09-26-2003, 08:49 AM
Rajdeep Sardesai is a lost cause. Like Darth Vader he has gone over to the dark (or is it dork) side a long time ago, and he wouldnt be able to recognize Dharma even if it were staring him in the face. His notion that there exists only a political motivation for the support of RJB is silly. The reason Ayodhya resonated among such a large proportion of the Hindu public is that it is a core issue of civilizational identity. After all what benefits would expats like me derive, if the temple were built, considering that most of us would probably not settle in India ever again. The notion that an invader can come in and willy nilly destroy temples at his whim and fancy is loathsome to most Indians, who have said enough is enough and have said to themselves it will not happen again.
Here is an interview with Sir Vidiadhar (Naipaul) where he refutes the sentiments of the Dork side. The interviewer is Dileep Padgaonkar another one who has been lost to the Dork side
"An area of awakening"
[url="http://www.ayodhya.com/ayotemplet.jsp?sno=35&E35=1"]Interview by Dilip Padgaonkar[/url]
The Times of India,
18 July 1993.
Padgaonkar (P): The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent rise of Islamic nations in Central Asia, the Salman Rushdie affair, similar harassment by fundamentalists of liberal Muslim intellectuals in India: all these factors taken together persuaded some forces to argue that a divided Hindu society cannot counteract Islamic fundamentalism.
Naipaul (N): I donât see it quite in that way. The things you mentioned are quite superficial. What is happening in India is a new, historical awakening. Gandhi used religion in a way as to marshal people for the independence cause People who entered the independence movement did it because they felt they would earn individual merit.
Today, it seems to me that Indians are becoming alive to their history. Romila Thaparâs book on Indian history is a Marxist attitude to history, which in substance says: there is a higher truth behind the invasions, feudalism and all that. The correct truth is the way the invaders looked at their actions. They were conquering, they were subjugating. And they were in a country where people never understood this.
Only now are the people beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalizing of India. Because of the nature of the conquest and the nature of Hindu society such understanding had eluded Indians before.What is happening in India is a mighty creative process. Indian intellectuals, who want to be secure in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is going on, especially if these intellectuals happen to be in the United States. But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening: deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging even if at times this response appears in his eyes to be threatening.
However, we are aware of one of the more cynical forms of liberalism: it admits that one fundamentalism is all right in the world. This is the fundamentalism they are really frightened of: Islamic fundamentalism. Its source is Arab money. It is not intellectually to be taken seriously etc. I donât see the Hindu reaction purely in terms of one fundamentalism pitted against another. The reaction is a much larger responseâ¦. Mohammedan fundamentalism is essentially negative, a protection against a world it desperately wishes to join. It is a last ditch fight against the world.
But the sense of history that the Hindus are now developing is a new thing. Some Indians speak about a synthetic culture: this is what a defeated people always speak about. The synthesis may be culturally true. But to stress it could also be a form of response to intense persecution. these are very prescient and perceptive remarks. Naipaul's command of language coupled with his clarity of thought makes him a formidable figure of the 20th century, one whose reasoned and logical approach to events should be taken very seriously.
(P): How did you react to the Ayodhya incident?
(N): Not as badly, as the others did, I am afraid. The people who say that there was no temple there are missing the point. Babar, you must understand, had contempt for the country (that) he had conquered. And his building of that mosque was an act of contempt for the country. In Turkey, they turned the Church of Santa Sophia into a mosque. In Nicosia churches were converted into mosques too. The Spaniards spent many centuries re-conquering their land from Muslim invaders. So these things have happened before and elsewhere.
In Ayodhya the construction of a mosque on a spot regarded as sacred by the conquered population was meant as an insult. It was meant as an insult to an ancient idea, the idea of Rama, which was two or three thousand years old.
(P): The people who climbed on top of these domes and broke them were not bearded people wearing saffron robes and with ash on their foreheads. They were young people clad in jeans and tee shirts.
(N): One needs to understand the passion that took them on top of the domes. The jeans and the tee shirts are superficial. The passion alone is real. You canât dismiss it. You have to try to harness it.
Hitherto in India the thinking has come from the top. I spoke earlier about the state of the country: destitute, trampled upon, crushed. You then had the Bengali renaissance, the thinkers of the nineteenth century. But all this came from the top. What is happening now is different. The movement is now from below.
(P): My colleague, the cartoonist, Mr. R K Laxman, and I recently traveled thousands of miles in Maharashtra. In many places we found that noses and breasts had been chopped off from the statues of female deities. Quite evidently this was a sign of conquest. The Hindutva forces point to this too to stir up emotions. The problem is how do you prevent these stirred-up emotions from spilling over and creating fresh tensions?
(N): I understand. But it is not enough to abuse them or to use that fashionable word from Europe: fascism. There is a big, historical development going on in India. Wise men should understand it and ensure that it does not remain in the hands of fanatics. Rather they should use it for the intellectual transformation of India.
By Rahul Singh,
The Times of India, 23 January 1998
®: You gave an interview to the Times of India, which was interpreted by the BJP as supporting them in the destruction (of the Babri structure). Do you think you were misunderstood?
(N): I can see how what I said then could be misinterpreted. I was talking about history; I was talking about a historical process that had to come. I think India has lived with one major extended event that began about AD 1000 the Muslim invasion. It meant the cracking open and partial wrecking of what was a complete cultural, religious world until that invasion. I donât think the people of India have been able to come to terms with that wrecking. I donât think they understand what really happened. Itâs too painful.
And I think this BJP movement and that Masjid business is part of a new sense of history, a new idea of what happened. It might be misguided, it might be wrong to misuse it politically, but I think it is part of a historical process. And to simply abuse it as Fascist is to fail to understand why it finds an answer in so many hearts in India.
"The truth governs writing"
Interview by Sadanand Menon
The Hindu,
5 July 1998.
(M): You have given some signals during your visit here this time about your - it may be a wrong word - your "happiness" with the emergence and consolidation of some kind of parasitic Hindu political order here. How do you sustain such a thesis?
(N): No. I have not done that actually. I have talked about history. And I have talked about this movement. I have not gone on to say I would like Hindu religious rule here. Ali that I have said is that Islam is here in a big way. There is a reason for that and we cannot hide from what the reasons were. The great invasions spread very far south, spreading to, you know, even to Mysore.
I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the tenth century or earlier time disfigured, defaced, you know that they were not just defaced for fun: that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilization of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions. And I would like people, as it were, to be more reverential towards the past, to try to understand it; to preserve it; instead of living in its ruins. The Old World is destroyed. That has to be understood. The ancient Hindu India was destroyed.
(M): Many things changed and many things overlapped in Indian history due to many diverse interventions. But do such processes over time justify the line of "historic revenge" with retrospective effect? Does it make that inevitable? What do you see unfolding before your eyes here today?
(N): No. I do not think so. It need not happen. If people just acknowledged history, certain deep emotions of shame and defeat would not be driven underground and would not find this rather nasty and violent expression. As people become more secure in India, as middle and lower middleclass begins to grow; they will feel emotion more and more. And it is in these people that deep things are stirred by what was, clearly, a very bad defeat. The guides who take people around the temples of Belur and Halebid are talking about this all the time.
I do not think they were talking about it like that when I was there last, which is about 20 something years ago. So new people come up and they begin to look at their world and from being great acceptors, they have become questioners. And I think we should simply try to understand his passion. It is not an, ignoble passion at all. It is men trying to understand themselves. Do not dismiss them. Treat them seriously. Talk to them.
(M): But donât you think this tendency is only going to increase - this tendency to whimsically and freely interpret religion or history at the street level?
(N): I think it will keep on increasing as long as you keep on saying it is wicked and that they are wicked people. And if we wish to draw the battle-line, then of course, you get to battle. If you try to understand what they are saying, things will calm down.
Here is an interview with Sir Vidiadhar (Naipaul) where he refutes the sentiments of the Dork side. The interviewer is Dileep Padgaonkar another one who has been lost to the Dork side
"An area of awakening"
[url="http://www.ayodhya.com/ayotemplet.jsp?sno=35&E35=1"]Interview by Dilip Padgaonkar[/url]
The Times of India,
18 July 1993.
Padgaonkar (P): The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent rise of Islamic nations in Central Asia, the Salman Rushdie affair, similar harassment by fundamentalists of liberal Muslim intellectuals in India: all these factors taken together persuaded some forces to argue that a divided Hindu society cannot counteract Islamic fundamentalism.
Naipaul (N): I donât see it quite in that way. The things you mentioned are quite superficial. What is happening in India is a new, historical awakening. Gandhi used religion in a way as to marshal people for the independence cause People who entered the independence movement did it because they felt they would earn individual merit.
Today, it seems to me that Indians are becoming alive to their history. Romila Thaparâs book on Indian history is a Marxist attitude to history, which in substance says: there is a higher truth behind the invasions, feudalism and all that. The correct truth is the way the invaders looked at their actions. They were conquering, they were subjugating. And they were in a country where people never understood this.
Only now are the people beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalizing of India. Because of the nature of the conquest and the nature of Hindu society such understanding had eluded Indians before.What is happening in India is a mighty creative process. Indian intellectuals, who want to be secure in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is going on, especially if these intellectuals happen to be in the United States. But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening: deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging even if at times this response appears in his eyes to be threatening.
However, we are aware of one of the more cynical forms of liberalism: it admits that one fundamentalism is all right in the world. This is the fundamentalism they are really frightened of: Islamic fundamentalism. Its source is Arab money. It is not intellectually to be taken seriously etc. I donât see the Hindu reaction purely in terms of one fundamentalism pitted against another. The reaction is a much larger responseâ¦. Mohammedan fundamentalism is essentially negative, a protection against a world it desperately wishes to join. It is a last ditch fight against the world.
But the sense of history that the Hindus are now developing is a new thing. Some Indians speak about a synthetic culture: this is what a defeated people always speak about. The synthesis may be culturally true. But to stress it could also be a form of response to intense persecution. these are very prescient and perceptive remarks. Naipaul's command of language coupled with his clarity of thought makes him a formidable figure of the 20th century, one whose reasoned and logical approach to events should be taken very seriously.
(P): How did you react to the Ayodhya incident?
(N): Not as badly, as the others did, I am afraid. The people who say that there was no temple there are missing the point. Babar, you must understand, had contempt for the country (that) he had conquered. And his building of that mosque was an act of contempt for the country. In Turkey, they turned the Church of Santa Sophia into a mosque. In Nicosia churches were converted into mosques too. The Spaniards spent many centuries re-conquering their land from Muslim invaders. So these things have happened before and elsewhere.
In Ayodhya the construction of a mosque on a spot regarded as sacred by the conquered population was meant as an insult. It was meant as an insult to an ancient idea, the idea of Rama, which was two or three thousand years old.
(P): The people who climbed on top of these domes and broke them were not bearded people wearing saffron robes and with ash on their foreheads. They were young people clad in jeans and tee shirts.
(N): One needs to understand the passion that took them on top of the domes. The jeans and the tee shirts are superficial. The passion alone is real. You canât dismiss it. You have to try to harness it.
Hitherto in India the thinking has come from the top. I spoke earlier about the state of the country: destitute, trampled upon, crushed. You then had the Bengali renaissance, the thinkers of the nineteenth century. But all this came from the top. What is happening now is different. The movement is now from below.
(P): My colleague, the cartoonist, Mr. R K Laxman, and I recently traveled thousands of miles in Maharashtra. In many places we found that noses and breasts had been chopped off from the statues of female deities. Quite evidently this was a sign of conquest. The Hindutva forces point to this too to stir up emotions. The problem is how do you prevent these stirred-up emotions from spilling over and creating fresh tensions?
(N): I understand. But it is not enough to abuse them or to use that fashionable word from Europe: fascism. There is a big, historical development going on in India. Wise men should understand it and ensure that it does not remain in the hands of fanatics. Rather they should use it for the intellectual transformation of India.
By Rahul Singh,
The Times of India, 23 January 1998
®: You gave an interview to the Times of India, which was interpreted by the BJP as supporting them in the destruction (of the Babri structure). Do you think you were misunderstood?
(N): I can see how what I said then could be misinterpreted. I was talking about history; I was talking about a historical process that had to come. I think India has lived with one major extended event that began about AD 1000 the Muslim invasion. It meant the cracking open and partial wrecking of what was a complete cultural, religious world until that invasion. I donât think the people of India have been able to come to terms with that wrecking. I donât think they understand what really happened. Itâs too painful.
And I think this BJP movement and that Masjid business is part of a new sense of history, a new idea of what happened. It might be misguided, it might be wrong to misuse it politically, but I think it is part of a historical process. And to simply abuse it as Fascist is to fail to understand why it finds an answer in so many hearts in India.
"The truth governs writing"
Interview by Sadanand Menon
The Hindu,
5 July 1998.
(M): You have given some signals during your visit here this time about your - it may be a wrong word - your "happiness" with the emergence and consolidation of some kind of parasitic Hindu political order here. How do you sustain such a thesis?
(N): No. I have not done that actually. I have talked about history. And I have talked about this movement. I have not gone on to say I would like Hindu religious rule here. Ali that I have said is that Islam is here in a big way. There is a reason for that and we cannot hide from what the reasons were. The great invasions spread very far south, spreading to, you know, even to Mysore.
I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the tenth century or earlier time disfigured, defaced, you know that they were not just defaced for fun: that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilization of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions. And I would like people, as it were, to be more reverential towards the past, to try to understand it; to preserve it; instead of living in its ruins. The Old World is destroyed. That has to be understood. The ancient Hindu India was destroyed.
(M): Many things changed and many things overlapped in Indian history due to many diverse interventions. But do such processes over time justify the line of "historic revenge" with retrospective effect? Does it make that inevitable? What do you see unfolding before your eyes here today?
(N): No. I do not think so. It need not happen. If people just acknowledged history, certain deep emotions of shame and defeat would not be driven underground and would not find this rather nasty and violent expression. As people become more secure in India, as middle and lower middleclass begins to grow; they will feel emotion more and more. And it is in these people that deep things are stirred by what was, clearly, a very bad defeat. The guides who take people around the temples of Belur and Halebid are talking about this all the time.
I do not think they were talking about it like that when I was there last, which is about 20 something years ago. So new people come up and they begin to look at their world and from being great acceptors, they have become questioners. And I think we should simply try to understand his passion. It is not an, ignoble passion at all. It is men trying to understand themselves. Do not dismiss them. Treat them seriously. Talk to them.
(M): But donât you think this tendency is only going to increase - this tendency to whimsically and freely interpret religion or history at the street level?
(N): I think it will keep on increasing as long as you keep on saying it is wicked and that they are wicked people. And if we wish to draw the battle-line, then of course, you get to battle. If you try to understand what they are saying, things will calm down.