Germany’s response to India was most enthusiastic and open hearted

Her finest open minded scholars appreciated Hindu Philosophy.

***

Henrich Heine (1797-1856), a late German Romantic lyric poet, whose influence was enormous not only in Germany but in most countries of the Western world.

He remarked that: 

“The Portuguese, Dutch and English have been for a long time year after year, shipping home the treasures of India in their big vessels. We Germans have been all along been left to watch it. Germany would do likewise, but hers would be treasures of spiritual knowledge.”

(source: India and World Civilization By D. P. Singhal - Pan Macmillan Limited. 1993 part II p. 234). Refer to chapter on European Imperialism.

Arthur Schopenhauer  (1788-1860), German philosopher and writer. He was one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century. He was the first Western philosopher to have access to translations of philosophical material from India, both Vedic and Buddhist, by which he was profoundly affected. Counted among his disciples are such thinkers as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, as well as Sigmund Freud, who takes a large part of his psychological theory from the writings of Schopenhauer. 

"There is no religion or philosophy so sublime and elevating as Vedanta."

Schopenhauer was in search of a "philosophy which should be at once ethics and metaphysics." India did not disappoint him. He found it in the Upanisadhic "tat twam asi", "that thou art". 

"From every sentence (of the Upanishads) deep, original and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit...."In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. They are destined sooner or later to become the faith of the people." 

(source: Kumbha Mela - By Jack Hebner and David Osborn  p. preface - By Thomas Beaudry and (source: The Discovery of India - By Jawaharlal Nehru Oxford University Press. 1995. pg 92 and The Upanishads Translated for the Modern Reader By Eknath Easwaran Nilgiri Press. 1987 p. 300 and Outlines of Hinduism - By T. M. P. Mahadevan - p.30).

Germany never had colonial aspirations in India

Unlike Great Britain’s Empire of colonizing greed Chancellor Count Otto von Bismarck (1815 - 1898) had vowed that Germany would not carry any colonial policy’ in 1881. 

When in modern times Europeans reached India in great numbers to trade, interest in India and her culture was awakened. Switzerland, Austria and Germany never had colonial aspirations in India, yet scholars from these countries contributed a great deal to Indology.

German Indologists

The growing influence of Indian thought in recent years has indeed frightened some Western religious writers, such as Hendrick Kraemmer (World Cultures and World Religions), who have designated it as the "Eastern invasion of the West". Perhaps excessive anxiety to defend the Western Christian traditions may have led Kraemer to over-rate Indian influence. But there are many European scholars who have denounced Indian thought in unmistakable terms. Whether response or resistance, admiration or denunciation, all are equally indicative of impact and stimulus.

In a limited way the migration of Indian labor to other countries provided yet another link between India and the outside world. Indian settlers began to move to other countries in 1830, mainly to work on British plantations. This made abolition of slavery commercially possible a few years later, when the notorious indenture system was introduced in the British Empire. According to estimate, twenty-eight million Indians migrated to various countries between 1834 and 1932.

 

Wilhelm von Humboldt statue - one of the founders of The Humboldt University on Unter den Linden in Berlin. The Prussian minister W von Humboldt, a scholar and linguist and philosopher, studied the Bhagavad Gita and was deeply moved by it. Due to his initiative, a second chair of Indology was established in Berlin in 1820. 

(image source: webmaster's own collection of photos taken during a recent visit to Germany).

***

An important social survey, carried out in Britain about some years ago, produced some surprising results. A quarter of all those who professed belief in an after-life- an eighth of the population-did not believe that this after-life would be eternal; eleven percent of the believers actually declared their faith in transmigration. This was "perhaps the most surprising single piece of information to be derived from this research". Belief in transmigration is a typically Indian doctrine and is contrary to the creeds of Europe and Western Asia.

Politically and intellectually it was inevitable that there should have been some reaction in Europe against an invasion of Indian learning. Reaction against alien ideas appears to be a common human irrationality. Certainly, the nature of political relationships and nationalistic pride understandably played a significant role. European nations generally were more receptive to Indian ideas during the early period of their relationship which was based on relative equality. But as European political, technological and economic supremacy over Asia came to be recognized, an attitude of superiority crept into the European – and particularly the British- outlook. The influence of political relationships on cultural intercourse is further illustrated by the fact that, once the British became overlords of India, Indian learning drew more sympathetic and imaginative understanding form other European countries than it did from the British.

The discovery of Indian thought by European scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to an outburst of admiration and enthusiasm, mainly because they felt that Indian thought filled a need in their European culture. Neither Christianity nor the classical cultures of Greece and Rome were considered satisfactory any more and the European intelligentsia sought to apply the new knowledge, brought in increasingly by Indologists, to their own spiritual preoccupations.

 

University of Heidelberg Library. The oldest university in Germany.

(image source: webmaster's own collection of photos taken during a recent visit to Germany).

Famous Open minded and liberal German thinkers like Schopenhauer, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Paul Deussen, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Heiler, Werner Karl Heisenberg, Henrich Heine, Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, Count Hermann Keyserling were ardent admirers of Hindu philosophy and Sanskrit language. Refer to chapters on Quotes.

Refer to A Tribute to Hinduism: thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture - By Sushama Londhe - Heidelberg University Library.

***

It is significant that, with notable exceptions, India appears to have been most attractive to those Europeans who did not visit the country personally. In other words, Indian thought made a better impact on the European mind than did contemporary Indians.

 

Fredrick the Great, Germany's Enlightened monarch and Voltaire at San Soucci palace. 

Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire (1694-1774) France's greatest writers and philosophers, was a theist, and a bitter critic of the Church. He found that India was the home of religion in its oldest and purest form. He described India as a country "on which all other countries had to rely, but which did not rely on anyone else." He also believed that Christianity derived from Hinduism. He wrote to and assured Fredrick the Great of Prussia that "our holy Christian religion is solely based upon the ancient religion of Brahma."  

He among others held up Hinduism as an example of a natural deistic religion with a pedigree much older than that of Judeo-Christianity. " I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganga (Ganges), - astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc."

 

The Sans Souci Palace in Potsdam where Fredrick the Great and the French philosopher Voltaire met.

(image source: webmaster's own collection of photos taken during a recent visit to Germany).

***

Of all the European nations, Germany’s response to India was most enthusiastic and open hearted. Perhaps the similarity between the German and the Indian mind, in the sense that both are given to contemplation, abstract speculation, and pantheism, and both have a tendency towards formlessness, inwardness, and transcendentalism, contributed toward German understanding of Indian literature. 

Leopold von Schroeder says: "The Indians are the nation of romanticists of antiquity." The Germans are the romanticists of modern times". Sentimentality and feeling for nature are common to both German and Indian poetry, whereas they are foreign, for instance to Hebrew or Greek poetry. Another similarity is illustrated , by the Indian tendency to work scientific systems, India was the nation of scholars of antiquity, in the same way as the Germans are the nation of scholars of the modern times."

(source: India and World Civilization- By D. P. Singhal  p 268 and German Indologists - By Valentina Stache-Rosen  p. 255).

Proud to be ‘Internet Hindus’  
The Silent voice of Truth

Hindus who are proud to assert their identity and fly the Tricolour high have now found a new platform to have their say, the way they want it, without fear of being shouted down. Tired of being derided by pseudo-secularists in media who see nothing wrong with Muslim communalism and Christian fundamentalism but are swift to pounce upon Hindus for being ‘intolerant’, their cultural ethos crudely denigrated by the Left-liberal intelligentsia as antediluvian, Hindus have begun to harness technology to strike back with deadly effect.

They are bright, they are well-educated, they are not burdened with regional and caste biases, they are amazingly well-informed on national issues and world affairs, they are rooted in Indian culture, and they are politically alert. They hate being told they are wrong when they know they are right. They have a mind of their own and refuse to be led like sheep. Not surprisingly, they hold the Congress, the Left and regional parties in contempt, as they do journalists who cravenly ingratiate themselves with the establishment. 

For them, India matters — and matters more than anything else. Meet the ‘Internet Hindus’.

Refer to Mass Conversions in India – Destroying Cultures and Families -  By Vikay Paul - chakra news.com and Parlous state of temples - By Rajeev Srinivasan - dnaindia.com

In recent days there has been a spate of articles disparaging the ‘Internet Hindus’, variously describing them as “loonies”, “fanatics”, “irrational”, “Hindu Taliban” and, by an enraged news channel anchor (Sagarika Ghose)  “gutter snipes”. Much of the criticism has come from left-of-centre journalists who believe they have unfettered monopoly over media as their inalienable birth right. Exalted members of Delhi’s commentariat, who are indistinguishable from the city’s la-di-dah socialites, tend to turn up their noses every time they hear the phrase ‘Internet Hindus’ as they would at the suggestion of travelling by public transport. Others are given to contemptuously brushing aside ‘Internet Hindus’ as being irrelevant and describing their views as inconsequential. All this and more has neither dampened the spirit of ‘Internet Hindus’ nor blunted their assertive attitude.

Refer to I will arrest the Pope says Richard Dawkins - timesonline.co.uk.  Refer to Christianisation of Chennai Doordarshan's Channel - By Thamizhchelvan - vijayvaani.com

Refer to All Victims of Criminal Anti-Hindu Media Abuse - By V Sundaram and How church destroyed Swami Nithyananda! - By Rajiv Malhotra.  Refer to The Nithy Mea Culpa Interview? – By Rajiv Malhotra and The ongoing anti Hindu conspiracy in the contemporary India - vivekjyotiblogspot.com

Indian English Language Media Blacks out News - Christian missionary extremists demolish Hindu temple in AP - crusadewatch.org and Vatican told bishops to cover up sex abuse world wide - guardian.co.uk

Here are some statistics, culled from an ongoing online survey, which would help create a generic profile of ‘Internet Hindus’. The survey is open to all Hindus who use the Internet; the response has been overwhelming. Of those who have responded, 88.9 per cent have identified themselves as ‘Internet Hindus’, indicating they attach no shame to the term though their critics would want them to feel ashamed. Of the respondents, four per cent are aged 20 years and below; 55 per cent are aged 30 and below; 31 per cent are 40 and below; and, only 10 per cent are aged above 40. In brief, 90 per cent of them are young Indians.

The educational profile of the respondents is awesome: 43 per cent are graduates (most of them from top-notch engineering, science and medical colleges); 46 per cent are post-graduates (a large number of them have MBA degrees from the best B-schools); and, 11 per cent have PhDs. It is understandable that none of them is unemployed. Those without jobs are still studying (17.3 per cent) and can be found in labs and classrooms of the best universities here and abroad. Of the 82.7 per cent who are employed, 3.1 per cent earn up to Rs 2 lakh a year; 18.4 per cent earn up to Rs 6 lakh a year; 34.7 per cent earn up to Rs 12 lakh a year; and, 26.5 per cent earn more than Rs 24 lakh a year. Nearly 60 per cent of them frequently travel abroad on work and holiday. Some 11 per cent have travelled abroad at least once.

Contrary to the impression that is being sought to be created by their critics, ‘Internet Hindus’ are open to ideas, believe in a plural, law-abiding society and swear by the Constitution. They are often appalled by the shenanigans of our politicians, including those of the BJP, and are ruthless in decrying politics of identity and cynical vote-bank policies. They have no gender prejudices and most of them think banning FTV is downright silly in this day and age. The ‘Internet Hindus’ will not countenance denigration of their faith or biased media coverage of events, but 91.9 per cent of them respect and accept other religions. Asked if India is meant only for Hindus, an overwhelming majority of them, responding to the survey, said, ‘Hell, no!’

Refer to The bastardization of Indian Television - By Shashi Krishna

So why do they infuriate pseudo-secularists in media and make Delhi ’s commentariat see red? There are three possible explanations. First, the Net is beyond the control of those who control newspapers and news channels. While the print and audiovisual media have for long excluded contrarian opinion and denied space to those who disagree with absurd notions of ‘secularism’ or question the quality of reportage, the Net has provided space to the ‘other’ voice. Real time blog posts now record the ‘other side’ of the day’s story (“The Prince (Rahul Gandhi) was shouted down in Bihar, not feted by students!”), Twitter affords instant micro-blogging even as prime time news is being telecast (“That’s not true. I live in Bareilly. This is not how the riots began!”), and YouTube allows unedited amateur videos of events (the Meraj riots, the Islamist violence in Kashmir Valley) to be uploaded, giving the lie to edited and doctored versions shown by news channels.

Second, unlike carefully selected ‘Letters to the Editor’ in newspapers and ‘Feedback’ posted on news channel websites, the reactions of ‘Internet Hindus’, often savage and unflattering, cannot be thrown into the dustbin or deleted with a click of the mouse. English language media journalists, long used to fawning praise from readers and viewers, are horrified that someone can actually call them ‘dumb’ in public space and there’s nothing they can do about it. Third, the established elite, most of them middle-aged, are beginning to feel threatened. Here’s a new breed of Indians who have used merit and not ‘connections’ to make a mark in professional excellence, young men and women who are educated and articulate, and are willing to challenge conventional wisdom as preached by media ‘stars’ who have rarely, if ever, been questioned. The elite who dominate newspapers and news channels are seen by ‘Internet Hindus’ as part of India’s past, not future. As one ‘Internet Hindu’ writes in his blog, “A large number of ex-elite can’t stomach fact that children of bankruptcy are better travelled, better read and dominate the Internet!” Harsh, but true.

We can describe the ‘Internet Hindus’ as the “lunatic fringe”, but that won’t change the fact that their tribe is growing by the day. Soon, those on the fringe will move to the centre and their critics will find themselves precariously perched on the fringe. The Right is gaining ground as is the access and reach of the Net; newspapers and news channels, the Left’s last refuge, no longer command absolute control over information flow. It would be unwise to ‘block’ the voice of ‘Internet Hindus’, as then their clamour to be heard will further increase and there is nothing we can do to silence them. The times they are a-changin’.

(source: Don’t block the ‘Internet Hindus’   - By Kanchan Gupta - dailypioneer.com).

Hinduism in Early Lanka: Excerpts

The Evolution of an Ethnic Identity, Revised Second Edition, by K. Indrapala, is reviewed by K.S. Sivakumaran in this article. Mr. Sivakumaran’s purpose is to highlight and retell, for the benefit of readers who may not be aware of the historical aspects of the Hindu religion, the author’s description of Hinduism to the early Sri Lanka population, 360 BCE to 1200 CE. 

Some highlights are:

The worship of Lord Siva was prevalent in Sri Lanka from even before the mission of Mahinda in the 3rd century BCE. 

Saivism clearly was one of the two main elements in the evolution of the Sri Lankan Tamils, the other being the Tamil language. 

Soon after the invasion of the Chola emperor Rajaraja towards the end of the 10th century, a Siva temple at Padaviya was named as Ravikulamanikka Iswaram, after the emperor . The ruins of this temple are still there at Padaviya. The ruins of more Saiva temples have also been found. 

 

     

Lord Shiva and Chola Emperor Rajaraja 

The worship of Lord Siva was prevalent in Sri Lanka from even before the mission of Mahinda in the 3rd century BCE. 

***

Besides the temples of Matota (Maanthottam) and Gokarna (Thirukoanamalai), there were no doubt other Siva temples in the island. 

Saivism continued to be practiced in the Sinhalese kingdom. Saiva temples were venerated in many places predominantly settled by Sinhala Buddhists. Two of the most venerated temples dedicated to Siva were the Nagarisa kovil at Devinuvara and Munnisavaram temple at Chilapam (Chilaw). 

The first edition of Mr. Indrapala’s book was published by Kumaran Book House, Colombo and Chennai. The revised second edition was published two years ago by Vrjitha Yapa Publications, Colombo , Sri Lanka .

(source: Hinduism in Early Lanka: Excerpts - hinduismtoday.com).

Panini to the rescue

Research team turns to the "world's first computational grammarian!".

Panini, the legendary Sanskrit grammarian of 5th century BC, is the world's first computational grammarian! Panini's work, Ashtadhyayi (the Eight-Chaptered book), is considered to be the most comprehensive scientific grammar ever written for any language.

According to Prof Rajeev Sangal, Director of IIIT (Hyderabad) and an expert on language computation, Panini's epic treatise on grammar came to the rescue of language experts in making English unambiguous. English is more difficult (as far as machine translations are concerned) with a high degree of ambiguity. Some words have different meanings, making the analysis (to facilitate translations) a difficult process. Making it disambiguous is quite a task, where Panini's principles might be of use.  

 

Panini, the legendary Sanskrit grammarian of 5th century BC, is the world's first computational grammarian! Panini's work, Ashtadhyayi (the Eight-Chaptered book), is considered to be the most comprehensive scientific grammar ever written for any language.  

***

Ashtadhyayi, the earlier work on descriptive linguistics, consists of 3,959 sutras (or principles). These highly systemised and technical principles, some say, marked the rise of classical Sanskrit.

Sampark, the multi-institute effort launched to produce a translation engine, enabling users to translate tests from English to various languages, will use some of the technical aspects enunciated by Panini. "We looked at alternatives before choosing Panini," Prof Sangal says. Incidentally, Prof Sangal co-authored a book, Natural Language Processing - A Panini Perspective, a few years ago.

Besides the technical side, Panini would be of great help to researchers on the translation engine on the language side too. A good number of words in almost all the Indian languages originate from Sanskrit. "That is great because Indian languages are related to each other," Prof Sangal points out.

(source: Panini to the rescue - thehindu.com).  Refer to chapter on Hindu Culture and Sanskrit.

Vedic River Saraswati is real now

Marxist-Secularist dominated establishment to deny the existence of Saraswati River

Vedic River Saraswati is real now. Replying to a question by Prakash Javadekar, MP, in parliament, the government admitted that scientists have discovered water channels indicating "beyond doubt" the existence of the "Vedic Saraswati" citing conclusions of a study jointly conducted by scientists of ISRO, Jodhpur and the Rajasthan Government's Ground Water Department, published in the Journal of Indian Society of Remote Sensing. The study reports "clear signals of palaeo-channels on the satellite imagery in the form of a strong and powerful continuous drainage system in the North-West region and occurrence of archaeological sites of pre-Harappan, Harappan and post-Harappan ages beyond doubt indicate the existence of a mighty palaeo-drainage system of the Vedic Saraswati river in this region... The description and magnanimity of these channels also matches with the river Saraswati described in the Vedic literature." It is a significant shift of the government from its earlier position since UPA assumed power at the centre. The UPA government had earlier maintained that there was no trace of lost Vedic Saraswati River .

There have been consistent attempts by the Marxist-Secularist dominated establishment to deny the existence of Saraswati River attempting to dissociate Harappan civilization from mainstream Indian culture. Three years ago, senior CPI(M) leader and Politburo member Sitaram Yechury slammed the ASI for its efforts. A Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture, which he headed in 2006, said, "The ASI has deviated in its working and has failed in spearheading a scientific discipline of archaeology. A scientific institution like the ASI did not proceed correctly in this matter." The NDA government in June 2002 had announced excavations to trace the river's course which was vehemently criticized by the Marxist-Secularist academicians. Such approach is evident in almost every matter related to India 's glorious past wherein Marxist-Secularist camp tries to deprive India of its contribution to the world while seeking to perpetuate myths like Aryan-Dravidian divide to keep Indian society divided. Although the government admitting the existence of Vedic Saraswati River might be causing a lot of heartburn but faced with the facts Saraswati is now real for them too.

(source: Vedic River Saraswati is real now - voi.org).

How India ’s Intellectuals Spread Lies

***

More Equal than others – A study of the Indian left - excerpts

A British Legacy  

Thanks to the British legacy the Indian communists made them intellectually and temperamentally unIndian. Macaulay, the great imperialist, was of the opinion that the British should “form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but British in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect.” The Indian Communists were the most consistent and earnest Macaulaynes. 

The viewed the history, society, culture, and traditions of India as a European would do. At the heart of their rootlessness were two factors: the push factor, ie. The Macaulayan syndrome; and the pull factor, ie. The interanationalism and abstractions of Marxism. The pull factor did away with whatever Indianness was left in the communist leaders. Hence their escape from concrete realities to abstract fantasies, from nation to ideology.  

Double standards  

According to Brinda Karat, the BJP’s interpretation of Indian culture is “for the subordination of women.” In other words, if the Leftists oppose beauty contests, their protest is against the alleged “commodification of women”; if the Rightists do the same, they are working on an anti-women agenda. If the BJP sponsors rewriting history, it is an exercise in deceitfulness, distortion, and prevarication, but if the Leftist historians do the same – as they have been doing, the NCERT textbooks being an example – it is putting history in the right perspective. There are any number of such examples of the duplicity and double-speak of the Indian Leftists. Yet, they are seldom derided or criticized for their duplicity. Their cranky theories pass off as self-evident truths; their propaganda, as well-established facts. The reason is the tremendous intellectual hegemony they enjoy in the media, academic circles, and the opinion-making apparatus in the country.  

Refer to I will arrest the Pope says Richard Dawkins - timesonline.co.uk.  Refer to Mass Conversions in India – Destroying Cultures and Families -  By Vikay Paul - chakra news.com

Nationalism is a snarl word  

In their scheme of things, nationalism is a snarl word and patriotism is a euphemism for jingoism. For, they believe that the poor, the “toiling masses,” the subalterns, have little to do with national pride or the safety of the frontiers; they are bothered only about their bread and butter. Ergo, all sensible people should only think about improving the lot of the “toiling masses,” about “moral norms and democratic values.” Not surprisingly, rhetoric has prevailed over common sense and pomposity over national interest, thus rendering Indian foreign policy an abject failure. In fact, the malaise is deeper: not only the past has been inglorious, there seems to be little hope for the future.  It seems surprising that communists, who were seen as Quislings (traitors) because of their treacherous role during the Quit India Movement of 1942, and their sympathizers and like-minded people gained so much prominence in such a short time. One reason was of course, the intellectual bankruptcy of the Right or whatever passes in its name. In any case, there is no denying the fact that the Left was able to establish its intellectual hegemony in various spheres of life. So much so that even the most absurd assertions of progressive intellectuals often go unscathed. Whether it is the writing of history, domination in academics and academia or determining the foreign policy principles and parameters, the Left has left its indelible mark on everything. That too, without the required electoral mandate.

(source: More Equal than others – a study of the Indian left  - By Ravi Shanker Kapoor). Refer to Media as the Toxin-Spreading Agent - By Sandeep B

Learn Sanskrit in  London

In the heart of London , a British school has made Sanskrit compulsory subject for its junior division because it helps students grasp math, science and other languages better.

“This is the most perfect and logical language in the world, the only one that is not named after the people who speak it.  Indeed the word itself means ‘perfected language.” – Warwick Jessup, Head, Head, Sanskrit department

“The Devnagri script and spoken Sanskrit are two of the best ways for a child to overcome stiffness of fingers and the tongue,” says Moss.  “Today’s European languages do not use many parts of the tongue and mouth while speaking or many finger movements while writing, whereas Sanskrit helps immensely to develop cerebral dexterity through its phonetics.”

(source: London School Makes Sanskrit Compulsory - indianrealist.wordpress.com).

The glory of ancient Hindu astronomers

When we talk of the earth going around the sun as it has always done, its globular shape, the different seasons, different lengths of day and night, mind goes back to Galileo and Copernicus, scared to death, holding the truth back lest the fury of the church falls upon them for letting the world know the reality of nature. When one thinks of gravity one thinks of Newton sitting under an apple tree watching an apple fall to the ground and Newton proclaiming “Lo! there is gravity.”

If I were to say Hindu philosophers talked and wrote about gravity and the globular shape of the earth centuries before Newton and Galileo and Copernicus, and quoted Hindu sources, I would not only be dismissed as a “fanatical Hindu communalist” by our ‘all-knowing-secular intellectuals’ but also incur their wrath.  And who wants that?

In order to state the truth and make it acceptable to our ‘all-knowing-secular intellectuals’ let me seek the help of a Muslim scholar from Central Asia . Who around 1030 AD wrote a very comprehensive book “Indica” about India — its literature, its philosophy, its religion, its culture, its languages, its history, its geography, its customs, its sciences including astronomy.  I am talking about Abu-Raihan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Alberuni — a scholar and a devout genuine Muslim by all standards.

Before I go into what Alberuni wrote let us take some time to find out more about this man — Alberuni.

(source: Earth’s Rotation, Globular Shape and Gravity - By Vinod Kumar - voi.org). 

***

Doctrine of Christian Discovery

According to which only Christians could be regarded as discoverers. 

The church decreed that ownership of a piece of land must go to the first Christian to spot it. (Hence, the claim that Columbus “discovered” America , or that Vasco da Gama “discovered” India). The people already living on the land did not matter, and the church encouraged their killing on a mass scale, where possible, as actually happened on three continents. This doctrine was made into a law by the US supreme court, and that is where the current US law on land-ownership vis-a-vis the “Red Indians” stands.

(source: Newton as Theologian - By C K Raju). Refer to Five Hundred Years of Injustice

Indian Leftists

"The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer." – Albert Einstein  

Hindus and Hinduism face two grave threats - Christian Conversion and Islamic Terrorism

Historically, Christianity is an imposition on the indigenous pagan spiritual religions of Europe and later, South America. Likewise Islam is an imposition on the spiritual religions of Arabia, Egypt and West Asia.

***

Techniques of Hegemony  - By Dr Ravi Shaker Kapoor

The capacity of the Leftists to make empirically unverified and unverifiable assertions is remarkable. Even more remarkable is the fact that these assertions often enjoy the status of self-evident truths.  Some of the Leftist dogma have absolutely nothing to do with experience or common sense. One of them is that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is an upper caste, upper class, north Indian party and, therefore can’t represent the masses of the country. This is a very comforting dogma: the rise of the BJP is explained in terms of “rabble-rousing” tactics, but, in the end, all will be well, as it happens in Hindi movies. People will see reason and dump this reactionary party. Only if wishes were horses!  

 

    

The Ramayana and author Ravi Shanker Kapoor.

Indian Leftists objected towards TV serials of the Ramayana and Mahabharata as communal serials!.

Indonesia , the world's most populous Muslim country, has centuries of association with Hinduism. Hinduism is 'also known by its formal Indonesian name Agama Hindu Dharma. It is practised by 93% of the population of Bali, but also in Sumatra, Java, Lombok and Kalimantan .'  

The Ramayan and Mahabharat are a strong part of Indonesian tradition; danced and puppet performances of the great Hindu epics are common. Some years ago, Ramanand Sagar's version of the Ramayan was screened on Indonesian television.

Refer to How Free Are We? -  By Jakob De Roover - outlookindia.com January 28, 2010 and Parlous state of temples - By Rajeev Srinivasan - dnaindia.com

***

Another instance of apriorism is the Leftists’ attitude towards popular TV serials of the eighties, Ramayana and Mahabharata. A few Left liberal intellectuals found the contemporaneity of the two serials and the BJP’s rise to be conspicuous; and this conspiciousness was seen as causation. Some more imaginative writers saw a conspiracy to saffronize culture. Ramanand Sagar (who made Ramayana), BR Chopra (who made Mahabharata), and top bureaucrats in the Information and Broadcasting Ministry were accused of working on a hidden agenda. Interestingly, these were also the bureaucrats who arranged the telecast of the anti-Hindu  and the anti-Sikh film Tamas, on television under Rajiv Gandhi’s rule. Similarly, Sanjya Khan had no compunctions in making Jai Hanuman, a serial in which “Jai Shri Ram” the war cry of the votaries of Hindutva, is heard frequently. But this does not make Khan a closet knickerwallah. This allegations against Doordarshan officials – that they encouraged “communal serials” – were even more ludicrous. 

Sir Richard Tottenham, additional secretary, Home, who played a key role in persuading communists to become Quislings during the Quit India Movement, wrote on March 23, 1943, “The communists are the sort of people who must always be “anti-something rather than ‘pro’ anything except perhaps themselves.”  

Girilal Jain in his book The Hindu Phenomenon (1994) has talked about the “liberal-Marxist-Gandhian idiom.

" It is “the idiom in which the public discourse has been conducted in our country for over seven decades, that is, since the ascendancy of the Gandhi-Nehru leadership in the freedom movement. As the name suggests, the idiom is a mixture of liberalism, Marxism, and Gandhism – each of the ingredients getting “emasculated” in the process of merger. Gandhi wanted all Indians – rich and poor, landlords and peasants, industrialists and workers, capitalists and socialists, Hindu and Muslims, upper castes and harijans – to unite in the fight against British imperialism. He got obsessed with the idea of inclusiveness that he bent backwards to accommodate the demands of the groups which were not keen on joining the mainstream. This was the beginning of appeasement. Lurking behind the Khilafat movement was the Moplah rebellion in Kerala in the early twenties. According to Khalid Bin Sayeed in Pakistan: The Formative Phase, 1858-1947 (Oxford University Press), in the rebellion, 

“Hindu homes were sacked, temples desecrated, and thousands of Hindus converted…The Moplahs were not only rising against Hindu zamindars but were also converting by force Hindus who did not help them..In the Central legistature it was decided that, according to the Madras Government, the number of conversions by force ran into thousands. But the Congress Working Committee did not want to hurt the Muslim feelings by denouncing in too strong terms the Moplah outrages, against Hindu religion, life and property.” 

For Gandhi, wanted to bring the Muslims to the mainstream. They supported him because they wanted the Khilafat in Turkey to be restored, not because they wanted India to be freed. Gandhi knew that, yet he sought their support. It didn’t matter to Gandhi what the ultimate objectives of the Muslims were as long as they supported him against the British. Ends justified the means. Gandhi also tried to appease a self-styled and self-serving leader of the harijans like B R Ambedkar who was unabashed collaborator of the colonial rulers. He hardly had any following – in any case, it was negligible when compared to that of Gandhi. But Gandhi make the famous Poona Pact with him in 1932. In other words, Gandhian inclusiveness was not natural but contrived and tokenist.  

Not surprisingly, the nationalist movement was deprived of the religious fervor – motherland, vande matraram, et al – and patriotic ardor, so poignant in the thoughts of Bankim Chandra Chattejee, Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghosh. The kernel of Indian nationalism slowly but steadily shriveled.

Hindu – A Snarl Word  

Denigrate-Hinduism project

To a large section of the intellectual class, the word “Hindu” stands for all that is rotten, obscurantist, retrograde, slothful, iniquitous, and inhuman in India. Hindus are the most backward looking, hypocritical, cowardly people: their society is caste ridden and oppressive; their economy can’t grow beyond a point; their past is full of ignominious defeats; and their future is bleak. Or many leading intellectuals believe so.  

The tragic rootlessness of the Indian Leftists

      

Nationalism was deHinduized, first under Mahatma Gandhi and then under Jawaharlal Nehru.

Denigrating Hinduism has been an old strategy of Leftists in their battle against Hindutva. Being the most consistent Macaulayans, they only saw the gloomy, seamier side of  India and Hinduism. 

It was suggested that India can never achieve an economic growth rate of more than 3.5 per cent. Hindus, as everybody knows, are slothful, fatalistic, superstitious, ritualistic, and pusillanimous people; they lack enterprise. Hence “the Hindu rate of growth.”  

Refer to A Tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and Wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture - By Sushama Londhe - Delhi Public Library.

Refer to Christianisation of Chennai Doordarshan's Channel - By Thamizhchelvan - vijayvaani.com

***

However, it was not like that all the time. Till the second decade of the 20th century, it was the Hindu idiom in which all nationalist discourse was conducted. Hindu nationalism and Indian nationalism were indistinguishable. As nationalism was deHinduized, first under Mahatma Gandhi and then under Jawaharlal Nehru, and as the liberal-Marxist-Gandhian idiom found recognition, the denigration of Hinduism started. It was Nehru who set the ball rolling by enunciating the theory that “majority communalism” is more dangerous than “minority communalism.”  For though the latter may cause a few law-and order problems and be a nuisance in politics, it is the former which can play havoc with the entire country. Therefore, goes the line of argument, majority communalism is nothing but fascism, Nazism etc; the consequences would be far-reaching; if the Hindus come under its spell, they will try to annihilate the Muslims as the Germans tried to exterminate the Jews under Hitler. There would be saffron Auschwitz and Dachau. So, Hindu communalism has to be fought “at any cost.”  

Denigrating Hinduism has been an old strategy of Leftists in their battle against Hindutva. They have played a key role in making “Hindu” a snarl word. Being the most consistent Macaulayans, they only saw the gloomy, seamier side of India and Hinduism. The denigrate Hinduism project was total operation. It made its presence felt not only in the political arena but also in the fields of academics and academia, media, art, and culture. It was suggested that India can never achieve an economic growth rate of more than 3.5 per cent. Hindus, as everybody knows, are slothful, fatalistic, superstitious, ritualistic, and pusillanimous people; they lack enterprise. Hence “the Hindu rate of growth.”  

Watch Rajiv Malhotra interviews Swami Nithyananda.   Indian English Language Media Blacks out News - Christian missionary extremists demolish Hindu temple in AP - crusadewatch.org and Vatican told bishops to cover up sex abuse world wide - guardian.co.uk

In historiography, Leftist scholars have tried to underestimate the contributions of Hindus and magnify their shortcomings. Communist historian DN Jha thundered that there was never a “golden age” in ancient India ; it was no more than a myth. Another Marxist historian, R S Sharma, propounded the theory that the Gupta period, which had been identified with Golden Age by nationalist historians, actually contained the seeds of decay and debilitating feudalism. Anything that belongs to ancient or Hindu India is bad, retrograde, and reactionary.    

Such has been the sway of the liberal-Marxist-Gandhian idiom and the deep-rootedness of anti-Hindu bias. Nobody has cared to challenge the oppressive-Hindu-society-egalitarian-Muslim theory. However, the fact is that the Muslim community in India , right from the beginning, has been as hierarchical and iniquitous as Hindu society. There have been clear cut divisions between the Ashraf (the respectable and the respected, the Muslim counterpart of bhadralok; they claim their superior status because of their foreign descent) and the Ajlaf (the plebeians). Zarina Bhatty blasted the egalitarian Islam theory in her essay ‘Social Stratification among Muslims in India ’ in Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar. She studied Muslim society at Kasauli ( a pseudonym), a Muslim village in Uttar Pradesh. She writes: “Muslim status groups and their structuring in Kasuali come close to the Hindu caste system. “interactions between the oonchi zat (high caste) and the neechi zat (low caste) are regulated by established patron-client relationships of the jajmani system…Like the Ashraf castes, which are arranged hierarchically, the non-Ashraf castes also relate to each other in a hierarchical manner.” Then there are unclean castes which are associated with polluting or unclean professions, like handling human excreta. “among the Muslims, if a person accidentally touches an individual of an unclean caste, the former must purify himself with a simple bath, particularly prior to performing a religious function like saying ‘namaaz,’ reading the Koran or entering a mosque. There is a difference between the Muslims and Hindus, and it lies in the fact that, unlike among Hindus, no elaborate rituals are prescribed for Muslims for purifying themselves in the event of physical contact with an individual from an unclean caste.”  

In other words, Muslim society is as much, if not more, hierarchically stratified and oppressive as Hindu society. The high and low castes, the patron-client system, the purity-pollution complex, untouchability – the Muslims have them all. Yet it was only Hindu society which has been accused for being rigid, caste ridden, and oppressive. Writes Bhatty, “It is unfortunate that for long Muslims of the subcontinent failed to attract the attention of anthropologists who studied this region.”  

It is because of the sustained denigrate-Hinduism project that the Mandalite ideology found legitimacy and wide acceptance. The Mandal Commission report is full of anecdotes, quotes, and references telling how unjust, rigid, and iniquitous Hindu society has been since time immemorial. It is a queer mixture of the true and the untrue, fact and fiction, history and mythology; the result is a perverted logic and regressive recommendations. A few gems from the report: “the concept of divine origin of the caste system has the authority of the holiest of Hindu scriptures.” “if religion was ever used as an opium of the masses, it was done in India .” “shudra’s social labor was the life-blood of India ’s great civilization.”; the role of caste status was so pervasive in society that the idea and administration of justice was colored by it.”  

The extensiveness and the intensity of the denigrate Hinduism project has been tremendous. Few intellectuals have recognized the fact that the history of India has been the history of assimilation. As Communist Party of India leader Bhogendra Jha points out, “ India has the tradition of assimilation; the West, of annihilation.” Assimilation, of course, has not been in accordance with the principles of Voltaire, Rosseau, and Marx; but in Indian millions have not perished because of the iniquitous social system. Comparing this with the West’s record in the Americas and Australia – where entire civilizations like those of the Mayas and the Aztecs were annihilated and peoples like the Red Indians, and Aborigines had to face genocide – the Indian social structure can be called humane. But then the denigrate-Hinduism project ignores all these facts, as it is a part and parcel of the liberal-Marxism-Gandhian idiom.  

A few observations by AL Basham in his Wonder That Was India, arguably the best book on ancient India, would show the hollowness of the denigrate-Hinduism project:

“….our overall impression is that in no other part of that ancient world were the relations of man and man, and of man and the state, were so fair. In no other early civilization were slaves so few in number, and in no other ancient law book are their rights so well protected as in the Arthashastra. No other ancient lawgiver proclaimed such noble ideals of fairplay in battle as did Manu. 

In all her history of warfare Hindu India has few tales to tell of cities put to the sword or of the massacre of non-combatants. 

The ghastly sadism of the kings of Assyria, who flayed their captives alive, is completely without parallel in ancient India . …To us the most striking feature of ancient Indian civilization is its humanity.”  

(source: More Equal than others – a study of the Indian left  - By Ravi Shanker Kapoor). Refer to Anger Is No Substitute For Substance, MR.Kancha Ilaiah - vigilonline.com. Refer to Media as the Toxin-Spreading Agent - By Sandeep B

American couples tie knot Vedic way  

Mumbai ( Maharashtra ): Amy Pearce blushed into her pallu as the priest Rohini Kumar chanted a Sanskrit mantra and then translated it into English: “This means you will have to take good care of all your cows.” He then added helpfully: “Hope you have many cows in your backyard.”

Pearce sat cross-legged besides her 6-foot, 4-inch bridegroom, Mark Terza, a physiotherapist-turned-yoga fanatic, blinking as the thick havan smoke enveloped the hall. But they weren’t the only Americans getting hitched in desi style in Mumbai. Beside them sat yet another couple — New York-based builder T J Macchiaroli and Melinda Pizzano, who runs a flourishing upcountry spa in Putnam County in New York .

The couples garlanded each other amidst Vedic chants at the Radha Gopinath Temple at Chowpatty on Monday morning. The guests of honor were 14 other yoga enthusiasts, also from the US brought to India on a 13-day spiritual tour by group leader Reghunath. “This is a historic first for Mumbai. Although we’ve had many such Vedic weddings for Indian couples in the past, this is the first time two American couples have decided to take the plunge into Indian culture together. And it all began after they started doing yoga,”

Radha Gopinath Temple founder Radhanath Swami said. Pearce and Terza had decided to get married in India after they met two years ago. And, while doing that, they affirmed that yoga was the “organic thread” that united them. “She was my yoga guru and I fell in love with my guru. I hope that is okay,” Terza, now a partner in his wife’s yoga school in New York , said laughingly.    

(source: Maharashtra Times).  

Secularism – The great Indian fetish  

Secularism is the most crucial subject in Indian politics; it is the ultimate frame of reference to commend or condemn parties and leaders; it is the subject most commented upon in the country. Yet few in India know or understand what secularism really is.  

As a consequence, the meaning of “secularism” has been debauched; it is perceived as synonymous with anything that is good, noble, or exalted. Concomitantly, “communalism” is taken as the antonym of secularism. If there is anything that excites Indian liberal intellectuals, it is a debate on secularism. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the word ‘secular’ means of or relating to the worldly or temporal, “not overtly religious, “not eccleslastical or clerical”  

It is well know that Stalin was responsible for the death of 40 million people; yet he was secular. In fact, his secularism, a by-product of the Marxian dogma, was so aggressive that he erstwhile Soviet Union set up a museum of atheism. Nor does his secularism make Stalin a champion of religious harmony; his hatred for Jews is not the creation of any “bourgeois propaganda.”  

Mao was another great secularist, and another great butcher of the 20th century. According to Mao: The Unknown Story, a recent book by Jung Chang and Halliday, the great Helmsman killed 70 million people. Ditto for Pol Pot of Cambodia. Pol Pot was also a secularist, who wanted to create a new society but ended up murdering every seventh citizen of his small south-east Asian country. Among non-communist mass murderers, Hitler was the greatest. He killed 6 million Jews. He got them eliminated because they belonged to what he thought was an “inferior race.” Secularism does not necessarily transform a man into an angel. In Indian politics, we have scamsters and crooks on both sides of the so-called secular-communal divide.  

Indian intellectuals believe that a number of our political and other problems are because of the weakening of secularism over the years. Great Britain is technically not secular, the monarch being the defender of the Anglican faith. The US President routinely invokes God in his speeches, and the god he invokes is the Christian God. Every currency note the US prints has “In God, we trust” inscribed on it.  

India, on the other hand, is vociferously secular; all political parties, including the BJP vie with each other to show themselves as secular. There is no secular state in the Arabian Peninsula; in Saudi Arabia, for instance, non-Muslims are not even allowed to practice their religion. Intellectuals are actually a deracinated lot; secularism is their magnificent castle in the air whose arches and domes they have fallen in love with; they abhor the idea of any connection with the ground realities.  

It must be noted that secularism is proving to be a malaise not only in India but in the entire world. Secularists, with support from the liberals and Left loonies, are determined to destroy all that is traditional, conventional, and of course religious.

(source: How India ’s Intellectuals Spread Lies  - By Ravi Shanker Kapoor  p. 80 - 85).  Refer to I Accuse: Anti Sikh violence of 1984 – By Jarnail Singh and The Unbearably sad reality of India - By Atanu Dey

Indian English Language Media Blacks out News - Christian missionary extremists demolish Hindu temple in AP - crusadewatch.org and Vatican told bishops to cover up sex abuse world wide - guardian.co.uk

Story of betrayal 

Kashmir the storm center of the world - Story of betrayal 

The story of Kashmir is a long story of betrayal by our own leaders. All endeavors by our honest, hardworking patriotic men were nullified by treachery.

The Moslem fundamentalists have got a strangle hold on Indian politics to such a degree that no books can be published or read without the approval of these highly sensitive individuals sniffing at anything that could even remotely be accused of being blasphemous to a delicate prophet. That explains why it was necessary to publish Mr. Balraj Madhok's book, KASHMIR - The Storm Center of the World, in the United States of America, a bastion of liberty and fair play and not in India, inspite of its national motto, "Truth Will Prevail". 

It was India that had banned Rushdie's book the first and not Iran or Saudi Arabia!

Readers will soon discover that the Kashmir imbroglio was the creation of one and one man only and that was India 's Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru. And unfortunately this very important fact has been kept hidden from the Indian people all these years by acts of omission and commission for which the entire Congress party and its luminaries have to be blamed.

The Indian people have been called upon to expend immense sums of money, lose thousands of innocent lives and all that for nothing. When the cream of Maharajah of Patiala's Sikh battalions were fighting the rapacious Moslem tribals, Pandit Nehru was laying in bed with his mistress Edwina Mountbatten. The man never ever took the trouble to visit any battle fronts, either in Kashmir , Tibet or in the North-East when the Chinese communists attacked India . Our boys had to fight a singularly difficult battle which had been rendered impossible by Nehru's ideological stupidities, who suffered from hallucinations and used to imagine himself as a 'British' Viceroy of India after the departure of Lord Louis Mountbatten of Burma . The man's retribution did come by divine intercession, one would say; he died a victim of syphilis. 

Story of betrayal 

When the cream of Maharajah of Patiala's Sikh battalions were fighting the rapacious Moslem tribals, Pandit Nehru was laying in bed with his mistress Edwina Mountbatten. 

When asked Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister, if the rumours about her brother having an affair with Edwina Mountbatten were true. She was herself a diva and uninhibited in her conversation. She said to me: “Of course he did. And good for him.”

***

The story of Kashmir is a long story of betrayal by our own leaders. All endeavors by our honest, hardworking patriotic men were nullified by treachery. The readers will read how Gopalaswamy Ayyengar's brief for the debate on Kashmir in the United Nations, was leaked to his opponent, Zafrullah Khan of Pakistan , over and over again, by Moslem agents of India 's Foreign Ministry, hired and promoted by Nehru himself.

It is a sad story of trying to save a country when a potent poison is injected into the psyche of the Indian people, in the form of Nehruvian secularism. The deadly symptoms are visible today in all aspects of life in India ; Kashmir is only one side of it. Then, one may ask, why are the secular minions of the now deceased Nehru trying to hold on to Kashmir ! The obvious reason is that if Kashmir goes, so goes the myth of Nehruvian secularism and the only justifying reason for India 's Moslems to remain in India against the wishes of the rest of the population. After all, the country was partitioned on religious grounds and at the demand of the Moslems only. They had maintained that they could not live among the kafir Hindus, or non-believers! The future of Indian Moslem in such a situation will then go back in the hands of our inscrutable gods; no man, secular or otherwise, will have any say when the final deluge comes!

The Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Christian refugees from Islamic Pakistan and Bangladesh , are inundating the streets of India . They had to leave their established homes and processions in those Islamic lands to save their lives. They too need a roof over their heads, a job to sustain themselves and their families. And how long will they live on the streets when India 's Moslems can go to those Islamic countries and vacate their homes here. They have homes waiting for them anyway! But things are being made even more difficult by the Congress party that permits illegal influx of Moslems from the two Islamic wings on either side, that runs into scores of millions already!

The author has chosen a right title for his book. It is quite eloquent. Kashmir IS the storm center of the world. This fact has been kept hidden so far but not any longer. There is a lot to learn from Mr. Madhok's present book and no doubt students of history and international politics will find the book extremely informative, if not shocking. The current leaders of India are exemplified by men like India 's erstwhile Foreign Minister Solanki, belonging to Nehru's Congress party. He was caught red handed while attempting one of his many anti-national and nefarious activities! Such are the men that helped to bedevil the Kashmir situation and the entire country is still paying for it. India has now been turned into a country where there is a lot of crime but NO punishment; but surely that is going to change when the people's retribution is administered in full dose, eventually. That will be the day!

Abode of Kashyap

Kashmir is the name of a Himalayan valley situated about 5,000 feet above sea level. Eighty miles in length and forty miles in width, this valley of the river Jehlum, the Vitasta of the Rigveda, pronounced as "Vyath in Kashmiri,'' is the largest valley of its kind in the world. The Vyath rises from Verinag springs on the foot of the Panchal range that surrounds this valley; flows north through the capital city of Srinagar and Wuler lake and then enters the mountains through a gorge resembling the mouth of a boar called "Varaha" in Sanskrit near the town named "Varaha Molla" now called Baramula on the northern tip of the valley. The valleys of the Liddar, the Sindh and a number of smaller streams that flow into the Jehlum add to the size and beauty of this celebrated valley.

Kashmir - Abode of Rishi Kashyap

It is often described as "Nandanvan" the pleasure garden or paradise of Bharat. 

The story of Kashmir is a long story of betrayal by our own leaders. All endeavors by our honest, hardworking patriotic men were nullified by treachery.

***

According to tradition recorded in a number of Sanskrit texts and chronicles of Kashmir this valley was once a vast lake. It was converted into an alluvial plain when Kashyap, a great "Rishi," made an opening into the surrounding mountains near Baramula. As a result the water of the lake was drained out and the submerged land became a habitable valley. It then came to be known as "Kashyap Marga" the abode of Kashyap from which the name Kashmir is derived. Geomorphological evidence has confirmed that the valley was originally a vast lake. History of Kashmir began with the settlement of the Indo-Aryan people in it in pre-Mahabharata days. It became a centre of Indo-vedic culture and civilization. Sanskrit literature is replete with references to it. It is often described as "Nandanvan" the pleasure garden of Bharat.

Unlike many other parts of India, we have recorded history of Kashmir from the earliest times. The oldest of these records is Nilamat Purana. It deals with the legends pertaining to the origin of Kashmir, the ordinances of Nila, the earliest ruler of Kashmir and gives detailed information about its numerous "Nagas" or springs and lakes that dot the valley and its surrounding ranges. Other notable sources of its history are: "Kultanimala Kavya" of Damodar Gupta, "Deshopadesha" of Kshemendra, "Vikrama Devacharita" of Bilhan, "Rajtarangini" of Kalhan and chronicle of "Jonrajya" who wrote in 15th century. Kalhan recorded the history of Kashmir from the Mahabharata period but the real beginning of Kashmir 's history can be traced to the rule of Mauryan emperor Ashoka who built Shrinagar as its capital. Kashmir was made a centre of Mahayana Buddhism by Kushan emperor, Kanishka. He built a town "Kanishkapura," now called Kanspura. It is situated about five miles from Baramullah on the Baramullah- Srinagar road. He also built many Buddhist viharas and convened the fourth Buddhist council there. Archeological remains of the viharas built by him have been found near Harvana Lake. Hun king Mihirgula, occupied the throne of Kashmir for some time after he was driven out of Punjab in the fourth century A.D. He later embraced Shaivism. 

 

The Sun Temple at Martand, located in Mattan, was built by King Lalitaditya (724-761 A.D.) However, the site was the location of an ancient temple built by Raja Ramdev (3005-2936 B.C.). 

The most celebrated king of Kashmir was Lalitaditya who ruled over it in the seventh century A.D. He extended his sway beyond the valley. He built the famous sun temple - the Martanda temple - on a plateau overlooking the town of Anantanag and the holy springs of Mattan in the Liddar valley. The ruins of this great temple which was destroyed by Sultan Sikandar in the 14th century point to the glory that was Kashmir at that time. 

Just outside of Srinigar are the massive ruins of a temple complex called Parshaspur, whose multi-ton stone blocks are scattered over a wide area. The configuration of the blocks is suggestive of a tremendous explosion having once destroyed the site.

Refer to chapter on Islamic Onslaught and My name is Khan And Here Is My List Of Terrorist Attacks in  India - islamicterrorism.wordpress.com

***

The most celebrated king of Kashmir was Lalitaditya who ruled over it in the seventh century A.D. He extended his sway beyond the valley. He built the famous sun temple - the Martanda temple - on a plateau overlooking the town of Anantanag and the holy springs of Mattan in the Liddar valley. The ruins of this great temple which was destroyed by Sultan Sikandar in the 14th century point to the glory that was Kashmir at that time.

Avantivarmen was another notable ruler of Kashmir who ruled in the 11th century. He built a new capital, Avantipur, mid-way between Anantnag and Srinagar. His prime Minister, Sayyah, deepened the Vitasta from the Wular lake to Baramullah which helped in reclamation of more land. A new town Sayyapur now called Sopore was built on the reclaimed land.

Shadow of Islam first fell on Kashmir in the 11th century when Sultan Mahmood of Ghazani made an unsuccessful attempt to conquer it. But some Muslim adventurers and preachers of Turkish, Persian and Khorasani origin entered the valley in the wake of his invasion.

(source: Kashmir the storm center of the world - By Bal Raj Madhok - iksahmir.net). Refer to Media as the Toxin-Spreading Agent - By Sandeep B

Condition of Hindu temples in Kashmir

Kali Yug - Destruction of Cultural Symbols and Shrines of Kashmir  

***

Desecration, damage and destruction of temples is not new and unusual phenomena. The process has been continuously going on ever since Kashmir passed into political domination of Muslim rulers in the first quarter of fourteenth century.

Islam like other Semitic religions enjoins upon the faithful to expand their religion by proselytizing the heathens, infidels and 'kafirs' (non-believers) to their faith to gain religious merit. "Jihad" or holy war is the instrument that is used for proselytization. The Muslim rulers of Kashmir , the Mughals and Pathans made full use of their political authority to effect conversion of Hindus of valley. To achieve the objective it became imperative for them to wipe out all traces of religious and cultural symbols of Hindus which included their temples, libraries, universities and ashrams etc.

In Kashmir gun powder was used for the first time not for fighting a war but for destroying massive Hindu stone temples. When it was felt that the fissionable material was not available in sufficient quantity for the iconoclasm, the nearby jungles were cut and used for setting on fire the giant stone structures of Hindu Temples. By excessive heat the stones burst, broke-away and crumbled these gigantic structures that spread through the length and breadth of Kashmir . The ruins of Martand, Avantipur, Devar etc. are mute witnesses of the depredation.  

Refer to Temples destroyed in Kashmir. Watch Video of destruction - Ram Mandir, Safakadal, and Roopa Bhawani Asthapan, Safa Kadal, Srinagar.

What does the UNCRIF say on these atrocities?

Atrocities in Kashmir

Since 1990, planned and organized secessionist-terrorism has brutalized Kashmir , the valley of peace and exquisite beauty. Systematic efforts have been made to destroy its syncretic culture, traditions, and heritage, by an orgy of mindless violence fueled by religious fanaticism and extremism, aided and abetted from across India 's borders.  

Terrorism has taken the lives of more than 2000 innocent men, women and children; the terrorists have indulged wantonly in abduction, rape, murder, arson, extortion and looting. Government officials, political leaders and workers, members of judiciary, print and electronic presspersons, and prominent citizens have been threatened, attacked and killed. Religious "codes of conduct" have been imposed on common people, and there has been large scale destruction of public and private property including over 400 secular state schools. More than 350,000 people of the minority community have had to flee their homes in the valley and today live as refugees in other parts of their own state and country. This is the "accomplishment" of the secessionists proxy-war in Kashmir .

The illustrations in the following pages give a glimpse of this unfortunate chapter of violence and destruction in the modern history of Kashmir . It is this calculated and ruthless attack on the innocent, all in the name of an illusionary "independence," that is the ultimate negation of the human rights of any people.

(source: Atrocities in Kashmir - ikashmir.net). Refer to Anger Is No Substitute For Substance, MR.Kancha Ilaiah - vigilonline.com

Islam’s Marriage with Terrorism  
When it comes to Islam, Indian intellectuals walk on eggshells

“Criticism of religion is the very measure of the guarantee of free speech – the literal sacred institution of society”. – Jonathon Turley

***

Leftwing intellectuals and liberals unquestionably go along with the claim that Islam is a religion of peace that it stands for fraternity and equality. As for violence associated with Islam, they argue that terrorists distort the “real meaning” of Islam, thus maligning the great faith. The great faith, assert liberals, further suffer at the hands of the media. The media – Western as well as Indian depicts the Muslims as fanatics and Islam as a violent religion. This is how Islam and Muslims are “stereotyped.” Or so the Leftist and liberal claim.  

As on other issues, Indian intellectuals are loath to see the reality as it exists. They continue to ignore facts and twist truths. They continue to confuse myth-making with scholarship, and propaganda. They make great efforts to veil the many passages in the Koran that explicitly instruct the faithful to slay non-Muslims, wage jehad, ill-treat women, and straitjacket life into prescription. These are the passages that have always inspired, and continue to inspire, violent men in the community to live up to the exhortations and instructions. It is true that vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving people; what is tragic is that the small, violent majority is able to impose its fundamentalist agenda on the majority without much protest from the latter. And intellectuals continue to pussy-foot around this reality. Liberals say that the root cause is always “socio-economic” conditions, and such conditions inevitably generate terrorism and violence. It is not Islam but poverty and political alienation that are root-cause. They also quote selectively from the Koran to buttress their arguments: “There shall be no compulsion in religion” (Sura 2:256). Conveniently, they do not quote other suras of the Koran, those preach violence, and intolerance.

“Our Marxist professors and other pundits of Secularism are very much mistaken when they discover or invent  economic and/or political motives for explaining away the crimes committed by Islam.” 

-  Writes Sita Ram Goel in his momentous Hindu Temples: What happened to Them.  

Refer to Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud – By Arun Shourie

So lets concentrate on the current situation. Today, terrorism has become synonymous with Islam: the terror of Islam haunts the entire world. Be it New York or Tel Aviv, Bombay or Bali – wherever there is terrorism, the signature of Islam is inevitable. This is no “stereotyping” by the media; this is no “Orientalism”; this is a fact. It is true that followers of other religions are also involved in terrorist activities, but what is conspicuous is the preponderance of Muslims in terrorist activities. Further, Islam explicitly and unequivocally exhorts its followers to indulge in violent activities against kafirs. The Christianity of the 21st century is different from the Christianity of the 11th century; ditto with Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, etc; but in Islam there has been little evolution in Islam. Even today, Muslims in substantial numbers believe in and wage jehad; attempts are made in different parts of the world to impose Shariat; the teaching of science is opposed in Muslim societies; freedom of artists and writers is frowned upon, and severely restricted, in Muslim countries; women are still stoned to death for adultery. In fact, the manner in which women are treated in Muslim societies is, to put mildly, appalling.  

The more important reason – perhaps the most important reason – is that Islam is transcendental totalitarianism. This is also the reason that it has survived for 14 centuries while other forms of totalitarianism arose and failed in the 20th century itself. Under communism and fascism, the state crushes the individual, and ends up not only controlling the entire polity and economy but also arts, culture, literature etc. However, in Islam, whether or not to urinate on soft ground, how to uncover private parts of the body, how to clean oneself after defecation, how to wash a tooth-stick, or what sexual position is proper. But Islam is very particular even about the most mundane and trivial of human activities; the advice of theologians is sought in such issues, as evident from Hadeees and fatwas. As Arun Shourie wrote in The World of Fatwas: “That a community which has been weaned on the dogma that even on such matters it needs the guidance of a Prophet has had all capacity for thinking for itself drained out of it. That a community drained in this way is ripe for picking by the Ulema.” And it is not surprising that this community provides a never-ending source of terrorists.  

The big question is: are the millions of Muslims doomed to the straitjacket of a religion that has proved to be inflexible for 14 centuries?  Indian intellectuals are vociferous, often rabid, while discussing the evils of Hindu society – untouchability and satee (even though they are dying practices), dowry, female feticide, etc. But when it comes to the shortcomings of Islam, they walk on eggshells. They become extremely cautious, lest they be denigrated as knickerwallahs. They want to appear “fair” to Muslims. They end up helping jihad. Regrettably, the champions of liberty become apologists of Islamic fundamentalism.

(source: How India ’s Intellectuals Spread Lies  - By Ravi Shanker Kapoor  p. 99  - 114). Refer to Indophobia: The Real Elephant in the Living Room - By Vamsee Juluri - huffingtonpost.com

Nara Nag temple of Kashmir- evokes awe and is a devotee's delight.

The Valley of Kashmir is known not only for its lush green meadows, snow-capped mountains but also for its historical and religious places. There is a temple complex called Nara Nag which evokes awe and is a devotee's delight.

The moonlight in the valley of the Nara Nag is a mesmerizing experience in the month of November as the snow on the higher peaks reflects the full moonlight in the sky, beauty is further added by the tortuous course of the Kanka River torrent whose white and foaming water epitomize the moon silver light on the earth. The fast gale, silver moon light and sound of the gushing water of the Kanka River is a commemorative sight for the Nara Nag group of temples.

 

Nara Nag also known as Narain Nag temple of Kashmir- evokes awe and is a devotee's delight. The Sodaratirtha referred in the Nilamata Purana is among the scared tiratha in Kashmir Valley presently known as Nara Nag. 

The Hindu period had massive stone temples like Martand, Avantipur, Naranag, and so on. There are also smaller temples in different parts of the valley. A detailed description of these ancient monuments is given in Aurel Stein’s translation of Kalhana’s Rajtarangini. In addition, we have the ruins of the city of Parihaspura established by King Lalitaditya. One typical example of vandalism done by none other than the archaeological survey of India is the Naranag Temple . A corrugated iron roof has been placed on a massive stone temple! The temple which is in ruins would have been more presentable without a modern day tin roof.

***


The small tank with perennial water of Nara Nag has refreshing, digestive properties. At a further distance there is a temple dedicated to Bhairva. The western group identified with the temple is dedicated to Lord Siva. Lalitaditya Muktapida eighth century King of Kashmir erected a temple of Lord Shiva here. The King Avantivarman paid a visit and and donated a pedestal with a silver conduct for bathing at Bhutsher. These temples are built of grayish granite found in abundance in neighborhood and their different architectural entities as evidently prove that they are of a different era. 

The Sodaratirtha referred in the Nilamata Purana is among the scared tiratha in Kashmir Valley presently known as Nara Nag. Till the last quarter of 20th century, out of religious beliefs, local Kashmir Pandits after consecrating the ashes of their relatives in the Gangabal Lake come to perform the last rites for the peace of departed soul.

The first group consists of seven temples, the largest temple of the group has two entrances opposite to each other in north-east and south-west direction. The temple is built of huge rectangular stones laid in dry masonry with inter locking system. The interior is square and ceiling is domical built of horizontal kanjur stones and the apex stone crowned by a full blown lotus. The galvanized sheets roofing is of later addition. All the temples had conical stone roof of a single stone, the evidence of which are available on the site. The center is an unpaved square space for missing image of principle diety in the interior. 

The closed doors embellished with trefoil arches and pediment reflect the Greco-Roman influence on the Kashmiri Temple architecture. The closed arches decorated with square topped arches meant to carry sculptures. Besides the main temple, there are six other miniature shrines placed in an unsymmetrical manner in the compound intended as subsidiary shrines. These subsidiary shrines were probably erected by various groups of pilgrims as a mark of reverence after returning from Gangabal Lake in form of "votive offering" after successful accomplishment of the hazardous ascent to Gangabal Lake.

About one hundred meters below towards the River Bed , the second group of temples is enclosed by two chambered huge gateway of similar size and shape as of Avantipur temple. 

The roofless two chambered gateway were once supported by four pillars, the base of which are in situ. In this group there are about six small roofless temples with high plinths. The main shrine has only huge arched entrance and other three sides have closed doors with trefoil arches encased in triangular encasing. The ceiling of the grabha-griha or the Cella rounded off with rubble lime motar, probably of the later period, converting the square into a circle originally the triangular slabs springs the domical roof by corners of Kanjur stones. The three exterior trefoil niches once had a large image which is no more extant. A huge rectangular tank scooped out from a single rock into a water tank exists on the south face of the principal temple. The whole group encircled is by the remains of rectangular wall of huge stones of which the foundation could be traced, together with several base of pillars and fluted pillars similar to the Avantiswamin Temple , just opposite to the main entrance. There is a large platform with evidence of twelve pedestals of pillars, eight in number four on the longer side and four on the shorter side. 

The flight of stairs is built between the central pair of columns facing the first group of temple. The 100` ft long by 67` broad pillared hall is a remarkable architecture feat of the whole group of temples. 

The temples were plundered in the days of Jyasimha in Kalhana's time. The temple of Naranag suffered many misfortunes as mentioned in Khalhana's Rajatarangani during the reign of Sangramaraja (11th century). The temple- was plundered by Bhandesvara, a Minister of the King. For the period of the reign of Uchchala (12th century) a conflagration caused much damage to the building and during the reign of Jayasimha Hayavadava(12th century), a rebel minister also attacked these temples. Nara Nag is the base camp of the Gangabal Lake it takes 8-10 hour on foot or on horse back to reach the lake.

(source: Nara Nag – By A K Khanna).  

Stolen 12th-Century Emerald Shiva Is Recovered

A special wing of Tamil Nadu police has recovered a stolen emerald murti of Lord Shiva worth over US$10 million.

“This emerald Deity is very precious one which could be valued around 500 million rupees in the market was stolen from Tiruturaipundi temple and yesterday a special team has arrested the main accused persons A. Ramesh and P. Senthil,” said Additional Director General of police (Economic Offences Wing), G. Thialakavathi.

Stolen from Marundeeswarar Temple in Thiruthuraipoondi town in February this year, the murti dates back to the 12th century, officials said.

(source: Stolen 12th-Century Emerald Shiva Is Recovered - hinduism today.com).

Ancient Hindu Temples Unearthed in Perfect Condition in Indonesia

Researchers from the government’s Archaeological Office in Yogyakarta , excavated for 35 days and eventually unearthed two 1,100-year-old small temples. “The temples are not so big, but they have features that we haven’t found in Indonesia before." Historians believe that Hinduism spread in Java in the fifth century, followed three centuries later by Buddhism. Kingdoms hewing to both Hindu and Buddhist beliefs flourished in Java before Islam in the 15th century. But Islam itself incorporated beliefs and ceremonies from the other two religions. Just as some unearthed temples in east Java have a Hindu upper half and a Buddhist lower half, some early mosques had roofs in the shape of Hindu temples, said Timbul Haryono, a professor of archaeology at Gadjah Mada University here and an expert on Hinduism in Southeast Asia. Early mosques faced not in Mecca ’s direction, but west or east in the manner of Hindu temples.

“Things didn’t change all of a sudden,” Mr. Haryono said. “Islam was adopted through a process of acculturation.” In Indonesia ’s arts, like the wayang shadow puppetry that dramatizes Hindu epics, or in people’s private lives, traces of the earlier religions survive, he said. Food, flowers and incense still accompany many funerals for Muslims, in keeping with Hindu and Buddhist traditions. 

“Hinduism was Indonesia ’s main religion for 1,000 years,” he said, “so its influence is still strong.”

(source: Ancient Hindu Temples Unearthed in Perfect Condition in Indonesia - Hinduism today.com).

Ramayana Casts Its Ancient Spell In Singapore

With numerous heroes and villains and its powerful feel-good message of good triumphing over evil, the Ramayana has been one of the great epic poems of Indian culture for centuries. Originally attributed to the Hindu Sanskrit poet Valmiki, the story has been retold and adapted over time by poets, scholars and everyday storytellers.

It has also captured the imagination of many other cultures beyond its origins in India . In Southeast Asia, scenes from the Ramayana can be found in places ranging from Prambanan, a 9th-century Hindu temple compound in Yogyakarta in central Java, Indonesia, to the magnificent 12th-century Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

“Ramayana Revisited: A Tale of Love & Adventure,” an exhibition that is running at the Peranakan Museum, Singapore until Aug. 22, underlines the cross-cultural power of the popular epic.

As it spread across Southeast Asia, the Hindu tale was adapted, with localized versions emerging like the Ramakien in Thailand or the Reamker in Cambodia . Through the display of shadow puppets, papier-mâché masks, sculptures and paintings on paper and cloth sourced from the permanent collection of the Asian Civilisations Museum , this exhibition narrates the Ramayana story according to a 17th-century version from north India . The narrators of this version are Lava and Kusha, the two sons of Rama, and it tells the classic tale of their father’s epic quest to rescue their mother, Sita, from the demon king Ravana with the help of Rama’s devoted friend Hanuman and his army of monkeys.

While some of the artifacts that are shown are ancient and quite rare, like a 12th-century bronze Hanuman from the late Chola period in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, or a 12th-to-13th century bas-relief from the state of Madhya Pradesh of a reclining image of Vishnu on cosmic snake, others — especially shadow puppets and masks — are more recent. Some have been commissioned by the museum over the past 15 years.

(source: Ramayana Casts Its Ancient Spell In Singapore - Hinduism today.com).

Reject this anti-Hindu education and history 

***

"You cannot be proud of a heritage you know nothing about, and in the name of secularism, we have spent 50 years in total denial of the Hindu roots of this civilisation. We have done nothing to change a colonial system of mass education founded on the principle that Indian civilisation had nothing to offer." 

"As for me I would like to state clearly that I believe that the Indic religions have made much less trouble for the world than the Semitic ones and that Hindu civilisation is something I am very proud of."

      - writes Indian columnist Tavleen Singh, The Indian Express June 13, 2004.  

Refer to Hinduism History Lesson - Hinduism Today and Newton as Theologian - By C K Raju and Bharata Bharati.com. 

Refer to Christianisation of Chennai Doordarshan's Channel - By Thamizhchelvan - vijayvaani.com.  Refer to Mass Conversions in India – Destroying Cultures and Families -  By Vikay Paul - chakra news.com

***

Apart from de-Hinduising Hindus, Macaulayan education has distorted Hindu religion and history. As per this education, Hindus never resisted any foreign aggression, and they do not have any glorious history. This education suppresses how Hindus valiantly fought invaders for several centuries, and defended their religion and  motherland.

Sanskrit which is the best, sweetest and divine language (bhashasu mukhya madhura divya geervaan bharati) has been driven out of Indian schools and colleges by Macaulay’s education. With the exception of  Tirukkural which is in Tamil, almost all ancient Hindu scriptures like Ved, Upanishads, Ramayan, Mahabharat are in Sanskrit.  

The UPA Government of India (headed by Sonia Gandhi) has succeeded in persuading more state governments to accept  the NCERT texts. A report on Monday (January 5, 2009) said 12 more state governments have accepted to teach NCERT texts in their schools.

Though as per classical Indian tradition, “Sa vidya ya vimuktaye”, (that which liberates us is education), modern Indian education binds one to Macaulay’s anti-Hindu world. Missionary-oriented colonial education (commonly known as Macaulay’s education) was introduced in India in 1835 by Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), a British national, who as a member of the Supreme Council of India was in India from 1834 to 1838.

Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’ approved by Governor General William Bentinck on March 7, 1835 downgraded Indian languages including Sanskrit, and replaced them with English. Macaulayan education has no place for Hindu scriptures, Hindu heritage and Hindu history. It was introduced to de-Hinduise Hindus; and to make them respect British rule over India .

Though education should generate self-discovery, Macaulay’s education generates self-alienation among Hindus. How India ’s cultural traditions were demolished by Macaulay is clear from Macaulay’s biographer GD Trevelyan’s observation, “A new India was born in 1835. The very foundations of her ancient civilisation began to rock and sway. Pillar after pillar in the edifice came crashing down.”  

Refer to Parlous state of temples - By Rajeev Srinivasan - dnaindia.com and How church destroyed Swami Nithyananda! - By Rajiv Malhotra.  Refer to I will arrest the Pope says Richard Dawkins - timesonline.co.uk

Indian English Language Media Blacks out News - Christian missionary extremists demolish Hindu temple in AP - crusadewatch.org and Vatican told bishops to cover up sex abuse world wide - guardian.co.uk

DE-HINDUISING HINDUS

Macaulay had contempt for India ’s native Hindu culture. He wanted to de-Hinduise Hindus as is evident in his following letter dated October 12, 1836 to his evangelist father: “Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully; we find it difficult to provide instruction to all. The effect of this education on Hindus is prodigious. No Hindu who has received an English education ever remains sincerely attached to his religion. It is my firm belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respected classes 30 years hence. And this will be effected without our efforts to proselytise; I heartily rejoice in the prospect.”

And how he wanted to proceed is seen from the following excerpt from his 1835 ‘Minute on Education’:- “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

Since Macaulayan education has no place either for Sanskrit or for Hindu scriptures like Ved, Ramayan, Mahabharat, Tirukkural etc., it has de-Hinduised most of the Hindus and transformed them into brown English clones ignorant of Hindu religion, Hindu heritage and Hindu history.

De-Hinduised by Macaulayan education, and brain washed by Macaulayan main stream media, most of Hindu intellectuals, bureaucrats, journalists, MBAs, business persons, doctors, lawyers, chartered accountants, engineers, teachers and the rest know nothing about Hindu religion; and do not know any Mantra of Ved or any Shloka of Ramayan, Mahabharat or Tirukkural. Accordingly, most of the Hindus are self-alienated and indifferent to attacks being made on Hinduism by anti-Hindu forces.

(Note: The Indian "secular" constitution prohibits religious studies in Indian universities).

DISTORTION OF HINDU RELIGION AND HISTORY

Hinduism is based on Ved which are all embracing and permit no caste system or birth-based caste system. But to divide Hindu society, missionaries proclaim that Hindus follow a discriminatory birth-based caste system. Macaulayan education and Marxist historians encourage such anti-Hindu misconceptions.

Entire curriculum is guided by Karl Marx who had declared, “Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history”.

GLORIFICATION OF INVADERS

In his book The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage, Will Durant (1885-1981), the American historian, calls Muslim rule in India as the bloodiest story in history. As against this, history books issued by National Council of Educational Research and Training, and written by Marxists, glorify Muslim rule in Hindu Bharat; and downgrade Hindu heroes like Prithviraj Chauhan, Maharana Pratap and Chhatrapati Shivaji. These books falsify history and denigrate Hinduism. As per these books, Ramayan and Mahabharat are mere fictions; and Ram and Krishna did not exist.

Apart from acting as academic cheerleaders for terrorists, many leftist historians are deliberately distorting history to make it compatible with Marxism. They support the discredited Aryan Invasion Theory, and deny the existence of ancient river Saraswati. Marxists’ interpretation of Indian history is motivated, fictional, anti-Hindu, self-righteous and objectionable.

Inspired by their anti-Hindu agenda, these sham historians fabricate history to defend the actions of Muslim invaders and rulers like Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud Ghazni, Mohammad Gouri, Feroz Tughlak, Allauddin Khilji, Taimur, Bahmanis, Babar, Aurangzeb, Nadir Shah, and Ahmadshah Abdali. They suppress the killings of millions of Hindus, and destruction of thousands of Hindu temples by Muslim invaders over the centuries.  

Refer to chapter on Islamic Onslaught and My name is Khan And Here Is My List Of Terrorist Attacks in  India - islamicterrorism.wordpress.com

They reject the existence of glorious Hindu past. They dub their detractors as communal, and downgrade genuine historians. And for presenting anti-Hindu fiction as history, these fake historians are rewarded with national and international awards, honours and acclamations.

BANISHMENT OF SANSKRIT

Sanskrit which is the best, sweetest and divine language (bhashasu mukhya madhura divya geervaan bharati) has been driven out of Indian schools and colleges by Macaulay’s education. With the exception of Tirukkural which is in Tamil, almost all ancient Hindu scriptures like Ved, Upanishads, Ramayan, Mahabharat are in Sanskrit. After banishing Sanskrit from education, Macaulayists call Sanskrit ‘the dead language’. That shows their attitude towards Hinduism. Ignorance of Sanskrit has made Hindus ignorant of their Sanskriti (culture), their religion, their heritage and their identity.

WAY OUT

Ever since 1947, Macaulay’s legacy has strengthened fake secularism. And fake secularism has brought disaster for Hindus in the shape of genocide and eviction of Hindus from Kashmir, Pak-Bangla combine’s terrorist and demographic invasion to plant more Pakistans and Bangladeshs on Bharat’s soil, and foreign-funded Christian missionary evangelisation by fraud and inducement. Moreover, Macaulayan curriculum has produced self-alienated Hindus who are indifferent to attacks on Hindus and Hinduism. Accordingly, Hindus have to be liberated from Macaulayan education and spurious secularism. And to achieve this goal, ’secular India ’ has to be transformed into ‘Hindu Bharat’. 

Logically, in 1947, on India ’s Partition on religious basis and creation of Pakistan as demanded by Muslims, Bharat should have been declared a Hindu nation. But the problem can be solved even now by declaring Bharat a Hindu country. No one can object to Bharat being declared a Hindu nation when all the 57 Muslim-majority countries are declared as Islamic countries. Hindu Bharat will have no place for anti-Hindu education as also for fake secularism. Hindu Bharat will replace the current anti-Hindu education with a system that honours Hindu heritage, history and ethos. Besides, it will restore the dignity of Bharat’s native languages. And since survival of Sanskrit is a must for survival of Hinduism, Hindu Bharat will revive Sanskrit and make it a regular subject in schools and colleges. And Hindu Bharat will ensure that its heritage and civilization survive.

Hindu Bharat will give justice to all and appease none. In Hindu Bharat, there will be one law and one nation; no distinction of majority and minority; and no discrimination, whatsoever, against any community. Besides protecting Bharat’s Hindu identity, Hindu Bharat will crush Pak-Bangla terrorist and demographic invasion, as also foreign funded conversions. Therefore, for the very survival of Hindus and Hinduism, all pro-Hindu individuals and organisations must work to transform India into a Hindu nation by all peaceful, constitutional and lawful means. This is the only way to undo the colossal damage done by Macaulay to Hindus and Bharat.

(source: Reject this anti-Hindu education and history - By J. G. Arora - indianrealist.wordpress.com). The writer is former Chief Commissioner of Income Tax.

Are Hindus the Village Idiots of India?
An entire state got ethnically cleansed and all the Hindu Kashmiris were made homeless.  

***

This evening there was a bomb blast at a bakery in Koregaon Park in Pune. A few dozen killed. Not a big deal. Indians don’t mind such minor inconveniences. Indians take mass-scale murders in their stride and don’t blink. We will read in the newspapers about the resilience of the population tomorrow, especially in The Times of India.

We will read how Mr Blue Turban has responded with very strong words condemning the terrorism. Nothing to get excited about. It happens. Indians are resilient. They are more interested in movies — “My Name is Khan” is playing and the movie halls are full. They are Indians who watch Mr Khan prance about. The audience is not comprised of Martians, not even people much beloved of Mr Khan, the Pakistanis. Mr Khan cannot be blamed, though. It is a free country and Indians choose to make a hero of a person who should more accurately be understood to be a traitor. 

Refer to Will Karan Johar Make a Film on Islamic Terorrism: My name is Kaul, not Khan - islamicterrorism.com.  

Refer to Jihadi Terrorism in India : The Saudi Connection – By B Raman

It appears that Indians have a hard time distinguishing between heroes, tyrants and traitors. A major thoroughfare in the capital of India is named after Aurangzeb, a tyrant who committed wholesale murder. No one really seems to mind. I would not be the least surprised if in time to come, streets are named after Bhutto and Musharraf in India .

As India is a universal adult franchise democracy, the people choose the leaders and if the leadership is wanting, the buck has to stop at the people. Some people blame the media. But the media strictly reflects the sentiments of the people. The Times of India is exhibit #1. That paper’s schemes are basically anti-India to the core. Yet its circulation is in the tens of millions. The Indian public buys that paper. That newspaper may be publishing unadulterated crap. But the reason it supplies crap is that the Indian public demands crap. That’s the law — demand creates its own supply. In any self-respecting population, these sort of newspapers and TV channels would go out of business yesterday. In India , they do a roaring business.

Indians are alright with a few hundred Indian citizens dying every now and then through terrorism. Nov 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai did not faze them. They voted the Congress into power — the same party that pretty much set up the conditions for the terrorism.

The unfortunate fact is that even if a 100 million Indians were killed by terrorism — and that is not likely to happen — but even if 100 million were killed, it would not make all that much of a difference to Indians. There will still be over a billion Indians left. An entire state got ethnically cleansed and all the Hindu Kashmiris were made homeless. Indians don’t mind that. The continue to vote for the Congress party. A few thousands here and there dead don’t matter all that much. Let’s put those numbers in perspective. A few thousand children die EVERY DAY from preventable causes. Does not bother Indians, does it? The Congress party engineers the poverty that kills by the hundreds of thousands every year. Indians find that totally acceptable.

Indians love cricket and Bollywood. The newspapers and TV channels understand that and they do what they have to do. If the media is a prostitute, the leaders of the nation are pimps who are duly elected by democratic processes which include all sorts of fair elections. Prostitutes and pimps would not be in business without the johns. The johns are the most essential factors for the flourishing business of pimps and prostitutes.

It’s all karma, neh?

(source: Bomb Blast in Pune - By Atanu Dey - deesha.org). Refer to An eye-opening list – India ’s English Media - indianrealist.wordpress.com

"Hinduism is a relentless pursuit of Truth. Truth is God and if today it has become moribund, inactive, irresponsive to growth, it is because we are fatigued; and as soon as the fatigue is over, Hinduism will burst upon the world with a brilliance perhaps unknown before." 

                                                         – Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948) India's fervent nationalists. Refer to Hinduism History Lesson - Hinduism Today

***

Devil Quoting Scriptures  

Hindu-bashing has been a favorite pastime of Indian communists, Left-of-the-Center academics, teenybopper intellectuals, and sundry other Left-libbers.  

They had a lot of fun at the expense of the state exchequer for decades. For the Establishment was favorably disposed towards them and tried to keep them in good humor. Legitimacy and respectability were bestowed upon them during the Nehru era; Indira Gandhi built institutions to accommodate them with comfort. And they could have lived happily ever after, denigrating Hinduism even more vigorously, an exercise for which the liberal-Marxist-Gandhian shibboleths come so handy. But this denigration underwent a sea of change by the end of the eighties.  

For, the diabolical Hindu communalism had once again started raising its ugly head. This was the turning point. Leftist intellectuals realized that unrestrained and unsubstantiated Hindu-bashing would be counter productive, it would only help the Hindutva brigade. Instead of going all-out against anything Hindu, they adopted a cautious approach. There was a strategic about-turn. Gone were the days of downright Hindu denigration, when it was fashionable to coin derogatory terms like the Hindu rate of growth. Now, Leftist intellectuals waxed eloquently about the greatness of Hinduism, its legendary tolerance, its mind boggling diversity etc. When the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjit controversy was at its peak, the fronts came up with slogans like kan-kan mein vyape hain Ram, mat bharkao danga lekar unka naam (Lord Ram is immanent in every particle, don’t instigate communal riots in his name). The most important and high profile of these fronts, the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (Sahmat), launched a series of campaigns and programs to fight against the “communal forces” which were, and are, a threat to the “composite culture” of India. Suddenly, agnostic intellectuals started seeing great merit in the works of Bhakti poets. Rootless Left-libbers, who never liked to speak Hindi, started relishing devotional poems in Brajbhasha, a dialect of Hindi. The line of action was against Hindutva; at the same time Leftist intellectuals propounded the theory that Hinduism and Hindutva were, and are, two different things. 

Refer to An eye-opening list – India ’s English Media - indianrealist.wordpress.com.  Refer to Christianisation of Chennai Doordarshan's Channel - By Thamizhchelvan - vijayvaani.com

Indian English Language Media Blacks out News - Christian missionary extremists demolish Hindu temple in AP - crusadewatch.org and Vatican told bishops to cover up sex abuse world wide - guardian.co.uk

Ashish Nandy, (Indian Christian) who was associated with the Delhi based Center for the Study of Developing Societies, wrote an article in The Times of India with the self-explanatory title “Hinduism versus Hindutva: The Inevitability of a Confrontation” (18th February 1991). According to Nandy, “Hindutva will be the end of Hinduism. Hinduism is the faith by which a majority of Indians still live. Hindutva is the ideology of a part of the upper-caste, lower-middle-class Indians, though it has now spread to large parts of the urban middle classes.” Further, “Hindutva is one of those pathologies which periodically afflict a faith or a way of life.” Hinduism has, over the centuries, handled such pathologies; it still retains the capacity to handle one more.”  

In other words, Hinduism is a great faith, a way of life which is resilient and timeless; Hindutva is a passing phase, a seasonal fever which comes and goes. Hinduism is noble; Hindutva ignoble.  

Beyond the sophistry lies the strategy: don’t lampoon Hinduism; attack only Hindutva. 

For, then the votaries of Hindutva won’t be able to allege that the Left intellectuals are anti-Hindu. It would be better to concentrate upon the aspects emphasizing the tolerance, pluralism, and diversity of Hinduism; glorify these aspects and shout from the rooftops that the Hindutva brigade is determined to do away with this glory; it wants to make Hinduism a monolithic religion, bulldoze Little Traditions, straitjacket all plurality, and prepare the human material for a fascist, Hindu Reich. Needless to say, the Leftist intellectuals were opposed to this Nazification; they found an icon in Gandhi and a useful medium in the liberal-Marxist-Gandhian idom. The Semitization line of argument was presented by some Leftist intellectuals at a time when the BJP was posturing aggressively and the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid movement was its peak. Interestingly, an axiom of the Semitization theory is that the Semitic tradition, with its stress on homogeneity, is inferior to the Hindu tradition which thrives on and promotes heterogeneity.  

Many Leftist intellectuals started claiming that they wanted to keep Hinduism in its pristine form – with its plurality, diversity, etc. And, the argument went, the Hindutva brigade want to defile the grandeur of Hinduism by Semitizing it. It was a curious situation: the traditional haters of Hinduism became its defenders – that too, against the traditional champions.  Gandhi’s ideology was the antithesis of Hindutva and his leadership a saga of deHinduization of the Congress and of the Indian polity.  

The Political economy of Art  

Maqbul Fida Hussain painted Saraswati, the goddess of learning in the nude. Many Hindu organizations objected to this; the BJP was one of them; its leader K R Malkani, was one of those who denounced Husain. Not surprisingly, the coterie stood firmly behind Husain. A prominent leftist historian, Harbans Mukhia, wrote, in the Pioneer (18th October 1996):  

“Whenever Husain drew inspiration from mythology for his art, which has been frequent, it was Hindu mythology. Whenever he painted any figure from a religious stream, it was the figure of Ganesh, Durga, Saraswati. Mr. Malkani does, however, prescribe a step to Husain to redeem himself if only in part: paint women from Muslim mythology and religious history in the nude..”  

 

Now that he is a citizen of Qatar (with a totalitarian regime with zero tolerance) would he dare to caption it as ‘ Fatima enjoying in Jannat with animals’? 

May be he will convince the Qatar regime there to permit freedom of expression in word, writing and painting. For this he could start experimenting painting forms and figure of Mohamed the Prophet-and his family

Hussain’s artistic freedom it seems to run unfettered in an expression of sexual perversion only when he envisages the Hindu Gods and Goddesses. Why use Goddess Saraswati and Sita for his perverted expressions? Use Fatima and watch the consequence.

Talking about Freedom of Expression-this is the Hussain who supported Emergency-painted Indira Gandhi as Durga slaying Jayaprakas Narayan. He supported the jailing of artists and writers. Where did this Freedom of Expression go?

(source: An Open Letter N Ram , Editor in Chief , 'The Hindu'- By Dr Mrs Hilda Raja).

***

Isn’t it a fact that had an artist or a writer taken similar, or even much less, liberty with Islam, his fate would have been similar to that of Salman Rushdie? 

There is nothing wrong in making the Right to Freedom of Expression absolute and allowing everybody to write, draw, or paint anything he or she wants. But this right can’t be with “reasonable restrictions” in some cases and without them in others. Leftists are quick to refer to Article 19 of the Constitution, which defines the Right to Freedom to Expression, whenever controversies like the nude Saraswati erupt. 

But it’s a fact that some very prominent Leftist intellectuals had sought a ban on the writings of Right wing journalists Girilal Jain and Swapan Dasgupta. Similarly, Leftist students of the Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University protested against the depiction of falling sickle and hammer in the James Bond movie Golden Eye. There was also a demand to ban the popular TV serial, melodramatic manner and saffron was – even literally conspicuous by its presence.  

Most of the Leftists are atheists or agnostics. This makes them particularly hostile to Hinduism; for here the Macaulayan disdain for religion. Leftists and secularists are afflicted with what post-modernism calls logocentrism; they are obsessed with the post-Enlightenment concern for totality. In their scheme of things, there is little space for plurality or for the others – especially those who don’t blindly believe in Western ideas and ideals. Hindutva, obviously is an abominable threat to the Enlightenment project. Leftists don’t believe in any kind of divinity, but they do believe in their divine right to denigrate the religious beliefs of Hindus. Hence the self-righteous, secular fanaticism.  

Communists on Indian Nation  

Arun Shourie in his well-researched book, The Only Fatherland: Communists, Quit India and The Soviet Union, has convincingly portrayed the traitorous role of the CPI during the 1942 movement. Communists not only collaborated with the British but were also proud of their treachery and were keen to impress upon the government of their niggardly role.  

Right from the beginning the communists, a few exceptions apart, have been the most Westernized lot – to the extent that their Westernization has amounted to de-Indianization. The fascination for Western concepts has been so great that the Indian communist theory has often neglected the basic facts about the country. Bhogendra Jha, a veteran communist leader from north Bihar says:  

“We try to conceive a nation according to Western definitions. But the fact is that the history of India is the history of assimilation. The Aryans came and settled here, and so did the Greeks, the Shakas, the Kushanas, and others. This uniqueness was beyond the comprehension of the West which is familiar with annihilation – eg. Of the Red Indians in America and the Aborigines in Australia. But there was a thread of cultural integration in India ; for instance, by establishing four mathas in different parts of the country, Shankaracharya underlined this unity.”  

Jha is among the few communists who fought against the British during the Quite India Movement. Interestingly this fact is ignored even by the Leftist historians who otherwise take great pains to justify the CPI’s ignominious and traitorous role in 1942. For them, Jha who talks about Indian tradition and culture, remains anathema, an outsider who does not put empirical evidence into the straitjacket of ideology, who is not de-Indianized enough to be trusted.

India is a civilization, its language game has to be understood from within, as an insider, or at least without the prejudices and presupposition of an outsider.  

(source:  More Equal than others – a study of the Indian left  - By Ravi Shanker Kapoor). Refer to Media as the Toxin-Spreading Agent - By Sandeep B. Refer to I Accuse: Anti Sikh violence of 1984 – By Jarnail Singh and The Unbearably sad reality of India - By Atanu Dey

(Note: Words like composite culture, multi-religious, secular values, creativity of art, freedom of expression, human rights and secularism are all frauds adopted by left-liberals, Communists, Minorities and pseudo-secular politicians with the aid of foreign agencies to de-Hinduise this Hindu Nation. Perverted artists and their fellow travellers cannot attempt to efface the rich Hindu culture of art, tradition, image and narrative to conform to their own track of de-Hinduisation of Hindu civilization; Hindus have woken up! 

What seemed to have escaped the attention of Husain’s liberal acolytes is that international capitals would not have lionized him had he painted a nude Virgin Mary engaged in compromising poses. One can only imagine the uproar that this would have produced. And Qatar would most certainly not have conferred citizenship on him had he produced cartoons of their Prophet!

