Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (8) Voice of India's true identity

Meera Nanda, the microbiologist turned philosopher of science, focuses her best work on a topic properly belonging to a science philosopher’s field, viz. the claim that Hinduism is a “scientific religion”. The claim has been made since at least Swami Vivekananda in the late 19^th century, and many English-speaking Hindus take it for granted eventhough they themselves have little grounding in science. I hope to give her refutation of this claim due consideration in the future, for it is truly important, being the highest-quality deconstruction of Hinduism’s most promising bid for a place in the modern world.

But some of her work is of lower quality, having only the anti-Hindu animus in common. Yet, Meera Nanda has done her homework fairly well and, with a few exceptions, avoids taking cheap shots. In a political sense, she could have afforded to, for no one who attacks Hinduism risks any censure for not getting his facts straight. It seems that her intellectual seriousness or even her conscience has prevailed: she didn’t want to be caught in the act of lying by even one informed reader. All the same, some serious inaccuracies have crept in.

Sometimes Meera Nanda ventures outside her own domain to attack other Hindu efforts to assure the survival of the Dharma. Her latest major essay in this category is “Hindu triumphalism and the Clash of Civilisations”, published in the influential Political and Economical Weekly (Delhi), 11 July 2009. She notes that it is only the third paper ever to focus on the pro-Hindu publishing outfit Voice of India. The first one was by the Japanese graduate student Mitsuhiro Kondo, who interviewed Sita Ram Goel, founder and mastermind of Voice of India. I wrote a comment on her work in Elst 2002. The second one, of which I hadn’t heard yet, is given as Reza Pirbhai: “Demons in Hindutva: Writing a Theology for Hindu Nationalism”, Modern Intellectual History, 2008, and which will get a reply in due time The third is her own.

            On personal details, she gets a few less important ones wrong regarding myself, but some pretty fundamental ones concerning the Indians involved. Writing in 2009, and after paying a visit to the Voice of India office, she doesn’t seem to know that Pradeep Goel, who managed the practical aspects of publication for over fifteen years, had passed away in 2005. She also writes about Abhas Kumar Chatterjee and others as if they are still alive. These are not just painful mistakes, but indicate a serious misunderstanding about the role of Voice of India today, viz. that it is now a thing of the past. Secularist “experts” on Hindu activism have strictly ignored this centre of Hindu thought while it was active and only discovered it near or after its end, and that too only sparingly.

            It is no surprise, then, that she gets the main things wrong as well. Thus, she associates Sita Ram Goel repeatedly with “Hindutva”. But to my knowledge, Goelji never ever applied the term "Hindutva" to his own thinking. Though a freedom fighter (i.e., in India, an activist in the anti-colonial freedom movement) in his youth, he often explicitly rejected the nationalist paradigm, especially in contexts where the Sangh Parivar was using it as a ploy to skirt around the difficult ideological issues. In RSS parlance, difficult ideological themes are systematically replaced with a simplistic dichotomy of Indian/foreign or national/”anti-national”. Thus, Babar as a "foreign" rather than "Islamic" invader, Communism as "anti-national" rather than any of the ideological things one could hold against it, the Christian mission as a "CIA vehicle" rather than a religious challenge.

Like most somewhat open-minded people, he was fully aware that the identification of Hinduism with India was becoming obsolete, with ever more Hindus settling abroad and forgetting their mother tongue, and with ever more Westerners adopting Hinduism formally or de facto. The present age is the worst moment in history to redefine Hinduism in terms of its geographical roots rather than its contents.

            On balance, though, I think his rejection of the Sangh, while having a strong ideological dimension in the mind of that hard-headed ideologue, was primarily of a different nature, stemming from his many personal experiences with the RSS and its functioning. His very first objection to the Sangh was against its personnel, against their low intellectual and moral calibre. In all dealings with them, so he told me, there is some unpleasantness, some promise not kept, some trespassing against ordinary good manners, and often some ideological betrayal. In our first conversation, in 1989, he derided the RSS-BJP as "the biggest collection of duffers that ever came together in world history". And in our last, in 2003 (in the presence of Prof. Saradindu Mukherji and Dr. David Frawley), he gloomily said: "Hinduism will not survive unless this RSS-BJP movement perishes." And in between, he said things like: "The RSS is leading Hindu society into a trap."

She manages to accuse himof “Hindu triumphalism”, repeatedly. Like in the paper’s title, here it is the word triumphalism that catches the reader’s eye. That is about the last word I would have thought of when Sita Ram Goel’s work is mentioned. The almost opposite concept of alarmism would seem more appropriate. On the first page of his seminal booklet Hindu Society under Siege, Sita Ram Goel wrote: “But the death of Hindu society is no longer an eventuality which can no longer be envisaged. This great society is now besieged by the same dark and deadly forces which have overwhelmed and obliterated many ancient societies.”

                As a loser, Meera Nanda quotes from Voice of India writers themselves only very sparingly, being all the more talkative about alleged “links”. Thus, she quotes from “Hindu terrorist groups like Sanatan Sanstha” (2009, p.107)  as saying much the same thing, but then alleges that “the most strident expression of Hindu triumphalism comes from a group of writers associated with Voice of India”. That is, more strident than “Hindu terrorism”. The Breivik quotes follow the same pattern: she cannot pinprick the critique of Islam given by Voice of India authors (there is no trace of it in these articles), so she just juxtaposes Voice of India with Breivik’s name and hopes readers will fall for it. Given the great demand for reassurance about Islam, and hence for ridiculing its critics, she may well have some success with what is contentswise an admission of  weakness.

                Meera Nanda shows her utter confusion, or her lack of scruples, when she tries to link Voice of India to the Nouvelle Droite. She claims that “they are finding new recruits from the European New Right”, though she cannot name any (and I as an insider can say that they are non-existent), and purports to name three cases of interaction.

One is an interview which Ram Swarup gave to Christopher Gérard (Brussels), editor of the second Antaios. It is true that Gérard was enthusiastic about Ram Swarup’s apology of Hindu polytheism, and for that reason he gave some publicity to him. But there were also deep differences, papered over in social contexts but nonetheless real. Thus, Gérard was a great believer in the Aryan Invasion Theory, while Ram Swarup opposed it. And Gérard was a great fan of Alain Daniélou, a bookish defender of Hindu traditionalism (as he conceived it, highly idiosyncratically) and of the caste system, while Ram Swarup stood in the native “tradition” of Hindu reformism. The interaction between Ram Swarup and Christopher Gérard, limited to a few meetings, did not go beyond a joint celebration of polytheism, a cause to which both of them were wedded before.

Incidentally, in describing Antaios, Meera Nanda commits several mistakes. She says it was “started by Mircea Eliade and Ernest Jûnger, both ofwhom had close connections with fascist movements in their native Romania and Germany respectively”. (2009:113) Yes, Ernst Jûnger was a Nazi in the 1920s,when it was an opposition movement repressed by the German police and being a Nazi took courage; he was also an anti-Nazi in the late 1930s when Nazism wa in power and being an anti-Nazi took courage. That makes him a very different sort of anti-Nazi from Meera Nanda, who is always found on the safe side. As for Mircea Eliade: Wendy Doniger, the darling of the Nehruvian secularists for her anti-Hindu writings, held the Mircea Eliade Chair at the prestigious Chicago University. Shall we say that she was not averse to fascist connections?

