All you who thought that Aryans were a band of blue-eyed, light-skinned
marauders from some distant cold clime sit up and take notice.
For it is a lie invented by the British to justify their own subjugation of
India.
Aryans were actually home-grown products who spilled out of India to spread
sweetness, light and possibly Sanskrit as well, all over the world.
At least this is what the Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Samiti believes. Formed with
the blessings of the Sangh parivar in 1973, in memory of Baba Saheb Apte,
noted RSS worker, the society intends to rewrite history.
It has 400 branches in the country. And its one-year-old Calcutta chapter is
now holding its second annual conference.
Vice-president of the central Vishwa Hindu Parishad committee and an eminent
cardiologist in Calcutta Dr Sujit Dhar heads the society here as president
of the
Samiti's Academic Council, Eastern India. The Calcutta chapter has around 30
members.
The society intends to uncover two simple truths.
First, it wants to show how our Muslim rulers burnt every document of history
testifying to a glorious Hindu past.
Second, how the British inflicted atrocity after atrocity on us.
H.M.K. Puri, coordinator of the Calcutta samiti, says: "The society wants to
reveal such truths which the British distorted for their gain."
The samiti "is an unbiased, a-political association", he says, its only mission
being rectifying the harm done by the British and other evils.
The Calcutta chapter has already compiled a history of the Hooghly district
mainly with the help of ancient scripts on temples.
One day, all the brief histories written at the district, town and village
levels
will be put together to make one grand picture of the wonder that is India, that
is 'Bharat'.
The society has evolved its own methodology.
"One should start from the district headquarters and reach the village, the
family
and the individual. The collection can be done by local persons staying in and
around the district," a society manual says.
At its annual conference, the Calcutta branch is pledging to explore a series of
horrors perpetrated by the British on India.
On the agenda are three issues.
First, the 1943 famine. The society believes it was actually a genocide by the
British, but masked cleverly as a natural disaster. While one crore people died,
the society has information that tonnes and tonnes of foodgrain were buried
underground by the military on order from the government.
Second, Netaji and the INA. The society claims that thousands of INA soldiers
were sent in submarines to India in 1944, but were wiped out by the British in
a secret operation.
Third, the Partition. The samiti will start a special investigation cell on the
division of India.
The samiti has also hit upon an effective method to cleanse the Christian
influence in our history: kalganana, or the "scientific Hindu way of calculating
time".
Kalganana establishes that the beginning of historical time goes back to
1,974,687,097 years, or the "Deva Yuga", says Balaram Chakraborty, a
historian.
He has worked extensively on writing the history of the Northeast, and now
has joined forces with the samiti.
Kalganana also claims that this is the 51st Hindu century, or Yugabda.
One obvious advantage of this system is that it banishes the reference to Christ
that dividing time into B.C. and A.D. inevitably brings.
It is not clear, however, what bearing kalganana, or any other discovery by
the samiti, has on India's present or future.