publishers-from-india

"Perhaps the concept of shame applies to only women but not men. Maybe because she was a ‘prostitute’ she was able to write crude depictions of sex without shame. In that case, it surely must not suit the supposed learned men to depict conjugal pleasures in the same way?. (as a sarcastic retort to criticism of the original work and her 1910 edition containing sexual/erotic passages, believed to being unsuitable for women)"

"As it is not only written by a woman but by a woman who was born into the same community as mine, I intend to edit and publish it in a proper form."

"I cannot let this book go no matter how many times I read it...it is as adorable as Lord Krishna."

"He does not seem to have understood the gravity of the offence. India's elite lauded the amendments to the IPC, widening the definition of rape, little realizing that they did not apply simply to lower-class men, but could affect them too. While there has been much clamour for the death penalty in cases of rape involving the lower classes, would the elite now like to apply this to themselves?"

"Later, years later, a famous editor who regularly took tea with Sonia and who became a close confidante of her daughter Priyanka had a story to tell. We were having coffee together in the coffee shop of the Oberoi in Mumbai and I, as always, looked up to the eighteenth floor and paid silent tribute to those who were lined up against a wall and shot dead by the Pakistani jihadi terrorist, Fazlullah, on 26/11. And I was thinking of those who were killed in this coffee shop that same horrible night, when the editor said something that brought me instantly back into the present moment. This was not long after Tarun Tejpal was jailed for the alleged attempted rape of a friend of his daughter’s in a lift in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Goa. We were talking about how astounding it was that he had made so much money from a magazine that barely sold a few thousand copies. ‘The money didn’t come from journalism,’ the editor said. ‘I am sure not,’ I said. ‘Well, let’s just say that Tarun Tejpal had good reasons to be very, very close to 10 Janpath.’ In my head it was as if the pieces of a puzzle started to come together. I met Tarun through Vidia and Nadira Naipaul. Although he was always charming and friendly when we met, there was something about him that kept me from sharing their admiration of him. And I had always been sceptical whether his sting operations were sting operations or exercises in entrapment. His most famous sting operation was conducted in the third year of Vajpayee’s government, and it so discredited Vajpayee that it turned his government into a lame duck. The two people caught on hidden cameras accepting money from fake arms dealers were the BJP president, Bangaru Laxman, and Jaya Jaitley, who had long been the closest aide of George Fernandes. George had to resign as defence minister and the scandal never died. But because I saw it more as entrapment than journalism I began to follow other Tehelka exposés closely and noticed that they seemed always to expose Sonia Gandhi’s opponents."

"Twelve million people were displaced as a result of Partition. Nearly one million died. Some 75,000 women were raped, kidnapped, abducted, forcibly impregnated by men of the ‘other’ religion, thousands of families were split apart, homes burnt down and destroyed, villages abandoned. Refugee camps became part of the landscape of most major cities in the north, but, a half century later, there is still no memorial, no memory, no recall, except what is guarded, and now rapidly dying, in families and collective memory."

"Such good relations we had that if there was any function that we had, then we used to call Musalmaans to our homes, they would eat in our houses, but we would not eat in theirs and this is a bad thing, which I realize now. If they would come to our houses we would have two utensils in one corner of the house, and we would tell them, pick these up and eat in them; they would then wash them and keep them aside and this was such a terrible thing. This was the reason Pakistan was created. If we went to their houses and took part in their weddings and ceremonies, they used to really respect and honour us. They would give us uncooked food, ghee, atta, dal, whatever sabzis they had, chicken and even mutton, all raw. And our dealings with them were so low that I am even ashamed to say it. A guest comes to our house and we say to him, bring those utensils and wash them, and if my mother or sister have to give him food, they will more or less throw the roti from such a distance, fearing that they may touch the dish and become polluted ... We don’t have such low dealings with our lower castes as Hindus and Sikhs did with Musalmaans."

"Broad views about life have shrunk into religions, and we have been turned into their symbols. They regard us as empty symbols. Symbols of a religion, a nation. We mustn’t be trapped by that. In this war, let that be the ground of your contest. A ground that cannot be reduced to definition and detail."

"The members of the Voice of India group themselves are inspired only by democratic texts when they invoke contemporary European thought to justify their anti-Muslim crusade, and they deliberately leave out anything that has an extreme right appearance .... (It is) the appearance of cosmopolitan and sometimes extremely sophisticated intellectuals, like Girilal Jain, former editor-in-chief of the Times of India, Swapan Dasgupta, who works in the same newspaper or Arun Shourie ex-editor-in-chief of the Indian Express who mark the scene. Some are former members of Socialist parties or the Congress (notably Jay Dubashi). There are also former Communists. Many ... have notably gathered around the publishing house Voice of India of Sita Ram Goel, this new avatar of Hindu nationalism. He loses, in a way, any traditional side. He ... takes up all that is possible from secular and democratic polemicists .."

"The importance of Sitaram Goel's and Ram Swarup's work can hardly be over-estimated. There is no doubt that future textbooks on comparative religion as well as those on Indian political and intellectual history will devote crucial chapters to their analysis. They are the first to give a first-hand Pagan reply to the versions of history and "science of religion" imposed by the monotheist world- conquerors, both at the level of historical fact (e.g. Sitaram Goel's "History of Hindu-Christian Encounters") and of fundamental doctrine (e.g. Ram Swarup's "Hinduism vis-a-vis Christianity and Islam"), both in terms of the specific Hindu experience (e.g. Sitaram Goel's "Hindu Society under Siege") and of a more generalized theory of religion free from prophetic-monotheistic bias (e.g. Ram Swarup's "The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods", a ground-breaking statement of Pagan doctrine)."

"Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel were witnesses to the untiring aggression against Hinduism by Christian missionaries, they deemed Christianity a serious problem, and so they took aim at Christianity. Not some mysterious force behind Christianity, but Christianity itself. They adopted the typically modern rejection of Christianity as exemplified by Bertrand Russell's book Why I Am Not a Christian. Their criticism focused mainly on three points: (1) the irrational basis of Christian theology; (2) the largely fabricated basis of early Christianity's sacred history as related in the New Testament; (3) the intolerant and inhumane record of Christianity in history. This has nothing whatsoever to do with "postmodernism" but is purely and consistently the modern approach to the Christian belief system and Church, in the footstep of the criticisms developed by Western secularists since the 18th century... The next one among the errors in this paragraph: Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel wrote in defence of Hinduism, never of "Hindutva"."

"In sharp contrast with the repetitive-nationalistic and Indocentric approach of Golwalkar and the RSS, Goel and Shourie (and Ram Swarup before them) have developed a historical and philosophical critique of Christianity and Islam that has universal validity. It is part of continuum with Western and other foreign critiques of the said religions. .... Of course, the approach pioneered by Ram Swarup is “hard-line” in the sense that it is not susceptible to change under the impact of changing political configurations. The BJP and RSS may decide one day that they need to build bridges with padres and mullahs, but that doesn’t alter the truth status of the latter’s belief systems. The Voice of India approach is unflinching in the same sense in which logic is sharper than diplomacy, or uprightness is tougher than compromise, or a diamond is hardier than mud."

"While Voice of India had a controversial reputation, I found nothing irrational, much less extreme about their ideas or publications... Their criticisms of Islam were on par with the criticisms of the Catholic Church and of Christianity done by such Western thinkers as Voltaire or Thomas Jefferson. In fact they went far beyond such mere rational or historical criticisms of other religions and brought in a profound spiritual and yogic view as well."

"Voice of India through Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel and Koenraad Elst provided the main intellectual defense of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement starting thirty years ago. Their contributions were very important in sustaining it."

"One wonders too at the relevance of his next rather irrational comment: “Ironically, many of those expressing these anti-migrational views are emigrants themselves, engineers or technocrats like N S Rajaram, S Kak and S Kalyanaramam, who ship their ideas to India from US shores”. What indeed has this absurd statement to do with facts and evidence?… Then, it continues in the same tone of irrelevance and contempt, forgetting how many Universities and Journals spend enormous funds on useless hypotheses and ostracise all non-immigrationists: “They find allies in a broader assortment of home-grown nationalists including university professors, bank employees, and politicians (S. S. Misra, S. Talageri, K. D. Sethna, S. P. Gupta, Bh. Singh, M. Shendge, Bh. Gidwani, P. Chaudhuri, A. Shourie, S. R. Goel). They have even gained a small but vocal following in the West among "New Age" writers or researchers outside mainstream scholarship, including D. Frawley, G. Feuerstein, K. Klostermaier, and K. Elst. Whole publishing firms, such as the Voice of India and Aditya Prakashan, are devoted to propagating their ideas”. Here two further points are worthy of note: first, Prof Witzel obviously does not know what “New Age” writers are; second, the whole passage has the shrill tones of McCarthyism or any totalitarian dogmatism (and censorship). Instead of emitting such strident emotional cries and witch-hunt slogans, Prof Witzel and his followers had better re-examine their unfounded linguistic assumptions and recall the words of Edmund Leach, who was neither an Indian nationalist technocrat, nor a New-Age writer, but a solid, mainstream pillar of the academic establishment"

"The militants of VOI are adamantly opposed to the idea that all religions deserve equal respect. Even paying lip-service to this ideal, as RSS and BJP do, appears like an unbearable betrayal of the Hindu cause to them."

"Ram Swarup is one of those rare souls whose vision exceeds that of those around them, whose mind is so clear it can bring clarity to others. For us, the editorial staff at Hinduism Today, his writings were a treat - always bold, incisive, unapologetic, targeting strategic issues with uncanny precision. Our personal meetings with him and with his friend and student Sita Ram Goel were always a delight. His passionate intellect was incandescent and it was working in service to his deeper spirituality. If we could but hear him and heed him, our future would be as strong as our past."

"[Pirbhai is at his best when he sums up Voice of India thinking as devising an ideology] “rationally akin to the Enlightenment without falling prey to materialism”."

"Pirbhai is not too far off the mark when he writes: “Voice of India, in fact, was established to provide the Sangh Parivar ‘a full-blooded Hindu ideology of its own and process all events, movements, parties and public figures in terms of that ideology, rather than live on borrowed slogans or hand to mouth ideas invoked on the spur of the moment’.”... “Swarup puts it most succinctly in ‘A need to face the truth’, making what seems the most repeated statement in Voice of India writings, that ‘the problem is not Muslims but Islam’.”... Pirbhai is at his best when he sums up Voice of India thinking as devising an ideology “rationally akin to the Enlightenment without falling prey to materialism”. (p.52) For some reason he, along with the Sangh, he considers this a “staggeringly harsh theology”. (p.51) Maybe it is just “secular” in the real sense of the term."

"Ram Swarup, now in his seventies, is a scholar of the first rank.... Today, anyone reading those critiques would characterise them as prophetic. But thirty years ago so noxious was the intellectual climate in India that all he got was abuse, and ostracisation.... His work on Hinduism and on Islam and Christianity has been equally scholarly. And what is more pertinent to the point I want to urge, it has been equally prophetic. No one has ever refuted him on facts, but many have sought to smear him and his writing. They have thereby transmuted the work from mere scholarship into warning. ... The forfeiture is exactly the sort of thing which had landed us where we are: where intellectual inquiry is shut out; where our traditions are not examined, and reassessed; and where as a consequence there is no dialogue. It is exactly the sort of thing too which foments reaction. (...)"Freedom of expression which is legitimate and constitutionally protected," it [the Supreme Court] declared last year, "cannot be held to ransom by an intolerant group or people." To curtail it in the face of threats of demonstrations and processions or threats of violence "would amount," the Court said, "to the negation of the rule of law and surrender to blackmail and intimidation."

"Late in the afternoon on November 15, a police official visited the office of the Voice of India, a publication house that has been publishing works of academic excellence. ... The policeman brought with him a letter that Mr. Shahabuddin had written to Minister of State for Home P.M. Sayeed. Dated August 20, it asked that the government have the book ["Hindu View of Christianity and Islam"] examined "from the point of view of banning it under the law of the land." "This book is blatantly offensive to the religious sensibilities of Muslims and Christians," Mr. Shahabuddin had written. ... It is not the law these people rely on. They rely on intimidation, It is exactly by tactics of this kind that an earlier book of Mr. Swarup - Understanding Islam Through Hadis - was put out of circulation, The English edition was published in 1982 in the US and reprinted in India in 1983. ... Our response should be three fold. First, whenever an attempt such as this from quarters such as Mr. Shahabuddin is made to stifle free speech, to kill even scholarly inquiry, we must go out of our way and immediately obtain the book.... Secondly, whenever the intimidators prevail and such a book actually comes to be banned large numbers should take to reprinting it, photocopying it, to circulating it, and discussing its contents. The third thing is more necessary, and in the long run will be the complete answer to the intimidators. As long as scholars like Mr. Swarup are few, intimidators can bully weak governments into shutting them one by one. But what will they do if 1,000, scholars are to do work of the same order? This is the way to deal with intimidators. Let 1,000 scholars carry on work Mr. Swarup has pioneered."

