There was an interesting news item recently on an online seminar held on Dharmashastras by Mahindra University school which had a prominent American Indologist speaking. There might be a few genuine exceptions but we simply need to be careful of Indologists who study India without involving the traditional scholars of the land. Indology looks superficially flattering to us but whether it was German Indology of the past or the American variety of the present, there remains always an element of deconstruction and undermining of the cultural integrity of the country. Scholars, from Herder through Schlegel and beyond, accepted the Enlightenment legacy of identifying the living heathens with the ancient pagans. Writers repeatedly stressed that the ancients, living in another part of the world, represented the childhood of Man and India was the cradle of world civilization. It is no credit when it can only mean that those who live in this culture are still in their cradles – and have been there during the last thousand years, unlike their European counterparts. The main reasons for this situation were: the geographical climate; the psychological character of the Hindus; the characteristic property of that race; or the social structure. For a twentieth-century liberal (or Marxist) the choice boils down to the social structure as a cause for the stagnation- the ‘caste system’, of course, sanctioned by a primal religion which dominates all aspects of human life.
The evolutionist conception of the history of religions (from ‘heathenism’ or polytheism, through Judaic monotheism, to Christianity and then peaking in the Protestant variety) operated in the background for scholars across centuries. This authorized a critical interrogation of any text from any tradition as to which elements are ‘reaching forward’ and which ‘reaching backward.’ Adluri and Bagchee show how German Indology, with racism ruling supreme, was more to define Germany’s own intellectual history, philosophy, politics, and religion. Today, Indologists in American Universities and their followers in India produce complex theories in dense language attacking our stories, cultures, and traditions. The mutual give and take; the patting and applauding of each other in a closed circle of researchers; academic posts; travel grants; and granting of awards give an eerie resemblance to the dreadful scholarship of German Indology. The discourses of Aryan-Dravidian divide; the caste-system with the evil priests at the top; the existence of religions in India with later morphing of ‘Hindu’ into ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Hindutva’; the falsification of history to exonerate past invaders; the persistent bashing of the so called ‘forward-castes’ has not changed across centuries of Indology.
Living pagan Asian civilizations showed a persistent unity of philosophy and religion which had brought forth unsurpassed intellectual achievements impossible for Westerners to suppress entirely. These vast nations were able to sustain their cultural integrity in the colonial encounter to a degree that indigenous peoples in many parts of the world could not. Their suppression, therefore, had different means. The modern disciplines, Indology among them, accordingly worked to tame these traditions through their texts. Dr Balagangadhara says: ‘Indologists use discredited theories from earlier social sciences to put across outlandish claims regarding a culture about which they are ignorant. Contemporary social sciences draw upon these ignorant claims to put across equally outlandish claims about human societies and cultures, again in ignorance of what the Indological claims rest upon.’
The western narratives have become true descriptions of our world in many areas. The Indologists, Sanskritists, and the social scientists depending on each other deserve credit for accomplishing this incredible feat of making ‘the’ caste system synonymous with ‘discrimination’ and ‘oppression’ and so effortlessly supplant the British ‘class’ hierarchy, American ‘racial’ inequality, the ‘apartheid’ policy, the Nazi ideology, and so on. Indology is not a viable route for improvement of the different domains (anthropology, sociology, political science). Each exacerbates and aggravates the other’s problems by importing ‘facts’ from each other. Anthropologists spent about 100 years attempting to get rid of a pernicious and incoherent concept like ‘tribe’ only to see it sneak back in, via Indology and other social sciences, into the Indian Constitution, Indian legislation, and their administration. It becomes impossible to see ignorance coming as knowledge with the form of presentation involving moralizing talk and a normative language. ‘Inequality’, ‘discrimination’, ‘injustice’, and such other notions determine the alleged talk about society, culture, and people by Indologists of all hues. Adluri shows what is ultimately at stake in their entire rebuttal of Indology: freeing the ancients from being subjects of interrogation, and permitting the ancients to question us moderns instead. We just need to be wary of ‘scholars’ and ‘intellectuals’ at American Universities indulging in India studies. Exceptions only prove the rule.
RANDOM MUSINGS 