Indic Religions
India is one of the primary source of religions since time immemorial. India has given Sanatam Dharam ( normally known as Hindu religion), Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs. All the religions are impacted by the This section will contain the documents and reserach papers related to all religions orginated in India.
Portrayal of Hinduism by White American Scholars
Prof. Makkhan Lal
The academic world is flooded with books and so-called research monographs by American scholars, especially from Chicago and Harvard Universities. No Hindu gods and goddesses are spared. The language, the contents, and indeed the graphic descriptions, leaves one wondering whether he is reading a book on religion, mythology and about gods and goddesses or pornography wherein each and every object, each and every word, and in each and every description, the only thing visible is sex, sex, sex and more sex in all its manifestations possible through imagination. Not that there is no criticism on the issue in the academic world, but the defence of such gutter literature is much more vociferous, shrill and strong in the name of what they called peer reviews.
Unlike all other major world religions, Hinduism does not have its own home team, by which we mean a combined group of academic scholars who are both practitioners of the faith and well-respected in the academia at the highest levels. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism each have their respective home teams in the academics – in fact, multiple homes representing different denominations of these religions. Even China has recently established numerous well-funded Confucius institutes around the world that teach Chinese civilisational approaches to human issues on par with western models.
There has been virtually no protest from Indian academia. It has behaved in most cowardice and impotent manner. In fact, Indians themselves have contributed to the problem in significant ways. While American universities have major programmes for studying world religions and cultures, Indian universities do not offer similar programmes and provide the intellectual inputs to the world. Indeed, the discipline of Religious Studies does not even exist in most universities in India due to the particular myth that positive knowledge about, and intellectual involvement with, religion breeds communalism. Many Americans are shocked to learn that there is a deep prejudice among India’s intellectually colonised intelligentsia, according to which secularism implies the exclusion from, or even condemnation of Indic religions in, civic society – which is exact opposite of the respectful place given by American secular civic society to its majority Judeo-Christian traditions.
Age of the Rigveda
Prof. Makkhan Lal
The date of the Rigveda and Vedic literature has formed the subject of a keen and protracted controversy. Max Mueller, who was the first to deal with the question of the antiquity of Sanskrit literature, based his calculations on the story of Vararuchi Katyayana, narrated in the Kathasaritsagar of Somadeva, written in the 12th century A.D. He fixed the date of vedas between 600 to 200 B.C. Since Max Mueller repeatedly affirms his faith in the stories of Genesis and the chronology given by Bishop Usher, he was therefore, obliged to accommodate the whole Indian literature within the time-frame provided by Usher. Some contemporary Sanskritists like M.A. Winternitz, T. Goldstrucker, H.H. Wilson and W.D. Whiney objected to this whole methodology of Mueller and the dates assigned by him to Sanskrit literature. In this research paper Prof Makkhan Lal explores the antiquity of Vedas using three different approaches:
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Iron and the Vedic Chronology
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Astronomy and the Vedic Chronology
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Mathematics and Vedic Chronology