RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale said on Thursday that India needs to discard the Macaulayist mindset in order to reverse the narrative war against the country that has been going on for a long time.
This comes close on the heels of Prime Minister Narendra Modi repeatedly saying that India should discard the legacy of T B Macaulay by 2035, two centuries after Macaulay in his ‘Minute on Indian education’ document proclaimed that he wanted “Indians by blood but English in mindset”.
Speaking at the release of former BJP Rajya Sabha MP Tarun Vijay’s book ‘Mantra Viplav’ at the World Book Fair here, Hosabale said, “This is the era of narrative — it need not be true. One can even distort and push one’s agenda forward.”
He said that outsiders captured India, exploited its economy and also colonised Indian minds, leading to ‘mantra viplav’ (roughly, subversion of Indian belief systems).
Recalling Western scholarship on India in colonial times, he said, “Max Muller was appointed with an agenda. The narrative that Aryans came from outside and pushed Dravidians southwards, and that India is not one but many nations, was pushed.”
Calling extant Indian knowledge as an ocean that needs to be engaged with and interpreted for the present times, Hosabale gave a call for the use of Indian instead of Western terminology. “We should study the terms that were given by our civilisation, and understand their meaning and context. Some people think that these are difficult Sanskritised words, but English words we study are also difficult,” he said.
BJP Rajya Sabha MP Sudhanshu Trivedi said that the present fight to reclaim Indian knowledge is even more important than the freedom struggle that the country fought.
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“Today a section of our intellectual establishment is addicted to Macaulay, Marx and Mughals… As the Prime Minister said, we should come out of the Macaulayist mindset 200 years after Macaulay’s Minute,” he said.
Author Tarun Vijay said that when a society is poisoned, it dies. “Left-liberal, secularism and Jihad are ideological poison. Hindutva is our answer to it, and we are on the way to victory,” he said. “Maoism, etc., are like Ghori and Ghazni. Left extremism is not the correct word for them; it is communist terrorism. The Ram temple and Somnath are symbols of our victory.”
