The reductionist prejudice that the West equals order and India equals chaos fails to explain how Indians are able to excel not only in various spiri… - Rajiv Malhotra
" "The reductionist prejudice that the West equals order and India equals chaos fails to explain how Indians are able to excel not only in various spiritual practices but also in the rational fields of science, business and engineering. Western scholars are caught off-guard when confronted with evidence of sophisticated cultural and scientific achievements in the pre-Western history of the subcontinent. Many of them deal with this confusion by arguing that the achievements of the Indian past and even the comprehensive philosophies of the present are somehow not really Indian ; hence, for instance, the view that the highly ordered and precise Indus–Sarasvati civilization is not Indian in its origins. If westerners do call something 'Indian', they try to show that it was somehow antithetical to Sanskrit-based civilization and accuse the latter of having destroyed it. Hence, too, the view that Hindu dharma did not exist prior to some conspiracy by Hindu nationalists to conjure it up during the past two hundred years. All these pronouncements are based on arguments that Hinduism lacks norms, order and central authority. As per this mindset, chaos cannot coexist with order.
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About Rajiv Malhotra
Rajiv Malhotra (born 15 September 1950) is an author and Hindu activist who, after a career in the computer and telecom industries, took early retirement in 1995 to establish The Infinity Foundation. Through this organization Malhotra has promoted philanthropic and educational activities in the area of Hinduism studies.
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The corrective to this problem in my view is the ancient and powerful Indian practice of 'purva paksha'. This is the traditional dharmic approach to rival schools. It is a dialectical approach, taking a thesis by an opponent ('purva pakshin') and then providing its rebuttal ('khandana') so as to establish the protagonist's views ('siddhanta'). The purva paksha tradition required any debater first to argue from the perspective of his opponent in order to test the validity of his understanding of the opposing position, and from there to realize his own shortcomings. Only after perfecting his understanding of opposing views would he be qualified to refute them. Such debates encourage individuals to maintain flexibility of perspective and honesty rather than seek victory egotistically. In this way, the dialectical process ensures a genuine and far-reaching shift in the individual.
. In the case of India, the Joshua Project points its finger at Hindus who comprise the dominant faith and are clearly targeted as competitors to overcome. This is particularly ironic given that Hinduism has a reputation for embracing and receiving other faiths, including Christianity. Yet when incidents of violence have occurred, it is often the Christian missionaries who cast the first stone in the form of hate speech such as 'pagan', 'idol-worshipper', 'heathen', etc. – systematically belittling Indian deities, symbols and traditions and offering whole villages financial incentives to convert. But rarely is any of this provocation ever mentioned. What is carefully documented and publicized instead are the half-truths, for example, that a Christian was attacked for merely being so.
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