History, Time and Knowledge in Ancient India.

When I was reading this article and some things about how Indian history is viewed struck me as problematic.

To begin with, one of the most influential sources of indian history to the west, is Mills' The History of British India. This book was written by someone who never even visited the country of his writings. Not only that, he sought the patronage of the British East India Company. That means, this work most likely has had military underpinnings. If Mill was looking for things to justify British colonization, he could find them. But the power of media is such that, now, most historical views on india are based on the information from such works. In trying to remain objective and correct in recording the past, and making "intelligent" judegements on past events, historians can lead or mislead entire populations.

This hegemony of sorts also lead me to question why there is absolutely no representation of south Indian expression in this entire article. The identity of an "Indian" is an imagined one. When we refer to ancient India, we mostly refer to Hindu India and more importantly, to Aryan India (somewhere in the article they mention: 'the timeless authority of the vedic reveleation'). I can think of a number of poetic texts in the Tamil language that narrate stories of Kings and empires(still, I've never come across dates being mentioned) circa the greek and roman civilizations, but these texts are hardly absorbed into the canon of ancient indian writing. This is because of a long and conscious blindness to Dravidian culture by the Aryans. I feel that Sanskrit has always been the language that embodies India not because it is the oldest language, but because: before Vasco da Gama, anyone travelling to india from the west came via the Hindu Khush. To get to South India is a long and arduous journey. And it is a journey past celebrated sanksrit speaking cultures. By the time anyone gets to the land of the Natives, they are already viewing the land influenced by Aryan thinking. In ancient india, Kingdoms of the south were just that, seperate kingdoms. But when we look at India now, we put together those many cultures and make generalisations. Within those generalisations, the aryan, the sanksrit speaker and the hindu stand tall. This, i find, is highly problematic.

Moving on, the author mentions that he is looking only at philosophies of six schools of thought as his focus for inquiry. He bases his knowledge of these schools (schools that propound the importance of experiential learning) based on documents written, most likely, by historians like Mill and Hegel. Traces of ancient India are hard to find. they have been destroyed by forces of nature, they have been codified in order to be protected from invaders, the codes have been forgotten by the children of the children of the children.. I can only disagree with Mill and Hegel's arguments because I can comprehend them, because i have been taught 'the western codes of thinking'. But answers to questions about ancient india cannot come from those codes, or a series of documents about indian philosophies in those codes.

This is highly subjective, but i feel like the people who know the language of the answers to these questions can never understand the language of the question.