Introduction: Conspiracy against
Columbus, nexus against Newton
Indian Express reporters certainly deserve to be on the staff of India's biggest English-language daily newspaper. They are thorough professionals. That is, as journalists they are thorough practitioners of the ignorant profession. Satiricus is also a journalist, but being far below the standards of Express excellence, he reads books to improve his ignorant mind. That, fortunately, is not necessary for these gentlemen. Their minds are already at the acme of improvement through ignorance, and there is really nothing more that they can unlearn. Some days ago this was admirably demonstrated by the newspaper's Chandigarh reporter in his fairy tale. That was printed by the paper as his scholarly ridicule of RSS-made history in the publication circulated during that organisation's current all-India mass contact drive. Satiricus had been happy to write about that delightful derision, but what makes him still happier is to see that what this “truth-involves-us-all” newspaper's Chandigarh reporter can do, its Lucknow reporter can do better. Regretfully repeating the fell fact that “world's history has been rewritten” by the wretched RSS, the learned man from Lucknow has devoted an entire opening paragraph to what fantastic claims the Sangh makes.
Detailing the devilry the reporter writes : “It was an Indian, and not Christopher Columbus, who discovered America. It was Indians Aryabhatta and Bhaskaracharya, and not Newton, who first came to know about the gravitational force. Sanskrit is the mother of all European languages.” All this is, of course, perfectly preposterous. But what is far more preposterous is that quite a few foreigners masquerading as outstanding scholars say the same thing. For instance, before Columbus discovered America there should have been no America. But surprisingly enough there are people who actually say America existed before Columbus, that it was highly civilised, and it was Indians who had done the civilising. The official history of Mexico officially admits that “those who arrived first on the continent later to be known as America were groups of men driven by the mighty current that set out from India”. If a man by name I.S. Muthanna can be believed in spite of his being an Indian, he has written a whole book on Indians in North America in which he writes that Indians had reached North America 5000 years ago. Lopez, Spanish author of The Aryan Races in Peru writes : “Every page of Peruvian poetry bears the imprint of Ramayana and Mahabharata.”
To cap it all, documents published by the National Geographic magazine document many striking parallels in Hindu and pre-Columbus American art, architecture, religious symbols, cosmological ideas, social structure, vocabulary, even games, and finally the not-so-coincidental use of the Hindu-invented zero in the mathematics of both cultures. What on earth is all this? Satiricus can only call it a conspiracy against Columbus. Now for the nefarious nexus against Newton. Satiricus can understand the RSS claiming that Newton was not the discoverer of gravitation, because he expects nothing better from the Sanghwalas. But what can he say when the Jewish Encyclopaedia says the same thing? It actually mentions Bhaskaracharya by name and says in his treatise Siddhantashiromani Bhaskaracharya has mentioned a force of attraction resembling gravity, discovered centuries later by Newton.
Then there is also this foreign fellow by name P. Johnstone who wrote that gravitation was known to the Indians before the birth of Newton. The Indian Express epitome of all knowledge on earth sneers at upstarts like Aryabhatta and Bhaskaracharya, but Satiricus finds to his consternation that even Will Durant writes deplorably enough in his book The Story of Civilisation that “India is the motherland... of our mathematics”, and if Encyclopaedia Britannica is to be believed, Bhaskaracharya and Aryabhatta are the world's original mathematicians. The Encyclopaedia says Arithmetic was discovered by Indians in the second century BC and regards Bhaskaracharya's treatise Lilavati as “the first book on modern Arithmetic”. It further says : “In 499 AD Aryabhatta finished his work giving rules of Arithmetic”, and also that he “was one of the first to use Algebra”. Bhaskaracharya even calculated the time taken by the earth to orbit the sun and stated that it was 365.258,756,484 days”!
These figures make Satiricus so dizzy that he cannot figure out how our intellectuals (apart from Express experts) can understand how the RSS could brainwash Bhaskaracharya. Finally this claim that Sanskrit is the mother of all Indo-European languages. Now it is one thing for swayamsevak Satiricus to make such a silly claim, but what can one say when non-swayamsevak Will Durant makes exactly the same claim in exactly the same words? For in his Story of Civilisation, the obdurate Durant writes: “Sanskrit is the mother of Indo-European languages.” What makes things far worse is that this one-line claim has a hoary history behind it, which gives even the English language a Vedic ancestry : Millenniums ago, in the Rigvedic age, there was a great battle, called Dasharajna, between a Vedic king called Sudas and a confederacy of ten peoples with two group names, Anu and Druhyu.
They were defeated, after which
the Druhyu migrated from the Vedic heartland and spread to the North-West,
right up to the borders of Europe. One of these peoples came to be known
as Druids, a distortion of Druhyu, and later as Celts. These Celts spoke
Celtic, which was spoken before the Christian era over a wide area of Europe,
from Spain to Britain. The original languages that the ten peoples, including
Druhyu, of the Dasharajna war, developed into proto-proto-Indo-European
languages, some of which became extinct, like Latin, while others developed
into extant, spoken languages, including English! Good God! Does that mean
English is a distorted form of Sanskrit? Looking to the distorted English
that the Indian Express writes, Satiricus would tend to agree. But would
that make the Sanskrit language the mother of all distortions? Only poor
Panini can say.