Refer to Did M F Husain offend Hindus and Why ? and Hey “Ram”! Feelings of “Islamic” compassion, “The Hindu” style! - By B R Haran - vijayaavani.com)

In the Age of Kali Yuga

Diabolical plot to defame Hindus worldwide

***

Hindu Hating Mafia Media and Dravidain Drivel

"Swami Nithyananda was critical of Dravidian politics and Christian conversions, so he is paying the price. He is from a lower caste community and very effective in stopping Christian conversions in rural Tamil Nadu. So the Dravidian supremo Karunanidhi and the Church targeted him. This was an orchestrated attack at multiple locations simultaneously, some attacks starting even before the TV video was played. Clearly it was coordinated. This plight faces every Hindu guru. Its nothing new for the church which has a 2000 history of such mafia tactics to destroy pagan opponents. It is due to this fear that most gurus today dilute Hinduism and make it look like pseudo-Christianity. Message is that gurus with authenticity combined with audacity are going to get attacked this way."    - V Sundaram

Dravidian divisiveness is being backed by Christian Evangelism.

Hindu Hating Mafia Media and dastardly Dravidain Drive

The Swami Nithyananda issue is only an episode in the ongoing anti Hindu conspiracy in the contemporary India.

Hindu Swamijis with millions of followers all over the world only to highlight the fact that they have all been relentlessly chased by the Government and the mass media -- both print and electronic --in India for various reasons only because they are all Hindus.  

Refer to I will arrest the Pope says Richard Dawkins - timesonline.co.uk.  Refer to Spycam Journalism, the Conspiracy against Swami Nithyananda & the Christian-Dravidian nexus -- Rajiv Malhotra.  Also refer to Tear Down That Wall - By Christopher Hitchens - slate.com

  Refer to How church destroyed Swami Nithyananda! - By Rajiv Malhotra.  Indian English Language Media Blacks out News - Christian missionary extremists demolish Hindu temple in AP - crusadewatch.org and Vatican told bishops to cover up sex abuse world wide - guardian.co.uk.  Refer to Mass Conversions in India – Destroying Cultures and Families -  By Vikay Paul - chakra news.com

Watch - Rajiv Malhotra interviews Swami Nithyananda and The Nithy Mea Culpa Interview? – By Rajiv Malhotra. Refer to All Victims of Criminal Anti-Hindu Media Abuse - By V Sundaram. Refer to Why Swami Nithyananda Must Resign Now - The Medha Journal

***

Deliberate Media And Government Attack On Swami Nityanada and Sanatana Dharma - By V Sundaram

In Tamilnadu - where a few scurrilous newspapers and TV Channels, deriving their inspiration and working philosophy from what I call the dastardly Dravidian Drivel, seem to be working on a 24x7 basis for the creation of false illusions about men and events. They are essentially anti-Hindu, pan-Islamic, pan–Christian in their general outlook. Our every effort to satisfy our extravagant expectations simply makes them more extravagant and makes our illusions commercially more attractive to these vermin in the media. For these pseudo-secular, Islam-embracing, Christianity coveting and Hindu-hating non-men in the mafia of mass media in India—both print and electronic-- the creation of more and more false illusions about Hindu Swamijis, Saints And Sages---the broadcast of “the false news behind the false news”—seems to have become the life-breath of their whole time commercial operations.

(source: Deliberate Media And Government Attack On Swami Nityanada and Sanatana Dharma - By V Sundaram).  Refer to An eye-opening list – India ’s English Media - indianrealist.wordpress.com  

The ongoing anti Hindu conspiracy in the contemporary India

"The Swami Nithyananda issue is only an episode in the ongoing anti Hindu conspiracy in the contemporary India . Similar allegations were, once, levelled against Matha Amruthandamai. My advice is to be vigilant and respond to such allegations in an appropriate manner. " - Prof. P C Isaac.

 

    

The arrest and demonization of Kanchi Shankaracharya and Swami Lakshmananda of Khandamal was murdered by mercenary Maoists and Evangelist/Christian missionaries.

The diabolical and tragic ongoing anti Hindu conspiracy in the contemporary India.

Refer to The Great Catholic Cover-Up: The pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it - By Christopher Hitchens - slate.com and Papal letter was a disgraceful deceit - independent.co.uk

Refer to Tear Down That Wall - By Christopher Hitchens - slate.com

***

Hinduism is passing through a very dangerous phase. 

A deep-rooted conspiracy has been hatched by the Evangelists and the anti-Hindu, ‘secular’, mercenary parties to break the back bone of Hinduism. Muslims destroyed a number of our temples in olden times. They and the Christians converted a lot of our people to alien religions. Now evangelists have targeted India on a large scale. The result is that the present Govt. controlled by the Italian mafia is targeting Hindu spiritual leaders by cooking up allegations against them and foisting false cases on them.

The following incidences are clear proof of their evil design:-

1) The arrest and demonization of Kanchi Shankaracharya.

2) Swami Lakshmananda of Khandamal was murdered by mercenary Maoists and Evangelist/Christian missionaries are behind the murder.

3) Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur is said to be a powerful speaker, who used to conduct discourses , and was very popular in North India . She attracted thousands of people. She is another victim of the Government’s dangerous votebank politics. She has been arrested in the Malegaon bomb blast case, tortured, made to undergo narco-analysis tests and she is still in the jail, inspite of the Court disallowing MACOCA in her case. .

4) Another sanyasi of Kashmir was also arrested and tortured in the Malegaon blast case, and he is also in jail.

5) Next victim is Sant Asaram Bapu.

6) Similarly, Sanatan Sanstha has been doing good work awakening Hindus. So they have been targeted by the evangelists and the Govt.

7) Swami Nityananda has become very popular at a very young age, attracting a lot of youth. So the evangelists and the mercenary anti-Hindus have targeted him.

8) Other Mutts and Ashrams have to be on their guard and Hindus must unite to protect the reputation of their spiritual leaders.

9) K. Lenin is a paid Evangelist spy and crook and he is bound to create more problems. Since his mission is a failure, the conspirators may target him and put the blame on the Ashram head like in the case of Shankaracharya and Asaram Bapu.

(source: Diabolical plot to defame Hindus - vivekjyoti.blogspot.com). Refer to Debutante Dharma-Gurus: Violating a civilisational patent - By Sandhya Jain

Deployment of a large budget to "finish off" some top Gurus in South India

There is a corrupt nexus between lower level police and media, both under the common control of certain politicians. Like any mafia this machinery is available for the right terms. In this case I have learnt that a US based group of a certain religion deployed a large budget to "finish off" some top gurus in South India and I heard names of two specific religious organizations in south India acting as the nodal agencies. There is more than one force at work here and these come together for removing a common threat….

Just as Kanchi Acharyas were framed, Nithyananda has also been framed...

The politics in Tamil Nadu is absolutely dirty. This is a fact.

Some overlord in Madurai wanted the land in a prime location donated by a devotee to Nithyananda' s ashram. Because the land was refused, a smear campaign was planned and launched.

(source: The ongoing anti Hindu conspiracy in the contemporary India - vivekjyotiblogspot.com).  Watch Rajiv Malhotra interviews Swami Nithyananda.  Refer to The Great Catholic Cover-Up: The pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it - By Christopher Hitchens - slate.com.

The Rootless Indian Elite

***


The Brown Parrot  

Richard Crasta, author of the book, Impressing the Whites has remarked:

"Why do we Indians, and billions of nonwhite people, go blue in our brown and black faces, trying to impress the whites? Why do we so yearn for the approval of whites, even though colonialism is supposedly dead, and we boast of an ancient and philosophical culture second to none?"

(source: Impressing the Whites - By Richard Crasta). 

(Note: Refer to The Rootless Indian Elite - Deracinated Indian Elite (DIE) - Internationalists without roots in India. Exposure/living in western world has removed the traditional Indian cultural link in family/thought. Macaulayized Mind -  Products of British Education process which de-emphasizes local culture and tradition. Long colonial exposure has created a British mental attitude and world view. More English than the English themselves).  Refer to Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud – By Arun Shourie

Refer to Secularism: Last refuge of the Hindu traitor - indianrealist.wordpress.com.  Refer to Mass Conversions in India – Destroying Cultures and Families -  By Vikay Paul - chakra news.com

***

On 14th October 2008, the Booker Committee announced in London that Aravind Adiga will get the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel,`The White Tiger'. The writer, Aravind Adiga claims in an interview:

"At a time, when India is going through great changes and ,with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society", he said, adding that the criticism by writers like Flaubert, Balzac & Dickens in the 19th century helped England and France become better societies.

In a single breath, Adiga takes upon his young self, the huge responsibility of highlighting all the `brutal injustices' of India, while feeling proud enough to compare himself with Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens.

Adiga, on the other hand, is thrice removed from the society and the events he talks about in his book. Born in a metropolitan, Chennai, educated in Australia, the UK , and the US , he has nothing in common with his protagonist, Balram, who is a `low-caste' driver from Bihar. But the un-authenticity of narration doesn't bother Adiga. In fact, he thinks it is quite a duty of a writer to go beyond his own experience; to take a leap beyond reality; to plunge into pure fantasy. He believes in writing by remote-sensing.

What we see in Adiga is not a natural evolution, but a sudden ideological revelation. He is not trying to learn anything. He knows it all. The ideas are pre-arranged. In the absence of cultural roots he has an ideology to guide him. Secularism. Fantasy and remote-sensing makes up for reality. Worn-out formula-writing makes up for creativity. Adiga has hitched his wagon to a star. And in Indian heavens, there is only one star. Secularism. It is the Ideology.
On the level of language too, Adiga falls far too short. The style of narration doesn't match with the projected aim of the book to point out the `brutal injustices' of Indian society. His style takes him nearer to the post-modern writing, while his aim is as ambitious as of a Communist ideologue. For this purpose Adiga inserts some of the most famous secular slogans in Balram's speeches but his style of narration being post-modern is personal and individualistic. Adiga betrays his ignorance of rural Indian society - not that he knows urban India - at many points in the novel. For instance, he asserts that many water buffalos can be bought in seven thousand rupees. Let him purchase just one!

So according to Adiga, the salient features of India are: Every traditional Indian village has a blue-movie (pornographic) theatre. No one can enter Indian malls without wearing shoes. Shoes are compulsory. No low-caste man can ever enter an Indian mall. Even if he enters stealthily, he is then caught, beaten and publicly humiliated. In India , if an owner runs over a man with his car, his driver has to go to jail instead. If a servant steals anything, then his entire family, back home, is ritually lynched to death. (their women being repeatedly raped.) Every Indian book stall sells `rape magazines'. There are separate markets for servants. In Indian brothels, they take extra money from servants, called as `Working-class surcharge'. Sadhus, are actually homosexual hookers, who get paid to be buggered by foreigners. A common Hindu is worse than an Islamic terrorist. Indian caste system is worse, or at least as bad as the secret police of a totalitarian state.

The last claim is the central theme of the novel. The caste system of India is called the `Rooster Coop'. Adiga compares the caste system with the secret police of a totalitarian state. This comparison is preposterous. Communism accounted for more than twenty million deaths in USSR, sixty-five million in China, one million in Vietnam, two million in North Korea, two million in Cambodia, one million in Eastern Europe, 1.7 million in Africa, one and a half million in Afghanistan and millions of others. And all this in less than seventy years! Does Indian caste system in its history of more than five thousand years, has anything even remotely comparable to equal this record?

The only place where he innovates is, in hurting the Hindu religious sentiment. Thus, the polytheism of Hindus is mocked as, "How quickly do you think you could kiss 36,000,004 arses?"

Balram is called as the `sidekick' of Krishna. The hero goes on to murder his employers, who are earlier called as Ram & Sita! Lord Krishna is called as a `chauffeur'. About, Kali, the Hindu goddess:

"...I looked at the magnetic stickers of goddess Kali with her skulls and her long red tongue - I stuck my tongue out at the old witch. I yawned. Hanuman is called as the slave god of Hindus, an imposition which still makes the low-caste slaves of the upper-caste."

"Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love and devotion.... These are the kinds of gods they have foisted on us, Mr. Jiabao. Understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom in India ."

In 1994 Christian missionary, father Augustine Kanjamala of Pune wrote an article in Deccan Chronicle titled, `Replies to Arun Shourie'. In the article he wrote, "Harijans worship deities of lower rank, while caste Hindus worship deities of higher rank. For instance, Hanuman is worshipped by Harijans and Rama is worshipped by upper caste in the same village.... Hanuman was the servant of Rama; Harijans are servants of higher caste Hindus. A close affinity between their hierarchy of gods and the hierarchy of society."

Later, indefatigable Arun Shourie had a face-to-face debate with father Kanjamal at Hyderabad. Arun Shourie said, "This is insinuation, it is deliberate distortion.... I can assure you that Hanuman Ji is as dear to high caste Hindus, as to low caste Hindu. If after two hundred years of Christianity in India ... this is your understanding of India , much needs to be done.... But there is a question... Does the servant and master relationship, high caste and low caste relationship also apply to other Hindu gods? If not, then, how does your thesis stand? Nandi is ridden by the Shiva. Is it that the low caste people are asked to worship Nandi? And high caste should not worship Nandi? What you have written in your article is a foolish thing to write."

So in 1994, Arun Shourie systematically showed during the face-to-face debate that this insinuation `is a foolish thing to write'. But in 2008, we had another fool repeating the same missionary propaganda, of course recycled as literature this time.

Aravind Adiga is in the line of a new breed of writers like Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai who being Christian or having sympathy with Christianity, share a hatred of Hinduism and Hindu society. It is not a coincidence but a deliberate act of the Booker committee to award all the three. They have ignored really good novels from Pakistan . Why? Because by awarding Pakistani writers, like Mohammed Hanif and Mohsin Hamid, the Left will gain nothing in the bargain. You may call it the Booker Scandal. This is how the alliance of Marxists and the missionaries works against the Hindu society.

Writing a novel in India is neither an intellectual nor a spontaneous venture. It is organized on the lines of the formula set by the demands of secularism, seeded during the period of Independence struggle and developed and codified during the Nehruvian era.

A writer is expected to follow the secular formula, which is to show how Hinduism is inferior to other religions; how superstitious and stupid Hindus are; how evil caste-system is; how vile Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas are and how suppressed Shudras are. Show how violent Hindu mythology is, while the very word of Islam means peace. Show that just like Islam and Christianity, Hinduism is also an import in India , having no original claim. Make Hindu history in India as short as possible. At the same time, extend the Christian and Islamic claims on Indian soil as long back in history as possible. Throw in some exotic stories of widow burning, caste discrimination, infanticide etc. to pepper this secular curry.

Do not, in any case, criticize Islam! Try to extol its virtues, and if not possible just keep mum about its atrocities. Show how they are extremely discriminated in every field such as education and employment. Also, do not criticize Christianity and their violent conversion activities. 

This is the formula which guides every new book and every new writer in India . There is no new voice, no new question, nothing new under the sky. All has been discovered. Every question has been asked, every answer has been given by the Formula, and every problem has been solved by it. What remains to be done is to repeat the secular slogans again and again. For this no tigers are required. Parrots are more than enough for the job.

This formula has a history, which is very well portrayed by Dr. Ravi Shanker Kapoor in his book More Equal than Others: A Study of the Indian Left, 2000. The literary establishment of India is guided by the leftist intellectuals. All over the world, the Communists have always infiltrated the institutions in order to influence the public opinion. Giving these institutions a neutral veneer, they sell Communist propaganda without letting the masses know the truth behind it.

Novels in India, just like the Bollywood movies are produced according to the guidelines dictated by the establishment. If a new writer follows the secular formula, then his books will be bought by all the schools, colleges, universities and most importantly, all the libraries across the country. For a year or two he will be interviewed by the media, invited to speak on the `problems' of India and their `solutions'. The `intellectual circles' of Delhi , Mumbai and Kolkata will throw some parties for them where these writers will fume and fret about the evils of Indian society. Pretty secure career.

 Dr. Ravi Shanker Kapoor elaborates in another of his book How India's Intellectuals Spread Lies, 200728 that the motive of all this effort is to drill guilt into the hearts and minds of the Hindu majority. So all the ills of Indian society are blamed on Hindus. Adiga too indulges in guilt-mongering against Hindus. The Leftists have been largely successful in their endeavors. Hindus have been defensive.

"The guilt pervades further, permeating the public debate, infecting the body-politic, dominating the minds and hearts of those who matter... In India, more than half a century of guilt-mongering and other Leftist tricks have created a climate of opinion in which Marxist lies pass of as gospel truth."

This is what Nobel Laureate, V S Naipaul resents when he comments about Indian writing. Commenting on Nirad Chaudhari's intellectual incompetence, Naipaul says:

"Sixty years after Independence that problem is still there. India has no autonomous intellectual life."

His words ring quite true in the context of Indian writers in general and Adiga in particular. There is no autonomous intellectual life in India . The literary concepts are dictated by the secular establishment.

"... no national literature has been created like this at such a remove, where the books are published by people outside, judged by people outside, and read to a large extent by people outside."32

Yes! No national literature has ever been created in a foreign language. In spite of tall claims and revolutionary agenda, the paradox of Indian English writing remains. The paradox of a literature divorced from its native language. Indian writers rarely speak and never read or write in any of the Indian languages.

Most of the Indian writers who have won awards like Booker, no longer live in India or have no connections with the rural India which they claim to write about. They are rootless and hence their works lack authenticity. More the rootlessness, more the arrogance

Imitation is the hallmark of Indian formula-writing. Adiga is an imitation of his predecessors like Arundhati Roy, who were an imitation of writers like Mulk Raj Anand & Nirad Chaudhary, who in turn were an imitation of yet others... a tradition of imitation going back to the times of Lord Macaulay. In fact, he inaugurated this tradition in India in his famous note to Lord Bentinck, the then Governor-General of India - Minute of Education on India in February 1835.

The imitation has seeped into the sub-conscious of Indian psyche, and Indians are no longer aware of it. Nothing else can be more representative of the intellectual bankruptcy of rootless Indian writers, than the fact that they do not even realize it. India is full of parrots, green, red, white, black, brown... but none of them are conscious that they are actually parrots. Some even think that they are tigers...even white tigers!

(source: The Brown Parrot - By Pankaj Saksena - Voice of India). Refer to Impressing the Whites - By Richard Crasta

Ten more things I hate in India

Lavish marriages

I have nothing again marriages, having successfully gone through one myself (with an Indian), but it hurts my sentiments to see so much money and energy wasted for a ceremony which should be 'sacred'. Further, the 'outcome' of the marriage is not always proportionate with the money invested. What shocks me is the lavishness, verging on indecency of some Indian weddings, usually in the large metros. I don't appreciate the ostentatious side of these ceremonies which is often more a showing of wealth (often borrowed), than the celebration of the union between two individuals. Though considered a 'seasonal' industry, the Indian wedding industry has an estimated turnover of over Rs 150,000 crores; and it is growing by the year. One could argue that it creates employment, but too many people are indebted the day after; this is not healthy.

Nouveau riche

The nouveau riche tribe is a despicable species whether in India or elsewhere on the planet. They behave particularly badly in this country. They speak loudly and they like to show-off their newly-acquired wealth. One understands that they had no time to invest to educate themselves, being too busy making money, but life, whether of an individual or a nation should be balanced. Culture is an essential part of any human being.

(source: Ten more things I hate in India - By Claude Arpi).

A Tragic Tale of Callous Hindu Indifference - By Atanu Dey

The Russian word “pogrom” means “to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently” and is applied to “any incident of wanton and unrestrained destruction on a mass scale.” According to the wiki, the word came into English via Yiddish. The etymology of the word makes sense. Yiddish literally means “Jewish”. Jews have been the victim of pogroms by Christians and Muslims for millennia everywhere in the world except for India. The world will never be allowed to forget that because the Jews will make sure that they themselves will not forget what is the most tragic part of their civilizational history.

Through persecuted globally, the Jews endure and what is more, they thrive. Compare the achievements of the 14 million or so Jews of the modern world with that of the 1.4 billion Muslims. The latter are one hundred times as numerous. Yet the Jews give a fight to the Muslims that the Muslims are not likely to ever forget and certainly not ever forgive. The Jews are clearly more successful than the Muslims. Perhaps it is this evident superiority of the Jews that rankles the Muslims and Jews get special treatment. The Islamic tradition holds that non-muslims are pigs, but the Jews are apes and swine. This Jewish superiority must have been around for a very long time as the hatred is as old as Islam. The founder of Islam said that at a future time even the trees and stones will tell Muslims to come and kill Jews hiding behind them. The Jews are not indifferent to what the Muslims have done to them. They don’t want to have a repeat of their history. Besides there are too few left of them for them to be have the luxury of pretending that they are not targeted by faithful Muslims. They are not interested in committing civilizational suicide and hence they fight. They are not indifferent.

The Hindus, on the other hand, are numerous. There are an estimated 800 million or so Hindus in India . A few tens of millions of Hindus slaughtered will not make any immediate difference to them. Kanchan Gupta reminds us of what happened to the Kashimir Pandits (Hindus) at the hands of majority Kashmiris (Muslims) — “driven out of their home and hearth, virtually stripped of their identity and reduced to living as refugees in their own country”. As is clearly apparent, Hindus don’t care. Kanchan concludes it is “a tragic tale of Hindu indifference.”

The Kashmiri Pandits are not the first victims of Islam-motivated pogrom of Hindus. It’s been going on for a thousand years. It is only getting more intensified. Since its advent, Islam has been making steady advances in the Indian subcontinent. Parts that were once Buddhist and Hindu, have over the centuries become totally Islamic. 

And those parts that became Islamic, have steadily declined in terms of human civilizational values. Afghanistan for instance, used to a place of high culture and learning. Now it is a wasteland. As Muslims they are destroying — remember Bamiyan Buddhas — what they as non-muslims had built.  

Refer to chapter on Islamic Onslaught and My name is Khan And Here Is My List Of Terrorist Attacks in  India - islamicterrorism.wordpress.com

Pakistan, which is now nearly 100 percent Muslim, having systematically reduced their Hindu population through violence and conversion, has as its main objective the destruction of India . The ancestors of today’s Pakistanis were all Hindus and Buddhists. So also Bangladesh . Once upon a time, what is Bangladesh today used to have a Buddhist and Hindu population. My ancestors were persecuted by their converted Muslim neighbors and had to leave their homes.

I can imagine that there are Hindus alive in India today some of whose descendants will — having converted to Islam given the incentives that the government of India is providing for conversion — actively seek the destruction of Hindus and India. That’s what has happened. That’s what Pakistan is: the descendants of non-muslims who have sworn to be the eternal enemies of non-muslims.

The tragic tale of callous Hindu indifference to the fate of Kashmiri Pandits is not new. It is an ancient oft repeated tale. It is the only reason that Islam has been able to make advances into the Indian subcontinent. The signs are not good. External forces threaten a civilization but it cannot be destroyed until internal contradictions make it impossible to survive. As Huntington pointed out, civilizations are not murdered; they commit suicide. The current government of India , a government of a country that is majority Hindu, is helping Hindus commit suicide. Like Afghanistan , Pakistan and Bangladesh , India too will descend into hell and become part of the global Islamic empire. There is still hope but when a people are hell-bent on suicide, it is hard to stop them. Besides, one wonders if there is any point in wasting time stopping anyone who is convinced that self-destruction is a noble endeavor. No wonder Gandhi is revered in India .

(source: A Tragic Tale of Callous Hindu Indifference - By Atanu Dey - deeshaa.org). Watch Rajiv Malhotra interviews Swami Nithyananda.

The Sacred Ganges , Threatened by Climate Change

Note: Hindu leaders have long been among the most outspoken defenders of natures balance. For the Hindu, nature is sacred, to be respected and cared for. The last few weeks saw a growing momentum worldwide for initiatives that gather religious leaders to discuss climate change's causes, consequences and possible solutions. 

INDIA, November 4, 2009: The Himalayan glaciers are the largest body of ice outside the polar caps, and they are under threat from global warming. The warning comes from experts, among them Dr. R K Pachauri, head of the UN’s Intergovernamental Panel on Climate Change and Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 2008.

According to the BBC, “The Himalayan range the area most affected by global warming in recent years.” This short video focuses on the Ganges ; Watch video on - Himalayan glaciers under threat

(source: news.bbc.co.uk and The Sacred Ganges , Threatened by Climate Change - hinduismtoday.com).

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Millions of Hindu women throng Kerala festival

“There is nothing like this anywhere else in the world. It is amazing the way a whole city makes arrangements for women to make this offering.” -         Diane Jennet, devotee

India 's southern state of Kerala may have hosted the largest gathering of women ever seen on the planet. 

Clad in traditional Kerala saris and bearing offerings of food, more than two million Hindu women - perhaps more - thronged the state capital Trivandrum on Sunday.  

The women braved searing heat to offer a special meal at the Attukal temple to Hindu Goddess Bhagavathy - one incarnation of the potent goddesses Kali and Saraswati.

The legend goes that Bhagavathy once visited the spot where the temple stands today on the banks of the Killiyar river.  The goddess, in the guise of a girl, sought the help of the head of a local family to cross the river. He helped her - but she vanished soon after.  

In the ancient religious texts, Bhagavathy is said to annihilate evil and protects the good in this world - she grants every wish of her devotees. This is also the fervent hope of the women who come year on year.

Guinness Worlds Records certified the crowd strength was 1.5 million when it was assessed for the first time in 1997. Last year turnout was 2.5 million and this year, according to festival organisers, it was estimated to be 3 million. Attukal Bhagavathy Temple Trust secretary KP Ramachandran Nair says that from next year an agency associated with the National Geographic channel will conduct aerial surveys for a more scientific headcount.

(source: Millions of women throng Kerala festival - BBC news.com).

Academic Allergy to Hinduism?

Historically, Christianity is an imposition on the indigenous pagan spiritual religions of Europe and later, South America. Likewise Islam is an imposition on the spiritual religions of Arabia, Egypt and West Asia.

***

How Free Are We? - By Jakob De Roover

According to Salil Tripathi, the rise of Hindu nationalism is indeed the major threat to intellectual freedom in the study of India. In his essay, all Indians concerned about the representation of India and its traditions come across as bigots and prudes. The goondas who burned M.F. Husain’s paintings and ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute are presented as the extremist fringe of a ‘long arm of fundamentalism’ that also embraces NRI professionals and Western Hindu sympathisers. 

On the other side, Tripathi places historians like Romila Thapar  (Refer to Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud – By Arun Shourie) and religion scholars like Wendy Doniger, who (so he claims) go as far as ‘the facts’ take them and are attacked for doing so (75-87). These scholars are presented as spirited fighters ‘arguing for academic freedom and the spirit of open inquiry in India ’ (86). 

This way of presenting things is flawed. Like most journalists, Tripathi ignores another threat to intellectual freedom in the study of India —one that may be less manifest, but is all the more insidious.  

Refer to Indophobia: The Real Elephant in the Living Room - By Vamsee Juluri - huffingtonpost.com.  Refer to Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud – By Arun Shourie and Impressing the Whites - By Richard Crasta.  Refer to Hinduism History Lesson - Hinduism Today and This is What UCLA Teaches About India - sandweepweb.com

A climate of implicit censorship has long dominated this field. Not quite as spectacular as the rise of ‘Hindu’ censorship, this is not the stuff of juicy journalism. But this kind of censoring is as harmful: it also moulds people’s minds in particular ways; it constrains their speech; it compels them to show compliance to certain dogmas in their writings; and, for the unlucky few, it may even end their careers. The difficulty is to identify the modus operandi of this form of censorship. Much like racism, it is only in certain blatant cases that one can say with certainty that it has occurred. Nonetheless, we have to try and circumscribe this obstacle standing in the way of a much-needed rejuvenation of the study of India. What follows are some impressions of the situation in contemporary Europe, India and the USA. Sometimes these may seem caricatures, but caricature is required to make the implicit explicit.

In Europe, the issue cannot be separated from the colonial past and the present state of affairs, where the old continent is losing its earlier dominance to rising Asian nations that outpace it in every way. In response, Europeans have developed a set of strategies to convince themselves that their civilization is still morally superior. Here, scholars of India have an important role to fulfill. Simply put, they are expected to do the following: acknowledge that India is indeed going through swift economic growth; next, point out that it still has tremendous poverty, the caste system, superstition, religious conflicts, gender inequality, exploitation, child labour, nepotism, bribery, revolts, incompetence...; and provide appropriate details on these flaws and the necessary footnotes or fieldwork. In this way, these scholars should contribute to what John Gray calls the ‘comfort blanket against an unfamiliar world’, which Europe is weaving around itself. ‘Rest assured; we are still on top’.

Naturally, few scholars today would be willing to state explicitly that the European civilization is superior. Yet, while they disavow Eurocentrism, they also reproduce a deep-rooted cultural asymmetry. When European scholars describe India, they tend to connect all ills and atrocities in that society to the nature of Indian culture. One links widow-burning, dowry murder, domestic violence, female infanticide and caste discrimination to ‘Hindu’ foundations.  

Europe also loves to celebrate Indian authors whose specialty is revealing the ‘dark underbelly’ of Indian society. 

In contrast, social ills and atrocities in European societies are characterised as aberrations: racism, colonial genocide, the two World Wars, the Holocaust, sexual abuse, etc. are considered as acts that deviate from the true temper of European culture. 

This stance of cultural asymmetry has become the hidden premise of the European study of India. 

Historically, the situation in India has grown from much the same set of equations. The colonial state nourished an intellectual class that was expected to spell out and justify its 'civilising mission'. The intelligentsia had to show how western political theory had laid down the way forward for India and how the state was the guide on this road. It sought to demonstrate that Indian history and society—and ‘Hindu religion’ in particular—embodied the negation of western liberal norms: inequality, irrationality, tyranny (at a later stage, patriarchy was added). The postcolonial state inherited the institutional structures and conceptual framework of its colonial predecessor and also its tendency to treat the human sciences as instruments of the state’s project to reform society. Crudely put, academics in these disciplines could play two roles: ideologues were to show the significance of some western political theory to India and characterise Indian history and society in such a way that the implementation of this political theory became the only option; fact-gatherers had to collect the data related to some problem for the state’s project of reform.  

Over the years, the fashionable theories shifted from liberalism to Marxism and back again. Generally, the adherents of this approach to Indian society called themselves ‘secularists’ and shared one central attitude: they were allergic to ‘Hinduism’.  In the first five decades following Independence, these secularists dominated the Indian universities and established an intellectual and institutional hegemony. They wrote the textbooks and dominated the UGC, ICSSR or ICHR. By the 1980s, when orthodox Marxism had worn out in most places, the hegemony was so entrenched that it allowed a few universities and research institutes in Delhi and Calcutta to perform a role very similar to that of the colonial master. They imported the latest ‘radical’ fashions from Paris and New York to couch an old story in the newest jargon: they used Foucault’s ‘discourse’ and ‘capillary power’ or Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ to repeat that the Indian culture promoted inequality, patriarchy and moral bankruptcy. Social scientists in the hinterland were expected to imitate the secularists from the metropolis. If they did well, they could end up in JNU or perhaps even be invited to the West. This hegemony of the secularists reproduced itself through different forms of implicit censorship: it determined what was published, where the funding went, and who got appointed.

At the same time, there was a growing sense of alienation between these intellectual classes and substantial layers of Indian society. The rise of Hindutva produced a backlash against the academic allergy to Hinduism. When the BJP came to power in the late 1990s, Hindu nationalism tried to displace secularism by attempting to take over the institutional hegemony and modes of censorship that the secularists had created. Now, Hindu nationalists took it upon themselves to write the textbooks and control the universities and the relevant government bodies. However, these people had neither the education nor the sophistication to do so in the (relatively) subtle ways of the secularists. The crudeness led to outcries in India and the West about ‘rewriting history’, ‘the end of academic freedom’ and ‘the return of censorship’. The message to the Hindu nationalists must be clear: learn from the secularists how to practice the art of censorship in more implicit and subtle ways. Whatever the future may bring, the humanities in India have now been hijacked by this struggle between secularism and Hindutva.

The rise of Hindutva has also determined the current state of affairs in the American study of India and Hinduism. Here, the implicit censorship takes the form of a climate of fear: the fear to be branded ‘Hindutva’. There are three central factors in US society that have contributed to this pernicious climate. One is the large-scale migration of highly-educated Indians into the US over the last few decades. Affluent Hindu-Americans have been shocked by what the American schools teach their children about ‘Hinduism’ and India. Turning to the universities, they discovered that these often tell the same story, albeit with more theoretical sophistication. Many Hindu-Americans are highly successful in engineering, business or other professions; many also sympathize at some level with Hindu nationalism. Shocked by the western representation of ‘Hinduism’, they think they can now replace this with a ‘Hindu’ representation. They do not realise that it takes more than intelligence and professional success to develop an alternative to five centuries of Orientalism. After retirement, some of these professionals take up the hobby of writing stories about India that no intellectual will ever take seriously.  

Refer to Hindu American Foundation and President Obama Praises Hindu Americans For Service - hinduismtoday.com and Refer to Indophobia: The Real Elephant in the Living Room - By Vamsee Juluri - huffingtonpost.com and Defaming Hinduism - By V Sundaram and Impressing the Whites - By Richard Crasta and Lies, Lies and More Lies: The Campaign to Defame Hindu/Indian Nationalism – By Vivek

The second factor lies in the many forms of Protestant Christianity that dominate American society. The theological framework shared by these denominations inevitably transforms the Hindu traditions into a species of false religion. Naturally, political correctness no longer allows scholars and educators to speak of ‘heathen idolatry’ or the ‘cruelty’ and ‘tyranny’ of ‘false religion’. Therefore, they have turned to seemingly ‘secular’ depictions of caste, inequality, patriarchy and poverty in India to show that Hinduism is a pale and erring religion, opposed to liberal values. The earlier religious condemnation has become a social critique. 

Often, both go hand in hand. For instance, American Evangelical organisations join forces with scholarly critics of caste to promote the idea that India should become ‘post-Hindu’, as in the case of Kancha Ilaiah and the Dalit Freedom Network.

(Refer to Hear the rumble of Christian hypocrisy - By Richard Dawkins - timesonline.uk.co). Refer to Re-Writing History, Changing America’s Young Minds - New York times.

The third factor is the most interesting: it is the potential for implicit censorship that seems intrinsic to the US academic world. This is difficult to pin down. The witch hunts organized by Senator McCarthy during the Cold War played a significant role in creating this atmosphere. The terror of being denounced as a ‘traitor’ penetrated the American humanities at a deep level. To someone who has no first-hand experience of the academic study of India in the US , it must be difficult to imagine the number of young scholars who say things like ‘this is what I really think, but I will not say it in public, because I’m up for tenure’. By the time they receive tenure, they have usually conformed to the orthodoxy. Together these factors have produced an unhappy mix. There is a cold war going on between the ‘Hindu-Americans’ (and a few academic sympathisers) and the mainstream scholars of Hinduism. Academics no longer fear being called ‘commies’, ‘reds’ or even ‘heathens’, but now ‘Hindutva’ has taken the place of such labels in the study of India. If one makes positive noises about the contributions of Indian culture to humanity, one runs the risk of being associated with ‘Hindu nationalism’ or with the NRI professionals who aggressively challenge the doyens of Hinduism studies. The popular media like to represent these doyens as valiant warriors for academic freedom, much as Tripathi does in his essay. This is far removed from reality. The dominant scholars too impose dogmatic limits that one cannot cross without provoking their ire. Because of the significance of letters of recommendation, peer pressure and plain gossip in American academic circles, their forms of implicit censorship are highly effective in making or breaking careers. This has created a widespread fear of saying ‘the wrong thing’, which paralyses the study of Indian culture.

Jakob De Roover is at the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium.

(source: How Free Are We? -  By Jakob De Roover - outlookindia.com January 28, 2010).

From Katherine Mayo to Wendy Dongier - Motives remain the same

Gandhi rightly termed Ms Mayo's book, Drain Inspecotor's report

***

Sir (Dr) Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) was one of the most profound philosophers of this century, author and educationalist. In 1926, he was deputed by Calcutta University as the university delegate to the Congress of the Universities of the British Empire. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1940, first Indian to be thus honored. He succinctly said: 

 

“The West tried its best to persuade India that its philosophy is absurd, its art puerile, its poetry uninspired, its religion grotesque and its ethics barbarous”.

 

(source: The Decline of the West - By Oswald Spengler  p. 13). 

"Though it is less well-known in this country (USA),  anti-Hindu bigotry is every bit as ugly and dangerous as anti-Semitism or racism"  - By Jeffrey Long

"Very simply, Doniger denigrates the Gods and Goddesses that Hindus worship as a manifestation of the Divine. "   - Hindu American Foundation

"India, once a major civilizational and economic power that suffered centuries of decline, is now newly resurgent in business, geopolitics and culture. However, a powerful counterforce within the American Academy is systematically undermining core icons and ideals of Indic Culture and thought. For instance, scholars of this counterforce have disparaged the Bhagavad Gita as a dishonest book; declared Ganesha's trunk a limp phallus; classified Devi as the mother with a penis and Shiva as a notorious womanizer who incites violence in India; pronounced Sri Ramakrishna a pedophile who sexually molested the young Swami Vivekananda; condemned Indian mothers as being less loving of their children than white women; and interpreted the bindi as a drop of menstrual fluid and the ha in sacred mantras as a woman's sound during orgasm. Are these isolated instances of ignorance or links in an institutionalized pattern of bias driven by certain civilizational worldviews?"  

"The book is more than 600 pages long, and the number of errors average more than 1 per page. There are errors of chronology, of historical dates and sequence of events, geography, verifiable historical facts, proper names, translations of Sanskrit texts and so on. These errors are compounded by strained and agenda driven interpretations that whitewash medieval atrocities on Indians, perpetuate colonial and racist stereotypes about Hindus, attribute many positive developments within the Hindu society to impulses from Christianity or Islam and grossly distort historical evidence."    - Vishal Agarwal.

"Hindus, for example, would be mortified if the eroticized, sexualized spoof of Hindu theology long promoted by this nation's "preeminent" scholar of Hinduism at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Prof. Wendy Doniger, was offered as the expert voice to school foreign policy students. They would much rather that voice be balanced between practicing Hindus and academics who seek to understand and recognize the Hindu tradition from the perspective of the practitioner. "     - Aseem Shukla

(source: Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America - By Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicholas and Aditi Banerjee). Refer to Hinduism History Lesson - Hinduism Today and This is What UCLA Teaches About India - sandweepweb.com and A Chapter-wise Review - By Vishal Agarwal  

For Katherine Mayo refer to chapter on Glimpses III

***  

Sexualized spoof of Hindu theology

“yad bhaavam tad bhavati” -  a Sanskrit proverb (you perceive according to your mental makeup).

***

A scholarly critique of gutter scholarship of Doniger - By Aditi Banerjee  

“The Bhagavad Gita is not as nice a book as some Americans think,” “Throughout the Mahabharata, the enormous Hindu epic of which the Gita is a small part, Krishna goads human beings into all sorts of murderous and self-destructive behaviors such as war in order to relieve "mother Earth" of its burdensome human population and the many demons disguised as humans … The Gita is a dishonest book; it justifies war,”

                - Wendy Doniger in a lecture titled “The Complicity of God in the Destruction of the Human Race.” 

Refer to chapter on Hindu Scriptures and Quotes. Refer to RISA Lila - 1: Wendy's Child Syndrome - By Rajiv Malhotra and Indophobia: The Real Elephant in the Living Room - By Vamsee Juluri - huffingtonpost.com.  Refer to Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud – By Arun Shourie and Newton as Theologian - By C K Raju

***

Doniger claims to have translated ‘Rig Veda’ and ‘Laws of Manu’, texts that were translated in 18th century itself by others. Professor Michael Witzel of Harvard described her translations as ‘lacking common sense’,  ‘unreliable’, ‘idiosyncratic’ ,and “a stream of unconnected George-Bush-like anacoluths“.

(source: Modern Mandhara and apes - By Incognito thoughts). Refer to Wendy Doniger is a syndrome - By Sandeep B

Stereotype and vilify the entire Hindu-American community?

Wendy Doniger (Mircea Eliade Distinguished Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School and in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago) was recently interviewed in Outlook with reference to her new book, The Hindus: An Alternative History. In the interview, she (1) falsely and unfairly brands all of her critics as right-wing Hindutva fundamentalists, and (2) grossly mischaracterizes (and misquotes) the text of the Valmiki Ramayana, calling into question her “alternative” version not just of the Ramayana, but also of Hinduism and Hindu history as a whole.

Doniger’s prominence and clout as a “definitive” authority in the discourse on Indian traditions and history give her views considerable significance. For, it is Doniger’s (and her colleagues’) versions of Hinduism and Hindu history (which are often at serious variance with traditional Hinduism as practised and understood by Hindus themselves) that form the curriculum of university courses, line the bookshelves of the “Hinduism” sections of bookstores (physical and virtual), and are given play in the Western and Indian mainstream press.  

 

A Classic illustration of what happens when somebody is confronted with a superior culture.

From Katherine Mayo to Wendy Dongier 

Why are Abrahmaic faiths all experts and authority on Hinduism?

The portrayal of Hinduism at the hands of Western academia is a proof that the same tradition continues in the new century, in newer places whose goal is same - to brow beat India, its traditions to suit geo-political interest of their masters.

     

Wendy Doniger's new book and Prof. Michael Witzel of Harvard University.

Under the guise of providing an alternative history, the real nefarious agenda of The Hindus is to drive a wedge between Hindus and non-Hindus in India and elsewhere. 

Doniger claims to have translated ‘Rig Veda’ and ‘Laws of Manu’, texts that were translated in 18th century itself by others. Professor Michael Witzel of Harvard described her translations as ‘lacking common sense’,  ‘unreliable’, ‘idiosyncratic’ and “a stream of unconnected George-Bush-like anacoluths“.

Refer to Wendy Doniger's Imagined History of The Hindus - By Hindu American Foundation and Wendy Doniger is a syndrome - By Sandeep B and Doniger Does Doggie – By Shrinivas Tilak and Defaming Hinduism - By V Sundaram and Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America - By Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicholas and Aditi Banerjee and A Chapter-wise Review - By Vishal Agarwal  

Sign Petition - Demand for withdrawal of a flawed book on Hindu History published by PENGUIN

***

Accordingly, this latest “alternative” history could easily become known as the “canonical” history of Hinduism, because of the imbalance of power between the Western academy and the traditional institutions for learning about Hinduism (which have been marginalized and largely rendered inaccessible under British colonialism.)

Defamation of Critics

The introduction to the interview begins with a misleading quote:

“[Doniger] has continued to infuriate the Hindutva brigade with her unorthodox views on Hinduism and its sacred texts, earning for herself the epithet: “crude, lewd and very rude in the hallowed portals of Sanskrit academics.””

The quote attributed to the “Hindutva brigade” is actually from the BBC web site:

Professor Wendy Doniger is known for being rude, crude and very lewd in the hallowed portals of Sanskrit Academics. All her special works have revolved around the subject of sex in Sanskrit texts ranging from Siva: The Erotic Ascetic to Tales of Sex and Violence…Never one to shy away from sex, she threw herself into the job of translating the [Kama Sutra] … She was particularly interested by the parts that justify adultery and the list of ways to get rid of a man … When she was translating it (over a period of a few years and numerous Sanskrit classes), she frequently found herself having to take cold showers. 

The false attribution of this quote to the “Hindutva brigade” sets the tone for the rest of the interview—heaping blame on a nebulous, undefined, straw man “Hindutva Internet Brigade” for the whole continuum of criticism of Doniger’s work—criticism that has come mostly from moderate and liberal Hindus, secularists, non-Hindu scholars and even one prominent Harvard Indologist who is not known for being friendly towards Hindus. Rather than confront the actual criticisms, Doniger pretends that her only critics are Hindu extremists, and by rebuking this “enemy” she tries to deflect any criticism of her work.

Doniger ignores the prolific response to her work by the American Hindu community, including dozens of published articles, countless public conferences, repeated calls for debate and dialogue between the academy and the Hindu-American community, and a recently published book analysing the representation of Hinduism in American universities. It is totally irresponsible for such a prominent professor, whose career is built on writing about Hinduism, to stereotype and vilify the entire Hindu-American community on the basis of the actions of a few.  

Hindu society acknowledges and celebrates any genuine scholars of Hinduism, irrespective of their gender, race or caste.  For example, the late Sir John Woodroffe/ Arthur Avalon is regarded by even the most traditional and orthodox of Hindu acharyas, including the late Shankaracharya of Sringeri, as one of the great Tantric scholars of modern times—despite his being neither Hindu nor Brahmin-born.  In addition, Dr. Klaus Klostermaier, University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba (Canada), is highly respected in Hindu circles.  Linda Johnsen, neither male, Hindu, nor Brahmin-born, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism (2002) among several other books, is also highly regarded for her knowledge about Hinduism.

