Why the book The Hindus: An Alternative History was banned Controversial facts

Why the book The Hindus: An Alternative History was banned Controversial facts


The online PDF which is available on internet has 683 pages

Each chapter in this book raises new questions for the reader

Its duty Of the Indian historians that they should read this book and answer each chapter with explanations

But in India we do not have any great historians , even if we got I am sure they wont come out and say the truth as  Indian is a limited democracy where mob rules

1-
The publisher house agreed for the ban to save the money if they would have fought they would have won the case

2-
Publisher house may have thought that this way book will get publicity and everyone will buy the book, I do not think it is going to happen, there will be no increase in sales
Majority people will download the book illegally and they will read it

As book is banned now if you are Indian Citizen even if now you buy it online legally then also you will break the law

3-
Now let us move to the book

4-
The language of book is tricky and very difficult to understand for Common people

5-
The poster of the book is erotic and this is one reason I think the organization file the case

6-
Book makes the reader to think about History and Hindu religion in a new direction, the topics which we never discuss or the questions which we never ask

7-
The book is divided into 25 chapters

a)    CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION: WORKINGWITH AVAILABLE LIGHT

b)    CHAPTER 2 - TIME AND SPACE IN INDIA 50 Million to 50,000 BCE

c)    CHAPTER 3 - CIVILIZATION IN THE INDUS VALLEY 50,000 to 1500 BCE

d)    CHAPTER 4 - BETWEEN THE RUINSAND THE TEXT 2000 to 1500 BCE

e)    CHAPTER 5 - HUMANS, ANIMALS, AND GODS IN THE RIG VEDA 1500 to 1000 BCE

f)    CHAPTER 6 - SACRIFICE IN THE BRAHMANAS 800 to 500 BCE

g)    CHAPTER 7 - RENUNCIATION IN THE UPANISHADS 600 to 200 BCE

h)    CHAPTER 8 - THE THREE (OR IS IT FOUR?) AIMS OF LIFE IN THE HINDU IMAGINARY

i)    CHAPTER 9 - WOMEN AND OGRESSES IN THE RAMAYANA 400 BCE to 200 CE

j)    CHAPTER 10 - VIOLENCE IN THE MAHABHARATA 300 BCE to 300 CE

k)    CHAPTER 11 - DHARMA IN THE MAHABHARATA 300 BCE to 300 CE

l)    CHAPTER 12 - ESCAPE CLAUSES IN THE SHASTRAS 100 BCE to 400 CE

m)    CHAPTER 13 - BHAKTI IN SOUTH INDIA 100 BCE to 900 CE

n)    CHAPTER 14 - GODDESSES AND GODS IN THE EARLY PURANAS 300 to 600 CE

o)    CHAPTER 15 - SECTS AND SEX IN THE TANTRIC PURANAS AND THE TANTRAS 600 to 900 CE

p)    CHAPTER 16 - FUSION AND RIVALRY UNDER THE DELHI SULTANATE 650 to 1500 CE

q)    CHAPTER 17 - AVATAR AND ACCIDENTAL GRACE IN THE LATER PURANAS 800 to 1500 CE

r)    CHAPTER 18 - PHILOSOPHICAL FEUDS IN SOUTH INDIA AND KASHMIR 800 to 1300 CE

s)    CHAPTER 19 - DIALOGUE AND TOLERANCE UNDER THE MUGHALS 1500 to 1700 CE

t)    CHAPTER 20 - HINDUISM UNDER THE MUGHALS 1500 to 1700 CE

u)    CHAPTER 21 - CASTE, CLASS, AND CONVERSION UNDER THE BRITISH RAJ 1600 o 1900 CE

v)    CHAPTER 22 - SUTTEE AND REFORM IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE RAJ 1800 to 1947 CE

w)    CHAPTER 23 - HINDUS IN AMERICA 1900 -

x)    CHAPTER 24 - THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 1950 -

y)    CHAPTER 25 - INCONCLUSION, OR, THE ABUSE OF HISTORY


7-
The book talks about Veda
The book talks about Hindus eating non-veg food including beef, cow or bull
The book says
The Vedic people sacrificed cattle to the gods and ate cattle themselves, and they counted
Their wealth in cattle.
They definitely ate the beef of steers18 (the castrated bulls), both ritually and for many of the same reasons that people nowadays eat Big Macs (though in India, Big Macs are now made of mutton); they sacrificed the bullsbf (Indra eats the flesh of twenty bulls or a hundred buffalo and drinks whole lakes of soma19) and kept most of the cows for milk. One verse states that cows were “not to be killed” (a-ghnya [7.87.4]), but another says that a cow should be slaughtered on the occasion of marriage (10.85.13), and another lists among animals to be sacrificed a cow that has been bred but has not calved (10.91.14), 20 while still others seem to include cows among animals whose meat was offered to the gods and then consumed by the people at the sacrifice.

8-
The book discusses about female freedoms and sexuality from ancient times, Mahabharata and Ramayana and other period

9-
The book talks about females and their life style, sexual freedoms and how the society behaved with them
Raises many valid questions and which need to be answered by the people who do like this questions

Questions like

Rama’s return to heaven as Vishnu is described in great detail, and the monkeys revert
To their divine form, and everyone you’ve ever heard of is there to welcome him in heaven
(Including the ogres), but not Sita (7.100)

People name the name daughter as Sita or very few dare to name the daughter as Drapudi?

Drapadi got 5 husbands Sita got 1 husband

The book is excellent read for everyone who wants to know more and more about Indian history

Just do not read , do not think what it says is right but try to find the truth and try to answer the questions which are raised by the book

Manu and the Artha-shastra quote each other;9 in particular, Manu borrowed from the Arthashastra the sections pertaining to the king, civil administration, criminal and civil law.10 The Artha-shastra, roughly contemporaneous with several Buddhist texts about kingship,11 may have contributed to, and taken from, such texts ideas about the importance of taxation and the endowing of stupas/temples. Clearly this is a shared corpus of ideas

Sita never dies, but she vanishes four times. First she vanishes when Ravana carries her
off, and Rama gets her back. Then she parts from Rama three times, into three natural
Elements—a fire, the forest, and the earth—as a direct result of that first estrangement: Rama
Keeps throwing her out now because Ravana abducted her years ago.

Rama banishes Sita as Dasharatha has banished Rama.
Significantly, the moment when Rama kicks Sita out for the second time comes directly after a
long passage in which Rama makes love to Sita passionately, for many
days on end; the banishment comes as a direct reaction against the sensual indulgence (7.41).
Rama’s wife is above suspicion, but Rama suspects her

SITA ENTERS THE EARTH
Rama sent messengers to Valmiki to say, “If she is irreproachable
in her conduct and without sin, then let her prove her good faith.” Valmiki then came with Sita,
and swore by his unbroken word of truth that the two boys were Rama’s children and that he had
seen Sita’s innocence in a vision. Rama replied, “I agree entirely; Sita herself assured me before,
and I believed her and reinstated her in my house. But there was such public condemnation that I
had to send her away. I was absolutely convinced of her innocence, but because I feared the
people, I cast her off. I acknowledge these boys to be my sons. I wish to make my peace with the
chaste Sita in the middle of the assembly.” Then Sita swore, “If, even in thought, I have never
dwelt on anyone but Rama, let the goddess Earth receive me.” As she was still speaking, a
miracle occurred: From the earth there rose a celestial throne supported on the heads of Cobra
People [Nagas]; the goddess Earth took Sita in her arms, sat her on that throne, and as the gods
watched, Sita descended into the earth.His eyes streaming with tears, head down, heartsick,
Rama sat there, thoroughly miserable. He cried for a long time, shedding a steady stream of
tears, and then, filled with sorrow and anger, he said, “Once upon a time, she vanished into
Lanka, on the far shore of the great ocean; but I brought her back even from there; so surely I
will be all the more able to bring her back from the surface of the earth (7.86.5-16, 7.87.1-20,
7.88.1-20).”  But he cannot bring her back. When Sita enters the earth, she leaves the king
alone, without his queen. She abandons and implicitly blames him when she leaves him, turning

At the end of the Ramayana, when Sita keeps disappearing and reappearing in a series of
epiphanies, she is scorned and insulted until she commits two acts of violence that prove both her
purity and her divinity. In this pattern, she resembles a god, particularly Shiva, who vandalizes
Daksha’s sacrifice when Daksha disdains to invite Shiva to it (MB 12.274). But Sita’s story more
closely follows the pattern of equine Vedic goddesses like Saranyu and Urvashi: She comes from
another world to a mortal king, bears him children (twins, like Saranyu’s), is mistreated by him,
and leaves him forever, with only the twin children to console him. She can be set free from her
life sentence on earth, her contract with a mortal man (Rama), only if he violates the contract by
mistreating her.

Sita is subject to mortal desires and delusions and is vulnerable even though she is said to
be invulnerable. For instance, Rama insists (when he claims that he knew all along that Sita was
chaste and that he made her go through fire only to prove it to everyone else), “Ravana could not
even think of raping Sita, for she was protected by her own energy (6.106.15-16).” Yet that very
verb, meaning “to rape, violate, or assault,” is used when Ravana grabs Sita by the hair (3.50.9),
A violation from which her chastity does not in fact protect her.

The Valmiki Ramayana thus sowed the seeds both for
the oppression of women in the dharma-shastric tradition and for the resistance against that
oppression in other Hindu traditions.

The horse sacrifice plays a crucial role at both ends of the Ramayana. At the start King
Dasharatha, childless, performs the horse sacrifice not for political and martial aggrandizement
but to have a son, another express purpose of the ritual

At the very end of the Ramayana, Rama is tricked into having to kill Lakshmana. This
happens as the result of an elaborate (but not atypical, in this text) set of vows and curses. Death
incarnate comes to talk with Rama, to remind him that it is time for him to die. Death makes
Rama promise to kill anyone who interrupts them; Lakshmana guards the door. An ascetic
arrives and threatens to destroy the world if Lakshmana won’t let him see Rama; Lakshmana,
caught between a rock and a hard place, chooses the lesser of two evils, his own death rather than
the destruction of the world. He interrupts Rama and Death, whereupon Rama says that for
Lakshmana, being separated from him (Rama) would be so terrible that it would be the
equivalent of death, and so he satisfies the curse by merely banishing Lakshmana, who then
commits suicide. Does this episode represent a displaced, suppressed desire of Rama to kill
Lakshmana?

Dogs too occupy a moral space here. During the period of Sita’s exile, a (talking) dog
comes to Rama and complains, first, that dogs are not allowed in palaces or temples or the homes
of Brahmins (whereupon Rama invites him into the palace) and, second, that a Brahmin beggar
beat him for no reason. Rama summons the Brahmin, who confesses that he struck the dog in
anger when he himself was hungry and begging for food; when he told the dog to go away, the
dog went only a short distance and stayed there, and so he beat him. Rama asks the dog to
suggest an appropriate punishment for the Brahmin, and the dog asks that the Brahmin, whom he
describes as filled with anger and bereft of dharma, be made the leader of a Tantric sect. (The
dog himself had this position in a former life and regarded it as a guaranteed road to hell.) This
granted, the Brahmin feels certain he has been given a great boon and rides away proudly on an
elephant, while the dog goes to Varanasi and fasts to death (7.52).49 Clearly, the dog is morally
superior to the Brahmin, and Rama treats him with great respect throughout this long and rather whimsical episode.

Book raises hundreds of questions in which direction we never thought as we only know the Ramayana and Mahabharata as told by the people or the Ramayana shown on the television serial

The book talks about  poems written in the period of Vedas, Rig Veda

But in India the simple method is if you do not like critical questions just ban the book which will not allow the spread of crucial or important questions

It is great journey when you read the book, just think on every para and try to match it with the knowledge which you know or if you got the doubts and  if you  got a friend who knows and who is a balanced person you can refer those questions to that man
Otherwise  do not ask any one, just read the book, keep searching answers or just forget it

If you think Ramayana or Mahabharata or about Hindu religion shown in TV serials is right
Then please do not read this book

If you think something is missing , if you want to find the truth or if you seek truth or if you got critical questions

Then read this book, it will help you, book will not answer your questions but book will give you new direction to find a truth about Indian History and Hindu Religion

Reality views by sm –

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Tags - The Hindus: An Alternative History reasons ban