My Oxford Lecture on ‘Decolonizing Academics’

[Music] good evening we'd like to welcome you to Shri Rajesh maletas Gees lecture on decolonizing academia here at Oxford tonight now I'd like to introduce pundit Satish emoji from the British Board of Hindu scholars he's also the general counsel of the general secretary of the National Council of Hindu temples UK and he'll commence tonight's events and proceedings with a traditional opening thank you sir loony G it gives me great pleasure to start these proceedings especially in the presence of some of some people who I have regarded as gurus at different times in my life so Rajiv ji most welcome thank you very much for that firstly and most appropriately it's a Hindu tradition especially in areas of our scholarship that before we start anything we always take a few moments and reflect upon the gift of those people who have actually given us the benefit of their wisdom and their affection people who recall our gurus where there are parents or whether our teachers and so I'm going to start and I'd ask you just to mentally reflect upon those people who've shared their wisdom with you guru brahma guru vishnu guru devo maheswara guru sakshat param this may see [Music] and in that regard I'm also delighted to mention Swami Omega and VA service with eg and Minnie Shetty who have taken the trouble to be with us and thank you for your blessings when this event also in times gone past when ancient Rishi's used to sit together to discuss issues which were contentious or issues which required a deep contemplation they used to set an intention and they used to set that intention with a mantra and many of you I hope will have come across the set of overdue mantra and so if you'd like to join me in the center of the mantra for a moment ohm saying are overdue said open up to savvy young god of our hey they just weaned arboretum us too with fish Oh shanthi shanthi shanthi he made divinity guide us and protect us may we learn from each other in a spirit of affection trust and harmony may our efforts today be rewarded with illumination and radiance and most importantly may they never be harsh words between us and finally I will close with one small mantra which is very pertinent to today's event and that's the asset omus at gummy a mantra so if you'd like to join in you're more than welcome to Oh I said oh ma South Gallia Thomas Oh Marge oh dear come here with your mom Rita the first line of that is very pertinent to this evening's event may we all be guided and maybe or move from us at the Unreal the untrue towards an understanding and an experience of Satya the truth and reality to introduce guest speaker Shri Rajiv Malhotra ji Rajiv Malhotra is an internationally renowned researcher writer speaker and public intellectual his field is current affairs as they relate to civilizations cross control cross cultural encounters religion and science he has had multiple careers in his life from being a top corporate executive of a fortune hundred company a strategy consultant and a very successful entrepreneur in the IT and media industries and this is what's most remarkable at the peak of his career when he owned about 20 companies worldwide he had a spiritual shift and took early retirement at the age of 44 to study philanthropy research and to public service the outcome of that has been some truly groundbreaking research I may add sir that your work has been truly transformational thank you he has disrupted mainstream thought and provided fresh provocative positions on Dharma India religion and globalization he's authored hundreds of articles there about 400 video lectures available online and if anyone's interested in this field I highly recommend them they provide very insightful listening he's written five books three of them are on the podium their academic Hindi phobia the battle for Sanskrit in ResNet being different breaking India and invading the sacred currently he the founder and director of infinity foundation in Princeton New Jersey he's also the chair of the board of governors at the center of index studies at the University of Massachusetts his foundation has provided grants for pioneering programs in Indic studies yoga Hindi at Harvard Rutgers and the University of Hawaii and the list goes on so I think I'll stop there suffice it to say that yesterday evening there was a program at the houses of Parliament at Westminster where Rajeev Rajeev G was the guest speaker and he spoke to a captivated audience we'd like to just share with you some of the reactions of other honorable members of parliament so here's the first one from the right honourable Teresa villas MP it's really an honor for me to be here it was a phenomenal presentation by a guest speaker a fascinating reflection on hugely important cultural issues in India and in terms of its relationship with the UK I am very taken by the idea of soft power reparations you've given us a huge amount of food for thought I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts on so many crucial issues which are found fascinating and I would like to thank everyone who is here for this really important event Honorable Bob Blackmon MP for Harrow thank you for coming along and challenging us I open the session by saying that some say that you're a slightly controversial figure but that is good because controversy encourages debate thank you for giving us your sage advice on this crucial issue an honorable Stephen pound member of parliament rajeev g it's been an honor to sit at your feet today we are not just blessed by your presence but illuminated by it and intellectually challenged by your iconoclasm which is what a great writer and philosopher should do and finally by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi prime minister of the most populous nation in the world and probably the most popular prime minister in the Rajeev ji deserves sincere appreciation for glorifying our priceless heritage and clearing the misinterpretations about it and with that I'd like to invite Rajiv ji - please come on and start the lecture [Applause] thank you thank you everyone who organized this I'd like to start by giving a brief account of colonization before we talk about decolonization several centuries before India got colonized Ireland was colonized for several centuries and you could say that the ground rules the modus operandi the strategies were tested they're tested perfected before they were applied elsewhere most people think that the colonization of India starts with the British actually in the 1600s when the East India Company was created and that started the British era of colonization of India about the same time other Englishmen went across America and started what they call settlement so the 1600s was the sort of rise of Britain as a world power the two big empires the one in India and the one in Americas starting almost simultaneously now these scholars who study colonialism haven't done justice to looking at this triangle Ireland the colonization strategy and methods then finding their way in one case to India and in the other case to America also many of the people many of the intellectuals in America writing their experience were in contact sometimes directly and often indirectly with their counterparts in India so the colonization of India and the colonization of America were not separate a lot of ideas about Native Americans which they had they would project onto Indians in India and this is interesting when you look at art how they're depicting when you look at you know some of the literature written at that time a whole lot of their ideas memes about Irish keep getting projected onto the Native Americans in America and Indians in India and also back and forth this is a whole topic which people who claim they have already mastered colonial studies decolonization haven't really done justice to but the story doesn't begin they're a hundred years before the 1600s beginning of the British experience in America and in India it was Portuguese who started the colonization of India in Goa and other places they did not achieve such a large scale but they are the first Europeans who came there and about the so in the 1500s the Portuguese landed in India and started their process early 1500 a century before the British did and also about a century or so before the early 1600s settlements of British people in America you have Columbus so a hundred years before the British you have the Portuguese and the Spaniards doing their thing they were the naval powers at the time before Northern Europeans became the naval powers and the Portuguese went looking for India one way around Africa and Columbus went looking the other way across the Atlantic the question that the story should not even start there even sooner it has to start because the question has to be why were the Portuguese so keen and the Spaniards so keen as sort of naval powers why were they so keen to find a way to India I mean certainly Columbus was not going to India to bring human rights I mean that's why I tell the Americans you know that okay you know why you're going to India and you're doing all these great things being human rights and whatnot but do you realize the very founding of this country started with somebody else Columbus because he wanted to go to India but he was not bringing human rights he wanted all the wealth he wanted the trade routes so why were these guys doing it so the story goes even before that they were doing it because the Ottomans blockaded the trade routes between Asia and Europe and the Indian goods were so sought-after such a huge amount of trade that India was a manufacturing economy India was an export economy steel textiles medicines when you look at the trade records of Vasco da Gama and the other Portuguese that came afterwards they call it spice but it's medicines it's plant medicines I mean it's not you know some turmeric that would build up build a huge Portuguese Empire come on so what was classified that way were actually medicines plant medicines and a whole lot of textiles and steel were part of this trade so India was a very wealthy country if you really want a proper history world history of the last five hundred years six hundred years and if you really want to understand the rise of Europe you know the rise of Europe story has to start with a very wealthy India that is supplying enormous amounts of things and Europe has nothing to supply in return that the Indians want so the Indians demand gold so the Indians end up accumulating one of the largest gold reserves in the world from export and gold then becomes the reserve currency that's how gold the gold standard in economics starts because India was exporting and wanted gold payments so when you understand all that and then you understand that the Ottomans blockaded the that's sort of like OPEC cartel embargo so the OPEC guys have a historical precedence they know that their predecessors also blockaded long ago so when the ottoman blockhead in crisis in Europe they need see roots Queen of Spain is a venture capitalist so she finds all these tour trips to go and look for sea routes and so on from by Columbus etc so the the history of Europe the rise of Britain the origins of America which becomes United States later the so-called discovery of America and I always say well if if Columbus discovered America in 1492 does it mean that the natives who lived there for twenty thousand years never discovered it I mean that's a kind of a racist implication that it was discovered when the white man discovered it and there is a doctrine of Christian discovery the Pope when these the so called discoveries were taking place issued a papal bull one of those edicts which said that this was called the doctrine of Christian discovery which said that when Christians discover it in the name of the Lord and church and what not that constitutes discovery until then it has not been discovered and I think this mentality continues when they say that plant medicines from tropical countries don't comprise the code don't comprise intellectual property until somebody like Johnson and Johnson or bristol-myers has filed a patent because you know they know the legal procedure how to do that so this business of what constitutes discovery what constitutes intellectual property also has a racist origin now the story of colonialism is a is an amazing story that has never been properly written the British early British loved India they were called romanticists they were founded amazing this is before they started becoming rulers they were traders and they were in love and they talked about the education system was sophisticated the agriculture was very sophisticated they talked about the textiles so the the two major industries which started the British Industrial Revolution were two of India's largest export industries named textiles and steel but in the accounts in history it never says that the the occupation of India had anything to do with the sudden rise out of nowhere of the textiles and and steel industries in Britain so the there is there are so many loose ends so much so many dots to be connected and the the European benefits from India's mathematics astronomy linguistics philosophy medicine etc are huge Cambridge University did a project somebody called Joseph Needham in Cambridge did 30 volumes on the history of Chinese science and about 20 years ago I thought somebody should do that for India's Science and Technology nobody had they were isolated works here and there not properly done and not put together so the Infinity foundation has published 14 volumes called the history of Indian science and technology and we want to continue doing more so this is a very big story when people write about India they don't write these things they talk about everybody coming and invading a primitive weak people and they keep defeating as they're getting defeated and succumbing and somebody the early Aryans supposedly brought Sanskrit and Vedas and then after that the Greeks brought brought astronomy and philosophy and people in India didn't really know how to think for themselves and then the Mughals brought tandoori and sitar tabla and then the English came and brought the English language and cricket and now the Americans should bring human rights so this is the I call it the invasion theory of India which means that the story of India the narrative of India is basically chapters of being invaded by people who've done good to you as a result of these invasions so decolonization must first start by taking proper stock of all these things and if you haven't taken proper stock of these things you know you really cannot you can get lost in a lot of who breed which is what most of the post-colonial people are doing I read all the post-colonial scholars from Edwards ie to homi Bhabha to write three Spivak too you know or all of these big names ramachandra guha and all of them i read all these guys and the a courageous imaginative creative decolonization project I don't see in the Academy and I will talk to you about it that is why before the Academy can claim that they are decolonizing they got to decolonize themselves the Academy itself is a colonial enterprises what I will show you you see the post-colonial studies started when Edward Sayid produced his famous Orientalism book in the 70s and this became a very new thing and a whole lot of post-colonial studies started and that was the study of the colonies and what they were doing wrong a lot of good work came out of that I must say they dug up a lot of stuff and compiled it but you know they didn't know how to replace this colonial narrative they were dismantling with something correct about India how do you you need to understand the Indian grand narrative which is the Indian narrative about itself you need to understand that in order to know what you are replacing the colonial narrative with it's one thing to disrupt it's another thing to construct so you need both if you want a garden you have to disrupt the weeds and the disrupt all the bugs and get rid of them and so on but you also need to plant flowers and nurture them and you know fertilize them so you need to have both a disruption of what you don't need and a construction of what you do need so the post-colonial people were very good at disrupting the colonial enterprise but when it came to constructing there was a big problem they did not want to recognize the Vedic heritage because they all came from a Marxist background and that would be bad news it would mean that they are actually helping their enemy so the outcome of post-colonial studies was something called subaltern studies some orton studies says we we are not a nation India is in India as a group of Nations of fighting tribes and castes and communities and minority religions and all kinds of different things so the supportin studies was the beginning of what I call the breaking India project because it started looking at the decolonizing not replacing the decolonizing the after decolonizing not replacing it with a vedic heritage or a kind of a pan Indian unified view but a view of broken India so one of the flaws in the decolonizing project was they were not able to go prior to the Mughal era and find something positive so they would say that colonization is a European thing it's bad horrible and they find all kind of thing there and when you decolonize the great the golden era is the Mughal era so now this is another problem the academic study of colonialism and decolonizing is unable to accept Islamic colonization it's politically incorrect you'll be called Islamophobic if you just said you know the Muslim the Mughals were colonizers but the fact is somebody comes and imposes religion they impose the Persian language which is not anything disputed people know that they impose the jizya tax which is on infidels they're living the good life destroying a lot of temples they shut down that burnt Nalanda Takshashila a couple dozen major universities did not build a single new one and India was the land of exporting knowledge from these places to all over Asia mathematics meant to Middle East from there and the Middle East people recognized the translations from Indian languages - you know mathematic sticks to Arabic and then sometime later these texts were translated to Latin ended up in the libraries of the Vatican and then these were further translated into northern European languages and that's what informed people like Newton and many other people in fact so the huge export was not out of a vacuum they were knowledge centers they were like the Oxford's and Cambridge's and Harvard's of that era because they attracted the cream of brilliant people from all over Asia the queen of Cambodia and our whole College in Nalanda just to have the privilege of sending her best students there and and there are so many so much of the history is written by foreign students Chinese foreign students who would return back to China I would write in Chinese you know their narratives about what they learned so the Arabs wrote a lot about their experience of India so the idea of a very knowledge producing society is well documented it is not some saffron Hindu BJP project I mean these things are the records of these things are very very old so this got dismantled during the Mughal era a whole lot of these universities got dismantled and new ones were not built so the the civilization took a different turn yes there was a lot of you know pop culture but it was pop culture was promoted certain kinds of pop culture but the deep culture the deep civilization the traditions of learning became fragmented they survived in spite of all the colonization so I to me the colonial process in India the colonization before you talk about decolonization mean the colonization starts at least in the Mughal era you cannot dismiss that and then the Portuguese era and then the British era and then the American era and the colonisation by brown sepoys today in places like Oxford and various other places who become the new intellectual elite bringing a colonial lens wearing a colonial lens and looking at India through that colonial lens I mean that's the new colonization so these are sepoys 2.0 the first sepoys were the kind who fired bullets at Jallianwala Bagh under general dyers command and they were the sepoys that fought for the British in so many wars and the new sepoys are not wearing the military uniform of the British and carrying the Union Jack flag they are intellectuals and they are basically working for a Western framework and intellectual you know apparatus they're they're very important mercenaries in a sense working for the Western apparatus and it's easy for them to say we are doing decolonizing why do you need to do it who are you to do it we're going to be colonizing we are we are told in Oxford one of the reaction was why is he gonna talk about decolonization doesn't you know we have a whole lot of mechanism we find it insulting that somebody you should come and talk about decolonization in other words the insiders of one of the biggest colonial enterprise in the world which is Oxford feel that they have the exclusive right to decolonize and it's not something that Outsiders should even talk about in fact I have a book here there's a this is a book called Oxford and Empire I first read it about 20 years ago it's published by Oxford University Press so it's not some you know some radical fringe guy and it's been around for a quarter century at least I've known it and I know I have many other books of this sort to document what happened right here in the colonial enterprise which the academic world here has not come to terms with and it is perfectly fair for outsiders to come and point out and Italy and and if they are liberal as they want to be then they ought to listen and they all who answer back they ought to debate rather than come up with one reason after another one excuse after another not so this is an important decolonizing process called decolonizing Academy the academic people themselves especially the people who claim to be in post-colonial studies need to be decolonized so what happened after India's independence is that the study of India which is called in dalla ji which has started in Germany France England they were also indologists in Russia by the way Italian indologist they were indologists there were similar people in America they didn't call themselves and ologists but there were people studying India that Enterprise shifted after independence with a large number of Indians being given custody of that enterprise in India and in the West so it started out there are five I call it the five waves of in dalla ji after independence all these five waves I'm going to name are made in the West imported into India none of them is an Indian social theory and none of them fired by pioneered by any Indian so you'd have to listen to this list and then tell me what is decolonization all about this is an import of foreign social theories so the first was Marxism brought into India that's an it's an import the second after Edward Sayid was post-colonial studies that was also a certain lens a certain methodology how you study the third was important studies also brought from the West the first the next was post-modernism the whole post-modernism that grand narratives aren't good grand narratives are bad and so on and so forth and let's deconstruct that Indians deconstruct their own grand narrative which means just keep breaking up the bay breaking their own foundation let me tell you I've lived in the United States for 46 years longer than the vast majority of Americans who were born there I know the country extremely well not only as a who's done lots of things there but formally and rigorously studied American history American culture American religion politics very very systematically and for the last 25 years this is my full-time job I mean I I resigned retired sold off got out of all my business activities so that I could devote my time to do this and I spend more hours doing this than any academic scholar because most of them have other duties like teaching and administration and all of that and keeping their jobs and I don't have to worry about it I can devote myself 18 hours a day of just doing my research which is quite a luxury so I've done a lot of research and let me tell you the post-modern project has been an export project with India as the most successful market post-modernism in the United States is only living in academic cocoons it is not how the media represents the United States it is not in the Italian Day Parade the Irish Day Parade in New York and the India parade Pakistan parade China parade they're all very very ethnic full of grand narratives with Frei pride and and I and I and all this crystallized once when SUNY Stony Brook's the State University of New York Stony Brook Center for index studies had me as a keynote speaker at their fifth anniversary long long ago and I talked about the importance of Indian Americans to claim a positive identity for themselves being Indian and being American at the same time just like there are these so many other hyphenated identities and there were people just ready to jump on me these academic type people first didn't want me speaking they tried their best to every kind of excuse for that and I'm talking about like 20 years ago and then they promised they were given this I think that they'll give the rebuttal they'll they'll debate I said fine I'm more than happy so they were so full of jargon so full of this very sort of you know unimaginative memorized jargon that all of learn basically not understanding America at all because the position that you're bringing your you're bringing your identity with you from India because it's something wrong with you in such a bunch of baloney because this is happen this event was happening in New York and I said you I don't know how many years you lived in New York but you should see New York the mayor the whole place is so proud of their ethnic parades they have about 20 or 30 countries you know they have Japan parade and Irish parade and this and that Hispanic parade black parade they're so proud of all these identities and you are saying that Indians should be ashamed of claiming this identity you really don't know America at all so you see America did not post modernize itself it caused it explained to the Indians as if it is everybody's post modernizing and Indian post Martin is stupidly went and started projecting this anti narrative anti grand narrative on India but the American grand narrative is solid the American grand narrative is very strong I mean there is there is no danger whether you are one party or the other party that you're going to you know overthrow the founding fathers and you won't like the you know the basic symbols in the national holidays and the big monuments and all of that those are very solid that the grand narrative of America is very solid the grand narrative of Japan is very solid in Japan the grand narrative of China is very solid in China the British current narrative is very strong about the history about the about the you know royal family about English language democracy or all all the things that the British are proud of in fact so much that that is why they left brexit because they want to reclaim the grand narrative and this grand narrative project is is a very important part of nation-building so what the left and the post-colonial is and the subaltern is who then became post modernists did not understand is that Indians have a natural need like anyone else to have their own grand narrative so they pass on a positive story about who we are and they got sick and tired Indians got sick and tired of being told we're a bad we have nothing but violence and we are uncivilized and we need Westerners to come and civilize us and this is it is this wave that brought Modi to power it is not that some top-down thing happened it's a popular movement and I spend a lot of my time visiting India every year for for at least four visits a year ever since I came to the u.s. I have not skipped a single year so I know the pulse in different places in India and I can tell you that this is coming this is happening because people were just very concerned that the ruling elite in India had sold out dismantled their grand narrative sold out to the West becoming a new kind of anti narrative elite a new kind of very anti narrative elite and I find when I'm debating such people they are intellectually mediocre I find that they are just not very intelligent you try to hold give them an logical argument and they fall apart then they start accusing you and then it's all about personalities and this father accused this and that it's all about ad homonyms it is not a fight between left and right it is not because a whole lot of Dharma is very what you would call liberal liberal thinking liberal thinking left is thinking and right is thinking it's not one or the other you cannot really contain it in either the left or the right the Hindu Dharma is got things from all over the spectrum it's more a fight between people who are imaginative intelligent original thinking critical thinking skills versus people who are mediocre it's simply a question of smarts versus dumb people and it is natural for dumb people to gravitate towards you know we all stay together and we have slogans and boy if some curries coming he's threatening us he's threatening our parampara our union ideological union and so you know we're gonna attack him and I know all the one-liners how to attack this guy it's this is what the so-called post-colonial studies and this is what a lot of these South Asian Studies has turned out to be now I am NOT demeaning and talking down to everybody because I know some very smart people also I know some very good scholars also both of indian-origin and certainly Western origin I know good scholars but I'm saying that there is this kind of a gang mentality of you know defensiveness of a kind of an ideological position which is not something that they are comfortable discussing they are actually quite under informed about their own field of study so when an outsider comes it's particularly threatening so the prevailing view from the South Asian Studies is things like there is no India the British gave in India there was no unity it was all just hocus-pocus but how do you explain that the remind is a grand narrative of the geography from the northernmost to Lanka there are several thousand names of locations villages mountains forests rivers that all happen to be the case there is in fact a book somebody wrote where he traces the journeys of people in Ramayana and he looks at the map of India and you can plot those those things are still existing they got those same names so there is a there is a sense of unity there then you have the shack tepee terms which are the centers of Shakti the Devi and which are all over India in fact some in Pakistan and Nepal and Bangladesh also so all over that region there are these Shakti Pitons there are held together by one philosophy a one particular spiritual tradition which has its sacred sites all over the country so there is a unity for them and then RD Shankara when he sets up his four P terms he goes to four corners of India I mean if there and those days travel is very difficult so its daughter is not a easy job to go I mean it's basically making a statement that this is one unity and then you look at kumbhamela a huge thing kumbhamela has records of communities from every corner of country of the country coming at the astrologically defined designee time and it's supposed to happen the different the different groups in their different order when they come and who comes from which part of the country and they come from everywhere this is a very old tradition and it documents a kind of a unity so I could go down and tell you the unity of India whether you call it India or parrot or Hindustan doesn't matter that entity is what we are talking about I mean if a if a woman marries changes her name you cannot say that because she has this new name she did not even exist you have to be intelligent enough and say she existed but I had a different name at that time so the name is not what we're talking about whether India the name existed is not part of the conversation there existed a certain sense of nation and a sense of geographical unity and a sense of cultural heritage and traditions and our gamez and and all kinds of other you know things that Indians is that unify India's a consciousness and this unity is also documented by foreign travelers they are talking referring to it whether they're calling it hint or whatever they're calling it their name is not important they are referring it to it to this as a particular community of people large number of people with a lot of diversity but a sense of unity so this business that we want to decolonize but we want to turn it into fragmented nation-states they'll keep fighting each other we will create a Dalit stand here and a northeast there and a separate Kashmir here and a separate this one and that one and that one and we'll keep we create the re-entry median fight and now there is this moon de the moon das studied in Harvard are supposedly the real Indians and even the Dravidians came from somewhere else that's the new theory that there is not only foreign Aryan invasion but the foreign Robinho new invasion it's just as the Aryans and invading the Davidians who had earlier invaded the moon das so now this breaking up of India is kind of a multi-layered process that goes on and on so the a large number of Indian I call them see poised the Sepoy is 2.0 the sepoys 2.0 are part of this mercenary kind of intellectual apparatus and many of them mean well some of them are doing it unconsciously a lot of them are very I know I have relatives by the way I have friends kids in this and they had wonderful people I mean there it's not like they're genuinely doing something to harm their nation they actually love their nation but they sort of sucked into this so there is a kind of machine intellectual machine in sitting in some of these universities faculty in university faculties where when the new kids come they get brainwashed into this system and so I for one do not accept that we have been decolonized intellectually I do not accept that the apparatus that claims to be the decolonizing mechanism is doing its job so yesterday I made an announcement of my next book which is a new movement I'm calling it the soft power reparations movement I am against financial reparations for one thing it won't happen it's just to make noise it's just to get some political mileage you can get some votes you can get some noise back home but you know telling them ok we have to declare your guilt and send me money for that it is so ridiculous to assume that I mean imagine that you process that will be required under British law and far bigger than bricks it to have to admit something like that I mean there's just no chance so it's not a question of whether you're right or wrong somebody has to have some common sense and make demands that are realistic and practical because one of the things diplomats should know is how you negotiate a win-win how you ask for something that also makes sense for the other side that will also be very beneficial for us and how you move in that way and I will propose my soft power reparations in that regard which has nothing to do with money it has to do with restoration of history restoration of our tech restoration of the whole intellectual you know intellectual ideas we had which got distorted some of them got taken away the whole project of decolonizing to me is a project of rewriting helping working together to restore our grand narrative restoring our grand narrative undoing the harm that the extreme left has done which is to destroy our grand narrative and this is not as a right wing or something like that I just believe every people need a grand narrative and our grand narrative was destroyed by the Mughals and then destroyed by the Europeans and then destroyed by the Indian Left there's three waves of destruction of our grand narrative so just like you know so many countries are kicking out these bumps they're kicking the bums out election after election whether it is UK or France or whether it is Australia or Japan or you know India the that old extreme left very dishonest very asymmetric very hypocritical he's been kicked out so while that is happening the vacuum that has to be filled is a vacuum of grand narrative so decolonization is it requires a a grand narrative project to go with it you don't want to decolonize and leave a vacuum and then you'll have Isis coming to fill that vacuum or will have Mao is coming or you'll have all kind of insurgencies to come and teach people all kinds of stuff and make them irresponsible you want while you're decolonizing you want to create a positive grand narrative to replace it so that project the positive grand narrative project is totally antithetical to the intellectual elite that control in yesterday's today and this is the central ID I have so I want Britain and India to work together on such a project and I'm calling that soft power reparations it's not hard power reparations because it's not about military and it's not about money soft power India had huge soft power it attracted people to India from all over the world and this was the the Cambridge history of economics documents that around 1850 or in early 1800 India was a very dominant economic power after that it declined dramatically so the soft power was there which was fueling the hard power the soft power brought in the people demand for Indian goods India had a kind of a brand recognition so there was that sort of thing to restore this soft power is the reparations I'm talking about and I'm happy to say you saw the quote from some MPs yesterday they were so impressed by this call for soft power reparations I'm very taken by the idea of soft power reparations and we talked afterwards and we decide we'll continue this dialogue dialogue so my infinity foundation might do some projects some conferences in the UK for which we'll bring in British you know affiliates British partners you know from the British establishment to join us to rethink and reimagine India now my favorite would be that the first one we do should be a fresh analysis of the RNA invasion theory because the new evidence is so strong against the RNA invasion theories so strong there is arguments both ways but the overwhelming argument says that this is just not true I would like this kind of a conference where we we don't ban people we would bring them in we would invite them we wouldn't bite debate we would like that because that's that's how we can reconcile things and with an open mind we should talk about that we should also talk have another conference on the role of Lord Ridley's census in creating the caste system and compared to what it was in that earlier era and earlier and earlier and the picture is not so black and white it's not that there was no abuse it's not like that it's not a perfect society we never had a perfect society and now nor did anyone else but we were not such horrible people either and we cannot dismiss the whole tradition blanket because somebody told us to do so so the idea of jothee and very fluent and so many examples of cooperation and so many examples of somebody born in one jardine one Varna being upgraded here there down it's sort of like people join a certain profession and they can move around mobility is there depending on on various factors and you know with public education you have more mobility which which frees a person from the status at the time of birth because if you have public education then everybody in that area regardless of what the parents profession was they go to the same school to get the same opportunity so it's not about some Hindu thing it's about public education and mobility and economic opportunities so I also want to talk have conferences on very provocative topics and yes that makes me controversial and I'm very happy to be controversial because my job is to disrupt so the Indian grand narrative which is the topic of my next book and the soft power reparations issue the whole thing the indian grand narrative is not something that we create and expect people will buy into its co-created it's co-authored by the people it's lots of debates lots of debates you gotta include all kinds of people in it it's not some one group and then you sell it to everybody else down their throat people have to participate so it's a it's a kind of a consensus building democratic process which we need to start a grand narrative project like that and I'm showing that in my book how that project might happen it should include lots of things about our country including good things bad things but rewriting fresh rather than taking over that what the post-colonial scholars have produced for us this has to be compatible with modernity post modernity in the sense of modern 21st century it has to be technologically compatible it has to be fair it has to accommodate all the people in India regardless of their ethnic background religion minority whatever they are it has to accommodate all of them so it has to be very a very dynamic and a very fair kind of a system now I'll come to Oxford my first visit was in the 90s the Oxford center of version of studies had been started by Shona Krishi just a few months earlier and later he made it the Oxford Centre for Hindu studies but at that time it was called the Oxford Centre for fashion of studies and I was the first invited guest speaker and I had a very good time in fact I met Ursula King a great scholar whose work I read and I was so surprised my encar we were at dinner and there's a sitting there so I had a phenomenal time talking to her getting hold of her latest books which were part of my research at that time so I in the tour saw this Sir William Jones and the pundits carving on in one of the chapel walls and I wanted to take a picture of it but I could only take a very sort of low res quick quiet picture because it was it require a lot of permission and they didn't want you know somebody to take a picture of this and I I and this is a very interesting image which shows Sir William Jones sitting on a throne and he's considered the person who has discovered Sanskrit he's the discoverer of Sanskrit and made the laws for the Hindus he gave the Hindus their laws it says and on the floor are shown pundits sitting on the floor days.some looking this way if I'm going that way like a bunch of chaos you know and he's the guy who's sort of teaching the class he's teaching the rest he's teaching the pundits this is Sir William Jones in the punt is a very famous iconic image right here in Oxford there's never been a protest against it because we think is wow it's so good you know it's cool as part of Rhodes who's masterminded slavery and atrocities in Africa the whole built a huge fortune of diamonds to the most horrible atrocious things imaginable are documented in his history is honored here the whole Rhodes Scholarships so you know there is something called you domesticate a threat you know like you domesticate so when you domesticates a nice friendly pet thing and it's not going to be a threat to you so you domesticate things of this sort as part of you kind of rehabilitate them give them a good story and then you give enough road scholarships to people in the third world and they're all part of the story you see so my book the battle for Sanskrit I wish you had a copy of it but on the cover of this book is this Sir William Jones and the pundits a very high-rez picture and it took me two years to get a copy to get that high-res picture I had to apply for all kinds of permissions to bring in a camera and they wouldn't they wouldn't do this then you had to be certified or whatever whatever went on but anyway in the end somebody smuggled it and just sent me a copy and said anonymous this is yours so I have that's how I have it so so you know when you look at when you look at a place like that you should consider this is just one representative of a worldwide network of well-established elite institutions studying India the whole infrastructure the whole methodology whose methodology is it it is not our methodology this is not our methodology and in when I try to reverse the gaze because poor of apeksha is a tradition we have saying that you study the other you study the other with respect and give a position and then he studies you this is our debating tradition and there is no other that is disqualified it is nothing to do with you know some of the great exemplars were just random guy walking in and had an argument and you had to respond to him that's our liberalism that kind of a thing so when I try to get our traditional Sanskrit scholars to respond to Western thought there are so many problems so many obstacles in the way they don't know English well some of them do but they don't know Western thought which is being referenced so somebody is referencing Gramsci and then he's referencing this person from the past and that person and Hegel and the guide in India has an aura of that so we've also experimented sending them for training but when you send them for training they convert and they just never come back then they become like this Ananya bajpai type people who just hate their culture who they just brainwashed into hating their culture so they take that turn so it's very difficult for the it's impossible for the West to claim that what they're doing is on an even level playing field where the Indian side has equal rights to the discourse the Indian pundit is consulted as a native informant like you send anthropologists to some village in Bihar and she goes and studies some poor women and start looks at them talks to them ask them questions interviews them and use it to construct some kind of an anthropology the pundit is studied like these exotic guys you know he's weird we had clothes and he eats this way and he sits on the floor and he talks that kind of an anthropology of the pundit and the punt is not on par most people there are if they ever sight they're Indians source the Indian scholar who gave them the translations and who gave them the knowledge if the site at all when I go to those people what I hear is that this Westerner came they were very nice to me so nice they gave me gives the very generous but then my question is did you read what they wrote oh no nobody is a nice man I am sure he would have done a right job then I start reading out I'm saying they have written this this is what they do and then the whole atmosphere changes and then I say you know you have been had you've been had because they've sucked is not as out of you they've just maybe acknowledged you're maybe not they basically twisted this around it's become their dissertation most of it taken from Indian people here and there because they come with very substantial grant some Fulbright or whatever and they can hire a little team of pundits and scholars to do all the work for them and you know translate this and dig up that and dig up that and they have to basically integrate the knowledge that these people produce they're almost like it's a team that they're managing and so it's abusive because the Indian scholarship is not treated at par with the Western the Indians have a huge philology of their own we have a huge philology system that's not what's being used our terms of reference are not what's being used in the work being done about our culture and our people are not getting this draft ability to criticize it scrutinize it and talk back and say this is wrong that's wrong this is not a desire so in fact that's a violation of rules of ethics and when I pointed this out to some famous scholars in the West doing this I was told by Latin scholars Greek scholars scholars of the you know you know various Judah Jew a Christian old traditions that such sloppy work would never be tolerated against their culture I talked to a Chinese and he said nobody would dare take so much Liberty with mandarin texts and get away with it and they would probably be totally banned to come from the China and no American University would dare give them a PhD without a real solid traditional traditional mandarin scholar looking through it and having the final word but it's in India that they can get away with it and that's because we're still colonized that is colonialism we have a part shala system in India to certify scholars we don't have a western-style you go to the certain place and you work for a PhD and you do this process that process and then these people certify you we don't and it's not peer-reviewed Western peer-reviewed journals that will determine your career for in an Indian system so what it means is that if you are following the Indian system no matter how loaded you are no matter how much your community thinks of you you as far as the Western system is concerned you are not qualified so if a Swami Ramdev came and wanted to be the exemplar to teach yoga he would be as well as your PhD where are you published articles if a late so our median answers for the who passed away sometime exemplar in vedanta eden irony of such degree i mean nor the Drummond Maharshi I mean nor did we vacant and I mean nor did Gandhi for that matter so the people who are the keepers of our grand narrative are simply unqualified by the Western tradition so that you can throw them out you can you can give them an evening talk for it's like nice book or optics it's good optics you can give them an evening talk and kind of domesticate them with nice courtesy and you know manners and all of that stuff and hope they go away and it just everything stays the same but if they if somebody like that who has knowledge tries to penetrate tries to really dig deep into what you're doing then all hell will break loose and believe me I know that this is a long topic it's an interesting topic I just want to throw open this conversation I'm glad to be invited here by the very organizers of this event and I look forward to further conversations I think that the success of yesterday's event in the Parliament makes it pretty clear that that was the beginning of our longer engagement I'll have in London so I expect to be back you know once or twice a year and more than happy to debate opponents with respect no ad homonyms just talk about the subject matter and I would love to do that and there are younger people interested younger people who are not so threatened getting interested I know certainly in the US there's a large number of young scholars who have had it with the establishment and they feel secure enough to come out and talk this way and so I'm happy to say that I'm also nurturing a team of young scholars both in India and in the United States thank you very much [Applause] I'd like to kick off proceedings with a question from Tappin people here thank you for being here and sharing your wonderful thoughts my question was how was the best approach to decolonize academia or how do you think we'll it it was banned out will it be bottom-up approach where students put pressure on the faculty or do you think it's going to be top-down approach that somehow people up and the faculty are pushed by their higher admin set of people no hegemonic power whether it was British rule Mughal rule Portuguese rule or any rule voluntarily says let's pack up and go because it's the nature of domination to want to continue it so I do not expect an internal solution from within the Academy for its own decolonization I have worked with over a couple hundred cases of students in PhD programs young faculty members people who are not tenured postdocs coming to me privately on the condition of anonymity for help lots of cases of what they're calling bullying here but what we would call intimidation harassment abuse discrimination some of it very publicly the public thing has stopped because there have been lawsuits in the US now people can file lawsuits and they are the underdogs who are not empowered have a private position which supports me and they even want they even give me a lot of my data by the way a lot of my data I get in these anonymous things and then I they ask me to use it and I do so I serve as their voice that's how I started out you know and then I did my own investigations some of the private positions they just cannot make them public and they have to either comply with the system or at least sort of stay out of trouble you know out of the limelight and sort of inform me once in a while what what's going on what I should know and now it's no longer just me it used to be 20 years ago but now I'll tell you there's a whole network of people who are vigilant on this and they'll take it out on social media and we big thanks to the social media we can really give it back we are not worried about a controversy or a problem because for every the OIS has 5,000 members in Facebook I have 4 million followers on Facebook I would love to have a if they want to really get it out and if I wanted to turn turn loose against them I could really give them hell I mean they know that so they won't take us on now there used to be a time when they could muzzle us because the channels of knowledge flow and information flow were very streamlined these academic presses and the journals and the news media were very much in awe of what this particular scholar has said and the aam aadmi voice wouldn't count and the colonized had no voice but things have changed because the social media has done that so there are there is asymmetric warfare which we can fight because we have less to lose I'm not looking for a job there is nothing they can give they can do for me that I need and there is nothing that I can take away from me that counts so in a sense I've got a no-lose situation I can just fight on a principle just on the principle whereas they have their careers and their reputations and the peer groups and this and that and for 20 years things are falling apart for that for the for the academic colonizes but having said that I will say it is not going to be enough for the insiders to manage it on their own you definitely need help and a lot of instigation from people who are outside the Academy who are the subject of study when somebody studies Hinduism you know I am a stakeholder how can you deny me the right and say use none of your business you are talking about me and my culture my heritage I am a stakeholder so because the public is a stakeholder it has a right to talk back to the Academy and to say you are not the exclusive Adhikari the monopoly that your views the only view it's one bill and I say you have a right to that view by the way I have never never asked for a book ban that's a total false statement about me I've asked for debate I've asked for equal right to talk back in fact I want the opportunities to have strong debates so why would I you know want a book ban I've never wanted a book ban but I wanted to set the record straight so for instance the Wendy Doniger book in India I there was a group of Royals who filed the case not asking for a book ban so you see academic people are supposed to be accurate and you're not supposed to lie about the facts they keep saying the man the book firstly I was not involved some lawyers took this case up but I'm telling you what their case was because I read it they wanted the publisher to correct the mistakes which they pointed out dates names whatever facts they wanted their mistakes to be corrected and the publisher whom we know went to Wendy Doniger and said let's put out a new edition correct these mistakes it happens all the time but that was a matter of prestige not to admit that she made mistakes so the publisher decided they will pulp the books and bring it down it was a publisher decision it was not a court order the court didn't order that they have to ban the book the court was in that instance there was no book ban it was something the petition was something else so you know there's a lot of lying going on outside line and so when you have such an abusive system of you know peers looking out for each other and not even having honesty and transparency and integrity there is no chance that they will have some higher calling one day and they'll wake up enlightened and they'll say oh we should stop doing this I don't think it will happen without pressure from the outside the next question is actually from an online contributor rational conversation about colonization or decolonization with academic sea poise often seems to turn into adversarial debate what is the best way to engage with academics a Poisson well I think the very extreme cases who are sort of too far into this are probably it's too late for them to change their to ideologically close-minded so I think the best thing to do is to take the ones who are more moderate who are more rational you know who are reasonable maybe the younger ones maybe those that are not too much committed and sold out and have conversations with them and have conversations which are not that you know I'm right in your wrong kind of conversations but let's share experiences my recipe is that we should just keep doing more of this we should keep building our social media channels so that we have huge communities of people on board the academic sea poising more isolated I mean they have you know twenty people in class or maybe 50 people in a class and I put out a video and I have 400,000 views so they know that the game has shifted and and they and they cannot just sort of ignore the huge avalanche of support that we are getting so time by itself is kind of on our side because I can see that these guys are on the run some of them are getting desperate my advice to the young people to the scholars would be you don't want to be aligned with a group which is you know with the academic group which is going to bring you into disrepute and I will tell you very honestly Wendy Doniger 20 years 15 years ago she was being she was the call herself the queen of Hinduism studies had the largest number of PhDs but used and people were lined up to be however as the advisor now for the last few years is hardly anybody working under her for a PhD because they just don't want to be part of this and it is because they realize that this is based on actual merit this whole thing is all built up the whole brand and image and reputation of being a great scholar just sort of built up on hot air and it is not real so to some extent the free market of ideas is winning it's the free market of ideas that's winning it's not some kind of we don't have to go and attack them or any of that stuff I used to be very intensely engaging the academic people going to their conferences buying the tapes of all the sessions that I couldn't attend going back and listening to them reading all the dissertations giving responses online I used to do this now I basically ignore them I just building my own base my own base of intelligent people who want their narrative back and there's a huge market for that there's a huge number of people who want their narrative back and so it's the academics of feeling kind of suffocated and left out and isolated and bypassed and so on and so we don't really have to go and fight them at all I didn't plan that my event in Oxford would be some kind of a fight against them I wanted to talk about decolonizing like I I would provoke some things like I would ask them provocative things like you know why not consider the Islamic period as a colonization also and why not consider many many of the scholars as perpetrators of the control system and these are perfectly reasonable questions there's nothing wrong with them I sent a list of a bunch of questions and issues and topics I would cover and I guess they didn't like that then but you can read that and see if there's anything unreasonable to you okay thank you very much the next question was submitted by a Hirsch tirana my question was according to you the history which has taught in India why is it not able to move away from the Gandhi narrow narrative to more Bhagat Singh and Subash Chandra Bose narrative because due to them I believe we attain independence and my addition question to you after your presentation was I must ask this go ahead yes so when you talk about soft power reparations do you then suggest that the British actually are taught about the atrocities they committed when they colonized India isn't the British then running a risk of kind of ensuring that their generations are apologists and who are not proud of what they did okay so I'll answer the second one I think it's a sign of maturity to come to terms with one's own history in Germany they teach the Holocaust and the teachers they say that this is part of history we should come to terms with it and we never let it happen again in united states that each slavery the history of slavery in schools a black steam on it so why is it that Indians cannot demand that British school students should be taught about the truths of color colonialism it'll make the mature made them better citizens and they Britain should hold its head high and say we we whatever happened happened and now we should move on so this soft power is not about money it's about these issues coming to terms with this it's more about that I think it's far more impactful and easier and more rational to expect them to agree and we were pleasantly surprised that they were favourable they liked it and they and we are actually going to develop some collaboration that have conferences on the topic topic a topic like that your first question on you know why haven't we change our history you know the strange thing is we used to think it's all the Nehru dynasty but now for three years we can't blame the Nehru dynasty if nothing has happened the UPSC exam where civil servants are selected is full of this kind of nonsense questions and they're supposed to read all kinds of you know or weird old European Western social theories about Indian anthropology all that kind of stuff and why the new government hasn't done it I don't know but it's a problem and and my job is to raise raised voice to that effect that it is we cannot say a change at the government would automatically solve these problems because it hasn't so our job is to keep mentioning this and keep putting pressure pressure is building up the pressure that the grassroots the same grassroots you know tsunami that brought brand Modi into power also now demands these kind of changes that's good news [Applause] do you see institutions such as oxygen Aversa tea having a role to play in making soft power reparations and if so what do you see this role as being well I think Oxford has to first decolonize itself before it can do any of that Oxford has to do you know its own reparations I don't know what repre mean how this William Jones statue supposedly William Jones teaching the pundit Sanskrit and all that and laws of Hindus I mean I don't know how I mean this if this happened in the United States the concerned community whether it's Hispanics or whether it's blacks they would just raise hell and just get rid of it and they would be such a big stink over it and why this has been around for 200 years and this glamourizing of roads and all kinds of things you know that have a terrible history so I don't expect that of its own Oxford will do anything they have too much to lose and I think that it'll there was a I'll tell you the hope a year ago a year and a half ago there was a conference of university heads in Princeton University and I attended that and that was called the future of universities there was a topic future of universities and the consensus was that the brick-and-mortar university is obsolete because there's so much going online it's the the Amazon effect online what happened to you know shopping malls and all that I mean they're saying that this learning they give statistics of what percent of the people are going online and what percent are going to a brick-and-mortar class so it's starting from the bottom you know the less less important universities are folding and all that very difficult to keep them going and the elite University Princeton University feeling the pressure that you know will they be able to continue attracting students or are these new paradigms so attractive that people are not going to want to come to class an exception is when you need laboratory when you need for medicine you need a laboratory for engineering you need a laboratory you need a physical place that's different but I think that there this handwriting is being seen by universities that they have to add value now the humanities is a very easy target too because you know the anthropologist brought his value-added because you know white people in the you know in the West many of them most of them wouldn't ever go to India or China or someplace it was very dangerous very expensive they didn't know the language there are all kind of reasons why very very few people went there visited now with the rise of tourism you don't depend on some anthropologist telling you what is life like in Delhi you just go there yourself and if you don't go there you have online facilities you have the internet you have friends you have friends in class sitting right here with you so the role of the academician as a middleman and gatekeeper and interpreter of culture aid for people of culture be has gone down because they're squeezed this is called disintermediation that's a term that we started when I was consulting with AT&T on what what are the applications of the Internet we talked about disintermediating travel agents because people can book themselves disintermediating stockbrokers because people can buy sell shares on their own so one industry after another got disintermediated retailers with Amazon so the academic world is also going to get squeezed and disintermediated because anybody can put up their courses anybody can take those courses so now the academic people have to fight to preserve their exclusivity that elitism they have to put a brand value they have to show that you know this is a degree from this place and it'll get you a job so now it's become more of a kind of a brand management it's more of a brand management by the elite universities rather than really substance it's not that they're offering substance that would not be available online there's you can get all the information of for a Harvard MBA without ever going to Harvard all every or all that stuff you can get online you can go to youtube all those courses are there so it's no longer for knowledge it's more a social club elite club is more for getting that stamp and and upgrading your job opportunities or maybe getting a spouse pick who you meet there because you've gone to an elite place it's it's those sort of things so I feel that this is not sustainable this is not sustainable very long so universities will feel the pressure and I think that's where change will come okay thank you very much thank you for a wonderful talk today and what we are seeing is that you are actively pursuing sedation dollars in India and there is already an established American ontology which you saw as the other counterpart of this narrative now what ideally should happen is that between this two narratives there should be churning of yeah it's a question it's a question yeah I'll squeeze it so there should be a middle ground that should be appearing based on this two poles and some certain things should settle down what we are seeing is that this part is moving this way and this part is going this way no middle ground is appearing which it could be percolated down stress and and people could absorb certain things as settle effects more and more dispute and more and more disconcerting rather than consensus happening okay it's a very good question I would answer it so firstly it's not United States with ontology it's also Europe it's in dollar G's every way that's the venetie the foreign lens point of view and so we've started what is referring to is we've started it's positioned ology where we want traditional trained scholars from traditional parts allas who know a lot about whether it's Mubarak or whether it's Vedas or whatever is Dharma Shastra whatever it is to argue back now we have invited the Westerners to these conferences they don't want to come we've invited them in we've had three conferences now we're going to have a fourth one in the fourth one there's some quite a few bites I would say out of 50 papers ten are Westerners and they're wanting to engage so you see what happens is when you have a monopoly and some new guys is an upstart he starts the monopolist will first start ignore him he's not ignore him because he doesn't want to give him importance then he'll insult him he insults him and call him names and whatnot because engaging the underdog is not good for the monopolist but as the underdog gets more and more powerful more prominent then there comes a tipping point when it's non ignoring the people are non ignoring so the good thing is we are picking people who got traditional degrees there from traditional institution of various kinds and they're very much connected with their heritage and their giving responses like we expected additional person to give so the counter scholarship the counter narratives that we are bringing is of course going to provoke and stimulate and create controversy that's what it's supposed to do so you have a thesis and now you have an antithesis that we have created and now there needs to be a synthesis there needs to be synthesis we would like that so every time we have a call we have a conference we have a call for papers we really want our opponents to come and in occasions where they have come we've given them respect we've given them honor we've asked them to chair panels we've given them you know limelight we really want them to come because we really think that's the process that ought to happen but they feel very kind of you know defensive because they have had this Raj the rule of the intellectual elite for so long they don't want to they have too much to lose so what you are saying is going to happen should happen it will take time we need to build up more capital for hours with issue energy movement to become more and more non ignoring but now we're going to do so they should Knology conference for and maybe five or six will be here in London with the help of British people to talk about soft power reparations now when we talk about soft power reparations it's not going to be aligned with the extreme liberal left because their idea is that the British civilized us the British built a nation who is the one asking for reparation they didn't exist a nation nobody existed and we should worry about you know all the abuses that Indians are doing to their own people so their narrative is very different they're not going to want to participate we will certainly like to invite them so it's not us stopping that from happening they have to come and participate but good question [Applause] how do you British Indians or American Indians balance the indian grand narrative with the british or american grand narrative particularly when both grand narratives don't currently have a relationship of mutual respect so I can speak for United States in the United States the door is open to every new community to create its narrative and make it part of the American story people have done it so many communities have done it we if we haven't done it it's not because somebody stopped us it's not therefore it's we who haven't done it so it's for people like us to get going and that's what our projects are all about to create the Indian grand narrative within the American context and that's something related to the Indian grand narrative in India for people in India in that geographical context what changes is the geographical context and the narrative in USA has to also cohabitate with the American grand narrative so I think it is happening and my feeling is based on my first ever parliamentary address yesterday and the response we got I think if bright you know Indians with an open mind presented that this is our part of the grand narrative of Britain I think this would be very good and that's what the soft power reparations project is wanting to do so I know that many her mix in this country or just in general may be lacking a knowledge of Sanskrit so how can we or people generally nurture or foster a deep sense of devotion towards the study of Sanskrit amongst Terminix so that we may encourage use of it more in a conversational basis daily sure which may I'm coming to the end so that that may itself lead on to producing scholars because if obviously if they know some screw if they have a firm knowledge in it they can tackle oh okay I understand the question so there is an organization called Sanskrit Marathi they have chapters everywhere in the world I'm sure in many places in England they would have chapters they teach spoken Sanskrit they teach very well they have a huge track record they have taught lakhs of people so you know I have to specialize in what I do and refer people to other specialists so anything about learning Sanskrit I refer to them I have a good relationship with them so I would say you contact Sanskrit Bharati and join them they are looking for students we got more Indian throats and every country in this world and yet why can't we grab this narrative why is it that we Indians are inevitably sidelined in every major discourse about civilizations how do we recruit enough people to the sámi so what you are what you're mentioning is the strategic plan of infinity foundation is exactly that and it's a huge challenge I mean I get up 4:00 in the morning and until I go to bed seven days a week this all I do I mean not only researching and writing but producing videos and elearning courses and traveling to people and making petitions and all kinds every respect I could do for 25 years that's all I have done it is a very difficult job to get our own people on board they will talk a lot but when you know will they put their money where their mouth is that's the question also you know the thing is that it is easier for somebody who hasn't had a personal transformation it's easier to justify doing something for the cause for our culture which is non-controversial so you can build a school it's not controversial nobody else they don't build a school I mean we bring you know clean water or food distribution there are so many needs of our society that have nothing to do with narrative you see this intellectual job firstly is an intangible it requires somebody who's himself an intellectual and understands the power of narrative a lot of the people with a lot of money don't understand why does it matter I got a pooja room in my house I'm doing my puja and you know my my kids wear this and you don't know we are okay don't worry so this business of varied personal looking at in a very micro level rather than looking at the macro picture look rather than looking at the whole Kurukshetra of intellectual discourse they're looking at some little thing and though they don't see a problem so it's either that or they don't want to get into something controversial or they just feel that this is there is nothing personal they'll get out of it it's better if you give a donation to Oxford or Harvard and get on some committee or some chair and get a building named after you your kids will get into college it'll be good business you know you you'll get into the networking with high net-worth people and maybe some you know billionaires will invite you and you'll be part of the billionaire club because you're showing your philanthropist and all that you know so the rich Indians have their own hangups so many hangups I did a recent interview with Baba Ramdev you should watch it's in Hindi but with the English titles so I asked him that I you know I need help so he said I'll help you and he says when I started I had the same problem as you I went to all the rich people and they all gave me every kind of excuse not to help me because I was too provocative I was taking on the consumer goods consumer products goods companies of the world with Indian solutions and there was too dramatic it was like Swadeshi we are doing so they seemed ology he was doing so they she consumer goods you know so he said I'll help you because I sympathize with you and he says it's the small and small people the middle class with small small sums of money whatever the percentage the 510 percent of their income they can give it says it's those people who started giving investments for me and not this billionaire type he says it on camera and that's my experience exactly you cannot we are not getting help from the government because there are two politically two problems one is they are too afraid of these minority what banks second is the worst problem which is inbred mediocre people have to be given jobs inbred mediocre people now I have consulted for British Telecom they had inbred mediocre people we convinced them you got to kick them out and get new people from the outside in leadership positions I consulted for AT&T and we sort of turned the whole company around by not having this hiring from within and promotion from within but the political parties in India are very afraid of bringing new people from the outside they would want to take look at their own ranks and they don't have a very deep bench of talent so you see the billionaires in our conduit the political system is not gonna do it the gurus are more interested in their own one organization so they will look after the market share and expansion of their particular tradition their particular system of meditation or whatever it is that they're doing and not look for the whole pan Hindu app and Dharma issue so this is a very serious problem and that's why we need help because we are one of the few that are taking on a very tough challenge so I'm glad you asked the question thank you and I think we've got time for one more so the final question is by an acacia thank you for a wonderful talk if you could please give me a bit of elaboration on what's wrong with just being tolerance versus respecting someone and secondly what's an example of a soft power reparation maybe for World War one maybe you can elaborate a little bit on that thank you okay so tolerance is not good enough and what we asked for is mutual respect because I can tolerate somebody with the attitude that you're going to go to hell but I'll tolerate you I mean it's sort of like I'll put up with you and toleration tolerance is something which started in Europe in the middle of religion wars among Christian groups and they had exclusivity requirement you have to join in this particular denomination Church and otherwise is illegal so after all these brutal religion wars between rival sort of kings in neighborhoods there was there were treaties that I'll tolerate your people in my kingdom and you tolerate mine in your kingdom it's sort of like they could they don't have to be persecuted it's sort of like it says we won't persecute tolerance is that kind of a background and all the religious dialogue is all these religious organizations when you ask them what's your position towards other faiths they're very proudly say I thought we'd have tolerance and I just give them hell because tolerance is a very backward kind of an idea it really is demeaning talking down you wouldn't tolerate your spouse at home you wouldn't say I'll tolerate having dinner with you and or in the office you wouldn't say you know I tolerate you to be sitting there you know my office with me it's outright insulting now mutual respect is easier said than done I have demanded mutual respect and people very easily say we sign up for it I was at a in Dallas after 9/11 there was all this very india-pakistan bye-bye because they were scared you know Pakistan a very scared that every Americans are coming after us so the Mahdi suddenly they wanted to hug the Indian certainly and so in Dallas I was there so there was this lady Pakistani running a radio station South Asian kind of radio station so I was told you as you want to interview you so I went there and one of the callers said Rajiv pie we are so happy you're here in our town and on behalf of all the Pakistanis I want to tell you we believe in mutual respect you know suddenly beginning mutual respect so I said I'm very honored but let me tell you what you are respecting I I worship the female divine so I'm assuming you respect that I worship informed I have nothing no problem with multi with form you know and I believe in karma so I am very happy that you respect that she hung up [Applause] so there's a hypocrisy of mutual respect the hypocrisy you kind of so I have developed the concept called poison pills which means that you need this nice butterfiy you know or whatever gulab jamun very delicious but I put in a thing that you might follow as part of it and when you swallow it will go down your digestive tract it'll transform you to challenge your digestive tract because you thought you go to digest this garage German but you don't didn't know that you long with it comes this other thing so which I'm calling a poison pill so the poison pill includes these kind of things that I want mutual respect but who is this I and what is my tradition my tradition includes all these things now I'm not asking you have to worship my deity I'm not saying that you must worship in form or that you should respect the feminine divine or you should believe in karma I'm not asking you to convert I'm just saying you should respect my right to do that you see that is such an important win-win offer which they cannot accept and that's the kind of important offer we should make we should make offers which are so rational so fair it's mutual I'm offering this to you I respect that you go to the Kaaba I respect you go to the Vatican I respect you have you know you different whatever the religion is I respect that but I want you to do the same for me the problem they have is that then they cannot go and convert they cannot go and say you are going to hell because if they have signed up that we respect you then they cannot say you're going to go to hell and you've got to convert and you belong to the backward barbaric tradition so what this would do is it would put an end to hostile takeovers where one religion is praying as a predator upon other religions so that's why I've developed this kind of a strategy I would like you to say a few words on the world war one story of Indian contribution to britain existing today okay soft power reparations family and ask for an example and I guess I forgot to do so one example would be you know the history of World War one is incomplete without mentioning that the largest number of soldiers fighting on the Allied side were Indians 1.3 million Indians fought in World War one more than the combined number of soldiers of all other nations put together so this is a huge thing and 75 thousand were killed in Indians almost 75 70,000 more were seriously injured so more than 10 or 12 percent of them were in very bad shape so either died or very seriously injured there is no memorial to them and a similar story with World War two so what I told the parliamentarians yesterday is that most military historians would say would agree I've talked to a few of them that had the Indians not been fighting for the Allies the Allies would probably have lost and you the British would be a German colony and the and I told and then we would be having a different kind of decolonizing discussion thank you thank you thank you [Applause] okay there is one thing that each and every person can do and that is but GG's Twitter handle is there he has a very active and dynamic Facebook page so if you do want to support the principles upon which he has done his work then please connect get hold of the books and share it with other people let other people know as well as your own immediate but also other friends so thank you very much for coming I'm going to hand over to Rikishi to deliver a vote of thanks for us thank you first I'd like to say thank you to everyone for coming here tonight it's been a brilliant event there are many books to read and I'd say that if you haven't read these books please do read these books because from books from these books we want to we can talk from a position of strength and power because then you really know the information and that's key to understanding what's what's what's been said here secondly I'd like to say there please do use Facebook Twitter social media and tell your family and friends about what you've heard here today because you are our voice now and that is very important going forward and lastly I'd like to thank everyone for coming here that this kind of event would not happen with a great team we have a number of volunteers too many to mention here we've had some really important guests flying especially from both the USA and Canada I'd like to thank them too so please and also I'd really like to thank the students of Oxford University that helped us to put this together and lastly I'd like thank you for attending so please give yourself and everyone here a big round of applause [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Rajiv Malhotra Official

Views: 88,234

Rating: 4.9255519 out of 5

Keywords: Rajiv Malhotra, Infinity Foundation, India, Indian, Hindu, Hinduism, Religious, Religion, Isha Foundation, Sadhguru, Meditation, Buddhism, Education, Modern, Society, Politics, Globalization, Breaking India, Being Different, Academic, Hinduphobia, Indra’s Net, Indras Net, The Battle For Sanskrit, Sanskrit, Mind Sciences, Yoga, Yogi, Holy, War, Vedic, Poison Pill, London, United Kingdom, Colonialism, Oxford, Soft Power Reparations

Id: YVlM_a8lmBI

Length: 100min 36sec (6036 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018

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