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This book argues that Sanskrit and sanskriti are alive, sacred and sources for liberation. However, the future will depend on what the insiders of our tradition do with this. The big breakthrough will take place only if serious Sanskrit scholars and important India-based institutions enter this Kurukshetra to directly make a difference. An old adage says: a pandit is one who is moved to act upon his conviction (‘yah kriyavan sah panditah’). Change can be brought about only through action, not by armchair pandits.

I wish to propose a list of debates that will hopefully result from this book. Even if only a few of these debates take place with well-informed insiders representing the tradition, they could be game changers. This approach is also the best way to train intellectual kshatriyas who can represent the dharmic traditions confidently, based on solid knowledge and argumentation skills. Furthermore, the knowledge generated as a result of such debates would inform policymakers in education, culture, science, public health, interfaith affairs, foreign affairs and media. In each case, I state my position concisely in the list that follows.

A. Contesting the intellectual re-colonization of India

1. Export of the adhikara for Sanskrit studies: The Battle for Sanskrit is the result of my campaign to discourage the Sringeri Peetham from being shanghaied by American Orientalists. Such a hijacking is being attempted with the help of NRI funding and the support of senior administrators at Sringeri. This illustrates a tendency for adhikara to get transferred to institutions and individuals who are invested in other civilizations. I consider this very dangerous. Debates are needed to discuss the mechanisms required for reviving and developing our civilizational foundations in a manner that does not undermine the traditional adhikara. We must develop strategies for collaboration with Western Indologists and install the safeguards needed for this.
2. Western universalism as the privileged framework being adopted: The present trend has been to train Indian scholars in the use of Western tools for critical thinking; this requires many years of mastering a wide range of Western theories and theorists. This threatens to marginalize the tools of critical thinking found in Indian sanskriti, siddhantas, paramparas and sampradayas. Meanwhile, Indian civilizational gems are being appropriated and turned into Western assets. I use the analogy of the US dollar serving as the world reserve currency. I propose that we position some powerful Sanskrit non-translatable categories as part of the global intellectual currency for the future.
3. Status of Orientalism: Although Sheldon Pollock claims we live in a post-Orientalist era, I argue that the old form of Orientalism 1.0 has mutated into the more sophisticated form of American Orientalism that may be seen as Orientalism 2.0. We ought to discuss whether Indology today is largely a newer and updated genre of Orientalism.
   

   B. Contesting the use of Buddhism as a wedge against Hinduism

    

4. Buddhism’s relationship to Hinduism: Is Buddhism truly at odds with Hinduism? Was it really anti-Vedic as commonly alleged by Western scholars? Evidence from traditional Indian sources suggests that the differences between the two have been grossly exaggerated. In fact, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism share a common matrix/womb of dharma from which they all emerged.
5. Chronology of key Hindu texts: In order to support their thesis that Hinduism lacked innovation due to brahmin monopoly and the oral tradition, the American Orientalists tend to explain all the innovation in Hindu texts as being the result of Buddhist interventions against the Vedas. They adjust the chronology for the primary Sanskrit texts of grammar, Purva-mimamsa, the Ramayana, etc., to locate them after the Buddha. This is to support the claim that all these texts were Hindu reactions to Buddhism.
6. Writing in ancient India: Was writing in India introduced a few centuries after the Buddha, by foreign migrants and converts to Buddhism, as claimed by the American Orientalists? The entire history of Indian languages and culture as depicted by them disregards the evidence of writing available from the Indus–Sarasvati Civilization materials.
   

   C. Contesting the depiction of Sanskrit and the sanskriti based on it

    

7. Oral tradition: The scholarship I critique in this book tries to undermine the importance of the Indian oral tradition. I have explained why the oral tradition was not only vital in the past evolution of Indian culture, but that it also holds great promise for the future development of mind sciences and offshoots into education and other fields.
8. History of Indian languages: American Orientalists assume that Sanskrit arrived from foreign migrants into India and that it was genetically and structurally different from the Indian vernaculars. They allege that Sanskrit eventually succeeded in dominating the vernaculars and established hegemonic control over them. This contestable premise has infiltrated contemporary social theories that are being used to divide Indians into conflict-ridden linguistic and social groups. It contradicts the traditional view that Sanskrit and Prakrit (from which the vernaculars evolved) are two mutually supportive linguistic streams constituting a speech system known as vac.
9. Allegation of built-in social abusiveness: According to a growing number of Western Indologists, Sanskrit and sanskriti have always abused and oppressed the women, Dalits and Muslims of India. This is emphasized as a structural defect as opposed to being a matter of isolated instances. It is alleged that Sanskrit grammar, Vedic texts and the shastras are the root causes; they are said to be laden with rules that preclude intellectual freedom. This is a viewpoint traditionalists might want to vigorously contest, and we must hear both sides.
10. Allegations of lack of creativity: It is further purported that shastras prevent genuine creativity and progress in vyavaharika (worldly) matters, because they are straitjacketed by the Vedic world view. However, there is an abundance of counter-evidence showing that Indians have been innovative in producing and applying shastras to both empirical and spiritual domains. Shastras, therefore, cannot be dismissed as lacking in practical innovations and creativity.
11. Allegation of Sanskrit’s ‘death’: I have argued against the academicians who say that Sanskrit has been dead for a thousand years. I cite traditional scholars such as Krishna Shastry and K.S. Kannan who wish to debate this issue.
12. Secularization of Sanskrit and sanskriti: Sheldon Pollock’s camp is committed to the secularization of Sanskrit because it regards spiritual practices such as yajnas, rituals, pujas, tirthas (pilgrimages), vratas (vows, promises) and various other sadhanas to be primitive, superstitious and exploitative. One of their principal agendas is to remove aspects that are linked to the paramarthika (spiritual) realm and only focus on those in the purely laukika or vyavaharika (mundane) realm. Traditionalists consider this a serious violation to the integrity of our tradition. I firmly resist this reductionist secularization.
13. Allegation of kavya as political weapon: The American Orientalist camp maintains that kavya (literature) was developed specifically for the kings to be able to assert their power over their subjects. In other words, it is seen as an ancient form of a ruler’s propaganda machinery. Such a reductionist view must be contested. Kavya cannot be collapsed into mere politics; it has served many positive functions for the general population both in the secular and sacred domains.
14. Ramayana: Is the Ramayana meant to portray an exploitative dominion by the kings, i.e., is raj dharma an abusive system of governance? My opponents see the Ramayana not in terms of a genuine spiritual quest but as a political device. They consider it a weapon that has been used to cause violence against the Muslims even to this day. However, bhaktas (devotees) maintain otherwise. They see Rama as a role model for all rulers.
    D. Reclaiming and repositioning Sanskrit and sanskriti
15. One-way flow of knowledge from Indian texts into English: For centuries, Indian-language texts have been translated into English while a flow in the reverse direction has remained virtually non-existent. As a result, only English has become the language of research and communication for knowledge in most fields. Sanskrit must find its legitimate place alongside English as a repository of knowledge with its own way of thinking. Here we can learn from China’s strategies concerning Mandarin.
16. Other ancient languages comparable to Sanskrit: Western scholars routinely categorize Sanskrit with Latin which they deem to be a ‘dead’ language, and/or with Greek which they hold as a classical language. Modern Indian scholars blindly accept such a classification of Sanskrit as a dead or classical language. This is not acceptable to traditionalists because Sanskrit and sanskriti did not evolve through outright rejection of the past but as a continuity with the past. Therefore, we need to make efforts to decouple Sanskrit studies from Latin/Greek studies and to classify it alongside Mandarin and Persian which are living and continuous with their respective pasts. We should bring in discussants from Asian countries where languages such as Mandarin, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese are given prominence, and recognized as both old and modern.
17. Scope of Sanskrit studies: Besides studying the Sanskrit language and its old texts, it is necessary to introduce and employ Sanskrit categories and methods for research in modern domains such as computational linguistics, ecology, animal rights, the aging population and family structures, neurosciences and mind sciences, education and accelerated learning, mathematics and other theoretical sciences and health sciences, just to name a few. We must dismantle the present system of intellectual apartheid in which Sanskrit is kept isolated from the knowledge disciplines where its treasures are being appropriated and reformulated into Western paradigms, and given new histories as so-called Western ‘discoveries’.
18. Exposing Hinduphobia: If a scholar were to refute the very existence of Allah, or claim that the Quran does not represent the actual word of God, or that Muhammad was not a prophet, it would be called Islamophobia. This allegation would apply even if the scholar in question were saying ‘positive’ things like: Arabic has a rich treasury of poetry, the Quran holds a light for humanity, etc. None of that would satisfy the Muslim mind. An analogous situation exists in the way an attitude gets classified as anti-Semitic. Hindus should be alarmed by the existence of a double standard in Western academics, because the same sensitivity and adhikara to speak for our tradition is not granted to Hindus. This is why Sheldon Pollock was shocked when I characterized several of his stances as inimical to Hindu dharma (i.e., Hinduphobic). We need to define a level playing field for characterizing a work as Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Hinduphobia, etc.

