India

"India under Indira Gandhi was also probably the arena for more KGB active measures than anywhere else in the world, though their significance appears to have been considerably exaggerated by the Centre, which overestimated its ability to manipulate Indian opinion."

"[This ideology was] “more Eurocentric than regular imperialism. It used radical slogans but its aims were reactionary. (…) Marx fully shared the contempt of the British imperialists for India. He fully subscribed to the theses of colonial scholarship that India was not a nation, had no history and was meant for subjugation. Marxism was Macaulayism at its most hostile. It blackened Indian history systematically. It gave to [the] Indian social and political system its own format, the one it had learnt from its European teachers. It saw in Hinduism not (…) a great spiritual civilization but only communalism.”"

"The US State Department's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism has found that going by the number of terror attacks and the number of killings of innocent citizens every year from 2012 until now, the big-five terror group consists of the IS, Taliban, Boko Haram, al Qaeda, and the Communist Party of India (Maoist)."

"During the 1920's and 1930's young radicals like Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose and Jayaprakesh Narayan were straining at the leash: they fretted at the patient and peaceful methods of the Mahatma. The Indian communists dubbed him a charismatic but calculating leader who knew how to rouse the masses but deliberately contained and diverted their revolutionary ardour so as not to hurt the interests of British imperialists and Indian capitalists."

"Indian philosophy, Mao tells Kissinger, is ‘just a bunch of empty words’. ‘India did not win independence,’ Mao tells Kissinger, ‘If it does not attach itself to Britain, it attaches itself to the Soviet Union. And more than one half of their economy depends on you...’ In his important study, Garver reproduces a poem of Mao in which India is represented as a helpless cow with a bear—the Soviet Union—astride it. Garver cites the ‘Maoist exposition’ of the poem which explains the reference to India as follows: ‘Chairman Mao’s use of the cow as a metaphor for India could not be more appropriate. It is no better than a cow... it is only food or for people to ride and for pulling carts; it has no particular talents. The cow would starve to death if its master did not give it grass to eat... Even though this cow may have great ambitions, they are futile.’"

"Readers would be surprised to know that we also got books on socialism at government cost. The government thought that they would be able to divert the minds of political prisoners by making them interested in socialist ideas, which they thought were a lesser evil than ‘terrorist’ actions such as the murder of oppressive British officials. Thus, the government had some hand in making political prisoners in the Andamans interested in socialism. They had unknowingly sowed the seeds of communism among political prisoners detained in other jails as well."

"Nehru’s daughter, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, carried her father’s game much farther. In her fight for a monopoly of power, she split the Congress Party, and made a common cause with the Communists. Well-known Communists and fellow-travellers were given positions of power in the ruling Congress Party, in the Government at the Centre as well in the States, and in prestigious institutions all over the country. The Muslim-Marxist combine of “historians” had already captured the Indian History Congress during the days of Pandit Nehru, and many honest historians had been hounded out of it. Now this combine was placed in control of the Indian Council of Historical Research and entrusted with extensive patronage. The combine took over the National Council of Educational Research and Training also, and laid down the guidelines for producing school textbooks on various subjects. The Jawaharlal Nehru University was created and financed on a fabulous scale in order to collect Communist professors from all over the country, and form them into a frontline brigade for launching all sorts of anti-Hindu campaigns. The smokescreen for this Stalinist operation was provided by the slogan of Secularism which nobody was supposed to question, or examine as to what it had come to mean. Its meaning had to be accepted ex-cathedra, and as laid down by the Muslim-Marxist combine. In the new political parlance that emerged, Hinduism and the nationalism it inspired, became blackned as “Communalism”. Small wonder that the word “Hindu” started becoming a dirty word in the academia as well as the media."

"In this context, one should know that there is a strange alliance between the Indian Communist parties and the Muslim fanatics. In the forties the Communists gave intellectual muscle and political support to the Muslim League's plan to partition India and create an Islamic state. After independence, they successfully combined (with the tacit support of Prime minister Nehru) to sabotage the implementation of the constitutional provision that Hindi be adopted as national language, and to force India into the Soviet-Arab front against Israel. Ever since, this collaboration has continued to their mutual advantage as exemplified by their common front to defend the Babri Masjid, that symbol of Islamic fanaticism. Under Nehru's rule these Marxists acquired control of most of the educational and research institutes and policies."

