General History Thread - India : News , Updates & Discussions . (2 Viewers)

[Azaad]

View: https://x.com/hindookissinger/status/1934886264601498099

How true is this?

Could be. Lactase tolerance is another gene mutation traced to the sub continent that spread out to the world. There's also coloured pupils the gene mutation of which was traced either to the BMAC or its vicinity IIRC.

 

[swesh]

View: https://x.com/hindookissinger/status/1934886264601498099

How true is this?

Human first migrated to India from Africa so it's very plausible

 

[swesh]

Title: Arun Shourie exposes ICHR scandals
Author: N.S. Rajaram
Publication: BHARATIYA PRAGNA
Date: MARCH 2000 VOLUME 2 NUMBER 3

ICHR is in the news again, not for any scholarly contribution but
for political reasons, which is a fair reflection of its benighted
career under 'secularist' domination. From all the sound and fury
emanating from 'scholars' and their allies in the media, the average
reader may be excused for thinking that high principles are at
stake.

The reality is quite different: it is only a diversionary tactic
meant to save themselves from exposure as venal men and women,
caring nothing for truth and capable of stealing both money and
research. This is clear from Arun Shourie's thoroughly documented
"Eminent Historians". True to character, the English language media
has taken up their side without even mentioning their record, or
even Shourie's expose.

Here is the real story behind one of the major controversies. The
Government of India funded the ICHR to produce a comprehensive
multi-volume work on the Freedom Movement, to be called 'Towards
Freedom'. The importance of the project is not in dispute,
especially as the British produced a multi-volume work on the
transfer of power giving their version of the story. But the
'eminent historians' of the ICHR failed to produce the work even
though the funds allotted to the project were spent.

As Shourie points out: "An afterword is in order to this sorry tale
of the Towards Freedom Project. As far as history writing is
concerned, few things could have been more important than to bring
alive for subsequent generations what our leaders felt and did in
the long struggle to wrest freedom for the country. And just see how
these eminences have handled this responsibility: a project which
was to have been completed in five years and a few lakhs has been
dragged for twenty-seven years, a crore and seventy-odd lakhs have
been gobbled up in its name - and the volumes are still said to be
on their way. This is gross dereliction - independent of what the
volumes will contain, and what they would have left out."
[Correction: it seems the amount was more like four crores (forty
million).]

It is worth noting that an earlier effort on the history of the
Freedom Movement headed by the great historian R.C. Majumdar was
aborted by vested forces within the Congress. What was Majumdar's
crime? He refused to bend history to suit the interests of the
Congress. It was given to a greatly inferior scholar, one Tarachand,
who produced a worthless tract. Fortunately, Majumdar had the will -
and the scholarship - to produce without any sponsors the
magisterial three-volume "History of the Freedom Movement in India"
(Firma KLM, Calcutta). Majumdar went on to observe: "... It is an
ominous sign of the times that Indian history is being viewed in
official circles in the perspective of recent politics. The official
history of the freedom movement starts with the premise that India
lost independence only in the eighteenth century and had thus an
experience of subjection to a foreign power for only two centuries.
Real history, on the other hand, teaches us that the major part of
India lost independence about five centuries before, and merely
changed masters in the eighteenth century."

Returning to the Towards Freedom project, some of the details
ferreted out by Shourie are enlightening. Several historians claimed
that they worked on various projects in an 'honorary capacity',
implying that they took no money for their work. This was a
subterfuge. They invariably took substantial sums of money at the
beginning of the project, but were not given the final installment
due upon the completion of the project, for the simple reason they
never did complete the project.

This can be illustrated with a case involving a leading historian -
no doubt eminent as well - Bipin Chandra. This 'eminent historian'
was sanctioned Rs 75,000 for the year 1987-88 for the assignment
entitled 'A History of the Indian National Congress'. By 1989, he
had been given Rs 57,500 with the balance (Rs 17,500) to be paid
after the completed manuscript was submitted. He did not receive the
balance due because he never cared to submit any manuscript. Upon
inquiry, Shourie was told by the ICHR that the remaining balance is
yet to be paid because a "formal manuscript in this regard is yet to
be received." In other words, Bipin Chandra had taken whatever money
he could without producing anything. This is not the full story
however. Shourie writes (pp 15-16):

"Later I learnt that the Rs 75,000/- which had been allotted to this
"eminent historian" for this project - "the Oral History Project" -
had been but a part, a small part of the total take. Bipin Chandra
was given in addition Rs Two Lakhs by the ICSSR and Rs Four Lakhs
through the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Neither institution
received any manuscript from him." In other words, this eminent
historian was like a scam operator, taking money promising future
gains, and then disappearing with the cash. The sums involved will
seem small when compared to the crores and scores of crores looted
by politicians and scamsters. But if they stole relatively small
sums of money, it is only because that was all they could lay their
hands on. It was not thrift but lack of opportunity that prevented
them from scaling Boforsian heights.


It was not just money they stole, but also other people's research
as the following episode involving Irfan Habib and his protege
Tasneem Ahmad shows. In the year 1976-77, the late Dr. Paramatma
Saran, one of India's most distinguished medieval historians,
submitted to the ICHR the English translation (with annotations) of
the Persian work Tarikh-i-Akbari by Arif Qandhari. Soon the
manuscript mysteriously disappeared from its archives until it
resurfaced nearly twenty-five years later under bizarre
circumstances. In response to repeated inquiries by Dr. Saran's
son-in-law, and even an official inquiry, the Deputy Director of the
Medieval Unit of ICHR - one Tasneem Ahmad - reported that the
manuscript was "submitted but not traceable." The official inquiry
also somehow got killed, because of the involvement of a galaxy of
'eminent historians', notably Irfan Habib.

A case of utter irresponsibility - one might say - but the story is
only beginning. The very same 'submitted but not traceable'
manuscript was submitted as a Ph.D. dissertation by none other than
Tasneem Ahmad, the Deputy Director of the Medieval Unit of the ICHR!
He even had the temerity to publish it under his own name with a
foreword by Irfan Habib who showered fulsome praise on his protege.
"What it [Tarikh-i-Akbari] needed," wrote the eminent historian
Irfan Habib in his Foreword to the stolen work "was a full-scale
English translation. This has been provided by Dr. Tasneem Ahmad in
a very competent manner, aiming at faithful accuracy and at a
critical assessment of the information here received by comparing it
with that offered by other sources."

The 'eminent' Professor Habib of the Aligarh Muslim University,
twice Chairman of the ICHR and five times its member, did not stop
there. He lauded the pilfered work as a "notable contribution to the
National celebration of the 450th Anniversary of Akbar's birth. I
feel confident that it would reinforce the interest in Akbar's age
widespread among those who have a care for the long process of the
creation of a composite culture and a unity that together constitute
what is India." Habib's is now one of the loudest voices complaining
about the politicization of the ICHR! Of course, "Brutus is an
honourable man."

As we examine the work of these 'eminent historians' and their modus
operandi, plagiarism and corruption - though heinous in themselves -
are not their worst sins. They are guilty of the far greater sin of
'corruption of the spirit' - as Veda Vyasa called it - of forging an
ideology and methodology built around institutionalized lying. It is
an ideology that simply refuses to acknowledge the existence of
truth. Whatever suits their self-interest is held up as truth - to
be imposed on the nation.

In this context, it is worth recording what Koenraad Elst had to say
about Sita Ram Goel's Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them (Volume
II). Elst observed: "If this book ever gets the publicity it
deserves, negationist ['secularist'] historians will find it
difficult to show their faces in public. They stand exposed, and
only their control of the media can save their reputation by
censoring their career-long efforts at history falsification."

That day has hopefully dawned with the breaking of the 'secularist'
monopoly over the ICHR and other institutions. And the 'secularist'
noise about the Towards Freedom Project and cries of
'Saffronization' are nothing but diversionary tactics meant to save
themselves from exposure and public disgrace. Thanks to Shourie's
Eminent Historians, they can run but cannot hide.

 

[swesh]

The Legend of Chatrasal Bundela



Lacerating across the heart of India stretches a wild and untamed land known as the Chambal valley and beyond to Bundhelkhand which houses an equally untamed and proud people. With a rugged love of independence and pride they have a long history of resistance and struggle against oppressors and are even celebrated in numerous films in the Indian Film Industry as the âhonourable banditsâ.



The people of the region say that the only offering that they can make the Goddess of the River is their blood and that their land has always cried out for it. Throughout their history they have remained unsubdued by successive waves of invaders and oppressors with even the British Army moving only with great care through their land.



The most celebrated of their warriors, revered to this day, is Chatrasal Bundela, a young man of 18 years who challenged one of the mightiest empires of the world in 1665. The Mughal Empire was at its zenith of power and glory when the puritanical Islamic emperor, Aurangzeb, began to unleash the full flow of Islamism over India. Taking up the inspiration of the Maratha warrior Shivaji, Chatrasal gathered the hardy Bundela warriors to his side to raise the banner of Hindu freedom.



His father, Jujhar Singh had raised the banner for freedom a generation earlier but was killed in battle with the Mughals after himself killing the favourite of the emperor, Abu Fazl.

The freedom loving people of Bundelkhand however refused to submit and kept raising their heads and fought for freedom. A deadly struggle, which eventually spread over nearly fifty years, then ensued with wave after wave of Mughal and Pathan attacks over the land being beaten back. Each successive invasion brought with it the desecration of Hindu temples and population, including cold-blooded murder of unarmed civilians, the rape of women and slavery for captured women and children. This only redoubled the Bundela intensity for the fight for freedom and vengeance.



The âJizyahâ tax or Islamic poll tax upon the Hindus was imposed by the Mughals. The Maulvis who came to collect in Orchha, the capital of Bundelkhand, had their severed heads sent back to the Emperor with pages of the Koran stuffed in them as a sign of the Bundelas contempt for the Mughalâs fanaticism. The emperor himself led a huge expedition to Bundhelkhand to smash the âidol worshippersâ in 1684 but was forced to retreat without achieving any lasting successes, leaving behind trails of horror and destruction but still failing to subdue Chatrasal and the Bundelas.



From there onwards the Maratha attacks began to shake and then crumble the Mughal empire and, following the death of Aurangzeb, the Bundelas steadily began to gain ground over their Muslim adversaries. The cream of the Mughal generals were sent one after the other to subdue the Bundelas but all their campaigns ended up in failure.



Eventually in a last desperate attempt the famous Pathan warrior Muhammad Khan Bhangash was sent with his fighters in 1730 and engaged in a final struggle. The now aged Chatrasal with his sons and warriors drew the Pathans into battle and with the help of the Maratha Peshwa Baji Rao they won a final victory over the Mughals in 1730 expelling them finally from their lands.

The relentless wars of the past half century eventually ended with Chatrasal dying a free man leading a free people: an inspiration to successive generations of Hindus and an apt lesson that freedom is not something that can ever be taken for granted but must be maintained by endless and continuous vigilance. It shows us that the endless waves of cruelty and barbarity unleashed on the Hindus failed to destroy or subdue their innate love for freedom and dharma. When nation after nation from the edge of Europe to the very borders of India had their past obliterated by waves of genocidal and fanatical attacks by the votaries of the âOneâ and âOnly Trueâ âGodâ which swept through Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, the Hindus survived. Not only survived, but struggled and fought and clung to their dharma as all around fell and their cultures and ways of life were forgotten and relegated to the museum.



Published by Shakti Marg

 

[swesh]

British sahibs learnt to bath in India



The first Englishmen who came to India as servants of the East India Company were bewildered by many of our customs. Many of them commented on, in their letters home, the habit, among certain classes of the Hindus, of taking a daily bath.





The early factory-hands of John Company in India may have been somewhat scandalized by the fact that Hindu men and women of good families should not mind taking their baths in full view of others, what they found even more strange was that they should be washing their bodies at all.



For the British, the process of washing the body entailed lying prone in a tub half full of hot water. And how many houses in pre-Industrial England could have had metal containers large enough to accommodate grown men and women, and, even more, the facilities to heat up enough water? The conclusion was inescapable. For most Englishmen of the 17th and 18th centuries, a bath must have been a rare experience indeed, affordable to the very rich, who perhaps took baths when they felt particularly obnoxious, what with their zest for vigorous exercise, such as workouts in the boxing ring or rowing or riding at the gallop over the countryside. What a sensual pleasure it must have been to lie soaking in a tub full of scalding hot water? But such indulgences were possible only during the few weeks of what the English call their summer. For the rest of the year, the water in the tub could not have remained hot for more than a couple of minutes, and from November through February must have gone icy cold as soon as it was poured in. Brrrrr!

Then again, even those who thus bathed their bodies a few times every summer seem to have been careful to, as it were, keep their heads above water. In other words, a bath did not also involve a hair-wash. Otherwise there doesn't seem to be any reason why they should have found it necessary to coin-or adopt-a special word to describe the process of bathing hair: shampoo, which, 'Hobson Jobson' tells us is derived from the Hindi word, champi, for 'massage'. Why a word which normally described the process of muscle-kneading should have been picked on to explain a head-wash, is not at all convincing. It seems that the Company's servants used to send for their barbers every now and then to massage their heads with oil and then rinse

off the hair with soap and water. So the head-champi, became 'shampoo'.





Which may explain why G M Trevelyans's English Social History does not so much as mention the word 'bath'. In the pre-industrial age it was, at best, an eccentricity indulged in by exercise-freaks in the summer months, and a head-bath was even rarer. English royal court felt compelled to post in 1589: "Let no one, whoever he may be, before, at or after meals, early or late, foul the staircase, corridors, or closets with urine or other filth."



But, out in the tropics they must have gone about smelling quite a bit. In fact, the Chinese, when they first encountered the White man described him as "the smelly one".



According to William Dalrymple, in his book White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India: "Indian women, for example, introduced British men in the delights of regular bathing." And again:





"Those who had returned home and continued to bathe and shampoo themselves on a regular basis found themselves scoffed at as 'effeminate'."


Early Christians took a dim view of bathing. St. Benedict in the 6th century declared that "to those who are well, and especially the young, bathing shall seldom be permitted." In the early 1200s, St. Francis of Assisi declared personal uncleanliness a sign of piety. Europeans have an interesting history of bathing. Long before they turned Christian, Scandinavians and Germans bathed naked in lakes and rivers during the summer months, and in public baths during the winter. With the advent of Christianity nakedness came to be associated with vulgarity, lascivious thoughts and, therefore, sinful. St Agnes (d. 1077) never took a bath; St Margaret never washed herself; Pope Clement III issued an edict forbidding

bathing or even wetting one's face on Sundays. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the practice of bathing in rivers was frowned upon. In 1736 in Baden (Germany), the authorities issued a warning to students against "the vulgar, dangerous and shocking practice of bathing."





(source: The importance of bathing - by Khuswant Singh - tribuneindia.com).
(source: Smelling sahibs learnt to bathe in India - by Manohar Malgonkar -tribuneindia.com).

 

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Macaulay's Minute on Education, February 2, 1835

 

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Bhai Haqiqat Rai was born at Sialkot in 1724 A.D. His father was Bhai Bhag Mall Khatri. His maternal grandparents were Sikhs and he was married at a young age to Durgi the daughter of Sardar Kishan Singh. During Mughal rule, children used to go to mosques to study Persian from Maulvis (Muslim priests). Bhai Haqiqat Rai was also learning Persian from a maulvi. He was the only Hindu while all his other class-mates were Muslims. One day, the maulvi had gone out. Bhai Haqiqat Rai-had a quarrel with a boy. In order to tease Bhai Haqiqat Rai, he called bad names to mother goddess. In anger, Bhai Haqiqat Rai called name to Bibi Fatima in retaliation. When the Muslim boys heard him calling name, all of them gave him a sound thrashing. He returned home weeping.

In the evening, the Muslim boys got together, went to the maulvi and said, "Today, when we said to Haqiqat Rai that their gods and goddesses are made of clay and all are false, he said Bibi Fatima to be false and called her names." The maulvi said, "Did that infidel call Bibi Fatima names?" The boys exaggerated the event and said, "When we said to him that we would complain to the maulvi, he replied that he was not afraid of him. His maternal uncles and inlaws are Sikhs. He will get the maulvi eliminated through them." The maulvi was greatly enraged on hearing this. He said to the boys, "Call that infidel and bring him to me."

At the message from the boys, Bhai Haqiqat Rai and his father went to the maulvi. As soon as they arrived, the maulvi caught hold of Bhai Haqiqat Rai and started beating him The maulvi beat him to unconsciousness but his anger did not subside. He arrested Bhai Haqiqat Rai and sent him to Amir Beg, the administrator of Sialkot. The next day the qazi said to Bhai Haqiqat Rai in the court, "You have hurt the feelings of believers by calling names to Bibi Fatima for which you should be given severe punishment. For this sin you can be burnt alive after pouring oil on you. you can be torn apart alive from dogs. But your sin may be pardoned if you embrace Islam." Bhai Haqiqat Rai refused to become a Muslim. By order of Amir Beg, Bhai Haqiqat Rai was hanged feet up from a tree and beaten but he did not agree to embrace Islam.

Amir Beg sent Bhai Haqiqat Rai to Zakria Khan, the Governor of Lahore. Mother Goran said to Bhai Haqiqat Rai, "Son! No doubt I shall lose a son by your death but if you give up your faith I shall be called the mother of a deserter and faithless son. I pray to God to bestow on you the will to keep your faith even if you have to sacrifice your life." When Bhai Haqiqat Rai did not agree to embrace Islam even after further torture, he was martyred by the orders of the Governor in January 1735 A.D.

 

[swesh]

Swaraj Bhawan — Photos from PIB
Swaraj Bhawan and the myths of
patriotic nationalism

Last January, I visited Swaraj Bhawan, the original Anand Bhawan, in Allahabad, which Pandit Motilal Nehru gifted to the Indian National Congress in 1930 when he built his new house next door. Both houses are now museums that display the Indian nationalist movement as well as the carefully crafted adaptation of British colonial lifestyle that characterised Nehru family life. Swaraj Bhawan features a rather breathless sound-and-light tour from room to room, though you have to move quickly to keep up with it. If you fall behind, you’re left standing in the dark. The tour starts at the entrance to what I take to be the original bungalow of a complex of connected buildings. On the left, there is a horse-drawn carriage, minus the horses. On the right, there is the following inscription: "Swaraj Bhawan originally belonged to Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the 19th century Muslim leader and educationist. At the house-warming party, Sir William Moor hoped that this large palatial home in Civil Lines of Allahabad would become the cement holding together the British Empire in India. Paradoxically, the house was bought by Motilal Nehru in 1900, and went on to become a cradle to the Indian Freedom Struggle which was to destroy British rule in India." Now epigraphy, the interpretation of inscriptions, is one of the many gaps in my training as a historian. For the past eight months, however, this particular inscription has occupied a good deal of my time and attention. My question is not only whether there is any truth to it as a description of events in time past, but more, what is it trying to say about the nature of India’s colonial experience and the place of a significant "Muslim leader" in relation to Indian nationalism?

The statement in the inscription was not entirely new to me. I had come across a very similar account some years ago in the biography of Jawaharlal Nehru by the journalist M.J. Akbar.[1] Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t take it seriously. For one thing, academic that I am, I was put off by the failure to cite a source. The misspelling of the name of the British official, Sir William Muir, indicated that the author could not have based this on the sort of documentary research that historians rely on. Now here was the same story, inscribed on the site itself, complete with misspelling, presumably put there when Swaraj Bhawan became a museum in the mid-1990s, a few years after M.J. Akbar’s book.

As it happens, I had visited Swaraj Bhawan about 25 years earlier. I was taken there by the late Professor S. Bashiruddin, the former librarian of Aligarh Muslim University, to meet a member of the Nehru family, who had converted much of it into an orphanage. But I don’t remember that anything had been said about a connection with Syed Ahmad Khan. So, frankly, I was sceptical about the truth of the inscription. I knew from my earlier research on Syed Ahmad Khan[2] that he had never lived in Allahabad, and I was sure that I would have come across something if he had such an extensive property there, since he was by no means a wealthy man and pretty much had to live on his salary as a sadr amin (subordinate judge), plus a significant but not munificent political pension of Rs 200 a month for so-called ‘Mutiny service’.

To pursue my inquiry, I knocked on the door of S.P. Mall, the Deputy Director of Anand Bhawan, to see if he could tell me more about the source for the inscription, other than M.J. Akbar. He very kindly showed me an essay by Bishambhar Nath Pande, a well-known historian and public figure, entitled ‘The House where India was Born: Swaraj Bhawan: an Irony of History’, which in turn was derived from Pande’s earlier book,[3] The relevant passage in the Allahabad book states:

After inflicting vengeance on the participators of the rebellion of 1857 the British administrators realised that it had been very wrong on their part to have punished the entire Muslim population for the uprising. They greatly realised their mistake and began to adopt a favourable policy towards that important minority in order to have an undisturbed rule in India. Their eyes rested for this purpose on Sir Syed Ahmad. The Lieutenant-Governor of the NWFP as well as the Governor-General of India often used to take Sir Syed in confidence and constantly approached him for advice on matters concerning the state. In 1867 Sir William Muir, the then Lieutenant-Governor of NWFP wrote to Sir Syed: ‘As you are often needed at Allahabad for important consultations and as you feel inconvenience during your shot [sic] visits to this city it is proposed that you may have your own Kothi constructed at Allahabad. That would enable you to prolong your visits at the Provincial Capital. For this purpose I have got a site selected measuring 20 acres of land at a 10 minutes drive from the Government House.’

There is a footnote here: ‘Sir W. Muir’s Confidential Despatches, Imperial Records.’ Pande goes on to say that Syed Ahmad accepted the offer and by 1871 a house was built on the land, which Syed Ahmad named Mahmud Manzil after his son. Pande goes on:

The formal ceremony of the occupation of the Kothi proved a great success. Sir William Muir, the chief guest on the occasion, replying to the toast said: "I have every hope that ‘Mahmud Manzil’ would prove a great cementing centre for the consolidation of the British Empire in India."

There is then another footnote: ‘The Pioneer, July 18, 1871’. Finally, Pande says that the house was later occupied by Syed Mahmud, when he became Justice of the Allahabad High Court, and was then sold in 1892 to Rai Bahadur Permanand Pathak, who sold it to Pandit Motilal Nehru for Rs 20,000 in 1898. There is then a third footnote: ‘The Municipal Building Records’. Here, then, was a more substantial source, but I still had problems with it. For one thing, Pande had clearly confused NWFP, the North West Frontier Province, with the NWP, the North Western Provinces. For another, William Muir did not become Lieutenant-Governor of the latter until 1868, not 1867. With the exception of the reference to The Pioneer, the other references were distressingly imprecise. It would take more substantial primary documentation to make me believe that the British government had given this huge mansion in Allahabad to Syed Ahmad Khan. Mall suggested that the place to look for such sources was the Nagar Mahapalika, the municipal office building in Allahabad. When I went to the Nagar Mahapalika, I was fortunate enough to be directed to B.B. Banerjee, Additional Commissioner, a PhD in history, who cordially heard my story and offered to help get to the truth of the matter. After I had returned across the Aluminum Curtain to the United States, he sent me an email attachment that he had scanned for my benefit — the relevant pages from B.N. Pande’s Allahabad book. I wrote him back my thanks but said that I would still hope to find something more like a primary source. When I had the opportunity to return to Allahabad, I visited Banerjee and he was able to locate a relevant document, after all, in the Municipal Records: the Register of Government Property (Nazul) in Charge of Nagar Mahapalika of Allahabad. There, at serial no. [4] in the village of Hashimpur, otherwise known as 1 Church Road, settlement no. L 35 A.B. was apparently the relevant property, or at least a piece of it, 2 bighas and 9 bis. I was informed there are 20 biswa to a bigha, and 32 biswa to an acre, that is, considerably less that the amount of land mentioned in Pande’s book. One other problem was that the entry was dated 24 October 1910 (G.O. No. 3518/XI-28E) and that the occupying tenant was listed as Jawaharlal Nehru, who by then had reached an age of majority. There was no information about the earlier history of the property. Perhaps I would have more luck at the Collectorate, but I decided to put that off for later.

