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Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel: Intellectual kshatriyas who wielded the pen like a sabre – Shankar Saran

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Sita Ram Goel & Ram Swarup

Wake up, folks, wake up! As intimidated as you are by the fear of going against the stream and looking racist, you don’t understand or don’t want to understand that a reverse crusade is on the march. As blinded as you are by the myopia and the stupidity of the politically correct, you don’t realise or don’t want to realise that a war of religion is being carried out. A war they call Jihad. A war which is conducted to destroy our civilisation, our way of living and dying, of praying or not praying, of eating and drinking and dressing and studying and enjoying life. As numbed as you are by the propaganda of the falsehood, you don’t put or do not want to put in your mind that if we do not defend ourselves, if we do not fight, the Jihad will win. It will win, yes, and destroy the world that somehow or other we have been able to build. – Oriana Fallaci in The Rage and the Pride

Violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1970 Nobel lecture. 

Writing against the current in a democratic society poses problems of a different kind. Pondering at the range and depth of writings of Ram Swarup (1920-1998) and Sita Ram Goel (1926-2003), and the approach of our academia and media towards them gives an inkling of the problem.

In a totalitarian political system—Fascist, Communist or Islamist—a non-conformist writer can hardly publish anything. Even writing in private is a dangerous venture. But in a country with complete freedom of speech, with a ‘politically correct’ intellectual ambience, an inconvenient author can be silently buried in indifference. Not even the most open minded readers would know of his existence. Speaking of the Soviet case, Solzhenitsyn had observed that “the environment is dense and sticky: it is incredibly difficult to make even the smallest movements because it immediately takes the environment with them.” In contrast, the atmosphere in democratic countries is “like a rarified gas, or almost a vacuum: there it is easy to wave one’s arms, jump, run, turn somersaults—but it all has no effect on anybody else, everyone else is doing exactly the same in a chaotic manner.”

Without understanding this difference, we can never comprehend why even sixty years’ of original work of the rare duo of Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel hardly left a mark on the intellectual scene of our country. Both died largely unsung. It is not a small measure of the regrettable situation that even a solitary biographical sketch of them each came from a Belgian scholar, Koenrad Elst. No Bharatiya scholar, journalist or student wrote one. Neither in their lifetime, nor after they passed away. Our media did not even bother to take note of the demise of Sita Ram Goel in 2003. The chief reason for this unfortunate state of affairs is that their work remained largely unknown to the general public of our country. Both were original and non-conformist thinkers. Our governments as well as the academic class felt quite at ease in ignoring them. Media happily followed suit.

There was a time in the Soviet Union when Solzhenitsyn was vilified. His works were considered ‘concoction’, ‘betrayal’, ‘disease’ and what have you. Even in the Soviet Literary Encyclopaedia of 1973 his name found no place at all (this, after he was already world-famous with Ivan Danisovich, and the Nobel Prize). He simply did not exist.

In this country, a very similar attitude was applied towards Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel as far as our academic class is concerned. Goel found no mention in intellectual debates and writings on issues he published for decades. If rarely someone mentioned his name, it was scornfully dismiss him as ‘communal’. Hence unwanted, irrelevant. It is a mark of the pathetic condition of our social sciences that after the demise of the Soviet Union, and opening up of the Soviet and East European archives, our Marxist professors were not dragged on the coals for their propagandistic writings masquerading as scholarly ones. Nothing happened by way of re-examining their highly distorted writings on history, political science or economics. On the contrary they are still ruling the roost! By corollary, even after the demise of communism, Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup are not accorded their due place in the scholarly arena for their realistic, incisive and farsighted analyses of the communist systems. Perhaps after the advent of a Saudi Gorbachev, this might be done.

Disaster at Inception: The English Takeover

Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel wrote on Communism, Marxism, Maoism, Islam, Christianity and Hindutva. In this country all these are politically sensitive subjects. As is well-known, to the first five issues it is considered politically correct to be respectful, even reverential. As for the last one, it is best to disregard, if not mock openly. Reasons are various for this pitiable situation in this otherwise intellectually rich country.

A misconception regarding the Islamic mentality on the part of the national leaders since the 1920s was one. Getting the very first prime minister heavily enamoured by Marxism, Soviets and Islam was another. It has to be understood that the founding moments of any institution, law or system invariably become crucial to set the tone and standards for a long time to come. For a free Bharat the period of, say, 1947-56 was such a founding one because so many of our intellectual or socio-political traditions laid down by the Communist-and-Islam-leaning first prime minister.

Jawaharlal Nehru: India’s First Prime Minister

English becoming the intellectual language of the country, even after freedom from the British rule, was the third reason. It summarily and effectively excluded more than 95% of the population from participating in influential intellectual exercises. Thus a possible corrective to ideologically marred theories, propositions etc was foreclosed at the very inception. English ensured that even if a Bharatiya citizen is wise, experienced, knowledgeable and articulate, he or she can do nothing to check or persuade an erring intellectual or a whole intellectual group—unless he can do it in English. Besides, he must also hold a high chair to be heard.

Discourse in any language other than English in this country, howsoever rich and invaluable, simply does not touch the influential, decision making classes. Thus, intellectual pursuits became an undeclared monopoly of a minuscule few, who, even if grossly errant, ignorant or misguided on a matter in hand, could still set the standards for the entire country to follow—history writing and NCERT textbooks since inception are a case in point. The rest of the population simply came to accept, in naïve belief, a la Soviet citizens of yore, that whatever is emanating from the high chairs of a council, academy, commission, university, centre or ministry is certainly better informed. “They must know better who speak and write in English” became the common, if disastrous, sentiment among the Bhartiya public.

In the subjects mentioned above, that never was the case. The philosophy, understanding and experiences of the common Bhartiya masses were vastly different from the English-wielding intellectual elite about, say, the ways of socio-economic change or the Islamic character. Yet they could do nothing, thanks to the monopoly of English in matters academic or policy, to correct the academic and political decision makers. This restrictive, anti-Bharat role of English in a free Bharat is hardly considered in analysing why such a “politically correct” intellectual atmosphere came to rule here.

Original Critiques of Islam, Christianity and Communism

In such a politically correct intellectual environment Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel jointly represented diametrically opposite views. The dominating political and intellectual classes which followed a different path, naturally detested this. It is, therefore, not surprising that the duo’s rich contribution was wholly ignored. Both started publishing their critical works with the advent of freedom in 1947. It is out of the purview of this essay to compare the parallel views of the duo and those of the ruling intellectual-political classes of our country. Suffice it to say that time has proven most of the analyses and conclusions of Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel right.

Of the nature and role of Marxism-Leninism, Soviet system, Maoist practice, and Communist economies, it is now irrefutably evident that whatever our first prime minister and Left-leaning economists, social scientists believed for decades (some still do) were indeed mere superstitions. As far the Islamic problem is concerned, anyone can judge the farsighted analyses the duo presented till the end of their lives. Life has shown, decade after decade, that from Gandhi to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, every leader or preacher seriously erred, with very tragic consequences, in assessing the Islamic problem. In their case, wishes were not horses.  Every concession, every leniency, all hosannas to Islam did never bring a single positive result. As Sita Ram Goel put so succinctly, in one of his last contributions:

“A study of Hindu-Muslim relations since the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 tells us that Muslims have been making demands—ideological, political, territorial—and Hindus conceding them all along. Yet the Muslim problem remains with us in as acute a form as ever. With the advent of petrodollars and the emergence of V.P. Singh, Laloo Prasad, Mulayam Singh and Kanshi Ram on the political scene, Muslims have become as aggressive and intransigent as in the pre-partition period.”

To understand the nature of the problems we are facing today on this score, and also to value the scholarly contribution of Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel, it would be helpful to see what some other gifted observers have concluded the world over. Oriana Fallaci, whom Milan Kundera calls the ideal of the 20th century journalism, has been saying this for the last twenty-five years. She is a remarkable writer inured to living with all races and habits and beliefs, accustomed to opposing any fascism and any intolerance without any taboos.

She is indignant towards all those who did not smell the bad smell of a war to come and who tolerated the abuses that “the sons of Allah” were committing in Europe with their terrorism. Her straight reasoning:

“What logic is there in respecting those who do not respect us? What dignity is there in defending their culture or supposed culture when they show contempt for ours?”

She puts the likes of Osama bin Laden on par with Hitler and Stalin, firmly arguing that fascism is not an ideology, but behaviour. She warns that the fight with this fascism “will be very tough. Unless we Europeans stop shitting in our pants and playing the double-game with the enemy, giving up our dignity. An opinion I respectfully offer to the Pope too.”

Do we comprehend what Fallaci is stating? Most of the members of our intellectual class would not. Let alone fighting a war, on the intellectual plane, they tend not even to see the international phenomenon and problem. As if every disaster perpetrated by the sons of Allah in any corner of the world is a mere accident and not manifestations of a single ideology.

Bamyan Buddhas

Bamiyan Buddha Destruction

Question: Why do some people remain unfazed even by violence of such magnitudes as 9/11, Bamiyan, Godhra or Nadimarg in Kashmir? They readily try to explain away such violence blaming some “primary” cause and thus shield the barbaric perpetrators. But the very same people hysterically cry “fascism” on even an ordinary statement that the Ayodhya temple movement is a national sentiment. Why such double standards?

Political correctness is not the whole answer. Love for one’s own comfort, ignorance and laziness also play the part for many a people. As Solzhenitsyn aptly said in the context of condemning the nuclear tests conducted by France and China, that the double standards were “not only because of moral squint, but simply out of cowardice. Because from an expedition into the Chinese desert or to the Chinese coast nobody would return—and they know it”. The same is truer of keeping silent on everything Islamic, fascist or terrorist, while crying hoarse about even non-acts of “Hindu fascism”. As the great author wrote, “They only protest when there is no danger to life, when the opponent can be expected to give in and when there is no risk of being condemned by ‘Leftist circles’—it is always better, of course, to protest with them.” This is highly apt to describe the noisy secularists of Bharat.

We have different scales of values for wickedness and punishment. According to one, killing of an innocent-looking terrorist—Ishrat Jahan for instance—or a missionary indulging in illegal proselytizing activities—Graham Staines—shatters the imagination and fills the newspaper columns with rage. While according to another, systematic cleansing of Hindus from the territory of Kashmir, Assam and Nagaland, burning an entire train coach with Hindu pilgrims in Godhra, mushrooming of Islamic terrorist dens in the border areas of West Bengal, Bihar and UP—all this gets no attention much less alarm. No condemnation, no seminar, no books, no documentation and, of course, no campaigns on the lines of “fight against saffronisation”.

Whenever an Islamic assault becomes impossible to ignore and at least our editorial classes feel compelled to write something of a criticism they never forget to mention “Hindu extremism” in the same vein. It is pure fiction, an added insult to meek Hindus who have been at the receiving end all along for centuries. No one speaks for them with force, with extra-constitutional methods. Hence no question of a Hindu “extremism”.

But in editorials, Islamic violence is never condemned on its own merit, it is wilfully clubbed with a Hindu one. This artificial balancing flies in the face of hard, horrible facts. There has never been a single act on the part of the Sangh Parivar which can even remotely match, either in words or deeds, those of the Islamic ones: Lashkar-e-Toiba, Student Islamic Movement of Bharat (SIMI), Deendar Anjuman, Hizb-ul-Muzahideen, Tablighi Jamat et al. Yet the politically correct editorial and academic classes of this country present Hindu “extremism” and Islamic terrorism on par. Worse, for some, the former is the cause of the latter. Therefore, the bigger culprit is the (Hindu) Sangh Parivar. Hence all fight is against “saffronisation” and none against “Islamisation” of every possible thing—land, people, culture, dress, food, language, thought and manners.

What kinds of scales are used in this artificial balancing of Islamic intolerance with an imaginary Hindu one? The first unit on one scale may be ten, but the first unit on another scale may be ten to the sixth power, that is, one million. It is high time our politically correct eminences understood these two non-comparable scales of valuation of the volume and moral meanings of events. It is impossible to accept the ideology of Osamas bin Ladens even remotely comparable to that of say, Pravin Togadia. One is causing a “Une grande Peur” (A great Fear) all over the Western world and the non-Islamic Eastern world. While the other causes nothing because she merely expresses the frustration of common Hindus. An angry Hindu at best draws a derisive laugh among the Islamic world steeped in unimaginable violence. Unimaginable both in methods and scale.

An Excellent Guide

If we want to understand the things in perspective, there is no better guide than Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel. Yes, not even Bernard Lewis or Daniel Pipes has done it with such perfection as the duo (Lewis et al are marred by their West-centric approach, ignoring the role Islam played in Bharat and the difficult Hindu struggle with it for centuries).

Oriana Fallaci has presented the scenario very well on an empirical plane. Addressing those who remained indifferent or harboured illusions about the Talibani destruction of the Buddha statues in Bamiyan she asked,

“Who is next, that the ‘idols’ of Bamiyan have been blown up like twin towers? The other Unfaithful who pray to Vishnu or Shiva, Brahma, Krishna, Annapurna? … Do they hate only the Christian and Buddhists, those voracious sons of Allah, or do they aim to subjugate our whole planet?”

Unfortunately, there are still very few scholars in the West to delve into the issue on a realistic plane.

It is no exaggeration that on philosophical, historical and analytical planes, Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel have presented superior analyses about the Islamic malady. To realise all this, we must first know exactly and thoroughly whatever has been happening all these decades in every corner of the world—from Afghanistan to Sudan, from Palestine to Pakistan, from Malaysia to Iran, from Egypt to Iraq, from Algeria to Senegal, from Syria to Kenya, from Libya to Chad, from Lebanon to Morocco, from Indonesia to Yemen, from Saudi Arabia to Somalia. Only then can one comprehend the hollowness of the artificial balancing of “both Hindu and Muslim” communalism/extremism, which is a routine, mindless practice in our country. In practice, it is nothing but a profound help to the Islamic jihadi politics and terrorism targeting Bharat.

Penetrating Analysis of Islamic Terrorism

The phenomenon of the modern phase of Islamic terrorism arose in the late nineteen sixties. Beginning with September 1970 “Arab terrorism” came to be known in the entire world. No academic or journalist, howsoever politically correct, could then imagine balancing that terrorism with anything else. It was original and Islamic. Balancing it with some US, Israeli or Hindu deeds are a much later invention.

