Indra's Net (book)
 | |
| Author | Rajiv Malhotra |
|---|---|
| Country | India |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Hinduism, Philosophy |
| Published | 2014 (HarperCollins Publishers India) |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 376 |
| ISBN | 978-9351362449 |
| OCLC | 871215576 |
Indra's Net: Defending Hinduism's Philosophical Unity is a 2014 book by Rajiv Malhotra, an Indian-American author, philanthropist and public speaker, published by HarperCollins. The book highlights the unity, coherence, and continuity of Hinduism and Hindu philosophy throughout their history. It makes proposals for defending Hinduism from what the author considers to be unjust attacks from scholars, misguided public intellectuals, and hostile religious polemicists. Indra's Net has been reviewed in newspapers,[1][2][3] video sharing sites,[4] web fora,[5][6] and other websites.[7]
Background & release
Malhotra had written several previous books defending various aspects of Hinduism. He states that Indra's Net was catalyzed by a 2012 panel at the meetings of the American Academy of Religion to discuss his book Being Different (2011). Two panelists based their objections against the book on the "single premise"[8]:45 that no unified Hindu tradition existed. These panelists "regarded any notion of Hindu unity as a dangerous fabrication and saw me as guilty of propagating it."[8]:45 Malhotra had known of several distinct cases of bias
where the great Hindu visionaries of the modern era were being charged with proto-fascism which struck me as bizarre. But I had not connected the dots or realized how insidious and widespread such a theory had become. Once I started to unravel the myth-making of neo-Hinduism and the ideological motivations behind it, I saw the dire need to contest its widespread acceptance among academic scholars and so-called experts on Hinduism. I decided that the battle must be taken to the academic fortress where the nexus is headquartered and from where it spreads its narratives.[8]:44
The book's central metaphor is "Indra's Net". As a scriptural image "Indra's Net" was first mentioned in the Atharva Veda (c. 1000 BCE).[8]:4–5,310[9]:910–911 In Buddhist philosophy, Indra's Net served as a metaphor in the Avatamsaka Sutra[8]:13[10] and was further developed by Huayen Buddhism to portray the interconnectedness of everything in the universe.[8]:13[10][11] Malhotra employs the metaphor of Indra's Net to express
the profound cosmology and outlook that permeates Hinduism. Indra's Net symbolizes the universe as a web of connections and interdependences.... The net is said to be infinite, and to spread in all directions with no beginning or end. At each node of the net is a jewel, so arranged that every jewel reflects all the other jewels.... a microcosm of the whole net.... [and] individual jewels always remain in flux.[8]:4–5
The book uses Indra's Net as a metaphor for the understanding of the universe as a web of connections and interdependences, an understanding which Malhotra wants to revive as the foundation for Vedic cosmology,[8]:4 a perspective that he asserts has "always been implicit"[8]:18 in the outlook of the ordinary Hindu.
Indra's Net was released in India on 29 January 2014 at the Vivekananda International Foundation, where a talk was given by Arun Shourie.[12] Shourie stated that in the book, Malhotra "has given us a pair of spectacles, a new pair of spectacles through which to understand... our own religions and our own tradition".[13]
Topics covered
Indra's Net contains 12 numbered chapters divided into two major parts, as well as introductory and concluding sections, notes, and an index. The book seeks to expose and refute "the influential narrative that Hinduism was fabricated during British rule and became a dangerous new religion".[8]:xiv
Purva Paksha (Examination of My Opponents' Positions) is Part 1's title. Its opening chapter, Eight Myths to be Challenged, outlines eight theses that the book first presents (Part 1) and then seeks to refute (Part 2). The remaining six chapters in the first part present a history of the 8 theses as they were expressed by scholars and gained wider cultural attention. The most attention is given to writings by the German scholar Paul Hacker (ch. 3), Leopold Fischer, later known as Agehananda Bharati (ch. 4), Ursula King (ch. 5), and the Trinidad-born Anantanand Rambachan (ch. 6), who are characterized, along with Hacker's associate William Halbfass, as the "pioneers"[8]:48 who established the thesis or myth of Neo-Hinduism. Various details are supplied on these scholars' biographies, ideas, and sometimes methodologies.
Malhotra states that the work of these "founders" then led to "echoes"[8]:49 among Western humanistic scholars such as Heinrich von Stietencron, Christophe Jaffrelot, Sheldon Pollock, Richard King, and others. These led to further echoes among Indian academics such as Romila Thapar and Meera Nanda, and among Indian public intellectuals such as Pankaj Mishra and Jyotirmaya Sharma. From these circles, the "myth of neo-Hinduism" has been widely disseminated through media, popular culture, and government policy-making, and is "increasingly assumed by cosmopolitan Indians who imagine they are... well-informed".[8]:55–6 Part 1 also notes that these views have been resisted by some academic "defenders"[8]:145 of contemporary Hinduism, including Arvind Sharma,[8]:145 Brian Smith,[8]:146 and Krishna Prakash Gupta.[8]:148
Uttara Paksha (My Response), Part 2, opens by arguing that prior to colonialism there had been "a vibrant flow of Indian ideas"[8]:173 and much unification of Hinduism by thinkers such as Vijnanabhiksu. It presents the concepts of "astika (those who affirm) and nastika (those who do not affirm)"[8]:154 — terms sometimes loosely translated as orthodoxy and non-orthodoxy — arguing that
The very existence of these old philosophical categories is clear evidence that people we later started calling Hindus did indeed have an awareness of collective unity and coherence regardless of whether or not they had a name for their identify.[8]:154
However, the colonial period promulgated several distorted understandings of Indian thought, including views of philosophical schools as "frozen, homogenized and isolated... at war against one another in a manner typical in Western history".[8]:169 According to the book, these distortions were shaped by the needs of Europeans to construct arguments in purely intra-European debates on topics such as pantheism and Europeans' own imagined Sanskrit-speaking Aryan ancestry. Subsequent chapters document traditional Hinduism's concern for service to society (ch. 9) and discuss the harmony between Vedanta and Yoga (ch. 10).
A "big picture"[8]:233 vision of Hinduism is then presented (ch. 11), based on integral unity, or "unity-in-diversity",[8]:234 represented by Indra's Net. The computer-derived image of "open architecture" is offered as a metaphor for the Hindu approach to the divine, with a lineage (sampradaya) or individual teacher (guru) functioning analogously to a "'systems integrator' - who selects the components for the client"[8]:243 if the client foregoes a do-it-yourself approach. The open-architecture metaphor is "applicable to numerous different schools which share common principles, symbols, and techniques, all... designed to help people gain access to higher states of consciousness.... [and] all have certain common standards and architectural principles".[8]:242 Swami Vivekananda and other promulgators of contemporary Hinduism were thus merely offering "an ongoing adaptation"[8]:259 within "a long-standing, continually evolving tradition".[8]:259
Additional chapters warn that the openness and flexibility of the Indian approach is also making it vulnerable to "digestion by predators",[8]:259 such as Western scholars or entrepreneurs who repackage Hindu ideas in Western secular terms, with original Indian sources forgotten. Westerners become "falsely established as original thinkers",[8]:267 while the uncredited Indian source is represented as oppressive or irrational.[note 1]
The book's concluding chapter proposes ways to prevent "predators"[8]:271 from exploiting the open architecture of Hinduism by more clearly establishing its core principles, such as karma and reincarnation. Malhotra proposes that the notion of astika could be helpful for defense if it were clarified. He suggests that several criteria could be used to "disqualify"[8]:283 any philosophical or religious view from being considered as astika: history centrism,[8]:283 a synthetic cosmology,[8]:287 fear of chaos,[8]:288 and a disembodied view of knowing.[8]:284 Malhotra explains that his proposal "is merely a starting point for further discussion and evolution of the categories.... this is how the open architecture has functioned in the past and must function now."[8]:279
Reviews
Reviews have appeared in The Hindu,[1] The Economic Times,[2] The Free Press Journal,[3] YouTube,[4] at web fora Medha Journal[5] and Lokvani,[6] and other websites.[7]
The Hindu wrote that the book "articulates the multidimensional, holographic understanding of reality" and "offers a detailed, systematic rejoinder"[1] to views slandering contemporary Hinduism as illegitimate and inherently oppressive.
In The Economic Times, Vithal Nadkarni noted the Atharva Vedic origins of the image of Indra's net. To the reviewer, Malhotra's contention that Hinduism has always spanned traditional, modern and post-modern categories "evokes the image of Shiva's Trinity, also known as that of Master of Time past, present and future, enshrined at... Elephanta".[2]
In The Free Press Journal, M. V. Kamath wrote that "Malhotra has done his job in explaining Hinduism [remarkably] well".[3]
On YouTube, Subramanian Swamy, former president of the Janata Party (1990-2013), stated with regard to Indra's Net that "this kind of writing is something that ultimately should become textbook reading for graduate students in India".[4]:2:45-2:54 He added that "this imperialism in scholarship [as criticized in the book] is something that Rajiv Malhotra is fighting alone; we need much more support being given to him".[4]:5:18-5:30
At the Medha Journal, Pradip Gangopadhyay wrote that Malhotra had "written a stout defense of the coherence and unity of Hinduism",[5] although he expressed differences with some parts of Malhotra's analysis. Gangopadhyay felt that Malhotra's "defense of [Swami Vivekananda] is genuine and sincere but not always effective", and was "amazed" why Malhotra "did not see Shankara as a unifier of Hinduism".[5]
On his blog, Varadaraja V. Raman wrote that "Malhotra has done it again: Written a substantial book on a topic that should interest all those who care for the Hindu world.... Malhotra does for Hinduism what G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy and C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity did for their religion: presenting robust, positive, and enlightened visions of the religion."[7] He added that "What is not pointed out in the book, but deserves mention, is that in spite of more than a century of adverse propaganda, a great many educated people in the West have, by and large, positive images of India and Hinduism."[7]
At the website Lokvani, Bijoy Misra expressed appreciation of the book's concern to refute misrepresentations of Hinduism, explaining that he becomes "concerned because the new [erroneous western-driven] literature does become the reading material for my own children and grandchildren, who would have little access to good traditional resources,"[6] and that the book "has particular significance for people like me who wish to practice their Hindu faith in the open society of the United States."[6]
See also
Notes
- ↑ From Indra's Net (p. 267): "The Indian source gets depicted in one of two extreme ways: on the one hand, it is abusive to women, hopelessly backward, ridden with weird notions of caste, dowry, sati, etc., and ruled by some very strange-looking half-animal gods; on the other, it is full of romantic otherworldly 'mystical wisdom' that has great potential but lacks 'rationality', which the West must supply."
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Anonymous (5 February 2014). "Untitled [review of Indra's Net, by Rajiv Malhotra]". The Hindu. Retrieved 24 March 2014.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Nadkarni, Vithal C (27 January 2014). "Net of unity". The Economic Times. Retrieved 24 March 2014.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Kamath, M. V. (4 May 2014). "Defending Hinduism’s Philosophical Unity [book review]". The Free Press Journal. Retrieved 27 May 2014.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Swamy, Subramanian (4 March 2014). "Dr Subramanian Swamy talks about Rajiv Malhotra latest book Indra's Net". YouTube. Retrieved 24 March 2014.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Gangopadhyay, Pradip. "Indra's Net review-Ia". Medha Journal. Retrieved 24 March 2014.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Misra, Bijoy (4 March 2014). "Book Review: Indra’s Net – Defending Hinduism’s Philosophical Unity". Lokvani. Retrieved 24 March 2014.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Raman, Varadaraja V. (29 March 2014). "Reflections on 'Indra’s Net: Defending Hinduism’s philosophical unity' by Rajiv Malhotra". V. V. Raman's blog (http://acharyavidyasagar.wordpress.com)''. Retrieved 1 April 2014.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 8.10 8.11 8.12 8.13 8.14 8.15 8.16 8.17 8.18 8.19 8.20 8.21 8.22 8.23 8.24 8.25 8.26 8.27 8.28 8.29 8.30 8.31 8.32 8.33 8.34 8.35 Malhotra, Rajiv (2014). Indra's Net: Defending Hinduism's Philosophical Unity. Noida, India: HarperCollins Publishers India. ISBN 9789351362449. ISBN 9351362442, OCLC 871215576
- ↑ The Atharva Veda verse 8.8.6. says: "Vast indeed is the tactical net of great Indra, mighty of action and tempestuous of great speed. By that net, O Indra, pounce upon all the enemies so that none of the enemies may escape the arrest and punishment." And verse 8.8.8. says: "This great world is the power net of mighty Indra, greater than the great. By that Indra-net of boundless reach, I hold all those enemies with the dark cover of vision, mind and senses." Ram, Tulsi (2013). Atharva Veda: Authentic English Translation. Agniveer. pp. 910–911. Archived from the original on 30 March 2014. Retrieved 26 March 2014.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Jones 2003, p. 16.
- ↑ Odin 1982, p. 17.
- ↑ Shourie, Arun (29 January 2014). "Indra’s Net Release by Arun Shourie, January 29, 2014". Indra's Net (book website). Retrieved 24 March 2014.
- ↑ Das, Sankhadip (3 March 2014). "Transcript: Arun Shourie's Lecture on 'Indra's Net'". Hitchhiker's Guide to Rajiv Malhotra's Works. Retrieved 24 March 2014.
Sources
External links
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