Colonial hegemony of Indology Those who are at the forefront of expressing their disgust and anguish at the act of withdrawing Wendy Doniger’s snigger of a book on the Hindus are a very distinct and peculiar type. They are a type which, because they have been the beneficiaries of the munificence of the “outsiders” can hardly ever come round to accept that the “insiders” may one day speak and talk back at “outsiders” who had hitherto been the sole arbiter and definer of their image. It was, most certainly, one of these types who must have peer-reviewed Doniger’s stuff on behalf of her publishers – surprisingly that act and actor has so far managed to avoid being discovered and discussed. This type has modeled itself “on its departed counterpart” and has always viewed “any emphasis on the ‘glories of ancient India’ as an act of Hindu Fundamentalism.”[1] Veteran archaeologist and historian, Professor D.K. Chakrabarti of the University of Cambridge in his masterly study of colonial Indology, quite succinctly describes such a type which began to thrive post-independence as the “ebb of nationalism died down.” The Indian historian, notes Chakrabarti, “became increasingly concerned with the large number of grants, scholarships, fellowships and even occasional jobs to be won in the Western universities, there was a scramble for new respectability to be gained by toeing the Western line of thinking about India and Indian history.”[2] In such an atmosphere and scramble, there could thus be no question of working to loosen the “stranglehold of Western Indology” nor of scrutinizing its implications for India. The only sure and certain way to academic and material success was by adopting this attitude of non-challenge and non-questioning. So dictatorial and closed has been this type, that whenever they perceived some rumbling against the “premises of Western indology”, rumblings which arose from people who were insiders but with “no control of major national historical organizations”, they summarily dismissed these as “fundamentalists of some kind, mere dhotiwalas of no intellectual consequence.”[3] The Natives strike back This same sneer was evident when one saw these types talk about the Shiksha Bachao Andolan and its democratic protests against the portrayal of Hindus done by an outsider to the tradition. Couched in sophisticated words and expressions made purportedly in favour of the freedom of expression and of interpretation was a venomous feeling which brooks no opposition, resistance or talking back to the external interpretation of India. One of the grandsons of the Mahatma, an otherwise erudite and reticent gentleman-scholar and former bureaucrat, has recently expressed such an indignation and sneer at the attitude of talking back, of questioning and expressing dissent. A sense of racial superiority towards Indians and their tradition has almost always been the hallmark of Western Indologists or Western interpreters of Indian civilization. R.C.Majumdar pointed at this tendency saying that Europeans “would hardly be in a position to write the history of India, so long as they do not cast aside the assumptions of racial superiority and cease to regard Indians as an inferior race.”[4] This sense of superiority indigenised after the colonial masters departed and manifested itself through perpetually negative portrayals of Hindus and their traditions. Such an indigenised negative portrayal was also in line with the continuing negativities on India in the Western academia and together it became a formidable generator of “alternate” histories of India. These alternate readings, in course of time, became the mainstream by sidelining the actual alternate readings of Hindus, their manners and their customs. In his latest study on the philosophical unity of Hinduism, Rajiv Malhotra, for instance, describes this tendency, in the American – Western context, of controlling and of distorting the reading and description of India. He terms this as a “form of cultural and civilisational imperialism which takes the spiritual traditions of a people and distorts and dilutes them so as to appeal to the imperial palate.”[5] The attempt has always been to portray the “other” traditions as either overtly otherworldly or irrational, weird, perpetuating voodoo-like cults and systems that required interpreting, debunking or rationalizing – the manifestations of the sense of the “mission civilisatrice.” Malhotra points out how: - See more at: indiafacts.co.in/western-indology-academic-apartheid/#sthash.wXTluQAI.r0N4RiQb.dpufindiafacts.co.in/western-indology-academic-apartheid/#sthash.wXTluQAI.rOPvVUop.dpbs
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 03:44:47 +0000
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