Film on Holi

[John Gardner]

under the circumstances, it is understandable that there is a past 
evaluative weight placed upon the term chaos.  however, the term "racist" 
is equally offensive and does not assist the quality of this dialogue.

further, to absolutize the "one and only meaning" of chaos, as suggested 
below, is to also keep earnestly alive the ignorant and childish 
attitudes of early western indologists (and, sadly, current ones).  
further, linguistically and semantically word meanings are not absolute, 
unchanging, and eternal.  to try and maintain such a position does 
obeisance to the very hegemony perpetrated by the socio-political 
vicissitudes of english which, it appears, RAJAGOPALANM at HARPO wishes to 
see handled differently and more sensitively.

jrg


On Wed, 7 Feb 1996 RAJAGOPALANM at HARPO.TNSTATE.EDU wrote:

> dear people ,
> Chaos theory is a part of mathematics . Please note this fact . Do not try to link that with
> link that with the word " chaos ' used by indologists .They are two 
> totally diffeent contexts . The mathematics " chaos' does not lend
>  any honourable nature to the word Chaos used by Indologists. Some indologists
> use the word chaos  without knowing that it has an offensive connotation 
> against the society to which it refers . Perhaps such innocent indologists
> will correct themselves  after being pointed out that that word was used
> by some missionaries with racist motives ( like Max muller) to
>  to insult  
> and denigrate Hinduism and other non-white cultures. But some determined
> racist indologists keep hammering on using that word and try to get respecta-
> bility for that word by going out of context and keep using that
> insulting word to describe hinduism in a wrong way . Real scholars of Indology
> should watch for this and should not represent a society in a wrong way
> ( even by innocence ) when they want to be scientific.  M.Rajagopalanm
>