Here is a video of a talk by the author of the calendar, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_EZOgvZZQs.
Regards,
Palaniappan
From: INDOLOGY <indology-bounces@list.indology.info> on behalf of Indology List <indology@list.indology.info>
Reply-To: Dean Michael Anderson <eastwestcultural@yahoo.com>
Date: Tuesday, January 4, 2022 at 3:15 AM
To: "Kapstein, Matthew" <mkapstei@uchicago.edu>, Alex Watson <alex.watson@ashoka.edu.in>
Cc: Indology List <indology@list.indology.info>
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] "The Age of the Unicorn, Brought to You by IIT Kharagpur"
Thanks for posting this. I'd be interested if anything more develops in this area.
Best,
Dean
On Tuesday, January 4, 2022, 01:53:03 PM GMT+5:30, Alex Watson via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:
On this topic, I'm forwarding a mass email that was sent 10 days ago to a number of faculty members in History and Philosophy departments in India.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
Date: Sun, Dec 26, 2021 at 9:54 PM
Subject: Revisiting Vishwaguru Bharatvarsha in IIT Kharagpur's 2022 Calendar
To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing this letter as I believe it is the most I can do, in the face of what is happening.
Attached is the 2022 calendar for IIT Kharagpur. Kindly take a look at it.
I am not a historian, merely an amateur, and hence I cannot satisfactorily provide a rebuttal to the 'reinterpretations' of Indian history.
What shocks me is how a premier scientific institution of India can allow for such a selective reading of history, which absolutely flies in the face of scientific rigour, and present a racially/nationally self-flattering hypothesis . In these days, racial pride and national pride have become one and the same (India 'is an ancient race', after all).
By all means, dispel eurocentric readings of history. I am all for presenting a view of history where the indigenous knowledge systems of different civilizations are studied on their own merits and not as appendices to western thought.
But do we need to supplant western supremacist bias with Indian supremacist bias? This calendar seems to assume that the current consensus amongst historians is that Aryans plundered their way into the country by hacking away at Dravidians. That all current historians, barring those associated to Vidya Bharati / Sewa Bharati (which are absolutely NOT, IN ANY WAY, associated to RSS or BJP), have a view of Indian history steeped in cultural inferiority, actively crafted by jealous westerners to chip away our collective pride.
What a convenient strawman to attack current historians, who subscribe to nothing of the sort.
Something tells me that the majority of historians in India will not respond to this calendar either. Pardon me for saying this, but I have seen a tendency in 'career experts' - experts and authorities in different subjects, be it history or science - to pass off an opportunity to rise to an occasion which needed them to act, by pretending that they are holding back because of some virtue like 'staying focused' or 'being patient' - unless, of course, it is institutional, can be mentioned on the CV and faculty page, and pushes them up the career ladder. Then they do it because 'they love/care about the subject'.
This calendar assumes three things -
Using the same kind of logic used in that calendar, I can also provide very convincing interpretations, weaving together real archaeological evidence, of the literal existence of a 'now extinct' creature Hydra that the Greek hero Hercules fought. In fact, I can even prove that Hercules is just the Greek name for Krishna, and Hydra was just Kaliya Nag whom Krishna defeated ! Or that an Egyptian god of the dead called Anubis does greet you after you die - and is none other than Yamdev, who also tested Yudhisthira ! Or a half-man-half-bull monster created using 'ancient gene therapy' which is remembered as the Minotaur of Crete (using technology invented by Shiva to transplant Ganesha's head). I could also, very easily, using selective evidence, prove that the Earth is actually only 6000 years old as the Bible says, and humans and dinosaurs lived together - indeed there are entire schools runs by people who believe this Biblical nonsense in the US, just as we believe Brahminical rationalizations.
Just as European scholars selectively used Greek and Roman history to prove a view of Western superiority centuries ago, today we are selectively using Indian history to prove a view of Eastern superiority. We are fighting racial supremacy with racial supremacy.
We seem to believe that India has had a patent on philosophical and spiritual thought since time immemorial - why stop at 7000 BCE? Perhaps we were the Vishwa-Guru since Treta Yuga (2 million years ago) when even homo sapiens did not exist. Perhaps Ayodhya palace was built by Homo Erectus. Or is that too offensive to suggest? Or maybe homo sapiens did indeed exist 2 million years ago, but the west conspired to hide the fact, so that India never realized how it invented palace-building and governance. After all, even the Allahabad High Court had once proclaimed that 'Ayodhya temple was probably built by Lord Rama 9 million years ago'.
Should we start revisiting human evolution to accommodate the fact that the Treta-Yuga ended millions of years ago? After all, this calendar seems to treat the Vedas as an infallible source composed by rishis who had transcended all fallibilities in human judgement.
Maybe Dashavatar are nothing but a mapping of the different evolutionary stages of humans ! Think about it ! Matsya (fish), Kurma (tortoise), Varaha (warthog), Vamana (Homo Erectus ???), Narasimha (Neanderthal ???) - it is evident how this perspective has been suppressed by bolshevik-leaning apparatchiks of Nehru, Indira and the current roster of urban naxals to keep Indian pride from realizing itself !!!
Why not go one step further and say that Mount Meru really is the center of the world as the Vedas say, and Mt. Everest is a colonial myth? Or better yet, say that Meru was the ancient name of Everest?
Should we ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of genetic studies point to the fact that there was indeed several waves of migration of Aryan tribes into the Indian subcontinent - a MIGRATION which these neo-racialists posit as a hypothesis of 'INVASION' in order to discredit it - and the fact that the Indus Valley used no language remotely similar to Sanskrit? Or dismiss the majority of the archaeological evidence, amongst which a few pieces suggest an alternate hypothesis which these neo-racialists so desperately cling to? Or should we believe that the first language to have developed on Earth was Sanskrit, and all other languages are but inferior copies of it?
This new school of 'Indian Knowledge Systems' seems to be hell bent on ignoring all evidence that presents a more sober picture of history, and crafting a self-glorifying picture of eternal nationhood based on the idea that all good on Earth came from India, from kindness to animals to brushing one's teeth to philanthropy.
This is sad, because I really am an enthusiast of Indian philosophy - actual ancient Indian philosophy, not the neo-vedantist reinterpretations of wishful thinkers, conveniently used to bolster the idea of an ancient enlightened civilization as the bedrock of Indian nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, to counter a supremacist, patronizing British imperialism. There really was a need to do away with Eurocentric readings of history.
If only we had a school who studied Indian scholarly traditions with rigour and humanist sentiments, and not the humanist posings of Vedic platitudes of 'vasudhaiva kutumbakam' and 'tat tvam asi' - every religion has scores of proverbs attesting to their humanistic, universalistic and inclusivistic credentials. These are often written by the very people least likely to be inclusive in their behaviour - like my Gandhian, Arya Samaji grandfather who threw a fit when he realized that his daughter's boyfriend was not a Brahman, or my bleeding heart left-leaning IAS officer uncle who mutters 'bloody sepoy' when his uniformed valet fails to bring him his cup of coffee on time.
To use rapturous, generous proverbs, adages and mantras to blind one to reasonable skepticism is insulting to one's intelligence, especially if the person hails from IIT.
Unfortunately, we seem to have responded to Western supremacist history of the world (which has been in decline for decades now, and modern historians are quite aware of eurocentric bias) with the Indian supremacist history of the world.
This letter is what I could do to respond to this troubling development in Indian academia. What will you do? Probably nothing. After all, it takes the ability to prioritize things which are s̶e̶l̶f̶i̶s̶h̶ practical to defeat thousands of other more foolishly idealistic people to get into an IIT, either as a professor or a student. You've got tenure, grants and PhD students. Thats all that matters.
Whatever,
Some Guy Whose Insolence Will Probably Vex You More Than The Subject of this Letter
On Tue, Jan 4, 2022 at 1:31 PM Matthew Kapstein via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote: