PN Oak

[Koenraad Elst]

About PN Oak:

This Marathi-writing Azad Hind Fauz veteran is often paraded by Indian
Marxists as the paragon of Hindu nationalist historiography.  In reality, he
is shunned and treated as an
embarrassing nuisance by Hindu historians and as a plain laughing-stock by
others.  "He makes us laugh away our blues", according to SR Goel in a
letter in BJP Today protesting against the publication of one of Oak's
articles, ending a thirty-year boycot of Oak's theories in Sangh Parivar
publications, boycot enacted after a similar letter of protest in 1961 by RC
Majumdar.  Oak is
especially notorious for his fantastic etymologies: Vatican being
Veda-Vatika, Rome as Ram-nagar, Dutch being the language of the Daityas,
etc.

Yet, sometimes he does have a point.  While the Taj Mahal was of
course not a "Tejo-Mahalya" Shiva temple as he claims, the story of the
Taj's building seems more complicated than Shah Jahan wanted us to believe.
I have an article somewhere by one
Marvin Mills, an architecture professor in New York, arguing that the Taj
could not possibly have been built from scratch in the time given by Shah
Jahan's chronicle.  He suggests that it had been some kind of luxurious
datcha of
Shah Jahan's Rajput vassal Jai Singh, built as a royal holiday resort rather
than as a
mausoleum, then taken over (bought, expropriated, received as a gift?) by
Shah Jahan, who redesigned it for the eternal
rest of his Mumtaz.  That notes for payment of craftsmen have been found,
and that European travellers testified to the construction works, merely
proves that work was done, which is uncontroversial, not that it was an
entirely new building.

But a Hindu temple, the Taj never was.  Oak is on safer ground where he
claims the same for the Kaaba in Mecca.  That too was of course not a Shiva
"Makkeshwar" temple, as he claims, but it is quite certain that pre-Islamic
Arab traders and Gujarati banias visited each other's temples, and
recognized a commonality between the Black Stone and the Shivalingam.  There
is a strong Muslim tradition to this effect, including the belief that after
the islamization of Arabia, the Pagan Arab gods (of whom 360 were
represented in the Kaaba) had fled to India, esp. to the Somnath temple in
Gujarat, which explains the otherwise wasteful and strategically hazardous
raid of Mahmud Ghaznavi to that idol-house.  To the Muslims, Arab polytheism
and Hinduism were essentially the same religion, and the Arab and Indian
polytheists seem to have had the same perception of each other.

Yours sincerely,
Koenraad Elst
ke.raadsrots at unicall.be
http://members.xoom.com/KoenraadElst/