In his painstakingly long academic journey through mountains of source material available in Europe, Prof Prodosh Aich establishes that the entire understanding of India developed by self-claimed scholars from West is erroneous, since the initial attempt to comprehend ancient India through the Vedas was itself faulty. He questions the validity of the works of the famous western scholars who translated the Vedic literature into English, German and Italian. A vast majority of them did not even set foot on the Indian soil and those who came here did not learn the ancient languages in an organised manner, even though translation needs an equal command of both languages. Since neither the Vedic language nor the Sanskrit were spoken languages since ages, it was all the more difficult for them to develop language skills required for translation. Colonialist Imperial England had prepared a concerted design to establish the superiority of blond-blue eyed-white-Christian culture over other cultures that they opted to define as «primitive», particularly in case of India. Prof Aich uses juxtaposition to drive home a point and leaves judgement to readers. He frames a question and then answers it by using the primary source material. The book is bound to trigger an academic debate in the West also and would go a long way to establish once for all that the much-trumpeted and self-championed discipline of Indology in the West has in fact been based on falsehood. It must have been a design that none of the scholars so far bothered to use the existing material, so abundantly available, which could have helped to unravel the truth about the colonial powers and imperial administration and bureaucracy. Scholars after scholars, even after the end of colonial empire, have continued to overlook the material that would have removed the well-laid myths about Indian society, polity and culture.
Оглавление
Prodosh Aich. Lies with Long Legs
Lies with Long Legs
To this book
Contents
The Impetus
Prologue: We are, what we know
What is happening to us?
Who paved the way for the “epochal discoverer”
#Who is this William Jones?
Calcutta – Sir William's Eldorado
All trails lead to Calcutta
Treading in Sir William’s steps
Epilogue: An era of brainwashing
Отрывок из книги
To this book
The Impetus
.....
We will leave it at the indication that every ”we-feeling” presupposes actual or pretended positive qualities which “the others”, of course, don’t possess. It does not matter at all whether scientists, publicists or journalists or others are concerned. Whether they write or not write something like, ‘in the context of the early Indian history it appears to be appropriate, to speak of ‘Aryas’ in the German language, to distinguish the mythical primary race of Indo-Europeans of Northwest India more clearly from the ideological construct ‘Arier’ of recent times’. The ascribed physical features and their valuations, which are imagined and internalised to assume magnificence and superiority, are reflected in their minds and emotions.
The massage to be transported is that the “short-statured” persons are not just “not tall”, but they are also “incalculable and mischievous”; dark-skinned people are in fact “shady customers”, not so frank and open as fair skinned people. And if they have dark eyes in addition, who would like to encounter them? Being citizens or not, who would seriously think about integrating them into the “we-group”? A culture, which has generated the consciousness of superiority of the „blond-blue-eyed-white“ people for centuries, must also be named accordingly, and we should not any longer accept that “experts on culture ” confuse us by inventing new labels for this culture. The “Aryans” could not have been Christians. Christianity emerged later. But who are the “Indo-Europeans”? Are they only the Christian descendants of the “Aryans” or also products of the blond-blue-eyed-white-Christian culture? Are they not more civilised than the “Indo-Aryans”? And a little superior too?
