non-fiction-authors-from-india

"The PHFI appears to have a conflict of interest in advising the government of India and directing the immunization programme."

"PHFI is a private society cleverly disguised as a public-private partnership since some of the people in the governing body are or have been senior civil servants or public servants."

"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."

"India has a rule of law and this decision should have been taken when Supreme Court had first upheld the death sentence. It is unfortunate that such decisions become subject to electoral politics."

"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.”"

"[I]n religious matters, the present-day Hindus are the descendants of the Indus valley people."

"Whether the Aryans should be regarded as the authors of the Painted Grey Ware or not has been a matter of dispute. While most Indian scholars have held that they were, others have doubted it. It is not necessary to reconsider the matter here in detail, and it would suffice to emphasize that the geographical horizon of the later Aryans is cotenninous with that of the Ware; there is also a remarkable chronological proximity between the dates of the beginning of the Ware and the later Vedic age, which no critical scholar would place before the start of the first millennium B.C. There can, therefore, be no reasonable doubt in ascribing the Ware to the later Aryans."

"[Ghosh is critiqued for his] utter subjugation to the framework of writing offered by Wheeler... [and for his] remarkable unwillingness to break out of the frame of thought which controlled research on ancient India in the pre-independent India period.... [He chose to] abide by the dictates of colonial Indology without showing any inclination to break out of their shackles."

"In view of Stein’s statement which had led us to believe that nothing very ancient would be found in the region, it was a great thrill for us when even on the first and second days of our exploration we found sites with unmistakable affinities with the culture of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. And a few subsequent days’ work convinced us that the Sarasvatī valley had been really a commingling of many rivers, not only geographically, but culturally... ‘the valleys of the Sarasvatī and the Drishadvatī must be regarded as very rich indeed in archaeological remains’."

"In India the ... true horse is reported from the Neolithic levels at Kodekal [dist. Gulbarga of Karnataka] and Hallur [dist. Raichur of Karnataka] and the late Harappa levels at Mohenjo-daro (Sewell and Guha, 1931) and Ropar and at Harappa, Lothal and numerous other sites. … Recently bones of Equus caballus have also been reported from the proto-Harappa site of Malvan in Gujarat."

"Hindutva is the single Sanskrit word that attempts to capture the instinctive nature of Bharatiya nationalism that Savarkar tried to define analytically and Ambedkar to articulate emotionally. ... Hindutva is nothing less or nothing more than feeling like a Hindu. ... Hindutva is a philosophy that can guide Bharat in this civilizational battle, a battle which she inherited through the misguided policies of our successive governments."

"Dharma is as fundamental to our existence as its converse in the physical world, the Second Law of Thermodynamics which governs the progression of things from order to randomness. Like the Second Law there will be many definitions of Dharma."

"It is critical to note that in a nation-state the people take their cue from the Constitution whereas in a civilizational state the Constitution flows from the nature of the people. In the latter, the Constitution is an outcome of national identity and not the rationale for it."

"It was our dream to get Homi Bhabha, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the Afro-American studies department, where Mr. Bhabha will begin teaching in the spring. Reaction in the English department, where Mr. Bhabha will be spending the bulk of his time, was just as enthusiastic. He's manifestly one of the most distinguished cultural theorists of the postcolonial and diasporic experience in the world, said Lawrence Buell, the department chairman. Elsewhere, however, news of the appointment, which was first announced a year ago, provoked less jubilation than disbelief. When I heard that, I was dismayed, said Marjorie Perloff, an emeritus professor of English at Stanford University. For Harvard to be thrilled to be hiring Homi Bhabha -- he doesn't have anything to say.... One could finally argue that there is no there there, beyond the neologisms and latinate buzzwords, said Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University. Most of the time I don't know what he's talking about."

"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, Aimé Césaire."

"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to `normalize’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."

"Nasîru’d-Dîn’s leading disciple, Syed Muhammad Husainî Banda Nawãz Gesûdarãz (1321-1422 A.D.), went to Gulbarga for helping the contemporary Bahmani sultan in consolidating Islamic power in the Deccan."

"An anecdote relating to Shaikh Jalalu’d-Din’s stay in Deva Mahal reads like other stock-in-trade stories and fairytales. It was related by such an authority as Gisu Daraz. According to him Shaikh Jalalu’d-Din stayed at Pandua in the house of a flower vendor. On the day of his arrival, he found each of the house members crying. On enquiry he was told there was a demon in the temple who daily ate a young man. It was the king’s duty to provide the demon with his daily food. On that day it was the turn of the young son in the family. The Shaikh requested them to send him in place of their son but they refused to accept the offer for fear of the king. The Shaikh, then followed the young man to the temple and killed the demon with a single blow from his staff. When the king accompanied by his retinue reached the temple to worship the demon they were amazed to find the demon killed and an old man dressed in black with his head covered with a blanket. The Shaikh invited them to see the fate with their god. The sight of their vanquished idol prompted them to accept Islam."

"With this, the discussion sought to be undertaken in this book comes to an end. This much is clear—by the end of 1924, Bharat’s indigeneity may have found a way, although not ideal, to live with a dual consciousness, namely the Bharatiya and the European. However, it was once again confronted with an earlier form of coloniality, namely Middle Eastern, which had managed to revive, reinvent and organise itself after the decline of the Mughal empire and was once again on the march. This time around, Bharat was ill-prepared to deal with this challenge owing to its dual consciousness, which severely limited its ability to call a spade a spade. Consequently, Bharat had embarked on the fatal path of accommodation and compromise under the burden of ‘values’ inherited from the Christian European coloniser, which muddled its sense of self, in the process leaving it woefully ill- equipped to weather the storm, which was no more brewing but had already announced its bloody arrival—or, more accurately, re-arrival—by the end of 1924."

"" ..“caste” and “tribe” as we understand them today, are ethnocentric categories created by the Christian European coloniser based on ethnographies of Bharat’s society and social organisation prepared by Christian missionaries.." - Indian Express, January 15, 2024"

"Ever since British author and columnist Martin Jacques proposed about a decade ago that China was a ‘civilisation-state’ which Europe could not relate to given the latter’s nation-state-based worldview, similar assertions have been made about Bharat being a civilisation-state. In 2014, Dr. Koenraad Elst wrote a piece on his blog titled ‘India as a civilisation-state’ wherein, citing Zhang Weiwei’s book The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State, he contended that Bharat too must make a similar case for itself. Dr. Elst’s position was based on his view that Bharat’s ‘self-understanding’ supported its case of being or becoming a civilisation-state. Subsequently, this position has been echoed by others, including the current National Security Advisor Shri Ajit Doval. In my opinion, such a position must be examined and made good from both a conceptual and practical perspective if the purpose is to give effect to that position at the level of law and policymaking, failing which, it would be reduced to just another fashionable buzzword or a mere talking point."

"That said, merely because Bharat is a living civilisation in the realm of society, it does not translate to Bharat being a civilisation-state. In other words, a State that presides over a civilisation is not a civilisation-state; instead, a State that is conscious of the civilisational character of its society and structures itself on civilisational lines is a civilisation-state. Therefore, one needs to go beyond the name Bharat to understand if the manner in which the Indian State has been structured and functions, is alive to the fact that the society it presides over is a federal civilisation, and not a nation in the European sense. Specifically, for the Indian State to be treated as an Indic civilisation-state, we would need to examine whether the State has been built on the fundamental building blocks of this civilisation, and whether its political and social infrastructure viewed through the prism of its Constitution is designed to replace the colonial consciousness with Indic consciousness."

"To paraphrase writer and philosopher George Santayana, those who do not learn from history are doomed, and dare I say, cursed and condemned to repeat it."

"Hindutva really means, as understood by its advocates, conformity to the idea that India has primarily been a Hindu rashtra. It is not a religious philosophy or a social reform movement. It is a political philosophy based on cultural chauvinism, which insists that the non-Hindus of India accept their place as "minorities", whose safety and security will depend on their ability to earn the "goodwill of the majority". At the heart of the Hindutva ideology is the idea that the good of a majority should also be seen as the good for any minority, and that any assertion of minority rights is essentially a threat and a challenge to the political authority of the majority. Such minorities, therefore, are seen by the Hindutva advocates as anti-national and anti-social. Besides, any attempt by a minority to swell their numbers is seen by the Hindutva votaries as aggression. Hence, conversion to Christianity or a Hindu girl’s marriage to a Muslim or a Christian are seen as undesirable and provocative acts."

"Hindutva’s organisational apparatus is the oldest, the most continuous, and certainly the most multifarious political formation in the world devoted to the service of mobilising hatred."

"I want to bring out in drawings what my ancestors did in sculpture in the temples of Southeast Asia."

"She lived the kind of elite Indian life that could have only taken place in the years between the two World Wars, when the highest echelons of Indian society could simultaneously keep one foot firmly planted in the country of their birth, but another just as firmly, in the broader international networks of the British empire."

"Moorthy Muthuswamy, a US-based nuclear physicist and author, brought to the notice of USCIRF the ‘data on the origin of religious conflicts in India’ and also ‘verifiable data to the attention of USCIRF that points to Christian institutions in India practicing religious apartheid on majority that are in violation of Article 23 and Article 26 of Universal Declaration of Human rights’. 41 He found that the 2006 report ignored the data provided by him."

"Our battle is not against . . . symptoms of sins such as poverty and disease. It is directed against Lucifer and innumerable demons which fight day and night in order to drag the human souls into an eternity without Christ... Viewing the effects of pagan religions on India, I realised that the masses of India are starving because they are slaves to sin. The battle against hunger and poverty is really a spiritual battle, not a physical or social one as secularists would have us believe. The only weapon that will ever effectively win the war against disease, hunger, injustice and poverty in Asia is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The key factor—and the most neglected—in understanding India’s hunger problem is the Hindu belief system and its effect on food production. Most people know of the ‘sacred cows’ that roam free, eating tons of grain while nearby people starve. But a lesser-known and more sinister culprit is another animal protected by religious belief – the rat . . . The devastating effects of the rat in India should make it an object of scorn. Instead, because of the spiritual blindness of the people, the rat is protected. Mature Christians realize the Bible teaches there are only two religions in the world. There is the worship of the one true God, and there is a false system of demonic alternative invented in ancient Iran. From there, Persian armies and priests spread their faith to India, where it took root. Hindu missionaries, in turn, spread it throughout the rest of Asia. Animism, Buddhism and all other Asian religions have common heritage in this one religious system."

"When the data and events point to the Hindus being at the receiving hands of Christians/Muslims, USCIRF filters out relevant details to portray the events in a way it likes."

"The satyagraha was a triumph of the progressive forces, a spontaneous humanistic upsurge, a great wave of social resurgence and a whirlwind that sounded the final warning to the perverse and obstinate orthodoxy all over India to voluntarily put an end to its age-long repression. . . . Vaikhom was the biggest and longest mass movement ever organized in India for social freedom and members of all communities promptly responded to the appeal . . . to participate in it."

"The creation of India and Pakistan were pyrrhic victories for their denizens because the political, socioeconomic, psychological, and culture havoc wreaked by that momentous event is reflected in those pogroms, ethnic cleansing, proliferation of nuclear weapons, poverty, and riots that continue to cause seismic tremors in the Indian subcontinent."

"In Kashmir, rights relating to life, liberty, dignity of the people, and freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution, embodied in the fundamental covenants and enforceable by courts of law, have been gravely violated."

"The increasing communalization of Indian politics is a juggernaut that annihilates the myth of secularism in India."

"Among those who stayed on is Sanjay Tickoo who heads the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti (Committee for the Kashmiri Pandits’ Struggle). He had experienced the same threats as the Pandits who left. Yet, though admitting ‘intimidation and violence’ directed at Pandits and four massacres since 1990, he rejects as ‘propaganda’ stories of genocide or mass murder that Pandit organizations outside the Valley have circulated."

"But all that came with a heavy personal price. The more I identified with the 'Revolution' of the 'oppressed', the more unbearably negative I became as a person."

"All that energy and enthusiasm that went into my contribution as a 'social activist' and in the cause of the 'Revolution' paid me well in material terms, however, though I have to say that this wasn't the only or even major reason why I was in the business of championing the 'Revolution' in the first place. I won generous scholarships to go abroad to do a Ph.D. and then two post-doctoral projects to study various aspects of 'marginalised groups' in India. I was invited to attend conferences in over two dozen countries to pontificate on the same subjects. I was appointed as a full professor in an Indian university and was paid handsomely for the articles and books that I continued to churn out, machine-like, all about the 'oppressed'. In addition, I was assigned projects by several NGOs to study the 'oppressed', for which I was well rewarded financially. Although I have to say that I did not quite intend this to begin with, writing and conferencing about the 'oppressed' soon turned into a lucrative source of livelihood for me. I was actually, and quite literally, living off the misery of the 'oppressed', although I did not fully realise it then."

"There was nothing at all good in Hindu traditions or in America or in Capitalist Modernity, for instance, I convinced myself, for I was hooked onto the 'progressive' and 'radical' rhetoric that 'upper' caste Hindus in general (including most of my own family!) and almost every single American was complicit in perpetuating 'oppression'."

