Tag indian history

Romila Thapar and the collapse of the ‘eminent’ Marxist monopoly – Utpal Kumar

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Romila Thapar

The real challenge before Indian historiography today is not the existence of competing narratives, but the treatment of one ideological school as the sole custodian of intellectual legitimacy while dismissing all dissent as ignorance. – Utpal Kumar ‘

Sometimes the crisis of Indian historiography can be captured through a single viral clip.

In the video, eminent historian Romila Thapar confidently claims that Patanjali described the relationship between Brahmins and Sramanas as being like that between a snake and a mongoose. It is a striking image, perfectly suited to the Marxist interpretation of ancient Bharat as a perpetual battlefield of social conflict. There is, however, one problem: the passage does not exist in Patanjali’s Mahabhashya. As author Nityananda Mishra explains in the viral clip, Patanjali refers to Sramanas and Brahmins together only once, and even there the snake-mongoose analogy is absent. Interestingly, the same claim had appeared in Thapar’s earlier works, including Interpreting Early India (1992) and Cultural Pasts (2000).

This incident is important not merely because it reveals the truth about a disputed quotation. It is important because it raises uncomfortable questions about the authority exercised by certain schools of Indian historiography and the reluctance within parts of academia to subject “eminent” historians to the same scrutiny they routinely apply to others.

For decades, a relatively small ideological circle dominated the country’s historical discourse. Their influence rested not merely on scholarship, but also on institutional power. They wrote textbooks, controlled college and university departments, influenced media narratives, and determined who truly qualified to be a “serious” historian. Those who questioned them were dismissed as communal, revivalist, unscientific, or simply “unqualified”. The irony, of course, is that many of these guardians of “scientific history” were themselves shielded from the most elementary standards of scrutiny.

That immunity is now gone.

Romila Thapar’s recent memoir, Just Being, reflects this anxiety. She laments the growing influence of what she calls “non-historians” in shaping public understandings of the past and argues that official support is increasingly going towards narratives different from those produced by “professionally trained historians”.

“Until a decade or two ago,” Thapar writes, “historical scholarship was not interfered with by unqualified people. That situation has now changed. The perception of history that is being popularised and has official backing is distinct from that which is being researched by scholars. The two are moving in opposite directions. The danger is that the latter may be nullified by the official support given to the former.”

The complaint reveals a deeper unease. After all, the first time since Independence, Marxist historiography in the country no longer enjoys uncontested intellectual authority. It is this erosion of monopoly, more than disagreement itself, that seems to have generated such anxiety, if not anger.

If one looks back, the country’s “eminent” historians evaded intellectual accountability for most of the post-Independence era. In fact, the only time they were put in the dock—quite literally—was when they went to the Allahabad High Court as “expert witnesses” in the Ram Janmabhoomi case. The Ayodhya case was unusual because it compelled our “professionally trained” historians to leave classrooms and seminar halls to enter a courtroom, where claims had to withstand cross-examination rather than ideological consensus. As author Arvind Singh writes in India’s Rogue Historians, the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute was “perhaps the only instance where Marxist historiography was weighed on jurisprudence”.

The results were devastating. One after another, “expert witnesses” collapsed under cross-examination. Behind the intimidating academic reputations lay conjecture, second-hand assumptions, ideological certainties, and in some cases startling unfamiliarity with the very primary evidence on which they claimed expertise.

One striking example was Prof Suresh Chandra Mishra, who appeared before the court as an expert witness and epigraphist. Prof Mishra initially claimed that inscriptions found at the disputed structure were written in Arabic. Later, he revised the statement and said they were in Persian. Eventually, under cross-examination, he admitted that he knew neither Persian nor Arabic. The contradiction was devastating because epigraphic expertise necessarily depends upon linguistic competence.

The matter became even more awkward when Prof. Mishra claimed he had compared the inscriptions with passages from the Baburnama, which he said he carried inside the disputed premises. When he was cornered by the other side, which argued that one was not allowed to carry anything inside, he changed his statement again, saying he had relied on memory to compare the inscriptions after coming out of the site. Justice Sudhir Agarwal dryly noted this “wonderful memory”, particularly given Mishra’s admission that he knew “neither Persian nor Arabic”.

Then came archaeologist Suraj Bhan, another prominent figure of the academic establishment. His credentials appeared impressive in public debates, but under oath the limitations became apparent. Despite holding degrees involving Sanskrit, he admitted he could neither read nor speak the language. Justice Agarwal observed that Bhan “has not read the text of the inscriptions as published in different books from time to time and had no occasion to compare them”, and that parts of his testimony rested on “pure conjecture and surmise”.

Similarly, Prof. Suvira Jaiswal reportedly acknowledged that, despite appearing as an “expert witness” in the Ayodhya case, she had not read key primary sources such as the Baburnama. Another star expert witness, Prof. Shirin Musavi, reportedly stated that she had never personally visited Ayodhya to examine the disputed structure; she believed such examination was unnecessary for a historian.

These were the historians who were supported and patronised, often openly, by the country’s leading historians led by Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma, D.N. Jha and Irfan Habib, among others. It is interesting that while these second-rank historians took the lead in supporting the Babri Masjid cause, the top historians avoided doing so. They knew the pitfalls of their historiography. They knew it would not withstand cross-questioning. They were also not used to being questioned in public.

The case exposes a contradiction at the heart of elite academic discourse in the country. Historians who insist upon methodological rigour and denounce dissenters as “non-historians” were themselves, in a case as significant as Ayodhya, found relying on assumptions, ideological predispositions, or incomplete engagement with primary evidence.

The larger issue, however, is not that historians can make mistakes. Genuine scholarship always leaves room for error, revision and correction. The real problem is the culture of intellectual insulation that protected certain historians from sustained scrutiny for decades. Within academic and media ecosystems, their assertions were often treated as settled truth. Critical examination was discouraged because it threatened the ideological consensus that dominated post-Independence intellectual life.

The real challenge before Indian historiography today is not the existence of competing narratives. A confident civilisation can accommodate disagreements. The danger lies instead in treating one ideological school as the sole custodian of intellectual legitimacy while dismissing all dissent as ignorance.

Ironically, as Romila Thapar’s memoir itself suggests, the decline of intellectual monopolies often produces resentment. Much of the current anxiety and anger directed at “non-historians” appears rooted less in questions of qualification than in the loss of cultural and institutional control.

History does not—and cannot—belong permanently to any ideological priesthood. – Firstpost, 25 May 2026

› Utpal Kumar is the author of the book, ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’. 

Historian Cartoon

Why Michel Danino’s scholarship must be cherished and celebrated – Swarajya

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Prof. Michel Danino

A survey of Michel Danino’s work provides context to the widespread unease surrounding the Supreme Court’s adverse remarks about him. – Swarajya Staff

The Supreme Court on 11 March ordered a blacklisting of three experts involved in drafting a controversial chapter on ‘corruption in the judiciary’ for a Class 8 NCERT textbook.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul Pancholi described the NCERT director’s response as “disturbing” after it emerged the chapter had been rewritten without disclosing details of the new experts or approval processes.

The court directed the Union government and states not to associate with Professor Michel Danino, Suparna Diwakar and Alok Prasanna Kumar, who were involved in drafting the earlier chapter.

An affidavit by NCERT Director Dinesh Prasad Saklani stated that Michel Danino had supervised the drafting of the chapter, whilst educator Suparna Diwakar and legal researcher Alok Prasanna Kumar were also involved in the process.

The bench directed the Union, all states and all institutions receiving state funds to disassociate them from rendering any service which would mean payment from public funds.

The court observed it had “no reason to doubt that Professor Michel Danino along with Ms Diwakar and Mr Alok Prasanna Kumar either does not have reasonable knowledge about Indian judiciary or they deliberately, knowingly misrepresented the facts in order to project a negative image of the Indian judiciary before students of class 8 who are at an impressionable age. “

However, the three individuals can approach the Supreme Court for modification of this order, the court added.

Who is Michel Danino?

Michel Danino, born in 1956 in Honfleur, France, is a French-born Indian author, scholar, and educationist who has lived in India since 1977 and holds Indian citizenship.

Drawn to Indian civilization from his youth, influenced by Sri Aurobindo and Auroville, he settled in India and became a lifelong student of its ancient heritage. A visiting professor at IIT Gandhinagar, where he supports the Archaeological Sciences Centre, Danino has authored key works including The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati (2010), exploring the Vedic river, and Indian Culture and India’s Future (2011). He has also co-edited textbooks on Indian knowledge traditions and edited Sri Aurobindo and India’s Rebirth (2018).

The Supreme Court’s comments give his critics fresh ammunition to attack him.

Danino has been a target of suspicion in certain academic and media circles for years. The charge is familiar: he writes sympathetically about ancient India’s civilisational achievements, he has defended the physical existence of the Sarasvati river, he has questioned the Aryan invasion theory. This, the accusation runs, makes him a scholar whose conclusions are predetermined by ideology rather than evidence.

Those who make this accusation have, with remarkable consistency, declined to engage with his works.

What the Evidence Actually Looks Like

The Lost River, Danino’s most comprehensive work, is an investigation into the Sarasvati—the river celebrated in the Rig Veda that later texts describe as “disappearing.” The question of whether this river had a physical existence, and if so where, has become entangled in Indian political controversy. Critics therefore treat any scholarly work that argues for its historical reality as ideologically motivated.

What those critics rarely discuss is how Danino builds his case.

The book draws on geological surveys conducted by the Geological Survey of India; on satellite imagery analysed from NASA’s LANDSAT series, France’s SPOT series, and India’s own IRS satellites; on nuclear isotope dating of groundwater samples carried out by scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre; on bore-hole data drilled by American hydrologist Robert Raikes near the Harappan site of Kalibangan; on a 1986–1991 hydrogeological survey of the Cholistan Desert conducted by two German scientists, M.A. Geyh and D. Ploethner; and on remote-sensing research published by three scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation.

This is before one counts the 19th-century British surveyors, the French CNRS mission of the 1980s, the American and Japanese researchers, and the Indian archaeologists whose fieldwork Danino synthesises across more than 400 pages.

The accusation of ideological bias is, in other words, being levelled at a book whose evidentiary base spans four continents, two centuries of scholarship, and at least six scientific disciplines.

Satellite imagery from a NASA programme does not adjust its findings based on Indian political conditions. German isotope hydrology does not take instructions from the RSS. Either the geology is sound or it is not—and critics who wish to challenge Danino’s conclusions are obliged to say which data they dispute and why.

The Quality that Distinguishes a Scholar from an Ideologue

There is a further dimension of Danino’s work that his critics have chosen to overlook: his explicit, consistent acknowledgement of uncertainty and dissent.

In the prologue to The Lost River, he writes that whatever perspective his readers choose to adopt, he will be satisfied if they feel enriched by the inquiry.

In the body of the book, he returns repeatedly to scholars who hold different views, notes where the evidence is genuinely contested, and presents his own synthesis as a reasoned interpretation rather than an unchallengeable verdict. “We will hear diverse viewpoints,” he writes, “learn from every one of them, and I will present my own, while weighing and trying to reconcile inputs from a variety of disciplines.”

This is not a rhetorical formula. It is borne out in practice. Danino does not suppress inconvenient findings. He discusses the minority of scholars who have questioned whether the Vedic Sarasvati was located in India at all, or whether it existed as a physical river.

He engages with their arguments before offering his rebuttal. He flags, more than once, the limits of what the evidence can establish. He distinguishes between what is demonstrated, what is probable, and what remains speculative.

A partisan sophist does not do this. An intellectual demagogue selects evidence, suppresses alternatives, and presents conclusions with a certainty the record does not support. Danino does the opposite—and the contrast with the certainty his critics bring to their dismissals of him is, in itself, telling.

The Argument His Critics Would Rather Not Have

Perhaps the most uncomfortable dimension of Danino’s scholarship—uncomfortable, specifically, for those who accuse him of serving a political agenda—is that his sharpest criticism is directed not at ancient India’s detractors but at the Indian state’s failure to take its own intellectual heritage seriously.

In an article in The Hindu in 2015, Danino notes that no Indian university has a department dedicated to the history of science. He notes that the best online resource for India’s classical mathematicians—a tradition that includes Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Bhaskaracharya, Mahavira, and Narayana Pandita—is maintained not by an Indian institution but by the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

He notes that significant research contributions to the field in recent decades have come from scholars in the United States, France, Japan, and New Zealand, while their Indian counterparts have worked, in his words, “with little or no institutional support.”

This is not a celebration of ancient India’s greatness. It is a damning audit of post-Independence India’s intellectual priorities. If his agenda were simply to flatter a political constituency, he would not write this. He writes it because it is true, and because a scholar whose subject is being neglected has an obligation to say so regardless of whose discomfort it causes.

The same essay makes an argument that deserves to be read in full by everyone who has dismissed Danino as a partisan. He argues that mainstream Indian historiography’s silence on India’s genuine scientific and mathematical achievements—its failure to give Brahmagupta or Sushruta the space it gives to kings and dynasties—has created the vacuum that fantasists have filled.

The absurd claims about ancient aircraft and Vedic nuclear weapons that embarrass serious scholars arise, at least partly, from a historiography that has told Indian students their civilisation produced nothing worth studying.

Danino’s prescription is not mythologising. It is rigour: document the real achievements, teach them properly, and there will be no room left for the fabrications.

A scholar who builds his case on German groundwater surveys, NASA satellite data, and French archaeological missions is not producing ideology. A scholar who acknowledges competing viewpoints, flags the limits of evidence, and invites his readers to draw their own conclusions is not producing propaganda. A scholar who criticises his own country’s institutions for neglecting the very field he is defending is not writing to please a political master.

In the same way, a scholar who included a section on problems with one of India’s most important institutions in a school textbook is only enabling informed civic understanding among young students. – Swarajya, 16 March 2026

See also

Michel Danino Quote

Michel Danino: The quiet giant of our time – Sandeep Balakrishna

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Michel Danino

Prof. Michel Danino has actually rescued the NCERT by lifting it out of the morass into which the Leftist establishment had sunk it. … The reforms to history textbooks under Danino’s leadership were long overdue and are in the right direction. – Sandeep Balakrishna

Michel Danino, in many ways, is reminiscent of the gurus of the ancient Indian parampara. Unassuming and quiet, yet a powerhouse of scholarship, which is matched only by his dignity and unimpeachable intellectual integrity.

I have had the immense fortune of learning from him for nearly two decades. On the several occasions I have met him, the experience has always been enriching, fruitful and, above all, ennobling.

In fact, if at all I have managed to contribute in any meaningful way in the area of Bharatavarsha’s history and cultural heritage, I owe a huge debt of gratitude—which I cannot repay—to Danino’s stellar body of work.

The areas of his scholarly investigations are daunting even for professional scholars—exposing the bogus Aryan Invasion Theory, tracing the trajectory of the Saraswati River, archaeology, ancient Indian knowledge traditions, nuances of the Puranas and epics, prehistoric studies, Harappan art and town planning, marine archaeology….

From a larger perspective, Danino has created a substantial and qualitative scholarly legacy in his own lifetime and continues quietly on his chosen path away from the public glare, away from any temptations of celebrity.

