To millions of self-aware, questioning Hindus who
regularly mine the vaults of the information age for clues
about their long-suppressed civilizational identity, Rajiv
Malhotra needs no introduction. You may have listened to his
presentations and debates on YouTube videos, read his articles
at a variety of online venues ranging from The Huffington
Post to Niti Central, and perhaps become familiar with the
seminal, path-breaking ideas he has articulated in four books
thus far: “Invading the Sacred”, “Breaking India”,
“Being Different”, and “Indra's Net”.
Perhaps you identify in his work the building blocks
of the historical grand-narrative we've all been searching
for: the ancient, authentic story-of-ourselves that
Indians were forbidden to express during a thousand years of
oppressive foreign rule, and that a powerful nexus of
left-wing politicians, Christian missionary organizations, and
Marxist academicsseek to bury completely even today. Or perhaps
you think he's too confrontational, too controversial, and his
ideas too antithetical to our gentle post-colonial ethos,
dedicated to maintaining a picture ofsuperficial coexistence
at all costs.
Either way, what is certain is that Malhotra is a
fount of ideas whose time has come, and that he cannot be
ignored. Nor can he be ridiculed into submission;
shrill, ad-hominemderision targeting his credentials has
previously been issued by a plethora of self-aggrandizing
Twitter loudmouths and professional name-callers, but to no
avail, as his ideas continue to be disseminated ever more
widely.
Mahatma Gandhi once said of his detractors: "First
they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you,
and then you win." Like many oppressors of yore, the
nexus of left-wing India Studies academics and international
Christian missionary organizations has already made vigorous
but ultimately futile attempts to silence Malhotra with the
first two of these tactics. Little wonder that now, they're
gearing up for a no-holds-barred fight.
The circumstances of the ongoing battle, with highly
dubious allegations of "plagiarism" having been leveled
against Malhotra by a lecturer at a Christian seminary in New
Jersey, beg the question of why the forces determined to
suppress his ideas have invested in such desperate smear
campaigns (with a concomitant squandering of academic
credibility, such as it ever was, on the part of their
hatchet-men). A brief review of his work should make the
reasons clear.
In "Invading the Sacred", Malhotra identified and
took to task the cartel of peer-review that rigidly controls
discourse about Indian cultural traditions, specifically Hindu
religion, in the American academy. He wrote
penetratingly of this group's penchant for analyzing Hinduism
with Western critical theories that represent its traditional
features as fundamentally oppressive and primitive: the
foundation of the "caste, cows, and curry"paradigm of Indian
religion that dominates the Western popular imagination.
In tandem, Malhotra exposed the fact that generations
of Western scholars have been harvesting the wealth of Indian
traditional knowledge systems without
attribution;appropriating Yoga, Ayurveda and various
disciplines of meditation for the innumerable benefits they
provide modern Western societies, without acknowledging the
origin of these products in the very same civilizational
continuum that religious studies academics workovertime to
defame. His identification of this process as "digestion"
earned him the ire of many powerful individuals who depended
upon its extractive mechanisms to thrive. At the same time,
his questioning of the official academic position on Hinduism
as a primitive and exploitative faith proved extremely
inconvenient to missionary groups, who rely on this
representation to justify "saving" the millions of
dark-skinned souls allegedly chafing against its
shackles.
"Breaking India" went a step further, explaining how
false narratives concocted under the aegis of
long-defunct and thoroughly baseless race-theories,
such as the "Aryan Invasion of India" and "Dalit/Dravidian
identity", were being utilized to foster political
destabilization of the modern Indian state. Worse yet, these
inventions had become the basis of atrocity literature
fabricated to compel the imposition of more sinister political
interventions, such as the threat of economic sanctions against
India by Western governments in the name of "human rights";
all of this amounted to pressure tactics that would ultimately
aid Christian missionary groups in their efforts to reap
converts from amongst India's more disadvantaged
populations.
If Malhotra's first two books were long-overdue
exposés of the exploitative machinery deployed by certain
Western interests against Indian civilization, his third,
"Being Different", sets forth a positive formulation of Indian
identity in the modern age. It contrasts Dharma
civilizations, which gave rise to Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and
Sikh belief systems, with Abrahamic civilizations rooted in
monotheistic faiths such as Judaism, Christianity or Islam,
highlighting certain features that make Dharma civilizations
unique: an emphasis on living systems of embodied
knowledge rather than privileged historical narratives as the
basis for spiritual belief; a comfort with ambiguity and
complexity as opposed to the rigid intolerance of perceived
chaos; a worldview predicated on existing integral
unity within the universe, instead of a synthetic unity that
human beings must impose upon creation; and a grounding in
non-translatable Sanskrit terminology that inherently resists
attempts at cultural digestion by enforced homogenization.
"Being Different" analyses the identity crisis faced
by modern-day Hindus in terms of "difference
anxiety": a perceived need to make oneself more
acceptable to the Western other by explaining one's identity
in terms dictated by the framework of Western universalism.
The book advocates an alternative approach: that of
reversing the gaze upon the West and insisting on a
relationship based on the recognition and acceptance of
existing differences with mutual respect.
