Ten Heads of Ravana: A Critique of Hinduphobic Scholars

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For long, a handful of scholars and intellectual elites, whose understanding of Bharata is disjointed from tradition and often inimical to the Dharmic way of life, have controlled India's civilizational narrative. They analyze Bharatiya sanskriti through a Western gaze while discarding native models. Embedded in powerful ecosystems, gilded Lankas, they are increasingly replacing traditional guru-s and ācārya-s as the modern adhikari-s of Indian knowledge systems.

In contemporary Indian scholarship, eminent personalities like Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Shashi Tharoor, Ramachandra Guha, Sheldon Pollock, Wendy Doniger, Devdutt Pattanaik, Kancha Ilaiah, and Michael Witzel are at the forefront of such India studies.

Ravana was a scholar par excellence, but he was on the wrong side of Dharma. Hence, Srirama waged a war against him to prevent a breakdown of society. Similarly, today's eminent scholars can be thought of as the contemporary embodiments of the historical Ravana-academically influential personalities, but grossly mischaracterizing the Dhärmic way of life and history of Bharata.

In this collection of essays, authors Dr. K.S. Kannan, Dr. H.R. Meera, Manogna Sastry, Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay, T.N. Sudarshan, Dr. Sharda Narayanan, Anurag Sharma, and Divya Reddy have brought to light, through rigorous evidence-based research, numerous factual naccuracies, willful misrepresentation and deliberate distortions in the scholarship of many such intellectual heads of the modern Ravana.

"This anthology is special because most of these young scholars have been mentored by Rajiv Malhotra over a long period. Thankfully, a new generation of scholars is ready to carry forward the pioneering work in civilizational studies."

Infinity Foundation India (IFI) has, for the past several years, been at the forefront in the field of civilizational studies, applying the lens of Dharma to examine a broad range of topics. As a leading think tank, it has published game-changing original research that has been widely disseminated through books, blogs, social media, e-learning courses and videos. The themes it has worked on have included the history of Indian science and technology, impact of modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, consciousness studies, cultural and spiritual history, comparative studies of civilizations, education, ecology, ethics and human rights. Since the past two centuries, Indology has been controlled by Western scholars and institutions, who have applied Western methods to study Indian civilization. Infinity Foundation India has been a pioneer in exposing this stranglehold and providing responses from the Indian point of view. It coined the term Swadeshi Indology to refer to this new approach to disrupt Western Indology and construct its own traditional interpretations. The present book - Ten Heads of Ravana - is the latest offering from our team of brilliant scholars.

The idea of Ten Heads of Ravana was born during an Infinity Foundation India retreat in 2019, to commemorate and reflect on its work thus far and plan ahead for the changing nature of the kurukşetra. Nestled in the beautiful surroundings of Rishikesh, the retreat was a memorable time for the team to reconsider its work through Dharmic frameworks and paradigms. As they contemplated the current dynamics of Indology, there emerged a need for an anthology that would inform the general reader of the thoughts of some well-known scholars of the field. I am delighted to see that discussion bear fruit through this book.

The title of this anthology-Ten Heads of Ravana-has been chosen with care. The use of 'Ravana' is intended as a parody and not literally. The metaphorical resemblences are clear: The historical Ravana disrupted society's Hindu structures, and the 'heads' chosen for this book are considered by Hindus today to be individuals doing something similar but intellectually and not with physical violence. The historical Ravana was very intelligent, a great scholar, hard working and with immense power at his disposal. The ten scholars featured in this book are powerful in the current academic discourse, have worked diligently most of their lives to develop their intellectual "weapons", and their impact is not to be trivialized.

The scholars chosen as the intellectual heads of the metaphorical Ravana are being taken seriously in this book. There is no intention on the part of the authors to attack the individuals at a personal level, but rather to cast their work in the framework from the perspective of Dharma. The essays consider the major themes and arguments from each individual's ouvre and showcase why they misrepresent and distort studies related to Bharata and Dharma and why the typical reader needs to be mindful of the narratives being pushed due to the powerful influence of the ecosystem they have built over several decades. The authors have taken care to not engage in any ad hominem attacks or unprofessional takedown of the individual scholars.

The Ramayana, one of the greatest mahakavya-s of Bharata, shows us the nature of Ravana as the king of Lanka and the main antagonist of the epic. He is believed to have learnt the Arthashastra from Shukracharya, adept at the use of maya and won boons from Brahma and Siva. Ravana's use of tactics-from the manner in which he abducted Sita to his battle with Srirama and his army, trying to trick Sita by showing the severed head of Srirama, to using psychological warfare tactics during Sita's captivity at the Asokavana-hold many lessons. These are not merely instances from an epic story but hold equivalents even in today's world.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages