The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

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UlanBatori
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by UlanBatori »

https://in.newshub.org/historian-richar ... 2.html#_=_
Renowned historian and academic Richard Fox Young had alleged that Indian research scholar and writer Rajeev Malhotra has plagiarised his works....oung, first brought to light the fact that Malhotra had taken chunks off his works to include in his own books Breaking India and Indra's Net.
Which brought one response in comment:
Anonymous

17 July, 2015 1:12 PM

Could someone please back up the claim that this Young Fox is a "renowned historian and academic"? The fellow seems to have stayed as Associate Professor, 35 years after his rather below-mediocre PhD that took him 8 years. Searching on Google Scholar, well, even after digging for 10 pages one finds maybe 4 or 5 publications that bear his name, most poorly cited. one cited a lot but maybe to laugh. Typical Indian Dhimmis, to call this "Renowned Histerian". Young Fox's work is most appropriate summed as "Hwhay Do the Heeethain Rage??" as the Conversionists bellow every Sunday to their assembled sheep. He has done absolutely nothing remotely original. Also, this article claims that Young Fox accused Malhtora of plagiarizing HIS work. Impossible, because Fox hasn't done anything. So much for Indian journalistic standards.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by RoyG »

Ulanbatori,

Is there anyway we can go through his works and dig up instances of plagiarism? We can go through Pollock and Nicholson as well. RF Young is trying to turn this into a game. He's building up an army of sepoys to nitpick Malhotra's pieces. We can play the same game. I'll join twitter and get in the action as well. Do people still use turn it in?
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by MurthyB »

Rajiv Malhotra-ji hits back:

http://www.niticentral.com/2015/07/18/r ... 24312.html
It amazes me that there is nothing original in your explanation of bhedabheda, as your knowledge is obtained from reading Indian texts, western interpretations and sitting at the feet of Indian pandits to learn. Unfortunately, western Indology does not recognize what the pandit teaches you as his work, because it is oral and not written in a peer-reviewed (hence western supervised) publication. So the whole protocol of claiming something to belong to you as the author is a sort of technology of thievery. Fortunately, Indians have started claiming back their bio-heritage such as Ayurveda from such thievery that is being done by westerners claiming that Indians never filed patents as per western rules. It is time to also claim our intellectual heritage back.
Indian pandits know their materials by heart and it is orally transmitted; and they do not have the ego to claim authorship. They are very humble and hence get taken for a ride. They are duped by any ‘good cop’ from the west who comes in Indian dress to talk to them nicely and bamboozle them into believing that he is a friend of the tradition. Westerners can pick their brains freely, without which you would not be able to learn; but then you go back to the West and have the arrogance to call it yours. As per your Western protocol, you thank the pandit in some preface once, and feel that it suffices. But if you feel that my 30 references to your work fall short then by the same token, please note that you, too, ought to be acknowledging your pandits and Indian textual sources in every single paragraph, if not every sentence.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by MurthyB »

^^^ Not OT at all. Since 2008, the Indologist Sanskritist gang has been at the forefront of fighting against any revival of Sanskrit as a spoken language.

Apparently according to Dr. Stella Sandahl, Sanskrit revivalists are interested in "cutting throats", "raping nuns", "destroying mosques", etc. This preposterous and extremely offensive allegation was made in an academic e-list no less, eliciting a couple of muted protests. Dr. Sandahl also makes the equally outrageous allegation that Sanskrit revivalists are all proponents of the Hindutva political movement:
http://list.indology.info/pipermail/ind ... 32021.html
on ratemyprofessors.com, one review says:
She has high standards for her students. She taught me to be precise in my translations. A brilliant Indologist with an eye for detail. A fascinating lady to chat with. In class she can often get off topic and talk about Hindutva or give long personal anecdotes.
So I did my undergraduate work in YooEss onlee, and took Spanish as my humanities requirement. This entailed taking more than an year's worth of Spanish with mostly one or two professors, at least 3 or even 6 courses, I don't recall the exact number. In that entire time, I don't recall them ever veering off into Franco's politics or Shining Path ideology or Che's exploits, or Castro or anything. We discussed Marquez, Borges and the like and that was it. Stuck to Spanish grammar, literature, and the sort of thing you would expect from Spanish classes.

It seems like Indology is infested with politically obsessed Marxists; why is that? It seems like Marxists are looking for any society or country that they can find as soft targets just like the jihadis look for failing states in the ummah world to take over. Modern India must be top on the list of places for a potential marxist revolution, and the generally spineless left-o-philic Indian nationalism of congress has made it easier for them. Is that the explanation? Have white westerners, shunted out from peddling marxism in other mainstream contexts, especially during the cold war, historically found refuge in Indology? Even that petition started against RM on change.org was by one fellow called Jesse Knutson who wrote a countercurrents article in 2010 asking the Indian government to surrender to the Naxals, and let them create an independent Maoist state. This guy's "expertise" is in the Sanskrit poetry of 12th century senapati Bengal courts. Why is he a Naxalite? A white, American guy.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by member_26011 »

The strategy is probably what any pissed off academic typically does. Here is mine:

Get his papers and the citation chain; crawl for a while and study them. Build a graphical model of people and terms. This usually reveals both key players and lines of attack. These people are activists pretending to be researchers. Such people generally make too many mistakes.

One line appears to be that Hinduism is not tolerant of Christianity and claims of acceptance of plurality are false. This guy producers material to support this conclusion. just trash this under performer in all fora by staying on message.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by UlanBatori »

Don't want to derail a nice thread, but this has become the #1 issue because of the atrocious and vicious nature of the attack. If someone wants to start a separate thread say u no where, pls do so and indicate that it has been started. The thesis of the twerp can be obtained as given above, but that's for someone else. As Rajiv explains, EVERYTHING that these buggers write about, is plagiarized. They never acknowledge the precise source of any Samskrtam item. Just saying it is from the Vedas is garbage - who poured the Vedas into their ears? Same with quotations from Ramayana or anything else - they don't cite the real reference from where they got something. So what is needed is an all-out expose of the Divinity Schools and Seminaries and their real purpose. Simple statistic: Some 3 percent of all Xtian clergy are under investigation for 'pedophile' child abuse/ sodomy. Versus less than 0.01 percent or so of the general population. Where did they become such, or conversely, do Divinity Schools and Seminaries go out and recruit such monsters in order to send them out to torture and subjugate and corrupt innocent people? We know they write 'textbooks' that are mostly *orn and specifically kiddie *orn. So we know that is mostly on what passes for their minds. We know there is a lot of sex going on in the seminaries (see what I posted above). See the case in Kerala where the young nun was murdered when she was going to go public.

This is the aspect that needs exposure: these buggers are literally that. The Indian/ Hindu experience is not unique. Check the experience of the Native Canadian people of, say, British Columbia or Vancouver Island. The South American experience. The Hawaiian experience, the South Seas experience, the Tahitian experience, the African experience, the Filipino experience, and of course the Native American experience. The Australian experience, the NewZealand experience, the Korean experience, the Chinese experience. I think a worldwide expose of Princeton and Harvard contributions to pedophilia, sodomy and general child abuse, needs to be exposed. Would make a lot of entertainment on Twitter and FB, if nothing else. :)

As for the 'plagiarism' claim, I think that has now backfired. Need to use their own noise for some serious entertainment now. Look at the Princeton history: they use "plagiarism" to destroy students who are from non-OneCommunity/OneRace/OneGender. The cases are pretty clear. Student refuses sexual advances from Princeton Prof - 'plagiarism' finding follows, with Star Chamber rules of evidence - meaning none is considered.

So they tried that on Malhotra - and are getting it right on their own musharrafs now.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by UlanBatori »

OT.. Speaking of Princeton, here is their version of the Olympics Should post this online at Teetar etc.

And this gem from the Trustees of Princeton:
Since 1993 Princeton has participated in a nationwide study of alcohol use through the Core Survey.*[see footnote at end of file] Findings of the 1998 survey, the most recent and the third in the series, remain consistent with earlier studies. The key findings serve as a snapshot of alcohol use at the University:

More than half of our students used alcohol before they entered the University. Another twenty-five percent drank alcohol by the end of their first year. Fifty-seven percent of our first-year students reported increased drinking after arriving here.
Forty-three percent of Princeton undergraduates reported binge drinking at least once in the two weeks prior to the survey. Binge drinkers are defined as those who, over a specified two-week period, have had at least five drinks in one sitting.
Nine percent of Princeton undergraduates reported patterns of alcohol use that suggest that they are problem drinkers.
Ninety-eight percent of those in the study believed that the social atmosphere at this University promotes alcohol use.

Alcohol abuse is involved in essentially all serious instances of physical violence and sexual abuse that occur on campus.
This is one of the requirements on women at Princeton in order to graduate - otherwise they get dragged to the Inquisition Room at the Seminary on Plagiarism charges to face Dr. Young Fox
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by RamaY »

Did my part. Let's hope the message spreads!
@RamaY_BRF: .@RajivMessage @RichardFoxYoung
I demand that western indologists recall their books & republish them with proper Rishi/Bhashya citations.

@RamaY_BRF: .@RajivMessage @RichardFoxYoung
Every mentioning of Veda Mantra must precede with Rishi, Chandas, Kara-Anga Nyasa, Dhyana Slokas
+

@RamaY_BRF: .@RajivMessage @RichardFoxYoung
+
Every reference to Veda Mantra / Hindu Devata must be followed with "Tat Tvam Asi" & it's meaning.
+

@RamaY_BRF: .@RajivMessage @RichardFoxYoung
+ Any/Every quotation of Hindu references must affirm that "Hinduism denies that humans are born sinners"
+

@RamaY_BRF: .@RajivMessage @RichardFoxYoung
+ Any reference to Mantras & Bijaksharas must include the Adhisthana Devata's shahasra-Nama pujaavidhi.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by RoyG »

If Sheldon and Co. are acting like this, B4S must be full of embarrassing truths. Malhotra hasn't disclosed what sort of details are in it but I think its possible that he caught Sheldon lifting not only oral traditions but entire sanskrit passages without giving proper credit. RM has indicated that almost nothing he says is original many times but I don't think people understand the gravity of it. You're literally presenting the evidence in a book while on the other hand tearing his ideas and lifework into pieces. Coupled with RM speaking out against him at conferences and then finally at the World Sanskrit event, it is probably driving him mad. He knows whats in it but he is powerless to stop it from coming out into the open. He has to sleep with those thoughts till September.

Wish I could get a pre-release copy. The wait is killing me too.

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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by UlanBatori »

Rajiv Malhotra promises to remove the Plagiarist's References: Nicholson's. :rotfl:
Dear Andrew Nicholson: Rajiv Malhotra responds
https://www.change.org/p/publishers-of- ... al-freedom
Dear Andrew Nicholson...
Rajiv Malhotra responds to Andrew Nicholson.
Rajiv Malhotra
Indian–American researcher, author, speaker. Current affairs, inter-civilization, science
Dear Andrew Nicholson,
I am glad you have entered the battlefield so we can get into some substantial matters. Since this is an extended article, I want to go about it systematically, starting with the following clarifications: I used your work with explicit references 30 times in Indra’s Net, hence there was no ill-intention. But I am not blindly obeying you, contrary to your experience with servile Indians; hence your angst that I am ‘distorting’ your ideas is unfounded. My writing relating to your work can be seen as twofold:

Where I cite your work.
Where it is my own perspectives.

You are entitled to attribution for ‘A’ but not for ‘B’.
Regarding ‘A’, I am prepared to clarify these attributions further where necessary. But, as we shall see below, I am going to actually remove many of the references to your work simply because you have borrowed Indian sources and called it your own original ideas. I am better off going to my tradition’s sources rather than via a westerner whose ego claims to have become the primary source. This Western hijacking of adhikara is what the elaborate Western defined, and controlled system of peer-reviews and academic gatekeepers is meant to achieve, i.e. turning knowledge into the control of western ‘experts’ and their Indian sepoys.
Regarding ‘B’, let me illustrate by using the very same example you cite as my ‘distortion’ of ‘your’ work. You wrote in your book that Vijnanabhikshu unified multiple paths into harmony. This is correct. That comes under ‘A’. But I add to this my own statement that Vivekananda does the same thing also. This is important to my thesis that Vivekananda built on top a long Indian tradition, and not by copying ideas from the West as claimed by the neo-Hinduism camp. This is ‘B’ – my idea. Your complaint is that by asserting this about Vivekananda, I am distorting you. You fail to distinguish between ‘A’ and ‘B’ because you assume that you are the new adhikari on the subject and anything in addition to or instead of your views amounts to a distortion. I see this as a blatant sign of colonialism.
You are carrying the white man’s burden to educate the Indians even about our own culture. Please note that Vijnanabhikshu is an important person in our heritage and there are numerous commentaries on his work. Yours is not any original account of him. You got this material from secondary sources. But by complying by the mechanical rules of ‘scholarship’ you got it into western peer-reviewed publications, and hence you claim to be the new adhikari. Furthermore, nor was Vijnanabhikshu the first to unify Hinduism. I have sources of the unification of various Hindu systems that go back much further in time and you do not seem to be aware of these. My point is that Vivekananda stands on the shoulders of many prior giants within our own tradition. I cited you to the extent it worked for me but did not stop there; I took it further than you have.
Sir Williams Jones started this claim to be the ‘new pandit’ in the late 1700s when he was a top official for the East India Company. Today that enterprise is dead in one sense, but has revived and reincarnated into new forms. You do not seem conscious that your position is not only arrogant but also puts in the parampara of Sir William Jones.
I re-examined your book lately and find too many ideas taken from Indian texts and experts that are cleverly reworded in fancy English. Let’s take a look at bhedabheda Vedanta. My teacher of this system has been Dr Satya Narayan Das, head of the Jiva Institute in Vrindavan, who spent considerable time with me while I was writing Being Different where I first explained my understanding. He is considered one of the foremost adhikaris today in this system, and adhikar in our tradition is not a matter of producing publications (with lots of quotation marks and obedience to other rules), but mainly requires actual experience of what is being said. Without the inner experience of the states of consciousness being discussed, it is at best secondary knowledge.
This experience is not a simple matter for western Indologists who spend hours going through other western interpretations and Sanskrit dictionaries. By complying with the procedural requirements of citations, etc. they suddenly claim to have become the new original and primary source. This system needs to be questioned, and I have written extensively about the syndrome I call the peer-review cartel. (You can read my debate on this a decade back on Rediff.com)
Therefore, I intend to delete most of the references to your book for bhedabheda, because it is clear that you lack the adhikara as per our system. I do wish to credit you in some respects but nowhere close to what you demand. It amazes me that there is nothing original in your explanation of bhedabheda, as your knowledge is obtained from reading Indian texts, western interpretations and sitting at the feet of Indian pandits to learn. Unfortunately, western Indology does not recognize what the pandit teaches you as his work, because it is oral and not written in a peer-reviewed (hence western supervised) publication. So the whole protocol of claiming something to belong to you as the author is a sort of technology of thievery. Fortunately, Indians have started claiming back their bio-heritage such as Ayurveda from such thievery that is being done by westerners claiming that Indians never filed patents as per western rules. It is time to also claim our intellectual heritage back.
Indian pandits know their materials by heart and it is orally transmitted, and they do not have the ego to claim authorship. They are very humble and hence get taken for a ride. They are duped by any ‘good cop’ from the west who comes in Indian dress to talk to them nicely and bamboozle them into believing that he is a friend of the tradition. Westerners can pick their brains freely, without which you would not be able to learn; but then you go back to the West and have the arrogance to call it yours. As per your Western protocol, you thank the pandit in some preface once, and feel that it suffices. But if you want that my 30 references to your work fall short then by the same token, please note that you, too, ought to be acknowledging your pandits and Indian textual sources in every single paragraph, if not every sentence.
Only that portion of your work which you feel gives truly original thoughts can become yours and make you its adhikari. If you would be kind enough to send us a list of what you consider original thoughts in your book, and that I have used these because they are not found anywhere else except in your work, then I would gladly bow to you and thank you profusely. But whatever portions (which is almost the entire book) are merely your rehashing the Indian materials in fancy English, over those I do not grant you the status of ‘ownership’.
Poetry and art are different than this. There, the originality is not in the substance but in the presentation. However, you are writing analytical works and there the originality would have to be established in the content and substance of the work, and not based on the ‘form’ of language gymnastics. Much of Western Indology is a factory to copy-paste and distort Indian materials, and process it through an industrial machinery called ‘academic knowledge production’ controlled by the Western institutions, journals, funding agencies, archives, gatekeepers, standards and rules, and so forth. Its requirements of idiom, the toolkit of theories to be used, language standards, etc., are such that 99% of the Indian traditional pandits (the true keepers of adhikara) are unable to participate.
My forthcoming book examines these mechanisms of exclusion in detail, which is why the war against it has started already. (This attack by you out of the blue comes 1.5 years after Indra’s Net, not as some remarkable coincidence, but because your peers are rattled at the thought that they are about to be exposed as the continuation of Sir William Jones.)
I challenge you to disclose all your Indian teachers – these are not ‘native informants’ as your system calls them but the true adhikaris of our heritage, and whose services you purchase to be able to do your work. What frightens your colleagues is that my book will educate our traditional pandits about your methods of exploitation. Let me frighten you even further: All my books are in the process of being translated into Sanskrit, specifically for the purpose of education of young pandits about the issues I raise. So my target reader is not folks like you, but our own pandits and others who claim this as their heritage and practice. I am especially interested in those who did not sell out to western sponsorship, foreign tours, etc. These will comprise my home team. I am only doing a humble service to inform them about the issues and remedies.
This is why more and more Indologists will be asked to come out of the woodwork and defend the old fortress. In the process they will also expose themselves. But that fortress is crumbling and my work merely accelerates the process of India once again becoming the center of Indology and not a subservient satellite of it.
Indian authorities should demand the return back to India of the 500,000 Sanskrit manuscripts that are lying outside India in various Western universities, archives, museums and private collections. These are our heritage just like old statues and should be returned since they were mostly taken by theft during colonial rule. I consider these more precious than the Kohinoor diamond. Right now, it is western Indologists like you get to define ‘critical editions’ of our texts and become the primary source and adhikari. This must end and I have been fighting this for 25 years. Now we finally some serious traction, thanks in part to people like you who attack and give me a chance to make my case more openly. Please note that what happens to me personally is irrelevant, and I am glad if attacks like this awaken more people.
My response to you is nothing personal, but serves to educate my own people. You are a glaring example of what I have called a ‘good cop’, i.e., one who goes about showing love/romance for the tradition. But at some time his true colors come out when he does what I have called a U-Turn. You would make an interesting case study of the U-Turn syndrome, for which we ought to examine where you got your materials from, and to what extent you failed to acknowledge Indian sources, both written and oral, with the same weight with which you expect me to do so.
To suit their agendas, westerners have pronounced theories like ‘nobody owns culture’ and ‘the author is dead’. Our naïve pandits are too innocent to know any of this, but I wish to inform them. The claim that nobody owns a culture makes it freely available to whosoever wants to do whatever they choose to do with it. Hence, Indian cultural capital is being digested right and left. The contradiction is that the west is ultra-protective about its ‘intellectual property’ and your obsession to squeeze more references/citations out of me illustrates this.
By declaring that the ‘author is dead’, the West says the contexts and intentions of the rishis are irrelevant. They are dead and nobody knows what they meant. So ‘we’ (the Western Indologists) must interpret Indian texts by bringing our own theories and lenses. This has been the basis for the Freudian psychoanalysis of Hinduism, and all other Western theories being applied. If the original author is dead, the material does not belong to anyone. It is public domain. So whoever has more funding and powerful machinery will determine how it is interpreted. However, the same ‘nobody owns culture’ principle does not apply to what you consider as your ‘property’. Indians need to wake up to this game.
They need to stop funding Western Indology and develop Indian Indology. The ‘make in India’ ideal should also be applied here. Expecting Indologists to change because you dole out money is like feeding a crocodile expecting him to become your friend. For the first 10 years of my work in this area, I gave away a substantial portion of my life savings in an unsuccessful attempt to fund and change the Indologists’ hearts. But they play the good/bad cop game with skill. I learned a great deal because I was acknowledged as the largest funder of western Indology at one time. Then I stopped and became their harshest critic. I have on file a lot of grant correspondence with Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, to name just a few. Naturally, they worry that I am exposing their secrets. One day I will get someone to organize all that material into a publication.
Before I close, I wish to address one of your points – that I lack the competence in Sanskrit to be able to do my work. I will address in a separate article my background and experience and how it fits the specific type of work I have focused on. But meanwhile let me inform you that, just as Western Indologists work in teams of collaborators consisting of specialists in different domains, so also I have been building my team of collaborators whose combined strength on Indology far exceeds anything you can possibly match. I bring a specialty they lack, and vice versa. But I am unable to get into further details at this time.
Welcome to the battlefield! I hope we can avoid personal acrimony and deal with the multiple issues I have raised above in a professional and mutually respectful manner. I give back as hard as I get. (Dr. Swamy’s slogan, being acknowledged without need for quotation marks…)
= Rajiv Malhotra
http://swarajyamag.com/culture/dear-andrew-nicholson/
Atanu Dey on Rajiv Malhotra – “May our Tribe increase”
ATANU DEY - JULY 18, 2015
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by svinayak »



Nachan Farrate VIDEO Song
Bharatiya Identity
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by UlanBatori »

Is this a coujin of the One and Only Haseena Atimbum?
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by UlanBatori »

Time to understand da "other side" and debate it: Pls move to another dhaga if inappropriate here, but these ppl need to be studied carefully.

