“We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realise that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb.”
“We worship Lord Ganesha. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”
No. This was not from one of Dinanath Batra’s infamous textbooks, but from our Prime Minister’s speech. If this continues, soon we will have a whole horde of people believing that aliens built the pyramids, a la Transformers . (There are some who do)
There’s seems to be a need to bring back a ‘glorious past’, a call back to times gone by when India was on top of the world, so to speak. A character in BBC’s 90s show Goodness Gracious Me is called Mr. Everything Comes From India — where he says everything from Cliff Richards, William Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, most English words, the British royal family, Superman and even Jesus came from India. The only notable exception was Prince Charles, whose ears “make him African”.
Our current rulers are also following this example, as a means to fulfil their promises to the public — that they will restore the country to the heights it was once at. It is the reason the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) now has a chairperson who believes that the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were occurrences in history and not myths. It’s the reason a little known king called Hemchandra Vikramaditya, called Hemu by the Akhil Bhartiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana (ABISY, a historical research organisation associated with the RSS), is being touted as the the saviour of Hindus in medieval times, the first to set up a Hindu Rashtra.
It’s also the reason A.K. Ramanujan’s stellar essay Three Hundred Ramayanas was removed from the Delhi University’s curriculum, why Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus was pulped, why a BJP leader can comfortably call for book burning at the National Museum.
The last regime desperate to cling on to the very same ‘glorious past’ narrative were the Nazis. Similar theories gave rise to the concept of a ‘master race’, and little needs to be said about what happened next.
To a certain extent, it is understandable why there is a need to make a religion that thrives on pluralism and the spirit of inquiry into a singular, almost masculine narrative. But mythological chest-beating suppresses actual progress. If plastic surgery were to be patted on the back and claimed as Indian, a better point of reference would be the Sushruta Samhita , in which rhinoplasty and various other surgical procedures are recorded.
Instead, we have a Prime Minister who decides that myths are real and takes examples from them. Refusal to entertain a scholarly work that doesn’t fit your rhetoric is not just making a farce of democracy, but plain and simple bullying. It is using a position of power to silence dissenters, the only thing that differentiates India from, well, North Korea.
This will not be the first or the last time we hear such statements from our leaders. It wouldn’t be surprising if tomorrow, we have someone telling us, the masses, that stem cell research was active in ancient India, because that’s how the Kauravas were born, or that nuclear power was used because the Brahmastra is just that.
Until then, we will just be ‘brainwashed’ to believe that the Wright brothers came before the pushpaka vimana.
