Essayists From India

"A ‘fifth-generation dynast’ Rahul Gandhi has no chance in Indian politics against ‘hard-working and self-made’ Narendra Modi, and Kerala did disastrous thing by electing Congress leader to Parliament...Narendra Modi’s great advantage is that he is not Rahul Gandhi. He is self-made. He has run a state for 15 years, he has administrative experience, he is incredibly hard-working and he never takes holidays in Europe...“India is becoming more democratic and less feudal, and the Gandhis just don’t realise this. You (Sonia) are in Delhi, your kingdom is shrinking more and more, but still, your chamchas (sycophants) are telling you that you are still the Badshah.”... the fact that they loved other nations more than India. The rise of aggressive nationalism worldwide and “the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in neighbouring countries are some other reasons behind the evident leap of Hindutva in India in recent times..."

"Three men did most to make Hinduism a modern faith. Of these the first was not recognized as a Hindu by the Shankaracharyas; the second was not recognized as a Hindu by himself; the third was born a Hindu but made certain he would not die as one. These three great reformers were Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar. Gandhi and Nehru, working together, helped Hindus make their peace with modern ideas of democracy and secularism. Gandhi and Ambedkar, working by contrasting methods and in opposition to one another, made Hindus recognize the evils and horrors of the system of Untouchability. Nehru and Ambedkar, working sometimes together, sometimes separately, forced Hindus to grant, in law if not always in practice, equal rights to their women. The Gandhi-Nehru relationship has been the subject of countless books down the years. Books on the Congress, which document how these two made the party the principal vehicle of Indian nationalism; books on Gandhi, which have to deal necessarily with the man he chose to succeed him; books on Nehru, which pay proper respect to the man who influenced him more than anyone else. Books too numerous to mention, among which I might be allowed to single out, as being worthy of special mention, Sarvepalli Gopal’s Jawaharlal Nehru, B. R. Nanda’s Mahatma Gandhi, and Rajmohan Gandhi’s The Good Boatman. In recent years, the Gandhi-Ambedkar relationship has also attracted a fair share of attention. Some of this has been polemical and even petty; as in Arun Shourie’s Worshipping False Gods (which is deeply unfair to Ambedkar), and Jabbar Patel’s film Ambedkar (which is inexplicably hostile to Gandhi). But there have also been some sensitive studies of the troubled relationship between the upper caste Hindu who abhorred Untouchability and the greatest of Dalit reformers. These include, on the political side, the essays of Eleanor Zelliott and Denis Dalton; and on the moral and psychological side, D. R. Nagaraj’s brilliant little book The Flaming Feet. By contrast, the Nehru-Ambedkar relationship has been consigned to obscurity. There is no book about it, nor, to my knowledge, even a decent scholarly article. That is a pity, because for several crucial years they worked together in the Government of India, as Prime Minister and Law Minister respectively."

"Most Indians – and, following Attenborough's film, many non-Indians too – are moderately well acquainted with the colleagues and critics of the mature Gandhi. Yet they know very little about those who worked with him in South Africa. Here, his closest friends outside his family were two Hindus (a doctor turned jeweller and a liberal politician respectively); two Jews (one a journalist from England, the other an architect originally from Eastern Europe); and two Christian clergymen (one a Baptist, the other an Anglican). These six men were, so to speak, the South African analogues of Gandhi's famous colleagues in the Indian freedom struggle – Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose, Madeleine Slade (Mira Behn), C. Rajagopalachari, Maulana Azad, et al. They are much less recognized (in some cases, unrecognized), although their impact on Gandhi's character and conduct may have been even more decisive, for they came into his life when he was not yet a great public figure or 'Mahatma' – as he was in India – but a struggling, searching activist."

"I … allowed my memory to journey back to the days when I was a boy of ten, full of health and optimism, when my wonder at the great game of living had yet to give way to disillusionment at its shabbiness."

"The India I Love, does not make the headlines, but I find it wherever I go – in field or forest, town or village, mountain or desert – and in the hearts and minds of people who have given me love and affection for the better part of my lifetime."

"A representative of India's rishi tradition in the modern age."

"What an irony it is. “These books are sacred’—that is the refrain about the Quran and the Hadis compilations. Until you reproduce them. Then the apologist exclaims, ‘But who reads them?’ Indeed, as happened in the case of Ram Swarup’s pioneering study, Understanding Islam through Hadis, then the demand is that the book reproducing them be banned!"

"I read with great interest Sri Rain Swarup’s scholarly paper on the intimate connection, amounting almost to identity, between Buddhistic philosophy, and the Vedanta of the Upanishads."

"Ram Swarup is perhaps the greatest Hindu intellectual of post-independent India."

"Among the authors ... none is more distinguished than Mr. Ram Swarup. I have written about him earlier: Now about 75, he is one of the deepest thinkers I have come across. His work is foundational."

"We strongly condemn all recent attempts in India and abroad to prevent free inquiry into the history and the doctrines of religions... In particular, we condemn the attempt by Syed Shahabuddin to make the Indian authorities impose a ban on the book Hindu View of Christianity and Islam by Ram Swarup... We also condemn the pending ban on Ram Swarup's earlier publication Understanding Islam trough Hadis..."

"I had reprinted in 1983 Ram Swarup's Understanding Islam Through Hadis, which A. Ghosh (Houston, Texas) had got published in the U.S.A. in 1982. A bookseller informed me that he had seen this book among those which were being examined by the Home Department of the Delhi Administration, and may be banned. ... I was at my home when I received a phone call from my office that the SHO of Hauz Kazi Police Station in Old Delhi had arrested the binder, and taken away the whole lot of translation copies which were still unbound. I rushed to the office...Soon after we reached the Police Station, he shouted at me, "Who are you? What have you done? A big riot was about to break out." I told him that I was nobody, and did not understand the accusation. He barked, "Muslims are excited. They have heaps of bricks and stones piled up on the roofs of their houses, and firearms within. They can set the city on fire whenever they want". I asked him why the police had allowed them to collect and keep the arsenal. He snarled, "put this question to your leaders, I am only a poor policeman trying to feed my family". I kept quiet....I may add that though the criminal cases against the publisher and printer of both publications were dismissed, the publications themselves remain banned.... In 1993, the Dariyaganj Police Station was out to repeat the performance by the Hauz Kazi Police Station when Syed Shahabuddin wrote a letter to P.M. Sayeed, Minister of State, Government of India requiring a ban on Ram Swarup's Hindu View of Christianity and Islam. A policeman came to our office and took away a copy of the book. He returned next day, and said, "The police cannot judge the book on its own. There should be some government department which performs the duty." Our office informed him about the Press Advisor of the Delhi Administration. In fact, our office telephoned the Press Advisor's office in the policeman's Presence. The office said that the book may be sent to them by the Police Station. The policeman went away. He, however returned again next day, and said, "Our SHO wants to see either Ram Swarup or Sita Ram Goel. One of them should go and meet him at 4 o'clock in the afternoon tomorrow." I could smell the mischief immediately. I went into hiding, advised Ram Swarup to do the same, and asked Alok Kumar to get us anticipatory bail... Then came Arun Shourie's piece, How should we respond? in his syndicated column appealing to Hindus to defy the ban if imposed. The police took no further step."

"I could see that his seeking had taken a decisive turn towards a deeper direction. He [Ram Swarup] was as awake to the social, political and cultural scene in India as ever before. But this vigil had now acquired an entirely new dimension. Political, social and cultural movements were no more clashes or congregations of external forces and intellectual ideas; they had become projections of psychic situations in which the members of a society chose to stay. His judgments had now acquired a depth which I frequently found it difficult to fathom."

"The same pattern was repeated in the case of the Hindi translation of Ram Swarup's Understanding Islam Through Hadis. ... Radiance, a Weekly published by the Jamaat-e-Islami from Delhi, had raised hell in its issue of 17-23 June, 1990. "Most portions of the book are concoctions and distortions as well as defamatory and derogatory to the Holy Prophet", it wrote. It went on to quote passages from the translation without informing the readers that all of them are found in the orthodox collections of Hadis as well as the pious biographies of the Prophet! It depended on the ignorance of the common Muslim and ascribed those passages to the writer, Ram Swarup! ... But what happened on 27th November 1990 was the most surprising event in the history of this case. A notification of the Delhi Administration announced that the Hindi translation, Hadîs ke Mâdhyama se Islâm kâ Addhyana had been banned and all its copies stood confiscated as soon as published. There was not the hint of a reference that the same Administration had screened the book not once but twice, over a period of three years, cleared it as unobjectionable, and got dismissed the case registered against the publisher and the printer. Come March 1991 and the English original of the book was also banned by the same Administration, without taking into account the fact that this book had been in print and circulation in India for eight years and that the Administration itself had found it unobjectionable after having scrutinized it for months soon after it was published. Strange are the ways of Secularism in India!"

"The Jama'at-i Islami paper Radiance, on the front page of its June 17, 1990 issue, carried a big caption : "Is this book not objectionable?" Presenting some excerpts from Ram Swarup's book, it warned its readers :"Most parts of the book are concoctions and distortions as well as defamatory and derogatory to the Holy Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him)"."