After the beginning of a Euro-Arab dialogue in 1975, and dubious agreements thereafter, petrodollars came pouring into the Western media and academia. The money readily brought subtle and not so subtle messages and conditions. Only then did this kind of artificial balancing began to appear in print. First in France, then in the whole of Europe and American universities. Today from the Harvard University to the London School of Economics to the Jawaharlal Nehru University, from the New York Times to the Economist to the Times of India there are any number of scholars and hacks who compete with each other to explain that anything but Islam is responsible for the acts of Islamic terrorism. That Islam is nothing but basically a religion of peace and brotherhood. And woe betide those who dares contradict this!

That exactly was the refrain towards Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel of our left-secular hacks and professors. Keeping eyes wide shut towards the Islamic nature of so many international problems—violence, bigotry, terrorism, intolerance, etc.—has made the West more vulnerable. It is not the problems attached to gaining insight that made it difficult for the West, but lack of will to say the right thing. The same can be said more assertively about our own country, for we especially prefer the comfortable to the difficult.

Though it has also to do with the traditional Hindu character that remains concerned mostly with swaddharm (one’s own Dharma), and altogether ignored studying and understanding the various religions of the others, the creeds of those aggressors who, driven by permanent hostility and purpose to convert, repeatedly attacked Bharat. This careless attitude to deeply study Islam, Christian missionaries or Communism also played the part for the astonishing Hindu ignorance of Islamic or Communist theory and practices. This in turn, makes the game of the invaders, aggressors, revolutionaries and infiltrators an easy one.

However, as in Europe, here too, the spirit of Munich has been leading the search for insight. The spirit of concessions and compromise, and of cowardice, self-deception by prosperous leaders, scholars and responsible individuals. They all have lost the will to set limits, to be firm. This course has never in the past led to the desired results, including preservation of peace and justice. The experience of Gandhi and the Partition are the most visible examples. But it seems that human emotions are stronger than even the clearest lessons of the past.

Enfeebled Hindu professors, editors and leaders—George Fernandes, the former Defence Minister provided the latest example of Hindu meekness by swallowing and concealing the insults inflicted at the US airports—of Bharat paint sentimental pictures of how violence will generously allow itself to be softened up.

That is not to be.

Primary Sources of Islamic Terror

It is not without reason that of 52 Islamic countries in the world today there is not a single one professing democracy. All are dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of one or another kind, declaredly following Islam. Yes, coercion, intolerance, violence, conquest and propaganda are intrinsic to Islam. From the very beginning, at the place of its birth itself, it could not gain ground except by violence and treachery. So much so that the Arabs, “who had been hitherto upright and chivalrous, became a great scourge and cruel invaders and rulers. Their ethical code suffered a great decline. They began to live on the labour and sweat of others.”

Reading Koran and other authentic primary sources of Islamic literature, one can easily discern that lying and treachery in the cause of Islam has received divine approval. Any hesitation to perjure oneself in that cause is represented as weakness. Consider this. During a synod that the Vatican held in October 1999 to discuss the rapport between Christians and Muslims, an eminent Islamic scholar addressed the stunned audience declaring with placid effrontery, “By means of your democracy we shall invade you, by means of our religion we shall dominate you.” The meaning is clear as daylight.

This typical treachery is on display everywhere in Europe. Islamic migrants force themselves on European people misusing the democratic and humanitarian laws of the respective countries, viciously threatening with “I know my rights” to the local inhabitants. The same “rights” they don’t have, and don’t care to have in their Islamic countries of origin. Some of the perpetrators of 9/11 were on the watchlist of the FBI and CIA. Yet, residing in the USA itself, they could carry out their inhuman mission because the humanitarian laws of the country allowed them the luxury to learn piloting, move around, meet and conspire, and finally to bring down the twin towers of New York.

This is what the Islamic scholar meant.

But as in Bharat so in the West, scholars, leaders and editorial classes have tried to downplay this essential fact. They fail to recognise or don’t want to recognise that a reverse crusade is going on. It is forced on Europe and the USA. Yet their policymakers are trying their best to appease the aggressors. The aggression is an ever-growing reality that the Western leaders senselessly feed and back up. Witness their treatment to Pakistan. Whatever the Bush administration has been looking for in Iraq, to punish Saddam Hussain, were abundantly available in Pakistani territory. Undisguised, under the very US eyes. But instead of taking serious note of it, and appropriate action, they offered Pakistan to be an ally of the NATO! Which attitude is the reason why those crusaders increase in numbers, boss around more and more. They will demand more and more and bully with greater intensity. Till the point of subduing us. Therefore, dealing with them is impossible. Attempting a dialogue, unthinkable. Showing indulgence, suicidal. And he or she who believes the contrary is a fool.

Therefore, the fact must not to be lost sight of, even for a moment, that Islam is more an imperialist, dictatorial, political ideology. It brooks no reform. It severely punishes even members of its own fold, howsoever superior or honourable in knowledge and position for the mere crime of attempting reform.

At this point, it is very important to note that Muslim population and Islam are not the synonymous terms. Just as Marxism-Leninism and Soviet people were not. As criticising Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism-Maoism was not an insult or vilification of the Soviet people or Chinese people, so criticising Islam is not “spreading hate” against Muslims. It is a clever ploy of Islamist scholars, leaders, jihadis as well as Left-secular propagandists in Bharat that they arouse the Muslim masses against any such criticism as though it is directed against them.

Muslims are in most cases as victims of the Imams, Ayatollas, Amirs as the common Russians and Chinese were at the hands of their Marxist masters, the chairman or general secretaries. This ploy has to be fought tooth and nail.

Inasmuch as Islam is a political ideology with a complete social, political, juridical system of its own, it is as liable to criticism and scrutiny as any other political creed. More so as its political ambitions and juridical regulations are never confined to Muslims alone. It has clear rules, regulations and directions applied to non-Muslim masses whether for the moment it is ruling a country or not. Thus the political ideology of Islam, even otherwise, directly affects non-Muslims of the world.

Therefore, not only the Muslim but non-Muslims also have every right to criticise Islam. But the Islamic scholars and ulema using all kinds of pretexts and deceptions, shifting and contradictory—bearing the situation in a given country in mind—deny this right to non-Moslems and Moslems alike. However, as Ram Swarup said so meaningfully, once intellectual freedom is gained for the Moslem masses, rest is only a matter of time. Most Islamic rulers and scholars perceive this very well. Which is why they are hell-bent not to give intellectual freedom to their own brothers in faith, their Moslem subjects. They use every kind of violence, threats, regulations, logics and ploys to deny this.

Why?

The words of Solzhenitsyn quoted in the beginning of this article explain it. It also explains why violence is intrinsic to Islam. Make no mistake. Islamic violence is not a reaction to this or that deed of the West or the Jews or the Hindus. It is because Islam has no intellectual or verbal argument to offer on any point. The erstwhile Soviet scholars used to quote Marxism-Leninism like a spell on all questions. Even if it answered none. Likewise, Islamic scholars quote Koran in every matter, without the slightest regard for or reference to common human reason. That can hardly satisfy inquiring minds, whether non-Moslem or Moslem. That is why Islam regularly employs intimidation and violence to subdue anyone and everyone, anywhere and everywhere, anytime and everytime.

If these essential points are glossed over as have been done in Bharat throughout the 20th century by many respectable leaders and scholars, the Islamic problem can never be understood, let alone solved. Therefore, neither theoretical illusions nor practical difficulties—read fear—should come in way for recognising and fighting this war. As the great living fighter writes,

“In Life and in History there are moments when fear is not permitted. Moments when fear is immoral and uncivilised. And those who out of weakness or stupidity—or the habit of keeping one’s foot in two shoes—avoid the obligations imposed by this war, are not only cowards: they are masochists.”

These are the same values—freedom from ignorance and freedom from fear—that Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel tried to instil in us in their gentle, yet firm way. They were intellectual warriors—heroes of our time. – Dharma Dispatch, 24 April 2019

› This essay was first published in the volume, “India’s Only Communalist: In Commemoration of Sita Ram Goel,” edited by Dr. Koenraad Elst 

› Shankar Sharan is an Indian author and professor of Political Science at the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in New Delhi. 

India's Only Communalist: In Commemoration of Sita Ram Goel

The non-dual reality of Lord Shiva – David Frawley

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Nataraja

Shiva is not what we think God is supposed to be, conforming to our opinions or hopes; Shiva is what the Supreme Divine truly is beyond the limitations of our minds and the fixed tenets of any particular faith or belief. … There is no box we can place Shiva into, no formula or structure that the mind can arrive at that can comprehend him. – Dr David Frawley

Shiva is ultimately a deity that represents the non-dualistic Absolute beyond all the contraries and oppositions of this dualistic world of time, space, and karma. He is the force of transcendent unity that is more than the combination of opposites and holds simultaneously the power of both sides of all dualities. Shiva is a deity who transcends duality in his very nature, appearance and manifestation—which also requires that he embraces all dualities and resolves them back into himself. This makes Shiva difficult to understand for the dualistic mind caught in outer differences and distinctions.

Shiva reflects the supreme truth that dwells beyond both relative truth and relative falsehood. He is the Supreme Being beyond both relative being and non-being. He is the supreme good beyond both relative good and evil. He embraces our world on both sides, above, below, and in the center and yet stands infinitely beyond it. He is One, yet he is all. He is everything and nothing, both within all things, outside of all things, and not limited by anything.

As a non-dual deity, Shiva seems contrary to our prevailing views of what is logical, right or appropriate. Shiva is portrayed as a dispassionate yogi yet he has the most powerful passions and the most beautiful and powerful wife. He both destroys Kamadeva, the ordinary God of love but then becomes the Supreme God of Love himself, Kameshvara. He takes us beyond suffering, but to do this he can cause us excruciating pain.

Shiva awakens a higher awareness in us, but for this to occur he must first take us beyond all our preconceptions, making us see the darkness of ignorance behind our lives. Shiva represents our higher Self that is the goal of our aspirations, but to reach it we must allow our ego, its attachments and opinions to be dissolved, giving up our ordinary sense of self altogether.

The challenge of our encounter with Shiva

Shiva in his diverse names, forms, and actions is meant to be challenging for us to grasp. Lord Shiva is not meant to be easy to understand, nor can we present his reality in a simple manner that resolves all doubts as to what he actually represents. To contact the reality of Shiva we must face all doubts and difficulties within ourselves and learn how to move beyond them with steadiness and grace. We must recognize the limitations of the mind and its particularized knowledge. The portrayal of Shiva is not meant to present us with only a pleasing appearance, any more than life is always kind. Our encounter with Shiva is meant to shake us up, to stir our inner transformative energies—to get us to question ourselves and all that we may hold to be truth or reality.

Any real encounter with Lord Shiva is not likely to conform to our existing beliefs, hopes, or expectations. It may not leave us feeling more confident about who we are, or more certain that our lives are moving in the right direction. An encounter with Shiva may not initially make us feel happier or give us more prosperity or what we may regard as a better life.

Shiva is not what we think God is supposed to be, conforming to our opinions or hopes; Shiva is what the Supreme Divine truly is beyond the limitations of our minds and the fixed tenets of any particular faith or belief. Shiva is the supreme reality, not we ourselves, our ideas, opinions, books, or institutions. Shiva is the cosmic reality not our individual or collective imaginations and fantasies. There is no box we can place Shiva into, no formula or structure that the mind can arrive at that can comprehend him.

To arrive at the state of supreme awareness that is Shiva, we must allow ourselves to be stripped bare of our personal conditioning down to the subconscious level, beyond the memories of the present birth and the perceptions of the outer world. We must learn to see ourselves in all beings past, present, and future. We must be humbled back to the core of our being where no self-image prevails, and where there is no other that we have to conform to, please, or fear.

The human mind as it is today is not a conscious intelligence that we can rely upon to determine what is real. It is a conditioned response mechanism for biological survival and social development. Information technology has augmented its powers but not taken us beyond its dualistic limitations. But in the silence of the heart, where all is forgotten, one can know the truth. You are Shiva in your deepest Self and core being. Shiva is the non-dual reality in which you personally are not there, yet in which through your inmost essence of feeling and awareness you are everything.

We can approach Lord Shiva many ways through ritual, yoga, mantra, pranayama and meditation, but these are only expedient measures to draw us beyond body and mind to the mysterious core of our being that knows all intuitively without being trapped in any concepts.

Om Namah Shivaya!

› Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) is a Voice of India author and teacher in the Vedic tradition. Article from Vedanet.

Ramana Maharishi Quote

USA: Seven stages of imperial decline – Samannay Biswas

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Empires

The United States, as the world’s leading superpower since the mid-20th century, exhibits many hallmarks of late-stage economic and imperial decline, patterns already seen in Spain, Britain, and the Soviet Union. – Samannay Biswas

All throughout history, major empires and superpowers have followed recurring patterns of economic decline, often resulting in collapse. This framework, popularised in analyses of Spain, Britain, and the Soviet Union, identifies seven stages driven by overextension, financial mismanagement, and societal shifts.

The “seven stages of empire” was a theory conceived by Lieutenant General Sir John Bagot Glubb, also known as “Glubb Pasha.” Glubb was a soldier in World War I and a long-time commander of the Arab Legion in Jordan until his retirement in 1956. During his retirement, he became a historian and an author.

In 1976, he wrote the essay The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival based on research of over a dozen empires over a period of 3,000 years, including the Assyrians and the British Empire. His observations were that the life span of most empires is typically around 250 years, with all empires following a cyclic pattern consisting of seven parts: the pioneers, the conquest, the commerce, affluence, intellect, decadence, and decline.

In his view, whether in a culture and technology-dominated world or a materialistic and fragmented one, the moral and social trajectory of an empire draws upon a same pattern of duty, discipline, and then materialism, fragmentation, and loss of unity. Though not a deterministic theory, Glubb’s idea was a caution, and it influences current arguments regarding an imperialism ascent and fall, including an America one.

With evidence drawn from historical data and current trends related to the US economy, as of January 2026, this article explores these phases, how they appeared within previous empires, and why it appears to be moving through these phases faster than projected. With evidence drawn from historical data and current trends related to the US economy, as of January 2026, this article explores

Stage 1: Military Overextension

It’s also a fact that the fall of many empires started with the thinning out of resources around the world.

There are many examples throughout history. Spain during the 16th century had military forces deployed on four different continents, with military expenditures accounting for half of its spending. The British Empire, which extended to six continents by 1900, had costs it couldn’t sustain during World War I, with expenditures reaching $40 billion, or $1 trillion in today’s currency. The Soviet Union supported wars ranging from Afghanistan to Africa with 15-20% of its spending.

Meanwhile, military expenditures for the U.S. recorded $900.6 billion during fiscal year 2026, surpassing the total military spending of the next 10 countries combined. Furthermore, despite maintaining more than 750 bases in 80 countries and deployed troops in 150 countries, the US is facing difficulties in maintaining its presence through aged military hardware and manpower deficiencies. Others see this repeating the same mistakes of the past.

Stage 2: Currency Debasement

To finance themselves, empires have no choice but to debase their currency.

Spain also brought a lot of copper into the silver currency; thus, the purity level of the silver currency fell from 100% to nearly 0% by the end of 1600. This increased inflation. Britain left the gold standard by 1931. This reduced the value of the pound by 25%. The ruble in the Soviet Union was not convertible, meaning that it relied on the exports of gold and oil.

The US lost the gold standard in 1971, and the fiat currency has been used since. But the US dollar has lost 98% of its value since then. The value of the money supply in the US has increased by 400% since the year 2000, and nearly $6 trillion has been printed since 2020. The decline of the US dollar currency in the modern era may cause potential inflation risks given the structure of the economy.

Stage 3: Debt Spiral

If left uncheckded, borrowing translates to defaults or unaffordable interest payments.

There were four bankruptcies between 1557 and 1596. Britain had $30 billion in debt by 1945, which was above GDP. Reserve depletion was a result of economic stagnation in the 1980s.

As of the data cut off of January 18, 2026, the US national debt was recorded at $38.62 trillion, with its debt-to-GDP ratio recorded at 123.6%. The interest payments are inching closer to $1 trillion, which even surpasses spending on the military. Also, the deficit for 2025 was recorded at $1.74 trillion, which is 5.9% of GDP, and it is forecasted to increase to 6.1% in 2035.

Stage 4: Loss of Productive Capacity

Wealth influxes result in deindustrialization.

The import of gold from Spain undermined the manufacturing industries in Spain. Britain’s relocation of industries after World War II undermined industries in Britain. The USSR’s central planning system led to inefficiencies in grain production, causing the USSR to import grains.

There has been a decrease of 49,000 factory jobs in the US between February and September 2025, marking the 70,000th job cut since April 2025, leading the overall employment level to 12.69 million, the lowest level since March 2022. The trade gap of the country has also escalated by 14% or 95.2 billion dollars in the first nine months of 2025, registering an acceleration of 131.3 billion dollars for goods imports. Importation of medications and electronics is still a notable component.

Stage 5: Social Decay

Economic strain manifests in societal breakdowns.

Spain experienced rising crime and emigration. Britain’s post-empire period was marked by inequality. The USSR faced disillusionment and brain drain.

In America, homelessness increased by 18% to 771,480 in 2024, with an increase of 23% in initial incidents since 2019. Drug overdose deaths decreased by 21% to approximately 73,000 in the year to August 2025, yet they continue to be high. Birth rates will also be lower, with slower growth in population due to an increase in overdose and suicide deaths. Trust in institutions has reached an all-time low with a rise in crime levels.

Stage 6: Loss of Reserve Currency Status

Countries that are allied start diversifying away from the dominant currency.

The loss of global acceptance was even worse for Spain. “The British pound depreciated from $4.03 in 1940 to $1.27 today. The ruble never became a reserve currency.”

“Dedollarization is gathering pace.” Countries within the BRICS are lining up alternatives, with central banks buying more gold than ever before for five straight years as of 2022. The value of China’s yuan-denominated trade is increasing, and Saudi Arabia has started accepting funds for oil exports in something other than US dollars. The dollar’s role in international reserves is at a two-decade low. This may heighten US vulnerabilities.

Stage 7: Total Collapse

Sudden crises frequently precede final collapse.

Spain became a secondary power by the year 1700. An empire was lost by Britain within two decades after the year 1945. The USSR fell apart in 1991, after about 900 days of acute crisis.

The US is arguably already in Stage 5, with warnings of Stage 6. The forces pushing for acceleration are rapid growth of debt, evidence of dedollarization, and increased societal stresses. Debt is projected to close in on 118% of GDP by 2035. But there are arguments opposing it, pointing to collapses that never occurred and with growth running at 1.8 to 1.9% CAGR.

The Decline of the Spanish Empire

The Spanish Empire reached its peak in the 16th century under rulers like Charles V and Philip II, controlling territories across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. At its peak around 1580, it dominated global gold and silver production, with the Spanish real serving as a reserve currency.

The Spanish Empire had decayed into a financially drained, non-preeminent state by the end of the 17th century. The decline was the result of economic neglect, military overextension, domestic rebellions, and inefficiency.

Spain waged warfare relentlessly, such as the Eighty Years’ War waged against rebels from the Netherlands or wars fought against the Ottoman Empire and the English or the French. By 1580, troops were spread across four continents, absorbing over fifty-percent of government expenditures.

The inflow of silver caused inflation, followed by bankruptcy and the collapse of domestic industry due to imports. The forced expulsion of Jews and Moriscos reduced the skilled workforce. Poor leadership and corruption exacerbated the decline of Spain, resulting in an empire that was large in terms of appearance but shallow in reality.

The Decline of the British Empire

At its height, the British Empire controlled 25% of the planet’s land surface and populations, and the pound sterling was the world’s reserve currency.

The decline accelerated following World War I and became irrevocable following World War II. Overextension of the military, war debts, decline of industry, and the rise of colonial nationalism contributed to the inability of the imperial power to maintain control. Britain went bankrupt following World War II with its debt level exceeding its GDP.

Currency devaluation, loss of colonies such as India, and geopolitical setbacks like the Suez Crisis confirmed Britain’s diminished status. By the late 20th century, the empire had dissolved into the Commonwealth, marking the end of Britain’s imperial era.

The Decline and Collapse of the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union found itself a superpower after World War II but disintegrated in 1991. Expenditures due to military build-up, economic stagnation, inefficiency in central planning, and a drop in oil prices were factors in its disintegration.

Reforms of Gorbachev revealed faults in the system that brought relaxation in control in politics and prompted movements for independence in Eastern Europe as well as the USSR. Factors such as ethnicity conflicts, corruption, decay in institutions, and poor governance led to dissolution without a major war.

Where The US Stands?

Even so, there are some traits indicative of a further six stages of decline which the United States shares with Spain, Britain, and the USSR. These include a powerful global position, but still some key advantages, such as innovation, flexibility, well-developed capital markets, or military might, that the United States has vis-à-vis its putative competitors. It is possible to trace signs of growing weaknesses in each stage.

What these trends foretell is that a possible decline might emerge sooner than the historical precedents had indicated in the past since the magnitude of global interdependence, debts, and new geopolitics are all involved.

Stage 1: Military Overextension

Military overextension has persisted, with the US maintaining the world’s largest defense budget. The Department of Defense’s fiscal year 2026 budget request is approximately $892.6 billion—near-flat from prior years but still above the combined spending of the next several major powers.

Commitments range from more than 750 bases in over 80 countries, NATO obligations in Europe, relationships in Asia such as Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, to deterrence in China, Russia, and Iran. Recruitment difficulties, aging inventory, and possible multiple front situations such as Taiwan, Ukraine crises, and the Middle East war zones keep stretching their capacity.

These pressures mirror the unsustainable military burdens that exhausted prior empires.

Stage 2: Currency Debasement

Currency debasement has continued through fiat mechanisms. The dollar has lost about 98% of its purchasing power since the gold standard ended in 1971.

The massive monetary expansion-especially since 2020-has been a given source of sustained inflationary pressures, even if partly moderated in recent times. This is a similar dynamic to Spain’s coin debasement and Britain’s post-war struggles with currency stability, though it comes on a far larger scale given the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency.

Stage 3: Debt Spiral

The debt spiral has never been higher. As of January 7, 2026, the gross national debt is at $38.43 trillion, an increase of $2.25 trillion from last year, averaging a daily increase of a staggering $8.03 billion.

This translates to 120% of GDP and interest payments that are approaching and surpassing $1 trillion a year. The deficit impact for fiscal year 2026 has shown borrowing of $602 billion for the first three months.

In contrast to sovereign bankruptcies in Spain or the debt crises in post-WWII Britain, the US has the “benefit of being able to borrow in its own currency because its dollar is widely held as a foreign exchange reserve currency.” Still, the rising cost of borrowing and fiscal risk of “debt monetization”—monetary policy being used to pay debt—“may push the system to its tipping point sooner than before.”

Stage 4: Loss of Productive Capacity

Decreased productivity can also be seen in the deindustrialization of the economy. Factory employment plummeted in 2025, posting its eighth consecutive monthly decline in December, reaching around 12.692 million, which is the lowest in several years.

The industry lost tens of thousands of employment positions due to tariffs, supply chain shifts, and global forces, despite government policy initiatives targeting reshoring. Though the trade gap for the goods and services trade declined slightly late in 2025, deficits remain.

Heavy reliance on imports for electronics, pharmaceuticals, and critical components parallels Spain’s historical import dependence and Britain’s erosion of its industrial edge.

Stage 5: Social Decay

The various indicators are where social decay manifests. Homelessness reached record highs, with over 771,000 people affected in 2024, as housing costs and a widening inequality led to this movement.

New drug overdose deaths, despite recent declines, are elevated, and the fertility rate is continuing to trend downward. Population growth increasingly relies on immigration, and under current projections, natural decline is possible by 2030.

With political polarization, crime issues in urban centers, and emigration of skilled talent in certain sectors, confidence in institutions is at historic lows. These dynamics echo social fragmentation in previous empires under economic stress.

Stage 6: Loss of Reserve Currency Status

A loss of reserve currency status is already exhibiting visible, but increasing, trends. Central banks are stockpiling gold, alternative currencies, such as the yuan, are finding increasing use in the settlement of trades, and the BRICS countries are making progress in new systems.

The dollar’s holding in global reserves has been gradually reduced over two decades, but it remains around 57-60%. However, it remains dominant in global foreign exchange transactions. The move by Saudi Arabia away from dollar-denominated oil contracts, as well as attempts by China, Russia, and India to avoid dollar-based payment systems, show that there is momentum.

Stage 7: Total Collapse

While complete collapse is still a prospect rather than an imminent danger, the coincidence of the above factors, as well as possible external shocks in the form of large-scale geopolitical turmoil, sudden interest rate spikes, or speeded-up dedollarization, may start a abrupt collapse.

Historical cases of collapse have differed greatly in the speed of collapse: its taking several decades in Spain, its taking perhaps two decades in Britain following World War II, in contrast to the few years in the Soviet Union. The highly interconnected nature of the US’s role in the world means that whatever crisis emerges—whether debt ceiling crisis, a serious default scare, or a run on reserves—the US’s finance sectors are likely to be more susceptible to a faster cascade in a crisis.

While resilience factors such as innovation and policy flexibility remain, the arithmetic of compounding debt, eroding productive capacity, and shifting alliances suggests the window for course correction is narrowing, potentially leading to significant economic reconfiguration sooner than many anticipate. – Times Now, 18 January 2026

›  Samannay Biswas writes financial stories for Times Now Digital. 

Uncle Sam

Rushdie’s Duplicity: A victim of Islamist violence makes Hindu nationalism an easy target – Utpal Kumar

VOI

Salman Rushdie

To watch Rushdie reprimand “Hindu nationalism” after surviving a near-fatal Islamist attack is therefore to witness a tragic spectacle: a man shaped by fear into criticising the safest opponent available. – Utpal Kumar

Soon after Salman Rushdie was stabbed by an Islamist madman in New York in August 2022, Gopalkrishna Gandhi wrote an article in the Hindustan Times, ‘The scorching truth of Rushdie’s ordeal’. While examining the Rushdie stabbing, Gandhi seemed oblivious to the attacker’s identity—the writer didn’t mention even once why the novelist was attacked, who the attacker was, or why Rushdie was forced to stay under cover for years despite issuing several apologies. Instead, he invoked Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu in 1948. His verdict became intriguingly problematic when he wrote, “The attack on Rushdie comes from the same source?”

Really!

Salman Rushdie’s latest warning about the “rise of Hindu nationalism” in Bharat seems to follow the same Left-‘liberal’ pattern—of, first, denying or at least minimising the scale of Islamist violence; and, second, if the scale of violence is too vast to ignore, creating an equivalence in Hinduism. It reads less like a principled stand and more like a man barking up the only tree that never bit him while fastidiously avoiding the forest of blades that left him with one eye less and a badly damaged liver.

The documented record of violence against Rushdie is neither vague nor debatable. It is exhaustively chronicled by many scholars, including Daniel Pipes, who, in his book The Rushdie Affair (1990), coined the term “Rushdie Rules” to describe how “editors, newspapers, publishers, and academic teachers abide by a new set of rules—new to modern Westerners at least—which limit the freedom to discuss Islam with the same methods, terminology and frank inquisitiveness that are considered normal in discussing Christianity or Hinduism”. Rushdie had himself written extensively about this in his 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton.

It was Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa that sent Rushdie into hiding. Then, there was the selective killing of no less than 45 people worldwide associated in one way or the other with The Satanic Verses—this included the murder of its Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, in 1991. Many were stabbed, including an Italian translator of the book in Milan; a Norwegian publisher was shot in Oslo. And, finally, it was an Islamist radical, Hadi Matar, who in 2022 stormed a stage in New York and plunged a knife repeatedly into Rushdie’s neck and abdomen, leaving him almost dead. All this is a living testament to the fact that Khomeini’s decree, as Daniel Pipes emphasises, “was never simply a religious opinion, but a death sentence with no expiry date”.

In contrast, Rushdie’s affair with Hindu nationalism is not only bloodless, it is anti-climactic in many ways. When he mocked Bal Thackeray and caricatured Hindu figures in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), the much-anticipated Hindutva havoc never materialised. Thackeray, far from issuing anything resembling a fatwa, responded with a shrug and the suggestion that his secretary could read the book for him.

