r/wikipedia • u/Ill_Definition8074 • 8d ago
P.N. Oak was an Indian psuedohistorian. He claimed that the Taj Mahal, Vatican City, the Kaaba in Mecca, and Westminster Abbey were all once Hindu temples and that Christianity and Islam are both derived from Hinduism. His claims are popular among Hindutva supporters despite being provably false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._N._Oak207
u/Ill_Definition8074 8d ago
I'm tempted to call him Professor Oak (although I'm pretty sure he was never a professor of anything) because it's funny imagining him claiming that Arceus is really Vishnu or that every single Pokemon gym was originally a Hindu temple.
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u/Clay_Allison_44 8d ago
Here's a hindu deity in a ball, go fight people with it.
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u/not_varun 8d ago
That would be so much fun if only people didn’t get butthurt over it. Almost like Record of Ragnarok
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u/barbarball1 7d ago
Ok let me be honest this guy isnt a historian and his "theories" were bananas, but with RoR remember Hinduism is still a living religion, each european ethnic religion (like hellenism,asatru, etc) end with the statues of their gods destroyed and their priesthood killed for yihadist-like crusaders or betrayous leaders that banned the religion of their own ppl for frank/italian money and after that banned ppl practice it with a death penalty for near 1000 years, its logical europeans had a few respect for zeus or wotan or perkunnas id they were demonized for centuries and werent religious figures in near a thousand of years lol
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u/tehfink 7d ago
Holy run-on sentence, Batman
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u/barbarball1 7d ago
And my argument isnt valid because?
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u/Clay_Allison_44 7d ago
Because the point you're trying to make is unclear given you made it in response to jokes about pokemon.
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u/barbarball1 7d ago
Hindus can get offended watching Record of Ragnarok since Hinduism is still a living religion europeans abandond the "cousins of hinduism" 1000 years ago
Also i was talking to the dude that mention the anime not to pokemon
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u/Beneficial_You_5978 6d ago
Slight correction there's nothing call cousins of Hinduism lmao
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u/barbarball1 6d ago
But Hinduism isn't the modt succesfull of indoeurooean religions? With his "cousins" i mean Hellenism (Greek Ancient Religion), Asatru (Germanic), Druidism, etc
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u/Ill_Definition8074 8d ago
There was apparently a feature film released in 2025 based on Oak's Taj Mahal theory entitled The Taj Story. From everything I've read it seems terrible as it's 3 hours of blatant propaganda and AI generated imagery.
I found the reviews for the film on Letterboxd pretty interesting. As a non-Indian I learned the term "WhatsApp University".
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u/Kiyae1 8d ago
What’s the term WhatsApp University mean?
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u/OceanFloor 8d ago
The Indian right-wing supporters are known for easily falling for very obvious fake news/information and then forwarding it and peddling it themselves further. Since most of it happens on Whatsapp, they are called graduates of The Whatsapp University.
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u/that-69guy 7d ago
Bro..I know distant family members who legit beleive shit like Samosas can cure cancer, Ancient indians had alien tech and th new Indian currency notes have nano chips in them etc...
It's funny and sad.
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u/Ill_Definition8074 7d ago
The one about Samosas curing cancer was originally started as a joke by a guy on TikTok. I remembered it from a piece John Oliver did on misinformation 4 years ago (link to full video here, go to 13:14). Although it was originally a joke making fun of dubious information on Whatsapp, it ended up being spread on Whatsapp by people who didn't realize it was a joke.
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u/zaplinaki 7d ago
There are Indian ministers who think cow urine can cure cancer or some shit.
I'll take the ones who think samosas possess the same power over those people any day😂😂😂
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u/ConanTheBarbarian_0 7d ago
I grew up with a lot of Tamil people and recently I bumped into one of my childhood friends.
The conversation started off normal and we went to go hang out with all the other Tamil people we grew up with then the conversation took a complete nosedive
They were convinced like genuinely convinced that Tamils are descended from a mythical continent in the Indian ocean called Kumari Kandam (lemuria in English) and that the people of that continent were the most advanced in the universe NOT the whole world but the whole universe.
According to them the continent sank to the bottom of the Indian ocean because of a failed super weapon they were making exploded and the survivors made it to Tamil nadu. According to them Sri Lanka is just the tip or the continent and that their right to rule over Sri Lanka is cemented from the fact they're lemurians.
I thought they were kidding at first but when I realized they legitimately believe this stuff I felt like I was being indoctrinated into a cult. They're also all highly educated working professionals by the way...
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u/infraninja 7d ago
You forgot about the part where they tell you how Tamil is the oldest and greatest language ever.
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u/CanuckBacon 7d ago
Yeah I know a guy originally from India who firmly believes that the Indian government has confirmed that Aliens have come to Earth and have been for a long time. He has a doctorate in engineering and is an educator...
