Watching the lunar eclipse, I wondered about one of the gaps in India’s ethos. It is possible to accurately predict sunrise, sunset, solstices, equinoxes and eclipses for centuries. Since time immemorial, India has had superb calendars and almanacs.
Celestial calculations are fiddly and require good number systems. India was among the first places to devise positional number systems and this invention may, in fact, have been driven by the socio-religious imperative to do celestial calculations.
Logically, a good calendar and good number systems form a basis for dating. Events can be cross-referenced with certainty. Knowing that a lunar eclipse occurred at 0052 IST on June 16, we also know Virat Kohli was run out, 22 hours later.
There wasn’t a single decent dating system anywhere in ancient India. So, it is impossible to put accurate dates to most of ancient Indian history. The rare exceptions involved external contact. We know, for instance, that Alexander crossed the Indus and beat Porus in 326 BC.
Other events can be similarly dated via an external agency. Ashoka sent emissaries to spread dhamma — we know when they arrived in neighbouring kingdoms. Fa Hien and Hiuen Tsang wandered around, enabling us to place the reigns of various monarchs. From the medieval period onwards, various Muslim rulers and the Europeans kept calendars.
Why did ancient India lack a collective sense of history, one absent over millennia and across a huge region? Nobody wrote historical narratives complete with data and dates. None of the learned folks who calculated celestial cycles for thousands of years ever cross-referenced those to daily occurrences. Not one kept a diary.
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It is an odd blind spot for an entire civilisation. One reason may be, in analogy with the Soviet Union, ancient India wanted a “reliable past”. Any historical narrative had to fit with the whims of the ruler of the moment. Uncomfortable truths were, therefore, safer forgotten.
The blind spot persists. Nowadays, it is closer to being deliberate prohibition against writing “unreliable” history. We want black and white: Gandhi good; Jinnah bad; Akbar good; Aurangzeb bad.
The educational system is rigidly controlled and it would be difficult for a “politically unsound” historian to be taken seriously. The laws are also geared to the suppression of both accurate information and unwelcome opinion.
The official archives are an impenetrable mess. Successive governments have refused to declassify documents about the Naval Mutiny (1946), Netaji’s death (1945?), the Indo-China War (1962), Shastri’s death (1965) and so on, all on the absurd grounds of security concerns.
In addition to official disinclination to part with information, anybody can choose to be offended by anything at all for a wide variety of reasons and then go to court to suppress the offending work. It is not necessary to have actually read something before being offended by it.
If the legal process seems tedious, a short cut is to burn a few books and create a public disturbance, secure in the knowledge that the offending work will then be put on ice. This has happened in the past to various books that offered an objective analysis of Gandhiji’s life and assassination, Netaji’s flirtation with fascism, Shivaji, Sikhism, Dhirubhai Ambani’s career and so on. Which is why there are few unvarnished written biographies despite a plethora of fascinating oral histories.
The truth may be inconvenient and dissenting opinions may be unpleasant. But a civilisation bent on sweeping things under the carpet repeats the same mistakes ad infinitum. India suffered successive historical waves of invasion and colonisation because local rulers never learnt from the unrecorded mistakes of their predecessors. Modern India’s history of appalling mis-governance is no accident since it works very hard not to keep records of its errors and omissions.