REDEFINING-REWRITING-REDISCOVERING MEDIEVAL HISTORY !
It is not unusual today, for instance, to keep on making claims which have no scientific or historical back-up, to tell us that the favourite mode of transportation of the many heroic personages from the Mahabharat and Ramayan was the ‘viman’, the predecessor of what we mortals now call aircraft. Anu Shakti and thermonuclear weapons, and whatever today’s super powers may have in their arsenals, were routinely used in Mahabharat. Inter-planetary travel was like hiring a cab from Connaught Place to Karol Bagh, more seriously suggesting a rewrite of ancient and medieval Indian history, starting probably from the Ramayan and Mahabharat.
After all Vyas or Valmiki, the authors of two epics, were as much humans as the so-called historians whom we have been taught to take seriously. So we are told. Not that anyone has ever challenged the Mahabharat and the Ramayan as two great epic narratives. Likewise, a BJP-ruled State might order the schools run by Christian missionaries in the tribal areas that they immediately install murtis/pictures of Maa Saraswati in their institutions so that the children are allowed to bow to the goddess of learning before getting past the images of Jesus and Mary; that they shall not refer to any of the teacher-priests as Father, like saying “yes, father”. A repetition of an earlier fiat that forbade the use of the word principal for head of a similar institution.
It is not unusual today, for instance, to keep on making claims which have no scientific or historical back-up, to tell us that the favourite mode of transportation of the many heroic personages from the Mahabharat and Ramayan was the ‘viman’, the predecessor of what we mortals now call aircraft. Anu Shakti and thermonuclear weapons, and whatever today’s super powers may have in their arsenals, were routinely used in Mahabharat. Inter-planetary travel was like hiring a cab from Connaught Place to Karol Bagh, more seriously suggesting a rewrite of ancient and medieval Indian history, starting probably from the Ramayan and Mahabharat.
After all Vyas or Valmiki, the authors of two epics, were as much humans as the so-called historians whom we have been taught to take seriously. So we are told. Not that anyone has ever challenged the Mahabharat and the Ramayan as two great epic narratives. Likewise, a BJP-ruled State might order the schools run by Christian missionaries in the tribal areas that they immediately install murtis/pictures of Maa Saraswati in their institutions so that the children are allowed to bow to the goddess of learning before getting past the images of Jesus and Mary; that they shall not refer to any of the teacher-priests as Father, like saying “yes, father”. A repetition of an earlier fiat that forbade the use of the word principal for head of a similar institution.
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