PERVEZ HOODBHOY: Jinns invade campuses // NAYANJOT LAHIRI: When Propaganda Passes for History
NB: These two articles summarise the assault on intelligible speech and mindfulness that is unfolding across the sub-continent. The establishment is now hell-bent upon fostering an authoritarian culture by destroying our capacity to think. In such an atmosphere, democratically inclined people (and not merely academicians) need to defend standards for reasonable debate. Democracy is dependent upon thoughtful speech. DS
‘Motivational speakers’ claiming paranormal knowledge are today’s rage in educational institutions here.
Last week, a workshop titled ‘Jinns and Black Magic’ was
organised in Islamabad by the department of humanities at the COMSATS Institute
of Technology (CIIT), one of Pakistan’s largest universities. The invited
speaker, Raja Zia-ul-Haq, introduced as a ‘spiritual cardiologist’ is reputedly
an expert on demonic possessions and evil spirits. He is popular: a press
photograph shows no standing room left in the university’s main auditorium.
Interesting logic was used to prove the existence of jinns
and black magic. The speaker first categorised all unseen creatures into three
types: those that fly; those that change shape and appearance depending upon
circumstance; and those that find abode in garbage or dark places. Why, he
asked, would Hollywood invest in horror movies and paranormal phenomena if
these didn’t actually exist?
But hang on! Doesn’t his argument force you to accept that
Hollywood’s popular vampires, werewolves, and zombies are also real, not mere
fiction? Surely this nonsensical claim could have been challenged by a single
bold person in the audience. But, as at all such events, the organisers ensured
that the preacher’s three-hour monologue would be uninterruptable.
What lies next is to be seen. Perhaps CIIT could go for
creating a jinn-based telecommunications network. Another promising direction
could be radar-evading jinn-powered cruise missiles. Jinn chemistry, a research
subject activated in the Ziaul Haq era, could be another growth point. CIIT
could also pursue a proposal from the 1970s, initiated by a senior director of
the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, to replace fossil and nuclear fuels with
jinn power.
Actually, last week’s event was unexceptional. In schools,
colleges, and universities similar ‘motivational speakers’ claiming paranormal
knowledge are today’s rage. The Institute for Business Management (Karachi),
for example, organised a meeting on ‘The last moments of a man’. The poster
showed the grayed hulk of a man slouching through a graveyard. Students (again
a full auditorium, I’m told) were given graphic glimpses into life in the next
world. The source of this information, probably secretly SMS’ed from inside the
grave, was not revealed by the speaker.
One might have thought that Pakistan’s super-elite
universities would be different. Lums, the country’s most expensive private
university, has a school of science and engineering built with American
dollars. It appeared to have a serious mission but several Lums professors now
openly deride scientific reasoning.
Quite accidentally, earlier this year I happened to attend a
public lecture given by a professor of humanities at Lums whose specialty is
science-bashing. While admitting he knew no physics, he went through the usual
stale post-modernist critiques of science and then claimed that the Nobel Prize
for physics, awarded to American physicist Robert Millikan in 1923, was
undeserved since it was based upon a selective choice of data.
The distortions were clear to me, but when the professor
poured a ton of scorn on Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc squared, my eyes
nearly popped out and my heart stopped beating. What else could make an atom
bomb explode, or a nuclear reactor produce electricity? Jinns, surely! But he
is not alone in making such claims. The head of the biology department, in an
email to the entire Lums faculty, excitedly claimed that reciting or listening
to certain holy verses “can control genes and metabolites” and suggested that
specially equipped audio-visual rooms be made in hospitals to treat terminally
ill patients.
Perhaps to underscore its determination to shift away from
Western science, last month Lums ousted Pakistan’s most highly regarded and
respected mathematical physicist from his tenured position. Fortunately, he
loses nothing since Harvard, Princeton, or MIT (from where he received his PhD)
will welcome him with open arms.
Paranormal and conspiratorial ways of thinking dovetail well
with each other. Hence it should not surprise that the current vice chancellor
of Punjab University, Pakistan’s largest public university, has written a book
asserting that 9/11 was an inside job. Further, according to a newspaper
interview, he says that the world’s entire economic system is controlled by
Jews huddled together in the town of Monte Carlo. Conspiracy buffs can expect even more delights now that the
famous Zaid Hamid, having successfully dodged his sentence of 1,000 lashes, is
back from his months of incarceration in Saudi Arabia. This fiery orator is
expected to soon resume his popular campus speaking tours across Pakistan.
The all-pervasive anti-reason, anti-science attitude on our
campuses might seem difficult to understand. No, it’s not hard, just think for
a moment. To spit venom at science and pillory its epistemological basis is
easier than falling off a broken chair. Rejecting science means you are spared
the required toil, effort, and exacting mental discipline needed for learning
hard stuff like math and physics. Besides, you might not even have the talent
for it. It’s far easier to curse science than to woo it.
Consider the advantages: mental disorders like epilepsy can
be understood and cured without bringing in neurosurgeons or clinical
psychologists since, of course, it’s the jinns at work. A good resident pir or
exorcist would do fine. You don’t have to learn the messy science of
meteorology because jinns make winds. And seismology is useless since
earthquakes happen because of our bad deeds.
As for toys and trinkets like computers and cellphones we
can, like our Saudi brothers, always buy the best from Apple or Nokia. Some
money-hungry Zing-Zang-Zong company will happily run the cellphone networks for
Pakistan. The dirty business of technology and inventing things can be safely
left to the Chinese, Americans, and Europeans. Their jinns know their job so
well.
Pakistan’s universities should have been beacons of
enlightenment, open inquiry, and bold new thinking. Instead they are sheep
farms. A legion of intellectually lazy and ignorant professors wants a breed of
students who will submit to authority, not question or challenge. Knowing that
an invented bogeyman subdues five-year-olds effectively, they hope the spectre
of unworldly creatures and fear of death will suitably frighten
20-25-year-olds. The newly launched jinn invasion of campuses means that
Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual decline will accelerate.
The writer teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad.
Why is the Culture Ministry sponsoring exhibitions that no
serious historian will do anything other than guffaw over?
When does good archaeology become pure propaganda? And what
does it tell us about what is passing for history and culture these days?
Seeing the exhibition which described itself as a ‘Unique Exhibition on Cultural
Continuity from Rigveda to Robotics’ certainly made me ask these questions and
think about the motivations in putting together this display. The exhibition, organised between September 17–23 at
the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi , was the brainchild of the Institute of
Scientific Research on Vedas whose director, Saroj Bala, is a retired member of
the Central Board of Direct Taxation. With support from the Sangeet Natak
Akademi and the Ministry of Culture, its message was that ‘Vedic Culture
provided the foundation on which the superstructure of Indian civilisation is
being laid till date’.
The message was writ large in the various panels that
presented a great deal of ancient India within the Vedic framework. It is Vedic
people, for instance, who set up advanced centers of learning like Takshashila,
Ujjain and Nalanda. If weaponry was found in sites stretching from Haryana to
Uttar Pradesh, these are seen as part of the Ramayana references to weaponry.
And yes, dates on the basis of astronomical observations in Vedic texts and the
epics were shown in the exhibition as a sure fire way to predict, among other
things, the exact birthdate of Ram – which is said to be January 10, 5114 BCE.
In fact, from Balochistan to the Ganga plains, archaeological sites from 7000
BCE to 2000 BCE were presented as supporting a cultural continuum which
represents ‘Vedic culture’.
Obsession with dating: Preparing water-tight calendars of the past on the basis of
astronomical years has a long history that goes back to Biblical scholars such
as Archbishop James Ussher in the 17th century. It was he, for instance,
who provided a date of the biblical flood as being in the year 2348 BCE. On the
basis of biblically based estimates, he provided an even more precise one for
the creation of the world. This happened around 6 PM on a Saturday which was
October 22 in the year 4004 BCE.
The Ussher chronology, incidentally, was consigned to the
dustbin of history around the middle of the 19th century because it did
not fit in with the archaeological indications of human existence much before
that time. While biblical chronology still has some die-hard adherents, it would
be an embarrassment for any archaeologist worth her salt to be engaging
seriously with it. To put it another way, it is part of the prehistory of
modern archaeology. The creation of modern archaeology, in fact, is based on
the assumption that artefacts and monuments have a history that goes beyond
textual sources, and very frequently, they do not illustrate the lives and
deeds of people and events mentioned in religious literature like the Bible.
Evidently, the organizers of the Vedic exhibition do not have any such
reservations. Their motivation is very much in a mould that the
17th century Ussher would have completely approved of. It is another
matter that no scholars in their right minds will go anywhere near their
travesty of Indian civilisation.
More seriously, the organisers have not considered the
implications of astronomical calculations on the basis of which precise dates
for epic heroes and events have been offered by them. Dates do not exist in
isolation. They have to be seen in relation to each other, offering a connected
and continuous chronology. So for instance, what does all this mean for the
date of the Buddha or that of the Maurya dynasty? The implications of the
textual chronology would result, for instance, in placing Ashoka hundreds of
years before the 3rd century BCE. This doesn’t make any sense
in the light of the contemporary rulers in Asia and beyond that are mentioned
in Ashoka’s inscriptions. That is why a scholar as recently as 2014 wrote that
‘It would be irrational to ascribe specific chronologies to the various
dynasties that one encounters as early as the Rigveda and the
later Vedic literature and as late as the epics and the Puranas’.
Significantly, this is not the opinion of a left-wing historian but the widely
respected archaeologist Dilip Chakrabarti – who wrote this in a series that is
supported by the Vivekananda International Foundation.
Immaculate conception: The other motivation that stands out is a determination to
squeeze archaeological cultures of diverse lineage and region into an all
encompassing womb, that of the ‘Vedic civilisation’. Interestingly, this only
includes societies whose subsistence pattern is strongly agricultural. That
there are early agricultural societies in north and northwest India and
Pakistan is well accepted but, unlike what the ‘unique exhibition’ states, we
are looking at different cultures here. Mehrgarh in Balochistan with an
8th millennium BCE antiquity of wheat and barley cultivation is
qualitatively different from what can be seen at Lahuradeva in the Gangetic
plains in the 7th millennium BCE. Within the Gangetic plains itself, there
were distinctive yet interacting lifeways. Around the time when Lahuradeva
flourished, there were scores of hunter gatherer societies around meander lakes
and streams in the central Ganga plains. Such hunter gatherers, though, don’t
figure in this Vedic story at all.
There are, at least, two other major problems with this
story. First, the subsistence pattern of such agricultural societies is
selectively presented. Cattle bones, for instance, are the most common animal
remains at places like Mehrgarh and in Harappan times. Why was this fondness
for cattle consumption missing in the mounted exhibits? The image of our
ancestors wolfing down vast quantities of meat is obviously not congenial to
those who feel that the past must serve the prejudices of the present. The second
problem is that in their enthusiasm to rewrite history, the organisers seem to
have ignored the arguments of archaeologists who turned up this evidence.
Lahuradeva’s copper objects are an instance in point which have been pushed
back to 5000 BCE in the exhibition – completely ignoring the unambiguous manner
in which the excavator placed them in the 3rd millennium BCE.
This is how good archaeology becomes bad history.
While many more pages can be filled up with the fictions and
fallacies that I saw masquerading as history in the Lalit Kala Akademi, it is
not my purpose here to catalogue them. What needs reiteration is that this was
an exhibition whose design told viewers that the Rigveda and
the epics are thinly disguised accounts of an actual sequence of historical
events. It also put forward a fantasy in which all agricultural societies in
north India over four thousand years, regardless of their differences, could be
viewed as the archaeological interface of Vedic civilisation. All this is so
misleading and manipulated that it does not even deserve the label of bad
history.
May I add that it is ironic that while the Prime Minister is
spending millions trying to bring Silicon Valley to India, we already have a
Silly-Con valley in the shape of a bunch of people who are trying to con us
into believing their self-serving myths via futile exhibitions that no serious
historian will do anything other than guffaw over.
Nayanjot Lahiri is Professor at the Department of
History, University of Delhi
