NiṣādaHermaphroditarchaṃśa (Mal'ta boy ka parivar)

Indian history myths, narratives and overcorrections

Most people you see online saying things authoritatively really just got all their information from Wikipedia, so don’t believe them uncritically. Fun study: by making edits to Wikipedia, researchers were able to alter court judgement wordings in Ireland. Wikipedia itself has its own cliquey politics, and even in the idealization is only meant to reflect current academic coverage (plus what some activist projects demand be emphasized, like “Women in Red”, “WikiProject Africa”).

But academic Indology has seen knowledge destruction since the 1970s, due to factors largely exogenous to Indian politics:

1. A general decline in competence in the humanities, especially pronounced in marginal topics like Indian history — as a result, the results of detailed topical study fell out of general narrative-setting tertiary sources (which, btw, are the ones that Wikipedia relies on most)
2. The rise of “postcolonialists” — the less said about their weird psychological states the better; I will just leave this very on-point take by @Indian_Bronson here.
3. Seriously studying Indian history is associated with “Hindu nationalists”, who are coded as enemies (and who do not do themselves any favour in acting as inerudite as possible)

Bad ways to respond to this include:

• Inane conspiratorial explanations (no, there are not evil geniuses, they have no complex intentions, everything is just the product of some silly social dynamics)
• Trying to curry the left’s favour by using their lingo like Hinduphobia and decolonialization (no, these are not dumb people, they know you are the enemy, you can’t “fool” them)

You will never be afforded the generosity that Afrocentrists or feminists are — you will never be seen as friend — and you shouldn’t be trying (to sell your intellectual honesty for a position in their ranks), in the first place.

Generally I think when an institution (mainstream Indology) sucks, it is best to mostly ignore them and develop your own parallel, more competent ones. The humanities are just no good, their acceptance mechanism is based on authority, consensus and other social nonsense rather than any truth orientation. You don’t even need to seriously address or debunk their claims, they are obviously false to anyone whose IQ exceeds their age, you just need to incessantly mock them until “Wikipedia University” becomes as low-status as “WhatsApp University”. The problem with this is:

• The only thing that unites contrarians is their disagreement with the status-quo, and there are many more ways to be wrong than to be right, so most “alternative” anything is bunk (this is a general problem for the political right, because the only defining feature of the right is their opposition to the left).
• I have a need — a primal, insatiable need — to write rebuttals to wrong things, people being wrong is just a giant DDOS attack on my senses and on my productive life and there’s nothing I can do about it, I MUST DO IT.

Some of the things I respond to are straight-up falsehoods; some are weird narratives that suggest either bias or insularity; and for some I also respond to “right-wing overcorrections” (quack kanging).

++ weird spin: importers have power, Tamils just saw as gifts, arab and chinese cola, Second Urbanization, Sangam secular or Jain/Buddhist, weird maps

