ATI, cant vs rant

[Bharat Gupt]

Sep 1999, Bharat Gupt wrote:
>
> > INDIA IS A PLACE WHERE THE VEDAS AND THE SHRUTI-SMRITI TRADITION HAS
> > BEEN LIVED (NOT STUDIED OR MUSEUMISED OR INDOLOGISED) AND STILL IS THE
> > MAJORTY FAITH.[etc.]
>
> Dear Dr Gupt,
>
> Surely we need to make a distinction between scholarship and popular
> belief.  This forum is a scholarly one, aimed at universtity-level
> researchers......
> --
> Dominik Wujastyk
> Founder, INDOLOGY list

Dear Dr. Wujastyk,
I do not argue for any concession to popular views or to majority faith and I am
certainly thankful to the scholarship of this forum from which I hope to keep on
learning.
But my intention was to point out that a culture  still practising the vedic traditions
(indeed in a transformed shape but no less valid for that reason) is bound to
sceptically confront  the transitory nature of conclusions drawn from research that
keeps  changing with every generation of researchers. Till Mortimer Wheeler,
Mohenjodaro was the site which decided that much about Aryan invasion of India. With
many other sites  dug up now, a revision of the hypothesis is underway.

For those who are practioners of the Vedic tradition the implications of historical
research are very different than they are for Indologists, Indian or otherwise. For the
academic, it is a matter of re-arranging data, but for the practioner it is adjusting to
a "new" ancestory. The true believer does not want any concession from rational inquiry.
Vedas will not become any less holy if it is established that they were composed outside
India. But for the practioner  things are much more intricate than just changing
academic positions. My purpose behind mentioning Indians as practioners was to highlight
this difference.

And it is for this reason that I will dare to disagree with you "that a confessional
adherence to a particular set of ideas is incompatible with the academic study of those
ideas." The tribal lives the idea, the anthropologist uses the idea for a different
agenda.   But this as we know is an endless debate, yet unavoidable in the present
situation.
Bharat Gupt