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regular-article-logo Monday, 01 September 2025

Hanuman trumps Armstrong: Historians caution against promotion of myths as facts

Pankaj Jha, a history professor at Lady Shri Ram College, said historians used several internal and external parameters to determine if a character was historical, fictional, mythological or mytho-historical

Basant Kumar Mohanty Published 31.08.25, 05:49 AM
Representational image

Representational image File picture

During a recent interaction with BJP leader Anurag Thakur, a group of students from a school in Himachal Pradesh said Neil Armstrong was the first man to travel to space. Thakur wanted to set the record straight. “I think it was Lord Hanuman,” he said.

“We have thousands of years of tradition, knowledge and culture. If we do not know them, we will be confined to what the British told us,” the BJP MP told the gathering at Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya in Una on National Space Day (August 23), resorting to mythology to find the answer to a general knowledge question.

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Like Thakur, several BJP ministers and leaders have attempted to propagate mythological stories and characters as historical facts, setting a trend that many historians have cautioned against. (See chart)

Audrey Truschke, a history professor at Rutgers University in the US, said history consisted of real, verifiable events, people and trends supported by evidence. “Mythology is not verifiable and, moreover, frequently features supernatural elements, such as sentient animals, gods and demons, and anachronistic technological advances. Historians work on the basis of evidence,” she wrote in response to questions from The Telegraph.

“There is extensive written and material evidence for the existence of Alexander of Macedon, Akbar and many Egyptian pharaohs, as well as specific actions taken by these individuals. There is no evidence for the existence of Ram as a man, and the idea of Ram or Hanuman as deities falls outside the bounds of history altogether. We cannot verify the existence of gods; some would say that’s why we call it faith,” she wrote.

Pankaj Jha, a history professor at Lady Shri Ram College, said historians used several internal and external parameters to determine if a character was historical, fictional, mythological or mytho-historical.

A historical event or character has verifiable evidence that they lived a life sometime in the past, fictional characters are created by authors to tell a meaningful story, and mythological characters often have supernatural or superhuman attributes.

Jha said mythologies were stories set in a non-linear, non-human temporal framework, and mythological characters could flit across aeons and be familiar with other mythological characters, irrespective of the time and distance between them. Jha said written texts offered clues to readers on whether it was meant to be read as history or mythology.

“Of the dozens of parameters used by historians to determine the character of a text, probably the most important ones have to do with the treatment of time. One of these is the way time is referenced. For example, a mythological story would rarely say in which period — Vikram Samvat or Shaka Samvat or Laxman Samvat — an event took place. They do not give a fixed timeline to their characters either. Only large aeons are referred to,” Jha said.

“Ram may be made to talk about Shiva, and Shiva will also be familiar with Ram. Were they contemporaries? If not, who came first and who came later? One who came earlier may not know about the existence of the one who came later, right? The authors or readers of mythologies are not bothered by these questions. Not because they are stupid, but because they instinctively know that mythologies reference time differently,” he said.

Jha said historical characters grew old and died. Divine characters, even in their human incarnations, do not die natural deaths.

A history professor of a central educational institution said mythological stories were figments of imagination without any archaeological or other factual basis. “Today, we talk about movement in space, which happens with the help of a spacecraft and solid technology behind it. If Hanuman had it, there should be some trail of the machinery and technology. Further, the technology used in the making of that craft should have existed in some form or other, at least in texts,” he argued.

“Such rhetoric only gives us the false satisfaction that we had everything in the past. No need to learn from others. What I say about Hanuman’s spacecraft could also be true for Pushpak Viman, the aeroplane of Ravan,” he said.

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