[INDOLOGY] Comparison of Brahmins (and their cultural context) with Nazis (and their cultural context)? both inappropriate and inapt

Sun May 9 16:12:12 UTC 2021

Dear Artur,

I would say... I don't know? Most Vedic ritual activities depict themselves
as being ideally patronized by a materially-wealthy financiers or hoping
for that (and despising stingy ones). The ritual moment is a kind of public
moment when many clans are together and so the proto-śrauta system, I see,
as a kind of inter-clan negotiation one
which can produce a coalition, a detente to hostilities, as well as
consecration, marriage, funerary activities. So the focus is really on the
poetic-priestly tradition and these patrons as the audience. Not much
mention of cities, urban life, etc. but it's also not necessarily the case
that a clan that patronized Vedic ritual
could not be construed through the categories of "farmers, craftsmen,
merchants" in addition to what we expect (that is ranchers). I would say
the texts care little for this kind of vision of society, and rather are
focused on a society made of  generous and hospitable patrons (as opposed
to stingy ones), and those in our coalition (as opposed to
enemies/outsiders). But on urban life in the Vedas proper I have heard a
vast silence---and that makes sense because cities were not "on the ritual
ground" and nearly everything topical and of concern to the Vedas is
happening on the ritual ground or is embedded in an aetiological narrative
justifying something happening on the ritual ground. That does not mean
that they didn't know about cities, but in my published work I don't write
about urban life either because it is not the topic at hand (as I imagine
Buddhist dhāraṇīs, for instance, don't have much to say about urban
logistics either...). In which case, we wouldn't speak of "Vedic
civilization" either, we would speak of Vedic "ceremony-networks" from
which perhaps we can infer things about the historical political
organizations that employed them.

On the other hand, by this description I am inherently assuming Vedic
tradition is something that has to do with the "Vedic period" and "the
Vedas," there are of course much later (pre/post Classical) texts that
would claim the mantle of the Vedic tradition that *may* have a good deal
to say about urban life, but if so I am ignorant of them currently and
would love to know more.

Best,
Caley

On Sun, May 9, 2021 at 11:49 AM Artur Karp <karp at uw.edu.pl> wrote:

> Tak.
>
> A few questions, perhaps simplistic, but nevertheless necessary.
>
> Did something described as "Indian civilization" actually exist (Caley:  <I
> am not sure if we should continue to call it "Vedic civilization" at that
> point.>).
>
> If so - then when, where, in what forms?
>
> Did farmers, craftsmen, merchants fully participate in it?
>
> Were the religious messages preserved in the Vedic texts accessible to
> them linguistically - and conceptually?
>
> Were early urban organisms administered by reference to Vedic legal
> formulas, including, but not limited to, the cleaning up of urban spaces of
> refuse, of animal and human excrement? Including taxation?
>
> I would like to know where in the Vedic tradition I could find these kinds
> of formulas. I see them in the Buddhist tradition, clearly - but in the
> Vedic tradition?
>
> Best,
>
> Artur
>
>
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>
> niedz., 9 maj 2021 o 16:51 Caley Smith via INDOLOGY <
> indology at list.indology.info> napisał(a):
>
>> Dear Jan,
>>
>> Thank you for making this PDF available, I have a hard copy but it's
>> always useful to have a digital one too.
>>
>> I too feel the comparison is fraught, please correct me if my musings are
>> completely wrong, but it seems to narrowly define Nazism as a kind of
>> anti-urban sentiment, and I don't think that is the case at all. Rather,
>> the Nazis who patronized the House of German Art were *urban*! We know
>> of many lyric poetic traditions (from the Sangam to the troubadours of
>> Provençe) who loved to represent the bucolic scene in their verbal art yet
>> that art was performed at a courtly non-rural setting. So are all these
>> "anti-urban" and thus some species of Nazism? Hardly. There is a much more
>> immediate reason why urban Nazis might have preferred landscapes, namely
>> they figured themselves to be natural inherent landlords of the country
>> (the Volk) and thus the sole owners/stakeholders of the government.
>> Everyone else is either an outsider or a service tenant in this model, no?
>> Urbanites viewing scenes of ruralia seems to me to be more about
>> constructing a vision of themselves as these landlords, like the
>> slave-owning plantation owners in the US that Hitler admired (and of course
>> a feature of classical liberalism is that only landed gentry can vote, that
>> is "own" the govt; "manifest destiny" easily becomes the quest for
>> Lebensraum). In other words, the museum becomes a way for urban Nazis to
>> conceive of their place in their domain.
>>
>> And maybe this isn't the whole story, but it seems to be radically
>> different from the middle (even late) Vedic situation, which derives
>> directly from a real pastoral/horticultural mode of subsistence in which
>> pasturage/fields are not part of self-idealization but actually the basis
>> of food production. The elaborate inter-clan hospitality rituals of the
>> Vedas speaks more to an anxiety of the fragile nature of that existence and
>> the tenuous balance of power. Rather than anti-urban, I imagine that urban
>> centers were simply irrelevant to Vedic civilization at first, their more
>> immediate concerns were inter-clan politics on the ground. Now,
>> post-Alexander and post-Aśoka we may have a very different story but I am
>> not sure if we should continue to call it "Vedic civilization" at that
>> point. And if we are talking about post-Alexander/post-Aśoka then we are
>> talking about a radically different community, arguably traumatized, and
>> newly reactionary. I think that's a very different and new set of aesthetic
>> commitments and social concerns guiding the proto-Dharma tradition than
>> that of the middle/late Vedic period proper.
>>
>> Perhaps there is something in the comparison I have completely
>> misunderstood, and if so mea culpa, but otherwise I don't get it.
>>
>> Best,
>> Caley
>>
>> On Sun, May 9, 2021 at 9:59 AM Jan E.M. Houben via INDOLOGY <
>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear All,
>>> A fascinating symposium on "Greater Magadha" is at present taking place
>>> at Edmonton (Alberta), Canada, and on account of the ongoing epidemic it is
>>> entirely online: the announcement (http://eventleaf.com/GreaterMagadha)
>>> is accessible on several lists.
>>> In a brief presentation and subsequent discussion of his theory at the
>>> beginning of this symposium -- a detailed argument and extensive references
>>> to pieces of evidence for this stimulating and well-researched theory is
>>> found in his *Greater Magadha: Studies in the culture of early India* (Leiden
>>> 2007) --   Johannes Bronkhorst referred briefly to his comparison between
>>> Brahmins (and their cultural context) and the German Nazis (and their
>>> cultural context). On this specific reference by Johannes Bronkhorst during
>>> the symposium, I posed a question in the special section set up by the
>>> organizers of the conference: "Questions and answers will be conducted over
>>> a separate service, sli.do."
>>> Since my question, although it received several "upvotes", did not pass
>>> the censorship of the anonymous "moderator" of the online questions -- who
>>> wrote to me "3 days ago (only visible to you) There was no such comparison"
>>> -- it would be useful to pose the question in other fora such as this
>>> Indology List.
>>> Those familiar with the work and especially the *Greater Magadha* book
>>> of Johannes Bronkhorst -- this apparently does not include the anonymous
>>> moderator of the Questions section of the symposium -- will have
>>> immediately recognized that the remark by Johannes Bronkhorst refers to pp.
>>> 251-252 of *Greater Magadha* (and similar passages elsewhere), where we
>>> read:
>>>
>>> "when it came in contact with cities, Vedic civilization did not like
>>> them.
>>> ...
>>> It is hard to resist the temptation of a comparison with the Third Reich.
>>> Among the hundreds of paintings brought together in the House of German
>>> Art
>>> in Munich, opened by Hitler in 1937, not a single canvas depicted urban
>>> and
>>> industrial life (Watson, 2004: 311-312)."
>>>
>>> The comparison is both inappropriate and inapt, especially since a very
>>> different analysis of the situation of the community of practicing Brahmins
>>> in ancient India is possible, for instance the one proposed by me in:
>>>
>>> “From Fuzzy-Edged ‘Family-Veda’ to the Canonical Śākhas of the
>>> Catur-Veda: Structures and Tangible Traces.” In: *Vedic Śākhās: Past,
>>> Present, Future. Proceedings of the Fifth International Vedic Workshop,
>>> Bucharest* 2011, ed. by J.E.M. Houben, J. Rotaru and M. Witzel, p.
>>> 159-192. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University, 2016.
>>>
>>> As the book is at present no more available but will soon again be
>>> available in a new edition, I have made this study *temporarily* accessible
>>> on my Academia.edu page.
>>>
>>> The main principles followed in this study to explain the situation of
>>> the community of practicing Brahmins in ancient India are (1) "natural
>>> selection" in the transmission of knowledge through any current medium of
>>> transmission (at first exclusively ritual, next ritual plus written texts,
>>> inscriptions and manuscripts -- much later printing is added and at present
>>> the internet...): see e.g. Houben 2001; (2) ritual in the context of an
>>> *evolving* economical and ecological world: see Houben 2019 (see also:
>>> Gadgil and Guha, *This Fissured Land: an Ecological History of India*,
>>> 1992 and Perennials edition 2013).
>>> N.B. Both Houben 2001:
>>> “’Verschriftlichung' and the relation between the *pramāṇa*s in the
>>> history of Sāṁkhya.” *Études de Lettres* 2001.3: *La rationalité en
>>> Asie / Rationality in Asia*, ed. by J. Bronkhorst: 165-194.
>>> and Houben 2019:
>>> “Ecology of Ritual Innovation in Ancient India: Textual and Contextual
>>> Evidence.” [NB: partly comparing and contrasting Vedic and ancient Iranian
>>> ritual.] In: *Self, Sacrifice, and Cosmos: Vedic Thought, Ritual, and
>>> Philosophy. Essays in Honor of Professor Ganesh Umakant Thite’s
>>> Contribution to Vedic Studies*, ed. by Lauren M. Bausch, pp. 182-210
>>> (References to this article integrated in id., “Bibliography,” pp.
>>> 223-238.) Delhi: Primus Books
>>> are now accessible on my Academia.edu page.
>>>
>>> I hope and expect the issue will lead to further fruitful discussions.
>>>
>>> All best, Jan Houben
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> *Jan E.M. Houben*
>>>
>>> Directeur d'Études, Professor of South Asian History and Philology
>>>
>>> *Sources et histoire de la tradition sanskrite*
>>>
>>> École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE, Paris Sciences et Lettres)
>>>
>>> *Sciences historiques et philologiques *
>>>
>>> Groupe de recherches en études indiennes (EA 2120)
>>>
>>> *johannes.houben [at] ephe.psl.eu <johannes.houben at ephe.psl.eu>*
>>>
>>> *https://ephe-sorbonne.academia.edu/JanEMHouben
>>> <https://ephe-sorbonne.academia.edu/JanEMHouben>*
>>>
>>> *https://www.classicalindia.info* <https://www.classicalindia.info>
>>>
>>> LabEx Hastec OS 2021 -- *L'Inde Classique* augmentée: construction,
>>> transmission
>>>
>>> et transformations d'un savoir scientifique
>>>
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