Chanakya!
A great, well-researched serial was sacrificed at the altar of Secularists
Chanakya emerged as the most popular television serial in India in 1991-92. I, like many of my fellow JNU students, used to impatiently wait for next Sunday to watch it. The serial portrayed the ancient-historic figures in such a magnificent way that every Indian felt proud of it. We learnt something that wasn't taught to us in our History textbooks in school. Suddenly history became interesting as for the first time it made sense and it looked like our own history.
The serial, however, didn’t go down well with the Left fraternity. Like ‘Ramayan’ and ‘Mahabharat,’ they thought, this serial too was a “Hindu cultural onslaught” on “Secular India.” A campaign was mounted to discredit the popular serial.
R Champakalakshmi, then a history teacher in JNU, saw a “pro-Hindutva subtext” in it and a “nationalist agenda.” She found the "liberal use of saffron flags and ‘Har Har Mahadev' slogans" in the serial, objectionable.
She argued, “There is no historical evidence to prove that the Saffron flags were used in those days while going into a war.” Dr Chandra Prakash Dwivedi, the actor-director-producer of Chanakya, countered Champakalakshmi by asking her “to reveal the colour of the flags that were used when Chandragupta Maurya’s army would go into a war and provide the historical evidence along with it.” Champakalakshmi never came up with an answer. She couldn't. She, on behalf of all Leftists, argued against the Saffron flag because they hate that colour which symbolises India's valour since time immemorial. All that the old lady could manage was, mumble accusations that the serial was preaching the ideology of the RSS.
There were others from the JNU-DU-AMU history mafia, who attacked the serial by saying that "there was no sense of Indian nationhood in the fourth century B.C." They said, "Dwivedi is trying to create a Pan-Indian identity at a time when there was none."
We, in ABVP, challenged the leftist history teachers of JNU and asked them to tell us that if India as a nation didn't exist before the "British formed it," what did Christopher Columbus set out to discover in the sixteenth century? Was it India or something else? What was Megasthenes describing as India in his travelogues if it was not a nation and only isolated and discrete kingdoms?
We never got an answer. For a Eurocentric Marxist, a nation is always associated with a rigid system of governance - the State. Cultural unity and feeling of oneness have no meaning for them. A bunch of kingdoms with people speaking different tongues without an emperor lording over them does not make sense to them as a great nation. Which is what India was until the Mughal empire was built. Emperor Ashoka, who came closest to forming one such grotesque superstructure, having conquered and subjugated many kingdoms, at the end of it all, threw away his own kingdom too and became a mendicant. That there was no empire does not disentail India from being a nation. Empire building was never on our agenda.
Another Jehadi critic, Iqbal Masud, questioned the very relevance of Chanakya and his treatise in present times. He wrote, "In the existing cauldron of hatred, the serial's image of shaven heads and Vedic mantras is only bound to ignite passions."
These are the kind of tricks Leftists employ to shut up all alternative versions of history. They were so shaken by the popularity of Chanakya that they mounted extreme pressure on the Congress government of the day and the serial was pulled off air. A great, well-researched serial was sacrificed at the altar of Secularists.... Dev Kumar, former Teacher
