Indian MarxismAmong the most active and determined academic opponents of any serious reopening of the AIT(Aryan Invasion Theory) debate, we find Marxists such as Prof. Romila Thapar (whose positions will be discussed below) and Prof. Ram Sharan Sharma. Let us make it clear from the outset that there is nothing controversial about the label 'Marxist': in India, Marxism is still the dominant paradigm in the Humanities, and hundreds of academics are still proud to call themselves Marxists. It is therefore a bit bizarre when Romila Thapar insinuates that the non-AIT school merely uses the label 'Marxist' as a cheap way to dismiss the Indian pro-AIT scholars like Sharma and herself without proper refutation: "Those that question their theories are dismissed as Marxists!" If confirmation from an unsuspected Marxist source is needed, Tom Bottomore's standard dictionary of Marxism mentions and quotes both R.S. Sharma and Romila Thapar as representatives of Indian Marxism.
The Marxist dominance of India's cultural sphere is not a convenient rumour, it can easily be documented and its genesis traced and explained. Nehru was fond of Communism though personally too bourgeois to join it. It was chiefly his daughter Indira Gandhi (guided by her secretary P.N. Haksar) who, when she was critically dependent on Communist support during her intra-Congress power struggle, promoted Communists (often unregenerate Stalinists till today) and created many new institutes for them, including Jawaharlal Nehru University. In 1975, when the Communist bid to take over the Congress Party from within was thwarted by Indira's son Sanjay Gandhi, the Communist power position in the intellectual sector was left untouched: its importance escaped the Gandhi family, who only focused on immediate political power. When in 1998, the new BJP Government nominated people of its own choice to the Indian Council of Historical Research, a roar of indignation went up among Indian Marxists against this 'politicization of scholarship', highlighting to the alert observer the extent to which the Marxists themselves had treated the ICHR as their own playground, and how, like spoilt children, they couldn't stand losing it.
Marx's Indian followers have a confused but predominantly negative attitude to the question of India's legitimacy as a united republic. They are willing to accept the unified Indian state as long as it is useful to their own ends (as in 1959-62, after their election victory in Kerala gave them hope of taking over India, a hope crushed by the embarrassing Chinese invasion of 1962), but they are just as ready to discard it, because they do not believe in it and have no loyalty towards it. Around the time of independence, they actively campaigned for the Balkanization of India, hoping to gobble up one fragment after another. They never tire of denouncing anything that bolsters India's unity as a 'myth'. For them, India is an artificial unit, a prisonhouse of nations, bound to fall apart.
In contrast with other colonized countries, Marxists in India played no important role in the freedom movement, except negatively. According to a Western Marxist observer: "Uncompromising opposition to Gandhi and his cherished Hindu convictions meant that communists were cut off in a considerable measure from the mainstream of the patriotic struggle". Ever since, they have supported every antinational cause: the crushing of the Quit India movement (1942), Partition (1947), the Razakar terror campaign to prevent the merger of Hyderabad with India (1948), the Chinese claims to Indian territory (up to 1962: "China's chairman is also India's chairman"). As late as 1997, Communist leader Sitaram Yechury refused to admit that China had been the aggressor in 1962. In the 1990s, they have threatened secession of the states they control in the event of a Hindu-nationalist election victory. It is a different matter that by the time this victory took place, in 1998, the Communist movement had become too weak and grey to hazard such action.
To complete the picture, it should be realized that as born upper-caste Hindus alienated by westernization, Indian Marxists are animated by a seething hatred of their ancestral culture. Unlike the British who felt some patronizing sympathy for the heathens whom God had entrusted to their civilizing care, anglicized Hindus feel a need to exorcize the remainders of Hindu heritage from themselves and their surroundings.
**** Marxism against India ****
To understand the compulsion on Indian Marxists to hold out against changes in the dominant AIT paradigm as long as possible, we should know a few things about their unique position as compared to that of Marxists elsewhere. Their animosity against the native culture of India and against a theory which would strengthen their own country's prestige is somewhat surprising, for in most Third World countries, Marxists have also been ardent nationalists in the struggle for cultural as well as political and economic decolonization. In Communist countries, national history was rewritten not only to vilify the reactionary forces (e.g. Confucius) but also to highlight and glorify the nation's contribution to material culture and scientific progress. This is or was true of China, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and of their supporters abroad. Thus, Cambridge scientist historian Joseph Needham's loyalty was to Mao's version of Stalinism as a system, but he got enamoured with China itself and wrote a very Sinocentric history of Science and Civilization in China, highlighting the unexpectedly large contribution which China has made to human progress.
Along the same lines, we must note in India the lone Marxist historian Bhagwan Singh, who has contributed to the critique of the AIT, focusing specifically on the material culture and the economic data available in Vedic literature and the archaeological record of the Harappan cities, to show that the two match. Also, Western Marxists of an earlier generation have protested against the imperialist projection of colonial racism onto the colonized native society, as in the AIT-related racial theory of caste: "The early Indo-Aryans could no more have thought in modern terms of race prejudice than they could have invented the airplane." Finally, Soviet historians have extolled ancient Hindu contributions to science and political culture which were ignored by their political allies in India.
Most Indian Marxists, by contrast, along with their supporters in Western Indology departments (when it comes to controversial issues, most Western India-watchers are incredibly gullible parrots of whatever their privileged Indian contacts tell them), go out of their way to belittle India and to vilify as 'chauvinistic' or worse any attempt to revalue India's contribution. The mainstream of contemporary Indian Marxism is true to Karl Marx's own contempt for and worst-possible interpretation of all things Indian. Marx thought that Hinduism "was the ideology of an oppressive and outworn society"; he 'shared the distaste of most Europeans for its more lurid features. he was as skeptical as his Hindu followers were to be of any notion of a Hindu 'golden age' of the past."
Marx acknowledged the colonialists' historical mission of eliminating the 'Asiatic mode of production', and claimed that colonial rule could only be compared (to its obvious advantage) to the memory of Turkish or the threat of Czarist rule, but not to native rule, for which India was historically unfit because it had never been a nation. In an 1853 letter, Marx wrote that "Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society."
The idea of a continuous and glorious civilization in North India dating back more than 5,000 years does not fit in well with this vision. That of the barbaric Aryans imposing foreign rule on the hapless natives is much more useful, esp. for characterizing Indian society as 'oppressive'. This way, lingering colonial prejudices of Western scholars and the class interests of India's anglicized elite and anti-Hindu intelligentsia reinforce each other to create the strange spectacle of Indians and indologists virulently opposing any rethinking of India's past which might increase the weight of India's own contribution to her own history.
For instance, Romila Thapar questions the term 'Indus-Saraswati civilization', which 'evokes the Rigveda' (by bringing the Vedic river Saraswati, where the biggest concentration of Harappan cities has been found, into the picture), for its 'ideological and political dimensions', and she imputes to its proponents the following motive: "The equating of the Harappan and Vedic culture is not essentially an attempt at correlating archaeological and literary sources (") There are other agendas which are being addressed in the attempt."78 It is bad form and bad scholarship to bypass someone's arguments to attack his motives, and even worse to replace his stated motives with imputed motives, but this is one phenomenon which outside observers of the debate will have to get used to: Indian Marxism has given wide currency to the approach of 'I don't care what arguments you come up with, I'm going to tell you what your true motives are, you reactionary pig'.
But then, even if reprehensible, this imputation of motives may once in a while hit upon the truth. 1 believe Prof. Thapar is right when she guesses this reasoning in the minds of Indian AIT critics: "If it can be argued that the Harappan culture is in fact Vedic or that the Rigveda is earlier even than the Harappan, then the Vedas continue to be foundational to the subcontinental civilisation of South Asia and also attract the encomium of representing an advanced civilization, superior even to the pastoral-agrarian culture actually described in Vedic texts." However, I think that in saying this, Prof. Thapar has also revealed what exactly goes on in the minds of Indian Marxist critics of AIT criticism. Indeed, Vedic tradition does gain in stature by being identified with the vast and advanced Harappan civilization: that is why Indian nationalists like it, and just as precisely, it is why Indian Marxists abhor it.
**** The establishment vs. the outsiders ****
Since the Marxists have occupied the seats of academic and media power for decades, it is no surprise that their attacks on others often take the form of a haughty dismissal. David Frawley's contributions are laughed off with reference to his lack of western academic training (he studied the Vedas in a traditional Indian setting, becoming an acknowledged vedacarya). The fact that he published about Ayurveda and Vedic astrology are sufficient to denounce him as a 'quack'. With reference to Subhash Kak and N.S. Rajaram, indeed complete outsiders to the Indian history establishment, Romila Thapar dismisses the contribution of these 'American-trained professional scientists researching on ancient India' as essentially 'nineteenth-century tracts [though] peppered with references to using the computer so as to suggest scientific objectivity', typical for amateurs who do history 'as a hobby'.
Should people be allowed to speak out on subjects not mentioned on their diplomas? Romila Thapar seems to think so when it comes to her own case, e.g. as a non-linguist she invokes the authority of the linguistic evidence several times: 'Such an early date for the Rigveda is untenable on the available linguistic evidence nor is there support for the argument of a westward flow of people from northern India, neither from linguistic nor from archaeological sources' And: 'These reconstructions disregard the linguistic data, probably because it would puncture their argument. It is conveniently stated that the linguistic models arise out of political and cultural factors and presumably therefore may be ignored.'
The latter sentence is an incorrect rendering of N.S. Rajaram's rejection of the linguistic evidence. Though he does make much of the political context behind the linguistic theory of an East-European Urheimat, his point is, rather, that the reconstruction of a proto-language can never reach beyond the stage of mere hypothesis, for it cannot pass the decisive scientific test of empirical verifications. This critique is pertinent, though by no means as devastating for the scientific value of historical linguistics as Prof. Rajaram assumes; it is at any rate more than a 'convenient' excuse.
I believe AIT critics are wrong to disregard the linguistic evidence, but I also believe that for those who rightly choose to take it into account, evaluating the linguistic evidence requires specific competence. The US-based scientists' exaggerated skepticism vis-à-vis linguistics has at least made them abstain from dabbling in a subject they don't sufficiently understand. By contrast, Romila Thapar discusses not only the linguistic but also the astronomical evidence, if only to dismiss it as unreliable. Now, here is a subject on which I would rather trust a NASA scientist like Prof. Rajaram than a bookworm from JNU's History department. Likewise, the evidence of Vedic mathematics (Baudhayana's Shulba Sutra as logical ancestor of Babylonian and Greek mathematics) is a subject which I would rather leave in the care of professional mathematicians like Rajaram and Subhash Kak. If anything looks '19th-century' in this debate, it is the conspicuous negligence by Prof. Thapar and other invasionists of the input from the exact sciences, an input which has gone far in strengthening the anti-AIT case.
True, there is often something naive about exact scientists when they enter the field of the Humanities. But then, people from the Sciences have a logic and a lucidity and a healthy aversion to compromise with prevalent opinion (natural laws not being bendable to opinion), so that, once they have learned the ways of the Humanities, they often do much better than the established authorities. This is particularly true in India, where bright students are invariably guided towards the scientific departments, so that the Humanities typically attract the second-rate students, quite a few of whom go on to become professors. Anyone can master the art of providing erudite footnotes, but the Vedic and Harappan evidence, particularly the evidence reachable through the 'hard' sciences (astronomy, geology), is a much more serious nut to crack.
Another Marxist historian, Parvathi Menon, has ridiculed Dr. Natwar Jha, who has elaborated a Sanskrit-based decipherment of the Indus script, as 'just a schoolmaster'. Comments N.S. Rajaram: 'This is not true, but it doesn't matter. The great mathematician Ramanujan was a clerk in the Madras port, while Einstein himself was serving as a clerk in the Swiss patent office when he discovered Relativity. The idea of objectivity is beyond such minds; status means everything.'
Mercifully, Romila Thapar and her friends haven't found occasion to comment on Shrikant Talageri yet. His bright and innovative contributions, quite literally written after working hours 'as a hobby', would not suggest to the readers that he actually makes a living as a bank clerk. There was a time when Marxists denounced academic ivory towers and applauded the contributions of working people, but in India they have been too privileged to be even polite towards people who make an honest living.
