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Koenraad Elst

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Dr. Koenraad Elst is a Belgian writer, scholar and researcher. He is the author of over ten books on topics related to Hinduism, Indian history, and Indian politics.

Biography

Template:Hindu politics He was born in Leuven, Belgium, on 7 August 1959, into a Flemish Catholic family. He graduated in Philosophy, Chinese Studies and Indo-Iranian Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven.

During a stay at the Benaras Hindu University, he discovered India’s communal problem and wrote his first book about the budding Ayodhya conflict. While establishing himself as a columnist for a number of Belgian and Indian papers, he frequently returned to India to study various aspects of its ethno-religio-political configuration and interview Hindu and other leaders and thinkers. His research on the ideological development of Hindu revivalism earned him his Ph.D. in Leuven in 1998. He has also published about multiculturalism, language policy issues, ancient Chinese history and philosophy, comparative religion, and the Aryan invasion debate. Dr. Elst became a well-known author on Indian politics in the 1990s. He also met the Hindu writer Sita Ram Goel in India, and was influenced by his writings.

Koenraad Elst has also written several books on the Aryan invasion debate, Ayodhya temple issue and issues related to Islam, Christianity and Hinduism.

Controversies and influences

Elst is a member of the Christian-Democratic trade-union. He described himself as "a secular humanist with an active interest in religions, particularly Taoism and Hinduism, and keeping a close watch on the variegated Pagan revival in Europe."

He seems not to have changed his religion, for he said: "I am neither a Hindu nor a nationalist. And I don’t need to belong to those or to any specific ideological categories in order to use my eyes and ears. (...) As I said, I am phasing out my involvement with communalism studies. The subject is really very simple, the problem as well as the solution. It isn’t all that challenging and interesting, it only seemed that way because of the artificial obstacles thrown up by the secularists." And he wrote: "However, I do readily admit to being a “fellow-traveller” of Dharmic civilization in its struggle for survival against the ongoing aggression and subversion by well-organized hostile ideologies."

Koenraad Elst is a controversial figure. He has been able to gain only limited acceptance among the dominant stream of the academic study of South Asia/India both in the West and in India, because many academics, including such as are internationally influential, regard him as biased and agenda-based. He is very much in the centre of debates between so-called "Hindutva" and the so-called "Indian Marxist" or "pseudo-secular" groups, being either acclaimed or rejected according to the respective stance of those concerned. As values and opinions play a dominant role in this matter, the evaluation of such controversies is extremely difficult.

Elst has also published many articles in Dutch, and he contributed to the conservative magazine Nucleus , along with other interventions described as emanating from right-wing circles in Belgium. Koenraad Elst is also a contributor to the "conservative-libertarian" internet magazine The Brussels Journal, the flemish satirical weekly 't Pallieterke and other Belgian or Dutch publications. He also wrote for Indian magazines like Outlook India and the Kashmir Herald. He wrote a postcript to a book written by the neoconservative Daniel Pipes ("The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West").

On the ideological side, it was claimed that K. Elst's citations, referred authors and developments take place in the general framework of nationalist and reformist ideologies, which appeared in India in the late XIXth century and in the beginning of the XXth century.

Bibliography

Notes

  1. Article from bharatvani.org
  2. bharatvani.org op. cit.
  3. Elst interview
  4. Voice of Dharma review
  5. All three terms reproduced here are those used by the respective opponents in such debates and are not to be taken at face value.
  6. bharatvani.org op.cit.
  7. See "some more reading matter about Dr. K. Elst" by Prof. R. Zydenbos in .
  8. For a description of the rising of reformist ideologies in India see René Guénon "Introduction To The Study Of The Hindu Doctrines", chapter "Vedanta Westernized".

See also

External links

Controversies

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