Joe Shearer
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- Apr 19, 2009
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Good to see someone taking on this neglected troll and getting him shut up.
Far too much.
There are those who have clearly been released by Dr. Pavlov, after a lifetime of faithful service. They run around biting others irrespective of what those others are doing.
Without answering you directly, I remembered and am reproducing an eloquent passage by a friend of mine from a small discussion group of our own, very private, speaking to each other on topics that interest us in very quiet tones. You may find his thoughts expressive; they are taken from a larger piece on Shivaji and Aurangzeb.
First of all it is a clear repudiation of the notion held fast among the Orientalists that India as a nation was a modern concept, a product of the British rule. For example, in 1880 Sir John Starchey, an Imperial official emphatically dismissed that ‘there ever was a country of India’. “It is conceivable”, he said “that national sympathies may arise in particular Indian countries” but “that they should extend to India generally, that the men of Punjab, Bengal, the Northwestern Provinces, and Madras, should ever feel they belong to one nation, is impossible”. Later yet Churchill reiterated similar sentiment. India, he said was merely a geographical expression. “It is no more a single country than the Equator” he is said to have quipped.
These Imperialists can be forgiven their ignorance. The reason why Churchill and others misread India so badly was part arrogance and part inability to conceptualize anything outside the Western civilizational model. The Western worldview was and in many ways still remains completely different from the Indian. While India emphasized pluralism and assimilation the Western world view of the time was compartmentalized and exclusionary. Around the time when Shivaji was admonishing the Mughal Emperor for his narrow mindedness, half a way around the world Europeans had just about finished writing the treaty of Westphalia by which they formalized the concepts of narrow nationalism as the only means to avoid conflict. From hence forth the Western civilization would balkanized, to be parceled out in a patchwork of ‘independent’ states; big and small; independent kingdoms complete with independent rulers free to impose their personal will, personal form of governance and personal faiths upon the people within their respective nations.
Not everyone was enamored by this relatively modern and artificial arrangement. “Nations states” wryly noted the Indian intellectual Tagore; “were like neatly pressed bales of humanity……bound in iron hoops, labeled and separated off with scientific care and precision”.
That imperative, if obeyed, will take care of the need to trim down in certain other ways.
You???
Did you have the Saraiki-speaking Rakhaldas Bannerji in mind?
Of course not. It was the Punjabi Daya Ram Sahni who began excavations in Harappa the previous year 1920-21.
Please.
Let's not confuse the Palaeolithic with the Mesolithic with the Village stages that overlapped with the IVC. I suggest, if you are going to get brazen and challenge people, and IF you read outside the Internet, get the book, India: An Archaeological History, and read the first four chapters //@jbgt90 - there is a copy waiting for you, whenever you have the time. When you read what has actually been dug up, rather than what we bandy around among each other in a slightly demented attempt at exchanging the lengths of our scholarly extensions, there may be a mild cultural shock. You have been cautioned.//
Joe you are just too good sometimes my friend.
