Category india

Hindus in South India must unite for their collective past and shared future – David Frawley

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Thiruvalluvar

Hindus in South India must recognise that their vote is crucial in this democratic political era, where political influence is necessary for any social respect. To not vote for those who support you is to condemn yourself to be ruled by those who are against you. – Dr. David Frawley

South India has long been the most Hindu and Vedic part of India in terms of its culture and way of life. By South India we mean the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

South India has the largest, oldest, most numerous and most attended Hindu temples, particularly in Tamil Nadu, not simply museum pieces but centres of an active and devoted community.

Vedic culture is most studied and practised in South India, including Yoga, Vedanta, Ayurveda, Vedic Astrology, Vastu, Classical Indian Music and Dance, with Sanskrit Stotras and Vedic chanting. The three main Vedantic lines and Acharyas followed throughout India, Advaita and Shankaracharya, Vishishtadvaita and Ramanumujacharya, Dvaita and Madhvacharya, originated in South India and are still centred there. The main Himalayan temples like the Char Dham are run by priestly families from South India.

South Indian popular culture has the most Hindu influence, easy to see in their movies with stories and references to Hindu deities, which are now getting acclaimed throughout India. More people in South India have Sanskrit names, including politicians like Karunanidhi or Jayalalitha, while Sanskrit loan words are common in the vocabularies of its languages including Tamil or Malayalam.

South Indian kingdoms, notably the Vijayanagar Empire, whose capital city was one of the largest and richest in the world, preserved Vedic culture from destruction by the Muslim Turks. South Indian dynasties through history, notably the Pallava, Kakatiya, Hoysala, and the famous Cholas upheld Hinduism/Sanatana Dharma and its monumental temple culture. The Cholas in particular spread it from to Southeast Asia as far as Indonesia. The temple art and sculpture of these South Indian dynasties is still the most appreciated of India today, notably the Chola Shiva Nataraj statues.

Many great gurus honoured worldwide for their teachings on Yoga and Vedanta came from South India, including Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi, Swami Sivananda, Swami Chinmayananda, Swami Dayananda of Arsha Vidya, BKS Iyengar, and Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. Sri Aurobindo though from Bengal set up his ashram in Pondicherry. To study Yoga, Vedanta and Ayurveda today students come mainly to South India.

Increasing political contradiction for Hindus in South India

Yet in spite of Vedic practices prevailing in South India there is a dangerous contradiction that threatens the Hindus in the region, a new attack on its great traditions that have so far endured for millennia.

South Indians at a political level rarely vote to defend their Hindu culture, whether in state or national elections. They seldom vote to protect their human and social rights as Hindus. South India has been dominated by regional political influences which lack a national vision, many of which are staunchly anti-Hindu, like the Communists of Kerala and the DMK in Tamil Nadu.

Today the Communist influence in India (which still has not renounced Stalin or Mao) is most prominent in South India. In addition, Conversion activities targeting Hindus are prominent in South India, both Christian and Islamic. Islamic terrorist groups like PFI are most active in the South.

Christian missionaries have tried to subvert South Indian Hindu culture by creating their own Christian Bhajans, Christian Bharatnatyam, even Christian Yoga. Some churches are made to look like Hindu temples and perform aratis. Christian priests may wear saffron robes or rudrakasha malas. Missionaries have attempted to infiltrate and promote conversion at Hindu sacred sites extending to the most sacred Hindu site of Tirupati.

Aggression of anti-Hindu ‘Stalinism’

This anti-Hindu influence in South India has reached such a fevered pitch that a DMK leader like Udhaynidhi Stalin, with the support of his father Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, can vocally preach for the elimination of Hinduism/Sanatana Dharma, condemning it like a dangerous disease, proclaiming it is necessary to eradicate Sanatana Dharma for the sake of human equality and social progress as if it had no merits at all. Sadly, such a brazen call to harm Hindus and disrupt their way of life is ignored or downplayed, while a call to do so against other religious communities in India would have resulted in national and international outrage.

This DMK, though calling itself a Dravidian party, has in fact tried to suppress and destroy Dravidian culture, which has been largely Hindu and Vedic since the dawn of its long history. Even the ancient Matsya Purana says that Manu as a flood figure came from Kerala.

DMK is in denial of the great Hindu kingdoms, dynasties and temple culture of South India, its extraordinary art, sophisticated philosophies, profound Vedic sciences and yogic spirituality. There is little traditionally Dravidian about the DMK, except perhaps their Sanskrit names which highlights their own Hindu family past they are trying to erase.

DMK Dravidian politics, we should note, is not Indian, Bharatiya or traditional but an extension of European nationalism, where the different linguistic zones of Europe like Germany or France, wanted separate countries, defined according to western politics of the right and the left. Though claiming to be atheists and rationalists, it is Hindu traditions that the DMK criticises and maligns, not the others. Their main enemies that they target are the Brahmins not colonial rulers and their prejudices which they seem to share.

DMK’s inspiration Periyar on India’s Independence called for a day of mourning for Tamils for not getting their own separate state apart from India. He also supported a separate state for Pakistan and encouraged the partition of India. Clearly DMK began as an anti-India party, anti-Bharat, and so naturally anti-Sanatana Dharma, and retains that divisive mentality today. For them dictator Stalin remains a role model to be named after, not any of the leaders of the Indian Independence Movement or the great gurus of Tamil Nadu.

Challenging the danger ahead

Not bringing a Hindu spiritual and cultural Dravidian influence into politics has ceded the political field in South India and its powers to Leftists, Christians and Muslims that are more politically active, better organised and funded. It has resulted in a situation in which Hindus in South India are becoming misrepresented, marginalised and oppressed, with a declining political voice and decreasing social rights. Hindu temples remain under state control and expropriation. Public education portrays Hinduism in a negative light as regressive, while looking at anti-Hindu groups in a positive light as progressive, continuing the anti-Hindu colonial agenda in India.

This Hinduphobia is obvious in Communist-ruled Kerala like the Sabarimala temple issue. Overall, Kerala Hindus are marginalised and can be attacked if they give themselves a political voice. They may prefer to avoid public exposure at a political level to protect themselves and their families. In Kerala Communist political rallies, we see pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, even Che Guevara, figures who promoted violent revolution and genocide. DMK anti-Brahminism resembles European anti-Semitic movements that resulted in oppression and genocide of the Jews.

Even the Congress party in Tamil Nadu has become under the rule of the DMK as a junior part of its alliance and accepts or defends their anti-Hindu propaganda. In Andhra Pradesh, Jagan Mohan Reddy and his YSR Congress caters to Christian missionary influences extending to direct financial support.

Fortunately, to counter this danger, a new Hindu resistance is arising in South India, though still in its initial phase. Notably, we find young Hindu leaders like K. Annamalai in Tamil Nadu and Tejasvi Surya in Karnataka taking up new Bharatiya activism. At the national level, PM Narendra Modi has honoured the traditional culture of South India with the Statue of Equality dedicated to Ramanujacharya’s ideas on equality in Hyderabad, by honouring Adi Shankara’s birthplace in Kerala, and by visiting Udupi and honouring the Madhva line as well.

In conclusion, Hindus in South India must recognise that their vote is crucial in this democratic political era, where political influence is necessary for any social respect. To not vote for those who support you is to condemn yourself to be ruled by those who are against you. In addition, Hindus need to challenge the anti-Hindu media in South India.

This call for a new political awareness is not a call for Hindus to oppress anyone, as it will likely be maligned, but for Hindus to have their right portrayal in history, their human, legal and religious rights, and freedom to live a Hindu way of life just like their ancestors did. It is very strange to find Hindus threatened in India with its Hindu majority and Hindu/Bharatiya past. But it is a real problem that must be addressed not only for Hindu human rights but for maintaining the cultural traditions of South India in all of its diversity and splendour, which is one of the greatest and oldest cultural heritages in the world. – Firstpost, 8 Septemeber 2023

› Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) is the director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies and the author of more than 30 books on Yoga and Vedic traditions. 

E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker Quote

Nandi’s Witness: The moral question and obvious evidence at Gyanvapi Mosque – Venu Gopal Narayanan

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It is a moral question: if, by custom, tradition, belief, and history, Nandi has always been posted to watch over Shiva, why have legalistic delays and an otiose intransigence prevented him from resuming his duties for so long? – Venu Gopal Narayanan

The issue of whether the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi was built on a Shiva temple, or not, is entering its denouement phase in various courts.

A number of questions are being asked: many are legal; more are legalistic; others are technical; and some, as always, are wretchedly political ones pregnant with instigative intent.

Original Kashi Vishwanath Temple with Gyanwapi Mosque standing atop it.

At one level, the entire legal ruckus seems slightly mindless and wholly needless, since the three domes of the mosque rest on the intricately sculpted remnant western wall of what is clearly a Hindu temple.

But then, defending the indefensible using word play has long been the preferred modus operandi for some schools of politics.

Alleged Shiva linga found in a well in the Gyanvapi Mosque.

As a result, the questions are flying thick and fast: Is that linga-shaped object in the mosque’s forecourt a linga or a pillar? Is it old or new? Is it made of concrete or stone?

Will an archaeological survey bring out the truth? Why should a survey be allowed? Is the petition for a survey legally tenable? Why do ‘they’ want a survey? Won’t ‘they’ ever let us live in peace? Ad infinitum.

Separately, the media domain is filled with questions about the questioners.