"Ever since, they have supported every antinational cause: the crushing of the Quit India movement (1942), Partition (1947), the Razakar terror campaign to prevent the merger of Hyderabad with India (1948), the Chinese claims to Indian territory (up to 1962: “China’s chairman is also India’s chairman”). As late as 1997, Communist leader Sitaram Yechury refused to admit that China had been the aggressor in 1962. In the 1990s, they have threatened secession of the states they control in the event of a Hindu-nationalist election victory. It is a different matter that by the time this victory took place, in 1998, the Communist movement had become too weak and grey to hazard such action.... This kind of wild allegation has to do with the Communists’ bad conscience about their collaboration with the British against the freedom movement in 1941-45."

"The contrast with the Communists is striking. The Communists stood exposed as traitors in 1942-47, when they informed the British government (a Soviet ally) about Quit India activists and served as a mercenary intellectual vanguard for the Muslim League by propagating economic and other secular-sounding arguments for Partition; once more in 1948-50, when they supported the separatist Razâkâr militia in Hyderabad and subsequently started an armed uprising of their own; and yet again in the run-up to the Chinese invasion of 1962, when they clamoured that “China’s chairman is also India’s chairman” and accused India of having started the war with China. But they were always back on top within a short time, fully respected members of the democratic political spectrum. Better still, they managed even to make other parties implement much of the Communist agenda, from the nationalization of the banks to an unnecessary degree of hostility to the West, upheld by Congress and Janata governments alike. Such are the results when you make it your priority to control the ideological air space, rather than the ground level of work among the masses."

"For those unfamiliar with modern Indian history: the Marxists, already pushy for acquiring as much power in the institutions as they could grab, were handed a near-monopoly on institutional power in India's academic and educational sector by Indira Gandhi ca. 1970. Involved in an intra-Congress power struggle, she needed the help of the Left. Her confidants P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan packed the institutions with Marxists, card-carrying or otherwise. When, during the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77), her Communist Party allies threatened to become too powerful, she and her son Sanjay removed them from key political positions but, in a typical instance of politicians' short-sightedness, they left the Marxists? hold on the cultural sector intact. In the good old Soviet tradition, they at once set out to falsify history and propagate their own version through the official textbooks. After coming to power in 1998, the BJP-dominated government has made a half-hearted and not always very competent attempt to effect glasnost (openness, transparency) at least in the history textbooks. This led the Marxists to start a furious hate campaign against the so-called 'saffronization' of history."

"[Marx thought that Hinduism] “was the ideology of an oppressive and outworn society”; he “shared the distaste of most Europeans for its more lurid features. (…) he was as sceptical as his Hindu followers were to be of any notion of a Hindu ‘golden age’ of the past.”"

"[When asked in 1963 that "now that there is Communist government in Kerala, what would happen if communists came to power at the Centre?"] - Communists, communists! Why are you all so obsessed with communism and communists? What is that the communists can do what we cannot do and have not done?... Why do you imagine the communists will ever be voted to power at the Centre? The danger to India, mark you, is not Communism. It is Hindu right-wing communalism."

"Indian Marxists have the power but lack the numbers, so they have cultivated alliances with all actual or potential enemies of Hinduism."

"I turned inevitably with goodwill towards communism, for, whatever its faults, it was at least not hypocritical and not imperialistic. It was not a doctrinal adherence, as I did not know much about the fine points of Communism, my acquaintance being limited at the time to its broad features. There attracted me, as also the tremendous changes taking place in Russia. But Communists often irritated me by their dictatorial ways, their aggressive and rather vulgar methods, their habit of denouncing everybody who did not agree with them. This reaction was no doubt due, as they would say, to my own bourgeois education and up-bringing."

