The Great Hindu Civilisation Quotes

“In Punjab, the great Guru Nanak (1469–1539 CE), who founded the Sikh faith, was greatly influenced by the Bhakti movement. Sikhism, under Nanak, and the nine Gurus who followed him, the last being Guru Gobind Singh (1666–1708 CE), created a remarkably sublime and powerful monotheistic faith of nirguna bhakti. In clear Vedantic tones, its mul mantar or fundamental prayer—Ik Onkar: There is only one Supreme Being—made a powerful call of universal spiritual appeal. Like Brahman, the Sikh Absolute is nirankar (formless), akal (timeless), karta purakh (the Creator), agam agochar (incomprehensible and invisible) and is Waheguru (wonderous Teacher). The religion emphasised the non-duality of divinity—Ek noor te sab jag upja: From one luminous light the entire universe arose. In this one statement, it pole-vaulted above conventional religious orthodoxies.
Of great importance in the Sikh faith is mehar, kirpa, karam or the Grace of God. Guru Nanak taught that to obtain this, the most important form of worship is bhakti. Guru Arjan, in the Sukhmani Sahib, recommended that true religion is one of loving devotion to God. Selfless devotion and service can lead to Sach Khand or the Realm of Truth, which is the final union with the spirit of God, akin to the Advaita notion of brahmanubhav. Thus, Sikhism considers simran (the meditative remembrance) of God, and japna (chanting or kirtan of God’s name) to be an essential part of religious practice. The singing of the Guru’s hymns as contained in the Guru Granth Sahib—the only divine symbol of worship recognised by Sikhism—is practised through the shabad kirtans. The passages of the Guru Granth Sahib were poetically composed in rhyme, and lent themselves easily to exceptionally soulful musical compositions based on thirty-one ragas of classical music.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“One excess leads to another, and votaries of the other extreme depict Muslim rule as only one of devastation and destruction, completely devaluing the significant cultural exchange that was also partly its consequence. Both sides then deliberately discount historical truth, and shadow-box with the fictions they want to live with. The sane alternative is to accept history as it happened, acknowledge the traumatising impact of the Muslim destruction of Hindu civilisation, recognise the inestimable loss that it caused to the collective assets—physical and intellectual—of a very significant part of our history, and accept that a great deal of that destruction was due to the religious fanaticism of the Islamic rulers. Hindus were ruthlessly subjugated and institutionally discriminated against by the Muslim state. The advent of Islamic rule broke the continuity and evolution of a great civilisation; it disrupted the creative rhythm of that remarkable period of history; it destroyed a great deal of its cultural artefacts; and, it provided the first example in Indian history until then, of such widespread and violent religious intolerance. True secularism can only arise from a reconciliation with history, not suppression of truth, for that only serves to strengthen the extremism of the counter narrative. As Amish Tripathi argues: ‘Denial invariably leads to repressed truth finding expression in the ugliness of hatred and anger, as we see in some parts of India today. It’s healthier in the long run for societies to accept, confront and then learn to handle the truth.’24”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“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

“Vijayanagara had adopted ‘many of the administrative, tax-collecting, and military methods of the Muslim sultans that surrounded it—namely, stirrups, horse-shoes, horse armour, and a new type of saddle’. Its architecture also showed evidence of the use ‘of the arch and the dome of the Islamic north’.15 Reciprocally, Hindu influences were also discernible in the Islamic sultanates, with whom the Vijayanagara kingdom on occasion entered into strategic alliances.
I am not, however, clear what these arguments prove. Because the kings of Vijayanagara did not appear bare-chested in public, or because they used stirrups or horseshoes, and because, where they felt politically necessary, they aligned themselves with one Muslim sultanate to finesse the other, was Vijayanagara not a Hindu kingdom? Or that, when it was defeated, the Muslim sultans did not savagely destroy the city and, in particular, attack its remarkable temples? To quote a few instances of Hindu–Muslim syncretism in architecture, in dress or in administrative practices, is more an acknowledgement of the unavoidable fusions wrought over centuries, and not a change in the mindset of Muslim conquerors against kafirs and their practice of destroying Hindu cultural and religious artefacts.
It is a moot point too whether the Vijayanagara kings, on conquering a Muslim sultanate, would have as relentlessly destroyed mosques. Historical records clearly bring out that Krishnadevaraya (1509–1528 CE)—the most illustrious ruler of Vijayanagara and among the greatest kings India has seen—respected all faiths. He was himself a Vaishnavite, but extended wholehearted patronage to Shaiva, Jain and other sects. He employed Muslims in his army, encouraged them to settle in the capital city and erected a mosque in 1439 for them to pray. For the Muslim officers in his court, he placed a copy of the Koran before his throne so that they could perform the ceremony of obeisance before him without sinning against their religious injunctions, even though the Vijayanagara kingdom was formed with the aim of protecting Hindus and Hindu culture from Muslim attacks. Christian Portuguese also found residence in the capital. The Portuguese traveller, Barbosa, who visited Hampi during Krishnadevaraya’s rule, wrote: ‘The king allows such freedom that every man may come and go and live according to his own creed, without suffering any annoyance and without enquiry whether”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of the idols and the temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves. … The architectural evidence—the absence of Hindu monuments in the north—is convincing enough. The conquest was unlike any that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated people never write their history.’15
In the same interview, Naipaul argues that the Muslim conquerors succeeded in ‘the grinding down of Hindu India’. The loot and plunder and destruction, and their religious hostility to non-believers, was not restricted to the original foreign invaders, but a feature of the entire period of Islamic rule. He cites the example of Vijayanagara in this context. ‘Let us consider two last dates. In 1565, a year after the birth of Shakespeare, Vijayanagara in the south is destroyed and its great capital city (Hampi) laid waste. In 1592, the terrible Akbar ravages Orissa in the east. This means that while a country like England is preparing for greatness under its great Queen, old India in its sixth century of retreat, is still being reduced to non-entity. The wealth and creativity, the artisans and architecture of the kingdom of Vijayanagara and Orissa must have been destroyed, their lights put out.’16 Naipaul’s larger point is that such depredations dealt a body blow to the creative impulses of the Hindu civilisation. ‘This is where we come face to face with the Indian calamity. When places like Vijayanagara and Orissa were laid low, all the creative talent would also have been destroyed. The current was broken. We have no means of knowing what architecture existed in the north before the Muslims. We can only be certain that there would have been splendours like Konark and Kanchipuram.’17
In an article in the UK newspaper, the Guardian, writer-historian William Dalrymple attempts to rebut Naipaul’s outspoken views. Naipaul’s ‘jaundiced’ view, he argues, was due to the influence of the ‘imperial historiography of Victorian Britain’, where the British sought to paint the Muslims as plunderers to bring out their own ‘civilizing mission’. Vijayanagara, he says, was ‘heavily Islamicised by the sixteenth century’. This can be inferred by the fact that ‘the Hindu kings of Vijayanagara appeared in public audience, not bare-chested as had been the tradition in Hindu India, but dressed in quasi-Islamic court costume’, symbolic, according to him—on the authority of American Sanskrit scholar, Philip Wagner—‘of their participation in the more universal culture of Islam’.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“Unlike Amartya Sen, who downplays the destructive religious evangelism of Muslim rule in India, he minces no words about what kind of impact it had. In an interview to the newspaper The Hindu in 1998, he said: ‘I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the tenth century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realize that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilization of that world was mortally wounded by those invasions. The Old World was destroyed. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.’14 Next year, he reiterated his views in an interaction with the magazine Outlook: ‘The millennium began with the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of the north. This is such a big and bad event that people have to find polite, destiny defying ways of speaking about it. In art books and history books, people write of the Muslims “arriving” in India, as though the Muslims came in a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest of India is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of the idols and the temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves. … The architectural evidence—the absence of Hindu monuments in the north—is convincing enough. The conquest was unlike any that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated people never write their history.’15
In the same interview, Naipaul argues that the Muslim conquerors succeeded in ‘the grinding down of Hindu India’. The loot and plunder and destruction, and their religious hostility to non-believers, was not restricted to the original foreign invaders, but a feature of the entire period of Islamic rule.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“Falsified history nurtures its own mythologies. A breed of writers and intellectuals still persist in trying to portray the Islamic invasion as some kind of great syncretic carnival, where the invaders came and partook of the local sweetmeats, and the conquered had a happy morsel of biryani, while both sat down to work out the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb that we so value today. The bathos of this imagined utopia works only on the ignorance of facts or deliberate distortion. The case of Amir Khusrau (1253–1325 CE) is instructive. Many people believe that he was a mystic, a Sufi poet, the spiritual disciple of his contemporary, the great Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya; he is regarded as the progenitor of Hindavi, a language that moved away from Persian and dipped liberally into Braj Bhasha, the language of the common masses; he is seen as having enabled Khari Boli, the precursor to the Hindi spoken today; he is also widely known as the ‘father’ of Urdu and the qawwali, and possibly the inventor of the sitar and the tabla; his admirers have given him the title of ‘Tuti-e-Hind’ or the Parrot of India; his love for India has been extolled; and his qawwalis are still very popular across India.
But there is another aspect to Amir Khusrau. He was a prominent member of the court of five Sultans who ruled from Delhi, the most important among whom was Allauddin Khilji. In this capacity, he wrote extensively about their conquests and victories and their destruction of the temples of the infidels. In his book, Khaizan ul Futuh, he describes how ‘the kick of Islam’ destroyed the beautiful temple of the dancing Shiva at Chidambaran. When Malik Kafur, Allauddin’s general, attacked the Chidambaran temple—to exactly quote Amir Khusrau’s triumphant language—‘the heads of brahmans and idolators danced from their necks and fell to the ground at their feet, and blood flowed in torrents. The stone idols called Ling Mahadeo, which had been established a long time at the place and on which the women of the infidels rubbed their vaginas for satisfaction, these, up to this time, the kick of Islam had not managed to break. The Musalmans destroyed all the lings and Deo Narain fell down, and other gods who had fixed their seats there raised their feet and jumped so high that at one leap they reached the fort of Lanka.’10 The same tone and language is there in his descriptions of other such desecrations.
Amir Khusrau is an interesting case study. Undoubtedly, his creative output shows that he had assimilated some aspects of Hindu civilisation (his mother was a Hindu), especially in the areas of language and music. At the same time, he provides sufficient proof of his approval of the destruction of Hindu temples and his hostility to the faith of the infidels. Unfortunately, those who seek to whitewash history, dwell only on his contribution to the composite ‘secular’ culture of India. This distortion of history through deliberate amnesia is wrong and needs correction, because it is becoming increasingly futile to hide the truth. The correct appraisal would be to appreciate his cultural contributions to the ultimate development of a syncretic culture, while accepting that this did not change his hostility to the Hindu religion, nor did it represent any reduction or mitigation in the continued destruction by Muslim rulers of Hindu religious and cultural artefacts.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“A.K. Warder, Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, University of Toronto, who has no interest in whitewashing either side of the conflict, writes: ‘The Turkish conquests of more than half India between 900 and 1300 were perhaps the most destructive in human history. As Muslims, the conquerors aimed not only to destroy all other religions but also abolish secular culture.’2 Will Durant, the well-known chronicler of civilisations, is as categorical: ‘The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history … its evident moral is that civilization is a precious thing whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians.’3 The degree of physical destruction is vouched for by noted art historian Heinrich Zimmer too, who laments that in north India ‘very little survives of the ancient edifices that were there prior to the Muslim conquest: only a few mutilated religious sites remain.’4
Amartya Sen concedes that ‘the slash and burn culture of the Muslim invaders … devastated several cities and ruined many temples, including particularly famous ones in Mathura, Kanauj, and (Somnath).’5 He also acknowledges the account of the Arab–Iranian traveller Alberuni who accompanied Mahmud to India, of this carnage. ‘Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed these wonderful exploits, by which Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions.’6 However, he believes that the Hindutva movement is deliberately highlighting Muslim destruction ‘through motivated selection and purposefully designed emphases as well as frequent exaggeration’.7 He is in a hurry to move away from the barbarism of the Muslim invasion to the undeniable and welcome syncretic elements of Hindu–Muslim culture that developed much later and over time.
