Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them

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Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them
AuthorSita Ram Goel
Arun Shourie
Harsh Narain
Jay Dubashi
Ram Swarup
CountryIndia
LanguageEnglish
SubjectHinduism
GenreNon-fiction
Publication date
1991
ISBN81-85990-49-2 (Volume 1)
ISBN 81-85990-03-4 (Volume 2)
OCLC41002522
LC ClassDS422.C64 H562 1998

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them is a two-volume book by Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie, Harsh Narain, Jay Dubashi and Ram Swarup.[1] The first volume was published in the Spring of 1990.

Contents[edit]

The first volume includes a list of 2,000 mosques that he claims were built on Hindu temples, based primarily on the books of Muslim historians of the period or inscriptions found on mosques. The second volume excerpts from medieval histories and chronicles and from inscriptions concerning the destruction of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist temples. The authors claim that the material presented in the book as "the tip of an iceberg".[citation needed]

The book contains chapters about the Ayodhya debate. The appendix of the first volume contains a list of temple-destructions and atrocities that the authors claim took place in Bangladesh in 1989. The book also criticizes "Marxist historians", and one of the appendices of the second volume includes a questionnaire for "Marxist professors", one of whom was an Indian historian Romila Thapar.[citation needed]

Reception[edit]

Cynthia Talbot, writing in 1995 about religious identities in pre-modern India, noted temple desecration to have been on the rise in Andhra Pradesh only since the late sixteenth century—while such a statistic did hold true for Goel's too, she cautioned that his estimates were "largely inflated" as a result of his uncritical reliance upon Perso-Arabic chronicles and inscriptions.[2] Romila Thapar has criticized Goel's list, arguing that he does not understand how to read historical sources contextually.[3]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Alyssa Ayres; Philip Oldenburg (2005). India Briefing: Takeoff at Last?. M.E. Sharpe. pp. 127–. ISBN 978-0-7656-1593-0. Retrieved 29 December 2020.
  2. ^ Talbot, Cynthia (1995). "Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 37 (4): 717. doi:10.1017/S0010417500019927. ISSN 0010-4175. JSTOR 179206. S2CID 111385524.
  3. ^ Romila Thapar et al.: Communalism and the Writing of Indian History, People's Publishing House, Delhi 1987 (1969), pp. 15–16, and repeated in her letter to Mr. Manish Tayal (UK), 7-2-1999, concerning Arun Shourie: Eminent Historians, ASA, Delhi 1998. Manish Tayal: "Romila Thapar's reply to 'Eminent Historians'", 16-2-1999. "Koenraad Elst Who is a Hindu? (2001)

External links[edit]

  • Online version:
---Volume 1 First Edition (There is also a second revised and enlarged edition.[1] The online version is the first edition.)
---Volume 2 Second Enlarged Edition
  1. ^ http://www.worldcat.org/title/hindu-temples-what-happened-to-them/oclc/732112011&referer=brief_results [bare URL]
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