The Ten Heads of Ravana: Identifying the Facets of Hinduphobia
Edited Version First Published in indiafacts.org
Introduction
Hinduphobia is real, deep, and scary. This anthology of essays, edited by Rajiv Malhotra and Divya Reddy, is an extremely important book whose alternative title could be ‘Hindus, Know Your Enemies.’ Hinduphobia of all forms is increasing the world over by concerted efforts of people in positions of influence. The ten people discussed in the book, compared to the heads of Ravana, represent the adharmic or asuric forces. A wonderful group of authors (K.S. Kannan, T.N. Sudarshan, Sharda Narayanan, Anurag Sharma, Divya Reddy, Manogna Sastry, Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay and H.R. Meera) discuss in detail each of these adharmic forces, both inside and outside the country, seriously undermining the civilizational ethos of the country.
The scholars analyzed are both Indian (Shashi Tharoor, Ramachandra Guha, Devdutt Patnaik, Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, and Kancha Iliah) and western (Wendy Doniger, Audrey Truschke, Michael Witzel, and Sheldon Pollock). Taking care not to indulge in ad-hominem attacks, each essay delves into the writings of these influential scholars individually to show the threat they pose to Hindus. The religious background of these ‘heads of Ravana’ include practising Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims and even atheists. Similarly, the political ideology which drives the Hinduphobic scholars ranges from the far- left across the center to even the so-called right if one wants to believe the modern classifications.
Thus, on one end of the spectrum comes Kancha Iliah who, like a hardened evangelical, pours forth pure hatred on Hindus; and on the other are the more subtle writings of Shashi Tharoor who claims to be a practising Hindu. The westerners approach India and Hinduism from a supposed interest and love for the country- Indology, a vicious enterprise mostly. Germany and other European nations started the project of Indology when they started studying India and its scriptures. It flattered us no end when people like Max Mueller studied Sanskrit and translated the Vedas. However, the motivation for Indology was deep racism with an intellectual effort to undermine the integrity of the country. Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, in their classic The Nay Science, thoroughly expose the Indological project emanating from Germany.
Following the war, Europe lost much interest and perhaps did not have the finances too to continue the Indology projects in their universities. The scene of action shifted to USA where the present study of India continues and mostly in a negative format. Indology appears to be a great concept when one approaches a five-thousand years surviving civilization with respect and a willingness to learn. But when the purpose of such studies is to undermine the country and the Hindus, then it is only our fundamental need to reject them. Not only rejection but we should be able to formulate an intellectual rebuttal to the one-sided narratives.
SN Balagangadhara says that it is one of the most amazing aspects of Indian culture that it rarely bothered to study foreign ideologies and influences the way they studied us. India produced an enormous corpus of knowledge based mainly on its own experiences. Its decentralised polity also ensured that India never physically invaded any other country to loot and plunder. However, this decentralised political system and an indifference to study foreign religions and philosophies allowed an enormous amount of physical and intellectual one-way attack on India and its culture.
Colonial rule allowed a great power to push many one-sided narratives and strategies to break India at all levels (social, economic, political, educational, and so on). However, the colonials did what they had to do. The real tragedy came at independence when our political-academic-intellectual combine could not look beyond the colonial narratives. Sita Ram Goel plainly calls it ‘Macaulayism’ and SN Balagangadhara has a more deeply developed thesis of ‘colonial consciousness.’ The biggest damage of colonialism was not its physical plunder and the intellectual narratives it set during its time but the permanent altering of the intellectual frameworks of the Indians. This altering not only makes Indians persist with the colonial stories (there are intolerant religions in India; there is a ‘caste system’ in india; Aryans invaded india; Brahmins were exploitative people; our arts and sciences were primitive; our culture was barbaric; and so on) but there is even a refusal to believe any alternative versions of India. Any attempts to create an alternative meets with an incredible resistance and outright derision.