**** Indian Marxists abroad ****
In their campaign against India and Hinduism, Indian Marxists get plenty of patronage from Western universities. When Non-Resident Indians raise money to fund a chair of Indian Studies in a Western university, what they get for their money is in most cases the appointment of an Indian Marxist academic who comes to confirm the Western audiences in their most negative stereotypes about India, e.g. by reducing every single aspect of Hindu civilization to 'caste oppression' (it is Axioma 1 of contemporary Indian Studies that Hinduism is caste, wholly caste and nothing but caste). Thus, the Hinduja Foundation has set up an Indic Studies programme in Columbia University, but its staff includes determinedly anti-Hindu characters who even vilify their own sponsors at conferences elsewhere.
One occasion where I saw US-based Indian Marxists in action was at the 1996 Annual South Asia Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in a panel purportedly dealing with the AIT debate. I knew that excellent and innovative papers by N.S. Rajaram and Shrikant Talageri had been rejected by the organizers, so I felt entitled to expect presentations of top-notch scholarship dwarfing even that of Rajaram and Talageri. Instead, what the audience got, was a canvassing session for the 'Forum of Indian Leftists' without any scholarly papers. The speakers disdained to even mention any of the argumentative contents of the AIT debate, except 'David Frawley's paradox' (the AIT's puzzling implication pointed out by Frawley, viz. that the Harappan civilization had numerous cities but no literature, while Vedic civilization had a vast literature but no cities), which they simply laughed off without discussion ad rem.
But Frawley's paradox is entirely pertinent: what are the chances that a literate culture leaves the biggest conglomerate of archaeological sites behind, but only a handful of short inscriptions as the complete corpus of its literature; while the illiterate conquerors produce a vast and sophisticated literature within a few centuries, but leave no sizable architecture behind? What are the chances that the largest civilization of the world loses its language to a conquering band of nomadic tribesmen? The AIT has the weight of probability against it.
The one interesting piece of information in the whole session was presented by Vijay Prashad: about the impact of the Aryan race theory on the position of (Asian) Indians in the USA in the past century. It turns out that for much of the time, they were counted as 'white' thanks to their IE connection, and that they strongly held on to this profitable classification rather than to show solidarity with other non-white minorities. But in the 1970s, when the policy of positive discrimination for ethnic minorities started to have a serious impact, Indians were not slow to parade their skin colour as entitling them to minority privileges. If true, this is yet another interesting instance of the political use of the AIT. However, Prashad revealed his destructive intentions when he called Dalit Voice 'a wonderful paper' and praised its disruptive positions, esp. its division of Indians in aboriginals and invaders.
Biju Matthew insisted on the Stalinist position that in the social sciences, no theory ever comes without a political agenda. So, he reduced the whole AIT debate to a question of cultural policy of the Indian bourgeoisie, which was badly trying to be European. This was indeed part of the motive for the 19th-century acceptance of the AIT by the likes of Keshab Chandra Sen, but not of the present-day rejection of the AIT. But Matthew had not cared to notice the diametrical opposition between the former, colonial, and the latter, anti-colonial positions, perhaps because he counted on a knee-jerk reaction of hostility to anyone who merely utters the word.
He was all the more serious about deciding the burning question whether Non-Resident Indians should call themselves 'Indian' or 'South-Asian'; he himself opted for the latter 'because it has the advantage of being antinational'. He wanted South-Asians in North America to shake off their religious and national identities and develop an 'identity project' on the model of the African-Americans, which would only leave race as the distinctive trait of South-Asians in the US, a self-identification which approximates racism in its original meaning. I am in no position to berate African-Americans for defining their own identity in racial terms, for the reduction of their complex ethno-religio-linguistic identities (Yoruba, Ashanti etc.) to their skin color was forced on them by Arab (7th-20th century) and later also by European slave-traders (15th-19th century); but to deliberately drop existing non-racial identities for a racial one, that is another matter.
Marx's Indian followers have a confused but predominantly negative attitude to the question of India's legitimacy as a united republic. They are willing to accept the unified Indian state as long as it is useful to their own ends (as in 1959-62, after their election victory in Kerala gave them hope of taking over India, a hope crushed by the embarrassing Chinese invasion of 1962), but they are just as ready to discard it, because they do not believe in it and have no loyalty towards it. Around the time of independence, they actively campaigned for the "Balkanization of India", hoping to gobble up one fragment after another. They never tire of denouncing anything that bolsters India's unity as a 'myth'. For them, India is an artificial unit, a prisonhouse of nations, bound to fall apart, (as what any of the hostile country inimical to India, would expect and dream of).
In contrast with other colonized countries, Marxists in India played no important role in the freedom movement either, except negatively. According to a Western Marxist observer: "Uncompromising opposition to Gandhi and his cherished Hindu convictions meant that communists were cut off in a considerable measure from the mainstream of the patriotic struggle". Ever since, they have supported every antinational cause: the crushing of the Quit India movement (1942), Partition (1947), the Razakar terror campaign to prevent the merger of Hyderabad with India (1948), the Chinese claims to Indian territory (up to 1962: "China's chairman is also India's chairman"). As late as 1997, CPI leader Sitaram Yechury refused to admit that China had been the aggressor in 1962.
In the 1990s, they had threatened secession of the states they control in the event of a Hindu-nationalist election victory(i.e. BJP/RSS). It is a different matter that by the time this victory took place, in 1998, the Communist movement had become too weak and grey to hazard such action.
To complete the picture, it should be realized that as born Hindus alienated by westernization, Indian Marxists are animated by a seething hatred of their ancestral culture and heritage.
**** Marxism against India ****
To understand the compulsion on Indian Marxists to hold out against changes in the dominant AIT paradigm as long as possible, we should know a few things about their unique position as compared to that of Marxists elsewhere. Their animosity against the native culture of India and against a theory which would strengthen their own country's prestige is somewhat surprising, for in most Third World countries, Marxists have also been ardent nationalists in the struggle for cultural as well as political and economic decolonization. In Communist countries, national history was rewritten not only to vilify the reactionary forces (e.g. Confucius) but also to highlight and glorify the nation's contribution to material culture and scientific progress. This is or was true of China, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and of their supporters abroad.
Along the same lines, we must note in India the lone Marxist historian Bhagwan Singh, who has contributed to the critique of the AIT, focusing specifically on the material culture and the economic data available in Vedic literature and the archaeological record of the Harappan cities, to show that the two match. Also, Western Marxists of an earlier generation have protested against the imperialist projection of colonial racism onto the colonized native society, as in the AIT-related racial theory of caste: "The early Indo-Aryans could no more have thought in modern terms of race prejudice than they could have invented the airplane." Finally, Soviet historians have extolled ancient Hindu contributions to science and political culture which were ignored by their political Leftists and Marxists allies in India, instead went on to counter that very argument.
Most Indian Marxists, by contrast, along with their supporters in Western Indology departments (when it comes to controversial issues, most Western India-watchers are incredibly gullible parrots of whatever their privileged Indian contacts tell them), go out of their way to belittle India and to vilify as 'chauvinistic' or worse any attempt to revalue India's contribution.
In their campaign against India and Hinduism, Indian Marxists get plenty of patronage from Western universities. When Non-Resident Indians raise money to fund a chair of Indian Studies in a Western university, what they get for their money is in most cases the appointment of an Indian Marxist academic who comes to confirm the Western audiences in their most negative stereotypes about India, e.g. by reducing every single aspect of Hindu civilization to 'caste oppression' (it is Axioma 1 of contemporary Indian Studies that Hinduism is caste, wholly caste and nothing but caste). Thus, the Hinduja Foundation has set up an Indic Studies programme in Columbia University, but its staff includes determinedly anti-Hindu characters who even vilify their own sponsors at conferences elsewhere.
One occasion where I saw US-based Indian Marxists in action was at the 1996 Annual South Asia Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in a panel purportedly dealing with the AIT debate. I knew that excellent and innovative papers by N.S. Rajaram and Shrikant Talageri had been rejected by the organizers, so I felt entitled to expect presentations of top-notch scholarship dwarfing even that of Rajaram and Talageri. Instead, what the audience got, was a canvassing session for the 'Forum of Indian Leftists' without any scholarly papers. The speakers disdained to even mention any of the argumentative contents of the AIT debate, except 'David Frawley's paradox' (the AIT's puzzling implication pointed out by Frawley, viz. that the Harappan civilization had numerous cities but no literature, while Vedic civilization had a vast literature but no cities), which they simply laughed off without discussion ad rem.
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By Gurumurthy
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