Are We A Hindu Rashtra?
By Samuel Dhar
16 April, 2016
Countercurrents.org
Hinduism is not a religion. For that matter neither are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikkhism and so on.
These are all COMMUNITIES.
Literal meaning of the Word, ‘Hindu’, coined by the Persians of the 7th century, is ‘universal’. By this definition, most of us who firmly believe in one Universal God, commonness of human kind and unity of social order, are true Hindus.
If screaming, ‘Bharat Mata ki Jae’ is the test of nationalism, many of us are not. India has always been a Patriarchal Community. Vedic folklore supposes Bharat, a male, to be the founder of the Nation known by his name.
A million dollar question is : “From where does the word ‘Mata’ get attached to Bharat?”
Our Bharat shall not become a Hindu Rashtra, simply by contorting and perverting its meaning and establishing an association with a so called religion.
As Guru Nanak said, “There is neither Hindu nor Mussulman (Muslim), but only man. So whose path shall I follow? I shall follow God’s path. God is neither Hindu nor Mussulman and the path which I follow is God’s.”
This is our heritage.
Many Holy Names for God, from many different traditions, are present in Sri Guru Granth Sahib. To name a few, ‘Hari’ appears 8344 times, ‘Ram’ 2533 times, Gopal 491 times, Gobind 475 times, Prabhu 1371 times and so on.
This is our heritage.
In the words of the Upanishads :
“Bala, darpa, kamam, moham, krodham, parigraham,
Nirmamah, Shanto Bhuae Kalpate.”
This is the true path of/to God; “Rid of the five sinful ways, born out of the five human indriyas, we can roam the entire ethereal space of the Universe, in peace; one with God”; I AM THAT I AM.
This too is our heritage.
By accepting the Rakhi sent by Rani Karnavati, Humayun gave birth to a new social order of a mixed culture.
This is our Heritage.
Are the ten Commandments only a Christian faith. Barring three of the first four, the other seven commandments are universal in nature :
Shall not take the LORD’s name in vain (Not swear).
Shall honour thy father and mother.
Shall not kill.
Shalt not commit adultery.
Shalt not steal.
Shalt not bear false witness.
Shalt not covet thy neighbor’s property, wife or servant.
Can all this too not be a part our heritage?
Recently, a circulated study report, painstakingly prepared by an esteemed fellow Indian, under the banner of Virat Hindu Sangam, found its way in my mail box, kind courtesy a fellow Veteran. The report lists thousands of Muslim shrines, mosques, mazars and dargahs, which were either built upon the ruins of or built with the materials of Hindu temples/shrines.
Even if the above report is taken on face value, most true Indians would not understand its purpose. What has the compiler tried to achieve?
How far in History do we go back? How much of distortion of History do we accept? At which point of time in History do we stop taking stock of edifices of a new order built on the ruins of an existing culture?
Extensive archaeological excavations have proved that before the Aryan migration into the ancient Indian subcontinent, IVC was a highly developed civilization on its frontiers, on the fertile flood plains of the Indus River and its vicinity. This civilization was attacked and annihilated. As the Vedic group advanced rapidly to the rest of the Indian Sub-Continent, the Dravidians retreated further East and South, till they had no were else to go. Poor Chaps!
The earliest evidence of religious practices of IVC date back approximately to 5500 BC; evidence suggests that the IVC had social conditions comparable to Sumeria and even superior to the contemporary Babylonians and Egyptians.
Whatever be the origin of the Aryans, it is an incontrovertible fact of history that the Aryans were not indigenous to India, were totally a different race than the Dravidians of IVC and that they completely destroyed the towns and cities of the latter civilization and established themselves atop its ruins.
Flying in the face of facts of both Archaeology and modern science, it has become fashionable for the Hindutva Brigade to state on authority, with the support of unverified arguments, that the Aryans were none other than those of IVC and were the original inhabitants of India,
Cristian Violatti, one of the editors of Ancient History Encyclopedia, has written, “Unlike the peace loving Dravidians of the IVC, Aryans in antiquity, were a nomadic war like tribe of cattle herders”.
This is borne by many an ancient account, a few of which are :
A number of key battles of Dasarajna’ or the ‘Dashradnya Yuddha’ or the Battle of the ten kings, spanning many years, described in the Rig Veda, resulted in the total destruction of the pre-Vedic culture and settlements.
Rig Veda also mentions the battles fought by the earlier Aryan King Devdosa, with non Aryan Dasa King Sambara, the death of the latter and the complete annihilation of 99 non Aryan cities.
Then of course, if any further proofs were required, we have our very own Mahabharat, through which the Vedic Philosophy was propounded in the Bhagwat Gita, the Upanishads and the Vedanta.
Who was the non-Aryan King Dasa and what was the non-Aryan civilization of the 99 cities completely destroyed by the Aryan King Devedosa?
Archaeological excavations of the IVC till date, carried out over almost 100 years, establish IVC’s flourishing and advanced nature, much beyond the competence of the nomadic Aryans of that period.
Some of us, who still wonder how such an advanced civilization like the IVC, suddenly vanished, have to look no further than the accounts in the Rig Veda, of wars waged by the Aryan King Devdosa as also the war of the ten Kings.
Archaeological excavations have uncovered a culture that had nothing in common with the culture of the Vedic Aryans. IVC people, unlike the Vedic Aryans of later years, were largely city bound and peaceful, followed no rituals but believed in philosophy, meditated, practised Yoga, reared or used no horses, had no iron tools/weapons, fought no wars, at least till the ones thrust upon them by the latter, had a language other than Sanskrit and had a script for writing on seals.
Much is made of by some private archaeologists and a handful of historians who have been trying to debunk the erstwhile established fact of the transmigration of the Aryans. I will recommend to these skeptics, the relevant web site of ASI for these latter day excavations http://asi.nic.in/asi_exca_imp_gujarat.asp. ASI which makes no such claims.
Whereas, copious written and Archaeological proofs of the existence of IVC spanning over three millenniums exist even today, there is not even a shred of similar proof of the legendary Vedic Aryan civilization which flourished thereafter; the unscripted literature, (For lack of a written script), is supposed to have survived orally for a millennium, before being reduced to writing around 600 BC.
A detailed study of the findings of the Archaeological sites will lead to the following conclusions :
(a) The IVC were not conversant with iron technology even as late as 1500 BC and were still using copper and bronze tools and making artifacts from these metals.
(b) The seals of the period were still being written in the same script as before.
(c) Carbon dating, firmly establishes the dating of excavated artifacts as between 3000 to 1500 BC.
(d) No mention of these sites are found in the Vedas or the Upanishads.
(e) IVC seals depict a creature we call unicorn bulls, mistaken as horses by some eager diggers, out to prove that Aryans were indigenous to India.
The word ‘Arya’ was used by the Indic people of the Vedic period in India. to refer to a geographic location known as Aryavarta, where Indo-Aryan culture flourished.
(Gopal Madan, 1990, ‘India through the ages’, Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. p. 70.).
The closely related Persian people used the same term as an ethnic label for themselves in the Avesta scriptures, and the word forms the etymological source of the country Iran. (Mallory 1991, p. 125).
It is difficult to understand how the word Hindu, coined by Persians in the 7th century BC, got hitched to a culture and oral literature at least a thousand years older ! Even if the existence of a Dravidian IVC culture is ignored, there is no Hindu connection to the origin of the Vedic Culture.
Given the mass of evidence, only a small part of which has been enumerated above, should one ask for the restoration of the Dravidian Institutions and culture of the IVC after destroying everything Vedic-Aryan? Preposterous? Yes, most definitely.
How logical is, then, the painstaking efforts of the Hindu Brigade under the encouragement of the Parivar, to reverse History, by listing destroyed so called Hindu shrines, with shrill calls for rebuilding all real or imaginary Hindu temples/shrines after destruction of the present Muslim monuments?
Samuel Dhar is an Army Engineer officer, who took premature retirement 28 years ago to practise as an engineering consultant, specialising in use of polymers in constructions. He has authored scores of Articles and book on philosophy, theology and Nationalism. He also has a collection of poetry. His Blog site, “Samuel’s World” as well as Sainik Darpan, has over 120 articles.