Book Review – Rearming Hinduism

This book’s title is misleading. It’s not about violently establishing Hinduism or taking up arms to defend it. Vamsee Juluri is a professor and brings data through his research rather than just his opinions to argue his case. This is a difficult book to read.. It’s almost like sitting in a lecture with Google on your finger tips or an old fashioned dictionary. 

Here’s a sample of a paragraph in the book – 

  
“Anthropocentric” and “historiography” were new words for me. On nearly every page I had to check the meaning of some word or the other and I have highlighted something on every page. 

That said, this book is a must read to atleast help us sift through the altered Hindu history that has been written and is being written. It also hints at a mammoth conspiracy to ensure Hinduism is buried or its origin traced to some European tribe. I am no blind fanatic nor do I support any form of fundamentalism but there is a lot of evidence to point to the systematic demoralisation of Hindus. The successive governments in independent India have almost made the Hindus feel like they are trespassers in their own home. The pride in our way of living and this is not the Hindu way of living, it’s the Indian way of living, was taken away and crushed by the Britishers who colonised us. Rather than restoring the pride in our great nation and our way of living – the government and the custodians of our history books, the communists just rubbed the last bit of it into the dust, hoping it never raised its head.. But well May 2014 happened. 

There is much to learn from Hinduism, and in this fractured, violent, destructive world, the way of Hinduism is probably a solution and a salve. I certainly wish we learn to live “with” nature with a deep sense of gratitude. I certainly wish we wake up each morning and pray for everyone’s wellbeing, and I certainly wish we live in harmony. I don’t like the word secular because it smells of politics … Now the new word that’s trying to replace secular is intolerance. Please don’t believe everything the paid media tells you… They are paid to manufacture headlines, sensationalise news and they don’t care about you or the nation, just their pay check and TRPs. 

Anyway .. I am pasting some of the sentences and paragraphs that caught my attention the most. For a complete understanding of Vamsee Juluri’s data and research, read the book. 

  
  
“The history of human civilization, contrary to some current myths, is marked by an increasing dependence on the centrality of violence. In the past few centuries, with the rise of colonial modernity and in the aftermath of postcolonial modernity in which our lives unfold now, the mediation of society by violence has only increased. Simply put, each of our bodies, whether we are personally violent or not, now consume resources extracted by a worldwide system of violence, against people, animals, fish, birds, and even trees. The birth of a child in the middle or upper classes anywhere on earth marks the end of the lives of so many living beings, whether we realize it or not (and as if trees are not enough, there is now a proposal to kill jelly-fish to make diapers, believe it or not, and those jelly-fish apparently are proliferating because almost all the other fish in the oceans have been factory-farmed!). For five hundred years, we have covered up a way of life based on killing with niceties and promises like human rights. We are living in the most extreme stages of a moral and civilizational failure of monstrous proportions.”