Authors From India

"The belligerence of Left academics was at odds with their inability to validate and authenticiate their assertions in Court. On the very issues they continue to raise outside, they had been found on weak footing in the Allahabad High Court. (3)"

"On Muhammad Ghuri, Tarinicharan says that his soldiers were 'inhabitants of the hills, hardy and skilled in warfare. By comparison, the Hindu kings were disunited and their soldiers relatively docile and undisciplined. Consequently, it was only to be expected that Muhammad would win easily. But that is not what happened. Virtually no Hindu ruler surren- dered his freedom without a mighty struggle. In particular, the Rajahputra were never defeated. ‘The rise, consolidation and collapse of Muslim rule have been completed, but the Rajahputra remain free to this day.'"

"The Rohillas displayed their iconoclastic fervour during the campaing, melting all the silver and gold idols they could seize. In the interests of the Himalayan trade and the pilgrimage traffic, the Kumaun rajas maintained cordial relations with them. p. 70"

"The Mysore Archaeological Survey contends that at least three temples within his realm were destroyed on Tipu's orders. The Harihareswara temple at Harihar was looted and a section of it converted into a mosque, while the Varahaswami temple in Seringapatam and the Odakaraya temple in Hospet were both destroyed. p. 68"

"He [Tipu Sultan] sponsored the construction of the Ala Mosque within the fort of Seringapatam, in which pillars of Hindu origin are clearly visible. p 65"

"In India, the twain of faith and polity never met. It was not within royal purview to supervise the compliance of religious obligations by the citizenry. Indeed, there were no religious duties mandatory for all. p. 3"

"The problem of historical accuracy is compounded as we proceed into the medieval era. Key civilizational issues raised by the Islamic arrival are not even hinted at. […]. In the entire discussion on the Delhi Sultanate, the words dhimmi and jaziya are deliberately omitted, though they are crucial to understanding the dynamics of that epoch. There is a complete glossing over of the closed nature of the governing class […].Instead, there are innumerable misleading references to Hindu participation in the governmental process. If Indian involvement at the lower levels of administration did not make the colonial state an Indo-British venture, surely the same logic applies here as well? Yet the text insists that Hindu princes, landholders and priests of the time became constituents of the ‘new aristocracy’ that arose. The fact, however, is that leaving aside the ruling houses of Rajputana, Rajput resistance even in the neighbouring Katiher region remained intense till the last days of the Mughal Empire. The participation of landholders in the ruling class was, likewise, extremely restricted even under the Mughals. Hence, to assert that involvement of these groups was the norm in the Sultanate period is taking liberties with truth. Overlooking all forms of Hindu persecution, the book states that Brahmins and ulema were equally permitted to propagate their respective faiths. References to the infamous ‘pilgrimage tax’ are conveniently dropped.... [NCERT’s textbook Medieval India for class eight by Romila Thapar is] “partial and partisan”... “well-known historical facts are found deliberately obliterated or undervalued”... “the Leftist claim to historical objectivity suddenly appear vulnerable”."

"A scholar of medieval Indian history, Meenakshi Jain accurately captures a core theological reason for the Caliph’s glowing praise of Mahmud: Mahmud’s assault on Somanatha electrified the Muslim world because it was viewed as a sequel to the Prophet’s action at Kaba. Muslims identified the Somanatha idol as that of Manat62, believed to have been ferreted out of Mecca just prior to the Prophet’s attack on its temple. By destroying Somanatha, therefore, Mahmud was virtually completing the Prophet’s work; hence the act was hailed as the crowning glory of Islam over idolatry."

"Notwithstanding this politico-cultural reality, early Indian nationalists sought to inculcate a spirit of inclusivity and accommodation into the emergent socio-political discourse. As the freedom movement developed however, the Muslim League articulated an ideology committed wholly to its Islamic fountainhead and stressed the need to maintain the community’s political dominance in the country. The League’s refusal or failure to come to terms with the forces of modernization ushered in by the British further pushed it on a trajectory away from the national mainstream."

"Indian Marxists, notwithstanding their claims to originality, have always been faithful followers of Western intellectual trends, often long after these were dated in the west. Thus, well after Western academics expounded upon European feudalism, Indian Marxists continue to search for point-by-point parallels between post-Gupta India and the West. Similarly the once-in-vogue notion of 'imagined' communities continues to bewitch our Marxist brethren who remain committed to fitting the history of the subcontinent to this maxim. Only the western rethinking on old patriotisms underpinning the new nationalisms has yet to win the allegiance of Indian Marxists."