"Negativism, then, was a defining feature of being 'progressive', and that's what I began to revel in. But such negativism was almost entirely one-sided in 'activist' circles, for to be counted as a 'real' 'social activist' it was simply unthinkable that the 'oppressed' could be faulted for almost anything at all. For a 'social activist' to even mention, leave alone condemn, the foibles of the 'oppressed communities'--gender injustice or caste rivalries among Dalits or the obscurantism and misogyny preached in many Muslim madrasas or the terror attacks and killings of innocents by Naxalites and radical Islamists--was tantamount to nothing less than treason. Reports about such matters were generally dismissed as 'malicious ruling-class propaganda' or 'malicious Brahminical brainwashing' or even as an 'understandable reaction of vulnerable minority communities to ruling caste/class/imperialist oppression'. Sometimes, if these were grudgingly admitted to be true, they were sought to be passed over in silence in order to 'respect the sensibilities of the oppressed' or as 'minor contradictions' that ought not to be addressed on the grounds that it would allegedly 'divide' the oppressed, 'sabotage' the struggle against 'oppression' and thereby 'play into the hands of the real opressors'. If you only just pointed out that there were serious faults in the madrasas that needed to be urgently addressed (even for the sake of the Muslim children who studied therein) or that Muslim Personal Law was seriously biased against Muslim women or that many Dalits who had taken advantage of the system of protective discrimination behaved with fellow Dalits almost as shabbily as did their 'upper' caste Hindu 'oppressors', you were sure to be shouted down as a 'government agent' or a 'paid stooge of Hindutva forces', not only by fellow 'progressives' but also by a whole host of voices among the communities whom you had spent years trying to defend and promote. If you even so much as mildly hinted that the conditions of Muslims in India weren't half as bad as sections of the Urdu media wanted people to believe or that the Muslims in this country had much more freedom than in any Muslim-majority state or that untouchability was no longer as rampant as it once was in some parts, you were bound to be accused of betrayal and your motives were rumoured to be entirely suspect. If you acknowledged that probably less Muslims were killed by Hindus in riots in India every year than the number of fellow Muslims slaughtered by their co-religionists in the 'Islamic' Republic of Pakistan or in God-forsaken Afghanistan or that the plight of religious minorities in many Muslim countries, particularly those ruled by theocratic regimes, was much worse than in India or that some Dalit officials were neck-deep in corruption, you were bound to be hollered at for allegedly being a 'traitor' to 'The Cause' of the 'oppressed'. The very same folks who egged you on to write about their problems and to take the Hindutva beast by its horns (for they were either too scared to do it themselves or didn't have the same writing skills or the same access to the English media) would shrilly denounce you as an 'agent' of this or the other 'power' if, in your quest to be honest and balanced, you pointed out even some of the mildest of their faults. It was as if by definition the 'oppressed' were spotless angels who could do no wrong and their 'oppressors' wholly and incorrigibly demonic."

"In the fascist Hindutva imagination, the Indian Muslims are continuously reviled as Pakistani "fifth columnists," as "enemies of the nation" and so on, and their patriotism is said to be suspect. The Muslim as the menacing "other" occupies a central place in Hindutva discourse, and this has been used to legitimize large-scale anti-Muslim violence."

"The very same folks who egged you on to write about their problems and to take the Hindutva beast by its horns (for they were either too scared to do it themselves or didn't have the same writing skills or the same access to the English media) would shrilly denounce you as an 'agent' of this or the other 'power' if, in your quest to be honest and balanced, you pointed out even some of the mildest of their faults. It was as if by definition the 'oppressed' were spotless angels who could do no wrong and their 'oppressors' wholly and incorrigibly demonic."

"On 15 March 1990, by which time the Pandit exodus from the Valley was substantially complete, the All-India Kashmiri Pandit Conference, a community organisation, stated that thirty-two Pandits had been killed by militants since the previous autumn."

"In 1991 the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ... published a book titled Genocide of Hindus in Kashmir. It claimed among many other things that at least forty Hindu temples in the Kashmir Valley had been desecrated and destroyed by Muslim militants. In February 1993 journalists from India’s leading newsmagazine sallied forth from Delhi to the Valley, armed with a list of twenty-three demolished temples supplied by the national headquarters of the BJP, the movement’s political party. They found that twenty-one of the twenty-three temples were intact. They reported that "even in villages where only one or two Pandit families are left, the temples are safe ... even in villages full of militants. The Pandit families have become custodians of the temples, encouraged by their Muslim neighbours to regularly offer prayers." Two temples had sustained minor damage during unrest after a huge, organised Hindu nationalist mob razed a sixteenth-century mosque in the north Indian town of Ayodhya on 6 December 1992."

"I salute you for your courage, bravery and decades of sacrifice. As an unarmed group with science and technology not at your side, you have ousted the most advanced forces from your region. It will now bring an era of peace for Afghanistan and the region."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"Let us put our democratic freedom to delight use!"