| She and her
colleagues are responsible for a number of textbooks in India on the history of the
country, which not surprisingly are negative about the majority religion of the land.
Thapar is not unique in her thought, but she affords us a good example of leftist
scholarship has worked in India. If we understand
that historians like Thapar are Marxists the logic behind her studies becomes obvious.
Thapar's historical criticisms of Hinduism are quite negative, and it is often easier to
get more sympathetic accounts of Hinduism from professors in the West, particularly those
who have practiced some professors in the West, particularly those who have particularly
those who have practiced some Hindu-based yogic or meditational teachings.
Thapar even doubts whether Hinduism as a religion really
existed until recent times. She portrays Hinduism not as a comprehensive tradition going
back to the Mahabharata or to the Vedas, but as a relatively modern appropriation, and
therefore misinterpretation, of older practices and symbols, whose real meaning we can no
longer know as we are not products of that cultural milieu which produced them in the
first place. |
