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Decolonizing The Hindu Mind: Ideological Development Of Hindu Revivalism
The ideological dimension of the Hindu revivalism has been mostly misrepresented or rather neglected in the ongoing debates on the subject.Thoroughly analysing the ideological statements of it's advocates and their critiques of the existing secular order Dr.Koenraad Elst provides an overview of the ideas animating the movement.A period of rapid political changes that witnessed the rise of the BJP with only 21 Lok Sabha seats in 1984 to have 179 seats that enabled it to form a coalition government at the Centre in 1998 is the focus of the study.Amidst the umpteen number of works available on Hindu revivalism,this work stands out with it's clear focus and clarity of thought.
880 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2001
124 people are currently reading
543 people want to read
About the author
Koenraad Elst
41 books158 followersFlemish writer and orientalist (without institutional affiliation).
Koenraad Elst was an editor of the New Right Flemish nationalist journal Tekos 1992 to 1995 and also contributed to other Flemish seperatist publications like Nucleus, 't Pallieterke, Secessie and The Brussels Journal.
Koenraad Elst is one of the most well-known western writers to actively defend the Hindutva movement.
Koenraad Elst was an editor of the New Right Flemish nationalist journal Tekos 1992 to 1995 and also contributed to other Flemish seperatist publications like Nucleus, 't Pallieterke, Secessie and The Brussels Journal.
Koenraad Elst is one of the most well-known western writers to actively defend the Hindutva movement.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
August 16, 2020
4.5/5 A well-argued, well-structured and exhaustive book that goes into the terminology, history, ideology, personalities of “Hindu revivalism” and takes stock of it in 1999.
Key Premise :-
The Sangh Parivar has deliberately ignored and frowned upon intellectual pursuits making it an easy target for the malicious left-liberals and laughing stock of modern and intellectual Hindus. Looking at 2020, this is self-evident that the Modi govt faces a severe shortage of conservative/RW intellectuals who can head institutions.
And the Sangh/BJP has no-one to espouse their valid positions on aborgation of 370, Ram Mandir etc in a thoughtful manner in the public domain.
Other important points :-
A) The West and Macaulay-putras look at India which is a Hindu (and hence Indic) majority country with an Abrahamic lens. So the paradigm in which Abrahamic intolerance and exclusion are the default are implicitly and incorrectly assumed when talking of Hinduism and Hindu grievances and majority sentiments are suppressed unnecessarily.
Add - Perhaps my review will also be read by the same lens :)
B) Conversely, the Sangh Parivar looks upon Abrahamic religions with an Indic lens and tries to “Indianise” them forgetting that exclusion is central to them. It has reduced Hindu revivalism to a project of nationalism (prophetic of Dr. Elst). Also, in its naivety BJP continues with the same minority appeasement that it criticised Congress for. Again true, for Modi is the first unapologetic Hindu PM.
C) The Sangh is mistakenly considered “fundamentalist” or regressive. The Sangh opposes caste discrimination and it doesnt oppose reforms towards making Hindusim more modern. Adding my opinion here, I would like Sangh to stop any food bans. Our Hindu spirituality is not dependent on rituals.
D) The Sangh Parivar makes a lot of noise but has achieved nothing in repealing laws that grant favours to non-Hindus while discriminating against Hindus. I think this is one area in which the Modi govt has made some progress.
E) In perhaps its only shortcoming, the book failed to make me understand the meaning of “Integral Humanism” or “Hindu Rashtra”.
I have my own opinions on a no. of topics related to this but not stating them here. Suffice to say that this is one of the most important books to read for those interested in Indian politics. Also do read “The Indian Conservative” by Jaitirth Rao.
Key Premise :-
The Sangh Parivar has deliberately ignored and frowned upon intellectual pursuits making it an easy target for the malicious left-liberals and laughing stock of modern and intellectual Hindus. Looking at 2020, this is self-evident that the Modi govt faces a severe shortage of conservative/RW intellectuals who can head institutions.
And the Sangh/BJP has no-one to espouse their valid positions on aborgation of 370, Ram Mandir etc in a thoughtful manner in the public domain.
Other important points :-
A) The West and Macaulay-putras look at India which is a Hindu (and hence Indic) majority country with an Abrahamic lens. So the paradigm in which Abrahamic intolerance and exclusion are the default are implicitly and incorrectly assumed when talking of Hinduism and Hindu grievances and majority sentiments are suppressed unnecessarily.
Add - Perhaps my review will also be read by the same lens :)
B) Conversely, the Sangh Parivar looks upon Abrahamic religions with an Indic lens and tries to “Indianise” them forgetting that exclusion is central to them. It has reduced Hindu revivalism to a project of nationalism (prophetic of Dr. Elst). Also, in its naivety BJP continues with the same minority appeasement that it criticised Congress for. Again true, for Modi is the first unapologetic Hindu PM.
C) The Sangh is mistakenly considered “fundamentalist” or regressive. The Sangh opposes caste discrimination and it doesnt oppose reforms towards making Hindusim more modern. Adding my opinion here, I would like Sangh to stop any food bans. Our Hindu spirituality is not dependent on rituals.
D) The Sangh Parivar makes a lot of noise but has achieved nothing in repealing laws that grant favours to non-Hindus while discriminating against Hindus. I think this is one area in which the Modi govt has made some progress.
E) In perhaps its only shortcoming, the book failed to make me understand the meaning of “Integral Humanism” or “Hindu Rashtra”.
I have my own opinions on a no. of topics related to this but not stating them here. Suffice to say that this is one of the most important books to read for those interested in Indian politics. Also do read “The Indian Conservative” by Jaitirth Rao.
May 1, 2018
A well researched work on Hindu revivalism. It is perhaps one of the very few books that discuss the revivalists in an unbiased manner and has the basic courtesy to at least give the reader a glimpse of what the Hindu revivalists themselves claim to be. The opinion regarding the so called pro-Hindu organizations like BJP/Jan Sangh/BJS/RSS/VHP is mostly what has been ascribed to them and hardly professed by them. In Elst's analysis each of them is analysed carefully, quoting from the very members of the organizations. His own opinion comes later and is not forced on the reader. The author is honest enough to also include instances where the held opinion his or others is contradicted.
A striking feature of the book is its definition of various terms like 'secularism' and 'communal', used extensively in the current social and political discourse but mostly inaptly applied. The book illustrates how these words have, in the Indian context, assumed the exact opposite of what they are supposed to mean. Apart from the brief history of the mentioned organizations, their ideological stands (or mostly the lack thereof), the book discusses the stand of various revivalists who were de facto independent of the Sangh organizations. These include Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, K. S. Lal, Ashis Nandy, Girilal Jain and many others.
Written more than a decade ago, the book correctly diagnoses the disease of the Sangh of reducing every debate to national vs anti-national. This particular characteristic of Sangh went on display right after the Modi government came to power. The author views this as a mechanism of trying to avoid an outright attack on the ideology or the principles of its opponents and is thus an entirely pointless exercise which accomplishes nothing at best and provides basis (though flimsy) for their enemies to brand them as fascists and/or Nazis (given the history associated with ultra nationalism) at worst.
In my opinion, the takeaway message would be that the Sangh is an ideological prisoner of its opponents and hence, has not been able to decolonize the Indian minds. With its rich history of shunning those who speak their minds and those who bring them to power, the Sangh is of little practical use to the cause of Dharma. Therefore, it is time that natives of Indic Civilization stop outsourcing their protection to Sangh and themselves take responsibility for the unenviable fate that awaits them and maybe fight against it if they can be bothered to.
Also,
Anyone who wants the following questions answered must read the book:
1. Why has the BJP, while being the largest political part in terms of numbers not been able to accomplish any of the agendas that propelled it to power? These include: Article 30, Article 370, Raam Janabhoomi as temple site, toning down the very high minority appeasement, resettlement of Kashmiri Pandits in Kashmir and the like. After all, a strong voice even when in opposition should be able to influence the policies of those sitting in power and that is what it exists for in a democracy.
2. Why do most 'Hindu Nationalists' still cry foul and feel unrepresented and misrepresented even when a so called 'Hindu Nationalist' party is currently in power?
3. Why do only anti-Hindu and anti-India stories make it to international press? Why is it that any violence perpetrated by a non-Hindu and a Hindu being persecuted in India or elsewhere hardly ever make it to columns of The Economist, The Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post? And really, what is it that these media outlets have against India?
4. Why does the Indian right wing perpetually complain and in spite of being majority never gets anything done. Also, why does it complain now, since now the fascist, Manuwadi, Brahminical BJP is in power?
5. Why is it that population of self declared Hindu tribal (using the word due to lack of better word,
should not be used as entire Hindu population is essentially tribal) people is falling and that of Christians is rising in the North East of India when RSS is present there and is abducting girls to teach them Gayatri Mantra?
6. What is the fabled 'Hindu Rashtra' after all?
A striking feature of the book is its definition of various terms like 'secularism' and 'communal', used extensively in the current social and political discourse but mostly inaptly applied. The book illustrates how these words have, in the Indian context, assumed the exact opposite of what they are supposed to mean. Apart from the brief history of the mentioned organizations, their ideological stands (or mostly the lack thereof), the book discusses the stand of various revivalists who were de facto independent of the Sangh organizations. These include Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, K. S. Lal, Ashis Nandy, Girilal Jain and many others.
