Discovering India through the Bharatiya Lens: Breaking the Colonial and Marxist Myth, Author: Dr. Kamlesh Kumar Bajaj (2024), Delhi: Prakhar Goonj Publications

Bharatiya idea of India is the message that Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj authentically conveys in his path-breaking work titled "Discovering India through the Bharatiya Lens: Breaking the Colonial and Marxist Myth." Putting forth a cognitive distinction between the pre-existing Bharat and the 'discovered' India, the timely book unravels Nehru's purposeful identification of 'Indianization' in preference to 'Hinduisation' as a process of national integration. The Nehruvian consensus for a "settlers' nation" that derives its intellectual inspiration from the Colonial and Marxist narratives is pursued in the interest of playing down the historical reality of iconoclastic annihilation and dehumanizing conversion perpetrated by imperial Islam and colonial Christianity. While the author offers the ideational encounter between West Europe and India as the contour of causality in his thesis, the juxtaposition of literary and archaeological sighting provides empirical strength to his inquiry.

The six-fold chapter scheme of the book systematically exposes the Nehruvian agenda of erasing Bharatiya idea of India. It starts with Nehru's Idea of India, saying, "The idea of India [for Nehru] changed from the Vedic cultural heritage of Bharat to Muslim-dominated 'composite culture' (p.93)." The Nehruvian scheme of description purposefully prefers 'Indianisation' to 'Hinduisation' as the characteristic feature of 'composite culture.' It does so by equating celebrated kings, including Kanishka and Harshavardhan, who have been completely assimilated in Bharat by adopting Hinduism and allied Buddhism, with Islamic invaders who have perpetrated religiously motivated unspeakable, unending violence. The impetus behind this overstretched argument is to advance the 'Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT)' of the British at the cost of Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) sighting, for the convenience of bringing out a confirmation that India is a nation of 'settlers'.

In continuation of exposing Nehru's keenness in erasing the country's self-hood, the second chapter of British Rule, Macaulay's Education System-Enslaving the Indian Mind, sets the context of colonial capture of mind space in Bharat. It covers the conquest of and famine in Bengal, the introduction of English Education and Legal systems, the translation of Rig-Vedas, and the Hindu-Muslim divide. The chapter highlights the existence of an all-inclusive education before 1835 and its destruction by the British. Gandhian thinker Dharampal's eye-opening account of a Beautiful Tree provides the testimony to this Macaulayan mischief. The chapter posits that Macaulay's "Education Policy of 1835 for creating Brown Sahibs instilled inferiority in Hindus about Hinduism and encouraged them to convert to Christianity (p.100)." Other damaging contributions of Macaulay, as described in the second chapter, are: laying the foundation of the British policy of divide and rule favouring Muslims in preference to Hindus; speeches in the British Parliament, especially the one on the Somnath Temple favouring the Muslims; and authorship of the Indian Penal Code based on the English Law.

Consequently, comes the ideational encounter between colonial and decolonial agencies in the third chapter Vedic Heritage - Interpretation of Maharishi Dayanand in comparison to that of the Europeans. The author aptly regards it as the defining chapter of his book, since he brings out here Vedic enlightenment visions of Bharatiya sages in contrast to the agenda-driven portrayal of the Vedas by the European interpreters. Max Muller is the chief architect of this mission of interpreting the Vedas as the 'polytheistic text.' The purpose of such a false interpretation was to prove the Vedic civilization as 'primitive' and 'barbarian'. The falsehood about the Vedas was, however, exposed by an effective rebuttal by Maharishi Dayananda. He demonstrated that the Vedas contain knowledge of an advanced civilization. He put forth Arsh interpretation of the Vedas, drawing upon ancient Vedic treatises of Yaska, Panini, Patanjali, Kapila, Goutama, Kanada, Jaimini and Vyasa. Later on, Sri Aurobindo's writing Secret of the Vedas endorses Dayananda and further demystifies the negative profiling of the Vedic civilization.

The uncritical 'polytheistic' interpretation of the Vedas in an insensitive approach, however, manages to execute and extend the evangelizing adventurism under the successive patronages of the colonial and the Nehruvian dispensations, as runs the theme of the fourth chapter Christian Missionaries - Proselytization of Hindus and Role of Vedas Interpreted by the Europeans. Here, the author argues, "...the European translation of Vedas, in particular that of Max Muller, attained twin objectives of making the English-educated Indians feel ashamed of their religious practices while helping the missionaries confront the Brahmins and pandits on their rituals and multiple gods and idol worship in their sacred scriptures. It helped promote the proselytization work of missionaries (p.101)." Again, the chapter reveals that evangelist expansion continued in Bharat even after independence, with the pro-active encouragement of Nehru. Demonstratively, he rejected the whistleblower Niyogi Committee Report of 1956 that laid bare the conversion-related facts in Madhya Pradesh. As a matter of greater concern, Nehru literally handed over the country's northeast part to Verrier Elwin, a missionary masquerading as an anthropologist, "to let [its] tribals live their pristine lives without any modernization and development (p.102)."

The state-sponsored evangelization process during colonial-contemporary eras follows medieval time's violence-laden conversion to Islam in Bharat. While Nehru carried forward the colonial practice of providing support to post-independence Christian missionaries, he rationalized the medieval incursion of Islamic invaders by considering them as 'Indianized' dwellers in the country. Hence, interrogation of his 'Indianization' thesis becomes the discussion point in the fifth chapter, Islamic Invasion of India - Did they ever Indianize? It firmly refutes the fake projection of 'syncretic culture' and 'invigorating innovation' amid invasive Islamic rule, the false claim of 'egalitarian status' for socially marginalized sections in the Islamized society, the rationale behind the appeasement gesture towards the Islamist forces during the freedom struggle, the justification for offering leadership roles in educational and political spheres to people pridefully attached with their exogenous ancestry, and so on, so forth. The passionate promotion of the 'Indianization' thesis, therefore, appears to be compelled by a strong urge to make the 'AIT' relevant for narrating the inhabitation history of the country.

The reconfirmation of relevance of the 'AIT' for understanding the historic inhabitation process in Bharat becomes difficult, keeping in view the emerging evidence indicating the pre-existence of IVC and an advanced Vedic civilization. The periodic sighting of literary and archaeological evidence contests the colonial narratives, inspiring the quest for a true history of Bharat. To this end, the sixth chapter, Discovering India through Bhartiya Lens, pleads for a relook into refreshing findings of Bhartiya and Western thinkers who have been fairly disposed towards the Vedic heritage of Bharat. Some of them include Maharishi Dayananda, Swami Vivekananda, Tilak, Sri Aurovindo, Bhagwat Datta, A. N. Singh, Guru Datta Vidyarthi, Surendra Kumar, Dharampal, Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Helenus Scott, Reuben Burrow, John Playfair, Henry Colebrooke, Goldstrucker, Will Durant, Daniel Pipes, Koenraad Elst, David Frawley, and Stephen Knapp. The decolonial expedition in mind space of Bharat necessitates a deeper insight into her ideational treasures and material achievements being rooted in her Vedic heritage.

The foremost breakthrough of this voluminous text is the qualitative elevation of the decolonial discourse from the civilizational binary of Bharat and India towards the cultural fault line of Hinduization and Indianization. While culture is some body's thought and action carried over from one generation to another, civilization is his or her cumulative ideational and material accomplishments. Accordingly, Hindu is a cultural being and Bharat is his or her civilizational space. As Vedas lay the ideational foundation of the Hindus in Bharat, Vedic enlightenment occupies the centre stage of the debate that unfolds in the book, involving Bhartiya and European minds. The source of enlightenment (Vedic heritage or European legacy) remains a protracted debating point in Bharat. One traces a similar demarcating line among European scholars differing with each other on the scientificity of the Vedas. The book breaks the ice in saying that European interpreters with apparent denial positions are intrinsically aware of the enlightenment quotient of the Vedic knowledge. The imperial evangelist motivation is the cause of their duality between external articulation on and internal recognition of Vedic science.

The book offers a significant takeaway for its readers when it exposes the process of transferring fundamental and applied science, not just material wealth, from the colonies to the imperial headquarters through transplantation of Euro-centric educational and legal apparatus. In a way, it carries forward the message on the enlightenment debate already conveyed in Will Durant's The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage and Dharampal's Indian Science and Technology, validating the Vedic heritage argument over the dominant European legacy narrative in Bharat. Illustrating the country's astronomic excellence, the author shows Sun Temple constructed in Konark, and its portrait adores the cover page of his book. Furthermore, it highlights rituals involving worshippers of both Hindu and 'tribal' ancestry in Jagannath Temple of Puri and Lingaraja Temple of Bhubaneswar, proving the so-called fault line drawn by the British between the Hindus and 'tribal' community as unnatural. The book has many more noteworthy revelations too. The most striking one is, however, finding the British, Evangelist, Islamist, Communist and Nehruvian agendas on the same page during the course of deciphering colonial content and context.

As the book conveys a hint for its subsequent editions to appear, there is scope for its further improvement. The freshness of ideas and empirical solidity that the book carries, demands its indexing, making it more handy for the investigative readers. It has a passing reference to the country's navigational history that begins with the oceanic legacy of Chola rule. As the testimony stands out, peninsular Bharat has a longer temporal stretch of maritime and naval heritage, starting from Kalinga kingdom on the east coast to Maratha power on the west coast. As a result, the myth of Portuguese navigators bringing order to the Indian Ocean can be busted. The message conveying vested interest-inspired interpolations in the texts that follow Vedas requires greater investigation in the interest of decolonial exposition. Hence, the likelihood of steadily mainstreaming the Bhartiya idea of India looms bright with the arrival of a genre of books that discover the 'discoverers.'