https://twitter.com/PrasunNagar/status/1375786766674759686 — coinage

• “The Second Urbanization was associated with the rise of Buddhism and Jainism” – a weird sort phrasing that misleadingly attributes credit to these sects. In reality, you already see this sudden rise in prosperity happening in the Brāhmaṇa and Upaniṣad texts c. 800 BC [my pet theory is that this was a result of the end of hostilities between the Vedic elites and Paṇis with the development of the Varṇa system (which would form the basis for the Hindu synthesis more generally)]
• “Coinage in India may have been introduced by contacts with the West” – It is hard to date the earliest Indian coins, but they were generally associated with major early NBPW sites that were significant in the Mahajanapada period, and contained symbols and were of weight standards as old as the Indus Valley Civilization. There is also a fairly organic development of coinage seen in the Vedas themselves.
• “The Pythagorean theorem was developed by the Babylonians earlier than the Indians” – the Bronze Age Babylonians certainly came close. Relevant primary sources are: IM-67118, VAT 6598+BM 96957, TMS-I, BM 85194, BM 85196, YBC 8633, Plimpton 322, Si.427 (for remaining primary sources see Høyrup 2002, p. 385 and page refs therein). But – and it pains me to say this; the Mesopotamians were my first love and what got me into history in the first place – I think calling this a discovery of the Pythagorean rule is a misunderstanding of how they did math – they were fundamentally problem-solvers rather than theory-developers, in that they did not really develop abstractions (except for the simplest of things, like areas and volumes, or the isosceles case of Pythagoras). They would try to attack a problem with some cut-and-paste techniques, but never really think of developing an abstract rule – this is why they never explicitly state the theorem, because they never thought in these terms, and this is why their mathematics did not advance beyond this for centuries, after 1700 BC or so. By contrast the Śulbasūtras explicitly state: “The areas produced separately by the lengths of the breadth of a rectangle together equal the area produced by the diagonal.”
• “Cāṇakya wasn’t historical / The Arthaśāstra was not written by Cāṇakya, but rather composed in the Gupta period” – The Mauryan context of the Arthaśāstra is obvious to anyone who has read the text, and historians’ attempts to cast doubt on the reads at this point like a Yes Minister episode. The state institutions (censuses, various covert methods, heavy punishments, the specific currency system) strongly agree with Megasthenes but had disappeared in later times (the currency system already changed in the time of Patañjali, i.e. early Śuṅga) – in fact, it seems apparent (based on his choices of emphasis) that many of Megasthenes’s accounts come from the Arthaśāstra itself rather than from observations; the religious context (Buddhists mentioned only once and in composition with the Ājīvakas, Śaiva ascetics still viewed as an out-group); the political context (e.g. describing Kamboja as ruled by mercenary corporations); the obvious and overwhelming influence on the Pañcatantra, Tamil Sangam literature and Indo-Scythian epigraphy whose dates are known. See also: Shamashastry’s preface, his defense against claims of later dating. [Note that the mention of Cīna is not a counter-argument: Qin was the Westernmost state, thus the closest to traders, like Ionia deriving Yavana for Greece. Still it is possible that the text continued to be edited for several centuries to reflect the flurry of technological innovations during the Maurya-Gupta interregnum, but this was probably limited to the “big lists” of machines, alchemical concoctions, magic tricks, etc.]
• A weird map of the Maurya empire excluding forested or desert areas – This is a standard applied to no other historical empire (e.g. to Persian or Steppe empires), and isn’t worth a serious rebuttal.
• “The Tamil Sangam period was independent of Vedic civilization, or derived rather from Jain/Buddhist culture” – Not worth a serious rebuttal.
• “Vikramāditya was not historical” – see my earlier post.
• “The Gurjara-Pratīhāras were a dynasty of foreign origin” – Modern Gurjars cluster genetically with Punjabi groups, and have a very good fit on a standard Steppe+IVC+AASI model (more so than most Indian castes), they were probably a Punjabi group that migrated to the imperium at Ujjain and ruled from there, as was common through history. Similarly the proposition that the Agnikula myth was about explaining a foreign origin is entirely unfounded, and genetically disproven.
• “The Cōḻa naval achievements were the product of employing Arab and Chinese engineers”

Left-wing myth: Ayodhya didn’t exist until the Gupta period. Right-wing overcorrection: Not only was Ayodhya historical, the Ramayana is completely historical, the Rama Sethu is man-made and was built 7000 years ago Left-wing myth: The Ramayana and Mahabharata were all made up during the Gupta period, Yudhishtira is actually based on Ashoka. Right-wing overcorrection: The Mahabharata is from 3000 BC and everything in it is true word-for-word, the Ramayana is from 7000 BC. Bardic literature etc. Exception: Ayurveda. Left-wing myth: The Aryans invaded India and enslaved the native population, creating the caste system. Right-wing overcorrection: The Aryan invasion never happened, Aryans originated in India and migrated outwards. Left-wing myth: Vikramaditya never existed, he was a legendary ruler just based on Chandragupta II. Right-wing overcorrection: Vikramaditya not only existed, he conquered the entire world including India, Arabia, Central Asia and Europe.

Hinduism, Brahmins and narratives

Left-wing myth: Everything is about caste system, etc.

Right-wing overcorrection: The caste system was created by the British to divide Indians, until then it had only to do with your occupation or how good a person you are.

Left-wing myth: Hinduism bad, Buddhism etc good.

Right-wing overcorrection: Buddhism was a part of Hinduism; one can’t exist without the other (Vivekananda “Brahmanical intellect and Buddhist emotion”).

Left-wing myth: Hinduism is oppressive etc.

Right-wing myth: No, Hinduism is nihilistic! You can be environmentalist and be Hindu!