Though Antaios had the same name as a paper founded by Jûnger and Eliade, it was not founded by them. Their paper folded and Antaios was founded anew by Christopher Gérard. He in turn folded it years before Meera Nanda wrote her piece. So the title is available, and a Croat has again founded a paper called Antaios. Oh, and one more detail: Gérard’s Antaios appeared in French, so Ram Swarup never read it.

The second case of interaction between Voice of India and the Nouvelle Droite which Meera Nanda alleges, is this: “Francois Gautier, a follower of Sri Aurobindo, and more recently of Sri Sri Ravishankar, is another VoI author who had a long career with the French newspaper La Figaro, which has been described as the mouthpiece of the French New Right. Gautier is the brain behind the idea of creating a museum showcasing the Hindu ‘holocaust’ at the hands of Muslims.” (2011:113)

The only thing in common between François Gautier and the French Nouvelle Droite thinkers is probably that they are French. He has been in India for decades and is out of touch with developments in France. Yes, he has been a correspondent for Le Figaro for a while, but that was after the paper severed its links with the Nouvelle Droite authors working for its magazine ca. 1980. His museum of Muslim atrocities on Hindu society is the best proof of his non-connectedness to the Nouvelle Droite, which happens te be pro-Islamic and has nothing to do with the Counterjihad agitation now animating a new generation of European parties.

The third is me. But I already said that, save for criticizing Christianity, I have never espoused the typical agenda points of the Nouvelle Droite, not even when, long ago, writing for Nouvelle Droite publications. And here again, the opposite viewpoint on Islam is striking and significant. Luc Pauwels invited me to the Nouvelle Droite paper TeKoS precisely as a counterweight to the existing pro-Islamic tendency. Though Meera Nanda hopes to use the “New Right” as a bridge between Voice of India and the Islam-hating terrorist Anders Breivik, these champions of a “Euro-Arab alliance against the US and Capitalism” have strictly nothing to do with Breivik.

            What then is the difference between Voice of India and the established Hindu Nationalist movement? According to Meera Nanda, “While Islamophobia is not new, its expression used to be moderated by the so-called ‘essential-unity Hinduism’ – the familiar rhetoric which proclaims that all religions are equally true. (…) Even the most radical Hindu communalists occasionally said some good things about other faiths in order to show how big-hearted and tolerant their own faith is.” (2009:107)  Yes, and in fact, far more than she will give them credit for. Frequently, BJP leaders declare and the Organiser writes that terrorism has no religion, that the great religion of Islam is misunderstood by its critics and misused by its fanatics, that “Islam is more sinned against than sinning”, etc.

According to her, “This essential-unity Hinduism, hypocritical though it was, is facing new ideological threats. A new triumphalism is emerging which does not hesitate to openly and unapologetically celebrate the alleged superiority of Hinduism over the alleged depravity of Islam, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Christianity as well.” (2009:107) Yet, “the new tribe of triumphalists speak in terms of pluralism, science and tolerance which supposedly abound in Hinduism.” (2009:107) Her term triumphalism is as inept as could be: everything of value is vulnerable, and consequently Hinduism is no match for its challengers, just as Greek philosophy wasn’t. It has, according to Voice of India’s mission statement, only truth on its side. And whether Truth Shall Prevail, as India’s motto has it, remains to be seen.

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Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (7) Hindu and Flemish nationalism

Meera Nanda, the slanderer, says I have one foot in Flemish nationalism and one foot in Hindu nationalism (2009). And of course I have written in Flemish nationalist magazines, both to praise and to criticize. But what I have written does not follow some party-line. In particular, I am anything but a “nationalist”. One of the chapter titles in my book Decolonizing the Hindu Mind was “Nationalism as a misstatement of Hindu concerns”. (p.474) I wrote quite a few articles against Flemish and Belgian nationalism and a whole book against Hindu nationalism: BJP vis-à-vis Hindu Resurgence, published by the fabled Voice of India, Delhi 1997. Indeed, I already expressed my scepticism of all nationalisms as far back as 1991, in my book Ayodhya and After.

It is especially my articles against Belgian nationalism which have endeared me to the Flemish nationalist media and opened  their columns for me. In my youth, I had little notion of Flemish nationalism, and Belgian nationalism was an object of fun. As Flemish emancipation gained ground, Belgian nationalism acquired teeth and became worthy of opposing once more. If Flemish nationalism were in the ascendant and had a state at its disposal, I would probably oppose it formally, but that is not the case. So I vocally oppose Belgian nationalism instead. But I speak decent French (certainly better than their Dutch), have friendly relations with many Walloons and deplore  it when the Flemings of my children's generation speak English with their Walloon peers. The borders in this part of the world have run every which way, so I have no attachment to any borders nor to any nationalism.

What Meera Nanda writes about my Flemish nationalism is of one kind with so much that she writes, viz. vicious nonsense. It also has nothing to do with Voice of India, which she seeks to slander with anything she can find. I discovered Flemish nationalism only after discovering Hindu nationalism, and I never spoke nor wrote about it in India. But in spite of herself, she does have a point: there is a similarity between the Hindu and the Flemish situation.    

The Hindus are a religiously defined society, the Flemish are a linguistically defined society, and both form the majority in their respective countries, India c.q. in Belgium. Both are non-racial societies and have lost many members: racially theirs, but effectively part of the enemy camp. Their enemies are partly taken out of their own flesh. They are moreover proud of their conversion and look down on their ancestors. (That is why it was misplaced of Guru Golwalkar in his famous quote from We, 1939, and of Subramaniam Swamy in “How to wipe out Islamic terror”, DNA, 16 July 2011, to insist that the Indian Muslims must remember their Hindu forebears: as if all Muslims in the world don’t know that their ancestors were non-Muslims. Mohammed even located his own mother in hell because she was inevitably a Pagan, and that is also where all Hindus are or will be according to the Indian Muslims.)

They are decried for being the majority when in fact they turn over backwards to please the minority community. Both have in common that they are denounced abroad by ignorant people as an overbearing majority when in reality they are badly on the defensive. Their opponents are naturally nationalistic, every one of them, whereas they themselves have an opposition inside their own ranks. It took a Flemish author, viz. myself, to appreciate how the Hindus in India can be a majority numerically but a minority politically.


The Flemish also pay for the Walloons just as the Hindus pay for the Muslims. Even when Flanders was poorer than Wallonia, the first 130 years or so of Belgium (founded in 1830) there was a stream of money from Flanders to Wallonia. And now it has become a torrent, proportionately bigger than the stream of money from West to East Germany. Similarly, Hindus are on average more industrious and hence richer than Muslims. About the intrinsic poverty of Indian Muslims, falsely implied by Nehruvian secularists to be because of their oppression, it was observed: “It is curious how markedly for evil is the influence which conversion to even the most impure form of Mahomedanism has upon the character of the Panjab villager; how invariably it fills him with false pride and conceit (…) and renders him less well-to-do than his Hindu neighbour (…) When we move through a tract inhibited by Hindus and Musalmans belonging to the same tribe, descended from the same ancestor, and living under the same conditions, we can tell the religion of its owner by the greater idleness, poverty, and pretension, which marked the Musalman, it is difficult to suggest any explanation of the fact.” [Census Report 1881, Province of Punjab vol. I (p.103-4), quoted from A History of Sikhs by Hari Ram Gupta, and by Sarvesh Tiwari on his blog.]

