48-50: Three non-fiction books
48. B. B. Lal, The Sarasvati Flows On: The Continuity of Indian CultureA short, easy-to-read (except for one chapter which seems to come from another book entirely) pop non-fiction summary of the Indus or Harappan Civilization, a Bronze Age culture located in the modern countries of India and Pakistan, which had its own writing system, cities, and
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The Indus is a subject which I study myself, so I could go on forever about the problems with the first book; I just wasn't sure if other people would care. :) Basically, there's currently a right-wing political movement in India known as Hindutva; in a extremely simplistic explanation, you could think of them sort of like Fundamentalist Christians in the US. One aspect of this movement is an emphasis on India as a inherently Hindu nation (some individuals involved with the movement therefore discriminate against other long-standing religious groups in India, like Muslims, Christians, etc; other individuals argue that these groups are culturally Hindu even if they're not religiously Hindu). This manifests within archaeology in efforts to 1) prove that the Indus people believed in Hinduism, because that would show that India has been Hindu since the beginning of recorded history and 2) the Indus culture was totally just like modern Indian culture, since Hindutva members tend to emphasize conservatism over change. You can see this even in the title of Lal's book: "The Continuity of Indian Culture". Now, the Indus culture may or may not have had a religion which modern people would recognize as Hinduism; I can't say. But it's not really adequate archaeological interpretation to say, "Look! The Indus people drew a picture of someone with crossed legs! Clearly this is totally evidence for the beginning of yoga, and it had the exact same cultural meaning to them that it does to us, never mind the 5000 years in between!" Which is pretty much what Lal does at some points.
I don't know enough about Lal to know how involved he personally is with the Hindutva movement, but I do know he was involved in the Ayodhya debate, and if you read that wikipedia page, you'll get an extreme example of how the Hindutva movement gets involved in archaeology.
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I'm not sure, but if I had to guess, I would say most Hindutva supporters have no problem with them. It's more about Hindu as a culture/religion and not as much about it as a language (since Hindi, at least as it exists today, is a very recent development). I do know Hindutva has been gaining popularity in South Indian Dravidian regions lately, and one would think there would be a bigger difference there than to Bengali.
Anyway, it's a bit complicated.
Yeah, that's to say the least! The whole issue is enormously complicated (particularly when you get into areas like "what does secularism even mean in a multi-religious, non-Western context?"), and I am definitely no sort of expert in modern Indian political/cultural movements. But it is important, and I wish I knew more.
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