Today, it's a dangerous topic for Sinologists who want to be taken seriously. In the 19th century already, organizers of academic conferences decreed… - Koenraad Elst

Now that our mythographer has gone off track, he extemporizes all at once about “White Knights” with a “Hindutva obsession”, opposing “multiple truths” and waging a “Crusade against Muslims”, out to “dehumanise” the opposition. Here I confess, I simply can’t keep up with his cannonade. I think he is referring to himself when he speaks of “rejecting the model of conversation”.

Thapar and Sharma are quoted as representatives of Indian Marxism in Tom Bottomore’s History of Marxist Thought, Oxford 1988, entry “Hinduism”; Habib has subtitled his recent book Essays in Indian History (Tulika, Delhi 1995) as Towards a Marxist Perception.

As Talageri has shown, the horse sacrifice originates in the Vedic period and then becomes prominent. Subsequently it was exported to Central Asia. If remains of an Ashwamedha are found there, it is not earlier but later than the Vedic testimonies of this ritual. Its performers are not on the way to, but on the way from India. There is to need at all to deny the Central-Asian findings related to the Veda, only the implied chronology of the Vedas is wrong. Which is no wonder, as the present chronology is not based on anything.