Saturday, August 28, 2021

Rewriting History

Once there was a tyrant feudal lord. He would oppress his subjects using all the means within his power. He would often torture them; force them serve to his cause; plunder their assets; abuse their women and children; violate their traditions and culture and exploit their lands to his benefit.
Once he learnt that one of the traders in his village posses large amount of gold and precious stones. He immediately summoned the trader to his palace and ordered him to surrender all his wealth to his Lordship. The trader refused to obey the orders arguing that the wealth is the reward of the hard work done by him and his ancestors, and only his children have the right to own it.

The Lord got furious and ordered his muscleman to beat the trader black & blue and lock him in the basement. The musclemen would beat the trader everyday but he would not tell them where his treasure is hidden. To make sure that the trader does not die before disclosing the location of his treasure, the Lord's servants would give adequate food to the trader and apply medicine on the wounds inflicted by his musclemen on him.

Finally one day the trader gave up and surrendered all his treasure to the feudal lord. He was then released from the prison and sent home alive.

The ballad singers of the feudal lord immediately went around the village singing praises for the Lord, telling the people how kind the Lord is as he would give adequate food and medicine even to the rebels and prisoners.

The ballads mentioning that Central Asian and European Invaders built India, created infrastructure like Rail, Roads and Schools etc. sounds eerily similar to this story. This all roads and Railway looks like food and medicine given to the imprisoned trader - a big farce.

Recently, a narrative has been started to rewrite the history books to present the Indian viewpoint of the events of past 1200years.

I believe that we need to look into our history from the viewpoint of "invader and invadee" rather than through the prism of religion or race, and put things in right perspective.

We must tell our generations about our glorious past; but with the objective of motivating them to recreate that wealth and status. The objective must not be to make them hate some religion or race while continuing to suffer from a sense of servitude for the invaders; carry a deep inferiority complex and refusing to stand up to the tyrants.

Our Children must be given strong reasons to believe that if central Asian and European invaders did not plundered us, we could have created much better roads, railways, ports, monuments and social infrastructure what they created to further their objectives of plunder, oppression and exploitations. 

No comments:

Post a Comment