Another similarity is that both the Flemish and the Hindus opted for multiculturalism whereas the Walloons and the Indian Muslims sought a territorial “solution” and followed the Brezhnev doctrine: what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is up for grabs. When a lot of Flemings went to the Walloon industrial areas, the Flemish movement advocated a generalized bilingualism: one Belgium with two official languages everywhere. The Walloons however blocked it and imposed the linguistic frontier in 1932,with the understanding that South of it would be unilingually French and North of it, French would also remain the elite language. Thhe many Flemings remaining in Walloon territory were forced to become Walloon, and some of their descendants are now the worst enemies of their ancestral community. The Muslim electorate massively voted for Partition in 1945, drove most Hindus from West Pakistan in 1945 and the same more gradually in East Pakistan or Bangladesh, but kept India as a joint account where Muslims were not only welcome but even enjoyed certain privileges.

Similar is also the way the French-speaking Belgians and the Indian Muslims have managed to confirm their privileges through legislation and the creation of institutions. Thus, the bolts in the Belgian Constitution to “protect” the numerical minority and prevent the majority from ever acting like a majority, or the notion of “secularism” and the Article 30 protecting only minority institutions in the Indian Constitution. For the majority, there are institutions rewarding pro-minority opinions, such as the King Baudouin Foundation c.q. the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.  

A difference is of course the nature of the opponent: we can think of the French in different terms from anti-Flemish imperialism (indeed, when the French are on the defensive, as in Québec, the Flemish sympathize with them), whereas Islam is intrinsically anti-Pagan and hence anti-Hindu. The Indian Muslims have killed a few million Hindus within living memory, whereas the occasion when the French killed a handful of Flemish lies centuries in the past. Or to revert that: the Hindus are being tested a lot harder than the Flemish for their patience with the other community. Whenever the Hindus kill Muslims, it is highlighted and much is made of it, but what is truly remarkable is the many occasions when they don’t react. They are, in India as much as in Pakistan and Bangladesh, frequently subject to Islamic petty terror, but only react in kind after several occasions when Islamic violence really gets out of hand.

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George Thompson as a case study in racist Invasionism

On the internet discussion list of the Religion in South Asia (RISA) chapter of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), September 2011 saw a debate on racial concepts in Vedic India. The thread’s header was: “Why is Krishna blue?” My participation in it was probably a factor in my subsequent sudden and unexplained expulsion from the list. This expulsion frees me from the commitment to secrecy about what is being said and done on the list. So now, we can give a little overview of that debate.

Early on, Prof. George Thompson put his cards on the table: “I've been telling students for 25 years that Krishna is blue because he is a non-Vedic tribal god.” (8 Sep.)

A UK-based Indian Professor was not so sure: “Well, the non-Vedic nature of the god might not ensure the colour! Indeed Krsna (but perhaps Visnu too) is identified with Mayon - the dark one - in Cankam Tamil, and it is not clear which way the influence went. But on the other hand, another colour-coded non-Vedic Tamil god is Seyyon - the red one - who came to be called Subrahmanya...”

Thompson replies: “Well, the color is ensured by the etymology of the word 'krsna'. As for Visnu, he is of course an early Vedic god, though not yet a prominent one in the RV, and there is no mention of Visnu's color in early Vedic, as far as I know.” (8 Sep.)

To a Chicago-based Professor who is not convinced that the dark colour of Krishna’s idols refers to historical skin colour, Thompson replies: “It is clear that Krsna is a black god. There is no shame in that. And there is no shame in the view that he was a tribal god. Or an aboriginal one. Where is there lack of respect in the suggestion that Krsna was originally a non-Vedic tribal god? I think that Krsna is more interesting than his white Vedic colleagues.” (9 Sep)

The professor from Chicago did not take this veiled imputation of anti-aboriginal racism lying down: “You seem to entirely misconstrue my meaning. As I took some minor pains to suggest, my issue was with evidence, not conclusion. I have no trouble with black. Black is beautiful, as they used to say. Nor, were it remotely possible to establish that Krishna was ‘originally’ a ‘tribal god’ or ‘aboriginal god’, would there be any shame for him or his devotees.

“My concern is not with theological shame, but with what might be called methodological shame (or its lack). Empirically speaking, of course, (that is, de facto) you are entirely correct that ‘there is no shame in the view that he was a tribal god’. On the other hand, de jure, I think there ought to be rather more shame in the community of scholars who study Indian religions (and this goes for the vast majority of references in historical works to Indian ‘tribes’ or ‘aborigines’).

“Whether or not one is a ‘tribal god’ (whatever that might be -- and I think this is not at all clear, however people might bandy the concept about) is (ideally) normatively neutral. However, making claims about tribal this and tribal that based on fragments of ambiguous evidence, half-formed ideas about what the native communities of India might have been in the historical periods under discussion, and a healthy dose of lazy historical fantasy (in respectable circles, this is called ‘historical retrodiction’ or ‘synthesis’), should be a matter of some shame indeed.”

“There is some little evidence for communities one might call ‘aboriginal’ or ‘tribal’ in India in the ancient period. However, most of it either requires serious interpretative caution (being, after all, literary representations of marginal communities that bear marked connotations in mainstream discourses) or contradicts the typical Indological fantasy of what characterizes ‘aboriginal, tribal’ societies and religions.”

So, this Professor imputes to Prof. Thompson an eagerness to bandy “racism” about, as well as the methodologically sloppy readiness to assume “tribal” origins. I am not the only one to suspect that George Thompson is a race hustler. A Professor from Buffalo NY dedramatizes the race issue in the Hindu context:

“I recall, many years ago, H. Daniel Smith, the Sanskrit scholar who had by then turned his focus to Hindu poster art, telling a class that the reason that Kali was represented in poster art as blue rather than black was because they couldn't use that much black in early chromolithography -- I don't recall exactly why; perhaps it seeped into neighboring colors? And the technical limitations of the poster art changed the way many people visualized Kali (as blue as well as black). Perhaps something similar is the case with Krishna?” (9 Sep.)

Thompson to the Chicago professor, 9 Sep.:

“I suppose that I have misunderstood your original post, because in fact I do agree that there is little evidence -- either positive or negative – for any claim about Krsna's origins. When we are dealing with texts that are at least 2000 years old (and in my case at least 3000), we are all, in my view, in the dark ages. I probably am more aware of this than most list members because I spend most of my time on the Rgveda. One of my little projects is to translate the cycle of hymns attributed to the rsi Diirghatamas, so I know a lot about darkness, intentional, riddling darkness.

“Color symbolism is an interesting matter but it does not lead us to the light of history. By the way, my reference to white Vedic gods was facetious (I was vaguely alluding to our White Aryan Brotherhood friends). I don't think that any of us is ‘white’. ‘Whiteness’ is a racist concept, in my view. I will close by pointing out that the Vedic clans were not only not white; they were tribal, intensely macho, and virulently xenophobic. I've been reading Jarrod Whitaker's new book Strong Arms and Drinking Strength: Masculinity, Violence and the Body in Ancient India (I've been asked to review it). He points out that nowhere in the RV is nrmna, 'manliness,' ever ascribed to any indigenous peoples (p. 53).”

Nobody in his right mind was referring to “our White Aryan Brotherhood friends”, except for George Thompson. It is only he who links the Indo-Aryans with the unrelated White Aryan Brotherhood. He wrote back on 10 September:

“[The Chicago professor] and I have gotten clearance from Deepak to continue this discussion for a bit longer. Several misunderstandings have been cleared up.

