‘Ten Heads of Ravana: A Critique of Hinduphobic Scholars’ is a book authored by noted scholar Rajiv Malhotra along with Divya Reddy and boasts of a collection of essays critiquing the works of 10 most prominent Left-oriented contemporary historians and scholars of ancient India. Launched in an event organised at Delhi University, the book is also available at the World Book Fair.
In the book, a team of scholars — KS Kannan, HS Meera, Manogna Sastry, Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay, Sudarshan TN, Sharda Narayanan, Anurag Sharma, and Divya Reddy — have contributed their observations through evidence-based research which is centred on questioning the western view of ancient India.
“It took four years of work by our team of scholars who went through multiple texts and intensive research to bring to light numerous factual inaccuracies, wilful misrepresentation and deliberate distortions in the scholarship of many such intellectual heads of the modern Rāvana,” said Malhotra.
The 10 intellectuals whose works have been critiqued in the book are Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Shashi Tharoor, Ramachandra Guha, Sheldon Pollock, Wendy Doniger, Devdutt Pattanaik, Kancha Ilaiah, and Michael Witzel — stalwarts at the forefront of such India studies, he added.
“For long, a handful of scholars and intellectual elites, whose understanding of Bharat is disjointed from tradition and often inimical to the Dharmic way of life, have controlled India’s civilisational narrative,” he said.
The team of authors said they had invited the 10 scholars whose works they had critiqued to the event but had not got any response from them.
The book was launched along with a day-long session of discussion by the authors as panelists.
Malhotra is known for his books such as Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Fault Lines; Being different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, The Battle for Sanskrit: Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred, Oppressive or Liberating, Dead or Alive?; Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power: 5 Battlegrounds, among others.
Asked what inspired him to write on the subject, Malhotra said he has been working around countering the western view of ancient India for years and this is just another crucial subject that he wanted to address.
“Rāvaṇa 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 eminent scholars we have chosen for this anthology can be thought of as the contemporary embodiments of the historical Rāvaṇa —academically influential personalities, but grossly mischaracterising the Dharmic way of life and history of India,” said Reddy.
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