No, he is actually being quite above board. He is making a cogent argument about a certain flexibility that Dharmic culture sustains, that Abrahamic cultures cannot.deepbluehum wrote:What also comes to mind are texts like "The Sermon on the Mount According to Swami So and So," interpreting Christianity in Hindu terms. Everything this guy blames the West of doing, Hindus did it too. He's doing underhanded Hindu proselytizing. This is exactly the kind of empty debate the Buddha warned of.
What he is saying is not new-- for example, Bataille makes a distinction between festival cultures which regularly engage in the destruction of surplus value and hegemonic cultures which supress such destruction (see The Accursed Share). Or exam the interesting essay from Ten Thousand Plateus called Nomadology.
What Malhotra is interested in, among other things, as driving home the fact that western academic myth of the Aryan Invasion Theory, etc. has created many distortions of Indian culture. This is not to say that there are no linguistic continuities between peoples in the so called IE continuum. But languages are not peoples.
Also I find his work appealing, especially as someone who has abandoned Buddhist chauvanism -- and such chauvanism is essentially a Western phenomena.