Koenraad Elst

Quite frequently, my mailbox is hit by yet another product of the PN Oak-type imagination. This one refers to a web article  “Was the Christian Vatican Originally a Temple to Lord Shiva?” It claims that “Rome’s church compound is in the shape of [a] Shiva Lingam”. It also suggests, citing as its source the “famous [...]

A possibly good side to the Wendy Doniger affair At first sight, the withdrawal of Prof. Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus, an Alternative History by her publisher Penguin is an all-round disaster for the Hindus. The nit-picking by some Hindu activists that the book wasn’t really banned by a Court but only withdrawn by the [...]

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 [...]

In the recent years there has been a rise of  Hindu activism in India and globally as the alternative to the traditional activism of the RSS and the rest of the Sangh Parivar family . Dr Koenraad Elst and Rajesh of HHR discuss this phenomenon. [...]

“On Hinduism is a treat. For those who already know and admire Wendy Doniger’s work, this is a handy (if hefty) compendium of many of her essays…. For those who are reading her for the first time, the book is a marvellous introduction to the multiple ways that Hinduism can be approached and understood through [...]

The UPA Home Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, is but the umpteenth to repeat in public the notion of “Hindu terrorism” and to apply it to the RSS and BJP. Predictably, the RSS and BJP react furiously. They say they have nothing to do with Hindu terrorism, and that the lone Hindu terrorist Nathuram Godse, the  [...]

On 14 November 2012, Prof. Deepak Sarma posted an article on Huffington Post, titled “White Hindu converts: mimicry or mockery?” In that blog, he defines Hindus in America as an ethnic group animated by a memory of the colonized condition. It should, he argues, mistrust attempts by white Americans to convert to their religion. These [...]

The late Ram Swarup (1920-98), definitely the most important Hindu philosopher of independent India’s first half-century, liked to point out that other cultures had traditions similar to Hinduism before Christianity or Islam wiped them out. As he put it in his path‑breaking study of polytheism, The Word as Revelation (1980): “There was a time when [...]

Until his death in 2003, Bhishma Sahni was one of India’s most renowned Hindi language authors and playwrites. His 1974 controversial and popular novel ‘Tamas’ (Darkness) won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1975 and in 1987 was made into a television series for the national channel Doordarshan. Sahni wrote about the exodus of Hindus and [...]

My father worked in the Ministry of External Affairs and as such he was transferred out of India to Indonesia, the world's largest Islamic country. I went to an international school, where there was a very limited curriculum about India or Hinduism. [...]