Heady legal verbiage is distilled with reductionist severity, by self-styled experts blessed with only a passing knowledge of the law, to such an extent, that it makes the concept of ‘dumbing down’ seem intelligent.

It is entirely beside the point that most such efforts either miss the point, get it wrong, or merely muddy the pool further.

Auranzeb's firman ordering the destruction of the Kashi Vishwanath Temple (Sept. 1669).

Is that judge kosher? Why didn’t this lawyer make that point? What about the imperial firmans ordering the destruction of a temple at that very site? Can’t they be adduced as irrefutable evidence? Or, is it all a sinister majoritarian ploy? Again, ad infinitum.

And then, there is a statue of a seated bull at the northern perimeter of the Vishwanath temple at Kashi, which has been quietly asking a different query ever since the ruckus began some centuries ago. He is Nandi, Shiva’s mount.

According to the legends which made this sacred land, Nandi is the keeper of Shiva’s abode, be it atop Mount Kailash, at Kashi, or any one of the innumerable grihas where a dreadlocked trident-bearer is the resident deity.

Nandi is endowed with great strength, and his job is to keep the peace while his Lord attends to various matters; so strong, in fact, that even Ravana, the invincible Lankan king, had to suffer a humiliating chastisement at Nandi’s hooves, when the royal visitor once threw a petulant fit after being forced to wait for an audience with Shiva at Kailash.

It is a task demanding eternal devotion and great fortitude, for which reason, Nandi is always found seated facing the abode of his master.

Photo by Britisher Samuel Bourne taken in the 1860s with the caption "Gyanvati is not a mosque, but a temple".

But this Nandi of Kashi has not seen peace, and oddly not his Lord, in a long age, for he sits facing away from the jyotirlinga of Vishwanath, gazing at a mosque through tall barricades erected by thoughts alien to this land. That is why his query is different from any other.

It is a moral question: if, by custom, tradition, belief, and history, he has always been posted to watch over Shiva, why have legalistic delays and an otiose intransigence prevented Nandi from resuming his duties for so long? It is a question for the ages.

Our modern questioners would rush to answer, excitedly and volubly, that the delay is on account of a small, but extremely influential section of the Muslim aristocracy, along with the secularist parties, who have turned the issue into a cause celebre for political control of a vote bank, and vital electoral profit.

Perhaps they are right, from a legal or a technical standpoint, but theirs is not a moral answer.

The reason is that an article of faith goes far beyond a judge, a court, a law, or an archaeological survey. It is an issue of morality: is it right to hinder Nandi thus? And the issue will be resolved peaceably, the day that point is answered honestly.

Consequently, it is not a matter of which court will answer Nandi’s query, or about how justly it will be answered, but when, because some questions cannot be avoided.

That is the way of dharma. In the end, the natural order of things is always restored by the truth.

Just as the Yaksha Prashna to Yudhishthira was the question of the Dvapara Yuga, Nandi’s query is the question for this Yuga, and the time for an answer has arrived. – Swarajya, 25 July 2023

› Venu Gopal Narayanan is an independent petroleum consultant who focuses on energy, geopolitics, current affairs and electoral arithmetic.

Vishwanath Temple Complex and Gyanvapi Mosque.

Rethinking the Indus Valley civilisation – Nanditha Krishna

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Mohenjo-daro Dancing Girl (ca. 2300-1750 BCE).

Vasant Shinde, who has excavated several Harappan sites, was fortunate to isolate DNA from the skeleton of a Harappan lady at Rakhigarh. The result was a South Asian gene spread all over India, with no Steppe or Iranian ancestry. But Harappan genomes have been found in Iran and Turkmenistan, giving credence to the Out of India theory. – Nanditha Krishna

A seminar on ‘Art in the Indus Civilization’ was recently held in Chennai. Why art? Because the unverifiable readings of the Indus script are a major impediment, art becomes the most reliable source of information. This Bronze Age civilisation covered a vast area, from Balochistan in the west to Western UP in the east, from Afghanistan in the north to Gujarat in the south, the largest “empire” of the ancient world. Remains of agriculture from 6500 BCE are found in Mehrgarh, Balochistan.

Although Kalibangan (in India) was discovered first, Mohenjo Daro and Harappa were reported first but went to Pakistan during Partition. Subsequent excavations revealed that 75 per cent of the Indus civilisation is situated along the Ghaggar-Hakra, now identified with the river Saraswati. However, it is still known as the Indus Civilisation because the first sites were excavated there. Kalibangan, Dholavira, Lothal and Rakhigarhi are among the important sites subsequently excavated. In 1924, the Indus civilisation was declared a site of remote antiquity by the British, who had earlier maintained that Indian history began in 600 BCE!

The art of the Indus civilisation includes terracottas, ceramics, glyptics, sculpture, jewellery made of carnelian, steatite, gold, silver and, faience and beads. Art “expresses important ideas or feelings” of a people. Early terracottas are primitive, made of pressed clay and pinched, with huge holes for eyes. The mature period produced beautiful images of trees, animals, birds and deities engraved on seals and paintings on pottery. The art residues are distinctive spokespersons for this civilisation. The seals were made of steatite, faience and terracotta and used commercially and ritually. Dogs with collars and elephants with rugs over their back suggest that they had been domesticated. Images of horses, rhinos, monkeys, rams, other animals and birds appear either as toys or on seals. Ornaments, shells, turquoise and lapis lazuli were moved from 500 to 1500 km away.

Why is the naked bronze dancing girl presumed to be dancing? Why is the stone priest-king of Mohenjo Daro presumed to be a priest-king? There are no answers. Several images of yoga poses exist, while two naked male torsos of grey lime are outstanding. One twists a leg, a male dancing figure comparable to the Nataraja pose. The other is in samabhanga, perhaps a Tirthankara (Yajurveda mentions three). 

The earliest worship scene in India is a seal from the Indus Civilisation where a three-horned male figure stands inside a stylised pipal tree. There are several seals of male figures with three pipal leaves protruding from the head, recalling the Ashvatavriskshastotram. The second important seal type is a tree with prickly thorns and small leaves, the khejari or shami, with a female figure seated on a branch and a tiger below, reminiscent of the paalai or desert described by Tolkappiyar, whose goddess is Kotravai or Durga and plant, the prickly kotran. Durga’s vehicle is the tiger. In the Vedas, ashvata and shami were rubbed together to produce fire. Three-headed male figures meditate in yogic moolabandhaasana. All these are Harappan and Vedic iconography. Popular animal stories from the Panchatantra are painted on jars.

Vasant Shinde, who has excavated several Harappan sites, was fortunate to isolate DNA from the skeleton of a Harappan lady at Rakhigarh. The result was a South Asian gene spread all over India, with no Steppe or Iranian ancestry. But Harappan genomes have been found in Iran and Turkmenistan, giving credence to the Out of India theory. According to Dr Shinde, the dominant gene in most south Asians is 25 to 30 per cent Harappan. By craniofacial reconstruction, he found that Harappans resembled contemporary Haryanvis.

Radha and Krishna playing chess.

Some scholars believe that the second urbanisation of 1000 BCE was disconnected from Harappa, with a dark Vedic Age in between. This is false, says Prof Michel Danino, because the same technologies in pottery, water management, metallurgy and crafts are pursued throughout Indian culture. Fire altars and lingas, sindoor and Mother Goddess figurines, lost wax technique to cast bronze statues, and more have continued since Harappa. Tribal women wear Harappan-style bangles on their arms, and chessmen from Lothal and dice from Harappa are still popular games. Swastika and tree worship still prevailed, while the Harappan weight system continued throughout Indian culture. Check dams to avoid flooding, bathrooms with commodes and drainage lines with manholes for cleaning are Harappan legacies. So, did “untouchability” begin there? Unlike Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Indus people didn’t build pyramids and ziggurats, but made life comfortable for the common person in well-built cities.

When people travel with their musical instruments, they retain their names. The piano and violin retain their names everywhere. Shail Vyas researched Mesopotamian references to Meluha (as the Indus Valley was known there) and found the names of 30 Indian musical instruments and 60 items of trade, including animals, birds and timber species, from Meluha, all in Sanskrit, with similar Mesopotamian equivalents. These had gone with the sea-faring Meluhans of the Indus.

It is time to rethink the Harappan civilisation, a culture with much archaeology but little literature. Vedic culture is all literature, and no material remains—is it possible? The Vedas speak of copper, not iron, making it a Bronze Age civilisation like Harappa. The Vedic civilisation was riverine and agricultural, like the Harappan. The Early Harappan Period lasted from 3300 to 2900 BCE, the Mature period from 2900 to 1900 BCE and the Late Harappan from 1900 to 1500 BCE. By 1000 BCE, the Painted Grey-Ware of the Mahabharata period had appeared, so the Vedas would have to be much earlier. The Vedas do not speak of any homeland outside India. The two civilisations were contemporary, probably the same, for Meluhan Sanskrit in Mesopotamia is compelling evidence. It is time our history books reveal the truth. – The New Indian Express, 12 march 2023

> Nanditha Krishna is an author, historian, educationalist and environmentalist.

Sindhu-Saraswati (Indus Vally) Civilisation Map

Was Tipu Sultan really a patriot and great freedom fighter? – Jaithirth Rao

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Tipu Sultan (Photo)

The fact is Tipu was a brilliant military tactician and a weak military and political strategist. He allied with the French, who ended up on the losing side. He was bigoted and had megalomaniac pretensions of a Muslim conquest of India. – Jaithirth Rao

If only the Marxist editors of NCERT textbooks had admitted that Tipu Sultan was a flawed human being, perhaps some of us would not have many problems. The absence of such honesty makes us say: Ay, there’s the rub! In the Marxist version of the earlier sarkari sycophants, Tipu was a patriot, a tolerant, secular ruler, a great freedom fighter and so on. The question of “flaws” simply did not arise.

Tipu’s apologist, the Australian historian Kate Brittlebank, points out that he was virtually unique in being an Indian ruler who died fighting the British and did not take a pension from them. There is a considerable verisimilitude in that statement. But that does not automatically make Tipu a patriot. He allied with the French and if the fortunes of war had been different, India may have come under the rule of the French East India Company—not exactly a sanguine prospect for Indian patriots.

Misplaced patriotism of Tipu Sultan

The ruler of Mysore corresponded with the Sultan of Turkey and was not averse to that exalted person becoming the suzerain of India. At least for many of us, the British Raj was a better happenstance than an Ottoman Raj and that is our view as patriots. The Ottomans are unlikely to have built railways or set up universities, institutions that incidentally came up in the Ottoman Empire decades after they did in British India. Tipu wrote to Zaman Shah Durrani, the third king of the Durrani Empire in Afghanistan, to help throw out the British in India. Some of us see this as evidence of religious bigotry against Hindu Marathas, not secular patriotism.

In emphasising his anti-British credentials, which are taken as self-evident proof of his patriotism, the Delhi-JNU-Aligarh-Rutgers-Australia group of historians seem to forget that the British were not the only enemies of Tipu. In the last siege of Seringapatam (or Srirangapatna, if you so prefer) in 1799, there were more Hyderabad Nizam’s soldiers in the army attacking Tipu’s than those of the East India Company. And I assume that no one can accuse the Nizam of being a Hindu bigot. There were a lot of Maratha soldiers too. In fact, more soldiers loyal to Indian rulers, Hindus and Muslims, fought Tipu than the soldiers of the East India Company, which the Marxists love to hate.

My mother’s family is of “old Mysorean” vintage and many of these tales are stories I have heard from my grandfather Madhava Rao and my many granduncles. Our narrative is that while Tipu’s father and ruler of Mysore Hyder Ali was a usurper, he nevertheless maintained the fiction that he was a deputy of our beloved Wodeyar kings. It is Tipu who started calling himself “Sultan” and who marginalised our traditional rulers completely. The dowager Wodeyar Maharani Lakshmammanni was in correspondence with the British who she saw as legitimate “restorers” of order in our land and who looked upon Tipu as the disloyal, treacherous and, need I say, unpatriotic traitor. The Marxist historians will doubtless dismiss the venerable lady as a Hindu bigot or in current parlance as a supremacist.

Kodavas, Roman Catholics, Nairs, and the British

It is interesting to note how the Marxists of today are making light of the sufferings of Kodavas of Coorg (or Kodagu) and slyly portraying them as British agents. The fact is that most Kodavas hate Tipu who allegedly forcibly converted many of them. The descendants of this community of Kodava “converts” are still around.

Masjid-i-Ala (Jama Masjid)

Mysore Archaeological Dept. Report (1935)

Tipu was also brutal towards the Nair community of Travancore and Malabar. Again, forced conversions were the rule. And he followed it up with the destruction of temples. His worst depredations were against the Roman Catholic Christians of Mangalore. Forced marches, forced conversions, abductions of Mangalorean Christian women—all of these are documented and well-known. I wonder if the bishops of today’s crypto-Marxist Roman Church in India will even bother to talk about this. The Leftist historians of the world dismiss Tipu’s cruelty to British prisoners, including the forcible dressing of young drummer boys as girls and the violation of their civil rights as “imperialist propaganda.” It definitely was propaganda. But let us not forget the kernel of truth in these accounts.

The so-called secular historians talk endlessly about Tipu’s support of the Hindu temples of Srirangapatna and Nanjangud and of the Sringeri Mutt. Many of these are documented and cannot and should not be denied. But if the historians are neutral, they should have the integrity and courage to state that some of this support stemmed from Tipu’s faith in these temples possessing unique abilities in the realm of astrological predictions. Tipu was a believer in astrology. I give him credit for that. Will secular historians do the same?

A brilliant tactician but a weak strategist

The other point that the Marxist historians make is that Purnaiah, who was a Brahmin and a minister under Hyder Ali and Tipu, was pro-Tipu. This is true. But the same historians could have and should have added that many Mysoreans believed and still do that Purnaiah was a traitor a few times over!  I have a simple explanation. Purnaiah was perhaps a nobody until Hyder spotted him and his entire rise, including becoming the  Diwan of Mysore, was on account of Hyder and later Tipu. He was simply being loyal to his benefactors. Incidentally, in his later life, Purnaiah was equally loyal to the East India Company. Arthur Wellesley, who later became the Duke of Wellington, respected and admired Purnaiah. My grand-uncle Nagaraja Rao, a devout Brahmin himself, while talking about Purnaiah once told me that “Brahmins have a chameleon-like ability to adjust realistically to the powers that be.” That might sum up the Purnaiah story. Not loyalty or disloyalty, but realism.

Tipu called his government (which from our family’s point of view, was one of usurpers) the Sarkar-e-Khudadad, an Islamic Persian expression indicating that it was the government of God. Tipu deliberately introduced Persian into the land records of his dominion. Is it bigoted on our part to admire the British army officer Mark Cubbon who subsequently changed the rules and reintroduced Kannada and Marathi in the village maps? Who is the traitor? Who is the patriot? Who was benevolent? Who was malevolent? Important questions to ask. No wonder, even today, no political party wants to change the name of Cubbon Park in Bengaluru or remove his statue.

The fact is Tipu was a brilliant military tactician and a weak military and political strategist. He allied with the French, who ended up on the losing side. He was bigoted and had megalomaniac pretensions of a Muslim conquest of India. Hence his outreach to the Turks and the Afghans. He was a parvenu local Muslim and anathema to the Nizam who advertised his Persian ancestry. The Marathas saw him as a thorn in their side. The Nawab of Carnatic Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah hated Tipu and was his unforgiving enemy. Many of Tipu’s subjects longed for the return of Wodeyar rule.

Hyder Ali was a military and political genius but his son Tipu, lacked his good sense. He allowed a large coalition—the Marathas, the Nizam, the British, the Kodavas, the Maharaja of Travancore and the Nawab of Carnatic to get together against him. He relied on the French who were irresolute and incompetent; he appealed to Turks and Afghans who were otherwise preoccupied and uninterested. He was clever. But unlike his father, he was not intelligent. He lost.

In any event, he was not a great, shining patriot. He was flawed, like most of us are. – The Print, 27 February 2023

› Jaithirth Rao is a retired businessperson who lives in Mumbai.

Why a nation and its people must know their true history – Makkhan Lal

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India History Cartoon

No country can become a great nation, a world guru and a world leader on borrowed ideas, borrowed cultures and borrowed systems. The greatness and leadership is built upon the solid foundation and the pride of their own past. – Dr. Makkhan Lal

History, history writing and history teaching have, indeed, become newsworthy not only in India but also in most other parts of the world. The reasons may be varied—construction of a national history curriculum in India, England and Wales, the design of national history standards in the US, the content of history textbooks in Japan, China, Korea, Pakistan, Israel, and Germany, the approach to invasion of Latin American countries by the Europeans, the development of new curricula in the successor states of the former USSR, or even the rewriting of history textbooks in Russia after the collapse of the former USSR. Issues of identities, heritage, and citizenship, all rooted in the past, have become the hot stuff of politics.

Similarly, an issue can be raised about the conquest of peaceful people belonging to Inca, Aztec and Maya civilisations by the gun-trotting Europeans. Whether the victory should be viewed as the discovery of a new world and new economic resources for Europe, as is generally viewed by European and North American historians, or it should be seen as the destruction of the independently developed three native civilisations by technologically more advanced nations that have an unending lust for looting others’ treasures and making other people subservient.

A South American historian may well say: “It may be a subject of celebrations for Europeans but for us it is a subject of mourning because just in a few years the Europeans destroyed our civilisation developed over several thousands of years!”

Why study history

Questions have often been raised that when there are so many problems and differences of opinions among historians why should we study history at all.

History is all about the past. In almost every country, city, town and village throughout the world, a large number of existing buildings were built in the past to meet the needs and aspirations of people, now dead. This is most obvious in existing temples, churches, mosques, fireplaces, houses, public buildings, and so on. The systems of governments, political ideas, religious beliefs, art, architecture, cultural practices, educational systems, customs and behaviours are all products of the past, recent or remote.

The past is all-pervasive which, indeed, means that we cannot escape from it. The past signifies what actually happened—events that have taken place, societies that have risen and fallen, ideas and institutions, eating habits, dressing habits, etc. History is precisely the study of this human past. The past is our heritage; we are part of it and the past is part of us in all aspects: Be it culture, behaviour, religious faith and practices, be it rituals, be it the tradition of political, social and economic systems. It is reflected in our day-to-day living.

History is also about roots. It provides societies and individuals with a dimension of longitudinal meaning over time which outlives the human life span. It connects us with our past. History also allows us to peep into the future by providing precedents for contemporary actions and forewarning against the repetition of past mistakes. From its sense of continuity, history offers the apparent form and purpose to the past, the present and the future. In the words of E.H. Carr: “The past is intelligible to us only in the light of the present, and we can fully understand the present only in the light of the past.” He further says that history is needed “to enable man to understand the society of the past and to increase his mastery over the society of the present.” There is a need for history. It has a deeper social value and meaning.

The study of history is not a luxury. It is a necessity. This necessity has been best summed up by Arthur Marwick. He writes: “Individuals, communities, societies could scarcely exist if all knowledge of the past is wiped out. As memory is to the individual, so history is to the community or the society. Without memory, individuals find great difficulty in relating to others, in finding their bearings, in taking intelligent decisions—they lose their sense of identity. A society without history would be in a similar condition. … A society without knowledge of its past would be like an individual without memory. … It is only through a sense of history that communities establish their identity, orientate themselves, understand their relationship to the past and to other communities and societies. Without history (knowledge of the past), we, and our communities, would be utterly adrift on an endless and featureless sea of time.”

We all move ahead through the past of our own cultures, own civilisations, and values and it is this accumulation of ideas and experience, transmitted through education and sheer daily living that gives our thoughts meaning and the patterns and purpose of our actions. It is not that we live in the past but we are defined by it, and so the success of even the most forward-looking developments must inevitably rest on their relation to the ideas and practices of the society they are meant to serve. Science may forget its own history, but a society cannot.

History is neither a simple chronicle of the past nor a list of rulers and kings and the narratives of their rules. The past is not simply a collection of distinct ages or a hotchpotch of facts. History is an extremely complex discipline. Another point that needs to be emphasised is that a historian’s job is not that of a cook who prepares dishes as per the liking of his customers and adds spices accordingly. It is not the job of a historian to write politically correct history. His obligation is to write factually correct history.

It will be helpful if all historians remember what Sir Jadunath Sarkar wrote about the job of a historian: “I would not care whether the truth is pleasant or unpleasant, and in consonance with, or opposed to, current views. I would not mind in the least whether the truth is, or is not, a blow to the glory of my country. If necessary, I shall bear in patience the ridicule and slander of friends and society for the sake of preaching the truth. But still, I shall seek truth, understand truth, and accept the truth. This should be the firm resolve of a historian.”

This brief discussion on the nature of history as an academic discipline should make it abundantly clear that history is neither a static discipline nor can the writings on and of history be put into a set mould. Each generation views and writes about the past in the light of its own experience. Therefore, all interpretations and explanations are and must be as temporary and provisional as the descriptions. But in all these endeavours the sanctity of truth and facts should not be forgotten. Unanimity or one’s efforts to make others surrender is a recognisable characteristic of dictatorships, and not that of a free state. Open and continuing discussions and debates are the essence and strength of history and, for that matter, a great strength of an open society of an intellectually vibrant nation.

And now a word of caution! There is a tendency among historians to act as judges and give moral sermons. Historians must write and rewrite history. They are not supposed to be moral judges. Benedetto Crose has rightly said: “Those, who on the plea of narrating history, bustle about as judges, condemning here and giving absolution there, because they think that this is the office of history … are generally recognised as devoid of historical sense.”

Problems in history writing

Historians recognise that they are all culturally and socially influenced in their endeavour to write history but make all efforts to deny that their work is culturally, or socially, determined or constructed. As has been discussed briefly in the Introduction, EH Carr in chapter two of his book What is History provides a useful summary on this aspect of history writing. He quotes Donne Devotion that society and individuals are inseparable. “No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Like any other individual, a historian too is a social phenomenon, both the product and the conscious and unconscious spokesperson of the society to which he belongs. It is in this capacity that he approaches the facts of the historical past.

Therefore, we must not forget that we cannot fully understand or appreciate the work of a historian unless we have first grasped the standpoint from which he himself approaches it, and that standpoint is itself rooted in social and historical background. It is, therefore, essential that before we study history, we must study the historian and study his historical and social environment. When some historians claim that they are writing scientific history, or that only their version of history is correct, one must conclude immediately that the historians are not only being untruthful but are also hiding their political agenda under the garb of a “scientific” history. There exists nothing like scientific history. On similar lines, Benedetto Croce also spoke with his characteristic bluntness:

“The historian must have a point of view, … an intimate personal conviction regarding the conception of the facts which he has undertaken to relate. … It suffices to read any book of history to discover at once the point of view of the author if he is a historian worthy of the name and knows his own business. … Absolutely historical historians do not and cannot exist. Can it be said that Thucydidus and Polybius, Livy and Tacitus, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Giannone and Voltaire were without morals and political views; and in our own time, Guizot or Thiers, Macaulay or Balbo, Renke or Mommson? … If the historian is to escape from this inevitable necessity of taking sides, he must become a political and scientific eunuch; and history is not the business of eunuchs. … Historians who profess to wish to interrogate the facts without adding anything of their own, are not to be believed.”

Karl Marx buried among the crosses of Highgate Cemetery, London.

The problem with Marxist historiography and its relationship with history is much more curious. For Marx and his followers, i.e. Marxist historians, the problem of history is not just understanding “what happened”, “how it happened” and “why it happened”. For them, the problem is “how to change the world” by the use of history. At the core of this view lie two fundamental beliefs. Firstly, the Marxists believe in five universal stages of history.

These five stages are:

  1. Primitive Communism
  2. Slavery
  3. Feudalism
  4. Capitalism
  5. Communism

Secondly, they believe that the society we inhabit is a bad bourgeois society and, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis. The good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only “we” work systematically to destroy the language, the value, the culture, the ideology of this “bourgeois” society. This necessitates a massive, radical left-wing political programme, and everything the historians write, every criticism they make, is determined by that overriding objective. In this, the post-modernists are exceptions. They are fully convinced of the utterly evil nature of the “bourgeois” society but have lost all hope of change and have fallen back into destructive nihilism. They assert that the only way to achieve Marxism is to destroy society if it cannot be changed.

Marxist historians have failed to understand and appreciate the fact that the society we live in has evolved through a complex historical process, very different from the Marxist formula of the rise of feudalism over slavery and bourgeoisie overthrowing the feudal aristocracy. It is highly complex with respect to the distribution of power, authority, and influence. Just as it was not formed by the simple overthrow of aristocracy by the bourgeoisie, so, in its contemporary form, it does not consist simply of a bourgeois ruling class and a proletariat. The idea that we are now in the final period of the late-capitalist crisis is simply absurd. Marxists have been looking forward to the final capitalistic collapse for over a century—in 1848, 1866, 1918, 1946, 1963 and 1968, to mention just a few dates, but as fate would have it, they are themselves doomed forever.

Statements like “The pursuit of history is, whether practitioners choose to acknowledge it or not, a political occupation,” indeed, is not only exceptional but also far-fetched. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the experience of colonisation around the world has shown that domination by a more powerful culture—which defines its reality in quite different ways—either totally destroys, or at least drives, the less powerful ones into a subservient role. What was considered culturally “valid” can be rendered “invalid”, and the politically weaker ones are somehow required to modify their reality to fit within the constraints of the new codes.

We, as historians, must learn to recognise: “The past is perceived in different ways by different cultures. Methods of interpreting, recording, managing and protecting the past also differ between cultures. … The way people define their existence, their world view and their creation stories, and how they value, interpret, manage and transmit their past will continue to be handed on from generation to generation.”

Conclusions

Let us remember that no country can become a great nation, a world guru and a world leader on borrowed ideas, borrowed cultures and borrowed systems. The greatness and leaderships are built upon the solid foundations and the pride of the past; deeper the foundations, taller are the superstructures. Even globalisation is built upon this foundation. Many countries are part of globalisation on a much larger scale than India without abandoning their history, culture and heritage. It is on this basis they are able to assert their authority and influence the world order. – Firstpost, 6 January 2022

› Prof. Dr. Makkhan Lal is a historian and the founder director of the Delhi Institute of Heritage Research and Management.

How the Nehruvian Congress manipulated Gandhi’s assassination to emasculate Hindu nationalism – Koenraad Elst

VOI

Had Nathuram Godse foreseen the consequences of the act he contemplated, he might have thought twice about going through with it – Dr. Koenraad Elst

There are some historical events that are momentous in nature but have not received the kind of attention and examination they deserved. The topic of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of Nathuram Godse on 30 January 1948 is one such incident. Though it comes up regularly for discussion, it is wantonly distorted to embarrass the RSS and the party associated with it, the BJP, which was actually founded in 1980, that too as a reincarnation of the Jan Sangh, which had equally been founded after the murder, in 1951. This then is the best-known long-term effect: The unrelenting allegation that anything smelling of Hindu nationalism, and certainly the RSS, necessarily leads to such crimes. But are we missing something?

Chitpavan massacre

The first consequence of the murder was immediate: Nathuram Godse’s own community, the Chitpavan Brahmins, was targeted for mass murder. The comparison with the mass killing of Sikhs by Congress secularists after Indira Gandhi’s murder is fairly exact, except that the 1984 massacre is well-known (even eclipsing the memory of the larger number of Punjabi Hindus murdered by Sikh separatists in the preceding years), whereas this one has been hushed up. The New York Times first drew attention to it, reporting 15 killings for the first day and only for the city of Mumbai (then Bombay). In fact, the killing went on for a week and all over Maharashtra, with V.D. Savarkar’s younger brother as best-known victim.

Arti Agarwal, who leads the research in “Hindu genocide”, estimates the death toll at about 8,000. On mass murders, estimates are often over-dramatised, but here we must count with a countervailing factor: The government’s active suppression of these data, as they would throw a negative light on Gandhism. But research on this painful episode has now started in earnest, and those presently trying to get at the real figures include Savarkar biographer Vikram Sampath.

Crackdown

The second consequence came right after: The government’s crackdown on the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. Their offices were closed down, their office-bearers imprisoned for a year or so, their stocks of literature impounded. It clipped their wings for years to come. The Hindu Mahasabha lost its president Syama Prasad Mukherjee, who went on to found the Jana Sangh. The Hindu Mahasabha would never recover from this blow. Its last MP was Mahant Avaidyanath, best known as a leader of the Rama Janmabhoomi movement and the guru of present UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath, defected to the BJP in 1991.

By contrast, the RSS did survive quite well, and even generated a whole “family” of like-minded organisations, including a new political party. In a numerical sense, it was to thrive; but in two other senses, it paid a high price.

The third consequence was a drastic change in the political landscape. After Partition, the Hindutva movement had the wind in the sails. All Congress’ assurances that warnings against Islamic separatism were mere British-engineered paranoia, had been refuted by reality. Gandhi’s promise that Partition would only come over his dead body, had proven false. The new-fangled ideology of secularism stood discredited at its birth. And yet, overnight, the Hindutva current was marginalised and Nehruvian secularism started its triumphant march. By his murder, Godse had smashed the window of opportunity of his own political movement.

Amputated backbone

Finally, the fourth consequence would only materialise over the long term: The Hindu movement began to lose its defining convictions. Rather than continuing to see India as an essentially Hindu nation, it bought into the secularist notion of a mere “Hindu community” juxtaposed to “minority communities” that were endowed with equal rights and increasingly with privileges vis-à-vis the Hindus.

When Jawaharlal Nehru was widely criticised for having facilitated the Chinese invasion, the RSS halted the publication of a Nehru-critical article by Sita Ram Goel in Organiser: Rather than clamouring that its guest author’s judgement of Nehru stood vindicated, it feared that if anything were to happen to Nehru, the RSS would again get the blame. As the Gandhi murder had shown, it wasn’t necessary to be actually guilty to still incur the punishment, viz, by “having created the atmosphere” for the crime. The RSS bought into the secularist narrative that the Hindu ideology had caused the murder and started amputating its own ideological backbone.

If Godse had foreseen these consequences of the act he contemplated, he might have thought twice about going through with it. – Firstpost, 27 July 2022

› Dr. Koenraad Elst is a well-known Indologist from Belgium.

Gandhi's death reported in the NYT.

Why ‘eminent historians’ still swear by the debunked Aryan theory – Makkhan Lal

VOI

Image depicting the imaginary Aryan invasion of India from the Caspian Sea.

“It is difficult to say that all the earliest Aryans belonged to one race, but their culture was more or less the same type. Originally the Aryans seem to have lived somewhere in the steppes stretching from Southern Russia to Central Asia. On their way to India the Aryans first appeared in Central Asia and Iran. A little earlier than 1500 BC the Aryans appeared in India.” – R.S. Sharma

“By 1500 BC when the Aryans began to arrive in India, the Harappan culture had collapsed. We do not know where they came from; perhaps they came from north-eastern Iran or the region near the Caspian Sea or Central Asia.” – Romila Thapar

The two quotations from India’s two “eminent historians” sum up their approach to the Aryan Invasion Theory. Just look at expressions “difficult to say”, “seems to have”, “somewhere in steppes”, “we do not know where they come from”, “perhaps they came from north-eastern Iran or the region near Caspian Sea or Central Asia”. Despite so many probabilities, they are certain that Aryans came from outside. When and from where? No idea!

Despite all evidence to the contrary, why does the Aryan invasion/migration theory (AIT) continue to remain the lifeline of Indian Marxist historians? Let us now look at the AIT in historical perspectives.

Linguistic Evidence

Florentine merchant, Filippo Sassetti, who lived in Goa from AD 1583 to 1588, was struck by similarities between Sanskrit and European languages, especially Latin and Greek. Later, the relationship between Sanskrit and European languages was further elaborated by William Jones and many other scholars in the service of the East India Company. The efforts made towards understanding these linguistic similarities between Sanskrit on the one hand and Greek, Latin and some other modern European languages on the other gave rise to a new discipline called ‘comparative linguistics’. Its birth had questionably motivated considerations and in the last 200 years the discipline (if at all it is a discipline) of ‘Comparative Linguistics’ has shown a far greater variety of gymnastic exercises than the sport of gymnastics itself.

Since the earliest books (i.e. the Vedas) of the Aryans and so also all human beings are written in Sanskrit, it came to be recognised as the language of the Aryans. In the beginning, all European languages, along with Sanskrit, came to be clubbed as Aryan languages, and Sanskrit got identified as not only the oldest of all but also the mother of all European languages. Lord Monboddo was convinced that “Greek was derived from Sanskrit”. Frederick Schlegel, a highly respected German linguist wrote, “The Indian language is older and others [European languages] younger and derived from it.” Thus, Sanskrit came to be recognised as the mother of “all the less ancient Indo-European languages, as well as the modern European tongues and dialects”.

But these opinions did not last very long. Local pride, racial complexes and Evangelical considerations overshadowed everything as a part of a shift from ‘Indo-mania’ to ‘Indo-phobia’.

Though William Jones could not accept the earlier view that Sanskrit is the ‘mother’ of all Aryan languages. He advocated that Sanskrit is just a ‘sister’, i.e. a co-descendant of an earlier ancestor language. Following the lead provided by Jones, F. Bopp wrote: “I do not believe that Greek, Latin and other European languages are to be considered as derived from Sanskrit. I feel rather inclined to consider them together as subsequent variations of one original tongue, which however, the Sanskrit has preserved more perfect than its kindred dialects.”

So, a search for the original homeland of a language, namely ‘Proto-Indo-European’, led different scholars to different places. This search for the imagined original language homeland also meant the search for the ‘Original Homeland of Aryans’. This also gave rise to forging labels such as the ‘Indo-Aryan’, ‘Indo-European’, ‘Aryan languages’, ‘Indo-Aryan languages’, and the ‘Indo-European languages’. Sometime around the 1820s, the word ‘Aryan’ began to be dropped and it simply became ‘Indo-European’. Some German scholars even started using the term ‘Indo-German’ on the presumption that the Sanskrit and German languages, between them, covered the entire Indo-European speaking area—the farthest language to the east being Indic and German to the west.

Sanskrit, even today, may be “the greatest language of the world” or even if it “is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin and more exquisitely refined” but so what? How could a language spoken by ‘niggers’ have been once the mother of languages today spoken by Europeans, i.e. white people? This position could not be accepted even by William Jones and Max Mueller, who have been so wholesome in their praise for Sanskrit.

Sanskrit was first demoted from mother to the position of a mere sister of all the ancient and modern European languages, but later on, with further building-up of the language tree, it came to be demoted to the position of grand-daughter, when it got linked to the so-called Indo-Iranian family. Thus, the position is: Proto-Indo-European language gave birth to the Indo-Iranian, which in turn produced Sanskrit. It’s already almost 200 years and the search for the grand-mother of Sanskrit (i.e. the Proto-Indo-European) is still on. We still do not know what she (the Proto-Indo-European Language) may have looked like, of what colour she may have been, or what may have been her physical and metaphysical structure. She still remains formless even in dreams. Quite often, these practitioners of philology were so illogical, so incoherent, so absurd, so adamant and arrogant, but, indeed, their impact has been so devastating that it has aptly been termed as ‘linguistic tyranny’.

Central Place Argument and Aryan Invasion

Once Sanskrit was demoted from the honoured status of being mother to all Indo-European languages and made a mere sister or niece of the European languages, a search started for the ‘original tongue’ i.e. the ‘Proto-Indo-European’. This cleared the deck also for legitimising the Aryan invasion of India; a theory which suggested that Sanskrit was brought here from the place where this imaginary language called ‘Proto-Indo-European’ was spoken. In 1842, A.W. von Schlegel claimed: “It is completely unlikely that the migrations which had peopled such a large part of the globe would have begun at its southern extremity (i.e. India) and would have continually directed themselves from there towards the northwest. On the contrary everything compels us to believe that the colonies set out in diverging directions from a central region.”

And for Schlegel this central region consisted of the areas around the Caspian Sea.

With the increasing hold of the British on India, the colonial and the Evangelical interests soon became a force in shaping Indian history for the rest of the academic world. Following the lead provided by A.W. von Schlegel, Max Mueller reiterated his position on the issue of the Aryan invasion and said in 1887: “If an answer must be given as to the place where our Aryan ancestors dwelt before their separation … I should still say, as I said forty years ago, ‘somewhere in Central Asia’ and no more.”

However, Srinivas Ayengar wrote in 1914: “The Aryans [in their entire literature] do not refer to any foreign country as their original home, do not refer to themselves as coming from beyond India, do not name any place in India after the names of places in their original land as conquerors and colonisers do, but speak of themselves exactly as sons of the soil would do. If they had been foreign invaders, it would have been humanly impossible for all memory of such invasion to have been utterly obliterated from memory in such a short time as represents the differences between the Vedic and Avestan dialects.”

It must be reiterated that it does not refer to a single name of flora and fauna found in Central Asia, Russia and Europe. If Rig Vedic people came from Central Asia how come they have no memory of it. Historically, linguistically and as per the oral traditions it is simply impossible.

