On 12 February, Penguin India announced it was withdrawing and destroying—in India—all published copies of historian Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009). Penguin’s decision came after reaching an out-of-court settlement with Shiksha Bachao Andolan, which, in 2011, had filed a legal complaint objecting to sections of Doniger’s book. Amidst the vocal expressions of concern over the damage done to free speech and academic freedom in India were also thinly-veiled suggestions that justice had been done, that the right outcome—the suppression and quelling of an academic work that supposedly offended Hindu sensibilities—had been reached. A prominent voice in this choir was of one Rajiv Malhotra, who noted on his Twitter account that Doniger was merely the ”idol of inferiority complex Indians [sic] in awe that white person studies Hinduism,” that Penguin’s withdrawal of her work was justified in a world in which “media bias” in an “intellectual kurukshetra [sic]” had led to a “a retail channel controlled by one side.”
This dispute over Wendy Doniger’s work is merely the latest instance of a long-running contestation of how best to study India and all things Indian.
The philosopher and statesman Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan noted in the preface to his two-volume opus Indian Philosophy (1923) that the “modern aesthete” dismissed Indian philosophy and its associated cultures as “chaotic clouds of vapor and verbiage”; he then moved on to provide a sympathetic explication of its central systems and principles that would be both comprehensible to the Western mind and suitably respectful of Indian philosophy’s intellectual contributions to philosophical discourse at large. While comparisons with Western philosophy were unavoidable, they did not have to begin with the premise that Indian philosophy needed to merely play catch-up to it. In more recent times, the philosopher Daya Krishna sought to achieve, if not a synthesis, then at least a dialogue between Western and Indian philosophy that would show their mutual relevance, their ability to influence each other’s most central debates, all the while emphasising the latter’s distinctive formulation of classic philosophical problems.
Such exegeses and analyses—conducted by insiders and directed outwards as a form of resistance—need not be merely academic exercises; they have been used to combat ideologies—such as colonialism, imperialism, and their notorious offspring Orientalism—which rely on the systemic denigration of indigenous intellectual traditions. But these contestations do not always proceed straightforwardly; sometimes the putative pushback might only serve to replace one ideology with another.
For well over a decade, SN Balagangadhara (most recently in Reconceptualizing Indian Studies, Oxford University Press, 2005) and Rajiv Malhotra (most recently in Being Different, Harper Collins, 2013) have been engaged in projects superficially similar to those of Radhakrishnan and Krishna. Malhotra—an Indian-American entrepreneur turned “speaker and public intellectual“, and full-time founder-director of the US-based Infinity Foundation, which funds “Indic studies”—has been a long-term critic of Western academic studies of India, accusing its practitioners of an unrepentant Eurocentrism, of applying irrelevant modes of scholarship to phenomena best studied by indigenous modes of inquiry, of demeaning Indian religions, and, in general, of undermining India politically by fixating on its internal dissensions and crises. Malhotra’s polemics have not gone unanswered, most notably in the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s sharp retort that they showed “disregard for the usual canons of argument and scholarship” and were merely “a postmodern power play in the guise of defense of tradition.” Balagangadhara, professor of philosophy at Belgium’s Ghent University, has written extensively on the history and philosophy of religion; these studies feature extended critiques of sociological and anthropological studies of India and have acquired considerable notoriety in both the Indian and the Western academy. While the philosopher Vivek Dhareshwar recently claimed he has engendered “a new research milieu” for those studying India, the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam has described his work–as Wiki cited–as “confused.” Balagangadhara’s influence has not remained confined to academic boundaries and has made its way into modern Indian political discourse. This is visible in his controversial claims that the caste system and discrimination based on it are non-existent, that the twelfth century Vachana movement—often regarded as an intellectual voice for Dalit struggle—was instead unconcerned about the caste system because of its insignificance; and in his student Dunkin Jalki’s suggestion that the victims of the Kambalapalli massacre—seven Dalits who were burnt alive in Karnataka’s Kolar district in March 2000—were ill-served by the “misplaced ideology” of Kannada progressives who indicted caste-based discrimination as a motive for the killings. (The high-caste accused in the case were acquitted.)
There is thus a broader, edgier, cultural dimension to the contested scholarship of both these writers, one that makes it more relevant to thinking about modern Indian political life than your garden-variety journal article or academic monograph. Here, the alluring hint of fundamental paradigm subversion is balanced by the possibility of reactionary fulmination disguised as sincere protest.
Both Balagangadhara and Malhotra suggest that the Western gaze is infected with a “colonial consciousness” which has permeated our understanding of Indian culture, philosophy, social modes of being and politics; insofar as those engaged in studying India—whether Indian or otherwise— resist adopting an “Indian perspective,” it is because of this pervasive consciousness. Both claim Western categories and the insistence on their universalism have so shaped discourses surrounding Indian philosophy, thought and culture that these can only offer a critically crippled and weakened alternative to the Western intellectual tradition. The East can, at best, appear as a pale aspirational shadow of the West; philosophical learning and moral edification run only from the West to the East. Balagangadhara and Malhotra seek to reverse the gaze, to turn around the evaluative lens—philosophical, moral, or social-scientific—back towards the West, away from its perennial focus, the East.
