[INDOLOGY] Call for Papers AAIS first Annual conference

Wed Jun 26 09:50:21 UTC 2019

Dear Dr. Paturi,

Thank you for your reply to my message concerning the American Academy of
Indic Studies (AAIS); your reply illustrates two of the major reasons that
other colleagues and I feel that a productive scholarly engagement with the
AAIS and similar organizations is not possible.

The first reason is that the AAIS and its organizers are not speaking or
acting "in good faith": the presence of numerous contradictions and
inconsistencies in the AAIS's own statement regarding its aims, methods,
and broader intellectual project and its misleading use of scholarly terms,
not to mention the fact that it takes positions on politically-charged
topics while declaring itself "non-political", suggests that it is not
being transparent about its scholarly, intellectual, or political
orientation and program. I do not believe that it is possible to have a
rational, intellectual dialogue with organizations or individuals that
attempt to obfuscate their own ideological and intellectual commitments and
that willfully distort their interlocutors' statements and positions.

Similarly, your response to my statement does not engage substantively with
any of the issues I have raised nor does it offer a nuanced reading of my
statements, but rather attempts to invert their meaning through the tired
and rather transparent trick of suggesting that those who point to social
or ideological divisions are in fact trying to create those divisions. In
the US, we are familiar with this hallmark of right-wing propaganda through
examples like "Advocates of racial justice are racists because they always
bring up race," while those in India will be familiar with the right-wing
cliche that "Dalit activists are casteist because they see caste in
everything." Such a bad-faith reading and response to my statements hardly
requires any further analysis. At the same time, your writing on other
public forums
<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/bvparishat/cbthNAM0jNc/ldkQ5bpNBgAJ> about
supposed divisions between "Indian" and "Western" academics reflects that
you do, in fact, believe in this distinction
<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/bvparishat/cbthNAM0jNc/5L8OKuRwBgAJ>,
though you demure from acknowledging it here. Again, it is difficult for me
to see this as a dialogue made in good faith.

The second reason for our anxieties regarding the AAIS is the lack of
respect shown by some (though, it must be said, not all) of its organizers
for basic collegiality and freedom of speech and thought. These individuals
have clearly stated on public forums their preference for a Hindu
majoritarian state over India's current structure of a secular republic,
their belief that secularism produces bad scholarship and that left-leaning
Indian intellectuals are part of a Maoist-led conspiracy to destabilize
India; they have accused their colleagues and their own students of
sedition, and have tried to publicly justify violence against Indian
university faculty and students at the hands of both the state and also
non-state actors like the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad.

Similarly, your response avoids the question of violence and harassment of
these faculty and students by suggesting that a condemnation of violence
against a group must necessarily condemn violence against all groups at all
times in order to be authentic. This is just another example of the
fallacious "whatabout-ism" (e.g. "All lives matter" versus "Black lives
matter") that is the hallmark of right-wing and fascist movements of the
present day. This kind of equivocation reflects such a deep level of
cynicism that I frankly have nothing to say about it.

In summary, until the AAIS and other such organizations demonstrate that
they can act in good faith and with respect for the rights of all members
of the academic community, I cannot see a possibility for fruitful
intellectual engagement with them. Similarly, you and I have such vastly
different notions of what constitutes intellectual honesty and basic human
decency that I do not believe that we can have a productive exchange or
correspondence; therefore I suggest that we end this thread here, unless
anyone else has something to add.

Sincerely,

Tyler Williams

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 5:46 PM Nagaraj Paturi <nagarajpaturi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Correction:
>
> I wanted to say
>
> Baselessly linking the  "harassment" and "violence" against  scholars of
> that political leaning with the organization sending the CFP is what is
> objectionable in that approach.
>
> not
>
> Baselessly linking the  "harassment" and "violence" against only scholars
> of that political leaning with the organization sending the CFP is what is
> objectionable in that approach.
>
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 12:14 PM Nagaraj Paturi <nagarajpaturi at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear Dr Tyler Williams,
>>
>> Your post below has many expressions that deserve response.
>>
>> You accuse AAIS as an organisation that divides scholars studying Indic
>> Civilization into "we Indians" and "they the Western". The very fact that
>> the CFP is shared on this forum where a very big number of western scholars
>> are members and it is inviting all the members to contribute to the
>> conference, shows that no such attitude of only Indian no western
>> participation in the study of Indic Civilization exists in the CFP or in
>> the organization that shared it here.
>>
>> While the CFP is being posted by a scholar dedicated to the study of the
>> discipline of History , you say that the CFP and the organization sharing
>> it are opposed to the discipline of History. " Religious Studies" is a
>> discipline that does not exist in any Indian university and exists only in
>> the west. The person sharing the CFP has a PhD degree in that discipline.
>> You say that the CFP and the organization sharing it are opposed to
>> 'western' disciplines. You say that the organisation represented by the
>> scholar sharing the CFP calls "History", a western discipline and is
>> opposed to it while the fact is that she is a professor of that very
>> discipline History.
>>
>> Your post characterizes and caricatures the Indology list as a forum of
>> left leaning intellectuals who consider only the left leaning/ Marxist
>> Indian scholars as "our Indian colleagues" . I don't think Indology list is
>> such, though, there is a possibility of scholars with such a leaning being
>> in good numbers here.
>>
>> More agonizing is the repeated use of words such as "harassment" and
>> "violence" in your post. You say that this harassment and violence happens
>> to " our" non-Maoist  "  Indian colleagues" because of conflating them with
>> the " Maoist rebels ". You mention the word " Urban Naxals" which is the
>> title of a recent book by Sri Vivek Agnihotri. That book starts with the
>> description of an incident of violence against him. It is not clear whether
>> the violence against him described there was the act of Maoist rebels are
>> the Marxists who are not Maoist rebels but allowed they getting conflated
>> with the Maoist rebels. That apart, such incidents prove who, in Indian
>> academic institutions, for all the past decades after independence,  have
>> been in a position of committing "harassment" and "violence" against those
>> who disagree with them.
>>
>> In any case, singling out the "harassment" and "violence" against only
>> scholars of a certain political leaning and ignoring harassment and
>> violence against scholars of other kind of thinking is blatently visible in
>> your post.  Baselessly linking the  "harassment" and "violence" against
>> only scholars of that political leaning with the organization sending the
>> CFP is what is objectionable in that approach.
>>
>> You bring back the last WSC discussion saying , "in order to suggest that
>> the conflict was between Indians and westerners took on the quite literal
>> form of *not allowing the marginalized women to speak*." after the
>> organisers clarified that violence and not allowing were not facts and the
>> discussion in that regard was closed here after that clarification.
>>
>> Your words
>>
>> "In other words, in making the argument out to be between "we Indians"
>> versus "non-Indians," the organizers elide the fact that South Asian
>> knowledge systems, by and large as they come to us, were produced by elites
>> that were oftentimes involved in marginalizing other groups."
>>
>> while putting into the mouth of the organizers the non-existing attitude
>> of  "the argument  to be between "we Indians" versus "non-Indians," ",
>>
>> makes the perception
>>
>> "that South Asian knowledge systems, by and large as they come to us,
>> were produced by elites that were oftentimes involved in marginalizing
>> other groups"
>>
>> to be a fact.
>>
>> What is the purpose of academic forums and conferences if it is not to
>> discuss such fact-perception differences and such  claims which are
>> contestable and debatable.
>>
>> You list one kind of post-colonial studies
>>
>> which has theorizations such as
>>
>> 1. colonialism (and its epistemological violence) were carried out by
>> European *together with *members of elite South Asian communities,
>>
>>  2) due to that epistemic rupture it is no longer possible to access some
>> kind of "pure" indigenous knowledge or understanding,
>>
>>
>> as THE (only) post-colonial studies paradigm
>>
>> and don't show the diligence that other approaches to post-colonial
>> studies are possible.
>>
>> It does not reflect nuanced understanding and intricate understanding of
>> issues such as Orality and Literacy, history of accessibility of certain
>> kinds of texts in comparison to the other kinds of texts due to the history
>> of European scholarly attention to certain texts in comparison to the other
>> kind of texts and the projection of that colonial and European lack of
>> accessing and lesser prioritization as "silencing" by the authors of the
>> texts accessed by the Europeans.
>>
>> Yes,   "academics have a responsibility to listen to marginalized and
>> formerly silenced voices of history (and the present)"
>>
>> Paradigms alternative to  those of the post-colonial studies listed by
>> you under your # 1 & 2 above,
>>
>> and countering views to the
>>
>> views such as
>>
>> "that South Asian knowledge systems, by and large as they come to us,
>> were produced by elites that were oftentimes involved in marginalizing
>> other groups"
>>
>> that have been made into the global academic mainstream using the global
>> political power
>>
>> are the ones currently globally marginalized  and global academics have
>> responsibility to listen to these alternative views.
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 11:12 AM Tyler Williams via INDOLOGY <
>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear colleagues,
>>>
>>> With all due respect to the colleague who posted this announcement, I
>>> must express serious misgivings about the nature of the proposed
>>> "conference," so serious that I am uncomfortable with the Indology
>>> listserve being used to promote this event.
>>>
>>> There is no delicate way to put it: the AAIS is a Hindutva ideological
>>> project with specious intellectual foundations that is not only hostile to
>>> the disciplines and work of many of the scholars on this list but that also
>>> aligns itself with a politics that encourages harassment and even violence
>>> against our colleagues in India.
>>>
>>> The AAIS, per its website, states the reason for its existence thus:
>>> until now, "Western" disciplines like history, philology, philosophy,
>>> etcetera have been used to understand Indic material and are not sufficient
>>> for the task; therefore a new academic program is necessary that uses
>>> "Indic" knowledge systems to understand Indian material. This well-worn
>>> nativist argument ignores two important things: first, systems of knowledge
>>> like history, philology, philosophy, etcetera were practiced in South Asia
>>> during the precolonial period-- a fact that many scholars of this list
>>> demonstrate in their research-- and second, the fact that many scholars
>>> working in so-called "Western" disciplines (because whether we work in
>>> South Asian or other universities, we all have to work in existing
>>> departments) actually use South Asian knowledge systems in their study of
>>> texts, history, social phenomenon, and the like. The fact that many of us
>>> were trained in South Asian institutions by traditionally-trained
>>> scholars--or by non-Indian scholars well -steeped in things like nyaya,
>>> kavyasastra, itihasa, etc.--should tell one that we do, in fact, take South
>>> Asian knowledge systems seriously.
>>>
>>> The AAIS's charter and mission are, in fact, anti-intellectual and built
>>> on highly dubious arguments. Like several similar organizations that have
>>> sprung up over the last several years with the rise of Hindutva politics,
>>> it appropriates the language of postcolonial studies while totally
>>> rejecting both the theoretical and ethical imperatives of postcolonial
>>> studies. Postcolonial studies argues 1) that colonialism (and its
>>> epistemological violence) were carried out by European *together with*
>>> members of elite South Asian communities, 2) due to that epistemic rupture
>>> it is no longer possible to access some kind of "pure" indigenous knowledge
>>> or understanding, and 3) academics have a responsibility to listen to
>>> marginalized and formerly silenced voices of history (and the present).
>>>
>>> In contrast, the AAIS poses such vague and theoretically problematic
>>> questions as "Would the academic presentation of the Indic civilization be
>>> different if it had been the work of scholars who did not use Western
>>> theories and categories?" and makes anti-historical assertions such as "The
>>> term “Indic” is a reference, not just to India as a modern contemporary
>>> country, but to the civilization that has been known internationally and
>>> historically by the river Indus. It refers to more than 5000 years of a
>>> continuous civilization whose kernel is a unique knowledge system which is
>>> beneficial to all humankind." The anti-historical, anti-intellectual, and
>>> nationalist implications of this should be clear.
>>>
>>> Most worryingly, the AAIS appears to ignore the most fundamental tenets
>>> of postcolonial criticism: to constantly and self-reflexively locate
>>> oneself as a scholar in institutions and dynamics of power. Groups like the
>>> AAIS imply that the only power differential is between "Western" scholars
>>> and "Indian" natives; doing so requires eliding or ignoring the massive and
>>> complicated relationships of power in South Asian societies. In other
>>> words, in making the argument out to be between "we Indians" versus
>>> "non-Indians," the organizers elide the fact that South Asian knowledge
>>> systems, by and large as they come to us, were produced by elites that were
>>> oftentimes involved in marginalizing other groups.
>>>
>>> This dynamic came out nowhere more vividly than on this list (and
>>> others) after the last WSC: those of the nativist Hindutva persuasion
>>> complained that allowing women who had suffered marginalization in the
>>> Sanskrit-learning community to speak about that marginalization was
>>> anti-Indian and part of a global conspiracy to malign the Indian nation. In
>>> this case, suppressing dissent *within* the Indian community in order
>>> to suggest that the conflict was between Indians and westerners took on the
>>> quite literal form of *not allowing the marginalized women to speak*.
>>>
>>> Finally-- and I realize the seriousness of this claim-- the AAIS and
>>> similar organizations ally with a politics that has encouraged the
>>> marginalization, harassment, and even violence against our colleagues in
>>> India, including colleagues on this list. The AAIS website specifically
>>> singles out "Marxism" as one of the evils of "Western" scholarship; this is
>>> (and has been) used as a dogwhistle to attack any left-leaning (or even
>>> centrist) scholars working in India. A few of the AAIS board members
>>> themselves have repeated and amplified calls for rooting out "urban
>>> Naxals," a term that conflates left-leaning academics with Maoist rebels in
>>> India. We are all only too aware of the real danger this kind of politics
>>> poses for the lives and livelihoods of Indian colleagues.
>>>
>>> I apologize for using the space of the listserve for a polemic; I am
>>> just tired of seeing the scholarly forum which Dominik and others have
>>> worked so hard to build used for a purpose that is directly hostile to the
>>> work of so many of us. The AAIS presents itself as a serious, progressive
>>> voice; I am afraid that it is anything but.
>>>
>>> Respectfully,
>>>
>>> Tyler Williams
>>> University of Chicago
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 7:30 AM Lavanya Vemsani via INDOLOGY <
>>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello All,
>>>> Attached below is the CFP for AAIS conference. Please plan to join us
>>>> for the First Annual Conference.
>>>> Please circulate the CFP widely.
>>>> Thank you.
>>>> Lavanya
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Call for Papers for the Inaugural Conference of
>>>>
>>>> American Academy of Indic Studies
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The American Academy Of Indic Studies (AAIS) is a scholarly,
>>>> non-political, non-religious, and non-profit academy for scholars and
>>>> students interested in Indic civilization. We work with the objective to
>>>> promote study and research of Indic Civilization in Academia. More info at
>>>> www.AAIndicStudies.org <http://www.aaindicstudies.org>
>>>>
>>>> For its inaugural conference, AAIS invites proposals for scholarly
>>>> presentations on the issues of ‘Indic Civilization and Postcolonialism’. We
>>>> invite proposals from a broad category of academic disciplines to submit
>>>> their research in the processes and endeavors of postcolonialism of Indic
>>>> wisdom and traditions.
>>>>
>>>> The objective of this conference is to explore the influences of the
>>>> ‘Occident’ and ‘Modernity’ on the Indic intellectual culture and society at
>>>> large. It will be highly valuable to evaluate those influences and
>>>> investigate attempts towards drafting a long term agenda towards
>>>> postcolonialism. An inquiry into the structural, procedural, or attitudinal
>>>> obstacles to better incorporate postcolonialism is the prime intent under
>>>> consideration. The plan is to appraise what you think would be the ideal
>>>> arrangement for systematic investigation, publication, and dialogue over
>>>> the coming decade, in order to involve mainstream academia in the process
>>>> of postcolonialism.
>>>>
>>>> The deadline for abstract submissions is Oct 15th
>>>>
>>>> Conference Date: Feb 20-22, 2020
>>>>
>>>> Conference Venue: Dallas, Texas in affiliation with
>>>> https://www.naaas.org
>>>>
>>>> Conference Proceedings: To be announced.
>>>>
>>>> *Lavanya Vemsani*
>>>> Ph.D (History) Ph.D. (Religious Studies)
>>>> Professor, Dept. of Social Sciences
>>>> Shawnee State University
>>>> President, *Ohio Academy of History *
>>>> Co-founder, *American Academy of Indic Studies *
>>>> Editor-in-Chief
>>>> *American Journal of Indic Studies*
>>>> Managing Editor
>>>> *International Journal of Indic Religions *
>>>> *Associate Editor *
>>>> *-Canadian Journal of History *
>>>> *-Air Force Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs*
>>>> http://www.shawnee.edu/academics/social-sciences/faculty/lvemsani.aspx
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> INDOLOGY mailing list
>>>> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
>>>> indology-owner at list.indology.info (messages to the list's managing
>>>> committee)
>>>> http://listinfo.indology.info (where you can change your list options
>>>> or unsubscribe)
>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> INDOLOGY mailing list
>>> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
>>> indology-owner at list.indology.info (messages to the list's managing
>>> committee)
>>> http://listinfo.indology.info (where you can change your list options
>>> or unsubscribe)
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Nagaraj Paturi
>>
>> Hyderabad, Telangana, INDIA.
>>
>>
>> Director,  Inter-Gurukula-University Centre for Indic Knowledge Systems.
>> BoS, MIT School of Vedic Sciences, Pune, Maharashtra
>>
>> BoS, Chinmaya Vishwavidyapeeth, Veliyanad, Kerala
>>
>> Former Senior Professor of Cultural Studies
>>
>> FLAME School of Communication and FLAME School of  Liberal Education,
>>
>> (Pune, Maharashtra, INDIA )
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Nagaraj Paturi
>
> Hyderabad, Telangana, INDIA.
>
>
> Director,  Inter-Gurukula-University Centre for Indic Knowledge Systems.
> BoS, MIT School of Vedic Sciences, Pune, Maharashtra
>
> BoS, Chinmaya Vishwavidyapeeth, Veliyanad, Kerala
>
> Former Senior Professor of Cultural Studies
>
> FLAME School of Communication and FLAME School of  Liberal Education,
>
> (Pune, Maharashtra, INDIA )
>
>
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20190626/51f8fc38/attachment.htm>