{भारतीयविद्वत्परिषत्} Who was Śabarī

[Kushagra Aniket]

Dear Scholars,

I am sharing my Hindi article refuting the view of Svāmī Karpātrī Ji and Svāmī Niścalānanda Sarasvatī Ji that Śabarī was a Brāhmaṇa woman.

Regards,

Kushagra Aniket

Economist and Management Consultant

Columbia University'21

Cornell University'15

New York, NY, U.S.A.

ka...@cornell.edu

[Nityanand Misra]

Dear Kushagra Ji

Very well-written. For the niṣpakṣapāta scholars, it is very clear that Śabarī was not a Brāhmaṇa. The position that she was a Brāhmaṇa stands on weak footing. 

In addition to the Bhuśuṇḍi-Rāmāyaṇa, the episode of Śabarī offering tasted (ucchiṣṭa) fruits to Śrī-Rāmā also occurs in the Premapattana of Rasikottaṃsa.

[Shashi Joshi]

Why is there any need to show that even bhaktas of Rama were all of certain varNa or jAti?

How are people so insecure and why?

Isn't bhakti for all?

Thanks,

~ Shashi

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[K S Kannan]

The article is excellent.

Cogent arguments and authoritative citations.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bvparishat/CANu%2BFoBmvpUvbSDDv6_ZjfRxkvEGUr-Gw5VKk%2BobV6h2F9sHTw%40mail.gmail.com.

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Dr. K.S.Kannan  D.Litt.

​Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj Chair Professor (Retd.), IIT-Madras.

Member, Advisory Board, "Prof. A K Singh AURO Chair of Indic Studies", AURO University, Surat.
Member, Expert Committee for Review of Criticism of Indian Knowledge Traditions, Central Sanskrit University (under MoE, GoI), Ganganath Jha Campus, Prayagraj.
Adjunct Faculty, Dept of Heritage Science and Technology, IIT Hyderabad.

Nominated Member, Academic Committee, Kavi Kula Guru Kalidasa University, Ramtek.
Member, Academic Council, Veda Vijnana Shodha Samsthana.
Academic Director, Swadeshi Indology.
Nominated Member, IIAS, Shimla.

Former Professor, CAHC, Jain University, Bangalore.

Former Director, Karnataka Samskrit University, Bangalore.

Former Head, Dept. of Sanskrit, The National Colleges, Bangalore.

https://sites.google.com/view/kskannan

[सर्वभूतहिते स्मार्त्त कुवँर बिपिन चौहान]

धर्म की जय हो। अधर्म का नाश हो।
प्राणियों में सद्भावना हो। विश्व का कल्याण हो।
गौ माता की जय हो। गौ हत्या बन्द हो।
शासन विधान शास्त्रीय हो। मठ मंदिरों की मर्यादा सुरक्षित हो।
भारत अखण्ड हो। राम राज्य की जय हो।
॥ हर हर हर महादेव ॥

हमारे गुरु पंडितराज बटुक प्रसाद शास्त्री जी ब्रह्म नाल निवासी द्वारा लिखित पुस्तक शबरी ब्राह्मणी थीं पुस्तक का विमोचन करते हुए दादागुरु धर्मसम्राट स्वामी श्री करपात्री जी महाराज।

जानकारी अधिक हेतु पुस्तक हेतु पुस्तक का अनुगमन करें।

धन्यवाद।

[Yasoda Jivan dasa]

Dear kushagra ji

Very nice Article.

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[Kushagra Aniket]

Dear Scholars,

Thank you for all your valuable comments.

Nityananda Ji, thank you for your comments. I did cite the Premapattana of Rasikottaṃsa on p.33 of my (original) article. Interestingly, Karpatri Ji wrote a "sammati" to the 1972 edition of this book!

Subsequently, Dr. Satyan Sharma (a member of this list) kindly provided several citations from Dharmashastras in support of my position. I have incorporated them in this expanded version (please see attached). I have also added a section on the identity of Sage Matanga - it appears that he too was hailed from an antyaja community.

Furthermore, in my study of the writings of Svami Karpatri Ji, I have discovered several other statements which are inconsistent with the shastras. For example, he has claimed that Shudras do not have the adhikara to speak Sanskrit. Worse still, his positions are now cited by activists to denigrate Sanatana Dharma.

The amount of evidence against these positions of Karpatri Ji is simply voluminous. It is imperative that a critical review of his works is conducted.

(I am ignoring the reply of Kunwar Ji, as it is focused on mere sloganeering. The arguments mentioned in the book cited by him have all been reviewed and addressed by me.)

Regards,

Kushagra

Kushagra Aniket

Economist and Management Consultant

Columbia University'21

Cornell University'15

New York, NY, U.S.A.

ka...@cornell.edu

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[Nityanand Misra]

Namaste, Kushagra Ji

On Tuesday, 8 July 2025 at 9:31:48 pm UTC+5:30 Kushagra Aniket wrote:

Nityananda Ji, thank you for your comments. I did cite the Premapattana of Rasikottaṃsa on p.33 of my (original) article. Interestingly, Karpatri Ji wrote a "sammati" to the 1972 edition of this book!

I may have missed that page while glancing through the article. I am not surprised that Karapātra Svāmī Jī wrote a sammati to the book, which contains a verse that contradicts his position. Most forewords, sammatis, and praśastis are written without thoroughly reading the text and manuscript. 

 

Furthermore, in my study of the writings of Svami Karpatri Ji, I have discovered several other statements which are inconsistent with the shastras. For example, he has claimed that Shudras do not have the adhikara to speak Sanskrit. Worse still, his positions are now cited by activists to denigrate Sanatana Dharma.

The amount of evidence against these positions of Karpatri Ji is simply voluminous. It is imperative that a critical review of his works is conducted.

Yes, and a critical review should also explore in detail the possibility that a significant part of the books of Karapātra Svāmī Jī was written by his disciples and not by the guru himself. I strongly believe that some works attributed to Karapātra Svāmī were written by a group of scholars (called ghostwriters in modern parlance) and solely attributed to Karapātra Svāmī. 

Karapātra Svāmī Jī did not have the knowledge of foreign languages and the training in specialised disciplines (Western philosophy, comparative anatomy, evolutionary biology, etc.) to understand, let alone critique, the works of Hegel, Kant, Huxley, Darwin, etc. How was Karapātra Svāmī then able to read, understand, critique, ridicule and mock the works of these authors and many other foreign authors quoted and critiqued in the Hindi book ‘Mārksavāda Aura Rāmarājya’ (“Marxism and rule of Rāma”, मार्क्सवाद और रामराज्य, 1957)? It is unlikely he was reading Hindi or Sanskrit translations because many works (e.g., John Dawson’s “Modern Ideas of Evolution”) cited in the book were never translated into Hindi or Sanskrit. The obvious explanation is that other scholars were reading, summarising and also ghost-writing for Karapātra Svāmī. Rahul Sankrityayan, the Marxist scholar and polyglot who knew thirty languages, wrote that the study of works and literature referenced in the book ‘Mārksavāda Aura Rāmarājya’ was beyond the capabilities of Karapātra Svāmī, and it was clear that Karapātra Svāmī’s disciples had helped him wholeheartedly in this endeavour. Like Karapātra Svāmī, Sankrityayan was also a tall scholar with his flaws. However, this particular observation of Sankrityayan was spot on.

The above paragraph is from a small article I wrote last year on Karapātra Svāmī falling for an American creationist hoax in his book ‘Mārksavāda Aura Rāmarājya’.

