Begin at 12:08, for how free speech actually works. Rajiv Malhotra takes on American academic Sheldon Pollock and the response is to try to stop the publication of his book through "informal" methods. However, when someone moves the court (e.g., with respect to Doniger's book) that is gross intolerance.
Thursday, February 11, 2016
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vnm · 472 weeks ago
(i) adhikAra for Indology - RM makes a big point of this but the elephant in the room is the pathetic state of research in Indian Universities. Pollock's work did not come out of a vacuum but is to be viewed in the context of 300+ years of writing in the Humanities. It is of course, not RM's business to talk about Indian Universities but I was surprised that not one person in the audience at places like JNU and IIT-B brought this topic up for discussion.
(ii) pUrvapakSha - RM makes a very valid point about (the lack of) pUrvapaksHa and I believe he has written about it in the book (haven't read it yet). This is clearly related to (i). Take JNU for instance where RM gave a talk hosted by the Sanskrit Dept. I am fairly sure most students in that Dept are completely unfamiliar with Foucault's work (which lies at the heart of Pollock's thesis). I will be so happy if my assertion is incorrect but it is based on comments made by the Prof. (Head of the Dept.?) in that Dept. "Sanskrit is not a dead language because thousands speak it". If this is the Sanskrit Dept's best argument (and I note that today's Swarajya has a piece by Prof. Subhash Kak saying something similar; but I'll excuse him since he is not trained in the Humanities), then I am afraid the Battle for Sanskrit is already lost.
(iii) Which brings me to a couple of recent works - Poetics of Conduct and The Hidden Lives of Brahman. Both books came out of dissertations written in the West (Columbia and Harvard, if I remember right; ironically field work for both these books was done in the place RM routinely disses these days) and although they do not engage with Pollock's Language of the Gods ... directly, they show how his thesis can be contested by phenomenology, anthropology and ethnography. But Humanities in India is dominated by naive reductionist history, "invention of tradition", "Brahmana/Hindu hegemony" and similar approaches that are hardly original.
(iv) "Intellectual kShatriya" - a term coined by RM. He argues forcefully for more of these. But if these are not backed by "intellectual brAhmaNas", then this battle cannot be won. I believe mAnasataraMgiNI got it right - we Hindus have become intellectual cretins over the centuries. In fact, even RM seems to have accepted this for he says somewhere that "the new brAhmaNa" now sits in Columbia, Harvard and other centers of learning in the West.
macgupta 81p · 472 weeks ago