highly flatters their ego, and to give themselves this unique status we find that their attacks on India’s past are as vicious and ignorant as those of the British and Muslim historians. No wonder histories continue to be written with all the contempt we learnt to feel for our past, and with all the lack of understanding we developed for our culture during the days of foreign domination.
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DISTORTIONS BEGENNING WITH THE FREDDOM STRUGGLE:
A new source of distortion was opened during the period of the freedom struggle itself. Nationalist leaders strove to win Muslim support for the Independence struggle. In the hope of achieving this end, Indian nationalism itself began to rewrite the history of medieval times.
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IMAGINARY HISTORY and MUSLIM RULE BECOMES INDIGENOUS:
Under this motivation, Muslim rule became ‘indigenous’, and Muslim kings became ‘national’ kings, and even nationalists, those who fought them began to receive a low score.
R.C. Mojumdar tells us how, under this motivation, national leaders created an imaginary history, one of them even proclaiming that Hindus were not at all a subject race during the Muslim rule, and how these absurd notions, which would have been laughed at by Indian leaders at the beginning of the 19th century, passed current as history at the end of that century...........
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Excerpts from the article by Late Ram Swarup ( a renowned thinker and philosopher associated with Delhi based Indian think tank, Voice Of India)
http://www.bharatvani.org
Indian Express, January 15, 1989
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