When I returned to Delhi in January, I called on B.R. Nanda, former Director of the Jawaharlal Nehru Library and the author of The Nehrus, which was one of my models for a possible history of the family of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.4 Nanda told me that his book on the Nehrus had been vetted by no less a person than Jawaharlal Nehru himself. The book states that the house was purchased from Kunwar Permanand, but Nanda said that he had never come across any connection with Syed Ahmad Khan. Just as I was about to dismiss the story as a total fabrication, however, I came across a little commemorative essay in the Nehru Library by Indira Gandhi, who was born in the house, that says, "As far as we know, the house belonged originally to Mr Justice Mahmud who sold it to Raja Permanand of Moradabad, Judge of Shahjahanpur, from whom it was bought by my grandfather, Pandit Motilal Nehru, in 1900."[5] Here, then, was an independent source for the connection with Syed Mahmud, the son of Syed Ahmad Khan. It gave me reason to believe that there was at least some connection and that it might be worth pursuing the matter further.

 

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Proposal to celebrate 1857 revolt


The suggestion (January 7) to celebrate the 1857 revolt as a mark of solidarity is appreciable. However, it was not the British who took reins from the Muslim rulers. The British came to India as traders. They established business houses under the East India Company Inc. after obtaining permission from Mughal Emperor Jehangir (1612).

After the death of Emperor Aurangzeb (1707), the wars of succession, coupled with Byzantine intrigues, wrecked the empire. Afterwards, destruction of Delhi by Nadir Shah Afshar (1738-39) and six consecutive invasions by Ahmed Shah Abdali (1747 to 1762) ruined the central authority. As a result of this uninterrupted mayhem, the empire lost its resources, and the governors of major provinces such as Bengal-Bihar-Orissa, Deccan and Oudh almost seceded and became independent, with nominal allegiance to the centre.

The weakness of the centre encouraged insurrections of and on, with no central authority to assert the writ of the emperor. After the battle of Buxar (1764), Shah Alam-II granted diwani of Bengal-Bihar-Orissa to the East India Company (1766), abdicating thus his sovereign rights to the British. Subsequently, Maratha power acquired ascendancy to such an extent that Shah Alam out of apprehensions for his personal safety appointed Mahadji Sindhia as supreme regent and C-in-C of the Mughal army.

Then during interregnums came Ghulam Qadir Rohilla who, out of personal vendetta, sacked the Delhi Fort, and blinded Emperor Shah Alam. The princes and princesses were flogged and dishonoured and imperial servants were beaten to death. The entire palace was dug to unearth the concealed treasure. For nine weeks the imperial city had been under siege of the Rohilla marauders. The hapless blind emperor was made to sit in the open, in scorching heat and was not allowed even proper meals. Later on the forces of Sindhia at the instructions of the emperor captured Ghulam Qadir Rohilla; he was blinded and put to death.

The Marathas were having sway over Delhi, and the emperor's power was restricted to the Red Fort. "Hukumat Shah Alam, uz Delhi ta Palam" was a popular saying those days.

In the Anglo-Maratha war (1803) Gen Lake defeated Doulat Rao Sindhia and took Shah Alam-II under his protection. An officer of Lake's army writes: "The descendent of the great Akbar and Aurangzeb was found... blind and aged, stripped of authority and reduced to poverty, seated under a small tattered canopy, the fragment of regal state and the mockery of human pride".

Thus, power was taken not from Muslims, (as they had already lost it, de facto, to the Marathas) but from the Marathas whom the British defeated and became masters of India.

MANZOOR HUSSAIN KURESHI

Karachi

Source:https://web.archive.org/web/20101028200852/http://www.dawn.com/2004/01/16/letted.htm

 

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Austenizing" of British Atrocities in India

Gideon Polya

fundamental feature of the scientific method involves gathering data, generating testable and potentially falsifiable hypotheses to explain the data, and experimentation to test such hypotheses. Reiteration of this process yields models that are progressively better approximations to reality and indeed this scientific method has been responsible for the extraordinary scientific and technological advance of humanity in the last few millennia. It should be obvious that ignoring or rubbing out the data simply short-circuits the whole process and prevents rational prediction. This ethical commitment to and respect for the basic data should not be required only of scientists -- it is a requisite for all seekers after truth, including historians, sociologists and economists.
Respect for the data is particularly critical for historians because in general they cannot perform experiments and their data are simply the records of past events. While we are well aware of the selectivity of historians and of the adage "history is written by the victors," we also recognize the truism that "history ignored yields history repeated." Thus with the world already experiencing appalling discrepancies between geopolitically available food and population demand, the deletion of massive man-made famines of British India from history and from general public perception is not merely unethical -- such white-washing also represents a major threat to humanity. Deletion of major man-made catastrophes from history increases the probability that the same underlying, but unaddressed, causes will yield repetition of such disasters.
I have recently published a book -- "Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial Rapacity, Holocaust Denial and the Crisis in Biological Sustainability" -- that deals with the two century holocaust of man-made famine in British India and its effective deletion from history. It deals with this "forgotten holocaust" that commenced with the Bengal Famine of 1769-1770 (10 million victims) and concluded with the World War II man-made Bengal Famine (4 million victims) and took tens of millions of lives in between. The lying by omission of two centuries of English-speaking historians continues today in the supposedly "open societies" of the global Anglo culture. This sustained, continuing lying by omission in the sophisticated but cowardly and selectively unobservant culture of the Anglo world has ensured that very few educated people (including Indians) are aware of these massive past realities. In contrast, nearly all are aware of the substantially fictional "Black Hole of Calcutta" of 1756 that demonized Indians and indeed became part of the English language.
Such deletion of unpleasant realities from history is described in my book as "Austenizing" after Jane Austen, whose elegant novels were utterly devoid of the ugly social realities of her time. While Jane Austen’s family and others related to it were intimately involved in the rape of India, it was perfectly legitimate for Jane Austen, the artist, to remove social horrors from her exquisite literary canvas. However, the continuing Austenizing of British Indian history is a holocaust-denying outrage that ultimately threatens humanity by ignoring the massive man-made famine disasters of the British Raj and hence the underlying causes of racism, greed and moral unresponsiveness.
Repetition of immense crimes against humanity such as the World War II Holocaust is made much less likely when the responsible society acknowledges the crime, apologizes, makes amends and accepts the injunction: "Never again." However, when it comes to the horrendous succession of massive, man-made famines in British India, no apology nor amends have been made and it is indeed generally accepted that such horrors will be repeated on an unimaginably greater scale in the coming century. While British prime minister Tony Blair has apologized for the mid-19th century Irish famine that killed over a million people, he has not even commented on the mid-20th century man-made famine in British-ruled Bengal that took four million lives. (He is aware of this, having acknowledged receipt of a copy of my book).

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In the World War II Bengal Famine, when the price of rice rose above the ability of the landless rural poor to pay and in the absence of a humane colonial government, millions simply starved to death or died of starvation-related causes. While there was plenty of food potentially available, the price of rice rose as a result of a number of factors including the following: cessation of imports from Japanese-occupied Burma; a massive war-time decline in requisite grain imports into India; a deliberate strategic slashing of Indian Ocean shipping by Churchill; British seizure of rice stocks in certain sensitive areas of Bengal; the seizure and destruction of boats critically required for food acquisition and distribution; the failure to actually declare a famine under the colonial Famine Code and the "divide and rule" policy of giving the various Indian provinces control over their own food reserves. "Market forces" determined that industrial Calcutta, cashed up as a result of the wartime boom, was able to pay for rice and sucked food out of a starving, food-producing countryside.
The 1943-1944 Bengal Famine was accompanied by a vast multitude of starvation, near-death and terminal horrors. The world is rightly indignant about the large-scale, wartime "comfort women" abuses of the Japanese Army. However, it is not aware of the civilian and military sexual abuse of starving Bengali women and girls that was conducted on such a massive scale that it is reflected in demographic survival statistics. Ultimately millions suffered and died because their colonial British rulers did not care for them. Their ultimate ruler, wartime British prime minister Winston Churchill, had a confessed hatred for Indians, confiding to the Secretary of State for India in 1942 that "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." Not surprisingly, the Bengal Famine, that was responsible for 90% of total World War II British Empire military and civilian casualties, is not mentioned in Churchill’s 6-volume "History of the Second World War." Churchill astonishingly asserts in his book: "No great portion of the world’s population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the people of Hindustan. They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small Island."
It was in the following way that my book was inspired, in part, by Jane Austen's writings. My father was a refugee to Australia from Nazi Europe in 1939 and I am deeply conscious of the Holocaust that wiped our extensive and gifted family from the face of Europe. I always had a deep interest in history and one can readily imagine my consternation on learning of the Bengal famine of 1943-1944 and the massive loss of life involved through the film Distant Thunder made by the pre-eminent filmmaker Satyajit Ray. My consternation turned to indignation when I turned to my large personal library to find that an event of a similar magnitude to the Jewish Holocaust and occurring at the same time was comprehensively absent, except for a brief, 3-word mention in a German historical encyclopaedia. Recourse to a major university library quickly established the reality of this "forgotten holocaust" but also confirmed the outrageous, near-comprehensive deletion from British history of this man-made disaster, and indeed two centuries of such crimes against humanity in British India.
My wife, Zareena, is a Fiji Indian whose grandparents went to Fiji from Bengal and Bihar as indentured labourers for the British. She introduced me to Jane Austen’s work Northanger Abbey and a key passage finally precipitated my literary and historical journey. Jane Austen was aware of the prolonged public trial of Warren Hastings, an important family connection, and the allegations against him of immense crimes against humanity in India. In Northanger Abbey, the heroine Catherine Morland, spooked by the gloomy abbey, surmises that Henry Tilney’s father may have done away with Henry’s mother. Henry reproves her thus:
"If I understand you rightly, you have formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to. Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"
The world currently has a population of about six billion, of whom about two billion suffer food scarcity and nearly one billion suffer chronic malnourishment. About twenty million die prematurely each year from starvation-related causes. Conservative, status quo estimates would predict thirty million such deaths per year by 2050. If by 2050 the Third World returns from the current annual mortality of about 10 per 1000 to the 35 per 1000 obtaining in British India in 1947, then we will see an "excess mortality" of a staggering 200 million people per year. This is nevertheless avoidable provided there is a global moral responsiveness in our economically globalized world of a kind absent in relation to both the searingly remembered Jewish Holocaust and the now "forgotten" Bengal Famine of 50 years ago. That responsiveness is only possible if past, present and likely future man-made famine holocausts are unavoidably, remorselessly and continually presented to global public perception.

World over-population is the basis of the current mounting crisis in global sustainability and must be urgently addressed. Clearly greatly increased female literacy as well as Third World debt relief and enhanced economic security represent effective partial solutions. Humane solutions can and indeed must be found -- we cannot walk by on the other side. We must resurrect the "forgotten holocausts" of colonial India and resolve: "Never again."

 

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Early Theosophy and Freemasonry in India

"The years between 1876 and 1884 proved to be the seed time for Indian nationalism which took a definite shape with the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885."

The Encyclopaedic History of Indian Freedom Movement/edited by Om Prakash. New Delhi, Anmol, 2003.



The Masons of Bengal in the 1860s knew what opening up Freemasonry to Indians would mean, and they were dead set against it. It was Lord Zetland (the English Grand Master) and his deputy, Lord Ripon, who in the 1860s had to insist upon the principle of universal brotherhood and, in doing so, promoted, albeit from the top down, a new vision of empire among Masons.



Indian Masons assimilated only too well to the British imperial community-to the point of becoming "brothers" to the English, Scotish, and Welsh-and they strove to obtain the rights and privileges which attended this fraternal assimilation. This was the genesis of the nationalist impulse among the western-educated Indians.



They envisioned and expected to live in an empire of nationalities, in which Indians played an equal role with whites in governing the Indian Empire. Unfortunately for them, the British were simultaneously forging a national identity based on their superior position in the Empire. In the contest between these two nationalisms, British and Indian, the middle path of an imperial brotherhood based on parity would necessarily lose out. Indian Masons, then. who had gone a long way in reaching parity with the British in the lodge, sought the same thing in the Raj as nationalists, but were to find that parity there was "blocked," or at least too slow in coming.



At the first Congress in 1885, Dadabliai Naoroji explained what drew the westerneducated Indians politically to the British: 'What attaches us to this foreign rule with deeper loyalty than even our own past Native rule, is the fact that Britain is the parent of free and representative Government and that we, as her subjects and children, are entitled to inherit the great blessing of freedom and representation.' (Briton Martin,, New India, 1885, p. 298)



In the front ranks of Indian leaders in the early Congress Party (and even before) were a number of Masons: Dadabliai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji, Narayan Chandavarkar, among those in Bombay. In Bengal, there was W.C. Bonnedee, Man Mohan Ghosh, and Rash Behari Ghosh, and probably others whom research in lodges there would no doubt turn up.



What these men wanted was respect, to be treated like equals, to be "brothers" with the British in running India, just as they were "brothers" with them in the lodges.



An examination of the Masonic Presidents of the Indian National Congress from its inception in 1885 to the Surat "split" between Moderates and Extremists in 1907, is impressive. Of the Congress Presidents from the Bombay Presidency, a staggering seventy-eight percent-were Freemason. In addition, one President-Lal Mohan Ghosh was the brother of the Mason, Man Mohan Ghosh, and thus may have been a Mason himself (which would have made forty-eight percent of the I.N.C. Presidents Masons):



1885 W.C. Bonnedee Mason (Bengal)

1886 Dadabhai Naoroji Mason (Bombay)

1887 Badruddin Tyabji Mason (Bombay)

1888 George Yule Unknown

1889 Williarn Wedderburn Unknown

1890 Pherozeshah Mchta Mason (Bombay)

1891 P. Ananda Charlu Unknown

1892 W.C. Bonnedee Mason (Bengal)

1893 Dadabhai Naoroji Mason (Bombay)

1894 Alfred Webb, M.P. Unknown

1895 Surendranath Banedea Unknown

1896 Rahirntulla Muhammad Saymni Mason (Bombay)

1897 Sir C. Sankaran Nair Unknown

1898 Ananda Mohan Bose Unknown

1899 Ramesh Chandra Dutt Unknown

1900 Narayen Ganesh Chandavarkar Mason (Bombay)

1901 Dinshaw EduIji Wacha Doubtful (Bombay)

1902 Surendranath Banedea Unknown

1903 Lal Mohan Ghosh Unknown (brother of M.M. Ghosh)

1904 Sir Henry Cotton Unknown

1905 Gopal Krishna Gokhale Doubtful (Bombay)

1906 Dadabhai Naoroji Mason (Bombay)

1907 Rash Behari Ghosh Mason (Bengal)



Creating a Masonic Brotherhood of "Mahatmas."



By the mid-19th century Freemasonry was permeating Bombay's intellectual atmosphere with its ideas of a "religion" underlying all religions, and individual and societal perfectibility. It seems that western-educated Hindus began self-consciously to reproduce Freemasonry in their movements of religious and social reform. There where overlapping memberships in Freemasonry and various reform movements (e.g., the Prarthana and Arya Samajes, Vivekananda, and the Rahnumai Mazdayasnan Sabha); and close ideological similarities; Freemasonry with the Manava Dharma Sabha and Pararnahansa Mandali.



Masonry provided a template of ritualism and graded degrees which could be copied and altered, whether in the Theosophical Society or Saraswati's "Aryan Masonry," in order to create a bridge between Eastern and Western religious thought in the 19th century. This template allowed Westerners and Easterners thrust together by the political bonds of imperialism to explore each other's religions within the context of something familiar: ritualism and occultism.



Some of the Masons in in leadership positions of the Arya Samaj were Harichand Chintaman, Mulji Thakarshi, Chitpavan Brahmin physician, Dr. Anna Moreshwar Kunte. Thirty-seven Brahmin members of the Samaj, would be initiated in Lodge Islam in 1878, and affiliated to Lodge Aryan that same year. (Short History of the Aryan Lodge, in The Aryan Lodge. No. 30 G11, Centennial Jubilee Celebrations, December 9, 1978)



In 1873 Hindu Masons received a Temporary Warrant from the District Grand Lodge (English Constitution) of Bombay to found a lodge named Aryan. The Aryan Lodge was duly constituted in 1877, its aims being to attract and initiate Hindus. Its founding members were Edward Tyrrell Leith, the lodge's first Master, Dr. Joseph Anderson, a surgeon, Bal Mangesh Wagle, the "First Advocate of the High Court of Bombay," Shantaram Narayan and Ghansharn Nilkanth Nadkarni, the most prominent pleaders of the High Court, Dr. Shantaram Vithal-Sanzgiri, Dr. Atmararn Pandurang Tarkhad, and Harichand Chintaman, who later became first Lodge leader of the Theososphical society in India. After the formation of Aryan, a considerable number of western-educated Hindus regularly entered Freemasonry, men who had important roles in the economics, politics, and social and religious reformism of the Bombay Presidency.



