Arun Shourie: Trending quotes (page 3)

“The forfeiture is exactly the sort of thing which has landed us where we are : where intellectual inquiry is shut out; where our tradition are not examined and reassessed and where as a consequence there is no dialogue.”

Arun Shourie

About the book banning of Ram Swarup's Understanding Islam through Hadis. quoted from Koenraad Elst. Ayodhya and after: issues before Hindu society. 1991. Ch. 12.

“Caste is real. The working class is real. Being a Naga is real. But ‘India is just a geographical expression!’ Similarly, being a Muslim of course is real – Islam must be seen and talked of as one block of granite – ... But Hinduism? Why, there is no such thing: it is just an aggregation, a pile of assorted beliefs and practices – ... And anyone who maintains anything to the contrary is a fascist out to insinuate a unity, indeed to impose a uniformity, where there has been none. That is what our progressive ideologues declaim, as we have seen. In a word, the parts alone are real. The whole is just a construct. India has never been one, these ideologues insist – disparate peoples and regions were knocked together by the Aryans, by the Mughals, by the British for purposes of empire. Anyone who wants to use that construct – India – as the benchmark for determining the sort of structure under which we should live has a secret agenda – of enforcing Hindu hegemony.
This is the continuance of, in a sense the culmination of, the Macaulay-Missionary technique. The British calculated that to subjugate India and hold it, they must undermine the essence of the people: this was Hinduism, and everything which flowed from it. Hence the doggedness with which they set about to undermine the faith and regard of the people for five entities: the gods and goddesses the Hindus revered; the temples and idols in which they were enshrined; the texts they held sacred; the language in which those texts and everything sacred in that tradition was enshrined and which was even in mid-nineteenth-century the lingua franca – that is, Sanskrit; and the group whose special duty it had been over aeons to preserve that way of life – the Brahmins. The other component of the same exercise was to prop up the parts – the non-Hindus, the regional languages, the castes and groups which they calculated would be the most accessible to the missionaries and the empire – the innocent tribals, the untouchables.”

Arun Shourie

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998)

God , Faith , People , Secret

“Once they had occupied academic bodies, once they had captured universities and thereby determined what will be taught, which books will be prescribed, what questions would be asked, what answers will be acceptable, these historians came to decide what history had actually been! As it suits their current convenience and politics to make out that Hinduism also has been intolerant, they will glide over what Ambedkar says about the catastrophic effect that Islamic invasions had on Buddhism, they will completely suppress what he said of the nature of these invasions and of Muslim rule in his Thoughts on Pakistan,3 but insist on reproducing his denunciations of ‘Brahmanism’, and his view that the Buddhist India established by the Mauryas was systematically invaded and finished by Brahmin rulers.
Thus, they suppress facts, they concoct others, they suppress what an author has said on one matter even as they insist that what he has said on another be taken as gospel truth. And when anyone attempts to point out what had in fact happened, they rise in chorus: a conspiracy to rewrite history, they shout, a plot to distort history, they scream. But they are the ones who have been distorting it in the first place – by suppressing the truth, by planting falsehoods.”

Arun Shourie

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998)

History , Question , Nature , Universe

“The most extensive deletions are ordered in regard to the chapter on ‘Aurangzeb’s policy on religion’. Every allusion to what he actually did to the Hindus, to their temples, to the very leitmotif of his rule – to spread the sway of Islam – are directed to be excised from the book. He is to be presented as one who had an aversion – an ordinary sort of aversion, almost a secular one – to music and dancing, to the presence of prostitutes in the court, and that it is these things he banished... In a word, no forcible conversions, no massacres, no destruction of temples. Just that Hinduism had created an exploitative, casteist society. Islam was egalitarian. Hence the oppressed Hindus embraced Islam!
Muslim historians of those times are in raptures at the heap of kafirs who have been dispatched to hell. Muslim historians are forever lavishing praise on the ruler for the temples he has destroyed, for the hundreds of thousands he has got to see the light of Islam. Law books like The Hedaya prescribe exactly the options to which these little textbooks alluded. All whitewashed away.
Objective whitewash for objective history. And today if anyone seeks to restore truth to these textbooks, the shout, ‘Communal rewriting of history’.”

Arun Shourie

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998)

Hell , Religion , Time , Law

“And on the basis of criteria of this kind tribals were hacked off from Hindu society. One has but to read the descriptions of Animism which were relied upon to notice that they could well be describing a variety of Hindus.”

Arun Shourie book Missionaries in India

Source: Missionaries in India, 1994

Animals , Reading

“Is an institution the Indian history course of which covers only the period from the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi to 1947, the geography course of which focuses on the Arabian peninsula, an institution of and for India?”

Arun Shourie

The World of Fatwas (Or The Shariah In Action), 1995

History

“In the face of all this those who continue to assert, ‘Shariah has safeguarded the rights of women like no other system of law has,’ do so only because of their confidence that no one but them has read the texts of shariah.”

Arun Shourie

The World of Fatwas (Or The Shariah In Action), 1995

Confidence , Law , Reading , Self-confidence

“Not an enforced amnesia but an unsparing memory - that is what will build a nation.”

Arun Shourie

Source: A secular agenda, 1993

Memory

“Upon going through the text the reader will notice how completely contrary to the facts are the cliches which are bandied about in public discourse in India, and which as a consequence so many have by now internalised....”

Arun Shourie

A secular agenda, 1993

“Every single Muslim historian of medieval India lists temples which the rulers he is writing about has destroyed and the mosques he has built instead.”

Arun Shourie

Source: Indian controversies: Essays on religion in politics (1993) 429

“Clearly, what our newsmen call 'hard-liners' have been vindicated.”

Arun Shourie

Source: Indian controversies: Essays on religion in politics (1993)