Descriptions of the kings of Magadh in the Puranas were fabricated, historic records were destroyed, false synchronization of edicts and coins were created to connect them to Ashok of Maurya dynasty, and in this way misguided the whole world.
The fabrications.
The example of the mutilation in the Bhavishya Puran is one of the most potent evidences that reveal the style of the working of the British. It evidently surmises that first they fabricated and incorporated the desired date of an historical personality in the original manuscript, whatever they wanted. Then they employed efficient scholars to write the full page or the full chapter that had the fabrication by exactly imitating the writing style of the original. In this way when the imitation was ready to the desired standard, they destroyed the original sheets and replaced them with the imitated ones. Now an original-looking manuscript was ready for circulation which was in fact the fabricated one.
When the Venkateshwar Press printed the Bhavishya Puran, as a general professional policy, they must have looked into more than one manuscript to ascertain the correctness of the matter, and because that was the only kind of manuscript available, so it was printed that way. Other printers copied the same thing which was printed by the Venkateshwar Press.
With this reference it becomes evident that the dynastical discrepancies in the descriptions of the rulers of Magadh, which are found in the printed volumes of the Puranas like Vishnu, Matsya, Vayu and Brahmand, may also be the work of the same people.
There is also a possibility that in certain old manuscripts, while copying, the person may have made some minor mistakes in rewriting the names and the ruling period of the kings. But, in that case, there must also have been such ancient manuscripts of the same Puran that would have correct names and figures, because there were a number of copies available of all the Puranas at that time. So it was fully possible to get the correct version of the names and the ruling period of the kings of the dynasties of Magadh by comparing all the available manuscripts of those Puranas which describe the dynasties of Magadh. But it was not done, because the English people were not interested in correcting the dynastic statements; they were interested in damaging the statements so that they could find an excuse to disregard the authenticity of the descriptions of the Puranas.
They had almost all the available manuscripts of the Puranas in their vast libraries and they had all the possible facilities to reconstruct and fabricate the manuscripts. Thus, under the above circumstances, it is most logical to believe that they must have destroyed these manuscripts (the entire manuscript, or only the required part of it) which had the correct statements of the kings of Magadh and kept those few which had some discrepancies; and, at the same time, they must have also added new discrepancies and fabricated the manuscripts of the Puranas according to their desired scheme. In this way, they created a master copy of each Puran with those dynastical discrepancies and, accordingly, fabricated the rest of the copies of those Puranas that were in their possession. These copies were made available for circulation. Later on these fabricated copies were published which are available nowadays.
There are only eight dynasties from Brihadrath to Andhra that are described in the four Puranas with the names of the kings and their reigning period. But in the existing available copies they don’t exactly match with each other. The pronunciation of their names and their reigning period varies. They are supposed to be exactly the same, but they are not. At some places this discrepancy is enormous.
which are available nowadays.
For example: In the Matsya Puran there is a description of only 6 kings in Maurya dynasty whose names are mostly unmatched and are not in proper sequence and who ruled for (6 + 70 +36 + 8 + 9 + 70) 199 years. But the concluding verse at the end of this description and in the same chapter tells that the total number of Maurya kings was 10 and their reigning period was 137 years. Such drastic discrepancies can never be the copying mistakes even if the most sloppy person is doing this job. It’s a clear case of deliberate fabrication.
The last thing is that, except the dynastical discrepancies, all the available Puranas are still in a perfect shape. Their Divine references, stories, teachings, technical descriptions, philosophy and the ancient history, everything is well coordinated and well established.
When were these fabrications done?
You may be interested to know when was that done? It’s easy to find out. Jones gives his last statement in 1793, and after 39 years in 1832 H.H. Wilson, the President of the Asiatic Society of London, publishes his commentary on the Vishnu Puran in which he gives a comparative view of the dynastical discrepancies of all the four Puranas. In this way he establishes a ground to criticize all the Puranas. Thus, it is clear that these fabrications to distort the dynastic dates and the pronunciation of the names of the kings of Magadh were done in the early 19th century. Thirty-nine years were good enough time for them to fabricate the Puranas.
The ingenious trickeries.
(1) The fabrication and the mutilation in the dynastic records of the Puranas, and its subsequent presentation by H.H. Wilson in his commentary on the Vishnu Puran, was such an ingenious work of trickery by the English people that confused every Indian writer and they couldn’t detect the fraud. The writers like Narayana Sastry and Krishnamacharar also got confused by this trickery and all the writers thought that the dynastic descriptions of the Puranas were faulty.
(2) Not only that, they did something more which was worse than that. They promoted and produced some of the religious books (the Smritis and Grihya Sutras etc.) that had certain impious interpolations which showed that Hindu Sages killed and ate animals. They destroyed the true originals, kept the corrupted copies of those books for circulation and publication, and then said, “See, your own books are saying that,” and in this way all the western writers got the license to openly abuse the Hindu religion. This trickery also befooled the whole world.
