Daughters to inherit fathers’ self acquired, inherited properties, to get preference over others: SC

 In a significant verdict, the Supreme Court on Thursday said the daughters of a male Hindu, dying intestate, would be entitled to inherit the self-acquired and other properties obtained in the partition by the father and get preference over other collateral members of the family.

In a significant verdict, the Supreme Court on Thursday said the daughters of a male Hindu, dying intestate, would be entitled to inherit the self-acquired and other properties obtained in the partition by the father and get preference over other collateral members of the family.

The judgement, which came on an appeal against the Madras High Court verdict, dealt with the property rights of Hindu women and widows under the Hindu Succession Act.

“If a property of a male Hindu dying intestate (without a will) is a self-acquired property or obtained in the partition of a coparcenary or a family property, the same would devolve by inheritance and not by survivorship, and a daughter of such a male Hindu would be entitled to inherit such property in preference to other collaterals (such as sons/daughters of brothers of deceased father),” a bench of justices S Abdul Nazeer and Krishna Murari said.

The bench was dealing with the legal issue concerning the right of the daughter to inherit the self-acquired property of her father, in the absence of any other legal heir.

Justice Murari, writing the 51-page judgment for the bench, also dealt with the question of whether such property will devolve on to the daughter upon the death of her father, who died without a will, by inheritance or shall devolve on to “father’s brother’s son by survivorship”.

“Right of a widow or daughter to inherit the self-acquired property or share received in the partition of a coparcenary property of a Hindu male dying intestate is well recognized not only under the old customary Hindu Law but also by various judicial pronouncements...,” the verdict said.

Referring to the legal provision, it said the legislative intent was to remedy the limitation of a Hindu woman who could not claim an absolute interest in the properties inherited by her but only had a life interest in the estate so inherited.

“Section 14 (I) converted all limited estates owned by women into absolute estates and the succession of these properties in the absence of a will or testament would take place in consonance with Section 15 of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956...,” it said.

If a female Hindu dies intestate without leaving any issue, then the property inherited by her from her father or mother would go to the heirs of her father whereas the property inherited from her husband or father-in-law would go to the heirs of the husband, it said.

“The basic aim of the legislature in enacting Section 15(2) (of the Hindu Succession Act) is to ensure that inherited property of a female Hindu dying issueless and intestate, goes back to the source,” it said.

Dealing with the facts of the case, the bench set aside the trial court and the high court’s findings dismissing the partition suit of the daughters.

The apex court said, “...since the property in question was admittedly the self-acquired property of a father despite the family being in a state of jointness upon his death intestate, his sole surviving daughter will inherit the same by inheritance and the property shall not devolve by survivorship.

“Thus, the impugned judgement and decree dated March 01, 1994, passed by the Trial Court and confirmed by the High Court vide judgment and order dated January 21, 2009, are not liable to be sustained and are hereby set aside,” it said. 

(Source: Republic World)

‘He was what was called in those days a sports type’: Ram Guha through the eyes of Rukun Advani

 ‘His aim was to disprove the Hindu idea of reincarnation by circumventing his own afterlife through becoming either Bishan Singh Bedi or Erapalli Prasanna.’

It may be best for me not to begin my recollections of Ram along the standard template which recommends the phrase “The first time I met...” The reason is that our first meeting was inconsequential. Apparently, we met on a college badminton court forty-five years ago, in about July 1974.

Since Ram did not go on from this badminton court to become the father of Deepika Padukone, this first encounter’s location, at least, was not an augury of the direction of Ram’s future fame. I have no idea what Ram was doing near a badminton court in the mid-1970s because his interests lay in a corner of a different field, the cricket pitch. His agenda even then was anti-Hindutva, though it took a peculiar shape because it had become mixed up with his interest in cricket.

Ramchandra Guha. | SAM PANTHAKY/AFP

His aim in those days was to disprove the Hindu idea of reincarnation by circumventing his own afterlife through becoming either Bishan Singh Bedi or Erapalli Prasanna in this life. Failing either of those two options, he seemed to have resigned himself to a third, which was to become Gundappa Vishwanath. Since I was far from passionate about cricket, for the remainder of our college years Ram and I lived proximate lives without ever coming close.

