Rohan Raghav Sharma reviews Dr. Makarand Paranjape's book titled: "JNU - Nationalism and India's Uncivil War"; while analysing the happenings in JNU that led to the events detailed in the book. He also questions Dr. Paranjape's optimism and suggestions for handling the university moving forward.
‘India In The Eyes Of Europeans’ by Martin Farek, one of the scholars of the Comparative School of Cultures in the Czech Republic; is a book that analyses the biases of the Christian European scholarship in interpreting all that is foreign to it; especially the way that scholars influenced by Christian theology, Western and Indian alike, view Indian and more specifically Hindu history.
DiLorenzo's 'The Problem With Socialism' is a must-read for all the impressionable youth entering colleges preyed upon by heavily flawed discourses.
The recent upheaval about a Hindu temple for Thalaivetti Muniyappan (“Muni Baba with the broken head”) in Salem TN, apparently a patched-up and restored Buddha statue, and therefore taken away from its worshippers by Court order with the prospect of giving it to the Buddhists , reminds us of a similar line of argument in the Ayodhya debate of 1990-91.
The 'right wing’, the ‘left wing’, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Aryan-Dravidian deniers, the anti-Brahmins, practically everyone can make use of Ambedkar's writings to bash the opponent. However, at the core of his ideology was a strong antipathy to both Hinduism and the Brahmins.
Khushwant Singh's 'A History of the Sikhs' suffers from the same drawbacks that the mainstream secular-liberal scholarship does. The book seems to be serving his bias much more than the objective truth.
This book by Sudha Mohan breaks many of the myths surrounding the ‘caste system’. A deep study of the book helps one to realize that the various groups across the country—the ‘forward’ castes, the ‘backward’ castes, the ‘scheduled’ castes, and the scheduled ‘tribes’ are the diverse jatis with all kinds of practices, an array of flowers in the same garden of India as Hindus.
Barua's book is an important reflection on the nature of colonial subjecthood, at least in its elite manifestations. We discover that it was by no means completely lacking in agency. The elite colonial subject was not a passive receptacle for the political, or, in this case, the religious and philosophical ideas issuing from the West.
While a lot of energy is spent on understanding the threats posed by Islam, Christianity, or leftist liberals to the Hindu way of life, we don’t spend as much energy on understanding the threats posed by secularisation and the costs thereof to Hindu religion.
Dr Pingali Gopal reviews Essence of the Fifth Veda, a captivating compendium by Gaurang Damani.