Hindus we're fundamentally a semi-literate civilization up until the very recent past. What I mean by semi literate is that although they had a writing system, the number of actual literate population was miniscule, like 1% or less. Historiography is unmistakably biased towards
https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1471620890194591759
those who ultimately left the most surviving textual records. It is why we treat the Greek records of the Trojan war as factual, because there is no surviving Trojan version. This doesn't just apply to far antiquity but to fundamental notions of authenticity today. Whoever can
generate the bigger mountain of scribbles, the written variant of having the loudest bullhorn will generally be regarded as de facto correct. The pitiful thing about Hindu civilization is the absolute dearth of historical first hand textual records so that much of the scholastic
study has to be done through a foreign lense. The Canon history of Indian would be a blank canvas without Greek accounts of Indian antiquity, Chinese records of the early medieval period, Muslim accounts of the late medieval, and of course British records of the early modern era.
If the Indians are upset with this state of affairs, they have no one but their own ancestors to blame for having written almost nothing down for the record and will have a long road ahead to fill in this void with something more believable than the We wuz flying atomics that the
Hindutva crowd that seems the most energized in doing so.
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