A diversity of “White saviours”

(Pragyata, 16 Feb 2017)

Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik wonders: “Why do many Indians need White saviours?” (Scroll.in 26.12.2016) The article is a bit chaotic and overstresses the element “mythology”, but that may be an occupational hazard in a writer on the Mahabharata and Purana stories. At any rate, it seems to have been written without malice, and it deserves an answer. I will give some observations on the stance of “Whites” in general and then explain my own position.

English medium

The first White person to figure in his list of “saviours” is Thomas Babington Macaulay. In the 1830s he pioneered English education in India, at least for the elites, whom he then expected to translate the modern values for the common people. In keeping with the spirit of the times, his reform was explicitly elitist. But with that limitation, it was nonetheless not malicious, contrary to the enemy-image he has acquired. He actually perceived Anglicization as a necessary phase of modernization, in preparation of India’s independence. Nearly a century before the British loyalist Mahatma Gandhi converted to the “total independence” ideal, Macaulay already thought in terms of Indians being independent equals with Britons.

Nonetheless, his policies would lead to the biggest hurdle for India’s decolonization. The maintenance and expansion of his English education (and administration) by Jawaharlal Nehru is ultimately responsible for the major colonial remnant in contemporary India: the dominant position of English. Whatever Macaulay’s good intentions, which counted for the colonial period, they have had a deeply antidemocratic effect in the Indian Republic. As Madhu Kishwar has written: the major determinant of your career chances in India is not your caste or religion, but whether you are fluent in English.

However, only by way of historical reference can this situation be called “colonial”. According to the Constitution, English should have been phased out by 1965; no outside power was involved when the Indian elite (using the Dravidianist misgivings as pretext) sabotaged this switch. This elite profited too much from the disenfranchisement of the Indian commoners by the dominance of English. Without saying it out loud, they thanked Macaulay for their linguistic privileges. (Ambedkarites in the Christian sphere of influence also laud Macaulay for bringing, through English, Western humanitarian and egalitarian values into India.) “Decolonization” implies the belated phasing out of English, but this will involve the defeat not of some foreign colonizer but of the indigenous elite.

Something analogous applies to the entire cultural sphere. Certain colonial injections have been embraced by the indigenous elite, which then imposes them on a war footing on the general population. Case in point is “secularism”, originally a phase of late-Christian society, internalized though heavily distorted by India’s elite, and then imposed on the entire Indian polity. Another example is the teaching of Western thought models in each of the Humanities, to the detriment of indigenous models. This counts in particular for Pattanaik’s own field of mythography, where the ancient indigenous tradition is being subjected to deconstruction by recent Western models.

Decolonization

In some respects, talk of “colonial” and of “decolonization” is embarrassingly obsolete, because the battle lines have fundamentally changed since 1947. Thus, some Hindu Nationalists fulminate against “White” interference and accuse “Sepoys” (Indians collaborating with the colonizers) of “kissing the White a..”; as if there were some “White” conspiracy against today’s India. When “Whites” (to borrow Pattanaik’s racial terminology) care about the rest of the world, it is mostly about the Islamic world as a source of trouble, and about China as a rival. About India, I can testify that very few outsiders care one way or the other. Indians only flatter themselves by imagining India to be the target of a hostile conspiracy. And they are badly living in the past if they imagine that some Westerners are saying to each other: “For Whiteness’ sake, we have to thwart those damn Indians.”

 To the extent that race has any importance at all, the world has really changed, and “anti-racism” has now effectively become the state religion of most Western countries. People of other races take the same positions vis-à-vis India as Whites used to do, for these turn out to follow from certain geopolitical constraints, not racial concerns. In fact, both under a Black Secretary of State (Condoleezza Rice) and a Black President (Barack Obama), America’s South Asia policy has been as tilted towards Pakistan and against India as under, say, Richard Nixon. But admittedly, things become easy when you can divide mankind simply by skin colour, so this racial approach is attractive to lazy minds.

The situation that Pattanaik puts up for discussion has little to do with race. That Indian polemicists nonetheless like to speak in terms of race, as if it were 1940, is not so much morally reprehensible for being “racist”. Rest assured, for “Whites”, being considered the culprit of every wrong in the world only evokes a yawn, we’ve heard it so many times. The problem with it is that it shows mental laziness among Indians, both in the form of anachronism, as if on a battlefield you can afford the luxury of anything less than cool realism; and of vicarious self-flattery, as if you are carrying the mantle of genuine fighters against racial discrimination like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela.

Apparently, it feels great to re-enact the moral equation of colonial times, with the colonizer rightly in the dock and you on the moral high ground. It also sounds safely secular, which is why you can always get the whole audience to applaud when you claim aloud that “the British imposed the Partition on India”. This is a blatant lie, but one promoted by the secularist establishment, because it exculpates the Muslim League and its accomplices Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. The British firmly opposed the Partition plan, until in March 1947 the newly-appointed last Viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, gave in to the increasingly violent pressure from the Muslim League natives.

That is why I don’t like the use of the term “decolonization” (as opposed to the act of decolonization, wherever needed), eventhough I myself have prominently used it in the past. It is a term of adolescent rebellion against the colonizer as father figure, who in reality has long left the scene. In the land of proud civilization-builders, not just philosophers like Kapila or Yajñavalkya but also scientists like Lagadha and Panini and resourceful strategists like Chanakya and Bajirao, this adolescent behaviour is unbecoming. It is high time for Indians to shed their acquired inferiority complex as colonial underlings and reconnect with their glorious, or at any rate independent, past.

“Decolonization” is also a term of cowardice because it misdirects your combative energies towards a long-dead enemy, thus hiding your fearful appeasement of more immediate enemies. Whoever speaks of “decolonization” thereby shows his own use of colonial categories, with your own destiny still having to be wrested from some foreign authority. In reality, your destiny is yours, and foreign powers only have as much power in India as the Indian authorities themselves give them. Indians are responsible, not colonizers or other foreigners.

Do-gooders

Nonetheless, it does almost look like the situation of a colonized nation when you consider the enormous cultural power wielded in India by Western, now mostly American-based, NGOs, think-tanks and institutions of higher learning. They have rarely been set up in order to serve some imperial goal, yet they still embody a very colonial psychology. They still think that India has to be lifted out of its own barbarism. They give themselves a civilizing mission, constantly nurtured with atrocity literature to justify the treatment of Indians as backwards in need of tutelage. But today, this “native barbarism” has been redefined in terms of human rights. American India-watchers and India-meddlers analyse Hinduism as a litany of human rights violations, and present themselves as the saviours whom India’s many oppressed categories have been waiting for.

Pattanaik makes a good observation when he writes that high-profile India-watching academics “need to indulge America’s saviour complex if they need a share of the shrinking funding. The objective of the research needs to alleviate the misery of some victim and challenge a villain. And so, Doniger will provide evidence of how Puranic tales reinforce Brahmin hegemony, while Pollock will begin his essays on Ramayana with reference to Babri Masjid demolition, reminding readers that his paper has a political, not merely a theoretical, purpose.” Exactly.

He also is onto something when he guesses that “European and American academicians have been on the defensive to ensure they do not ‘other’ the East. So now, there is a need to universalise the ‘othering’ process – and show that it happens even in the East, and is not just a Western disease. And so their writings are at pains to constantly point how privileged Hindus have been ‘othering’ the Dalits, Muslims and women, using Sanskrit, Ramayana, Mimamsa, Dharmashastras, and Manusmriti.”

That doesn’t explain everything, but it must be welcomed as a true observation on the “social justice warrior” nature of current Orientalist scholarship. It is scholarly in the sense of coming with lots of footnotes, but not in the sense of being impartisan and objective. Here you should realize its continuity with the colonialist endeavour at its starkest. When Hernán Cortéz conquered Mexico, he used social and ethnic grievances to mobilize the local “lower castes” as cat’s paw against the ruling Aztecs. In both cases, the goal is to dispossess the dominant group among the “savages” and thus bludgeon it into opening up to “civilizing” influences, and the means to achieve this is often an alliance with the groups with grievances against it. 

This is where Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock come into the picture. They are representative of the enormous ideological clout Westerners still wield in India. The  colonial-age Orientalists only conditioned the minds of a small intellectual upper class; today, the Western view of India and Hinduism, through mass education and the media, influences everyone and co-determines policy-making. Because Indians have invited the Donigers and Pollocks in.

From her writings, it appears that Wendy Doniger does not consciously position herself as anti-Hindu. To be sure, she is partisan, e.g. Pattanaik notices that in the dedication to her “banned” book, “Doniger refers to a ‘good fight’ against Hindutva”. But she thinks those who have been identified with the struggle for the Hindu cause have misunderstood their own religion, while she is in fact restoring the “real” Hinduism. She genuinely believes that her Freudian interpretive model of Indian mythology somehow reveals true underlying meanings, the hidden logic of Hinduism.

In fact, it is to a large extent the same approach that Pattanaik has also used to build a career of explaining Hindu stories in a manner acceptable to secularists and poorly rooted anglicized Hindus. In that sense, it is to be welcomed that he is now shifting towards a stance critical of Doniger, apparently under the influence of Rajiv Malhotra’s criticism of his own Donigeresque approach to Indian stories.

Wendy Doniger’s conception of Hinduism deserves a more thorough treatment, much of which has already been pioneered by Rajiv Malhotra. But one general observation, which counts for the whole current of psycho-analytical “deconstruction” of Hinduism, is that the clumsy Freudian concepts she uses are simply not sufficient to understand Hindu explorations of consciousness and human nature. I once heard an Indian psychologist who had guzzled down big doses of this psycho-analytical framework, pontificate that a Guru is followed because he is a “father figure”. You could see him savour this expression, as if he considered what he had said as very profound. Well, there are many types of father figure, but only few have the specific qualities needed to be a Guru; and psycho-analysis has never been able to turn anyone into a Guru in the Hindu sense. The smaller cannot contain the greater.

There is something comical about the psychologist’s attempt to fit the hoary Hindu ideas about the psyche into the modern attempts by his own new-fangled discipline, still groping in the dark. But because Doniger’s flippant approach serves the purpose of belittling and ridiculing Hinduism well, it is welcomed and highlighted by the Indian elite with its many-pronged attack on Hinduism. And she is not even a psychologist: elsewhere, her “alternative” (actually quite conformistic, only a bit more titillating) deconstruction of a religion would have been criticized as not based on any competence.

Politicized philology

Sheldon Pollock, a very good Sanskritist at least in a purely linguistic sense, is more explicitly involved with the anti-Hindu discourse promoted in India by the missionaries and the Ambedkarites, and their first line of attack, the “secularists”. He has pioneered some valid insights into the Sanskrit “cosmopolis”, which did not oppress vernacular languages from Gandhari to Javanese but fruitfully coexisted with them to their mutual benefit. But at the same time, he has helped greatly in belittling and politicizing the Ramayana and in promoting the “Hinduism bad, Buddhism good” thesis.

This is not very original, in fact it is only a sophisticated formulation of widely-held views. Thus, Pattanaik attributes the same viewpoint to another big name we just met: “Doniger’s essays on the Puranas make you see Hinduism as a violent authoritarian force challenged by non-violent egalitarian Buddhism.” But in this discourse of hate, which instrumentalizes Buddhism as a bludgeon to beat Hinduism with, Pollock has gone farther than all others. In 1993 he published a paper arguing that Hinduism (particularly the Mimansa school, Brahminical par excellence) sits at the centre of Nazi doctrine. Yes, it is long ago, and partly explainable from the war psychology emanating from the Ayodhya controversy, in which he explicitly sided with the negationist school denying Islam’s well-documented destructive role in Hindu history. But he has never retracted this position and has remained a leading voice in anti-Hindu and anti-Brahmin discourse.

In this case, as in some other matters (such as the exact place of Christianity in European civilization, often exaggerated in India, e.g. Doniger and Pollock are not motivated by Christian concerns, a secularist position which Pattanaik here acknowledges to be “the hallmark of objectivity in educational circles”), my own role has been to help Indians in better understanding European history wherever it is relevant to Indian debates. The case Pollock has built, is untenable for anyone familiar with the concerned part of European history. What few Indomanic racists have existed in Germany during the century before 1945, were not exactly poles apart from Pollock and the secularists: on the contrary, they shared the latter’s own anti-Brahminism and pro-Buddhism. They considered Brahmins as agents of the “dark indigenous” people mired in superstition and puerile ritualism, who contaminated the pure “Aryan invader” culture, while they held the Buddha to have been a real Aryan trying to restore the genuine and superior Aryan traditions. Hitler was not only an anti-Semite but in passing also a votary of India’s equivalent, anti-Brahminism. That is why Pollock fails to quote from the “National-Socialist Indologists” a single line in praise of Jaimini or Kumarila Bhatta or any other Mimansaka, but has to quote the Buddha’s name several times.  

This little excursus into the nadir of Sheldon Pollock’s scholarship should, however, not obscure the fact that with his erroneous anti-Brahmin spin on the history of German Indology, he is serving an Indian rather than a Western cause. Today, anti-Brahminism comes in as a helpful tool for US-based missionaries to pit Hindus against one another along lines of caste and ethnicity (“Dravidians” and “Adivasis” against “Aryan invaders”), and in the 19^th century, it has indeed been launched by missionaries; but it has now mainly become an Indian ideology animating much of Indian culture (Bollywood) and politics. More than some CIA conspiracy, it is this Indian current that Western scholars seek to align with.

Skin colour

“But who does Hindutva turn to for establishing the greatness of Hinduism, and Sanskrit, and Vedas? A European, Koenraad Elst. And an American, David Frawley. So much for ‘decolonising’ the Hindu/Indian mind. So much for swadeshi. Does this reveal our deference to White scholarship? Does this reveal Indians are beyond racism? One wonders if African American Indologists or Chinese American Indologists would ever evoke similar passions.”

The colour obsession, while not entirely absent among the Indian public, does not go very far in explaining our role in Indian politico-cultural discourse. It so happens that “Oriental Philology and History” (one of my diplomas), the proper name of “Orientalism”, was developed in Europe, and some of those roots are still in force, all while it now largely conditions the dominant Indian discourse about India itself. The “White” presence in this line of scholarship was almost a 100% till recently, as the upcoming non-White presence in Western universities (as Indians know all too well) was mostly in Engineering and Medicine, shortcuts to status and wealth, not in the Humanities and certainly not in its more esoteric departments. It is only recently that the children of Asian immigrants have started entering the “Orientalist” sections. But I am sure that the day a Chinese-American, not to mention an Indian-American, starts putting out theses as provocative as Doniger’s or Pollock’s, and from equally prestigious positions, he will evoke similar passions among the affected Hindu public.

The use of Westerners, the reason why they can serve as argument of authority in India, is firstly that in controversies, they count as outsiders, hence more objective; and secondly, that modern culture does indeed count as intrinsically more scientific. The first argument is very weak: those who get close enough to Indian culture to have anything to say about it, have usually befriended one of the warring camps inside India, and hence have become just as partisan as their Indian sources. Thus, practically all the Western press correspondents in Delhi are safely in the pocket of the secularists and cherish a vicarious hatred of assertive Hinduism. This yields what I have called a “circular argument of authority”: Indian secularists feed their Western contacts their own view of the Indian religio-political landscape, and when their Western dupes then go public with these same views, the secularists hold them up as independent confirmation of their views by the scientific West.

Strategy

Pattanaik is oh so even-handed: “If we attribute strategy to the works of Doniger and Pollock, the same needs to be done to the works of Elst and Frawley.” I don’t know about David’s, but in the case of my own work, I am surprised to learn of its “strategic” dimension. I don’t know of any policy that was inspired by my work.

It seems that we “are catering to a vast latent need of privileged Hindus to feel good about themselves”. I leave it to David to explain his motive (which I think is simply a love of Hindu Dharma, but I admit Pattanaik may consider this naïve), but mine is as follows.