Membership consisted of Hindus, Muslims, and Parsis (although, in the case of Aryan, Hindus did predominate, since it was, after all, founded to screen Hindu applicants). Pherozeshah Mehta, a Parsi, was a member of both Lodge Rising Star (mostly Parsi) and Lodge Aryan, as was N.G. Chandavarkar, a Saraswat Brahmin. And Lodge Islam, which was founded in 1876, "has admitted Hindus, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Jews and various other classes of people during its life of over a hundred years." ( S.P. Sarbadhicary, How Hindus Were Admitted Into the Mysteries of Freemasonry, p.19-20)



After the formation of Aryan, a considerable number of western-educated Hindus regularly entered Freemasonry, men who had important roles in the economics, politics, and social and religious reformism of the Bombay Presidency.



After co-founders of the Theosophical Society H.P. Blavatsky and Olcott came to India in 1887, Blavatsky claimed that her Mahatmas belonged to a lodge of Freemasons.



Blavatsky claimed that "The Rishis of the Vedic school were, of course, also Founders of the Masonic." (The Theosophical Society or Universal Brotherhood, in The Theosophist, vol. 1, no. 7, April, 1880: 179) And is a clear attempt to use antiquarianism to appropriate Freemasonry to ancient Hinduism, and make the Vedic Rishis the earliest exponents of the Craft. The colonized is attempting to alter the moral relations between him and the colonizer by placing the origin of the West's most cherished and venerable organization (after the Church) in India.



The new an expanded set of "Principles, Rules, and By-Laws" of the T.S. at a meeting held at the palace of the Maharaja of Vizianagram in Benares on 17 December 1879 (revised and ratified in February 1880), strongly bear the impress of Freemasonry.



The Society was formed, âupon the basis of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity," a principle not contained in the former foundation by âlaws of the 1875 T.S. in New York .



Like Freemasonry the T.S. initiated its members and had three degrees: the Third and lowest, the Second, and the First and highest "Sections." Once initiated, the new Theosophist was to be invested with the secret signs, words, or tokens by which Theosophists of the third (probationary) Section make themselves known to each other, a solemn obligation upon honour having first been taken from him in writing, and subsequently repeated by him orally before witnesses that he will neither reveal them to any improper person, nor divulge any other matter or thing relating to the Society.



Creeds and modes of worship may differ but the idea that God is one is common to the whole race. And in the love of God, common to humanity is to be found that harmony which it is the mission of the Universal Religion not only to preach but which it strives to make an actuality of life.... Saints, therefore, ask you to look beyond yourselves-to a centre that is within yourself, and it is only when the seed of goodness will have been sown there that it will fructify into what is called Universal Brotherhood, Universal Love, and Universal Religion. (speech delivered at the Social Reform Association, Mangalore, 1900, in The Speeches and Writings of Sir Narayen Ganesh Chandavarkar, 88.)



An important goal of the Hindu reform movements looked at here was not only to modernize society, but to elaborate a universal religion which could serve as the basis for a new, universal polity, although for practical purposes this meant a unified Indian/Hindu nation (whether Hindu or Indian was not always made clear) whose diverse elements would be harmonized by a latitudinarian spirituality which stressed fraternity. In the words of Narayen Chandavarkar,



In his presidential address at the 1893 Indian National Congress, Naoroji concluded with almost the same words he had used in Lodge Yarborough twenty-five years earlier: ... The day, I hope, is not distant when the world will see the noblest spectacle of a great Nation like the British holding out the hand of true fellow-citizenship and of justice to the vast mass of humanity of this great and ancient land of India with benefits and blessings to the human race. (Dadabhai Naoroji, quoted in Annie Besant How India Wrought For Freedom: The Story of the National Congress Told From Official Records, Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1915, p.165)



At the time that Dadabhai Naoroji was speaking of brotherhood and racial harmony in Lodge Yarborough, he and his associates were seeking parity with the British in the Indian Civil Service the "steel frame" of the Raj and the key institution in governing India. (Dadabbai Naoroji, speech at Lodge Yarborough, published September 19, 1868, in Bristol Guardian Newspaper)



Many Freemasons, following an ideological trajectory which began in the Renaissance, finally "de-centered" Christianity and, by the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, had come to see Freemasonry as a universal "religion" supple enough to serve the needs of empire, nationalism, and socio-religious reform. In the case of Empire, unlike the Theosophical Society, many Raj officials belonged to Freemasonry, which makes it all the more intriguing.



The Masonic scholar LS.M. Ward in 1921 poetically expressed the point to which Freemasonic religious formulations had been evolving for a century:



The Preserver, whether they call him the Madi, Or speak of the Christ returned to earth As the sun in his heat and glory From His throne in the azure sky. Sucks up the mist and dew, Whether they hail Him by Buddha's name And returning them to earth, Or Kalki, of Vishnu sprung, Renews the verdant plain, They tell us a truth for all the same So the Lord of Death and Birth And by every mystic sung. Returns to us again. (J.S.M. Ward, Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods, p. 344)



W.C. Bonnerjee and Rash Behari Ghosh must have been members of the Congress (or at least sympathizers)-when he spoke of people of all races, castes, and religions, whether of the East or West, joining together to give the practical effect to the Grand teachings of our Order. This mirrored the pluralistic vision of India, as well as the desire for a closer and more equitable union between India and Britain, that the Indian National Congress espoused. At the same time, this was also a vision of what the British Empire could be, and it could not have been lost on the consciousness of the Hindu and other Indian Masons at this meeting that one of their own had just been honored with membership in a Canadian lodge, half a world away. Masonic membership meant joining a world-wide fraternity, and membership could lead to international recognition and honors within that fraternity (which no doubt commanded the respect of even the British in India).

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