The History of Bharatvarsha

Respected All

Pranams

Just Samartha Bharat Parva is completed. Bharat was Samartha. Bharat is Samartha. Bharat will always remain Samartha. The need is to know Bharatvarsha.

Swami Vivekananda has already told us : The ancient history of India is full of descriptions of the gigantic energies and their multifarious workings, the boundless spirit, the combination of indomitable action and reaction of the various forces, and, above all, the profound thoughtfulness of a godly race. If the word history is understood to mean merely narratives of kings and emperors, and pictures of society - tyrannized over from time to time by the evil passions, haughtiness, avarice, etc., of the rulers of the time, portraying the acts resulting from their good or evil propensities, and how these reacted upon the society of that time -such a history India perhaps does not possess. But every line of that mass of the religious literature of India, her ocean of poetry, her philosophies and various scientific works reveal to us — a thousand times more clearly than the narratives of the life-incidents and genealogies of particular kings and emperors can ever do -  the exact position and every step made in advance by that vast body of men who, even before the dawn of civilisation, impelled by hunger and thirst, lust and greed, etc., attracted by the charm of beauty, endowed with a great and indomitable mental power, and moved by various sentiments, arrived through various ways and means at that stage of eminence. Although the heaps of those triumphal flags which they gathered in their innumerable victories over nature with which they had been waging war for ages, have, of late, been torn and tattered by the violent winds of adverse circumstances and become worn out through age, yet they still proclaim the glory of Ancient India.

Sri Rabindranath Tagore in 1903 had written on The History of Bharatvarsha which echos what Swamiji has said. We shall see it in the days to come.

Be proud about our Bharatvarsha.

The history of India that we read and memorize for our examinations is really a nightmarish account of India. Some people arrive from somewhere and the pandemonium is let loose. And then it is a free-for-all: assault and counter-assault, blows and bloodletting. Father and son, brother and brother vie with each other for the throne. If one group condescends to leave, another group appears as if out of the blue; the Pathans and the Mughals, the Portuguese and the French and the English together have made this nightmare ever more complex.

But if Bharatavarsha is viewed with these passing frames of dreamlike scenes, smeared in red, overlaid on it, the real Bharatavarsha cannot be glimpsed. These histories do not answer the question, where were the people of India? As if the people of India did not exist, only those who maimed and killed alone existed.

It is not that this bloodletting and this carnage were the most important things in Bharatavarsha even in those miserable days. Despite its roar, the storm cannot be regarded as the most important event in a stormy day. In that day too, with sky overcast with dust, the most important thing for man was the flow of life and death and of happiness and sorrow that moves on in the countless village-homes, even though beclouded. But to an alien passer-by the storm is the most important thing; the cloud of dust devours everything else from his view. For he is not inside the home, he is outside. That's why in the history narrated by the foreigners we get the accounts of the dust, of the storms, but we do not get even a word about the homes. Those histories make you feel that at that time Bharatavarsha did not exist at all; as though only the howling whirlwind of the Pathans and the Mughals holding aloft the banner of dry leaves had been moving round and round across the country from north to south and east to west.

However, while the lands of the aliens existed, there also existed the indigenous country. Otherwise, in the midst of all the turbulence, who gave birth to the likes of Kabir, Nanak, Chaitanya, and Tukaram? It was not that only Delhi and Agra existed then, there were also Kasi and Navadvipa. The current of life that was flowing then in the real Bharatavarsha, the ripples of efforts rising there and the social changes that were taking place — none of these find an account in our history textbooks.