Talk:Monisha Bajaj

By Sachi Anjunkar

Monisha Bajaj is Professor of International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco^[1] as of May 2024. According to her university profile, her research areas are education & international development; international & comparative education, human rights education, peace education, educational innovation in the global south, gender and schooling, global education, and immigrants and refugees.

She has published no books, papers, or research pertaining to Hindus, the Indus Civilization, or caste.

In 2016, she fraudulently associated herself to be 'K12 public school educator and teacher educator' and signed a letter addressed to the Instructional Quality Commission, California Department of Education supporting the South Asian Histories for All and the Sikh Coalition ^[2] as :

In this Letter she misinterpret academic research, ignoring scholarship. "The letter opposes the use of terms like "Sindh-Saraswati" for the Indus Valley Civilization, arguing for historically accurate terms: "According to scholarly consensus the Indus Valley Civilization predates Hindu Vedic culture"^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8]^[9]^[10]^[11]^[12]
Through this letter she further attack to state that those representing Indian history are Hindu nationalists. She state:

"The Hindu nationalist version of history seeks to demonize Muslims of South Asia as descendants of Muslim invaders or of those who were forcibly converted to Islam"^[13]^[14]^[15]^[16]^[17]^[18].

In 2016, she signed a letter endorsing a letter submitted by the South Asia Faculty Group^[19]^[20] where it addressed the State Board of Education, California Department of Education, dated May 17, 2016. In this letter they requested removing the word India from textbooks. In addition, they falsely^[21] stated:

"There is no established connection between Hinduism and the Indus Civilization."
"It is inappropriate to remove mention of the connection of caste to Hinduism."

Publications related to India[edit]

Books[edit]

Bajaj, Monisha. Schooling for Social Change: The Rise and Impact of Human Rights Education in India. Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2011.

Journal Articles[edit]

Bajaj, Monisha. Human Rights Education in Small Schools in India. Peace Review, vol. 24, no. 1, 2012, pp. 6-13.
Bajaj, Monisha. From ‘Time Pass’ to Transformative Force: School-Based Human Rights Education in Tamil Nadu, India. International Journal of Educational Development, vol. 32, no. 1, 2012, pp. 72-80.
Bajaj, Monisha, and M. Pathmarajah. En‘gender’ing Agency: The Differentiated Impact of Educational Initiatives in Zambia and India. Feminist Formations, vol. 23, no. 3, 2011, pp. 48-67.
Iyengar, R., and Monisha Bajaj. After the Smoke Clears: Examining Curricular Approaches to Environmental Education in Bhopal, India. Comparative Education Review, vol. 55, no. 3, 2011, pp. 424-456.
Bajaj, Monisha. Conjectures on Peace Education and Gandhian Studies: Method, Institutional Development, and Globalization. Journal of Peace Education, vol. 7, no. 1, 2010, pp. 47-62.

References[edit]

↑ Monisha Bajaj University Profile accessed 14 May, 2024
↑ 5-17 Thenmozhi Soundararajan South Asian Histories for All + Sikh Coalition
↑ Gupta, S. P. “The Dawn of Civilization.” History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization: Volume I: Part 1, edited by G. C. Pandey and D. P. Chattopadhyaya, Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 1999.
↑ Singh, K. (2021). Colonial Roots of the Aryan Invasion/Migration Theory and the Contemporary Archaeological Evidence in Western Sources. Indian Historical Review, 48(2), 251-272. https://doi.org/10.1177/03769836211052101
↑ Dikshit, K. N. “Origin of Early Harappan Cultures in the Sarasvati Valley: Recent Archaeological Evidence and Radiometric Dates.” Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology, vol. 9, 2013, pp. 132.
↑ Kautilya. The Arthaśāstra. Translated and edited by L. N. Rangarajan, Penguin Books, 1992.
↑ Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark. Ancient Cities of the Indus Civilization. Oxford University Press, 1998.
↑ Lal, B. B. Piecing Together: Memoirs of an Archaeologist. Aryan International Books, 2011.
↑ McIntosh, Jane R. A Peaceful Realm: The Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilization. Westview Press, 2002.
↑ Possehl, Gregory L. Indus Age: The Beginnings. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
↑ Possehl, Gregory L. The Indus Civilization. Alta Mira Press, 2002.
↑ Sarkar, Anindya, et al. “Oxygen Isotope in Archaeological Bioapatites from India: Implications to Climate Change and Decline of Bronze Age Harappan civilization.” Nature Scientific Reports, vol. 6, May 2016, pp. 1–9. doi:10.1038/srep26555.
↑ The text gives the impression that Islam spread in India due to merchants spreading it. The truth is that Islam spread due to forced conversion (either through violence, intimidation or extra-taxation for non-believers known as jizya)
↑ Will Durant in Our Oriental Heritage states the following: The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.... The first Moslem attack was a passing raid upon Multan, in the western Punjab (664 A.D.)... But the real Moslem conquest of India did not come till.... the year 997.... when Mahmud.... swept across the frontier with a force inspired by a pious aspiration for booty. He met the unprepared Hindus at Bhimnagar, slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their temples, and carried away the accumulated treasures of centuries. Returning to Ghazni he astonished the ambassadors of foreign powers by displaying “jewels and unbored pearls and rubies shining like sparks, or like wine congealed with ice, and emeralds like fresh sprigs of myrtle, and diamonds in size and weight like pomegranates.” Each winter Mahmud descended into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with full freedom to pillage and kill; each spring he returned to his capital richer than before. At Mathura (on the Jumna) he took from the temple its statues of gold encrusted with precious stones, and emptied its coffers of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewelry; he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of two hundred years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naphtha and burnt to the ground. Six years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, Somnath, killed all its fifty thousand inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni. In the end he became, perhaps, the richest king that history has ever known. Sometimes he spared the population of the ravaged cities, and took them home to be sold as slaves; but so great was the number of such captives that after some years no one could be found to offer more than a few shillings for a slave. Before every important engagement Mahmud knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of God upon his arms. He reigned for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years and honors, Moslem historians ranked him as the greatest monarch of his time, and one of the greatest sovereigns of any age.
↑ Seeing the canonization that success had brought to this magnificent thief, other Moslem rulers profited by his example, though none succeeded in bettering his instruction. In 1186 the Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghanistan, invaded India, captured the city of Delhi, destroyed its temples, confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its palaces to establish the Sultanate of Delhi—an alien despotism fastened upon northern India for three centuries, and checked only by assassination and revolt. The first of these bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of his kind—fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts, as the Mohammedan historian tells us, “were bestowed by hundreds of thousands, and his slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands. “In one victory of this warrior (who had been purchased as a slave), “fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.” Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and brigands by casting them under the feet of elephants, removing their skins, stuffing these with straw and hanging them from the gates of Delhi. When some Mongolian habitants who had settled in Delhi, and had been converted to Islam, attempted arising, Sultan Alau-d-din (the conqueror of Chitor) had all the males—from fifteen to thirty thousand of them-slaughtered in one day. Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak acquired the throne by murdering his father, became a great scholar and an elegant writer, dabbled in mathematics, physics and Greek philosophy, surpassed his predecessors in bloodshed and brutality, fed the flesh of a rebel nephew to the rebel’s wife and children, ruined the country with reckless inflation, and laid it waste with pillage and murder till the inhabitants fled to the jungle. He killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a Moslem historian, “there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his Civil Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers and executioners were wearied out by their work of dragging the victims and putting them to death in crowds.” In order to found a new capital at Daulatabad he drove every inhabitant from Delhi and left it a desert; and hearing that a blind man had stayed behind in Delhi, he ordered him to be dragged from the old to the new capital, so that only a leg remained of the wretch when his last journey was finished. The Sultan complained that the people did not love him, or recognize his undeviating justice. He ruled India for a quarter of a century, and died in bed. His successor, Firoz Shah, invaded Bengal, offered a reward for every Hindu head, paid for 180,000 of them, raided Hindu villages for slaves, and died at the ripe age of eighty. Sultan Ahmad Shah feasted for three days whenever the number of defenseless Hindus slain in his territories in one day reached twenty thousand.
↑ These rulers were often men of ability, and their followers were gifted with fierce courage and industry; only so can we understand how they could have maintained their rule among a hostile people so overwhelmingly outnumbering them. All of them were armed with a religion militaristic in operation, but far superior in its stoical monotheism to any of the popular cults of India; they concealed its attractiveness by making the public exercise of the Hindu religions illegal, and thereby driving them more deeply into the Hindu soul. Some of these thirsty despots had culture as well as ability; they patronized the arts, and engaged artists and artisans–usually of Hindu origin– to build for them magnificent mosques and tombs; some of them were scholars, and delighted in converse with historians, poets and scientists. One of the greatest scholars of Asia, Alberuni, accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni to India and wrote a scientific survey of India comparable to Pliny’s Natural History and Humboldt’s Cosmos. The Moslem historians were almost as numerous as the generals, and yielded nothing to them in the enjoyment of bloodshed and war. The Sultans drew from the people every rupee of tribute that could be exacted by the ancient art of taxation, as well as by straightforward robbery; but they stayed in India, spent their spoils in India, and there by turned them back into India’s economic life. Nevertheless, their terrorism and exploitation advanced that weakening of Hindu physique and morale, which had been begun by an exhausting climate, an inadequate diet, political disunity, and pessimistic religions.
↑ The usual policy of the Sultans was clearly sketched by Alau-d-din, who required his advisers to draw up “rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion.” Half of the gross produce of the soil was collected by the government; native rulers had taken one-sixth. “No Hindu,” says a Moslem historian, “could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver...or of any superfluity was to be seen.... Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and chains, were all employed to enforce payment.” When one of his own advisers protested against this policy, Alau-d-din answered: “Oh Doctor, thou art a learned man, but thou hast no experience; I am an unlettered man, but I have a great deal. Be assured, then, that the Hindus will never become submissive and obedient till they are reduced to poverty. I have therefore given orders that just sufficient shall be left to them from year to year of corn, milk and curds, but that they shall not be allowed to accumulate any property.”
↑ Abraham Eraly in The Age of Wrath: The History of the Delhi Sultanate has similar things to say. This is precisely because both Will Durant and Abraham Eraly have based their contentions on the records left by the historians of the various Sultans mentioned in the above.
↑ 5-17 Prof. S. Shankar et al support letter
↑ 5-17 Kamala Visweswaran South Asian Faculty Group
↑ Gupta, S. P. 'The Dawn of Civilization.' In History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization: Volume I: Part 1, edited by G. C. Pandey and D. P. Chattopadhyaya. New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 1999.

[1] Monisha Bajaj University Profile accessed 14 May, 2024

[2] 5-17 Thenmozhi Soundararajan South Asian Histories for All + Sikh Coalition

[3] Gupta, S. P. “The Dawn of Civilization.” History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization: Volume I: Part 1, edited by G. C. Pandey and D. P. Chattopadhyaya, Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 1999.

[4] Singh, K. (2021). Colonial Roots of the Aryan Invasion/Migration Theory and the Contemporary Archaeological Evidence in Western Sources. Indian Historical Review, 48(2), 251-272. https://doi.org/10.1177/03769836211052101

[5] Dikshit, K. N. “Origin of Early Harappan Cultures in the Sarasvati Valley: Recent Archaeological Evidence and Radiometric Dates.” Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology, vol. 9, 2013, pp. 132.

[6] Kautilya. The Arthaśāstra. Translated and edited by L. N. Rangarajan, Penguin Books, 1992.

[7] Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark. Ancient Cities of the Indus Civilization. Oxford University Press, 1998.

[8] Lal, B. B. Piecing Together: Memoirs of an Archaeologist. Aryan International Books, 2011.

[9] McIntosh, Jane R. A Peaceful Realm: The Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilization. Westview Press, 2002.

[10] Possehl, Gregory L. Indus Age: The Beginnings. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

[11] Possehl, Gregory L. The Indus Civilization. Alta Mira Press, 2002.

[12] Sarkar, Anindya, et al. “Oxygen Isotope in Archaeological Bioapatites from India: Implications to Climate Change and Decline of Bronze Age Harappan civilization.” Nature Scientific Reports, vol. 6, May 2016, pp. 1–9. doi:10.1038/srep26555.

[13] The text gives the impression that Islam spread in India due to merchants spreading it. The truth is that Islam spread due to forced conversion (either through violence, intimidation or extra-taxation for non-believers known as jizya)

[14] Will Durant in Our Oriental Heritage states the following: The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.... The first Moslem attack was a passing raid upon Multan, in the western Punjab (664 A.D.)... But the real Moslem conquest of India did not come till.... the year 997.... when Mahmud.... swept across the frontier with a force inspired by a pious aspiration for booty. He met the unprepared Hindus at Bhimnagar, slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their temples, and carried away the accumulated treasures of centuries. Returning to Ghazni he astonished the ambassadors of foreign powers by displaying “jewels and unbored pearls and rubies shining like sparks, or like wine congealed with ice, and emeralds like fresh sprigs of myrtle, and diamonds in size and weight like pomegranates.” Each winter Mahmud descended into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with full freedom to pillage and kill; each spring he returned to his capital richer than before. At Mathura (on the Jumna) he took from the temple its statues of gold encrusted with precious stones, and emptied its coffers of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewelry; he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of two hundred years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naphtha and burnt to the ground. Six years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, Somnath, killed all its fifty thousand inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni. In the end he became, perhaps, the richest king that history has ever known. Sometimes he spared the population of the ravaged cities, and took them home to be sold as slaves; but so great was the number of such captives that after some years no one could be found to offer more than a few shillings for a slave. Before every important engagement Mahmud knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of God upon his arms. He reigned for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years and honors, Moslem historians ranked him as the greatest monarch of his time, and one of the greatest sovereigns of any age.

[15] Seeing the canonization that success had brought to this magnificent thief, other Moslem rulers profited by his example, though none succeeded in bettering his instruction. In 1186 the Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghanistan, invaded India, captured the city of Delhi, destroyed its temples, confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its palaces to establish the Sultanate of Delhi—an alien despotism fastened upon northern India for three centuries, and checked only by assassination and revolt. The first of these bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of his kind—fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts, as the Mohammedan historian tells us, “were bestowed by hundreds of thousands, and his slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands. “In one victory of this warrior (who had been purchased as a slave), “fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.” Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and brigands by casting them under the feet of elephants, removing their skins, stuffing these with straw and hanging them from the gates of Delhi. When some Mongolian habitants who had settled in Delhi, and had been converted to Islam, attempted arising, Sultan Alau-d-din (the conqueror of Chitor) had all the males—from fifteen to thirty thousand of them-slaughtered in one day. Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak acquired the throne by murdering his father, became a great scholar and an elegant writer, dabbled in mathematics, physics and Greek philosophy, surpassed his predecessors in bloodshed and brutality, fed the flesh of a rebel nephew to the rebel’s wife and children, ruined the country with reckless inflation, and laid it waste with pillage and murder till the inhabitants fled to the jungle. He killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a Moslem historian, “there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his Civil Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers and executioners were wearied out by their work of dragging the victims and putting them to death in crowds.” In order to found a new capital at Daulatabad he drove every inhabitant from Delhi and left it a desert; and hearing that a blind man had stayed behind in Delhi, he ordered him to be dragged from the old to the new capital, so that only a leg remained of the wretch when his last journey was finished. The Sultan complained that the people did not love him, or recognize his undeviating justice. He ruled India for a quarter of a century, and died in bed. His successor, Firoz Shah, invaded Bengal, offered a reward for every Hindu head, paid for 180,000 of them, raided Hindu villages for slaves, and died at the ripe age of eighty. Sultan Ahmad Shah feasted for three days whenever the number of defenseless Hindus slain in his territories in one day reached twenty thousand.

[16] These rulers were often men of ability, and their followers were gifted with fierce courage and industry; only so can we understand how they could have maintained their rule among a hostile people so overwhelmingly outnumbering them. All of them were armed with a religion militaristic in operation, but far superior in its stoical monotheism to any of the popular cults of India; they concealed its attractiveness by making the public exercise of the Hindu religions illegal, and thereby driving them more deeply into the Hindu soul. Some of these thirsty despots had culture as well as ability; they patronized the arts, and engaged artists and artisans–usually of Hindu origin– to build for them magnificent mosques and tombs; some of them were scholars, and delighted in converse with historians, poets and scientists. One of the greatest scholars of Asia, Alberuni, accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni to India and wrote a scientific survey of India comparable to Pliny’s Natural History and Humboldt’s Cosmos. The Moslem historians were almost as numerous as the generals, and yielded nothing to them in the enjoyment of bloodshed and war. The Sultans drew from the people every rupee of tribute that could be exacted by the ancient art of taxation, as well as by straightforward robbery; but they stayed in India, spent their spoils in India, and there by turned them back into India’s economic life. Nevertheless, their terrorism and exploitation advanced that weakening of Hindu physique and morale, which had been begun by an exhausting climate, an inadequate diet, political disunity, and pessimistic religions.

[17] The usual policy of the Sultans was clearly sketched by Alau-d-din, who required his advisers to draw up “rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion.” Half of the gross produce of the soil was collected by the government; native rulers had taken one-sixth. “No Hindu,” says a Moslem historian, “could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver...or of any superfluity was to be seen.... Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and chains, were all employed to enforce payment.” When one of his own advisers protested against this policy, Alau-d-din answered: “Oh Doctor, thou art a learned man, but thou hast no experience; I am an unlettered man, but I have a great deal. Be assured, then, that the Hindus will never become submissive and obedient till they are reduced to poverty. I have therefore given orders that just sufficient shall be left to them from year to year of corn, milk and curds, but that they shall not be allowed to accumulate any property.”

[18] Abraham Eraly in The Age of Wrath: The History of the Delhi Sultanate has similar things to say. This is precisely because both Will Durant and Abraham Eraly have based their contentions on the records left by the historians of the various Sultans mentioned in the above.

[19] 5-17 Prof. S. Shankar et al support letter

[20] 5-17 Kamala Visweswaran South Asian Faculty Group

[21] Gupta, S. P. 'The Dawn of Civilization.' In History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization: Volume I: Part 1, edited by G. C. Pandey and D. P. Chattopadhyaya. New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 1999.

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