Bharat Rakshak

SwamyG wrote:A Telugu person from Mysore doing so many thing in Tamil Nadu. Not a bad example for Bharatiya identity.

Shankk wrote:SwamyG, it was new for me as well specifically the scale of it. Of course this does not translate much into any kind of following as it is just a get together to have good time than anything else but brighter side is it is not discarded offhand as a pagan practice. That is a good indication of open mind from people. Take a look at the facebook page for WesternHindu. Some interesting tidbits. We all can easily assume anglos having been exposed to Indian culture but the reach is far beyond. Places like Ukraine, Germany and others.

Shankk wrote:World Biggest HOLI in UTAH,USA 2013.

6. What about the charge that you have offended Christian faith…

Let me make one thing very very clear. I am a practicing Catholic Christian. My voice is not against Christianity or Catholic religion. My voice is against the vested interests in the organized religion which are exploiting the common people. They say Catholic Church gave us education…yes, it is true.. but where are the community leaders, and entrepreneurs and educationists who should have come from this vibrant community? They also gave us herd mentality and we need to break from that … which is not against the spirit of Jesus but in tune with what He taught.

Another problem is my emphasis on our own spiritual traditions which are far older… like the mother goddess worship which is very much in our blood.

I am today the voice of my people as the guardian of the coast of Mother India … as the owners and creators of this age old civilization… from Ramayana to Mahabharatha to every Purana my people have a role in it, they are not an imported people. They have their roots in this culture and in this spiritual tradition. The fact that I am a Catholic cannot deny this heritage of our people. I hence speak their voice.. the voice of our ancestors speaks through me.

And how can that offend any religion?

Primarily the words Yoga and Religion are used quite subjectively and understood quite differently by different people, particularly those from varying backgrounds. Yoga itself comes from Sanskrit “Yuj” to Join/ Union/ Yoke derived) from Yoga itself. Yoga is about the Union/ Joining/ Yoking of what? The Supreme Lord of Yoga Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita uses the word “Yoga” over a 100 times and tells Arjuna:

“He who sees the Whole Universe within that Self and the Self everywhere in the Universe-is the Perfected Personality- The Great Yogi” [Chapter 6:29; Bhagavad Gita]

The Union/ Yoke is ultimately at it’s highest all about the Self Realization that the Individual Self and Supreme are one and the same, the fundamental realization of the oneness of all life. Yoga is the technique that ultimately helps achieve this. Disciplining of the Body, Mind and Self are all part of the process. It is for that reason Lord Krishna urges Arjuna to be steadfast in Yoga. Even Sanjaya at the penultimate chapter of the Gita calls Krishna as Yogeshvara, the Lord of Yoga, in verse 18.75 says:

“By the grace of Vyasa I have heard this supreme secret of yoga from Krishna, the supreme Lord of Yoga,appearing directly before my eyes, speaking it himself”

Disciplining of the Body, Mind, Self by itself isn’t really a ‘religious’ act itself. It is also not an end to itself in Yoga but only a basic launch platform to ultimately realise the Unity/ Yoke/ Oneness of the Self and Supreme.

Spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar will deliver a lecture on "How Indian values and karma can help business leaders attain their goals" at the seventh Horasis Global India meet to be held in Switzerland next month.

Agnimitra wrote:Big day.

The 55-year-old Danish-Moroccan was convicted for posting online threats, screeds, photos, links and messages that praise Osama bin Laden and call on his readers to join al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra front. Mansour has also posted videos of soldiers being executed in Syria and Iraq.

...citizenship for dual nationals involved in terrorism could be suspended or even revoked.
People born in Australia could also lose some privileges if they broke anti-terror laws, he added.

Ameet wrote:Upcoming short film from Pixar featuring Hindu Gods; Sanjay's Super Team.

Patel, chose three deities to reference in Super Team: the monkey-like Hanuman, the goddess of power and protection Durga, and the blue-skinned Vishnu, who represents preservation.

Some might liken them to a Hindu version of the Avengers, or an Indian take on Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, but they're more meaningful than that to Patel. "I kind of have an insider's point of view so I see them a little bit differently," says the filmmaker.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movi ... /29592193/

That the samanvaya has been at work at in shaping the psyche of Hindu nation can be seen in the Gupta emperors adhering to the Vedic traditions patronizing the two of the greatest achievements of so-called heterodox Buddhism—the Ajanta caves and the university of Nalanda reached their pinnacle under the non-Buddhist Gupta kings.

The white Hun Mihiragula, despite his embracing the worship of Vedic deity Rudra, was defeated by a confederacy of Hindus under Narasimha Gupta (Baladitya) and Yasodharma about 528 CE. This event is highly glorified in ancient Indian history and has crucial import: though India had assimilated invading clans into her social fabric, Mihiragula was marked as an alien and driven out of India.

This is mainly because of his continued massacre of Buddhist monks and destruction of their monasteries. India’s core historical movement identifies anything that threatens the samanvaya and unity as alien and fights to remove invaders from its organism or detoxify the invader of the expansionist tendencies of monocultures, and assimilate them.

SaiK wrote:dunno if this would be OT from the issue of this article, but the author points it to be the struggle against sanskrit as viewed by the western media gangs.

What we face is the potential risk of the intellectual re-colonization of India, this time using brown-skinned sepoys working as puppets controlled in foreign-based centres such as the seminary located in Princeton.


There has been a vicious campaign against me and my writings in the cyber and media space. This started soon after I gave a talk recently at the 16th World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok, about the key ideas in my forthcoming book ‘The Battle for Sanskrit’. It addresses some key disagreements: should Western assumptions in Sanskrit studies be the dominant paradigm for understanding our tradition? Are Indians simply becoming consumers rather than producers of discourse on their own tradition? Can Sanskrit be viewed as mainly a tool of oppression? Is Sanskrit also sacred rather than purely secular? And so on. The points certainly generated lot of interest and support from the traditional side. But there were a lot of disgruntled voices as well which felt threatened.

http://www.niticentral.com/2015/07/15/r ... 23900.html

The simple counter-argument here is that the attack is unfounded. Malhotra has never claimed to be writing original history of India. His line has ALWAYS been to highlight the offensive writings of western 'scholars' (*****). Thus his books are, as anyone over age 3 can see, comprised almost entirely of quotations from various entities.

The charge of plagiarism is a grotesque abuse of the concept. Malhotra is by NO MEANS using the work of others and passing it off as his to make money. Far from it, he is highlighting and comparing the work of others. In the process, if one gets a bit confused about who is being cited where, that is natural.

If there are errors in attribution they should be pointed out and corrected in a followup edition. End of story.

I was recently “bombed” by an online petition with a sensational charge that I had “plagiarised” in my earlier book, Indra’s Net. The demand was that publishers must withdraw my books. The accusation is that in nine different instances in Indra’s Net, I should have cited a certain book by Andrew Nicholson, which I failed to do.

However, the facts are different: I do cite Nicholson’s book about 10 times in the main text with an additional 20 references in the endnotes. Clearly, I am informing the reader that I utilise Nicholson’s ideas with a combination of his words and mine. I do not cite him after every single sentence where I use him, but it is unambiguously clear when reading entire passages of my book that I am discussing his works. Unfortunately, none of those attacking me have bothered to acknowledge this simple fact. Those passing judgment need to figure out why someone wanting to plagiarise a source would bother referencing it about 30 times.

Highly experienced writers say this is a common grey area in scholarship, with no absolute standard or norm. In the worst case they see this as a simple copyediting human error – but not critical because Nicholson does get ample references and hence the purpose of citing gets satisfied in spirit if not in every literal instance.

The routine method for someone who finds errors in a book is to write to the publisher asking for corrections. Publishers routinely process this. We are not in the era when commandments were carved in stone. In the digital age, content does change routinely, due to various factors including inadvertent copy editing errors.

There is a general understanding among publishers and authors that any errors/addendums get routinely fixed in the next print run. My earlier book, Being Different, has had over 100 small changes made over several print runs – ranging from cosmetic to more significant. These were brought to our attention by readers in a constructive manner as well as those we detected ourselves. None were intentional and none caused any controversy. Each of my books has 300 to 600 citations of various sources, and my editors and I do the best we can to cite accurately. But we are not perfect. Neither me, nor my publisher have a problem in adding quotation marks or citing the source each and every time in the next print. I am happy to do that.

But I suspect the intention is not to help the discourse (and me) become more accurate, but rather to shut me and others out of the debate altogether. The demand to withdraw books (as opposed to correcting the issues) is unprecedented in such a situation. It is a tactic to make a mountain out of a molehill or fake a molehill to make a mountain. Those very voices who hated Dinanath Batra for asking for a book to be withdrawn, are now asking for my books to be withdrawn.