This civilisational lopsidedness was noted by Koenraad Elst in his preface to The Rushdie Affair, where he contrasted the Ayatollahs’ unforgiving wrath despite Rushdie’s repeated apology with the quick closure of the Shivaji Maharaj controversy when Khushwant Singh apologised for calling the Maratha hero “a bastard”. In the Hindu case, an apology ended the matter. In the Islamist case, apology merely confirmed guilt. The difference is civilisational, not rhetorical.

Given this stark historical-civilisational difference, Rushdie’s latest denunciation of “Hindu nationalism” appears less like conviction and more like reflex—the reflex of a man who has learnt, through his own bloody experience, which ideologies kill and which merely complain. It is psychologically understandable, even if morally disappointing and intellectually dishonest.

A traumatised man avoids the bully but lectures the weak and gentle. Writers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali have described this phenomenon as the “fear-shaped silence” that hangs over critiques of Islamism. Rushdie may not be totally silent, but he is certainly cautious, careful to look for the safer target while framing his criticisms of Islamism within layers of diplomatic phrasing. He is well aware, better than anyone else, of the one ideology that puts a global contract on life that never gets revoked.

To watch Rushdie reprimand “Hindu nationalism” after surviving a near-fatal Islamist attack is therefore to witness a tragic spectacle: a man shaped by fear into criticising the safest opponent available. It is not courage; it is self-preservation masquerading as principle. And it underscores a deeper truth about our intellectual climate—the willingness of cultural elites to condemn, even cut, the tree that never struck them while tiptoeing around the jungle that nearly swallowed one of their own.

Rushdie’s warning about Hindu nationalism may win him applause in Left-‘liberal’ salons, but it is a misdirection that obscures the true, documented, bloodstained threat that has shadowed him for the past 36 years. If he is barking, he is barking up the wrong tree—and perhaps the only one that never bared its teeth.

Hindu nationalism, after all, did not force Rushdie into hiding. Hindu nationalism did not murder his colleagues. Hindu nationalism did not stab him on an American stage. Hindu nationalism did not declare that repentance is insufficient and that the sentence is eternal. Islamism did all of this, openly and repeatedly—an ideology that celebrates the likes of Hadi Matar.

Perhaps Rushdie the rebel, which he was once in the 1980s, is no more, as he himself had suggested in Joseph Anton. Recalling the moment in 1989 when a fatwa was issued against him by the Ayatollah of Iran, he remembered receiving a call from a woman BBC reporter who asked, “How does it feel to know that you have just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini?” It was a sunny Tuesday in London, but Rushdie had never felt the world so dark. “It doesn’t feel good,” he replied, though inwardly he thought, “I’m a dead man.”

Rushdie, the rebel writer, is long dead. Long live Rushdie! – Firstpost, 9 December 2025

› Utpal Kumar is Opinion Editor at Firstpost and News18 and is the author of the book “Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History”.

The monotheistic interpretation of Hinduism originates in colonial Hindumesia – Yogendra Singh Thakur

VOI

Hindu Gods

The over-arching need to find common ground with Abrahamic faiths … has at the very heart of it the belief that Hinduism is somehow inferior to the supremacist, monopolist and violent monotheistic religions. – Yogendra Singh Thakur

Some time ago, the former Lok Sabha Speaker and Union Minister Shivraj Patil claimed that Hinduism has a concept of “jihad” similar to the one in Islam. Patil, highlighting that there is a lot of discussion on jihad in Islam, said that “the concept comes to the fore when despite having the right intentions and doing the right thing, nobody understands or reciprocates, then it is said one can use force.”

“It is not just in Quran, but in Mahabharata also, the part in Gita, Shri Krishna also talks of jihad to Arjun and this thing is not just in Quran or Gita but also in Christianity,” he said adding further fuel to the fire.

Faced with the natural and correct backlash on the statement, Patil attempted to dress the wound with a clarification. But the dressing was evidently soaked in salt as the clarification only worsened the situation. Patil went on to say that just as Islam and Christianity, Hinduism too does not endorse many gods but only one. Such a god has “no colour, no shape and no form,” he said. Basically, the former Union Minister was pushing the monotheistic belief—the existence of one sole formless god—which is the very foundation of Abrahamic faiths. This is the same belief which has been at odds with polytheistic Hinduism for centuries, leading to the many wars initiated and instigated by Muslims and Christians, the ethnic genocides that these two religions have carried out worldwide and in India, and even caused the Partition of the country.

Some days ago, another political leader from the state of Karnataka, made an ill-intentioned remark on Hinduism, calling the word Hindu, “dirty”. The leader went on to remark that we should rise above the boundaries of religion and that “it is not appropriate to glorify anything related to Hinduism.” One wonders why it is always that Hindus and Hinduism are targeted whenever there is a call to rise above religion and religious identity, and that these calls are usually followed or accompanied by abusing only Hinduism and Hindus.

This idea about rising above religion or a notion that religion, when it comes to Hinduism, is something to be insecure about is not limited to the remarks of ignorant and mischievous political leaders alone. The Supreme Court has very famously stated that Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life. What this statement evidently implies is that Hinduism is a cultural belief system with rituals, festivals, and beliefs about life and death, and it does not contain any larger social regulation system, any system of doctrines or practices related to spirituality or worship, that it does not have anything to do with the sacred, holy, absolute, divine, and of special reverence, or that Hindus do not have ant political aspirations as a community. Hence in a scenario when such a system is built or such aspirations are formed, it becomes, by definition, “un-Hindu”: Hindus are merely amoebic, shape-shifting human beings in this conception of the Supreme Court of India.

This is what senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid asserted, when he claimed that Hindutva, which advocates for certain political interests of Hindu society, is similar to Boko Haram and ISIS terrorist outfits. But despite such cruel, false, and provocative comparisons drawn on the basis of “Hinduism is a way of life” notion, many do like to continue advocating it, including our current Prime Minister himself.

It is this notion alone which is at the heart of an advocacy that Hindus are not a people following one religion but a people identifying with a certain culture, irrespective of religious affiliations—the kind of advocacy which the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief, Dr Mohan Bhagwat, does quite often. Dr Bhagwat often expresses that they “have been telling since 1925 (when the RSS was founded) that everyone living in India is a Hindu. Those who consider India as their ‘matrubhoomi’ (mother land) and want to live with a culture of unity in diversity and make efforts in this direction, irrespective of whatever religion, culture, language and food habit and ideology they follow, are Hindus.” He adds that everyone living inside the boundaries of his imagined 40,000-year-old Akhand Bharat are Hindus.

The over-arching need to find common ground with Abrahamic faiths—by saying that the concept of jihad and a single formless god is in the core of Hinduism or that all people living in India and amidst Indian culture are Hindu—has this understanding at the very heart of it—that Hinduism is somehow inferior to the supremacist, monopolist, violent, and culturally, civilizationally, spiritually, and experientially different faiths. The unreasonable urge to “rise above religion,” or to not appreciate the aspects of Hinduism, is also driven by the same notion of relative inferiority. People possessed with such a notion do not seek to maintain the differences between a Pagan polytheistic faith like Hinduism and Abrahamic monotheistic faiths like Islam and Christianity; or even between the socio-cultural beliefs of Hinduism and the beliefs of Utilitarian globalists.

And why does this particular notion exist in the modern Hindu with such prominence? The answer to this can be traced back to the social reform movements in early modern British India.

The British Raj in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was undergoing a change in attitude towards India. One of the reasons for this change in attitude was the French Revolution, which seemed to inspire revolution around the world, particularly posing a threat to the colonial nations under the British, the long standing enemies of the French. In order to prepare themselves ahead of any French attempts or “inspiration” to destabilise the British Empire, the English from the College of Fort William pressed for a unified Hinduism. Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) and Lord Wellesley were central to these efforts [1].

Lord Wellesley was brother of the future Duke of Wellington (who later defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815) and spoke many a time against the French Revolution. As David Kopf notes [2], “a root cause of Wellesley’s actions was, by his own admission, his fear and hatred of France and the very real danger of French expansion into India” [3].

And thus from the College of Fort William commenced reformist interpretations of Hinduism, to turn it into a bulwark against possible “social activism, revolutionary tendencies and challenges to the status quo.”

Colebrooke wrote, under a substantial influence of Jesuit missionaries, that Hinduism was originally—and in its true form—a monotheistic religion with only a formless god at its center. It was thought that the diversity of Hinduism posed a threat to the stability of the British Empire in India in the post French Revolution era.

Hindu reformers such as Ram Mohan Roy followed Colebrooke and aggressively propagated the idea that Hinduism at its core is a monotheistic faith with no room for image worship or idolatry. Roy, walking in the footsteps of Colebrooke’s orientalism, divided the Hindu past into a “monotheistic true era” and the “polytheistic false era”. The latter era, according to him, was destroying “the texture of society” [4].

Later, Ram Mohan Roy founded the Brahmo Samaj with the objective of institutionalising these reformist ideas and interpretations of and about Hinduism. In his attempt, Roy incorporated a large portion of Christian theology into Hinduism [5]. The motives of it, as popularly described by scholars, was to oppose Christian Jesuit activities. But as evidenced from his earlier writings, there was definitely a drive of the orientalist belief behind it which saw Hinduism as originally a monotheistic faith.

The implication of this monist/monotheistic view of Hinduism naturally resulted in attempts to essentially dissolve Hinduism as a separate theology and project it as just another branch of global universal theism. Ram Mohan Roy considered “different religions as national embodiment of universal theism and the Brahmo Samaj as a universalist church” [6].

The social reform movement was carried out against what the reformers deemed to be the backward aspects of Hindu culture, practices, and mores. The goal of the movement was a restructuring of Hindu institutions and beliefs. At the core of these reform movements was dislike or even hatred of polytheism, which is essentially the crux and whole of Hinduism. As a remedy for the ills in Hinduism, Ram Mohan Roy advocated a monotheistic Hinduism in which reason guides the adherent to “the Absolute Originator who is the first principle of all religions” [7]. Roy was essentially incorporating the core beliefs of an Abrahamic faith into a polytheistic religion, labelling it a guiding truth.

What was started by Ram Mohan Roy was taken to even greater lengths and to a much bigger audience by Dayananda Saraswati and his Arya Samaj (founded in 1875). Dayananda studied Vedic literature and aggressively propagated the monotheistic interpretation of Hinduism. Multiple gods, to Dayanand, were a Puranic corruption by the priestly class to control and mislead the masses. And all post-Vedic Hindu literature, including the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, were deemed inauthentic. “Go back to Vedas,” Dayanand proclaimed.

But amidst all this ground-breaking activism lay a highly prejudiced—and possibly Christian-centric—view of the Hindu past. Vedas speak proudly of many gods/deities with hymns dedicated to all of them. It is hard to imagine how this apparent fact could be interpreted into believing that the Vedas propagate monotheism, unless the interpreter has already concluded otherwise. Sure, the Vedas propound grand, cosmic speculation about the origins and nature of the cosmos, with the universe originating “through the evolution of an impersonal force manifested as male and female principles”. So, we find in the Vedas a “tension between visions of the highest reality as an impersonal force, or as a creator god, or as a group of gods with different jobs to do in the universe” [8].

Later the Ramakrishna Mission furthered similar monistic views of Hinduism, terming Hinduism as a religion of all, irrespective of faith or god. The notion of one religion for all, an umbrella theological belief system that could create a universal brotherhood of faiths, was taken to its extreme by the Theosophical Society founded by the Russian spiritualist Madame H.P. Blavatsky and the American Col. H.S. Olcott in 1875. In just nine years the Society had around a hundred branches along with its global centre in Adyar. The Theosophical Society used unconventional and indirect ways to further its ideas of theological universalism and monism. It managed to influence many important personalities who would later go on to change India’s politics via the Indian National Congress. The Society opened many schools and colleges including the Central Hindu College at Banaras.

The British establishment, no doubt, supported, encouraged and institutionalized these reforms, albeit for its own good. With the advent of the eighteenth century, British attitude towards India—which was purely an evangelic utilitarian one—was to somehow do away with the stagnation in Indian society by the work of law and “education” in Christian principles. The zealous goal of these efforts, as Udayon Mishra notes [9], was the creation of a “Europeanised India” with substantial incorporation of Christian ideas and beliefs into Hinduism. Hindu reformer organizations like the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, the Theosophical Society, and others played that role exactly, knowingly or unknowingly, playing into the hands of British evangelicals.

This reformist approach of incorporating Christian core beliefs into Hinduism turned out to be a big help to the Christian missionaries and theologians. “By characterising Hinduism as a monistic religion, Christian theologians and apologists were able to criticise the mystical monism of Hinduism, thereby highlighting the moral superiority of Christianity,” Richard King notes. Christian theologians furthered the view that the enormous diversity of Hinduism—in gods, sects, and beliefs—was a sign of inferiority of the Indian stock, thereby making it a responsibility of the British to “educate, civilise, and save” Hindus and India.

“Educating” the Hindus on their so-called monotheistic core was also seen as a step that could help Britishers to club diverse Hindus into a group of single-minded people, easier to govern and less likely to start insurgencies. On the looming prospects of French expansion, an atmosphere of suspicion and anxiety about the stability of British rule led to the furthering of reformed interpretations of Hinduism.

And thus, the anxiety caused by the French Revolution and the British evangelical utilitarian zeal to Christianise India, guided the reformist view of Hinduism. This over-arching need to find common ground with Abrahamic faiths was born out of decades of colonial Hindumesia. – IndiaFacts, 15 December 2022

Footnotes

  1. Dhar, Niranjan, Vedanta and the Bengal Renaissance, Calcutta, Minerva Associates, 1977.
  2. As quoted by King, Richard A. H, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East”, 1999, pp. 130.
  3. David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernisation, 1773–1835, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1969, pp. 46-47.
  4. Ibid., pp. 199-200.
  5. Charles H. Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform, Oxford University Press, 1964.
  6. Dr. Sanjeev Kumar, Socio-religious reform movements in British colonial India, International Journal of History 2020; 2(2): 38-45.
  7. Heitzman and Worden, eds., “India: A Country Study,” 1995.
  8. Bijoy Prasad Das, Rammohan Roy: Progressive Role as a Social Reforms and Movements for Social Justice, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention, Volume 10, Issue 6, pp. 57-59.
  9. Udayon Misra, “Nineteenth Century British Views of India: Crystallisation of Attitudes”, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 19, no. 4, 1984, pp. 14–21.

› Yogendra Singh Thakur is a freelance columnist from Betul, Madhya Pradesh. He is pursuing his studies, majoring in History, Political Science, and Sociology.

Vedic Gods

From Dharma to Dogma: The genesis of caste – Acharya Prashant

VOI

Indians

India’s tragedy is that somewhere in history, caste and dharma were kneaded together like salt in dough. What began as a division of labour merged with notions of virtue and sin. Acting within one’s caste became dharma; going outside it became sin. – Acharya Prashant

Every few years, incidents remind us that caste persists in different avatars. Our Constitution guarantees equality, yet divisions control how we live, marry, vote, and worship. Knowingly or unknowingly, we judge people by birth. Caste survives despite legal systems, educational programs, and metropolitan anonymity.

We wrongly believe social reform alone can fix what is mostly psychological. Caste is not a census number; it is a paradigm of evaluation. People constitute systems; as long as people don’t inwardly change, systemic change won’t help much.

Caste and the Constitution

The Constitution guarantees liberty, equality, and fraternity. Yet caste persists because exclusivity, superiority, and material benefits are irresistible. Caste has become ingrained in habit, rooted in livelihood, kinship, and identity. Our constitutional principles are like rangoli patterns on the ground; they cannot change the soil underneath.

That soil pervades everyday life. Many trades favour one community over another. Marriage remains mostly endogamous, with nine of ten unions within caste. Lineage maps out towns and villages. And when voting time comes, we rarely cast our vote; we vote our caste.

When Caste Masquerades as Dharma

The persistence of caste cannot be explained by sociology alone. Laws may impact behaviour and reforms may change customs, but neither explains nor eradicates how caste has been sanctified in dharma’s name.

For humans, consciousness is paramount. An insult to self-worth hurts far more than bodily injury. More than our flesh, we protect our ‘feeling’ of being right: our dharma. Dharma is the inner compass for right seeing and living, man’s most sacred possession, guiding all people.

India’s tragedy is that somewhere in history, caste and dharma were kneaded together like salt in dough. What began as a division of labour merged with notions of virtue and sin. Acting within one’s caste became dharma; going outside it became sin.

If caste were only a social structure, reformers would have erased it. If merely legal, the Constitution would suffice. But caste is sustained in religious belief. It persists because it hides behind Dharma’s name.

As long as this false dharma based on birth endures, caste will endure. What is worshipped will not be questioned, and what is not questioned will not change.

The History of Caste: The Distortion of Dharma

To understand why caste became inseparable from Indian life, let’s start from the beginning. The Purusha Sukta in the Rigveda speaks of an all-encompassing Being from whom everything comes. The hymn is metaphorical: the Brahmin came from His mouth, the Kshatriya from His arms, the Vaishya from His thighs, the Shudra from His feet. The symbolism points at how every form of work emerges from the same living whole, without any mention of hierarchy.

The Rigveda differentiates between Arya and Dasa, indicating early social stratification. There is still a dispute about whether varna was originally fluid or hierarchical. The goal is not to prove a perfect history, but to understand that any tradition has both liberating and limiting parts. It is our ethics that decide the thread we will follow next.

The Upanishads are the best argument against caste because they don’t just reject birth-based differences; they also reject body identification. The Vajrasuchika Upanishad, for example, directly emphasises that caste is unreal. The Bhagavad Gita said that varna comes from guna (individual physical tendencies) and karma (individual choices), not birth.

Such scriptures were being composed and had sublime philosophy emphasizing egalitarianism. However, there was a critical lapse: the scriptures were limited to a few meditative thinkers who mostly remained aloof and out of touch with mainstream society. The authors of the scriptures presented their insights in books, but did not get into grounded social activism to turn the spiritual insights into social reality. So, concurrently with the heights of meditative revelations, the social order continued to have strong currents of discrimination. By about 400 BC, the Dharmasutras emerged to become practical social guides. ‘Dharma’ began to mean social order. Spiritual symbolism became social distortion, and these new ‘scriptures’ started to show inequality based on caste. Over time, these grew into Dharmashastras, remembered as law codes such as the Manusmriti. Here lay the tipping point. The Purusha Sukta was reread with harmful additions: claims of Brahmin superiority, prohibitions on hearing the Vedas, and punishments for non-compliance. The spiritual metaphor became a manual of social control.

Later, the Puranas reinforced these distortions. With the Puranas’ dualistic approach came theism, and the social order was declared divinely ordained. Now, rebelling against caste meant rebelling against God, who made the caste system. Story after story contained subtle caste validation. Divine avatars were consistently born into upper castes, while those who challenged varna faced curses or calamity. The logic was circular but effective: if the gods themselves observed caste, it must be cosmic law. In dualistic theology, God becomes the author of worldly hierarchy. What Advaitic philosophy had rejected, mythology now sanctified.

Advaita Vedanta maintained a steadfast intellectual stance: since all distinctions are illusory, how can caste be authentic? But as caste became the dominant social system, even Advaita found itself compromised between transcendental truth (paramarthik) and practical social order (vyavaharik). The peak of truth was accepted as the highest, but was made distant from the ground of lived reality.

Caste’s story, however, is not one of unbroken supremacy. The Buddha did not accept the authority of the Brahmins. Bhakti poets Saints Kabir, Ravidas, and Chokhamela ridiculed caste. Basava’s Veerashaivism and Guru Nanak’s teachings went against the idea of a hierarchy. However, even as Bhakti emphasized that all individuals are equal in the eyes of God, it did not quite revolt against the unequal social hierarchy. A strange co-existence of unequal social order with equality before God was not just accepted, but institutionalized in Bhakti mythology, social order and rituals.

The reform movements show that resistance to caste often does arise within the religious system. But the idea of equality is often reabsorbed by the strong current of social inertia. What started as a misinterpretation of scripture became a social law, then a habit, and finally institutionalized heredity. The lesson is serious: to fight caste, you need both spiritual clarity and institutional change.

The Economics of Discrimination

Endogamy, or marrying within one’s own group, is at the heart of caste. It keeps bloodlines and a sense of belonging, while creating psychological walls. When marriage becomes restricted, so does social intimacy—families stop sharing meals, homes, and lives with those outside their group. Communities that marry within closed circles risk losing genetic diversity and cultural exchange. The biological costs are real, but the cultural impoverishment runs deeper: when people cannot marry across lines, they struggle to see each other as equals.

Yet caste continues not just as a belief but also as a source of profit. The priest’s ritual authority gave him power over knowledge, while the landlord’s caste position made his hold on land and labour even stronger. Endogamy preserved not just bloodlines but property. By ensuring daughters married within the caste, families kept wealth and land concentrated, turning social boundaries into economic moats that protected privilege across generations.

The Path Forward: Returning from Smriti to Shruti

The solution cannot principally come from courts; it must arise from understanding dharma itself. Sanatan Dharma was never meant to be a set of strict rules and inherited beliefs. It was the dharma of Shruti, the direct revelation of Truth. The emphasis was on clarity of consciousness, not on divine commandments. Social order was to be a spontaneous and fluid outcome of individual realization. Over time, however, we began living by Smriti, frozen law, and social convention.

As long as Smriti remained faithful to Shruti, it guided society; when it diverged, it enslaved society. Much of what we call “Hindu practice” belongs to this later distortion, drawn more from the Manusmriti and Puranas than the Upanishads. We talk about Vedic heritage, yet we live by hierarchies that came after the Vedic period.

This appeal to return to Shruti has a crucial objection: what if the texts themselves are complicit? What if hierarchy is inherent rather than incidental?

We need to consider this criticism. If the Upanishads were enough, why did Vedantic philosophy persist alongside millennia of discrimination? Sublime texts alone do not ensure accurate interpretation. The conclusion is stark: for each truthful scripture, we also need an equally truthful interpreter. The interpretation, practically, is as important as the scripture itself. And this interpretation must be made socially widespread, though that task will face resistance from those whose power depends on distortion. So, we need culture and powerful institutions to ensure and defend scriptural wisdom’s rigorous interpretation and dissemination.

And a note of caution to the sage-philosopher: your job doesn’t stop at meditation, revelation and publication. You need to get into the society and ensure that the light seen by you becomes the living light of the common man. The philosopher, the meditator, the thinker can’t afford to hide in his cave, he will have to be, firstly a rebellious social activist, and secondly, a meticulous institution-builder. This will mean getting into the din of public life and sacrificing the serenity he so lovingly cherishes, but that’s the sacrifice life and history demand of him. If he refuses, the consequences of his self-absorption will be socially devastating.

Democratization of Interpretation

We must ask who has the authority to interpret Shruti. In the past, only Brahmins, especially priests, had that right. But we cannot have the same gatekeepers who let the truth get distorted in charge of bringing it back.

It is important to make interpretation more democratic. Shruti should be accessible not as a privilege but as a birthright of consciousness. This means having translations of the Upanishads in the vernacular language, open discourse, and the recognition that spiritual realisation, not lineage, is what qualifies someone to understand the Upanishads.

When religion diverges from philosophy, it transforms into a blind and violent force, serving as a tool of fear rather than liberation. The Upanishadic view starts where hierarchy stops. It sees the sacred not in birth but in realisation.

In Vedanta’s light, every division dissolves. The way forward is cleansing religion, valuing truth over tradition, realisation over recollection. No interpretation of any scripture is valid if it violates the principles inherent in the Mahavakyas “Aham Brahmasmi” and “Tat Tvam Asi”.

The Path in Practice

It begins with modern, scientific education of the ego-self in school and college curricula. Students must be exposed to the process of biological and social conditioning, the matter of false identities, and the question “Who am I?”.

Cultural change valuing the Upanishads over the Manusmriti must be promoted, as well as rigorous interpretation of Smriti texts true to the spirit of Vedanta. Religious institutions must open doors regardless of birth, and spiritual leaders should publicly reject caste-based privilege.

Legal and economic measures too remain vital: affirmative action, anti-discrimination enforcement, and equalisation of opportunity. The soil is renewed not by one hand alone but by many: the teacher, the reformer, the legislator, and the rebel. – The Pioneer, 8 November 2025

› Acharya Prashant is a spiritual teacher, philosoper, poet and author of wisdom literature.

There are Brahmin, Kshatriya, Patel, Jain, Bania, Parsi, Saiyad, Pathan and Christian sanitation workers in Gujarat.

Max Müller to Doniger to Orsini: The West sends Trojan horses to India – Abhijit Majumder

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Trojan Horse

The West repeatedly sends academic Trojan horses who would erase and distort Indian history, attack self-esteem, construct divisive narratives, and collude with India’s own sell-out intelligentsia to project credibility. – Abhijit Majumder

India is the imperialist’s unfinished project. Few lands that have been touched by Christian or Islamic imperialists have managed to remain largely unconverted and geopolitically intact. In a little over 100 years since 1900, the centuries-old fluid indigenous faiths in the entire African continent, for instance, dwindled from 76 per cent of the population to just 8 per cent, having been replaced by the two hardcoded religions.

Bharat, or what remains of it after Pakistan and Bangladesh were created, still has not given in. Sanatan Dharma is still the way of life for more than 75 per cent of Indians, and in spite of the best efforts of invaders and colonialists, its nationalism and civilisational self is rising again, its economy rapidly growing, its military gaining muscle.

The mere presence of Bharat—with its staggering size, diversity, and potential—has unnerved the West enough across ages to repeatedly send academic Trojan horses who would erase and distort history, attack self-esteem, construct divisive narratives, and collude with India’s own sell-out intelligentsia to project credibility.

The controversy around Francesca Orsini, Hindi scholar from London-based SOAS, is a continuation of that. A white woman specialising in an Indian language may fascinate us, but a look into her political activism in academic guise begins to reveal a different story.

She accuses the very language she teaches, Hindi, of political usurpation of other languages. She has a problem with Indian nationalism. In 2020, she introduced a resolution in the Seattle City Council against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

While India is not obligated to host those arriving to spread intellectual poison, Orsini was deported recently after landing in Delhi for gross violation of visa conditions during her previous visits. Orsini is a rather mediocre entrant in the galaxy of Western radicals who have got into the study of Indology, history, Sanskrit and other languages only to undermine Bharat.

German philologist Friedrich Max Müller, hired by the British colonialists in 1847, came with a mission to bury the Vedas, which he described in a letter to his wife as “the root of their religion, and to show them what that root is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3,000 years”. He also wrote: “The ancient religion of India is doomed, and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault will it be?”

Then there was James Mill, a Scottish historian and economist whose work, The History of British India (1817), divided Indian history into Hindu, Muslim, and British periods. In his book, Mill extensively describes Hindus as “uncivilised”, “barbaric”, “savage”, and “rude”. This gentleman wrote with astonishing confidence on India without once stepping on this land and no knowledge whatsoever of Indian languages.

The more recent gift horses from the West to India like Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock, and Audrey Truschke employ a more sophisticated packaging but are no less venomous. Doniger uses psychoanalytic quackery to introduce a homosexual angle to the relationship between Ramkrishna Paramhansa and his disciple Swami Vivekananda; Pollock blames the Sanskrit language for the Holocaust; and Truschke swoons over the genocidal Mughal Aurangzeb.

India’s intellectual tradition is among the most welcoming mindscapes in the world. Bharat has continuously assimilated knowledge and made “outsiders” its own. Even in the modern era, it has been enriched by foreigners from Sister Nivedita to David Frawley, Michael Danino to Koenraad Elst, Francois Gautier to Maria Wirth. These scholars have taken a dharmic approach. They did not approach Indic knowledge with the mission to debase it.

But ultimately, Indians will have to take a major part of the blame for not taking up their own knowledge universe seriously, neglecting languages like Sanskrit, writing their own history, and leaving a vast vacuum for the likes of Orsini to fill.

Unless Bharat begins to take its own story seriously, vultures will come to feast. – News18, 25 October 2025

› Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist and editor-in-chief at Earshot Media, New Delhi. He is the author of the book, ‘India’s New Right’. 

George Orwell Quote

 

How Bombay experienced the Great Uprising of 1857 – Dinyar Patel

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British blowing mutinous Indian sepoys from guns.

