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Awaken Bharata:
For several decades, Voice of India, a small New Delhi publishing house, has been bringing forth books calling for the resurgence of Sanatana Dharma, the ancient Hindu tradition. Voice of India publications have included books on the discrediting of the theory of the Aryan invasion of India; the Marxist historians' denial of the numerous and massive Hindu holocausts during the Islamic period; and the horrors perpetrated by Christian missionaries in Goa and elsewhere in India. Among principal authors published by the house are Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, David Frawley, and Navaratna Rajaram. David Frawley, director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies (http://www.vedanet.com) based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has authored ten books on India, including "Hindu and Vedic Knowledge for the Modern Age"; "Hinduism, The Eternal Tradition: Sanatana Dharma"; "From the River of Heaven"; "Tantric Yoga and the Wisdom Goddesses"; and "Arise Arjuna: Hinduism and the Modern World." David Frawley (Vamadeva Shastri) is well-recognized in India as a "Vedacharya" or teacher of the ancient Vedic wisdom. During the past 1000 years of foreign rule in India till 1947, the suppression of Hindus has severely distorted their great cultural heritage, the oldest continuous civilization that goes back to 8000 B.C. Frawley's "Awaken Bharata," a call for the intellectual renaissance of India, follows the tradition of brilliant books by Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. Their books, however, suffered neglect by Indian intelligentsia, who, since independence, have been under the sway of Marxism and pseudo-secularism. "Awaken Bharata" is organized in three sections: A Call for Hindus to Awaken; The Sleep of Pseudo-Tolerance; The Future of Hindu Dharma. In the first section, Frawley writes: ". . . not many people, even Indians, are aware that Bharata (India) is the oldest nation in the world, perhaps the first of the nations of humanity." The main reason for this ignorance is that education in India continues to follow the Macaulite model, set in 1835, which disparaged Indian cultural heritage with the aim of imposing Western hegemony. During the past fifty years, since independence, false notions of secularism have aborted Hindu renaissance. Unlike the Western countries, where secularism means the state maintains a distant neutrality toward religions, contemporary Indian polity has been forcing a pseudo-secularism that "grants special government benefits to religious minorities and penalizes the religious majority, including offering salaries to Mullahs and maintaining Islamic personal law, but taxing Hindu temples." The Congress party, which till recently governed for nearly all of the years since independence, has been the major culprit in cynically championing pseudo-secularism in order to garner Muslim votes. In the second section, Frawley argues that one reason there hasn't been an outcry against pseudo-secularism in India is the erroneous interpretation of the ancient doctrine "Sarva Dharma Samabhava, which has been mistranslated as "all religions are equal." In fact, Dharma is "a universal law that we can discover through objective inquiry, questioning all dogmas and preconceptions....The correct term for the common Western idea of religion, which is a particular belief, in Hindu thought is not Dharma but 'mata' meaning a belief, view or opinion. There is no such possible statement as 'Sarva Mata Samabhava' or the equality and unity of all opinions." Western religions are based on dogma or belief. "To equate a belief, like that of Christ's resurrection in Christianity or Mohammed's ascension to Heaven in Islam, with a Dharma, is an error." All religions are not equal. Both Christianity and Islam, based on dogmas, each claiming to be exclusively true, cannot, in principle, be the equal of Hinduism. In the chapter "Sufis and Militance," Frawley observes the "gullibility" of Hindus to Sufism, "even if it hides the same old fundamentalism and militance Hindus oppose. They will bow down at the grave of a Sufi saint without inquiring about what made the particular person holy. In a number of instances it was his slaughter of the infidels that was responsible for his sanctity, including the ancestors of these self-same Hindus." This chapter is replete with citations to Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi's "A History of Sufism in India," a compendious 2-volume work of scholarship. Sample citation: A prominent sufi of the Suhrawardi order, Saiyid Nuruddin Mubarak of the thirteenth century exhortation of Muslim rulers to "make every effort to disgrace and humiliate Hindus. They should not tolerate the sight of Hindus, and in particular they should exterminate the Brahmans, who are the leaders of heretics and the disseminators of heresy." About the supposed tolerance of the Sufis, Frawley notes: ". . .even great Sufi poets like Attar and Sanai wrote in praise of Sultan Mahmud's destruction of Somnath as a great victory of Islam over idolatory. ... Some earlier teachers, like the great Persian poet Rumi, were used by Sufi orders as a mystical support for their more militant agendas, just as St. Francis of Assisi, a gentle and saintly figure, was used by the more militant Catholic Church to improve its image." Frawley warns: "One should not think Sufi militance was an affair of the Middle ages and has been given up in modern times. Today there is an effort by Sufis to appear more liberal, not only in India but in the West, but if we look deeply this is often a public relations ploy. Ask such Sufis to criticize traditional Islamic militance. Ask them to honor the use of images in religious worship. Ask them to criticize traditional Islamic law with its cruel anti-blasphemy and anti-apostasy rules. Let their answer be your guide." In the third section, Frawley writes about the new masks of colonialism such as communism, which ". . . in India remains an anti-Indian and anti-Hindu force that wants to eliminate the traditional culture of the region, for a leftist Western model that has already failed in the West." Among other masks, he sees, are the new economic mask of globalism and the academic historical colonialism. The latter continues to insist on the discredited myth of the so-called 'Aryan invasion of India.' This despite the work of scholars like Subhash Kak, The Astronomical Code of the Rig Veda, S.P. Gupta The Indus-Sarasvati Culture and B.B. Lal The Earliest Civilization in South Asia." One of the suggestions Frawley offers for awakening India is making Sanskrit the national language: "The soul of India exists primarily in Indian culture or Bharitya Samskriti. This in turn has its roots in the Sanskrit language, which must be revived, much like the Hebrew language has been revived in Israel. Sanskrit should again be made the national language and turned into a vehicle, not only for study of the past, but for the development of the future." At least at present, I am afraid not many will take this suggestion. Written with remarkable lucidity, this book is a much-needed
wake-up call. |
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