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Indian conservatism has not received academic recognition: Jaitirth Rao
Jaitirth Rao unveiled his book ‘The Indian Conservative’, at an event organised by Pune International Centre (PIC), at Sumant Moolgaonkar auditorium
Post Indira Gandhi’s regime as the Prime Minister and historian Nurul Hassan, who has also served as the union minister of education, academics particularly in social sciences and humanities has been colonised and dominated by the Marxist, Freudians and post-modernists, while Indian conservatism has not received proper academic recognition,” said author, Jaithirth Rao.
Rao was speaking at the unveiling of his book ‘The Indian Conservative’, at an event organised by Pune International Centre (PIC), at Sumant Moolgaonkar auditorium, Senapati Bapat road.
The book explores modern Indian conservatism in five spheres – economic, political, cultural, social, and aesthetics and education.
Abhay Firodia, president, Force Motors; Professor Pradeep Apte, Gokhale Institute of Politics & Economics and S Khirwadkar, managing partner, Shadja Consultants, participated in the discussion organised as a part of the programme. Vijay Kelkar, economist and vice-president, Pune International Centre, was present among the dignitaries.
“Conservatism has deep roots in India. Our culture goes back to 1,300 years and it has sacred geography with various traditions that of Hinduism, Islam or Jainism. We have our own tradition of conservatism and two foundational texts of our civilisation that define Indian conservatism are Shanti Parva from the Mahabharata and Thiruvalluvar’s Kural,” Rao said.
The Kural, is a classic Tamil language text consisting of 1,330 couplets or Kurals
He added saying that conservatives today have an important role to play in conserving our culture as ‘conservatism’ and ‘conservation’ come from the same roots.
“There are two strands of conservative thought in India, one which began with Raja Rammohan Roy, social reformer, and other with Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, novelist, poet and journalist. What we need to focus on is not their desired reform but the way they went about it,” said Rao.
“We have dismissed historians like Radha Kumud Mukherjee, Jadunath Sarkar or Nilakanta Shastri from the academia, which, today, happen to be Marxist and post-modern,” he added.
According to Firodia, education during the British era was much more balanced than what is being taught today. “We have veered extremely toward the leftist and jettisoned our cultural values. The history taught today is malicious, synthetic and fabricated, which is trying to break our affinity to our land, destroy our confidence and make us hate ourselves. Conservative thought should reach all university students through this book as it presents a well reasoned and non-violent counterpoint,” he said.
Prof Apte said, “The conservative idea of modernising tradition is certainly worth embracing in a deeply traditional society like India. The leftist ideology is having dangerous influence on subjects like English literature, sociology and political science.”
