Category: Academic Negationism
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The ‘Hindoo’ Mind : Colonised by Macaulayism
‘ Macaulayism ‘ the term derives from Thomas Babington Macaulay, a member of the Governor General’s Council in the 1830s. Earlier, the British Government of India had completed a survey of the indigenous system of education in the Presidencies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras. A debate was going on whether the indigenous system should be…
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Reclaim civilisational self from shallow history texts
“Political considerations, ideological affiliations—especially of those who have always tried to establish an imported ideology—of well-resourced groups who have thrived in the Western academia by projecting India as a society in perpetual conflict and instability, has largely influenced the study of history. Their prime political objective, despite their arguments to the contrary, has been to…
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Savarkar and Modi, beginning and end of Hindutva
Hate mongers Hate mongers often need concocted stories to buttress their political message. In India, these are most common in that peculiar Indian form of hatred: anti-Brahminism. As the local counterpart to what anti-Semitism has been in the West, it fantasizes about how Brahmins have only domination over us lesser mortals as their uppermost concern.…
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Response to Girish Shahane on Rajput ‘Failure’ or Victory ?
I have just been exposed to a worthless and meaningless article by a self-propagating Hindu phobic writer. The person I refer to is known as Girish Shahane, who by his own account is the proud owners of multiple degrees from various institutions including Oxford University – we presume he means the world famous Oxford University…
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Romila Thapar mistakes Hindu impotent rage for a pro-Hindu power equation
According to retired history professor Romila Thapar, “academics must question more” (The Hindu, October 27, 2014). She was delivering the third Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture, eloquently titled: “To Question or not to Question: That is the Question”. The problem addressed by her was that “academics and experts shied away from questioning the powers of the…
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Looney Marxist Historian Attacks Arun Shourie
D.N. Jha’s “Reply to Arun Shourie”, dated 3 July 2014, was published in shorter form as “Grist to the reactionary mill”, Indian Express, 9 July 2014. It starts as follows: “I was amused to read ‘How History Was Made Up At Nalanda’ [28 June 2014, the Indian Express:] by Arun Shourie, who has dished out…
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Romila Thapar’s Marxist Rant on ICHR nomination
Retired historian Romila Thapar has written an opinion piece (“History repeats itself”, 11 July 2014, India Today) giving the standard secular reaction to the appointment of equally retired historian Y. Sudershan Rao as chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research. It gives the predictable (indeed, predicted, see K. Elst: “A Hindutva historian in office”,…
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‘Marxist’ History in the Unmaking
“Modi’s accession to power and the respect he clearly enjoys among the neighbouring governments—and even in the US—may well be an apt occasion to rethink our attitude towards the ideological power struggle in India. So far, Indians and foreigners, and even many inside the BJP, have looked at India through the glasses which the wrongly-named…
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How Buddha was turned Anti Hindu
Orientalists have started treating Buddhism as a separate religion because they discovered it outside India, without any conspicuous link with India, where Buddhism was not in evidence. At first, they didn’t even know that the Buddha had been an Indian. It had at any rate gone through centuries of development unrelated to anything happening in…
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Aryan Re-Invasion Theory
An Indo-European Conference The Indogermanische Gesellschaft organizes a conference every year. It must be one of the few international conferences where German is still spoken, along with English. I don’t know why I had never gone there, but this time (29-31 July 2013) I did. It was held in Leiden in the main building of…