Part of it is again given by Pattanaik himself: “After having been at the receiving end of Orientalist and Marxist criticism since the 19th century, privileged Hindus have not developed requisite skills in the field of humanities to launch a worthwhile defence.”

That much is certainly true: both in India and in the diaspora, talented Indian youngsters have rushed to the Medical and Engineering departments, leaving the Humanities for their not-so-bright brothers and sisters. Hindu activist organizations have never invested in scholarship, and their very few recent attempts to gain a toehold in this little-understood world have been clumsy and unsuccessful. Add to this that in these departments, the Left has built a power position and enforces its vetoes against anyone showing any sign of loyalty to the Hindu cause. So, to say that “Hindus have not developed requisite skills in the field of humanities” is not far off the mark. With my limited means, I used to assume I had something to contribute there, viz. a more accurate picture of Indian history compared to the facile or plainly mischievous assumptions that the Left has tried to instil in the next generations.

Then there is the reason Sir Edmund Hillary gave for climbing the Everest: “Because it was there.” When I noticed the big power-wielders in the Indian landscape with their rope tricks fooling people on the Ayodhya temple or the Aryan debate, the adventurous White man in me was awakened to go “hunting tigers out in Indiah”. That is, at least, if you try to think up a subsconscious personal reason. My conscious reason was that so much bluff as was spread by the Indian intellectual establishment simply had to be answered and defeated.

Conversion

“Outsourcing the job to White Men is an easy alternative. Particularly those who manage to establish credibility. Frawley does that brilliantly by declaring himself a Hindu, with an evocative title of Pandit Vamadeva Shastri, which makes him a “Brahmin” in Hindu eyes, justified on grounds of his vast knowledge of the Vedic scriptures, and his long practice of Ayurveda and Jyotisha. His wife is Indian, and has the title of Yogini. Elst, by contrast, insists that he is not a Hindu, for he is well aware that no one can be ‘converted’ to Hinduism, that it is linked to birth, and that Hinduism is deeply linked to geography.”

Secularists are fond of saying (and of quoting Westerners to the effect) that “there is no conversion to Hinduism”: to them it means that Hindus are condemned to keeping mum when the missionaries convert to Christianity. By contrast, I do think conversion to Hinduism is possible. Firstly, communities as a whole have done it throughout history; it is between communities that conversion is rare. (If you are a Jat or a Rajput and you convert to Islam, you will still get identified with your caste for generations. Indian Muslims have been tutored to hide this, to uphold the anti-Hindu fiction of an “egalitarian Islam”, but Pakistanis candidly tell you: “I am a Rajput Muslim.”) Secondly, in borderline situations such as a mixed marriage, someone can join a particular Hindu community, on condition that its legitimate members accept you as one of theirs.

And then there are the present circumstances, where Hindus are forced to compete with predators and hence modestly organize Ghar Wâpasi (“return home”), the reconversion of people once estranged from Hinduism. I fully support that policy. It mostly works among villagers, with whom bookish me has little rapport; but if my writing about Islamic scripture can help a Muslim to free himself from his religious conditioning so that he wants to “return home”, I will be most happy.

In spite of all that, I myself have never converted to Hinduism, though I have received initiations from several acknowledged Gurus. I do not sport a Sanskrit name. But that is not at all meant as a tacit criticism of the course David Frawley has chosen.

“Frawley overcomes this bottleneck easily by insisting Vedic civilisation is universal and open to all humanity, and by defining what it means to be a true Brahmin. It is significant, however, that no white convert to Hinduism ever identifies themselves as Vaishyas or Shudras. It is either Brahmin or Kshatriya, that is intellectual and combative – and always superior. So much for ‘division of labour’ thesis of varna.”

The Brahmin name “Shastri” was given to David, it is not he who claimed Brahminhood. As for myself, by traditional definitions of varna, I would of course be a Shudra, and there is nothing wrong with that. A Swiss friend of mine (and of “Vedic socialist” Swami Agnivesh), who lived in an ashram in Rishikesh for years, calls himself Shudrânanda: Shudra and happy to be one! Among great Hindu figures I particularly like, is Sant Ravidas, who was a cobbler on the outskirts of Varanasi. Well, the outskirts of Hinduism, that is where you might situate me.

Polemics

I feel flattered by Pattanaik’s accurate assessment of the history debates I have participated in: “Elst has done a lot of research on Ayodhya and endeavours to provide evidence to prove the Babri Masjid was indeed built on a site that once housed a Hindu temple. He has strongly challenged views of scholars like Richard Eaton who seek to secularise the iconoclasm of Muslim rulers. The standard trope in modern historical studies seems to be that Hindu temples were destroyed not only by Muslim rulers but also by Hindu rulers as part of establishing their authority. It disregards all Hindu memory and Islamic writing that shows motivation of Muslim rulers at its core was religious, designed to replace the Hindu faith with Islam. This is aligned with Western academic anxiety at being seen as Islamophobic – no points lost if one is Hinduphobic. Elst provides the fodder to challenge this view.”

But here I break ranks with many history-rewriters: “Both Elst and Frawley provide strong arguments to support the ‘Out of India’ theory that seeks to establish India as the true homeland of the Aryan race or Sanskrit language, claiming it gave civilisation to the world.”

 “Despite their deep knowledge of Hinduism, neither Elst nor Frawley, neither Doniger nor Pollock, believe in letting go and moving on, which is the hallmark of Hindu thought, often deemed as a feminine trait. Instead, Elst and Frawley keep drawing attention to injustice done by colonisers, goading Indians to rise up and fight, a violent tendency that is the hallmark of Western thought, often deemed as a masculine trait. Likewise, Doniger and Pollock keep reminding their readers that Hinduism’s seductive ‘spirituality’ must at no point distract one from its communal and casteist truths.”

Wow, psycho-analyzing people from a distance, that must be tough. Look, I don’t understand all this jargon dividing civilizations into “feminine” and stuff. I merely see a debate (about the invasion theory) that has not been satisfactorily concluded yet, so I keep working. That is not an idiosyncratic refusal to let go. After the Ayodhya debate was concluded and the pre-existence of a temple at the site proven and officially accepted, I have left that debate behind me. I let go of it.

By contrast, the injustice done by the Muslim colonisers remains a fact with consequences in the present day, and continuous with some presently existing injustices (violent oppression of Hindus in Muslim-majority states, anti-Hindu discriminations in the Constitution). Letting go of those concerns would be too early. That is just a matter-of-fact view. Myth cannot really throw new light upon it.

Likewise, I assume that Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock take the causes they fight for seriously. In that case, they must realize that those causes are large and not exactly ephemeral: they will still be with us on our dying day. So, people are free to change course in life, but abandoning a project you have worked for before seeing it through is not particularly virtuous. I don’t think sons of the Indian soil like a BR Ambedkar nor a SR Goel abandoned the causes they worked for halfway. It is not always time to “let go”.

Parting shots

So far, so good. But in cauda venenum, the venom is in the tail. I strongly object to Pattanaik’s parting shots.

“So both parties keep the Hindu wound festering. Both also offer the balm of ‘justice’, a Western approach that is politically volatile for India, and commercially lucrative for them.”

The people who created doubts about the temple in Ayodhya, and inflicted the whole controversy on India (and on Hindu communities in Bangladesh and the UK), did unnecessarily revive an old wound and then kept it festering. Those who sought for the exact historical scenario and its doctrinal background did just the opposite. And as for the bystanders who ignore the factual results that the latter have achieved, the too seem to want the controversy to “fester”.

As for “lucrative”, for those familiar with the vetoes and exclusions inflicted upon dissenters by the Humanities establishment in the West and the secularist establishment in India, such a thought is beneath contempt. If “lucre” had been my motive, I would of course have joined the opposite camp.

And here he is really mistaken: “Neither privileges the Indian idea of diversity, that rejects homogeneity, and allows for multiple paradoxical even hierarchical structures to co-exist.” At least when speaking for myself, I can confidently state that on the contrary, my criticism has always been directed precisely against the religions and ideologies that are out to suppress diversity.

The mythographer speaks: “Doniger and Pollock follow the Greek mythic pattern that establishes them as heroes who are in the ‘good fight’ against ‘fascist’ monsters. Elst and Frawley follow the Abrahamic mythic pattern that establishes them as ‘prophets’ leading the enslaved – colonised – Indians back to the ‘Vedic Promised Land’.”

I don’t know how Greek a “good fight” is, but that is indeed how they see their work; and so do we. As for prophets, I don’t really believe in divine spokesmen, so let that sobriquet pass. Perhaps David, who is more of a visionary, could be described in those terms, though he himself, as far as I know, never did. Me, I only see specific errors being made, and I am simply the much-needed schoolteacher wielding his red pencil. If that can lead anyone to his Promised Land, fine, but I don’t even look that far, I just want those errors out of the way. Perhaps Bhangi (sweeper) would be a good caste for me.

But then: “Being placed on a high pedestal is central to both strategies. Criticism also evokes a similar reaction in both sides – they quickly declare themselves as misunderstood heroes and martyrs, and stir up their legion of followers. Doniger and Pollock have inspired an army of activist-academicians who sign petitions to keep ‘dangerous’ Indian leaders and intellectuals out of American universities and even American soil”: Subramanian Swamy, Narendra Modi, and in similar controversies Rajiv Malhotra, the Dharma Civilization Foundation and others. Indeed, the Indological community’s touching (occasional) concern for freedom of speech is not erga omnes. And at that point, any similarity with Frawley and myself ends.

“No dissent is tolerated. If you agree with either side, you become rational scientists for them. If you disagree with them, you become fascists – or racists.” Both Frawley and myself have written thousands of pages. I offer one symbolic rupee for whoever can find any statement to that brandishing effect. On the other hand, I can point to a number of pages in my own work where I go out of my way to defend the freedom of speech of those conspicuously not in agreement with me, esp. Wendy Doniger. No special merit, for if you yourself have been the target of enough exclusions, it comes easily.

It seems we are dealing with an attitude that seeks to come out on top during a argument by picking up the quarrel in the middle and pretending that both sides are equal. A very profitable posture, for it also allows for laziness since you don’t even have to study the contents of what the two sides are saying or doing.

Now that our mythographer has gone off track, he extemporizes all at once about “White Knights” with a “Hindutva obsession”, opposing “multiple truths” and waging a “Crusade against Muslims”, out to “dehumanise” the opposition. Here I confess, I simply can’t keep up with his cannonade. I think he is referring to himself when he speaks of “rejecting the model of conversation”.

Wrong!

Yet, I have hardly any quarrel with Pattanaik’s conclusion: “If we have to truly be decolonised, and truly swadeshi, be it the MK Gandhi or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh variety, we have to overcome our inferiority complexes, and without succumbing to chauvinism, realise that we Indians, with all our shortcomings, do not really need Europeans and Americans to tell us what Hinduism, Sanskrit or Vedas were, are, or should be.”

Well, if you put the issue in those terms, I am all for overcoming inferiority feelings and dependence on others. That is why Indians don’t need Doniger’s eroticized or Pollock’s politicized reading of the Ramayana, and why the interiorization of their approach in the late AK Ramanujan’s or in Pattanaik’s own work was a bad idea. Only, I don’t think that that is because these august scholars are “White”, or “Western”, or even “Indologists”, but merely because they are wrong.

It is no big deal to be wrong once in a while. Fortunately there are others, conversation partners with a verbal red pencil, who are kind enough to correct you. Vishal Agarwal has published a whole book of corrections to the many errors in Wendy Doniger’s not-so-banned “banned book”. I have participated in a whole conference to set Sheldon Pollock’s loaded views of Sanskrit straight. It will not save the world, or even that small part of it that is India, nor that small minority that is still Hindu. But still it is a good clean feeling not to have to live amid untruths, whether lies (oh, how I loathe that term) or, more often, mistakes. Myths are another matter.

Read more!

Academic bullies

 (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.

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