Jonah Blank, Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India (New York: Grove Press, 1992) ("India is starting to trade stagnation and peace of mind for opportunity and frustration. The same is true in many other countries, but nowhere is the exchange more clear-cut. When old women complain about Westernization, moan that their grandchildren are growing up like little Americans, this is what lies at the heart of their grumbles. It's easy to see what one gains from modernity: the TV sets, the waterproof tin roofs, the medicines that work like powerful magic. It's more difficult to see what one gives up." Id. at 44. "Everyone, I think, longs for a world where good always trounces evil. When we go to the movies we know the hero will win out and the villain will be crushed, but we still grip the armrests in anticipation. What are action-thriller films if not mortality plays? Does the sadistic drug lord ever walk unpunished? It is the same in most popular forms of fiction: right must defeat wrong, or else we'd feel cheated." "In real life, it is quite often evil that trumps. In real life, rapists and murderers go free on judicial technicalities, slumlords and stock manipulators flourish as respected members of society. In real life, good, honest, hard-working people lose their livelihoods at the flick of a corporate raider's pen. Perhaps that is why we so desperately seek escape. We ache for a world where good always wins, because that is not the real world we inhabit. We long for Saint George. We long for Rama." Id. at 175. "Man's finest aspirations produce man's most hideous crimes--as soon as the goals come to dominate the methods. Mao Zedong had the dream of creating a perfect human society, of wiping aways inequality, hunger, and class injustice; to bring about this utopia he instituted the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, events that killed more than fifty million people. Pol Pot tried so hard to stamp out an oppressive feudalism that he exterminated one fourth of the population of Cambodia. Even megalomaniacal dictators like Stalin and Hitler had visions that extended far beyond personal aggrandizement, and that is what made them so dangerous. Their dreams were twisted, but they were dreams nonetheless. The most nefarious butchers in history have slept quite soundly at night, lulled by the soothing fantasy that they were striving for good." "Most often, perhaps, evil lies not in the ends but in the means." Id. at 196-197. "India has never been a melting pot, or even (as the Canadians prefer) a salad bowl. It is more like a bazaar where the stew and the salad ingredients are bought: an exuberant, disorderly display of every color flavor, and price, of vegetables, grains, and meats, of scents and spices mixing only in the scented air. It is a profusion, a confusion, but never a true fusion." Id. at 207. "From kindergarten through high school I learned virtually nothing about the world beyond Europe and America. [] I don't recall ever being told to respect the cultures of Asia--at that time political correctness didn't extend across the Pacific Ocean. [] Race (along with gender and sexual orientation) has become an academic football. [] Every day we in the West close our eyes to the wisdom and the beauty of four millennia, because it comes from societies we make little attempt to understand. The Ramayana, like the Odyssey or Paradise Lost, is a cultural treasure, not of one particular race but of all races. It tells us much about India, but just as much about ourselves." Id. at 216-217. "Many Westerners think of Hindu theology as an impossibly intimidating subject, as far above the common person's ken as the intricacies of quantum physics. There are many reasons for this. Much of our impression of Eastern religions comes not from genuine Hindus or Buddhists but from muddle-minded pseudo-swamis giving out pamphlets at airports, or from New Age bookstores where the Rig Veda is shelved next to the healing crystals. Moreover, it is indeed daunting to set aside the entire Judeo-Christian intellectual framework that underlies everything we believe. And, yes, many aspects of India's ancient philosophy are complex enough to make Wittgenstein wince." Id. at 236. "The method by which a person unifies his own spirit with the divine spirit is yoga. The religious yoga of a devout Hindu has little relation to the stretching and relaxation classes which go by that name in America--about as much relation, perhaps, as receiving holy communion has to munching Saltines: the latter action is similar, but stripped of all meaning." Id. at 244.).
Ved Mehta, Portrait of India (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1993).
Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs, Volume I: 1469-1839, 2d. ed (New Delhi, India: Oxford U. Press, 1999, 2001).
Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs, Volume II: 1839-2004, 2d. ed (New Delhi, India: Oxford U. Press, 1999, 2004).
Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1989, 2011) ("Ah, Ganapathi, I see I disappoint you once more. The old man going off the point again, I see you think; how tiresome he can be when he gets philosophical. Do you know what 'philosophical' means, Ganapathi? It comes from the Greek words phileein, to love, and sophia, wisdom. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, Ganapathi. Not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling defect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes. Whereas wisdom, true wisdom, is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it." Id. at 163. "Whatever our ancestors expected of India, Ganapathi, it was not this. It was not a land where dharma and duty have come to mean nothing; where religion is an excuse for conflict rather than a code of conduct; where piety instead of marking wisdom, masks a crippling lack imagination. It was not a land where brides are burned in kerosene-soaked kitchens because they have not brought enough dowry with them; where integrity and self-respect are for sale to the highest bidder; where men are pulled off buses and butchered because of the length of a forelock or the absence of a foreskin. All these things that I have avoided mentioning in my story because I preferred to pretend they did not matter." "But they matter, of course, because in our country the mundane is as relevant as the mythical. Our philosophers try to make much of out great Vedic religion by pointing to its spiritualism, its pacifism, its lofty pansophism; and they ignore, or gloss over, its superstitions, its inequalities, its obscurantism. That is quite typical. Indeed one may say it is quite typically Hindu. Hinduism is the religion of over 80 per cent of Indians, and as a way of life it pervades almost all things Indian, bringing to politics, work and social relations the same flexibility of doctrine, reverence for custom an absorptive eclecticism that characterize the religion--as well as the same tendency to respect outworn dogma, worship sacred cows and offer under deference to gurus. Not to mention its great ability to overlook--or transcend--the inconvenient truth." Id. at 411-412.).
