The Tyranny of Indian History as taught in schools...2

I particularly find it amazing that whenever I talk to people about the native wisdom and knowledge of the ordinary people of this land and its lineage how fascinated they are about these things. Many complain that these details are not taught as part of social science in their school syllabus.

History, historically has been the narration of the conqueror. Any conqueror wants to re-write history favourable to himself / herself and conveniently wipeout all those histories that are unfavourable. Unfortunately, this written history itself is not of any ancient history. Histories of different parts of the world have had different ways of being recorded, remembered and recollected.

We in India are great storytellers. Our biggest history are stories that are narrated from generation to generation bereft of the influence of the written word in the village temples and haats by various types of performing artists through songs, narrations, renderings, in between reading of scriptures, as koothu, theatre, katha and many more diverse forms of narration.These are in so many variations and in so many dialects that it is difficult to even start to count the different stories that are being narrated.

Somewhere I read that there are more than 300 forms of Mahabaratha in narrative style alone in one part of the country. The tamil writer Jayamohan who has recently embarked on a mammoth ten year writing of the entire Mahabaratha acknowledges more than 10 variations in the south indian languages including 3 known in Tamil (in complete as he differentiates between the complete and abridged versions and the commentaries of which there are many more including that of Rajaji and Mahakavi Bharathi). His Venmurasu apparently has more than 5000 people who have dedicated two hours (it takes that long to read the daily chapter that he writes) every day for the next ten years to follow him. This is the most amazing literary effort of our times.  A film made on the rendering of the Mahabaratha as a Koothu in the vanniyar dominated regions of northern (to central) Tamilnadu by Sashikanth called, 'Kelai Draupadai', he has filmed the tradition of local village histories being interspersed within the meta narrative of the Mahabaratha. Similarly there may be several hundred variations of the Ramayana.

But these are not histories that we read in our history books.

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