April 13, 2008 – 12:14 am
The Mohammadan conquest with its propagandist work and later the Christian missionary movement attempted to shake the stability of Hindu society and in an age deeply conscious of instability, authority naturally became the rock on which alone it seemed that social safety and ethical order could be reared. The Hindu, in face of the [...]
March 26, 2008 – 12:23 am
An article (link courtesy the Acorn) by Nandini Sundar that tries to examine the Maoist menace by drawing guidance from the Mahabharata, gets the Mahabharata portion almost wholly wrong.
The elections are over but the secular crowd never seems to tire of slamming Gujarat. This time, a social scientist of sorts holds the baton. He tries to prove that the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, 2003 is dangerous.
His bottomline: the Act misunderstands the “nature of faith and of religious quest.” He elaborates on what [...]
March 15, 2008 – 11:15 pm
The old suspect, A.K. Ramanujan emerges out of the woodwork on Outlook’s pages. The magazine’s leader to this article says:
…in a pocket of the Delhi University, right-wing student activists have taken exception to this essay by the celebrated scholar A.K. Ramanujan, on the many Ramayanas living across languages and narrative genres, each different but no [...]
February 3, 2008 – 6:26 pm
Many thanks to a reader who brought to my notice M.F. Hussain’s interview with Tehelka. Readers of this blog know my views on Hussain. The interview is interesting because this is the first piece I have read where Hussain gives us a bit of insight on his own understanding of his art. This is a [...]
January 20, 2008 – 3:22 pm
Professor M.Hiriyanna is one of the little-known scholar-giants who gifted us new insights, and corrected thriving misperceptions in Indian philosophy. The title of this post is derived from his 1939 Indian Philosophical Congress lecture bearing the same title.
His lecture delivers the message of Indian philosophy in the layman’s language both in content and presentation. That [...]
January 7, 2008 – 12:49 am
This is where I wind up my previous post on Hindutva, which I had left unfinished. I pointed to a fundamental error in understanding Hindutva by comparing it to "militant Islam."
December 17, 2007 – 9:29 pm
Thanks to reader Kaanganeya for pointing me to this excellent interview where S.N. Balagangadhara (Baalu) shares his thoughts on certain fundamentals, which he says need heavy redefining. I’ll add my random bits here.
The current theoretical framework is firmly embedded within Western cultural history and proves inadequate when it comes to studying non-Western traditions. The framework [...]
November 10, 2007 – 3:35 pm
Introduction
Ananda Coomaraswamy was featured in this blog earlier. He remains one of the most staunch defenders of the Indian tradition in the mould of what David Frawley calls an Intellectual Kshatriya.
Coomaraswamy wrote a series of articles about the state of (the British-imposed) Indian education and alerted Indians about its perils. Because he mostly wrote for [...]
November 3, 2007 – 1:14 am
Prakash Karat has finally admitted that China is the Fatherland.
CPM general secretary Prakash Karat vowed to oppose a strategic alliance between India and the United States claiming that such a move was meant to “counter-balance” and “encircle” China.
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On what the Mahabharata Really Says
An article (link courtesy the Acorn) by Nandini Sundar that tries to examine the Maoist menace by drawing guidance from the Mahabharata, gets the Mahabharata portion almost wholly wrong.