Sheldon Pollock's Idea of a "National-Socialist Indology"

(Purva Paksha: the first Swadeshi Indology Conference, Chennai, July 2016)



abstract

Sheldon Pollock is by no means the first one to build on the mythology that has overgrown the factual core of a link between racism in general, National-Socialism in particular, and the study of Indo-European and Sanskrit. In his case, the alleged National-Socialist connection of Sanskrit is heavily over-interpreted and emphatically taken to be causal, as if the interest in Sanskrit has caused the Holocaust. We verify the claims on which he erects this thesis one by one, and find them surprisingly weak or simply wrong. They could only have been made in a climate in which a vague assumption of these links (starting with the swastika, which in reality was not taken from Hinduism) was already common. Yet, even non-specialists could easily have checked that Adolf Hitler expressed his contempt for Hinduism, repeatedly and in writing.

Pollock’s attempt to even link the Out-of-India Theory with the Nazi worldview is the diametrical opposite of the truth; it was the rivalling Aryan Invasion Theory (which Pollock himself upholds) that formed the cornerstone and perfect illustration of the Nazi worldview. This linking could only pass peer review because of the general animus against Hinduism and Indo-European indigenism in American academe. The whole forced attempt to associate Hinduism with National-Socialism suggests a rare animosity against Hinduism., 

+++++++++

Sheldon Pollock’s Idea of a “National-Socialist Indology”

Sheldon Pollock, professor of Sanskrit at Columbia University, links Sanskrit with the Holocaust, no less. Or at least, his critics (Malhotra 2016, Paranjape 2016) cite him to that effect. But according to Tony Joseph (2016), one of Pollock’s declared defenders, “the anti-Pollock campaign is based on quotes stripped out of their context”. Be that as it may in general, in the present paper we will take care to put Pollock’s utterances on the links between the Sanskrit tradition and National-Socialism (NS, Nazism) in context. As it happens, in this case, there is simply no context that could possibly render Pollock’s position harmless, for it is the single worst allegation possible in contemporary Western culture, viz. responsibility for the Nazi Holocaust. Nevertheless, we will give due attention to this context.

A somewhat frivolous element from the immediate context was that NS Germany was hosting Indian freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose. (“Jana Gana Mana, independent India’s national anthem, was first performed in an imposing celebration at the inauguration of the Deutsch-Indische Gesellschaft in Hamburg on 11 September 1942, for Bose had chosen it as free India’s national anthem”. (Hartog 2001:iv))  But that context can perhaps best be left undiscussed, for the regiment that Bose had formed, was anything but Hindu traditionalist. Far from inspiring caste hierarchy into their NS hosts, Bose’s soldiers were not organized by caste, unlike those in the British-Indian army. Bose was a socialist, a progressive, on the same anti-caste wavelength as Pollock; but the Nazis never held that against him.

So let us see what Pollock himself chooses to focus on.

The centuries before National-Socialism

In his overview of pre-Nazi German Indology, Pollock only follows the received wisdom when he stereotypes 19th-century German scholarship. He credits the German Orientalists with the creation of Wissenschaft, the scholarly canons that became normative in academe worldwide, with an ideal of objectivity (as in the definition of historiography by Leopold von Ranke, mentioned by Pollock 1993:84: reconstructing events “as they have been in reality”); but also with a frantic search for a German national identity. In that project, they used the Sanskrit tradition, viz. as partially preserving the “Aryan” identity that, through Indo-European (Indogermanisch or Arisch) linguistic unity, could inspire any German cultural self-identification.

Like so many contemporary scholars of the field, including Hindus and Muslims, he assumes the conceptual framework of Edward Said’s thesis Orientalism (1978). There, Said analyses the academic discipline of Orientalism (formally: “Oriental Philology and History”, as still on this writer’s diploma) as but an instrument for control, a method used by the colonial powers to dominate the natives of the Orient. This claim has been lambasted as riddled with factual errors and as conceptually a conspiracy theory by Irwin (2006), Warraq (2007) and Elst (2012), but has taken academe by storm and is now cited as gospel.

Pollock (1993:114) gives a nod to the existence of a “pre-orientalist orientalism”, a scholarship originating in the Catholic Church’s late-medieval attempts to reconnect with the Oriental Churches and to study its Islamic rival, when Europe had no colonies yet. Yet he formulates his own career project in Saidian terms: “Moving beyond orientalism finally presupposes moving beyond the culture of domination and the politics of coercion that have nurtured orientalism in all its varieties, and been nurtured by it in turn.” (Pollock 1993:117)

The expression “orientalism in all its varieties” refers, among other things, to the special nature of Orientalism in its mainstay, German-speaking Central Europe. Unlike France and England, Germany had initially no colonies, and later only some colonies far from the Orient. This fact should refute Said’s whole thesis, but he neutralizes it by keeping German Orientalism outside the purview of his book. (Later, this gap was filled by Marchand 2009 and, for Indology, by Adluri & Baggchee 2014) According to Pollock (1993:83), Germany practised its own Orientalism in an attempt to solve its “problem of identity”, and more consequentially, “to colonize Europe, and Germany itself, from within”, in a “German allomorph of British imperialism”. And here we see, with a big stretch, the connection between the proverbial German scholarship of the 19th century and the Nazi project of empire. Just as British Orientalism was evil by being a concoction in the service of empire-building, German Orientalism was evil by its connection with hyper-nationalism and genocide. That, at least, is Pollock’s message.

Nazi investment in Indology

Modern scholars devote a lot of time to studying every possible dimension of the NS polity and ideology, including the work of anyone thought to have NS ties, such as the philosopher and NS party member Martin Heidegger: ‘Like the predicament of Indology, that of humanistic studies in general has belatedly seized the attention of scholars, as

Der Fall Heidegger [“the case of Heidegger”] demonstrates.’ (Pollock 1993:112)

And so, Pollock includes his own specialism, Indology, among the culprits. The indictment: “In German Indology of the NS era, a largely nonscholarly mystical nativism deriving ultimately from a mixture of romanticism and protonationalism merged with that objectivism of Wissenschaft earlier described, and together they fostered the ultimate

‘orientalist’ project, the legitimation of genocide.” (Pollock 1993:96)

The allegation is extremely serious. Yet, he never quotes any of those Indologists as actually declaring they want genocide; or that the aim of their professional choice is genocide. Since, moreover, genocide is somehow declared to be the ultimate finality of Orientalism, this seems also to indict the French and British Orientalists. Alright, he fails to prove that rather unlikely point; but what does he prove? 

He claims a “substantial increase in the investment on the part of the NS state in Indology and ‘Indo-Germanistik.’ Both [Heinrich] Himmler and [Alfred] Rosenberg sponsored institutes centrally concerned with ‘Indo-Germanische Geistesgeschichte’.” (Pollock 1993:95) Note the sly cursory shift from Indology to “Indo-Germanistik”: the former deals with India and, as we shall see, received no increased interest from the NS regime at all; while the latter deals with Europe and especially Germany, the putative racial heir of the Indo-Europeans, and became the centre of NS attention.

In fact, the proof he himself adduces, proves something else than an increased German interest in Indology. He compares a total of 26 full professors of "Aryan" orientalism in Germany with just 4 in England, the colonial metropole – but for the year 1903 (detailed in Rhys-Davids 1904). This had nothing to do with a NS penchant for India, for this special German interest in the Orient existed since long before (and incidentally, makes minced meat of Said’s linking Orientalism with the colonial entreprise).

In support, Pollock refers to a primary source, the Minerva Jahrbücher, an annuary with academic data. But after thoroughly checking these, the contemporary German Indologist from Göttingen, Reinhold Grünendahl (2012:95), shows these data to confirm an uneventful continuity with pre-NS days: “As was the case with the 1933/34 volume and Rhys Davids’s paper of 1904, none serve to corroborate Pollock’s presumptions. The same holds for recent evidence-based studies that in any way pertain to such issues […], all of which confirm that Pollock’s deep ruminations on ‘the political economy of Indology in Germany in the period 1800–1945’ (1993: 118n5) are entirely unfounded. Nevertheless, his attendant admonition

that this is an ‘important question’ awaiting ‘serious analysis’ (118n5) has become a kind of gospel, recited by others […] with increasing confidence, but with very little to show as yet in terms of substantiation. Yet, all this while, dozens of ‘histories of German Indology’ are built on the—still unfulfilled—promises of that gospel.”

In his researches, Grünendahl (2012:194) has checked Rhys-Davids’ writings and discovered a telling example of how the racialist “NS” worldview was already present in Britain earlier: “However, a more important factor seems to me to be Rhys Davids’s racialist—or more precisely Aryanist—bias, documented, for example, in statements to the effect that

Gautama Buddha ‘was the only man of our own race, the only Aryan, who can rank as the founder of a great religion’ and that therefore ‘the whole intellectual and religious development of which Buddhism is the final outcome was distinctively Aryan, and Buddhism is the one essentially Aryan faith’ (1896:185), which ‘took its rise among an advancing

and conquering people full of pride in their colour and their race… ‘ (1896:187).”

But Pollock (1993:94) has a point when he notes that a number of Indologists were NS party members or SS officials, e.g. Walther Wüst, Erich Frauwallner, Jakob Hauer, Richard Schmidt. He estimates these as one-third of the Indology professors. He admits that there was a silent opposition too, e.g. when Wüst became board member of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (“German Oriental Society”), “the aged Geiger [= Wilhelm Geiger, Wüst’s mentor] objected privately to the behavior of Wüst.” (Pollock 1993:123) And that may have been the tip of an iceberg, though we will not hazard a guess on the proportion of open resisters, silent resisters, fence-sitters and collaborators.

Functionalism

Pollock gives the impression of a rather shaky grasp on NS history. It is, after all, not his field. Rather than properly delving into it in preparation of this ambitious paper, he seems to have gone by the received wisdom prevalent in his own liberal circles. The charitable explanation is that, not being a historian of WW2, he simply overstepped the boundaries of his competence. The alternative is that he deliberately forged this claim about Indology and National-Socialism as a weapon, in this case against the Sanskrit tradition. Some popular writers (e.g. Pennick 1981) have indeed done something similar, often after classifying Hindu ideas like reincarnation in the “occult” category. They have correctly sensed the windfall of benefits, whether political or commercial, guaranteed to whomever manages to instrumentalize references to National-Socialism. 

He claims that “the extermination of the Jews would seem to pose a serious challenge to any purely functionalist explanation of National Socialism.” (Pollock 1993:88) Perhaps there was still some room for doubt in 1993, and though marginal, the hypothesis of “intentionalism”, viz. that the genocide of the Jews was planned since the beginning of the Nazi movement, was still in existence in erudite company. This hypothesis would imply, in a maximalist interpretation (viz. that any supporter of National-Socialism wilfully supported all of its programme), that NS Indologists like Fauwallner or Hauer supported “genocide”.

Strictly speaking, Hindus have no reason to defend these Indologists, for none of them was Hindu, and they projected a non-Hindu NS framework onto Hindu texts. Given the complexity of the reasons for a man’s inclinations, their interest in the Sanskrit traditions implies nothing at all about the Sanskrit tradition itself. Nevertheless, it is worth observing that even if these scholars were party members, this does not mean they supported genocide, for that item was not on the party programme. Anti-Semitism is bad (and of that, they can certainly be held guilty) but genocide is something else again. Even when it was later decided upon, it was still carried out in secrecy because the top Nazis knew that it would offend the German population including many party members.

Today, no historian worth his salt takes this intentionalism serious anymore, though it lives on in Hollywood stereotyping. Apart from unsupported by facts, intentionalism also sins against the reigning postmodernist canon by being “essentialist”, i.e. positing an irreducible unchanging nature to NS ideology; when even that turns out to be historical and changeble under the impact of circumstances. The “functionalist” hypothesis has won the day, viz. that the idea of genocide only came about in a chain of unforeseen decisions under war circumstances in 1940-41. Even then it was carried out in secrecy: as late as 1943, Jewish Councils in occupied countries co-operated in the deportation of their own community, thinking Auschwitz was merely a labour camp. You could be a NS party member and support the idea of a Jew-free Europe (through emigration, as had happened in the 1930s) yet not support nor even know about genocide. To be sure, ethnic cleansing is reprehenssible too, but it is not genocide. Scholars ought to exercise a sense of proportion.

For political campaigners living in the relative comforts of the post-war era, it is easy to laugh at the German commoners’ 1945 profession: Wir haben das nicht gewusst (“We didn’t know about it”); but very often, it was formally the truth. Again, supporting the NS regime was bad enough; but it was something else than support for genocide. Pollock, voracious quoter that he is, can at any rate not cite any NS Indologist as expressing support for genocide.

But suppose, just suppose, that tomorrow, an incriminating statement by one of those Indologists gets discovered. Well, he is a human being, susceptible to all kinds of influences, not just those from his field of specialism. It would then still remain to be proven that the Sanskrit tradition which he studied, had given him this inspiration for genocide. Sanskrit writers can be accused of teaching inequality through caste, and Pollock does indeed do so, but it has not been quoted here (nor, as far as is known, anywhere else) that the Vedas or Śāstras preach genocide.

Now, if Vedic literature ever enjoined (not even just recounted, but actually enjoined) genocide, there is no doubt that the Dalit movement, the missionaries, the “secularists”, the Khalistanis, the many anti-Hindu India-watchers, and perhaps Pollock himself, would gleefully quote it. Not that they ever quote the instances of genocide in the Bible or in the traditions about Mohammed, but for Hinduism they would not be that polite. Indeed, it would have been logical to quote it very prominently in this very paper, as it would prove its entire point. But it seems not to exist.

Anti-Semitism and the Sanskrit Tradition

While genocide entered the mind of some top Nazis only by 1941, another element always associated with the NS ideology was intrinsic to it since the beginning, and very prominent in its writings since ca. 1920 and in policies since 1933: anti-Semitism. While Pollock takes as a matter of courses that to the Nazis, “Aryan” was the opposite of “Semitic”, he doesn’t furnish any fact or quote at all that would meaningfully link this with the Sanskrit tradition.

