“The Idea of India” – *must read*
I am grateful to Sh Krishen Kak for allowing me to publish this essay by him (in full), first published as THE IDEA OF INDIA by India First Foundation, Nov 2008:127-138. I would encourage everyone to please read it in full. It is superbly thought-provoking, richly referenced and well researched. Without further ado (CAUTION: Long Post),
***Â THE IDEA OF INDIA ***
KRISHEN KAK
The idea of India is a conception often credited by our English-speaking “secular†elite to Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru or Sunil Khilnani, not necessarily in that order.
Our British colonizers too gave themselves credit for it, with an echo by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 8, 2005 at Oxford University. It is they, he said, who gave us our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories, our judiciary, our legal system, our bureaucracy, the English language, and cricket.[1] Mr Singh on that occasion did make the token nod to “India’s ancient civilizationâ€, but it is clear he believes we did not have these notions before the British blessed us with them. Regrettably, he omitted mentioning the railways that are supposed to have knitted us together and, for universal school education, he omitted making the conventional ascription to British missionaries[2].
In point of fact, however, the historical conception of the one-ness of what in English is called “India†goes back at least 6000 years to the Rig Veda[3]. It is important to understand this history because the name we give ourselves or that others give us provides us with a social and political identity and meaning, so that “India” says something about how we see ourselves and how others see us.
The citizens of India are called Indians, as distinguished from the followers of a “religion†called Hinduism[4]. At the same time, the indigenous peoples in many parts of the world are called “Indiansâ€. “Indian” was frequently a Western imperial and pejorative label for dark-coloured indigenes and, at least till the end of the 14th century (a Vijaynagar inscription c.1393 referring to the emperor as “Hindurayasuratranaâ€), that is, just about 600 years ago in the history of our civilization going back at least 9,000 years, we had no such thing as “Hinduism”. So let us see how we got our name, and the meanings often connected with it.
The word “India” is the pronunciation in English of the Greek pronunciation of the Iranian pronunciation of the Sanskrit word “sindhu”, which was our own name in our own language for the mighty river called Indus which has always been a major landmark for travellers to our country from lands to our northwest.
The ancient Iranians – or Persians, as they used to be called – found difficulty in pronouncing the initial “s†of “sindhuâ€, so they called it “hindu†– the word occurs for the first time in the Avesta of the ancient Iranians, and they used it to describe generally this land and all the people in it. From Iran the word passed to Greece where it became Indus, with variations among the ancient Arabs, Turks, Mongolians, and Chinese (the last saying “shin-tuâ€) who came into contact with us to study, trade or conquer.
This word “Hindu†is not found in any of our ancient texts. It is nowhere in the Vedas; it is nowhere in our epics, nor in the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, nor in any of the treatises of Yoga. It does not appear in any of our indigenous languages, not till the 7th century when it was brought in by the Islamic invaders. The Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang who visited our country between 630 and 645 AD reports that while “shin-tu†or its variants could be heard outside our borders, it was unknown within our country. Even after Islamic rule was established in our country, the word did not gain popular currency and was not used, at least till the 14th century, except by the Islamic rulers to refer to the non-Muslim population as a whole of this land.
So, it is quite clear that, to begin with, “Hindu†was a foreign word. It was not a “religious†description. It was a purely geographical label, initially describing the land and people in the vicinity of the Sindhu river but gradually spreading to cover all parts of this country and its people. It can be said that the word “Hindu†acquired a pan-Indian connotation from ancient Iranian times – but this was only in the speech of foreigners, and even with them it did not indicate any distinction of class, caste or creed. To emphasize, it was merely a foreign geographical description, and “Hindustan” was the land of the “Hindus”. How from being a geocultural description this was made into a “religious†label is another story.
Thus, the word we have adopted to describe our country and ourselves evolved as a word foreign to us. Over the millennia, this word has acquired a number of meanings that foreigners associated with us, and many of which we have internalized. Most of these meanings are not complimentary. In fact, most frequently, in the post-colonial international eye, India stands for overpopulation, poverty, dirt and corruption, and the majority of our people are believed to be lazy other-worldly Hindus. Remember that it was an Indian who made an international joke of what he cunningly called “the Hindu rate of growth”[5] – conveniently forgetting, of course, that in pre-colonial times it was this same rate of growth that resulted in making us what the historian KM Ashraf described as “the wealthiest colossus of the world”. How British colonial rule reduced us from being one of the richest lands to becoming one of the poorest is also another story.[6]
It is a well-known phenomenon that, in an unequal power relation, the weaker tries to model itself on what is commonly perceived to be the stronger, and so one of the legacies of centuries of colonial rule (compounding the dhimmitude ingrained in us by Islamic rule) is that we still try to invent ourselves in ways we think will find us Western approval. The West gave us (among other things) our name, its concept of the nation, its modern value system, its political system and our political boundaries, its understanding of religion and of time, its educational system, its view of female beauty and of masculinity as machismo so, not surprisingly, it is still to the West we turn for recognition and for affirmation of our identity.
In politics, we define ourselves in Western terms. We have modelled ourselves on the British model of parliamentary democracy. We have a fixed border, limiting ourselves in time and space. We argue that we are, or we are not, a nation, a concept that has come to us from the West. And when we go West, as so many of us hope to do, we try and make it easier for us to be accepted by them by changing our names – or our “religion†– to theirs. Hari becomes Harry; Akanksha, Angie; Kishore, Kevin; Sudha, Sue; Ramsadan, Ramsden; Piyush becomes Bobby and a Catholic. These are actual examples.
Indira Gandhi, when she was harassed by criticism in India, used to go to Europe for approbation, and she was known to have commented that the European press and people were more appreciative of her worth and achievements than the Indian press and people. So dominating is our need to reify ourselves in Western terms that, if I recall correctly, even our philosopher-President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan explained our dharma as polymorphous monotheism – that is, a monotheism of many shapes – because Christanity is monotheistic and propagates itself as ipso facto superior to all our richly symbolic and fascinating ways of constructing Divinity.
We have internalized the eurocentric view of the world and the need for a foreign affirmation of ourselves and, as long as this need remains, we will always be inferior to the West.
But are we only a construction of the West? Did we never have any word, any name, of our own for ourselves?
If we look at the Constitution of India, we find a very telling phrase that occurs in it but once. This is “India, that is BhÄrat,…”. Clearly, the modern Indian Constitution, promulgated in English, sees India as the primary name and, hence, identity, but it does make one mention of a “BhÄrat” as a secondary name. Significantly, the Constitution in its Hindi translation reverses this to “BhÄrat, that is India…â€; significant, because this endeavour at synonymy in fact glosses over, as we shall see, an essential attitudinal dichotomy.
Western social science discourse postulates the concept of The Other that defines identity in terms of opposition (and not complementarity). Thus, the Devil is the Other of God, the Black Man of the White Man, the woman of the man, communism of capitalism, atheism of theism, polytheism of monotheism, and so on.
The Fathers of the Republic of India chose to retain as our primary identity a label of Otherness. But who or what is this BhÄrat to which they accorded token recognition?
Bharat was a legendary sage-emperor of our land, and BhÄrat is the offspring of Bharat. Therefore, the children of Bharat are BhÄrati and the land of the children of Bharat becomes BhÄratvarsha. This was the common name our pre-Islamic ancestors shared for our homeland. It had no fixed political boundaries but was actually the land in which we shared a common spiritual-cultural complex, a civilization. This land (now referred to as Akhand BhÄrat) comprised broadly eastern Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal and upto Kailash in Tibet, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, and the shared spiritual-cultural complex was called the sanatana dharma. There was a common name for the land and a common name to include the numerous different ways of worshipping in it, and the evidence is that we shared a single common name for ourselves as a civilization – as the children of Bharat, the BhÄratis or BhÄratvasis.
By the time of the epic MahabhÄrata about 5000 years ago[7], the understanding of a shared land and a shared spiritual-cultural complex was well in place. The MahabhÄrata presents peoples from the entire subcontinent as a civilizational unity. The Kuru-Panchala kingdom extended through the Gangetic plain. Gandhari, the mother of the Kauravas, was from Gandhara which is now Pakistan and part of Afghanistan. Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas, was of the Yadava clan of what is now Madhya Pradesh in central India. The Pandavas allied with Krishna who was originally of Mathura south of Delhi but who shifted to Dwarka on the Arabian Sea. Krishna’s main enemy was Jarasandha of Magadha or Bihar. In the war of the MahabhÄrata, kings participated from as far off as Sindh in the west and Pragjyotish or Assam in the far north-east. In their pilgrimages and victory marches, the Pandavas travelled from Afghanistan to Tibet to Assam to Kanyakumari, and even Sri Lanka is mentioned.
The Vishnupurana has
uttaram yat samudrasya himadreshcaiva daksinam
varsam tad bharatam nama bharati yatra santatih
(BhÄrata is the land north of the seas, south of the Himalayas, and where the people are called BhÄrati.)
Thus, there cannot be any doubt whatever that any “idea of India†pre-dates by centuries both the British and the Muslims, and can be traced back culturally to the very wellsprings of our civilization[8]. The devious, insidious, widespread and (even today) official propagation of the diametrically opposed macaulayan myth[9] has had horrendous consequences for our rashtra, for BhÄratvarsha.
Macaulayan mythology denies BhÄrat through a false Aryan Invasion Theory and a false Aryan-Dravidian “racial†divide[10]; through false distinctions of “religionâ€[11]; a false history of caste and tribe[12]; a false claim of foreigners as our civilizers, saviours and educators[13]; and a grotesquely false interpretation of secularism[14].
Macaulayan mythology is designed to further the evangelical manifesto of making Indians become Christians “without knowing itâ€[15], the macaulayan manifesto of forming “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellectâ€[16], and the ruinously effective colonial strategy and legacy of destroying BhÄrat by dividing-and-ruling it.
What then is significant about BhÄrat as the construction of our country?
It is indigenous, evolving from within the psyche of our own people. India is a response to a foreign label; BhÄrat is our own name for ourselves. It is self-affirmative. What is common is not defined by political interest or by religious dogma but by spiritual aspiration eventually personified as BhÄrat Mata – our land as Mother. It was created through two major means – at the classical or scholarly level by the spread of Sanskrit, and at the popular level by the phenomenon of pilgrimage. And an indigenous universal school education – superior to that that the British had in their own country – played no little part in nurturing it.[17]
The ordinary people of our land, through centuries of foreign rule, retained a sense of an overarching civilizational unity embodied in BhÄrat Mata. All as children of Bharat are of one rashtra; we see ourselves with a common ancestor; normatively (and, as now proven, genetically), BhÄratis are one “raceâ€, one people. “India” was always a foreign construct, with a foreign-focused divisive interpretation. The people of “India”, through oppressive foreign rule, internalised a psychological inferiority. Consequently, our macaulayan elite likes to see “India” as progressive, modernising, Westernised; and we distinguish the “BhÄrat” of the ordinary non-English speaking people as poor, backward, illiterate, regressive and native. This is an elitist prejudice and unfortunate, apart from being quite untrue.
I lived almost 6 years in the USA – and let me assure readers that the West gives us nowhere near any of the importance we want the West to give us. Yet our macaulayan elite continues to salivate for the West, to become second-class Whites.[18] I sometimes teach MBA students in an upscale b-school; most are quite unfamiliar with the MahabhÄrata, even its principal characters. I know of an elitist private school in Delhi whose students described a desi collation of aloo-puri as “shit†and refused to eat it. I know MBA students in a premier b-school who described as “s-h-i-t†the cultural personification of knowledge as a goddess and, therefore, to be respected. I know a Punjabi young woman both of whose parents are fluent in Punjabi and her mother still covers her head; but the young lady, educated in an elite missionary college, is fluent neither in Punjabi nor in Hindi nor knows why her subculture’s festival of “lorhi†is celebrated – but proudly declares she’s “secular†and knows the reason for Christmas. In Princeton, I saw schoolchildren playing “ball†by kicking around their book-filled backpacks; in BhÄrat, a book that falls to the ground is picked up and touched to one’s head. A successful desi businessman described his wife as his chief asset, and when this was explained to MBA students in terms of a cultural perception of the wife as Lakshmi, many male students laughed. And, no, these are not isolated examples. There are many more, and these represent an emerging mindset, a pattern of civilisational change. It is two different worlds – one in which, for example, food is symbolized as Annapurna and knowledge as Saraswati, and the other that dismisses such imagery scatologically.
That the “idea of India†or, correctly, a comprehension of bhÄratiyata, still prevails and holds together our civilization and our remaining land is not because of our macaulayan elite. If “India†can still be thought of as “eternalâ€, it is thanks not to the citizens of India but to the children of Bharat.
Look around ourselves. From the vast geocultural domain in which the dharma flourished, we steadily began to lose it to violently hostile belief systems, totally antithetical to bhÄratiyata, that entered our land. Even after Independence, we continue to lose ground; even today, quite literally.[19] The Republic of India is riven by division. It is founded on a conception of society that is so inherently divisive that we now need to position anti-aircraft guns to protect our prime minister when he celebrates its Independence in our national capital[20].
BhÄratvarsha bases itself on an entirely different conception that is inherently unifying.
Two examples should make this clear:
BhÄrat sees all the indigenous panthas and sampradayas as constituents of the dharma, the Constitution of India formally constructed and promotes some of them as distinct and mutually exclusive “religionsâ€;
BhÄratis see themselves as having contextual and fluid identities within the overarching dharmic one; the British privileged and fixed one – that of jÄti – and, with their missionaries, made it central to Indian identity[21]; with the Constitution of India following suit, now casteism, vote-bank politics and minority appeasement run rampant in India.
From an anthropological perspective, I believe one root lies in understanding whether the individual is the unit of society or whether the group, but this too becomes another story. [22]
The “idea of India†is, therefore, an insubstantial linguistic expression. Cognitively and experientially, it is bhÄratiyata, emerging from the dharma, that still holds us together.
Our name is important, but even more important is that, whatever name we use, we need always to remember that the backbone and strength of our land, our civilization, our rashtra, is bhÄratiyata.
India divides; BhÄrat unites.
– x –
Notes:
1. http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/nic/0046/pmspeech.htm. This is a fine example of our official school of historiography that claims it is foreign rule that civilized us lawless natives.
2.  A totally false ascription; see Dharampal, “The Beautiful Treeâ€, Mapusa: The Other India Press, 1996.
3.  For the date, see NS Rajaram & David Frawley, “Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilizationâ€, New Delhi: Voice of India, 2001.
4.  It is most emphatically iterated that Hinduism is not a “religionâ€. It is “dharmaâ€, and there is no equivalent in English to “dharmaâ€. What English commonly understands as “religion†(typically, “recognition of, obedience to, and worship of a higher, unseen powerâ€) is an abrahamic construction with no conceptual equivalent (because of the requirement of “obedienceâ€) in any of our own languages. The dharma does not require a belief in or worship of, much less obedience to, any higher, unseen power by whatever name called, and an atheist is a dharmi too. The words closest to “religion†that we have are “pantha†and “sampradayaâ€. However, because of our macaulayan system of education, we tend to accept as appropriate the abrahamic construction. (Our macaulayan system of education can be summed up in its subliminal projection of “West is bestâ€; an enduring legacy of TB Macaulay’s notorious Minute on Indian Education in which he stated “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India…..all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England…..false history, false astronomy, false medicine…a false religion…..absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology†– http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html).
5.  Prof. Raj Krishna of the Delhi School of Economics. Prime Minister Singh too was once on its faculty. It is not without relevance that Mr Singh again parroted a myth when he claimed the Amarnath yatra “was run by Muslims in Kashmir and it is over 180 year old pilgrimageâ€. In fact, documentation of the yatra pre-dates any Muslim involvement in it and goes back centuries to ancient texts (http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Amarnath-row-Thousands-court-arrest-in-Jammu/350196/).
6.  Ashraf, quoted in Akhtar Riazuddin, “History of Handicrafts: Pakistan-India” (Islamabad: National Hijra Council, 1988). “It has been estimated that the total amount of treasure that the British looted from India had already reached Pds 1,000,000,000 (Pds 1 Billion) by 1901. Taking into consideration interest rates and inflation this would be worth close to $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 Trillion) in real-terms today†(Dr Leo Rebello, “My Indiaâ€, pps, http://www.healthwisdom.org/).
7.  For the date, see Rajaram & Frawley, op. cit.
8.  David Frawley, “The Rig Veda and the History of Indiaâ€, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 2001.
9.  The British did not accept any notion of the historical unity of the Indian subcontinent; the Muslims do, but credit it to Islam. See Sankrant Sanu, “Why India Is A Nationâ€, http://sankrant.sulekha.com/ blog/post/2003/10/why-india-is-a-nation.htm, and Dileep Karanth, “The Unity of Indiaâ€, http://www.swaveda.com/articles.php?action=show&id=47.
10.  See, for example, David Frawley, “The Myth of the Aryan Invasion of Indiaâ€, New Delhi: Voice of India, 2005.
11.  See Koenraad Elst, “Who is a Hindu?â€, New Delhi: Voice of India, 2002.
12.  “All ancient Indian sources make a sharp distinction between the two terms; varna is much referred to, but jÄti very little, and when it does appear in literature it does not always imply the comparatively rigid and exclusive social groups of later times. If caste is defined as a system of groups within the class, which are normally endogamous, commensal and craft-exclusive, we have no real evidence of its existence until comparatively late times†– AL Basham, quoted by Arvind Sharma, “What Was Manu Up To?â€, http://arvindsharma.wordpress.com/, emphasis added. See also Nicholas Dirks, “Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern Indiaâ€, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. On the British deliberately and fraudulently excluding “tribe†from the dharmic mainstream, see Sandhya Jain, “Adi Deo Arya Devataâ€, New Delhi: Rupa, 2004.
13.  See, for example, the works of the late Dharampal. See also P Priyadarshi, “Zero Is Not The Only Storyâ€, New Delhi: India First Foundation, 2007.
14. See, for example, the works of the late Sita Ram Goel.
15. The influential British politician and evangelist William Wilberforce, quoted by Dharampal, op. cit. Conversions to Islam are more problematic than conversions to Christianity, but the lower rate is compensated for by the demographic aggression of illegally immigrating Bangladeshi Muslims who are then enabled by a “secular†State to get Indian identities that allow them to vote in and influence Indian elections (see, for example, Samudragupta Kashyap, “Bangla infiltrators now kingmakers in Assam: HC judgeâ€, The Indian Express, July 30, 2008). “Former President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad, in his neighbouring Assam Lok Sabha constituency, invited Bangladeshis to make his constituency a Muslim majority†(DN Mishra, “Neighbour or invader?â€, The Pioneer, Feb 23, 2003). Even President APJ Abdul Kalam prevented the deportation of Muslim aliens (A Mishra, “Kalam responds to SOS; stalls quit India notices”, The Pioneer, Feb 25, 2005). There is no record of any President intervening to return Hindu citizens to Kashmir, and the “secular†State makes little more than token attempts to repel what the Supreme Court bluntly called this “external aggression†(Navin Upadhyay, “Govt failed to protect Assam from external aggression: SCâ€, The Pioneer, July 15, 2005).
16. Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education, op. cit. Note how in English our dharmic lore is invariably referred to as “mythology†whereas comparable lore in Christanity and Islam – such as the parthenogenetic birth of Jesus or Mohammad’s excursion on an eagle-winged horse – is not.
17. For Sanskrit, see Karanth, op. cit.; on education, see Dharampal, op. cit.; on pilgrimage, see SM Bharadwaj, “Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India: A Study in Cultural Geographyâ€, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Both Sanskrit and pilgrimage as unifiers pre-date by millennia not just the railways the British introduced but all other foreign factors to which macaulayans ascribe our civilizational unity.
18. Symptomatic is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s gratuitous declaration on Sept 25, 2008 in Washington, DC to US President George Bush that “In the last four and half years that I have been Prime Minister, I have been the recipient of your generosity, your affection, your friendship. It means a lot to me and to the people of India…The people of India deeply love you†(http://www.hindu.com/2008/09/27/stories/2008092760171200.htm).
19. Witness the roaring declaration on July 22, 2008 in Parliament by a Kashmir MP that “hum jaan de denge lekin zamin nahi denge†(we will give our lives but not our land) – Omar Abdullah, quoted by Ashok Pandit, “Dark side of freedomâ€, The Pioneer, Aug 15, 2008. And, “…..the Constitution itself contains the seed for a de facto and de jure separation of even those parts of Kashmir that are physically still within India. Read Art 370 and you will know why even the already broken crown rests so uneasily on our head. By this provision J&K is exempt from many laws that are applicable to the rest of the country, many other constitutional provisions themselves are declared redundant in that State and worse, the operation of even the ‘residual’ laws are subject to the approval of the J & K Assembly! That is, a State Government can overrule the writ of the Union! Indeed, this Article is a dangerous knife in the nation’s stomach, an independence within an independence and a huge mockery of a free, united India†(TR Jawahar, “Freedoms Galoreâ€, http://newstodaynet.com/col.php?section=20&catid=30). Prafull Goradia points out the decline of the Hindu population of the subcontinent from 80% to 60% between 1900 and 2000 AD (“Can Muslims be secular?”, The Pioneer, Apr 7, 2004).
20. http://www.hindu.com/2008/08/15/stories/2008081561240300.htm .
21. It is therefore that Justice C Dharmadhikari can write, “The real component or unit of the Hindus is caste only. The term Hindu is concord of all castes. In Hinduism, caste is real, religion is myth, so it is not even a community†(in Muzaffar Hussain, “Insight into Minoritismâ€, New Delhi: India First Foundation, 2004:6). On contextual identities and the role of missionaries in singling out one of them, see Dirks, op.cit.
22. “The unit of this democracy is citizen or voter and not the institution or community†– Justice Dharmadhikari, op. cit., page 7. In an insightful essay, Kalyan Viswanathan shows why “Hindus, even though they are a majority in India, do not behave like a majority. They behave more like a large collection of small minorities. While from a spiritual/religious point of view this is not a problem, and India has always valued a certain inherent diversity and a co-existence of different paths, sects and sampradayas, this is a very serious problem from a political standpoint……In any modern democracy (where numbers matter), assembling a coherent identity translates to influence and power…..So unless Hindus learn to forge together a larger overarching identity, and start behaving like a more coherent and homogenous group, they are in for trouble…..Hindus will inevitably come out losers in their own country where they are supposedly a majority†(K Viswanathan, “Hindu Identity: why and why notâ€, http://www.sanatanadharmafoundation.com/, Aug 17, 2008).  Questions, then, are not just of the need for Hindu political self-consciousness but of the aptness of Western-style so-called “modern†democracy (that is solely number/individual-based) to the bhÄratiya ethos and to the survival of BhÄrat.  Justice Dharmadhikari goes on to say “the perfect Indian citizen of this nation is one who considers India as his motherland and possesses a special kind of love for it…†(op. cit., page 8) – and there you have it, the India/BhÄrat muddle and mismatch. It is BhÄrat Mata, not India Mata (all that pop-culture on Indian TV that sings “In-dee-yaa†looks to America for inspiration). It is BhÄratis who venerate the land as mother; for India, the land is a resource to be exploited. It is two different mindsets, two different worlds. On an individualism-based “modern†society as inherently violent, see Krishen Kak, “Enucleated Universes: An Ethnography of the Other America and of Americans as the Other”, Princeton University, Ph.D. dissertation, June 1990. This is not for a moment to suggest that BhÄrat does not have its own problems, but the solutions to these do not lie in the West – see Krishen Kak, “The White solution to Brown problemsâ€, Vicharamala 68, http://www.vigilonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=300&Itemid=55.
*** End ***
Related Posts:
Building the Indian Mind – Brick by Brick
“Hindu”, India and “Bharat” – The Story behind Word Origins and
This must be the last word on origin of “Hindu” (This cites a very well researched paper disputing the “foreign origin†of the word “Hinduâ€)
Also read:Â “India, that is Bharat…” from which
For those who think that the nation of Bharat is a British creation, they should be reminded about Rigveda verse by Vis’vamitra RV 3.53.12: vis’va_mitrasya raks.ati brahmedam bharatam janam, (this mantra of Vis’vamitra will protect the nation of the people of Bharatam). In Tamil bharatam (written pa_ratam) refers to the Hindu ra_s.t.ra. â€
I really enjoyed the first half of that. Rather informative.
But unfortunately it turned divisive – us vs. them. I struggle to figure who it is that has the inferiority complex; I suspect it’s no one group on the whole.
They are not all bad, just as we aren’t all good.
Dear Shantanu,
“They behave more like a large collection of small minorities. While from a spiritual/religious point of view this is not a problem, and India has always valued a certain inherent diversity and a co-existence of different paths, sects and sampradayas, this is a very serious problem from a political standpoint”.
What a profound statement. This has what has been the source of exploitation by all the invaders of Bharat.
The statement is very true as I know about certain sects in ,Hinduism, the Hinduism of the priests and the ritualists and the exploiters, who still believe in that GODS are there to divide and rule.
If GODS can be identified so why blame the Human!
There are certain groups which believe in Vaishnavism wnd others who believe in Shaivism.
One group will not even look at a temple or place of worship where there is a different “GOD” according to the group he belongs!
If this kind of thinking is encouraged by the religious leaders, how can you expect “Hinduism” to look at itself otherwise than what has been described in the paragraph?
Unless the purity of the true Sanatana Dharma is reinforced by each and every Child and parent we are going to have the Educated Individual exploiting us and we will for ever be fighting a rear guard action rather than taking the war into the enemy camp.
Please I am not here to deride the different sects or sampradayas. The point which I am trying to exploit here is the matter that all these sects and sampradayas have a common source of information and they all culminate and lead to one goal, Loka Samastha Sukino Bhavantu.
Unless the different sampradayas and sects close ranks we are doomed.
Let them maintain there objectivity but let them work towards understanding the fundamental fountain of knowledge from which they flow and work towards a goal.
Regards,
vck
Dr. ManMohan Singh, speaking at his Alma Mater, was perhaps right that the idea of India was a British creation. We are for ever grateful to them for giving s everything including Dr. Singh.
I understand he is not very familiar with Delhi or he sincerely believes that Jama Masjid, Kutub Minar, Iron Pillar were created by Britihsh educated Architects and engineers. Of course Taj was built by his fellow student at Oxford. Had it not been for British and British Education we would never have got these things.
It is a free country and Dr. Singh is fully entitled to his opinions and no one should take any offence.
Let us wish him well.
Very great, very informative article.
Wish we have lot more people like you and Shri Krishen Kak.
Bharat is suffocating by the biased media, and corrupt politicians.
People like you are fresh air and light of direction.
May Almighty improve us all to contribute to resolve this serious situation that has come about in Bharatvarsha.
Thank you Vikram…The credit must really go to Sh. Kak who painstakingly researched and referenced this…and of course put it all together in a great prose.
Bharatham need a leader who speaks like this..
Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law should be told to get out of India , as the government targeted
radicals in a bid to head off potential terror attacks.The same applicable to Christians also, if they want to convert and impose their religions, to Nationalist Hindus.
Separately, THE NEW LEADER OF INDIA angered some Indian Muslims by saying he supported spy agencies monitoring the nation’s mosques & mADRASSAS. We have every right to Monitor your Madrassas and Mosques because it instills Radical Terrorism on Young minds.
Quote: ‘IMMIGRANTS,RADICAL MUSLIM GROUPS, CONVERTING CHRISTIANS NOT NATIONALIST INDIANS, MUST ADAPT.
Take It Or Leave It.
I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture. Since the terrorist attacks on Mumbai , we
have experienced a surge in patriotism by the majority of INDIANS.
This culture has been developed over 50 centuries of struggles,trials and victories by millions of saints & sages who have sought freedom’ And try to invade by barbarian Muslim Kings & christian radicals including Britishers. Now a roman maid.. jhonia.. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
We speak mainly Sanskrit, Hindi, not , Arabic, Chinese,
Japanese, Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to become part of our society Learn the language!’
Most INDIANS believe in HINDU God. This is not some HINDU, rightwing, political push, but a fact, because HINDU sAINTS & SAGES, on SANATANA DHARMA principles, founded this nation, and this is clearlydocumented IN SCRIPTURES & PURANAS, DONT TREAT THEM AS MYTH OR SUPERSTITIONS the country belongs to saints & sages. It is certainly appropriate to display it on the walls ofour schools. If Hindu God offends you, then I suggest you consider another
part of the world as your new home, because Hindu Gods & Hinduism is part of our culture.’
Can we start using Jai Bharat! Jai Sindhu! instead of Hind and Hindustan. I think it is more appropriate to say Jai Sindhusthan! I would love to do that. It sounds beautiful!
Jai Sindhu! Jai Bharat!
HAIL SAKTHI.
vck
@ Sakthi: I also saw your comment on Offstumped…It has provided some thoughts for a forthcoming post.
Shakti, I completely agree with you. Hindu Rashtra!
Right is always right 😉
Jai Bharat. Let us all work toward the Hindu Rashtra. Apparently some american authors understand and empathize more with that desire than most of our secular intellectuals. Check out these posts.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/when_elites_eschew_defense_the.html
http://mwcnews.net/content/view/26990&Itemid=1
http://mwcnews.net/mamblog/Itemid,201/task,show/action,view/id,26991/Itemid,201/
http://www.islam-watch.org/Rizwan_Salim/What-Islamic-Invaders-Did-to-India.htm
Jai Bharat. Let us all work toward a Hindu Rastra. Here are some articles by american authors who seem to have a greater understanding of our nationalist stand than our secular intellectuals who are still trying to define secularism.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/when_elites_eschew_defense_the.html
http://mwcnews.net/content/view/26990&Itemid=1
KK,
I appreciate your work. I’ve read some of your articles at UMD_Samskritam too.
I agree with all the facts and figures. But my soul sometimes cries that why we Bhartis ignored our rich history and culture and keep ignoring to date.
I still believe that the “The idea of India” is an International blunder which was accepted by then our “most learned politicians equipped with English language” who were responsible to write our constitution. Actually the whole concept of Independence was misdirected and misguided. The persons who were actually responsible for throwing British Raj out didn’t came forward with determination to rewrite BHARATVARSHA. Instead the power hungry politicians, were allowed to take a lead and were acceptable to Britishers, were given full autonomy to write the future of Bharat from 1947 onwards.
When you read the history as a layman, Purans, Upnishads till I was born, it doesn’t makes sense. I always felt there a missing link, a huge gap between past and the present.
There was never a religion in Bharatvrsha. It was a discpline, a way of living life which we called a DHARMA. I agree with the definition of the religion.
When a group of people follows a single leader and believes in his teachings constructs a religion, which is not a case in Bhartis.
NOW time is demanding to correct our history. We together need to fill the gap.
I appreciate K.KAK and B.SHANTANU for their dedication towards enlighting the right people.
Namo Bharatam, Namo Samskritam||
Hare Krishna
Post 30 USA was it an idea or ……. read this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
” The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory under President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 almost doubled the nation’s size. The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism. A series of U.S. military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819. The United States annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845. The concept of Manifest Destiny was popularized during this time.[32] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest. The U.S. victory in the Mexican-American War resulted in the 1848 cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest”
Now let us see Great Britain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain
Its Iron Age inhabitants are known as the Britons, a group speaking a Celtic language, and most of it (not the northernmost part (beyond Hadrian’s Wall), where the majority of Scotland lies today) was conquered to become the Ancient Roman province of Britannia. After the fall of the Roman Empire, over a period of 500 years, the Britons of the south and east of the island were assimilated or displaced by invading Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes). At about the same time Scots invaded from Ireland, absorbing both the Picts and Britons of northern Britain, and in the 9th Century the Kingdom of Scotland was formed. The south-east of Scotland was colonised by the Angles and formed, until 1018, a part of the Kingdom of Northumbria. Ultimately, the population of south-east Britain came to be referred to, after the Angles, as the English people. To speakers of Germanic languages, the Britons were called Welsh, a term that eventually came to be applied exclusively to the inhabitants of what is now Wales, but which survives also in names such as Wallace, and in the second syllable of Cornwall. The Britons living in the south-west of Britain, in the areas now known as Wales and Cornwall, were not assimilated by the Germanic tribes, a fact reflected in the survival of Celtic languages in these areas into modern times. At the time of the Germanic invasion of Southern Britain, many Britons emigrated to the Continent, to the area now known as Brittany, where Breton, a Celtic language closely related to Welsh and Cornish and descended from the language of the emigrants, is still spoken. In the ninth century, a series of Danish assaults on northern English kingdoms led to them coming under Danish control (an area known as the Danelaw). In the tenth century, however, all the English kingdoms were unified under one ruler as the kingdom of England. In 1066, England was conquered by the Normans, who introduced a French ruling élite that was eventually assimilated. Wales came under Anglo-Norman control in 1282, and was officially annexed to England in the sixteenth century.
Now , presto Canada.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada
The English established fishing outposts in Newfoundland around 1610 and colonized the Thirteen Colonies to the south. A series of four Intercolonial Wars erupted between 1689 and 1763. Mainland Nova Scotia came under British rule with the Treaty of Utrecht (1713); the Treaty of Paris (1763) ceded Canada and most of New France to Britain following the Seven Years’ War
I wont go further. So you see Post 30 it was not India , where people came from outside , but all over the world invasions have been taking place. Just read the above and go thru the wiki’s.
What makes India different from other countries is the culture of India. The culture of India has been a awesome wonder for the outsiders. Infact, you could say that whatever came to India merged with Indian culture. The other places as I have shown in the excerpts totally demolished the indigenous cultures. Outstanding example is Kanishka. He came from outside , but build Buddhist shrines and built many temples for Shiva and other Gods and led a prosperous kingdom.
This did not happen in the West. The reason for this. It required very, very very deep study.
I used to watch movies when I was young. Remember Marlon Brando. He refused the Oacar award because his indigenous race was treated ………. You fill in the words.
Time permitting will continue on this.
Hare Krishna
A few questions to the author:
1. Could he please give us a historical period when this “Bharat” was supposed to have ruled the entire India? I am looking for historical and not mythological period, by the way!
2. What constituted this “Bharatvarshya”? Of course, this question only follows from a satisfactory answer to the first question.
3. It is recorded history that nothern parts of India and what are now Pakistan and Afghanistan were ruled by many Greek, Persian, Buddhist and Muslim dynasties over a couple of thousand years. If the author could, how would he prove this history wrong? Again, using historical data and not mythological stories please!
4. How would the author reject the historical facts that Mauryan dynasty in the north and Satvahana dynasty in the central and southern India were, as a matter of fact, rival dynasties? What gives the author reasons to believe that there was any idea of a unified India during that period?
Must mention that some of the references the author has provided are childish at best. Take for example references to David Frawley. A simple google search of this name would tell you that he’s a convert to Hinduism and of course has a biased opinion. A sophisticated and responsible researcher would present a balanced view and the author fails to do so here.
What makes India a great country is not its “unique” culture but the influence of European, Persian and Islamic cultures on the existing vedic civilization predominantly in the north India.
I hope people don’t fall for this right-wing propaganda to serve dangerous political interests. India is great not because we are monolithic but because we are diverse. I am proud about the fact that I have the blood of many great world civilizations running through my veins!
@Ashish: First request: Have an open mind. Be aware that the history you and I learnt has been severly distorted through the prism of ideology (and prior to that through the prism of justifying the noble mission).
The concept of India is not merely “territory” and as I mentioned elsewhere, the concept of “nation” is a modern, western construct that I would not like to use to interpret our culture and history. To ask questions like “When did someone rule whole of India” are not meaningful to a conducive dialogue.
ShriRam and ShriKrishna are not mythological figures. There is vast amount of evidence to prove the historicity of Shri Krishna and increasing amount of evidence to suggest the historical basis of Ramayana too.
You may or may not get “satisfactory” answers to your questions but I would still encourage you to read alternative interpretations of history.
Pl do get your dates right…The Satvahanas were co-existent with Mauryans only for a liimted period. They came after the Mauryans and were not rivals.
