 "<b>Letters:</b> Battle against Pollock")
Last week, poet and Professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Makarand R Paranjape, took on the Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University, Sheldon Pollock, in the Business Standard (Read here). The article argued, in an acerbic tone alien to academic discussions, that Padmashri Pollock was “desacralising Sanskrit”, “killing” Sanskrit and “secularising Sanskriti”. It also called Indian academics who do not agree with the vicious attack on Pollock, “sepoys”.
All of those words within quotes have been borrowed from the playbook of NRI businessman-turned author Rajiv Malhotra, who has made a name and a role for himself by leading an army of “intellectual kshatriyas” (his own words), to battle against academicians he regards as “Hindu-phobic”. When Malhotra uses such phrases to make a meal of the scholarly works of academics, it doesn’t really surprise anyone, given this background. But when academics like Paranjape join the feast, it does.
The arguments and phraseology that Paranjape uses are taken from Malhotra’s recent book, 'Battle for Sanskrit'', which could have been more aptly titled 'Battle Against Pollock'. The book, which is a mishmash of assumptions, distortions and contradictions makes the basic point that Pollock is an ‘outsider’ – a pejorative term he uses often - with no ‘respect and empathy for the greatness of Indian civilisation.’
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Anyone who has read Pollock’s path-breaking book, 'The Language of the Gods in the World of Men' (2006), would know the hollowness, in fact, the perversity, of this allegation. The book, which is already regarded as a classic, chronicles the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’, the largest cultural empire that was ever built without armies and invasions, and extending from Afghanistan to Java.
It is probably one of the grandest tributes to the ‘greatness of the Indian civilisation’ that has ever been written, with the kind of rigour and detail that is rarely seen. The book ends by asking the world to learn from the way the Sanskrit Cosmopolis arose, spread, and evolved over two millennia. Pollock's latest book has just been released and it is titled 'A Rasa Reader', and is on the theory and practice of aesthetics in India’s cultural history. A mere listing of his work spanning over three decades will take up 10 closely-typed foolscap pages, so one is not even going to attempt to summarise the scope of his writings.
Out of all that body of work, Paranjape and Malhotra pick out four or five papers written between one to three decades ago, and then use the standard devices that pamphleteers resort to: strip a quote out of its context, make the worst possible conclusion without even a suggestion that other conclusions are possible, and damn a scholar by insinuation rather than reasoning.
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Nonetheless, let’s stick with the choice of texts Paranjape and Malhotra have made, and see what they have got. Paranjape opens his piece with a quote from Pollock which he obviously thinks would be sufficiently inflammatory, but refrains from giving its context! The quote that Paranjape has chosen is about ‘Sanskrit and Indian studies contributing to programs of domination’, in the context of Nazi Germany. Stripped of its context, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that this was Pollock's way of absolving the Germans of culpability for the excesses of Nazism!
But this is far from the case. The quote is from the paper ‘Deep Orientalism’, which is an examination of the inadequacies of the theory of Orientalism as put forward by Edward Said. Said’s theory attributed much of western representations of Eastern cultures to the requirements of colonial domination and administration. In Pollock’s view, colonisation might explain Indology studies as conducted by the British, the colonial power, but it does not explain the far larger Indology studies conducted by the Germans. In both volume of intellectual production and investment, the Germans surpassed all the rest of Europe and America combined. So why did the Germans study Indology as fervently as they did, when such study did not serve any German colonial purpose?
Pollock put structure and rigour to the answer to this question, the bare outlines of which were already known- that German interest in India’s antiquity was driven by Germany’s own need and search for an identity that was separate from, and superior to, the rest of Europe. Or to be more specific, the German fascination for and identification with their supposed Aryan origins.
The question then arises as to how this German Indology driven by the German need for an Aryan identity, fit into the later, Nazi scheme of things, which also drew upon already existing Aryan heritage theories. Pollock argues that many prominent Indologists of the time went along with the Nazis and helped them embellish and feed their narratives.
This is the actual context of the quote and it is a damning indictment of the role that German Indologists of that period played and the uses to which they put their own understanding of Sanskrit and Sanskrit culture. So, it is no surprise that Reinhold Grunendahl, a German Indologist, denounces Pollock with all he has, thus giving Paranjape the ammunition and the quotable quotes he needs! Quite a different story from the one Paranjape suggests.
That takes us to ‘The Death of Sanskrit’, another paper that Pollock wrote, in 2001. Here, Paranjape again uses tactics that would be expected from a Malhotra, but is distressing to see in the hands of an academic, such as: Using loaded phrases like “killing” Sanskrit, while hiding the fact that no one has publicly, consistently and robustly championed the cause of Sanskrit, as Pollock has, over the years. His papers and talks, including ‘Crisis in the Classics’, are desperate pleas for greater support for Sanskrit knowledge and study.
That is why it is shocking to see Paranjape say this about Pollock: “When he fails to ‘kill it’, he resorts to a strange sleight of scholarly hand: ‘Sanskrit had never been exactly alive in the first place.’”
So did Pollock actually say, “Sanskrit had never been exactly alive in the first place?”, as Paranjape suggests? The answer is… NO! Even at first reading of his paper, it is abundantly clear that he is arguing AGAINST the view of some people that “Sanskrit had never been exactly alive in the first place”! For, in the same paragraph where this quote appears he goes on to write: “Yet the assumption that Sanskrit was never alive has discouraged the attempt to grasp its later history; after all, what is born dead has no later history. As a result, there exist no good accounts or theorisations of the end of the cultural order that for two millennia exerted a trans-regional influence across Asia—South, Southeast, Inner, and even East Asia— that was unparallelled until the rise of Americanism and global English”. From hereon, until the end of the paper, Pollock is trying to bring alive and chart the history that Sanskrit had as a living language!