"One final reason for being confident is that because of the work of Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Koenraad Elst, David Frawley, and Rajiv Malhotra the corpus is now reaching a critical mass. So, that we can think that within few years we will have a library for India and a library of India."

"This book is also a tribute to all those scholars who have served, and are still serving, as benefactors of the nation, foremost among them being the Voice of India family of scholars who will ever remain the intellectual focal point for exercises in rejuvenation of the innermost spirit of India."

"An informative and a must-visit site for every Hindu who wishes to rediscover his roots and dharma."

"Our only weapon is truth."

"In 1982, Ram Swarup (1920–1998) established Voice of India, a publishing house that over the next decades published a great deal of literature critical of Christianity in India. Though he shared Gandhi’s conception of religion and repeated many of Gandhi’s general criticisms of Christian proselytization, Swarup did so with more bombast and sarcasm than the frank but generally civil Mahatma. In addition, while Gandhi regularly criticized Christians’ obsession with conversion, he frequently spoke admirably of Christ and of Christian ethics. Swarup would have none of it..."

"Gandhi can be credited with having established and/​or popularized many of the basic arguments against conversion to Christianity, but it was Ram Swarup who brought those arguments back to life at the end of the twentieth century. In 1982, Swarup established a publishing house, Voice of India, which has since then published a significant amount of literature in defense of Hinduism, including many of the texts referenced in this chapter. One of the stated goals of Voice of India, according to Swarup, was to “show to its own people that Hinduism is not that bad and other religions not so wonderful as they are painted by their theologians and televangelists”. With Voice of India’s publication of his own Hinduism vis-​à-​vis Christianity and Islam, Swarup inspired a new generation of anti-​Christian critics, as we will see in the next section on Sita Ram Goel. Though many of his arguments may have been Gandhi’s originally, the assertive, orotund, and confrontational style was distinctly Swarup’s, and the influence of that style can be felt in the writings of nearly all the other authors profiled in this chapter.... Trained as an historian at the University of Delhi, Sita Ram Goel had an active career as a social activist, fighting for various causes throughout his career. As he describes it, a narrow escape from a murderous Muslim mob in 1946 appears to have moved him in a more conservative direction, particularly with regard to his views on Islam. After 1982, he became involved, with Swarup, in establishing Voice of India."

"The epochal 1980s up to the fall of the Babri Masjid and later is also notable for a resurgence that’s truly breathtaking: there was a sudden public interest in such obscure and “boring” disciplines as archeology and linguistics. For the first time since independence, the Leftists were being challenged on their own turf, especially in history. Sita Ram Goel’s Voice of India alone published... groundbreaking works, still definitive classics in their own right. ... the quality and quantity of work produced by Voice of India during this period in this genre remains comparably unsurpassed. These works provided the solid and indisputable raw material for Hindu activist and other organisations working on the ground and in other realms."

"Conversely, banning this book would send a signal that the present establishment will do what it can to prevent Hinduism from rising up, from regaining self-confidence, from facing the challenge of hostile ideologies."

"The Voice of India authors deliberately avoid the term “Hindutva”, a clumsy neologism combining the Persian root Hindu with the Sanskrit suffix –tva, and properly designating only the specific Hindu nationalist line embodied in the Hindu Mahasabha (HMS, Hindu Great-Assembly) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteer Corps). They were never too enamoured of the brainless nationalism of the organizations properly described and self-described as championing Hindutva. Calling them a “school of Hindutva” is part of a widely-used terminological strategy of prejudicing the audience against anyone taking any pro-Hindu position, along with older Procrustean misnomers like “Hindu Right”, “Hindu fundamentalism” and “Hindu fascism”. In many cases it is not even a “strategy” but an instance of intellectual laziness: being on top of the world in an all too comfortable power position, the secularists don’t even take the trouble of using or coining an appropriate terminology specific to the Hindu revivalist phenomenon. At any rate, Voice of India is not a “school of Hindutva”... Her term triumphalism is as inept as could be: everything of value is vulnerable, and consequently Hinduism is no match for its challengers, just as Greek philosophy wasn’t. It has, according to Voice of India’s mission statement, only truth on its side. And whether Truth Shall Prevail, as India’s motto has it, remains to be seen... Voice of India is only secondarily an Indian nationalist movement. It is first of all a civilizational revivalism."

