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| Bodhidharma; Yoshitoshi, 1887 |
"As we move, the story travels. But if you misunderstand a story for history, then that’s pathetic."
- R. Balakrishnan, Indologist
There is something profoundly human about wanting our stories to be real. Not just meaningful or metaphorical. Real. As in datable, documentable, diggable-from-the-earth real. Somewhere along the line, meaning ceased to be enough. Somewhere, we began to look at myth, the shimmering, breathing soul of every civilization, and say: “Prove it.”
This demand, this quiet, almost innocent insistence, is where presupposition of historicity begins. Not with dogma, but with longing.
I have seen it in the eyes of those who mean no harm. An Indian Christian, young and devout, beams as they point to the Book of Kings, convinced that the phrase “distant lands of gold” must be India, the forgotten land of Ophir. Not because archaeology says so. Not because it changes doctrine. But because the need to be included eclipses the caution of inquiry. I have seen Chinese house churches whisper sermons about their ancient ancestors being among the lost tribes, or the Magi, those to whom the light first came, while others insist that they were Persian in origin. Sometimes, even the Chinese characters miraculously point to the events in Genesis. In those services, the maps bend. East becomes West. Time folds. Histories contort to make room for those who fear they were left out of the page.
This is not arrogance. It is vulnerability. The pain of peripheral faith, the ache of belonging to a tradition whose center of gravity is elsewhere. It is the desperation of trying to believe that your land, your ancestors, your people mattered to the divine from the beginning. That you were there. That you were seen.
And yet, from this tender wound rises the most dangerous thing in historiography.
Not a hypothesis. Not a hope. But the unspoken decision, made before any excavation, that a thing must be true, and that evidence will either prove it or be discarded. This is the quiet tyranny of the already-decided.
In Egypt, a granite stele stands with the name of Israel carved faintly into stone, the Merneptah Stele, dating to the late 13th century BCE. For those who have spent their lives defending the historicity of the biblical Exodus, this stele becomes a talisman. “See?” they say. “Israel existed. The Bible was right.”
Except, no. Not so easily. The stele proves only that an entity named “Israel," likely a tribal group, existed in Canaan at that time, and that too amongst many other tribes mentioned in multiple Egyptian records. The Merneptah Stele, or any other source for that matter, doesn't talk about a mass exodus or the sudden emergence of an Israelite tribe in Canaan. In other words, what we have is an ancient record that mentions Israel as just another Bronze Age tribe that fully settled in the region by the 13th Century BCE, or perhaps even earlier, with no recorded relationship with Egypt whatsoever. This finding contradicts the traditional biblical timeline, which puts the historicity of the Book of Exodus itself into question. Interestingly, historians never claimed that the Exodus happened. They were simply placing it in the temporal framework of history to entertain the question, "If it had happened, then where in Egyptian history CAN we place it?"
But for the apologist, this contradiction becomes motivation to rewrite the dates, stretch the margins, retranslate the stone, anything to preserve the sacred narrative. "If it didn't happen in the 13th century, then it must have happened at least a century before Israel settled there.
But do we have any historical data to support that newfound claim? No. The same people who sought the aid of an archeological discovery to extrapolate an assumption now discard archeology itself to reclaim their presupposition. Because the presupposition is not meant to be tested, but defended.
Elsewhere, atop Mount Ararat, a quiet, unrelenting search continues. Satellite photos, alleged wood samples, and radar anomalies are brandished to “prove” that Noah’s Ark landed there. Never mind that the Hebrew flood narrative shares motifs with much older Mesopotamian myths. Never mind that geology offers no evidence of a global deluge. For many, this isn’t about science or even salvation; it’s about assurance. If the Ark is real, then the story is real. And if the story is real, then so is everything else.
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| The Merneptah Stele; Cairo Museum (Copyright) |
This is why Presupposition is the archenemy of historiography. It weaponizes the archive against itself. It searches not for truth, but for confirmation. It does not ask, “What happened?”. It declares, “This happened. Now go find it.”
And this disease is not limited to a single faith or tradition. In South India, a legend flows quietly through Mosques and memory, the tale of Cheraman Perumal, a great king of the Chera dynasty, who, upon witnessing a divine vision or hearing of the Prophet Muhammad’s mission, set sail for Arabia and embraced Islam. The story is beautiful. It is filled with longing, with spiritual humility, and with the ocean as witness. But the historical foundation is thin, evaporating under scrutiny. There are no contemporary Arab sources. The timelines conflict. The records of the Perumals themselves are silent. Eminent historians have already attributed the conversion to a Perumal who lived centuries later. And yet, the myth is told and retold, especially in Kerala, as if etched into stone.
Why? Because in a world where Islam is often seen through Arab eyes, this story allows Indian Muslims, especially in the south, to say: “We were there at the beginning. We were among the first.”
The legend does not aim to dominate. It simply wants to belong.
And still, it bends the past until it breaks.
So does the myth of Bodhidharma, the Indian prince turned monk, who traveled to China and, according to popular legend, introduced not only Chan Buddhism but also the martial arts that would later evolve into Shaolin Kung Fu. Here, the Indian nationalist takes pride. What greater proof of civilizational superiority is there than the claim that even China's most sacred monastery owes its soul to India?
