(Pragyata, 30 November 2016)
Audrey Truschke is a Professor of Religious Studies in Stanford,
California, and has gained some fame with her work on the patronage of Sanskrit
by the Moghuls. In order to get that far, she had to toe
the ideologically mandatory line: neither in America nor in India does the
Hindu-baiting establishment allow a dissident to get seriously established in
the academic world. Predictably, we see her elaborating the same positions
already taken by an earlier generation of academics, such as whitewashing
Aurangzeb. Not that this was a hard job for her: one gets the impression that
she is a true believer and really means what she says. Then again, she may have
done an excellent job of creating the desired impression all while secretly
knowing better.
Bullying
Her position in the article “The Right’s problem with
history” (DNA, 26 Oct. 2016) is summed up as: “Unable
to defend a fabricated history of India on scholarly grounds, many foot
soldiers of the Hindu Right have turned to another response: bullying.” It
would be normal to compare secularist historians and their Western dupes with
people of the same rank, namely different-minded historians, in this case
belonging to the “Hindu Right”. These are not exactly numerous, having been
blocked systematically from academe by the single permitted opinion in both
India and America, but they exist. Yet, they and their output are absent from
her paper. From a street bully, I would expect a denunciation of street bullies,
and from an academic a polemic against her own peers.
The photograph accompanying the article tells
it all. If it had been about her own school of history, the picture would have
shown established historians involved in this debate, such as Wendy Doniger or
Sheldon Pollock. But now that the opposition is at issue, it shows a group of
non-historians, not in an airconditioned college hall but in a street
demonstration exercising their freedom of expression. The reader is expected to
recognize them as representatives of the “Hindu Right”, and as “bullies”.
She testifies to verbal attacks she herself
has endured “from members of the Hindu Right”, and which she evaluates as “vicious
personal attacks on the basis of my perceived religion, gender and race”.
Correction: she could have maintained the very same religion, gender and race
and yet never be attacked by those same Hindus (indeed, most Jewish female whites
have never experienced such attacks), if she had not belonged to the “scholars
who work on South Asia” and who have earned a reputation as Hindu-baiters. She
has been attacked on the basis of what she has written, nothing else.
But it is true, and deplorable, that an
uncouth but vocal class of people clothe their denunciations of an ideological
position in foul personal attacks. It so happens that I know her plight very
well, for me too, I receive my share of what some would call “hate mail” when I
express skepticism of beliefs dear to Hindu traditionalists (e.g. the eternity of
Sanskrit, the supernatural origins of the Vedas, the Rama Setu, or the Krishna
Bhakti verses in the Gita). And also when going against the dogmas of her own
school, such as that Muslim rule in India was benign, or that Sanskrit has an
origin of white invaders oppressing black natives. Nothing dangerous, though,
and I doubt her claim of “physical attacks” on Indologists, unless she means
the egg thrown at Wendy Doniger in London.
From the start, Truschke tries to capture the
moral high ground by citing one of her lambasters as tweeting: “Gas this Jew.”
In America, such reference to the Holocaust is absolutely not done, and Indian
secularist circles adopt the same sensitivities once they see these as valid
for the trend-setting West. To the Hindu mainstream, this hyperfocus on
anything associated with the WW2 is not there, and they had no history with
Antisemitism; but still this quote would be unacceptable there, for regardless
of what Jews exactly believe, Hindus tend to respect other faiths.
However, her claim might be correct (not sure
there), for there are indeed some Hindu hotheads who have adopted this kind of
rhetoric. In pre-internet days, they would brew their own conspiracy theories,
but now the access to websites carrying elaborate Western conspiracy theories,
starring the Zionist World Conspiracy, entices them into using this kind of
language. Certainly deplorable, but not at all representative for the “Hindu
Right”: hardly even for its bullies, not for its leaders (both VD Savarkar and
MS Golwalkar described the Jews as role models for loyalty to one’s own roots) and
not at all for the “Hindu Right” scholars whom she is carefully ignoring.
Academic bullying
This
“bullying” had best been compared to the “bullying” on the other side. Like,
for instance, the two attempts by Leftist students to silence me, as a twice scheduled
speaker, at the Madison WI South Asia Conference in 1996 and a private event
preceding it, hosted by Prof. Andrew Sihler. Or the successful protests against
the Dharma Civilization Foundation’s offer to fund a chair at UC Irvine, when
so many US chairs are comfortably being funded by the Saudis.
But on
Truschke’s own side, the dividing line between bullies and academics is not so neat.
Why stoop to street bullying if you have tenure? It is far more effective,
then, to resort to academic bullying. Thus, in their intervention in the
California Textbook Affair, where Hindu parents had sought to edit blatantly
anti-Hindu passages, the explicitly partisan intervening professors even
managed to get themselves recognized as arbiters in the matter. This would have
been unthinkable if those bullies had not been established academics. (And this
I can say eventhough my criticism of the Hindu parents’ positions exists in
cold print.) Her focus on street bullies has the effect of misdirecting the
reader’s attention, away from the more consequential phenomenon of academic
bullying.
I myself have
been barred from several Indologist forums by active intervention or passive
complicity of the same Professors who otherwise clamour “censorship!” when anything
at all happens to a book they favour. Thus, they are so very sensitive that
they dramatically talked of “threats to freedom of speech” when AK Ramanujan's 300 Ramayanas, a book belittling a Hindu
scripture, was not selected as required reading in Delhi University, though
otherwise it remained freely available. They claim to champion “freedom of
speech!” when Wendy Doniger’s error-ridden book Hinduism was withdrawn from circulation, though it was never
legally banned but was left available for another publisher; who did indeed come
forward, so that the book is again lawfully omnipresent. But when I appealed to
them to intervene for annulling my banning from the Religion in South Asia (RISA)
list, which had been done in violation of its own charter, they all looked the
other way.
A recent example. In 2014, I read a paper on the
Rg-Vedic seer Vasishtha and his relative divinization in a panel on
“divinization” at the European Conference for South Asia Studies in Zürich. My
paper was enthusiastically received, also by the panel’s organizers when I sent
in the final version for publication. First they accepted it, but then, I received an embarrassed
e-mail from the organizers stating that they could not include my paper,
without any reason given. Upon my enquiring, the half-line reply said that it
did not fit their project. In all its insignificance, this still managed to be a
blatant lie, and their earlier acceptance confirmed that this could not have been
the reason. But some higher up had warned them that I am to be treated as
excluded, just like on many other occasions.
Far more
seriously, both in America and in India, scholars suspected of pro-Hindu
sympathies are blocked in their access to academe, and their work gets studiously
ignored. For India, a tip of the blanket over this hushed-up phenomenon was
lifted by Dr. A. Devahuti: Bias in Indian
Historiography (1980). It is seriously in need of an update, but I am given
to understand that one is forthcoming. For America, a start was made by Rajiv
Malhotra with his books Invading the
Sacred (2007) and Academic
Hinduphobia (2016).
Hinduphobia
Coming to contents, Truschke accuses “Hindu
Right-wingers” of attacks on “academics”. I would have expected them to attack
“anti-Hindu Left-wingers”, and indeed I learn that this is exactly how they see
it,-- and how they see her. If she doesn’t like being characterized this way,
she is herewith invited to stop calling her adversaries similar names. The
binary Left/Right is at least problematic here, yet for a quarter century I
have seen this scheme used to explain matters. Except
that the Left doesn’t call itself Left: it treats itself as the natural centre,
and anything to its right is deemed politically coloured: “Right” or very
easily “extreme Right”.
Anyway, she calls “alleged Hinduphobia”
nothing more than “a strawman stand-in for any idea that undercuts Hindutva
ideology”. The term was made popular by Rajiv Malhotra, whom I have never known
to swear by “Hindutva”, a specific term literally translated as “Hindu-ness”
but now effectively meaning “the RSS tradition of Hindu Nationalism”. At any
rate, one does not have to follow Hindutva, or even be a Hindu or an Indian, to
observe that American India-watchers utter a strong anti-Hindu prejudice in
their publications. Not to look too far, I can find an example in myself: I
have written a number of publications criticizing both Hindutva as an ideology
and the Hindutva organizations, yet I can off-hand enumerate dozens of illustrations
of Hindu-baiting by supposed India experts in the West as well as by their
Indian counterparts.
At most, one can critize the term
“Hinduphobia” for being etymologically less than exact. Words in -phobia normally indicate an irrational
fear, and fear is not the attitude in which Hinduism is approached. The term
was coined on the model of Islamophobia,
a weaponized word meant to provoke hatred, yet now a thoroughly accepted and
integrated term among progressive academics. A -phobia is normally a psychiatric term
and its use to denote political adversaries is of a kind with the Soviet custom
of locking up dissidents in mental hospitals. And indeed, people shielding
Islam from proper enquiry do treat their opponents as mentally warped
marginals. But the core of truth in the reprehensible term “Islamophobia” is at
least that it points to “fear of Islam”, a religion which its critics do indeed
diagnose as fearsome. Hinduism, by contrast, has been criticized as cruel,
evil, superstitious, ridiculous, but not as a threat. It is only Hindus who
flatter themselves that the “Abrahamics” want to destroy Hinduism because they fear it as being superior and more
attractive.
The use
of the term Hinduphobia is predicated
upon the already existing acceptance and use of the term Islamophobia. If the UN, the governments of the US and EU etc., and
the pan-Islamic pressure group OIC, were to give up this ugly and vicious term,
then the Hinduphobia term so disliked
by Truschke would lapse with it and get replaced again by the older and more
accurate term Hindu-baiting. But
until then, it throws the Islamophile and Hindu-baiting scholars of Truschke’s
persuasion back on the bare fact that they themselves have and display the kind
of prejudice against Hinduism of which they accuse the Islam critics.
History
According
to Truschke, “a toxic combination of two realities fuel the Hindu Right’s
onslaught against scholars of South Asia: Hindu nationalist ideology rests
heavily on a specific vision of Indian history, and that version of history is
transparently false.”
Now it
gets interesting, with two competing views of Indian history, one true and one
false: “Hindu nationalists claim that India’s past featured the glorious
flourishing of a narrowly defined Hinduism that was savagely interrupted by
anybody non-Hindu, especially Muslims. However, the real story of Indian
history is much more complicated and interesting.”
A
“narrowly defined Hinduism” is only projected into the Hindu past by
semi-literate non-historians who do indeed man the middle ranks of the
uniformed RSS. No serious Hindu historian, not the lamented Jadunath Sarkar, RC
Majumdar, Harsh Narain or KS Lal, nor contempory scholars like Bharat Gupt or
Meenakshi Jain, would be foolish enough to simply deny the “diversity and
syncretism” that Truschke sees in India’s past. But here again, we see how
Truschke has chosen not to address the scholars of a competing persuasion, but
the village bumpkins.
In one
sense, however, even the most sophisticated historians will affirm that India’s
past was indeed “glorious”. And it was not at all “complicated”: India was
simply independent. Yes, ancient
India had its problems too, it had local wars, it was not paradise on earth,
but in one decisive respect, Indians under Muslim or British occupation correctly
remembered it as “glorious”: it ruled itself. When the British told Mahatma
Gandhi that his hoped-for independence would only throw India back into its
headaches of casteism, communalism and the rest, he aswered that India would of
course have its problems, “but they will be our own”. Compared to being under
foreign tutelage, such self-rule is nothing less than glorious.
This
brings us to Truschke’s own field of research: “Especially problematic for
Hindu nationalists is current scholarship on Indo-Islamic rule, a fertile
period for cross-cultural contacts and interreligious exchanges. This vibrant
past is rightly a source of pride and inspiration for many Indians, but the Hindu
Right sees only an inconvenient challenge to their monolithic narrative of
Hindu civilisation under Islamic siege.”
Note how
two issues are artfully mixed up here: the questionable monolithic view of
Hinduism and the very correct view of a Hindu civilization besieged and raped
by Islam. It is true that non-historian “Hindu nationalists” are rather
inaccurate in their “monolithic narrative of Hindu civilisation”; but it is not
true that the period of “Indo-Islamic rule” is a “source of pride and
inspiration”, nor that it is contested only by “Hindu nationalists”. Her notion
of “current scholarship” is of course limited to her own school of thought,
heavily overrepresented in academe, partly due to its aggressive policy of
exclusion vis-à-vis others.
There
are admittedly those who identify with foreign colonizers: many Indian Muslims
identify with Mohammed bin Qasim and with the Moghuls (whom Pakistan considers
as the real founders of their Indo-Islamic state), and many Nehruvian
secularists share and continue the British opinions about India and Hinduism.
But those who identify with India, even if they admit some good aspects of
these colonizations, do not take any pride at all in having been subjugated.
Yes, there were instances of collaboration with the colonizers, such as the
hundreds of thousands of Indians whose sweat made the “British” railway network
possible, or the Rajputs whose daughters filled the Moghul harems in exchange
for their fathers’ careers in the Moghul army. But those instances are at most
understandable, a lesser evil in difficult circumstances, but not a source of
“pride and inspiration”.
A few episodes of Muslim occupation were
indeed “vibrant”, viz. after Akbar’s realistic appreciations of the existing
power equations persuaded him to rule with rather than against his Hindu
subjects. Then, as everybody already knew, Hindus did indeed give their cultural
best, rebuilding the temples which the Sultanate has demolished (and which
would again be demolished by Aurangzeb),-- a tribute to the vitality of Hindu
civilization even under adverse circumstances. And some
Muslims did indeed engage in “interreligious exchanges”, such as Dara Shikoh
translating the Upanishads into Persian; later, he was beheaded for apostasy.
But even
then, academics had better use their critical sense when interpreting these
episodes, rather than piously taking them at face value. In the Zürich
conference already mentioned, I heard an “academic” describe how contemporary
Hindi writers praised Aurangzeb, the dispenser of their destinies. Well, many
eulogies of Stalin can also be cited, including by comrades fallen from grace
and praising Stalin even during their acceptance speeches of the death penalty;
but it would be a very bad historian, even if sporting academic titles, who
flatly deduces therefrom that Stalin a benign ruler. Govind Singh’s “Victory
Letter” to Emperor Aurangzeb was, in all seriousness, included among the
sources of praise, leaving unmentioned that Aurangzeb had murdered Govind’s
father and four sons. Every village bumpkin can deduce that Govind hated
Aurangezb more than any other person in the world, and that he was only being
diplomatic in his writing because of the power equation. Academics laugh at
kooks who believe in aliens, but it took an academic, no less, to discover an
alien who actually admired the murderer of his father and sons.
According
to Truschke’s admission, a lot of Hindus are “happy to underscore the violence
and bloodshed unleashed by many Indo-Islamic rulers”, but she wrongly
identifies them as “Hindu Right”. It doesn’t require a specific ideological
commitment nor even any religious identity to observe well-documented
historical facts. Mostly documented by the Muslim perpetrators themselves, that
is. Thus, like Truschke herself, I am neither Hindu nor Indian, yet I can read
for myself with what explicit glee the Muslim chroniclers described temple
destructions and massacres of Unbelievers.
The mistake of plagiarism
“In
contrast to the detailed work of academics, the Hindu nationalist vision of
India’s past stands on precarious to non-existent historical evidence. As a
result, the Hindu Right cannot engage with Indologists on scholarly grounds.
Indeed, the few Hindutva ideologues who have attempted to produce scholarship
are typically tripped up by rookie mistakes—such as misusing evidence,
plagiarism, and overly broad arguments—and so find themselves ignored by the
academic community.”
The
inclusion of “plagiarism” among her list of “rookie mistakes” gives away that
she is fulminating specifically against the work of Rajiv Malhotra, whom she is
careful not to mention by name. For his book Indra’s Net, he was famously accused of plagiarism (by a mission
mentor), for he quotes the American scholar Andrew Nicholson’s book Unifying Hinduism, in which he concurs
with the same position that Hinduism had elaborated its common doctrinal
backbone long before the Orientalists “invented Hinduism”. In fact, he only
used Nicholson as a source to prove that Westerners too could acquire this
insight, there was nothing “Hindu nationalist” about it. And he amply quoted
him in so many words, though a few times, for the flow of the narrative, he
merely rephrased the theses of this much-quoted author. By that standard, most
papers contain plagiarism; but what passes unnoticed elsewhere becomes a
scandal when done by a self-identifying Hindu.
Yet,
numerous Indologists started a holier-than-thou tirade against the
“plagiarism”, a comical drama to watch. Malhotra then walked the extra mile
writing Nicholson out of his narrative and quoting original sources instead
(thereby incidentally showing the amount of plagiarism that Nicholson himself
had committed, though no Indologist ever remarked on that). But this
inconvenient development was given the silent treatment, and Truschke still
presupposes that there ever was a substantive “plagiarism” case against
Malhotra, and by extension against the whole “Hindu Right”.
Malhotra
has indeed been “ignored by the academic community”—until he found the way to
make his critique non-ignorable. That indeed shows a lot of skill in dealing
with the way of the world, for until then, Hindus had only painstakingly proven
themselves right and the “academics” wrong, but had had no impact at all. By
contrast, Malhotra, by personalizing his argument into specific dissections of
the work of leading scholars such as Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock or
Anantanand Rambachan, has earned a session at the annual conference of the
trend-setting American Academy of Religion. On Indological discussion forums,
his input is frequently mentioned, though the academics mostly keep up their
airs of pooh-poohing that interloper, in a bid to justify their ignoring his
actual critique of their own work.
By the way, notice my term: a
“self-identifying Hindu”. As the case of Malhotra has amply exemplified, it
suffices to stand up as a Hindu, or to own up Hinduism, in order to be dubbed
“Hindu Rightist”, “Hindutva ideologue”, as well as “fanatic”. “rookie” and all
the fair names Hindus have been called by Prof. Truschke’s august school of
thought. To them, the acceptable Hindu, or what Malhotra calls a “sepoy”, is one
who never identifies as a Hindu, but rather as “Indian” (or better, “Bengali”,
“Malayali” etc.), “low-caste”, and ideologically “secularist”. The exception is
when countering criticism from self-identified Hindus, for then, he is expected
to say: “But me too, I am a Hindu!” That way, he can fulfil his main task: as
long as there are Hindus, he must deny them the right to speak on behalf of
Hinduism and to give it a presence at the conversation between worldviews.
History debates
Most
Hindu scholars had or have not found the way to impose their viewpoint on the
sphere of discourse yet. In the case of objective scholars among non-Hindus,
this would not have mattered. It is, after all, their own job to trace any
material relevant to their field of research, including obscure works by other
scholars, even adversaries. But in this case, there are some cornerstones of
the Indological worldview which tolerate no criticism nor alternatives, so
these are to be carefully ignored.
Thus,
Shrikant Talageri’s case against the Aryan Invasion Theory, the bedrock of the
“academic” view of ancient Hindu history, is painstaking, detailed, voluminous,
factual and well-formulated, yet Truschke’s own entire tribe of “academics”
simply goes on ignoring his case without bothering to refute it. (Well, there
are two articles talking down to him, but we mean actual refutations, not mere
denials.) If academics were to live up to the reputation they have among
laymen, they would have set aside their current business to deal with this
fundamental challenge to their worldview.
Or take A
Secular Agenda by Arun Shourie, PhD from Syracure NY and stunningly
successful Disinvestment Minister in the AB Vajpayee Government, when India scored
its highest economic growth figures. It was a very important book, and it left
no stone standing of the common assumption among so-called experts that India
(with its religion-based civil codes and its discriminatory laws against
Hinduism) is a secular state, i.e. a state in which all citizens are equal
before the law, regardless of their religion. Though the book deconstructs the
bedrock on which the “experts” have built their view of modern India, they have
never formulated a refutation. Instead, they just keep on repeating their own deluded
assumption, as in: “The BJP threatens India’s structure as a secular state.” (Actually,
the BJP does not, and India is not.) They can do so because they are secure in
the knowledge that, among the audiences that matter, their camp controls the
sphere of discourse. Concerning the interface between religion and modern politics,
the established “academic” view is not just defective, it is an outrageous
failure.
Or
consider historian Prof. KS Lal’s works on caste and religion, refuting with
primary data the seeming truism, launched by the Communist Party ideologue MN
Roy and now omnipresent in the textbooks, that the lowest castes converted en masse to Islam because of its claimed
message of equality. Islam mainly won over the urban middle castes (and not
because of eguality, a value rejected as ingratitude towards the Dispenser of
destinies in the Quran, but because of the privileges vis-à-vis non-Muslims),
not the Untouchables. Again, the silent treatment has been the only response
the “experts” could muster.
The Ayodhya affair
It is
uncommon for Audrey Truschke and the opposite school to have any kind of direct
debate at all. In the US this was, until Rajiv Malhotra, unthinkable for lack
of any pro-Hindu school willing and able to stand up to the overwhelming
anti-Hindu bias among those Indologists willing to wade into any controversial
subject. But in India, there have been a few such confrontations. And on those
occasions, the “academics” did not cover themselves with glory.
One consequential
instance in India was the Ayodhya scholars’ debate in the winter of 1990-1991,
organized by the Janata (Left-populist) government headed by Chandra Shekhar.
This was won hands down by the scholars affirming the existence of a Hindu
temple underneath the Babri Masjid, first against a delegation of Muslim
leaders unfamiliar with historical methodology, selected by the Babri Masjid
Action Committee, then against a group of Marxist academics called in by that
same Committee for saving the day. The latter’s position was but an elaboration
of the official orthodoxy created by a group of academics from JNU when they issued
a statement, The Political Abuse of
History (1989), denying the existence of temple remains underneath the
Babri Masjid. It had been taken over as Gospel truth by most of the academic
and journalistic India-watchers in the West, including Truschke’s mentors. They
kept the lid on the debate’s outcome.
More detail
about the controversy can be found in my paper The Three Ayodhya Debates (2011). But since I do not hold an
academic chair, she might not take me serious, so let that pass. Instead, I may
refer her to the excellent book Rama’s
Ayodhya (2013) by Prof. Meenakshi Jain of DU. No Indian or Western academic
has refuted it or even formally taken cognizance of it. After Court-ordered
excavations in 2003 had definitively confirmed the existence of the temple,
acknowledged in the Court verdict of 2010, they have all turned conspicuously silent
on Ayodhya.
Indeed, what insiders knew all along, has now become
official: the stance of the “academics”, both Indian and Western, has been an
outrageous failure. It relied entirely on the authority of a few “experts”
already known for their anti-Hindu positions. Their “expertise” fell through
completely once they were cross-examined on the witness stand, as amply
documented by Prof. Jain.
That those
“experts” didn’t manage to uphold their case against the temple was a surprise
only to their dupes, including the American India-watchers. At least, I assume
these were dupes and had genuinely swallowed the no-temple claim (“concocted by
the wily Hindu fundamentalists”). The alternative is that they were deliberate accomplices
in the Ayodhya deception, an artificial controversy that killed thousands and
brought down several governments. I would prefer not to think such things about
scholars like Audrey Truschke and her mentors.
A remarkable
aspect of the experts’ fall from grace was the smugness with which they took
the witness stand. They had not deemed it necessary to brush up their knowledge
of Ayodhya, or to give their ill-founded statements of opinion a more solid
basis at least after the fact. They had for so long publicly pretended, as
Truschke now does, that the Hindu side merely consisted of a bunch of deplorables,
that they didn’t see the need to gear up for the confrontation.
Iconoclasm
The Ayodhya
controversy was part of a larger issue, viz. Islamic iconoclasm, which
victimized many thousands of places of worship in India and abroad, starting
with Arabia. Or at least, that is how historians like Sita Ram Goel and Profs.
Harsh Narain, KS Lal, Saradindu Mukherji saw it: turn this one controversy into
an occasion for educating the public about the ideological causes of the
iconoclasm that hit Hindu society so hard and so consistently for over a
millennium. But the RSS-BJP preferred to put the entire focus on their one toy
in Ayodhya, and obscure or even deny the Islamic motive behind it. (The ideological
impotence and non-interest on their part provides yet another contrast with
the academics’ imaginary construction of a wily, resourceful and highly
motivated Hindu movement.)
As part of his
effort, Goel published a two-volume book giving a list of two thousand
purposely demolished temples, mostly replaced by mosques. The part on the
theology of iconoclasm proved irrefutable, and has never even been gainsaid on
any of its specifics. The list of two thousand temples equally stands entirely unshaken,
as so many challenges to the reigning school that tries to downplay the
tradition of iconoclasm pioneered by the Prophet. Ever since, the dominant
policy has been to disregard Goel’s work and carry on whitewashing the record
of Islam regardless.
Since stray
new proofs of Muslim temple destruction keep popping up, that school has
developed an alternative discursive strategy to prevent such cases from
suggesting their own logical conclusion. It now preaches that a few temple destructions
have indeed taken place, but channels this admission towards a counterintuitive
explanation: that Hinduism is to be blamed for these, not Islam. The core of
truth is that a handful of cases have been documented of ancient Hindu kings
abducting prestigious idols from their adversaries’ main temples, just as
happened in Mesopotamia and other Pagan cultures. These are then presented as
the source of inspiration for Aurangzeb’s wholesale destruction (documented in
his own court chronicles) of thousands of temples and many more idols.
Not that any
of the many Muslim iconoclasts ever testified that such was his inspiration.
Their motivation, whenever explicitly stated, and whether inside or outside of
India, is invariably purely Islamic. Since the negationist school is unable to
document its thesis, let me show them by example how to do it.
Kashinath
Pandit’s book A Muslim Missionary in
Mediaeval Kashmir (Delhi 2009) contains a translation of the Tohfatu’l Ahbab, the biography of the
15th-century Islamic missionary Shamsu’d-Din Araki by his younger contemporary
Muhammad Ali Kashmiri. After describing the many temple demolitions Araki
wrought or triggered in thinly populated Kashmir (many more than the “eighty”
which the secularists are willing to concede on Richard Eaton’s authority for
all of India during the whole Muslim period), the biographer gives Araki’s
motivation in practising all this iconoclasm.
Does he say:
“Araki then recalled the story how a Hindu king ran off with an idol and
thereby felt an urge to do something entirely different: destroy all the idols
and their idol-houses with it”? No, he recounts the standard Islamic narrative
of the Kaaba: it was built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham for monotheistic
worship (thus yielding a far more authoritave precedent than idol theft by an
Infidel king), until unbelievers made it “a place for the idols and a house for
the statues. Some Quraish chieftains (…) turned this House of God into the
abode of devilish and satanic people. For innumerable years, this house of
divine light and bliss became the worshiping place for sorcerers and depraved
people and the centre of worshippers of idols (made of stones).”
Fortunately,
this injustice didn’t last, neither in Mecca nor in Kashmir: “When the last of
the prophets (Muhammad) saw this situation, he lifted Imam ‘Ali Murtaza on his
shoulders so that defiled and impure idols and images were struck down in the
House of God. (…) In the same manner, Kashmir was a den of wicked people, the
source of infidelity and a mine of corruption and aberration.” (p.258)
And then the
enumeration of Hindu sacred places levelled and mosques built in their stead
resumes. An extra detail of interest for all those who idealize Sufis is that
the text lists many occasions when “Sufis” and “Derwishes” participated in
massacres and temple demolitions.
At any rate,
that is what a Muslim testimony of the motive for temple destructions looks
like. At least in the real world, not in the make-believe world of our
“academics”. I had already challenged Richard Eaton (the originator of this
thesis, a self-described Marxist) and his followers to come up with such
evidence in 1999, but nothing has ever materialized. Come on, Prof. Truschke,
you can make an excellent career move by producing this proof.
To sum up:
on the one hand, we have Islamic icononoclasts and their contemporary
supporters saying in so many words that Islam made them do it. Moderns who
highlight this evidence are, in Truschke’s estimation, “bullies”. On the other,
we have no evidence at all for the claim that the Islamic iconoclasts, intent
on destroying Hinduism itself through its icons, took inspiration from Hindu
icon-stealers, who installed the icon in their own temple for continued worship
(as if abduction, wanting to have
something close to you, were the same thing as murder, i.e. wanting something
to disappear from this world). This claim is nothing more than special
pleading. Yet, people who propagate it are, in Truschke’s description,
“academics”.
Conclusion
The
bourgeoisie sets great store by status. Scholars go by a different criterion:
knowledge. They know, through learning or personal experience, that for some of
the great insights and discoveries we are indebted to outsiders and amateurs;
and that quite a few of their colleagues have big titles and positions not
corresponding to their actual knowledge. They also know that holding (or at
least uttering) the required opinions can make or break an academic career:
either formally, as when a non-Anglican could not get admission to Oxford
University, or informally, as under the reign of progressivist conformism
today.
To think
highly of the academic world presupposes a link between scientific achievement
and academic rank, and this largely makes sense in the exact sciences. In the humanities,
especially in the social “science” and literature departments, this link is
also deduced, but only as a parasitical extension of the conventions in the
exact sciences. Much of what passes for scholarship these days is only ideology
wrapped into jargon. Some sophomores take it seriously: having just gained
entry into the academic world, they idealize it and are proud of their
belonging to a higher world distinct from lay society. And most laymen believe
it: over-awed by status, they assume that academic status presupposes both
knowledge and objectivity, the basis of academic authority.
There exists a test for objective knowledge: a good
theory predicts. Physicists who know the relevant parameters of an object in
motion, can predict its location at future times. Well, how about the
predictions by the academic India-watchers? In the mid-1990s, when the BJP’s
imminent coming to power was a much-discussed probability, top academics
predicted that a BJP government would turn India into a Vedic dictatorship,
whatever that may be. They were put in the wrong even swifter than expected: in
1996, BJP leader AB Vajpayee was Prime Minister for 13 days, then lost the vote
of confidence, and instead of seizing power for good, he meekly stepped down.
Academics predicted the victimization of Dalits and women, gas chambers, “all
the Indian Muslims thrown into the Indian Ocean”, and what not. Well, the BJP
has been in power from 1998 till 2004, and since 2014: where are those gas
chambers?
Scholars of
modern India, as well as historians of fields relevant for contemporary
political debates, have a lot to be modest about. They may have academic
positions, but their record is not such that they are in a position to talk
down to outsiders, the way Audrey Truschke now does.