A few Chinese travellers like It-sing have recorded that Ashoka was a saṃnyāsi and a Bauddha bhikkhu. They also state that they have seen a statue in this form. There is a system among Buddhists: Anyone can become a saṃnyāsi and can revert to the life of a householder. They can also move to a different āśrama. Fa-hien, Xuanzang (Hiuen Tsang), It-sing, Dharmasvami, and others were Chinese Buddhist travellers who came to India.
The previous episode recounted Dr. BGL Swamy’s firsthand experience of the nature and contours of an “official” Tamil history complete with concocted names for “pure Tamil” flora. If this was the state of affairs in the science department, it was taken to an entirely different level in the History department.
An Advisory Committee was formed by the Government to document and publish “The Official History of the Tamils” in ten volumes. It doesn’t need to be explicitly stated that the Government exercised utmost care in selecting the members. Dr. BGL Swamy recalls that Tamil writers like Cheeni Venkataswami, Pandit Natesan and others were part of the committee. The history lecturer of Presidency College and two or three lecturers teaching other subjects had also adorned that committee as members.
There was a gap of about three hundred years between Buddha and Aśoka. Buddha lived in the 6th century BCE. He was born in 560 BCE. He saw the effulgence of kṣātra in his surroundings. He had seen the lacunae and failings of the system of republics. Even so, he felt that one should support the war that is fought out of love for one’s freedom. Today Buddha has become a symbol for the cowardly pseudo-secularism. Buddha was a person who sincerely upheld Vedic values.
Note: This essay and the ones that follow it are translated adaptations from the corpus of writings on the Dravidian movement authored by the late Dr. B G L Swamy. These essays are not literal translations.
To understand the Dravidianists of today, it is absolutely essential to understand the history and mythology of the ancient Tamil country.
The Tamil country stands tallest among all Indian regions that swallowed the missionary and colonial propaganda of the Aryan Invasion Theory in the closing decades of the 19th Century onwards. More specifically, sections of the Tamil country uncritically swallowed the “Dravidian” propaganda, internalized it, gave it an ideological shape premised basically on the linguistic separateness of Tamil.
All the historians of the world have unanimously hailed Aśoka. That Aśoka was an ideal king has been widely circulated. In ancient times, no other king, in no other part of the world undertook the establishment of so many dharma-śāsanas (rock edicts pertaining to law and dharma) like Aśoka. About two thousand three hundred years back, no other king had an empire of such expanse, to this extent, or this sort of reign. Nobody has recorded their acts with such extreme introspection or self-proclamation.
The personalities of Chanakya and Chandragupta were of similar eminence, similar spirit; the supreme testimony to this fact is that such a large empire was managed efficiently for several years and the onslaught of the ambitious, war-hungry Alexander was quelled without leaving even a trace of its memory. From this we learn how sharp their developmental strategy must have been. We see how bright that patriotism must have been, which found inspiration from their strong sense of identity.
Known as Kodagu in Kannada, Coorg is a picturesque hill-country forming the Southern tip of Karnataka. It forms the border between Karnataka and Kerala, and is in many ways, the gateway to the Malabar region in Kerala. Today it is primarily known for its scenic beauty and spectacular views of thickly-forested mountain ranges, valleys, waterfalls, and sprawling coffee estates.