More than a decade ago, I took a course in Archaeology, as part of my graduate coursework in Anthropology. We were asked to pick a topic and write a term paper on it. We had to first submit an outline of the paper, and develop it as the semester progressed. When it was my turn to submit my outline, my professor asked me why my results and conclusions sections were blank. I gave her what I thought was an obvious answer, which is that I would not know what the results and conclusions would be until I finish the proposed study, and that I would have that section completed by the end of the semester. I was awestruck by her response. She said, “You should know what you would like your results to be like and what you might want to conclude, and accordingly, you will go looking for the data”.

This professor, a white American female, was known to be one of the brightest young scholars in Archaeology who won a number of fellowships, awards and grants during her career. She gave me a ‘C’ on the course because I could not generate the “desired” results and conclusions even by the end of the semester. I took what I got, moved on to study Biology where objectivity meant something, and told myself never to worry about Archaeology again in my life.

As the saying goes, “Never say never”. In one of the strangest and most unlikely ways that it could have happened, I got involved with Archaeology again. It’s a book called “Rearming Hinduism” by Prof. Vamsee Juluri that sent me down the rabbit hole, which is where I write this piece from.

To me “Rearming Hinduism” is not a book. It’s a trigger that lights a fire in one’s heart and mind, the kind that serves as an inspiration and a guiding light in the rabbit hole of Indian religion, culture and history, for people like me; people who, in spite of having a history of our own, grew up as if we didn’t.

When I was a child, religion and culture were something to be left outside the big school gate. History (of India or of the world) was all about “3 marks/short answer questions”, “8 marks/essay type questions”, “objective type” and “multiple choice”. After memorizing all the dates and events, and diligently and dispassionately regurgitating them in the exams, all that I looked forward to was to put history behind me, where it really belonged, in a literal sense. I know that some of my peers may have been able to better appreciate the fact that history included stories from the past, but that’s probably where their interest in history ended.

Whose past was it? Who narrated it? How did they narrate it? Why did they narrate it in the manner that they did? Why should we care?

While answers to these questions are themselves an elaborate history worth knowing about, as far as modern educated Indians like me are concerned, even today, history is more of a subject you get into only if you are not good in Mathematics or Science. When someone shouts from the rooftops that the West, with its vested interest, has distorted the story of our great grand parents and their ancestors, it seems more like paranoia.

The way I see it now, modern educated India is largely made up of two kinds of people, who, despite a lot of mutual differences, are unanimous in their opinion about history.

One group consists of the kind of people who believe in the old Telugu proverb, which translates to: “Unless the water is poured into the conch, it is not sacred, and unless it comes from the West, it cannot be true or worthwhile, be it science or history.

Then there are the leftists, “liberals” and “free-thinkers” who literally will not accept water if it came out of a sacred conch. They will not listen to, let alone accept, any truth that might shake their ideological tree. It has to be noted that these are the same people who claim to welcome new knowledge and discoveries in the field of science no matter where they originate, but somehow new discoveries and perspectives in history and culture do not fall into the same category.

So, we have a cohesive population, who can happily agree on one thing, which is that Indians, especially Hindus, are not capable of or qualified to narrate their own history. The problem lies only with those people who cannot agree. Any attempt on their part to narrate history on any other terms, especially our own, is often termed as a mission aimed at saffronizing history.

I completely agree that history should not be shown through colored glasses, not rose, not saffron and not red either, for truth has no color. I also understand that we may not all be able to dig up artifacts and look at archaeological ruins to figure out the truth about our past. However, as Prof. Juluri says in his book, what we can do is to look around us and dig deep into our hearts. We can exercise our true intellect, our natural wisdom, independent of modern education or training, to judge the soundness of a narrative.

I would like to quote a wonderful example by Stephan Knapp, from his essay “Death of the Aryan Invasion Theory” here:

If a few thousand years in the future people could uncover our own houses after being buried for so long and find television antennas on top of each house wired to a television inside, who knows what they would think. Without a recorded history of our times they might speculate that the antennas, being pointed toward the heavens, were used for us to commune with our gods who would appear, by mystic power, on the screen of the television box inside our homes. They might also think that we were very much devoted to our gods since some houses might have two, three, or more televisions, making it possible for us to never be without contact with our gods through the day. And since the television was usually found in a prominent area, with special couches and reclining chairs, this must surely be the prayer room where we would get the proper inspiration for living life. Or they might even think that the television was itself the god, the idol of our times. This, of course, would not be a very accurate picture, but it reflects the difficulty we have in understanding ancient religion by means of analyzing the remnants we find.

Claiming to be able to recount a complete and accurate picture of the past based on a few historical remnants is bad. Far worse is the practice of looking only at what one is interested in, like my professor of Archeology or the famous Hinduism scholar, Wendy Doniger, to satisfy certain fantasies or to support specific ideologies. Even worse is to believe such narratives unquestioningly, purely based on where they originated.

Once you see this clearly, even if you get a ‘C’ in Archaeology like me, eventually, you will know that this clarity is key to understanding your own history.