Michel Danino (born 4 June 1956) is a French-born Indian writer. He is a guest professor at

IIT Gandhinagar Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (also known as IIT Gandhinagar or IITGN) is a public technical university located in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. It has been declared to be an Institute of National Importance by the Government of In ...

and has been a member of the

Indian Council of Historical Research The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) is a captive body of the Ministry of Education, Government of India established by an Administrative Order. The body has provided financial assistance to historians and scholars through fellowshi ...

. In 2017,

Government of India The Government of India (ISO: ; often abbreviated as GoI), known as the Union Government or Central Government but often simply as the Centre, is the national government of the Republic of India, a federal democracy located in South Asia, c ...

conferred

Padma Shri Padma Shri (IAST: ''padma śrī''), also spelled Padma Shree, is the fourth-highest Indian honours system, civilian award of the Republic of India, after the Bharat Ratna, the Padma Vibhushan and the Padma Bhushan. Instituted on 2 January 1954, ...

, the fourth-highest civilian honor for his contribution towards Literature & Education.

Life in India

Danino spent a few years in

Auroville Auroville (; City of Dawn) is an experimental township in Viluppuram district, mostly in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, with some parts in the Union Territory of Pondicherry in India. It was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa (known as "the Mo ...

, Tamil Nadu before shifting to the

Nilgiri mountains The Nilgiri Mountains form part of the Western Ghats in northwestern Tamil Nadu, Southern Karnataka, and eastern Kerala in India. They are located at the trijunction of three states and connect the Western Ghats with the Eastern Ghats. At le ...

, where he resided for two decades. In 2003, he settled near

Coimbatore Coimbatore, also spelt as Koyamputhur (), sometimes shortened as Kovai (), is one of the major metropolitan cities in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is located on the banks of the Noyyal River and surrounded by the Western Ghats. Coimbato ...

and accepted Indian citizenship.

Work and reception

Danino wrote ''The Lost River: On The Trail of the Sarasvati'' (2010), which tentatively identified the legendary

Sarasvati River The Sarasvati River () is a deified river first mentioned in the Rigveda and later in Vedic and post-Vedic texts. It played an important role in the Vedic religion, appearing in all but the fourth book of the Rigveda. As a physical river, i ...

, mentioned in

Rigveda The ''Rigveda'' or ''Rig Veda'' ( ', from ' "praise" and ' "knowledge") is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns (''sūktas''). It is one of the four sacred canonical Hindu texts (''śruti'') known as the Vedas. Only one Sh ...

with the current

Ghaggar-Hakra River The Ghaggar-Hakra River is an intermittent river in India and Pakistan that flows only during the monsoon season. The river is known as Ghaggar in India, before the Ottu barrage, and as the Hakra in Pakistan, downstream of the barrage, ending ...

. V Rajamani over

Current Science ''Current Science'' is an English-language peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It was established in 1932 and is published by the Current Science Association along with the Indian Academy of Sciences. According to the ''Journal C ...

reviewed it in favorable terms and praised Danino for his meticulous research.

Peter Heehs Peter Heehs is an American historian living in Puducherry, India who writes on modern Indian history, spirituality and religion. Much of his work focuses on the Indian freedom fighter and spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo. His publications includ ...

's opinion of one of Danino's works, ''Sri Aurobindo and Indian Civilization'', is that it was lacking in linguistic knowledge, and being made up by attacks on colonial orientalists and half-informed invocations of nationalist orientalists. Heehs also criticized Danino's other works for appropriating

Sri Aurobindo Sri Aurobindo (born Aurobindo Ghose; 15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was an Indian philosopher, yogi, maharishi, poet, and Indian nationalist. He was also a journalist, editing newspapers such as ''Vande Mataram''. He joined the ...

in his campaign against the

Indo-Aryan migration The Indo-Aryan migrations were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples, an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages, the predominant languages of today's North India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lank ...

s, and for distorting Aurobindo's speculative views as assertions. Heehs added that Danino selectively cherry-picked quotes from his draft-manuscripts and ignored his published works, which were far more nuanced. Others have accused Danino of pursuing a sectarian

Hindutva Hindutva () is the predominant form of Hindu nationalism in India. The term was formulated as a political ideology by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923. It is used by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the ...

oriented scholarship based on

historical negationism Historical negationism, also called denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record. It should not be conflated with ''historical revisionism'', a broader term that extends to newly evidenced, fairly reasoned academic reinterp ...

. Danino was a contributing author to an encyclopedic volume by

Wiley-Blackwell Wiley-Blackwell is an international scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons. It was formed by the merger of John Wiley & Sons Global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business with Blackwell Publish ...

, on South Asian history and archaeology, about the domain of

Indus Valley civilisation The Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), also known as the Indus Civilisation was a Bronze Age civilisation in the northwestern regions of South Asia, lasting from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE, and in its mature form 2600 BCE to 1900&n ...

References

External links

Michel Danino homepage at IIT-G
{{DEFAULTSORT:Danino, Michel 1956 births Living people 20th-century Indian writers 21st-century Indian writers French emigrants to India Naturalised citizens of India Indian people of French descent French Indologists Indian Indologists Indian spiritual writers French spiritual writers Indigenous Aryanists Recipients of the Padma Shri in literature & education 20th-century French writers

Life in India

Work and reception

See also

References

External links