For those who’ve read my criticisms on this topic before, this won’t really contain anything new. I’ve discussed this topic in parts on several occasions throughout the years on my blog, but I never bothered making a complete and thorough blog post, because I had initially thought that I should be willing to do more reading into it, but after reading historian Kishori Saran Lal and experiencing such an abject shock at the details he gave and copiously cited Muslim historians that were Mughal and Tughlaq court officials and recognizing how mistreated Hindus are by this supposed academic discipline . . . I decided it is probably better to write this and just let my opinions on it be known. I honestly don’t believe it’ll change anything, because Western and US Indologists, and Religious Studies departments more generally, don’t value anything Hindus say unless it is a Hindu who is filled with bigotry towards fellow Hindus. The anti-Hindu bigotry of Religious Studies departments is so normalized that when I was reading a free sample on Amazon of “Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi: Orientalism and the Mystical Marketplace” by Sophia Rose Arjana, she just casually claimed Hinduism wasn’t a religion and posited a historic falsehood as her justification. The entire academic discipline of Religious Studies is just so steeped in bigotry towards Hindus that people don’t really recognize the extent of it due to the normalization. Thus, I suspect they’ll just discount anything I say anyway and probably won’t even read this.
For a better overview of their beliefs and claims about India’s history, here is a general overview of Andrew J. Nicholson’s claims from Chapter 10 of Andrew Nicholson’s book “Unifying Hinduism” where he cites most of the other US and Western Indologists; which has the following:
“HINDUISM: A MODERN INVENTION? “Hindu” was not originally a Sanskrit word but a Persian term used by Muslims to describe a regional or ethnic identity: the people living near the Indus, or Sindhu, river.44 Only at a relatively late date was the term adopted by Indians to refer to themselves, typically as distinguished from outsider groups known as turuskas (Turks) or mlecchas (barbarians). Cynthia Talbot has recorded the earliest usage of the word “Hindu” in an Indian language from inscriptions in mid-fourteenth-century Andhra, in which some Vijayanagara kings were described with the epithet “Sultan among Hindu kings” (Hindu-raya-suratrana).45 Talbot cautions, though, that in these inscriptions, “Hindu meant Indic as opposed to Turkish, not ‘of the Hindu religion’ as opposed to ‘of the Islamic religion.’”46 In Gaudīya Vaiṣṇava texts written in Bengali in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “Hindu” was occasionally used to distinguish natives from yavanas or mlecchas.47 Although the context makes clear that these foreigners were Muslims, Gaudīya Vaiṣṇava writers did not state this explicitly until the eighteenth century, when the term musulmāna fnally became common usage in Bengali. In this case too, the word may have designated ethnicity generally and not a specific set of religious beliefs.
Further on in the chapter:
“Unlike later Hindu nationalist intellectuals, who sometimes recorded their fantasies of heroic and violent resistance to Muslim oppression, Sanskrit intellectuals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries responded with silence.28”
Nicholson, Andrew J. Chapter 10: Hindu Unity And The Non-Hindu Other (4806-5293). Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (South Asia Across the Disciplines). Columbia University Press, 2010.
Nicholson goes onto cite Indologists Pollock, Talbot, Thapar, and anonymous so-called “historians” claiming Muslims and Hindus weren’t aware of each other in the Medieval period apart from Sanskrit writers responding with epithets towards Muslims. He wrongfully cites Akbar the Great, a King who de-converted from Islam to form his own religion, as an example of a Muslim King who was curious about Sanatana Dharma / Hinduism. He and his US Indologist peers assert that Hindus and Muslims weren’t really aware of each other:
In Sheldon Pollock’s article “Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination in India,” he illustrates another way that medieval Hindus employed cultural memory to categorize Muslims. He points out that in numerous medieval commentaries and retellings of the story of Rāma, the demons (rākṣasas) of the story are identified with Muslims.35 For instance, in the Rāmāyaṇa section in which the demon Virādha asks to be buried in a pit after his death rather than cremated, two eighteenth-century commentators remark that the Muslims, “who are the rākṣasas of the Kali age, still follow this custom.”36 Pollock is particularly interested in medieval kings who fashioned their public image in the likeness of Lord Rāma, using the text’s narrative logic to portray Muslim opponents as demons. But demonization can be found in other contexts as well. Cynthia Talbot notes that although there is little explicit use of royal symbols from the Rāmāyaṇa in the medieval inscriptions of Andhra Pradesh, Muslims are demonized in a similar way37 I would add that that the motif of one’s adversaries as demons has very early roots in India. In particular, the portrayal of philosophical opponents as demons dates back at least as far as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad.
And further on:
The increasing availability of translations of vernacular texts from the late medieval period should finally put to rest the notion that there was no conception of a specifically Hindu religious identity that differed from the beliefs and practices of Muslims. Although early uses of the word “Hindu” in fourteenth-century inscriptions seem to use the word in a geographical or ethnic sense, Cynthia Talbot acknowledges that ethnicity is a composite of many factors—including “language, costume, marriage customs and fighting styles”—some of which have their basis in religious practice.55 Just as observation led the authors of vernacular texts to remark on differences of food or dress, eventually it led to an appreciation of the principled religious differences underlying some of the more superficial differences in custom. “Hindu” was originally an ethnic designator. But the ample evidence from fifteenth-and sixteenth-century writers shows that by that time, the word “Hindu” had been adopted by vernacular-language authors and had in some contexts taken on a more specifically religious sense.
Although Stietencron would surely resist this idea, his analysis of the eleventh-century Somaśambhupaddhati is accidental evidence in support of Lorenzen’s thesis. Both Lorenzen and Pollock mark the period shortly after the Somaśambhupaddhati century as a time of important shifts in Hindu self-representation. For Pollock, the twelfth century was the beginning of the invention of a new tradition in which kings became Rāma by adopting his symbols and applying them to their own historical circumstances.56 For Lorenzen, the period between 1200 and 1500 was the time in which rivalry between Hindu and Muslim created a newly self-conscious identity of Hindu or proto-Hindu unity. In this book I have focused on a group of texts from the same time period: philosophical works written in Sanskrit. The evidence from medieval philosophy and doxography corroborates the thesis that Lorenzen has advanced. Before the twelfth century, the category of “affirmer” (āstika) is a blurry one, potentially admitting groups such as the Buddhists and Jainas, who affirm the existence of worlds after death. But sometime during a critical period between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the category of āstika began to harden into the classification of the “six systems” as they are recognized today. At the same time, Buddhists and Jainas became permanently classified as “deniers” (nāstikas) in influential Advaita doxographies. Also in the late medieval period, the category of nāstika underwent a subtle blurring with categories like “barbarian” (mleccha), allowing foreigners to be classed together with Buddhists and Jainas.57 This blurring also allowed the epic and Purānic strategies of “demonization,” once applied solely to Buddhists, Jainas, and Cārvākas, to extend to foreigners, and especially to Muslims. Philosophical authors writing in Sanskrit do not acknowledge Islam explicitly. But the perceived threat of Islam motivated them to create a strictly defined category of āstika philosophical systems, systems that professed belief in the authority of the Veda. This category was later reformulated according to further developments in the nineteenth century and the medieval list of āstika darśanas became known as the “schools of Hindu philosophy.”
COMMUNALISM, UNIVERSALISM, AND HINDU IDENTITY
There are dangers in recognizing the existence of Hindu-Muslim divisions in medieval India. My greatest concern is that my thesis might be taken out of context to support a Hindu communalist political agenda. Romila Thapar, among others, has pointed out the communalists’ need to present a unified, homogenous group identity:
“Communal” … in the Indian context has a specific meaning and primarily perceives Indian society as constituted of a number of religious communities. Communalism in the Indian sense therefore is a consciousness which draws on a supposed religious identity and uses this as the basis for an ideology. It then demands political allegiance to a religious community and supports a programme of political action designed to further the interests of that religious community…. Such identity tends to iron out diversity and insists on conformity, for it is only through a uniform acceptance of the religion that it can best be used for political ends.58
The rather arcane historical controversy over philosophical and theological identities in medieval India has ramifications for contemporary Indian political debates. Arguments for a Hindu self-identity or a unified Hindu theological voice in the medieval period can be co-opted by Hindu communalist political actors.59 Accordingly, I suspect that a part of the motivation of Stietencron and others to assert that Hindu identity is purely a nineteenth-century colonial construction is to weaken Hindu communalism. For if “Hinduism” is merely an artificial construction that outsiders imposed on Indians in the nineteenth century, simplistic historical narratives of medieval Hindu unity in the face of Muslim oppression would be proved false. By acknowledging a process of synkrētismós by which late medieval Hindus formulated a new religious identity over and against a Muslim Other, seeing medieval history through a religious, communal lens once again becomes possible.
The evidence presented in this book suggests that there was no single understanding of what it meant to be a Hindu in medieval India. “Hindu unity” was not a structure created in the late medieval period that has existed unchanged from that point to the present day. “Unifying Hinduism” is a process, not an entity. Indian intellectuals have been engaged in this process for at least seven hundred years. Although they often have agreed that this unity exists, the demon has always been in the details. We see a debate over the details of this unity in the confrontation between Advaita Vedāntins and their Bhedābhedavāda opponents in sixteenth-century India. Although both groups provided hierarchical accounts of the āstika s chools, their understandings of the metaphysical ground of āstika unity were very different. One vision of Hindu unity, the Advaita Vedānta view, has come to dominate modern Hinduism. But Hindu philosophical minorities refuse to be silenced and continue to assert alternative interpretations of what it means to be a Hindu. This evidence of a gradually developing and deeply contested Hindu identity in the medieval period cannot be used to reduce regional political struggles in medieval India to a global Muslim-versus-Hindu clash of civilizations. Nor can it be adduced as evidence for Hindu communalist arguments that Muslims were engaged in religious genocide against Hindus for explicitly theological reasons. As Thapar notes regarding medieval religious identities,
Even the recognition of a religious identity does not automatically establish a religious community…. Clashes which on the face of it would now be interpreted as between Hindus and Muslims, would require a deeper investigation to ascertain how far they were clashes between specific castes and sects and to what degree did they involve support and sympathy from other castes and sects identifying with the same religion or seeking such idenity.60
Religious motivations for violent behavior by Muslims against Hindus and Hindus against Muslims in the medieval period cannot be ruled out, as Stietencron might wish, on the grounds that Hinduism did not exist. But for most incidents of violence between Hindus and other groups, the evidence points to motives more political than theological. This applies to the widely publicized destruction of Hindu temples by Muslims61 and also to the history of Śaiva violence against Jainas and Buddhists, often elided by those who seek to emphasize Hinduism’s superior history of religious toleration.62 Despite textual evidence possibly suggesting that Hindus saw it as their duty to wage holy war against demonic followers of the Buddha and Mahāvīra, those struggles too were grounded more often in realpolitik than in religious principle.63
Nicholson, Andrew J. Chapter 10: Hindu Unity And The Non-Hindu Other (4806-5293). Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (South Asia Across the Disciplines). Columbia University Press, 2010.
The chief reason it is important to repudiate this is because of what I can’t unsee when considering what their claims about India and Hinduism were compared to the historic realities: the eerie parallels of Kishori Saran Lal’s history of India’s Islamic slave markets and what was done to the Yazidis. How could they be so similar if Western Indologists like Sheldon Pollock, Andrew J. Nicholson, Audrey Truschke, Wendy Doniger, Cynthia Talbot and Romilia Thapar were the ones stating the truth and not Koenraad Elst and Kishori Saran Lal?
According to Wikipedia, historian Kishori Saran Lal lived between 1920 – 2002, he wrote a segment about Medieval Islamic conversion practices in his 1973 magnum opus which is no longer in print, Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India (1000-1800), and he reiterated the same arguments with the same citations in a much smaller book in 1990 titled “Indian Muslims: Who Are They” which had the following on pages 23 – 27 which reads as follows:
And what happened to the Yazidis according to an August 13th, 2015 New York Times article by Romanian journalist Rukmini Callimachi published under the title “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape” which had the following:
And further on:
And further on:
And even further on in the subsection titled “The Market” referring to the Slave Market:
And other portions with disturbing similarities:
I fear it must be asked . . . could Sheldon Pollock, Andrew J. Nicholson, Cynthia Talbot, Wendy Doniger, and Audrey Truschke have saved Yazidi, Jewish, and Christian lives, if they had just been honest about Medieval India’s history under Islamic rule? An unknown portion of ISIS fighters were actually shocked and distressed by the slave markets according to the NY Times reports, but if they had easier access to historic facts about Islamic slave trades that happened in Medieval India and Medieval Iran, if the Western and US Indologists hadn’t knowingly and willfully lied by making people doubt the true history of the Medieval conquests under Islam, then could at least some Yazidi, Jewish, and Christian lives have been spared from genocide? That question is genuinely, sincerely bothering me. I could not believe what I was reading when I got to the part about Islamic conversions in Medieval India and how it was done through massive, centuries-long slave markets that read exactly like the NY Times article on what happened to the Yazidis. Why did the US and Western Indologists hide this? Why did they try to protect this from any scrutiny? Why did they try to label Koenraad Elst and Kishori Saran Lal as insane for legitimate history? Just why? As it stands, they will never have to live with the consequences like the Yazidis and Christians who were sold in ISIS’s Islamic slave markets did.
Audrey Truschke, Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock, Andrew J. Nicholson, Romilia Thapar, and Cynthia Talbot are not stupid people; they had to have come across this history, they claim to have studied the scholarship and done research on grounds of Academic freedom, and they willfully lied about the historic information of India to protect Muslim feelings over historic facts and they did this even when the Yazidi genocide was happening with ISIS repeating the behaviors of the Islamic colonizers of India. Even when gangrapes of British girls are happening by Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs in Oxford and throughout Britain, and I seriously doubt they hadn’t heard of these news incidents either, they almost certainly kept silent about Islam’s real history while knowing these incidents were happening. If they claim to not know, then how can they claim to be experts about India’s history and claim to rebuke historical facts argued by others like historian Kishori Saran Lal and Indologist Koenraad Elst?
Another major reason that finally prompted me to write this was the following question: How are Religious Studies departments of Indology in the US and Europe actually academic in any feasible way? Judging from the information that I’ve spent time reading and sifting throughout the years, I honestly can only come to the conclusion that the vast majority of Indology is nothing more than a vehemently pro-White Supremacist claptrap that exploits academic freedom in order propagate racism against Indian people in general (i.e. not just Hindus, but all Indians), deliberate falsehoods about Hinduism, and vehement support for cultural and physical genocide of Hindus including – but not limited to – abject genocide denial of all of Islam’s Medieval history in India and a willful ignorance of British genocidal policies upon Indians more generally. Now, if the argument is that their only realm of expertise is translations, then unfortunately they don’t behave that way at all and there is no compelling reason to believe any iota of information they say, because it is so filled with willful distortions that it has to be deliberate. That is, the entire supposed academic discipline seems to be more about pleading ignorance than doing any verifiable research at all. They do nothing of any legitimate value and most of the value seems to be fixing misconceptions that Hindus have been pointing out for hundreds of years but were labeled as conspiracy theorists and “Islamophobic” for stating historic truth. Andrew J. Nicholson’s book and the entire enterprise seems obsessed with semantics on the term Hindu; if you want to call us Dharmic or Vedic, then that’s all that it would need to be. It’s just a useful shorthand.
Three specific issues out of the way first, Indian archaeologist B. B. Lal, who changed his mind about any supposed invasion after looking at the evidence, had this to say about dating the Rigveda, I wanted to make this part particularly clear because Western Indology – unsurprisingly – continues lying about it even after archeological findings have debunked them, but of course an Indian person who disagrees with them – even a respected archaeologist like B. B. Lal – doesn’t matter to a glorified White Supremacist claptrap like Western Indology:
I only read reviews and criticisms of Wendy Doniger’s work, but if she is really claiming Hinduism has phallic symbols, then it isn’t a woman using Hinduism to spew her bizarre sex fantasies and fetishes as Hindutva groups wrongly criticized. It is just anti-Hindu bigotry and hate against Hindus stretching back since 1905, because Western academia made the same racist and bigoted statements against Native Americans for simply having snake symbols and used Hindus as a comparison for their bigotry. Wendy Doniger was simply being racist and a bigot as her academic profession taught her to be and has schooled people into being since at least 1905 in the US. She is using her academic credentials to shield her White supremacist opinions that academia has shielded from White men prior to her since 1905 (bold Emphasis added by me):
CHARACTER OF THE SERPENT. The worship of the serpent was undoubtedly the first form and ever after, even to this day, the predominating one in the religious rites bestowed upon animal life in general; the fear and reverence accorded animals primarily considered sacred or made so by gradually regarding them as endowed with supernatural powers finally embraced a great number of animal forms. But the “trail of the serpent” was over and above them all, in all races, all climes and all times. The serpent more than any other animate creature possesses properties of mystery and divinity. He moves “swift as a shadow” without hands, feet, wings or fins, on land or on water; without noise or warning; with the speed of an arrow he strikes his foe and pierces him with his death-dealing fangs; or envelopes his enemy no matter how large or strong in his resistless embrace and crushes the breath of life from his victim or swallows whole his prey that is transfixed by his charm or unaware of his silent approach; his colors are as variegated as the leaves of the forest; his movements graceful and weird; the glow of his eye awful and enthralling; he assumes a variety of forms and figures ; sheds his skin and comes forth renewed and rejuvenated; he is long lived; enlarges his size and strength ; he is inspirited and fiery. Surely a creature with such anamalous powers was well calculated to arouse the awe, superstition, fear and reverence of the primitive ages. Says Forlong: ”The serpent is the special Phallic symbol which veils the actual God, and therefore do we find him the constant early attendant upon Priapus or the Lingum, which I regard as the second religion of the world. It enters closely into union with all faiths to the present hour. We find him in the Vishnas, the Hindoos, and the tales of Vedic Avatars. He is God in eternity, the many coils of the snake representing infinitiveness and eternity, especially so as represented by the Egyptians with tail in mouth. There is no mythology or ancient sculpture in which the serpent does not bear a part. The universality of serpent worship has long been acknowledged by the learned. It is called Ophiolatry. It has been worshiped in the lowest strata of civilization. In Egypt we see the serpent under a multitude of symbols and connected with all sorts of worship; also in Assyria and India. We meet him in the wilderness of Sinai, the groves of Epidauraus, and in the Samothracian huts. In the case of serpents the most wonderful legends and the few facts come down to use regarding their saliva, mode of coition, sperm, skin and egg. Pliny tells us in regard to the origin of the serpent egg that this is brought about by a bed or knot of snakes ; that an infinite number entwine themselves together in the heat of summer, roll themselves into a mass, and from the saliva of their jaws and the froth of their bodies is generated an egg called anguinum and that by the violent hissing of the serpents this egg is forced into the air. The egg, or its priestly imitation, has always been much prized and was once revered by Kelts as an object of Druidical worship. The Keltic story of the production of the anguinum is like that given by Pliny. The snakes were said to meet at Beltime, join mouths and hiss until a bubble was produced; other snakes then hissed on this and blew it in a ring over the body of a snake when it at once hardened.” The worship of fire was third in the order of superstitious worship. Tree, serpent and fire worship existed in their origin in the order thus named, but in the early progress of man became contemporaneous worship. The sun worship was also one of the primary forms and while following the three named above became likewise coincident and after its introduction is found with many races closely connected with the serpent worship.
Randall, Emilius Oviatt. The Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio: mystery of the mound and history of the serpent: various theories of the effigy mounds and the mound builders (pp. 53-54). Kindle Edition.
A Wikipedia statement about Audrey Truschke’s claims on her own historic source having memory issues:
If this represents her arguments accurately, then it is an attempt by Audrey Truschke to hide the fact that he reported Aurangzeb’s scorched earth policies against Deccan Sultans to conquer their lands had slaughtered millions of Muslims. From my review of K.S. Lal’s Growth of Muslim Population of Medieval India 1000 – 1800 AD:
One aspect that has me thoroughly confused is Indian Muslims and even pseudo-Indologists like Audrey Truschke rallying around the figure of Islamic ruler Aurangzeb when there are much less bloodthirsty Islamic rulers that they could have used as a rallying point and the not-so-insignificant fact that we have a great amount of historical information, including two eyewitness accounts, that could make a compelling argument that Aurangzeb almost certainly murdered more Muslims than any other ruler in India’s entire history. Regardless of their motives, it’s a definitive nail in the coffin for their credibility to rally around this bloodthirsty monarch. In fact, European eyewitness accounts during Aurangzeb’s reign are the ones who confirm this. Page 84 explains that Niccolao Manucci mentions Aurangzeb’s armies destroyed crops and heavily suggests a military campaign not unlike scorched-earth policies. The people being slaughtered and the Kingdoms that Aurangzeb was warring against were independent Muslim Kings of the Deccan and the ones dying from plague due to a mix of the failure of rains and the thorough destruction of crop fields by Aurangzeb’s military were undoubtedly Muslims. Niccolao states over two million people died in just two years from 1702 – 1704; these two million would have to be mostly Muslim peasants ruled under independent Deccan Sultanates. Moreover, he left a desolation of crops during a time when the rain wasn’t falling, which means the death toll of just Muslims must’ve been enormous afterwards due to Aurangzeb’s war campaigns against independent Muslim Sultans; especially if the confirmed record of two million Muslim deaths in just two years due to Aurangzeb’s wars is anything to go by. K.S. Lal also cites the more neutral Khafi Khan on pages 84 – 85, a Mughal historian who was also an eyewitness, who explains there were mass killings, the burning down of populated locations, he confirms a purposeful scorched-earth policy on cultivation, starvation of carriage-animals, and a general massacring of the populous. . . all of these victims would have been Muslim peasants. Khafi Khan likely waited until Aurangzeb’s death because he wanted to be honest about what was done to the Muslim population of the Deccan. Any claims he was lying are perplexing given that Aurangzeb’s multiple war campaigns are well-attested history that led to the Mughal Empire’s decline. Page 86 mentions Islamic rulers in Afghanistan invading and further weakening Mughal hold at various times from the 1730s – 1790s that was tenuous due to internal power struggles among self-serving Mughal princes and viziers. This is not to say that it was exclusively Muslim and K.S. Lal makes no such illusions; page 85 also mentions that the Marathas were having intra-rulership struggles including villages burned, open murder and robbery gone unchecked, and caravans destroyed in what were intra-Hindu power struggles for control of Maratha territory. The victims of the Maratha power struggles would have largely been Hindus, just as the victims of Mughal power struggles were largely Muslims.
And also, musical instruments are forbidden in Islam, if Youtuber Apostate Prophet can find this information easily, then why can’t self-stylized academics of Medieval India’s history?
Hadith – The Book of Clothes and Adornment – Sahih Muslim – Sunnah.com – Sayings and Teachings of Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه و سلم), sunnah.com/muslim/37/159.
I wrote a more thorough rebuttal of other Indologists in a subsection of chapter twenty-seven of my book, Faith in Doubt, which can be read as follows:
Debunking US Indology
I want to be clear that I honestly didn’t hold these views until after reading into the arguments by Indology in more depth. I was firmly on the side of US Indology because I expected to find credible and logical arguments for their assertions about Hinduism not being a unified religion. I expected fact-finding research like the contemporary Religious Studies department arguments on Christianity, but instead all I found was dubious claims, an ignorance of contemporary archaeological findings, and an ignorance within Western Indology’s scholarship on Islam’s entry into India. Western Indology has a lack of apparent knowledge of one of the most well-respected historians from the US who is known throughout world history, Will Durant. Even worse than this, there are largely pretentious claims about the impact of British imperialism upon modern India. I expected strong fact-finding research based on a fusion of archaeology, history, and perhaps different subjective viewpoints about culture based on factual evidence when I began researching Indology, but I learned soon after from friends who studied history and philosophy in Western academia that Indology, as a part of Religious Studies, are the least credible sources of information in Western academia because they don’t do any research into topics like archaeology and history. This was surprising to me because what I had thought was rigorous research into India’s religious history, comparable to studies on Christianity among Religious Studies scholars, was actually just a bunch of people making up their own personal views on a religion and claiming to have more authority than actual hard evidence from archaeology, history, and genetic research showed. These Indologists behave as if they have special knowledge or a better understanding of a deeper meaning, but they don’t do any real research. To my surprise, they instead make-up their own beliefs and have been using their influence to assert their personal beliefs about Hinduism as equivalent to hard evidence from archaeology. When confronted with hard evidence from archaeologists from India, excerpts from US historians like Will Durant, and criticisms of their approach from Indians of India; they have almost collectively dismissed any and all controversy by depicting criticisms against them as rabid, hostile, and made in bad faith instead of critiquing or responding to the arguments themselves. I personally contacted Indologist Andrew J. Nicholson by email and he never responded; months later, I noticed that his twitter account had vanished. From what I’ve observed of the more notorious incidents, it seems bizarre to me that this would be their approach to controversy since they should be able to satisfy any criticisms by showing research and evidence, but have instead behaved in an overly sensitive manner by depicting all criticism as beneath their notice while making spurious accusations on the character of the people criticizing them. However, what really caused me to doubt the approaches by US Indologists was their attempts to paint all criticisms of them by people in India or of Indian descent as a monolith of rabid hostility and their explicit refusal to engage in any of it on that basis. As you’ll probably be able to tell if you notice my real name which is on the copyright of this book, I am of Indian descent. It is because I am of Indian descent criticizing them that I fear retribution and slander because of how I’ve observed people in US Indology departments behave. Judging from the evidence, it seems their aim is to silence any criticism from people of India or of Indian descent outside of these Indology departments who criticize the consensus of US Indology departments. I don’t know the extent of this issue for other Western Indology departments, but I’ll be critiquing some of them too.
The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy
I’ll begin my critique with The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy of 2017, which was reprinted in 2018, and since I can’t make lengthy quotes of any portion of the book without the express permission of Oxford University Press, I’ll have to lay out in explicit terms what I find problematic with these Indologist critiques and may sometimes list both the chapters and pages of those chapters when necessary. While my primary aim is criticizing US Indology, I’ve chosen to critique others in Western Indology insofar as they show the same failings of US Indology and sustain arguments based on either insufficient or bad evidence. Usually it is a complete lack of evidence on their part. Essentially, the underlying assumptions should be highlighted and then critiqued in order to expose the failings of what may well be this entire department on a global scale throughout the West, if the most current version of The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy as of 2019 serves as an indication. As it would be beyond the scope of this book to give a general review of the entirety of its contents, I’ve narrowed the focus to pertinent specifics that I’ll be addressing, I’ve settled for critiquing the Introduction and the four chapters of Part 1: Methods, Literatures, and Histories of The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy which exists as the main thesis of the textbook; it is geared to explain to an audience of upcoming Indologists about what to expect in the academic discipline. I’ve chosen this method due to constraints, as I’m of the opinion that the entirety of the text is problematic due to ample evidence from the textbook itself and the chapters I’ve read outside of Part 1.
I’ll begin with the introductory chapter, “Introduction: Why Indian Philosophy? Why Now?” by the editor of the textbook, Jonardon Ganeri, who is listed as a Global Network Professor of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University and a visiting Professor at King’s College.[1] His chapter shows no evidence that he has any awareness or knowledge of the mass genocides of the Indian population during the Islamic conquests of India[2]; on page 4, he refers to the purported Aryan settlers that Indian archaeologists have shown to be a falsehood with extensive evidence that’ll be detailed in another section below and the introductory page itself mentions the so-called impact of British colonialism but never mentions the Islamic colonialism prior to that.[3] On page 8, he briefly touches upon so-called Mughal patronage but fails to mention the massacres and colossal death toll of Islam’s ravaging, plundering, and enslavement of Indians throughout the entirety of the Indian subcontinent.[4] This has been copiously documented by legendary historian, Will Durant. In volume 1 of his series The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage, Will Durant details the mass genocides perpetuated by Islamic invaders in Chapter 16 from subsection “VI. The Moslem Conquest” to the very end of Chapter 16 of The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage.[5] Will Durant himself refers to it as “probably the bloodiest story in history” before going into the grizzly details.[6] At no point does Jonardon Ganeri show any indication that he is knowledgeable about this history at all throughout the Introduction of The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy and seems to depict interactions between Indians and the Islamic invaders as congenial when the only time period that could credibly be argued would be under Akbar the Great after he had de-converted from Islam, ordered the shut down of the mosques throughout India, and forbade the teachings of the Quran.[7][8] However, before and after Akbar under more pious Islamic rulers, the story is an unambiguous bloodbath and Will Durant doesn’t mince words or soften the details of the horror that Islam brought upon India.[9] If you doubt this, feel free to read Chapter 16, subsection VI all the way to the end of Chapter 16 of The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage.[10] The only time the practitioners of Sanatana Dharma – be it Hindu, or Buddhist, or Jain, or later on the Sikhs – ever lived in any peace during Islamic rule was when a Islamic ruler de-converted from Islam and rejected the Islamic religion. At no point does Jonardon Ganeri put this in proper context and doesn’t even seem to be aware of this history in his introductory chapter.[11]
The next chapter was what made me lose confidence in Western Indology and gradually caused me to change my views on this entire enterprise called Indology within the US, but this view may be applicable throughout the West too. I had assumed that they based their views on hard evidence, but “Chapter 1: Interpreting Indian Philosophy Three Parables” by Matthew T. Kapstein, a Professor at the University of Chicago who purportedly specializes in Tibetan Buddhism, makes it clear that this isn’t true.[12] Kapstein explains without any ambiguity on pages 15-16 of the book that Western Indologists have absolutely no criteria for determining what interpretations are valid and what aren’t valid.[13] They don’t base their understanding from any deep understanding of the ancient Sanatana Dharma theology and they hold no special knowledge or criterion of procedures for how to develop an understanding of Indian philosophies.[14] In short, they haven’t developed any method at all that can make accurate and reliable judgments on the theology of Hinduism.[15] In fact, Kapstein outright explains on page 16 that hermeneutics, with the exclusion of legal hermeneutics, offers absolutely nothing as a guideline to demarcate valid and honest interpretations from dishonest or unreliable interpretations.[16] This means that they have no method at all for separating their own make-believe with any potentially credible scholarship. Kapstein claims that Indology attempts to utilize archaeology, but this is plainly proven false since they never accepted information from Indian archaeologists who reliably and credibly debunked the Aryan Race Conspiracy Theory with scientific and historical evidence.[17] The Aryan Race theory was supported by Nazism and Adolf Hitler. Western Indologists have held onto those Nazi viewpoints which pervades the entirety of The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy of 2017-2018 despite the Aryan Race theory having been debunked in 2014-2015 by Indian archaeologists through empirical and scientific evidence.[18][19][20] For whatever reason, Western Indologists have since tried to push these Nazi theories that they’ve held as sacrosanct into the work of modern Western geneticists, possibly without the awareness of the broader scientific community that the methods of Indology are arbitrary, unreliable, and seem to be pure guesswork without any basis on historic evidence. One must question why these Western Indologists hold onto these Nazi theories so strongly and dismiss any criticism from outside as not part of their arbitrary consensus that isn’t based on empirical evidence. And, if the scientific community doesn’t know about how unreliable their methods are, then why weren’t Western scientists duly informed and instead have had their meaningful scientific work, their trust, and goodwill co-opted by Western Indologists? Further along in Chapter 1, on pages 20 – 23 in the subsection titled “The Meaning of Moksa” in the book, Kapstein cherry-picks three philosophers – Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes – in order to ignorantly assert that Western philosophy’s entire body of work on the terminology of the word freedom is based upon civic governments and political participation.[21] He demonstrates no understanding of Dharmic teachings of Moksha being an existential philosophical disposition and he shows no indication that existential philosophers of so-called Anglophone and continental philosophy such as Schopenhauer was influenced by the Upanishads[22]; Nietzsche was profoundly influenced and impressed by Buddhism even declaring it, and the intellectual capacity of the Brahmins of Sanatana Dharma, as entirely superior to Christianity in The Anti-Christ.[23][24] How did Kapstein miss not only the basic usage of Moksha’s terminology of freedom, but also two of the most famous Western philosophers who were influenced by Dharmic views on freedom? Why did he use a reductionist argument on the various philosophical dispositions of Western Philosophy’s views on freedom? Even from his chosen selection, he doesn’t seem to be aware of the extent Rousseau praised and had his philosophy influenced by Islamic theology.
However, another equally compelling issue must be asked: how can any so-called “consensus” within the sphere of Western Indology be allowed to dismiss empirical scientific evidence by Indian archaeologists?[25][26] Moreover, on what grounds can Western Indology claim any special privilege on knowledge of Hinduism over any random Hindu individual when they have no methods and their so-called research is the equivalent of any random person making a blind guess?[27] How can they dismiss Rajiv Malhotra or any other Hindu who has criticism on the basis of consensus, when their consensus is pure blind guessing with no real methodology, they have no recognition of Hindu practices like Yogi, and there is no evidence from their behavior of any interest in archaeology that disproves Nazi theories that they harbor? To my surprise, throughout The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy, Western Indologists demonstrate no awareness of the mass genocide by Islamic conquests elaborated by historian Will Durant in The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage and the subsequent mass starvation policies which may also credibly constitute genocide caused by British colonialism as copiously documented by historian and Marxist Mike Davis in his work, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World in which he collected and referenced numerous documented accounts by mostly US Christian missionaries and US journalists who spoke out against the British policies in defense of the human rights of the people of India.[28][29] How can they claim to be searching for proper context and a better understanding of India’s changing philosophies throughout the history of the subcontinent, if they categorically ignore the most notorious impacts of Islamic and British imperialism?[30][31][32] Judging from their lack of methodology, I don’t quite understand why Indians of the Dharmic faiths within India even bother protesting or view anything Western Indologists say as credible when any random opinion that they have on their own religion is actually more valid than the so-called hermeneutic methodology which is quite honestly just pure, blind guesswork on the part of these so-called scholars in the West.[33] It’s a methodology that claims to have no methodology and just makes random guesses with the hopes that others who are equally as uninformed about Hinduism agree with them. This insularity can be comparable with the Tafsir of Islam, but with the clear difference that they claim nobody outside their insular community has any right to an opinion on a religion that isn’t even theirs. Kapstein ends the chapter by emphasizing that Western Indologists have no conceptual framework except for hypothetical ideas that they critique each other with and it is thus a reaffirmation that they have no knowledge beyond pure, blind guesswork.[34]
Chapter 2 “History and Doxography of the Philosophical Schools” by Ashok Aklujkar, a Sanskritist and Indologist working at the University of British Columbia[35], falsely assumes an isolated distinction between Western Philosophy and Sanatana Dharma on page 32 since it isn’t as clearly demarcated as he assumed and will be explained further below.[36] He asserts that proper guidance is required (assuming Western Indologists) but fails to detail specific procedures since Western Indology has none according to the chapter prior to his chapter.[37][38] Finally, he contradicts himself on page 35 and continuing on to page 36 by first correctly asserting that Indian Philosophy isn’t irrational and then using the very stereotype that he just stated was wrong by demarcating philosophy as purely rational and then implying religion that isn’t based on rational arguments should have its definition broadened as somehow conforming to rationality.[39] This is simply a self-contradiction that is trying to re-contextualize words by redefining illogical beliefs within Hinduism as somehow rational, but refusing to simply use actual rational arguments within Hinduism itself. Chapter 3 “Philosophy As A Distinct Cultural Practice” by Justin E. H. Smith, listed as a Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Universite Paris Diderot (Paris 7)[40], explicitly begins on page 56 by asserting the audience of Indology is for people of “European” or “Western” backgrounds and then goes onto explain that comparative studies should never include comparing philosophies of two distinct cultural backgrounds.[41] On page 57, he asserts that Greece and India only had significant contact in geography and astronomy, he explains how the philosophical exchange that created Pyrrhonian skepticism by Christopher Beckworth has been dismissed without any explanation why, and goes onto explain that there seems to be no evidence of a philosophical exchange between Greece and India because there is no “smoking gun” at all.[42] Evidently, Smith is either utterly ignorant of or entirely dismissive of the period of Hellenization of India that occurred shortly after the defeat of Alexander the Great[43]; many Greek people migrated in droves.[44] The cities and military colonies of Alexander the Great were expanded by the Greek migration from approximately 70 to an additional 250 and eventually, the Greco-Bactarian kingdom was formed by King Demetrius I of Bactria from his successful invasion of Northern India in which there is evidence to indicate that he effectively ruled over it.[45] A cultural syncretism that is unparallel in history proceeded for almost 200 years from 180 BCE to 10 CE.[46] This astonishing level of peaceful intermingling of what is known as the Indo-Greek kingdoms is shown from several compelling pieces of evidence. The Greek and Indian languages and symbols fused within the coinage such as the Greek language in the front and the Pali language in the back.[47] Archaeological evidence shows the blending of Ancient Greek and Ancient Sanatana Dharma practices; statues of the Buddha protected by the Greek God Herakles/Heracles, statues of Mahayana Buddhist deities, and Greco-Buddhist statues of the Buddha in general.[48] Given all of this fascinating history, which Smith doesn’t demonstrate to have any knowledge of in Chapter 3[49], is it reasonable to believe that there was no cultural exchange of philosophical viewpoints or a shared philosophy? There is ample, compelling evidence that indicates Buddhism flourished as a result of this cultural exchange which may have conceivably helped spread Buddhism to East Asia.[50] Yet, despite this astonishing history, Western Indologists expect people to believe that there was no philosophical exchange or perhaps that this almost 200 years of history doesn’t count as a significant and compelling wealth of evidence of such exchange?[51][52] Does that honestly make sense? Further along on pages 58-59, Justin E. H. Smith demonstrates no understanding that Adivasi is a term coined in the 1930s for people in India who didn’t own land and doesn’t mean that they were the original inhabitants as he heavily implies since all Indians are the original inhabitants of India.[53] On page 59, he wrongfully presumes that the debunked Nazi Aryan Race theory is true by claiming that Adivasi traditions show evidence of pre-Aryan origins.[54] He can only claim that it is pre-Aryan, if he assumes the Nazi conspiracy theory is true.[55] He goes on in page 59 to argue the dubious claim that all philosophical positions have anthropological roots which implies that people throughout history can’t have used their reasoning faculties or imagination.[56] Finally, the only useful content that can be gleaned on page 70 is that a Mughal leader attempted to fuse the psychotic teachings of the book, the Quran, as being somehow proved true by the mostly more intellectual and interesting Upanishads; Smith demonstrates no knowledge as to how utterly absurd such a task is, but instead Smith discusses some insane translator by the name of Francois Bernier who cut open animals in front of a Hindu pandit to teach the pandit philosophy and Smith acts as if this was a failure of cultural exchange instead of the act itself being entirely insane on the part of Bernier as it is doubtful most people in the West would begin a cultural exchange by butchering a living animal (in this case, a goat) in front of non-Westerners.[57] Finally, there isn’t much to be said about Chapter 4, “Comparison or Confluence of Philosophy” by Mark Siderits, a retired Analytical Asian Philosophy Professor from Seoul National University[58]. The entirety of the chapter reaffirms comparative philosophy being unwilling to mix philosophies with the pretense that they’re isolated and then he mentions fusion philosophy, but then warns that it could be a form of cultural appropriation and mangling an Indian philosophical school’s ideas.[59] One wonders why on earth a person couldn’t simply reference where they got an idea and then explain how their new idea departs from it before exploring their own philosophical inquiry.
Gerald J. Larson, Andrew J. Nicholson, and Sheldon Pollock
Gerald J. Larson is a Religious Studies Professor at Indiana University and he has focused his work on India.[60] Gerald J. Larson’s book, India’s Agony Over Religion, began with one of the most astonishing premises that I had ever read from a supposed scholar. He has conducted no formal study in Political Science and yet presumed to have knowledge about it and had the confidence to make one of the most shoddy pieces of scholarship ever written. I had to stop reading due to the thoroughgoing anti-intellectual joke of a premise and I honestly can’t believe that this was accepted by any university. The initial premise is that India has been influenced by the outside world and there is no distinct Hindu or Indian thought in the secular and modern government of India. Not only does he imply that India’s intellectual history is wholly borrowed and heavily alludes that this fact is shameful (within the title, no less), but he credits the Western world for the accomplishments of the Indian people in forming a secular Republic because the initial ideas were from the Western world.[61] I decided not to read further partly because the premise is utterly faulty and mostly because I needed to conserve spending since the original plan was to make a Three-part book; I had already bought the main textbook and Andrew J. Nicholson’s works so I really needed to conserve spending. Nevertheless, to further the point and to better understand why it is absurd: Can anyone name a modern country in the world that has ideas wholly distinct and isolated from all influences by other countries either in its governance or its views on religion? The premise was an absurd one. Larson failed to explain what an isolated Hindu or Indian thought would even be. If you wish me to further explain, then please consider what this premise would mean if regarded with any degree of seriousness. If we take Larson’s absurd premise to its logical conclusion, then Cyrus the Great should be credited for any Western abolitionist movement because he was the originator of the idea of banning slavery, India should be credited for the care for animals in all countries because of how it was the first to treat animals well and codify it into a set of rules throughout a government, and – if we’re crediting the Western world for the actions of other people – then the Western world would have to collectively be blamed for Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward which killed tens of millions of Chinese civilians due to his following the ideals of Marxism which were developed in the West. Larson’s asinine claims fail to explore the category of human psychology and the transmission of beliefs from one culture to another, which he clearly didn’t even think about when writing his book. Finally, his other book Classical Samkhya: an Interpretation of its History and Meaning, which I did read two chapters of, showcases the blind guesswork of hermeneutics and affirms that there is no credible reason for Indology to have any internal consensus since he critiques people who aren’t even Indologists and takes their ignorant views seriously with the objections being his own ignorant assertions.[62] Why, then, does Western Indology disqualify the views of so many Hindus in India who have criticisms? Their consensus has no criteria at all, so on what intellectual grounds can Indology departments refuse the views of anyone with an opinion on Indian intellectual traditions?
In a June 2018 interview with The Indian Express, Indologist Professor from Columbia University, Sheldon Pollock claimed that he looked at the ugly in Indian history[63], but it would seem that he turned a blind eye to the ugliness that Islam brought upon India and the mass death toll in its wake.[64] Pollock depicts his detractors in a very one-sided view and seems to present himself as above the supposed hate, while refusing to honestly engage with them in dialogue.[65] He seems to be blissfully unaware of the Hindutva side of the conflict in Kashmir before signing his name in opposition to it.[66] He has shown no knowledge of the Kashmiri Hindus who were driven out via mass violence by terrorist groups and mobs of Kashmiri Muslims or the cluster of Islamic terrorist groups that Kashmir has affiliated itself with from Pakistan over the years which includes al Qaeda-linked groups.[67][68] If his 1985 essay and details about his other works from Nicholson’s book are any indication, it seems that he may not have any knowledge of the genocidal history of the Islamic conquests in India either or the fact that – as utterly awful as Casteism is – it was the horror of the Islamic conquests that caused untouchables to flee India in droves in a mass exodus from which they eventually became identified as the Romani people.[69][70][71][72] Oh, and the fact they had common Sanskrit words in their language casts doubt on arguments that it was an exclusive language of the upper-caste in ancient India.[73] He neither seems aware or interested in learning of the political issues in contemporary India that he knowingly and willingly involves himself with. It seems to me that his entire career has been made by categorically denying genocides of Hindus from both his writings and his political participation. Whether its ancient history like the Islamic conquests or contemporary history like the Kashmiri Hindu Pandits who were driven out of Kashmir.[74] If he was simply ignorant of the political issue of Kashmir, then why did he choose to knowingly get himself involved? If he pleads ignorance to the history of Islamic invasion in India despite attaining his Ph.D. in 1975 on Indian studies, then what kind of scholar does that make him, if he’s purportedly trying to bring an improved context on Indian history as an Indologist throughout his career?
Andrew J. Nicholson’s books were of interest to me because, before I had acquired and read The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy and bore witness to his lack of understanding of the basics of the burden of proof in analytical philosophy along with his thesis advisor Sheldon Pollock[75], I had assumed that he had knowledge about Samkhya philosophical thought and I had been eager to read more in order to learn more of the historical development of my own religion and perhaps to better critique it with an outsider view. However, I kept spotting logical fallacies and errors in his book, Unifying Hinduism, from the beginning. I was astonished to find that the entire premise, and apparently a large portion of Western Indologist scholarship, has been solely devoted to one-word as the disputed reason why Hinduism is supposedly a modern invention, which is the word Hinduism itself.[76] Nicholson’s book was an attempt at a middle-ground approach; yet, he never seems to question the fact that his entire book is premised upon an argument of semantics.[77] It is a false premise. I actually couldn’t believe that this was the controversy and that the bold claim that Hinduism was never a religion was based upon nothing more than semantics.[78] Quite honestly, I wonder how can people from India get so riled-up and angry over this shoddy scholarship which seems to be the norm of Western Indology. Even more astonishing, I found it difficult to process the idea that many decades worth of so-called scholarship by Western Indology to make bold arguments was based upon semantics and almost nothing else as evidence.[79][80] Every other religious group would have probably laughed at this premise as what matters are the definition and the self-identification of the religious practitioners; the Abrahamic faiths themselves aren’t based on a solid grounding of history. The core of Sanatana Dharma has always been that we are part of the same Oneness and that we have our own interpretations about that oneness; reading portions of the Mahabharata, The Upanishads, the Devi Gita, the Bhagavad Gita, and even Andrew J. Nicholson’s own translation of the Siva Gita, which I bought and read before Unifying Hinduism, led me to that understanding and affirmed that understanding when I delved more deeply into Sanatana Dharma religious texts. That’s the core of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. We’re all the same religion, but we each have our own denomination based upon interpreting our Oneness. Many atheists and others curious enough to look into Hinduism have also accepted this as the main thesis of Sanatana Dharma; yet, Western Indology seems incapable of understanding this basic premise.
Nonetheless, there’s deeper problems with the behavior of Western Indology, and possibly the entirety of Indology. These Indologists, especially Western Indologists, don’t seem to be aware of the fact that there is no evidence that the Exodus of Moses or the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt ever happened.[81] Therefore, any historical comparison between the Abrahamic faiths and Hinduism is based upon falsehoods about the history of the Abrahamic faiths. That means Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all founded upon a falsification of history; moreover, Islam itself claims that Judaism and Christianity are falsehoods and that the prophets were all Muslim since the beginning of time. Andrew Nicholson never attempts to address this issue when mentioning the Abrahamic faiths as a comparison and it seems that he doesn’t know judging from the book itself.[82] Moreover, judging from actual Christian history, if we were to take the various Christian sects at their word, then they’ve never been unified; for example, many Protestants consider both Mormonism and Catholicism as aberrations that aren’t part of Christianity. Jews, Muslims, and Christians all have varied sects which entirely disagree and the latter two go so far as to argue that other practitioners of their faith aren’t legitimate Muslims and Christians respectively. Comparatively, some Hindus consider each other as part of the same Oneness and are willing to include Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews if they are comfortable with it; this is under the presumption that Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism are already part of Sanatana Dharma. Nicholson never once bothers to consider why it is that Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians lived in peace and harmony with practitioners of Sanatana Dharma for many hundreds of years while the Islamic conquests brought upon an immediate massacre after an already bloody history of Islam’s massacres of Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians throughout its history in the Middle East. While European imperialism brought upon its own sordid affairs like the Goa Inquisition in which Catholic Portuguese, upon first contact in India in their “civilizing mission” on behalf of the Catholic Church, decided to immediately burn down Indian Jewish synagogues and forcibly amputate Hindus and Jews in front of their families to bring about forced conversions to the Catholic faith[83][84]; I haven’t found evidence of persecutions or violence by Indian Christians upon other Indians before the European conquests, but if I am mistaken then I’ll adjust accordingly upon obtaining valid historical information.
The most problematic view is in Nicholson’s tenth chapter. If his references to other Indologists are to be believed, then Sheldon Pollock, Romila Thapar, Cynthia Talbot, and the so-called anonymous number of historians are all entirely ignorant of the mass genocides perpetuated by Islamic invaders and subsequent rulers on the Indian subcontinent[85]; for all the arguments about proper context, none of them seem to be aware of one of the bloodiest tragedies in India’s history which was solely the act of Islamic invaders and rulers.[86] I suspect that I will be vilified by these so-called scholars and have ad hominem attacks thrust at me for arguing this point due to my religious and ethnic background, so here is a snippet from Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage from subsection VI. The Moslem Conquest:
Each winter Mahmud descended into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with full freedom to pillage and kill; each spring he returned to his capital richer than before. At Mathura (on the Jumna) he took from the temple its statues of gold encrusted with precious stones, and emptied its coffers of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewelry; he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of two hundred years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naphtha and burnt to the ground.73 Six years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, Somnath, killed all its fifty thousand inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni. In the end he became, perhaps, the richest king that history has ever known. Sometimes he spared the population of the ravaged cities, and took them home to be sold as slaves; but so great was the number of such captives that after some years no one could be found to offer more than a few shillings for a slave. Before every important engagement Mahmud knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of God upon his arms. He reigned for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years and honors, Moslem historians ranked him as the greatest monarch of his time, and one of the greatest sovereigns of any age.74
Seeing the canonization that success had brought to this magnificent thief, other Moslem rulers profited by his example, though none succeeded in bettering his instruction. In 1186 the Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghanistan, invaded India, captured the city of Delhi, destroyed its temples, confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its palaces to establish the Sultanate of Delhi—an alien despotism fastened upon northern India for three centuries, and checked only by assassination and revolt. The first of these bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of his kind—fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts, as the Mohammedan historian tells us, “were bestowed by hundreds of thousands, and his slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands.” In one victory of this warrior (who had been purchased as a slave), “fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.”75 Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and brigands by casting them under the feet of elephants, or removing their skins, stuffing these with straw, and hanging them from the gates of Delhi. When some Mongol inhabitants who had settled in Delhi, and had been converted to Islam, attempted a rising, Sultan Alau-d-din (the conquerer of Chitor) had all the males—from fifteen to thirty thousand of them—slaughtered in one day. Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak acquired the throne by murdering his father, became a great scholar and an elegant writer, dabbled in mathematics, physics and Greek philosophy, surpassed his predecessors in bloodshed and brutality, fed the flesh of a rebel nephew to the rebel’s wife and children, ruined the country with reckless inflation, and laid it waste with pillage and murder till the inhabitants fled to the jungle. He killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a Moslem historian, “there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his Civil Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers and executioners were wearied out by their work of dragging” the victims “and putting them to death in crowds.”[1]
- [1] Durant, Will. Chapter XVI: From Alexander to Aurangzeb: VI. The Moslem Conquest (Pgs. 10447-10520). Our Oriental Heritage: Being a History of Civilization in Egypt and the Near East to the Death of Alexander, and in India, China and Japan from the Beginning to Our Own Day. Simon and Schuster, 1935.
This history was entirely available to them in world-renown historian Will Durant’s book, The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage, which was published in 1935. They repeatedly argue in a collective, one-sided view of vilification and yet none of these so-called scholars seem to be aware of the catastrophes that Islam wrought upon India. Nicholson suggests the peaceful and tolerant Akbar the Great, but asserts that he is a Muslim and makes no mention of the fact that Akbar abandoned the Muslim faith to set-up his own religion; if anything, Akbar was the first and probably only Ex-Muslim King.[1] Even worse, Nicholson’s assertions and references to other so-called scholars only casts further doubt on their credibility because the lack of textual information on Hindu-Muslim encounters that Nicholson mentions in his book are likely due to the way Islamic countries set-up their societies.[2] Islam traditionally, and even today throughout multiple Islamic countries like Lebanon and Syria before the Civil War, follow a process of religious apartheid which includes enforcing societal customs of gender apartheid.[3][4] Blasphemy is an offense that would get people killed even back then since they would be under strict Sharia observance and Muslims essentially live with special privileges in Islamic societies when they are the ruling power. What can explain these supposedly high-profile Western Indologist scholars sheer ignorance of these facts about Islam and Nicholson’s own ignorance in which he states that Hindu intellectuals are arguing a myth while he himself shows no awareness of the historic context of Islamic invasions?[5] Is it laziness? Is it political correctness? Unfortunately, the problem seems to be much worse than that. The study of hermeneutics, lacking any basis in guidelines or any procedures, repeatedly fails to put important events in historic context because it is just the practice of make-believe. Beyond using Western academia as a shield from criticism, it builds a capricious consensus on the basis of personal whims within an insular community and pretends to be a scholarly endeavor because of its setting. Western Indology isn’t a legitimate academic discipline and it probably doesn’t deserve to waste anymore University grant money when much more intellectual scholarly work in STEM departments or social science work such as Political Science, Ethics Philosophy of AI, and Business are much more important and accurate. In effect, US Indology is intrinsically worthless.
Debunking The Aryan Invasion/Immigration Theory
Due to this being a hotly contested political issue, I’ve decided to simply share the full two-part interview by journalist Nithin Sridhar who works for a US-based non-profit independent media organization, NewsGram.[6] In his interview with an accredited Indian archaeologist whose research is based upon the scientific method and empirical evidence. From the November 30th, 2015 article “No Evidence for warfare or invasion; Aryan migration too is a myth: B. B. Lal” by Nithin Sridhar is as follows:
Aryan Question: Part 1
Recently, Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) leader Mallikarjuna Kharge raked up a controversy in the Parliament by saying: “Ambedkar and we are from this country. Aryans came from outside. We are the original inhabitants of this land.”
His statements have again shed light on the Aryan question that continues to remain unresolved and controversial. The issue of Aryans first arose during the colonial period when the European scholars conceived of two different races- Aryan and Dravidian. They further propounded that Aryans invaded India and destroyed the native culture, forcing Dravidians to move south-words.
Later, the racial connotations were removed and replaced by linguistic divisions between speakers of the Aryan group of languages and the Dravidian group of languages. But, even today this the racial division continues to be harbored in Indian politics, especially in Dravidian politics and in certain Dalit groups.
In the last few decades, the proposition of military invasion has also been largely rejected and replaced by the proposition of immigration of Aryan speakers into India. Further, many Indologists have raised serious questions regarding this proposed migration as well, and they have propounded a non-migration scenario. Some have also proposed a possible westward migration of people from India. The issue is further complicated by the fact that it is multi-dimensional and requires investigation from diverse fields ranging from Archaeology and Linguistics to Genetics and Hydrology. Thus, the Aryan issue is mired in confusion and controversy.
In order to highlight few salient features of the Aryan issue and assess the current position regarding various questions like identification of the Aryans, their homeland, their dating, their connection with Indus-Valley civilization, etc. NewsGram decided to interview various Indologists, academicians, and Independent scholars who have worked for decades on various aspects of this issue.
In this first interview for the ‘Aryan Question’ series, NewsGram spoke to Brij Basi Lal, popularly known as B. B. Lal, regarding Aryan people, their movement, and their relationship with Harappan civilization.
- B. Lal is a renowned archeologist and former Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) who has written many books and papers on the Aryan issue including his 2015 book- ‘The Rigvedic People: Invaders?/ Immigrants? Or Indigenous?’ Here is the first installment of the interview–
Interview with B. B. Lal-1
Nithin Sridhar: How deep are the roots of the most ancient civilization of the Indian subcontinent, known as the Harappan Civilization, and through what stages did it develop?
- Lal: The Harappan Civilization (also called the Indus Civilization or Indus-Sarasvati Civilization), which reached its peak in the 3rd millennium BCE, grew up on the Indian soil itself. While there are likely to have been earlier stages, the earliest one so far identified is at Bhirrana, a site in the upper reaches of the Sarasvati valley, in Haryana. This is the stage when the people dwelt in pits and used incised and appliqué pottery called the Hakra Ware. According to Carbon-14 dates, it is ascribable to the 6th -5th millennium BCE. I call it Stage I.
In Stage II, identified at a nearby site called Kunal, the people gave up pit-dwellings and built houses on the land-surface, used copper and silver artifacts and a special kind of pottery which was red in color and painted with designs in black outline, the inner space being filled with white color. This Stage may be assigned to the 4th millennium BCE.
In Stage III, beginning around 3,000 BCE, a new feature came up, namely the construction of a peripheral (fortification?) wall around the settlement, which has been noted at Kalibangan, located on the left bank of the Sarasvati in Hanumangarh District of Rajasthan. Another important feature that can be noted here is an agricultural field, marked by a criss-cross pattern of furrows. It may incidentally be mentioned that this the earliest agricultural field ever discovered anywhere in the world in an excavation. An earthquake, occurring around 2,700 BCE, brought about the end of Stage III at Kalibangan. This is the earliest evidence of earthquake ever recorded in an archeological excavation.
However, after about a century or so the people returned to Kalibangan, but with a bang. This is Stage IV. They now had two parts of the settlement, a ‘Citadel’ on the west and a ‘Lower Town’ on the east. Both were fortified. In the Lower Town there lived agriculturalists and merchants, while the Citadel was the seat of priests and elites. In the southern part of the Citadel, there were many high, mud-brick platforms on which there stood specialized structures, including fire-altars and sacrificial pits. There is ample evidence of writing, seals, weights, measures, objects of art in this Stage, assignable to circa 2600 to 2000 BCE. The peak had been reached.
Citadel, Middle Town, and Lower Town were also features of other sites of Indus-Sarasvati civilization.
For various reasons, including sharp climatic changes, the drying up of the Sarasvati, and steep fall in trade, the big cities disappeared and there was a reversal to the rural scenario. Some people migrated from the Sarasvati valley into the upper Ganga-Yamuna terrain, as indicated by sites like Hulas and Alamgirpur. The curtain was drawn on a mighty Indian civilization.
NS: Many people hold that there was an ‘Aryan Invasion’ which destroyed the Harappan Civilization. How far is this true?
Lal: Let us first go to the background against which the ‘Aryan Invasion’ theory emerged. In the 19th century, Max Muller, a German Indologist, dated the Vedas to 1200 BCE. Accepting that the Sutras existed around 600 BCE and assigning 200 years to each of the preceding stages, namely those of the Aranyakas, Brahmanas, and Vedas, he arrived at the magic figure of 1,200 BCE.
There were serious objections to such ad-hocism by contemporary scholars, like Goldstucker, Whitney, and Wilson. Thus cornered, Max Muller finally surrendered by stating: “Whether the Vedic hymns were composed in 1000 or 1500 or 2000 or 3000 BC, no power on earth will ever determine.” But the great pity is that some scholars even today cling to 1200 BCE and dare not cross this Lakshamana Rekha!
In the 1920s, the Harappan Civilization was discovered and dated to 3rd millennium BCE on the basis of its contacts with West Asian civilizations. Since the Vedas had already been dated, be it wrongly, to 1200 BCE, the Harappan Civilization was declared to be Non-Vedic. And since the only other major language group in India was the Dravidian, it was readily assumed that the Harappans was a Dravidian-speaking people.
In 1946, Wheeler discovered a fort at Harappa; and since the Aryan god Indra has been mentioned in the Rigveda as puramdara, i.e. ‘destroyer of forts’, he lost no time in declaring that Aryan Invaders destroyed the Harappan Civilization.
In the excavations at Mohenjo-Daro, some human skeletons had been found. In support of his ‘Invasion’ theory, Wheeler stated that these were the people who had been massacred by the invaders. However, since the skeletons had been found at different stratigraphic levels and could not, therefore, be related to a single event, much less to an invasion, Wheeler’s theory was prima facie wrong. Dales, an American archeologist, has rightly dubbed it as a ‘mythical massacre’.
Indeed, there is no evidence whatsoever of an invasion at any of the hundreds of Harappan sites. On the other hand, there is ample evidence of continuity of habitation, though marked by gradual cultural devolution. A detailed study of human skeletal remains from various sites by Hemphill and his colleagues has established that no new people at all entered India between 4500 and 800 BCE. Thus, if there is no evidence of warfare or of entry of an alien people where is the case for any ‘invasion’, much less by Aryans?
NS: In the last few decades, many scholars have taken recourse to the theory of ‘Aryan Migration’ from Central Asia. How far does this new theory stand scrutiny?
Lal: The ghost of ‘Invasion’ has re-appeared in a new avatāra (incarnation), namely that of ‘Immigration’. Romila Thapar says: “If the invasion is discarded, then the mechanism of migration and occasional contacts come into sharper focus. These migrations appear to have been of pastoral cattle breeders who are prominent in the Avesta and Rigveda.” Faithfully following her, R. S. Sharma adds: “The pastoralists who moved to the Indian borderland came from Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex or BMAC which saw the genesis of the culture of the Rigveda.”
Contrary to what has been stated by Thapar and Sharma, the BMAC is not a pastoral culture, but a highly developed urban one. The settlements are marked not only by well-planned houses but also by distinctive public buildings like temples, e.g. those at Dashly-3 and Toglok-21 sites. Then there were Citadel complexes like that at Gonur. The antiquities found at BMAC sites also speak volumes about the high caliber of this civilization. In the face of such a rich heritage of the BMAC, would you like to deduce that the BMAC people were nomads – whom Thapar and Sharma would like to push into India as progenitors of the Rigvedic people? I am sure, you wouldn’t.
But much more important is the fact that no BMAC element, whether seals or bronze axes or sculptures or pot-forms or even the style of architecture ever reached east of the Indus, which was the area occupied by the Vedic Aryans as evidenced by the famous Nadi-stuti hymn (RV 10.75.5-6). Hence, there is no question of the BMAC people having at all entered the Vedic region. Thus, the theory of ‘Aryan Migration’ too is a myth.
NS: Some people hold that the Rigvedic flora and fauna pertain to a cold climate and hence the Rigvedic people must have come from a cold region. What do you think of this view?
Lal: If the attempt at bringing the Vedic Aryans into India from the BMAC has failed, why not try other means? In this category falls the attempt by certain scholars who hold that that Vedic flora pertains to a cold climate and, therefore, the Ṛigvedic people must have come from a cold region and cannot be indigenous. In this context, they refer to species such as birch, Scotch pine, linden, alder, and oak. But, let us examine Rigveda.
In the Rigveda the following trees are mentioned: Aśvattha (Ficus religiosa L.); Kiṁśuka (Butea monosperma [Lamk.]; Khadira (Acacia catechu Wild.); Nyagrodha (Ficus benghalensis L); Vibhīdaka/Vibhītaka (Terminalia Billerica Roxb.); Śālmali (Bombax Ceiba L. Syn. Salmalia malabarica [DC.] Schott); Śiṁsipā (Dalbergia sisso Roxb,). The main regions of the occurrence the foregoing trees are – India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar.
In fact, what is true in the case of the flora is equally true in the case of the fauna as well. Some of the animals mentioned in the Ṛigveda include Vṛiṣabha (Bos Indicus); Siṁha (Lion, Panthera leo L.); Hastin/Vaaaraṇa (Elephas maximus L. and Loxodonta africana), which all typically occur in a tropical climate.
Moreover, even the birds testify to the fact that Ṛigveda have been composed in a tropical climate. In this context, two typical birds may be cited: Mayūra (Pavo cristatus L.) and Chakravāka (Anus Casarca).
From what has been stated in the preceding paragraphs, it must have become abundantly clear that the flora, as well as fauna mentioned in the Ṛigveda, are typically tropical. Further, no cold-climate flora and fauna find a place in this text. Thus, there is no case to hold that the authors of the Ṛigveda belonged to a cold climate.[1]
- [1] Sridhar, Nithin. “No Evidence for Warfare or Invasion; Aryan Migration Too Is a Myth: B B Lal.” NewsGram, 30 Nov. 2015, http://www.newsgram.com/no-evidence-for-warfare-or-invasion-aryan-migration-too-is-a-myth-b-b-lal
The second part of the NewsGram interview, from the December 1st, 2015 article “Vedic and Harrapan are respectively literally and materially facets of the same civilization: B. B. Lal” by Nithin Sridhar with Indian archaeologist Brij Basi Lal is as follows:
Interview with B. B. Lal-2
Nithin Sridhar: If the Aryans were neither ‘Invaders’ nor ‘Immigrants’, were they ‘Indigenous’?
B.B. Lal: To answer this question, we must first settle the date of the Rigveda since the entire mess has been created by wrongly dating the Vedas to 1200 BCE. In this context, the history of the River Sarasvati plays a very vital role. In the Rigveda, it has been referred to as a mighty river, originating in the Himalayas and flowing all the way down to the ocean (RV 7.95.2). But by the time of the Panchavimsha Brahmana (XXV.10.16) it had dried up.
Against this literary background, let us see what archaeology and other sciences have to say in the matter. Along the bank of the Sarasvati (now called the Ghaggar) is located Kalibangan, a site of the Harappan Civilization. It had to be abandoned while it was still in a mature stage, owing to the drying up of the adjacent river. According to the radiocarbon dates, this abandonment took place around 2000. Since, as already stated, during the Rigvedic times the Sarasvati was a mighty flowing river and it dried up around 2,000 BCE, the Rigveda has got to be earlier than 2000 BCE. How much earlier is anybody’s guess; but at least a 3rd millennium BCE horizon is indicated. Further, Rigveda X.75.5-6 very clearly defines the area occupied by Rigvedic people, in the 3rd millennium BCE, as follows:
imam me Gaṅge Yamune Sarasvati Śutudri stotam sachatā Parus̩n̩yā / Asiknyā Marudvr̩idhe Vitastayā Ārjīkīye śr̩in̩uhya- Sus̩omayā // 5 //
Tr̩is̩tāmayā prathamam yātave sajūh̩.Susartvā Rasayā Śvetyā tyā / Tvam Sindho Kubhayā Gomatīm Krumum Mehatnvā saratham yābhir̄iyase // 6 //
Which means the area occupied by Rigvedic people was from the upper reaches of the Ganga-Yamuna on the east to the Indus and its western tributaries on the west. Now, if a simple question is asked, viz. archaeologically, which culture occupied this very area during the Rigvedic times, i.e. in the 3rd millennium BCE, the inescapable answer shall have to be: ‘The Harappan Civilization’. Thus, it is amply clear that the Harappan Civilization and the Vedas are but two faces of the same coin. Further, as already stated earlier, the Harappans were the sons of Indian soil. Hence, the Vedic people who themselves were the Harappans were indigenous.
NS: But, materially, many objections has been raised against the Vedic = Harappan equation. How do you reconcile them?
Lal: Yes, I am aware that against such a chronological-cum-spatial Vedic = Harappan equation, many objections have been raised. Notably, three important objections have been raised, namely: (1) Whereas the Vedic people were nomads, the Harappans were urbanites; (2) The Vedic people knew the horse while the Harappans did not; and (3) The Vedic people used spoked wheels, but the Harappans had no knowledge of such wheels.
Let us take up the first question. The Vedic people were not nomads wandering from place to place, but had regular settlements, some of which were even fortified. In RV 10.101.8 the prayer is: “stitch ye [oh gods] the coats of armour, wide and many; make metal forts secure from all assailants.” RV 7.15.14 runs as follows: “And, irresistible, be thou a mighty metal fort to us, with hundred walls for man’s defense.” Even on the economic front, the Vedic people were highly advanced. Trade was carried on even on the seas. Says RV 9.33.6: “O Soma, pour thou forth four seas filled with a thousand-fold riches.” The ships had sometimes as many as ‘a hundred oars (sataritra)’. Politically, the Vedic people had sabhas and samitis and even a hierarchy of rulers: Samrat, Rajan and Rajakas (RV 6.27.8 & 8.21.8). That these gradations were real and not imaginary is confirmed by the Satapatha Brahmana (V.1.1.12-13): “By offering Rajasuya he becomes Raja and by Vajapeya, Samrat; the office of Raja is lower and of Samrat, higher.” In the face of the foregoing evidence, can we still call the Rigvedic people ‘Nomads’?
Now coming to the horse, in his Mohenjo-daro Report, Mackay states: “Perhaps the most interesting of the model animals is the one that I personally take to represent a horse.” Wheeler confirmed the above view of Mackay, adding that “a jawbone of a horse is also recorded from the same site.” Now a lot of new material has come to light: from Lothal, Surkotada, Kalibangan, etc. Lothal has yielded a terracotta figure as well as the faunal remains of the horse. Reporting on the faunal remains from Surkotada, the renowned international authority on horse-bones, Sandor Bokonyi of Hungary, emphasized: “The occurrence of true horse (Equus Caballus L.) was evidenced by the enamel pattern of the upper and lower cheek and teeth and by the size and form of the incisors and phalanges (toe bones).”
Now lastly, the spoked wheel. Though the hot and humid climate of India does not let wooden specimens survive, there are enough terracotta models of spoked wheels, e.g. from Kalibangan, Rakhigarhi, Banawali, etc. Thus, all the objections against the Vedic=Harappan equation are baseless. The two are respectively the literary and material facets of the same civilization.
NS: Some proponents of the ‘Aryan Invasion’ or ‘Aryan Migration’ theory hold that the Harappans was a Dravidian-speaking people. What do you think of that?
Lal: According to the ‘Aryan Invasion’ thesis, the Invading Aryans drove away the supposed Dravidian-speaking Harappans to South India. If there was any truth in it, one would find settlements of Harappan refugees in South India, but there is not even a single Harappan or even Harappa-related settlement in any of the Dravidian-speaking States, be it Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka or Kerala! Further, it is seen that even when new people occupy a land, the names of at least some places and rivers given by earlier people do continue. For example, in USA names of rivers like Missouri and Mississippi or of places like Chicago and Massachusetts, given by earlier inhabitants, do continue even after the European occupation. But there is no Dravidian river/place-name in the entire area once occupied by the Harappans, viz. from the Indus to upper reaches of the Yamuna. All told, therefore, there is no evidence whatsoever for holding that the Harappans was a Dravidian-speaking people.
NS: Some scholars have stated that Vedic Aryans migrated from India towards the West. Did some Vedic people really emigrate to the West?
Lal: The answer is in the affirmative and the evidence is as follows: Inscribed clay tablets discovered at Bogazkoy in Turkey record a treaty between a Mitanni king named Matiwaza and a Hittite king, Suppilulima. It is dated to 1380 BCE. In it the two kings invoke, as witnesses, the Vedic gods Indra, Mitra, Nasatya and Varuna. Commenting on this treaty, the renowned Indologist T. Burrow observes: “Aryans appear in Mitanni as the ruling dynasty, which means that they must have entered the country as conquerors.” ‘Conquerors from where?’ may not one ask? At that point of time (1380 BCE) there was no other country in the world except India where these gods were worshipped. Thus, the Aryans must have gone from India.
This emigration from India is duly confirmed by what is recorded in the Baudhayana Srautasutra.
“Pranayuh pravavraja.Tasyaite Kuru-Panchalah Kasi-Videha ityetad Ayavam pravrajam Pratyan Amavasus * Tasyaite Gandharayas Parsvo Aratta ityetad Amavasavam.”
The verb used in the first part is pravavraja. Thus, as per rules of grammar, the unstated verb in the second part * should also be ‘pravavraja’. The correct translation of the second part would, therefore, be: “Amavasu migrated westwards. His (people) are the Gandhari, Parsu and Aratta.”
Thus, the Baudhayana Srautasutra does in fact narrate the story of a section of the Vedic Aryans, namely the descendants of Amavasu, having migrated westwards, via Kandahar (Gandhara of the text) in Afghanistan to Persia (Parsu) and Ararat (Aratta) in Armenia. From there they went to Turkey, where the Bogazkoy tablets of the 14th century BCE, as already stated, refer to the Vedic gods Indra, Mitra, Varuna and Nasatyas. Indeed, there is enough archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence from Iran, Iraq and Turkey, which duly establishes this westward migration of the Vedic people in the 2nd -3rd millennium BCE.
NS: There is a clear linguistic relationship between various languages in the Indo-European family. How is this explained if there was no invasion/migration of the Aryans into India?
Lal: No doubt similarity of language between any two areas does envisage a movement of some people from one to the other. But why must it be presumed that in the case under consideration, it must necessarily be from west to east? A movement of people from east to west would also lead to the same result? Isn’t it? There is plenty of archaeological evidence that the Harappans, who were none other than the Vedic people (as I mentioned before), spread outside India into Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran, and Iraq. In Afghanistan, there was a full-fledged settlement of the Harappans, at Shortughai. In Central Asia, sites like Namazga Tepe have yielded a great deal of Harappan material. At the southern end of the Persian Gulf, there was a colony of the Harappans in Oman. In Bahrain a seal bearing Harappan script and the Indian national bird, the peacock, stand as indisputable testimony to the presence of the Harappans in that island. In fact, king Sargon of Akkad hailed Harappan boats berthed in the quay of his capital. All these movements of the Harappans are assignable the 3rd millennium BCE.
In answer to the previous question, I had mentioned that there was an unquestionable presence of the Vedic people in the region now known as Turkey, in the second millennium BCE. From Turkey to Greece it is a stone-throw distance and from there Italy is just next door. The entire foregoing evidence would squarely explain the similarity between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. For this, one need not conjure up an ‘Aryan Invasion’ of India!
NS: It has been held by some scholars that the Harappan Civilization became extinct, leaving no vestiges behind. How far is this true?
Lal: Because of various reasons, such as break up in external trade, drastic climatic changes, the drying up of the Sarasvati and so on, the Harappan urbanization had a major setback: cities gradually vanished, but villages continued. There was no extinction of the people who carried on their day-to-day life, though in a humble way than before. Thus, we find many of the Harappan traits in vogue even today. For example, the application by married Hindu women of vermilion (sindūra) in the partition line of the hair on the head, the wearing of multiple bangles on the arms and of pāyala around the ankles; practice of yogic exercises; worshipping Lord Shiva, even in the form of liṅga-cum-yoni; performing rituals using fire-altars, using sacred symbols like the svastika; and so on. Indeed, be not surprised if I told you that the way you greet each other with namaste goes back to the Harappan times. Above all, even some of the folk tales, like those of ‘A Thirsty Crow’ or ‘The Cunning Fox’, which grandmothers narrate to the children while putting them to sleep originated in the Harappan times. Tradition dies hard![1]
- [1] Sridhar, Nithin. “Vedic and Harappan Are Respectively Literary and Material Facets of Same Civilization: B. B. Lal.” NewsGram, 2 Dec. 2015, http://www.newsgram.com/vedic-and-harappan-are-respectively-literary-and-material-facets-of-same-civilization-b-b-lal
There have been accusations that some Western Indologists, instead of accepting and adapting to new information, fraudulently began adding their unsubstantiated suppositions to the work of US geneticists; if this is so, then it must be ascertained how thoroughly they’ve committed these fraudulent activities as that would mean that they lied to the US scientific community by arguing their make-believe assumptions held the same standing as empirical facts.[1] The archeological investigations by Indian archaeologists were never added to The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy and multiple Western Indologists display no awareness of them. Controversy over so-called genetics in the male line of Indian genealogy arose to argue in defense of the debunked Aryan Race Theory and it became a topic of further controversy within the country of India until finally the study’s much anticipated conclusions were released. On Outline.com, in the article “Harrapan Site of Rakhigarhi: DNA study finds no Central Asian trace, junks Aryan invasion theory” by journalist Anubhuti Vishnoi in which she concisely details as follows:
The much-awaited DNA study of the skeletal remains found at the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi, Haryana, shows no Central Asian trace, indicating the Aryan invasion theory was flawed and Vedic evolution was through indigenous people.
The lead researchers of this soon-tobe published study — Vasant Shinde and Neeraj Rai — told ET that this establishes the knowledge ecosystem in the Vedic era was guided by “fully indigenous” people with limited “external contact”.
“The Rakhigarhi human DNA clearly shows a predominant local element — the mitochondrial DNA is very strong in it. There is some minor foreign element which shows some mixing up with a foreign population, but the DNA is clearly local,” Shinde told ET. He went on to add: “This indicates quite clearly, through archeological data, that the Vedic era that followed was a fully indigenous period with some external contact.”
According to Shinde’s findings, the manner of burial is quite similar to the early Vedic period, also known as the Rigvedic Era. The pottery, the brick type used for construction and the general ‘good health’ of the people ascertained through the skeletal remains in Rakhigarhi, he said, pointed to a well-developed knowledge system that evolved further into the Vedic era. The study has, in fact, noted that some burial rituals observed in the Rakhigarhi necropolis prevail even now in some communities, showing a remarkable continuity over thousands of years.
Shinde, who is the vice-chancellor of the Deccan College, Pune, was the lead archaeologist in the study while Rai, who is the head of the ancient DNA laboratory at Lucknow’s Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, did the DNA study.
MINOR TRACES OF IRANIAN STRAINS
According to Rai, the evidence points to a predominantly indigenous culture that voluntarily spread across other areas, not displaced or overrun by an Aryan invasion. “The condition of the human skeletons, the burial…all show absence of palaeo-pathology symptoms which could indicate ailments due to lack of medical care. The persons here were healthy; denture morphology showed teeth free of any infection; bones are healthy, as is the cranium,” Rai told ET.He also discounted the notion of any violent conflict. “There are no cuts and marks which would be associated with a population subjected to warfare. All this indicates that the people were receiving well-developed healthcare and had full-fledged knowledge systems.” The excavations in Rigvedic phase, he said, corroborate this. “This points to greater continuity rather than to a new Aryan race descending and bringing superior knowledge systems to the region,” Rai said.
The Rakhigarhi study, he said, while showing absence of any Central Asian/Steppe element in the genetic make-up of the Harappan people, does indicate minor traces of Iranian strains which may point to contact, not invasion.
The Aryan invasion theory holds forth that a set of migrants came from Central Asia armed with superior knowledge and arms and invaded the existing settlements to establish a more sophisticated civilisation in India and pushed the original inhabitants down south. Rakhigarhi is one of the biggest Harappan civilisation sites spread across 300 hectares in Hisar, Haryana. It’s estimated to be 6,000 years old and was part of the mature phase of the Harappan period.
Rai disclosed that 148 independent skeletal elements from Rakhigarhi were screened for the presence of DNA molecules at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad. Of the 148 skeletal remains, only two samples yielded any relevant DNA material.
Meanwhile, hectic last-minute efforts are on to get additional genetic details of the DNA material. One of the DNA samples recently faced contamination in a Seoul laboratory and efforts are on to segregate it. Samples were sent to laboratories in Seoul and Harvard for establishing accuracy. The contamination, Rai said, is unlikely to have any major bearing on the study’s primary findings.[1]
- [1] VISHNOI, ANUBHUTI. “Read & Annotate without Distractions.” Outline, The Economic Times, outline.com/8eLEVN.
Western Academia versus Western Indology
I don’t know to what extent this critique will even be useful or effective. I had wanted cogent and intellectual critiques of Hinduism, so I had naturally looked more into Western Indology in the hopes of gaining an outsider view of my own religious background. A year ago, I had a negative disposition of the BJP because I had trusted that the Western mainstream media was reporting honestly about the situation in India. Although they may detest me for writing this, Ex-Muslims of North America’s critiques on Islam is what made me re-evaluate everything that I had learned and implicitly trusted as reliable, particularly Muhammad Syed’s criticism of the Islamic slave trade being far worse in terms of impact on the lives of African civilians than the Atlantic slave trade (both were equally reprehensible in terms of human rights) and Sarah Haider’s arguments about Islam’s propensity for cultural genocide.[1][2] Arguments from individuals like Koenraad Elst, which I had believed to be insane and hateful due to mainstream Western Indologists portrayal of his work, turned out to be true once I internalized the Ex-MNA critiques and began to factually re-evaluate everything. What horrified me the most was that the first time I had learned of the genocide of India by Islam, it had been from a far-right British political organization whose stated goal was ethnocentrism in Great Britain. I had naturally believed that these were abhorrent lies about the history of Islam, or perhaps exaggerated details about the historical record which ignored whatever it was that Hindus did at the very least. I anonymously asked Indians from India online and they had never heard of such massacres; I had believed that surely they would have heard of such events if they were so detrimental and important in understanding India’s history. Yet, a Sikh website also shared similar info and cited similar historians and journalists; I quickly assumed that it was all some harebrained conspiracy theory because why did Western Indology seem so ignorant of such tragic events? Surely, they’ve looked over this information? I had read Andrew J. Nicholson’s Unifying Hinduism and at no point does he seem aware of this history, nor does anyone else in Western Indology that he cites.[3] He even cited Romila Thapar who argues that Muslims and Hindus weren’t aware of any distinction in period of Islam’s entrance into India.[4] That was why I had thought it was either an exaggeration or lies. After listening to Ex-MNA, I had looked through several Islamic sources online and began to realize the horrible truth when I reflected on what I thought I knew was credible information from Western Indology and compared it to the internal beliefs of Islamic teachings. To my personal horror, Elst’s claim about approximately 80 million deaths seemed to gain significant ground when learning of Islam’s own history before it entered India. Several months worth of research on Hinduism from Western Indology turned out to be complete garbage after I looked at the supposed far-right sources and picked the most reliable one to read; Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage. Durant had visited India to conduct thorough research, he had briefly paused to write The Case For India in defense of Indian liberty against British imperialism after being aghast at the mass starvation under British policies, and Durant largely cites Muslim historians when copiously detailing the horrific bloodbath that Islamic conquests caused in India upon practitioners of Sanatana Dharma. Will Durant’s work has largely stood the test of time and the only portion he seems to be wrong about regarding India would be the Indo-Aryan conquest; in that specific chapter, he mainly focuses on the amazing technological developments and he was working with what was believed to be reliable information. Durant focuses on accuracy and the fact the Indo-Aryan invasion has proven to be a myth doesn’t discount his other historical writings which are more on point. Dismissing his entire work because one portion, during a time when it seemed to be the most reliable information, would be a fallacy of composition; the fallacy essentially means that because something is true for one component of a particular thing then it must be true for all of it. He even adds a caveat before the chapters on India’s history in his book about specific dates in Indian time periods before the 1600s being speculation based on the best information available, but the events themselves did happen from what can be gleaned from the sources. Unlike contemporary Christian missionaries in India who shout about how Hindus are all devil worshippers while proselytizing and goading impoverished people into forced conversions, Will Durant seems to have cared out of genuine concern for his fellow human beings when he was in India and in my personal opinion, his return to Catholicism in his later years is incidental to his legacy. I think his work largely withstood the test of time because he was aiming for accuracy to the best of his abilities when he published Our Oriental Heritage in 1935.
The information in Will Durant’s book was wholly available to Western Indology for several decades, but it seems that none of them are aware of it since none of them mention the Islamic conquests. Moreover, the theses of the Western Indologists that I looked into seem to be hasty generalizations; a hasty generalization is a rushed conclusion without looking at all the factors. Larson isn’t qualified to make his argument as he has never studied Political Science, Psychology, or Sociology. Romila Thapar’s conclusion about supposed pastoral migration of Indo-Aryans contradicts the facts and her arguments about Muslims and Hindus not being aware of each other contradict both the historical record and psychological studies of human behavior regarding how different social groups interact upon contact.[5][6] Neither Sheldon Pollock nor Andrew J. Nicholson show any awareness of the brutal massacres by Islamic invaders in the writings of theirs that I’ve read.[7][8] Some readers may reasonably conclude that this is due to ignorance of Islam and a result of special privilege being granted to Islam in Western academia, but there’s a more pernicious aspect to all of this when The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy is also added into this issue for evaluation. The supposed “research” of Western Indology seems to be categorically wrong; at no point is any shred of information that they’re arguing actually the truth because they don’t base it upon empirical evidence from what I’ve read. As two examples, Justin E. H. Smith shows no knowledge that the Adivasi term was coined in the 1930s and doesn’t refer to any original inhabitants of India.[9] Romila Thapar claimed that the term Hindu was formed in the 14th Century CE according to Nicholson’s book and shows no knowledge of the fact that Hindu was derived from an Old Persian inscription on Darius The Great I’s grave made in 490 BCE which describes the people of India as the “Hindush” when Hidush is translated into another language since the n is silent.[10] These are basic elements of information that Western Indology has uniformly failed in acknowledging throughout the West. The problem runs deeper still; if they weren’t aware of these basic facts, then they are incompetent, but if they were aware yet never posed any response with factual evidence to back them up to counter these arguments, then they’re deliberately lying and distorting history for whatever reasons they have. Regardless of either scenario, to the best of my knowledge with the information given to me, Western Indology is proving to be an anti-intellectual, insular community that is thoroughly destroying the credibility of Western academia from within and it remains unchallenged. Any opposing view is seen as beneath them or it is argued to be conspiratorial without evidence despite the fact that all they have to show is hermeneutics, which is just their own personal views which they’re trying to push into the scientific domain to claim more credibility than what they actually have to offer. For my part, I fear that regardless of what I’ve written here, I’ll just be lumped as a hateful bigot or a conspiracy theorist and be forced to watch as Western academia – a community that I both admire and of which I am a proud product of – becomes beleaguered with these falsehoods while all I can do is watch from afar. At the very least, the experience of this research was what slowly began my appreciation for Free Speech and Free Inquiry after my early life throughout grade school and bearing witness to the US Federal government’s actions had almost thoroughly destroyed my confidence in the US Constitution.
Additional sources I put in another blog post debunking the Aryan invasion theory myth by this White Supremacist claptrap:
My understanding regarding the Aryan Migration theory:
- No Evidence Yamnaya groups ever migrated to India in the timeframe for any supposed conquest or migration to unite the languages.
— - No Iranian farmer or Steppe Pastoral genome to support the conquest or migration theory that the idea of an Indo-European language tree hinged on.
— - To get a clearer picture of how badly this hoax has been debunked, there’s now evidence showing that the upper-half of India was in fact speaking an off-shoot of the proto-Dravidian language. The basis is that there’s good evidence to support that the ancient Indus Valley were multilingual speakers and speaking multiple languages was more commonplace in very ancient times.
– - Rochester Institute of Technology, Assistant Professor of the School of Mathematical Sciences, Nishant Malik, put the final nail in the coffin with the mathematical model showing a Global Ice Age contributing to an eventual massive drought of the monsoon season of the Indus Valley Civilization was the real reason for the fall of the Harrapan civilization when studying historic weather patterns of the ancient world.
– - Archaeological findings have found that the Harrapan civilization is 8000 years old: One and Two.The India Today link has a distortion though, the Ancient Egyptian civilization apparently stretches back to 10,000 years to my understanding and it is thus older than the Harrapan / Indus Valley civilization, but the Harrapan / Indus Valley civilization would be the second-oldest due to being 8000 years of age, judging from this information.
For those who want links to B. B. Lal’s full interviews from 2015: One and Two.
Finally, I just want to say – not that anyone cares, but I really just wanted to say – I wish I had never got to know anything about Western Indology. I wish I had never even bothered with how much utter lies and deceit I had to weed through. Examples like Romilia Thapar’s falsehoods run amok:
Romila Thapar – A Fraud and Fake “historian”
The full story of how Marxist Historians fabricated the fiction that Hindu Kings had a tradition of destroying temples without doing any research on the subject.
An American scholar, Y C Rosser has written about her experience with Marxist historians, which is revealing. More so, because no Indian student has undertaken such a simple verification she did. After repeatedly hearing the propaganda that ‘Hindu Kings also destroyed temples’, Rosser decided to dig deeper. She met the same Marxist historians who in the first place unleashed this propaganda. She was shocked to notice that every Marxist historian tried to evade or escape from the authenticity of such a serious topic by quoting someone else. In Rosser’s own words:
Having heard for more than a decade this claim (that Hindu Kings also destroyed temples) by anti-Hindus as an accepted fact, I naturally believed that such events…must have been well recorded in research papers on history, even though I had never seen myself any solid proof in support of the same. I met Harbans Mukhia who had mentioned destruction of temples by Hindus in an…article (The Hindustan Times, March 19, 2000). I asked him what documents on the subject he has in possession. He told me that Prof. Romila Thapar has some information to support the proposition that…Hindu kings also used to destroy temples. He also said that he too had some references somewhere in his files. I wondered those files must be lost in dust by now because even though he has been repeating this story for so many years and has so many publications on mediaeval Indian history, but he has not written any research paper on such an interesting point he has been repeating so much. After some days, I met Prof. Romila Thapar and said that Prof. Mukhia told me that you can give me some information to support the theory that…Hindu rulers regularly destroyed temples in their neighbouring kingdoms. She said she has not written anything but an American research scholar, Richard Eton, has written something recently about it in the preface to his new book….
A classic case of liberally passing the buck. And this very Romila Thapar had so emphatically written way back in year 1969 without a single shred of evidence:
Other reasons can be found when one turns to the tradition of Hindu kings and enquires whether any of them were despoilers of temples and idol-breakers.
Note the hint that Romila Thapar gives: of an established tradition of temple desecration by Hindu kings; the only matter of enquiry being about the ‘reasons’ behind that! But fifty-one years later, Romila Thapar still has neither evidence nor any documentation to offer to support her claim. The only recourse, as now as then, has been a feigned pretension to suggest gullible readers as if the fact is well-known and beyond dispute.
The same trick has been used by the other purveyor, Prof. Harbans Mukhia. Back then, Mr Mukhia, was a mere lecturer in a Delhi college. He wrote in 1969 with the same, easy, over-confident style, in the same pamphlet co-authored with Ms Thapar:
Incidentally, many Hindu rulers also did the same (destruction) with temples in enemy-territory long before the Muslims had emerged as a political challenge to these kingdoms.
Can one imagine that these worthy professors have fooled the entire academic circles and the nation for more than half a century? They were cocksure that ‘Hindu rulers also destroyed temples’ fifty years ago and have ever since repeated it countless times. But if one asks for evidence, these professors are quick to pass the buck to some random historian or scholar.
It is clear that Romila Thapar and Harbans Mukhia have been doubly dishonest to their readers and students. First, to cover up the horrors of the destruction of the Somnath temple by Mahmud Ghazni, Romila Thapar concocted an entire ‘tradition’ of ‘destruction of temples by Hindu kings.’ Obviously what she had been saying all along was quite baseless. Otherwise she could have provided to Rosser at least some old reference (not a recent writing of Richard Eaton) on the strength of which she had so nonchalantly emphasised the ‘tradition of temple destruction by Hindu kings.’ Why does she refer to a ‘recently’ written–a mere article at that–by an American? What has been her own study on the subject? How did she reach such a far-reaching conclusion? Answers to such basic questions cannot be found. Because these eminences never studied the subject in order to reach any conclusion. They just manufactured the conclusion to shield the Islamic barbarities in Indian history, to balance it, evidence be damned.
The second dishonesty in the aforementioned incident is that the two professors did not correct their mischief even after so many years, even being aware that the ‘fact’ is being repeated by their colleagues[i] and students on the authority of their name and fame. In other words, all other propagandists/lecturers/students/activists repeated the lie emboldened by a singular confidence: that it is written by Romila Thapar and Harbans Mukhia! And so it became a ‘fact’ for them and to a large number of gullible intelligentsia. The truth of the matter is that the neither Ms Thapar nor Mr Mukhia ever written even a single article, leave alone a book, on the subject.
This then is a good specimen of the kind of brazen propaganda that has passed for history in India since independence.
However, the main question needs to be addressed, and addressed repeatedly: on what basis has Romila Thapar continuously peddled the lie that Hindu kings destroyed temples as a regular ‘tradition’? By her own admission to Y C Rosser, she did not study the subject; then on what ground did she write that 1969 propaganda piece? The country has a right to know because it directly impacts national policy and future generations.
The other sleight of hand that Romila Thapar has repeatedly indulged in was to quote the Rajatarangini which refers to a single instance of a Hindu King who destroyed temples. By a bizarre twist of logic, she has justified the wholesale destruction of Hindu temples by Mahmud Ghazni and other Islamic invaders. But there’s something even worse: Romila Thapar and her Marxist friends term Islamic invaders as visitors. At any rate, the Rajatarangini reference has become a Romila Thapar trademark over time.
To understand the rationale behind the countless frauds committed by Romila Thapar and gang on Indian history and public discourse, one needs to understand the Communist psyche. This psyche is imbued with a terrible and permanent kind of blind belief about the world and ‘the cause.’ All facts and events find a place in the communist psyche only in the system of that blind belief. Facts have no independent existence. Not only facts but all socio-political-academic work, its political utility, too, is animated by and coordinated with that belief, a religious dogma in reality. Thus, the Indian communist and Marxist approach has always been diehard anti-Hindu and pro-Islam as a rule. Those who come in contact with them also develop the same toxic psyche.
Owing to her family’s close connections with the Nehru dynasty, Romila Thapar was able to eventually occupy and monopolise all sorts of influential institutional positions, which she wielded with impunity. It was this and her close connections with the Communist Party of India that enabled her to don the garb of the most reliable ‘source’ for the fabrication that Hindu Kings had a “tradition” of destroying temples. It is worth noting that this selfsame fabrication was the main reasoning and basis put forward by the JNU historians in 1989 against the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.
However, it is also interesting that despite Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia et al confessing that they had not studied this aspect, they have refused to discard their fiction owing to just one reason: they had understood its sinister political utility, which translates to mobilising the Muslim vote bank.
Look at it from any angle and we find that the attitude of Marxist historians was even worse than that of a lowly politician. Genuine scholars shrink in horror at this sort of academic fraud and chicanery.
Author and Source: Shankar Saran, https://www.dharmadispatch.in/commentary/how-the-marxist-historians-fooled-the-country-without-doing-any-research-on-hindu-temple-destructions
It may be of interest to fellow Hindus to point out: temple burnings happened among Medieval Mayan Native Americans in what is now known as Mesoamerica and I’m aware of one case of Mexica (popularly known as Aztec) temple burnings which was pointed out to disprove historic misconceptions about Nezahualcoyotl in the same region of Mesoamerica. It is curious that a Machiavellian-style Native American war tactic, usually used by Mayan Warrior-Princesses to conquer territories for their own respective Native American medieval dynasties against other Native American dynasties, should be claimed to be used by Hindu Kings of India. It is nice to know that Romilia Thapar has an interest in learning Native American histories just as I am, but it seems plausible that she wrongly misunderstood the term “Indian” in reference to Native Americans at some point in her career and started peddling this distortion about our Hindu ancestors.
A lot of Western and US Indology’s arguments are genuinely ill-thought out. I recall Larson’s arguments about a lack of prophets and it made no sense, because then all but the Abrahamic faiths and Zoroastrianism would have to be discounted as religion, in which case religion would just mean the Abrahamic faiths. So should Native Americans, Africans, Hawaiian, and Maori faith traditions should be dismissed too, because they don’t follow a strictly Abrahamic criteria? The argument that certain lower-caste groups weren’t allowed in specific temples is not a valid argument discrediting Hinduism as a faith tradition, because other forms of discriminatory bias such as gender segregation exists in Islamic countries; it would be the equivalent of claiming Muslim men and women follow a different religion because women aren’t allowed in certain places in Islamic countries. Moreover, Hindus pointed out the baffling contradiction that it makes no sense to claim that the Caste system is over 5000 years old and that Hinduism didn’t exist and it is a modern invention. That would mean that laws protecting vulnerable Caste groups living now would have to be abolished as historic distortions of history too. Fully, nothing most of these Western and US Indologists generally argue makes any logical sense.
Even now, all they do is spread hate and distortion, Audrey Truschke, instead of criticizing the Polish government for Holocaust denial as its official government policy, has instead decided to accuse Hindus of being Nazis. This is fundamentally who these people are, projecting their White Supremacist hate upon those they view as easy targets and I’m tired of Hindus trying to be polite about this blatant racism. An article by author, :
On the streets of New York, Audrey Truschke — then Assistant Professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University — stood with a megaphone and declared to a crowd: “Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his political party, the BJP, openly adhere to Hindutva.”
She then launched into her historical comparison: “Hindutva came about roughly 100 years ago… It was inspired in its early days by Nazism. Did I say Nazis? Yeah, I said Nazis.” She emphasised: “I want to be clear that I am talking about real, actual, historical Nazis.”Then came the most inflammatory claim: “Early Hindutva espousers openly admired Hitler… They praised Hitler’s treatment of the Jewish people in Germany as a good model for dealing with India’s Muslim minority.”With this inflammatory rhetoric, she branded India’s ruling BJP and its adherence to Hindutva as Nazi-like — by extension tarring the hundreds of millions of Indians who democratically elected this government, as fascists. It wasn’t scholarship; it was street theatre designed to demonise an entire community. For Hindus across America, this wasn’t just academic discourse — it was public vilification. To rub salt into the wound, the department of history at Rutgers gleefully posted Truschke’s diatribe on their Facebook feed with the endorsement: “That’s what we call public history.”Now, with her latest book India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent hitting shelves this month, Truschke’s troubling methodology is reaching an even wider audience. The timing couldn’t be more urgent for examining what happens when academic platforms become weapons of ideological warfare.THE HITLER ANALOGY: HISTORY STRIPPED OF CONTEXTTruschke’s accusation draws from a controversial passage in We or Our Nationhood Defined, published in March 1939 and attributed to MS Golwalkar of the RSS. The reality is more complex than her megaphone moment suggests.The book wasn’t authored by Golwalkar but paraphrased and translated by him. The historical context matters crucially: in 1939, the full extent of Nazi atrocities against Jews was not yet known. The Holocaust — the systematic extermination of six million Jews — wouldn’t begin until 1941. For many colonised peoples worldwide, including some Indians, Hitler was viewed primarily as an enemy of Britain — their colonial oppressor.The passage reflects the ideological uncertainty of that era, when colonised peoples worldwide were grappling with competing definitions of nationalism and looking to various models of national reorganisation. More importantly, the RSS has explicitly disavowed this misattributed quote, and decades of subsequent Hindutva writings have evolved far beyond these early formulations. But such nuance doesn’t fit Truschke’s narrative.Most perversely, her Hitler comparison erases a remarkable historical truth: Hindus have never persecuted Jews. For over two millennia, India has been a haven for Jewish communities — in Kerala, Maharashtra, and Bengal. While Jews faced pogroms in Europe, ghettos in the Middle East, and extermination in Nazi camps, they found safety and dignity in Hindu-majority India.To draw parallels between Hindutva and Hitler isn’t just inflammatory — it’s a moral inversion of history that anachronistically applies knowledge of the Holocaust to judge a misattributed quote from an earlier period — and then use that nearly 100-year-old aside to define a contemporary political movement. This is not academic history; it is political pamphleteering.A PATTERN OF DISTORTIONThis isn’t an isolated incident. Truschke’s 2017 book Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King whitewashes a well-documented record of temple destruction, discriminatory taxation, and forced conversions. Despite abundant evidence from Aurangzeb’s own firmans (imperial decrees) documenting systematic iconoclasm and forced conversion of Hindus, she claims he “simply left temples alone” and was a protector of Hindus, dismissing documented destructions as merely following “an Indian stance dating back, at least, to the Chalukyas and Pallavas”.This false equivalency ignores a crucial theological distinction. When Aurangzeb’s contemporary sources praise him for hitting against the “infidels” and spreading Islam through “holy war,” these aren’t political calculations — they’re expressions of religious doctrine. In Islamic theology, idol worship is the gravest sin, making temple destruction an act of piety. Hinduism contains no such mandate. Political motivations aren’t identical to doctrinal imperatives.Truschke dismisses scholars like Jadunath Sarkar as unreliable while downplaying Persian sources that contradict her narrative. Her approach isn’t history — it’s revisionism designed to obscure inconvenient truths.Her recently published India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent promises more of the same: selective citations, interpretive sleights, and wholesale demagoguery. We can expect the 600-page tome to follows the familiar pattern — Hinduism cast as irredeemably oppressive, Islam framed as emancipatory. There’s little interest in balance, complexity, or competing narratives. It is only in the politicised ghetto of “South Asian Studies”, where practicing Hindus have little voice, that an academic would get away with this level of propaganda.SILENCING STUDENTS, STIFLING DIALOGUEAt a recent Georgia Tech event, a Hindu student described confronting Truschke at Princeton about her portrayals. Instead of engaging his respectful questions, she dismissed his concerns as “Hindutva propaganda” and shut him down. The room fell silent — a moment of intimidation, not academic exchange.Hindu students at Rutgers report similar experiences: hesitating to speak in her classes, fearing they’ll be branded bigots for defending their faith. Many now avoid her courses entirely. In 2021, students petitioned against her teaching Hinduism, citing her claim that the Bhagavad Gita “rationalises mass slaughter” and her suggestion linking Hindus to the January 6 Capitol riot.Rutgers defended her academic freedom and promised dialogue with the Hindu community. That dialogue never materialised.THE DOUBLE STANDARD PROBLEMAmerican universities rightfully crack down on antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Black racism. Yet when Hindu students raise similar concerns, institutions often look away, or worse, actively endorse such writing.Truschke positions herself as the victim of “Hindu nationalist trolls” while sidestepping legitimate concerns from students who feel unsafe in her academic spaces. When she tweeted that Lord Rama was a “misogynistic pig” — later claiming scholarly translation — even Robert Goldman, the scholar she cited, publicly rejected her framing. One wonders how the academy would react if a professor used the same language about a different revered figure, say Prophet Mohammad.The damage spreads beyond academia. Hindu students report being mocked as “cow piss drinkers”, stereotyped as “Brahmin oppressors”, or casually equated with fascists. When they respond, they’re accused of extremism — silenced not by force, but by fear.DRAWING THE LINEThis isn’t about suppressing legitimate criticism of Hindutva politics. It’s about distinguishing between scholarly critique and rhetorical abuse.Truschke’s defenders, including Romila Thapar and Sheldon Pollock, argue that attacking Hindutva isn’t Hinduphobia. In practice, targeting Hindutva often disguises targeting Hindus.When Truschke abuses Rama, she is attacking an iconic figure in the Hindu tradition, revered across the length and breadth of India. There can be no better evidence of what her target is.Would such treatment be tolerated toward any other faith community?The answer is obvious. Hinduism, as a non-Abrahamic tradition, remains open season in many Western academic spaces. This double standard isn’t just unjust — it’s intellectually dishonest.THE PATH FORWARDUniversities must confront this hypocrisy. If “safe spaces” truly exist for all, Hindu students deserve the same dignity afforded every other community. That means distinguishing between legitimate academic inquiry and inflammatory demagoguery — whether delivered through peer-reviewed journals, street megaphones, or 600-page histories now being peddled as the history of India.Academic freedom must be balanced with academic responsibility. Scholars have the right to challenge religious and political traditions, but they also have an obligation to maintain scholarly standards, engage in good faith, and create inclusive learning environments.With Truschke’s latest work now in circulation, the stakes have never been higher. Her interpretive framework isn’t confined to specialised academic journals — it’s shaping how a new generation learns about Indian civilisation.Until universities address this imbalance, the promise of inclusive academia remains hollow. Hindu Americans will continue raising their voices — not to suppress debate, but to demand what every community deserves: fairness, intellectual honesty, and basic respect.The megaphone may be loud, but truth has a voice of its own.
I wish wanting to learn about my own ancestor’s past didn’t require me to do fact-checking on such egregious and obvious lies and distortions. I wish I had never bothered getting curious enough to purchase and read a book as absolutely stupid and ignorant as Andrew J. Nicholson’s Unifying Hinduism. That book, Pollock’s articles I read, and Larson’s books were both so egregiously asinine that I just don’t want to waste my time and money on obvious historic falsehoods. I just don’t understand why this is being shielded as academic freedom when they’re clearly not even doing research, but acting as a form of censorship from criticizing Islam in academia. From my point of view, Western and US academia have been permanently hampered by not holding these historic falsehoods to account and allowing a White Supremacist claptrap to go unchallenged for so long. I wish I didn’t have to see how much these self-congratulating academics willfully lie to deny genocide, even when the same actions of genocide repeats in modern form. I’m just disgusted by these people and it honestly makes me wonder what the point of human rights even is, if academia allows this level of willful lies, distortion, and ignorance to go unchallenged, unchecked, and doesn’t hold any of these self-serving people to account. They probably never will be. Nobody cares what we Hindus think even of our own history, after all.
Bibliography and Endnotes
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- [2] Haider, Sarah, and Gad Saad. “Islam’s ERASURE of Distinct Cultures & Histories – Sarah Haider (with Gad Saad).” YouTube, Gravitahn, 15 Feb. 2017, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrvVqi5dOxk.
- [3] Nicholson, Andrew J. Chapter 10: Hindu Unity And The Non-Hindu Other (4806-5293). Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (South Asia Across the Disciplines). Columbia University Press, 2010.
- [4] Nicholson, Andrew J. Chapter 10: Hindu Unity And The Non-Hindu Other (4806-5293). Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (South Asia Across the Disciplines). Columbia University Press, 2010.
- [5] Durant, Will. Chapter XVI: From Alexander to Aurangzeb: VI. The Moslem Conquest (Pgs. 10447-10448). Our Oriental Heritage: Being a History of Civilization in Egypt and the Near East to the Death of Alexander, and in India, China and Japan from the Beginning to Our Own Day. Simon and Schuster, 1935.
- [6] Ispas, Alexa. Psychology and politics: a social identity perspective. Psychology Press, 2014.
- [7] Nicholson, Andrew J. Chapter 10: Hindu Unity And The Non-Hindu Other (4806-5293). Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (South Asia Across the Disciplines). Columbia University Press, 2010.
- [8] Pollock, Sheldon. “Is There an Indian Intellectual History? Introduction to ‘‘Theory and Method in Indian Intellectual History.’’” Http://Www.columbia.edu, Columbia University, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mesaas/faculty/directory/pollock_pub/indian_intellectual_history.pdf.
- [9] Kapstein, Matthew T., et al. Chapter 3: Philosophy as a Distinct Cultural Practice: The Transregional Context by Justin E.H. Smith (Pg. 56). The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy. Edited by Jonardon Ganeri, Oxford University Press, 2018.
- [10] “Hindush.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 Mar. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindush.
- [1] Talageri, Shrikant, et al. “Panel Discussion on the Current State of Aryan Theories.” Moderated by Rajiv Malhotra, YouTube, Swadeshi Indology, 24 Mar. 2018, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmeVR8sqSd4.
- [1] Durant, Will. Chapter XVI: From Alexander to Aurangzeb: VII. Akbar The Great (Pgs. 10520 – 10691). Our Oriental Heritage: Being a History of Civilization in Egypt and the Near East to the Death of Alexander, and in India, China and Japan from the Beginning to Our Own Day. Simon and Schuster, 1935.
- [2] Nicholson, Andrew J. Chapter 10: Hindu Unity And The Non-Hindu Other (4806-5293). Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (South Asia Across the Disciplines). Columbia University Press, 2010.
- [3] Shams, Imtiaz, et al. “Fighting Allah, Defending Muslims – Armin Navabi, Imtiaz Shams, Muhammad Syed.” YouTube, Ex-Muslims of North America, 5 Jan. 2018, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwnHreJNavE. For reference: Timestamp 55:17 – 1:00:58. Imtiaz Shams explains that the Pact of Umar is an apartheid document and its relevance in Islamic dominated civilizations. He, Armin Navabi, and Muhammad Syed then discuss contemporary Ex-Muslim human rights issues.
- [4] Haider, Sarah, et al. “Islam, Modesty and Feminism.” YouTube, Ex-Muslims of North America, 12 Oct. 2017, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QToH2x8njJM.
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- [2] Kapstein, Matthew T., et al. Introduction: Why Indian Philosophy? Why now? by Jordan Ganeri (1-14). The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy. Edited by Jonardon Ganeri, Oxford University Press, 2018.
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- [5] Durant, Will. Chapter XVI: From Alexander to Aurangzeb (10072 – 10817). Our Oriental Heritage: Being a History of Civilization in Egypt and the Near East to the Death of Alexander, and in India, China and Japan from the Beginning to Our Own Day. Simon and Schuster, 1935.
- [6] Durant, Will. Chapter XVI: From Alexander to Aurangzeb: VI. The Moslem Conquest (Pgs. 10447-10448). Our Oriental Heritage: Being a History of Civilization in Egypt and the Near East to the Death of Alexander, and in India, China and Japan from the Beginning to Our Own Day. Simon and Schuster, 1935.
- [7] Kapstein, Matthew T., et al. Introduction: Why Indian Philosophy? Why now? by Jordan Ganeri (1-14). The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy. Edited by Jonardon Ganeri, Oxford University Press, 2018.
- [8] Durant, Will. Chapter XVI: From Alexander to Aurangzeb: VII. Akbar The Great (Pgs. 10520 – 10691). Our Oriental Heritage: Being a History of Civilization in Egypt and the Near East to the Death of Alexander, and in India, China and Japan from the Beginning to Our Own Day. Simon and Schuster, 1935.
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