Apart from being co-authored by Aravindan anna, which alone is reason enough to read the book, this is a path-breaking book. It brings into the limelight of Indian intellectual discourse the importance of Christian interference and indirect aggression into the sovereignty of India, through the artificially implanted Dravidian and Dalit identity politics.
I have just began reading it and currently sailing through Chapter 3: Inventing the Aryan Race. It traces how the discovery of Indian philosophy, culture and science amazed European scholars initially and reached a peak when they began to romanticize India as the cradle of civilizations, praising its language and grammar, art and literature, philosophy and spirituality. This quickly gave raise to the lucrative discipline of Indology and related discourses beginning from late eighteenth to early nineteenth century.
However, imperialism backed by Christianity and economic ambitions soon upturned the cart of Indian origin of the western civilization, creating this new wave of contempt and disgust for all things Indian. To justify colonization and enslavement of India, the scholarly ilk of white Europe began to spin elaborate hypotheses that culminated with Nazism and the holocaust. Prominent figures involved in such sullied research were Jones, Renan, Muller, Hegel, Pictet and others.
All of this is briefly covered in this particular chapter. This big roundabout by European scholarship alone is an important chain of reactions in history that will need a few volumes to elaborate. The book just gives us a glimpse.
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