He correctly notes that the NS view of the Vedas was through an anti-Semitic lens: “The Ŗg-Veda as an Aryan text ‘free of any taint of Semitic contact’; the ‘almost Nordic zeal’ that lies in the Buddhist conception of the marga [way]; the ‘Indo-Germanic religion-force’ of yoga; the sense of race and the ‘conscious desire for racial protection’; the ‘volksnahe kingship’ such is the meaning of the Indo-Aryan past for the National Socialist present, a present that, for Wüst, could not be understood without this past.” (Pollock 1993:89)

Yes, that is how the Nazis saw it because they were racist and anti-Semitic to begin with. But the knowledge of the Sanskrit tradition could add absolutely nothing to that. There was nothing in the Vedas themselves that suggested anti-Semitism, it was entirely in the eye of the beholder. Anti-Semitism existed in Europe ever since the people became convinced, through Christianity, that the Jews had been responsible for Jesus’ death. Modern nationalism added an ideal of homogenization, so that Jews were wished away as an obstacle to this ideal. By contrast, Vedic literature doesn’t know of Jews at all, and Hindu history has only shown a pluralistic hospitality for the Jewish communities on the Malabar coast, complete with their distinctive traditions.

In fact, that pluralism and respect for different identities could be cited as a redeeming feature of the caste system targeted so systematically by Pollock. Hindu reformers who deny the intimate link between caste and Hinduism during the past twenty or so centuries are wrong. But they might start by enumerating some redeeming features, such as the sense of belonging-to (rather than of being-excluded-from), and pluralism. Within the caste framework, nobody’s comfort or identity was threatened when a foreign community was added. At any rate, the really existing caste system did not include anti-Semitism.

The only thing Pollock can come up with here, in a footnote, is this: “The ratio ārya : caṇḍāla [outcaste, untouchable] :: German : Jew was made already by Nietzsche”. (Pollock 1993:119) Friedrich Nietzsche was popular among top Nazis, but they read him selectively, leaving out the positions that would not have endeared him to an NS regime. He disliked German nationalism and especially anti-Semitism as, at least, vulgar.

Nevertheless, it is true that Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols: The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind 3) speculated on the Jews’ origin as emigrated Caṇḍālas, Untouchables, based on more speculations by the amateur-Indologist Louis Jacolliot. We have discussed this question in full detail elsewhere (Elst 2008), but briefly, it all hinges on the mistranslation of the word dauścarmya, “having a skin defect”, from the enumeration of Caṇḍāla traits in the classical law code Manu Smṛti (10:52, but based on 11:49). This word was understood as “missing a piece of skin”, hence “circumcised”. In reality, Manu nowhere mentions circumcised ones, whether Jews or Muslims.

Moreover, Nietzsche’s account doesn’t fit the neat scheme given by Pollock. Nietzsche recognized that in some ways, Jews do not fit the dirty and submissive stereotype of outcastes at all, and have been characterized by Aryan traits ever since their entry into history. They ennobled themselves by becoming warriors and conquering their “promised land”. They are stereotypically very money-savvy, like the trader caste, and their obsessive purity rules and book-orientedness remind one of the Brahmin caste. Whereas Untouchables do the dirty work at funerals, Jewish priests or Kohanim are expected to stay away from corpses. Jews were demonized by the Nazis, but not as low-castes.

Unlike the stereotype of Caṇḍālas (more applicable to the Gypsies, known to descend from Indian low-castes and despised by the Nazis), the Jews were considered as rich, powerful, manipulative and extremely clever. Jews definitely did not relate to Germans the way Hindu low-castes relate to the upper castes. And anyway, the NS policy regarding the Jews was not based on this Nietzsche quote.

The “Aryan” homeland question

The official birth of Indo-European linguistics by William Jones’s famous Kolkata speech in 1786 (set on a scientific footing by Franz Bopp in 1816, as recognized by Pollock 1993:84) set in motion the search for the original homeland of this language family. The initial favourite was India, as famously stated by Friedrich von Schlegel (cited by Pollock 1993:85). In the present context, it might be a significant detail that Schlegel “married the daughter of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn”, for which he was reproached as “missing racial instinct”. (Poliakov 1971:217) Many other scholars from this period can be cited to the same effect, e.g. in 1810, Jakob-Joseph Görres had Abraham come from Kashmir. (Poliakov 1971:219)

In the next decades, the putative homeland was relocated westwards, but Pollock (1993:77) claims that the Germans “continued, however subliminally, to hold the nineteenth-century conviction that the origin of European civilization was to be found in India (or at least that India constituted a genetically related sibling)”.

 

This insinuates that the Nazis still believed in an Indian homeland whereas the British and their allies had long converted to the idea of a more westerly homeland. This much is true, that the NS state was intensely interested in the question of Indo-European origins: Communist states “employ myths of utopia, while fascist systems employ myths of origins”. (Pollock 1993:85) But then, Pollock artfully smuggles in a continuity between the earlier Out-of-India hypothesis and the preferred NS location of the homeland. The NS state’s legitimation by “Aryan” origins “had been provided early in nineteenth-century Indian orientalism; a benchmark is Friedrich von Schlegel's identification (1819) of the ‘Arier’ as ‘our Germanic ancestors, while they were still in Asia’ (Sieferle 1987:460). In the later NS search for authenticity, Sanskritists, like other intellectuals ‘experts in legitimation’, as Gramsci put it, did their part in extrapolating and deepening this discourse.” (Pollock 1993:85; Antonio Gramsci was the Italian Communist leader who, ca. 1930, theorized the acquisition of cultural hegemony as a prerequisite for political revolution.)

Note also this adroit suggestion of Indian paternity in this quotation from the NS Indologist Walther Wüst: “I know of no more striking example of this hereditary, long-term tradition than the ingenious synopsis contained in the brief words of the Führer and the longer confession of the great aryan personality of antiquity, the Buddha. There is only one explanation for this, and that is the basic explanation for components of the National-Socialist world-view: the circumstance, the basic fact of racial constitution. And thanks to fate, this was preserved through the millennia . . . [through] the holy concept of ancestral heritage [Ahnenerbe].” (Pollock: 1993:90)

Note that in all Pollock’s quotations from NS Indologists, only one Hindu is mentioned by name, repeatedly: the Buddha. He tries to make the Mīmāṁsā thinkers with their chiseling of Śāstra law into an inspiration to the Nazis (as if they needed Mīmāṁsā to conceive of inequality), but never manages to find a Nazi quote about them. None, for example, about the 12th-century Śāstra commentator Bhaṭṭa Lakṣmidhāra, whom he himself drags in frequently as justifying societal hierarchy. On the other hand he presents the Buddha as an antidote to Vedic inequality, yet that same Buddha turns out to be very popular among the Nazis. 

There was no NS belief in an Indian homeland at all, on the contrary. To be sure, there was a belief in a racial kinship with the ancient “Aryans” in India, freshly invaded from their more westerly homeland. Of Nordic origin, these Aryans brought their talents into India and gave expression to them in ancient writings, and these naturally showed a kinship with Greek thought and other “Aryan” achievements in Europe.

Thus, NS Indologist Erich Frauwallner says, in Pollock’s account (Pollock 1993:93): “Frauwallner argued that the special meaning of Indian philosophy lay in its being ‘a typical creation of an aryan people’, that its similarities with western philosophy derived from ‘the same racially determined talent’, and that it was a principal scholarly task of Indology to demonstrate this fact. Reiterating an axiom of NS doctrine, that ‘Wissenschaft in the strict sense of the word is something that could be created only by nordic Indo-Germans’, Frauwallner adds, ‘From the agreement in scientific character of Indian and European philosophy, we can draw the further conclusion that philosophy as an attempt to explain the world according to scientific method is likewise a typical creation of the Aryan mind.’"