Such interpolations would have been done by the Chatriya Kings of olden days as they loved to eat meat. So, to justify their such habits, they employed Sanskirt scholars to add such passages of meat eating in our hand-written religious books, which later on remained as collections in the Hindu society
When the English people came to India and started collecting our handwritten scriptures they discovered those impious interpolations of meat eating in the religious books of rituals and Smritis etc. It was in their favor, because they wanted to destroy our religion and culture. So, using the influence of their ruling power, they enormously collected our books and employed hundreds of scholars to reorganize and sort out the books according to their choice. In that collection there must have been some non-interpolated books in their unblemished form. Those books would prove hazardous to their scheme, so they were later on carefully destroyed.
This was the period when the members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal were actively involved in producing such literatures that degraded and abused Hindu religion, and its president Sir William Jones, the obedient servant of the British, was wholeheartedly busy finding ways of how to blemish the greatness of Hindu scriptures and condemn the Divine history.
It is thus very obvious that those people, to achieve their aim of defaming Hindu religion, must have also done a lot of fabrications and would have interpolated such verses in Hindu religious books wherever they would have found it convenient to do so; and later on they must have destroyed the true and uninterpolated handwritten books.
They knew that Hindus adore their Sages, Saints and acharyas. They are vegetarian and have great regard for the cow. Thus, with one blow, they tried to crumble the faith of the Hindus in their Vedic Sages. They vigorously promoted such ideas which showed that Vedic brahmans not only ate meat but they loved to eat meat as a must. In this way they imposed their personal characteristics upon Hindu Sages.
The Greek gods and goddesses were pleased with animal sacrifices, Roman gods were of the same kind, and the God of OT loved to demand frequent animal sacrifices from each and every house. Thus, because such things were in their own religion, the English people, tried to abuse the Vedic yagyas and the Vedic religion in a similar way. Could any sensible person imagine the depth and the extent of the wilfulness of those people who promoted such frauds to delude the minds of the Hindus from their own religion?
Hindus from their own religion?
In those days, in the late 19th century, there were three major publishing companies in India, Shree Venkateshwar Press of Bombay (1871), Nirnaya Sagar Press of Bombay (1864) and Chaukhamba Vidyabhavan of Varanasi (1892). Most of the religious books and scriptures were originally published by them. It should be noted that it was the prime ruling period of the British in India. So it must be understood that the manuscripts that were produced by the English people were unhesitatingly printed by these publishers. Whether they did it knowingly or unknowingly, it can’t be said, but the fact was that for them only those copies were available for printing.*
Thus, on one side, the English people got those fabricated religious books published and destroyed the true originals; and, on the other side, they showed to the Hindu community that it is their own religious books that say such things. In this way, their ingenious trickery befooled the Hindu society, Hindu scholars and also befooled the whole world.
Now you know the truth. So, wherever such impious verses or passages are seen in our printed religious books you must know that they are the malicious gift of the rulers of India of those days.
False synchronization of edicts and coins.
To support their fabricated ideology of Chandragupt Maurya being in 300’s BC, they did a lot more fabrications and manipulations. There were two kings in Magadh dynasties: Ashokvardhan, the grandson of Chandragupt Maurya, who was in the 15th century BC, and Samudragupt Ashokaditya (Priyadarshin), the son of Chandragupt of Gupt dynasty, who was in 4th century BC.
Samudragupt was called Samudragupt Ashokaditya, or Ashok, or Ashok-the-Great or Ashok Priyadarshin. He was called Priyadarshin after adopting the Buddhist religion. But he was generally known as Ashok. He had a huge empire that stretched up to Punjab, whereas Ashokvardhan’s kingdom was very small. It was the existing Bihar province of India. Ashok (Samudragupt Ashokaditya) established a number of monuments throughout his kingdom.
Taking advantage of the similarity of their name, the English people, manipulatingly ascribed all the edicts of Samudragupt Ashokaditya to Ashokvardhan who was the grandson of Chandragupt Maurya. The period of Chandragupt Maurya was already pulled down from 1541 BC to 312 BC by Jones and it was subsequently followed by the other European writers. So, whatever ancient coins and edicts of that period (3rd to 4th century B.C.) were found, they tried to patch it up with Ashokvardhan (Maurya), which, in fact, were related to Samudragupt Ashokaditya. In general, they fabricated and created such records that showed wrong historic dates of all of the important historical figures like Panini, Buddh and Shankaracharya etc.
In this way their writers constructed an enormous amount of biased literature against Indian religion and history that flooded all the libraries of India and of the world, which became the basis for all other writers to follow the same line of negative concepts about India; and thus, the glory of our scriptural Dignity was suppressed under the weight of their fabricated net of forged ideologies.
The policy of the Britishers to create personal embitterment in the community, the emphasis on the English education, to represent the Vedic religion in a most demeaning manner, to keep the Indians under the grip of poverty by not promoting the industrial developments of India, and to own the big commercial companies themselves, damaged the entire social structure of India. As a result, the common people of India lost their national consciousness. They forgot that the welfare of India is their own welfare and the damage to India is their own damage; and thus, a deep instinct of personal selfishness grew in the hearts of the Indians from which they couldn’t recover.
The nineteenth century and the twentieth century were the prime time in the history of the world when major social, industrial and scientific developments happened and the prosperity of a country touched its heights. But, during that time India was only sucked of its resources and was left far behind because of the ruling policy of the British. Two hundred years of loss in the field of commercial, industrial, technological and scientific development is such a big thing which can hardly be recouped
