The Chinese self-designation Hua and the root-word Ᾱrya
It is but rare that I take the trouble to write a mere summary of a paper I have read with increasing enthusiasm. Here is one occasion. It pertains to “The earliest Chinese words for ‘the Chinese’: the phonology, More...
Aryan debate keeps on attracting silly politicos: A response to Shoaib Daniyal
In June 2015, Scroll.in published an article by Shoaib Daniyal on the Aryan debate, wherein he ridiculed the Out of India theory by comparing it with Intelligent Design or a Flat Earth Hypothesis. Here is a brief More...
The Andronovo cradle of the Indo-Iranians?
In 2006, the late Russian archaeologist Elena Kuzmina wrote a hefty book on the Origin of the Indo-Iranians (Brill, Leiden). It gives a very detailed history of the Andronovo culture and its surroundings in time More...
Recollections with Sita Ram Goel: Part 3
[contextly_sidebar id=”koFpYmrzoIYZXytaojq0EHPU7PdjP0EW”] Clash of Civilizations The now-fashionable expression “clash of civilizations” was already in use in India well before Samuel Huntington More...
Recollections with Sita Ram Goel: Part 2
[contextly_sidebar id=”olbXYE1WqBTzVkaEX7UySfYkkAUOwQqQ”] His Kindness Secularists like to bandy about the hateful stereotype of Hindu revivalists as anti-Muslim and anti-Christian hate-mongers. The More...
Recollections with Sita Ram Goel: Part 1
This is the first part of the author’s essay in a volume he has edited: India’s Only Communalist. In Commemoration of Sita Ram Goel, Voice of India, Delhi 2005. Now that the trail-blazing Hindu publisher and More...
Excavations Show the Cultural Continuity of the Vedic Harappans
Nonagenarian archaeologist B.B.Lal has synthesized his findings of the latest decades in the book The Rigvedic People: Invaders/Immigrants or Indigenous (Aryan Books, Delhi 2015). In it, he seeks to answer three More...
Evaluating the Islamic Genocide of Hindus
“The Partition Holocaust”: the term is frequently used in Hindu pamphlets concerning Islam and the birth of its modern political embodiment in the Subcontinent, the state of Pakistan. Is such language More...
Ashoka And Pushyamitra Sunga: A Study In Mythmaking
Let us elaborate one example of pro-Buddhist bias in modern indologist scholarship. It has to do with a story of alleged Hindu persecution of Buddhism by Pushyamitra, a general in the service of the declining Maurya More...
Revisiting Slumdog Millionaire
The output of the Mumbai film industry largely consists of superficial plots with light-hearted music and little contact with pressing social and political realities. By contrast, Danny Boyle’s movie Slumdog More...