“In the introduction to my Gita translation, I claimed, on the basis of my reading of the text alone, that the doctrine that Krsna as an avatar of Visnu was not yet a settled doctrine in the Gita. Somewhat later after making this assertion, I was asked to review Angelika Malinar's book The Bhagavadgiitaa: Doctrines and Contexts published in 2007 (which is the year in which I had finished my Gita book), and she made the case for this claim at much greater length than I did, and she persuasively argued that her very learned view, and my not very learned but intuitive view, represented the current consensus.

“So, I think that it is fair to say that there was initially significant resistance to the idea that Krsna was an avater of Visnu. In most of the text of the MBh, Krsna is usually considered a mere mortal King of the Vrsnis. While the term vrsni is a good old Vedic word, it isn't used to refer to a particular tribe. The clan of the Vrsnis do not appear on the scene until epic [MBh] Sanskrit. Since I am a Vedicist most of all, I claim no expertise on the ethnography of this Vrsni clan. It might be worthwhile to pursue this, though. It may help us to learn something historically significant about Krsna's origins. But I'll leave this for those who would know more than I do.

“Through this sort of ethnographical research we may be able to get some historical insights into the origins of Krsna. In any case, I think that this kind of approach may prove to be more fruitful than color symbolism.”

A very Christian Professor intervened on 9 September under the header: The Indo-European Immigrants' Self Consciousness:

“Sisters and brothers, A recent mention of Jarrod Whitaker's new book reminded me of something that I have been meaning to ask the list. I know from Ed Bryant's The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture, that the evidence that the Indo-Europeans characterized the indigenes in South Asia as ‘snub nosed’ is exceedingly thin. This prompts a more basic question: Assuming that the Indo-Europeans migrated into South Asia, but assuming that it was not a catastrophic invasion, that it was a movement over several centuries, etc., is there solid evidence in early Vedic literature that the migrating Indo-Europeans thought of themselves as a separate people? That they spoke a different language. Or had a different religion and mythology. Or that they were somehow ethnically distinct (if not with longer noses, than with lighter skin, or is even that too much a product of modern racism). That the immigrants labeled themselves ‘Aryans’ and the indigenes were labeled ‘Dasyus’ or ‘Dasas’, of something of the sort. Is the evidence good for this?”

Another Professor added on 11 september under the same header: The Indo-European Immigrants' Self Consciousness:

“In all of our excitement to discuss why Krishna is blue (from the serious to the silly), I fear this excellent question posed by [the Christian Professor] may have gotten lost in the barrage of emails. I am very interested in this topic as well, and would also appreciate some insight from our Vedic scholars.”

That’s when, 11 september, I intervened under this same header: The Indo-European Immigrants' Self Consciousness:

“Dear listfolk,

“The debate over whether there ever was an Aryan invasion has raged (and I mean raged) for two decades, and if there had been such evidence for the Vedic people seeing themselves as invaders and others as natives, it would have been plastered all over the affected discussion forums including this one. So no, there is no such evidence.

“Françoise Bader in her textbook of Indo-European linguistics tries to derive ‘Arya’ (the self-reference term of both Iranians and Vedic Indo-Aryans) from ‘alia’, related to Latin/English ‘alien’, in the sense of ‘the foreigners, the invaders’. But even among the Aryan Invasion believers, she never found many takers for this rather oxymoronic explanation of a self-referential term as meaning ‘the others’.

“In the Rg-Veda, the terms ‘Dasa’ and ‘Dasyu’, which are also known in ethnic meanings in Iranian languages, refer without any doubt to Iranians, i.e. fellow Indo-Europeans, whiter than or at least as white as the Vedic people. Not to Mundas or Dravidians. The Rg-Vedic Battle of the Ten Kings and Varshagira Battle (the first on the Ravi banks in West Panjab, the second beyond the Bolan Pass in southern Afghanistan, after the westward expansion rendered possible by Vedic kind Sudas's victory in the first battle), were very definitely between Iranians and Vedic Indo-Aryans. The second of these battles is also alluded to in the younger Avesta, where the same battle leaders are mentioned: Rjashva/Arjasp and Somaka/Humayaka on the Indian side, Vishtaspa/Ishtashva on the Iranian side. RV 1:122:13 mentions Ishtâshva, the Sanskrit form of Iranian 'Vishtâspa', well-known as Zarathustra's royal patron: 'What can Ishtâshva, Ishtarashmi or any other princes do against those who enjoy the protection (of Mitra and Varuna)?' Thus the interpretation of Sayana and SK Hodiwala, as reported by Shrikant Talageri, The Rigveda, a Historical Analysis, p.215-221, and also followed, at least in the names given, by HH Wilson and KF Geldner in their RV translations. It is a rare treat in studies of ancient literature when a single event is reported in two independent sources, which moreover represent the two opposing parties in the event.

“[Dear Chistian Professor], your question for evidence is an eminently good one. When people say, for example, that Krishna, though described as belonging to one of the Vedic ‘five nations’, is called ‘black because he was a non-Aryan indigenous tribal leader’, it is indeed right and necessary to ask them for their evidence.

“Kind regards,

“Dr. Koenraad Elst, non-affiliated Orientalist”

This argumentation of mine contains one non-essential mistake, viz. the Vârshâgira Battle took place on the eastern, Indian side of the Bolan pass, not on the Western, Afghan side. But it was a battle between Vedic Indians and Avestan Iranians. Terms like Dâsa, Dasyu and Asura are well-attested in Iranian but nowhere attested  in “tribal” languages.

Nonetheless, George Thompson replied on 12 september, now under the header: The Indo-European Immigrants' Self Consciousness. He clearly was very angry for my accusing him of building a far-reaching thesis on no evidence at all:

“Dear List,

“We have had this argument with Mr Elst many, many times already, and I am not going to waste much time on running in circles with him again. He is a virulent Hindutvavadin. Frankly, I don't think that he has earned a place on this list.

“Bader's etymology for the term ‘arya’ is in fact widely accepted by competent linguists. Actually, it isn't her etymology. It is much older than she is. It has been common knowledge for several generations. Elst is not a competent linguist.

“Let me point out also another mistake that Elst makes, along with [yet another Professor]. No Indo-Europeans ever invaded India. Indo-Europeans, by the third millennium, had already fragmented into a dozen or more distinct linguistic families. Indo-Europeans weren't a race! They were a group of linguistic families, speakers of various related languages! This is linguistics 101, my friends! I can't believe that I have to give this lecture yet again on a scholarly list!

“The clans that migrated into India some 3000 plus years ago were Vedic clans, who had very close ties to the Iranian clans that migrated westward into Iran at about the same time that the Vedic clans were approaching the Indian subcontinent. They fought constantly with their Iranian cousins, just as they fought constantly with the indigenous clans of India when they finally reached the Panjab.

“Look, we have significant evidence, linguistic evidence, that clearly demonstrates that the Vedic tribes did in fact migrate into India over the course of many centuries. We have good linguistic evidence that Indra fought against tribes who had no eth[n]ic ties whatsoever with Indo-Iranian tribes (see Kuiper's list of terms that have no cognates either in IE or in Indo-Iranian). These would have to have been tribes indigenous to India.

“Elst continues to think that early Iranian and early Vedic clans thought in terms of their ‘whiteness’ Well, what evidence is there for that? Elst, in my view, clearly operates from a racist ideology. Look again at him.

“If you all want to explore the scholarly dark ages: this is where to look.

He is not competent to talk about Avestan. I am.”

Well, well. In a context where the difference between a and â, between arya and ârya, gets confused by the occasional non-use of the â, it seems that George Thompson hasn’t understood the import of Françoise Bader’s use of arya. Unlike Paul Thieme and other “competent linguists” who are “older than she is”, and who interpreted ârya as a derivative of arya, “other” , viz. as “inclined towards the other, hospitable, altruistic”, Bader interprets ârya as a synonym of arya, viz. as “the other, the stranger” through the semantic conduit “coming from another country = ârya”. (Langues Indo-Européennes, p.66) There is no evidence for this at all, except that it falls in line with the Aryan Invasion Theory; but even all the other AIT champions never thought of it, until George Thompson gave his support to it.

Then we have the champion of the racial interpretation of ancient Vedic terms slamming the open non-racial door: “Indo-Europeans weren't a race! They were a group of linguistic families, speakers of various related languages! This is linguistics 101, my friends! I can't believe that I have to give this lecture yet again on a scholarly list!” Most members even of the RISA list were perfectly aware of the non-racial import of the Rg-Veda, it is only George Thompson who opened the debate by saying in so many words that for 25 years he has been teaching that Krishna’s imputed racial traits are significant for his ethnic background.

What is simply unacceptable is that the avowed racist George Thompson, once he feels the anti-racist mood on the RISA-list, accuses me of all people of racism. Ever since my first writing on the Aryan Invasion Theory, the book Indigenous Indians in 1993, I have consistently lambasted the 19^th-century racial interpretation of Vedic terms. George Thompson, by contrast, has espoused that interpretation all along.

It remains a fact that Iranian refers a hundred times in  a self-referential or at least partially Iranian sense to the terms which the Vedas use to name their enemies. None of the tribal languages, not even the Dravidian languages, do so. They also do not have the so-called deshi (vernacular but not attested in Sanskrit) words for Hindi plant names, which are non-existent in the non-Indian Indo-European languages only because it is no use retaining a word for a (in Europe) non-existent plant. All the Kuipers of this world cannot change that.

As a parting shot, Thompson gives this along: “If you all want to explore the scholarly dark ages: this is where to look.” Just the opposite: in the Middle Ages, scholarship reputedly went by authority, which is George Thompson’s method, and the Aryan Invasion method. After the Enlightenment, the scholarly method required evidence, which is my method.

Meanwhile, the list master implored me at once to let it all pass. On 12 September, he sent me a message under the all too clear header: “pls do not respond to that RISA msg”:

“Dear Koenraad:

            "Out of the best interest of the RISA-L listserve, please do not respond to that msg, acrimonious as it was. You are, of course, more than welcome respond off list.

"yours, Deepak, RISA-L admin”

I complied, but must say I have not been rewarded. Though I didn’t react at all, I was shown the door somewhat later. By contrast, I have no information that the offending list member, George Thompson, was reprimanded in any meaningful way. He didn’t apologize on- or off-list. So now, at least, I am at liberty to divulge what happened.

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Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (6) Koenraad Elst's real identity

As a bad loser, Meera Nanda tries to score points on the side. She avoids the main fight, which is the irrational basis of Christianity and Islam. No, not the sorry record of these religions in India and in all Pagan lands, which is only secondary, but the fact that they are based on a truth claim which isn’t true. Christianity has incorporated a lot of things that make sense, but its basic belief as laid down in the Nicene creed is nonsense. We don’t even know whether Jesus existed, but at any rate he wasn’t the son or incarnation of God. We are not sure Mohammed existed, but we are very sure that he didn’t hear God’s voice to dictate to him the Quran. As a scientist, Meera Nanda ought to realize this. But she is in a contradictory situation: she is scientist enough not to believe all this nonsense, but her employers (and possibly her convictions) force her to uphold Christianity and Islam as at least superior to Hinduism. So, to do something about the effect of people (viz. myself) pointing out this contradiction, she doesn’t face them head-on but tries to hit them sideways, as by hiding behind Breivik or by the tested tactic of “guilt by association”.

Ever since I have been writing on secularism and religious conflict, and particularly about Islam, I have had plenty of mud thrown at me. What I have never seen so far is an actual refutation of my central theses. A few non-academic bloggers have tried to muster some arguments, and I have given them a reply in return in my books. So, those who try to take me on mostly do so with “guilt by association”. This rhetorical tactic is used by polemicists of all stripes, everywhere,  and for thousands of years. In itself, it is not tied up with an ideology. Its greatest pioneers are the fishwife types, people who give colour to their humdrum existence by telling sensational tales, true or somewhat less true, about other people. When a fishwife sees how an unknown man rings the bell at the neighbouring woman’s door, and is welcomed in, she doesn’t need to go and listen at the door about what exactly is being said and done between the two of them. The mere fact that a man and a woman are together behind closed door is basis enough for a good story, the details can be filled in by the imagination.

However, on top of the universal dimension of this fishwife tactic, we do notice its popularity among Leftists. I have been a Leftist myself, I know the mentality. In a typically Leftist superstition, it is thought that opinions are contagious. They don’t hang out with people suspected of different opinions for fear of being contaminated. And this is really possible in their case, as their doctrine may not be very strong. Why, I myself lost my Leftist convictions after (apart from negative experiences) sufficient exposure to alternatives. So when they see someone speak with a Rightist party, they genuinely believe that he must be of the same opinion. The idea that different-minded people might have something to tell each other, just doesn’t occur to Leftists.

In my case, Meera Nanda avoids a head-on confrontation with the points I made and instead tries to couple me with less-than-respected political parties and movements: the Vlaams Belang party (Flemish Interest, formerly Vlaams Blok, i.e. Flemish Bloc), Flemish nationalism in general, and the New Right: “It so happens that Koenraad Elst has one foot firmly in the European New Right and the other foot in the Hindu New Right spawned by the VoI school. In Europe, he is considered a ‘leading Orientalist’, and writes frequently for The Brussels Journal, a European nationalist anti-Islamic blog, cited repeatedly by Breivik in his manifesto. Elst has also worked with think-tanks and publications suspected of links with Belgium’s far right, anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant party, Vlaams Belang.”

So, last but not least, she “links” me to the “far-right, anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant party, Vlaams Belang”, though not directly. That is of course the safest: she knows that she can easily be found out as a liar if she links me directly to a political party, so she does it indirectly. Well, I can put the same thing more charitably, and thank her for not directly linking me to a political party. After all, she could easily have gotten away with one more false statement, she has far more institutional support than I do.

The basis in reality of the allegation is this: in 1992 I spoke on Islam before a Vlaams Blok audience. This went by unconspicuously, but one year later it was reported in the tabloid De Morgen, where I was called an “ideologist” of the party. All claims linking me to the party go back to this one article. In reality, my ideology and the party’s were at loggerheads, even on the issue of Islam. Thus, I pleaded for an  immersion of Islamic pupils in the European school system and culture, whereas the party at the time wanted to keep Islamic pupils in a separate school system (just as the Mullahs wanted) in preparation of their return. VB-watchers logically made fun of the party’s intellectual poverty, that they could not find better guests than such as would explicitate their dissident opinions; in my case even a long-haired hippy known to frequent coloured types.

With my appearance at a Vlaams Blok gathering, I had breached the cordon sanitaire. Strictly, the cordon pertained to politicians making (non-existent) coalitions with the Vlaams Blok, but in effect it also counted for intellectuals merely talking with them. And that is the very reason why I did what I did. When  I look back those twenty years now, I am not sure I would speak to a Vlaams Blok gathering, because I would not want to make it so easy for the Meera Nanda’s of this world to avoid the real issue through guilt by association. At that time, I thought that there was no way my own position could be confused with the party’s, my writing was after all clear enough. Now I know better: nobody cares about what you write (few people read it in the first place), not even intellectuals like Meera Nanda, but they will remember all the better before what audience you read it out; that  is the way of the world. But back then, what disturbed me was that Communists forgetful about their own crimes  had decreed the cordon, which was a clear breach of freedom of opinion. They had even hijacked the name of the anti-Communist Czech platform Charta 77 as Charta 91. That is why I just had to accept the Vlaams Blok invitation: to make a gesture against this neo-Communist attack on the democratic polity. Of course the slander that befell me as a consequence will never happen to a conformist like Meera Nanda; indeed it is committed by her kind.

After that, many leftists and middle-of-the-road people broke off relations with me, and I lost a lot of job opportunities. Some people saw they had been duped but continued to avoid me, this time out of shame, but the result was the same: my social life became so much the poorer. Association with the wrong party comes at a price, which is one of the reasons I treat Meera Nanda as a debtor. But when the same paper, through the pen of a practicing neo-Pagan priest and Socialist Party activist repeated its allegation in 1999 (with nothing as his source but the paper’s own reporting from 1993), the reaction was zero or positive. By that time, everybody knew the paper was lying. And more recent references to me have not repeated the allegation either. For instance, when Russian TV interviewed me on Belgian affairs, coincidentally a day after the Breivik affair, De Morgen described me as a “new-rightist separatist”: that is not true either, but it is vague and I can live with it. When Belgian nationalists tried to exploit the mentioning of my name by Breivik, they called me a Flemish separatist or so, but the link to that party was absent. So, the imputed connection between myself and this party is dead for more than a decade among all people in the know, including my enemies.

The English Wikipedia, however, contains, thanks  to Sanjay Subramaniam, a false statement: “According to Sanjay Subrahmanyam, he has connections to the far-right Vlaams Blok”. I have no such connections, nor half-connections or part-connections. But the blot on the encyclopedia’s fair name is not just in the wrongness of the statement, but in its partisan and non-encyclopedic nature. Among other things, Sanjay Subramaniam is neither an expert on me nor on Belgian politics, so he should not have been quoted in an encyclopedia at any rate.

Who is this Sanjay Subramaniam? He was exposed in my book Ayodhya, the Case against the Temple, ch.4.3. as just another Nehruvian academic who does what his kind does best, viz. bluffing and lying: “So, practically every word in Subramaniam’s evaluation [of Arun Shourie’s book Eminent Historians] is malicious and untrue.” (p.46) He was also nominated by the BJP in 2002-04 when they set up a chair for Indian Studies in Oxford. As I had predicted, the BJP did not pursue “saffronization”, the way its enemies alleged, but a pat on the shoulder by its enemies. Of course this never materialized, but the prospect was enough to make the BJP nominate one of its known critics. At any rate, Sanjay Subramaniam was the face of saffronization, and of the BJP’s stupidity. Then I exposed him again in my book The Saffron Swastika, ch.7.2-7 for his slanderous attacks on Leftist Islam critics like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the murdered Theo Van Gogh. Exposed as a liar, he saw no other way out than Meera Nanda, viz. to shoot at the messenger. 

But no matter what he says, I have never been a member or employee of the VB. Repeat: never. I have been a member of the Christian-Democratic party in 2000-2010 and have been a member of Christian-Democratic social organizations since the 1970s. In 1999, the Christian-Democrats narrowly lost the elections and were thrown out of government after more than four decades; I thought it was finally a good time for reform. Unfortuntely I took ill right after becoming a party member, and the party was never far enough from power to allow for real reform, so nothing came of my quixotic reform plan. But if you want my real political affinity, there it is.  

If Wikipedia wants to live up to its promise of being a reliable encyclopedic source, it will strike this and all sentences resembling it from its article on me. At most, it can use me as an example of how it was fooled by some of its all-too-partisan collaborators. Speaking of whom: the history page accompanying my page proves forever that some Wikipedia collaborators wanted to inflict on me the maximum harm possible, an attitude incompatible with work for an encyclopedia. Shouldn’t Wikipedia fire them and wipe out everything they wrote? Of course they can still contribute blogs and columns, by preference under their own full names, but they have proven themselves not to be encyclopedic authorities.

Incidentally, other Wikipedia entries refute the said allegation. The English Wikipedia, entry Anders Behring Breivik, mentions me among his host of “sources of inspiration”, but refrains from linking me to any political party or movement. It would have liked to if it could, but it could not. So to put me down in a different manner, it calls me a “neo-Pagan writer”. That too is an insult and meant as one; it does not call the Islamic scholar Daniel Pipes “the Jew Daniel  Pipes” and rightly so: Breivik or his sources quote us for we for what we authoritatively say on Islam, not for our real or imagined religious beliefs.

The Dutch Wikipedia, entry Brussels Journal, relying on better-informed sources than a Sanjay Subramaniam, has a chapter on relations with political parties. It notes that the press tends to associate BJ with the VB because founder Paul Beliën’s wife is an MP for the VB and because “there is also a strong similarity between Beliën’s and the VB’s thinking, though in the last few years, the relation between the VB and Beliën has been rather tense.” And then it adds: “There are also writers and contributors, like Flemish law scholar Matthias Storme, who is a member of the N-VA [a rival party], orientalist Koenraad Elst, former VRT [Flemish TV] reporter Jan Neckers, libertarian VLD [another rivaling party] blogger Luc Van Braekel and others who are not VB members and express other opinions.” Incidentally, Paul Beliën left the Brussels Journal well before the Breivik affair; the paper is now managed by Luk Van Braekel.

But my own entry, while rather silent about the main things I have done, starts out by associating me with yet another political movement, the Nouvelle Droite, viz. by the factual observation that I had been a board member of TeKoS, a Flemish Nouvelle Droite quarterly, in 1992-95. So Meera Nanda adds that I have “one foot firmly in the European New Right”.

The wrongest word there is “firmly”. Those who know me, acknowledge that I am not so firm in my engagement with groups and movements; I am only firm in being an Orientalist. In this case too, the years mentioned should already have alerted readers to my not-so-firm beliefs in the Nouvelle Droite (which Meera Nanda translates as New Right). Also, there were only two board meetings yearly, which were merely social occasions, because the owner took all the decisions.

Apart from TeKoS, I only contributed a single article to any Nouvelle Droite publication, viz. to their flagship publication Nouvelle Ecole, where in 2001 I contributed a defence of the Out-of-IndiaTheory, directly flying in the face of the Nouvelle Droite position (which is very pro-AIT) and answered on the spot by both Alain de Benoist, their mastermind, and Jean Haudry, their specialist on Indo-European matters. It is a good thing that they are more open-minded than the Indian secularists, but that shouldn’t obscure our differences.

That can be generalized: though I published in the Nouvelle Droite publication TeKoS, Meera Nanda and her friends will have a hard time finding articles of mine where I develop the typical Nouvelle Droite themes, such as identity. There are even articles where I lambast the Nouvelle Droite (or the Vlaams Belang, for that matter), but they are in Dutch, which I surmise Meera Nanda does not read. Note however that it is her own unsolicited conceit that she is a specialist on the thoughts of Koenraad Elst.

Remark that Meera Nanda is silent about the leftist Islam critics. Yet, they have everything to do with it. My first article on and against Islam was in 1989 in Toestanden, a Communist weekly. My first lectures about and against Islam were for several departments of the Masereelfonds, a Communist cultural foundation. You won’t find it in my Wikipedia entry, of course, but I have the evidence. In the 1990s, the Left didn’t know what to do with Islam and looked the other way, but in recent years, leftist intellectuals have come out in large numbers to say out loud that there is something wrong with Islam.  Thus, in my country, people like Etienne Vermeersch, Geert Van Istendael, Benno Barnard, Luckas Vander Taelen,  Patrick De Witte, and many others have published articles critical of Islam, initially against their friends’ circle, but increasingly with approval. Meera Nanda might not know this, but even and especially if she did, she would not mention it because it doesn’t fit her story of a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Let us conclude with a final example of how wrong she can be. From here, we will also use Meera Nanda’s article “Hindu triumphalism”, published in the Economic and Political Weekly, July 2009, distinguishing between (Nanda 2011) and (Nanda 2009). In it, she tries to prove her accusation of my “links” with both the VB and the Nouvelle Droite by writing: “Indeed, the editor-in-chief of TeKoS, Luc Pauwels, was one of the founders of the Vlaams Belang”.

Luc Pauwels, whose father spent the war as a prisoner in Buchenwald, was the editor of TeKoS till about 2001 and volunteered to be the Secretary of the Vlaamse Volkspartij (Flemish People’s Party), one of the splinters after the Volksunie (People’s Union) compromised itself in 1978. After the party’s President, Lode Claes, failed to get elected, the party died out and some of its members joined the Vlaams-Nationale Partij (Flemish National Party), the other splinter with whom the Vlaamse Volkspartij had contracted an electoral agreement known as the Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc). Now, during the vote on this alliance, arguably the basis of the Vlaams Blok, the Vlaamse Volkspartij was split roughly in half: the bigger half, in favour of the bloc, was led by the Party President, Lode Claes, while the smaller half, voting against the bloc, was led by the Party Secretary, Luc Pauwels. So, when making the point that Luc Pauwels had co-founded the Vlaams Blok, Meera Nanda is as mistaken as she can be. She could still have said that Luc Pauwels was a known rightst or so, but she chose to link him to the wrong party. I don’t hold it against her that she is ignorant about something as unimportant as Belgian politics, only that she pretends to be a specialist in the matter.

As for myself, I am my own man, not a party man. I deserve to have my viewpoints examined not on their real or imagined associations but on their merits. I want my real and stated positions attacked, not those at my declared enemies' convenience.

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Another secularist whitewash of Islam

A Professor of South Asian History at Trinity College Hartford, Connecticut, Vijay Prashad, commented on French India-based journalist François Gautier. He wrote “Hindu Holocaust?”, published on www.newsindia-times.com (25 Sep. 2009), in reaction to Gautier’s opening of a “Hindu Holocaust” museum in Pune. Actually it got a more positive name, referring to the successful freedom struggle by Shivaji, which in turn drew a lot of flak from the Hindu nationalist side. Hindus unaware of the Jewish touchiness regarding the alleged misuse of the term “Holocaust” (in fact first used for the Armenian genocide by the Turks, which took the form of the destruction by fire of the Armenian-held town of Urfa), and of how the reference to the Holocaust would obviously put the Jewish suffering in the centre instead of the Hindu suffering that is the object of the museum, held it against Gautier that he seemingly went soft on what happened to the Hindus. At any rate, a museum was devoted  to the Hindu-Muslim struggle, and Vijay Prashad didn’t like that.

Vijay Prashad is a familiar type: a Nehruvian secularist, i.e. an institutional winner but a loser on contents. He was one of the people who clamoured, after my Ayodhya lecture in Madison WI 1996, that “a scholarly rebuttal should be given”, but whose scholarly rebuttal is still awaited. For a while he took part in a debate with Rajiv Malhotra, for which a whole yahoo list was  created, but he wimped out. On the Hindu Holocaust too, he takes comfortable conformistic positions but he has never written a serious rebuttal of the “Hindu nationalist” (actually purely historical) theory that Muslims killed millions of Hindus.

So, let’s see what he got worked up about. In the main, it is money: “A fundraiser in New Jersey on Aug. 16 raised $50,000 for a ‘Hindu Holocaust’ museum to be built in Pune. The museum is the brainchild of a Frenchman, Francois Gautier, and is under the auspices of the Viraat Hindu Sabha (VHS). They claim that over the past thousand years, millions of Hindus were killed, with the intention to wipe Hindus off the map.”

The intention is mostly in the eye of the beholder, though I cannot exclude that there are genuinely are some Hindus in America who believe that the Muslims had the intention to “wipe Hindus off the map”. Some of course had that intention, but by and large, Muslims are satisfied if Hindus convert. They can stay on the map, but as Musllims. However, no song need be made about Hindus dying, sometimes war is an Allah-ordained necessity, and so, Hindus have died by the millions. We need not even look very far: of the one to three million victims of the Bangladesh war in 1971, most were Hindus, totally dwarfing those who were killed in religious riots in remainder-India since 1947. In 1947 too, the Hindu refugees from West Panjab killed by their Muslim neighbours far outnumbered the East Panjabi Muslims who didn’t make it to the Promised Land they themselves had created.

According to vijay Prashad, “The numbers are vague, as one might expect, but the culprit is precisely defined: Islam. (…) It reduces the complexity of the subcontinent's rich history into a simple morality play that has only two characters: the Hindu and the Muslim. The latter is the invader who has come and killed the former. Nothing else matters.”

Many other things matter to the Hindu revivalists, as the array of Sangh Parivar and other Hindu organizations testify. The hyperfocus on the Hindu-Muslim conflict exists only in the eye of the Nehruvian beholder. But the focus of this one lone museum is indeed the Hindu-Muslim conflict. That is as it should be: a conflict spanning more than a millennium and a whole Subcontinent deserves a museum.  

And there’s even more in the eye of the beholder: “The idea of the Hindu Holocaust casts the Hindu as history's victim, who should now become history's aggressor to avenge the past.” A leftist and revolutionary like Vijay Prashad cannot countenance a straight summary of facts, he has to imagine a violent “revenge”. Well, the museum’s object is just to show factual history, and the viewer is then free to decide on his own reaction.

Speaking of imagination, Viyay Prashad’s runs wild: “But the Hindu was not always the victim. If you read the historical records carefully, you will find that many Hindus participated in the slaughter of other Hindus, and that the Hindu-Buddhist battles of the ancient world were perhaps more bloody than anything that comes afterward.” Which battles were those? As Sita Ram Goel once said in this same context: I am asking for one example, not two.” But the battles in which Islam wiped out Buddhism, in the 10^th century in Afghanistan and then in North India at the end of the 12^th, are well-attested.

With reference to Romila Thapar’s book on Somnath, Vijay Prashad asserts: “There was killing, but that was as much for reasons of warfare and plunder as for reasons of God and tradition.” He hasn’t studied Islamic history at all, else he would know that Mohammed himself commanded ca. 82 raids on caravans, purely “for reasons of warfare and plunder”, and that these very raids were the occasion to launch the term jihâd. In Islam, there is no antagonism between plunder and God.

Of course, he lists cases of Hindu magnanimity as cases of Hindu-Muslim coexistence, e.g.: “In the 13th century, a local raja, Sri Chada, granted a merchant from Hormuz the right to build a mosque on temple land. He also provided the mosque with a disbursement for teachers and preachers, for the daily reading of the Quran and for the celebration of festivals. The Veraval-Somanatha inscription of 1264 shows us that even orthodox Shaivite priests cooperated in the building of the mosques.” He ought to have mentioned the Vijayanagar king who employed Muslim generals, only to be betrayed by them during the momentous Battle of Talikota, when they joined the Muslim Army and inflicted defeat and destruction on Vijayanagar.

Of course Vijay Prashad cannot stand it when foreigners who defy the description as “Hindu nationalists” agree with the “Hindu Holocaust” scenario: “Gautier’s (…) work reads like another European apologist for extreme Hindutva, Koenraad Elst. Both went to strict Catholic schools and now hold a deep animus against Christian missionaries, but seem to take their venom out mainly against Islam. Gautier and Elst want to make plain the ‘Muslim genocide against Hindus’. But neither is a serious student of history, with little idea of how to read historical texts. They draw more from a misplaced passion than from a real, sober scientific exploration of the facts. That they are taken seriously is a sign of the degradation of reason in the world of Hindutva.”

            Well well, the loser Vijay Prashad who negates history but has never been able to produce a single paper establishing his conformistic whitewash of Islam, is now berating the museum-opener and writer of factual Hindu-Muslim history as having ‘little idea of how to read historical texts’. Texts of which he himself leaves the reading to Romila Thapar. As long as the power equations remain as they are, he will have more success with his lies than we with the facts, that cannot be helped; but eternity will know Vijay Prashad as a liar.

Meanwhile, he is mistaken in alleging that Gautier and I “have a deep animus against Christian missionaries”. Both of us have gone out of our way to explicitate that we have Catholic priests among our relatives and that we have fond memories of them. At the same time, we have perfectly rational reasons for having our doubts about the missionary enterprise among the Hindus. But for those reasons, Vijay Prashad has to substitute an emotional”animus”, because the eye of the beholder cannot face a rational critique of his favoured religions.  

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The Huffington Post debate on A.K. Ramanujan

A.K. Ramanujan's essay Three Hundred Ramayanas has elicited a debate misstating the issues. The problem with the essay is not that it is blasphemous, but that it is flawed. It is just unscholarly.

 

A Hindu writing under the pen name Artboxone (5-12) and thinking he was being helpful referred to an article about past affairs of Hindu anger over Hinduism’s academic misrepresentation:

“An excellent summation contextualizing the RISA-L chronology has appeared in the academic forum (!!!), as described below: McComas Taylor: ‘Mythology Wars: The Indian Diaspora, ‘Wendy's Children’ and the Struggle for the Hindu Past’, Asian Studies Review [1035-7823] yr:2011 vol:35 iss:2 pg:149-168.”

Vishal Agarwal replied (5-12):

“The paper by McComas Taylor is another example of deception. For example, it completely omits to mention Swami Tyagananda's published book (by Motilal Banarsidass) on Jeffrey Kripal's work. Likewise, it totally misrepresents my own criticism of Paul Courtright's book on Ganesha calling it nitpicking and point to spelling errors. In fact, in our rebuttal extending over 80 pages, only half a page deals with spelling errors and so on. Now is this because Taylor did not understand our critique, or was he being dishonest? I leave it to the reader to decide.”

Vishal Agarwal added (2-12 to 5-12) more observations:

“Whether people like it or not, the fact is that there is no credible proof that Valmiki's Ramayana post-dates the Buddha. There is a complete absence of mention of Buddha or Mahavira or their followers or of Nandas, Mauryas or Shungas and so on. There is no mention of Pataliputra or Rajagriha. Rather, the latter's predecessor Girivraja is mentioned. Even if there were additions to the text in subsequent centuries, the data in the text itself is clear that it belongs to a much older era. In a country of 1.2 billion people, you will find all sorts of interpretations and retellings. The secularists and leftists like Ramanujan use this diversity as a weapon against Hinduism, and argue that there is no normative Dharma or no ‘highest common factor’. Ipso fact, Hinduism is a 'myth'. This is the subtext of Ramanujan's essay. And it is for this reason, it was prescribed by the leftist faculty of Delhi University. Otherwise, there is not much merit in the essay. Asuras can read the Mohashastras but there is no need to prescribe it in the DU reading list when there are dozens of better things to chose from.

“Where Ramanujan got it wrong, driven by his ideological agendas, is to to place all the diverse renderings of Ramayana at par with the Valmiki Ramayana. Let us get one thing VERY CLEAR - All these different versions of Ramayana (Dasharatha Jataka included) have the Ramayana of Valmiki as their basis and draw their storyline to it. It is another matter that they adapt it to their own purposes. Even Ashvaghosha, the author of Buddhacharita, salutes Valmiki as the Adikavi. The Shakya lineage was derided for having descended from a brother sister union. The Buddhists therefore created the Jataka in which Rama and Sita married, and linked the Shakyas with the Ikshavakus. So, their agenda was obvious. To claim, despite this obvious explanation, that in the 'most ancient version of the Ramayana, Rama and Sita are siblings' is to distort stuff with the deliberate intent of deriding Hindu beliefs. Likewise, the Paumicharyam clearly seeks to create an alternative Jain version. This phenomenon so rampant in Jainism that there is no need to detail it. The Jains created alternatives for everything Hindu (which pre-supposes the prior existence of Hindu originals).

“Ramanujan was 'mohita'. His agenda was Hinduphobic and Leftist. He may have done some good work but it has to be taken with a pinch of salt. In any case, let us not deviate from the issue. The question was whether it was appropriate for AKRs essay to be in the prescribed reading list in DU. And my answer is a firm no. It is academically flawed and ideologically driven and was prescribed precisely because of the Hinduphobic arguments that it inadvertently proposes. When even early Buddhist authors can claim (e.g., the Spitzer Manuscript, dated to 200 AD or earlier on palaeographic grounds) that the omniscience of Buddha is proven because he had studied the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the obvious conclusion is that these texts were considered pre-Buddha even by Buddhist writers at that time. Otherwise, they would not fool their readers. For that matter Jatakas etc. have their own versions of Krishna's life too. But it is obvious which one is older and which is a recast.

Artboxone added (2-12):

“AK Ramanujan was not a historian or mythologist. His scholarship was primarily in English literature with a smattering of Kannada and Tamil folklore. He didn’t have the kind of knowledge of Sanskrit that an essay, which dismisses the authorship of Ramayana, demands...

"The fact is that over 5000/6000 years, every single tradition, author, poet, or folktale takes Valmiki’s name with the utmost reverence as the original author of Ramayana. Not one other person is mentioned as the author. Yet, AK Ramanujan’s opium-filled pen includes Valmiki’s original as ‘one of the tellings’ on the basis of… absolutely no evidence. He simply assumes...

"The claim that this puerile essay provides ‘alternative viewpoints’ is absurd. Alternative viewpoints must be based on the original epic, on the original story and not on fantasy. You can’t alter the original dramatically — like making Ravana Sita’s father — and then claim that it’s an ‘alternative viewpoint’. That’s distortion, not an alternative viewpoint. And 300 Ramayanas does precisely that — it legitimizes such distortions...

"The behaviour and character of academic mullahs is once again consistent with their sorry record of misdeeds. The way — the civilized way to go about protesting an issue like this is to call for an academic debate. Call experts on both sides, have a debate and then come to a conclusion. But then that’s how academics do it...”

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