Revisiting Asoka- III: Ashoka The Terrible
[contextly_sidebar id=”9fNbdtifJBTRSuJJyFO8QXdx2e2Cla2v”] Though Bindusara’s ministers had preferred Ashoka to Sushima and helped him to come to power, they did not hold him in high regard and were More...
Reconstructing The History Of The Ājīvikas
[contextly_sidebar id=”9ESt2LWLO1vg0xiGMne81qYY36gAmpVD”] In my previous articles “A new dating of Mahāvīra based on Mālava era” and “A new dating of Buddha based on the evidence of Sumatitantra”, More...
No Mr Devdutt Pattanaik, Patriarchy did not rise due to hermits!
The popular model of a patriarch is derived from the Abrahamic mythology. Hence the patriarch is a serial rapist. Jehovah the God of Abraham sure demands absolute submission. I can agree with Devadut Pattanaik (DP) More...
Book Review: ‘Rama and Ayodhya’ by Meenakshi Jain- Part I
The diffusion of propaganda requires repetition. In the words of someone many leftists have secretly admired for long, repetition is what makes propaganda successful- the full quote is (bold-emphasis mine), “The More...
Opposing the Left is Not “Right”- Part I: A letter to students
Two Facebook Posts and a Debate with a Journalist Supporting Indian Left-Wing Thinking—A Case study It all started with the JNU row. Being an academic in the United States who teaches and researches in the areas More...
Essential Facts of Sanatana Dharma
Sometimes people ask what Hinduism is, and how it compares with the other religious/spiritual traditions of the world. Most of the time Hindus find it difficult to provide simple and cogent answers to such questions, More...
Deconstructing D D Kosambi: Numbers Don’t Lie
[contextly_sidebar id=”CtlbqfVD2njARe6J7u2rYBPdUrsRRT4n”] Numbers Kosambi goes on to question the veracity of the Mahabharata’s claim on the numbers: “If a Mahabharata war had actually been fought 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...
Religion Data of Census 2011: II The Imbalance Worsens
In this second post on the religion data of Census 2011, we give the main national aggregate numbers about the changes that have taken place in the share of different communities during 2001-11, and try to put these More...
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...