The idea of a unified India existed not (just) on land (in terms of territory) but (also) in the sense of cultural unity…As I mentioned on the Facebook page, the past few hundred years of colonial rule and colonial mindset has made us forget that there was a history, a culture a tradition and a civilisational unity BEFORE this land was colonised…That is the reason why people from Kanyakumari travel to Badrinath and the Gujaratis will go to Rameshwaram for a pligrimage. That is why the four maths established by Shankaracharya were at the natural boundaries of this “bhoomi”…that is why there is an unbroken tradition of worshipping Pashupatinath right from the Saraswati-Sindhu civilisation until today…and that is why there has been – since the earliest of times – a sense of shared socio-cultural heritage across this land.
While there did exist multiple kingdoms in history on this land, there was always a free exchange of ideas, people, goods and scholarship unmindful of (and unencumbered by) these boundaries.
I do not agree with you that our culture is not unique. It is…No other culture or civilisation in the world has had the profound origins that this culture has; has assimilated so much from outside and yet retained its liberal, open and tolerant ethos…There is a reason why many people suggest that this “way of life” can be a model for the 21st century.
Finally, labels are dangerous – especially when wrongly applied. If you want to dismiss this as right-wing propoganda, that is your prerogative. I do not agree.
P.S. Before accusing Sh Frawley of biased opinion, pl. be aware the ALL history is biased. Hence the request to read widely and form your own opinion.
@Shantanu – I will attempt to respond to each of the paragraphs in your last post below:
1) I come from a middle-class Marathi family with at least a soft corner, if not a vociferous support, for the sangh parivar. So it was only when I opened my mind to other possibilities that I saw the world in a different light. Having said that, I am still willing to reconsider all of what I know to be true and reject all history as I know it today if I am presented with an equally credible research against it. Unfortunately, I haven’t come across it yet and my challenges have so far gone either unheeded or ridiculed. I would be more than glad to be proven wrong.
2) Okay so we can’t define India is terms of territory, fair play! How can we then define India? What would be your idea of India? This is not a challenge. I am really curious to know what would be the “ideal” India in your opinion (both in territorial and cultural terms).
3) I have come across the research in support of the existence of Ram and Krishna. I don’t doubt that there was a Hastinapur or an Ayodhya or a Dwarka. They may well have existed. But the existence of certain places mentioned in the then literature doesn’t prove the existence of these men, definitely not in their godly forms. By that logic, Superman must exist because New York exists! That’s simply not the right way to prove history.
4) I don’t quite understand what “interpretations of history” means! Historical events either took place or they didn’t! Interpretations of history are only drawn to create biases, as you rightly mentioned in your last para.
5) As you rightly said, the Sathavahanas did co-exist with the Mauryans and if I am not mistaken, they even declared themselves independent. They had their own currency etc. I have spent a few years of my life in Paithan (the Sathavahana capital ‘Pratishthan’) and know from my brief cultural education there that the dynasty didn’t have much to do with the north Indian dynasties. So the idea of united India didn’t really exist at least in territorial terms.
6&7) But yes I agree with you that there was free exchange of people, ideas, and trade between the different dynasties and that must’ve lead to cultural exchanges across the land. Now that’s not very surprising and definitely not unique to India. The human race has spread all over the world through exchanges and interactions between different civilizations. That’s what has brought the world, and not only India, closer to each other. But to say that because people, ideas and trade could freely travel across the mainland, and consequently created many cultural similarities, doesn’t mean that there was always a ‘one-dimensional’ culture that the length and breadth of India (as we know it today) could identify with in those days! By that logic, Europeans have always had very fluid boundaries (many examples of royal marriages across kingdoms – the British royal family has German roots!) but it would be at best naive to generalize Europe into one uniform culture.
8) Pardon my use of word ‘unique’. It was quite an inappropriate word to suggest ‘one-dimensional’. But yes I agree with you, as I said in my previous post, that India is great because it has been influenced by so many different civilizations and that’s added to the richness of our culture.
9) I find this a propaganda because I can’t quite see the reasons behind redefining our history to fit a certain way of right-wing thinking! These historical distortions are quite regularly misused by the “parivar” and that’s very very scary!
To conclude, I don’t think my generation is really bothered about the definitions of India and what is/was/should’ve/could’ve been India! I don’t think we are really interested in going back to the past. We want to look to the future. Did Aryans really come to India? Who cares! Could we be the first to reach Mars? Now we are talking! Could we have had our own railways without the British? Really not interested! Could we have the fastest train in the world running in India? You bet!
Ashish: My last comment on this aspect.
Re. “interpretations” of History, pl read this post: Lies and Half-Truths in the name of National Integration. Another example of what I mean by different “interpretations” is the history of the freedom struggle as noted by British authors vs accounts by Indian historians.
Part II of the above post is here.
Pl also read about what might well be the biggest whitewash in Indian History.
If what you say is true (re. your generation not being interested in history), that is a tragedy. A nation that cannot remember its history is condemned to repeat it.
I am surprised that you interpret my curiousity to uncover the truth as an attempt to “redefine” history to fit a certain way of “right-wing thinking”! Such accusations are quite regularly hurled by “secular” historians “and that’s very very scary“!
P.S. By the way, I never used the word “one-dimensional” culture. To say that about Indian culture or Indian-ness would be an insult to our heritage.
@Shantanu – first up, I used the term ‘one-dimensional’ and didn’t attribute it to you. I know that you don’t believe that it’s ‘one-dimensional’ but to someone like me, it does come across as such.
Secondly, I never said that you are redefining history. Clearly, I was referring to this article, of which you are not the author and hence I would be very unwise to attribute it to you.
Now about the links that you provided in your last post. I don’t quite remember ever being taught that Aurangzeb was a nice guy! Neither in school and definitely not at home. And I have no doubts that he was a bigot and a mad-man hell bent on spreading Islam in India. So if there is any change in the text books since my schooldays (1994) in favor of Aurangzeb, then it must be absolutely condemned. We are better off having gotten rid of such people!
I had the privilege of living with Mr. P. N. Oak for a few months and personally discuss the controversy surrounding the Taj Mahal. Having known him personally, I don’t doubt his sincerity and archaeological knowledge and I had told him when we discussed this that I hoped his claim was investigated further. I don’t understand why this controversy should lead to political or religious unrest. Irrespective of whether it was built by the Rajputs or the Moghuls, the fact remains that it is a beautiful structure and an Indian icon. People around the world know it as a “symbol of love”. Shouldn’t we be content with that? I think we, the Indians (and please don’t take this as a personal affront to you!), need to learn to see the bigger picture and act a little mature at times.
I must say that I have as much problem as you do with the Indian idea of “secularism”! I think we’ve got it all wrong. Secularism in India literally means anti-Hindu and pro-Muslim! And I would hate to be categorized as such. I have a huge problem with Islam and I am beginning to have a huge problem with Hinduism because in order to fight Islam, it is turning into one! If Hinduism is all about tolerance, inclusiveness and all that, I don’t think the current torch-bearers are doing a great job of representing it as such!
@Ashish,
Couple of questions:
1.
Could we be the first to reach Mars? Now we are talking!Can you tell me what purpose “reaching to Mars” serve? Are we going to look for oil there? or food? gems or gold? One of the major problem with our country is the mis-prioritization where government can not arrange even basic method of cloud-seeding which may help avoid farmer suicide but reach for moons and planets. Why would I as a tax-payer continue to fund white elephant projects like “Chandrayan 1” when the basic food security can be done at the 1% of the expense of a space project. The only benefit of a space project is the advance in rockets that can be used for military purpose, but cost far outweigh the benefit. We could buy the advanced rockets and encourage scientists and private funds to do joint space research programs.
2.
I have come across the research in support of the existence of Ram and Krishna.– I am not sure about Rama, but competing ideologies like Buddhism and Jainism mentions Krishna being a great prince, warrior and strategist. Whether one accepts image like Rama or Krishna as Gods, would be a good question and passionate arguments can be made against or in support of it. One however, can not deny that good research must be made about our history having those personalities. The existing political climate simply does not want that research to continue. There is a series of submerged sites along both coast lines, no one in position of power wants them excavated. A researcher just wanted the help from drivers in Indian Navy, government simply denied that one too.3.
I am still willing to reconsider all of what I know to be true and reject all history as I know it today if I am presented with an equally credible research against it.Help me understand here. When you say “credible”, what do you actually mean? Endorsed by history department in JNU? Considerable genetic researches in last 10 years discredited any theory of significant mass movement into India after 2000 BCE. The initial combined reaction from historians and Indologists was that geneticists should stick to making medicines. Recently, high priestess of secular, Marxist (and thus very objective) historical views (who also holds some chair in JNU), corrected her Aryan Migration Theory and determined that Aryan culture impacts trickled down to India even when no human movement happened. Apparently, cultures have long wide legs with which they crossed rivers and mountains. Is this the credibility you are talking about?
4.
Historical events either took place or they didn’t!– How do you know that they took place or not? Either by architectural discovery or circumstantial evidence or by reading ancient books that refers to real events. All of them require interpretation. For example, how did we know that Megasthenis came to India? His own book is not found. A few ancient writers referred to his book, wrote about his journey to far places in the east and also wrote about the one-eyed humans and other strange creatures he met there. Unless you interpret these clues using other known authentic (authenticity being another point of interpretation) sources and common sense, you can not determine what might have happened. However, it is this interpretation and common sense where personal bias plays in. Forget someone like Indologist Michael Witzel, rigorous historians like JN Sarcar or Vincent Smith are not freed from their biases. No human is.I remember when I was a student of fifth standard, I was told in history class, that Kings use religion to establish their divinity and power. Problem arose when even a kid like me asked for an example of such a king in Indian history. The teacher, a CPM union leader and a party-certified intellectual, was shocked by my audacity. She did not have an answer and ignored my question. I shudder to think the damage these people of dogma and faith (Marxism, Christianity, western atheism, Islam – all demand absolute faith in their ideology and not very different to each other) have done to the grand history of my country. Indian history is so deeply damaged by those Euro-centric leftist idiots, a nationalist can not do a bigger damage.
Oh, one more thing, just because the people I oppose call themselves left, I do not have to call myself right. I am a nationalist, I was and I would be.
5.
By that logic, Europeans have always had very fluid boundaries (many examples of royal marriages across kingdoms – the British royal family has German roots!)– They almost always did.At the end, allow me to quote my favorite English language writer:
Those who control the present control the future. Those who control the future control the past.
This is exactly the reason, academic support is sought by every political movement, so that history can be re-interpreted by the leaders. This is exactly the reason, departments after departments in most universities in India were filled with Marxists or socialists so that Marxist interpretation of our history can not be questioned. 20 years after the disastrous fall of USSR and communist doctrine, finally all someone can do in our country is to ask some questions about widely held belief of our Marxist interpreters. If we can not ask questions, we can not show that the emperor does not have any clothes. And lies of this particular emperor are needed to be torn apart.
@Sid
1) Please watch this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHWsJgarMtA. A prominent astro physicist named Brian Cox explains why Mars is important and why we should explore the planet further. Now what are we going to achieve by researching the existence of Ram and Krishna?
We could either take the lead in areas such as scientific discovery or keep fighting over temples and mosques. If you choose to do the latter, please don’t blame the west for dividing you. The British enjoyed the fruits of this division but they’ve gone for the last 6 decades and I don’t see your lot showing much inclination towards unity even today!
2) When I say ‘credible’, I mean something that has withstood extensive critical research, arguments & counter-arguments, competing theories and multi-faceted challenges. So to say that “something is true because we believe so, and anyone who thinks otherwise is simply doing so because they don’t like us” isn’t good enough! This is true in science, and this is true in history.
3) You seem to have bundled everything from economic philosophy to religions in one category and that’s amusing and bewildering! I hope you know the difference between Marxism and Christianity! And western atheism and Islam? Gosh! What’s “western atheism” anyway? And what’s “eastern atheism” then?
4) Again, what’s a nationalist? I am born in India and I love India dearly. But from the looks of it, I am a Marxist, Christian, Western Atheist and Muslim and probably not “patriotic enough” in your books? I hope I am wrong but I am not very optimistic about it.
Cheers!
AD
@Ashish,
It is kind of wonderful how you bypassed answering each of the questions I asked.
1.Your link about Mars: Who said Mars is not important? I raised questions about feeding white elephants projects using tax-payer money. This money can be better utilized for the things that require immediate attention. Unless someone justifies a good ROI of reaching Mars first there will be many questioning this argument.
2.
"... We could either take the lead in areas such as scientific discovery or keep fighting over temples and mosques... "– We need both. There are men who would search for the truth behind natural phenomenon and there are men who would long for spiritual truth. A great culture accommodates both. Between religion and science, a dynamic society does not ban one in favor of the other, it accepts both and tries to maintain the balance between faith and reason.3.
"Now what are we going to achieve by researching the existence of Ram and Krishna?"– It is a part of self knowledge. Maculay’s infamous 1835 memo about Indian education system contains this line: Rest assured, self knowledge would imply self rule.4.
So to say that “something is true because we believe so, and anyone who thinks otherwise is simply doing so because they don’t like us†isn’t good enough!– I would like you to show where I have said it. In the spirit of discussion, I would appreciate if you read my posts before you wrote your response.5.
You seem to have bundled everything from economic philosophy to religions in one category and that’s amusing and bewildering!and
hope you know the difference between Marxism and Christianity!Do you know the similarity? Both are dogmatic and highly envious of existence of any voice of criticism or dissent.
And western atheism and Islam? Gosh!Oopss, so upset, huh!! For someone, who is upset with religion so much, should be careful while using a word that is etymological representative of the word God.
What’s “western atheism†anyway? And what’s “eastern atheism†then?Can we assume some knowledge of the subject matter under discussion please? Western atheism is very similar to other creeds in it’s intolerance of other voices. Eastern atheism? Heard about Charvaka? or Sankhya schools of philosophy? Boradly speaking, eastern atheism does not care if God existed or not. Buddha, while answering to his disciple about the existence of God, said that the question of God’s existence does not matter to him. Western atheism (Dawkins style and Marx before that) goes ahead and declares that God does not exist.
6.
"But from the looks of it, I am a Marxist, Christian, Western Atheist and Muslim and probably not “patriotic enough†in your books?"– Interesting. So I have accused you of being all these without writing any such thing? Would you mind showing me how?Finally,
"... and I don’t see your lot showing much inclination towards unity even today!".Obviously, I lack your sense of decency and finesse. Would you mind showing me what “my lot” is. I need to understand that part, before we can go into more discussion. Thanks to your comment I already have an understanding of your lot.
1) Good. So from “Can you tell me what purpose “reaching to Mars†serve? Are we going to look for oil there? or food? gems or gold?” to “who said Mars is not important?” is good progress. I am sure we will get there eventually!
As for the question of ROI on such investments, we can’t see them in a year or two and they can’t be measured only in monitory terms. And by the way, I never said that we should reinvest the money in scientific developments that has probably been assigned to food security or poverty eradication. And anyway, I used Mars as a mere example. The bigger point I was trying to make was that we should look at investing our energies in something more meaningful than digging up old graves.
2) Yes we should accommodate those who are looking for spiritual explanations but there’s a difference between “accommodating” them and “propagating” them. I don’t think anyone has a problem with someone sitting in the caves of Himalaya contemplating on the afterlife; the problem is when they start butting in the corridors of power. But if they are willing to let their beliefs up for critical scrutiny, they are more than welcome!
3) Self-knowledge? How about trying to find our place in the universe? construct of our DNA? Workings of the human brain? But anyway, what do I do if it’s conclusively proven that Ram or Krisha actually existed? How in your opinion would that change our present? our future? oh yes, and that little something about “rule”?
4) Did I attribute that “something is true if I believe so…” to you personally? I am sorry if I did but I am absolutely sure I didn’t!
5a) Is Marxism dogmatic? How so? Is there no place for dissent in Christianity? Okay, Protestant, Catholic, Anglicans, Orthodox, Methodists, Presbyterian, Mormon…. I rest my case!
5b) Atheism is essentially a non-belief in a supreme being. It’s a little unfair to compare Charvakya to Dawkins because of the huge time gap between the two. Dawkins could claim today that God doesn’t exist because of the scientific advances we’ve made. Clearly, Charvakya didn’t know then that we’ve evolved from monkeys! (and by the way, Dawkins always said that “personal god as we know it today” does not exist! There’s no way to refute the existence of a supernatural entity… life could well have been planted on the earth, just for the sake of possibility!)
So there’s hardly any difference between eastern and western Atheism. The only difference is that the atheists in the west were made to come out strongly because of the religious aggressions. It was thankfully a little different in India but from the looks of it, it wouldn’t remain the same for long. The more the saffron brigade tries to push people back to stone-age, the stronger atheists would come out. After all, there’s a limit to which one could tolerate the sangh parivar non-sense.
6) As I implied in my last post, it was merely my assumption that I’ve been categorized into the people of “dogma and faith” and I said I hoped I am wrong. And now from your “show me how” question, I assume that you don’t think I am a person of “dogma and faith” and I am glad about that. Apologies for the misinterpretation.
7) When I say “your lot”, I mean that sizeable chunk of people in India who are still stuck on vedic civilization and continue to refuse to accept the many civilizations that have enriched India. Who still consider Islam and Christianity as alien and still yearn for an “akhand bharat”!
If that’s not you, I would have no shame or hesitation in apologizing unconditionally and take my words back.
@Ashish,
Good. So from “Can you tell me what purpose “reaching to Mars†serve? Are we going to look for oil there? or food? gems or gold?†to “who said Mars is not important?†is good progress. I am sure we will get there eventually!Mars is important from the point of view science and science is just as important as any other branch of human intellectual output. It is a crime for a country where it’s citizens die of starvation to engage in a space race just because few well-fed elites would like to brag about it during dinner parties. I do not belong to such elites and I am not seeing how I am getting “there”.
And anyway, I used Mars as a mere example.Apparently, not a good example.
we should look at investing our energies in something more meaningful than digging up old graves.Just because you do not consider those old graves part of your identity does not mean that everybody else thinks that way. Those, who consider those old graves as lively gardens, have as much rights to this society and this nation as you do. If you do not have the suitable attitude to offer respect to them and work with them towards a better world then your rightful place is a dictatorship.
but there’s a difference between “accommodating†them and “propagating†them– Show me why there is a problem in propagation. The religion is not something that people are supposed to practice in a cave in Himalayan region, it is part of a modern civilization.the problem is when they start butting in the corridors of power.– Who told you that the principle job of men of religion is poking their nose in the corridor of the power? Why do not you start with an example, specially the ones involving “old graves”?But if they are willing to let their beliefs up for critical scrutiny, they are more than welcome!– Nobody is stopping you from “scrutiny”. Where did you get so far by scrutinizing?How about trying to find our place in the universe? construct of our DNA? Workings of the human brain? But anyway, what do I do if it’s conclusively proven that Ram or Krisha actually existed? How in your opinion would that change our present? our future? oh yes, and that little something about “ruleâ€?– Good questions. I have one: can you deny your mother and father or their father and mother? Not knowing who you belong to is akin to not knowing who you are. In our consciousness, time consists of: past, present and future. The first two determines the third and knowing the first two would give us clue about the third. The questions that you placed are good questions and they need to be answered. But a search for their answer is not mutually exclusive of search for the history.I am sorry if I did but I am absolutely sure I didn’t!– That is one of the most original attempt at denial I have ever seen.Is Marxism dogmatic? How so? Is there no place for dissent in Christianity?– No. Read up Marx and Lenin. You are considered a “reactionary” if you are questioning their dogma. Each of the sects you are talking about are equally dogmatic. Consider this: there are around 38000 Christian sects around the world. All of them accept Bible as word of God and Jesus as their savior. Yet one belonging to one sect is forbidden to enter the place of worship of the others. The lesson is: if you are raising your voice against Dogma, you have to establish your separate sect and find your own political voice before you get butchered.Clearly, Charvakya didn’t know then that we’ve evolved from monkeys!How does that make eastern atheism same as western atheism? Western athiesm is a reaction to the dogmas of the western faith. It is not surprising the reaction that dogma-based faith would produce would be dogma-based too. Eastern atheism is sort of a tradition that got periodically lost and found. The fact that traditional Lokayata/Nastika is adopted by scholars of philosophy means that it was not a socio-political movement(like Periyar’s movement was) but a school of thought. If Dawkins permitted an individual God, then this means that western atheism is exactly opposite to Carvaka shool of thought because Carvaka ignores (instead of denying) any sort of God. So did Buddha.The more the saffron brigade tries to push people back to stone-age, the stronger atheists would come out. After all, there’s a limit to which one could tolerate the sangh parivar non-sense: Sangh and rest of the saffron brigade fills a gap that exists between highly-educated English-speaking self-loathing “my-skin-is-whiter-than-yours” Hindu-hating coconuts and common lay-men who does not know better than depending on those elites for direction when their very way of life and closely-held belief systems are attacked from all directions. If they got their directions from those people who are out there to learn British dining etiquettes because eating with Hands was so uncool (although British themselves are confused about dining etquette when they are served naans), they would not go to Pravin Togadia or Ashok Singhal for direction. Your educated Dawkins-read mind may find antics of Togadia and his clan unsophisticated, dirty or bigot. I too felt that way at times. But if I have to think through the entire problem, I get ashamed of myself. I am one of those better-privileged, better-read, comparatively more successful people who call themselves a proud Hindu, yet done very little to comfort those who need help. My suggestion would be to go and search for the answers to the questions you asked in item 3 or try to understand the problem instead of mouthing whatever trash Burqa Dutts of the world are serving.7) When I say “your lotâ€, I mean that sizable chunk of people in India who are still stuck on vedic civilization and continue to refuse to accept the many civilizations that have enriched India. Who still consider Islam and Christianity as alien and still yearn for an “akhand bharatâ€!: Good point. While I am not stuck on so-called vedic civilization, I am have no illusion about “enrichment” that any other civilizations have bought in. Those enrichment are written in blood in collective memories of the Hindu population and no amount of white-wash by Romilla Thapar clan would abolish them. The question is not whether we call Christianity or Islam alien or not, the question is whether Christianity or Islam could accept the country as their own or not. Take names for example. Do you know if any Muslim or Christian is named Ashish? Ashish has nothing to do with Hinduism. It is a sanskrit word in our culture that every Muslim or Christian inherits. Why then someone needs to refer to Arabic names or European names? The truth is that “alien”s are equally responsible for alienation. The entire two nation theory was shoved down our throat on the basis that Muslims are not part of this nation. So, is there a reason that one group of people continue to demand that they are not part of us and we would continue to declare that they are part of us. Simply ridiculous.=>
“Who still consider Islam and Christianity as alien and still yearn for an “akhand bharatâ€!”
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I don’t know about any yearning for “akhand bharat” (And anyway, what’s wrong with yearnings? Don’t you yearn to explore Mars and discover the secrets of DNA etc.?), but Islam and Christianity are definitely alien to BhArat. Both of these ideologies are intolerant of other beliefs, whereas Sanatan Dharm and Dharmic paths (Buddhism, Jainism) do not claim any exclusivity over God/Truth and are not intolerant of other paths.
So, in that context, yes, the two ideologies are indeed alien to the ethos of BhArat. All you have to do is compare how Dalai Lama, Jews, Parsis have lived in India (historically as well as recently) and freely practiced their religion, to how so many Islamic countries even to this day do not even allow any public display of a religion that is not Islam. If you want to look at another example, there’s the massacre of Ahmaddiyas in Pakistan not so long ago simply for following their faith (i.e. they were not hurting anyone), and most Pakistanis do not even pretend to be sympathetic to them.
So, there’s no “consideration” – those two ideologies are indeed alien, when looked at from a certain context.
@Sid, your lack of knowledge of everything from Marx to atheism to Christianity is baffling. I wouldn’t venture into discussing each in detail because a) this is not the most appropriate forum for that and b) there isn’t a point anyway. But here’s a bit of education: (And btw, I hope you are not a scientist because it would be a waste of talent if all you are going to do is brag about it on dinner tables!)
Karl Marx was a philosopher and Marxism is simply his ideas on political, social and economic structure. Stalin may have used Marxism as a tool, or an excuse, for his evil acts (much in the same way the parivar uses Hinduism!) but you can’t blame Marx for Stalin’s acts. I don’t agree with Marx’s ideas but that doesn’t mean he was evil!
Atheism is simply a non-belief in a supreme being. There is no difference between eastern, southeastern, middle-eastern or western atheism. In the old days before scientific enlightenment, atheism was more of a philosophy but as science progressed and uncovered a lot about our universe, the non-existence of god turned into a reality.
Bible consists of two books – old and new testament. The Jews follow the old testament and accept it as the word of god. The new testament consists of 4 gospels purportedly written by Christ’s disciples. It’s not word of god! Catholics and many other Christian denominations follow the new testament. Furthermore, there’s enough debate about Christ himself. Some say that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, others claim that she was Christ’s wife and carried his child; many denominations are currently debating women priests and homosexuality…. Christianity is seeped in dogma, blind faith and frankly, most of its claims are outrageous but there is enough room for debate within the religion.
Dawkins doesn’t permit an individual god. He in fact says that a personal god as we know it today doesn’t exist. Please refer to point 5b in my earlier post.
Religion is not part of a modern civilization, quite the contrary. It belongs to an era when we didn’t know a lot about ourselves and the world around us. Religion has very little to contribute to a modern society. Sweden and Denmark are largely non-religious and they are some of the happiest and best places to live on this planet.
My mother and father and their mother and father…. sorry what?
Now to the important point:
@Sid and Kaffir
You did turn out to be what I feared. Your disregard for many civilizations is both hurtful and offensive. The middle-eastern and western civilizations have been in India for many centuries now but you seem to want to go only as far back in time as is convenient for you. You want to take India back to the times when these civilizations didn’t exist in India. How about going further back then? Say a couple of million years ago? Guess what, we all are alien in India and in most other parts of the world. All of our ancestors migrated to different parts of the world from Africa.
People travel, as they should, and they carry their cultures and traditions with them. And India has benefited from the many different people that have landed on our shores. They mingled with each other and created new cultures. We’ve got so many things from the middle-eastern people that we value so much today as our own (Hindi-Urdu is a hybrid language as is gulab-jamun. Indian music and art had significant Islamic stamp that you simply can’t wipe out). I come from Mumbai and I can’t imagine the city without the majestic British architecture and Goa without its beautiful Portuguese heritage. Sure there have been clashes but they are so way back into the past that they really shouldn’t matter today. What matters is cherishing this wonderfully hybrid culture and preserving it.
Many Hindus have migrated from India to all parts of the world and sure enough, they built their own temples everywhere. Hell, the RSS clan is even active in promoting Hinduism in many parts of the world. Indians proudly talk about the Diwali celebrations in the British houses of parliament. I am sure you don’t have a problem with any of that, then why should you have a problem with other cultural influences in India? But hell who am I talking to! Hypocrisy is a right-wing virtue!
@Sid, I thought it was a very silly question and didn’t want to respond to it but just so that you know, my ex-girlfriend is named Nisha and she’s a Catholic. One of my best friends is named Renu and her daughter is named Arya and they are Catholics too. Whilst on that note, what does ‘Sid’ stand for in Sanskrit? But then again, Hypocrisy is a right-wing virtue!
Ashish, your entire response to my earlier comment can be termed as non sequitur and tangential/irrelevant. Please learn to understand what you read instead of jerking your knee in a predictable fashion or attributing to me your own delusional ideas/conclusions, and please learn to accept certain unpleasant facts about these two ideologies. Additionally, Atanu had written an excellent post on the differences between ideologies and people – if you’re interested, I can provide the link.
@Ashish,
Your ability to bypass questions
because a) this is not the most appropriate forum for that and b) there isn’t a point anywayis awesome. I am wondering why these reasons failed to stop you from putting your points here before.but you can’t blame Marx for Stalin’s acts.– Who is blaming him? I am blaming his ideas.There is no difference between eastern, southeastern, middle-eastern or western atheism.– Ok, I am learning to take stuff at face value. Good lesson from an atheist.... but as science progressed and uncovered a lot about our universe, the non-existence of god turned into a reality.– Yes, so one fine morning, He decided He should not exist and became non-existent !!Christianity is seeped in dogma, blind faith and frankly, most of its claims are outrageous but there is enough room for debate within the religion.– Once again, I am learning to accept things at face value. Good lessons, can we have few examples?Dawkins doesn’t permit an individual god. He in fact says that a personal god as we know it today doesn’t exist. Please refer to point 5b in my earlier post.– Sorry to mis-read it. Can you refute the differences between eastern and western atheism by showing some logic? But that would be too much to expect because you really do not know anything about eastern atheism, do you? That is the reason you are making blank statements and running from a point wise discussion? Ooppss, I forgot, this is not the correct forum and there is no point anyway. Why did you write a reply then?Religion is not part of a modern civilization, ... Sweden and Denmark are largely non-religious and they are some of the happiest and best places to live on this planet.– Oh my"Gosh"!!! So the concept of happiness was never there in the old civilizations of the world. Because, you see, all of them were religious. Also, how do you know, Sweden/Denmark does not have religion? More than 70% people still go to Church there. If that is the sign of non-religion, then even America is same, because according to Bill Maher, 30% Americans are atheist. Yet that is the biggest source of evangelical money.I am quoting your hero Dawkins here: Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists. which means if you are not atheist, you are not highly intelligent. I quoted this because the arrogance that stares so directly from this statement can also be found in your response. Dawkins, however, tries to argue based on logic and fact sometimes, your entire response contains only blank assertions about atheism. If this is not dogma, what is?
Ashish,
Can you put their full name out, please? We can see.
Also, Sid is my alias. I am Siddhartha. I do not need to explain what does that mean.
@Sid, Sid, Sid…. the topic of discussion on this forum is the “idea of India” and Karl Marx, Richard Dawkins and Christianity has very little to do with this discussion. Hence, didn’t want to get too involved in that discussion.
But won’t “bypass” your questions, if your points could be called that, anymore!
1) Okay, you can’t blame Marx’s ideas for Stalin’s actions in the same way that you can’t blame Valmiki for the nutters who razed Ayodhya in 1993.
2) No, god didn’t decide one fine day to not exist. He never did exist and the more science expanded our horizons, the clearer this became.
3) For examples of how there’s scope for debate within Christianity, please refer to paragraph number 4 in my last comment.
4) I have told you very clearly in my last two posts that atheism is simply a non-belief in supernatural existence. An atheist is a person who doesn’t think that a god exists. You could be in the east or west or anywhere in between and still think the same way. If that logic is not good enough for you, I don’t know what is!
5) Sweden and Denmark are largely atheists and I don’t know where you get this 70% figure from. Please have a look at this http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_atheist.html. As a matter of fact, Britain has more believers than Sweden and Denmark put together and the Church-going population even here is less than 50%. Whatever told you that I implied that people in the previous centuries weren’t happy? I am simply making a point that religion has very little to contribute to a modern society and you could still be happier, healthier and wealthier in countries where religions already have a very insignificant role to play!
6) Right, so Dawkins is my hero now. Someone had made Ayn Rand my heroine on some other discussion on this blog. Guys, just because I agree with someone doesn’t make that person my hero or heroine and just because I disagree with someone doesn’t make that person my sworn enemy!
7) A little critical thinking required on your part please. Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists implies that if you are highly intelligent, you are more likely to be an atheist. It doesn’t mean that if you are not an atheist, you are not intelligent. I know many people who are highly intelligent and believers. My mom is a devout Hindu and I don’t think she’s dumb. Although I highly doubt the existence of god, I don’t have a problem if someone wants to believe in one!
I am glad that you find Dawkins logical and factual “sometimes”. I am sure he would be very pleased to get your sanction!
@Sid, may I know why you are interested in my full name please?
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“I know many people who are highly intelligent and believers. My mom is a devout Hindu and I don’t think she’s dumb. “
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But is your mom highly intelligent? 🙂
“Not dumb” is a pretty backhanded compliment to give to someone, especially one’s mother.
And why is “intelligence” the be-all and end-all? What happened to other values like kindness, generosity etc.?
@Ashish, You said:
——Many Hindus have migrated from India to all parts of the world and sure enough, they built their own temples everywhere. Hell, the RSS clan is even active in promoting Hinduism in many parts of the world. Indians proudly talk about the Diwali celebrations in the British houses of parliament. I am sure you don’t have a problem with any of that, then why should you have a problem with other cultural influences in India? But hell who am I talking to! Hypocrisy is a right-wing virtue!—–
My take: Open your eyes! Money through immigration is their big business and they do know how to keep eye and check on minorities by allowing temples and mosque to be built. They are not dumb like Indians and Hindus! Hizab, and Sharia law is ban in many countries instead of they have lot of immigrants and legally entered people! Everybody is in process of preserving their countries culture, religion and traditions. They are not fool like bunch of Indians.
——-People travel, as they should, and they carry their cultures and traditions with them. And India has benefited from the many different people that have landed on our shores. They mingled with each other and created new cultures. We’ve got so many things from the middle-eastern people that we value so much today as our own (Hindi-Urdu is a hybrid language as is gulab-jamun. Indian music and art had significant Islamic stamp that you simply can’t wipe out).——-
My take: One side you want India to remember Gulab Jamun and Hindi-urdu hybrid but soon want to wipe of that Muslims and Christians were invaders and ruined the house of the host and their past history. It is painful for Ashish if some of the Indians are trying to put their house in order! little Inconvenient!
What benifit are you talking about? Its alright for you, Hindus lives under fear, threat to their existence, muslims fundamentalists, and fatwas and terrorism but you get upset with Ayodhya incident very easily. Also very soon want to forget Kashmiri refugees, Mumbai blasts, US and UK blasts, train blasts happens in India as well as in other part of the world. Obsessed with RSS but not with SIMI and other Islamic terror uprising which are more dangerous in India as well as in other parts of the world. Are you talking about clashes of past? and mingling by converting people?
——-Indian music and art had significant Islamic stamp that you simply can’t wipe out). I come from Mumbai and I can’t imagine the city without the majestic British architecture and Goa without its beautiful Portuguese heritage. Sure there have been clashes but they are so way back into the past that they really shouldn’t matter today. What matters is cherishing this wonderfully hybrid culture and preserving it—-
My take:I heard that entertainment industry was not and is not prevalent in Islam, What is that stamp of music and art are you talking about? They converted most of the Hindustani musicians and artists, and hybrid “Mujra” and taj mahal kind tomb was gifted to India. You are fine when you claim glory of Islam and British but not fine when Hindustani claims their glory of ancient Bharat! Very Nice!
—–One of my best friends is named Renu and her daughter is named Arya and they are Catholics too—
My take:The Hindu names to catholic people is openly played tricks with Hindus to fool them and suppress them!.
I am not a kind of person who dont like to give rights to claim everyone but not at the cost of suffering of indeginious people, their culture and traditions. To Ashish, it may not seems valuable but to many it still has value!
@Kaffir
a) If you guys are so tolerant of all other religions and if you are so welcoming and all inclusive, what on earth are you arguing for?
I lived in a little village called Paithan and the people there tell a story about a local saint. He used to walk to a river for bath everyday. One day, some miscreant decided to spoil his day and spat on him when he was returning from his bath. The saint walked back to the river, took and bath and came back and was again spat on. This happened for 50-odd times and the saint walked to the river every single time he was spat on. That’s tolerance. Razing places of worship and killing people isn’t tolerance!
b) If some country doesn’t allow the freedom of worship doesn’t mean we should follow that country’s path. Hindu radicalization in India should not use Islamic radicalization in Pakistan as an excuse. But then again, people like Zakir Naik and Promod Mutalik feed on each other. They are the reason for each others’ existence.
I invite all just commentators on this forum to show to me where, even for once, have I condoned Islamic terrorism and terrorist organizations. Why does condemning one form of extremism automatically qualifies for supporting other form of extremism? Extremism is dangerous, be it Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Jewish and must be equally condemned!
@Indian, no the many cultures that have made India their home haven’t “ruined” the country; they may have ruined your fantastic idea of a puritan “Hindustan” and it’s not the same! And you are not trying to put the house in order; you are simply looking to create disorder and disharmony.
Why do you insist that the whole world is out to fool you, to trick you and to suppress you? If you spew hate, you’ll get hate. If you show compassion, you will get compassion. I have lived in India and outside of it and never once came across any muslim, christian, jew or sikh who wanted to somehow “ruin” me!
And @Indian, not many people fall for your trick in India anymore. This is not the early 90s and rest assured, we will not go back to the late 90s. You are fairly and squarely defeated and good riddance!
This country has immense potential. This generation has great aspirations. We don’t care for your hate mongering. The sooner you realize this, the better it is for all of us!
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“a) If you guys are so tolerant of all other religions and if you are so welcoming and all inclusive, what on earth are you arguing for?”
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Ashish, not sure what you mean by “you guys” and why you’d address your above comment to me. I am tolerant of others to follow their path (I don’t really care what people choose to believe in, though if I remember correctly, you seemed to have a problem with people believing in a matted-hair saintly god living in the mountains – yet, paradoxically, you cite an example of a saint in your comment), but I am not tolerant of the intolerance that is part of some ideologies. Simple as that. Tolerance does not mean being a doormat, and tolerance does not mean – at least to me, YMMV – in making a fetish of non-violence.
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“I lived in a little village called Paithan and the people there tell a story about a local saint. He used to walk to a river for bath everyday. One day, some miscreant decided to spoil his day and spat on him when he was returning from his bath. The saint walked back to the river, took and bath and came back and was again spat on. This happened for 50-odd times and the saint walked to the river every single time he was spat on. That’s tolerance. Razing places of worship and killing people isn’t tolerance!”
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Huh? What has “razing places of worship and killing people” got to do with me or any of the comments I made? There goes your hyper-active mind again. Dude, if the heat is affecting your thought process, please drink some aam panna or some cold water.
Speaking of your story, I’ve read similar versions too (a saint saving a scorpion from some imminent death/drowning, and the scorpion stinging him). What each of these stories forget – or rather, the people reading them forget – is that the protagonist is a saint, and not all people can be saints, and that it takes hard work to reach that stage. A country and a nation needs not just saints, but also warriors, merchants and other members of the society performing different roles. Recommending the saintly behavior, as you mentioned above, to our soldiers guarding our borders would be very foolhardy.
I find it really strange and inexplicable – not to mention irrational – when Hinduism is equated with saintly behavior like the one you mention, and it is implicitly recommended that everyone start acting like saints, while ignoring that it was Dayanand Sarasvati who first called for the overthrow of British rule, or that fighting for justice (would that be un-saintly and intolerant by your definition?) is very much part of Hinduism, or that there were examples like Parshuram’s. Simply trying to imitate the behavior of a saint by common folks – without putting in the hard work that goes into becoming a saint – is pretty stupid, if you ask me. More so is recommending such a behavior as state policy, not that you recommended it.
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“b) If some country doesn’t allow the freedom of worship doesn’t mean we should follow that country’s path. Hindu radicalization in India should not use Islamic radicalization in Pakistan as an excuse. But then again, people like Zakir Naik and Promod Mutalik feed on each other. They are the reason for each others’ existence.”
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Again, you blissfully ignore the context in which I mentioned that fact about Saudi Arabia, and instead, jump to certain conclusions based on your own delusional thoughts. At least be courageous to take responsibility for your own thoughts and conclusions instead of ascribing them to me!!!
Ashish, and I only speak for myself, based on what I read and learn, and I make my own decisions. I’m not part of some imaginary “you guys” group that likely exists only in your mind.
The least you could do is state your comments as your own individual views, instead of ascribing them to the entire “new generation”, as if you’ve been appointed their spokesman.
Stay cool.
@Kaffir
from your comment, “it was Dayanand Sarasvati who first called for the overthrow of British rule, or that fighting for justice (would that be un-saintly and intolerant by your definition?) is very much part of Hinduism”, replace
a) Dayanand Sarasvati with Osama Bin Laden
b) British rule with American occupation
c) fighting for justice with Jihad (it’s one and the same)
d) Hinduism with Islam
and you’ll see how similar your views are to Islamic terrorism.
Now before you lynch me for comparing Dayanand Saraswati with Bin Laden, let me clarify that I don’t mean that they are one and the same but I am merely making a point that using your logic, you could easily justify Islamic extremism!
Give this a thought!
Adding fuel to the fire…
“Jihad” is not fighting for justice…Jihad is specifically directed against Infidel’s and Islam’s enemies…(to the best of my knowledge).
Fight for justice (Dharma-Yuddha?)is not against an entire group of people but against tyrants, oppressors and despots – again, to the best of my knowledge.
Pl feel free to continue the discussion on “Jihad” on the link in my comment. Thanks
@Ashish,
@Sid, may I know why you are interested in my full name please?Because every catholic has a religious component in his/her name. When you took names to refute the point raised about names (a very small issue but a reflection of larger ones), I would like you to write the entire name so that every one can see who was being honest about the names. If you were so uncomfortable about taking the full names, you should not bring those names in a public debate, should you?
@Ashish
“That’s tolerance. Razing places of worship and killing people isn’t tolerance!”
Who is this statement direct towards. I think we all agree on this.
@Sid, you continue to show your narrow-mindedness. I don’t feel angry any more. I just feel very sorry for you.
No, I won’t tell you the surnames because that’s disclosing their identities and I can’t do that without their permissions. Suffice it to say that my ex-girlfriend has a Portuguese surname because her grandparents were Portuguese and my friend’s surname is distinctly Malyali and you wouldn’t find that surname anywhere in the west.
@Shantanu, I’ve read the Koran (unfortunately, I don’t have it by-heart and I can’t quote the verses) and have discussed with some of my muslim friends the concept of Jihad. Jihad literally means strife. It could be a strife against your own self or it could an armed struggle for justice.
@Kaffir
In response to your comment “The least you could do is state your comments as your own individual views, instead of ascribing them to the entire “new generationâ€, as if you’ve been appointed their spokesman.”
Thanks for your unsolicited advise. My “new generation” was in response to Indian’s post and if you have a problem with me talking on behalf of someone, I would expect you not to respond to my comments made to someone else.
I responded on behalf of all those people who I know and have many a times protested against the khaki half-chaddis and of course I put forward a sentiment we share in common. I don’t see that as a major problem, not least because the authors of the comments I was responding to, too, represented a chunk of population as I have listed below:
1) Sid said – “Just because you do not consider those old graves part of your identity does not mean that everybody else thinks that way. Those, who consider those old graves as lively gardens, have as much rights to this society and this nation as you do. If you do not have the suitable attitude to offer respect to them and work with them towards a better world then your rightful place is a dictatorship”.
2) Sid said – “I am one of those better-privileged, better-read, comparatively more successful people who call themselves a proud Hindu”
3) Indian said – “It is painful for Ashish if some of the Indians are trying to put their house in order! little Inconvenient!”
4) Indian said – “What benifit are you talking about? Its alright for you, Hindus lives under fear, threat to their existence, muslims fundamentalists, and fatwas and terrorism but you get upset with Ayodhya incident very easily.”
5) Indian said – “am not a kind of person who dont like to give rights to claim everyone but not at the cost of suffering of indeginious people, their culture and traditions. To Ashish, it may not seems valuable but to many it still has value!”
Anyway, I don’t think representing someone should be such a big issue.
@Anupam
“Who is this statement direct towards. I think we all agree on this.”
No, I don’t think we all do. If we all did agree on this, I don’t think we would’ve had to spend so much of our time and energy arguing about it.
@Kaffir
Just FYI, another attempt to represent others. @Anupam, it’s not a criticism of you. I think it’s quite natural that we represent those who we share a common argument with. No offence.
Namaste @Ashish,
I do not object your views or arguments, except one.
Please do not try to put your words in my (or anyone’s) mouth.
You may not be interested in your roots and culture, but I’m (and so maybe others). You may decide to turn deaf towards the causes for the issues that we face today, but you can not ask others to.
Ultimately we need learn from our mistakes and past experience. [even corporates pay good salary to experienced candidates, just an e.g.].
Think for a while:
If Nehru (who proudly carries the title given by invaders) and clan would adopted Vaishali time democracy, with some timely changes, many of issues wouldn’t have been there.
If Prithraj Chauhan would have killed Ghori first time itself we might have been out of islamic invaders so their followers.
Macaulay said that Bharatiy can only enslaved if uprooted from their culture and traditional education.
So from history one can learn that not to believe invaders (who are always after their interest).
Jai Bharat!
Ashish,
1. Valmiki’s writing and Marx’s writing are not same. Thus your comparison does not hold. Coming to think of it, you are indeed terrible with your examples. Also, as far as I know, destruction of an old mosque should not be an issue to a declared atheist.
2. Hmmm…sigh. So, science proved about the non-existence of God !!! Or even worse, science made God non-existent. It is as enjoyable as the story where L. Euler proved existence of God mathematically in the court of Queen Catharene I and was honored for it.
3. I know Europe’s history well. Your comments does not state how those different christian sects got started. You should also state what sort of political military threats King faced for starting protestant sects. If you face prosecution for opposing dogma, can any sane person say that there was an opportunity for debate inside that dogma?
4.
An atheist is a person who doesn’t think that a god exists.Your debate about atheism started with your opposition to my use of the term “western atheism”. Eastern athiesm is not atheism according to your definition. Then you have to agree then that atheism is a western construct and therefore my usage was correct.5. Try these two links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Sweden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Denmark
6.
Guys, just because I agree with someone doesn’t make that person my hero or heroine and just because I disagree with someone doesn’t make that person my sworn enemy!– Right. So when myself and Kaphir are arguing against you, we are clearly identified with"your lot"and the category"that I feared". Labeling is a specific thinking pattern that liberals and pseudo-atheists are used to. That is the kind of selective"critical thinking"I am not used to, but I hope I can learn from a master like you !!!7a. So Dawkins was not your hero but you need to defend each of his quotes !!! Big brother, then?
7b.
Although I highly doubt the existence of god, I don’t have a problem if someone wants to believe in one!. Sometime back you wrote:Religion is not part of a modern civilization, quite the contrary.Accepting the proposition that we
"guys"are not used tocritical thinking, I believe the second statement states that you are not willing to give belief system a place in modern society but in your first statement you do not have a problem with someone else’s belief!!! Can you kindly reconcile these two statements?I am glad that you find Dawkins logical and factual “sometimesâ€. I am sure he would be very pleased to get your sanction!– I am glad to know that you think he is waiting for my sanction. I stop finding him logical when I see him being asked some critical questions about his thesis of atheism, he repeatedly says, “But we are getting there!!” Yes, atheism is sort of getting there for last 400-500 years.@Sandeep
I think we are talking about two very different eras. The middle-eastern and European invasions in India are historical facts and I am not questioning them. But to therefore term the present day Islam and Christianity in India as “not part of India” would be very wrong. In fact, India is one of the very few countries to harbour almost all world religions and that is something to be proud of, not something to be angry about or ashamed of.
Now if Prithviraj Chouhan had done this, if Shivaji had done that, if the Peshwas weren’t as useless as they were…… if we could get anywhere with these ifs and buts, I would’ve loved to participate in it. The fact remains that we can not change history.
“You may decide to turn deaf towards the causes for the issues that we face today, but you can not ask others to.”
I don’t know what issues you are referring to but the pressing issues I see today are bad governance, poor infrastructure, illiteracy, and poverty and I am sure you wouldn’t want to blame them onto Muslims and Christians.
Finally, I don’t want to forget my roots. I am very proud of my roots and the colourful culture that we have. Please don’t try to turn that into one saffron-coloured culture. That’s all I ask.
@Sid
1) I wasn’t a comparison. It was a metaphor. I hope you understand the difference.
2) You were right the first time. Science proved the non-existence of god as we know it today. i.e. there definitely isn’t a guy up in the sky lying on a giant snake watching menakas dance neither is there an old man with white beard who created this earth in 6 days.
7a) No, I don’t defend Dawkins outright. Dawkins says he wished there was a god but there isn’t. I tend to agree more with Christopher Hitchens who says that not only there isn’t a god, we are actually better off without such an existence.
7b) That’s a good point. I make a clear distinction between individual belief and religion. I don’t have a problem if someone wants to believe in a supernatural entity but I have a problem if that person, as part of a group, starts dictating our political and social lives. So I don’t have a problem with someone believing in Allah but I have a problem with that person asking for reservations, subsidies, favours etc because of that person’s individual belief. E.g. I may believe that superman is real but I wouldn’t go asking people to wear their undies on the outside.
And more importantly, I am a die-hard liberal and I believe in protecting an individual’s freedom of opinion, belief and expression, even if I don’t agree with them.
3) Martin Luther, a German monk, started Protestantism and as a matter of fact, he wrote to Rome with his objections with certain catholic practices. However, I am not here to defend Christianity and I agree with you that it is highly dogmatic and based on blind-faith.
4) This is where I get frustrated with you. An atheist is an atheist – it’s an opinion and it doesn’t have geographical definitions. It’s like a liberal (not in political terms but in philosophical terms). But if you want to feel good, yes I agree that you were right and I was wrong. Can we close this loop please? Doesn’t contribute to the debate in any meaningful way.
5) From the link you’ve provided on Sweden:
23% of Swedish citizens responded that “they believe there is a God”.
53% answered that “they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force”.
23% answered that “they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force”.
I know you will direct me to the attached table released by the Church of Sweden but it’s a Church report and is highly likely to be biased. The research findings that I’ve published above, on the other hand, were released by Eurobarometer commissioned by the EU and is more likely to be unbiased. And bear in mind, this was a 2005 research. Having lived in Europe, I could tell you that the last two figures are quite likely to go up.
6) I didn’t categorize you two in one lot. You yourselves did through your arguments. I defined “your lot” in one of my previous posts and I also said that if don’t identify yourself with it, I will have no shame in apologizing. You didn’t dissociate yourselves from it.
About Dawkins and science “getting there” – once upon a time, the earth was flat, the sun revolved around the earth, god created the world in 6 days and the gods sat up in the heaven sipping on their wine and watching women dance. Science has managed to refute most of it and even the most faithful don’t accept that any more. Now the argument being put forward is that if god didn’t create the earth, then he definitely created the big bang. Science is working on it and the large hadron collider is trying to solve the mysteries of the big bang. The reason science can’t come up with answers as fast as religions can is because science doesn’t permit fantasies and wishful thinking. It’s not as simple as sticking a wet finger in the air!
@Ashish,
Exactly, nowhere in my comments I’ve put blame on christians and muslims of today and that is not my intent too. I also proudly say that we are the only nation to have such diversity.
I do not wish to play the ifs and buts game; my point is that history teaches and until it is researched, truth can not be established. The current shade of (Bharatiy) history is distorted and doesn’t exactly make one feel proud of parents, which is disastrous in my terms.
Current problems are mostly because of too much of tolerance of any issue.
Your comment “Please don’t try to turn that into one saffron-coloured culture”. I’m unable understand asking and trying to preserve my culture, that too in the land of my ancestors, is too much to ask for? People here allow afzal khan’s tomb to be built illegally in order to appease a section. But request for permission to celebrate Shivaji Mahraj’s anniversary is turned town in the name of security.
Almost everyday a temple is being vandalized in J&K valley, Hindu pandits were forcefully thrown out of their land, some districts in UP are turning into mughalistan, NE states are largely affected because of illegal immigration, muslim concentration growing in malegao, malegao is well known mini-pakistan in MH, in Kandhmal murder of Swamiji, Rampant misuse (by means of force of power, money)of freedom of expression and preaching by xians, unnecessary love towards invaders like Afzal khan by today’s muslims, fatwa against vand mataram, why to be so gentle with afzal guru, kasab (any proved terrorist Hindu/Muslim/Xian for that matter), Bareilly was burnt and vandalized by muslim mob, illegal immigrants are being legalized for votes, list is endless…
Can’t you see history is repeating?
Like Prithviraj Chauhan, today under the name of pseudo-secularism some people are trying to be too generous and tolerant towards dastardly actions from one sect?.
True we have hell lot of other problems, but these are also problems faced by a section of society which is threatened of its existence (like Kashmiri pandits).
So past is past but these ideologies are not showing any sign of change, so how do you propose to deal with them by being tolerant. How can you be tolerant to the people who are intolerant to you and dont want to see you in vicinity.
Suppose someone starts calling you “Hashish” what would be you reaction? Would you not correct it?
Of course I’ll. So same is true with my cultural and spiritual identity which has been maligned and denigrated intentionally. So, its my dharma to stand up against the odd and fight my way out towards truth.
Jai Bharat!
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“Now before you lynch me for comparing Dayanand Saraswati with Bin Laden, let me clarify that I don’t mean that they are one and the same but I am merely making a point that using your logic, you could easily justify Islamic extremism!”
=>
Ashish, yet another example of those imaginary enemies/adversaries in your mind. Why would I want to lynch you? As far as I know, making illogical statements is not punishable by lynching, and you are entitled to your “logic” of equating Osama Bin Laden with Dayanand Saraswati. Besides, I have neither any power nor any desire to lynch you for making stupid statements.
BTW, why would you give the example of the saint and his tolerance, and then seem to justify Osama Bin Laden’s violent actions? Looks like you really keep shifting your position, and aren’t sure of what you stand for. Just like you made fun of those who believe in Lord Shiva, but then give me an example of the saint from your village. At least use one yardstick and apply it consistently.
As for the logic of my statement, perhaps you forgot that I gave the example of Parshuram and Swami Dayanand Saraswati in a specific context and to refute your point – to remind you that Hinduism =/= saintly behavior of turning the other cheek, and Hinduism does not imply making a fetish of non-violence, as implied by you. Now, if you want to irrationally run away with my example and cut-and-paste Osama Bin Laden on to it, you are free to do so. But whatever your point is by doing that, it is lost on me.
@Sandeep
You have every right to preserve your culture but within the boundaries of the larger Indian culture that is made up of many cultures just like yours. It should co-exist, not seek to replace. If that’s not what you intend to do, I couldn’t be more happy.
Some of the problems that you’ve listed are real, some of them fictional. For instance, Malegaon turning into a mini-Pakistan is labelling the ordinary citizens of this country as Pakistanis and that’s simply very offending. By doing so, you are not doing a great job of bringing them closer to you. They’ll only keep drifting away! There are many parts within the UK with a significantly large Indian population but the British don’t call those parts mini-Indias (well, some of them do, but they are simply ignored!)
On the other hand, yes there are excesses happening against minorities in Kashmir and the Kashmiri pandits must get their rightful place in their homeland. Similarly, the fatwas etc. must be completely banned and the Deobandi institution closely monitored. It goes without saying that anyone who has been attacked, injured or killed in the name of religion, they must be brought to justice and dealt with very strictly. That includes those who torched the train in Godhra as well as those who killed innocent civilians in the religious riots. People like Kasab and Afzal Guru must be punished without any mercy…
In a nutshell, the law must deal with all anti-social activities without bias. There’s absolutely no doubt about that.
Let me assure you that your culture hasn’t been denigrated intentionally. The people who are denigrating it are the very people who claim to be its torch bearers. Let me be very upfront. The RSS clan is bringing a lot of shame to Hinduism. They drove me away from Hinduism and I know from experience that I am not the only one.
If you must prove the beauty of your culture to someone, it must be to them. And if you are committed to doing that, believe me, I am on your side.
@Ashish (#45): Re. Jihad, yes it does literally mean strife and could be interpreted in many ways except for the slightly inconvenient fact that all of the 199 references to Jihad in the most authoritative hadith collection speak of jihad only as “warfare†without once mentioning the “inner struggle” that Jihad apologists are so fond of [cf. Douglas Streusand, “What does Jihad mean?”, Middle East Quarterly, September 1997]”. Pl do read the entire post and comments whenever you have some time.
Also, since you brought the RSS into this discussion, let me mention this thread – which is more appropriate for discussing the organisation. Not sure just how is the “RSS” “bringing a lot of shame to Hinduism” But this is more appropriately discussed on the other thread.
***
All: Thanks for contributing to the discussion.
@Shantanu, I am not a big fan of Islam and yes the hadith does claim quite outrageous things, including the virgins! That’s where the Islamist idiots source most of their material from! Because, as you rightly said, it is convenient.
I don’t want to trigger yet another discussion. This one has sucked plenty of my energy as it is. Suffice it to say, that RSS is everything that Hinduism isn’t and was never supposed to be!
@Ashish
I just looked at RSS post and found this link I had posted there-
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/RSS-opposes-caste-based-census/articleshow/5966103.cms I know this is not the appropriate thread but your thoughts are welcome.
Ashish,
1. Yes, metaphor is the right word. So you think your metaphor was very apt?
2. Blank and bold assertion. The claim that science has proven non-existence of God is every bit as dogmatic as saying “My God says that only he exists, not any other God!!” I have not heard any scientist saying that science has proven it. Mathematician Laplace, in a meeting with Napoleon Bonaparte, declared “I have no need of that hypothesis” when asked about God. That is the best science can do, it can ignore God. But, there will always be a good majority in human civilization who would choose to have faith in their faith because life is just too damn complicated to not to think about a God. Faith can not replace reason, neither reason can replace faith. For the sake of civilization, the more pluralistic and less dogmatic the faith becomes better it would be. Sam Harris, in “End of Faith” went to great length to prove how religion is bad. So did Hitchens in “God Is Not Great”. The problem is that, intelligent they are, they did not realize they are fighting against dogma and dogma is not faith. I said that western atheism is a reaction to the dogmatic religion, because that is what I understood after reading Hitchens’ book.
there definitely isn’t a guy up in the sky lying on a giant snake watching menakas dance– I am quiet amazed that a six thousand year old religion, it’s long tradition, legacy and philosophy can just be distilled in that sentence. If anything, it does not hurt our belief, but it establishes the bankruptcy of your understanding of our Dharma. One intellectually honest person should limit himself to what he knows about. Else he ventures into a dark territory, does not know how to get out and succumbs to one or other competing dogmas.7b.
And more importantly, I am a die-hard liberal and I believe in protecting an individual’s freedom of opinion, belief and expression, even if I don’t agree with them.– If someone told you that that is a liberal idea, then it is an outright lie. Liberals were also die hard supporter of communist regimes and later changed colors when soviet regime and banana states established by it fell like stack of cards. In light of gulag and camps in Siberia, establishing the claim of tolerance of other’s ideas is a pretty hard struggle but apparently there are enough people willing to believe next round of lies. We live in interesting times.5. So let me get this straight. Church in seventies could figure out that in 2009, Eurobarometer will bring out surveys, so they kept bringing out white-washed surveys to prove their significance? I remember, long time back, when our statistics professor opened introductory lecture he started with this English proverb: “There are three kind of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics”. He wanted to establish the fact that statistics without appropriate or published methodology runs the risk of any sort of mis-interpretation. Because I do not know the methodology used by any of these parties, I would stay away from arguing about authenticity. It would suffice to say that existence of both surveys prove that your claim about atheist heaven can not go unchallenged.
Science has managed to refute most of it and even the most faithful don’t accept that any more.– Not true. Start with places in Arabian Peninsula.The reason science can’t come up with answers as fast as religions can is because science doesn’t permit fantasies and wishful thinking.– Exactly. That is the exact reason I would like your hero to shut up and talk only about things that are absolutely proven. You have not proven the non-existence of God, thus come back with that claim only when you have irrefutable proof. Merely screaming about it makes you as credible as scientologists. Till you have proofs that others can not refute, like it or not, you have to accept that somebody has a different opinion and they deserve the same place in the society that you have. According to you, that is a liberal way of life, is not it, Mr. Liberal?Oh, one more thing, about the name issue, I did not ask for a surname, I asked for the Christian name for the names you posted. If you did not want the identities to be given up, you should not have posted the names at all.
Shantanu,
Ashish’s understanding of Hinduism can be summarized in following quote that I am picking from his earlier response:
there definitely isn’t a guy up in the sky lying on a giant snake watching menakas danceSo if he thinks that RSS is everything Hinduism should not be, one can ignore because like most RSS men, he too has no idea about Hinduism.
@Anupam, if you want my thoughts on the link that you provided, then there are a couple of issues discussed together there.
a) All human beings are equal and we must treat each other fairly. We should get rid of the caste system as soon as possible.
b) Illegal migrants should not be allowed to settle down in India. They are there illegally and that’s a crime.
This is common sense and RSS saying it doesn’t make the organization more bearable.
This is from their website and I quote “The proclaimed purpose of the organization is “serving the nation and its people in the form of God – Bharata Mata (Mother India) and protecting the interests of the Hindus in India””
I was always told that Hinduism is inclusive and tolerant and “protecting the interests of the hindus” doesn’t sound quite inclusive to me. Moreover, if Hinduism is a culture and many religions could fit into this culture, why is RSS worried if Islam or Christianity becomes a prominent religion in India? People would worship Allah or Jesus but still remain Hindus, wouldn’t they? http://www.sanghparivar.org/forum/when-muslims-will-become-absolute-majority-in-india-india-will-be-declared-islamic-country-if-
I again urge you all to not fall for this propaganda. I know my words are falling deaf ears but I will try to do what I must do. At least, I wouldn’t feel guilty of not doing much when this country goes to dogs.
Anyway, RSS is not alone. There’s BNP here in the UK with similar fascist attitudes. Fortunately, the largely tolerant British public has shunned them into oblivion.
But as I said, I am not very keen on wasting my time banging my head against a dead wall. I am quite content in the knowledge that a larger part of India would have nothing to do with these guys and it has shown it through the ballot box over and over again.
@Sid, of course you would distance yourself with the concepts of Vishnu and Bramha etc. Of course, these are not Hindu characters. It’s a very covet plot by the muslims and christians to defame hindus.
Anyway, really not interested in responding to your senseless banter any more. About science and faith, again, I don’t need to convince you, or anyone else for that matter, of what science has managed over the years. Won’t break my head against you. I am quite content in the knowledge that science would break many more myths in the coming years and silence its critics as it has been doing over so many decades.
=>
“About science and faith, again, I don’t need to convince you, or anyone else for that matter, of what science has managed over the years. Won’t break my head against you. I am quite content in the knowledge that science would break many more myths in the coming years and silence its critics as it has been doing over so many decades.”
=>
Ashish, would you like to cite instances where Hinduism has been a critic of science, and Hinduism has put up obstacles in the path of science?
I’m constantly amazed at how people read some western authors who write about this grand “science vs. religion” battle (and that religion is Christianity), and then simply superimpose that battle on to Hinduism/India, without even analyzing that idea, or without realizing that people like Dawkins, Hitchens et al have very little knowledge about Hinduism, and their arguments (re: science vs. religion) are primarily addressed at, and largely apply to Christianity (religion) and the western history of development at science. And, then these people also imply or claim that they are “rational” and rest all are idiots. *rolling my eyes*
correction: “..history of development of science.”
Ashish,
@Sid, of course you would distance yourself with the concepts of Vishnu and Bramha etc. Of course, these are not Hindu characters. It’s a very covet plot by the muslims and christians to defame hindus.I am at a loss to understand the kind of scientific mindset that would produce this sort of output based on what I wrote. Since when did Vishnu and Brambha defame Hinduism so that they have to be placed by Muslims and Christians? They, as I understand, are not Ghazis. Besides, the imagery that you tried to describe (someone sleeping on a great snake watching Maneka’s dance) hardly describes the Gods we have. It describes your scant knowledge of the Dharma and the extremely confused state of mind that prompts you to jump to any argument without basic understanding of the subject matter under discussion.
My parting unwanted advise was to stick to your friends who agree that there were lot of options to debate in Christianity or Jihad is a struggle for justice. Next time, try a subject you know something about.
Shantanu,
A request:
Please consider starting a new thread to discuss this grand “science vs. religion” battle that so many Indians shout about from the rooftops, and how relevant is it to India, Indian history and Indic faiths? Also, it would be nice if these people stated their definition of “science”/”religion” so that we don’t get examples of an ISRO scientist going to a temple as their big gotcha! proof of how Hinduism is against science.
Thanks.
@Ashish
“This is from their website and I quote “The proclaimed purpose of the organization is “serving the nation and its people in the form of God – Bharata Mata (Mother India) and protecting the interests of the Hindus in India—
I was always told that Hinduism is inclusive and tolerant and “protecting the interests of the hindus†doesn’t sound quite inclusive to me. ”
I fail to understand why “protecting the interests of the hindus†is not inclusive and and tolerant. Hinduism has no such preaching where Hindus are not allowed to let others follow their religion or there is only one God etc…lot has been written about why polytheism is more tolerant..
What baffles me is your inference that protecting the interest of Hindus is not inclusive and tolerant, I think you are looking at Hinduism through a different prism and I don’t have to say what kind of prism that is…
You don’t have to go far, this blog itself has enough material for you to give enough inrformation to make you understand that why it is in every ones interest to protect the interest of Hindus, oldest and the most tolerant religion in world…
check this interesting animation…
http://www.mapsofwar.com/ind/history-of-religion.html
@Ashish
—-they may have ruined your fantastic idea of a puritan “Hindustan†and it’s not the same! And you are not trying to put the house in order; you are simply looking to create disorder and disharmony—-
By the way we never had a idea of puritan Hindustan! still has a dream of fantastic “Bhaaratâ€. And why not? because you don’t like it! Your use of puritan only reminds me of Islam and shows your poor knowledge of Hinduism. Simply creating disharmony, its your judgement, not others! Catch the right culprits and spare abusing here. Simply stop spewing hate on wrong audience.
—-Why do you insist that the whole world is out to fool you, to trick you and to suppress you? If you spew hate, you’ll get hate. If you show compassion, you will get compassion. I have lived in India and outside of it and never once came across any muslim, christian, jew or sikh who wanted to somehow “ruin†me!—-
What a chidish talk! If they spew hate than I am not yearning for their love or compassion either! I see only one extremists who carry Jihad which is a threat to innocents lives. I don’t fear calling Spade a spade! Do what ever you want to do. I am not going to change it because you don’t like it and I am not in a mood of twisting the truth. I too have lived in India and outside India and stop lying that you have not came across any extremists. They don’t come openly and tell you that I am extremists. So as per you, Sept 11 was a joke! Recent Pakistan origin man caught on airport who left bombs in Van so he can injure and kill as much as he can was amusement. U.K is not left either same as Canada where 18 young boys are convicted for crime against the Nation. I can go on and on….You are using the space of the blog and addressing issues as if we need to change to change this people.
—And @Indian, not many people fall for your trick in India anymore—-This country has immense potential. This generation has great aspirations. We don’t care for your hate mongering. The sooner you realize this, the better it is for all of us!
Dont act preacher of peace to me and asking me when and what I should realize. I am fine with my ideas. Dont worry! I am not coming from barbaric religion which thrives on hate and sword. Go and tell to those who kills innocents and turns innocents boys in to jihadis! Your advise is well placed there! Do let them know that don’t ruin the great aspiration of young India as well as U.S, U.K and Canada If you are so much worried! They are the real hate mongers.
Dont reply to me, I don’t have time to go in to unnecsessary discusion with your kind of selfstyled person. Closing the eyes problem don’t go away learn to live in real time what is happening around you and me.
@Kaffir (#64): Thanks for the suggestion. I’m watching this discussion with interest. Might open another thread…Let me see how this evolves.
@Anupam
If I am looking at Hinduism from a different prism, consider this: Hindu “Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) UK is a voluntary, non-profit, social and cultural organization. Sangh, as the organization is popularly known, aims to organize the Hindu community in order to preserve, practice and promote Hindu ideals and values.” – http://www.hssuk.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=44&Itemid=28
If Hinduism is synonymous to nationalism, what’s the Sangh doing in the UK promoting Hindu ideals and values? If they are nationalists, shouldn’t the UK Sangh be protecting the British interests and promoting British ideals and values?
Consider this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcgWxknfzcU&feature=related – Start at 2.07 mins and please reflect on that interview. How’s Madina a Hindu place? He wants the vedic dharma to spread all over the world? Nationalism? Or fascism?
When I told my mother that I don’t believe in her stupid gods, her response was, “okay!”. When I told her that I might marry someone from other religion, she said, “my puja-ghar has enough room to accommodate one more god!” That’s the Hinduism I grew up with and I don’t identify with these nutters.
Whilst walking on the streets on Illford, London, I was approached by a VHP volunteer and offered a copy of the Gita. She told me that it’s for free for me to read and spread its message to my friends. When did Hinduism resort to this spiritual prostitution?
There’s nothing wrong with protecting the Hindus if an equal amount of effort is put into protecting the Muslims, Christians, Jews, Persians, Shikhs and Buddhists too.
@Everyone, I said yesterday that the largely tolerant British population has shunned the likes of BNP into oblivion and then wondered, why am I engaging with you? You do what you gotta do and I will do what I gotta do. Let the future speak for itself and spare us this unyielding debate.
@Ashish,
About Malegao or Hatampura in Ahmednagar: I lived in Ahmednagar for 2 years. Whenever there used to a cricket match between Bharat Vs Pakistan and Bharat lost the match, some people celebrated and no one objected from there because simply non-muslims were so afraid of passing from that area even in broad daylight. Tell me where in Bharat Muslims feel this way while passing from non-muslim populated area, any e.g.?
Muslims clerics/mullas are forcing muslims from my native village to turn away from non-muslim friends. And that has been creating tension in recent times. What to do with this?
I’ll just say that you need to think otherwise too. Nowhere I’ve said that some miscreants aren’t there on this side, but seeing the numbers its evident that muslims and xians are overzealous to unset the harmony and create rift among citizens.
About Science:
Let me give you a simple example of how science (nature) is part of Sanatan Dharma.
I have been told since my childhood that in the month of Shravan one should not eat non-veg. When I questioned it, my mother tried to convince me in the name of god which I never subscribed as it never appealed to my young questioning mind. But when I grew up and started looking out for the reasons I realized that in Shravan there are enormous changes in the atmosphere which slows down your digestion system. So any heavy food may create health problem like food poisoning, gas, lose motions etc.
Another example was to drink cow urine to become pure. Which I always opposed but some scientist recently concluded that Gomutra helps you keep cancer like diseases at bay. So what my mother taught me was correct but only thing is that she could not satisfy my questioning attitude. Now seeing such developments I’ve started looking into every tradition and ritual in positive light before I criticize it.
This is just tip of iceberg and I’m sure you must be aware of many such rituals and traditional values which have strong scientific reasons.
Tell me which religion in the world has such deep rooted science in it?
I’m not here to prove how Sanatan Dharma is better than other religions but to clear the air that my tradition and Dharma is no inferior to anyone. And absolutely not barbaric as stated by some crooks from west.
I would request you to see some things in positive light which will help bring good change to the society.
Yes Caste-ism is the biggest problem which we are facing for long and we need to fight it but one can not abandon Dharma because he/she can not fight the evil in it.
And if you are sure that RSS is not following Sanatan Dharma and it is them why you are going away from Sanatan Dharma then I don’t see a fighting spirit in you. (If someone associated with your family start spreading mischievous things about you and your family would you keep away from your family?).
[Though, I don’t believe that RSS is all that Hinduism is not]
Jai Bharat!
P.S.: I’m a bit dispersed in my comments and trying hard to be as specific and to the point as possible. Also not so good in english.
@Sandeep, a very quick comment from me. I know that your way of life is not inferior to any other and I respect that. There are others who believe that their ways of life are equally good and we must respect that too!
If there are any anti-national elements who are defying India, then they must be dealt with sternly. But to call someone anti-national for cheering for a particular Cricket team would be very juvenile. I know that there’s an underlying sentiment in cheering for Pakistan, and I have personally seen it happen myself, but that was way back in the late 80’s and 90’s but I am sure you’ll agree that that has subsided a lot with more Muslim Cricketers playing for India. I know the muslims mustn’t support India only if Muslims play in the team but the point I am making is that the more people, not only muslims but people of other religions too, feel part of India, the more enthusiastically they’ll participate in the national affairs. In that light, as a majority community, we must aim to make the minorities feel part of us, not apart from us!
Similarly, if your claims of Muslim clerics creating divide in the community are true, then without doubt, those clerics must be dealt with strongly.
I used to go to the Md. Ali road in Mumbai in the middle of the night during the Eid festivals for some finger-licking food. I never felt scared and neither did my friends. An Indian citizen should not feel scared to go to any part of his/her country, or indeed to any part of the world, and it is the government’s responsibility to make him/her feel secure.
Btw, did you ever feel scared walking through some areas? Were you ever attacked, injured etc? What is the basis of your fear? I am not challenging you. I am simply trying to understand the source of your feeling.
Regd. science vs. religion. Although I agree with the contention that Hinduism hasn’t challenged scientific developments as aggressively as Christianity has done, I think we need to also understand that most of the scientific developments took place in the west, where Christianity is a dominant religion. If further scientific developments are to take place in India, a clash with religious beliefs is a fair possibility.
Here are a few examples where Hindus have rejected scientific understanding of certain religious miracles!
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Desi-fables/articleshow/6094485.cms
Please note: this is not limited to hindu miracles but there are couple of them in this list.
This is on bbc today – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/south_asia/10401741.stm Interesting
“Still they strictly follow religious rules and observe rituals in traditional Hindu way.”
I thought there were no “religious rules” in Hinduism!
“They say they have all converted to Hinduism but many still use their Christian names and African surnames.”
Converted to Hinduism?
“Once inside the temple, you forget that you are a continent away from India.”
Exactly my point!
“Hindu religion was first introduced in Ghana by Sindhi settlers who migrated to Africa after India was divided in 1947.”
Clearly, using the logic argued by some of the commentators, Hinduism must alien in Africa and the Africans must protect their way of life from this growing Hindu phenomenon?
@Ashish,
“Hinduism must alien in Africa and the Africans must protect their way of life from this growing Hindu phenomenon”
It looks like you missed the whole point.
The person in the picture said that “We don’t ask anyone to convert to Hinduism…”, that’s the answer to all of the problems. Don’t force anyone.
But here we can see a completely different picture. First Islamic Invaders forced people to convert to Islam or die. Then christian missionaries are exploiting the tribal section which is unknowingly falling into the trap. Xians history is blood soaked. [I’m not against preaching any religion, but it has to keep some human values while doing so]
I have not heard that Sanatan Dharma have done this at any place(I stand to be corrected).
Jai Bharat!
@Sandeep
“We don’t ask anyone to convert to Hinduism” and yet he himself converted to Hinduism along with some 1000-odd people!
Force-conversions are not the only way of growing a religion. Would the “Hindu nationalists” be happy if people choose to convert to other religions for financial, social, political gains?
Besides, Isn’t Hinduism synonymous to Indian-ness? What is it doing is Ghana then?
I am still waiting for a suitable answer to my RSS-in-UK question. What are they doing here and why are they promoting Hindu values in the UK?
@Ashish,
what is problem if someone willingly accepts Sanatan way of life?
“Surprisingly, there is even a picture of Jesus Christ amid the idols of Hindu deities.” this tells everything that Sanatan does allow you pray other religious gods too.
I won’t be surprised if someone starts praying allah, some Greek deity in temples.
Also Sanatan is not limited to Bharat alone and it shouldn’t be.
You are also correct that Hinduism shall be limited to Akhand Bharat and the place of preaching shall be Pakistan, Tibet, Bangladesh, Srilanka. As Hinduism is synonymous to Sindhuism (Culture in the Sindhu-Sarswati terrain).
But Sanatan has no such bindings.
Saints have spoken about this “He Wishwachi Majhe Ghar” (Whole world is my home).
So in case of Hinduism yes RSS should not be allowed to do so in the name of hinduism, but if Sanatan teaching is what they are preaching then I see no reason to object.
So does boundaries matter for good thoughts and eternal teachings?
(I agree that Muslims and Xians might think like me about their religion and they are to do so)
Jai Bharat!
@Sandeep
“Also Sanatan is not limited to Bharat alone and it shouldn’t be”
Good. We are beginning to draw a clear separation between nationalism and religion (you may not call Sanatana Dharma “religion” but I see it as such. I hope you’d allow me to and we could agree to disagree on that!)
No, there’s absolutely no problem with someone wanting to spread their religion all over the world and they should be allowed to do so freely and fairly. So in that spirit, I have no objection to RSS promoting its religion in the west but they must make it clear that their religion is not synonymous to Indian-ness! The idea of India is too big and too broad to be defined by Sanatana Dharma or Islam or Christianity or anything else.
I personally love the idea of “hey vishwachi maze ghara” and follow that in principle. The idea of “universe as our home”, however, runs contrary to the idea of “nationalism”, which seeks to divide the world in small pieces of land!
Dear Shantanu
A very interesting article (by Kak). I don’t want to enter into the debates on this subject since the subject only holds a relatively modest interest for me (as I’ll explain below). Instead, I’d like to offer my views on something that is somewhat (tangentially) related.
To me, having been persuaded at least in part by Swami Suddhananda (http://bit.ly/dhneSi) and his pantheism (advaita), a philosophical school that appears to be broadly compatible with my preliminary mental experiences with yoga, and with the Buddhist (recall he was an Indian too!) belief that good conduct is more important than the question of god, I am inclined to see such things broadly and not purely from a narrow national perspective. (I started a facebook group on this matter, called “Swami Suddhananda and his approach to our shared humanity” (http://bit.ly/a4w5jK) – have a read of some of my notes on his comments).
In addition, I am guided by Emperor Tiberius who remarked long ago: ‘if the gods think that they have just claims for grievance, they can surely take care of themselves’. All disputes between religions are therfore a nuisance. The gods can take care of themselves, so let religions stop fighting.
Second I like this: “To a man with an empty stomach food is God” (Gandhi). Third: “An empty stomach is no good for religion” – Vivekananda. In other words, if one thinks of starving children across rural India, we are better advised to focus relatively more on good governance than on history.
While matters about our heritage are interesting there remains considerable scope for speculation and subjectivity. On the other hand, the following are 100% true facts about life:
– We are all ONE biological species. All human DNA is virtually identical.
– We all experience the world in EXACTLY the same way: we are the only truly self-conscious species.
– We all experience pain, and we all seek happiness in little things in our own way
– Just because someone is an Indian or ‘Westerner’ or a ‘Hindu’ or a ‘Muslim’ doesn’t make them less susceptible to pain, or less conscious, or in any way different.
– We need a nation to protect us and our freedoms, else the nation is of NO USE to us.The nation totally useless to us if it doesn’t protect our life and liberty or provide us with reasonable equal opportunity.
In brief, I am not in favour of any attempt to fit me into any mould (hindu/bharatiya/indian/australian/westerner/etc.). I am ME. Each of us an individual, with the nation PURELY created to serve our needs. The nation, whatever it is called, doesn’t exist outside me. It is merely an artefact of convenience (although we are naturally bonded to our own nations, just as I retain a very strong bond with India).
I’m quite interested in history, hence I’m keen for more research in this area.However, I resist attempts to subsume my personality into the structures that the dead past may throw up. Happy to deduce lessons from it, but as far as my identity is concerned, I prefer my own personality, for good or bad.
And to me India or Bharat smell equally sweet (or stinky). Calling India Bharat won’t make it less corrupt nor will it feed the poor. Calling India Bharat won’t make our horrible political leaders disappear! Fixing this is a task of great urgency that we must devote ourselves to.
I don’t mind at all if India is officially renamed Bharat and the word India abolished (like they’ve done for Bombay or Madras). Indeed, I think the word Bharat resonates wonderfully with every Indian. That, however, to me is a VERY MINOR issue of no import. It won’t change ONE thing on the ground, except give a steady job to sign painters and printers of letterheads of government stationary.
Second, we must be cautions to not make any fanatic deductions from discussions such as the one going on here. For instance I do not agree with a commentator who suggests “Hindu Rashtra!” Let’s be clear: the free nation must not align with any religious belief system.
The Indian mind has always been deeply committed to self-development and individual ‘absolution’. It is an intuitively tolerant mind. Let’s therefore encourage India to recreate that openness of mind and to create a beautiful nation, truly Indian, which allows each individual to develop fully and completely in any way they choose to.
Apologies if I’ve wandered off topic completely!
Regards
Sanjeev
Sanjeev,
While I read some of your writings – here and in your book – and I do not agree to a good portion of them, this is the first time I am trying to raise a few points.
... if one thinks of starving children across rural India, we are better advised to focus relatively more on good governance than on history.Yes, can not agree more. Fundamental aspects of life matter more than the intellectual aspects. But here lies a great paradox: in our system, people are supposed to choose people who will be responsible for good governance. This choice requires an exercise that is different from those which were triggered by fundamental needs like food or clothing or shelter. What happens to the choice if the fundamental needs are met by some unscrupulous men in short term on the promise of removing the choice i.e. getting elected to the position of governance? Good governance, by it’s very definition, should derive policies that would help the population to meet it’s fundamental needs in long term. I have seen votes being sold for a kg of rice and Rs. 20/-. I can not blame those who sell them, they had not got any more valuable stuff than vote. You can blame those who buy the votes but that is an easy option. Try to put yourself in that position – if you want to win election and if you do not want to buy vote, there is always somebody who would buy them and thus win the election. If you try to eradicate it by force, it would go underground because there will be a good demand and supply mechanism at work. If you approve of it, then we have to accept that fundamentals of democracy as we know are compromised and elections would be race of money – formally. What is the way out?
The western ideals of democracy never took root in India. That ideals of democracy, sophisticated it is, is definitely not for the people whose daily struggle is to earn bread involving physical labor and idea of entertainment is desi liquor or nautanki shows or masala movies in the evening. This is not to say that in western world, such communities can not be found. For example, in villages of American southern states, people are equally ignorant and desperate, rogue politicians who would buy votes – be in the name of church or skin color or plain money – are in large number. But a considerable number of middle class tax-paying somewhat educated citizens consider ideals of secular democracy to be holy and thus the democracy stands well and rule of law finds it’s takers in most parts of those countries. Unless, we establish the root of an Indian democracy (and that can not happen with just imported ideas, a fusion with tradition is what is needed, it may take generations), we can not solve the problem of governance.
Sid,
No point in arguing with that man. He is a bloody nehruvian than nehru himself. He doesn’t understand a bit of either Indian traditions or Sanskrit. He doesn;t know what he is talking about.
Can anyone explain the meaning of these wise words from Shri.Sabhlok ji??
“I follow the great ancient (non-Hindu) Indian tradition of scepticism which has given the world great progress (through the pathway of the Greeks”
It would be interesting if someone attempts a comparison study of Shri.Sabhlok’s “career” with Shri.Jean Dreze’s ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dr%C3%A8ze).
Placing this here for the record, courtesy: http://centreright.in/2012/04/bodhi-sattvas-hindutva-part-1/#_edn1 :
As early as 1916, in his famed paper presented at an anthropology seminar of Columbia University, Dr.Ambedkar made an observation that may well become the definition of what is today called the ‘cultural nationalism’ in Indian context:
It may be granted that there has not been a thorough amalgamation of the various stocks that make up the peoples of India, and to a traveller from within the boundaries of India the East presents a marked contrast in physique and even in colour to the West, as does the South to the North. But amalgamation can never be the sole criterion of homogeneity as predicated of any people. Ethnically all people are heterogeneous. It is the unity of culture that is the basis of homogeneity. Taking this for granted, I venture to say that there is no country that can rival the Indian Peninsula with respect to the unity of its culture. It has not only a geographic unity, but it has over and above all a deeper and a much more fundamental unity—the indubitable cultural unity that covers the land from end to end.[1]
From: Dr.Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development, (Originally a paper presented at an Anthropology Seminar at Columbia University on 9th May 1916), Siddharth Books, 1945:2009 p.7
A brief excerpt from A vibrant entity by Aatish Taseer, Hindustan Times, April 26, 2012:
I grew up around many such distortions, the ugliest of which was the idea, advanced by the British, and supported by Muslims because it trivialised the harm done by the Islamic invasions: that there was no idea of India. It was like Churchill said: “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.”
Such an offensive thing to say! A near complete dismissal of India’s classical past. And so untrue. One has only to open a work of Sanskrit literature, like the Kumarasambhava, say – and what an opening: “There is in the north the king of mountains, divine in nature, Himalaya by name, the abode of snow. Reaching down to both the eastern and western oceans, he stands like a rod to measure the earth” – to know that while there was not a unified political entity (as neither there was in Europe or Greece) there was an incredibly powerful notion of India, asserted again and again in its literature. Of a cultural unity. A world so vibrant, so inter-connected, that it allowed for a man like Vallabhadeva in the 10th century in Kashmir, to write the first commentary on the Kumarasambhava, which in all likelihood was composed five centuries before in Ujjain. And, nine centuries later, Mallinatha, working in modern-day Andhra Pradesh, felt the need to improve on what had come before and wrote his marvelous exegesis on the same work. Would it were that India today, with armies securing her borders, had such a profound sense of who and what she was.
I offer this as one distortion of India by foreigners. …But the foreigners are not to blame; what is to blame is India’s historic and continuing dependence on foreigners for an idea of herself.
Churchill said: “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.â€
———————————————————————–
Who is Churchill to say what India is? It should not even be discussed because that parameterizes the very subject/debate on foreign perception. We don’t play ball in their hands.
What India is, is definitely and essentially a statement for Indians to make; not a British politician.
As the last paragraph has put forth well:
“I offer this as one distortion of India by foreigners. …But the foreigners are not to blame; what is to blame is India’s historic and continuing dependence on foreigners for an idea of herself.”
We should keep the strings in our hands. Others are free to say what they want but it is inconsequential to us and the Indian identity.
Regards,
Virendra
Courtesy KV SarmaJ:
Description of Bharata Khanda in Brihaspati Sutram
Brihaspati Sutram is an old hindu text on danda niti, artha niti, raja niti. it documents various duties and meaning of justice. It talks of a very interesting description of Bharata Khandam.
**
Many times, even “those who swear by Hindutva” face difficulty in identifying and acknowledging the fact that Bharatiya tattva vichara, Bharatiya saiddhantika chintana are not just an experience like Tapasya but cover real physical details. This is one of the very important reasons why many texts even later day Prabhanda literature explicitly state Bharata Khandam. One such detail is present in Jnanappana as documented here: vivekitam.wordpress.com/201…
Also, from Ramayana, mitraaNi dhana dhaanyaani prajaanaaM sammataaniva |
jananii janma bhuumishcha svargaadapi gariiyasii || 6-124-17
Nepal adopted the second line their motto and coat-of-arms. However, we in India continue to find it difficult to accept that Bharata Khandam had a national character flowing in it in the form of culture. So much so that, texts which are supposed to talk of justice, penalty and dharma too talk of Bharata Khanda as a karma bhumi.
One such text is Brihaspati Sutram. Please download a translation (with original) here: archive.org/details/brihasp…
Following tweets capture the exact quotes from the text. Please do go through pages 83-85 for a detailed translation.
Quote from Brihaspati Sutram explaining the geographical world view and Bharata Khanda follows:
1. Panchashatkoti Yojana puthivi.
2. Saptadveepa vati cha.
3. sapta samudraa vruta cha
4. Karma Bhogati-abhogaa divya srungaara siddha kaivalya iti dveepaabhidaanah
5. madhyah karmabhumih.
6. tanmadhye geroraajambuh
7. tatrottare himavaan
8. tasya dakshino nava saahasri bhuh
9. tatra daakshinaatyo bhaaratah khandah
10. tasya saangnaa dharmaadharma phalaah siddhanti
11. tatra dandaneetih
12. poorva bhaaratiyaih patitavyah bhavishyairvartamaanaischa chaaturvarnikaischa
These quotes clearly talk of the geographical detail of Bharata Khanda.
Please use these quotes while arguing with people semi-literate in Hindu history. Bharata Khandam is real. Ancient Hindus had a world view like none other. In fact, if you put above stated details in perspective: 7 dveepas indicate why karma is such an important part of our lives.
Through Karma only, bhoga, abhoga, srungara, siddhi and kaivalya are possible. Probably this is the reason why Poonthanam in Jnanappana says “Please know that this our motherland, Is the land to do Karmas, And it is definitely impossible, To destroy the residual karmas any where else” (stanza 19).
I was just going through the above conversation between two group of ideas.
It was interesting to see that we Bharathiya were not able to explain/defend our own culture.
Therefore it should be a must for Bharathiya to first know our own culture and also the thinking of others. Just to start with we can search for “Rajiv Malhotra” in youtube.
– Difference between Tolerance and Mutual Respect
– Being Different
– Breaking India
– Science and technology in Indian History.
– western universal-ism.
– “We are all same, all path leads to same truth”
– Nationalism & Dharma
Probably going thorough his great you tube videos we will understand the actual Manthan that is happening in this world and what is the role of us in it.
Please read “India – A sacred geography” by Harvard scholar Diana Eck which clearly lays out that Bharata existed long before India did!
From What Sanskrit has meant to me 17 August 2013, by Aatish Taseer
..
I grew up in late 20th century India, in a deracinated household. I use that word keeping in mind that racine is ‘root’ in French, and that is what we were: people whose roots had either been severed or could no longer be reached. A cultural and linguistic break had occurred, and between my grandparents’ and my parents’ generation, there lay an imporous layer of English education that prevented both my father in Pakistan, and my mother, in India, from being able to reach their roots. What the brilliant Sri Lankan art critic, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, had seen happening around him already in his time had happened to us (and is, I suppose, happening today all over India).
‘It is hard to realize,’ Coomaraswamy writes in The Dance of Shiva, ‘how completely the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West.’
This is an accurate description of what we were. And what it meant for me, personally, as an Indian writer getting started with a writing career in India, was that the literary past of India was closed to me. The Sanskrit commentator, Mallinatha, working in 14th century Andhra, had with a casual ‘iti-Dandin: as Dandin says’, been able to go back seven or eight hundred years into his literary past. I could go back no further than fifty or sixty. The work of writers who had come before me, who had lived and worked in the places where I lived and worked today, was beyond reach. Their ideas of beauty; their feeling for the natural world; their notion of what it meant to be a writer, and what literature was—all this, and much more, were closed to me. And, as I will explain later, this was not simply for linguistic reasons.
I was—and I have TS Eliot in mind as I write this—a writer without a historical sense. Eliot who, in Tradition and the Individual Talent, describes the ‘historical sense’ as: a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense, he feels, compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but that [for him]—I’m paraphrasing now—the whole literature of Europe from Homer onwards to that of his own country has ‘a simultaneous existence’.
My problem was that I had next to nothing in my bones. Nothing but a handful of English novels, some Indian writing in English, and a few verses of Urdu poetry. That was all. And it was too little; it left the bones weak; I had no way to thread the world together.
The place I grew up in was not just culturally denuded, but—and this is to be expected, for we can only value what we have the means to assess—it held its past in contempt. Urdu was given some token respect—though no one really bothered to learn it—but Sanskrit was actively mocked and despised. It was as if the very sound of the language had become debased. People recoiled from names that were too Sanskritic, dismissing them as lower class: ‘Narindar,’ someone might say, ‘what a driver’s name!’ They preferred Armaan and Zhyra and Alaaya. The Sanskrit teacher in most elite schools was a figure of fun. And people took great joy at having come out of a school, such as The Doon School, say, without having learnt any more Sanskrit than a derisive little rhyme about flatulence.
What was even more dismaying was that very few people in this world regarded Sanskrit as a language of literature. In fact, Sanskrit, having fought so hard historically to escape its liturgical function and become a language of literature and statecraft, had in the India I grew up been confined once again to liturgy. And an upper-class lady, on hearing that you were learning Sanskrit, would think nothing of saying: ‘Oh, I hate all that chanting-shanting.’
Sanskrit was déclassé; it was a source of embarrassment; its position in our English-speaking world reminded me of the VS Naipaul story of the boy among the mighty Mayan ruins of Belize. ‘In the shadow of one such ruin,’ Naipaul writes in The Enigma of Arrival, ‘a Mayan boy (whatever his private emotions) giggled when I tried to talk to him about the monument. He giggled and covered his mouth; he seemed to be embarrassed. He was like a person asking to be forgiven for the absurdities of long ago…’
+++
To have Sanskrit in India was to know an equal measure of joy and distress. On the one hand, the language was all around me and things that had once seemed closed and inert came literally to be full of meaning. ‘Narindar’ might have sounded downmarket to the people I had grown up with, but it could no longer be that way for me. Not when I knew that beyond its simple meaning as ‘Lord of Men’, nara—cognate with the Latin nero and the Greek anér—was one of our oldest words for ‘man’. Some might turn their nose up at a name like Aparna, say, preferring a Kaireen or an Alaaya, but not me. Not when it was clear that parna was ‘leaf’, cognate with the English ‘fern’, and aparna, which meant ‘leafless’, was a name Kalid ¯a sa had himself given Paravati: ‘Because she rejected, gracious in speech though she was, even the high level of asceticism that is living only on leaves falling from trees of their own accord, those who know the past call her Aparna, the Leafless Lady.’
My little knowledge of Sanskrit made the walls speak and nothing was the same again. Words and names that had once seemed whole and complete—such as Anuja and Ksitaja—broke into their elements. I saw them for what they were: upapada compounds, which formed the most playful and, at times, playfully profound compounds. Anuja, because it meant ‘born after’, or ‘later’, was a name often given to the youngest son of a family. And ksitaja, which meant ‘born of the earth’—the ja being a contraction of jan, that ancient thread for birthing, begetting and generating—could be applied equally to an insect and a worm as well as the horizon, for they were both earth-born. And dvi|ja, twice born, could mean a Brahmin, for he is born, and then born again when he is initiated into the rites of his caste; it could mean ‘a bird’, for it is born once when it is conceived and then again from an egg; but it could also mean ‘a tooth’, for teeth, it was plain to see, had two lives too.
So, yes: once word and meaning were reunited, a lot that had seemed ordinary, under the influence of the world I grew up in, came literally to acquire new meaning. Nor did the knowledge of these things seem trifling to me, not simply a matter of curiosity, not just pretty baubles. Because the way a culture arrived at its words, the way it endowed sabda with artha, gave you a picture of its values, of its belief system, of the things it held sacred.
Consider, for instance, sarıra or ‘body’. One of its possible derivations is from √srr, which means ‘to break’ or ‘destroy’, so that sarıra is nothing but ‘that which is easily destroyed or dissolved.’ And how could one know that without forming a sense of the culture in which that word emerged and how it regarded the body? The body, which, as any student of John Locke will tell you (1), had so different a significance in other cultures.
I thought it no less interesting to observe the little jumps of meaning a root made as it travelled over the Indo-European belt. Take vertere, ‘to turn’, from the old Latin uortere: we have it in Sanskrit too: vrt, vartate: ‘to turn, turn round, revolve, roll; to be, to live, to exist, to abide and dwell’. It is related to the German werden—‘to become’. From where we have the Old English wyrd—‘fate, destiny’; but also werde: ‘death’. That extra layer of meaning restored, it was impossible ever to think of Shakespeare’s ‘weird sisters’ from Macbeth in the same way again.
What Sanskrit did for me was that it laid bare the deep tissue of language. The experience was akin to being able to see beneath the thick encroachment of slum and shanty, the preserved remains of a grander city, a place of gridded streets and sophisticated sewage systems, of magnificent civic architecture. But to go one step further with the metaphor of the ruined city, it was also like seeing Trajan’s forum as spolia on people’s houses. The language was there, but it was unthought-of, unregarded, hardly visible to the people living among it: there as remains, and little more. There are few places in the world where the past continues into the present as seamlessly as it does in India, and where people are so unaware of it.
Neither is the expectation of such an awareness an imposition of the present on the past. Nor is it an import from elsewhere; not—to use the Academic’s word—etic, but deeply emic to India. For it is safe to say that no ancient culture thought harder about language than India, no culture had better means to assess it. Nothing in old India went unanalysed; no part of speech was just a part of life, no word just slipped into usage, and could not be accounted for. This was the land of grammar and grammarians. And, if today, in that same country, men were without grammar, without means to assess language, it spoke of a decay that could be measured against the standards of India’s own past.
That decay—growing up with as little as I had—was what lay behind my need for roots and the keenness of my excitement at discovering them. It was the excitement, at a time when my cultural life felt thin and fragmentary, of glimpsing an underlying wholeness, a dream of unity, that we human beings never quite seem able to let go of. But there was something else. In India, where history had heaped confusion upon confusion, where everything was shoddy and haphazard and unplanned, the structure of Sanskrit, with its exquisite planning, was proof that it had not always been that way. It was like a little molecule of the Indian genius, intact, and saved in amber, for a country from which the memory of genius had departed.
Adding these 2 nuggets of info here (both underline the essential socio-cultural and civilisational unity of India):
ow many of you knew that he had willed the Koh-i-noor to the Jagannath Temple in Orissa? Unfortunately, the will was never executed. In 1849, the British finally got control of Lahore and along with it the treasures of the Sarkar Khalsa. Amongst them was the Koh-i-noor – which was surrendered to the Queen of England – in whose control, it remains till date. source
and this excerpt from an email by Sh Jay Bhattacharjee
Every Bengali school student, by the time he or she is 7 or 8, gets to read Gurudev’s epic poem about the martyrdom of Baba Banda Singh Bahadur, the ascetic turned warrior, who fought Mughal tyranny and died heroically like a true martyr.
The poem is titled “Bondi Beer” (“The Valiant Prisoner”).
Even convent school types or probashi (expat.) Bengali children ..living outside Bengal who did not read this poem in school invariably heard it from their parents or family members / friends.
Tagore’s language and imagery are so powerful that they are ingrained in our minds.
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The link below takes you to an article where Sikh historians pay their respects to Gurudev. The attached file has the full transcript of the poem (in Roman script) and a reasonably accurate translation
http://www.sikhnet.com/news/glory-sikh-heroism
Interesting research supporting the hypothesis of fundamental unity even in medieval times..
From Tourism in medieval South India a highly-developed activity, says AMU historian, IANS, Mar 13, 2014:
..”From the epigraphs available of the period, it is clear that there was a lot of north-south movement. Generally, people from North India are termed as Aryan in the inscriptions. You can see people from Kashmir and Bengal in many pilgrim centres of South India,” historian and epigraph-specialist S. Chandni Bi of the Aligarh Muslim University’s history department told IANS in an interview.
“There are many inscriptions in Tamil denoting the presence of Kashmiri people. They are seen as donors, making endowments to the Sri Rangam, Tiruvottiyur, Kancheepuram and Chidambaram temples, to mention only a few. There are at least eight Tamil epigraphs that mention Kashmiri donors between the 11th and 13th centuries,” she added.
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People from not only different parts of south India but also from many parts of the north extensively toured the south for political, economic and philanthropic reasons. Thus, the Sri Rangam inscriptions are written in Tamil, Sanskrit, Oriya, Telugu, Marathi and Kannada, pointing to visitors from these lands.
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After transport and stay, the next priority was food. It appears that eateries were available on roadsides, which provided livelihood to destitute women. An elaborate free food distribution system ensured that tourists would not need to pay at the popular pilgrim centres, Chandni Bi said.
At many centres, there was provision perhaps for exchange of currency of different kingdoms and rulers that facilitated the tourists.
“We also have evidence of a hospital functioning in the Sri Rangam temple,” the historian said.
“Moreover, almost all the houses had single or double raised platforms at the entry point that helped travellers to avail of rest and night stay. Generally, the common public were also kind and large-hearted to take care and spare food and water for travellers from far and near,” Chandni Bi added.
Isn’t it quite amazing that there is a Bengali movie* “Marutirtha Hinglaj” about the Hinglaj Mata** temple in Balochistan, thousands of miles away?
And yet, they deny the “Idea of India”…
* The Bengali Film Marutirtha Hinglaj Was Released In The Year 1959 Uttam Kumar, Sabitri Chatterjee, Chandraboti Debi, Moni Shrimani, Shyam Laha, Pahari Sanyal, Anil Chatterjee, and Bikash Roy. The Bengali Film Is Directed By Bikash Roy. Hemanta Mukhopadhyay Scored the Music in the Film.
** Hinglaj Mata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinglaj and “Balochistan’s Hinglaj Mata Temple” http://j.mp/1qUlhbL
From The 1000th coronation year of Rajendra Chola, one of the greatest kings of India, the author’s response to this comment:
Santh:
Here is someone brainwashed with ‘me indian first’ propaganda.
King Rajendra was a tamil first and a tamil last. He was no Indian. There was no concept of India in his times. India was a unified response to British colonial role — nothing more and nothing less. I do not want the real greatness of tamil kings to be undermined by the newly discovered Indian nation and jingoistic patriotism. I am sure Bengal and Karnataka had great rulers and thats what they are. Not ‘Indian’. Please open your eyes to historical facts and quit being brainwashed.
Ajithkumar:
India was, is and will be a land of highly diverse people but bound by a common thread.. There was concept of Bharatvarsha in his times, Ramayan and Mahabharat were the stories told to every kids during those times across India. Everyone wanted to leave their last breath in Kasi. One’s spiritual quest is over only when he visits both Kasi and Rameshwaram. Every spiritual seeker went to Kailash. While Raja Rajan was called as ‘Ponnien Selvan’ (Son of river Ponni), Rajendran worshiped Ganga. Cholas took pride of the fact that ‘Chedi’ kingdom (Raja Rajan’s mother side ancestors) fought along with the Pandavas in Mahabharat. Till date they are called as Chedirayans. Irrespective of the skin tones, languages, race and numerous kingdoms the people of this land has always been united by a common thread and that is Sanatana Dharma. It is believed that the Ashes of Shakthi is spread across India in various places not just in Tamil Nadu, there is a Jyothirlinga in every corner of this country not just in Tanjore, Adi Shankara started his mutts in every direction of this country and not just in Kerala. Dharma and Mukthi were the guiding force for people all across. This entire concept of British formed India is illogical, British did not form India, British controlled only half of the nation while the rest were princely states. If there was no common binding thread, why did all the princely states joined India at the time of independence, and how can a seamless country form out of that hubris. The Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu and the kids of Macaulay in the North spread this idea of British formed India, which is an outright lie. British ruled half of India for less than 90 years (From 1757 to 1857 parts of India was controlled by English East India Company and from 1857 to 1947 India was ruled by the queen), however far bigger kingdoms have ruled India for centuries together, how can you attribute the formation of India to the Brits?
prem
The concept of a nation state encompassing the entire Indian subcontinent did not exist prior to the British. That is just the facts.
While there were times when large portions of the land were under various kings (notably the Gupta, the Chola, Chera, Mughal dynasties etc), the borders expanded and contracted as individual kingdoms at the periphery of these empires extended their control and shook of the hold of the emperors who were ruling from afar.
India consisted of many kingdoms (as you have also pointed out), but these kings were vassals and subjects of the British East India company and then later (after 1858) subjects of the British Crown – that is, directly under the British monarchy. Prior to this, the different kingdoms (and not a nation state of India which didn’t exist) were seen as either vassals or as private property of a single company which had its own shareholders.
That is British established the notion of a single nation state which is ADMINISTERED centrally. This is important to understand – because prior to this India was not seen as a place which was administered by a single political entity.
Incidentally, Burma and Ceylon were not administered from India and was not seen by the British as part of the nation state of India. Which is why these places became separate nations when the British left India.
So while there was definitely transfer of ideas, religions etc across large parts of India, there wasn’t a notion of a single political nation state called India prior to the British.
see more
Ajithkumar :
It goes without saying that what was called as India/Indica/Hind/Bharat was never ruled by one single kingdom. But still the whole world addressed the entire sub-continent as a single entity. What was the reason for that? The terrain, food, languages, clothing and race are highly diversified, yet the world identified the entire land mass as a single entity. Columbus set out on a voyage towards India and not to a Baroda, maratha or travancore kingdom. Alexander wanted to conquer India and not just mewar, meerut or magadha in India. This land always had a common identity, irrespective of geo-political diversity. So Rajendra Chola was an Indian king as much as he was a Chola King. There were 566 Princely States, also called Native States, which were not part of British India. These states were not conquered by the British, however I do agree that many of them were subsidiary alliances. In 1947, at the time of the partition of India, Britain offered these princely states in the sub-continent the option of acceding to either India or Pakistan, or remaining independent. They could all have aspired to become independent countries just like what the Nizam did (He was of Turkish origin), but every princely state readily became an integral part of India. They were ready to lose their identity and merge with India. Why is that? Despite Nizam of Hyderabad wanting a separate country the people of Hyderabad state wanted to be with India (85% Hindus). At that time Hyderabad was the richest of all princely states, it had good infrastructure, telecommunication, railways and even an airport. Despite all that the people wanted to be a part of India and revolted against the Nizam, thousands were killed and terrorized by the Nizam forces. The reason for that is they identified themselves as a part of Bharat and not as an entity of Hyderabad. Every political observer at the time of our independence said that India would break in to several small countries, and yet here we are after 7 decades as a single country. This is not because we had great prime ministers and governments, but because the majority of the population share a common thread.
From CIVILISATIONAL TRUTHS ABOUT INDIA, Thursday, 17 July 2014 by Koenraad Elst
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Mr Zhang argues specifically that India has always lacked political unity, which China has usually had. He has picked up the usual ‘secularist’ misconception…
In fact, the ideal of political unification existed already in ancient times, and came fairly close to realisation in the Maurya, Gupta, Mughal and Maratha empires. More importantly, even in a condition of political fragmentation, India showed a remarkable civilisational unity. That makes modern India a civilisation-state par excellence: It is a state that unites regions with little politics but much civilisation in common.
Mr Zhang also argues that China alone has a civilisational continuity stretching back 5,000 years. In India, by contrast, you can frequently hear China enumerated among the areas that have lost their civilisational continuity because of foreign interference. Europe and America lost their souls to Christianity, Egypt and Babylon lost theirs to Islam, and likewise, China has seen a thorough overhaul of its way of life under Mao Zedong. Only India enjoys civilisational continuity since at least the Harappan period.
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Indians should not begrudge the Chinese their continuous civilisation. But they should muster the ambition to make the same claim, and outline a similar agenda for themselves. They have suffered far longer, and sometimes worse, oppression by hostile forces than the Chinese under the Cultural Revolution, and incurred serious losses in terms of lives, territory and self-esteem, yet they have survived. So here they are, reclaiming what is theirs after centuries of foreign rule and over a half-century of depreciation by the ‘secularist’ elite, Indian in blood but hostile to India in spirit.
Why should a civilisation incarnate itself in a common state? After all, it has held out for millennia even when being politically fragmented. But today, the state is far more important than at any time in the past. It can provide security to its constituent regions when these are attacked precisely because of their civilisational identity.
To be sure, the usual suspects are bound to oppose this civilisational viewpoint. With their studied superficiality, the secularists view India as a hodge-podge of ‘communities’, of which a very recent one, concocted by the ‘Orientalists’, is Hinduism. Just as I finish this article, my attention is drawn to a French magazine celebrating the appointment of an Indian secularist historian to the Collège de France with an interview. There, he speaks out against the very notion of a Hindu civilisation. The whole is not real, only the fragments are. The notion of an over-arching civilisational unity and long-term continuity may be obvious in China, and get applause there, but in India it is ‘communal’!
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Depending on how you define ‘nation’, India has known several divisions into what would be rated as ‘nation’ elsewhere. Of course we can fuss over definitions and maintain that even complex and pluriform India is still a nation-state somehow. But it is more economical and more credible to dispense with this terminology altogether and call India a civilization-state.
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India has the 24-spoked wheel of the chakravarti or universal ruler in its flag, meaning that within his empire, every tribute-paying vassal state had its own autonomy and traditions. In modern and more egalitarian terms: The Indian federation unites many communities into a single civilisation-state.