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The traditions of sanatana dharma are experiential and can be analysed academically provided what is symptomatic of Western scholarship (studies of caste, etc.) go alongside dharmic representations.

The problem is that the dharmic student’s potential is stymied by the ongoing crisis.

There is a traditional parable about a pious person who wanted to go to the local tavern in order to rescue and reform the drinkers and to bring them to the temple instead. A wise man cautioned him to think twice before entering the tavern, because while he may enter with good intentions, thinking that he will bring others to the temple, he may instead himself get stuck in the tavern. And then not only would he have failed to rescue the others, but he himself would be lost, too.

Some well-intentioned, well-heeled Indian groups and businessmen are now engaged in foolhardy attempts to go into the metaphorical tavern—in this case, the Western academy.  It is well-known that the academy—the system of universities and scholarship prevalent in the West and in India today—is virulently anti-Hindu and anti-India. It is dominated by leftist discourse that hates traditional societies and religion and that finds tempting and soft targets in Hinduism.

As Indians in India and the diaspora accumulate even greater hordes of wealth, they are plum targets for fundraising and bankrolling various projects of different kinds. Combined with the sincere but misguided intention of some well-meaning Indian individuals and groups, it has led to a dangerous trend of Indians and Hindus bankrolling projects in the academy that threaten to harm the interests of India and Hinduism.  Rather than taking over enemy territory, we are actually now bankrolling the enemy. 

Three examples of this phenomenon have been in the news recently.

One is the controversy over the Murty Classical Library of India. N.R. Narayanana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, and his family bestowed a $5.2M grant to Harvard University for the establishment of the Murty Classical Library of India under the general editorship of Sheldon Pollock, the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of Sanskrit and South Asian Studies at Columbia University. The library is intended to translate into English 500 classics of Indian literature in various languages from the past two millennia. Pollock has a history of anti-Hindu scholarship spanning decades.

In addition to Pollock, the editorial board for the library consists of Monika Horstmann, Professor Emerita of Modern Indian Studies, Heidelberg University; Sunil Sharma, Associate Professor of Persianate and Comparative Literature, Boston University; and David Shulman, Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The first volume of the series was Sufi Lyrics, and other titles include The History of Akbar (presented in two volumes), two volumes on Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, and Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women.

A petition was launched by several renowned Sanskrit scholars in India, garnering over 15,000 signatures, asking the Murtys to reconstitute the editorial group of the library with a fair representation of the lineages and traditional groups that teach and follow the traditions of the texts being translated. They also are requesting a written set of standards and policies for consistency throughout the project, including principles like rejection of the discredited Aryan Invasion theory, etc. Now, predictably, the academy is lashing out, with a massive PR campaign to discredit the petition in order to ensure Pollock’s continued stewardship of the project.

This news comes on the heels of the University of California, Irvine rejecting a $3M donation to establish chairs in Hindu and India studies by the Dharma Civilization Foundation (DCF), an organization seeking to counter anti-Hindu bias in the academy.  The rejection was based on concerns about the ‘ideology’ of the donors and the organization.

There have also been efforts afoot to establish an Adi Shankara chaired professorship at Columbia University on behalf of the Sringeri peetham (one of the most hallowed and prestigious Hindu institutions in the world and the first matha to be established by Adi Shankaracharya), again under the oversight and guidance of Sheldon Pollock. The determination as to who would occupy the chair, what studies would be pursued under the chair, etc., would all remain with the university administration and their appointed committee, not Sringeri peetham or the donors.

While the motives behind each of these initiatives may be laudable, they are fundamentally ill-conceived and dangerous. None of these initiatives provide sufficient controls to ensure that our interests are unharmed. They are tantamount to handing over a blind check to the academy, which has a long and checkered history of anti-India and anti-Hindu bias. When we as individuals in the US, for example, donate money to qualified tax-exempt charities, there are controls in place to ensure that the funds can only be utilized for certain purposes and in certain ways under tax laws.  These controls ensure that we are not defrauded and that our hard-earned money is not squandered by the recipient. These initiatives totally lack such controls.

To think that a few million dollars here and there will be enough to cause a meaningful change in the academy is foolish and incredibly naïve. Entering traditionally hostile territory requires sufficient armor and a waterproof battle plan and strategy in order to ensure that you do not simply end up as a pawn for the other side. Even having one of our own appointed as a professor is not sufficient if the ultimate control and authority over that professorship is wielded by a coterie of scholars who are opposed to our traditions as we interpret them, in the absence of sufficient controls to ensure autonomy for the chair.

Outside scholars can study – but not define for us – our Samskriti

Of course, there is a role for scholarship of our traditions from outside the tradition.  A sterling example of such scholarship is that of Dr Koenraad Elst, who does not identify as a Hindu, but who studies Indology with academic rigor, impartiality and from a principled approach, without mincing words or hesitating to call a spade a spade. His conclusions often do not agree with a traditionalist Hindu reading, but because he is objective and fair, his scholarship is most welcome and appreciated.

This is in stark contrast to the scholarship of Sheldon Pollock. Pollock does not approach Indology from an impartial starting point. He has a very definite political agenda. He is explicit about wanting to remove the sacred from Sanskrit, to view Sanskrit through a purely political lens, as a tool of oppression against women and shudras in particular. He compares the aesthetic power of Sanskrit to the use of propaganda by Nazis, to make beautiful and aesthetically appealing the ideology of oppression and hate. In effect, he compares ancient Indian civilization to the racial oppression by the Nazis. This is the perspective he brings to bear in all his studies of Sanskrit; this is the inherent bias which he carries into his work on the Murty Classical Library of India.

Imagine the repercussions of such bias on the composition of the library! He in effect gets to decide, along with the editorial board, which of the thousands of texts in our history count as our classics and frame the narrative they tell about our civilization.  Hiring somebody else to define and interpret your culture’s literary classics, the very history of your literature, in effect gives them the power to define you. These ‘classics’ are not dead books of a vanished civilization, like the Iliad and Odyssey of the ancient Greeks—these are the sources of our living culture and religion, as vibrant and central to our civilization as the Bible. Could you imagine the Church outsourcing the translation of the Bible to non-Christians? Why should we do the same?  

The ideological biases of these scholars cannot but influence the quality of scholarship and translations of these important texts. It was precisely such biases that gave rise to the racist, Eurocentric translations and depictions of our culture and religion in colonial times. In the 1700s and 1800s, European scholars undertook a serious study of our civilization through Indology in order to exploit our wealth and digest into Western systems our traditional knowledge. When we handed over to them our texts and the wisdom of our panditas, they used this knowledge against us. Max Muller and his cohorts appropriated traditional knowledge from our pandits and then twisted and distorted our literature and practices to come up with poisonous myths like the Aryan Invasion theory, the Aryan/Dravidian racial divide and the reduction of our religion to caste, cows and sati. William Jones did the same with his fabrication of ‘Hindu Law’.

We are still suffering from the consequences of their distortions of our civilization, the deep divides created by their divide-and-rule tactics, the false notions of ourselves and our history through the lies they have fed us. It will take us generations to recover from this, if we can ever fully recover at all. We may have removed geographical colonialism but we have not yet removed the colonialism of the mind. 

We cannot afford such a dangerous experiment again. For, what starts in the Ivory Tower does not stop there. Academic discourse spreads to mainstream media, to popular culture, to our psychological understanding of ourselves and our identity. It tells us in very fundamental ways who we are as individuals and as a civilization. We are not talking of arcane things here. We are talking of the creation of a library meant to withstand the test of time, that will be a testament to the greatest pieces of literature created in India over the past two millennia. We are talking of what our kids will be taught in college about their heritage and religion at a time when their identities and ideologies are most susceptible to molding.

This is a huge responsibility that we cannot take lightly. Good intentions are not enough, when there is so much at stake. We have to be far-seeing and act for the long-term interests of India and Hinduism, not for what looks good as a photo-op or glossy press release today. 

Academic Qualification does not Constitute Adhikara

The Dharmic traditions are not religions of the book that can be defined by doctrine or dogma alone. They are living traditions based on embodied experience, and in order to properly understand, preserve and teach them, one has to have aparoksha jnanam (direct rather than indirect knowledge, based on experience). One must become brahmanishta (established in the consciousness of Brahman) in addition to srotriya (learned in the scriptures). It is only then that one would know which particular meaning of a verse is the correct interpretation in which context.

Our rishis and acharyas were fastidious about the qualifications required in order to approach the study of our shastras. Our religious system, and that of all dharmic traditions, is based on adhikara bheda, meaning differentiation according to qualification. In other words, in order to properly understand, study and teach our traditions, it is not enough to know Sanskrit. One must follow a certain lifestyle, based on yamas and niyamas, have a requisite level of vairagya (dispassion) and viveka (discrimination) and learn from a qualified teacher.

Technical knowledge or book knowledge is not enough. Qualification is based upon antahkarna shuddhi (inner purity), which is attained through strict disciplines and adherence to a lifestyle of ritual purity, spiritual practices and learning in accordance with the traditional ways. In order to study the Vedas, for example, one must have undergone the upanayana samskara (sacred thread ceremony) and perform daily the trikala sandhya vandanam (particular rites of worship offered at dawn, dusk and midday as prescribed in the Vedas and transmitted at the time of upanayana). Nor is the concept of adhikara limited to the Vedas alone. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that the wisdom of the Gita is never to be explained to those who are devoid of austerities, who are not devoted, and who do not render service.

The integrity of our shastras and their interpretation was of utmost importance to our rishis and acharyas. The Vedas and the Vedic tradition were carefully organized into various lineages, so each aspect would continue throughout time uncorrupted and pure. The methods through which oral transmission and the various paramparas were preserved ensured that the Vedic tradition lived on and came to us today as a living tradition, even when all other ancient religious traditions have perished.

Most people now do not even know who a Ganapathi is, but this is a designation for a particularly learned Vedic scholar. In order to become a Ganapathi, one first learns the Vedic texts by heart. This process itself could take up to five years. In the next stage, the pada patha, the entire samhita is split word by word and learned.  After that, the krama patha is learned, in which the student learns to combine words.  Next, in jata patha, the verses are learned in the sequence of 1,2,2,1,1,2/2,3,3,2,2,3/3,4,4,3,3,4, and finally, in the ghana patha stage, the verses are learned in the sequence of 1,2,2,1,1,2,3,3,2,1,1,2,3/2,3,3,2,2,3,4,4,3,2,2,3,4. By learning the same verses in so many different sequences, the Vedic texts become encrypted in the mind and full-proofed against error or corruption in their recitation and transmission. Such is the unfathomable discipline and intensity of practice with which our forefathers have preserved our samskriti for us. Alas, today there are hardly more than a few dozen Ganapathis left in India.

Our ancestors and acharyas sweated blood to pass along to us the Vedic tradition uncorrupted and pristine. They developed frameworks for preservation and transmission that safeguarded against error and abuse. They knew before the Europeans ever came along the dangers of being lax in terms of who can interpret and teach the Vedic tradition and how it is to be taught.

When they took such care, how can we dare to be so negligent and reckless?     

What Will Be Our Legacy?

We choose today what our legacy will be in the years to come. Do the Murtys want to be remembered for funding the next Max Muller, for being yet another in a long line of sepoys? Do we want to be remembered for funding the study of our religion by those who see it as oppressive and fundamentally bad?

Or, do we have enough self-respect to decolonize our minds, to demand that we have over the study of our tradition the same autonomy that the Muslims, Buddhists and Christians have over theirs? They get to define who they are for themselves, with outside scholarship playing only a marginal or fringe role. When Hindus try to do the same, they are accused of being fanatical or fundamentalist.

Our ancestors and acharyas have entrusted us with the custodianship of the oldest surviving religious tradition in the world, the last living of the pagan faiths, the mother source of all dharmic traditions, the civilization which has been the backbone of Bharata desha and the Indian subcontinent and beyond. To outsource that custodianship, to abdicate our duties of custodianship of our samskriti, would be a betrayal of who we are, from where we come and who we are destined to be.

Aditi Banerjee is a practicing attorney at a Fortune 500 financial services company in the greater New York area. She is on the Board of Directors of the World Association for Vedic Studies (WAVES) and has organized and presented at global conferences on matters related to Dharma. She co-edited the book, Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America, and has written widely on Hinduism and the Hindu-American experience.

TV summary: Sheldon Pollock writes, “All Indian learning … perceives itself and indeed presents itself largely as commentary on the primordial sastras.” … “We ourselves do not “create” knowledge, but merely bring it to manifestation from the (textual) materials [Vedas/Sastras]” and concludes that since “all knowledge is pre-existent”, “progress can only be achieved by a regressive re-appropriation of the past.” Therefore, “there can be no conception of progress of the forward movement from worse to better, on the basis of innovations in practice”. “If any sort of amelioration is to occur, this can only be in the form of a “regress’” a backward movement aiming at a closer and more faithful approximation to the divine pattern [Vedas/Sastras].”

Question: Do Hindus (“traditional Indians”) believe that all knowledge is sourced from Vedas and Sastras?
Sheldon Pollock says so emphatically. In fact, he is convinced sufficiently to write an entire article towards this conclusion titled “The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory in Indian Intellectual History”. This paper was published in the prestigious Journal of the American Oriental Society in a special issue in honor of Pollock’s teacher, the famous Harvard Indologist, Daniel Ingalls.

In that paper, Pollock draws the damning conclusion that Hindus believe that all knowledge is sourced from Vedas/Sastras and hence failed to make progress in sciences (vyavaharika or this-worldly knowledge) because they saw themselves limited to merely extracting knowledge of the Vedas: theory (rules or “grammars”) of the Vedas always preceded the practice of science. West, on the other hand, is diametrically opposed to it and held experimentation and practice as the means to developing knowledge of science.
Summarizing his conclusive views on Indian intellectual history, Pollock writes,

“The understanding of the relationship of sastra (‘theory’) to prayoga (‘practical activity’) in Sanskritic culture is shown to be diametrically opposed to that usually found in the West. Theory is held always and necessarily to precede and govern practice; there is no dialectical interaction between them. Two important implications of this fundamental postulate are that all knowledge is pre-existent, and that progress can only be achieved by a regressive re-appropriation of the past.

Pollock arrives at his thesis as follows:

1. Epistemology of Hindus points all knowledge to be divine in origin as with all of material Universe (Satkaryavada cosmogony); there is no knowledge creation, only uncovering concealed preexisting knowledge. Pollock writes, “First the “creation” of knowledge is presented as an exclusively divine activity and occupies a structural cosmological position suggestive of the creation of the material universe as a whole. Knowledge, moreover – and again, this is knowledge of every variety from the transcendent sort “whose purposes are uncognizable (adrstartha) to that of social relations, music, medicine (and evidently even historical knowledge) – is by and large viewed as permanently fixed in its dimensions.”
2. Vedas and Sastras are of a divine origin. Moreover, all divine knowledge has been transmitted through and only through Vedas and Sastras. Therefore, all human exploration of knowledge is limited to uncovering concealed knowledge in Vedas and Sastras. Pollock writes, “Knowledge, along with the practices that depend on it, does not change or grow, but is frozen for all time in a given set of texts that are continually made available to human beings in whole or in part during the ever repeated cycles of cosmic creation.”
3. Sastras provided rules (or grammars) to govern many aspects of non-ritualistic human behavior. Grammars of Sastra had a strangle-hold on practically all aspects of secular human behavior in traditional India. Pollock writes, “These grammars were, by a process to be discussed, invested with massive authority, ensuring what in many cases seems to have been a nearly unchallengeable claim to normative control of cultural practice.”
4. Even when (vyavaharika) knowledge of this world – such as medical, surgical, ayurvedic, astronomical/astrological, art – was developed in traditional India, Indians viewed such knowledge to be necessarily originating from but concealed in preexisting Vedas/sastras. Pollock writes “All Indian learning, accordingly, perceives itself and indeed presents itself largely as commentary on the primordial sastras.”
5. Believing that Vedas are eternal and perfect, and that all knowledge, ideological and of practice, is in the Vedas has limited Hindu minds to Vedas for seeking knowledge and eliminated any change of civilizational progress. Pollock writes, “The eternality of the Vedas, Sastras par excellence, is one presupposition or justification for this assessment of Sastras”. Pollock adds, “From the conception of an a priori sastra it logically follows – and Indian intellectual history demonstrates that this conclusion was clearly drawn – that there can be no conception of progress of the forward movement from worse to better, on the basis of innovations in practice. … it is clear that in traditional India there were at all events ideological hindrances in its way. If any sort of amelioration is to occur, this can only be in the form of a “regress’” a backward movement aiming at a closer and more faithful approximation to the divine pattern.”

Pollock’s conclusion is nothing short of a sweeping judgment on the entire Indian civilization and knowledge development. He summarizes this moribund predicament when he writes, “Logically excluded from epistemological meaningfulness are likewise experience, experiment, invention, discovery, innovation. According to his own self-representation, there can be for the thinker no originality of thought, no brand-new insights, notions, perceptions, but only the attempt better and more clearly to grasp and explain the antecedent, always already formulated truth. All Indian learning, accordingly, perceives itself and indeed presents itself largely as commentary on the primordial sastras.”

If Sheldon Pollock’s pronouncements are true, Indian civilization amounts to becoming a victim of its own creation by jailing creative minds of generations of intellectuals within the restrictive confines of cultural rules enunciated in Sastras over multiple millennia. This is not only a damning narrative of India’s past, but also a damning foreboding for those who follow tradition in India.

To summarize Pollock, give up your traditions and progress the way of the West or be damned.

By: Surya Kachivuk

Snapshot

• Until Sanskrit is inculcated as a spoken language of Hindus devoid of academic rigour, there will not be any changes.
• Till we make our ancient systems relevant and applicable to the young aspiring individuals in India we won’t succeed.

During the controversy of James Laine’s book on Shivaji in 2004, the then PM Vajpayee had mentioned that “Countering the views in a particular book by another good book is understandable.” What he essentially meant was that the answer to a book should be a book. The whole petition and controversy regarding Murthy Classical Library reinvigorates certain tenets that the Right and Conservatives should adhere to.

Firstly, Rajiv Malhotra has blown the veil of biased “Indology” and he deserves credit for it. What the Right should not do however is to play the same old game that the Left-Lib has played all this while. For decades the Left pressurised and bullied many scholar who didn’t toe their line. This led to a permeation of a single-sided Leftist view point across all spheres of life from education to media.

And whom are we fighting against? This isn’t an imperial battle that’s divided by geography but it’s a well-established systematic architecture with deep foundations within India and Indians across. While we argue whether Pollock should be the head of MCL series or not, take a step back and you will find that he is the ‘Arvind Raghunathan’ Professor of South Asian Studies, a chair funded by another Indian.

While the Murthys can be criticized for their selection, what about the Sringeri Mutt one of the highest Adaviatic school of learning which was all set or is set to start a chair of Hindu Studies in Columbia with Pollock.

Sringeri Mutt

In strategy we need to pick the battles at the Right Time.The most important instrument of creating this base is the language Sanskrit itself. What Hebrew is to Jews,Sanskrit has to become for Hindus and there has to be a deep trickle down effect to its masses. So how can this mass movement be enabled?

Innovate

One of the reasons for adoption of Linux and later on Open Source in the software industry was the deep contempt for the monopoly of Microsoft. They thought the best way to counteract the “secret source code” was to throw it open through a self-governing knowledge network. A similar Open Source Network is needed for Sanskrit texts. The right-wing scholars should come together to disseminate, translate and interpret texts into consumable common man’s vernacular languages.

Aided with people from IT background the scholarship should be transparent and collective in pursuit. The model could be crowd-funded but the end products should be free. Today it’s difficult to get decent translations of all the four Vedas, let alone other texts. The Open source community can build ground rules but the essence is to disseminate knowledge for masses with an appreciation for Sanskrit.

Inculcate

Yoga could become a mass movement through the proliferation of Yoga schools or a at every street corner. They way Sunday schools contributed in making the Bible a household book, weekend schools in Sanskrit is needed to make it a mass movement. Until Sanskrit is inculcated as a spoken language of Hindus devoid of academic rigour, there will not be any changes.

Integrate

Sanskrit is considered to be old, rustic and non-applicable in the current context. While spiritual gurus hold workshops on subjects like Bhagvad Gita & Leadership, there is an understandable difficulty in integrating the ancient with the modern. The small minority of scholars who are knowledgeable about Nyaya, Vaisheshika or Samkhya should cross pollinate with “like minded” professionals and teachers to formulate an Applied Theory that could be used in day to day lives.

For example a Nyaya scholar can work with a management executive and come out with a ‘Decision Making’ concept. Till we make our ancient systems relevant and applicable to the young aspiring individuals in India we won’t succeed. Similar to the Chinese who are integrating Confucian thought in their modernity, a similar assimilation is needed in India.

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda the father of Hebrew language had said “ The Hebrew language will go from the synagogue to the house of study, and from the house of study to the school, and from the school it will come into the home and… become a living language”.

The same is needed for Sanskrit.

Nagendra Sethumadhavrao is a Product Engineering Exec based in LA. He has a PhD in Innovation Management and works on Chaos Theory and Metaphysics. He can be reached at @dr_nagendra

The Battle for our Sanskriti is Raging in Full Force.

On one side, we have the Hindu bashers operating under the Western Indology flag. This is a highly developed ecosystem as they hold the reins to prestigious Ivy League institutions in the U.S., and anyone seeking degrees in the field of Indology is required to subscribe to their views. Thus, they have been able to leverage the prestige of the institutions to build an army of misinformed and prejudiced people. These people have been inducted into Indology study departments all over the world and are currently spilling lies and hate with the goal of destroying our civilization and dividing our people. They have multiplied astronomically over the years and spread their tentacles across the globe through students (degree holders). In addition, their livelihoods are dependent on their mastery in spilling this hate, which is why they have come up with many unique and original approaches to do the job.

On the other side, we have Rajiv Malhotra. The reason I say this is that he is the lone person who discovered what was going on, researched the industry, and reached out to Indians through his books (Invading The Sacred, Breaking India, Being Different, Indra’s Net and The Battle For Sanskrit). The + denotes Truth, similar to what the Pandavas chose in the battle of Kurukshetra. It also means that, like it or not, Malhotra’s decades of tapas have started to pay off, and both the Indian people and many ordinary Westerners are increasingly seeing what is going on.  So his side is swelling in numbers.

Given the path-breaking nature of Malhotra’s latest book, The Battle For Sanskrit, a series of events have taken place over the past few weeks. I first present here the chain of events and then show the reactions of the press so the reader can judge for him/herself how good a job the press has done.

Event Highlights

1. Rajiv Malhotra released his book called the Battle for Sanskrit, which included an extensive critique of Western Indologist Professor Sheldon Pollock among other things. This work is purported to be a first of its kind since Pollock has been writing on Hinduism for several decades and has his own thriving ecosystem but traditional scholars weren’t aware of his contributions, or their effects on Indian society and social discourse. Malhotra, being located in the U.S. with a deep understanding of the American milieu as well as the Hindu tradition to which he was born, decided to take up the task. Because of his background, he could bridge the gap between the Western Indologists and traditional scholars, many of whom endorsed his work and sought alliances with him.
2. What followed was a petition by 132 distinguished Indian traditionalists to remove Pollock from the position of general editor of the Murthy Classical Library of India (MCLI). MCLI was set up to translate 500 Indian works in various languages. The petitioners quoted from Pollock’s lecture titled “What Is South Asian Knowledge Good For?” where he says, “Are there any decision makers, as they refer to themselves, at universities and foundations who would not agree that, in the cognitive sweepstakes of human history, Western knowledge has won and South Asian knowledge has lost?  …That, accordingly, the South Asian knowledge South Asians themselves have produced can no longer be held to have any significant consequences for the future of the human species?”
3. A Western Indologist called Prof. Dominik Wujastyk took exception to the petition and alleged that the traditional side hadn’t read the entire piece by Sheldon Pollock on which the petition was based. He correctly said, “In this passage, Prof. Pollock is criticising the administrators of western universities who do not give proper recognition and value to Indian knowledge systems, and only view India as a place to make money or to make practical applications of knowledge systems of the West”. He quoted from various pages of the lecture to support this claim.
4. In a subsequent rebuttal, Professor Krishnamurthi Ramasubramanian quoted Pollock from the same lecture: “greater part of South Asian achievements and understandings” have “no claim whatever … to any universal truth value in themselves, and precisely because they pertain to what are specifically South Asian modes of making sense of the world.” Professor Ram agreed that Pollock has a way of making concessions during his lectures but comes back to refute them thereafter, upholding the view that the petitioners pointed out. His concluding lines are also significant: that “our understanding of ‘usefulness’ and ‘truth’ [of South Asian knowledge] has grown substantially in the time since Marx and Weber” (clearly displaying his bias and conclusion about the drishti or lens with which the studies are to be done). He also pointed out Pollock’s political activism: “Prof. Pollock has been a prominent signatory of two statements which have strongly condemned the actions of the authorities of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and the Government of India in taking constitutionally mandated legal actions against the anti-national slogans raised by an unauthorized assembly of protesters at the JNU on the 9th of February 2016. While castigating the actions of the democratically elected Government of India as an “authoritative menace”, these statements do not condemn the protesters who called for the dismemberment of India and abused the Supreme Court of India for “judical killing”. As regards Wujastyk’s claim that the petitioners weren’t familiar with the whole lecture he said “We are not upset by Prof. Wujastyk’s claim that “Prof. Ramasubramanian has misunderstood Prof. Pollock’s views by 180 degrees”, though it is totally incorrect. But we are deeply dismayed by his insinuation that many of  those who have signed this petition (most of them eminent Indian scholars) “have signed Prof. Ramasubramanian’s petition, presumably without having read Prof. Pollock’s work for themselves, or having failed to understand it.”  As indicated by Gandhi, statements exhibiting such condescension borders almost on racial prejudice.”
5. At around the same time, the South Asia faculty issued Changes to the school curriculum in American Schools “South Asia faculty suggested edits to grade 6 school text books: World History and Geography: Ancient Civilizations”. The changes clearly show that the department is phasing out the existence of India and Hinduism from the minds of school children. We all know that people tend to trust school text books unquestioningly, so these children are being prepared to fight for untruths, with the potential for spilling further hate. It appears that while we blame Muslim terror groups for working on the minds of young children, the South Asia faculty is doing much the same thing although under the cloak of civility.

a. instead of “Northern India”, “Indus Valley Civilization”
b. add “Pakistan” so the line reads “Indus Valley River in India and Pakistan”
c. Arabian peninsula, India and equatorial Africa should be changed to “Arabian Peninsula, the Indian Ocean littoral and equatorial Africa”
d. Change India to the Indian subcontinent
e. “The early civilization of India” should be changed to “The early civilization of South Asia”
f. Change Harappa to Indus
g. Delete reference to Hinduism and replace with religion of Ancient India

6. Rohan Murty is batting for Pollock.

Role Of Media

The media was relatively silent until Prof Dominik Wujastyk entered the picture.

In fact, Malhotra had a mega launch, visiting many leading institutions all over India and lecturing packed halls. He also visited the Kanchi Shankaracharya for blessings and collaboration. I read just a couple of stories at the time describing his “whirlwind tour” and noted some fear that the social media was becoming more important than the regular one.

But after the petition was filed and gathered 10K supporters within a couple of days (the number keeps growing), Dheeraj Sanghi wrote in a personal blog that he had “no idea about Prof Pollock”, but had read the whole lecture. In what remains of this blog, he talked about the distinguished scholars/academics behind the petition with great disdain as if that too should be part of free speech. He went on to talk at length about the need to critique Pollock on objective terms. He doesn’t appear to have read “The Battle for Sanskrit” yet. Some of the comments below this article are enlightening.

The Economic Times Bengaluru was also one of the first out with a story. The tiny news story took a tone that many would term neutral but the following line in Pollock’s support was a giveaway: “Those aware of Pollock’s work held that the signatories “misrepresent Pollock to achieve their end”.” This is of course a clear indication that the writer was aware of the details of Pollock’s work and also had personal knowledge of the fact that none of the signatories of the petition were so aware. This feels presumptive and dishonest.

Anushree Majumdar’s piece in the indianexpress as it exists today appears relatively neutral (although she does have an inexplicable laudatory tone for MCL et al). Also, she starts off with the words “ Nearly six years after American scholar Sheldon Pollock was chosen to steer the course of the Murty Classical Library of India”, but doesn’t mention the reason for the stir after six years, i.e., a certain detailed critique of Sheldon Pollock’s work called The Battle For Sanskrit.

Then came Mridula Chari of Scroll, who could hardly hold her praise of Pollock (since Scroll doesn’t welcome comments and has for long been a mouthpiece for Western Indologists, this is very easy to do). She dismisses Pollock’s anti-national politics as a “fashionable allegation”. This article also included selective quotations from Pollock’s lecture.

Then there was an article by “sepoy” (amazing how the modern web doesn’t require you to display true identity when you are obviously out to slander others and talk in favor of breaking up nations and dividing people). The writer talks at length about school text books and the history of Ramayana, but doesn’t bother to explain the anomaly: the existence of Ram Mandir before the Mughal period is now archeologically proved. She/he then goes on to talk about an utterly laughable claim that “Hindus claim to have pure Aryan descent”, when this is a construct of Western Indology 200 odd years ago to divide the people of India (we have Dalit separatism today because of it). The Aryan invasion theory has since been proved archeologically incorrect, but the argument goes on.

Scott Jaschik had an article on the issue as well, where he expressed solidarity with Western academics. The article had little else to add to the discourse, until right at the end, where he made a claim that “some scholars in India whose views clash with nationalists report losing their jobs or their influence” (he links to another American site as evidence, where a Muslim writer rues the plight of an Indian leftist, liberally sprayed with references to Indian political parties). One wonders at the use of the word nationalist as if it is a special kind of sin perpetrated by Indians, as if Americans are not required to be nationalist or uphold nationalistic sentiments.

The Economic Times also hosted Muslim writer Arshia Sattar who is known for her deconstruction of the Ramayana under Pollock’s guidance. While she couldn’t resist defending her mentor, she didn’t add anything to the debate.

Indrani Basu applauded Rohan Murty, junior fellow at Harvard University, who claimed that the petitioners were like people sitting in a peanut gallery throwing shells at those who were actually working. Basu doesn’t mention the rebuttal from Professor Ram and actually has nothing else to add about the whole thing at all.

There are many other news stories and rebuttals, but I’m stopping quoting them here because I have to stop somewhere. Also, this platform doesn’t allow me to hyperlink as I would have liked to do, which limits the scope of this piece.

When a reader goes through these stories, some obvious similarities and features stand out-

A Question Of Motivation

All of the above write-ups take a very strong stand in favor of Pollock, driving one to wonder about their motivation. After all, when so many Indian scholars and academics have taken such a strong stand and the repercussions for the unity and integrity of India are openly visible to all, it’s strange that the media is spewing out one story after another although they can find nothing new to add. This naturally leads one to believe that there is a publicity campaign going on, but whether it’s Sheldon Pollock or the Murthys doing it is anyone’s guess. The Murthys certainly have the money and Pollock the required ecosystem, so it appears to the outsider that the two are in bed together.

A Question Of Sensationalism

The first news stories covering the issue were enough proof of this. While touching on the contents of the petition itself and skirting around the seriousness of the concern, the writers used their eloquence to push the JNU sedition case to the forefront while expressing their solidarity with antinational activists.

While the public was trying to figure out whether a politically motivated depiction of their history was indeed harmful to them, the second lot of writers was getting ready. This lot picked up Prof Wujastyk’s objection to the petition to spin stories about how the Indian traditionalists hadn’t read the whole lecture and poked fun at their interpretation of Pollock’s 1985 paper on Sanskrit shastras.

A Question Of Rigor

While Pollock has manufactured debatable and at times, utterly outrageous theories, no one can deny that he worked very hard to secure the finances and then do the job. Journalists would have done well to read Malhotra’s book before jumping to conclusions, but they were obviously rushing to get the story out without much care for authenticity.

A Question Of Ethics

The more I think about it, the more I am amazed at the easy immorality of journalistic representations. There seems to be no mandated responsibility to report the truth and the facts. Protected by an umbrella called “free speech” that applies to them alone, they can go about condemning or praising according to their wishes. Their hosting organizations can allow or omit any comments as they desire under the pretext of “review” and the public voice can be crushed as if it didn’t exist.

Bottom Line

It is evident that journalism is a modern concept because, if there was a shastra on journalism, the ethical standards of journalists would be higher and they would be motivated by the social responsibility built into the dharmic way of life. The world would therefore rid itself of these regressive, self destructive tendencies and move peacefully towards higher truth.

In a market economy where words aren’t valuable in themselves as vehicles of transcendence but as the currency for political control, academic “findings”, the fabrication of history and news production are increasingly merging and transforming into a dangerous monster playing on humanity for the greatest financial gain. The intelligent amongst us would do well to take note.

132 Indian scholars and academicians petitioned Rohan Murty towards removing Pollock from chief editorship of the Murty Classical Library. The response this petition has drawn is staggering in scope and astonishing in content.

Rohan Murty has himself hit out saying, “It is quite rich to sit in the peanut gallery, pass comments and throw empty shells at those who are actually rolling their sleeves up and working on the ground.” In essence he belittles top scholars from prestigious institutions of IITs and Sanskrit universities as in a “peanut gallery” who throw “empty shells”. This is a staggering and disrespectful dismissal of Indain scholars. Contrast this with the respectful approach of the petitioners who in the very beginning express their admiration and appreciation. He also asserts that the root of the problem is that “there aren’t more scholars in India capable of carrying out such translations from ancient literature”. So basically in India, he cannot find scholars capable of translating its own scriptures? How low have Indians sunk in the eyes of these folk?

The second shocking attack came from Kiran Mazumdar Shaw.

“Idle xenophobic minds” – This to a petition that made no personal attack whatsoever and squarely stuck to positions that Pollock takes and his political activism. This a tag for 132 eminent academicians of India!

So petitioners have no right of saying respectfully that they don’t approve of a decision taken by Rohan Murty? Distorting the discourse by making it something about rights which it is not?

The name calling for Indian scholars continues

He dismisses 30 Sanskrit scholars of which some are Head of Departments and Chair persons as confused between “Mantra chanting” and scholarship. Our elite are self professed experts in understanding who is a fine Sanskrit scholar.

How do they know he is a fine/great scholar? I hope not like this…

Rajiv Malhotra has written a book specifically on this topic for these journos and elite to be informed about Sheldon Pollock’s scholarship. But here, our folk conclude he is a great scholar by meeting him at JLF! In the same token how have they dismissed Indian scholars? Is it because they have read them or because they do not attack the Modi government enough? There is no doubt of Pollock’s interest in Indian politics.

Below is another article by Indrani Basu who thinks this name calling by Rohan Murty is a “brilliant response”

http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/03/02/rohan-murty-pollock-removal_n_9371122.html?utm_hp_ref=india

It must be noted in the article, that she introduces Pollock as a “historian” when he is a Sanskrit scholar who interprets Sanskrit texts. This is how 1) interpretations turn into facts 2) Indologists become experts of everything in India from history to politics 3) “well informed” journos haven’t done even minimum fact checking.

Hindustan times article:-

http://www.hindustantimes.com/india/pollock-murty-classical-library-issue-indian-experts-back-canadian-prof/story-jeaEJlPwycQZBZIRUlarjI.html

When HT seeks an opinion about the issue, who does it approach? Ramachandra Guha and Kancha Iliah. One who thinks that “red” and green in the Indian flag represents Hindus and Muslims respectively and the other who has racist justifications for the destruction of Hinduism. The article also notes ” The Change.org petition, signed by 132 Indian academics, most of whom hail from various Brahmin sub-castes”. They have done a caste census of the signatories of the petition! It also misquotes the petition where the original states that the scholars conducting the translation “need to be imbued with a sense of respect and empathy for the greatness of Indian civilization”. Hindustan Times distorts this and quotes the petitioner as saying “Pollock lacks respect and empathy for the greatest of Indian civilizations”

Has he read that Pollock criticizes the very idea of Shastras? This is what he has to say on the topic, “Sastras is one of the fundamental features and problems of Indian civilization in general and of Indian intellectual history in particular.”

Let us rewind a bit. Does Kiran who thinks Pollock is “a great scholar who knows what he is saying”, or Shekhar Gupta who thinks “Pollock is a fine Sanskrit scholar” being attacked by those envious of him or Madhavan Narayanan who thinks questioning Shastras needs to be “democratically considered”, know that Pollock had signed a petition pressurizing the University of California, Irvine against setting up Vedic and Indic civilisation chair from funds by DCF. Here is a detailed article that is must read on the same:-

http://linkis.com/swarajyamag.com/idea/abfb4

So why, if he was a fine scholar, did he have to pressurize through petitions to pulp certian chairs? Couldn’t he have a genuine debate and free flow of ideas? Why did his student Ananya Vajpayee sign a petition to pulp Rajiv Malhotra’s books the result of which, Pollock is being known for his views among the common public? Will Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Shekhar Gupta now use the same names and words they tagged the Indian scholars with on Pollock?

When the elite of India have such a dismal attitude towards Indian scholars bordering racism, when their only source of information on Indian affairs comes from the Pollocks of the world and when they are so ill informed about his own writings while defending him, are we to pretend a level playing field exists? Pollock in the end maybe right in his views of Shastras, but when the discourse is so lopsided and when his cabal signs petitions to pulp Hindu academic chairs, there is just no genuine debate required for the churning from which the truth will come out. One must also remember that all this has a lot to do with marketing. There are many great Indian scholars who don’t market themselves in the same way. The various media posts that claim “right wing” scholars are petitioning against Pollock have shown that the Indian elite is reduced to thinking through their “wings”. The discourse becomes so reductionist and unhealthy. As regards to Pollock’s politics I quote from The battle of Sanskrit which quotes Grunendahl:-

“Pollock’s post-Orientalist messianism would have us believe that only late twentieth-century (and now twenty first century) America is intellectually equipped to reject and finally overcome ‘Eurocentrism’ and European epistemological hegemony that is a pre-emptive European conceptual framework of analysis that has disabled us from probing central features of South Asian life, from pre-western forms of ‘national'(or feminist, or communalist, or ethnic) identity or consciousness, premodern forms of cultural modernism, precolonial forms of colonialism. The path from “Deep Orientalism” of old to a new “‘ndology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz’ leads to a ‘New Raj’ across the deep blue sea.”

“From its colonial origins in Justice Sir William to its consummation in SS Obersturmführer [a senior rank in the Nazi party] Wüst, Sanskrit and Indian studies have contributed directly to consolidating and sustaining programs of domination. In this (noteworthy orthogenesis) these studies have recapitulated the character of their subject, that indigenous discourse of power for which Sanskrit has been one major vehicle and which has shown a notable longevity and resilience.” (pg. 111 Deep Orientalism, italics mine)

About Wüst, Pollock (p. 89) says that he wrote “the programmatic article “German Antiquity and the History of Aryan Thought” … after the National Socialists took power … a model for what was to come.” Wüst interpreted that “the ancient aryas of India were those who felt themselves to be the “privileged, the legitimate” … because they established the superiority of their race, their culture, their religion, and their worldview in the course of struggle with host populations.” Pollock does nothing to debunk this interpretation. Rather, he affirms it in his essay by explaining that the aryas achieved it through monopolization of Sanskrit language and knowledge.

If these are not connections forged by Pollock between Sanskrit and Nazism, if this is not an attempt to blame Sanskrit for Nazism, I don’t know what can be. Yet people are not convinced and think that Pollock is engaged merely in a comparative analysis of the “morphology of domination.” Anyone who has read Pollock carefully would know that in his view all knowledge is political in nature and is ultimately about politics. Therefore, while he continues to engage in politics through knowledge, naive intellectuals assume that he is on some great intellectual quest.

