[INDOLOGY] Caste and Gender at the WSC

[Ananya Vajpeyi]

Dear Colleagues,

Thanks to Dr. Audrey Truschke, Dr. Iris Farkhondeh and others who have
taken up some of the points I raised in my article in the Hindu yesterday
as regards the debacle of an (attempted) forum on caste and gender in
Sanskrit Studies at the WSC Vancouver, held on July 10.

As I have been working on an intellectual biography of Dr. Ambedkar for the
past few years, I am quite well aware of the regressive politics around
reservations, majoritarianism and caste more generally in Indian academic
and public life. Seeing reactionary positions in these areas surface at the
WSC was no surprise to me.

Three things however, offended, angered and distressed me that evening that
I could not elaborate on in the short space of a newspaper op-ed, that too
meant for a general readership and not a small group of specialists like
those on this list.

One, that it was Dr. Kaushal Panwar and not really Professor Mandakranta
Bose or me that the audience attacked most frontally. In other words, the
vicious undercurrent was of caste, not gender. (Those who were present
would recall that many of the most persistent interruptions and objections
came from women).

Two, that English and Sanskrit were used to intimidate, harass and silence
Dr. Panwar, who is a Hindi speaker and does not have the fluency in English
necessary for a heated altercation of the kind we were forced into that
night -- although she did prepare her remarks in English out of respect for
the overall protocols of the WSC, which was conducted primarily in English
(with a few sessions in Sanskrit). This was linguistic bullying and nothing
else. It compounded the message of social (caste-based) power and
patriarchal (gender-based) domination that the hecklers and trolls in the
audience were trying to convey.

If I were not a Hindi speaker myself and able to speak with Dr. Panwar in
asides, she would have been verbally lynched. It was infuriating that no
member of the assembly -- organiser, office-bearers, moderator, spectators,
senior faculty from UBC -- found any means to call out or control this
aggressive register of humiliation directly targeting one speaker.

Third, the use of the term "harijan", again aimed at Dr. Panwar. Would
North American scholars (and I include here Indians teaching in North
American universities and living in the US and Canada for long years)
countenance the use of the term "negro" in an academic meeting in any other
discipline? Only two very small categories of Indians still use "harijan"
-- historians of nationalism (and I include myself in this number), and
residual Gandhians (especially those who are very old and dated in their
understanding of the cultural politics around this problematic word).

But the way it was hurled at Dr. Panwar that night was offensive enough
that even she momentarily lost her cool and reacted. I don't know what silo
Indology pretends to be living in that there is no bottomline around
politically salient and sensitive categories of identity like "dalit" and
"harijan". The WSC owes Dr. Panwar an outright apology for the way she was
spoken to by some very vociferous members of the audience.

It rankled also that she was repeatedly addressed as "Kaushalya" -- an
unwarranted and unacceptable Sanskritization of her name, which, as is
conventional in many languages of Punjab and Haryana, is not marked for
gender. Disagree all you like on the meaning of the Manusmṛti and the
Ṛgveda, but nobody has any business distorting someone's proper name by way
of a casteist slur.

Never in India have I seen such appalling disrespect. The lynch-mob
mentality was on naked display. I think the sense of entitlement and
impunity came from being overseas, far from any larger, more diverse and
complex social context which would immediately hold people responsible for
such egregious behaviour and keep everyone's worst impulses in check.
Anywhere but in a Sanskrit conference abroad, someone, at least one other
person if not a large number, would have spoken up for Dr. Panwar.

What really to my mind shattered completely the entire moral premise of
this supposedly scholarly body was that the president of the IASS read us a
lecture on the correct sāmāsa in "harijan" (hari-jana, as he would insist).

If a mirror could be held up to Sanskrit and Indology, this forum was it.
For those of you who have spent your life in these disciplines, who care
about your scholarly community, and who follow a certain fundamental ethic
of decency and courtesy towards students and colleagues, men and women,
Indian and non-Indian, Hindu and non-Hindu, young and old, brahmin and
non-brahmin, please take a moment to LOOK, and really see what's staring
you in the face. I know from private discussions with Sanskritist friends
and former teachers and classmates that the majority of those attending the
conference were not in agreement with the way our forum was hijacked and
vitiated.

It's your professional organisation, it's your collegial association, it's
for you to do some serious soul-searching and house-keeping. Personally I
have never attended the WSC before and I may never do so again. So also Dr.
Panwar, after her / our harrowing experience. But you all have to live with
the consequences of what you have allowed to happen to your field of study.
I say it's not too late for a course correction.

Sincerely --

Ananya Vajpeyi.

-- 

*Ananya Vajpeyi *
*Fellow and Associate Professor*
*Centre for the Study of Developing Societies*
*29 Rajpur Road, Civil Lines*
*New Delhi 110054*
*e: vajpeyi at csds.in <vajpeyi at csds.in>*
*ext: 229*

*http://www.csds.in/faculty_ananya_vajpeyi.htm
<http://www.csds.in/faculty_ananya_vajpeyi.htm>*


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