Pandurang Vaman Kane
Indian Indologist and Sanskrit scholar
Pandurang Vaman Kane (pronounced Kaa-nay) (7 May 1880 – 8 May 1972) was a notable Indologist and Sanskrit scholar. He received India's highest civilian award Bharat Ratna in 1963 for his scholarly work that spanned more than 40 years of active academic research that resulted in 6,500 pages of History of Dharmaśāstra.
Quotes
edit- Nothing is gained by a total denial of even sporadic cases of religious persecution and vandalism. But such cases were very few and their very paucity emphasizes and illuminates the great religious tolerance of the Indian people for more than two thousand years.’ ... There is a great difference between local brawls as in the above case and a general policy by a community or a king of wholesale persecution.
- About alleged cases of religious persecution by Hindus. P.V. Kane, History of the Dharmashastras, Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law, Volume V, Part II, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona, 1977, p. 1011, note 1645a. quoted from Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers.
- Ancient sages laid the foundation by insisting...that there is and must be harmony between man’s spirit and the spirit of the world and man’s endeavor should be to realize in his actions and in his life this harmonyand unity. The Upanishads teach that man gains by giving up (by renunciation) and exhorts man not to covet another’s wealth (Ishopanishad I: ‘tena tyaktena bhunjeetha maa grdhah kasya svid dhanam.’... there are certain values of our culture that have endured for three thousand years, viz, the consciousness that the whole world is the manifestation of the Eternal Essence, restraint of senses, charity and kindness...Many young men have in these days hardly anything which they believe as worth striving for whatever the cost maybe, and hence they have nothing to practice as an ideal. We have to preserve a religious spirit among common men and women, while getting rid of superstitions...opposed to all science and common sense...It is not the age-old principles of Hindu religion that are at fault, it is modern Hindu society that has to be reorganized... [23] Social reforms and politics have to be preached through our age-old religion and philosophy. If a large majority of our people and the leaders throw away or neglect religion and spirituality altogether, the probability is that we shall lose both spiritual life and social betterment...
- History of Dharmashastra: Volume V, Part II: P.V. Kane, BORI, Pune, 2007, Quoted in S. Balakrishna, Seventy years of secularism.
- Kane, in fact, wrote that the Rigvedic people were earlier than the Indus valley people” and that there was some evidence to believe that the Indus valley people “were probably Aryans “ or different but ‘contemporaneous with the Rigveda Aryans”.
- quoted in Chakrabarti, D. K. (2009). Who Owns the Indian Past?: The Case of the Indus Civilization.
