Vs Naipaul Quotes

“Unlike Amartya Sen, who downplays the destructive religious evangelism of Muslim rule in India, he minces no words about what kind of impact it had. In an interview to the newspaper The Hindu in 1998, he said: ‘I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the tenth century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realize that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilization of that world was mortally wounded by those invasions. The Old World was destroyed. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.’14 Next year, he reiterated his views in an interaction with the magazine Outlook: ‘The millennium began with the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of the north. This is such a big and bad event that people have to find polite, destiny defying ways of speaking about it. In art books and history books, people write of the Muslims “arriving” in India, as though the Muslims came in a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest of India is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of the idols and the temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves. … The architectural evidence—the absence of Hindu monuments in the north—is convincing enough. The conquest was unlike any that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated people never write their history.’15
In the same interview, Naipaul argues that the Muslim conquerors succeeded in ‘the grinding down of Hindu India’. The loot and plunder and destruction, and their religious hostility to non-believers, was not restricted to the original foreign invaders, but a feature of the entire period of Islamic rule.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward