How India’s Past was Packaged as ‘Fiction’

When does a civilization truly fall? When its temples are burned? When its gold is looted? Or when its own children begin to laugh at their ancestors, repeating the conqueror’s lies as if they were truth?

The Time We Walked With Our Ancestors

Once, in Bharat, history and faith were inseparable. They were not two streams but one flowing river. A child in Ayodhya did not “believe” in Ram’s birth — he knew it, because his grandfather had shown him the spot, just as his grandfather before him had done.

A fisherman in Dwaraka didn’t debate whether Krishna existed — he lived with the ruins of Yadava palaces beneath the sea. In Kurukshetra, farmers ploughed their land with the memory of Pandava blood still staining its soil.

This was Itihasa — “It happened thus.” Memory woven into stone, soil, song, and ritual.

The First Great Wound: Invaders & the Torch

The Turkic and Mughal invasions targeted not just wealth but memory. Nalanda’s libraries smoldered for months, Vikramshila and Odantapuri reduced to ruins. Copper-plate genealogies of kings were melted into coins. Temples that housed archives of lineage and lore were razed, their histories consigned to ash.

Mosques rose over sacred sites, not just to dominate but to rewrite geography. Cities were renamed to bury identity. Yet, oral traditions survived: Ram Leelas, Krishna bhajans, Puranic storytelling. The sword could wound, but memory resisted.

The Second Great Wound: The Colonizer’s Pen

Where the invader failed with fire, the colonizer succeeded with ink. The British understood a deeper truth: people who walk with their ancestors cannot be enslaved.

So, they severed the link — not by burning temples, but by altering minds.

Enter William Jones, Max Muller, Monier Williams. Men dressed as scholars but serving empire. They translated our scriptures — yet with every line, they sowed doubt:

“Rama, the mythical king…”
“Krishna, a legendary hero…”
“The Vedas, primitive hymns…”

Their textbooks codified poison: the Bible was history, the Quran was revelation, but the Ramayana? Mythology. The Mahabharata? Legend.

It was not scholarship. It was strategy.

The Poison Took Root

The British left in 1947, but the colonizer’s mind remained. English-educated elites inherited the narrative. Brown on the outside, colonial in thought.

They mocked Govardhan’s lifting, yet never questioned Noah’s Ark.

They dismissed Dwarka as fable, but accepted resurrection without irony.

They laughed at Ram Setu, yet reverenced the parting of the Red Sea.

This was not skepticism. It was slavery disguised as modernity.

From Itihasa to Myth: The Colonial Strategy in 5 Moves

Double Standards & Silent Acceptance

Imagine, for a moment:

If an Indian textbook called the Quran “Islamic mythology,” the streets would burn.

If a Western journalist called Jesus “Christian myth,” cathedrals would thunder with outrage.

But when Ramayana is labeled “Hindu mythology”? We nod. We repeat it. We teach it to our children.

Thus, the conqueror’s lies are carried forward not by foreigners, but by Hindus themselves — smiling, secular, “modern.”

The Final Destruction Is Not Physical

Civilizations do not die when outsiders torch their temples. They die when their own children torch their memory.

• Every time we say “mythology” instead of Itihasa, we bury Ayodhya again.
    
• Every time we call Mahabharata “legend,” we shadow Kurukshetra.
   
• Every time we dismiss Ram Setu as “natural,” we amputate our civilizational spine.

Sanatana Dharma survived because memory survived. Forgetting is death.

Final Thought

So, ask yourself: whose words do you carry when you call your Itihasa a myth? Are you a guardian of memory — or an echo of your conqueror?

Civilizations don’t die when temples are burned. They die when their own children laugh at their memory. Say Itihasa, not Mythology. Stop repeating the enemy’s vocabulary. Stop laughing at your ancestors. Teach your children pride, not shame. 

Because the true battle is not outside us. It is inside — between memory and forgetfulness, between dignity and derision. And the side you choose will decide whether Sanatana lives — or becomes a footnote called “myth.”