I speak from personal experience.

The distinguished positions he has held—most notably as Visiting Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar and, lately, as Chairperson of the NCERT—are not only entirely deserving but reflective of his eminence.

The Supreme Court, which took suo motu cognisance of a chapter on judicial corruption in an eighth-standard NCERT textbook, has meted out rather high-handed treatment to Danino.

In many ways, it is a tacit admission of its ignorance of his distinction.

There are legions of students and scholars who literally venerate Danino.

Without exaggeration, Danino—a Frenchman by birth and an Indian citizen for over three decades—is one of the finest cultural patriots of India.

He is deeply anchored in the philosophy and ideals of Sri Aurobindo, one of twentieth-century India’s greatest mystic-saints.

To put this in context, Danino has actually rescued the NCERT by lifting it out of the morass into which the Leftist establishment had sunk it.

Arun Shourie’s Eminent Historians, a classic exposé of the NCERT (apart from the Humanities department of the HRD ministry), is perhaps the most devastating critique of this morass to date.

But the late scholar N.S. Rajaram supplies an even more stunning data point that Shourie’s book does not contain.

He mentions how Nurul Hasan—Indira Gandhi’s favourite Education Minister—ran the NCERT like a czar and the consequences thereof.

“NIEPA is a particularly influential body that administers and oversees educational policy in India.

NCERT controls textbooks and other materials that are used in schools and colleges in India…

Through his control of these two powerful bodies, Nurul Hasan became the education czar in India…

A single example should help give an idea of the dangers of this centralised feudal educational policy.

For over 20 years, H.S. Khan—Nurul Hasan’s favourite—headed the history and sociology division of the NCERT.

He is known to hold the view that India became civilised only through the introduction of Islam.

This, incidentally, is also the official Pakistani line…

This is taking the Aryan invasion idea a giant step backwards…

In 1986, on Khan’s initiative, textbook writers in all the states were directed to change the version of history to accord with the anti-Hindu model.”

Yet not one court back then took umbrage at these flagrant distortions of history done at the behest of sitting ministers and high-ranking bureaucrats.

The reforms to history textbooks under Danino’s leadership were long overdue and are in the right direction.

Yet the Supreme Court has taken severe objection to one solitary chapter dealing with judicial corruption and has used its power disproportionately against a widely respected scholar and academic.

Its wording is troubling, to say the least.

“… We have no reason to doubt that Professor Michel Danino, along with Ms Diwakar and Mr Alok Prasanna Kumar, either does not have reasonable knowledge about the Indian judiciary or they deliberately and knowingly misrepresented the facts in order to project a negative image of the Indian judiciary….

There is no reason why such persons should be associated in any manner with the preparation of curriculum or finalisation of textbooks….

We direct the Government of India and all states/UTs/universities etc. to disassociate the three of them forthwith and not assign any responsibility involving public funds.”

Since my own schooldays, there have been any number of chapters in textbooks dealing with political and bureaucratic corruption.

Yet, as far as I can remember, there were no cases or punitive court actions against their authors.

To state the obvious, judicial corruption is a reality.

One is reminded of the recent case of Justice Yashwant Varma, which sent nationwide shockwaves and led to impeachment proceedings against him.

Omitting the mention of uncomfortable truths—judicial corruption in this case—will not make them disappear.

One is tempted to use the cliché that truth is stranger than fiction, but this issue is perhaps one of the clearest signs of the times we live in.

Or rather, an illustration of a timeless truth of history beautifully captured in the Mahabharata:

sulabhāḥ puruṣā rājan satataṃ priyavādinaḥ |
apriyasya tu pathyasya vaktā śrotā ca durlabhaḥ ||

“O King, it is easy to find people who always say pleasant things.

But it is extremely rare to find someone who speaks the unpleasant but beneficial truth, and even rarer to find someone willing to listen to it.” – News18, 13 March 2026

› Sandeep Balakrishna is an author, editor, columnist, public intellectual and an independent researcher. He is the founder and chief editor of The Dharma Dispatch.

See also 

Plato Quote

Sita Ram Goel’s letter to Romila Thapar – Sandeep Balakrishna

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Romila Thapar

Sita Ram Goel’s letter in 1991 to Romila Thapar rebuffs her and her gang’s phoney claims that Muslim invaders and rulers did not destroy Hindu temples and forcibly convert Hindus to Islam. – Sandeep Balakrishna

The first thing about Left-Liberals is the fact that they’re bullies and miraculously transform themselves as victims the moment someone stands up to them. A defining character-trait of a bully is a complete absence of manners and decency. Even a brief perusal of the “works” of the likes of Ram “perfumed” Guha, (late) Girish Karnad, (late) U.R. Anantha Murthy, T.M. Krishna, et al reveals this fact. Needless, they all took their lessons from that arch-bully Nawab Nehru. A little known fact of Nehru’s career as a wily politician is that when challenged, he would beat a temporary retreat, then go behind the scenes and write flowery, flattering letters in honeyed language to persuade his opponent to “please let me have my way just this once.” Those were vastly different times and Nehru got away with his perfidy. However, once he was confident that his authority as prime minister and party supremo was unchallengeable, he bared his fangs and hunted down and finished off the same opponent with a zealotry matched only by a medieval sultan.

This is the exact playbook that the Nehruvian history establishment followed under the leadership of Czarina Romila Thapar. And like Nawab Nehru, her gang either expelled or finished off the careers of all scholars and historians who did not toe the Communist line. Yet, there were undaunted men and women who were not only not afraid of their bullying but actually stood up to them and punched back twice as hard. In the political realm, the indomitable Chakravarthy Rajagopalachari ensured that Tamil Nadu would never have a Congress government. In the realm of history writing, doughty fighters like Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie, Koenraad Elst, David Frawley, and Meenakshi Jain led the fight from the front at great personal cost. It took a long time, but truth prevailed: names like Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Bipan Chandra, and D.N. Jha have deservedly become obscenities and swearwords. Think about it: would you like to be called “Romila Thapar?”

Of these Sita Ram Goel was the master-boxer who did not give the dictionary meaning of say, “charlatan” as “a person falsely claiming to have a special knowledge or skill.” He simply uttered the word, “charlatan.” And provided us a great model at calling out charlatanism:

1. Suffer them not

2. Confront them head on

3. Be independent

4. Watch them squirm and then lose their ground when they start abusing and defaming you personally

5. The final stage: when they play victim

Recent history shows that all of these have rung true in real life. One cite scores of instances of this in Sita Ram Goel’s writings but a letter that he wrote to Romila Thapar in 1991 serves as a superb illustration of this model. In it, Goel rebuffs Romila Thapar and her gang’s phoney claims that Muslim invaders and rulers did not destroy Hindu temples and forcibly convert Hindus, to say the least. By itself, the letter is an exemplary work that combines solid historical scholarship, adherence to truth, and fearlessness in confronting an opponent armed with formidable political and institutional power.

Here are some excerpts included in the appendix of his monumental, two-volume work, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, Vol. 1, Appendex 4.

Excerpts from Sita Ram Goel’s Letter to Romila Thapar

We return to the Marxist professors…

We have cited from eighty histories written by Muslims over a period of more than one thousand years. We have also cited several Islamic inscriptions which confirm what the historians say. The citations show how Hindu temples continued to be destroyed over a vast area and for a long time. We have added no editorial comments and given no communal twist to the events that took place. All along, we have kept to the actual language used by the Muslim historians.

We wonder if the professors will dismiss as a mere listing of dates the evidence we have presented. What we expect from the professors is that they will come forward with historical analysis and interpretations so that the destruction of Hindu temples mentioned in the Muslim narratives gets explained in terms of economic or political or any other non-religious motives.

