Koenraad Elst
Showing all 15 books
The question of the Homeland of the Indo-European (IE) or “Aryan” language family is, as riddles in the otherwise prosaic field of historical linguistics go, of unusual importance. It pits essentially two theories against one another. Either ancestral Proto-Indo-European (PIE), mother of most Indian and European languages, was spoken in Northwestern India, some 6000 years ago. This was the dominant view for some forty years after the close kinship ...
One of the rare matters on which all known religions seem to agree, is the condemnation of calumny as an extremely grave evil. Calumny carries little risk to the perpetrator but can inflict enormous damage on the targeted individual or group, not through the calumniator's own hands but through those of all who lend credence to his words. It is both cowardly and destructive. In today's opinion climate, no calumny is worse than the allegation that someone is a ...
As part of their entrenched power position, the British colonizers and later their Nehruvian successors have always tried to control the discourse on religion. Among other concerns, they have seen to it that the term "Hindu" got divorced from its historical meaning, which quite inclusively encompassed all Indian Pagans, in order to fragment Hindu society. In parallel with their effort to pit caste against caste, they have tried to pit sect against sect, ...
The present book is my last contribution to the literature on what is known in India as "communalism", meaning the conflict between the different religions, principally Hinduism and Islam. My first book in this sphere of interest was Ram Janmabhoomi vs Babri Masjid: A Case Study in Hindu-Muslim Conflict (1990). It served a good purpose, viz. to break the false impression that the world of scholarship including Western Indologists was united in ...
Science has made considerable progress, to the point of being able to decide many historical riddles such as whether a given site has a history as a place of worship. With the modern techniques available, it is rather absurd that there should be a controversy over such a simple and easily verifiable matter. It is incredible that there has been a yes/no game over the existence of temple remains at the disputed site for about fifteen years, when the matter could be ...
Unlike many books on the Aryan Invasion debate, the present collection of papers does not promise to terminate the debate with a final judgment. It merely puts on record a number of arguments developed in recent years, mostly in an actual debating content: on the linguistic aspects, the astronomical chronology, some lesser-known political contents, even the ego factor in the debate. None of it is very eccentric, in fact it all remains safely close to the ...
On the December 2003, in his home in Delhi, 82-years- old historian and publisher Sita Ram Goel passed away. He was one of India's most important thinkers in the post-in dependence era. His a writings are central to the recent Hindu awakening the country that is now growing rapidly to world prominence. While his guru and colleague, Ram Swarup, laid the spiritual and philosophical basis for the movement, the movement, the detailed analysis and it-depth ...
The ideological dimension of the Hindu revivalism has been mostly misrepresented or rather neglected in the ongoing debates on the subject. Thoroughly analysing the ideological statements of its advocates and their critique of the existing secular order, Dr. Koenraad Elst provides an overview of the ideas animating the movement. A period of rapid political changes that witnessed the rise of the BJP with only 2 Lok Sabha seats in 1984 to have 179 seats the enabled ...
