Two seemly disjointed happenings triggered this article today.
One – I was walking down an old alley here in Singapore, where a signage in front of a 180 year-old building read “national monument”. It was a monument for the simple fact that an ordinary house has lived on for 180 years. Nothing more. I was bemused – because, my ancestral village is strewn with houses which are over 150 years old, even today. And there are tens of thousands of such villages across the country.
Two – a Tweet today, that over 400 idols that were seized from smugglers are lying neglected, in open air, exposed to rain and shine, in the Madras Museum. Apparently, the museum authorities are unable to trace the antecedents of these idols and therefore are struggling to restore them to their respective temples. A clear issue of lack of documentation. Record-keeping is clearly not India’s forte. For that matter, we have very few museums in India, compared to Europe or the USA, on a per capita basis. In Europe, for instance, one would find a museum even in the smallest of towns, on topics ranging from Trains, to sheep and agriculture, to windfarms to tulips.
That set me thinking. The Indian culture appears to have had two distinct traits, in this context:
One- most of the knowledge and creative arts have remained “off the record”, for over 3000 years. And most of them have survived. Word of mouth was clearly preferred over documented and structured passing of information and knowledge down the generations. Our methods of ancient studies and scholarly academics had beautiful systems that made any written or documented approach superfluous. For example, the way the vedas were taught, using the Ucharanam and Anu-Ucharanam made sure that the Vedas remained intact, through sheer word of mouth, for thousands of years ( until the Mughals had destroyed North Indian Veda Pathashalas, that is). Recitations like the Kramam, Jatha , Ghanam were not merely designed to repeat the Vedas in a certain way, but, if one observes carefully, they intermesh the various syllables in a mathematical order back-and-forth, almost like how a weaver would weave a fabric from threads, crisscrossing and intermeshing into a tight and foolproof output. This ensured that the “original template” could be passed down the generations for over 3000 years (at the very least) with near-zero pilferage. All by word of mouth (until recently). This is nothing short a miracle, in human history. No wonder that so many invasions over the centuries over India could perhaps destroy many of the visual arts and artefacts, but not the knowledge and wisdom. In other words, there simple was no need for any archives or repositories.
Two- The Rig Veda says "Aano bhadra krtavo yantu vishwatah", ie., "Let noble thoughts come to me from all directions". This to me, aside from the main idea of being open to knowledge irrespective of the source, also meant that the emphasis on the individual was non-existent. We have, as a civilization, recognized the contributions of great souls, but have failed to keep record of the life and history of those very creative souls. For example, Adi Shankara’s works in Advaita Philosophy were well recorded, but hardly anything with clear documentary evidence is known about him. Or about most other famous and noble souls of the past. Bartruhari was one of the best known contributors of Sanskrit poetry, literature and philosophy, but estimates of his very existence have varied by a good five centuries apart! Why go back so far in history? Saint Thyagaraja had apparently composed over 24,000 songs. But today, hardly 8,000 of them remain with us. The Kamba Ramayanam of today apparently has quite a few verses, which have been contested by experts like Rasikamani PKC as not being “original” and that they may have been “inserted” at a later date. We could have well lost most of the Tamil works of a couple thousand years forever, if not for the valiant efforts U V Swaminatha Iyer, who literally dug them out of obscurity, from termite infested palm-leaf manuscripts cross a few attics in non-descript villages.
So, India as a country has culturally never placed emphasis on recorded evidence to be left for the future generations. That traits appears to continue till this day. And willy-nilly, after McCaulay system of education took over the nation, we have placed a lot of emphasis on the individuals – ie, hero worship. Today, we not only idolize Sachin Tendulkar, for example, but as a nation, we appear to be keener on what he is up to, off the cricket field! This applies to all celebrities. The advent of social media has accelerated this behaviour to new heights.
And yet, at the same time, we do not seem to play any emphasis on our heritage and our relics of the past. We, as Indians, appear to be indifferent, and if I may dare say do, even a trifle indignant to our past. We do not seem to have gone around the world to collect, for example, sound tracks of our yesteryear musicians, or our leaders. We do not even have a National Archive of Sounds, for example, where the immortal voices of many of our political spiritual and thought leaders could be preserved for the future generations. Almost all OECD countries and China have them. We do not appear to care for our dilapidated temples. Because we have been brainwashed into believing that those are not worthy of preservation and nurture. We still have not established structured studies of Dwaraka, off the Gulf of Cambay, or the Bay of Bengal , off the coast of Mahabalipuram, to establish the grandeur of the Pallava dynasty or the reign of Lord Krishna. We, on the contrary, appear to be more anxious to establish Rama and Krishna more as myths, without conduct of any structured study of the archaeology. These are, but, two of the thousands of such instances that may be strewn all over the country.
Thus, progressively, as a civilaization, we have veered away from content preservation to hero-worship, ignoring the very content that got us world reputation over the centuries.
The result: We depend on external agencies and powers that be, to “feed us” with information. Many of such “feeds” have been proven, of late, to have vested interests.
Because we have not been able to get a firm grip of our own past, with aid of proper documentation, studies and establishing facts through them, we seem unsure of our own position in a world, where the likes of China and even Russia have their own state media agencies spreading their respective positions and messages to the rest of the world. Russia Today is the mouth-piece of the Russian Tzar (ie, Putin) . XinHua it is, for China. And of course, the likes of BBC, CNN etc..
Do we have an India media arm to counter these forces? If not, why not? When will we even make attempts to shape our own narratives and place them in front of the world, if ever we aspire to become a global power in the near future?
