On 7/17/07, shiv sastry wrote:
On Tuesday 17 Jul 2007 3:32 pm, ashok _ wrote: > I would say "hindu kingdoms" (rather than "indians do not document > anything" ) did not document anything. The arab tradition of > documenting everything was followed by muslim kingdoms... er.. a very small percentage of Muslims in India would fall in that category IMO. There rest were Hindus and behaved like Hindus even after conversion for various reasons.
I am not talking about general social commentary. I am talking about a history written by historians, geographers, travelers. I don't see how the issue of a converted person writing history comes up..... The mughal emperors had an army of historians and geographers and actively encouraged such activity... for e.g. abul fazal, mirza nathan, abdul qadir badauni. Are you saying there people were not indian ? (Apart from that there were travelers from the arab world who wrote social travelogues... ibn khaldoun, Al Biruni... Traveling of course was not a strong point for hindus, they were generally navel gazers )
However we are heading into Naipaulesque territory here. The narrative of a convert would not normally reflect what is pre-conversion or even pre-islamic.
i think few of these historians mentioned were converts, and not all of them wrote with prejudice and bias (a lot of documented history of hindu society in that period comes from the works of these people....) On Naipaul, I have read one of his books about islam... while he makes certain interesting observations, he has many "tainted views". For one, he neither speaks nor understands arabic which i think is neccessary to make any objective anthropological on the religion and its philosophy....he is a traveler with many biases, and many of these biases are based on his indian roots.....