An independent analysis done by serious readers was posted online and out of the nine alleged omissions, they found that six were properly acknowledged, albeit not using the precise format required by certain Western conventions. In the other three cases, there could be a misunderstanding if someone wants to nit-pick, although a reader of the entire chapter would get a clear sense of the source being acknowledged.

However, there is much more going on in the background. The complaint comes from some people whose anger is really targeted at my forthcoming book that exposes some problems in Western scholarship on Indian culture. The petition was started within days after I presented an overview of my next book at an international conference. The chief complainants are individuals I have had tense arguments with in the past, due to the controversial positions I take. I am open to engage in a debate with them on issues of substance without personal acrimony, and with neutral moderation. I have made numerous offers of debate but the other side has not responded. They have chosen to try and silence me instead.

The real issue is even broader. A common criticism they level against me is that I am not in an academic job, hence I am an “outside”’ who is not entitled to “meddle” in the discourse. Despite having researched full time for two decades, produced four major books and countless blogs and lectures, these “high priest” of academics still remain unimpressed.

Or is it that they are worried? Is their monopoly being threatened over the public discourse on matters of general importance, such as how our civilisation is to be interpreted? Why is there a presumption that the adhikara to think creatively is reserved only for the academicians? From Jesus Christ to Sri Krishna, from Vivekananda to Gandhi, from Shashi Tharoor to Narendra Modi to Arvind Kejriwal – public intellectuals all across the ideological spectrum have included influential persons who were not academicians. In this Internet age and with its dis-intermediation (eliminating the middlemen), the world of knowledge producers has expanded and the high priests of the past feel threatened.

This brings us to the further question of the norms and standards of English usage that we are supposed to obey literally. My attackers wish to judge me by certain specific norms of citation that most Indian writers do not follow – including many trained in Western systems. In fact, one academician suggested that someone should examine the published works of the persons accusing me, as that is sure to reveal that they are guilty of the very same thing they accuse me of. In other words, in actual practice most scholars like to give “enough” references to indicate their sources clearly, but without over-populating the text with “scare quotes”. The extent of literal citation should also depend on the type of genre and audience.

Unfortunately, our colonised minds are programmed to obey the rules of idiom, quotation, style, etc. set by the West. It is time to discuss whether we should decolonise ourselves in this regard. I believe we should be free to innovate in the way we use language. I am not writing academic books, but writing for the commoner. I am taking subject matter that has remained hidden in the academic closet, and I am making it accessible to the mainstream reader. This is frightening to the gatekeepers of the academic world who see me as a trespasser on their turf. I am not bound to obey the rules they have made. It is for my readers to judge whether my works are useful or not, and academics do not have the license to authorise or deny my free speech.

Ironically, these very same academicians are claiming to champion the downtrodden voices, the subalterns, on the basis that elitist Brahmins have controlled the Sanskrit rules, idiom, etc. and non-Brahmins have been treated as unqualified and lacking the adhikara to write in Sanskrit. I feel they are guilty of the same elitism by treating me as unqualified to write in English. My forthcoming book, in fact, examines these very topics of Sanskrit versus English elitism and issues of who controls the intellectual production.

An allegation of plagiarism must look at the issue at two distinct levels: substance and form. Plagiarism as a matter of substance is when the author hides a source because he wants to claim originality for something he has borrowed. Nobody who has read my book has said that that is even remotely the case, because it would run counter to the fact that I have very frequently referenced Nicholson’s work.

The second level is whether there is omission of references in a merely technical sense. This is where customs for acknowledgment differ, depending on whether it is an academic book (which mine are not), which readership is viewing it, and so forth. I wish to point out that in ancient Indian traditions, references were required (as in ancient Sanskrit texts) but the Western conventions did not apply. Sanskrit does not even have quotation marks in its character set. Yet traditional scholars made clear when they referred to someone else’s thoughts. So in the worst case, I might be accused of violating a specific technical convention of the style and form of acknowledging sources. But certainly no plagiarism can be said at the level of the intention and spirit of my work.

Suppose we gave the dog a bone by increasing the number of citations for Nicholson from 30 to 35, would that really bring them to the discussion table to sort out the matters of substance and avoid playing such games? I hope so.

Elmer K. and Ethel R. Timby Associate Professor of the History of Religions
Department of History
116 Hodge Hall
Phone: 609.497.7775
Fax: 609.497.7728
Email: [email protected]
(Presbyterian)

Richard Fox Young is Princeton Theological Seminary’s Elmer K. and Ethel R. Timby Associate Professor of the History of Religions. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and is interested in the history of the encounter between Christianity and various religions of Asian origin, the place of Christianity in non-Western pluralisms, and contemporary understandings of interreligious dialogue. He teaches courses on the encounter of other religions with Christianity, comparative missiology, and Buddhism and Hinduism. He has served on the editorial advisory board for Studies in the History of Christian Mission since 1997. He is a member of Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton
Education:
B.A. (Honors), University of Oregon, 1972, Religious Studies
Ph.D. (Honors), University of Pennsylvania, 1980, Oriental Studies

Home > DISSERTATIONS > AAI8107818
THE MATAPARIKSA CONTROVERSY: A CASE STUDY IN HINDU APOLOGETICS BASED UPON EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY SANSKRIT TREATISES DIRECTED AGAINST CHRISTIANITY

RICHARD FOX YOUNG, University of Pennsylvania
Abstract

Studies in Hindu apologetics have heretofore usually concentrated on intrareligious differences or argumentation vis-a-vis other religions of Indian origin. This dissertation turns instead to orthodox Hindu assessments of Christianity, taking as its focal point a controversy that started in 1839 when the Matapar(')iksa {Examination of Religions}, a Sanskrit treatise against Hinduism, was published by John Muir, a Christian Orientalist. To this assault three Hindu pandits responded, also in Sanskrit. Their texts, from which extracts are translated and analyzed, offer insights into an apologetics that, unlike what one finds in Neo-Hinduism, accented resistance instead of accommodation.^ The Introduction and "Resistant Hinduism," the second chapter, clarify the historical context of the Matapar(')iksa Controversy by reference to records of previous Hindu-Christian debates. Attention is paid to certain ideas which prevented pandits from seriously grappling with religions of non-Hindu origin until the early nineteenth century. Chapter three, "The New Hermeneutics, " traces the efforts of missionaries to overcome Hindu reticence to engage in dialogue by forging out of Sanskrit a terminology and idiom for expressing Christain doctrines. One finds biographical profiles of each participant, with emphasis on the specific religious traditions from which they viewed each other, in the fourth chapter, "The Disputants." The fifth chapter, "Resistance and Accommodation," takes each principal objection to Christianity and traces its connections with presuppositions of Hindu philosophy and religion. A crucial concern here is to indicate the extent to which patterns of responses found in these texts were dependent upon preexisting argumentation in intra-Hindu apologetics."Christianity in the General Scheme of Dharma," the sixth chapter, separates interpretations of religious plurality from individual anti-Christian arguments, and relates them to such diverse ideas of the pandits as the following: the unity and compatibility of religions; the impossibility of salvation apart from Vedic revelation; and divine propagation of delusive religions as a form of punishment. An Epilogue traces the impact of the Controversy on the subsequent thinking of the participants.^ Doctrine by doctrine analysis indicates consistently stiff resistance on the part of the pandits to all major aspects of Muir's presentation of Christianity. These include creation of matter and souls, which implicates God in the deformities of nature and the sinfulness of man; double predestination; original sin; justification by faith; probation or sanctification; heavenly rewards; and non-human life, for which there is said to be inadequate concern among Christians. Conversely, the pandits defend their religion vigorously against such allegations as the following: Hinduism is crass polytheism; its various branches lack equilibrium; it encourages idolatry; its gods disport immorally; its scriptures cannot be eternal; brahminhood contravenes human equality; and Puranic cosmography is scientifically uninformed. Notable in these arguments and counterarguments is lack of interest in Jesus Christ, Christianity's central figure.^ At this juncture, Hindu apologists found little in Christianity that had not already been rejected by Hinduism itself in the course of its own development. Moreover, previous patterns of apologetics were useful to the pandits in their encounter with Muir. This fact notwithstanding, each pandit produced a different scheme of religious plurality, one generating tolerance and the others intolerance. This evidence overturns the prevalent misconception that Hindus view other religions uniformly. Only the concept of adhikara unifies these theologies of religion. Though negative, these texts should be understood as historically representative of Hindu orientations to other religions. ^
Subject Area

Religion, History of
Recommended Citation

RICHARD FOX YOUNG, "THE MATAPARIKSA CONTROVERSY: A CASE STUDY IN HINDU APOLOGETICS BASED UPON EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY SANSKRIT TREATISES DIRECTED AGAINST CHRISTIANITY" (January 1, 1980). Dissertations available from ProQuest. Paper AAI8107818.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI8107818