"What counts as “extreme” and “controversial” in India is Voice of India’s criticism of religions. There is nothing “Right-wing” about that; if anything, it should rather be called Left-wing, but it is principally just a scholarly pursuit."

"It is remarkable that all the writers who have published contributions to Hindu thought in the Voice of India series, are not members of any RSS front. The same thing counts for the scholars (except two) who have compiled the VHP evidence for the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir. Thought develops independently. But social and political movements may, or may not, provide intellectuals with a platform and a network to broadcast their ideas."

"He was an ardent nationalist and a self-appointed Congress quartermaster general during the 1942 movement, supplying explosives to the Quit India revolutionaries underground and printing subversive literature for dissemination at home and abroad."

"Whether loved or hated, admired or feared, Ramnath Goenka, or RNG, simply cannot be ignored. He was a good friend but a dangerous adversary."

"He had access to Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, C.Rajagopalachari and all the post-Independence greats, such as K. Kamaraj, Jayaprakash Narayan and Indira Gandhi, none of whom hesitated to exploit his grit and ingenuity."

"RNG could be magnanimous to a fault, he could also be mean. He had all the time for Gandhians, yet was full of stories on Gandhian humbug."

"RNG had all the contradictions of great men. He could be magnanimous to a fault (the way he indulged Mulgaokar); he could, without any trace of guilt, also be mean—as he was with some of his low-paid stringers. One day he came rushing out of Hick's bungalow in Chennai screaming that the Kakinada correspondent should be sacked because he was "more expensive than Kissinger."

"For energy, drive, hard work, range of friends at the highest levels, incredible recall, commitment to causes, he was peerless."

"You meet them, you see them, you understand them and you know what they stand for; and whether stand for some principles, like Ramana Maharishi, Swami Muktananda, and Sai Baba. You can’t have anything but admiration for such great men. You learn from them. For instance, Mahesh Yogi, he teaches you meditation and it’s great science and great yoga. So, as a person interested in yoga or spiritualism. I came to know them, and to be in their company."

"I have some interest in spiritualism.I believe in Sai Baba. I believe in Mahesh Yogi. I believe in naked fakirs."

"Well, I believe in what might be called spiritualism, be it a Hindu, be it a Muslim, be it a Christian. It makes no difference what religion it is because all religions have only one objective. So, no question, of preferring one religion or the other. *All religions take one to the same God."

"There have been a couple of key-points, for example in 1942, we had to close down the papers at the behest of Mahatma Gandhi, and during the emergency when we had to face the full wrath of the government. On both the occasions, we carried our policy to its logical conclusion."

"The evolution of the concept of a national news agency Press Trust of India] was the direct consequence of the spirit of independence that swept the country since the days of the Quit India Movement. The desire to shake off the imperial domination in the field of news supply was at the heart of this evolving thought."

"During the British rule the war was only at the political level. Now, the war descends to a personal level, that is the difference."

"I have committed every crime in the Indian Penal Code, except murder."

"An astute Marwari businessman domiciled in Madras, he turned a media baron, assiduously accumulating credits by rendering political or monetary favours or putting in a word for someone who needed assistance, asking for nothing in return."

"Ramnath Goenka was a Man of many parts, freedom fighter, Gandhian Worker, politician, merchant, industrialist and newspaper magnate. But more than anything else he was an indomitable warrior for the Freedom Of the Press, whose frontiers he fearlessly defended and pushed, Often at enormous cost to himself. His mission as a newspaper publisher was to empower the citizen, uphold his right to know, and to make all those in power and authority accountable To the people a mission that he carried out with unflagging, if sometimes excessive zeal."