D. N. Jha

Dwijendra Narayan Jha (born c. 1940 died 4 February 2021) is an Indian historian, specialising in ancient and medieval India. He was a professor of history at Delhi University and a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research.

Jha in November 2012

Quotes

• The Hindutva forces, in their bid to aggravate religious conflicts in the country, argue that Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam and Christianity in the past and therefore they have to be reconverted so as to take them back into the Hindu fold. But such an assertion has no basis in our history.
• The idea that the Muslims were destroyers of 'Hindu' temples and that they converted 'Hindus' to Islam by force is extremely tendentious and is largely unfounded.
  • General President's Address Punjab History Conference, 31st Session 19-21 March 1999. In "Against Communalising History", Social Scientist, Vol. 26, No. 9/10 (Sep. - Oct., 1998), pp. 54-56. Also in Is D. N. Jha Communalising History? by Vinod Kumar

• For the upper classes all periods in history have been golden; for the masses none.
  • quoted from Arun Shourie (2014) Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud. HarperCollins

• The truly golden age of the people does not lie in the past, but in the future.
  • quoted from Arun Shourie (2014) Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud. HarperCollin

• Arun Shourie, who has dished out ignorance masquerading as knowledge – reason enough to have pity on him and sympathy for his readers!... Acceptance or rejection of this kind of source criticism is welcome if it comes from a professional historian but not from someone who flirts with history as Shourie does... in his pettiness Shourie is quick to discover plagiarism on my part!
• “In his conceit Shourie is disdainful and dismissive of the Tibetan tradition, which has certain elements of miracle in it, as recorded in the text.”
• Admittedly, one does not have to take the miracles seriously, but it is not justified to ignore their importance as part of traditions which gain in strength over time and become part of the collective memory of a community.
• The above account mentions the fortress of Bihar as the target of Bakhtiyar’s attack. The fortified monastery which Bakhtiyar captured was ‘known as Audand-Bihar or Odandapura-vihara’ (Odantapuri in Biharsharif, then known simply as Bihar). This is the view of many historians but, most importantly, of Jadunath Sarkar, the high priest of communal historiography in India. Minhaj does not refer to Nalanda at all: he merely speaks of the ransacking of the ‘fortress of Bihar’ (hisar-i-Bihar).
• It is neither possible nor necessary to deny that the Islamic invaders conquered parts of Bihar and Bengal and destroyed the famous universities in the region.
• Shourie had raised a huge controversy by publishing his scandalous and slanderous Eminent Historians in 1998 during the NDA regime and now, after sixteen years, he has issued its second edition, from which the article under reference has been excerpted. He appears and reappears in the historian’s avatar when the BJP comes to power and does all he can to please his masters. His view of the past is no different from that of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and their numerous outfits, consisting of riff-raff and goons who burn books that do not endorse their views, who vandalize art objects which they label blasphemous, who present a distorted view of Indian history, and who nurture a culture of intolerance. These elements demanded my arrest when my book on beef-eating was published, and they censured James Laine when his book on Shivaji came out. It is not unlikely that Shourie functions in cahoots with people like Dina Nath Batra, who targeted A K Ramanujan’s essay emphasizing the diversity of the Ramayana tradition; Wendy Doniger’s writings, which provided an alternative view of Hinduism; Megha Kumar’s work on communalism and sexual violence in Ahmedabad since 1969; and Sekhar Bandopadhyaya’s textbook on modern India, which regrettably does not eulogise the RSS. Arun Shourie seems to have inaugurated a fresh round of battle by fudging, falsifying and fabricating historical evidence and providing grist to Batra’s mill.
  • D.N. Jha’s “Reply to Arun Shourie”, dated 3 July 2014, was published in shorter form as “Grist to the reactionary mill”, Indian Express, 9 July 2014. as quoted in Elst, K. An “eminent historian” attacks Arun Shourie, in: Forever Ayodhya, 2023, Aryan Books International. Chapter 7.

Quotes about Jha

• During the Government-sponsored scholars’ debate on the evidence for the demolished Ayodhya temple in 1990-91, Jha was a member of the Babri Masjid Action Committee’s delegation against the Vishva Hindu Parishad. Like then, his intervention now in the debate on the purported tolerance and the very existence of “Hinduism” is not an impartisan source from which debaters could borrow authoritative arguments; it is itself one side of the polemic. Which is permitted, but should be kept in mind by the reader.
  • Review by Elst, Koenraad of D.N. Jha: Rethinking Hindu Identity, London/Oakville: Equinox, 2009. 100 pp., $85 HB, $28,95 PB. Published in Journal of Asian Studies, Cambridge University Press, August 2011, p.872-874., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2012). The argumentative Hindu. New Delhi : Aditya Prakashan.

• Note the unscholarly language, and this at his advanced age. We are dealing with a verbal street-fighter who has been given a post as an academic. Further down, we see him belittling his opponent, typical for the nouveau riche who thinks the world of his own status... To sum up: like any stage magician, Jha indulges in misdirection. While he himself has been caught in the act of misquoting his source (Yadava), and repeats this act of dishonesty in this very article, he tries to offset his embarrassment by a flight forward, viz. heaping imaginary allegations and plain swearwords upon his critic.
  • Elst, K. An “eminent historian” attacks Arun Shourie, in: Forever Ayodhya, 2023, Aryan Books International. Chapter 7.

• We have already encountered D.N. Jha, and seen how he concocts ‘evidence’ and distorts sources in his textbook on ancient India.... Given what we have seen of Marxist historians even in this brief book, the brazen-faced distortions – to the point of falsehood – do not surprise me. What does surprise me is that no one looked up either the source that Jha had cited or the text.... That these eminences were in control of journals, of history congresses, and university departments, had another immediate consequence: no one dared question their work. They hadn’t to explain their ‘theses’, they could serve up any concoction as ‘evidence’. In regurgitating the same assertions, they convinced themselves that they were being consistent; in arriving at the same reductionist explanations for diverse phenomena, phenomena millennia apart, they convinced themselves that they were fortifying the theory. In fact, all they were doing was repeating themselves. There was nothing new to be learnt as it had all been explained before! In a word, unquestioned, above being challenged, they slipped into shoddiness, and thus stagnation – Jha’s Address is an illustration of the kind of drivel that came to pass as scholarship.
  • Arun Shourie (2014) Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud. HarperCollins
  • D.N. Jha replied to Shourie's criticism in the article Grist to the reactionary mill, 2014