HOW FREE ARE WE?

Subject:	HOW FREE ARE WE?
Date:	Sat, 30 Jan 2010 03:46:40 GMT

HOW FREE ARE WE?

Forwarded mesage from J. L.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Jakob de Roover makes some excellent points here. The contrast is
quite dramatic with the study of other traditions, in which the
voices of scholar-practitioners are welcome, or even dominant
(Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam). To self-identify as Hindu
seems to require the disclaimer that one does not endorse Hindutva.
Also, the term Hindutva is thrown around to such a degree that it is
not even clear what it means. One sometimes suspects that it is
simply a way to silence someone whose representation of Hinduism one
does not like. I cannot think of another tradition whose academic
study is so dominated by those whose philosophical commitments are at
odds with the tradition itself, and who are so invested in
controlling its representation so as to avoid its being shown in an
appealing light.

End of forwarded message from J. L.

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Forwarded mesage from S. V.

Friday, January 29, 2010

The rise of Hindutva has also determined the current state of affairs
in the American study of India and Hinduism. Here, the implicit
censorship takes the form of a climate of fear: the fear to be
branded 'Hindutva'. There are three central factors in US society
that have contributed to this pernicious climate. One is the large-
scale migration of highly-educated Indians into the US over the last
few decades. Affluent Hindu-Americans have been shocked by what the
American schools teach their children about 'Hinduism' and India.
Turning to the universities, they discovered that these often tell
the same story, albeit with more theoretical sophistication. Many
Hindu-Americans are highly successful in engineering, business or
other professions; many also sympathize at some level with Hindu
nationalism. Shocked by the western representation of 'Hinduism',
they think they can now replace this with a 'Hindu' representation.
They do not realise that it takes more than intelligence and
professional success to develop an alternative to five centuries of
Orientalism. After retirement, some of these professionals take up
the hobby of writing stories about India that no intellectual will
ever take seriously. [...] The third factor is the most interesting:
it is the potential for implicit censorship that seems intrinsic to
the US academic world. This is difficult to pin down. The witch hunts
organized by Senator McCarthy during the Cold War played a
significant role in creating this atmosphere. The terror of being
denounced as a 'traitor' penetrated the American humanities at a deep
level. To someone who has no first-hand experience of the academic
study of India in the US, it must be difficult to imagine the number
of young scholars who say things like 'this is what I really think,
but I will not say it in public, because I'm up for tenure'. By the
time they receive tenure, they have usually conformed to the
orthodoxy.

End of forwarded message from S. V.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Opinion

How Free Are We?

Yes, the rise of Hindu nationalism is indeed a major threat to
intellectual freedom in the study of India, but it's also time to
confront a climate of implicit censorship that leads to its own
pathology

By Jakob De Roover
Outlook
Thursday, January 28, 2010

This has been a tumultuous decade for the academic study of India. In
his recent Offence: The Hindu Case (2009), Salil Tripathi provides a
timely overview of the growing censorship and harassment that
scholars working on India have faced. Not a pretty sight to behold:
people have felt the need to ban books and terrorize authors, hassle
teachers and disrupt classes, toss eggs at some and blacken others'
faces. Academics now run the risk of smear campaigns, court cases and
physical intimidation; all because certain groups feel offended by
what they write about the Indian past or the Hindu traditions. The
facts are difficult to miss. Hence, the threat that Hindu nationalism
poses to academic freedom has caused commotion around the world.

According to Tripathi, the rise of Hindu nationalism is indeed the
major threat to intellectual freedom in the study of India. In his
essay, all Indians concerned about the representation of India and
its traditions come across as bigots and prudes. The goondas who
burned M.F. Husain's paintings and ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental
Research Institute are presented as the extremist fringe of a 'long
arm of fundamentalism' that also embraces NRI professionals and
Western Hindu sympathisers. On the other side, Tripathi places
historians like Romila Thapar and religion scholars like Wendy
Doniger, who (so he claims) go as far as 'the facts' take them and
are attacked for doing so (75-87). These scholars are presented as
spirited fighters 'arguing for academic freedom and the spirit of
open inquiry in India' (86). This way of presenting things is flawed.
Like most journalists, Tripathi ignores another threat to
intellectual freedom in the study of India -- one that may be less
manifest, but is all the more insidious.

A climate of implicit censorship has long dominated this field. Not
quite as spectacular as the rise of 'Hindu' censorship, this is not
the stuff of juicy journalism. But this kind of censoring is as
harmful: it also moulds people's minds in particular ways; it
constrains their speech; it compels them to show compliance to
certain dogmas in their writings; and, for the unlucky few, it may
even end their careers. The difficulty is to identify the modus
operandi of this form of censorship. Much like racism, it is only in
certain blatant cases that one can say with certainty that it has
occurred. Nonetheless, we have to try and circumscribe this obstacle
standing in the way of a much-needed rejuvenation of the study of
India. What follows are some impressions of the situation in
contemporary Europe, India and the USA. Sometimes these may seem
caricatures, but caricature is required to make the implicit
explicit.

In Europe, the issue cannot be separated from the colonial past and
the present state of affairs, where the old continent is losing its
earlier dominance to rising Asian nations that outpace it in every
way. In response, Europeans have developed a set of strategies to
convince themselves that their civilization is still morally
superior. Here, scholars of India have an important role to fulfil.
Simply put, they are expected to do the following: acknowledge that
India is indeed going through swift economic growth; next, point out
that it still has tremendous poverty, the caste system, superstition,
religious conflicts, gender inequality, exploitation, child labour,
nepotism, bribery, revolts, incompetence...; and provide appropriate
details on these flaws and the necessary footnotes or fieldwork. In
this way, these scholars should contribute to what John Gray calls
the 'comfort blanket against an unfamiliar world', which Europe is
weaving around itself. 'Rest assured; we are still on top'.

Naturally, few scholars today would be willing to state explicitly
that the European civilization is superior. Yet, while they disavow
Eurocentrism, they also reproduce a deep-rooted cultural asymmetry.
When European scholars describe India, they tend to connect all ills
and atrocities in that society to the nature of Indian culture. One
links widow-burning, dowry murder, domestic violence, female
infanticide and caste discrimination to 'Hindu' foundations. Europe
also loves to celebrate Indian authors whose specialty is revealing
the 'dark underbelly' of Indian society. In contrast, social ills and
atrocities in European societies are characterised as aberrations:
racism, colonial genocide, the two World Wars, the Holocaust, sexual
abuse, etc. are considered as acts that deviate from the true temper
of European culture. This stance of cultural asymmetry has become the
hidden premise of the European study of India.

Historically, the situation in India has grown from much the same set
of equations. The colonial state nourished an intellectual class that
was expected to spell out and justify its 'civilising mission'. The
intelligentsia had to show how western political theory had laid down
the way forward for India and how the state was the guide on this
road. It sought to demonstrate that Indian history and society -- and
'Hindu religion' in particular -- embodied the negation of western
liberal norms: inequality, irrationality, tyranny (at a later stage,
patriarchy was added). The postcolonial state inherited the
institutional structures and conceptual framework of its colonial
predecessor and also its tendency to treat the human sciences as
instruments of the state's project to reform society. Crudely put,
academics in these disciplines could play two roles: ideologues were
to show the significance of some western political theory to India
and characterise Indian history and society in such a way that the
implementation of this political theory became the only option; fact-
gatherers had to collect the data related to some problem for the
state's project of reform.

Over the years, the fashionable theories shifted from liberalism to
Marxism and back again. Generally, the adherents of this approach to
Indian society called themselves 'secularists' and shared one central
attitude: they were allergic to 'Hinduism'. In the first five decades
following Independence, these secularists dominated the Indian
universities and established an intellectual and institutional
hegemony. They wrote the textbooks and dominated the UGC, ICSSR or
ICHR. By the 1980s, when orthodox Marxism had worn out in most
places, the hegemony was so entrenched that it allowed a few
universities and research institutes in Delhi and Calcutta to perform
a role very similar to that of the colonial master. They imported the
latest 'radical' fashions from Paris and New York to couch an old
story in the newest jargon: they used Foucault's 'discourse' and
'capillary power' or Gramsci's 'hegemony' to repeat that the Indian
culture promoted inequality, patriarchy and moral bankruptcy. Social
scientists in the hinterland were expected to imitate the secularists
from the metropolis. If they did well, they could end up in JNU or
perhaps even be invited to the West. This hegemony of the secularists
reproduced itself through different forms of implicit censorship: it
determined what was published, where the funding went, and who got
appointed.

At the same time, there was a growing sense of alienation between
these intellectual classes and substantial layers of Indian society.
The rise of Hindutva produced a backlash against the academic allergy
to Hinduism. When the BJP came to power in the late 1990s, Hindu
nationalism tried to displace secularism by attempting to take over
the institutional hegemony and modes of censorship that the
secularists had created. Now, Hindu nationalists took it upon
themselves to write the textbooks and control the universities and
the relevant government bodies. However, these people had neither the
education nor the sophistication to do so in the (relatively) subtle
ways of the secularists. The crudeness led to outcries in India and
the West about 'rewriting history', 'the end of academic freedom' and
'the return of censorship'. The message to the Hindu nationalists
must be clear: learn from the secularists how to practice the art of
censorship in more implicit and subtle ways. Whatever the future may
bring, the humanities in India have now been hijacked by this
struggle between secularism and Hindutva.

The rise of Hindutva has also determined the current state of affairs
in the American study of India and Hinduism. Here, the implicit
censorship takes the form of a climate of fear: the fear to be
branded 'Hindutva'. There are three central factors in US society
that have contributed to this pernicious climate. One is the large-
scale migration of highly-educated Indians into the US over the last
few decades. Affluent Hindu-Americans have been shocked by what the
American schools teach their children about 'Hinduism' and India.
Turning to the universities, they discovered that these often tell
the same story, albeit with more theoretical sophistication. Many
Hindu-Americans are highly successful in engineering, business or
other professions; many also sympathize at some level with Hindu
nationalism. Shocked by the western representation of 'Hinduism',
they think they can now replace this with a 'Hindu' representation.
They do not realise that it takes more than intelligence and
professional success to develop an alternative to five centuries of
Orientalism. After retirement, some of these professionals take up
the hobby of writing stories about India that no intellectual will
ever take seriously.

The second factor lies in the many forms of Protestant Christianity
that dominate American society. The theological framework shared by
these denominations inevitably transforms the Hindu traditions into a
species of false religion. Naturally, political correctness no longer
allows scholars and educators to speak of 'heathen idolatry' or the
'cruelty' and 'tyranny' of 'false religion'. Therefore, they have
turned to seemingly 'secular' depictions of caste, inequality,
patriarchy and poverty in India to show that Hinduism is a pale and
erring religion, opposed to liberal values. The earlier religious
condemnation has become a social critique. Often, both go hand in
hand. For instance, American evangelical organisations join forces
with scholarly critics of caste to promote the idea that India should
become 'post-Hindu', as in the case of Kancha Ilaiah and the Dalit
Freedom Network.

The third factor is the most interesting: it is the potential for
implicit censorship that seems intrinsic to the US academic world.
This is difficult to pin down. The witch hunts organized by Senator
McCarthy during the Cold War played a significant role in creating
this atmosphere. The terror of being denounced as a 'traitor'
penetrated the American humanities at a deep level. To someone who
has no first-hand experience of the academic study of India in the
US, it must be difficult to imagine the number of young scholars who
say things like 'this is what I really think, but I will not say it
in public, because I'm up for tenure'. By the time they receive
tenure, they have usually conformed to the orthodoxy.

Together these factors have produced an unhappy mix. There is a cold
war going on between the 'Hindu-Americans' (and a few academic
sympathisers) and the mainstream scholars of Hinduism. Academics no
longer fear being called 'commies', 'reds' or even 'heathens', but
now 'Hindutva' has taken the place of such labels in the study of
India. If one makes positive noises about the contributions of Indian
culture to humanity, one runs the risk of being associated with
'Hindu nationalism' or with the NRI professionals who aggressively
challenge the doyens of Hinduism studies. The popular media like to
represent these doyens as valiant warriors for academic freedom, much
as Tripathi does in his essay. This is far removed from reality. The
dominant scholars too impose dogmatic limits that one cannot cross
without provoking their ire. Because of the significance of letters
of recommendation, peer pressure and plain gossip in American
academic circles, their forms of implicit censorship are highly
effective in making or breaking careers. This has created a
widespread fear of saying 'the wrong thing', which paralyses the
study of Indian culture.

In one sense, then, the picture for students of India is even grimmer
than the one Tripathi sketches. In another sense, there is hope,
because times of turbulence also hold the potential for intellectual
change. As students of India, we will have to take seriously the
growing discontent among Hindus about the ways in which their
traditions have been depicted. Some of this is inspired by an attempt
to sanitise the Hindu traditions according to the model of Islam and
Christianity and the prudishness of middle-class morality. However,
other strands express a deep sense of grievance towards the
secularist hegemony and the academic allergy to Hinduism. As long as
reasonable and well-educated minds do not address these grievances,
Hindu nationalism will be able to tap into the growing anger among
Hindus and manipulate this to its own benefit. To address such
problems, one needs to work towards a climate of intellectual freedom
that has too long been absent from the study of India.

Jakob De Roover is at the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium
http://www.cultuurwetenschap.be/

More at:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264014

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti

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