"How do you ignore history? But the nationalist movement, independence movement ignored it. You read the Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru, it talks about the mythical past and then it jumps the difficult period of the invasions and conquests. So you have Chinese pilgrims coming to Bihar, Nalanda and places like that. Then somehow they don't tell you what happens, why these places are in ruin. They never tell you why Elephanta island is in ruins or why Bhubaneswar was desecrated. So history has to be studied, it is very painful history. But it is not more painful than most countries have had… It isn't India alone that has had a rough time, that has to be understood. But the rough time has to be faced and it cannot be glossed over. There are tools for us to understand the rough time. We can read a man like Ibn Battuta who will tell you what it was like to be there in the midst of the fourteenth century, terrible times. An apologist of the invaders would like to gloss that over. But it would be wrong to gloss that over, that has to be understood… But I would like to see this past recovered and not dodged."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
V.S. Naipaul, Interview, with URMI GOSWAMI, JANUARY 14, 2003 0 'How do you ignore history?' . V. S. Naipaul in Economic Times, 13 January 2003
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Historical_negationism
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Historical negationism
41 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Historical negationism →
Related Quotes
"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed i…"
"The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even…"
"Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but …"
"I realize that my study of remains incomplete because it is limited to Jews and Christians. It should be supplemented…"
"“History and Language textbooks for schools all over India will soon be revised radically. In collaboration with vari…"
"While such reactions were foreseeable, I was nonetheless taken aback by their scale and by the use of certain languag…"
"The destruction wrought by the Muslim raids and invasions left the civilisation headless, wounded, truncated in its d…"
"But the negationists are not satisfied with seeing their own version of the facts being repeated in more and more boo…"
"India has its own full-fledged brand of negationism: a movement to deny the large-scale and long-term crimes against …"
"This caravan loaded with synthetic merchandise has, however, continued to move forward. Eight years later (1982), it …"