Historians From India

"Repeated attempts were made to make it impossible for the Hindus to live in the Portuguese territories by depriving them of the means of subsistence. The following order in the name of king D. Jo’o was published by the governor Francisco Barreto on June 25, 1557: “IT make it known to those who sec this letter, that having regard to the great disadvantage to the service of God and my service which can result and to the inconvenience which can arise, from my officers in these parts, those of justice as well as of revenue, utilising the services of Brahmins and other Hindus , and being desirous of taking steps in that regard I hereby order that, as from the notification hereof, no officials of mine, controllers of revenues, commissioners of customs, treasurers, receivers of customs, accountants, lessees of my customs or other revenues, judges, scriveners and notaries and other officials of revenue and justice should utilise the services in any way whatsoever of any Brahmin or other infidel in matters of his office ; and any of such officials who do the contrary shall incur the penalty of losing his office, and the said Brahmins shall become captive, and lose all their property one half to me and the other to the person who denounces them, and this should be so understood in my city of Goa as well as other cities and forts of those parts. Also as I hold it a great disservice to God and to me that in the said cities and fortresses the said Brahmins and Hindus should exercise the offices which are given them by my governors, captains and officials, 1 hereby order that from now onwards they should not serve in those offices and that such offices should not be given them ; and that all the offices which it is customary to give to the natives of the land should be given to the Christians and not to the Hindus, as stated above; and I also order that all Mucadams of all offices in the land shall be Christians and this work should be given to Christians and not to any Hindus or infidels.’’"

"One of the provisions of the law passed by king D. Sebastifo on December 4, 1567 was to the effect that in his dominions there should not exist any Muslim hajis or Hindu preachers, Joshis, Joguis, Sorcerers, Gurous of temples or any other person who held a religious office among the Hindus or were the heads or supporters of the religions of the Hindus; he ordered that they should leave his dominions within one month ; failing which they would be held as captives for service in the docks."

"As marriages were forbidden in Portuguese territories, Hindus had to go to neighbouring territories under Muslim rule for celebrating them and the marriage parties were frequently waylaid by robbers. The viceroy D. Pedro de Almeida in 1679 permitted the Hindus to celebrate marriages in their houses behind closed doors, provided outside the houses were present an armed guard appointed by appropriate authorities who would prevent Bottos (Hindu priests) and other ministers of the Hindu temples from entering the houses for performing sacrifices or other Hindu rites and ceremonies as was customary. The Inquisition took over the duty of policing such marriages by sending parties of the notorious Naiques of the Holy Office. It was, however, pointed out that ‘the order made performance of marriages totally impossible, because, according to the custom of the Hindus, marriages could not be valid without the presence of Bottos and performance of Hindu ceremonies, and if performed otherwise they would be null and void, the wives taken by such marriages only concubines and the children born of such marriages illegitimate and deprived of the social status of their fathers.” The order was accordingly revoked and replaced by the decree of king D. Pedro dated August 29, 1679 which permitted the Hindus to perform marriages in ships or barges in the rivers which separate the Portuguese territories from the territories ruled by Muslims, provided no Christians were present."

"On March 13, 1613 the viceroy D. Hyeronimo de Azevedo issued an order that no infidel should marry during the times forbidden by the Church and during other times of the year they could do so only outside their villages and observing all that the Concilio Provincial had laid down and other relevant laws, under pain of a fine of 1000 Xerafins, of which one-third would be paid to the accuser and two-thirds applied towards the expenses of the High Court.® A still more draconian order promulgated on January 81, 1620 ran as follows : “In the name of His Majesty I order that as from the date of publication of this order, no Hindu, of whatever nationality or status he may be, can or shall perform marriages in this city of Goa, nor in the islands or adjacent territories of His Majesty, under pain of a fine of 1000 Xerafins, one-third of which would be paid to the accuser and two-thirds applied towards the expenses of His Majesty’s navy ."

"On April 2, 1560, the viceroy D. Constantino de Braganca ordered that a large number of Brahmins, whose names were included in the rolls appended to the order should be thrown out of the island of Goa and the lands and fortresses of the Portuguese king. Only those who were natives of Salsete and Bardez were permitted to return to their villages. Others were banished under pain of their being made prisoners on the galleys without remission and losing all their property, one half to the accuser and the other to whatever purpose the viceroy may consider appropriate. They were given one month within which to dispose of their property."

"In the present chapter it is proposed to review in brief various measures taken by the Portuguese rulers in India with the object of converting the natives to Christianity. The measures tall into two broad categories. Firstly, there were those the object of which was to make it difficult for the natives to continue to retain their old religion. The temples and shrines of the Hindus were destroyed and they were forbidden to erect or maintain new ones even outside the Portuguese territories; practice of Hindu rites and ceremonies such as the marriage ceremony, the ceremony of wearing the sacred thread, ceremony performed at the birth of a child, was banned ; priests and teachers of the Hindus were banished ; Hindus whose presence was considered as undesirable from the point of view of propagation of Christianity were sent into exile ; those who remained were deprived of their means of subsistence and ancestral rights in village communities; they were also subjected to various humiliations, indignities and disabilities ; ‘‘ orphan” children of the Hindus were snatched away from their families for being baptised ; and men and women were compelled to listen to the preaching of Christian doctrine. In the second category can be classed the measures intended to provide positive incentives for conversion to Christianity, such as, those which sought to give the Christians a monopoly of public posts, altered the laws of inheritance in favour of persons who changed their religion, discriminated in favour of Christian converts in the matter of the rights and privileges in the village community. As would be expected, the Inquisition played a prominent role both in bringing pressure on the secular authorities to pass discriminatory legislation and in enforcing the measures with characteristic sternness and severity."

"The campaign of the destruction of the Hindu temples existing in the Portuguese territories did not entirely succeed in its object as they were soon replaced by new temples in neighbouring territories. Whenever possible, the images of Gods worshipped in the temples which had been destroyed were smuggled outside the Portuguese territories and installed in new temples ; where this was not possible, new images were made and installed. For instance, Mangesh from Cortalim and Mhalasé from Vernem were installed at Priol; Shantadurga from Cavelossim at Queula and Ramnath of Loutulim and Mahalakshmi of Colvé at Bandora. Hindus who had migrated to neighbouring territories also built new temples to their family Gods in those territories and many such temples are found to this day in the coastal districts up to South Kanara and Kerala. The Portuguese missionaries soon discovered that erection and maintenance of new temples out- side Goa was being financed by the Hindu citizens in Portuguese territories and many new converts continued to remain attached to their old Gods. To put a stop to this, the third Concilio Provincial held in Goa in 1585 requested the King of Portugal by a resolution to pass a decree forbidding the Hindus from financing the erection and maintenance of temples in neighbouring territories. ‘This resolution ran as follows : ‘“‘ It is known for certain that the Brahmins and other infidel subjects of Your Majesty have erected and are erecting in the lands of the neighbouring infidel chiefs, almost all the temples which in our territories had been pulled down and under the same names and titles as they previously had. The construction and maintenance of these temples as well as of the staff thereof are supported by moneys which are earned in our territories and taken out. This is a great offence against the laws of God and also has a deleterious effect on the New Christian converts as it weakens them in their faith, apart from the fact that it results in large sums being exported to foreign territories for being spent towards such idolatrous purposes. This Council prays Your Majesty to order under pain of grave punishments that no infidel subject of Your Majesty build temples or cause them to be built, nor reconstruct them nor finance at his cost their upkeep or maintenance of the staff therein nor give any assistance or gift for such purpose. Since Your Majesty prohibits the infidels from going on pilgrimage to or attending festivals held at such temples under pain of exile and fines, it is a much worse offence to build or maintain such temples at their cost. The Concilio begs Your Majesty that fines be imposed on such infidels, and such part thereof as he may consider appropriate be applied towards new Christian churches which may be erected in future or might already have been erected in the villages in which the said infidels reside, in case there is need for such assistance ; and in case the churches do not need the same, towards any other purpose which the Prelate may consider appropriate.’’"

"Records of the missionary activities of the Franciscans which are available are not as full and complete as those of the missionary activities of the Jcsuits. In a report of the activities of the Franciscans which has been published under the title ‘‘ Noticta que obravdo os frades de S. Francisco,” it is stated that they “destroyed 800 Hindu temples where false Gods were worshipped."

"In a report submitted by Irmao Gomes Vaz to the king on December 12, 1567, he gives extracts from some letters sent by the Captain of Rachol in which the latter gives particulars of his campaign of destruction of temples. In this we find a reference to ‘‘Malsa devi.’”’ In one of the extracts it is stated that on the preceding day the captain of Rachol broke the principal image of the temple of “‘ Alardol ’’ (Mardol ?) into pieces.*4 It is also stated that on March 15, 1567 the temples of Doro, Mando, Narana, Baguaonte and Hesporo (Ishwar) of Sancuale were burnt down and the images found therein destroyed. There is also a reference to the destruction of the temples of Cuncolim, Chinchinim and Ambelim. It is also stated that the images found in the destroyed temples were thrown into the rivers in the vicinity or melted to make candlesticks and other objects for use in the local churches."