The Aryan Invasion Story
Whether a cause or effect but the strongest correlation of Hinduphobia has to be the belief of the Aryan Invasion Theory. The common thread which runs through almost all the intellectuals studied is the (mis)use of the Aryan theory. The basic story of the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) is something like this: Around 1500 BCE, a group of fair horse-riding invaders came riding from the Russian Steppes into North-West India and subjugated the dark native population without horses (the Harappans) and drove many of them away to distant lands.
First proposed in the 19th century, due to the linguistic commonalities of Sanskrit with other European languages, there developed a concept of a PIE (Proto-Indo-European) language spoken by a group occupying an original ‘Homeland’. From this Homeland the PIE speakers migrated to various regions of Europe and Asia (including Iran, Syria, and India) where the original language transformed (degenerated) into many local versions but maintained a distinct connection to the original language. The original language and the Homeland have been areas of intense speculation.
The strongest evidence is from the linguistic field which shows a remarkable connection between the various European languages and Sanskrit (and it’s derived many Indian languages). However, migrations based on linguistic theories are not definitive since almost every other field (archaeology, textual data from the Vedas, inscriptions) has rejected such gross migrations. The most objective evidence comes from archaeological studies which does not show a shred of evidence to support any large-scale invasions from outside India. The textual data from the Vedas (Shrikant Talageri) not only rejects the Aryan theory but gives evidence for an out of India migration to other parts of Asia and Europe. Genetics is the latest hope for the Aryan proponents but the evidence is both contradictory and ambiguous.
As the narrative continues, these Aryans brought Sanskrit, Vedas and the varna system too. The first three orders (Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and the Vysyas) were the ‘original’ Aryans who subjugated the Harappans giving them the status of Sudras (the lowest in the varna system). Those driven to the mountains and hills became the tribals of India; those driven to the South of Vindhyas became the Dravidians; and the most deprived who stayed put became the untouchables and the Dalits of today. Hence, all the noxious divisive narratives of India today (Dravidians, Sudras, tribals, and Dalits as forming a separate identity from the ‘Aryan’ Hindus) firmly bases itself upon to a great extent on the Aryan Invasion theory. In the face of overwhelming evidence against large scale invasions the theory has a softer version or the AMT- Aryan Migration Theory. Even more ad-hoc adjustments happen when an Indologist like Michael Witzel (one of the ten heads discussed in the book) suggests a single tribe which comes to India and does not return back!
Anyone believing the Aryan theory may not be Hinduphobic but the reverse almost always holds true. One of the characteristic features of the Hinduphobic intellectuals is the variable use of the theory to hit out against the Hindus. The primary objective is that Hindus themselves are foreigners in their land and there is nothing like ‘indigenous’ Indians. The Hindus were simply the pre-European colonisers of the indigenous groups. Only the method of usage varies from the harsh and vitriolic attack of a Kancha Iliah to the subtle polished language of Tharoor. The Marxist scholars like Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib found it useful to perpetuate the essentially colonial story because it fits rather well with the ‘exploiter-exploited’ paradigm. Hence, despite no evidence for the mystical Aryans, it is unfortunately an important clutch for persistent anti-India and anti-Hindu rhetoric in the country.
Whitewashing Islamic history
An important uniting thread for the Hinduphobic scholars is their attachment to secularism. Jakob De Roover (Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism) shows how secularism as a state policy after independence was a profound mistake stemming from a lack of understanding of religions, traditions, and the nature of both Europe and India. Secularism was a solution for Christendom at a specific period of its history when the various denominations were fighting each other quite vigorously based on their individual doctrines.
Secularism separated the Church from the State. However, secularism was not a universal solution for all cultures and for all periods of time. Secularism however became one of the pillars of Nehruvian policy for a New India. An improper understanding turned first our traditions into religions and then applied the solution of secularism to them. This has led to many problems and the most important, paradoxically, is the rise of ‘Hindu fundamentalism.’ The conversion of traditions into ‘proper’ religions makes them more intolerant and exclusionary. The Indian solution from across centuries was the reverse ‘traditionalising’ of religions which came to us from foreign lands so that they became more tolerant and inclusive.
However, the biggest implementation of secularism in the political-academic combine became appeasement which meant severely distorting the history of Islamic imperialism in India. It must be the most unique event in the history of any country that the first Education minister of India for ten long years was an Islamic scholar. It is sad and strange that a country, recently split on religious identities, and a Hindu culture which needed to be redefined and resurrected after a thousand years of physical and intellectual pillage chose a Muslim to guide its educational policies. The later hijacking of Indian history by Marxist intellectuals like Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib (the Aligarh school of historians) allowed propagation of a distorted history which whitewashed most of the Islamic rulers’ brutalities and iconoclastic activities.
The overwhelming philosophy was not to hurt the present-day Muslims but this had tragic consequences. Our thinkers could have set a narrative by detaching the present Muslims from the crimes of the past Islamic invaders. There would have been no need to falsify our history and at the same time carry the country forward with better harmony. However, in a poorly conceived strategy based on falsehood, they, in fact, strengthened the association of the unconnected Muslims of contemporary times to the past Islamic imperialism.
The methods of the individuals discussed in the book vary. From the straight denial of atrocities despite glaring evidence (akin to Holocaust denying) of an Aurangzeb (Audrey Truschke) to twisting history (Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib) to show that religion did not play a role in their destructive activities, the defence and thus the distortions of Islamic rule have been tremendous. Shashi Tharoor plays an intelligent game. He is quite brutal in his attack on the English colonials but spares the Islamic imperialism. His argument is that they ‘stayed back’ in the country and settled here. How does that make them any less of plunderers?
Arun Shourie (Eminent Historians) and Neeraj Atri with Muneishwar Sagar (Brainwashed Republic) have exposed the noxious role of the leftist historians in twisting the historical narratives. The lies and whitewashings of the past caused immense damage to both Indian Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu now seethes in anger when he comes to know the historical narratives beyond the textbook teachings and the Muslim goes into a protective mode trying to defend the indefensible. The textbooks went against a huge body of contemporary descriptions of the invaders by chroniclers and historians which exist intact in our libraries. There may have been some exaggerations but the large body of evidence corroborates the brutal nature of the invasions.
Reducing the Hindu History to Footnotes
An important characteristic of Hinduphobic scholars is the continuation of the historical project after independence to reduce Hindu contributions to footnotes. Historians like Romila Thapar and Habib assured that growing generations of Indians had nothing to be proud about its past before the invaders landed. Ten Heads of Ravana amply demonstrates the various narratives stacked against Hindus which include: Exploitative Sanskrit and the upper castes (Sheldon Pollock); the ‘myths’ of Ramayana and Mahabharata (Doniger, Devdutt Patnaik) gaining prominence only after the Islamic rulers; the doubtful ‘historicity’ of Rama and Krishna showing a profound ignorance of Indian culture as how we deal with our past (Marxist historians brought in ‘historicity’ of Rama while fighting in the Ayodhya temple case to obfuscate the physical evidence of the mosque standing on the remains of a Hindu temple); wicked Indian kings fighting each other allowing foreign invaders to walk in; no great indigenous rulers and achievements of Indian culture; and so on.
Krishnadevaraya, Marthanda Varma, Lachit Borphukan, the Cholas, the Pandyas, the Sikh Gurus, and the Marathas had superficial attention while we imbibed the Delhi-centric history with great passion and vigour. The most obscure and transient rulers of Delhi went deep into our collective conscience. The depiction of the social evils of indigenous people (caste system, untouchability, exploitation) or the benevolence of foreign invaders finally projected through the prism of religion. Brainwashed Republic shows how the history writers achieved this by using every trick in the book: lies, appealing to authority, appealing to prejudice, cherry-picking, disinformation, euphemisms, exaggeration, glittering generalities, guilt by association, half-truths, intentional vagueness, labelling, loaded language, oversimplification, third-party technique, unstated assumption, thought terminating cliché, and so on. At least two generations entered colleges and built their lives believing sadly that nothing good came from our country.
Our history became a history of invaders (the mythical Aryans, Islamic rulers, the Europeans, and the British in succession) instead of the land and its people. There was never an elaboration of reasons why greedy rulers needed to come to India in the first place when the reverse never happened. Today, ‘colonial consciousness’ infecting most of our educated elite allows a persistent refusal to acknowledge Indian heritage and contributions (unless of course, a Westerner acknowledges and validates it). The ten scholars discussed in the book broadly picture Hindu society as a heterogeneous mass divided by race, religion, sect, caste, class, and language but united by only a shared slavery under colonial rule.
Unfortunately, it takes a great amount of convincing for Indian intellectuals that Hindu society too, before the invaders, made major contributions (and continues to do so) to the spiritual, cultural, philosophical, and scientific wealth of humankind. We were simply the richest and the most prosperous country in the world before the colonials landed. India and China, with almost equal share were contributing more than 50% of the world GDP for seventeen centuries from the start of the millennium as Angus Maddison shows. This could not have happened if a ‘primitive’ culture (composed mainly of Hindus) were wallowing in ignorance and superstition.
Our scholars generated a huge corpus of knowledge by reflecting on our experiences. The story of villainous Brahmins withholding this knowledge is simply a colonial narrative which we internalised. Dharampal using the colonial records itself shows that this whole narrative of ‘Brahmanical denial of education’ is simply false and divisive. Hinduphobia freezes the extraordinary corpus of literature dealing with hundreds and thousands of topics into one corrupted interpretation of Purusasukta hymn and some selected passages from Manusmriti. None of the smrtis, which the Hinduphobic scholars love to dissect have the status of a wide-ranging powerful truth, normative and prescriptive, across time and space. No political, secular, or religious power enforced these on entire populations.
Sanskrit as an Exploitative language
One distinctive way of scholarly Hinduphobia is to attack Sanskrit. Sheldon Pollock is the primary and the strongest example of this scholarship who believes Sanskrit is a ‘dead’ language fit only for study like other dead languages (like Latin). Rajiv Malhotra (The Battle for Sanskrit) previously showed how Sheldon Pollock who, in his theories of Sanskrit, undermines the entire culture of the country. A typical feature of Pollock is his extremely dense language bewildering an ordinary reader.
The essay on Pollock informs how Pollock essentially deconstructs Sanskrit grammar, and Sanskrit ‘ideology’ making it ‘oppressive’ to Dalits, women, and Muslims. It explains oppression by the kings and Brahmin priests; expansion of Hinduism to far East countries; and Nazi racism too! In his attacks Pollock would rather believe that the most perfect language ever devised by the human mind can only destroy the plurality of India and will aggravate inequality as in the past while encouraging violent nationalism.
On the other hand, scholars like Vyaas Houston state Sanskrit as a ‘perfect language infinitely more sophisticated than any of our modern tongues.’ Another (Rens Bod) believes that the history of linguistics begins not with Plato or Aristotle, but with Panini’s grammar treatise- the Astadhyaya. With its complex use of metarules, transformations, and recursions, the grammar in Ashtadhyayi is like the ‘Turing machine,’ an idealized mathematical model that reduces the logical structure of any computing device to its essentials.
The terse, perfect, unambiguous, and complete logical rules describing Sanskrit morphology has been extremely influential in ancient and modern linguistics. European scholars discovered Panini in the 19th century inspiring modern linguists like Bopp, Saussure, Frits Staal, and others. Staal notes that the idea of formal rules in language – proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1894 and developed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 – has clear and unambiguous origins in the formal rules of Paninian grammar.
Panini’s ‘auxiliary symbols’ technique, rediscovered by the logician Emil Post, became a foundation method in the design of computer languages. John Backus and Peter Naur introduced the formal structure of computer programming languages during 1958-60. T.R.N. Rao and Subhash Kak quote P. Z. Ingerman (1967) who, with definite evidence of Panini being the earlier independent inventor of this structure, wanted a name change to Panini-Backus Form. Subhash Kak shows that Panini’s grammar has direct parallels in computer science.
How did a perfect language with a perfect grammar become oppressive, exploitative, and dead? For the colonials, it came in the way of their narratives of a primitive civilization needing the help of a benign white rule. Unfortunately, post-independent India saw a Marxist ideology becoming the driving force of our educational narratives by looking at every social, political, and economic issue only in the framework of the exploiter and the exploited. Sanskrit soon became the carrier of Brahmanism, patriarchy, and oppression.
India Bashing-Hindu Bashing-Brahmin Bashing
Holding Brahmins responsible for all the evils of Indian society is an essential component of Hinduphobic narratives as it has the idea of undermining a civilization. It can be a direct abuse in the hands of Kancha Iliah and scholars like Wendy Doniger. Despite centuries of scholarship, amazingly the story of villainous Brahmins never changed as an explanation to the problems of Indian society.
The most popular story about Indian religions was a degeneration of a ‘pure’ religion of the Vedas (Vedism) through crafty Brahmins into Brahmanism. Buddhist and Bhakti elements injected some good points and caused a transformation into the present Hinduism which still stays mostly bad. Hinduism as a religion was responsible for all the social evils in the country especially the caste system and untouchability. In more modern times, economists have gone further to blame Hinduism for even its alleged tardy economic growth (the return of the ‘Hindu’ rate of growth as Raghuram Rajan recently declared).
Meenakshi Jain (The Plight of Brahmins) writes that the British distrusted educated Brahmins in whom they saw a potential threat to their supremacy. The facts of a thriving economy, arts, and sciences where all varnas played an important role before the colonials landed; the fact that Brahmins were neither rich nor powerful at any point of time in history; the continuous downward mode of Brahmins in their traditional activities following independence; The Beautiful Tree (Dharampal) showing the British documents themselves negating any denial of education to non-Brahmins; many non-Brahmin communities as land owners rather than Brahmins responsible for oppression of the deprived; and thousands of Brahmins losing their lives in the Islamic invasions, Goan Inquisitions, or the freedom struggle did not deter scholars of today to reassess the role of varnas and jatis in Indian society or to reject the simplistic explanations offered by the colonials.
Tragically, post-independence, the critique was not of the colonials (and their narratives) but turned inwards to focus on the so-called forward castes- the villains created by the colonials. Brahmin bashing became an evolved discipline as the narratives and social sciences simply failed to question the previous colonial understandings of India. The social sciences of today start their theories assuming the truth of the previous assumptions. The left influenced academia with their favourite theories of exploiter and the exploited, the missionaries, and the brainwashed intellectuals in partnership continued the British story post-independence. The chief criteria for academic acceptance in the top universities is to criticise Brahmins; for the Brahmins themselves, to constantly repeat ‘mea culpa.’
Eroticising of Hindu Gods, Intellectual Violence, and Playing the Victim Card
The deepest intellectual violence occurs on Indian culture when the likes of Devdutt Patnaik and Wendy Doniger offer absurd interpretations of our texts. A numb silence on our part encourages them even more. A few become violent and come to represent ‘Hindu fundamentalism’ allowing the Hinduphobic writers then to play the victim. Like Nityananda Mishra elsewhere, one chapter in the book carefully explains why Patnaik, in popular books beautifully written and illustrated, is a threat to Indian culture by his extremely problematic translations of Sanskrit texts.
Wendy Doniger, an influential American Indologist, remains obsessed with sexual themes and themes of exploitation of women and lower classes in her Freudian reading of Indian texts. Her books reveal a deep antipathy to Hindus with falsifications of Indian history, politics, traditions, culture, antiquity, scriptures, deities, and important rituals. For example, her free-will interpretations of Rama as both a sex addict and an oppressor of lower castes and women; Laxman having sexual fantasies for Sita; and many such, makes her ideas a gross violence on the Indian Hindus.
In her controversial book, ‘Hindus: An Alternative History,’ she manages to sexualize almost all the scriptures: Ramayana, Mahabharata, Upanishads, and the Vedas too. Vishal Agarwal, Aditi Banerjee and Bharat Gupt (New Stereotypes of Hindus in Western Indology) gave an exhaustive rebuttal of Wendy Doniger’s book showing how Doniger’s scholarship makes gross errors in basic textbook level of history, geography, and scriptural interpretations. The Freudian analysis, for whatever its worth, seems more applicable to Doniger herself. A strong leftist ideology with the consistent binaries of exploiter and exploited informs her scholarship. Krishna’s call to Arjuna as Gita ‘encouraging’ violence makes us wonder about her scholarship. Wendy however refuses to engage with the traditionalists preferring to do an academic ‘hit and run.’ Unfortunately, she has a great following amongst many Indian scholars and writers.
