Articles

On a Wednesday night, Arshya Gurbani reaches into a white cabinet and wakes a couple Hindu gods from their slumber. She carefully lays out statues of Ganesh and Shiva on a table in preparation for aarti, a worship ritual that reminds Hindus to stay humble and give thanks for good fortune. But Gurbani, 21, and [...]

It has been long since Hindu Dalits in Pakistan are facing double discrimination wherever they live. This discrimination starts from the place they live which is by upper caste Hindus who creates a disturbance in their lives from entrance to temples. On the other hand majority of Dalit Hindus are facing severe problems wherever they [...]

‘Sonia Gandhi Maino ‘ Anti Hindu Congress’ ‘Sickularism’ (secularism) ‘Pseudo Secularists’  ‘CIA ‘ ‘Hindu disunity ‘ paid anti hindu media’Taj Mahal is Hindu temple’ and many other slogans along with thousands of conspiracy theories has become the favourite diet of most Hindus who are lost in emotional outbursts of rants and rhetoric. This is not [...]

This article has been generated assuming that majority of the readers are familiar with the background of Arya Samaj, how it got started, its initial association with Brahmo Samaj and the later break off, its founder (Dayananda Saraswati), etc. The focus of this article is more on the situation of the Arya Samaj today and [...]

“When Germany is Christian, is India Hindu?”  got amazingly good response with thousands of facebook likes. However, some readers felt I made a mistake by not distinguishing between good, tolerant Hinduism, which is a private belief, and bad, intolerant Hindutva, which stands for the ‘communal agenda of an extreme right Hindu party’ that wants to [...]

Gunga Din is a character from a classic Rudyard Kipling poem, and was adapted into a film of the same name in 1939. In that production, Gunda Din is a simple water bearer who sacrifices his life in order to save the white British soldiers from rebel forces of the Thugee. The film is now [...]

The controversy about Penguin India’s decision to withdraw and pulp Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History brings to the surface issues likely to trouble scholars of India for years to come. First, the obvious: the banning of any book violates academic or intellectual freedom. Rightly so, this leads to moral indignation among the intelligentsia of India [...]

I was shocked and aghast to read the comments of author Wendy Doniger calling Indian Judiciary as the main villain in this case. Equally shocking was the article of Ram Chandra Guha carried by your esteemed newspaper stating that courts have failed to protect artistic rights. Equally stunning was the letter of Arundhati Roy calling [...]

Numerous Hindus come across as jubilant and triumphant now that they, or some of them, have managed to pressure Penguin books into agreeing to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: an Alternative History and destroy its stock. I am not that happy about it. And I agree with Wendy that the real villain of the [...]

The recent withdrawal from Penguin Publishing of ‘The Hindus’ by veteran anti-Hindu academic and rabble rouser Wendy Doniger has brought out the usual useful idiots who clamour for freedom of speech. What these ardent democrat so conveniently forget is that it is demagogues like Doniger who have used their positions of influence to crush that [...]