My History

I was watching a program on PBS. The theme of the program, hosted by a Harvard University Professor, was to trace lineage of some of the famous American black personalities as far back as they could. Any written documentation in the form of county records or War records that talks something about their ancestry was used to create sort of picture about who owned their ancestors, where did they worked and what did they do before and after civil war or during the re-construction story.

One of the personalities they interviewed was Chris Rock, famous stand-up comedian. They traced his great-great-great grandfather's life story in 1870's. Back then being a black and that too in south states of United States wasn’t exactly a pretty picture. But somehow Chris Rock's grand-grand-grand father managed to get the basic education. When American civil war ended and black slaves were freed, this guy had audacity to contest election for North Carolina assembly. Not only did he get elected but he stood for the election again after his first term and was re-elected. His bravery was worth rounds of applause. It's a different story that pretty soon blacks were disbarred from contesting assembly election but in the short window of a decade Chris Rock’s ancestor shone bright on the horizon. Listening to this, Chris was literally in tears. But what he said next moved me completely. He said 'growing up as a black kid, I always thought that all I am going to do in life is to clean after the white man. It's just I was lucky to bump into a comedy club and things changed drastically for me. But if I knew that my ancestors were intelligent and brave to this extent, things would have been different. I would have been ambitious to begin with'

He really hit the bulls’ eye with his thoughts. Living in America, it is not hard to figure out that black population is poor in every sense of social structure. Though they have freedom to do anything and enjoy equal rights as non-Black population, something is missing. Providing equal opportunity is the maximum extent to which a Government can help any backward ethnic or social group. But it’s entirely up to that group to grab the opportunity, to educate them and progress over the period of few generations. Something of this sort is not happening with the black community in US.

I guess one thing that they sorely miss is the historical context of their existence. The only thing that they can definitively say is that they are all from African continent. Beyond that no one of knows about their ancestors, their culture, their homeland. Nothing! They have no stories of bravery to recount and no tales of inspiration. They have no ethnic traditions to live with and no indigent philosophy to die with. Yes, they are Christians but that too was imposed on them. In short they lack confidence to shape their future because their history was lost in cruelty of slavery and was painted blank with white supremacy. (During slavery even Church believed that Black people have no souls!)

One of the less discussed and subtle effect of colonization was that the conquistadors tried their best to either completely wash away the conquered peoples history. This helped them create doubt in the minds of Conquered people. They were so successful in their mission that most of the conquered people loath their past and are eager to accept western civilization as the only alternative.

That brings me back Indian society. India is one of the very few nations that prospered tremendously in post-colonial era. All though, the problems we faced were similar to other new born nations with minor exception of each problem multiplied by billion people, India some how managed to stay united and focused towards prosperity. There are various reasons behind this success. But one reason that is rarely discussed and which is anti-thesis to what I described above is that India has rich history. Apart from China, India is the only country that has religion, traditions, philosophies, language, and literature, in short, culture blooming and continuing uninterrupted at least for past seven thousand years. So, technically India became independent in 1947 when in fact the events of 1947 were mere bleeps in the 'a-historical' timeline of India. We progressed tremendously in last sixty years but that's not exactly an achievement. This is the least that we should expect from us. We have experienced every possible situation, good or bad. We have seen glory days of Harshawardhan Empire and dark days of Islamic terror. We have seen bravery Shivaji and treachery of our own brethren fighting with Muslims. Yet, somehow we managed to survive. '

But sadly Indians aren't aware of who they are. Under the guise of secularization, wile communists are slowly washing Indians of their rich past. Aurangzeb is painted as a Hero and Mughal era as a Golden period. Ramanayan & Mahabharata is treated as a fantasy. There is no objective research towards Indian history and the only thing that is imposed on the people is vested interest of political group. We are desperate to world how we are a new nation when we should be imparting the long lasting values of humanity on rest of the world. On the one hand we have anti-national communists who are on mission to destroy India and establish outdated and brutal communists rule and on the other hand we have our youth, educated in western system more interested in adapting alien concepts and lampooning western ethos without thinking rationally.

That's not the end of our misery. We have so called nationalist who, instead of doing thorough research, blindly believe that India had everything and all we need to do is to re-discover that glory. That's quite stupid too. We should treat our history more of stepping stone towards the future. We need to understand our history thoroughly and pragmatically in order to build our future in tune with modern times. There is nothing like 'going back' to the glory days. The only option is constructing new 'glory days'. '

History is a treasure but it's up to finder how to use it. Fortunately, our ancestors gave us rich history and we owe same thing to our future generation.

Without history there is no future. Just ask to the people who were robbed their history!