Criticism
Manini Chatterjee, in a review in the Calcutta Telegraph, called Elst's book Ramjanmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid a "very bad book". She also said that it was marred by miserably tentative terminology, like "maybe" and "possibly". Paul Teunissen's review of the same book criticizes Elst for the unfavourable portrayal of Syed Shahabuddin.
Thomas Blom Hansen described Elst as a "Belgian Catholic of a radical anti-Muslim persuasion who tries to make himself useful as a 'fellow traveller' of the Hindu nationalist movement". Ashis Nandy criticized the alleged dishonesty and moral vacuity of Elst.
Sarvepalli Gopal in the book Anatomy of a Confrontation calls Elst "a Catholic practitioner of polemics" who "fights the Crusades all over again on Indian soil". He also says that it is difficult to take an author, who "speaks of the centuries when there were Muslim rulers in India as a bloodsoaked catastrophe", seriously.
Ayub Khan says that Koenraad Elst is the most prominent advocate of Sangh Parivar in the West. He further says: "Such is his importance in Hindutva circles that L.K. Advani quoted him at length while deposing before the Liberhans Commission investigation the demolition of Babri Masjid." In a reply to Ayub Khan, Elst says that he has been critical of the Sangh Parivar in his writings.
Christian Bouchet criticized Elst's book The Saffron Swastika for having placed far too much trust in Savitri Devi's autobiography, and for claiming that Savitri Devi was bisexual.
Read more about this topic: Koenraad Elst
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)