Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars, by Koenraad Elst.

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Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars,

by Koenraad Elst.

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As stated by the author in the introduction, this is a collection of his papers from 2005 to 2018, on various topics, dealing with different aspects of India and Hinduism, and as the others see them or react to them.

Elst does persist in making asinine statements, whether to merely provoke or often from racism, ignorance et al.

Often Elst makes comments that leave one uncertain if he's ignorant about India, being racist, or trying to prove he hasn't gone native.

"Nonetheless, let me offer some general observations. If Hindus are wrong anywhere in their evaluation of Aurangzeb, it is not in misstating his record, which was highly reprehensible even by the standards of his own day. But because of the crimes he undeniably committed against the mass of non-Muslims and against a few unorthodox Muslims, Hindus tend to launch this shrill rhetoric against the person Aurangzeb, as if he were an evil man. He was not. ... "

Yes he was, in killing and maiming people to bend them to his will, apart from the general atmosphere of atrocities he encouraged perpetrated against nonmuslims. He not only blinded Sambhaji, elder son of Shivaji, for refusing to covert, but had sons of a Sikh guru beheaded before they were past mid-teens, and then there's the boiling a man alive to death because he was in love with a daughter of his. Those specific instances might not quite match achievements of Mengele or Eichmann, but the sadusm is only different in number of victims, if that. Evil, yes, on par with any Nazi war criminals, punished or otherwise.

One might equally well opine, on the lines of Elst - and of course, everyone on the other side - disclaiming evil of Aurangzeb, that Mengele wasn't evil, he was a normal medical doctor with an aesthetic bent, immaculately dressed, pleasant with most people including those he selected or otherwise, and deeply interested in the scientific experiments. It woukd be all true and attested for even by holocaust survivors, all except certification as "not evil".

Germans certainly do not think there was anything wrong with a young man choosing to join SS because alternative was to be sent to "Russia, where it was very cold; so what if one had to .... " - and that statement was from a Bavarian in his early twenties during mid 1980s, too young to experience any of it,

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Contents

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Introduction

1.Hindu Fearlessness through the Ages

2.Is Yoga Hindu? The Court Verdict

3.Did Ramakrishna Also Practise Other Religions?

4.Aum In or Out for International Yoga Day?

5.Is Yoga Hindu? The Question at Face Value

6.The Modi Government as an Exponent of BJP Secularism

7.Debating the Hindu Right

8.The Confabulated Murder of Saint Thomas

9.Pluralism in Ilā’s City

10.The Sati Strategy

11.Hindus Need Dharmic Awakening? Rather, the BJP needs Dharmic Awakening

12.Book Review of ‘Academic Hinduphobia: A Critique of Wendy Doniger’s Erotic School of Indology’

13.The Aurangzeb Debate

14.Ayodhya: Meeting Romila Thapar Halfway

15.Guha’s Golwalkar

16.The RSS in Western Media

17.In Favour of Freedom of Expression

18.Academic Bullies

19.Macaulay’s Life and Times

20.Indraprastha vs Dînpanah: Nothing Communal about ‘Indraprastha’

21.A Diversity of ‘White Saviours’

22.Symbolism of India’s Anthem

23.Down with ‘Nationalism’

24.Pishacha Vivaha and Rakshasa Vivaha: On the Notion of a ‘Lesser Evil’

25.Standing Up for the Purusha Sukta

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Introduction

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"The present volume is a collection of my papers from 2012 to 2018. All of them, tangentially or centrally, pertain to India’s ongoing culture wars. They are not about ancient or medieval history (where I have mainly been writing about the Indo-European homeland theories and the genesis and intra-Hindu status of Buddhism, therefore about religious conflict), except insofar as it impacts current debates.

"‘Culture wars’ is a term that dates back to the nineteenth century and to the German nation-builder Otto von Bismarck, who started a struggle with the Church for control over education—the Kulturkampf (culture war). Though he lost the struggle, the term gained currency in the United States (US) as the debate between modern and religious worldviews. In the broader sense, it can refer to any non-economic controversy. To the men who think that only economic matters are ‘the real issue’, these cultural controversies are but a distraction."

"With our own history of Christian pangs of conscience over this taking control of one’s own death (as had once been common among the pagan Romans, where Stoic philosophers such as Seneca justified it), we should understand that Hindu society has always accepted euthanasia—not suicide by a lovesick Romeo but a mature end to life by a person who has his or her reasons for doing so. Hinduism has a more relaxed attitude to death, seen through the larger perspective of reincarnation, and appreciates the renunciation that death brings. This is where the fundamental values of civilization come into play and where, as American culture warriors are wont to say, ‘ideas have consequences’. Except for advanced yogis who are said to be able to control their own life force and hence their time of passing, the usual procedure is fasting unto death. Some well-known modern cases are V.D. Savarkar in 1966 and Vinoba Bhave in 1982. Among Jains, it is, in fact, quite common.

"When Bhave lay on his deathbed, he was visited by then prime minister Indira Gandhi. Immediately, secularist editorials had written about how he was entitled not to Indira’s respect but to a time in jail and force-feeding, because he was trespassing against the law of the land. But this law, which prohibited a gentle death, had been enacted by the British and had its roots in the colonial era, in which the savage natives were ‘civilized’ by imposing on them Christian-inspired beliefs. Only God, not man, should have control over life and death—such was the Christian view. Here, as elsewhere, secularists, without any proper reflection, had just expressed their knee-jerk opposition to anything that was remotely Hindu. They were identifying with colonial rule, and had internalized a Christian position without even realizing it. (They were also exhibiting an anti-democratic mentality, as if the law of the land is something imposed on us rather than something we ourselves can evaluate and modify.)"

"This difference between the separate legitimate identities of different groups and the total equality envisaged by modern liberalism is most readily visible in the largest cultural shift around: women’s emancipation. In the US army, women now have the right to every job that men do, including frontline combat duty. Even the Israeli army, for long the yardstick of women’s participation in national defence, has never gone that far. Likewise, India has a more realistic approach to women’s rights than the American variety of feminism. Madhu Kishwar’s periodical, Manushi, is the pioneer of this rooted and more mature form of feminism in Indian society."

"The definition of ‘secularism’ is a uniquely Indian concern. Muslims and Christians, no matter how radical or obscurantist, call themselves secularists, even if their counterparts abroad may abhor secularism. Many Nehruvians, too, consider themselves secularists, even if they are not sure of the right definition of the nebulous ideology they swear by. And those in the Hindutva brigade do the same, but make use of a more qualified term—‘real secularism’ or ‘positive secularism’.

"Within their discourse, however, a conspicuous evolution has taken place, one towards Nehruvian secularism, with Narendra Modi extolling ‘development’ (from infrastructure and digitalization to toilets) at the expense of specifically Hindu priorities, thus echoing Jawaharlal Nehru’s praise of hydroelectricity generators as ‘our new temples’, discarding the need for the classical sort. At the time of writing, the Nehruvians and their foreign allies are still suppressing the acknowledgment that the erstwhile Hindutva forces have indeed, for better or for worse, evolved in the direction of secularism. Considering the fanciful foreign reporting in 2014–19 about a non-existent fanatical Hindu government, they are still succeeding in their disinformation."

"I dedicate this collection to the Vedic foremother Ilā, and to all first-born sisters, including my own.

"Koenraad Elst

"18 February 2019, Delhi"

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February 13, 2022 - February 13, 2022.

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1. Hindu Fearlessness through the Ages

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"Hindus are often confined to the Gandhian niche of being infinitely tolerant. They are expected to take everything lying down. If they show some self-respect, they are told that this isn’t ‘really Hindu’.

"One hears it all too often: ‘Hindus are cowards, they only deserve what they are suffering.’ Mahatma Gandhi said it clearly enough: ‘The Muslim is a bully, the Hindu a coward.’** But Hindus are by no means cowards. Hindus as such have their problems, but lack of bravery is not one of them.

"Look at the Bangladesh war of 1971. The Pakistani army was brave enough as long as its job consisted of, among other things, perpetrating crimes against Bengali women, but as soon as the Indian Army appeared on the scene, all they could do was flee and surrender. The Indian Army liberated the oppressed Muslims and the persecuted Hindus of Bangladesh. Or look at the Kargil War of 1999. Though politicians forbade Indian soldiers from taking the war into enemy territory by crossing the Pak border, the Indian Army besieged the Kargil mountain which the Pak invaders had taken, and reconquered it.

"Let us look at the historical record. First off, the Vedas and the Hindu epics, like most ancient writings, extol bravery. The Bhagavad Gita also underpins its plea for bravery on the battlefield with a typically Hindu (at least very un-Christian and un-Islamic) philosophy, namely the belief in reincarnation. Cicero and Caesar had noted the Gallic men’s battlefield bravery and its connection to their belief in reincarnation. This was equally true of the Hindu warriors: they were not afraid of death.

"Then, Hindus stopped Alexander the Great. To be sure, this is old history, we have a paucity of reliable sources about what really happened. At any rate, Alexander’s soldiers were uniquely far from home and understandably unwilling to go farther even if they could. But the fact remains: the great Alexander was satisfied with the Iranian provinces of India’s frontier and declined to enter India proper. That was no mean achievement of the Hindus.

"Then the Shakas, Kushanas and Hunas managed to gain a foothold in India’s Northwest. The Shakas were defeated—the Vikram calendar begins with this victory. These conquering foreigners were not fully expelled, but at least they were absorbed. There is no distinct Shaka, Kushana or Huna community today, much less do they demand minority privileges.

"The Muslims entered Indian history with a naval attack north of present-day Mumbai a few years after Prophet Mohammed’s death. It was repelled. Then for half a century, they sent a number of expeditions overland from Mesopotamia to Sindh. Each expedition was defeated.

"While conquering North Africa was a cakewalk, there was a caliph who expressed his reluctance to send another army to Sindh, because those expeditions only cost the lives of so many good Muslims. But, of course, if you keep trying, you will break through one day. So eventually, Mohammed bin Qasim occupied Sindh in AD 712. But even then, his successor was soon defeated.

"Meanwhile, the Muslim armies conquered Central Asia, and their next attack was through Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass. Afghanistan was ruled by the Hindu Shahiya dynasty, which gave them a long-drawn-out fight. But towards the year AD 1000, the Muslims finally won, and the Shahiya king killed himself when he found himself unable to defend his subjects. From Afghanistan, Mahmud Ghaznavi entered India proper for what his court chroniclers described as raids.

"In fact, he would have been happy enough to occupy India permanently, but the Hindus were still too strong for that. However, what the Hindus had in bravery, they lacked in alertness. They didn’t realize that Islam was a new type of enemy, much more difficult to digest than the earlier invaders. In the peripheral Kashmir region, the king acted ‘secular’ and gave Muslims positions of power and confidence, which then gave them the opportunity to take steps towards the Islamization of the region. This scenario would be repeated many times, down to the present.

"Thus, the kings of the Vijayanagar empire showed off their broad-mindedness (now mis-termed ‘secularism’) by hiring Muslim troops, only to find in the battle of Talikota that their Muslim armies defected to the Muslim opponent camp and inflicted defeat on their erstwhile Hindu overlord. (For doubting Thomases, this inconvenient fact has even made it past Nehruvian controls into standard textbooks such as K.A. Nilakanta Sastri’s A History of South India: From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar, or Hermann Kulke’s and Dietmar Rothermund’s A History of India.)

"Meanwhile, Mahmud’s nephew Salar Masud Ghaznavi made a successful foray into the Ganga basin. The Hindu kings in the neighbourhood got together to stop him. Led by Maharaja Sukh Dev, and including the famous philosopher-king Raja Bhoja, they defeated Ghaznavi in the battle of Bahraich near Ayodhya in AD 1033.

"It is a different matter that sentimental Hindu sleepwalkers of later years joined their Muslim neighbours in worshipping at Salar Masud Ghaznavi’s grave, not appreciating the bravery and foresight of the Hindu kings and soldiers who had defeated him. There are certain things very wrong with the Hindu mentality, but again, lack of bravery is not among them. For more than a century and a half, the people of the Ganga basin considered Islamic invasions a thing of the past."

"Hindu sleepwalkers of later years joined their Muslim neighbours in worshipping at Salar Masud Ghaznavi’s grave"???? Never heard of it.

"But then, the breakthrough came. It was not due to Hindu cowardice, but due to Hindu magnanimity and overconfidence. A year after being defeated by Prithviraj Chauhan, who had spared him, Mohammed Ghori did battle again and took his erstwhile victor captive. After blinding and executing Prithviraj, he and his generals conquered the entire Ganga plain, using newer battlefield strategies.

"From there, they would extend their power southwards to cover almost the whole subcontinent in due course. But for five centuries and a half, the Hindus had prevented this, while West Asia, North Africa and Spain had fallen within eighty years.

"The age of Muslim expansion was again marked by endless Hindu resistance. Wise Muslim rulers opted for a compromise with this unbeatable foe (misinterpreted by secularists as ‘secularism’), but more zealous rulers depleted their forces in endless wars.

"In this endeavour, they were helped by a stream of West-Asian adventurers and African slave-soldiers who came to India to increase the Delhi Sultanate’s large standing armies. The Muslim states were totally geared to warfare, something rare in Hindu history. For this reason, we can say with the comfort of hindsight that the Muslims could finally have conquered all of the subcontinent had they remained united.

"Even Hindu bravery could probably not have prevented it, any more than the brief acts of North African bravery could stop the Islamization of North Africa. But fortunately, Muslim states or Muslim ethnic lobbies within a state also fought each other, which gave Hindus a chance to regroup and mount another counter-attack.

"Also, some Hindu kings did what they thought best under the circumstances, viz. they surrendered without war, paid tribute and retained sufficient autonomy to house rebels from other areas or become rebellious themselves once circumstances allowed it.

"For a comeback, it was important to have these free territories (just like the reconquista of Spain was possible only because its Asturian region had managed to remain free since the beginning). Their collaboration was not cowardice but a ruse to gain time. All the same, this meant that many Hindus enlisted in the armed forces of sagacious Muslim rulers.

"Akbar, who had consolidated his power by defeating the Hindu ruler Himu, was smart enough to keep enough of the Hindus on his side to overpower rival Muslim claimants and to fight Hindu freedom fighters. Famously, the rebellious Rana Pratap was countered by Man Singh, who wielded the sword of the Moghul empire. Hindu bravery was employed by Muslim rulers.

"Finally, in the seventeenth century, a rebellious Shivaji, born in a family of collaborators, would arise and restore Hindu sovereignty. Where his Maratha army appeared, defeat of its enemies was a certainty. The Moghul empire became a mere shadow of its former self, while military power rested with the Marathas.

"In 1817, the Peshwas, who had taken over the Maratha confederacy, were terminally defeated by the British. But again, this was not for Hindus’ lack of bravery. They fought like lions, and on the other side, other Hindu divisions fought like lions for the British, who could conquer and rule India without doing too much fighting themselves.

"If something can be held against the Marathas and their Peshwa successors, it is not lack of bravery or military prowess, but lack of proper ideological motivation. This is why they spilt their energies in predatory raids against other Hindu populations, it is why their leader Mahadji Scindia prostrated before the powerless Moghul emperor in 1771, it is why some Peshwa descendants could be enticed into a Hindu-Muslim or Moghul-Maratha cooperation (which was really a case of mutual deception) in the Mutiny of 1857. They lapsed from Shivaji’s sense of mission as the liberator of the Hindus."

"They haven’t emulated the techniques by which the secularists, like the British of yore, exercise power totally out of proportion to their numbers. They haven’t figured out how to stop the phenomenon of ‘Hindus wielding the sword of Islam’, in which Akbar exulted, but which has become so commonplace under the guise of secularism. For that, an analysis of all the factors in the field is necessary."

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February 13, 2022 - February 13, 2022.

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2. Is Yoga Hindu? The Court Verdict

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"In the debate over the definition of Hinduism, it is often asked whether yoga is Hindu."

"A county judge in San Diego, California, has ruled that yoga is not always religious (Washington Post, 2 July 2013). Parents in a San Diego school district had complained that yoga was intrinsically intertwined with the Hindu religion and that its practice in a public school setting violated the constitutional separation of church and state. The court ruling means that these parents had it wrong: It is possible to divorce yoga from Hinduism, and that is how the local school authorities have gone about their yoga classes.

"While yoga may be religious in some contexts, and then notably Hindu, it can also be practised and taught purely for its benefits. Modern school authorities see these benefits mostly in the form of strength, suppleness and nervous relaxation, as well as combating aggressiveness and bullying. Therapists might add the benefit of restoring or at least improving normalcy in individuals afflicted with burnout, nervous breakdown, certain complexes and other mental disorders. Serious practitioners would invoke calmness, renunciation, even liberation (howsoever defined), as worthy goals for human beings who are perfectly healthy from the beginning. But all of them would do so without reference to Shiva, or Ganesha, or whichever God it is that Hindu yogis invoke."

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"YOGA IS INTRINSICALLY HINDU"

"This judgment is part of a broader struggle over the origins and nature of yoga. Some Christians, apparently including the litigating parents from San Diego, object that yoga is intrinsically Hindu and that it serves as a conduit for Hindu polytheistic god worship and even for ‘evil Hindu social mores’ such as caste discrimination, arranged marriage and widow-burning. It is, of course, also debated on how far these mores and this polytheism are bound with Hinduism, but it is universally agreed that, at least as a system of worship, Hinduism is different from Christianity.

"For the same reason, these circles had in the past opposed Transcendental Meditation, a simplified form of mantra meditation, for being obviously Hindu, even though advertised as ‘scientific’. They had hired specialized lawyers (or ‘cult busters’) to show that the various gurus who seduced Americans into yoga were salesmen of Hinduism-based cults.

"These Christians find odd allies in the Hindus who insist that yoga is indeed naturally Hindu, and that the bead-counting and incense-waving and greeting gestures and, indeed, prayers that Hindu yogis practise, all come with the yoga package and cannot be divorced from it. They criticize American yoga aficionados, such as many showbiz stars and, indeed, the San Diego yoga schoolteachers, for reducing yoga to a fitness system without its cultural roots."

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"YOGA IS UP FOR GRABS"

"On the other side of the divide are those Hindus who say that yoga is scientific and universal, so that it is only normal for it to take on local cultural forms wherever it goes. The motorcar was invented in Germany, but few people driving a Japanese car still remember this. The aeroplane was invented in America, but this invention is now available to travellers all over the world. The Chinese don’t put a sign ‘invented in America’ on their planes, nor do they pay intellectual property rights on them. Of course, Chinese textbooks have a line or two on the aeroplane’s invention by the Wright brothers, and that nod to American honour will suffice. As the late Bal Thackeray used to say: ‘You cannot take the swadeshi (“national produce”) policy too far, for then Indians would have to do away with the light bulb.’ So Hindus should be happy that Americans are willing to practise their yoga, and apart from a historical detail of origins, India or Hinduism no longer come in the picture.

"And this still is a neutral rendering of the viewpoint of a sizable number of Hindus. We don’t even mention moneymakers like Deepak Chopra, who try to obscure yoga’s Hindu origins in order to claim certain yoga techniques as their own.* Aseem Shukla aptly calls him the front runner of ‘how to deconstruct, repackage and sell Hindu philosophy without calling it Hindu!’ Chopra likens the Hindu rejection of his appropriation of yoga as ‘the resentment of an inventor who discovered Coca-Cola or Teflon but neglected to patent it’, thus explicitly subjecting Hindu tradition to American commercialism.) Some yoga schools, whether manned by native Hindus or by Christian-born Westerners, have patented their own brand name and techniques, so that nobody, and certainly not Hindu tradition, can claim these.

"This tendency is strengthened by the attempt of some Hindus to deny a Hindu identity even to the worldview they themselves are advertising, e.g. as I have witnessed several times, the Hare Krishnas worship Krishna, a Hindu god par excellence, yet tell Western audiences that they are not Hindu; or the Ramakrishna Mission, founded in the late nineteenth century under the motto ‘Say with pride, we are Hindus’, now says that its message is ‘universal’ rather than ‘narrowly Hindu’ (as analysed in detail by Ram Swarup in The Ramakrishna Mission: In Search of a New Identity, 1986).

"Again, these Hindus find odd allies in many Christians, both the lukewarm and the activist kind. Lukewarm Christians, as well as New Age ex-Christians, see yoga as a neutral and universal commodity. For them, it can be practised as a fitness system without having any serious implications on their worldview or religion. Just as the European colonizers used the compass and gunpowder without bothering that these were Chinese inventions, American yogis have taken yoga for its tangible benefits without bothering about its Hindu origins. Even the Sanskrit names of the yoga exercises have been translated, so that you can become an accomplished yogi without even being reminded of its exotic origins.

"Activist Christians, by contrast, admit that yoga is not religiously neutral. They want to adapt yoga because of its inherent attractiveness, and transform it into ‘Christian yoga’, as they themselves call it (e.g. Yogafaith.org or Christianspracticingyoga. com). To them, yoga has indeed historically been linked with Hinduism, but can be delinked from it and tied to another religion. We have even reached the stage where some Christian centres and schools back in India offer classes in ‘Christian yoga’."

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"YOGA HAS HINDU ROOTS"

"First off, it is a matter of course that yoga is Hindu. The word ‘Hindu’ is a very general term encompassing every Indian form of pagan religion, no matter how old. It is, therefore, simply silly to say ‘yoga is older than Hinduism’, as Deepak Chopra does (for example, in his just-cited debate with Aseem Shukla). The question, then, becomes whether yoga can be divorced from Hinduism and given a neutral universal identity, as claimed by the San Diego yoga teachers, or even relinked to another religion, as is claimed by the adepts of ‘Christian yoga’.

"A system of physical fitness, if it is only that, can certainly be integrated in modern Western or purportedly global culture. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad already says, and the later hatha yoga classics more colourfully assert, that the yoga practitioner develops a healthy and lustrous body. They even lure the readers into practice by intimating that one becomes irresistible to the opposite sex—the very reason why most modern Americans take up yoga. Like the aeroplane or the light bulb, a system of physical fitness can be exported and inculturated, divested of its original couleur locale.

"However, it is worth emphasizing that yoga, and even particularly hatha yoga, does have Hindu roots, because this seemingly trivial knowledge is now being challenged. A few academics have claimed that Chinese ‘internal alchemy’ (Neidan) travelled overseas to coastal India and influenced Indian siddha yoga and siddha medicine. A few techniques of hatha yoga do seem similar to older Daoist exercises from China. The influence has been posited but by no means proven. I am willing to consider it probable, but even then it was only an influence on a few exercises in a long-existing native tradition. It is nobody’s case that the Rig Vedic reference to ‘munis’, wandering ascetics with ashes over their naked bodies (still recognizable as the Naga sadhus), or the Upanishadic glorification of the breath as the key to consciousness and self-mastery, or Patañjali’s description of a whole yoga system, is due to foreign influence."

It's silly in the first place to posit that China is an older civilisation or that India isn't older, either due to India being colonised or due to Chinese bullying. As for claims, why reject Russian claims to various discoveries with derision and accept Chinese ones with fanfare? Chinese occupation of Tibet wasn't protested with a word by any nation in UN, but US went bankrupt financing corrupt Pakistan generals to conduct jihafist war in Afghanistan where the government had invited Russian help to deal with jihadusts, and allowed terrorist attacks against India by pakis meanwhile using US funding and other stuff.

China claims Tibet, and several parts of India, belong to China. China lies.

"Very recently, the American media has gone gaga over a new theory claiming that hatha yoga is very recent and is essentially a gift from the British colonizers. This can, of course, not be said for the breathing exercises so typical of hatha yoga, but many of the postures are said to be standard exercises of British soldiers, or to be part of Western systems of gymnastics. Even in this limited form, the claim is ridiculous. The essence of hatha yogic postures is relaxation and allowing a steadily held pose to take its effect over time. By contrast, Western gymnastics pride themselves on being ‘dynamic’, of emphasizing movement and muscle strength. Further, a very physical circumstance comes in the way: Yogic exercises are mostly done on the floor. In cold England, the floor is avoided, witness the generalized use of chairs and of the ‘English’ water closet. Any influence would have to be confined to the standing exercises. At any rate, if at all there was Western influence, it can never have been more than an influence touching the skin of an already old native tradition."

Just ask a British regiment to do a Vrikshaasana in tandem for ten minutes. One minute would be surprising enough if they can do it even individually, much less as a regiment all in sync. Even easier, try Padmaasana, properly, not just one leg over other but two intertwined. Then touch forehead to ground without breaking the Padmaasana.

Stop claiming and taking credit. Theft of Kohinoor and harvests, and much, much more, was bad enough.

"But even hatha yoga sees its physical and breathing exercises only as a means to a higher end: liberation. A fortiori, the ancient yoga synthesized by Patañjali was totally geared towards liberation, howsoever defined. The definition of his kaivalya (‘isolation’ of consciousness from its objects, his supreme state) is: quieting the mind so that it consciously rests in itself and is not absorbed by its usual objects. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in reincarnation, or an afterlife, or nothing at all: it suffices to let the self rest in itself, right now. Whatever liberation may be, it is definitely different from, and incompatible with, Christian salvation."

And liberation is only a first step. Ultimate aim of yoga, as of everything in Hinduism, is achieving union with Divine, Yoga literally meaning union in Sanskrit and in every language of Indian origin.

"But this is a goal not pursued in most American yoga studios. They aim to make singers better singers, caregivers better caregivers, workers better workers. This has been done before: After the Buddhists had familiarized the Chinese with meditation, some Confucians still rejected the Buddhist philosophy of renunciation and liberation, but embraced the practice of meditation, just to ‘tune their instrument’, to function better in society. You can do this, but it is not the fullness of yoga. Also, all the Western therapeutic adaptations of yoga, as a treatment of physical or mental ailments, are designed to make a defective human being normal; while the original yoga was meant to make normal people liberated. So, by commodifying yoga, Americans are importing something from India, but not the whole package."

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February 13, 2022 - February 13, 2022.

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3. Did Ramakrishna Also Practise Other Religions?

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"Modern anglicized Hindus, both ‘secularists’ and loyally practising Hindus, are overwhelmingly under the spell of the colonial-age current of thought known as the Bengal Renaissance, sometimes more broadly as the Hindu Revival. A key idea that germinated during this movement and became a mantra under Mahatma Gandhi and an unassailable dogma in secularist India today, is that ‘all religions are equally valid’, often even ‘equally true’. This idea was pioneered within the Kolkata-based Brahmo Samaj, and became the received wisdom among educated Bengalis even before 1900. A case in point was the Ramakrishna (RK) Mission, launched by Ramakrishna’s disciple Swami Vivekananda. "

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"Part 1*

"When the RK Mission sought recognition as a minority ca. 1990, its central argument for its non-Hindu character was that, unlike Hinduism, it upheld ‘equal truth of all religions’ and ‘equal respect for all religions’. The latter slogan was popularized by Mahatma Gandhi as sarva-dharma-samabhâva, a formula officially approved and upheld in the BJP’s constitution. In 1983, RK Mission spokesman Swami Lokeshwarananda said: ‘Is Ramakrishna only a Hindu? Why did he then worship in the Christian and Islamic fashions? He is, in fact, an avatar of all religions, a synthesis of all faiths.’*

"The basis of the Swami’s claim, as per Swarup, is a story that Swami Vivekananda’s guru, Paramahansa Ramakrishna (1836–1886) once, in 1866, dressed up as a Muslim and then continued his spiritual exercises until he had a vision, and likewise as a Christian in 1874. If at all true, these little experiments shouldn’t be given too much weight, considering Ramakrishna’s general habit of dressing up a little for devotional purposes, e.g. as a woman, to experience Krishna the lover through the eyes of His beloved Radha (not uncommon among Krishna devotees in Vrindavan); or hanging from trees to impersonate Hanuman, worshipped as the monkey god and a close ally of Rama.**

"But is the story true? Author Ram Swarup finds that it is absent in the earliest recordings of Ramakrishna’s own talks. It first appears in a biography written twenty-five years after Ramakrishna’s death by Swami Saradananda,*** who had known the Master only in the last two years of his life. Even then, mention (on just one page in a 1,050-page volume) is only made of a vision of a luminous figure. The next biographer, Swami Nikhilananda, ventures to guess that the figure was ‘perhaps Mohammed’. In subsequent versions, this guess became a dead certainty, and that ‘vision of Mohammed’ became the basis of the doctrine that he spent some time as a Muslim, and likewise as a Christian, and that he ‘proved the truth’ of those religions by attaining the highest yogic state on those occasions.

"It is hard not to sympathize with Swarup’s scepticism. In today’s cult scene, there are enough wild claims abroad, and it is only right to hold their propagators guilty (of gullibility, if not of deception) until proven innocent. In particular, a group claiming experimental verification of a religious truth claim as the unique achievement of its founder, should not be let off without producing that verification here and now. Shady claims about an insufficiently attested event more than a century ago will not do. It is entirely typical of the psychology behind this myth-making that a researcher can make such claims. Neither Swami Vivekananda, nor any other monk known to the author, ever carried out his own experiments. They all accepted the truth of all religions on the basis of their master’s work. This is the familiar pattern of the followers of a master who are too mediocre to try for themselves that which they consider is the basis of the master’s greatness, but who do not hesitate to make claims of superiority for their sect on that same (untested, hearsay) basis."

Easy and cheap comments about Hindus is one thing, what about church?

Did even any pope, much less every member of every church, try crucifixion and resurrection to prove it can be done? Or failing, question if the story?

How about virgin mother of the son of God, whose virginity was, according to gospels, intact after the - natural - birth of the son? Anyone try repeating that experiment?

Or say the church lies?

................................................................................................

"WAS RAMAKRISHNA A MUSLIM? OR A CHRISTIAN?"

"For some more polemical comment, let us look into one typical pamphlet by a Hindu upholding the Hindu character of the Ramakrishna Mission: The Lullaby of Sarva-Dharma-Samabhâva by Siva Prasad Ray (included as chapter 7 of his book Turning of the Wheel, Houston 1985). The doctrine of ‘equal respect for all religions’ (in fact, even a more radical version, ‘equal truth of all religions’) is one of the attributes claimed by the RK Mission as setting it apart from Hinduism.

"This doctrine is propagated by many English-speaking gurus, and one of its practical effects is that Hindu girls in Westernized circles (including those in overseas Hindu communities) who fall in love with Muslims feel justified in disobeying their unpleasantly surprised parents, and often taunt them: ‘What is the matter if I marry a Muslim and your grandchildren become Muslims? Don’t these babas to whom you give your devotion and money always say that all religions teach the same thing, that Islam is as good as Hinduism, that Allah and Shiva are one and the same?’

"When such marriages last (many end in early divorce), a Hindu or Western environment often leads to the ineffectiveness of the formal conversion of the Hindu partner to Islam, so the children are not raised as Muslims. Yet, Islamic law seems to impose on the Muslim partner the duty to see to this, and in a Muslim environment, there is no escape from this Islamizing pressure. Thus, after the Meenakshipuram mass conversion to Islam in 1981, non-converted villagers reported to the effect that there had been marriages between Hindu harijans and the converts. Whether it was the bride or the groom, the Hindu was expected to convert to Islam.*

"Even when the conversion is an ineffective formality, such marriages or elopements which trumpet the message that Hindu identity is unimportant and dispensable do have an unnerving effect on vulnerable Hindu communities in non-Hindu environments. They also remain an irritant to Hindus in India, as here to writer Siva Prasad Ray. More generally, the doctrine that all religions are the same leaves Hindus intellectually defenceless before the challenge of communities with more determination to uphold and propagate their religions."

Use there of "irritant" reminds one of the author of 'Life With Father, Life With Mother', who speaks of reading a French Bible and finding the word "irrite" replace the English "wroth" diminishing god.

"To counter the facile conclusion that Ramakrishna had practised Christianity and Islam and proven their truth, Ray points out that Ramakrishna was neither baptized nor circumcised, that he is not known to have affirmed the Christian or Islamic creed. Likewise, he failed to observe Ramzan or Lent, he never took Christian or Islamic marriage vows with his wife, and he never frequented churches or mosques. This objection is entirely valid: Thinking about Christ or reading some Islamic book is not enough to be a Christian or a Muslim."

The only condition of belonging to either of them is repudiation of "all other", and Ramakrishna certainly never renounced Kaalie, in particular, or Hinduism in general.

"Equally to the point, he argues: ‘Avatar’ or incarnation may be acceptable to Hinduism but such is not the case in Islam or Christianity. In Christianity, one might say that the notion of divine incarnation does exist, but it applies exclusively to Jesus Christ; applying it to Ramakrishna is plain heresy. Sitting down for mental concentration to obtain a ‘vision’ of Christ or Prophet Mohammed is definitely not part of the required practices of Christianity or Islam. Neither religion has a notion of ‘salvation’ as something to be achieved by practising certain states of consciousness. In other words: Before you claim to have an agreement with other people, check with them whether they really agree."

Far from "required", it's not even allowed to be claimed; remember Jean D'Arc, or Bernadette of Lourdes? Latter wasn't burned at stake, former was; presumably that wasn't due to French victory, and independence from possible English colonisation, solely due to her visions?

"The same objection is valid against claims that Swami Vivekananda was ‘also’ a Muslim. As Kundrakudi Adigalar, the forty-fifth head of the Kundrakudi Tiruvannamalai Adhinam in Tamil Nadu, has said: ‘He had faith and confidence in Hinduism. But he was not a follower of Hinduism alone. He practised all religions. He read all books. His head bowed before all prophets.’ But ‘practising all religions’ is quite incompatible with being a faithful Christian or a Muslim: As the Church fathers taught, syncretism is typical of pagan culture (today, it is called the ‘New Age’)."

Indeed, Vivekananda could only be a Hindu to be able to do any of it.

"Leaving aside polytheistic Hinduism, the mere attempt to practise both Islam and Christianity, if such a thing were possible, would have stamped Ramakrishna as definitely not a Christian, nor a Muslim. Moreover, it is simply untrue that Swami Vivekananda ever ‘practised’ Christianity or Islam: He was not baptized or circumcised, did not attend Church services or Friday prayers, never went to Mecca, never observed Ramzan or Lent. But he did practise vegetarianism (at least in principle) and celibacy. Worst of all, he did worship Hindu gods, which by definition puts him outside the Islamic fold, Islam being based on the rejection of all gods except Allah."

Replace the last word with another appropriate one and that's just as true of church.

"Ramakrishna was quite satisfied worshipping Goddess Kali, but as Ray says: ‘There is no respectful place for deities in female form in Islam. Rama Krishna engaged in the worship of Kali was nothing but an idolater in the eyes of the Muslims. Islam says that all idolaters will finally end up in Islam’s hell. Now, I want to ask these eggheads of sarva-dharma-samabhâva if they know where exactly the place for Ramakrishna in Islam is? The fact is that Ramakrishna never truly worshipped in the Islamic fashion, neither did he receive Islamic salvation.’"

And bring celibate despite his marriage, what could he possibly do with an Islamic heaven if it was offered to him, complete with 72 "hoors"?

"Ray challenges the RK Mission monks to try out their assertions on a Muslim or a Christian audience: ‘All this is, thus, nothing but creations of confused and boisterous Hindu monks. No Christian padre or Muslim maulvi accepts Ramakrishna’s salvation in their own religions. They make snide remarks. They laugh at the ignorance of the Hindu monks.’

"Ray makes the snide insinuation explicit: ‘Only those Hindus who do not understand the implications of other religions engage themselves in the propagation of sarva-dharma-samabhâva; like stupid and mentally retarded creatures, such Hindus revel in the pleasures of auto-erotism in their wicked pursuit of the fad.’ This rude comparison means that they pretend to be interacting with others, but it is a mere fantasy, all inside their own heads, with the assumed partners not even knowing about it."

Well, the idea was popularised by Gandhi, but then they always saw Gandhi as Hindu leader.

"Finally, Ray wonders what happened to the monks, those of the RK Mission and others, who talked about ‘equal truth of all religions’ and chanted ‘Râm Rahîm ek hai’ (‘Rama and Rahim/Allah are one’) and ‘Ishwar Allâh tere nâm’ (‘both Ishwar and Allah are Your names’) in East Bengal before 1947. As far as he knew, they had all fled across the new border when they suddenly found themselves inside Pakistan, but then he said: ‘Many a guru from East Bengal (who) has been saved by the skin of his teeth, once in West Bengal, resumed his talk of sarva-dharma-samabâva. But the point still remains that if they really had faith in the message of sarva-dharma-samabhâva, they would not have left East Bengal.’ As so often in Indo-Pakistani and Hindu-Muslim comparisons, the argument is reminiscent of the inequality between the contenders in the Cold War: you could demonstrate for disarmament in the West, but to demonstrate for this in the East Bloc (except if it were for unilateral disarmament by the Western ‘war-mongers’) would have put you in trouble."

................................................................................................

"‘ALL RELIGIONS’ VS THE ETERNAL RELIGION "

"Ray also mocks the RK Mission’s grandiose claim of having evaluated not just a few popular religions, but all religions. ‘Did Ramakrishna ever worship in accordance with Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Saurya or Ganapatya principles? No, he did not. Neither did he worship in accordance with the Jewish faith of Palestine, the Tao religion of China, the religion of Confucius, or the Shinto religion of Japan. Empirically verifying the truth of each and every religion is a valid project in principle, but a very time-consuming one as well.’

"According to Ray, the slogan of ‘equal truth of all religions’ is nothing but a watered-down sentiment that means nothing. It is useful only in widening the route to our self-destruction. It does not take a genius to realize that not all paths are good paths in this life of ours; this is true in all branches of human activity. Unlike the RK Mission monks, Ray has really found some common ground with other religions, and with rationalism too: They all agree on the logical principle that contradictory truth claims cannot possibly all be right—at most one of them can be right."

"The larger issue revealed by the incident with the RK Mission is a psychology of self-repudiation which is fairly widespread in the anglicized segment of Hindu society, stretching from actual repudiation of Hinduism to the distortive reformulation of Hinduism itself after the model of better-reputed religions. In a typical symptom of the colonial psychology, many Hindus see themselves through the eyes of their once-dominant enemies, so that catechism-type books on Hinduism explain Hinduism in Christian terms, e.g. by presenting many a Hindu saint as a ‘Christlike figure’. Modern translations of Hindu scriptures are often distorted to satisfy non-Hindu requirements such as monotheism. This can take quite gross forms in the Veda translations of the Arya Samaj, where entire sentences are inserted to twist the meaning in the required theological direction. (For example, the Houston Arya Samaj website translates the Gayatri Mantra thus: ‘The literal meaning of the mantra is: “O God! You are Omnipresent, Omnipotent and Almighty. You are all Light. You are all Knowledge and Bliss. You are Destroyer of fear, You are Creator of this Universe, You are the Greatest of all. We bow and meditate upon Your light. You guide our intellect in the right direction.”’* Sentences 2 to 4 are nowhere in the Sanskrit original.) The eagerness to extol all rival religions and be unsatisfied with just being Hindu is one more symptom of the contempt in which Hinduism has been held for centuries, and which numerous Hindus have interiorized.

"In Ramakrishna’s words: ‘Various creeds you hear about nowadays have come into existence through the will of God and will disappear again through His will. Hindu religion alone is Sanâtana dharma’, for it ‘has always existed and will always exist.’"

................................................................................................

Part 2**"

"RKM IS HINDU"

"One person scolded me for even thinking that the Ramakrishna Mission is non-Hindu. He cites the Hindu atmosphere and the many Hindu rituals and practices at the Mission centres. I might add the fact that the Mission only recruits among Hindus. No Christian or Muslim would join this pagan outfit. That fact alone refutes the Mission’s own claim that it has somehow embraced all religions. The Mission is a typically Hindu group, and even its pompous claim of validating all world religions is a claim made by many Hindus. When Mahatma Gandhi said: ‘I am a Hindu, I am a Muslim, I am a Sikh, I am a Christian’, Mohammed Ali Jinnah dryly commented: ‘That is a typically Hindu thing to say.’

"But I am surprised to hear that the Ramakrishna Mission has not disclaimed Hinduism. Not only has the organization shouted from the rooftops and on all kinds of public forums that ‘universal Ramakrishnaism’ is superior to ‘narrow Hinduism’, it has even gone to court to be officially recognized as a non-Hindu minority.*"

................................................................................................

"LOGIC"

"I’ve had to face endless argumentation in favour of the belief that Jesus lived and died in India. This belief stems from the 1894 book La Vie Inconnue de Jésus-Christ (‘The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ’) by the Russian aristocrat Nicolas Notovitch, who claimed to have found notes about Jesus’s stay in India in a monastery in the Himalayas. This manuscript was never found and the monastery’s abbot denied ever having had or seen such a text. The contents of the text, which Notovitch claimed to have seen, were also very suspect: The themes of Jesus’s alleged controversies with Brahmins are typical for the late-colonial age, not at all for the first century."

" ... As a Muslim commented, you cannot take a holiday and be a Muslim for a while, then revert to goddess-worshipping. Neither Christianity nor Islam consist in having a ‘vision’ of their founder."

Unless they are seen as a subset, of course, which their adherents must deny of course.

"Nonetheless, this RKM sympathizer’s reformulation of the challenge to non-Ramakrishaites is interesting: ‘The scope of my discussion is quite limited and is focused on only one thing: Ramakrishna believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ and he did practise some discipline of Christianity, on the results of which his belief was based. The same can be said of his feeling for some discipline of Islam—that he practised it and derived divine/spiritual satisfaction from it. I think it is for Koenraad Elst to spell out his clear position on this observation once and for all.’"

Whatever Elst says, the truth is this - Ramakrishna was great, and his visions do not restrict him in the narrow fenced compounds of those creeds that don't allow any adherents to experiment even within, let alone worship outside of, the narrow confines.

"As a matter of walking the extra mile, I will spell out my position. However, let it be understood that I am under no obligation to explain anything or give proof for anything, as I am not putting forward any claim. I am merely sceptical of a claim made by the RKM and this fellow. Because it is he who has put forward a claim, it is up to him to prove his point. Even if nobody comes forward to offer any kind of counter-proof or refutation, the mere fact that the claim is put forward does not annul its need for proof. As long as the claim is not proven, it is right for sterling Hindus like Ram Swarup and Siva Prasad Ray to express scepticism of it. The burden of proof is 100 per cent on the maker of this challenge."

A precisely 'church marry modern scepticism' position by Elst. There's of course no possible "proof" of one person's visions for another, one can only know one's own experience, and if elst has healthy scepticism, he must question church doctrines before all else - especially regarding virgin birth, mother examined post birth and found virgin, etc.; the criteria of experiments and proof he demands from thise that assert visions of Ramakrishna’s experiments, he ought to demand from church regarding those doctrines. Else, it's racism.

................................................................................................

"BELIEF IN JESUS"

"Now, my position. If Ramakrishna had found that his own Hinduism was insufficient, if he had founded a new religion, which the RKM calls Ramakrishnaism, if RK had found Christianity and Islam to be ‘part’ of this new religion and if he had personally ‘verified the truth’ of these religions by means of ‘visions’, then this would be such a momentous revolution that he would have spent the rest of his days discussing and elaborating on it. Instead, there was absolute silence, and Kali. So this already pleads against the RKM’s claim."

On the contrary, the point is abrahmic stuff was far too small fry for Ramakrishna or anyone familiar with the tremendous treasures of Hinduism, just as Alps are smaller than Himaalayan ranges and regions.

"Now that we are discussing this, it strikes me that in the twenty-four years that I have followed this debate, I have not seen the RKM come up with an actual quote from the master in which he claims Jesus’s divinity. ... "

Perhaps that was made up by church? Perhaps he was at level of Jean D'Arc, no more?

" ... Surely, such belief would have been big news to his Hindu and non-Christian followers. ... "

Not to Hindus, no. Hindus do not deny manifestations, even incarnations, of Divine that might occur outside India. And it does not make them greater by definition. Ramakrishna was a devotee of Kaalie, Force of Divine Love, and his visions are unlikely to have changed his path or his devotion, least of all to something as narrow a club as an abrahmic faith.

" ... Our critic, too, has eloquently beaten around the bush in several replies and has spurned the occasion to present to us the only thing that would finish this debate, viz. proof (as opposed to mere claims) that RK worshipped Jesus as a divine being. The best proof would be a statement to this effect by RK himself, but this time, too, it is not forthcoming."

Because he didn't, his having a vision doesn’t change his spirituality from Kaalie to what Elst demands proof of.

" ... Hindus by their upbringing may know everything about puja or other Hindu things, but their knowledge of Jesus tends to be very hazy. I, having gone through the whole Catholic education system and, moreover, having made a purposeful study of the character Jesus, know more about this subject than the RKM sympathizer will ever know in his lifetime."

"So, what I know about Jesus is that he was no more divine than you or me. He was a wandering healer, with his ears open for the wisdom going around, which he relayed in his own logia, sermons with parables—a few of them good—but still revered by the people mostly because of his reputation as a healer. To be sure, his friends and relatives, who knew him, saw through his act, which is why he performed no ‘miracles’ in his hometown (Matthew 13:57, Mark 6:16, Luke 4:1-24). Elsewhere, he could often pull them off, but still he was less powerful than proper medicine would have been. Thus, he healed someone of epilepsy (deemed ghost possession, e.g. Mark 9:14-29, Matthew 17:14-20, Luke 9:42), making him rise after his epileptic seizure—but such fits always subside and end in a return to normalcy. And in one case, the gospel says in so many words that the disease later reappeared (Matthew 12:3-45). There’s nothing scandalous, but nothing divine either, about false beliefs in healing powers.

"Jesus had what I would consider a rather big idea about himself, just like Prophet Mohammed and some other religious leaders. Thus, he believed that he was the Messiah. He repeatedly made the prediction that he would return within the lifetime of some in his audience (Matthew 16:27-28; 24:25-34; 26:63-64; Mark 13:26-30; Luke 21:27-32; John 16:16). Today we are 2,000 years and dozens of generations down the line, yet Jesus has not come back. Now, wrong predictions are human—in fact, they are ten a penny. Jehovah’s Witnesses put their feet between your front door to predict the end of the world, but it didn’t come in 1914, nor in 1975."

"I have said enough to underpin the conclusion: Jesus was not divine. If Ramakrishna was a Muslim, as the RKM claims, then he was already convinced of Jesus’s non-divine status, which is a basic belief of Islam (and in that respect, Islam is more rational than the cult of personality that I believe Christianity is). If, however, as our RKM sympathizer claims, RK believed in the divinity of Christ, then he was badly informed, not to say that he was mistaken.

"In fact, this sympathizer wants you to venerate a gullible Ramakrishna who believed the sob stories of the missionaries, to the point of self-hypnotizing and seeing a vision of Jesus. By contrast, I (or rather Swarup and Ray) give you a Ramakrishna who was discerning enough to keep the missionaries at a distance. He was not a Christian, nor a Ramakrishnaist, but simply a Hindu, worshipping Krishna and Hanuman and, most of all, Kali. You, too, can live a happy, healthy, holy life while staying a Hindu and ignoring Jesus."

It's unlikely Ramakrishna was taken in by missionaries. Whether he had the said visions or not, if he didn't say it and someone else did, it amounts to "maybe". If he'd said it, there'd be reason to believe that, but not that he'd converted.

Colin Wilson writes about Quetzlcoatl in Philosopher's Stone; it did not make the protagonist a devotee or follower. If ekst had a vision of Ramakrishna, that might be grace, but devotee or otherwise is a question he'd have to decide for himself.

................................................................................................

"BEING A CHRISTIAN"

"The second claim is that Ramakrishna ‘practised a Christian discipline’, and that, as a result, he found that Christianity is equally true and yields the same results that he had already reached through his Hindu sadhana. Now, ‘being a Christian’ or ‘being a Muslim’ has a precise definition, which RK did not fulfil. He was not recognized as one of theirs by any known maulvi or padre. The missionaries sent bulletins home, in which they reported the conversions they had achieved—surely they would not have neglected reporting the Christianization of a leading Hindu saint? And the RKM has had more than a century to get and show the document that proved their case, viz. that Ramakrishna turned his back on ‘narrow Hinduism’.

"Even in the different sects of Hinduism, you only become a member by going through a formal ceremony. You are given a yajnopavit (sacred thread) or you get diksha (initiation) or shaktipat (transmission of energy). Ramakrishna never went through the formal ceremonies making him a Christian or a Muslim. He was not circumcised and never uttered the Islamic creed. He was not baptized and never uttered the Christian creed. No matter what vision he had, it did not make him either Christian or Muslim."

"Not that they would make any tangible difference. Ramakrishna may have been pure gold, but even his acceptance of the quintessential Christian belief in Jesus’s divinity would not make Jesus divine—at least not more than you and me. If, after all these years, the RKM were at last to prove that Ramakrishna did worship Jesus, we would have to conclude that he was mistaken—surely not the conclusion the RKM would like us to draw. Fortunately, there is no indication that he did."

................................................................................................

"SOME FURTHER PROBLEMS WITH THE RKM’S CLAIM"

"Another problem: A Christian cannot be a Muslim, and a Muslim cannot be a Christian. Leaving aside Hinduism and ‘Ramakrishnaism’, please focus only on Christianity and Islam. How could Ramakrishna be a Christian while also being a Muslim? No Christian or Muslim authority would accept his being one while also being the other. Christians believe Jesus was the son of God, both God and man, while Muslims consider him just a man. Christians believe he was resurrected, while Muslims disbelieve that he even died on the cross. How did RK combine these mutually exclusive beliefs?"

Elst enumerates the official positions of the enclosures, ignoring the possibility that reality might be otherwise; it's akin to looking at two fenced off walled gardens, ignoring the kind, water streams and air that connect them, acting as conduits of much.

"Finally, RK is known to have died while worshipping Kali. By Christian and Islamic definition, he was a goddess-worshipper, hence an out-and-out pagan. If he ever was a Muslim or a Christian, his dying as a pagan meant that he was an apostate. If being an ignorant pagan is bad enough, being a wilful apostate, who has known but rejected the truth and reverted to the false belief of paganism, is demonic and a sure ticket to the fires of hell. So, according to the RKM, RK has spent the last century braving the fires of hell. For that is what Islam and Christianity (which the RKM holds to be ‘true’) promise to a pagan like Ramakrishna."

Again, those are official positions of the official institutions, while Ramakrishna might have, due to having experienced a far greater truth, been above and beyond.

If he had a telescope, powerful enough to see the ninth planet, his seeing Mars and Mercury wouldn't be surprising; nor would be his reticence on the point.

"The RKM professes a syncretism, combining elements of different religions. Ramakrishnaism is a syncretism par excellence, affirming ‘all’ religions to be true. As the Church fathers wrote, syncretism is typical of paganism; and as the numerous interreligious as well as intra-Christian persecutions of even very slightly different doctrines show, Christianity was by contrast very intolerant of doctrinal pluralism. The Roman-Hellenistic milieu in which the first Christians had to function was full of syncretism, with Roman matrons worshipping Isis with the babe Horus (an inspiration for the image of Mary holding the babe Jesus), legion soldiers worshipping Persian-originated Mithras, and imperial politicians worshipping the Syrian-originated Sol Invictus, the invincible sun. Against this syncretism, the Church fathers preached religious purity: extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church, there is no salvation). They had no problem admitting that paganism was naturally pluralistic, but, they reasoned, what is the use of choosing between or combining different kinds of falsehood?

"They, as Christians, had something better than pluralism, viz. the truth. And once you have the truth, you are no longer interested in any other religion. So from the Christian viewpoint, the RKM’s dissatisfaction with ‘mere’ Hinduism is an admission that Hinduism doesn’t have the truth."

It's unclear if Elst is asserting the last paragraph as his position or stating it as that of church. In any case it's incorrect, opposite of truth.

................................................................................................

"SWAMI VIVEKANANDA’S CLAIM"

"The best argument in favour of the RKM’s claim is a statement apparently made by Swami Vivekananda. According to our correspondent: ‘The next desire that seized upon the soul of this man (RK) was to know the truth about the various religions. Up to that time he had not known any religion but his own. He wanted to understand what other religions were like. So he sought teachers of other religions. (…) He found a Mohammedan saint and placed himself under him; he underwent the disciplines prescribed by him, and to his astonishment found that when faithfully carried out, these devotional methods led him to the same goal he had already attained. He gathered similar experience from following the true religion of Jesus the Christ.’

"Our RKM sympathizer wants to ‘point (out) to KE that the burden of proof is on him to disprove the observations of RK’s chief disciple (and official spokesman?), as otherwise, by default, they should be assumed to be true. (…) Would KE care to share his compelling reasons to believe that SV lied?’"

Hereon, Elst goes to the extent of stating that Swami Vivekananda might have been missed, and no matter what he said, it wasn't possible because Hinduism goes towards liberation and official position of other two institutionally is that they don't.

So he fences himself in the diktat of the institutions rather than keeping an open mind about what truth could be.

................................................................................................

"Conclusion"

"The RKM’s ambition to outgrow Hinduism and be ‘universal’ is a form of hubris. In Greek religion, hubris, or man’s will to be equal to the gods, is the cardinal sin. In Christianity too, Adam and Eve committed hereditary sin, not by lust (as many superficial people think) but by hubris: Initially innocent creatures, they wanted to be equal to God, who knows good and evil. In this respect, at least, many (it would be hubris to assert ‘all’) religions agree—and they happen to be right. So let us stop this bad habit of making claims about ‘all’ religions, including those that we know only hazily or not at all. One thing that initially attracted me to the Hindu cause was the humbleness and simplicity of the ordinary Hindus I met. It would be nice if all megalomaniacs climbed down from their high horses and rediscovered this simplicity."

Elst would rather close his eyes than see what may be staring him in face.

"The ISKCON people, I believe, never confront Christianity or Islam, but they get really nasty against fellow Hindus who are not as Krishna-centred (such as the pre-Krishna Vedic rishis) as they themselves are. ... "

ISCKON aren't about worship or devotion as much as about naming money and diverting attention Hinduism.

"Hinduism existed before Jesus and Mohammed. It was good enough for the Vedic seers and non-Vedic sadhus, and it didn’t need those two. I think Hinduism will only survive if it forgets about this version of Ramakrishna. The RKM ultimately has no choice but to admit that for the past so many decades, it has been spreading an erroneous and harmful belief—the divinity of Christ and Mohammed, and the ‘equal truth’ of Christianity and Islam. It should announce out loud that all struggles over its exact identity are over, because it owns up to its natural Hindu identity. Indeed, it should rediscover and second its founder, Swami Vivekananda, who declared: ‘Say with pride, we are Hindus!’"

But why should pride in Hinduism, and greatness of its truth, mean denying or ignoring everything elsewhere? This is where Hindus are clearer. Others can wear blinkers, have institutions that impose inquisition and worse. That has nothing to do with divinity of, say, Leonardo da Vinci.

................................................................................................

................................................

February 13, 2022 - February 13, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

4. Aum In or Out for International Yoga Day?

................................................................................................

" ... I received a copy of the booklet the Government of India issued for the United Nations’ first Yoga Day. It falls on 21 June, Summer Solstice, a day of mixed feelings: It is the longest day alright, but it is also the start of the Sun’s decline—the converse of the beginning of the Sun’s rise on Winter Solstice, considered a reason for celebration."

Elst castigates the government of India for not blaxoning Aum at head of the Yoga Day brochure, May 2015.

"In my opinion, this is the real goal of the lobbies that swear by ‘secularism’: the annihilation of Hinduism. Those who thought the BJP was aggressively pro-Hindu will be surprised to learn that the BJP is supporting this project. The result is that the BJP is having the worst of both worlds: It surely manages to displease its Hindu constituents, and it still fails to please its secularist masters."

That's the general tone.

He's wrong, of course.

................................................................................................

................................................

February 13, 2022 - February 13, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

5. Is Yoga Hindu? The Question at Face Value

................................................................................................

"Part of the secularist project is to belittle Hinduism: Anything Indian that is bad or deemed to be bad is blamed on Hinduism, whereas anything good or deemed good is delinked from Hinduism. Since yoga has been embraced in the West and threatens to give Hinduism a good name, a lot is invested in proving that ‘yoga is not Hindu’."

("*Talk by the author in Ghent, Belgium, on the occasion of the first UN Yoga Day, celebrated worldwide on 21 June 2014")

"A much-discussed topic in the context of cultural appropriation is whether ‘yoga is Hindu’. The argument is so heated because Westerners often aggressively argue that yoga is separate from Hinduism, so that Hindus cannot lay claim to it and have no say when foreigners allegedly distort it. In reply, the Hindu American Foundation has waged a campaign to ‘take back yoga’.

"In this argument, much of the history of yoga is trotted out, mainly to deny that it ever was Hindu in the first place. About modern postural yoga, developed by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, it is asserted (David Gordon White, Mark Singleton) that it owes more to British army drills than to tradition. Yet, many exercises are from the well-attested hatha yoga repertoire dating back to ca. the eleventh century. This tradition, in turn, starts against the background of the introduction of the notion of Kundalini, not older than AD 400, and the concomitant need to remove ‘energy blockages’ in the spine by means of postures and breathing techniques. There are strong indications, starting in Joseph Needham’s famous research, that this innovation itself owes a lot to the Chinese tradition of ‘internal alchemy’ (Neidan, a system of breathing and physical exercises linked with Chinese medicine), more than 2,500 years old, or centuries older than the birth of Kundalini in India. An early case of ‘cultural appropriation’, so to speak.

"However, these colourful and headline-friendly forms of yoga are only a supplement that came to enrich the heart of yoga, which itself was already attested since Harappa, ca. -2500. A number of Harappan seals depict yogis in meditation, though never in hatha yogic contortions. Yoga as meditation is already described in the Bhagavad Gita and the Katha Upanishad, up to -1000. There is absolutely no indication that they ever got this fundamental doctrine and practice of yoga anywhere else. And even if they had done so, it would still make yoga a central part of Hindu civilization for far longer than, say, the matrioshkas (of Korean provenance) have become proverbially Russian.

"Then you can further argue that any culture this early cannot be called ‘Hindu’ because the word didn’t exist yet. True, it is a late exonym stemming from the Persian for ‘Indian’, but it has always, and especially since the Muslim invasions introduced this Persian term in India, referred to precisely the native culture that distinguished its practitioners from the Muslims and other outsiders. This predated the word, which came to designate a culture that already existed, and that is indeed continuous with ancient Indian culture. At this point, we must highlight Nick Allen’s finding (in his pathbreaking article ‘The Indo-European Origins of Yoga’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 2 (1):1-20, 1998) that cognate myths and literary motifs in the Greek and Indian epics differ by having a yogic component in the Indian but not in the Greek version."

................................................................................................

" ... Disrespect for Hindu origins is found in their very concealment, for example, by translating the Sanskrit names of exercises, by the denial of their assumed philosophical background or even the latter’s replacement with non-Hindu worldviews, for example ‘Christian yoga’. These demanding Hindus form an unexpected de facto alliance with purist Christians who recognize yoga as intrinsically un-Christian, just as many (not all) Muslim authorities reject it as un-Islamic."

Now, having insulted Swami Vivekananda in another article, Elst proceeds to insult another, thus time a living, guru from India. And, too, Yoga itself, spirituality of Hinduism, and more.

"Though anyone can take the airplane, and though this invention was never meant for the exclusive use by the Wright brothers’ fellow countrymen, it is irrevocably an American invention. This should not endlessly be repeated, but it should not be denied either; and many Hindus think that this is now increasingly happening with yoga. A slippery slope leading to this ‘digestion’ is the assertion by the leading yogi Jaggi Vasudev that ‘yoga is not more Hindu than that Isaac Newton’s law of gravity is Christian’. This papers over a fundamental difference: The discovery of physical laws is not dependent on a Christian background (see Archimedes’ law, Euclid’s theorems, the Indian numerals, the Chinese discovery of magnetism, etc.), whereas the discovery of yoga is at least more favoured by some cultures than by others. Indeed, it is naturally in conflict with Christianity, which can accept hatha yoga as a physical discipline on a par with gymnastics but imperatively links salvation with baptism and belief in Christ, not with the mere ‘funny feeling’ triggered by yoga practice."

Elst decides to get explicit in case a reader or audience didn't get it.

"So the situation is that many so-called ‘moron swamis’ welcome this ‘digestion’ (with Western culture as the tiger swallowing the goat and thereby strengthening itself), allegedly because they have little discernment and because they enjoy being flattered by the interest Westerners take in their ‘product’. If Hindus denounce the ‘cultural appropriation’ of yoga, you can immediately cite a great many fellow Hindus who approve of it and cooperate with it."

Who said Jaggi Vasudeva was flattered about his disciples including some westerners? Elst flatters his race. As for Jaggi Vasudeva, what he's said in response to those of West or non Hindus who object to Yoga as Hindu, us "Newton discovered gravity, he was Christian, so let's fly!" His point precisely was that effect of Yoga, when done properly, would benefit regardless of a formal ceremony of induction into Hindu religion as such, just as gravity affects the whole world regardless of race or creed. The corresponding opposite would be, visit to Lourdes being benefic regardless of baptism or equivalent.

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February 13, 2022 - February 14, 2022.

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6. The Modi Government as an Exponent of BJP Secularism

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Elst goes again on a rampage castigating Modi government, February 2015!

" ... BJP leaders have an enormous inferiority complex vis-à-vis the secularists and, even when in office, try to live up to the norms laid down by their opponents."

Again, he's wrong, of course.

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February 14, 2022 - February 14, 2022.

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7. Debating the Hindu Right

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"How does the West look at India? The Western public is completely, and the professional India-watchers largely, dependent on information filtered by a Delhi bottleneck under firm Nehruvian control. This is not a matter of ‘sepoy’ intellectuals blackening India and Hinduism at the behest of an American conspiracy. It is a two-way influence, with Indians trying to live up to Western fashions and Westerners trying to align with Indian ideological norms.

"An important new book exemplifies this American-Indian cooperation against any political mobilization in the name of Hinduism—Pluralism and Democracy in India: Debating the Hindu Right (Oxford University Press, New York, 2015). It is a collection of twenty essays, mostly based on updated versions of contributions to a 2005 conference in Chicago. The editors are religious historian Wendy Doniger and law scholar Martha Nussbaum, both from the top-ranking University of Chicago. Doniger’s name has gained some currency in India ever since her book The Hindus: An Alternative History was withdrawn by the publisher under Hindu pressure (affair discussed in detail below, ch.20). This way, a biased, flippant and error-ridden book, already exposed in detail in Vishal Agarwal’s counter-book, was given a false aura of martyrdom. The episode also confirmed her enmity for any Hindu self-assertion, as is obvious from the introduction she co-authored with Nussbaum.

" About the outspokenly partisan perspective of the book, we can be brief because no attempt is made to hide it. Thus, if we are going to discuss ‘democracy in India’, it should be hard to leave the Emergency and the Sangh Parivar’s opposition to it unmentioned; yet these are carefully and completely hushed up. The year Zero of the book’s time horizon is explicitly said to be 2002, because of the Gujarat riots. On these, the old progressive party-line is still strictly observed, assuming ‘Modi’s complicity in the riots’ (p.14). Herewith, they consciously overrule the fact that ‘he has not been convicted in court’ (p.1), though not for want of trying. But if riots are deemed so important, surely attention is paid to the far larger killing of the Sikhs in 1984 by Congress secularists; or to the East Bengali massacre of Hindus in 1971 that dwarfed all Indian communal killings since Independence combined? No, this book only notices killings when Hindus are (or can be portrayed as) the perpetrators.

"The Ayodhya controversy is mentioned a number of times, but without the decisive information—quite new to the American target audience—that the temple argument has a strong claim to legitimacy, according to several findings (discussed elsewhere). The whole lambasting of the centuries-old pro-temple consensus, challenged by the secularists in 1989 and rebaptized the ‘Hindu fundamentalist claim’, was carried through American academe—yet it was wrong. The paper specifically about ‘the road from Ayodhya’ has forty footnotes, all referring to partisan anti-Hindutva sources except for one in which BJP stalwart Ram Madhav provides some hard data. ... "

................................................................................................

"The editors call Narendra Modi’s accession to power ‘ominous for India’s very future as a democracy’ (p.1). In American academe, the demand of objectivity, on which scholarly authority is based, is candidly suspended in works about Hindu politics."

" ... Mushirul Hasan’s paper on the BJP’s reforms on textbooks provides interesting data on the BJP’s intellectual agenda as seen by the secularists. Once you have accepted that this is not a scholarly account but a veteran’s memoir giving the view of one of the warring camps, it becomes a very worthy read. Incidentally, on p.255, Hasan labels Hindu history-rewriting an ‘attempt to Talibanize India’s history’, thus holding up an Islamic movement as the level to which Hindus could stoop. Thereby, he implicitly admits that the ideologically streamlined textbooks which he fights in India are a routine fact of life in Pakistan."

("*Published as ‘How the West Looks at India’ in The Pioneer, Delhi, 6 September 2015")

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February 14, 2022 - February 14, 2022.

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8. The Confabulated Murder of Saint Thomas

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"There was an article by David Green propagating the Christian claim that ‘Thomas the Apostle was murdered in India’,** viz. by Brahmin priests of Kali. In the brief letter below, I set the record straight. Since this myth is standard fare among secularists and Gandhian Hindus in India, and since their attention span is notoriously short, it will be useful if they read the following summary.

"So your source is ‘common Christian tradition’? Fortunately, we are past the stage where we believe a story just because ‘tradition’ says so. Therefore, we don’t believe the blood libel against the Jewish people any more (i.e. that it is responsible for the killing of Christ, and by extension also for other deadly crimes), even though for centuries it has been supported by ‘common Christian tradition’. Likewise, we don’t believe the blood libel against the ‘priests of Kali’ either.

"Nothing of this legend is proven. The only written source for it is already some fifty years younger than this Thomas’s supposed martyrdom: the apocryphal Acts of Thomas. There, he is presented as coming to ‘India’, then a very large term (when Columbus landed in what he thought was Zipangu/Japan, he called the natives ‘Indians’, meaning Asians), in a part that was desert-like and where the people had Persian names. This describes Afghanistan or western Pakistan well, but not the lush and rich tropical landscape of south India. When he has committed several crimes against society, the king asks him to leave, and only when he refuses this diplomatic solution does the king have him executed.

"I first learnt about the hollow mythical nature of the St Thomas story while studying in Leuven Catholic University, from a Jesuit professor of Comparative Religion, Frank de Graeve. Not exactly a ‘fanatical Hindu’ source. More recently, Pope Benedict XVI publicly declared that St Thomas had come to western India, and that from there, after an unspecified period of time, Christianity, not Thomas, reached south India.* I am aware that Indian Christians have raised hell against this scholarly assessment, and have pressured the Vatican into removing this statement from its website. But that is not going to alter the verdict of scholarly historiography: There is no evidence at all to support this story.

"And when Christians did reach the coastal area of south India, probably as fourth-century refugees from the Persian empire that had turned hostile after the Christianization of its Roman rival, they were welcomed rather more cordially than any treatment given by Christians to pagans. Far from being ‘murdered by the priests of Kali’, they were given hospitality and integrated into Hindu society, without any questions asked about the contents of their religion. Hindus have extended their hospitality more recently to Parsis, Armenians and Tibetan Buddhists; and more anciently to the Jews. That glorious record is the target of gross injustice in the fictional story of St Thomas."

................................................................................................

The real clue to falsification of history is in the insistence on ‘priests of Kali’, of whose specific worship sects are missing in South India, even though there are various Godesses worshipped - for example Meenakshi in Madurai, the most worshipped, or Kanyakumari at the Southern tip in the town named after her. Kali worship is more prevalent in Bengal, and there's certainly no tradition of any Thomas having gone that far.

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February 14, 2022 - February 14, 2022.

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9. Pluralism in Ilā’s City

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("In 2016, the Sanskrit department of the Allahabad University hosted an international conference on the Rig Vedic verse ‘Ekam sad viprā bahudhā vadanti’ ... ")

"Bhadrajanāḥ, Mama nāma Kūnrāḍ Elst asti, aham Pascimadvīpād Beljamdeśād āgatosmi

"Unfortunately, that is about all the Spoken Sanskrit I can muster. I only learnt the Devabhāśā as a literary language, a storehouse of political and philosophical insights and terminology, but not as a daily medium of communication. For anything more sophisticated, I will have to switch to a language in which I can express my thoughts more comfortably. Isliye, mein abhī Angrezī me bol dum.gā. Kṣamā kījiye. (It is for this reason that I will switch to English, forgive me.)"

"Thus, having come all the way from the West, I am often reminded here of Rudyard Kipling’s verse: ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’

"It is one of the most famous poems in English but was written in India—Kipling was a native Mumbaikar. However, as it stands here, the verse means just the opposite of what he had in mind, and this becomes clear from the context:

"‘But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!’"

................................................................................................

"Ahiṁsa paramo dharma—‘non-violence is the highest ethic/righteousness’—is another quotation cut in half to suit contemporary purposes. In a Gandhian context, it has come to stand for absolute pacifism. But in the original Mahābhārata version, it is only half the picture: The other half is dharma hiṁsa tathaiva ca, or ‘righteous violence’. So, non-violence in some situations, but righteous violence in others. And that happens to be far more realistic."

"The Greek word monos does not mean ‘one’—it means ‘one alone’. It is not inclusive, but exclusive. It is the very opposite of what our Vedic verse expresses. That mantra is not directed against anything, but if at all you want to bring monotheism into the picture, then it is against monotheism."

................................................................................................

"The verse we are considering was written by one of the earliest Vedic seers, the ṛṣi Dīrghatamas, in the last one of his twenty-five hymns, the Riddle Hymn (RV 1:164). His name means ‘long darkness’ and this is sometimes explained as referring to blindness. However, he is also known for his astronomical insights (including the first division of the heavenly circles in 360°, on top of that in twelve parts), and it is hard to do astronomy when you’re blind. Rather, ‘blindness’ seems to have been an accepted circumlocution referring to a certain attitude of deep concentration and piercing research. ... "

................................................................................................

"One Muslim among hundreds of Hindus, and already Hindus want to conceal their opinions. Already all those Hindus are ready to bend over backwards to please that one Muslim, without even asking him! This must be an underground society, used to living in hiding. And yet, what for? Are they ‘Islamophobic’, meaning ‘afraid’ of Islam?"

................................................................................................

"Let us analyse the word Allāh, as students of the Devabhāśā would. You may know that deva, ‘god’, literally means ‘the bright one’. Now, the bright ones living in heaven are, of course, the stars. And, indeed, in Sumerian hieroglyphics, 5,000 years ago, the concept of ‘god’ was rendered as a radiant star. This sign was pronounced Dingir in Sumerian, and Ilu/El in Akkadian Semitic. It is the same El that we find, through Hebrew, in Gabriel (‘My strength is God’), Uriel (‘My light is God’) or Michael (‘Who is like God’).

"Now, this El is rendered into a generic substantive (compare it with God/godhead, deus/deity, deva/devatā): Hebrew eloha, Arabic ilāh. In Arabic, then, this generic noun is coupled with the article al to become al-ilāha, ... "

"The name Allāh acquired the monotheistic meaning of ‘only God’ with the Islamization of Arabia in the 620s. Before that, it had a generic meaning. Thus, it is described how someone kneels down before a statue of the moon god Hubal and then ‘prays to Allāh’, i.e., ‘prays to the deity before him’, viz. Hubal. So, the word Allāh belongs in the polytheist landscape.

"This moon god Hubal presided over the Kaaba, the shrine built around a meteor stone fallen from heaven. In an unsculpted stone, Hindus will readily recognize the Śivaliṅgam, the symbol of the moon-carrying god (Candradhāra), the Lord of the Moon (Somanātha), Śiva. Hubal’s or Śiva’s crescent has become the main symbol of Allāh. And like Śiva, ‘the deity’ Hubal comes with a triad of goddesses: In India they are Pārvatī, Durgā and Kālī; in Arabia, al-Lāt (al-Ilāhat, ‘the goddess’, the sun), al-Uzza (‘the strong one’, the planet Venus) and al-Manāt (‘fate, doom’, the night). Remark how in Arabic, like in German, the word ‘sun’ is conceived of as female, the word ‘moon’ as male, which facilitates the personification of the moon as the god Hubal, and of the sun as the goddess al-Lāt.

"I don’t know if Hindus and Muslims are all that different, but Indians and Arabs clearly are not. Their religious imaginations have generated very parallel families of gods."

"Among Hindus with an excitable fantasy, this has led to the belief that ‘the Kaaba used to be a Śiva temple’. This is exaggerated, but through the theme of the moon- god, Śiva does have a link with the Kaaba. Indian traders visiting Arabia used to worship there, and Arabs used to worship at the Somnāth temple on the Gujarat coast. Later, Mahmud Ghaznavī believed that the Arab goddesses, chased out of Arabia by the Prophet, had found refuge there."

................................................................................................

"At least 5,000 years before Akbar, this area was the habitat of Ilā, the daughter and eldest child of Manu. He, in turn, was the founding patriarch of mankind, or at least of a part of it. His daughter, in spite of her primogeniture, had to leave the succession to the throne to her younger brother, Ikṣvāku, who stayed in the paternal capital, Ayodhyā, and founded the Solar dynasty. Being myself an eldest son but second child, I know how it must have felt: Ikṣvāku always looked up to his elder sister and felt a bit indebted to her.

"On her part, Ilā moved out to Pratiṣṭhānapura, next to the virgin land where Akbar was to build his divine city. This is where her son Purūravas founded the Lunar dynasty.

"One descendant of theirs, Nahuśa, moved westwards to the Sarasvatī valley, where one of his own descendants was Yayāti, after whose five sons the ‘five tribes’ were named. Of these, Pūru headed the central Paurava tribe. One of his progeny was Bharata, after whom India is still called Bhāratavarṣa. In his clan grew a tradition of composing hymns, and these were collected in the Vedas. Later sources describe Dīrghatamas as his court priest. The Vedic seers rightly glorified their ancestress, Ilā, who became a goddess and member of a typical goddess triad: Ilā, Bhāratī and Sarasvatī."

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February 14, 2022 - February 14, 2022.

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10. The Sati Strategy

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"Among the hostile stereotypes of Hinduism is that it forces wives on to the funeral pyre of their husbands. This custom of sati was always limited to a few castes and, even then, subject to certain conditions. It was outlawed almost two centuries ago. Nevertheless, the topic still bedevils many debates with or about Hinduism.

"After making history with her book on the Ayodhya controversy, Rama and Ayodhya (2013), Professor Meenakshi Jain adds to her reputation with the present hefty volume, Sati: Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries, and the Changing Colonial Discourse (Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2016). In it, as a meticulous professional historian, she quotes all the relevant sources, with descriptions of sati from the ancient through the medieval to the modern period. She adds the full text of the relevant British and Republican laws and of Lord William Bentinck’s Minute on Sati (1829), that led to the prohibition on sati. This book makes the whole array of primary sources readily accessible, so from now on, it will be an indispensable reference for all debates on sati.

"But in the design of the book, all this material is instrumental in studying the uses made of sati in the colonial period. In particular, the missionary campaign to rally support for the project of mass conversion of the Indian heathens to the saving light of Christianity made good use of sati. This practice had a strong in-your-face shock value and could perfectly illustrate the barbarity of Hinduism."

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"INDIGNATION"

"In the preface, Professor Jain surveys the existing literature and expresses her assent to some recent theories. Thus, Rahul Sapra found that Gayatri Spivak’s observations—e.g., that the nineteenth-century British tried to remake Indian society in their own image and used sati as the most vivid proof of the need for this radical remaking—don’t take into account the changing political equation during the centuries of gradual European penetration. In the seventeenth century, European traders and travellers mostly joined the natives in glorifying the women committing sati, whereas by the nineteenth century, they posed as chivalrous saviours of the victimized native women from the cruel native men. This was because they were no longer travellers in an exotic country and at the mercy of the native people, but had become masters of the land and gotten imbued with a sense of superiority."

"Then again, it is, of course, interesting to realize the continuity between the present-day interference in Indian culture by Leftist scholars like Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock and that of the British colonialists: ‘We know best what is wrong with your traditions and we come to save you from yourselves.’

"In this respect, the changes in the Western attitude to sati run parallel to that regarding caste. Until the early twentieth century, caste was seen as a specifically Indian form of a universal phenomenon, viz. social inequality. Around the time of the French Revolution, the idea of equality started catching on, but only gradually became the accepted norm. At that point, it became problematic that people’s status was said to be determined by birth. In this case, determination by the inborn circumstance of being a woman, unequal in rights compared to men, and never more radically unequal than in committing sati. After the Second World War, the norm (henceforth called human right) of absolute equality and increasingly of absolute individual self-determination made the tradition of caste and of sati too horrible to tolerate. Therefore, the indignation about sati is far greater today than when Marco Polo visited India. Today, sati is already a memory, but the commotion around the exceptional sati of 1987 gave an idea of the indignation it would provoke today."

................................................................................................

"EVANGELIZATION"

"Ever since the missionaries set out to convert the pagans of India, they made it their business to contrast the benignity of Christianity with the demeaning atrocities of heathenism. This was an old tradition starting with the biblical vilification of child sacrifice to the god Moloch by the Canaanites. The practice was also attested by the Romans when they besieged the Canaanite (Phoenician) colony of Carthage. The Bible writers and their missionary acolytes present child sacrifice as a necessary component of polytheism, from which monotheism came to save humanity. And indeed, we read here how Reverend William Carey tried to muster evidence of child sacrifice too (but settled for sati as convincing enough, p.178)

"In reality, the abolition of human sacrifice was a universal evolution equally affecting pagan cultures such as the Romans. ... In this respect, Brahmanism was definitely ahead of the rest of humanity.

"Not to idealize matters, we have to admit that, like the biblical writers, who used the vilification of the child-sacrificing Canaanites as justification to seize their land (and even to kill them all), pagans who had left the practice behind equally used the reference to it to score political points. The Romans had practised human sacrifice within living memory and then abolished it, so they were acutely aware of it and tried to exorcize it from their own historical identity by rooting it out in conquered lands as well. (This is the same psychology as among modern Westerners who remember their grandfathers’ abolition of slavery and therefore feel spurred to support or engineer the ‘abolition of caste’ in India.) Using that mentality, Roman war leaders would emphasize this phenomenon of child sacrifice among the Carthaginias to portray them as barbarians in urgent need of Rome’s civilizing intervention. Later, Caesar would also demonize as human-sacrificers the Druids of Gaul, another ‘barbarian’ country the Romans ‘liberated’ from its own traditions after conquering it. Likewise, the Chinese Zhou dynasty justified its coup d’état (eleventh century BCE) against the Shang dynasty by demonizing the Shang as practising human sacrifice.

"This way, sati came in very handy to justify an offensive in India. Mind you, in a military sense, India had partly been conquered already, and British self-confidence at the time was such that the complete subjugation of the subcontinent seemed assured. The offensive in this case was not military, its target was the Christianization of the East India Company, to be followed by the conversion of its subject population. Around 1800, the company was still purely commercial and even banned missionaries: Their religious zeal might have created riots, and those would be bad for business. So, the Christian lobby had to convince the British parliamentarians that the Christianization of India was good and necessary, and therefore worthy of the company’s active or passive support, namely to free the natives from barbarism. To that end, there was no better eye-catcher than sati."

"Let us only note that the missionaries are responsible for associating Hinduism with sati much more prominently than would be fair. The missionary assault on Hinduism dramatized the practice of sati, which had been an ‘exceptional act’ performed by a minuscule number of Hindu widows over the centuries, of which the occurrence had been ‘exaggerated in the nineteenth century by Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries eager to Christianize and Anglicize India’."

................................................................................................

"Krishna"

"Many Hindus believe that sati is an external contribution, probably triggered by Muslim conquests. ... "

Elst quotes tales from Mahâbhârata and older scriptures to say that the tradition was older, with instances from Veda. He mentions Krishna in context of several wives of his having opted for Sati, then tries to ameliorate that with Hindus, unlike muslims or Christians, not being forced to follow examples or diktat, and instead having freedom to make ones own decisions.

But while instances following legend of Sati are known, a tradition is a different matter, and Sati was not a tradition as such, not until Queen Padmini and women of Chittor went, en masse, to pyres, after saying a final farewell to their men, who were sent off for a final battle in the war forced by Alauddin Khilji on Chittor for his demand that the King of Chittor surrender the Queen, his own wife, to the Islamic invader.

To the women, who by then knew - since the Queen Sanyogita had been ordered, by the Muslim Saint buried at Ajmer - to be stripped and gang raped by soldiers, after she refused his demand that she marry the conqueror Ghori immediately after he'd beheaded her husband - how Islamic barbarian invaders treated women, and weren't willing to allow their selves to be subjected yo such humiliation and dishonour as being forced against their will, the very old legend was the recourse, and then on it became tradiion to be followed by widows.

Unmarried females used other ways to commit suicide when kidnapped and facing prospect of being forced, whenever possible, and that gave rise to the preemptive child marriage committing girls early to their final clan, along with weddings in North being secret affairs conducted at night, still the major difference between North and South India.

Latter saw much less of the pervasive, brutal subjugation and barbarism of Islam, and weddings have remained the festive celebration where women aren't hidden but resplendent in their finery, going in group to the temple to accompany the bride on previous evening, to being prominent throughout the wedding, and other celebrations.

"Indeed, a woman wanting to commit sati needed some willpower, for Hindu society did not take this as a matter of course. As per the many testimonies, she usually had to overcome the dissuasion from her family and from worldly or priestly authorities. (But rather than leading her away in chains for her own good, as modern psychiatrists would do, they give her the decisive last word.) That is why the first British report on the practice spoke of ‘self-immolation of widows’. Contrary to allegations of ‘murderous patriarchy’ by modern feminists (who hold the same ignorant prejudices about Hindu culture as the average foreign tourist), women themselves chose this spectacular fate."

" ... But no matter how rare the actual practice of sati, it remained a glamorous affair, honoured among the Hindu masses with commemorative stones (sati-kal) and temples (sati-sthal)."

What Elst doesn't mention is that a woman, however determined beforehand, had to be unimaginably brave to go through with it, since it's not cremation in a locked box and it's always possible to climb down as heat of flames begins to hit one with reality, while danger of a possible kidnapping has yet to happen.

Naturally the women were venerated for the extraordinary courage, but that doesn't mean that one could go through it just for that. Women didn't lack respect in traditional Hindu society.

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"HINDU SATI?"

"Sati was not confined to the Hindu civilization. It existed elsewhere, both in Indo-European and in other cultures. Rulers in ancient China or Egypt are sometimes found buried with a number of wives, concubines and servants. In pre-Christian Europe, the practice was related (directly, not inversely) to the status of women in society: not at all in Greece, where women were very subordinate, but quite frequently among the more autonomous Celtic women. Among the Germanic people, a famous case is that of Brunhilde and her maidservants following her husband Siegfried into death. Yet, Indian secularists preferentially depict sati as one of the unique ‘evils of Hindu society’."

