Upinder Singh

"Delhi’s history is etched over its landscape in stone. Magnificent forts, mosques and tombs of the Sultanate and Mughal periods evoke the aura of the medieval world while the stately layout and architecture of bear the imposing imprint of British imperial rule."

"The Delhi area has an incredibly long and eventful ancient past, beginning thousands of years ago in the stone age and merging at the other end into the medieval period when the Rajputs made way for Delhi Sultans in the twelfth century."

"The idea of a peace-loving, nonviolent India exists, persists, as part of a selectively constructed and assiduously cultivated national self-image in the midst of a society pervaded by social and political violence. It lives along with the memory of the three great ideologues of nonviolence in ancient India—Mahavira, the Buddha and Ashoka. But the amnesia toward the contexts of intense social and political conflict and violence in which these thinkers emerged and with which they engaged of ten reduces them to simplified stereotypes, invoked from time to time for self-congratulatory rhetoric or political gain."

"Very early dates for the Rig Veda that fall within the 7th or 6th millennium BCE are clearly not acceptable. … Dates falling within the late 3rd millennium BCE or the early 2nd millennium BCE (calculated on the grounds of philology and/or astronomical references) cannot be ruled out. The date of the Rig Veda remains a problematic issue."

"If Sharma and Thapar are not overtly anti-Hindu, writers like Upinder Singh certainly are. Her repugnance to find any echo of Hinduism in the religion of the Indus civilization is absolutely amazing, because everybody with knowledge of Marshall’s analysis of the Indus religion will know that the basic parameter of that analysis was Hinduism. How on earth does Upinder Singh deny it, especially after the discovery of a terracotta replica of lingam in a yonipatta in the mature Indus context at Kalibangan? How on earth do historians like Upinder Singh explain Jainism and Buddhism as examples of multi-religious diversity in ancient India when both these religions were offshoots of Hinduism? The blind belief of this type of scholar in Aryan invasion is palpably rooted in their belief that Hinduism, like Islam and Christianity, are immigrant religions in India."