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Rajiv Malhotra
133 quotes
“Wikipedia biases in my entry (just as one example) which it prevents being corrected. It is re-colonizing Indians.”
Rajiv Malhotra (born 1950) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rajiv Malhotra on Twitter on 8 Aug 2013
“India is the world largest territory, both geographically and by population, that is up for grabs by the expansionist, predatory ideological movements in the world.”
Rajiv Malhotra (born 1950) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: India Is The World’s Largest Territory Which Is Up For Grabs By Predatory Forces” by R Jagannathan - Mar 09, 2018,
“Unfortunately, Hindu nationalism today sometimes seems to be mimicking the worst things about the West, by becoming obsessively history-centric. But this is different than the past of Hinduism, and is atypical amongst Hindus even today.”
Rajiv Malhotra (born 1950) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rajiv Malhotra (2003), Problematizing God's Interventions in History
“I believe in science, I believe in evidence, if there are other treatments that the modern medicine doesn't support those should also be brought to the table, whether its ayurveda, whether its Naturopathy... and should be evaluated in clinical trials.”
Rajiv Malhotra (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We interviewed Pierre Kory on my channel. It got almost million views in a few days. Then YouTube sent us notice banning it... What a shame they cannot face the evidence and experience of an accomplished doctor.”
Rajiv Malhotra (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It matters little whether such ideas have any basis in fact. Once an idea becomes entrenched in the institutional machinery and eventually in the collective imagination of the public, it can be used for all sorts of exploitation.”
Rajiv Malhotra (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because the assumption of Mosaic ethnology was well established, it was important to secure both families of languages within that framework. Ellis claimed that Tamil is connected with Hebrew and also with ancient Arabic. Their logic was that since William Jones considered Sanskrit to be the language of Ham, and other scholars claimed that Sanskrit descended from Noah's oldest son, Japheth, by the process of elimination the remaining son of Noah, Shem, must be the ancestor of the Dravidian people. This made Dravidians a branch of the Scythians or in the same family as Jews.”
Rajiv Malhotra (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His work had far-reaching consequences. It established the theological foundation for Dravidian separatism from Hinduism, backed by the Church. It was accompanied by Christian usurpation of many of the classical art-forms of South India. The concept of dissociating Tamils from mainstream Hindu spirituality provided Caldwell an ethical rationale for Christian proselytization. Eighty years after his death, a statue of Caldwell was erected in Chennai's Marina Beach alongside the statue of another missionary scholar, G.U. Pope. It is a major landmark in that city today.”
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“While Deivanayagam was busy fabricating textual interpretations, the archbishop of Mylapore was manufacturing archeological evidence to prove the myth of St Thomas. In 1975, he hired a Christian convert from Hinduism to fabricate epigraphic evidence proving the visit of St Thomas to South India. When this hired gun failed, the archbishop sued him in court. The Illustrated Weekly of India raised questions alleging corruption in this case.”
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“Such attacks and provocations on indigenous spiritual traditions never find their way into international media or the reports about freedom of religion.”
Rajiv Malhotra (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But the book could not get a mainstream publisher and I had to work very hard. The big mainstream publishers did not want to touch it... And it became an instant best-seller. They refused to put the cover image of a broken India even though I explained that I found it in the office of an African-American professor in Princeton, who was part of the Afro-Dalit movement. They found it too provocative.”
Rajiv Malhotra (born 1950) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: India Is The World’s Largest Territory Which Is Up For Grabs By Predatory Forces” by R Jagannathan - Mar 09, 2018,
“Pro-India perceptions are ignored and the Indian legacy of supporting the rights of down-trodden are dismissed derisively. Worldviews that emphasize conflicts are encouraged. Ideologues give open call to racial civil wars, which are published by prestigious academic publishing houses of the West. US governmental monitoring mechanisms focus on India with distorting lenses and quote and requote their own reports to project a savage imagery of India as a dark frontier region ripe for Western intervention.”
Rajiv Malhotra (born 1950) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (Malhotra and Neelakandan 2011:173) in Ten heads of Ravana : a critique of Hinduphobic scholars. (2023). Garuda Prakashan Private Limited.
“Steve Farmer explains on his webpage that its goal is to 'allow policy analysts and historians to build cultural simulations without any formal programming'. The term 'cultural simulations' means the ability to simulate 'what if' the USA were to collaborate with group X against group Y, and various permutations and combinations of scenarios for such 'cultural interventions' in India. One can see similar theoretical interventions actually being implemented in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Yemen.”
Rajiv Malhotra (born 1950) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: quoted in Manogna Sastry, in Ten heads of Ravana : a critique of Hinduphobic scholars. (2023). Garuda Prakashan Private Limited
“India is more than a nation state. It is also a unique civilization with philosophies and cosmologies that are markedly distinct from the dominant culture of our times – the West. India’s spiritual traditions spring from dharma which has no exact equivalent in western frameworks. Unfortunately, in the rush to celebrate the growing popularity of India on the world stage, its civilizational matrix is being digested into western universalism, thereby diluting its distinctiveness and potential.”
Rajiv Malhotra (born 1950) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rajiv Malhotra. Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, 2011. Synopsis
“It is through Western categories, and hence the Western 'gaze', that the people who constitute the Judeo-Christian traditions see the world. This gives the Western perspective a de facto status as arbiter of what is considered universally true. When another civilization is the object of such a gaze, it becomes relative and no longer universal. Indeed, its depiction as the alien makes it interesting precisely because it is particular and not universal.”
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“I began to see the beginnings of what was later to crystallize as my thesis that history-centrism is the key difference between Judeo-Christian and dharma traditions.”
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“While the inner sciences have a long history in countries such as India, Tibet and China, they have never rejected the outer sciences, and there has never been a conflict between dharma and science as there has been between Western religion and science.”
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“For instance, in Hinduism and Buddhism, mantras, or sacred chants, which encapsulate many of the key insights of the tradition, are taught to children before they can even understand their meaning. Their chanting is considered effective even without this understanding. Through their vibrations, these mantras exert an impact directly on the body down to the cellular or even subtler levels, and become profoundly internalized and transformative.”
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“A religion with an ever-growing line of enlightened masters, such as exists in the dharma traditions, is less likely to become fossilized into institutional dogma and therefore more difficult to control.”
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“The point being that the influence of dharmic philosophy on Western culture runs deep and yet consistently goes unacknowledged.”
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“The Abrahamic traditions tend to focus outward; the dharmic ones, inward. The difference between observing historical mandates and discovering the structures of consciousness is stark. I am aware of the centuries of intense intellectual debates among Indian philosophers that clearly demonstrate the vast diversity of views. I do not wish to over-generalize. My integral theory of dharma opposes homogeneity and yet identifies common principles, especially in contrast with Western assumptions. 4 The history-centric worldview results in synthetic unity, not integral unity.”
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“As I delved deeper, I realized that the schisms between Christianity and science have never been resolved, not even after centuries of conflict. Instead, there is merely a veneer that attempts to hide the underlying cracks. This is not the case with dharmic traditions where there is no inherent conflict in principle between science and dharma.”
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“The modern West is chauvinistic in its account of why freedom did not evolve in non-Western societies. The dharmic notions of freedom such as moksha, mukti and nirvana are alternatives which the West has not recognized sufficiently. 68 From a dharmic perspective, the West has been driven not by freedom but by the mandates of its self-image which require infinite expansion in a finite world. This is neither sustainable, as we now know, nor scalable to include all humanity. History points to various schemes (including colonialism and genocide) aimed at containing or undermining the non-West.”
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“Of course, the West has occasionally dabbled in countercultural revolts against normative conventions, and these have enriched its society with a new context-sensitivity. In general, however, its dominant ideal is the privileging of certainty and uniformity, which it touts as universalism.”
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“Yogic experiences are difficult to represent accurately in any language other than Sanskrit, for, as Sri Aurobindo has noted, it is only in Sanskrit that they have been systematized. Thus, Sanskrit is the 'language of yoga'. Sanskrit philosophy states that monosyllabic sounds comprising the Sanskrit alphabet are at the origin of creation. In fact, the Sanskrit phonemes themselves reveal the nature of reality. The root sound of the phoneme references its corresponding manifestation.”
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“Sanskriti has had an obvious influence on Thailand dating from 1500 ce. Sanskrit was used for public social, cultural, and administrative purposes in that country and other parts of South-east Asia. Today, Sanskrit is highly respected as the medium for validating, legitimating and transmitting royal succession and instituting formal rituals. Khmer society (in Cambodia) was highly Indianized, and the later Thai kings embraced the Indian religions and based their principles of government on Hindu practices.”
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“I am aware that important initiatives are under way, often funded by generous Western donors, to preserve and translate ancient Sanskrit texts. These efforts are laudable. They cannot substitute, however, for an understanding of the importance of Sanskrit terms and texts in the original language as resources for spiritual practice and even for social organization. Nor do these efforts even begin to rectify one of the great scandals of the modern university: the absence of Sanskrit from the curriculum – even in philosophy where it was a pillar of learning in the West not long ago.”
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“As the evangelists leave my home, I always hope our conversation has challenged their assumptions about the people they are preaching to, and that perhaps they will re-examine the idea that all people outside of their church are in a state of spiritual deficiency. But until they do, I will continue to welcome them into my living room, offer them chai, and share with them the good news that there is no such thing as original sin.”
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“But it was Hegel, among all German thinkers, who had the deepest and most enduring impact on Western thought and identity. It is often forgotten that his work was a reaction against the Romantics' passion for India's past. He borrowed Indian ideas (such as monism) while debating Indologists to argue against the value of Indian civilization. He posited that the West, and only the West, was the agent of history and teleology. India was the 'frozen other', which he used as a foil to define the West.”
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“The notion of individualism that has emerged in the West is a relatively recent development even though it is often claimed to be derived from classical antiquity and Abrahamic theological tenets. This revisionist claim of being the exclusive and defining feature of the West – in contradistinction to the putative Oriental lack of individuality – is the result of myth-making.”
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“The contradiction between Christian exclusivism and true liberalism is seldom discussed openly (and perhaps even privately).”
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“The precise outcome of purva paksha on both sides of the East/ West divide cannot be presupposed, and the participants must remain open to all possibilities. What is needed immediately is a recognition of difference, and of the importance of respecting this difference. I hope this book contributes to the establishing of an open field of engagement, a Kurukshetra, on which East and West may meet on more equitable terms than in the past.”
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“The book is one of the few attempts by an Indian intellectual to challenge seriously the assumptions and presuppositions of the field of India and/or South Asian studies tout ensemble , including not only the work of European and American scholarship but as well the neocolonialist, postmodernist and subaltern ressentiment so typical of contemporary Indian intellectuals... The book will be controversial on many different levels and will undoubtedly elicit rigorous critical response'.”
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“Malhotra writes with passion from within an avowedly dharmic stance, undermining the attempts to domesticate and expropriate Indian traditions in a process of inter-religious dialogue that is ultimately based on a Western cosmological framework. This book is essential reading for Western scholars.”
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“A classical concept in Hinduism has been that a true proposition has to be consistent with sruti, yukti (reason/logic) and anubhava.”
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“[Indra's Net is a metaphor for] the profound cosmology and outlook that permeates Hinduism. Indra's Net symbolizes the universe as a web of connections and interdependences [...] I seek to revive it as the foundation for Vedic cosmology and show how it went on to become the central principle of Buddhism, and from there spread into mainstream Western discourse across several disciplines.”
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“For example, Cambridge University established a prize named for an essay competition on the topic: 'The best means of civilizing the subjects of the British Empire in India, and of diffusing the light of the Christian religion throughout the eastern world.'”
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“This is why the mainstream Western academics does not teach Abhinavagupta, Aryabhata, Bharata, Bhartrihari, Shankara, Kalidasa, Kapila, Kautilya, Nagarjuna, Panini, Patanjali and Ramanuja, among many other Indian greats on par with the great Greek thinkers. This violates the principle that the classical thinkers of all civilizations ought to be incorporated into curricula based solely on their merit and current relevance.”
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“The modern academics find it politically incorrect to criticize the devastation under Islamic rule, even though post-colonial scholars have amply exposed the ruin created by the British.”
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“In the Mahabharata, the ceremony for the oath of a new king includes the admonition: 'Be like a garland-maker, O king, and not like a charcoal burner.' The garland symbolizes social coherence; it is a metaphor for dharmic diversity in which flowers of many colors and forms are strung harmoniously for the most pleasing effect. In contrast, the charcoal burner is a metaphor for the brute-force reduction of diversity into homogeneity, where diverse living substances are transformed into uniformly lifeless ashes.”
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“The Gita ... explains the basis for the Hindu principle of charity as Narayana-seva, i.e., serving God by serving one's fellow human... This is also the basis for Gandhi's concept of ahimsa. Krishna asserts that generosity (dana) and compassion (daya) are qualities that arise 'from me alone'.”
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“Before Vivekananda, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had proposed such a system of ethics in which he cited Hindu texts for support. He used the Upanishadic notion 'tat tvam asi' to assert that a good person recognizes that his self is the same as that which is manifested in every other person, and this notion grounded his ethics.”
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“There is a new awakening in India that is challenging the ongoing westernization of the discourse about India and the intellectual machinery that produces it.”
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“One of his [Pollock's] goals is to critique and expunge what he sees as deeply entrenched static social hierarchies, barbarisms and poisons. I do not see anything inherently wrong with this intention by itself; most Hindus welcome improvements and the evolution of their culture. The issue worth debating is that Pollock sees these ills as deeply rooted in the Vedas themselves and as requiring the abandonment of core metaphysical and sacred perspectives.”
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“I am not alone in making this point. At least one European Indologist accuses Pollock of relocating Orientalism 'to the "New Raj" across the deep blue sea'.”
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“He [Grünendahl] says Pollock's narrative 'is not an evidence-based study of Orientalism or Indology in Germany, but a sophisticated charge of anti-Semitism based largely on trumped-up "evidence".... Pollock's post-Orientalist messianism would have us believe that only late twentieth-century (and now twenty-first century) America is intellectually equipped to reject and finally overcome [‘Eurocentrism’...] The path from the 'Deep Orientalism' of old to a new 'Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz' leads to the 'New Raj' across the deep blue sea.”
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“Wilhelm Halbfass, the late Indologist at the University of Pennsylvania, took such ridiculous statements into strange, speculative areas and wrote: Would it not be equally permissible to identify this underlying structure as 'deep Nazism' or 'deep Mimamsa'? And what will prevent us from calling Kumarila and William Jones 'deep Nazis' and Adolf Hitler a 'deep Mimamsaka'?”
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“Thus, Grünendahl has noted Pollock's tendency to develop broad narratives without any supporting evidence. Moreover, he draws attention to Pollock's messianism in promoting American scholarship.... , casting doubt on Pollock's attempt to analyse Sanskrit objectively. He raises the pertinent question as to whether Pollock is providing the intellectual foundations for America's 'New Raj', to replace the dead British Raj - i.e., whether American imperialism is replacing the dead British imperialism.”
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“He sidesteps the rise in the funding of Persian and Arabic by the secular Indian government and by foreign sponsors, and the concurrent dramatic decline in Sanskrit funding. He does not expose the downsizing and dismantling of the institutions , both formal and informal, on which Sanskrit and sanskriti have traditionally thrived. Pollock is careful not to implicate the non-Hindu forces that have wreaked havoc against Sanskrit.”
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“It seems obvious that Pollock is committed to the Marxist theory linking literary works and political power. He wants to deploy it as his lens for analysing how the aesthetic use of languages in India became interwoven into the fabric of politics. At a deeper level, beyond the aesthetic and political usage of Sanskrit, he finds that old Marxist demon: theology. For him, as for most Marxist-oriented scholars, all forms of spirituality/transcendence are, in effect, irrational, deformed and mystified ways of thinking....”
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