Rajiv Malhotra (born 15 September 1950) is an Indian-American author, public intellectual, and a public proponent of Hindutva. He is the founder of Infinity Foundation, an organisation known to focus on Indic studies, and financially aid Columbia University's project to translate the Tibetan Buddhist Tengyur.
He has been called a Hindu nationalist, due to his prolifically writing in opposition to the western academic study of Indian culture and society, which he maintains denigrates the tradition and undermines the interests of India "by encouraging the paradigms that oppose its unity and integrity". Malhotra has authored books that cover subjects such as civilisational studies, comparative religion, philosophy of science that espouse ideals of Indic traditions and their position in the global discourse.
Early life and education Malhotra was born on September 15, 1950 in New Delhi, India. He earned his undergraduate education in physics at St. Stephen's College, Delhi. He subsequently moved to the United States where he earned a degree in computer science from Syracuse University.
Career In 1995, Malhotra established Infinity foundation in Princeton, New Jersey.
Malhotra had been a speaker at an international conference held at the Center for Indic Studies, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and was a board member of the Foundation for Indic Philosophy and Culture at the Claremont Colleges. He also wrote extensively on internet discussion groups and e-magazines.
In October 2018, Malhotra was appointed an honorary visiting professor at the Centre for Media Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. On 6 November 2018, he delivered his first lecture organized by the School of Sanskrit and Indic studies on the topic of Sanskrit non-translatables. As of May 2026, Malhotra serves as the chairman of Center for Indic Studies.
Infinity Foundation Malhotra founded the institute in 1994; followed by Educational Council of Indic Traditions (ECIT) in 2000. The foundation works without any full-time workers other than the Malhotra himself. The stated goals were to fight a perceived misrepresentation of ancient Indian religions and to document the contributions of India to world civilization. No member of the advisory board was an academic and most belonged to the software industry.
The Foundation has given more than 400 grants for research, education and community work. Financially aids Columbia University's project to translate the Tibetan Buddhist Tengyur. It has also provided small grants to major universities in support of programs including a visiting professorship in Indic studies at Harvard University, Yoga and Hindi classes at Rutgers University, the research and teaching of non-dualistic philosophies at the University of Hawaii, Global Renaissance Institute and a Center for Buddhist studies at Columbia University, a program in religion and science at the University of California, an endowment for the Center for Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, and lectures at the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. The foundation has provided funding for journals like Education about Asia and the International Journal of Hindu Studies and for the establishment of the Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence at James Madison University.
Views Criticism of American academia (2000s)
Wendy's Child Syndrome
In early 2000s Malhotra started writing articles criticising Wendy Doniger and related scholars, claiming that she applied Freudian psycho-analysis to aspects of Indian culture. His 2002 blog post titled "Wendy's Child Syndrome"Rajiv Malhotra (2002), "RISA Lila – 1: Wendy's Child Syndrome" was considered as the starting point of a "rift between some Western Hinduism scholars [...] and some conservative Hindus in India, the United States, and elsewhere". Martha Nussbaum has called it a "war" by "the Hindu right" against American scholars.
The blog post "has become a pivotal treatise in a recent rift between some Western Hinduism scholars—many of whom teach or have studied at Chicago—and some conservative Hindus in India, the United States, and elsewhere". Malhotra concluded in his blog post: "Rights of individual scholars must be balanced against rights of cultures and communities they portray, especially minorities that often face intimidation. Scholars should criticize but not define another's religion."
According to Braverman, "Though Malhotra's academic targets say he has some valid discussion points, they also argue that his rhetoric taps into the rightward trend and attempts to silence unorthodox, especially Western, views."
The essay, together with a series of related essays and interviews, has been republished in Academic Hinduphobia, in the wake of the withdrawal of Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History from the Indian market, due to a lawsuit "alleging that it was biased and insulting to Hindus".rajivmalhotra.com, Academic Hinduphobia The withdrawal led to extensive media attention, and renewed sales in India. Malhotra said "the drama has diverted attention away from the substantive errors in her scholarship to be really about being an issue of censorship by radical Hindus", hence the republication of his critique of Wendy Doniger and scholars related to her.
