Voice of India

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Voice of India (since 2002 Bharatvani Institute; since 2004 Voice of Dharma) is a New Delhi (India) publishing house, allegedly "heavily subsidized",^[1] ^[2] founded by Ram Swarup in 1983 and later joined by Sita Ram Goel, who themselves published extensively under the label.

It is notable for English language books supportive of Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) sentiment and political ideology, including works by Arun Shourie, David Frawley, Shrikant Talageri, Francois Gautier, Harsh Narain, Subhash Kak, Koenraad Elst, N. S. Rajaram.

Together with Aditya Prakashan, founded by Goel in 1963, it is a major outlet for the revival of "communalist" and allegedly "Hindu revisionism and propaganda"^[2], targeting a nostalgic audience of expatriate Indians in the USA in particular^[1]. The books of are also reportedly widespread among the ranks of the leaders of the Sangh Parivar.

According to his own statements, Goel's intention in creating his publishing house was to contradict in print, 'scientifically', the Indo-Aryan migration theory.^[2]

The internet domains voi.org (since 1998) and voiceofdharma.org (since 2004) are held by the Illinois based "Viraat Hindu Sabha" of Satinder Trehan, who also holds hinduholocaust.com, sarvesamachar.com and hindutva.org.

[edit] Criticism

Voice of India and Aditya Prakashan are at the center of the allegations a cottage industry indulging in historical revisionism put forward by Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer in their debunking of the "Harappan horse seal" hoax of The Deciphered Indus Script (by N. S. Rajaram and N. Jha, Aditya Prakashan, 2000) in 2000:^[3]

“

In the past few decades, a new kind of history has been propagated by a vocal group of Indian writers, few of them trained historians, who lavishly praise and support each other's works. Their aim is to rewrite Indian history from a nationalistic and religious point of view. [...] Ironically, many of those expressing these anti-migrational views are emigrants themselves, engineers or technocrats like N. S. Rajaram, S. Kak, and S. Kalyanaraman, who ship their ideas to India from U.S. shores. They find allies in a broader assortment of home-grown nationalists including university professors, bank employees, and politicians (S. S. Misra, S. Talageri, K. D. Sethna, S. P. Gupta, Bh. Singh, M. Shendge, Bh. Gidwani, P. Chaudhuri, A. Shourie, S. R. Goel). They have even gained a small but vocal following in the West among "New Age" writers or researchers outside mainstream scholarship, including D. Frawley, G. Feuerstein, K. Klostermaier, and K. Elst. Whole publishing firms, such as the Voice of India and Aditya Prakashan, are devoted to propagating their ideas.

”

[edit] References

^ ^a ^b Michael Witzel, 'Rama's Realm: Indocentric rewriting of early South Asian archaeology and history' in: Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public Routledge (2006), ISBN 0415305934, p. 205.[1]
^ ^a ^b ^c Michael Bergunder, "Contested Past", Historiographia Linguistica xxxi:1 (2004), 59–104.
^ Witzel, Michael and Steve Farmer. 2000. Horseplay in Harappa, Frontline, 17(20), September 30-October 13.