ENGLISH EDUCATION TO DESTROY TIMELESS BHARAT’S NATIONAL HINDU IDENTITY-II

V.SUNDARAM I.A.S.

In the first part of my review of the book titled ‘EDUCATING TO CONFUSE AND DISRUPT: Defiling History and Education System of India’, authored by two bold intellectual Kshatriyas --- who mercifully are not the usually ignorant servile, spineless, pseudo-secular and anti-Hindu academic vermin sponsored by the UPA Government in power--- namely, Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit. The fact that this very necessary book has been published at all is a great tribute to the courage, judgement, integrity, defiant national spirit and vision of the publishing house of India First Foundation. I am saying this because the Firangi Memsahib Sonia Gandhi and her Private Nation-Looting Company called the Sonia Congress Party are committed to the pernicious ideology and philosophy of gagging and crushing freedom of speech and thought to all Hindu Spiritual Leaders, Hindu Intellectuals, Hindu Journals and Hindu Organizations and Institutions.

Front Cover of the Book



Here I cannot resist quoting certain excerpts from the Vision Statement of India First Foundation: “Unfortunately, the ideal of Rama Rajya set by Mahatma Gandhi, which provided the ideological basis of our freedom, became anathema to the post-independent polity, politicians, intellectuals and establishments. EVEN THE GOAL OF THE RAMA RAJYA CAME TO BE REGARDED AS NARROW, SECTARIAN, COMMUNAL AND EVEN OUTRIGHT DANGEROUS. As Swami Vivekananda said, it is given to the Hindus by destiny to discover the idea of Universal Validity of all faiths and ways of life and share it with the rest of the world. This inclusive idea, which vindicates all Gods, faiths, peoples and way of life, is the ultimate destination of the journey of Humanity and the final guarantee for Global and National Peace. And it is in this context and with this background and purpose, some intellectual Kshatriyas have come together to launch one more humble effort through India First Foundation.”

India First Foundation has used the word ‘dangerous’ while referring to RAMA RAJYA of Mahatma Gandhi. I would go a step further and say that in today’s political milieu, it would be viewed in political and official circles of the UPA II Government of India as even ‘treasonable and seditious’ warranting the invocation of the Anti Terrorist Act. The recent track record of the ATS in Maharashtra is a pointer in that direction.

These two authors have quoted the following words of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru from his Annual Convocation address at Aligarh Muslim University on 24 January, 1948 to prove their thesis that NEHRU was a first rate hypocrite and an opportunistic, a layer upon layer --- ‘somersaulter’: ‘I am proud of India, not only because of her ancient magnificent heritage, but also because of her remarkable capacity to add to it by keeping the doors and windows of her mind and spirit open to fresh and invigorating winds from distant lands. India’s strength has been two fold: her own innate culture which flowed through the ages, and her capacity to draw from other sources and thus add to her own ... I have said that I am proud of our inheritance and our ancestors who gave an intellectual and cultural prominence to India. How do you feel about this past? Do you feel that you are also a sharer in it and inheritance of it and, therefore proud of something that belongs to you as to me? Or do you feel alien to it and pass by it without understanding it or feeling that strange thrill which comes from the realisation that we are the Trustees and inheritors of this vast treasure. I ask you these questions because in recent years many forces have been at play diverting people’s mind into wrong channels and trying to pervert the course of history. YOU ARE A MUSLIM AND I AM A HINDU. We may adhere to different religious faiths or even to none; but that does not take away from that cultural inheritance that is yours as well as mine. The past holds us together; why should the present or the future divide us in spirit?’

Though Pandit Nehru openly declared that he loved the Hindu heritage of India and wanted every one to partake of it, yet in action, unfortunately, he did exactly the opposite thing. For example, when Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel wanted to reconstruct the famed Somnath Temple in Gujarat, Pandit Nehru tried to obstruct it in every possible manner. Similarly when President Rajendra Prasad wanted to participate in the opening ceremony of the newly constructed Somnath Temple, Nehru tried his best to dissuade the President from attending the ceremony in his official capacity, on the specious plea that India is a ‘SECULAR’ Country. Committed to his anti-Hindu philosophy of pseudo-secularism, Pandit Nehru performed a perfect act of ‘super-somersault’ when he declared in a shameless manner: “By education, I am an Englishman, by views, an internationalist, by culture, a Muslim, and I am a Hindu only by accident of birth”. That is why posterity will damn him as MAULANA JAWAHARLAL NEHRU and not as Pandit Nehru!!!

In the convocation address of 1948, referred to above, Pandit Nehru had forcefully indicated that there was something wrong with the psyche of the people. Today, not one of his successors or followers in Sonia Congress Party would dare even remember what their own beloved leader and icon Panditji had said in 1948. The nation has got into the irretrievable mire of Islam-embracing, Christianity-coveting ANTI-HINDU PSEUDO SECULARISM.

Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit have asked the right questions: What was responsible for the entrenched ideology that not only disowned and distanced itself from the glorious past of India, but also distorted and denigrated it? Why have Indian heritage and history been consistently denied their rightful place in world history and even in books written by Indians and published in India even after our independence? Why has the Indian contribution in the realm of philosophy, culture, legal system, universal brotherhood, medicine, polity, science and technology been denied its place in the SUN? In this context I fully endorse the view of these two authors: “India’s contribution to various branches of knowledge and wisdom was denied in the past by the British as well as many Indian historians working under the British Raj and British influence. But why has this attitude not changed even after our independence?

The two authors have rightly observed that the enslavement of the mind is, perhaps, the deadliest weapon in the world. With the introduction of Macaulay system of education in 1835 the enslavement of the Indian mind began and it continues to be so even today --- even after 63 years of our partitioned independence.

The study of history is not a luxury. It is a necessity. Arthur Marwick (1936-2006), the historian, has been cited by these two authors. According to Marwick, as memory is to the individual, so history is to the community or the society. Without memory, people would lose their identity. A society without knowledge of its past would be like an individual without memory. To quote the exact words of Marwick: ‘Without history (knowledge of the past), we, and our communities, would be utterly adrift on an endless and featureless sea of time.’

THE BRITISH COLONIAL GOVERNMENT IN INDIA DID EVERYTHING NECESSARY TO OBLITERATE AND EFFACE THE MEMORY OF ANCIENT INDIA FROM THE MINDS OF OUR PEOPLE. As long as the British ruled India, Indians felt totally helpless to stop the falsification of their history caused by the ruling CABAL of English Colonial Evangelical Rulers. Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit have pointed out that though laudable efforts were made by several great Indian historians and Indologists like Sir Jadunath Sarcar, R.C. Majumdar, R.K. Mukherjee, K.P Jaiswal, D.R Bhandarkar, K.A Neelakanta Sastri and others to present an objective history of India from the Indian point of view even during the days of British Rule, yet their writings were kept outside the pale of officially recognised, trumpeted, pampered, patronised and lionised historians of British Raj.

From 1920’s to 1940’s, it was the widespread popular hope and expectation that with the attainment of our freedom, the injustice done to the past of India and its educational system by the British rulers would get automatically rectified in the same manner as has been the case in most countries that became free after a long period of foreign rule.

Alas! This has not happened in India! Even after our independence, the very same people who had helped the British in ruling the country and had opposed the freedom movement became partners in the decision-making process due to the favours extended to them by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. In this context I am referring to the OBNOXIOUS Communists and the MENACING Marxists---the very same wicked Communists who had done everything in their might to subvert the Quit India Movement in 1942. These traitors had spied against all well-known Congress leaders, including Nehru himself, and had worked against their efforts to avert the partition of the country. The very same Communist criminals guilty of treason in 1942 became the favourite toadies of the Nehru Congress Anti-Hindu Raj in post independent India.

‘Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit have rightly observed: “Consequently, even in free India, we have continued with not only the outdated British colonial education system, but also with a system that worked and is still working consistently against Indianness, the Indian psyche, the Indian ethos and, finally the Indian identity. Nothing can be more telling than when the President of this country Mr. Abdul Kalam requests ---- once again in a Convocation Address in 2005--- that the Macaulay system of education, which is still continuing even after 63 years of our independence, be changed. It may be mentioned in passing here that the Macaulay system of education came into force in 1835, exactly 170 years ago’.

The Colonial British Raj tried its best to obliterate the Glorious Hindu past of India. Even after independence Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao, A B Vajpayee and Dr Manmohan Singh have continued the same dastardly tradition. In this context I am reminded of how George Orwell envisioned a bleak society everywhere in the post Second World War world in which a people’s touchstones with the past would be systematically pulverized by a government as a matter of public policy. He wrote: ‘All history is a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as is necessary’. The motto of all these traitors is : WHO CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE; WHO CONTROLS THE PRESENT CONTROLS THE PAST.

I have already observed that Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit-- two bold intellectual Kshatriyas---who mercifully are not the usually ignorant, servile, spineless, pseudo-secular and anti-Hindu academic vermin sponsored by the UPA II Sonia Government in power dressed in brief authority in India. By vicious academic vermin, I am referring to the endless procession of anti-Hindu, anti National, pro-Muslim, pro-Christian and virulently Marxist Historians produced by Pandit Maulana Jawaharlal Nehru University right from the early 1970’s. I am referring to the known intellectual prostitutes like Ifran Habib, Romilla Thapar, R.S.Sharma and Bipin Chandra who have sold their spiritless souls for a mess of Sonia Congress and Communist pottage and patronage like coveted jobs in the Government and petty Padma Awards!

The continuation of the British system of education and the deliberately distorted history of India produced by certain pseudo-secular scholars in the 1940’s and early 1950’s (which included Pandit Nehru himself!) totally favoured and helped the Communists/Marxists. The Communists fully

endorsed the continuance of Macaulay system of education in free India. Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit are absolutely right in saying that for the known traitors of the CPI and CPI(M), free India was neither a sovereign country nor a sacred motherland. If it was any thing, it was a disgusting mass of Bourgeois Earth, to be converted into a Communist State as early as possible. Not only during the days of Quit India Movement 1942, but also during the time of Chinese invasion of India in 1962 and long thereafter till today, the Communists have acted as traitors. ONE SECTION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY, WHICH CAME TO BE KNOWN AS CPI(M) AFTER THE COMMUNIST SPLIT IN 1963, DISPLAYED THE COMMUNIST BRAND OF DISRUPTIVE EXTRA-TERRITORIAL LOYALTY BY VIEWING INDIA AS AN AGGRESSOR AND MAO TSE TUNG’S COMMUNIST CHINA AS AN INNOCENT VICTIM OF UNPROVOKED INDIAN AGGRESSION. For this anti-National group, Indian democracy was a farce. It still remains a farce for them even today in the CPI(M) ruled States like West Bengal and Kerala where history and social science text books are full of anti-Hindu venom and anti-national communist propaganda.

COVER PAGE OF BOOK

BY SRI DHARAMPAL (1922 - 2006)

The most important chapter in this very important book of Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit under review is Chapter 2 titled ‘Destruction Of The Beautiful Tree’. They begin this Chapter by quoting the prophetic words of Mahatma Gandhi which he spoke at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatam House, London on 20 October 1931:

“I say without fear of my figures being challenged successfully, that today India is more illiterate than it was fifty years or a hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that, and THE BEAUTIFUL TREE perished. The village schools were not good enough for the British administrator, so he came out with his programme. Every school must have so much paraphernalia, building, and so forth. Well, there were no such schools at all. There are statistics left by a British administrator which show that, in places where they have carried out a survey, ancient schools have gone by the board, because there was no recognition for these schools, and the schools established after the European pattern were too expensive for the people, and therefore, they could not possibly overtake the thing. I defy anybody to fulfil a programme of compulsory primary education of these masses inside of a century. This very poor country of mine is ill-able to sustain such an expensive method of education. Our State would revive the old village school master and dot every village with a school both for boys and girls.”

Thus it will be clear that Mahatma Gandhi stringently criticized the British education policy in India and observed that India at the time was more illiterate than it had been 50 or a 100 years ago. Gandhi felt that the colonial state's intervention had created a form of education that was totally alien to the Indian reality. It could not touch the lives of the millions and tended to impose a borrowed identity on a minuscule elite. He therefore was primarily concerned with the need to formulate an alternate, meaningful, nonviolent, non-exploiting education system that would be truly reflective and representative of the village-based, multi-cultural Indian society.

In his seminal article on education in the Harijan of the July 31, 1937: "By education I mean an all-round drawing out of the best in child and man—body, mind and spirit. Literacy is not the end of education, nor even the beginning. It is only one of the means by which man and woman can be educated. Literacy is in itself no education. I would therefore begin the child's education by teaching it a useful handicraft and enabling it to produce from the moment it begins its training. Thus every school can be made self-supporting, the condition being that the State takes over the manufactures of these schools...I hold that the highest development of the mind and the soul is possible under such a system of education. Only every handicraft has to be taught not merely mechanically, as it is done today, but scientifically, i.e., the child should know the why and wherefore of every process".

The above grand dream of Mahatma Gandhi of reviving the old village school master in every village was completely shattered by the Russia-embracing Communist vision of Pandit Jawharlal Nehru and his successors for 60 years after 1947. Any one can see that both the British East India Company which ruled India from 1757 to 1858 and later the British Colonial Government gave a deathblow to the traditional gurukula system of education in every village in India. After the British left, continuous blows have been dealt, to such remnants of the ancient system of education and culture that remained, by the Congress Governments of Nehru and his successors till date with one vital difference. The British colonial government never targeted the Hindu faith and religion after 1858. On the other hand all the Congress governments after our independence, wholly assisted by the Communists and the Marxists and the terrorist Muslims, have worked in a determined manner not only to destroy our traditional systems of education, but also to root out Hindu religion, Hindu culture, Hindu society and in short all vestiges of Sanatana Dharma. This assault has reached its peak today under the anti-Hindu and evangelical firangi memsahib Government of India!

It is indeed amazing to see that the Father of our Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, could really present such a precise and exact view of the planned destruction of the traditional systems of education in India by the British Raj as early as in 1931. The only inference that we can draw is that he was very familiar with the reports of some of the British Civil Servants of Bengal, Bihar, Bombay and Madras Presidency on the native systems of education that prevailed in those parts of India in the first quarter of the 19th century.

It was the great Gandhian scholar and historian Dharampal (1922 - 2006) who has completely brought out the ground level truths about the indigenous Indian education in the 18th century in his path-breaking and monumental book titled ‘The Beautiful Tree’. In this work Dharampal has clearly explained how our age-old system of education was destroyed in a systematic manner by the English administrators of the East India Company from 1775 to 1857. The wailing cry of Mahatma Gandhi in London in 1931 against the destruction of ‘The Beautiful Tree’ of indigenous education by the British administrators of British Raj in the 19th century, was fully vindicated in a detailed and scientific manner with unassailable documentary and statistical evidence by Dharampal in his magnum opus ‘The Beautiful Tree’. (I have presented the front cover of this book above.) DHARAMPAL HAS EFFECTIVELY DEBUNKED THE MYTH THAT DALITS HAD NO PLACE IN THE INDIGENOUS SYSTEM OF EDUCATION.

Shri Dharampal (1922 - 2006)

Besides this great work, he has also authored several books, including ‘Indian Science and Technology in the 18th Century’. I remember myself and my wife attending a public lecture in Madras in the late 1990’s when he spoke eloquently with solid facts and figures about India’s achievements in the fields of science and agriculture, the proven efficacy of indigenous systems of local governance in India and the deleterious effects of British bureaucratic rule on Hindu society and culture.

After the lecture when we had a discussion with him about various aspects of British colonial rule, Dharampal told us that the British could never understand the eternal spirit of India. These were his words in this context: “What is great about India?...we need to understand this...the greatness of this country is that the ordinary people in this country have a certain understanding, that everything in nature is connected...and they have built their lives around this understanding...this is the greatness of this country”. Dharampal was of the view that it was a conscious policy of the British government in India to cut asunder this chain of time tested understanding among the masses of India derived from our ancient culture through the imposition of wrongly conceived, dogmatically and dictatorially implemented bureaucratic forms, programmes and policies of British Raj.

I am happy to note that Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit have rightly given the title of DESTRUCTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL TREE to Chapter 2 of their book. This chapter has been divided into 3 sections. In Section 1, they have dealt with in detail the system about which Mahatma Gandhi was talking about and admiring as The Beautiful Tree in 1931 and which was destroyed by the British. In Section 2, they have given a detailed account of the changing British education policy from the time of Governor General Warren Hastings from 1774 to 1785 and going up to the period of Governor General Amherst, who ruled from 1823 to 1828. According to these two authors, the pernicious educational policies pursued during this period of 54 years led to the complete enslavement of the minds, hearts and souls of the Indian people. In Section 3, they have taken a close look at the strategies adopted by the British to destroy the Indian education system.

Chapter 2 of the book deals with the past of British India of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is our sacred duty to look at this past and understand it in letter and spirit. If we choose to ignore the past, we run the risk of not only losing our control over the present, but also forfeiting our right to the future. In this context, we should derive our inspiration from the following engraving of inscriptions upon the neo-classical architecture of the National Archives in Washington DC: ‘What is Past is Prologue’; ‘Study the past’; ‘The glory and romance of our history are here preserved in the chronicles of those who conceived and builded the structure of our nation’; ‘The ties which bind the lives of our people in one indissoluble union are perpetuated in the archives of our Government and to their custody this building is dedicated’; ‘This building holds in trust the records of our national life and symbolizes our faith in the permanency of our national institutions’.

The most beneficial impact of the British Rule has been the establishment of Departments of National Archives in all parts of India. Based on a thorough study of these ancient and old records and documents, Dharampal has brought out all the bitter unknown truths of British Rule in the field of education. Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit have succeeded in furthering the work of Dharampal by showing how the process of destruction of education in free India has been more or less completed by the Congress and other “secular” anti-Hindu governments with great political zest and enthusiasm during the last 62 years after our independence.