There are some in our society who remain colonialised but are unaware of this enslavement. Our society has historical antecedents that include India, China, Africa and Europe. It is therefore difficult to conceive why only the Western European worldview is accepted as the only truth.
When control of the Trinbagonian State was being manipulated by the Western European colonisers, our respective ancestors had no choice but to accept the colonial worldview. After achieving independence and developing our own national identity, as well as reclaiming our ancestral heritage, why should the Indo-Trinidadian be derided for interpreting the society in which they live with an Indian lens?
This process of decolonising may include the simple act of altering our salutation from “Hello” or “Good Morning” to “Sita Ram” and changing “Mister” to add the suffix “ji!”
The fact that India has over 4,000 communities, 300 languages and a complicated social order does not negate this latent emotive drive to create a landscape that is our own and not defined by a colonial construct.
Rabindranath Tagore, famed Indian poet/philosopher (7/5/1861-7/8/1941), wrote: “India has been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism.”
Nearly all Indo-Trinidadians are descendants of indentured immigrants from mainly Northern India, in particular, the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The traditions, culture and languages of these states are still very present in many aspects of Indo-Trinidadian culture. The Indo-Trinidadian is not confused about his or her historical and cultural traditions.
In The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen attempts to deride Indian/Hindu culture in his lobby for secular politics, and the inequalities he perceives as holding back India. Gordon Johnson, president of Wolfson College, Cambridge, correctly observes that “my greatest disappointment with this book is that its use of history is as unscrupulous and trivialising as that of those Sen wishes to bring down. The Argumentative Indian is not sufficiently thoughtful and serves as a forceful reminder that history is constantly being used in a dangerously naive way.”
The dangerous abuse of revisionist history is evident in the work of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). The ASI of India was founded in 1861 by Sir Alexander Cummingham, headquartered in New Delhi, a government agency under the Ministry of Culture. The suspected historical research undertaken by the ASI over the years surfaced recently in the Ram Sethu (Bridge of Sri Ram) controversy. The Ram Sethu was constructed by Sri Ram on his journey to Sri Lanka thousands of years ago.
The Indian government threatened to destroy the bridge in an attempt to dredge a canal to facilitate ships. In the fiery debate that ensued, the ASI asserted there was no man-made bridge and Sri Ram did not exist.
In reviewing the evidence, the Supreme Court of India stated: “The affidavit submitted by the Archaeological Survey of India in the Supreme Court suffers for want of even basic requirement of scientific study, as no onshore or underwater archaeological exploration seems to have been undertaken at the site in dispute.
“No report has ever been published by the ASI and no one from the ASI has visited this site and conducted any preliminary archaeological exploration. Therefore, any affidavit filed by this department has no scientific value, cannot stand scrutiny and deserves to be rejected.
“The conclusion that there was no human activity at the site is not valid. As the stand taken by the ASI is unscientific, no proper pre-attention has been given to the historicity of the site when the project was floated and what has been now presented is a shabby, haphazard, patch work that deserves to be faulted.”
Citing ASI as authorities on Indian history is questionable at best in modern scholarly debates.
An example of historical revisionism can be evidenced by former Anthropological director general KP Singh, in his book People of India, which perpetuates the now-debunked theory that India was the subject of racial intermingling due to invasions over the centuries. Proceedings of the National Academies of Science by Vijendra Kashyap, director of India’s National Institute of Biological, an autonomous scientific institute in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, operating under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, however, has provided scientific evidence that the Indian subcontinent may have acquired agricultural techniques and languages.
