Category: Book Reviews

Sita Ram Goel in this book defines the history of the Islamic invasions of India and its role in contemporary Indian politics. This book also gives background to what he names dhimmitude (it is a neologism first found in French denoting an attitude of concession, surrender and appeasement towards Islamic demands) in India. At the outset of the book, the author mentions the thoughtlessness of the ruling class secularists and socialists in India suffering from ideological blindness. He says if they do so, that would become sacrilege and a serious slur on their reputation as progressive, liberal, and large hearted.

They are not supposed to see the violent waves of Islamic imperialism swelling all around them. He berated Indian secularism, alleging that “this concept of Secularism is a gross perversion of the notion which arose in the modem west as a revolt against Christianity and which should mean, in the Indian context, a revolt against Islam as well.

As compared to Islamic invaders Britishers and their missionary nexus were pretty much kinder to India and the Indians as described in relation to the medieval Islamic invaders. Unlike Muslims, they never demolished Hindu temples and converted Hindus by force and never attempted insult and injury on every Hindu sentiment and institution. We can even say the animosity of Christians towards Hindus was more organized and well structured whereas Muslims spewed direct and intolerant hatred on Hinduism like mullahs and Sufis poured ridicule and contempt on Hindu religion and culture without any compunction.

To amplify insult to injury, the National Curriculum Authority had issued edicts to present Islamic and European colonialism in a glowing favorable light. The result was that in 50 years generations had grown up with no knowledge of their rich heritage. Goel called it “an insidious attempt at thought-control and brainwashing” and argued that National Curriculum Authority guidelines are an “experiment with untruth” and an exercise of suppressio veri suggestio falsi. He asserted that the NCERT guidelines are recommendations for telling lies to our children, or for not telling to them the truth at all.” This book goes some way towards helping understand a small but significant segment of history that was stifled. The best part of the book is author submitted the work without any kind of self-imposed censorship. This makes it difficult to swallow the factual discourse for leftist intellectuals.

Hindu view of the conflict and Muslim view of the conflict is described very lucidly in this book, he gave two different dimensions to look after the objectives of respective sides which clear out that, the rise of Vijayanagara, the Marathas, and the Sikhs, the religious motive here is brought into a sharper focus. The goal for which the sword of Hindus was unsheathed by Harihar and Bukka, Shivaji and the Sikhs, comes to be quite clear in many poems written in praise of these heroes by several Hindu poets. The objective was to save the cow, the Brahmin, the ikha, the sutra, the honour of Hindu women, and the sanctity of Hindu temples.

On the succeeding dimension, many Muslim historians of medieval India have left for posterity some very detailed, many a time day-to-day, accounts of what happened during the endless encounters between Hindus and Muslims. The prominent theme in these accounts is of mu’mins (Muslims) martyred; of kafirs (Hindus infidels/non-believers) dispatched to hell; of cities and citadels were sacked; tons of genocide taken place; of Brahmins killed or forced to eat beef; of temples smashed to the ground and mosques raised on their sites. But the unfortunate and deliberate distortion of history by progressives stands on the viewpoint that, no exaggeration of this kind of religious and political conflicts should be permitted in NCERT textbooks. Even though the guidelines are aware of these barbaric destructions by Islamic invaders they still warn that ‘there should be no over-glorification of the medieval rule’ and further prohibited that the writer should not under-emphasized condemnation of bigotry, intolerance and exclusiveness.

Even though Goel was hard on medieval invaders he also believed that the “average Muslim is as good or bad a human being as an average Hindu” and warned:

“Some people are prone to confuse Islam with its victims, that is, the Muslims, and condemn the latter at the same time as they come to know the crudities of the former. This is a very serious confusion, which should be avoided by all those who believe in building up a broad-based human brotherhood as opposed to narrow, sectarian, self centred, and chauvinistic nationalism or communalism.”

Sita Ram Goel is one of the underrated intellectuals who got suppressed by eminent historians for his uncensored brutal and factual attack on pseudo-seculars. Also to note, when Goel applied for a passport in the year 1955, it was directly declined by the PM office. Goel was staunch Marxist initially but after his critical comments on Nehruvian nexus he was subjected to all sorts of malignance and he was accused falsely by ad-hominem attacks. Later on, he turned into an anti-communist.

This book stands out as a shred of perfect evidence to know the perpetual distortion of history by eminent historians, and also an eye-opening work to understand the organized modus operandi of Marxist intellectuals in open academia.