From: Radha Rajan
Academe as battleground – Part 1
Witzel and Clooney expose Indian follies and Indian vanities
Witzel and Clooney come and go and their so-called conferences, lectures and discussion meetings in India have exposed Indian academe's vanities and follies. Their visits have their uses if only because they emphasized the known but rarely accepted limitations of the average Indian/Hindu intellectual that sees but has not been trained to decode what he sees into productive intelligence or information. This failure to see and decode is specific to the political objectives of Nehruvian-secular Indian academe and its more affluent master, American and European academe.
Like all invasions, foreign academic invasion into our sacred portals has been made possible by the active collaboration of our own scholars who are either partners and/or beneficiaries of their foreign patrons or just plain stupid; their stupidity fired by nothing more than arrogant presumptions of their own greatness and infallibility. Tamil and Sanskrit scholars, scholars of epigraphy and linguistics, scholars of Srivaishnavism and Saiva-Siddhanta and big and small historians guilty of encouraging and entertaining foreign merchants of Abrahamic religions masquerading as scholars in various disciplines, exemplify the latter.
Western universities and their political cousins, the strategic affairs think-tanks have been transformed into battlegrounds where issues of nationhood and nationalism of former colonies of White Christendom are raised, discussed and disposed of ex-parte, as is known in legal terminology. This is yet to be understood by Indian scholars who continue to live and cogitate within sequestered campuses; and for those that do step out, a beguiling foreign finger to hold on to is ready and waiting. Soon after they step out, the enticing finger puts a ring around their noses; but by then, it is too late for any kind of independent and self-willed intellectual mobility.
That ideas of our nation, nationhood and nationalism are being settled by foreigners and that such an academic discourse constitutes the basis not only for the systemic de-Hinduising mission of our nation by Nehruvian-secular polity but also for all separatist, sub-national assertions or insurgent movements inside our country has not even occurred to them. Some knowledge of the forces influencing geo-political trends is as mandatory for scholars as computer literacy, if only to train them to see the minefields and pitfalls of contemporary academe.
Compulsions of western academe
The end of colonialism marked the end of one significant phase in world history just as post-colonial assertion of old national identities marked the beginning of another phase which is still unfolding and evolving. Such an assertion threatened to cement caste, clan and tribal identities which had suffered erosion under White Christian colonial scholarship, academe and education system. This threat caused western academe's transformation from making brazen interventions through motivated scholarship to manipulate the Indian mind into bulldozing their way into the sacred portals of Hindu religion and its institutions.
Roberto di Nobili, GU Pope, Max Mueller, Macaulay, Eugene Irschick, Michael Witzel, Francis Clooney and several others – scholars all, whose scholarship has provided grist for the profitable mill of subaltern studies, sub-national identities, separatism and de-Hinduising polity. The success of their mission to subvert the nationhood of this Hindu nation through bogus scholarship was hinged to the greed, self-interest and downright villainy of their Indian minions.