In 1857, fear and panic in Bombay laid bare the brittle, ultimately ephemeral nature of the British Empire, the most powerful empire in world history. – Dinyar Patel

About a century ago, the historian Georges Lefebvre pored over historical records dating from the late summer of 1789 in France. Here, he traced a seismic wave of panic, the “Great Fear”, when large parts of the country worried that armies of brigands were about to violently derail the French Revolution.

“Fear bred fear,” LeFebvre pronounced, outlining an archival paper trail of rumour and terrifying anxiety.

A similar paper trail exists in India, a shiver of fear detectable in archival holdings from mid-1857 through 1858, the time of the Great Uprising. Much of that archive focuses on the North Indian heartland—epicentres of the rebellion such as Delhi, Kanpur, and Lucknow.

But panic never exists within neat geographical boundaries. In places far removed from sepoy control, fear once more bred fear, with colonial authorities from Aden through Rangoon writing in tones of marked desperation.

What follows is a brief account of the Uprising in one such place rarely mentioned in the history of that momentous year: Bombay. It is an account culled from crumbling folios in the Maharashtra State Archives, which represent a tiny stratum in the overall set of records pertaining to 1857 in India. Though small, this particular paper trail nevertheless demonstrates how, in the span of weeks and months, and in one of the most secure locations in British India, imperial hubris gave way to a state of utter terror. This is a portrait of a city on edge.

Colonel John Finnis was the first European officer to be killed in the uprising in Meerut (The Illustrated Times).

Mutiny in Meerut

On May 10, 1857, sepoys in Meerut mutinied and killed several of their British officers. News of this incident reached Bombay with remarkable speed: the next day, via a telegram from Agra. By the following morning, readers of the Bombay Times digested the contents of this telegram under a headline blaring “Serious Intelligence: MUTINY AT MEERUT.” With rebels having subsequently cut telegraph lines, Bombay citizens awaited confirmation of this report via overland dak and private correspondence.

At the time, Bombay was the administrative headquarters of a vast arc of western India stretching from Karachi in the northwest to Dharwar in the southeast. Now, from across this territory, reports streamed into Bombay Castle, the nerve centre of the colonial bureaucracy, detailing alarming developments.

A deadly riot in Bharuch in May. A plot, discovered in June, to kill Europeans in Satara and Mahabaleshwar and restore the Maratha dynasty. A mutiny of the 27th Infantry in Kolhapur in July, coupled with rumblings about Bhil insurrections in Khandesh. In the eyes of many colonial officers, this smacked of a broad-based, coordinated conspiracy.

Thereafter, small events triggered all sorts of conspiracy theories. In North India, British officials had panicked over the distribution of chapatis from village to village, a supposed harbinger of revolt. Something far more prosaic caused dread and foreboding in western India: twigs. Officials in Bombay Castle lost sleep over reports of villagers near Cambay passing along bundles of the stuff.

Was it a signal for insurrection? While administrators ultimately accepted the explanation of locals—that it was a method to apprehend a common thief, whose foot imprint was the size of the twigs—they implored the Indian legislative council in Calcutta to make all systems of “carrying signs from village to village” a penal offence. Carrying twigs was now a borderline traitorous activity.

Bombay remained quiet, but the governor, Lord Elphinstone, a man once rumoured to be romantically linked to Queen Victoria, nervously apprised the strength of the European forces in the city. He counted only 200 infantrymen, with perhaps 50 or 60 additional artillerymen. Although authorities in London had dispatched thousands of troops, they would take at least two more months to arrive – perhaps longer since they were, confoundingly, being routed via the Cape of Good Hope rather than the quicker route through Egypt.

J.M. Shortt, commander of the garrison in Bombay, bluntly told Elphinstone that they would therefore have to rely on Indian sepoys, regardless of worries about disaffection within the ranks. “There is no choice,” he stated.

Fear bred suspicion, and suspicion hardened into a policy of repression. Soon, the jail at Thana was bursting at its seams, overcrowded with prisoners oftentimes rounded up on the flimsiest of charges. Butcher’s Island, in the harbour, housed elite detainees, such as the family of the deposed raja of Satara, believed to be involved in the conspiracy in that former princely state and in Mahabaleshwar.

The wider dragnet scooped up some curious characters, such as an Irish convert to Islam and a Jewish man from Warsaw who happened to be visiting Ratnagiri. Officials like Charles Forjett, Bombay’s ruthlessly efficient deputy commissioner of police (and a Eurasian, the offspring of an Indian mother), justified the detention of such Europeans.

He alerted his superiors to vague intelligence that parties of Europeans were “on their way to India to afford assistance to the Mutineers.” Consequently, Forjett suggested employing a “trustworthy Foreigner” to spy on and monitor the movements of any Europeans arriving in the harbour. The white man was now suspect, as well.

As paranoia spread, so did intelligence-gathering efforts. Authorities began opening and reading private correspondence, alert for any signs of sympathy for the sepoys. Some letters were flagged for almost comically absurd reasons.

A Muslim man from Aurangabad harangued a Bombay friend for not writing to him or sending him money, but was impolitic enough to include a throwaway line hoping that the forces of the Mughal emperor would soon reach the Deccan.

Other correspondence no doubt raised the hairs on the necks of eavesdropping Britons. A separate missive from Aurangabad moved quickly from commercial matters to discussion of how local Muslims planned to wage jihad and massacre Europeans during Muharram.

Educated Indians, often considered a key constituency of support for the Raj, also came under suspicion. Police infiltrated a library to monitor the conversations of Keru Luxumon Chhatre, an accomplished mathematician who later moved in the same circles as Mahadev Govind Ranade and Dadabhai Naoroji.

They also targeted Jagannath Shankarsheth, the respected Maharashtrian commercial magnate, accusing him of communicating with rebels, including Nana Saheb, one of the Uprising’s leading commanders.

As anxieties rose about a wide cross-section of the Indian population, authorities nervously eyed the religious calendar. Certain festivals had long provoked concerns about safety or communal harmony in the city. Now, they struck a decisively different form of terror in the minds of Europeans, who feared ripe moments for mass rebellion.

During Bakri Eid, in early August 1857, a “state of alarm” seized the European community, causing many families to take refuge in the Fort or on boats docked in the harbour. In Bombay Castle, British administrators recoiled at this very public expression of the vulnerability of the ruling class. “It is an evil the recurrence of which should be cautiously avoided since it serves to create the very danger that is apprehended,” declared one official.

A “large & influential body of English Gentlemen” soon convened to make sure that this did not happen again.

Muharram, however, loomed in the distance, and was a greater cause of concern, since it was, at the time, a very public occasion which brought together Hindus and Muslims. Panic once more spread throughout European quarters, forcing the hands of Elphinstone and his ministers. They devised an elaborate plan, “a chain of posts round the Native Town”—the densely-packed districts sprawling from Girgaum to Dongri—manned by police and troops, which could contain any disturbance.

Constructing this chain compelled officials to see Bombay’s geography in a stark new light, assessing positions of strength and vulnerability. One vital point, Elphinstone believed, was today’s Nana Chowk, then the site of Jagannath Shankarsheth’s house and a Parsi club house.

Elphinstone suggested placing one company of European and Indian troops here, along with a battery and guns soon to arrive from Bushire in Persia. Another strategic location was the Byculla railway station: here, Elphinstone argued, a train “would carry away the ladies & children” (of white complexion; the welfare of Indians was not factored in) while men could remain to defend the bridge over the railway line.

As Europeans counted down the days to Muharram, Bombay must have appeared as a city preparing for a siege. Shortt, the commander of the garrison, moved his troops out of the Colaba cantonment while keeping a small detachment on that island in case Indian troops rebelled.

The island was so narrow—no more than fifty yards in places—that he felt assured that a few men “could defend Colaba against an army”. At the Bori Bunder railway station—where, two decades later, work would begin on the Indo-Gothic Victoria Terminus—a train was kept “always prepared” to allow for the quick movement of soldiers. A picket guarded the foot of Malabar Hill at night.

Forjett, meanwhile, began identifying “rendezvous points,” places where Europeans could gather and seek shelter in case Muharram turned into a mutiny. Long discussions ensued, with various locations considered. Finally, the government produced neatly printed flyers, marked “Private,” which instructed Europeans on the rendezvous points in their vicinity, such as the house of William Yardley, the chief justice of the supreme court, for residents of Mahalaxmi and Breach Candy. Officials determined that Europeans in the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company could defend their own establishment in Mazagaon, perhaps with help from the navy, although Shortt worried that sailors were “difficult to manage and to keep away from liquor.”

Muharram seemed to pass without incident. Diwali, however, nearly became explosive. Some days before the festival of lights, Forjett began spying on some sepoys. Dressed in disguise, he monitored nighttime conversations through slits in the wall of a house where they gathered. Here, he heard the sepoys discuss “the Plunder of Bombay” and acknowledge that they had originally planned to “rise and slay and plunder” during Muharram. Police soon swooped down on the sepoys and arrested them.

After a summary trial, they were condemned to be blown from the mouths of cannons.

On the day of their grisly execution, a large throng of curious onlookers gathered at the site, a corner of the Esplanade opposite today’s Metro Cinema. Amongst the crowd was one of the future founders of the Indian National Congress, Dinsha Wacha, then a 13-year-old student at the Elphinstone Institution. Fresh from afternoon classes, he watched as the convicted sepoys were chained to the cannons. Fuses were lit and commanders barked orders to fire. “The burnt flesh sent an unpleasant odour which we all could easily sniff,” Wacha recalled. “All was over.”

By this time, the worst of the panic in Bombay was over, as well. News had reached the city of the British recapture of Delhi, something which greatly soothed frayed nerves in Bombay Castle. While there were still many tense moments—in January 1858, Forjett claimed that members of the 10th and 11th Regiments were holding seditious meetings in the Native Town—the tone of correspondence in archival records began resuming their normal bureaucratic tenor.

Officials made plans to reward allies, punish suspected traitors, and disarm vast swaths of the population. A sense of imperial hubris returned.

The archival record, nevertheless, testifies to the sheer fragility of British rule in western India for a few months in 1857. One official in riot-torn Bharuch, for example, penned an emotional letter to Bombay Castle, telling his colleagues that he did not expect to survive the violence. Reports of the assassination of the magistrate of Satara, later refuted, momentarily threw into question the writ of British rule in the southern Deccan.

While records overwhelmingly provide the perspectives of ruling Britons, the voices of Indians are often audible, like the Parsis of Bharuch, who were so terrified of violence that they deliberately fed wild rumours to increase the British troop presence in the town.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking documents are petitions from Indians caught in the crossfire, claiming wrongful imprisonment and gross miscarriages of justice. Entire villages around Satara wrote to Elphinstone, accusing local British administrators of crimes and corruption.

“You have put to death the Ryots of the Southern Maratha Country without any fault on their part,” they declared. “We are prepared to die. If you wish, kill all of us now.”

Georges LeFebvre published his book, The Great Fear of 1789, in 1932. It helped pioneer a new historical perspective, one which accounted for the role of fear, panic, and rumour in human affairs. As LeFebvre pointed out, while looking at this phase of Revolutionary France, rumour regularly turned into fact, and suspicion into certainty, catalysing a whole host of political processes.

Nor was 1789 an aberration. There were numerous other bouts of mass panic during the Revolution and afterwards, as there were across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. In India, historians have identified similar episodes: “information panics” before and during the Great Uprising, periodic fears of another mutiny in the decades thereafter, and moments of mass hysteria during the Second World War.

Fear and panic remain major agents of change: simply recall the Covid-19 pandemic or survey social media-fuelled conspiracy theories spread by right-wing authoritarians. In 1857, fear and panic in Bombay laid bare the brittle, ultimately ephemeral nature of the British Empire, the most powerful empire in world history.

Today, these agents have shattered political and social norms, weakened democracies, and helped hurtle us into a “post-truth” era. Old certainties have crumbled with astonishing speed.

We have left a rich archive of fear and panic for future historians to explore. – Scroll, 27 July 2025

› Prof. Dinyar Patel is an author and  Associate Professor of History at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai. 

Sepoy uprising in Meerut (Illustrated Times, July 1857).

Christianity’s fraudulent legacy – M. Paulkovich

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Jesus saves ...or else!

The cult of Christianity has an incalculable amount of blood on its hands. And the Jesus tale seems to have been nothing more than oral legend, with plenty of hoax and fraud perpetrated along the ages. – Michael Paulkovich

Most historians hold the position I had once harbored as true, being a Bible skeptic but not a Christ mythicist. I had maintained that the Jesus person probably existed, having fantastic and impossible stories later foisted upon his earthly life, passed by oral tradition then recorded many decades after Jesus lived.

After exhaustive research for my first book, I began to perceive both the brilliance and darkness from history. I discovered that many early Christian fathers believed with all pious sincerity their savior never came to earth—or when he did, it was Star-Trekian style, beamed down pre-haloed and fully-grown, sans transvaginal egress. Moreover I expose many other startling bombshells in my book No Meek Messiah: Christianity’s Lies, Laws, and Legacy.

I embarked upon one exercise to revive research into Jesus-era writers who should have recorded Christ tales, but did not. John Remsburg enumerated forty-one “silent” historians in his book The Christ (1909). I dedicated months of research to augment Remsburg’s list, finally tripling his count. In No Meek Messiah I provide a list of 126 writers who should have recorded something of Jesus, with exhaustive references.

Perhaps the most bewildering “silent one” is the mythical super-savior himself, Jesus the Son of God ostensibly sent on a suicide mission to save us from the childish notion of “Adam’s Transgression” as we learn from Romans 5:14. The Jesus character is a phantom of a wisp of a personage who never wrote anything. So, add one more: 127.

The Jesus character is a phantom 

Jesus is lauded as a wise teacher, savior, and a perfect being. Yet Jesus believed in Noah’s Ark (Mt. 24:37, and Lk. 17:27), Adam and Eve and their son Abel (Lk. 3:38 and Lk. 11:51), Jonah living in a fish or whale (Mt. 12:40), and Lot’s wife turning into salt (Lk. 17:31-32). Jesus believed “devils” caused illness, and even bought into the OT notion (Jn. 3:14) that a magical pole proffered by the OT (Num. 21:9) could cure snake bites merely by gazing upon it.

Was Jesus smarter than a fifth grader?

