Month: April 2016

It takes audacity of the best/worst kind to deny a fact outright.

The intention to denigrate Hinduism and its culture started from Islamic period and it was carried on in a more subtle and systematic manner by the British firstly by publishing ‘First History of India’ by James Stuart Mill from England who without even visiting during the 12 years it took him to write the ‘History’ where he begins by asserting that the world did not begin before 4000 years ago and Indians were barbarians and steeped in superstitions.

Our Secular Indians of post Independent India did not even flinch.

Many of them carried and are carrying on in the path..

Wendy Doniger , author of Alternate History which ridicules Hindus and insults Krishna, faced flak from India, of course, excepting from the Sickularists.

Having been shown the Book where it deserved to be, in the Dustbin, it looks as though she has taken recourse to denigrate Indians in the web.

This gem of a piece seems to have been written in http://www.vichaar.com and is quoted by the site https://wondersofpakistan.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/the-battle-over-indian-history/

Check the site and you will know what I am talking about.

The vichaar site does not seem to work.!

The  article titled Battle over Indian History quoted by a site extolling Pakistan is, to say the least, is disgusting and speaks of intellectual dishonesty and moral depravity.

When one attempts to write a History one is expected to be careful and that too when you write about a country about which you are unfamiliar with its culture and its History.

You should know the language and study and if you lazy or an illiterate you should get some one who can read and study.

There is no evidence of Rama Temple and it is a story.

Really!

Check out the Link

https://ramanisblog.in/2012/04/05/ramayana-lord-ramas-exile-date-and-other-details/

And follow the Related posts or

Still better,

Google Rama’s date+ramanan50

‘https://ramanisblog.in/2012/04/05/ramayana-lord-ramas-exile-date-and-other-details/

There are authentic sites about the Temple of Rama in Ayodhya which give out proof about Ram Mandir , Ayodhya.

Please check them.

What is painful is the similar attitude shown by some Indians and of course The Hindu, Indian Newspaper which has published them,

Though I have been writing  on dating the Ramayana, Mahabharata and other Indian texts, I have not written on Ayodhya Temple’s date.

The Sri Rama Navami, the Birth date of Lord Rama falls on 15 April 2016.

‘

“It’s not a logical judgement with so many parts going 2-1. One does not accept the logicality of the judgement,” said Irfan Habib, a noted historian and a former Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research who earlier taught at the Aligarh Muslim University.

He noted that the verdict seemed to legitimise the events of 1949, when an idol was placed inside the mosque, by constant references. On the other hand, by minimising any mentions of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the court seemed to be disregarding it, he said.

He also expressed surprise that two judges questioned the date of construction of the Babri Masjid, as well as the involvement of emperor Babar or his commander Mir Baqi, since there had been clear inscriptions to this effect before the demolition. “Things that are totally clear historically, the court has tried to muddy,” he said.

“The historical evidence has not been taken into account,” said D.N. Jha, history professor at the Delhi University. Noting the judgement’s mention of the “faith and belief of Hindus” in reference to the history of the disputed structure, Dr. Jha asked why the court had requested an excavation of the site.

“If it is a case of ‘belief,’ then it becomes an issue of theology, not archaeology. Should the judiciary be deciding cases on the basis of theology is a question that needs to be asked,” he said.

Professional archaeologists also noted that the judges did not seem to rely heavily on the Archaeological Survey of India’s court-directed excavation of the site in 2003, at least in the summaries of their verdict available on Thursday evening.

“Somewhere, there is doubt about the credibility of that report,” said Supriya Verma of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, who acted as an observer during the ASI excavation.

She noted that neither Justice Sudhir Agarwal nor Justice Dharam Veer Sharma even referenced the ASI report to support his conclusion on the existence of a temple on the site before the mosque was built.

“It is almost as though they themselves were not convinced by the evidence. They are clearly conceding that there was no archaeological evidence of a temple or of its demolition…It is a judgement of theology,” she said.

Another observer of the ASI excavation, Jaya Menon of the Aligarh Muslim University, noted that the ASI report itself did not provide any evidence of a demolition, and only asserted the existence of a temple in its conclusion. “So I don’t know on what basis they made their judgements,” she said. The ASI report had been criticised by many archaeologists for ignoring evidence such as animal bones, which would not have been found in a temple for Ram, and the existence of glazed pottery and graves which indicated Muslim residents.’

Source.http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/historical-evidence-ignored-say-historians/article805087.ece

For years, some Hindus have argued that the 16th century mosque called the Babri Masjid (after the Mughal emperor Babur) was built over a temple commemorating the birthplace of Rama (an avatar of the god Vishnu) in Ayodhya (the city where, according to the ancient poem called the Ramayana, Rama was born), though there is no evidence whatsoever that there has been ever a temple on that spot or that Rama was born there.

On December 6, 1992, as the police stood by and watched, leaders of the right-wing Hindu party called the BJP whipped a crowd of 200,000 into frenzy. Shouting “Death to the Muslims!” the mob attacked Babur’s mosque with sledgehammers. In the riots that followed, over a thousand people lost their lives, and many more died in reactive riots that broke out elsewhere in India. On the site today, nothing but vandalized ruins remains, and, in a dark corner of the large, empty space, a small shrine with a couple of oleograph pictures of Rama, where a Hindu priest performs a perfunctory ritual. Whether or not there ever was a Hindu temple there before, there is a temple, however makeshift, there now.

People are being killed in India today because of misreadings of the history of the Hindus. In all religions, myths that pass for history–not just casual misinformation, the stock in trade of the internet, but politically-driven, aggressive distortions of the past–can be deadly, and in India they incite violence not only against Muslims but against women, Christians, and the lower castes.

Myth has been called “the smoke of history,” and there is a desperate need for a history of the Hindus that distinguishes between the fire, the documented evidence, and the smoke; for mythic narratives become fires when they drive historical events rather than respond to them. Ideas are facts too; the belief, whether true or false, that the British were greasing cartridges with animal fat, sparked a revolution in India in 1857. We are what we imagine, as much as what we do.

Hindus in America, too, care how their history is taught to their children in American schools, and the voices of Hindu action groups ring out on the internet. Some of these groups, justifiably incensed by the disproportionate emphasis on the horrors of the caste system in American textbooks, and by the grotesque misrepresentation of Hindu deities in American commercialism, ricochet to the other extreme and demand that all references to the caste system be expunged from all American textbooks.

And so I tried to tell a more balanced story, in “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” to set the narrative of religion within the narrative of history, as a statue of a Hindu god is set in its base, to show how Hindu images, stories, and philosophies were inspired or configured by the events of the times, and how they changed as the times changed. There is no one Hindu view of karma, or of women, or of Muslims; there are so many different opinions (one reason why it’s a rather big book) that anyone who begins a sentence with the phrase, “The Hindus believe. . . ,” is talking nonsense.

My narrative is alternative both to the histories promulgated by some contemporary Hindus on the political right in India and to those presented in most surveys in English–imperialist histories, all about the kings, ignoring ordinary people. But the texts tell us not just who was the ruler but who got enough to eat and who did not. And so my narrative is alternative in its inclusion of alternative people. How does one include the marginal as well as the mainstream Hindus in the story? The ancient texts, usually dismissed as the work of Brahmin males, in fact reveal a great deal about the lower castes, often very sympathetic to them and sometimes coded as narratives about dogs, standing for the people now generally called Dalits, formerly called Untouchables. The argument, for instance, that Dalits should be allowed to enter temples, an argument still violently disputed in parts of India today, can already be found, masked, in ancient stories about faithful dogs who should be allowed to enter heaven. So too, though Feminists often argue that Hindu women were entirely silenced, women’s voices–their ideas and attitudes and, above all, their stories–were often heard and recorded by the men who wrote down the texts.

Foreigners, too, made contributions to Hinduism from the very beginning. Once upon a time–about 50 million years ago –a triangular plate of land, moving fast (for a continent), broke off from Madagascar (a large island lying off the southeastern coast of Africa), and sailed across the Indian Ocean and smashed into the belly of Central Asia with such force that it squeezed the earth five miles up into the skies to form the Himalayan range and fused with Central Asia to become the Indian subcontinent. Or so the people who study plate tectonics nowadays tell us, and who am I to challenge them? Not just land but people came to India from Africa, much later; the winds that bring the monsoon rains to India each year also brought the first humans to peninsular India by sea from East Africa in around 50,000 BCE. And so from the very start India was a place made up of land and people from somewhere else. India itself is an import, or if you prefer, Africa outsourced India (and just about everyone else).

The magnificent civilization of the Indus Valley (in present-day Pakistan) traded with Sumer, Crete, and Mesopotamian, before it came to a mysterious end in about 2000 BCE. At just about the same time, in the nearby Punjab, a very different culture entered India from the Northwest and created the great corpus of texts called the Vedas, the oldest texts of Hinduism. Other invaders– Greeks, Turks, Arabs, and British–made valuable contributions to the complex fabric of Hinduism.

We can trace certain important ideas throughout the centuries of this unbroken tradition. For example: A profound psychological understanding of addiction to material objects is evident throughout the history of Hinduism. Addiction was the concern not merely of kings or scholars but of ordinary people, like the proto-hippy and the gambler who are depicted in the Vedas (see excerpt). One reaction to this perceived danger was to control addiction through asceticism or renunciation. And so began an ongoing battle between a great tradition that always celebrated sensuality (think: elephants encrusted with rubies, temples that make rococo look like Danish modern, the Kama-sutra) and another that feared the excesses of the flesh and practiced meditation (think: Gandhi).

Some of the British, especially in the early colonial period, admired and celebrated the sensuality of Hinduism. Others, particularly but not only the later Protestant missionaries, despised what they regarded as Hindu excesses. Unfortunately, many educated Hindus took their cues from the second sort of Brit and became ashamed of the sensuous aspects of their own religion, aping the Victorians (who were, after all, very Victorian), becoming more Protestant than thou. It is not fair to blame the British for the Puritanical strain in Hinduism; it began much earlier. But they certainly made it a lot worse. And cultural influences of this sort, as much as the grand ideas, are part of what makes the history of the Hindus so fascinating.

http://www.vichaar.com/

Scholarship of

‘

Maps in front pages: Maps titled Indias Geographical Features and India from 600 CE to 1600 CE 
COMMENT: In the first map, the Waziristan Hills area is marked erroneously as Kirthar Range. The Kirthar Range is at least 200 miles further south. In the third map, Janakpur, Nagarkot, Mandu and Haldighati are marked several hundred miles from their correct geographical location.

Pg. 67 – It is claimed that the entire Harappan culture had a population of 40,000! 
COMMENT: This is estimated as the population of Mohenjo-Daro alone. The population of the entire culture is estimated around 500,000.

Pg 130 – The author claims that there are no Gods in the Vedas who are Shudras. 
COMMENT: It is anachronistic to assign castes to Rigvedic deities, but nevertheless, Pushan, Vesmapati and others have been considered Shudra deities in later times.

Pg 450- It is claimed that Emperor Ala-ud-Din Khalji did not sack temples in Devagiri. 
COMMENT: His contemporary Amir Khusro clearly mentions that the Emperor sacked numerous temples and raised mosques instead.

Pg 552 – The book claims that the Ramcharitmanas was written at Varanasi. 
COMMENT: Both modern scholarship as well as tradition accept that the work (or at least most of it) was written in Ayodhya.

Pg 128 – The book likens the Vedic devotee worshipping different Vedic deities to a lying and a philandering boyfriend cheating on his girlfriend(s). 
COMMENT: This is offensive and ignores that fact that in the Rigveda, the gods are said to be all united, born of one another, and from the same source.(India Today)

5.Why is it that writing on Islam, even  a hint of Prophet’s Image.would hurt Religious sentiments ?

Satanic Verses  by Rushdie was banned for much less and a booty was announced to kill the author.

6.The Da Vinci Code was initially banned for portraying History as found in Christianity.

7.Are these secularists prepared to publish a Book on Muhammad marrying a Widow with a child,

Or marrying a nine-year old,

or The practice of Thighing in Islam where children are raped as a practice?

Or Mary of Magdalene was the wife , to put it politely,of Jesus?

8.I have a good collection of Posts on the History of Islam, Christianity, American wiping out the Indians,Debauchery of the British Monarchy.

Any body there to publish them in the interest of Truth and History?

The Hindus Alternative History Krishna Fondling Breasts

Source and citation in Block quote is from

https://wondersofpakistan.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/the-battle-over-indian-history/