Book review

For the past two centuries, Indology has been controlled by Western scholars and institutions, which have applied Western methods to study Indian civilisation. Infinity Foundation has, for the past several years, been at the forefront in the field of civilisational studies, applying the lens of ‘Dharma’ to examine a broad range of topics. “The present book — Ten Heads of Ravana — is the latest offering from our team of brilliant scholars, scholars I have mentored”, says Rajiv Malhotra.

The title of this collection, Ten Heads of Ravana, has been chosen with care. The use of ‘Ravana’ is intended as a parody and not literally. The metaphorical resemblances are clear — the historical Ravana disrupted society’s Hindu structures, and the ‘heads’ chosen for this book are considered by Hindus, today, to be individuals doing something similar, but intellectually and not with physical violence.

The ten scholars featured in this book are powerful in the academic discourse today; they have worked diligently most of their lives to develop their intellectual ‘weapons’, and their impact is not to be trivialised. There is no intention on the part of the authors to attack the individuals at a personal level, but rather to cast their work in the framework from the perspective of Dharma. The authors of these essays have taken care not to engage in any ad hominem attacks or unprofessional takedowns of the individual scholars. Ramayana, one of the greatest mahakavyas of Bharat, shows us the nature of Ravana as the mighty king of Lanka and the main antagonist of the epic. He is believed to have learned the Arthashastra from Shukracharya, was adept at the use of maya, and won boons from Brahma and Shiva.

The ten contemporary scholars in this book have been chosen because their work includes aspects that many Hindus today consider adharmic, just as the historical Ravana was perceived in his time. And just as the historical Ravana defended his positions, so did the ten scholars. The authors of this book respect the opponents’ right to intellectual freedom and merely wish to offer rebuttals so the readers can decide for themselves.

Consider, for example, the article on Romila Thapar. She has been one of India’s foremost historians, having held control of premier national educational and research institutions to influence academic discourse and government policies over decades. Anurag Sharma, in his brilliant essay, refutes Thapar’s historiographical assumptions by providing strong counterexamples from Indian history.

The Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock has been the subject of Rajiv Malhotra’s book, ‘The Battle for Sanskrit’. Several volumes were published from the series of Swadeshi Indology conferences held in Chennai and New Delhi by Infinity Foundation India. The editor of these volumes, Professor KS Kannan, presents a powerful essay on Pollock’s major arguments and modus operandi. Kannan shows that despite being a scholar who makes his living out of Sanskrit, Pollock denies the very nativity of Sanskrit to India and calls the language dead despite many proofs to the contrary.

Ten Heads of Ravana: A Critique of Hinduphobic Scholars’ is a book authored by noted scholar Rajiv Malhotra along with Divya Reddy and boasts of a collection of essays critiquing the works of 10 most prominent Left-oriented contemporary historians and scholars of ancient India. Launched in an event organised at Delhi University, the book is also available at the World Book Fair.

In the book, a team of scholars — KS Kannan, HS Meera, Manogna Sastry, Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay, Sudarshan TN, Sharda Narayanan, Anurag Sharma, and Divya Reddy — have contributed their observations through evidence-based research which is centred on questioning the western view of ancient India.

“It took four years of work by our team of scholars who went through multiple texts and intensive research to bring to light numerous factual inaccuracies, wilful misrepresentation and deliberate distortions in the scholarship of many such intellectual heads of the modern Rāvana,” said Malhotra.

The 10 intellectuals whose works have been critiqued in the book are Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Shashi Tharoor, Ramachandra Guha, Sheldon Pollock, Wendy Doniger, Devdutt Pattanaik, Kancha Ilaiah, and Michael Witzel — stalwarts at the forefront of such India studies, he added.

“For long, a handful of scholars and intellectual elites, whose understanding of Bharat is disjointed from tradition and often inimical to the Dharmic way of life, have controlled India’s civilisational narrative,” he said.

The team of authors said they had invited the 10 scholars whose works they had critiqued to the event but had not got any response from them.

The book was launched along with a day-long session of discussion by the authors as panelists.

Malhotra is known for his books such as Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Fault Lines; Being different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, The Battle for Sanskrit: Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred, Oppressive or Liberating, Dead or Alive?; Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power: 5 Battlegrounds, among others.

Asked what inspired him to write on the subject, Malhotra said he has been working around countering the western view of ancient India for years and this is just another crucial subject that he wanted to address.

“Rāvaṇa was a scholar par-excellence, but he was on the wrong side of Dharma. Hence, Śrīrāma waged a war against him to prevent a breakdown of society. Similarly, today’s eminent scholars we have chosen for this anthology can be thought of as the contemporary embodiments of the historical Rāvaṇa —academically influential personalities, but grossly mischaracterising the Dharmic way of life and history of India,” said Reddy. ​