India was not important to the Nazis because they saw it as their ancestral land (they did not), but because it illustrated the Nazi worldview: (1) dynamic white Aryans enter the land of indolent dark people; (2) they subjugate them in a racially-conceived caste system, a kind of Apartheid; (3) in spite of trying for racial purity, they succumb too often to the charms of native women, so they racially degenerate; and therefore, (4) they ended up overpowered by whiter races, first the Turks and then, mercifully, their own purer Aryan cousins from Britain. Since the mid-19th century, this worldview had already been promoted by Britain, meanwhile it had been fortified by the ascendence of Darwinism (“struggle for life”, “survival of the fittest”) and finally acquired an extra intensity in NS Germany.

In the first years of the renewed debate on the Indo-European homeland, it was a common confusion that the Out-of-India theory, disappeared after Schlegel but now back in strength, had something NS about it, e.g. Zydenbos 1993. This confusion was deliberately fostered by some Indian “secularists” trying to criminalize the Indian homeland hypothesis, e.g. Sikand 1993. In reality, the NS theorists as well as the NS textbooks emphasized and highlighted the putative European homeland and concomitant invasion into India. Zydenbos and Sikand themselves were in Hitler’s camp.

    

The confusion centred on the word Aryan, of Sanskrit origin. In NS discourse, this was routinely interpreted in a racial sense, though race was here not just skin colour but also had a cultural component. Thus, both Sanskrit and German could only be such precise and structured languages because they emanated from racially predisposed nations (and the “degeneration” of Sanskrit to the much looser modern Indian languages is thus a consequence of racial degeneration). In vulgar propaganda, the linguistic, cultural and biological dimensions were completely confounded, but this even influenced high-brow discourse: “An example of this more sophisticated orientalism is the work of Paul Thieme”, Harvard Sanskritist Michael Witzel’s revered teacher, esp. his “analysis of the Sanskrit word ārya, where at the end he adverts to the main point of his research: to go beyond India in order to catch the ‘distant echo of Indo-germanic customs’.” (Pollock 1993:91)

From Adolf Hitler’s mouth, no words in praise of Hinduism are known. A few expressions of contempt, yes, e.g. Subhas Bose’s army: “Hitler himself ridiculed the 3000-man strong regiment of Indians.” (Hartog 2001:iii) But there is one statement of importance in the present context. Among Hitler’s rare utterances on the Hindus was a racial interpretation of the AIT. These are his own words (Jäckel & Kuhn 1980:195, quoting Hitler 1920): “Wir wissen, dass die Hindu in Indien ein Volk sind, gemischt aus den hochstehenden arischen Einwanderern und der dunkelschwarzen Urbevölkerung, und dass dieses Volk heute die folgen trägt; denn es ist auch das Sklavenvolk einer Rasse, die uns in vielen Punkten nahezu als zweite Judenheit erscheinen darf.” (“We know that the Hindus in India are a people mixed from the lofty Aryan immigrants and the dark-black aboriginal population, and that this people is bearing the consequences today; for it is also the slave people of a race that almost seems like a second Jewry.”)

For Grünendahl, this is merely an example of how the primary sources of German history contradict the free-for-all that amateurs make of it. Joseph (2016) dismisses Grünendahl’s many factual data as only to be expected from a “German”, an ad hominem against a whole nation, as well as a covert admission that he cannot refute even one of them. Grünendahl (2012:196) had noted the same inability in an earlier Pollock defender, Vishwa Adluri (2011): when challenging the many facts mustered by Grünendahl, Adluri neither shows Grünendahl’s data to be incorrect, nor does he bring other facts proving Pollock’s case: “a pitiable want of judgment as well as evidence.”

But the objective finality of Pollock’s thesis is more specific, viz. to blacken the Indian homeland hypothesis by associating it with National-Socialism. Reality, however, is just the opposite: more even than other Europeans, the Nazis espoused and upheld a westerly homeland and the invasion hypothesis. This invasion happens to be a corner-stone of Pollock’s worldview, with invader castes guilty of expropriating and subjugating the natives, who became the lower castes. Hitler-Pollock, same struggle!

To end this discussion on an element of nuance, however, we have to note an odd passage.

Though Pollock repeatedly affirms NS belief in what is nowadays called the Out-of-India theory, and assumes this throughout his paper, honesty demands that we mention how one time, very cursorily, he nods to the opposite (and true) scenario: “From among the complexities of NS analysis of the Urheimat question it is worth calling attention to the way the nineteenth-century view expressed by Schlegel was reversed: the original Indo-Europeans were now variously relocated in regions of the Greater German Reich; German thereby became the language of the core (Binnensprache), whereas Sanskrit was transformed into one of its peripheral, ‘colonial’ forms.” (Pollock 1993: 91-92)

Even this is not entirely true, for the dominant opinion was that the homeland was to the east or southeast of Germany, while even the SS research department Ahnenerbe explored locating the homeland in Atlantis: fanciful, but at least outside Germany. Still, Pollock’s statement does justice to the NS worldview by denying India the honour of being the homeland. It explains why we often see a shift in the focus of NS Indologists from India to “Indo-European” or “Aryan” issues, racially identified with Nordic. Thus, in 1934 Jakob Hauer still wrote on “Indo-Aryan” metaphysics of struggle, but in 1937 he published on the religious history of the “Indo-Europeans”. Pollock’s own enumeration of supposedly India-related activities usually confuses “Indian” with “Indo-European”, i.e. “Aryan” or essentially “Nordic”. It is only by confusing those two that an impression of a NS orientation towards India can be created.

National-Socialism and the Sanskrit tradition

Two factors of a seeming connection between Hinduism and NS Germany are unavoidable: the swastika and the term ārya. About the swastika, the matter is simple: it does not come from India. It is a more widespread symbol, very prominent e.g. in Troy, excavated by a German, and part of Greek history which was a decisive inspiration to Germany’s academic culture. It was also very common in the Baltic area, where German army veterans formed Freikorps militias to defeat the Bolsheviks in 1918-20. When they came home, often to join nationalist parties, they brought the swastika with them.  (More detail in Elst 2007) The NS view was that it was Nordic in origin, and that it only became common in India after having been imported by the Aryans.

As Sünner (1999:66) puts it: “the hooked cross, which the Nordic cult of light carried into the Orient”. Indeed, this was part of a general septentriocentric worldview: “Unconcerned about historic truth, their builders were termed as ‘Indo-European Urvolk’ and ‘heroes of the North’, who later co-founded the civilizations of Egypt, India and Persia.” (Sünner 1999:60-61) India was not in the picture, except as a distant horizon to be conquered and civilized by Norsemen.

As for Aryan: “The term ārya itself merits intellectual-historical study (and I mean diachronic analysis, not static etymology) for premodern India at least of the sort Arier has received for modern Europe.” (Pollock 1993:107) True, Hindus too might learn a lot from realizing that this term is historical, that it has gone through changes, and that the classical meaning “noble” (a meaning unattested in the Ŗg-Veda) has mundane roots too. Yet, Pollock does no more than focus on the Manu Smṛti, fairly late and worn-out as a supposed repository of caste teachings and anti-egalitarian musings about ārya vs. anārya.

Moreover, Pollock (1993: 107-8) brings in the concept of race: “From such factors as the semantic realm of the distinction ārya/anārya and the biogenetic map of inequality (along with less theorized material, from Vedic and epic literature, for instance), it may seem warranted to speak about a ‘pre-form of racism’ in early India (Geissen 1988: 48ff.), especially in a discussion of indigenous ‘orientalism’, since in both its classic colonial and its National Socialist form orientalism is inseparable from racism.”

That is certainly the NS reading, but from a top Indologist, we might have expected an explanation of whether this was the Indians’ own intended reading. He doesn’t go into this question at all but confidently assumes an indubitably positive answer. To exonerate him, we might take this as merely a logical application of the Aryan invasion scenario, firmly established since the mid-19th century: the Aryans came in, met a different race of aboriginals, and imposed a racial Apartheid on them: the caste system. So, in a way, the case against Pollock is the case against Western Indology as a whole.

His arguments about the inequality fostered by the Śāstras thus always has a racial dimension. Caste is too big a subject to argue out here, but let us notice that he has no problem mustering incriminating quotations excluding low-castes from Vedic knowledge. He does acknowledge feeble dissenting voices, such as the early Mīmāṁsā thinker Bādari, who argued that Śūdras too can build Vedic fires for sacrifice, since "the Śūdra desires heaven, too (…) and what is it in a sacrifice that any man can do but that the Śūdra is unable to do?" (Pollock 1993:109) But the over-all picture is decidedly inegalitarian. However, inequality is a nearly equally distributed good, and for that value, the Nazis could have found inspiration in other societies, if they needed any at all, such as the Arab or colonial slave systems.

Inequality yes, but racial, no. All this depends on the racial reading of Sanskrit concepts, starting with the enumeration of four social functions (without a word about how to recruit for them) in late-Vedic hymn RV 10.90, “the locus classicus in the Veda” for caste division. Even “the biology” is said to be “of course latent in the RV passage”, though he does not say how and other readers cannot find a trace of it. (Pollock 1993:125) All this follows from the Aryan invasion scenario, and on this point, there is no chance of refuting Pollock unless the homeland debate is waged all over.

At any rate, none of these interesting musings about Indian society played any role whatsoever in NS policies. Pollock (1993:86-87) is only projecting his own focus when his Indologist’s eye recognizes caste phenomena in NS policies: “The myth of Aryan origins burst from the world of dream into that of reality when the process of what I suggest we think

of as an internal colonization of Europe began to be, so to speak, shastrically codified, within two months of the National Socialists' capturing power (April 1933). The ‘Law on the Reconstitution of the German Civil Service’, the ‘Law on the Overcrowding of German Schools’, and a host of supplementary laws and codicils of that same month were the first in a decade dense with legal measures designed to exclude Jews and other minority communities from the apparatuses of power (including ‘authoritative’ power, the schools and universities), and to regulate a wide range of social, economic, and biological activities.”

Finally, another point of difference between NS racism and caste society is this. The relation between the Germans and the “inferior” races was conceived as hierarchical, but the NS conception of German society was not as a hierarchy: all members of the master race were deemed reasonably equal. Hitler himself had climbed up from down below; there was no objection against social mobility. Germans were not to be held inside the class they happened to be born into, unlike the low-caste Hindus in Pollock’s oft-stated view.

In this connection, Hitler himself objected to the idea of a hereditary priesthood. Though he doesn’t name it, this could be applied to the Brahmin caste: “The Catholic Church recruits its clergy in principle from all classes of society, without discrimination. A simple cowherd can become cardinal. That is why the Church remains combattive.” (Pierik 2012:83, quoting Hitler’s table talk of 2 November 1941) So, even in his anti-Brahminism, Pollock finds himself in Hitler’s camp.

The banalization of criminalizing Hinduism

In his conclusion, Pollock digresses about the future of his scholarly discipine. There, he takes for granted the connection he has earlier posited between Sanskrit and the Holocaust. In an entirely non-polemical tone, he off-hand builds on this putative connection: “How, concretely, does one do Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz in a world of pretty well tattered scholarly paradigms?” (Pollock 1993:114)

In the process of disinformation, an idea is first launched and argued in high-brow papers like the New York Review or the Economic and Political Weekly; subsequently it is presented as the received wisdom in more general media, like the Washington Post or the Times of India; but the final stage is when the idea is presented as a matter of course, and conveyed through popular media, women’s magazines etc. That is what completes the instilling of false ideas in the popular mind.

Similarly, to promote an idea intended to become a fixture in our worldview, it is useful to repeat it, first as a topical proposal to be proven, then as a theorem deemed to have been proven, finally as a truism on which other proposals can safely be built.

Yet, we don’t hold Pollock as an individual guilty of this disinformation. Though his authoritative voice does its bit to determine the Zeitgeist, he was mainly surfing on an already-existing Zeitgeist.

Firstly, the tendency to project the Nazi episode onto something morbid and unique in the more distant German past, and particularly the exoticization of 19^th-century Germany’s supposed self-doubt and search for an identity, was already very common in the preceding decades (e.g. Poliakov 1971), and still is to some extent.

Secondly, the link between Hinduism (as well as Lamaism) and Nazi culture had already been proposed by a number of writers. Moreover, it converges with a widespread revulsion among Westerners against the caste system, which they liken to slavery and identify, through the Aryan invasion hypothesis, with racism. This misses the warlike element in National-Socialism, but that is slightly made up for by all the stories about Hindu riots and by the symmetry fallacy whenever Muslim violence comes in the news: “Ah, but all religions do it; Hinduism must have a similar terrorism.” Even then, it still doesn’t have the element of “genocide”, but Pollock remains determined to read that into it.    

Conclusion

It is one thing to hold a view that, upon analysis, turns out to be mistaken. To err is but human. However, one should become extra careful when the view one expresses, is an allegation. It becomes even more serious when it is the worst allegation one can possibly make, viz. the accusation of responsibility for the Holocaust.

The situation with allegations is simple: either you prove them, or you yourself are guilty of slander. This then can be held against Pollock: he has made a grave allegation, yet has failed to buttress it with proof, though not for lack of trying.

The question which Hindus should contemplate, then, is this one. Should the Sanskrit tradition be given in care to a pofessor of Sanskrit who stands by such a grave though false allegation against it? 

Adluri, Vishwa, 2011: “Pride and prejudice: Orientalism and German Indology”, International Journal of Hindu Studies, 15, p.253-294.

--, and Bagchee, Joydeep, 2014: The Nay Science, A History of German Indology, OUP, New York. .

Breckenridge, Carol A., and Van der Veer, Peter, eds., 1993: Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, UPenn Press.

Elst, Koenraad, 2007: Return of the Swastika, Voice of India, Delhi.

--, 2008: “Manu as a Weapon against Egalitarianism: Nietzsche and Hindu Political Philosophy”, in Siemens & Roodt 2008, p.543-582.

--, 2012: “The Case for Orientalism”, in The Argumentative Hindu. Essays by a Non-Affiliated Orientalist, Voice of India, Delhi, p.442-455.

Geissen, Imanuel, 1988: Geschichte des Rassismus, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.

Grünendahl, Reinhold, 2012: “History in the making: on Sheldon Pollock’s ‘NS Indology’ and Vishwa Adluri’s ‘Pride and prejudice’”, International Journal of Hindu Studies no.16, p.189-252.

Hartog, Rudolf, 2001: The Sign of the Tiger. Subhas Chandra Bose and his Indian Legion in Germany, 1941-45, Rupa, Dehi.

Irwin, Robert, 2006: For Lust of Knowing: the Orientalists and Their Enemies, Allan Lane, London.

Hale, Christopher, 2003: Himmler’s Crusade. The true story o t 1938 N expedition into Tibet,, Bantam, London.

Hauer, Jakob Wilhelm, 1934: Eine indo-arische Metaphysik des Kampfes und der Tat: Die Bhagavad Gita in neuer Sicht, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart.

Hauer, Jakob Wilhelm, 1937. Glaubensgeschichte der Indogermanen, Vol. 1, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart.

Hitler, Adolf, 1920: Warum sind wir Antisemiten?, in Jäckel & Eberhard 1980, p.184-204.

Jäckel, Eberhard, and Kuhn, Axel, eds., 1980: Hitlers sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, 1905-1924,

Joseph, Tony, 2016: “Battle against Pollock”, Business Standard, Delhi, 3 May 2016.

Malhotra, Rajiv, 2015: The Battle for Sanskrit. Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred? Oppressive or Liberating? Dead or Alive?, HarperCollins, Delhi.

Marchand, Suzanne, 2009: German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race and Scholarship, German Historical Institute, Washington DC, and Cambridge University Press.

Paranjape, Makarand R., 2016: “The deepest Orientalist”, Business Standard, Delhi, 29 April 2016.

Pennick, Nigel, 1981: Hitler’s Secret Sciences, Nevile Spearmen, Suffolk.

Pierik, Perry, ed., 2012 (1980): Hitlers Tafelgesprekken 1941-44 (“Hitler’s Table Talk”), Aspekt, Soesterberg.

“

Poliakov, Léon, 1987 (1971): Le Mythe Aryen. Essai sur les Sources du Racisme et des Nationalismes, Editions Complexe, Paris.

Pollock, Sheldon, 1993: “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and power beyond the Raj”, in Breckenridge & Van der Veer 1993, p.76-133.

Quinn, Malcolm, 1994: The Swastika. Constructing the Symbol, Routledge, London.

Rhys Davids, Thomas William, 1896: Buddhism: Its History and Literature, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, London (American Lectures on the History of Religions, First Series, 1894–1895).

--, 1903-4: "Oriental Studies in England and Abroad", Proceedings of the British Academy, London, 183-97.

Said, Edward, 1995 (1978): Orientalism, Penguin, London.

Schlegel, Friedrich, 1808: Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, Mohr, Heidelberg.

Sieferle, Rolf Peter, 1987: "Indien und die Arier in der Rassentheorie", Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 37:444-67.

Siemens, Herman, and Roodt, Vasti, eds., 2008: Nietzsche. Power and Politics, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin.

Sikand, Yoginder, 1993: “Exploding the Aryan myth”, Observer of Business and Politics, 30-10-1993.

Sünner, Rüdiger, 1999: Schwarze Sonne. Entfesselung und Missbrauch der Mythen in Nationalsozialismus und rechter Esoterik, Herder Spektrum, Freiburg im Breisgau.

Thieme, Paul, 1938: Der Fremdling im Rigveda, Brockhaus, Leipzig.

Warraq, Ibn, 2007: Defending the West. A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Prometheus, Amherst NY.

Zydenbos, Robert, 1993: “An obscurantist argument”, Indian Express, 12-12-1993.

Read more!

Macaulay's biography

(published in Oriëntalistische Literaturzeichnung, December 2016, p.528)

Masani, Zareer: Macaulay. Pioneer of India’s Modernization. Noida: Random House India 2012. XV, 269 S. 8°. Hartbd. INR 450,00. ISBN 978-81-8400-303-1.

            There are a lot of things wrong with many Indians’ unquestioning trust in and use of the thesis put forward by Edward Said in his unjustly famous book Orientalism (1978). This work is full of factual errors, leaves unconsidered the German-language mainstay of orientalism (to which its main proposition linking Orientalism with colonialism happens not to apply), and essentially is a conspiracy theory, turning all scholars concerned into colonial agents. But with regard to Indians specifically, it uses “Orientalism” in a sense different from the original application relating to India, which in turn is distinct from its academic use as the name for a philological discipline. “Orientalist” originally refers to those British administrators of India who, around 1800, opined that the native languages were more suited as mediums of education and modernisation than English. Whereas “Orientalism” has become a dirty word among Hindu nationalists as much as among ‘postcolonial’ Marxists, the historical Orientalists actually pursued nativist education policies still advocated by the same Hindu nationalists.

            Now a book has appeared which presents the man who put the Orientalists out of business by pushing through an Anglicist education policy: Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859). Finally, we have an up to date biography of this person extremely influential in Indian history. As Zareer Masani says on the cover of his book Macaulay. Pioneer of India’s Modernization: “If you’re an Indian reading this book in English, it’s probably because of Thomas Macaulay”. His last biography was one by his nephew George Otto Trevelyan, still in the nineteenth century.

            The present book is a pleasant enough read, giving all the relevant data. It is marred by only one factor, which may even garner the author sympathy among some of his readers, namely his all too conspicuous sympathy for his subject, not to say his unconcealed admiration.

            By birth and upbringing, Macaulay was part of a British circle of elite people who were both liberal and Christian. The best known example of this movement was William Wilberforce (1759–1833), who successfully campaigned both for the abolition of slavery and for allowing missionary activity in India. We see Macaulay going to India not to fulfil a historical mission, but as the only way seemingly open to him to boost his finances. He worked as an assistant to Governor-General William Bentinck, most famous for prohibiting the self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres (satī). It was formally in a written advice to him that he formulated his famous Minute on Education in 1835. Apart from determining education policy for centuries to come (we still have an education system sensibly called Macaulayan) , he also made his mark in other areas: e.g. he drafted the Indian penal code. Then he returned to stay in England for twenty more years as a scholar and a famous poet, to die at age 59.

            It will not endear the man to Indian nationalists that he used his spare time in Calcutta to pursue his interest in the Graeco-Roman classics while spurning the native ones. His contempt for Sanskrit writings is well-known and comes through in his Minute, where he equates the whole of Sankrit literature in terms of knowledge content with a single shelf of a popular library in Britain. Or, according to the approving author: “Macaulay was notoriously dismissive, if not downright hostile and contemptuous, about native Indian, and particularly Hindu, customs and religious superstitions” (p. xiii).

            Hindu nationalists tend to use his name when they mean the Anglicised elite. However, he did not spin a conspiracy that made the influence of the British long outlast their presence in India, as nationalist narrative implies. Instead, Indians themselves have opted for his and against nativist policies regarding language and education. Maybe they have chosen to pursue a wrong course (or maybe not, as this book affirms), but it is at any rate their own doing, not that of a Western conspiracy.

            Was Macaulay’s education policy good for the former untouchables, here called “Dalits” (the choice of words in this case being very sensitive)? As Dharampal has shown in his book The Beautiful Tree. Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (New Delhi: Biblia Impex 1983), basing himself on contemporaneous British surveys carried out in preparation of the implementation of Macaulay’s policies, Indian schools were by no means backward, and the school system was definitely more democratic than the contemporaneous one in England. It did not serve many untouchables, but they were represented, contradicting the usual assumption that low-castes were forbidden from learning to read and write. Moreover, positing a causal relation between the introduction of the English medium and the emancipation of the low-castes is factually incorrect. China pursued a radical policy of equalisation and achieved near-general literacy without using one word of English. Many Chinese engineers of whatever social background work at high-tech jobs without knowing English.

            Macaulay also did not have the egalitarian reforms in mind which his present-day Dalit fans ascribe to him. Britain at that time had steep class differences, which helps explain why, as administrators in India, the British could so easily accommodate the caste system. As we learn in this book, Macaulay was not in favour of universal franchise, preferring to keep it restricted to people owning property or diplomas. The Indian leftists and subalterns the very circles that celebrate his memory opposed the latest Gulf War in which a superpower bludgeoned a backward country in the name of human rights (and probably in the service of private capital). Exactly the same conditions prevailed in the First Opium War, which Macaulay passionately and prominently supported.  In this case, the author is more even-handed, observing that today, “Macaulay’s ideas about an imperial mission to inform and educate still underpin the way the West exports its values to the rest of the world, especially through ‘soft’ power and the subtle transfer of cultural and economic norms” (p. xv).

            Did Macaulay provide the glue that still holds independent India together, as his fans, including the author, believe? The Constituent Assembly envisaged two alternatives to English as the official language: Hindi, taken to be more or less spoken as a mother tongue by some 40% of the population, which was chosen and badly failed (partly but not wholly by sabotage from the English-speaking elite); and Sanskrit, which had a history as an official language and was highly respected both in India and abroad. Sanskrit was little spoken (as was English), but learning it as a common second language would have proved easier than making Hebrew the first language for Jews migrating to Israel, also because of the many vocabulary links between Sanskrit and the vernaculars. If Sanskrit was a difficult language, it was difficult for everyone, and it did not seriously favour one region over another, the way Hindi did.  Even Bhimrao Ambedkar, Law Minister and venerated ideological light of most low-caste Macaulay fans, strongly supported Sanskrit. India might have been united under its own classical language. However, after a 50–50 vote, Assembly President Rajendra Prasad cast the fateful deciding vote in favour of Hindi, thus aborting the possibly successful Sanskrit experiment and indirectly making English the only viable alternative. Macaulay might have been history by now, but he is back with a vengeance. And if Masani has his way, Macaulay is here to stay.

Read more!

The wheel of the world ruler

Bovenkant formulier

Belgo-Indian contacts in historical perspective, this is the subject and subtitle of a much-needed project: classifying what in history Belgium had to do with the emerging superpower India. As this book is unlikely to be translated, I take it upon myself to summarize some of its salient findings. Compiler of the book is the Slavicist and historian, Professor Idesbald Goddeeris, whose focus is the history of colonization and now, increasingly, of modern India. Previously he wrote a standard work on the history of India together with Prof.Em. Winand Callewaert.

The title, The Wheel of Ashoka, is a reference to La Roue d' Açoka, title of the memoirs of Prince Eugène de Ligne (1959), the first Belgian ambassador in independent India (1947-51). Although an admirer of his class peer Jawaharlal Nehru, he did not quite believe in the latter’s identification of this symbol of Emperor Ashoka . Rightly, he wrote that this was an older symbol of empire, the ideal of the Cakravarti or " wheel turner ", the emperor who is in the centre of administration and receives tribute from all the vassal states. The ideal of the universal ruler existed for centuries, though Ashoka (not Queen Victoria, as too many Westerners still think) was the first who realized it by uniting most of the subcontinent under one scepter.

Belgians in India, politically

In strictly political terms, Belgium and India have had little to do with each other. Some Belgian seamen were employed by the Portuguese fleet and thus were among the first to colonize some peripheral regions of India, especially Sri Lanka and Goa. In 1498 Vasco da Gama landed in the southwestern coastal city of Kozhikode (Calicut). That area, cocopalmwaving Kerala and neighboring Sri Lanka, were regarded as the earthly paradise. An Antwerp imprint of Thomas More's book Utopia therefore contains a poem by the humanist Pieter Gillis which is partly in the local language, Malayalam.

In 1500 the Portuguese trading posts became the Estado da India, the base of some Flemish travellers, including diamond traders and missionaries who tried to win souls, on site or farther inland. For example, while in prison awaiting his execution, Moghul prince and throne pretender Dara Shikoh reported profound discussions with the Flemish Jesuit Father Busée. In 1602, the Netherlands founded the United East India Company (VOC), also an employer of a lot of Flemish adventurers. Christophe Vielle (Louvain-la-Neuve) and Michael Limberger (Ghent) present an overview of these early contacts, from antiquity to about 1700. The following contributions deal with the next stages of colonization , which include the momentary Ostend counterpart of the Dutch East India Company in ca. 1720.

The Kingdom of Belgium (1830-) had no structural links with India, only a lot of personal and business contacts, with the diamond trade as its crown jewel, and only in the last twenty years, the fast-growing Indian investments in the Belgian industry. When still a prince, Leopold II paid a visit to India in 1865, and Albert I, his successor as king, did so in 1925. It was especially his wife Elizabeth who conceived a lifelong fascination with India . She took up practising yoga and received some well-known yoga masters. Brussels became one of the main centres for introducing yoga to the West.

 

In 1943, the Flemish collaboration leader Hendrik Elias received his Indian counterpart Subhas Chandra Bose, or so history has come to call them, but both saw themselves more as freedom fighters. Bose was killed in 1945 in Taiwan, but his country was independent two years thereafter, while Flanders is still waiting. In the reserved atmosphere of the Cold War, King Baudouin (r.1951-1993) waited until 1970 before paying this Soviet ally a state visit.

At a slightly lower protocol level, however, there had been a major contact between Belgium and the fledgling Indian republic concerning the Kashmir issue. In 1947, this principality had not joined the newly independent India nor the tear-away state of Pakistan. When irregular forces from Pakistan invaded the area, it acceded to India and was narrowly saved by Indian troops, who began the reconquest of the state. This would have been completed in 1948, were it not that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had already referred the matter to the nascent UN. Precisely that month, Belgium presided over the Security Council, and so it was up to the Belgian diplomacy to resolve this conflict. A thankless chore, and we cannot say it was really  "resolved" : for we hear frequently in the news that as late as in 2014, there is still a Kashmir question, with the same line of control as in 1948, an effective boundary between the recaptured territory and the third of Kashmir that is still under Pakistani occupation. In that area in 1947-48, Pakistan has wiped out all non –Muslims, and it has refused to vacate the conquered territory, a condition imposed by the UN for a plebiscite. In 1965 and 1999 there were more wars over Kashmir, and it became a sde flashpoint in the 1971 Bangladesh war. In 1948-49, the Belgian diplomats acquired the reputation of being very pro-Pakistan, and so the Kashmir issue has continued to fester. At this point, this review adds the information that one of the best sources of information on Kashmir is the bulletin issued by the former professional soldier Paul Beersmans, who stayed in the area for long as a UN observer and revisits it frequently.

"Oriënt"

The book reports correctly that there has been a shift from the study of the classics ("Indology") to the sociological approach ("South Asian Studies") within the Orientalist departments. The authors, like most intellectuals involved, seem to find this good and normal, but we have our doubts. The “natives” concerned are still very focused on their classics. Islam’s Western advocates strongly support "studying not Islam but Muslims", but the Muslims themselves faithfully keep to their source texts. Their Islam is in essence, following the scripturally recorded example of the Prophet, but what postmodern Islamologists choose to study is precisely the non-Islamic element in the lives of Muslims. In Hindus, the role of the scriptural corpus is less pronounced but still stronger than the trendy neglect of the classics presupposes. This shift takes place both in India itself, where Sanskrit comes increasingly under pressure, and in the entire West, where not only Orientalist chairs be abolished, but in parallel also Latin and Greek, along with history. The classics and any reference to the past are wilfully side-tracked by socialist policy-makers ideologically driven to capture the population under a dome of contemporaneity. On this, they make common cause with the liberals, who shut down chairs of Latin or Sanskrit in pursuance of the Thatcherite principle of abolishing everything that is not immediately self-supporting or lucrative, “to invest less in chicken and more in eggs".

Consubstantial with the rejection of classical studies is the use of "Orientalist" as a term of abuse. Orientalists were eccentric scholars of Asian cultures to the extent that they devoted a lifetime to studying them. They and their perfectly venerable discipline, Oriental studies, were vilified by the late Edward Said, a Palestinian Christian who claimed that they had only been water-carriers of the colonial or imperialist project by purposely devising a contempt -laden characterization of Oriental man. In his famous book Orientalism (1978), Said only defended Islam by denouncing its Western analysers, though his approach has been applied to other fields within Oriental Studies. He painted Islam as a pathetic victim, although the British in India persisted in honouring and maintaining the Moghul empire until 1857, and made ​​common cause with the Muslim League against a freedom movement identified as Hindu. Among the colonial powers it was only Portugal that had attacked Islam as such. It is somewhat understandable that Muslims still flaunt Said’s thesis: after all, he served their interests. But for others it is quite ridiculous, partly because his book is teeming with factual errors, partly because of its over-all nature of what should be called a conspiracy theory: the so-called scholars across countries and centuries actually were all agents of imperialism, and their seemingly scientific theories were only coded weapons to belittle the Asian civilizations and put them in manageable boxes.

Since about 1990, all students of Political Science and Oriental Studies are given large doses of Said’s worldview, a trend that will no doubt be studied one day as a textbook example of a politically motivated aberration In the present book, different contributions show its influence. Thus, we find an example of this “Orientalism” discourse in an otherwise very informative chapter of this book, "shapes of the spirit" by Patrick Pasture and Elwin Hofman (both historians from Leuven), about the history of yoga. This is hardly a reproach to the authors: they only apply a theory which, although wrong, happens to be the prevalent paradigm. In any case, their trendy proposition that yoga is but a Western-inspired recent phenomenon is factually incorrect. The yoga tradition has existed since at least three thousand years. The very popular Bhagavad-Gita exhorted its hero Arjuna two thousand years ago to “become a yogi”, the Yoga Sutra was commented by many ancient and more recent philosophers, the postures of hatha yoga are the subject of written instruction recorded since a thousand years.

At most, some foreign elements have been included: around 400 AD the Chinese notion of the "microcosmic orbit" (a guided tour of attention along the spine up to the crown and along the front back down) had a formative influence on the so-called kundalini yoga and the chakra system; and around 1900, some elements of Western gymnastics crept into Hatha Yoga, especially the headstand and the concatenation of 12 ancient postures into a dynamic sequence, the " salute to the sun”. The approach to the postures, which requires total relaxation and slow performance, however, is unknown in the West, except precisely in recent disciplines that draw on Hatha Yoga in this regard. Conversely, the western pelvic floor muscle exercises that every pregnant woman nowadays, are actually inspired on the yogic mula bandha ("root lock"), not to mention the numerous neuro- and psychological techniques that are based on ancient Indian meditation exercises. A recent example is Mindfulness, a velvet version of Vipassana meditation which was, among others, already practiced by the Buddha.

Jesuits

The topic of a playful chapter illustrates the Zeitgeist before and after independence quite well: Belgian comic-strips. We see the gradual elimination of the existing stereotypes and prejudices. The recent economic and demographic history is also discussed, including the experiences of the now numerous Indian students in Belgium, and a description of the newly built Jain temple in Antwerp by museum curator Chris De Lauwer, who regularly guides visitors there.

An important aspect, especially for the historically very Catholic territory of Flanders, is mission history. After the Congo, India was the destination of most of the missionaries from our region. In Kerala, Panjab and especially Chotanagpur (today Jharkhand and a part of West Bengal), they could leave their mark. The Jesuit mission expanded from Kolkata to the tribal area west of the city, and there the mission of Constant Lievens s.j. played an important role. The naive tribals understood nothing of the property laws the British imposed, and lost their mineral-rich lands to urban investors; so Lievens offered them legal support. "Fire must burn", was his motto. Another important figure was Herman Rasschaert s.j, who tried to intervene in religious riots and was slain by his own tribals on March 24, 1964 (exactly 50 years ago). Recently, the pastoral responsibility was transferred to indigenous priests .

Typical of the Flemish priests, unlike for example the American missionaries, was their attention for the vernacular languages. Camille Bulcke s.j. wrote a Hindi dictionary that is still authoritative. The tribal languages ​​in Chotanagpur were written down for the first time, provided with modern terminology, and introduced as medium for primary education. In 2000, the Hindu nationalist government added some languages to the list of official languages​​, including the tribal language Santali. That these tribal language were upgraded is the merit of the Government, to be sure, but that they had become mature vehicles of culture and therefore came to be considered for official status at all, was mainly the work of the Flemish Jesuits .

Belgian research into India is the subject of a contribution by Winand Callewaert (Leuven). Important scholars include Charles de Harlez (Louvain), Louis de la Vallée-Poussin (Ghent) and Etienne Lamotte (Louvain) . A well-known name in the Flemish movement is Walter Couvreur, co-founder of the Flemish nationalist party in the 1950s, but here mainly the Sanskritist who also taught Hittite and Tocharian (Ghent) . Then comes the more recent research, including my own professors Pierre Eggermont and Gilbert Pollet (Leuven). The latest generation includes among others Christophe Vielle (Louvain) and Eva De Clercq (Ghent). I should add that Callewaert himself is no doubt the most famous Belgian scholar in modern India, writer of a vast Hindi-English dictionary of the devotional movement and editor of many works by or about popular devotional saints (Dadu, Ravidas and others), whose followers deeply venerate him. Foremost in this category is his editing the Guru Granth, the holy book of Sikhism.

Since completeness is not of this world ("only Allah is perfect"), we cannot summarize the whole book. But we can warmly recommend it, there was a real need for a work that presents all this information.

Idesbald Goddeeris , ed : Het Wiel van Ashoka. Belgisch-Indiase Contacten in Historisch Perspectief (Dutch: “The wheel of Ashoka, Belgo-Indian contacts in historical perspective”), Lipsius , Leuven 2013 , 243 pp. , € 29.50 , ISBN 978 90 5867 954 3 .

Read more!