But the historical record offers little support. The earliest Chinese sources that mention Bodhidharma, such as the Luoyang Jialan Ji (547 CE), describe him as a meditation teacher, not a martial artist. The connection to Kung Fu appears much later, particularly in the Yijin Jing, a Ming dynasty forgery with no credible link to Bodhidharma. Even the Shaolin Temple’s own stele inscriptions from its early history are silent about martial training during his era.
More importantly, Chinese martial arts predate Bodhidharma by centuries. The Zhou Li and other Warring States-era texts describe structured combat training. Han dynasty records refer to wrestling (jiao li) and military drills. What we now call "Shaolin Kung Fu" emerged organically from indigenous practices, Daoist body culture, and temple defense needs, not from a single Indian monk.
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| Bodhidharma Cave, Dengfeng, China (Copyright) |
But presupposition does not care. It speaks louder than caution. It sees silence in the record not as a boundary, but as permission. And so it fills the gaps with glory.
The same impulse lies behind efforts to “prove” the historicity of Lord Rama’s birth at a precise spot in Ayodhya. The Ramayana, a layered epic, composed over centuries, never gives coordinates. But in modern India, archaeological digs, political rhetoric, and court judgments have all leaned heavily on the presupposition that the story is literal. Temple ruins are assumed to be Ram’s birthplace, and the gaps in records are interpreted as deliberate erasure. What was once sacred poetry becomes litigation, and faith becomes a tool of nationalism. The story is not so different when it comes to those who seek astronomical data in the Mahabharata either, attempting to date the Kurukshetra war using the positions of stars described in verse, as if Vyasa wrote not poetry, but a chronicle. As if divine time could be translated into ephemerides and orbital cycles. And the tragedy is not just scholarly. It is spiritual. Because by demanding that the Mahabharata happened, its readers cease to hear what it aims to teach.
| The Sanauli "Chariot", a misnomer widely attributed to what appears to be a "spoke-less" cart from IVC. Source: PIB India |
Elsewhere, the denial of history takes a different form. When Europeans first encountered the great stone city of Great Zimbabwe, they refused to believe that sub-Saharan Africans could have built it. Early colonial archaeologists twisted evidence to attribute the ruins to Phoenicians, Arabs, or even ancient Hebrews, anyone but the local Shona people. Here, the presupposition was not inclusion, but exclusion: a refusal to imagine African sophistication outside the European gaze. The myth of the “helpless native” needed history to be silent, and so it was silenced.
| Great Zimbabwe Ruins Credit: Think Africa |
What we see in all these instances is myth transforming into failed history. And it turns sacred stories into brittle, falsifiable claims. They become weak to criticism, vulnerable to doubt, and disrespected by the very institutions meant to study them.
This danger is not limited to believers. Secular ideologues do the same. Marxist historiography in India once tried to write the entirety of history as an overarching class struggle, reducing every nuance to dialectic, while ignoring the role of memory, spirit, and emotion. Colonial historians treated the East as stagnant, superstitious, and feminine, only to justify their "civilizing" missions. Nationalist historians rewrote medieval India as an unbroken chain of golden Hindu kings, interrupted only by violent invaders, erasing the pluralism of courts, the syncretism of saints, and the complexity of memory.
Everywhere, the past is forced to kneel.
What is lost in all this is not just accuracy, but wonder. Because history, when allowed to speak on its own terms, is filled with mysteries more haunting than any myth. Civilizations rise and vanish without reason. Saints walk unrecorded. Empires fall to winds, not war. And sometimes, nothing happens. Sometimes, silence really is the answer.
To be a historian is to accept and admit that the archive will never be complete, that certainty is rare, and that not everything can be recovered. But to be a good historian is to resist the urge to replace uncertainty with presupposition. To refuse to trade humility for comfort.
The tragedy is that many think admitting that a myth is not history means it is not valuable. That if the Exodus didn't happen, the Prophet never split the moon in half, Bodhidharma never punched a wall, Rama never crossed the sea, or the Ark isn’t frozen on a mountaintop, then the story is meaningless.
But this is a failure of imagination.
A myth does not become holy because it happened. It becomes holy because it is retold. Because it shapes identity, morality, and longing. Because it tells us who we are. Not in GPS coordinates, but in memory. Maybe this is irrelevant to a fundamentalist brain. Maybe this is immaterial to the current socio-political reality that surrounds us.
But I write this not as a cynic. I write this as someone who has stood in the architectural, cultural, and civilizational magnificence of countless temples and sacred groves; who has visited mosques out of historical curiosity and spiritual awe; who has sought and absorbed the quiet sanctity of synagogues in the corners of my society, and who has taken the blood and body of Christ to embellish myself with the spirit of communion.
I too, have read myths and wept.
I too, have believed things that later collapsed under the weight of evidence, but I loved them still, even in ruins.
And if there is one thing that I have learned in this path of an observer, it is this:
If we do not guard history from our own desires, we will turn it into a mirror. We will stop asking what happened, and start seeking endorsement. And then, the past will stop speaking, because it has nothing to say to those who refuse to listen.
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