Talk:Arunabh Ghosh

By Sachi Anjunkar

Arunabh Ghosh is Associate Professor of History at Harvard University, as of November 2022. According to his university profile, research interests include social and economic history, history of science and statecraft, transnational history, and China-India history.

As per his bio, he has published books, papers or research pertaining to Hindus, rights of Hindus, the impact or relationship between Islam and Hinduism / Hindutva, India or the Indian Government in the context of BJP government.

In 2021, he along with Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of the Taliban, co-signed a letter supporting "Dismantling Global Hindutva" Conference, as an academic and scholar and made the allegation

"the current government of India [in 2021] has instituted discriminatory policies including beef bans, restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith weddings, and the introduction of religious discrimination into India’s citizenship laws. The result has been a horrifying rise in religious and caste-based violence, including hate crimes, lynchings, and rapes directed against Muslims, non-conforming Dalits, Sikhs, Christians, adivasis and other dissident Hindus. Women of these communities are especially targeted. Meanwhile, the government has used every tool of harassment and intimidation to muzzle dissent. Dozens of student activists and human rights defenders are currently languishing in jail indefinitely without due process under repressive anti-terrorism laws."

Publications related to India

1. Ghosh, Arunabh. "Trans-Himalayan Science in Mid-Twentieth Century China and India: Birbal Sahni, Hsü Jen, and a Pan-Asian Paleobotany." International Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 2022, pp. 239-261.
2. Ghosh, Arunabh, Adhira Mangalagiri, and Tansen Sen. "China and India in the Age of Decolonization: An Introduction to the Nehru Papers Project, 1947–1964." China and Asia, vol. 3, no. 2, 2021, pp. 177-182.
3. Ghosh, Arunabh. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China. Princeton University Press, 2020.

Publications related to India

• Ghosh, Arunabh. “Killing Humanities in India.” Times of India Blog, 14 Aug. 2015

Summary

Killing Humanities in India This article, while published in Times of India, is an unscholarly rant by someone who feels that they are important enough to have been consulted when they in fact aren't. The focus of his rant is on the Humanities and Social sciences domain in India.

Arunabh makes a number of unsubstantiated accusations and allegations across a number of people & topics:

1. He makes false claims about how India treats history.
2. He alleges that well accepted historical documents such as Ramayana and Mahabharata are in fact not historical and relegating them as 'cultural and literary epics' on a fanciful whim
3. He also makes factually & historically inaccurate statements such as "Ram built his temple in Ayodhya."
4. He disputes recorded historical facts about various technological innovations stating that the documents are wrong without any substantiation
5. He feels that its unfair that the current Indian government doesn't blindly accept history documented out of India's colonial past and wants to take an uncolonized perspective based on India's cultural legacy
6. He alleges that India's preference to ban books against specific academics and writers is new when in fact, it is a policy that has been exercised across many years and administrations
7. He alleges that India doesn't do justice to its recent history but admits that "this apathy for our recent history is not something we can pin on BJP alone" but does not substantiate that India has done poorly in documenting its recent history
8. He alleges that the leaders of IIAS, ICCR, ICHR and FTII for being ideologically bias and for promoting skewed perspectives about history. He specifically states that the academic legacy from these institutes was ideologically driven in the past and he, as a bystander, doesn't like how the status quo is being changed - the evidence for the statement is here -

“the latest changes-of-guard in venerable institutions such as IIAS, ICCR, ICHR and FTII indicate not so much the replacement of one set of ideologically driven scholarship by another, but rather the victory of a chest-thumping anti-intellectualism that regards scholarship the way one would subtitles in a silent film: unwelcome and unnecessary.”

To sum up, Article "Killing Humanities in India" is rife with baseless assertions, unverified statements, and accusations put forward by Arunabh Ghosh.