Falsehood of Eurocentric History!

The second millennium if the Christian era is about to end. It is the most dominant of eras since about 1492 when the Christian Church got its political act together in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It was able to get the last remaining kingdom ruled by a ‘Muslim’ dynasty, Granada, attached and defeated and conquered.

The new rulers Ferdinand and Isabella rode in triumph through the streets if this most beautiful albeit ‘Moorish’ city. They made it a capital offence for a Muslim to live in their realm. Mass conversions and deportations of the unwilling-to-convert followed.

To make the draconian order more lucrative to both the Church and the State Jews were also included in the interdict and the proscription. Many Jews and Muslims crossed over to Portugal. Their relief was short-lived. A daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella was given in wedlock to the King of Portugal; on condition that he emulate the scintillating example of Spain. The second uprooting took place.

The ascendancy of Christianity as interpreted by white Europeans may well have propagated ideals and ideas which the Lord Jesus Christ would find difficult to reconcile with the title ‘Prince of Peace’! The bloodshed caused by self-professed ‘Christians’ in the Crusades had occurred at the start of the second millennium.

The deadliness came in with the development of firearms which made white Europeans not only invincible but most dangerous whether they were resisted or allowed to win without a fight. They used the fact of their enemy being non-Christian to indulge in their most sadistic bloodlust.

Even today, Bill Clinton is supported by Britain and Australia when he sends Death and Destruction into the coloured world of Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. In 1945 Britain and the USA sent atom bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki although the Japanese war machine was already crumbling.

The Japs delude themselves if they believe that just because the Apartheid practising white South Africans accorded them ‘white’ status to enable five star hotels to make money they are indeed accepted as White! When it came to the crunch the ‘white’ Germans were not given the deathblow of an atomic strike.

The Japanese were not given one but two. Just to make sure.The above bhoumika or preamble or, in modern management terminology ‘make ready’ writing is to ask the reader to assess the past or about to be past millennium from the native, ‘ethnic’ or Indian point of view.

The media will be flooded by the US American and European inputs and our lazy writers and journalists will ‘copy’ with the minimum changes necessary to pass muster. A recent article for school children in a prominent English daily talked of dividing the 2nd millennium into four parts. The first was ‘Dark Ages’.

This section talked of Europe in the majority of the coverage. All about ‘Europe being split into small kingdoms’ and the feudal system. It went on to say ‘Church was the binding force and all kingdoms owing allegiance to the Church fought Ottoman Turks in wars known as the Crusades’!

Finally, in the last two sentences on this section entitled ‘The Dark Ages’ India rises above the surface of the writers Eurocentric prejudice and we learn ‘In India the first Islamic rulers set up the Delhi Sultanate’.The second section of the four into which the departing millennium is divided is entitled ‘The Age of Reason’. Here too the talk is irrelevant to India as agriculture is ‘giving way to industry’!

The last two lines are again about India. The beginnings of Colonial Rule are seen in India and the French, the Portuguese, the English.’The next sentence should swell the English chests with pride regardless of its accuracy or effect on the ‘native’ ‘ethnic’ Indians.“

British Rule was firmly established and India came under one uniform administration and was linked by transport and communication infrastructure.’The implications, dear reader is that before the white man took up his most onerous burden there was an absence of all-India transport and communications linkages.

The Mauryas, who ruled from the Oxus to at least Chitaldurg district in Karnataka, the Mughals who were considered suzerain even in Kerala did without transport and communication links. All the current talk of connecting rivers and having super highways are only the gilding the lily created by the British!

Perhaps it is a good occasion, this twilight of the second millennium of the Christian era to move away from the Eurocentricism imposed by the colonial experience. The first half of the period (1001-1501) sees people in Asia, the Americas, Africa and Australia living their own lives. Letting ‘native, ethnic’ genius had a free rein.

The architectural remains include the cyclopean masses created by the Incas. In India we have the tallest free-standing tower — Qutub Minar. In the deccan we have the superb Charminar. Also the fantastic temples of the Empire of Vijayanagar. The Taj may be the best known but it is only one of the marvels.

There was also the Peacock Throne. the great city of Shahjahanabad with its quite successful effort of creating a veritable ‘Heaven on Earth’.The scientific achievements of Europe, especially in metallurgy enabled them to produce firearms far superior to any in the rest of the world.

This made them world-beaters and world conquerors from the 16th Century onwards. the result was that all the world was looted in order to benefit Europe. the cultures and civilisations of Asia, the Americas, Africa and Australia were systematically destroyed.

The peoples who emulated the ignoble European example like the Russians after Peter ‘the Great’ and the Japanese showed that cruelty is no discriminator on grounds of colour.The hatred preached by the Europeans on grounds of their colour and interpretation of Christianity has been the curse of the second half of the millennium about to end.

We see six per cent of humanity, the population of the USA, consumes 40 per cent of the resources of the world. Even in the USA there is grinding poverty. Not only in the traditionally deprived and disadvantaged blacks but also whites.

Although a self-proclaimed Hindu (The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh today takes great pains to distance themselves from him!), Nathuram Vinayak Godse killed him by pumping three bullets into his bare chest before the half of the 20th century was over (January 30, 1948) Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has left a detailed model for simple living and high thinking.

A detailed model for life without plundering all natural resources, was dismissed as a ‘crank’s view’. The emphasis is on ‘market mechanism’. This ideal has not solved even the comparatively smaller problems of the West.

The half millennium of European dominance has been disastrous for all of mankind except for favoured groups like the Nazis, the Fascists, the cabals of the Stalinist Communist Party and the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and their look alikes like Clinton.