Intellectually, Matthew is of course perfectly right, and puts this larger point succinctly.
The institutional situation is sadly more complicated. Traditionally trained scholars, both within and outside the Indian university system, are increasingly concerned that they can’t always tell what part of their research, pursued in the innocence of
their traditional methods, family traditions, and intellectual concerns, might fall foul of various activists. But they are also pragmatically aware of two forces that are more difficult to work around. One is that, in a context where public funding has traditionally
flowed only according to political calculations and not support of the humanities, even the occasional rhetoric of support for the cultures of Sanskritic scholarship seems appealing. The other is that, with the reality of public funding as remote as ever,
any future support for their scholarship has to come from private sources. And one can see what that implies: they have to play a very careful game in which they must constantly negotiate with private donors (some traditional patrons, others from the new dispensation)
in an oblique way over what is studied and how.
The real line of pressure in the collaboration between academics in the global West and traditional scholars (in both Indian universities and other institutions) is over the livelihood and future of the latter. I would urge those of us - the majority on
this list - who are of the former category, to always keep in mind the depth and scope of the challenges faced by the latter, even when it occasionally appears as if ideology (rather than livelihood) is the sticking point. This is made trickier still by the
tensions within India itself between those with a background in contemporary social sciences, whose everyday research is obviously under attack and those in Indological areas of scholarship who are constantly trying to find a way of working in the complex
situation I outlined above. There is a great deal more misunderstanding and lack of cooperation than might help the common cause of scholarship in India, when social scientists have a deep distrust of the larger Sanskritic inheritance (for reasons we don’t
need to go into here), and traditionally-trained scholars see their deeper horizons fundamentally questioned by a modernist presentism.
Best,
Ram
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy
Lancaster University
From: INDOLOGY [indology-bounces@list.indology.info] on behalf of Jesse Knutson [jknutson@hawaii.edu]
Sent: Friday, August 05, 2016 10:42 AM
To: Greg Bailey
Cc: Dominik Wujastyk; Indology List
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] reviews of Malhotra's books
Indeed. Brilliant and succinct. I think this could be the perfect basis for a very powerful collective response to the Hindu nationalist attack on scholarship. Best,J