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        All books are either dreams or swords,You can cut, or you can drug, with words Sword Blades and Poppy Seed

                                                                                                                                                                - Amy Lowell
 

        A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.

                                                                                                                                                                   - Daniel J Boorstein

        The test of any great book or literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it. I have just finished reading a very great book titled INVADING THE SACRED—An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America edited by Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio De Nicolas and Aditi Banerjee. I am under the spell of this great book because it is a beacon of moral illumination. It is a powerful frigate which takes us lands away. An avant-garde book, to adapt the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas—a place where history, past or present, comes to life. In every sense of the word this landmark book is a mighty ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

        I understand that Rajiv Malhotra who is the President of the Infinity Foundation, Princeton, New Jersey is the main force behind the publication of this revolutionary book. Krishnan Ramaswamy, one of the editors of this book, is a scientist in psychometric research. He is an ardent student of the Vedas, Vedanta, Sanskrit and Panini, with a lifelong interest in Bakthi poetry. The second editor Antonio T. de Nicolas is Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the State university of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of several books and is now serving as Director of the Bio-Cultural Research Institute. The third Editor Ms. Aditi Banerjee is a practicing Attorney in New York. She has authored books like 'The Hyphenated Hindus in Outlook India'; 'Hindu- American: Both sides of the Hyphen, in Silicon India'; and 'Hindu Pride'. She is totally committed to the preservation and revival of the traditional ways of knowledge rooted in Sanathana Dharma.

        Till 1000 AD, India was a major civilizational and economic power. After that date, India suffered centuries of decline and degradation. After centuries of stagnation, the world is noticing a new resurgence of India in the spheres of business, geo-politics and culture. However, a powerful counterforce is operating within the American academic circles which are systematically undermining core icons and ideals of Indian culture and thought. Let me give some examples in this context. Many scholars belonging to this counterforce have disparaged the Bhagavad Gita as 'a dishonest book'; declared Lord Ganesha's trunk 'a limp phallus'; classified Goddess Devi as 'the mother with a penis' and Lord Shiva as 'a notorious womanizer' who incites violence in India; declared Ramakrishna Paramahamsa as 'a pedophile who sexually molested the young Swami Vivekananda'.

        These 'Great Writers' (!!) have condemned Indian mothers as being less loving of their children as compared with their white western mothers; they have interpreted the sacred 'Bindi' as a drop of menstrual fluid and the “HA” in sacred Sanskrit mantras and incantations as a woman's orgasm.

        I have no doubt that this new generation of 'Great Writers and Scholars' in America are creating new categories of revolutionary sub-disciplines like Pornographic Anthropology, Pornographic Sociology, Pornographic Philosophy, Pornographic Comparative Religion. For such great thinkers nothing can be graphic unless it is pornographic; nothing can be logical unless it is sexually logical; and nothing can be intellectually stimulating unless it is sexually titillating.

        This new book is the product of an intensive multi-year Research Project. It seeks to uncover and to bring out into the open platform of fearless and informed public debate about the sub-terranean networks operating in America behind what the Editors/ Authors of this book describe brilliantly as “HINDUPHOBIA”. This work describes the Indian diaspora's challenges to such dubious and pornographic scholarship and effectively documents how those Scholars (Intellectual Kshatriyas indeed) who dared to speak up have been branded as “Dangerous”. Against this background, the editors and all the writers of individual articles in this book are asking the following relevant questions:

        1. Are these graphically pornographic academic pronouncements really based on evidence, and how carefully is this evidence cross-examined?

        2. How do these images of India and Indians created in the American academy influence public perceptions through the media, the education system, policy makers, and popular culture?

        3. Are India's internal social problems going to be managed by foreign interventions in the name of Human Rights?

        4. How do power imbalances and systemic biases affect the objectivity and quality of scholarship?

        5. What are the inalienable historic rights (like riparian rights in the field of irrigation in every country) of practitioner experts in “talking back” to academicians?

        6. What is the role of India intellectuals, policy makers and universities in fashioning an authentic, effective and enduring response to such cultural onslaughts from the west?

        As Prof S N Balagangadhara from the University of Ghent, Belgium in his foreword has observed: “India will be a global player of considerable political and economic impact. As a result, the need to explicate what it means to be an INDIAN (and what the 'INDIANNESS' of the Indian culture consists of) will soon become the task of the entire intelligentsia in India. In this process, they will confront the challenge of responding to what the West has so far thought and written about India. A response is required because the theoretical and textual study of the India culture has been undertaken mostly by the West in the last 300 years. What is more, it will also be a challenge because the study of India has largely occurred within the cultural framework of America and Europe. In fulfilling this task, the Indian intelligentsia of tomorrow will have to solve a puzzle: what were the earlier generations of Indian thinkers busy with, in the course of the last two to three thousand years?”

        Most of the textbooks produced and read by all our students for nearly 250 years contained a standard story of Indian culture which ran as follows: Caste system dominates India, strange and grotesque deities are worshipped in strange and grotesque ways, women are discriminated against, the practice of widow burning exists and corruption is rampant.

        In this context I am reminded of the three important British statements and views made on India in the British House of Commons in 1813 during the debate on the Christianization of India by Mr. William Wilberforce (1759-1833) and Mr James Mill (1773-1836) and by Mr Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) in the House of Commons in 1843. All of them subscribed to the belief of the great inferiority of India as a Civilization and treated it as degraded, sunk in superstition and wretchedness. They condemned everything Indian, manners, beliefs, religious systems and philosophies, Indian art and architecture, the manner in which Indian Society was organized in Communities and Jathis, and thought that its fine manufactures would only be the creation of effeminate beings. In brief for them India knew neither manliness, nor the great European Art of War. For all three of them and certainly for James Mill, the people of India could be compared only with the indigenous people of the Americas (Red Indians). For all of them if most of the people of India were to disappear (to be exterminated!!) like the Red Indians of America did, it would have been no loss and perhaps a great good.

        The editors / authors of this book show that while generations of Indian intellectuals have accepted the above British Colonial lopsided descriptions as more or less true, the future generations in India will not be so accommodating and yet at the same time they will also never fail to test these answers for their truth. Anyone can say this with confidence because more and more people in India are gradually moving towards this kind of research based upon honest intellectual curiosity and critical inquiry.

        We can see from this book that the relations between the academic community and the Hindu community in North America are being dominated by a sharp debate, which has rolled over to journalism and on to the internet. This trend has been activated by the turbulent reservations expressed by a large number of Hindus in North America over the way Hinduism is being portrayed and depicted in the Western Academia and by the vigorous response of the academic community to such criticism.