Forgotten heroes – the true story of India

Years ago, I scored a ticket to the first cricket Test match to be played in the city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat: India versus a West Indian 11 that included the peerless Viv Richards. I had expectations of an epic match as I joined other fans pushing into the brand new ground. But by the end, it was the performance of the spectators, not the players, that had staggered me. As the West Indians took the field, loud monkey-whoops filled the air, and banana skins rained down from the stands. The pelted players – probably the greatest West Indian team in history – stood there in their flannels, stunned.

Indians are rightly sensitive about racism directed at them; an Indian student beaten up in Australia, say, will swiftly become national news. Yet some Indians can be unthinkingly at ease with their own contempt for people of darker skin – a contradiction that warps both our present and our sense of the Indian past. As I travelled across India exploring the contemporary afterlives of 50 important historical figures spanning 2,500 years for Incarnations, my new book and 50-part BBC radio series, I heard dozens of young Indians extoll the bravery of Shivaji, the 17th-century Maratha warrior who defied the Mughals and serves today as a symbol of Hindu pride and resistance to Muslim rule. But when I mentioned a fierce resistor of Mughal expansion who came before Shivaji, young eyes went blank. For that forgotten leader doesn’t fall into any of the standard narrative silos of Indian history – Hindu, Muslim or European. Rather, he was an uncommonly clever and adaptive Ethiopian who had been shipped to India as a teenaged slave.

We have seen what happens when cultural biases run against a historical figure. So what if the biases run in the figure’s favour? That individual often gets turned into a demi-god, while the experiences of the actual, inconsistent human being fall away. As I chased down historical lives in far-flung communities, at archaeological sites, and in archives and texts, I sometimes noticed an almost comical gap between the superhero guises some figures are forced to wear today and their own self-critical sensibilities. One such was India’s first global guru, who brought yoga to the west: the baby-faced, proselytising monk known as Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902). Nowadays in India he is portrayed as the heroic personification of modern muscular Hinduism, a man insistent about the superiority of his religion over all others. (He is also a personal hero of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.) Less well remembered is the Vivekananda who could be a perceptive critic of Hindu society.

Vivekananda’s fame derived from lectures on Hinduism that he delivered in flamboyant, saffron-robed style across America and Europe in the 1890s. But even as he took those audiences by storm (“I give them spirituality, and they give me money,” he wrote with a wink to one of his Indian patrons), he was deeply shaken by his first encounters with an egalitarianism and social progressiveness that his fellow Hindus lacked. Visiting a Massachusetts women’s penitentiary, he was astonished by the dignity even criminals were afforded. “Oh, how my heart ached to think of what we think of the poor, the low in India,” he wrote to a friend back home. “They have no chance, no escape, no way to climb up … They have forgotten that they too are men. And the result is slavery.”

The contradictions lacing Vivekananda’s speeches and letters – on whether caste was integral to Hinduism, on the validity of certain Hindu rituals and customs – intimate the depth of his intellectual struggle, and one of his greatest internal conflicts was with the effect of his faith on the powerless. “No religion on earth preaches the dignity of humanity in such a lofty strain as Hinduism,” he would write, “and no religion treads upon the necks of the poor and low in such a fashion as Hinduism.” But such contours in Vivekananda’s personality and intellectual life got flattened during his conversion into a laminated image: that of righteous Hindu nationalist avenger of the Muslim and colonial conquests of India, ambivalent about nothing at all.

In modern India, writers and historians have been intimidated – and libraries and bookshops ransacked – when they have dared to treat vaunted figures as historical beings. By insisting that favourites from India’s past be preserved in memory as godlike, full of certitude and above human consideration, we don’t just deny them their real natures, we sabotage their exemplary force.

Indian sexism being even more deeply rooted than racism, I can’t claim I was surprised to find that there were far fewer historical records for significant female lives than there were for their male counterparts. But what I saw more clearly is how an absence of documentary sources plays into our ridiculous cultural tendency to turn real women of intellect, judgment, fallibility and bravery into goddess-types.

Propagandhi711 wrote:comrade your contempt for working class poor and the low was also on display during the devyani episode. I distinctly remember your attempt to sweep the accusations under the rug claiming the maid was doing it out of self interest and poor ppl in india do it for peanuts. forgot that episode, have we?

I guess even an allknowing, ardent bleeding heart cant escape the shackles of caste system

confuzzled dude wrote:

Propagandhi711 wrote:comrade your contempt for working class poor and the low was also on display during the devyani episode. I distinctly remember your attempt to sweep the accusations under the rug claiming the maid was doing it out of self interest and poor ppl in india do it for peanuts. forgot that episode, have we?

I guess even an allknowing, ardent bleeding heart cant escape the shackles of caste system

Isn't Devayani herself belong to Dalit community?

Kinnera wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Propagandhi711 wrote:comrade your contempt for working class poor and the low was also on display during the devyani episode. I distinctly remember your attempt to sweep the accusations under the rug claiming the maid was doing it out of self interest and poor ppl in india do it for peanuts. forgot that episode, have we?

I guess even an allknowing, ardent bleeding heart cant escape the shackles of caste system

Isn't Devayani herself belong to Dalit community?

So you support people blindly because they belong to a certain caste?

confuzzled dude wrote:

Kinnera wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Propagandhi711 wrote:comrade your contempt for working class poor and the low was also on display during the devyani episode. I distinctly remember your attempt to sweep the accusations under the rug claiming the maid was doing it out of self interest and poor ppl in india do it for peanuts. forgot that episode, have we?

I guess even an allknowing, ardent bleeding heart cant escape the shackles of caste system

Isn't Devayani herself belong to Dalit community?

So you support people blindly because they belong to a certain caste?

Nope. I was supporting Indian govt's (and other nations') practice.

Kinnera wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Kinnera wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Propagandhi711 wrote:comrade your contempt for working class poor and the low was also on display during the devyani episode. I distinctly remember your attempt to sweep the accusations under the rug claiming the maid was doing it out of self interest and poor ppl in india do it for peanuts. forgot that episode, have we?

I guess even an allknowing, ardent bleeding heart cant escape the shackles of caste system

Isn't Devayani herself belong to Dalit community?

So you support people blindly because they belong to a certain caste?

Nope. I was supporting Indian govt's (and other nations') practice.

Is it Indian govt's practice to make people overwork, without a break?

confuzzled dude wrote:

Kinnera wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Kinnera wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:
Isn't Devayani herself belong to Dalit community?

So you support people blindly because they belong to a certain caste?

Nope. I was supporting Indian govt's (and other nations') practice.

Is it Indian govt's practice to make people overwork, without a break?

I think we discussed enough on this subject, so I don't want to repeat myself again, let's leave it at that.