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by screye 1204 days ago
Time and again Indians prove themselves to be the most self-hating community of them all. Not everything has an agenda.

> Hindus were subjugated by Muslims and English

Which is historically true. All of North India has zero temples or structures of historic importance that are more than a few hundred years old. A Bihari Hindu should not have to go searching in Tamil Nadu for signs that his ancestors achieved things of significance.

> Indians were better

It doesn't come from a place of malice. But, as a people that have been beaten down. It does help to know that your civilization made significant contribution to shaping the world as we know it. A Muslim doesn't have to wonder, the Taj Mahal & Red fort are the 2 crowning jewels of India. India could vanish tomorrow & both Muslims + Christians would still have a flattering model of what their people had achieved in the rest of the world. Hindus are grounded in India, and (mostly) India alone. Great contributions of pre-invasion Indians do not have compete with the architectural wonders that later rulers built. Both can co-exist.

The large majority of Indian Muslims & Christians trace their cultural & ethnic origins to the populace that inhabited this land for the last (at least) 4000 years. There needn't be cognitive dissonance to acknowledge the achievements of of the common ancestor as part of a unified Indian identity.

2 comments

Please don't take HN threads further into political and/or nationalistic and/or religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

oof, getting scolded is rough. Got it.
Yeah, I know it feels bad and that's not the intention - we just have to do what we can to try to prevent this place from experiencing the default internet outcome (self-immolation), or at least to stave that off for a little longer.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

There is no self hate going on. What we are saying is that India was on par with rest of the world. Lets just have an objective assessment of its's past instead of white washing everything that is old.

For example, we (collectively) do not know anything about drawbacks of Nalanda university. All we heard since childhood is that it is great

Do we need to find a blemish in something before enjoying its beauty/magnanimity/magnificence? :)