The problem


SOME years ago the eminent Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock began to formulate an argument about the study of India’s premodern languages, texts and traditions that is best summed up in his now well known phrase ‘Crisis in the Classics’.1 Pollock, who has spent his scholarly career writing a comprehensive history of the literary cultures of Sanskrit and of a range of Indian and Asian vernaculars that have been impacted by Sanskrit over the past two and half thousand years, came to the realization that the wellsprings of creative writing, systematic thought, religious learning and political power – all of the vectors along which we could gauge the vitality and development of Sanskrit over the full span of its recorded history – had at long last, in our time, dried up.2

In the 21st century, Sanskrit, and together with it many other classical languages of India, including Persian and Tamil, have ceased to show any signs of life. Not only is there no ongoing production of new knowledge in these languages, we are fast reaching a point where scholars who know how to read them, and who understand their textual histories, are no longer to be found in our traditional academy or our modern institutions. With the disappearance of trained readers, teachers, commentators and exegetes, Pollock has been arguing that our access to the languages, documents, artifacts and sensibilities of South Asian cultures before 1800 CE will effectively end. Long accused of lacking the capacity for historical thinking – for history as such – Indians will actually succeed in unmooring themselves from their past, launching out into an unforgivably oblivious, culturally impoverished and monochrome future.

The crisis in the classics has been a long time coming. Its roots lie in the epistemological crisis precipitated in India’s knowledge traditions as well its political traditions by the advent of colonialism in the mid-19th century. After 1947 the postcolonial Indian nation state, ironically, drove the last nails into the coffin of classical learning. After 1991 the neoliberal state, especially in those phases marked by the political ascendance of the Hindu Right (1998-2004; and 2014 onwards), seems to be in the process of finally burying the corpse of our collective history, and of all that we knew about the way we used to be – or rather, the myriad ways, the vast array of forms of life, types of belief, kinds of practice, and the innumerable expressions of human consciousness that characterized and constituted our part of the world for about three millennia before colonialism. The door is being shut on the past.

What is astonishing is that this is happening not in some country ruled by the purveyors of authoritarian, nihilistic, fundamentalist, ethno-nationalist and totalitarian ideologies, but right here in democratic India, which prides itself as much on its ancient civilization as its liberal constitution, and which wagered, at independence, that uniquely in the post-war world it had the capacity to carry all of its diverse, incommensurable histories into a common future of enlightened pluralism. The crisis in the classics, which might appear at first to be the idiosyncratic and basically irrelevant obsession of a handful of philologists at Indian and foreign universities, turns out to be the worrying symptom of a much more profound failure in the political promise and historical imagination of modern India.

Pollock has asked whether India’s crisis in the classics is actually upon us; if it is, then what factors can explain it; is it even worth caring about it, given that the past is by definition what has passed; and finally, what can be done to avert the complete and utter breakdown in India’s relationship with its own classical, precolonial history, replete with texts, perhaps the largest number of texts ever produced anywhere, in any civilizational matrix, throughout the anthropocene era? What is going to be the future, if any, of philology? What is to be, Pollock demands to know, ‘the fate of a soft science in a hard world?’3

Over the years, Pollock has made a thorough compilation and analysis of all the data to do with languages, texts, experts, departments, programmes, publishers, manuscripts – the entire paraphernalia that goes with philological study – and shown that India has indeed, within the past 20-30 years, lost the intellectual resources and institutional infrastructure necessary for the preservation and continuance of Sanskrit, classical Tamil, Hale Kannada, Maithili, Braj, Farsi, to say nothing of medieval Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Kashmiri, etc.

He has also made extensive arguments about a range of factors that have hurt classical scholarship, including: anti-Brahmin and non-Brahmin social movements in southern India (which throw the baby of Sanskrit out with the bathwater of caste ideologies associated with Brahminical learning); Islamophobia that mischaracterizes and then stigmatizes Urdu, Persian and Arabic languages and literatures as being of ‘Muslim’ provenance and hence not welcome in ‘Hindu’ India; vernacular identity movements like Dravidianism which are often if not always based on linguistic chauvinism; regional identity conflicts like say in linguistically overlapping, i.e. bilingual and bicultural parts of Maharashtra and Karnataka, leading to phenomena like ‘language riots’; imperialist Orientalism (in the colonial period), followed by anti-Orientalist nativism (in the postcolonial period); and finally, counter-intuitively, an overall decline in the standard of English-language proficiency across the board in the Indian education system, combined with the failure of educational policy to install Hindi or any other modern Indian language in place of English as a genuine pan-Indian link language.

At this juncture, one year into the BJP-led regime with Narendra Modi as prime minister, what is most worrying is the politicization of all things classical. Cabinet ministers, elected politicians, as well as leaders belonging to various outfits of the Sangh Parivar continually make bellicose and unconstitutional assertions about the essentially Hindu character of the Indian nation.

The compulsory teaching of Sanskrit in schools; the declaration of the Bhagavad Gita as a ‘national book’; statements about the equivalence of ‘Indian’ and ‘Hindu’ identities, completely confusing and collapsing nation and community, politics and religion; attempts to question, undermine and scuttle public holidays that mark the festivals, rituals and other significant occasions connected with non-Hindu faiths; the struggle over the consumption of beef; the forced conversion of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism using the specious procedure of ghar wapsi (‘homecoming’, the notion that converts are merely ‘returning’ to their original faith); outlandish and patently false claims about the advanced nature of science and technology in ancient India; the aggressive promotion and marketing of yoga as an indigenous brand or product that exemplifies the government policy of ‘Make in India’ – these are only some of the developments in the Modi administration since May 2014 that have taken place under the sign of the ‘Classical’.

The virulent discourse around classical languages, classical civilization, classical India, classical culture and even classical science is fast becoming the new euphemism to signal the construction of a Hindu Rashtra. Somehow classicism has been turned into the enemy of secularism. Pollock writes: ‘Of all the historical literary cultures of India, it is Sanskrit that has most fatefully been caught between two benighted armies, the lumpen saffron right and the anti-Brahman infantile left. It is shocking and painful to recognize how debased is the level of discourse on Sanskrit these days, politicized in the most ignorant fashion.’ (This quote is from an article published in 2011 – today, in 2015, matters have gone from bad to worse, with the saffron right leading a majority government).4

Most of the outcry over the official sponsorship of a Hindutva agenda via the Sangh’s takeover of national institutions concerned with the arts, humanities and social sciences, like research councils, academies, archives, universities, libraries, museums and committees appointed to set syllabi, write textbooks and formulate educational policy – most of the protest feels stale. India’s traditionally left wing and liberal intellectual establishment and academic class had put up a spirited fight throughout the 1990s, during the Ram Janambhoomi movement and the NDA’S first administration under Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, unfortunately, or may be expectedly, without much success.

Veterans of the culture wars over the past 25 years are now in their seventies and eighties; a younger generation of scholars, artists and activists balks at repeating the same struggle when the electoral mandate in favour of the BJP and its allies has gone up so significantly under Modi’s leadership. Any trace of radicalism appears missing from student politics and the campuses of public universities. Citizens and voters born and raised in the era after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 seem to have little conception of India’s complex past, its inherent cultural diversity, and its charter commitment to a hard-fought egalitarian, plural, secular and progressive polity arrived at through the labours of the founding generations throughout the anti-colonial period between the 1880s and the 1950s. The conflicted, critical and circumspect nationalisms of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and Ambedkar have arguably been replaced by aggressive Hindu nationalism that combines the worst tendencies of early 20th century fascism with early 21st century populism that we see ascendant in illiberal democracies and so-called ‘soft’ dictatorships around the world.

What began as a crisis in the classics has become a full-blown war for the very idea of India. Non-Resident Hindus in the Indian diaspora, especially in the United States, are at the front lines in disrupting, debasing and bankrupting the disciplines concerned with the study of South Asian languages, literatures, history and culture, whether on American campuses, in Indian institutions or in the popular press, electronic media and social media. Non-academics, paid ideologues and hired help from among the NRI warriors of Hindutva continually strive to ensure that evidentiary standards, reasoned argumentation, rigorous research, genuine dialogue, principled dissent and civilized disagreement are no longer possible in any discussion of India’s past. We thank our stars that unlike our counterparts in Pakistan and Bangladesh, Indian scholars, writers and intellectuals are not being shot at point-blank range or hacked to death on the streets, and can retreat to our books and ideas in the privacy of our homes and minds.

Glorified trolls, who have political patronage but no scholarly qualifications whatsoever (and no cultural commonsense either, no contact with the unmarked but highly sophisticated strategies of living with difference that are a part of everyday life in India), have brought the conversation around Indian history to a grinding halt. Since the Hindu Right has no public intellectuals to speak of among its sympathizers, it conducts its cultural warfare through poorly-written blogposts (in English, of sorts), illiterate tweets, and cringe-worthy misspelled abusive ‘comments’ that appear after articles on the websites of newspapers and magazines.5 Bigotry, propaganda and lies are rampant, and no one bothers to respond to the patently senseless diatribes against Muslims, minorities or the West constantly emanating from the Sangh. Instead of an honest and difficult debate between liberals and conservatives, left and right, religious nationalists and progressive secularists, intellectual life in India these days has become a choice between noise, nonsense and silence.

In such thoroughly adverse circumstances, should we bother about the classics? Why not abandon them altogether, since no one in Modi’s India seems to care for such things as facts, truth, beauty, difference or coexistence? Pollock recalls from the Bhagavad Gita, a verse that leaps to mind in the context of the Hindu Right’s destructive attitude to our knowledge of the past (BG: 2: 63). The preservation, clarification and respect of memory are all necessary for preserving the integrity and sharpness, not just of the individual mind but also of the collective consciousness of an entire culture:

Krodhaat bhavati sanmohah

Sanmohaat smriti-vibhramah

Smriti-bhramshaad buddhi-naasho

Buddhi-naashaat pranashyati



From anger comes delusion

From delusion, the confusion of memory

From the bewilderment of memory,

Comes the destruction of intelligence

And thence follows

The ruin of man.

Pollock writes: ‘Let me end by stating things as plainly as I can. India is confronting a calamitous endangerment of its classic knowledge, and India today may have reached the point the rest of the world will reach tomorrow. This form of knowledge, under the sign of a critical classicism, must be recovered and strengthened not for the mere satisfaction of those outside of India who cultivate the study of its past but for the good of the people of India themselves. I may not have ready to hand an institutional solution to the crisis in the classics, but I remain hopeful that one can be found. Achieving this solution will require a collective public conversation on the problem – and the conversation must be insistent and loud.’6

This public conversation has yet to occur. The space for it is daily being squeezed, with the control of institutional spaces going over into the hands of officials, administrators and academics who are amenable to toeing the government’s agenda on questions of Indian history. In Pakistan, students are taught a special subject called ‘Pakistan Studies’, which is a narrative about the historical life of Pakistan with the pre-1947 history of undivided India written out of it, or taken apart and reconstructed in such a manner as to exclude all non-Islamic elements from a complex South Asian past. It is the triumph of ideology over history to the point of rendering Pakistan’s past unrecognizable from an Indian perspective. The Indian state under a Hindutva-driven regime seems headed in the same direction – imminently wanting to construct a history of India that is a Hindu history, with Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Dalit, tribal, and all other sorts of heterogeneous cultural-religious-social identities marginalized, undervalued or excluded altogether. Perhaps such a history would come to be called ‘Indian Studies’ in the Hindu Rashtra that we can only hope never comes to pass.

Philologists are not the only community of scholars to deal with classical texts. Historians, literary theorists, philosophers, practitioners of the classical performing arts, historians of science, art historians, archeologists, curators, artists, scholars of religion, philanthropists and indeed even ordinary people who encounter the faiths and the arts in their everyday life, all come face-to-face with classical texts in some form or other, to different extents and with different degrees of interest and engagement. At a Dhrupad concert I attended recently, I knew myself to be having an aesthetic experience that can only be described as deeply philological. This style of beautiful and extremely difficult classical music blends elements of Vedic mnemonics with Saivite worship, the pursuit of pure, pre-linguistic sound with the play of language, percussion with voice, paeans to Hindu deities rendered by Muslim maestros of the form. There is no simple way to enjoy this music – the entire auditory, emotional and cognitive experience is classical in the true sense of the term.

During a trip to Hampi, the abandoned capital of the medieval Vijayanagara kingdom in southern India some months ago, I could see with my own eyes the strangeness, the unfamiliarity, the radical mystery of the past, which can be visible to us in its fragmented remains and ruins and yet eludes us in some very important dimension as a sensorium, an entire world and a way of life which is lost to us forever and cannot be recovered. During another trip to Ladakh, I visited Buddhist monasteries, some of them more than a thousand years old, where monks read, recite and debate classical Tibetan and Sanskrit texts that for them constitute their Dharma, the core of their practice and their belief, and for scholars like myself or my colleagues at American departments of the history and philosophy of religion could only ever be objects of philological engagement. My past could be someone else’s present: such is the very nature of life in India. But because of the crisis in the classics, we are looking at a future in which we will not know how to read texts, look at artifacts, or imaginatively enter the life-worlds of our countless ancestors.

Or take that I lost my father a few weeks ago. As his only child, even as a female, I had to perform all of the rites and rituals associated with his passing. While lighting his funeral pyre, while praying for his soul to find peace and transcendence, while propitiating his ancestors, while immersing his ashes in the holy rivers, while comforting my mother and other relatives and kinsfolk, I found myself, under the guidance of priests and pandits, reciting mantras and verses from the Vedas, from the Bhagavad Gita, from a variety of Vaisnava texts, some of which I knew already because my father had taught or sung them to me all my life, others because I had received a philological training as a scholar of South Asian premodernity.

My encounter with the classics in these moments of profoundest grief was nonetheless at once completely organic (in the sense of following from my upbringing as a Hindu), and highly mediated (by my education as a philologist). I could understand and take comfort from the rituals I had to perform thanks to both types of access that I had to these archaic texts – texts which are routinely brought to bear during rites of passage in the Hindu life cycle, and hence texts that are always contemporary despite their immense age. There was no way to predict this beforehand, as a scholar of Sanskrit rather than as a daughter who had lost her father, but when time came I did take comfort from the ancient wisdom that was invoked precisely to enable me to deal with great sorrow. My mourning is my own, particular to me, but I also belong to a culture which has evolved sophisticated strategies of coping with loss of a kind that is universal, human, and inevitable. In such circumstances, philology provides me with what could be called ‘tools for living’.

To give the final word, then, to Sheldon Pollock – ‘Studying the assembled record of 3,000 years of Indian thinking, thinking of the very highest order, is not merely a pleasure or a duty we owe the dead – though it is both those things, too – but a unique, and uniquely fulfilling, way of tracing the genealogy of our contemporary selves, whether you are Indian or not. If we lose the ability to read these texts of the past we lose something essential to us that we can find nowhere else.’7



ANANYA VAJPEYI



Footnotes:

1. Sheldon Pollock, ‘Crisis in the Classics’, Social Research 78(1). Spring 2011, pp. 21-48. I wrote an earlier commentary on Pollock’s investigation of the full dimensions of this crisis, here: Ananya Vajpeyi, ‘Crisis in the Classics: Need for a Classics Survey’, India in Transition, Centre for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania, April 2010: https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/vajpeyi

2. See Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006. See Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003.

3. Sheldon Pollock, ‘Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World’, in James Chandler and Arnold Davidson (eds.) The Fate of the Disciplines, Critical Inquiry 35(4), 2009, pp. 931-61.

4. S. Pollock, ‘Crisis in the Classics’, op. cit., p. 40.

5. See for example some of the commentary on my op-ed, ‘The Story of my Sanskrit’, The Hindu, 14 August 2014: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/th ... 321759.ece

6. S. Pollock, ‘Crisis in the Classics’, op. cit., p. 43.

7. S. Pollock, ibid., p. 40.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Tuvaluan »

Here is another view from the other side:

http://www.rediff.com/news/column/how-i ... 150720.htm
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Agnimitra »

Tuvaluan wrote:Here is another view from the other side:

http://www.rediff.com/news/column/how-i ... 150720.htm
So aptly summarizes the Anglo colonial "view" - that India is "a nation of cheats and thieves". The author fires indiscriminately and rants about the Vyapam scam in this article on Rajiv Malhotra.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Karthik S »

Gurus, people who grew up in 80s and 90s would remember patriotic songs such as Baje Sargam, Mile Sur.., being played in DD. It had a positive effect on many people who watched them. It reminded them from time to time that we are Indians. Could that be replicated by asking various channels to allocate 10 to 15 mins of their time every day to broadcast such songs?
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by A_Gupta »

Madhusree Mukherjee - the imperial roots of hunger
http://video.ku.dk/adi-dr-madhusree-muk ... ndependent
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by RajeshA »

Agnimitra wrote:
Tuvaluan wrote:Here is another view from the other side:

http://www.rediff.com/news/column/how-i ... 150720.htm
So aptly summarizes the Anglo colonial "view" - that India is "a nation of cheats and thieves". The author fires indiscriminately and rants about the Vyapam scam in this article on Rajiv Malhotra.
I would say this is just another example of "Wraith Narcissism". First you suck out all the life energy, the blood, the youth, the kshatriyata, the beauty of the other, and then you start cursing him as limp, pale, old, weak and ugly!

First the colonials bring down your GDP from 26% down to 2.6% of the World GDP, and then they start calling you poor and wretched.

First the colonials take down all your industries and then they start calling you backward, or diplomatically put, as a "developing" country.

First the peacefuls ones start raping women and then colonials start calling Indians aka Hindus as incapable of respecting women in our country.

First they nurture a sold-out sepoy system of politico-mafia under the able leadership of Nehru-Gandhis in India and then they throw scorn at you for being corrupt.

Both the mafia and the media are both arms of the same colonial system, and both are used to slap Bharatiyas. And most Indians get sucked in into one of these arms. Either they join the corrupt-system or they call everything as corrupt and start throwing scorn at it, both sides distancing themselves from Bharatiyata in the end.

It itself is a little mental chakravyuha, and we all have difficulty finding our way out of it.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by member_28638 »

Why Rajiv Malhotra matters to “White” Hindus like me

http://www.vicharvimarsh.com/2015/07/23 ... ign=buffer

A quote from the article:
As a white American woman, I am indebted to the ability of the people of India in being able to preserve the knowledge and spiritual education in face of the Muslim invaders and the Britishers. As an American, I see very clearly that American civilization is very unbalanced. There is the drive to make lots of money, have all kinds of things, and go on all kinds of sensation-enhancing adventures, as if only these are the ends themselves rather than the means to a higher goal, and this is at the expense of doing what is right. “Wait, how toxic or dangerous is it to make this product or that product? Pollution emissions?” Laws have had to be enacted to address these questions precisely because the persons who own the means of production or the knowledge to make things do not have the people and the environment at heart in decision-making, and that comes from our Western background that is not focused on spiritual education to the level found in Dharmic society. Upon receiving this spiritual knowledge, a person begins to see other less destructive ways of making and using things, and really ask the question of “Do we really need this or that?” In essence, being able to do without so much of what exists today.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Agnimitra »

RajeshA wrote:
Agnimitra wrote:Here is another view from the other side:

http://www.rediff.com/news/column/how-i ... 150720.htm

So aptly summarizes the Anglo colonial "view" - that India is "a nation of cheats and thieves". The author fires indiscriminately and rants about the Vyapam scam in this article on Rajiv Malhotra.
I would say this is just another example of "Wraith Narcissism". First you suck out all the life energy, the blood, the youth, the kshatriyata, the beauty of the other, and then you start cursing him as limp, pale, old, weak and ugly!

First the colonials bring down your GDP from 26% down to 2.6% of the World GDP, and then they start calling you poor and wretched.

First the colonials take down all your industries and then they start calling you backward, or diplomatically put, as a "developing" country.

First the peacefuls ones start raping women and then colonials start calling Indians aka Hindus as incapable of respecting women in our country.

First they nurture a sold-out sepoy system of politico-mafia under the able leadership of Nehru-Gandhis in India and then they throw scorn at you for being corrupt.

Both the mafia and the media are both arms of the same colonial system, and both are used to slap Bharatiyas. And most Indians get sucked in into one of these arms. Either they join the corrupt-system or they call everything as corrupt and start throwing scorn at it, both sides distancing themselves from Bharatiyata in the end.

It itself is a little mental chakravyuha, and we all have difficulty finding our way out of it.
True. The British were masters at it. They were calling Indians thieves and cheats even while they were sucking the life out of the country, looting its wealth and flooding the famine-struck starving countryside with cheap liquor. LK Advani once recounted that during British rule, mirrors in railway coaches had embossed on them, "Stolen from British Indian Railways", so that when the colonial subject looked at his face in it, he would be reminded that his countrymen sometimes steal public goods that belong to the country's British masters, and his is an ignoble nation of cheats and thieves that is being civilized by the colonial masters. The sheer shameless irony of it all is astounding. It is even more astounding that 65 years after independence an Indian sepoy will talk the same way to his countrymen, defending an American cabal of "Indologists" with a proven track-record of anti-Hindu work.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Arjun »

Have never understood why Hindutva is assumed to be a 'conservative' philosophy, as in the confusion in this piece:

The missing conservative intellectuals

Hindutva is actually the ultimate liberal philosophy - it stands firmly AGAINST organized, missionary religion in any form or shape.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Agnimitra »

अब्दुल्कलामः संस्कृतस्य महिमानं प्रतिपादयति -

APJ Abdul Kalam on the importance of Sanskrit -

http://m.rediff.com/news/2007/feb/01kalam1.htm
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by RamaY »

A must watch speech by S Gurumurthy (20mins) that talks about Bharat, how modernism has become another Abrahamic religion etc.,

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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by member_28638 »

The book "India in Greece" that the British tried to destroy:

http://www.mindserpent.com/American_His ... greece.pdf
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by UlanBatori »

Fox Young does a "Spit Here on Me Please" on Caravan.
Comments: Ram Jagessar gives it right back on YoungFox's nose:
Ram Jagessar
So the Princeton Seminary Troll and Pennington Presbyterian Troll thinks I am a digital bully and blackmailer! That really is funny coming from Richard Fox Young the noted internet harasser and academic blackmailer who has launched 1200 tweets attacking Rajiv Malhotra since March this year. Young is the man who launched the blackmail campaign against Rajiv's publishers Harper Collins trying to get them to block publication of Rajiv's upcoming book Battle for Sanskrit, on the basis of alleged plagiarisms in a previous book Indra's Net! Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander , Young and I see he can dish it out but he can't take it. I have no problem in telling the world that Richard Fox Young is a bottom feeder, no talent pseudo academic Princeton Seminary troll motivated by bitter jealousy of the best selling, game changing Hindu scholar Rajiv Malhotra. Young is a washed up so called "expert" on Hinduism who never had an original idea in his life, and is trying his mightiest to bring down Rajiv, who by most accounts is a brilliant thinker who has changed the game for Indology and Hinduism studies, and incidentally exposed outsider frauds like Young, his mentor Holbfass, his idols Pollock, Nicholson, Anant Rambachan and the like. I see clearly that Young is in a panic because Rajiv's new book is exposing his PhD supervisor Holbfass, Pollock the Sanskrit con man etc etc, and that is the real reason why he is trying to bring down Rajiv, not any foolishness about plagiarism. There's much more I can say about Young that is not as complimentary as this post, but I reserve that for later. He had a free run at Rajiv for some time, but that's all over. What he dishes out for Rajiv he will get in return for himself and his idols too, and not just from me. I have company who are already engaging Young across the board where his gatekeepers cannot stop us. We have already trashed Young's alias RajivMFan, and earlier this year we put an end to the free run of that Neo Hinduism sepoy and sellout Anant Rambachan. Young has made it clear he has a "no prisoners" policy. Really nice for a Princeton Seminary man. an enlightened Pennington Presyterian churchie. All I can tell him is that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Ram Jagessar
- See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/r ... KpWsq.dpuf


Counterpoint
Time for a “Diagnostic Test” on Rajiv Malhotra’s Books
By Richard Fox Young | August 1, 2015
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In New Jersey, where Rajiv Malhotra, an Indian-American public intellectual, and I live as near neighbours in the town of Princeton, all vehicles—from clunkers to limos­­­—have to undergo a periodic diagnostic test of their roadworthiness. Electrodes are attached to the vehicle’s engine, some sort of hose stuck into its tailpipe, and a sticker slapped onto the driver-side window if it passes. Drive without one and you could get pulled over and fined. The test has relatively little to do with the octane, high or low, of the gas you buy at the pump. It's about how your vehicle measures up when a diagnostic test is done in conformity with New Jersey’s minimalistic safety standards. Is it a hazard on the highway or not?

On and off for the past four years, I’ve been doing a similar test on Rajiv Malhotra’s oeuvre. My interest was drawn to two books in particular, Breaking India (New Delhi: Amaryllis, 2011) and Indra’s Net (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2014). It was because I found Malhotra’s “thinly religionised” Hindutva nationalist ideology odious that I read him attentively and attempted, unsuccessfully, to engage him in the time-hallowed ways of academe. I tried to do so through a co-authored critique of Breaking India, Studied Silences: Diasporic Nationalism, “Intellectual Kshatriyas” and the Hindu American Critique of Dalit Christianity’s Indianness, in a book that I co-edited.

After Breaking India I moved on to Indra’s Net, but as I was reading both books ever so closely, a collateral concern about their roadworthiness on the highway of knowledge (excuse the metaphor!) gnawed at the edges of my awareness. I could sense that it wasn’t only because of low tire-pressure that Malhotra’s books seemed to lurch and thump along. However, it was only after I plugged SafeAssign (a plagiarism detection software) into the tail pipe of Indra’s Net—the book I had singled out for an especially thorough inspection—that I found irrefutable confirmation of the plagiarism I had suspected all along.

In his recent book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015), Jon Ronson explores how Twitter has become every digital terrorist’s favorite weapon of “mass online destruction”. Still, one doesn’t publicly “shame” a person like Rajiv Malhotra on social media as I have attempted to, without trepidation. Done carelessly, it could be ruinous—as it has been for several victims who have been wrongly maligned in the past, as Ronson illustrates in his book. It was imperative to level such a charge only after doing my homework as meticulously as I could and I did, both for Malhotra’s sake and mine. After all, I did not want to bear false witness against him or set myself up for a nosedive into obloquy. When various iterations of the SafeAssign test led to the same conclusion regarding the text of Indra’s Net, I went ahead and pressed the tweet button on Twitter back in early July this year. Using the hashtag #Message4Rajiv, I adduced seven examples of the evidence (adding an eighth later) I had culled from Malhotra’s books in a series of more than sixty-six consecutive tweets, all of which were numbered.

Back in 2012, Michael Moynihan, an American journalist, had found himself in a similar position when he revealed that Jonah Lehrer—a former writer with the New Yorker—had fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. While recounting the sequence of events that led to this revelation and the trauma that he felt afterwards, Moynihan is quoted as saying in Ronson’s book, “What we do, when we ****** up, we don’t lose our job, we lose our vocation.” My unease was hardly as great as Moynihan talks of experiencing, but I, too, made the disclosures with a degree of hesitation.

Ten days later and unbeknownst to me, a denizen of Rajiv Malhotra’s online clique sent a retaliatory email warning to my colleagues at Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS), the institution where I teach. PTS is often referred to as “obscurantist” by Malhotra’s allies—evidently with his approval. The subject of this email was, “Exposing an Internet Troll on Your Faculty,” and the writer identified himself as Ram Jagessar, an Indo-Caribbean Canadian-Hindu journalist writing from Toronto. Characterising my tweets as the “rantings of a person crazed by envy and rage,” Jagessar referred to himself as a member of the “5,000 strong Rajiv Malhotra Discussion Group.” Stating that he was “about to launch a wide ranging expose” of me as “an ugly Christian academic troll,” he boasted of being able to unleash against PTS a barrage of digital missiles, using a “list of 4,500 Hindu organisations world wide.” The “gloves [would] come off,” Jagessar warned, unless his conditions were met—an apology from me to Rajiv Malhotra, “admitting the error of my ways” and promising to “cease and desist [my] idiotic and useless tweets.”

Ordinarily, an email such as this would go into the trash without the blink of an eye, and that’s where several of my colleagues immediately put it. When I learned of it, however, I felt that it might be a mistake to shrug it off. Jagessar happens to be a prominent Toronto-based “Intellectual Kshatriya” (a term of self-description popular with Malhotra’s clique), whose emails are a staple of the Malhotra-managed Yahoo listserv, dubbed the “Yahooligans” by a commentator on Reddit.

In the weeks since this soap opera, now in its umpteenth act, got going, Malhotra’s fanciful excuses have included the claim that an attempt was being made to deprive him of his “intellectual freedom.” This was plainly disingenuous of Malhotra, considering Jagessar’s bald-faced attempt to deprive me of mine, by the kind of intimidation ordinarily called blackmail. As the entire faculty at PTS—apart from me—found this person’s email in their inboxes on the morning of 13 July 2015, I wanted them to hear my side of the story, too. Here, in part, is what I wrote:



Colleagues —

On the surprise email from Ram Jagessar of Toronto, I'd like to provide a bit of background. In brief, but with more than 140 characters …

On Twitter, I have adduced evidence of serial acts of plagiarism (not of my work but others') by a Princeton-resident, Rajiv Malhotra, a Hindu American public intellectual, wealthy IT entrepreneur and founder of a Hindu-nationalist think tank, the Infinity Foundation.

Four years ago, along with John Boopalan, our PhD candidate in [Religion and Society], I attended a lecture at the University [Princeton] for the launching of a book by Mr. Malhotra, called Breaking India (New Delhi 2011). Much to our dismay, Malhotra launched into a rant, calling Christianity a "cancer" in the body of India that must be ripped out, being spread by a nexus of Christian evangelicals, Washington politicians, and corrupt Indian academics. Especially troubling was that he characterized Dalit converts to Christianity as mentally deficient and incapable of making responsible decisions on their own (hence, his support for the legal constraints on 'conversion' now in place in many of India's states).

After the book launch at the University, I became less willing to pursue my scholarship in the distantiated way I always have (or told myself I did). In short, I was 'conscientized,' and I have never looked back since. Still, John Boopalan and I trod the timeworn path of routine scholarship and produced an essay on Malhotra's noxious mischaracterizations of Indian Christianity and Dalit Christians. […] Attempts have proven futile to elicit any response at all to the book by Malhotra.

In the course of reading Breaking India, I noted a number of possible plagiarisms[;] the first, of my beloved mentor at the University of Pennsylvania, Wilhelm Halbfass, irked me a great deal. On the very same page, 62 words, without quotation marks or acknowledgement, were taken out [of] a book by French scholar Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise, published by Harvard University Press. Besides this, in another more recent publication of Malhotra's called Indra's Net (2014), published by HarperCollins India, I found the plagiarism to be even more massive, especially of a book published by Columbia University Press called Unifying Hinduism by a friend and colleague, Andrew Nicholson of SUNY, Stony Brook.