We stick to our position, namely, that it is the theology of Islam which offers the only straight-forward and satisfactory explanation of why Muslim conquerors and rulers did what they did to Hindu places of worship. We have provided full facts about that theology, as also about the history of how it took its final shape. It would be most welcome if the professors come out with their comments on the character and meaning of this theology. In fact, we look forward to a Marxist explanation of it. What were the concrete material conditions and objective historical forces which gave rise to this theology in Arabia at that time?

Next, we refer to the second point which the professors had made in their letter to The Times of India [sometime in August 1986]. They had said that acts of intolerance have been committed by followers of all religions. … We do not share their philosophy of separating the Buddhists, the Jains and the Animists from the Hindus. But we agree to use their terms for the time being and request them to produce:

1. A list of epigraphs which record the destruction of Buddhist and Jain monuments and Animist shrines by any Hindu, at any time;

2. Citations from Hindu literary sources describing destruction of Buddhist and Jain monuments and Animist shrines by any Hindu, at any time;

3. The Hindu theology which says or even suggests that non-Hindu places of worship should be destroyed or desecrated or plundered, or which hails such acts as pious or meritorious;

4. A list of Hindu kings or commanders whom Hindus have hailed as heroes for desecrating or destroying or converting into Hindu places of worship any Buddhist or Jain monuments or Animist shrines;

5. A list of Buddhist and Jain monuments and Animist shrines which have been desecrated or destroyed or converted into Hindu places of worship in the remote or the recent past;

6. The names and places of Hindu monuments which stand on the sites occupied earlier by Buddhist or Jain monuments or Animist shrines, or which have materials from the latter embedded in their masonry;

7. Names of Buddhist, Jain and Animist leaders or organizations who have claimed that such and such Hindu monuments are usurpations, and demanded their restoration to the original occupants;

8. Names of Hindu leaders and organizations who have resisted any demand made by Buddhists or Jains or Animists for restoration of the latter’s places of worship, or called for legislation which will maintain the status quo, or cried “Hinduism in danger,” or staged street riots in support of their usurpations.

We think that this sort of concrete evidence alone can decide the question of the limits to the logic of restoration of religious sites…

If the professors fail to come out with answers to questions posed by us, and to present the evidence in support of their statements, we shall be forced to conclude that far from being serious academicians, they are cynical politicians hawking ad hoc or plausible explanations in the service of a party line. In fact, we shall be justified in saying that they are … Stalinists. Stalinism … is an exercise in suppressio veri suggestio falsi in pursuit of a particular end. – The Dharma Dispatch, 16 March 2020

Hindu Temples: What Happened To Them (Vol. I).

What Mahmud of Ghazni did must not be forgotten – Reshmi Dasgupta

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Somnath temple converted to mosque ca 1931.

What happened during this week 1,000 years ago was not a one-off assault by a greedy Central Asian despot who just incidentally happened to be Muslim. Mahmud’s destruction of Somnath set off a millennium-long assault on it by men who definitely had one thing in common apart from Islam: an animus towards the Jyotirlinga. – Reshmi Dasgupta

From January 6 to 9, 1026, the army of Mahmud of Ghazni lay siege to the wondrous temple of Somnath near the port city of Veraval. The defenders of the fortified shrine eventually could not repel the troops of the Central Asian invader and Somnath was captured. It was Mahmud’s 16th raid on India and loot was not the only target. Contemporary sources mention that Hindu merchants offered more money if he spared the idol; he refused and struck the first blow.

For that act, Mahmud earned the title “Butshikan” or idol-breaker, from an admiring Islamic world and his renown for the desecration of Somnath and other major Hindu temples in India persisted for centuries. Sultan Sikandar Shah earned the same Butshikan title in the 14th century for destroying temples in Kashmir in pursuance of the precepts of the Sufi preacher Mir Mohammad Hamadani. Even 600 years later, Aurangzeb appreciated Mahmud’s Islamic fervour.

It is inevitable that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s commemoration of the 1000th anniversary of the first destruction (as opposed to the misleading word “sacking” commonly used for the violent actions of Mahmud of Ghazni) of the Somnath temple will be countered with supposed “proof” of either “Arab” heroism or Hindu perfidy or both. It is now almost an article of faith among certain sections in India and abroad that Mahmud was more maligned than malevolent.

As has been often pointed out in recent times, the assertions of the high priestess of the secular camp Romila Thapar on the destruction of Somnath lack basis in actual facts even if delivered with withering condescension in impeccable upper class accented English. But there are plenty of willing believers in Thapar’s argument that Mahmud was not communal—merely venal—and that his destruction of the magnificent Shiva lingam at Somnath was incidental.

Indeed, the PM calling the repeated rebuilding of Somnath after each brutal destruction and plunder a symbol of the “unbreakable courage of countless children of Bharat Mata who protected our culture and civilisation” will be met with predictable counters. First, that “Arabs”—mainly traders who had settled in the area and married local women—died protecting Somnath from Mahmud’s marauders. Second, that there were many Hindus in Mahmud’s army.

There were indeed Hindus in Mahmud’s army, including battalion commanders, and he used them with varying effectiveness in campaigns on the subcontinent and even further north in Central Asia. But the phenomenon of mercenaries—soldiers of fortune who fight for the best paymaster—is well known. The presence of Hindus in his army cannot be taken to mean Mahmud was “secular” or that his actions were not intended to attack and diminish India’s majority faith.

There is no dependable account of Arabs dying while defending Somnath, but they could well have been miffed by their co-religionists from Ghazni disturbing their livelihoods. Arabs had all been Islamised by then although earlier traders and sailors may have adhered to pre-Islamic faiths including Christianity. So, it would be a stretch to imagine they would risk irking Allah by actually fighting alongside local Hindus kafirs to save Somnath from his holy warriors.

The Veraval Inscriptions (so named for the ancient port town next to the Somnath, which had a bustling mercantile trading business) dated to about 250 years after Mahmud’s destruction of the great Shiva lingam, highlight the dynamic between the two communities in the last millennium. The bilingual inscriptions from the reign of the Vaghela king Arjundev, records an agreement for the financing of the upkeep of a mosque at Somnath Patan built by a resident of Hormuz.

Curiously, the longer Sanskrit inscription lists the Hindu king and hierarchy but mendaciously describes the lord of the mosque as Vishwanatha and Shunyarupa and even calls Prophet Mohammed a “prabodhak” or preceptor. The Muslim shipowner donor from Hormuz Nuruddin Firoz is called a “dharmabandhav” of Sri Chhada who seems to be the mosque’s chief administrator. But in the shorter Arabic notation, there is no attempt to Indianise Allah or his Prophet.

The twin inscriptions seem to indicate that Hindu rulers bore no lasting animus against all Muslims—especially the Arab and Persian merchants from the Gulf—for the depredations of the Turkic invader from Ghazni 200 years before, and allowed them to set up mosques near the temple. But one sentence of the Arabic inscription points to the thinking of the Muslims even if they attempted to couch their initial outreach to the Hindus with seemingly syncretic gestures.

The Arabic inscription expresses the hope that Somnath will one day become a city of Islam, and that infidels and idols will eventually be banished from it. Why did the officials of the Vaghelas (the last Hindu kingdom of the region) allow that explicit expression of intent to pass unchallenged? Could they not read Arabic? Or were they persuaded, as indeed are some academics reading it 750 years later, that it was a “pro forma” statement and did not constitute a threat?In the event, though Somnath was revered enough for the 11th century Chalukya ruler Bhima I to rebuild it after Ghazni’s desecration, local inhabitants naively seemed to have borne no permanent suspicion of Muslims as the Veraval inscriptions two and a half centuries later seems to confirm. But a mere 35 years after those twin plaques were incised, the army of Delhi’s Sultan Alauddin Khilji under Ulugh Khan pillaged and destroyed Somnath yet again.

And that deed was approvingly chronicled by no less than the much-admired (even today) Persian poet Amir Khusro. In Khazain-ul-Futuh (Treasures of Victory), he gleefully wrote in 1310 (after Khilji’s armies attacked again in 1304 and annexed all of Gujarat):

“So the temple of Somnath was made to bow towards the Holy Mecca; and as the temple lowered its head and jumped into the sea, you may say that the building first said its prayers and then had a bath.”

He also added:

“It seemed as if the tongue of the imperial sword explained the meaning of the text: ‘So he (Abraham) broke them (the idols) into pieces except the chief of them, that haply they may return to it.’ A pagan country, the Mecca of the Infidels, now became the Medina of Islam. The followers of Abraham now acted as guides in place of the Brahman leaders. The robust-hearted true believers rigorously broke all idols and temples wherever they found them.”

Khusro also dispelled doubts about the intent of the Arabic Veraval inscription:

“Owing to the war, ‘takbir,’ and ‘shahadat’ was heard on every side; even the idols by their breaking affirmed the existence of God. In this ancient land of infidelity, the call to prayers rose so high that it was heard in Baghdad and Madain while the Khutba resounded in the dome of Abraham and over the water of Zamzam. The sword of Islam purified the land as the Sun purifies the earth.”

That Khusro described Somnath as the “Mecca of Infidels” underlines its primacy as a Hindu centre of worship, reiterating its pride of place as the first of the 12 Jyotirlingas listed in the Shiva Purana. So it is not surprising that every Muslim ruler thereafter who wanted to assert his religious cred and supremacy attacked Somnath, from Muzaffar Shah to Mahmud Begada to Aurangzeb. But it was restored, rebuilt, reconsecrated faithfully by Hindu rulers each time.

What is glossed over by apologists is that Somnath was not considerately left to resume worship. It was converted into a mosque by several Islamic attackers and then reconstructed repeatedly as a temple by Hindu monarchs. It was turned into a domed mosque by Aurangzeb in 1665. And the final rebuild happened in 1951, thanks to the determined efforts of Sardar Patel, KM Munshi and Dr Rajendra Prasad in the teeth of opposition from Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

In 1783, the formidable Maratha queen Ahilyabai Holkar had another Shiva temple constructed 200 metres from the original site of Somnath, whose added dome and minaret can be seen in late 19th century photographs now in the British Library. She had done the same three years earlier in Varanasi where the original Kashi Vishwanath temple had been mostly destroyed (only one wall left standing) and rebuilt as “Gyanvapi” mosque, also on Aurangzeb’s orders.

So, what happened during this week 1,000 years ago was not a one-off assault by a greedy Central Asian despot who just incidentally happened to be Muslim. Mahmud’s destruction of Somnath set off a millennium-long assault on it by men who definitely had one thing in common apart from Islam: an animus towards the Jyotirlinga. That it is standing proudly again is indeed a testament to the quiet determination and faith of the children of Bharat Mata, as PM Modi said. – News18, 7 January 2026

›  Reshmi Dasgupta is a freelance writer formerly with the Times of India Group. 
Somnath Temple

Somnath: A thousand years of unbroken faith – Narendra Modi

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Narendra Modi at the Somnath Temple.

If the Somnath Temple, which was attacked a thousand years ago and faced continuous attacks thereon, could rise again and again, then we can surely restore our great nation to the glory it embodied a thousand years ago before the invasions. – PM Narendra Modi

Somnath … hearing this word instils a sense of pride in our hearts and minds. It is the eternal proclamation of India’s soul. This majestic temple is situated on the western coast of India in Gujarat, at a place called Prabhas Patan. The Dwadasha Jyotirling Stotram mentions the 12 Jyotirlings across India. The stotram begins with “सौराष्ट्रे सोमनाथं च…” symbolising the civilisational and spiritual importance of Somnath as the first Jyotirling.

It is also said:

सोमलिङ्गं नरो दृष्ट्वा सर्वपापैः प्रमुच्यते ।

लभते फलं मनोवाञ्छितं मृतः स्वर्गं समाश्रयेत्॥

It means: Just the sight of Somnath Shivling ensures that a person is freed of sins, achieves their righteous desires and attains heaven after death.

Tragically, this very Somnath, which drew the reverence and prayers of millions, was attacked by foreign invaders, whose agenda was demolition, not devotion.

The year 2026 is significant for the Somnath Temple. It has been 1,000 years since the first attack on this great shrine. It was in January of 1026 that Mahmud of Ghazni attacked this temple, seeking to destroy a great symbol of faith and civilisation, through a violent and barbaric invasion.

Yet, one thousand years later, the temple stands as glorious as ever because of numerous efforts to restore Somnath to its grandeur. One such milestone completes 75 years in 2026. It was during a ceremony on May 11th 1951, in the presence of the then President of India, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, that the restored temple opened its doors to devotees.

The first invasion of Somnath a thousand years ago in 1026, the cruelty that was unleashed upon the people of the town and the devastation that was inflicted upon the shrine have been documented in great detail in various historical accounts. When you read them, the heart trembles. Each line carries the weight of grief, cruelty and a sorrow that refuses to fade with time.

Imagine the impact it had on Bharat and the morale of the people. After all, Somnath had great spiritual significance. It was also on the coast, giving strength to a society with great economic prowess, whose sea traders and seafarers carried tales of its grandeur far and wide.

Yet, I am proud to state unequivocally that the story of Somnath, a thousand years after the first attack, is not defined by destruction. It is defined by the unbreakable courage of crores of children of Bharat Mata.

The medieval barbarism that began a thousand years ago in 1026 went on to ‘inspire’ others to repeatedly attack Somnath. It was the start of an attempt to enslave our people and culture. But, each time the temple was attacked, we also had great men and women who stood up to defend it and even made the ultimate sacrifice. And every single time, generation after generation, the people of our great civilisation picked themselves up, rebuilt and rejuvenated the temple. It is our privilege to have been nurtured by the same soil that has nurtured greats like Ahilyabai Holkar, who made a noble attempt to ensure devotees can pray at Somnath.

In the 1890s, Swami Vivekananda visited Somnath and that experience moved him. He expressed his feelings during a lecture in Chennai in 1897 when he said:

“Some of these old temples of Southern India and those like Somnath of Gujarat will teach you volumes of wisdom, will give you a keener insight into the history of the race than any amount of books.

“Mark how these temples bear the marks of a hundred attacks and a hundred regenerations, continually destroyed and continually springing up out of the ruins, rejuvenated and strong as ever! That is the national mind, that is the national life-current. Follow it and it leads to glory. Give it up and you die; death will be the only result, annihilation, the only effect, the moment you step beyond that life current.”

The sacred duty of rebuilding the Somnath Temple after independence came to the able hands of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. A visit during Diwali time in 1947 moved him so much that he announced that the temple will be rebuilt there. Finally, on May 11th 1951, a grand temple in Somnath opened its doors to devotees and Dr. Rajendra Prasad was present there. The great Sardar Sahib was not alive to see this historic day, but the fulfilment of his dream stood tall before the nation.

The then Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, was not too enthused with this development. He did not want the Honourable President as well as Ministers to associate with this special event. He said that this event created a bad impression of India. But Dr. Rajendra Prasad stood firm and the rest is history. No mention of Somnath is complete without recalling the efforts of K.M. Munshi, who supported Sardar Patel very effectively. His works on Somnath, including the book, Somanatha: The Shrine Eternal, are extremely informative and educative.

Indeed, as the title of Munshiji’s book conveys, we are a civilisation that carries a sense of conviction about the eternity of spirit and of ideas. We firmly believe that that which is eternal is indestructible, as outlined in the famous Gita verse “नैनं छिन्दन्ति शस्त्राणि….” There can be no better example of our civilisation’s indomitable spirit than Somnath, which stands gloriously, overcoming odds and struggles.

It is this same spirit that is visible in our nation, one of the brightest spots of global growth, having overcome centuries of invasions and colonial loot. It is our value systems and the determination of our people that have made India the centre of global attention today. The world is seeing India with hope and optimism.

They want to invest in our innovative youngsters. Our art, culture, music and several festivals are going global. Yoga and Ayurveda are making a worldwide impact, boosting healthy living. Solutions to some of the most pressing global challenges are coming from India.

Since time immemorial, Somnath has brought together people from different walks of life. Centuries ago, Kalikal Sarvagna Hemchandracharya, a respected Jain monk, came to Somnath. It is said that after praying there, he recited a verse, “भवबीजाङ्करजनना रागाद्या: क्षयमुपगता यस्य।”. It means: “Salutations to That One in whom the seeds of worldly becoming are destroyed, in whom passion and all afflictions have withered away.” Today, Somnath holds the same ability to awaken something profound within the mind and soul.

A thousand years after the first attack in 1026, the sea at Somnath still roars with the same intensity as it did back then. The waves that wash the shores of Somnath tell a story. No matter what, just like the waves, it kept rising again and again.

The aggressors of the past are now dust in the wind, their names synonymous with destruction. They are footnotes in the annals of history, while Somnath stands bright, radiating far beyond the horizon, reminding us of the eternal spirit that remained undiminished by the attack of 1026. Somnath is a song of hope that tells us that while hate and fanaticism may have the power to destroy for a moment, faith and conviction in the power of goodness have the power to create for eternity.

If the Somnath Temple, which was attacked a thousand years ago and faced continuous attacks thereon, could rise again and again, then we can surely restore our great nation to the glory it embodied a thousand years ago before the invasions. With the blessings of Shree Somnath Mahadev, we move forward with a renewed resolve to build a Viksit Bharat, where civilisational wisdom guides us to work for the welfare of the whole world.

Jai Somnath! – The New Indian Express, 5 January 2026

› Narendra Modi is the Prime Minister of India and Chairman of the Shri Somnath Temple Trust.

Ruins of Somnath as viewed in 1869

Why are Indian historians in denial mode? – David Frawley

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Indus Script

It is time for deconstructionist historians to be deconstructed. Such historians, whose view of the world is purely outward, do not have the insight to appreciate India. … Their historical accounts reflect the attempt of a recent ruling elite to rewrite history in its own image—and to deny legitimacy for any other group, even if it requires denying the very existence of India before they assumed power! – Dr. David Frawley

India today is a strange country in that, uniquely among the nations of the world, it seems to be afraid of its own history.

If we study current historical accounts, particularly by India’s academic Left, the most important fact about the history of India is that there is no real history of India. This is because such scholars are unable to see the existence of any cohesive entity called India before 1947.

India as a real country in their view is attributed mainly to Jawaharlal Nehru and his followers after independence on a region that, though previously under the umbrella of British rule, was otherwise lacking in unity, continuity or perhaps even civilisational depth.

Such historians are happy to negate the history of their own country. Their accounts of India’s history are largely denials of any enduring country, civilisation or culture worthy of the name. Their history of India is one of foreign invasions, temporary or vanished empires, internal social divisions and conflicts, and a disparate and confused cultural diversity. They regard India as a melting pot or conglomeration of widely separated peoples and cultures coming together by the accident of geography that hardly constitutes any united country or national identity.

Unfortunately, such Indian historians, particularly with political alliances with Left historians in UK and US, are introducing their anti-India ideas into Western academia, which still does not understand India’s very different civilisational model.

Such studies forget that national identity is cultural, not simply political. India did not become a British state under British rule or an Islamic state under Muslim rule. The older Indian/Bharatiya culture continued.

These anti-India views are easily countered by a number of historical facts.

The first is that outside people and countries have long recognised a civilisation called India.

After Alexander the Great came to India in the fourth century BCE, the Greek historian Megasthenes wrote a book on the region called Indika, in which he noted an existing tradition in the country of 153 kings going back over 6,400 years. The Greeks overall lauded the civilisation of India.

Buddhist pilgrims in the ancient and medieval period, particularly from China, honoured India and its great culture during their travels. India’s cultural influence spread to Indonesia and Indochina in the East and into Central Asia, extending on a religious level to China and Japan.

The ancient Romans lost much of their wealth in a one-sided trade with India and the Europeans long sought the riches of India. Columbus, of course, found America by chance while looking for a more direct sea route to India.

Second, India, like many countries, has more than one name. The Indian Constitution says the “India that is Bharat”. Bharat is the main ancient name for the region going back to King Bharat, an ancient ruler long before Rama, Krishna or Buddha.

The Bharatas were the main people of the ancient Rig Veda, who ruled from the Sarasvati region. They eventually split into several groups, one of which, the Kurus, became dominant in late ancient times, as the main people of the Mahabharata.

Modern historians can more easily deny history to the name India than to Bharat and so ignore the other name of the country.

Third, India has probably the oldest, largest and most continuous literature of any civilisation. The Vedas with their many thousands of pages dwarf anything from the Middle East, Egypt or Greece of the ancient period.

Geography is an important topic in these texts. The Vedas speak of a land of seven rivers, Sapta Sindhu, extending to the ocean, of which the Sarasvati River was the most important. The Persians in their oldest Zend-Avesta remember the area as Hapta Hindu. Sindhu, Hindu and India are related terms.

The Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranas outline a sacred geography of India/Bharat from Kailas in the north to Lanka in the south, Assam in the east to beyond the Indus in the west. Buddhist and Jain texts do the same, showing a common culture and geography.

Around this sacred geography, Indians built numerous temples and recognised numerous sacred sites, revealing this vast region and its cultural unity.

Along with these sacred sites are numerous festivals and pilgrimages. We see this in modern India, which has the largest tradition of pilgrimage in the world, notably the massive Kumbha Melas that bring in tens of millions of pilgrims. Pilgrims throughout India visit these sites, with South Indians commonly travelling as far as the Himalayan temples of the north. Festivals like Diwali are elaborately celebrated throughout the country.

Ancient Indian literature contains a calendar system still widely followed, the Panchanga. Indian calendars extend from historical time of thousands of years to cosmic time of billions of years.

Fourth, extensive new evidence of archaeology upholds the cultural continuity of the region. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) claims that in the Haryana/Kurukshetra/Sarasvati river area there is evidence of a continual development of agriculture and civilisation from 8000 BCE, extending through the Harappan urban era. This area hosts Rakhigarhi, the largest Harappan site, more extensive than Mohenjodaro or Harappa.

The Harappan Civilization—also called the Indus Valley or Saraswati Civilisation—is the largest and most uniform urban civilisation of the ancient world in the third millennium BCE. It ended with the drying up of the Sarasvati River around 1900 BCE, which the Geological Survey of India (GSI) has verified. The Vedas refer to the different stages of the Sarasvati river from an ocean-going stream to drying up in the desert, showing they resided on the river long before its termination.

Consistent with their negative line of thought, Leftist historians ignore this information or accuse archaeologists of political bias in their findings.

Lastly, but equally important, the independence movement drew inspiration from the older history of India/Bharat, with such revered figures as Swami Vivekananda, Lokmanya Tilak and Sri Aurobindo seeking to revive the ancient culture. Even Mahatma Gandhi’s mantra was Ram and his idea of India was Ram Rajya.

Not surprisingly, most of these independence leaders have been ignored by the same group of historians, who have made Nehru tower over them, with some afforded diminished roles and others forgotten altogether.

The Congress party, the main support for such historians, has since named every major institution or initiative in India possible after the three members of the Nehru family who became prime ministers. They have little regard for other Congress prime ministers like P.V. Narasimha Rao, whom they have also almost erased from history.

Yet at the same time today, India’s great culture and civilisation through Yoga, Vedanta, Buddhism, Sanskrit, Indian music and dance is once more influencing the entire world—expanding in spite of this historical denigration.

It is time for these deconstructionist historians to be deconstructed. Such historians, whose view of the world is purely outward, do not have the insight to appreciate India, because it is not a mere political formation but a vast spiritual culture.

Their historical accounts reflect the attempt of a recent ruling elite to rewrite history in its own image—and to deny legitimacy for any other group, even if it requires denying the very existence of India before they assumed power! – Vedanet, 30 June 2016

›This article originally appeared in Swarajya Magazine. 

› Dr David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) is a Vedacharya and includes in his unusual wide scope of studies Ayurveda, Yoga, Vedic astrology, and Indian History.

Mohenjo-daro Graphic

 

Chanakya: Why Devdutt Pattanaik’s pseudo-history falls apart – Prosenjit Nath

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Chanakya & Chandragupta Maurya

Chanakya was real, brilliant, and indispensable to India’s civilisational memory, no matter how inconvenient that fact may be for the modern political fantasist Devdutt Pattanaik. – Dr. Prosenjit Nath

I read Devdutt Pattanaik’s article “A fantasy called Chanakya” in The New Indian Express (9 Nov. 2025). Had Chanakya himself been alive, Pattanaik’s fantasies would have survived about as long as the kusa grass Chanakya famously uprooted when he vowed to destroy the Nandas. Beneath the polished prose and familiar rhetoric lies an old ideological trick: confuse the reader with multiple names, shout “interpolation” often enough, wrap it all in modern caste politics, and hope a historical figure vanishes.

But history does not work that way. The moment one actually looks at primary sources, Pattanaik’s thesis collapses flat.

Let us begin precisely where he does not want readers to look: the Arthaśāstra itself. The text explicitly identifies its author in unmistakable terms: “विष्णुगुप्तेन आर्यकौटिल्येन च सम्पादितम्”—compiled by Viśnugupta, the noble Kautilya. And again: “समाप्तं कौटिलीयम् अर्थशास्त्रम्”—here ends the Arthaśāstra of Kautilya.

Pattanaik’s sleight of hand rests on manufacturing two doubts. First that since the author is called “Kautilya”, Chanakya must be fictional. Second, that if the Arthaśāstra can be pushed centuries later, Chanakya cannot belong to the Mauryan age or guide Chandragupta Maurya. Both doubts evaporate the moment chronology is taken seriously.

Ashoka’s edicts from the 3rd century BCE describe an empire run through mahamatras, welfare officials, judicial ethics, administrative surveillance, animal-protection days, and moral governance—all core elements laid out systematically in the Arthaśāstra. The Mauryan state cannot be built on a Kautilyan framework if that framework supposedly did not exist until 500 CE. The empire itself is the evidence. Kautilya must predate Ashoka, exactly as tradition maintains—at least the late 4th century BCE.

Then comes the Spitzer Manuscript, the oldest known Sanskrit manuscript (1st–2nd century CE), which contains unmistakable references to the Arthaśāstra. Its discovery location is devastating for Pattanaik’s narrative: a Buddhist monastery in Kizil, Xinjiang—thousands of kilometres from any imagined “Brahmin power structure”. Why would Buddhist monks preserve and study a supposedly late “Brahminical propaganda text”? They would not, unless the text was already ancient, authoritative, and indispensable. This single fact shatters the claim that Kautilya was invented centuries later.

But the knockout punch arrives with the Kāmandakīya Nītiśāra (4th century CE), authored by the Buddhist scholar Kāmandaki. He explicitly and admiringly states that Viśnugupta/Kautilya—the author of the Arthaśāstra—was the very strategist who overthrew the Nandas and established Chandragupta Maurya. This is not a Hindu text, nor a Brahminical self-glorification exercise. A Buddhist intellectual, with no incentive to mythologise a Brahmin minister, identifies Kautilya and Chanakya as the same revolutionary statesman. That is the missing bridge Pattanaik refuses to acknowledge.

The convergence does not stop there. Buddhist sources such as the Mahāvaṃsa and Divyāvadāna describe Chandragupta’s Brahmin mentor. Jain texts like the Nisītha-Cūrṇi and Hemacandra’s Pariśiṣṭaparvan narrate the same overthrow of the Nandas by Chanakya for Chandragupta. Gupta-era dramas like Mudrārākṣasa assume the identity of Kautilya and Chanakya is already common knowledge. Kashmiri traditions such as the Tantrākhyāyikā immortalise Chanakya as the archetype of political genius. Across Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, and regional traditions—often rivals, sometimes hostile—the same man performs the same acts under different names. That is not myth-making; it is historical convergence, the strongest form of evidence when dealing with antiquity.

Pattanaik makes much of multiple names, as if this were suspicious. It is not. In the ancient world, it was normal. Confucius was also Kong Qiu, Kongzi, and Zhongni. In India, Viśnugupta is the personal name, Kautilya the gotra or scholastic name, and Chanakya the patronymic. One man. Many names. Total consistency. Claiming otherwise is like arguing that Zhongni disproves Confucius.

The remaining tactics are equally flimsy. References to “China” and Roman dināra are used to push the Arthaśāstra centuries forward. Yet scholars like K.P. Jayaswal showed long ago that “Cina” refers to the Sina/Shina Himalayan region near Gilgit, not Han China—hence terms like kauseya and cinapatta, which are not Chinese words. Later interpolations do exist, just as they do in Homer, Euclid, or the Pentateuch. No serious scholar claims interpolations prove the author never existed. Pattanaik deploys this argument selectively because he needs the text to be late to sever it from Chanakya.

Finally, the caste obsession collapses entirely. The earliest sources identifying Chanakya as a Brahmin are Buddhist and Jain traditions—historically critical of Brahmin authority. If “Brahmins invented Chanakya”, why do rival traditions independently preserve the same identity centuries earlier? Because they were transmitting historical memory, not manufacturing propaganda.

To be clear: Chanakya, Kautilya, and Viśnugupta are not three different people. They are three traditional names for one historical genius—the architect of the Mauryan Empire. When multiple competing traditions over two millennia remember the same man overthrowing the same dynasty for the same emperor, coincidence becomes absurd. History, in this case, is unanimous.

Devdutt Pattanaik’s article is not courageous scholarship. It is ideological provocation dressed up as history—a soggy biscuit of pseudo-academia that dissolves the moment primary sources are allowed to speak. And they speak loudly: Chanakya was real, brilliant, and indispensable to India’s civilisational memory, no matter how inconvenient that fact may be for modern political fantasies. – News18, 1 January 2026

› Prosenjit Nath is a technocrat, political analyst, and author. He writes on national, geopolitical, and social issues.

A Fantasy Called Chanakya by Devdutt Pattanaik

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 the West has sustained an anti-India bias on Kashmir till today – Claude Arpi

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Maj. William Brown

Despite Raja Hari Singh having signed the Instrument of Accession and joined India, Maj. William Brown of the Gilgit Scouts refused to acknowledge the orders of the Maharaja, and on November 1, 1947, he handed over the entire area of Gilgit-Baltistan to Pakistan. – Claude Arpi

On May 4, during an interactive session at the Arctic Circle India Forum 2025, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar spoke of broader geopolitical upheavals affecting the world, in particular Europe, which “must display some sensitivity and mutuality of interest for deeper ties with India”.

Answering a question on India’s expectations from Europe, Jaishankar said, “When we look out at the world, we look for partners; we do not look for preachers, particularly preachers who do not practice at home and preach abroad.”

This sharp answer came after the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, urged both India and Pakistan to exercise restraint.

Kaja Kallas, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, formerly a Prime Minister of Estonia, was obviously ill-informed about the situation in Kashmir (and along the India-Pakistan border).

The attitude of certain Western countries (as well as the UN General Secretary) represents a great danger for India today; it has been so in the past.

The Kashmir Issue

A few years ago, while researching in the Nehru papers, I came across a “Top Secret” note written in the early 1950s by Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai, then secretary-general of the Ministry of External Affairs and Commonwealth Affairs; it was entitled “Background to the Kashmir Issue: Facts of the Case”; it made fascinating reading.

It started with a historical dateline: “Invasion of the state by tribesmen and Pakistan nationals through or from Pakistan territory on October 20, 1947; the ruler’s offer of accession of the state to India supported by the National Conference, a predominantly Muslim though non-communal political organisation, on October 26, 1947; acceptance of the accession by the British Governor-General of India on October 27, 1947; under this accession, the state became an integral part of India.”

Unfortunately, in a separate note, Lord Mountbatten, the Governor General of India, mentioned a plebiscite which would “take place at a future date when law and order had been restored and the soil of the state cleared of the invader”, then “the people of the state were given the right to decide whether they should remain in India or not.”

It was an unnecessary addition, but Mountbatten wanted to show British (so-called) legendary fairness.

Anyway, the conditions were clear and in two parts: first, the Pakistani troops or irregulars should withdraw from the Indian territory that they occupied, and later a plebiscite could be envisaged.

Bajpai’s note also observed: “Pakistan, not content with assisting the invader, has itself become an invader, and its army is still occupying a large part of the soil of Kashmir, thus committing a continuing breach of international law.”

The Gift of Gilgit

Worse was to come; Maj. William Brown, a British officer, illegally offered Gilgit to Pakistan. The British paramountcy had lapsed on August 1, 1947, and Gilgit had reverted to the Maharaja’s control. Lt. Col. Roger Bacon, the British political agent, handed his charge to Brig. Ghansara Singh, the new governor appointed by Maharaja Hari Singh, while Maj. Brown remained in charge of the Gilgit Scouts.

Despite Hari Singh having signed the Instrument of Accession and joined India, Maj. Brown refused to acknowledge the orders of the Maharaja under the pretext that some leaders of the Frontier Districts Province (Gilgit-Baltistan) wanted to join Pakistan.

On November 1, 1947, he handed over the entire area to Pakistan, in all probability ordered by the British generals.

An interesting announcement appeared in the 1948 London Gazette mentioning that the King “has been graciously pleased … to give orders for … appointments to the Most Exalted Order of the British Empire.…” The list included “Brown, Major (acting) William Alexander, Special List (ex-Indian Army)”. Brown was knighted for having served the Empire.

At the time, the entire hierarchy of the Indian and Pakistan Army were still British. In Pakistan, Sir Frank Messervy was commander-in-chief of the Pakistan Army in 1947-48, and Sir Douglas Gracey served in 1948-51; while in India, the commander-in-chief was Sir Robert Lockhart (1947-48) and later Sir Roy Bucher (1948), and let us not forget that Sir Claude Auchinleck (later elevated to Field Marshal) served as the supreme commander (India and Pakistan) from August to November 1947.

Who can believe that all these senior generals were kept in the dark by a junior officer like Maj. Brown?

The Western influence or manipulation continued in the following years and decades; the Americans soon entered the scene too.

India and the Western Powers

After China invaded northern India in 1962, Delhi decided to ask for the help of the Western nations, particularly the United States. The latter was only too happy to offer it and thus gain leverage over India, which until that time had been “neutral and non-aligned”.

Seeing northern India invaded by Chinese troops, it seemed logical that the United States would come to India’s aid, but it turned out differently.

Soon after the ceasefire declared by the Chinese on November 22, 1962, and instead of helping India, Great Britain and the United States decided that the time had come to resolve the Kashmir dispute between their Pakistani ally and India, now begging for help.

Two days after the ceasefire, Averell Harriman, the US Under Secretary of State, and Duncan Sandys, the British Commonwealth Secretary, visited the two capitals of the subcontinent to persuade the “warring brothers” that it was time to bury the hatchet and find a solution to the fifteen-year-old Kashmir question. Harriman and Sandys signed a joint communiqué and asked the two countries to resume negotiations.

India’s invasion by China was forgotten.

Delhi, in a position of extreme weakness, had doubts about the possibility of obtaining positive results from negotiations conducted under such circumstances, but Nehru did not refuse the “offer”.

On December 22, 1962, he wrote to the provincial chief ministers: “I have to speak to you briefly on the Indo-Pakistan question, and particularly on Kashmir. In four days, Sardar Swaran Singh [the Minister of External Affairs] will lead a delegation to Pakistan to discuss these problems. We realise that this is not the right time to have a conference like this, as the Pakistani press has vitiated the atmosphere with insults and attacks directed against India. Nevertheless, we have agreed to go and will do our best to arrive at a reasonable solution.”

The two delegations ultimately held a series of six meetings; nothing came of them. The first negotiations took place in Rawalpindi; Swaran Singh and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s foreign minister, limited themselves to a historical presentation of the problem and the reiteration of their respective points of view. During the talks, India reaffirmed that it wanted to explore all possibilities to resolve the issue, as it wanted to live in peace with Pakistan, which insisted that the UN resolutions of August 1948 and January 1949 must be implemented as soon as possible (without them vacating the occupied part of Hari Singh’s kingdom).

The negotiations got off on a bad start: just before they began, the Pakistani government announced that it had reached an agreement in principle with China on its border issue. Just a month after the end of the Sino-Indian War, Pakistan was prepared to give China a piece of territory that India considered its own. What a slap in the face for India! Were the Western powers aware of the secret negotiations between Pakistan and China? Probably.

It is indeed surprising that Pakistan, an ally of the United States and the Western world, chose this moment to make this announcement. It was proof that Pakistan expected nothing from the talks with Delhi.

Negotiations on Kashmir continued between January 16 and 19, 1963, in Delhi and February 8 and 11 in Karachi, of course without any tangible results. Pakistan wanted a plebiscite, but India insisted on the prior demilitarisation of the regions occupied by Pakistan.

Talks took place in Calcutta between March 12 and 14. India proposed some readjustments of the Line of Control, but these were rejected by Pakistan.

During the fifth round of talks held in Karachi between April 22 and 25, India protested that Pakistan had ceded part of Kashmiri territory to China; there was no longer any chance of finding a negotiated solution to the Kashmir issue.

During the sixth and final round of talks, India clarified that it had no intention of replacing a democratically elected government with an international organisation that it believed had no knowledge of local issues. India therefore rejected the proposals.

Retrospectively, 63 years later, it is not surprising that in an interview with Sky News, when the interviewer Yalda Hakim questioned him about Pakistan’s long history of backing, supporting and training terrorist organisations, Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif admitted, “Well, we have been doing this dirty work for the United States for about three decades, you know, and the West, including Britain.”

India should indeed beware of some Western powers. – Firstpost, 10 May 2025

› Claude Arpi is Distinguished Fellow, Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi. He is the director of the Pavilion of Tibetan Culture at Auroville.

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