academics-from-india

"Historians like Sarkar, Dr Romesh Chandra Majumdar, Vishwanath Kashinath Rajwade, Raghubir Singh, Hemchandra Raychaudhuri, Kashi Prasad Jayaswal, Devadatta Ramakrishna Bhandarkar, Govind Sakharam Sardesai and several contemporaries of theirs, many of whom shone in brilliance even under colonial rule, are in my view exemplars of what fact-based, dispassionate historians are."

"Shortly before the foreign invasions began from the 11th century onwards, the Hindu body politique was fast losing the two invaluable qualities of colonisation and proselytisation so indispensable for the self-preservation and continuance of a race or people and its culture. On the other hand, the new foreign invaders who were of Muslim religion were aggressive proselytisers, with the consequence that instead of Muslims being converted to Hinduism, many Hindus became Muhammadans. Hindu Society was now on its trial. Nevertheless, it wonderfully began to tide over this crisis by reclaiming most of the Hindus that were being converted to Muhammadanism. Śud'dhi movement in India began, not recently with the Arya Samajists re-converting the Muhammadan Malkana Rajputs, but in the tenth century."

"After finishing this Vedic study I had no idea what to do with it. Fortunately, through a personal friend I came into contact with M.P. Pandit, the secretary of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. I had long admired Pandit’s many books on the Vedas, Tantra, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Pandit was perhaps the foremost scholar of Indian spirituality, not from an academic view but from a real understanding and inner experience that spanned the entire tradition. If anyone could appreciate what I was doing, it was he. I first visited Pandit in San Francisco in the summer of 1979. I brought my writings on the Vedas and Upanishads and explained my approach to him. What I received from him in return went far beyond my expectations. Pandit was a calm and concentrated person, with a penetrating vision. He listened carefully before making any comments. Instead of trying to influence me he was quite receptive and open to what I was attempting. I told him that I was not an academic but doing the work from an inner motivation and an intuitive view. He said that it was better that I was not an academic because I would not repeat their same old mistakes and could gain a fresh view of the subject. Pandit strongly encouraged me to continue my work, offering his full support. He called my Vedic work my "Divine mission," that I should follow out. He said both to my surprise and my honor that he would get my writings published in 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."

"“It is beyond even the imagination of Hindus that one community in the same country will have to prepare itself for a violent clash with another community. Muslims have all along misused this deep-rooted mental outlook of Hindus. Not only have they increasingly escalated their intransigent demands, they have also coloured it with the communal nature of their faith. Propaganda based on falsehood has been the foundation of their fight. Owing to all these reasons, they have attained success far beyond even their own expectations."

"“I utter these words, I have offered these suggestions from a profound sense of duty towards Dharma. The Hindu society and culture is now faced with grave danger. In these tumultuous times, all Hindus must organize themselves being inspired by the same sense of existential duty and make provisions for their self-defence. At the present time, Muslim leaders have embarked on a dangerous spree of making incendiary speeches and writings. They are repeatedly throwing challenges to the Hindu community in a spirit of heightened, unprovoked aggression. Not a single leader of the Muslim League has issued even a whimper of condemnation against the genocide of Hindus in Bengal. It appears that they are delighted at this Hindu genocide. I am not calling for unleashing aggression against Muslims where they are in a minority. On the contrary, wherever Hindus are in a majority, the rights and peaceful existence of Muslims has been guaranteed. However, the exact opposite is true in places where Muslims are in a majority: the lives, property, and religious practices of Hindus have become endangered. It is precisely the lack of powerful organization and unity of Hindus that is at the root of this Hindu societal weakness and is what has emboldened Muslim obduracy."

"The author does not claim for the period from Parikshit to Bimbisara the same degree of authenticity as for the age of the Mauryas , the Satavahanas and the Guptas . The absence of trustworthy contemporary dynastic records makes it preposterous to put forward such a proposition. In regard to the early period it has been his principal endeavour to show that the huge fabric of sacerdotal and rhapsodic legends is not based solely on the mythical fancy of mendacious priests and story- telling Diaskeuasts ; that bardic tales sometimes conceal kernels of sober facts..."

"“For numerous years, Hindus have invested tremendous efforts at fostering Hindu-Muslim unity with a spirit of magnanimity. At every turn, Hindus have come forward on their initiative to cooperate with Muslims and have yielded to their demands. However, when I increasingly noticed that the tolerant spirit of the Hindu society has been mistaken for its weakness, it has filled me with immense sadness. Each time the Hindu society has extended its cooperative hand, a corresponding measure of response has not emanated from the Muslim society. I am uttering these words after a lifetime of deep contemplation. Till the time the Hindu society does not strengthen its own condition and plight, there will be no solution for the Hindu-Muslim problem."

"Historians like Sarkar, Dr Romesh Chandra Majumdar, Vishwanath Kashinath Rajwade, Raghubir Singh, Hemchandra Raychaudhuri, Kashi Prasad Jayaswal, Devadatta Ramakrishna Bhandarkar, Govind Sakharam Sardesai and several contemporaries of theirs, many of whom shone in brilliance even under colonial rule, are in my view exemplars of what fact-based, dispassionate historians are."

"“Hindus must unfailingly, selflessly, and freely extend every support to fellow Hindus—whether the support is asked or unasked. Only Hindus can support Hindus. No other community in India cares for the welfare of Hindus. Barbaric aggression, false and communal political propaganda, attempts to hasten the sunset of the Darshana of Bharatavarsha—Hindus should show no leniency against any or all such attempts, no matter how powerful they are. In addition, Hindus must safeguard against the decline in their population. If all this is not done, Hindus won’t have a future in their own homeland. Negligence is an invitation to annihilation. Therefore, laziness and inertia are not options. In this noble endeavour, valour must shine with brilliance, which in turn must inspire other Hindus. No Muslim who tries to cause trouble in the peaceful coexistence of Hindus must be tolerated."

"One of the lessons I’ve learned during the pandemic…the mistake I saw over and over again was this desire to use science communications to manipulate the public, to vastly underestimate the capacity of the public to understand nuance, and oversimplify and demonize who disagreed with the public health message as if they were somehow the enemy. I think all of those things breed distrust, it miseducates the public about what science is learning and discovering and what it is not learning and discovering, and if it impinges on people’s lives in ways that end up hurting them (like their children can’t go to school for years and they’re depressed or they’re addicted to opioids after their doctors and everyone are telling them that these things can’t get your addicted, they’re fired from their job on the premise COVID stops you from spreading COVID). All of these things are the fruits of a paradigm that views scientific communication as something which ought to lord over you rather than something which helps you decide how to make good decisions about your life. Essentially, we created a class of unclean people as a matter of public policy. You can understand why people who went through that would say, 'Given that the vaccine didn't turn out to stop you from getting and spreading COVID, why should I trust you on anything else?' That, that's where we currently are. [T]he problem here is that the scientific community embraced an ethical norm about unity of messaging and then enforced it on fellow scientists. And then it cooperated with the Biden administration to put in place a censorship regime that made it impossible even for legitimate conversations [e.g., about vaccine injuries] to happen. There was essentially a groupthink at scale. It was impossible to organize a panel with the kind of diversity of opinion that was needed. There were [a] million or more — I know this from the set of people who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, tens of thousands of scientists and doctors who disagreed [with the lockdowns], but they were afraid to stick their head up for fear of getting chopped off. It's not an accident that Stanford didn't allow a scientific panel with my point of view about the efficacy of lockdowns until 2024."

"It’s very easy, for instance, to cure Alzheimer’s in mice. But those things don’t translate to humans."

"The First Amendment still doesn’t apply in practice... Free speech rights exist right now only because the administration has chosen to allow them, not because the First Amendment is protecting us. ... Why would I be put on a blacklist by Twitter?... Why would a private company, whose money is made by people communicating with each other, decide to put me on a blacklist? It turns out the answer is the government forced them to do it.... Science depends on free speech... If we silence debate, we silence discovery. And if the First Amendment cannot be enforced, then it is still a dead letter.... Right now, free speech in America depends on who is in power... That’s a perilous place to be."

"“It is clear to plain sight that all these brutalities are not accidental. If the Hindu society is serious about its own honour and self-respect, it needs to prepare a powerful counter against such actions. Unfortunately, over the last few decades, Hindus have become associated only as a people endowed with Dharma, truth, non-violence, and peace-loving people. The spirit of Kshatra has completely vanished from the mental space of Hindus."

"“There are two urgent and important duties before the Hindu leaders of our society: the first duty is towards their Matrubhoomi; the second is towards their Dharma, culture, and their brethren. The immediate need of the hour is the fact that the Hindu society should organize itself as an unified whole. No group or section of the Hindu society is exempt from this duty. This calls for selfless service on the part of the last Hindu, done in a spirit of devotion to the Matrubhoomi. It is essential to forget distinctions of Jati and Varna. All Hindus must symbolize the ideal of Hindutva in their own selves and come forward for the protection of their eternal Hindu culture even if it means sacrificing their lives."

"This censorship activity killed people… The reality is that the First Amendment, if it had been actually in place during the pandemic, would have saved lives. It would have led to less damage, less destruction, fewer people dead."

"I recall an incident told by a senior Shankaracharya Swamiji, a shishya of Karapatri Swamiji Maharaj, that Pandit Madan Mohan Malviyaji, the founder of Banaras Hindu University, was terminally ill and was getting treated on the university campus, which is outside of the aforementioned geography of Kashi. He was once questioned by a Vedic scholar. ‘Why isn’t he spending his final days within the sacred area?’ asked the scholar. ‘Doesn’t he have shraddha (faith) that by giving up [his] body there one attains mukti (liberation)?’ Malviyaji replied that he intentionally avoided staying in Kashi. He was not seeking liberation in that birth as his vision was to establish a large Hindu gurukul where students were grounded in ancient practices that were also relevant in the present. But this dream ended up as something else as the first graduate batch from BHU were the children of ‘Macaulay’. Malviyaji wished for another birth to rectify this. He felt that if he died in Kashi, he might miss that opportunity. Such was his conviction in the efficacy of mukti in Kashi, which is also common to all practicing Hindus."

"“In the present situation, there is actually no need to even seek the reasons for the aforementioned organization and unification of Hindus. The most important reason is clearly evident—the declared aims and goals of Muslim religious and political organisations and their actions across the nation. The poisonous speeches of Muslim leaders; the kind of focused and deliberate pamphleteering done by anonymous Muslim organisations; the dangerous political and religious overtones taken by the Muslim League; the genocide of Hindus in Calcutta; the incessant flood of messages from East Pakistan calling Muslims to wage war against Hindus across the country and unleash large scale riots; forcible conversions of Hindus to Islam; abducting, raping and converting Hindu women; mercilessly slaughtering innocent Hindu infants; destroying temples; looting Hindu shops—this has been the continuous story over the last few months. It is imperative that immediate steps need to be taken by Hindus to halt and prevent such atrocities."

"Lastly, preliminary results by geoscientists A. Chatterjee and J.S. Ray point to a ‘paleo channel present beneath the modern Ghaggar-alluvium along a 120 km trail’ which was active before 4000 BCE and whose sand deposits are ‘akin to those of the sediment carried by higher Himalayan born Sutlej River and very different from the Siwalik derived Ghaggar sediments’. If confirmed, these findings would contradict the view that the river was purely rain-fed throughout the Holocene."

"The name Varuna is not found outside India. Its equation with Greek Ouranos, though accepted by philologists, must be rejected on account of two differences, the quality of the second vowel and the place of the accent. The second vowel in Varuna is U and it is a in ouranos. The former word is accented on the first syllable and the latter on the final syllable, though accenting it on the syllable third from the end would not have militated against the special law about the place of the accent in the Greek language. Either discrepancy would not have by itself gone against the equation but their combination makes it extremely difficult to connect Varuna and Ouranos .... Varuna appears to be a purely Indo-Aryan word, formed in the same way as karuna, taruna, dharuna, etc."

"These beings have also been called 'not divine' (a-deva) and 'not human' (a-miin~a), which shows that they were something between men and gods, i.e., they were demons."

"But K. Chattopadhyaya'" has penetratingly corrected Parpola's authorities: King Sudas has been called in the Rgveda Paijavana, Yaska in a Nirukta passage (II.24) '" paijavanalt pijava- nasya putrah, says that Pijavana was the name of Sudas's father. King Divodasa is also mentioned as the ancestor of Sudas. Professors Macdonell and Keith'" incline towards the view that Divodasa was the grandfather of Sudas, and Pijavana his father. Their reasons for this supposition fail to convince me. R.V. VII. 18.22 mentions Paijavana Sudas as the ruiptr of Devavant: Devavant seems to be used here for Divodasa.!" ruiptub probably means "of the son", for "son" is the usual meaning of the word naptr or napiu in the Rgveda, But even if the later meaning of "grandson" be put on the word, as Sayana has done (devavato riijiio naptub pautrasya) , how will Professors Macdonell and Keith explain the concluding verse of the hymn [25]: imam , , naro marutab sascatanu divodasam, nd pitaram sudasab avis/ana paijavanasya ketam dunasatn ksatram ajdram duvoyu, where Divodasa is explicitly calledthe father , (pita) of Sudas? This passage clearly establishes that Divodasa was the father and not the grandfather of Sudas. As regards Pijavana he may have been the same person as Divodasa as Geldner'" supposes, or may have been some remote ancestor."

"Who were the progenitors [of Vedic culture], and wherefrom do they emerge in our historical view? Questions like these have been a bewildering source of controversy. . . . Some Indian scholars . . . strongly maintain that the Aryans were autochthons of the land" (Tripathi 1967, 26);"

"Continuity of hieratic or bardic tradition preserves many old forms and in religious texts antique forms are generally preferred. ... The chief ground for taking the Rgveda-Samhita as the earliest Vedic. text is the archaic character of its language as compared with much of the remaining Vedic literature. Another ground for this conclusion is the fact that a large number of verses which are in their proper contexts in the Hymns of the Rgveda are found utilised in the mantra collections of the other Vedas, from which one may infer that they were borrowed from the Rgveda-Samhita. Both these grounds make the comparative antiquity of-large portions of the Rgveda-Samhita almost certain. But they do not entitle us to assume that the whole of the Rgveda- Samhita is older than the other Vedic texts .... Scholars have always recognised that this Samhita has older and later portions...."

"It is not true that mandalas I (or large portions of it), VIII and particularly X of the Rgveda-Samhita are the only later additions. There are enough indications to show that additions were made even in "the family books", the original nucleus of the Samhita. If we make a careful study of the arrangement of these "family books", ... the fol- lowing scheme seems to have been followed by the original redactors: - 1. the family groups were arranged according to the decreasing number of the hymns in each of these books; 2. within each family group the Agni hymns came first, then the Indra hymns and then the Visvadeva hymns (if there were any) and after them hymns to the other deities in due order; and . 3. within each devatii sub-group, the hymns were ar- ranged according to the diminishing number of stanzas contained in them."

"I have said above that the chief ground for placing the greater portion of the Rgveda-Samhita in a very early period is the archaic character of its language. But the Samhita is not lacking in late linguistic features as well. It well known that the word usura means "a good spirit", "a god" or "God" in the Rgveda-Samhiui as its cognate ahura means in the Avesta, and that in the later Vedic literature and in classical Sanskrit the word has undergone semantic deterioration, acquiring the sense of "demon"."

