Colonial Discourse and the Suffering of Indian American Children is now freely available.
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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.

Sphoṭavāda

From Hindupedia, the Hindu Encyclopedia

By Swami Harshananda

Sphoṭavāda literally means ‘the doctrine of “breaking forth”.

This is the theory of the school of grammarians. How does the meaning of a word flash in the mind? When a person utters the word ‘cow,’ its meaning as an animal of certain peculiar characteristics flashes across the mind immediately after the word is fully uttered. That factor or principle or power by which this happens is called ‘sphota’.

Sphoṭa is different from the individual letters of the word which die or disappear as soon as they are uttered. Only after the last letter is uttered, the meaning flashes in the mind. Hence, it is not the letters that produce the meaning. A separate factor different from them, but which gets manifested through their combination like a flash, has to be accepted. This is sphoṭa. It applies to a sentence also.


References[edit]

  • The Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Swami Harshananda, Ram Krishna Math, Bangalore

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