"Naïve readers may not have noticed it yet, but here we are dealing with an instance of a widespread phenomenon: the crass manipulation of the term ‘Hindu’. Every missionary and every secularist does it all the time: calling a thing ‘Hindu’ when it is considered bad, but something (really anything) else as soon as it is deemed good. Many Hindus even lap it up: It is ‘instilled, albeit inadvertently’.

"Thus, whenever Westerners show an interest in yoga, the secularists and their Western allies hurry to assure us: ‘Yoga has nothing to do with Hinduism.’ (It is like with Islam, but inversely, for whenever Muslims make negative-sounding headlines, we are immediately reassured that these crimes ‘have nothing to do with Islam’.) There may be books on ‘Jain mathematics’, but never about ‘Hindu mathematics’, for a good thing cannot be Hindu. If the topic cannot be avoided, you call it, say, ‘the Kerala school of mathematics’ or fashionably opine that it ‘must have been borrowed from Buddhism’. So yoga cannot be Hindu when its merits are at issue. However, when it is presented as something funny, with asceticism and other nasty things, then it can be Hindu, and even used as a middle term to equate something else (something nasty, of course, like sati) with Hinduism. So: Sati is Hindu!

"In this case, the poor, hapless secularists are even right. Sometimes even a deplorable motive, like their single-minded hatred for Hinduism, makes men speak the truth: Sati is Hindu. Sati is not Brahmanical: the Rig Veda enjoins continuing life rather than committing sati, and the Shastras either don’t mention it or prefer widowhood, for which they lay down demanding rules. Many of the testimonies cited here mention Brahmanical priests trying to dissuade the woman from sati. Not Brahmanical, then, but nonetheless Hindu, a far broader concept. A Hindu means an ‘Indian pagan’, as per the Muslim invaders who first introduced the term in India. And indeed, sati has existed in many countries but certainly in India, and it is not of Christian or Islamic origin, so it may be called pagan. And so can the rejection of sati. See?"

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February 14, 2022 - February 14, 2022.

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11. Hindus Need Dharmic Awakening?

Rather, the BJP needs Dharmic Awakening

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Elst in 2016 criticizes Modi government for not doing anything for Hindus and predicts he'll lose next election as Vajpayee did.

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February 14, 2022 - February 14, 2022.

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12. Book Review of ‘Academic Hinduphobia:

A Critique of Wendy Doniger’s Erotic School of Indology’

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"Rajiv Malhotra’s new book, Academic Hinduphobia: A Critique of Wendy Doniger’s Erotic School of Indology, is a serious commentary on the ineptness of the so-called experts of Hinduism, holding positions of power and prestige in American universities. It is a pleasant read, rich with anecdotes from the author’s personal journey.

"Malhotra is the belated Hindu answer to decades of the systematic blackening of Hinduism in academe and the media. This is to be distinguished from the negative attitude to Hinduism among ignorant Westerners settling for the ‘caste, cows and curry’ stereotype, and from the anti-Hindu bias among secularists in India. Against the latter phenomenon, Hindu polemicists have long been up in arms, even though they have also been put at a disadvantage by the monopoly of their enemies in the opinion-making sphere. But for challenging the American India-watching establishment, a combination of skills was necessary, which Malhotra has only gradually developed and which few others can equal."

" ... In this war, American academe is linked with foreign policy interests and the Christian missionary apparatus, and they reinforce one another. Hindus have a formidable enemy in front of them, more wily and resourceful than they have ever experienced before. That is why a new knowledge of the specific laws of this particular battlefield is called for."

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"DEMONISATION"

"Malhotra correctly lays his finger on the links between Christian traditions and present-day Leftist techniques to undermine India. ... The early church deliberately spread or concocted martyrdom stories, for it empirically found these successful in swaying people towards accepting the Christian message.

"Today, this tradition is being continued in secularized form: ‘Western human rights activists and non-Westerners trained and funded by them go around the world creating new categories of “victims” that can be used in divide-and-conquer strategies against other cultures. In India’s case, the largest funding of this type goes to middlemen who can deliver narratives about “abused” Dalits and native (especially Hindu) women.’ (p.219)

"Here, Malhotra prepares the ground for his Breaking India thesis, where different forces unite in a common goal: to deconstruct India’s majority culture and fragment the country. At the same time, he sketches the psychology of the Hindu-haters, explaining why they have such a good conscience in lambasting Hinduism and trying to destroy it. They like to see themselves as the oppressed underdogs, or, in this case, as champions of the oppressed, in spite of their privileged social position and their senior position vis-à-vis the born Hindus who come to earn PhDs under their guidance.

"Among those confronted here are Sarah Caldwell, David Gordon White, Deepak Sarma, Robert Zydenbos and Shankar Vedantam. Note the names of some Hindu-born sepoys. The term ‘sepoy’ for Hindus trying to curry favour with their white superiors needs to be nuanced a little bit. In colonial days, it was black and white: Britons trying to perpetuate and legitimize their domination, and Indian underlings trying to prosper as much as possible in the British system. Today, American Indologists are also partly influenced (especially in their furious hatred of Hindutva) by Indian secularist opinion, but then this has, in turn, been oriented in an anti-Hindu sense precisely by the earlier cultural anglicization of the elites during colonial times. Anyway, in the present context, it is indeed Americans leading the dance and Indians trying to keep up."

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"WENDY’S PSYCHOANALYTIC FREE-FOR-ALL"

"One of the faces of academic ‘Hinduphobia’ is the flippant eroticizing discourse about Hindu civilization developed by Chicago University’s Professor Wendy Doniger, continued by her erstwhile Ph.D. students and eagerly taken over by prominent media establishments like The Washington Post. Here, Malhotra, first of all, amply documents the reality and seriousness of the problem. Imagine: A number of professors who are not at all qualified as psycho-analysts and would be punishable if they applied their diagnosis to a living human being, feel entitled to psycho-analyse a guru like Ramakrishna or a god like Ganesha."

Disgusting.

Is it because they insist in name of faith in propagating absurd stories on their own side? The following suggests it might be more personal in that case.

"Thus, Jeffrey Kripal’s thesis about Ramakrishna (Kali’s Child) is, according to a quoted Bengali critic, marred by ‘faulty translations’, ‘wilful distortion and manipulation of sources’, ‘remarkable ignorance of Bengali culture’, ‘misrepresentations’ and a simply defective knowledge of both Sanskrit and Bengali. (p.101) He has, like too many academics, the tendency to ‘first suspect, then assume, then present as a fact’ his own desired scenario, i.e., ‘that Ramakrishna was sexually abused as a child’. (p.105) A closer look at his errors could make the reader embarrassed in Kripal’s place—e.g., mistranslating ‘lap’ as ‘genitals’, ‘head’ as ‘phallus’, ‘touching softly’ as ‘sodomy’, etc. Kripal’s whole scenario of Ramakrishna as a defiler of boys is not only unsubstantiated—and it provides not only a peep into Kripal’s own morbid mind—but it is also, in this age of cultural hypersensitivity, a brutal violation of Hindu and Bengali feelings. If it were an unpleasant truth, it had a right to get said in spite of what the concerned communities would think, but even then, a more circumspect mode of expression and more interaction with the community directly affected would have been called for. But when it comes to Hindus, riding roughshod over them is still the done thing."

"Similarly, Paul Courtright (in his book Gane’sa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings) develops his thesis about Ganesha’s broken trunk being a limp phallus, and of Ganesha being the first god with an Oedipus complex, on the basis of what is clearly defective knowledge about the elephant god. The lore surrounding Ganesha is vast, and does not always live up to Courtright’s stereotype of a sweets-addicted diabetic. He has some stories in Hindu literature to his credit where his phallus is not exactly limp. Indeed, I myself am the lucky owner of a Ganesha bronze where he is doing it with a dakini (a nymph serving as partner to a tantric yogi or deity).

"Doniger herself is now best known for the numerous errors in her book The Hindus: An Alternative History, diagnosed in detail by Vishal Agarwal. Known among laymen as a Sanskritist, her shoddy translations of Sanskrit classics have been criticized by colleagues like Michael Witzel, not exactly a friend of the Hindus. In a normal academic setting, with word and counter-word, where the peer review would have included first-hand practitioners of the tradition concerned, Doniger’s or Kripal’s or Courtright’s gross errors would never have passed muster. It is only because the dice have been loaded against Hinduism that these hilarious distortions are possible. It is, therefore, a very necessary and very reasonable struggle that Malhotra has taken up."

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"THE RISA LIST"

"When I wrote my book The Argumentative Hindu (2012), I seriously wondered whether to include my exchanges with the RISA (Religion In South Asia) list about the dishonourable way listmaster Deepak Sarma and the rest of the gang overruled list rules in order to banish me, and how many prominent Indologists actively or passively supported his tricks. I didn’t consider my own story that important, but finally I decided to do it, just for the sake of history. Future as well as present students of the conflicting worldviews in India and among India-watchers in the West are or will be interested in a detailed illustration of how mean and pompous the anti-Hindu crowd can be in defending their power position.

"Here we get a detailed report on a much more important RISA debate that took place in 2003, and as it turns out, it was indeed worth making this information available. ... "

" ... Recent incidents, some concerning Malhotra himself, confirm that the exclusion of people because of their opinion, the systematic haughtiness because of institutional rank (‘Malhotra is not even an academic’, a sophomoric attitude unbecoming of anyone experienced with how progress in research is made, and by whom), the intellectually contemptible use of ‘guilt by association’, are all still in evidence in Western Indologist forums.

"Malhotra notes an improvement in the general mood as a result of the debate: ‘For the first time in RISA’s history, to the best of my knowledge, the diaspora voices are not being branded as saffronists, Hindutva fanatics, fascists, chauvinists, dowry extortionists, Muslim killers, nun rapists, Dalit abusers, etc. One has to wait and see whether this is temporary or permanent.’ (p.215)

"So far, the impression prevails that the mood has not changed much. We saw this in 2015, when Malhotra was accused of plagiarism. A detailed look at the case exonerated him and actually made the whole controversy rather ludicrous, yet otherwise moderate voices on the Indology and the Indo-Eurasian Research lists (I can’t speak for the RISA list, but it contains the same people) all ganged up against him. They acted very indignant over something that, even if it were true, would only be a trifle, immaterial to the debate at hand. It is this persistence of the same anti-Hindu attitudes that makes this book more than a historical document: It teaches Hindus what to expect today if they challenge the Indological establishment."

" ... Remember, they had predicted a ‘Muslim holocaust’ if ever the BJP would come to power (and have never had to bear the consequences of their grossly wrong prediction in the field of their supposed expertise). Even ivory-tower academics had to be aware of that feedback from reality. Then again, this consideration ought to prevail even now, with Narendra Modi opening many doors internationally and not at all living up to the hate image many India-watchers had sworn by in the preceding years. Yet, ‘Hinduphobia’ is still with us."

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"PHOBIA"

"The major flaw in this book is its title. I object to political terms ending in ‘-phobia’, normally a medical term meaning ‘irrational fear’, as in arachnophobia, the ‘irrational fear of spiders’. As far as I know, the first term in this category of political terms borrowed from the medical register was ‘homophobia’, the ‘irrational fear of homosexuals’. First of all, the word was wrongly constructed. Literally, it means ‘fear of the same’, i.e., ‘fear of the same sex’, whereas men criticizing homosexuality are not usually afraid of men. In fact, the words target people who disapprove of homosexuality, no matter what their rational or emotional motive. The term or connotation of ‘sexuality’ is missing (you might try ‘homophilophobia’) and the targeted ‘disapproval’ is not the same thing as the stated ‘fear’, nor as the intended ‘hate’. Still, the neologism won through, thanks to the bourgeoisie’s sheepish acceptance of it.

"Thus, it is verifiable that books may be written about ‘Jain mathematics’, but when Hindus do mathematics, it will be called ‘Indian mathematics’ or ‘the Kerala school of mathematics’. Congress politician Mani Shankar Aiyar once praised India’s inherent pluralism, enumerated its well-attested hospitality to refugee groups, and then attributed all this not to Hinduism but to ‘something in the air here’. In missionary propaganda and in the secularist media, it is always emphasized that ‘tribals are not Hindus’—except when they take revenge on Christians or Muslims, because then the media reports on ‘Hindu rioters’.

"This obsessive negativity towards Hinduism needs to be named and shamed. Now that the bourgeoisie has interiorized terms like ‘homophobia’ and ‘Islamophobia’, it is clear that the neologism ‘Hinduphobia’ belongs to a language register they will understand. Once heightened scruples prevail and linguistic hygiene is restored, all three terms may be discarded together. But until then, the use of Hinduphobia in counter-attack mode is a wise compromise with the prevailing opinion climate."

"Next came ‘Islamophobia’, literally ‘irrational fear of Islam’, intended to mean ‘hatred of Islam’, and in effect targeting ‘disapproval of Islam’ or ‘Islam criticism’. This term was first launched in the 1990s by the Runnymede Trust, a British quango dedicated to fighting racism. It was taken over by many governments and media, and especially promoted by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. It is an intensely mendacious term trying to criminalize the normal exercise of the power of discrimination. The targeted critics of Islam need neither fear nor hate Islam—their attitude may rather be likened to that of a teacher using his red pencil to cross out a mistake in a pupil’s homework. But again, a mighty promotion by powerful actors made the word gain household status."

"On the other hand, an irrational anti-Hinduism is a reality. It is precisely through comparison with Islam that this becomes glaring. Whenever a group of people gets killed in the name of Islam, immediately the politicians concerned and the media assure us that this terror ‘has nothing to do with Islam’. In the case of Hinduism, it is just the reverse. Of any merit of Hinduism, it is immediately assumed that ‘it has nothing to do with Hinduism’, whereas every problem in India is automatically blamed on Hinduism, from poverty (‘the Hindu rate of growth’) to rape."

("*Published on Pragyata.com, 5 July 2016")

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February 14, 2022 - February 14, 2022.

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13. The Aurangzeb Debate

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"Unfortunately, I have no time for a full review of Audrey Truschke’s book, checking primary sources and all that, though if it somehow proves necessary, I will do it anyway. I am concentrating on more complex and more important issues in the history of Hindu thought, while the history of Islam has lost my interest because it is so simple and our conclusions about it are not at all threatened with a need for revision. As a doctrine, Islam is a mistake, and as a historical movement, it has a very negative record vis-à-vis Unbelievers, especially the Hindus. The secularists and their foreign dupes may cry themselves hoarse in their denial of these straightforward and amply proven facts, but they don’t stand a chance, though not for want of trying.

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Elst does persist in making asinine statements, whether to merely provoke or often from racism, ignorance et al.

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"Whenever Islamic rulers or warlords feel compelled to provide a justification for their iconoclasm, they point to earlier Islamic leaders’ precedents, but most of all to Mohammed’s own model behaviour, especially the epochal moment after the city of Mecca’s surrender when the Prophet and his son-in-law Ali removed the pagan Kaaba’s 360 idols with their own hands. The job completed, they declared that with this, light had triumphed over darkness—truly a defining moment in Islam’s genesis (as described in the Sirat Rasul Allah, the Prophet’s orthodox biography). Not one Islamic theologian will contradict us when we say that an exemplary Muslim is one who emulates the Prophet."

" ... He regretted having destroyed temples not because he was suddenly struck with compassion for the accursed Infidels, but because he had provoked them into rebellion and thus endangered Islam’s position in India. For almost two centuries, Islam had thrived and enjoyed power, thanks to a compromise with the Hindu majority—these had a subordinate position, but not emphatically so. Not enough to make them rise in revolt. Now, after Shivaji’s successful rebellion, it was becoming clear that Indian Islam had entered a period of decline. The romantic ideal of emulating the Prophet in every detail had come in the way of Islam’s larger and deeper goal, viz. consolidating and extending its power, ultimately expected (as ordered by the Quran itself) to culminate in world conquest.

"Let us note, finally, that on this issue, Audrey’s book is representative of a wider concern to whitewash Aurangzeb. In their all-out war on Hinduism and specific Hindu ideas, the South Asia scholars tend to practise groupthink—there is rarely anything original, they only outdo each other in how daring they can make their own articulation of ever the same position. In 2014, I participated in an all-day session on Aurangzeb at the biannual conference of the European Association for South Asian Studies in Zürich. One paper after another highlighted some quotes from contemporaneous writers in praise of Aurangzeb. These are easy to find, as he had the last say in their success or marginalization, even over life and death. On Stalin, too, you can easily find many contemporary sources praising him, and then silly academics concluding therefrom that he can’t have been so bad.

"Thus, one of the sources was Guru Gobind Singh’s Zafar Namah or ‘victory letter’. If you quote it selectively, you might think he was an admirer and ideological comrade of Aurangzeb’s. But the Guru was strategically with his back against the wall and had to curry favour with the man holding all the cards. So he wrote a diplomatically worded letter and held his personal opinions to himself (and here is one case where personal relations must have trumped ideology). It is entirely certain, and academics cover themselves with shame if they cleverly try to deny it, that the Guru hated Aurangzeb from the bottom of his heart. Aurangzeb was responsible for the murder of his father and all four sons. Any proletarian can understand that, in private, Guru Gobind Singh must have said the worst things about Aurangzeb. You have to be as silly or as partisan as a South Asia scholar to believe that the Guru meant to praise Aurangzeb.

"To sum up, the presently discussed thesis by Truschke comes to add to the numbers of what formally look like studies in history, but effectively are meant as strikes in the ongoing battle against self-respecting Hinduism."

("*The author’s letter replying to a review of Audrey Truschke’s book Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth, published in The National Interest on 22 April 2017.")

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February 14, 2022 - February 14, 2022.

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14. Ayodhya: Meeting Romila Thapar Halfway

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"The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), together with the neighbouring British Museum, is a centre of orientalism in its proper sense, viz. the study of ‘oriental’ civilizations. Exactly one hundred years ago, it came about as the headquarters of what Edward Said notoriously called ‘orientalism’, meaning the colonial empire’s project of pigeonholing every oriental culture in order to better dominate it.

"At that same time, on the enemy side in the ongoing First World War, the German scholar Max Weber published one of the most influential studies of the Orient, focusing on the question of the economic views and implications of the world religions, and especially the part about Hinduism and Buddhism. It sought to understand why not they but Protestantism had presided over the technoscientific and economic breakthrough to industrial capitalism and modernity.

"Some fifty people gathered in the SOAS’s Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre for the centenary of both SOAS and Max Weber’s work. As for SOAS’s anniversary, Chairman Peter Flügel quoted viceroy Lord Curzon calling SOAS at its time of conception the ‘necessary furniture of the empire’, for ‘oriental studies are an imperial obligation’. This is a key citation in Said’s ‘orientalism’ thesis, viz. that orientalist scholarship was essentially a strategic investment by the colonial establishment."

Elst speaks about the conference, about Romila Thapar who had led the "no temple existed" position on Ayodhya while Elst had opposed it, and Weber.

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February 14, 2022 - February 14, 2022.

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15. Guha’s Golwalkar

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" ... Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS, ‘Indian People’s Association’), founded in 1951, was a venture into explicit politics which Golwalkar agreed to against his wishes, after the Hindu Mahasabha (‘Hindu Great Council’, °1922) had irredeemably fallen from grace with the murder of Mahatma Gandhi by one of its members. ... "

It's been known widely enough and published, too, that Godse had severed relationships with both RSS and HMS long before his decision to kill Gandhi was made. The organisations had nothing to fo with it, not even informed or in any other way had any information thereof. He kept his own counsel gor most part, except for a couple of associates, and neither his friend nor his brother had any reason to draw attention himself by speaking of it, to anyone outside the small group.

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"THE PLACE OF BOOKS IN HINDU NATIONALISM"

"Guha misrepresents (probably because he misunderstands) the role of books in the Sangh. His inference that Bunch of Thoughts somehow determines today’s BJP government’s policies is a typical secularist fantasy, if only because the BJP has emancipated itself from the RSS. Most BJP men today are not from the RSS, and even the RSS men inside or outside the BJP have rarely read this Hindutva manifesto. ... "

" ... Dr K.B. Hedgewar came from the Bengal revolutionary faction of the freedom movement, and brought its secretive methods along. Like the revolutionaries, wary of feeding written evidence of their designs to police informers, RSS men never communicated in writing but travelled around to pass information orally. ... "

"The (indeed real) influence of Bunch of Thoughts in RSS discourse is mainly through oral sermons by bauddhik (intellectual) officers selecting a few nice passages. Most RSS men won’t recognize the more difficult passages that Guha draws grim conclusions from. It is like the Bible in Roman Catholicism, where the raw passages are kept out of hearing distance: The flock is only fed the elevating passages through selected Sunday readings."

" ... While the Congress has evolved from secular nationalism to making common cause with the Breaking India forces, the BJP has evolved from Hindu nationalism to secular nationalism. ... Secularist intellectuals like Guha may find this absurd, but it is the reality."

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"‘WE, OR OUR NATIONHOOD DEFINED’"

"Guha’s critique is certainly not the lowliest kind of anti-Golwalkar polemic. In articles of that category, used unquestioningly as source in the majority of the introductions to Hindu nationalism, the targeted Golwalkar book would not be Bunch of Thoughts (1966) but his slim maiden volume, We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939). That attempt at ideological contemplation of the political challenges before Hindu society has earned notoriety because of two overquoted passages. In one, Golwalkar is selectively cited as seemingly supporting Nazi Germany. I have analysed this passage in the context of the book and its time (one chapter each in The Saffron Swastika, 2001, and Return of the Swastika, 2006, or online at https://www.academia.edu/14793753/Disowning_Golwalkars_We), and found this common allegation, present in every introductory text on Hindutva, totally wanting. Thus, anti-Semitism was the core doctrine of National Socialism, yet the Jewish people were the foremost role models upheld by Golwalkar for the ‘Hindu nation’. As for the Nazis’ militarism, he contrasts Germany’s champions of martial virtues with the sages who form the Hindu role models ‘in serene majesty’. This oft-quoted passage is irrelevant for contemporary debates, except to show to what mendaciousness secularists and foreign India-watchers can stoop.

"The other passage could have more to do with contemporary politics. It clearly distinguishes Christians and Muslims from the Hindus, as mere guests vis-à-vis the host society, entitled to protection and an honourable life, but to nothing more. Golwalkar proposes that they ‘re-assimilate’, or else accept a protected status as foreign residents ‘claiming nothing, not even citizens’ rights’. Yet, as the book disappeared from circulation in 1948 and Golwalkar vetoed its reprint for being ‘immature’, most Sangh members have never even seen that line. It doesn’t reflect the current party line of the RSS, let alone the BJP."

"The only incriminating fact that still attaches to We is its disowning by the RSS. It officially disowned the book in 2006, only confirming half a century of the book’s factual non-existence, and with that decision, we have no quarrel. But it also claimed, quite mendaciously, that the book had not been written by Golwalkar and did not reflect his ideas. Nobody got fooled, except the most obedient among the RSS’s own volunteers."

Elst is wrong. Theft of this manuscript handed over to Golwalkar, entrusted by Savarkar for publication, which manuscript was work of Savarkar's brother, was the reason Godse had severed ties with Golwalkar and RSS.

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"BUNCH OF THOUGHTS"

"Golwalkar does indeed remain ‘the chief ideologue of the organization’, meaning the RSS, and till today, his ‘bearded visage is prominently displayed’ at RSS functions. It may also be true that as an RSS veteran, Prime Minister Narendra Modi ‘hugely admires Golwalkar’. Yet, in general, it is a big stretch of Guha’s to claim that Bunch of Thoughts is ‘of enormous contemporary relevance’ and is for the ruling party what the Quran is for Muslims. Firstly, the RSS impact on the BJP is limited and waning. Secondly, Islam is a ‘religion of the book’ and heavily determined by the contents of the Quran, to which it explicitly pays obeisance; but Hinduism is not that book-oriented, even when it pays plenty of lip service to the scriptures."

Elst is wrong in the last part, perhaps he's unaware of rich treasures of Indian literature apart from the treasure of scripture of ancient India. Publishing is big business in poor nation of people robbed for over a millennium by various colonial regimes, only because people read. Most of ancient traditional learning, however, was of memory and "Manana", and this remains true in regard to scriptures.

This is why Persia was illiterate within a century of Islamic onslaught, with libraries burnt by invaders. India survived that and more, being less dependent on manuscripts, even though it's hard to estimate how much work, how much knowledge of sciences, mathematics and astronomy was lost.

" ... More than anyone else, he is responsible for the RSS’s anti-intellectual orientation, which has been very consequential: (1) a complete absence from the public debate (2) a propensity to make fools of themselves with fantastic claims, e.g., that ‘ancient Indians had airplanes’, as if India’s real contributions to science and technology weren’t good enough ... "

Why must Elst assume that the scriptures of India were false? Racism?

Europe tends to assume that Europe knows best. Well, Europe and her descendents haven't figured out architecture of pyramids or of other humongous monumental buildings such as at Tiahuanaco and Gobekliteppe, much less India. Airplanes, or whatever be the technical epithet for the vehicle that flew Raama and Sita back from Lanka to Ayodhya, were known to India. Knowledge being lost has happened elsewhere too, and if anyone knows about Stonehenge and other sites even in UK, it's hardly common knowledge.

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"NATIONALISM"

"Contrary to what the secularists allege these days, the RSS was very much rooted in the freedom movement, in anti-colonial nationalism. It started as a security force to protect a Congress meeting in 1925, and its founder, K.B. Hedgewar, had been trained by the Bengali revolutionary wing of the freedom movement. (This explains a working principle of the RSS, viz. its secretiveness and reliance on direct communication.) Its slightly older sister, the Hindu Mahasabha (1922), was originally a Hindu lobby within the Congress.

"This nationalism was a logical choice, at least in the 1920s. The immediate pressures from the anti-colonial struggle and the international after-effect of the national passions of the Great War, made nationalism honourable and obligatory. Even associations for sports or music took the habit of marching in uniform, as if they were armies marching to the battlefield. The RSS followed this pattern.

"Emotionally, this nationalist appeal undoubtedly works. Election campaigns fought on national issues tend to unite the citizens around them, transcending and trumping the usual contests between collective self-interests (communal, casteist or regional), which are divisive.

"It is another question whether it still is such a wise choice after 1945, when nationalism got a bad name through its identification with the losing side in the Second World War; after 1947 and the decades of independence, when India has other concerns than its relatively assured national freedom; after 1947 again, as the year when many Hindus became citizens of the suddenly separate countries of Pakistan and (what was to become) Bangladesh; after the resettlement of millions of Hindus abroad and their acquisition of a foreign nationality (apart from those already in Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Afghanistan); and after quite a few non-Indians became Hindu. As I have argued elsewhere, ‘nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns’."

Again Elst is wrong - while India, of present and of ancient times, has given refuge to every group and person in need, from persecuted Jews, Parsis and Tibetans to even Southeast-Asian refugees who may have used it only as a stepping stone before proceeding to greener destinations - Hindus in the lands or nations elst lists have no other refuge, nowhere else to go, if assaulted where they are by Islamic jihâd wielders.

Nationalism of India and of Hindus, of Hinduism, is desperately needed in face of realities of jihad on one hand, and the plight of Jews for two millennia due to persecution by Rome, resulting in Holocaust, due to loss of homeland.

"Thus, the reason why Muslim invaders destroyed Hindu temples was not that they were ‘foreign invaders’, as claimed in most RSS pamphlets, for then they would have imposed ‘foreign temples’ on Hindu sites. No, it was because they were Muslim, a word avoided nowadays in RSS parlance, and they imposed mosques. In discussions about Ghar Wapasi (‘homecoming’), the reconversion of Christian converts to Hinduism, promoted by the RSS, I often hear the justification: ‘Christianization also entails Westernization’—as if Christianization without Westernization were alright. But that is not the problem: Hindus themselves are fast Westernizing (without the RSS-BJP doing anything against it), but this does not make them non- or anti-Hindu. And at least the Catholic missionaries are responding to this complaint by ‘inculturation’, i.e., Christianization without Westernization. So that is alright for the RSS: Indian Christians smashing Hindu ‘idols’, as long as they duly wear a dhoti? For ‘nationalists’, blind to the religious dimension, it is."

Elst has a habit of quibbling on small possible words, where reality is obvious. RSS isn't objecting to men wearing trousers or women blouses, bras and petticoats, unlike the way sarees were worn when British fashions weren't yet copied universally.

Obviously the relevance us about destruction of essential Indian, Hindu culture. And yes, any idigenisatisation by missionaries and preachers of church is all deception, for purposes of conversion, after which alienation of coverts from India actively imposed and encouraged by preachers, begins.

So no, destruction of temples and objects of worship by Dhoni wearing converts isn't acceptable, or even on horizons of minds of RSS, or anyone but Elst and his like.

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"HINDU RASHTRA"

"Why was the nation conceived as ‘Hindu’, rather than ‘Indian’? ... "

Has Elst forgotten, or is he unaware, that the two words are of the same root, the word Hindu (according to him being Persian for Sindhu) being deformed by Europe go Indus, and the kind and her people called Hindu by West Asia, India and Indian by Europe? In Germany, the mention if "Hindu muslims" wasn't a contradiction in terms but reference to Muslims of India, fir a long time.

India has no identity without, other than, Hinduism. Hindus have no existence without India, other than another homeless community as targeted as were jews fir two millennia.

" ... In Hedgewar’s analysis, Hindu society constituted the Indian nation, while the minorities were mere guests. ... "

Thus was literally fact until Islamic barbaric invasions, followed by Europe and her missionaries. Now, those cherishing heritage of erstwhile colonial regimes not only wish equal status, they demand that of pigs as in Animal Farm, that of "more equal". Elst questions on that basis, denying facts via blinkers.

" ... The rationale for this term is the post-Golwalkar doctrine that ‘Hindu’ is synonymous with ‘Indian’."

That is not a doctrine, least of all by a Hindu, but mere fact of history. The two words are for the same land and her people, and even latter a European deformation of the former, a West Asian term.

"Earlier, ‘Indian’ was reduced to ‘Hindu’ (subtracting any non-Hindu Indians from the ‘Indian’ category, as in Golwalkar’s quotes above), but in the RSS discourse of the last decades, ‘Hindu’ is being reduced to ‘Indian’. This purely geographical and thus ‘secular’ notion was the meaning of the Persian word ‘Hindu’ 1,500 years ago. But when the Muslim invaders imported it into India, it immediately had a religious meaning: all Indian pagans in the broadest sense, i.e., all those who were not Jews, Christians or Muslims. This, then, is the original Indian meaning of Hindu: any Indian pagan, whether Brahmin, Shudra, Buddhist, tribal or any other grouping or denomination, but emphatically excluding Muslims and Christians. ... "

" ... BJP now, having learnt its lesson from the A.B. Vajpayee government’s passivity on Hindu issues, wants to ‘keep the pot boiling’. It wants to throw some crumbs to its Hindu constituency, such as a punitive strike against Pakistani terrorist camps, to buy sufficient loyalty from its Hindu support base—but without doing anything substantive on important Hindu demands. ... "

What moron would dream of such a description as "some crumbs to its Hindu constituency, such as a punitive strike against Pakistani terrorist camps", after the decades of attacks suffered by India due to the terrorist factory that masquerades as a nation but was conceived, in the first place, by Churchill, as a free military base for use of West against USSR? What moron thinks Hindus see that "punitive strike against Pakistani terrorist camps" as crumbs?

Would it make sense if it were about France, Germany and even Notre Dame in Paris vs retaliation against a blitzkrieg?

Does Elst seriously think that if your ancestors lived in sunshine, instead of dark nordic latitudes, you can't think, or can be fooled?

Apparently.

" ... The Gupta or the Chola empire or any other pre-modern Hindu political entity was coronated with Hindu rites and facilitated Vedic and Puranic traditions, but never called itself a ‘Hindu rashtra’. ... "

Why would they? The word was foreign. The word they'd have used is Aarya. That wasn't about race, either, but culture of the land.

................................................................................................

"INDIA’S UNITY"

"Unlike Jawaharlal Nehru, Golwalkar didn’t see this nationhood as a project, a ‘nation in the making’, but as an ancient heritage: ‘Long before the West had learnt to eat roast meat instead of raw, we were one nation, with one motherland.’ Indeed, in many RSS writings, it is claimed that the Vedic expression matrbhumi, or ‘motherland’, meant ‘India’, in the sense of ‘the subcontinent’.

"That is not true, but the belief has a long tradition. A close reading of the Vedas shows a geographical horizon stretching from roughly Prayag to the Afghan frontier. The only Vedic seer credited with crossing the Vindhya mountains was Agastya, and that was noticed precisely because it was an exceptional adventure, not a visit to a province of his familiar motherland. In the Mahabharata, an epic based on a historical war of succession in the Vedic Bharata dynasty ca. 1400 BC, the geographical ambit of the events and persons involved is similarly limited. Yet, by the time of the final editing, around the time of Christ, dynasties from the farthest ends of India had had themselves written into the narrative. They wanted to belong to the expanding Vedic civilization, which is also why they invited Brahmin families and donated land to them, in order to have them confer Vedic legitimacy on their dynasties."

First of all, Agastya wasn't seen as going outside Aaryaavarta, and Raamaayana is where all of India is encompassed already - Mahâbhârata is where India is no longer as much of dangerous forests, but civilised kingdoms galore all over.

As for dating, Europe always seeks to diminish India - but Indian civilisation predates India watching as Ocean north vanished and Himaalayan ranges were rising out of the ocean. If its not eyewitness account, it's tremendous spiritual power to know this and record it into knowledge of ancient India as a legend. Vedas are far older than West is willing to admit.

"Not since a God-given eternity, but at least for more than 2,000 years, all of the subcontinent has had a sense of unity. ... "

Well, definitely since before Raamaayana begins - Raavana and his siblings being older, and his half brother being the famous Kubera, capital of whose kingdom in Himaalayan region was famous for riches, so much so Raavana determined that his own capital in Lanka would rival it, and he made it happen too - it was famed as Lanka paved with gold. Neither was Raavana a pioneer in South or in Lanka, nor was his brother so in Himaalayan region. That already then establishes the North-South boundaries roughly, although more might have existed. Lands have submerged since.

" ... This is far more than most countries can say, and it is enough to justify its political unity today. The pilgrimage cycles, the narration of the same epics in village squares all over the country, and the visible presence of the otherwise self-contained Brahmin caste and the monastic orders, created a degree of self-conscious cultural unity. This sometimes approached but never fully reached political unity, which at any rate only concerned the elites: Changing borders made little difference to ordinary life. Clearly, political unity existed at least as an ideal."

That last bit might not have been true. What was true is, kings were expected to follow Sharma in sense of duty, of protection and welfare of their people; and if they wished a greater kingdom or emperorhood, they waged wars by giving notice and meeting other army at appointed time and place, away from civilian lives. People being able to live in security to be able to carry on their nirmal lives was the utmost requirement.

Political unity became a dire need only after Islamic invasions.

"The fact is that here, Golwalkar gave utterance to a feeling common among Indians. Whatever the details of the past, Indians believe in national unity. And this is not a nationalism ‘in the making’—on the contrary: The Nehruvian elites dish out all kinds of reasons why not Indianness but the separate communal identities are ‘real’, yet when push comes to shove, Indians stand united. Before the Chinese attacked in 1962, Tamil Nadu was in the grip of separatist fervour, but when the invasion came, the Tamils, all while remaining wedded to the Dravidianist cultural demands, abandoned the separatist camp and threw their lot in with India. Also, history shows that the surest way to win an election lies in having just won an Indo-Pak war. The local and communal identities are real, but so is the ‘national’ identity.

"Hence Guha’s Golwalkar quotation: ‘Hindu society developed in an all-comprehensive manner, with a bewildering variety of phases and forms, but with one thread of unification running inherently through the multitude of expressions and manifestations.’ Here Golwalkar’s observation is impeccable, though I would call this unity ‘civilizational’ rather than ‘national’. Guha comments: ‘What precisely this unifying thread was is never defined.’ Well, it is Hinduism. This is a vague and capacious notion, but adequate enough to explain India’s self-conscious unity."

................................................................................................

"Part 2*"

"WORLD TEACHER"

"It is not as if other nations are waiting for India’s contribution. Then again, what they did take or accept from India was the most precious contribution. China had no mean philosophy sprung out of its own soil, but nonetheless accepted and integrated Buddhism. Among the Greek philosophers, Pythagoras and later the neo-Platonists were but the most explicit in copying Indian concepts and even practices, and they influenced the whole of European philosophy, as well as a bit of Christian theology. ... "

More than that.

Worship as carried out in churches, not protestant but including Anglican, have the same components familiar to any Hindu, even though not all of them, and different in outer forms - incense, lights, flowers - candles instead of oil lamps made by a potter, or European flowers instead of fragrant tropical ones, are not serious differences. Tradition of Pravachana, Bhajana and Kirtana, not as formal as once a week choir and preaching but nevertheless known in temples of India, has been for centuries, as long as temples existed. It could only be a younger religion copying an older one.

" ... A much later revolution in European thought was wrought by Immanuel Kant, who admitted the decisive influence (‘awakened from my dogmatic slumber’) from David Hume’s sudden development of a quasi-Buddhist view. Hume doesn’t mention Buddhism, and would perhaps have been laughed out of court if he had, but recently we have discovered that his philosophical awakening had been triggered by his reading two detailed accounts of Buddhist thought by Catholic missionaries posted in Tibet or Thailand. Modern thinkers like A.N. Whitehead, C.G. Jung and Ken Wilber tapped directly into Indian thoughts and practices, even if not always acknowledging it (an attitude discussed by Rajiv Malhotra in his innovative thesis of the ‘U-turn’).

"On the other hand, translating this natural attractiveness of Indian traditions for outsiders into a missionary spirit is not very Hindu either. When real Evangelists meet someone from a different religion, immediately their missionary mechanic sets to work: What buttons are there in him that I can click to make him open to my message? Hindus don’t have this at all. When they meet someone from a strange religion, they become naturally curious. They feel no need to destroy that foreign religion and replace it with Hinduism, but assume that there must be a core of wisdom in it, something essentially the same as what makes Hindus tick."

................................................................................................

"THE BUDDHA'S COSMOPOLITANISM"

" ... we can agree that Buddhism never set great store by defending India’s borders, which were not threatened in the north or the east, where the Buddha lived and worked. The northwestern frontier was known to the Buddha, and indeed culturally familiar, not felt to be a foreign land at all, for his friends Prasenajit and Bandhula had studied there, at Takshashila University. (Yes, it existed before Buddhism: Contrary to the Nehruvian received wisdom, the university as an institution was not a Buddhist but a Vedic invention.) But he was not in the business of defending it: At that very time it was not threatened either, and he indeed had other priorities anyway. ... "

" ... Something similar counts for other Indian sects. The Vedas and the epics report a number of wars, but never a defence against foreign aggression. Once there was real aggression, by Mohammed Ghori, defender Prithviraj Chauhan was betrayed by Jayachandra, latter as much a Hindu as the former. They were aware of some cultural unity stretching from Attock to Cuttack, but politically they were attached to their own part of the subcontinent ... "

Attached isn't the word, it was more about duty of defense; and Jayachandra isn't excused by anyone on any count.

" ... The RSS notion of a deshbhakt (a ‘patriot’, ‘devotee of the country’, meaning a devotee of the whole subcontinent) did not exist in pre-modern Hinduism."

Not true. Shivaji definitely was about defence of Hindu people and culture, even if it began in a corner; hence growth of Maratha empire. Maharana Pratap similarly was not merely defending his position, which he could have just as well by emulating Hindu kings who had joined Akbar in a sub position. From Prithviraj Chauhan on, the defenders against Islam were defending Hinduism and Hindu people.

"Then again, you do get the notion of India as a ‘punyabhumi’, a territory fit for earning merit, which you have to purify yourself to re-enter after a stay abroad. Here you get the bridge between Hindu spirituality and Hindu nationalism. In my opinion, like in that of cosmopolitan secularists, this was a degenerative trend, but as an outsider, I don’t want to tell Hindus what to do or believe. So here we do have to admit that Golwalkar had a traditional basis for his assertion of India’s uniqueness."

Why degenerative, isn't clear, and he's being racist in assuming he has authority to "tell Hindus what to do or believe", or even capability. One is reminded of a german colkeague, entrusted by employers to welcome us to Germany, proceeding to infirm us how India should control population; another German, a woman of Australian nationality traveling from Germany returning to Australia, met us in a small village nowhere close to any major airport, and proceeded to do the same, complaining in the resort's empty restaurant of crowds. It dawned on us that she was there as a missionary and didntvwish to admit it, since it made her illegal.

................................................................................................

"CASTE"

"Buddhism had come into the limelight in 1956, shortly before the book was written: with Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s adoption of, or (in Guha’s borrowed Christian construction of the event) ‘conversion’ to Buddhism. Ambedkar had wanted to show a fist to caste Hinduism, yet that did not make him a ‘traitor to the mother society and the mother religion’. On the contrary: He said that conversion to a foreign religion would harm the nation, which he did not want, hence his embracing of a sect born in India. As Savarkar had commented, Ambedkar’s ‘refuge’ in Bauddha dharma was ‘a sure jump into the Hindu fold’. ... Guha correctly notes that Golwalkar ‘does not so much as mention the great emancipator of the Dalits’."

Does Guha or any other so-called self-labelled "secular" mention Ekanaath, in the context of awareness of humanitarian rather than casteist behaviour? Or even Raama, for that matter who did partake of the fruits eaten partly by the tribal, Shabarie, despite strict rules of Hindu culture? It's convenient to forget them, so as to castigate upper caste Hindus, is all.

"For people involved in a crusade against Hinduism, like the Nehruvian secularists, it was a foregone conclusion that whatever a Hindu leader ever wrote, he would most of all be judged for his position on caste. That this will always be a negative judgement is an equally foregone conclusion. Hinduism, for them, is ‘caste, wholly caste, and nothing but caste’. This implies that a nominal Hindu is deemed to have turned against his religion if he takes an approvedly egalitarian position—only then is he the good guy. If he spits on his mother, bravo! But if he chooses to defend Hinduism, as Golwalkar does, every possible position he takes will always be deemed an intolerable discrimination on caste lines. Even if he pronounces himself in favour of full equality, he is still lambasted for being patronizing and exercising his ‘Brahmin privilege’."

In a weirdest version thereof, it's not Hindus, RSS or even NRI Indians, but the supposedly or rather self-labelled secular politicians who went to town putting down PM Narendra Modi as a tea vendor, something he'd done as a little boy helping his father run a stall on a small train station. India that voted for him was joined by NRI crowd in love and pride for him, and all the more so after he spoke about his low caste roots, electing him as PM. It's the self-labelled seculars that openly on public television program of an enemy country begged pakis for help to "get rid of him", so much so the hosts were speechless for once! And reactions aren't different when Hukum Narayan Dev Yadav speaks in parliament.

"According to Guha, ‘Golwalkar vigorously defends the caste system, saying that it kept Hindus united and organized down the centuries’. Yet, what follows is something else than a ‘vigorous defence’—it is a nuanced historical understanding that a social system at variance with modern homogenizing nationalism may yet have had its historical advantages: ‘On the one hand, the so-called “caste-ridden” Hindu society has remained undying and unconquerable… after facing for over 2,000 years the depredations of Greeks, Shakas, Hunas, Muslims and even Europeans, by one shock of which, on the other hand, the so-called casteless societies crumbled to dust, never to rise again.’ Whether a causal relationship can be established between caste and the survival of Hinduism should be investigated, but it is a reasonable hypothesis that deserves better than Guha’s blanket condemnation."

Golwalkar was correct.

"‘Bunch of Thoughts altogether ignores the suppression of Dalits and women in Hindu society.’ Look at these double standards. Pray, Mr Guha, show me a book written in defence of Islam that expounds on the mistreatment of women in Islam. After you have done that, you may ask this very similar question of Hinduism. As a prolific writer, have you published anything about the oppression of women in Christianity, a critique developed by the very originators of feminism in the world? Why do you single out Hinduism here? We have never seen you ask feminist authors why they haven’t contributed anything to the struggle for Hinduism’s self-respect against its many enemies, so why the reverse? Further, we may speculate that the women’s viewpoint just didn’t occur to Golwalkar, as a confirmed bachelor leading an all-male organization; and that in the India of the 1960s, women’s issues were not as high-profile as today.

"By contrast, caste inequality has continuously been on the agenda in the Indian republic. Golwalkar was not silent about it, but gave much less prominence to caste than anti-Hindu authors do, who assume that ‘Hinduism is caste, wholly caste, and nothing but caste’. RSS veterans who still knew Golwalkar in person told me he took a nationalist and non-conflictual view of the issue: As a nationalist, he believed in the minimization of all divisive factors and in a large measure of equality for all members of the Hindu nation, but not in social engineering, much less in quota or reparative discrimination (‘affirmative action’). Thus, when a Brahmin neophyte at first refused to eat together with the other castes, he allowed him to eat separately, until he was familiar enough with the RSS attitude that he himself came around to eating with the others. That way, his acceptance of inter-caste commensality was much better anchored than if imposed on him. The RSS boasts of being the only caste-free civil organization in India. By contrast, the political parties that for historical reasons call themselves ‘anti-caste’ practise naked caste advocacy. They typically are informal or even self-designated interest groups of a particular group of castes."

................................................................................................

"COMMUNALISM"

"Guha accuses Golwalkar of paranoia vis-à-vis Indian Muslims and Indian Christians, and quotes him: ‘What is the attitude of those people who have been converted to Islam and Christianity? They are born in this land, no doubt. (…) Do they feel it a duty to serve her? No! Together with the change in their faith, gone are the spirit of love and devotion to the nation.’

"The memory of the Partition was still fresh, and of the fact that a vast majority of the Muslim electorate had voted for it. The missionaries, too, had considered it likely that with Independence, India would lapse into chaos, so that some Christian-dominated areas in Kerala and the Northeast could declare their independence. It had also been noticed in the Northeast that non-Christianized tribals gave ‘Indian’ as nationality to census officers, while Christians gave their tribal identity. So Golwalkar’s suspicion of the minority, while not to be accepted like that, still had a core of truth to it."

Elst gives Guha's quote on Golwalkar about questioning loyalty of dominant non-Hindu minorities, and Guha likening it to Europe questioning that of Jews prior to WWII, asking if (we are meant to infer that) Golwalkar was a nazi.

"Well, not exactly. First of all, before the Jews became the object of world conspiracy suspicions, the allegation of a foreign or international loyalty originally concerned not the Jews but the Catholics, with the Jesuit order as their main weapon of aggression. The Protestants, somewhat like the Orthodox Christians, were organized nationally and accepted doctrinal differences, at least within the confines laid down by the Bible; by contrast, the Catholic church was a global monolith with aspirations for world domination. ... "

Wasn't JFK too considered with uncertainty on this point, people looking askance until he was questioned publicly on this, and his answer was considered satisfactory, before he could win?

" ... My own country, Belgium, was a Catholic frontline state, with institutions for Irish, English and Dutch Catholics to support them and eventually allow them to topple the Protestant domination of their countries. There were also real-life incidents that nurtured the suspicion of a Popish Plot, most famously the ‘gunpowder plot’ by Jesuit agent Guy Fawkes to blow up the British Parliament. So, there was a core of truth to those suspicions. Even in demography, these suspicions were not baseless. As late as the 1950s, Dutch Protestants used to warn: ‘Be careful with those Catholics; with their large families, they may overtake our country.’ And, indeed, today the percentage of Catholics is larger than that of Protestants—only, between them, they are not even the majority any more, and the Protestant-Catholic dichotomy has become irrelevant. Also, the Catholic birth rate has plummeted to the national average."

Guy Fawkes is known, but weren't so too Vatican's attempts to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I, with assasins sent one after another?

"The suspicion of a Jewish world conspiracy was mainly based on a forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, originally fabricated by the Czarist secret police, though disapproved of by the czar himself. When Islam critics in the West point out that Islam has ambitions for world domination, the Guhas in our midst try to be funny and allege that we fantasize, after the same model, a ‘Protocols of Mecca’. No: The Zion Protocols were a forgery, but the so-called ‘Mecca Protocols’ for world domination are real. The Quran itself, authoritative for every single Muslim (though ignored by many, fortunately but un-Islamically), says, ‘War and hatred will reign between us until ye believe in Allah alone (Q.60:4)’, or ‘Make war on them until idolatory does not exist any longer and Allah’s religion reigns universally (Q. 2:139 and again Q. 8:39)’. The Jewish Bible has a doctrine of domination too, but only of the Promised Land, while the Quran speaks of world domination."

Indeed.

"So, the difference between the anti-Jewish and the anti-Islamic suspicions is one between falsity and reality. I am aware that for propagandists, reality doesn’t count, only perception does. With the studied superficiality typical of Nehruvian secularism, the seemingly similar perception of the anti-Jewish versus the anti-Islamic suspicion is enough. They can throw that around as a grave allegation, as here in Guha’s article, and be confident that no one will step in to correct them."

"Christians have a similar doctrine of world conquest, though less confrontational. In its formative first centuries, Christianity lived as a minority in the vast Roman Empire, and unlike Islam, it had to accommodate national laws not of its own making. This fitted Saint Paul’s repudiation of the biblical law: It is the spirit (viz. of charity) that counts, not the letter of the law. This means that Christianity became naturally secular: It separated the religious sphere, thoroughly Christian, from the worldly and political sphere, dominated by non-Christian forces. During the heyday of Christian power, Christianity impinged ever more on the political sphere, but in the modern era, it did not have too much difficulty returning to its original ‘secularist’ position of accepting the separate identity of the political sphere. A telling criterion: Comparatively few people were killed in the struggle to wrest worldly power from the Churches, compared, for example, to the struggle between secular ideologies in the twentieth century. And in this struggle, the secular forces were more violent than the Christian forces, witness the French Revolutionary genocide in the Vendée or the persecution of Christianity in the Soviet Union."

If one ignores inquisition, certainly. But when it's considered in combination with weekly thunderings about hellfire, and more, they are only comparable with what was shown in a film about The Little Emperor and the Communist technique of educating him, presumably not different from those used on others.

"However, in a more moderate and sophisticated way, Christianity does have an ambition of world domination too. Like in Islam, all non-believers are deemed to go to hell, though few Christians now take this seriously any more. Jesus’s injunction to ‘go and teach all nations’ means that India, too, is on Christianity’s conversion programme. When the Pope came to India in 1999, he said openly and in so many words that his church wanted to ‘reap a great harvest of faith’ in Asia, which implies destroying Hinduism the way the native religions of Europe and the Americas were destroyed. He, thereby, badly let his secularist allies down, for they had always ridiculed the Hindu nationalist suspicion that Christianity only meant destruction for Hinduism. Yet, after being put in the wrong so bluntly, here is the secularist Guha again shamelessly ridiculing Golwalkar’s suspicion of Christianity."

The so-called and in reality self-labelled secular brigade in India are in reality merely anti-Hindu appeasers of everything allied to anything foreign, with exception of Israel. They are just as dismissive of Jain interests, but less so of Buddhists who aren't about making waves anyway, and are pushed aside by secularists when it's about China. Sikhs are on fence of considerations of the secular, having support of Pakistan anytime there's a conflict in India with tacit support from separatist Sikhs abroad, however hidden and denied the support despite all evidence, as seen last year.

"On one point, though, Golwalkar is blatantly wrong: It is not India that the Christians want to destroy, but Hinduism. Here again, nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns. Not the nation, but the religion is their target. ... "

That might be the focus, but the concern about conversion ignores breaking of not only India, but homes, social ties, and everything that connects a converted person to his past, as has been evident. Church related publications even write of 'Manipur exported to India', ignoring Manipur being part of India and not just accidentally due to British either, but since before Mahâbhârata; in fact church has not just supported insurgency in Northeast, in border areas and tribals, but given rise to it in the first place.

" ... Christians were loyal to the Roman Empire (of which the fifth-century Germanic enemies were already Christian too), but when the empire fell, they adapted: After all, their main loyalty was not a political structure but a religion. And then they became loyal citizens of Visigothic Spain, Ostrogothic Italy and Frankish France, a political loyalty that was inevitably secondary. They were not deshbhakts, they were Yesubhakts. And similarly, they sing the Indian anthem with as much conviction as their Indian compatriots. And they will do so even more when they come to live in a ‘post-Hindu India’ (of which Christian convert Kancha Ilaiah dreams). But if a different political structure comes to replace the Indian republic, they will effortlessly adapt to that too. Defending the nation against a Christian onslaught leaves their real target undefended: the Hindu religion."

That last bit is unclear. Elst seems to think that defending India leaves Hinduism undefended? But that seems to imply that the two are separate, which is false. It's a position natural for non-indian, conversionist, world-comquest oriented religions, but it's as false as their doctrines.

................................................................................................

"GANDHI"

"Guha quotes Golwalkar as asserting that ‘the foremost duty laid upon every Hindu is to build up such a holy, benevolent and unconquerable might of our Hindu people in support of the age-old truth of our Hindu nationhood’. This was never said in the Upanishads—it is not part of the fabled Hindu spirituality. But then, Hinduism has survived because of other factors than spirituality. At times, it is simply right to emphasize the martial virtues. Proof a contrario: Buddhism was purely about spirituality and didn’t practise self-defence, so when it was really attacked, during the Muslim invasions, it was wiped away from Central Asia and India in one go. ... "

Central Asia, yes, India, no, not quite, and it will live as long as Hinduism does.

Hindus have not only respected Buddha for spiritual stature achieved, and for the impersonal reasons he left worldly life despite being a born prince expected to inherit the throne, but have admitted him as ninth Avataara of the greatest God, Vishnu. Buddhist places in India, thise not destroyed by Islamic barbarism, are in place, subject only to time and winds, forest and rains. Some have been renovated and are managed by Buddhists, others protected and cared for by archeological department or centre and states, and are high on tourist destinations.

Buddhism was destroyed in Central Asia also due to Hinduism, and Hindus, being destroyed, and Buddhism left without its life support.

" ... In spite of Golwalkar’s unhistorical view of ‘Hindu nationhood’, he was right to extol the project of ‘unconquerable might’.

"Guha compares this ‘supremacist point of view’ with what M.K. Gandhi regarded as the duty of Hindus— to ‘abolish untouchability and to end the suppression of women’ and to ‘promote interreligious harmony’. Indeed, Mr Guha, ‘there could not be two visions of what it takes to be a Hindu, or an Indian, that are as radically opposed as those offered by Golwalkar and Gandhi respectively’."

Gandhis demonstration of this travelled more and more from asking Hindus to 'digest' the massacre of thousands in Kerala to silence on that of over a hundred and fifty thousand in Noakhali to insistence on forcing refugees from Pakistan, Sikhs and Hindus, Pakistan, to return, even if they were certain to be massacred as their families had been; he spoke, wrote and published this, further asking them to die with love for, not rancor against, their killers, till the end.

This was inhuman, unless he believed he could resurrect them, and that he certainly couldn't; explicitly, he said he was disappointed that they didn't understand his sacrificing them, and if they did, they'd jump in fire as sacrifices by being murdered but refusing to leave.

Those that badmouth Hindus and label them along with Godse have conveniently forgotten Noakhali, Lahore, and Gandhi demanding the refugees be turned out of the shelters they'd found in Delhi in harsh winter, which they were, onto roads and parks and sidewalks, including old and babies and children, by police beating them with sticks.

Gandhi was stone pelted when he went to visit to talk and hid behind a door, and was taken out by back door under police protection.

But Guha seems to think it was OK to consider massacres of over ten, eleven million Hindus - not soldiers but unarmed civilians including women, children, old, everyone - as being of no consequence whatsoever, except only as a sacrifice in the worship ceremony Gandhi was performing, as Gandhi wrote at time of Noakhali.

"There are several things wrong with this picture. Factually, it is not true that the Mahatma opposed ‘suppression of women’; on the contrary, he notoriously practised it. Perhaps his wife Kasturba accommodated the arrangements Gandhi imposed on her, but there cannot possibly be an illusion that their relationship was one of equality. Towards his wife, as well as his children, he was an unmitigated family tyrant. And as shown by Radha Rajan in her book Eclipse of the Hindu Nation: Gandhi and His Freedom Struggle, his relations with the young women with whom he carried out his ‘experiments with chastity’ was also perversely exploitative."

True.

"As for untouchability, Gandhi made it his priority, and at that junction of history, it was indeed a necessity; but to make it a defining trait of Hinduism is simply wrong. For thousands of years, Hindu society didn’t know of hereditary untouchability, which is not mentioned in the Rig Veda (and no, you shrill screamers out there, not even in the Purusha Sukta). Later it did, and was comfortable with it. For opposite reasons, Hindus in those periods were not preoccupied with abolishing untouchability: First because it wasn’t there, then because they thought it was alright. One can be a Hindu without practising untouchability, but also without being fired up to abolish untouchability. Today’s Hindu communities I know in Holland (Bhojpuri-speaking Rama worshippers from Surinam) have only the faintest notion of caste and none of untouchability, but are very much Hindu. In the same spirit, the RSS ranks were not tainted with untouchability either. In that respect, Golwalkar’s vision was different from but by no means ‘radically opposed’ to Gandhiji’s."

" ... Gandhi was wrong to equate Hinduism with non-violence, which is extolled as a virtue on the spiritual path, but not a virtue for the warrior. No matter how the warrior class is recruited, at any rate it is deemed necessary in the real world. Hinduism is a complete system: It accounts for society’s needs as much as for the requirements of the spiritual path. Gandhi’s version of Hinduism was very unbalanced and morbidly moralistic. It ought to be a warning sign for Hindus that the secularists are so insistently dangling Gandhi as a role model before them."

And all the while, they hardly show it in their own life - far from his celibacy after four children, they not only do not denounce rapes including gang rapes and murders, when it's under their own ruled states, but even excuse it with public pronouncements, or worse, blame it on victims, latest bring young Muslim girls being made a frontline in agitation for "right of choice" to wear garment covering head to foot including face, and some males invariably stating that rapes happen when women don't do so.

This is the public flagrant non emulating behaviour if supposedly Gandhi followers, while other facet is about their promoting family and clan as top position contenders for their parties, states, or centre, as a matter of course, seeing it as inheritance of a reward for services by an ancestor.

Gandhi as a family man and father was an extreme opposite, damaging lives, education et al of his sons.

"Likewise, ‘inter-religious harmony’ was a natural practice between the many sects within Hinduism, and partly even towards Christianity and Islam. When Muslims pass a mosque, they greet it, but not a temple or a church. It is only Hindus who greet any building or object that is deemed sacred to anyone. This was the practice long before Gandhi. But these Hindus, or certainly their intellectual vanguard, had the power of discrimination, sharpened by their many debates between the different sects. Being nice to Muslims and sympathizing with the piety that finds its expression in prayer or fasting, is different from assenting to the illusory Islamic doctrine, starting with the funny belief that Mohammed was God’s exclusive spokesman.

"In Gandhi’s days, this critical role vis-à-vis Christianity and (at the cost of a number of murders) Islam was taken by the Arya Samaj, which Gandhi lambasted. His role in this regard was entirely negative, abolishing the power of discrimination in the Hindu worldview. He thus prepared the ground for the wilful superficiality characteristic of the Nehruvians. He also, through his wider influence on all Hindus, prepared the ground for the complete ideological illiteracy among RSS men, along with Golwalkar."

" ... Hindus had better return to their real role models: to Dirghatamas and Vasishtha, to Rama and Krishna, to Canakya and Thiruvalluvar, to Vishnu Sharma and Abhinavagupta, to Ramdas and Shivaji. Their contribution in ideology and the art of living should be made relevant to the present—they had everything in them that we need. Hindus should not follow Western categories, like ‘national’ vs ‘anti-national’, or ‘Left’ vs ‘Right’, not because they have been imported, but because by now they have been sufficiently put to the test and found wanting."

................................................................................................

"VANGUARD OF HINDU SOCIETY"

"Certainly, the RSS does a lot of good work at the basic level. Best known in India, though passed over in silence by the world media in emulation of the English media in India, is its disaster relief work. This, indeed, cannot be praised too much, if only to compensate for the culpable silence about it in every anti-Hindutva article, including this one by Guha. Whenever a flood or an earthquake strikes, RSS men immediately come on the scene and do the thankless jobs that secularists feel themselves too precious for."

................................................................................................

"INDIA'S UNITARY STRUCTURE"

" ... the same way committed Muslims always go back to the Quran and live as if in seventh-century Arabia, Guha expects Modi to live by the old book, without any changes.

"Guha quotes Bunch of Thoughts: ‘The framers of our present Constitution also were not firmly rooted in the conviction of our single homogeneous nationhood.’ He thinks Golwalkar ‘was angry that India was constituted as a Union of States, for in his view, the federal structure would sow “the seeds of national disintegration and defeat”.’"

Funny, didn't Nehru insist on a strong centre rather than a federation of states?

"The framers did indeed sow the seeds of divisive politics steered by sectional interests, though not with their purely symbolic definition of India. On the other hand, their responsibility should not be exaggerated: A good political structure is not all-powerful and cannot indefinitely prevent the eruption of divisive tendencies. Golwalkar’s obsession with this ‘single homogeneous nationhood’ is historically incorrect, but so is the Constitution’s claim that ‘India is a Union of States’. An example of a union of states is the European Union, where separately existing countries threw in their lot together. Or the budding United States, where thirteen separate British colonies, upon their gaining independence, formed a union. In India, even the nominally independent princely states were effectively part of British India, so the Indian republic was but a continuation of an existing unitary political entity.

"According to Guha, ‘Golwalkar wanted the Centre to be all-powerful. Modi may now speak of the virtues of cooperative federalism, but his guru, Golwalkar, wrote of the need “to bury deep for good all talk of a federal structure of our country’s Constitution”.’ Here again, we see that Modi simply, and quite normally, doesn’t follow the book written by Golwalkar. In this respect, though, Modi does stand in a Hindu tradition and even a BJP tradition, from which Golwalkar was deviating. Ancient Hindu empires had to respect each vassal-state’s swadharma: It had its own ways, and even the inclusion in a larger political structure should not interrupt that vassal-state’s attachment to its distinctive ways."

So that's where the latest drivel from opposition comes, screaming about it bring a federal structure, accusing BJP of dictating! Fraud begins, or at least gets vicabufrom, Guha amongst others.

"As for modern India and the BJP, the A.B. Vajpayee government split the states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to give political expression to the relative distinctiveness of the Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand areas. It also extended recognition as official language to several ‘tribal’ languages. ... "

................................................................................................

"CONCLUSION"

"Guha concludes thus: ‘No one who reads Bunch of Thoughts can reach a conclusion other than the one the (entirely representative) quotes offered above suggest—namely, that its author was a reactionary bigot, whose ideas and prejudices have no place in a modern, liberal democracy. If ever the prime minister has the courage to give an unscripted, no-holds-barred press conference, the first question an honest journalist should ask him would be, “Sir, how do you reconcile your (long-standing) admiration for Golwalkar on the one hand with your (new-found) respect and regard for Ambedkar and Gandhi on the other?”’

"Guha’s passing assurance of representativeness is false. Just as has happened in the usual references to Golwalkar’s book We, here, too, passages have been cherry-picked to make him look bad. Bunch of Thoughts is a repetitive and mediocre book, but is on the whole rather harmless. ... "

"Now to the contents of Guha’s advice to Modi. It is a doubtful trait of Hinduism that in can reconcile contrasting entities. At best, this means finding common ground underneath a seeming opposition. But, often, it means untruthfully papering over real conflicts of interest. Hence Guha’s suspicion that Modi juxtaposes these three characters on his home altar and yet is unable to reconcile their worldviews. To reconcile Golwalkar with Gandhi is not so bizarre—they actually have fundamental traits in common, as argued above. To reconcile Ambedkar with Gandhi is already harder, though this is a couple whose like-mindedness Guha seems to take for granted; in fact, they had a sharp conflict between them, which neither of them had with Golwalkar. Not only was their outlook on both religion and modernization very different (rationalist versus crassly sentimental), but they actually clashed on what to Guha is clearly the most important topic in the universe: caste. However, the real challenge here is to reconcile Ambedkar with Golwalkar."

" ... In the feudal system, the nobility was not tied to a nation. Till today, the remaining royal dynasties in Europe are biologically the most pan-European families. By contrast, the commoners were mostly tied to a particular nation and easily rallied around the banner of the modern nation-states. Moreover, nationalism allowed those commoners to feel equal to their upper-class compatriots. And historically, it is nationalism, first through the initiative of Otto van Bismarck, which created a social security system and its consequent strong bond of self-interest between the commoners and their nation. Likewise, even if Golwalkar were a Brahmin (and already for that reason fated to be forever hated by the Ambedkarites and the foreign India-watchers in their pocket), he advocated a common identification of everyone with the nation, regardless of caste.

"Contrary to the secularists’ hazy assumption, Hindu nationalism is distinct from Hindu traditionalism, and the central point of contrast is precisely caste. Genealogically, in the 1920s, Hindu nationalism sprang from Hindu reformism as incarnated in the Arya Samaj, intended as a stalwart Hindu movement (‘back to the Vedas!’) but emphatically anti-caste. The foundational insight of this Vedic egalitarianism was that Vedic society had no castes—which is accurate at least for the age of the Rig Vedic family books. Several leading early Hindu nationalists had been Arya Samajis. The main self-imposed task of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS was Hindu ‘self-organization’, or sangathan. This was the practical application of Swami Shraddhananda’s book Hindu Sangathan, Saviour of the Dying Race (1924). If one book can make you understand modern Hindu activism in general, of which Hindu nationalism and a fortiori the RSS is only one current, it is that one, far more than Bunch of Thoughts. But Swami Shraddhananda, murdered by a Muslim in 1926 (as related, for example, in B.R. Ambedkar’s Thoughts on Pakistan), had been a radically anti-caste Arya Samaji."

"Undoubtedly, Guha’s comment has the merit of drawing attention to Guru Golwalkar’s main political manifesto. However, to a moderate extent, it suffers from the main flaws of the Nehruvian depiction of Hindu nationalism. Based on a very hazy knowledge of the facts on the ground within the Hindu movement, it cultivates a stereotypical enemy image. It also conflates very distinct strands, such as Hindu traditionalism versus Hindu reformism, and anachronistically takes past states of affairs to be still in force. ... "

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February 14, 2022 - February 15, 2022.

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16. The RSS in Western Media*

................................................................................................

"On Friday 3 November, the Flemish broadcaster VRT Canvas, in its programme Terzake (‘To the point’), presented a Dutch documentary from the series De Westerlingen (‘The Westerners’), in which young Dutchmen meet youngsters in countries across the world to explore the differences in culture. ... "

" ... According to the announcement on the TV station’s website: ‘In India extremist associations acquire ever more influence. Nicolaas Veul meets activist young Hindu nationalists in the holy city of Allahabad. He goes around with Divya, Ritesh and Vikrant. They fight for a Hindu India, and against influences from outside.’"

................................................................................................

"HINDU FASCISM?"

"At the outset, in the car on the way to an event of the RSS, he was quickly briefed by an Indian secularist on the Hindu nationalists. These were said to be ‘increasingly powerful’, to be issuing for use in schools ‘textbooks rewritten in a pro-Hindu sense’ and to be ‘openly linked with the Nazis’.

"This was a nice summary of the power equation in the reporting on India worldwide and in all the different segments of the media: All press correspondents in and ‘experts’ on India look at Indian society, especially the communal conflict, through the glasses that a handful of secularists have put on their noses, reproducing the latter’s anti-Hindu bias and disinformation. For the average viewer, every topic in the ensuing meetings came under the cloud of these initial ‘revelations’, even though nothing in the RSS performance effectively filmed confirmed or illustrated any of them."

"Since the 1980s, I have never heard the term ‘Hindu nationalists’ without the addition that they are ‘emerging’ or ‘increasingly powerful’. They should have been all-powerful by now. ... "

"Nowhere in this documentary would you pick up any hint to the main communal reality in India: the anti-majority discrimination. It is admittedly hard to explain to outsiders, and therefore easy to conceal or deny, but Hindus are indeed second-class citizens in their native country. I am aware that right now, many non-Indian readers will refuse to believe me, but it is really like that. Anywhere in the world you can download the text of the Indian Constitution, so please verify for yourself, starting with Article 25-30.

"So, what did you get to see? Many people in the city were on the streets converging on an open ground where a meeting of a local RSS unit (shakha, or ‘branch’) with physical and ideological training was about to take place. They were wearing (or in the case of newcomers, buying) the RSS outfit—white shirt and black cap and trousers. It was the new uniform, for till recently, the black trousers would have been brown knickers, even more colonial-style. Their military style was highlighted, though everyone could see for themselves that all the ‘weapons training’ they did was with sticks, rather harmless in the age of the Kalashnikov. Naturally, there was no hint that an endless series of murders of RSS men has been committed by Kerala communists, Khalistanis in Punjab and others. The RSS youngsters also did not bring it up, or if they did, that part was not shown. The persistent suggestion was that they were the perpetrators of violence, not its victims, though no such violence was actually shown.

"When interviewing these RSS activists, Nicolaas repeatedly remarked that this or that guy was actually impeccably friendly and quite nice. Not at all how we would picture the fascists announced initially by the secularist. Then what was wrong with them?"

................................................................................................

"VALENTINE'S DAY"

"The real topic of this documentary series was the culture clash and the native resistance against Westernization. And indeed, these young people refused to absorb the flood of Westernizing influences. One example of a pernicious influence was Valentine, taken straight from the existing Western commercial pop culture. More ideologized people denounce it also as a ‘Christian’ holiday. Valentine was a Roman priest who performed tabooed weddings, and when martyred and sainted, the church gave him a day in the saints’ calendar, 14 February, coinciding with the pre-Christian fertility feast presided over by the goddess Juno Februa (‘clean, purifying’) of 13–15 February. It took a thousand years, to the age of the troubadours and courtly love, before he graduated to becoming the patron saint of romanticism.

"As such, commerce catapulted him to the fore, and made the saint’s day into an occasion pious Christians would frown upon: the feast of sentimentalism and getting carried away with infatuation. Since the late eighteenth century, there is a whole literature, and later movies, about youngsters following their hearts and overcoming the resistance of their unfeeling, narrow-minded parents. This is now re-enacted in India, where commerce and the secularist-promoted fondness of all things Western is spreading the highly artificial celebration of Valentine’s Day. This has become the symbol of Western decadence, in which the pursuit of emotional kicks takes precedence over long-term institution-building, marriage and the resulting children’s well-being. Nicolaas’s Indian interlocutor wants to spare his country the breakdown of family life that has come to characterize the modern West.

"But in the documentary, in the interview with the RSS activist, we only see a humourless spoilsport’s jaundiced rant against a day of innocent fun. The Dutch lad just doesn’t see that there is another side to it, and that the Hindu critique of Valentine has its legitimacy. This RSS fellow was voicing a very positive viewpoint, one in favour of the precious fabric of traditional social values, of the time-tested mos maiorum (‘ancestral custom’), which is being undermined by modernist influences symbolized by Valentine’s Day. Possibly it is not good enough to overrule modernization, but that remains to be seen, and the traditionalist view deserves a proper hearing."

................................................................................................

"COMMUNICATION"

"But then, come to think of it, the RSS fellow didn’t have the required communication skills to overturn an anti-Hindu bias instilled in the Western public since decades. And by ‘anti-Hindu’, I do not mean the kind of grim animus seen in the missionaries or the secularists, but a background conditioning: Nicolaas has no quarrel with the Hindus as such, and he is probably not even aware of his implicit anti-Hindu bias, but like most Westerners with an interest in India, he has innocently absorbed the partisan view of India fostered by the really hostile people."

" ... In this case, an interviewed RSS man suffered from a lack of serious historical knowledge, or of a chauvinist type of gullibility. He explained that India has invented plastic surgery and, as proven by the Ramayana, the airplane. This story has two related drawbacks: As far as evidence can tell, it is not true; and it is bad publicity, for while it may make a handful of gullible folk admire Hindu culture, it turns Hinduism into a superstitious laughing stock for many more. ... "

Does Elst know that West had written off all Indian legends, epics, et al as mythology, and refuses to look again - but India had the knowledge of witnessing Himaalayan ranges rising out of the ocean and ocean North vanishing? What is evolution if not Dashaavataara? Laugh at the knowledge about plastic surgery and airplanes all you like, but they are there, in relevant books - Aayurveda and Raamaayana, respectively. And much more.

Anyone aware of pyramids etc ought yo know that modern scientists are incapable of solving just how those, or the Tiahuanaco and Gobekliteppe monumental buildings, were done - or purpose thereof, or Stonehenge and other similar things dotting UK.

Knowledge of "how" can be lost. As for India, take a look at some old architecture. Konark and Ellora would be a good beginning.

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February 15, 2022 - February 15, 2022.

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17. In Favour of Freedom of Expression

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"Many people—Hindus, Westerners and the rest—pay lip service to freedom of expression, but then add that this freedom is not absolute, that it should be hemmed in and supervised. I disagree, and have argued it out in this article.

"In the lifetime of the older ones among us, freedom of expression in India first became a hot item with the Salman Rushdie affair, when, in 1988, his novel The Satanic Verses was banned. This was done by Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government at the request of Muslim leader Syed Shahabuddin, in exchange for the latter’s calling off of a Muslim march on Ayodhya (then a hotspot because of the temple/mosque controversy), expected to cause bloodshed (see my afterword to Daniel Pipes’ The Rushdie Affair)."

"For the younger generation, the main events were the withdrawal of A.K. Ramanujan’s essay Three Hundred Ramayanas from Delhi University’s syllabus in 2011 under Hindu pressure (see e.g. ‘Ramanujan & the Ramayana’, Sunday Guardian, 30 October 2011); and the publisher Penguin’s withdrawal of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History in 2014, likewise under Hindu pressure. It was propagandistic hyperbole to speak of ‘censorship’ in these cases, but there is simply no comparison with the Rushdie case, where the book was not just legally banned but the writer was threatened with the death penalty and several of its translators (Norwegian, Japanese) were effectively killed. ... "

What's "effectively killed"?

" ... Yet the media and the academics have done their best to whip up indignation over these affairs, so that they now pass as grim examples of censorship."

"Neither document was judicially banned, but the Hindu plaintiffs wielded an article of law as threatening argument, and this could not be ignored: Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code. Why is this article there, and what role does it play in India’s public life?"

................................................................................................

"LOOKING IN FROM OUTSIDE: THE DONIGER AFFAIR"

"In November 2014, at its annual conference, the AAR held a panel discussion on censorship in India under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, itself occasioned by the Penguin publisher’s withdrawal under Hindu pressure of Doniger’s book. This translated into a section of the July 2016 issue of the Journal of the AAR (JAAR) with four contributors and a response from Doniger. It addresses ‘the true source of the conflict, section 295A of the Indian Penal Code’. (Pennington 2016:323)

"This article 295A criminalizes ‘outraging the religious feelings of any class of Indian citizens’. Dina Nath Batra, former national director of the Hindu nationalist organization Vidya Bharati, had entered a lawsuit against the publisher under Section 295A. The latter recognized that the case had a solid legal footing and decided to avoid defeat by settling out of court. He agreed to withdraw the book from circulation and pulp all remaining copies. Not that any book actually got pulped: Before they could be physically withdrawn, ‘all extant copies were quickly bought up from the bookstores’ (Doniger 2016:364) because of the sudden free publicity.

"While many academics accused Penguin of cowardice, Doniger understood that they had acted under threat of law, and emphatically denounced Section 295A: ‘The true villain was the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than a civil offence to publish a book that offends any Hindu, a law that jeopardizes the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how ludicrous the accusation brought against a book.’ (Doniger 2014, quoted by Pennington 2016:330)"

She'd be considered honest if she had championed the cause of Salman Rushdie and his previously banned novel, which wasn't even claiming to be factual report or philosophical serious critique.

"This statement is entirely correct, except for one word. Doniger is being brazenly partisan and incorrect where she claims that the law prohibits every book that ‘offends any Hindu’. Formally, it does not discriminate, and applies to all Indians regardless of religion. Historically, as we shall see, the law was enacted to prohibit books that offended Muslims, and to silence Hindus. Her insinuation that this law has a pro-Hindu bias, giving Hindus a privileged protection that it withholds from others, is simply false in both respects. It fits in with the common narrative that India is a crypto-‘Hindu rashtra’ oppressing the minorities, when, in fact, the minorities are often privileged by law vis-à-vis the Hindus."

"Likewise, in Pennington’s paraphrase (2016:329), Martha Nussbaum claims that in India, such defamation laws ‘are used primarily by majority groups to bludgeon minorities’. This is wildly untrue (though it is true in the other successor-state of British India, viz. Pakistan), as will become clear when we see how Section 295A came into being."

................................................................................................

"REACTIONS AGAINST BOOK WITHDRAWALS AND CENSORSHIP"

"To be sure, most intellectuals’ indignation was selective. There have indeed been cases where they have failed to come out in defence of besieged authors. No such storms of protest were raised when Muslims or Christians had books banned, or even when they assaulted the writers. ... "

Including the film based on Da Vinci Code, which had church go to court and force the film to show a disavowal twice, despite the film and the book being a discussion of facts about church, as the mystery thriller proceeds.

" ... Thus, several such assaults happened on the authors and publisher of the Danish Mohammed cartoons of 2006, yet at its subsequent annual conference, the prestigious and agenda-setting AAR hosted a panel about the cartoons, where every single participant supported the Muslim objections to the cartoons, though to different degrees, and none of them fully defended freedom of expression. (Another panel there was devoted to lambasting the Jihadwatch.org website by Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, both targets of death threats and at least one effective but failed attempt on their lives, but not defended at the AAR panel by anyone.)

"In their own internal functioning too, the AAR scholars and Indologists don’t put a premium on the freedom to express dissident opinions. Here I speak from experience, having been banned from several forums where Doniger and some of her prominent supporters were present and gave their tacit consent. (Elst 2012:350-385) The most high-profile target of this policy has probably been Malhotra, a sharp critic of Indologist mores and anti-Hindu bias, some of whose experiences in this regard have been fully documented. (Malhotra: Hinduphobia, 2016)

"It is entirely reasonable for India-watchers, like for freedom-loving Indians, to deplore this law and the cases of book-banning it has justified; but less so for people who chose not to speak out on the occasion of earlier conspicuous incidents of book-banning. Where was Doniger when Rushdie’s book was banned? At any rate, many Indian secularists, who mostly enjoy the support and sympathy of those American academics, upheld the ban, which was decreed by a self-declared secularist prime minister (Rajiv Gandhi*), and ruling party (Congress). Where were they when demands were made to ban Ram Swarup’s Hindu View of Christianity and Islam, or when the Church had Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code banned?

"American Indologists including Doniger have always condoned religious discrimination on the condition that Hindus are at the receiving end; they only protest when Hindus show initiative. And much as I deplore Batra’s initiative, it meant at least that Hindus were not taking Doniger’s insults lying down. Briefly: While everything pleads against this act of book-burning, the American India-watchers are not very entitled to their much-publicized indignation."

" ... Even more pervasive is the effect of threats to their careers. You will be in trouble if you utter any ‘Islamophobic’ criticism of Islamic censorship, but you will earn praise if you challenge even proper judicial action against any anti-Hindu publication. This, then, safely predicts the differential behaviour of most intellectuals vis-à-vis free speech."

................................................................................................

"THE DONIGER AFFAIR: WHAT IS IN IT FOR THE HINDUS?"

"For the Hindus, the book withdrawal was a pyrrhic victory. The publicity they gained worldwide was entirely negative, and it corroborated their recently manufactured image as authoritarian and intolerant. The decision was also ineffectual, for, in the days of the Internet, it remained easy to access a soft copy of the book. ... "

That shows complicity from doubles. Kindle dies not sell Salman Rushdie’s book if your address is shown located in India. Any other source about accessing it could only be illegal, unless there are official booksellers - and publisher - willing to sell it on internet regardless of recipient's address.

" ... The Hindus concerned also kind of admitted that they were unable to fight back with arguments.

"Yet, they did have the arguments. A list of the numerous factual errors in Doniger’s book has been compiled by Vishal Agarwal, an Indo-American medical engineer and Sanskritist (2014, but already online since 2010). Most of all, he has shown how her book’s treatment of Hinduism is unconscientious and flippant to a degree that would can never be acceptable from a professor of her rank (Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor at Chicago University, top of the world) for more established religions. In the reprint of her book through another publisher (Speaking Tiger, Delhi, 2015), she didn’t deign to acknowledge this work, nor make any correction."

For "more established" read jihadist, powerful, dominating, comversionist, Holocaust perpetrating, later abrahmic faiths that now target Hindus, after doing so to Jews for two millennia, and have between them finished off every other ancient culture (Communism sharing credit for China's cultural demise), and been responsible for most massacres, genocides, et al, apart from Holocaust - sharing credit for the last with other, atheist or otherwise, totalitarian creeds.

There's nothing else "more established" about either Islam or church, when compared with Hinduism.

"This is a serious aspect of the case that Western academics and their Indian cheerleaders have strictly kept the lid on. On the contrary, Pennington (2016:330) claims that the book was lambasted ‘even when a scholar is demonstrating what is manifestly true based on her research’."

Pennington lies there, even going by what little Elst quotes of it elsewhere.

"We can vaguely get an idea of Hindu opinion in India about Doniger’s book through the sparse comments by the Hindi-language press. S. Shankar in Dainik Jagran ‘charged Doniger with a familiar set of shortcomings: overlooking standard classical works, exoticizing the Hindu tradition, writing history in league with India’s Marxist historians and relying largely on foreign rather than Indian scholarship’ (Pennington 2016:331). In Shankar’ own words, she shows a ‘negligent and arrogant mindset…born of colonial and racist thinking’. Vivek Gumaste at Rediff.com asserts that ‘this is not a pure battle for free speech’, but ‘a parochial ideological ambush masquerading as one’ (Pennington 2016:331). He calls it ‘subtle authoritarianism’ out to ‘suppress the Hindu viewpoint’ (Pennington 2016:331).

"To an extent, this is true—there is no level playing field, and the American academics, including Doniger herself, have done their best never to give the Hindus a fair hearing. On the other hand, this power equation is the Hindus’ own doing. They have never invested in scholarship, and so they had to take umbrage behind a threatened judicial verdict now that they had the chance. Here, Hindus only pay the price for their self-proclaimed vanguard’s intellectual non-performance over the last decades."

Elst fails to take into account the effect of treatment given to Hindus for duration of subjection to Gordian rules, which has continued as attitude on part of West, while it has served to convince Hindus that west was going to behave thus no matter what. After all, what can one expect from those killing in name of false doctrine, whether jihadists or those conditioned by inquisition!

" ... Prominent Hindus from the past would not be proud of Hinduism suppressing freedom of expression: great debaters like Yajñavalkya, the Buddha, Badarayana, Shankara or Kumarila Bhatta."

They did not argue with court of Raavana where they'd be treated with derision, ridicule and worse, as abrahmic conversionists have done to Hinduism and Hindus - for that, another argument is needed.

"Ancient Indian thought was never divided in box-type orthodoxies on the pattern of Christians versus Muslims, or Catholics versus Protestants. This is only a Western projection, borrowed as somehow more prestigious by the Indian ‘secularists’, who impose this categorization on the Indian landscape of ideas. At any rate, the vibrant interaction of ancient India’s intellectual landscape, where free debate flourished, was nothing like the modern situation where Doniger’s own school has locked out the Hindu voice and the latter has reactively demonized her and thrown up hurdles against expressions of her viewpoint."

................................................................................................

"HISTORY OF SECTION 295A"

"HISTORY OF SECTION 295A Section 295A was not instituted by Hindu society, but against it. It was imposed by the British on the Hindus in order to shield Islam from criticism. Thus, it is truthfully said on the Digplanet.com/ wiki website, consulted on 5 August 2016, under the entry Rangila Rasul: ‘In 1927, under pressure from the Muslim community, the administration of the British Raj enacted Hate Speech Law Section 295(A).’

"The reason for its enactment was a string of murders of Arya Samaj leaders who polemicized against Islam. This started with the murder of Pandit Lekhram in 1897 by a Muslim, because Lekhram had written a book criticizing Islam. A particularly well-publicized murder took place in December 1926, eliminating an important leader, Swami Shraddhananda, writer of Hindu Sangathan: Saviour of the Dying Race (1924), next to V.D. Savarkar’s Hindutva (1924), the principal ideological statement of Hindu revivalism. (However, the trigger to the murder lay elsewhere, viz. the protection he personally gave to a family of converts from Islam to Hinduism.) Moreover, there was commotion at the time concerning another very provocative subject: Mohammed’s private life, discussed by Mahashay Rajpal in his (ghost-written) book Rangila Rasul, a response to a Muslim pamphlet disparaging Sita. Rajpal would be murdered in 1929 (the series of murders was discussed e.g. in Ambedkar 1940; for Shraddhananda’s story, see Jordens 1981).

"Doniger and the four authors who wrote about the origin and meaning of Section 295A for JAAR strictly keep the lid on this crucial fact. None of the contributors has let on that the trigger for this legislation was repeated unidirectional communal murder, viz. of Arya Samaj leaders by Muslims, nor that it was meant to appease the Muslim community. None of them so much as hints at this. Anantanand Rambachan (2016:367) even alleges that ‘the aggressive party was the Arya Samaj’. No, the Arya Samaj criticized Islam, an attitude which psychologists might call ‘aggression’ in a metaphorical sense. But aggression in the sense of inflicting violence on the other party was one-sidedly Muslim.

"And even verbally, the Arya Samaj was not really the ‘aggressive’ party. In Shraddhananda’s authoritative biography, not by a Hindu, we read that ‘some of his writings about the Muslims expressed harsh and provocative judgments. But (…) they were invariably written in response to writings or pronouncements of Muslims which either vehemently attacked Hinduism, the Arya Samaj, and the Swami himself, or which supported methods such as (…) the killing of apostates, and the use of devious and unfair means of propaganda.’ He himself ‘never advocated unfair, underhand or violent methods’ (Jordens 1981: 174-175).

"C.S. Adcock (2016:341) comes closest to the truth by writing that ‘polemics continued to cause resentment and, increasingly, it seemed, serious violence’. For an academic writer on the origins of Section 295A, it is bizarre that he has so little grasp of the basic data and doesn’t know the nature of the ‘seeming’ violence. And even he falsely insinuates that this violence was symmetrical, avoids mentioning the deliberate murders (as opposed to mere emotional riots) and hides the Muslim identity of the culprits. When Hindus allege that Indology today is systematically anti-Hindu, they can cite this as an example."

Mountbatten's one sided concern would fo too, as would the British caste system of preference in all matters India, built on English caste system with added lower rungs for other Europeans, Anglo-Indians, Eurasians, native Christians, and muslims in that order, above any Hindu.

"The British finally resolved to curb this form of unrest. While their justice system duly sentenced the murderers, they also decided to make an end to the religious polemics that had ‘provoked’ them. After the Mutiny of 1857, Queen Victoria had solemnly committed the British administration to avoiding and weeding out insults to the native religions. However, the right to religious criticism had been taken for granted, on a par with the right of Western missionaries to criticize native religions in a bid to convince their adherents that they would be better off joining Christianity.

"For example, in 1862, the magistrate sitting in judgement upon a case against a reformist who had criticized the caste-conscious Vallabhacharya Vaishnava community upheld this right: ‘It is the function and the duty of the press to intervene, honestly endeavouring by all the powers of argument, denunciation and ridicule, to change and purify the public opinion.’ (Adcock 2016:345) He ‘upheld the importance of religious critique, and held public opinion in religious matters to be susceptible to reasoned argument.’ (Adcock 2016:345)

"In Britain, reasoned debates between worldviews flourished, for public opinion was held to be ‘susceptible to reasoned argument’. Initially, the colonial authorities treated Indians the same way. But this assessment was reversed by Section 295A, and quite deliberately."

"Note that the British public would never have stood for such a reasoning. But what was unacceptable to them, and not even countenanced for the Indian subjects fifty years earlier, was imposed on the colonial underlings during the last phase of the British Raj. And has remained with us since.

"The murder of Shraddhanada finally made the British rulers turn this attitude into law: ‘In 1927, Section 295A was enacted to extend the ease with which “wounding religious feelings’” by verbal acts could be prosecuted.’ (Adcock 2016:345) Apart from punishing the murderer, they sought to punish Shraddhanada as well, retro-actively and posthumously."

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"COUNTERPRODUCTIVE"

"The British were not so much interested in justice, they merely wanted peace and quiet so the economy could flourish. The Arya Samaj was not doing anything that the Christian missionaries had not been doing (and are still doing today) to the populations they wanted to convert, viz. trying to convince them that their native religion was unwholesome and wrong. This implied saying negative things about that religion, or as the emotion-centric phrase now goes, ‘insulting’ it."

And church in India continues, with insulting posters on light pillars or trees in streets in quiet residential neighbourhoods of growing cities, apart from instructing their illiterate flock to bathe and change into fresh clothes no more than once a week, so that one must suffer a stinking maid, or never hire one of another faith.

"But if the Arya Samaj’s words provoked unwanted Muslim deeds, they were part of the problem and had to be remedied. However, in spite of this intention to prevent riots, the new law did not end the recurring Muslim murders of Arya Samaj leaders until the Second World War, nor the concomitant riots, as discussed by Dr Ambedkar (1940:156). It was the Partition that broke the Arya Samaj’s back, driving it from its power centre in West Panjab with the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College in Lahore. After Independence, anti-Islamic polemics were widely blackened as ‘communal’ by an increasingly powerful ‘secularism’, and thus abandoned by the Arya Samaj. But Section 295A had little to do with this."

" ... This present-day effect of Section 295A could easily convince the scholars to sign a petition against this undeniably despotic and un-secular law. Still, it is odd that with their widespread anti-Hindu and pro-minority bias, they object to a law originally enacted to shield a minority from criticism and to punish Hindu words for Muslim murders."

" ... Christians as well have invoked it, for example to ban Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. This creates a sickening atmosphere of a pervasive touch-me-not-ism, with every community outdoing the other in being more susceptible to having its sentiments hurt."

................................................................................................

"RATIONALE BEHIND SECTION 295A"

"But the Hindu instigators did not inspire ‘fear’, and definitely did not have the backing of political authority. This all happened when the Congress party was in power. It is not entirely unheard of that Indian judges are on the take, but in most cases, the Indian judiciary is independent, so a government sometimes has to suffer verdicts not to its liking. Thus, Narendra Modi was repeatedly cleared by the courts from alleged guilt in the post-Godhra riots of 2002 while the Congress, which invested heavily in anti-Modi propaganda, was in power."

" ... At the time of the Ramanujan and Doniger controversies, the Congress was safely at the helm. If the publishers were in awe of any powers-that-be, it must have been of the Congress ‘secularists’. So, regardless of the prevailing regime, Section 295A by itself exercises a pro-censorship influence."

" ... ‘Queen Victoria’s declaration of religious neutrality (…) explicitly promised to refrain from interference in the religious beliefs and practices of Indian natives. (…) What provoked Victoria’s declaration was the assumption that religion in India was the source of volatile passions that were a threat to peace.’ (Vishwanath 2016:353)

"This position was colonial par excellence, contrasting Britons capable of reasoned debate with natives who were prisoners of emotions and superstitions. ... "

"Colonial prejudices are not always incorrect, yet this one really does injustice to the average Hindu, who is more interested in other religions than was the case among Christians until recently. But perhaps they show less of a tendency to criticize. From experience, I tend to think that their natural tolerance as shown towards the refugees is not due to indifference and smugness but to open-mindedness."

................................................................................................

"SECULARISM"

"For a scholar, it is very poor to use this word as if it hadn’t acquired a meaning in India (since Jawaharlal Nehru, ca. 1951) totally at variance with its original Western meaning. This should be obvious to whoever studies the types of Indians calling themselves secularist, and those lambasted as anti-secular: ‘The concept of secularism as known to the modern West is dreaded, derided and denounced in the strongest terms by the foundational doctrines of Christianity and Islam. (…) It is, therefore, intriguing that the most fanatical and fundamentalist adherents of Christianity and Islam in India—Christian missionaries and Muslim mullahs—cry themselves hoarse in defence of Indian secularism, the same way as the votaries of communist totalitarianism coming out vociferously in defence of democracy.’ (S.R. Goel 1998:vii)"

" ... In India, by contrast, secularists cheer for the application, formally or in spirit, of Section 295A to outlaw religious criticism—except when it is Hinduism that gets criticized. And that is why the AAR scholars, in solidarity with their Indian secularist friends, have never moved a finger about minority-enforced censorship but made a mountain out of the Doniger molehill. Here, they vehemently denounced the clumsy Hindu attempt at banning an otherwise poor book that, to them, has the cardinal virtue of riding roughshod over Hindu self-perception."

................................................................................................

"CONCLUSION"

"Finally, the possibility has to be faced that the fanaticism potentially emanating from certain worldviews has something to do with the contents of these worldviews themselves. Not every religion is equally prone to getting provoked to violence by criticism. I make bold to say that, through a felicitous coincidence, the religions originating in India are quite capable of solving ideological differences of opinion peacefully."

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February 15, 2022 - February 15, 2022.

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18. Academic Bullies*

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"Audrey Truschke is a professor of Religious Studies in Stanford, California, and has gained some fame with her work on the patronage of Sanskrit by the Moghuls. In order to get that far, she had to toe the ideologically mandatory line: Neither in America nor in India does the Hindu-baiting establishment allow a dissident to get seriously established in the academic world. Predictably, we see her elaborating the same positions already taken by an earlier generation of academics, such as whitewashing Aurangzeb. Not that this was a hard job for her: One gets the impression that she is a true believer and really means what she says. Then again, she may have done an excellent job of creating the desired impression, all while secretly knowing better."

................................................................................................

"BULLYING"

"Her position in the article “The Right’s problem with history” (DNA, 26 October 2016) is summed up as: ‘Unable to defend a fabricated history of India on scholarly grounds, many foot soldiers of the Hindu Right have turned to another response: bullying.’ It would be normal to compare secularist historians and their Western dupes with people of the same rank, namely different-minded historians, in this case belonging to the ‘Hindu Right’. These are not exactly numerous, having been blocked systematically from academe by the single permitted opinion in both India and America, but they exist. Yet, they and their output are absent from her paper. From a street bully, I would expect a denunciation of street bullies, and from an academic a polemic against her own peers.

"The photograph accompanying the article tells it all. If it had been about her own school of history, the picture would have shown established historians involved in this debate, such as Wendy Doniger or Sheldon Pollock. But now that the opposition is at issue, it shows a group of non-historians, not in an air-conditioned college hall but in a street demonstration exercising their freedom of expression. The reader is expected to recognize them as representatives of the ‘Hindu Right’ and as ‘bullies’.

"She testifies to verbal attacks she herself has endured ‘from members of the Hindu Right’, and which she evaluates as ‘vicious personal attacks on the basis of my perceived religion, gender and race’. Correction: She could have maintained the very same religion, gender and race and yet never be attacked by those same Hindus (indeed, most Jewish female whites have never experienced such attacks), if she had not belonged to the ‘scholars who work on South Asia’ and who have earned a reputation as Hindu-baiters. She has been attacked on the basis of what she has written, nothing else."

" ... I know her plight very well, for I, too, receive my share of what some would call ‘hate mail’ when I express scepticism of beliefs dear to Hindu traditionalists (e.g. the eternity of Sanskrit, the supernatural origins of the Vedas, the Rama Setu or the Krishna Bhakti verses in the Gita). ... "

It's easier and cheaper to indulge in this than yo publicly side with say, everything of facts about church brought into Da Vjnci Code, from Vatican sponsored murders to lies as a policy to frauds of the story propagated.

It's also easier and cheaper to see the truth of Raama Setu, now that satellite research is there to see on internet, including conclusions that it wasn't natural and the stones weren't local; it's not expensive to walk a distance along, either, but oerfectly ordinary people (clearly not activists) doing so are on several videos on internet too.

Frankly if that hadn't been so, the story would still have the same appeal to every Hindu. But that its proven amazes one, about the engineering feat. One can't see the airplane the couple few back on return after the war, but one can see the Setu built by Hanuman and his Vaanara army for Raama.

" ... And also when going against the dogmas of her own school, such as that Muslim rule in India was benign, or that Sanskrit has an origin of white invaders oppressing black natives. ... "

Both are false propaganda by racists who are unable to see facts, and must twist them to suit an arbitrary self flattering thesis, of superiority of ancestry of dark Nordic latitudes lived without light most of the time, so natives of India must be dark, anything not dark skin or remotely intelligent must be foreign, and muslims must be painted benign because of abrahmic fellow fraternity ties, never mind the attacks in US or France, London or Australia.

Perhaps it's the psychology an Israeli woman spoke of when she said west was treating Israel like a canary in a mine, or worse, perhaps India and Hindus are seen by West as sacrifice offered to jihadists, hoping the Rottweiler would be satisfied and not take the West after that.

"From the start, Truschke tries to capture the moral high ground by citing one of her lambasters as tweeting: ‘Gas this Jew.’ ... "

"However, her claim might be correct (not sure there), for there are indeed some Hindu hotheads who have adopted this kind of rhetoric. In pre-Internet days, they would brew their own conspiracy theories, but now the access to websites carrying elaborate Western conspiracy theories, starring the Zionist world conspiracy, entices them into using this kind of language. Certainly deplorable, but not at all representative of the ‘Hindu Right’: hardly even for its bullies, not for its leaders (both V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar described the Jews as role models for loyalty to one’s own roots) and not at all for the ‘Hindu Right’ scholars whom she is carefully ignoring."

More likely, it was either to make her see how it felt when a sensitive point was poked - Islamic regimes in India having been far more than ten times Holocaust over as many centuries - or, far more likely, it just as well could have been from a Pakistani pretending to be a Hindu over internet.

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"ACADEMIC BULLYING"

"This ‘bullying’ had best been compared to the ‘bullying’ on the other side. Like, for instance, the two attempts by Leftist students to silence me, as a twice scheduled speaker, at the Madison, Wisconsin, South Asia Conference in 1996 and a private event preceding it, hosted by Professor Andrew Sihler. Or the successful protests against the Dharma Civilization Foundation’s offer to fund a chair at University of California Irvine, when so many US chairs are comfortably being funded by the Saudi Arabians.

"But on Truschke’s own side, the dividing line between bullies and academics is not so neat. Why stoop to street bullying if you have tenure? It is far more effective, then, to resort to academic bullying. Thus, in their intervention in the California textbook affair, where Hindu parents had sought to edit blatantly anti-Hindu passages, the explicitly partisan intervening professors even managed to get themselves recognized as arbiters in the matter. This would have been unthinkable if those bullies had not been established academics. (And this I can say even though my criticism of the Hindu parents’ positions exists in cold print.) Her focus on street bullies has the effect of misdirecting the reader’s attention, away from the more consequential phenomenon of academic bullying.

"I myself have been barred from several Indologist forums by active intervention or passive complicity of the same professors who otherwise clamour ‘censorship!’ when anything at all happens to a book they favour. Thus, they are so very sensitive that they dramatically talked of ‘threats to freedom of speech’ when … Three Hundred Ramayanas, a book belittling a Hindu scripture, was not selected as required reading in Delhi University, though otherwise it remained freely available. They claimed to champion ‘freedom of speech’ when Doniger’s error-ridden book The Hindus: An Alternative History was withdrawn from circulation, though it was never legally banned but was left available for another publisher; who did indeed come forward, so that the book is again lawfully omnipresent. But when I appealed to them to intervene for annulling my banning from the Religion in South Asia (RISA) list, which had been done in violation of its own charter, they all looked the other way."

"A recent example. In 2014, I read a paper on the Rig Vedic seer Vasishtha and his relative divinization in a panel on ‘divinization’ at the European Conference for South Asia Studies in Zürich. My paper was enthusiastically received, also by the panel’s organizers when I sent in the final version for publication. First they accepted it, but then, I received an embarrassed e-mail from the organizers stating that they could not include my paper, without any reason given. Upon my enquiring, the half-line reply said that it did not fit their project. In all its insignificance, this still managed to be a blatant lie, and their earlier acceptance confirmed that this could not have been the reason. But some higher-up had warned them that I am to be treated as excluded, just like on many other occasions.

"Far more seriously, both in America and in India, scholars suspected of pro-Hindu sympathies are blocked in their access to academe, and their work gets studiously ignored. For India, a tip of the blanket over this hushed-up phenomenon was lifted by Dr A. Devahuti in Bias in Indian Historiography (1980). It is seriously in need of an update, but I am given to understand that one is forthcoming. For America, a start was made by Rajiv Malhotra with his books Invading the Sacred (2007) and Academic Hinduphobia (2016)."

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"HINDUPHOBIA"

"Coming to contents, Truschke accuses ‘Hindu Right-wingers’ of attacks on ‘academics’. I would have expected them to attack ‘anti-Hindu Left-wingers’, and, indeed, I learn that this is exactly how they see it—and how they see her. If she doesn’t like being characterized this way, she is herewith invited to stop calling her adversaries similar names. The binary Left/Right is at least problematic here, yet for a quarter century I have seen this scheme used to explain matters. Except that the Left doesn’t call itself Left: It treats itself as the natural centre, and anything to its right is deemed politically coloured: ‘Right’ or very easily ‘extreme Right’.

"Anyway, she calls ‘alleged Hinduphobia’ nothing more than ‘a strawman stand-in for any idea that undercuts Hindutva ideology’. The term was made popular by Malhotra, whom I have never known to swear by ‘Hindutva’, a specific term literally translated as ‘Hindu-ness’ but now effectively meaning ‘the RSS tradition of Hindu nationalism’. At any rate, one does not have to follow Hindutva, or even be a Hindu or an Indian, to observe that American India-watchers utter a strong anti-Hindu prejudice in their publications. Not to look too far, I can find an example in myself: I have written a number of publications criticizing both Hindutva as an ideology and the Hindutva organizations, yet I can off-hand enumerate dozens of illustrations of Hindu-baiting by supposed India experts in the West, as well as by their Indian counterparts."

"... And indeed, people shielding Islam from proper enquiry do treat their opponents as mentally warped marginals. But the core of truth in the reprehensible term ‘Islamophobia’ is at least that it points to ‘fear of Islam’, a religion which its critics do indeed diagnose as fearsome. Hinduism, by contrast, has been criticized as cruel, evil, superstitious, ridiculous, but not as a threat. It is only Hindus who flatter themselves that the ‘Abrahamics’ want to destroy Hinduism because they fear it as being superior and more attractive."

"Hindus who flatter themselves" after over a millennium of bring at receiving end of butcherings and worse, by barbaric islamic invaders? If it weren't for superiority of Hinduism, why was propaganda and killings necessary for conversion to one, and fraud combined with temptations to another, abrahmic conversionist religion?

Why not be content with conducting uour own religion and wait strangers to be attracted by light thereof, if there is truth in it? China, after all, became Buddhist exactly this way - the emperor had a vision of in immense golden God rising West, and sent an emissary to India to find out more after being informed by his minister, that indeed a new God had been in India. On return of the emissary, the emperor converted himself and his people en masse.

"The use of the term ‘Hinduphobia’ is predicated upon the already existing acceptance and use of the term ‘Islamophobia’. If the United Nations, the governments of the United States and the European Union, etc., and the pan-Islamic pressure group Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, were to give up this ugly and vicious term, then the ‘Hinduphobia’ term so disliked by Truschke would lapse with it and get replaced again by the older and more accurate term, ‘Hindu-baiting’. But until then, it throws the Islamophile and Hindu-baiting scholars of Truschke’s persuasion back on the bare fact that they themselves have and display the kind of prejudice against Hinduism of which they accuse the Islam critics."

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"HISTORY"

"According to Truschke, ‘a toxic combination of two realities fuel the Hindu Right’s onslaught against scholars of South Asia: Hindu nationalist ideology rests heavily on a specific vision of Indian history, and that version of history is transparently false.’

"Now it gets interesting, with two competing views of Indian history, one true and one false: ‘Hindu nationalists claim that India’s past featured the glorious flourishing of a narrowly defined Hinduism that was savagely interrupted by anybody non-Hindu, especially Muslims. However, the real story of Indian history is much more complicated and interesting.’"

Truschke is subscribing to the racist view adopted by Europe in fellowship with the other abrahmic barbaric religion of invaders determined to destroy all other cultures. But she's wrong in this, and those she's attacking far more correct.

"In one sense, however, even the most sophisticated historians will affirm that India’s past was indeed ‘glorious’. And it was not at all ‘complicated’: India was simply independent. Yes, ancient India had its problems too—it had local wars, it was not paradise on earth—but in one decisive respect, Indians under Muslim or British occupation correctly remembered it as ‘glorious’: It ruled itself. ... "

That wasn't the only sense, and it's racist to deny the tremendous treasure of knowledge India has had and cherished, still a living culture of antiquity, while others fell to murderous onslaught of Rome or Islam.

"This brings us to Truschke’s own field of research: ‘Especially problematic for Hindu nationalists is current scholarship on Indo-Islamic rule, a fertile period for cross-cultural contacts and interreligious exchanges. This vibrant past is rightly a source of pride and inspiration for many Indians, but the Hindu Right sees only an inconvenient challenge to their monolithic narrative of Hindu civilization under Islamic siege.’"

So massacres and enslaving of millions of Hindus is irrelevant to someone sensitive about Holocaust? Or is she also writing about German contributions to Jewish ethos in the same positive tone of "cross-cultural contacts and interreligious exchanges", and agreeing happily with official positions of Holocaust deniers such as Iran?

" ... it is not true that the period of ‘Indo-Islamic rule’ is a ‘source of pride and inspiration’, nor that it is contested only by ‘Hindu nationalists’. Her notion of ‘current scholarship’ is, of course, limited to her own school of thought, heavily overrepresented in academe, partly due to its aggressive policy of exclusion vis-à-vis others."

"There are admittedly those who identify with foreign colonizers: Many Indian Muslims identify with Mohammed bin Qasim and with the Moghuls (whom Pakistan considers as the real founders of their Indo-Islamic state), and many Nehruvian secularists share and continue the British opinions about India and Hinduism. But those who identify with India, even if they admit some good aspects of these colonizations, do not take any pride at all in having been subjugated. Yes, there were instances of collaboration with the colonizers, such as the hundreds of thousands of Indians whose sweat made the ‘British’ railway network possible, or the Rajputs whose daughters filled the Moghul harems in exchange for their fathers’ careers in the Moghul army. But those instances are at most understandable, a lesser evil in difficult circumstances, but not a source of ‘pride and inspiration’."

Comparable in all but actual price paid with slavery as it existed in US, for example - would anyone of confederate ancestry claim it was a "source of ‘pride and inspiration’" for say, Oprah Winfrey, to have had an ancestor or more that was a slave?

" ... Hindus did indeed give their cultural best, rebuilding the temples which the Sultanate had demolished (and which would again be demolished by Aurangzeb)—a tribute to the vitality of Hindu civilization even under adverse circumstances. And some Muslims did indeed engage in ‘inter-religious exchanges’, such as Dara Shikoh translating the Upanishads into Persian; later, he was beheaded for apostasy."

Or merely for bring in the way of a brother who murdered all elder brothers and jailed the father, apart from blinding Sambhaji, beheading two teenage sons of a Sikh guru, and boil a prospective son-in-law alive, amongst millions other looted and killed.

"But even then, academics had better use their critical sense when interpreting these episodes, rather than piously taking them at face value. In the Zürich conference already mentioned, I heard an ‘academic’ describe how contemporary Hindi writers praised Aurangzeb, the dispenser of their destinies. Well, many eulogies of Stalin can also be cited, including by comrades fallen from grace and praising Stalin even during their acceptance speeches of the death penalty; but it would be a very bad historian, even if sporting academic titles, who would flatly deduce therefrom that Stalin was a benign ruler.

"Guru Gobind Singh’s ‘victory letter’ to Emperor Aurangzeb was, in all seriousness, included among the sources of praise, leaving unmentioned that Aurangzeb had murdered his father and four sons. Every village bumpkin can deduce that Guru Gobind Singh hated Aurangzeb more than any other person in the world, and that he was only being diplomatic in his writing because of the power equation. Academics laugh at kooks who believe in aliens, but it took an academic, no less, to discover an alien who actually admired the murderer of his father and sons."

And no, there's no shred of doubt where his, Guru Gobind Singh’s, loyalties lay. If that letter God been sincere or heartfelt, he'd not be remembered by Sikhs with pride. But one nay safely bet that Sikhs aren't Gandhi, keeping faith with a horrible enemy, and would prefer to side with a Rhett Butler rather than an Ashley Wilkes, where the conversation between former and Scarlett - about getting out of Yankee prison and coming home - is concerned.

"According to Truschke’s admission, a lot of Hindus are ‘happy to underscore the violence and bloodshed unleashed by many Indo-Islamic rulers’, but she wrongly identifies them as the ‘Hindu Right’. It doesn’t require a specific ideological commitment or even any religious identity to observe well-documented historical facts. Mostly documented by the Muslim perpetrators themselves, that is. Thus, like Truschke herself, I am neither Hindu nor Indian, yet I can read for myself with what explicit glee the Muslim chroniclers described temple destructions and massacres of Unbelievers."

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"THE MISTAKE OF PLAGIARISM"

"‘In contrast to the detailed work of academics, the Hindu nationalist vision of India’s past stands on precarious to non-existent historical evidence. As a result, the Hindu Right cannot engage with Indologists on scholarly grounds. Indeed, the few Hindutva ideologues who have attempted to produce scholarship are typically tripped up by rookie mistakes—such as misusing evidence, plagiarism, and overly broad arguments—and so find themselves ignored by the academic community.’

"The inclusion of ‘plagiarism’ among her list of ‘rookie mistakes’ gives away that she is fulminating specifically against the work of Malhotra, whom she is careful not to mention by name. For his book Indra’s Net, he was famously accused of plagiarism (by a Christian mission mentor), for he quotes the American scholar Andrew Nicholson’s book Unifying Hinduism, in which he concurs with the same position that Hinduism had elaborated its common doctrinal backbone long before the Orientalists ‘invented Hinduism’. In fact, he only used Nicholson as a source to prove that Westerners, too, could acquire this insight, there was nothing ‘Hindu nationalist’ about it. And he amply quoted him in so many words, though a few times, for the flow of the narrative, he merely rephrased the theses of this much-quoted author. By that standard, most papers contain plagiarism; but what passes unnoticed elsewhere becomes a scandal when done by a self-identifying Hindu.

"Yet, numerous Indologists started a holier-than-thou tirade against the ‘plagiarism’, a comical drama to watch. Malhotra then walked the extra mile, writing Nicholson out of his narrative and quoting original sources instead (thereby incidentally suggesting that Nicholson himself had committed plagiarism, though no Indologist ever remarked on that). But this inconvenient development was given the silent treatment, and Truschke still presupposes that there ever was a substantive ‘plagiarism’ case against Malhotra, and by extension against the whole ‘Hindu Right’.

"Malhotra has indeed been ‘ignored by the academic community’—until he found a way to make his critique nonignorable. That indeed shows a lot of skill in dealing with the way of the world, for until then, Hindus had only painstakingly proven themselves right and the ‘academics’ wrong, but had had no impact at all. By contrast, Malhotra, by personalizing his argument into specific dissections of the work of leading scholars such as Doniger, Pollock or Anantanand Rambachan, has earned a session at the annual conference of the trend-setting AAR. On Indological discussion forums, his input is frequently mentioned, though the academics mostly keep up their airs of pooh-poohing that interloper, in a bid to justify their ignoring his actual critique of their own work.

"By the way, notice my term: a ‘self-identifying Hindu’. As the case of Malhotra has amply exemplified, it suffices to stand up as a Hindu, or to own up Hinduism, in order to be dubbed ‘Hindu Rightist’, ‘Hindutva ideologue’, as well as ‘fanatic’, ‘rookie’ and all the fair names Hindus have been called by Professor Truschke’s august school of thought. To them, the acceptable Hindu, or what Malhotra calls a ‘sepoy’, is one who never identifies as a Hindu, but rather as an ‘Indian’ (or better, ‘Bengali’, ‘Malayali’, etc.), ‘low-caste’, and ideologically ‘secularist’. The exception is when countering criticism from self-identified Hindus, for then, he is expected to say: ‘But me too, I am a Hindu!’ That way, he can fulfil his main task: As long as there are Hindus, he must deny them the right to speak on behalf of Hinduism and give it a presence at the conversation between worldviews."

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"HISTORY DEBATES"

" ... Shrikant Talageri’s case against the Aryan invasion theory, the bedrock of the ‘academic’ view of ancient Hindu history, is painstaking, detailed, voluminous, factual and well formulated—yet Truschke’s own entire tribe of ‘academics’ simply goes on ignoring his case without bothering to refute it. (Well, there are two articles talking down to him, but we mean actual refutations, not mere denials.) If academics were to live up to the reputation they have among laymen, they would have set aside their current business to deal with this fundamental challenge to their worldview.

"Or take A Secular Agenda by Arun Shourie, Ph.D. from Syracuse, New York, and stunningly successful disinvestment minister in the A.B. Vajpayee government, when India scored its highest economic growth figures. It was a very important book, and it left no stone standing of the common assumption among so-called experts that India (with its religion-based civil codes and its discriminatory laws against Hinduism) is a secular state, i.e., a state in which all citizens are equal before the law, regardless of their religion. Though the book deconstructs the bedrock on which the ‘experts’ have built their view of modern India, they have never formulated a refutation. Instead, they just keep repeating their own deluded assumption, as in: ‘The BJP threatens India’s structure as a secular state.’ (Actually, the BJP does not, and India is not.) They can do so because they are secure in the knowledge that, among the audiences that matter, their camp controls the sphere of discourse. Concerning the interface between religion and modern politics, the established ‘academic’ view is not just defective, it is an outrageous failure.

"Or consider historian Professor K.S. Lal’s works on caste and religion, refuting with primary data the seeming truism, launched by the Communist Party of India ideologue M.N. Roy and now omnipresent in the textbooks, that the lowest castes converted en masse to Islam because of its claimed message of equality. Islam mainly won over the urban middle castes (and not because of equality, a value rejected as ingratitude towards the dispenser of destinies in the Quran, but because of the privileges vis-à-vis non-Muslims), not the Untouchables. Again, the silent treatment has been the only response the ‘experts’ could muster."

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"ICONOCLASM"

"The Ayodhya controversy was part of a larger issue, viz. Islamic iconoclasm, which victimized many thousands of places of worship in India and abroad, starting with Arabia. Or at least that is how historians like Sita Ram Goel and professors Harsh Narain, K.S. Lal or Saradindu Mukherji saw it: Turn this one controversy into an occasion for educating the public about the ideological causes of the iconoclasm that hit Hindu society so hard and so consistently for over a millennium. But the RSS-BJP preferred to put the entire focus on their one toy in Ayodhya, and obscure or even deny the Islamic motive behind it. (The ideological impotence and non-interest on their part provide yet another contrast with the academics’ imaginary construction of a wily, resourceful and highly motivated Hindu movement.)"

How idiotic must one be yo imagine that Hindus, which gone through it fir over a millennium, needed a reminder! It hasn't been forgotten, since it wasn't limited to destruction of all Hindu architecture, temples, sculptures and more, but about the greatest genocides accompanied by gang rapes and kidnappings of women.

How moronic must one be to think that a culture driven from Khajuraho and Konark to women's heads and faces hidden in sarees was unaffected enough to forget why it happened, or a people treated as of no importance when massacred by erstwhile regimes had forgotten it after repeated massacres during twentieth century by the community associated with the said regimes!

Hindus didn't need a reminder of context of Ayodhya, either regarding ancient legend of Raama or regarding the temple and its destruction and why.

Outsiders, Hindus knew, were associated more closely with the said erstwhile regimes, weren't going to care, anyway, being of the same inclination as of the temple destroying regimes, determined yo wipe out the only ancient and living culture, India.

"As part of his effort, Goel published a two-volume book giving a list of 2,000 temples demolished on purpose, mostly replaced by mosques. The part on the theology of iconoclasm proved irrefutable and has never even been gainsaid on any of its specifics. The list of 2,000 temples equally stands entirely unshaken, as so many challenges to the reigning school that tries to downplay the tradition of iconoclasm pioneered by the Prophet. Ever since, the dominant policy has been to disregard Goel’s work and carry on whitewashing the record of Islam regardless.

"Since stray new proofs of Muslim temple destruction keep popping up, that school has developed an alternative discursive strategy to prevent such cases from suggesting their own logical conclusion. It now preaches that a few temple destructions have indeed taken place, but channels this admission towards a counter-intuitive explanation: that Hinduism is to be blamed for these, not Islam. The core of truth is that a handful of cases have been documented of ancient Hindu kings abducting prestigious idols from their adversaries’ main temples, just as happened in Mesopotamia and other pagan cultures. These are then presented as the source of inspiration for Aurangzeb’s wholesale destruction (documented in his own court chronicles) of thousands of temples and many more idols.

"Not that any of the many Muslim iconoclasts ever testified that such was his inspiration. Their motivation, whenever explicitly stated, and whether inside or outside of India, is invariably purely Islamic. Since the negationist school is unable to document its thesis, let me show them by example how to do it.

"Kashinath Pandit’s book A Muslim Missionary in Mediaeval Kashmir (Delhi, 2009) contains a translation of the Tohfatu’l Ahbab, the biography of the fifteenth-century Islamic missionary Shamsu’d-Din Araki by his younger contemporary Muhammad Ali Kashmiri. After describing the many temple demolitions Araki wrought or triggered in thinly populated Kashmir (many more than the ‘eighty’ which the secularists are willing to concede on Richard Eaton’s authority for all of India during the whole Muslim period), the biographer gives Araki’s motivation in practising all this iconoclasm.

"Does he say ‘Araki then recalled the story how a Hindu king ran of with an idol and thereby felt an urge to do something entirely different: destroy all the idols and their idol-houses with it’? No. He recounts the standard Islamic narrative of the Kaaba: It was built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham for monotheistic worship (thus yielding a far more authoritative precedent than idol theft by an Infidel king), until unbelievers made it ‘a place for the idols and a house for the statues. Some Quraish chieftains (…) turned this House of God into the abode of devilish and satanic people. For innumerable years, this house of divine light and bliss became the worshiping place for sorcerers and depraved people and the centre of worshippers of idols (made of stones).’

"Fortunately, this injustice didn’t last, neither in Mecca, nor in Kashmir. ‘When the last of the prophets (Muhammad) saw this situation, he lifted Imam Ali Murtaza on his shoulders so that defiled and impure idols and images were struck down in the House of God. (…) In the same manner, Kashmir was a den of wicked people, the source of infidelity and a mine of corruption and aberration.’ (p.258)

"And then the enumeration of Hindu sacred places levelled and mosques built in their stead resumes. An extra detail of interest for all those who idealize Sufis is that the text lists many occasions when ‘Sufis’ and ‘dervishes’ participated in massacres and temple demolitions.

"At any rate, that is what a Muslim testimony of the motive for temple destructions looks like. At least in the real world, not in the make-believe world of our ‘academics’. I had already challenged Richard Eaton (the originator of this thesis, a self-described Marxist) and his followers to come up with such evidence in 1999, but nothing ever materialized. Come on, Professor Truschke, you can make an excellent career move by producing this proof.

"To sum up: On the one hand, we have Islamic iconoclasts and their contemporary supporters saying in so many words that Islam made them do it. Moderns who highlight this evidence are, in Truschke’s estimation, ‘bullies’. On the other hand, we have no evidence at all for the claim that the Islamic iconoclasts, intent on destroying Hinduism itself through its icons, took inspiration from Hindu icon-stealers, who installed the icon in their own temple for continued worship (as if abduction, wanting to have something close to you, were the same thing as murder, i.e., wanting something to disappear from this world). This claim is nothing more than special pleading. Yet, people who propagate it are, in Truschke’s description, ‘academics’."

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"CONCLUSION"

"The bourgeoisie sets great store by status. Scholars go by a different criterion: knowledge. They know, through learning or personal experience, that for some of the great insights and discoveries, we are indebted to outsiders and amateurs; and that quite a few of their colleagues have big titles and positions not corresponding to their actual knowledge. They also know that holding (or at least uttering) the required opinions can make or break an academic career—either formally, as when a non-Anglican could not get admission to Oxford University, or informally, as under the reign of progressivist conformism today.

"To think highly of the academic world presupposes a link between scientific achievement and academic rank, and this largely makes sense in the exact sciences. In the humanities, especially in the social ‘science’ and literature departments, this link is also deduced, but only as a parasitical extension of the conventions in the exact sciences. Much of what passes for scholarship these days is only ideology wrapped in jargon. Some sophomores take it seriously: Having just gained entry into the academic world, they idealize it and are proud of their belonging to a higher world distinct from lay society. And most laymen believe it: Over-awed by status, they assume that academic status presupposes both knowledge and objectivity, the basis of academic authority.

"There exists a test for objective knowledge: A good theory predicts. Physicists who know the relevant parameters of an object in motion can predict its location at future times. Well, how about the predictions by the academic India-watchers? In the mid-1990s, when the BJP’s imminent coming to power was a much-discussed probability, top academics predicted that a BJP government would turn India into a Vedic dictatorship, whatever that may be. They were put in the wrong even swifter than expected: In 1996, BJP leader A.B. Vajpayee was prime minister for thirteen days, then lost the vote of confidence, and instead of seizing power for good, he meekly stepped down. Academics predicted the victimization of Dalits and women, gas chambers, ‘all the Indian Muslims thrown into the Indian Ocean’, and what not. Well, the BJP has been in power from 1998 till 2004, and since 2014: Where are those gas chambers?"

"Scholars of modern India, as well as historians of fields relevant for contemporary political debates, have a lot to be modest about. They may have academic positions, but their record is not such that they are in a position to talk down to outsiders, the way Truschke now does."

Isn't Truschke the outsider, along with West, where it concerns India?

Surely she wouldn't have been so blind if she'd had any ancestry of Indian origin?

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February 15, 2022 - February 16, 2022.

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19. Macaulay’s Life and Times

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"There are a lot of things wrong with many Indians’ unquestioning trust in and use of the thesis put forward by Edward Said in his unjustly famous book Orientalism (1978). This work is full of factual errors, leaves unconsidered the German-language mainstay of orientalism (to which its main proposition linking orientalism with colonialism happens not to apply) and essentially appears to be a conspiracy theory, turning all scholars concerned into colonial agents. But with regard to Indians specifically, it uses orientalism in a sense different from the original application related to India, which, in turn, is distinct from its academic use as the name for a philological discipline. ‘Orientalist’ originally referred to those British administrators of India who, around 1800, opined that the native languages were more suited as mediums of education and modernization than English. Whereas ‘orientalism’ has become a dirty word among Hindu nationalists as much as among ‘postcolonial’ Marxists, the historical orientalists actually pursued nativist education policies still advocated by the same Hindu nationalists.

"Now a book has appeared which presents the man who put the orientalists out of business by pushing through an anglicist education policy: Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), considered the godfather of India’s anglicized ruling class and hated by Hindu nationalists. Finally, we have an up-to-date biography of this person extremely influential in Indian history. As Zareer Masani says on the cover of his book Macaulay: Pioneer of India’s Modernization, ‘If you’re an Indian reading this book in English, it’s probably because of Thomas Macaulay.’ His last biography was one by his nephew George Otto Trevelyan, still in the nineteenth century."

"We see Macaulay going to India not to fulfil a historical mission, but as the only way seemingly open to him to boost his finances. He worked as an assistant to Governor-General William Bentinck, most famous for prohibiting the self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres (satī). It was formally in a written advice to him that he formulated his famous “Minute on Education” in 1835. Apart from determining education policy for centuries to come (we still have an education system sensibly called Macaulayan), he also made his mark in other areas, e.g., he drafted the Indian Penal Code. Then he returned to stay in England for twenty more years as a scholar and a famous poet, to die at age 59.

"It will not endear the man to Indian nationalists that he used his spare time in Calcutta (now Kolkata) to pursue his interest in the Graeco-Roman classics while spurning the native ones. His contempt for Sanskrit writings is well known and comes through in his “Minute”, where he equates the whole of Sanskrit literature in terms of knowledge content with a single shelf of a popular library in Britain. Or, according to the approving author: ‘Macaulay was notoriously dismissive, if not downright hostile and contemptuous, about native Indian, and particularly Hindu, customs and religious superstitions.’ (p.xiii)"

Hindus prefer to notice better, discerning minds such as that of Goethe, with good reason.

"Hindu nationalists tend to use his name when they mean the anglicized elite. However, he did not spin a conspiracy that made the influence of the British long outlast their presence in India, as nationalist narrative implies. Instead, Indians themselves have opted for his and against nativist policies regarding language and education. Maybe they have chosen to pursue a wrong course (or maybe not, as this book affirms), but it is, at any rate, their own doing, not that of a Western conspiracy."

Elst falsely mixes up two separate sets of Indians and falsely implicates Hindus thereby. Those who chose to continue Macaulay policy were brought up therein, and behaved exactly as intended, described by him as brown copies of British rulers. Elsts is falsely mixing those with "Hindu nationalists".

"Was Macaulay’s education policy good for the former untouchables, here called ‘Dalits’ (the choice of words in this case being very sensitive)? As Dharampal has shown in his book The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (1983), basing himself on contemporaneous British surveys carried out in preparation of the implementation of Macaulay’s policies, Indian schools were by no means backward, and the school system was definitely more democratic than the contemporaneous one in England. It did not serve many untouchables, but they were represented, contradicting the usual assumption that low-castes were forbidden from learning to read and write. Moreover, positing a causal relationship between the introduction of the English medium and the emancipation of the low-castes is factually incorrect. China pursued a radical policy of equalization and achieved near-general literacy without using one word of English. Many Chinese engineers of whatever social background work high-tech jobs without knowing English.

"Macaulay also did not have the egalitarian reforms in mind which his present-day Dalit fans ascribe to him. Britain at that time had steep class differences, which helps explain why, as administrators in India, the British could so easily accommodate the caste system. ... "

Use of two separate ends class and caste here is to cover up the fact that caste system wasn't peculiar to India or Hinduism that every society had one, that India had a unique one based not on wealth, power, race and religion, but only on men's work, and that it was a fraud perpetrated by erstwhile colonial regimes to propagate falsely that caste was equal to Hinduism.

Cast or caste is an Anglo-Saxon word, it wasn't invented after Europe came to inflation, it means box in German and both European as well as Islamic societies had castes, differently categorised from India.

In India, British set up a caste system of their own, based on English caste system and adding lower rungs for others, beginning with European and lower down through Anglo-Indians to Eurasians to native Christians to Muslims. Hindus were the lowest rung, and inverted deliberately for more castigation.

" ... As we learn in this book, Macaulay was not in favour of universal franchise, preferring to keep it restricted to people owning property or diplomas. The Indian Leftists and subalterns, the very circles that celebrate his memory, opposed the latest Gulf War, in which a superpower bludgeoned a backward country in the name of human rights (and probably in the service of private capital). Exactly the same conditions prevailed in the First Opium War, which Macaulay passionately and prominently supported. In this case, the author is more even-handed, observing that today, ‘Macaulay’s ideas about an imperial mission to inform and educate still underpin the way the West exports its values to the rest of the world, especially through “soft” power and the subtle transfer of cultural and economic norms’ (p. xv)."

Soft, meaning the sanctions such as those imposed on Iraq, causing deaths of uncounted numbers of babies and children, or that now Afghanistan is left in, with taliban left billions of dollars worth of weapons, tanks, planes and more, while women of Afghanistan are left at their mercy (they promptly declared women must hide, stop education, and service taliban fie sex and reproduction purposes, every female between age of ten to forty five), as well as everyone who dealt with US forces, not as killers but as helpers?

"Did Macaulay provide the glue that still holds independent India together, as his fans, including the author, believe? The Constituent Assembly envisaged two alternatives to English as the official language: Hindi, taken to be more or less spoken as a mother tongue by some 40 per cent of the population, which was chosen and badly failed (partly but not wholly by sabotage from the English-speaking elite); and Sanskrit, which had a history as an official language and was highly respected both in India and abroad. Sanskrit was little spoken (as was English), but learning it as a common second language would have proved easier than making Hebrew the first language for Jews migrating to Israel, also because of the many vocabulary links between Sanskrit and the vernaculars. If Sanskrit was a difficult language, it was difficult for everyone, and it did not seriously favour one region over another the way Hindi did. Even Bhimrao Ambedkar, law minister and venerated ideological light of most low-caste Macaulay fans, strongly supported Sanskrit. India might have been united under its own classical language. However, after a 50-50 vote, assembly president Rajendra Prasad cast the fateful deciding vote in favour of Hindi, thus aborting the possibly successful Sanskrit experiment and indirectly making English the only viable alternative. Macaulay might have been history by now, but he is back with a vengeance. And if Masani has his way, Macaulay is here to stay."

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February 16, 2022 - February 16, 2022.

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20. Indraprastha vs Dînpanah:

Nothing Communal about ‘Indraprastha’

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"Indraprastha was the town founded by the Pandava brothers of the Mahabharata fame as their capital. Here, the eldest among them, Yudhishthira, became the ‘ruler of righteousness’ (dharmarâja). More than 3,000 years later, on 22-23 November 2016, the Draupadi Dream Trust held the first Indraprastha Conference in the National Museum, Delhi. This was part of a larger initiative on Indraprastha, with an exhibition in the Purana Qila (Old Fort). This fort had been built over the ancient site of Indraprastha, now partly made visible by archaeological excavations.

"Among secularists, there is predictably an attempt to sow doubt about this. In his 2015 book Where Stones Speak: Historical Trails in Mehrauli, the First City of Delhi, Rana Safvi argues that the finds under the Purana Qila have not been established to be the Pandavas’ city, which was but ‘mythological’. In particular, they are claimed not to contain the characteristic Painted Grey Ware (PGW), as per the 1954 excavations by India’s top archaeologist, B.B. Lal. However, sixty-two years later, the nonagenarian Lal edited the brochure of the present exhibition and, taking into account several excavations since then (which Safvi feigns to ignore), asserts that PGW was indeed found there, and that it was certainly the city of the Pandavas. Mehrauli was not the oldest part of Delhi, Indraprastha was."

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"LIGHTENING"

"A ‘prastha’ is an open space, a clearing in the forest where you go and settle, a ‘colony’. Thus, a vanaprastha, an elderly person who withdraws from society, is ‘one who goes and settles in the forest’ or ‘one who has the forest as his colony’.

"The new town was dedicated to Indra. He was the god of the thunderstorm that puts an end to the oppressive summer heat and opens the rainy season. That is why among the twelve Vedic solar months or half-seasons, he rules the first month of the rainy season. ... "

"He was also the slayer of the dragon Vrtra, a model for all the dragon-slayers in the world, such as Zeus killing Typhon, or Saint George, or Siegfried, or Beowulf. In Iran, he was transformed into a demon, but his nickname Verethragna (Vedic Vrtrahan, ‘Vrtra-slayer’) then became a popular god in its own right. ... "

"Less poetically and more philosophically, the Atharva Veda puts him at the centre of the sophisticated concept of Indrajâla, ‘Indra’s net’. In this net, a diamond in every knot reflects every other diamond knot, and thus the whole. The West needed another 4,000 years to develop the similar concept of the ‘holographic paradigm’."

"In India, Indra’s cult gradually declined after the Mahabharata age. Originally an embodiment of masculine strength, he becomes the subject of poetic variations extolling his (and his wife Shachi’s) sexual prowess. Like his Greek counterpart Zeus, he gets involved in flings on the side, such as with sage Gautama’s wife Ahilya. While becoming a character of fun, he further gets disavowed by the Mahabharata hero Krishna. In the famous Govardhan episode, Krishna lifts a mountain and holds it like an umbrella over the common people to protect them from the storm, embodiment of Indra’s wrath. This spurs on the further decline of the Vedic gods and their replacement with the now-familiar Hindu pantheon. By the time Hindus start building temples in the last centuries BCE, Indra is no longer worshipped."

Small, and not so small corrections:- one, any Vedic era ceremony, involving offering to Gods via ceremonial fire, still includes invitation and offerings to all Gods of Vedic era, including Agni (Fire) and Indra, Sourya (Sun) and Chandra (Moon), and many more; two, the worship of Indra declined beginning with after Raamaayana, chiefly due to his deception of wife of a sage without her consent and without informing her. By Mahâbhârata, if he was seen as someone that could hurt people due to anger, it was because he'd been seen as not necessarily always benefic.

"However, the Buddha arrived just in time for Indra to play a role in his career. It was Indra himself who persuaded the freshly awakened Shakyamuni to start preaching his new-found path. Buddhist monks then spread the cult of Indra to foreign lands as far as Japan. Indra’s weapon, the lightning or vajra, became the emblem of instant Enlightenment. The sought-after ‘self-nature’ (Chinese zixing) is present all the time, deep in all of us; but when we embark on the path of meditation and finally awaken to it, it strikes like lightning."

Gods in Vedic era pantheon of Gods of India aren't just bring of a higher plane of existence who interact with humans and war with forces of darkness, but also have functions and organs of control in humans. Indra is related to skin with its porous character, related to his thousands of eyes.

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"DÎNPANAH AND THE RELIGION"

"When the Muslim conquerors incorporated the area into their capital and built the Old Fort there, it was apparently not a case of ‘a Hindu sacred site destroyed to make way for a showpiece of Muslim power’. Indraprastha had largely fallen into disuse centuries before the conquests, leaving pride of place to other parts of Delhi. Still, the conquerors were aware of the site’s past as Indraprastha, for in his Ain-i-Akbari, Moghul chronicler Abu’l Fazl writes that it had been built on the site of ‘Indrapat’. There was probably no explicitly communal angle to it when the Muslim rulers chose the Indraprastha site.

"That changed when the second Moghul emperor, Humayun, decided to reorganize the area as his own glimpse of paradise, calling it Dînpanah, ‘refuge of Islam’. Dîn is the general Semitic word for ‘justice, righteousness’, even ‘religion’ (roughly, dharma). It was in this sense that the syncretistic emperor Akbar was to use it when he founded the Dîn-i-Ilâhî, the ‘divine religion’. This new religion was meant as a confluence between Hinduism and Islam, symbolized by Akbar’s newly founded city of Ilâh-âbâd (‘divine city’, wrongly transcribed by the British as Allahabad) on the Ganga-Yamuna confluence. But this religion did not exist yet in Humayun’s time."

Ilâh-âbâd wasn't built in empty or vacant space, but at a spot extremely busy with pilgrimages by Hindus, everyday on individual or groups basis and annually on humongous level, with people arriving from everywhere in India during month of Maagha (when on full moon day the Moon is seen close to Maghaa, the first star in Leo), most staying at Prayaaga or Prayag (confluence) for a month.

On individual or family or group basis throughout the year its either part of a pilgrimage that nay include other sites such as Kaashi (Banaras) down the river, Haridwar up river, and possibly more of pilgrimage spots in Himaalayan region.

And one important reason some people come us fir flowing ashes of a family member or other close contact into Gangaa, which is preferable at either Prayaaga or Kaashie, if at all possible. If not, there are other rivers all over India of course, and many of them considered holier too than others, but Gangaa tops the preferred list, being considered holiest of all.

"Akbar’s usage of Dîn accorded with its original Semitic meaning once used by the Arab pagans. But it deviated from the meaning that Mohammed had conferred on the term during his rulership in Arabia: specifically the religion of Islam. It is in this more limited sense that the word came to be used in names like Saifu’d-dîn, ‘the sword of Islam’, and likewise in Humayun’s Dînpanah, ‘refuge of Islam’. Humayun’s rulership of Delhi was short-lived, and when he finally recovered it, he found his Dînpanah in disarray. He did not get a chance to rebuild it, for he died soon after. So, it only had a very fleeting existence and made no mark at all in Delhi’s long history. By contrast, the earlier town of Indraprastha had existed for many centuries.

"Recently, some well-meaning but illiterate bureaucrat came up with the idea that Lutyens’ Delhi should be renamed Dînpanah. However, naming a central neighbourhood of Delhi after a particular religion might not go down well with the preponderantly secular-minded population. Probably the bureaucrats who considered naming the area’s development project Dînpanah had not considered this, because they had not realized the meaning of Dîn. At any rate, the plan was shelved when they learnt of the far better credentials of Indraprastha."

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"THE GOD"

"Now, some usual suspects will object upon hearing anything with the Vedic god Indra in it: ‘Communal!’ They are mistaken. There is nothing communal about the holographic paradigm. There is nothing communal about sudden Awakening. He is the same storm god we find the world over: Zeus among the Greeks, Jupiter among the Romans, Thor among the Vikings (whence ‘Thursday’), Marduk in Babylon and Ba’al in the Levant. Note how Indra is likened to a bull, how Zeus seduced princess Europa in the shape of a bull, and how Ba’al was famously worshipped as a bull in the biblical episode of the golden calf.

"In fact, in the golden-calf events, two faces of the storm god were in confrontation: Not just Ba’al but even Moses’ god Yahweh are evolutes of essentially the same god. A lesser-known face of the storm god was indeed Yahweh among the Midianite Beduins in northwestern Arabia. Among them, then led by chieftain Jethro, the fugitive Egyptian prince Moses found asylum. That is when he acquired both a wife and a new religion. Yes, Yahweh was originally an Arab storm god, whose name was misinterpreted by the Bible authors as ‘He who is’. His name, as shown by Julius Wellhausen, stems from a verbal root ‘h-w-h’, also attested in the Quran, and meaning ‘to move in the sky’. This is both in the sense of the storm wind’s blowing (an image of the palpable though subtle power of heaven) and of an eagle swooping in to catch its prey (an image of the sudden whims of destiny)."

So in effect abrahmic religions are worshippers of Indra, just by another name! That they don't wish to progress to higher levels of Divine is entirely in accord with Indra and his status as King of Heaven.

"This Yahweh, this choleric storm god, was then taken to Egypt, apparently in the age when some of Pharaoh Akhnaton’s monotheistic reform was in the air. Next, he led Moses and the Israelites in the legendary Exodus through the desert. He remained powerful, sovereign and choleric, but was theologically transformed into the biblical ‘jealous god’, who tolerates no second god beside him. This Yahweh, the sender of prophets, was later to be embraced by Mohammed under the name Allah, from al-Ilâh, ‘the god’."

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"LONG LIVE INDRAPRASTHA!"

"So, everybody can feel happy with the name Indraprastha. No Muslim invader ever destroyed a temple to Indra, for he had been worshipped before the Hindus even used idols housed in temples. Indra throwing the lightning (elsewhere ‘Thor’s hammer’) is an apt image of heavenly intervention in earthly affairs. Everybody naturally considers thunder and lightning to be the prime symbol of heaven’s unchained might over us. Thus, there is nothing communal about this name—on the contrary. Indra’s thunderstorms are a pan-religious symbol, an embodiment of the basic unity underlying the plurality of religions.

"Indraprastha was founded as the capital of the Pandavas’ small-time kingdom but the area was destined by fate to become the capital of the Delhi Sultanate, partly the Moghul Empire, Samrat Hemachandra’s short-lived empire, the later British Indian Empire spanning the whole subcontinent, and now the Indian republic. It is a source of pride, and worth celebrating, that here, the ‘righteous ruler’ once chose to highlight the great universal ideas personified in Indra. Therefore, the open-minded Delhiites all agree: Indraprastha amar rahe!"

Hindus, if asked their choice of a Vedic deity, would likely prefer Sun, or Saraswatie; but Indra as King of Heaven (Swarga in Sanskrit and therefore in all languages of Indian origin), is all right too.

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February 16, 2022 - February 16, 2022.

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21. A Diversity of ‘White Saviours’

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"Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik wonders: ‘Why do many Indians need white saviours?’** ... I will give some observations on the stance of ‘whites’ in general ... "

The very introduction there tells of the deep ingrained bias against India, so much so Elst might not be aware of it. Mythilogist? Why, because Pattanaik deals with ancient Indian legends, figures knowledge? Would it be ok to call all abrahmic preachers mythologists, on that basis? Or is racism above all, before all?

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"ENGLISH MEDIUM"

"The first white person to figure in his list of ‘saviours’ is Thomas Babington Macaulay. In the 1830s, he pioneered English education in India, at least for the elites, whom he then expected to translate the modern values for the common people. In keeping with the spirit of the times, his reform was explicitly elitist. But with that limitation, it was nonetheless not malicious, contrary to the enemy-image he has acquired. ... "

Is Elst unaware that his career didn't include mere setting up of the education system, but is chiefly noted for the policy that was subsequently followed by British and Katrina by thise that considered themselves their heirs, which was of breaking spirit and spine of India by every possible means, especially by lying about everything that was good about India and calling it bad- and those chiefly in sights were Hindus, most notably Brahmins, because he realized they connected and held up India in spirit?

When leftists speak of upper castes, they font target rich, or even erstwhile Nawaz and Rajas, or even Mughals; Brahmins were always poor, but they are targeted with every foul and fraudulent accusation, while left and secular and all such self-declared falsely labelled group of India simply melts before those traditional enemies of left in Europe, the rich and the aristocrat.

" ... He actually perceived anglicization as a necessary phase of modernization, in preparation of India’s independence. Nearly a century before the British loyalist Mahatma Gandhi converted to the ‘total independence’ ideal, Macaulay already thought in terms of Indians being independent equals with Britons."

That's as false as it gets. His, and that of British, policy was to create a class to serve British, as clerical employees, and brown outside but white inside, to ape their masters, alienated completely from mainstream India.

To this day, while scientists and higher level studies scholars come from public and government schools set up by Indians, missionaries operated convent schools aren't good in imparting or inculcated any science, but excel at diction of - not necessarily study of - English; most convent students go on to humanities, their highest aim an administrative career, while Indian students crowding graduate departments of universities in US in science, mathematics and technology come either from other schools, or have a family background that, being staunchly traditional Indian, can overcome the convent school handicap. The latter are usually South Indian.

"Nonetheless, his policies would lead to the biggest hurdle for India’s decolonization. The maintenance and expansion of his English education (and administration) by Jawaharlal Nehru is ultimately responsible for the major colonial remnant in contemporary India: the dominant position of English. Whatever Macaulay’s good intentions, which counted for the colonial period, they have had a deeply antidemocratic effect on the Indian republic. As Madhu Kishwar has written: The major determinant of your career chances in India is not your caste or religion, but whether you are fluent in English."

There have been instances in Delhi of candidates asked to collect appointment letters before being informed that unfortunately they must teach Hindi medium; on being told that the candidate is quite capable thereof, due to having been educated in Hindi medium, the interviewing panel did a turnabout and informed the candidate that any further contact was quite unnecessary.

"However, only by way of historical reference can this situation be called ‘colonial’. According to the Constitution, English should have been phased out by 1965; no outside power was involved when the Indian elite (using the Dravidianist misgivings as pretext) sabotaged this switch. The elite profited too much from the disenfranchisement of the Indian commoners by the dominance of English. Without saying it out loud, they thanked Macaulay for their linguistic privileges. (Ambedkarites in the Christian sphere of influence also laud Macaulay for bringing, through English, Western humanitarian and egalitarian values into India.) ‘Decolonization’ implies the belated phasing out of English, but this will involve the defeat not of some foreign colonizer but of the indigenous elite."

That's only partly true. British administration is far from blameless in this. Education wasn't the only sphere they preferred briwn Englishmen, but politics most of all. Gandhi, Jinnah and Nehru were as English as it gets, except only one always ate like one and dressed always so in clothes. Others, more capable but more Indian, were given hardhest possible imprisonment or worse, intended to break them in spirit and physically. Gandhi insisted that Patel step aside for Nehru setting aside the democratic choice of assembly, and according to some sources, it's because he "knew" that British would only allow an independent India if Nehru were to be PM.

"Something analogous applies to the entire cultural sphere. Certain colonial injections have been embraced by the indigenous elite, which then imposes them on a war footing on the general population. Case in point is ‘secularism’, originally a phase of late-Christian society, internalized though heavily distorted by India’s elite, and then imposed on the entire Indian polity. Another example is the teaching of Western thought models in each of the Humanities, to the detriment of indigenous models. This counts in particular for Pattanaik’s own field of mythography, where the ancient indigenous tradition is being subjected to deconstruction by recent Western models."

Chief construct of which is to teach that everything Indian is myth ir false, while everything foreign and especially anything related to religions associated with erstwhile colonial regimes is worthy of reveremce.

................................................................................................

"DECOLONISATION"

" ... as if there were some "white" conspiracy against India! ... "

Has Elst heard, watched or read, BBC lately, or over the decades he's made his career on matters related to India and Hindus? He himself speaks of the anti-India, anti-Hindu attitude he has been up against, in academia loosely titled Orientalist or Indologist, yet he thinks it's not percolated in general atmosphere?

"In some respects, talk of ‘the colonial’ and of ‘decolonization’ is embarrassingly obsolete, because the battle lines have fundamentally changed since 1947. Thus, some Hindu nationalists fulminate against ‘white’ interference and accuse ‘sepoys’ (Indians collaborating with the colonizers) of ‘kissing the white a**’, as if there were some ‘white’ conspiracy against today’s India. When ‘whites’ (to borrow Pattanaik’s racial terminology) care about the rest of the world, it is mostly about the Islamic world as a source of trouble, and about China as a rival. About India, I can testify that very few outsiders care one way or the other. Indians only flatter themselves by imagining India to be the target of a hostile conspiracy. And they are badly living in the past if they imagine that some Westerners are saying to each other: ‘For whiteness’ sake, we have to thwart those damn Indians.’"

Starkly racist, after the history of squeezing every penny from India - and starving millions to death by stealing harvests of India, a history that ekst should be familiar with, apart from the fact that "The Great Game" was keeping India and keeping USSR out, away from it, and this concern directed most policies of British empire, which collapsed after leaving India.

The very attitude of denigration there smacks of an awareness of having one time, for centuries, bled the living cure foof antiquity.

"To the extent that race has any importance at all, the world has really changed, and ‘anti-racism’ has now effectively become the state religion of most Western countries. People of other races take the same positions vis-à-vis India as whites used to do, for these turn out to follow from certain geopolitical constraints, not racial concerns. In fact, both under a black secretary of state (Condoleezza Rice) and a black president (Barack Obama), America’s South Asia policy has been as tilted towards Pakistan and against India as under, say, Richard Nixon. But admittedly, things become easy when you can divide mankind simply by skin colour, so this racial approach is attractive to lazy minds."

That very epithet at the end was a racist characterisation of India by Europe, no matter how little actual work they did in India and how hard the Indians worked; so's the preference for Pakistan by all presidents since Nixon to Obama, while Pakistanis pride themselves on being "tall, fair, blue eyed, ..." etc, bragging on internet.

In reality that preference is largely for convenience of military base against Russia, but why is containing Russia in Asia important if India isn't of interest, when Tibet has been gifted over to a far worse coloniser and jihadis stemming from Pakistan have attacked, assaulted and murdered in US, France, and Australia?

As for the "not white" characterisation of Obama and Condoleezza Rice, is Elst unaware that anyone with a drop of Sub-Saharan African blood in DNA is classified as "black" in US, while DNA of Obama is fifty percent "white", as is his complete bringing up by his mother's parents?

And that if an African American has no "white blood, it's a fresh immigrant, but no one whose ancestry gies back over a century could avoid "white" DNA, rapes of slaves or natives being never characterised as criminal by either US or Australia?

"The situation that Pattanaik puts up for discussion has little to do with race. That Indian polemicists nonetheless like to speak in terms of race, as if it were 1940, is not so much morally reprehensible for being ‘racist’. Rest assured, for ‘whites’, being considered the culprit of every wrong in the world only evokes a yawn, we’ve heard it so many times. The problem with it is that it shows mental laziness among Indians, both in the form of anachronism, as if on a battlefield you can afford the luxury of anything less than cool realism, and of vicarious self-flattery, as if you are carrying the mantle of genuine fighters against racial discrimination like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela."

Every derisive bit there smacks of racism as does every denial. More of the same follows.

................................................................................................

"DO-GOODERS"

"Nonetheless, it does almost look like the situation of a colonized nation when you consider the enormous cultural power wielded in India by Western, now mostly American-based, NGOs, think tanks and institutions of higher learning. They have rarely been set up to serve some imperial goal, yet they still embody a very colonial psychology. They still think that India has to be lifted out of its own barbarism. They give themselves a civilizing mission, constantly nurtured with atrocity literature to justify the treatment of Indians as backward, in need of tutelage. But today, this ‘native barbarism’ has been redefined in terms of human rights. American India-watchers and India-meddlers analyse Hinduism as a litany of human rights violations, and present themselves as the saviours whom India’s many oppressed categories have been waiting for."

They do forget current enough events in US.

"Pattanaik makes a good observation when he writes that high-profile India-watching academics ‘need to indulge America’s saviour complex if they need a share of the shrinking funding. The objective of the research needs to alleviate the misery of some victim and challenge a villain. And so, (Wendy) Doniger will provide evidence of how Puranic tales reinforce Brahmin hegemony, while (Sheldon) Pollock will begin his essays on Ramayana with reference to the Babri Masjid demolition, reminding readers that his paper has a political, not merely a theoretical, purpose.’ Exactly.

"He also is on to something when he guesses that ‘European and American academicians have been on the defensive to ensure they do not “other” the East. So now, there is a need to universalize the “othering” process—and show that it happens even in the East, and is not just a Western disease. And so their writings are at pains to constantly point how privileged Hindus have been “othering” the Dalits, Muslims and women, using Sanskrit, Ramayana, Mimamsa, Dharmashastras and Manusmriti.’

"That doesn’t explain everything, but it must be welcomed as a true observation on the ‘social justice warrior’ nature of current orientalist scholarship. It is scholarly in the sense of coming with lots of footnotes, but not in the sense of being impartisan and objective. Here you should realize its continuity with the colonialist endeavour at its starkest. When Hernán Cortéz conquered Mexico, he used social and ethnic grievances to mobilize the local ‘lower castes’ as cat’s paw against the ruling Aztecs. In both cases, the goal is to dispossess the dominant group among the ‘savages’ and thus bludgeon it into opening up to ‘civilizing’ influences, and the means to achieve this is often an alliance with the groups with grievances against it."

That was a part of Macaulay policy, explicitly so.

"This is where Doniger and Pollock come into the picture. They are representative of the enormous ideological clout Westerners still wield in India. The colonial-age orientalists only conditioned the minds of a small intellectual upper class; today, the Western view of India and Hinduism, through mass education and the media, influences everyone and co-determines policymaking. Because Indians have invited the Donigers and Pollocks in.

"From her writings, it appears that Doniger does not consciously position herself as anti-Hindu. To be sure, she is partisan—for example, Pattanaik notices that in the dedication to her ‘banned’ book, ‘Doniger refers to a “good fight” against Hindutva’. But she thinks those who have been identified with the struggle for the Hindu cause have misunderstood their own religion, while she is, in fact, restoring the ‘real’ Hinduism. She genuinely believes that her Freudian interpretative model of Indian mythology somehow reveals true underlying meanings, the hidden logic of Hinduism.

"Doniger’s conception of Hinduism deserves a more thorough treatment, much of which has already been pioneered by Malhotra. But one general observation, which counts for the whole current of psychoanalytical ‘deconstruction’ of Hinduism, is that the clumsy Freudian concepts she uses are simply not sufficient to understand Hindu explorations of consciousness and human nature. I once heard an Indian psychologist who had guzzled down big doses of this psychoanalytical framework pontificate that a guru is followed because he is a ‘father figure’. You could see him savour this expression, as if he considered what he had said very profound. Well, there are many types of father figure, but only few have the specific qualities needed to be a guru; and psychoanalysis has never been able to turn anyone into a guru in the Hindu sense. The smaller cannot contain the greater.

"There is something comical about the psychologist’s attempt to fit the hoary Hindu ideas about the psyche into the modern attempts by his own newfangled discipline, still groping in the dark. But because Doniger’s flippant approach serves the purpose of belittling and ridiculing Hinduism well, it is welcomed and highlighted by the Indian elite with its many-pronged attack on Hinduism. And she is not even a psychologist: Elsewhere, her ‘alternative’ (actually quite conformist, only a bit more titillating) deconstruction of a religion would have been criticized as not based on any competence."

What's not racist, ignorant, arrogant and stupid in use of that word "hoary"? But then someone brought up in a Europe not quite out of shadows of a nazi ideology can't be expected to lose his mind's blindness even when light of India hits, and perhaps a wilful holding on to harder blinkers is the only reaction one can expect.

................................................................................................

"POLITICIZED PHILOLOGY"

"Pollock, a very good Sanskritist, at least in a purely linguistic sense, is more explicitly involved with the anti-Hindu discourse promoted in India by the missionaries and the Ambedkarites, and their first line of attack, the ‘secularists’. He has pioneered some valid insights into the Sanskrit ‘cosmopolis’, which did not oppress vernacular languages from Gandhari to Javanese but fruitfully coexisted with them to their mutual benefit. But at the same time, he has helped greatly in belittling and politicizing the Ramayana and in promoting the ‘Hinduism bad, Buddhism good’ thesis."

Of course those that intend to loot and butcher India prefer Buddhism over Hinduism, they see history thereof in Central Asia! Islam took much less time to wipe out Buddhism, and leftovers were finished off by Communists for greater part, leaving some lands of South East Asia and Sri Lanka where neither Islam nor church have given up on conquest. India stands in the way with her Hinduism still very alive, by not relinquishing the worldly and embracing renunciation of Buddhism, leaving them this world to conquer.

"This is not very original—in fact, it is only a sophisticated formulation of widely held views. Thus, Pattanaik attributes the same viewpoint to another big name we just met: ‘Doniger’s essays on the Puranas make you see Hinduism as a violent authoritarian force challenged by non-violent egalitarian Buddhism.’ But in this discourse of hate, which instrumentalizes Buddhism as a bludgeon to beat Hinduism with, Pollock has gone farther than all others. In 1993, he published a paper, ‘Deep Orientalism?’, arguing that Hinduism (particularly the Mimansa school, Brahmanical par excellence) sits at the centre of the Nazi doctrine. Yes, it is long ago, and partly explainable from the war psychology emanating from the Ayodhya controversy, in which he explicitly sided with the negationist school denying Islam’s well-documented destructive role in Hindu history, but he has never retracted this position."

They never give up hoping, that if only they abuse Hindus enough, Hindus will accept all their lies, do they!

"In this case, as in some other matters (such as the exact place of Christianity in European civilization, often exaggerated in India—for example, Doniger and Pollock are not motivated by Christian concerns, a secularist position which Pattanaik here acknowledges to be ‘the hallmark of objectivity in educational circles’), my own role has been to help Indians better understand European history wherever it is relevant to Indian debates. ... "

Two millennia of imposition, enforced by centuries of inquisition, burning at stake every voice of dissent, or even thought not completely in accord, cannot be expected to have no effect in mindsets of a land still almost solely church dominated with exception only of some, not all, migrants.

Pollock and Doniger might not explicitly articulate a wish to see church take over India, but do they scrupulously compare every criticism of Hinduism with comparable facets of Europe and church? No, they are happy to target another race, another faith, one they have no connection to and can therefore shoot freely at, all the while rising in a career which they are incapable of making in, say, physics, or even meteorology.

" ... The case Pollock has built is untenable for anyone familiar with the concerned part of European history. What few Indomanic racists have existed in Germany during the century before 1945, were not exactly poles apart from Pollock and the secularists: On the contrary, they shared the latter’s own anti-Brahmanism and pro-Buddhism. They considered Brahmins agents of the ‘dark indigenous’ people mired in superstition and puerile ritualism, who contaminated the pure ‘Aryan invader’ culture, while they held the Buddha to have been a real Aryan trying to restore the genuine and superior Aryan traditions. ... "

As complete nonsensical a falsehood as it gets. Buddha was as much a pure Indian as Raama an Aarya, neither with any ancestry of anywhere else other than India as defined geographically through history, and called Aaryaavarta or Bhârata, by everyone of India. Aaryan invasion theory is fraud perpetrated by Europeans, using the Sanskrit word Aarya in a false way giving it a connotation that does not exist, just as they did to Swastika. Aarya has nothing to do with race or colours of any physical parts.

" ... Hitler was not only an anti-Semite but in passing also a votary of India’s equivalent, anti-Brahminism. ... "

Targeting Brahmins was not "India's", it was a policy of erstwhile colonial regimes, explicitly stated by Macaulay for British to employ to break India, but always used by Islamic regimes, and taken up by various people after having suffered centuries of colonial rule.

" ... That is why Pollock fails to quote from the ‘National-Socialist Indologists’ a single line in praise of Jaimini or Kumarila Bhatta or any other Mimansaka, but has to quote the Buddha’s name several times.

"This little excursus into the nadir of Pollock’s scholarship should, however, not obscure the fact that with his erroneous anti-Brahmin spin on the history of German Indology, he is serving an Indian rather than a Western cause. Today, anti-Brahminism comes in as a helpful tool for US-based missionaries to pit Hindus against one another along lines of caste and ethnicity (‘Dravidians’ and ‘Adivasis’ against ‘Aryan invaders’), and in the nineteenth century, it has indeed been launched by missionaries; but it has now mainly become an Indian ideology animating much of Indian culture (Bollywood) and politics. More than some CIA conspiracy, it is this Indian current that Western scholars seek to align with."

So more blondes can find easy money in Mumbai with trivial appearances?

................................................................................................

"SKIN COLOUR"

"‘But who does Hindutva turn to for establishing the greatness of Hinduism, and Sanskrit, and the Vedas? A European, Koenraad Elst. And an American, David Frawley. So much for “decolonizing” the Hindu/Indian mind. So much for Swadeshi. Does this reveal our deference to white scholarship? Does this reveal Indians are beyond racism? One wonders if African-American Indologists or Chinese American Indologists would ever evoke similar passions.’

"The colour obsession, while not entirely absent among the Indian public, does not go very far in explaining our role in Indian politico-cultural discourse. It so happens that ‘Oriental Philology and History’ (one of my diplomas), the proper name of ‘orientalism’, was developed in Europe, and some of those roots are still in force, all while it now largely conditions the dominant Indian discourse on India itself. The ‘white’ presence in this line of scholarship was almost a 100 per cent till recently, as the upcoming non-white presence in Western universities (as Indians know all too well) was mostly in Engineering and Medicine, shortcuts to status and wealth, not in the Humanities and certainly not in its more esoteric departments. It is only recently that the children of Asian immigrants have started entering the ‘orientalist’ sections. But I am sure that the day a Chinese-American, not to mention an Indian-American, starts putting out theses as provocative as Doniger’s or Pollock’s, and from equally prestigious positions, he will evoke similar passions among the affected Hindu public."

Elst is mixing up a lot, as do most non Indians. Engineering and medicine aren't about prestige as much as outlet for intelligence to a safe career, a concern of middle class, while prestige indeed is with graduates of church run or British established institutions of education, which never intended encouraging Indians to careers other than serving British in clerical positions, and those people from richer homes are the ones who after a degree or two in humanities, possibly a career in administrative services, label themselves "secular" etc. (unless they are staunchly Hindu and so keep their mouths shut). They make noise and keep prestigious positions of media and administration for most part, with rare exceptions.

The engineering, technology, medicine and science students Elst speaks of are the backbone of India and her intelligent middle class, predominantly Hindu.

"The use of Westerners, the reason they can serve as argument of authority in India, is firstly that in controversies, they count as outsiders, hence more objective; and secondly, that modern culture does indeed count as intrinsically more scientific. ... "

No, it's simpler - it's subconscious racial memory of two to three centuries past; this is also why Muslims get dominant position in arguments, it's about the mayhem of over a millennium and more. For that matter, why did China dominate the discourse vis-a-vis India? It's racial subconscious memory of Mongols, who were called Mughal by Persia, and the atrocities perpetrated through India culminating in Aurangzeb, that is seen in the behaviour of Indian governments until 2014.

" ... The first argument is very weak: Those who get close enough to Indian culture to have anything to say about it have usually befriended one of the warring camps inside India, and hence have become just as partisan as their Indian sources. Thus, practically, all the Western press correspondents in Delhi are safely in the pocket of the secularists and cherish a vicarious hatred of assertive Hinduism. This yields what I have called the ‘circular argument of authority’: Indian secularists feed their Western contacts their own view of the Indian religio-political landscape, and when their Western dupes then go public with these same views, the secularists hold them up as independent confirmation of their views by the scientific West."

No, again it's simpler. If those from West would use their minds instead of fraternising with bootlickers, the falsely self-declared secularist brigade would overnight turn proud Hindu.

................................................................................................

"STRATEGY"

"Both in India and in the diaspora, talented Indian youngsters have rushed to the Medical and Engineering departments, leaving the Humanities for their not-so-bright brothers and sisters. ... "

Again, those that rise to top via humanities are precisely those that expect it, coming from richer backgrounds and educated in British estate church run institutions. You can see the entitlement in their demeanor. Some are even in fact intelligent but misuse it in India in fraudulent diatribes against Hinduism, if not in fraudulent diatribes outside India against India. One can easily think of a person firmly on fence, wasted in congress. His intelligence and debating skills were evidenced at oxbridge debates, telling off British in their home in their language with their accent. But he is topped by someone whose skills are better, fortunately used for India.

"Then there is the reason Sir Edmund Hillary gave for climbing the Everest: ‘Because it was there.’ When I noticed the big power-wielders in the Indian landscape with their rope tricks fooling people on the Ayodhya temple or the Aryan debate, the adventurous white man in me was awakened to go ‘hunting tigers out in Indiah’. That is, at least, if you try to think up a subconscious personal reason. My conscious reason was that so much bluff as was spread by the Indian intellectual establishment simply had to be answered and defeated."

................................................................................................

"CONVERSION"

"‘Outsourcing the job to white men is an easy alternative. Particularly those who manage to establish credibility. Frawley does that brilliantly by declaring himself a Hindu, with an evocative title of Pandit Vamadeva Shastri, which makes him a “Brahmin” in Hindu eyes, justified on grounds of his vast knowledge of the Vedic scriptures, and his long practice of Ayurveda and Jyotisha. His wife is Indian, and has the title of “Yogini”. Elst, by contrast, insists that he is not a Hindu, for he is well aware that no one can be “converted” to Hinduism—that it is linked to birth, and that Hinduism is deeply linked to geography.’"

Elst could if he wished become Hindu and declare it, but its not as simple as a small ceremony, it's a transformation. Becoming a smoker is far easier with peer pressure and advertising, as is bring pressured into latest fashions and makeover; becoming a neurologist or mathematician is a lifetime transformation, and becoming a Hindu us only comparable with being a yogi (not physiexercise teacher, but someone rising in consciousness to unite, literally Yoga, with Divine), generally not just achieved with a sprinkle and a word.

Birth and ancestry helps, by environment of DNA, gestation and family, apart grom ambient society, helping.

"Secularists are fond of saying (and of quoting Westerners to the effect) that ‘there is no conversion to Hinduism’: To them it means that Hindus are condemned to keeping mum when the missionaries convert to Christianity. By contrast, I do think conversion to Hinduism is possible. Firstly, communities as a whole have done it throughout history; it is between communities that conversion is rare. (If you are a Jat or a Rajput and you convert to Islam, you will still get identified with your caste for generations. Indian Muslims have been tutored to hide this, to uphold the anti-Hindu fiction of an ‘egalitarian Islam’, but Pakistanis candidly tell you: ‘I am a Rajput Muslim.’) Secondly, in borderline situations, such as a mixed marriage, someone can join a particular Hindu community, on condition that its legitimate members accept you as one of theirs."

If you are willing, that is. Being Hindu is least about acceptance by others and more about inner being.

"‘Frawley overcomes this bottleneck easily by insisting Vedic civilization is universal and open to all humanity, and by defining what it means to be a true Brahmin. It is significant, however, that no white convert to Hinduism ever identifies themselves as Vaishya or Shudra. It is either Brahmin or Kshatriya— intellectual or combative—and always superior. So much for the “division of labour” thesis of varna.’

"The Brahmin name ‘Shastri’ was given to David, it is not he who claimed Brahminhood. As for myself, by traditional definitions of varna, I would, of course, be a Shudra, and there is nothing wrong with that. A Swiss friend of mine (and of ‘Vedic socialist’ Swami Agnivesh), who lived in an ashram in Rishikesh for years, calls himself Shûdrânanda: Shudra and happy to be one! Among great Hindu figures I particularly like, is Sant Ravidas, who was a cobbler on the outskirts of Varanasi. Well, the outskirts of Hinduism, that is where you might situate me."

It's not clear why anyone thinks that Indian classifications of men based on their vocation or work are limited to India, except India is aware of duties in each whether followed scrupulously or not.

Anyone involved in trade, industry, business us Vaishya, and anyone involved in services, craft etc. is of that group; if one wishes to categotise oneself as Kshatrya, one in a military profession is quite suitable, ancestry of such background is good, but a church cleric not quite, unless church is defined as military's deception arm.

Intellectuals classifying themselves as Brahmins is appropriate but not without adhering to hygiene rules, beginning with bathing every morning, wearing fresh change of clothes (not unwashed), and other similar washing rules not articulated in a book but inculcated for millennia through families. They apply yo all upper castes, and people involved in work where it's difficult are excused, but are better for observing them. Brahmins, no excuses.

Also, no demanding compensation for services rendered, no refusing services for lower offering, as far as two top castes go.

................................................................................................

"POLEMICS"

" ... Pattanaik’s accurate assessment of the history debates I have participated in: ‘Elst has done a lot of research on Ayodhya and endeavours to provide evidence to prove the Babri Masjid was indeed built on a site that once housed a Hindu temple. He has strongly challenged views of scholars like Richard Eaton who seek to secularize the iconoclasm of Muslim rulers. The standard trope in modern historical studies seems to be that Hindu temples were destroyed not only by Muslim rulers but also by Hindu rulers as part of establishing their authority. It disregards all Hindu memory and Islamic writing that shows motivation of Muslim rulers at its core was religious, designed to replace the Hindu faith with Islam. This is aligned with Western academic anxiety at being seen as Islamophobic—no points lost if one is Hinduphobic. Elst provides the fodder to challenge this view.’

"But here I break rank with many history-rewriters: ‘Both Elst and Frawley provide strong arguments to support the “Out of India” theory that seeks to establish India as the true homeland of the Aryan race or the Sanskrit language, claiming it gave civilization to the world.’"

And it's correct, on both counts.

" ... I merely see a debate (about the invasion theory) that has not been satisfactorily concluded yet, so I keep working. That is not an idiosyncratic refusal to let go. After the pre-existence of a temple at the site of the Babri Masjid has been largely accepted, I have left that debate behind. I let go of it.

"By contrast, the injustice done by the Muslim colonizers remains a fact with consequences in the present day, and continuous with some presently existing injustices (violent oppression of Hindus in Muslim-majority states, anti-Hindu discriminations in the Constitution). Letting go of those concerns would be too early. That is just a matter-of-fact view. Myth cannot really throw new light upon it."

................................................................................................

"PARTING SHOTS"

"The people who created doubts about the temple in Ayodhya and inflicted the whole controversy on India (and on Hindu communities in Bangladesh and the UK) did unnecessarily revive an old wound and then kept it festering. Those who sought the exact historical scenario and its doctrinal background did just the opposite. And as for the bystanders who ignore the factual results that the latter have achieved, they, too, seem to want the controversy to ‘fester’."

Correct.

"As for ‘lucrative’, for those familiar with the vetoes and exclusions inflicted on dissenters by the Humanities establishment in the West and the secularist establishment in India, such a thought is beneath contempt. If ‘lucre’ had been my motive, I would, of course, have joined the opposite camp."

Obviously, unless one making that accusation knows how to circumvent the obvious obstacles faced by Elst and Frawley.

"And here he is really mistaken: ‘Neither privileges the Indian idea of diversity, that rejects homogeneity and allows for multiple paradoxical, even hierarchical, structures to coexist.’ At least when speaking for myself, I can confidently state that on the contrary, my criticism has always been directed precisely at the religions and ideologies that are out to suppress diversity."

"The mythographer speaks: ‘Doniger and Pollock follow the Greek mythic pattern that establishes them as heroes who are in the “good fight” against “fascist” monsters. Elst and Frawley follow the Abrahamic mythic pattern that establishes them as “prophets” leading the enslaved—colonized—Indians back to the “Vedic Promised Land”.’"

Wow, Greek hero and Judaic Prophet too, flattery! Or not, reality.

"I don’t know how Greek a ‘good fight’ is, but that is indeed how they see their work—and so do we. As for prophets, I don’t really believe in divine spokesmen, so let that sobriquet pass. ... "

What has belief got to do with what one is? If you look like Marilyn Monroe, you fo, and if you're a Prophet, you are, believe it or jump off Mont Blanc, it doesn't change. Does it?

" ... I don’t even look that far, I just want those errors out of the way. Perhaps Bhangi (sweeper) would be a good caste for me."

" ... ‘Being placed on a high pedestal is central to both strategies. Criticism also evokes a similar reaction on both sides—they quickly declare themselves misunderstood heroes and martyrs, and stir up their legion of followers. Doniger and Pollock have inspired an army of activist-academicians who sign petitions to keep “dangerous” Indian leaders and intellectuals out of American universities and even American soil’: Subramanian Swamy, Narendra Modi, and in similar controversies, Rajiv Malhotra, the Dharma Civilization Foundation and others. Indeed, the Indological community’s touching (occasional) concern for freedom of speech is not erga omnes. And at that point, any similarity with Frawley ends."

August company!

"It seems we are dealing with an attitude that seeks to come out on top during an argument by picking up the quarrel in the middle and pretending that both sides are equal. A very profitable posture, for it also allows for laziness, since you don’t even have to study the contents of what the two sides are saying or doing.

"Now that our mythographer has gone off track, he extemporizes all at once about ‘white knights’ with a ‘Hindutva obsession’, opposing ‘multiple truths’ and waging a ‘crusade against Muslims’, out to ‘dehumanize’ the opposition. Here I confess I simply can’t keep up with his cannonade. I think he is referring to himself when he speaks of ‘rejecting the model of conversation’."

One must say it's unclear why Pattanaik wrote this. Blackmailed?

................................................................................................

"WRONG"

"Yet, I have hardly any quarrel with Pattanaik’s conclusion: ‘If we have to truly be decolonized, and truly Swadeshi, be it the M.K. Gandhi or the RSS variety, we have to overcome our inferiority complexes, and without succumbing to chauvinism, realize that we Indians, with all our shortcomings, do not really need Europeans and Americans to tell us what Hinduism, Sanskrit or the Vedas were, are or should be.’"

Being a Hindu with unlimited treasure culturally behind one, why does Pattanaik have inferiority complex instead of an arrogant assurance on par with a mathematician who comprehends most lectures in any conference on the subject? What shortcomings? Poverty was due to being looted and defeat was due to shortcomings civilised face vis-à-vis barbarians, like humans mauled by Rottweilers backed by nazi guards.

"Well, if you put the issue in those terms, I am all for overcoming inferiority feelings and dependence on others. That is why Indians don’t need Doniger’s eroticized or Pollock’s politicized reading of the Ramayana, and why the interiorization of their approach in the late A.K. Ramanujan’s or in Pattanaik’s own work was a bad idea. Only, I don’t think that that is because these august scholars are ‘white’ or ‘Western’, or even ‘Indologists’, but merely because they are wrong."

And that gies other way too. Whether Pythagoras was blond is irrelevant.

" ... But still, it is a good, clean feeling not to have to live amid untruths, whether lies (oh, how I loathe that term) or, more often, mistakes. Myths are another matter."

Elst might go take a look at Ramsetu, at least on YouTube.

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February 16, 2022 - February 16, 2022.

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22. Symbolism of India’s Anthem

................................................................................................

"NATIONAL SYMBOLS"

"Like with the green colour in more recent political flags, Hindus need not stick to the communal interpretation of the Muslims and Nehruvians: Long before Islam existed, green was already around and had a natural meaning: opulence, prosperity, as well as nature. Likewise, orange forever remains the colour of fire, of tapas (‘heat’, asceticism), of spirituality.

"The middle strip is white, a colour that plays a role in both (actually, in all) religions and suggests purity. Mahatma Gandhi tried to adorn it with his pet spinning wheel, but the Nehruvian alternative won through: ‘Ashoka’s wheel’, in blue. Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘India’s last viceroy’, was a champion of both the Moghul and the British colonial cultures and quite ignorant of the native culture, so he did not know that the twenty-four-spoked wheel long predated Ashoka. It was the symbol of the Chakravarti, or the ‘wheel turner’, the axis in the wheel of the samrajya, ‘unified rule’, ‘empire’, a principle already sung in the epics.

"Making India into a Chakravarti-kshetra was an old ideal, and Ashoka admittedly came close to realizing it: He was almost a ‘pan-Indian’ ruler. However, he did not originate this notion. The spoked wheel embodies the relation between a single centre and numerous (‘twenty-four’) secondary centres on the periphery, i.e., the central authority spreading its umbrella over the several states with their swadharma (ca. ‘own mores’) and swatantra (‘autonomy’). As such, it is a fine symbol of India’s federalism, for ‘unity in diversity’.

"But then, if the belief in Ashoka’s identification with this wheel creates enthusiasm among Buddhists worldwide for the Indian republic, so much the better. And on the currency notes, it is really Ashoka’s own contribution that we find (together with the face of the poverty-preaching M.K. Gandhi): the lion capital, a shape dug up in Sarnath in 1905."

The photograph might be of the dug-up stone lion from Sarnath, and it might be Ashoka’s, but lion does belong to India and in fact a distinct species very different from African, and the conceptual use of lion, as symbol of power, is inherent in the word fir throne being Simhaasana in Sanskrit and in India’s indigenous languages, as it is in the Goddess Durgaa using lion as a vehicle, Durgaa being Divine Victory.

"India’s anthem is a song written by Rabindranath Tagore in 1911, Jana Gana Mana. It opens by addressing the Jana Gana Mana Adhinayak or ‘the commander of the people’s minds’, the Bharata Bhagya Vidhata or ‘the dispenser of India’s destiny’. Who is this?"

It doesn't matter if people interpret it as written for an occasion and addressed to a British king; he obviously wasn't ultimately the one it's addressed to!

................................................................................................

"GOD SAVE THE QUEEN"

"Britain’s anthem is the oldest in the world. The writer is unknown, but the attribution to John Bull ca. 1618 is common. It is addressed to God, but otherwise, it is all about the monarch ... "

"The same tune once provided the anthem to several countries, including even imperial Russia (1816–1833). When devising national symbols, new nation-states just assumed that the tune of the venerable British Empire’s anthem naturally and intrinsically was the melody of a national song. Prussia adopted it in 1795, and after its chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, unified the German states (minus Austria and Switzerland) and presided over the founding of the German empire in 1871, the new state adopted as anthem the Prussian national song. Because of its British and Prussian associations, some southern German states did not accept the song."

Weren't most royals of Europe related intimately and several times over, even before Queen Victoria and Christian of Denmark?

................................................................................................

"WILHELMUS"

"While God Save the Queen played a pioneering role in spreading the notion that a state needs an anthem, it was nevertheless not the oldest song to become an anthem. That honour goes to the Wilhelmus, with lyrics written ca. 1572, probably by Filips van Marnix van Sint-Aldegonde, mayor of Antwerp, in honour of his friend Willem van Oranje-Nassau (William of Orange-Nassau), the founder of the Netherlands. When the song was written, there was no notion of a national anthem yet, so it was only officially adopted as such in 1932. The tune had only just been composed, in 1568, and had served to animate the Protestant defenders of Chartres in France against their Catholic besiegers. Ideally, after declaring independence from Spain, the Netherlands should have encompassed Belgium (including Antwerp), Luxemburg and a slice of present-day France, but those territories were reconquered by Spain."

Most interesting history.

" ... he came from a town now in Germany, but that is not the reason for this choice of words. At that time, the areas speaking German and Dutch were then one dialect continuum, called Duytsch or Dietsch, literally ‘folkish, popular’, as opposed to aristocratic French and priestly Latin. To the extent that Dutch/Dietsch already counted as a separate language, it was called Nederduytsch, ‘Low German’.)"

" ... It illustrates how Christianity shaded over into nationalism, by likening the worship of ‘false gods’ to the submission to foreign rulers."

" ... In 1814, at the fag end of the Napoleonic occupation, Max von Schenckendorf wrote a poem expressing German patriotism: Wenn alle untreu werden, so bleiben wir doch treu, or ‘When all become disloyal, even then we remain loyal.’ It ends in a pledge to the German Reich, which had long led a ghost existence until it was abolished by Napoleon in 1806 and was only surviving as an ideal.

"The poem was soon put to music using the Wilhelmus tune and became known as the Treuelied, or ‘the loyalty song’. More than a century later, it was adopted by the Nazi elite corps SS. ... "

................................................................................................

"‘KAISERHYMNE’/’DEUTSCHLANDLIED’"

"For his birthday in 1797, the Austrian emperor Franz was treated to a new song, with lyrics by leading poet Lorenz Leopold Haschka and music by the famous composer Joseph Haydn. ... "

"Here, too, the defeat of 1918 rendered the song without object, so the lyrics were replaced, but the tune, after a decade of disuse, was revived in 1929. The lyrics had now become thoroughly republican, focused on the nation instead of the head of state, but with God still lurking in the background: Sei gesegnet ohne Ende, or ‘be blessed without end’. It lapsed in 1938, when Austria was annexed by Germany.

"At the end of 1918, Germany became a republic. A new anthem did not have to be devised. The lyrics had been available in a nationalist poem from 1841 by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, since then sung to the tune of the well-known Austrian Emperor’s Hymn. It was the time of German unification, and the song called on all Germans to put their loyalties to their own local states between brackets and focus on the then-fragmented Germany as a whole. Hence the song’s title: Das Lied der Deutschen, ‘The Song of the Germans’, or Deutschlandlied, ‘Germany’s Song’. Foreigners usually know it through its opening line, Deutschland über Alles, ‘Germany above all’. This sentence had nothing to do with condescension towards non-Germans, only with a hierarchy between Germany as a whole and its parts: Germany above Bavaria, Germany above the Rhineland, etc."

"The song remained the national anthem when the National Socialists under Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, including when they occupied much of Europe in 1939–1945. The latter circumstance gave the song a highly negative connotation. Outsiders reinterpreted the opening line as meaning, ‘Germany above every other nation in the world.’ When Dutch children saw the British bombers fly over their country to drop their load over German cities, they inverted the sentence: Alles, Alles über Deutschland, or ‘(Drop) everything, everything, on Germany’."

"The second stanza is innocent but not deemed dignified enough to serve as an anthem, and the first is frowned upon as seeking the restoration of Germany’s pre-1945 borders. With the loss of East Prussia, the Memel River is now hundreds of miles from the German borders, and with the definitive independence of Austria, Germany has lost all pretence of bordering Italy. Now, the listing of these borders has acquired a decisively imperialistic connotation, which originally it did not have."

................................................................................................

"‘LA MARSEILLAISE’ AND ‘LA BRABANÇONNE’"

"La (Chanson) Marseillaise, ‘(The Song) of Marseille’, was written in Strasbourg but was named after volunteers from Marseille who had intoned it while entering Paris. It served as a model for the Belgian national anthem, La Brabançonne, ‘(The Song) of Brabant’. ... "

"‘THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER’

"The anthem of the USA was written in 1814, to the tune of an existing popular song from Britain, by the lawyer Francis Scott Key. He had witnessed an event in the British-American War of 1812 from a rare vantage point: as a prisoner held on a British ship participating in a British naval siege of Baltimore. He had been impressed with the American flag on the tower of a coastal fort, and saw how, after a night of fighting, it was still there in the morning. That, then, is the focus of the song: not God, not the ruler, only tangentially the nation (though in iconic terms, in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’), but the national flag and the bravery of the American soldiers who defended it. It served as the semi-official anthem for a century, until, in 1931, a law was enacted officially declaring it the anthem."

................................................................................................

"JANA GANA MANA"

"The song was written in 1911 by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in high Bengali bordering on Sanskrit. (Among his other poems, one more was destined to make it to the status of national anthem: Amar Sonar Bangla, ‘My Golden Bengal’, written in 1905. It was adopted as the anthem by Bangladesh in 1971. He also wrote the music for Sri Lanka’s anthem.) In a multilingual country, it has the virtue of being understandable to every citizen with even just a smattering of education. It was first performed at a conference of the Indian National Congress, which at that time was working for the interests of the subcontinent, though not for a separate independent state yet.

"The song’s first performance with the status of national anthem was by Subhas Chandra Bose’s troops in Germany. Before his well-known leadership of the Indian National Army under Japanese tutelage in 1943–45, he had commanded a smaller army, recruited from among the Indian soldiers in the British army units taken prisoner at Dunkirk, as part of the Nazi-German war effort in 1941–42. It was on 11 September 1942, in an imposing celebration inaugurating the Deutsch-Indische Gesellschaft (German-Indian Association) in Hamburg, that men for the first time stood to attention for Jana Gana Mana as India’s anthem. That Bose had already elevated the song to anthem status would later predispose India’s Constituent Assembly into confirming this status."

" ... in 1911. At that time, the British king George V was India’s ruler. Moreover, he was about to pay a visit to India only weeks after the song was first performed—at a Congress meeting, where a proper reception for the king was central on the agenda.

"By connecting these dots, the British press at the time, and many of its Indian readers, believed that Tagore had composed the song in honour of the king. The claim proved particularly tenacious and is occasionally heard even today. Among RSS activists, the rumour also served as a conspiracy underpinning the suspicion that India had never really become independent. Yet, the poet was to deny it, later in life even vehemently. But the first years, this correction did not reach the public."

"The mistaken belief that Tagore had wanted to praise the British king and thus further legitimize his rule over India had its bright side. It crucially helped in convincing the Nobel committee to award its 1913 prize for literature for the first time to a non-Westerner. Gitañjali, Tagore’s award-winning collection, is no doubt fine poetry, but to win the Nobel Prize, its author had better satisfy a preliminary condition. Tagore was deemed a loyalist of the colonial dispensation, and therefore a convert to civilization uplifting his own more backward countrymen. He was a link in the chain of ‘civilizing the savages’, as Europeans in those days conceived of it. From a distance, he counted as what the Belgians in the Congo used to call an évolué, an ‘evolved’ native who had made the effort to assimilate reasonably well to the level of the colonizers. Now that was the kind of merit to be rewarded."

"If questioned, the Swedes on the committee would probably not have opposed or condemned India’s nationalist movement. But at the same time, Europe in those days was abuzz with stories of murderous rebels and brave colonials who went there to tame them (cfr. India’s ‘criminal tribes’ or Thugs). So, to actually give open support to a rebellious colonial underling would have been too much even for the well-meaning Swedish bourgeoisie. In these circumstances, the mistaken impression that Tagore had put his literary services at the feet of the British monarch came in handy."

................................................................................................

"THEN WHO IS THE ‘BHARATA BHAGYA VIDHATA’?"

"In a letter dated 10 November 1937, Tagore explained the true story: ‘A certain high official in His Majesty’s service, who was also my friend, had requested that I write a song of felicitation towards the Emperor. The request simply amazed me. It caused a great stir in my heart. In response to that great mental turmoil, I pronounced the victory in Jana Gana Mana of that Bhagya Bidhata (Bengali pronunciation; “dispenser of destiny”) of India who has from age after age held steadfast the reins of India’s chariot through rise and fall, through the straight path and the curved. That Lord of Destiny, that Reader of the Collective Mind of India, that Perennial Guide, could never be George V, George VI, or any other George. Even my official friend understood this about the song. After all, even if his admiration for the crown was excessive, he was not lacking in simple common sense.’

"Here Tagore already lets on the real identity of this dispenser of India’s destiny. As a scion of the Brahmo Samaj, a sect espousing an abstract Hinduism based upon Upanishadic philosophy and frowning upon the variety of colourful god-figures from devotional Hinduism, he avoids mentioning by name any deity. Yet, he leaves no one in doubt that he means the Eternal Charioteer leading the pilgrims on their journey through countless ages of the timeless history of mankind. This clearly refers to Krishna of the Bhagavad Gita, who is there as Arjuna’s charioteer. Later, he was elevated to the status of the incarnation of Vishnu, deemed to take birth ‘in age upon age’, whenever dharma has weakened and needs to be strengthened.

'Usually, only the first stanza is publicly sung. But if you read on or sing on to the third stanza, it all becomes clear enough. The iconography of Vishnu and Krishna (chariot, conch, the expression yuge yuge, ‘age upon age’) is exuberantly sung there, and the singers describe themselves as yatri, ‘travellers’ or, in effect, ‘pilgrims’. King George, prime minister Nehru or any other worldly ruler is absent—the entire focus is on Krishna, the guide and charioteer. He is said to ‘deliver from sorrow and pain’, which would be too much honour for a mere state leader; and to be ‘the people’s guide on the path’. There is nothing humdrum or pitiably ‘secular’ about this anthem. Hail the Bharata Bhagya Vidhata!

"As the leading Tamil journalist Aravindan Neelakandan pointed out to us, it doesn’t even end there. In the fourth stanza the dispenser of India’s destiny is identified as a ‘loving Mother’, who, ‘through nightmares and fears, protected us in Your lap’. This adds to the Hindu vision of the divine. God may manifest as a reliable charioteer, as a loving mother, as Sri Krishna or as Durga Ma, and if the song had been longer, no doubt in other forms as well.

"And indeed, why stop there? The fifth and last stanza throws up one more appearance of the Divine Guide. Here, He is identified as Rajeshwara, the ‘Royal Lord’ or the ‘Kingly Shiva’, who is the primal teacher or Adi Guru. India would not be India without Him."

................................................................................................

"IS IT SECULAR"

"India only calls itself secular since 1975, when Indira Gandhi’s Emergency dictatorship inserted the words ‘secular, socialist’ into the Constitutional description of India as a ‘democratic, federal republic’. That makes these two words the only ones in the Constitution that never went through a proper parliamentary debate; the least democratic part of it. In the days of the Constituent Assembly, by contrast, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee, explicitly refused to include ‘secular’. When, twenty-eight years later, the term did get inserted, it had acquired the meaning ‘anti-Hindu’, yet most Hindus accept the term because they naïvely assume it still has the meaning ‘secular’.

"Consider another unsung stanza, the second. To a superficial reader, this might give the impression of espousing religiously neutrality:

"‘We heed Your gracious call.

"The Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, "Muslims, and Christians,

"The East and the West come together,

"To the side of Your throne,

"And weave the garland of love.

"Oh! You who bring in the unity of the people!’

"Indian Muslims and Christians still have a lot of un-Islamic or un-Christian feelings in them, inherited from their Hindu ancestors, adopted from their Hindu environment, or simply stemming from universal human nature. Thus, they generally have a strong attachment to their motherland, overruling their tutored orientation to Mecca, Jerusalem or Rome. In that sense, their attachment to India does bring them together with their Hindu compatriots. Most Hindus are not too serious about doctrines, they overlook the specific points which set Islam and Christianity against all other religions, and hence tend to welcome all sects into the Indian fold.

"But this stance is not reciprocated. The attitude that takes all sects to be one happy family is emphatically not Muslim and not Christian, for these sects vow only hellfire upon all the others. The spirit of this second stanza is not also-a-bit-Muslim, nor also-a-bit-Christian, it is not a bit of everything; while (or even because of) welcoming every one regardless of beliefs, it is thoroughly Hindu.

"Does that mean every true Indian should believe in a being up there who watches over India’s destiny? Hinduism is pluralistic and has room for different interpretations. Several orthodox as well as heterodox schools of Hindu thought are non-theistic and treat the gods as mere projections of ideas in the human mind, existing only because we feed them our mental energy. Fine, treat the Dispenser as a mental projection—but do feed Him or Her your mental energy."

................................................................................................

"TERRITORIAL DEBATE"

"Secularists and Pakistanis, not too surprised to find themselves in the same bed once more, object to the inclusion of Sindh among India’s provinces. Of course, the song was written when Sindh was fully included in British India, no less than Utkala (Odisha) or Banga (Bengal). It had not been partitioned off yet, not even from the Bombay Presidency, let alone from India when Pakistan was formed. Come to think of it, West Panjab and East Bengal also failed to be taken out.

"Well, the fathers of Pakistan had better adapt their plans to the geographical enumeration of regions in this song. They should not have tried to sever these provinces from India. Now they are stuck with a state of which most of the territory properly belongs to another state, another civilization, of which the remnants are still found in their soil, from Mohenjo-Daro on down. For it is entirely apt that Sindh, West Panjab and East Bengal still find mention in India’s anthem. Just like Gilgit and Baltistan are rightly called ‘Pak-Occupied Kashmir’, Pakistan and Bangladesh are nothing but ‘Islam-occupied India’. When a Pakistani leader lamented to Murli Manohar Joshi that ‘Pakistan is not complete without Kashmir’, Joshi finished his sentence: ‘… and India is not complete without Pakistan.’

"When Germany put the first stanza of its anthem on the back-burner, it was because it wanted to prove it laid no claim on the territories between the post-1945 borders and the Memel River (which would mean most of Poland and Lithuania). Those territories were not, even if there exists such a thing, ‘intrinsically’ German. They had been conquered and forcibly Christianized in the Teutonic Order’s crusade centuries after the German state (in full: the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’) had come into existence. That they were lost again could be a pity, but not a strike at Germany’s heart. By contrast, Sindh, the province around the lower Indus River, happens to be the root of the name ‘India’ itself, derivative from the Greek river-name Indos, from the Persian form ‘Hindu’ of Sanskrit ‘Sindhu’, i.e., the Indus river. It contains Mohenjo-Daro, with the Priest King, the Dancing Girl and Shiva Pashupati, famous icons not of ‘5,000 years of Pakistan’ but of Hindu civilization. Of course, Sindh deserves to return to India. One day, when Pakistan has lost its reason for existing, it will."

................................................................................................

"ALSO RAN"

"When the freedom movement and later the Constituent Assembly deliberated upon the choice of an anthem, there were three serious candidates. Sâre Jahân se Acchâ Hindustân Hamâra, ‘Of the whole world, the best is our Hindustan’, was an Urdu song by Mohammed Iqbal, composed in 1904. Having studied in Germany, he may well have been inspired by Deutschland über Alles, but with the wrong, though now common, idea that this means ‘Germany is superior to the rest’. At any rate, his opening line said in so many words that India is superior to the rest.

"Whatever the merits of the lyrics and the melody, any choice of an Iqbal song came to leave a bad taste in the mouth when, a few years before his death in 1938, he became the spiritual father of the fledgling Pakistan movement. That best-in-the-world country India was suddenly not good enough any more; he wanted the Islamic-dominated territories to separate from it.* Nonetheless, it has never ceased to enjoy a certain recognition within the Indian Army."

"Another option was Vande Mâtaram, ‘I salute thee, Mother’, meaning Mother India. ... "

" ... Muslim law scholar explains the reason: ‘There are some objectionable words in Vande Mataram.’

"This throws a different light on Jana Gana Mana. The anthem’s ‘Dispenser of India’s Destiny’ unambiguously signifies the Beloved Guide Krishna, the Combative Mother Durga, the Eternal Guru Shiva. According to certain prophets, these are all ‘false gods’, if not impersonations of Satan. If Vande Mâtaram is ‘communal’, so is Jana Gana Mana. And that is what is good about it.

"While the song is large enough to encompass all of India throughout its history, united or divided, Aryan or Dravidian, tribal or urban, monarchical or republican, without distinction, it still does take an ideological stand. It is not nihilistic, no liberal-anything-goes here, no Islamic monolithic caliphate, nothing that negates or oppresses the native civilization. Instead, this song welcomes a dharmic umbrella for all the varieties of India’s children."

................................................................................................

"MOTHER INDIA"

"Recently, the secularists have looked hard and deep for more objections to Vande Mâtaram. And yes, they found something. In a later stanza, not usually sung, it is asked (in a translation by Sri Aurobindo):

"‘Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands,

"When the swords flash out in seventy million hands

"And seventy million voices roar

"Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?’

"When the novel was written, the results of the first census were well-known. ‘Seventy million’ was not the population of India, which then must have been approaching 300 million. Instead, it was very nearly the population of Bengal, and suggests that the book did not envisage a rebellion by all Indians, but one by all the inhabitants of Bengal. This could be used by the secularists and all their Breaking India allies as proof that even the nationalist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee did not think of India as a political unit: He was more of a Bengali nationalist. Indeed, their revered British role models would have been right in asserting that they themselves had ‘created’ India, which, until then, had been (in Winston Churchill’s words) ‘no more a political unit than the equator’.

"Conversely, the poem has to be read in the context of the novel, and there we find the freedom fighters worshipping Bhârat Mata, ‘Mother India’. The poem itself, as quoted above, defines the Motherland geographically as ‘from shore to shore’, clearly India rather than Bengal. They saw no contradiction between love of Mother India and love of Golden Mother Bengal. So, this secularist discovery is little more than a storm in a teacup."

................................................................................................

"CONCLUSION"

" ... Apparently, most voting members were unaware of the God-talk in Jana Gana Mana’s third, fourth and fifth stanzas. Alternatively, they may have considered it as not really part of the national anthem anyway, which officially it wasn’t. Or they may not have cared for secularism. At any rate, when including these stanzas, the song is emphatically God-oriented and Hindu."

" ... It is emphatically nation-and-God-oriented, God in this case probably being identifiable as Krishna, or more abstractly, the idea of the divine involving itself in this world whenever dharma requires it."

Elst forgets the other stanzas, one speaking of Mother, another interpreted by him as for Shiva.

"The song does not commit itself to a specific political system, such as monarchy, by glorifying the ruler. It merely expresses love for the nation through all its variegated landscapes and experiences—which goes hand in hand with, and follows naturally from, a veneration of the Divine Guru. According to Tagore, and according to all Indian citizens who intone or honour his anthem, India is not complete without a heaven-oriented, sacred dimension."

"*This piece has been adapted from the article published on Voice of India, 7 April 2017."

................................................................................................

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February 16, 2022 - February 16, 2022.

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................................................................................................

23. Down with ‘Nationalism’

................................................................................................

"For once, the secularists have it right. The nationalism by which the Hindutva crowd swears is a Western invention. Feelings for your home country are universal, and natives of India will need no prodding, nor any foreign or native ideology to defend their country when necessary. Nationalism is just there, as a gut feeling, not in need of any promotion or defence. But as an ideology, it is the creation of the modern West, hardened in the fires of the First World War. Of the secularists, we already knew that they always ape the West (or what they assume to be Western), but for champions of native civilization, it is worth noticing."

Elst is wrong, and those for nationalusm aren't aping West, even Italy, any more than Greece or Rome was aping India in their attire, however badly. The need has been for India to unite, especially since separatists managed to partition the nation on the eve of independence, and if nationalism is the only suitable term in English, it doesn’t amount to an import or copy.

Alternative is further pieces broken and forced away by the dominant minority religions or creeds in name of their beliefs, a process they can carry on ad infinitum as long as India allows it in name of secularism, as separatists were trying in one state after another since independence.

Pakistan has already vowed on public television to reduce India to size of Sri Lanka, and take over the rest. Bangladesh Islamic institutions by any name have not only an agenda but a published one, of flooding Northeast India with its migrants - not Hindu refugees fleeing Islamic terror and atrocities, but muslims deliberately infiltrating, with intention of ultimately breaking Northeast India away in name of Islam. Church in Northeast follows the same agenda by conversion and by deliberate alienation of the converted from ambient society, with publications including sentences like "Manipur exported to India last year ...".

................................................................................................

"NATIONALISM IN A CHANGING WORLD"

" ... Just at that time, after the First World War, nationalism was at its peak. When theorizing the national struggle, Hindu activists had little choice but to take inspiration from European thinkers like Giuseppe Mazzini, mastermind of Italian reunification and translated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar."

Just because some of the independence warriors were aware of the world doesn't imply that either patriotism or nationalism were imported; there were plenty of inspiring examples from Indian history near and far in past, from Queen of Jhaansie to Prithviraj Chauhaan, and further past, Puru who fought Alexander.

"However, they could have looked to Hindu history to see that one of the central concerns of all nationalists was completely lacking there: homogenization. India was the champion of diversity. States were rarely linguistically homogenous and rulers didn’t care to make them so. ... "

Linguistic homogeneity wasn't a factor in Europe either until US opted for it; and for that matter, Russia still is composed of a multilingual population, while UK imposed English, with punishment for children who lapsed to Welsh at school.

" ... Loyalty was less to one’s state (which could easily change) but to a more lasting and more intimate identity: one’s caste. As B.R. Ambedkar’s grandson, Prakash Ambedkar, said: ‘Every caste a nation.’ ... "

This equation, at the end above, is the nonsense propagated against India and Hinduism. Nonsense because, before ease of transport with modern roads, with every craftsman necessary to village economy and functioning, existing of necessity in every village, villages were mostly independent and well knit, with not just one caste in a village but necessarily many. They might marry within caste (but never within village, even within caste), and eat separately, but that did not stop natural human, economic or friendly relationships, especially between children, women, even older males.

" ... In traditional India, one’s community, in many cases meaning one’s caste, served as one’s social security."

So did village, in most needs other than those of marriage.

"In Savarkar’s student days in London, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires still flourished and were characterized by a state religion (Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism), just as Hindutva stalwarts had in mind for India, whereas ethnic nationalism favoured secularism—for example, German unification deliberately downplayed the Catholic/Lutheran dichotomy. Another example of how nationalism and religiosity are naturally antagonistic was provided by Turkey: While Atatürk abolished the Ottoman Empire’s religious bias, his secular-nationalist republic created the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. The old empires had a dominant language (Russian or German), but along with a certain unequal tolerance to minority religions, they also left room for minority languages and made no attempt to impose a single language. This could be contrasted with the then purest example of nationalism, the French Third Republic (1871–1940), where the minority languages, still spoken by half the French population in the nineteenth century, were being destroyed and the state ‘religion’ of secularism aggressively promoted."

France isn't secular, except more so than, say, most Islamic republics. Choice of a holiday isn't secular, for example - no Jews can opt for a Saturday and work instead on Sunday, not even shopkeepers - nor can a Hindu have state sanctioned holiday for any of the Hindu festivals, even instead of those on church calendar.

For that matter, the filthy manner in which a Hindu married woman is treated at CDG airport in Paris is positively malicious, unhygienic and overall disgusting, apart from being uncalled for - a mark on forehead that signifies marriage, a living husband, an awareness of Divine within human, goodwill of one married woman towards another, and a myriad other things (including having had a bath before setting out), isn't a danger to security of anyone, unlike a garment that hides identity and can hide a deadly weapon, as evidenced in recent years by a burqa clad women in Canada robbing a department store.

No, French secularism merely translates to no imposition of church attendance on citizens. It might be better than that of U.S., but there it stops.

"True, with the First World War, the aforementioned empires disappeared, but another example even closer at hand survived: the United Kingdom. Few people realize how the specific status of each part of the UK differed: the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, Wales, etc., all had and still have a different relation with the British Crown. The Welsh and Gaelic languages were not supported by the state, but there was no active campaign to weed them out either. ... "

Incorrect, the last bit. It wasn't a campaign as much as outright suppression until recent decades.

" ... In spite of a rising level of tolerance, there was a state religion and all traditional customs and institutions were upheld. ... "

Not according to the poorer Indian students denied bath by their landladies, with the students trying to sneak one occasionally and the landlady enforcing the taboo by keeping watch!

" ... All while struggling for their sovereignty, perhaps Hindus could have learnt something from their colonizers? ... "

Anyone who thinks British didn't impose, or Hindus didn't or don't learn, has to be delusional.

" ... (For starters, they could have realized that Britain was centred on Brigid, the fire-clad goddess whose name is related to Bhrgu, the Vedic Ur-seer who introduced the fire sacrifice.)"

Most interesting!

Were Druids, after all, Dravid who migrated to Britain? Dravida has a meaning in Sanskrit that amounts to peninsular. Perhaps they, too navigated the passage, as Pacific islanders did across the ocean.

"Back to reality. The Hindutva pioneers opted for the then-prestigious model of the nation-state and tried to cram Hindu political aspirations into it. Rightly or wrongly, this is what happened, ... "

No, it's the other way. Giving it a name of a word familiar in English no more amounts to copying a European model and "cram Hindu political aspirations into it", than an Indian woman wearing a saree in modern way amounts to stealing a blouse of a European woman, or non-existence of the very concept thereof in India prior to arrival if British.

................................................................................................

"‘NATIONALISM IS HINDUISM’"

"In one sense, the word ‘nationalism’ is defensible from a Hindu viewpoint. For the overseeable past, Hinduism has been native to India, whereas Christianity and Islam are irrevocably of foreign origin, with their founding histories and sacred places located outside India. Other factors remaining the same, Hindus will always identify with India in a way that Christians and Muslims cannot."

"Golwalkar’s rhetoric was notoriously clumsy, but the point to retain is that he made a distinction between Hindus, howsoever broadly defined, and non-Hindus. Whether or not that distinction should have any juridical consequences, the fact is that Hindus and non-Hindus were deemed different in respect of nationhood. That was a non-secular vision. In a secular state, religion wouldn’t matter, but Golwalkar opted for a state in which religion would determine citizenship.*

"A comparison with Israel comes to mind, where any Jew worldwide can claim citizenship. Some non-Jews are citizens because they already lived there before the creation of the Zionist state or because they are spouses of Jewish immigrants, but, as a class, they cannot claim citizenship. And indeed, both Savarkar and Golwalkar did invoke Zionism as an inspiring example."

"To sum up, nationalism can be loaded differently from the religiously neutral meaning given to it by the Nehruvians. ... "

Since they were Leftist, and later increasingly so, the sentence above is limited by definition of religion as worship of an invisible object that's unproven by material science; change it to creed, and it's no longer valid.

Leftists are just as dangerously inclined to obey diktats from outside India as members of religious groups with institutions abroad claiming loyalty; or for that matter, not only leftists, but also those whose whole being is geared to next prize from West, to be bought by selling anything that is demanded, whether it's abusing Hinduism or denying the very nationhood of India.

" ... Now they claim that ‘anyone who lives in India is a Hindu’. I see no further need to point out once more how mendacious this view is; let us merely settle for the observation that it is impolite: No account is taken of the general Muslim’s or Christian’s rejection of his own unasked-for inclusion in the ‘Hindu’ category. And if half-baked politicians insist that their mendaciousness is necessitated by political expediency, let us then maintain standards and remind them that at least they should distinguish the lies their mouths speak from the views their brains actually believe in: If you think you really must tell a lie, at least stop believing your own lies (which are meant to fool the enemy, not yourself) and remain aware that ‘Hindu’ is not the same as ‘Indian’."

While the two - seemingly different, but stemming from the same root - words have come, only lately, to mean different things, it's only due to Islam and Christianity being imposed on India and converted people being taught to disassociate themselves, with an ulterior aim of wiping out Hinduism and identity of India along with her culture, knowledge and everything else. That begins with denial of its existence, to begin with.

But the two words were, until British came to India, same, only in different languages and regions, springing from Sindhu river's name changing to Hindu in West Asia and thence Indus in Europe, while the land and it's people were named after it in each part similarly, in each region outside, after the river. Hindu in west Asia was Indian in Europe, Hind in West Asia was India in Europe.

Hindus referred to Hindus as Aarya until other religions came in, with the epithet Hindu from Islamic invaders kater copied by British to separate muslims. And Dravida simply meant peninsular as a geographical pinpointing, used for example by Shankaraachaarya, for describing himself; it wasn't a racial difference, and his caste wasn't questioned or denied by anyone of another region either.

For Indians, they were Aarya, and the land was Aaryaavarta or Bhaarata, and India was a foreign word as was Hindu, used by outsiders to refer to India and Indians, Germany until quite late referred to muslims of India as Hindu Muslims.

So yes, the two words are the same, just change of language.

And since the dominant minorities are taught to adhere to their religions and institutions thereof for loyalty, while they are being used to break up India as a nation, this further cements the identification of hindu with India, over and above that of past, when the two dominant minorities didn't exist, whether in India or in world.

India had no quarrel with the smaller minorities - Jews, Parsis, even Sikhs, or others - but they did, instead, with the dominant ones, most of them outside India, everywhere, wherever there was a contact.

"As the author of a book called Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, I take objection to the recent organization of a Hindu nationalist forum called ‘Decolonizing the Indian Mind’. There is a lot to be decolonized about Hindu society as such, which is still exploited and belittled, though now mostly by Indians, but nothing at all to be decolonized about ‘India’. ... "

Who's kidding who, with all sorts of little or big institutions and states out there, from BBC to Pakistan to US, church, and China, attempting to use a minority in India to impact negatively on population of India, create a disturbance and talking of breaking India to pieces! Those that are willing to be influenced thus, or to sell their words or actions, however temporarily or otherwise, whether for money or for ultimate prize of 72 promised "hoors", are certainly of a colonised mindset.

" ... The country became independent in 1947. Any lingering British influence in India, including the official use of the English language, has been a free and conscious choice by Indian politicians. ... "

So the butcher isn't responsible if the half cut lamb can't run faster?

" ... Similarly, the present Americanization has not been imposed by any outside forces, in spite of their eager desire, but has been allowed in and welcomed by Indian politicians, most of all by the BJP."

BJP might welcome friendly relationships, without liking church to wipe out culture of India, surely? Or must India turn into a mirror of church of Rome, and institute an inquisition exactly duplicating that of church? Or copy taliban whiplashing unescorted women, only, apply it instead to men attempting to convert others?

................................................................................................

"PARTITION"

"Lined up against them within the Muslim community were the so-called ‘nationalist Muslims’, meaning that minority among Muslims who rejected Partition because they ultimately wanted to gobble up the whole of India, not just a part of it. Their spokesman was Maulana Azad, veteran leader of the Khilafat movement, who even managed to convince Mahatma Gandhi to prevent Partition by handing all of India over to Jinnah and thus realize Muslim minority rule (but they were overruled by Congress, see my book Why I Killed the Mahatma). They were not impressed with the nationalist idea that the world should be divided into sovereign territorial units belonging to nations. At most these could be administrative units within the really sovereign unit, the caliphate, intended to comprise the whole world. Nor were they impressed with the modern fad of democracy.

"As Pakistan’s spiritual father Mohammed Iqbal said: ‘Democracy is a system in which heads are counted but not weighed.’ He only gave in to the force of numbers because of awe for modernity and the British-created power equation. But the Khilafatists believed that this novelty of democracy was but a paper tiger and that like in the Middle Ages, Muslims should just grab power. Later, Muslim power could always see to it that Muslims become the majority. Since Gandhi and Nehru had always been called nationalists, Muslims who sided with them against Partition in order to keep their option of all-India conquest open were also called nationalists, though what they really hoped for was a reunification of the Muslims in a new caliphate where they would lord it over the unbelievers.

"Do keep in mind that both parties had the same goal: Islamic world conquest. The wrongly called ‘nationalist Muslims’ went straight for it, largely because the modern world was unfamiliar to them, while the separatists made temporary concessions to the new circumstances and first wanted to consolidate Muslim power in Pakistan. Initially they were even willing to settle for Dr BR Ambedkar’s proposal to exchange populations, so that no Muslim would stay behind in remainder-India. They couldn’t believe their luck when, on this score, India’s hands were tied by Gandhi and Nehru, who insisted on blocking this rational and peaceful formula. The Muslim League’s assessment was that while the Paki Hindus had to flee, the Indian Muslims could stay where they were, thus forming a fifth column for the next phase of Islamic expansion."

................................................................................................

"INTEGRAL HUMANISM"

" ... in name, ‘integral humanism’ had a touch of genius. It sounds so innocent and positive, something that nobody can object to. That is why, in spite of being the official ideology of the RSS and the BJP, in which every member is trained, it is never mentioned in textbooks by ‘experts’ on Hindutva. Out of an unscholarly political activism, these ‘experts’ prefer to push more negatively sounding terms, of which ‘Hindu nationalist’ is still the kindest. It is unthinkable to read a textbook on the Labour Party without coming across the word ‘socialism’, yet so noxious is the intellectual climate in both India and India-watching that it is entirely the done thing to write expert introductions on the RSS-BJP without mentioning its actual ideology."

"The concept of a ‘national soul’ could make sense as a purely descriptive attempt at encapsulating the statistical tendency of a ‘nation’ towards a certain mentality. But even as a statistical average, it is susceptible to serious evolution.

"One example. The ancient Romans were known for their organizing power, and this is what allowed them to defeat the fearless but less organized Gauls and Germans. But then Arminius, a German mercenary in the Roman army, learnt these organizing skills, returned to his country, organized a German army and defeated the Romans. It was the first time the Germans got associated with organizing skills, a great tradition of theirs ever since. By contrast, after holding out as great organizers for several more centuries, the Italians became proverbially chaotic, great artists but lousy strategists or politicians. They know all about cuisine and amore, but you wouldn’t entrust any organizational task to them. The ‘national soul’ is an entity subject to change."

" ... What Upadhyaya was really getting at was that Indians have a mentality in common that oozes out from Hinduism. The ‘idea of India’ that secularists like Shashi Tharoor or Ramachandra Guha like to preach about is but a secular nod to the unmentionable term ‘Hinduism’. ... "

................................................................................................

"AYODHYA"

"Author argues that destruction of temples in India had to do with Islam, not foreign sources of destroyers. That's partly true, but only at strictly splitting hair kind of level of argument. Basically conversion in case of India has always amounted to shift of loyalties towards something out of India, as opposed to Hindus who have only this homeland. Besides, Babar in this case certainly was an invader while Raama was indigenous, so it makes sense to argue nationalism. It doesn't apply to indigenous Muslims who destroy temples, because the reason they do so is because it's Islam, a foreign creed opposed to culture of India, that enforces it over majority of nation.

................................................................................................

"BJP SECULARISM"

" ... When Hindu activists defied the BJP leadership to demolish the disputed structure on 6 December 1ECULA992, BJP leader L.K. Advani called it ‘the blackest day in my life’. Yet, in the larger scheme of things, this act greatly expedited a solution to the controversy, thus saving thousands of lives."

" ... The late Pramod Mahajan realized (possibly purely as a matter of electoral calculus) the untenability of the contrast between the BJP programme and the BJP performance: He wanted the BJP to raise certain of these Hindu demands. It they were to be vetoed by the allies, or defeated in the Lok Sabha, they would form excellent stakes in the election debates; and if they were to pass, the BJP could take them as trophies to the campaign. But Vajpayee was adamant about going to the voters with a purely economic programme, and though India’s growth figures were then at its peak, he got soundly defeated."

"The current BJP government is repeating this performance. The Supreme Court judgment against triple talaq (divorce through instant repudiation of a wife) was used as a fig leaf, somehow proving that the BJP was slowly inching towards the abolition of the separate Islamic family law system and towards a common civil code, an old election promise. In reality, the case had been brought by a few Muslim women. That the BJP happened to be in power was merely a coincidence (though its follow-up, viz. to consolidate the verdict by trying to enact it into law, is commendable and contrasts favourably with Rajiv Gandhi’s 1985 move to overrule the progressive Shah Bano verdict on alimony rights with a more sharia-compliant law)."

" ... Like Jawaharlal Nehru, like the erstwhile RSS ideologue Nana Deshmukh (theorist of the Vajpayee line), like all the NGOs meddling in Indian affairs, like every capitalistic or socialistic materialist, the BJP swears exclusively by ‘development’ (vikas). It gladly ropes in the Hindu votes through the Hindu image that the secularists keep giving it, but makes no commitment any more to anything Hindu.

"Not that it will ever receive the much-hoped-for pat on the shoulder from the secularists. ... "

Elst hasn't understood either Hindus or India or, of course, the present government. To begin with there's nothing of materialistic or philosophical about it when PM Modi talks of Vikas for everyone, it comes down instead to poor women having gas with those who can afford letting their subsidies go; it amounts to every village getting electricity and roads, poor getting housing and toilets, and such minimal necessities. India understands him because he's been honest and determined to wipe out corruption. As for the brigade falsely labeling itself secular, they have been reduced to false accusations, screaming abuse, attempting to set India on fire and lying.

................................................................................................

"MISCONSTRUCTION"

"Time and again I get to see how the nationalist paradigm distorts issues. Thus, the missionary challenge is no longer a matter of Western intrusion into India. Most missionaries are now Indian, and even the Evangelical sects teleguided from America will make sure to send a native to any inter-faith meeting or TV debate. Missionaries are not CIA agents plotting against India; they have their own agenda since centuries before the CIA or the colonial enterprise even existed, and their target is not some nation or state, it is all pagan religions—in India, principally Hinduism."

Elst cannot guarantee whether they are CIA or not, but in any case being native to India can only pressure them to prove their loyalty to church harder, and if they are teleguided from US, that is further indication that the institution is under control of not one - church - but a further second, US funded pressure, to convert.

Yes, they certainly are attacking Hinduism. That does not negate attacking India, for ancient living culture of India, treasure of knowledge of ancient India, is all part of Hinduism, and sought to be negated, destroyed, ridiculed, and more, by church. If you seek to drain a live organism of all its blood and organs, stuffing it with material of your taste does not bring it back alive, and same is true of attempted organ theft from a healthy person. The murderous attack against Hinduism is not devoid of ill will against India, nor does church predating US prove anything.

Elst proceeds to tell about a Hindu friend who told Elst about a holy man living in Himaalaya and supposedly very old; Elst relates his, Elst's not bring impressed by this man resulted in this Hindu friend turning unfriendly. Elst concludes that many Hindus are just as sceptical as him and many Westerners are just as ready to believe as a Hindu.

The logic and fact part here has almost nothing to do with any particular person. As for gullibility, what better example than church flock with faith in not only resurrection, which is easier explained, than the virgin mother doctrine, which insusts that the mother's virginity was intact after birth of the child, as evidenced after examination by several women in the neighbourhood! Was there a caesarean, who performed it since there was not even a midwife, and why wasn't it mentioned? If the baby was brought in by a stork flying in instead, that could be more believable.

As to Elst expecting that a man should impress him with knowledge and insight in current affairs because of his power of yoga just because he's lived supposedly long, he might ask himself if the man wanted to impress him, Elst, or was instead happy enough to let him think he was unimpressive. The least he could do in the first case if he indeed had yogic power, was to strike from ten, twenty, thirty feet away, without any physical instrument, across walls. Wiser yogi do not indulge in this sort of display, whatever the temptation, and if angry, seek instead to focus on control.

But an even greater point is why expect an all pervasive knowledge of current affairs or interest therein in one, just because he's an older yogi with supposedly powers. As someone of India, with unquestionably great yogic authority, said about another one, the person can know what Churchill had for breakfast this morning, but there's no reason to do so.

Even in ordinary people, one hardly expects an Einstein to be knowledgeable on Mao or an FDR to recite Koran by heart instantly. Yes, it's possible that a yogi can satisfy or amaze one with a feat of knowledge or wisdom, but instances where opposite occurs are hardly worth mention, any more than complaining that a visit to Notre Dame in Paris didn't result in a miracle that could have convinced one, and giving that as an argument against either the architecture or usage thereof.

"In another discussion, Hindus were arguing that the Partition was the doing not of the poor, hapless Muslims, but of the British, who had it in for the Hindus, so much so that they even committed ‘genocide’ on them. Well, ‘genocide’ implies murderous intention, and Hindus only flatter themselves if they attribute this to the British, who merely wanted to make money and thus instituted economic policies with an enormous collateral damage, but didn’t care one way or the other whether the natives lived or starved. When the Muslim League launched the Partition project, the Brits initially rejected it (though taunting the Congress with it as proof that the Congress did not represent India) and only came around when Muslim violence had made it seem inevitable and the beginning Cold War made them see its benefits. The Partition was a 100 per cent Muslim plan, only assented to by the British at the same time and in the same spirit as the conversion to its acceptance by many Congress politicians, ultimately even Mahatma Gandhi (June 1947) who had sworn ‘Partition only over my dead body’."

One, Muslims were coerced by a British officer into forming the league with agenda of separation, despite their unwillingness, when they were convinced he'd find other Muslims to do it; two, Churchill finalized Partition when Russian tanks rolled into Berlin, having worked constantly on FDR against Stalin in war strategy about opening a second front - British focused on "The Great Game", keeping Russia away from India, even throughout WWII; three, Nehru refused use of military bases to West against Russia, and Jinnah okayed it promptly; four, Ireland had been divided successfully with results disastrous for Ireland and successful for UK, before India; five, it was the ultimate revenge for 1857, as per Macaulay policy, to break India internally as well as formally.

Whether Elst is bring naive and taken in by British denials, turning lack of evidence and absence of proof into proof of absence, or is it a matter of racial fraternity, isn't clear.

No one in India exculpates Jinnah or any of those that pushed it.

But if British weren't intent on breaking India for the reasons mentioned, Pakistan should have been limited to Muslim majority parts of Bengal and Sindh, since neither Punjab which voted unionist, nor NWFP which were furiously, dangerously angry about separation from India, should have been given to Pakistan; it only made sense in context of military bases for The Great Game.

"Moreover, while no Hindu says it openly, it is so obvious to any observer that they only want to play hero against the long-departed Brits because they have interiorized the fear that they might offend the Muslims, with whom they still have to deal. What S.R. Goel called ‘the business of blaming the British’ is a trick of misdirection, popular among stage magicians, which only a buffoon would believe."

If an administration with police and military force watches one gang massacre a section of public, and runs away while leaving the murderous gangs loose, no one exculpates the murderers, who have acted the same way for a thousand years and longer; but the said administration is incompetent or complicit, definitely not innocent.

When they see their actions result in death of several million civilians, and only comment is a two faced statement, blaming the last bit but not the centuries past on the perpetrators, fraud and complicity is evident.

" ... Political delusions are as common among Westerners as among Indians, and appeasement of Islam has become just as big in Europe as in India. ... "

"Falling back on the nationalist paradigm makes Hindus misunderstand issues. It is, of course, far easier to separate people by skin colour than by ideology, very appealing to the lazy, tamasic mind. But it is sure to make you mistake enemies for friends, and friends for enemies. If you think you can afford that on a battlefield, suit yourselves."

It's unclear why Elst is intent on exculpating British administration including Macaulay, but if this had happened to say, Belgium, he perhaps might know better.

One can truthfully say that exculpating France and England about handing over Czechoslovakia to Hitler is rare, cowardly, or stupid, as is blaming Czechoslovakia for not fighting back.

Yes, Hitler threw a dramatic fit, but France and England weren't exactly powerless frightened Southern belies at a ball unable to protest.

And if British couldn't protect civilians of India from massacres of over ten millions after looking for over two centuries, they were incompetent bullies no different from a Changis Khan or an Eichmann, but if they were capable of protecting civilians and didn't, they were no different from those who planned and carried out Holocaust.

................................................................................................

"CONCLUSION"

"A Hindu yoga master whom I know once made the effort of disabusing some European yoga aspirants from their fascination with India: ‘India is not that important, India will disappear one day.’ India is not absolute, not sanâtana, ‘eternal’. India is relatively important as the cradle of yoga, and secondarily as the cradle of many other cultural riches. But what is important is its culture, sanâtana dharma. If a party of Hindu travellers get stuck on an uninhabited island without the means to escape from there, they can still set up their ‘Ram rajya’ in this new territory. Maybe they won’t have coconuts and marigolds there to reproduce their rituals, but to those new circumstances too they can adapt their sanâtana dharma."

That so-called Hindu yoga master may or may not be prophetic, hopefully latter. Earth isn't guaranteed by the Divine, nor is universe, or existence.

But the island he talks of might not survive with attacks from various others, whether states or religions - India had geographical advantages for millennia until murderous creeds rose up.

"Finally, let me state that nationalism, not as a pompous ideology but as an intimate feeling, as what a better word calls patriotism, is just natural. Certain ideologies try to estrange you from it, but Hindu dharma accepts and nurtures it. Every penny spent on RSS propaganda for nationalism is a penny wasted. Every effort to rewrite textbooks in a nationalist sense is an effort misdirected. ... "

One shouldn't spend efforts on clearing up lies abusing and accusing one? Is that philosophy evident in actions of Elst? Au contraire!

"A feeling for your motherland is simply normal and doesn’t need any propaganda. For the Vedic seers, the motherland was only the Saraswati basin in Haryana; King Bharat never heard of the subcontinent named after him, but for today’s Indians, that subcontinent is a lived reality. It is that expanse to which they are attached, and that we should uphold."

Much of that including location of Saraswati is based on modern nomenclature contradicting ancient lores and likely the former is incorrect in pooh-poohing latter.

"In the modern age, when the state is far more important than in the past, the Indian republic is a necessity to defend Hindu civilization. In that sense, it is only right to be an Indian patriot. But that national feeling goes without saying."

As long as the pressure to keep shut about it continues, the India breakers get a say. Ekst was right about West appeasing Muslims. India being sacrificed is the trick they expect to pacify the Rottweiler with, but the beast has now tasted blood after Afghanistan, Russia and US, France and more.

................................................................................................

................................................

February 17, 2022 - February 17, 2022.

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................................................................................................

24. Pishâcha Vivaha and Râkshasa Vivaha:

On the Notion of a ‘Lesser Evil’

................................................................................................

"Râkshasa Vivaha"

"A culture war that has raged in Christian countries before, and is bound to rock Muslim countries in the coming decades, concerns ‘reparation marriage’. Once in a while, a case of such an arrangement makes headlines, followed by arguments pro or, mostly, contra.

"On Twitter, a lady friend protested against a judicial verdict in a case where a Muslim man had raped a Hindu girl, who, as a consequence, gave birth to a child. A judge okayed a ‘solution’, viz. that he marry her. We won’t discuss the particular case, but the very principle of treating rape as less consequential if the victim agrees to marry the perpetrator."

What ancient culture, long before Alexander, formulated, isn't identical with ideals of present times.

................................................................................................

"PATRIARCHAL"

"The lady had counselled us not to ‘communalize’ the issue, as it happens as well in cases where only Muslims or only Hindus are involved. Well, there is, of course, a communal angle, in that the Prophet, as per his biographer Ibn Ishaq, explicitly condoned rape of non-Muslim hostages after caravan raids**, according to Islamic law, non-Muslim women, in certain circumstances, are up for grabs (cfr. the Islamic permission to take infidel women as ‘captives of the right hand’, in Q.4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, 70:30). To be sure, in many earlier societies, this was also the relation between the upper classes and the despised classes, and that is precisely the point Islamic law intends to make: Muslims are the upper class, unbelievers must be subservient to them. However, while this communal angle is really there, it is not our concern here."

Droit de seigneur, regular and used in Europe, not in India Mahâbhârata and much else being evidence to the contrary.

"Lately I notice that many Hindus who really mean to serve the Hindu cause, many of whom are indeed labelled ‘Hindu fanatics’ by their secularist colleagues, have taken to using this concept. Last week, a Swarajya article about the proper Hindu reaction to the galloping Muslim demography (with a Kerala Muslim community of 26 per cent having 42 per cent of new births) warned that Hindus should not think of forcing their wives to have more children, as that would be ‘patriarchal’. That would turn them into ‘breeding machines’, the approved progressive term for ‘mother’. This was not just a terminological problem: It bought into the whole presupposition that women are being instrumentalized and that they have no agency themselves, and certainly no ‘communal’ agency, in wanting to counter the Muslim demographic offensive. Apparently, women can’t want anything, certainly not survival as a community."

Elst has obviously overlooked the word "forcing" there; the argument excludes women who are more than willing.

" ... No matter what terminology and hence what conceptual framework we use to make sense of this practice of marriage after rape, we all agree that there is something wrong with it. ... "

It isn't "practice" any more than rape itself is, but there are different contexts of social kind - in USA it would be unthinkable as a solution ordered by a judge, because the victim wouldn't be seen as a soiled object. In a society where Muslim males are brutes out to rape every female not clad in a completely covering black tent-like garment, as mullahs from Egypt to Australia not only excuse them for doing but order them to do, the victim might only have a life if she's a Westerner who can safely return home, but otherwise it's questionable. Such a marriage, of course, might only last exactly as long as the rapist decides, if he's Muslim, so it unlikely it's much of a punishment to him.

................................................................................................

"AN INTERNATIONAL PROBLEM"

"Many cultures that knew the institution of marriage, and that considered rape as a punishable offence (whether out of respect for the woman’s violated autonomy or for her male guardian’s violated ‘property’), showed themselves lenient if the woman came forward agreeing to marry the man standing trial. In medieval Europe, it was the done thing. Cases are known of many a man standing trial for rape and being saved from punishment by his victim offering to marry him.

"As I write this, I receive an e-mail from the liberal advocacy forum Awaaz, calling for solidarity with a girl called Lubna, a rape victim in the Arab world forced to marry her rapist. But then, I learn that Jordan has just outlawed the practice, and that Egypt and Tunisia have also done this in recent years. In other Muslim countries, the practice persists, and in Personal Law, India since Jawaharlal Nehru tries to provide its Muslims with a Muslim environment.

"In the more backward parts of Europe, the practice was also known until recently. Thus, Franca Viola (°1948), a farmer’s daughter from rural Alcamo in Sicily, got engaged to Filippo Melodia, nephew of a rich mafia don, with her parents’ assent. Shortly after, he was arrested for theft and mafia membership, and because of this, Franca’s father called off the engagement. Her family got threatened but persisted. At 17, Franca was abducted and raped by her rejected fiancé. Her father was contacted by Filippo’s family for a meeting to settle the matter, namely with a ‘reparation marriage’, to ‘repair’ her and her family’s honour. In 1965, Italy still had its Article 544 of the penal code, which turned rape into mere premarital sex, frowned upon but not punishable, and even annulled an earlier conviction for this rape, if a marriage between perpetrator and victim ensued.

"Thanks to the coordinates given for the proposed meeting, he could send in the police, have her liberated and her abductors arrested. In the court case against Filippo, the defence tried to portray the abduction as voluntary on the girl’s part. This so-called fuitina, ‘escape’, was the usual scenario in love marriages not wanted by the girl’s family. The girl presented her father with an accomplished fact: First violating the family’s honour, then restoring it through marriage. But the fuitina defence did not help: Filippo was imprisoned for ten years. (Data borrowed from Philip Roose: “Franca Viola en de afschaffing van het ‘herstelhuwelijk’ in Italië”, Doorbraak, 3 August 2017)

"The trial and its outcome gave a boost to the legal recognition of women’s rights. In 1981, Article 544 was abolished. In 1996, rape was redefined as a violation of personal integrity, no longer as a violation of public morality or family honour. In my own country, Belgium, this change took place in 1989, not very long ago either. That Jordan abolished the ‘reparation marriage’ only in 2017, and that Tunisia outlawed all violence against women the same year, is hardly proof of being ‘backward’ when we consider how recent these developments are in Europe. Which is not to deny that India, backward or not, had better catch up with these developments."

The last bit presumes it's a universal legal recourse in India, and also that a dockets as rural and poor - has Elst seen any of it? - will jump to being Manhattan just by being told to do so.

................................................................................................

"GLOBAL HUMAN CULTURE"

"What missionaries and other so-called secularists attack in Hinduism is usually an attack of something brought forth by mankind and now (or within living memory) only surviving in Hinduism. Thus, to culpabilize Hinduism, they berate sati (a widow’s self-immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre), a very minoritarian practice among ancient Hindus, now non-existent. It was limited to the warrior castes, and counselled against in the Rig Veda, where the very first mention of the practice is where a widow intends to commit it but gets dissuaded. On the other hand, it has been attested among the aristocracy of the ancient Chinese, Mongols, Egyptians, Celts and Scandinavians. Contrary to feminist analysis, it was not a measure of the contempt in which women were held: Among the Greeks, women had a lowly status and had no ‘honour’ to defend by committing sati, whereas among the Celts, where women had a higher status, there was plenty of sati.

"The secularists attack the Purusha Sukta (‘Hymn of the Man’), the late-Vedic foundation stone of social differentiation ultimately yielding the caste system, as if similar myths did not exist in China, in Rome, in Scandinavia and, indeed, in the New Testament. There, Saint Paul likens the social classes to body parts, unequal but condemned to cooperate. This became the basis of the social teachings of the Catholic church, better known as corporatism, i.e., ‘body-like worldview’. The church has always defended a layered society with inequality against the rising tide of socialism and egalitarianism. (This does not only count for the Catholic church of the nineteenth-twentieth century, but also for Martin Luther’s opposition against the German peasants’ rebellion, Russian Orthodoxy’s support for serfdom, the Southern Baptist support to slavery in the US or the Afrikaner Calvinists’ support to apartheid.)"

"When the missionaries are taking Hindus by the nose and pointing it towards the ‘social evils of Hindu society’, they are cleverly pointing it away from the skeletons in the cupboard of Christian society. ... "

Including inquisition.

" ... So, contrary to secularist- missionary designs, Hindus need not be village bumpkins only aware of their own traditions. The knowledge of foreign traditions will go a long way in relativizing any ‘evils of Hindu society’, even if real."

"Meanwhile, it is incontestably true that the Hindus’ own legal tradition, as laid down in the Dharmashastras, does equally contain the recognition of marriage consequent on rape. Dharmashastra is a field in its own right, and proper experts can say a lot more about it, but let us already point to a general fact of consequence to our topic."

One difference, or more than one, and it's important - one, it wasn't an alternative to a punishment, but an award to the victim, of rights she had as a married woman, whether the perpetrator agreed or not; two, polyandry was fact, however rarely in practice. Three, just as important a child was never blamed or seen as less whatever facts of its conception, but just as importantly, the woman wasn't branded.

................................................................................................

"DEMONIC MARRIAGES"

"The Dharmashastras recognize a series of different marriage forms, usually eight. These are all legally binding and confer a number of enforceable rights and duties, but they are not equal. On top of the list are several forms of arranged marriage, where both families involved are in consensus. To the moderns’ objection about the marriage partners’ feelings, let us briefly say that a start with neutral feelings (often between youngsters who had never met) means that it can only get better, especially with the bond conferred by common children; whereas a love marriage starts with intense feelings which tend to diminish, mostly slowly but sometimes dramatically. Among older Hindus, the consensus used to be that emotion-driven love marriages decided on by immature youngsters end in disaster."

Ancient Indian culture did recognise and honour love marriages, and not only those performed with consent of elders in complete ceremony, but even those that were with only "Heavenly Beings As Witnesses", Gandharva Vivaaha. Famous couples who are known to have gone with it include oarents of Bharata who infua is named Bhârata after, and a grandson of Krishna.

"In modern India, the arranged marriage has become a compromise between the parents’ considerations and the youngsters’ preferences, often at their own suggestion of a prospective partner they have met in university or on the job. Even where the parents introduce them to a partner they have sought out, the smartphone gives the engaged couple opportunities to get to know each other that were unthinkable in the past. In those days, in the Hindu as in many other cultures, newly-weds often met for the first time before the altar. Often, it was the love of their parents and the confidence in the latter’s choice (even when seemingly harsh or irrational) that gave newly-weds the determination to see the initial difficulties through.

"Moreover, nurture and nature conspire to make children take after their parents, so the parents’ choice of a son/daughter-in-law may not have been too different from what those youngsters at a riper age would consider likeable in a partner. Very recently, an older woman confided to me that her mother had warned her about the fiancé she had chosen: ‘Of course she had seen it correctly, as I was to find out later, but since I was young and headstrong, I ignored her advice.’ Modern forms of online (especially psychologically assisted) dating try to combine the advantages of mutual attraction with those of the premeditated arranged marriage.

"A lower type is where the compatibility of the partners or their families is not considered. Thus, a rich candidate comes to buy your daughter, offering a bride-price, as is still common in the Muslim world and among African tribes. This type was named after a foreign people deemed hostile yet rich and powerful: the Asuras. It is common to name negative things after foreigners; for example, when the native American venereal disease syphilis spread in Europe through seamen and their encounters with prostitutes, the French called it ‘the Spanish disease’, Germans called it ‘the French disease’, and the Poles called it ‘the German disease’."

Asura isn't a race but a nomenclature for a set of characteristics, as is Raakshasa, Daitya and some others.

"Two other foreign tribes were treated with hostility but also with contempt: the Râkshasas and the Pishâchas. The former are the ‘bear people’, hence ‘demons’. The latter have been described by Panini as a warrior tribe in the Afghan-Pak mountains, thought to be cannibals, and whose name has indeed survived with a similar connotation as ‘cannibal’, or, again, ‘demon’. ... "

It wasn't "bear people"! In fact Raama's Vaanara army included bears, and a famous one later was a father-in-law of Krishna, but not because the two epochs weren't very far apart; rather because, despite their bring very far apart, some of those having witnessed the previous one lived on into the second.

Meanwhile what Elst describes of Râkshasa sounds more like humongous creatures encountered by US military in Afghanistan, other US citizens in Northwestern US forests, and Russians in Central Asia, and those indeed are cannibal - eating us humans, not one another - but can learn to live with and breed with, humans, as evidenced by Colin Wilson in his Mysteries.

Râkshasa meanwhile, as they are described in ancient Indian descriptions, don't fit the region mentioned by Elst.

" ... After them, the two lowest forms of marriage were named. The first is violent abduction and rape, against her family’s and her own will. (This must be distinguished from the love marriage that sometimes takes the form of a staged abduction, but with the woman’s consent, the above-mentioned fuitina). The second is seduction with intoxicants, where the woman is in no position any more to give or withhold her consent."

That fits the character described. One, a female, famously wanted to marry Raama's brother or himself, and was enraged ento attempt to murder Sita the wife of Raama, when spurned by him. As a revenge fir the reprisal thereof she induced her brother Raavana into kidnapping Sita.

"History is rife with episodes where women were abducted and forced into marriage. Far more often than is thinkable today, they also acquiesced in the situation as the lesser evil, especially as soon as children came and stabilized the forced marriage. That set their mind on something relatively more positive, the absorbing business of raising children who, after all, were also their own. The classical example here is the abduction of the Sabine women by the Romans.

"During the Partition there were numerous cases of Hindu women abducted and raped by Muslims. After a semblance of peace had returned, a lot of them rejoined their families, but many others preferred to stay with their abductors (where they would at least be honoured as the women who gave their parents-in-law grandchildren) rather than go back to their families and to a life of being reviled as carrying the stain of defilement. Something of the same problem resurfaced when Yezidi women were abducted en masse by the Islamic State in 2014–15. Yezidi tradition was very harsh on a raped woman, but since it had now happened on such a scale, the community elders decided to lift the otherwise usual status of defilement and dishonour, and welcome the victimized women back with full honour."

Weren't Yezidi butchered and subjected to genocide by ISIS, who forced the women into slavery, both white slavery and otherwise?

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"RATIONALE OF DEMONIC MARRIAGES"

"As pointed out by my erstwhile supervisor at BHU, philosophy professor Kedar Nath Mishra (I signed up for a Ph.D. programme there, which I could not pursue due to family circumstances, but Mishra and I remained in contact and later he invited me for lectures in Varanasi), it made good practical sense to extend the recognition of the married state even to such crime-originated unions. The Shastra writers were less into pure principles and more into the good of society, less concerned about the individual and more about the large number. Thus, unlike modern self-centred liberals, they cared about the child that might spring from such unions. It was no pleasure to grow up as a bastard (reason why ‘bastard’, ‘son of a bitch’, ‘harâmzâda’ and other synonyms were the ultimate swear words), and this arrangement ensured that they had a father. It might not be the mother’s favourite partner, but then, the child was half him as much as half her."

Any such words are of non-Hindu origin, but yes, the child has a right to benefit of paternal protection and care, and that was part if it. The other part is about the woman's rights. The scenarios described by Elst next, not quoted here, apply more to post Islamic invaders Hindu society, not pre invasion, but it's reality of most of the world where, unlike in India, men were held responsible for their actions and not able to shift the blame onto the victim.

" ... But declaring her legally married to her rapist would give her and her child a leg to stand on vis-à-vis him and his family. It would also restore her honour somewhat in the eyes of her family and of society at large.

"All this makes sense only in a society with a ‘patriarchal’ valuation of the roles of men and women and the life-styles open to them. But that is the society in which the Shastra writers had to design their rules. In practice, they generally could not make the affected women fall back on the state’s social security (though the self-same Shastras impose upon kings also the duty to provide for such women), and certainly not restore her ‘honour’. They dealt with reality, not with wishful thinking in air-conditioned parlours, as American feminists do. What they ensured was the best possible outcome for all concerned in the circumstances.

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"MODERNISATISATION"

"In Hinduism, such reforms need not be seen as a Western encroachment on native tradition, not even where formally they are just that. Essentially, they fulfil Hindu tradition’s own capacity for what modern Catholics would call aggiornamento, ‘updating’.

"Among Muslims, with their more backward Sharia, it still persists. But even there, it is on its way out, as witnessed in the reforms in several Middle Eastern countries. The Indian Muslim community is called upon to follow suit."

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"CONCLUSION"

"As happens so often, and more so among our culturally illiterate contemporaries, we notice the typical projection of contemporary norms emanating from a prosperous equal-opportunity society on to an ancient arrangement fit for a traditional society. This is a narrow-minded and self-centred thought habit and had better be corrected. Yet, regardless of these intellectual niceties, we may nonetheless agree that the days of the reparation marriage are over for good."

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February 17, 2022 - February 17, 2022.

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25. Standing Up for the Purusha Sukta

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"PURUSHA SUKTA"

"Anuradha Dutt’s novel Redemption (Evolutes Publication, Gurgaon, 2017) is the story of the Chaudhury family from Dhaka, but also the analysis of a recent piece of Indian sociocultural history. The one large-scale event at its centre is pregnant with dramatic potential, and has indeed brought dramas and tragedies to the lives of millions: the Partition. This family avoids the worst by moving out in time to what was then called Calcutta. But even in peacetime, that city of the dark goddess Kali is full of religious zeal and social friction, enough to fill a good novel with. And then the children move out to Varanasi, to Delhi, and again become part of the main episodes of post-Independence history."

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"CASTE POLITICS"

"When Hindu activists are confronted with the officially propagated view, thought up by communist leader M.N. Roy, that Islam made many converts thanks to popular resentment against the caste system, they often counter this by alleging that, instead, Islamic rule hardened caste relations and other inequalities (especially between the sexes) and strengthened the hand of orthodoxy over the other Hindus. That is indeed the position taken in Redemption. ... "

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"AVESTAN COLOURS"

"In the writer’s opinion, the Avestan four pistras, ‘colours’, are the origin of the Indian varnas, ‘colours’ (p.xi). These are known from the Denkart, a book written down after the Muslim invasion of Iran had started, when the Zoroastrian priests realized that the very survival of their religion was under threat. It is based on oral tradition, till then kept from being defiled by writing, and no doubt very old, though not necessarily unchanged. The book itself could not possibly have influenced India’s social structure, even when the Parsi refugees brought it into India shortly after. We are then talking about the ninth century AD, some 2,000 years after caste considerations make a number of appearances in the Mahabharata, the life of the Buddha and other old sources.

"Rather, the Iranian division of society has a similar origin as the same division in Indian society. The Iranians came from India, as Shrikant Talageri has convincingly demonstrated. ... Their status of ‘foreigner’ is ambiguous, given that they came from India and are one of the ‘five peoples’ alongside the Vedic tribe: They are deemed to descend from the two brothers Anu and Puru, two of the five sons of Yayati. Iranians are quite present in the Vedas, such as through the sages Bhrigu and Cyavana.

"Hindus ought to give up this defensive stand of trying to appease critics. Yes, Christian missionaries, themselves veterans of much oppression and representatives of a culture that practised slavery till recently, do find fault with Hindu casteism, and with anything else they can lay their hands on, like sati. So, lots of Hindus react by agreeing with them—yes, casteism is bad, Sir—and then trying to salvage Hinduism by disconnecting it from caste. (Or likewise, trying to disconnect it from sati, alleging that this was caused by the Muslim invasions or so.) This only makes your critics laugh and is totally counterproductive. ... "

Elst and West in general doesn't want to see fact that have affected them too (- women were kidnapped by Muslims not only in India but also from ships plying across Atlantic -), if it involves seeing truth of Hinduism or Hindus, against Islam; but that Sati was not a practice or tradition, until the horror of Queen Padmini and hundreds of Chittor women throwing themselves into fire took place, after their saying final farewell to their men, in a war that was because Alauddin Khilji was attacking Chittor on being refused his demand, by King of Chittor who wouldn't hear of handing his wife over to the barbarian, is historical. It wasn't she alone who perished thus that day, but all other women of Chittor, since they expected no different, and preferred death to the barbaric alternative.

And if missionaries et al think it's funny, that exposes what little sympathy they have with women everywhere. But the horror and menace was real until British rule replaced Islamic, which is why Hindus accepted discontinuing what wasn't a tradition until Islam forced a choice on Indian women. Most unmarried women ended their lives, if they could, in any way possible, if so kidnapped.

And it wasn't about prejudice against another culture. When a marriage took place, conducted properly and honoured subsequently, it remains respected, with at least two famous examples. But essential to acceptance by Hindus was lack of coercion or kidnappings by the Islamic component, which was present in cases where women preferred to end their lives.

" ... The result is that they multiply these argumentative tactics—for example, today they have taken to saying that Hinduism is anti-ecological, so that flying kites on Uttarayana kills birds, bursting crackers on Diwali pollutes the air, the colours thrown on Holi are full of toxic chemicals, etc. The only thing left for Hindus is to wind up their whole noxious religion and convert."

As Elst himself points out, castes were not only in every society, but explicitly sanctioned by church and by Koran, so pointing at Hindus is fraudulent.

These attacks aren't due to reason for Sati being falsely blamed on Islam, but simply that whether missionaries or anyone else, whoever attacks Hindus isn't worried about truth, facts, or anything else. Hindus are a cheap target when jihadists are threatening the existence, of not only human civilisation but very earth and life. Everyone knows how ridiculous it is to blame kites when planes and lighting and chemicals are disrupting ecology - it's a more ridiculous version of pontificating about watering lawns and gardens in California to save water, but keeping mum about industries. Can Hindus do something to stop bring attacked? Well, point out that Muslims aren't attacked, and ask yourselves why. Then it would be decent to stop attacking Hindus.

"Look at me: My Celtic and Germanic ancestors practised human sacrifice. Near my place, there is a pond where, thanks to the composition of the soil, dead bodies are well preserved. They have dug up bodies there of people bearing ritual marks who had been drowned on purpose in the pond as sacrifice to the gods. So what? We don’t do that any more, and if we did, I make bold that I would be among the abolitionists striving to stop this practice. But I find no virtue at all in denying it as a fact of history. So, please stop these attempts to wimp out from the ethically challenging parts of your own heritage. Hindu dharma is good enough to exist and to continue, even if it has some stains to wash off."

One, Hinduism doesn't prescribe human sacrifice. Two, church having alienated Europe against prior culture, it's easy to disassociate. Three, here's proof that church does, and fully intends to, wipe out all Indian culture, specifically Hinduism. Four, just because an accusation is made by West or church doesn't mean it's true. Five, most reforms began within Hindus, and that, long before Europe came to India.

................................................................................................

"PURUSHA SUKTA: INTERPOLATION"

" ... There is no indication for this Avestan origin of so central a Vedic hymn as the Purusha Sukta, and the perfect sameness of the body metaphor in the Vedas and Avesta rather points to a common origin. And this is not unlikely, given that the same metaphor is found in the Germanic myth of Ymir and the Chinese myth of Pangu."

"Ostensibly, the hymn is from the final stage of Rig Vedic composition, shortly before Veda Vyasa’s final editing of the hymns into the fully formed Vedas. It soon became the Vedic bedrock of varna doctrine and gets reproduced or quoted to that effect in younger Vedic writings, including the Atharva Veda and the Yajur Veda (so, there also interpolations?), the Panchavimsha Brahmana, Taittiriya Aranyaka, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana.

" ... The Vedas are a very stable body of texts, a virtual ‘tape-recording’ of actual recitations from thousands of years ago (says Harvard Sanskritist Michael Witzel), and were not easily trifled with. ... "

"Yet, because the Purusha Sukta was used to confer Vedic legitimacy on a later practice, it stands to reason that the hymn could have been a later interpolation. But in that case, the interpolators would have made sure to include occupational heredity and endogamy into it. These are the two aspects of caste which, no doubt, parents regularly had occasion to convince recalcitrant sons and daughters of, so that some Vedic authority would have been useful to them. Instead, the hymn can serve as testimony of an earlier (viz. late-Vedic) age when these practices were not yet part of the budding caste system.

"To sum up: It is an understandable and honourable hypothesis that the Purusha Sukta was an interpolation, but it is unproven ... "

................................................................................................

"PURUSHA SUKTA: CONTENTS REGARDING CASTE"

"In any case, it makes no difference, for Hindu tradition has assumed this hymn even if it were younger than the Vedas, have given it Vedic (‘revealed’) authority and regarded it as the bedrock of varna ideology for some 2,000 years. Nitpicking about its literary status as possibly an interpolation can’t undo this. Hindus have amply owned it up, and now have the responsibility to deal with it.

"Yet, this dealing with caste does not mean dealing with the Purusha Sukta. There is something problematic about caste, even if it cannot be reduced to that, but there is nothing actually problematic about the hymn."

Elst really is unaware of Pandharpur.

"If you read more carefully than done by the traditionalists of centuries past and the Ambedkarites of our own time, you find that the hymn says nothing about caste. It only describes four functions in a developed society: priest, warrior, entrepreneur and worker. It does not say that these functions are discreet, and among animal husbandmen (as the Vedic tribe apparently was), they were not. They overlapped, and initially, any householder could perform as priest, he could take up arms to defend his village, he could, of course, tend his cattle and he could repair his utensils and do other menial work. The hymn doesn’t say jobs were allotted to one specific birth group; nor that by birth you are predetermined to doing that profession, the same that your father did (of which the Vedas itself provides counter-examples). It doesn’t say you can only marry someone from the same birth group."

Elst is also unaware of refutation of stupid interpretation of Vedas implying "animal husbandmen (as the Vedic tribe apparently was)", apparently.

"Indeed, centuries later, we see the Buddha uphold the idea that caste is purely patrilineal, a son is Kshatriya because his father was and regardless of what his mother was. His friend Prasenajit, by contrast, disappointed because his wife turns out to be non-Kshatriya, already espouses the norm of caste endogamy, which must then have been an innovation. At any rate, endogamy as a defining trait of the historical caste system is not yet present in the Purusha Sukta.

"Meanwhile, the same body-parts metaphor for the social classes is paralleled not just in writings of ancient Scandinavia and China but also in two sources definitely familiar to nineteenth-century orientalists: the Roman administrator Menenius Agrippa and the New Testament author Saint Paul, considered the real founder of Christianity. In their case, the metaphor does not pertain to the correspondence between body parts and parts of the universe, only to that between body parts and societal classes (where the Purusha Sukta has both). If those worthies could think up the corporatist metaphor, so could the Vedic sages. The said Greco-Roman authors used the simile to deduce that everyone should know his place on the social ladder and be satisfied with it—just the conservatism and lack of social mobility that the missionaries and Leftists object to in the case of Hindu caste society. And again, even if this trait of keeping everyone in his place was an aspect of the full-grown caste system, it was not part of the Purusha Sukta."

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"CONCLUSION"

"Hindus have learnt to look at their own classics through the eyes of their enemies. Thus, they are very ashamed and embarrassed about their legal codes, the Shastras, because these do, indeed, contain some iniquitous casteist verses—thus doing injustice to the rest of those books, often very inventive or lofty. They are even ashamed of their Purusha Sukta, which the enemy claims is casteist, but in fact is not casteist at all."

"And here, too, there are other, non-controversial parts that get overlooked. Thus, the hymn opens by saying that the Universal Man (Purusha) has a thousand heads. That means: The Universal Man is a community of ordinary individual men. Hindus sometimes felt the need for a leader, but hey, the Purusha Sukta rightly prescribes: We together are that leader. When we put our limited heads together, we together become the Cosmic Man. Isn’t that profound? If I were a Hindu, I would be proud of my Purusha Sukta. I would never want it to be a mere interpolation from an obscure foreign source."

Notice lack of a dictatorial religious institution in India, every Brahmin in effect a Hindu pope.

Hence Ekanaatha and other saints of the era.

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February 17, 2022 - February 17, 2022.

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Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars

by Koenraad Elst

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February 13, 2022 - February 17, 2022.

Borrowed December 30, 2021.

Purchased January 03, 2022.

Kindle Edition, 254 pages

Published May 5th 2019

by Rupa Publications

Original Title

Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars

ASIN:- B07QX77JCM

................................................

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07QX77JCM

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rupa Publications

(5 May 2019)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4556585285

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Thursday, February 17, 2022

Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars, by Koenraad Elst.

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