01-19-2006, 11:56 PM
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheHeathenIn...ss/message/2077
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Deservedly, Rajiv's article has appalled the readers: horror,
indignation, anger and bewilderment at the RISA *lila*. However, after
expressing the initial indignation, one has to get down to the serious
business of initiating a more thorough discussion. E-boards are not
the best places for a focussed discussion, I know: people have a
tendency to respond to fragments of the posts, or to those parts that
incite or interest them the most, so that the `discussion' tends to
lead a life of its own. But with some understanding, some amount of
good will and some patience, I am sure, we can keep the discussion
focussed.
I want to raise three issues: (a) how to analyse what Rajiv portrays;
(b) depending on that, what an adequate response consists of. Before
we do either (this is one of the things I have discovered through my
own research during the last two decades), we need to be clear about
© how we *should not* analyse the situation that Rajiv has sketched.
Given that all three (in their general form) have been my obsessions,
I have been reflecting on them deeply, seriously and systematically
for some time now. I would like to share some of the results of this
reflection with you. This will be a multi-part post: depending on the
*kind* of responses elicited by the first part of the mail, I will
decide whether to go ahead or desist. In this first part, I will take
a (rather slow) run up to tackling the third issue first. And even
here, I look at RISA *lila* as an exemplification of a more general
issue or as an _expression of a much broader tendency.
Perhaps, it is best to begin in an autobiographical mode. I came to
(continental) Europe some 25 years ago, naively thinking that
`cultural difference' is something that `cosmopolitan' Indians would
not experience: after all, I had studied Natural Sciences in India;
knew English rather well; was more familiar with the British and
European history than I was with that of India (I once had plans to
join the IAS by doing exams on these subjects); felt right at home
with the western philosophy ⦠It took me about 4 years of living in
Europe, without relating to any Indian (or even Asian) community
because I did not want to land up in an emotional and social ghetto,
to realise that I was wrong: `cultural differences' were no fictitious
invention of anthropologists; it involved more than being a vegetarian
or being barefoot at home when the weather was not too cold. This
realisation was instrumental in shaping my research project: what
makes the Indian culture different from that of the West? (I never
felt anything other than an Indian amongst the Europeans.)
I began to research this issue with some vague hunches and intuitions
as my reference points: there was no literature to guide me in my
endeavour. Of course, the first fields I went into were Indology and
Anthropology. Pretty soon I discovered that neither was of any use.
Not only did they fail to provide me with any insights, but they also
succeeded in merely enraging me: the kind of rage you feel when you
read the analyses of Wendy Doniger or Kripal. Indology is full of
`insights' like those you have read in Rajiv's article. What has
varied over time is the intellectual jargon that clothes these
`analyses'. Going deeper into the history of these disciplines (with
respect to India) drove home some lessons very deeply: in both form
and content, there was pretty little to differentiate between the
Christian missionary reports of the 18th to 20th centuries and the
Indological tracts. And that between a Herder and a Goethe on the one
hand (the German Romantics who `praised' India while being derogatory
about it at the same time) and a James Mill and an Abbé Dubois on the
other, there was not much of a space to draw a dividing line.
Researching further, I discovered that these `Indological truths' were
enshrined in the `modern' social sciences: whether you read along with
a Max Weber on ` The Religions of India' or thought along with a Karl
Marx on the `Asiatic mode of production' or even disagreed with the
omnipresent `Oriental Despotism' of a Karl Wittfogel. Modern
psychoanalysis of India, beginning with Carstair's `The Twice Born'
through `The Oceanic Feeling' of Mussaief-Masson (another Indologist
using psychoanalysis to understand Indian religions), had already told
our tale: Indian culture was `narcissistic' (in the sense of
`secondary narcissism') and thus pathological in nature.
My initial reactions to these discoveries parallel the response of
many a post on this e-board: horror, rage and a conviction that
`racism' is inherent in these writings. Pretty soon, this conviction
about `racism' of European authors gave way to doubts: Is it possible
to convict all European authors of racism? Are we to assume that, in
the last 400 years or so, all writers who wrote on India were racists?
If yes, how to understand the powerful impact these writers and their
theories have had on the Indian authors and Indian social sciences? If
no, why did they say pretty similar things? Is one to say that the
`respected' Indian social scientists are no better than brown sahibs?
Is Indian social science merely a disguised variant of Indology? So on
and so forth.
