translators-from-india

"I studied the works of Kapali Shastri, the guru of M.P. Pandit, who wrote extensively on the Vedas from Sri Aurobindo’s point of view. Many of my comments on the Upanishads that I had written were echoed in Kapali’s work. I eventually discovered that Kapali, prior to connecting with Aurobindo had been a disciple of Ramana Maharshi. He was responsible for many of the Sanskrit works on Ramana under the pseudonym K. Kapali was the chief disciple of Ganapati Muni, who was perhaps the chief disciple of Ramana. Ganapati had first discovered Ramana as a young boy then called Brahma Swami, because he was a Brahmin boy. He renamed him Ramana and Bhagavan. Ganapati wrote several important Sanskrit works on the Maharshi and also put Ramana’s teachings into Sanskrit, which Kapali as his disciple commented on."

"A knowledge of Sanskrit literature from the Vedic period to the Classical period is essential to understand and appreciate a large number of passages scattered among the poems of Tamil literature."

"Gidwani’s Tipu has a political value today, especially after the Congress Government in 1974, perhaps to oblige the Muslim voters, released a commemoration stamp on Tipu, and described him as a ‘freedom fighter.’…Releasing a 50-Paisa postage stamp commemorating Tipu in July 1974, a minister of Karnataka said that Tipu was ‘a hero’ of Karnataka, ‘the defender of freedom,’ and so on. The chairman of the stamp releasing committee…wanted the writers to ‘present a true and faithful account’ of Tipu. Well… Gidwani has obliged him, rather sneakily, and in the form of a novel."

"Even those Tamil scholars who regarded Tamil literature and civilization to be superior to Sanskrit did not demonize Sanskrit. A good example was 'Manonmaniam' Sundaram Pillai. He claimed that Tamil was superior to Sanskrit because Tamil was still used in his day as a popular language. A Tamil song by him has been recognized as the official song of Tamil Nadu. However, he never denigrated or rejected Sanskrit, and visualized Tamil and Sanskrit as two eyes of the Goddess of learning, though for him Tamil was the right eye. When Bishop Caldwell dated the seventh-century Saiva saint Thirugnana Sambandar at the end of the thirteenth century, Sundaram Pillai refuted this dating and emphatically established that Sambandar could not be dated later than seventh century CE."

"The Saiva Siddhanta is the indigenous philosophy of South India and the choicest product of the Tamilian intellect. [. . .] This high and noble system, based on the Agamas or Saiva scriptures, was corrupted by the puranic writers, whose sole object was to reconcile the Vedas and the Agamas [. . .] The Tamilar, overbourne by the political ascendancy of the Aryans, accepted the system, [. . .] Bhakti or loving piety, the root idea of the Saiva system, ennobled the persons, whatever their caste, colour or creed [. . .] Such a widely tolerant, ennobling, rationalistic faith has been made to assume the garb of a thoroughly intolerant, fictitious, and meanly selfish system. The Tamilar, therefore, are in duty, bound to throw off the puranic veil which dims their vision and to realise the old conception of Him as enshrined in the ancient Tamil poems based on the Tamilian Agamas."

"In the course of centuries the Tamil Saivas, who were vegetarians and who had looked upon the Aryas as mlecchas for their [habits of] meat-eating and drinking intoxicants and as untouchables came, by the force of juxtaposition, of aryan adaptability, and of political contingencies, to be reconciled to the ways and habits of their neighbours and to accept the authority of the Vedas, [. . .] Saivaism, accepting the Vedic rule, became metamorphosed into Vedic or Vaidika Saivaism.'"

"They say he is the luckiest man, who has in his heart two women. Nobody can be unluckier than me, I am always in love with two women."

"Mushrooms sprout overnight and die, but banyan tree takes years to take root. True love is like a banyan tree - last to sprout, last to die."

"Performance appraisal report (PAR) is the appraisal committee's ‘impersonal’ evaluation of the ‘public’ service rendered by ‘public’ servants in their ‘impersonal’ capacity in a ‘public’ organisation; hence there is nothing "personal" about PAR."

"Lalitha Iyer is none other than Hemangi Sharma in disguise."

"Usha Thorat :- Dr Pradhan makes ingenious use of Right to Information to address individual grievances of people."

"Recovering principal with tenfold interest, Kalahandi will then take her revenge against her betrayer."

"Nothing is more painful in this world than love unrequited. But can true love remain unrequited? Whatever you give, it comes back to you a hundred fold, nay a thousand fold."

"Truth is naked. Truth was, is, and will ever be. But we humans like to wear masks."

"All the moments in which you do not love, are wasted moments of life which will never come back. Our call is to love. There is no meaning in life without love."

"I am not afraid of you, my friend, I am afraid of your ghost. After death you may stalk my books, my epitaphs, my biographies."

"God knows the thoughts of all human beings even before they are released from their tongues. One who tunes into God knows all the thoughts welling up in all human hearts."

"Although drought is a natural disaster, starvation deaths are an avoidable man-made disaster."

"Pokhran was born. Pokhran was dead. In less than a millionth of a second. Hymen of secrecy was breached for ever. Infant had become a Big Boy, at once shy and bold, with the suddenly acquired carnal knowledge of creation and annihilation. Then the Buddha smiled."

"To perceive pure love that is God, you have to unmask your heart, unmask your soul, unmask the purity of your being."

"History has always changed its course, changed its stance, swaying to the tunes, pendulum like, between a Ruling Party and an Opposition Party."

"Just in case you find this world too much a burden for you, you can always my dear find the path, always come back to me."

"Whenever you start digging into history, history is re-written all over again. The more you dig, the more you gain, and the more you lose faith from history."

"When death will spread all over the land, then alone will the living dead understand."

"The Delhi Sultanate period was a time of extraordinary churning that had a far-reaching impact on the history of India that followed it. At many points, it involved critically decisive junctures which had the potential to extinguish—or at any rate, reduce—the severity, dominance and influence of Muslim rule in India. The Delhi Sultanate was endowed with a sort of inbuilt character of ephemerality unlike other Hindu empires that preceded it."

"It was also a period of all-round sweeping changes: old systems of governance and statecraft were uprooted, the administration was Islamised, an oppressive tax regime was introduced and centuries-old native traditions, worship, manners, customs, dressing, food habits, education and language underwent a brutal and, in many cases, irreversible transformation and destruction."

"From this point onwards, large parts of India would witness and suffer the prolonged, ruthless and oppressive domination of Turkish Muslim rule for more than four hundred years. To the native Indian tongue, the word ‘Turushka’ evoked repellent connotations of barbarism, Hindu genocide, forcible conversions, wholesale gangrape of their women, repeated and large-scale temple destructions, mindless cow slaughter and industrial-scale slave-taking."

"One significant reason, however, is the fact that the overall discipline of historical scholarship in India, especially after the 1950s, has largely been destroyed thanks to Marxist ideological manipulation. To put this in real terms, nearly three generations of first-rate scholarship has been wiped out, as a result of which the pioneering work begun by Sir Jadunath Sarkar, R.C. Majumdar, S. Srikanta Sastri, D.C. Sircar, A.D. Pusalker and Radha Kumud Mookerji has continued to languish."

"While Qutub-ud-din Aibak deserves credit for sundering all ties with Ghazni and thereby preventing further, destructive Muslim raids from Central Asia, he also heralded a new power structure and centre that would endure for the next six hundred years. For the first time in the long history of ancient Bharatavarsha, Delhi became the seat of a prolonged, oppressive religious despotism concentrating all power within itself. So far, the city, at various points, had at best been a principality, governorship and protectorate. With due regard to vastly changed historical and political circumstances, it can reasonably be said that a basic element in the template that Qutub-ud-din Aibak had set has continued till date, minus the religious despotism: Delhi continues to be the political centre of modern India, shorn of any traces of the native classical culture and civilisation."

"In the late 18th century, Tipu Sultan, one of the last Muslim rulers to command a significant kingdom in southern India, wrote frequent, anxious letters to the Caliph, inviting him to invade India and aid him in his fight against the infidel Christians, the British. The underlying significance of all such correspondences is a historical theme that has remained constant from the day the alien invading forces of Islam began their forays into Bharatavarsha, looking for favour, approval and endorsement of their authority in this country from a transnational religious imperialism."

"Hindus were suddenly rudely jolted awake to a wholly unfamiliar, living nightmare when Mahmud’s armies overwhelmed the sacred Indo-Gangetic plain, the nucleus of their ancient punyabhoomi, the hordes of his locust-like barbarians setting fire to its fertile, green, smiling plains, plundering, indulging in indiscriminate massacre of innocent citizens, gangraping women, enslaving boys, girls, men, women and children, destroying ancient cities and centres of learning, art and culture, razing magnificent temples sanctified by uninterrupted centuries of nationwide devotion, smashing murtis and enforcing an alien religion at the point of the sword and fire."

"Like his predecessors, Iltutmish was also a pious Sunni Muslim and followed the dictates of his religion dutifully. He completed the construction of the Qutub Minar which Qutub-ud-din Aibak had commissioned. He never missed saying the five prayers daily and strictly observed all the prescribed Islamic rituals. He also harboured an inveterate hatred and intolerance towards the Shias and persecuted them on a significant scale, which led to an Ismaili Shia rebellion in Delhi whose declared goal was his assassination. Iltutmish suppressed it with shocking violence which resulted in their indiscriminate slaughter. Needless to mention, his policy towards Hindus was far worse. Towards the end of his life, around 1233–1234, he marched against the sacred city of Vidisha and razed its ancient Sun Temple. Next, he proceeded towards Ujjain, the beloved city of Kalidasa and of generations of poets, scholars and people of learning from the ancient times. It was the proudest and the pre-eminent centre of culture and commerce during the golden Gupta era. Ujjain was also home to the magnificent and sublime Mahakala Temple (or Mahakal) dedicated to Shiva, one of the twelve sacred Jyotirlingas. The immortal poet Kalidasa, an unparalleled devotee of Shiva, dedicates beautifully poignant verses53 in his timeless poem Meghaduta to describe the Mahakala Temple complete with the evening Nada-Aradhana, the performance of music and dance before Shiva. Quite naturally, it was one of the great hubs of idolatry. With a savage stroke, Iltutmish demolished54 this exquisite temple—a majestic, living proof and a profoundly dignified symbol of the possibilities of what innate devotion and stainless piety could accomplish when it finds unsullied expression in architecture and refined sculpture. A work of three hundred painstaking years and countless generations of dedicated, joyous, backbreaking work, an awe-inspiring system of transmitting generational knowledge, an economic framework and political stability that sustained all this tragically fell to the sword, pickaxe and the fire of a determined vandal. The Mahakala Temple is described by Firishta himself as magnificent … surrounded by a wall one hundred cubits in height. The image of Vikramaditya, who had been formerly prince of this country, and so renowned, that the Hindus have taken an era from his death, as also the image of Mahakal, both of stone, with many other figures of brass, were found in the temple. After the pious ravage was complete, Iltutmish ordered his troops to carry these broken idols and ‘many other figures’ and ‘brass statues of Vikramaditya and other notable rulers’ to Delhi where they were ‘broken at the door of the great’ Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque so that the Faithful could trample upon it."

"It marks the first episode of forced and panicked mass migrations of Hindus, Jains and other native non-Muslim populations from various parts of northern and western India towards the central and southern regions. Indeed, a separate volume dedicated to narrating the full history of such forced Hindu migrations within India awaits the pen of a future historian. One of the more enduring and durable features of Hindu social life since time immemorial was the remarkable continuity and attachment they had towards their immediate geographical surroundings. Muhammad’s perfidious victory shattered that sense of permanence and continuity forever. From then onwards, this age-old stability and settled generational rhythm of life would repeatedly be smashed for the next five hundred years throughout northern, eastern and western India by the same forces of religious zealotry and iconoclasm that motivated Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazni and now, Muhammad of Ghori. The Jain Acharya Asadhara writes33 that when the Sapadalaksha34 region was conquered by Shihab-ud-din alias Muhammad of Ghor, he fled from his native country and migrated to the safe haven of Malwa, because he was scared of being forcibly converted and his family molested by the marauding armies."

"The Sultan was ambling his way towards death in one fit of helpless fury at a time. In all probability, the sultan merely suspected that the illness that had seized him this time would pass, too. He was, after all, the Shah, the Upholder of the Deen, The Only True Faith in the world, the sultan who had known no defeat, who had ‘conquered the east and protect[ed] the west’, who had been honoured by none less than the mighty Chief of the Abbasids, and more importantly, he was the One who had ‘destroyed the country of the sun-worshippers’.1 Wherever his sword had been raised, such far-flung, powerful kingdoms like those at Kara2, Ujjain, Ranthambhor, Chittorgarh, Deogiri, Dhur Samundar and Madura5 met the same fate as that of the ‘garden of Behar’, whose soil was ‘dyed with blood as red as a tulip’, and everywhere the ravaging sultan went, the ‘Hindus, in alarm, descended into the earth like ants.’"

"It was only after Tipu’s tyrannical regime ended that the original idol of Krishna was transported back to Guruvayoor and reinstated with due ceremony. Equally, if no signs of destruction are visible today, it is because of the intervention of an officer named Hydrose Kutty, a Hindu who had been forcibly converted to Islam by Hyder Ali. He helped repair, renovate, and restore the temple and reinstated the land grants and exemptions that had historically been given to it by various kings."

