N. S. Rajaram Quotes

Eminent Historians makes for depressing reading. It leaves one wondering as to what must be stirring in the minds and souls of these ‘eminent historians’, to make them sink to such depths of intellectual and moral degradation as would place them in the company of Lysenko and Goebbels... their disloyalty to the nation and the culture that has sustained and nourished them, and without which they would be nothing. Unlike Indian scientists and technologists who are recognized everywhere, in the world of humanities, these ‘eminent historians’ are utter nonentities, little more than crooked reflections of colonial stereotypes.

This is not true, but it doesn't matter. The great mathematician Ramanujan was a clerk in the Madras port, while Einstein himself was serving as a clerk in the Swiss patent office when he discovered Relativity. (…) The idea of objectivity is beyond such minds; status means everything.

This observation is puzzling, to say the least, and it is not at all clear what any of it has to do with ancient history. The first part about class and caste is standard Marxist fare. But Thapar's foray into futurology, the prediction that an "Aryan nation" could emerge from the discovery that the "Aryans" are native to India, is irrelevant to the history of India. It is relevant, however, to modern politics. The dreaded "Aryan nation" . . . was a European invention. Are we to discard evidence and cling to the Aryan-invasion theory because of a perceived political threat . . . ? (Rajaram and Frawley 1995, 15)

Thapar's comments are portrayed as "vintage Marxist rhetoric," which has "gratuitously drag[ed] in the bogey of the 'Aryan nation' . . . [as] a blatant attempt aimed at divert- ing attention away from the real issue" (Rajaram 1993, 33).

fabricating astronomical data going back thousands of years calls for knowledge of Newton's Law of Gravitation and the ability to solve differential equations.

“what the history establishment has done through the models it has proposed for both the ancient and the medieval periods is to exactly reverse the historical picture”.

Indian Marxists in particular are singularly touchy about the whole thing and hate to be reminded that their pet dogma of the non-indigenous origin of the Vedic Aryan civilization is an offshoot of the same race theories that gave rise to Nazism.

"English translations of the Rigveda . . . represent a massive misinterpretation built on the preconception that the Vedas are the primitive poetry of nomadic barbarians. Nothing could be further from the truth" (Rajaram 1995, xvi).