Thursday, March 10, 2016

A Pollockism

Pollock concludes in his essay "Deep Orientalism":
“From its colonial origins in Justice Sir William to its consummation in SS Obersturmführer [a senior rank in the Nazi party] Wüst, Sanskrit and Indian studies have contributed directly to consolidating and sustaining programs of domination. In this (noteworthy orthogenesis) these studies have recapitulated the character of their subject, that indigenous discourse of power for which Sanskrit has been one major vehicle and which has shown a notable longevity and resilience.”
In brief, the Germans learned Sanskrit, and that caused them to be infected with Nazi doctrines, per Pollock. 

Other scholars have remarked that Pollock is remarkably thin on evidence.

To quote Rajiv Malhotra, Reinhold Grünendahl "says Pollock's narrative "is not an evidence-based study of Orientalism or Indology in Germany, but a sophisticated charge of anti-Semitisim based largely on trumped-up "evidence"...... He takes up the question of Pollock's attempt to associate Indology with Paul Lagarde (1827-91), a noted German scholar who focused his analysis on Greek, Arabic and Hebrew texts using tools of comparative philology.  Grünendahl says there is no evidence that Lagarde was influenced by Indology or had any association with it.  Lagarde's The Current Tasks of German Politics is supposed to have deeply influenced Hitler.   In it, he called for (a) unification of the German peoples, and (b) relocation of Polish and Austrian Jews to Palestine.  During his lifetime, he was seen and celebrated for his knowledge of classical Greek and Hebrew — not anything remotely connected with Sanskrit.  Interestingly, the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia has a detailed entry on Lagarde, with no mention of his association, in any way, to Sanskrit, Indology or India.

Comments (5)

Loading... Logging you in...
  • Logged in as
I question whether you have actually read the Pollock article in question, both because your interpretation seems off base and because this so-called conclusion occurs on page 111 while the end notes begin on page 117. In case you actually care to read it, you can find it <a href = "http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/30304033/_b6_ab_b7_bd_d6_f7_d2_e5_d3_eb_ba_f3_d6_b3_c3_f1_c0_a7_be_b3.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1457594692&Signature=wlihvpkD6tQzuEQFVV2W7olRv0c%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DOrientalism_and_the_postcolonial_predica.pdf">here

You might find, or at least I found, that the actual content is both more nuanced and defensible than you claim.
2 replies · active 470 weeks ago
When the message is "you're a Nazi", nuance is irrelevant. Sometimes plain speaking is good. As an analogy, I have no doubt that all through the years the Republican political strategy was "nuanced and defensible". Pat Buchanan in his 1992 Republican convention speech was blunt, but was put aside. We now finally have the clearest view of what the Republican vision actually means.

Also see: https://www.change.org/p/mr-n-r-narayana-murthy-a...
'Grünendahl says there is no evidence that Lagarde was influenced by Indology or had any association with it.' Lagarde knew Sanskrit and was a student of Ruckert. He did influence and was influenced by people who (unlike him) specialized in Sanskrit as opposed to his own specialization in Bible studies. Lagarde's ideas influenced the Prussian General Staff- most notably Luddendorf- who was as much of an Anti-Catholic as an anti-Semite. However, as a number of scholars have pointed out (Adluri is supposed to be a philosopher- he knows nothing about either Indology or German pedagogic history) German indology had no impact on Nazi ideology because it had already abandoned the romantic theory of language found in Renan & Max Muller. Indeed, Grunendahl points out that Pollock mendaciously attributes the word of an Assyriologist (Von Soden) to Frauwallner- an Austrian Indologist
1 reply · active 469 weeks ago
I searched and found little to say that Lagarde knew Sanskrit. In fact, his work on the Avesta supposedly explains difficult words in terms of Armenian, not Sanskrit; which I found very peculiar.

But I hope to read Ulrich Sieg's biography of Lagarde sooner than later, and that should settle the issue.

Post a new comment

Comments by