At the core of western academe's agenda for India is the intent to de-link the basis of nationhood of India's majority populace from the territory of the nation. This they have attempted to do through an elaborate intellectual charade which has sought refuge in the motivated campaign that there is a multi-disciplinary approach now to history writing. The end result of the collective efforts of western academe and its Indian minions has been to make the following astounding claims –
- We know that Hindus constitute the majority populace of this country and that Hindus cite the Rg.Veda as the fountainhead of their religion/dharma/way of life; we assert that the Rg. Veda was not born on this soil
- We know that the Brahmins are the repositories of all Vedic knowledge but we contend that the Brahmins are the nomads from Central Asia who brought the Rg. Veda into this country; the Brahmins are the Aryans who invaded/migrated into this country from Central Asia; the corollary is that the non-Brahmin Tamils are the Dravidians on whom this Brahminical religion was imposed
- The second corollary is that as long as the politics of the Aryan Invasion Theory is yielding political returns we will ignore the incongruity of Kanda/Muruga, the Tamil God being born to Aryan alien Parent-Gods; according to Dravidian political theory the older brother of the Tamil God is also an alien Aryan import from North-India
- It is our contention that just as the roots of the Muslim religion lie outside this country's borders, just as the roots of the Christian religion lie outside this country's borders, just so do the roots of the Hindu religion lie outside the country's borders
- We contend therefore that Hindus cannot claim this territory to be their own. Hinduism is as alien to this soil as Islam and Christianity
- Hindus cannot claim that the Indus civilization was Vedic civilization because we do not know if the Indus script is Sanskrit; we will never accept any decoding of the script by Hindu scholars which even remotely implies that the people of the Indus civilization were Vedic Hindus; and we will continue to mock and disparage all attempts to hyphenate Saraswati to Indus
- We know that Rg.Vedic Sanskrit is different from Kalidasa's Sanskrit; but we will never allow any pretentious Hindu to even breathe that perhaps the Indus script may well be either an even earlier Sanskrit or the earliest script of Rg. Vedic Sanskrit
- We the monopoly-holders of Indian history haven't conclusively decoded the script but considering the fact that the Rg. Veda was brought into this country by wandering nomads, we are certain that the script can at best speak only of mundane, commonplace things – maybe of goats and wives
- And to nail any nascent lie that the Indus-Saraswati civilization was Vedic, let us tell you that no horse bone has been excavated from the sites and what you show us as horse bones are actually donkey bones. Let us reiterate, until the nomadic Aryans from Central Asia brought the horse, Sanskrit and Rg. Veda all together with them when they invaded India, you had no horses, only donkeys. The Rg. Veda speaks of horses and so we declare triumphantly that the people of the Indus-Saraswati civilization, which had no horses, only donkeys, and which we pre-date to the Rg. Veda, preceded the Hindus
- Ergo, Indus-Saraswati sites which belong to this soil are not Vedic, their language is not Sanskrit and the language, whatever else it may speak of certainly cannot speak of high philosophy, high astronomy or high mathematics
- They cannot speak of exalted things associated with advanced civilizations because we at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard have settled it as a given that only settled societies practicing agriculture, not wandering nomads, can have civilization. It is completely besides the point that today we refer to settled societies doing agricultural, derogatorily as the Third World
- You Hindus take unjustifiable pride for the wealth of exalted knowledge contained in the Rg. Veda; the truth is these Aryan nomads, the later-day Brahmins of settled Hindu society actually picked up all astronomy, mathematics and philosophy along the way as they were nomading across Egypt, Greece, Arabia and the middle and far-east before they thundered into India on horses they bought through barter in Arabia
- Therefore there were perhaps one, two or more civilizations on this soil before the nomads decided to settle down and found the Hindu Indus-Saraswati civilization. We can tell you to the second when the Central Asian nomads charged into this country on their chargers from carbon-dating the Sanskrit language of the different books of the Rg. Veda
- Speaking of the different books of the Rg. Veda, we declare the chronology to be all wrong. We so declare from the manner by which the Central Asian nomads evolved from possessing just one monosyllable to invoke the divine, to call the wife and also the goat, to coining one word per object. We can therefore tell you that Book 1 of the Rg. Veda comes towards the end of the Vedic age (the Hindus had 3 words by then for the divine, the wife and the goat) while it is actually Book 8 which is the early stage (because the Hindus used 'om' for the divine, goat and wife) and Book 32 which you, if you knew your numbers correctly, you would expect to belong to the last stage, is actually the middle-stage (because by then while 'om' meant only the divine, the Hindus still used the same word for wife and goat)
- We are using anthropology, archeology, epigraphy, subaltern history and philology to prove that Veda Vyasa didn't know how to count and did not know chronology when he decided to give up horse-riding and nomading to sit down to redact the Rg. Veda; besides, Veda Vyasa had no sense of history because what he wrote, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford cannot accept to be history. We are also using social and political science to prove that because Rg. Vedic women sang off-key their men did not permit them to sing the Vedas. They did one better – they refused to teach them the Vedas so that Hindu women could never chant them even when feminists tempted them and goaded them to sing the vedas. Modern-day male chauvinism was undoubtedly inspired by Rg. Vedic Brahmins (To be continued)
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