It is possible that some politically affiliated sections of Hindu society are seeking to deliberately dwell on Muslim atrocities of the past in order to create religious divisions and exploit them for their own benefit. Such an approach is wrong and needs to be countered. However, it is equally wrong to gloss over history and falsify it for present-day ‘secular’ imperatives.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“Motivated apologists have other unconvincing theories also. One of these, propounded by the late Professor Mohammad Habib of the Aligarh Muslim University, sought to extenuate the extent of savagery by arguing that it was motivated by the ‘lust for plunder’, which any conqueror would display. In his book, Sultan Mahmud of Ghaznin, first published in 1924, he discounted, therefore, the repeated destruction of Hindu temples. It could be true that temples were attacked because they were also the repositories of great wealth; but it is stretching the imagination to believe that fanatical hostility against non-believers was not a motivation. The unfortunate fact is that this attempt to downplay Islamic religious bigotry was sanctified by people of intellectual eminence and erudition like Jawaharlal Nehru. In his book Glimpses of World History, Nehru writes in a letter to his daughter Indira, that Mahmud Ghazni was ‘hardly a religious man’, and that he admired the architecture of Hindu temples.1 However, he omits to mention what Professor Habib himself acknowledges, that Mahmud gave instructions to burn down hundreds of temples.
It is also argued that the Turkic invaders cannot be singled out for attacking those of another faith; Hindus too destroyed Buddhist and Jain places of worship. However, I do not believe that Hindus ever attempted the destruction of Buddhist and Jain religious sites anywhere near the level of desecration wrought by the Muslim conquerors. There may have been some cases of violence between the Indic faiths, but—as I have painstakingly argued earlier—the overwhelming historical evidence establishes beyond the slightest doubt that Buddhism and Jainism flourished in India within the overall broad-based world view of Hinduism, and that Hindu kings—far from being hostile to these two faiths—were both patrons of their viharas and monasteries, and even professed believers in their doctrine.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“The Rig Veda says that desire was the first movement that arose in the One after it had come into being through the power of abstraction. ‘Desire arose first in It, which was the primal germ of mind; (and which) sages, searching with their intellect have discovered in their heart to be the bond which connects entity with non-entity.’48 The very strength of the urge made it useful to use as a metaphor to convey or explicate a metaphysical point. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says: ‘Just as a man, closely embraced by his loving wife, knows nothing without, nothing within, so does this “person”, closely embraced by the Self that consists of wisdom, knows nothing without nothing within.’49 The same Upanishad also has this passage where a woman’s genitals are used as symbols to describe a sacrificial fire: ‘Woman is a fire, Gautama: the phallus is her fuel; the hairs are her smoke; the vulva is her flame; when a man penetrates her, that is her coal; the ecstasy is her sparks.’50 As I have discussed, the major gods in the Hindu faith have all got consorts. They are rarely described as celibate recluses; they may be said to be beyond passion in an ontological sense, but in their incarnate form they are explicit in the demonstrative attraction of the opposite sex. The goddesses do not lag behind. Their love for their husbands or lovers is often portrayed in an assertively earthy and sensual manner. Gods and goddesses represent a conscious duality, Purusha and Prakriti, complementing each other.
The inclusion of desire in the larger religious and spiritual vision gave it both sanctity and philosophical legitimacy. Kama, the God of Love, akin to the Greek Eros, or the Roman Cupid or Amor, has been exalted in a hymn of the Atharva Veda as a supreme god and creator. ‘Kama was born the first. Him neither gods, nor fathers, nor men have equalled. Thou art superior to these and for ever great.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“As Yudhishtara says to the Yaksha: ‘In this cauldron fashioned from delusion, with the sun as fire and day and night as kindling wood, the months and seasons as the ladle for stirring, Time (or Death) cooks all beings: this is the simple truth.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“When ideation on the intricacies and substance of creativity has been incubated for millennia, it is bound to find reflection in the pursuit of the aesthetic ideal. Kings aspired to be seen as cultured because that was expected of them by the people at large. Royal patronage reinforced popular aspirations among the populace for cultural knowledge, and provided institutional venues for their aesthetic fulfilment and enjoyment. Thus, a few centuries after the Gupta age, we have the remarkable example of Raja Bhoja (c. 1010–1055 CE), who ruled over an extensive kingdom in the Malwa region, with his capital at Dhara, near present-day Bhopal. Although his conquests were not insignificant, Bhoja is best remembered as a patron of the arts, literature and the sciences. As a scholar-king, he was the role model of later Hindu monarchs like Krishnadevaraya of the Vijayanagara dynasty, who chose to call himself ‘Abhinava Bhoja’, the new or modern Bhoja. Under Bhoja, his capital Dhara became a renowned intellectual centre. It is said that in his kingdom even humble weavers could compose metrical Sanskrit kavyas. Bhoja wrote as many as eighty-four books on subjects as diverse as astrology, lexicography, Sanskrit grammar, poetics, dramaturgy and a commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Shastras. He was also a great poet himself—the work Shringara Prakash is one of his notable works—and a well-known musician.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“Latin was the language of science, technology, medicine and law, apart from, of course, classical literature. It was also the language in Europe of international communication, scholarship and diplomacy. Since some of those countries which speak languages derived from Latin and value it as an ancient and classical language and the repository of much wisdom, were also ruthless colonisers, does that make Latin only a language of exploitation? Are the Vatican and the Pope only ‘colonisers’, since Latin is still the official language of the Holy See?
It is a moot point whether Sheldon Pollock would agree to see Latin only from such a narrow perspective. Why then does he not have the same approach to Sanskrit? Rajiv Malhotra makes a spirited critique of these kinds of double standards, and confuses it with a new Orientalism in some sections of American Indology. He accepts that Sanskrit was more a preserve of the elite and that some sections of its corpus do contain prescriptions for social and gender exclusion. But, it is essential that, as with other classical languages, a narrow dismissal is tempered with the right balance and judicious appraisal. Sanskrit, Rajiv Malhotra strongly argues, was also the ‘repository of philosophy, art, architecture, popular song, classical music, dance, theatre, sculpture, painting, literature, pilgrimage, ritual and religious narratives. It also incorporates all branches of natural science and technology—medicine, botany, mathematics, engineering, dietetics etc.’25 More than anything else, it was the vehicle of the great spiritual, philosophical and creative wisdoms distilled over millennia. Malhotra adds that it was not just a communication tool, but also a vehicle for ‘enduring sacredness, aesthetic powers, metaphysical acuity, and ability to generate knowledge in many domains’.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“Adi Shankaracharya, who is credited with the revival of Hinduism, could fearlessly rubbish central tenets of Hindu faith with lyrical felicity. In his famous stotra, the Nirvana Shatakam, he states—Na dharmo, na chartho, na kamo, na moksha: None of the four purusharthas or goals of life in the Hindu world view have meaning. Indeed, he goes further to say—Na mantro, na teertham, na veda, na yajnah: Neither mantra, nor pilgrimage sites, nor consecrated ritual, not even the Vedas are of any value. All that matters is Chit-ananda rupam: Awareness and Bliss. In this context, he actually conflates himself with Shiva—Shivo ham, Shivo ham: I am Shiva, I am Shiva. In most other conventional religions, especially the Abrahamic faiths, this assumption of godhood would be considered blasphemy. Indeed, by contrast, we have the example of the great Sufi mystic, Al-Hallaj (858–922 CE), in Persia, almost contemporaneous with Shankaracharya, who was put to death for having had the temerity to say—Ana’l Haq: I am the Truth. In ancient Greece, Socrates, the great philosopher, in the fourth century BCE, was sentenced to be killed by drinking hemlock, accused of ‘impiety’ and for his espousal of what is now called the logic of Socrates. At that very time in India, many divergent schools of philosophy were revelling in the freedom given by their faith to explore the truth in the way they thought fit. In such a milieu, Buddhism was genuinely under threat of being assimilated within the larger diversified matrix of Hinduism; indeed, many Hindus still believe that Buddha was the last avatar of Vishnu. No wonder then, that Buddhism could flourish with much greater ease with its identity as separately preserved, outside the shores of India, than in the land where it was born.
Actually, Amartya Sen is right when he writes that Sanskrit has a larger volume of agnostic or atheist writings than any other classical language. Sheldon Pollock too is strongly rebutted by other reputed Western scholars. George Cardona, also a prominent Western Sanskrit scholar, emphasises ‘the sharp critical thinking skills of early Sanskrit studies across various disciplines. … At no point in early and medieval India was there an absolute, thoughtless acceptance of tradition, even by different followers of a single tradition. … Nor are grammatical, exegetical, or logical systems made solely as maidservants to Vedic tradition.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“This remarkable narrative has to be assessed beyond merely the colourful details added later by imaginative biographers. What the dialogue actually represented—and that is the reason why it was projected as such an important part of Shankara’s life—was to assert the primacy of thought over ritual, at a time when precisely the opposite seemed to be given more importance by Hindus. The sixth and the seventh centuries CE saw a revival of Hinduism, and the relative decline of Buddhism. However, a part of this revival was excessively focused on Puranic mythology, and the mechanical performance of Vedic ritualism. Somewhere in all of this, there was a divorce from the loftiness of thought that was the essential substratum of the Hindu vision. In the pursuit of how exactly to perform a ritual as per precise Vedic injunctions, the glorious mystical insights of the Upanishads had been overwhelmed. Temples were flourishing, but there was a disconnect between the motions of worship and the philosophical foundations underlying it. There was the need to once again reassert the jnana marga to salvation, to relink Hinduism to its metaphysical insights, and restore to it the grandeur of thought and contemplation. That was the manifest purpose of Shankara, and there could be no better metaphor to project it than his victory in a debate over Mandana Mishra. Indeed, there is little doubt that Mishra’s defeat must have made a major impact on the beliefs and practice of Hinduism across India. Even without modern means of communication, the progress of the debate and the intricacies of the arguments, witnessed by thousands of people, would have spread by word of mouth to tens of thousands more across the length and breadth of the country. The debate, when seen in the historical context of the evolution of Hinduism, further institutionalised, at the highest level of learning, the importance of dialogue, discussion and discourse—not coercion, violence or acrimony.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“One has to imagine a setting in a forest sometime as far back as 2000 BCE or earlier, where a sage, who has spent decades perhaps in the search for truth and wisdom, shares thoughts, most often elliptically, with a group of students eager to begin their own journey in unravelling the mysteries of life. The conversation is not in the form of a formal dialogue, but through parable and suggestion, story and allusion, or statements of deep penetrative insight into what constitutes the transcendent reality underlying our lives and this universe. What is significant is that while obviously having the role of a mentor, the guru is open to questions being asked and instead of delivering a monologue from a pedestal, is willing to have a conversation which is guided as much by what the guru has to say as by what is being asked by the shishya. Significant too is that what the sage says is not in the nature of a command, but more in the format of an insight, inviting discussion and interrogation. Considering the fact that for many Hindus (including Adi Shankaracharya), even though the Upanishads are seen as shruti or revealed texts, the fact that they were dialogic, and not prescriptive, set the tone for the further evolution of Hinduism itself.
Other foundational texts of Hinduism carry forward this dialogic tradition. One of these is the Brahma Sutra by Badarayana written sometime around 450 BCE. In Indian tradition, Badarayana is identified with the legendary Vyasa who compiled the Vedas. The Brahma Sutra is known by many names—Nyaya Prasthana, because it puts the teachings of the Upanishads in a structured order; Vedanta Sutra, since it is a text on the Vedanta; Sariraka Sutra, since it deals with the nature and evolution of the embodied soul; and Uttara Mimamsa Sutra, since it deals with the final section of the Vedas, unlike the Purva Mimamsa which deals with the earlier sections.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“This became the basis of the powerful Advaita school of philosophy, of which Adi Shankaracharya in the eighth century CE became the legendary spokesperson. Brahman is urja or infinite energy, pure, pervasive cosmic consciousness, and unsullied awareness. It is intelligence personified—as can be inferred by the absolute order in the universe, both at the micro and macro level. The embodiment of perfect knowledge, Brahman is beyond knowledge, the knower or the known. It has no beginning, for it is eternal; it has no cause, for it is beyond the categories of time, space and causality; it has no end, for it always was and will always be. Its powers are unlimited; it is omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient, a singular, indivisible, purna (complete in itself) and universal force—ekam eka sarvavyapi. Everything in the cosmos is an emanation of Brahman, but Brahman itself is beyond all activity and purpose as per our finite ways of thinking. Unchanging, it has no need to evolve or develop, grow or diminish. In its passivity, it is potentiality itself; in its aloofness it is omnipotent; in its apparent purposelessness it is infinite intelligence; and, in its indefinability it is definitiveness itself. It is. Nothing without it, is. Its ekarasa (uniformity) has no parts; its identity is akhanda (division-less). In this sense, it is self-luminous, without the need of predication, conditionality or qualification.
Having posited the absolute immanence of Brahman as the only Reality in the universe, the Advaita school asserted that Brahman and Atman (the Self) are the same. When we peel away the empirically manifest—mind, body, ego and senses—what is left is nirvisheshachinmatram or undifferentiated consciousness that is the characteristic of both Brahman and Atman. The objective and the subjective then become the same. Atma ca Brahma: Atman is Brahman, say the Upanishads.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“The Hindu civilisation’s thought processes were never overwhelmed, even when its people were conquered. This is important, because monuments can be destroyed, but the fortress of ideas is imperishable.
The core of this thought process was spiritual, as distinguished from simply religious practice. The spiritual vision both transcended and guided religious rituals, and spilled over into the secular realm. This did not make it a religious civilisation. The spirituality was more about ultimate truths, an exploration of the world of ideas, and not a manual only for religious worship. This spiritual churning could have a religious counterpart, but would survive even without it. As Rabindranath Tagore says: ‘In reality, our history had deeply serene and contemplative phases—for the longest period of time—periods not without war or turmoil, but essentially grappling with pivotal concepts in the realm of thought [emphasis mine].’2 Sri Aurobindo also speaks about ‘an ingrained and dominant spirituality, an exhaustive vital creativeness and … a powerful, penetrating and scrupulous intelligence … each at a high intensity of action … the stamp put on her by that beginning she has never lost”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“The truth is that Hinduism is both a salad bowl and a melting pot. It is—and was—a great religion not because it was linear or prescriptive, but because, self-assured in its central narrative, it was not intimidated by diversity. ‘It is perfectly acceptable in Hinduism to be a polytheist, monotheist, monist, pantheist, agnostic, atheistic, animist or any combination thereof’.74 This is proof of its deeply eclectic spirit, not a reason to devalue its coherence. As Rabindranath Tagore says: ‘To experience unity in diversity and to establish unity amongst variety—this is the inherent dharma (the spirit) of Bharat. Bharatvarsha never interpreted diversities as hostility.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“At Nalanda, Xuanzang says, ‘There were ten thousand students who studied not only the Buddhist literature in all its branches, but other works such as the Vedas (including Atharva Veda), Logic, Grammar, Medicine, Sankhya philosophy etc., and discourses were given from hundred pulpits every day. Piety of generations of kings not only adorned the place with magnificent buildings, both residential and lecture halls, but supplied all the material necessities of this vast concourse of the teachers and the taught.’45 Many of these kings were Hindus.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“Arun Shourie argues that although ‘the Mahabharata and the Ramayana describe warring states they are the epics of one people [emphasis mine]’,33 and, indeed, in the Ramayana, Rama goes across the subcontinent, from Ayodhya in the north to Sri Lanka at the very southern tip. Shourie bolsters his reasoning by a fascinating study of many Hindu rituals which clearly indicate this pan-Indian consciousness. ‘Only Namboodiris from Kerala are to be priests at Badrinath, those in the Pashupatinath temple at Kathmandu are always from South Kanara in Karnataka, those at Rameshwaram in the deep south are from Maharashtra. … Every Diwali the sari for the idol of Amba at Kolhapur comes from the Lord at Tirupati. The Sankalpa Mantra with which every puja commends the prayers in the deities, situates the yajyaman (the person organizing the puja) with reference to the salients and sacred rivers of the entire land.’34 Commenting on this, Dr Koenraad Elst says: ‘From hoary antiquity, the Sankalpa locates the Hindu worshipper in time and space, notably in Bharatvarsha, in a decreasing scale of geographical regions down to the city or region where the ritual is performed.’35
The truth is that, although it may be expedient for some people to deny an ancient Hindu civilisation, such a civilisational awareness was millennia old, and has had a lasting and verifiable impact on the evolution and, indeed, the very character of India. To admit this is not to invite ‘xenophobia’ or ‘cultural paranoia’. Nor is it the febrile imagination of Hindu enthusiasts. It is, simply, borne out by the facts of history, and cannot be controverted by superimposing the political attitudes of today on the cultural integrations of the past. Sudhir Kakar, one of India’s most respected psychologists—and certainly no Hindutva-vadi—writes: ‘Indian-ness is about similarities produced by an overarching Indic, pre-eminently Hindu civilization, that has contributed the lion’s share to what we would call the “cultural gene-pool” of India’s peoples.’36 The fact, or memory or acceptance, of such a civilisation can be devalued, marginalised, forgotten or ignored, but it cannot be erased.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“One can have local fealties, and also a sense of being part of a larger loyalty. But, the dichotomy was created deliberately, so as to debunk any claim to civilisational consciousness. An ancient civilisational footprint would lead to the verifiably factual claim that it was dominantly Hindu, and that would jeopardise the present-day need to downplay this in the interest of ‘preserving secularism’. Hence, historical objectivity must be sacrificed on the altar of a perceived sense of political correctness.
Objective historians are today willing to accept this reality. Dr Upinder Singh writes: ‘One of several explanations of the name Bharatvarsha connects it with the Bharata people, descendants of the legendary king Bharata, son of Dushyanta and Shakuntala. Cosmography blends with geography in the Puranas. Bharatvarsha is said to consist of nine divisions (khandas), separated from one another by seas. But the mention of its mountains, rivers and places—some of which can be identified—suggests that the composers of such texts were familiar with various areas of the sub-continent, and perceived them as part of a larger cultural whole [emphasis mine]’.23 Surprisingly, for all his protestations, Khilnani also accepts this. He says: ‘Equally significant was India’s archive of images of political community, which related culture to polity. In the Brahminic traditions, for instance, the Puranic literature expresses a sense of the sub-continent’s natural geographic frontiers, reflected in a sacred geography mapped out by tirthas, pilgrimage points scattered across the land, and encompassed by the idea of mythic realms like Aryavarta or Bharatvarsha.’ Moreover, he contradicts himself when he seeks to confine this cultural polity only to ‘Brahminic traditions’.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“Jawaharlal Nehru had a well-intentioned but romantic view of Indian history, which he presented with considerable literary verve in his book, The Discovery of India. He saw India as ‘an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been subscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously’. Khilnani interprets this to argue that in Nehru’s imagination, ‘India appeared as a space of cultural mixing, its history a celebration of the soiling effects of cultural miscegenation and accretion’.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“It is nobody’s case that Hindu civilisation did not have any superstition and prejudice and a great deal of meaningless rituals, largely perpetuated by an elite Brahmanical class. But, it is farcical—and grossly inaccurate—to argue that India’s ancient past was only ritual and superstition. Ancient and complex civilisations are not unidimensional—either this or nothing else. ‘Except for a handful, Indian intellectuals’ … approach to the past is characterized more by intellectual and emotional inertia than by critical selectivity.’8 In this ill-informed binary, ‘the relationship between tradition and modernity is allowed to remain in a state of perpetual dichotomous tension; no encouragement is given to conceiving this relationship as dialectical, creative, rejuvenating’. The projection of ancient India encompasses an entire ecosystem of vested interests. Its disdainful dismissal is based as much on ignorance as on transparent personal interest.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“The ingrained hostility to India’s Hindu civilisation also stems from the ill-informed claim that this is essential to preserve the nation’s secular fabric. Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate, is an ardent votary of this school of thought. In his book The Argumentative Indian, he argues that those who speak of a Hindu civilisation ‘are the promoters of a narrowly Hindu view of civilisation’.2 While conceding that ‘these old books and narratives have had an enormous influence on Indian literature and thought’—a rather supercilious way of describing thousands of years of civilisational achievement—he nevertheless views ‘the harking back to ancient India with the greatest suspicion’. The key to his thinking lies precisely in this inadvertent confession. For him, the very attempt to revisit ancient India is ab initio a tainted exercise, a matter of the greatest suspicion. This is an a priori conclusion, influenced by factors extraneous to the independent value and need of such a project. For a person of his intellectual calibre, to dogmatically label anyone wanting to ‘hark back’ to ancient India as a Hindu fundamentalist is, to put it politely, deeply disturbing.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward

“The inference that any interest in our Hindu past is tantamount to being communal is the ludicrous reaction of the rootless anglicised elite in our country, and of people of a certain ideological persuasion. For them, millennia of our history, and of the undeniable and unparalleled achievements of ancient India, must lie buried, unexplored, inert and forgotten, because to show an interest in them—and even more dangerously, appreciation for them—turns you automatically into a ‘Hindu’ fundamentalist. The tragedy is that such reflex ‘secularists’ know close to nothing about our ancient past. They can quote Shakespeare but have never read Kalidasa or Thiruvalluvar; their knowledge of our epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, has been gleaned from comic books and they have only the scantiest idea of the basic storyline. They have no idea when Adi Shankaracharya lived, what he wrote, no clue of the six systems of Hindu philosophy or the three foundational texts of Hinduism, not even a notion about the remarkable principle of aesthetics of that period, no knowledge about the intellect that went into such concepts as dharma, no concept about what the four purusharthas are, and are largely ignorant about the unprecedented scientific achievements of that time.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward