The Neocon Heartbeat of the Indian Left

The above passage was penned by Prem Kumar Mani, a party hopping politician, who is currently with Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD (he was with JDU before) though he started his political career with the Communist Party.[2] He had also dabbled in ‘progressive literature’ with establishment blessings. The passage was originally written for a caste magazine ‘Yadav Shakthi’.

It was translated and published in 2012 by an anti-Hindu propaganda bi-lingual magazine ‘Forward Press’ in November 2011. Following this, a ‘Mahishasur Martyrdom Day’ was organized by ‘All India Backward Students Forum’ (AIBSF) at JNU campus on 17 October in which among the main speakers were Prof. Kancha Ilaiah, a former professor at Osmania University and Prem Kumar Mani.[3]

Prof. Kancha Ilaiah has a gifted mind for churning out crackpot reconstructions on Indian mythology, often portraying it as a collection ‘Aryan’, ‘Brahminical’ conspiracies against the down-trodden. That is understandable given the fact that he is with Dalit Freedom Network (DFI) which is a front of Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) whose honorary president is Jonathan Aitken, a politician charged with ‘perjury and perverting the course of justice’ in 1999, who then served seven months in jail. In jail, Aitken discovered evangelical fundamentalist Christianity as a means of comeback. [4] It is interesting that the anti-Hindu shows staged in ultra-left wing citadels in India have their ultimate string pullers in the Christian Right of the West.

Coming back to the original duplicity of making a martyr out of Mahishasura and peddling a racial interpretation of a Hindu myth as the ‘Shudra’ reading, one finds an immense ignorance of not just Indian history but also a colossal insensitivity to the local traditions that exist throughout India.

Asuras are a Race?

Let us start with some hard facts.

There is a tribal community called Asurs who venerate Mahishasur. Can this be taken as the proof of the speculation that the slaying of Mahishasura was indeed the slaying of aboriginal tribes by invading Aryans?

The answer can be easily gleaned by looking at Ravan, another valiant anti-hero of pan-Indian epic Ramayan. After the advent of colonial narrative, the anti-Brahminical Dravidian movement had been projecting Ravan as the non-Brahminical Dravidian hero who was defeated by cunning Aryan Rama. However traditionally it was Kanyakubja Brahmins, a Brahmin sub-sect in Madhya Pradesh, not non-Brahmins, who have been venerating Ravana as their ancestor. [5]

There are temples for Duryodana, the anti-hero of the other pan-Indian epic Mahabharatha at both Uttarakhand in the north and Kerala in the south. Hence it should not be surprising that in India which has traditionally nurtured diversity and pluralism, every anti-hero in any mythology would also be venerated by some community somewhere in the country. To construe a racial interpretation to the mythology based on the existence of such communities is not just bad academics but also hate mongering.

Harappans Stand Accused?

Further, there is not an iota of evidence that buffalo was not venerated by Vedic civilization. There may be a correlation between the buffalo like head-gear of the Harappan ‘yogi’ seal and the hymns of the Vedas invoking the imagery of buffalo with regard to Vedic divinities. Indologist Stella Kramrisch pointed out in her authoritative work on Siva: