From: ANAND
The past decades have seen a high tide of history distortion by the dominant Leftist school of historians in India. Future scholarship will study their self-assured posturing with amusement. Here's one instance.
In his column "Foreign Certificates", published on 4 January 2009 in The Hindu Magazine, the well-known subalternist sociologist Ramachandra Guha makes the following assertion:
"At the height of the Ayodhya movement, the Sangh Parivar circulated, at vast expense, the writings of an obscure Belgian ex-priest which claimed that Hindus had been victimised for thousands of years by Muslims and Christians, and that destroying a mosque, building a temple in its place, and sacrificing thousands of (mostly innocent) lives along the way was the only way that this cumulative historical injustice could be avenged. This ex-priest had little training as a historian, and even less credibility. But unlike the other similarly untrained ideologues of the Hindu Right, his citizenship was not Indian, but Belgian. The hope was that the colour of his skin would trump the shallowness of his arguments."
To be sure, I am not an ex-priest. As a child I considered becoming a priest, but like most fellow-countrymen of my generation, I outgrew the Roman Catholic religion. I am fully trained in historical method, one of my diplomas is in "Oriental Philology and History", and I have quite a bit of hands-on experience with innovative historical research. As for my lack of credibility, it is a fact that people of Guha's class were in no mind to lend me any credence, but none of them has ever demonstrated in writing any "shallowness" in my arguments. Neither does Guha in this column. While I have analysed the arguments of his school in considerable detail in my books on the Ayodhya question and on Hindu-Muslim relations in general, no refutation of my position has ever been produced.
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1 comment:
Do respond in full force to psec historian Ramachandra Guha at his email: ramguha@vsnl.com
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