Karnad Quotes

“The noted writer and film personality, the late Girish Karnad, was however a staunch critic of Naipaul, accusing him of regurgitating Orientalist ideas about Muslims and displaying ‘a rabid antipathy to the Indian Muslim’.20 The argument that an honest appraisal of Muslim rule is ‘Orientalist’ and influenced by British perspectives, as Dalrymple also argues, holds little water. Are Indians incapable on their own of examining the evidence on record of what transpired during this period? The British have come and gone. Their colonial biases and attempts to see themselves as the civilising power have been thoroughly exposed. They were as destructive of Hindu civilisation as of Muslim rulers. Indians are now attempting to see their history as it was, on the basis of evidence available, and without putting a gloss on historical facts. That gloss cannot be perpetuated by privileging syncretism over destruction, but by trying to see both in perspective.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward