Surely you’ve heard how the Taj Mahal was really built on top of a Hindu temple called the ‘Tejo Mahalaya’? Or that 36 percent of the scientists in NASA are really Indian? And has India never really invaded another country in 10,000 years? I have heard these ‘truths’ half my life. Especially since I began using the Internet.

But have you ever tried to verify any of these facts? If you have, that makes you a skeptical patriot, like me. So is any Indian who listens to the received wisdom from anyone – parents, family, school, social or political leaders – but also demands, “show me the data”. I think it’s good for a country to have lots of young people who are skeptical (not cynical), and this election season is the perfect time to ask such questions.

I examine a handful of these ‘India facts’ in my book, The Sceptical Patriot: Exploring the Truths Behind the Zero and other Glories. Facts that many Indians love to brandish to justify their country’s wonderful past. While their truth varies, the interesting question these ‘facts’ raise is what they say about us, and how we see ourselves in connection to our history.

In the course of writing this book I have amassed a list of 50 or 60 ‘facts’ in my notebooks. Only a few of them found their way into The Sceptical Patriot, but one India fact I was sad to leave out was the number of Indians working in NASA. It’s impossible to prove or disprove the 36 percent (or whatever the latest figure is that people throw around), because NASA doesn’t release data on the nationality of their employees. It’s incredible how many people believe it anyway



And the Taj Mahal being the ‘Tejo Mahalaya’ – it’s been repeated so many times it’s a bit of a joke. I really wanted to look into the origins of this urban myth, but it was something I couldn’t do because I didn’t have the time to go to Agra or speak to people in the Archaeological Survey of India about it.

But for me, the most interesting India fact by far – and one that did make it into the book – is the idea that for the last 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 years (depending on who’s telling you the story), India has never colonized or invaded another country.

The popularity of this fact speaks volumes of the modern Indian approach to history, the idea of nationality, and the idea of India. When it comes to India, we’ve just decided that all internecine warfare (the repeated Chola invasions of Sri Lanka, for example) doesn’t count as invasion – a somewhat convenient reflection of a post-colonial Indian mindset towards history. It also captures very well the bitterness that a lot of people have about stuff that happened centuries before they were born. I’ve often seen this being held up as a certificate to justify what India’s doing today, or to justify why everyone else should be nice to India – “Look, please be nice to us, we’ve never invaded anybody else”.

It’s wonderful how these India ‘facts’ can be found everywhere, from blogs on the Internet to government reports to investment proposals to books by eminent politicians and public figures. A particular dubious quote by Macaulay (one that I analyze in the book) appears in numerous government reports and books. For instance it features prominently in ‘India Vision 2020’, a document published by the Planning Commission in 2004. Each time this quote is parroted over and over again, without any attempt being made to verify its truthfulness or provenance. It must be true, the authors seem to say, because it simply is.

It also says something about the quality of academic research – while researching for a chapter on the origin of plastic surgery in India for instance, I found many journal articles on the subject in which the sourcing was circular, dubious and full of mistakes. It’s clear that the authors haven’t bothered to look at the original sources – they’ve simply cut and pasted things from the Internet. It’s more common than you think, and it makes finding facts phenomenally difficult.

People you might normally think of as having brains functioning perfectly well believe in some of these India facts with a devoted passion. Sometimes I meet people saying things like: India was perfect until the British came, if they hadn’t imposed a western way of living on Indians, we would have been as great a power as the Japanese. I don’t call these things myths – because some of them might be true. But one of the reasons I think they work so well, and that intelligent people repeat them, is because they slot very easily into how we’d like our narrative of history to flow.

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