"No Answers For Kalam's Poser On History"
©Lucio Mascarenhas
The following had appeared in the Times of India, Bombay, February 27, 2004, on page 10.
Patna: A research institute here is yet to provide a suitable response to (Indian Union's) President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam's query on whether India's warrior kings ever invaded foreign lands — over 3,000 years (ago).
Mr. Kalam had put this challenge before researchers and historians at the Patna-based "Kashi-Prasad Jayaswal Research Institute" during his visit to Bihar in May last year: "Nearly ten months after Kalam made the query, he is yet to get an answer," said a source at the institute.
There is little doubt that there are no ready answers to the question but it has generated tremendous interest among historians, the source said. There are references in Indian history to foreign invasions over the past three thousand years, but apparently Indian emperors never invaded foreign countries. What role did India's warrior kings paly, Mr. Kalam had asked the institute's director; historian B.K. Choudhary, and urged him to trace the answer.
Kalam visited Bihar again February 14 and spent a few hours in Patna but no one from the institute got in touch with him to provide him with any answers. Mr. Chowdhary, however, said he had spoken to Kalam on the subject during his meeting with him last year and had explained (that) it would not be easy to give simple answers.
The institute had intitially started on an answer to the query by asking top historians, including Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma, B.N. Mukherjee and Vidula Jaiswal to dredge out the facts. It had declared (that) it would submit its opinion after getting historians' responses. (IANS)
Philistinism, Hypocrisy or Know-Nothingism?
Mr. Kalam is nominally a Muslim, but a brown-noser of the Hindu Neo-Nazis, which is why the Indian Neo-Nazi leader and Prime Minister, Vajpayee, made him "President." Kalam is the most disgraceful of persons to have occupied the position of President of India; no one is of so low a standard and quality as he is. But that is merely a reflection of how low India has fallen, in its present ruling dispensation, the Hindu Neo-Nazi "Bharatiya Janata Party" and its coalition, the "National Democratic Alliance."
The Hindu Neo-Nazis are a bunch of mendacious hypocrites. They like to pretend that Hinduism and Hindus have never done any wrong or injured anybody. Part of that falsehood is the claim that Hindu princes, kings and adventurers did not invade and colonize, as did people in other cultures.
It is a sign of how low India has fallen, and how far have these falsehoods penetrated that no other than a person occupying such an "exalted" position as that of the President of the Indian Union, President of Bharat, seeks to legitimise these ideas by his "innocuous" query; and that no historian or mediaman has the gumption to call Kalam's bluff, thereby tacitly legitimising this falsehood. What an orgy of self-feeding narcissism and philistinism this is!
My voice is small and insignificant. However, I make an attempt to reach out to people and destroy lies, and even though I reach a very small number of people, and they to a few others, I will continue my work, for I have the confidence that if I keep on contradicting the "official" lies of the Neo-Nazis, the truth will eventually prevail and destroy them and all their foul pretences.
Any one conversant with Indian history — even a schoolboy — ought to know that no rational and honest man can or ought to pretend or accept and countenance, even for a second, such a foolish and poisonous pretence, that Indian rules, princes and adventurers did not commit aggression against others, invade and colonize other lands and subjugate other peoples. The record of Indian history is too long, consistent and well-known to justify any such pretence.
The history of Hindu India begins with the Aryans and their invasions, colonisation, enslavement of the pre-Aryan peoples of India, whom they denigrated as the "Dasyus" or "Dasas" — the "Slave Peoples." The first settlement of the Aryans was in what is now north Pakistan, the Paktoonkhwa and West Punjab regions, that they named as "Aryavarta" — the Abode of the Aryans. Later, they penetrated the Gangetic plains, which they named "Madhya-Desa" — the Middle Country, even as they began to push beyond into Vanga, modern Bengal, and into the Trans-Vindhyan regions south of the Vindhya Mountains. Even today, emigrants from the "Madhya Desa" are called as "Madhesias" in Nepal.
During this process, the aborigines who escaped domestication as sub-human slaves, fled into the jungles and hills of the Deccan plateau and into the Brahmaputra Valley, to the east. They became the "Adivasis", which word means "Aborigines." These are the Kols, the Mundas, the Mon, the Khmers, the Ho, the Santhals, the Bhils and Bhilavas, the Gonds, etc.
India never entertained the concept of unitarianism — the concept of being one country. Rather, India was always considered to consist of innumerable little countries, called "Desams," which were constantly at war among themselves. Part of the reason for this was the Brahmin agenda of keeping the powerful Kshatriya caste pre-occupied and thus off-balance, thereby preventing them from paying attention to the fact that the Brahmins were lording over them, and, as in the western Aryan lands, Iran, and as attempted several times in India, that they do not unite and overthrow the Brahmin parasites.
Yet, the process of invasions of even more lands and of the subjugation of even more people never stopped while the Hindus were free.
Shortly after penetrating Vanga, an Aryan by the name of Singhal, which means "Of the Lion", led an expedition to conquer and colonize the island of Ceylon, thus founding the Sinhala nation and kingdom there.
The Tamil epics are full of accounts of Aryan invasions, complete with chariots and horses, of the Tamil homeland. Over time, the Hindus came to assimilate and dominate even the Tamils, and integrated them into the greater Indian civilisation.
Shortly after Asoka, the Mauryan emperor, embraced Buddhism, thus ceasing to be a Hindu, those of his Hindu subjects who choose to retain their Hinduism, complete with its racism, xenophobia and misanthropy, emigrated south of the Vindhyas in a huge wave, and settled in the lands immediately to the east of the Concan. They called themselves "the Great Nation," or "Maharashtra." I have seen no records of what they did to and with the aborigines, but, given their track record, it could not have been anything pretty.
Hindu rulers and brahmins who used Vanga (Bengal) and Tamil Nadu as their spring boards, began to explore the Bay of Bengal, the Sunda Archipelago, the Indo-China landmass, reaching upto the Philippines, which also they colonized. Their remnants were integrated into the Great Malay Empire and then into fragments of Malay states, surviving as the local royalty — the "Putras" and "Putris" of South East Asia and of Mindanao. These names actually merely means "sons" and "daughters", but they have acquired, in South East Asia, the meaning of "princes" and "princesses" — testimony to India's and Hinduism's enduring legacy of colonisation and conquest.
A Brahmin named "Kaundinya" invaded what is modern Cambodia, defeated a local princess whom he wed, and founded the Champa nation. Later the Champas — who by then had adopted Islam — were displaced into what is now South Vietnam, where they survive as a minority people.
The Champa people were themselves displaced from Cambodia by another Indian group, the Kambojas, who gave the country its present name. The Kamboja dynasty founded the city of Angkor Wat.
Other Hindu invaders founded the Sri Vijaya and Sailendra Empires, the cities of Jakarta (Jaya-Kshetram) and of Singapore (Sinhapuram), among others.
In the history of Krishna, who is regarded as a "god" by the Hindus, it is narrated that he led an expedition to the lands on the other side of the Arabian Sea, going on till he found a large river which was named "Krishna" after him, its discoverer, leaving colonies behind. Scholars have speculated that these lands would be Somalia, Ethiopia and the Sudan, and the river, the Nile.
Shivaji Bhonsale was so eager to revive these Hindu traditions, long lost due to the Islamic onslaught, that he fitted out and led a Naval Expedition to Muscat, Oman.
©Lucio Mascarenhas