The Know it all Internet Historian

(This original rant was supposed to be a Facebook post but I ended up making a blog and thought of screaming here instead . I will hereafter use this place for more unnecessary screaming. Please bear with my rants and my illiberal use of the English Language)

As someone who enjoys reading up on Indian history and culture in my spare time I am part of many groups that claim to provide a platform for the same.

Unfortunately, quite a few of them are dominated by people who make or discuss posts which are nothing short of pure Fantasy.

An example: ' Indians knew of the Nuclear Bomb 1 Million Years ago'.

If this isn't bad, you should try looking at the comments that follow with a good many of them believing this. Granted that such posts do provide a good amount of traction because of it's bombastic nature but the amount believing it is where I find the most problematic part. Problematic because they believe that this country's history has been hidden away by the British and the real history of Ancient India's past is far too glorious for the west to digest.

Of course, this is not to say that India's past and history was any less glorious, but that certainly shouldn't be an excuse to propagate made up ideas and attribute it to ancient Indians superior wisdom, especially when logic and thinking falls out of the roof.

Going back to the people who are now a part of this ludicrous little group, I got involved in two direct instances with the lot and the outcome of the conversation was as inane as expected.

The First Instance: A guy wanted to know if there's any temples from before the 7th Century BC. A very pertinent question.

And the answers that followed were something like these:

XXX Indian temple is from 5000BC

YYY Indian temple is from 3000 BC

ZZZ Indian temple is from 700 CE

Notice the inaccuracies here? Statement one and two is incorrect and is pure fantasy at this point. This is mainly because the dates would predate vedic civilization which is not possible. Indian temple building as we know it for sure started at the time of the Maha janpadas which puts it at the 5^th-6^th Century BC, a possible consequence of Urbanization is this era and this formation of distinct polities.

I am not even considering what’s been said in point 3 as the said person clearly doesn’t know the basic difference between BC and AD.

Another similar incident followed the next day, this one was from an image shared by postcard news that has known to have a poor record of fact checks. The image attributed the Iron Pillar of Delhi to a much earlier date than archeologically proven to 2300 years old ( Mauryan Era).  The pillar has been proven to be from the Gupta period and was erected by Chadragupta Vikramditya from the 4^th Century AD. This bit of info is middle school history and almost every educated Indian knows of this.

( The Delhi Iron Pillar and the original inscription on it)

But, in the vein of this post itself , the comments were quite a bit supportive of the idea that the pillar was far older. In fact despite providing sources to re-affirm this fact, many were still hell bent on this . It felt almost bizarre to see , this kind of blind support of something despite the evidence pointing to otherwise. The comment that stood out the most was when one guy said that he has read the inscription himself and can confirm that the pillar was much older. That honestly came out of nowhere, and the person went further to claim he has researched on this. When I proved to him that it’s not possible for the pillar to be older, I was accused of being a google scholar, a British stooge and the comment was deleted in a fit of rage by him.

( The translation of the inscription attributed to Chandragupta Vikramaditya) 

I could cite many more such incidents, but as someone who finds history fascinating and despite not being a historian myself, I find the rise of such people detrimental to the whole purpose of history itself. It’s quite a sad state of affairs honestly, and social media makes it just worse. Indian history is rich and for sure deserves much more attention than it has gotten over the years, but for surely not in this manner.