Indian Council of Hindutva Research

Welcome to the new utopia. The recently appointed chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), Professor Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, has written mainly blogs. That’s the reason his oeuvre is unfamiliar to professional historians. He was professor of history and tourism management at Kakatiya University, a somewhat odd-sounding name for a department since the two disciplines are as separate as chalk and cheese. It is not clear if Prof. Rao was charged with turning out tourist guides who overwhelm visitors at sites that preserve landmarks of ancient Indian history with their knowledge of legends.

At any rate, the appointment effected by HR minister Smriti Irani confirms an individual without a proven professional track record of history-writing to head a leading national body which has crores at its disposal. This means resources will be wasted in worthless pursuits. In his public pronouncements Prof. Rao has been at pains to point out that he has not been in the RSS, the country’s mother Hindutva body, but is still a nationalist and a patriot. The caveat was hardly needed for nationalism is no one’s monopoly though some try to make out that it is.

Of one thing we may be reasonably sure. Under Prof. Rao’s guidance it will be the effort of the ICHR to single out for funding research which aims to show that India’s intellectual attainments in ancient times — defined as the era before Islam came to India — was unrivalled, and that some of the landmark principles of today, especially in science, are traceable to the ancient Hindus but, alas, have come to notice now on account of their re-discovery in the West.

This midget’s understanding of the past, whose chief attribute is its cringing chauvinism, is regrettably what we may expect from a government whose lead engine is the Hindutva-nurtured BJP. Remarkably, the HRD minister in the first NDA government, Murli Manohar Joshi, who was a former physics professor and should have known better, paid obeisance at the same low altar of national exaltation by sacrificing known principles of scholarship as his present counterpart. T.K. Venkatasubramanian, who was ICHR member-secretary during the first NDA government, has noted that Prof. Rao’s writings have not been put to “professional scrutiny”.

The BJP and the RSS labour under the incorrect notion that Marxist historians have dominated ICHR in the past. This bogus claim is at the base of the burning desire to liberate history-writing by appointing trustworthy Hindu nationalists. The suitable altering of school textbooks to inject communal venom cannot be far behind.