Sanatan Archive

Union Minister for Railways, Ashwini Vaishnaw, took to Twitter on Sunday to share the first glimpses of the ‘Shri Ramayan Yatra,’ a rail circuit specifically designed to promote religious tourism in places associated with the Ramayana.

Ramchandra Manjhi may have won the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian award and Sangeet Natak Akademi, but his biggest achievement is something else.

As the Ram Janmabhoomi movement was at its peak, the Narasimha Rao govt at the centre had brought a new law with a motive to prevent Ram Janmabhoomi-like reclamation movements by Hindus in India. This law was the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act 1991. This article wishes to shed some light on what this act is and how it is a hurdle in the reclamation of Hindu temples.

It has been Indian secularism’s biggest defect that our Constitution, which promises to be fundamentally secular, has multiple provisions specifying exactly how religious institutions should run. A government that has its eye on the wealth of temples must also have the intellectual honesty to not maintain that it’s a secular government. Yet of this failure, every single Indian government of the past, and the present, is culpable.

The Indian Sub-continent has given birth to billions of people who have lived and followed Vedic and Dharmic values, traditions, and culture for millennia, and it is the one land on earth that has given shelter to all currently known major faiths. This Sub-continent, also known to its inhabitants as Mother India or Bharath, has more than 40,000 years of documented history and has served as one of the bases of all wisdom and knowledge that humankind can contemplate. In other words, it has helped lay the foundation of all sciences and philosophies. It is, therefore, surprising to learn about a conference like Dismantling Global Hindutva (https://dismantlinghindutva.com). 

The road to India's independence was horribly a tough one; every stride you make is an adventure. It was not that India got her freedom without blood-shed and violence. Though Gandhiji chose non-violence and civil disobedience as a means to free the fetters on India, it did not yield the desired results as we all know. Then and there, in the early 18th and 19th century, violence against the British misrule did raise its ugly head whenever there were lapses in the administration.

On 16th August 1946, Kolkata (then Calcutta) experienced its most violent convulsions. The infamous ‘week of long knives’ – an unprecedented orgy of loot, murder, rapes and molestation let loose on the city’s unsuspecting Hindus by Muslim League strongmen and goons that left 7,000 people dead, tens of thousands maimed and an estimated 1.2 lakh homeless – started with the call for ‘direct action day’ by League supremo Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

The Marathas deploying for action in the dim winter dawn: the Vazir, in full armour; whither do you fly?’: the choking dust: the combatants rolling on the ground, locked in a deadly embrace: the cries of ‘Din! Din!’ and ‘Har, Har, Mahadev!’ and lastly, the dramatic annihilation of one the most splendid and gallant armies that ever took the field. A defeat is, under some circumstances, as honorable as a victory; and never, in all their annals, did the Maratha armies cover themselves with greater glory, than when the flower of the chivalry of the Deccan perished on the stricken field of Panipat, fighting against the enemies of their creed and country.

Most of us know that India is home to the world’s largest golden temple. What some of us don’t know is that the largest golden temple in India is not the Temple of Amritsar, but the temple of Sripuram in Tamil Nadu. Popularly known as Sri Lakshmi Narayani Golden Temple of Sripuram, it is a divine seat of the goddess of wealth, surrounded by the blissful landscape of lush greenery at the foot of hills in Thirumalaikodi near Vellore.