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Koenraad Elst

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Dr. Koenraad Elst 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

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."

It was claimed by Zydenbos that Dr. Koenraad Elst collaborates to extreme right publications in Belgium, sometimes under the name "Koen Elst".. He is also a contributor to the conservative-libertarian newspaper "The Brussels Journal" .

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.

Notes

  1. See "some more reading matter about Dr. K. Elst" by Prof. R. Zydenbos in
  2. For a description of the appearance of reformist ideologies in India see René Guénon "Introduction To The Study Of The Hindu Doctrines", chapter "Vedanta Westernized".

Works

Other publications

  • Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory, In Edwin Bryant and Laurie L. Patton (editors) (2005). Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History. Routledge/Curzon. ISBN 0700714634. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  • Postcript to Daniel Pipes: The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West (1990), Transaction Publishers, paperback (2003) ISBN 0765809966

See also

External links

Controversies

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