Some years ago, the doyen of Indology in the USA, Wendy Doniger wrote a book titled ‘The Hindus – An Alternative History.’ First, there has never been an authorized history of Hindus or ‘Hinduism’ a term used for Hindu philosophy, so how could there be an alternative history?

An outsider who looks at ‘Hinduism’ with a Western worldview, who has been patronized by an institution that has roots in the organized church, took it upon herself to define ‘Hinduism’ and then write an alternative history too! This is how outsiders have taken control of the Hindu narrative. Based on their interpretation of ‘Hinduism’, Hinduphobia is promoted.

The first problem starts with defining a ‘way of life’ having various faiths and ‘sampradayas’ with a very open-ended approach to search for the ultimate truth and or every possible worldview as an ‘ism’. None of the scholars have defined Christianity or Islam as an ‘ism’. But Hindu dharma is bracketed into a closed system like ‘Communism’, ‘Marxism’, and so on. All Bharatiya belief systems, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism are tagged as an ‘ism’.

If we were to go by the definition of a closed ideology, then Islam and Christianity, which are not open to change, evolution or reforms should be ‘Islamism’ and ‘Christianism’, not Hindu dharma.

A chapter-wise review of the abovementioned book, covering about 600 occurrences of factual errors, trivializations, and eroticization, has been meticulously developed by Vishal Agarwal, and partially by Chitra Raman. When a Hindu scholar, Dinanath Batra, went to a court for baseless and wrong interpretation of Hindu scriptures by a person whose Sanskrit is suspect and has been challenged by many Sanskrit scholars with pointed references.

He was called fascist and intolerant though he did not burn Wendy’s book nor did he take out protest marches demanding ‘sar tan se juda’ (separate head from the body). The publishers and the author couldn’t respond to his objections backed by correct references and the publisher agreed to pulp the book in India, not worldwide. But Batra was demonized across the media. The good gentleman and Hindus were condemned as fundamentalists, intolerant, and fascists.

This is how Hinduphobia is entrenched in western academia, happily ingested by people down the food chain for better prospects in the international circuit controlled by Left and Church-promoted academics. These people are identified by the highly respected public intellectual, Rajiv Malhotra, as mercenary ‘brown sepoys’ who join Wendy and her likes as pawns in this game of supremacism.

The first one to confront this Hinduphobia was Swami Vivekananda. His Chicago speech is a classic.

Hindu dharma, encompassing all the belief systems born in Bharat and taking inspiration from the Vedas and Upanishads is defined by westerners with no Dharmic background. They hold seminars in which they tell Hindus what is right or wrong about the scriptures and their society. They are either Westerns looking at Hindu dharma through Christian lenses or irreligious atheist Marxist lenses.

They don’t even call the westerners who have spent a lifetime studying and imbibing Hindu dharma or Sanatan dharma. Scholars such as David Frawley, Jeffry Armstrong, or Koenraad Elst find no place in such seminars on intellectual gymnastics. Do they do it for other belief systems or religions, say Islam or Christianity? No. In their case, the interpretation or discussions are done by their scholars, not westerner “non-believers.” Do they try to write an ‘alternative history of Islam and analyze it under Freudian lense’? No.

Jeffrey Kripal, Wendy Doniger’s protege, paints Ramakrishna Paramahamsa as a pedophile and Swami Vivekananda as a homosexual. In his book ‘Ganesa’, Paul Courtright, another student of Wendy, caricatured Ganesha with a trunk that is likened to a limp phallus and as one who is attracted to his mother ‘Parvati’. A senior ‘sanyasi’ of Ramkrishna Mission, Swami Tyagananda, wrote a long rejoinder refuting all the claims of the so-called scholar, Kripal. They never engaged him in a debate, nor did the book reach the academic shelves. Bindi has been academically analyzed as “A drop of menstrual blood”. There are hundreds of such examples.

The swastika has been defamed and abused as being the inspiration of Hitler and the Nazis. Scholars created a narrative that is now accepted broadly despite vehement counter by scholars on the other side that clearly show that Hitler and none of his top colleagues ever used the word ‘Swastika’. It was mentioned by Nazis as ‘Hagen Cruz’ or the ‘Hooked Cross’. Hindus have been abused and insulted based on this untruth and propaganda.

This is how Hinduphobia is mainstreamed as a truth. However, it is ‘Islamophobia’ that is now an institutionalized term that can be thrown at anyone who tries to even read out the exact meaning of the verses in their holy book.

The genocide of Kashmiri Hindus and its atrocities on them are not recognized. The ‘scholars’ controlling the research in universities do not allow any research or thesis on atrocities on Kashmiri Hindus and the aspiring researchers are told, “There was no genocide in Kashmir.”

According to pieces of evidence from the official chroniclers of Islamic invaders, the Hindu holocaust over centuries was the biggest holocaust in human history. Indian historian Professor KS Lal estimates that the Hindu population in India decreased by 80 million between 1000 AD and 1525 AD, an extermination unparalleled in world history. This slaughter of millions of people occurred over regular periods during many centuries of Arab, Afghan, Turkish, and Mughal rule in India. Those who agreed to pay exploitative ‘Jiziya’ tax were allowed to live as ‘dhimmies’ or second-class citizens. Four million Indians from 1825 to 1850 and 15 million from 1875 to 1900 died of British-made famines.

Pope has gone on record apologizing for inquisitions and other cruelties to convert people in various countries but he has not yet shown any inclination for apologizing for cruelty against Indians to convert people. Goa inquisitions are still not officially recorded because Indians have not presented their records to the world assertively.

The painful history of ‘girmitya’ or contract labor, which was nothing but a glorified name for cruel bonded labor for conscription from India for British and other imperialist colonies in Fiji, Surinam, Mauritius, Trinidad, and Guyana, has never been given its due place. While atrocities against blacks and natives are reluctantly and slowly being recognized, and, rightly so, Hindus have not yet found a place in this atrocity literature.

The latest attempt in the US to introduce ‘caste’ as a category for admitting Indians to their universities is part of this campaign of Hinduphobia. Prof Ved Nanda (Professor of Law for 55 years in the USA, President of the Faculty Senate for two years, vice provost for Internationalisation from 1994 to 2008, has taught in 8 other Law schools) has written to California State Education trustees, “We have adequate, indeed, effective federal and state civil rights laws addressing discrimination based on national origin and its related categories [….] based on my experience of never having come to cross a single case of discrimination among the faculty or students in all these universities based upon caste. Hence, adding caste as a separate category is totally redundant and could perhaps discriminate against Hindus.”

But it is an uphill struggle for Hindus to fight for self-respect.

The institutionalization of Hinduphobia is real. Tirumurti, permanent representative of India to the UN, has rightly called out this bias against Hindus. It is time to call out this new kind of intellectual and political racism.

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Ratan Sharda - The writer is a well-known author and columnist. He has written seven books on RSS and done Ph.D. on RSS