[FullGarden_S]

>Our prime minister and most citizens love to brag about "ancient culture" and "proud history"

Yes. I think so too.

The bragging is mostly patriotism and it wouldn't be a wonder if the same patriotism made them wish they could erase or forget their own embarrassing past two centuries of history. Most of the historic records before that point were totally destroyed or lost so feeling proud of what's left and moving on is not bad but seriously not prioritizing preservation is really ignorant.

[fakedang]

> Most of the historic records before that point were totally destroyed or lost so feeling proud of what's left and moving on is not bad but seriously not prioritizing preservation is really ignorant.

It's actually cultural. Even foreign historians from a thousand years back such as Al Biruni criticized the Indian cultural norms of focusing on oral traditions, instead of written text, and the use of assumptions, story telling and exaggerations instead of facts and accurate retelling, which in turn feeds into a culture that prioritized fantasy over curiosity. It's stunning to say how we can obtain accurate records of the locations of the homes destroyed in the Great Fire of London in the 16th century, but don't have an accurate account of many kings in the Indian subcontinent during the 19th century.

This could have been a direct result of the caste system, wherein the deep study of literature was only allowed for Brahmins - not even the kings and nobility.

[rayiner]

What's wild to me is how British/British Americans can trace their families based on detailed records kept by random villages going back to the Middle Ages. Meanwhile my dad's legal birthday is off by six months because his village in Bangladesh didn't issue a birth certificate until he was five (in the mid 1950s) and then kind of just guessed.

[anui293]

This could have been a direct result of the caste system, wherein the deep study of literature was only allowed for Brahmins - not even the kings and nobility. The sentence itself shows the why the oral tradition failed to capture accurate records. From "The beautiful tree" by dharampal -> "in which it had been assumed that education of any sort in India, till very recent decades, was mostly limited to the twice-born amongst the Hindus, and amongst the Muslims to those from the ruling elite.

The actual situation which is revealed was different, if not quite contrary, for at least amongst the Hindus. It was the groups termed Shudras, and the castes considered below them who predominated in the thousands of the then still-existing schools in practically each of these areas."

[tempytempytemp]

My comment isn't exactly about embarrassing pasts or patriotism. There is lack of basic understanding about preserving data, records and books properly; not just the "how", but also the "why". Just go to any college in the country and see how librarians and students deal with the books they hold, and compare it to how colleges in the US/Europe do the same. The difference is night and day. This can be any type of book; doesn't matter if it's history or math.

Treat a book properly, and thousands of people across future decades will be able to peruse it. Treat it like garbage, and that knowledge won't be available in the future. It's the same with digitization. You need a plan to keep all the books you digitize, or else it's in danger of getting lost if the government/responsible person gets defunded/deprioritized.

All talk about "glorious history of culture and science" is hollow if you cannot store proof of it properly.

[anon291]

> their own embarrassing past two centuries of history.

I think part of the problem is exactly this. We don't say Spain should be embarrassed at the Muslim conquest, yet we're expected to say India should be 'ashamed' (for what?) for their past two centuries? History just is... We should stop assigning emotional value to it.

The issue here is twofold. Firstly, India is not unique in this pursuit. China also has taken charge of constructing its own history, and sometimes it's at odds with Western thinking. Often time, the oral / traditional accounts are found to be true.

Secondly, the West also falls into magical thinking. For example, right here, you are parroting the idea that Indian heterodoxy over their own history is misguided. However, it has a clear historical basis in the fact that Britain tried to expropriate most of its history. I don't mean taking various artifacts.

I mean that, for many years, Western historians pushed the idea that the Indus Valley Civilization inhabitants were not related to modern Indians. They couldn't deal with the fact that Indians may have had one of the oldest, largest, and richest ancient civilizations. Of course history has proved them wrong.... Harappan genes are well represented in the Indian subcontinent.

So, sure, we can make all kinds of claims about Indian historians inflating their own history (I would agree), but to then say that Western historians don't is just wrong... Remember, Nazi Germany's racial policy is the direct result of a ridiculously flawed and fantastical understanding of Indian history by Western historians. Like it or not, the Nazis were western too (and besides, plenty of non-German historians agreed with them... we just like to forget about that).

Finally, we cannot ignore the impact of Nazism here. Even today, it is difficult to talk about Aryans without conjuring up images of genocidal Germans. Research has to be qualified and disclaimed so that people don't take the objective historical record and try to justify more atrocities.

For example, going back to the IVC. European historians were insistent that the Aryans civilized India, and many insisted that the IVC was Aryan, and not really 'Indian'. Again, the evidence is very clear that the Harappans have no steppe ancestry. But again, we have an example of the very sort of behavior you accuse india of, except by British historians.

[FullGarden_S]

>India is not unique in this pursuit. China also has taken charge

No? India is unique in this pursuit because China didn't take as big of an hit as India did. The fact that The Vedas were preserved till now is well enough proof that oral accounts were not useless.

I'm an Indian. I myself can't trace my ancestry past my great grandfather lol(similar to most of the current native black Americans living in the USA) because no records were maintained as that was how insignificant avg. Indian life in India was viewed as back then, thanks to great philanthropists like Mr. Winston Churchill(not like I care). I don't think I can get through to the other comment that started out with the "c-word" and pointed out about castes and oral accounts but lineage of nobles and kings were well maintained by Brahmins and after a rough 2 centuries, very little was left to back up such claims of proper record maintenance so there's no point in fretting over it. Thanks sharing about Nazism, that's news to me.

After seeing people around me, I started to believe that Indians have an inferiority complex engraved into them due to the colonialism and they don't value books or their own history because they don't value themselves in the first place, which was the context behind my previous comment. I think it resulted as a side effect due to the helplessness they felt after what they lost, namely their heritage and their identity along with it. All this makes it seem like their inferiority complex is not going away anytime soon. Gotta see.