My new book, The Battle for Sanskrit, offers a critique of a category of western Indologists whose work is based on the writings of Sheldon Pollock. I respect Pollock as a hard working scholar, but I am troubled by his approach to the Sanskrit tradition because it undermines some core ideas that most practicing Hindus greatly value. In this blog, I want to touch briefly on some of the substantive points where I disagree with Pollock’s work. I refer the reader to my book for evidence of his positions and my arguments against them.

My book frames these issues in terms of two opposing lenses: the lens of insiders, who are those with loyalty to the Vedic worldview, and lens of outsiders, who are those who dismiss (or at least marginalize) the Vedas and look at the Sanskrit texts primarily through Marxist and postmodernist theories of social oppression and political domination.

Adopting the insider perspective, my main objections to Pollock and other outsiders concern the following methods and views:

• The methodological separation between the secular and the sacred in studying Sanskrit tradition;
• The claim that racial and ethnic oppression, class discrimination and gender bias are intrinsic to Sanskrit and its conceptual matrix in the Vedas;
• The side-lining of the oral tradition as a dynamic part of Indian history and thought;
• The politicizing of the genre of kavya;
• The outright dismissal of the positive value of shastra;
• The insistence on a dramatic split between Sanskrit and the vernaculars;
• The determination to show maximum split between Hinduism and Buddhism;
• The distortion of the Ramayana as socially abusive and as harbouring anti-Muslim rabblerousing.

Pollock’s fundamental assumption and the governing methodology of his work involves making a sharp separation between the realm of the sacred, or paramarthika, from the realm of the mundane, or vyavaharika. He sees the transcendental basis of the Vedic tradition primarily as a form of irrational mystification, encoding it its very core hierarchical and anti-egalitarian views and proscription. As a consequence, he sees advances in Indian history as having come about by moving away from this base. Pollock refers to the ‘long prehistory of Sanskrit’ as a period of ‘sacerdotal isolation’, in which he says the Vedic rishis existed in a state divorced from a logical understanding of the empirical world.

This view is indicated in the title of his magnum opus, The Language of the Gods and the World of Men; Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India (2006), a book that should be required reading for anyone wishing to engage with Pollock at a serious level. For Pollock, the defining historical event is what he sees as Sanskrit moving out from the grip of brahmin elitism, which he feels consisted of meaningless rituals and otherworldly fixations, into the world of politics under royal patronage. Once it gets turned into a political device for kings, Sanskrit becomes stultified and regressive because the royalties become decadent due to internal corruption and social injustice.

Pollock simply sets aside the paramarthika dimension of life because he finds it not susceptible to modern, scientific methods of study.  He does not claim to have practiced any Vedic related forms of sadhana, and his work is not based on a Vedic perspective. He calls himself a secular scholar, and thus an outsider to the tradition. The result of this is to make the transcendental perspective subservient in the study of Sanskrit and its texts.

Note that an insider point of view on the history of Sanskrit and on its future is in effect excluded from the very start by Pollock’s method of separating the sacred from the secular. This approach enjoys a growing acceptance in the academy, and this has turned Sanskrit studies into largely a campaign to attack it on issues of social justice in India.

Moreover, he is explicit about the political consequences he wishes to be drawn from his work: that the only way forward for social justice in India lies in relegating Sanskrit firmly to the past (as a ‘dead’ language), where it can be scrutinized for harboring regressive thoughts. This point takes us to my second objection: Pollock’s view that Sanskrit encoded toxic/oppressive views of women, minorities and others from the start, and that its revival today is in service of reactionary and communalist forces.  He writes:

Sanskrit was the principal discursive instrument of domination in premodern India and in addition, it has been continuously reappropriated in modern India by many of the most reactionary and communalist sectors of the population (cited in The Battle for Sanskrit, 140).

This oppressive deployment of Sanskrit continues today, he says:

Traditional domination as coded in Sanskrit is not ‘past history’ in India, to be sure. Partly by reason of the stored energy of an insufficiently critiqued and thus untranscended past, it survives in various harsh forms (intensified by the added toxins of capitalist exploitation by twiceborn classes) despite legislation designed to weaken the economic and institutional framework associated with it (cited in The Battle for Sanskrit 141).

Scholars have ignored all this, he laments. So the goal of Indology today, he says, ought to be to ‘exhume, isolate, analyze, theorize, and at the very least talk about the different modalities of domination in traditional India’. His analysis is based on an interpretation of the social restrictions on the use of Sanskrit in the early tradition. Access to Sanskrit, he points out, was reserved for ‘particular orders of society’. In his view, Sanskrit only became de-monopolized by the intervention of Buddhists, though even then it remained an instrument of political power. Kings used it to stabilize the culture and create a ‘culture-power formation.’ They decided who could study it and for what purpose. He elaborates on this point as follows:

[Sanskrit] was a code of communication not everyone was entitled to use, and fewer still were able to use. It is not just that some people did and some did not employ Sanskrit, but rather that some were permitted to do so and some – the majority, who otherwise might have been able to do so – were prohibited (cited in The Battle for Sanskrit, 140).

Once again, Pollock locates the original source of these oppressive restrictions in a Vedic worldview, one he calls ‘Aryan’. He writes:

Given the nature of the primary sphere for the application of Sanskrit, it is not surprising that this constraint was formulated as a restriction on participation in the rituals and liturgical practices of the Sanskrit speech community, whose members called themselves Āryas (cited in Battle for Sanskrit, 142).

His methodological and ideological program emerges from and reinforces his dislike of Vedic discourse and his investment in Western methods in philology. This stance leads him to sideline the oral tradition in history. The chanting of mantras, the preservation of rituals, and the memorization of large, complex texts represent for him the deadening yoke of the past on an emerging social and political consciousness.

Secondly, his position leads him to see Buddhism as a kind of radical intervention and upgrade in the Vedic tradition, breaking the stranglehold of the brahmin monopoly and creating new forms of cultural production such as kavya. In his eyes, the real intellectual payoff in the study of the language lies in re-interpreting such genres as kavya, and even the great early treatises on Sanskrit grammar, for the light they can shed on a growing public sphere designed firstly to bolster and extend the prestige and power of the royal courts and secondly for their continued encoding of oppressive social views on women, minorities and outsiders. In the service of this view, Pollock sees Sanskrit itself as a language of the cosmopolitan elite, different in origin from the vernaculars and in tension with them.

He also sees the great epics of India, such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, as justifying the violent suppression of the ‘other’ in Indian politics.

Pollock’s western lens also leads him to a view of shastra that would astonish those who value the huge body of knowledge they represent both intrinsically and for its potential to generate new thought. For him, the constant reference in shastras to Vedic norms and cosmologies and to spiritual wisdom virtually guarantees that they cannot really produce innovation.  They are locked in outmoded and ‘pre-modern’ frameworks from which they cannot break out into the kind of free thought that the west itself only achieved in the enlightenment. Of the famous Sanskrit shastras that deal with linguistic issues, he writes:

Classical Indian civilization, however, offers what may be the most exquisite expression of the centrality of rule-governance in human behavior. Under the influence perhaps of the paradigm deriving from the strict regulation of ritual action in vedic ceremonies, the procedures for which are set forth in those rule-books par excellence, the Brāhmanas, secular life as a whole was subject to a kind of ritualization, whereby all its performative gestures and signifying practices came to be encoded in texts. Śāstra, the Sanskrit word for these grammars, thus presents itself as one of the fundamental features and problems of Indian civilization in general and of Indian intellectual history in particular.

It is easy to miss the real import of statements like this, which are often couched at first in terms that are complimentary to the tradition, like ‘exquisite’.  Later, however, these exquisite texts become the problem: the source of all is backward, premodern, uncritical, unscientific and stultifying in Indian thought.

Here Pollock is clearly exporting onto India the western secular grand narrative of history according to which the medieval church and the Christian faith on which it was based were deadening forces from which people had to break free through the scientific revolution in thought. It follows that Pollock would naturally be deeply opposed to current efforts to revive spoken Sanskrit. For him this revival is no more than saffronization at work; it can only be seen as a tool of the kind of repression and mystified thinking he finds holding Indians back in their long history.

This then is, in brief, a scan of the positions Pollock takes to which I most object, and which I have discussed and refuted in detail in The Battle for Sanskrit.

I want to say in conclusion, however, that Pollock’s positions on these matters are not to be dismissed easily or taken lightly. He is not only extremely learned in Sanskrit, but insightful on its past and its great works at many points. Those who wish to defend the tradition against his reading of it must meet high standards of scholarship, reasoned argument and commitment to a progressive future for India. They need not, however, adopt a western lens or use the tools of western secular theory to do so, nor need they accept the terms proposed by western academic institutions. They have resources closer to home for these purposes, and they are much more likely to be effective because they can speak with the authority of those for whom the Vedic tradition is not only a life commitment but a rich treasury of knowledge of both paramarthika and vyavaharika realms.

Those who are reading or about to read my new book, The Battle for Sanskrit, will be aware that I focus much of my attention on the prominent American Indologist Sheldon Pollock, who is the most high-profile and influential exponent of what I have called American Orientalism. I wish to explain why I have chosen him as my primary interlocutor and what my interactions with him have been.  I wish to make as clear as possible the reasons for my engagement with him, and the experiences I have had in personal conversations with him and in reading his work.

I focus on Pollock (as opposed to taking a broad but superficial review of the work of multiple scholars) for the following reasons:

• To set a debate in motion against a powerful school of thought, one must dissect and respond to its very best minds and works, and not engage its weakest or most vulnerable scholars. This has also been the traditional Indian approach to debate since ancient times. Pollock deserves to be considered the foremost contemporary exponent of American Orientalism, as I will explain below.
• By naming Pollock as the leader, I invite him, his students and his collaborators to have open-minded conversations and debates with the goal of achieving a better mutual understanding. In effect, this book starts a sort of debate with the American Orientalist camp on their approach to Sanskrit and India studies.
• My focused approach allows me to drill deep into the American Orientalist writings and offer my perspective. I can be concrete instead of making abstract generalizations.
• Pollock’s writings inform a whole generation of scholars as well as mainstream media personalities, and he has achieved unprecedented influence in comparison to any other Western Indologist today.
• He has ‘gone native’ to a large extent and become assimilated in several Indian institutions, which dramatically increases his influence and power. Hence, we can speak of the Pollockization of Sanskrit studies.

 This approach of debating the opposing side’s leader is consistent with my previous books. In each of them, I have addressed one big issue, an issue that was not in my view being addressed adequately by the adherents of the dharmic traditions; hence I tried to engage with its major exponents.

The entire enterprise of engagement and debate has been governed by my understanding of the Sanskrit tradition of purva-paksha. This practice makes huge demands on those who adopt it, demands that the opposing side must be seriously studied and directly engaged, and that differences not be suppressed but fully and publicly aired and explored.

I have also been driven by a strong and growing conviction that traditional Hindu experts who are personally invested in Sanskrit culture and spiritual wisdom have until now failed to rise to the challenge of this engagement, for reasons I have explained in my writings.

Pollock is a worthy opponent, an Indologist and scholar of Sanskrit whose knowledge of the subject matter is unquestionably expert and dedicated. In choosing him as a focal point for my latest book, I have taken on the strongest possible representative and advocate for positions that I want to contest with mutual respect. Indeed, let me say at the outset that in order even to begin to meet the challenges of his work I have had both to immerse myself in his considerable body of scholarship and to pursue many of the sources on which he draws. I have had to read a vast body of secondary work by insiders and outsiders to the tradition alike in order to form my views. In the course of doing so, I have learned a great deal and gained a great measure of respect for him. I believe him to be a sincere lover of the subject he studies and I think his intentions are good, even when he may be blind to the bias caused by his own ideologies. My issue is that he sees the tradition too much through a reductionist western lens.

Pollock espouses views, takes positions and proffers analyses that should raise red flags for those who value the Vedic heritage of India and wish to see it flower as a resource for the future.  Among other things, he is no friend of the Hindu religion – or of any religion, as far as I can see – and he routinely dismisses or discounts the kind of transcendental perspective that is precisely where its strength lies. Furthermore, he is overtly political in his allegiances and feels no compunction in taking positions and fostering interventions in the Indian context that are in line with his leftist and secular commitments, while at the same time taking funding from major capitalist elites. There is nothing wrong with this per se, and he is certainly entitled to his opinions, but he is often not transparent about the coloring of his lens by these ideological allegiances and sources of support. He seems blind to the way his politics affects his entire reading of the tradition, and does so, I believe, often in distorted and misleading ways.

I’d like my readers first fully to appreciate Pollock’s achievements and the importance of his role in Indology, so that they will better understand what I am trying to do and what I am up against in doing it. Let me now introduce Professor Pollock and his work for those who have not read him in detail.

Sheldon Pollock studied Latin and Greek classics at Harvard and this grounding has influenced his subsequent approach to philology in general Sanskrit in particular. After moving on to acquire his Ph.D in Sanskrit studies from Harvard under the famous Indologist, Daniel Ingalls, he spent the next few decades working diligently on a variety of Sanskrit texts. The resulting publications cover a vast canvas of topics in Sanskrit studies, one that has been rarely matched by Western scholars and even by many in India.

His first major study was on the Ramayana in the 1980s. In it, he consciously differentiated himself from fellow Western Indologists. He criticized scholars who romanticized the Sanskrit tradition, and argued for the use of a method he called ‘political philology’ to interpret Sanskrit texts. His approach was radically different from those of Ingalls and the major German Indologists in that he did not share their goal of representing the insider’s perspective on Sanskrit. In further work, he continued this trajectory, developing his critique of Sanskrit culture and tradition as encoding elitist values and oppressive constructs of women, dalits and Muslims. His career culminated in his magnum opus, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, a major work which needs to be read closely and in detail by anyone who wishes to engage with his positions.

Pollock has been widely recognized for his achievements both in the academy and beyond, in India as well as the US. Here are some of his accomplishments:

• He is a fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is currently a chaired professor at Columbia University in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies.
• The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (2006) won the Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association of Asian Studies, as well as the Lionel Trilling Award.
• He has been awarded a Distinguished Achievement Award by the Mellon Foundation.
• At a 2008 conference entitled ‘Language, Culture and Power’ organized in his honour by his students, some of the most respected Indologists participated to pay him tribute.
• He was General Editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library, for which he also edited and translated a number of volumes.
• He has been joint editor of South Asia Across the Disciplines, a collaborative venture of the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press and the Columbia University Press.
• He is currently the principal investigator of ‘SARIT: Enriching Digital Collections in Indology’, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Bilateral Digital Humanities Program.
• One of his initiatives was the Ambedkar Sanskrit Fellowship Program at Columbia, which aims to establish an endowment to fund graduate studies in Sanskrit for dalit students.
• He directs the project ‘Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism’, in which scholars examine the state of knowledge that was produced in Sanskrit before colonialism.
• He is also editing a series of ‘Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought’ while working on another book, titled Liberation Philology, for Harvard University Press.

 These awards and recognitions have sealed his status in the eyes of most Indian intelligentsia as one of the few remaining scholars with the authority to interpret and speak about Sanskrit texts. Some examples of this recognition are listed below:

• The President of India awarded him the Certificate of Honour for Sanskrit, and subsequently the Padma Shri for his distinguished service in the field of letters.
• He has been featured as one of the star figures at the Jaipur Literary Festival over the past seven years, and is routinely invited to high-profile conclaves and seminars in India to help interpret India’s traditions for the Indian elite.
• He is interviewed by Tehelka news magazine and India’s NDTV network, and has received India Abroad’s Person of the Year award.
• He was the keynote speaker at the golden jubilee celebrations of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi.
• He serves as a juror on the committee that awards the Infosys Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences. One of the most prestigious feathers in his cap is his position as General Editor of the Murty Classical Library of India (Harvard University Press). I will examine this position in detail in a later chapter.

 Pollock has many constituents and appeals to many disparate groups of people.

• The Indian left sees him as a priceless ally in exposing Hindu chauvinism by providing evidence of oppressiveness encoded within the Sanskrit tradition. For them, he is a worthy successor of D.D. Kosambi (the late Marxist scholar of Sanskrit) and far better equipped with updated Western social theories. They lionize him as a creator of new Marxist lineages even though, ironically, he is well-funded from capitalist pockets.
• Western academics see him as a unique scholar of intellectual history, his credentials bolstered by access to Sanskrit that few of his peers possess. He is also a novel exponent in the application of Western social theories to Sanskrit-based cultures.
• Wealthy Indians see association with Pollock as opening doors for them to serve on boards of major institutions, giving them the proud sense of finally having arrived into the same league as the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers. Some of his benefactors might seek more mundane rewards, such as high-level networking.
• Indian Sanskrit scholars believe that Pollock’s elevated profile brings prestige to their field of study, which has otherwise been largely neglected by modern, sophisticated people. They perceive him as doing them a favour by serving as their ambassador; some hope that by professing loyalty to him, they might be lucky enough to secure foreign trips and funding for themselves.
• Traditional Hindu organizations are, in some cases, in awe of him, because his international affiliations give them a chance to bask in his reflected glory. By virtue of his presence, their tradition at least nominally secures a seat amongst the global elite. A good example of this phenomenon has been the desire of some administrators at Sringeri Sharada Peetham, established by Adi Shankara, to anoint him as a sort of ambassador for their legacy.
• The Indian government, media and public intellectuals tap superficially into his work as a source of one-liner wisdom – at least until recently. Pollock seems to provide an easy bandwagon, as it were, onto which they can jump without having to know much in the way of depth.
• Naïve Hindus feel proud that their heritage is being championed by an American from a prestigious university, and celebrate him for bringing their tradition into the limelight.

 Pollock has offered a challenging critique of the tradition that deserves and needs close attention and engagement from the Indian traditional side. That engagement and critique have not so far been done. Though there are a few refutations of specific arguments in his work by western scholars, most of the general treatment of him is hagiographic, and the degree to which he has been lauded in India is based on superficial reading and media hype.

Sheldon Pollock is important for me to engage not only because of his giant reputation, but also because he represents the school of thought I have called the new American Orientalism. Not only does he rely on western literary and culture theory in his approach, he represents an assertively leftist and anti-spiritual approach to the subject. In this respect, he appears to be driven by a set of assumptions and historical experiences shaped by the trauma and guilt of native American genocide and slavery as well as by European philology.

Free from the obvious burdens of British colonialism, he engages in a subtler form of Orientalist imposition, the kind of imposition I have analyzed in my book Breaking India. This involves a tendentious reading of the Indian past and of its present problems that is fixated on caste, class, race and gender oppression and regards our cultural achievements as tainted by this legacy. I do not deny that these problems exist, and that they have ancient roots, as they do in the past of most global cultures today. But to read our entire tradition in these terms and to treat every attempt to revive and re-invigorate it as a form of nationalism or saffronization does no service either to our heritage or to our future.

My book looks at some key points of tension in Indology. It frames the issues by looking through the lenses of two opposing camps: the ‘insiders’ who subscribe to a Vedic worldview and the ‘outsiders’ who dismiss the spirituality of the Vedas. The byline of the book’s title captures three broad areas of contention that are discussed in its chapters:

Is Sanskrit political or sacred?
Oppressive or liberating?
Dead or alive?

In each pair of opposites, the first position mentioned is that of the outsiders, and the second position is that of the insiders. Thus, outsiders find Sanskrit and sanskriti to be political, oppressive and dead. The insiders would disagree and find our Sanskrit-based sanskriti to be sacred, liberating and alive.

Pollock’s critique is serious, informed, and motivated by strong commitments; but it is also myopic and captive to a single, reductionist political ideology. He deserves both respect for his positions and a reasoned response that is neither ignorant nor bombastic. Such a critique must acknowledge whatever in his work has validity, but also defend our tradition, its roots in a transcendental perspective and its capacity for growth and change. Such a response has been singularly lacking from the traditional side.

It is important to clarify that only a small portion of today’s Indologists are American Orientalists. It would be incorrect to project my critique of Orientalists onto the whole community of academic scholars of the social sciences and humanities, many of whom have gone to great lengths to shed the mentality I am criticizing here, and to understand and express an insider perspective, whether from the point of view of their own commitments and practices or as a matter of principle. However, the influence of Pollock’s group is significant in academics, media, education and public opinion. Hence, his works must be discussed in detail.