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In this book, we analyze the psycho-social consequences faced by Indian American children after exposure to the school textbook discourse on Hinduism and ancient India. We demonstrate that there is an intimate connection—an almost exact correspondence—between James Mill’s colonial-racist discourse (Mill was the head of the British East India Company) and the current school textbook discourse. This racist discourse, camouflaged under the cover of political correctness, produces the same psychological impacts on Indian American children that racism typically causes: shame, inferiority, embarrassment, identity confusion, assimilation, and a phenomenon akin to racelessness, where children dissociate from the traditions and culture of their ancestors.


This book is the result of four years of rigorous research and academic peer-review, reflecting our ongoing commitment at Hindupedia to challenge the representation of Hindu Dharma within academia.

Avadhuta

From Hindupedia, the Hindu Encyclopedia

By Jit Majumdar


  1. removed; shaken away; discarded; rejected; washed away; shaken (agitated); destroyed; fanned; kindled; repudiated
  2. one from whom all (impurities) have been shaken away; one who has discarded all ignorance, bondage, limitations and obligations; one from whom anything false or impure has been rinsed away; one who has repudiated or rejected any falsity or ignorance or limitation (of personality)
  3. a class of spiritual adepts, mystics, saints or mendicants, going back to very ancient roots, who were/are generally antinomian, eccentric and liminal in nature and characteristics, and who have achieved a state of being beyond ego-consciousness, duality and worldly concerns and acts without consideration for standard social etiquette. Such personalities are considered to be free from the consciousness of the individual ego, and to live and behave “free like a child”. By definition free from standard ritual observances, injunctions and affiliations, they are associated with apparently crazy or eccentric modes of behaviour and lifestyle, who dramatize the reversal of social norms, and transgressing of the boundaries of conventional standards of social mores, which is a behaviour characteristic of their spontaneous lifestyle. As a rule belonging to the Śaiva Nātha, Śākta and Sahajiyā Buddhist traditions, they are as a norm classed into several sub-groups, each distinguished by their own ways of dressing, appearance, personality, behaviour and way of life, such as Brahmāvadhuta, Śaivāvadhuta, Vīrāvadhuta and Kaulāvadhuta (Bn. Tantra / MhN. Tantra).

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