Written more than a decade ago, the book correctly diagnoses the disease of the Sangh of reducing every debate to national vs anti-national. This particular characteristic of Sangh went on display right after the Modi government came to power. The author views this as a mechanism of trying to avoid an outright attack on the ideology or the principles of its opponents and is thus an entirely pointless exercise which accomplishes nothing at best and provides basis (though flimsy) for their enemies to brand them as fascists and/or Nazis (given the history associated with ultra nationalism) at worst.
In my opinion, the takeaway message would be that the Sangh is an ideological prisoner of its opponents and hence, has not been able to decolonize the Indian minds. With its rich history of shunning those who speak their minds and those who bring them to power, the Sangh is of little practical use to the cause of Dharma. Therefore, it is time that natives of Indic Civilization stop outsourcing their protection to Sangh and themselves take responsibility for the unenviable fate that awaits them and maybe fight against it if they can be bothered to.
Also,
Anyone who wants the following questions answered must read the book:
1. Why has the BJP, while being the largest political part in terms of numbers not been able to accomplish any of the agendas that propelled it to power? These include: Article 30, Article 370, Raam Janabhoomi as temple site, toning down the very high minority appeasement, resettlement of Kashmiri Pandits in Kashmir and the like. After all, a strong voice even when in opposition should be able to influence the policies of those sitting in power and that is what it exists for in a democracy.
2. Why do most 'Hindu Nationalists' still cry foul and feel unrepresented and misrepresented even when a so called 'Hindu Nationalist' party is currently in power?
3. Why do only anti-Hindu and anti-India stories make it to international press? Why is it that any violence perpetrated by a non-Hindu and a Hindu being persecuted in India or elsewhere hardly ever make it to columns of The Economist, The Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post? And really, what is it that these media outlets have against India?
4. Why does the Indian right wing perpetually complain and in spite of being majority never gets anything done. Also, why does it complain now, since now the fascist, Manuwadi, Brahminical BJP is in power?
5. Why is it that population of self declared Hindu tribal (using the word due to lack of better word,
should not be used as entire Hindu population is essentially tribal) people is falling and that of Christians is rising in the North East of India when RSS is present there and is abducting girls to teach them Gayatri Mantra?
6. What is the fabled 'Hindu Rashtra' after all?
August 17, 2020
Original review posted here https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiansRead/...
The book is divided into 6 parts by the author.
It starts with pointing out some problematic terminology, words that have been misinterpreted or rather misused grossly, such as "Hindu Revivalism", "Hindutva", "Secularism", "Hindu Nationalism", "Hindu fundamentalist and traditionalist", Gandhian secularism", "Marxism", among some others. The author explains how these words came into being and what they actually mean. The author also provides a detailed account of how these words have wrongly been used by politicians, academics, media (both Indian and Foreign), to portray Hindu organizations in a bad light. The author argues how India has never truly been secular in the western sense because of "appeasement". The author cites several cases such as "Satanic verses" and 'Shah Bano case" to expose the situation. He also brings in light the control of Marxism in Indian politics, academics, and the media. He then goes on to expose the unabashed bias of the media and people writing regarding the situation (Asghar Ali Engineer, Romila Thapar, etc.) within and outside India against the Hindus, and favoring the Muslims in the name of "Secularism". He shows how the Hindu voices have been ignored in discussion of relevant cases and how they have been wrongly accused of being "communal" whereas the people being favored are the ones blatantly advocating such policies.
Next, an entire chapter is dedicated to a historical survey to give a factual framework of historical data concerning the protagonists of Hindu revivalist politics and ideology. He starts by calling it the "Hindu Renaissance". He mentions the very first organizations and individuals who led the Hindu revivalist politics and ideology, he mentions Brahmo samaj, Arya samaj, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo amongst others. He briefly mentions their stance on Hindu revivalism, activities undertaken by them and how they differed from each other. Next, he talks about mostly the political organizations and individuals who are relevant to the topic. He brings up Congress and Muslim league and shows the appeasement towards Muslims, talks about how early Hindu Mahasabha was inclined towards the orthodox and conservative lines, and how it reformed after the rise of Savarkar. He mentions the murder of Mahatma Gandhi and how the Hindu organizations were cracked down upon. Next, he shifts his focus on the Sangh Parivar and the eminent personalities. He focuses on the Jana Sangh, their formation, their commitments, the role of people like Deendayal Upadhyaya, and Balraj Madhok and their role during the time of emergency. Next comes the BJP, which is discussed in detail, about how it was formed, what it stood for, and how it was different from existing Hindu organizations, and how it rose to power. He debunks the popular argument that the BJP is a "communal" or "pro-caste system" using several examples. He also briefly mentions Vishwa Hindu Parishad's stance on Hindu agenda. Then, he mentions some related parties, such as the Swatantra Party, Shiv Sena, discussing their ideologies. Lastly, independent Hindu authors, their works against communists and in favor of hindu revivalist movement, and how they have been largely neglected in the relevant discussions and termed as "communal".
The next part talks about the ideology and polemic in the organized Hindu movement, the author, in detail, criticizes the Sangh's anti-intellectualism, and shows how this has hampered in bringing out the Hindu's side of the story, how their no media presence has hurt them dearly in important events such as emergency and the Ayodhya episode, and the same scheme has been followed by the BJP as well. The author talks about hindu criticism of the RSS for this anti-intellectual stance, he sources extensively from Sita Ram Goel and Abhas Chatterjee to show the shortcomings of the Sangh Parivar. Next he talks about Sangh and non-sangh polemic against Christianity, Marxism, Communism, and Islam, all leading to the conclusion that they have been exceptionally weak polemics carried out by the Sangh, and very limited by the non-sangh Hindus as well, whereas the sangh is attacked viciously by their opponents. He talks about Islam in detail, and shows how the stance taken by the Sangh is no less than appeasement and goes on to prove how the sangh is more nationalistic than Hindu as claimed by their opponents. He junks the notion that "Islam is egalitarian" which is generally towed by Marxist and Islam apologetics using ample evidence from previous writings and exposes the evils of the Mughal rulers.
In the end parts of the book, the author discusses the idea of a Hindu state, Hindu nation. He discusses the idea of Hindu nationalism as given by people like Sri Aurobindo, and how it equates to Indian nationalism. Then he looks at the views of some other writers such as Arun Shourie, Balraj Madhok, V.D. Savarkar on the subject and finally the RSS and BJP views on this, and how they have no clarity on this subject which has harmed them severely and a lot of Hindu revivalists feel let down by such approach from the perceived Hindu organizations. He also looks at the polemics of Nehruvian secularists and Marxists against this idea of Hindu revivalists. Finally, the author turns towards the specific Hindu grievances against the policies adopted, he mentions the injustice in the discourse, regarding Hindu victims of the Kashmir violence, and other communal violence and shows how the media happily adopts the version bashing the Hindus even if it is not supported by any facts whatsoever, but tends to shy away when Muslims are in question, also mentions how BJP and the Hindus have been demonized by accusing them of absurd things which are often too exaggerated, but nonetheless find acceptance. Then he talks about legal discrimination by citing Article 30, and some other articles along the same lines, he talks about conversion laws, state control over the temples, talks about lack of common civil code, and exposes the hypocrisy of the secularists on this issue, and how BJP has been the only one who has been in support of this law, but it has preferred to stay away from it for various reasons.
Overall, this is a very good read, full of insights and a deep exploration into sensitive issues that have plagued the Hindus for decades. A much-needed reality check for the so-called Hindu organizations such as RSS, why they have an image as we see today, what they lack in their strategy. Explores how certain self-proclaimed secularists have hounded out certain people and organizations from key institutions because they don't fit their flawed version of Secularism, etc. I felt that the book is very well researched, and brings forth things and ideas that wouldn't normally come up because of how the system has worked for decades. I would suggest everyone interested in this subject to read it.
BY user eternalrocket (u/eternalrocket)
The book is divided into 6 parts by the author.
It starts with pointing out some problematic terminology, words that have been misinterpreted or rather misused grossly, such as "Hindu Revivalism", "Hindutva", "Secularism", "Hindu Nationalism", "Hindu fundamentalist and traditionalist", Gandhian secularism", "Marxism", among some others. The author explains how these words came into being and what they actually mean. The author also provides a detailed account of how these words have wrongly been used by politicians, academics, media (both Indian and Foreign), to portray Hindu organizations in a bad light. The author argues how India has never truly been secular in the western sense because of "appeasement". The author cites several cases such as "Satanic verses" and 'Shah Bano case" to expose the situation. He also brings in light the control of Marxism in Indian politics, academics, and the media. He then goes on to expose the unabashed bias of the media and people writing regarding the situation (Asghar Ali Engineer, Romila Thapar, etc.) within and outside India against the Hindus, and favoring the Muslims in the name of "Secularism". He shows how the Hindu voices have been ignored in discussion of relevant cases and how they have been wrongly accused of being "communal" whereas the people being favored are the ones blatantly advocating such policies.
Next, an entire chapter is dedicated to a historical survey to give a factual framework of historical data concerning the protagonists of Hindu revivalist politics and ideology. He starts by calling it the "Hindu Renaissance". He mentions the very first organizations and individuals who led the Hindu revivalist politics and ideology, he mentions Brahmo samaj, Arya samaj, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo amongst others. He briefly mentions their stance on Hindu revivalism, activities undertaken by them and how they differed from each other. Next, he talks about mostly the political organizations and individuals who are relevant to the topic. He brings up Congress and Muslim league and shows the appeasement towards Muslims, talks about how early Hindu Mahasabha was inclined towards the orthodox and conservative lines, and how it reformed after the rise of Savarkar. He mentions the murder of Mahatma Gandhi and how the Hindu organizations were cracked down upon. Next, he shifts his focus on the Sangh Parivar and the eminent personalities. He focuses on the Jana Sangh, their formation, their commitments, the role of people like Deendayal Upadhyaya, and Balraj Madhok and their role during the time of emergency. Next comes the BJP, which is discussed in detail, about how it was formed, what it stood for, and how it was different from existing Hindu organizations, and how it rose to power. He debunks the popular argument that the BJP is a "communal" or "pro-caste system" using several examples. He also briefly mentions Vishwa Hindu Parishad's stance on Hindu agenda. Then, he mentions some related parties, such as the Swatantra Party, Shiv Sena, discussing their ideologies. Lastly, independent Hindu authors, their works against communists and in favor of hindu revivalist movement, and how they have been largely neglected in the relevant discussions and termed as "communal".
