Did the Buddha Break Away from Hinduism?
This was published in Hindu Human Rights, on 10 August 2013, and in Sutra Journal, October, 2015. Orientalists have started treating Buddhism as a separate religion because they discovered it outside India, without More...
Reconceptualizing India Studies: Book Review
S.N. Balagangadhara Rao, better known as Balu, is Professor of Comparative Culture Studies in Ghent University, Belgium. Balu is a Kannada Brahmin by birth, a former Marxist, and his discourse has a very in-your-face More...
Decoding Gandhi’s Letters to Hitler
Mahatma Gandhi’s admirers are not in the habit of confronting embarrassing facts about their favourite saint. His critics, by contrast, gleefully keep on reminding us of a few facts concerning the Mahatma More...
Lessons from the Rajiv Malhotra Affair
Now that everybody has had his say on the Rajiv Malhotra plagiarism affair, we can better discern the larger context that explains the different forces at work here. Plagiarism The trigger was the discovery that More...
Savarkar and Modi, beginning and end of Hindutva
Hate mongers Hate mongers often need concocted stories to buttress their political message. In India, these are most common in that peculiar Indian form of hatred: anti-Brahminism. As the local counterpart to what More...
The United Minorities Challenge before the Modi Government
The United Minorities are waging a no-holds-barred campaign against Narendra Modi or against whomever is or can be pictured as a pro-Hindu power-wielder. One of their lines of attack is the blackening of the ruling More...
How to spot an Indian Intellectual
From a lecture by former JNU Vice-Chancellor Prof. Kapil Kapoor before the Indore-based India Inspires Foundation, I have to relate a particularly relevant part, viz. about our Indian “intellectuals”. More...
Views on Hindu contemporary activism
Secular cum laude The French India scholar Christophe Jaffrelot has collected his recent papers in a hefty volume: Religion, Caste & Politics in India (Primus, Delhi 2010). I had hardly been following his work More...
Encyclopaedia of Hinduism: A Review
A major and long-awaited project has been brought to completion. The 11-volume Encyclopedia of Hinduism, with a foreword by Dr. Karan Singh, is the brainchild of the India Heritage Research Foundation and Swami More...
Does one become a Hindu?
Both Sita Ram Goel and VamadevaShastri (David Frawley) have written a book called How I Became a Hindu. I could never write such a book because I have deliberately made a choice not to identify myself as Hindu. More...