Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana (ABISY) is a subsidiary of the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ( ; , , ) is an Indian right-wing, Hindu nationalist, paramilitary volunteer organisation. The RSS is the progenitor and leader of a large body of organisations called the Sangh Parivar (Hindi for "Sangh family" ...
(RSS), a Hindu-nationalist organisation. Envisioned in 1973 by Moropant Pingley, a '' pracharak'' of the RSS, and founded in 1978-79, ABISY holds that India's history was distorted by the
British Raj The British Raj (; from Hindi ''rāj'': kingdom, realm, state, or empire) was the rule of the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent; * * it is also called Crown rule in India, * * * * or Direct rule in India, * Quote: "Mill, who was himsel ...
, and seeks to correct the biases. Scholars state that the actual aim of the organisation is to rewrite Indian history from a Hindu nationalist perspective.


History

The Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana (ABISY) is a subsidiary of the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ( ; , , ) is an Indian right-wing, Hindu nationalist, paramilitary volunteer organisation. The RSS is the progenitor and leader of a large body of organisations called the Sangh Parivar (Hindi for "Sangh family" ...
(RSS), founded in 1978-79. It was envisioned in 1973 by Moropant Pingley, a '' pracharak'' of the RSS. The organisation was further developed by Balmukund Pandey, who would later become its Organising Secretary. According to social anthropologist Daniela Beti, the main leaders of the organisation have an ideology aligned with
Hindutva Hindutva () is the predominant form of Hindu nationalism in India. The term was formulated as a political ideology by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923. It is used by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the ...
ideology, although the members of the organisation may have their own reasons for participating. In July 2014, Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, the head of the
Andhra Pradesh Andhra Pradesh (, abbr. AP) is a state in the south-eastern coastal region of India. It is the seventh-largest state by area covering an area of and tenth-most populous state with 49,386,799 inhabitants. It is bordered by Telangana to the ...
chapter of ABISY, was appointed Chairperson of the
Indian Council of Historical Research The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) is a captive body of the Ministry of Education, Government of India established by an Administrative Order. The body has provided financial assistance to historians and scholars through fellowshi ...
(ICHR) by the
National Democratic Alliance National Democratic Alliance (NDA) () is a Centre-right politics, centre-right to Right-wing politics, right-wing and Conservatism, conservative Indian big tent political alliance led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It was foun ...
government headed by
Narendra Modi Narendra Damodardas Modi (; born 17 September 1950) is an Indian politician serving as the 14th and current Prime Minister of India since 2014. Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014 and is the Member of Parliament from ...
. In March 2015, three other ABISY-affiliated historians were nominated as members to the Council: Narayan Rao, former professor at Berhampur University and the national Vice-President of ABISY, Ishwar Sharan Vishwakarma, Professor in the Department of Ancient History, Archaeology and Culture at Gorakhpur University and the All-India General Secretary of ABISY, and Nikhilesh Guha, a retired Professor of Kalyani University and the head of the Bengal chapter of ABISY. The appointments were described by commentators as an effort by the Modi administration to fill government institutions with individuals ideologically aligned with the RSS.


Ideology

The stated objective of the ABISY is writing Indian history "from a national perspective". The name ABISY means ''"The Plan (also in the sense of committee) for collecting History of the Whole of India"''. Scholars have described the organisation as engaging in
historical revisionism In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of a historical account. It usually involves challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event or times ...
to present a narrative consistent with the ideology of Hindutva. Pandey states that Indian historians have been exposed to western distortions, which created a false impression of Indian cultural diversity. According to Pandey, the ''
puranas Purana (; sa, , '; literally meaning "ancient, old"Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature (1995 Edition), Article on Puranas, , page 915) is a vast genre of Indian literature about a wide range of topics, particularly about legends an ...
'' were the most significant source of Indian history. The organisation states that beneath the diversity of India's culture is a unifying
Hindu culture Hinduism () is an Indian religions, Indian religion or ''dharma'', a religious and universal order or way of life by which followers abide. As a religion, it is the Major religious groups, world's third-largest, with over 1.2–1.35 billion ...
. It regards the Vedic culture to have originated in the Janjati and Adivasis traditions, the local Indian cultures. The ABISY believes that the Indo-Aryans did not migrate to the Indian subcontinent from Central Asia, but were the original inhabitants of India, some of whom later left the subcontinent and civilised other parts of the world. This theory is rejected by mainstream scholars, as it contradicts a wide range of scientific research. This belief is also used to argue that upper-caste Hindus and Adivasis share a common stock, but that only the caste-Hindu lineages were advanced enough to expand out of the subcontinent. Scholars have described this ideology as an effort to justify discrimination against Adivasi peoples.


