The Big Scandal of Indology !

Almost all you have in academic textbooks about ancient India is either a superficial, banal, half-truth or plain wrong.

Why we want to try to bring out an alternative, more indic view of Indology at @HinduMediaWiki ???

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The understanding of earliest India offered by the Indology community is based on flimsy philosophical and methodological foundations and a deep misunderstanding of the texts.

Imagine this: While Studying in an International college, you find an announcement of a course.

That course is named "Introduction to Indian Societies" and you took that course.

While attending the classes you realised that the speaker knows the broad elements of the history of your country, BUT his understanding is so shallow that it borders on nonsense.

What can you do? You can’t just say, “Excuse me, but you have it all wrong.” No, because you’re a first-year student and prof is triple PhD holder.

Not wanting to be rude or be accused of grandstanding for attention, you hold your tongue and walkout at the first opportunity.

Later, you speak privately with the prof. and find it is not just him, he was taught wrong stuff at his college when he was a student; it is pervasive.

This is the big scandal of Indology. Worst it is a racist enterprise.

The enterprise has the stated objective is to teach Indians what their books mean!!!

Its premise is that Indians are culturally backward, and they never developed scientific or critical thinking, and so they lack access to the “true” meaning of their texts.

Hold it, you say! Isn’t it stupid to believe this? India is one of the cradles of world science and of logic, grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, aesthetics, moral and political discourse, not to mention stories and fables.

The Indologists are generally ignorant about science so they respond by saying that these are contributions to Western enterprises and besides, they add, what they are pointing to are "Indian cultural deficiencies" (read Race!).

You say that couldn’t be true, for Indians are amongst the most successful entrepreneurs in the West and the wealthiest ethnic group in the United States, where there is a level playing-field. They say, maybe “yes”, but it’s only because Indians are mimicking the Westerners.

And then they change the subject and say that when it comes to the old texts, Indians carry so much of emotional baggage that only they (the Western Indologists) can interpret them correctly.

[It's my past experience when I asked not to teach Moughal societies but Hindu Varna]

How can people in the academy believe in such racist stuff, you ask. Why haven’t these folks been drummed out of their jobs for stupidity, if nothing else?

The answer is a complicated story.

Neither does the scandal have anything to do with the national origin of the professors or whether they belong to one tradition or the other. Many Westerners have done wonderful work on India and likewise many Indian professors have done shoddy work.

To get true insight in any field, one needs to approach it with humility and pure heart, and suspend the lens of one’s own tradition, whatever that might be. In the world of wisdom and insight, class, nationality or race do not matter: we are all equal.

In private conversations with academics who work on India, there is an acknowledgement of a cabal that consists of racists, European supremacists, leftists & others who might be sincere but so marinated in an obviously wrong paradigm that they don’t even know they are wrong.

And then, of course, there are the thick-headed ones who just don’t get it; one of those once wrote me an email saying that only “philologists have the authority to interpret ancient India.”

Unbiased editors, themselves academics, are aware that many Indology faculty are so fanatical and politicized so as to have lost contact with the truth.

To be fair, the Indologists made useful contributions in lexicography, manuscript preservation and collation.

The Indologists missed the larger meaning that provides coherence to the Indian texts; this is why their mistakes have continued generation after generation. Sri Aurobindo was right to point out that the European interpretations of the Vedas are essentially worthless.

To make sure that there is no misunderstanding, what I mean by the enterprise of the Indologists are narratives on ancient India and to the extent they affect understanding of the later periods.

I acknowledge the great contributions scholars from the West have made to the study of the classical period and what followed thereafter.

I have learned a lot from my profs. especially from Vishwajit Pandayan (anthropology) and Shiv Vishwanathan (STS and globalization) but..

The drive by the Indologists to define India on their terms is entirely consistent with the larger European project of epistemicide. One reason that the Indologists are befuddled is because of incorrect assumptions about the nature of Indian society.

Even if one were to excuse their self-confessed bias, why did the Indologists turn out to be so totally wrong in their understanding of the texts? Many of them were competent and patient scholars who were trying their best to make sense of what they had in front of them.

The answer is that the Indian texts have traps for the uninitiated. If the process of understanding involves many steps in a ladder, there is much in the texts that will let you believe you have reached the top at whatever step, if that is where you want to be.

Thus, there is room in the texts both for those who believe that the ritual is only outer, and others who believe it is symbolic.

Indian texts require navigating through their own protocols. This is where the guru or the teacher comes in, and oral instruction is extolled.

The Indologist reads this somewhere and gets lost and thinks this means that there is no written stuff anywhere! They don’t get that the context is everything and the declarations within the tradition are not to be taken literally.

I have been surprised how many Western acolytes often interpret stories of a spiritual master’s presence at two places at the same time as the literal truth. Growing up in the company of sadhus and other spiritual people, one learnt to separate the word from the image.