"... Consequently we can safely infer that wherever the general scheme has been disturbed we have reasonable grounds for suspecting interpolations .... To give an ins- tance, the original Indra collection of the III Mandala was . hymns 30-50, the first hymn (30) containing 22 verses, and the last (50) only 5; the three supplementary Indra hymns (51-53), having respectively 12, 8 and 24 verses, seem to have been added in two instalments, hymn 53 (24 verses) having been added some time after hymns 51 (12 verses) and 52 (8 verses) had been appended to the original Indra collection. There are many more such additions, in some cases of entire groups of hymns. Now these later additions are not necessarily all later compositions. They may have been added later, because they were discovered later. But some of them certainly can be compositions of later times. Then there are six verses in the accepted text of the Rgveda-Samhita, 1.99.1, VII.59.12, X.121,1O, X.190.1-3, whose Pada-Piitha is wanting. The only inference that we can make from this fact is that these verses did not form part of the Rgveda-Samhiui when Sakalya compiled its Pada-Piuha. Consequently they have been added even so late as after the time of Sakalya. In this case too it is not possible to say that they were all composed after Sakalya, particularly when VII.50.12 and X.121.10 are found in the various Yajurveda-Samhitas. But we can presume this for X.190.1-3, which bear on their very face the impression of lateness. We do not find these three cosmogonic verses, showing knowledge of the Kalpa theory, till the very late Taittiriya Aranyaka (X.1.13), a text which shows know- ledge of Smrtis (1.2.1) ...."

"I have always felt that the idea underlying this theory has a basis other than the purely scientific or historical one."

"Consequently the hymns in which these passages occur should be assigned to the period of the later Vedic literature. Other passages that similarly show late linguis- tic characteristics must also be considered as of late date. But the converse of this proposition is not necessarily true. It is possible that even in later ages unbroken family traditions enabled the priestly bards to compose hymns in antique form. In fact, there are several indications to show that this actually happened. Consequently, there must be some hymns in the Rgveda-Samhiui which, though early in form, are actually late in date.... The different attempts that have been made so far for the detailed chronological stratification of the Rgveda-Samhiui by Arnold, Belvalker, Weist and others have either failed or met with only partial success, for failing, among other reasons, to re- cognise that poems antique in form may yet be late in date. I therefore apply the criterion of thought for determining the early and the late passages in this text."

"V.M. Apte strikes a neutral note: "Whether fetishism is to be read into a reference to an image of Indra and whether the worship of idols or images of gods was known to the Rigveda, are points on which no certain conclusions can be reached. ""

"The three-fold nature of Agni is a favourite topic with RV poets: his heads, bodies, stations, splendours and births are each three-fold. He is the earliest representative of the famous Indian trinity... ""

"The milch-cow (Dhenu) is contrasted with the bull, and there are special terms for cows, oxens and calves of different ages, for cows barren or otherwise and in various stages of growth and motherhood, as well as for a cow with a calf substituted for one of her own which had died (Apte in Majumdar 1951: 460)"

"Clothes were generally woven of sheepís wool ... The dress in this period seems to have consisted of three garments ñ an under-garment (nivi), a garment proper (Vasas) and an over-garment (Adhi-vasas), like a mantle or cloak. The Satapatha Brahmana describes the set of sacrificial garments as consisting of silk under-garment (Tarpya), a garment of undyed wool, an over-garment and a turban (Ushnisa). A royal head-gear or turban is worn at the Rajasuya and Vajapeya ceremonies by the king. The turban of the Vratya is referred to. The sandal or shoe was made of boar-skin ... Skins were used as clothing."

"The scene of traditional history opens in India [and it comprises] the whole of Northern India extending in the east upto Orissa... [There is a] total absence of extraterritorial memory in the Rig Veda... It really cannot be proved that the Vedic Aryans retained any memory of their extra-Indian associations."

"The words Panik or Vanik, Panya and Vipani, found in Sanskrit, suggest that the Panis were merchants par excellence of the Rigvedic age [even though] greedy like the wolf, niggardly, of cruel speech."

"Geologists have long identified ‘a wide dry channel coming south from the spot near Ropar where the Satluj abruptly swings westward’; that palaeochannel meets the Ghaggar near Shatrana, some 60 km south of Patiala, close to the point where the Sarsuti also joins the Ghaggar. It roughly follows the bed of the seasonal Patialewali. Remarkably, notes Valdiya, ‘at the point of confluence, the Ghaggar channel suddenly becomes 6-8 km wide—and remains unusually wide until it loses itself in the sand dunes of the Thar desert, west of Anupgarh’. This sudden broadening of the Ghaggar is the unmistakable sign that it once received some of the Sutlej’s waters at this point."

"They alone contain something like a continuous historical narrative, and it is absurd to suppose that the elaborate royal genealogies were all merely figments of imagination or a tissue of falsehoods."

"That age [of the Rigveda] is not known with even an approximate degree of certainty."

"We may join to their statements Pusalker's comment on the claims staked for several potteries that they belong to the supposed Vedic Aryan invaders: "There is... no positive evidence to connect the Vedic Aryans with the excavated Cultures subsequent to those of the Indus Valley... So far archaeological excavation has yielded nothing of the nature of sacrificial implements or other ritual paraphernalia that can definitely be called Aryan and associated with the Vedic Aryans, though it must be admitted that the Painted Grey Ware culture has been found at all excavated sites connected with the Bharata War. ""

"Post-cremation burials have been discovered ... distributed among strata of all periods [at Mohenjo Daro.]"

"It is absurd to suppose that the elaborate royal genealogies were all merely figments of imagination or a tissue of falsehoods."

"The noted sanskritist Aklujkar (Professor at British Columbia, Canada) does not consider the mainstream chronology incontestable and writes “only relative chronology has been well argued for”(1996: 66)."

"There are so many antecedents alongside the usual postcolonial triad of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak. Important as they are, we have to remember figures like Frantz Fanon, Aime Césaire."

"I am at the moment a Fellow in the History department at a famous US University. And there are historians of colonialism who know more about this stuff than I could know in two lifetimes. But all through this year, the thing that have fell most strongly and have said, to general embarrassment, is that it is almost as if we didn't exist...."

"A press report on a recent anthropological survey led by Kumar Suresh Singh explains: “English anthropologists contended that the upper castes of India belonged to the Caucasian race and the rest drew their origin from Australoid types. The survey has revealed this to be a myth. ‘Biologically and linguistically, we are very mixed’, says Suresh Singh (…) The report says that the people of India have more genes in common, and also share a large number of morphological traits. ‘There is much greater homogenization in terms of morphological and genetic traits at the regional level’, says the report. For example, the Brahmins of Tamil Nadu (esp. Iyengars) share more traits with non-Brahmins in the state than with fellow Brahmins in western or northern India. (…) The sons-of-the-soil theory also stands demolished. The Anthropological Survey of India has found no community in India that can’t remember having migrated from some other part of the country.”"

"The oldest works now available in Dravidian languages were obviously written long after their contact with Aryan culture , and can afford no clear guidance to the pre- Aryan state of Dravidian culture."

"Literature is in other countries the bed-rock of history, in India it is often a snare."

"However it might be ... [regarding the original homeland], both those who advocate the theory that the Aryans came from outside India . . . and those who dispute the foreign theory and believe the Aryans to be autochthons are of the same opinion [that Punjab was the abode of the Rgveda" (Sastri and Srinivasat Chari 1971, 2; )"

"Quite a few coins clearly show a yagnakunda. That is mostly the case with the Pandyas’ coins, some of which also portray a yubastambha to which a horse is tied as part of the ashvamedha sacrifice. As the numismatist R. Krishnamurthy puts it, “The importance of Pandya coins of Vedic sacrifice series lies in the fact that these coins corroborate what we know from Sangam literature about the performance of Vedic sacrifices by a Pandya king of this age.”"

"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."