Thread by @vakibs

Thanks for this articulated viewpoint. The only problem with it is that 100% rubbish view of Indian history manufactured by the British colonial Raj. Did Indians never have a strong native power that unified the geography? Only foreign invaders unified it, Mughals or the British?

https://twitter.com/lhommebetenoire/status/1489177402014314497

The idea that India is a disjoint jigsaw puzzle of a geography, that was barely ever unified except by the (superhumanly) strong external powers and that too for only brief periods of time: this was just a convenient and self-congratulatory propaganda prepared by the British Raj.

The British needed this propaganda to impose their rule on Indians, which they did for a period of 90 years (1857-1947). That’s a tiny blip in Indian history. Even during this period, we must remember they were only indirectly administering 50% of the land under princely states.

But in this tiny flimsy period of Indian history, which also saw the great tide of freedom movement that ultimately their Raj, the British succeeded in distorting Indian history and brainwashing some Indians. Looks like the brainwashing succeeded also on Americans, like Fukuyama.

Let’s look at native Indian literary sources: the right metric for understanding the history of any great civilization. What do they say? They speak of a long series of Chakravartins who ruled the vast expanse of Jambūdwīpa. They speak of Digvijaya campaigns of mighty rulers.

It is not just native literary sources. This is corroborated by foreigner accounts. The Persians, for example, speak of the kings of “India” (not Indian provinces). Likewise, the Greeks mention the same. XuanZang explains Indian geography was unified several times in the past.

The British found this massive literary evidence inconvenient. So they cooked up a myth: that Indians don’t have a sense of history. That Indian literature couldn’t be trusted. Instead, India must be interpreted through anthropology and archeology, like a passive dead culture.

Even archeology threw up extremely inconvenient evidence. There is phenomenal coherence and unity in archeological evidence across the vast expanse of the Indian subcontinent. The same motifs, the same cultural artifacts, the same religious symbols are spread all over the place.

So the British made an even more crooked myth: that the archeological period must be broken up into arbitrary phases: the prehistoric period, the Buddhist period, the “Hindu” period and so on. They must be treated as separate countries. This bullshit is made into academic dogma.

Without all this British myth-making and nonsense, if anybody looks at India with some fricking commonsense, they will see India as a remarkably coherent and unified civilization, with a very strong civilizational identity.

The question is: what do the Americans want to believe.

I knew Rahul Gandhi is too stupid to articulate any coherent view on India. He is a mere sock puppet for a more insidious force, the erstwhile colonial interests that tormented us. He is merely relaying their view on India to our parliament. Well, that view is wrong and rubbish.