"The first Bengali with a scientific insight to attack the problems of the language was the poet Rabindranath Tagore; and it is flattering for the votaries of philology, to find in one who is the greatest writer in the language, and a great poet and seer for all time, a keen philologist as well, distinguished alike by an assiduous enquiry into the facts of the language as by a scholarly appreciation of the methods and findings of the modern Western philologist. The work of Rabindranath is in the shape of a few essays (now collected in one volume) on Bengali Phonetics, Bengali Onomatopoetics, and on the Bengali noun, and on other topics, the earliest of which appeared in the early nineties, and some fresh papers appeared only several years ago. These papers may be said to have shown to the Bengali enquiring into the problems of his language the proper lines of approaching them."

"MIA and NIA languages are not, strictly speaking, derived from the language of the Rigveda or from Classical Sanskrit […] these Aryans of the eastern tracts seem to be different from the Midland or Vedic Aryans in many respects―in religious observances, in many practices, in dialect […] these Aryans were distinct from those other Aryans of the West among whom the Vedic culture grew up, distinct in dialect, in religion and in practices... The morphology of Vedic […] retains most faithfully the inflections of primitive Indo-European."

"“Throughout the whole range of Urdu literature in its first phase… the atmosphere of this literature is provokingly un-Indian - it is that of Persia. Early Urdu poets never so much as mention the great physical features of India - its Himalayas, its rivers like the Ganges, the Jamuna, the Sindhu, the Godavari, etc; but of course mountains and streams of Persia, and rivers of Central Asia are always there. Indian flowers, Indian plants are unknown; only Persian flowers and plants which the poet could see only in a garden. There was a deliberate shutting of the eye to everything Indian, to everything not mentioned or treated in Persian poetry… A language and literature which came to base itself upon an ideology which denied on the Indian soil the very existence of India and Indian culture, could not but be met with a challenge from some of the Indian adherents of their national culture; and that challenge was in the form of highly Sanskritized Hindi’.”"

"Political institutions and ideologies are the warty outgrowth of the religious thinking of the man; in a way responsible for the tragedy of mankind. We are slaves to our ideas and beliefs, and we torture ourselves in the hope of achieving something. All our experience, spiritual or otherwise, is the basic cause of our suffering... The body is not interested in anything "you" are interested in; that is the battle that is going on all the time."

"Thought creates frontiers everywhere. That's all it can do. ...it is thought that has created the world; and you draw lines on this planet, "This is my country, that is your country". So how can there be unity between two countries? The very thing that is creating the frontiers and differences cannot be the means to bridge the different viewpoints. It is an exercise in futility."

"We think that thoughts are there inside of us. We think that they are self-generated and spontaneous. What is actually there is what I call a thought-sphere. The thought-sphere is the totality of man's experiences, thoughts, and feelings passed on to us from generation to generation."

"No talent is required to reproduce. Nature has done a tremendous job in creating this extraordinary piece — the body. The body does not want to learn anything from culture. It doesn't want to know anything from us. We are always interested in telling this body how to function. All our experiences, spiritual or otherwise, are the basic cause of our suffering. The body is not interested in your bliss or your ecstasies. It is not interested in your pleasure. It is not in interested in anything that you are interested in. And that is the battle that is going on all the time. But there seems to be no way out."

"Nature is interested in only two things — to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man."

"We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood."

"Whether you are interested in moksha, liberation, freedom, transformation, you name it, you are interested in happiness without one moment of unhappiness, pleasure without pain, it is the same thing. Whether one is here in India or Russia or in America or anywhere, what people want is to have one without the other. But there is no way you can have one without the other. This demand is not in the interest of the survival of this living organism."

"I am not anti-rational, just unrational. You may infer a rational meaning in what I say or do, but it is your doing, not mine."

"You can have the courage to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. That any fool can do, but the courage to be on your own, to stand on your two solid feet, is something which cannot be given by somebody. You cannot free yourself of that burden by trying to develop that courage. If you are freed from the entire burden of the entire past of mankind, then what is left there is the courage."

"You know the story of 'Alice in Wonderland'. The red queen has to run faster and faster to keep still where she is. That is exactly what you are all doing. running faster and faster. But you are not moving anywhere."

"You think when you don't want to do anything. Thinking is a poor alternative to acting. Your thinking is consuming all your energy. Act, don't think!"

"Whatever pursuit you are indulging in, somewhere along the line it has to dawn on you that it is not leading you anywhere. As long as you want something, you will do that. That want has to be very, very clear. What do you want? All the time I ask you the question, "What do you want?" You say, "I want to be at peace with myself." That is an impossible goal for you because everything you are doing to be at peace with yourself is what is destroying the peace that is already there. You have set in motion the movement of thought which is destroying the peace that is there, you see. It is very difficult to understand that all that you are doing is the impediment, is the one thing that is disturbing the harmony, the peace that is already there."

"To be an individual and to be yourself you don't have to do a thing. Culture demands that you should be something other than what you are. What a tremendous amount of energy — the will, the effort — we waste trying to become that! If that energy is released, what is it that we can't do? How simple it would be for every one of us to live in this world!"

"Society or culture or whatever you might want to call it, has created us all solely and wholly for the purpose of maintaining its continuity and status quo."

"I am simply pointing out that at the rate at which we are going the whole genetic engineering technology will end up in the hands of the political system to be used for the complete control and subjugation of man."

"If you are freed from the goal of the "perfect" ,"godly", "truly religious" then that which is natural in man begins to express itself. Your religious and secular culture has placed before you the ideal man or woman, the perfect human being, and then tries to fit everybody into that mold. It is impossible. Nature does not exist at all. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque."

"If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place."

"Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow. It is like lightning and thunder. They occur simultaneously, but sound, travelling slower than light, reaches you later, creating the illusion of two separate events."

"It is the ones who believe in God, who preach peace and talk of love, who have created the human jungle. Compared to man's jungle, nature's jungle is simple and sensible! In nature animals don't kill their own kind. That is part of the beauty of nature. In this regard man is worse than the other animals. The so-called "civilized" man kills for ideals and beliefs, while the animals kill only for survival."

"Our mind (and there are no individual minds — only "mind", which is the accumulation of man's knowledge and experience) has created the notion of the psyche and evolution. Only technology progresses, while we as a race are moving closer to complete and total destruction of the world and ourselves. Everything in man's consciousness is pushing the whole world, which nature has so laboriously created, toward destruction. There has been no qualitative change in man's thinking; we feel about our neighbours just as the frightened caveman felt towards his. The only thing that has changed is our ability to destroy our neighbor and his property."

"There is no such thing as truth. The only thing that is actually there is your "logically" ascertained premise, which you call "truth"."

"I have assumed that the goal, enlightenment, exists. I have had to search and it is the search itself which has been choking me and keeping me out of my natural state. There is no such thing as spiritual or psychological enlightenment because there is no such thing as spirit or psyche. I have been a damn fool all my life, searching for something which does not exist. My search is at an end."

"I have one thing against medical technology. You see, the very desire to understand the human being is to control him — that is why I am not quite in sympathy. The day you control the endocrine glands, you will change the personality of man; you won't need any brainwashing. Brainwashing is a very elaborate process. If nature had been allowed to go on in its own way, everybody would have become a unique flower. Why should there be only roses in this world? What for? A grass flower or a dandelion flower has as much beauty, as much importance in the scheme of things. Why should there be only jasmine flowers, roses, or some other flower? So, the possibility is there of a change taking place which is sudden, not progressive. It has to happen in a very sudden and explosive way to break the whole thing."

"To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a "Natural Man"."

"People call me an enlightened man — I detest that term — they can't find any other word to describe the way I am functioning. At the same time, I point out that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all. I say that because all my life I've searched and wanted to be an enlightened man, and I discovered that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all, and so the question whether a particular person is enlightened or not doesn't arise. I don't give a hoot for a sixth-century-BC Buddha, let alone all the other claimants we have in our midst. They are a bunch of exploiters, thriving on the gullibility of the people. There is no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear and not God. I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize. That's the realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize."

"My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody."

"It is the body that is immortal. It is living from moment to moment. As a human body it is an extraordinary piece of creation. But as a human being he is rotten because of the culture."

"It [thought] is a mechanical thing and can solve only mechanical problems. But you want to use it to understand something living; that is the problem. It is not intended for that. Human problems are something living. You cannot use thinking to solve those problems."

"A guru is one who tells you to throw away all the crutches that we have been made to believe are essential for our survival. He would ask you to walk, and he would say that if you fall, you will arise and walk."

"Food, clothing and shelter — these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception."

"The plain fact is that if you don't have a problem, you create one. If you don't have a problem you don't feel that you are living."

"The fact is that we don't want to be free. What is responsible for our problems is the fear of losing what we have and what we know. All these therapies, all these techniques, religious or otherwise, are only perpetuating the agony of man."

"Pfizer and Moderna are the best vaccines. They have been out since Dec-2020. Why don't we have them in India yet? Do we not deserve the best? Don't we buy defense equipment from abroad? Is this not a war like situation? Why does the vaccine have to be made here and only here?"

"That’s what human relationships are about – selective sharing and hiding of information to the point of crazy confusion."

"Practical enough to leave the people who do the funny stuff alone."

"It is amazing how the brain will connect one thought to another until it gets to where it wants to be."

"When you screw up someone’s life, the least you can do is leave the person alone."