[INDOLOGY] beyond Malhotra's books

[David and Nancy Reigle]

To further complicate the picture, it is not only traditional scholars in
India who are dependent upon outside funding. There was a time when Rajiv
Malhotra did not have the "us versus them" mentality. It was his funding
that actually launched Robert Thurman's ambitious project to translate and
publish the whole Tibetan Tanjur, the huge collection of śāstra texts that
were originally translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan. Thurman writes in
the Preface to the first volume of that series to be published, *The
Universal Vehicle Discourse Literature*, p. xi:

"In the late 1980s, we and the Institute moved to Columbia University in
New York, where we were able to work out an affiliation in 1988 such that I
and subsequent occupants of the newly established Jey Tsong Khapa
Professorship in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies would remain formally
charged with the task of translating and publishing "the whole Tanjur," as
the *Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences*. Fundraising was slow, and the
pressing needs of the Tibetan people, whose scholars are the actively
creative intellects indispensable to our whole project, seemed more urgent
a use for whatever support people generously gave. The Institute went
somewhat onto the back burner, while we focused on developing Tibet House
US, the American institution dedicated to preserving Tibetan civilization,
founded at the request and with the gracious patronage of His Holiness the
Dalai Lama.

"Finally, in the year 2000, the founder of the Infinity Foundation in
Princeton, New Jersey, Mr. Rajiv Malhotra, saw the relevance of the *Treasury
of the Buddhist Sciences* to the recovery and presentation to the world of
ancient India's classic Buddhist heritage, and the Foundation awarded the
Institute, in affiliation with the Columbia University Center for Buddhist
Studies, a publication grant to start the actual printing. In 2001, the
Infinity Foundation joined with Tibet House US in another grant to engage
the scholarly, administrative, editorial, and design services of Dr. Thomas
Yarnall, to advance and complete the project."

I do not know what led to the change in Rajiv Malhotra's perspective.

Best regards,

David Reigle
Colorado, U.S.A.


On Fri, Aug 5, 2016 at 4:15 AM, Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi <
c.ram-prasad at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:

> Intellectually, Matthew is of course perfectly right, and puts this larger
> point succinctly.
> The institutional situation is sadly more complicated. Traditionally
> trained scholars, both within and outside the Indian university system, are
> increasingly concerned that they can’t always tell what part of their
> research, pursued in the innocence of their traditional methods, family
> traditions, and intellectual concerns, might fall foul of various
> activists. But they are also pragmatically aware of two forces that are
> more difficult to work around. One is that, in a context where public
> funding has traditionally flowed only according to political calculations
> and not support of the humanities, even the occasional rhetoric of support
> for the cultures of Sanskritic scholarship seems appealing. The other is
> that, with the reality of public funding as remote as ever, any future
> support for their scholarship has to come from private sources. And one can
> see what that implies: they have to play a very careful game in which they
> must constantly negotiate with private donors (some traditional patrons,
> others from the new dispensation) in an oblique way over what is studied
> and how.
> The real line of pressure in the collaboration between academics in the
> global West and traditional scholars (in both Indian universities and other
> institutions) is over the livelihood and future of the latter. I would urge
> those of us - the majority on this list - who are of the former category,
> to always keep in mind the depth and scope of the challenges faced by the
> latter, even when it occasionally appears as if ideology (rather than
> livelihood) is the sticking point. This is made trickier still by the
> tensions within India itself between those with a background in
> contemporary social sciences, whose everyday research is obviously under
> attack and those in Indological areas of scholarship who are constantly
> trying to find a way of working in the complex situation I outlined above.
> There is a great deal more misunderstanding and lack of cooperation than
> might help the common cause of scholarship in India, when social scientists
> have a deep distrust of the larger Sanskritic inheritance (for reasons we
> don’t need to go into here), and traditionally-trained scholars see their
> deeper horizons fundamentally questioned by a modernist presentism.
> Best,
> Ram
>
> Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
> Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy
> Lancaster University
> ------------------------------
>
>


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