As the evangelists leave my home, I always hope our conversation has challenged their assumptions about the people they are preaching to, and that pe… - Rajiv Malhotra

Mantra energizes prana, or life-spirit energy. Some healers transfer prana to a patient. Even self-healing can be accomplished by concentrating prana on certain organs, which can have the effect of clearing away an illness. Mantra can be a part of this process. If one repeats a mantra while visualizing an ailing internal organ bathed in light, the power of the mantra can become concentrated there with beneficial effect. This is why a child is often carefully given an appropriate name so that it will internalize its name as vibration, and over time the effect of repeating the name will bring inner transformation in subtle ways.

Although he sees this process as politically driven, Pollock does acknowledge there were no conquering Sanskrit legions that caused Sanskritization, unlike the coercive Romanization which followed Roman military legions. Nor was there a central church-like religious institution and hence no evangelism that could have Sanskritized through religious conversion. He admits that the notion of the Sanskrit cosmopolis does not fit the Western notion of an empire.

India's postmodernist scholars who brag about their Western training and connections are encouraged to deconstruct Indian civilization, showing it to be a scourge against the oppressed. The deconstruction of India by Indian thinkers has a destabilizing effect which invites a new kind of colonialism. The most fashionable kind of difference being championed by Indian postmodernists is of the subalterns 'from below', seen as the oppressed underclass. But many of these oppressed minorities have been taken over by global nexuses (churches, Chinese Maoists and Islamists, to name only the major ones) with the result that they are not truly autonomous and independent but satellites serving a new kind of remote-controlled colonialism. Thus, the postmodern posture on difference has had the overall effect of causing native cultural identities to become vulnerable to imperialism – which is exactly the opposite of what the postmodernists claim they want to achieve.