American academia In his 2003 blog post "Does South Asian Studies Undermine India?" at Rediff India Abroad: India as it happens, Malhotra criticises what he views as uncritical funding of South Asian Studies by Indian-American donors:
Malhotra voices four criticisms of American academia. Primarily, he claims "American academia is dominated by a Eurocentric perspective that views western culture as being the fount of world civilisation and refuses to acknowledge the contributions of non-western societies such as India to European culture and technique". Then, he goes on to say that the academic study of religion in the United States is based on the model of the "Abrahamic" traditions; this model is not applicable to Hinduism. He says Western scholars focus on the "sensationalist, negative attributes of religion and present it in a demeaning way that shows a lack of respect for the sentiments of the practitioners of the religion". His final claim is that South Asian Studies programs in the United States create "a false identity and unity" between India and its Muslim neighbour states, and undermine India "by focusing on its internal cleavages and problems".
Malhotra argues that American scholarship has undermined India "by encouraging the paradigms that oppose its unity and integrity", with scholars playing critical roles, often under the garb of 'human rights' in channeling foreign intellectual and material support to exacerbate India's internal fault lines. He claims Indian-American donors were "hoodwinked" into thinking they were supporting India through their monetary contributions to such programmes. Malhotra compares the defence of Indian interests with corporate brand management, distrusting the loyalties of Indian scholars.
Malhotra argues that a positive stance on India has been under-represented in American academia, due to programmes being staffed by Westerners, their "Indian-American Sepoys" and Indian Americans who want to be white – whom he disparages as "career opportunists" and "Uncle Toms", who "in their desire to become even marginal members of the Western Grand Narrative, sneer at Indian culture in the same manner as the colonialists once did". Malhotra has accused academia of abetting the "Talibanisation" of India, which would also lead to the radicalisation of other Asian countries.
U-turn theory
Malhotra posits that the Western appropriation of Indic ideas and knowledge systems has a long history. He names this theory of his "The U-Turn Theory". He then goes on to show how the appropriation occurs in several stages: In the first stage, a Westerner approaches an Indian guru or tradition with extreme deference, acquires the knowledge as a sincere disciple, lives in the ashram and adopts the usage of Hindu iconography. Once the transfer of knowledge is complete, the former disciple, and their followers progressively erase all traces of the original source, such as removal of the Sanskrit terms and historic context of India. The knowledge gets repackaged as the idea of their own thought or they claim to be universal by removal of the Indian heritage, and may even proceed to denigrate the source Indian tradition. At this stage, the traditional Indian knowledge gets decontextualized and Christianized. In the final stage, the ideas are exported back to India by the former disciple and/or his followers for consumption as Western science or as 'superior' thought. Malhotra cites numerous examples to support this theory, dating from the erasure of Upanishadic and Vijnanavada Buddhist influences on Plotinus to the modern day reimportation of Christian Yoga into India.
As evidence, he cites a number of "U-Turners" from the scholarly fields of mind sciences, cognitive sciences and psychology: The theory of multiple intelligences by Howard Gardner was inspired from the original works of Sri Aurobindo's Planes and Parts of the Being. The techniques followed in Herbert Benson's 1975 book The Relaxation Response matches that of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation (TM) teachings, but Malhotra critiques that Benson doesn't acknowledge the source on his scholarly works. Malhotra refers to various western sources to support his argument. Furthermore, Malhotra claims that, Benson nudges towards Christianization through his 1987 book Your Maximum Mind by introducing faith and hope into his trademark technique, Benson Method, through funding from the Templeton Foundation. Daniel Goleman, famously known as the originator of Emotional intelligence, didn't mention the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba in his academic work, who had a primary influence on Goleman during his time in India. Although Goleman used Dalai Lama for his introductions, he was peer pressured to disguise the "Indian background" during his PhD dissertation. Jon Kabat-Zinn applied Buddhist meditation techniques in therapeutic and medical settings under the name of Mindfulness Meditation. However, Kabat-Zinn doesn't credit the original Buddhist sources, and instead called the techniques his "own" by mentioning that he had "developed" them himself. Malhotra claims that this was the commercial franchising of Vipassanā.
In Vivekananda's Ideas and the Two Revolutions in Western Thought (2013), Malhotra claims that Vivekananda has deeply influenced modern western thought, but that this influence in some cases remains unacknowledged and uncredited. Some examples Malhotra cites are William James and his work The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); Aldous Huxley and his work The Perennial Philosophy (1945); and the notion of involution in the works of Ken Wilber, a term which Vivekananda probably took from western Theosophists, notably Helena Blavatsky, in addition to Darwin's notion of evolution, and possibly referring to the Samkhya term sātkarya.
Criticism of Christian Yoga Malhotra believes that the practice of a distorted version of Yoga, Christian Yoga, is not only inimical but also detrimental to Christianity's fundamental principles and doctrines. He supports his argument by specifically citing the theology of Christianity and Bible, and compares it to the philosophies of Yoga. Yoga transcends all dogma and beliefs.