(Pragyata, 11
September 2016)
The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), together
with the neighbouring British Museum, is a centre of Orientalism in its proper
sense, viz. the study of “Oriental” civilizations. Exactly one hundred years
ago, it came about as the headquarters of what Edward Said notoriously called
“Orientalism”, meaning the colonial Empire’s project of pigeon-holing every
Oriental culture in order better to dominate it.
At that same time, on the enemy side in the ongoing First
World War, the German scholar Max Weber published one of the most influential
studies of the Orient, focusing on the question of the economic views and
implications of the world religions, and especially the part about Hinduism and
Buddhism. It sought to understand why not they but Protestantism had presided
over the techno-scientific and economic breakthrough to industrial capitalism
and modernity.
Some fifty people gathered in the SOAS’s Brunei Gallery
Lecture Theatre for the centenary of both SOAS and Max Weber’s work. As for
SOAS’s anniversary, chairman Peter Flügel quoted viceroy Lord Curzon calling
SOAS at its time of conception the “necessary furniture of empire”, for
“Oriental studies are an imperial obligation”. This is a key citation in Edward
Said’s “Orientalism” thesis, viz. that Orientalist scholarship was essentially a
strategic investment by the colonial establishment.
As for Weber, his view is fairly representative of general
Western opinion (partly by having created it) regarding the Hindu-Buddhist
counterpart to the role of the Protestant work ethic in the genesis of
capitalism. He had concluded that the Orientals certainly succeeded in
launching a mercantile capitalism but, partly because of their otherworldly
religion, failed in creating modern industrial capitalism. However, he also had
testified in 1916 how, in the middle of WW1, he had found his study of the
Hindu-Buddhist worldviews invigorating. We were going to recreate some of that
spirit.
Romila Thapar
The keynote lecture was given by the octogenarian historian
Prof. Romila Thapar. She looked quite good for her age, elegant and dignified
in her sari. She thus exemplified Sita Ram Goel’s observation that secularists
often display a sincere affection for traditional Hindu culture, all the more
striking when supposed Hindutva militants go all out for Westernization, from
the British-style RSS uniform and brass bands to the present-day
BJP-facilitated guzzling down of American economic mores and cultural
mannerisms. The secularists of the older generation are culturally still very
Indian, and have a traditional pride presenting an unassuming alternative
identity to the present idealization of Western examples. (I am reminded of her
colleague Prof. Irfan Habib’s proud old-Marxist rejection of US patronage,
contrasting to the complete conceptual as well as outwardly Americanization of
the younger generation of secularists and Ambedkarites.)
It transpired that she had a vivid interest in Weber’s work
regarding India, whom she read some forty years ago. As no Indian scholar of the
younger generation showed a similar interest, she had graciously accepted the
invitation from SOAS. The institution was familiar ground to her. She earned
her PhD degree at SOAS with a dissertation on Ashoka’s inscriptions, published
as an authoritative book in 1961. (Also present here was retired Oxford
Buddhologist Prof. Richard Gombrich, who strongly disagrees with her on those
inscriptions, which he doesn’t consider “secular” at all, but instead
outspokenly promoting the specific Buddhist worldview.) She immediately
established a good rapport with the audience, speaking slowly with a clear and
authoritative diction, as an experienced professor should.
She started with noticing the obvious: that Max Weber’s
research on Indian history and society relied heavily on colonial writings
available then, and necessarily differed from the present-day theories. Being a
prisoner of the colonial view, he did not thematize the implications of colonialism itself (unlike Karl Marx, who
wrote about colonialism in Ireland and India). Weber reproduced and refined the
colonial theory of “Oriental despotism”, which militated against the individual
freedom and social mobility needed for the genesis of modern capitalism.
Religions and their
work ethic
Weber remains most famous for his thesis that the Protestant
work ethic in the UK, the US and Germany was responsible for the rise of
industrial capitalism. Weber argued that capitalism could not have originated
in the India because of its lack of fraternization between different groups
(esp. during apprenticeship, where Indian pupils were confined to their caste
environment)), its lack of social mobility, its cultural depreciation of
commerce and its otherworldly religious orientation. He did not give sufficient
consideration to the Jains, whose trading activity, money-lending and
renunciation of enjoying their profits come closest to the Protestant work
ethic, though in passing he admits they had potential. In precolonial times,
China and India were the main economies in Eurasia and practised mercantile
capitalism. But they missed the shift to industrial capitalism, which took
place in Europe.
But then, Weber neglected the specific 18th-19th century
history of India and the role of both native and colonial capitalism therein.
More generally, he treated Hindu culture as a monolithic whole, insufficiently
considering the differences between classes and regions, and not taking the
changes between the different periods into account. In a borrowed distortion
typical for the Orientalists of the colonial period, he based his understanding
of Hinduism only on texts, esp. the Vedic corpus to whom different groups
across regions and centuries paid due
lip-service all while exhibiting variations and going through changes. Thus,
that is why the scripture-based fourfold Varna (“caste”) system figured far more
prominently in the Western image of Hindu society than the real-life
thousandfold Jati (“caste”) system.
The corrective that Hindu society was too readily seen as
changeless may have been the most important message in her lecture, seemingly
trivial but full of consequences for both Hindus and practising Orientalists.
In this case, the colonial-age Orientalists, with Weber in their wake, may have
borrowed their extremely static view of Hindu culture from the Hindus themselves.
Allow me to improvise an example.
The “Hindu caste
system”
When the Ambedkarites and their Western cheerleaders anchor
the caste system, complete with untouchability, in the Rg-Veda’s Purusha Sukta,
they are wrong; yet, they are only following a traditionalist Hindu view that
prevailed during the past few centuries. The box-type caste Apartheid with
caste endogamy of the Puranic and early modern era was nowhere to be seen in
the Rg-Veda: the earlier family books don’t report any trace of it, and the
Purusha Sukta in the late Book 10 only reports the existence of four distinct
functions in a complex society. After that, the caste system gradually hardened
with a stage of hereditary caste only in the paternal line (as with the Brahmin
Vyasa, son of the Brahmin Parashara and the fisher-girl Matsyagandha; and as
with the sons of Dasis who were recruited into the Brahmin caste, mentioned
here by Prof. Thapar), and finally endogamy. Equating Hinduism with the classical
caste system, as is the wont of the Christian missionaries, the Ambedkarites
and many an Orientalist, makes the mistake of disregarding change in Hindu
history, but this mistake is based on Hindus having made the same mistake. For
some two thousand years, any trespass against or doubt regarding the fully
grown caste system was condemned with an invocation of the Rg-Veda’s authority,
as if the Purusha Sukta had described the kind of caste system with which later
Hindus were familiar.
(It deserves mention here that Prof. Thapar has personally
contributed to our awareness of change within Hindu social structure. She has
edited the book India. Historical Beginnings and the Concepts of the
Aryan, 2006, in which Marxist
historian Shereen Ratnagar asserts,
p.166: “if, as in the case of the early Vedic society, land was neither
privately owned nor inherited by successive generations, then land rights would
have been irrelevant to the formation of kin groups, and there would be nothing
preventing younger generations from leaving the parental fold. In such societies
the constituent patrilineages or tribal sections were not strongly corporate.
So together with geographic expansion there would be social flexibility.” It
has become fashionable to moralize about the caste system, with evil Brahmins
inventing caste and then imposing it on others; but hard-headed Marxists don’t
fall for this conspiracy theory and see the need for socio-economic conditions
to explain the reigning system of hierarchy or equality. The pastoral
early-Vedic society did have the conditions for a more equal relation between
individuals than the more complex later Hindu society.)
Other factual inaccuracies in Weber’s work include the total
disregard for the presence of Islam in India, like for that of Buddhism in
China, because their foreignness jeopardizes Weber’s explanation of India’s
economic performance as stemming from the Indian religions. The different religions
were treated as self-contained, not porous. The Indian state was described as
agricultural, while recent studies corrected this: there was much commerce,
including maritime, and this had only increased with urbanization after the
year 1000. Weber also exaggerated the power of karma beliefs to reconcile
people to social misfortune. The peasantry often responded to crises by migration,
and sometimes even by that supposedly un-Indian behaviour: rebellion. They
didn’t wait for the next birth to better their circumstances.
Trade was not despised, and even Brahmins and ascetics
involved themselves in it, e.g. in the horse trade. Labour division between
castes was more flexible than used to be thought. In the century before Weber,
the static view of caste was conspicuously challenged by the anti-Brahmin
movements and by the upper-caste reform movements. Even a non-specialist could
have been more aware of these developments.
Conclusion
So, let us sum up. Max Weber’s world exists no more, and
even the terms of the debate have been altered. Are the categories of religion
used by Weber (and likewise by Marx) still valid? They strike us now as
context-free and innocent of the changes that took place. Today, this
non-change view is regarded as ahistorical. Weber would have been better if he
had compared the same period in East and West, rather than comparing apples
with pears: timeless societies in the distance with the familiar recent stage
of Western society.
We remain stuck with the large question: what prevented Asia
from taking the lead in knowledge? Why was the lead grabbed by Europe, after
having lagged behind for so long? More was required for this than the Protestant
work ethic. And another question, rather trivial but appropriate on this
occasion: how would Max Weber have seen the religion of India a hundred years
later?
Afterthought
So much for the Weber lecture. People who know something of
the Ayodhya controversy may be surprised to learn that afterwards, I had a few
friendly interactions with Prof. Thapar. Remembering the flak I drew in India when
I took my erstwhile Aryan Origins adversary Michael Witzel’s side in the
controversy that followed the publication of his book on Global Mythology, I
will take the trouble to explain.
Firstly, it is all rather long ago, about a quarter century.
Back then, she took a leadership role in the secularist plea that there was no
basis for historans to accept the belief that a Hindu temple had stood at the
site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. In the dominant political and academic
circles, that position suddenly became a consensus, and I stood out by challenging
it. But that debate has been settled, definitively with the Court-ordered
excavations in 2003, which laid bare plenty of remainders of the temple. When
the war is over, soldiers go home, and let the war psychology which had
animated them on the battlefield, subside.
I will not mention the names of some Hindu and some
anti-Hindu scholars who are still repeating quite exactly what they said
decades ago, especially in the Aryan Origins debate. They foam at the mouth
when they argue their point, and keep on doing so. But for better or for worse,
I am not like that. So, the second reason is that I really don’t believe in
personalizing debates on specific issues. Admittedly, I was not quite immune to
that tendency when I was younger. But gradually, you not only know in theory,
but also realize in practice, that human relations should not, or as little as
possible, be affected by controversies. Even in controversies that I find
myself in today, I endeavour to stay on friendly terms with my adversaries.
Number three is the reason of principle, that I want
henceforth to guide all my dealings with adversaries. As Socrates said, the
root of everything deemed evil is ignorance. People who objectively do evil,
subjectively believe they are doing the right thing, because somewhere they
have picked up a mistaken idea of what constitutes right, or of what exactly it
is that they are doing. There is no need to intensify the impression that they
are evil, it is more helpful to make them see reason, and automatically they
will correct their position; for it is not in eagerness to do the right thing
that they are lacking. It also helps to
remain aware that you yourself with all your good intentions seem likewise to
be on the wrong side from your adversaries’ viewpoint. That is no reason to
assume all positions are equal, or to drop your own convictions, but it will
help you to better understand how anyone could have taken the opposite position
to your own.
Meanwhile, on the lawn outside the SOAS gate, there is a
statue of the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar. It carries a translated quotation of
his, which I would like to reproduce as my parting shot:
“Meet with joy, with pleasant thoughts part,/ Such is the
learned scholar’s art.”
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