The Idea of India
Posts Tagged ‘Clash of Civilizations’
The Hindus Live In Small And Dark Houses Or Finding The Roots Of War In Textbooks – The Pakistan Episode
The Hindus Live In Small And Dark Houses Or Finding The Roots Of War In Textbooks - The Pakistan Episode

The minds of children are usually shut inside prison houses, so that they become incapable of understanding people who have different languages and customs. This causes us to grope after each other in darkness, to hurt each other in ignorance, to suffer from the worst form of blindness. Religious missionaries themselves have contributed to this […]

In Defense Of Doubt Or How Intellectual Walls Have A Terrible Way Of Leaking
In Defense Of Doubt Or How Intellectual Walls Have A Terrible Way Of Leaking

Someone threw an egg at historian Wendy Doniger during a lecture in London in November 2003. Seven years later Wendy Doniger threw a book back at them. But more about this scholarly debate in a bit. — Reading Raymond Schwab’s masterpiece The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680 – 1880 one […]

Breathing Life And Death Into Gods And Men
Breathing Life And Death Into Gods And Men

   

Beyond Boundaries by Pankaj Mishra
Beyond Boundaries by Pankaj Mishra

This essay is reprinted here by kind permission of Pankaj Mishra. The original piece appeared in The National newspaper and can be seen here. Pankaj Mishra is the author of four books, most recently The Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond. But it was perhaps his writings […]

Deconstructing Kashmir – Part V: Lost Paths To The Shared Or Historical Elisions That Divide
Deconstructing Kashmir - Part V: Lost Paths To The Shared Or Historical Elisions That Divide
Still Looking For Answers In Ayodhya / Liberhan Report Published
Still Looking For Answers In Ayodhya / Liberhan Report Published

What is happening in India is a new, historical awakening…Today, it seems to me that Indians are becoming alive to their history…Only now are the people beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalising of India…What is happening in India is a mighty creative process…the sense of history that the Hindus are now […]

What’s Love Got To Do With It?
What's Love Got To Do With It?

The drive from Jammu to Srinagar takes about 12 hours by Sumo. That is what I had been told. It took me about about 12 hours to figure out exactly what a Sumo was. The public buses, small size mini vans in fact, that run regularly between the twin cities of Jammu and Srinagar, are […]

On Samuel Huntington & The Use of History
On Samuel Huntington & The Use of History

Samuel Huntington, author of the book ‘The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order‘, died on December 28th 2008. In an obituary in the New York Times, in a typically fawning obituary, thought it ‘uncanny’ i.e. a reflection of his brilliance, that in that book he had written (predicted?) that ‘Somewhere in the […]