Saturday, June 22, 2013

Making history

I am now creating history. I am not a historian/politician/economist/author. It is just this habit of seeing the past with my own mindset, bring it to the present and try to extrapolate to the future. The ideas mentioned are my own. These days you not only stand on the shoulder of giants but have to confront many number of chauvinistic giants, chauvinistic for various reasons.

The caste system. Why didnt I write about this all these days? why? May be, I, thought that a lot has been told and written. A sense of DejaVu. I will be going to write about history, present and future of the caste system. This topic is unlike any other topic which I have written about. I have to tread carefully, there are a lot of historical chauvinists. My definition of truth is very simple. "Past is the truth" and it is the only truth. How do we know the past? How do we come to know about the past? Through history. Shall we change my one liner to "History is the only truth", NO. History is and will be subjective. I have not come across any objective historical material because it is impossible to have one. Why? It is impossible to write one. When you write, you are limited by the language, time and other external subjective influences.

How do we add objective dimension to history? By asking many many people to write one. Homogenising these various writings will make us tend towards objectivity of the subject in question. I used the word "tend" to indicate that the number of people required to get a real objective estimate has to tend to infinity, which is humanly impossible. And if at all it happens, homogenising will be IMPOSSIBLE in the required time. Truth is always difficult.

History has been the recorded views of the elite. Ther is no record of the lives of all the other 99%. Why? Gods and kings were supreme. Everybody others were just "people". We have an account of all the Gods the elite prayed to. Do we have the same account of gods worshipped by the artisan, the laborer, the road cleaner, the cobbler, the blacksmith. etc... NO. What have we done to enslave them further. Further we have made them forget the gods whom they prayed for, all these years and made them embrace the flashy and the costlier gods of the elitist society.

Why did all the ancestral sufferings get forgotten so easily? Majority of the sufferings was due to the exclusitivity of these elitist gods and all the rules regarding their worship. Was a cleaner allowed to think of various building materials, was an artisan, an artist, laborer ever allowed to think anything beyond his work, NO. If allowed they would'nt get any. Where do you get the innovation? Are you telling me the iron pillar somewhere in India has stood the test of time? You are joking with half a billion population, of course, there will be one artisan who is passionate about his job and accidentally that is what he liked.

I have heard that the Aryans were responsible for the division of tasks among the people, which is in turn the pre-cursor to the caste system in India. What was the strategy which the dravidions followed? Did they follow an exact socialism? Wherein everbody just stepped in to overcome the shortcomings/need of the society on their own without anybody's influence?

What do I think? I thin the aryans already knew the shortcoming of this kind of society. They understood that there are certain tasks in the societal setup which majority of them disliked. In the dravidian setup, I think this discord was not present, at that moment, among the members.

The aryans observed this "bliss" of relationships and started thinking. They came to know that everybody "valued" their work and thought of every work having the same value. The aryans sowed the first seeds of the elitist behaviour by the way they worshipped and presented their gods. They just complicated it to make it elitist. They were able to impress upon the simple minded, since they worshipped a superior god, they themselves were superior. Here started the divide. Goodness is somehow and always associated with naiveness. This simplistic co-existence of the dravidians led to their exploitation. The stagnancy of learning and basking in the glory of successfully creating the divide, led us to being ruled by plethora of kings/governments. The aryans seperated themselves from the original and made them un-approachable, thereby increasing their supremacy. The original submitted to the vileys who then carefully carved the hierarchial system of society.

This power over 99% of the people led to creation of various units. Each unit size depended on the power the leader was having. Now, more power was needed. The leaders waged war against each other, thereby increased their domain of power. Who fought the wars on the battlefield? Your answer here. Because "history" does not answer this.

Now, I can fantasize, am i good at it....................