6 ideas
Malhotra argues that terms like dharma, atman, and shakti lose or distort meaning when mapped to English words like religion or soul. Forcing them into Western categories, he says, digests and dilutes Indic thought.
He proposes adopting Sanskrit terms directly into English, as words like karma and yoga already have. Preserving the original word protects the concept's full meaning.
The book frames the translation of sacred vocabulary as an act of intellectual colonization. Who defines the words, Malhotra argues, controls how a tradition is understood.
With Satyanarayana Dasa, the book catalogs specific Sanskrit terms and explains why each resists English equivalence. The entries function as a defense manual for Indic concepts.
He contends that equating atman with soul imports Abrahamic assumptions foreign to Vedanta. The error is not incompleteness but active misrepresentation.
Malhotra treats vocabulary as inseparable from the metaphysics it encodes. To keep the worldview intact, one must keep the words intact.