"The missionary zeal of the rulers would not permit them to rest in patience until the Hindu temples fell into ruins for want of repairs. They also saw that the Hindus were migrating with their gods beyond the reach of their power. A pretext was therefore found in 1567 to destroy the temples of Salsete and break the images of gods found therein. The incident which provided the occasion for this action was as ,follows : Diogo Rodrigues, Captain of the fort of Rachol, had summoned some villagers of Loutolim, but they did not appear. He was advised to burn the houses of these villagers by way of punishment for their disobedience. Rodrigues felt that it would be a more effective punishment if the principal temple of the viHage was burnt down and he acted accordingly. The villagers sought redress from the ‘‘ Capitéo ds Justigas de sua Magestade”’ in Goa who ordered that Rodrigues should make amends by rebuilding the temple which he had burnt. Rodrigues appealed against this decision and he received the powerful support of Archbishop Primaz and the Provincial who told the viceroy that the decision was deplorable. As a result the viceroy ordered Rodrigues to burn down as many temples of Salsete as possible. Elated at his success, Rodrigues returned to Rachol and with the active assistance of the missionaries of Salsete strove day and night to burn down temples and break the images found therein. Francisco de Souza writes that the number of temples destroyed at this time was 280."

"The Portuguese rulers apparently hoped that the Hindu temples which would thus be left unrepaired would in the course of time fall into ruins and be extinct. The Hindus of Salsete approached the Viceroy and clamoured against this order but their appeals fell on deaf ears. They thereupon returned home ‘*‘ and placing in carriages the idols, whose temples were threatened with ruin, they moved to the other side where there were no Portuguese to persecute them.’%! The image of Shri Mangesh was probably moved from Cortalim (Cudtthalla) at this time in 1566."

"It is indeed an irony of history that some of the descendants of the ‘“‘ New Christians ’”’ in Goa, who suffered cruelly at the hands of the Inquisition, should be so anxious to prevent the truth about the working of the institution from coming to light."

"I have always felt it a pity that there should be no authentic account’ of the Inquisition in India and have given some thought to the problem of filling up this lacuna in our history....From information which became available later, there is reason to believe that these records were deliberately burnt."

"One can visualise two main difficulties in the way of a historian of the Holy Office in Goa. First, the Inquisition continued to inspire terror in the hearts of contemporaries for a long time even after its power was on the wane and they would naturally prefer not to speak of it or to disclose what they knew of its dark deeds to the curious historian. Second, records of the Inquisition and other authentic documentary material were not available. It may be expected also that the authorities of the Church and the State in Portugal would prefer to hush up the excesses com- mitted by this tribunal and they would frown at any attempt to bring to the light of the day this dark chapter in the history of that country. I hence believe that in the present conditions few Goan savants would dare to undertake the task and it would be only a historian of Portuguese birth, like A. Herculano, Oliveira Martins or Cunha Rivara, who may some day do full justice to it."

"The records of the Inquisition should have formed the most important source of information for writing an account of its working. Unfortunately, they are not available either in Goa or in Portugal and there is reason to believe that they were destroyed."

"In the present volume scrupulous care has been taken to eschew bias and present a dispassionate and objective account of the working of the Goa Inquisition. Inspite of this, the picture which emerges is undoubtedly grim. But this could not be helped as truth had to be told."

"On the other hand, the story of the Inquisition is a dismal record of callousness and cruelty, tyranny and injustice, espionage and blackmail, avarice and corruption, repression of thought and culture and promotion of obscurantism and an Indian writer who undertakes to tell it can easily be accused of being inspired by ulterior motives. From this point of view, it would have been appropriate if the task had been undertaken by a Portuguese historian..."

"During the early period of British rule in India, the administrators tended to look askance at the growth of the printing press in this country. Indians had not sufficiently advanced at this stage to participate effectively in journalism, and the press was in the hands of the compatriots of the rulers. But these people were often extremely critical of the admini- strators. This was not only embarrassing at the moment, but it was feared that it might result in accelerating the growth of political consciousness among Indians, a prospect which many administrators were not prepared to view with equanimity. Fortunately, there were far-sighted statesmen like Elphinstone, who held that the immediate practical advantages of the press as an instrument of popular education far outweighed the remote political risks, and they sought a solution of the difficult problem in the establishment of a controlled press."

"In conclusion, we can say that the Indonesian literati had access to all branches of Sanskrit learning and they put these disciplines to the best of use in the emergence of their own creative literature."

"It is telling that the pioneering work on this topic by K.D.Sethna has been thoroughly ignored by India's politically motivated historians."

