Navaratna Srinivasa Rajaram was an Indian academic and a Hindutvaideologue, notable for his publications from the Voice of India publishing house, propounding the "Indigenous Aryans" hypothesis and asserting that the Vedic period was extremely advanced from a scientific view-point. ; Rajaram also claimed to have deciphered the Indus script which was rejected.
Rajaram extensively published on topics related to ancient Indian history and Indian archaeology, alleging a Eurocentric bias in Indology and Sanskrit scholarship and arguing within the realms of "Indigenous Aryans" theory instead. He criticized the process by which, he said, Eurocentric 19th century "Indologists / missionaries" arrived at many of their conclusions. Despite being dismissive of exploiting linguistics as a tool for historiography, Rajaram questioned how it was possible for 19th century European evangelical "Indologists / missionaries" to study and develop hypotheses on Indian history, claiming many of them were "functionally illiterate" in Indian languages, including even the fundamental classical language, Sanskrit. Rajaram suggests that: He advocated the Indigenous Aryans hypothesis and rejected Indo-Aryan migration theory as a fabricated version of history devised for missionary and colonial interests, and later propounded by left-liberals and Marxists. Dating the Vedas to circa 7000 BC, he also propounded that the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley corresponds with the end phase of the Vedic Age and thus hypothesized it to be a part of Vedic era. In Puratattva, the journal of the Indian Archaeological Society, Rajaram claimed that "Vedic Indians" taught the Pharaohs of Egypt to build the Pyramids. He also asserted that the concept of secularism being irrelevant to a pluralistic state and thus claimed that ancient Hindu India was a secular state. Rajaram asserted that Islamic scriptures have played a more intricate role in Islamic Fundamentalism rather than socio-economic inequalities. He also claimed to have deciphered the Indus script and of having equated it to late Vedic Sanskrit; both of which were later debunked and of having developed a quantum mechanical proof which supposedly proves the irrationality of all prophet-based revealed religions.
Criticism
Rajaram's contributions have been characterized by physicist and noted skeptic Alan Sokal as pseudoscience and by other reviewers as "trash" and "crude" or "nonsensical" propaganda. Sudeshna Guha notes him to be a sectarian non-scholar. In 2000, Rajaram had flaunted a horse on an Indus seal as a path-breaking discovery that lends credence to the belief that Aryans were the actual inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilization, until Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer exposed the fraud in the Frontline magazine later that year. Romila Thapar, a noted historian, supported the expose against Hindutva driven historical revisionism. Regarding the "Indus horse" hoax, Asko Parpola, professor of Indology at Helsinki University, stated that Rajaram's and Jha's claims of having deciphered the Indus script were universally rejected. Noted epigraphist and an expert in Indus scripts-- Iravatham Mahadevan dismissed Jha-Rajaram work as a "non-starter" and "completely invalid", that even mis-analysed the direction of reading. Speaking from the chair of the President, on the occasion of the 2001 session of Indian History Congress, as to the recent advances in the deciphering of the Indus Script, Mahadevan noted that there was hardly any significant progress in the last decade. Concerning Rajaram's works, he notes:- Thapar noted Rajaram's writings to resemble nineteenth century tracts that were evidently unfamiliar with tools of historiography but were sprinkled with programming references; so as to suggest scientific objectivity. She also noted that anybody who disagreed with him was branded a Marxist. K. N. Panikkar criticized his works to be a communal intervention in historiography that was not an academic exercise in quest of truth but rather a political project knowingly undertaken with a cavalier attitude to the established norms of the discipline, so as to hamper the secular fabric of the society and lead to the establishment of a Hindu state. Endowed with the support of the ruling party, this succeeded in floating an alternative narrative of history and turning history into a contentious issue in popular discourse. Cynthia Ann Humes criticized Rajaram's Politics of History as a polemic work whilst Suraj Bhan noted it to be a demonstration of historical revisionism. Michael Witzel noted him to be an autochthonous writer, whose books were a mythological rewrite of history and were designed for the expatriate Indians of the 21st century, who sought a " largely imagined, glorious but lost distant past".
