Indian Pseudo-Intellectuals Thrive on Courting Religion

Indian intellectualism since the second half of the last century has largely nourished itself through courting religion (,anti-religion and mostly anti-Hindu religion). Merely by chance, I read an article on Indian Renaissance by one Mr. Panniker in a weekly (probably Outlook or some such one generally available on Air India's domestic in-flight reading. The author, once a Vice Chancellor of an Indian University somewhere, in a nice composition in English, showed that the author knows a few names of the leaders of the Indian Renaissance, although he hesitated naming that as Bengal Renaissance as is internationally known and was quite appropriately recognized by Gokhale's remark: 'What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow'. This of course was only true till India became Independent and effect of the Renaissance evaporated as the period of serfdom to the leaders of political business began.
Be that as it may, the central contention of the article in the magazine appeared to be as follows:


"Indian Renaissance (he could name only a three/ four Bengali's and a person from South India as the leading figures) was not really a Renaissance given the following:
a) this Renaissance was seeking rebirth through rediscovering some thing in the past literature,
b) the leaders of the Renaissance were not much concerned with use of reasoning in life,
c) the leaders of the Renaissance were more interested in resurrecting old Hindu religious scripts like the Vedanta into a new form of religion where worship takes place in idol-less temples where the followers join together in some kind of mass prayers,
d) the leaders were mostly educated middle-class, non-secular and did not or could not have a mass following,
f) the leaders had not paid any importance to free India from the British Rulers
g) the impact of the Renaissance was very limited and the best that they could achieve was Abolition of Sati, Right of widows to get married."


Nearly a century has gone after the end of the India Renaissance period. Clearly, the impact of Renaissance is nil. If there is any requirement of proof of the negligible effect of Renaissance, the best, readily-available one is the former Vice Chancellor, author of the article and the article itself with its unscientific, empirically invalid theory. The article is mainly English language, no logic, little history, based on a mistaken that religion is bereft of all reasoning, that old Sanskrit text could not have any reasoning content and that the current Indian fashion of equating  practice of religion by individuals and communities as non-secular. This is not surprising because for about 70 years or so, low quality brains have thrived by adopting this technique to establish themselves as scholars- within-India. But all this that I write about such 'only-in-India' scholars is in bad taste.

 Better is to hand over the future of these scholars to intellectuals and the common people at large. They can theselves find out how they are being fed with unscientific theories and distorted history.


1. Recommended readings: life and biographies of Raja Rammohan Roy, Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, Pandit Iswar Chandra Vidya Sagar, Acharya Keshub Chandra Sen, Rishi Bankim Chandra Chattopadhya,  Swami Vivekanada, Rishi Aurovindo Ghosh, Rabindranath Tagore, Satratchandra Chattopadhyay, Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose, Acharya Prafull Chandra Roy, Acharya Satyendra Nath Bose to name only but a few leaders of Bengal Renaissance.
2. To note that the leaders of the Renaissance were secular even if they believed in the particular for of religion or spirituality they adhered to/ practised.
3. To note that it was because of Raja Rammohan Roy who learned English only at the age of 22 and that too only after learning Bengali, Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu and Hindi, was instrumental in establishing educational institutions to expose Bengali children to English, Mathematics, Logic and other Sciences rather than the British Rulers setting up merely Sanskrit schools and Christian missionaries setting up their Church-linked schools.
4. To find out if it was the writings of Bankimchandra Chattopadhya, Swami Vivekananda,  Rabindra Nath Tagore, Saratchandra Chattopadhya and others who planted the seeds of freedom in the minds of the Bengali Youth, besides bringing a cultural revolution in the cities and towns and even penetrated rural Bengal.
5. To note that the rise of independent-spirited scholastic pusuit of sciences were due the leadership of Jagadish Chandra Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray and Satyendra Nath Bose who were among the first set of scientists to be recognised internationally.
6.  To note that Renaissance that originated in Italy and then spread throughout Europe, the British Isle and the USA benefited from the patronage of the Christan monasteries and the rich merchant elite and wealthy class including the monarchs. The Bengal Renaissance was not cultivated in Hindu Temples or Muslim Masjids, but the wealthy merchants and Zaminders provided considerable patronage.
7. To confirm that the concept of Renaissance (re-birth) in Italy was associated with an intensive study of literature, philosophy and science texts of much earlier Greek and other civilizations as were available in various libraries: this was strongly similar to the study of Vedanta and rediscovering the knowledge in the light of modern analytical methods during Bengal and Indian Renaissance.
8. To note that the humanistic approach was a major characteristic of the Indian/ Bengal Renaissance as it was in the case of the European Renaissance.
9. To get convinced that the idea that Vedanta was all religion and no reasoning or science is a false propaganda of the weak-brained Indians who took the umbrella of socialism to install themselves in scholastiv\c and intellectual leadership field through backdoor and so that they do not get discarded in open completion from high quality brain power and reasoning skills/ aptitudes. It is only very poor quality brain and reasoning power that erroneously concludes that Vedanta is a religious script. "The Upanishadic literature is not a religious scripture and is free from dogma and doctrines. It is not a part of any religion but is a philosophy for all times and for all. This philosophy does not oppose any school of thought, religion, or interpretation of the scriptures, but its methods for explaining its concepts are unique. The Upanishads should not be confused with the religious books of the East; there is a vast difference between the philosophy of the Upanishads and the preachings of any of the religious scriptures of the world."  "The Upanishads prepare, inspire, and lead the student to know and realize the Ultimate Truth. First of all, the philosophy of the Upanishads frees one to cast away his intellectual slavery to blind faith, superstitions, sectarian beliefs, and dogmas." The Indian intellect deformed with dogmas and blind faith perceives the Vedanta as religious script.

10.  To note the origin of logic and reasoning in India. "The Nasadiya Sukta of the Rigveda (RV 10.129) contains ontological speculation in terms of various logical divisions that were later recast formally as the four circles of catuskoti: "A", "not A", "A and not A", and "not A and not not A". "The development of  formal Indian logic dates back to the anviksiki of Medhatithi Gautama (c. 6th century BCE) the Sanskrit grammar rules of Pāṇini (c. 5th century BCE); the Vaisheshika school's analysis of atomism (c. 2nd century BCE); the analysis of inference by Gotama (c. 2nd century), founder of the Nyaya school of Hindu philosophy; and the tetralemma of Nagarjuna (c. 2nd century CE). Indian logic stands as one of the three original traditions of logic, alongside the Greek and Chinese traditions. The Indian tradition continued to develop through to early modern times, in the form of the Navya-Nyāya school of logic." ... "Renaissance thinkers sought out in Europe's monastic libraries and the crumbling Byzantine Empire the literary, historical, and oratorical texts of antiquity, typically written in Latin or ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity. It is in their new focus on literary and historical texts that Renaissance scholars differed so markedly from the medieval scholars of the Renaissance of the 12th century, who had focused on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural sciences, philosophy and mathematics, rather than on such cultural texts. Renaissance humanists did not reject Christianity; quite the contrary, many of the Renaissance's greatest works were devoted to it, and the Church patronized many works of Renaissance art. However, a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were brought back from Byzantium to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for the first time since late antiquity. This new engagement with Greek Christian works, and particularly the return to the original Greek of the New Testament promoted by humanists Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, would help pave the way for the Protestant Reformation." (see Wikipedia).

As a small brief I extract from Internet :
11. One  Internet site gives the following names in relation to Indian Renaissance.Sri Aurobindo, Allama Iqbal , Sir Syed Ahmed Khan , Ramakrishna , Ramakrishna Mission , Raja Ram Mohan Roy , Brahmo Samaj , Prarthana Samaj , Sir Ganesh Dutt , Dayananda Saraswati ,Swami Sahajanand Saraswati , Swami Vivekananda.

12. In his book  INDIAN RENAISSANCE  Acharya I. V. Chalapati Rao covers ART & CULTUREm SCIENCE & SOCIETY, LIFE & PHILOSOPHY and EDUCATION & LITERATURE.

13. About Bengal Renaissace, Wikipedia writes “The Bengal Renaissance refers to a social reform movement during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the region of Bengal during the period of British rule. The Bengal renaissance can be said to have started with Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1775–1833) and ended with Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), although there have been many stalwarts thereafter embodying particular aspects of the unique intellectual and creative output.

14. Nineteenth century Bengal was a unique blend of religious and social reformers, scholars, literary giants, journalists, patriotic orators and scientists, all merging to form the image of a renaissance, and marked the transition from the 'medieval' to the modern.
During this period, Bengal witnessed an intellectual awakening that is in some way similar to the Renaissance in Europe during the 16th century, although Europeans of that age were not confronted with the challenge and influence of alien colonialism. This movement questioned existing orthodoxies, particularly with respect to women, marriage, the dowry system, the caste system and religion. One of the earliest social movements that emerged during this time was the Young Bengal movement, that espoused rationalism and atheism as the common denominators of civil conduct among upper caste educated Hindus. Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s Renaissance aimed at resuscitating the pristine Aryan spirit, ‘Unitarianism of God’, with the help of modern Western rationalist spirit.

15. The parallel socio-religious movement, the Brahmo Samaj, developed during this time period and counted many of the leaders of the Bengal Renaissance among its followers. In the earlier years the Brahmo Samaj, like the rest of society, could not however, conceptualize, in that feudal-colonial era, a free India as it was influenced by the European Enlightenment (and its bearers in India, the British Raj) although it traced its intellectual roots to the Upanishads. Their version of Hinduism, or rather Universal Religion (similar to that of Ramakrishna), although devoid of practices like sati and polygamy that had crept into the social aspects of Hindu life, was ultimately a rigid impersonal monotheistic faith, which actually was quite distinct from the pluralistic and multifaceted nature of the way the Hindu religion was practiced. Future leaders like Keshub Chunder Sen were as much devotees of Christ, as they were of Brahma, Krishna or the Buddha. It has been argued by some scholars that the Brahmo Samaj movement never gained the support of the masses and remained restricted to the elite, although Hindu society has accepted most of the social reform programmes of the Brahmo Samaj. It must also be acknowledged that many of the later Brahmos were also leaders of the freedom movement.
Bengali literature found so many and so bright names found crowded together in the limited space of one century of te Bengali Renaissance: Ram Mohan Roy, Muhammad Shahidullah, Akshay Kumar Datta, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Sharat Chandra Chatterji, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Dina Bandhu Mitra and f course Rbindranath Tagore. Within the three quarters of the century, prose, blank verse, historical fiction and drama wee introduced for the first time in the Bengali literature….While Ram Mohan Roy and Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar were the pioneers, others like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee widened it and built upon it^]. The first significant nationalist detour to the Bengal Renaissance was given by the brilliant writings of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. Later writers of the period who introduced broad discussion of social problems and more colloquial forms of Bengali into mainstream literature included the great Saratchandra Chatterjee.

16. The Tagore family, including Rabindranath Tagore, were leaders of this period and had a particular interest in educational reform^[5]. Their contribution to the Bengal Renaissance was multi-faceted. Indeed, Tagore's 1901 Bengali novella, Nastanirh was written as a critique of men who professed to follow the ideals of the Renaissance, but failed to do so within their own families. In many ways Rabindranath Tagore's writings (especially poems and songs) can be seen as imbued with the spirit of the Upanishads. His works repeatedly allude to Upanishadic ideas regarding soul, liberation, transmigration and—perhaps most essentially—about a spirit that imbues all creation not unlike the Upanishadic Brahman. Tagore's English translation of a set of poems titled the Gitanjali won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. He was the first Asian to win this award.
The word "renaissance" in European history meant "rebirth" and was used in the context of the revival of the Graeco-Roman learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries after the long winter of the dark medieval period. A serious comparison was started by the dramatis personae of the Bengal renaissance like Keshub Chunder Sen, Bipin Chandra Pal and M. N. Roy. For about a century, Bengal’s conscious awareness and the changing modern world was more developed and ahead of the rest of India. The role played by Bengal in the modern awakening of India is thus comparable to the position occupied by Italy in the European renaissance. Very much like the Italian Renaissance, it was not a mass movement; but instead restricted to the upper classes. Though the Bengal Renaissance was the "culmination of the process of emergence of the cultural characteristics of the Bengali people that had started in the age of Hussein Shah, it remained predominantly Hindu and only partially Muslim. Swami Vivekananda who founded Ramakrishna Mission is considered a key figure in the introduction of Hindu philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga in Europe and America, and is also credited with rising interfaith awareness, bringing Hinduism to the status of a world religion during the end of the 19th century. Vivekananda is considered to be a major force in the revival of Hinduism in modern India. He is best known for his inspiring speech beginning with "sisters and brothers of America", through which he introduced Hinduism at the Parliament of the World's Religions at Chicago in 1893.
During the Bengal Renaissance science was also advanced by several Bengali scientists such as Satyendra Nath Bose and Jagadish Chandra Bose. Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was a polymath: a physicist, biologist, botanist, archaeologist, and writer of science fictions. He pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics, made very significant contributions to plant science, and laid the foundations of experimental science in the Indian subcontinent. He is considered one of the fathers of radio science, and is also considered the father of Bengali science fiction. He was the first from the Indian subcontinent to get a US patent, in 1904.
Satyendra Nath Bose was a physicist, specializing in mathematical physics. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose-Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose-Einstein condensate. He is honoured as the namesake of the boson. Although more than one Nobel Prize was awarded for research related to the concepts of the boson, Bose-Einstein statistics and Bose-Einstein condensate— the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics was given for advancing the theory of Bose-Einstein condensates.


Beware of the current pseudo-intellectuals, pseud-secular that have infiltrated Indian higher education and political leadership. They are trying to brainwash Indians continuously. You always have a recourse to the Internet Surfing to build your own strength. Unlike those who read in schools before 1970s, most Indians did not have a chance to read the history of Renaissance in schools in textbooks that had much more credibility than those afterwards.