This blaming Westerners naturally extends into the field of scholarship. Thus, the evil of Indians aping Westerners is blamed on Westerners, includin… - Koenraad Elst
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This blaming Westerners naturally extends into the field of scholarship. Thus, the evil of Indians aping Westerners is blamed on Westerners, including Orientalists, in that they are said to have deduced many Indian achievements from foreign sources and thus hurt Indian self-esteem. E.g., even now the Dutch Orientalist Johannes Bronkhorst derives Buddhist Abhidharma and debating techniques from Greek philosophy, just as many before him allotted a pivotal role to the Greeks in developing the best of Hindu civilization, including the Buddha statue and the culture of Mandirs (temples) and Murtis (idols). David Pingree and Kim Plofker derive much of Indian astronomy from Mesopotamia. They are probably wrong, but I would plead for their apoliticism and innocence.
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Koenraad Elst
Koenraad Elst (born 7 August 1959) is a Flemish right wing Hindutva author, known primarily for his support of the Out of India theory and the Hindutva movement. Scholars have accused him of harboring Islamophobia.
Having researched several more books on this topic and the disinformation techniques determining the reporting about India’s political relations, we are now convinced that the last few decades’ main corpus of research literature on this topic will become a laughing-stock once the power equation that fosters such disinformation has lapsed. No one can be forced to do the honourable thing. As free speech absolutists we also don’t believe in punishing people for failing to do the honourable thing. Honour has no use; you just have it, or you don’t.
When Europeans first thought up the AIT around 1820 (after having espoused the OIT for half a century) and then took it to India, many Indians simply denied that anyone had come from anywhere, and pointed out correctly that nothing amounting to what is known as the Aryan invasion (with the importation of Sanskrit from outside) is described in scripture... Both Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas (Athens) and myself have many anecdotes up our sleeves of how any Homeland debate in which the OIT figures, is being stonewalled by AIT-leaning linguists... Then again, this genocide does exist, viz. as part of the Dravidianist mythology, especially in its missionary version, because of overcompensation for the real genocide of natives in the Americas that accompanied their Christianization. (Ch. 30)
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Today, this reluctance to posit a central indebtedness of Indian culture to European conquerors (for that is how the Greeks ended up in India) tallies well with the Zeitgeist in the West, where the European element in every form of progress or achievement is downplayed and the contributions of others emphatically highlighted or magnified. But then again, regarding India, there is a Zeitgeist within the Zeitgeist: even within the existing ‘down with us’ atmosphere in Europe, there persists a secondary agenda borrowed mainly from India’s Nehruvian secularists, viz., belittling Hinduism.
