The “rediscovery of India” should start with rereading the works of people like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Swami Vivekananda, former Union Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar has said.
He was here on Wednesday to attend a seminar on ‘Rediscovery of India’ held in memory of late Leftist thinker M.N. Vijayan. The event was organised by Kozhikode-based M.N. Vijayan Samskarika Kendram.
Nehru had said that the military history of India was of conquests, Mr. Aiyar pointed out. “But the cultural history of India, Nehru said, is of looking at what has come from outside, choosing what you like of it, integrating into the tradition, and thereby evolving this culture, which is what we call Indian culture,” he said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, however, thinks that the country had been under 1,200 years of slavery when Muslim kings and later the British ruled it. Mr. Aiyar said that if 1,000 years of Indian civilisation under Muslim kings were rejected from history, it would remove things such as tailoring, miniature painting, poetry which were brought to and developed in India by Muslims. “Even [the] Hindi [language] was invented by a Muslim, Amir Khusro in the Nizamuddin Aulia, where the local language which was called Brijbhasha, was combined with Turkish, Arabic and Persian that came from outside. Over a period of time, it acquired a linguistic character of its own, which is called Hindi today,” he said. It was wrong to say that the country suffered under Muslim rule, but rather it had flourished during those years. Quoting Gandhi and Nehru, Mr. Aiyar said that India’s culture had always been composite in nature.
