The recent attacks by self-styled “Indian” scholars on Professor Sheldon Pollock further heightens a systematic campaign to vilify any type of serious academic investigation of India’s pasts. This is a small-minded and parochial effort at best, but more darkly, an attempt to reorient any permissible interpretation of South Asian history towards serving a deeply conservative Hindutva agenda. 

The study of early texts and artefacts originating in the subcontinent is not the exclusive privilege of ethnic Indians, any more than the study of classical Rome or Greece ‘belongs’ only to modern Italians and Greeks. Indeed, if scholarship of these latter domains had been so limited, humanity as a whole might have lost extensive literary and cultural treasures ranging from Aeschylus to Lucretius to the dustbin of history. Efforts such as the Murty Classical Library require disinterested and meticulous scholarship to rediscover similar literary assets and make them available to a wider global audience. They must not be left to the mischievous interpretation of ideologues.

We note also that Prof Pollock has been speciously misquoted. For instance, please see:

1. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1160302/jsp/frontpage/story_72368.jsp#.VtZhopN96T8

2. http://thewire.in/2016/03/02/what-the-petition-against-the-sanskritist-sheldon-pollock-is-really-about-23357/

3. "This is the conviction that animates this book: that the literatures of South Asia constitute one of the great achievements of human creativity.  In their antiquity, continuity, and multicultural complexity combined, they are unmatched in world literary history and unrivaled in the resources they offer for understanding the development of expressive language and imagination over time and in relation to larger orders of culture, society, and polity."

Pollock (2003): Literary Cultures in History, University of California Press, Page 2.

We urge scholars everywhere to support Prof Pollock’s continued role as curator of these materials, if only because he has spent decades of painstaking and careful research into the enormous variety of literary cultures in India’s long history and has surely earned the right to direct an academically rigorous effort to build the library.

Sudhir Chella Rajan, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras

Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras

Kalpana Karunakaran, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras

Milind Brahme, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras

Ajit Menon, MIDS, Chennai

C. Lakshmanan, MIDS, Chennai

S. Anandhi, MIDS, Chennai

Kripa Ananthpur, MIDS, Chennai

D. Jayaraj, MIDS, Chennai

Vijaybaskar, MIDS, Chennai

A. Mangai, Chennai

PK Abdul Rahiman, Madras University, Chennai

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