This respect is not just academic—non-Indian spiritual gurus have been revered by Hindus as well.  Daya Mata (Faye Wright), another female, non-Hindu, non-Brahmin (by birth) of the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) was highly regarded by the most traditional and orthodox of Hindu leaders, including (I have been told) the late Shankaracharya of Sringeri, a great scholar and authority on Hinduism.  Similarly, Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble), female, non-Hindu, non Brahmin-born, perhaps the most prominent of Swami Vivekananda’s disciples, has been revered as a true Hindu saint by many orthodox Hindus, including Brahmins; so also has Mother (Mira Alfassa), the Frenchwoman closely associated with (and successor to) Sri Aurobindo.  I could go on with a list of lesser known women of foreign birth who are equally acknowledged as true representatives of Hinduism.  I have not even touched upon the scores of Indian women who have been revered by Hindus from the Vedic times to the modern day—e.g., Gargi, whose open debate with the great sage Yajnavalkya is prominently featured in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad.

Moreover, the idea that “it’s considered unseemly in the conservative Hindu view for a woman to talk about sex--that’s something men talk about among themselves” is another blatantly false stereotype by Doniger.  

Doniger’s contention that traditional Hindu women are not allowed to talk about sex is directly refuted by the celebrated account of the debate between Ubhaya-Bharati and Adi Shankara, one of the great intellects of the world, sage from the 8th Century CE, and father of Advaita Vedanta as known today.  Adi Shankara was challenged to a debate by Mandana Misra, a learned and well-known Purva Mimamsa scholar.  They agreed that Mandana’s wife, Ubhaya-Bharati, a renowned scholar in her own right, would be the referee and that the loser of the debate would become the disciple of the winner.  After debating for many days, Mandana Misra lost and was about to become the disciple of Adi Shankara.  However, Ubhaya-Bharati then challenged Adi Shankara to debate her, on the grounds that since she and her husband were one person upon being married, he would have to defeat both of them in order to win the debate.

Adi Shankara accepted her challenge.  The debate went well for Adi Shankara until Ubhaya-Bharati began posing intricate questions on the science of erotics (well-accepted, in the appropriate context, as a topic of sacred discourse and knowledge in Hinduism).  If it was “considered unseemly” per traditional Hinduism for women to talk about sex, the official version of the Shankara Digvijaya (accepted as authentic by the Sringeri Shankaracharya Matha) would never have mentioned Ubhaya-Bharati’s questioning of Adi Shankara.  (Adi Shankara ended up satisfactorily answering the questions on eroticism, and Ubhaya-Bharati accepted her defeat.) 

There is also the celebrated account given in the Yoga Vasistha of Queen Chudalai, an advanced yogini, who initiates her husband, King Sikhidvaja, as her disciple; she tests his renunciation repeatedly and instructs him on the proper attitude towards sexual union and sensual pleasure.  Similarly, the famous Tripura Rahasya narrates Princess Hemalata’s initiation of her husband, Prince Hemachuda, into the secrets of samadhi and moksha.  Finally, the Mahabharata recounts the famous interaction between Arjuna and Urvashi—when Arjuna rejected Urvashi’s frank invitation for sexual union, she pronounced the following curse: “Since thou disregardest a woman come to thy mansion … of her own motion—a woman, besides, who is pierced by the shafts of Kama, therefore, O Partha, thou shalt have to pass thy time among females … destitute of manhood and scorned as a eunuch." 

As these examples show, not only were women allowed to discuss sex, they had the authority and scriptural and social standing to challenge and teach the greatest of sages and the most royal of men with respect to all subject matters, including sex and eroticism.

Of course, it is unfortunate that the puritanical mores of Victorian British rule have corrupted modern Hindu society, restricting the open acceptance of sex and sexuality.  However, the holistic acceptance of sex and sexuality (without gender or orientation bias) inherent to Hinduism is still vibrant and alive in traditional Hinduism.

In a personal context, I can say unequivocally that despite my birth and upbringing as an American and my liberal schooling in Boston and at Yale Law School, my most honest and open discussions of sex have been with the most orthodox and “traditional” of Hindu swamis and acharyas.  They helped me unlearn the associative guilt and sexual repression of Western mores.  (Refer to Adam’s Family Jewels - by Tibor Krausz). They also taught me that sexual desire is, in the appropriate context, an integral part of life and that there is nothing sinful  or shameful about it, and that heightened sexual energies are not antithetical to, but can be an integral part of, spiritual development for people qualified (adhikaris) for those types of sadhana or spiritual practice.

In short, playing this race and sex card may be an attempt by Doniger to elicit sympathy—but this cannot substitute for sound scholarship.  In the traditions of true academic scholarship, Doniger should let her work stand or fall on its own merits and not hide behind false victim hood.  

For the rest refer to A scholarly critique of gutter scholarship of Doniger - By Aditi Banerjee  and Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America Rupa & Co., June 2007 and RISA Lila - 1: Wendy's Child Syndrome and Oh, But You Do Get It Wrong! - By Aditi Banerjee - outlookindia.com

'Proving' Hindus are a very depraved bunch of idiots? 

Doniger Does Doggie - By Shrinivas Tilak

"All of you seem to think that, like Sigmund Freud, that... sex is the explanation for everything.."

    - Barrister Horace Rumpole in John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey.

***

Dogs (along with horses and cows) loom large in Doniger’s latest work. The index contains a dozen or so entries under the main heading of dogs for instance. The 779 pages book is officially entitled, “The Hindus: An Alternative History” (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009; hereafter The Hindus). 

In Doniger’s ‘alternative history’ (in reality it is more like a work of fiction and not at all a history) unfolding India and Hinduism, "dogs" represent "high caste Hindu males" who have according to her oppressed and repressed everybody else in India since the ancient Vedic times. In Doniger’s reckoning, the traditional history of India (“a product of Brahmin imagination”), religious minorities and social outcastes are reduced to a status of a ‘scape-dog’ (or are they all underdogs) (p. 145) (these underdogs include Muslims who ruled over the Hindus and controlled territory larger than currently recognized as India for most of the last millennium; I told you this is a work of fiction!).

The main purpose of The Hindus, accordingly, is to provide a narrative account of alternative people who do not figure in the Brahmin-generated history — people who are "alternative" in the sense of "otherness," people of other religions, or cultures, or castes, or species (even animals)(p.1). Having read The Hindus from cover to cover, I can say that Doniger lives up to her promise but at a terrible cost for Hindus and India.

Demeaning Hindus and 'defrocking' (both theologically and sexually) their gods and goddesses: Penguin-Doniger agenda

It is this kind of hatemongering against Jews that even led to their Holocaust during WWII, and Doniger should understand it well enough.

              

Rajiv Malhotra and Dr. Srinivas Tilak

Defamation of Critics - Wendy Doniger is a classic illustration of what happens when somebody is confronted with a superior culture. The initial state of dumbfoundedness gives way to irrational hatred towards the thing that such a mind cannot comprehend.

Refer to RISA Lila - 1: Wendy's Child Syndrome - By Rajiv Malhotra and Doniger Does Doggie – By Shrinivas Tilak - sukta-sumnablogspot.com and A Chapter-wise Review - By Vishal Agarwal  

Refer to In Conversation With Dr. Shrinivas Tilak And Vishal Agarwal - By Ranjani Saigal - lokvani.com

Sign Petition - Demand for withdrawal of a flawed book on Hindu History published by PENGUIN

***

Under the guise of providing an alternative history, the real nefarious agenda of The Hindus is to drive a wedge between Hindus and non-Hindus in India and elsewhere. 

In order to show how Hindus are so utterly unlike others Doniger engages in denigrating, distorting, and demeaning all Hindus (low or high caste, men or women) and what is worse, ‘defrocking’ (both theologically and sexually) their gods and goddesses. Selectively picking mythic episodes (stories) from the Purana and the Tantra texts Doniger describes relations between gods and gods, between gods and goddesses, between goddesses and animals. Here, a god beheads another god; there, a goddess ‘hooks up’ with a buffalo [demon] and so on. See for instance chapter 14,‘Goddesses and Gods in the Early Puranas’ and chapter 15 ‘Sects and Sex in the Tantric Puranas and the Tantras.’

I will leave it to professional psychiatrists (like Dr. Shreekumar Vinekar) to analyze and interpret Doniger’s preoccupation with sex and pervert joy she finds in abstracting from Hindu myths sexual encounters (natural and ‘unnatural’) between gods/goddesses and humans or animals. Doniger claims that she is a ‘recovering Orientalist.’ Orientalism, she asserts, refers to a cluster of attitudes that implicated the first European scholars of India in the European colonization of India, overwhelming reliance on textual studies being one of them, pp.34-35). In truth, Doniger seems to have added a sexual dimension to the textual one in her so called studies of India and Hinduism.

Elsewhere Doniger does betray an awareness that Hindu views of animals are far more complex to capture by words like “sacred” or “impure.” Other people’s zoological taxonomies look bizarre only to people who view them through their own rather ethnocentric lenses (p. 659). The fact is: Doniger continues to look at all Hindu taxonomies through her unique ethnocentric lens.

Here, I will deal with two specific instances where Doniger clearly abandons the role of an unbiased, academic historian. While discussing the Taj Mahal in chapter 24‘The Past in the Present’ she claims, “One advocate of Hindutva has argued, on the basis of absolutely no evidence, that the Taj Mahal, in Agra, is not a [sic] Islamic mausoleum but an ancient Shiva temple…"(p. 679). Doniger herself does not bring any clear evidence for her assertion that the Taj Mahal is an Islamic mausoleum nor does she refer to any legitimate archeological study of Taj Mahal. To date, the Archaeological Survey of India has not carried out a systematic survey of the Taj Mahal.  Doniger does not mention P. N. Oak by name (the end note does provide reference to his book Taj Mahal: The True Story, 1989). There is growing evidence suggesting that it is still not clear who actually built the Taj Mahal or what its purpose was (see my blog “P. N. Oak: the lone fighter, etymologist, and historian” on www.sulekha.com for details).

In sum, those who will rely on "The Hindus" to learn about Hindus in the history of India will do so at their own peril.

(source: Doniger Does Doggie – By Shrinivas Tilak - sukta-sumnablogspot.com). Dr Tilak holds Ph D in History of Religions from McGill University, Montreal, Canada and has taught at several universities in Canada. Refer to Adam’s Family Jewels - by Tibor Krausz and The X-Rated Bible - By Ben Edward Akerley and The Harlot by the Side of the Road - By Jonathan Kirsch

Wendy Doniger is a syndrome

 

Wendy Doniger - a product of Harvard and Oxford Universities.

***

In closing, Wendy Doniger is a classic illustration of what happens when somebody is confronted with a superior culture. The initial state of dumbfoundedness gives way to irrational hatred towards the thing that such a mind cannot comprehend. This was pretty much the reaction of Islam when it first set foot in India . Her incredible felicity for detecting only sex in everything that India has produced should qualify as the scholarly equivalent of the wonders of the world. Her refusal to engage her critics in debate and to tar them as fanatics and fundamentalists is the other side of the same coin. But she has been quite successful in creating an aura of trendiness around her books in the fashionable circles in urban India . Needless, secular magazines like Outlook lap her up with some glee because she has shown to be quite adept in the Art of Indian Secularism. The fact that in an epic work of 24000 verses, which has stood the test of time, the only worthwhile thing she found was Rama and Sita’s sex life (as she imagines it) speaks eloquently about her own Alternate History.

(source: Wendy Doniger is a syndrome - By Sandeep B).

Whose history is it anyway?

Hindus know that Doniger was derailed before. In 2003, Microsoft retracted a chapter on Hinduism written by Doniger for its online encyclopedia after a heavily publicized internet campaign protested factual and interpretive errors in her essay. In the end, a Hindu writer, providing the emic, or insider's perspective, wrote an entry that depicted Hinduism in the light that practitioners would actually recognize.

That there would be trouble was apparent right from the preface of her book. There, Doniger asserts that hers is not a history of how Hinduism is lived today, but rather offers a "narrative alternative" to the one found in Hinduism's holiest scriptures. This 780-page tome is set as Doniger's rendering of Hinduism's history based--we are to assume--on her own interpretations of scripture, her own biases and inclinations. Infamous for her penchant to sexualize, eroticize and exoticise passages from some of the holiest Hindu epics and scriptures--often invoking a Freudian psychoanalytic lens--Doniger has been accused of knowingly polarizing and inflaming. She does not disappoint.

I revisit her work now not just because Doniger provokes so many of us in the Hindu American community. Doniger represents what many believe to be a fundamental flaw in the academic study of Hinduism: that Hindu studies is too often the last refuge of idiosyncratic and irreligious academics presenting themselves as "experts" on a faith that they study without the insight, recognition or reverence of, in this case, a practicing Hindu or even non-Hindu--striving to study Hinduism from the insider's perspective--would offer.

Parallelisms in her book conjure up obsolete anecdotes comparing the sacred stone linga representing Lord Shiva to a leather strap-on sex toy, and Lord Rama, one of the most widely worshiped deities, is psychoanalyzed to have acted out of fear that he was becoming a sex-addict like his father. As Agarwal shows, Doniger's prose is replete with cutesy, perhaps, but offensive and jejune turns of phrases such as, "If the motto of Watergate was 'Follow the money', the motto of the history of Hinduism could well be 'Follow the monkey' or, more often 'Follow the horse'." And in another section, her interpretations of the Rig Veda, the most ancient of the Vedas that Hindus consider sacred, Doniger sees incest and adultery with a pregnant woman in a verse praying to God for protection and safe delivery.

Doniger's alternate version of Hindu history, now playing in over 700 libraries in North America and Europe , raises a real fear that her "alternative" will become the mainstream. This issue is important to a minority striving to take control of its own narrative--a struggle repeated by generations of Americans as their voice grows and progeny prospers.

The Southern Poverty Law Center continues to wage a public campaign against an anti-Semitic professor at Cal State Long Beach, and open protests continue against a faculty member holding white supremacy views at the University of Vermont. Each professor has academic freedom, but an agitating laity is wondering if institutions must support the mendacity of bigoted players devaluing that freedom.

Doniger has tended to dismiss criticisms from Hindus as politically motivated, chauvinistic, sexist, casteist--the list is long. It is as Vamsee Julluri, Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco , wrote:

"The academy has gone almost directly from the Orientalist myth of Hindu superstition to the postmodern concern about Hindu fundamentalism, without even a notice of the great Hindu religion in between, and what it means to its followers and admirers. The academy must engage with Hinduism more positively."

Academic freedom is sacrosanct. But academic legitimacy in the eyes of the public sets a much higher bar. 

(source: Whose history is it anyway? - By Dr. Aseem Shukla - newsweek.washingtonpost.com).

***

Amazon reviews:

It's like asking a Nazi to write about Judaism?
Collected negative stereotypes of Hinduism in mainstream Western academia

The evangelicals of the Abrahmic faith that gave comfort and guidance to ethnically cleanse the American Indians, slavery, Jim Crowe, lynchings, commit the Rwanda massacre, The Goa/Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust are empowered by this author. Here Wendy does the same job on Hindus and Hinduism. The worst interpretations wearing the worst anti Hindu filters. And she does that with absolute conviction.

The biggest offense is, she has been spamming the "texts on Hinduism" with her prejudices and using the bully pulpit of Academia to spread her hate and prejudices. Like the "Boys of Brazil" (Fiction), she has also spawned many Ph.Ds on "Anti Hindusim" like herself (Non fiction).

This is indeed the Kali Yuga

You'd think that with so much erudition and 700 pages at her disposal the author would have more insightful and profound things to say. The insights of this book are banal and often delivered with sophomoric humor. The state of academics is indeed abysmal if this the best that can be produced by one of its high priestesses.

This book will going into my tag sale pile.

Unfortunately, The Indian "secular" constitution prohibits religious studies in Indian universities. So you would not find Indian academicians from India challenging Wendy and her Ganga Dins. Its left to us amateurs to challenge her but then we are quickly branded as "right wing Hindutvas". How convenient these people from the Abrahmaic faiths are all experts and authority and "know it alls" on Hinduism..  eh? Sheesh!  

Don't bother reading this biased, childish, highly opinionated, and sex-centric slander on Hinduism,

This was a sad read and was hardly a credible view of Hinduism. The author's snarky comments poke fun and comes across with a clear biased agenda instead of educating anyone. I was shocked and amazed at how petty her narration was at points and that she didn't bother to do any fact checking on some of her distorted recounts of history. It was equally shocking how prejudiced and jaded she comes across. Even more amazing that she is an academic who blatantly gets historical facts wrong that any fifth grader can research and point to her misconceptions. Obviously she has an ax to grind and would rather tear down a religion she apparently has personal issues with instead of providing a valuable unbiased educational book.

Doniger conveys almost none of the spiritual vitality and seems not to recognize any of the practical spiritual knowledge that other writers and teachers show to be embedded in Hindu scriptures. If anything, she belittles these aspects of Hinduism in just that sort of way that modernized people as a group tend, unfortunately, to do, believing themselves to "know better" and to be more "sophisticated" than people who maintain their ancient traditions. So if you are looking for a view of Hinduism that will lead you beyond the limitations of the modern materialistic-mechanistic worldview, this is not the book for you.

And so, this sort of nonsense continues, but only in America (and, I may add at the Marxist/Left-leaning Jawahalal Nehru University in Delhi). Centuries old Sanskrit studies departments at leading universities in the UK and Germany have been disbanded since there are no takers anymore for this kind of slanted work. In America too, the University of Chicago (where Ms. Doniger sits) and Harvard (where the other claimant to this sort of drivel, Mr. Witzel, sits), funding for this kind of work is on its last legs.  

Ganesh composed the Mahabharata? - says the learned scholar

"Wendy Doniger aspires to the genre of Emma Darcy, Rosemary Rogers and "Debbie Does Dallas", except that she does not have the talent. Her field of endeavor is best described as Porno-Bigotry, which appears to be the main specialty of the University of Chicago 's grandiosely-named " School of Divinity ". Others who make money by peddling such toxic waste are "Limp Phaullus" Courtright of Emory University's School of PornoBigotry , Michael Witzel of Harvard's School of Aryan Supremacy , and several others who use the Holy Cloak of Fundamental "Christian" as a flasher uses a raincoat - to gain admittance to unsuspecting society.

Limp Phaullus Courtright wrote that he thought a toddler asking for a lollipop was asking for oral sex. One can only wonder at the plight of Emory students who pick a pencil or candy bar out of their book-bag. Wendy Doniger gushed in her Foreword to that kiddy-porn garbage dump, how "Ganesh composed the Mahabharatha", (?) showing how ignorant she is of even the most basic aspects of Hinduism or Indian lore. What further evidence is needed, that these are just frauds?  These porn-peddlers appear to believe that they are above (or beneath?) laws against child pornography because of "Academic Freedom" - a blot on that hallowed American tradition.

(source: amazon reviews and Hinduphobic Indology  - By Ari Saja).

The reality is that in this publish or perish culture, the Emperor (or the Empress) really has no clothes.

Doniger claims that she is a ‘recovering Orientalist’ and has abandoned the Orientalist perspective in teaching or writing about Hinduism. Orientalism, she asserts, refers to a cluster of attitudes that implicated the first European scholars of India in the European colonization of India , overwhelming reliance on textual studies being one of them, pp.34-35). The fact is, Orientalism is much more than what Doniger claims it to be. It stands for the body of knowledge that the European powers began to generate from the seventeenth century onwards with a view to consolidate the economic, military, and political gains they had started making in Asia and Africa . Thus, having acquired military and political control over a sizeable portion of India , administrators of the British East India Company began to cast doubt and sow divisions among the people of Asia (and Africa ) concerning their cultures, religions, and societies by gaining exegetical control over their traditional systems of knowledge.

Behind the façade of providing an alternative history, the real agenda of The Hindus is to drive a wedge between the marginalized and the mainstream Hindus.

Under the guise of providing an alternative history, the real agenda of The Hindus is to drive a wedge between Hindus and non-Hindus in India and elsewhere. In order to show how Hindus are so utterly unlike others Doniger engages in denigrating, distorting, and demeaning all Hindus (low or high caste, men or women) and what is worse, ‘defrocking’ (both theologically and sexually) their gods and goddesses. Such a book therefore does have the potential to harm the Hindu self-perception and identity, particularly, young Hindus who happen to live in the diaspora. 

Refer to Anti-Hindu Propaganda for Kids - hinduismabout.com

Indic and Hinduism studies in particular are also plagued by a strong prevalence of racist and (Judeo-Christian) fundamentalist attitudes amongst several western scholars. One only needs to peruse the archives of Liverpool Indology and other lists controlled by them to see how much abuse and discrimination Indians have to suffer in these professional discussion lists. Anyone from India contradicting the received wisdom of Western Indology is termed as a Hindu Nationalist. On the other hand, there are also quite a few academics of Indian origin who subscribe to Leftist and Communist ideologies and inject Indian politics in American Academe. When I went to college in India , we used to hear of Leftist and Communist controlled Teacher Unions in Delhi University and other places. Now I see that these same teacher union leaders are in American Universities in dozens. They will collude with anyone who can berate Hindus just because that is what they did when they were in India . Rajiv Malhotra has aptly used the term ‘sepoys’ for them.

Hindu haters will, in the course of time, quote her book to the effect that Hindu saints indulged in sexual orgies, that Hindu Deities were full of lust and so on. It is this kind of hatemongering against Jews that even led to their holocaust during WWII, and Doniger should understand it well enough.
 
It is a sad fact that most English writings on Hindu traditions are by writers who are not of Indian or Hindu origin. . One of the reasons why books by Western scholars get undue importance is that they are quoted profusely by their native informants – the Marxist historians of India , especially on matters related to Ancient and Modern India .

Timid Hindu Professors

The bane of the Hindu American community is that Professors in religious studies of Indic origin are too timid to stick out their necks and protest against this blatant distortion of our traditions.

They should decide whether their loyalty lies with their religious and cultural heritage, or with dishonest colleagues who treat them as ‘pillow dictionaries’ (to borrow a phrase used by Doniger) or as inferior native informants anyway. If a dozen of them develop some spine, the problem will disappear within a few months. The pathetic timidity that Hindu professors show is unparalleled in other religious traditions. Ironically, these same professors sometimes do not hesitate to collude with their prejudiced colleagues and run down their own co-religionists in the process to save their own skins.

(source: In Conversation With Dr. Shrinivas Tilak And Vishal Agarwal - By Ranjani Saigal - lokvani.com). Watch Rajiv Malhotra interviews Swami Nithyananda.

An Aging Communist and a Gutter scholar?

Vinod Mehta — the Aging communist editor of “Outlook” magazine and the despicable doormat of the Gandhi family (lovingly called Old Fox by Indians in India) — and the Hindu-phobic Wendy Doniger — lovingly called the Witch by Indians in the US — have come together to declare Lord Ram as a debauch and a woman-hater. 

Refer to RISA Lila - 1: Wendy's Child Syndrome - By Rajiv Malhotra and Wendy Doniger's Imagined History of The Hindus - By Hindu American Foundation.

Yawn! This is just an incestuous foreplay between two old Hindu haters who lie together in bed for convenience and their shared hatred of the pagans. One has not forgiven the Hindus for rejecting the Lord God of the Whites and treat their land as holy in contrast to their own; the other has not forgiven them for rejecting the prophet of No God, Karl Marx, whose weed he used to smoke in his university days in the seventies. This is what I talked about in my recent post about Indian communists and White church agents having appointed themselves as interpreters of Hinduism on behalf of the Hindus. (“We will tell the world what Hinduism is, not the Hindus. And anyone who does not agree with our interpretation is a fascist.”). The above link is a perfect example where this intellectual dishonesty is seen in action. Mehta and Dongier, both are not Hindus but are self-claimed authorities on everything related to the Hindus.

(source: Old Fox and the Witch - indianrealist.wordpress.com). Refer to Adam’s Family Jewels - by Tibor Krausz and  Indophobia: The Real Elephant in the Living Room - By Vamsee Juluri - huffingtonpost.com

Defaming Hinduism – By V Sundaram  

Hindus are the latest in a long list of 'savage' minorities to be pitted against the 'civilizing' force of the America 's Manifest Destiny. 

Unlike the frontier struggles of the past, this is not a physical battle with literal bloodshed, but a battle of ideas, where indigenous traditions and ways of knowledge are sought to be decimated by Western tropes and ontologies (brought forth by academic 'Pilgrims' venturing into foreign and exotic intellectual and cultural territory!), where the 'dead Indian' is not a physical body, but a deity (Ganesha, Shiva, the Goddess victimized by the psychoanalytical weapons of the academic battalion) or a saint like Sri Ramakrishna, defamed as a paedophile. It is only when we start looking at the ongoing raging controversy in terms of this paradigm that we can make sense of the war cry being sent out by the RISA Cartel against the indigenous Hindus re-staking their claim over their own intellectual and philosophical territory. 

No wonder Rajiv Malhotra is being viewed by American Indological scholars of the Chicago School as a Red Indian leader from the 'Savage Frontier', who has to be exterminated at all cost, in spite of all 'Hindu terror' and however long and hard the road may be!!   Wendy Doniger and her friends when they get worsted in any academic debate, they resort to vitriolic abuse and character assassination.

(source: Defaming Hinduism - By V Sundaram). Refer to Re-Writing History, Changing America’s Young Minds - New York times.

Afghanistan's marginalised Hindus

Despite its long history in the country, Afghanistan's Hindu minority has been pushed to the fringes of society

Perhaps Radha wasn't the most beautiful girl in Afghanistan. But such were this Hindu girl's looks and kindness that all of Kabul 's bachelors fell in love with her. Her fame was such that the people of Kabul composed a famous song for her. The song says: "We have made Lala promise not to cremate Radha". Nearly 80 years later, this song is still sung in Afghanistan. Lala, meaning brother, is the term Afghans use to refer to Hindus. In the song, the people ask Lala not to cremate Radha's beautiful body after her death, as is required by Hindu tradition.

During the reign of King Amanullah Khan (1919-1928) Radha's father, Ranji Das, was finance minister, a role that had long been filled by the Hindus of Afghanistan. But the growth of religious fundamentalism has now pushed the Hindus out of government offices, forcing them into the bazaars. It is now many years since a Hindu held a government post in the country. But they are still running a major part of the Afghan bazaars, and come second in trading medical products.

Overlooking Kabul is a mountain called Asmayi. The name is apparently a Hindu term, deriving from the goddess Asha. Today, the mountain has become the largest pilgrimage centre for Hindu worshippers. According to a Hindu tale, an eternal fire burns at the summit of Asmayi, a fire which has refused to die out for 4000 years. There are two other centres of worship in Kabul , the Harshari Natha temple in Kabul 's Baghban Kucha, and the Shorbazaar Temple . These are Kabul 's oldest temples, where Hindus celebrate divali and naradatar. They are also the meeting places of the Sikh and Hindu religious associations. In addition to these, Kabul today has many other newer and larger temples scattered in different parts of the city.

According to Professor Rajesh Kochhar's book, The Vedic People, Afghanistan is one of the oldest Hindu centres of the world. Kochhar says that a large part of Rigveda was written in Afghanistan , with Helmand and Arghandab being mentioned as sacred rivers in both the Rigveda and Mahabharata. The Surya temple, dedicated to the god of sun, and the Yogi of Panjshir, which represents a worshipper turned into stone, north of Kabul , are both ancient Hindu sites. And yet, if foreigners were to travel to Afghanistan today, they would encounter so few Hindus that they would assume the Hindus are either from elsewhere or recent immigrants. They would encounter a community that is neither playing its part in politics nor getting involved with the rest of the world.

Hindus are clearly among the oldest inhabitants of Afghanistan . They are the native people, whom Islamic fundamentalism has turned into unprotected strangers. Strangers, who this year found themselves forced to argue for days with Muslims in the centre of Kabul in order to be allowed to cremate their dead in line with their tradition. Strangers who never dare to send their children to school for fear of mockery.

In February 2001, during the Taliban's reign, Hindus found themselves forced to wear a distinguishing yellow stripe on their arm. Even though the Taliban have been removed, Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf, presently an MP in Karzai's administration, has expressed a similar opinion on TV:

The Sikhs and Hindus of Afghanistan are considered part of the dhimmi in line with sharia law. The government has an obligation to protect them but they are required to pay a poll tax. They can hold civilian occupations, such as doctors, but they cannot be in charge of a governmental body or office. Upon meeting a Muslim, a Hindu is required to greet the Muslim first. If a Muslim is standing and there is a chair, the Hindu is not allowed to sit down on the chair.

According to MP Anarkali Honaryar, a representative of Sikhs and Hindus in the Afghan parliament, the majority of the country's 200,000 Sikhs and Hindus are now living abroad, and the number of people leaving Afghanistan for India , Europe and or Pakistan grows by the day.

Friends of Afghanistan's cultural heritage increasingly fear that these ancient inhabitants of the country might one day meet with the same fate of other peoples of Afghanistan, including Jews and Buddhists, and so vanish from the the country altogether.

(source:  Afghanistan's marginalised Hindus -  By Reza Mohammadi - guardian.co.uk ).

How India ’s Intellectuals Spread Lies  

*** 

“Criticism of religion is the very measure of the guarantee of free speech – the literal sacred institution of society”. – Jonathon Turley

Greet Wilder (1963  ) Dutch politician, leader of the Party for Freedom, he has observed:

"What is happening in Europe should not come as a surprise. The reality is that where Islam roots, free speech dies. There is not a single Islamic country in het world where people are really totally free to say what they think. Ever since the so-called prophet Muhammad ordered his men to kill the poet Asma bint Marwan, the brave woman who warned her people against this murderous cult, radical Muslims think they have a license to kill anyone, who dares to criticize Muhammad’s word or actions. Free speech is Islam’s enemy. Islam is a threat to the Europe of Socrates, Voltaire and Galileo. "

"As I said, there are many moderate Muslims. But there is no such thing as a moderate Islam. Islam’s heart lies in the Koran. The Koran is an evil book that calls for violence and murder – Sura 4, Verse 89 and Sura 47, Verse 4 -, terrorism – Sura 8, Verse 60 – and war – Sura 8, Verse 39. The Koran describes Jews as monkeys and pigs – Sura 2, Verse 65 / Sura 5, Verse 60 and Sura 7, Verse 166. It calls non-Muslims liars, miscreants, enemies, ignorant, unclean, wicked, evil, the worst of creatures and the vilest of animals."

***

India's Useful Idiots  

Indian intellectuals seem to have a tryst with mendacity. They keep mouthing Leftists untruths ad nauseum, often without realizing that these are lies. Like the sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, they keep parroting Leftist lies, clichés, and platitudes – most of the time without understanding the consequences all these would lead to. Lenin coined an interesting term “useful idiots” for the Left leaning and liberal intellectuals who blindly and unquestioningly accepted Leftist lies.  

Useful Idiots?

 

              

The descendents of Gandhari

Jawaharlal Nehru, Arundhati Roy, Khushwant Singh, Kulip Nayar, P. Chidambaram, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Mushirul Hasan blindly follow the Left on all important issues. 

Refer to Dirty laundry at the Times of India - By Raja M

***

In India , too, we have an army of useful idiots – the eminent liberals who are always genuflecting to the Left. And all of them are honorable men and women, pontificating in newspapers and magazines, sermonizing in seminars and television talk shows. Some of the venerable names in India ’s public discourse – Jawaharlal Nehru, Arundhati Roy, Khushwant Singh, Kulip Nayar, P. Chidambaram, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Mushirul Hasan, among others – blindly follow the Left on all important issues. They are the descendents of Gandhari. According to Mahabharata, Gandhari had blindfolded herself since her husband, Dhritrashtra, was blind. Now Dhritrashtra’s blindness was more than physical; he was also blind to the delinquency of his son, Duryodhan; he refused to recognize the evil of Duroydhan. Dhritrashtra could not see evil; Gandhari did not want to see evil.  

Like Gandhari, liberal intellectuals do not want to see evil, be it the malevolence of socialism or of Islamic terror. But when it comes to critizing the RSS or the BJP, Indian liberals are extremely hostile and malicious; they are in the words of Irving Kristol (1920 - 2009) more anti-anti-communist than anti-communist. Now, for the Indian liberal anything “traditional bound” is anathema; and if the tradition is Hindu in essence, as it is in the case of India – whatever the purveyors of “composite culture” may say – he can only revile it.  

Indian liberals, however, are nice people. They read the right kind of authors (Edward Said and Noam Chomsky), for instance, and quote them adoringly; they pontificate over the fate of secularism and make the right kind of noises (the rise of communalism and fascism in India); they espouse cool causes (empowerment of dalits, uplift of women, awareness about AIDS, eradication of child labor, amelioration of the conditions of slum-dwellers); they hand their heads in shame when Babri Masjid is demolished (and keep mum over the spread of Islamic terror). Nice people: they go into raptures over play by Vijay Tendulkar (or by any other hater of Hindu society); they are the connoisseurs of High Art and High Culture; they visit Kamani Auditiorium and Vadhera Art Gallery; combine good etiquette with Left-libber rhetoric; they do not believe in offending anything chic, especially if it is as sacrosanct as received wisdom. Why think anything that has not been thought earlier? And why say anything that has not been said earlier? The veil of received wisdom is impenetrable, like maya, covering the reality. Which ensures that the Indian intellectual will never be “mugged by reality.”  

Tyranny of Decibels  

If you know a little bit of Islam and its inherently intolerant message, you are likely to point out that there is no “stereotyping”, that Islam is, well, like that only, and that Islam is what Islam does (and it is not what the Mushirul Hasans and the Edward Saids say it is), you would be denounced as an ignorant bigot. Hindu society is most iniquitous, unjust and unfair in the world, in which a small minority of upper castes oppress and exploit their less fortunate brethren scream Leftist intellectuals and casteist leaders like Kanshi Ram, Lalu Prasad Yadav, and Mayawati. If you have the courage to challenge such canards, you are inarguably a status quoits, an apologist of the barbaric caste system, and of course a Hindu fundamentalist.  

Interestingly, you will face only accusations and allegations; no reason or evidence is expected to substantiate the grave charges against you. You will argue, they will won’t; they will shout, and you will be shouted down. Similarly, once the high priests of secular-liberal inquisition brand you as communal, fascist, or anti-poor, there is no way you can challenge that. There will not even be a mock trial; only the charge is read out and immediately it becomes the verdict; your views will not even be heard; if you insist, you will be, well, shouted down. Abuse is the argument.

When decibels rule the roost, it is not surprising that the shrillest and the loudest noisemakers appear to be the most convincing campaigners; fashionable radicals and often vested interests masquerade as the crusaders of the truth. Communal harmony is just another way of bashing not merely the BJP, the Sangh Parivar, but often the entire Hindu society. The Left sets the agenda and the tune; intellectuals, because of their mental lethargy, are unable to see through the game and form the chorus. The intellectual bankruptcy of the so-called Indian Right just aggravates the matter. For, instead of effectively countering the Left’s hidden agenda, the semi-educated knickerwallahs either capitulate or lapse into gibberish.

(source: How India ’s Intellectuals Spread Lies  - By Ravi Shanker Kapoor  p. 1 - 28). How Free Are We? -  By Jakob De Roover - outlookindia.com January 28, 2010

Arundhati Roy – Sentimentalism oozing from very pore  

If you want to know what chic is, just have a look at Arundhati Roy’s recent writings. The latest intellectual fads, fashionable phraseology, high sounding rhetoric, sexy philanthropy, magnificent gibberish, high humbug – you will find everything there. It all adds up to a great style, but with little substance.  

Nietzsche once wrote: “I want to say in ten sentences what others say in ten volumes – and what they do not say.” In this respect Arundhati Roy is the antithesis of Nietzsche; her sentimentalism drives her to write rambling, long-winded essays on almost everything under the sun – from nuclear bombs to hydroelectric projects, from the pathos of tribals to the alleged perspicacity of Chomksy; write, without the necessary wherewithal, without the backing of any scholarship, without even proper understanding of any of the subjects. Borrowing heavily from Leftist cliché.  

Borrowing heavily from Leftist clichés and trendy shibboleths, adding a bit of Gandhi-like-love-for-pristine-things, and embellishing her arguments with a liberal dose of anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism, she produces essays which Outlook magazine – that platform for political correctness and cretinism – loves to publish. And since she has been acknowledged in the West, as a winner of Booker prize, her verbose denunciations pass off as eloquence, and half-baked analysis as expertise.  

She moves into the rarefied realms of Indology by saying:  

“Whether or not there has ever been a single civilization that could call itself “Indian civilization”, whether or not India was, is, or ever will be a cohesive cultural entity….Our country, as we know it, was forged on the anvil of the British Empire for the entirely unsentimental reason of commerce and administration…”  

 

       

If India never existed, where did Columbus want to reach? Why is the arrival of Vasco da Gama at Calicut considered a major event of world history? What did Megasthenes refer to by his treatise Indica? Why did Shankaracharya set up four seats of learning in four different parts of the country, and not merely his native Kerala? Why did very Hindu king want to become a Chakravarti Samrat, ruling the entire nation. And why did the Muslim kings of north India want to reach the natural boundaries of the Himalayas, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal ? Why did A L Basham write his monumental, The Wonder That Was India?  

Refer to Marco Polo never made to China and Marco Polo World Discovery Was Big Con

***

So, according to Arundhati Roy India does not exist. At any rate, not as a nation, not as a civilization; merely an administrative convenience, and that too of the erstwhile colonial masters. This is in tune with the official philosophy of British imperialists that India was merely a “geographical expression” – a thought not much different from that of communists. 

If India never existed, where did Columbus want to reach? Why is the arrival of Vasco da Gama at Calicut considered a major event of world history? What did Megasthenes refer to by his treatise Indica? Why did Shankaracharya set up four seats of learning in four different parts of the country, and not merely his native Kerala? Why did very Hindu king want to become a Chakravarti Samrat, ruling the entire nation. And why did the Muslim kings of north India want to reach the natural boundaries of the Himalayas, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal ? 

Why did A L Basham write his monumental, The Wonder That Was India?  

The problem with intellectuals like Arundhati Roy is that they are too lazy to use common sense or even just to look around before coming to conclusions. Slothfully, they reach out for the available Leftists explanations and slogans; the explanations unquestioningly accepted and slogans religiously chanted.  

(source: How India’s Intellectuals Spread Lies  - By Ravi Shanker Kapoor   p. 28 -  41).

Vaikuntha Chaturdasi 
It is believed that Lord Shiva gifted the Sudarshana Chakra to Lord Vishnu on this day. 

Vaikuntha Chaturdasi is observed on the 14th day of the waxing phase of moon (Shukla Paksha) in Kartik month. The day is dedicated to relationship of Lord Vishnu and Lord Shiva. It is believed that Lord Shiva gifted the Sudarshana Chakra to Lord Vishnu on this day. Vaikuntha Chaturdasi 2009 date is November 1. Vaikunda Chaturdashi Upvas (Fasting day) is marked on October 31 in many calendars.

Legend has it that Lord Vishnu one day decided to visit Lord Shiva who was residing at Kashi. Lord Vishnu collected 1000 lotus flowers from Manasarovar to offer it on the Shivaling at Kashi by reciting the 1000 names of Shiva. After collecting the flowers from Manasarovar in the Himalayas , Lord Vishnu reached Kashi and was warmly welcomed by Lord Shiva. Lord Vishnu then began to offer the flowers one by one to the Shivling at Kashi. He chanted a name of Lord Shiva and offered one lotus flower.  

 

     

It is believed that Lord Shiva gifted the Sudarshana Chakra to Lord Vishnu on this day. 

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Lord Vishnu was fully absorbed in the process and Lord Shiva decided to test Him and removed one lotus flower that Lord Vishnu had brought and hid it. Lord Vishnu chanted the 1000th name of Shiva and when he looked for the 100oth lotus flower it was missing. Immediately Lord Vishnu realized that He is known to his devotees as Kamalakanan – the lotus eyed. So he offered one of his eyes instead of the last Lotus.

Shiva was moved by this devotion of Lord Vishnu and immediately hugged Vishnu and thus restoring his eye. Lord Shiva then presented the Sudarshana Chakra to Vishnu to fight evil and accepted him as the supreme commander of the three worlds and one who sustains all living and nonliving beings. Lord Vishnu and Shiva are worshipped on the day and people observe Vaikunda Chaturdashi Upvas. Some people opt for a fast from sunrise to sunset.

(source: hindu-blog.com).

I am become Death, destroyer of worlds

Everyone knows that the dinosaurs were exterminated when an asteroid hit what is now Mexico about 65m years ago. The crater is there. It is 180km (110 miles) in diameter. It was formed in a 100m-megatonne explosion by an object about 10km across. The ejecta from the impact are found all over the world. The potassium-argon radioactive dating method shows the crater was created within a gnat’s whisker of the extinction. Calculations suggest that the “nuclear winter” from the impact would have lasted years. Plants would have stopped photosynthesising. Animals would have starved to death. Case closed.

Well, it now seems possible that everyone was wrong. The Chicxulub crater, as it is known, may have been a mere aperitif. According to Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University , the main course was served later. Dr Chatterjee has found a bigger crater—much bigger—in India . His is 500km across. The explosion that caused it may have been 100 times the size of the one that created Chicxulub. He calls it Shiva, after the Indian deity of destruction.

Dr Chatterjee presented his latest findings on Shiva to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland , Oregon , on October 18th. He makes a compelling case, identifying an underwater mountain called Bombay High, off the coast of Mumbai , that formed right at the time of the dinosaur extinction. This mountain measures five kilometres from sea bed to peak, and is surrounded by Shiva’s crater rim. Dr Chatterjee’s analysis shows that it formed from a sudden upwelling of magma that destroyed the Earth’s crust in the area and pushed the mountain upwards in a hurry. He argues that no force other than the rebound from an impact could have produced this kind of vertical uplift so quickly. And the blow that caused it would surely have been powerful enough to smash ecosystems around the world.

Further examination revealed a crater rich in shocked quartz and iridium, minerals that are commonly found at impact sites. (These are also the telltales in distant layers of ejecta that the rock in question has come from an impact.) Most important, the rocks above and below Shiva date it to 65m years ago. Dr Chatterjee therefore suggests that an object 40km in diameter hit the Earth off the coast of India and forced vast quantities of lava out of the Deccan Traps. As well as killing the dinosaurs the impact was, he proposes, responsible for breaking the Seychelles away from India . These islands and their surrounding seabed have long looked anomalous. They are made of continental rather than oceanic rock, and seem to be a small part of the jigsaw puzzle of continental drift rather than genuine oceanic islands.

This story, though, raises the question of why there is but a single ejecta layer of iridium and shocked quartz in late Cretaceous rocks around the world. One answer might be that the two impacts were, in effect, simultaneous—that the objects which created Shiva and Chicxulub were the daughters of a comet that had broken up in space and hit the Earth a few hours apart, as the pieces of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter in 1994. Other, smaller craters in the North Sea and Ukraine have been prayed in aid of this theory. Recent research suggests that there was, in fact, no impact in the North Sea at all, but the Ukrainian site does appear to be the result of a genuine collision that took place at the time of the dinosaur extinction and could therefore be connected with Shiva. But even if it is, it is so much smaller that its environmental effect would have been both minor and local.

The picture that is emerging, then, is of a strange set of coincidences. First, two of the biggest impacts in history happened within 300,000 years of each other—a geological eyeblink. Second, they coincided with one of the largest periods of vulcanicity in the past billion years. Third, one of them just happened to strike where these volcanoes were active. Or, to put it another way, what really killed the dinosaurs was a string of the most atrocious bad luck.

(source: I am become Death, destroyer of worlds - economist.com).

‘Hindu Democrats’ Inject Hindu Values Into U.S. Politics

A Democratic Party activist and a U.S. Army soldier currently deployed in Afghanistan have co-founded Hindu Democrats, a Virginia-based political action committee aiming “to mobilize the Indian American bloc in the United States” to support Democratic Party candidates through the “representation of Hindu American values in American politics.”

Hindu Democrats executive director and co-founder Bharat Krishnan, a junior at American University in Washington, D.C., told India-West that his fledgling organization “respects the separation of church and state as one of the bedrock principles” of the U.S.

Nevertheless, he said, “Religious organizations have always sought political representation - the great thing about America is that there is the opportunity to form many of these organizations to make sure that no one organization wields too much power.”

The organization’s co-founder, Rajiv Srinivasan, is a 2008 graduate of West Point currently in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan .

(source:  ‘Hindu Democrats’ Inject Hindu Values Into U.S. Politics - indiawest.com).

Did You know

USS Warships Krishna and Indra

They fought valiantly in wars, defended the United States and were manned by hundreds of sea men for decades. The American Navy's Achleous class of ships, named after a Greek river Deity, includes the USS Krishna and USS Indra. Built during World War II, they are the only two US Navy ships named after Hindu Gods.     

                                  

                  

The USS Krishna and USS Indra.

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Both USS Krishna and USS Indra are repair ships, support units that provide maintenance and succor for other ships. At 100 meters long, they are built to be able to stand on their own in a battle. The ships had their maiden voyage in 1945. They both participated in the Vietnam war and were functional until the 1970's, when US Krishna was sold and USS Indra retired. The latter was ceremoniously sunk in 1992 off the coast of North Carolina, in an effort to create an artificial coral reef.

(source: Hinduism Today  - Jan/Feb/March, 2010 p. 14).

 

 

 
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