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American scholar Andrew Nicholson has accused noted author Rajiv Malhotra of plagiarising from his book Unifying Hinduism in his Indra’s Net. Malhotra responds.

The hard evidence that cannot be ignored

Given the media’s mediocrity in blindly repeating what other journalists say (without reading the evidence), I want to list the hard evidence from Indra’s Net and let intelligent readers decide for themselves. Everyone I have showed this to, including academic scholars with no familiarity or interest in the specific subject matter, have told me that if one has this many references to Nicholson it would be ridiculous to shout ‘plagiarism’.

Note that most of the reference to his work are in chapter 8 between pages 157-170. The references after page 300 are located in the end notes.

At most they could claim that in a few instances the quotation marks were omitted, but there is no doubt that the author is referring to Nicholson’s work.

Indra’s Net has about 450 end notes, of which about 350 are references to various works by others. There is no intention to hide others’ works at all, in fact, quite the contrary: I am often chided for over-doing references. Nicholson cites far fewer references in any of his works.

Also, less than 3% of Indra’s Net references pertain to Nicholson, because he is relevant only to minor portions of the book. Hence, he is hardly supplying anything major.

Analysis of the facts

My conclusion is that I have pumped his ego by giving him too much importance. His book came into the limelight only after Indra’s Net referred to it. Although it had been out for a few years, only after Indra’s Net his publisher put out his interviews and promoted it heavily. Rather than being grateful, he made a u-turn once I explained that my next book is a critique of his PhD mentor, Sheldon Pollock. His MA was done under Wendy Doniger.

He is extremely critical of ‘Hindutva’, etc. He gladly accepted another award given by Uberoi Foundation, a very explicitly Hindutva organization. When it comes to duping Hindus and taking their money, he has done well as a ‘good cop’. His ‘good cop’ facade that had fooled me has now come off under the false pretext of being a victim.

An arrogant allegation of distortion

Another allegation he makes is that where I disagree with his stance, it amounts to a distortion – as though I cannot give my position and must always agree with him. The specific instance is where he says Vijnanabhikshu was unifying Hinduism. I cite him with agreement. Then I add that Swami Vivekananda was also doing the same thing. Nicholson is angry that I say this of Vivekananda when he meant to say this only for Vijnanabhikshu. My statement on Vivekananda is my own and I am entitled to it.

My mistake in citing his substandard work

I decided to do as new edition of Indra’s Net in which I will remove all references to Nicholson. After reflecting further on his work, I realized that many Indian writers have said the same thing he says, and in greater detail. I am better off citing them instead of him. Also, his notion of ‘unity’ is a synthetic unity whereas mine is integral unity: these are my original concepts and explained in my book, Being Different. So rather than using an unreliable and contradictory source like Nicholson, I will bypass him entirely and explain the deeper integral unity of Hinduism based on Indian sources.

Further De-colonizing myself

Why do we like to cite western sources so much? Partly it’s a colonial habit to assume that the westerner must be more reliable. But in so many cases one finds the opposite: the westerners are better at language, style, appearance of polished presentation. But the work is superficial and often hides a bias underneath. Nevertheless, more publishers and media outlets get interested if a work cites many western sources. We must become self-conscious of this colonial mind set and change it.

There is another reason as well: When I go searching for research works on some specific topic, it is the western works that are predominantly available electronically and in local libraries. Often one has to hunt down an Indian work for weeks or months to get it. Often one does not even know about good Indian works because Indians are not as effective at promoting their works.

But with the help of Indian scholars like Vishal Agarwal and Shrinivas Tilak, I have been able to cite Indian works that had appeared long before Nicholson’s, and that are far deeper and more comprehensive than his work. In fact, it’s a shame that he ignores them or gives lip service when in fact he ought to cite them as heavily as he demands of me.

List of references to Nicholson

Following is the list of references to Nicholson, each item preceded by the page number in Indra’s Net.

Indra’s Net, 15:

In his excellent study of the pre-colonial coherence of Hinduism, titled Unifying Hinduism, Andrew Nicholson explains that prior to the medieval period there was no single way to define what ‘astika’ meant.

Indra’s Net, 65:

Hacker’s suppression of this material compromised his integrity as an objective scholar, as it misled readers into thinking his writings on Hinduism were objective evaluations when in fact they were, in Andrew Nicholson’s words, the work of a ‘Christian polemicist’. [i]

Indra’s Net, 157:

I agree with Nicholson that:

Modern historiographers of Indian philosophy have largely been blind to the numerous intertextually related definitions of the terms astika and nastika. This oversight is further evidence of our own credulity and overreliance on a handful of texts for our understanding of a complex situation in the history of ideas. [ii]

Indra’s Net, 158:

[Without quotation marks but see the end note where reference is given to Nicholson]: Later still, these six got further consolidated with a shared commitment to Vedic authority, by which they differentiated themselves from Jains and Buddhists. [iii]

Indra’s Net, 159-60:

Andrew Nicholson places the growing consolidation of Hindu ‘big tent’ unity in roughly the fourteenth to sixteenth century CE period. [iv] He shows that the categories of astika/nastika were fluid previously, but in this period they became solidified and hardened. He sees the medieval consolidators of contemporary Hinduism as analogous to European doxographers. A doxography is a compilation of multiple systems of thought which are examined for their interrelationships, and sometimes new classifications are proposed. It is like a survey of various philosophies from a particular point of view that is looking for relationships across various systems. Often the bias of the doxographer is expressed by the set of schools that he includes and the ones he excludes, and the criteria by which he ranks them. [v]

Nicholson goes into great detail to show that the writings and classifications by rival Indian schools changed during the medieval period, with many cross-borrowings and new alliances. [vi] He argues that this Indian genre, akin to European doxography, served as the means to cross-fertilize among traditions, thereby making each tradition more accessible to others.

Indra’s Net, 161-62:

Nicholson’s view is that the medieval scholars such as Vijnanabhikshu became the pathway for Western Indology. Nicholson writes how a new kind of unified view of Hinduism emerged:

Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries CE, certain thinkers began to treat as a single whole the diverse philosophical teachings of the Upanishads, epics, Puranas, and the schools known retrospectively as the ‘six systems’ (darsana) of mainstream Hindu philosophy. The Indian and European thinkers in the nineteenth century who developed the term ‘Hinduism’ under the pressure of the new explanatory category of ‘world religions’ were influenced by these earlier philosophers and doxographers, primarily Vedantins, who had their own reasons for arguing the unity of Indian philosophical traditions. [vii]

Indra’s Net, 169-70:

Andrew Nicholson, whose work on the coherence and antiquity of Hinduism is the positive exception to many of these trends in scholarship, further explains this problem as follows:

In the west, our understanding of Indian philosophical schools (as the word darsana is generally translated) has been colored by our own history. The default model for the relationship between these schools is often unwittingly based on models derived from Western religious history: the hostilities between the three religions of the Book, the modern relationship of the various Christian denominations, or even the relation between orthodox and heterodox sects in early Christianity. [viii]

Nicholson is also concerned about making sure that Indian thinkers are studied as individuals and given their due, and not simply lumped together into frozen ‘schools’:

Once the theory of the British invention of almost everything in modern India has been properly debunked, we can look realistically at the ways that such thinkers creatively appropriated some Indian traditions and rejected others. This is not the only reason to study premodern India, but it is one of the most important. Sanskrit intellectual traditions should be approached not as a rarefied sphere of discourse hovering above everyday life and historical time but, rather, as a human practice arising in the messy and contingent economic, social, and political worlds that these intellectuals occupied. [ix]

Nicholson suggests that other models are available for Westerners to appreciate the distinction of each thinker, such as the one used in science. Different scientific disciplines operate in separate domains. They discover in parallel, and they continually try to reconcile their differences. But they are not mutual enemies. In the same manner, we can say that different Indian systems have focused on different domains: Mimamsa focuses on exegesis of Vedic ritual injunctions; Vedanta on the nature of Brahman; Nyaya on logical analysis; Vaisheshika on ontology; Yoga on the embodied human potential; and so on. Nicholson writes:

One of the important differences between the analytical terms darsana and vidya is that ‘sciences’ are not inherently at odds in the way that ‘philosophical schools’ are often depicted. Instead, they can represent different, and often complementary, branches of knowledge, much in the way that modern biology, chemistry, and physics are understood as complementary. [x]

Indra’s Net, 316:

Nicholson points out the huge borrowings made by Christianity: ‘Does this apply equally to the Christian theology’s illicit borrowing of the theological concepts of the immortal soul and the infinity of God from Greek philosophy? Such concepts are not found in Christianity in its pure, Semitic, pre-Hellenized form. The widespread tendency of ”claiming for one’s own what really belongs to another” is a primary means of change, growth, and innovation in all philosophical and theological traditions, not just in Hinduism.’ (p. 188)

Indra’s Net, 325:

Nicholson, 2010, p. 179: ‘”Believer” and “infidel”, though tempting, are also too fraught with Western connotations of right theological opinion (and the latter too closely associated with medieval struggles between Christians and Muslims). The terms “affirmer” and “denier” are better, since these are neutral with regard to the question of right opinion versus right practice. An affirmer (astika) might be one who “affirms the value of ritual” (Medhatithi), one who “affirms the existence of virtue and vice” (Manibhadra), one who “affirms the existence of another world after death” (the grammarians), or one who “affirms the Vedas as the source of ultimate truth” (Vijnanabhikshu Madhava, etc.). The typical translations for the terms astika and nastika, “orthodox” and “heterodox”, succeed to a certain extent in expressing the Sanskrit terms in question.’

Indra’s Net, 326:

Nicholson (2010) writes that ‘the sixteenth-century doxographer Madhusudana Sarasvati, argues that since all of the sages who founded the astika philosophical systems were omniscient, it follows that they all must have shared the same beliefs. The diversity of opinions expressed among these systems is only for the sake of its hearers, who are at different stages of understanding. … According to Madhusudana, the sages taught these various systems in order to keep people from a false attraction to the views of nastikas such as the Buddhists and Jainas.’ (p 9)

Indra’s Net, 328:

Examples of Indian doxographies named by Nicholson include the following: … [followed by a list of 11 lines not in quotation marks, but it is clear they refer to Nicholson]

Indra’s Net, 329:

Although Vivekananda was a passionate advocate of a Vedanta-Yoga philosophy and spirituality, he was not averse to drawing on elements of Western philosophy and metaphysics that were popular at his time. His predilection for Herbert Spencer and other Europeans of the time was to borrow English terminology in order to present his own philosophy more persuasively. He did so because his own philosophical tradition had been savaged by colonial and Orientalist polemics. (Nicholson 2010, pp. 65, 78)

Indra’s Net, 344-345:

This is a long end note that has Nicholson referenced in it by name 4 times; but the material is not in quotation marks.

Footnotes

i. Nicholson, 2010, p. 188.

ii. Nicholson, 2010, p. 175.

iii. Nicholson, 2010, pp. 3, 5, 25.

iv. [Malhotra’s comment: Though Nicholson is mentioned in main text, this end note backs up the statement by using Lorenzen’s work, because Nicholson’s work was inadequate] One may ask why this consolidation into modern Hinduism took place in the medieval period. Some scholars have theorized that the arrival of Islam might have led to a coalescing of various Hindu streams into closer unities than before. It has been surmised that the attempts by Akbar and then Dara Shikoh to synthesize Hinduism and Islam into one hybrid might have been seen threatening Hindu digestion into a subset of Islam. This threat could have been a factor in this trend to bring many nastika outsiders into the tent as astika insiders. Regardless of the causes for this, there is ample evidence to suggest that multiple movements began to organize diverse Hindu schools into a common framework or organizing principle. Each of these rival approaches had its own idea of the metaphysical system in which it was at the highest point in the hierarchy, with the rest located in lower positions in terms of validity and importance, but the point here is that highly expansive unities were being constructed. Another scholar espousing this thesis of the development of an ‘insider’ sense of Hinduism as a response to Islam is David Lorenzen. He notes that between 1200 and 1500, the Hindu rivalry with Muslims created a new self-consciousness of a unified Hindu identity. Lorenzen draws his evidence from medieval literature, including the poetry of Eknath, Anantadas, Kabir and Vidyapati, and argues that the difference between Hinduism and Islam was emphasized in their writings. This emphasis showed the growth of an implicit notion of Hindu selfhood that differed from Islam. For instance, many bhakti poets contrasted Hindu ideas that God exists in all things, living and not living, with Islam’s insistence on banning this as idolatry. Lorenzen concludes: ‘The evidence instead suggests that a Hindu religion theologically and devotionally grounded in texts such as the Bhagavad-Gita, the Puranas, and philosophical commentaries on the six darsanas, gradually acquired a much sharper self-conscious identity through the rivalry between Muslims and Hindus in the period between 1200 and 1500, and was firmly established long before 1800.’ (Lorenzen, 2005, p. 53)

v. [Malhotra’s comment: The following End note is my reflection on the point made in the main text.] This method of writing is common among historians of ancient civilizations, especially when they deal with works that have become extinct, and hence there is a need to fill in the blanks with some degree of invention. For example, Plato’s book on Socrates gives the only information available today on an earlier philosopher called Anaxagoras. The same is true of the Charvakas in India: very little of their own work survives and it is only through third-party critiques that we can reconstruct what the Charvakas were thinking. In a sense, most of the known ancient history of the world is of this kind, because little is based on direct accounts written at the time.

vi. Examples of Indian doxographies named by Nicholson include the following… [Malhotra’s comment: An 11-line list from Nicholson is stated, but without quotation marks because it is a summary of his text. Nevertheless, the reference to his work is clear right at the beginning of the end note as indicated above.]

vii. Nicholson, 2010, p. 2.

viii. Nicholson, 2010, p. 13.

ix. Nicholson, 2010, p. 18.

x. Nicholson, 2010, p. 163.

Postscript: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly stated that Andrew Nicholson had been given an award by the Hindu American Foundation. That sentence has now been removed.

Rajiv Malhotra explains how to fit modern science into the Vedic framework.

A common desire among Hindus today is to see their Vedic tradition through the lens of modern science. There are good reasons for doing this. After all, modern science has accomplished so much and given us many gifts, thus attaining the status of being the gold standard of truth. Therefore, according to most persons, the legitimacy and worthiness of any body of knowledge should be determined by the extent to which it is in conformity with modern science.

I support this aspiration, but with some important caveats and qualifiers. Unfortunately, I do not see most scholars of what is being called ‘Vedic science’ appreciating these qualifiers. Hence, I wish to first explain some characteristics of Vedic knowledge, and then discuss the issue of how this knowledge relates to modern science. Let me start with what I do not wish for: I do not wish to have Vedic knowledge become digested into modern science. On the other hand, I actually want that the process be the opposite: I wish to fit modern science into the Vedic framework.

Vedic knowledge has two broad aspects: shruti and smriti. Shruti is that which is eternal, with no beginning or end. It is the absolute truth unfiltered by the human mind or context. Smriti, on the other hand, is knowledge as cognized by human conditioning. All modern science is smriti. This is the key insight I wish to offer and elaborate upon. Once we understand this and figure out its implications, we can easily see how modern science fits into the Vedic framework as a new type of smriti.

Because shruti transcends human conditioning, it is only available to the level of consciousness I have called the ‘rishi state’ in my book, Being Different. This is a state potentially available to every human being, and the various paths to achieving this are available in the Vedic system of knowledge and practices.

Everything that humans in the ordinary state develop, interpret and transmit is conditioned by the filters programmed into our minds; and hence it is smriti. Science is the understanding of reality based on human senses and reasoning, and hence is limited by these. All accounts of history are smriti. All political ideologies, including the constitutions of nations and the various laws of society are human constructions. All conceptual categories, vyavaharika (worldly) knowledge and experience are filtered through human conditioning. Every kind of knowledge being taught in the modern education system is limited to smriti because it consists of works produced by the human mind.

The relationship between shruti and smriti is very important to understand. These are not two disconnected realms. One can lead to the other: each path to attain the rishi state starts out in the vyavaharika realm, and each such path is based on smriti knowledge. Most forms of sadhana or spiritual practice we do are based on some smriti, and these have the potential to eventually lead us to the rishi state. Many texts used for yoga, bhakti, jnana and various other process are smritis. This is the relationship between absolute and relative knowledge, or between the transcendent and worldly realms.

Each epoch of history and every level of human consciousness had its own context in which knowledge has been generated and made available to us. Hence, we can think of shastra, itihasa and purana each as a certain genre or type of knowledge. Each is a smriti serving the purpose of informing certain kinds of minds, in ways suitable for such minds. Each genre of smriti is an approximation of shruti. As humans advance, they develop new needs and build new capabilities to fill those needs. Hence, new genres of smriti are always emerging as a result of human creativity.

Seen in this way, modern science is a special type of smriti developed for the logical mind, which is a mind that seeks truth by the criteria of such truth being reproducible and verifiable by anyone. This modern scientific truth has achieved great success in solving many kinds of practical problems. Instruments have been developed to measure and hence verify (or refute) empirical claims to ever finer levels of detail. Better measurements lead to more refined theoretical models, which in turn lead to better technologies. This is a cycle that feeds itself. It is undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements of humankind. Western civilization deserves credit for its successful pursuit of modern science.

Given this powerful new smriti called modern science, it might seem as if we can side line shruti. Alternatively, a naïve person might see it as desirable to map shruti knowledge onto modern science’s frameworks. I call this the bad habit of digesting one civilization into another. The problem is that modern science functions in terms of reference that block shruti altogether.

The Vedic framework has both shruti and many kinds of smritis in a coherent and organically unified system. However, trying to make shruti fit into the system of modern science is an unfortunate act of distortion and a digestion of shruti. The scientific framework is not rich and open enough to allow possibilities that are critical for the integrity of shruti. The reason for this problem is that modern science did not evolve as a smriti within the Vedic system.

Our challenge now is to map modern science into the Vedic structures so as to turn it into a smriti that would be compatible with shruti. This way, science would benefit from the Vedic vocabulary and framework; this would facilitate the further development of science.

For instance, the Vedic notion of shakti as ‘intelligent energy’ cannot be replaced by separate energy and intelligence being combined into a synthetic unity. Shakti is not two separate entities seen as one, but a single unified intelligence-energy entity. Also, shakti is not constrained by localization in the sense of classical science. Indeed, there is no substitute for shakti in modern science. It is a non-translatable. It includes multiple discoveries of modern science, such as: non-local causation; energy-matter equivalence; potential states of matter as a system of intelligence, etc. Yet, all these disparate modern ‘discoveries’ do not add up to shakti, for it is more than the sum of its parts. It is a blunder when Vedic scientists translate shakti into reductionist categories like ‘energy’, etc.

Similarly, the nature of time is very different in the Vedic framework than the notion of time in modern science. The principle of karma is a theory of delayed causation: Unlike physics where causation is only immediate and empirically traced back to the cause, in karma an action can have both immediate and delayed consequences, including consequences that are not empirically traceable to the cause. So karma theory would see physics as a subset, because it deals with immediate empirical effects only. In karma theory, the delayed portion of one’s actions are stored in potential form as a subtle form of causation memory (i.e. sanskaras) whose fruits emerge at a later time in some form.

Vedic scientists should stop the habit of mapping Vedic categories on to similar sounding modern scientific ones, because in doing so they are destroying humankind’s collective knowledge and blocking potential advancements. What Vedic scientists must do, instead, is to map modern science into Vedic categories, and investigate with open minds the feasibility of various such mappings. This includes both empirical testing and theoretical debates.

Do not translate akasha as space or ether. Rather, space/ether type of entities could be seen as a small subset of akasha. Fire is a subset of agni and its many forms. The fashionable term ‘energy healing’ (itself largely based on appropriating Vedic ideas) is a subset of the vast terrain we know as pranic healing. The list is endless.

There is another problem with rash translations of Vedic terms into modern science. Because science is smriti, it is in flux and will always be superseded by superior models as humans advance their vyavaharika knowledge. When that happens, the Vedic mappings to science will make the Vedic framework seem obsolete as well. For instance, Indians mapped akasha as ‘ether’ in the late 1800s, in order to make Vedic knowledge look ‘scientific’. A few decades later, physicists rejected the concept of ether. What did that do to the category of akasha? It became embarrassing as something that ‘science had proven to be false’. So it is better to let akasha remain akasha and resist the craving to impress modern scientists.

Whatever is non-translatable is also non-digestible. As long as we retain our framework and its categories, and utilize them actively in futuristic research, we will be able to protect the integrity of our tradition. This should be the basis for our identity; it is priceless.

The key research project for us is to identify principles and practices of Vedic knowledge that can be shown to be distinct from the conventional science of a given epoch. It has been shown that the mathematical idea of infinitesimal and infinite series was incompatible with Christianity’s worldview and was imported from India to Europe, leading to the ‘discoveries’ by Descartes, Newton and others.

Many Ayurveda principles are simply alien to Christianity as well as modern medical science because Ayurveda uses notions of physiology that Western medicine lacks. Hence, certain Indian diets that are becoming trendy in the West for medical benefits have been validated empirically by modern medicine, but the science behind these is still new in the West and is disconnected with core Western assumptions about the nature of the human being. Vedic principles of the environment are rapidly being assimilated for the sake of modern ecology; but the framework on which they are based is being separated out, the ‘useful elements’ isolated and grafted on to Western frameworks. As a result, the environment is now being protected more for the sake of ‘natural resource management’ than as a stakeholder in its own right. The single most promising area of Vedic knowledge for the future is in the vast realm of the mind sciences. This has been an ongoing research topic for me and one in which I intend to write extensively.

While most of the Vedic scientists have been negligent in doing purva-paksha to understand the digestion under way, the Western scientists have been frantically busy in their mining expedition to extract and digest Vedic knowledge. Many Vedic scientists, gurus and political leaders have foolishly been serving such enterprises, in the name of ‘becoming global’.

The Abrahamic religions are disconnected from both shruti and modern science. They do not allow the notion of the rishi state as a human potential. Therefore, what we call shruti is simply unavailable in their system. Humans, according to them, are inherently limited only to the smriti level of knowledge. To transcend this human limit of conditioning and context (i.e. to go beyond the smriti level), one has to receive messages from God sent through prophets. This is the only way by which humans can hope to know the higher truth that cannot be directly cognized by our limited minds. As a result of this, the history and texts of the lineage is all we have to know the higher truth. This is why the Abrahamic religions are stuck in past history and fight to death over minute details of that history. There are no rishis available to them to rediscover the higher truth, because the human potential does not include such higher states.

The Abrahamic religions have also never had an adequate framework for science. On the contrary, being history-centric has made them persecute free thinking. Hence, they cannot even allow new smritis based on new contexts and new human experiences.

Templeton Foundation has been pioneering on behalf of Judeo-Christianity to bridge the separate worlds of science and religion. It hijacked the project started by Infinity Foundation at the University of California started in the 1990s. This project was bringing into the academic world the dharma-based metaphysics of science and spirituality (vyavaharika and parmarthika, respectively). After Infinity Foundation had funded and provided intellectual inputs to this program for three years, Templeton learned about it and came with much larger funding offers to take over the project. The direction was changed and it switched over to becoming another one of its digestion projects. They recruited many Hindu thinkers, including some prominent ones that Infinity Foundation had nurtured for several years.

The above is only one of several examples where our intellectuals have been co-opted by those who want to impose their worldview; a worldview which is usually based on the western Judeo-Christian framework and propped up as the Universal. My point is that our intellectuals have lacked the vision to pursue research that would be in our best interests, and have aligned themselves with those trying to digest our heritage.

To sum up, I wish to leave the reader with the following key points:

• Modern science should be seen by us as a new kind of smriti, one that has a very useful purpose.
• Unfortunately, this new smriti has been built on a framework and vocabulary that is disconnected from the Vedic one, and hence it would be a good idea to express modern science in Vedic terms. This would allow us to develop modern science further because of the broader framework offered by the Vedas.
• Abrahamic religions are a form of smriti also, but very limited and primitive, because they do not believe in the human potential I have called the rishi state. This makes these religions historically frozen and dogmatic, vulnerable to violence.
• A serious blunder that is going on is the fashion to map shruti on to modern science (and even to Abrahamic religions). This must stop, and be reversed: We must do purva-paksha of modern science and the Abrahamic religions using our frameworks instead.

Brand Management by other countries in USA

India is under-represented in American academia compared to China, Islam/Middle East and Japan, among others. Even the study of Tibet is stronger than that of India. Worse than the quantitative under-representation is the qualitative one: While other major countries positively influence the content of the discourse about them, pro-India forces rarely have much say in India Studies.

China:

China is fortunate that its thinkers are mostly positive ambassadors promoting its brand. Chinese scholars have worked for decades to create a coherent and cohesive Chinese Grand Narrative that shows both continuity and advancement from within. This gives the Chinese people a common identity based on the sense of a shared past — one that maps their future destiny as a world power. Pride in One Unifying Notion of the National Identity and Culture is a form of capital, providing an internal bond and a defense against external (or internal) subversions that threaten the whole nation. Scholars play an important role in this construction.

China’s Grand Narrative is a strong, centripetal force bringing all Chinese together, whereas many Indian intellectuals are slavishly adopting ideologies that act as centrifugal forces pulling Indians apart.

The China Institute’s New York mission is to influence public opinion on China. It holds art shows, language classes, lectures, films, and history lessons. Unlike the India-bashing films and lectures on many American campuses these days (selected by self-flagellating Indian professors), the Chinese project a positive image of China. The key difference is that China’s scholars are not trying to go public with China’s dirty laundry — they are not trying to use international forums to fix domestic problems.

In sharp contrast, Indian academics often lack self-confidence and pride in India, and use every opportunity to demean India internationally, and to justify this as a way of helping India’s human rights problems. These Indians seem too desperate to join the Grand Narrative of the West, in whatever role they are granted admission, whereas Chinese scholars have not sold out to the same extent.

The China Institute also has many pro-China programs for Chinese parents and kids, K-12 curriculum development, teacher training, student scholarships, and seminars for corporate executives and journalists. The Institute has a successful program to teach Chinese-Americans to project a hyphenated identity that combines both American and Chinese cultures, and they call this ‘leadership training,’ while South Asian scholars often labor to undermine the Indian-ness of our children’s identities, by equating Indian-ness with chauvinism.

Pakistan:

A good analysis would also scrutinize the Pakistani government funded Quaid-e-Azam Chairs of Pakistan Studies at Berkeley and Columbia. The appointments to these chairs are under the control of the Pakistani government, and are rotated every few years. Note that this is accepted as normal and has not attracted any criticism from academia. It is little wonder that the American media has interviewed more pro-Pakistan scholars than pro-India scholars.

Pakistani scholars have established their leadership over South Asian Muslims’ campus activism in the US, and claim to represent Indian Muslims. Many Indian academicians have joined their bandwagon to denigrate Indian culture in the name of human rights activism and South Asian unity. These scholars hold great influence over young impressionable Indian kids in college. It seems that the Pakistani government has adopted a corporate-style strategic planning process, while many Indian-American donors have not approached this as competitive brand management.

Tibet:

Another good example of how soft power can be developed and projected via academic intervention is the case of Tibet. Twenty five years ago, H H the Dalai Lama asked his Western disciples to get PhDs from top Western universities, and to become Buddhism professors in colleges. Today, almost every major US campus has practicing Buddhists on the faculty, who project their spiritual identities very publicly and confidently.

Even though Buddhism shares most of its meditation techniques with other Indic traditions, Buddhism has become positioned as a valid research methodology for neuroscience, whereas Hinduism is plagued with the caste, cows and curry images. Buddhism is explained intellectually and sympathetically, not via an exotic/erotic lens. Buddhist scholars have a powerful impact on students, and serve as media experts and public intellectuals. Buddhism has major Hollywood endorsements. India has nothing even remotely comparable to the influence of Tibet House in building its cultural capital.

Japan and Korea:

The Japan Foundation and Korea Foundation are also great institutions worthy of study by NRI donors. The Japanese have funded over fifty academic chairs in the USA.  Pro-Japan scholars occupy these chairs, and they have close ties with scholars based in Japan; they are loyal to the Japanese identity and culture. An ambitious teacher training program has certified thousands of Americans to ‘Teach Japan’ in schools. The Japanese drive the Americans’ study of Japan, and not vice versa as in India’s case.

The Korea Foundation has sponsored a series of books on a variety of subjects on Korea and donates/subsidizes these books to libraries worldwide.

Repositioning India’s brand

As a priority, India’s image in American academia needs a corporate type analysis of the market/competition and current status. This would lead to the diagnosis and identification of key problems needing correction. Only then could a viable strategy emerge. This brand repositioning is necessary for more Indian-Americans to succeed on their own terms in management and political arenas. It is also necessary for an independent profile of India.

The strategy for influencing India Studies could begin with looking at India’s technology developments and opportunities, and the resulting geopolitical implications. This could build on the recent positive Indian image in corporate America and American business schools. Donors may want to think about initially working with business schools instead of South Asian Studies Departments, especially since Indian-American donors have better experience in evaluating business scholars than humanities scholars. Many of the contentious issues listed at the end of this article would not apply because of greater convergence between India’s interests and the mindset of business schools.

At the same time, culture is an important form of capital and must be positively positioned as a part of any brand management. Cultural branding should not be allowed to become a liability under the control of anti-India forces. Yoga and Ayurveda are examples of positive cultural areas that are now in the mainstream and deserve to be brought back under the India brand. Two illustrations will show the economic cost of not managing cultural capital:

Yoga is a multi-billion dollar industry in the USA, with 18 million American practitioners, $27 billion/year revenues (from classes, videos, books, conferences, retreats), over 10,000 studios/teachers, and 700,000 subscribers to Yoga Journal. However, cultural shame has kept Indians out of this field, and over 98% of yoga teachers and students in the USA are non-Indians.

Clearly, the economic potential here could be as big as India’s software exports, especially if yoga were included in India’s proposed initiative to export health care services. America’s yoga centres are potential retail outlets for Indian culture and brand marketing.

Ayurveda is a $2 billion/year industry and a part of the high growth international market for plant medicines. The popular consumer brand, Aveda, was started by an American devotee of Indian gurus to bring Ayurveda to the West. (Aveda is short for Ayurveda.) He later sold it to Estee Lauder: Now, Estee Lauder sources herbs from countries other than India, and there has been no royalty to Kerala’s farmers who are being displaced from their traditional industry. Nor is there any recognition of this loss in the Indian intellectual’s mind. Contrast this with the way the Chinese government has turned Chinese medicine into a multi-billion dollar vehicle for Brand China, or with the way the French wine and cosmetic industries have endowed their products with a mystique that protects French jobs.

To explain why educated Indians are amongst the best knowledge workers in the world, the common reason given is that the British taught us English, science and governance. But under this theory, all former colonies, such as Kenya, Uganda, Egypt, Zaire, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Myanmar should be suppliers of knowledge workers on par with India. Few Indians have the courage to articulate that the reason is partly because of India’s long cultural traditions that emphasize learning and inquiry, including the openness fostered by its pluralistic worldviews.

In fact, Indians were exporters of knowledge systems and knowledge workers throughout the Middle East and Pan-Asia for centuries prior to colonialism. Arab/Persian records indicate that many hospitals in the Middle East were run by Indian doctors and that Indian scholars ran their universities. Indians were chief accountants in many Persian courts. Indian mathematics went via Persian/Arab translations to influence European mathematics.

Furthermore, Buddhists took Indian knowledge systems to East and Southeast Asia, including medicine, linguistics, metallurgy, philosophy, astronomy, arts, martial arts, etc. Indian universities (such as Nalanda) attracted students from all parts of Asia, and were patronized by foreign rulers. All this is well appreciated by scholars in East and Southeast Asian countries but is hardly known to Indians.

Indian corporate executives are playing a key role in charting India’s future through knowledge based industries. Therefore, it should be important for them to sponsor an honest account of India’s long history of exporting both its knowledge workers and complete knowledge systems. This historical account is important in reinventing India’s non-innovative education system and repositioning its brand. Hence, Indian-Americans must question the colonial discourse which promotes the view that ‘anything positive about India was imported from elsewhere.’ The impact of such skewed discourse on Indian children is pertinent and must be examined.

I have found that American audiences are very open and even eager to learn about India’s contributions to American culture. But most professors of India Studies in American universities consider such themes irrelevant or, worse still, chauvinistic. In doing so, they apply a different standard to India as compared to other non-Western civilizations. This has a lot to do with the cultural shame that many Indians in academe feel burdened with – in contrast with successful Indian executives who project positive identities.

Consider the following examples that are usually not emphasized in the academic research/teaching in India Studies, when equivalent items concerning China, Islam, Japan, etc are emphasized:

– America’s ‘Discovery’ was the result of venture capital from the Queen of Spain to explore new trade routes to India, because Indian goods were highly sought after. Most people find it hard to believe that India could have had such prized export items, and some find such suggestions troubling given their preconceived images of India’s culturally linked poverty. Any genuine exploration of India’s economic history is nipped in the bud.

– The New Age Movement is neo-Hindu, with 18 million Americans doing yoga, meditation, and adopting vegetarianism,  animal rights and other Indian values. Eco-Feminism was brought to America by Vandana Shiva, who explained to Americans the philosophies of the sacredness of the environment. American Pop Culture owes a great deal to Indian music (via the Beatles and others), film, art, fashions and cuisine.

– Icons of American Literature, such as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Eliot, the Beats, among others, were deeply involved in the study and practice of Indian philosophy and spiritual traditions. While they are widely read and admired, the Indian wellsprings of their inspiration is often downplayed, to the detriment of all students. Modern Psychology, since the work of Jung and others, has assimilated many theories from India, and this has impacted mind-body healing and neurosciences.

– American Religion has adopted many Indian theological ideas transmitted via Teilhard de Chardin’s study of Ramanuja. Transcendental Meditation was learnt in the 1970s by monks in Massachusetts and repackaged into the popular ‘Christian Centering Prayer.’ The study of the Hindu Goddess became a source of empowerment for many American Christian women.

– American Civil Rights drew inspiration from Gandhi: Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson and others wrote about satyagraha as their guiding principle with great reverence in the 1960s, but this has faded from the memory of African-American history as taught today. How many Indians know that Indian social theories influenced J S Mill, who is regarded as the founder of modern Western liberalism, and that many Enlightenment ideas also originated in India and China? The Natural Law Party is considered a pioneer in American political liberalism, but it is generally unknown that it was started by, and is run by, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Western followers.

Such positive themes are rarely reflected in the humanities curricula concerning India. The disciplines are populated by scholars who typically entered the US after the Soviet collapse, when funding by Soviet-sponsored sources ended. They still continue to espouse sociological models that have been discarded for decades, thereby hindered India’s progress in the global economy. They continue to promote divisive scholarship about India. One wonders why the West legitimizes such persons and positions them as representatives of India. Now they have reproduced their mindsets in a whole new generation of confused Indian-Americans with PhDs in the humanities.

Challenging the India-Bashing Club

While India’s positive image is not adequately projected in US academia, the many negative stereotypes abound, devaluing India’s brand into fragments and chaos. These include:

Anti-progress: Indian culture is depicted as primitive, obsolete, and frozen until outsiders come and push it forward. Hence, the implication seems to suggest, we must invite outsiders to come and fix our problems for us.

Unethical: Indian culture is essentialized by images of abusive caste, sati, dowry deaths, and other human rights atrocities, including aggressive charges of fascism, violation of minority rights and violence. Indian scholars often lead these parades that overemphasize public tirades against India in the West, while failing to understand the implications of brand damage in a global capitalist system.

Unscientific: Indians are shown as mystical people lacking Western style rationality.

Everything good about India is assumed to have been imported: The British gave us a sense of nation. There was no worthy Indian culture prior to the Mughals. The Greek brought philosophy and mathematics to India. The “Aryans” brought Sanskrit. By implication, Indians are doomed to dependency, which contradicts the vision of India’s future trajectory being based on knowledge-based industries.

Many Indian scholars in the humanities, journalists, and ‘intellectuals’ in Non-Government Organizations depend on Western funding, Western sponsored foreign travel, acquiring legitimacy in the eyes of Western institutions, the ability to parrot canned Western ‘theories,’ and even identifying as a member of the Western Grand Narrative – not as options but as necessary conditions for success. Clearly, such loyalties, identities and ideologies must resonate with their sponsors.

Unlike China Studies and Islam Studies, India Studies is controlled by the West, often with the help of Indian mercenaries. The frequent bombardment of negative imagery of Indian society is devastating its soft power. The globalization of India’s ‘human rights’ issues is not solving any social problems in India. It has become a cottage industry for many Indians – whose role may be seen as analogous to the sepoys who helped the British rule over the rest of their brethren. Many Indian scholars are, at best, apologetic about Indian culture. They go about with great aplomb ‘exposing’ internal problems of India at international forums, for which their careers are well rewarded.

Certainly, there is legitimacy and urgency to human rights concerns. But the academic treatment of this subject is asymmetric vis-à-vis India as compared to other countries. More importantly, American campuses are not the place to resolve them. Students are being brainwashed into thinking of India as a quagmire.

Proposed Mission Statement for NRI Philanthropists

Prior to supporting India Studies, Indian-American philanthropists must, first, establish their mission statement. I submit the following statement for their consideration, at least as a starting point:

The mission is to bring objectivity and fair balance to India Studies so as to: 1. strengthen and enrich America’s multiculturalism at home; 2. empower Indian-American kids’ hyphenated identities; 3. improve US-India cooperation as cultural equals; and 4. improve India’s cultural brand in the globalization process.

It is important to note that this mission statement does not include using American classrooms or media as platforms to cure Indian society of its problems. This is the point over which there is a serious conflict of interest between Indian-American donors and many ‘South Asian’ academicians in the humanities who are deeply entrenched in anti-India activism. To put it bluntly, some oppose the very notion of a strong Indian nation state, calling that chauvinism, and would like a balkanized India consisting of weak sub-nationalities. Many have taken the position that to expose India’s ‘human rights atrocities’ is central to their mandate. This is usually done without giving equal time (or any time) to India’s many positive accomplishments in social development and pluralism. Naively putting such individuals in charge of one’s well-intended donations would be like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.

Questions that donors must address

Since Indian-Americans have already earned the highest levels of success and self-esteem, they should not be overly impressed by the prestige of academic institutions. They must utilize their best negotiation skills and not get bulldozed into accepting ‘standard’ terms from the universities. Indian-Americans have no reason to be over-awed by the Western-centric approaches to social sciences and liberal arts, whose very validity and effectiveness are being challenged by serious thinkers in the West. Indian-Americans should bring to these discussions their own reference points from the corporate world, such as the following questions and issues suggest.

A strategic choice must be made between promoting India Studies (which would be a centripetal force helping India’s unity as a nation state without compromising its diversity) and South Asian Studies (which is a centrifugal force pushing India towards balkanization).

Should the overarching theme support mutual understanding between cultures through exploring India’s vast cultural capital, or support political activism against India? What is the brand damage currently being done by Indians engaged in one-sided public tirades, who exaggerate India’s internal problems in front of audiences that are ill-equipped to make balanced judgments? How should one approach Indian scholars who have become mercenaries? What is the connection between such scholars and Marxism and its derivatives?

To address the above issues, Indian-American donors first need to clearly articulate what they consider to be their own vision of India. Next, they need to examine the degree to which their vision is compatible with that of various humanities scholars. India’s brand must not be outsourced to people whose ideologies are subversive of India’s integrity.

How is India’s brand positioned relative to other civilizations? Who are the major competitors, and what are their strategies, strengths and weaknesses? A comparison between India Studies and China Studies, among others, is very important. What are the major brand problems that India faces today?

What is the relationship between India’s cultural capital and its brand equity? For example, if India can supply world class professionals in so many fields, then why does India have less than two percent of the market share in the massive American industry of yoga, meditation and related areas? Why are there no world class Indian institutions in this field producing the equivalent of IIT graduates to go and capture world markets – given that the trend in holistic living is increasing worldwide and India has unmatched brand equity that could also boost its health care export industry? Furthermore, the positioning of Indian Classics in academe, as compared to Greek Classics and Chinese Classics, must be examined in relation to cultural capital formation.

What are the distribution channels that control the production and dissemination of ideas about India’s brand? Who are the key players in control over each stage and what are their critical success factors? In particular, who funds the production and distribution, and who controls the intellectual platforms to think about India? The critical bottlenecks, especially those that tend to be monopolistic, should be identified.

What were the key trends over the past 25 years in India Studies? Why has India failed to enter India Studies as a serious player and, by default, allowed Indians to be reduced to consumers who lack their own intellectual capital to drive the field?

Why is there no funding for India Studies within India, to empower a new generation of ‘insiders of the tradition’ to enter the global field of India Studies; to contest old paradigms about India; and to shift the center of gravity of India Studies back to India, in the same way that most other major civilizations are controlling their own intellectual discourse?

Donors need to examine the consequences of these brand problems — such as Indian students’ identity crises, and the marginalization of India’s soft power.

There are valuable lessons in the successes of other American minority cultures that have taken control over their own brand management — Jews, blacks, women and gays being prominent examples.

Based on this type of research, donors should establish targets for the future. They should also establish the criteria for evaluation and the mechanisms to monitor the progress.

Undoubtedly, there will be those in India Studies departments who feel threatened by enlightened Indian-American donors entering the discourse as equal partners. One strategy to ‘buy out’ Indian-American donors is to admit them to prestigious committees where they can hobnob with dignitaries and send pictures home.

Meanwhile, below are two good role models for objective India Studies in the US:

The Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania focuses on the business and political aspects of India: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/casi/

The Center for India Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook is more multifaceted and emphasizes the humanities — including culture, languages, history, religions, arts and dance: http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/CAS/india.nsf/pages/about

Each is an India-centric approach, in which ‘South Asia’ is treated from India’s perspective.

The former example (UPenn) is easier to implement in a pro-India manner, because corporate and political winds have shifted in India’s favor lately. However, the latter (SUNY) has made a bigger impact on the identities of Indian students in that university — one that is attributed to the courage and leadership of the scholars in charge and the Indian-American donors in that vicinity.

In the long run, culture will play a vital role in India’s brand. Some Indian-American groups are hesitant to tackle the systemic biases that plague the academic work on Indian culture and society. They should delay funding in this area until they have a better understanding of the issues at stake. Their safer bet is to fund business schools. A good example of India’s brand management is the recent joint initiative by the Government of India and the Confederation of Indian Industry. (See: http://www.ibef.org/index.asp )

Recommendations for Academic Funding

– Continue pushing the US to upgrade India on par with China in its discourse, and to decouple India from the South Asian grouping. Furthermore, expose the entrenched academic forces that are subversive of India’s stability, which would be very dangerous for US interests.

– Establish a clear mission statement for India Studies. This should include a position on whether it should remain positioned as a ‘ghetto’ separate from mainstream humanities, or if, as in the case of Western civilization, India should be in the mainstream curriculum of various departments, such as history, philosophy, music, dance, science, medicine, psychology, politics, and so forth.

– Keep the Indian-American endowment with a trust/foundation that is in the hands of the Diaspora, and do not give the corpus away to any university. Give an annual budget to selected universities under a 2-year or 3-year contract, subject to evaluation and renewal. Universities do accept these terms.

– Appoint a knowledgeable Diaspora evaluation and monitoring committee to oversee what goes on in each program, and don’t just leave it to the university scholars to send you status reports. The committee should attend classes, read the publications of the department and participate in the events organized. Many problems of shoddy or biased scholarship disappear when the scholars know that they are being watched by the funding sources – as it is done by Western funding sources routinely.

– Keep the appointment durations no longer than 2 or 3 years in the beginning, until there is enough experience. Tenured appointments are very counter-productive in case an India-hater gets in.

– Require the program to be India Studies and not South Asia Studies. There is no point in including anti-India scholars on committees and having deadlocks in the decision-making. Examine the program details, and avoid funding scholars and topics that are counter to your vision.

– Do annual surveys and publish reports on what the effect of the sponsored work is on students and the American public at large.

Published: December 9, 2003