I guess I was asked to write this article because I’m a Westerner who has been defending India for a long time, and I have written many books, both in French and in English, which rewrite Indian history.
The first thing I would like to say is that when I was a child, I was brought up to be a proud Frenchman. We were taught, right from kindergarten, about the great French poets, writers, statesmen and warriors. Indeed, Napoleon, who could be called the Shivaji Maharaja or Maharana Pratap of France, has been given a huge space not only in French history books and curriculums, but also on national television, in newspapers, in hundreds of books, and so on.
I was born in the seventh district of Paris, near Napoleon’s museum in Les Invalides. It is not only a beautiful museum right in the middle of Paris, where Napoleon’s remains are resting, but also a place of national celebration, where great ceremonies happen in the presence of the French president and prime minister. Compare this with Shivaji Maharaj, who is only given a few lines in Indian history books — and sometimes even called “a plunderer”.
As Swami Vivekananda rightly said, “No nation can move forward unless it looks squarely at its own history.” However, what I have observed in India is that even now, after eight years of the BJP government, the education that is given to children is basically a British leftover. That is, you learn by heart tremendous amounts of Western knowledge, but you know nothing about Kalidasa, one of the greatest poets ever of humanity, or the Bhagavad Gita, which could be called the Bible of future mankind, or Sri Aurobindo, the supreme philosopher of the 20th and 21st century.
As a result, Indian kids grow up, most of them not being proud of being Indians, rootless, having no grounding in the greatness or the ancient-ness of their own history, their wonderful scriptures, the Vedas, for instance, which has inspired many Western philosophers, from Nietzsche to Voltaire. The greatest brain drain in the world is that of Indians, Hindus in particular, because having been brought up with a Westernised outlook, their only aspiration is to go to the US, UK, Canada, and so on.
Where, even though they do brilliantly (the head of Google is a Hindu, the new head of Twitter is another Hindu, etc), they melt into the Western fabric, having retained no Indian-ness, which could make them shine and partake in something of the greatness of the Indian ethos and spirituality. Their children and grandchildren will become more American than the Americans, more British than the British, as Macaulay, the Pope of Westernising India, had wanted.
Whenever I give lectures in the United States on the urgent and absolute need to rewrite Indian history — and mind you, there are tens of thousands of Indian students in American universities — it evokes very little interest in them.
It’s a paradox: In the US, out of 10 white Americans, seven practise Hatha Yoga, under one form or the other; most of the Hollywood stars are yogic adepts, you see often in films on TV series (like Kaley Cuoco, for example, in The Big Bang Theory) that they are able to practise Surya Namaskar or a difficult asana with ease and fluency. Indeed, Hatha Yoga and Pranayama are now taught in some US preschools and used in companies to de-stress their executives during three-day workshops.
Read More at https://www.firstpost.com/india/why-indian-history-textbooks-are-in-absolute-and-urgent-need-of-revision-10179621.html
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