If the positive approach to self-identification
detailed in "Being Different" alarmed the nexus of interests
determined to keep Hindus on the back foot, the
thorough deconstruction in "Indra's Net" of a highly motivated
and specific distortion of Indian civilizational narrative,
championed by an influential section of Western Indologists,
must have seemed unbearably threatening. Here, Malhotra
directly takes on the peddlers of the "Neo-Hinduism" thesis:
the pernicious and entirely unsubstantiated notion that
Hinduism never existed as a philosophically unified "religion"
until the 19th century, when a group of nationalist Indian
philosophers (Swami Vivekananda among them) cobbled it together
from a diverse ensemble of essentially unrelated folk beliefs,
spiritual texts and popular mythologies originating in
different micro-cultures from across the subcontinent.
The idea that Hinduism is a relatively recent and
politically-motivated invention is, again, useful to all
groups of Malhotra's detractors. Christian missionary
organizations, whose claim to spiritual authority lies in
asserting the supremacy of the historical narrative conveyed
in the Bible, employ this false representation to characterize
Hinduism as an illegitimate religion. Professional digesters,
who have made their fortunes peddling ideas derived from Yoga
or meditation to Western consumers without acknowledgement,
see in it a ready-made excuse to avoid attributing the origins
of such knowledge within an effectively delegitimized
tradition. Finally, left-wing Indian academics, who enjoy
backing from within the deep state in many Western countries,
leverage it as yet another opportunity to undermine the very
case for Indian nationhood. With its rigorous
demolition of the Neo-Hinduism thesis, "Indra's Net" deprives
all these groups of aninvaluable source of ammunition.
It is the announcement of Malhotra's forthcoming
book, however, that seems to have goaded this nexus into
precipitous action. In this publication, Malhotra
takes on a group of Western academics (and their Indian
acolytes) committed to effecting the cultural genocide of
Indian civilization by wresting control of the very genetic
code in which its vast, rich and heritable legacy of
knowledge transmission is inscribed: the Sanskrit language
itself. He exposes the motivations implicit in the approach
that its leaders, including the highly influential scholar
Sheldon Pollock, advocate towards the study of Sanskrit:
sterilizing its vast oeuvre of all the sacred content it has
produced; interpreting its literature with the singular
purpose of portraying Hindu tradition as oppressive and
inegalitarian; and entombing it within the confines of a
conceptual museum as a dead language, fit only for scholarly
study, incapable any longer of nurturing the great forest of
civilizational traditions that has drawn sustenance from it
for thousands of years.
Pollock is extremely well-connected, not only within
Western academic circles, but to numerous powerful individuals
amongst the Indian elite-- many of whom have staked their
credibility upon backing him, ironically enough, as a champion
of Sanskrit "revival". It is hardly surprising that, a few
days after Malhotra offered a preview of his forthcoming book
at the World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok, the onslaught
against him has been taken up from all quarters.
This is the context in which we must consider the
barrage of internet noise underpinning the indisputably flimsy
allegations of plagiarism that one Richard Fox Young has
recently directed against Rajiv Malhotra. The veracity of the
allegations themselves has been dissected and exposed in
numerous other venues; I will not address them here, other
than to say that they only reveal how little credibility Mr.
Young had to lose when he made himself available to conduct
this unfortunate kamikaze attack in the first place.
However, in a situation typical of the 24X7 news
media age, the accusation that Malhotra committed plagiarism
has itself gained greater prominence, through endless
repetition, than the question of whether there is any merit to
the charges themselves. In effect, the blurry edge
of the news cycle has been utilized to inflict a smear that
Malhotra’s antagonists hope will pre-emptively alienate his
vast constituency of potential readers. During last
year’s election campaign in India, this tactic emerged as the
preferred weapon of the entrenched and morally bankrupt
incumbents against the reformist outsider, Narendra
Modi.
On a thorough reading of the allegations it becomes
obvious that the nexus of interests who collude to suppress
the Hindu narrative, and foster the perpetual colonization of
the Indian psyche, is attempting to pin Malhotra on a
technicality. While this does reflect their
inability to counter him with substantive arguments, it should
not be lightly dismissed; after all, the British East India
Company’s use of the Doctrine of Lapse demonstrates how a
technicality could be leveraged to annex a vast number of
states and enslave our people.
To all those Indian commentators who have seized upon
the current fracas as an opportunity to make sagely equivocal
statements deploring the alleged propensity to plagiarism
amongst Indian writers, I would offer this reminder:
if you let your opponent set the rules of the game, you have
only yourself to blame when you lose.
About Author - Kartik
Mohan is an executive in a tech firm in New York, with
extensive background in tracking Hinduphobia and fighting it for
20 years.
Also read
1.
Rajiv
Malhotra speech at World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok 2015
2. Circular
Firing Squad of Flying Attack Monkeys Target Rajiv Malhotra
3. Plagiarism
charge: Why Rajiv Malhotra is on the gunsights of western
Indologists
4. Wendy's
revenge: Plagiarism charge against Rajiv Malhotra is a red
herring
5. Fundamentalist
Cleric Throws Plagiarism Bull at
American Author
6. When
Caste was not a bad word
7. Freduian
twists to Hindu myths
8. Why
post-independent India is at odds with its true nature
9. Taking
Sanskrit to the world
10.In
the world’s largest Muslim nations Hindu epics survive and
thrive
11.The
modern revivalists
12.Foreign
Funding of Indian NGO's