DIALOGUE QUARTERLY Volume-18 No. 1 July-September, 2016 Subscription Rates : For Individuals (in India) Single issue Rs. 30.00 Annual Rs. 100.00 For 3 years Rs. 250.00 For Institutions: Single Issue Rs. 60.00 in India, Abroad US $ 15 Annual Rs. 200.00 in India, Abroad US $ 50 For 3 years Rs. 500.00 in India, Abroad US $ 125 All cheques and Bank Drafts (Account Payee) are to be made in the name of “ASTHA BHARATI”, Delhi. Advertisement Rates : Outside back-cover Rs. 25, 000.00 Per issue Inside Covers Rs. 20, 000.00 ,, Inner page coloured Rs. 15, 000.00 ,, Inner full page Rs. 10, 000.00 ,, DIALOGUE QUARTERLY Editorial Advisory Board Mrinal Miri Jayanta Madhab Editor B.B. Kumar Consulting Editor J.N. Roy ASTHA BHARATI DELHI The views expressed by the contributors do not necessarily represent the view-point of the journal. © Astha Bharati, New Delhi Printed and Published by Dr. Lata Singh, IAS (Retd.) Secretary, Astha Bharati Registered Office: 27/201 East End Apartments, Mayur Vihar, Phase-I Extension, Delhi-110096. Working Office: 23/203 East End Apartments, Mayur Vihar, Phase-I Extension, Delhi-110096 Phone : 91-11-22712454 e-mail : [email protected] web-site : www. asthabharati.org Printed at : Nagri Printers, Naveen Shahdara, Delhi-32 Contents Editorial Perspective 7 Intellectual mercenaries, the Post-Independence Avataras of the Hindu Munshis 1. North-East Scan Assam Floods: Another Perspective 11 Patricia Mukhim Manipur: Maintaining Sanity in the Times of Chaos 14 Pradip Phanjoubam 2. Pre-Paninian India Linguistic Awareness from Rig Veda to Mahabharata 17 Dr. Damodar Thakur 3. The Preliminary Research of Hindu Sculptural Artifacts of Vijaya Period in Champa in Binh Ðinh Province 28 Phan Anh Tu 4. In Favour of Freedom of Expression 49 Koenraad Elst 5. Is ‘Dalit’ Activism Just Propaganda by Other Means? 64 Rajeev Srinivasan 6. Indian History and the Colonial Historiography 75 Makkhan Lal 7. Colonial Imprint on Historiography in India 92 Navaratna Rajaram 8. New Perspective on Ancient Indian History in the Context of Emerging Insights 100 Come Carpentier de Gourdon 9. Stupidity in the Garb of Scholarship 108 B.B. Kumar 10. Wendy Doniger’s Vulgar Hindu History 124 Shankar Sharan 11. Sati Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries, and the Changing Colonial Discourse 145 Meenakshi Jain 12. Sub-regionalism in South Asia: Potentials and Prospects of BBIN 155 Mohammad Monirul Islam 13. Energy Scarcity and Ambiguity making India Vulnerable against Non-Traditional Security Threats 172 Prabhavit Dobhal 6 DIALOGUE, Volume-18 No. 1 Editorial Perspective Intellectual mercenaries, the Post-Independence Avataras of the Hindu Munshis India is a vast country, and, as is expected, it also has its problems, as any country of its size and complexity is expected to have. Unfortunately, such problems are often aggravated by a section of our intellectuals and the media. Spoiled by the political patronage, they simply raise the issue at the high emotional pitch; create confusion, rather than suggesting remedies, whenever there is change of guard. Presently, two issues, rather two critical problems related to Kashmir and cow-protection, are being hotly debated in the Indian press. One finds a lot of empty perverted rhetorical discourse in the same. Many good Samaritans advise soft human approach in case of Kashmir. But how, when one confronts the cruel face of a terrorist? Indian Express has published the papers of Harvansh Mukhia, Kancha Illaiyah, and many others. Most of the papers writers indulge in empty perverted rhetorical discourse. Mukhia, a retired Marxist professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, as usual, cannot free himself from colonial Marxist paradigm. According to his paper, The pseudo alternative, “The Sangh Parivar has furthered the colonial understanding of India’s past.” He further writes: “Even as it hopes to divide and rule by pitting gaurakshaks against the beef eaters, the Parivar’s agenda of rewriting history and bringing back the glories of ancient India remains a pipe dream. It’s not for nothing that there has not been a single book or even an article from its historians that has been under discussion on any platform, right wing or left wing over the past few decades.” Here, it needs mention that Mukhia is wrong on many counts. He is not only giving a political statement, rather indulging in sloganeering, but also lacks professional honesty. At least none can blame RSS of intra-Hindu social divide, and for the oppression of a section of the Hindus. And again only the Marxists accept the equation of caste and class; and it DIALOGUE, Volume-18 No. 1 7 is not RSS, but the Marxists, who are responsible for retention of colonial constructs, such as ‘Aryan Aggression Theory’ (now Aryan Migration Theory) in our curricula. Mukhia is dishonest that he brings to reference the names of Prime Minister Modi and Smriti Irani, rather than that of Dharmpal, Ram Swarup and others in a discourse