Misrepresentation

What is the core? Not the likes of the following, since hindus themselves make many such mistakes:

  • Ridiculous translations from the Clay series brought out by Mr Pollock and co, arising from shaky grounding in Indian thought - TW16.

Consequences

  • These dry/ context-free scholars have tended to influence (very actively or otherwise) how Hindu traditions are summarized or presented to Hindus and non-hindu-s alike. Eg. The California case.
  • [To be edited.] Casting pro-hindutva people as fools (while deliberately ignoring savants on the hindutva side).
  • Subversion of the sikh-s by Max Arthur Macauliffe [T1].
    • Abrahamized the sikhs even more.
    • Invented pro-british fake prophesies.

Books

  • Plenty are books produced by western Indologists and their acolytes which have attempted or inadvertently tended to subvert Hindu traditions with inimical narratives.
    • Hindu reviews site: here.
    • Vishal Agarwal’s review of Wendy Doniger’s “The Hindus: An Alternative History” : AM10.
    • Early Indological work was heavily motivated by Evangelism.
      • Eg: The Monier-Williams / Max Muller race.
    • Imputing flawed racist narratives.
      • Prof. George Thompson on kRShNa (KE12)
    • Robert Goldman: “The perverted man who compared the expansion of Hanuman to the erection of a flaccid phallus. Wants to down-size the Ramayana to put the uppity Hindus in place.” (IMG, IMG2, BVP, TW1).

In Education

  • 2005 California Textbook controversy
    • Problems
      • Wiki. Changes finally accepted: CA, archive.
      • CA textbooks hearing 2015: Omission of women [YT], caricature of caste [YT]
      • A presentation on what is taught about Hindu-s in textbooks (Hinduism Today presentation).
    • Witzel, Pollock and many others launched a successful, concerted attempt to subvert positive changes brought to the coverage of the Hindu ethos in California textbooks. Witzel’s congradulatory 2005 letter here, where he next plans to target BBC.
    • Strategic errors on the Hindu side:
      • KE10: " So, when in 2005 the school textbooks in California came up for review, two Hindu organizations proposed a series of edits to the chapter on Hinduism. Some were uncontroversial, e.g. replacing the photograph of a mosque with the caption “Hindu temple” by the photograph of a proper Hindu temple. Some were cases of intra-Hindu infighting, e.g. replacing the philosophical “self-realization” as the goal of Hinduism with the devotional “God-realization”. Outsiders who took an interest in this, could have an opinion on this, but it was not serious enough to warrant interference. But when Hindus proposed that “the Aryan Invasion Theory is wrong” and “nobody believes in it anymore”, a revolutionary c.q. a plainly wrong statement, this alerted a number of Hindu-bashing groups including several academics with a say in the Aryan question. What followed was procedurally not very kosher, with the academics gate-crashing into the debate with a very partisan stance being accepted by the educational authorities as arbiters to a controversy which they themselves had started. "
  • 2016 CA textbook fight
  • Indian textbook subversion. (Incomplete.)