“THE SUNNY TRAIT COMMON TO all the luminaries of the New Indian Renaissance is this: they were polymaths in the widest sense. In our context, they had a solid training and grasp of the Bharatiya tradition and had also mastered the Western intellectual and philosophical milieu dating way back to ancient Greece, Rome and all the way up to say, Huxley. This command enabled them to confidently hold the fort in any argument or debate with Western scholars.

An enchanting pleasure in life is to repeatedly savour their clinical demolitions of ill-informed Westerners pontificating on Hindu philosophy, culture, society and history with the omniscient air of a fundamentalist padre preaching from the pulpit. Five random names come to mind.

In terms of both volume and excellence, Mahamahopadhyaya P.V. Kane ranks first. A substantial chunk of the six thousand plus pages of his History of the Dharmasastra is a scrumptious feast of roasted Western scholarship. Of special note is how Kane repeatedly treats Dr. J. Jolly’s misinformed scholarship as if it were a football…..”