This article points out at least two issues about what historians can do, and do do. As a professional historian, I have no truck with people who try to dismiss the whole project of historical recreation as ideology writ large. Sorry folks, but Waterloo happened. Napoleon lost. Why he lost, though, is controversial, can be interpreted in different ways, and its overall significance may be greater or less than one historian or another maintains. We can trace an idea or a symbol, and say some important things about how that idea or symbol changed its meaning over time. This is useful. Just so long as you separate things you can verify from specualtion or inference--which Laine may or may not have done, as I have not read his book. In another context, you can get pissed off at someone who says that we have no peice of paper on which Hitler orders the extermination of the Jews. But it is true. What is bullshit is to infer from this first statement that he had nothing to do with it, or worse, that it didn't happen, which it clearly did. There, you need to look at the wealth of information we have about Hitler, the way he ran his government, other documentary and physical evidence, and Hitler's personal ideology and utterances. Taken together, they seal the deal--the Holocaust happened, and Hitler was in direct, even micromanaging, control of the state that perpetrated the outrage. If Historians and those who write or speak about them were more clear about what is being put forward as demonstrable, and what is, one hopes, informed speculation, then less of this nonsense (althoug not willful attempts at rabble-rousing like this) would take place.

"all hell broke loose, kind of like the recent Chocolate Jesus debacle in New York, only amplified by about a trillion orders of magnitude."

I was trying to think of a religious furore and just couldnt think of one - nicely remembered.

Although... I wonder if there have been any bigger ones recently... For some reason I'm seeing burning embassies...

Nope, I /just/ cant put my finger on it... Oh well. Shrug!

It sounds like the prof has come off saying something like "John Wayne's real name was Marion and he grew up in suburban California". I just don't understand how allegedly smart people can be so irresponsible as to attack an icon that is so dear to so many. We ought to be able to charge him with patriot act violations or something.

But seriously, stories like this warm my heart with the knowledge that people are people no matter where ya go.

it has been very disappointing to read over the last year about indian culture. so many people, women esp., run to those ashrams or whatever as solace from problems in the west. but what do they really know? there are terrible mistreatment of women, vicious marriage matches, sex-based abortion, attacks on any lower castes speaking up in this country about their real historical treatment. the god thing now - it is a new low. i have lost all interest in the mystery of these cultures. yet one reads about all this escape and love by a recent female boomer writer to the east. thank god, i am past that and can address these cultures on political and human rights grounds. this article just adds to that.

Unless you mean the other 100 million or so people with the surname "Gandhi."

India is not and has never been fertile soil for M.K. Gandhi's addlepated political philosophy -- and good riddance to it. Gandhi's movement, remember, ended in a terrible civil war and the murder of, among many others, M.K. Gandhi. Gandhi's political organization was mired in corruption well before independence, and blossomed into the sad socialism of Nehru and the ugly dictatorship of Indira Gandhi.

It bears keeping in mind that Bombay is governed by the Shiv Sena -- "Shivaji's Army" -- an openly fascist political party headed by (see if this sounds familiar) a failed artist with oddball xenophobic theories. Not cryptofascist, not "fascist" as in "Oh those mean Republicans are a bunch of nasty ol' fascists," but actually fascist.

If you want a glimpse at the real political culture in India, check out Raj Kamal Jha's "Fireproof."

While the term "Hindu nationalism" is a convenient punching bag to denigrate the revival of a culture that had been subjugated for nearly a millennium, in this particular case the inconvenient facts do not fit the assumptions. The Sambhaji Brigade, which attacked scholars and ransacked the library, are not composed of Hindu fundamentalists. They are, in fact, virulently anti-Brahmin and have even attacked the leader of the RSS, the favorite bete-noire of anti-Hindus everywhere. Indeed, the Sambhaji Brigade includes a number of Muslims within their ranks; but why let this stand in the way of the appealing fiction of benighted Hindu nationalists attacking a nobel White (Christian?) scholar who only seeks to uncover uncomfortable truths about a cultural native icon. Never mind that his "findings" are wildly speculative and have little, if any, basis. Oh, and while you are at it, pass the martini on the left-hand side (of your high horse)!

"It sounds like the prof has come off saying something like "John Wayne's real name was Marion and he grew up in suburban California"."

Ummm, that speaks more to the shallowness of your own cultural history if your analogy of a cultural icon is a bandy-legged, marginal actor whose only battlefield experience was behind klieg lights. Try Charlemagne or El Cid or Henry V, if those names mean anything to you, and consider what their bastardization based purely on hearsay (to be charitable) would mean to French, Spanish or English proles. Not to condone the violence, but don't downplay the highly mischievous nature of Laine's foolish words.