I knew roughly who he was, and I also knew precisely what “type” he was – he was what was called in those days a “sports type”. This knowledge was a subconscious certainty somewhere inside me that if there was a fellow in our college who was never going to amount to anything intellectually, his name was Ram Guha.

He would develop his muscles, grow into a hunk, even perhaps wear a turban, and the climax of his aspiration would – to put it with the studied inaccuracy of those mystified by cricket enthusiasts – be to draw Viv Richards out of the crease and bowl him round his legs.

To my mind in those days Ram Guha was someone who could be safely written off and forgotten about. I was not alone in thinking this way. The college we went to was full of bright people who were all mostly determined to join the IAS, and they too seemed to think Ram didn’t stand much chance of becoming a bureaucrat.

In an ironic way, and for the wrong reasons, they were right. We all thought Ram would never make it into the bureaucracy because he seemed keener on the square drive than the intellectual drive, less interested in his present IAS prospects than the future prospects of EAS Prasanna.

But the real reason, which perhaps no one saw, was that Ram was too restless, too passionate, too wayward, and too interested in too many things – such as playing bridge, participating in quizzes, and casually pursuing as many women as possible – to fit into the Procrustean mould that shapes most bureaucrats. So I forgot Ram quite comprehensively for many years until in the mid-1980s we ran into each other quite by chance at the wedding of a friend we had in common.

I was by this time an editor at the Oxford University Press (OUP) and Ram seemed keen to woo me with his passion for the PhD in sociology he’d been working on at the Calcutta IIM. I expressed interest in hearing what he’d been up to and invited him to drop in at the OUP. Some days later, Ram arrived in my office to discuss the book he had in mind.

What he did not know was that I had only invited him out of sheer curiosity – curiosity over why this man who I recalled as the failed reincarnation of Bishan Bedi had been so animated about some Garhwali village where, apparently, the women had taken to embracing tree trunks. Had his failure to make it to the Indian Test team as a spin bowler bowled him clean out of his own mind?

You can imagine my surprise at our meeting, during which a man I’d by now mentally certified as a lunatic at a loose end started telling me about how the Subaltern Studies series had helped him understand narratives of dissent that were forged at a distance from nationalism. He spoke also of EP Thompson and someone called Sartono Kartodirdjo, a name so alien and impossible to pronounce that it could only have been of some exalted foreign academic.

The realisation slowly dawned on me that the man in my office had turned himself into a scholar. It seemed a bad case of spin taking another turn: the Ram I’d seen worship at the altar of Bishan Singh Bedi and Gundappa Vishwanath was now worshipping at the altar of Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna. It was a transformation nearly inconceivable, most unanticipated, and quite absolute.

I did not foresee then that this was only the first of several radical changes of direction in Ram’s intellectual life. Nor was The Unquiet Woods, Ram’s first book, which was published by the OUP in 1989, something that either I or anyone else at the time could have seen for what it was – the starting point of the unusually variegated career of a writer and intellectual.

My recollection of it thirty years on is still sharp – because of the exceptional clarity and accessibility of the prose in which it was written. Having edited the early volumes of Subaltern Studies and Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, I was just about getting used to the somewhat arcane terms in this kind of Indian history-writing about protest and dissent, the only greatly readable exception to the general trend being the prose of David Hardiman who, like Ram, seemed interested in an audience not confined within cloisters.

The prose of these two seemed to me modelled on a template traceable back to EP Thompson, in those days perhaps the important historian in the intellectual genealogy of every liberal and left historian. For my humdrum editorial purposes when facing the script of Ram’s first book, this was a wonderful lineage because it emphasised a vital interpenetration of complexity of thought and clarity of expression, which basically meant that I as editor had to do very little work as far as straightening out prose went.

In fact, in Ram’s writing ever since I have found very little that needs straightening out because he instinctively stays clear of obscurity. In his first monograph, though matters were frequently complex and complicated, the prose was never gratuitously “complicating” issues – an activity academics had begun taking a fancy to around then. His arguments and analyses were never the sort that could only be unravelled and properly understood by an intellectual elite already thoroughly immersed in the literature.

Ram was writing from the start for seriously interested and ordinarily intelligent readers, unswayed by the value fashionable academics put on fatuous obscurity. This partly accounts for the considerable success even of his first book, despite it being on a specialised subject.

Excerpted with permission from ‘The Unquiet Ram’, by Rukun Advani, from A Functioning Anarchy: Essays for Ramachandra Guha, edited by Nandini Sundar and Srinath Raghavan, Penguin Books India.

(Source: Scroll)

The British loved their meat, but some were fascinated by Hindu-Brahminical vegetarianism

 In ‘Meat, Mercy, and Morality’, Samiparna Samanta writes that the British in India thrived on an elaborate diet of meat, but some preferred vegetarianism in the tropical climate.

The nation’s national wealth was indicated through meat consumption: Britain was the heaviest consumer of meat in Europe. Several private memoirs, diaries, and letters of British officers and memsahibs attest that the British in India thrived on an elaborate diet of meat during the period. 

The starling array of meat consumed at Anglo-Indian breakfasts alone included crumbed chops, brain cutlets, beef rissoles, devilled kidneys, whole spatchcocks, duck stews, Irish stews, mutton hashes, brawns of sheep’s heads, and trotters in addition to Indian meat dishes like jhal frazie, chicken malai, and beef hussainee.

The massive consumption of red meat at breakfast was merely an English custom transferred to a tropical climate, irrespective of its suitability. During the early decades of Company rule in India, as Elizabeth Collingham’s work has shown, such ostentatious and unhealthy dining habits ‘served well to underline the status of the Company grandee in India’. 

Representational image | The Afternoon Meal (La Merienda) | Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art | Wikimedia Commons

However, with the increasing racialization of the Raj after 1857, the body of the British official in India became an even more powerful signifier of ‘Britishness,’ and diet and dress became, accordingly, cultural sites on which a sense of bodily difference between the British and their Indian subjects was maintained. According to Collingham, the lavish consumption of food and drink by the British in India was reminiscent of the nabob and continued to construct the official’s body as an aristocratic body in the Indian context. Over time there might have been a refinement of the eating etiquette compared with the meat-eating excesses of the earlier period, elaborate meals continued to be the norm.

Some Europeans in India, however, advocated vegetarianism. Tristram Stuart discusses the European fascination with Hindu-Brahminical vegetarianism in the early years of the Company rule. According to Stuart, the most surprising to western travellers in India were the masses of ordinary people who lived on what Europe considered an exceptionally abstemious diet. 

Stuart closely examines a few European travellers in India—Thomas Tryon and John Evelyn, among others—to demonstrate how they drew from Hindu theology and enshrined Indian vegetarianism in the mainstream of intellectual debate. The revered Jesuit missionary Abbe Jean Antione Dubois composed a tract, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, where he depicted ahimsa as a cowardly and effeminate doctrine, but sought to explain the real historical origin for vegetarianism through climatic compulsions.

According to Dubois, meat was indigestible and putrid in a tropical climate His suggestion was endorsed by a widespread tradition of European tropical medicine like the work of British naval surgeon, James Johnson, who, in his The Influence of Tropical Climates, More Especially the Climate of India, on European Constitutions (1813), applied the principle of temperance very strictly. H

aving identified over-stimulation and a tendency to plethora as the greatest risk to the Europeans newly arrived in a tropical climate, he recommended a cooling vegetable diet. Johnson’s recommendations were based on the eighteenth-century view of a vegetable diet as an antiseptic regimen which cleansed the bodily fluids of impurities while meat, as a stimulant, induced plethora, especially if taken in large quantities. 

Collingham argues that the Brahminical prohibition of wine and meat, as well as the simple diet of rice and vegetables of the Hindu poor, appealed to the temperance-minded British physicians as a laudable Indian custom, which contributed greatly to the health of the Indian population. Thus, British physicians like Johnson held up the Brahmins as models of ascetic, suitable behaviour. Having said that however, Collingham notes that most Anglo-Indians took little heed of arguments in favour of the vegetable diet and many resisted medical attempts to Indianize their constitutions.

Thanks to the lavish consumption of meat by the British in India, stomach disorders were inevitably common, but everyone blamed the climate rather than the unsuitability of their diet. The Governor, Philip Francis, thus wrote in 1775, which attests to the over-indulgence in meat: ‘I am tormented with the bile and obliged to live on mutton chop and water. The Devil is in the climate I think.’ These ostentatious eating habits were, as Burton argues, deployed as the cultural markers of a masculine, physically superior British Raj. In a similar vein, John Beames wrote about their daily eating habits:

Our chota haziri, or little breakfast, was at five-thirty to six, and consisted of tea, eggs boiled or poached, toast and fruit. 

Breakfast at eleven consisted of fried or broiled fish, a dish or two of meat—generally fowl cutlets, hashes and stews, or cold meat and salad followed by curry and rice and dessert. We drank either bottled beer—the universal Bass— or claret. Between four and five there was tea and cakes. Dinner at half past seven or eight consisted of soup, and entree, roast fowls or ducks, occasionally mutton, and in cold weather once or twice beef, an entremet of game or a savoury, and sweets.

If the gastronomic delights of the British were considered to be a metaphor for a physically superior Raj, the native kitchen was however very bleakly portrayed as symbolic of all that was filthy, dirty, and uncouth about Oriental cultures. The author of a cookbook described a typical kitchen in an Anglo-Indian compound as ‘a wretchedly mean, carelessly constructed, godown [outbuilding] … inconveniently far from the house, and consequently open to every passer-by.’

This excerpt ‘Meat, Mercy, and Morality: Animals and Humanitarianism in Colonial Bengal, 1850–1920’ by Samiparna Samanta has been published with permission from Oxford University Press.

(Source: The Print)

Uttar Pradesh Police registers first case under new law against 'love jihad'

 The case was registered by a resident of Bareilly who accused a Muslim man of trying to forcibly convert his daughter and also for threatening to kill her.

The Uttar Pradesh Police has registered its first case under the newly-implemented anti-conversion law, accusing a Muslim man of trying to forcibly convert a Hindu girl.

The case was registered Saturday under the Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance, 2020, which was cleared by Governor Anandiben Patel earlier that day.

Tikaram, a resident of the district Bareilly, filed the case at the Deorania Police Station against a youth named Uwaish Ahmed for allegedly threatening his daughter’s life and forcing her to convert to Islam.

Representational image | Photo: Pixabay

The Deputy Inspector General of Bareilly zone Rajesh Pandey told ThePrint that the Deorania Police registered the case under Sections 3 and 5 of the new law, along with the Indian Penal Code sections related to threat to life.

Pandey added that the accused, Ahmed, who is a resident of Sharifnagar in Deorania, had absconded from his residence and efforts were on to apprehend him.

Accused verbally abused girl, threatened to kill her

In his complaint, Tikaram alleged that Ahmed was acquainted with his daughter since they were students and used to frequently talk to each other.

However, recently, the latter started pressurising her to convert to Islam. According to the girl’s father, Ahmed and his family were warned on many occasions but he did not relent.

Tikaram also accused Ahmed of verbally abusing his daughter and threatening to kill her.

Based on his complaint, the police has registered an FIR against Ahmed under the ordinance that applies to cases of alleged ‘love jihad’. According to the police, a team is currently trying to apprehend the accused.

The Uttar Pradesh government approved the ordinance, Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion Bill 2020, that seeks to bar “forceful religious conversions”, including for marriage, on 24 November

The ordinance provides for an imprisonment of 1-10 years and a fine of Rs 15,000 to Rs 50,000 under different categories.

(Source: The Print)

Suman Kumari makes history, becomes Pakistan’s first Hindu woman judge

Suman Kumari has become the first Hindu woman in Pakistan to be appointed as a civil judge, according to a media report.

Suman, who hails from Qambar-Shahdadkot, will serve in her native district.

She passed her LLB examination from Hyderabad and did her masters in law from Karachi's Szabist University, Dawn reported.

According to Pawan Kumar Bodan, her father, Suman wants to provide free legal assistance to the poor in Qambar-Shahdadkot.

According to her father, Suman wants to provide free legal assistance to the poor in
Qambar-Shahdadkot.(Photo Courtesy: Twitter/@Danyal Gilani)

“Suman has opted for a challenging profession, but I am sure she will go places through hard work and honesty.” - Pawan Kumar Bodan, Suman’s father

Her father is an eye specialist while Suman's elder sister is a software engineer and another sister is a chartered accountant.

Suman is a fan of singers Lata Mangeshkar and Atif Aslam.

This is not the first time that a person from the Hindu community has been appointed as a judge. The first judge from the Hindu community was Justice Rana Bhagwandas, who served as the acting chief justice for brief periods between 2005 and 2007.

Hindus make up nearly 2 percent of Pakistan's total population and Hinduism remains the second largest religion in Pakistan after Islam.

(Source: The Quint)

An open letter by a chauvinist Hindu to the secular haze-clogged Shashi Tharoor

“Wasting water” during Holi and “colours on innocent animals” become a matter of concern for you who sits inside your private pools and travels in Business class planes. You cry of Patriarchal oppression during Karwa Chauth. But you don’t see patriarchy in “Mutilating female gentiles. “ With Ganesh Chaturthi, Durga Puja you crib about polluting water but ironically you don’t talk about the rivers of blood and animal waste that flows into the same water sources. You pick on every single Hindu celebration and mock our culture with a simple claim of being Environment unfriendly. Dear sir, we are tired of the Exasperating farrago of distortions, misrepresentations & outright lies that you speak, write, opinion about and sell in the name of being secular, writes Ashish Saradka, an engineer working for HP, in an open letter to Shahsi Tharoor on Readoo. Read on: 

Dear Shashi Tharoor sir,

This is an open letter to address the difference of opinions I have with the ‘Hindu Haze’ that you see in Deepawali,” and by a Hindu who is sad to be called “an individual polarized by the triumphalist people. Let us not barge into personal conflicts of deciding who is polarized and who is triumphalist. At least these words get huge on an average Indian travelling on an economy class seat in an aeroplane, unlike someone who thinks economy class as a “Cattle herd”.

Shashi Tharoor 

✔@ShashiTharoor

Bakr-Id sacrifices hurt only goats; Muharram mourners flagellate themselves, but Diwali firecrackers affect celebrants&non-revellers alike.

11:15 PM - Oct 10, 2017

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To start with, you go on to mention the pleas of parents to ban crackers has been an age-old demand in Delhi and how it causes pollution in the city by smog which clouds above the city during winters. Delhi NCR experiences winter in the months of December and January, which is over 45 days away from the Deepawali celebrations. To add furthermore, let us just look into what actually pushes in more pollutants to the atmosphere.

Delhi registers a record growth of around 9.9% vehicles every year, a data from Delhi government shows the increase in the number of vehicles in Delhi from 8.8 million in 2014-15 to 9.7 million in 2015-16. If we try to say cracker bursting is Willful polluting, then adding new vehicles is also the same. A city which hosts around 20 million people having half the number of vehicles in itself is alarming. And remember these vehicles pollute the city every single day, unlike 3 days during Deepawali.

For a moment before we discuss the ‘Hindu Chauvinism’ that is cribbing against the cracker ban let us just look back at old days when you celebrated things. I understand that you feel that stadium inaugurations, political party victories, New Year eve, Christmas can be celebrated with crackers, but celebrating Deepawali with crackers is bad!

Shashi Tharoor 

✔@ShashiTharoor

The fireworks illuminate the sky above Tvm's state-of-the-art stadium after the opening ceremony of @kerala2015

6:04 PM - Jan 31, 2015

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Now coming to the age-old debate of a bloodless Muharram, you speak about only goats being harmed. There are two reasons I am sad about this line of argument sir.

Shashi Tharoor 

✔@ShashiTharoor

Disgraceful BJP political pandering to retrograde elements inTN&Maharashtra results in torture of bulls. Urge Animal Welfare Board to appeal

8:35 AM - Jan 10, 2016

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Shashi Tharoor 

✔@ShashiTharoor

Absurd to justify inhumane conduct on the grounds of traditional culture. Sati was also part of traditional culture:will BJP justify it now?

8:36 AM - Jan 10, 2016

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These were your reactions when people wanted Jallikattu. We can’t justify animal torture in the name of traditional culture. Can we? Isn’t hurting and torturing goats in line with the above sentiments sir? Didn’t we all cry against the torturing of dogs in Yulin festival in China? Wasn’t that just about hurting animals?

Well, again let us not discuss on the sentiments and emotions attached with these celebrations. Let us check it from the perspective of pollution, the carbon footprint and the pollution caused by the meat consumption that accompanies these celebrations! A survey from PETA says that a staggering 51 percent or more of global greenhouse-gas emissions are caused by animal agriculture. It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef. Going by your words banning beef is a way to stop willful pollution of the environment, isn’t it? Let us all consume Tofu instead. Coming back with a prerogative saying “People have the right to eat what they want isn’t allowed. Because people are not let to burn what they feel like for celebrations.

Sir, we agree on your discourse where you say,” Diwali firecrackers effect both revellers and non-revellers alike. And Lord Ram was not welcomed with crackers.” Yes, we need to ban anything that effects the revellers and the non-revellers alike. And also things that were not a part of a tradition. For your information sir, loudspeakers were not a part of any Masjids or any tradition till the late 1920’s, something which isn’t as debatable as the timeline of the invention of gunpowder used in crackers.

Going by your own words and observations, Article 25 of the Indian Constitution grants Indians the freedom to practice religion “subject to public order, morality and health”. But if a religious observance – however, sanctified by centuries of tradition – affects the health of the public, modern civic responsibility suggests it must be modified. There are crores of people effected by noise created 5 times a day 365 days a year and their hearing capacities are in danger. Doesn’t our civic responsibility urge us to stop that?

One more point sir. I strongly disapprove of you denying the claims of Hinduism is in danger, because I am tired of people poking fingers into my eyes every time I celebrate my festivals, every time I try and follow what my ancestors have laid out in front of me to follow. I am afraid of Hinduism being a punching bag for all of you ‘Intellectuals’ to throw punches at whenever you are frustrated or feel like appeasing someone. I am sad about the double standards that you follow dictate terms like, “Harming Nature, sentiments, cruelty” clause in every Hindu celebration.

“Wasting water” during Holi and “colours on innocent animals” become a matter of concern for you who sits inside your private pools and travels in Business class planes. You cry of Patriarchal oppression during Karwa Chauth. But you don’t see patriarchy in “Mutilating female gentiles. “ With Ganesh Chaturthi, Durga Puja you crib about polluting water but ironically you don’t talk about the rivers of blood and animal waste that flows into the same water sources. You pick on every single Hindu celebration and mock our culture with a simple claim of being Environment unfriendly.

Dear sir, we are tired of the Exasperating farrago of distortions, misrepresentations & outright lies that you speak, write, opinion about and sell in the name of being secular. Please stop picking on us Hindus and dissecting Hindutva for personal and political gains. Let the ‘Dharma’ of this land flourish for years and years to come. Let us leave the traits of the rich tradition that we have for our descendants to come than try and malign it in the name of liberation. 

Why Westerners (including Mark Twain) failed to understand the multiplicity of idols in India

The bafflement of many who first behold the array of Hindu images springs from the deep-rooted Western antagonism to imaging the divine at all, writes Diana L Eck in the Scroll. Read on: 

It is visibly apparent to anyone who visits India or who sees something of India through the medium of film that this is a culture in which the mythic imagination has been very generative. The images and myths of the Hindu imagination constitute a basic cultural vocabulary and a common idiom of discourse. Since India has “written” prolifically in its images, learning to read its mythology and iconography is a primary task for the student of Hinduism. In learning about Hinduism, it might be argued that perhaps it makes more sense to begin with Ganesa, the elephant-headed god who sits at the thresholds of space and time and who blesses all beginnings, and then proceed through the deities of the Hindu pantheon, rather than to begin with the Indus Valley civilization and proceed through the ages of Hindu history. Certainly for a student who wishes to visit India, the development of a basic iconographic vocabulary is essential, for deities such as the monkey Hanuman or the fierce Kali confront one at every turn.

When the first European traders and travelers visited India, they were astonished at the multitude of images of the various deities they saw there. They called them “idols” and described them with combined fascination and repugnance. For example, Ralph Fitch, who traveled as a merchant through North India in the 1500s writes of the images of deities in Banaras: “Their chiefe idols bee blacke and evill favoured, their mouths monstrous, their eares gilded and full of jewels, their teeth and eyes of gold, silver and glasse, some having one thing in their hands and some another.”

Fitch had no interpretive categories, save those of a very general Western Christian background, with which to make sense of what he saw. Three hundred years did little to aid interpretation. When M. A. Sherring lived in Banaras in the mid-1800s he could still write, after studying the city for a long time, of “the worship of uncouth idols, of monsters, of the linga and other indecent figures, and of a multitude of grotesque, ill-shapen, and hideous objects.” When Mark Twain traveled through India in the last decade of the nineteenth century, he brought a certain imaginative humor to the array of “idols” in Banaras, but he remained without what Rudolf Arnheim would call “manageable models” for placing the visible data of India in a recognizable context. Of the “idols” he wrote, “And what a swarm of them there is! The town is a vast museum of idols – and all of them crude, misshapen, and ugly. They flock through one’s dreams at night, a wild mob of nightmares.”

Without some interpretation, some visual hermeneutic, icons and images can be alienating rather than enlightening. Instead of being keys to understanding, they can kindle xenophobia and pose barriers to understanding by appearing as a “wild mob of nightmares,” utterly foreign to and unassimilable by our minds. To understand India, we need to raise our eyes from the book to the image, but we also need some means of interpreting and comprehending the images we see.

The bafflement of many who first behold the array of Hindu images springs from the deep-rooted Western antagonism to imaging the divine at all. The Hebraic hostility to “graven images” expressed in the Commandments is echoed repeatedly in the Hebrew Bible: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

The Hebraic resistance to imaging the divine has combined with a certain distrust of the senses in the Greek tradition as well. While the Greeks were famous for their anthropomorphic images of the gods, the prevalent suspicion in the philosophies of classical Greece was that “what the eyes reported was not true.” Like those of dim vision in Plato’s cave, it was thought that people generally accept the mere shadows of reality as “true.” Nevertheless, if dim vision described human perception of the ordinary world, the Greeks continued to use the notion of true vision to describe wisdom, that which is seen directly in the full light of day rather than obliquely in the shadowy light of the cave. Arnheim writes, “The Greeks learned to distrust the senses, but they never forgot that direct vision is the first and final source of wisdom. They refined the techniques of reasoning, but they also believed that, in the words of Aristotle, ‘the soul never thinks without an image.’”

On the whole, it would be fair to say that the Western traditions, especially the religious traditions of the “Book” – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – have trusted the Word more than the Image as a mediator of the divine truth. The Qur’an and the Hebrew Bible are filled with injunctions to “proclaim” and to “hear” the word. The ears were somehow more trustworthy than the eyes. In the Christian tradition this suspicion of the eyes and the image has been a particularly Protestant position.

And yet the visible image has not been without some force in the religious thinking of the West. The verbal icon of God as “Father” or “King” has had considerable power in shaping the Judeo-Christian religious imagination. The Orthodox Christian traditions, after much debate in the eighth and ninth centuries, granted an important place to the honoring of icons as those “windows” through which one might look toward God. They were careful, however, to say that the icon should not be “realistic” and should be only two-dimensional. In the Catholic tradition as well, the art and iconography, especially of Mary and the saints, has had a long and rich history. And all three traditions of the “Book” have developed the art of embellishing the word into a virtual icon in the elaboration of calligraphic and decorative arts. Finally, it should be said that there is a great diversity within each of these traditions. The Mexican villager who comes on his knees to the Virgin of Guadalupe, leaves a bundle of beans, and lights a candle would no doubt feel more at home in a Hindu temple than in a stark, white New England Protestant church. Similarly, the Moroccan Muslim woman who visits the shrines of Muslim saints would find India less foreign than did the eleventh-century Muslim scholar Alberuni, who wrote that “the Hindus entirely differ from us in every respect.”

Worshipping as God those “things” that are not God has been despised in the Western traditions as “idolatry,” a mere bowing down to “sticks and stones.” The difficulty with such a view of idolatry, however, is that anyone who bows down to such things clearly does not understand them to be sticks and stones. No people would identify themselves as “idolaters,” by faith. Thus idolatry can be only an outsider’s term for the symbols and visual images of some other culture. Theodore Roszak, writing in Where the Wasteland Ends, locates the “sin of idolatry” precisely where it belongs: in the eye of the beholder.

In beginning to understand the consciousness of the Hindu worshipper who bows to “sticks and stones,” an anecdote of the Indian novelist U. R. Anantha Murthy is provocative. He tells of an artist friend who was studying folk art in rural North India. Looking into one hut, he saw a stone daubed with red kunkum powder, and he asked the villager if he might bring the stone outside to photograph it. The villager agreed, and after the artist had photographed the stone he realized that he might have polluted this sacred object by moving it outside. Horrified, he apologized to the villager, who replied, “It doesn’t matter. I will have to bring another stone and anoint kunkum on it.” Anantha Murthy comments, “Any piece of stone on which he put kunkum became God for the peasant. What mattered was his faith, not the stone.”8We might add that, of course, the stone matters too. If it did not, the peasant would not bother with a stone at all.

Unlike the zealous Protestant missionaries of a century ago, we are not much given to the use of the term “idolatry” to condemn what “other people” do. Yet those who misunderstood have still left us with the task of understanding, and they have raised an important and subtle issue in the comparative study of religion: What is the nature of the divine image? Is it considered to be intrinsically sacred? Is it a symbol of the sacred? A mediator of the sacred? How are images made, consecrated, and used, and what does this tell us about the way they are understood? But still another question remains to be addressed before we take up these topics. That is the question of the multitude of images. Why are there so many gods?

How leftist historians and intellectuals have systematically distorted Hindu history

The greatest damage done to the Hindus in modern day has been by the leftist historians who distorted the entire history. They glorified the brutal invaders whose sole aim was to destroy Hindus, and sidelined the brave Hindu rulers who fought to protect the Hindus. Next time any Marxist “intellectual” tells you that Hindus and Hinduism have survived due to the strong foundation of secularism, just ask them if that was the case, why did Hinduism come to an end in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, or even in Kashmir valley ? Why is Hinduism under constant decline in parts of Bengal and Kerala ? Once upon a time, all the above countries or regions had a huge Hindu population, and they do not exist anymore.

Marxist historians have been fooling the mass by saying Hinduism has survived attacks of thousand years due to its tolerance. Let us debunk the MYTHS:

1. Hinduism has NOT remained strong over the periods. It has not survived strongly. Rather, it has been steadily moving towards an end. A religion which was spread all over the subcontinent and as far as Burma, Thailand and Cambodia is today restricted to India ( that too only 70%). Hindus have been slaughtered in every country one by one. Today, they remain (majorly) only in India, and that too under threat in Bengal, Kashmir, Kerala, parts of UP and Bihar.

2. Whatever Hinduism has survived in India is NOT because of our tolerance. It is because there were Hindu rulers who fought fiercely for us and gave up their lives protecting Hindus from reign of terror unleashed by invaders since 1000 AD. Their reign ensured that Hinduism was not completely wiped out from India, unlike other countries.

– Prithviraj Chauhan protected us from Mohammad Ghori.
– Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj united us against the Mughal terrorists and Adil shah.
– Maharana Pratap bravely fought the Mughal and ensured Hinduism survived.
– Lachit Borphukan, the brave commander of Raja Ram Singh defeated the Mughals in battle of Saraighat and ensured that Northeast was never under the influence of Mughals.
– Guru Govind Singh ji, Baba Banda Singh Bahadur put a check to Aurangzeb’s brutality on Hindus to ensure that Sikhism and Hinduism continue to survive in North India.

– The are hundreds of other local rulers who fought bravely and put a check on atrocities on Hindus. However, they were sidelined by the Marxist historians and never given the due place they deserve.

3. This whole Marxist History that Hinduism has survived because of tolerance and secularism is a sugar pill to make Hindus believe the lie, and remain weak… Secularism and Tolerance have been propagated since long only to make Hindus timid and weak. There is a huge difference between genuine tolerance and staying mum when you are being attacked from all sides.

4. If the virtues of Tolerance and secularism were the reason of the survival of Hindus, Bangladesh would still be having 35% Hindus, Pakistan would stil be having 15% Hindus. Afghanistan, Indonesia, Kashmir would still be having a huge chunk of Hindu population.They were all killed and driven out.

If you open any school level textbook of history, most of the portion is dedicated to Mughals, Ghoris, Ghaznis and other invaders who killed Hindus, destroyed Hindu temples, raped Hindu women and forcefully converted Hindus. However, only a few paragraphs (and at times, not even that) is for our true heroes like Shivaji, Maharana Pratap, Prithviraj Chauhan, Guru Govind Singh and others who fought for us !

(Source: Post Card)