of historical nature. Persons like Kancha Illaiyah with the agenda of intra-Hindu divide, or those who are incapable of feeling the pain of those who revere the cow and equally feel the pain of our Dalit brothers have deep-rooted bias and agenda. Unfortunately, some newspapers and channels have become willing partners in such nefarious game. Anyway, what is going on is not an innocent phenomenon. Input of investigative journalism, may perhaps help in finding the reality. Elliot and Dowson’s massive eight-volume History of India as Told by its Own Historians, wrote about a strange Indic phenomenon related to Indian history writing. It was about the attitude, the mindset, of the Hindu Munshis writing about the Muslim rulers in India, who, as we know, mostly employed Muslim Munshis for recording the happenings/developments during their rule. The Muslim Munshis recorded with utmost joy the defeat of the Hindu rulers by the Muslim ones, massive Hindu massacre and their enslavement, and the destruction of their temples and settlements. The Hindus, killed in the war, were always dispatched to hell; this being so even in the case of one commanding a Muslim army. On the other hand, if a Muslim lost his life, he was a martyr, and has his place reserved in the heaven. Strangely, and to his extreme surprise, Sir H.M. Elliot found even the Hindu Munshis sharing the same attitude towards the Hindus. He labelled such Hindu Munshis as the “slavish crew;” Ram Swarup, a well-known scholar and thinker, just called them ‘Hindu Munshis.’ Sir H. M. Elliot found that some of the annalists, the chroniclers of events employed by foreign Muslim kings in India were Hindus also. But the results were no better. He observed that ‘‘from one of the nation we might have expected to have learnt what were their feelings, hopes, faiths, fears, and yearnings, of his subject race,’’ but this was not to be. He further wrote: “not one of this slavish crew who treats the history of his native country subjectively, or presents us with the thoughts, emotions, and raptures which is a long oppressed race might be supposed to give vent to.” Ram Swarup observes: “This tribe of Hindu Munshis or the ‘slavish crew’ of Elliot have a long life and show a remarkable continuity. Instead of diminishing, their number has 8 DIALOGUE, Volume-18 No. 1 multiplied with time. Today they dominate the universities, the media and the country’s political thinking.” Thus, the Hindu Minshis of the Saltnat or Mughal period did not vanish from the Indian scene; their progeny, or better to say they themselves appeared in their avatara, as the intellectual mercenaries or the intellectual sepoys. We find all the myths, distortions and hypotheses of the colonial days, as well as present day Western and Marxist, or even Stalinist distortions in their writings. Irfan Habib, in an earliest debate on History writing, declared that “Stalin’s classic essay on dialectical and historical materialism” was nothing less than “undoubtedly an advance over Marx’s own early ideas.” For him the caste system of Indian society “so well bears out the Marxist conception of a class society.” Habib glorified the Turkish invasion of India as it ‘‘freed the artisans from certain old restraints’’ and “laid a new basis for the growth of trade and commerce.’’ Facts have secondary importance for Irfan Habib; as the fixed conclusions were already drawn when he was 31 years old. All he wanted was “to apply the Marxist method” for which he needed “particular kind of facts.” (Irfan Habib, Marxist interpretation, in Seminar, New Delhi, Nov. 1962). Today, 85, Habib, along with other Stalinists like Romila Thapar et al., has hardly changed his stance, except a necessary disguise of terminology, forced by the demise of Soviet imperialism. Another difficulty with such scholars is their arrogance, which they share with some Western scholars. When confronted by some rival scholar, they simply refuse discourse. As for example, when Rajiv Malhotra, a well-known scholar, raised certain questions about the writings of Wendy Doniger about India; she refused to discuss the same with him and wanted to meet him as a scholar meeting a native informer. The same kind of arrogance was shown by Romila Thapar to Sita Ram Goel, who sent a questionnaire, given below to her along with his book in which he had pressed the Marxists to supply the relevant information about the destruction of the temples by the Hindus, claimed by the Marxists on the same line as the record of the destruction of Hindu temples by Muslims exists. So he requested the Marxist professors to produce the relevant information as per the following questionnaire: 1) A list of epigraphs which record the destruction of Buddhist and Jain monum ents and Animist shrines by any Hindu, at any time; 2) C itations from H indu literary sources describing destruction of Buddhist and Jain m onum ents and Animist shrines by any H indu, at any time, at any place; DIALOGUE, Volume-18 No.