PART II

The colo­nial mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion and min­imi­sa­tion of Hin­du and In­di­an his­to­ry is as old as the first in­vaders of In­dia. Each in­vad­er at­tempt­ed to rewrite In­di­an his­to­ry from their per­spec­tive. The British colo­nial rulers were no dif­fer­ent.

Athe­ist and an­ti-Hin­du writ­ers in­flu­enced by these colo­nial forces as­sert that the Rig Ve­da, the re­vealed scrip­ture of Hin­dus, is a mere 3,500 years old. N Kazanas (2000), in A New Date for the Rig Ve­da, sug­gests a date as ear­ly as 3100 BCE.

Based on iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the ear­ly Rigvedic Saraswati Riv­er ex­ca­va­tions at Mo­hen­jo-Daro and Harap­pa, many writ­ers have traced as­tro­nom­i­cal ref­er­ences in the Rig Ve­da dat­ing to as ear­ly as 4000 BCE.

Michael Dani­no, born June 4, 1956, in Nor­mandy France, was drawn to In­di­an spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and phi­los­o­phy in­flu­ence by Sir Au­robindo (Ghose) 1872-1950, philoso­pher, Yo­gi, Seer and col­lab­o­ra­tor Mir­ra Al­fas­sa, known as “Moth­er.” He is al­so the con­ven­er of the In­ter­na­tion­al Fo­rum for In­dia’s Her­itage, known for ex­pos­ing the bo­gus Aryan In­va­sion The­o­ry.

He wrote: “The av­er­age his­to­ry text­book greets its read­ers with a frag­ment­ed, con­fused and in­co­her­ent idea of In­dia. They learn noth­ing of the uni­fy­ing virtue of In­di­an cul­ture, of its syn­the­sis­ing na­ture, its un­par­al­leled con­ti­nu­ity, least of all its spir­i­tu­al foun­da­tions and its achieve­ments.

“By con­trast, oth­er na­tions, with an of­ten much more lim­it­ed her­itage than In­dia’s, find noth­ing wrong in nur­tur­ing pride for it in their stu­dents.”

Ac­cord­ing to for­mer diplo­mat Amit Das­gup­ta, au­thor of In­di­an by Choice, “In­dia is huge not sim­ply in terms of ge­og­ra­phy or his­to­ry. The sheer scale of her di­ver­si­ty is un­par­al­leled; she is nei­ther sta­t­ic nor pre­dictable.

“Change re­flects her soar­ing spir­it and is the essence of her eter­nal iden­ti­ty. Land­scapes, cus­toms, cloth­ing, lan­guage, cui­sine, even the Gods, dif­fer from place to place.

“In­dia is like the colours of a pea­cock’s feath­er. Each colour is dis­tinct and bril­liant. Yet no colour can be sep­a­rat­ed from the oth­er. The colours blend, one in­to the oth­er, like mag­ic.

“For me, In­dia is the Di­vine Pea­cock and the Peren­ni­al Tree. She is Mys­tery and Al­lure. She is home. She is the con­tem­po­rary and the clas­si­cal, the mod­ern and the tra­di­tion­al. She is change and con­ti­nu­ity. She is the eter­nal here and now. The past, the present, the fu­ture. She is you. And me. She is every­body.

“For many, In­dia re­mains a con­cept, an idea, an ex­per­i­ment. Even a jour­ney. A dis­cov­ery. And a re­dis­cov­ery.”

For hun­dreds of years, In­dia’s gift to the world, Hin­duism, was con­fined to the sub-con­ti­nent but to­day, this great re­li­gion has tak­en root in over 150 coun­tries. Aus­tralia, New Zealand, In­done­sia and on every con­ti­nent, Hin­duism and its way of life is be­ing em­braced with­out the ri­fle of con­quer­ing Chris­t­ian colo­nial pow­ers.

In Ghana, there is a thriv­ing Hin­du com­mu­ni­ty that was led by African Swa­mi Ghananand and in Hawaii, we find one of the largest Hin­du monas­ter­ies out­side of In­dia, led by “white” swamis with devo­tees of every racial shade.

The Hawai­ian swamis pro­duce an in­ter­na­tion­al month­ly Hin­du pub­li­ca­tion called Hin­duism To­day that cov­ers a wide range of Hin­du his­to­ry. Writ­ing about the pe­ri­od 300 to 1100 CE, they said: “Dur­ing this pe­ri­od, In­dia was the rich­est re­gion of the world and one of the most pop­u­lous. Great agri­cul­tur­al abun­dance, plus plen­ti­ful nat­ur­al re­sources, were key to the re­gion’s pros­per­i­ty. In­dia lay in the cen­tre of the world’s an­cient trade routes.

“Mer­chants sent spices, cot­ton, sug­ar and ex­ot­ic items east to Chi­na and west to Eu­rope. Hin­du re­li­gion, cul­ture and the San­skrit lan­guage linked all of In­dia. Great sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies as well as ma­jor re­li­gious move­ments came out of this ad­vanced and sta­ble so­ci­ety.”

Dr Deep­ak N Kotecha, in his pub­lished work Hin­dus Awake, wrote: “Amaz­ing­ly, the ‘se­crets’ to the be­gin­nings of the Uni­verse are all clev­er­ly hid­den in the Vedic and Hin­du Scrip­tures. They are ‘hid­den’ in plain sight for all to un­earth that care to know the truth.

“Man will nev­er have all the tools, tech­no­log­i­cal, math­e­mat­i­cal, or oth­er­wise, that he needs to know all the se­crets to the uni­verse, there have to be some clues. They are present so that we would ap­pre­ci­ate the com­plex­i­ty and mag­ni­tude of cre­ation and there­by recog­nise the val­ue of our true pur­pose and mis­sion in life.

“Hav­ing said this, what is even more as­tound­ing is that as the West, with its pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy and im­mense re­sources be­gins ex­plor­ing the se­crets of the uni­verse, is com­ing to con­clu­sions that are be­com­ing glar­ing­ly sim­i­lar to the rev­e­la­tions in our an­cient but time­less and eter­nal Hin­du scrip­tures!”