The fallacy of this central-place theory as the origin of an imaginary language and then spreading all around can be explained with a contemporary example—English. Consider a situation wherein after a couple of thousand years, people forget that England was the place where the English language developed and spread from, and start looking for the place of its origin. The Central Place Theory will exclude England in the very first instance, as it is located on the outskirts of the world of the English language. The United States of America would be the natural choice from where it spread to Europe and Asia in the east, and Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, etc, in the west and Canada in the north.

Lexicographic Evidence

Lexicography (the vocabulary of spoken/written words) is another area which was pressed in the service. Besides collecting a large number of the common words in various languages to prove their affinity, a number of words were chosen to prove the location of the language. For example, it has been argued that since there is no common word for the ocean in the Indo-European language, we can safely conclude that the Indo-European people were not aware of the ocean.

Varadpande rightly presses the points: “If we carry this reasoning further we shall have to suppose that ‘Indo-Europeans’ were living in a region where there was no air and no water, since there are no common words for air and water in all the ‘Indo-European’ Languages.”

The whole situation is that first a conjecture is turned into a hypothesis; to be later treated as a fact to be used in support of a new theory. For instance, language like Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Dravidian are no more than hypothetical constructions, which may or may not have really existed; and yet these modern creations are often imposed on populations that lived thousands of years ago, to prove migrations theories.

Shaffer writes: “The Indo-Aryan invasion(s) as an academic concept in 18th-19th century Europe reflected the cultural milieu of that period. Linguistic data was used to validate the concept, which in turn, was used to interpret archaeological and anthropological data. What was theory, became an unquestioned fact that was used to interpret and organise all subsequent data. It is time to end the ‘linguistic tyranny’ that has prescribed interpretative frameworks of pre-and proto-historic cultural development in South Asia.”

The question of Aryan invasion/Aryan migration vis-a-vis philology has always been questioned. In the beginning of the last century, Aurobindo, while commenting on the philology, wrote: “Comparative philology has hardly moved a step beyond its origins; all the rest has been a mass of conjectural and ingenious learning of which the brilliance is equalled only by the uncertainty and unsoundness. … The very idea of the science of language is chimera.”

It is important to point out that in the last 30 years renowned linguists like Ram Bilash Sharma, S.S. Misra, S.G. Talgeri, N.S. Rajaram and Koenraad Elst have proved, on the basis of linguistic evidence itself, that this whole theory of Aryan invasion/migration is a fallacy.

Aryans, Racialism and Rig Veda

Subjugation of India by the British filled the masters with a desire to prove their all-round superiority. Racialism was one angle of it. Writings of Grant, Mill, Marx, Macaulay and their accomplices denigrated Indian people, culture, civilisation, society, history and religion.

Trautmann has traced the emergence of racialism and the development of physical anthropology as a resolution of the inescapable philological reality with the colonial need for cultural superiority over the natives of India. One of the most striking types of evidence of such an attitude is best seen in the writings of ACL Carlleyle. In 1879 he wrote: “We, British Europeans are Aryans, and far more pure and genuine Aryans than the Hindus, and no talk of the Hindus can alter our race, or make us any less or any different from what we are. It is the Hindus who have altered and deteriorated, and not we. The Hindus have become the coffee dregs, while we have remained the cream of the Aryan race. The Hindus are like the monkey.”

Some scholars think that the linguistic affinities of Indians and Europeans were also responsible for the development of physical anthropology leading the whole debate towards racialism. Most of the European scholars could not accept the view that Indians (‘niggers’, that is how most of the time Indians have been referred to in those writings) could have been once related to them and could have, indeed, been their forefathers, a conclusion which comparative linguistics was suggesting.

Edwin Bryant expresses it in the following words: “Even during the earlier phase of the homeland quest, when India was still a popular candidate, many scholars were uncomfortable about moving the Indo-Europeans too far from their biblical origins somewhere in the Near East. There were those among the British, in particular, whose colonial sensibilities made them reluctant to acknowledge any potential cultural indebtedness to the forefathers of the rickshaw pullers of Calcutta, and who preferred to hang on to the biblical Adam far more than their European contemporaries.”

Max Mueller himself was sad to note the mood of the day: “They would not have it, they would not believe that there could be any community origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called niggers of India.”

The newly developing science of physical anthropology was pressed into service to project Aryans as tall, white-skinned, blue-eyed, with sharp and high nose, and dolichocephalic. The non-Aryans came to be identified as natives with dark skin, flat nose, short stature, and so on. The dasas mentioned in the Rigveda were made to represent non-Aryans, i.e., the indigenous local population of India. Thus, the frame of the invasion of Aryans and the subjugation of the non-Aryan local population got corroborated with the evidence from Physical Anthropology.

The racial theory had a devastating impact on European polity. Each nation/state started claiming to be the real descendent of the Aryan race and considered others as inferiors. Max Mueller tried to intervene by declaring again and again: “If I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull. … How many misunderstandings and how many controversies are due to what is deduced by arguing from language to blood-relationship or from blood-relationship to language. … An ethnologist who speaks of an Aryan race, Aryan eyes and hair, and Aryan blood is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or brachycephalic grammar.”

Alas! It was too late. The djinn created by Max Mueller had now grown up and was no longer under Mueller’s command. In the twilight years of his life, Max Mueller realised the devastating impact of distortions that he had made in Indian history in order to please his employers and the newly acquired faith. He died a sad man, preaching at the end of his career things like India: What Can It Teach Us.

He described India as: “The country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow, … a very paradise on earth, … [a place where] human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life.”

Racialism and DNA Evidence

In this context it will be useful to recall the studies carried out by K.A.R. Kennedy and his colleagues. For almost five decades they carried out a detailed study of a large number of pre- and proto-historic skeletons found in excavations from a large number of archaeological sites from all over the Indian sub-continent.

On the basis of their research, Kennedy and his colleagues concluded: “As for the question of biological continuity within the Indus valley, two discontinuities appear to exist. The first occurs between 6,000 and 4,500 B.C. The second occurs at some point after 800 B.C. but before 200 B.C.”

Both discontinuities exclude any adjustment for Aryan Invasion.

Besides the studies of Kennedy and his colleagues on ancient skeletons, an important study has come out recently on modern humans. Keeping in mind the AIT, Kivishield and his colleagues carried out a detailed study on gene pools of Western Eurasians and people of the Indian subcontinent. They studied the ‘genetic inheritance aspect’ of genes through the Mitochondrial DNA Test. It may be mentioned here that the mitochondrial DNA test can reveal the whole history of genetic changes and mutations that may have taken place even in the remote past i.e. several thousand years ago.

Kivishield and his colleagues have reached the conclusion that the Mitochondrial DNA, typical of Western Eurasians, is present among Europeans up to 70 percent whereas among Indians it is only up to 5.2 percent. The DNA gene pool of Western Europeans is very different from that of Indians. It has been very clearly stated that if there was any Aryan invasion of India a few thousand years ago, it must be visible in the mitochondrial DNA tests in terms of a splash in percentage of Western Eurasian genes. But this is not so. Further, the percentage and types of Western Eurasian genes present among south Indians and north Indians are almost the same. This fact establishes that there is no difference between the south Indian and north Indian gene pools, and the same goes against the Aryan invasion theory.

Conclusions

Now over a period of 200 years, the meaning of ‘Aryans’ has been constructed and reconstructed as being nomadic, pastoralists, sedentary agriculturists, dolichocephalic, brachycephalic, blond and fair, and from brown-haired to dark-haired. The Aryan homeland has been located and relocated everywhere, virtually from the North Pole to the South Pole, and from the shores of the Atlantic to Chinese deserts—South India, North India, Central India, Tibet, Bactria, Iran, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, Lithuania, the Caucasus, the Urals, the Volga Mountains, South Russia, the Steppes of Central Asia, Western Asia, Palestine, Anatolia, Scandinavia, Finland, Sweden, the Baltic, western Europe, northern Europe, central Europe, and eastern Europe.

The Aryan homeland, however, still remains elusive. J.P. Mallory has put the whole thing very succinctly: “One does not ask, ‘Where is the Indo-European homeland?’ but rather ‘where they put it now?’”

Anthropologist Edmund Leach of Cambridge University has most aptly summed up the whole question of the Aryan Invasion Theory. In 1990 in his article, Aryan Invasions over Four Millennia, Leach wrote: “Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasion? Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of Sanskrit come so dogmatically associated with the Aryan invasion? The details of this theory fit in with this racist framework. … The origin myth of British imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing ‘pure’ civilisation to a country in which civilisation of the most sophisticated kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here, I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of an independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history. … The Aryan invasion never happened at all.” – Firstpost, 20 July 2022

›  Prof. Dr. Makkhan Lal is a well-known historian and the founder director of the Delhi Institute of Heritage Research and Management.

Rig Veda

Sita Ram Goel Vindicated: ‘Eminent historians’ no longer deny Islamic iconoclasm – R. Jagannathan

VOI

Sita Ram Goel

If the “eminent historians” now can acknowledge the reality of Islamic iconoclasm, surely they can promote Hindu-Muslim amity by getting Muslim groups to accept that damage was done in the past, and some remedy is called for in the present to let bygones become bygones. – R. Jagannathan

Our “eminent historians”, mostly from the Left, are showing signs that they are not beyond all education when hit repeatedly on their heads with facts and evidence. The late Sita Ram Goel, who was among the first to debunk the whitewashed versions of India’s Islamic history, stands vindicated.

Before the Babri was demolished, they repeatedly asserted that there was no temple below the mosque. Once the archaeological survey ordered by the Allahabad High Court established beyond doubt that there indeed was a temple below the Babri, their story-line changed from “no temple below the mosque”, to bland assertions that what was under the Babri was another mosque or even a Buddhist stupa. (Read some of what they said then here.)

When evidence kept surfacing of multiple temple demolitions under Islamic rule, the party line was that this was done not for religious reasons but political reasons. False equivalences were drawn between consistent and bigoted Islamic iconoclasm and the occasional damage done to temples or Buddhist and Jain places of worship. The latter were aberrations rather than the norm.

Now, with a survey seeking to establish the presence of Hindu carvings (and possibly a Shiv Linga) inside the Gyanvapi Mosque, these eminences are slowly abandoning the claim that no temples were destroyed.

In The Times of India today (24 May), there is a clear acceptance that Mughal rulers destroyed temples, though the argument has changed.

Irfan Habib, professor emeritus at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), is quoted thus: “Mughal emperor Aurangzeb destroyed temples in Varanasi and Mathura to raise mosques. However, the question today is whether what was done in 1670 should be repeated, despite the existence of the Indian Monuments Act. Should we do the same things as Mughal emperors did in the past?” (Read the details here.)

This is progress. Big progress. If we should not do what Aurangzeb did, it is an indirect admission that the Mughal emperor was a bigot. Facts are no longer denied, or conveniently misinterpreted as mere political acts of rulers in the past, though that is not entirely gone.

Shalin Jani of the Delhi University department of history is quoted as saying: “As far as Mughal India is concerned, we know about the politics of temple desecration during those times. We can’t resolve our contemporary problems by looking at the past.”

Well, maybe the Germans got it wrong when they refused to airbrush history or deny Hitler and the Nazi past. Without acknowledging the past, and making some amends, we cannot move forward.

The unwillingness to see religious bigotry behind temple desecration is not entirely gone, but the facts are no longer disputed.

Nadeem Rezavi, professor of mediaeval history at AMU, is clearer. “No one can justify what Aurangzeb did. However, we can’t behave like him and keep demolishing mosques to restore temples. What difference remains then between the Mughal ruler and rulers of today?”

Clearly, Audrey Truschke, who has tried to whitewash Aurangzeb’s reign in her book Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth, clearly needs to hear what Habib and Rezavi now have to say. Aurangzeb was a bigot. Full stop. His temple desecrations were real, not just political fallout.

Clearly, the work done by Sita Ram Goel in volume two of his two-volume work on Hindu Temples: What Happened To Them  (Vol. 1 & Vol. 2), which examines both the Hindu and Muslim evidence, should now be required reading in all history departments, including AMU.

Later books by Meenakshi Jain (Rama & Ayodhya, The Battle For Rama, Flight of Deities & Rebirth of Temples, Vasudeva Krishna and Mathura, have also completely sealed the evidence in favour of the Hindu version of Islamic destruction of key temples. It is also time to revisit the older historical works of R.C. Majumdar and Sir Jadunath Sarkar and not just junk them as “communal historians”.

The only way forward from here is not to live in the past, but to acknowledge it, and negotiate a deal to hand over the Kashi and Mathura temples back to Hindus fully in return for Hindus allowing the rest of the temple desecrations to remain as acknowledged facts of history with no recompense due.

If the “eminent historians” now can acknowledge the reality of Islamic iconoclasm, surely they can promote Hindu-Muslim amity by getting Muslim groups to accept that damage was done in the past, and some remedy is called for in the present to let bygones become bygones. – Swarajya, 4 May 2022

› R. Jagannathan is a senior journalist and editor and the Editorial Director of Swarajya Magazine.

Gyanvapi Mosque back wall being the front wall of the ancient Vishwanath Temple.

Nightmare of Nehruism – Sita Ram Goel

VOI

Jawaharlal Nehru (London 1946)

The late Sita Ram Goel, a prominent historian, author, and publisher, had Left leanings during the 1940s, but later became an outspoken anti-Communist. He also wrote extensively on the damage to Bharatiya culture and heritage wrought by Nehruism. The article below is an extract from Goel’s book, How I Became a Hindu, first published by Voice of India in 1982.

Today, I view Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as a bloated brown sahib, and Nehruism as the combined embodiment of all the imperialist ideologies—Islam, Christianity, White Man’s Burden, and Communism—that have flooded this country in the wake of foreign invasions. And I do not have the least doubt in my mind that if India is to live, Nehruism must die. Of course, it is already dying under the weight of its sins against the Indian people, their country, their society, their economy, their environment, and their culture. What I plead is that a conscious rejection of Nehruism in all its forms will hasten its demise, and save us from the mischief which it is bound to create further if it is allowed to linger.

I have reached this conclusion after a study of Pandit Nehru’s writings, speeches and policies ever since he started looming large on the Indian political scene. But lest my judgement sounds arbitrary, I am making clear the premises from which I proceed. These premises themselves have been worked out by me through prolonged reflection on the society and culture to which I belong.

I have already described how I returned to an abiding faith in Sanatana Dharma under the guidance of Ram Swarup. The next proposition which became increasingly clear to me in discussions with him, was that Hindu society which has been the vehicle of Sanatana Dharma is a great society and deserves all honour and devotion from its sons and daughters. Finally, Bharatavarsha became a holy land for me because it has been and remains the homeland of Hindu society.

There are Hindus who start the other way round, that is, with Bharatavarsha being a holy land (punyabhumi) simply because it happens to be their fatherland (pitribhumi) as well as the field of their activity (karmabhumi). They honour Hindu society because their forefathers belonged to it, and fought the foreign invaders as Hindus. Small wonder that their notion of nationalism is purely territorial, and their notion of Hindu society no more than tribal. For me, however, the starting point is Sanatana Dharma. Without Sanatana Dharma, Bharatavarsha for me is just another piece of land, and Hindu society just another assembly of human beings. So my commitment is to Sanatana Dharma, Hindu society, and Bharatavarsha—in that order.

In this perspective, my first premise is that Sanatana Dharma, which is known as Hinduism at present, is not only a religion but also a whole civilisation which has flourished in this country for ages untold, and which is struggling to come into its own again after a prolonged encounter with several sorts of predatory imperialism. On the other hand, I do not regard Islam and Christianity as religions at all. They are, for me, ideologies of imperialism. I see no place for them in India, now that India has defeated and dispersed Islamic and Christian regimes.

I have no use for a secularism which treats Hinduism as just another religion, and puts it on par with Islam and Christianity. For me, this concept of secularism is a gross perversion of the concept which arose in the modern West as a revolt against Christianity and which should mean, in the Indian context, a revolt against Islam as well. The other concept of secularism, namely, sarva dharma samabhava, was formulated by Mahatma Gandhi in order to cure Islam and Christianity of their aggressive self-righteousness, and stop them from effecting conversions from the Hindu fold. This second concept was abandoned when the Constitution of India conceded to Islam and Christianity the right to convert as a fundamental right. Those who invoke this concept in order to browbeat the Hindus are either ignorant of the Mahatma’s intention, or are deliberately distorting his message.

My second premise is that Hindus in their ancestral homeland are not a mere community. For me, the Hindus constitute the nation, and are the only people who are interested in the unity, integrity, peace and prosperity of this country. On the other hand, I do not regard the Muslims and the Christians as separate communities. For me, they are our own people who have been alienated by Islamic and Christian imperialism from their ancestral society and culture, and who are being used by imperialist forces abroad as their colonies for creating mischief and strife in the Hindu homeland. I therefore, do not subscribe to the thesis that Indian nationalism is something apart from and above Hindu nationalism.

For me, Hindu nationalism is the same as Indian nationalism. I have no use for the slogans of “composite culture”, “composite nationalism” and “composite state”. And I have not the slightest doubt in my mind that all those who mouth these slogans as well as the slogan of “Hindu communalism”, are wittingly or unwittingly being traitors to the cause of Indian nationalism, no matter what ideological attires they put on and what positions they occupy in the present set-up.

My third premise is that Bharatavarsha has been and remains the Hindu homeland par excellence. I repudiate the description of Bharatavarsha as the Indian or Indo-Pak subcontinent. I refuse to concede that Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have ceased to be integral parts of the Hindu homeland simply because they have passed under the heel of Islamic imperialism. Hindus have never laid claim to any land outside the natural and well-defined borders of their ancient homeland, either by right of conquest or by invoking a promise made in some scripture. I, therefore, see no reason why Hindus should surrender their claim to what they have legitimately inherited from their forefathers but what has been taken away from them by means of armed force. Moreover, unless the Hindus liberate those parts of their homeland from the stranglehold of Islam, they will continue to face the threat of aggression against the part that remains in their possession at present. These so-called Islamic countries have been used in the past, and are being used at present as launching pads for the conquest of India that has survived.

My fourth premise is that the history of Bharatavarsha is the history of Hindu society and culture. It is the history of how the Hindus created a civilisation which remained the dominant civilisation of the world for several millennia, how they became complacent due to excess of power and prosperity and neglected the defences of their homeland, how they threw back or absorbed in the vast complex of their society and culture a series of early invaders, and how they fought the onslaughts of Islamic, Christian, and British imperialism for several centuries and survived.

I do not recognise the Muslim rule in medieval India as an indigenous dispensation. For me, it was as much of a foreign rule as the latter-day British rule. The history of foreign invaders forms no part of the history of India, and remains a part of the history of those countries from which the invaders came, or of those cults to which they subscribed. And I do not accept the theory of an Aryan invasion of India in the second millennium BC. This theory was originally proposed by scholars as a tentative hypothesis for explaining the fact that the language spoken by the Indians, the Iranians and the Europeans belong to the same family. And a tentative hypothesis it has remained till today so far as the world of scholarship is concerned. It is only the anti-national and separatist forces in India which are presenting this hypothesis as a proven fact in order to browbeat the Hindus, and fortify their divisive designs. I have studied the subject in some depth, and find that the linguistic fact can be explained far more satisfactorily if the direction of Aryan migration is reversed.

These are my principal premises for passing judgement on Pandit Nehru and Nehruism. Many minor premises can be deduced from them for a detailed evaluation of India’s spiritual traditions, society, culture, history, and contemporary politics. It may be remembered that Pandit Nehru was by no means a unique character. Nor is Nehruism a unique phenomenon for that matter. Such weak-minded persons and such subservient thought processes have been seen in all societies that have suffered the misfortune of being conquered and subjected to alien rule for some time. There are always people in all societies who confuse superiority of armed might with superiority of culture, who start despising themselves as belonging to an inferior breed and end by taking to the ways of the conqueror in order to regain self-confidence, who begin finding faults with everything they have inherited from their forefathers, and who finally join hands with every force and factor which is out to subvert their ancestral society. Viewed in this perspective, Pandit Nehru was no more than a self-alienated Hindu, and Nehruism is not much more than Hindu-baiting born out of and sustained by a deep-seated sense of inferiority vis-a-vis Islam, Christianity, and the modern West.

Muslim rule in medieval India had produced a whole class of such self-alienated Hindus. They had interpreted the superiority of Muslim arms as symbolic of the superiority of Muslim culture. Over a period of time, they had come to think and behave like the conquerors and to look down upon their own people. They were most happy when employed in some Muslim establishment so that they might pass as members of the ruling elite. The only thing that could be said in their favour was that, for one reason or the other, they did not convert to Islam and merge themselves completely in Muslim society. But for the same reason, they had become Trojan horses of Islamic imperialism, and worked for pulling down the cultural defences of their own people. The same class walked over to the British side when British arms became triumphant. They retained most of those anti-Hindu prejudices which they had borrowed from their Muslim masters, and cultivated some more which were contributed by the British establishment and the Christian missions. That is how British rule became a divine dispensation for them. The most typical product of this double process was Raja Ram Mohun Roy.

Fortunately for Hindu society, however, the self-alienated Hindu had not become a dominant factor during the Muslim rule. His class was confined to the urban centres where alone Muslim influence was present in a significant measure. Second, the capacity of Islam for manipulating human minds by means of ideological warfare was less than poor. It worked mostly by means of brute force, and aroused strong resistance. Finally, throughout the period of Muslim rule, the education of Hindu children had remained in Hindu hands by and large. So the self-alienated Hindu existed and functioned only on the margins of Hindu society, and seldom in the mainstream.

All this changed with the coming of the British conquerors and the Christian missionaries. Their influence was not confined to the urban centres because their outposts had spread to the countryside as well. Second, they were equipped with a stock of ideas and the means for communicating them which were far more competent as compared to the corresponding equipment of Islam. And what made the big difference in the long run was that the education of Hindu children was taken over by the imperialist and the missionary establishments. As a cumulative result, the crop of self-alienated Hindus multiplied fast and several fold.

Add to that the blitzkrieg against authentic Hindus and in favour of the self-alienated Hindus mounted by the Communist apparatus built up by Soviet imperialism. It is no less than a wonder in human history that Hindu society and culture not only survived the storm, but also produced a counter-attack under Maharshi Dayananda, Swami Vivekanand, Sri Aurobindo and Mahatma Gandhi such as earned for them the esteem of the world at large. Even so, the self-alienated Hindus continued to multiply and flourish in a cultural milieu mostly dominated by the modern West.

And they came to the top in the post-Independence period when no stalwart of the Hindu resurgence remained on the scene. The power and prestige which Pandit Nehru acquired within a few years after the death of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had nothing to do with his own merits, either as a person, or as a political leader, or as a thinker. They were the outcome of a long historical process which had brought to the fore a whole class of self-alienated Hindus. Pandit Nehru would have never come to the top if this class had not been there. And this class would not have become dominant or remained so, had it not been sustained by establishments in the West, particularly that in the Soviet Union.

It is not an accident that the Nehruvian regime has behaved like the British Raj in most respects. The Nehruvians have looked at India not as a Hindu country but as a multi-racial, multi-religious and multi-cultural cockpit. They have tried their best, like the British, to suppress the mainstream society and culture with the help of “minorities”, that is, the colonies crystallised by imperialism. They have also tried to fragment Hindu society, and create more “minorities” in the process. In fact, it has been their whole-time occupation to eliminate every expression of Hindu culture, to subvert every symbol of Hindu pride, and persecute every Hindu organisation, in the name of protecting the “minorities”, Hindus have been presented as monsters who will commit cultural genocide if allowed to come to power.

The partition of the country was brought about by Islamic imperialism. But the Nehruvians blamed it shamelessly on what they stigmatised as Hindu communalism. A war on the newly born republic of India was waged by the Communists in the interests of Soviet imperialism. But the Nehruvians were busy apologising for these traitors, and running hammer and tongs after the RSS. There are many more parallels between the British Raj on the one hand and the Nehruvian regime on the other. I am not going into details because I am sure that the parallels will become obvious to anyone who applies his mind to the subject. The Nehruvian formula is that Hindus should stand accused in every situation, no matter who is the real culprit. – How I became a Hindu, 1982

Sita Ram Goel Quote

Why we must worship Goddess Kali – David Frawley

VOI

Ma Kali at Dakshineshwar

“Ma Kali has a crucial social relevance today. Kali as the transforming power of time can usher us into a new era of global peace and understanding, if we can accept her demand for a real change of consciousness. Kali asks us to live for eternity, not merely for fleeting enjoyments or outer material gains.” — Dr David Frawley 

Ma Kali is the most misunderstood of all Hindu Goddesses, though She is often regarded as the most powerful. Kali’s dark and fierce form is certainly intimidating and hard to fathom, unless one is willing to look with discernment behind the veil of sensational images about Her.

Sri Ramakrishna ParamahamsaMa Kali was first introduced to the modern world by Ramakrishna Paramahamsa as the Supreme Mother of the Universe. Through Ramakrishna—an avatar for many—the inspiration of Ma Kali awoke India to its ancient spiritual heritage and brought the unifying message of yoga to the world.

This was at a time in which the world was dominated by colonial powers and the idea of a Universal Mother was not accepted—much less a World Mother who was dark in colour and fierce in demeanour from a backward country like India!

Yet instead of following Ramakrishna’s yogic teachings about Kali, most scholars today look at Kali in an alien and diminished light. What psychologists tell us about Kali often reveals more about their own fascinations with the subconscious mind, rather than the Great Goddess who looks over all of us with wisdom and compassion.

Yogic deities can be best understood according to meditation practises. They relate to energies of higher consciousness beyond the dualities of the mind and the urges of the body. As such, their appearances are dramatic and paradoxical—mind-blowing as it were, and intentionally so.

Nature of Ma Kali

Ma Kali is kala shakti or the power of time. She indicates the impermanence of all things, which is why She wears a garland of skulls. Yet She is also the ultimate transforming power of time, which is to take us from death to immortality. Along with endless time, Kali is boundless space, the limitless void, indicated by Her dark blue colour. Her magical dance of transformation is all existence.

Kali holds the vidyut shakti, the lightning or electrical force of consciousness that is the supreme power. All the goddesses and the entire universe manifests from Her indomitable force. Kali’s seed mantra is “kreem,” which is the kriya shakti or power of transformation behind the vast movement of life.

Kali is not the goddess of death and destruction as some see Her but, on the contrary, represents the complete victory of the Divine over all death and destruction. Her warrior goddess form removes all the illusions of the mind and reveals the undying presence of our inmost Self that is one with all.

Ma Kali as the yoga shakti

Kali is the inner power of yoga or yoga shakti. Yoga in the true sense is a practice of mergence and return to the Divine source of existence. Yoga rests upon nirodha, the full concentration of the mind and dissolution of the ego. Kali is the nirodha shakti, the power of negation, neti-neti, not this, not that, of the Upanishads.

Kundalini shakti, the secret yogic power of transformation within us, works through Kali’s grace and motivation. Kundalini ascends and dissolves all the chakras, or energy centres within us, back into the state of pure unity consciousness that is Ma Kali’s ultimate abode.

Kali is the shakti inherent in Shiva as Mahakala, the great lord of eternity. She dances on Shiva in a prone form, showing the Divine life and joy that manifests out of absolute stillness and transcendence.

Kali reminds one of Tagore’s verses “Let me carry death in life that I may know life in death.”

Yet, Ma Kali has a crucial social relevance today. Kali as the transforming power of time can usher us into a new era of global peace and understanding, if we can accept Her demand for a real change of consciousness. Kali asks us to live for eternity, not merely for fleeting enjoyments or outer material gains.

Those seeking to bring the Divine Light into the world should worship Ma Kali.

Ma Kali as the supreme form of the Universal Mother absorbs Her children back into Her blissful embrace. She takes us across the deepest darkness to reach the highest light.

Jai Ma Kali! – Daily-O, 6 April 2016

› Dr David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) has a D. Litt. (Doctor of Letters), the highest educational title possible in the field of Yoga and Vedic sciences, from Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana, the only deemed Yoga university recognised by the Government of India.

Ma Kali and the Kalighat temple complex.