Ten Heads of Ravana: A Critique of Hinduphobic Scholars

by Rajiv Malhotra, Divya Reddy (Editor)

For long, a handful of scholars and intellectual sites, whose understanding of Bhārata is disjointed from tradition and often inimical to the Dhārmic way of life, have controlled India’s civilizational narrative. They analyze Bhāratīya sanskriti through a Western gaze while discarding native models. Embedded in powerful ecosystems, gilded Lankas, they are increasingly replacing traditional guru-s and ācārya-s as the modern adhikāri-s of Indian knowledge systems. In contemporary Indian scholarship, eminent personalities like Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Shashi Tharoor, Ramachandra Guha, Sheldon Pollock, Wendy Doniger, Devdutt Pattanaik, Kancha Ilaiah, and Michael Witzel are at the forefront of such India studies. Ravana was a scholar par excellence, but he was on the wrong side of Dharma. Hence, Śrīrāma waged a war against him to prevent a breakdown of society. Similarly, today’s embodiments of the historical Ravana—academically influential personalities, but grossly mischaracterizing the Dhārmic way of life and history of Bhārata. In this collection of essays, authors Dr. K.S. Kannan, T.N. Sudarshan, Dr. Sharda Narayanan, Anurag Sharma, Divya Reddy, Manogna Sastry, Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay and Dr. H.R. Meera have brought to light, through rigorous evidence-based research, numerous factual inaccuracies, wilful misrepresentation and deliberate distortions in the scholarship of many such intellectual heads of the modern Ravana.

380 pages, Paperback

Published February 6, 2023

About the author

Rajiv Malhotra is the founder and president of Infinity Foundation. An Indian-American entrepreneur, philanthropist and community leader, he has devoted himself, for the last ten years, to clarifying the many misperceptions about Indic traditions in America and amongst Indians.

He is an active writer, columnist, and speaker on a variety of topics, including the traditions and cultures of India, the Indian Diaspora, globalization, and East-West relations. Rajiv has been appointed to the Asian-American Commission for the State of New Jersey, where he serves as the Chairman for the Education Committee, which was created to start an Asian Studies program in schools. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the New Jersey Chapter of the American Red Cross and has volunteered in local hospice and AIDS counseling.

Reviews

[Shailesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This books is truly unique, bold & a brilliant counter-attack to the various hinduphobic scholars in the academia & pop-culture.

The uniqueness comes from the way the purvapaksha was done for each of them is commendable.

The boldness of the book is taking the opponent head-on in an objective way critiquing the work of these hinduphobic scholars without slander or personal attack.

The uttarpaksha is simple bang on & hits the bull’s eye. This has been missing for a long time & this had given an open filed for any tom dick & harry to write/say whatever they thought of Sanatana Dharma.

The 1st ravana is Romila Thapar. This has been pending for a long time to rip apart the facade of this distortion. Here is my analogy of her work. She writes history the way a student would answer a history question when they don’t know the answer & that student has a sinister agenda.

The 2nd ravana is Sheldon Pollock. This is a brilliant essay that captures the key essence of his work. This guy is a serial offender when it comes hinduphobia. The bigger problem is that this guy has been honoured by a government award & the Indian billionaire solicited his services for a translation project of Sanskrit texts.

The 3rd ravana is Michael Witzel. This was a new one to me. He is a key champion of the AIT/AMT. He is not interested in any facts as knowing may change his mind. So he stays well away from them & continues with his propaganda.

The 4tn ravana is the famous self-proclaimed mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik. This comprehensive essay bares out various facets of Devdutt’s works & how’s the depth of work put in.

The 5th ravana is Irfan Habib. One of the most famous marxist distorian (excuse me for this label). This essay clearly highlights the agenda driven history writing.

The 6th ravana is Shashi Tharoor. This is one essay that felt like it showed me the mirror & I could see a reflection of myself from a few years back. The purvapaksha is clear & hits the nail on the head. I am sure this is going to make a lot of English educated Hindus uncomfortable.

The 7th ravana is Audrey Truschke. This is one of the latest additions to the tribe & she is a great patron of Aurangseb

The 8th ravana is Ramachandra Guha. This essay is very well composed with decoding the message for the reader.

The 9th ravana is Kancha Ilaiah. Why he is one of the most famous breaking India sepoy is very well illustrated in this essay

The 10th ravana is Wendy Doniger. The title of the essay on her is “Queen of Eroticism” sums it up very well of her work on Hindu texts.

To summarise, this year Dusherra has come early & time for us take down these Hinduphobic Ravanas (usage as metaphor) by spreading the light of knowledge by reading & disseminating the message of the book.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads # Hindutva, Indic

In the contemporary battlefield of Indian intellectual life, Rajiv Malhotra occupies a unique — and uniquely polarising — position. To his admirers, he is a courageous voice, one of the first to stand up to what they see as centuries of epistemic domination by the West, challenging the hegemony of Indology, Orientalism, and postcolonial studies.

To his detractors, he is a polemicist disguised as a scholar, a provocateur who thrives on exaggeration, misrepresentation, and the politics of grievance. Few writers generate as much heat, and as much devoted following, as Malhotra. His latest book, Ten Heads of Ravana: A Critique of Hinduphobic Scholars, edited by Divya Reddy, is both a continuation of his earlier work and, in some ways, a sharpening of it.

At its core, the book is not an original history, nor a fresh theory of Hindu philosophy. It is a critique — indeed, an attack — on ten scholars whom Malhotra identifies as purveyors of “Hinduphobia.” The metaphor of Ravana is deliberate: just as the demon king of the Ramayana had ten heads, each representing a different vice or threat, so too does Malhotra identify ten prominent academics whose work, he argues, distorts, maligns, or undermines Hindu traditions. These “heads” are not only Western but also Indian, representing a spectrum of academic disciplines: history, anthropology, religious studies, literary criticism. The cumulative effect is to construct a pantheon of adversaries against whom Malhotra positions himself and his Indic perspective.

Those familiar with Malhotra’s earlier books — Breaking India (2011), Indra’s Net (2014), The Battle for Sanskrit (2016), or Snakes in the Ganga (2022, co-authored with Vijaya Viswanathan) — will recognise his method here. He does not proceed gently, or with cautious neutrality. His writing is polemical, urgent, and often repetitive. He names names. He quotes liberally from his opponents, then dismantles them line by line. He insists that Hinduism, or “Indic civilisation,” has been subjected to centuries of intellectual colonisation, first by missionaries, then by Orientalists, then by Marxist historians, and most recently by postcolonial theorists and critical race studies scholars.

In Ten Heads of Ravana, this method is distilled into a dramatic narrative: each chapter is devoted to a particular scholar (or “head”), their arguments, and Malhotra’s critique. The effect is both forensic and theatrical. The tone is unmistakably combative — Malhotra does not hide his disdain for what he considers mischief, malice, or mediocrity in academia. For readers sympathetic to his project, this is invigorating: finally, someone naming and challenging the grandees of Indology. For sceptics, it is exhausting, even shrill: a perpetual grievance machine that rarely pauses to reflect on its own excesses.

Central to the book is the term “Hinduphobia.” Malhotra insists that much of academic writing on Hinduism is not neutral scholarship but thinly veiled prejudice, painting Hindus as backward, superstitious, oppressive, or irrational. He argues that just as Islamophobia or anti-Semitism are recognised as forms of bigotry, Hinduphobia too must be exposed and countered.

This is, at one level, an important intervention. It is true that Western scholarship has often been shaped by biases, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes deliberately. Missionary accounts painted Hinduism as idol worship in need of Christian correction. Colonial administrators classified and codified caste in ways that froze fluid traditions. Even modern anthropologists and literary critics have often treated Hindu practices as “exotic objects” rather than living traditions. Malhotra’s insistence that these patterns amount to structural prejudice is not without merit.

However, at another level, the term “Hinduphobia” risks becoming a blunt instrument. Malhotra tends to label any critique of Hindu practices — whether around caste hierarchies, gender inequality, or violence — as evidence of Hinduphobia. This collapses the distinction between prejudice and analysis, between hostile caricature and legitimate criticism. In doing so, he risks shutting down debate rather than enriching it. A scholar who points out the exclusionary aspects of certain Hindu traditions may be biased, or may simply be doing their job as a critic. For Malhotra, however, the line between critique and hatred is blurred, sometimes fatally.

The metaphor of Ravana is powerful, but it also reveals the theatricality of Malhotra’s project. Each of the “ten heads” is presented as a major menace to Hindu identity. Some are well-known Western academics, others are Indian intellectuals who have worked in the secular or Marxist traditions. Malhotra’s critique of them often follows a pattern:

1) Expose their assumptions — show how their framework is Western, Abrahamic, Marxist, or postcolonial rather than Indic.

2) Highlight their language — quote passages that portray Hinduism as exotic, irrational, or oppressive.

3) Reveal their networks — connect them to institutions, funding agencies, or ideological movements that supposedly benefit from destabilising Hindu society.

4) Offer an Indic counter-view — assert that Hindu traditions, when understood on their own terms, are sophisticated, plural, and not reducible to the caricatures presented.

This four-step dance is repeated across the chapters, giving the book a somewhat formulaic rhythm. Readers may find themselves nodding in agreement in the early chapters, but by the eighth or ninth “head,” fatigue sets in. The repetitiveness is both a strength (driving home the point) and a weakness (flattening nuance).

To place Ten Heads of Ravana in a wider intellectual context is to see its contrasts. Take Swapan Dasgupta’s Awakening Bharat Mata (2019). Dasgupta sought to canonise the Indian Right, curating writings from Savarkar, Mookerjee, and others to show an intellectual lineage of Hindu nationalism. His project was legitimisation: presenting the Right as cultured, serious, intellectually grounded. Manu S. Pillai’s Gods, Guns and Missionaries (2024), by contrast, was diagnostic: a sweeping history that showed how modern Hindu identity was forged through centuries of encounter with missionaries and colonisers, without polemic, but with layered complexity.

Malhotra stands apart from both. He is not canon-building like Dasgupta, nor history-writing like Pillai. He is battle-writing. His aim is not to historicise or legitimise but to fight — to take on named adversaries and publicly demolish them. Where Dasgupta is a curator and Pillai a chronicler, Malhotra is a gladiator. This makes his work electrifying for some, alienating for others. It also means that his books are less likely to be read in classrooms than in activist circles.

Despite its excesses, Ten Heads of Ravana has real strengths:

o First, it democratizes critique. For too long, academic debates on Hinduism have been confined to specialists. Malhotra, whatever his faults, opens these debates to a wider audience, giving ordinary readers a sense of what is being said about their traditions and why it matters.

o Second, his insistence on intellectual decolonisation has struck a chord with younger Indians who feel alienated from narratives written exclusively through Western frameworks.

o Third, the metaphorical framing — Ravana’s ten heads — gives the book a narrative drive that is unusual in scholarly polemics.

However, the limitations are equally evident. The first is the lack of nuance. Not every critique of Hinduism is Hinduphobic; not every scholar is driven by malice. By painting all opponents with the same brush, Malhotra weakens his case. Second, the tone is relentlessly combative. There is little space for self-criticism, little acknowledgement of the internal hierarchies and injustices within Hindu traditions themselves. Third, the book risks feeding into an echo chamber: it will be embraced by those already sympathetic, dismissed by those who are not, and rarely bridge the gap.

There is also the danger of caricaturing the adversary. Just as Malhotra accuses Western scholars of caricaturing Hinduism, he too caricatures his opponents, reducing their work to a few damning quotes rather than sustained engagement. The irony is sharp: in fighting distortion, he sometimes mirrors it.

It is easy to dismiss Malhotra, but doing so misses the point. He has become, whether one likes it or not, a central figure in the intellectual ecosystem of contemporary India. His books are widely read, his talks circulate on YouTube, his ideas shape the vocabulary of cultural nationalism. He speaks to a hunger that more cautious scholars have ignored: the hunger for recognition, dignity, and a sense of ownership over one’s traditions. In this sense, Ten Heads of Ravana is both a symptom and a catalyst of the times.

In comparison, A.G. Noorani’s The RSS: A Menace to India (2000) was equally polemical but on the opposite side. Noorani launched a fierce attack on the RSS, portraying it as fascist and dangerous. Malhotra, two decades later, does something similar — except his target is not the RSS but the secular and Western academy. Both are mirror images: sharp, polemical, unrelenting, and divisive. Both appeal to their own constituencies and are dismissed by the other.

Reading Ten Heads of Ravana is a peculiar experience. At times, I found myself nodding: yes, Western scholarship has often been patronising, yes, Hindu traditions deserve to be understood on their own terms, yes, intellectual decolonisation is overdue. At other times, I found myself frustrated: not every critic is a foe, not every analysis is a conspiracy, not every difference of perspective is phobia. The repetition of charges began to feel heavy, the sharpness of tone exhausting.

And yet, one cannot deny the energy of the text. Malhotra writes with conviction, and conviction is infectious. His work, even when flawed, compels a response. He does not allow indifference. That, in itself, is a kind of success.

In the end, Ten Heads of Ravana is less a book of scholarship than a book of battle. It seeks not to persuade the undecided but to rally the faithful, to arm them with arguments and metaphors in the ongoing war of ideas. It is polemical, selective, repetitive, but also passionate, clarifying, and unafraid.

Compared to Dasgupta’s canon-building and Pillai’s historicising, Malhotra’s approach is gladiatorial. He may not convince the academy, but he will continue to mobilise readers outside it. Whether this strengthens Hindu identity or narrows it into defensiveness is another question. What is certain is that Malhotra has ensured that Hindu traditions will no longer be discussed in academic circles without the spectre of his critique looming nearby.

If Ravana’s ten heads represented menace, Malhotra’s ten heads represent vigilance: a refusal to accept caricature without reply. Whether that vigilance becomes wisdom or paranoia depends not only on Malhotra but on the readers who choose to engage with him critically.

For the rest of us, the book is a reminder that in the battle of ideas, polemic too has its place — messy, abrasive, but undeniably consequential.

[Jay Mehta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is more like 4.5.
It's a good read for someone who wants to understand "who are these people" who have been at the forefront of the anti-Hindu (sometimes under the garb of being "anti-India") propaganda, mainly in American universities. The book covers popular names such as Romila Thapar, Sheldon Pollock, Devdutt Pattnaik, Irfan Habib, Shashi Tharoor, Audrey Truschke, Ramachandra Guha, Kancha Illiah and Wendy Doniger.
The authors did a great job not just debunking these distortions positions on various topics related to the Hindu faith but also going one level deeper to understand the framework within which these 10 "Ravanas" operate and the source of those thoughts. This gives a much deeper understanding and the ability to see these patterns among others such as established academics, media personalities and influencers who take inspiration from or have been students of these people.
It's a very important book and a good introduction to this space for those scratching their heads over what's happening and why there is so much Hinduphobia in the Western Hemisphere.
Taking away 0.5 for editing - typos, misplaced punctuations and incoherent sentences at a few places. But a great read overall.

[Lk Pal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ravana was a Pundit like these intellectuals which these ten heads symbolise. They are scholars par excellence but they tend to be vainglorious. Hats off to all the scholars and team of the authors who have been instrumental in highlighting the ten haughty heads. A must read for those Sanatanis who are keen to understand the poorvapakshya and the narrative by the gang of the left liberals.

[Pramod Vemuri · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is not much insight to be gained by reading the book. The authors of the book have an ideological lens, and the selection of the hinduphobic authors vary from deserving (pollock, illaiah) to undeserving (tharoor, guha). The notion of 'purvapaksha' is lost in some of the essays where the views are strawmanned. There is also a lot of criticism of the character and integrity of the the scholars, than their viewpoints themselves. That makes one wonder if the authors of this book ever wanted to engage in a genuine discourse, or if it's a petty quarrel of the authors published in book form.