Ten Heads of Ravana: A Critique of Hinduphobic Scholars

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For long, a handful of scholars and intellectual sites, whose understanding of Bhārata is disjointed from tradition and often inimical to the Dhārmic way of life, have controlled India’s civilizational narrative. They analyze Bhāratīya sanskriti through a Western gaze while discarding native models. Embedded in powerful ecosystems, gilded Lankas, they are increasingly replacing traditional guru-s and ācārya-s as the modern adhikāri-s of Indian knowledge systems. In contemporary Indian scholarship, eminent personalities like Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Shashi Tharoor, Ramachandra Guha, Sheldon Pollock, Wendy Doniger, Devdutt Pattanaik, Kancha Ilaiah, and Michael Witzel are at the forefront of such India studies. Ravana was a scholar par excellence, but he was on the wrong side of Dharma. Hence, Śrīrāma waged a war against him to prevent a breakdown of society. Similarly, today’s embodiments of the historical Ravana—academically influential personalities, but grossly mischaracterizing the Dhārmic way of life and history of Bhārata. In this collection of essays, authors Dr. K.S. Kannan, T.N. Sudarshan, Dr. Sharda Narayanan, Anurag Sharma, Divya Reddy, Manogna Sastry, Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay and Dr. H.R. Meera have brought to light, through rigorous evidence-based research, numerous factual inaccuracies, wilful misrepresentation and deliberate distortions in the scholarship of many such intellectual heads of the modern Ravana.