Developing Faultlines
The intellectual violence on our culture has continued unabated after independence due to the combined efforts of the politicians, social sciences, and the Indologists. At the most obvious level is declaring the non-Hindus as ‘minorities.’ Secularism became an abuse of the majority where it told the Hindus that it will ‘never forget and never forgive.’ It became an appeasement when it told Muslims and Christians that it forgets, forgives, and blanks out its history too. That has been a terrible solution for post independent India because, despite the best intentions, angers have only increased.
Abhas Chatterjee (The Concept of Hindu Nation) explains that all over the world inhabitants of a country classify all its citizens into two categories: nationals and minorities. It is only in India that there is a wrong notion of having two classes of a ‘majority’ and a ‘minority’ within the class of nationals. Thus, concerned Sanatanis are not fighting individuals but ideologists who alienate people from the original culture of the land using essentially colonial understandings of Indian society.
Varna-jati-ashrama is a civil societal system which allowed India to survive brutal invasions from across centuries. Colonial-missionary narratives with a purpose to break India superimposed ‘Caste,’ a western idea, on varnas and jatis and then made them into an ‘idolatrous’ religious phenomenon fit for condemnation. Our later understandings have not deviated a single bit from these narratives.
The constitutional definition of a Hindu is still a neti-neti definition resembling Savarkar’s ideas: anyone who is not a Christian, Muslim, Parsi or Jew. The Hindus are now ‘different’ from Muslims, Christians, and Parsis. Though the constitutional-judicial-political combine is still not very clear on what ‘Hindu, Hinduism, and Hindutva’ mean, it does not prevent intellectuals like Shashi Tharoor from pontificating and even writing books on why Hinduism is good and Hindutva bad. Such statements show a gross ignorance of the entire philosophy of Sanatana Dharma and its inclusive framework. Such ideas rely rather on western principles emanating from religious cultures which are divisive and exclusionary. The failure to turn to traditional understandings of our culture and simultaneously putting western (and Marxist) lenses to view Indian culture was the single biggest failure of post-independence scholarship.
The dividing Hinduphobic scholarship finally use approaches of all kinds (from very hard to very soft) to show that tribals, Dravidians, Dalits, Sudras, Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists are in fact separate from the first three orders (Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vysyas). This is a danger we must be ready to face. Similarly, the favourite trope that ‘India was never a nation’ needs countering with all our Sanatani might. Briefly, the modern concept of a nation-state profoundly fails to make sense in defining Bharatvarsha, a civilizational entity based on shared culture and spirituality.
The Discourses of Dalit Exploitation and Untouchability
Untouchability was a noxious weed rightfully attacked and reformed from within. The abominable practices where the Brahmins and other upper castes indulged in social exclusion of various jatis, barred temple entry, denied access to water wells, and such, certainly existed. It was a shameful period of Indian social history. But the severe criticism and reform came from within and equally from intellectuals and social workers who were not the victims (like Sri Aurobindo, Gandhiji, and Savarkar to name a few). Post-independence too, untouchability is a crime and constitutional-judicial reforms continue to address the inequalities existing in society based on the caste system (whatever be the understanding).
However, as scholars like Jakob De Roover (Scheduled Castes Vs. Caste Hindus: About A Colonial Distinction And Its Legal Impact) have shown, today the segregation of 1200 jatis and 65 million people into one single category (Dalits) based on a single tenuous criteria of ‘ex-untouchability’ status has become extremely problematic. The economic, social, political, educational deprivation do not define them but only an ‘untouchability’ status in the past. The definitions of untouchability have been circular and ambiguous which had in fact raised many arguments in the constitutional debates. Today, everyone just assumes the notion of untouchability without any question.
However, the strangest paradox of the country is that despite declaring untouchability (whatever be its understanding) as illegal, despite making large scale provisions for reservations (positive discrimination) in many areas of education and employment, the angers have only increased. The fissures are only deepening as the only narrative of India in national and international platforms is that of Dalit exploitation.
It is another matter that scholars like Dunkin Jalki, Sufiya Pathan (Violence Against SCs: How Absence of Reliable Data Leads to Disaster) and Nihar Sashittal (The enigma of caste atrocities: Do scheduled castes and scheduled tribes face excessive violence in India?) have shown that the statistical evidence of an ‘extensive’ Dalit exploitation does not exist at all. It is now a messy situation for India that all discourses target the Hindus and it’s so- called upper castes. Ironical, since the Dalit identity itself is mostly a political, constitutional construct and the records do not show any mass discrimination against this group. Much of the data is manipulation and cherry picking as Pathan and others show. However, it was a dangerous colonial narrative carried forward now by many intellectuals which says Hinduism equals caste system which equals untouchability and the solution for untouchability is destruction of Hinduism.
Concluding Remarks
This is a phenomenal effort on the part of Rajiv Malhotra and his team of scholars to help Indians fight a civilizational war. Each of the writers does a wonderful job in dissecting clean the individuals who are attacking the ‘last surviving pagan civilization’ in myriad ways. Some are clearly Trojan horses who attack Hindus despite being Hindus. They are the most dangerous. The academics are equally dangerous whose textbooks become reading material for competitive civil services exams. These civil servants, in their great positions of power and influence, determine further the educational policies of its citizens. The politicians, barring a few, are mostly clueless on the noxious nature of scholarship derooting and deracinating the growing generations of the country.
A book like this needs to become compulsory reading for anyone with an inkling of interest in the welfare of the country and the Hindus. The BJP won a landslide victory in 2014 because of an angry Hindu vote which consolidated after many decades of political leadership which took the Hindus for granted. The repeat performance seems to have angered the opposing forces today. A hate for BJP and for one man is transforming nationally and internationally into a hate for Hindus. This is the saddest aspect for Hindus since the BJP’s understanding of Sanatana Dharma appears to be equally doubtful. However, for the hapless Hindus today, as a political party it seems to be the least of the evils.
When India split into two countries, we had a country for ourselves and our own frameworks for progress. It is amazing that we could achieve so much despite the gross phobia against India, Hindus, and Brahmins. How much more we can achieve if we all unite as one single Bharatvarsha rejecting all the Hinduphobic narratives dividing our nation on a constant basis?
Unfortunately, everyone likes only a pliant Hindu ready to accept anything. The slightest defence generates shouts of ‘fanaticism,’ ‘fundamentalism,’ ‘Nazism,’ and so on. The Indian political-bureaucratic-education systems have allowed a great fissuring of our society. Varna-jatis of India prevented the disintegration of civilization in the face of a constant onslaught for hundreds of years and yet calls come out at regular intervals to disband it completely.
As Balagangadhara says: ‘Indologists use discredited theories from earlier social sciences to put across outlandish claims regarding a culture about which they are ignorant. Contemporary social sciences draw upon these ignorant claims to put across equally outlandish claims about human societies and cultures, again in ignorance of what the Indological claims rest upon. Both Indology and the social sciences enter a death-dance where neither dies but knowledge does.’ Thus, Balagangadhara says that the present social sciences (with one-sided hegemonical narratives) and Indology has contributed mostly nothing to the knowledge of ancient or modern India.
The western narratives have become true descriptions of our world in many areas. Each exacerbates and aggravates the other’s problems by importing ‘facts’ from each other. Moralizing talk and a normative language using terms like ‘inequality,’ ‘discrimination,’ ‘injustice’, and such other notions determine the alleged talk about society, culture, and people by Indologists of all hues. Adluri shows what is ultimately at stake in their entire rebuttal of Indology: freeing the ancients from being subjects of interrogation, and permitting the ancients to question us moderns instead. Buy and read the book. Urgently.
RANDOM MUSINGS 