Gentoo Studies

[Shrisha Rao]

On Tue, 4 May 1999, Lars Martin Fosse wrote:

> Swaminathan Madhuresan schrieb:
>
> >
> > Curious thing about Kak, Frawdley, Talagiri, Rajaram, & their
> > schoolers: None has any formal, university degrees in Linguistics
> > or Archaeology.
>
> That is an important prerequisite for their scholarship, and they are
> proud of it. They have no faith in Western scholarship such as
> philology, linguistics etc, and they prefer to construct their own
> version of scholarship.

A very valid point; however, while completely disowning any affiliation
with Frawley, et al., I still must point out that "Western scholarship" of
Indic studies is often as guilty of the same sins, albeit in a slightly
different context.  For instance, there are elaborate rules of philology,
linguistics, etc., in regard to the Vedas which have been around for ages
and are part of the classical Vedic tradition, which are conveniently
ignored by people propounding "Western scholarship" (which of course
includes many Indians as well) of the Vedas, and said people may also be
rightly accused of not knowing what they're talking about -- a la Frawley.

Then, too, there certainly is more than a slight tendency among proponents
of "Western scholarship" to rely excessively on each other's secondary
sources and form incestuous intellectual cliques with little outside
input.  It used to be said that in the days of the British Raj, Western
writers who pictured India would primarily deal with the few Europeans
there, and the "natives" would rarely figure, except perhaps as servants,
villains, or the occasional Maharaja.  The very same trend is certainly
present to a large degree in recent Indological scholarship (such as with
the late Jan Gonda, who had never been to India, but was perfectly content
to theorize about it extensively from his armchair).  This does lead to
absurd conclusions which are treated as classical truths of "Western
scholarship" -- for instance: recently, someone quoted an accepted opinion
among Indologists that the word/concept of `bhakti' was first propounded
by a Buddhist; look at the ashhTAdhyAyI, IV-3-95, where the word is used
by Panini, who lived before Buddhism.

As such, it would probably be as well to note that incompetence can take
various forms, and it is incorrect simply to assume that proponents of a
view one does not like are the only incompetents.

Regards,

Shrisha Rao

> Lars Martin Fosse