It was once prophesised that fascism or at least various forms of totalitarianism would sneak back by camouflaging themselves as an indefinable ‘freedom’. Now under this ‘freedom’ western academics and their willing collaborators in India’s universities, media and political chattering class were able to crush anything remotely smacking of India’s civilisational genius as reactionary Hindutva fascism.
Indeed there seemed to be no end to the colourful array of language employed in this regard. Anyone who dared to break this vice grip on what was determined as acceptable was deemed to be in cahoots with Hindu fundamentalism and worse still, a racist or someone who had a political agenda.
These aforementioned arsenal of verbal swearology were by no means mutually exclusive. Like the Venn diagrams taught in school maths lessons they overlapped a great deal, saturating the page. The greatest irony is that these very detractors are using ideas and language which are not just highly politicised, but also date from a time when being racist was deemed mainstream, acceptable, and the cutting edge of research.
Hence when Wendy Doniger and Michael Witzel denounced attempts to expose the Aryan Invasion Theory as the colonialist construct which it was (by Max Muller’s very own admission over 150 years ago), the claimed the ideas were politically motivated and not academically objective.
Yet Wizel, Doniger and many others are actually the ones compromising academic standards by using their own cultural and racial stereotypes to impinge upon the very subjects in which they claim expertise
Hence the present attack on Rajiv Malhotra, an American of Asian Indian descent whose books have provided fresh air against the stagnant stench of so called experts on India.
Yet by breaking the taboo of the colonialist and nineteenth century Social Darwinist racial template he earned the wrath of the anti-Hindu Axis. In the book Indra’s Net, Richard Fox Young and Andrew Nicholson they allege that Malhotra has plagiarised the latter.
However on closer inspection Malhotra has in fact provided references and citations. That is what any writer does to demonstrate research. Is it perhaps a mere coincidence that Young is affiliated with the obscurantist Princeton Theological Seminary? Over the past decade aggressive Christian missionary activity has gathered pace in India, as churches across the western world, even in God-blessed America, empty alarmingly.
The numbers have to be made up somewhere, and woe betide if any of the heathen target audience dare to rally so much as a verbal counter argument. It is important to bring Malhotra and anyone like him down should he challenge the missionary nexus who see the Hindu masses as nothing but ignorant devil worshippers ripe for conversion.
In this they have much in common with atheist Marxist and Leftist academics who view them in similar vein, helped by Marx’s own writings on India where he saw British rule with its famine and plantation slavery as necessary to bring the ignorant culture closer to the socialist paradise which right now is going very badly in its remnant of North Korea.
This is not something which only Malhotra has faced. During their own lifetimes Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup were vilified. David Frawley, Koenraad Elst and Francois Gautier have suffered in similar manner.
The difference now is that with social media and globalised technological communication access, the voices long suppressed can breath at last. HHR has itself suffered from threats of defamation for daring to expose the truth.
Once we lose out freedoms we cannot guarantee that we will get them back. As the attacks on Malhotra have demonstrated they have already been severely compromised. Just as it was once deemed correct to show African-Americans as the dim witted, scared shuffling ‘Negro’ in early Hollywood, or parodied in the black and white minstrel show, so it is now deemed mainstream to portray Hindus in a constantly negative light.
Instead of the slit-eyed evil Oriental of Fu Manchu, we now have new racial and cultural punching bags. The attack on Malhotra’s work is not to enhance freedom. It is to remorselessly retract it, based upon the same aforementioned racial/ethnic stereotypes which are now deemed repulsive and inaccurate.