As Mr. Malhotra is not an academic (and holds academe in the utmost contempt), I had no means (I did consider a number) other than social media to call attention to his infractions of the code of academic ethics the rest of us have to live by. Had he been affiliated to an institution of higher education, I could/would have drawn the attention of that institution to the issue; presumably, a panel would have been commissioned to weigh the evidence, and a variety of penalties might be enforced, from probation to dismissal.

In the absence of such mechanisms, here's what I did —

After months of painstaking research, I selected seven examples from the two previously mentioned Malhotra books. I uploaded a statement as to what my issues were and my methodology for adducing and assessing the evidence. I uploaded Princeton University's Code of Academic Conduct, its handbook definition of plagiarism (same as ours; we admit as much, and provide the link to PU), and its oh-so-helpful guidelines for recognizing and assessing actual cases of it. I then uploaded the seven examples, each with the original and the Malhotra copy highlighted to show precisely what he had lifted, without quotation marks or acknowledgments in most cases or only with acknowledgments in some (but with quotation marks removed). I then uploaded An Open Letter to Rajiv Malhotra's Publishers, and that was that, although the struggle to interpret and defend the evidence against Mr. Malhotra waxes fierce, even as I speak. The surprise email from Ram Jagessar is a case in point.

As for Jagessar, […] I do not think it an exaggeration to call him a digital bully and blackmailer. One target of his for nearly a decade has been Anantanand Rambachan, professor of Religious Studies at St Olaf's [Northfield, MN], respected by all for his scholarship and involvements in Hindu-Christian dialogue (Vatican Council for Interfaith Dialogue, WCC, etc.). Jagessar has orchestrated mass campaigns against him—and, coincidentally, Frank Clooney of Harvard [Divinity School]—as recently as April [2015] when the two of them participated in an interfaith dialogue at a Hindu temple in Virginia [The Durga Mandir, Fairfax Station, VA]. Ram Jagessar spammed their email and threatened protests; security in fact had to be arranged for them.

As a scholar and person of faith, I have decided I simply cannot live out my calling in the hallways of academe alone. There are those ‘pipe-like things out there that they call the Internet.’

In the meantime, the fur is flying, and I am ever, ever so sorry that the Seminary was targeted. I do not tweet on a PTS email account and have tried my darnedest to keep PTS out of the picture. The snoops have apparently prowled through our online bio pages, which, of course, are publicly accessible.

N.B.: On Twitter, "troll" means many things and Twitter bullies accuse people like me of being trolls when we get in the way by holding them to account for the noxious things they say. See for yourselves.

Regards,

Richard



Yes, do please see for yourselves how I hold Rajiv Malhotra responsible for the mess he’s made in the oversized stall he occupies in the Augean Stables of Twitter. For someone who considers himself a much-abused victim of plagiarism and serially accuses others of it, the evidence I adduced confirms that he is himself a serial victimiser whose plagiarism we must not ignore.

As I write this piece, America’s Vedanta Wars, an essay I did for Seminar—a periodical based in New Delhi—has just become available online and publicly accessible today. Anyone unsatisfied with the backstory offered in the email I wrote to my colleagues should go there for more on why I went for broke and made use of “those pipe-like things out there that they call the Internet” to confront Rajiv Malhotra in a conscientised act of engaged scholarship. In the last line of that essay, referring to the way academics usually shy away from public kerfuffles, I have written, “A more robust response may be needed.” That’s exactly why I did what I did on Twitter, and why I’m doing it still. It may be a soap opera, but it’s no laughing matter. It’s about the roadworthiness of the books we write—the cleanness of our scholarship—and the urgency of keeping vehicles off the road when they can’t even pass a routine diagnostic test of academic integrity.

Richard Fox Young is an associate professor at Princeton Theological Seminary (Princeton, NJ, USA). He holds the Timby Chair in the History of Religions.
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READER'S COMMENTS [23]
Prabhat Gupta
03 August 2015
12:21 PM
Richard Fox Young should read the rebuttal here: https://traditionresponds.wordpress.com/

reply

Mullah Abdul Bin Kabul
03 August 2015
09:50 AM
Salaam Editors! Why my commant is not published yet, please? Doesn't this brave Young Fox deserve our support?

reply

Rajiv Sharma
02 August 2015
23:01 PM
My comment is for Caravan Magazine not for Mr Richard Fox, Dear Sir/Madam, When I went through the above article, I find that Mr Fox is having some personal problem with Mr Rajiv Malhotra. So do you provide space in your magazine for such articles? If tomorrow someone who is not agreeing with Mr Fox writes some baised article against him, will you publish that? My objection is based on the following points. 1. Who has authorize him to do a diagnostic test on Mr Rajiv Malhotra's books? I think readers or fellow writers can only review the books but can't do a diagnostic test. Diagnostic test can be asked only by the universities or organizations or publishers of book. 2. Whatever points he has raised on Mr Malhotra's book (before writing this article) are properly answered by Mr. Malhotra and are examined by some independent scholars/readers and writers. This data is already available on internet, so did you take Mr. Malhotra's view on this before publishing it? 3. For you information I am adding following links where you can find all clarifications related to the controversy created by Mr Fox. a) https://traditionresponds.wordpress.com/ b) http://www.niticentral.com/2015/07/21/r ... 24859.html c) http://m.firstpost.com/india/rajiv-malh ... 49652.html

reply

Naveen Chandra
02 August 2015
18:10 PM
Mr. Richard Fox Young (RFY) wants to determine the” roadworthiness” of books by Rajiv Malhotra and ban them from being published as he will find them unworthy of publication. This logic belongs in the annals of Fascists and not in the writings of a so called scholar belonging to Princeton Theological Seminary. But then we have seen the Christian Seminaries at work when they “civilized” the Native People by committing genocide for which a Prime Minister of Canada had to issue an apology. The worthiness of a book is determined by the markets and not by the Christian academicians. In sixteenth century Jesuits went to India, stole the documents from the naive Brahmans and published them in Europe without citing the source and thus invented plagiarism. Over four hundred years the practice of plagiarising Vedic books was perfected by the academicians of the West – the latest allegedly being Andrew Nicholson of SUNY, Stony Brook, who has the gall to say that Malhotra plagiarised him. Let us also determine the “roadworthiness” of “Professors” like Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock and others. How about roadworthiness of books like “The Holy Bible”? Professor Elizabeth Anderson of Michigan University Ann Arbor criticizes what she terms morally repugnant lessons of the New Testament. She claims that "Jesus tells us his mission is to make family members hate one another, so that they shall love him more than their kin (Matt 10:35-37)", that "Disciples must hate their parents, siblings, wives, and children (Luke 14:26)". The actual quotations are given below (All quotations are taken from oremusBible Browser, bible.oremus.org) Matthew 10:35-37 (Referring to Jesus Christ the “loving figure”) For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; Luke 14:26 ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. My dear RFY I have more quotations from Bible if you care to know.

reply

Sanjeev Sabhlok
02 August 2015
18:06 PM
The Malhotra plagiarism case is open-and-shut. If he was an academic, he would lost his job and occupation by now. On top of that, he does not appear to be interested in restraining "his" people from taking things into their own hands. This confirms Malhotra's aggressive approach that Martha Nussbaum wrote about. If Malhotra et al. (Ram Jagessar, etc.) don't restrain themselves, they may well find themselves behind bars, ultimately. Justice is not for sale in the USA. I would encourage Malhotra to apologise both for his own plagiarism and for Ram Jagessar's aggression.

reply

Krishna
02 August 2015
12:45 PM
And what makes you think that what you say is the last word in academic integrity ? What gives you the authority to dismiss Rajiv Malhotra's defense ? You point out one unruly commentator and call him digital bully. Do you realize how many digital bullies Rajiv Malhotra and other Hindu's face every single day ? Or do you want to deny it ?

reply

nice_guy
02 August 2015
11:29 AM
This article is not stating anything new from the previous one written by the same author about Rajiv Malhotra's plagiarism. There is too much focus on personalities rather than issues. Trivial things like what one tweeted, who targeted whom, who is or is not noxious, etc. are being highlighted. Instead of all this it would be wonderful to see a public debate take place between Prof. Young and Rajiv Malhotra. Real issues and stands taken by both will come out if an intellectual exercise like this takes place. With years of research experience behind him Prof. Young should easily be able to handle such a debate. Readers are not able to get the benefit of his scholarship on real issues from articles like the one above.

reply

Mullah Abdul Bin Kabul
02 August 2015
04:12 AM
As a Man of Faith I am also shocked by this Resistance Of the Hindoos. You have a saying: "WHY Do the Heathen Rage?" We have a saying about what to do about the Kuffar but I am not saying it here where the kuffar can read it and abuse the Holy Book. We are of same mentality. We must keep Scholarship CLEAN by removing all these kuffar.


powerandprivilege

"Malhotra’s books seemed to lurch and thump along.." Sir, pl wake up. His books are a source of inspiration to a lot of Indians, despite the elitism of the academic world of which you are clearly a beneficiary of and RM an outsider. "digital terrorist’s favorite weapon of “mass online destruction.” You seem to be one such terrorist! Meditate on that thought if your religious beliefs allow you to do so. "a denizen of Rajiv Malhotra’s online clique.." You have exposed your white Christian supremacist [Nazi], racist self by the statement. The African Americans and Dalits need to beware
- See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/r ... KpWsq.dpuf

ThimmaNNa
A Christian's rant! Very very (un)surprisingly, he doesn't talk about the "road worthiness" of "Invading the sacred", where it all begins....
- See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/r ... uWAyx.dpuf

Saaraansha pandit

I did a diagnostic test on Richard Fox's Twitter account and found that 40% of his tweets are basically trolling Rajiv Malhotra. This guy is obsessed, not "conscientized", and his main goal seems to be to launch a big fight and get funded by Breaking India forces. Probably the best thing at this point is to ignore this paid seminary hack. But now I see the malodorous fingers of Hartosh Bal drumming away behind this anti-HIndu provocateur, so this saga goes on for another day.

Tamilarasan
01 August 2015
19:18 PM
Dear Mr Richard Fox The article seems to have no direction. I can sense the vague but ultimately shallow arguments on Breaking India and Indra's Net, the latter of which your allegation of plagiarism has been thoroughly deconstructed by independent sources. But it seems you still want to flog a dead horse. Is it because you have reached a dead end? You claim that you have written a critique on BI. In the Princeton University discussion on March 31 2011 you were captured on video in the audience, why did you not raise your points of concern or call for a debate. I believe Rajiv has called for a debate multiple times but you have constantly avoided them. Why would that be so? Perhaps the best way to get a redress on your itch that is Mr Rajiv is to call for a debate, don't you think so?

Ananth Sethuraman

Malhotra has cited the relevant authors so many times that these are only errata, not plagiarism. Why not talk about (1) Sheldon Pollock's---and more generally American universities---desire to raise money from Indian sources; (2) Halbfass's attempt to pass off the missionary Paul Hacker's work as neutral Hindu studies; (3) Fox's being a missionary and still taking a position of editorship of an academic journal?
- See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/r ... uWAyx.dpuf

karigar

What is an Indian Leftist mag doing airing the vituperations of a Christian closet fanatic? Wonders will never cease. It appears "enemy of enemy is friend" is being well illustrated here ...
- See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/r ... uWAyx.dpuf


Abdul Bin Kabul
Mr. Young Fox should inform these Infidels (Heathen, Kuffar) that he is a very important person with a very important position - the Missionary Position. What is a Semenary like the Princeton Semenary anyhow? It is a place to train Missionaries for Missionary Positions all over the world. They use books like Paul "Limp Phallus" Courtright's and Wendy "Repelled a Rotten Egg" Doniger. Example of Courtright's writing Dedicated to Jesus Christ Our Lawd and Savour: "Although there is no explicit evidence, Ganesha's propensity for sweets is a clear indication of Oral Sex". Is it any wonder then that among Xtian Priests in Missionary Positions, over 4 percent are sexual abusers/predators, compared to less than 0.1 percent of the general population. ALL Xtian priests are trained in Semenaries like Princeton Theological Semenary. It is good of Missionary Position Young Fox to bring Princeton Theological Semenary into the open discussion so that people can see what their faculty are doing in Missionary Positions. They use "Plagiarism" threats to make the Young Students bend over for "Salivation". Why is this not working when they try it on free people in the outside world? Why do the Heathen Rage? Princeton Theological Semenary should be very very happy that Young Fox is bringing such fame to their name.
- See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/r ... uWAyx.dpuf
ramana
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by ramana »

Tuvaluan wrote:Here is another view from the other side:

http://www.rediff.com/news/column/how-i ... 150720.htm
manoj wrote:http://www.rediff.com/news/column/the-b ... 150804.htm
The battle between secular India and Bharat
Sunil Sethi’s recent article, How India is a nation of cheats uses the Vyapam scandal in Madhya Pradesh and Rajiv Malhotra being accused of plagiarism with respect to his books Breaking India and Indra's Net to justify the title.

Using two examples to say we are a nation of cheats is an insult to 1.25 billion Indians. Notwithstanding aberrations, Indians are honest people and have earned a fair name for themselves worldwide.

So far as Indians being cheats has. Sethi read, 'The 10 Biggest Frauds in Recent US history' published by Forbes.com. Am taking the US because it is where Richard Fox Young, who has accused Malhotra of plagiarism, resides. Details are:

"Enron. The energy company's bankruptcy in 2001 after allegations of massive accounting fraud wiped out $78 billion in stock market value and led to the collapse of Arthur Andersen.

Bernard Madoff. New York money manager Bernard Madoff's $65 billion Ponzi scheme, the largest fraud ever by an individual, was exposed in December 2008.

Lehman Brothers. Investment bank Lehman, with $600 billion in assets, failed in late 2008. It was the largest bankruptcy in history and a spark to the worldwide financial crisis.

Cendent. Shortly after the company was created by the merger of CUC International and HFS in 1997, a massive, decade long accounting fraud at CUC was uncovered. It was estimated to have cost investors at least $19 billion.

MF Global. The brokerage firm, led by former Goldman Sachs Chairman and former New Jersey Senator then Governor Jon Corzine, had $41 billion in assets before failing in October 2011."
The root cause of corruption is because government systems and laws have not changed with time. Shankar Acharya wrote, 'But change has been slow in coming, far slower than in the "parent" civil service in Britain which long ago reformed its structure to better incorporate the specialist needs of effective modern governance.' Read Burden of Legacies. Also read What India must do to reduce corruption.

A left-leaning centralised socialist model has created a shortage/entitlement economy and ensured the Congress slogan in 1970's and 2014 was 'Garibi Hatao'.

In fact one of the reasons for India's limited progress is that post-independent India is at odds with its true nature. It is something that educated right of centre Hindus, one of whom is Malhotra, are trying to correct.

Sethi calls Rajiv, “'the philosopher-in-chief of Internet Hindutva' and it's as much a fight for intellectual probity and publishing ethics as a bruising ideological skirmish between liberal left-leaning academics and self-help Hindu revivalists.”
By virtue of having lived in the US for decades and growing up in Indian tradition, Malhotra has unique insights that have allowed him to write about the church-academia nexus. It is only natural that his credibility must be destroyed. Read What happened to the Rs 94k cr that Indian NGOs received.

Many are concerned about what they call 'Internet Hindutva'. Till the advent of the net ordinary readers had no way to counter left-leaning articles in the print media. The net has changed that. Many are unable to deal with this new reality.

On plagiarism here are two examples of Americans having appropriated Indian tradition.

One, millions of Americans practice yoga, it is a billion dollar industry. Since it originated in India should not Americans have taken permission for its use, paid royalty and credited Sanatan, Buddhist and Jain Dharma traditions? Instead the Americans coined a term 'Christian Yoga where Hindu symbols are substituted by Christian ones for e.g. Surya Namaskar is Son Salutations, where the Son is not Surya but Son of God ie Jesus Christ'.

Two, Malhotra said, “The Anthroposophical Society that was founded by Rudolf Steiner, was formerly with the theosophists where he picked up his main ideas from Hinduism, and where J Krishnamurti later became the head. The huge movement known as 'Mindfulness Meditation' is nothing other than vipassana and its American copyright claimant Jon Kabat-Zinn learned it from S N Goenka. 'Lucid Dreaming' is a technique widely taught in the USA including the US army and various medical centres, but it is in fact Yoga Nidra.”

Who do you think highlighted these infringements of intellectual property? To hear Rajiv Malhotra's talk at IIT Mumbai, "Are Indians buying back their own ideas from the West?”.

Rajeev Srinivasan recently wrote, 'The RISA group of mostly American religious academics who act as gatekeepers for Western Indology has consistently excluded those other than their own through the spurious argument of ‘scholarship’. Indeed, Wendy has spawned -- in nice counterpoint to Romila Thapar in India -- an entire generation of Hindu-hating ‘scholars’, both Indian and Western.'

Here is a personal experience. On May 13, 2015 the author attended a talk, at the Centre for South Asian Studies Stanford University, titled 'Genocide/Diaspora', by Kamala Visweswaran, University of Texas. The speaker talked about post-Godhra riots, killings in Kashmir, the plight of Sikh families affected by 1984 riots etc. Not a word about 58 women and children burnt alive in Godhra and 250 odd Hindus killed in the subsequent riots; not a word about the rape and massacre of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits resulting in a mass exodus and ethnic cleansing in the Kashmir valley.
ramana
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by ramana »

These seminaries collocate in famous Uty towns.

Berkeley, Ca also has a theology seminary. Shares library and resources.
Not to be confused with UC Berkeley.
UlanBatori
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by UlanBatori »

The bugger is still ranting away, posting copies of the Princeton freshman Regulations etc. Wonder if there is a copy of the Princeton Rules For Conduct on the Internet that one could post 4 him.

BTW, from Princeton Rules of Conduct for employees:
Standards of Conduct
Princeton University employees, whether filling full-time or part-time regular, term, or temporary jobs, are expected to meet a standard of conduct that is appropriate to the good name and reputation of the University.
Employees, while on University premises or while representing it elsewhere, should demonstrate proper
regard for the standards of the community and show respect for the law and for the rights of others.
Generally, the behavior of an employee, when not on University premises or on University business, is for
the individual to regulate. However, Princeton University reserves the right to take appropriate action when employees engage in illegal or inappropriate conduct or actions outside the University that raise doubts about their ability to fulfill job responsibilities; impact campus safety or security; or violate the University’s policy of respect for others. Refer to policy 5.1.1 Standards of Personal Conduct
or Rights, Rules, Responsibilities.
Respect for Others
Respect for the rights, privileges, and sensibilities of each other is essential in preserving the spirit of
community at Princeton. Actions that make the atmosphere intimidating, threatening, or hostile to
individuals are, therefore, regarded as serious offenses. Abusive or harassing behavior, verbal or physical, which demeans, intimidates, threatens, or injures another because of one’s personal characteristics or beliefs, is subject to University disciplinary sanctions. Examples of personal characteristics or beliefs include, but are not limited to, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, and disability.
Tolerating such behavior or submission to it as a condition of employment, evaluation, compensation, or
advancement is an especially serious offense. Procedures for resolving complaints or grievances on such
matters are described in section 1.6. of Rights, Rules Responsibilities.
Princeton University strives to be an intellectual and residential community in which all members can
participate fully and equally, in an atmosphere free from all manifestations of bias and from all forms of
harassment, exploitation, or intimidation. As an intellectual community, the University attaches great value to freedom of expression and vigorous debate. It also attaches great importance to mutual respect and deplores expressions of hatred directed against any individual or group. The University seeks to promote the full inclusion of all members and groups in every aspect of University life.
Mutual respect requires special sensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity. Expressions of racial or ethnic bias directed at individuals or groups undermine the civility and sense of community on which the well-being of the University depends. They devalue the distinctive contributions of the individuals affected and impair their ability to contribute their views and talents to the community and to benefit fully from participating in it. By alienating those individuals, they harm the whole community. The University calls on all its members to display the appropriate sensitivity and to challenge expressions of racial or ethnic bias whenever they encounter them.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Shreeman »

Having opened this thread accidently, am distressed to see the debate on plagiarism. As if *anyone* anywhere gives two hoots about plagiarism. Even if it is stamped and proven in a court.

Whatever else this buggery might be about, it is not about academic standards. Fox Young has an axe to grind that has nothing to do with scholarly value. I will bet the 2c I was going to use to pay down the enormous debt incurred for this education on that.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by UlanBatori »

Question is how to use the opportunity to maximum effect. Our sitting here saying that it has nothing to do with standards, has little effect. That point has already been made. But there are multiple levels of opportunities here, and one is slowly seeing how to use each to get some order-of-magnitude benefits.

The initial tank attack (aptly described as Circular Firing Squad Of Flying Monkeys) has been effectively stopped, and they are now sitting inside various sand traps and firing outwards. They lost the attempt to bully the publisher. The publisher came out fighting once they saw that there was solid support on their side. Called it an 'insult to the reader's intelligence'.

