Stick to your knitting

Last week, quite out of the blue, P B Mongia, a former professor at the Delhi School of Economics and an old friend, sent me a 2014 book by Lord Meghnad Desai. It is called Who Wrote the Bhagwad Gita. The sub-title says that it is a secular enquiry into a sacred text.

The book, which is quite excellent, is also very critical of the Gita. But it is excellent not merely because it is critical. It makes some very interesting points, and raises some very interesting questions.

That’s not surprising, considering Lord Desai takes his cue from the historian extraordinaire, D D Kosambi. Well done, your Lordship, you could have done much worse.

Lord Desai’s sharp, precise mind gives us a lot to think about, including the observation that the Gita is the work of three different people writing at different points in time. He also provides the evidence for this, which you can accept, or not.

But Hindus, deeply orthodox, merely religious or just Hindus, regard the Gita to have come directly from Krishna. It is, as Lord Desai says, a “revealed” text, God’s word and all that. Yet no one took a blind bit of notice of the book.

Given just how critical he is, it is surprising that not a single nutcase demanded that his book be banned. Which has made me wonder: Why was he not taken seriously by our Galahads?

A further question arises: Who exactly is qualified to write on a subject? If an economist writes on religious matters – as my Lord has done – will the people who matter in the context of religion not take him (or her) seriously?

Conversely, if the head of a religious institution writes a critique of John Maynard Keynes, will the economists pay any attention? If not, why not?

Had he been from a different religion would someone – another Dr Desai and a former columnist in this newspaper calls them Hindutwits – have taken some notice?

Islam and commentary

Lord Desai’s book reminded me of another by a Moroccan sociologist, the late Fatima Mernissi. It was called Women and Islam. She has written several other books on the subject which, alas, I have not read.

She makes the same points about Islam as Lord Desai does about the Gita: Both are misogynistic and quite irrelevant for the modern ethos with its emphasis on social equality.

Mernisssi annoyed orthodox Muslims very considerably. Her most famous book, The Veil and the Male Elite, was banned in all Arab countries. Lord Desai, however, got away merely with moderate sales.  

Then there are also Taslima Nasreen and Salman Rushdie who as novelists are entitled to some creative interpretation. Both have ended up annoying the orthodox Muslims. Mr Rushdie even had the honour of a fatwa against him.  

The Hindus have not been any the less touchy. Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History was withdrawn by the publishers, Penguin, when some silly people objected. She has also written a book on the Kama Sutra which, alas, has attracted no attention.

I do not, however, know of any author or book on Christianity in the last 100 years causing so much angst among the faithful. Their societies seem to have left religion – and its tendency to anger the faithful – far behind.

The others, like Buddhists and Confucianists also don’t seem to care what someone says about their holy texts, such as they may be. They, too, are far more self-confident.

‘Constrained scholarship’

Which takes me back to the original question: Who should be taken seriously and by whom? I ask this not just in the context of religion but also other subjects, like history, economics etc.

If you belong to a particular department in a university do you become a better scholar? Which matters more, the platform from which you preach, or the sermon?

Here I would like to introduce my concept of “constrained scholarship”. This comprises, basically, of individuals who not only blindly accept the group view but also, far more importantly, don’t have the intellectual courage to step out of their narrow domains.

Happily, Lord Desai does not belong to their ranks. He has therefore written on something that other economists would not dare to write about.

Conversely, he has not been taken seriously even though his is a serious study of the Gita. I wonder what would have happened had he been a historian from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Better sales, surely, and a broken window or two.