On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 4:35 AM, ss <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> With India's historical disdain for the humanities, neither historian >> nor sociologist was around to fully record or explain the scale of the >> destruction. > > Srini this is wrong. The history and and sociologuists merely wroet out their > biases and paid no attention to the Indian tradition of historical continuity > my mens of an oral tradition.
I agree that there's been no dearth of half baked theories that need avoiding, my favorite is the Noble Savage phenomenon (there's a hilarious text I recall that tried very hard to make the case that the Toda Tribes of Nilgiris were in fact one of the lost tribes of Israel), but that's digressing. I believe you've grasped the wrong import from my statement. There is a good reason the printing press wasn't invented in India - Indians weren't very big on writing things down for consumption. If you didn't learn it at the knees of your master you didn't learn - period. It is true that sociologists and historians are not solely a Western creation. And, in India the written record is quite strong when it comes to accounting - land grants to temples and war settlements are dutifully recorded in stone, brass plates and parchment right back to the start of recorded time. However, when it comes to recording the usual kinds of history India has lagged behind the rest of the world, and even China by a lot. Hagiographic records aren't solely an Indian phenomenon either, but there's not much of that either - sadly, oral record was preferred over the written as an instrument of caste control - the oral tradition preserved the transmission of knowledge within the permitted castes as the story of Ekalavya describes - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekalavya When it came to oral records Indians are definitely the masters - the Vedas have multiple checksums in them to prevent their corruption during transmission. It's no mean feat to transmit a complex text over millennia purely through oral means, but it's such a wasted effort - they had knowledge of writing all along and could have just written it down. The other thing is Indians of late don't seem to be a very introspective sort. Of course there are exceptions, but in general there are very few records from commoners in the last century. This is a rather recent phenomenon - there have been many great thinkers in the past, but again their mental efforts were lost to subsequent generations thanks to the peculiar Indian disdain for writing things down - we see this from the snatches of history that survive - the theological and philosophical debates of Adi Shankara are well recorded by his disciples, like the popular song bhaja govindam, but unlike Socrates, most Indian philosophers weren't so lucky as to have a Plato recording everything they said. Maharishi Kapila for example is more or less lost to the modern Indian. Even the well recorded teachings of the Buddha are rarely dissected in modern India, but one would hope that the person the Bahagavad Gita describes as equal to Krishna, and whom Buddha considers his spiritual master would merit some analysis. The art of analysis and introspection is lost in modern India. To compare if I were to hold up the world leader in navel gazing, the United States, the number of battle records and account of valor and martial prowess that have been recorded both in the first person and otherwise are innumerable. WWII and Vietnam alone must account for a good sized library of stories. With the number of battles and the enormous population of India our record of this sort of thing should respectfully stack up against any number of American histories, but sadly it doesn't. I think we've had no choice but to acknowledge we suck at athletic sport, let's come out on history and writing too.
