PRI: Which version of Indian history do American school students learn? | Public Radio International

I listened to the segment on the California textbook controversy on PRI's The World (May 2, 2017) and found it very biased and reductive, as it pertains to caste.

A few years ago, the Hindu American Foundation put out a report on caste.  Rajiv Malhotra, a prominent Hindu intellectual, said that the report provided ammunition to anti-Hindu groups.  HAF's Director of Government told me that when HAF made the rounds in DC to talk about hate crimes against Hindus (notably in Pakistan and Bangladesh), people shot back with "what about the caste system?"  That is why HAF put out its report on caste.

I disagree with Suhag Shukla that caste is a thing of the past.  Here are a few salient points about caste:

• Caste discrimination and caste-based violence is outlawed in India. Social attitudes, however, die hard.
• Reservations (affirmative action) provide minorities access to seats in the various legislatures, government jobs, and enrollment in higher educational institutions. 
• Caste did not enter in as an issue in the 2014 elections in India.  PM Narendra Modi is from a lowly caste.
• With regards to Thomas Blom Hansen's remarks that the caste system is "justified in the Hindu scriptures," the only allusion to caste in the Vedas is the Cosmic Man.  

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Review of Indra's Net

Namaste

Indra's Net: Defending Hinduism's Philosophical Unity by Rajiv Malhotra
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the first part of Indra’s Net, Rajiv Malhotra traces the lineage of scholars who posit a “neo-Hinduism” invented by Swami Vivekananda. The most recent of this lineage is Anantanand Rambachan of St. Olaf College, who claims that Swami Vivekananda’s reliance on direct experience is incompatible with Shankara’s reliance on sruti.

Malhotra then proceeds to show that Rambachan’s concept of Hinduism is too narrow: namely, that Shankara did not dismiss direct experience out of hand and that Sankara’s Advaita Vedanta is only one system of knowing within Hinduism. Malhotra discusses how Hinduism has evolved over time and places Swami Vivekananda squarely in the Hindu tradition.

Malhotra then discusses “digestion” of Hinduism. By digestion, he means the process by which people absorb the parts of Hinduism that they like and excrete (my word, not his) the parts they don’t like. A good example is the de-contextualization of yoga from Hinduism, whereas the rest of Hinduism is trashed.

He introduces the concept of “poison pills” to prevent the “digestion” of Hinduism into other frameworks. These poison pills include characteristics of Hinduism (karma, re-incarnation, embodied knowing, integral unity) that cannot be reconciled with the traditional tenets of Abrahamic religion and force the spiritual seeker to make a choice among religions.

Indra’s Net is more accessible than Malhotra's book An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism; however, Being Different and Indra’s Net re-enforce one another. I would have to read both books several times to fully understand the concepts that Rajiv Malhotra introduces. My 3-star rating is less about the merits of the book and more about the limits of my understanding.


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Review of Breaking India

Namaste, 

Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines by Rajiv Malhotra
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The book Breaking India by Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan is about the forces that are fragmenting India. While Islamic radicalism and Maoist insurgencies are two forces that are fragmenting India, Breaking India focuses on the North-South divide, as evidenced by its subtitle Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines.

Breaking India begins with a study of the construction of Aryan and Dravidian identities through the years and how this artificial divide was promulgated and led to setting different groups in opposition to each other. The book focuses on the construction of Dravidian identity, rather than on deconstruction of the AIT - perhaps because others have done that, the authors don't say.

The most eye-opening part of Breaking India is about the roles that academia, evangelical Christian organizations, NGOs, "think tanks," and governments play in undermining India's unity. Shared interests lead to unlikely pairings such as left-wing intellectuals with evangelical Christian interests. There are also unlikely alliances between Maoists and evangelical Christian entities in India's "Red Corridor."

I recommend Breaking India to anyone concerned about India's unity, and encourage readers to go beyond the main text to read the appendices and endnotes. Appendix B highlights references to the Vedas in Tamil religious literature and Tamil familiarity with smriti such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata - a testament to the unity in Indian civilization. Appendix C presents the extreme case of what can happen when separate identities are constructed and put in opposition to each other: the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that pitted Hutus and Tutsis against each other. Parallels are drawn with the bloody civil war in Sri Lanka that pitted Tamils and Sinhalese against each other.

Breaking India has a dedicated website, www.breakingindia.com.

Other examples of north/south interactions that I'd like to bring up (although they are not mentioned in the book):