Apollonius of Tyana

But perhaps no man is more fascinating than Apollonius Tyaneus, saintly first century adventurer and noble paladin. Apollonius was a magic-man of divine birth who cured the sick and blind, cleansed entire cities of plague, foretold the future and fed the masses. He was worshipped as a god, and son of god. Despite such nonsense claims, Apollonius was a real man recorded by reliable sources.

As Jesus ostensibly performed miracles of global expanse (e.g. Mt. 27), his words going “unto the ends of the whole world” (Rom. 10), one would expect virtually every literate person on earth to record those events during his time. A Jesus contemporary such as Apollonius should have done so, as well as those who wrote of Apollonius. Such is not the case. In Philostratus’ third century chronicle, Vita Apollonii, there is no hint of Jesus. Nor in the works of other Apollonius epistolarians and scriveners: Emperor Titus, Cassius Dio, Maximus, Moeragenes, Lucian, Soterichus Oasites, Euphrates, Marcus Aurelius, or Damis of Hierapolis. It seems none of these writers from first to third century ever heard of Jesus, global miracles and alleged worldwide fame be damned.

Another bewildering author is Philo of Alexandria. He spent his first century life in the Levant, even traversing Jesus-land. Philo chronicled Jesus contemporaries—Bassus, Pilate, Tiberius, Sejanus, Caligula—yet knew nothing of the storied prophet and rabble-rouser enveloped in glory and astral marvels. Historian Josephus published Jewish War ca. 95. He had lived in Japhia, one mile from Nazareth—yet Josephus seems to have been unaware of both Nazareth and Jesus. (I devoted a chapter to his interpolated works, pp. 191-198.) You may encounter Christian apologists claiming that Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius, Phlegon, Thallus, Mara bar-Serapion, or Lucian wrote of Jesus contemporary to the time. In No Meek Messiah I thoroughly debunk such notions.

The Bible venerates the artist formerly known as Saul of Tarsus, an “apostle” essentially oblivious to his heavenly saviour. Paul is unaware of the virgin mother, and ignorant of Jesus’ nativity, parentage, life events, ministry, miracles, apostles, betrayal, trial and harrowing passion. Paul knows neither where nor when Jesus lived, and considers the crucifixion metaphorical (Gal. 2:19-20). Unlike the absurd Gospels, Paul never indicates Jesus had been to earth. And the “five hundred witnesses” claim (1 Cor. 15) is a well-known forgery.

Qumran, the stony and chalky hiding place for the Dead Sea Scrolls lies twelve miles from Bethlehem. The scroll writers, coeval and abutting the holiest of hamlets one jaunty jog eastward never heard of Jesus. Dr. Jodi Magness wrote, “Contrary to claims made by a few scholars, no copies of the New Testament (or precursors to it) are represented among the Dead Sea Scrolls.“

Christianity was still wet behind its primitive and mythical ears in the second century, and Christian father Marcion of Pontus in 144 CE denied any virgin birth or childhood for Christ—Jesus’ infant circumcision (Lk. 2:21) was thus a lie, as well as the crucifixion! Marcion claimed Luke was corrupted, and his saviour self-spawned in omnipresence, a spirit without a body (see Dungan, 43). Reading the works of second century Christian father Athenagoras, one never encounters the word Jesus (or Ἰησοῦς or Ἰησοῦν, as he would have written)—Athenagoras was thus unacquainted with the name of his saviour it would seem. Athenagoras was another pious early Christian, unaware of Jesus (see also Barnard, 56).

The original booklet given the name “Mark” ended at 16:8, later forgers adding the fanciful resurrection tale (see Ehrman, 48). The booklet “John” in chapter 21 also describes post-death Jesus tales, another well-known and well-documented forgery (see Encyclopedia Biblica, vol. 2, 2543). Millions should have heard of the Jesus “crucifixion” with its astral enchantments: zombie armies and meteorological marvels (Mt. 27) recorded not by any historian, but only in the dubitable scriptures scribbled decades later by superstitious yokels. The Jesus saga is further deflated by the reality of Nazareth, having no settlement until after the 70 CE war—suspiciously around the time the Gospels were concocted, as René Salm demonstrates in his book. I also include in my book similarities of Jesus to earlier God-sons, too striking to disregard. The Oxford Classical Dictionary and Catholic Encyclopedia, as well as many others, corroborate. Quite a few son-of-gods myths existed before the Jesus tales, with startling similarities, usually of virgin mothers, magical births and resurrection: Sandan, Mithra, Horus, Attis, Buddha, Dionysus, Krishna, Hercules, Isiris, Orpheus, Adonis, Prometheus, etc.

The one true religion

If you encounter a Christian defending her faith purely based on its popularity, you would do well to inform her that Christianity was a very minor cult in the fourth century, while “pagan” religions, especially Mithraism, were much more popular in the Empire—and the Jesus cult would have faded into oblivion if not for an imperial decree.

From No Meek Messiah: It is 391 CE now as Roman Emperor Theodosius elevates Jesus (posthumously) to divinity, declaring Christianity the only “legitimate” religion of the world, under penalty of death. The ancient myth is rendered law. This decision by Theodosius is possibly the worst ever made in human history: what followed were century after century of torture and murder in the name of this false, faked, folkloric “prophesied saviour” of fictional virgin mother. Within a year after the decree by Theodosius, crazed Christian monks of Nitria destroy the majestic Alexandrian Library largely because philosophy and science are taught there—not the Bible. In Alexandria these are times of the highest of intellectual pursuits, all quashed by superstitious and ignorant Christians of the most godly and murderous variety: they had the “Holy Bible” on their side.

Emperor Theodosius I could have had no idea how much harm this blunder would cause humanity over the centuries that followed. Christianity was made the only legal cult of the empire, and for the next 1500 years, good Christians would murder all non-Christians they could find by the tens of millions.

Frauds and forgeries

Along the centuries the Church has sought to gain power and wealth, and No Meek Messiah exposes their many scams and deceits and obfuscations in detail including:

  • Abgar Forgeries (4th century)
  • Apostolic Canons (400 CE)
  • Hypatia the Witch (415 CE)
  • Symmachian Forgeries (6th century)
  • St. Peter Forgery (ca. 751)
  • False “Donation of Constantine” (8th century)
  • False Decretals (8th century)
  • Extermination of the Cathar “witches” (13th century)
  • Murder of the Stedinger “devils” (1233)
  • The Manifest Destiny decree (1845) and eradication of Native Americans
  • Invention of the “Immaculate Conception” (1854)
  • The Lateran Treaty (1929)

St. Paul overseeing the burning of books at Ephesus.

The good that Jesus brought

Early Christians believed all necessary knowledge was in the Bible and thus closed down schools, burned books, forbade teaching philosophy and destroyed libraries. The Jesus person portrayed in the Bible taught that “devils” and “sin” cause illness, and thus for some 1700 years good Christians ignored science and medicine to perform exorcisms on the ill.

The Bible decrees “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Ex. 22:18, with support from Dt. 18:10-12, Lev. 20:27, 2 Chr. 33:6, Micah. 5:12, and 1 Sam. 28:3). In the New Testament, Paul in Galatians 5:19-21 joins the anti-witchcraft credo. But let’s face it: Paul claims to be a devoted Hebrew, full of credulity and misogyny. Paul will “suffer not a woman to teach” and thus along the centuries women have been second-class citizens, especially within the Church. These juvenile and immoral Bible edicts are not left in the past.

From No Meek Messiah: Remember the witch hunts? Long ago and far away, past atrocities forgotten? So perhaps we should forgive and forget. Around the world, the Christian Bible is still used to accuse people, usually children, of “witchcraft” and to punish them. Refer to The Guardian, Sunday, 9 December 2007, “Child ‘witches’ in Africa”; Huffington Post, October 18, 2009, “African Children Denounced As ‘Witches’ By Christian Pastors”; and The Guardian, Friday 31 December 2010, “Why are ‘witches’ still being burned alive in Ghana?” The scripture normally cited regarding witches is Exodus 22:18, and there are many more. In Ghana, a study found that “accused witches were physically brutalised, tortured, neglected, and in two cases, murdered.” In Kinshasa, Congo, “80% of the 20,000 street children … are said to have been accused of being witches.” Even to this day the Bible’s proclamations against witches are still considered valid by many Christians. In places like Indonesia, Tanzania, the Congo and Ghana superstitious fundamental Christians actively pursue and execute witches, including murdering child “sorcerers.” In Malawi, accused witches are routinely jailed.

Christians are typically kept ignorant of certain evil and immoral words placed into the mouth of this mythical mystery-man:

“If any man come to me, and HATE NOT his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” – Luke 14:26.

Jesus is actually portrayed as a pitiful man in desperate need of praise:

“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” – Matt. 10:37.

Not only does Jesus never advise against slavery, but he recommends savage whipping of disobedient slaves:

“And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes.” – Luke 12:47.

Jesus has nothing against stealing, as he instructs his apostles to pinch a horse and a donkey from their rightful owner:

“And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage, unto the Mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples, Saying unto them, Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them unto me. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them.” – Matt. 21:1-3.

Gentle and meek and mythical

I personally know several Christians who accept evolution as scientific fact. Okay, they kind of ignore the Old Testament, but I asked one born again Christian about the genealogy of Jesus and she was only aware of another one in Luke.

From No Meek Messiah: Christianity absolutely depends on mythical “Adam.” Without Adam, Eve, and a talking snake, Jesus’ mission is moot and pointless and void. Christians are generally oblivious of this because they have been shown a genealogy in Matthew (which only goes back to “Abraham”), and are rarely if ever exposed to Luke’s disparate and childlike version—which if true would negate all of evolution and in fact most known history and science. According to the anonymous author of Luke, a mere seventy-five generations separate “Adam”—and the beginning of the universe—from the birth of Jesus some 2,000 years ago.

This “meek” messiah boasted he was “greater than Solomon” (Mt. 12:42), saying he “came not to send peace, but a sword” (Mt. 10:34), and  (Lk. 12:49). Jesus desperately needs your praise (Mt. 10:37), and advises you to beat your slaves.

Yahweh / Jehovah

This Jesus character speaks highly of father Yahweh‘s genocidal tantrums in Matthew 11:20-24. Jesus is referring to the book of Joshua where his father declares he will wipe out all people of Sidon: “All the inhabitants of the hill country from Lebanon unto Misrephoth-maim, and all the Sidonians, them will I drive out from before the children of Israel”.

You may have heard Christians claim that the only “god hates fags” verbiage comes from the Old Testament (Lev. 18:22), but both Paul (in Rom. 1:26-27) and Jesus speak out against it, as the J-man praises the ruin of Gaytown, Canaan: “But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.” – Luke 17:29.

Onward Christian soldiers

Christianity has a violent “holy book” as its authority, granting followers supremacy over the entire earth (e.g. Gen. 1:28) which they used to justify land grabs, genocide and holy conflicts. The following wars were perpetrated by Christians in the name of their saviour:

  1. War against the Donatists, 317 CE
  2. Roman-Persian War of 441 CE
  3. Roman-Persian War of 572-591 CE
  4. Charlemagne’s War against the Saxons, 8th century
  5. Spanish Christian-Muslim War of 912-928
  6. Spanish Christian-Muslim War of 977-997
  7. Spanish Christian-Muslim War of 1001-1031
  8. First Crusade, 1096
  9. Jerusalem Massacre, 1099
  10. Second Crusade, 1145-1149
  11. Spanish Christian-Muslim War, 1172-1212
  12. Third Crusade, 1189 CE
  13. War against the Livonians, 1198-1212
  14. Wars against the Curonians and Semigallians, 1201-90
  15. Fourth Crusade, 1202-04
  16. Wars against Saaremaa, 1206-61
  17. War against the Estonians, 1208-1224
  18. War against the Latgallians and Selonians, 1208-1224
  19. Children’s Crusade, 1212
  20. Fifth Crusade, 1213
  21. Sixth Crusade, 1228 War against the Livonians, 1198-1212
  22. Spanish Christian-Muslim War, 1230-1248
  23. Seventh Crusade, 1248
  24. Eighth Crusade, 1270
  25. Ninth Crusade, 1271-1272
  26. The Inquisitions
  27. War against the Cathars, 1209-1229 and onward
  28. War against the Stedingers of Friesland, 1233
  29. Spanish Christian-Muslim War, 1481-1492
  30. Four Years War of 1521-26
  31. Count’s War of 1534-36
  32. Schmalkaldic War, 1546
  33. Anglo-Scottish War of 1559-1560
  34. First War of Religion,1562
  35. Second War of Religion, 1567-68
  36. Third War of Religion, 1568-70
  37. Fourth War of Religion, 1572-73
  38. Fifth War of Religion, 1574-76
  39. Sixth War of Religion, 1576-77
  40. Seventh War of Religion, 1579-80
  41. Eighth War of Religion, 1585-98
  42. War of the Three Henrys, 1588
  43. Ninth War of Religion, 1589—1598
  44. Ottoman-Habsburg wars, 15th to 16th century
  45. War against the German Farmers (“peasants”), 16th Century
  46. The French Wars of Religion, 16th Century
  47. Shimabara Revolt, 1637
  48. Covenanters’ Rebellion of 1666
  49. Covenanters’ Rebellion of 1679
  50. Covenanters’ Rebellion of 1685
  51. The Thirty Years War, 17th Century
  52. The Irish rebellion of 1641
  53. Spanish Christian extermination of South American natives
  54. Manifest Destiny
  55. War of the Sonderbund, 1847
  56. Crimean War, 1853-1856
  57. Tukulor-French War, 1854-1864
  58. Taiping Rebellion, 1851 and 1864
  59. Serbo-Turkish War, 1876-78
  60. Russo-Turkish War, 1877-1878
  61. Russian Revolution, killing of Jews, late 19th century
  62. First Sudanese Civil War, 1955-1972
  63. Nigerian Civil War, 1967
  64. Lebanese Civil War, 1975
  65. Sabra and Shatila massacre, 1982
  66. Second Sudanese Civil War, 1983
  67. Yelwa Massacre, 2004
  68. Bosnian War, 1992-1995

A relatively unknown contrivance occurred in the thirteenth century when Pope Innocent III ordered a genocidal attack against the entire region of Languedoc France. The pope depicted the Cathars as witches; of being cannibals; desecrating the cross; and having “sexual orgies.”

Yet malefic sounds of sibilance emanated only from the Vatican, and not from its contrived enemies living peaceably in France with their pure and righteous ways. The Church murdered over a million innocent Cathars over the period of 35 years—men, women, children. Christian forces wiped them from the face of the planet. At the height of the siege, Christian forces were burning hundreds at the stake at a time. The Christian colossus exterminated them, then annexed much of Languedoc—some for the Church, some from northern French nobles. The extravagant Palais de la Berbie (construction began in 1228) and the Catholic fortress-cathedral Sainte Cécile (began 1282) are just two examples that remain to this day.

The Silent Historians

Conclusion

When I consider those 126 writers, all of whom should have heard of Jesus but did not, and Paul and Marcion and Athenagoras and Matthew with a tetralogy of opposing Christs, the silence from Qumran and Nazareth and Bethlehem, conflicting Bible stories, and so many other mysteries and omissions, I must conclude this “Jesus Christ” is a mythical character. “Jesus of Nazareth” was nothing more than urban (or desert) legend, likely an agglomeration of several evangelic and deluded rabbis who might have existed.

The “Jesus mythicist” position is regarded by Christians as a fringe group. But after my research I tend to side with Remsburg—and Frank Zindler, John M. Allegro, Thomas Paine, Godfrey Higgins, Robert M. Price, Charles Bradlaugh, Gerald Massey, Joseph McCabe, Abner Kneeland, Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Harold Leidner, Peter Jensen, Salomon Reinach, Samuel Lublinski, Charles-François Dupuis, Rudolf Steck, Arthur Drews, Prosper Alfaric, Georges Ory, Tom Harpur, Michael Martin, John Mackinnon Robertson, Alvar Ellegård, David Fitzgerald, Richard Carrier, René Salm, Timothy Freke, Peter Gandy, Barbara Walker, Thomas Brodie, Earl Doherty, Bruno Bauer and others—heretics and iconoclasts and freethinking dunces all, according to “mainstream” Bible scholars.

If all this evidence and non-evidence including 126 silent writers cannot convince, I’ll wager we will uncover much more. Yet this is but a tiny tip of the mythical Jesus iceberg: nothing adds up for the fable of the Christ. In the Conclusion of No Meek Messiah I summarise the madcap cult of Jesus worship that has plagued the world for centuries. It should be clear to even the most devout and inculcated reader that it is all up for Christianity, and in fact has been so for centuries. Its roots and foundation and rituals are borrowed from ancient cults: there is nothing magical or “God-inspired” about them. The “virgin birth prophecy” as well as the immaculate conception claims are fakeries, the former due to an erroneous translation of the Tanakh, the latter a nineteenth century Catholic apologetic contrivance, a desperate retrofitting.

Jesus was no perfect man, no meek or wise messiah: in fact his philosophies were and are largely immoral, often violent, as well as shallow and irrational. There have been many proposed sons of god, and this Jesus person is no more valid or profound than his priestly precursors. In fact, his contemporary Apollonius was unquestionably the superior logician and philosopher.

Christianity was a very minor and inconsequential cult founded late in the first century and then—while still quite minor—forced upon all the people of the Empire, and all rival kingdoms in the fourth century and beyond, as enforceable law with papal sanction. Christianity has caused more terror and torture and murder than any similar phenomenon. With its tyrannical preachments and directives for sightless and mindless obedience, the Bible is a violent and utterly useless volume, full of lies and immoral edicts and invented histories, no matter which of the many “versions” you may choose to read—including Thomas Jefferson’s radical if gallant abridgement.

The time to stop teaching the tall tales and nonsense to children, frightening them with eternal torture administered by God’s minions, has long ago passed. Parents who do so are likely deluded, and most surely are guilty of child abuse of the worst sort….

The cult of Christianity has an incalculable amount of blood on its hands. And the “Jesus” tale seems to have been nothing more than oral legend, with plenty of hoax and fraud perpetrated along the ages. It is my hope that mankind will someday grow up and relegate the Jesus tales to the same stewing pile that contains Zeus and his son Hercules, roiling away in their justifiable status as mere myth. – JNE, 19 July 2014

Thomas Paine Quote

Bibliography

  1. Catholic Encyclopedia, first edition. The Encyclopedia Press, 1907-1913.
  2. Dungan, David L., Constantine’s Bible, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.
  3. Ehrman, Bart, Jesus, Interrupted, New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
  4. Encyclopedia Biblica: A Critical Dictionary of the Literary, Political and Religious History: The Archeology, Geography and Natural History of the Bible, Edited by Thomas Kelly Cheyne and J. Sutherland Black. 1899.
  5. Magness, Jodi, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.
  6. Oxford Classical Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  7. Salm, René, The Myth of Nazareth, Parsippany: American Atheist Press, 2008.

Further Reading

  1. Alfaric, Prosper, Jésus a-t-il existé? 1932.
  2. Allegro, John M., The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1992.
  3. Barnard, Leslie William, Athenagoras: A Study in Second Century Christian Apologetic, Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1972.
  4. Bradlaugh, Charles, Who Was Jesus Christ? London: Watts and Co., 1913.
    Brodie, Thomas, Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2012.
  5. Carrier, Richard, Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus, Amherst: Prometheus, 2012.
  6. Doherty, Earl, Neither God nor Man, Ottawa: Age of Reason, 2009.
  7. Drews, Arthur, Hat Jesus gelebt? Mainz: 1924.
  8. Dupuis, Charles-François, L’origine de tous les cultes, ou la religion universelle, Paris: 1795.
  9. Ellegård, Alvar, Jesus One Hundred Years Before Christ, New York: Overlook Press, 2002.
  10. Fitzgerald, David, Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All, Lulu.com, 2010.
  11. Freke, Timothy, and Gandy, Peter, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999.
  12. Harpur, Tom, The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light, Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2005.
  13. Higgins, Godfrey, Anacalypsis, A&B Books, 1992.
  14. Jensen, Peter, Moses, Jesus, Paul: Three Variations on the Babylonian Godman Gilgamesh, 1909.
  15. Kneeland, Abner, A Review of the Evidences of Christianity, Boston: Free Enquirer, 1829.
  16. Kuhn, A. B., Who Is This King of Glory? Kessinger Publishing, LLC; Facsimile Ed edition, 1992.
  17. Leidner, Harold, The Fabrication of the Christ Myth, Survey Press, 2000.
  18. Lublinski, Samuel, Die Entstehung des Christentums; Das werdende Dogma vom Leben Jesu, Köln: Eugen Diederichs, 1910.
  19. Martin, Michael, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.
  20. Massey, Gerald, Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, Sioux Falls: NuVision, 2009.
  21. McCabe, Joseph, The Myth of the Resurrection and Other Essays, Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1993.
  22. Ory, Georges, Le Christ et Jésus, Paris: Éditions du Pavillon, 1968.
  23. Paine, Thomas, The Age of Reason, Paris: Barrots, 1794.
  24. Price, Robert M., Deconstructing Jesus, Amherst: Prometheus, 2000.
  25. Price, Robert M., The Case Against the Case for Christ, Cranford: American Atheist Press, 2010.
  26. Reinach, Salomon, Orpheus, a History of Religions, New York: Liveright, 1933.
  27. Remsburg, John, The Christ, New York: Truth Seeker, 1909. Reprinted by Prometheus Books, 1994.
  28. Robertson, John M., A Short History of Christianity, London: Watts & Co., 1902.
  29. Steck, Rudolf, Der Galaterbrief nach seiner Echtheit untersucht nebst kritischen Bemerkungen zu den Paulinischen Hauptbriefen, Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1888.
  30. Walker, Barbara, The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, New York: HarperOne, 1983.
  31. Zindler, Frank, The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, Cranford: American Atheist Press, 2003.

» Michael Paulkovich is an aerospace engineer, historical researcher, freelance writer, and a frequent contributor to Free Inquiry and Humanist Perspectives magazines. His book No Meek Messiah was published in 2013 by Spillix.

No Meek Messiah: Christianity's Lies, Laws and Legacy - Michael Paulkovich

Srinivasa Ramanujan: A genius who transformed mathematics – B. Sathish

VOI

Srinivasa Ramanujan

In just five years at Cambridge, Ramanujan earned the reputation of being the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century. He solved numerous complex mathematicam problems that had remained unsolved for centuries. – B. Sathish

Among the world’s legendary mathematicians, such as Leonhard Euler, Carl Gauss, and Carl Jacobi, a common trait is that they were trained by professionals. In stark contrast, Srinivasa Ramanujan (22nd Dec 1887–26th Apr 1920) was a self-taught mathematician. He once said, “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.” Ramanujan believed his mathematical insights were divine revelations bestowed by Goddess Namagiri Thayar of the ancient sixth-century temple in Namakkal. Deeply devout, he maintained that his discoveries were not merely the result of study, but were revealed to him in dreams by the Goddess.

Early Days

Ramanujan’s father, Kuppuswamy Srinivasa Iyengar, worked as a clerk in a sari shop, while his mother, Komalathammal, played a significant role in nurturing his early education. They lived in a small, traditional home in Kumbakonam. At the age of 21, Srinivasa Ramanujan married a ten-year-old girl, Janakiammal, on 14 July 1909. Although they had no children, Janakiammal’s life was remarkable in its own right. Ramanujan’s wife and mother lived with him until he left for England on 17 March 1914.

By the age of 15, Ramanujan had mastered trigonometry, algebra, geometry, cubic equations, and more. However, due to his intense obsession with mathematics, he lost his scholarship at Kumbakonam Government College in 1904 and subsequently failed to obtain a degree from Presidency College, Madras, in 1907. Interestingly, at just 18 years old, Ramanujan left home following a misunderstanding—an incident that was reported in The Hindu newspaper under the headline “A Missing Boy”.

Well-Wishers

Thanks to Ramaswamy Aiyer, the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society (IMS), who recognised the potential of this gifted mathematician. Ramanujan first published “Some Properties of Bernoulli’s Numbers” in 1910, and from then on, he published a total of 12 research papers in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.

In 1912, after securing a clerical job at the Madras Port Trust, Ramanujan joined the University of Madras as its first research scholar in May 1913.

Ramaswamy Aiyer introduced him to Sheshu Aiyar, who, in turn, gave Ramanujan a note of recommendation to meet Dewan Bahadur R. Ramachandra Rao, the then District Collector of Nellore and a noted mathematics enthusiast. On the suggestion of Sheshu Aiyar, Ramanujan began writing to well-known mathematicians in Britain, starting with unsuccessful attempts to reach M.J.M. Hill, E.W. Hobson, and H.F. Baker.

It was in January 1913 that Ramanujan wrote one of the most famous letters in the history of mathematics. The recipient was G.H. Hardy, a lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, and one of Britain’s foremost pure mathematicians. Without Hardy’s intervention, Ramanujan might never have been recognised as the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century. It was Hardy who truly discovered Ramanujan’s genius. (Explore the Hardy–Ramanujan number 1729!)

Hardy wrote of Ramanujan: “Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems … to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was … beyond that of any mathematician in the world.”

Ramanujan travelled to England on 17 March 1914, after seeking the permission of Goddess Namagiri Thayar of Namakkal, and stayed for about five years until 1919. In just five years, he earned the reputation of being the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, even as the world was engulfed in the First World War. He solved numerous complex problems that had remained unsolved for centuries.

How could a non-mathematician even imagine such achievements? For his work, Ramanujan’s name was accepted for the Fellowship of the Royal Society, and he was also elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

In 2012, Ken Ono of Emory University, United States, finally solved a problem that had remained an open challenge to mathematicians for 90 years—a problem originating from Srinivasa Ramanujan’s last mysterious letter. Professor Ono referred to the problem mentioned in Ramanujan’s final letter to Professor G.H. Hardy. In his speech, Professor Ono said, “No one was talking about black holes back in the 1920s when Ramanujan first came up with the mock modular forms, and yet, his work may unlock secrets about them.”

Ramanujan’s most celebrated works include number theory, infinite series, elliptic functions, modular forms, and mock theta functions, among others.

School education departments should make it mandatory for students to visit the little-known Ramanujan Museum (established in 1993 in Parry’s, Chennai), which houses a collection of some of his works—thanks to the efforts of mathematics educator P.K. Srinivasan.

A young Ramanujan with his wife Janaki Ammal.

Janaki Ammal

It would be an injustice not to mention Janaki Ammal and how her life unfolded after the sudden demise of Ramanujan at the young age of 32. After Ramanujan’s passing, Janaki Ammal lived in Mumbai for eight years, where she learnt tailoring and English. She returned to Madras in 1932, choosing to live as an independent woman. Hanumantharayan Koil Street in Triplicane became her home for the next 50 years. Tailoring helped her to survive financially.

She later adopted W. Narayanan after her close friend Soundravalli passed away. As a foster mother, Janaki Ammal ensured that Narayanan received a proper education and got him married in 1972. Narayanan and his wife, Vaidehi, took great care of Janaki Ammal until her death on 13 April 1994, at the age of 94.

In her later years, Janaki Ammal fondly recalled: “I considered it my good fortune to give him rice, lemon juice, buttermilk, etc., at regular intervals and to give fomentation to his legs and chest when he reported pain. The two vessels used then for preparing hot water are still with me; these remind me often of those days.”

Thanks are due to the governments of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and West Bengal, Madras University, and various mathematical institutions for their constant financial support to Janaki Ammal. The Hinduja Foundation also donated Rs 20,000 towards her welfare.

Janaki Ammal was a philanthropist as well, providing financial support to many students.

In interviews conducted soon after the discovery of Ramanujan’s “lost” notebook by George Andrews in 1976, Janaki Ammal lamented that a statue of Ramanujan had never been made, despite earlier promises. After the efforts of hundreds of mathematicians, a bronze bust was finally created from the only authentic passport-sized photograph of Ramanujan by American sculptor Paul Granlund. A copy of the bust was presented to Mrs Ramanujan at a formal function at the University of Madras in 1985—after a gap of 60 years.

I leave it to readers: are we truly celebrating him? If not, we must learn about Srinivasa Ramanujan and educate our children about his legacy. It is not only the government’s responsibility; it is ours as well.

One can only hope that, as centuries pass, Srinivasa Ramanujan will be remembered alongside other luminaries such as Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, and Bhaskara. – New18, 26 April 2025

› B. Sathish is an engineer in the automotive industry.

Sri Namagiri Lakshmi Narasimhaswami Temple, Nammakal.