Laureate criticised for attacking Hindu history

Right wing academics have criticised Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen for attacking a majority Hindu view of Indian history and calling it an organised attempt to rewrite history to suit a political agenda.

In an address to the Indian History Congress in Calcutta, Professor Sen warned that rewriting Indian history from the "slanted perspective of sectarian orthodoxy" undermined historical objectivity and went against the spirit of scientific scepticism and "intellectual heterodoxy".

He condemned Hindutva academics' tendency to use religious myths and symbols to construct a sectarian view of India's past -for example, "the interpretation of the Ramayana not as a great epic but as documentary history that can be invoked to establish property rights over places and sites possessed and owned by others".

Intellectuals who support the BJP-led Vajpayee government denounced Professor Sen's comments as an attempt to impose a western perspective and he was accused of pandering to "pseudo-secular" and Marxist historians.

Professor Sen said the demolition of the Ayodhya mosque by Hindu fanatics fed on the theory that it had been built on the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, was the result of a "characterisation of the Moghul rule as anti-Hindu".

He denounced attempts to construct a "Hindu view of history" and said such a view would not be consistent with India's cultural pluralism.