Ten Heads Of Ravana: A Critique Of Hinduphobic Scholars

Description

For long, a handful of scholars and intellectual sites, whose understanding of Bharata is disjointed from tradition and often inimical to the Dharmic way of life, have controlled India’s civilizational narrative. They analyze Bharatiya sanskriti through a Western gaze while discarding native models. Embedded in powerful ecosystems, gilded Lankas, they are increasingly replacing traditional guru-s and acarya-s as the modern adhikari-s of Indian knowledge systems. In contemporary Indian scholarship, eminent personalities like Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Shashi Tharoor, Ramachandra Guha, Sheldon Pollock, Wendy Doniger, Devdutt Pattanaik, Kancha Ilaiah, and Michael Witzel are at the forefront of such India studies. Ravana was a scholar par excellence, but he was on the wrong side of Dharma. Hence, Srirama waged a war against him to prevent a breakdown of society. Similarly, today’s embodiments of the historical Ravana—academically influential personalities, but grossly mischaracterizing the Dharmic way of life and history of Bharata. In this collection of essays, authors Dr. K.S. Kannan, T.N. Sudarshan, Dr. Sharda Narayanan, Anurag Sharma, Divya Reddy, Manogna Sastry, Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay and Dr. H.R. Meera have brought to light, through rigorous evidence-based research, numerous factual inaccuracies, wilful misrepresentation and deliberate distortions in the scholarship of many such intellectual heads of the modern Ravana.