The Aryan Question and Demolishing Myths

 Historian Romila Thapar's collection of essays opens up new, non-dogmatic and critical windows on the ‘the Aryan question' as much as the non-critical stereotypes floated by one-dimensional Hindutva forces in recent types, often shutting out all avenues of debate. Indeed, when a rigorous exploration of history, worked out through meticulous research and compilation of documents and facts, concepts and theories, are debunked in what is a completely crude and unilateral populist propaganda, then the dangers to discourse becomes universal and grassroot, beyond academics.

However, this can become a diabolical thin line - myths or half-facts juxtaposed with xenophobic propaganda to posit itself as the ultimate truth. The Aryan question was a  much debated phenomena during the ‘saffronisation of education' campaign in India unleashed during the BJP-led government in the Centre, when a virtual witch-hunt was launched by the Hindutva forces to eliminate the established secular realms of history and impose a ‘certain kind' of history, often prejudiced and terribly intellectually limited and judgmental. Thapar explores the Aryan concept and provides a critical take on the appropriation of the theory.

Writes Thapar: "What is sometimes called ‘the Aryan Problem' is not a simple problem of putting together the evidence for a historical period with easy answers. It is probably the most complex question in early Indian history and it requires considerable expertise in the interpretation of the evidence which ranges from ecology to philology.
The basic expertise requires some familiarity with at least four fields of enquiry: historiography, archaeology, linguistic and social anthropology. The evidence from these when interrelated provides historical hypothesis."

Demolishing Myths or Mosques and Temples? The book reopens the vicious and cynical discourse which seeks to subvert one of the most emotionally and politically contentious terrain of both religion and politics. For instance, the manner in which the Babri masjid destruction has been rationalised in recent times, or loose, unsubstantiated but sinister factsheets on how temples have been destroyed in medieval India by Muslim invaders, often missing the woods for the tree. This kind of ‘manufactured consent' pushes a dangerous and sectarian agenda instead of an authentic and complex socio-political narrative of certain periods of history. The essays here are brilliant narratives of conflict zones and the meanings we derive from the unfolding of these events. Not only demolition, the building of religious spaces itself tell a revealing story.

Both books are a must for all those who are grappling with the twilight zones of collective and yet fragmented reality, a chronicle of creative and critical history in the time of communal fascism and ‘herd mentality'. This history-telling transcends the academic reading of our past and present, and makes it indeed commonsensical and down to earth.