When Karapātra Svāmī fell for an American creationist hoax

Karapātra Svāmī was undoubtedly a great scholar of Sanskrit, Sanātana scriptures and Vedānta. His works in these fields are an invaluable addition to the Indic knowledge traditions. However, outside these fields, his knowledge was quite limited. He had no training or specialised knowledge in non-Indic languages, history, science, anthropology, etc. This, per se, is not a problem; there are limits to every human mind. But it becomes a problem when a scholar ventures way out of their areas of scholarship, not knowing where to stop, and starts speaking or writing about things they have zero idea about. This was a big problem with Karapātra Svāmī (or his ghostwriters, more on this later); he did not know where and when to stop.
The same Karapātra Svāmī who would astonish and inspire readers by writing on topics he specialised in would almost always reduce himself to a laughing stock by writing tomes with supreme confidence on topics outside his expertise. For example, he would confidently date Pythagoras, who lived in the sixth century BCE, to the thirteenth century CE. He would mock and chide great minds like Āryabhaṭa, Kepler and Newton for believing in the earth’s rotation and then establish with his ‘arguments’ and ‘proofs’ that the earth does not rotate. He would emphatically declare that scientists measuring the speed of light means nothing, adding that only the astronomical bodies mentioned in the Sūrya-Siddhānta move; other stars and comets are stationary. He would derive the Hebrew names Shem and Ham (names of two of the three sons of Noah in the Hebrew Bible) from Sanskrit ‘soma’ and ‘hema-garbha’ and thus ‘prove’ that Noah of the Bible was Manu and his sons Shem and Ham were Candravaṃśī and Sūryavaṃśī kings Soma and Hemagarbha. He would venture into biology and state that an amoeba is a more complex life form than all plants and trees because it can form a hole (referring to the food vacuole) in its body. He would quote from the many works of Christian creationists (of all people!) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to ‘disprove’ the theory of evolution and then go on to establish, with his own ‘arguments’ and ‘proofs’, his theory of ‘devolution’. This is just a sample of his writings outside his areas; there are hundreds of pages filled with such preposterous nonsense. Thankfully, these writings of Karapātra Svāmī are still in Sanskrit or Hindi. If they, or extracts from them, are translated into English, the whole world will laugh at how out-of-date and ridiculous Hindu traditional thought was as of the late 20th century. Sanātana/Hindu tradition believes in acquiring knowledge from everybody. The Hindus of yore learned a lot from the Greeks and the Romans: Sanskrit texts like the Yavanajātaka and the Pañcasiddhāntikā (with its Romakasiddhānta and Pauliṣasiddhānta) were the results of assimilating knowledge from foreigners. They had an open mind, unlike Karapātra Svāmī..
Many modern scholars believe that the Vedic commentaries attributed to Sāyaṇa are the work of many people, not one. Similarly, several people, including me, believe that some works attributed to Karapātra Svāmī were written by a group of scholars (ghostwriters) in addition to Karapātra Svāmī. Karapātra Svāmī did not have advanced knowledge of foreign languages and the requisite training in specialised disciplines (Western philosophy, comparative anatomy, evolutionary biology, etc.) required to understand, let alone critique, the works of Hegel, Kant, Huxley, Darwin, etc. How was Karapātra Svāmī then able to read, understand, critique and mock the works of these authors and many others quoted in the Hindi book ‘Mārksavāda Aura Rāmarājya’ (“Marxism and rule of Rāma”, मार्क्सवाद और रामराज्य, 1957)? It is unlikely he was reading translations because many works (e.g., John Dawson’s “Modern Ideas of Evolution”) cited in the book were never translated into Hindi or Sanskrit. Surely, other scholars were reading, summarising and also ghost-writing for Karapātra Svāmī. Rahul Sankrityayan, the Marxist scholar and polyglot who knew thirty languages, wrote that the study of works and literature referenced in the book ‘Mārksavāda Aura Rāmarājya’ was beyond the capabilities of Karapātra Svāmī, and it was clear that Karapātra Svāmī’s disciples had helped him wholeheartedly in this endeavour. Like Karapātra Svāmī, Sankrityayan was also a tall scholar with his flaws. However, this particular observation of Sankrityayan was spot on. Karapātra Svāmī was indeed helped by ghostwriters in writing this book.

Now we come to the topic alluded to in the title of the post: the Nevada shoeprint hoax. In the early 1920s, some American creationists, including the Catholic creationist Alfred W. McCann, claimed that a “Triassic shoe sole fossil” had been found in Nevada. McCann and others claimed that the ‘fossil’, which looked like a partial shoeprint to them, was proof that humans walked around with shoes in the Triassic age and thus ‘disproved’ the theory of evolution. While the current location of the ‘fossil’ is unknown, the photos of the same were published in the 1920s. From the photos, the object looks like a rock concretion. In 1922, McCann published an anti-evolution book peddling this shoeprint hoax. The book was slammed by both atheists and creationists for various reasons (a rebuttal was printed in the same year), and the hoax was never taken seriously by geologists, even though some other conspiracy theorists and creationists have brought up the Nevada shoeprint hoax now and then. By the early 1950s, the hoax had been debunked thoroughly. In a book published in 1952, science writer Martin Gardner dismissed McCann’s work in just two lines. But none of this mattered to Karapātra Svāmī (or his ghostwriters) writing in 1957. He (or they) presented the Nevada shoeprint as further ‘evidence’ and used it to build another ‘argument’ to ‘disprove’ evolution in ‘Mārksavāda Aura Rāmarājya’. Karapātra Svāmī neither understood the writings of Huxley and Darwin nor their arguments and theories. But he built up his case against their sound theories with such laughable titbits, including discredited hoaxes popularised by Christian creationists in the 1920s. Sankrityayan rightly said that Karapātra Svāmī relied on a gossipmonger to publish this claim.
This is not to discredit Karapātra Svāmī or praise Sankrityayan. Karapātra Svāmī remains relevant for Sanskrit and Vedānta studies and is an ācārya/guru worth honouring. But not everything he wrote was correct. By venturing into areas outside his expertise, he made himself (and Hindu intellectuals) an object of ridicule. 

[K S Kannan]

Apropos, and akin to, the statement of Sri Nityananda Misra:

" Most forewords, sammatis, and praśastis are written without thoroughly reading the text and manuscript."

I once heard a remark made of a critic:

"Oh, your review looks like that of a person  who has actually read the book!"!

Many Hindus have unfortunately taken a leaf blindly from Christian Creationism.

A pity that Karapatra Swamiji forayed into unexamined territory, 

and made/allowed to be made in his name, pronouncements  on issues he had no direct knowledge of.

The real tragedy is that so many get misled thereafter, owing to the standing and stature of a renowned figure.

Rightly did Shakespeare's Fool said:

"Speak less than thou knowest."

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[Kushagra]

Sarvebhyo namaḥ,

I am happy to report that a slightly shorter version of this article has now been published in the well-known Hindi e-magazine Samālocana:

My intention was to put this view on record.

Regards,

Kushagra

On Jul 8, 2025, at 11:47 PM, K S Kannan <ks.kann...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[विश्वासो वासुकिजः (Vishvas Vasuki)]

अत्रोच्चिष्टभक्षणे यद् कालिदासः प्रमाणीकृतः, तत्र कश्चन् सन्देहः - https://groups.google.com/g/kalpa-prayoga/c/WPM8QV5wV7Q । सन्तो निवारयन्तु तत्रैव। 

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Vishvas /विश्वासः

[Kushagra Aniket]

There might be some problem in your display because I am not seeing that sentence anywhere: "कालिदास ने भी अभिज्ञानशाकुन्तल में इसका उल्लेख किया है." The word Kalidasa itself is not mentioned. It may be due to parsing of the pdf or some other error. Or you might have access to an older version from somewhere (surprising).

Kindly refer to this published version as the final: 

https://samalochan.com/shabari/

Even the other sentence that you have quoted seems to be incomplete. The Smriti reference is cited to explain the words of Sri Rama in the Bhushundi Ramayana, not as standalone acceptance.

Kushagra Aniket

New York, NY, U.S.A.

ka...@cornell.edu

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[विश्वासो वासुकिजः (Vishvas Vasuki)]

Thanks - my fault indeed for trusting gemini AI to give me a plain text version of the article.

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[विश्वासो वासुकिजः (Vishvas Vasuki)]

प्रधानतात्पर्ये साधुन्य् अपि, अत्र टिप्पनीद्वयम् - 

 https://groups.google.com/g/kalpa-prayoga/c/WPM8QV5wV7Q/m/E-wltMXKEQAJ