But we can't keep having these attacks. What HAS happened is that the conversionist obscenity hordes thought they had won a great victory, and hence came rushing out into the open. Where they are now caught.

The Mongolian hordes are being prepared to sweep into their capitals, and that's what needs the good thoughts and documentation. First the attackers, then the collaborators, then the amplifiers.

There IS a nuclear weapon, but one would like to hold that back as long as possible.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Shreeman »

The right approach would be how many (indeed, is there even one that does) of these steller institutions actually bother to even address issues of academic integrity when their own stalwarts are caught pants down violating everything from immigration law, wage laws to copyright law? Fuhget about the niceties of academic freedom or integrity. Start counting examples publicly, and watch them squirm. The "publicly" is the problem.

Murican media isnt allowed to touch a story against caucasian masters unless the accuser/victim is also white/same camp. Short of that everything is chai biscuit over twitter, nukular waypon or not.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by UlanBatori »

Need focused weapons. Attack through chidiya-vana was a huuge mistake since there is an army of experienced vAnaras resident there. The attackers are now trapped there, but firing a non-stop barrage of stink bombs. Already hammered in the open ground of Blogs etc - they tried posting stories and detailed explanations in blogs, and u can c the unfortunate consequences of those if u go to unowhere forum. Annihilated in public. Opportunities used to start insurgencies and put out deterrents in various other places. But there needs to be an execution inside the vana. On Twitter one can keep tweeting - the only downside is if the Big Cat comes by and checks where the noise is coming from. I think Princeton admins at some point will have to intervene, because tweeting has become increasingly shrill and raises legitimate concerns about sanity and consequences-e-Postal for ishtudantz in future, etc. U r quite right, if documentation can be found that raises same pooch about some admin-e-brinjeton or beeteeyej, and starts Trending, then the fat is in the fire and the Cat has to act.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Prem »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadi_Rani
Hadi Rani a legendary character daughter of Hada Rajput married to Chundawat Chieftain of Salumbar, Mewar who sacrificed herself to motivate her husband to go to the War.[1][2]
When Maharana Raj Singh I (1653–1680) of Mewar called her husband to join the battle against Aurangzeb, the Sardar, having married only a few days earlier hesitated about going into battle. Rajput honour being what it is, he had to join the battle regardless of his reservations. He asked his wife Hadi Rani for some memento to take with him to the battlefield.Thinking that she was an obstacle to his doing his duty for Mewar, she cut off her head and put it on a plate in her dying moments. A servant covered it with a cloth and presented it to her husband. The Sardar, devastated but nevertheless proud, tied the memento around his neck by its hair. He fought bravely, making the Aurangzeb forces flee, and after his victory he got to his knees and cut his neck, having lost the desire to live.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Shreeman »

RoyG wrote:Ulanbatori,

Is there anyway we can go through his works and dig up instances of plagiarism? We can go through Pollock and Nicholson as well. RF Young is trying to turn this into a game. He's building up an army of sepoys to nitpick Malhotra's pieces. We can play the same game. I'll join twitter and get in the action as well. Do people still use turn it in?
TurnItIn sucks a$$, but I suppose in ulaanbator they have available accounts and ak-cess. I doubt my own accounts have been deactivated despite the years of lack of use, but I am short of electrons for another little while, at least. It may be a good starting point. Anyone can spend USD50? *per paper* and do a iThenticate report if they are so inclined, even outside of the confines of ulaanbator. iThenticate also blows hard. But if either is handy, it does not hurt to feed it whatever papers are in question.

Handily, in re. egg-jam-apples of academic excesses, I can only recommend the old favorite:

http://rajesh-kumar.org/wiki/index.php?title=Tweet01
http://rajesh-kumar.org/wiki/index.php?title=Tweet02

the retraction by Springer (discovered today, the correction at the end was known) at:

https://books.google.co.in/books/conten ... vVi1QMCnir

page 162 onward retracted are free to access.

And of course the institutional denial prior to the retraction here:

http://rajesh-kumar.org/wiki/index.php? ... ager-email

This isn't indology, and it isn't princeton. But the behavior is well documented. There hasn't been any comment from ANY of the schools of the authors, editors, and investigators of this federal work re. the retraction.

Compare also with the award winning washington post commentary (that was actually trash, the resulting lawsuit by the person mentioned in the story was dismissed and the whole thing cost at least one life -- the leading author killed himself I think, and nature eventually retracted the article anyway):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ ... story.html

This nonsense won awards. So much for integrity -- in academia, or journalism.

Again, not ethnic studies nor princeton but everything else is spread about coast to coast. Feel free to insert as appropriate if the high standards at the Stanfords, Washingtons, Universities of California, Utah, Pennsylvania, or Johns Hopkinses are of any relevance to the debate.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by MurthyB »

The marxist leftist cabal will be trying this new route of infiltration, in the guise of "reclaiming Hinduism", with funding from the Carter center:

Clarion Calls for a Progressive Hinduism
But it requires the unegotistic critique of much of Hindu scriptures, orientation to this world, and practices, and the simultaneous construction of a new Hinduism that will allow progressives to avail themselves of the sagacity that did indeed exist in the crevices :rotfl: of the past; identify with the struggles and spirit of those subalterns who hoped for Hinduism's fundamental renewal, even when facing the brunt of its oppressions; creatively rework Hinduism's large corpus of symbols (including key concepts of maya, karma, dharma, and moksa) so that they become insightful teaching tools for living as a progressive; and establish new institutions (and reform or at least challenge existing ones) that will ensure the durability of the above energies and pave the way for a new understanding of heritage as never exclusive, but a selection from one's particular pasts that belongs to all of humanity's seekers of truth, equity, and justice."
- Dr. Balmurli Natrajan

Balmurli Natrajan teaches anthropology at William Paterson University of New Jersey and is active in the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (www.stopfundinghate.org).
We aspire to build a global movement of Hindus who are concerned about the rights and wellbeing of all the peoples of our planet, and the fate of the planet itself. The Carter Center, which is "guided by a fundamental commitment to human rights and the alleviation of human suffering", is supporting the development of a collaborative network of faith-inspired individuals and organizations devoted to advancing human rights, and in particular those of women and girls.

However, some confusing links: Ruth Vanita (quoted above), is a Christian LGBT activist. She started Manushi that Madhu Kishwar is an editor of these days. A Ruth Vanita article appears on the infinityfoundation website. Kishwar is close to Rajeev Malhotra. And yet, the above group has all of the hallmarks of classic Hinduphobic subversion.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Prem »

http://www.firstpost.com/india/asi-unea ... 09240.html
ASI unearths 3000-year-old city near Madurai
The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), in an ongoing excavation project at Keezhadi, a small hamlet in Sivaganga district not too far from Madurai in Tamil Nadu, has uncovered and dusted off a crucial part of Tamil history.At Keezhadi, an obscure village, has now become a site of historical importance as ASI has excavated one of the "biggest human habitations of Sangam Age known so far", according to a report in The Hindu.“Through comparative dating, we place this site to be belonging to the 3rd Century B.C., which is over 2,500 years ago. However, the exact age can be arrived at only after carbon dating,” the report quoted Amarnath, who has worked on excavations in research of Indus Valley Civilisation in parts of Gujarat, as saying.ASI started excavating the place in February, 2015, and the project so far has been a great success. The habitations found are square shaped trenches, dozens of them, and historians are excited about the findings.According to a report in The Better India, the settlements could belong to the Pandya era of the Sangam Age.The report says that antiquities like glass, pearl, terracotta beads and early historic pottery has been found at the excavation site, which could help redraw Madurai's past.The excavation is being conducted at a private coconut farm. Who would've thought that a 3000 year old city was waiting to found under coconut covers.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by UlanBatori »

The habitations found are square shaped trenches, dozens of them
Huh?? :roll: pakistans i prejume?

What I want to know is whether they have found dosa-making plates.
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Pulikeshi »

Jhujar wrote:http://www.firstpost.com/india/asi-unea ... 09240.html
ASI unearths 3000-year-old city near Madurai
Through comparative dating, we place this site to be belonging to the 3rd Century B.C., which is over 2,500 years ago. However, the exact age can be arrived at only after carbon dating,” the report quoted Amarnath, who has worked on excavations in research of Indus Valley Civilisation in parts of Gujarat, as saying.
This is surely the work of Aliens collaborating with SDRE Sangham Dasyus to steal Aryan bricks from IVC :twisted: It was quite a scandal I hear :P
If any evidence of this habitat being older is found, it should be discarded as it will otherwise upset the secular, socialist, democratic credentials of the Anglicized Elite and their Alien overlords.
</sarc never off>
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Re: The Bharatiya - Identity, Vision, Agenda, Proposition

Post by Pulikeshi »

MurthyB wrote:The marxist leftist cabal will be trying this new route of infiltration, in the guise of "reclaiming Hinduism", with funding from the Carter center:

Clarion Calls for a Progressive Hinduism
"Will progressive Hindus be able to move forward the liberatory potential within Hinduism, build a renewed sense of being a Hindu, and become part of the global processes of renewal underway in many other traditions? I believe that this is not only possible, it is a calling that is impossible to neglect. But it requires the unegotistic critique of much of Hindu scriptures, orientation to this world, and practices, and the simultaneous construction of a new Hinduism that will allow progressives to avail themselves of the sagacity that did indeed exist in the crevices of the past; identify with the struggles and spirit of those subalterns who hoped for Hinduism's fundamental renewal, even when facing the brunt of its oppressions; creatively rework Hinduism's large corpus of symbols (including key concepts of maya, karma, dharma, and moksa) so that they become insightful teaching tools for living as a progressive; and establish new institutions (and reform or at least challenge existing ones) that will ensure the durability of the above energies and pave the way for a new understanding of heritage as never exclusive, but a selection from one's particular pasts that belongs to all of humanity's seekers of truth, equity, and justice."

- Dr. Balmurli Natrajan
This human should be provided with a Progressive Porcelain Throne award for thinking in the box of his colonial masters - all the while taking a massive dump on everything he holds dear and worth saving and evolving.

What nonsense equal-equal is this? The commentary above is wrong at so many levels of confusion that is not even worth beginning to tear it apart. The greatest tragedy of India is that its progeny have been educated in wonderful technical institutions, but lack basic skills in the social sciences. They use words such as liberal, liberator, modern, progressive, secular, etc. in a very naive sense without realizing they are adding to the confusion not reducing it and providing a useful path forward.

It is like having a magnificent clock in the head, but the clock maker is missing!
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