The stunning fact is that this is not the first time that Paranjape, Malhotra and the 130-odd academicians who signed a petition asking for the sacking of Pollock as General Editor of the Murty Classical Library at the Harvard University have made this kind of a mistake. Their petition had a solitary quote to substantiate their charges against Pollock, which had to be withdrawn within days when it became evident that the offending quote was not Pollock’s own, but that of his opponents which he was only restating before going on to demolish it! When academicians of apparently high calibre make the same mistake twice, you have to wonder, are these merely mistakes?
On to the third paper then, that Paranjape mentions: 'The Theory of Practice and The Practice of Theory' (1985). According to Paranjape, Pollock presents ‘Vedic-Shastric traditions’ as ‘rigid and oppressive’. This argument finds further embellishment in the petition (signed by Paranjape and others), which asserts that Pollock “sees all shastras as flawed because he finds them frozen in Vedic metaphysics, which he considers irrational and a source of social oppression.” Is this correct? Let us put it through the usual process: see the argument within its context.
First of all, Pollock’s paper makes it clear that what it is exploring is how tradition “views” the relationship of a shastra to its object of study, and what its sources of authority are - whether unchanging, eternal scriptures of divine origin or human experiences and experimentations. What it does NOT explore is how shastras actually functioned in practice. In fact, he goes on to say that irrespective of the theoretical understanding of the source of authority of a shastra, in practice, “Indian cultural history in the classical and medieval period is crowded with exciting discovery and innovation”! Here is the full quote: “Quite the contrary, if in certain areas the shastric paradigm did encourage – or enforce – a certain stasis (as in language and literature), elsewhere Indian cultural history in the classical and medieval period is crowded with exciting discovery and innovation (as in mathematics and architecture).”
So to say as Paranjape and his collaborators do, that Pollock sees “all shastras as flawed” is a violent misrepresentation of his positions and work. Flawed is not even a word that appears in the paper!
This article is too small a piece to fully work out Pollock’s argument in the paper, but four main points can be summed up. One, the dominant theory about shastras held that they derived their authority solely from the Vedas, not from human experiences or experimentations, unlike the dominant theory in the West. Two, a minority of shastras, including the Arthasastra and Charakasamhita, did not accept this dominant theory: they held, instead, that experiences do matter in the formulation of theory, and that the relationship was not one-way. Three, in practice, many shastras deviated from the theory, to incorporate experiences and new learnings. Four, Indian cultural history in both the classical and medieval period is crowded with exciting discovery and innovation, in mathematics, in architecture and medical sciences to mention only a few, though they often had to present themselves as rediscovery of lost Vedic knowledge, rather than new discovery.
How different that is, from the story Paranjape tells!
In fact, a current project that Pollock is leading is called “Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism”, from 1550 to 1750. In his own words: “The period witnessed a flowering of scholarship, lasting until the coming of colonialism, when a decline set in, that ended the age-old power of Sanskrit thought to shape Indian intellectual history.”
That takes us to 'Ramayana and the Political Imagination in India', written in 1993 which Paranjape mentions. As usual, the paper is quoted without its context: The use of the imagery of Ramayana in the contemporary politics of India in the early nineties, when the Babri Masjid/Ramjanmabhoomi conflict was at its peak, and the covers of magazines were emblazoned with the image of LK Advani posing as Rama in his rath, bow and arrow in hand. The paper, which sets out this context at the outset, is an examination of the way that the Ramayana has found resonance in politics at different times in India’s history. The paper shows how, from the 12th century onward, the Ramayana came to figure with increasing frequency in royal, documentary and textual representations. This was also the period when the Sultanate was established in India and the resulting conflicts caused a new royal discourse, with many kings seeing or presenting themselves as Rama. To deny that the story of the Ramayana has political resonance at all goes against common political experience in the India of even today, not to speak of the 12th century!
This series of misrepresentations of Pollock’s works and arguments in Paranjape’s 780-word article is only a taste sample of the far greater distortions that occur in Malhotra’s book. Those distortions are not a bug, they are a feature of the way Malhotra sees the world: as a grand conspiracy against our civilisation.
This was brought home to the world on September 30, 2015, when Malhotra got taken in by a farcical piece on the satirical website, The Onion, which said that the history of the Greek civilisation as we know it was all false, and “entirely fabricated”. From Homer and Aristotle to Parthenon and Euclidean geometry, it was all made up, the story went. Malhotra, who has had his suspicions about the Greek civilisation for long, lapped it all up, and tweeted triumphantly with a link to that story: “Greek civilisation was fabricated, admit western historians. What will Indian secularists do now?” As the internet dissolved into derisory laughter, Malhotra continued to stand by his tweet for hours, arguing that it was not his fault if satire sometimes came close to reality! (Read here)
Academics like Paranjape who have gone into battle under Malhotra’s leadership need to ensure that their own academic standards are not diluted – worse, vitiated beyond the point of credibility – in the process. The 130-odd academicians who signed the petition would also do well not to go by Malhotra’s pre-conceived opinions, but to read things for themselves so that they would not get into the kind of untenable positions that they did. They should not let the fact that Pollock signed “anti-Narendra Modi” petitions (an ‘accusation’ Paranjape makes) along with hundreds of other academicians in India and abroad on issues of current importance, stand in the way of their academic rigour and adherence to objectivity.
As Gautama Buddha told the Kalamas: “Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing… nor upon rumour… nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, 'The Monk is our teacher’. Kalamas, when you yourselves know: these things are good; these things are not blameable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed; these things lead to benefit and happiness...”
Read Pollock, and not only selectively. Malhotra is probably betting that you won’t.
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