SV: Rajaram's "horse seal"

[Lars Martin Fosse]

Jan E.M. Houben [SMTP:jhouben at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL] skrev 31. juli 2000
11:36:
> Rajaram's horse was false and unreliable. Was it also an intentional
fraud?
> If so, how easily does this pass to bookform in the Indian scholarly
> research tradition? Or was it sloppy methodology and low research ethos
> combined with eagerness to find and demonstrate ideologically desirable
> results?

Regarding the Jha/Rajaram effort to show that the language of the Indus
script is Sanskrit, I think we have to separate Jha's effort from
Rajaram's. It is, after all, Jha who has developed the interpretation of
the script. There is no reason to assume that Jha has committed a conscious
fraud. I believe he has presented his results in good faith, but he has
fallen into an intellectual trap which has been exposed on this list by
Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer. He is not the only one to fall into this
trap, others have done so in other fields than Indology.

Rajaram is a different cup of tea. Having read a couple of his books, I
could easily show how he manipulates research data in a flourish of
rhetorical language to defame and vilify Western scholars while promoting
views and interpretations that are, to be polite, intellectually weak. If
his manipulation of the "horse" seal wouldn't have drummed him out of
Academia, his books certainly would.

It is important to see Rajaram for what he is: a political person
manipulating research data to support a certain kind of politics. This
implies that he is of no interest to Indology as a contributing scholar. He
belongs in the political sphere, and should be of interest to students of
politics rather than Indologists. Indologists have a responsibility to
clean up the mess that Rajaram and his fellow travellers produce, in other
words: they should participate in the public debate and expose the errors
and manipulations that men like Rajaram produce. It is only to be wished
that such debunking could reach more people than the those who are
fortunate enough to have an Internet connection.

Lars Martin Fosse

Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse
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