Nexus Between Entities Influencing India

[Husky]

1. Writing up point 2 below reminded me of having read this next comment a couple of months back, which connected Aatish Taseer and Pollock. Well, they sounded the same in their intention w.r.t. Samskritam, so I suppose it's not surprising that the two should be factually connected and that Aatish is merely one of Pollock's subcontinental stooges and moutpieces.



indiafacts.co.in/re-establishing-shastras-indian-education/

Contrarian • 2 months ago

[...]

There is also a need to understand the "Indology" colonials' and sepoys' new moves. Case in point - Murty library, Pollock, Aatish Taseer and their "poison the well" strategies. Some kind of inoculation against such poison should be included in the road-map. It has modestly succeeded earlier against the Donigers, Witzels and Kripals.



The ideological barrage by the Thapars and JNU crowd will intensify and should also be taken into account - especially since funding will continue from US/UK South Asian studies Departments and Academies. Presentism will be the dominant motive in these attacks. How do we cope with these ?



[...]

2. Caught the following article by Aatish Taseer in IIRC bharatabharati some time ago. The article itself is a waste of time reading IMO, other than that one learns a lot of interesting things about Taseer itself such as how he hates Malhotra etc, probably because Taseer can't respond to Malhotra's valid denial of Taseer's encroachment on and hijacking of Samskritam.



But some of the comments at this next link are interesting, such as one by "Sam" (probably just Hindu saM).



(BTW, is Aatish infesting India? Can't he go be his secular half-muslim half-Sikh new-agey self in Pakistan, which is such a hell-hole it can only benefit from secular new-ageists, whereas in India the same drag the country down?)



disqus.com/home/discussion/openmagazine/quotmodi_must_provide_an_intellectual_alternativequot/



The comments section also contains Rajeev Malhotra's rebuttal to Aatish Taseer and more revelations of Hashish* Taseer's connection to what's-his-face Pollock. (* Why did Tavleen Singh name her son after a drug? But mustn't judge.)

Disciple523 • 5 months ago



EVEN BEFORE THE POLLOCK BOOK COMES OUT....Rajiv Malhotra's response to Aatish Taseer (Son of Tavleen Singh and a Pakistani Politician and Business man)



RAJIV MALHOTRA'S NOTE:



So the big war is on, even before my Pollock book comes out. It is not even in final draft yet, and a lot more work remains to be done. This latest salvo comes from a young novelist who is the son of Tavleen Singh and a Pakistani journalist.



If you recall, I had taken Tavleen to task on Twitter for her support of Pollock without her doing any due diligence on the positions of Pollock. Now her half-Pakistani son gets his turn to go after me. Open Source Magazine lends itself as a forum for this, without offering me any space to give my side of it.



His latest novel is a typical "South Asian bhai bhai" one finds from many Indian "intellectuals" wanting to transcend modern India and Pakistan. They project back their ideologies on to some imagined history of the subcontinent.



Familiar stuff? Not so easy. You are familiar with those saying this from an anti-Sanskrit position. But thanks to Pollock, he has directly trained and indirectly nurtured an army of such persons who make their case while wanting to appear pro-Sanskrit (in his sense of what Sanskrit is like).



Please read the excerpt below from his recent interview, with my responses in brackets. Please feel free to post this at his interview, on twitter or anywhere else. Let there be open discussion on the merits of various positions.

............................................................................



QUESTION: I find refined classicism throughout the novel, sustained by Skanda’s Sanskritised sensibility. What will you say?



AATISH: Yes, but Skanda’s interest in Sanskrit, though full of emotion, is at the end of the day a scholarly interest. It is not revivalist; it is not of the Rajiv Malhotra kind.



[Rajiv: Aatish does not appear to know that Pollock calls himself a revivalist of Sanskrit. Hence, according to the Left, being a revivalist of Sanskrit is not contrary to being a scholar. The two are compatible. What is contentious between Pollock and me is not scholar versus revivalist, but two different kinds of revival. Aatish needs more "scholarly" reading and less novel writing...]



AATISH: Men like him—Malhotra and his cohorts—have poisoned the pool of classical studies. They’re not scholars; few of them have even a passable knowledge of Sanskrit; but they’re determined to shut down serious scholarship, determined to coerce Western academia into telling them the few banalities they want to hear: things that warm their little NRI hearts: the Aryans did not come from elsewhere but sprang up out of the soil of India; Sanskrit is not one of many Indo-European languages, but the mother of all languages…



[Rajiv: 1) Aatish fails to cite even a single instance of my work that would support his personal allegation that I am "determined to shut down serious scholarship". Any scholar worth his salt ought to cite concrete evidence, and not engage in such ad hominem attacks. 2) The italics above are in the original interview - Aatish wants to emphasize that he supports the foreign Aryan theory and attacks me for saying that the "aryas" (there is no such thing as Aryans) have been indigenous to the Indian soil. He is also upset that I consider Sanskrit to be more than "one of many Indo-European languages". The "mother of all languages" motif troubles him greatly when applied to Sanskrit.]



AATISH: Now when you start to refashion the past to fit the needs of the present, you must ask yourself why? Why do I want the past to be one way and not another? Because if you set to work blindly remaking the past, you can do it a lot of harm.



[Rajiv: When my book comes out, I hope that he and his mom, Tavleen, will take the time to go through it, and see that the evidence proves just the opposite: That it is Pollock distorting the hard data of history to fit his modern analysis of Indian society. These novelists/journalists, lacking scholarly competence, will find themselves sandwiched between their support for Pollock-ism and their claim to be pro-Indian civilization. Let thaat debate start after my book comes out.]



AATISH: These monkeys, they want the white man to tell them that India—which Malhotra couldn’t bring himself to live in—was once the greatest country of all. Only then will they go away and let serious people get on with their work.



[Rajiv: Calling me a "monkey" hardly helps the image his mom wants him to have - that of a young, serious thinker. So he thinks that what I am all about is getting the white man to tell us how great we are. But thats not my position at all. I am critical of Indians who are in awe of white men's approval of them. He has not read my works criticizing that tendency among Indians. Rather, it is he and his mom craving white peolpe legitimizing them. Their swooning over Pollock demonstrates this. So who here is the one being the monkey in awe of "the white man"?]



AATISH: It’s sad to see this kind of sloganeer get traction in India—I read the other day in the paper that Delhi University had embarked upon a project to prove the Aryans were not foreigners. Such foolishness! It makes me fearful for India. And these are naturally fears that my novel is very alive to.



[Rajiv: Dismissing me as sloganeer with no specific data point? And this is the state of journalism in India that editors of mainstream media do not bother calling it out as unsubstantiated and as ad hominem attacks? Why such desperation so suddenly? His reference to Delhi University gives the answer. Because places like DU are now starting projects that will evaluate evidence "to prove the Aryans were not foreigners", people like Aatish are deployed to attack those involved. He is worried that now I "get traction in India".]



[Rajiv: It is important to note that this kind of mischief as Aatish represents is now being clothed as the new voice of the true Indians. The latest trend is to even sound pro-Modi while rejecting Modi's deep notions of who we are, and replacing them with love for the "foreign Aryans who brought us Sanskrit". This is where the kurukshetra is most intense - Indians serving as a new breed of sepoys who are dressed up as great lovers of India.]



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John Rock • 5 months ago



It is obvious that Rajiv Malhotra has become nonignorable for all these "wolves in sheep's clothing". Calling Rajivji names shows desperation on the part of pseudos of India who seek approval of the west. Rajivji has replied to every comment made against by Mr Paki here.



[...]

(repeats Malhotra's rebuttal of Hashish Taseer. Hashasin Taseer. Oh wait his name didn't have an H: Assassin Taseer. I'm so bad at spelling...)

Sam • 5 months ago



I echo what the previous commenters Karigar and Ravi had to say. Taseer appears to ”get it" in the flashes during the conversation, and, yet, in the end he clearly just doesn't get it. Toby, as depicted, might be a reflection of Taseer after all; forever outside of the temple-goers while appreciating the civilization that sustains them, but seeking to divorce their beliefs from this unique way-of-life and obliquely still

looking for some kind of validation from the West. For all his

appropriate contempt for the parvenu Lutyenites, he appears to

tragically be unable to escape his own pedigree in the swamp. Thus the bile with which he previously brilliantly skewered the great pretender, Willy Dalrymple, looks gratuitous and misplaced when it is applied to an Irani or Malhotra.



It is no doubt popular today in Lutyen's drawing rooms to sneer collectively at these 'Hindutva types”, but outside the

durbar it comes across as crass, petty and (mimic-Western) elitist. You can almost sense him channeling his mother; Modi is OK but it is the people surrounding him that will limit him. No! It is the insider Lutyen's elite like Arun Jaitely who need to be culled before their poison slows the civilizational resurgence, not the outsider Iranis or Malhotras. For all their learning and degrees conferred in the West, the previous education ministers fronted by the dynasty only spread the malaise further - the Indian economy couldn’t have been damaged more by

Manmohan Singh despite his superficially impressive pedigree in academics! Thanks to the temple-goers, but no thanks to the parasites subsisting off the Indian version of Versailles, India will self-correct when and if the Iranis and Malhotras overstep their bounds.



Taseer disappoints. Perhaps this is only his early-Naipaulian phase and he will eventually shed his Lutyen's baggage (and Mommy dearest) when he matures. Incidentally, the Malhotra acolytes only damage their cause when they distastefully harp on Taseer's antecedence. He has been scathing in his writings about Pakistan and his father's weaknesses, and doesn't deserve the pro-Pakistani label.

"forever outside of the temple-goers while appreciating the civilization that sustains them, but seeking to divorce their beliefs from this unique way-of-life" -> Same can be said about Aatish' illegal encroachment on Samskritam.

The final line by "Sam" is unnecessarily charitable to Aatish: "Incidentally, the Malhotra acolytes only damage their cause when they distastefully harp on Taseer's antecedence. He has been scathing in his writings about Pakistan and his father's weaknesses, and doesn't deserve the pro-Pakistani label."

But he is half-Paki, where Paki means islamic from TSP. That he hates it can't erase it. He is half-islamic half-Sikh qua kultur at least and recent ancestry too. So not sure why he thinks himself entitled to encroach on Samskritam. Oh wait, aliens feel entitled - via IE-ism - and Aatish Taseer subscribes heavily to IE-ism too (but can't even google the origins of the word Eire or use a Latin-English online dictionary, apparently, and his Skt may be just as suspect for all I know). Which explains Taseer's sense of self-entitlement to Skt. Both that and his connections to Pollock.