Rajiv Malhotra is an Indian-American author, researcher, professor, and speaker. His representative works include “Breaking India” (2011), “Difference” (2011), “Indra’s Web” (2014) and “Sanskrit War” (2016). He is the founder of the Infinity Foundation (1994) and the Education Council for Indian Heritage (ECIT) (2000). He has also published extensively in online groups and e-zines.
Wiki/Biography
Rajiv Malhotra was born on Friday, September 15, 1950, in New Delhi, India (age 72; as of 2023). His zodiac sign is Virgo. Rajiv Malhotra studied physics at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. In 1970, he studied computer science at Syracuse University in New York, USA.
Not much information is available about his wife and children. The problem with many Hindus, many nationalists, is that they micro-optimize, which means very local optimization of some of their interests. This may be a political interest, or it may be a racial interest. They are optimizing in a way that harms India’s macro interests. They don’t have a wide angle lens. “
family
Parents and siblings
There is not much information about his parents and siblings. His father was an engineer in Lahore before Partition.
wife and children
Not much information is available about his wife and children.
Profession
Founder
Rajiv Malhotra has worked in a variety of career fields, including software development, development executive, strategy consultant, entrepreneur in the information technology and media industries, and ran multiple IT companies in approximately 20 countries. He is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Indian Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Rajiv Malhotra was a panel speaker at an international conference held at the Center for Indian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in July 2002. Rajiv Malhotra is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Claremont Colleges Endowment for Indian Philosophy and Culture (2001).
Base
In 1994, Rajiv Malhotra retired at the age of 44. In the same year, he established the Infinity Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, to devote himself to his personal favorite areas of philanthropy, research and public service. His foundation supports journals such as Asian Education and the International Journal of Hindu Studies. He established the Education Commission for Indian Heritage (ECIT) in 2000 to combat misconceptions about ancient Indian religions and document the contributions of Indian services. Rajiv Malhotra is a member of the Advisory Board of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.
professor
In October 2018, Rajiv Malhotra became a professor at the Center for Media Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. On November 6, 2018, he delivered his first lecture on the theme of Untranslatable Sanskrit, organized by the School of Sanskrit and Indian Studies.
writer and researcher
Rajiv Malhotra has written several books on the theme of identity and self-discovery. His research includes the study of Western societies’ complex relationship with India. In particular, for the past ten years he has been studying inner sciences, Indian traditions, and Western culture.
publication
books
- Breaking India: Western Interventions on Dravidian and Dalit Fault Lines (2011), published by Amaryllis, published by Manjul Press.
- Being Different: India’s Challenge to Western Universalism (2011), published by HarperCollins India.
- Indra’s Web: In Defense of the Philosophical Unity of Hinduism (2014), published by HarperCollins India.
- The Battle of Sanskrit: Death or Life, Oppression or Liberation, Political or Divine? (2016), published by HarperCollins India.
Rajiv Malhotra meets Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi
- Sanskrit is Untranslatable: The Importance of Sanskrit in English (2020), by Rajiv Malhotra and Satyanarayana Dasa Babaji, published by Amaryllis, Manjul Publishing House.
- Ganga: Breaking India 2.0 (2022), by Rajiv Malhotra and Vijaya Viswanathan, Occam Publishing, an imprint of BluOne Ink.
- The Ten Heads of Ravana (2023), by Rajiv Malhotra and Divya Reddy, published by Garuda Prakashan House.
- Academic Hinduphobia (2016) Published by Voice of India; 1st ed.
Other publications
- American Exceptionalism and the Myth of the Frontier (2009)
- Invasion of the Sacred: An Analysis of American Hindu Studies (2007)
Articles and blog posts
- In the early 2000s, Rajiv Malhotra started writing articles criticizing several writers and their works. In 2002, he published a blog post titled “Wendy’s Child Syndrome,” criticizing Wendy Doniger for “applying Freudian psychoanalysis to various aspects of Indian culture.”
- In 2003, in his blog post titled “Will South Asian Studies Destroy India?” in Rediff India Abroad: The Case for India, Rajiv Malhotra criticized “the influence of Indian-American donors on South Asian studies.” funding”. In his opinion,
It is ironic that many prominent Indian-American benefactors were led down the garden path by Indian professors, who, ironically, assembled a team of academics to destroy Indian culture. Instead of using India’s view of itself and the world, these scholars promote India’s views using a worldview that is not conducive to India’s interests. “
projects and theory
U-turn theory
The U-turn theory states that a person who is part of the dominant Western culture first learns about Indian traditions and then projects all the knowledge gained from India and Indian culture into his or her own culture. The theory explains that Indians were incorporating Western adaptations of Indian culture and reintroducing them into their own country and culture. He divided the theory into five stages through which Indian knowledge was stolen by the West and resold in India.
Stage 1 – Discipleship
Westerners first learn about Indian traditions and culture.
Phase 2 – Decontextualization
Westerners first decouple and then steal all knowledge from the authentic sources of Indian tradition and culture.
Phase Three – Recontextualization
They then integrate the decoupled knowledge into their religious frameworks such as Christianity, spiritual science, and cults.
Stage 4 – Arson
In the fourth stage, they undermine and devalue the sources of knowledge.
Stage 5 – Repackaging
They repackaged the stolen knowledge into new English terminology and resold it back to India.
HIST Series (History of Indian Science and Technology)
The Infinity Foundation has published a series of fourteen volumes on the history of science and technology in India. The HIST series of projects is modeled on Joseph Needham’s famous series and aims to allow scholars around the world to understand China’s contribution to global knowledge.
untranslatable sanskrit
Rajiv Malhotra is building a new series of books and e-learning courses to protect Sanskrit untranslatable terms. He believed that certain Sanskrit words should not be translated into English because they had no corresponding English terms, which destroyed the original essence of the terms in their original language. It is important to use the terms in an appropriate manner.
Indian Mind Science
Infinity Foundation has brought the theories of Indian mind science to the forefront by conducting numerous workshops and conferences at various institutions in India such as IIT, Delhi University and several other universities. This led to the creation of a formal discipline of Indian Psychology in some Indian universities.
new vocabulary terms
Rajiv Malhotra coined the terms “Breaking India”, “Indian Grand Narrative”, “Hindu Open Architecture”, “Mutual Respect”, “History Centrism”, “Digestion” and “Hinduphobia” .
dispute
Plagiarism charges
In July 2015, Richard Fox Young, associate professor of religious history at Princeton Divinity School, and Andrew J. Nicholson, associate professor of Asian and Asian American studies at Stony Brook University, alleged Rajiv Malhotra plagiarized the entire book of “United Hinduism” in his book “Indra’s Net”,
Distort the words and arguments of respected scholars to further your own ends. “
In response to the accusations made by Andrew J. Nicholson, Rajiv Malhotra deleted all references in Chapter 8 of the book “Indra’s Web” and replaced them with references from Indian original sources. He further said,
In fact, I will remove many references to your work simply because you borrowed Indian sources and called them your own original ideas […] Now it is Western Indologists like you who define the “critical version” of our text and become the primary source and Adhikari.This has to end, I’ve been fighting this for 25 years […] We should examine where you got your material from and the extent to which you failed to acknowledge Indian written and oral sources as you expected me to.
Facts/Trivia
- Rajiv Malhotra has delivered more than 1,000 video lectures on his YouTube channel Infinity Foundation Official and has around 19,000 followers on Instagram and 7 million followers on Facebook.
- Rajiv Malhotra was a Hindu thinker who widely promoted his Hindu nationalist views on Indian culture.
- On January 11, 2023, Rajiv Malhotra tweeted against artificial intelligence,
Artificial Intelligence is biased against Hindu Dharma. I pointed this out two years ago in my book on artificial intelligence. Please note the Open AI session below. Krishna treated Muhammad and Jesus differently. pic.twitter.com/rJY7ogeD8K
— Rajiv Malhotra (@RajivMessage) January 11, 2023
- The Infinity Foundation funded Columbia University’s project to translate the Tibetan Buddhist Tengyur.
- In 2017, Rajiv Malhotra delivered a public lecture hosted by the Embassy of India in Washington.
Rajiv Malhotra 2017 public lecture hosted by the Embassy of India in Washington
- Malhotra opposed Western academic education on Indian culture and traditions because he believed it undermined India’s values
By encouraging a paradigm that opposes its unity and integrity”
- In Swarajya Magazine, March 2018, Volume 62 Issue 02, Rajiv Malhotra defines Hinduism and says:
Hinduism needs balance. Open architecture is very attractive and new forms can take root in Hinduism. At the same time, it needs (antivirus) to counter those who appear to be exclusive and subversive. Because, by highlighting exclusivity, they make no room for other parts of the open architecture. They try to hijack open buildings and make them enclosed. This is an important part of my job, to showcase the unity and diversity of Hinduism in a way that is responsible, dynamic and dynamic and remains competitive. This is not passive. ”
- In an interview with R Jagannathan, he talks about his theory and the dangers Indians face today.
The ‘Break India’ argument was not something I came up with overnight. It’s not a matter of coining a term; This has actually been my experience living in the United States for over 45 years. Some significant events occurred on this journey. I found some African-Americans coming back from India talking about things as Afro-Dalits to which they belonged; I met Marxists, many of them Indians, many of whom were aligned with the Maoist forces in India; I I encountered Christian missionaries sending huge sums of money to India, saying it was for social work. Indians are tracking isolated data points on Islam, Marxism or Christianity, but no one is tracking it end-to-end. They didn’t connect any of this to foreign powers. “
- Infinity Foundation has also published a 14-volume series on the history of science and technology in India.
- In an interview, when asked about the destructive power of Christianity, Islam and Maoism, Rajiv Malhotra said,
We (India) should exploit the conflict between Christianity, Islam and Maoism in global relations as they are fighting each other across the globe and we are not even aware of it. Our people are not exploiting their fault lines. This is something we can do. While in India they appear to be united, globally they are at war with each other. “
Categories: Biography
Source: HIS Education