"During the great national upsurge of 1942, the Communists acted as stooges and spies of the British Government… Mr. Joshi (of the Communist Party) was placing at the disposal of India the services of his Party Members… Joshi had, as General Secretary of the Party, written a letter in which he offered ‘unconditional help’ to the then Government of India and the Army GHQ to fight the 1942 underground workers and the Azad Hind Fauz (INA) of Subhas Chandra Bose… Joshi’s letter revealed that the CPI was receiving financial aid from the British Government, had a secret pact with the Muslim League…"

"Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.” England had to fulfill a double mission in India: One destructive, and the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia. Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Moguls, who had successively overrun India, soon became Hinduised, the barbarian conquerors being, by an eternal law of history, themselves conquered by the superior civilization of their subjects. [According to him the British were the first conquerors who were superior, and therefore inaccessible to Hindu civilization. They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the native society. The historic pages of their rule in India, report hardly anything beyond that destruction.] “The work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins. Nevertheless, it has begun."

"The world revolution will pass through Shanghai and Calcutta."

"We have up to now devoted too little attention to agitation in Asia. However, the international situation is evidently shaping in such a way that the road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal. Our military successes in the Urals and in Siberia should raise the prestige of the Soviet Revolution throughout the whole of oppressed Asia to an exceptionally high level. It is essential to exploit this factor and concentrate a military thrust against India to aid the Indian revolution ... the European revolution appears to have withdrawn into the background we ourselves have withdrawn from the West to the East."

"Wise witnessed in Bengal that some Bediya outcastes of the Hindu society had converted some thirty years ago (c. 1850) and become practising Muslims, ‘but they cannot enter the public mosque or find a place in the public graveyard. From a social point of view they are still aliens with whom no gentleman will associate or eat. The treatment of the Chandal by the Sudra is in no respect more rigorous or harsh than that of the Bediyas by the upper ranks of Muhammadans.’"

"The communists ... reject 'Congress dictatorship' but would welcome a strong state which would crush the communalists, esp the Hindu ones."

"Since some ignorant dupes of these Marxists denounce as “McCarthyist” anyone who points out their ideological inspiration, it deserves to be emphasized that “eminent historians” like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib are certified as Marxists in standard Marxist sources like Tom Bottomore's Dictionary of Marxist Thought . During the official historians' Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute in 1991, the pro-mosque team's argumentation and several other anti-temple pamphlets were published by the People's Publishing House, a Communist Party outfit. One of the recent textbook innovations most furiously denounced as “saffronization” was the truism that Lenin's armed seizing of power in October/November 1917 was a “coup d'état”. And in early 2003, while they were unchaining all their devils against glasnost , the Marxists ruling West Bengal deleted from a textbook a passage in which Mahatma Gandhi's biographer Louis Fischer called Stalin “at least as ruthless as Hitler”. Such are the true concerns of the “secularists” warning the world against the attempts at glasnost in India's national history curriculum."

"Uncompromising opposition to Gandhi and his cherished Hindu convictions meant that communists were cut off in a considerable measure from the mainstream of the patriotic struggle."

"The Ashraf caste are the highest and claim to be descendants of Prophet Muhammad, or other Arab chiefs, or Turks, or Persians. The Ajlaf are people of Indian origin who got converted by Islamic invasions; the Arzal are the lowest castes among Muslims. The Urdu word, quam , refers to caste and is commonly mentioned in matrimonial advertisements in Pakistan. In theory, caste is ostensibly banned in Islam, and so the politically correct interpretation of quam is ethnicity or community with common heritage. There are communities that identify themselves as Dalit Muslims."

"Evidence that Indian Muslims have strong caste prejudices among them is compelling. Early Muslim historians of medieval India like Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani and Ziauddin Barani (thirteenth-fourteenth century ce) denigrated the Indian converts to Islam. Barani advocated that the sultans should employ only those persons in government service that had aristocratic backgrounds by birth. He advised that children of low caste Hindu converts to Islam should not be admitted into madrassas because this education would qualify them for government jobs. Sultan Ghiyasuddin Balban (r. 1266-87 ce) made noble birth a prerequisite for state service and rejected candidates for official positions if they were low caste converts to Islam. It is also notable that when Sir Syed Ahmed Khan founded the Aligarh Muslim University in 1875, it banned admission to low caste Muslims."