Today, many of us are familiar with Edward Said and his book
`Orientalism'. In his wake, many buzz-words like `essentialism',
`Eurocentrism' (though interesting, Blaut is not theoretically
well-equipped), `Orientalist discourse', the `us-them dichotomy' etc.
whiz around. I would be the last to detract from the merits of Said's
book: he was one of the earliest writers to have drawn attention to
the systematic nature of the western way of talking about the Orient.
Despite this, the concept `Orientalism' is totally inadequate to
analyse the situation underlying RISA lila. Surely, the question is:
*Why is the West Orientalist?* Said's plea ends up denying any
possibility of understanding cultural differences or indeed why
Orientalism came into being, or what sustains it. To say, as the
`post-colonials' do, that the relation between `power/knowledge'
answers this question is to make a mystique of the dyad of Foucault as
though it `explains' anything. If this buzzword does anything at all,
it helps us `explain' why the `post-colonials' earn a good living in
the States: they talk the talk of their employees, and walk the walk
of their patrons. (This is not to deny that there are genuine and
committed people among them, or even to deny that they want to address
themselves to genuine and urgent issues. It is only to draw attention
to the phenomenon of `post-colonialism'.)
What I am saying is that one should not think that Rajiv paints a
`racist', or `orientalist' or a `eurocentric' picture. These words
obfuscate the deeper issue, one which is more insidious than any of
the above three. It might or might not be the case that Wendy and her
children are `racist'; ditto about their `eurocentrism' or
`orientalism'. But when you realise that they are not saying anything
that has not been said in the last three hundred years (despite their
fancy jargon), the question becomes: *why does the western culture
systematically portray India in these terms?* To say that western
culture is, in toto, racist or `eurocentric' is to say pretty little:
even assuming, counterfactually, that the western culture is all these
things (and that all the westerners are `racist', etc), why do these
attitudes persist, reproduce themselves and infect the Indians?
There is a weightier reason not to tread this path. In fact, it has
been a typical characteristic of western writings on other cultures
(including India) to characterise the latter using terms that are only
appropriate to describe individual psychologies: X culture is stupid,
degenerate, and irrational; Y culture is childish, immature,
intuitive, feminine, etc. To simply repeat these mantras after them is
to achieve very little understanding.
Rajiv says repeatedly that these writings `deny agency to the Indian
subjects'. I am familiar with this phrase through `post-colonial'
writings. This too is a mantra; like many of them, without having the
desired effect. And why is that? It might appear to make sense if we
merely restrict ourselves to Wendy and her children's analyses of
Ganesha, Shiva or Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. However, it looses all
plausibility when we realise that, for instance, social sciences use
one and the same `epistemology' to analyse both the west and India and
that despite this, their claims about India reproduce the `Indological
truths.' (Those who do not believe me are invited to dip, for example,
into those multiple theories of `the Indian Caste System': from the
sociobiological theories of a Van den Berghe - a sociologist - through
the social choice theories of an Olson jr. - an
economist-cum-political scientist. Even a book that wants to criticise
the writings that `deny agency' to the Indians, `Castes of Mind' of
Nicholas Dirks, ends up doing nothing else than `deny agency to the
Indians'.) Quite clearly, `the problem' cannot be solved by
`discovering' some or another pet epistemology (like Ronald Inden
does, in appealing to Collingwood).
In a way, you could say, we need to do to the west what it has done to
us, namely, study it anthropologically. But how to go about doing this
and not simply reproduce what generations of thinkers (from the west)
have already said about the West? It is amusing to use Freud to
analyse their Freudian analyses of Indian religions; or use
Patanjali's Chakras to typify their personalities. But at the end of
the day, we are still left with the task of studying and understanding
why the western culture talks about us the way it does.
In other words, it would be a *conceptual blunder* to look either at
Wendy or her children as exponents of racism, eurocentrism or even
Orientalism alone. (They might be any or all the three. But that does
not really matter.) We need to realise that they are doing two things
simultaneously: *drawing upon the existing social sciences and also
contributing to their further `development'.*
I hope to explain the significance of the last sentence in one of my
next mails. For the present, let me just say this: our problems do not
either begin or end in religious studies or Indology. They are deeper.
Much, much deeper. To tackle RISA lila as a separate phenomenon, i.e.,
to focus either on Wendy or her *parampara* alone, would be to
compound tragedy with conceptual blunder. Not only that. It would
prevent us from understanding RISA lila for what it is: *a phenomenon
that is typical of the western culture*.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Deservedly, Rajiv's article has appalled the readers: horror,
indignation, anger and bewilderment at the RISA *lila*. However, after
expressing the initial indignation, one has to get down to the serious
business of initiating a more thorough discussion. E-boards are not
the best places for a focussed discussion, I know: people have a
tendency to respond to fragments of the posts, or to those parts that
incite or interest them the most, so that the `discussion' tends to
lead a life of its own. But with some understanding, some amount of
good will and some patience, I am sure, we can keep the discussion
focussed.
I want to raise three issues: (a) how to analyse what Rajiv portrays;
(b) depending on that, what an adequate response consists of. Before
we do either (this is one of the things I have discovered through my
own research during the last two decades), we need to be clear about
© how we *should not* analyse the situation that Rajiv has sketched.
Given that all three (in their general form) have been my obsessions,
I have been reflecting on them deeply, seriously and systematically
for some time now. I would like to share some of the results of this
reflection with you. This will be a multi-part post: depending on the
*kind* of responses elicited by the first part of the mail, I will
decide whether to go ahead or desist. In this first part, I will take
a (rather slow) run up to tackling the third issue first. And even
here, I look at RISA *lila* as an exemplification of a more general
issue or as an _expression of a much broader tendency.
Perhaps, it is best to begin in an autobiographical mode. I came to
(continental) Europe some 25 years ago, naively thinking that
`cultural difference' is something that `cosmopolitan' Indians would
not experience: after all, I had studied Natural Sciences in India;
knew English rather well; was more familiar with the British and
European history than I was with that of India (I once had plans to
join the IAS by doing exams on these subjects); felt right at home
with the western philosophy ⦠It took me about 4 years of living in
Europe, without relating to any Indian (or even Asian) community
because I did not want to land up in an emotional and social ghetto,
to realise that I was wrong: `cultural differences' were no fictitious
invention of anthropologists; it involved more than being a vegetarian
or being barefoot at home when the weather was not too cold. This
realisation was instrumental in shaping my research project: what
makes the Indian culture different from that of the West? (I never
felt anything other than an Indian amongst the Europeans.)
I began to research this issue with some vague hunches and intuitions
as my reference points: there was no literature to guide me in my
endeavour. Of course, the first fields I went into were Indology and
Anthropology. Pretty soon I discovered that neither was of any use.
Not only did they fail to provide me with any insights, but they also
succeeded in merely enraging me: the kind of rage you feel when you
read the analyses of Wendy Doniger or Kripal. Indology is full of
`insights' like those you have read in Rajiv's article. What has
varied over time is the intellectual jargon that clothes these
`analyses'. Going deeper into the history of these disciplines (with
respect to India) drove home some lessons very deeply: in both form
and content, there was pretty little to differentiate between the
Christian missionary reports of the 18th to 20th centuries and the
Indological tracts. And that between a Herder and a Goethe on the one
hand (the German Romantics who `praised' India while being derogatory
about it at the same time) and a James Mill and an Abbé Dubois on the
other, there was not much of a space to draw a dividing line.
Researching further, I discovered that these `Indological truths' were
enshrined in the `modern' social sciences: whether you read along with
a Max Weber on ` The Religions of India' or thought along with a Karl
Marx on the `Asiatic mode of production' or even disagreed with the
omnipresent `Oriental Despotism' of a Karl Wittfogel. Modern
psychoanalysis of India, beginning with Carstair's `The Twice Born'
through `The Oceanic Feeling' of Mussaief-Masson (another Indologist
using psychoanalysis to understand Indian religions), had already told
our tale: Indian culture was `narcissistic' (in the sense of
`secondary narcissism') and thus pathological in nature.
My initial reactions to these discoveries parallel the response of
many a post on this e-board: horror, rage and a conviction that
`racism' is inherent in these writings. Pretty soon, this conviction
about `racism' of European authors gave way to doubts: Is it possible
to convict all European authors of racism? Are we to assume that, in
the last 400 years or so, all writers who wrote on India were racists?
If yes, how to understand the powerful impact these writers and their
theories have had on the Indian authors and Indian social sciences? If
no, why did they say pretty similar things? Is one to say that the
`respected' Indian social scientists are no better than brown sahibs?
Is Indian social science merely a disguised variant of Indology? So on
and so forth.
Today, many of us are familiar with Edward Said and his book
`Orientalism'. In his wake, many buzz-words like `essentialism',
`Eurocentrism' (though interesting, Blaut is not theoretically
well-equipped), `Orientalist discourse', the `us-them dichotomy' etc.
whiz around. I would be the last to detract from the merits of Said's
book: he was one of the earliest writers to have drawn attention to
the systematic nature of the western way of talking about the Orient.
Despite this, the concept `Orientalism' is totally inadequate to
analyse the situation underlying RISA lila. Surely, the question is:
*Why is the West Orientalist?* Said's plea ends up denying any
possibility of understanding cultural differences or indeed why
Orientalism came into being, or what sustains it. To say, as the
`post-colonials' do, that the relation between `power/knowledge'
answers this question is to make a mystique of the dyad of Foucault as
though it `explains' anything. If this buzzword does anything at all,
it helps us `explain' why the `post-colonials' earn a good living in
the States: they talk the talk of their employees, and walk the walk
of their patrons. (This is not to deny that there are genuine and
committed people among them, or even to deny that they want to address
themselves to genuine and urgent issues. It is only to draw attention
to the phenomenon of `post-colonialism'.)
What I am saying is that one should not think that Rajiv paints a
`racist', or `orientalist' or a `eurocentric' picture. These words
obfuscate the deeper issue, one which is more insidious than any of
the above three. It might or might not be the case that Wendy and her
children are `racist'; ditto about their `eurocentrism' or
`orientalism'. But when you realise that they are not saying anything
that has not been said in the last three hundred years (despite their
fancy jargon), the question becomes: *why does the western culture
systematically portray India in these terms?* To say that western
culture is, in toto, racist or `eurocentric' is to say pretty little:
even assuming, counterfactually, that the western culture is all these
things (and that all the westerners are `racist', etc), why do these
attitudes persist, reproduce themselves and infect the Indians?
There is a weightier reason not to tread this path. In fact, it has
been a typical characteristic of western writings on other cultures
(including India) to characterise the latter using terms that are only
appropriate to describe individual psychologies: X culture is stupid,
degenerate, and irrational; Y culture is childish, immature,
intuitive, feminine, etc. To simply repeat these mantras after them is
to achieve very little understanding.
Rajiv says repeatedly that these writings `deny agency to the Indian
subjects'. I am familiar with this phrase through `post-colonial'
writings. This too is a mantra; like many of them, without having the
desired effect. And why is that? It might appear to make sense if we
merely restrict ourselves to Wendy and her children's analyses of
Ganesha, Shiva or Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. However, it looses all
plausibility when we realise that, for instance, social sciences use
one and the same `epistemology' to analyse both the west and India and
that despite this, their claims about India reproduce the `Indological
truths.' (Those who do not believe me are invited to dip, for example,
into those multiple theories of `the Indian Caste System': from the
sociobiological theories of a Van den Berghe - a sociologist - through
the social choice theories of an Olson jr. - an
economist-cum-political scientist. Even a book that wants to criticise
the writings that `deny agency' to the Indians, `Castes of Mind' of
Nicholas Dirks, ends up doing nothing else than `deny agency to the
Indians'.) Quite clearly, `the problem' cannot be solved by
`discovering' some or another pet epistemology (like Ronald Inden
does, in appealing to Collingwood).
In a way, you could say, we need to do to the west what it has done to
us, namely, study it anthropologically. But how to go about doing this
and not simply reproduce what generations of thinkers (from the west)
have already said about the West? It is amusing to use Freud to
analyse their Freudian analyses of Indian religions; or use
Patanjali's Chakras to typify their personalities. But at the end of
the day, we are still left with the task of studying and understanding
why the western culture talks about us the way it does.
In other words, it would be a *conceptual blunder* to look either at
Wendy or her children as exponents of racism, eurocentrism or even
Orientalism alone. (They might be any or all the three. But that does
not really matter.) We need to realise that they are doing two things
simultaneously: *drawing upon the existing social sciences and also
contributing to their further `development'.*
I hope to explain the significance of the last sentence in one of my
next mails. For the present, let me just say this: our problems do not
either begin or end in religious studies or Indology. They are deeper.
Much, much deeper. To tackle RISA lila as a separate phenomenon, i.e.,
to focus either on Wendy or her *parampara* alone, would be to
compound tragedy with conceptual blunder. Not only that. It would
prevent us from understanding RISA lila for what it is: *a phenomenon
that is typical of the western culture*.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->