[INDOLOGY] A regressive face of Indology at the World Sanskrit Conference

[Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi]

There are two intertwined strands to the hostility displayed at the WSC and described by Dr Vajpeyi and others. Both are objectionable, although one has a more complicated genealogy than the other, but it is their combination that explains some of the problems that Dr Vajpeyi has anatomized.


One is the angry and often inchoate expression of cultural anomie by people who are beginning to feel economically confident enough to shout about a still unresolved colonial resentment that somehow the global standards for the study of a language-culture they identify with is not institutionally in their own hands. There are certainly issues here that need facing up to: one cannot simultaneously be committed to a liberal de-colonization of the curriculum in Western universities and yet not engage with how the voices of those who take themselves to come from such once-colonised cultures are heard. But such engagement has to adhere to exactly those standards of inquiry (for reasons of non-relativistic communication) that are themselves the point of contention. Here, the divide is not been Indians and Western scholars, but scholars from globally recognized institutions and those who do not (in the main) have such a position (regardless of their other forms of cultural capital). It isn't always clear how this can be resolved, and many attempts to find a common ground have been vitiated, but the effort has to carry on, so that we can look forward to a time when there is a levelling out of what is studied about cultures around the world in ways that are consistent and egalitarian, but not merely through the historical accident that the Western university has become the model for global academia. Swaggering assertions of the pure freedom of academics at Western institutions to ignore the tangled history of their disciplines (like Indology) won't do. Seen that way, we can understand, without condoning, the uncomfortable clashes that have begun to occur increasingly at international venues. (I wasn't at the WSC and depend entirely on the reports I have read on this listserv.) 'Without condoning': a historical understanding of cultural anger is in no way justification for dishonest arguments, bad behaviour, and sheer intolerance.


But there is another strand, which appears to have been much more evident at the WSC than, say, what some of us have seen at venues like the American Academy of Religion. And that is the quite systematic expression of age-old prejudice from people who feel that the slightest loss of their historical hegemony is in fact an attack on their very identity. (One supposes that if identity is built on a tenacious narrative of superiority, it is indeed put under attack from arguments for equality. Well, tough.) We know how that is happening with racism in America and Europe, and various fascist nationalisms around the world. In our own Indological corner, we have seen that happen in that perfect storm summed up by the title of the panel under discussion. Here, there is no morally complex aetiology. It is not the emergence of a certain counter-prejudice in place of a calm and considered critique of past and present intellectual practices. It is, rather, the persistence - nay, the virulent re-assertion - of age-old prejudices. Friends, this may, in some sense indeed be a battle between Indians, as Dr Vajpeyi cuttingly put it. And it may be that the perception of this strand over the other may have silenced colleagues of non-Indian extraction in the audience.


I won't presume to say how exactly scholars of whatever cultural origin think we ought to respond to the entwinement of these strands; perhaps there are responses to one that are exactly responses to the other, which is what I think Dr Vajpeyi feels. But I want to say one thing about how scholars must respond who (in whatever way) take themselves to come culturally out of Sanskritic culture. And that is to take responsibility for putting their knowledge of 'their' culture towards resisting these prejudices *not only* as scholars facing down threats to academic integrity *but also* as Indians willing to join battle amongst Indians. It should be unacceptable to take refuge in the complexity of how we study the Indian past in order to duck out of confronting the moral challenge of the Indian present. I suspect it is quite a temptation for those of us in comfortable Western institutions where we are disciplinary outsiders to stay away from taking a stand on issues where we are the cultural insiders.


My apologies for this long post.


Best,

Ram


Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Fellow of the British Academy
Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy
Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion
Lancaster University LA1 4YL
U.K.


Mr. Paturi and others,

The existence of pāṭhaśālā-s and gurukula-s for girls and women in some corner of India does nothing to mitigate the fact that several WSC participants were downright offensive to the three speakers on the specially convened public forum on caste and gender in Sanskrit Studies. The basis of the interruptions, shouting, heckling and intimidation was primarily a kind of arrogance towards both women scholars like Professors Bose, Panwar and myself, and those who are perceived to belong to non-Brahmin castes, and therefore to be unwanted and unwelcome interlopers in Sanskrit.

I entirely forgot to mention that many in the audience also insinuated that they were unable to follow the Sanskrit pronunciation of Professors Bose and Panwar, one of whom hails from Bengal and other from Haryana. The implication was that Sanskrit diction coloured by the speaker's vernacular language is unacceptable -- a laughable proposition, because who in India does not have one or other native local language which is her or his mother tongue. Someone even had the gall to ask Professor Bose to wear her glasses when she had trouble reading something out. The rudeness was intolerable. Again, the basis for these despicable interventions lay in deeply entrenched Brahminical notions of "purity" and "pollution", of "adhikara" and "bahishkara" -- whether based on caste, on gender, or on other registers of regional and linguistic identity.

Kindly stop trying to justify, excuse, explain or dismiss what happened. Stop pretending that everything is great because there are Vedic schools for girls in existence somewhere out there. It won't do. A collective apology is owed us all and most especially Dr. Panwar. This concerns the founding principles and protocols of the world's largest professional organization of Sanskrit scholars, which has no business undermining the basic respect and dignity owed to each and every member, male or female, Indian or foreign. If the WSC cannot get its act together, we will ask every woman Sanskritist -- and every man as well, who has a conscience -- to boycott the next meeting. Why would we come to a place where we are not treated on par with our male colleagues, and where basic and non-negotiable standards of professional courtesy are not maintained.

Ananya Vajpeyi.





On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 10:15 AM, Ananya Vajpeyi <vajpeyi at csds.in<mailto:vajpeyi at csds.in>> wrote:

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<mailto:vajpeyi at csds.in>
ext: 229
http://www.csds.in/faculty_ananya_vajpeyi.htm
[https://www.csds.in/uploads/images/gallery_banner/1522391835_avbanner.jpg]<http://www.csds.in/faculty_ananya_vajpeyi.htm>

Ananya Vajpeyi - CSDS<http://www.csds.in/faculty_ananya_vajpeyi.htm>
www.csds.in
Associate Professor. Ananya Vajpeyi works at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is currently working on three different projects: a history of caste categories in Western India from pre-colonial to modern times, a short political biography of Sanskrit, and her long-term research on the life of ...








--

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<mailto:vajpeyi at csds.in>
ext: 229
http://www.csds.in/faculty_ananya_vajpeyi.htm
[https://www.csds.in/uploads/images/gallery_banner/1522391835_avbanner.jpg]<http://www.csds.in/faculty_ananya_vajpeyi.htm>

Ananya Vajpeyi - CSDS<http://www.csds.in/faculty_ananya_vajpeyi.htm>
www.csds.in
Associate Professor. Ananya Vajpeyi works at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is currently working on three different projects: a history of caste categories in Western India from pre-colonial to modern times, a short political biography of Sanskrit, and her long-term research on the life of ...




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