India Quotes - page 59
I wish to also point out that Dr Ambedkar, the pioneering Dalit leader, had worked zealously to promote Sanskrit. A dispatch of the Press Trust of India dated 10 September 1949 states that he was among those who sponsored an amendment making Sanskrit, instead of Hindi, the official language of the Indian Union.
Rajiv Malhotra
India is more than a nation state. It is also a unique civilization with philosophies and cosmologies that are markedly distinct from the dominant culture of our times – the West. India's spiritual traditions spring from dharma which has no exact equivalent in western frameworks. Unfortunately, in the rush to celebrate the growing popularity of India on the world stage, its civilizational matrix is being digested into western universalism, thereby diluting its distinctiveness and potential.
Rajiv Malhotra
It seems obvious that Pollock is committed to the Marxist theory linking literary works and political power. He wants to deploy it as his lens for analysing how the aesthetic use of languages in India became interwoven into the fabric of politics. At a deeper level, beyond the aesthetic and political usage of Sanskrit, he finds that old Marxist demon: theology. For him, as for most Marxist-oriented scholars, all forms of spirituality/transcendence are, in effect, irrational, deformed and mystified ways of thinking....
Rajiv Malhotra
Many similar views were also expressed in the Sanskrit Commission Report written under the Nehru government in the 1950s. That report declares: "The State in ancient India, it must be specially pointed out, freely patronised education establishments, but left them to develop on their own lines, without any interference or control. It says that until the British disruption, the salient features of our traditional education included: 'oral instruction, insistence on moral discipline and character-building, freedom in the matter of the courses of study, absence of extraneous control...' ... We can never insist too strongly on this signal fact that Sanskrit has been the Great Unifying Force of India, and that India with its nearly 400 millions of people is One Country, and not half a dozen or more countries, only because of Sanskrit.'
Rajiv Malhotra
The attack on Bangladeshi Hindus is a crime against humanity. In and of itself, it is severe enough to spur our moral outrage and cause us to take action to stop it. But to make matters worse, it has been spreading across that open border into West Bengal, India. One would think these Hindu victims of Islamist terror would find a safe haven in the largest Hindu nation on earth, but they have not.
Richard Benkin
In spite of strength of my conviction, I have certain great regard for your fine abilities and love for the country and that shall be unabated whether I have the good fortune to secure your cooperation or face your honest opposition.... I see that we hold perhaps diametrically opposite views. My conviction based upon extensive experiences of village life is that in India at any rate for generations to come, we shall not be able to make much use of mechanical power for solving the problem of the ever growing poverty of the masses.
Mokshagundam Visveshvaraya
Wherever they found magnificent temples of the Hindus ever since the establishment of Sayyid Salar Mas'ud Ghazi's rule, the Muslim rulers in India built mosques, monasteries and inns, appointed mu'azzins, teachers, and store-stewards, spread Islam vigorously and vanquished the Kafirs. Likewise, they cleared up Faizabad and Avadh, too, from the filth of reprobation (infidelity), because it was a great centre of worship and capital of Rama's father. Where there stood the great temple (of Ramjanmasthan), there they built a big mosque, and where there was a small mandap (pavilion), there they erected a camp mosque (masjid-i-mukhtasar-i-qanati). The Janmasthan temple is the principal place of Rama's incarnation, adjacent to which is the Sita ki Rasoi. Hence, what a lofty mosque was built there by king Babar in AH 923 (AD 1528) under the patronage of Musa Ashiqan! The mosque is still known far and wide as the Sita ki Rasoi mosque. And that temple is extant by its side.
Babur
...the inexorable duty which has come upon you to use your political power to help our Island out of the rotten state which it has now fallen. When I think of the way in which we poured out blood and money to take Contalmaison or to hold Ypres, I cannot understand why it is we should now throw away our conquests and our inheritance with both hands, through sheer helplessness and pusillanimity. In this disastrous year we have written ourselves down as a second Naval Power, squandered our authority in Egypt, and brought India to a position when the miserable public take it as an open question whether we should not clear out of the country altogether. Currently with all this, we have so reduced our reputation abroad and among our own dominions, that as you said the other night, 'they all think we are down and out.
Winston Churchill
Bangladesh is a majority Muslim country, with a significant, if shrinking Hindu minority-about 25-30% at the time of Partition in 1947, and less than 9% in 2003. The textbooks in Bangladesh are not based on an anti-Indian bias as are state sponsored textbooks in Pakistan. The social studies curriculum in Pakistan is premised on creating a national identity that is distinct from India, whereas Bangladeshi textbooks reflect a more pan-South Asian perspective, though Bengal-centric.
Yvette Rosser
When I make presentations about India at teachers' conferences or in classrooms, the two most often asked questions are: "Why do women wear a 'dot' on their foreheads?" and "Why, when there is so much poverty in India, don't they eat all those cows?" These questions broach issues of relevance and correlating non-Western practices to similar experiences in the students' lives, within a context they can comprehend.
Yvette Rosser
In 1929, Heisenberg spent some time in India as the guest of the celebrated Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, with whom he had long conversations about science and Indian philosophy. This introduction to Indian thought brought Heisenberg great comfort, he told me. He began to see that the recognition of relativity, interconnectedness, and impermanence as fundamental aspects of physical reality, which had been so difficult for himself and his fellow physicists, was the very basis of the Indian spiritual traditions. "After these conversations with Tagore,” he said, "some of the ideas that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me.”.
Fritjof Capra
