Malhotra has written prolifically in opposition to the western academic study of Indian culture and society, which he maintains denigrates the tradition and undermines the interests of India "by encouraging the paradigms that oppose its unity and integrity".

[11][12] Malhotra studied physics at St. Stephen's College, Delhi and computer science at Syracuse University before becoming an entrepreneur in the information technology and media industries.

[web 1][13] Besides directing this foundation,[14] he also chairs the board of governors of the Center for Indic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and advises various organisations.

[24] In early 2000s Malhotra started writing articles criticising Wendy Doniger and related scholars, claiming that she applied Freudian psycho-analysis to aspects of Indian culture.

[web 1] His 2002 blog post titled "Wendy's Child Syndrome"[25] was considered as the starting point[26] of a "rift between some Western Hinduism scholars [...] and some conservative Hindus in India, the United States, and elsewhere".

[26] The blog post "has become a pivotal treatise in a recent rift between some Western Hinduism scholars—many of whom teach or have studied at Chicago—and some conservative Hindus in India, the United States, and elsewhere".

"[web 1] According to Braverman, "Though Malhotra's academic targets say he has some valid discussion points, they also argue that his rhetoric taps into the rightward trend and attempts to silence unorthodox, especially Western, views.

Malhotra said "the drama has diverted attention away from the substantive errors in her scholarship to be really about being an issue of censorship by radical Hindus", hence the republication of his critique of Wendy Doniger[28] and scholars related to her.

They regard the power of Grand Narrative (other than their own) as a cause of human rights problems internally, failing to see it as an asset in global competition externally.

[29]Malhotra argues that a positive stance on India has been under-represented in American academia, due to programmes being staffed by Westerners, their "Indian-American Sepoys"[32] and Indian Americans who want to be white – whom he disparages as "career opportunists" and "Uncle Toms", who "in their desire to become even marginal members of the Western Grand Narrative, sneer at Indian culture in the same manner as the colonialists once did".

[32] He then goes on to show how the appropriation occurs in several stages:[35][36] As evidence, he cites a number of "U-Turners" from the scholarly fields of mind sciences, cognitive sciences and psychology:[39][note 5] In Vivekananda's Ideas and the Two Revolutions in Western Thought (2013), Malhotra claims that Vivekananda has deeply influenced modern western thought, but that this influence in some cases remains unacknowledged and uncredited.

[63] Thus, rarely do American teachers go much deeper than mere physical forms or Asanas, hence they dilute the true depth and philosophies of Yoga.

[61] Yoga and Hinduism are deeply coupled, and renaming the original Sanskrit terms doesn't do any favor, since the actual physical practices, in the case of asanas remains the same, states Malhotra.

[64] Several of Malhotra's essays from the early 2000s were re-published by Voice of India in 2016 in Academic Hinduphobia: A Critique of Wendy Doniger's Erotic School of Indology.

Malhotra claims that "the drama has diverted attention away from the substantive errors in her scholarship to be really about being an issue of censorship by radical Hindus", hence the republication of his critique of Wendy Doniger[28] and scholars related to her.

[72] The term dharma: ... is used to indicate a family of spiritual traditions originating in India which today are manifested as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism.

It makes proposals for defending Hinduism from what the author considers to be unjust attacks from scholars, misguided public intellectuals, and hostile religious polemicists.

[74][note 17] In Buddhist philosophy, Indra's Net served as a metaphor in the Avatamsaka Sutra[75][76] and was further developed by Huayen Buddhism to portray the interconnectedness of everything in the universe.

John Hinnells, a British scholar of comparative religions, considers Malhotra to lead a faction of Hindu criticism of methodology for the examination of Hinduism.

[87] Other scholars welcome his attempt to challenge the western assumptions in the study of India and South Asia[88] but also question his approach, finding it to be neglecting the differences within the various Indian traditions.

[92] Martha Nussbaum criticises Malhotra for "disregard for the usual canons of argument and scholarship, a postmodern power play in the guise of defense of tradition".

[93] Brian K. Pennington has called his work "ahistorical" and "a pastiche of widely accepted and overly simplified conclusions borrowed from the academy".

[95] In May 2015, a Hindu-American scholar at St. Olaf College, Anantanand Rambachan, who studied three years with Swami Dayananda, published an extensive response to Malhotra's criticisms in Indra's Net.

According to Rambachan, Malhotra's understanding and representation of classical Advaita is incorrect, attributing doctrines to Shankara and Swami Dayananda which are rejected by them.

[97] Malhotra's critiques on Wendy Doniger's Freudian psychoanalytic interpretations of Hinduism in her academic works, have "led to verbal and physical attacks on western scholars and their institutions.

"[98][99] Malhotra claimed on social media in August 2020 that he spoke out against Wikipedia in the 1990s in a talk in Auroville that was posted in their magazine, when the portal sought Indian users for donations.

[106][note 22] Permanent Black, publisher of Nicholson's Unifying Hinduism, stated that they would welcome HarperCollins' "willingness to rectify future editions" of Indra's Net.

This must end and I have been fighting this for 25 years [...] we ought to examine where you got your materials from, and to what extent you failed to acknowledge Indian sources, both written and oral, with the same weight with which you expect me to do so.