The Burning Sands Of Sindh: A novel based on the life and times of Adi Shankaracharya

The Burning Sands of Sindh is the story of the beginning of India s decline, and enslavement of a thousand years, set in the eighth century. It contains a vast range of human experiences and emotions from the bizarre to the sublime. It is the story of every man and woman who chooses to walk in the faint but sure light of the atman. It is the story of those that do not want to live by the vagaries of chance or destiny. The modern rationalists have confined reason to a combination of sense-observations and logic. It is a neat method adopted by genuine seekers of knowledge, yet it lacks the joy that knowledge brings to the human heart. The expectation of the heart is not a whim, for nobody suffers more due to lack of this joy than those that lie in the Procrustean bed of empirical knowledge. Intellect of Indian philosophers was not only empirical. It evolved from Dhi (empirical) to Medha, i.e. the intellect aware of sources other than empirical, to Pragya, i.e. the intellect intimate with immortality, to Ritambhara, i.e. the intellect that integrates the other three and discovers nature of the material truth in the mundane world. Beyond these lie the transcendental truth that includes everything the material and the transcendental and satisfies the mind completely. Man needs to investigate the way to happiness. Nirmal Kumar has offered in this book a way to it, which may fit in the definition of rationality of a majority of the modern people. This story is set in the eighth century, when the Arabs invaded India and enforced Islam for the first time. It was not like the earlier invasions of the Iranians, the Greeks, the Shakas and the Huns. The Arab invasion aimed at wiping out India s spiritual culture, which did not use deceit, cunning and cruelty. The invaders aimed at changing the human personality from natural to artificial. They wanted humans to fit in the measurements of their newfound faith. They wiped out the most populated cities of Sind that resisted them. This gory event in India's history coincided with the brief life span of Shankaracharya, one of the world's great rationalists. He taught that when the intellect stops taking one further towards truth, a deeper faculty, Pragya intellect brings intimations of immortality to the mind. It grows only after the soul sacrifices itself to the Absolute. After Pragya, the Ritambhara intellect grows. It integrates the mortal body and the immortal soul. Self-sacrifice only introduces the soul to its immortality. It gave the people the secret of conquering fear and all negative emotions in those troubled times.