Rajiv Malhotra Quotes

When I first saw the PhD dissertation of Scott Levi being done at University of Wisconsin-Madison, I did not notice any mention about slavery in India before the Muslims. The dissertation was about slavery during Islam in India, and it was based on archives of that period available in the former USSR. But then a warning was issued by academic scholars that his work would play into the hands of “Hindu activists” like me. The published version was adapted with a preamble saying that slavery pre-dates Islam in India because it is mentioned in the Vedic literature. However, that claim is incorrect because it is based on mistranslating the Vedic Sanskrit term “dasu” as “slave”, which is an incorrect translation.

I wish to also point out that Dr Ambedkar, the pioneering Dalit leader, had worked zealously to promote Sanskrit. A dispatch of the Press Trust of India dated 10 September 1949 states that he was among those who sponsored an amendment making Sanskrit, instead of Hindi, the official language of the Indian Union.

Another very important feature revealed in Sangam literature is the conception of the unity of the land-mass stretching from the Himalayas in the north to Kanyakumari in the south. In at least two sources, Tamil kings were praised as having had supremacy amidst all the chieftains who reigned in the land between ‘the Himalayan abode of Gods’ in the north and Kumari in the south and the lands which have the sea as the frontier. 46 The northern limit of this cultural unity is often referred to as the Himalayas. Ganges in floods, as well as ships travelling on the Ganges, is among the scenes depicted in Sangam literature. Pilgrims from all over India coming to have holy baths at Kanyakumari as well as Rameswaram (Koti) have been mentioned in Sangam literature. Speaking of Himalayas and Kanyakumari in association, is another hallmark of many Sangam poems. Apart from such spiritual-cultural unity of India depicted in Sangam poems, there is at least one poem that refers to the political unity of India. This poem, from Puranannuru, speaks of a time when the whole of India ‘from Kanyakumari to Himalayas’ was ruled as one nation, unifying the diverse geographical zones of ‘plateaus, mountains, forests and human habitations’ by kings of the solar dynasty, and identifies Tamil kings as descendants of the solar dynasty.

Sanskriti has had an obvious influence on Thailand dating from 1500 ce. Sanskrit was used for public social, cultural, and administrative purposes in that country and other parts of South-east Asia. Today, Sanskrit is highly respected as the medium for validating, legitimating and transmitting royal succession and instituting formal rituals. Khmer society (in Cambodia) was highly Indianized, and the later Thai kings embraced the Indian religions and based their principles of government on Hindu practices.

From at least the beginning of the Common Era until about the thirteenth century, Sanskrit was the primary linguistic and cultural medium for the ruling and administrative circles from Purushapura (Peshawar) in Gandhara (Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan) to as far east as Pandurang in Annam (South Vietnam) and Prambanam in Central Java. It influenced much of Asia for more than a thousand years. Sanskriti was neither imposed by an imperial power nor sustained by any centrally organized Church ecclesiology. Thus, it has been both the result and cause of a cultural consciousness shared by most South and South-east Asians regardless of religion, class or gender.
Centuries prior to the Europeanization of the globe, the entire arc – from Central Asia through Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and all the way to Indonesia – was a crucible of a sophisticated Pan-Asian civilization.

...acting on Hacker's wishes, the editor of his collected works excluded the author's polemical Christian writings from the compilation. ... Many such polemical writings also appeared in fringe religious pamphlets and propaganda literature which are unknown to most scholars.... Hacker's suppression of this material compromised his integrity as an objective scholar, as it misled readers into thinking his writings on Hinduism were objective evaluations when in fact they were, in Andrew Nicholson's words, the work of a 'Christian polemicist'. In his posthumously published wrigings, Hacker is as explicit in his support for Christianity as he is in his attack on contemporary Hinduism.

A religion with an ever-growing line of enlightened masters, such as exists in the dharma traditions, is less likely to become fossilized into institutional dogma and therefore more difficult to control.

But it was Hegel, among all German thinkers, who had the deepest and most enduring impact on Western thought and identity. It is often forgotten that his work was a reaction against the Romantics' passion for India's past. He borrowed Indian ideas (such as monism) while debating Indologists to argue against the value of Indian civilization. He posited that the West, and only the West, was the agent of history and teleology. India was the 'frozen other', which he used as a foil to define the West.

The precise outcome of purva paksha on both sides of the East/ West divide cannot be presupposed, and the participants must remain open to all possibilities. What is needed immediately is a recognition of difference, and of the importance of respecting this difference. I hope this book contributes to the establishing of an open field of engagement, a Kurukshetra, on which East and West may meet on more equitable terms than in the past.

TBFS is a book about Sanskrit written in English by an author who is not a Sanskrit scholar. For such a book, to receive endorsements from some of the finest contemporary Sanskrit scholars from India is quite an achievement, even more so when some of them co-opt the terminology of the author in their endorsements. Any Indian Sanskrit author would love to get endorsements from scholars like Dayananda Bhargava, 45 Ramesh Kumar Pandey, 46 K. S. Kannan, 47 Sampadananda Mishra, 48 K. Ramasubramanian, 49 and Kapil Kapoor. 50 Co- opting Malhotra’s terminology, Bhargava, who has been interpreting Sanskrit works for the last sixty years, writes that the book ‘promotes a debate between the “insiders” and “outsiders” of our heritage’ and states, ‘... most insiders are either blissfully unaware ... or are living in isolation’. Kannan, who translated Malhotra’s Being Different into Kannada as Vibhinnate, says ‘the responsibility now lies squarely on traditional Indian scholars to take on the issues between insiders and outsiders which this book has framed’ and that Malhotra’s contribution is ‘this valuable role as the prime initiator of this dialogue’.

These are the consequences when Indians decide to imitate Harvard rather than re-building our own Nalanda.

Wilhelm Halbfass, the late Indologist at the University of Pennsylvania, took such ridiculous statements into strange, speculative areas and wrote: Would it not be equally permissible to identify this underlying structure as 'deep Nazism' or 'deep Mimamsa'? And what will prevent us from calling Kumarila and William Jones 'deep Nazis' and Adolf Hitler a 'deep Mimamsaka'?

His work had far-reaching consequences. It established the theological foundation for Dravidian separatism from Hinduism, backed by the Church. It was accompanied by Christian usurpation of many of the classical art-forms of South India. The concept of dissociating Tamils from mainstream Hindu spirituality provided Caldwell an ethical rationale for Christian proselytization. Eighty years after his death, a statue of Caldwell was erected in Chennai's Marina Beach alongside the statue of another missionary scholar, G.U. Pope. It is a major landmark in that city today.

I began to see the beginnings of what was later to crystallize as my thesis that history-centrism is the key difference between Judeo-Christian and dharma traditions.

He [Grünendahl] says Pollock's narrative 'is not an evidence-based study of Orientalism or Indology in Germany, but a sophisticated charge of anti-Semitism based largely on trumped-up "evidence".... Pollock's post-Orientalist messianism would have us believe that only late twentieth-century (and now twenty-first century) America is intellectually equipped to reject and finally overcome [‘Eurocentrism’...] The path from the 'Deep Orientalism' of old to a new 'Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz' leads to the 'New Raj' across the deep blue sea.