Way back in the ‘70s, there were two big countries which glorified their invaders, to the detriment of the indigenous populations.
One, of course, was the Umrika – where they celebrate ThanksGiving Day as a means of reminding the few remaining real Native Americans about the cruelty visited on them.
“Why Thanksgiving Is Also a National Day of Mourning. It’s important to know that for many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning and protest since it commemorates the arrival of settlers in North America and the centuries of oppression and genocide that followed.”
The Umrikans have, over the last few years, at the very least tried to get the true narratives out to a larger audience.
The other country which glorified the invaders? Our very own India. From as long as memory holds good till today, our complete narrative in India is hell-bent on taking forward the fiction that the last two major invader groups were a benevolent bunch of visitors, with the sole aim of improving matters for the natives.
While no doubt this bunch of hoodlums, because that is what most of them, rabble sent to India with a choice of loot and amass wealth – or stay back and spend time in poverty and possibly jail – were from two specific religions or to be precise, specific sub-sects therein, it is also a truth that amongst their first targets were co-religionists of other sects.
So the Dutch were stringing up on trees whichever European landed up in Malacca, and the French were borrowing money from the same money-lenders that the Brits were using to try to dominate the Hooghly and Ganga. The Portuguese were even better – they used Spanish seafarers, but did not let them hang around in India, since they were also required to sail the ships back.
As for the Mongols and then the Persians, reading up on their impact on the Yemenis as well as the Berbers and Moors who came from further over the oceans, is better understood when you visit the African part of the Mediterranean Sea. Or melting pots like the Balearic Islands and Marseilles.
Today, even small and not so rich Senegal, has a globally renown memorial to slavery. Goree Island, mention it to anybody from not just Senegal but also North-West Africa, and see the emotions. More moving than the Holocaust Memorials and Museums, and I have been there too, just that the Jewish people, true friends of India, have kept their narrative strong and alive.
So simple question – why don’t we have more Museums and Memorials documenting the simple truth that our invaders were at the very least cruel rampaging basxxxds, out to steal whatever they could lay their hands on, from knowledge to assets, of all sorts?
I found part of the answer here, in a review of a book on the Parsis, another community who arrived in India, and merged with the mosaic, just like the Jewish people.
American historian Will Durant had aptly said, “The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilisation is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”
Maybe because we do not travel enough within our own country to understand its real history? That’s what I am trying to understand and document in my own small way.
Come, join the resumption of my journeys, as an Indian in India out of choice. My blog rides India here – https://vm2827.blogspot.com/
( Veeresh Malik was a seafarer. And a lot more besides. A decade in facial biometrics, which took him into the world of finance, gaming, preventive defence and money laundering before the subliminal mind management technology blew his brains out. His romance with the media endures since 1994, duly responded by Outlook, among others.)
