Outlook letters page

[rohan.oberoi at CORNELL.EDU]

I found Chakrabarti's letter incredible.  Most egregious was his
denunciation of "the basic premise of Aryan migration" as "racist",
considering that there are many available scholarly defences of this
position that contain many factual arguments and not one racist one.
Northern Light had a copy of Rocher's review of Chakrabarti's book,
which suggests that this is not the first time he has been so free
with accusations of racism.

Regards,
Rohan.


   _________________________________________________________

   Source:  The Journal of the American Oriental Society
   Date:  04-06/1998
   Subject(s):  Books--Reviews
   Citation Information:  (v118 n2) Start Page: p307(2)
   ISSN: 0003-0279
   Author(s):  Rocher, Rosane
   _________________________________________________________


    Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian
                             Past.
                        (book reviews)
   _________________________________________________________

   By DILIP K. CHAKRABARTI. New Delhi: MUNSHIRAM MANOHARLAL,
   1997. Pp. xi + 257. Rs 350.

   Archaeologist Dilip K. Chakrabarti has produced a
   polemical survey of scholarship on ancient India. In
   addition to rehashing the "racist" assumptions of Western
   Indology, he charges his "mainstream" or "establishment"
   Indian colleagues with perpetuating the conventions of
   colonial scholarship in a way that is emblematic of the
   subservient relationship of the Third World to the West.
   Calling for the construction of an Indian perception of
   the Indian past, he argues, in apparent reference to
   historians of ancient India such as Romila Thapar, that
   this goal cannot be realized by combining India's ancient
   ahistorical texts with social-science theories. What is
   needed, he submits, are detailed investigations of the
   land in its relation with the people-such as are to be
   found in his other works. The point of the present volume
   is to blunt the thrust of earlier research. What he
   offers here is the first major exercise with regard to
   India of an expanding area of archaeological studies,
   that of the sociopolitics of the past, ushered in by
   Peter Ucko in sessions of the World Archaeological
   Congress since 1986.

   The introductory chapter which sets the issue includes a
   critique of current conditions for the study of
   archaeology and ancient Indian history in Indian colleges
   and universities: even in one of the more favorable
   cases, that of Delhi University, "archaeology is still
   'side-show of a side-show', the second side-show being
   'ancient India'" (p. 9). It also offers a broad survey of
   the interaction between archaeology, ideology, and
   nationalism in various parts of the world, ending with a
   rare positive evaluation of Martin Bernal's Black Athena.

   Chapter 2 surveys the interplay of race, language, and
   culture in the history of racial classifications, which
   reached their sorry acme in Risley's anthropometric
   measurements. Although much of this is well known and
   Chakrabarti's sustained vituperative tone tends to dull
   the reader's response, the survey is based on extensive
   reading and documentation and includes some lesserknown
   episodes, such as Fergusson's "racist" use (in his
   Archaeology in India with Especial Reference to the Works
   of Babu Rajendralala Mitra, 1884) of a critique of the
   works of the respected Indian scholar in opposing the
   famed Ilbert Bill, which sought to allow senior Indian
   judges to try criminal cases in which Britons were
   involved. The interplay of linguistic and ethnological
   paradigms in the construction of race in colonial India
   is a complex and thorny issue, deserving of less-leveling
   indictments and of more fine-grained studies, such as
   Thomas R. Trantmann's just-released Aryans and British
   India (1997).

   Chapter 3 offers an Indian take on a number of
   controverted issues in ancient Indian history. Building
   on a characterization of "the hypothesis of Aryan
   invasions of India" as "a racist myth," it is asserted
   that there was no Vedic Age in Indian history. This
   contention is based on three arguments: the ahistorical
   nature of the texts themselves, prejudices in their
   interpretation, and, more curiously, "the fact that they
   leave out of their consideration a very great part of
   India and thus cannot be given the status of a specific
   historical stage from which a course of unilineal
   evolution followed" (p. 158). The claim is made that,
   nothwithstanding contacts with regions to its west, the
   Indus civilization "remained exclusively Indian
   throughout its entire term of duration" (p. 167).
   Bechert's proposal of a later date for the Buddha is
   suspected of having been motivated by a desire to rule
   out Indian influence on Indian philosophy, while
   Spooner's suggested Achaemenid influence on Kumrahar is
   rejected, and Gandharan art described as representative
   of "the modern 'pushtu'-speaking peoples of this part of
   the subcontinent," rather than Hellenistic (p. 200).
   There follows a critique of Kulke's and Rothermund's
   attempt to determine the limits of the Maurya empire on
   the basis of the distribution of Asoka's edicts.
   Arguments in favor of a more expansive empire are that
   the Mauryas "could quite logically travel beyond . . ."
   or "would have been in a position to control . . ." (p.
   206). Proofs for the validity of an "Indian" position
   take a back seat to scorn heaped on alternative
   interpretations.

   The thirty-six pages of conclusions reprise many of the
   points raised in the book, including the issue that seems
   to be a primary source of the author's anger, the
   neocolonial character of Indian historical education. The
   perpetuation of this model requires, so he contends, that
   "institutions on the national level have to be 'captured'
   and filled up with stooges of various kinds. . . . That
   is why, there is no great difficulty for folksingers to
   be appointed to the chairs of scientific archaeology. . .
   . In such a context, the elites fail to see the need of
   going beyond the dimensions of colonial Indology, because
   these dimensions suit them fine and keep them in power"
   (pp. 212-13). 'Nuff said.

   ROSANE ROCHER UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

   COPYRIGHT 1998 American Oriental Society