"The Muslim shares to a very high degree sensitivity about rank which is so characteristic of the Middle Ages. Not only is he rank conscious, but he is keenly concerned with expressing social distinctions .... Questions of precedence are of considerable importance. Mankind was divided into four orders.... 1. King, 2. Wazir, 3. Aristrocracy of Wealth, 4. The middle class... The rest of the population counted for nothing."

"An overwhelming majority (seventy-five percent) of the present Indian Muslim population is called Dalit Muslims. Caste and untouchability are a lived reality for Muslims in South Asia, and untouchability is the community’s worst-kept secret. Many studies have claimed that concepts of ‘purity and impurity’; ‘clean and unclean castes’ definitely exist among Muslim groups. A 2009 study found there was not one ‘Dalit Muslim’ leader in any of the prominent Muslim organizations, which were dominated essentially by upper caste Muslims. In another 2015 study of seven thousand Dalit Muslim households across fourteen districts in Uttar Pradesh, many testified that they are seated separately at Muslim feasts. Respondents also confirmed that they eat only after the upper caste Muslims. Many said they are served food on separate plates. Around eight percent reported that their children are seated in separate rows in classes and also during school lunches. Similarly, at least a third of them stated that they are not allowed to bury their dead in an upper caste Muslim burial ground. They are told to go elsewhere or provided a corner of the main ground."

"It is true that Balban also made detailed enquiries about the families of all his officers. He refused to grant audience to a low-born officer (Amir-i-Bazariyan) for “granting him an interview would reduce the status of the king in the eyes of the common people and diminish the prestige of the throne”."

"In fact, their contempt for the native converts was deeper than that for their Hindu subjects. They had all along looked down upon the native converts as Ajlãf (low-born) and Arzãl (base-born) as compared to the Ashrãf (exalted) which distinctive designation they had reserved for themselves..... It was at this critical juncture that the frustrated fraternity of foreign Muslims took a very strategic step. They started swearing by a solidarity with the native Muslims whom they had despised so far. They let loose on the native Muslims an army of mercenary Mullahs recruited, mostly from their own ranks. These Mullahs went about broadcasting the message that ‘Islam was in danger’, and that ‘Hindus were out to enslave and exploit the Muslim minority’. It was in this manner that the residues of Islamic imperialism managed to ‘merge’ themselves with the native converts, and to present themselves at the head of a strong phalanx pitted against whatever historical forces threatened their unjust privileges. Hitherto, the haughty Ashrãf had stood strictly aloof from the abject Ajlãf and the despised Arzãl. Now all of a sudden the latter became the former’s ‘brothers in faith’. This was a tremendous transformation of the political scene in the second decade of the 20th century."

"These are the phenomena that account for the enormous increase in the number of those whom we today know of as Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Hardly any Muslim chronicler and historian of the period asserts that the ‘lower castes’ were embracing Islam because some high caste was oppressing them. On the contrary several of them record how different castes lived together, and peaceably. One after the other among them pours special venom on the ‘lower castes’ for being the most determined resisters to the spread of Islam. All this is evident from the memoirs of the emperors themselves, from the accounts of Islamic historians themselves. Yet, our judges repeat the cliches. Nor is it the case that Islam enabled those who converted to enter some egalitarian Utopia. Quite the contrary. And we do not have to look farther than the judgments themselves. What is the ‘reason’ these very judgments give for extending reservations to Muslims, for instance? What is the reason they give for overturning so central a theme of the Constitution and its maker – that such concessions shall not be given along communal fault lines? The ‘reason’ the judges give is that castes continue among Muslims to this day. Is this also because of Hinduism? Or because, as K.S. Lal shows, Islamic rule never aimed to, nor did it in fact, catapult people into some egalitarian Utopia?"

