On Saturday, October 25, this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Mumbai to inaugurate the new Reliance hospital. It was a gathering of some of the best minds in the medical profession. A galaxy of celebrities, including Mukesh Ambani himself, Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar and Sunil Gavaskar were on the stage. The Prime Minister spoke with his usual eloquence on the needs of medical science today and the relevance of the best scientific medical practices to India. Then, in a sudden twist, he announced that most of these had already been achieved in ancient India. The manner in which Kunti gave birth to Karna, as described in the Mahabharata, showed that genetic science was well developed. Equally, Ganesha proves that plastic surgery was at its peak in those times. After all, how else could an elephant’s head be grafted on to a human body?
I have often thought what impact these remarkable observations must have had on the audience of medical scientists and professionals. Would they have thought that the Prime Minister was adding a touch of humour to his speech? Perhaps, to give him the benefit of doubt, they might have thought that he was seeking to inspire them by referring to “achievements” in mythology. Or, maybe, some would have thought it best to treat such comments as the avoidable obiter dicta of any politician’s speech, interesting but not to be taken seriously. But the truth is that the Prime Minister was articulating exactly what he believes.
There is nothing wrong in paying tribute to the achievements of ancient India that are historically verifiable and represent peaks of refinement. Aryabhatt’s contribution to astronomy and mathematics is uncontested; Panini is, without doubt, the most pioneering grammarian the world has ever seen; Kalidasa or Thiruvalluvar represent, among a host of other equally talented contemporaries, the pinnacle of literary excellence; Kautilya’s Arthashastra is the world’s first comprehensive political treatise; the concept of zero is undoubtedly a seminal contribution of ancient India; Bharat’s Natya Shastra is the world’s first mediation on aesthetics; the Upanishads show that few other places in the world had achieved such lofty heights in the areas of philosophy; even chikitsa or medicine, was a separate science, a remarkable fact in itself.
But it is one thing to recognise the achievements of ancient India, and quite another to cross the line into mythology and claim that its contents, at both the factual and the literal level, reflect the exact reality of our past. There is a difference between blind faith and rational historical appreciation. Mythology is best understood as metaphor, where fantasy is deliberately used to convey a larger symbolism, or to emphasise a certain inference. It is never meant to be taken literally, for to do so would be to devalue the role of mythology itself. Hanuman carrying a mountain itself to treat a wounded Laxman is meant to show the great devotion of Hanuman; it cannot be interpreted literally to mean that monkeys could fly in the past carrying entire mountains in their hands. Pushpak Viman, the “flying chariot” of the Ramayana is meant to show the prowess and powers of the brave; it is not meant to prove that jet planes had been invented in our remote past.
Our two epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are full of great wisdom. It would be a pity if the wonderfully imaginative mythology which they incorporate is taken literally and interpreted as scientific fact, because that was not the intention of those who wrote them in the first place.
I have been given to understand that the examples that our Prime Minister quoted are also in Dinanath Batra’s book which has been prescribed as a text book in Gujarat, and for which Mr Modi, in his former capacity as chief minister of Gujarat, has written the introduction. If this is so, we have to ask ourselves what kind of history we are teaching to our children. There is a significant section in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh which genuinely believes that our ancient Hindu past is the repository of every achievement, past, present or of the future.
The danger of such an approach is that it blurs the line between a legitimate appreciation of our past and the necessary inculcation of a scientific and rational temper of mind; also, it presents a very warped sense of the historical narrative of India. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto for the last parliamentary elections provides a very good example of this doctoring of history. The introduction to the manifesto narrates the achievements of our historical experience. It stops somewhere around the 10th century CE. For those who drafted it, the history of India begins and ends with a Bharat that was supposedly exclusively Hindu. There is no achievement worthy of mention in the millennia that followed, not even the Taj Mahal, or the wonderfully evocative poetry of the Bhakti school and the Sufis, and so much more that today accounts for the Ganga-Jamuni sanskriti of our country.
Article 51 A (h) of our Constitution says that it “shall be the fundamental duty of every citizen of India to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of enquiry and reform”. In my view, Prime Minister Modi’s comments at the opening of the ultra-modern Reliance hospital infringed this injunction. Our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, perhaps represented one extreme of thought when he considered anything ancient as “deadwood of the past”. With our current Prime Minister the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. The time has come to say that the truth lies somewhere in between, in the space of an enlightened and rational humanism that is appreciative of our ancient past but without diluting the imperatives of a modern and progressive India.
Author-diplomat Pavan K. Varma has been recently elected to the Rajya Sabha
