[INDOLOGY] on Indology and the WSC

[Dominik Wujastyk]

I appreciate your post, Arlo, and agree with most of it.  But in your last
paragraph you make a couple of statements that I'd like to respond to.

First, the WSC received no money at all from the Indian Government.  The
conference was paid for by the attendees' fees and local charitable
donations.

Second, you take a pot-shot at WSC reviewers, "
As long as organizers of the WSC feel unable to impose serious peer review
for all papers proposed,..."   I was a reviewer myself, and I took the job
rather seriously.  And I know anecdotally that other reviewers did too.  I
read every abstract that was submitted to the Scientific Literature section
of the conference, both in English and in Sanskrit.  I thought hard about
them, and discussed them individually with my co-convener and in some cases
also with Adheesh.  A large proportion of submissions were rejected.  Those
that were accepted were of uneven quality, but were all papers that offered
some originality or interesting data.

Best,
Dominik

--
Professor Dominik Wujastyk <http://ualberta.academia.edu/DominikWujastyk>
,

Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity
,

Department of History and Classics <http://historyandclassics.ualberta.ca/>
,
University of Alberta, Canada
.

South Asia at the U of A:

sas.ualberta.ca



On Tue, 21 Aug 2018 at 02:58, Arlo Griffiths via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> 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
>


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