"In March 1991, Ram Swarup's book "Understanding Islam through Hadis" was banned, after the Hindi version had already been banned in 1990.... According to the fundamentalist party Jamaat-i Islami the book contained "distortion and slander", and as an example of this slanderous distortion, it mentions this passage: "Mohammed saw Zaynab in half-naked condition, and he fell in love with her". With this revelation, the fundamentalists managed to get some agitation going, and the book was banned."

"Perhaps the most revealing story of a book banning concerns Ram Swarup's Understanding Islam through Hadis.... A crowd of people gathered around the binders' shop. They demanded the entire stock of the objectionable book to be handed over for burning, otherwise they would set the place itself on fire. The police was called. They made no attempt to disperse the crowd. Instead they summoned and arrested the printer and the publisher, and they made sure that everyone got an eyeful of the arrest show.... the Delhi administration has had two meetings in 1988-89, to consider whether the book was objectionable. Twice it was cleared. But the pressure for banning it was kept up. ... The Jama'at as well as other Muslim groups, and personalities close to the Janata Dal (either faction), have sought a ban on Ram Swarup's book. In September 1990, a court ruled that the book was unobjectionable. But the pressure continued. And come December 1990, a third meeting of Delhi administration officials revoked the two earlier decisions, and issued a ban on the book."

"The global Hindu magazine Hinduism Today has described Ram Swarup as "perhaps Hinduism's most cogent analyst." The Prime Minister of India, Atal Behari Vajpayee, spoke of him as "a representative of India's rishi tradition in the modern age." ... He was a Hindu thinker of the first order, comparable to the many great Hindu thinkers of previous centuries. ... Ram Swarup, probably better than any other modern thinker, puts Hinduism into its proper perspective so that we can understand its foundation and its motivation.... Such people need to read Ram Swarup to really know what they are dealing with in what is called Hinduism. ... Ram Swarup unfolds this Sanatana Dharma with both a panoramic vision and a pinpoint accuracy so that it comes alive to the reader as an internal force of consciousness and light. For those who really want to understand the heart and soul of Hindu Dharma, the work of Ram Swarup is perhaps the best place to start. His expression is lucid, modern and concise, but firmly rooted in ancient traditions and a yogic understanding. He is aware of the many misconceptions and systematically works to remove them to arrive at the underlying truth that is helpful to all. For those who want to understand the Hindu religion as a whole, Ram Swarup's work is perhaps the best available guide. He is not speaking in terms of any particular guru or sampradâya but about the essence of the entire tradition, which pervades all of its multifarious manifestations. He is going back to an older, perhaps more rigorous but more honest presentation of this greater tradition which is beyond time and person, and which stands fearless in itself, not bowing down to any inferior creeds."

"In the long run, Ram Swarup will probably prove to have been the most influential Hindu thinker in the second half of the 20th century. He has, at any rate, been a crucial influence on most other Hindu Revivalist authors of the last two decades."

"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."

"Ram Swarup was the perfect link between Hindu Renaissance and renascent Paganism in the West and elsewhere. Thanks to his remarkable culture, to his generosity and sense of humor, Ram Swarup was more than a link. He was a Pontifex, as we say in Latin, a man throwing bridges over different rivers. ...He was an ally for all serious Pagan circles. He received me in Delhi like a son, gave me courage and strong advice and answered so many of my questions with such patience, such generosity. Like a real prince, he introduced me to some remarkable people. In a word, he "converted" me to India. Last but not least, he gave me my first lessons of Sanatana Dharma, not the tradition you read of in books, but authentic experience. How to thank such a man? Let us be faithful to this great figure of the Vedic Renaissance!"

"I would like to pay tribute to Ram Swarup, a man of great importance to our Indian brothers as a sage of the Vedic renaissance, but also to me personally as a young European whom he welcomed so kindly. To our Indian brethren I have nothing to teach about this remarkable man who played such an essential part in defending and explaining the Tradition... Your Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee rightly said that he was "a representative of India's rishi tradition in the modern age". As for me, I can never adequately express my debt to Ram Swarup whom I first met three years ago... It was Ram Swarup who gave me my first lessons in Sanatana Dharma. He encouraged me on the difficult path of rediscovering my identity which had been repressed first by the imprint of centuries of Christianity then with the stamp of materialism. It was he who, on the last occasion we met and when the time came to say goodbye, was able to find the right words to encourage and advise me to practice mental yoga so as to face up to a hostile or at the least an indifferent world. His friendship was both deep and dispassionate, and for this his influence was all the more striking. I have dwelt on these very personal considerations to show you how important this man was and remains for all those who strive for the restoration of the Dharma. Ram Swarup is an example to be followed, a true spiritual guide."

"Ram Swarup was feeling disturbed. He had no doubt that Hindu society was in for great trouble. He had been studying the scriptures of Islam and Christianity during the past several years, and had gone deep into their most orthodox sources. He had come up with the conclusion that they were not religions but cruel and intolerant ideologies like Communism and Nazism. The spread of these ideologies in India, he said, was fraught with fearful consequences for whatever had survived of Hindu society and culture in the only Hindu homeland."

"It was not long before I was visited by officers of the Crimes Department, and not only from Delhi. I was accused of causing communal discord, and threatening the peace of the land. I was arrested, and ordered to seek bail. The Station House Officer in Delhi who locked me up for twenty four hours, was mighty pleased with his performance. He boasted loudly that he had prevented a big street riot in Delhi. He invited me to accompany him and see for myself the missiles which the local Muslims had piled up on the roofs of their houses, apart from the firearms inside. When I asked him why he had not got the missiles removed and the firearms flushed out, he snarled, "Address your question to the big bosses of the political parties. I am only a small fry trying to earn my daily bread." I had been arrested in the classic case of Ram Swarup's documented study, "Understanding Islam through Hadis: Religious Faith or Fanaticism?"... There had been loud talk in the book market at Delhi that this book was going to be banned... A Muslim mob had materialized outside the binder's shop, and threatened to burn down the establishment. The Station House Officer, I had mentioned, had appeared on the scene in a matter of minutes, and carried away all the sheets as well as the binder. In the next few hours I had been picked up. ... The Delhi Administration issued a notification in November, 1991, stating that the Hindi translation will stand banned whenever it is published. In March 1992, the same Administration banned the English original also."

"He "had no use for any conventional morality or code of manners and could see clearly how they were mostly used to put the other fellow in the wrong.""

"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."

"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."

"Ram Swarup is probably the most important and cogent writer on Hinduism in the last half of the twentieth century."

"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."

"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..."

"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)."

"It is indeed a strange sect of Islam which claims for itself a founder other than Muhammad and a scripture other than the Quran, and which does not mention the name of the Prophet even once in its scripture quite considerable in length."

"To early European writers, it did not occur to regard Sikhism as different from Hinduism, an observation which agreed with the Sikhs’ own self-perception. The fashion to regard them as distinct belonged to the future of a more defined imperialist purpose."

"One of the most important thought leaders of the Hindu revivalist movement..."

"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"."

"Though he never had an organization, a mission or an ashram and preferred to remain in the background, Ram Swarup nevertheless became one of the dominant figures in modern Hindu thought. He brought an important new point of view into the Hindu renaissance of the past two centuries which can move it in a new positive direction. He not only wrote about Hinduism in the India context but relative to the world as a whole and the major movements and ideologies of our times. He articulated a Hindu point of view in a clear, succinct, cogent and comprehensive manner that makes it compelling for all those who have an open mind and an inner vision. Ram Swarup represents the deeper response of the Hindu mind to the critical cultural and religious challenges of today. His work has had a strong impact in India already but its main impact is likely to be for the future, for generations yet to come, as he was a thinker ahead of his time. His impact in the West, though crucial in regard to a number of individual thinkers, is yet to come and may prove more significant. Starting with his main disciple and colleague Sitaram Goel, he has inspired a whole group of thinkers and writers East and West, who are disseminating his ideas and inspirations in various ways."

"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."

"Some see in this change a triumph of Nehru over Gandhi. They, of course, do not mean Nehru as a person for Nehru was merely a symbol and he represented, in his own way, a typical response, the response of a defeated nation trying to restore its self-respect and self-confidence through self-repudiation and identification with the ways of the victors. The approach was not altogether unjustified at one time. It had its compulsions and it had also a survival value for us. But its increasing influence can mean no good to us."

"A country cannot be defeated politically unless it is defeated culturally. Our alien rulers knew that they could not conquer India without conquering Hinduism - cultural India's name at its deepest and highest, and the principle of its identity, continuity and reawakening. Therefore Hinduism became an object of their special attack. Physical attack was supplemented by ideological attack. They began to interpret for us our history, our religion, our culture and ourselves. We learnt to look at us through their eyes.... The long period created an atmosphere of mental slavery and imitation. It created a class of people Hindu in their names and by birth but anti-Hindu in orientation, sympathy and loyalty. They knew all the bad things and nothing good about Hinduism. Hindu dharma is now being subverted from within. Anti-Hindu Hindus are very important today; they rule the roost; they write our histories, they define our nation; they control the media, the academia, the politics, the higher administration and higher courts. They are now working as clients of those forces who are planning to revive their old Imperialism... During this period our minds became soft. We became escapists; we wanted to avoid conflict at any cost, even conflict and controversy of ideas, even when this controversy was necessary. We developed an escape-route. We called it "synthesis". We said all religions, all scriptures, all prophets preach the same things. It was intellectual surrender, and our enemies saw it that way; they concluded that we are amenable to anything, that we would clutch at any false hope or idea to avoid a struggle, and that we would do nothing to defend ourselves. Therefore, they have become even more aggressive. It also shows that we have lost spiritual discrimination (viveka), and would entertain any falsehood; this is prajñâ-dosha, drishti-dosha, and it cannot be good for our survival in the long run. People first fall into delusion before they fall into misfortune."

"Hindus temples have been under unprecedented attack for a thousand years. They suffered desecration, destruction, confiscation of their property and iniquitous taxation under the Muslim rulers. Under the British, the more physical methods ceased but fiscal methods were adopted for undermining "heathenism". A large part of the land and properties of the temples were taken away under all kinds of pretexts. After independence, the temples have fared no better. Their properties have not been restored to them and they continue to exist in deepening poverty. In the South where there are still many noble structures left, the temples are under the control of a Government which takes pride in being "secular", and whose secularity is thoroughly anti-Hindu in orientation."

"As it saw in the Self all Godly attributes, it saw in Gods the truth and powers of the Self; indeed, it taught that one who worships a God as other than himself becomes his sacrificial animal, his draught-animal. He is driven and ridden by him."

"It prescribes five daily sacrifices, pancha mahayajnas... The first yajna is Self-knowledge and self-study.. This is called bhrama-yajna... Daily reading of scriptures is its external aspect. The second yajna is pitri-yajna, offerting to one's ancestors... The third is deva-yajna, offering to Gods.... Deva-yajna is in reality an offering to our own higher nature, the secret Godhead within us. The fourth is bhutna-yajna, offering made to elements and all creatures... The last offering is called nri-yajna, which is an offering to men... (p. 242 ff)"

"Hindu dharma reverenced women; therefore, it had no difficulty in conceiving Goddesses. Hindus also learnt to give their women the honour they gave to their deities. Hindu lawgivers taught that women must be honoured by their fathers, brothers, husbands and brothers-in-law, who desire their own welfare; that Gods are pleased where women are honoured, but where they are not honoured sacred rites yield no rewards."

"Hinduism is like a great reservoir of water from which many streams take their rise and to which they again repair after passing through many strange and fair lands. It is a great, creative matrix giving birth to many beautiful and living forms. Itself a historical, it has given birth to many sects and branches with interesting, chequered histories. Paying sole allegiance to the Guide within seated in the cave of the heart, it has put forward from time to time many teachers and sages of incomparable power and vision, incarnating the very Gods above and within."

"In a way, none of these values were new but in the crucible of the Bhakti Movement they combined to crystallise in a new form and give rise to a new ethos. And under the influence of many great bhaktas and santas, they acquired a new urgency, a new poer. It made religion living for millions of people. Bhakti is now one of the greatest elements in Hindu religion. ....Hinduism has never been exclusively 'brahmanical'. It is particularly true of present-day Hinduism. It is the product of influences emanating from the humblest sources, and from most diverse circumstances. Kabir was a weaver; Raidas was a cobbler; .... (p 121 ff)"

"It is not that there are different Purushas to experience but the same Purusha is experienced differently at different levels. There is the experience of Divinity at the level of purified manas, but the same is also experienced at the level of buddhi. ... In the first, the experience is more particularised; in the second it puts on a more universal aspect. ... Manas particularizes; buddhi generalises. In the movement from manas to buddhi, spirituality rises from a spiritual experience to a spiritual truth. .... One need not grade the two experiences but one should try to understand the difference between them. At the level of purified mans, there is faith, joy, sonship, prophethood, inspired utterances, luminous visions, chosen destinies, unique roles.... (p. 101 ff)"

"The Gita tells us that there are four kinds of people who take to God-life. Of them ,the afflicted (arta) are the very first ones. The rest in their order are the seekers of knowledge, the seekerse of truth as it is, and the seekers of wisdom. (p.180)"

"To the Yoga the hightest concept of God is that of a being who is free from all klesas, klesapramrishtah, but in actual practice in most cases we have God who is joined with klesas. (p. 86)"