Truth: … A sandwich doesn’t become nihilistic because it doesn’t tell you who to vote for (although you may have heard of people associating the consumption of avocado sandwiches with being left-wing, rich, millennial, fiscally irresponsible or white – well, I like avocadoes and am exactly one of those).

Left-wing myth: Hinduism is oppressive, etc.

Right-wing overcorrection: No, Hinduism is liberal!

Truth: I really hate the meme “Hinduism is inherently liberal”, because literally none of the words in that sentence has a precise definition, bar maybe “is”. … Brahmahatya and free speech

Left-wing myth: Ashoka narrative

Right-wing overcorrection: None.

Left-wing myth: Buddhism used to be the majority religion in India.

Right-wing overcorrection: None.

Left-wing myth: Ashoka’s persecutions were “sectarian propaganda”.

Right-wing overcorrection: None.

The strengths of Ancient India

Left-wing myth: All Indic technologies were courtesy of some sort of foreign invasions, Indian civilization was inferior to European, Chinese and even Middle-Eastern civilization.

Right-wing overcorrection: Ancient India was incomprehensibly advanced: we had the internet, nuclear bombs, aeroplanes and smartphones, the ancients knew string theory.

Link to “What did ancient India look like?”.

Left-wing myth: Indian civilization never had an influence on any Western/Middle Eastern civilizations.

Right-wing overcorrection: All civilizations, their science and technologies, are due to India.

The truth: India had an outsized impact on Western civilization, more than the West did on India pre 1400 or even that India did on East Asia. Fibonacci, Pythagoras, Islamic golden age. … a particularly weird claim is that “importers are the dominant trade partner” – I have no idea what this means, considering that at the end of the day all trade is bilateral etc.

Left-wing myth: The Maurya empire is not as large as it was, it was just a bunch of cities and roads.

Right-wing overcorrection: None.

Left-wing myth: Ancient India did not have a writing system until the Mauryas; the Brahmi script was created by Ashoka based on Aramaic for his imperial inscriptions.

Right-wing overcorrection: The Brahmi script descends from the ancient Indus Valley script; India has had an unbroken literary tradition from 3300 BC or even earlier.

Left-wing myth: Taxila was Persian, not Indian! Panini was a Persian subject!

Right-wing overcorrection: Persia is also Indian!

… Panini likely lived during Chandragupta Maurya’s reign

Left-wing myth: Ancient Indian explorers weren’t a thing.

Right-wing overcorrection: Ancient Indian explorers made their way to the Americas, the Mahabharata describes a full-fledged world map [1]

The truth: Indian exploration and influence in SE Asia, Africa, West; Chola shipbuilding; Indian merchant dominance

Right-wing myth: Ayurveda is scientific and can co-exist with modern medicine.

Left-wing overcorrection: Ayurveda is complete hogwash, no medicinal innovation existed until the modern world.

Foreign invasions and ancient militaries

Left-wing myth: Islamic invasions were great for India, they introduced more mechanization in India and increased the GDP.

Right-wing overcorrection: All Muslim rulers in India were destructive barbarians and all Indic rulers were great and noble administrators.

Left-wing myth: Akbar, mysore GDP claims

Right-wing overcorrection: Akbar and Tipu Sultan were terrible rulers who impoverished their subjects.

Left-wing myth: The fact that India was invaded several times from the West but rarely invaded the West implies that it was militarily (or even technologically) inferior to the West.

Right-wing overcorrection: No, it means we just lacked unity/they used trickery against us, we were too honorable/Indians did conquer the West, Vikramaditya conquered the entire world, and the Aryans originated in India as well.

I don’t know the explanation. Overconfidence, etc. BS about “Indians used astrology”. You know, this is something which historians are simply biased against India: they’ll call someone like Hannibal a “tactical genius” (he was not) for his recorded failures, and make up some non-existent failures for India. I will note a couple of things, however: steppes were hard to control, the steppe empires also lost them after entering India/Persia, etc. But this is not in itself an explanation: why wasn’t India more fortified, if it was so valuable? Shouldn’t some equilibrium have been reached. The truth is, a far more detailed, scientific theory of ancient warfare is needed, and this is a technical problem with the humanities, not merely a question of biases, etc.

Left-wing myth: War elephants are overrated; their only advantage was in damaging the enemy’s morale. They could easily be panicked and routed, or surrounded by a phalanx and hacked down.

Right-wing overcorrection: None.

I don’t understand how anyone with any knowledge of ancient military history could possibly believe this.