"Tipu also didn’t spare the Krishna temple at Guruvayoor, which is one of the holiest Hindu temples in India. However, today’s Tipu-worshippers assert that it was Tipu who gave the land grant to Hindus to construct the Guruvayoor temple! An eminence named C.K. Ahmed writes with supreme confidence that “the Guruvayoor temple of today exists on the land that was granted as Inaam[gift or grant] by Tipu” but fails to give a single shred of evidence to back his assertion. However, the real story is that when the people of Guruvayoor heard of Tipu’s approach, they secretly transported its main idol to the Ambalapuzha Krishna temple then in the Travancore State. Here’s what the 2 January 1977 issue of the Illustrated Weekly of India says about the affair: The truth is that when Tipu raided the Malabar, he looted all the gold and jewelry in the Hindu temples there, pulled down the gold, silver and copper covering that placed on the roofs of these temples, looted their money, and vandalized them. Seeing the nature of his raid, the locals and Brahmins at Guruvayoor feared for the fate of the idol of Krishna in the temple, shifted it to Ambalapuzha and hid it."

"Mulastana—the original name of the Islamicised ‘Multan’—is a great city hailing from untold antiquity. The general region has been continuously inhabited for over five thousand years and is one of the proverbial cradles of human civilisation, now home to numerous archaeological sites dating back to the early Harappan period of the Indus Valley Civilisation. According to Hindu lore, Mulastana was founded by Rishi Kashyapa and was the capital of the Trigarta kingdom when the Great Kurukshetra War occurred. During Alexander’s raid of India, Mulastana was located on an island in the Ravi River (known as Iravati or Parushni in Vedic texts). This ancient city is now fabled for a proliferation of mosques, minarets and a vast collection of Islamic structures. It is also home to the largest collection of Sufi shrines in a single place. However, for at least three thousand years, Mulastana was one of the original homes that embodied and breathed the sanctity of the Sanatana Vedic civilisation and culture, which found its most magnificent and sublime expression in the Aditya (or Sun) Temple. According to the Bhagavata Purana, it was built by Krishna’s son Samba who performed a penance to propitiate Aditya in order to obtain a cure for his leprosy. When Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang visited the Sun Temple in 641, he described the murti of Aditya as made of ‘pure gold with eyes made from large red rubies’. Its doors, pillars and the shikhara (tower/dome) were all studded with silver, gold, rubies, gems and numerous varieties of precious metals. At a more profound level, Mulastana was one of the most sacred pilgrimage centres for Hindus, on par with Kashi, Prayagraj, Mathura and Kanchipuram."

"The Thirunavaya Temple, of unknown antiquity—local legends trace it back to about 5000 years but its written history dates to at least 1300 years—is today located 12 Kilometres south of Tirur in the Malappuram district. It was always renowned as one of the great centres of Vedic learning and a principal place of pilgrimage of the Vaishnava sect. Tipu’s brutal army not only plundered the temple but desecrated and destroyed it."

"However, the bigoted handwork of Tipu is clearly visible even today in the temples of Parampathali, Panmayanadu and Vengidangu. One look at the appalling damage done to the sanctum sanctorum of the Parampathali temple is sufficient to estimate the nature of Tipu’s iconoclasm."

"The case of the Thrikkavu temple in Ponnani was no different. After smashing the idols in the temple, Tipu converted the entire temple into an ammunition depot."

"Cultures may be said to have overall tendencies to idealize, and think in terms of, either the context-free or the context-sensitive kind of rules. Actual behavior may be more complex, though the rules they think with are a crucial factor in guiding the behavior. In cultures like India's, the context-sensitive kind of rule is the preferred formulation."

"Various taxonomies of season, landscape, times, gunas or qualities (and their material bases), tastes, characters, emotions, essences (rasas), etc., are basic to the thought-work of Hindu medicine and poetry, cooking and religion, erotics and magic. Each jati or class defines a context, a structure of relevance, a rule of permissible combinations, a frame of reference, a meta-communication of what is and can be done … Even the Kama-Sutra is literally a grammar of love, which declines and conjugates men and women as one would nouns and verbs in different genders, voices, moods and aspects. Genders are genres. Different body-types and character-types obey different rules, respond to different scents and beckonings."

"One has only to read Manu after a bit of Kant to be struck by the former's extraordinary lack of universality. He seems to have no clear notion of a universal human nature from which one can deduce ethical decrees like 'Man shall not kill', or 'Man shall not tell an untruth'. One is aware of no notion of a 'state', no unitary law of all men … The main tradition of Judeo-Christian ethics is based on such a premise of universalisation. Manu will not understand such a premise. To be moral, for Manu, is to particularise – to ask who did what, to whom and when … Each class (jati) of man has his own laws, his own proper ethic, not to be universalised."

"Whatever his context — birth, class, gender, age, place, rank, etc. — a man is a man for all that. Technology, with its modules and interchangeable parts, and the post-Renaissance sciences, with their quest for universal laws (and 'facts') across contexts, intensify the bias towards the context-free.'"

"Mind you, bigots, Indian Muslims have opted until now not to complain to the Arab and Muslim world about your hate campaigns and lynchings and riots. The day they are pushed to do that, bigots will face an avalanche."

"Thank you Kuwait for standing with the Indian Muslims! The Hindutva bigots calculated that given the huge economic stakes involved the Muslim and Arab world will not care about the persecution of Muslims in India."

"The Maulana’s observation and inquiry lead him to conclusions which are in complete contrast to what that typical fatwa of Deoband… says and what the Muslim press shrieks out week after week… Alas! Maulana Wahiduddin’s remains a voice in the wilderness… Maulana Wahiduddin states that as a community Muslims are much better off today than they were, say at the time of Partition. He gives telling instances in support of this fact. But, he says, to acknowledge the fact in public is regarded among Muslims as betrayal of the community."

"A particularly dark aspect of the Muslims’ existence in India seems to be communal riots. It is a fact that communal riots have taken place on a large scale in modern India over the last forty-five years and, regrettably, in some parts are still continuing. I repeat, nevertheless, that the occurrence of communal riots is not linked to the system of governance developed after Independence. It is related rather to the Muslims’ own rabble-rousing leadership and yellow journalism. What is the logic behind the riots? Let us again take an example from Bombay where, about twenty years before independence, an issue was made of a Hindu procession passing by a mosque: As it approached the mosque, the Mutawalli (the Keeper of the mosque) objected to its passage, and tried to stop it. When his request was not complied with, he registered a case in a Bombay court, demanding that a court order be issued, banning any Hindu procession in future in front of the Mosque. At that time Muhammad Ali Jinnah was living in Bombay, and it was he who acted as advocate for the mosque keeper. The judge, an Englishman, ordered that the relevant prohibitory notice be put up near the mosque in question. This successful advocacy of their case by Jinnah so enthralled the Muslims that they dubbed him Qaid-e-Azam, the great leader. But this was not leadership. It was more like leading the people astray. Jinnah should have told the Muslims that the solution to the problem of processions is not to try to stop them, but simply to ignore them. And that even if you manage to carve out a separate area of your own, as was done in the formation of Pakistan, there is no guarantee that processions will not again be leed through the streets. The truth is that the choice for Muslims did not lie between having, or not having processions. It was between tolerating processions or having riots. But the Muslims self-serving leadership and irresponsible journalism did nothing to steer Muslims away from wrong choices. As a result, in a bid to stop Hindu processions, riots have broken out from time to time in various places, with little hope of their ever ceasing in certain parts. Most of the riots in both India and Pakistan have this as their root cause."

"A new way of thinking is emerging among Muslims, who are now rapidly entering the field of modern education and producing scientists like Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Dr. S.Z. Qasim, medical experts like Dr. Khalilullah and economists like Professor A.M. Khusro etc. Muslim youths such as Javed Usmani and Amir Subhani have shown their mettle by topping in IAS examinations. I am certain that within one generation, Insha Allah, this gap will be bridged, and then no one will complain that the ratio of Muslims in government services is very low. A particularly dark aspect of the Muslims's existence in India seems."

"Any conflict has to perpetrators, and there are invariably faults on each side which cause and exacerbate it. It take two to make a fight. If one party withdraws itself from the region of conflict then the other will remain alone there: it will have none to fight against and the conflict will disappear. If, on the other hand, each party waits for peace initiatives to come from the other side before undertaking conciliatory moves of its own, then the mistrust between the two sides will continue to grow. The inevitable result will be escalation of the conflict between then. Hindu-Muslim communal riots, which have become regular feature of Indian life, are an example of such conflict, which can only be ended by unilateral action from one side. There are examples in the life of the Prophet Muhammad which show that it is the Muslims who should take this initiative. Worldly rivalry and conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims means that the latter see Islam, not in it true light, but through the tainted vision of their own prejudice: Muslims are their enemies so they adopt an antagonistic posture toward Islam as well. This is a situation which should be intolerable to Muslims, whose overriding concern should be for the true message of Islam to reach other people in all its purity, and in an atmosphere conducive to objective and dispassionate consideration. Seeing that such an atmosphere cannot be generated where there is conflict and mistrust, they should ensure an end to conflicts with other people; they should take unilateral steps for peace, without waiting for the initiative to come from the other side."