PARTITION : THE ETERNAL PAIN OF PUNJAB

SOURCE:
http://tarekfatah.com/hey-sikhs-happy-birthday/



        PARTITION : THE ETERNAL PAIN OF PUNJAB


[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVU2xmvf72A ]

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           Hey Sikhs, Happy Birthday!

                              by

                      Tarek Fatah

                     • November 17, 2013

        Guru Nanak with his two companions,
 the Muslim Bhai Mardan and Hindu Bhai Bala.

On first full moon after Diwali  millions of Sikhs and their friends around the world  celebrate Gurpurab, but few outside India know the significance of this day or its history. It’s the 549th( read in 2013 AD) birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of the Sikh faith and one of the greatest symbols of pluralism and tolerance in the world.

The 5,000-year old Indian civilization, born on the banks of the Indus and nurtured for many millennia by the Ganges, still enchants the rest of the world.

With a cacophony of cultures and a myriad of languages, India is truly incredible. A place where diversity is not just taught, but experienced as life itself.

The land of Krishna and the Vedas is the natural home to Hinduism, but under its umbrella, Hinduism has nurtured the other major religions of the world and provided refuge to those fleeing persecution. Be they Zoroastrians from Persia, Thomas the Apostle, or the descendants of Prophet Muhammad escaping the Arab Umayyad Armies, India has accepted all without any conditions and stands a power that has never once invaded its neighbours throughout its chequered history.

Mahatma Gandhi may epitomize India in the West, but he is just one of the many towering figures of history that have shaped the land, its culture and its religions. Poets such as Tagore and Iqbal immortalized India in verse while emperors like Asoka and Akbar ruled over dazzling domains that stunned the visitor.

Among the great philosophers and thinkers that India gifted to the world are two men who tower above the rest- Buddha and Guru Nanak Dev, the founders of Buddhism and Sikhism.

While Buddha is well known in the West as a result of his creed and followers, Guru Nanak, whose birthday we celebrate today is yet to be discovered.

Let this Muslim introduce you to the man who founded the world’s youngest religion, Sikhism and who had a profound role in shaping my Punjabi heritage, alas, one that was torn to shreds by the bloody partition of India in August 1947.

Today, the place where Guru Nanak was born in 1469 is a city that was ethnically cleansed of its entire Sikh population during the bloodbath of 1947. 

Nankana Sahib, a place where the Guru spent his childhood with Muslim and Hindu friends is a Bethlehem without Christians; a Medina without Muslims. For a few days the town will bustle with Sikh pilgrims from all over the world, but soon they will depart and nary a turban will be seen until the Sikhs return next year.

The city of Nankana Sahib lies near Lahore, my maternal ancestral home, where my mother and father were born. My mother told me how she as a Muslim girl grew up with Sikh neighbours and how she was part of the Sikh family’s celebrations at the time of Gurpurab and how she would travel with her friend to Nankana Sahib. Decades later she would still recall her lost friend who left Pakistan to seek refuge across the border.

Today Nankana Sahib celebrates, but there are no Muslim girls accompanying their Sikh friends.

None. It is sad.

Sad, because Sikhism and Guru Nanak were intertwined with Islam and Muslims. The Guru’s closest companion was a Muslim by the name of Bhai Mardana. It is said when Mardana was dying, the Guru asked him, how would you like to die? As a Muslim? To which the ailing companion replied,

“As a human being.”

Five hundred years later, a border divides Muslim and Sikh Punjabis. A border where two nuclear armies and a million men face each other. As a Muslim Punjabi I feel the British in dividing Punjab separated my soul from my body and left the two to survive on their own. Muslim Punjabis lost their neighbours and family friends of generations. Most of all they lost their language that today languishes as a second-class tongue in its own home.

We kept Nankana Sahib, but lost the Guru.

However, the tragedy that befell the Sikhs was far more ominous and deserves special mention. For Sikhs, the Punjabi cities of Lahore and Gujranwala, Nankana Sahib and Rawalpindi were their hometowns and had shared a history with their gurus. With the 1947 Partition, not only was Punjab divided, but the Sikhs were ethnically cleansed from Pakistan’s Punjab.

As a result of the creation of the Islamic State of Pakistan, the Sikhs lost absolute access to the following holy sites: Gurdwara Janam Asthan, the birthplace of Guru Nanak, in Nankana Sahib; Gurdwara Panji Sahib in Hasan Abdal; Gurdwara Dera Sahib in Lahore, where the Fifth Guru, Arjun Dev, was killed; Gurudwara Kartarpur Sahib in Kartarpur, where Guru Nanak died; and, of course, the Shrine of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Lahore.

When the killings and cleansing of 1947 ended, not a single Sikh was visible in Lahore.

Of course, Muslims too were chased out of the eastern parts of Punjab, but they were not losing their holy places of Mecca or Medina.

Even though we Muslims despair the occupation of Jerusalem, we still have the comfort of knowing that Muslims still live in and around the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

But what about the Sikhs?

To feel their pain, Muslims need to imagine how outraged we would feel if, God forbid, Mecca and Medina were cleansed of all Muslims and fell under the occupation of, say, Ethiopia. How can we Muslims ask for the liberation of Muslim lands while we institutionalize the exclusion and ethnic cleansing of all Sikhs from their holy sites inside an Islamic state?

Muslims who cannot empathize with the loss of the Sikhs need to ask themselves why they don’t.

Before 1947, Punjabi Muslims did not consider Sikhism as an adversarial faith. After all, from the Muslim perspective, Sikhism was the combination of the teachings of Sufism, which was rooted in Islamic thought and the Bhakti movement, an organic link to Hindu philosophy. It is true that Moghul emperors had been particularly vicious and cruel to the leaders of the Sikh faith, but these Moghuls were not acting as representatives of Islam. Not only that, the Moghuls inflicted even harsher punishments on their fellow Muslims.

With the creation of Pakistan, the Sikhs lost something even more precious than their holy places: diverse subcultural streams. One such stream flourishing in Thal region (Sind Sagar Doab) in what is now Pakistan, near Punjab’s border with Sind and Baluchistan, was known as the “Sewa Panthis.”

The Sewa Panthi tradition flourished in southwest Punjab for nearly 12 generations until 1947. This sect (variously known as Sewa Panthis, Sewa Dassiey, and Addan Shahis), is best symbolized by Bhai Ghaniya, who aided wounded Sikh and Muslim soldiers alike during the Tenth Sikh Guru’s wars with Moghuls. Sewa Panthis wore distinctive white robes.

They introduced a new dimension to the subcontinental religious philosophies. They believed that sewa (helping the needy) was the highest form of spiritual meditation — higher than singing hymns or reciting holy books. 

The creation of Pakistan dealt a devastating blow to the Sewa Panthis and they never got truly transplanted in the new “East” Punjab.

The organic relationship between philosophies and land, indeed, requires native soil for ideas to bloom. Other such sects and deras (groups) that made up the composite Sikh faith of the 19th and early 20th centuries included Namdharis, Nirankaris, Radha Soamis, Nirmaley, and Sidhs — all were pushed to the margins, or even out of Sikhism, after the partition.

The tragedy of the division of Punjab is best captured in a moving poem by the first prominent woman Punjabi poet, novelist, and essayist Amrita Pritam,

 “Ujj akhaan Waris Shah noo” (An Ode to Waris Shah), which she is said to have written while escaping in a train with her family from Pakistan to India.

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFkKOr08-jw ]

 Pritam wrote:

ujj aakhaN Waris Shah nuuN,
kithoN kabraaN vichchoN bol,
tay ujj kitab-e ishq daa koii aglaa varkaa phol

ik roii sii dhii punjaab dii, tuuN likh likh maare vaen,
ujj lakhaaN dhiiaaN rondiaN,
tainuN Waris Shah nuN kahen
uTh dardmandaaN diaa dardiaa,
uth takk apnaa Punjab
aaj bele lashaaN bichhiaaN te lahu dii bharii Chenab

(Today, I beckon you Waris Shah,
Speak from inside your grave
.
And to your book of love, add the next page
.
Once when a single daughter of Punjab wept, you wrote a wailing saga.
Today, a million daughters cry to you, Waris Shah.
Rise, O friend of the grieving; rise and see your own Punjab,
Today, fields lined with corpses, and the Chenab flowing with blood.)

As I celebrate the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak I read some profound words of wisdom he left for his Muslim friends. 

He wrote:(Guru Nanak)

Make mercy your Mosque,
Faith your Prayer Mat,
what is just and lawful your Qu’ran,
Modesty your Circumcision,
and civility your Fast.
So shall you be a Muslim.
Make right conduct your Ka’aba,
Truth your Pir, and
good deeds your Kalma and prayers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_jSvEGbFjY

                 WHO IS  TAREK  FATAH - PROFILE

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PROJECT SARASWTI : Problems of Indian Chronolog - Date of Mahabharata War

SOURCE:
http://ysudershanrao.blogspot.in/2007/10/problems-of-indian-chronology-date-of.html



                      PROJECT - SARASWATI

       Problems of Indian Chronology

           - Date of Mahabharata War

Human Empowerment Conference

(Sponsored by Sanantanadharma Foundation)

Dallas, Texas

12-14 Oct 2007

Indian Chronology – Problems and Perspectives

(A Note)

---Y. Sudershan Rao[*]

Prof of History (Rtd)

Kakatiya University,

Warangal,A.P.India

Modern genre of history which is two centuries old by now insists on two prerequisites, time-space coordinates, to situate any event or person in a historical context. 

The heuristics of any available evidence conforming to these coordinates will distinguish a historical fact. 

These determinants of authenticity of a historical record are borrowed from the principles governing the commercial and property transactions of the medieval and early modern Europe. The ‘instruments’ of commercial nature will directly and materially affect the concerned individuals and/or their succeeding one or two generations. Therefore, the genuineness of the document in question is subjected to scrutiny and if necessary corroborative evidence is also required in resolving the legal disputes arising out of such transactions. The application of these principles to the impersonal matters like historical inquiries without any discretion complicates the issues rather than solving them. One can not deny the existence of his forefathers preceding four or five generations because he does not know their names, the dates of their births and deaths or the locations where they lived. For the history of the recent past, these two coordinates may appear to be more relevant as the recent happenings have direct bearing on the present and near future. We get different types of source material for writing about a recent happening. A historian can make use of corroborative sources to attempt a historical narration. European history being relatively recent, the time-space determinants may hold validity to an extent.

When we are attempting to write the history of the civilizations and the peoples of remotest past whose antiquity can not be traced, a historian should use his discretion  applying  commonsense, reason and logic, as the basic tenets of scientific method of inquiry while examining the available historical source material to bring out the essence of the remote history for the benefit of mankind. 

Bharat Varsha, the Indian sub-continent or South Asia, is endowed with voluminous record – oral, literary and archaeological – of the history of not only its people and their culture but the history of entire Creation and its secrets. The rich oral tradition which has come down to us through infinite number of generations defy our estimation of its origin in every respect because it speaks of mind boggling reckoning of Time and infinite creations. Veda is believed to be eternal. It is a revealed knowledge. The revelations of great sages are handed down to us as oral tradition. 

The classification of this knowledge,

Veda, was attempted by Sage Veda Vyaasa whose times are connected with the great event, the Battle of Kurukshetra. 

Sage Vyaasa had much higher objectives for this classification than making it a chronological account. Most of the mantras included in the ‘Samhitas’ of the four books of Veda being common, the Sage has benefited the humanity with the Knowledge being presented in four different ways for varied purposes. The sage had given each version of the Veda to one of his able disciples for preservation and propogation. Modern historian assigns different periods for the origin of Rigveda and other Vedas citing certain changes in society to legitimize the Linear theory.

When the author of these four versions of Veda was one and the same, it is a matter of simple commonsense that these books (oral) are contemporaneous.

Sage Vyaasa also gave us the PuraaNa which speaks of the history of many creations and major events therein, both Cosmic and mundane. The genealogies of Rishis and major dynasties of rulers are given in the PuraaNa which Sage Vyaasa has recorded as handed down to him by his father, Sage Paraashar. Sage Paraashar got this knowledge of remote history as a revelation. Out of this one body of PuraaNa (Vishnu PuraaNa?), eighteen Maha PuraaNaas were composed during Mahabharata times. The major content and characteristics of these PuraaNaas being the same, each PuraaNa is endowed with some peculiarities of its own in its presentation and emphasis given to a major concept or phenomenon. Subsequently, many subsidiary puraaNaas, Saastras, Darshanas, Sutra and Kaavya literature were composed in different periods of time and published through oral transmission. The PuraaNic literature has been updated periodically. Though the origin of PuraaNic literature could be dated to Mahabharata and immediately after Mahabharata times, we can not fix up the exact time when the literature was made available in written form for the first time. Since the material used for writing is of perishable nature, even the earliest manuscript found by us turns out to be the latest written version of the original work. The modern scientific dating methods might at best help us estimating the approximate date of an artifact or manuscript (conditions apply!). A historian with unprejudiced sense of reasoning would only say that the dating of the available copy can hardly determine the date of the original work.

Bharat has no parallel in the world in respect of the quality, quantity, antiquity and continuity of its knowledge store. Vedic and PuraaNic literature give us very valuable data for tracing the history from the remotest past to the recent times. It may not be possible to assign a fixed date for every event or episode of the remote past which of course serves no purpose. But on that score the episode can not be dismissed as fictitious. The episodes in the Vedic and PuraaNic literature should not be blindly taken in its literal sense. They are encoded narratives. The solution for a riddle posed in one episode cited in one PuraaNa could be found elsewhere in the same work or in some other PuraaNa. It needs a mega view of the whole literature to understand and interpret an episode. So micro-studies should be attempted with only macro-understanding. 

Every ancient work, though specializes in any Sastra (science), or Dharma (conduct), or Art (music, dance or fine arts), or Itihasa (history) is encyclopedic in its nature and gives the benefit of a bird’s eye view of the universal knowledge and the Sanatana Dharma. Thus, every ancient work, irrespective of its special focus on an area, is capable of giving universal consciousness to a sincere seeker. In ancient Indian knowledge system, a specialty did not mean ignorance of the rest as we understand the specializations today. Holistic view was the order of the day. Therefore the problem should not be studied in isolation.

Further, every ancient work was aiming at raising the conscious level of its clientele from the mundane to the Ultimate through the known to the Beyond. The Dharma as a Sutra (thread) runs through all the ancient literary forms. The essence of Vedic thought is given in PuraaNas and Itihaasas for mass consumption as educative entertainment. Sanatana Dharma, the basis of the Vedic thought and PuraaNic knowledge, is explained through the Epics as live narratives. In view of the mega time scale, the ancients have divided the eternal Time in Yugas, Mahayugas, Manvantaras and Kalpas. With the help of PuraaNic genealogies and the astronomical data available from the Mahabharata, many scholars have attempted to fix the date of Mahabharata War with negligible variations. These studies would confirm that the Great Event took place around 3000 BC. Now, it is not difficult to arrive at a reasonable time-frame for the Mahabharata which draws a line between the remote and recent past. Modern historian, free from prejudices, can fairly reconstruct Indian Chronology taking the date of the Great War as the sheet anchor. Since the chronology is the spine of the body of history, the gaps or missing links may be covered withlogical interpretation of the valuable data from the ancient literature.

Heuristics and hermeneutics employed in the modern Historical Method for studying ancient societies of remote past, when associated with common sense, reasoning and logic would help resolve many misunderstandings and misconceptions entrenched in the present historical writings. What is basically required of a modern historian is a positive approach to knowing truth.

---

[*] He owes his understanding of the subject to Sathguru Sivananda Murty ji, Bheemunipatnam, A.P. India.

                 ____________________

Revisiting the Date of Mahabharata war:                   astronomical methods using

                    planetarium software

                             B. N. Narahari

                Achar University of Memphis

                               Delhi 2014

GOOGLE TO READ

http://serveveda.org/2_BNNA.pdf

Outline of the talk

 The date of the Mahabharata war

 • Initial attempts using Planetarium software

 • determined as a unique date, 3067 BCE • based on the astronomical data within the epic

 • independent of any other source 

Consistency of 3067 BCE with traditional reckoning of Kaliyuga 

“The Bharata War is the central landmark in Indian traditional history and fixing the date of that event will give us a starting point in settling dates of events occurring before and after that.” _A.D.Pusalker

CLICK/GOOGLE TO OPEN

http://serveveda.org/2_BNNA.pdf

SOURCE:



UNDERSTANDING  RAMCHANDRA GUHA



          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8Pun7pB4Gk

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eas3ow0SoNU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL8tTs2ODRo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL8tTs2ODRo