[INDOLOGY] on Indology and the WSC

Tue Aug 21 08:57:59 UTC 2018

Dear colleagues,

I would encourage Dr. Vajpeyi to reconsider the climactic paragraph of her most recent message:

"The fact that Indology in the past 5-10 years has been reduced to nothing but glorified trolling and unapologetic xenophobia is something we have to recognise and stop. The ill-fated forum at the WSC was just an instance of a disciplinary malaise that has, alas, gone metastatic. It's time to stand up to the trolls, bigots, misogynists and other rogue elements in our midst; time to stand up for our colleagues who have borne the brunt of harassment, intimidation, bullying and motivated misrepresentation. And to stand by one another, as Jay and Adheesh are doing, when we find ourselves facing hecklers and hooligans."

I myself am an Indologist. Is all that I have done in that capacity over the last 5-10 years "nothing but glorified trolling and unapologetic xenophobia"? I do not recognize myself nor most of the participants "in our midst" on this list, nor most of the people I have met at the WSC in Vancouver, in this blanket rebuke of our field of study. I deeply regret the events that I have had to learn about through this list, because I myself did not attend the ill-fated forum, while the papers and sections I myself attended in Vancouver were almost free of anything like these events — although a surprisingly violent response from a Chennai-based scholar to Dr. Libbie Mills' paper in the section co-convened by Dr. Anna Slaczka and myself probably had to be understood as a reflection of "us vs. them" sentiments. And I join all those, first among them Dr. Vajpeyi, who have spoken out against "harassment, intimidation, bullying and motivated misrepresentation". But please, let us not then misrepresent the very field that we are talking about, and keep an eye open for the things, fairly numerous in my opinion, that are going well in many parts of the field, and in many countries where scholars try to make useful contributions to Indology — India included.

Part of the problem with the WSCs in my analysis, based on having attended several of them since 2003, lies in the fact that they have so far tried to accommodate scholarly approaches to Indology while also celebrating Sanskrit as a living language, and that they often (always?) depend on financial resources furnished by the government of India. As long as organizers of the WSC feel unable to impose serious peer review for all papers proposed, and as long as India is under a government whose ideology is fundamentally at odds with the results of 200 years of Indological scholarship, under a government which instrumentalizes violence, future WSCs are bound to remain marred by behavior unbefitting to scholars.

Arlo Griffiths
EFEO, Paris

________________________________
From: INDOLOGY <indology-bounces at list.indology.info> on behalf of Ananya Vajpeyi via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info>
Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2018 7:51 PM
To: Indology
Subject: [INDOLOGY] Thanks and next steps / Caste and Gender

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing (finally, I hope) to acknowledge the statements by Adheesh Sathaye and Jay Soni, on behalf of the WSC and the IASS respectively, clarifying that both bodies maintain a policy against harassment and discrimination, and apologising for everything that went wrong at the Public Forum on Caste and Gender in Sanskrit Studies on July 10, 2018. Thank you both for doing the right thing.

These statements come as an excellent first step towards addressing a whole range of simmering issues in Indology, Sanskrit and, I would argue, South Asian History as well. It's encouraging that we have collectively entered into a discussion about the lines we want to draw and the boundaries we want to maintain between scholarship and academia on one side, and politics and religion on the other.

Our colleges and universities, departments and associations, journals and publishing houses, all across the world wherever India and South Asia are subjects of study, stand to gain by this basic housekeeping that we have begun to do here. I hope that the process of self-reflection, reasonable thinking and open conversation has just begun, and will not end here.

Since a video of our session on Caste and Gender in Sanskrit Studies does not appear to be online, I would like to state unequivocally that all three participants -- Mandakranta Bose, Kaushal Panwar and I -- spoke primarily about the texts we have worked on and the areas of our scholarly expertise, and not (except incidentally) about our experiences as women or as members of any religion, caste, community or ethnicity. By coincidence both Kaushal and I have done our doctoral research on sudradharma and stridharma -- she has published far more on this area than I have -- and we drew on our respective (though related) work to make our initial remarks.

Further, Mandakranta spoke about Sita in the Ramayana and I spoke about my ongoing project on an intellectual life of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who himself was a scholar of Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and wrote critically on a wide range of topics that are essentially Indological in their purview. Additionally I also mentioned epic and Upanisadic characters I have been revisiting (following Ambedkar), like Sambuka, Ekalavya, Sabari, Satyakama and others, whose narratives call caste identities and social structures into question.

A number of exchanges in a group called the Bharatiya Vidvat Parishad insinuate that our forum was not academic, not scholarly and not legitimate as a panel in the WSC. That we were there to speak autobiographically and to defame Hindu society. These are utterly false representations and bogus arguments. We did not speak in an autobiographical vein, and our criticisms were not in the first instance about how we, personally and individually, were treated in the course of our lives. We spoke critically about the texts we have studied, the societies and cultures in which those texts are embedded, in which they arose and circulate to date, and about the politics of caste and gender in many parts of the Sanskrit tradition, in its literature and its knowledge systems.

Rather than blaming the messenger, attacking us for looking at Sanskrit with open eyes, and raising a hue and cry about how anti-Indian, anti-Hindu, anti-Sanskrit etc. we supposedly are, fellow Sanskritists (including members of the BVP) ought to be doing their own work of philology, history, theory, hermeneutics, translation or whatever other modalities of reading and interpretation with an equally sharp eye on the objects of their analysis.

It's ridiculous to suggest that we "hate" Sanskrit / India / Hindu culture and so on. Nobody spends their life poring over, learning and teaching something that they hate. We are all, each and every one, in this because we love what we do and we try to be good at it. We all care about our texts, our teachers, our students, our colleagues and our institutions. We are committed to knowledge and to whatever it is we believe knowledge brings -- insight, truth, liberation, salvation, enlightenment, the greater common good, progress, human flourishing, equality, fraternity, solidarity, reason, succour -- all things worthy and valuable.

The fact that Indology in the past 5-10 years has been reduced to nothing but glorified trolling and unapologetic xenophobia is something we have to recognise and stop. The ill-fated forum at the WSC was just an instance of a disciplinary malaise that has, alas, gone metastatic. It's time to stand up to the trolls, bigots, misogynists and other rogue elements in our midst; time to stand up for our colleagues who have borne the brunt of harassment, intimidation, bullying and motivated misrepresentation. And to stand by one another, as Jay and Adheesh are doing, when we find ourselves facing hecklers and hooligans.

Thank you and best wishes,

Ananya Vajpeyi.

--

Ananya Vajpeyi
Fellow and Associate Professor
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Civil Lines
New Delhi 110054
INDIA

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