My Meeting with P.N.Oak

[Shrinivas Tilak]

   While his fancy etymologies are truly a rich source of comic relief from
academic drudgery, I came away after a meeting with Purushottam Nagesh
(P.N.)Oak at his resodence in Pune in July 1998 with a nagging suspicion
that something is indeed amiss with India's recorded history.
   Born in 1917 at Indore, Oak was trained as a lawyer and worked as a
broadcaster on the radio station operated by the Azad Hind Sena in Saigon
during WWII. In the 1960s he worked as information officer with the United
States embassy in New Delhi.
   In 1964 Oak founded the Institute for Rewriting Indian History in order
to rectify what he believes to be the biased and distorted versions of
India's history produced by the invaders and colonizers. In modern India,
claims he, secular and Marxist historians fabricated "idealized versions" of
India's past and drained it of her Vedic context and content.
   Oak's World Vedic Heritage (a huge tome of 1375 pages and 150
illustrations) was written to put India's (and world's) history straight. It
relies on scraps and bits of hard evidence that most academics will not
touch since they dread being laughed at by their peers.
   In his voluminous output Oak cleverly makes logical use of whatever
evidence that may exist in favour of his hypothesis such that the reader
reluctantly concedes that something like what Oak describes could have
happened. He also succeeds in disturbing a sensitive reader.
   His claim, for instance, that ancient Indians were excellent seafarers
and travelled far more widely than European or Muslim historians have led us
to believe, is worth pursuing.
   This thesis of Oak is comparable, in its approach, to Canadian writer
Farley Mowat's claim (made in his recent book The Farfarers) that Albans
(ancient inhabitants of northern British Isles) explored and even settled
North America.
   Oak obviously draws on a living tradition of speculative and imaginative
historiography and fantastic etymology that goes back to Yaska and Vyasa
where history and myth imperceptibly flow together.
   In my meting with him, Oak was gracious enough to acknowledge that some
of his conclusions or accounts are founded on conjecture and/or analogy. But
he appeared coy as he repeated, in rapid fire succession, some of the more
amusing "Oakisms" that Ed Bryant shared with us in his recent post to this
list.
   In the end, I came away with the impression that when hard evidence is
lacking, Oak moves back and forth between the conditional and the indicative
moods. In one of his works (I do not recall which right now and members of
this list will correct me if I am wrong), Sylvain Levy used a similar
approach to speculate on how India's history would have been if, like Nepal,
India had remained Hindu.
    S.Tilak



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