A Fake and Fraudulent Chitrapur Saraswat

 

 

A Fake and Fraudulent Chitrapur Saraswat

Shrikant G. Talageri

 

I am a Chitrapur Saraswat, and proud to be one. Proud not because of any kind of feeling of personal or ethnic superiority, because I do not believe in such a thing as ethnic purity or superiority: I know there must have been massive communal intermixing in the last thousand years alone. I would have been proud of my caste or community, whatever it was. I believe anyone and everyone in the world should be proud of their own identity and culture and of their ancestors, from a positive point of view, simply because it is their identity and origin, and because those were their ancestors. And not from a negative point of view which treats other identities and cultures, and the ancestors of others, as being in any way inferior to their own, or in any way requiring to be replaced or supplanted by their own: Cultural Imperialism, Deracination, Exploitative Colonialism, Racism, Casteism, and Religious Proselytism are some examples of viciously negative or vikṛta forms of pride in one's own identity, origin, culture and ancestry (or its equivalent "opposite": e.g. a person culturally or religiously converted to another culture or religion who bears hatred or contempt for his own ancestral culture and religion). In fact, it is because I am proud of my own identity, origins and ancestors, that I can completely identify, empathize and sympathize with every other person in the world who is proud of his own identity, origin and ancestry in a similar positive sense and concerned for their defence. 

[Incidentally, it is in this sense that I am proud to call myself a Hindu Nationalist: I do not consider the word "nationalist" to be a negative one, and one to be shunned, as so many people do. In my article on "Hindu Nationalism", a part of my longer article in the Sita Ram Goel commemoration Volume "India's Only Communalist" (edited by Koenraad Elst) published by Voice of India in 2005, I have made it very clear and in great detail that a true positive nationalist has respect and comradely feelings towards every other person in the world who is also a positive nationalist, and cannot feel disrespect for, or indifference or hostility towards, someone else's positive nationalism. Within India itself, as I pointed out in that article, and in all subsequent articles, my Hindu Nationalism equally encompasses our Vedic Hindu heritage as well as all other different cultures native to this land in their purest forms. The Andamanese culture, the oldest, most distinctive, and today the most endangered and most under-attack culture, is to me as much my own culture as the culture of the Rigveda, or as Konkani, Marathi or Kannada culture, and, I have written many articles about the Andamanese people and culture and their right to survival in pure form. From my writings, it should be clear to anyone that I am no lover of Islamic Kashmir, and I have even, in a recent article, condemned the government for pouring billions, if not trillions, of Indian/Hindu taxpayers' money in "developmental" projects in Kashmir in desperate bids to try to woo Kashmiri Muslim voters. But anyone, Kashmiri or non-Kashmiri, Hindu or Muslim, pro-Indian or pro-Pakistani, who agitates against environmental exploitation and destruction in Kashmir in the name of "development", will have my full and unapologetic support on that particular matter].    

 

My own particular pride in my community is based on the fact that a tiny community totaling around 22000 people is not only probably the most literate (and also dowry-free) community in the country but has produced some of the topmost luminaries in almost every field to an extent totally disproportionate to its numbers. My article lists these luminaries (many more have come to my notice after that, but I know where to stop!):

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-chitrapur-saraswat-community.html

But I am naturally not proud of anything and everything associated with my community. Like all communities in the world, there will always be specific things which require to be deplored or to be ashamed for: as a probably landowning Brahmin community in the villages of Karnataka, many feudal social evils were very present in our community (I am sure caste prejudice and exploitation of lower castes was one of them in the past), and as recently as fifty years ago we still had some living examples of the deplorable shaven-headed widow era (one of my mother's aunts was one of them).

Likewise, while I am proud to note the number of eminent luminaries in every field in my community, I am not an admirer of all of them: their numbers include many vicious and anti-Hindu leftist writers, dramatists and journalists. Recently, I was shocked beyond words to discover that the judge who sentenced Swatantryaveer (Vinayak Damodar) Savarkar to fifty years imprisonment in the Andaman islands was a Chitrapur Saraswat, and an eminent one: Narayan G. Chandavarkar, President of the Indian National Congress, 1900-1901. Many of these anti-Hindu leftist "intellectuals" as well as N.G. Chandavarkar are mentioned in the list of "eminent" Chitrapur Saraswats in my article: their anti-Hindu activities do not make them any the less "eminent", just as their "eminence" does not make their anti-Hindu activities any the less condemnable.

 

But this article is about another Chitrapur Saraswat whom I would never label as "eminent", and whom I would consider to be not only deplorable and condemnable but also a fake and a fraud. This is a Chitrapur Saraswat who has apparently converted from Hinduism to Christianity, and actually become an Evangelist "pastor" Shekhar Kallianpur. His actions are certainly deplorable and condemnable, as are the actions of all persons who convert and get alienated from their ancestral religions and cultures, and, worse, themselves actually join and become a part of the army of marauders attacking their ancestral religions and cultures. But this in itself is not the reason for calling him a fake and a fraud: the following video shows why I call him a fake and a fraud:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ae9IqaAqnk

This video, put up by this fraud himself, shows a dramatized presentation of the story of how he converted to Christianity, which forms a regular part of his repertoire. Look carefully at the video: the extremely traditional Brahmin boy with his extremely traditional Brahmin father, both dressed up in the kind of extremely traditional Brahmin clothes that one sees in the Kannada films on traditional Karnataka Brahmins which leftist or art directors used to produce in the nineteen-seventies. This video would have us believe that a Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmin boy from a village in Karnataka, who dressed in such traditional clothes and indulged in traditional studies of Hindu scriptures, was transformed into the extremely fanatical Christian Evangelist that this man is today, who speaks in a fake westernized accent and lives a modern westernized lifestyle!

I am not casting any doubts on this man being a Chitrapur Saraswat. But I would really be very interested in knowing his exact date of birth, and the exact name of the village, and the exact years CE, in which he lived in this extremely picturesque traditional attire and upbringing in his childhood. Was he a resident of our Chitrapur Math in Shirali in Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka (or one of its branches in other parts of coastal Karnataka), which is the only place I can think of where a young Chitrapur Saraswat boy in the second half of the twentieth century could have been living in this manner. Our community has mostly lived in cities and large towns in the twentieth century, and even Chitrapur Saraswats living in villages in the most mofussil rural area have been more modernized and westernized in their clothes and activities. I am not saying this with pride: I am just pointing out a fact. Where exactly was this traditional village where this "pastor" lived as a "traditional Brahmin boy" steeped in Hindu scriptures in his childhood?

 

This is not a new matter nor a big one. Fraud has always been a major cornerstone of Evangelist Christian activity from the moment of birth of this religion, and countless books by countless Indian and western scholars (including our Voice of India books by Sita Ram Goel, Ram Swaroop, Koenraad Elst, Arun Shourie and others, not to mention the Niyogi Committee Report, published by Voice of India) leave no scope for any two views on this. And this "pastor" is just an infinitesimally small cog in the massive machine of Evangelist activities who should really be given no importance by us.

But this particular "pastor" being a Chitrapur Saraswat, his depiction of his traditional "Chitrapur Saraswat" childhood before he saw the light being so blatantly fake and false, and his being in the news a few years ago in connection with an eminent RSS leader, prompted me to write this article.

In pursuance of its role as a vote-getter for the BJP, top leaders of the RSS have been busy in the last many years (or rather more busy than they used to be earlier) in establishing comradely relations with Islamist and Evangelist organizations, where they expect their fulsome praise for those worthies to rake in the Muslim and Christian votes for the BJP.

In one such program in Delhi on 19 December 2019, where there was a gathering of Evangelists from over 17 nations, the vice-President of the RSS, Indresh Kumar, particularly notorious for this kind of super-Secularist activity, was the Chief Guest. Here, for this Chitrapur Saraswat "pastor", Shekhar Kallianpur, it was, in his own words "a God moment for me to bring this beautiful message of Jesus Christ" to this RSS worthy. Strangely (or appropriately?) the event was reported in the newspapers the next day; and in many of the reports, this Shekhar Kallianpur was described as "Vice President of the RSS" bringing the message of Jesus Christ! The "pastor" had to issue a clarification in a 6.54 minutes video (which I have on my computer, downloaded from youtube at that time, but which seems to be missing on youtube now), titled "Pastor Shekhar Kalyanpur CLARIFICATION!!!" which featured his message at the program preceded by a written message:

"CLARIFICATION: This is to clarify the WRONG INFORMATION that is being circulated about me being misrepresented as the Vice President of RSS in the video of my message of CHRISTMAS that was delivered on the 16th December 2019 at New Delhi in the presence of Dr. INDRESH KUMAR Ji, the VICE PRESIDENT of RSS".

Perhaps this was an "amen" of things to come?