In this blog, I will walk you through his essay “Deep Orientalism” to show how it provides a step-by-step guide to blame India in general & Sanskrit in particular for Nazism. The outline is as follows:

Step 1: Trans-historicize the idea of Orientalism

Step 2: Show that “Orientalist” German Indology contributed to Nazism

Step 3: Show existence of pre-colonial “Orientalism” in Sanskrit thought

Step 4: Show that British Indology was a continuity of pre-colonial “Orientalism”

Step 5: Show Nazism is continuity of Sanskrit thought

Before we dive into the details, there is a caveat … My burden is only to explain the process by which Pollock attempts to blame the Sanskrit hoi oligoi thought for Nazism. I am not at all suggesting that his arguments are valid and one who knows better would clearly see that the conclusion does not follow from them. That Pollock intends such a conclusion is evident from the passage of his essay quoted above. All I can explain further is the half-baked process that allegedly leads to it but which is flawed right from the get-go.

Some may hold in good faith that Sanskrit thought cannot be held responsible for Nazism and so assume that people of deep erudition such as Pollock cannot possibly commit such a travesty. But that is what we must find out by reflecting upon their writings and hence this post.

Step 1: Trans-historicize the idea of Orientalism

Orientalism suggests that “European scholarship of Asia” and “colonial domination of Asia” are “mutually constitutive” (76). But Pollock claims this understanding of Orientalism is “maybe too narrow” because it cannot accommodate either German Indology or precolonial forms of domination in South Asia. Therefore, he over-stretches the concept of Orientalism as a process of colonization and domination that might also be conceived as potentially directed inwards, and ‘disclosed as a species of a larger discourse of power that divides the world into “betters and lessers” and thus facilitates the domination (or “orientalization” or ”colonization”) of any group’ (77).

Now, it is plain to see that Pollock has all but destroyed the very concept of Orientalism and reduced it to the simplistic idea of domination itself. He is, of course, aware of the problem and he responds: “To a degree this criticism is valid, yet I think we may lose something still greater if not doing so constrains our understanding of the two other historical phenomena” (78). This sets the tone not only of the essay but Pollock’s work in general, in my view: “may be too narrow,” “might conceive as potentially directed inwards,” “we may lose something still greater” … in other words only rhetorical devices, no logical arguments.

What is the “still greater” thing that we may lose? It is the study of Sanskrit culture as an indigenous discourse of power. The standard concept of Orientalism, however, suggests that the valorization of Sanskrit culture was itself an outcome of Orientalism.  Therefore, devalorization of Sanskrit culture becomes integral to an Orientalist critique. But this is something Pollock does not want. He wants to study Sanskrit culture as an indigenous discourse of power. It is for this “still greater” thing that he seeks to destroy the standard concept of Orientalism by reducing it to domination plain and simple.

And so Pollock insists that the Indology associated with the British colonization of India is only “a specific historical instance of a larger, transhistorical, albeit locally inflected, interaction of knowledge and power” (76). I really love this sentence. Next time someone charges you with being “ahistorical” throw this on their face. Tell them that their historical contextualization “may be too narrow” and “we may lose something still greater” if we do not seek the “larger, trans-historical interaction of knowledge and power” which gets “locally inflected” in “specific historical instances.” When you have this command over the English language, you can get away without making any rational argument.

Finally, let us note what Orientalism is really about. I will use Balagangadhara as an authority on Said and quote some insights from his Reconceptualizing India Studies (n.b. some of the following include quotes from Said’s Orientalism as well).

“As Said said repeatedly, ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, and ‘imperialist’ vocabulary does not transform something into an ‘Orientalist’ discourse, any more than the use of ‘dichotomizing essentialism’ does.” (39, italics mine)

“Orientalism is better grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than it is simply as a positive doctrine.” (ibid)

“It is a particular way of thinking. What kind of constraints transforms human thinking into Orientalist thinking? … The Orient and the Oriental … become repetitious pseudo-incarnations of some great original (Christ, Europe, the West) they are supposed to have been imitating… To the Westerner, however, the Oriental was always like some aspect of the West” (40, italics original)

“In Western descriptions of other cultures, the ‘otherness’ of the latter has disappeared; the West is the great original; others are but the pale imitations.” (ibid)

“Orientalism describes non-Western cultures in a way that effaces differences; a limited vocabulary and imagery are the consequences of this constraint.” (ibid)

In Pollock’s view, on the other hand, Orientalism is a form of “othering” that can be extended to any situation involving dominance. Pollock’s understanding of Orientalism is limited to begin with and he has flattened it out for the sake of his project. If other scholars are rightly condemned for such errors, why is Pollock spared? Because he advocates a “morally sensitive scholarship” (79)? That makes it self-righteous but it does not make it any more intellectual.

In light of the foregoing, it should be evident that the Nazi oppression of the Jews or the Brahmanical oppression of the shudras cannot be considered Orientalist because they do not involve the aforementioned processes. Nonetheless, they are forms of domination and can be studied as such. So why the fuss about attempting to designate them as Orientalist? Because that way you can connect them to each other and show them as equivalents, which you cannot do if you were to study them independently. It also facilitates lazy, arm-chair intellectualism, for all the research that has already been done in Nazism can be simply transferred to the Indian situation. As Pollock has so eloquently put it, “we may lose something still greater …”

Step 2: Show that “Orientalist” German Indology contributed to Nazism

As an Indian, this step is not very important for me. I am sure it would be so for German Indologists such as Grunendahl who have criticized Pollock’s essay but I am not overly concerned. There are, however, facets in this section of Pollock’s essay to which we must pay attention. German Indology is, of course, vital for Pollock’s project because it is a serious lacuna in Said’s Orientalism which connects knowledge with colonial domination.

As we have noted earlier, Orientalism is primarily an epistemological problem. When Indian thought is viewed through a Eurocentric, Christocentric lens, it will appear as it does, with or without colonialism. Colonialism cannot produce such knowledge, it can only finance it, make it authoritative and abet its internalization by the host population. But Pollock has made it primarily a problem of power and wherever power can be implicated in an “othering” found in knowledge, that is Orientalism for him. While colonialism is not central to Said’s Orientalism, Pollock has first assumed it to be so and then used German Indology to show that it need not be so (since Germany was not a colonial power) and used that as an excuse to suggest that Orientalism can take a variety of directions, inwards in case of Nazi Germany, and a variety of forms, such as monopolization of knowledge, in case of Brahmanical India.

Even if we may not be interested on the debate between the influence of German Indology on Nazism, what is of interest to us here is how Pollock has cleverly connected the process with the Indian situation. One of the first important insights we glean from this section of the essay is the interesting reference to Indian shastras: “an internal colonization of Europe began to be, so to speak, shastrically codified, within two months of the National Socialists’ capturing power” (86, italics mine). Is this not already setting the stage, sending subliminal signals, that shastric codes in precolonial India should be seen as parallels to Nazi laws?

In the same way, we are also told: “For some [Nazis], linguistic activity should have been included [among the activities regulated for excluding Jews and other minorities]” (86-87). Call for such regulation of linguistic activity in Nazi Germany has been emphatically pointed out by Pollock, and he has included with it a racist manifesto by some Guntert, obviously not because it was of great significance in the scheme of things in Nazi Germany, but because he is going to show later that linguistic monopolization of Sanskrit was the primary form of pre-colonial Orientalism in India. This is all preparation for what is to follow.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from this section, not for this essay in particular, but Pollock’s scholarship in general, is his emphasis on the problem of Wissenschaft. He takes great pain to show how the German scholarship of the Nazi era, while deeply implicated in politics and contributing towards the Nazi cause, remained utterly oblivious of it and boastfully presented itself as scientific and objective. I am sure German scholars will vehemently disagree but these contesting narratives do not concern us. Rather, we must note what Pollock is trying to do here. He is basically suggesting that no scholarship is really scientific or objective, no matter how much it tries to pretend otherwise, and by implication, therefore, scholarship should be unabashedly political because it simply cannot be otherwise. It does not matter how valid are your arguments but whose side are you on – the Dalits, the poor, the oppressed? Then what you say is automatically valid because your cause is good. On the other hand, if you claim to be on a quest for genuine knowledge and without a political cause, then you are unwittingly on the side of the upper castes, the rich, the oppressors, as the German scholars were inadvertently supporting the Nazis. If scholarship in the humanities has descended into rottenness today, you can blame this kind of thinking for it. It is not just Pollock; this anti-intellectual principle that the righteousness of one’s cause permits one to play truant with the facts, has polluted the very intellectual climate in which we live.

Apart from this, this section of the essay rambles on and on about the construction of Aryan identity, the “othering” of the Jews, the complicity of German Indology with Nazi politics, and so on, where Pollock, as usual, puts on display his vast erudition, whether relevant or irrelevant to the subject at hand, whose only purpose can be the intimidation of the reader.

We conclude by noting again Pollock’s contention that “German Indology has to be accommodated in any adequate theorization of orientalism” (96). But why it “has to be” is never explained. Couldn’t we just say that Orientalism is a flawed theory as so many have done? On the other hand, because it “has to be” so “orientalism, thought of as knowledge serving to create and marginalize degraded communities – even members of one’s own community – and thus to sustain relations of domination over them, reveals itself as a subset of ideological discourse as such.” Thus “British use of forms of orientalist knowledge for domination within India … help us theorize the German use of comparable forms for domination within Germany … [which] help us theorize how Indian forms of knowledge serve in the exercise of domination in India.” And so the stage is set for the study of high Sanskrit culture as a “precolonial colonialism” and a “pre-orientalist orientalism.”

Step 3: Show existence of pre-colonial Orientalism in Sanskrit thought

Let us begin with a reminder, yet again, that Pollock has given us something that can best be called as neo-Orientalism. Remember Hacker’s claim that Neo-Hinduism was emptying out Sanskrit words of their original meaning and refilling them with Western meanings? Well, since Pollock has emptied the original concept of Orientalism as the study of a conquered people as “pale and erring variants” of the conqueror, and refilled it with the new meaning of any “dichotomized essentialism” we can read his interpretation as a neo-Orientalism, instead of “Deep Orientalism.” Alternatively, those charged with propagating neo-Hinduism can defend themselves by claiming to be engaged in “Deep Hinduism.”

The morphology of domination in ancient India lay, according to Pollock, in the denial of access to shudras to Vedic learning and the Sanskrit language in which the authoritative discourse of dharma was articulated. It is evident that Pollock’s main concern is that the Orientalist critique obscures the role played by Sanskrit texts in pre-colonial forms of domination. Even more so, the Orientalist critique suggests that textuality itself may not have played a role in pre-colonial forms of domination (more on this in the next step). I think it is precisely Pollock’s attempt to show that textuality matters which leads him to point out that the pre-colonial form of domination consisted in the main of denying access to texts and the language of the texts. But this is a circular argument. If the role of textuality in pre-colonial forms of domination is itself not clear, what does it matter whether people had access to those texts or not? Only after it is established that textuality played a central role in pre-colonial forms of domination, as it did in the colonial period, that the denial of access to the dharmashastras and so on, can be established as a form of domination.

As per his literary style, Pollock rambles on and on, but two insights in this section of the essay deserve our attention:

(1) Although the dharmashastras and their commentaries have been produced throughout Indian history, out of that vast corpus the essay focuses specially on the nibandhas (digests) composed from 12th century CE. Why so? Because, as Pollock claims, they were produced in response to the Muslim invasions. Why is that important? Because, these nibandhas can be understood as a way in which the Indians defined themselves as a “tradition” against the alien “other.” The implication is straightforward. There is nothing extra-ordinary if during the colonial period in the 19th century, an Orientalist “tradition” was produced. Indians, it would appear, have always done it. They did it in response to the Muslim invasion (oooh, I must be careful … Pollock says “Central Asian Turks” not “Muslim”) as they did it in response to the British invasion. This is excellent sophistry in my view and segues neatly to the fourth step which contends that British Indology was not an innovation at all but a continuity of an Orientalizing tradition that always existed in Sanskritic India.

(2) The term “arya” and its distinction from the “non-arya” occurs frequently in this discussion. This “binary overarches the world of traditional Indian inequality” (107) but what does the term mean? Pollock says that the term “merits intellectual-historical study … for premodern India” (ibid) which means we do not know yet but Pollock gives us the valuable hint that the term is deserving of the attention “at least of the sort Arier has received for modern Europe” (ibid). And so it is evident, especially in light of the role that Aryan identity played in Nazi Germany, discussed at length earlier in the essay, that arya means something similar. And if there is yet any doubt that arya may have meant something else in pre-colonial India, such as “noble” for example, instead of a racial stock, such doubt is foreclosed by the clarification that “from such factors as the semantic realm of the distinction arya/anarya …  it may seem warranted to speak about a “pre-form of racism” in early India, especially in a discussion of indigenous “orientalism,” since in both its classic colonial and its National Socialist form orientalism is inseparable from racism” (ibid).

And so there we have it: Sanskrit culture, British colonialism and Nazism. All three are racisms. All three are orientalisms. And Sanskrit culture is the “pre-form”. Pollock does not explain what this term means but evidently it is some kind of a “proto” state awaiting maturity. This also suggests why it is difficult to pin it down unlike British colonialism and Nazism which manifested their evil so blatantly during their heyday. And it also suggests that the maturity could be realized in the future, say, once a certain “Hindutva” party seizes power in India. I should emphasize that Pollock has not said any of this explicitly. He has only said “pre-form” and laid down the parallels and continuities between Sanskrit culture, British colonialism and Nazism, but this is enough for the readers to do the math themselves.

Step 4: Show that British Indology was a continuity of pre-colonial “Orientalism”

The critique of Orientalism holds that “it was British colonialism that, in cooperation with orientalism, “traditionalized” society in such a way that it took on a form, a hegemonic Sanskritized form, that it may never really have had” (97). Pollock raises a two-fold objection to this critique. Firstly, British colonialism did not produce its form of domination tout court (which, I assume, should be interpreted as “without its precedent in the native culture”). Secondly, this critique does not take into account the history of pre-colonial domination (without which it cannot say with confidence that colonial forms of domination were innovative). These objections are explained with two examples.

As a first example, Pollock alludes to Stein’s view that “[Brahmanical] texts … received a new life lease and legitimacy at the hands of European orientalists who [based on them] constructed … a social theory allegedly pertinent … to pre-modern societies of South Asia, where it can have at best a partial validity (and that to be demonstrated). (98)” In objecting to this view, Pollock refers to the composition of the dharma nibandhas in the 12th century as “a kind of pre-modern “traditionalization” of” the social order. But Pollock does not explain how these two events – the production of the dharma-nibandhas and the production of Indological works – in different times and under radically different circumstances, and in fact authored by different people – the Indians in the first case and the Europeans in the latter – can be comparable. True, both involved scriptural study and validation, and both were sponsored by powers ruling in India, but that is only a superficial comparison. In the 19th century, we know that Eurocentric and Christocentric frameworks were used in the study of Indian scriptures for the purpose of colonization and proselytization. And that Indian laws were instituted on the basis of such study. But what was the point of the dharma-nibandha compositions? Pollock is right to say that “such vast intellectual output surely needs to be theorized in some way” (98) but European Orientalist Indology is hardly the model to achieve this theorization.

In the second example mentioned by Pollock, he contests the essay “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India” by Lata Mani who contends that as an effect of the colonial discourse, Brahmanical scripture came to be privileged and constituted as the authentic cultural tradition of India. Pollock complains that in order to prove this point, the author does not “proceed to the logically prior question, “whether brahmanic texts [have] always been prioritized as the source of law” (a good, though conceptually and historically complex, question), but to “a careful reading of the Parliamentary Papers” … [and thus] we never leave the colonial arena in pursuit of these goals” (99 ff).

Before we proceed further, it is worth noting that Pollock himself has not asked the “good, though conceptual and historically complex, question” though it is required of his own project of depicting Sanskrit texts as the locus of pre-colonial form of domination. Rather, he appears to have gone down the different track of demanding that we take seriously the ideals of varna system found in the shastras and kavya (such as the varna-related verses in the Ramayana, of which he gives an example in his essay, see p. 102) as bearing upon social reality. He laments that reflections concerning the social effect of “the dream of power” as found in Sanskrit texts, in constituting the reality on the ground, have not been brought to bear on the Indological problem (102-103). This, of course, would take us in the realm of mere speculation but I don’t think that matters to Pollock – we have already noted his disdain for the “scientific and objective” scholarship of the German Indologists. All knowledge is political, so why not hoist speculation as a form of knowledge if it is for a good cause? Indeed, Pollock’s whole essay seeks nothing more than a return to Orientalism. Of course, he cannot say this openly and so the garden path in the form of this murky essay. Indological texts were complicit with the power which sponsored them, but then so were the Sanskrit texts which Indology studied. If the former are to be critiqued as Orientalist, why should the latter be spared the same treatment? This is the petulant refrain which runs throughout Pollock’s essay.

Returning to Pollock’s critique of Mani, we note that he does not consider the fact that the reason why Mani does not find it necessary to leave the “colonial arena” is that the evidence she is looking for is covered in the texts of the colonial period where she discerns a change in the depositions made by the pundits. “While officials treated vyawasthas (the written responses of pundits to questions put to them by colonial officials on various aspects of sati) as truthful exegeses of the scriptures in an absolute sense, it is clear from reading the vyawasthas that the pundits issuing them believed them to be interpretive” (Mani, 133).

As Mani explains, the Parliamentary Papers show that the vyawasthas were tentative which would imply that the pundits issuing them were being called upon to interpret scripture in altogether different ways and for unprecedented purposes: “in the beginning at least, the responses of pundits appointed to the court did not reflect the kind of authority that colonial officials had assumed, both for the texts and the pundits” (ibid, 149). “By contrast there is nothing tentative about the 1830 orthodox petition; there are no qualifiers prefacing textual excerpts … [and the petition was noted as being] ‘accompanied by legal documents’. Here the equation between law and scripture is complete” (150). What Mani’s research of the Parliamentary Papers reveals is how Indians adapted themselves as they began to understand what could and could not pass muster in the new regime as legally admissible and gradually started prioritizing scripture in their legal petitions as they realized it would prove most effective with their colonial masters. It is evident from Mani’s essay that apart from Brahmanical scripture, there were other sources of law such as caste councils and customary usages, which were ignored by the colonial administrators as corruptions of the pristine sources.

But for Pollock this colonial discourse of seeking scriptural validity in legal matters is connected with and possibly derived from similar attempts made by the dharma-nibandha scholars. He completely ignores the fact that pundits in the colonial period were responding to the demands of their new rulers whose sensibilities in this regard obviously emerged from the Protestant reformation which valorized scripture over the Catholic tradition. It would be absurd to imagine that dharma-nibandha scholars and their patrons, who were obviously indifferent to such sensibilities, were engaged in a similar pursuit. If it appears doubtful that a great scholar such as Pollock could have made such a crazy insinuation, here is the full quote: “In fact, much of the discourse as we find it in the nineteenth-century Raj could easily have derived, and may have actually derived, from a text like the twelfth-century digest …” (100). I have already shown how Pollock has attempted to portray these twelfth-century digests – the dharma-nibandhas – as manifestations of a pre-colonial “Orientalism” and here we have covered how he seeks to establish that British Indology was continuous with it.

Step 5: Show Nazism is continuity of Sanskrit Thought

Let us recap the path down which Pollock has led us. First, the concept of Orientalism was redefined to make it purely a political problem and its epistemological aspect was ignored. Second, the contribution of German Indology to Nazism was highlighted. Third, the Sanskrit culture was depicted as a pre-colonial colonialism or a pre-oriental Orientalism. Fourth, British Indology was presented as contiguous with it. Now the math is simple. If British Indology was contiguous with Sanskrit thought then why not German Indology which emerged and functioned together with it? In fact, as Pollock suggests, British Indology did the foundational work for German Indology:

“The discourse on Aryanism that this orientalist knowledge generated was, to a degree not often realized, available to the Germans already largely formulated for them at the hands of British scholarship by the middle of the nineteenth century” (83, italics mine).

And so if German Indology can also be regarded as contiguous with Sanskrit thought then surely Sanskrit thought must be held responsible for what German Indology contributed to, namely, Nazism.

We must note, however, that there is nothing to suggest in Pollock’s essay that its purpose is to trace the origins of Nazism to Sanskrit thought. But this aetiology is easily suggested by the essay and Pollock has made no effort to warn against making such an interpretation, if that was not his intent. While respectful of the erudition contained in the Sanskrit shastras, it is evident that he finds them just as toxic and oppressive as the Nazi texts.

He ensures that the reader does not miss the connection between the two by referring to the latter as shastric codifications and focusing on the arya/anarya dichotomy in the former, to be read as analogous to the Arier distinctiveness contained in the Nazi texts. Similarly, the reference to the connection between language and race in Nazi rhetoric is a strategic inclusion considering that in Pollock’s view linguistic restriction was the main form which pre-colonial domination took in India.

Of course, Pollock regards the shastras as important even today, and as displaying great erudition … but to what end? As mere discourses of power, evident from the following passage:

“Traditional domination as coded in Sanskrit is not “past history” in India … Partly by reason of the stored energy of an insufficiently critiqued and thus untranscended past, it survives in various harsh forms … When, for example, we are told by a contemporary Indian woman that she submits to the economic, social, and emotional violence of Indian widowhood because, in her words, “According to the shastras I had to do it”; when we read in a recent Dalit manifesto that “The first and foremost object of this [cultural revolution] should be to free every man and woman from the thraldom of the Shastras,” we catch a glimpse not only of the actualization in consciousness of Sanskrit discourses of power, but of their continued vigor” (116-7).

This, then, is the relevance of the study of Sanskrit shastras for today. If there is any other kind of learning to be derived from them, he does not say anything about it at all.

But what if one objects that Pollock is merely engaging in a “comparative morphology of domination” and does not seek to establish a link between Sanskrit texts and Nazism, or to insinuate that the ideas contained in the former led to the latter? In response to this objection, we note firstly the striking parallels between the two, which Pollock has taken pains to establish. But even more than that, it is the very process of seeking “a comparative morphology of domination” which establishes the connection between the two. Sanskrit culture, British colonialism and Nazism cannot be established simply as independent streams, separate forms of domination, because of the Orientalist critique that the dominance of a Sanskrit cultural tradition was itself established by British and German Indology.

If this is wrong, as Pollock suggests, then British and German Indology were simply reproducing the toxic and oppressive forms of domination which they discovered in Sanskrit texts, the only difference being that the vector of British Indology was directed outwards – to colonialism in India – and the vector of German Indology was directed inwards – to Europe and Germany itself. We have already noted that Orientalism, in Pollock’s view, should be regarded as multi-directional. The only way to break the connection between the toxicity and oppressiveness of Sanskrit culture, and that of British and German Indology, is to admit that the two Indologies had misinterpreted and misrepresented the ideas contained in the Sanskrit texts. But if that is admitted, then Sanskrit culture cannot be regarded as toxic and oppressive in an Orientalist sense at all. Hence, I say that it is the very process of producing “a comparative morphology of domination” between Sanskrit culture, British colonialism and Nazism which requires that Sanskrit culture was a factor in both British colonialism and Nazism.

And he has, in fact, admitted as such:

“From its colonial origins in Justice Sir William to its consummation in SS Obersturmführer Wüst, Sanskrit and Indian studies have contributed directly to consolidating and sustaining programs of domination. In this (noteworthy orthogenesis) these studies have recapitulated the character of their subject, that indigenous discourse of power for which Sanskrit has been one major vehicle and which has shown a notable longevity and resilience.” (111, italics mine).

Note that Pollock does not say that British and German Indology exploited Sanskrit texts to consolidate and sustain programs of domination, as orientalism is commonly understood, but that Sanskrit and Indian studies have themselves contributed directly towards this goal. It was an orthogenetic development, a recapitulation of an indigenous discourse of power for which Sanskrit has been one major vehicle. That is deep orientalism: blame Sanskrit, save Indology.

The future of Indology as Pollock envisages it also becomes evident here. Thus far Sanskrit has used the British and German Indologists to spread its evil in the world. The powers with which these Indologies colluded – the Raj and the Nazis – become, in Pollock’s reading, simply innocent carriers of this poison. But now it is time to turn the tables on Sanskrit – to expose and contain the evil that festers in its heart. That is the future of Indology.