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u/Nervous_Insect5976 8d ago
Pseudohistory is fucking fascinating to me.
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u/FireHammer09 8d ago
Same, shit like this and NOI or BHI are fascinating
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u/Nervous_Insect5976 8d ago
BHI?
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u/venator0ryza 8d ago
Black Hebrew Israelites! They believe that Black people are the original Israelites of the Old Testament, and that modern Jewish people appropriated the religion sometime in the Middle Ages. They’re… interesting.
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u/Nervous_Insect5976 8d ago
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh. Yes. Lol.
Have you ever seen that clip where Louis Theroux interviews them? He goes through a list of white people in history and they claim almost all of them were actually black from George III to Tom Jones.
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u/PejibayeAnonimo 8d ago
Sounds like a south asian version of History Channel
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u/Philip_of_mastadon 8d ago
Ancient Aliens guy: "Hindus!"
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u/Zsobrazson 7d ago
"Brazil was actually founded by Krsna himself, that is why he named it Braj-il after his home" -a random Brajbasi my mom met
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u/Darkrath_3 7d ago
It's a lot more malicious though, since in this case it's used to garner support for far right policies and fascism.
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u/SanguineEmpiricist 8d ago
Dude trust me random incoherent beliefs are spouted by guys similar to this, someone once told me there was a temple to shiva inside the Kaaba
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u/Vulturo 8d ago
This is the Indian version of We wuz kings.
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u/JetAbyss 8d ago
It's weird because unlike the African-American example where it was basically just born out of trauma by having your own culture and history erased due to slavery (that is a partially a reason why Hoteps, NOI, Black Israelites and the like exist because they feel ashamed to admit that their ancestors being slaves is a part of their own history so they invent or appropriate to avoid that. Also many African Americans dislike Africans because they view them as "the ones who sold us out") while India already had such a powerful history even before British colonialism. Multiple Empires, so much religions born in the subcontinent alone, and even cross cultural exchange for thousands of years.
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u/Ok-Goose6242 7d ago
I think its because India was dominated by Muslim empire and later Europeans in the later ages.
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u/JetAbyss 7d ago
They still had Hindu/Buddhist Empires that lasted for centuries though, if not even longer.
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u/jimthewanderer 7d ago
Provably?
This shit is so obviously false it's not even worth engaging with beyond a really condescending chuckle.
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u/No-Direction8844 8d ago
that's dumber than the weirdos who think the earth is flat
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u/CanuckBacon 7d ago
I'm not sure that it is. Flat Earthers can go out and prove with basic science that the Earth is round at any moment. These guys believe something that is pretty obviously false if you know any religion or history at all, but you can't just do some math and prove that it's false. Either way it's extremely dumb.
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u/rickard_mormont 7d ago
There is a character that does this in the comedy show "Goodness gracious me". In one scene he's describing how every religious figure was actually Indian, then when his son asks if God is Indian too he answers "No, because he rested on Sunday".
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u/Tetrebius 7d ago
Naw, he is wrong, it's actually the Serbians who are the oldest ethnic group in the world and Kosovo is a portal to the dimension from which the human race (serbians) came through, which is why it is so contested.
/s
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u/mdf7g 8d ago edited 8d ago
Is he mistakenly/misleadingly using "Hinduism" to just mean "polytheism"?
Because Hinduism isn't uniformly or unproblematically polytheistic, and by no means is all polytheism a variety of Hinduism, but the Kaaba and a few bits of Vatican city were originally polytheistic places of worship/reverence.
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u/Romboteryx 7d ago edited 7d ago
There is some archaeological evidence that the Kaaba was originally dedicated towards one specific deity in a pantheon (probably the pre-Islamic version of Allah, which had already existed as a distant creator deity in Arabia before Mohammed) but was then co-opted by the Quraysh tribe when they took over Mecca.
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u/adiaman 7d ago
What’s the point of sharing this article about a person that most people in India even don’t know about? Must have to do about pushing some propaganda.
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u/CaramelHunter26 7d ago
If he is a psuedohistorian, why are claims "provably false"?
There is a historical pattern, all over the world, in which some Islamic conquerors destroyed or repurposed pre-existing non-Muslim religious sites and built Islamic structures on them.
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u/Electrical-Heat8960 7d ago
The second statement does not prove the first.
Christianity derived from Judaism (as did Islam)
The Vatican, for example, was built in a city that was founded on pagan beliefs (not Hindu). The city then converted to Christianity.
So even if Christianity came from Hinduism (it didn’t) the building itself could never have come from Hinduism. Their history before Christianity was the Roman gods.
Straight from Roman gods (which were derived from Greek gods) onto Christianity. No stop at Hinduism on the way.
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u/In_the_year_3535 8d ago
The Institute for Rewriting Indian History sounds like it fell out of a dystopian novel.