Activities


Projects

In August 2014, the organisation stated that it had completed four research projects, namely retracing the journey of the
Saraswati river The Sarasvati River () is a deified river first mentioned in the Rigveda and later in Vedic and post-Vedic texts. It played an important role in the Vedic religion, appearing in all but the fourth book of the Rigveda. As a physical river, i ...
, countering the theory that Aryans migrated into India and instead claiming that Aryans were originally from India who had migrate out of India, dating the Mahabharatha,
Shankaracharya Shankaracharya ( sa, शङ्कराचार्य, , "Adi Shankara, Shankara-''acharya''") is a religious title used by the heads of amnaya monasteries called mathas in the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Hinduism. The title derives from Adi ...
and
Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha, was a śramaṇa, wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism. According to Buddhist tradition, he was ...
, and emphasizing that the
1857 rebellion The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the fo ...
was the First War of Independence. It announced that its next ten-year project would be to compile all Hindu ''
Purana Purana (; sa, , '; literally meaning "ancient, old"Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature (1995 Edition), Article on Puranas, , page 915) is a vast genre of Indian literature about a wide range of topics, particularly about legends an ...
s'' into an encyclopedia, get scholars to interpret its original meaning, and to put it forward as India's real history. The ABISY has also stated that it intends to document the history of all the 670+ districts in India, and describe the history of the more than 600 tribal communities in India.


Methodology

The ABISY centers its historical work around Hindu scriptures. Berti states that ABISY methodology, as exemplified in its interpretation of
Kullu Kullu is a municipal council town that serves as the administrative headquarters of the Kullu district of the states and union territories of India, Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. It is located on the banks of the Beas River in the Kullu Va ...
mythology, is to collect orally preserved stories of the gods, or ''bharthā'', which are to be regarded as reliable sources for an understanding of those gods. ABISY leaders "decipher" those texts, or often just snippets of them, to reveal their similarity with
Sanskrit texts Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
, by focusing on specific words or expressions. This would reveal the Sanskrit identity of the village gods. ABISY tries to show a link between local cultures and a supposed unified Hindu culture by investigating those local cultures. Berti notes that this kind of "new local historiography" is not unique to Hindutva-writers, but has also appeared in African nationalistic discourse, and that "the political construction and utilisation of folklore was at the very heart of the XIX century’s European nationalisms."


Publications

The ABISY publishes the journal ''Itihas Darpan'' (Mirror of History), edited in Delhi. A majority of the articles are written in English, while a few are in
Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...
. It has been intermittently published since 1995; since 2016,
Indian Council of Historical Research The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) is a captive body of the Ministry of Education, Government of India established by an Administrative Order. The body has provided financial assistance to historians and scholars through fellowshi ...
has taken over the reins. Few authors had any institutional affiliation or even academic training in history. The editorial standards of the journal emphasize the urgency of "scientific character" in Indian historical research, with repeated references to "the importance of making reference to sources". Nonetheless, citations are often vague and they seldom refer to any recent work in academic history. Not all local history is deemed worth researching, but only those facts which are in accordance with the organisation's ideology.
Tanika Sarkar Tanika Sarkar is a historian of modern India based at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Sarkar's work focuses on the intersections of religion, gender, and politics in both colonial and postcolonial South Asia, in particular on women and the Hindu ...
notes the production to be a Brahmanical scape: both the editors were upper caste Hindus with no background in history, pages were affixed with Hindu imagery, and the primary focus remained on instilling a pride among readers about ancient India via idiosyncratic reading of Sanskrit texts. Histories of medieval and modern India are never delved into. In the April 2016 issue, one article derived all modern science from the
Vedas upright=1.2, The Vedas are ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism. Above: A page from the '' Atharvaveda''. The Vedas (, , ) are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the ...
while one prescribed
Manusmriti The ''Manusmṛiti'' ( sa, मनुस्मृति), also known as the ''Mānava-Dharmaśāstra'' or Laws of Manu, is one of the many legal texts and constitution among the many ' of Hinduism. In ancient India, the sages often wrote their ...
as the panacea for all evils plaguing India while yet another eulogized the unique traditions of Hindu tolerance.


Organisation

ABISY headquarters are located at Keshav Kunj, the
Delhi Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, primarily its western or right bank, Delhi shares borders w ...
office of the RSS. Under the central office are thirteen ''ksetra'', or provincial, offices, each run by a president. These centres are responsible for connecting ABISY ideology to local cultural lore and tradition. Branches of ABISY exist in
Chandigarh Chandigarh () is a planned city in India. Chandigarh is bordered by the state of Punjab to the west and the south, and by the state of Haryana to the east. It constitutes the bulk of the Chandigarh Capital Region or Greater Chandigarh, which al ...
,
Shimla Shimla (; ; also known as Simla, List of renamed Indian cities and states#Himachal Pradesh, the official name until 1972) is the capital and the largest city of the States and union territories of India, northern Indian state of Himachal Prade ...
and
Kullu Kullu is a municipal council town that serves as the administrative headquarters of the Kullu district of the states and union territories of India, Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. It is located on the banks of the Beas River in the Kullu Va ...
. ABISY states that it has 500 professors associated with it.


References


Sources

* * * * * {{authority control Anti-communist organizations Anti-communism in India Anti-Islam sentiment in India Historiography of India History resources Research institutes in India Far-right politics in India Hindu nationalism Hindutva Hindu organizations Hindu organisations based in India Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Sangh Parivar