"The principle of ranking finds a vigorous application. Those who claim foreign ancestry are the aristocracy, the Ashraf. They have their own ranking: Sayyids, Sheikhs, Moghuls and Pathans. They are divided into subsidiary categories, generally all endogamous. The local converts constitute the plebeian class and are frankly called Ajlaf and Arzal, Arabic words which mean the wretched, the ignoble, the mean, the triflings. … They are further divided literally into hundreds of castes, most of them strictly endogamous."

"The population of Indian Muslims grew rapidly through enslavement. This rapid growth gave rise to new problems. One was a tussle for power between foreign slave-Amirs and Indian slaves some of whom also attained to the position of nobles.... [Minhaj Siraj describes:] “The Maliks and servants of the Sultan’s Court were all Turks of pure lineage” (Turkan-i-pak) writes he, and Taziks of noble birth (Tazikan-i-guzida was). “Imad-ud-Din Rayhan (who) was castrated and mutilated, and of the tribe of Hind, was ruling over the heads of lords of high descent, and the whole of them were loathing that state, and were unable to suffer any longer that degradation.”... The language of Ziyauddin Barani is not less vituperative. He was a staunch believer in the racial superiority of the Turks and the baseness of Indian Muslims. He recommended that “Teachers of every kind are to be sternly ordered not to thrust precious stones down the throats of dogs… that is, to the mean, the ignoble, the worthless… To the low-born they are to teach nothing more than the rules about prayer, fasting, religious charity and the Hajj pilgrimage along with some chapters of the Quran and some doctrines of the faith… They (Indian Muslims) are not to be taught reading and writing for plenty of disorders arise owing to the skill of the low-born in knowledge… the low-born are capable only of vices… so they are called low-born, worthless, plebeian, shameless and of dirty birth.” ... The fate and fortune of the black Africans was not that good....the majority of them were treated as lesser Muslims."

"Muslim ‘community’ in India had remained sharply divided into two mutually exclusive segments throughout the centuries of Islamic invasions and rule over large parts of the country. On the one hand, there were the descendants of conquerors who came from outside or who identified themselves completely with the conquerors - the Arabs, the Turks, the Iranians, and the Afghans. They glorified themselves as the Ashrãf (high-born, noble) or Ahli-i-Daulat (ruling race) and Ahl-i-Sa‘adat (custodians of religion). On the other hand, there were converts from among the helpless Hindus who were looked down upon by the Ashrãf and described as the Ajlãf (low-born, ignoble) and Arzãl (mean, despicable) depending upon the Hindu castes from which the converts came. The converts were treated as Ahl-i-Murãd (servile people) who were expected to obey the Ahl-i-Daulat and Ahl-i-Sa‘adat abjectly. Shah Waliullah (1703-62) and his son Abdul Aziz (1746-1822) were the first to notice this situation and felt frightened that the comparatively small class of the Ashrãf was most likely to be drowned in the surrounding sea of Hindu Kafirs. ... They had to turn to the neo-Muslims. The neo-Muslims, however, had little interest in waging wars for Islam. They had, therefore, to be fully Islamized, that is, alienated completely from their ancestral society and culture. That is why the Tabligh movement was started."

"In the medieval period, heredity and lineage were taken into account in the selection of officers and nobles, and as far as possible low-born Indian Muslims were not appointed to high offices. Foreign Muslims were generally preferred, not only in the Sultanate of Delhi or the Mughal Empire, but also in the independent kingdoms of Gujarat and Malwa and the Adil Shahi and Qutbshahi kingdoms of the Deccan. ... With this background, it needs no reiteration that, by and large, Muslim administration drew neither on India’s native tradition nor on native manpower and the development of Muslim administrative system and its implementation and execution in India owed much to foreign elements. ... The administration of the Sultanate and Mughal Empire was bureaucratic throughout. Over long periods this administrative system was dominated by immigrants from abroad, mainly West Asia and North Africa and this gave it much of the character of foreign and Islamic rule. Commenting on the list of mansabdars in the Ain-i-Akbari, Moreland says that while about 70 percent of the nobles were foreigners belonging to families which had either come to India with Humayun or had arrived at the court after the accession of Akbar, of the remaining 30 percent of the appointments which were held by Indians, rather more than half were Moslems and “rather less than half Hindus.”"

"Muhammad Tughlaq always preferred foreign Muslims to Indians for appointment as officers. The rebellion of Ain-ul-mulk Multani (1339) during his reign was a symptom of the resentment felt by the India-born nobles against this policy of prejudice.... Foreign nobles looked down upon Indian Muslim nobles, and considered them as ‘lowborn’, although not all foreign Muslims were of high lineage."

"“Would our aristocracy like that a man of low caste or insignificant origin, though he be a B.A. or M.A., and have the requisite ability, should be in a position of authority above them and have power in making laws that affect their lives and property? Never! Nobody would like it.”"

"Mr. Beverley’s opinion, that even a low-caste Hindu, on his conversion to Islam, attains to a position of equality with the generality of Musalmans, simply betrays his ignorance of the customs of the Musalmans. From a religious point of view, of course, all Musalmans stand on a footing of equality. But according to usage and customs the social position and the family rank of a man do not become altered by the change of religion. .In fact the social position of a Musalman convert exactly corresponds to the station he held previous to his conversion, and he can associate with only such Musalmans as belong to the same station as he himself ; a low-caste person on his embracing Islam, is not allowed to hold familiar intercourse or claim equality with high-born Musalmans, nor can a Hindu of superior caste, upon his conversion to Islam, marry into a respectable Musalman family. Rigid and scrupulous regard has ever been paid by the Musalmans to social position and family dignity."

"To dissuade them from anarchic terrorism against British individuals, the authorities gave them Marxist literature in prison, because orthodox Marxism believes in mass violence once the revolution arrives, but not in stray acts of violence. The British would take care that the great revolution never came, and meanwhile the terrorists-turned-Marxists would remain physically harmless. That is how Bengal as the hotbed of revolutionary nationalism became the centre of Indian Marxism."

"However, it is not unlikely that the Arabs, who received from the Indians the numeral figures (which the Greeks knew not), did from them also receive the use of them, and many profound speculations concerning them, which neither Latins nor Greeks know, till that now of late we have learned them from thence. From the Indians also they might learn their algebra, rather than from Diophantus."

"Like the crests on the heads of peacocks, like the gems on the hoods of the cobras, mathematics is at the top of the Vedanga sastras."

"There is not, and cannot be, number as such. There are several number worlds as there are several Cultures. We find an Indian, an Arabian, a Classical, a Western type of mathematical thought and, corresponding with each, a type of number — each type fundamentally peculiar and unique, an expression of a specific world feeling, a symbol having a specific validity which is even capable of scientific definition, a principle of ordering the Become which reflects the central essence of one and only one soul, viz., the soul of that particular Culture. Consequently, there are more mathematics than one. ... and so it is understandable that even negative numbers, which to us offer no conceptual difficulty, were impossible in the Classical mathematic, let alone zero as a number, that refined creation of a wonderful abstractive power which, for the Indian soul that conceived it as base for a positional numeration, was nothing more nor less than the key to the meaning of existence. Negative magnitudes have no existence.... But when we are told that probably (it is at best a doubtful venture to meditate upon so alien an expression of Being) the Indians conceived numbers which according to our ideas possessed neither value nor magnitude nor relativity, and which only became positive and negative, great or small units in virtue of position, we have to admit that it is impossible for us exactly to re-experience what spiritually underlies this kind of number. For us, 3 is always something, be it positive or negative; for the Greeks it was unconditionally a positive magnitude, +3; but for the Indian it indicates a possibility without existence, to which the word “something” is not yet applicable, outside both existence and non-existence which are properties to be introduced into it. +3, -3, 1/3, are thus emanating actualities of subordinate rank which reside in the mysterious substance (3) in some way that is entirely hidden from us. It takes a Brahmanic soul to perceive these numbers as self-evident, as ideal emblems of a self-complete world form; to us they are as unintelligible as is the Brahman Nirvana, for which, as lying beyond life and death, sleep and waking, passion, compassion and dispassion and yet somehow actual, words entirely fail us. Only this spirituality could originate the grand conception of nothingness as a true number, zero, and even then this zero is the Indian zero for which existent and non-existent are equally external designations."

"I shall not now speak of the knowledge of the Hindus … of their suitable discoveries in the science of astronomy—discoveries even more ingenious than those of the Greeks and Babylonians, of their rational system of mathematics, or of their method of calculation which no words can praise strongly enough; I mean the system using nine symbols."

"I will omit all discussion of the science of the Hindus, a people not the same as the Syrians, their subtle discoveries in the science of astronomy, discoveries that are more ingenious than those of the Greeks and the Babylonians; their computing that surpasses description. I wish only to say that this computation is done by means of nine signs. If those who believe because they speak Greek, that they have reaced the limits of science should know these things, they would be convinced that there are also others who know something."

"It is more likely that Pythagoras was influenced by India than by Egypt. Almost all the theories, religions, philosophical and mathematical taught by the Pythagoreans, were known in India in the sixth century B.C., and the Pythagoreans, like the Jains and the Buddhists, refrained from the destruction of life and eating meat and regarded certain vegetables such as beans as taboo" "It seems that the so-called Pythagorean theorem of the quadrature of the hypotenuse was already known to the Indians in the older Vedic times, and thus before Pythagoras."

"Many of the key results of mathematics, some of which are at the very “core” of modern day mathematics, are of Indian origin. ...‘I wish to conclude initially by simply saying that the work of Indian mathematicians has been severely neglected by western historians.’...‘it is likely European scholars are resistant due to the way in which the inclusion of non-European, including Indian, contributions shakes up views that have been held for hundredsof years, and challenges the very foundations of the Eurocentric ideology."

"We know that the trigonometric sine is not mentioned by Greek mathematicians and astronomers, that it was used in India from the Gupta period onwards (third century).... The only conclusion possible is that the use of sines is an Indian development and not a Greek one. But Tannery, persuaded that the Indians could not have made any mathematical inventions, preferred to assume that the sine was a Greek idea not adopted by Hipparchus, who gave only a cable of chords. For Tannery, the fact that the Indians knew of sines was sufficient proof that they must have heard about them from the Greeks."

"The Hindus no less than the Greeks have shared in the work of constructing scientific concepts and methods in the investigation of physical phenomena , as well as of building up a body of positive knowledge which has been applied to industrial technique; and Hindu scientific ideas and methodology (e.g. the inductive method or methods of algebraic analysis) have deeply influenced the course of natural philosophy in Asia—in the East as well as the West—in China and Japan, as well as in the Saracen empire."

"However, Seidenberg was told by the indologists that these Sutras, or any Vedic text for that matter, were definitely written later than 1700 BC. But mathematical data cannot be manipulated just like that, and Seidenberg remained convinced of his case: “Whatever the difficulty there may be [concerning chronology], it is small in comparison with the difficulty of deriving the Vedic ritual application of the theorem from Babylonia. (The reverse derivation is easy)… the application involves geometric algebra, and there is no evidence of geometric algebra from Babylonia. And the geometry of Babylonia is already secondary whereas in India it is primary.” [To satisfy the indologists, he said that the Shulba Sutra had conserved an older tradition, and that it is from this one that the Babylonians had learned their mathematics:] “Hence we do not hesitate to place the Vedic (…) rituals, or more exactly, rituals exactly like them, far back of 1700 BC. (…) elements of geometry found in Egypt and Babylonia stem from a ritual system of the kind described in the Sulvasutras.”"

"I once heard, and I think it is true, that only one man in the world—some Indian mathematician—understood the mathematics of string theory in eleven-dimensional space, and he dreamed it."

"Ancient Indian culture has regarded the science of numbers as the noblest of its arts … A thousand years ahead of Europeans, Indian savants knew that zero and infinity were mutually inverse notions. In short, Indian science was born out of a mystical and religious culture and the etymology of the Sanskrit word used to describe numbers and the science of numbers bears witn The early passion which Indian civilization had for high numbers was a significant factor contributing to the discovery of the place-value system, and not only offered the Indians the incentive to go beyond the calculable physical world, but also led to an understanding much earlier than in our civilization of the notion of mathematical infinity itself."