Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
Unfaithful Wives Across Seas
Published on 13th February, 2022, in Mid-day. For nearly 2,000 years, Arab traders used the monsoon winds to travel across the sea to India. Along the Western coasts, in Kerala, Karnataka and Goa, they met people who allowed them to marry their daughters, but did not let them take these wives back home. These were…
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Articles
‘Are We Seeking Cultural Unity By Denying History?’
Published on 12th February, 2022, in Times of India. Tall statues of men, using Indian money and Chinese technology, are being built across India to unite India. There is the Statue of Unity of Sardar Patel in Gujarat, the Statue of Equality of Ramanuja-acharya built near Hyderabad, and soon there will be the Statue of…
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Articles
View: Reclaiming Loans Is an Achievement, But Writing Off Loans Is the Super-achievement
Published on 22nd January, 2022, in Economic Times. 2500 years ago, a great revolution took place in India. The country saw the rise of many monastic orders, in the middle of great affluence. The most popular amongst them were the Buddhists. But the Jains were the most resilient. The unique feature of the Jain monastic…
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Articles
How Puritanical Islam Faced Backlash in India
Published on 15th January, 2022, in Times of India. People who follow secularism have been accused of an asymmetrical relationship with Islam and other faiths. Make fun of the Islamic practices, and the secular scholar is upset. Make fun of Hindu practices, and the secular scholar provides rational explanations. Atrocities against Muslims by Muslims in…
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Articles
Sacrilege As a Political Tool
Published on 1st January, 2022, in Times of India. Animals can attack you if you claim their foraging grounds, i.e. their territory. Humans can attack you if you trespass on their holy land. Holiness is a human construct designed to make us believe there is something more to this world than the mundane life of…
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Articles
Hindutva’s Caste Masterstroke
Published on 1st January, 2022, in The Hindu. Ever since erstwhile champions of secular values have begun differentiating between Hindu and Hindutvawadi, a whole lot of intellectuals are bristling. They are arguing how these nuanced metaphysical differentiations hold no relevance on the street. Mostly from the Hindu elite, these are the same scholars who will…
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Articles
Chanakya’s Ritual Suicide
Published on 26th December, 2021, in Mid-day. Chandragupta Maurya would always eat only what his guru Chanakya provided. One day, out of love, he gave this food to his favourite queen who died instantly. Chanakya rushed to the spot and explained to the king that his food contained poison given in small doses over years…
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Articles
When Horses First Came to India
Published on 19th December, 2021, in Mid-day. The horse is not native to the Indian subcontinent. It has been the most prized import from the northwestern regions, from Arabia, Central Asia and from Eurasia. This is why the kings who live in the Northwest part of India, in Gandhara and Madra were referred to as…
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Articles
Why Does Hindutva Not Like Historians?
Published on 4th December, 2021, in Times of India. The subject that we know as history emerged only in the 19th century. Before that, memory, legends and evidence-based history were all combined as a single unit. They were stories from the past, communicated by bards to make communities feel good about the past or to…
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Articles
Was the Harappan Civilisation Hindu?
Published on 28th November, 2021, in Mid-day. We often trace the origin of Hinduism to Rig Veda, dated to 1,500 BCE. But the Rig Veda contains ideas that we can trace to Harappan civilisation. For example, Rig Veda mantra 8.47.17 refers to a measurement system based on increase by a factor of two (1, 2,…
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Articles
Hindu vs Hindutva: A Mythic Dissonance
Published on 24th November, 2021, in India Today. Hindus are at odds with the world in terms of its underlying mythic structure. By contrast, Hindutva is very much aligned to the dominant global discourse. We realise this if we meditate on two myths: the myth of equality and the myth of the wound. Myth here…
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Articles
How Did Hinduism Come to Dominate India?
Published on 20th November, 2021, in Times of India. Nearly 2,000 years ago, there were Buddhist stupas across India. Nearly 1,500 years ago, there were Buddhist caves in the Deccan. But 1,000 years ago, Buddhist structures were overshadowed by Hindu temples. Jain art, which was as popular as Buddhist art, became a relatively minor force.…
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Articles
Temples of Swaminarayan
Published on 13th November, 2021, in Economic Times. Most Indians are familiar with Raja Ram Mohan Roy and his Brahmo Samaj and link it with the 19th Century Hindu reformation. But very few know about Sahajanand Swami or the reforms instituted by his Swaminarayan sampradaya, even though both men lived in the same period of…
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Articles
Activism, Monotheism and Intolerance
Published on 17th October, 2021, in Mid-day. Have you noticed that academicians who say Hinduism is casteist, and promotes inequality, rarely talk about intolerance of monotheistic faiths like Christianity and Islam which dominate the world? Monotheist religions endorse the worship of ‘true’ God and oppose worship of ‘false’ gods, especially idolatry. What is a false…
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Articles
Collaborators Succeed in History
Published on 16th October, 2021, in Economic Times. In Hindutva’s political history, the Mughals were dacoits, who came from the North-West. A peer-reviewed history of India, of course, says that is not true. Foreign tribes have been entering through the North-West for a very long time. They all established their rule. The successful ones collaborated…
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Articles
The Courtesan’s Autonomy
Published on 3rd October, 2021, in Mid-day. In Mohenjo-daro, archaeologists found a tiny bronze statue of a young naked girl, with bangles in her left hand, standing erect with an attitude, right arm on a hip. Despite no evidence, they declared her to be a ‘dancing girl’ and the name stuck. For the archaeologists in…