Thus, Balagangadhara calls for a “reconceptualization of Indian studies”: to stop using Western intellectual frameworks—like “social science” and its associated paradigms—for studying Indian phenomena, which demand instead, for their understanding and analysis, indigenous categories and concepts. As a result, the disciplines of anthropology, history and sociology—as employed by those who study India—might find the basic methodologies and assumptions used for framing their subjects of study disrupted. Balagangadhara’s approach resonates with Malhotra’s notion of purv-paksha, a classical dialectical approach to debate wherein its participants understand and adopt their opponents’ perspective in order to be able to refute it. To kick-start such a process, Malhotra seeks to establish conceptual distinctions between “dharmic traditions” and the intellectual paradigms of the West so as to eschew a facile universalism. Unless the West views the East on its own terms—and “respects” it rather than merely offering it “tolerance”—the present asymmetrical state of affairs remains in a depressing limbo.
Balagangadhara and Malhotra find common ground in the claim that our understanding of Hinduism is constructed through the Orientalist lens. In his previous book The Heathen in his Blindness (1996), Balagangadhara advanced this argument as part of a broader thesis that religion is not a universal phenomenon but rather a Western—specifically, Christian—construct foisted upon colonial subjects, one resulting in a prejudiced evaluation of Indian culture, mores and morals. Colonial/Orientalist scholars took Christianity to be the archetypal religion—a system of beliefs equipped with theistic doctrines, deities and practices; religion was presumed a cultural universal; and the complex and varied practices observed in the Indian subcontinent were then shoehorned into this mould. Hinduism appeared as but a depraved Christianity mired in idolatrous practices, its followers were indicted of systematic adherence to false beliefs, and a romantic vision emerged of a stagnant, childlike India, caught in the caste system’s inexorable vice, a land crying out to be rescued by the West cast as saviour, bringing succour to the heathen.
The critique Balagangadhara and Malhotra mount in their new work builds on these older rejections of Orientalism and centres on the following: how might we conceive India, Indian philosophy, Indian culture and the dharmic traditions, once we have prised ourselves loose from the Orientalist vise that Edward Said eloquently described in his seminal work? In evaluating their work, we might ask in turn: Does a new Indian philosophy, a new paradigm for Indian studies understood broadly, one that educates the West, emerge from these works?
Their analysis—while possibly attractive enough in the abstract—is often found wanting in its concrete details, and at times lines up disconcertingly with reactionary Hindutva fundamentalism. Mere alignment with the theses of a reactionary movement is not enough to indict an argument. But it pays to be cautious when such an alignment does occur. Philosophical arguments can be, unsurprisingly, applied—by those convinced of their plausibility—to political ends.
A Constructed India
Balagangadhara claims that because of the refractive and distorting Orientalist lens, Western scholars saw social ills and targets for reform everywhere: for instance, the evils of the caste system and the pernicious priests who sat atop its hierarchy. Thus, these do not exist but are, rather, “constructions” of Orientalist social science. The term “Dalit”, in this view, only serves to obscure the diversity of those various ethnicities the term describes.
Such claims amount to a milquetoast defence of the caste system. For against such putative rebuttals one must balance the appalling record of caste-based violence in India. Such violence is no fiction—its victims are real, and mourned over on a regular basis. And the best understanding we possess of its causes invariably points us to caste-based animosity. Describing such tangibly real phenomena as mere “constructs” is not benign; as the Dalit activist and writer Devanur Mahadeva has written in response to Balagangadhara, arguing that tools for social justice such as “equal education, democracy and secularism” are merely “constructs of Western/colonial influences” may help implement an agenda of “totally erasing all that from our society.”
Like many in the Hindutva fold, Balagangadhara expresses discomfort with the permissiveness of modern Indian secularism. This is explicit in his claim that secularism permits under its ambit a predatory form of evangelical conversion in India. But the argument against proselytisation—roughly, that because the Hindu does not seek to recruit converts while the Christian does, laissez faire secularism merely sets up the former for indoctrination—is a paternalistic one. Will ignorant, gullible adivasis be taken in by the trinkets of the missionary and be unable to put down the Bible? In any case, a secular state has no business intervening to prevent proselytisation; doing so is a coercive exercise against free speech.
Balagangadhara also blames state secularism for the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. This is a variant of the Hindutva argument that secularism is alien and foreign to India, that its introduction was bound to create a backlash. As Balagangadhara says, “Secularism creates religious violence.” Such conclusions only bolster those who would construct a nation based on a static, preconceived Indian identity grounded in Hinduism rather than letting it dynamically emerge over time through interactions between its varied groupings and cultures.
Balagangadhara’s critique of supposedly Orientalist scholarship appears least plausible in the chapter ‘Open Letter to Jeffrey Kripal’ and in his reactions to Paul Courtright in the chapter ‘Are Dialogues an Antidote to Violence?’ These scholars had carried out imaginative reconstructions through a psychoanalytical lens of, respectively, the mysticism of Ramakrishna Paramahansa and the legend of Ganesha, thus earning them the considerable ire of many Hindu organisations and academics, who found the invocation of sexual repression and trauma in their analysis offensive and disrespectful to Hindu sensibilities. Balagangadhara attempts to justify the chorus of ire by means of a pair of tortured arguments that such treatments are essentially caricaturing and trivializing and that cross-cultural dialogues—between cultures separated by the systematic misunderstanding directed by one at the other—promote violence rather than ameliorate it. Balagangadhara concludes that Kripal and Courtright are “indulging in mischief” and doing “violence” to “the experiential world of the Hindus.”
These critiques are fundamentally misguided. The kinds of analyses conducted by Kripal and Courtright are common in literary theory; applying psychoanalysis to canonical texts, whether fictional or not, can provide illuminating alternative readings. We might ask: Can their narratives and characters’ actions be understood as manifestations of unconscious, repressed desires and traumas? Scholars and teachers of Freud and psychoanalytic theory often emphasise its creative aspects without necessarily claiming that psychoanalysis is an exact science seeking to uncover the truth about a text. With that ecumenical perspective in mind, one takes its claims as fuel for the imagination. Indian myths and religious texts are not immune from such open-ended investigation and exploration, the very hallmark of the freewheeling inquiry encouraged academic freedom. To imagine malice and disrespect in these invocations and employments of sexual themes—as Balagangadhara and Malhotra do—seems revelatory of deep-rooted insecurities.
An Indian Way of Thinking?
We might take Balagangadhara and Malhotra to be engaged in providing an affirmative answer to AK Ramanujan’s memorable question of whether there is an Indian way of thinking. (Ramanujan thought this emphasis provided one of several possible formulations of his original question; we could, after all, concern ourselves instead, with wondering whether there was an Indian way of thinking, or an Indian way of thinking.) Insofar as they point out the existence of the Orientalist lens, note the possible distortions it may induce, and highlight the distinctive worldviews present in the diverse theories and practices subsumed under the diverse body of thought that contemporary Western scholarship labels “Indian philosophy and culture”, they continue Ramanujan’s investigative project and deserve our attention. Where they deviate from this project—by relying on dubious premises or philosophically untenable claims or because they do not possess the latitudinarian vision embodied in Ramanujan’s work or in that of other scholars of Indian philosophy such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Daya Krishna or Ramchandra Gandhi—their work is internally incoherent and has unpleasant political ramifications. At such junctures, we have to seek our answers to Ramanujan’s questions elsewhere, perhaps in arguments that what we consider “Indian” or “Western” are hybrids undergoing recontestation and reconfiguration on an ongoing basis. We could then understand such terms as already outmoded by the modern world, already revelatory of older frameworks.
Turning now to Malhotra, one notices that while he advocate greater respect of Indian dharmic traditions in the work of Western academics, he sometimes does not seem similarly inclined toward the subjects of his reversed gaze. Malhotra, all too often, relies on a narrowly conceived history of the West as consisting solely of bouts of colonial and imperial conquest, and on implausible claims about the achievements and sophistication of Indian philosophies and cultures. (A “knowledge byte” on his website proclaims: “Cultures originating in desert [sic] lack fertility of soil & mind. Not industrious. Spread by looting others, cultural colonialism & genocide.” This unsubtle reference to the cultural traditions of the three great monotheistic religions is reductive in the extreme.) Moreover, Malhotra’s plea for genuine respect as opposed to mere tolerance is sullied by his tirades against Indian-American academics and South Asian studies scholars—as in his terming them “useful pets,” ostensibly faithfully parroting Orientalist talking points. During a public debate in 2004 with historian Vijay Prashad in Outlook magazine, where Malhotra interrogated a varied set of theses of the so-called “Indian Left”—such as its conception of the Indian nation-state and its understanding of Indian history—similar rhetorical missteps had made an appearance.
By contrasting the principles of dharmic traditions with those of Western intellectual tradition—the marriage of Greco-Hellenistic thought with Christianity, and the modern philosophy that emerged from the Enlightenment—Malhotra does provide some useful distinctions between Eastern and Western philosophies. While emphasising these differences, Malhotra also insists that certain key Sanskrit terms defy comparison with or incorporation into Western categories because they are essentially untranslatable. There is no acknowledgment, however, of a prominent debate in twentieth-century philosophy of language: the possibility of untranslatability. WVO Quine suggested translations between languages were always indeterminate; Donald Davidson suggested in turn translations were always possible and indeed, if one was not forthcoming, we would suspect we were not dealing with a language at all. How do these claims affect Malhotra’s? We do not know, for he does not consider them. Moreover, this untranslatability, if granted, creates a problem for Malhotra’s project: if such is the case, then what hope for communicating Indian philosophical concepts to the West? There is little chance, after all, that Sanskrit will become the medium of global philosophical discourse.
We might also wonder why the sophisticated culture associated with the dharmic traditions was so easily colonised by a Western culture that Malhotra sees as far inferior. Malhotra, after all, does not speak of “dharmic philosophies” but rather of “dharmic traditions”—that is, actual practices rather than abstract principles. An explanation couched in the bloody histories of colonialism and imperialism and their aggressive and intolerant attitudes is an incomplete one; the intellectual traditions and practices associated with particular cultures should ensure their survival in the face of external adversity. Malhotra’s analysis emerges as a highly idealised, theoretical one, only superficially applicable to its actual socio-empirical manifestations.
At times, the opposition Malhotra sets up is a tenuous one. In his exegesis, the dharmic traditions include all Indian schools of philosophical thought, but he does not take a similarly broad approach to Western thought, which has ranged from idealism to radical empiricism and pragmatism. Instead, the picture painted of the Western philosophical tradition—almost exclusively positivist and reductionist—is a traditional caricature. Such descriptions have been outmoded for a long time now, thanks to that tradition’s vigorous self-examination and critique over the past century or so, if not since earlier. Similarly, the all-too-quick dismissal of post-modernism as vacuous nihilism fails to account for the sharp critique it may provide of ideologies Malhotra is opposed to. Malhotra thus misses out on an opportunity to enlist philosophical allies in his endeavor. And in insisting on such sharp distinctions, Malhotra misses another point: those who choose to engage with both Western and Eastern thought are not necessarily seeking a synthesis of the two into a new intellectual paradigm, but rather looking for commonalities and intersections that might illuminate both.
As such, Malhotra foregoes opportunities for serious philosophical engagement with either Eastern or Western thought. This brings us to the central problems with the intellectual projects at hand.
The Point of it All
As the historian Satadru Sen pointed out to me in conversation, there are two broad points that run counter to the kind of gaze reversal Balagangadhara and Malhotra attempt. First, their attempt founders on some ineluctable facts. Orientalist gazes reflect uncomfortable historical realities of power; the East is scrutinised by this gaze because the West, to put it bluntly, conquered it. The philosophical and theoretical apparatus of its gaze was that of a civilization that had asserted its will over another. No such conquest underwrites this attempt to examine the West through an Indian lens, especially when Indian scholars themselves by and large do not rely on Indian philosophical or theoretical analyses to study the world or their own societies. Indeed, there is at this point in time, no unconquered, un-Orientalised Orient to deploy against the West. The fact of conquest does not grant the West the right to objectify. But still, whatever came before its encounter with the East has been transformed at a very fundamental level by this fact. So again, there is now no authentically Indian or indigenous lens that can be brought to bear on the West. The contexts within which our discourses take place are those largely constituted by the Western intellectual tradition; Balagangadhara’s and Malhotra’s philosophical idioms—couched in English—belong to it. The contemporary exercise of reversing the gaze—in particular, in the manner sought by Balagangadhara and Malhotra—seems like a thought experiment destined to fail.
Second, the “Indian culture,” “Hinduism,” and “dharmic traditions” referred to by Balagangadhara and Malhotra are left mysteriously unspecified. We might wonder how inclusive these terms are. Those who assume the existence of these broad and abstract categories can all too easily marginalise others who might not share their unspoken definitions of them. The group Balagangadhara claims to be speaking for—the “majority of Indians”, the “men and women” who “protest” the “violence” done to them by academic studies of “Hinduism”—enjoys hegemonic status. Those who suffer under that hegemony— women, adivasis, Dalits—might put forward very different understandings of what they would consider acts of “violence” directed against them, and might not, for instance, mind the inducements of conversion.
Here is a challenge for “Indian studies” as advocated by Balagangadhara and Malhotra: to not take refuge in imagined glories of systems understood in the abstract, independent of their actual historical application and manifestations, or indulge in implausible apologia for manifestly real social ills. Rather it must reckon with the history of this nation, one in which English has emerged as a language in which Balagangadhara and Malhotra seek to communicate and one whose study requires a more inclusive view than they seem to exercise.
Samir Chopra 
Just full of rhetoric and name-dropping and does not really get into the substance of the books and other writings that Chopra wants to criticize. The reason is obvious – perhaps Chopra is not familiar with the Indian systems of thought to start with! I find it amusing that he thinks that Nussbaum has responded to Malhotra. Quite on the contrary, other than rhetorical barbs, she has not engaged with him at all. Reading this blog in fact makes one convinced of the scholarship that Chopra has critiqued. It is very easy to be lazy and indulge in ‘group think’ as Chopra has done in throwing in his lot with the Leftists. Originality and true scholarship needs something else – intelligence, knowledge and hard work – qualities that are typically lacking in the so called ‘secularists’ in and from India. Their writings are nothing more than annotated bibliographies and footnotes to what is produced in the west.
Hi,
Could you give me a link to Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s comment on SNB?
Anirudh
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Monsieur Picart and the Gentiles of India,” in Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt, ed., Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010, 214.
Where has Sanjay Subrahmanyam commented on Balagangadhara’s work?
I find Malhotra’s description of Doniger as an ‘idol of inferiority complex indians’ laughably ironic. His ilk characterizes an old phenomenon; and in that context the accusation of ‘inferiority complex indians’ is particularly revealing of the mind the accuser. I still remember how shocked I was at first discovering how rabidly orthodox some of the indians who had recently immigrated to the US had become.
It doesn’t take a genius to realise the not-so-subtle transformations that an immigrant mind undergoes in a foreign land, especially one whose culture is dominant, at once deeply familiar and alien and the anxiety that results from realising that it is fully capable of severing one’s (and one’s childrens) cultural ties to the homeland. The occasional and inevitable racism and xenophobia makes matters worse. For all of Malhotra’s and Balagangadhara’s talk, this bit of self-awareness is glaringly absent. They never wonder if the ‘inferiority complex’ they see in others is actually a consequence of that very tint of their lenses.
Beneath all the layers of acadamese (its amusing to note how the po-mo canard has turned to bite the left hand that once fed it) Malhotra et al. are simply trying to justify what can only be called an ‘amar chitra katha’ version of hinduism, because of their broader ignorance of history and even sanskritic culture. This, of course, is the more charitable interpretation. (Balagangadhara’s ideas on caste is not worthy of pixels)
The most worrisome aspect of the whole thing is that the ranks of good, honest sanskrit scholars have greatly diminished in India. Serious scholarship of indic culture now mostly exists in the west and it is difficult to find voices in India knowledgeable (perhaps even fearless) enough to challenge views of Malhotra et al. But the state of scholarship is merely a mirror of a society that doesn’t value it. An average educated middle class indian who may even have heard of Socrates, would not have heard of, say, Kumarila Bhatt or Gangesh. It is an interesting comment on our culture that the majority of our knowledge of the two epics comes from a television show.
Ultimately, the thinking of Malhotra et al. as well as the fundamentalism of Hindutva (that is largely funded by NRIs) — that is — their vision of India, hinduism, etc. is more ‘western’ and modern than they would be capable of understanding. (I am suddenly reminded of Matilal’s entertaining essay on the ISCKON founder).
Thanks for your comment. Excellent points – the Bala/Malhotra theses really strike me as a kind of counter-orientalist discourse!
What are you babbling about? The issue is only one: The interpretation of Hindu scholars about Hinduism needs to be have primacy over interpretation of Hinduism by Xian and Muslim scholars who are ideologically hostile to what they call “idol worship.”
So I’m sure you’d welcome Dalit interpretations of Hinduism?
By Dalit if we say ambedkar, yes. Most recent Dalits or brahmins who are schooled in recent times are unable to understand India. This includes myself. After reading Balagangadhar’s thoughts I understand it better, Suddenly everything falls in place. Almost all castes have their own Gurus. It is not that brahmins were priests to everyone. If I take a closer look at traditions in my surrounding yes, balagangadhar’s thoughts make sense than what we are taught in school.
What is the definition of Dalit?
Lets look at this: “Thus, Balagangadhara calls for a “reconceptualization of Indian studies”: to stop using Western intellectual frameworks—like “social science” and its associated paradigms—for studying Indian phenomena, which demand instead, for their understanding and analysis, indigenous categories and concepts”
There are two points: (a) SNB has claimed that social sciences has built upon Orientalism, and that social sciences has taken Orientalism descriptions as facts and further to build on them. This is a broad claim, which you may not agree, because this single line doesn’t change your mind. So, you need an empirical argument. In the domain of religious studies, he has done that: the domain of religious studies has taken over genetic Christian theology. That’s one of central theses of “The Heathen in His Blindness”: here, he does it in three ways: (a) by analysis or close-reading; (b) by building arguments; (c) by providing a hypothesis about what religion (not a word, nor a concept, but the object/phenomenon that religion is).
In the domain of political theory, they have done that as well, if you read latest publications that are not in his reconceptualizing Indian studies. Just look for articles by him and Jakob de Roover in various political theory, Journal of Political philosophy, etc.
About caste: SNB has not denied ‘jaat’s exist’. He says that one has to distiguish the domain of study (in this case, caste) and the theories that study them, one such theory being that teh structure of Indian society is that of caste system. Just denying a theory or set of theories about a phenomena doesn’t mean that one is denying the phenomenona: for instance, just denying various theories of gravity does not entail that one is not denying the phenomenon of gravity.
About caste discrimination: same thing here. After all, you have claimed to be a philosopher. You better know that there is no fact-theory distinction or that facts are always facts of a theory or a background theory. No one has denied 12 or x number of killings by some caste in some village. But to go beyond this, one has to accept normative ethics to make them discriminatory. Yes, SNB has to come up with an alternative theory about ethics, but one can still look at underying theories that strructure these facts.
For more, http://www.hipkapi.com/2011/03/24/normative-assumptions-discriminations-and-caste-discriminations/
http://www.hipkapi.com/2011/03/09/vivekananda-and-caste-theory-ladenness/
For the general thrust, http://www.hipkapi.com/2011/02/28/negative-portrayals-of-non-western-cultures-like-indian-secularization-of-christianity-s-n-balagangadhara/
Then you say SNB “demand insteads, for their understanding and analysis, indigenous categories and concepts”
Well, he demands for alternative theories in various domains: this alternative theory has to account for mistakes of earlier generations. Just like Einstein’s theory accounts for anomaly of Newtons’ theory: for instance, Mercury Perihellion.
However, you are wrong to say that SNB demands to use indigenous categories(concepts). It is RM who argues for the thesis of intranslatables. SNB called a such demand nonsense. SNB knows the distinction between concepts (categories, meanings, sense), words, and reference (object/phenomena/events). What is one arguing when one has to indigenous concepts: for instance, DNA was not part of Indian languages; even Westerners were not aware of that word DNA in 18th century. What to make of it.
For more on the nonsense you attribute to SNB, read the articles here: http://www.hipkapi.com/indic-categories/
I can go on, but I stop, because it is not worth dissecting every piece you attribute to SNB. However, let me end with one thing:
There are two dominant trends in humanities/social sciences.
1. one has some idea, then links this idea to some or another philosophical stance available in the market. If someone wants to disagree this idea, they come with an alternative idea and links that to anotehr philosophical stance. Postcolonialsm, poststrustruralism, even Rajiv Malhotra, and current social scientists belong to this group
2. There is another tradition. Here, one tries to build hypotheses/theories, because arguments are not enough. One can always provide plausibility argument for P; others can equally come up with arguments for the support of one of empirical translations of “Not P”. SNB is calling others to come with theories that can explain the faults for current social sciences (in various domains): isn’t this a call for science, if you have studied history and philisophy of sciences.
Please just don’t read some third rate criticism of SNB to understand his writings.
A very well written piece, one which I wish somebody had written five years ago. If I were grading this in a philosophy course, I might have graded you with an “A-“. (I mean to bestow a compliment on your essay. Nothing more). And, if it makes you feel better, perhaps I would grade it even better.
But remember – your analysis has no real empirical backing. That is, no numbers. No numbers and so your opinion is purely subjective. So are the opinions of the opposing parties.
And if you are all essentially non-empirical, then the time is ripe for a social scientist to step in. There are some efforts in Stanford (and these efforts have much in common with certain empirically rigorous projects at Berkeley that I am aware of) that use more empiricism in studying India today.
To be really blunt about this : since our methodology is superior, that means our analysis is superior to that of others too.
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To get right down to it: there are other critiques to Courtright et al that you may be missing and that are arguably stronger ones.
To be precise:
(1) both the Balangangadhara and Malhotra points of view find little empirical support
(2) the Courtright perspective is not also not very well supported empirically.
(3) Furthermore, Dalit perspectives on Hinduism are welcome, but then many of the Dalit perspectives are by people who are either not very smart or they are by people who are incapable of rigorous empirical reasoning. Not all opinions are equal. Our opinions are, to be really honest, much better.
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> Balagangadhara concludes that Kripal and Courtright are “indulging in mischief” and
> doing “violence” to “the experiential world of the Hindus.”
Balagangadhara is not very empirically based. I believe that the empirical approach to the social sciences is a far superior to the methodology Balagangadhara adopts. I like Balagangadhara’s approach, however, since it is broadly in the right direction.
> Balagangadhara’s critique of supposedly Orientalist scholarship appears least plausible in
> the chapter ‘Open Letter to Jeffrey Kripal’ and in his reactions to Paul Courtright in the
> chapter ‘Are Dialogues an Antidote to Violence?’ These scholars had carried out
> imaginative reconstructions through a psychoanalytical lens of, respectively, the mysticism
> of Ramakrishna Paramahansa and the legend of Ganesha, thus earning them the
> considerable ire of many Hindu organisations and academics, who found the invocation of
> sexual repression and trauma in their analysis offensive and disrespectful to Hindu sensibilities.
I have posted a (very short) critique of Courtright, and since it aims to be social scientific, is a generally empirical critique. Most likely explanation of what is going on with Courtright – the man is blowing smoke.
> So I’m sure you’d welcome Dalit interpretations of Hinduism?
The opinions of Dalits are welcome. So are the perspectives on Hinduism of people who may call themselves Catholics, atheists, agnostics, free market advocates, libertarians, Christians, Muslims, Jewish Christians, Seventh Day Adventists, and even Scientologists. Anyone with data and methodology is welcome.
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My main reaction to your piece is the following – while subjective takes are good and have a place – it is to be noted that no matter how well informed a subjective take is, that is all it really is. My series of arguments, which aim to base themselves on empirically collected data, finds itself on neither side. In fact, both sides seem to be wrong in many places.
They need to find the time to get their ship in order. That is, of course, their problem, not mine. Hopefully, they will get to it.
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Now, if anyone can point ONE social scientifically accurate theory demonstrable with numbers proposed by Wendy Doniger (Hi, Wendy! Shalom!), Paul Courtright or Jeff Kripal, that would be very helpful. Because the amount of nonsense propagated by just these three over the past two decades has been enormous. Again, it is their problem to show research with numbers, not mine.
Now, mathematics is not a skill given to everyone. I even told Wendy Doniger this (“I cannot give [mathematical talent] to you. It is so inborn.” was the exact quote. Seinfeld joke, for those not in the know). I think it is safe to say that unless statistical support is provided for any of the claims made by the po’ fools named above, everything said by these people can be ignored. I would say more but I would like to be paid for any further consulting on this matter.
I provide you one instance of my fine work in this area. For more, just ask Samir Chopra for my email address. If you pay me, I can supply more analysis.
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Samir Chopra says:
> Balagangadhara’s critique of supposedly Orientalist scholarship appears least plausible in
> the chapter ‘Open Letter to Jeffrey Kripal’ and in his reactions to Paul Courtright in the
> chapter ‘Are Dialogues an Antidote to Violence?’ These scholars had carried out
> imaginative reconstructions through a psychoanalytical lens of, respectively, the mysticism
> of Ramakrishna Paramahansa and the legend of Ganesha, thus earning them the
> considerable ire of many Hindu organisations and academics, who found the invocation of
> sexual repression and trauma in their analysis offensive and disrespectful to Hindu
> sensibilities.
Saying any of this has caused zero ‘offense’ to my sensibilities, and that of many others who simply want a careful, scholarly analysis of the topic at hand. All we ask in the case of Ramakrishna Paramahansa – and all that has been asked – is for some data in support of the claims that there are traces of ‘sexual repression’ present in the first place. There is a whole organization called the Ramakrishna Mission, full of nice guys. They would be happy to review the data.
The social scientific critique of the ‘Sexual Repression Theory Involving Ramakrishna Paramahansa’ (SRTRP) is simple – provide us some numbers. Get me some data.
(0) You could say the same about Jesus. The man had twelve apostles. All men. These guys spent a lot of time together. THEREFORE, Jesus was gay.
Note that this nonsensical theory is as plausible as SRTRP.
(1) Okay, Xenu. The dude exploded nuclear bombs on top of a mountain. Why “bombs”? Why a “phallic symbol such as a mountain”? (At this point, it is considered proper in American Society of Religion circles to raise an ironic eyebrow. Indulge me if you will and imagine that I just did that). Is it an instance of Xenu’s repressed sexual feelings? Did Xenu want to have sex with all of humanity in one huge orgy?
Note that this nonsensical theory is also as plausible as SRTRP.
(2) Had any modern psychologist who knew Ramakrishna at the time concluded that the man’s teachings were a result of sexual repressed feelings?
(3) It is certainly possible that long periods of celibacy can lead to sexual repression. Sometimes, those feelings may even have been articulated. But is there any evidence to believe that such feelings were actually articulated? Also, if such feelings were articulated, is there any evidence to believe that such statements were *not* later corrected?
The instance of a call to ‘sit in the lap’ of Ramakrishna was used as evidence of Ramakrishna’s homosexual feelings. Even if it were the case that this is evidence of Ramakrishna’s homosexuality, has any psychologist who *knew* *Ramakrishna* *at* *the* *time* concluded that he had latent homosexual feelings? And if so, what evidence did he have? How is this claim supported?
Note that homosexuality is a tendency only in a small fraction of the human population, so generally throwing darts at the hypothesis of homosexuality at a random person is much, much more likely to be wrong than to be right. Much, much, much more. I can supply some numbers, but obviously need to be paid for further analysis.
> Balagangadhara attempts to justify the chorus of ire by means of a pair of tortured arguments
> that such treatments are essentially caricaturing and trivializing and that cross-cultural
> dialogues—between cultures separated by the systematic misunderstanding directed by
> one at the other—promote violence rather than ameliorate it.
VB says:
> There are two points: (a) SNB has claimed that social sciences has built upon
> Orientalism, and that social sciences has taken Orientalism descriptions as facts and
> further to build on them. This is a broad claim, which you may not agree, because this
> single line doesn’t change your mind. So, you need an empirical argument.
Orientalism is an ideology – as Samir Chopra helpfully points out. And as ideologies go, it is a remarkably thin set of arguments. As for me, I don’t even have anything against ideologies. But come on. You have got to do better than that.
Anyway, SNB’s claim that the social sciences are built upon Orientalism is false. It is totally and utterly false.
You read it here first.
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I have a much more satisfying theory.
This theory has two hypotheses. It is based on the idea of ‘separation’ as used by Spence and others. It is similar, in some ways, to the Market for Lemons model proposed by Akerlof. The theory’s hypotheses are as follows.
H1: Rich scholars of Hinduism produce good research.
H2: Poor scholars of Hinduism (defined as anyone with less than W* (currently half a billion dollars in assets)) produce bad research.
Very often, PS’s base their own research on other poor scholars of Hinduism (miscellaneous sadhus, assorted sanyasis, Wendy Doniger, et cetera). These po’ boys obviously don’t get very far because they are basing their research on other po’ scholars who themselves do very little fact checking.
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The reason Courtright is wrong is because he is a Poor Scholar. He does not have many career opportunities (I doubt that he can do programming at an advanced level or – more empirically testable – mathematics at a high level), and so he doesn’t want to abandon the area of study he has chosen because he has few other choices.
In fact, this is the fundamental problem in the first place. The problem is that many, many scholars before Courtright were *also* blowing smoke all the way on Hinduism.
Since it is hard to tell those blowing smoke from those not doing so, I came up with a simple ‘separation theorem’ – use monetary worth W to tell the difference between those who would have other means to support themselves as compared to those who would have no other means. There exists a W* beyond which people don’t seem to want to blow smoke on topics beyond their ability to analyze. This W* is certainly less than a billion.
This ‘separation theorem’ has, to my knowledge, thus far never been violated.
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Hello Everyone,
I have seen many responses, I would say that Samir Chopra is inclined to his own opinion and we must use this to simply know what he is saying. Let us not get emotional, as Arun Shourie says let us have a thick skin. Whether he is right or wrong is not the question but it is better we know his opinion. If people are itching to give a response then please blog your response. This way it will be more clearly visible to people.
One of the criticisms of Rajiv and SN seems to be that they homogenize Hinduism and disregard the advances of the Western thought in its self critique over the past hundred years.
So why dont you grant that privilege to Hinduism too with respect to caste, cows and curry formulas? Hinduism has, as have all systems of thought, been continuously reinterpreted, whether it was Sankara or Radhakrishnan or it was Tiruppanalvar ( a dalit Vaishnava) or Kambar (nonbrahmin). This application of theories and systems evolved in the West for analyzing western societies, mindlessly to cultures and societies which actually could be extremely different is what Rajiv at the core criticizes. Yes, how do you apply theories developed to study Christian civilizations to study Hindu, based on very radical foundations? And you dont even acknowledge that the theories may not be applicable or may lead to the wrong results.
Besides simplistic ideas that karma and rebirth lead to fatalism, (you dont apply that to existentialism, by the way) do you have a nuanced understanding of say is karma physically feasible, as is rebirth? What do the Eastern philosophers have to say about who is the man, the self, that is far more deeper and complex than a simple ‘Dvaitic’ interpretation found in the Abrahamic faiths? Why does the western man privilege the human DNA so much, even in his ‘integral’ or ‘secular humanism’ (would he be willing to extend his humanism to whales,dolphins elephants and chimpanzees)? Why?
As the Chinese do, and most Indians in the US and the west are now recognizing, while scientific theories in the hard, real sciences are valid, empirical and objective, theories in the so called social sciences are mere frames drawn up by individuals who may be serving their own (biases) or those of their parent societies, governments or political entities. Therefore it is best to keep clear of the so called social sciences for obtaining information.
Ultimately, one does not need a social scientist to tell him that one is alive and that he exists. Awareness is in the individual itself, and if one believes, pervades many life forms, and the whole universe if one believes the Easterns.
What a misguided article. The ‘author’ of this article literally has not understood anything from S.N. Balagangadhara’s work.
Any idiot with hands kan type up a ‘critique’ like this. All you do is invent statements you feel you can critisize and attribute them to other people to make yourself look smart and others stupid. Anyone that’s actually read S.N. Balagangadhara can see what kind of an idiot you are. Pathetic.