""Here is the book I was looking for," I had said to myself aloud as I finished the first edition of The Problem of Aryan Origins by K.D. Sethna... [it was] undoubtedly a brilliant piece of research. I had seen in this book the birth of a new dawn on the horizon of Indian historiography... It was in the midst of this stifling atmosphere that K.D. Sethna's work came like a breath of fresh air. But now a whole school of historians is coming forward... All of them recognize K.D. Sethna as the forerunner in the field. Future generations are bound to hail him as the harbringer of a new dawn."

"It seems impossible to doubt that Prithu Vainya at the commencement and Chandragupta I, founder of the Imperial Gupta in Magadha, at the termination are what the Indian informants of Megasthenes intended when they spoke of a series of 153 kings from Dionysus to Sandrocottus. Through Megasthenes the Purānic chronology of the rise of the Imperial Guptas in the last quarter of the 4th century B.C. appears to be completely vindicated."

"Surely, there is a limit even to the lack of the historical sense we may attribute to Indian chronologists. Critics of the Puranic time-scheme would definitely overshoot the mark by asking us to believe that an Indian living day after day under a particular king could be mad enough to push publicly the same monarch back in history by more than 6 centuries. Here is a reductio ad absurdum of the modern criticism and of the chronology currently accepted."

"Even without our calculations about the kingdoms and dynasties of the post-Andhra epoch, the very fact that the Puranas can terminate the Andhras in 390 B.C. and that a Chandragupta of Pataliputra arrives on the scene not long after—this very fact is enough, with Sandrocottus in the last quarter of the 4th century B.C., to make us sit up and take sharp notice of the extraordinary coincidence."

"In South America, the US government worked with the archipelago of military juntas from Argentina to Paraguay to abduct, torture, and murder Communists in the continent. This programme, which ran from 1975 to 1989, was called . It would kill around 100,000 people and imprison half a million."

"As the lights went out in the USSR and as the Third World Project surrendered before imperialist liberalization, a new era of intervention opened up. If the previous era felt like a roll call of coups, interventions, and invasions, populated by a rogues' gallery of butchers, assassins, and wheeler-dealers backed by Western intelligence services, now, after the fall of the USSR and the surrender of the Third World, the shield at the UN disappeared and the interventions from the West came like a tsunami."

"If the United States or the French or the British intervened into countries of the Third World, this was for freedom; the Soviets and the Third World project were the essence of unfreedom: this was a remarkable feat of interpretation."

"In 1965, one section of the Indonesian Army moved against Sukarno, and took over the institutions of the country. Then began what is generally understood to be one of the ghastliest political purges in modern times. The Indonesian Army and its allies - mainly fanatical anti-Communists, including religious groups - . What is beyond doubt - even though the US refuses to release fully its documents on this period - is that the United States and the Australians provided the Indonesian armed forces with lists of Communists who were to be assassinated, that they egged on the Army to conduct these massacres, and that they covered up this absolute atrocity."

"The CIA teachers were excellent at their jobs. of the CIA went to Uruguay, where ge taught the right wing groups how to use torture. 'The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect' - that was his credo. His favorite torture was to electrocute the genitals. He was killed by the left-wing in 1970."

"You don't need to be a statistician or an economist to be able to read the basic facts in the world today: the dominant classes and the corporations that they control extract surplus profits from the wealth produced by society, while billions of human beings who work to produce that wealth find themselves treated as if they are surplus humanity. This immense social divide, a widening gap across the class structure, can be observed in almost every single country in the world. This gap is not the result of any natural development, let alone of the magical phrase 'the Market'. This chasm across human society is produced and reproduced solely because of the civilizational system that privileges the private property of the few above the social needs of the many. That system is known as capitalism, a dynamic social process that - through inter-capitalist competition, through advancements in science and technology - has led to the vast increases in productivity but at the same time - because of private property - to immense social inequality. This double movement of capitalism, which generates enormous social wealth and enormous social inequality, both confounds humanity and provides immense potential for solutions to our great dilemmas - solutions that we call socialism."

"The moment that the Chinese scientists and doctors announced that the coronavirus could be transmitted between human beings on Jan. 20, 2020, the socialist governments went into action to monitor ports of entry and to test and trace key parts of the population. They set up task forces and procedures to immediately make sure that the infection would not go out of control amongst their people. They did not wait till the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11. This is in stark contrast to governments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, and other capitalist states, where there has been a hallucinatory attitude towards the Chinese government and the WHO. There is no comparison between the stance of Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and U.S. President Donald Trump: the former had a sober, science-based attitude, while the latter has consistently laughed off the coronavirus as a simple flu as recently as June 24."

"Bolivia’s key reserves are in lithium, which is essential for the electric car. Bolivia claims to have 70 percent of the world’s lithium reserves... Morales made it clear that any development of the lithium had to be done with Bolivia’s Comibol—its national mining company—and Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB)—its national lithium company—as equal partners... Tesla (United States) and Pure Energy Minerals (Canada) both showed great interest in having a direct stake in Bolivian lithium. But they could not make a deal that would take into consideration the parameters set by the Morales government. Morales himself was a direct impediment to the takeover of the lithium fields by the non-Chinese transnational firms. He had to go."

"The consequences of IMF orthodoxy are often deadly, with the Malawi case as one very painful episode. In 1996, the IMF staff pushed the government of Malawi to privatize its agricultural development and marketing corporation. This body held Malawi’s grain stock, and it regulated the price for the sale of grain in the country. Privatization of the corporation in 1999 left Malawi’s government without a means to protect its population in case of an emergency. Between October 2001 and March 2002, the price of maize shot up by 400 percent. Flooding in 2000-2001 and a year of drought set the food production in the country into distress. People began to die of starvation... The IMF did not relent. Malawi had to continue to service its debt. In 2002, it spent $70 million on its debt service payments, which was 20 percent of its national budget (more than Malawi spent on health, education, and agriculture combined). There was no lifeline through to Malawi, whose food crisis continues till today... No one within the IMF meeting will raise the question of democracy, both in terms of the IMF’s own functioning and in terms of the IMF’s relationship with sovereign countries around the world."

"For the past 40 years, the IMF has had the same agenda: to make sure that developing countries adhere to the rules of globalization set by the advanced capitalist states... Over these four decades, fires have burned on the streets of the countries that have gone to the IMF and then forced austerity upon their populations. In the 1980s, these uprisings used to be called “IMF riots.” It was clear to everyone that the IMF’s policies had provoked desperate people to take to the streets. The name given to these riots was precise. The emphasis had to be on the IMF and not on the riots themselves. The most famous of these riots took place in Venezuela—the Caracazo of 1989—which opened up a process that brought Hugo Chavez to power and that created the Bolivarian Revolution. It is reasonable to call the Arab Spring of 2011 an IMF riot because it was provoked by IMF austerity policies combined with rising food prices. The current unrest from Pakistan to Ecuador should be filed under IMF riot... The main lesson of these uprisings is not only that the people want fuel subsidies or a stable currency; what they want more than anything is democratic control over their own economy."

"The list of "accidents" is long and painful. In April 2005, a garment factory in Savar collapsed, killing seventy-five workers. In February 2006, another factory collapsed in Dhaka, killing eighteen. In June 2010, a building collapsed in Dhaka, killing twenty-five. These are the “factories” of twenty-first century globalization – poorly built shelters for a production process geared toward long working days, third rate machines, and workers whose own lives are submitted to the imperatives of just-in-time production. Writing about the factory regime in England during the nineteenth century, Karl Marx noted, "But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its wear-wolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight…. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by reducing it of its fertility" (Capital, Chapter 10)."

"The problem of the twenty-first century, then, is the problem of the color-blind. This problem is simple: it believes that to redress racism, we need to not consider race in social practice, notably in the sphere of governmental action. The state, we are told, must be above race. ... We are led to believe that racism is prejudicial behavior of one party against another rather than the coagulation of socioeconomic injustice against groups. If the state acts without prejudice (this is, if it acts equally), then that is proof of the end of racism. Unequal socioeconomic conditions of today, based as they are on racisms of the past and of the present, are thereby rendered untouchable by the state. Color-blind justice privatizes inequality and racism, and it removes itself from the project of redistributive and anti-racist justice. This is the genteel racism of our new millennium."

"Tagore’s poems and stories are mostly set in Bengal. However, in his non-fiction, that is to say in his letters, essays, talks, and polemics, he wrote extensively on the relations between the different cultures and countries of the world. Tagore, notes Humayun Kabir, ‘was the first great Indian in recent times who went out on a cultural mission for restoring contacts and establishing friendships with peoples of other countries without any immediate or specific educational, economic, political or religious aim. It is also remarkable that his cultural journeys were not confined to the western world’. He visited Europe and North America, but also Japan, China, Iran, Latin America, and Indo-China. That these travels were undertaken without any instrumental purpose marks Tagore out from the other members of our great quartet. Gandhi studied law in London and later went to South Africa to work. After he finally returned to India, in 1915, he visited England, once, to negotiate with the British Government. Apart from a short trip to Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon), he did not otherwise travel abroad in the last three decades of his life. As a young man, Ambedkar went to the United States and the United Kingdom to acquire advanced degrees in law and economics. Then he came back to a life of social activism in India. In later years, his trips overseas were to participate in political or academic conferences. At first glance, Nehru seems to have matched Tagore as a world traveller. Nehru first went overseas as a boy, to study at an English public school. Later, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, he travelled through Europe to forge links between the Indian freedom struggle and the world socialist movement. Still later, as Prime Minister of India between 1947 and 1964, he visited many different countries and continents. He went in his official capacity, representing and negotiating for his nation. Before and after Independence, Nehru’s journeys abroad were thus wholly political. (The one exception was when his wife fell seriously ill, and had to be taken to Europe for treatment.) On the other hand, Tagore travelled to other lands out of curiosity, simply to see and speak with humans of a cultural background other than his own."

"[On “truly frightening” right-wing Hindu nationalism (by an Indian questioner), whether it will always be a force:] As a citizen, I detest right-wing Hindu nationalism, I will vote for any other party. As a historian, I would say; so long as you have Pakistan, you will have Hindu nationalism. If the political class is alert, it will weaken, but if the political class is weak, Hindu nationalism will be in the ascendant. The Jihadis bomb Bombay to provoke Hindu-Muslim violence. The Kashmiri movement started for rights, was taken over by Jihadis, and expelled Hindus from the Valley."

"A ‘fifth-generation dynast’ Rahul Gandhi has no chance in Indian politics against ‘hard-working and self-made’ Narendra Modi, and Kerala did disastrous thing by electing Congress leader to Parliament...Narendra Modi’s great advantage is that he is not Rahul Gandhi. He is self-made. He has run a state for 15 years, he has administrative experience, he is incredibly hard-working and he never takes holidays in Europe...“India is becoming more democratic and less feudal, and the Gandhis just don’t realise this. You (Sonia) are in Delhi, your kingdom is shrinking more and more, but still, your chamchas (sycophants) are telling you that you are still the Badshah.”... the fact that they loved other nations more than India. The rise of aggressive nationalism worldwide and “the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in neighbouring countries are some other reasons behind the evident leap of Hindutva in India in recent times..."

"Nevertheless, these quarrels aside, we have to admit that Prof. Ramachadra Guha is an Indian patriot and, in a real sense, a Hindu."

"Ramachandra Guha himself claims that he’s a lapsed Marxist, a claim that’s suspect because this Hindu piece faithfully follows the Marxist template. The reason Guha attributes a symmetry between Hinduism and Christianity is because of Marx’s diktat that religion is the opium of the masses. And here’s a religion that refuses to conform to Marx’s definition of religion, which was primarily Christianity. Guha is thus forced to force-fit Hinduism into that definition. And that process necessitates intellectual dishonesty."

"In the generation (or two generations) before mine, the leading Indian historians (judged in terms of scholarly books and papers written and read) included Irfan Habib, R. S. Sharma, Ranajit Guha, Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Amalendu Guha, Sumit Sarkar, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, all of whom were influenced to a lesser or greater degree by Marxism; and Ashin Dasgupta, Dharma Kumar, Parthasarathy Gupta, Amales Tripathi, Rajat Kanta Rai, Mushirul Hasan, and Tapan Roychowdhury, all of whom were liberals. The leading political scientists included the liberals Rajni Kothari, Basheeruddin Ahmed and Ramashray Ray; the Marxists Javed Alam and Partha Chatterjee; and Ashis Nandy, an admirer of Tagore and Gandhi who like them stoutly resists being classified in conventional terms. The pre-eminent sociologists of that generation were M. N. Srinivas and André Béteille, both of whom would own the label ‘liberal’; and T. N. Madan, who while working on classically conservative themes such as family, kinship and religion would most likely see himself as a liberal too. Even the best-known or most influential economists of the 1960s and 1970 tended to be on the left of the spectrum, as the names of K. N. Raj, Amartya Sen, V. M. Dandekar, Amit Bhaduri, Krishna Bharadwaj, Pranab Bardhan, Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik, and Ashok Rudra (among others) signify."

"Contrary to what is sometimes claimed in the press, there are many fine historians in India. From my own generation of scholars, I can strongly recommend — to student and lay reader alike — the work of Upinder Singh on ancient India, of Nayanjot Lahiri on the history of archaeology, of Vijaya Ramaswamy on the bhakti movement, of Sanjay Subrahmanyam on the early history of European expansion, of Chetan Singh on the decline of the Mughal State, of Sumit Guha on the social history of Western India, of Seema Alavi on the social history of medicine, of Niraja Gopal Jayal on the history of citizenship, of Tirthankar Roy on the economic consequences of colonialism, of Mahesh Rangarajan on the history of forests and wildlife, and of A. R. Venkatachalapathy on South Indian cultural history."

"Hind Swaraj is probably not the right place to start an exploration of Gandhi’s ideas. In the Cambridge edition, Anthony Parel warns the reader against the ‘vast sea of Gandhian anthologies’, but it is to these anthologies that those who wish to properly appreciate Gandhi must necessarily turn. The more thoughtful, the more informed, and the more essential Gandhi are to be found in his articles, editorials, and letters of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, written as he came to more fully understand the people and practices of the country he was to lead to self-rule. The three selections from Gandhi’s writings that I would myself recommend are those made by Nirmal Kumar Bose, Raghavan Iyer (in its three-volume rather than single-volume rendition), and Gopalkrishna Gandhi. Having read these compilations, one can then turn to Hind Swaraj, perhaps to admire its precocious defence of non-violence and religious pluralism, while puzzling over its silence on caste and its demonization of the West."

"I was a student at the Delhi School at the very end of its Golden Age. The departments of economics and sociology were still world-class. Amartya Sen had left for England and M. N. Srinivas had retired to Bangalore; but Sukhamoy Chakravarty and André Béteille remained. There were also other brilliant scholars on the faculty—such as A. L. Nagar and Kaushik Basu in economics, and Veena Das and J. P. S. Uberoi in sociology. Both departments had active research programmes."

"Three men did most to make Hinduism a modern faith. Of these the first was not recognized as a Hindu by the Shankaracharyas; the second was not recognized as a Hindu by himself; the third was born a Hindu but made certain he would not die as one. These three great reformers were Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar. Gandhi and Nehru, working together, helped Hindus make their peace with modern ideas of democracy and secularism. Gandhi and Ambedkar, working by contrasting methods and in opposition to one another, made Hindus recognize the evils and horrors of the system of Untouchability. Nehru and Ambedkar, working sometimes together, sometimes separately, forced Hindus to grant, in law if not always in practice, equal rights to their women. The Gandhi-Nehru relationship has been the subject of countless books down the years. Books on the Congress, which document how these two made the party the principal vehicle of Indian nationalism; books on Gandhi, which have to deal necessarily with the man he chose to succeed him; books on Nehru, which pay proper respect to the man who influenced him more than anyone else. Books too numerous to mention, among which I might be allowed to single out, as being worthy of special mention, Sarvepalli Gopal’s Jawaharlal Nehru, B. R. Nanda’s Mahatma Gandhi, and Rajmohan Gandhi’s The Good Boatman. In recent years, the Gandhi-Ambedkar relationship has also attracted a fair share of attention. Some of this has been polemical and even petty; as in Arun Shourie’s Worshipping False Gods (which is deeply unfair to Ambedkar), and Jabbar Patel’s film Ambedkar (which is inexplicably hostile to Gandhi). But there have also been some sensitive studies of the troubled relationship between the upper caste Hindu who abhorred Untouchability and the greatest of Dalit reformers. These include, on the political side, the essays of Eleanor Zelliott and Denis Dalton; and on the moral and psychological side, D. R. Nagaraj’s brilliant little book The Flaming Feet. By contrast, the Nehru-Ambedkar relationship has been consigned to obscurity. There is no book about it, nor, to my knowledge, even a decent scholarly article. That is a pity, because for several crucial years they worked together in the Government of India, as Prime Minister and Law Minister respectively."

"Where do Goldman and Eaton and Trautmann and Zelliot and Gold figure in the canon of South Asian Studies? Judging from the country where they work in, the United States of America, not very high. Were they to enter a seminar room at the Association of Asian Studies meetings there would not be the buzz that would certainly accompany the entrance of diasporic scholars ten times as glamorous but not half as accomplished."

"Most Indians – and, following Attenborough's film, many non-Indians too – are moderately well acquainted with the colleagues and critics of the mature Gandhi. Yet they know very little about those who worked with him in South Africa. Here, his closest friends outside his family were two Hindus (a doctor turned jeweller and a liberal politician respectively); two Jews (one a journalist from England, the other an architect originally from Eastern Europe); and two Christian clergymen (one a Baptist, the other an Anglican). These six men were, so to speak, the South African analogues of Gandhi's famous colleagues in the Indian freedom struggle – Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose, Madeleine Slade (Mira Behn), C. Rajagopalachari, Maulana Azad, et al. They are much less recognized (in some cases, unrecognized), although their impact on Gandhi's character and conduct may have been even more decisive, for they came into his life when he was not yet a great public figure or 'Mahatma' – as he was in India – but a struggling, searching activist."

"The rise has been most phenomenal in Arunachal Pradesh, where the Christian percentage has grown from 0.79% in 1971 to 18.72% in 2001: this does not include the figures for crypto-Christians who are many in number in this state due to strong opposition from local tribals opposed to this massive proselytization... It can be seen that there is a complete sweep of conversion to Christianity among the tribal populations of Manipur, Nagaland and Mizoram: 96.8%, 98.5% and 90.5% respectively (the Chakma tribe of Mizoram alone representing a Buddhist survival of 8.3% in that state)... In Arunachal Pradesh, there is an even bigger survival of the original tribal religion: Here we have the traditional Donyi Polo religion followed by almost 47.2% of the tribal population of the state, or 30.3% of the total population of the state. In Manipur, as we saw, there is a clean sweep of conversion to Christianity as in the case of Nagaland and Mizoram, with 96.8% of the tribals converted to Christianity... There are other miniscule populations among the tribes of these five states of the North East still practicing their ancestral religious or belief systems, but they have been reduced to a micro-minority by the time of the 2001 census itself, and may by now be almost completely decimated... The facts are crystal clear: except for followers of these five religions, all the tribal population of India (except converts to Christianity) consists overwhelmingly of Hindu Category One tribals. As the religious population figures of the 2011 Indian Census are still undisclosed, we do not know what the situation is today (2013) and what it will be at some point of time in the future. We do not know how far the efforts to break off the tribals from Hindu society, by converting them to Christianity or trying to convince them even otherwise that they are not Hindus, will be successful. But the fact is that as of the data now available, they are full-fledged Hindus, self-declared, and any change in the situation can only be a change brought about by Goebbelsian and diabolical machinations, and can not represent the original situation... Yet the billion-dollar funded political and academic campaign to cut off the tribal population of India from the non-tribal population by branding the tribals as non-Hindu, often branding them with innocuous names like “animists”, is in full flow... And these figures are faithfully reported in the data provided by the Joshua Project, whose aim is to give the genuine religious population figures for all the ethnic peoples of the world, so as to enable missionaries to formulate their strategies accordingly. The Wikipedia article, like articles in the Indian media or in books meant for consumption in India, obviously have different aims: the primary one being the old policy of “Divide and Conquer”."

"In short, if powerful and super rich foreign missionaries enter into the interior heartland of India, and mass-convert large sections of tribals to their foreign religion by telling them that the religions, gods, beliefs and practices of their ancestors are “satanic” and will take them to hell, and that the only way to escape hell and attain heaven is to accept Christ and convert to their alien religion, this does not amount to “baiting” or provoking anyone, such as the tribals in particular or Hindus in general, or violating their civil rights. In fact, it amounts to turning the tribals “into proud men and women”! But if Hindu organisations (automatically “diehard communal”, since Hindu, in opposition to the presumably “tolerant and secular”, since Christian, missionaries!) enter these areas within their own country, and appeal to the local people in the name of their ancestral religions, and actually have the gall to “organize Hindu festivals”, it naturally amounts to gross “baiting” and provocation of the foreign missionaries and violation of their civil rights. And if there is any “retaliation” by the missionaries to this “baiting”, it is of course excusable as a perfectly natural and justifiable “reaction” to these gross provocations by the communalists. And of course civil rights organisations have to rush to the protection and defence of these poor, helpless and oppressed missionaries, and the hapless plight to which they have been reduced by “minority baiters” from the RSS has to be propagated in our secular press! ... Another example from a second leading national newspaper: (...) Doesn’t this sound like a description of Christian missionaries, who claim to have a “monopoly over spiritual knowledge” since their religion and God are the only true ones (all others being false religions and Gods who can only lead to hell), who “move into” different areas of the world to spread this message, who compel people to leave their “age-old ways” of worship and religion because these are “‘corrupt’, ‘evil’, or simply ‘wrong’”, and seek to obliterate everywhere “the uniqueness of the local culture” by trying to paint the whole world in one international imperialistic “fundamentalist” colour? Wrong! This is a description (in an Indian Express article, 11/10/98, “Converting History”, by Rajesh Sinha, describing the situation in certain parts of Rajasthan) condemning the VHP and other Hindu organisations for having “started competing with Christian missionaries in establishing schools [etc.]”, thereby leading to “most Christian converts now returning to the Hindu fold”. The writer, with a straight face, tells us: “In the process, the saffron hawks are changing the face of Rajasthan, where once communal identity was a matter of little importance”. Is this some kind of incurably perverted mental sickness, or is it the power of the dollar?"