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Sister Nivedita |
A blog dedicated to philosophy, history, politics, literature
Sunday, 31 July 2022
Sister Nivedita Versus Mother Teresa
Saturday, 30 July 2022
Vande Mataram and the Imagery of Bharat Mata
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A N Tagore’s 1906 painting of Bharat Mata |
Friday, 29 July 2022
Majumdar: On the Cult of Non-Violence
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R. C. Majumdar |
Thursday, 28 July 2022
On Tagore’s Failure to Defend Vande Mataram
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Tagore Chatterjee |
Wednesday, 27 July 2022
Sri Aurobindo: On Vande Mataram
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Sri Aurobindo |
Tuesday, 26 July 2022
On Lalchand’s Book: Self-Abnegation in Politics
Monday, 25 July 2022
On Sanatana Dharma
Sunday, 24 July 2022
Shamshera: A Spiteful Movie
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Sanjay Dutt as Shuddhi Singh |
Saturday, 23 July 2022
A dying race: Mukerji's Book that shook Bengal
“The Muslims have a future and they believe in it—we Hindus have no conception of it. Time is with them—time is against us. At the end of the year they could count their gains, we calculate our losses. They are growing in numbers, growing in strength, growing in wealth, growing in solidarity; we are crumbling to pieces. They look forward to a united Muslim world; we are waiting for our extinction.”
~ U. N. Mukerji, A Dying Race (1909)
When U. N. Mukerji penned A Dying Race, he was writing in the shadow of the 1901 Census of India, a document that shocked many Hindu intellectuals of his time. The census revealed a steep decline in the Hindu population across several regions, most strikingly in Bengal (then undivided). Drawing comparisons with the first census of 1872, Mukerji observed that within just three decades the Hindu Bengali population had fallen behind the Muslim Bengali population by nearly 2.5 million.
To Mukerji, these numbers were not mere statistics—they were civilizational portents. He argued that while Muslims possessed a clear sense of collective destiny, Hindus suffered from cultural fragmentation and political inertia. Islam, in his view, supplied its adherents with solidarity, confidence, and a vision of unity across frontiers, whereas Hindu society was splintered by caste divisions, ritual rigidity, and lack of social cohesion. This, he feared, would doom Hindus to perpetual decline unless remedied by reform and awakening.
More than a century later, his anxieties seem eerily prophetic when one looks at demographic transformations in the subcontinent. In present-day Bangladesh, Hindus constitute only 8.2 percent of the population, a sharp decline from the numbers at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Pakistan, where large Hindu communities once flourished, they now account for a mere 2.14 percent. Within India itself, episodes such as the forced exodus of Kashmiri Pandits demonstrate how political and militant pressures can hollow out ancient communities.
Yet, Mukerji’s book was not written in a spirit of despair. A Dying Race is more diagnosis than dirge. His central aim was to awaken self-consciousness among Hindus—to urge them to recognize the social weaknesses, economic stagnation, and religious indifference that left their society vulnerable. He examined the reasons why some Hindus abandoned their faith and converted, exposing the fractures within Hindu society as much as the pressures without.
The impact of his work was significant. By articulating the demographic anxieties of his age in a rigorous, data-driven, and introspective manner, Mukerji struck a chord with nationalist thinkers. His arguments influenced reformist movements such as the Arya Samaj and helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the formation of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1915.
Mukerji’s legacy lies not in foretelling extinction but in challenging complacency. A Dying Race stands as both a warning and a call to renewal—a reminder that civilizations survive not merely by numbers but by unity of purpose, vitality of culture, and clarity of vision.
Friday, 22 July 2022
Boris Johnson’s Final Words: “Hasta la vista, baby”
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Boris Johnson |
Thursday, 21 July 2022
Mahatma Gandhi and V. D. Savarkar
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V. D. Savarkar |
Wednesday, 20 July 2022
Bhagwat and Jinping: On National Culture
Tuesday, 19 July 2022
A Note on Swami Shraddhanand
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Swami Shraddhanand |
Monday, 18 July 2022
Mahatma Gandhi and the Khilafat Movement
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R. C. Majumdar |
Sunday, 17 July 2022
Vande Mataram: The Nationalist Song
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Bankim Chandra Chatterjee |
Saturday, 16 July 2022
Naipaul on the Ram Temple in Ayodhya
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The Planned Structure of the Ram Temple |
Friday, 15 July 2022
Nirad C. Chaudhuri: The Lost Temples of North India
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Photograph of the ruins of Somnath Temple taken in 1869 |
Thursday, 14 July 2022
Dr. Rajendra Prasad’s Speech at the Somnath Temple
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Rajendra Prasad |
Wednesday, 13 July 2022
The Reconstruction of the Somnath Temple
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Somnath Temple |
Tuesday, 12 July 2022
T. N. Madan on the Problem of Secularism
Monday, 11 July 2022
The Four Pillars of Nehru’s Political Order
Sunday, 10 July 2022
2019 Election as the Third Battle of Panipat
The Aim of the Government
Saturday, 9 July 2022
Indian Politics and Hindu Nationalism
Sheikh Abdullah’s 1953 Meetings With Adlai Stevenson
Thursday, 7 July 2022
From crusade to jihad: Ram Swarup on the war on Hinduism
“Like Marx who hated capitalism but regarded it as a higher form of economic and political organization and welcomed capitalists as sappers and miners of Communism, Christianity detested Islam but honored it for destroying idolatry.”
“Though Christianity has a poor opinion of Islam, yet it regards it as a partner up to a point; it welcomes Islam's role as a cleanser of the world from the gross pollution of idolatry—the name by which the two religions remember all other religions, past or present. This sympathy arises from the fact that the two religions in spite of the long history of conflicts share a common perspective and common ideological premises.”
~ Ram Swarup, Hindu View of Christianity and Islam
Ram Swarup was not exaggerating. For nearly twelve centuries, the political battle between Christianity and Islam has been fought with ferocity across continents—Crusades and jihads, colonial conquests and counter-reformations, theological denunciations and polemical rebuttals.
Yet beneath this enmity lies a subterranean kinship: both traditions share a fierce monotheistic exclusivism and a visceral hostility to polytheism. What separates them in politics unites them in doctrine. Both look upon the plurality of gods, the diversity of rituals, and the reverence for nature as idolatrous corruption to be eradicated.
It is here that Hinduism becomes their supreme target. As the world’s oldest and most enduring polytheistic civilization, Hinduism embodies precisely what Christianity and Islam have condemned for centuries: multiplicity of deities, sanctity of images, and the refusal to collapse divinity into a single, jealous God.
For the adherents of Abraham, this is not cultural difference but spiritual crime. Thus, while Christianity and Islam may quarrel over Jerusalem, they find common cause in condemning Varanasi.
In my own view—though Ram Swarup himself did not put it this way—Christianity and Islam represent two distinct temperaments of monotheistic power. Christianity is the religion of the philosopher and the trader: it argues, persuades, negotiates, and often seduces. Its missionaries in India came armed with scripture and schools, with the rhetoric of equality and the inducement of material incentives. Conversion was couched as enlightenment, modernity, or social mobility.
Islam, by contrast, is the religion of the warrior and the tyrant: it advances with the sword, it legislates by the sharia, it conquers cities and uproots civilizations. In India, its method of conversion has historically been coercive—political dominance backed by military violence, social humiliation, and, where persuasion failed, the pressure of survival itself.
Thus, the Hindu experience with these two proselytizing faiths reveals not contradiction but complementarity. Christianity seeks to dissolve Hindu society through intellectual subversion and economic inducement; Islam seeks to overwhelm it through military power and social coercion. Both, however, are driven by the same conviction—that the polytheistic civilization of India must not be allowed to endure.
What Ram Swarup discerned, and what we must recognize, is that the rivalry between Christianity and Islam is a family quarrel. Their deeper unity lies in their shared disdain for civilizations that revere plurality, symbolism, and divinity in manifold forms.
Against this combined ideological front, Hindu civilization has survived not by mimicry but by fidelity to its own spirit: the conviction that truth is not jealous but abundant, that the sacred can never be monopolized by one book or one prophet, and that humanity flourishes not in uniformity but in multiplicity.
Wednesday, 6 July 2022
Sardar Patel and Churchill’s Princestan
Tuesday, 5 July 2022
On The Somnath Temple
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Somnath Temple |
Monday, 4 July 2022
Remembering the Shah Bano Case
Sunday, 3 July 2022
W. C. Smith’s View of Islam in India
Saturday, 2 July 2022
A View of the Bangladesh War
Patel’s Warning About Chinese Communism
Friday, 1 July 2022
Amartya Sen and the pedagogy of pessimism: A critical reflection
Today’s newspapers carry yet another set of pronouncements from Professor Amartya Sen—statements that reveal more about the speaker’s ideological anxieties than the complex realities of India. Describing the present moment as one of "national collapse," Sen draws a direct line between the arrest of activist Teesta Setalvad and the alleged erosion of India’s democratic foundations. He laments that “colonial laws” are being used to incarcerate individuals, as though this were a novel betrayal of constitutional values.
One is compelled to ask: Is it truly “extraordinary,” as Sen puts it, that colonial-era laws remain on the statute books?
These laws have been part of the Indian legal framework since independence. Their presence is not a sudden deviation from liberal norms, but a structural continuity—one that successive governments, particularly those led by the Congress Party, chose not to dismantle. Given that Professor Sen has long been a vocal admirer of the Nehru-Gandhi lineage, it is worth reflecting on why his outrage emerges selectively—often when individuals sympathetic to his ideological worldview face legal scrutiny.
The case of Teesta Setalvad is illustrative. While it is appropriate—and necessary—for due process to protect all citizens, the presumption that any legal action against a public figure constitutes an existential threat to democracy must be tested against evidence, not ideological proximity. To invoke "collapse" at every moment of institutional disagreement is not analysis; it is hyperbole.
Sen’s views on Indian culture, too, reflect a familiar—albeit dated—rhetoric of civilizational harmony, in which he names Dara Shikoh, Ravi Shankar, and the Taj Mahal as emblems of syncretic richness. These are undeniable treasures of India’s pluralist past. Yet his assertions acquire a selective hue when they omit entire chapters of suffering, such as the forced displacement of the Kashmiri Pandits—a tragedy that has found little space in his moral universe. If India is not to be “a country of Hindus only,” as he warns, then surely justice must extend to Hindus too, when they are victims of violence or erasure.
For decades, Professor Sen has enjoyed a privileged intellectual position, bolstered by global institutions that celebrate his advocacy for egalitarianism and welfare economics. Yet, it is precisely in these domains—economics and policy—that many critics find his prescriptions unconvincing. His continued support for central planning and statist models, even after the global retreat of socialist command economies, raises questions about the practical relevance of his theories in the 21st century.
Indeed, some observers have argued that the Congress Party’s electoral decline—particularly in 2014—was accelerated by its entanglement with left-liberal intellectuals whose worldview had grown increasingly disconnected from the aspirations of an emergent India. The romance with state paternalism and inherited elite consensus no longer resonated with a generation that sought dignity through opportunity, not entitlement.
Allegations surrounding Professor Sen’s role in controversies such as the Nalanda University project, and his association with land disputes involving Visva Bharati University, have further complicated his public standing. While such accusations should be assessed fairly and legally, they underscore the paradox of a moralist who is often spared the scrutiny he demands of others.
The Nobel Prize he received in 1998 was, without doubt, a recognition of intellectual contribution. But its conferral also cemented his role as a moral authority—one that many in India now view with increasing skepticism. For nearly three decades, Sen has spoken to India, not with it—his tone often reminiscent of a headmaster correcting wayward pupils. Yet a nation of 1.4 billion, with its complexities and contradictions, resists such paternalism.
It is time to ask whether India's public discourse needs less admonishment from above and more engagement from within—less nostalgia for inherited paradigms and more openness to the diverse voices shaping its future.