The next part talks about the ideology and polemic in the organized Hindu movement, the author, in detail, criticizes the Sangh's anti-intellectualism, and shows how this has hampered in bringing out the Hindu's side of the story, how their no media presence has hurt them dearly in important events such as emergency and the Ayodhya episode, and the same scheme has been followed by the BJP as well. The author talks about hindu criticism of the RSS for this anti-intellectual stance, he sources extensively from Sita Ram Goel and Abhas Chatterjee to show the shortcomings of the Sangh Parivar. Next he talks about Sangh and non-sangh polemic against Christianity, Marxism, Communism, and Islam, all leading to the conclusion that they have been exceptionally weak polemics carried out by the Sangh, and very limited by the non-sangh Hindus as well, whereas the sangh is attacked viciously by their opponents. He talks about Islam in detail, and shows how the stance taken by the Sangh is no less than appeasement and goes on to prove how the sangh is more nationalistic than Hindu as claimed by their opponents. He junks the notion that "Islam is egalitarian" which is generally towed by Marxist and Islam apologetics using ample evidence from previous writings and exposes the evils of the Mughal rulers.
In the end parts of the book, the author discusses the idea of a Hindu state, Hindu nation. He discusses the idea of Hindu nationalism as given by people like Sri Aurobindo, and how it equates to Indian nationalism. Then he looks at the views of some other writers such as Arun Shourie, Balraj Madhok, V.D. Savarkar on the subject and finally the RSS and BJP views on this, and how they have no clarity on this subject which has harmed them severely and a lot of Hindu revivalists feel let down by such approach from the perceived Hindu organizations. He also looks at the polemics of Nehruvian secularists and Marxists against this idea of Hindu revivalists. Finally, the author turns towards the specific Hindu grievances against the policies adopted, he mentions the injustice in the discourse, regarding Hindu victims of the Kashmir violence, and other communal violence and shows how the media happily adopts the version bashing the Hindus even if it is not supported by any facts whatsoever, but tends to shy away when Muslims are in question, also mentions how BJP and the Hindus have been demonized by accusing them of absurd things which are often too exaggerated, but nonetheless find acceptance. Then he talks about legal discrimination by citing Article 30, and some other articles along the same lines, he talks about conversion laws, state control over the temples, talks about lack of common civil code, and exposes the hypocrisy of the secularists on this issue, and how BJP has been the only one who has been in support of this law, but it has preferred to stay away from it for various reasons.
Overall, this is a very good read, full of insights and a deep exploration into sensitive issues that have plagued the Hindus for decades. A much-needed reality check for the so-called Hindu organizations such as RSS, why they have an image as we see today, what they lack in their strategy. Explores how certain self-proclaimed secularists have hounded out certain people and organizations from key institutions because they don't fit their flawed version of Secularism, etc. I felt that the book is very well researched, and brings forth things and ideas that wouldn't normally come up because of how the system has worked for decades. I would suggest everyone interested in this subject to read it.
BY user eternalrocket (u/eternalrocket)
November 29, 2017
This book by Koenraad Elst gives a brief overview about the Hindu revivalism moment. books covers the excerpts,works and comparison of various modern Hindu revivalist thinkers ranging from Sita Ram Goel,Ram Swarup,Arun Shourie.History and ideologies of organisations like Arya Samaj,Bhramo Samaj,Hindu Mahasabha,RSS,VHP,BJS,BJP are also dealt with. Sri Aurobindo's,Vivekananda,Pt. Deendayal Upadhaya,V.D Savarkar ideas on Hinduism are also compared. legal(article 26,30,370,371),cultural, media discrimination faced by Hindus today is also stated at the end of this book.book also states idea of "Hindu State" and "Hindu Rashtra" as viewed by many ideologues.
A recommended book to all those who wish to study in deep about the Hindu revivalism movement and challenges it faces in India today.
A recommended book to all those who wish to study in deep about the Hindu revivalism movement and challenges it faces in India today.
May 9, 2019
Every Hindu should read this book. Book is well researched and have a great insight. I think i have almost read all of his books excluding 2 books -
1. Still No Trace of an Aryan Invasion
2. Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars(above to release).
All of his books are must read. Its quite informative for me atleast. Its a shame that he is not in mainstream.
1. Still No Trace of an Aryan Invasion
2. Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars(above to release).
All of his books are must read. Its quite informative for me atleast. Its a shame that he is not in mainstream.
May 8, 2019
Koenraad Elst as usual at his scholarly best, lists out the historical development of Hindu revivalism in the polity of India. Relying on primary sources, the book describes the various organizations and the movements that emerged as a response to colonialism and rival Abrahamic religions. It also talks at detail the shortcomings of the Hindu revivalist movement. The book is absolutely a must read for anyone interested in genuinely understand the much maligned Hindu Renaissance movement.
January 6, 2022
An exhaustive, well written history of Hindu nationalism and Hindu identity in 19th and 20th century India. Having read a lot of South Asian history over 40 years, I would call this an essential book to understand the evolution and ideas about Hindu political movements.
August 11, 2020
A must read brilliant book. You to need read to understand what it is written. Book like this cant be review.
December 30, 2021
This is a magnum opus work, needs to be reread multiple times to know and understand it better.
April 25, 2021
A good historicity of comparative political ideology of schema origin
May 20, 2021
Very impressed !!! This is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding 'Hindu revivalism' and related movements in India.
The book was based on the doctoral dissertation of the same author, it presents an exhaustively detailed, and extremely well-researched account of the Hindu revival movement, Often citing primary sources. He dives deep into various talking points/ concerns of the Hindu revival movement, the various political philosophy, and organizations within Hindu revival movements, personalities, historic events associated with them, and so on. All of these are analyzed in great detail, with proper citations and great attention to detail.
Anyone familiar with Elst and his works knows his ideological inclinations, but still, I am sure even a staunch critique of Elst's views or the Hindu revivalist movement in general, will be able to appreciate his effort in presenting the Hindu revivalist point of view with such objectivity. I just loved how spot-on he was with many of his analyses, especially when it came to the criticism regarding the anti-intellectualism tendency among a few of the Sangh affiliates.
This book despite being 20+ years old, but still much of the issue discussed here continues to dominate the political discourse today. Also, was able to connect the dots and put perspectives on a lot of what's happening today.
Very underrated book, I don't think there has ever been such a detailed account on the same topic before. I would consider it as one of the most seminal works on the Indian RW movement. Doesn't matter whether you are a critique or sympathetic to the movement. This book is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the ideology/s that drives the current political dispensation in India.
The book was based on the doctoral dissertation of the same author, it presents an exhaustively detailed, and extremely well-researched account of the Hindu revival movement, Often citing primary sources. He dives deep into various talking points/ concerns of the Hindu revival movement, the various political philosophy, and organizations within Hindu revival movements, personalities, historic events associated with them, and so on. All of these are analyzed in great detail, with proper citations and great attention to detail.
Anyone familiar with Elst and his works knows his ideological inclinations, but still, I am sure even a staunch critique of Elst's views or the Hindu revivalist movement in general, will be able to appreciate his effort in presenting the Hindu revivalist point of view with such objectivity. I just loved how spot-on he was with many of his analyses, especially when it came to the criticism regarding the anti-intellectualism tendency among a few of the Sangh affiliates.
This book despite being 20+ years old, but still much of the issue discussed here continues to dominate the political discourse today. Also, was able to connect the dots and put perspectives on a lot of what's happening today.
Very underrated book, I don't think there has ever been such a detailed account on the same topic before. I would consider it as one of the most seminal works on the Indian RW movement. Doesn't matter whether you are a critique or sympathetic to the movement. This book is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the ideology/s that drives the current political dispensation in India.
September 13, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads # Hindutva, Indic
This is one of those books that sits uneasily between scholarship and polemic, analysis and advocacy, critique and celebration. Published in 2001, it is in many ways a summation of Elst’s long engagement with the intellectual traditions of Hindutva, that broad and often contested term which signals both a political ideology and a civilizational identity.
For Elst, the task is clear: to take seriously, and to reconstruct with intellectual rigour, the history of Hindu revivalist thought from the nineteenth century to the present. His title is a manifesto in itself: the “Hindu mind” has been colonised, distorted by centuries of Muslim rule and British imperialism, and the act of revivalism is nothing less than an attempt to cleanse, reclaim, and reassert that mind in its own terms.
The boldness of this claim cannot be overstated. By invoking “decolonization,” Elst positions Hindu revivalism not as a reactionary backlash, as it is often described by secular Indian historians, but as a legitimate project of intellectual emancipation.
Just as African, Asian, and Latin American nations sought to decolonize their political and cultural selves in the twentieth century, so too, he argues, does Hinduism need to undergo a similar process: stripping away the accretions of colonial discourse, re-evaluating itself in its own categories, and refusing the epistemological dominance of the West. In doing so, Elst reframes Hindutva not as an aberration, but as an inevitable and even necessary response to the long shadow of colonial modernity.
What makes Decolonizing the Hindu Mind more than a polemical tract, however, is Elst’s extraordinary archival reach. He is deeply read in both the canonical figures of Hindu nationalism and the obscure pamphleteers, ideologues, and reformers whose names are often lost to footnotes.
The book reconstructs a genealogy that stretches from the nineteenth century reform movements — Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Dayananda Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda — to the explicitly political articulations of V.D. Savarkar, K.B. Hedgewar, and M.S. Golwalkar. Along the way, Elst excavates debates over caste reform, women’s rights, science, history-writing, and education, showing how these were always inflected by the larger question of Hindu selfhood.
The result is a text that insists on taking Hindutva seriously as an intellectual movement. Too often, he argues, both Indian secularists and Western scholars dismiss it as mere communalism, as an opportunistic mobilization of religious identity for political gain. Elst will have none of this.
For him, Hindutva is a sustained, decades-long attempt to theorize Hindu identity under conditions of subordination. It is not simply reactive; it is creative, generating new categories of thought, new ways of imagining collective life, and new visions of India itself.
This insistence is both the book’s strength and its provocation. On the one hand, Elst is right to remind us that ideas matter, that movements like Hindutva cannot be reduced to crude materialist explanations. To understand the rise of Hindu nationalism, one must understand the ideological soil from which it grew.
On the other hand, Elst’s sympathy with his subject sometimes tips into advocacy. He writes not only to explain Hindutva but to defend it, to argue that its critics have misrepresented it, and to suggest that its project of decolonization is both just and overdue.
This raises the perennial question about the role of the scholar: can one both analyse and advocate? Elst’s critics accuse him of crossing the line into propaganda, of writing not as a detached observer but as an apologist for the Hindu Right.
They point out that his revisionist readings of history often align suspiciously with Hindutva narratives — for example, his downplaying of communal violence perpetrated by Hindu groups, or his insistence on Muslim aggression as the defining trauma of Hindu history. For these critics, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind is less scholarship than legitimisation, an intellectual scaffolding for an ideology that is exclusionary and majoritarian.
And yet, to dismiss the book entirely would be a mistake. Precisely because Elst refuses to caricature Hindutva, he forces his readers to grapple with it in its full intellectual complexity. He makes visible the ways in which Hindu nationalism has engaged with questions of modernity, science, secularism, and democracy — not always rejecting them, but reinterpreting them through a civilizational lens. He shows how Hindutva thinkers have debated among themselves, disagreed, refined their arguments, and responded to changing political contexts.
In doing so, he destabilises the easy liberal narrative of Hindutva as an irrational atavism. It is, rather, a modern ideology, deeply shaped by the intellectual currents of its time.
Reading the book today, nearly a quarter century after its publication, one is struck by its prescience. When Elst wrote, the BJP had already emerged as a political force, but the cultural hegemony of Hindutva was not yet secure.
Two decades later, it is clear that the project of “decolonizing the Hindu mind” has moved from the margins to the mainstream. The rewriting of history textbooks, the resurgence of temple politics, the debates over “Indic knowledge systems,” the assertion of Hindu identity in global forums — all of these can be traced to the ideological genealogy Elst reconstructs. His book reads less like a history and more like a forecast, an early mapping of the terrain that would come to define India’s twenty-first century.
But this very resonance also sharpens the need for critical distance. If Elst is right that Hindutva is a project of intellectual decolonization, we must still ask: what kind of decolonization is it? Unlike other decolonial movements, which often emphasize pluralism, hybridity, and resistance to essentialism, Hindutva’s version tends toward homogenization.
It seeks to unify the vast diversity of Hindu traditions under a single banner, often at the cost of erasing regional, caste, and sectarian differences. It defines itself against the “Other,” particularly Muslims and Christians, in ways that can slide into exclusionary politics. Elst acknowledges these tendencies but does not adequately interrogate them. His sympathy blinds him to the dangers of a decolonization that becomes domination.
And yet, for all its biases, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind raises questions that cannot be ignored:
**What does it mean for a civilization to think in its own categories?
**How should societies scarred by colonialism reclaim their pasts without succumbing to chauvinism?
**Can revivalism coexist with pluralism, or is it doomed to erase difference in the name of unity?
These are not abstract questions; they are at the heart of India’s present. By insisting that we take them seriously, Elst performs a kind of intellectual provocation that is, in its own way, valuable.
The experience of reading Elst is therefore double-edged. On the one hand, one is impressed by the depth of his research, the range of his references, the clarity with which he outlines the intellectual development of Hindu revivalism. On the other, one is wary of his conclusions, the way his narratives align so neatly with Hindutva apologetics.
The reader oscillates between admiration and suspicion, fascination and discomfort. Perhaps this is as it should be. To engage with Elst is to be drawn into the very tension he describes: the tension between colonization and decolonization, between self-assertion and exclusion, between history and myth.
In the wider landscape of scholarship, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind stands as an outlier. It is not written in the cautious, measured prose of academic history. It is bold, opinionated, willing to take sides. In this sense, it mirrors the very subject it describes: Hindu revivalism itself was never timid. It was brash, provocative, unapologetic.
Elst writes in that same spirit, and whether one agrees with him or not, one cannot accuse him of cowardice. He has thrown his lot in with a controversial ideology, and he defends it with the zeal of a convert. That makes his work dangerous, but it also makes it compelling.
Reflecting on the book now, one might say that Elst has achieved his goal, though perhaps not in the way he intended. He wanted to decolonize the Hindu mind by giving Hindutva an intellectual genealogy.
In doing so, he has also decolonized the reader’s complacency, forcing us to reckon with the seriousness of an ideology we might prefer to dismiss. Even if one rejects his conclusions, one cannot walk away from his book without recognising that Hindutva is here to stay, that it is rooted in a century of ideological development, and that it cannot be wished away by denunciation alone. To understand India today, one must understand the story Elst tells, even if one tells it differently.
At nearly five hundred pages, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind is not light reading. It demands patience, critical vigilance, and a willingness to be unsettled. But it rewards that effort with a sweeping overview of a movement that has reshaped Indian politics and culture.
Like all powerful books, it leaves the reader not with answers but with questions — questions that will shape the way we think about identity, history, and the future of pluralism in India.
In the end, perhaps the most honest way to read Elst is to treat him as both scholar and partisan, both analyst and advocate. To read him is to enter a dialogue, not to accept his conclusions wholesale. He offers a map, but it is up to the reader to decide whether the terrain it describes is liberating or constraining, inclusive or exclusionary. In that sense, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind is itself a site of contestation, a book that demands we argue with it as much as we learn from it.
As a reflective reading, it reveals the paradox at the heart of modern India: the desire to shed colonial categories, to reclaim one’s own history, and yet the risk that in doing so, one reproduces new forms of domination. Elst celebrates the former and downplays the latter. Our task as readers is to hold both in view, to recognize the power and the peril of decolonization when it becomes revivalism.
On balance, then, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind is indispensable, not because it is correct, but because it is influential, provocative, and revealing. It is a book that helps explain why Hindutva has captured the imagination of millions, and why it continues to define the terms of debate in contemporary India. To read it is to understand not just a movement but a mindset, a way of seeing the world that insists on boldness, on reclamation, on self-definition. Whether one celebrates or resists that mindset, one cannot ignore it.
And perhaps that is the final irony. Elst wanted to decolonize the Hindu mind, but in doing so he has also unsettled the liberal mind, the secular mind, the complacent mind. He has forced a confrontation with an ideology that is no longer fringe but central. For that reason alone, his book deserves attention, critique, and reflection. In an era where India’s future hangs in the balance between pluralism and majoritarianism, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind is less a settled verdict than a provocation — a reminder that the battle of ideas is as crucial as the battle of ballots, and that the decolonization of the mind is always, inevitably, a contested process.
This is one of those books that sits uneasily between scholarship and polemic, analysis and advocacy, critique and celebration. Published in 2001, it is in many ways a summation of Elst’s long engagement with the intellectual traditions of Hindutva, that broad and often contested term which signals both a political ideology and a civilizational identity.
For Elst, the task is clear: to take seriously, and to reconstruct with intellectual rigour, the history of Hindu revivalist thought from the nineteenth century to the present. His title is a manifesto in itself: the “Hindu mind” has been colonised, distorted by centuries of Muslim rule and British imperialism, and the act of revivalism is nothing less than an attempt to cleanse, reclaim, and reassert that mind in its own terms.
The boldness of this claim cannot be overstated. By invoking “decolonization,” Elst positions Hindu revivalism not as a reactionary backlash, as it is often described by secular Indian historians, but as a legitimate project of intellectual emancipation.
Just as African, Asian, and Latin American nations sought to decolonize their political and cultural selves in the twentieth century, so too, he argues, does Hinduism need to undergo a similar process: stripping away the accretions of colonial discourse, re-evaluating itself in its own categories, and refusing the epistemological dominance of the West. In doing so, Elst reframes Hindutva not as an aberration, but as an inevitable and even necessary response to the long shadow of colonial modernity.
What makes Decolonizing the Hindu Mind more than a polemical tract, however, is Elst’s extraordinary archival reach. He is deeply read in both the canonical figures of Hindu nationalism and the obscure pamphleteers, ideologues, and reformers whose names are often lost to footnotes.
The book reconstructs a genealogy that stretches from the nineteenth century reform movements — Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Dayananda Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda — to the explicitly political articulations of V.D. Savarkar, K.B. Hedgewar, and M.S. Golwalkar. Along the way, Elst excavates debates over caste reform, women’s rights, science, history-writing, and education, showing how these were always inflected by the larger question of Hindu selfhood.
The result is a text that insists on taking Hindutva seriously as an intellectual movement. Too often, he argues, both Indian secularists and Western scholars dismiss it as mere communalism, as an opportunistic mobilization of religious identity for political gain. Elst will have none of this.
For him, Hindutva is a sustained, decades-long attempt to theorize Hindu identity under conditions of subordination. It is not simply reactive; it is creative, generating new categories of thought, new ways of imagining collective life, and new visions of India itself.
This insistence is both the book’s strength and its provocation. On the one hand, Elst is right to remind us that ideas matter, that movements like Hindutva cannot be reduced to crude materialist explanations. To understand the rise of Hindu nationalism, one must understand the ideological soil from which it grew.
On the other hand, Elst’s sympathy with his subject sometimes tips into advocacy. He writes not only to explain Hindutva but to defend it, to argue that its critics have misrepresented it, and to suggest that its project of decolonization is both just and overdue.
This raises the perennial question about the role of the scholar: can one both analyse and advocate? Elst’s critics accuse him of crossing the line into propaganda, of writing not as a detached observer but as an apologist for the Hindu Right.
They point out that his revisionist readings of history often align suspiciously with Hindutva narratives — for example, his downplaying of communal violence perpetrated by Hindu groups, or his insistence on Muslim aggression as the defining trauma of Hindu history. For these critics, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind is less scholarship than legitimisation, an intellectual scaffolding for an ideology that is exclusionary and majoritarian.
And yet, to dismiss the book entirely would be a mistake. Precisely because Elst refuses to caricature Hindutva, he forces his readers to grapple with it in its full intellectual complexity. He makes visible the ways in which Hindu nationalism has engaged with questions of modernity, science, secularism, and democracy — not always rejecting them, but reinterpreting them through a civilizational lens. He shows how Hindutva thinkers have debated among themselves, disagreed, refined their arguments, and responded to changing political contexts.
In doing so, he destabilises the easy liberal narrative of Hindutva as an irrational atavism. It is, rather, a modern ideology, deeply shaped by the intellectual currents of its time.
Reading the book today, nearly a quarter century after its publication, one is struck by its prescience. When Elst wrote, the BJP had already emerged as a political force, but the cultural hegemony of Hindutva was not yet secure.
Two decades later, it is clear that the project of “decolonizing the Hindu mind” has moved from the margins to the mainstream. The rewriting of history textbooks, the resurgence of temple politics, the debates over “Indic knowledge systems,” the assertion of Hindu identity in global forums — all of these can be traced to the ideological genealogy Elst reconstructs. His book reads less like a history and more like a forecast, an early mapping of the terrain that would come to define India’s twenty-first century.
But this very resonance also sharpens the need for critical distance. If Elst is right that Hindutva is a project of intellectual decolonization, we must still ask: what kind of decolonization is it? Unlike other decolonial movements, which often emphasize pluralism, hybridity, and resistance to essentialism, Hindutva’s version tends toward homogenization.
It seeks to unify the vast diversity of Hindu traditions under a single banner, often at the cost of erasing regional, caste, and sectarian differences. It defines itself against the “Other,” particularly Muslims and Christians, in ways that can slide into exclusionary politics. Elst acknowledges these tendencies but does not adequately interrogate them. His sympathy blinds him to the dangers of a decolonization that becomes domination.
And yet, for all its biases, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind raises questions that cannot be ignored:
**What does it mean for a civilization to think in its own categories?
**How should societies scarred by colonialism reclaim their pasts without succumbing to chauvinism?
**Can revivalism coexist with pluralism, or is it doomed to erase difference in the name of unity?
These are not abstract questions; they are at the heart of India’s present. By insisting that we take them seriously, Elst performs a kind of intellectual provocation that is, in its own way, valuable.
The experience of reading Elst is therefore double-edged. On the one hand, one is impressed by the depth of his research, the range of his references, the clarity with which he outlines the intellectual development of Hindu revivalism. On the other, one is wary of his conclusions, the way his narratives align so neatly with Hindutva apologetics.
The reader oscillates between admiration and suspicion, fascination and discomfort. Perhaps this is as it should be. To engage with Elst is to be drawn into the very tension he describes: the tension between colonization and decolonization, between self-assertion and exclusion, between history and myth.
In the wider landscape of scholarship, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind stands as an outlier. It is not written in the cautious, measured prose of academic history. It is bold, opinionated, willing to take sides. In this sense, it mirrors the very subject it describes: Hindu revivalism itself was never timid. It was brash, provocative, unapologetic.
Elst writes in that same spirit, and whether one agrees with him or not, one cannot accuse him of cowardice. He has thrown his lot in with a controversial ideology, and he defends it with the zeal of a convert. That makes his work dangerous, but it also makes it compelling.
Reflecting on the book now, one might say that Elst has achieved his goal, though perhaps not in the way he intended. He wanted to decolonize the Hindu mind by giving Hindutva an intellectual genealogy.
In doing so, he has also decolonized the reader’s complacency, forcing us to reckon with the seriousness of an ideology we might prefer to dismiss. Even if one rejects his conclusions, one cannot walk away from his book without recognising that Hindutva is here to stay, that it is rooted in a century of ideological development, and that it cannot be wished away by denunciation alone. To understand India today, one must understand the story Elst tells, even if one tells it differently.
At nearly five hundred pages, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind is not light reading. It demands patience, critical vigilance, and a willingness to be unsettled. But it rewards that effort with a sweeping overview of a movement that has reshaped Indian politics and culture.
Like all powerful books, it leaves the reader not with answers but with questions — questions that will shape the way we think about identity, history, and the future of pluralism in India.
In the end, perhaps the most honest way to read Elst is to treat him as both scholar and partisan, both analyst and advocate. To read him is to enter a dialogue, not to accept his conclusions wholesale. He offers a map, but it is up to the reader to decide whether the terrain it describes is liberating or constraining, inclusive or exclusionary. In that sense, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind is itself a site of contestation, a book that demands we argue with it as much as we learn from it.
As a reflective reading, it reveals the paradox at the heart of modern India: the desire to shed colonial categories, to reclaim one’s own history, and yet the risk that in doing so, one reproduces new forms of domination. Elst celebrates the former and downplays the latter. Our task as readers is to hold both in view, to recognize the power and the peril of decolonization when it becomes revivalism.
On balance, then, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind is indispensable, not because it is correct, but because it is influential, provocative, and revealing. It is a book that helps explain why Hindutva has captured the imagination of millions, and why it continues to define the terms of debate in contemporary India. To read it is to understand not just a movement but a mindset, a way of seeing the world that insists on boldness, on reclamation, on self-definition. Whether one celebrates or resists that mindset, one cannot ignore it.
And perhaps that is the final irony. Elst wanted to decolonize the Hindu mind, but in doing so he has also unsettled the liberal mind, the secular mind, the complacent mind. He has forced a confrontation with an ideology that is no longer fringe but central. For that reason alone, his book deserves attention, critique, and reflection. In an era where India’s future hangs in the balance between pluralism and majoritarianism, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind is less a settled verdict than a provocation — a reminder that the battle of ideas is as crucial as the battle of ballots, and that the decolonization of the mind is always, inevitably, a contested process.
February 12, 2022
At the very least, one sees a comparatively objective stance from the author, comparatively because from time to time the outsider who is capable of understanding India nevertheless needs to step back and reassure his ilk that he hasn't "gone native" - one sees it with Mark Tully, one sees it with Ruskin Bond, and with visitors from U.S. who praise india until suddenly thry question why Pakistan didnt get an equal share of land if India - and get progressively worse from thereon. Elst isnt that silly, of course, but he goes a tiny part of the way to where author of Three Cups Of Tea takes his stance for a few words, notably in his work titled Return of the Swastika.
Here, he begins with an extensive introduction, leaving very little out for anyone new to the subject, so much so one wonders what he's leaving for the rest of the book.
"It should be clear, however, that this Orientalist construction could not have come about without a certain basis in reality. Though “tolerance” is a very recent addition to the Hindu religious vocabulary, the historical reality of Hindu society is that foreign and dissident religions were effectively tolerated, as proven by the history of the Jews or the Parsis in India. Likewise, there is much truth in Voltaire’s enthusiastic Orientalist assumption that unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Indian and Chinese “religions” were not based on prophetic “revelations” but on a purely human contemplation of reality. Or for a similar example pertaining to Islam: the Orientalist association of Islam with sensuality was partly the result of internal European concerns in the Victorian Age, but it was none the less correct in so far as Islam does have a more positive appreciation of sex than Christianity."
Or it was just Arabian Nights?
Meanwhile, what's that about "Indian and Chinese “religions” were not based on prophetic “revelations” but on a purely human contemplation of reality."? Chinese, yes, but Indian, not same, not all of them - definitely some, if not all, are held as Divine revelations, such as Vedas, first and foremost; Bhagawadgeeta is in fact held as Truth shown and told by God Krishna in person as a conversation with his friend and cousin, Arjuna. Upanishads are by seers, explaining Vedas, but much of the later work and pronouncements by saints, seers et al is held as coming through vua human from Divine, depending on quality of inspiration perceptible.
The difference is NOT that Indian scriptures are not held as revelations; the difference is in their being held as treasure, compared to a university library, available to seekers of knowledge, not an instrument of power, of enforcement, imposed as exclusive belief.
"This then is also the reason for Hindu hostility to Islam as enunciated in numerous Hindu revivalist texts. Islam’s difference or “Otherness” has nothing to do with it, as the Hindu record of hospitality to the Moplahs (“sons-in-law”, Arab traders who married Hindu girls in Kerala) shows. But Hindus perceive Islam as anti-pluralistic and intolerant of what is from the Islamic viewpoint the “Otherness” of Hinduism.111 For this reason, they use the same somewhat inflated references to the Holocaust when speaking of their experiences with Islam, notably the Partition massacres of 1947 and the Bengali genocide of 1971. It is undeniable that there exists a widespread hostility to Islam among Hindus, and that this hostility is articulated if not cultivated by a number of Hindu revivalist authors; but it is sloppy thinking to construe this hostility in the fashionable terminology of “Otherness”."
"Somewhat inflated"??? Estimated numbers by European scholars are to the tune of a hundred million over the millennium that Islamic onslaught was suffered by India, and this was not part of soldiers slain in battles but civilians massacred regardless of age, gender or anything else (apart from kidnappings and rapes of women that drove India to change conduct regarding free movement of women in at least North India), all atrocities perpetratrated in name of religion, an uncivilized conduct unimaginable in India until Islamic invasions.
" ... The English-speaking elite, by contrast, and its mediatic and academic segments in particular, are the cultural heirs of the colonial system and consequently the enemies of Hindu Revivalism. This includes those Marxists who have always been up in arms against real or perceived forms of neo-colonialism in the political and economic sphere: “Those members of the Third World elite who never lose an opportunity to lash out against the West have been the worst affected by the colonisation of the mind. They speak in the language of the opponents and subscribe to their values.”
Westernisation isn't opposed or ridiculed in India by Hindus except in its harmful or ridiculous aspects, from fraudulent propaganda against Hinduism to wearing woollen suits in searing heat; some sections took to westernisation quickly, such as Punjab taking to bobbed hair and lipsticks, while others such as South Indians went more for women's education on par with males, without aping fashions. Having suffered much less from Islamic invasions as North India did, freedom of movement for women was far less affected, as evident even in differences between North versus South in traditional Hindu weddings as practiced, so this advance in education was all the more possible.
Elst labels France secular, which is only largely true. France still has most things closed on Sunday, and persecution of Hindu women apporting articles of dressing other than French (which in case of Hindu articles is not dangerous to public security as in case of Islamic veiling of women in black from head to foot), is not secular, to say the least. Nuns or bishops, or anyone else wearing a cross, for example, aren't persecuted for the same secularism! France may be more secular than say, Saudi Arabia, but persecution of Hindu women's dressing puts it below secularism in reality.
"Incidentally, this concealment job by Engineer and by the entire secularist academic establishment amounts to an unwitting admission of the outcome of the Ayodhya polemic: if a schoolboy comes home on Proclamation Day and remains conspicuously evasive about his exam results, you don’t have to actually see his report to know what those results are like. This may be an understandable ploy in the case of a losing contestant, but not in that of scholars pretending to be neutral reporters on a contest. To comment on such manipulation, we might take inspiration from Engineer’s own words on the same cover: “It is not only violence which has to be condemned but also distortion of history and intellectual dishonesty.”"
"Most consequentially, the Penguin book Anatomy of a Confrontation edited by S. Gopal, for most foreign India-watchers the only Ayodhya book within reach, carefully keeps Hindu contributions to the debate out of the picture. Thus, friend and foe have repeated again and again that the Vishva Hindu Parishad had a list of 3,000 mosques standing on the sites of (and often built with materials from) demolished temples.195 One would expect such a key document in such an earth-shaking controversy to be discussed threadbare by historians, but I invite the reader to go through the scholarly literature on the Ayodhya affair and locate even a single discussion of this list. In the vast majority of articles and books on the subject, it does not even figure in the bibliography."
That's precisely because it's true and they all know this, and too, that the number us small fraction if one considers ALL such destroyed temples and mosques or other structures built on the sites, including Taj Mahal.
They all know this, and are hoping following Hitler to stun and shut up Hindus by shouting a lie loudly. It's not that different from screaming at a woman to gorge her yo submit whether to rape or to agree to not reporting the rape or to lie that there had been none when they know its a lie - and it's not that different from shaking a crying baby, at that.
In this case, those shaking the baby don't care if the baby is dead as a result, as happened in the famous case in Boston against the English caretaker of the baby. All they want from Hindus, the last witnesses of murders of old vultures and civilisations by the two najor conversionist creeds imposed by colonial rules invading, is to provide silent slave labour, which is what Hitler wanted from all conquered populations.
"But strangely, while Indian secularist scholars don’t make the faintest attempt to keep up appearances of neutrality, most of their Western contacts, rather than hearing a professional alarm bell ring to put them on alert against biased information, simply follow suit. Indeed, to an extent, Western observers follow the lead of their Indian sources, and openly declare their partisan interest in the topic of “Hindu communalism”. Thus, an Australian professor starts out by calling the BJP “undoubtedly ‘a political problem’” and ends with lamenting “the evils of Hindutvism”."
That's because most of West so aligned against Hindus is aligned with Vatican as far as India goes, even if personally they select any of the other options including atheism. Israel might just be different, due to two reasons, and Judaism is as separated from Hinduism in its essential nature as are other Abraham's creeds, except the drive to convert everybody - that last bit again is where Israel is on the same side as India, hunted by Islam and church alike.
"In some cases, however, the Arya Samaj was simply right in claiming that Vedic norms were much closer to modern standards than to those of nineteenth-century Hinduism. Thus, caste oppression and untouchability are not mentioned in the Veda Samhitas. Similarly, the status of women in Vedic society was probably somewhat more equal with that of men, and their relations more relaxed, than in Hindu society of the Victorian age.11 When you consider certain cruel and wasteful Hindu rules of conduct, such as the prohibition of widow remarriage (often affecting child widows), or the loss of all proportion in the obsession with purity as expressed in the practice of untouchability, it is hard not to sympathize with the Arya Samaj project of returning to the Vedic outlook, which had at least been much closer to human common sense. The Vedic seers (some of them female) were adventurous and creative, while the Hindu of recent centuries was continually inhibited by fear of trespassing against a million scriptural rules, astrological warnings and the opprobrium of purity-conscious fellow-castemen."
They were following, subconsciously, the line of the foreign colonial rulers, of conversionist creeds, in blaming these ills on indigenous. If a factor such as lack of freedom for women or untouchability was nonexistent in vefic times and dies nit show in great epics, it must have arisen due to a foreign element, due to foreign practices that did not exist in India before invading barbarians brought in practices that had to be dealt with. Both the obvious ills that arose in Hinduism had to deal with those barbarians, chiefly with the invaders kidnappings of women who were thereby unable to move freely outdoors.
"The Arya Samaj generally blames the decline of Hindu civilization on purely Hindu factors, most notably “Brahminical priestcraft”, a scapegoat borrowed straight from Christian missionary anti-Brahminical polemic. This anti-Brahminism was, moreover, cast in the mould of Protestant anti-Popism, i.e. it was conceived as a restoration of the original divinely revealed doctrine against the distortive accretions of “tradition” and its wily guardians, the institutionalized priesthood."
It was easier and cheaper for them to blame Brahmins rather than the actual culprits - the invaders who were in power. If the practices were inherent to Hinduism Hindus would never agree to scrap them, but in fact the first person to go against untouchability was a Brahmin, long before British rule, and it had nothing to do with any proposal or thought from invader colonial rulers.
The following passage is highly objectionable.
"Another Bengali who made a lasting impression was Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902, civil name Narendranath Dutta). After going through the standard English school curriculum, he became a pupil of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa (1836-86), an ecstatic devotee of Goddess Kali who, though a married layman, acquired the aura of a great religious visionary. With his limited grounding in traditional religious training, Swami Vivekananda’s understanding of Hindu tradition as laid down in his handful of books on yoga is sometimes criticized as distorted and superficial."
That last sentence is simply untrue, unless one goes for an Humphrey Appleby argument such as " ... if they haven't been questioned, question them; then they have been questioned. "
In fact, the highest opinion on the topic, from highest possible source, is that Vivekananda was an Avataara, as was Buddha, and both of the same source Divine Shiva.
"Meanwhile, the destruction which a media bombardment with hostile opinion can work among the support base of a movement is enormous. So many Hindu intellectuals I have talked with were reluctant to come out in the open with their Hindutva sympathies because they felt intimidated by the secularist opinion constraints. During the Ayodhya crisis this went as far as pronouncing secularist opinions in the presence of a third person, only to retract those opinions as soon as we had the room to ourselves. Many potential Hindutva activists or sympathizers were exposed to the daily battering of the Hindutva movement in the media with hostile stories and opinions and ended up developing doubts about the Tightness of the Hindutva cause.
"What is more, sometimes the effects of a generalized anti-Hindu and anti-India bias get physical. Thus, a lot of the killing of Hindus and of Indian defence personnel in Panjab, Kashmir and the North-east was made possible by the diplomatic or indirect material support which the separatists there were receiving from foreign countries; and this support, in turn, was made possible by an anti-Hindu or anti-India tilt in Western media opinion.47 Why is American military aid to Pakistan not made conditional on the termination of Pakistani involvement in Kashmiri terrorism? Why is Western development aid to Bangladesh not made conditional on the termination of the country’s hospitality to separatist militias? Largely because no public opinion is created on these issues by a press which has otherwise amply proven that it can whip up public indignation in any direction desired (for example, to prepare NATO interventions in Iraq or ex-Yugoslavia). This means that Hindus and others have been killed as a consequence of the absence of the Hindu or even just a neutral perspective in the international media, whose reporting is based entirely on the most partisan English-language Indian media.
"Thus, if due publicity had been given to the expulsion of around 200,000 Hindus from Kashmir in early 1990 by the Muslim separatists, or to the instant expulsion of 50,000 Hindus from Kabul immediately after the Islamic conquest of the city in April 1992, this might have influenced world opinion in a pro-India and pro-Hindu sense.48 Now, most Westerners have never heard about the Hindu refugee problem, for most journalists including reputed India hands have simply kept it out of the picture.49 Where it was at all mentioned, it was given a vicious twist, for example: “The BJP … has told the Hindus to leave Kashmir, so that the Army could enter.”50 While refugees are normally the object of pity, The Economist called the Hindu refugees “cowards”.51"
If a rape victim is portrayed as inviting it, which is usually done, it's not the fault of the victim, it's that of those who are happy to absolve their conscience cheaply, so they need not fear about the perpetrators attacking them next. This is so about much of world events, from ceding Czechoslovakia in Munich to treatment of paedophile priests by general public and church, even after the scandal broke.
Fact is, it's easier to blame a victim, and it's done both ways. As Elst is doing now, blaming RSS and co for not screaming louder than the vicious Islamic jihadists and their convenient friends.
But then, who cared about Tibet, or refugees who managed to escape, or the Tibetans who were massacred, or those who are managing to survive without a voice, as slaves in their own country? Was it also responsibility only of India to shout about it? U.S. politicians and press shouted nonstop about Afghanistan when USSR was invited by Afghanistan to help against jihadists, until the publicity was used to cover up the real issue succeeded in camouflage of the real purpose, breaking up USSR. Does anyone care that Afghanistan meanwhile suffers ever since?
No, a terrorist factory is convenient, until it turns and bites the hand that feeds it, as jihadists did over two decades ago. And the stupidity of it all was Nixon befriending China until China has bought up US economy.
"Sometimes Western commentators have their own pro-Pakistani agenda (particularly British and American ones, because of the long-standing alliance of their countries with Pakistan), but mostly they get their inspiration from Indian opinion makers. Consider for example the ludicrous claim that Jagmohan, Governor of Kashmir in the winter of 1989-90, had herded the Hindus out: “The Kashmiri Pandits left the Valley in droves in 1990 because they were corraled and herded out like cattle by the cowboy-Governor of the day.”52 This is in disregard of the numerous testimonies of the refugees themselves, who were glad enough that Jagmohan had sent troops to escort them to safety, and most of whom had horror stories about relatives murdered by once-friendly Muslim neighbours; not to speak of the testimony provided by hundreds of actual dead bodies of Kashmiri Hindus. In keeping with this scenario of Hindus voluntarily leaving their homes just to please a whimsical Governor, the Indian media have systematically referred to the refugees with the euphemism “Kashmiri migrants”, and the foreign correspondents didn’t find the news of a mere “migration” spicy enough to trouble their information consumers with."
Does that blame lie entirely at the Indian media? Would U.S. media be so complicit, so complacent about blaming it on Indian media about it, if the victims were not Hindu, Buddhist, Jain? No, it's the abrahmic bias prevalent in West that is responsible for going along with the secular-leftist muslim appeasement of Indian media. ....
Here, he begins with an extensive introduction, leaving very little out for anyone new to the subject, so much so one wonders what he's leaving for the rest of the book.
"It should be clear, however, that this Orientalist construction could not have come about without a certain basis in reality. Though “tolerance” is a very recent addition to the Hindu religious vocabulary, the historical reality of Hindu society is that foreign and dissident religions were effectively tolerated, as proven by the history of the Jews or the Parsis in India. Likewise, there is much truth in Voltaire’s enthusiastic Orientalist assumption that unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Indian and Chinese “religions” were not based on prophetic “revelations” but on a purely human contemplation of reality. Or for a similar example pertaining to Islam: the Orientalist association of Islam with sensuality was partly the result of internal European concerns in the Victorian Age, but it was none the less correct in so far as Islam does have a more positive appreciation of sex than Christianity."
Or it was just Arabian Nights?
Meanwhile, what's that about "Indian and Chinese “religions” were not based on prophetic “revelations” but on a purely human contemplation of reality."? Chinese, yes, but Indian, not same, not all of them - definitely some, if not all, are held as Divine revelations, such as Vedas, first and foremost; Bhagawadgeeta is in fact held as Truth shown and told by God Krishna in person as a conversation with his friend and cousin, Arjuna. Upanishads are by seers, explaining Vedas, but much of the later work and pronouncements by saints, seers et al is held as coming through vua human from Divine, depending on quality of inspiration perceptible.
The difference is NOT that Indian scriptures are not held as revelations; the difference is in their being held as treasure, compared to a university library, available to seekers of knowledge, not an instrument of power, of enforcement, imposed as exclusive belief.
"This then is also the reason for Hindu hostility to Islam as enunciated in numerous Hindu revivalist texts. Islam’s difference or “Otherness” has nothing to do with it, as the Hindu record of hospitality to the Moplahs (“sons-in-law”, Arab traders who married Hindu girls in Kerala) shows. But Hindus perceive Islam as anti-pluralistic and intolerant of what is from the Islamic viewpoint the “Otherness” of Hinduism.111 For this reason, they use the same somewhat inflated references to the Holocaust when speaking of their experiences with Islam, notably the Partition massacres of 1947 and the Bengali genocide of 1971. It is undeniable that there exists a widespread hostility to Islam among Hindus, and that this hostility is articulated if not cultivated by a number of Hindu revivalist authors; but it is sloppy thinking to construe this hostility in the fashionable terminology of “Otherness”."
"Somewhat inflated"??? Estimated numbers by European scholars are to the tune of a hundred million over the millennium that Islamic onslaught was suffered by India, and this was not part of soldiers slain in battles but civilians massacred regardless of age, gender or anything else (apart from kidnappings and rapes of women that drove India to change conduct regarding free movement of women in at least North India), all atrocities perpetratrated in name of religion, an uncivilized conduct unimaginable in India until Islamic invasions.
" ... The English-speaking elite, by contrast, and its mediatic and academic segments in particular, are the cultural heirs of the colonial system and consequently the enemies of Hindu Revivalism. This includes those Marxists who have always been up in arms against real or perceived forms of neo-colonialism in the political and economic sphere: “Those members of the Third World elite who never lose an opportunity to lash out against the West have been the worst affected by the colonisation of the mind. They speak in the language of the opponents and subscribe to their values.”
Westernisation isn't opposed or ridiculed in India by Hindus except in its harmful or ridiculous aspects, from fraudulent propaganda against Hinduism to wearing woollen suits in searing heat; some sections took to westernisation quickly, such as Punjab taking to bobbed hair and lipsticks, while others such as South Indians went more for women's education on par with males, without aping fashions. Having suffered much less from Islamic invasions as North India did, freedom of movement for women was far less affected, as evident even in differences between North versus South in traditional Hindu weddings as practiced, so this advance in education was all the more possible.
Elst labels France secular, which is only largely true. France still has most things closed on Sunday, and persecution of Hindu women apporting articles of dressing other than French (which in case of Hindu articles is not dangerous to public security as in case of Islamic veiling of women in black from head to foot), is not secular, to say the least. Nuns or bishops, or anyone else wearing a cross, for example, aren't persecuted for the same secularism! France may be more secular than say, Saudi Arabia, but persecution of Hindu women's dressing puts it below secularism in reality.
"Incidentally, this concealment job by Engineer and by the entire secularist academic establishment amounts to an unwitting admission of the outcome of the Ayodhya polemic: if a schoolboy comes home on Proclamation Day and remains conspicuously evasive about his exam results, you don’t have to actually see his report to know what those results are like. This may be an understandable ploy in the case of a losing contestant, but not in that of scholars pretending to be neutral reporters on a contest. To comment on such manipulation, we might take inspiration from Engineer’s own words on the same cover: “It is not only violence which has to be condemned but also distortion of history and intellectual dishonesty.”"
"Most consequentially, the Penguin book Anatomy of a Confrontation edited by S. Gopal, for most foreign India-watchers the only Ayodhya book within reach, carefully keeps Hindu contributions to the debate out of the picture. Thus, friend and foe have repeated again and again that the Vishva Hindu Parishad had a list of 3,000 mosques standing on the sites of (and often built with materials from) demolished temples.195 One would expect such a key document in such an earth-shaking controversy to be discussed threadbare by historians, but I invite the reader to go through the scholarly literature on the Ayodhya affair and locate even a single discussion of this list. In the vast majority of articles and books on the subject, it does not even figure in the bibliography."
That's precisely because it's true and they all know this, and too, that the number us small fraction if one considers ALL such destroyed temples and mosques or other structures built on the sites, including Taj Mahal.
They all know this, and are hoping following Hitler to stun and shut up Hindus by shouting a lie loudly. It's not that different from screaming at a woman to gorge her yo submit whether to rape or to agree to not reporting the rape or to lie that there had been none when they know its a lie - and it's not that different from shaking a crying baby, at that.
In this case, those shaking the baby don't care if the baby is dead as a result, as happened in the famous case in Boston against the English caretaker of the baby. All they want from Hindus, the last witnesses of murders of old vultures and civilisations by the two najor conversionist creeds imposed by colonial rules invading, is to provide silent slave labour, which is what Hitler wanted from all conquered populations.
"But strangely, while Indian secularist scholars don’t make the faintest attempt to keep up appearances of neutrality, most of their Western contacts, rather than hearing a professional alarm bell ring to put them on alert against biased information, simply follow suit. Indeed, to an extent, Western observers follow the lead of their Indian sources, and openly declare their partisan interest in the topic of “Hindu communalism”. Thus, an Australian professor starts out by calling the BJP “undoubtedly ‘a political problem’” and ends with lamenting “the evils of Hindutvism”."
That's because most of West so aligned against Hindus is aligned with Vatican as far as India goes, even if personally they select any of the other options including atheism. Israel might just be different, due to two reasons, and Judaism is as separated from Hinduism in its essential nature as are other Abraham's creeds, except the drive to convert everybody - that last bit again is where Israel is on the same side as India, hunted by Islam and church alike.
"In some cases, however, the Arya Samaj was simply right in claiming that Vedic norms were much closer to modern standards than to those of nineteenth-century Hinduism. Thus, caste oppression and untouchability are not mentioned in the Veda Samhitas. Similarly, the status of women in Vedic society was probably somewhat more equal with that of men, and their relations more relaxed, than in Hindu society of the Victorian age.11 When you consider certain cruel and wasteful Hindu rules of conduct, such as the prohibition of widow remarriage (often affecting child widows), or the loss of all proportion in the obsession with purity as expressed in the practice of untouchability, it is hard not to sympathize with the Arya Samaj project of returning to the Vedic outlook, which had at least been much closer to human common sense. The Vedic seers (some of them female) were adventurous and creative, while the Hindu of recent centuries was continually inhibited by fear of trespassing against a million scriptural rules, astrological warnings and the opprobrium of purity-conscious fellow-castemen."
They were following, subconsciously, the line of the foreign colonial rulers, of conversionist creeds, in blaming these ills on indigenous. If a factor such as lack of freedom for women or untouchability was nonexistent in vefic times and dies nit show in great epics, it must have arisen due to a foreign element, due to foreign practices that did not exist in India before invading barbarians brought in practices that had to be dealt with. Both the obvious ills that arose in Hinduism had to deal with those barbarians, chiefly with the invaders kidnappings of women who were thereby unable to move freely outdoors.
"The Arya Samaj generally blames the decline of Hindu civilization on purely Hindu factors, most notably “Brahminical priestcraft”, a scapegoat borrowed straight from Christian missionary anti-Brahminical polemic. This anti-Brahminism was, moreover, cast in the mould of Protestant anti-Popism, i.e. it was conceived as a restoration of the original divinely revealed doctrine against the distortive accretions of “tradition” and its wily guardians, the institutionalized priesthood."
It was easier and cheaper for them to blame Brahmins rather than the actual culprits - the invaders who were in power. If the practices were inherent to Hinduism Hindus would never agree to scrap them, but in fact the first person to go against untouchability was a Brahmin, long before British rule, and it had nothing to do with any proposal or thought from invader colonial rulers.
The following passage is highly objectionable.
"Another Bengali who made a lasting impression was Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902, civil name Narendranath Dutta). After going through the standard English school curriculum, he became a pupil of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa (1836-86), an ecstatic devotee of Goddess Kali who, though a married layman, acquired the aura of a great religious visionary. With his limited grounding in traditional religious training, Swami Vivekananda’s understanding of Hindu tradition as laid down in his handful of books on yoga is sometimes criticized as distorted and superficial."
That last sentence is simply untrue, unless one goes for an Humphrey Appleby argument such as " ... if they haven't been questioned, question them; then they have been questioned. "
In fact, the highest opinion on the topic, from highest possible source, is that Vivekananda was an Avataara, as was Buddha, and both of the same source Divine Shiva.
"Meanwhile, the destruction which a media bombardment with hostile opinion can work among the support base of a movement is enormous. So many Hindu intellectuals I have talked with were reluctant to come out in the open with their Hindutva sympathies because they felt intimidated by the secularist opinion constraints. During the Ayodhya crisis this went as far as pronouncing secularist opinions in the presence of a third person, only to retract those opinions as soon as we had the room to ourselves. Many potential Hindutva activists or sympathizers were exposed to the daily battering of the Hindutva movement in the media with hostile stories and opinions and ended up developing doubts about the Tightness of the Hindutva cause.
"What is more, sometimes the effects of a generalized anti-Hindu and anti-India bias get physical. Thus, a lot of the killing of Hindus and of Indian defence personnel in Panjab, Kashmir and the North-east was made possible by the diplomatic or indirect material support which the separatists there were receiving from foreign countries; and this support, in turn, was made possible by an anti-Hindu or anti-India tilt in Western media opinion.47 Why is American military aid to Pakistan not made conditional on the termination of Pakistani involvement in Kashmiri terrorism? Why is Western development aid to Bangladesh not made conditional on the termination of the country’s hospitality to separatist militias? Largely because no public opinion is created on these issues by a press which has otherwise amply proven that it can whip up public indignation in any direction desired (for example, to prepare NATO interventions in Iraq or ex-Yugoslavia). This means that Hindus and others have been killed as a consequence of the absence of the Hindu or even just a neutral perspective in the international media, whose reporting is based entirely on the most partisan English-language Indian media.
"Thus, if due publicity had been given to the expulsion of around 200,000 Hindus from Kashmir in early 1990 by the Muslim separatists, or to the instant expulsion of 50,000 Hindus from Kabul immediately after the Islamic conquest of the city in April 1992, this might have influenced world opinion in a pro-India and pro-Hindu sense.48 Now, most Westerners have never heard about the Hindu refugee problem, for most journalists including reputed India hands have simply kept it out of the picture.49 Where it was at all mentioned, it was given a vicious twist, for example: “The BJP … has told the Hindus to leave Kashmir, so that the Army could enter.”50 While refugees are normally the object of pity, The Economist called the Hindu refugees “cowards”.51"
If a rape victim is portrayed as inviting it, which is usually done, it's not the fault of the victim, it's that of those who are happy to absolve their conscience cheaply, so they need not fear about the perpetrators attacking them next. This is so about much of world events, from ceding Czechoslovakia in Munich to treatment of paedophile priests by general public and church, even after the scandal broke.
Fact is, it's easier to blame a victim, and it's done both ways. As Elst is doing now, blaming RSS and co for not screaming louder than the vicious Islamic jihadists and their convenient friends.
But then, who cared about Tibet, or refugees who managed to escape, or the Tibetans who were massacred, or those who are managing to survive without a voice, as slaves in their own country? Was it also responsibility only of India to shout about it? U.S. politicians and press shouted nonstop about Afghanistan when USSR was invited by Afghanistan to help against jihadists, until the publicity was used to cover up the real issue succeeded in camouflage of the real purpose, breaking up USSR. Does anyone care that Afghanistan meanwhile suffers ever since?
No, a terrorist factory is convenient, until it turns and bites the hand that feeds it, as jihadists did over two decades ago. And the stupidity of it all was Nixon befriending China until China has bought up US economy.
"Sometimes Western commentators have their own pro-Pakistani agenda (particularly British and American ones, because of the long-standing alliance of their countries with Pakistan), but mostly they get their inspiration from Indian opinion makers. Consider for example the ludicrous claim that Jagmohan, Governor of Kashmir in the winter of 1989-90, had herded the Hindus out: “The Kashmiri Pandits left the Valley in droves in 1990 because they were corraled and herded out like cattle by the cowboy-Governor of the day.”52 This is in disregard of the numerous testimonies of the refugees themselves, who were glad enough that Jagmohan had sent troops to escort them to safety, and most of whom had horror stories about relatives murdered by once-friendly Muslim neighbours; not to speak of the testimony provided by hundreds of actual dead bodies of Kashmiri Hindus. In keeping with this scenario of Hindus voluntarily leaving their homes just to please a whimsical Governor, the Indian media have systematically referred to the refugees with the euphemism “Kashmiri migrants”, and the foreign correspondents didn’t find the news of a mere “migration” spicy enough to trouble their information consumers with."
Does that blame lie entirely at the Indian media? Would U.S. media be so complicit, so complacent about blaming it on Indian media about it, if the victims were not Hindu, Buddhist, Jain? No, it's the abrahmic bias prevalent in West that is responsible for going along with the secular-leftist muslim appeasement of Indian media. ....
November 25, 2020
Beautiful
November 4, 2021
Supposed to be the author’s PhD thesis, the book introduces and dissects the streams of thought that fall around sangh parivar.
Introducing to characters in and around the sangh parivar is a much refreshing way of dealing with the topic.
Most of the cheap writings of westerners and secularist writers regarding the SP are really challenged in an indirect way here.
Introducing to characters in and around the sangh parivar is a much refreshing way of dealing with the topic.
Most of the cheap writings of westerners and secularist writers regarding the SP are really challenged in an indirect way here.
June 4, 2022
I realised there were a lot of foolish assumptions i was making and i was thoughtlessly flowing along after I read this book. This book was filled with so many "Oh really?" moments for me. It's a little shameful but also quite unsurprising that it took an outsiders help to help me look at what is going on around me.
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November 20, 2024Masterpiece. Analysis is comprehensive. Hindus need to read this book at least once. Although events are contemporary, everything mentioned here is still relevant. In fact, the situation now seems to be even more dark, dystopian and dire. The regressive nature of the desert faith has been amplified by a woke, self-deprecating moronic milieu that still refuses to acknowledge the obvious.
March 11, 2023
A good primer on the Hindu revivalist movement starting in the 20th century that led to many socio-political developments in India. The author's outsiders' perspective is highly insightful.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews