ŚĀSTRA-S THROUGH THE LENS OF WESTERN INDOLOGY: A Response (Reclaiming Sanskrit Studies Book 2) by K.S. Kannan, Sowmya Krishnapur, Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay, Surya K, Vrinda Acharya K, Rajath Vasudevamurthy, Sudarshan T N, Manjushree Hegde.

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ŚĀSTRA-S THROUGH THE LENS OF WESTERN INDOLOGY:

A Response (Reclaiming Sanskrit Studies Book 2)

by K.S. Kannan, Sowmya Krishnapur,

Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay, Surya K,

Vrinda Acharya K, Rajath Vasudevamurthy,

Sudarshan T N, Manjushree Hegde

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This foundation, this series, this work was as needed on intellectual pane and in cultural realm as defense of India on physical plane.

As one reads even the volume editorial, one becomes aware of just how much Vidwattaa and Paanditya these authors must have, even over and above all the studies one becomes aware of as one sees the names referred, to be in thus good fight.

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Somewhere along the line, one paper begins by making a couple of statements regarding mathematics that come across more as a counterattack against mathematics rather than refutation of fraudulent attack by Pollock; but mathematics wasn't attacking anybody, certainly not India.

Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay says, in abstract of his paper at the outset -

" ... This paper is meant to be a refutation of some of Pollock’s core assumptions, by way of taking into account Gaṇita-śāstra/Indian arithmetic as a case study. We demonstrate that from the earliest times to premodern times, Gaṇita in India has relentlessly focused on real-life problems, developing logical and efficient algorithms for problem solving, - and this, even among Jain and Buddhist scholars, who do not regard Veda-s as a pramāṇa. Akin to all Indian schools of thought and even modern science, Gaṇita accepts pratyakṣa-pramāṇa or empirical evidence as the first means of knowledge. Depending, however, entirely on axioms, binary logic and eternally valid proofs (theory) - as opposed to calculations (prayoga) - it is formal Western mathematics that categorically rejects the empirical world, and is imbued with theological dogma. Binary logic cannot be taken as a normative logic, as the Buddhist Catuṣkoṭi and the Jain Syādvāda schema follow different approaches. Western mathematics, which is the only type of mathematics taught in schools today, therefore comes across as arcane, abstract and complicated to most non-specialists, and has become a tool of little more than cultural hegemony."

Similar comments were made in the Western Ontology on Rasa, perhaps by more than one paper.

One must point out a couple of things. One, elementary arithmetic, once taught at primary school level, is finished. Thereafter most people are equipped to deal with most calculations needed in life, unless one is dealing with theoretical questions of a science.

Mathematics is a science of ideas and concepts, structures thereof and establishing truths about these structures and their mutual relationships, and discoveries - not inventions - related.

The imaginary number i was a discovery in the process of calculating roots, useful but known to not exist in reality; today, this Then it is merely an amusing story, while complex analysis based on numbers involving real and imaginary numhers is a major branch of mathematics, while complex numbers are a basis of most work in algebraic geometry, along with the alternative, finite number fields.

Calculating as such hasn't gone out but has little use in original work in mathematics, other than, say, finding the next prime number. This is now too far off and computers have taken over now for decades. In mid eighties the latest prime discovered was long enough to fill a normal size sheet of oaper when printed continuously from left top corner to bottom right, or order of magnitude thereabouts. Now it's longer than enough to go around the earth if so printed out.

And whatever a computer can do, it's wasting mind for humans to do so.

It's neither about trend nor about any cultural hegemony. There are mathematicians of Indian origin who have done quite well, only, their names aren't a matter of newspaper headlines, nor the work accessible to those not at levels close in mathematics, but this is true of most mathematical geniuses with rare exceptions. Most people, even very well educated ones, couldn't name any mathematician alive or otherwise, and exceptions of fame such as thst of Ramanujan are rare. Ramanujan is famous in India due partly to his genius, but largely also to the story that sounds like filled with miracles, and a couple of instances comprehensible to general public.

There's no rule or law thst a mathematician must prove theorems or lemnas, and such comments demean those making them as boors unable to comprehend the difference.

Once, yes, computations were valuable. But theoretical work is where mathematics lives, unlike other, material or life, sciences with experimental branches.

"[ 6 ] “Mathematical platonism is any metaphysical account of mathematics that implies mathematical entities exist, that they are abstract, and that they are independent of all our rational activities... Mathematical platonists are often called ‘realists”’ (Cole 2016)."

That sounds like nonsense from ivory tower until one gives an example of the abstract concepts of mathematics obvious to everyone, such as a number, a point, a straight line or a plane, a circle, .... which are, each and all, as abstract and as real as they get. It's not tangible reality of evidence by senses or organs, not subject to experiments that the author ardently espouses, not subject to four way logic of both or neither existence and non existence. THEY EXIST.

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The following paper in third chapter, by K. Sure, makes up for the heartburn, but it's unlikely to make up for the damage caused India by the paper by Shubhodeep Mukhopadhyay in the second chapter. If West is kind, it will be happy to laugh it's head off at india; but that's being unrealistically optimistic.

Next paper, by Vrinda Acharya, asks an important question -

"The question that is persistently bothering me is – has there been no pūrva-pakṣa done by our traditional scholars for so many years for an article written as early as 1985? If yes, has it been effective? If not, it is highly unfortunate! The Swadeshi Indology Conference is a great step towards filling this lacuna and building a home team of scholars who can give appropriate rebuttals to the likes of Pollock."

Yes.

But the one after, by Rajath Vasudevamurthy, is an unexpected treat.

Most writings in this series have such a treat in form of small tidbits here and there, in excerpts from Sanskrit writings of antiquity and meanings in English provided. But this paper is from beginning on an uninterrupted experience of Aananda, with a succinct explanation and summary of much that encourages a reader to turn and indulge oneself by studying everything mentioned for oneself. It's comparable to an account of a Himaalayan journey and particularly one into remote regions beyond Leh, a supreme one being to Kailas and Manasarovar.

A tiny wish - that the quotations from Sanskrit were given in Devanaagarie, at least along with the Roman transcripts! Latter are painful to see, much as the effort is made to get them up to the required level to render Sanskrit without doubts regarding pronunciations.

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"Series Editorial"

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"It is a tragedy that many among even the conscientious Hindu scholars of Sanskrit and Hinduism still harp on Macaulay, and ignore others while accounting for the ills of the current Indian education system, and the consequent erosion of Hindu values in the Indian psyche. Of course, the machinating Macaulay brazenly declared that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India, and sought accordingly to create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” by means of his education system – which the system did achieve.

"An important example of what is being ignored by most Indian scholars is the current American Orientalism. They have failed to counter it on any significant scale.

"It was Edward Said (1935-2003) an American professor at Columbia University who called the bluff of “the European interest in studying Eastern culture and civilization” (in his book Orientalism (1978)) by showing it to be an inherently political interest; he laid bare the subtile, hence virulent, Eurocentric prejudice aimed at twin ends – one, justifying the European colonial aspirations and two, insidiously endeavouring to distort and delude the intellectual objectivity of even those who could be deemed to be culturally considerate towards other civilisations. Much earlier, Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) had shown the resounding hollowness of the leitmotif of the “White Man’s Burden.”

"But it was given to Rajiv Malhotra, a leading public intellectual in America, to expose the Western conspiracy on an unprecedented scale, unearthing the modus operandi behind the unrelenting and unhindered program for nearly two centuries now of the sabotage of our ancient civilisation yet with hardly any note of compunction. One has only to look into Malhotra’s seminal writings – Breaking India (2011), Being Different (2011), Indra’s Net (2014), The Battle for Sanskrit (2016), and The Academic Hinduphobia (2016) – for fuller details.

"This pentad – preceded by Invading the Sacred (2007) behind which, too, he was the main driving force – goes to show the intellectual penetration of the West, into even the remotest corners (spatial/temporal/ thematic) of our hoary heritage. ... "

Why this word "hoary" for India's beautiful, rich treasures of heritage?

" ... There is a mixed motive in the latest Occidental enterprise, ostensibly being carried out with pure academic concerns. For the American Orientalist doing his “South Asian Studies” (his new term for “Indology Studies”), Sanskrit is inherently oppressive – especially of Dalits, Muslims and women; and as an antidote, therefore, the goal of Sanskrit studies henceforth should be, according to him, to “exhume and exorcise the barbarism” of social hierarchies and oppression of women happening ever since the inception of Sanskrit – which language itself came, rather, from outside India. ... "

All of which is, of course, complete and utter nonsense propagated in West against India and everything good about her, as per Macaulay policy explicitly stated and employed by British regime.

" ... Another important agenda is to infuse/intensify animosities between/among votaries of Sanskrit and votaries of vernacular languages in india. A significant instrument towards this end is to influence mainstream media so that the populace is constantly fed ideas inimical to the Hindu heritage. The tools being deployed for this are the trained army of “intellectuals” – of leftist leanings and “secular” credentials."

And those willing to sell their souls and fracture their nation are not only always an easy prey, but available to join in this under a variety of self-stuck fraudulent labels - secular, progressive, liberal - and willing just as fraudulently to accuse India lovers under accusations and abusive labels just as falsely hurled at them.

"Infinity Foundation (IF), the brainchild of Rajiv Malhotra, started 25 years ago in the US, spearheaded the movement of unmasking the “catholicity” (- and what a euphemistic word it is!) of Western academia. The profound insights provided by the ideas of “Digestion” and the “U-Turn Theory” propounded by him remain unparalleled."

If one is familiar with history of attempted assassination of Queen Elizabeth I with multiple assassins sent by Vatican, and has gone through "Holy Blood, Holy Grail", that word "catholicity" associated chiefly with - or appropriated fraudulently as label by and for - church of Rome, acquires a very different connotation, just as the word "secular" has, after the anti-Hindu, anti-India brigade selfl-labelled themselves secular, continuing their obeisance to creeds assets erstwhile foreign colonial regimes and obedience to various foreign agencies with anti-India agenda, whether the latter be left or West, church or underworld.

"It goes without saying that it is ultimately the Hindus in India who ought to be the real caretakers of their own heritage; and with this end in view, Infinity Foundation India (IFI) was started in India in 2016. IFI has been holding a series of Swadeshi Indology Conferences.

"Held twice a year on an average, these conferences focus on select themes and even select Indologists of the West (sometimes of even the East), and seek to offer refutations of mischievous and misleading misreportages/misinterpretations bounteously brought out by these Indologists – by way of either raising red flags at, or giving intellectual responses to, malfeasances inspired in fine by them. To employ Sanskrit terminology, the typical secessionist misrepresentations presented by the West are treated here as pūrva-pakṣa, and our own responses/rebuttals/rectifications as uttara-pakṣa or siddhānta.

"Vijayadaśamī

"Hemalamba Saṁvatsara

"Date 30-09-2017

"Dr. K S Kannan

"Academic Director

"and

"General Editor of the Series"

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February 19, 2022 - February 19, 2022.

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"Volume Editorial"

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"“For in my sight, the villain with a crafty tongue

"Incurs a most heavy retribution: he boasts that his words

"Will cloak deceit decently, and boldly pursues his wicked end:

"Yet in fact he is not very wise.”

"- Euripedes (Medea 580-83),

"(trans.) D L Page

"The fashions of Western Indologists may change, but their designs remain the same.

"—K S Kannan"

"It gives us pleasure to place before the public the second volume of the proceedings of the Swadeshi Indology Conferences, entitled Śāstra-s through the Lens of Western Indology – A Response.

"As noted in the Volume Editorial of the first volume (Western Indology and its Quest for Power, 2017), two Swadeshi Indology conferences were conducted by IFI (Infinity Foundation India) in 2016 July and 2017 February, which sought to examine some of the writings of Professor Sheldon Pollock of Columbia University. The first conference had four themes, and the second one had six more.

"It goes without saying that there has been no intention of targetting one individual. It only happens that Pollock is the most formidable of the American Orientalists today, and his approaches and interpretations, pervasive as they are, are quite pernicious and inimical to Hindu heritage. He has been academically active for decades now and his sphere of influence is by no means small. There are hardly many that contest his views even in America.

"Much as Prof. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty is obsessed with sex, so is Pollock with power: Rajiv Malhotra, a leading public intellectual of America, notices how the word “power” recurs 600 times in Pollock’s Language of Gods... book (2006), and the words “political” and “politics” over 900 times! As we remarked in the Volume Editorial of the first volume, there is perhaps no event or utterance where Pollock cannot perceive some vicious play of power.

"We have planned a few more volumes in this series, and Volume 2 is being presented now. This volume deals primarily with śāstra-s, a theme that Pollock has dealt with in some detail in more than a dozen of his articles/books (from 1985–2015) which have been looked into by the over half-a-dozen scholars who have presented papers in this volume."

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"The opening paper by Sowmya Krishnapur (Ch. 1) analyses the claims of Pollock with respect to grammar, or rather Vyākaraṇa, in relation to political (which is to say, royal) power. What puzzles Pollock is the “widely shared, largely uniform cosmopolitan style of Sanskrit inscriptional discourse” – reaching even up to the farthest corner of the Far East: throughout the Sanskrit Cosmopolis. What touches him on the raw is that the style of the inscriptions there bears enormous kinship to that of standard Sanskrit poetry. The broadcasting of the philological instruments in order for this to come about can by no means be one on any small scale. He is acutely aware that Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa was “probably the most influential work on literary science in world history after Aristotle’s Poetics”. For him, it was the spread of (Sanskrit) grammar that chiefly carried cultural and political associations; nowhere else in the world, after all, was the study of language so highly developed: the roots of many basic conceptual components of Western modernity are traceable, after all, to substantive and theoretical formulations of premodern Indian linguistic thought. Grammar and rulership were for him mutually constitutive in India all through. He presents half a dozen inscriptions as “evidence” for this assertion, while, as Sowmya exposes, not one of these is commensurate with the demand. He presents puerile proofs — of Pāṇini and Patañjali as patronised by kings! The “evidence” of other grammarians is also equally naive. He beams with confidence characterising his own evidence as “slender but suggestive”, “rather vague data” etc. Sowmya has laid bare his sleight of tongue, while he is thus only spinning the yarn – weaving tapestries of theories out of tenuous and disjointed threads of factoids. If one wanted stately examples of equivocation and prevarication in academic papers, his papers offer them generously. The American Indologist is not just a vaitaṇḍika but an adept at chala and jāti in the craft of debate. To intertwine Vyākaraṇa – the “ajihmā rāja-paddhati” (after Bhartṛhari) with parātisandhāna-vidyā (after Kālidāsa), requires a jihma-vṛtti nonpareil that Pollock’s writings uniformly betray."

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"The paper by Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay (Ch. 2) is a rebuttal of Pollock’s practice v/s theory [hypo]thesis. The West is always good at driving a wedge where there is unity, and Pollock is West at its best. He pits śāstra against prayoga, by first befuddling the issue by his loose translation of the two words as “theory” and “practice”: such is his practice. Pollock alludes to śāstra-s such as Kṛṣī-śāstra, Gaṇita-śāstra, Gandha-śāstra etc., and indicates how they cover “virtually every activity”; for Pollock, śastra-s are cultural grammars, and the Veda is śāstra par excellence. He postulates that in Sanskritic culture, theory was “held always as necessarily to precede and govern practice”: that the secular life of an individual is subjected to an all-pervasive ritualization, leading to misery and entrapment of people; and the West is eternally progressive and forward-looking as it is not dependent on śāstric norms which are diametrically opposed to the Aristotelian approach. Subhodeep points out how Pollock uses selective observation, indulges in over-generalization, and summarily rejects all counter-evidence. Pollock conveniently overlooks the fact that Buddhist and Jain scholars made great advancements in Gaṇita despite according no special place for the Veda-s; whence there is no question of their works being treated as commentaries on the Veda-s. The Śulba-sūtra-s, the oldest extant mathematical texts already deal with design and architectural problems in ritual. Seidenberg spoke of geometry as traceable to ritual origins. Subhodeep turns the tables against Pollock’s charge - that conformity with śāstric norms implied no new discoveries, but a mere recovery of what was past knowledge; it is, on the contrary, Mathematical Platonism that rules mathematics today, which has disdain for empirical evidence: a veritable case, then, of those in glass houses throwing stones at others. What is much in evidence is the relish with which the Western Indologist loves to lampoon Hindu heritage: what if fidelity to facts is the first casualty, after all?"

Renaissance was needed desperately, not in India, but in a Europe reeling from centuries of repression, where inquisition squashed even any freedom of thought, or inquiry into nature,by burning at stake anyone not sufficiently terrorised.

India is recovering only from a series of onslaughts from various barbaric invaders and the colonial regimes imposed on the land, attempting to wipe out ancient and living culture of India, as those of most other ancient lands were in a short time, by two abrahmic conversionist religions followed by totalitarian creeds, all of them masquerading in pretense of equality and so forth."

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"The paper by K Surya (Ch. 3) on śāstra and prayoga as handled by Pollock, contains a rather powerful exposé of Pollockian fallacies. Śāstra-s crippled the innovative spirit of Indian intellectuals, bewails Pollock; he iterates and reiterates in manifold manners that these intellectuals could after all do little else than just uncover knowledge already pre-existent in the śāstra-s. Theory and practice as carried out in the West are diametrically opposed to their counterparts in the East, holds Pollock. So he rules out any role for experience, experiment, invention, discovery, innovation in traditional Indian learning."

Typical racist.

"He exploits Satkārya-vāda by first stretching it to illegitimate limits. Effects are inherent in causes, says the Satkārya theory, but Pollock goes to argue that knowledge must be inherent in prior textual material viz. the Veda – a “logical” extrapolation unheard of in the vast philosophical literature of the Hindus: (this, notwithstanding the enormity of the Vedic literature lost, already by the time of Patañjali (of the pre-Christian era), which is itself of no mean order). Neither on the basis of the commentary of Śaṅkara, nor of the Brahma-sūtra-s Śaṅkara was commenting upon, nor of the Upaniṣadic texts that the sūtra text was drawing upon – is it inferible that “all one has to do is to fall back upon nothing more than prior textual materials for any derivation or enhancement of knowledge”.

"As to the idea of divine origin claimed in the great and ancient Āyurveda texts such as Caraka-saṁhitā and Suśruta-saṁhitā, Surya points out how even those texts have undergone further redactions/revisions. The author cites “the staggering volume and diversity of scientific literary productions” post-bṛhat-trayī : thousands of medical texts produced 600 CE onwards describing “new diseases, new theories, new treatments and new medicines” — drawing upon the writings of Wujastyk.

"The American Indologist seems to read into the Hindu context what just happened with the Christian faith - viz. that valid knowledge had perforce to issue from the Bible, “the Book”. On the contrary, Hindu India never witnessed any Inquisition – no Galileo incarcerated, no Bruno burnt; and no Socrates made to drink hemlock on grounds of asabeia – “not believing in the god of the State”. Too, there is nothing in the Hindu scriptures, after all, that can be opposed to, or be threatened by, the theories of Darwin."

On the contrary, one could truthfully point out that the seed of evolution is in Dashaavataara, only changed with might as key.

"Nothing in academics can be more brazen than the leading Indologist’s chicanery in quoting from Caraka blatantly selectively lopping off key chunks of even adjacent texts; it is as simple and as hypocritical as deriving “Socrates is” from “Socrates is dead”. As is his wont, Pollock routinely misleads by partial citations. While the text lays due stress on perception and inference, he withholds it from the readers’ view. Authoritative testimony is misinterpreted by him as a “beginningless text”, and Surya proffers citations from Sadegh-Zadeh, versed in modern medical literature - exposing thereby the relentless and warrantless diatribe of the celebrated Indologist against śastra-s in general and the Veda-s in particular."

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"The paper by Vrinda Acharya (Ch. 4) examines the role of śāstra-s against the background of the verdicts of Pollock viz. that śāstra-s hinder genuine creativity, practical innovation, original thinking and progressive growth – as “the śāstra-s are straight-jacketed by the Vedic worldview”; that there is no dialectical interaction between theory and practices; that śāstra-s instigate authoritarianism; and that the relationship between śāstra and prayoga is diametrically opposed to what is found in the West.

"Not claiming to be exhaustive and complete in her investigation, Vrinda seeks to show certain arguments which boomerang on Pollock, certain assertions as lacking logic and proof, certain essential aspects overlooked by him, and certain quotations of his being plain wrong or selective. Vrinda cites with approval the remark of Hanneder - that Pollock’s argumentation is often arbitrary, given his (i.e., Pollock’s) tendency to over-interpret the evidence in support of his theory. Vrinda espies his rendering of the word dharma as ‘rule-boundedness’ as very narrow and parochial, given the breadth of the concept. Pollock complains about the centrality of rule governance in human behaviour as set forth in Manu-smṛti; endeavouring, all the same, to appear balanced and fair, he cites from Amy Vanderbilt’s Everyday Etiquette which abounds in similar rules - thus himself nullifying in effect the case he seeks to make out. He says students in the West are amazed to find a whole battery of rules in Manusmṛti. One is inspired to suspect arrogance on the part of Pollock: what if the West thinks of the East as having a very peculiar cultural grammar? Can not (or should not) the East think similarly of the West? Is it settled for him that the West is wise and all else otherwise? Branding śāstra-s as frozen in time, Pollock himself cites several scholars who present different lists of śāstra-s – thus proving himself a vadato-vyāghāta! His grouse that Indian art-making is too constrained by rules is contradicted by the fact that it is Western music which is very rigid in practice. Vrinda knows this as she is a musician herself. Is Pollock blind, then, to the limitations that Western (read American) civilization possesses?"

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"The paper of Rajath Vasudevamurthy (Ch. 5) deals with the issue posited by Pollock of śāstra as an impediment to progress.

"Rajath shows how Pollock is playing his mischievous game - quoting statements out of context. Reviewing the book Imperial Mughal Painting, Naipaul remarks: “Art then was limited by the civilisation, by an idea of the world in which men were born only to obey the rules”; slyly, Pollock cites this as a statement made in connection with Indian art, setting aside the other writings of Naipaul."

Besides, Naipaul was remarking about mughal colonial regimes, not culture of India as it flourished until invasions by barbarians.

"Rajath also shows how, while quoting Matilal’s translation of a verse from Jayanta Bhaṭṭa’s Nyāya-mañjarī, Pollock substitutes a word (- the key word, the very verb!) and has unscrupulously manipulated and thus misrepresented Matilal. Pollock will have to be accused of double injustice – injustice to Matilal and injustice to fellow scholars, and to even the future readers. There are more issues dealt with in the paper that the reader can peruse by himself."

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"The paper of T N Sudarshan (Ch. 6) points to nearly a dozen flaws in the reasoning methods of Pollock. For example he refers to four types of dissonance – epistemological, ontological, interpretive, philosophical (issues that have to do respectively with pramāṇa, tattva, mīmāṁsā and darśana). He proposes that the current Western theses on śāstra derive from deep ignorance – “a veritable nescience”, as Sudarshan would say. Valid interpretation of Sanskrit texts involves an inalienable saṁskāra which the Western Indologist typically lacks. Pollock’s philology is flawed and nebulous. The current “scientific method” is itself inadequate in respect of the interpretation of śāstra-s; neither does Pollock measure up to the task of their proper interpretation. The etic modes of analysis are often errant. Fallacious assumptions, institutionalized biases and insidious methods consistently vitiate the Pollockian program.

"Western Indology has not remained as bad as it used to be; it has steadily worsened and is getting the more and the more debased - being answerable first of all to the exigencies and executions of the military-political-industrial complex of their bosses. When have academia in the West not been a tool of their funding agencies? At the other end, again, modern science is not without its own biases; social sciences are more often than not biases sophisticated; and the “humanities are their own god”.

"What is sometimes remarked of history is truer of humanities: they usually are “hard-core interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts”. On the other hand, governed as they essentially are “by first-person empiricism”, śāstra-s are closer to the spirit of science than is current science. Critical theory seeks to “emancipate” (i.e. in a Western sense) all non-Western societies - as the current normative is “Western Universalism” (as aptly labelled by Rajiv Malhotra). Pollock’s socio-economic analysis subscribes to a Marxism-driven framework, notes Sudarshan. The power discourse that Pollock is obsessed with is influenced by post-modernistic perspectives. The new brand philology, Pollock claims, merits the same centrality among disciplines as philosophy or mathematics! Pollock’s philology is the very antithesis of scientific method as it is an anything-goes style “discipline”. Adluri and Bagchee have exposed the earlier critical theories. The equation of śāstra with theory is itself problematic, and the ontological relation Pollock speaks of in its connection with prayoga is even more so, betraying mischief rather than confusion. The mutually influential nature of theory and practice has been well-taken care of by the well-seasoned ancient authorities such as Kauṭalya; and Ryle or Pollock have hardly anything new to add to here. In any case, and as is his wont, Pollock links śāstra-s in general somehow to legislative control, and makes it an issue of prioritizing theory over practice. Reducing śāstra-s to mere theory first, Pollock takes next the step of branding śāstra-s as myths, thereby rendering their very credibility questionable. And all this exercise is spurred by the ulterior motive — of making the Western norms look superior.

"Even the enormous secular knowledge deposited in the Purāṇa-s are made to look mythical and shown as frozen for all time, allowing therefore neither change nor growth, and so there came to be no conception of progress. All this is aimed at characterizing the Purāṇa-s as encumbered by ideological hindrances and as being against the idea of progress in the West. Championing regress further, the śāstra-s pave the way for the universalisation and valorisation of the sectional interests of premodern India, and are in essence a practical discourse of power: so run Pollock’s convoluted concoctions.

"In his response to these complicated arguments of Pollock, Sudarshan takes a primary note of certain vital factors here: of the positive role of the required saṁskāra-s; of the negative impact of centuries of colonial rule; and of the consequent slavery and material impoverishment that have taken their own toll. The West is essentially āsuric as against the East which is essentially sāttvic: Will Durant expresses his indignation at the deliberate bleeding of India by England as the greatest crime in all of history. What is generally not easily noted is, Sudarshan aptly notes, that the same crime continues unabated to this day though essentially on an intellectual plane."

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"The last paper of Manjushree Hegde (Ch. 7) concerns with “Project SKSEC (Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism)”, the international collaborative project of Pollock. The project seeks to draw a picture of the “death of Sanskrit” in the face of European modernity. The paper holds a mirror to Pollock’s predetermined conjectures and conclusions. “Navya” (as in Navya Nyāya) is a precious discovery for him, and he loves to put it into some use somewhere, and what can be better than concocting a projectile in India synchronising with the Renaissance in Europe?; after all, navya and renaissance both convey the idea of the new! And what better opportunity to kill two birds with one stone (much better, indeed, than the niṣāda of the Rāmāyaṇa who killed (jaghāna vaira-nilayaḥ - Rāmāyaṇa 1.2.10) but one curlew with one arrow): claiming that India repudiated navya, and that the fillip for this came from within. And add a third “thesis” to cap it all: the creative upsurge in Indian science happened during Muslim rule.

"Manjushree calls the SKSEC enterprise a “shockingly mischievous endeavour”. Putting up a show of opening a conversation, this ambitious international collaborative project works within a fixed framework of predetermined conjecture, and works towards a set of predetermined conclusions. While he speaks of a pre-Colonial homomorphism between the East and the West, she unearths the depths of deviousness in the tall claims made of the very Renaissance. He sees an explosion of scholarly production beginning in the (pre-colonial) 16th century, but she produces a statistical analysis (based on sources such as the celebrated work of Karl Potter), to show that literary production in numerous disciplines has continued to flourish well beyond that date and in full measure and vigour - belying thence Pollock’s claims. Contrary to his contention, the Navya Nyāya language easily and soon enough became the technical language coming in handy as a medium for all serious philosophical discussions - essentially owing, as she well points out, to its ontological neutrality. Not a shred of proof has been, or can be, offered to show the pervasion of this mathematical format to Persian influence. Energetically sweeping facts away with his discriminatory broom, the American Indologist pretends ignorance of the Hindu polymaths – Abhinavagupta/Hemacandra/Vedānta Deśika et al. Manjushree illuminates his ignorance through bar charts chronicling the abundance of multidisciplinary productions right in the period he claims it was all so poor, after all.

"The pitiable paucity of armaments in his arsenal is pointedly referred to by her by alluding to his reference to but two, just two, examples (of Siddhicandra and Jagannātha) in every paper of his on the theme of subjectivity. The strikingly fanciful interpretation of Jagannātha’s verses - as autobiographical in nature and as betraying an illicit sexual relationship - bear no scrutiny if one goes by her analysis, drawing as she does upon the careful explanations of P V Kane in his work on Sanskrit poetics. Rarely does one find a keen parallel in the academic world to Pollock’s craft - of flip phraseology (as Hatcher discovers it) and of the art of self-contradiction (as Manjushree uncovers it) – the regular weapons leftists dexterously deploy. She reins in the fanciful flights of Pollock (in inventing unwarranted parallels with the West) by showing how India had after all no church to produce heresy and no excommunication and censorship to provoke Reformation and religious wars. She cites Danino (who in turn is citing Vincent Smith) or Bronner and Shulman (who marshal sound facts and arguments) to detonate the myths devised by him."

................................................................................................

"Swadeshi Indology champions the cause of contending with and combating, on an intellectual plane, the abominable iniquities that Western Indology in general, and American Indology in particular, have been perpetrating without compunction on our heritage.

"Thus the chapters are written on the basis of the various śāstra-s viz. Vyākaraṇa, Gaṇita, Āyurveda and Saṅgīta, and on an analysis of the very approach of science, and lastly, in regard to Pollock’s international project.

"A word about the content and style in the articles to follow. It goes without saying that the opinions expressed in the papers presented here are those of the respective authors. The authors hold themselves responsible for the veracity of their statements. And lastly, in the case of quotes from modern works, we have retained the nonstandard/inaccurate spelling/diacritics/punctuation that may sometimes be present in the source.

"Long ago did Manu record his caveat regarding the iniquitous implications of linguistic larceny (of the likes of Pollock):

"vācy arthā niyatāḥ sarve,

"vāṅ-mūlā, vāg-viniḥsṛtāḥ |

"tāṁ tu yas stenayed vācaṁ

"sa sarva-steya-kṛn naraḥ! ||

"“It is in speech that all ideas are settled/regulated; rooted in speech as they are, they issue from speech. And he who theives [which is to say, misinterprets] such speech is verily an omni-ereptor (Mr. All-Thief)!”

"Manu-smṛti 4.256"

"Makara-Saṅkrānti

"Hemalamba Saṁvatsara

"15th January 2018"

Dr. K S Kannan

"Academic Director

"and

"General Editor of the Series"

................................................................................................

................................................

February 27, 2022 - February 27, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Chapter 1"

"On Grammar and Royal Power*

"–Sowmya Krishnapur"

................................................................................................

"Introduction"

In the fourth chapter of his The Language of Gods in the World of Men (Pollock 2006), Professor Sheldon Pollock (hereafter Pollock) tries to establish the relation between Grammar and royal/political power. In the first section of the chapter, titled “Grammatical and Political Correctness: The Politics of Grammar” (Pollock 2006:162), Pollock tries to trace the evolution of this relationship. He states at the beginning of this section,

"“The spread of a widely shared, largely uniform cosmopolitan style of Sanskrit inscriptional discourse would have been impossible without an equally vast circulation of the great kāvya exemplars of that style, accompanied by the philological instruments without which the very existence of such texts was unthinkable”.

"(Pollock 2006:162)

"He gives several examples to show the spread of Sanskrit literature. Stating that along with literary works, the texts of literary art, metrics, lexicography, and related knowledge systems circulated throughout the Sanskrit Cosmopolis with the status of “precious cultural commodities”, he says that they “...came to provide a general framework within which a whole range of vernacular literary practices could be theorized” (Pollock 2006:163).

"Taking Kāvyādarśa of Daṇḍin as an example, he traces its spread through South India, Srilanka, Tibet, and China. He concludes that “All this makes Daṇḍin’s Mirror probably the most influential work on literary science in world history after Aristotle’s Poetics” (Pollock 2006:163). He makes similar observations about the spread of lexicons like Amara-kośa and metrical texts like Piṅgaḷa-sūtra and Vṛtta-ratnākara.

"Pollock begins the discussion on grammar with the statement “All that has just been described for kāvya itself and for its other ancillary practices is equally true of the knowledge system known as vyākaraṇa, language analysis or, more simply if less precisely, grammar” (Pollock 2006:164). In fact, he says that his observations hold truer for Grammar, “...since it carried cultural and political associations in premodern South Asia far more potent than any other form of knowledge” (Pollock 2006:164). According to Pollock, this qualifies Grammar to be considered separately, and by implication, exclusively, for a study of how Sanskrit knowledge systems circulated in the cosmopolis.

"This statement, in fact, serves as the anchor for this section. Saying “It merits separate consideration” (Pollock 2006:164), Pollock clearly states that his intention is to look at Grammar exclusively. Yet, at each step, he brings in a random mix of all different disciplines, while maintaining the focus on Grammar in the conclusions that he draws. A close analysis of the chapter reveals that the dexterity of Pollock lies in the sleight of tongue, and not in appropriateness or accuracy of the examples that he chooses. Hence, great care needs to be exerted in analysing his examples, and the words or phrases that he employs.

"In the very next paragraph, Pollock observes that the study of language was more highly developed in South Asia than anywhere else in the premodern world, and traces the roots of many basic conceptual components of Western modernity to substantive and theoretical learnings that their proponents gathered from premodern Indian linguistic thought. However, he cautions that this development of the study of language should not be seen as a purely abstract intellectual discipline “as it is typically seen”. Clearly, Pollock is paving the way here to drag into this his favourite lens of political philology, and give a whole new dimension to grammatical studies in India. He says,

"“Understanding the Indian care for language also depends, to a significant degree, on understanding the place of language care in the Indian social-moral order, and that in part means grasping its relationship to political power”

"(Pollock 2006:165)"

"This clearly shows that the focus of Pollock is - not on analysing the merits or otherwise of the millenia old tradition of Sanskrit grammar; not on the contributions of the Indian grammarians to the study of language; and certainly not on understanding the tenets of Vyākaraṇa-śāstra. His sole objective is to establish a link between Grammar and political power, so as to further some of the claims that he makes in his pet theories of political philology."

"This is demonstrated, according to Pollock, by three features (Pollock 2006:165):

"1. Celebration of grammatical learning especially in kings.

"2. Royal patronage of grammatical learning.

"3. Competitive zeal among rulers everywhere - to encourage grammatical creativity, and adorn their courts with scholars who could exemplify the same.

"Since Pollock claims that it was Grammar exclusively which enjoyed the privilege of such a close, mutually constitutive, association with political power, tradition expects him to defend his claims via the twin modes of marking off in the śāstric tradition, viz. ayoga-vyavaccheda and anyayoga-vyavaccheda1. To elucidate: demonstrating the continuous, exception-free association of Vyākaraṇa with these features would be ayoga-vyavaccheda; demonstrating that no other śāstra enjoyed such association with political power would be anyayoga-vyavaccheda. It is only when both these are demonstrated satisfactorily, would his observations, and the conclusions that he draws from them, be deemed acceptable by a discerning reader.

"Pollock himself declares that he is not aiming for anyayoga-vyavaccheda – i.e proving his claims with reference only to Vyākaraṇa, to the exclusion of other śāstra-s. This is done by a very clever use of circuitous language ... "

"This unravels the first trick of his writing: Despite focussing exclusively on grammar in his preface and his conclusion, Pollock freely utilises all the different śāstra-s, and even kāvya-s, in drawing his examples and evidences. By using the term ‘metonymically’, Pollock tries to justify this implicitly. But then, on what grounds would evidences built on a wide range of disciplines justify the conclusions that he draws pertaining to a specific and single discipline?"

................................................................................................

"Celebration of Grammatical learning in kings"

"For illustrating his first feature, i.e, celebration of grammatical learning in kings, Pollock mentions seven inscriptions, through which he wishes to demonstrate that grammatical learning among kings was held in high esteem across the Sanskrit Cosmopolis. These illustrations are examined below to see if they do actually serve his stated purpose."

"1. Praśasti of Kṣatrapa Rudradāman, Junagadh, 150 CE"

"The relevant portion of the inscription which is referred to by Pollock reads,

"“hastocchrayārjitorjita-dharmānurāgeṇa śabdārtha-gāndharva-nyāyādyānāṁ vidyānāṁ mahatīnāṁ pāraṇa-dhāraṇa-vijñāna-prayogāvāpta-vipulakīrtinā”

"(Hultzsch 1905-06:44) (hyphenation ours)

"Pollock himself translates it thus, “one who has won wide fame by his theoretical and practical mastery and retention of the great knowledges, grammar, polity, music, systematic thought, and so on” (Pollock 2006:166). While there is no doubt that the word śabdārtha used in the inscription does refer to Grammar, one must note that Pollock ignores the other streams of knowledge - such as music and logic, all equally held aloft as great (mahatī) by virtue of being mentioned alongside - and keeps his focus exclusively on grammar."

"2. Praśasti of Samudragupta, Allahabad, 4th cent. CE"

"Pollock quotes three statements from this inscription – “yasya prajñā-niṣaṅgocita-sukha-manasaḥ śāstra-tattvārtha-bhartuḥ...”, “vaiduṣyaṁ tattva-bhedi...”, “ādhyeyaḥ sūkta-mārgaḥ kavi-mati-vibhavotsāraṇaṁ cāpi kāvyam”

"(Fleet 1960:6). (hyphenation ours)

"Even going by Pollock’s own translation of the sentences [“master of the true meanings of the śāstras”, “a man of truth-piercing learning”, whose “way of poetry merits the closest study, and whose literary work puts to shame the creative powers of [other] poets.” (Pollock 2006:166)], there is no reference to Grammar, either explicit or implicit, in this inscription."

"3. Copper plate record of Durvinīta, 6th cent. CE"

"Pollock quotes a portion of the text of this inscription which reads “śabdāvatāra-kareṇa devabhāratī-nibaddha-vaḍḍa-kathena kirātārjunīye pañcadaśa-sarga-ṭīkākāreṇa durvinīta-nāmadheyena” (hyphenation ours) In Pollock’s own words, “the king is praised as the man who composed the Descent of Language [now lost], and rewritten the [Paishachi] Bṛhatkathā [Great Tale] in the language of the Gods”

"(Pollock 2006:166).

"The inscription also mentions that he composed a commentary on the fifteenth canto of the Kirātārjunīya. However, none of the works of Durvinīta are now available, and there is no evidence to even guess what kind of a work the Śabdāvatāra was. This being the case, it seems rather far-fetched to connect Durvinīta with Grammar, going merely by the title of an unknown text."

"4. Praśasti of King Sañjaya of Java, 732 CE"

"This inscription praises the king as “śāstra-sūkṣmārtha-vedī”, “one who understood the subtle points of śāstra-s”. Why should the term śāstra used here be interpreted as a reference to Vyākaraṇa, of all? Is not śāstra a term which can encompass all disciplines of knowledge? If we need to associate a particular discipline in relation to a king, is it not more logical to associate Artha-śāstra (or Dharma-śāstra or Nīti-śāstra), rather than Vyākaraṇa–śāstra?"

"5. Praśasti of Jaya-Indravarman I, Champa, 970 CE"

"Pollock says that this king is celebrated explicitly as an expert in Pāṇini’s grammar and the Kāśikā. The original text of this inscription could not be traced by me. However, a similar wording is found in the praśasti of 840 CE, related to Indravarman III of Champa. This inscription reads, “mīmāṁsa-ṣaṭtarka-jinendra-sūrmiḥ sa-kāśikā-vyākaraṇodakaughaḥ | ākhyāna-śaivottara-kalpa-mīnaḥ paṭiṣṭha eteṣviti sat-kavīnām”

"(Majumdar 1927:III 138) (hyphenation ours)"

"Since this inscription specifically mentions Vyākaraṇa and the grammatical text Kāśikā, we can freely admit this as an illustration for Pollock’s point. However, it must be noted that even this does not exclusively refer to Vyākaraṇa. Among all the śāstra-s mentioned here, including Mīmāṁsā, Tarka, Śaiva, Uttarakalpa, and so on, why is Pollock’s spotlight, it must be asked, only on Vyākaraṇa?"

"6. Praśasti of Sūryavarman I, Angkor, 1002 CE"

"Pollock himself provides the original reading of this inscription –

"“bhāṣyādi-caraṇā kāvya-pāṇiḥ ṣaḍ-darśanendriyā. yan-matir dharmaśāstrādi-mastakā jaṅgamāyate”

"(Pollock 2006:167 footnote) (hyphenation ours)

"The English translation of this verse, as provided by Pollock, is a beautiful illustration of his misleading usage of language. He translates the verse as,

"“one whose mind itself truly seemed a body that could move, with the [Great] Commentary [of Patañjali on Pāṇini’s grammar] and the rest [of the grammatical treatises] for its feet, [the two kinds of] literature [prose and verse] for its hands, the six systems of philosophy for its senses, and dharma and the other śāstra-s for its head.”

"(Pollock 2006:166)"

"Words supplied by Pollock, placed by him within square brackets, merit careful reading. While the original verse mentions bhāṣya without any attributes, Pollock translates it as ‘the [Great] Commentary [of Patañjali on Pāṇini’s grammar]’.

"It is well known that the epithet mahat on the term bhāṣya is used exclusively for the Vyākaraṇa bhāṣya. However, without this epithet, the word bhāṣya is a generic term whose instances are found in all śāstra-s.

"This is also backed by the fact that the other terms used alongside in the inscription, namely kāvya and darśana are also generic terms, not referring to any specific texts. Pollock provides the epithet ‘Great’ himself to drag the Mahābhāṣya into this, and using that, he extrapolates the term ādi to refer to the rest of grammatical treatises. Clearly, he is resorting to flights of fancy, even while there is no firm ground to leap from!"

"7. Description of the Veṅgi Cālukya king Rājarājanarendra, by the Telugu poet Nannaya"

"Here, Pollock says that the king is described as “lucid in thought, trained in the science of Kumāra [the Kātantra of Śarvavarman], a good Cāḷukya, luminous as the moon, [who] finds peace in studying the ancient texts.”

"(Pollock 2006:166)

"Kātantra indicated here is of course a grammatical work.

Thus, out of a total of seven examples quoted by Pollock, there are only three instances of a specific mention of Vyākaraṇa and its texts. Even among those, except in the last instance, Vyākaraṇa is mentioned alongside, and on par with, the other śāstra-s – neither exclusively, that is, nor as the most important. The other four examples are related to Vyākaraṇa only by a certain stretch of imagination.

"I leave it to the discerning readers to decide if Pollock is justified in claiming that ‘celebration of grammatical learning in kings’ is one of the features which demonstrates “a mutually constitutive association between Sanskrit grammaticality and rulership”."

................................................................................................

"Royal patronage of Grammatical Learning"

"To quote Pollock:

"“Since it was theory that underlay the royal practice of grammatical correctness, which itself was seen as a component of political correctness, it stands to reason that power should have actively cared for grammar by sponsoring the production of grammatical texts and ensuring their continued study.”

"(Pollock 2006:167)"

Pollock seems to make it sound abnormal that when learning Sanskrit one has to know grammer. This might indicate he had a difficulty in doing so, being from US and thus used to lazy habits of being bad even at the little required in US concerning academic excellence. But it's not only French and German that require a stricter degree of learning correct language, grammar, pronunciation and idioms, it's true of English too, in England. Since Pollock couldn't complain about being ridiculed for his English in, say, Oxford, one kmagines he thought he'd kowtow by demolishing India with ridiculous complaints about Sanskrit grammer, linking it to political power.

But as a general rule, Brahmins were poor, and required to learn, of which correct speech was the least expected requisite, so clearly Pollock is bollocks.

"Pollock quotes Hartmut Scharfe as providing the initial spark of such thought, where Scharfe opines that a strong case could be made for the importance of princely patronage of grammatical studies, and traces three spurts of activity in the 5th, 11th and 17th centuries coinciding with the period of strong kingdoms. Scharfe states this, as Pollock himself admits, “in passing”, with no elaboration on grounds of historical data only or any substantiation. However, Pollock is not satisfied by merely acknowledging that royal encouragement was (as in the case of all other literary/cultural activity) useful in promoting grammatical activity to an extent. He goes to the extent of claiming that,

"“...princely patronage was not just vaguely “important” to Sanskrit philology, and the history of the relationship between polity and philology was not just episodic, punctuated by spurts that nevertheless remain obscure in their origins and mysterious in their effects. On the contrary, royal power seems to have provided the essential precondition for the flourishing of the postliturgical philological tradition—as philology likewise provided a precondition for power— from the birth of the Sanskrit cosmopolitan order throughout its lifetime.”

"(Pollock 2006:168)"

In this his intention is to make Indian seem ridiculous, by giving some other scholars a basis for concluding that India was invaded, plundered, massacred, and under boot of barbarians, for centuries, only because India was too busy with learning grammer.

If he weren't dishonest, or if he were capable of learning, or doing better, he'd admit he thought it was easy to get ahead in Sanskrit Studies, but it wasn't - or he could have been at Institute For Advanced Studies at Princeton.

"These sentences are crucial in understanding the implications of Pollock, which are threefold:

"1. There would be no existence of Vyākaraṇa without royal patronage.

"2. The power of kings hinged on flourishing grammatical studies.

"3. Such a relationship between grammar and political power can be traced through the entire lifetime of the Sanskrit cosmopolitan order (and, by implication, the entire lifetime of Vyākaraṇa-śāstra itself).

"It is needless to state that Pollock would have to produce strong supporting material while making such claims - claims which go against everything that traditional students and practitioners of the system believe in. However, Pollock is wont to making strong asseverations based on flimsy foundations. He ventures relentlessly, however, to elaborate on the following instances in order to prove the existence of his fancied concomitance."

................................................................................................

"8 Pāṇini’s relation with power"

"Pollock admits that, “for the earliest period of Sanskrit grammar, the historical data are too thin to demonstrate the mutually constitutive relationship of grammar and power with much cogency” (Pollock 2006:168). Yet he reports “for what it is worth”, a legend mentioned by the seventh century Chinese pilgrim Xuangzang. The use of such a phrase (cited above in inverted commas) in serious academic writing by a veteran scholar is surprising, nay shocking. Does it not make it amply clear that the author is stating something despite knowing that it is by no means a trustworthy statement?

"The legend in question states that, on completing his grammar, Pāṇini offered it to his king, who regarded it highly, and ordered that all people in the country should learn the book, and offered a reward of one thousand gold coins for anybody who could recite it by heart.

"This association of Pāṇini with a king is unsupported by anything in his text, or in the vast commentarial literature on his text, or any stray historical references either. Yet, Pollock tries to build this relationship based on a legend heard somewhere, more than a thousand years after Pāṇini’s time. In addition, he also uses this legend to hint that the study of grammar in India was, right from the beginning, imposed by rulership.

"Does a trifling hearsay suffice to support the extraordinary claim that Vyākaraṇa-śāstra owes its very existence to political patronage?"

................................................................................................

"9 Patañjali and political power"

"Pollock again admits that the evidences offered by him are still “slender but suggestive” (Pollock 2006:168). He builds his case on two quotations from the Mahābhāṣya which have been widely discussed by scholars since a long time. These are the expressions:

"‘iha puṣyamitraṁ yājayāmaḥ’

"(“Here we conduct a sacrifice on behalf of Puṣyamitra”),

"and

"‘aruṇad yavanaḥ sāketam’

"(“The yavana besieged Sāketa”),

"which are offered by Patañjali as illustrations for certain rules. Pollock particularly relies on the second statement, and extrapolates from later practices to assert that - through this, Patañjali is trying to identify himself.

"Let us examine the context of the two citations from the Mahābhāṣya: ‘aruṇad yavanaḥ sāketam’ is offered by Patañjali as an illustration to the vārttika ‘parokṣe ca loka-vijñāte prayoktur darśana-viṣaye laṅ vaktavyaḥ’, under ‘anadyatane laṅ’ (Aṣṭādhyāyī 3.2.111). Pānini prescribes liṭ lakāra for cases of past tense where the event was not witnessed directly by the speaker (parokṣa). Regarding that, the vārttika states that famous events happening in the lifetime of the speaker, which could have been witnessed by him, govern the usage of laṅ rather than liṭ. Here, two examples are offered by Patañjali – ‘aruṇad yavanaḥ sāketam’, and ‘aruṇad yavano mādhyamikām’. The implication is that the attack on Sāketa and Mādhyamikā happened during the lifetime of Patañjali (and were not witnessed by him directly). These two statements have been discussed widely over the last two centuries for their grammatical/semantic implications, and those discussions are not relevant here."

" ... Pollock draws the conclusion that

"“...Patañjali – or the earlier grammarian he may have been citing - was seeking, in a very subtle way that virtually all later grammarians were to adopt, to identify himself, his patron and the place where he worked. That location was obviously courtly, whether it was the court of the Śuṅga overlords (the dynasty to which Puṣyamitra belonged) who succeeded the Maurya kings or another court three centuries later”

"(Pollock 2006:169)

"However, in drawing the above conclusion, Pollock ignores the fundamental difference between the examples offered by Patañjali and those offered by the later court-grammarians. Patañjali is stating the case of a foreign invasion, whereas the later grammarians are citing the conquests carried out by their patrons. If the examples were exactly similar, we would have to conclude that Patañjali was a grammarian in the court of the invading yavana. Is this accepted by Pollock? Obviously not, as he says that the location of Patañjali was the court of either Puṣyamitra or some other later king.

"When the difference in approach is so glaring, and when there is no mention of any “patron king” in Patañjali’s statements, how can Pollock be justified in concluding that his location was “obviously courtly”? Why can it not be the case that Patañjali is simply stating a famous event of his lifetime he was no witness to?"

................................................................................................

"10. The Case Of Kumāralāta"

"The next two grammarians that Pollock considers are Kumāralāta and Śarvavarman. Students of grammar should be excused for wondering who Kumāralāta is, as his name is unheard of in the vast grammatical literature, both Pāṇinian and non-Pāṇinian. Pollock himself says that

"“Kumāralāta is known as a grammarian only through fragments of his work discovered in Central Asia and brilliantly analyzed at the beginning of the century by Heinrich Lüders.”

"(Pollock 2006:169)"

"The Buddhist Kumāralāta is famous as the founder of the Sautrāntika sect. Belonging to the genre of Dṛṣṭānta-paṅkti (collection of moral stories which illustrate the principles of Buddhism), his work Kalpanā-maṇḍitaka is also known as Sūtrālaṅkāra. Pollock says,

"“The Kuṣāṇa emperor Kaniṣka appears in two of the tales in Kumāralāta’s story collection, but no further evidence is available to determine just how close the grammarian’s association with the court may have been”

"(Pollock 2006:169)."

We need to consider the following facts here –

"The authorship of Sūtrālaṅkāra itself is not settled; and this text is available fully in Chinese and only partially in Sanskrit, and is considered by many to have been penned by Aśvaghoṣa.

"Even if Sūtrālaṅkāra is accepted to be by Kumāralāta, it does not offer any conclusive evidence of the author’s relationship with the court of the Kuṣāṇa emperor. A few points omitted by Pollock, are also worth noting. The Sūtrālaṅkāra is a text with nearly two hundred stories, mostly featuring heroes from all walks of life, including brahmins, saṁnyāsin-s, bhikṣu-s, merchants, painters, washermen and so on. Further, even the Mauryan emperor Aśoka figures in three of the stories of this collection (Nariman 1923:196). Ignoring all this, how can Pollock postulate that Kumāralāta was in the court of Kaniṣka, just because Kaniṣka features in two stories of the collection?

"So, in this illustration offered by Pollock, Kumāralāta’s status as a grammarian is itself based on feeble evidence as only portions of the text are available. Further, Kumāralāta’s association with Kuṣāṇa emperor Kaniṣka is based on flimsy evidence from another text supposedly authored by him, but whose very authorship is debated. Thirdly, in the very next paragraph, Pollock remarks on the similarities between this text and the Kātantra-Vyākaraṇa, and concludes that it makes more sense to “assume that the Kātantra was adopted and expanded by the northern Buddhists than the other way around” (Pollock 2006:170). Pollock is also certain that the Kātantra antedates Candragomin’s work, which is reasonably securely assigned to the mid-fifth century.

"All this means that, in one paragraph, Pollock forcibly associates Kumāralāta with the Kuṣāṇa emperor Kaniṣka of the second century CE. And in the very next paragraph, he pushes him to later than fifth century CE.

"Though Pollock is very clever in that he does not explicitly associate Kumāralāta with Kaniṣka, the implication is very obvious. Also, if that is not what he is implying, why bring in Kumāralāta at this point at all?"

................................................................................................

"11 Śarvavarman, author of Kātantra-Vyākaraṇa"

"The next grammarian considered by Pollock is Śarvavarman, the founder of a non-Pāṇinian system of grammar called Kātantra-Vyākaraṇa. This system is popularly believed to have originated by the grace of Lord Kārttikeya. Thus, scholars hold that it is this system which is intended by the word kaumāra in the popular verse which enumerates the nine traditions of Vyākaraṇa –

"aindraṁ cāndraṁ kāśakṛtsnaṁ kaumāraṁ śākaṭāyanam |

"sārasvataṁ cāpiśalaṁ śākalaṁ pāṇinīyakam ||"

"Pollock fills two pages with details on the possible reason for the origin of Kātantra-Vyākaraṇa, the relationship between Kātantra and Kumāralāta-Vyākaraṇa, the extent of spread of Kātantra, endowments in South India specifically for its study etc.

"Wondering about the relevance of all this to the matter at hand, astute readers are apt to notice this – Pollock opens his writing on Śarvavarman by stating that “the grammarian Śarvavarman, author of the Kātantra, is placed by legendary accounts at the Sātavāhana court in perhaps the second century.” (Pollock 2006:169). Further, he says, “This location may receive some confirmation in a remark of Xuanzang’s biographer, who reported that “recently a Brahman of southern India again shortened [Pāṇini’s grammar] to twenty-five hundred stanzas for the king of South India.” (Pollock 2006:170).

"That Pollock himself does not consider this report to be authentic stands proved - both by the fact that he uses the term ‘legendary accounts’, and by his explicit statement about the certainty of Kātantra antedating Candragomin’s work of mid-fifth century CE. There is no evidence offered in the entire length of the next two pages of writing, for connecting Śarvavarman to any political power. Yet, at the end, Pollock concludes

"“Even so, whether it was Śarvavarman or Kumāralāta who composed the original Kātantra, there is little doubt that the author was closely associated with a ruling power, whether in the South or in the North.”

"(Pollock 2006:171)

"This is an extraordinary style of presenting a case, where a claim made in the introduction is simply reiterated at the end as the conclusion, without even an attempt to defend it in the span in between. The “proof” for Śarvavarman’s association with royal power is a legendary account (which doesn’t even contain any specific reference to him or his patron); the “proof” for Kumāralāta’s association with royal power, as demonstrated above, is the mention of a king in but two among two hundred stories of a story-collection of debated authorship.

"Yet, Pollock confidently states that “there is little doubt that the author was closely associated with a ruling power”.

................................................................................................

"12 Revival of the study of Mahābhāṣya by two kings of Kashmir"

"Pollock quotes two portions from the Rāja-taraṅgiṇī which narrate accounts of revival of the study of the Mahābhāṣya by two separate kings. The first is the instance of King Jayāpīḍa, which is given thus (Rāja-taraṅgiṇī) –

"utpatti-bhūmau deśe’smin dūradūra-tirohitā |

"kaśyapena vitasteva tena vidyāvatāritā || 4.486

"deśāntarād āgamayya vyācakṣāṇān kṣamāpatiḥ |

"prāvartayata vicchinnaṁ mahābhāṣyaṁ sva-maṇḍale || 4.488

"kṣīrābhidhāc chabdavidyopādhyāyāt sambhṛta-śrutaḥ |

"budhaiḥ saha yayau vṛddhiṁ sa jayāpīḍa-paṇḍitaḥ || 4.489

"This story states the the knowledge of Vyākaraṇa had disappeared from its very birthplace, and the king brought scholars from a different place to revive the study of the bhāṣya in his kingdom. He himself learnt from a teacher named Kṣīra, and, due to his association with scholars, became a learned man himself, honoured as Jayāpīḍa-paṇḍita. Jayāpīḍa’s reign has been determined by historians to be mid-eighth century CE. A second passage from the Rāja-taraṅgiṇī is also mentioned by Pollock, where an earlier king by name Abhimanyu performed a similar feat in the fourth century CE.

"candrācāryādibhir labdhvā deśāt tasmāt tadāgamam |

"pravartitaṁ mahābhāṣyaṁ svaṁ ca vyākaraṇaṁ kṛtam || "

"(Rāja-taraṅgiṇī 1.176)"

"Here, it is stated that upon receiving his command, Candra and other preceptors started the study of Mahābhāṣya, and also created their own system of grammar. Based on this, Pollock states that

"“clearly, for Kalhaṇa at least, the stories of the kings Abhimanyu and Jayāpīḍa are meant to be symmetrical as well as to convey a sense of the central place of royal patronage in the fostering of systematic Sanskrit knowledge, especially philological knowledge.”

"(Pollock 2006:172)"

"While this may appear true at first sight, two points are to be noted. The first is the fact that Jayāpīḍa was interested not just in grammar, but in all disciplines of knowledge. In the following verses of the Rāja-taraṅgiṇī (4.494 – 4.497), Kalhaṇa gives a long list of scholars patronised by Jayāpīḍa. They include the rhetoricians Udbhaṭa and Vāmana, Dāmodara-gupta (author of Kuṭṭinī-mata, a text on Kāma-śāstra), and poets like Manoratha. Also, going by the description, the scholarly Jayāpīḍa appears to be more of an exception rather than the rule. If all the rulers were uniformly interested in encouraging grammar, or indeed, as Pollock puts it, “it was a royal obligation to ensure the stability and continuation of the grammatical order” (Pollock 2006:173), how is it that the study of Mahābhāṣya, which was revived by Abhimanyu in the fourth century CE, utterly disappear (‘dūradūra-tirohitā’) in the first place, and within a span of a mere three centuries when Jayāpīḍa had to revive it again? Indeed, finding no scholars of grammar in Kashmir, Jayāpīḍa had to import them from other places.

"If Pollock accepts both instances mentioned in the Rāja-taraṅgiṇī, he would have to accept that, rather than being fervent supporters of grammatical knowledge, the kings of Kashmir were so averse to it that the tradition of grammatical studies was completely uprooted twice within the span of a few centuries."

................................................................................................

"13 Śākaṭāyana Vyākaraṇa"

"Pollock then mentions Śākaṭāyana, the court-grammarian patronised by the Rāṣṭrakūṭa king Amogha-varṣa of the eighth century CE. He composed a new system of grammar called the Śabdānuśāsana, and also an auto-commentary on it which was titled Amogha-vṛtti in honour of his patron."

................................................................................................

"14 Halāyudha, the author of Kavi-rahasya"

"Patronised by the Rāṣṭrakūṭa king Kṛṣṇa the Third, Halāyudha composed a praśasti titled Kavi-rahasya in praise of his patron. The unique feature of this poem is that it attempts to illustrate the various forms of meanings of all verbal roots. For example, this is the verse quoted by Pollock.

"vetti sarvāṇi śāstrāṇi,

"garvo yasya na vidyate, |

"vintte dharmaṁ sadā sadbhis,

"teṣu pūjāṁ ca vindati || 49

"(emphasis ours)

"This verse demonstrates the use of the verbal root vid in four different senses, along with its form (in the Present Tense) in each sense. Poems like Kavi-rahasya, composed with an intention of illustrating the rules of Vyākaraṇa or Alaṅkāra-śāstra, belong to a popular genre of kāvya-s called śāstra-kāvya. Under the pretext of śāstra-kāvya-s, Pollock also mentions Bhaṭṭi-kāvya. Also known as Rāvaṇa-vadha, Bhaṭṭi-kāvya is one of the oldest and the foremost of śāstra-kāvya-s, where Bhaṭṭi illustrates various Pāṇinian sūtra-s topicwise, even as he narrates the story of Śrīrāma. The final verse of this poem is,

"kāvyam idaṁ vihitaṁ mayā valabhyāṁ śrīdharasena-narendra-pālitāyām |

"kīrtir ato bhavatān nṛpasya tasya premakaraḥ kṣitipo yataḥ prajānām || 22.35"

"It means, “This poem was composed by me in Valabhī, which is ruled by Śrīdharasena. May the king attain fame through this, since he is engaged in delighting the subjects”. By mentioning this poem in this context, Pollock is clearly implying a royal association, though, as he himself admits, “...so far as can be determined from the text itself the narrative was not specifically intended to map against the life of the ruling overlord and cannot easily be read that way.” (Pollock 2006:174)."

................................................................................................

"15. Hemacandra, and Others"

"At the end of the twelfth century CE, Hemacandra composed this poem illustrating the rules of both Sanskrit and Prakrit grammars composed by himself, while narrating the history of his patrons – Jayasiṁha-siddharāja and Kumārapāla.

"Thus, among the eight evidences offered so far by Pollock in support of his second claim (that rulers went out of their way to encourage and promote grammatical studies), it has been demonstrated that the first four instances show no definite association with royal power. The fifth case of two kings of Kashmir is more illustrative of the apathy of kings towards grammar, rather than encouragement. It is only the last three examples which demonstrate definite cases of grammatical texts being composed by courtly scholars.

"Even Pollock must have been apprehensive as to whether his arguments suffice to demonstrate the association of grammar with royal power ‘throughout its lifetime’. Hence, he seeks to expand his domain by stating “If for the purposes of analyzing the interrelationship between power and philology we widen the genre-domain of śāstra-kāvya to include the illustration of not only grammatical but also rhetorical norms (alaṅkāra-śāstra), as the latter part of Bhaṭṭi’s work in fact does, we perceive a vast field of scholarly poetic texts on kings and literary culture” (Pollock 2006:174).

"Having set out to portray the exclusive and superlative association of grammar with political power, why this reliance now on just the other streams of knowledge?

"Yet, Pollock announces confidently: “This brief survey of power and philology could easily be extended to include almost every important intellectual who wrote on grammar in the Sanskrit Cosmopolis” (Pollock 2006:175). To this end, he throws in the names of Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri, Bhaṭṭojī Dīkṣita, Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa and Nāgeśabhaṭṭa.

"Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri (16th century CE) composed Prakriyā-sarvasva at the insistence of Devanārāyaṇa, the ruler of Ambalapuzha. He mentions this fact right at the beginning of his text. Bhaṭṭojī Dīkṣita and Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa, two famed names in the field of Pāṇinian grammar, were patronised by the post-Vijayanagara Nāyaka kings of Keladi in the 17th cent. CE, as stated by Pollock. However, there is not even a mention of their patron kings anywhere in their texts. Bhaṭṭojī Dīkṣita does not take the names of any patron even among the examples that he gives to illustrate rules in his text. It is highly doubtful if any political mileage or power was drawn by the kings by patronising these grammarians. It is more likely that they considered the patronage of all learning and arts as an essential component of good kingship, and not as any potent source of royal power. Nāgeśabhaṭṭa, the foremost among modern grammarians, lived in the 18th century, when “the sun of Sanskrit cosmopolitanism had already set” (Pollock 2006:175). He was patronised by a king called Rāma in the kingdom of Śṛṅgaverapura, as declared by himself in the prelude to one of his texts (Laghu-śabdendu-śekhara, verse 2). However, even his texts have absolutely no reference to his patron king any more than a mention of his name.

"After this, in line with his usual practice, Pollock provides a long list of rhetoricians who worked in royal courts, which fills a good deal of space but adds nothing to his aim of demonstrating that grammar carried political associations more potent than any other form of knowledge.

"The inherent weakness in these evidences need not be proved by anybody else. Pollock himself admits it as “rather vague data” (Pollock 2006:175). To make it more concrete, Pollock then proceeds to provide examples of royal endowments aimed at supporting the reproduction of grammatical knowledge. His intention is to use these to further strengthen his case for royal patronage of grammatical learning. However, as in the previous cases, they turn out to be nothing more than a flow of words which carries away the facts in its force.

"In this context, Pollock quotes three inscriptions – two from Karnataka and one from Tamilnadu – which we now examine."

................................................................................................

"16 Inscription of Govinda IV of Rāṣṭrakūṭa dynasty, 929 CE"

"Pollock makes a mention of land gifted by Govinda the Fourth to two hundred brahmins in Puligere for their study of grammar and (as Pollock puts within brackets) for the study of political theory, literary criticism, history, logic and commentary writing.

"Clearly, this is not an endowment purely for the purposes of grammatical learning."

................................................................................................

"17 Inscription of King Bijjaḷa of Kālacūri lineage of Kalyāṇa, 1162 CE"

"Pollock says that this grant of Bijjaḷa was given to a Kāḷāmukha Śaiva college in Kodhimaṭha, whose syllabus included “analysis of the Kaumāra [i.e. Kātantra], Pāṇinīya, Śākaṭāyana-śabdānuśāsana, and other grammars” (Pollock 2006:176). He does not mention what else was included in the syllabus. A look into the original text of the grant reveals that it included all extant streams of learning, including the four Veda-s, vedāṅga-s, darśana-s such as Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṁsā, Sāṅkhya, Bauddha etc., along with their commentaries, Yogaśāstra-s such as Lākula-siddhānta and Pātañjala, the eighteen purāṇa-s, dharmaśāstra, kāvya and nāṭaka. (Rice 1902:28 SK.102).

"How can this be treated as an illustration for patronage of grammatical learning exclusively?"

................................................................................................

"18 Inscription of Coḷa king Kulottuṅga the Third, 1235 CE"

"Pollock says that this Coḷa king donated a land of 400 acres for the construction of a “hall for the analysis of the gift of grammar” (Vyākaraṇa-dāna-vyākhyāna-maṇḍapa), giving the impression that such a vast space was allocated for grammatical learning. But actually, this land was given for maintaining the Vyākaraṇa-dāna-vyākhyāna-maṇḍapa, which is a part of the Tyāgarāja temple of Tiruvotriyur (Ayyar 1993:61).

"But it has to be accepted that this is one case where Vyākaraṇa is indeed treated exclusively. Thus, among the three illustrations provided by Pollock here, only one records an instance of a special privilege accorded to Vyākaraṇa. Despite this, Pollock believes that “further amassing data would only be redundant” (Pollock 2006:176). He concludes this section of the chapter saying

"“the main point should be clear: that power’s concern with grammar, and to a comparable degree grammar’s concern with power, comprised a constitutive feature of the Sanskrit cosmopolitan order.” (Pollock 2006:176)

"The third feature claimed by him, namely “competitive zeal among rulers everywhere to encourage grammatical creativity and adorn their courts with scholars who could exemplify it”, is elaborated in the second section of the chapter, and it will be taken up for analysis by me in a future article."

................................................................................................

"Conclusion"

"Pollock himself admits that Indian grammatical studies are held in worldwide esteem purely based on their intellectual depth, and nothing else. References to politics or royalty in works of grammar are extremely rare, even in works which were probably produced through royal patronage. Yet, Pollock tries to build an entirely imaginary relationship between grammar and political power using a convoluted language which conceals much more than it reveals. This paper has shown that the evidences that he brings forth are mostly weak, and sometimes totally irrelevant. Based on such unreliable evidences, he makes sweeping claims to support his grand theories of political philology.

"It is unfortunate that Vyākaraṇa-śāstra, which has been hailed by Bhartṛhari as the “straight path leading to the Light Sublime” has been looked at by Pollock entirely through a distorting lens, deceiving himself thereby and taking his readers for a grand ride."

................................................................................................

"Footnotes"

"[ 1 ] ayoga-vyavaccheda and anyayoga-vyavaccheda are two standard techniques used in the śāstra-s to demonstrate exclusivity. To prove an exclusive relationship between two entities A and B, one would have to prove two points – first, that A is always associated with B, and that there is no case where the association is absent. This is termed a-yoga-vyavaccheda, literally, ruling out non-association. The second is that A is never found in association with entities other than B. This is termed anya-yoga-vyavaccheda, literally, ruling out association of A with any non-B."

................................................................................................

................................................

February 27, 2022 - February 28, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Chapter 2"

"Practice v/s Theory: Gaṇita and Mathematics*"

"–Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay"

................................................................................................

"Abstract"

"Śāstra-s are an integral part of Indian knowledge systems, and provide systematic procedures to accomplish specific objectives in diverse fields - like mathematics, philosophy, architecture, politics, economy and others. Noted Sanskrit scholar Professor Sheldon Pollock however views śāstra-s as a problem, and sees a dichotomy between śāstra (“theory”) and prayoga (“practical activity”) in Sanskritic culture, and considers them to be a regressive reformulation of the contents of the Veda-s - the śāstra par excellence. This paper is meant to be a refutation of some of Pollock’s core assumptions, by way of taking into account Gaṇita-śāstra/Indian arithmetic as a case study. We demonstrate that from the earliest times to premodern times, Gaṇita in India has relentlessly focused on real-life problems, developing logical and efficient algorithms for problem solving, - and this, even among Jain and Buddhist scholars, who do not regard Veda-s as a pramāṇa. Akin to all Indian schools of thought and even modern science, Gaṇita accepts pratyakṣa-pramāṇa or empirical evidence as the first means of knowledge. Depending, however, entirely on axioms, binary logic and eternally valid proofs (theory) - as opposed to calculations (prayoga) - it is formal Western mathematics that categorically rejects the empirical world, and is imbued with theological dogma. Binary logic cannot be taken as a normative logic, as the Buddhist Catuṣkoṭi and the Jain Syādvāda schema follow different approaches. Western mathematics, which is the only type of mathematics taught in schools today, therefore comes across as arcane, abstract and complicated to most non-specialists, and has become a tool of little more than cultural hegemony."

One must here point out a couple of things. One, elementary arithmetic, once taught at primary school level, is finished. Thereafter most people are equipped to deal with most calculations needed in life, unless one is dealing with theoretical questions of a science.

Mathematics is a science of ideas and concepts, structures thereof and establishing truths about these structures and their mutual relationships, and discoveries - not inventions - related.

And whatever a computer can do, it's wasting mind for humans to do so.

It's neither about trend nor about any cultural hegemony. There's no rule or law thst a mathematician must prove theorems or lemnas, and such comments demean those making them as boors unable to comprehend the difference.

Once, yes, computations were valuable. But theoretical work is where mathematics lives, unlike material sciences with experimental branches.

................................................................................................

"Śāstra and Indian Knowledge Systems"

"For purposes of pedagogy, knowledge is organized into three categories, śāstra (primary sources), saṅgraha (compendiums) and ṭīkā (commentaries) within the tradition of Indian knowledge systems. Śāstra-s are broadly categorized as apauruṣeya and pauruṣeya.1 Apauruṣeya includes the Veda-s and notionally the vedāṅga-s, while pauruṣeya includes purāṇa-s including (itihāsa), ānvīkṣīkī (logic), mīmāṁsā (analysis and interpretation), dharma-śāstra (sociology/law/ritual), kāvya vidyā and all other vidyā-s and kalā-s (Kapoor 2005:22). Śāstra-s are texts dealing with specialized technical knowledge in diverse fields like mathematics, physics, chemistry, arts, architecture, astronomy, philosophy, politics, and a host of other subjects (Malhotra 2016:37) (Lochtefeld 2002:626).

"“Śāstra” is, in general, used to refer to any science. Scholars have translated, for example, Artha-śāstra variously as the “Science of Politics”, “Treatise on Polity”, “Science of Material Gain”, “Science of Polity”, and “Science of Political Economy” (Boesche 2003). While discussing the vast scope and breadth of śāstra-s, Professor Sheldon Pollock (hereafter Pollock) observes that they cover “virtually every activity” ranging from “cooking, sexual intercourse, elephant-rearing, thievery, to mathematics, logic, ascetic renunciation, and spiritual liberation.” (Pollock 1985:502). He enumerates among others, śāstra-s like Kṛṣi-śāstra, Gaṇita-śāstra, Gandha-śāstra, Kalā-śāstra, Matysa-śāstra and Śakuna-śāstra. Śūdraka, who thrived somewhere between 3rd century BCE and 5th century CE, even considers thievery a science in his plays Mṛc-chakaṭika and Padma-prābhṛtaka, and alludes to a book on Caurya Śāstra called Steya-sutta (Varadpande 2005:158-159).

"Unlike formal mathematics and theoretical sciences, śāstra-s do not follow the proposition-axiom-and-proof model, and instead, comparable to applied sciences and engineering today, present “a series of rules, which serve to characterize, and carry out systematic procedures to accomplish various ends. These systematic procedures are variously referred to as vidhi, kriyā or prakriyā, sādhanā, karma or parikarma, karaṇa, etc., in different disciplines” (Srinivas et al. 2014). In his treatise Vākyapadīya, Bhartṛhari (ca. 500 CE) states clearly that the procedures taught in the śāstra-s are simply certain means (upāya) towards certain desired ends, and must not be viewed as constraints or regulations.2 This is a continuation of Patañjali’s (ca. 2nd century BCE) assertion in his commentary Mahābhāṣya (on Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī) to the effect that “utterances and their meanings are actually established in the world: one does not, after all, go to a grammarian to make utterances for him, as one goes to a potter for pots.” Others like Puṇyarāja (commentator on Vākyapādiyā) and the 18th century scholar Nāgeśa-bhaṭṭa reiterate this same practical approach to scientific theorization (Srinivas 2016:8-10). "Kapil Kapoor has highlighted this fact that Indian thought being pluralistic, is not obsessed with a “one given truth” as in the West (Kapoor 2005:26). He says that while Indian thinkers acknowledge the existence of some truth, they have reservations about the possibility of getting access to or knowing it via single/exclusive paths/methods, and thus there can be different ways to know the truth. This allows for multiple world-views, ontologies and epistemologies; and therefore, an individual is not subject here to the pressures of societal/communal norms."

................................................................................................

"Pollock’s Views on Śāstra"

"Pollock views Sanskrit as an artificial enterprise, and sees Sanskrit knowledge systems, as a derivative of this non-natural language, and even as a mere continuation of the revelation of the Veda-s. Sanskrit knowledge systems include, according to him, “forms of thought about Sanskrit, about the language’s particular linguistic identity, peculiar social and ideological history (its connection with old revelation of the Veda-s), and specialized resource (such as the hyper-synonymy of a non-natural language)” (Pollock 2005:10).

"In his view, this belief of traditional India in the eternal nature of the Veda-s and as a fountainhead of all knowledge, constrains the Śāstra-s in the production of new knowledge, as Śāstra texts can at best reformulate what is already in the Veda-s. ... "

Even if that were true, how's that different from church imposing restrictions on knowledge, thought and speech of the flock except better due to lack of such a central authority, and infinitely better fir having no inquisition?

Or is that why Pollock is helping church to destroy culture if India by calling Sanskrit dead, useless, restrictive, and saying everything false that he can?

" ... Pollock thus considers śāstra-s as theory and injunctions, and treats them separately from prayoga (“practical activity”); and postulates that in Sanskritic culture, theory was “held always and necessarily to precede and govern practice” and that “all knowledge is pre-existent, and that progress can only be achieved by a regressive re-appropriation of the past.” This, Pollock believes, leads to a severe curtailment of individual agency, which he describes as “the most exquisite expression of centrality of rule-governance in human behavior” in Indic culture (Pollock 1985:499-500).

"Pollock sees in all this, a kind of bondage emanating from “a structure of religious dogma” (Veda-s), such that the secular life of an individual is subjected to an all-pervasive ritualization, “leading to misery and entrapment of people”, and laments that these dogmas have been a major problem in Hindu society (Malhotra 2016:115). ... "

Most strict rituals of Hinduism are about hygiene; and they are definitely rigorous, so much so church ptiests are known to have informed their flock that they need not follow Hindu rules such as bathing and wearing washed clothes, except on Sunday! Perhaps that's Pollock’s problem? Someone wondered if he washed, so he is calling Hindu books too restrictive?

" ... He seems to consider the Veda-s as books of revelation, perhaps similar to monotheistic revealed books like the Bible or the Koran, and sees a convergence of rules as well as revelations in śāstra-s. Finally, he argues that while śāstra-s survive in practice in varying degrees in Hindu society today, Sanskrit intellectual history and knowledge system came to an inevitable end in the eighteenth century, almost a century before “interactions with colonial knowledge” and despite the prevalence of a “dynamic era of intellectual inquiry” (pax mughalana) since 1590 under the Muslim rule, and “created a vacuum for Western knowledge to fill” the gap (Pollock 2005:82-83) (Pollock 2011:5)."

Pollock is full of fraud and ignorance due to racism if not by nature. He ignores the massacres by Islamic barbarian invaders, especially of thousands of scholars at universities in India, and burning of libraries. What survived was due to caste system and oral traditions of memorisation of śāstra-s. He like other colonial racists sees mughsks as encouraging knowledge, and doesn't acknowledge even Portuguese massacres of brahmins to duscoirage thought, inquiry, intellectual endeavours and encourage a mindless society of subjects allowed only music, encouraged to drink.

"Pollock’s approach may be succinctly captured as follows:

"• Out of the many different shades of meaning of “śāstra” ranging from science, procedure, philosophical system to regulations, he selects the “regulating” or “codifying” aspect of śāstra as representative because he “seems to find it prominent in what seems to be the first formal definition of śāstra” (Pollock 1985:501).

"• Within this specific context, he investigates a few śāstra-s in the domains of language, social relations and sexuality during the “classical age”; and concludes that all knowledge derives from śāstra, and that śāstra-s refer more specifically to the Veda-s."

................................................................................................

"Approach of this Paper"

"Therefore we will examine in this paper Pollock’s chain of reasoning in the context of Gaṇita-śāstra (Indian Arithmetic). Continuing in the same vein, we will then apply his framework of Western knowledge systems and his views of śāstra to modern Formal Mathematics, and analyze the implications. We will suitably demonstrate in this paper that his views on śāstra-s can be applied remarkably well to modern Western formal mathematics but not to Indian arithmetic, thereby rendering his generalizations questionable. On the other hand, as we shall demonstrate, the modern scientific method of research lends itself quite well to understanding and practicing Gaṇita but not mathematics."

................................................................................................

"Gaṇita-śāstra as a commentary on the Veda-s"

"Gaṇita (arithmetic) is an important śāstra for Hindus, Jains as well as Buddhists. Jains regard the knowledge of saṅkhyāna (the science of numbers) as a particularly important accomplishment, and in fact one of the four branches of their religious literature is called gaṇitānuyoga (Datta and Singh 1962:4). As per Mahāvīrācārya (a 9th century Jain mathematician), Gaṇita has immense practical applications across a diverse range of real-life situations: ... "

"In Buddhist thought, special emphasis was given on arithmetic (gaṇanā/saṅkhyāna) and even Gautama the Buddha started his education when he was eight years old “firstly (with) writing and then arithmetic as the most important of the 72 sciences and arts” (Datta and Singh 1962:4-6). Gaṇeśa Daivajña, in his commentary Buddhi-vilāsinī (c. 1540) on the 12th century text Līlāvatī, defines Gaṇita as the science of computation3, and we see demonstrable evidence right down to early pre-modern times of the prayoga of Gaṇita in almost all aspects of life."

"M.D. Srinivas says in this regard that Indian mathematical texts, similar to śāstra-s in general, follow a computational and algorithmic approach rather than being all about mathematical propositions, theorems, and proofs.

"The canonical texts of different disciplines in Indian tradition present rules, which are generally called as sutras or lakshanas. Most of these rules serve to characterize systematic procedures which are designed to accomplish specific ends. In this way the Indian Sastras are always rooted in vyavahāra or practical applications.” (Srinivas 2015:1)

"Both Jainism and Buddhism reject the Veda-s (“the primordial śāstra-s” as Pollock puts them) as pramāṇa (valid means of knowledge), and thus there is no question of Gaṇita texts being commentaries on the eternal knowledge encapsulated in the Veda-s, or of new discoveries of being an approximation to some Vedic divine pattern.

Here again we see the author continue his seeming ignorance about mathematics and giving a twist to the quote he gives by Srinivas, by adding "rather than being all about mathematical propositions, theorems, and proofs", quite unnecessarily, except his thinking that, if Pollock attacks Sanskrit, he can attack mathematics in return, because he's unaware of just what mathematics really is, and who were mathematicians through the world and time.

................................................................................................

"Epistemology of Gaṇita-śāstra and Mathematics: Upapatti versus Proof"

"Modern mathematics is about proof and not computation. A person has to irrefutably prove every mathematical proposition, and this philosophy of irrefutable proof is also what is taught in schools and colleges. Empirical observation and inference is not a valid means of knowledge in formal mathematics (unlike science), and computation does not play any significant role in the philosophy of mathematics.4"

It's unbelievable that someone is writing this genuinely when he could have talked with a mathematician at one of the research institutions across India or even one of the dozens of good mathematicians of Indian origin settled in U.S. at good academic level, and avoided getting this conference, and the whole series, laughed at through academia including in India.

Or he could have thought about it himself and realised his mistake.

Mathematics and philosophy of mathematics are separate, but those working in former never bother least about latter, being too busy. But here's in short why the author is wrong.

One may compute something to larger and larger quantities, and it still won't prove that it's permanently good, until proved logically, using past proven results if necessary. A fact might hold for large quantities and snap at next one. It's as simple as that, besides the obvious fact that numerical computations have been taken over by computers which can fo it faster and without mistakes.

This author geopardises the whole effort of refuting attack against India by Western Indology. He ought instead to have chosen, say, medicine. He'd be safer arguing for Aayurveda.

"This Platonist School of Mathematics, which is the dominant school, adheres to the metaphysical view that mathematics exists in relation to eternal abstract objects, beyond space and time, and mathematics is simply the means to discover such truths.5,6 Numbers are treated as abstractions according to David Hilbert who is considered to be one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 20th Century; and Horsten (2016) an adherent of mathematic formalism, argues that symbols are abstract entities, and higher mathematics is a formal game, and the statements of higher-order mathematics are uninterpreted strings of symbols whose proofs are nothing more than manipulation of these symbols using some fixed rules. He adds that the point of this game, “in Hilbert’s view, in proving statements of elementary arithmetic, which do have a direct interpretation.”"

Author is ok until he begins to give his own words instead of quoting Horsten.

"Gaṇita-śāstra is not based on the Western notion of axiomatic proofs but rather on what is known as upapatti, whose purpose is

"“(i) to remove confusion and doubts regarding the validity and interpretation of mathematical results and procedures; and,

"(ii) to obtain assent in the community of mathematicians” "

"(Srinivas 2016:4)."

Just how do they "obtain assent in the community of mathematicians", unless they propose Noone is admitted to the study without signing a document? There's no mathematics of making it obvious that a result is correct, without proof. Else "to remove confusion and doubts regarding the validity and interpretation of mathematical results and procedures" isn't possible.

"Moreover an upapatti may involve empirical observations and experimental verifications, and is subject to all the pitfalls of any empirical sciences like the construction of a bridge or a rocket-launch, and in this sense Gaṇita is quite distinct from Greco-European mathematics which demands infallible certainty."

Author is unaware that he's pulling down mathematicians of India of yore to the level of a hand held device computing sums! And they deserve better. He's unaware, despite being aware of names such as Hilbert, that calculation is to thought as his terrace us to space above, infinite beyond the solar system.

"Therefore Pollock’s second observation - that experience, experiment, invention, discovery, innovation are meaningless in the context of Indian knowledge systems (Pollock 1985:502) - must be rejected; and in fact it is modern day Western mathematics, on the other hand, where empirical observations and experience play no role."

If only he'd not been so gung-ho for a counterattack, his point would have half a validity just by listing mathematical works and results, instead of this ridiculous effort likely to bring ridicule on India. Pollock is wrong, but this author is attempting to outdo him. Quite unnecessarily too.

Unless Pollock paid him!

................................................................................................

"Gaṇita and Progress: Śulba-sūtra-s, Geometry and Town Planning"

"The Śulba-sūtra-s are among the oldest known mathematics texts in existence and the earliest among them have been estimated to have been composed in 800 BCE or earlier, although the principles espoused were probably in use from the much earlier Vedic times. They are manuals dealing with the construction of elegant and complex fire-altars used in Vedic yajña-s, and pre-suppose the knowledge of practical constructive geometry and abstract algebraic formulations (Dani 2010:10).

"Being engineering manuals, they provide the required mathematical guidelines for the construction of accurate brick-altars, some of which have complex shapes like “a falcon in flight with curved wings, a chariot-wheel complete with spokes or a tortoise with extended hands and legs” (Dutta 2002:5). The Śulba-sūtra-s deal with practical and real-world design and architectural problems. The construction of altars of various complex shapes like the isosceles trapezium, falcon or tortoise shape involved the use of square roots, irrational numbers, Pythagorean relations and advanced geometric concepts like area transformation (Bag 1990:4).

"Compared to contemporary Egyptian and Greek geometry of those times, the Indian technique was distinct and more practice-oriented “because of its concept of both rational and irrational numbers and their application of for verifying the truth of the theorem of the square of the diagonal” (Bag 1990:17). Seidenberg, the well-known mathematician and math-historian, posited that geometry as a subject had a ritual origin, and that constructive geometry and geometric algebra can trace their origin to an ancient culture resembling Vedic culture (Dutta 2002:4). ... "

Whats "an ancient culture resembling Vedic culture", except agreeing with eedt tacitly that Vedic culture is within timeline prescribed for human civilisation by biblical considerations?

" ... Since Gaṇita played an important role in the Vedic way of life and in Vedic geometry in particular, we may conclude, extending Seidenberg’s argument, that geometry as a scientific discipline of varied practical applications most likely originated from the Gaṇita-like śāstra of a culture resembling Vedic culture.7"

Having worked strenuously to redefine "Gaṇita" as something limited to computations, instead of equating it with mathematics, now this author proceeds to do this with other ancient knowledge of India! Was it really necessary to give another hammer to Pollock for assault?

"He mentions achievements of Indian mathematics by mentioning architectural computations and town planning, citing various excavation sites. Again, he's reducing Indian mathematics to level of an assistant to architect and engineer, or a hand held calculator, instead of the ultimate remote levels of consciousness such scholars live at.

" ... While discussing the implications of the priority of theory over practice, Pollock observes:

"“That the practice of any art or science, that all activity whatever succeeds to the degree it achieves conformity with shastric norms would imply that the improvement of any given practice lies, not in the future and the discovery of what has never been known before, but in the past and the more complete recovery of what was known in full in the past.”"

"(Pollock 1985:512)"

"This observation is not applicable to empirical sciences like Gaṇita-śāstra which follow the experiment-observe-and-theorize paradigm - which is a bottom-up approach rather than the axiom-and-proof paradigm, which is a top-down approach of formal mathematics. Like science and engineering, empirical observations were in fact the starting point of Indian arithmetic, followed by inferences and formulation of algebraic abstractions and algorithms, which could then be applied to other areas. This ties in very closely to the scientific method of research in contemporary Western knowledge systems."

Very mixed, this last paragraph.

Indian mathematics, by any name, wasn't restricted to calculations for architectural needs, even in past, as evident by another paper in Western Indology On Rasa conference, where a paper mentions Fibonacci having translated an Indian tract via its Arabic translation, for example, and name of the sequence named after him really deserving to be named after Piṅgala or Gopāla. This, or Nilkanth in Kerala later having written of conceptual beginning of differential calculus before Newton and Leibniz, were not routine computational works, but conceptual leaps, and counts as respectable mathematics regardless of absence of theorems. .

................................................................................................

"Applying Pollock’s Śāstra Framework to Formal Mathematics"

"In this section I will demonstrate that Pollock’s chain of reasoning with regards to śāstra-s and prayoga can, and in fact should be, applied to formal Western mathematics.

"The important building blocks of modern mathematics are statements, tautology, contradictions, axioms and proof.9 As per the Law of the Excluded Middle, every statement must be either true or false, but never both or none. While logic helps in deduction, some statements are required to begin with. These are axioms and are considered eternal truths. With these axioms and logic, on application of certain pre-defined operations, one arrives at a proof.10

"Noted mathematician, S.G. Krantz while delineating the difference between science (which relies on reproducible experiments with control) and mathematics (which relies on axioms) says that in mathematics one must set definitions and axioms in place before any other action, and that any statement without proof has no currency (Krantz 2007:7-8)."

It would've been far better if author had considered fighting for truth, instead of counterattack pointed at mathematics, risking not only being ridiculed but inviting ridicule on all future endeavours of India to fight back attacks such as by Western Indologists.

................................................................................................

"Mathematics and Eternal Truths"

"While discussing the epistemological implications of satkārya-vāda Pollock assumes that they “operated subliminally in the mythic representation of the transcendent provenance and authority of sastra”, and in fact, in a Western context the same is seen in the “Socratic merging of mathesis and anamnesis” (Pollock 1985:518). Satkārya-vāda is out of scope for this paper, but the notion of mathesis has a very important role to play in Western mathematics.

"The early Greeks believed that the knowledge on mathematics was innate and eternal and that even a slave boy with skillful probing could recall this eternal innate knowledge of mathematics from previous lives. This is known as mathesis or recollection of knowledge from previous lives, and is the origin of Western mathematics (Raju 2011a:274). Even today, Mathematical Platonism, which is the dominant school of mathematical thought, views all mathematical objects as already pre-existing and mathematics as a tool to discover the hidden reality and “that mathematical entities are not constituents of the spatio-temporal realm” (Cole 2016).

"Mathematics as a subject and the geometric notion of eternal truths, faced grave conceptual challenges in the 19th century - with the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, space-filling curves, continuous nowhere-differentiable curves and other findings opposed to geometric intuition and the Euclidean certainty of Western mathematics.

Author cites subsequent developments and the path of mathematical progress further.

................................................................................................

"Rejection of Empirical Evidence"

"Noted Western philosopher Kant, for example, rejects empirical knowledge outright, saying that “an empirical proposition cannot possess the quality of necessity and absolute universality, which, nevertheless, are the characteristics of all geometrical propositions” (Kant 1855:39).

"This disdain of modern mathematics for empirical evidence may be traced to the work of Greek mathematician Euclid (who supposedly lived in 3rd century BCE), and is said to be the author of The Elements, which is considered one of the most influential works in the history of mathematics12. ... "

Kant wasn't a mathematician. His work was known gor questioning existence. Empirical evidences are good enough for most in that area. Not for him.

"Raju points out that the 47th proposition (“Pythagorean theorem”) could easily be solved in one step, like Indian texts, if empirical methods were used throughout, and thus the “myth (that the Elements concerns metaphysical proof) makes the Elements either trivial or inconsistent” (Raju 2011a:276)."

Pythagoras theorem is indeed a model of what mathematics, concepts, theorems, and irrefutable proofs are, except most proofs get more involved and complex, as structures do. One step, if it's measuring, isn't good enough as proof. It's proof gir the one triangle measured, is all. Else it must proceed from known facts to logical next step until arrival at result, and I'm thus case, is certainly than one step. Besides, if it's so simple, why not quote it all?

" ... Western philosophy believed that such metaphysical proofs are “perfect” and infallible, in contrast to empirical proofs which are fallible.”

"(Raju 2012: Chapter 12, Section 5)"

What do they mean, "believed"??? If either Raju or the author can disprove it, why not give the argument here?

More nonsense from author -

"A direct outcome of this formalization of mathematics has been the separation of practice and theory in mathematics. Practical disciplines like engineering involve algorithmic computations and have minimal or no requirement of exact proofs. On the other hand, theoretical mathematics has become exceedingly complicated, unintuitive and laborious on account of excessive formalism. Raju explains why such formalism is anti-utilitarian and culturally biased:

" ... Historically, most school-level math originated in the non-West with a practical epistemology, but was absorbed in the West after superimposing on it an incompatible Western metaphysics, still used to teach it. This has made mathematics needlessly complex. Accordingly, math can be made easy and more universal by reverting to a more practical epistemology.”"

"(Raju 2011a:274)"

"Mobody stops anybody from counting or calculations, and it's still done at primary level. Anyone preferring to do computational work for engineering or gir local grocer, is quite free to do so. They might, however, prefer a hand held device.

................................................................................................

"Binary Logic of Formal Math versus Buddhism, Jainism and Quantum Logic"

"The Law of Excluded Middle states that every statement must be either true or false, but never both or neither. Mathematical proofs are based solely on this binary logic. It must however be clearly noted that binary logic is neither universal nor normative. There is no requirement that a statement must be either only true or only false. The Buddhist Catuṣkoṭi logic system (four-valued), the Jain Syādvāda system (seven-fold predication) and even quantum logic system are all valid non-binary logic systems. In Catuṣkoṭi system, a statement can be true, false, both true and false and neither true nor false. In the Jain Syādvāda system, a statement can take seven states like syād-asti (perhaps true), syān-nāsti (perhaps not true), syād-asti-nāsti (perhaps true as well as not true), syād-asti-avaktavyaḥ (perhaps true and indescribable), syān-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ (perhaps not true and indescribable), syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ (perhaps both true and untrue and indescribable) and syād-avaktavyaḥ (perhaps indescribable)."

Author makes it sounds like a wsr between the mathematicians on one side and dome Indian philosophies on other. It isn't. He's being silly.

"The sole reliance on binary logic as a fundamental universal postulate automatically excludes the four-valued Buddhist logic, or the seven-fold Jain predication. The imposition of a binary logic system in mathematics and claiming it to be universal is another attempt at cultural hegemony, as it delegitimizes the presence of any arithmetic with non-binary logic systems. The question of domination thus remains an important aspect of modern formal Western mathematics where an academic elite controls the curriculum, the discourse as well as the spread of mathematical knowledge of a very specific kind, and adhering to a specific ideology. ... "

Again, nonsense.

"The theorems that can be inferred from a given set of postulates will naturally vary with the logic used: for example, all proofs by contradiction would fail with Buddhist logic. One would no longer be able to prove the existence of a Lebesgue nonmeasurable set, for example. This conclusively establishes that the metaphysics of formal math is religiously biased, for the theorems of formal mathematics vary with religious beliefs. Furthermore, the metaphysics of formal math has no other basis apart from Western culture: it can hardly be supported on the empirical grounds it rejects as inferior!”"

"(Raju 2011a:277)"

................................................................................................

"Conclusion"

Author seeks to apply Pollock’s words against India to mathematics, which US silly, and in the process he insults I Duan mathematics by defining it as strictly computations which is untrue even of former era, and therefore of Gaṇita. He further uses a convoluted argument with quotes to suit.

"Formal mathematics perceives and indeed presents itself largely as commentary on the primordial axioms and laws already pre-existing, and anything new is simply a backward movement in order to better represent a divine pattern. Mathematics does not produce any new knowledge, but is a process of re-discovering and recovering external pre-existent truths. All advances in theoretical mathematics are viewed by its practitioners through an inverting lens of ideology, as renovation of recovery, since pratyakṣa-pramāṇa and anumāna-pramāṇa are epistemologically meaningless in the context of formal mathematics.

"Noted Israeli historian of science, Leo Corry traces the origins of “Eternal Truth” in modern mathematics from Hilbert to the latter-day Bourbaki School, and says that while earlier mathematicians believed in eternal mathematical truths, starting from mid-1930s, it came to be believed that mathematics has reached an “ultimate stage of evolution” and was unlikely to change “by any future development of this science” (Corry 1997:253)."

He manages to twist what truth exists in his quotes out of all recognition and proceeds to spout more nonsense.

"A final consequence of this is, as I have suggested earlier, that unlike in Gaṇita-śāstra, there can be no conception of progress in formal mathematics as in the evolutionary scale, mathematics has already reached an “ultimate stage”; and any movement that occurs is simply a backward movement towards an eternal mathematical truth. The origins of mathematics is, on the other hand, as we have seen, mathesis (interrogating the soul to rediscover eternal truths) and not from mathema (knowledge). The Greeks never saw any practical use of arithmetic apart from military use; arithmetic was intended for spiritual elevation only (Jowett 1892:585). Moreover the development of Western mathematics over the centuries has been closely linked to Biblical theology in one way or the other till the present day, and contrives to trace its origin to the mythical Euclid: a clear case of mythic self-representation. While discussing the various dimensions of hegemony in mathematics, Raju makes the following observation:

"“Identifying the difficulties with math learning, and proposing a solution, does represent a major advance. But there are difficulties in implementing the solution. Various stakeholders (such as students afraid of math, or their parents) are never consulted to decide what sort of math to teach. Even scientists and engineers are rarely consulted regarding what sort of math ought to be taught to them. However, if all decisions regarding the math curriculum are left solely to math “experts”, there is an obvious conflict of interests: for these experts were brought up on the older tradition of formal mathematics, and rejecting formal mathematics may well make their past work valueless.”

"(Raju 2011b:283)"

He makes mathematicians sound like bullies eith clubs hitting hapless students parents and engineers on head. In reality there's no better parallel image of old school brahmins committed to intellectual work, working on pittance, and abused equally by colonial regimes seeking yo destroy indigenous culture - in case of mathematics, the need bring of defense of mathematics, of concepts and thought.

"Sadly, the only form of arithmetic taught in schools and colleges is formal mathematics, which as we have shown, is theoretical, abstract, divorced from reality, dogmatic and metaphysical - all characteristics which a “science” should NOT have. Western mathematics therefore comes across as arcane, abstract and complicated to most non-specialists, and has become a tool of academic imperialism and cultural hegemony."

That's complete nonsense. What little is taught before students have options is minimal necessary for further alternatives of science, and if there were, say, purely Sanskrit or linguistic or housekeeping or hotel management courses offered at middle school on, no mathematics need be taught. When Chakravarti Rajagopalachari proposed vocational schools, though, his proposal was shot down by irate congress calling him casteist.

"In conclusion: Pollock makes use of selective observations to form a hypothesis by using the most restrictive definition of śāstra - in the sense of injunction, as applicable to Mīmāṁsā and the transcendental realm. He then overgeneralizes - by applying this narrow definition to all śāstra-s including those in the practical realm, since in his view, Mīmāṁsā is the most orthodox and most representative of Indian traditions, and even suggests that scientific śāstra-s are amenable to the same logic and treatment as other śāstra-s. Moreover, he summarily rejects all counter-evidence because he feels that the usage of śāstra-s in a non-restrictive, non-binding and non-injunctive manner is not representative of the whole tradition."

If only author had restricted his paper yo a reasonable exposition along thus, he'd nit have brought ridicule of Western and reason for ire from mathematicians of India.

But he goes on to more nonsense.

................................................................................................

................................................

February 28, 2022 - February 28, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Chapter 3"

"Is Practice already in Śāstra-s?*"

"–K. Surya"

................................................................................................

"Introduction"

"In his 1985 paper (viz. “Theory of Practice and Practice of Theory in Indian Intellectual History”), Professor Sheldon Pollock concludes that pre-modern Indian intellectuals held the belief that all knowledge of practice is contained in śāstra-s (“theory of practice”). Pollock says that this belief crippled the innovative spirit of Indian intellectuals and limited their practice to the merely uncovering and examining knowledge concealed in the śāstra-s. He restates this conclusion multiple times in his paper showing the centrality of the conclusion to the paper’s thesis. Here are some of the quotes from this paper:

"a. The understanding of the relationship of śāstra (“theory”) to prayoga (“practical activity”) in Sanskritic culture is shown to be diametrically opposed to that usually found in the West.

"(Pollock 1985:499)"

"b. Two important implications of this fundamental postulate are that all knowledge is pre-existent [...] The eternality of the Veda-s, the śāstra par excellence, is one presupposition or justification for this assessment of śāstra.

"(Pollock 1985:499)"

"c. All Indian learning presents itself largely as commentary on the primordial śāstra-s.

"Logically excluded from epistemological meaningfulness are likewise experience, experiment, invention, discovery, innovation.

"(Pollock 1985:515)"

"d. If any sort of amelioration is to occur, this can only be in the form of a regress, a backward movement aiming at a closer and more faithful approximation to the divine pattern.

"(Pollock 1985:515)

"e. From the conception of an a priori śāstra it logically follows [...] that there can be no conception of progress of the “forward movement from worse to better”, on the basis of innovations in practice.

"(Pollock 1985:515)

"f. All knowledge derives from śāstra; success [...] is achieved only because the rules governing these practices have percolated down to the practitioners - not because they were discovered independently through the creative power of practical consciousness -“however far removed” from the practitioners the śāstra may be.

"(Pollock 1985:507)

"g. We ourselves do not “create” knowledge, but merely bring it to manifestation from the (textual) materials in which it lies concealed from us.

"(Pollock 1985:517)"

"This paper critiques four excerpts from Pollock’s paper which together argue for his conclusion. Summarized at the end is Pollock’s core argument embedded in those excerpts and the rebuttal argued for in this paper."

................................................................................................

"I. Pollock’s view"

"In accordance with the Satkārya-vāda theory of causation, Indian intellectuals believed that all knowledge pre-exists in eternal texts. As a consequence, Indian intellectuals voluntarily limited their knowledge acquisition to merely bringing knowledge to manifestation from textual materials.

"To quote Pollock:

"In traditional India, the causal doctrine associated especially with Sāṅkhya and early Vedānta would seem to have particular relevance here ... This is the notion of Satkāryavāda: As a pot, for example, must pre-exist in the clay (since otherwise it could never be brought into existence or could be brought into existence from some other material. e.g. threads), so knowledge must pre-exist in something in order that we may derive it thence (thus in part the postulates of the a priori and finally transcendent śāstra): like the clay, which ex hypothesi must in some form exist eternally, that from which our knowledge comes must be eternal: and like the potter, we ourselves do not “create” knowledge, but merely bring it to manifestation from the (textual) materials in which it lies concealed from us. (Footnote here: For a good synopsis of the doctrine of Satkāryavāda, see Śaṅkara on Brahma Sūtra 2.1.18).”

"(Pollock 1985:517) (italics ours)"

But this neither stops one from thinking independently nor from experimenting, since one is only bringing out truth. On the contrary, it leaves one free to and spurs one on to do ones best in any direction at the bidding of one's soul, prompted by one's heart and energised by mind.

"Our Response:"

"In this excerpt, Pollock refers to Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on Brahma Sūtra 2.1.18, giving the reader the distinct sense that underlined parts are either stated explicitly in, or inferred implicitly from, the Sūtra or the Bhāṣya. As we will see, underlined parts cannot be inferred from either the Sūtra or the Bhāṣya.

:Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya elaborates on the Satkārya-vāda theory of causation (Gambhirananda 1965:339-345) at length according to which, material can neither be created nor destroyed; something cannot come from nothing. Therefore, all material pre-exists in some form. We know from common experience that a pot (an effect) is a manifestation of clay (its cause); and that curds (an effect) are a manifestation of milk (their cause). In addition, there must be some special potency in milk – which is not in clay - to manifest as curd. Furthermore, neither the potency nor the effect is independent of the cause. Accordingly, Śaṅkara concludes that the effect is pre-existent in the cause.

"It is noteworthy that Śaṅkara does not simply invoke śruti texts to make this claim. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya grounds its reasoning on everyday common experiences, and what appear probable on that basis. Śaṅkara’s approach is common to the Indian intellectual tradition of the past.

"Indian intellectual tradition requires that śruti texts be interpreted according to three conditions (Hiriyanna 1932:180-182):

"1. Revealed truth should be new or extra-empirical (a-laukika), i.e. otherwise unattained and unattainable.

"2. What is revealed should be un-contradicted (a-bādhita) by any other means of knowing. Interpretation of revealed knowledge should be internally consistent.

"3. Reason should foreshadow what revelation teaches. That is, revealed truth must appear probable on the basis of common experiences in the empirical sphere. They serve to remove any ‘antecedent improbability’ that may be felt to exist about the truth in question.

"Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on 2.1.18 clearly shows adherence to these conditions.

"In the excerpt, Pollock somehow infers from Satkāryavāda that [all] knowledge pre-exists in something and that that something is “textual materials”. To quote him

"As a pot, for example, must pre-exist in the clay so knowledge must pre-exist in something... We ourselves do not “create” knowledge, but merely bring it to manifestation from the (textual) materials in which it lies concealed from us.

"(Pollock 1985:517) (italics ours)"

"Let us briefly examine the Sūtra and Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya to see if Pollock can find support for his inference.

"Brahma Sūtra 2.1.18 (Gambhirananda 1965:339):

"[The preexistence and non-difference of the effect are established] from reasoning and another Upaniṣadic text.

"We pose three questions below in order to look into the questions raised/implied by Pollock:

"a. Could the Indian intellectual infer from the sūtra that all knowledge comes “from reasoning and Upaniṣadic texts”?

"Sankara’s Bhāṣya on sūtra 2.1.18 validates that the context of the sūtra is Satkārya-vāda. Gambhirananda clarifies that the phrase “another Upaniṣadic text” in the sūtra is to be understood to mean “another passage” from an Upaniṣadic text. Indeed Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on Sūtra-s 2.1.17 and 2.1.18 reference different passages from Chāndogya Upaniṣad. Thus, according to Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya, Sūtra 2.1.18 is saying that “Pre-existence of effect and non-difference of effect from the cause are established from reasoning and another passage in Chāndogya Upaniṣad.” There is simply no scope for the Indian intellectual to infer from tradition (which is to say Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya) - that the Sūtra is saying that all knowledge comes from reasoning and “textual” materials.

"b. If Indian intellectuals believe that knowledge is only discovered and not created, does that belief limit their “creative” capability?

"History illustrates that, even in purely creative fields such as art, such a belief did not hinder “creative” excellence. Modern day researchers in science and mathematics commonly believe that they only discover – and not create - knowledge in their fields. Modern day engineers and craftsmen only change “name and form” of materials and energy they work with, using principles derived from their knowledge of science and mathematics. There is nothing limiting to an intellectual’s practical “creative” capability if the intellectual believes that knowledge is only discovered and not created.

"But Pollock does not stop there. He says that, in accordance with Satkārya-vāda, Indian intellectuals believed - that all knowledge, including that of practice not only pre-exists, but that it pre-exists in something; specifically in textual materials.

"c. Does Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya allow Indian intellectuals to infer that all knowledge pre-exists in textual materials?

"In conformance with his Bhāṣya, Śaṅkara would agree that pāramārthika knowledge pre-exists in śruti texts, but that laukika (worldly) knowledge comes from common experience and not from any texts. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya neither says anywhere nor gives scope for the Indian intellectual to infer that laukika knowledge pre-exists in textual materials. Śaṅkara does not - and would not - make such a claim, simply because he would find the claim unreasonable and untenable - based on common experience. For example, Śaṅkara’s reasoning supports the idea that milk - and not clay – manifests as curd is something that follows from common experience, and not from any texts. In fact, the claim that all knowledge pre-exists in texts is completely unnecessary for, and even extraneous to, the Satkārya-vāda theory of causation. In particular, Satkārya-vāda does not require laukika knowledge, which is available to one and all through common experiences, to pre-exist in textual form.

"Thus, there is no credible reason for Pollock to infer that Satkārya-vāda led Indian intellectuals to believe that all knowledge pre-exists in textual materials. Thus, there is no justification for Pollock to insert the word “textual” into the context.

"While there is no justification, inserting the word “textual” does serve an important purpose for Pollock: it supports his conclusion that the Indian intellectual practically lived by the belief that all knowledge, including that of practice, pre-exists in eternal “textual materials” - an absurd but foundational assertion - in Pollock’s 1985 Śāstra-s paper."

Indeed.

................................................................................................

"II. Pollock’s View"

"Indian intellectuals believed that śāstra-s of practice are divine in origin; and therefore that they are perfect. Since śāstra-s are perfect, there is no scope for improving them. Therefore, there is no scope for original research."

One, he's wrong. Two, he's extrapolating from his own background, of church explicitly forbidding independent thinking to humanity and insisting that God and salvation must be channeled only through church, and no heresy must be allowed - enforced via inquisition for several centuries, until Renaissance could only happen with rejection of authority of church.

So now Pollock seeks to make up for the sin in eyes of church by imposing all guilt of church on India, so culture of India can be wiped out after the likes of him help butcher it, and church gets to conduct next inquisition in India!

"To quote Pollock: Our last examples of the individual śāstra as deriving from some primordial text

"[...]

"Finally, the most important of the medical texts, the Caraka-saṁhitā, claims to be Agniveśa’s transcription of the teachings of Ātreya, which were received, through Bhāradvāja, Prajāpati, and the Aśvins, ultimately from Brāhma, while the second major text, the Suśruta-saṁhitā, similarly begins with a mythological introduction concerning the origin of medicine, and claims that “Brāhma it was who enunciated this Vedāṅga, this eight-fold Āyurveda.”

"[...]

"From the conception of an a priori śāstra it logically follows [...] that there can be no conception of progress of the forward movement from worse to better, on the basis of innovations in practice.

"(Pollock 1985:513, 515) (italics ours)"

"Our Response:"

"In the above excerpt, Pollock presents Caraka-saṁhitā and Suśruta-saṁhitā as two śāstra-s of practice which claim to have divine origin. With this excerpt, Pollock is persuading the reader to accept that śāstra-s of practice claimed divinity to assert their impeccable epistemic credentials. Pollock wants the reader to accept as a consequence that pre-modern Indian intellectuals never upgraded śāstra-s of practice, and voluntarily limited themselves to merely bringing knowledge to manifestation from the śāstra-s.

"In this discussion, we see that claims of divine origin did not render śāstra-s of practice unquestionable. We will look at an example of how tradition intentionally modified a divine śāstra of practice. We will also see that Indian intellectuals contributed to vibrant original research long after the various śāstra-s were established in the tradition.

"Mīmāṁsā philosophers divided testimonial knowledge into pauruṣeya (authored) and apauruṣeya (eternal, authorless) (Sharma 2013:220-222). For Mīmāṁsā philosophers, Vedas are apauruṣeya; eternal and authorless, therefore their epistemic credentials are impeccable. All other texts are creations of human authors and such works are subject to defects, doubts, and errors.

"While Mīmāṁsā philosophers claimed impeccable credentials for the Veda-s, Nyāya philosophers located assent-worthiness of all knowledge in the epistemic credentials of the speaker as mentioned in the following sūtra (Ganeri 2010:10):

"Nyāya Sūtra 2.1.68 “Just as with the assent-worthiness of medical treatises and mantra-s, the assent worthiness of the Veda is a function of the credibility of the testifier.

"This sūtra is implying that there was no controversy insofar as assent-worthiness of medical treatises (Caraka-saṁhitā and Suśruta-saṁhitā) was concerned; their assent-worthiness depended on the credibility of their testifier. While Mīmāṁsā and Nyāya philosophers disagreed on epistemic credentials of śruti texts, they both agreed that assent-worthiness of śāstra-s of practice depended on the credibility of the testifier. Thus, the assent-worthiness of a śāstra of practice could be questioned in the Indian intellectual tradition even if that śāstra claimed a divine origin. Presently, we counter Pollock on two grounds.

"a. History of revisions of Āyurvedic texts; and

"b. Dynamic history of research in Āyurveda.

"(a) History of revisions: Divine śāstra-s of practice are not written on stone tablets

"In the Indian tradition, all knowledge is considered divine. Thus, attributing divine origin to a śāstra of practice is an expression of respect. It does not follow that the knowledge of that śāstra is perfect, or that it is complete. For example, Caraka-saṁhitā was revised first by Caraka, and later by Dṛḍhabala - several centuries after Caraka.

"Revisions to śāstra-s of practice of divine origin, while not common, were certainly not prohibited in the tradition as seen by Dṛḍhabala’s (5th century CE) comment:

"A redactor expands what was stated [too] briefly, abbreviates what is too extensive and [thereby] makes an ancient corpus of knowledge (tantra) new again. Therefore Caraka, who was exceedingly intelligent, revised this highest corpus of knowledge.

"(Maas 2010:2)"

"In contrast, tradition would not accept similar redactions to śruti texts.

"While citing Pollock’s 1985 śāstra-s paper, Phillip Maas (Maas 2010) notes that the history of literary works shows that Caraka-saṁhitā was indeed updated later. Dṛḍhabala explains1, 2 that the copy of Caraka-saṁhitā as available to him was incomplete. In a bid to complete the text, after propitiating Lord Śiva, Dṛḍhabala says that he added seventeen chapters to Caraka-saṁhitā on the subject of medical substances.

"Commenting on Dṛḍhabala’s own explanations for changes to Caraka-saṁhitā, Maas writes:

"Dṛḍhabala tells us that the older work was in need of revision. The reason for this, however, is not some deficiency in content. [...] The fact that Dṛḍhabala does not refer to a qualitative change of medical knowledge in time is not surprising at all if we remember the traditional account of how Āyurveda came to be known to mankind.

"(Maas 2010:2)"

"Caraka-saṁhitā’s claim to divine origin did not prevent future modifications (however, the claim helped limit the extent of modifications). Furthermore, knowledge underlying those modifications came from practical discoveries. In other words, Indian intellectuals did not deem Caraka-saṁhitā as an eternal śāstra beyond question; they did not consider Caraka-saṁhitā “text” as the only, or the final, source of knowledge.

"Caraka-saṁhitā’s claim of divine origin restrained modifications, ensuring its survival to our times. In addition, Indian tradition did not have “ownership rights”, “copyrights”, or “editorial rights”. Taking over someone else’s work and developing3 new editions is alien to Indian tradition. However, absence of future editions did not translate into lack of original research in future. Pollock’s paper seems to make the unstated assumption that new knowledge production can only happen through revisions of existing texts. As we see next, authority of Caraka-saṁhitā and Suśruta-saṁhitā certainly did not suppress the vibrancy of intellectual culture of original discoveries in India."

"(b) Dynamic history of vibrant original medical research"

"In his review of Meulenbeld’s monumental work A History of Indian Medical Literature4 (HIML) (Meulenbeld 1999-2002), Dominik Wujastyk writes:

"The early compendia called ‘the great triad (bṛhat-trayī)’ – those ascribed to Caraka, Suśruta, and Vāgbhaṭa — are works that at least most Indologists have heard of, if not studied. Volumes IIa and IIb of HIML will reveal to many for the first time the staggering volume and diversity of scientific literary production in the post-classical period. They survey the thousands of Indian medical works written from about AD 600 up to the present.

"Authors in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced a rich and important crop of diverse medical treatises, often describing new diseases, new theories, new treatments, and new medicines. These facts decisively contradict the two common opinions that post-classical Indian medicine was static and unchanging, and that medical creativity entered a dark age after Vāgbhaṭa.

"(Wujastyk 2004:405) (italics ours)

"Indian intellectuals were not merely “bringing knowledge to manifestation from śāstra-s of practice” as Pollock demeaningly presents. Long after medical śāstra-s were fully established in the tradition, the tradition of literary production of medical research continued unabated in the post-Classical period up to Colonial times.

"Next, we will see that the Indian intellectual actually believed that the quest for worldly knowledge is, in fact, not “centered on texts” at all."

................................................................................................

"III. Pollock’s view: "

"Indian intellectuals inferred that śāstra-s of practice are a priori texts (eternal), and as a consequence are perfect and all-encompassing. Therefore, experience and experimentation are useless for discovering laukika (worldly) knowledge.

"To quote Pollock:

"Logically excluded from epistemological meaningfulness are likewise experience, experiment, invention, discovery, innovation. According to his own self-representation, there can be for the thinker no originality of thought, no brand-new insights, notions, perceptions, but only the attempt better and more clearly to grasp and explain the antecedent, always already formulated truth. All Indian learning, accordingly, perceives itself and indeed presents itself largely as commentary on the primordial śāstra-s.

"(Pollock 1985:515)"

"Our Response:"

"(a) Śaṅkara unequivocally says that śruti is not a pramāṇa for laukika knowledge.

"Śaṅkara explains this in his Bhāṣya on Bhagavād Gītā 18.66:

"Śruti is an authority only in matters not perceived by means of ordinary instruments of knowledge, such as pratyakṣa or immediate perception; [...] A hundred śruti-s may declare that fire is cold or that it is dark; still they possess no authority in the matter. If śruti should at all declare that fire is cold or that it is dark, we would still suppose that it intends quite a different meaning from the apparent one; for its authority cannot otherwise be maintained: we should in no way attach to śruti a meaning which is opposed to other authorities or to its own declaration.

"(Sastry 1977:513) (italics ours)"

"Thus, the real issue is not whether all knowledge is in śruti texts, but whether śruti texts have authority on all knowledge. Śaṅkara is saying unequivocally that śruti texts do not have authority on knowledge where pratyakṣa is the pramāṇa. Therefore, “texts” cannot limit Hindu minds in laukika matters."

"Thus, Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on Bhagavād Gīta 18.66 debunks Pollock’s conclusive assessment viz. Indian intellectuals excluded experience and experimentation from epistemological meaningfulness. (Pollock 1985:515):

"Pollock’s harsh assessment ignores implications of the pioneering efforts in the intellectual traditions of India to systematize knowledge based on the nature of knowledge, and the means for arriving at valid knowledge. Pre-modern Indian intellectuals believed in pramāṇa theory and, as a result, understood that discovery of laukika knowledge was not confined to any “texts”.

"In contrast, in the Middle Ages, Western intellectual tradition vested7 scriptures with higher authority and assent-worthiness over reason (even in matters of laukika knowledge) when the two were in conflict. To this day, Christian apologists continue to affirm scriptural beliefs over established science when the two are in conflict in matters of laukika knowledge.

"The subject matter of pramāṇa is known as epistemology in Western philosophy. Epistemology arrived in Western thought relatively recently (apart from early Greek efforts to separate scientia (principles) from opinio (opinions of authority))8. There were no systematic efforts to separate worldly experiential (laukika) knowledge from metaphysical (alaukika) knowledge in the Western intellectual tradition until the times of empiricists9 viz. John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1859-1952). Incidentally, David Hume is known to have had knowledge of Buddhist philosophical views (Gopnik 2009).

"The Church publicity opposed discoveries of laukika knowledge (for example heliocentrism, the theory of evolution by natural selection, and the big bang theory) which conflicted with the religious scripture: Galileo was persecuted by the Church for championing new discoveries of laukika knowledge that conflicted with scriptural knowledge on laukika matters. Brian Baigrie writes:

"The tragedy that descended on Galileo has been described in many places. Briefly, he was warned in 1616 by the Inquisition to cease teaching the Copernican theory, for it was now held “contrary to Holy Scripture.” [...] Galileo was ordered by the Pope to travel to Rome where he was confined for a few months, threatened with torture, and forced to make an elaborate formal renunciation of the Copernican theory. He was sentenced to perpetual confinement and forbidden to publish anything on Copernicanism.

"(Baigrie 2002:54)"

"Given the belief in ex nihilo creation (i.e., creation from nothing), Western civilization had to wait until Enlightenment to discover the law of conservation of matter that Satkārya-vādin-s intuitively understood10 to be true - for over two millennia before. In spite of developments in Western epistemology, conflict between science and scripture continued unabated. Science did not always enlighten Abrahamic religious views in laukika matters."

"Even in the 21st century, educated Christians and Muslims routinely make assertions in laukika matters with religious scriptures as their pramāṇa. A prominent example is the argument for intelligent design11 and against the theory of evolution by natural selection. Because Abrahamic religious scriptures took a position on creation of Adam12- the first man - by God, many followers of those religions reject13 extensive evidence (pratyakṣa-pramāṇa) from a wide variety of scientific disciplines such as paleontology, geology, genetics, and evolutionary biology - thus undermining the theory of evolution by natural selection that explains known evidences (anumāna-pramāṇa) while also making predictions yet to be confirmed by future discoveries. It was only two years ago (2014) that the Pope made a nominal gesture towards reconciliation with the theory of evolution and the big bang theory (Withnall 2014).

"In contrast, Indian tradition has no issues with new discoveries of laukika knowledge which contradict existing śāstra-s. We know that Bhāskara, Āryabhaṭa, Varāhamihīra, and others made their intellectual pursuits in astronomy while being within the milieu of Indian tradition. For example, there are no records that Āryabhaṭa underwent mental conflict when his discovery of the mechanism of eclipses differed from corresponding ideas in established śāstra-s (e.g. Vedāṅga Jyautiṣa). As Śaṅkara said, “We should in no way attach to śruti a meaning which is opposed to other authorities or to its own declaration” (Sastry 1977:513). Indian intellectual tradition is clear on who has authority over laukika knowledge. If a scientific discovery (pratyakṣa-pramāṇa) from an assent-worthy person differs with interpretations of śruti texts, tradition requires that śruti text be reinterpreted to stay consistent."

................................................................................................

"IV. Pollock’s View:"

"If śāstra-s of practice are not truly eternal texts then they cannot be pramāṇa. Therefore, they had no choice but to claim divine origin."

Increasingly it's clear that Pollock dare not attack church, and takes what considers a safe shot.

"To quote Pollock:

"The medical tradition, which as we saw shares the paradigmatic mythic conception of the origins of knowledge, offers an epistemological analysis that may be extended to other śāstra-s in its discussion of the pramāṇa āpta-vacanam, “authoritative testimony.” After defining and describing the various “sources of valid knowledge,” the Caraka-saṁhitā remarks, “Of these three ways of knowing, the starting point is the knowledge derived from authoritative instruction. At the next step, it has to be critically examined by perception and inference. Without there being some knowledge obtained from authoritative instruction, what is there for one to examine critically by perception and inference?”

"Here we are given what seems essentially an epistemological response to the paradox [...] Since theoretically no one is exempt from the paralyzing effects of this paradox, it is impossible to imagine how a body of knowledge such as medicine could ever have developed and been transmitted without positing the existence of some prior beginningless and unbroken “authoritative instruction.” This enables the student to escape the circle by having the scope and object of his discipline defined for him, and learning what in fact it is that he must bring his powers of perception and inference to bear on.

"(Pollock 1985:516-517) (italics ours)"

"Our Response:"

"In order to properly understand Pollock’s argument, it is helpful to lay out his argument in three parts:

"Part 1: According to Pollock, Caraka-saṁhitā (the Āyurveda śāstra) says:

"Authoritative instruction (śāstra) is the starting point of medical knowledge.

"At the next step, knowledge of śāstra is examined by direct perception and inference.

"Without the śāstra, there is nothing to really examine by perception and inference.

"Pollock argues that students of Caraka-saṁhitā accordingly limited their own intellectual pursuits to merely examining knowledge concealed in the śāstra. This view of Pollock is clear from the italicized text in the excerpt: The scope and object of discipline is studying the śāstra by bringing his powers of perception and inference to bear on it; that is, subordinating perception and inference to śāstra.

"Part 2: Caraka-saṁhitā, the authoritative instruction, confers upon itself the status of a pramāṇa, an authoritative text. However, authoritative instruction, given its human origin, has to be ultimately sourced from perception and inference. As laukika knowledge, where else can it come from? In order to avoid this paradox of one pramāṇa depending on another pramāṇa, authoritative instruction has to be somehow established as being independent of other pramāṇa-s.

"Part 3: The only way that an authoritative instruction can have a standing as a pramāṇa is, if it is posited to be a beginningless text which is to say it is authorless, which amounts to saying it has a divine origin. Pollock calls this the “epistemological response to the paradox”. Caraka-saṁhitā indeed claims its origin in Brahmā (see the second excerpt).

"Pollock misrepresents Caraka-saṁhitā by selectively quoting from its commentary, excluding its important context, thereby altering its meaning.

"Pollock quotes only a specific part of the commentary from Caraka-saṁhitā presented in Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s book Science and Society in Ancient India (1978). Fortunately, Chattopadhyaya’s book provides extensive commentary surrounding the small quote that Pollock used. As we look at the broader context of the quote, we see that Pollock’s argument is untenable in the context of what Caraka-saṁhitā says: Why did Pollock then selectively quote from Caraka-saṁhitā deliberately excluding a few words thus materially altering the meaning?

"Firstly, by “authoritative instruction”, Caraka-saṁhitā does not mean a beginningless text. We substantiate by quoting.

"Caraka-saṁhitā:

"“[...] authoritative instruction means knowledge imparted by authoritative persons. Authoritative persons, again, are those who possess undisputed knowledge and memory, the technique of classification and whose observations are not affected by subjective factors called likes and dislikes. Because of being thus characterized, what they say is authoritative. By contrast, the words coming from persons that are inebriated, insane, stupid, subjectively inclined and given to half-truths are unauthoritative.”

"(Chattopadhyaya 1978:89)"

"Caraka-saṁhitā is saying that authoritative instruction comes from authoritative persons (āpta-upadeśa) who possess undisputed knowledge and memory. Pollock leaves out this definition of authoritative instruction - which is the exact opposite of what Pollock is persuading the reader to understand “authoritative instruction” to mean: “some prior beginningless and unbroken instruction”!

"Caraka-saṁhitā holds that full-knowledge for diagnosis cannot be obtained from any one of the three pramāṇa-s: authoritative testimony, perception, and inference.

"Let us look at the explanation in Caraka-saṁhitā immediately preceding the isolated quote used by Pollock:

"Three indeed are the modes of ascertaining the specific nature of a disease. These are

"(a) authoritative instruction (āpta-upadeśa),

"(b) perception (pratyakṣa), and

"(c) inference (anumāna).

"[...]

"The diagnosis of a disease is faultless only after the disease has been fully examined in all its aspects with the help of these three ways of knowing. The full knowledge of an object cannot be obtained by only one of these ways of knowing.

"(Chattopadhyaya 1978:89) (italics ours)"

"Here, Caraka-saṁhitā is explaining that it considers authoritative instruction a pramāṇa along with perception and inference. In other words, all the three pramāṇa-s provide relevant knowledge to decipher the nature of a specific disease; all the three pramāṇa-s have independent authority over parts of knowledge required for diagnosis. Pollock leaves out this commentary - which appears immediately before his chosen quote – as it conflicts with his thesis – viz. perception and inference are subordinated to authoritative instruction, and they merely further examine knowledge already pre-existing in the authoritative instruction.

"Caraka-saṁhitā holds that authoritative testimony is optional for the learned person, but perception and inference are critical.

"What immediately follows the isolated quote used by Pollock in Caraka-saṁhitā is

"For the learned, therefore, there are two modes of critical examination, viz. perception and inference. Or, if authoritative instruction also is included, the modes of critical examination are three.

"(Chattopadhyaya 1978:89)"

"According to the above comment from Caraka-saṁhitā, only two pramāṇa-s are critical for a learned person to examine a patient: namely, perception and inference. Pollock conveniently leaves out this comment - which appears immediately after his chosen quote – as it conflicts with his thesis that Caraka-saṁhitā subordinates direct perception and inference to authoritative instruction.

"Caraka-saṁhitā gives direct perception the same level of importance that a modern medical practitioner would give. Speaking on the critical importance of direct perception in medical diagnosis, Caraka-saṁhitā says

"One wanting to know the nature of a disease by perception should examine everything perceptible in the body of the patient [...].

"Thus for instance one should examine with the auditory sense the intestinal sounds, the sounds of the joints and finger knuckles, variations in the patient’s voice, or any other sound that may be present in any part of the body.

"With the visual sense are to be examined the color, shape, proportion and the general appearance as well as changes in physique and behavior of the patient. Besides, whatever else can be the object of visual knowledge should also be similarly examined.

"Such then are the ways of examining the patient by perception, inference and instruction (authority).

"(Chattopadhyaya 1978:90) (emphasis ours)"

"While detailed commentary has been truncated by us for the sake of brevity, the essence however is clear that diagnosis relies heavily on direct perception and inference. In fact, what Caraka says on the importance of direct perception and inference is what any modern physician would find agreeable.

"While Suśruta-saṁhitā calls itself14 a Vedāṅga, it is aggressive in asserting the importance of direct perception. It does not ask the reader to look up its “text”.

"Chattopadhyaya writes:

"Though this discussion of the Susruta-saṁhitā is less detailed than that of Caraka-saṁhitā just quoted, it needs to be noted that it seems to go a step further than the latter, inasmuch as it does not hesitate to use the sense of taste also for diagnostic purposes. However, what is much more remarkable is that [...] carried by its zeal for direct sense-perception, it goes to the extent of emphasizing the importance of the practice of dissecting human corpse, without which as the text claims, the knowledge of anatomy can never be satisfactory.

"(Chattopadhyaya 1978:93) (italics ours)"

"(c) Can authoritative instruction truly be a pramāṇa? Is there a paradox in thinking so?

"How can authoritative instruction be a pramāṇa independent of perception and inference? As a product authored by humans, does not authoritative instruction ultimately trace its origin to perception and inference of individuals? Is Caraka-saṁhitā stuck as Pollock insists in a paradox unless it also claims to be a beginningless text? Does Caraka-saṁhitā have no choice but claim to be a beginningless text - apauruṣeya, that is - in order to maintain its status as a pramāṇa?"

"Authoritative instruction is indeed an independent pramāṇa. Authoritative instruction does not have to be a beginningless text in order to avoid the paradox.

"Contemporary medical philosophical discourse recognizes the critical importance of testimonial knowledge and its status as a pramāṇa. Brief excerpts are provided below from (Sadegh-Zadeh 2015) with italicized text to highlight key points. ... "

Author provides further testimony with quotes from original Sanskrit texts and commentaries thereon, refuting Pollock’s accusations.

" ... medicine as a scientific discipline cannot exist without authoritative testimony. In fact, the only source for scientific knowledge is testimony. Without our collective testimonial knowledge, human beings would not be much better off than other animals."

"Most medical experts believe that medicine is primarily and exclusively an empirical science. They therefore assume that their expert knowledge stems from the following three sources: experience, memory, and reasoning. If this assumption were true, however, medicine as a scientific discipline could never exist. The assumption ignores collaboration, and hence, communication between medical experts as a source of knowledge. Yet, collaboration enables testimony, and as was anticipated above, testimony is the only source of scientific knowledge.

"[...]

"That means that if experience, memory, and reasoning are our primary individual sources of knowledge, testimony is our primary social source of knowledge. And without this social source of knowledge, with regard to intellect human beings would not be so very distant from animals, and scientific knowledge would not exist at all.

"(Sadegh-Zadeh 2015:536-537) (italics ours)"

"Sadegh-Zadeh explains:

"how the paradox that Pollock refers to is not a concern for testimonial knowledge.

"[...]

"Testimony can exist in indefinitely long chains. [...] However, the chain must start in some initial source so as to avoid infinite regress and vicious circles. [...] this origin of the chain i.e., the initial source of testimonial knowledge is not ‘experience, memory, or reasoning’ as one would suppose, but a community i.e., the society.

"(Sadegh-Zadeh 2015:536-537)"

"Even a researcher directly involved in laboratory research is not free from reliance on testimonial knowledge. The researcher relies on findings of other theories to conduct their experiments or interpret their laboratory results. In such a case, the researcher is not likely to have first-hand information on those theories.

"Medical journal articles can have as many as a hundred authors. Some of the authors will not even know how some of the results or numbers used in the publication are arrived at. Any one author can know that other authors did such and such work to arrive at a particular result.

"In summary, contemporary medical scholarship recognizes authoritative testimony as a pramāṇa along with direction perception and inference. There is no paradox in considering authoritative testimony a pramāṇa as Pollock imagines."

................................................................................................

"Summary of Pollock’s Argument and its Refutation"

"Pollock’s Argument"

"Pre-modern Indian intellectuals believed the following:

"Claim 1: All knowledge pre-exists in eternal “texts”.

"Claim 2: Śāstra-s of practice are eternal “texts” for their respective domains.

"Conclusion: All knowledge of practice pre-exists in respective śāstra-s of practice."

................................................................................................

"Refutation of Pollock’s Argument"

"Pre-modern Indian intellectuals did not believe in Claim 1. They believed that: Satkārya-vāda does not claim anywhere that all knowledge pre-exists in “textual materials” (verbal or written form).

"Pramāņa-s are independent means for valid knowledge. Thus, pramāṇa-s - and not “texts”- are authorities of knowledge.

"Pre-modern Indian intellectuals did not believe in Claim 2. They believed that: Direct perception and inference are essential pramāṇa-s for knowledge of practice. Because of their very nature, and because of their authority as pramāṇa and independence from other pramāṇa-s, valid knowledge from direct perception and inference cannot alternatively come from “texts”, even if those texts have divine origin.

"Authoritative testimonies are indispensable to growth of human knowledge, and constitute a pramāṇa. Śāstra-s of practice such as Caraka-saṁhitā were best-in-class for many centuries; they were the authoritative testimonies.

"Not just śāstra-s, all knowledge is divine. It does not follow that śāstra-s of practice have perfect knowledge or that they are complete. Assent-worthiness of śāstra-s of practice can be questioned even if the śāstra claims divine origin."

................................................................................................

"Proper Conclusion"

"Pre-modern Indian intellectual believed that śāstra-s of practice (“texts”) are authorities for testimonial knowledge. However, authoritative testimonial “texts” are not the sole means of knowledge of practice. Direct perception, inference, and authoritative testimony are all indispensable means for practical knowledge.

"Pre-modern Indian intellectual did not merely bring knowledge of practice to manifestation from the textual materials in which it lies concealed from us. There is historical evidence that they did extensive research and published original works in post-classical period well into recent times."

................................................................................................

"Footnotes"

"[ 1 ] Michelangelo held the belief that statues pre-existed in the marble that he was carving from; however, the belief did not stop Michelangelo from carving some of the most celebrated sculptures in history. “All the unfinished statues at the Accademia [Gallery in Florence, Italy] reveal Michelangelo’s approach and concept of carving. Michelangelo believed the sculptor was a tool of God, not creating but simply revealing the powerful figures already contained in the marble. Michelangelo’s task was only to chip away the excess, to reveal” (Accademia Gallery in Florence 1520-1540).

"[ 2 ] Dṛḍhabala writes: In this corpus of knowledge [composed] by Agniveśa, which was revised by Caraka, seventeen chapters as well as the Kalpa- and the Siddhi[sthāna-chapters] were found to be missing. These remaining [chapters] of that important corpus of knowledge were properly composed by Dṛḍhabala, son of Kapilabala, in order to complete it. (Maas 2010:4)

"[ 3 ] Gray’s Anatomy is the Western “śāstra of practice” first published in 1858. Gray’s Anatomy became an authoritative testimony for anatomy and it still remains so after all these years. The second edition, corrected and revised by Gray, was published before his death in 1860. Following Gray’s death, “rights” to Gray’s Anatomy changed hands. The newest US edition is the 41st edition published in 2015. UK editions of Gray’s Anatomy have been published in parallel to the US edition.

"[ 4 ] Meulenbeld’s monumental work A History of Indian Medical Literature (HIML) (Meulenbeld 1999-2002) comes in 5 volumes and spans over 4000 pages. Volume IA covers classical śāstra-s of medical practice. Volumes IIA and IIB show a vibrant intellectual history of original medical research from 600 CE until recent times. Volume 1A: 7-180 covers Caraka-saṁhitā. Volume 1A: 130-141 covers Dṛḍhabala exclusively.

"[ 5 ] To avoid misunderstanding, it is important to clarify at this point that we are not saying that all laukika knowledge comes from pratyakṣa pramāṇa. For example, when smoke is seen in the mountains but not the source, the fire, one relies on anumāna-pramāṇa to draw the inference that there is fire. This simple example shows us that anumāna-pramāṇa is an integral part of sourcing laukika knowledge. In addition, as will be discussed in detail later, authoritative testimony (āpta-upadeśa) is also an important pramāṇa for laukika knowledge.

"[ 6 ] Indian intellectual tradition was clear on the concept of pramāṇa from early times. Sāṅkhya-kārikā of Īśvara-kṛṣṇa is the earliest extant text of the Sāṅkhya philosophy. Verses 4-6 from his translation show the essence of epistemological thought in ancient Indian intellectual tradition: Perception, inference and right affirmation are admitted to be threefold proof; for they (are by all acknowledged, and) comprise every mode of demonstration. It is from proof that belief of that which is to be proven results. Perception is ascertainment of particular objects. Inference, which is of three sorts, premises an argument, and deduces that which is argued by it. Right affirmation is true revelation (āpta-vacana and śruti, testimony of reliable source and the Veda-s). Sensible objects become known by perception; but it is by inference or reasoning that acquaintance with things transcending the senses is obtained. A truth which is neither to be directly perceived, nor to be inferred from reasoning, is deduced from āpta-vacana or śruti.

"The English translation of Sāṅkhya Kārikā by Henry Colebrooke was published in 1837.

"[ 7 ] Augustine (5th century CE) took the position that faith comes first if reason disagreed with scripture. Augustine held that the Church was the ultimate arbiter to decide how reason should conform to scripture. Thomas Aquinas (13th century CE) introduced to the Western world the notion that philosophy (reason, secular natural laws) has its own useful place separate from scriptural knowledge (religious eternal laws). Scriptural knowledge has certainty; unlike scriptures, philosophy can be erroneous. Thus, neither Augustine nor Aquinas allowed reason to independently evaluate laukika claims in scripture. On Aquinas’ views on the relationship between theology and reason, Jan Aerstson writes:

"And even concerning those truths about God which human reason is able to attain, divine revelation is not superfluous, for those truths are known only to a few people, and mingled with a great deal of error. For these reasons theology, a rational inquiry based on revelation, is necessary.

"(Aertsen 1993:34-35)"

"The first principle is that there is harmony between philosophy, guided by the light of natural reason, and theology, guided by the light of faith. ...“If, however, in the writings of the philosophers one finds anything contrary to faith, it is not philosophy, but rather an abuse of philosophy stemming from a defect of reason.”

"In other words, scriptures are never wrong even if the knowledge in scriptures differs with laukika experience. Philosophy and reason then are useful insofar as they support scriptures."

"[ 9 ] Empiricists hold that sensory experience is the only means of knowledge. While rationalists hold that pure thought can be a means of knowledge, empiricists reject that possibility."

"[ 13 ] Belief in the creation of Adam, the first man, by God is core to the Christian doctrine of “Original Sin” and to the related concept of salvation by faith and grace. Rajiv Malhotra coined the term history-centrism (Malhotra 2011) to highlight the inextricable link between Abrahamic religious core doctrinal beliefs and history (including the “history” of creation of the first man in God’s image). (Barooah 2012) “Regular church attendance is strongly positively correlated with believing in creationism, and negatively correlated with believing in theistic evolution and evolution [by natural selection]. Among those who attend the church weekly, two-thirds believe in creationism, 25 percent believe in theistic evolution and a mere 3 percent believe in evolution.”

"Between 1982 and 2014, Gallup poll surveys found that more than 40% of adults in the U.S. still believe that man was created by God less than 10,000 years ago. (Newport 2014)"

"[ 14 ] Pollock writes: “...Suśruta-saṁhitā, similarly begins with a mythological introduction concerning the origin of medicine, and claims that “Brahmā it was who enunciated this Vedāṅga, this eight-fold Āyurveda.”

"(Pollock 1985:513)"

"Kunja Lal (1907:2) translates the original thus:

"“The Āyurveda (which forms the subject of our present discourse), originally formed one of the subsections of the Atharva Veda; and even before the creation of mankind, the self-begotten Brahmā strung it together into a hundred thousand couplets (Shlokas), divided into a thousand chapters.”"

................................................................................................

................................................

February 28, 2022 - March 01, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Chapter 4"

"On the Role of Śāstra : an Examination*

"–K. Vrinda Acharya"

................................................................................................

"Abstract"

" ... Pollock alleges that śāstra-s hinder genuine creativity, practical innovation, original thinking and progressive growth, since they are straitjacketed by the Vedic worldview. On the contrary, there is abundant counter-evidence which shows that Indians have always been innovative in producing and applying śāstra-s to both empirical and spiritual domains.

"His main contention in his article titled “The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory in Indian Intellectual History” (1985) is that “Śāstra is one of the fundamental features and problems of Indian civilization in general, and of Indian intellectual history in particular.”– wherein his terming of Śāstra as a ‘problem’ is itself weird and objectionable.

"This paper intends to review some of the striking points made by Pollock in this article, which are as follows.

1. In India, there is no dialectical interaction between theory and practice.

"2. All knowledge is pre-existent, and progress can only be achieved by a regressive re-appropriation of the past.

"3. The eternality of the Veda-s, the śāstra par excellence, is one presupposition or justification for this assessment of Śāstra.

"4. Indian civilization is constrained by rules of varying strictness.

"5. Śāstra-s instigate authoritarianism, which further leads to social oppression.

"6. The understanding of the relationship between Śāstra and Prayoga in India is diametrically opposed to what is usually found in the West."

"This paper proposes to critically examine the nature, rationality, motive, and more importantly, the need (if any) for such an analysis made by Pollock. It tries to throw some light on the shortcomings in his assumptions, his logic and his conclusions. Also highlighted in this paper are – some of his arguments which actually boomerang upon himself; some of the assertions which seem to have no basis whatsoever; some essential aspects overlooked by him; and a few of his selective/misleading citations."

................................................................................................

"Introduction"

"Professor Sheldon Pollock, the well-known American Sanskrit scholar and Indologist, the chief protagonist of the American Orientalist movement (as Rajiv Malhotra bears him out to be), is naturally one who cannot be ignored or taken lightly, considering the immense academic work he has done in the field of Sanskrit studies; these studies of his are quite unfavourable to the greatness and sanctity of our Sanskrit tradition. One cannot also miss to note the recognition, support and funding he gets from the Indian government/Indian academia/ traditional mutts/ Indian corporate/ secularists/ leftists.

"Pollock’s main agenda seems to be demeaning, or altogether dismissing, the transcendental nature of the Sanskrit language; and arguing that Sanskrit texts and scriptures were meant to be used as a tool for social oppression and discrimination. He explicitly praises the language for its kāvya, its beauty, aesthetics and structure; and at the same time constantly and implicitly disregards the Veda-s and other śāstra-s, as a part of his mission to “secularise” Sanskrit."

" ... In the words of Rajiv Malhotra “His extreme views on śāstra provide insight into the deep-rooted prejudices and chauvinism of the West.” (Malhotra 2016:115). He alleges that śāstra-s hinder genuine creativity, practical innovation, original thinking and progressive growth, since they are straitjacketed by the Vedic worldview; whereas there is abundant counter-evidence which shows that Indians have always been innovative in producing and applying śāstra-s to both empirical and spiritual domains."

................................................................................................

"Pollock’s assessment of Śāstra"

"In his article titled ‘The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory in Indian Intellectual History’, which was written as early as 1985, the very first sentence of his Abstract reads thus – “Śāstra is one of the fundamental features and problems of Indian civilization in general and of Indian intellectual history in particular.” (Pollock 1985:499) – wherein his terming of Śāstra as a ‘problem’ is itself weird and objectionable. His Abstract summarizes his position as follows.

"“The understanding of the relationship of śāstra (“theory”) to prayoga (“practical activity”) in Sanskritic culture is shown to be diametrically opposed to that usually found in the West. Theory is held always and necessarily to precede and govern practice, there is no dialectical interaction between them. Two important implications of this fundamental postulate are that all knowledge is pre-existent, and that progress can only be achieved by a regressive re-appropriation of the past. The eternality of the Veda-s, the śāstra par excellence, is one presupposition or justification for this assessment of śāstra. Its principal ideological effects are to naturalize and de-historicize cultural practices, two components in a larger discourse of power.”

"(Pollock 1985:499)"

Not subtle, exactly, the malevolent fraud, is he! And being as smug about being at no risk in attacking India as a racist can be, why should he bother being subtle or polite! He hasn't, after all, risked pointing a finger at Vatican for, say, multiple attempts at assassination of Queen Elizabeth I, or burning alive Jean D'Arc, or even the nazi ratline or the defending of paedophile bishops! Man enough, anyone? Not Pollock.

"Pollock condemns the śāstric codification and its normative character, and says that it was this attitude that prompted him to further study in the area of śāstric regulation, conceived accordingly as an analysis of the components of cultural hegemony or at least authoritarianism. He asserts that the question of domination remains important for several areas of pre-modern India, and everywhere civilisation as a whole has been constrained by rules of varying strictness.

"(Pollock 1985:499)"

He prevaricates. His hatred began when, after entering this field gor an easy route to career, position and fame, he ground himself failing grammar, something Noone ever required of him before. So he vowed vengeance against India for having lived Sanskrit, by false accusations.

" ... He analyses Vyākaraṇa, Dharmaśāstra, and Kāma Sūtra among other śāstra-s through his lens, and concludes that the śāstric discourse is injunctive - thereby giving no scope whatsoever for any individual for creative thinking. ... "

Would he prefer nurses fresh from nursery at fifteen attempting yo innovate whether to bathe him as a patient unable to move, rather than trained and experienced variety usually prefer most normal humans?

Or would he rather take Bavarian makes who disdain trivia such as bathing, fresh clothes etc, except once a moth at most, because they feel clean, Germany being clean? India prefers people bathe and change into fresh washed clothes every day, but that's too regulated for him, of course.

"What he means to say here is that no progress has happened in the Indian intellectual history for thousands of years owing to this ‘regression’, which in turn, is a result of the unchallenged and undisputed supremacy of the śāstra-s. He attributes this supremacy to what he calls the ‘mythic crystallization’ with regard to the origin of śāstra-s. He goes on to say that extant śāstra-s are either considered as abridged versions of the divine prototypes, or as exact reproductions of the originals; and quotes several examples. As a result of this, there has always been a backward movement only trying to be as close as possible to the divine paradigm, but no forward movement towards any betterment based on practical innovations. (Pollock 1985:512-515)"

One suspects he'd find his likes in a ZH, being an AH.

"The traditional pre-supposition or justification for all this, he argues, is that the Veda-s are considered eternal, infinite, self-existent and infallible; and they represent knowledge which is always pre-existent, without a beginning or an end, and as such, creation of knowledge is not possible. What is possible is only acquisition, modification or sometimes rejection of knowledge which already exists. All secular śāstra-s are carved out of the Vedic corpus, and share the Veda’s transcendent attributes. (Pollock 1985:517-519)"

So that's another reason for the hate assault - he, despite his assumptions of superiority based on pale or medium rare skin, couldn't be a God for a variety of dark people, became couldn't write anything original enough to be laudatory as well. Not in Sanskrit, and perhaps not in English either.

................................................................................................

"Analysing Pollock’s Approach"

" ... Individual śāstra-s have of course received intensive examination, as have certain major sub-genres, such as the sūtra. But a systematic and synthetic analysis of the phenomenon as a whole, as presenting a specific and unique problematic of its own, has not to my knowledge been undertaken.”

"(Pollock 1985:500-501)"

"Śāstra seems to be a big problem to him, but it has not been one to Indians. Where then is the question of making it an object of any scrutiny?"

Indeed.

"My assessment of Pollock writing on this subject is that he is ceaselessly wandering and searching for in the Indian system to prove his point. No doubt he seeks to substantiate his thesis by drawing together evidence from a wide variety of sources. But, as Hanneder says, Pollock’s argumentation is “often arbitrary”; in his review of Pollock’s paper on “The Death of Sanskrit”, Hanneder says “...it is my impression that Pollock has over-interpreted the evidence to support his theory...” (Hanneder 2002:294). Even here, in most cases, where he is unable to convince the reader, he tries to confuse! First of all, the very basic idea of śāstra that he uses to start his argument is not well-defined. He quotes from a wide range of texts and tries to arrive at a single definition of śāstra, which he can then conveniently use to drive his point.

"In fact, the term śāstra is seen to have more than one dimension in the Indian tradition. In the context of Alaṅkāra, Nyāya or Vyākaraṇa, the term śāstra is seen as theory, whereas with reference to philosophy, it refers to sac-chāstra or sad-āgama. (Refer Viṣṇu-tattva-vinirṇaya (of Ācārya Madhva) 1.3, 1.4). In some other context, it is confined to dharma-śāstra alone. In common usage, śāstra can also mean anything which has a scientific basis or even the ācāra-s and vicāra-s (“specified/regulated conduct”, and “trains of thought”) of an average Hindu household. In general, śāstra-jñāna means the technical know-how or specialized knowledge in a defined area of practice. Though Pollock cites several references from different disciplines, he ultimately sticks to one meaning as ‘theory’ and proceeds with his argument.

"Secondly, he doesn’t seem to have really understood the meaning of the words ‘pauruṣeya’ and ‘apauruṣeya’. He translates them as ‘human’ and ‘transcendent’ (Pollock 1985:502). In reality, ‘pauruṣeya’ refers to that which is created or composed by somebody, human or divine. (Puruṣa meaning either human being or the Supreme Being) (Ref. Apte 2007; also see Puruṣa-sūkta (= Ṛgveda 10.90) 1-3). And ‘apauruṣeya’ refers to that which is eternal or timeless, that which has always been there - for it is not created by anybody at all. This should sort out all the confusion he seems to have about which śāstra-s are pauruṣeya’ and which śāstra-s are ‘apauruṣeya’.

"Thirdly, he calls dharma ‘rule-boundedness’ (Pollock 1985:511) which is a very narrow and parochial interpretation. Dharma, the pivotal concept of Indian philosophy, is a very broad concept which has no single definition. It is derived from the root ‘dhṛ dhāraṇe’ which means ‘that which holds, supports, sustains, maintains’–“dhāraṇād dharma ity āhuḥ” (Mahābhārata 8.69.58). So, essentially it means the eternal unvarying cosmic law, inherent in the very nature of things. In short, it means the all-pervading cosmic order that sustains the entire creation. There is no single equivalent word which translates ‘dharma’ in any Western language. In the words of Rajiv Malhotra, it is a ‘non-translatable’ (Malhotra 2013:259).

"“The postulate of a single source of both sorts of knowledge was far more widespread, and is the dominant presupposition when not clearly enunciated (as it is in the most elaborate survey of sciences, Madhusūdhana Sarasvati’s 16th century Prasthāna-bheda, where the division between human and transcendent is altogether abandoned.”

"(Pollock 1985:503)"

" ... But Prasthāna-bheda only says “All the scriptures have the Supreme Lord as their purport” – “atra sarveṣāṁ śāstrāṇāṁ bhagavaty eva tātparyaṁ sākṣāt- paramparayā veti samāsena teṣāṁ prasthāna-bhedo ’troddiśyate”

"Prasthāna-bheda (p.1)"

"and does not speak about the source of the scriptures. The same text later confirms the apauruṣeyatva of the Veda-s. Says Prasthāna-bheda (p3) –

"“tatra dharma-brahma-pratipādakam apauruṣeyaṁ pramāṇa-vākyaṁ vedaḥ”"

"In reality, he is not making any objective study, though he claims he is. It is very clear that he is bent upon branding śāstra as ‘a problem’, as ‘regressive’, etc., and throughout his thesis, all his postulates and logic are directed towards the same. He does not really seem to be making any attempt to know how śāstra was understood in India. Actually, what he ‘wants’ to conclude is decided in the beginning itself."

"In order to appear balanced, fair, and just, Pollock acknowledges several aspects that contradict his claims, but later on very smartly sidelines them altogether, and ultimately concludes what he initially wanted to conclude.

"For instance, he quotes a passage from the Manu-smṛti which talks about a certain code of conduct with respect to greeting another person. He then exclaims that students in the West “are amazed to find even so apparently simple an act as meeting another person encumbered with a whole battery of rules”, and thus find Indian culture very alien. He then goes on to quote a section from a book called Amy Vanderbilt’s Everyday Etiquette, which prescribes rules for shaking hands, smiling, removing hats, etc., while meeting somebody.

"Surprisingly, he agrees that such cultural grammars, the mastery of which makes one a competent member of the culture in question, exist in every society, and that they are the code defining the given culture as such. But finally he concludes that it is only Indian civilisation that offers the most exquisite expression of the centrality of rule-governance in human behavior, and it is thus that śāstra which represents these grammars became a serious problem. (Pollock 1985:500)"

"To point out another example: towards the end of his paper, he draws inferences from Caraka-saṁhitā to the effect that all knowledge is eternal and pre-existent, and there can be no ‘creation’ of knowledge as such. He continues by citing Western philosophers like Socrates and Popper who also subscribe to the same view but in different words.

"But the clever conclusion that he makes is “Whatever the cogency of these more philosophical explanations for the special character attributed to śāstra, a historical-cultural consideration seems to me somewhat persuasive.” (Pollock 1985:518)

"This clearly shows that he eventually concludes just the way he wants, but simply gives references from here and there in order to make a show that he is following a very analytical approach. ... "

"Pollock is usually seen following a very tactful and oblique approach. He generally starts by admiring and appreciating Indian tradition. Those who read him only superficially will believe he is all praise for the same. There are several instances, in most of his writings, and particularly in this paper, where, in the same pages in which he criticises śāstra-s as being dogmatic and oppressive, he also admires them for their monumental and unparalleled intellectual accomplishment, and impact on culture in traditional India (Pollock 1985:500).

"Only an in-depth and comprehensive study of this will reveal to us that he is saying, implicitly though, that these monumental and unparalleled śāstra-s are to be seen as a prison in which Hindus have trapped themselves (Malhotra 2016:117).

"“ ...But most people today I think would readily accept the common-sense assessment of Ryle, that “efficient practice precedes the theory of it”... And this is the position that has been dominant in Western thinking from the time of Aristotle.”

"(Pollock 1985:510-511)"

"Does he mean to say that a civilisation - which is known the world over for its richness in philosophy, culture, religion, knowledge and education; which had seen the light of wisdom several centuries ago - when most countries in the world were steeped in the darkness of ignorance and primitiveness; and which gave to the world the most profound knowledge systems related to all possible domains of human life - does not have common sense?"

"Pollock has completely failed to recognize that those who originally wrote or composed the śāstra-s had indeed first practiced and experienced certain truths themselves; and only later, went on to textualise them. In fact, it is the basic eligibility criterion for anybody to write a śāstra. Only a śāstra written by a ṛṣi/mystic/seer with a deep transcendental and experiential yogic insight (Pollock seems to acknowledge this elsewhere but with a tone of subtle sarcasm) will have the real substance, and thus will stand the test of time, whereas others will gradually fade away. I am reminded of Swami Vivekānanda’s words – “Preach what you practice”."

................................................................................................

"Arguments lacking logic/proof"

"1. Pollock says “In the West, codes have largely remained “tacit” knowledge, existing on the level of practical and not discursive awareness. In India, by contrast, they were textualized, many of them at an early date, and had consequently to be learned rather than assimilated by a natural process of cultural osmosis.” (Pollock 1985:500)

"This doesn’t make much sense to me. First of all in India, cultural values are more assimilated than formally learnt from texts. Those who have studied the śāstra-s are only a few, but cultural codes and practices are an inseparable aspect of almost every Indian/Hindu which he/she learns by living the culture. Secondly, if Western codes are ‘tacit’ as he calls them, where was the need for a book like Amy Vanderbilt’s Everyday Etiquette which dictates cultural grammars in great detail?

"2. According to him, the Vedāṅga-s, primarily, were in their very nature only taxonomical and descriptive; and only later transformed themselves from a descriptive catalogue to a prescriptive or injunctive system. He uses Geertz’s concept of “models of” as against “models for”, and says texts that had initially shaped themselves to reality so as to make it “graspable”, end by asserting the authority to shape reality to themselves (Pollock 1985:503-504).

"But what is the basis for such an argument? In the absence of any valid historical or textual proof, this seems more like his own baseless assumption. Why, when, how, and on account of whom did such a transformation in the nature of Vedāṅga-s happen? - is a question he has to address here.

"3. Pollock first gives many quotations which indicate that śāstra had to always precede, guide, regulate, control and dominate practice in all domains of pre-modern Indian life. Then he goes on to cite some counter-examples by Kauṭilya, Manu, Daṇḍin, Suśruta, and Caraka among others, showing that experience or actual practice was considered more important than mere theoretical knowledge from texts/books.

"He cites these examples - which actually disprove his own line of argument - just in order to give the reader an impression that he is unbiased and is doing a very truthful and impartial scrutiny. However, he later dismisses all these examples calling them a ‘minority’. He says “Such voices...are pretty much in the minority. The dominant ideology is that which ascribes clear priority and absolute competence to shastric codification” (Pollock 1985:510).

"Here again, he does not give any convincing basis - for writing off these as minority views, and hence insignificant; or for claiming, consequently, the śāstra-s were, mostly and by majority, authoritarian."

................................................................................................

"Arguments which boomerang"

"1. He first says that although the word śāstra is attested from the time of the earliest literary monuments, no comprehensive definition is offered until the medieval period (Pollock 1985:501). But later on, while talking of Madhva’s definition of śāstra, he himself says it is that which is found in the Skāndapurāṇa (Pollock 1985:503), which definitely belongs to a period much earlier than the so-called medieval period. He also quotes definitions of śāstra from Pūrva Mīmāṁsā and Patañjali.

"Moreover, much of Sanskrit vocabulary is amenable to etymology, and every word that is used has to be well-defined. Śāstra is derived from the root ‘śāsu –anuśiṣṭau’. It is defined as “śiṣyate anena iti śāstraṁ” or “śāsti, trāyate ca iti śāstraṁ” or “śāsanāc chaṁsanāc caiva śāstram ity abhidhīyate”, (he himself quotes this last definition in a footnote) meaning “that which instructs or directs”, and certainly not “that which restricts”!

"2. Pollock argues that śāstra-s are fixed or rigid, and frozen in time, and hence do not offer any scope for creativity or innovation. He goes on to quote several traditional mystics, scholars and authors belonging to various times in history, who have listed the śāstra-s which they approve or consider as valid.

"But the very fact that so many scholars or authors have given different lists of śāstra-s itself proves that śāstra-s were in no way fixed or rigid. From time to time, newer śāstra-s were produced, sometimes supplementing, and sometimes refuting or competing with, each other. Where then is the question of any restriction?

................................................................................................

"Essential aspects overlooked"

"1. Pollock repeatedly emphasises the top-down nature of the flow of all knowledge in śāstra-s. He speaks extensively about Sanskrit grammar and feels that the usage of language is bound by strict grammar.

"He completely ignores the fact that there has always been a reciprocal flow of influence between grammar and usage in Sanskrit language, and so is the case in any śāstra-prayoga pair."

"Also, in the development of Sanskrit grammatical tradition, the Vārttika-s of Vararuci enunciate as much as 5000 exceptions to rules made by Pāṇini, out of which Mahābhāṣya of Patañjali negates 3000, and accepts the other 2000. Down the line, there were several other illustrious grammarians like Jayāditya, Nāgeśabhaṭṭa, Kaiyaṭa and so on, who made significant contributions to Sanskrit grammar. This proves the fact that Sanskrit grammar was never fixed or frozen."

"2. Pollock says that the texts on metrics were nomological in character, which made the subject to be treated with homogeneity for over some two thousand years and there has been a very keen attempt throughout on the part of poets to approximate their work as closely as possible to the shastric stipulations (Pollock 1985:499).

"Firstly, chandas or metrics did not stop with Piṅgala. Kedārabhaṭṭa’s Vṛtta-ratnākara and many other texts on metrics can be identified with the middle ages of Sanskrit prosody.

"Secondly, Vṛtta-ratnākara which is the most exhaustive compilation containing over 600 metres, shows a substantially larger repertoire than that found in any other metrical tradition.

"When almost all possible aesthetic combinations of metres are already dealt with, is there any logic in simply trying to think out of the box?"

"3. While speaking about arts, Pollock says art-making is constrained by rules of varying strictness (Pollock 1985:499). He doesn’t seem to acknowledge the fact that India’s contribution to the world in the field of music, dance and other forms of art is one of the greatest. Arts in India have always been the most creative and innovative; Indian artists have the maximum liberty, and the śāstra-s or the rules only go to provide a broad framework or boundary, and an open architecture within which art is expected to thrive. Tradition is dynamic and keeps evolving, and it has taken centuries to define and refine these boundaries.

"A celebrated saying “prayoga-pradhānaṁ hi nāṭyaśāstram” (Mālavikāgnimitra 1.15+) {The science of dramaturgy is predominated by practice (Translation mine)} very well proves the fact that, in Indian art, it is practice that makes theory, and not vice-versa. Boundaries are a must to bring in some orderliness and discipline in any art; drawn sensibly, they do not restrict creativity. What is the fun in creating something when it’s totally free ended?!

"Quite on the other hand, it is when boundaries are well-defined, that the challenge is immense, and any creation is bound to be amazing only when it is within a refined, well tested, space. If a certain artist is unable to explore his creativity within the boundary, that reflects on his own inability, and not on the limitations of the system itself.

"When we talk of music, it is Western Music in fact, which is very rigid in its practice, where a composition of Beethoven or Mozart has to be played exactly as it is, or rather, as it was when composed. Not so at all in Indian music: for example, the same composition of Tyāgarāja is presented by different artistes in different ways. Each artiste adds his own special touch to the composition, retaining however, the original structure. Not just that, it is only in Indian music that we find a unique concept of ‘mano-dharma’ which offers maximum liberty for an artist to express his art - in the most spontaneous, creative, and imaginative manner."

"4. Pollock looks at śāstra only from a single and limited angle; and repeatedly blames śāstra as being too normative. Whereas, while speaking about grammar, he himself says “...However detailed a descriptive grammar may be, it can never be totally exhaustive of linguistic practice. There are indeed passages in Pāṇini where this is evidently well understood, and where consequently it cannot be claimed that śāstra has made provision for all acceptable usage” (Pollock 1985:504-505).

"This is absolutely true, and it is only our ṛṣi-s or masters who had the vision to realise such a pragmatic and profound truth many centuries earlier than the rest of the world realised it. Yet, our śāstra-s are special and unique due to their greatness, grandness, and vastness, to a much greater extent than their counterparts in any other society in the world, ancient or modern. Pollock altogether fails to see this dimension of śāstra. Śāstra in India, as opposed to rules or codes of any other civilisation, is much broader, comprehensive and wide-ranging; and this shows it gives utmost freedom to the practitioner."

"5. Though Pollock recognizes the importance of taking account of traditional categories and concepts when attempting to understand the cultural achievements of ancient India, he doesn’t seem to see that in India, śāstra-s are always considered as collection of experiences of predecessors which they express in a well-defined and systematic manner, and which serve as guidelines to the successors.

"In a way, śāstra-s make our job easy in any field of activity by showing us the trodden path and providing us with time-tested principles and techniques (and some śāstra-s even tell us short cuts) which can be straightaway employed. This only enables us to take off from the point where our ancestors had stopped, to improve upon what they have done - rather than repeating all their earlier trials, and thereby learning things the long way. Thus, knowledge has always been incessantly evolving in India. This aspect of ‘evolution’ is completely ignored by Pollock."

"6. Pollock seems to be not in favour of the idea of divine origin of all knowledge. But it is in fact the very bedrock of Indian philosophical thought. The Upaniṣad-s proclaim “yasmin vijñāte sarvam idaṁ vijñātaṁ bhavati” (Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 1.3) {That by knowing which everything becomes known (Translation mine)} indicating an all-inclusive broad umbrella, within the purview of which everything else falls. A similar expression can be found in the Bhagavad-gītā (7.2)

"jñānaṁ te’ham sa-vijñānam

"idaṁ vakṣyāmy aśeṣataḥ |

"yaj jñātvā neha bhūyo’nyaj jñātavyam avaśiṣyate ||

"{I shall tell you without reserve about this knowledge (jñāna) together with [its] realization (vijñāna), knowing which there remains nothing further to be known here. (Translation: Swami Viveswarananda)}"

"7. Even in the kāvya-s there are ample references that show that ours was a dynamic tradition that always adored, encouraged and honoured creativity and novelty. Says Kālidāsa:

"purāṇam ity eva na sadhu sarvaṁ na cāpi kāvyaṁ navam ity avadyaṁ |"

"(Mālavikāgnimitra 1.2)"

"{Mere antiquity is not a validation for aptness. Poetry is not to be rejected just because it is novel. (Translation mine)}"

"8. Throughout his paper, Pollock attacks śāstra with words like rigid, frozen, fixed, authoritative, cultural hegemony, domination, dogmatic, prescriptive, rule-governance, regulation, injunctive, stipulative, legislative and so on; but nowhere in his paper has he given even a single example from any śāstra which imposes stringent rules, or instigates ‘authoritarianism’, or intimidates the practitioners of any dreadful consequences and/or leads to social oppression. Neither has he given any instance from Western culture, which he claims to give all scope for freedom and individual creativity. At least a couple of parallel examples in specific spheres of activity would have enhanced the efficacy of his assertions.

"9. Well does Rajiv Malhotra say “Pollock is unable to see that transcendence is the fountain-head of creativity. For Hindus, a śāstra can be a tool leading to transcendence, be it rasa in the performing arts, jñāna in Vedānta, or samādhi in yoga.” (Malhotra 2016:116)

"10. If Western students find Indian culture alien and strange, as claimed by Pollock, it is equally true that Indians find Western culture alien and strange. I think it is a matter of common sense that for anybody, any new, hitherto unknown or unfamiliar culture will always seem alien. Thus, it is no big deal that Westerners are amazed by Indian culture and its practices.

"11. Pollock is seen generalising the concept of ‘the West’. It is not clear what he actually means by the West and its culture. European countries such as Britain, France, Greece, Germany have their own independent and separate cultures, which are quite different, and sometimes totally opposed to the culture of America. Similarly, Central American and South American countries (the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs) also have had their own distinct and unique cultures. Pollock seems to be a representative of the American culture by and large, and implies merely ‘America’ when he says ‘the West’. Therefore, all his arguments in support of the ‘West’ also become narrow and constricted."

Neat!!!!!

................................................................................................

"Contrary references cited yet ignored"

"1. He quotes Vātsyāyana’s words from the Kāma-sūtra thus “...all over the world there are only a handful of people who know the śāstra, while the practice (of it, or, the application of its principles) is within the grasp of many people.” He goes on to say that, as for learning the śāstra itself, this is the necessary commencement of the tradition, and later serves to enhance the efficacy of the practice.

"He also mentions Chāndogya Upaniṣad’s and Yaśodhara’s view - that śāstra makes practice ‘stronger’, reliable, and consistent, unlike uninformed practice, whose effectivity is altogether fortuitous. (Pollock 1985:507)

"2. While speaking about grammar, he himself says: “...However detailed a descriptive grammar may be, it can never be totally exhaustive of linguistic practice. There are indeed passages in Pāṇini where this is evidently well understood, and where consequently it cannot be claimed that śāstra has made provision for all acceptable usage.” (Pollock 1985:504-505)

"3. He points out Kauṭilya’s expression – “One who knows śāstra but is inexperienced will come to grief in practical application.” He refers to Kauṭilya’s words “sarva-śāstrāṇy anukramya prayogam upalabhya ca” (Artha-śāstra 1.8.25) – meaning he ran through all the śāstra-s and observed actual practice. (Pollock 1985:509-510)

"4. In the context of learning the science of economics, Manu is quoted thus “(this has to be learned) from the common people themselves.” (Pollock 1985:509-510)

"5. Pollock says Daṇḍin offers his own definition of the nature of poetry after having brought together (summarizing, or, consulting) the earlier śāstra-s on the subject, and observing actual practices –

"“pūrva-śāstrāṇi samhṛtya

"prayogān upalakṣya ca |

"yathā-sāmarthyam asmābhiḥ

"kriyate kāvya-lakṣaṇaṁ ||”

"(Kāvyādarśa 1.2)."

"In his footnote, he also makes a mention of Ānandavardhana who he says is far more descriptive than other ālaṅkārika-s. (Pollock 1985:510)"

"6. He quotes from Suśruta-saṁhitā thus “For it is only by combining both direct observation and the information of the śāstra-s that thorough knowledge is obtained.” (Pollock 1985:510)

"7. He cites from Caraka-saṁhitā thus “Of all types of evidence, the most dependable is that directly observed.” (Pollock 1985:510)"

................................................................................................

"Conclusion"

"A thorough and more detailed investigation of Pollock’s paper will reveal that there are some more serious shortcomings in his assumptions, logic as well as conclusions. In my opinion he has not been quite successful in proving that śāstra-s are opposed to progress, and thus hinder creativity. Neither has he provided evidence to show that śāstra-s in India inspire hegemony and social oppression, nor has he demonstrated the inherent nature of freedom and progress which he claims to be the crux of the Western civilisation.

Yes.

................................................................................................

................................................

March 01, 2022 - March 01, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Chapter 5"

"Śāstra – an Impediment to Progress?*"

"–Rajath Vasudevamurthy"

................................................................................................

"Abstract"

"Śāstra is of two types – pauruṣeya and apauruṣeya – based on whether the subject matter revealed therein is accessible to be veriﬁed by the human mind or not; and whether the said śāstra has an author (human) or not. Veda is apauruṣeya since the subject matter it reveals, like dharmādharma-vyavasthā, punar-janman etc., can neither be proved nor disproved by the ﬁve senses and/or inference. Vedāṅga-s are ancillary sciences which help one in understanding the intended meaning of the Veda, while the Upaveda-s, Itihāsa-s, Purāṇa-s, Smṛti-s etc. are authored to help percolate the vision of the Veda to all sections of society, and so are considered pauruṣeya.

"The contrarian view is that the Vedāṅga-s - Vyākaraṇa and Chandas especially, were meant to describe the grammar and prosody used in the Veda; somehow, over time, they became prescriptive to the extent that future users of the language were forced to adhere to them more strictly than they are adhered to in the Veda itself. Such impositions can be found in the context of Dharmaśāstra-s, Āyurveda etc. It is claimed thereby that śāstra-s which were descriptive and ﬂexible in spirit to begin with, became over time prescriptive and rigid, thereby stiﬂing the creativity of the future generations."

"On the one hand, we see that Indian society has been vigorous all through, making original contributions in ﬁelds such as science and technology, mathematics, economics, and philosophy and language; while on the other hand, it is said to have undergone deterioration for a thousand years. This contradiction begs an effort to understand Indian history and culture in a holistic manner, paying adequate heed to all the underlying aspects."

................................................................................................

"1. Introduction"

"A critical and honest examination of Pollock’s paper on Śāstra-s (Pollock 1985) will motivate the reader to undertake a thorough study of Indian history and the unique place Śāstra-s hold in the Indian intellectual tradition. The study of Indian history is made complicated by the presence of various kinds of history – Marxist, Nationalist etc. In the context of the ﬁeld of Indology being dominated by Westerners, many of whom are not sympathetic to the Indic civilization, Sri Aurobindo remarks “...a time must come when the Indian mind will shake off the darkness that has fallen upon it, cease to think or hold opinions at second and third hand and reassert its right to judge and enquire in a perfect freedom into the meaning of its own Scriptures....” (Aurobindo 1994:130).

"In recent times, a lot of new evidence is surfacing which challenges the long held positions about Indian history; prominent among them being —

"• Study of world economic history where India led the world GDP for at least 1500 years (Maddison 2001)

"• Inﬂuence of Indian mathematics on Europe (Raju 2007)

"• Archaeological evidence from Bronze-age Harappan civilization suggesting that it is at least 8000 year-old and not just 5500 (Sarkar et al. 2016)

"• Re-examination of evidence; relating to Sandrokottos and Devānāṁpriya Priyadarśī, and Buddhist chronicles such as Dīpavaṁśa, Mahāvaṁśa; pushing the date of the Buddha back by about 500 years (Arya 2015:286-292, Roy 2016)"

"Anybody who gets to know about the science & technology, mathematics & astronomy and economic history of ancient India and China seeks an explanation as to how and why the two countries paled into insigniﬁcance at the turn of the 20th century. In the Indian context, many scholars lay the blame for this decline at the doors of the invasions starting from Mahmud Ghazni to the advent of the British. This explanation is not entirely satisfying; for, prior to those events many invasions (Greek, Huns, Shakas etc.) were warded off and the refugees (Jews, Parsees etc.) were seamlessly absorbed into the Indian community (Sanyal 2008:5-19). Swami Vivekananda observes that with the overemphasis of nirvāṇa for the masses in Buddhism & Jainism, the society lost its kṣātra and became vulnerable militarily to foreign invasions1; and in turn led to an erosion of value systems with extraneous lifestyle, definitions of life goals and thought systems being imitated without proper examination.

"Sanyal argues that the decline in the Indian civilization was due to a change in mindset; described as an inward-looking tendency, not open to comparison and sharing knowledge with others. Its most glaring effect is that crossing the ocean became a taboo to the people who had a great ship-building industry and maritime expertise (Sanyal 2010:19-24)!

"In this paper, we closely examine another interesting idea proposed to explain this decline - forwarded by Pollock2 – that śāstra-s are an impediment to creativity and progress. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: §2 (the next one) presents a traditional overview of śāstra-s, §3 presents some of Pollock’s views that śāstra-s come in the way of progress and §4 presents the Conclusion."

................................................................................................

"2 Śāstra-s — Insiders’ view"

"The basic details of how tradition views śāstra will not be found explicitly discussed in the main source texts such as the Veda-s, the Bhagavad Gītā or the Brahmasūtra-s. That is one of the reasons why it has led to so many concepts and interpretations different from the intention of śāstra. Hence it has been mandatory to learn the śāstra-s from a guru who is grounded in the tradition, who may be described as an “insider” (Malhotra 2016:24-28). Some of the very important features of śāstra are discussed in this section according to the tradition of Advaita Vedānta (since Pollock quotes Śaṅkarabhāṣya in a few places), but I believe these details are acceptable to other Vedāntic traditions by and large."

................................................................................................

"2.1 Definition & Scope"

"Etymologically, the word Śāstra is derived in two ways “śaṁsanāt śāstram” and “śāsanāt śāstram”, which indicate the pāramārthika (transcendental) and vyāvahārika (transactional) relevance of śāstra respectively3. In its restricted sense, śāstra refers to the Veda (literally, ‘knowledge’), which primarily reveals those facts which cannot otherwise be known; and the Veda has no role in revealing what can be known by other available means (§2.2). The subject matter of the Veda is: the nature of the jīva (individual), reason for a particular birth, what happens after death, what means can be adopted while living to reach favorable ends after death etc. These are termed dharmādharma-vyavasthā (cosmic moral order), gati (travel after death), loka (other worlds) etc. Therefore, unless one has total śraddhā in the words of the Veda, one cannot commit oneself wholeheartedly to understand and live this vision.

"The first part of the Veda, called Karma-kāṇḍa reveals relation between sādhana and sādhya (means and ends) and is put in the form of injunctions and prohibitions (vidhi and niṣedha). Knowledge of this part of Veda, called Aparā-vidyā (literally, Lower Knowledge) serves to fulﬁll the desires of man - for a better body, better loka & better possessions. This is achieved via

• yajña - performance of the sacred rites with a reverential attitude

• dāna - sharing one’s possessions

• tapas - austerities4

"This brings about a tremendous change in the doer: committed to such a lifestyle, he stands to gain freedom from pride, arrogance, violent reactions, hoarding, selﬁshness, pettiness etc., which in turn gives a mind, subtle enough for (or prepared to be open to) the second part of the Veda called Jñāna-kāṇḍa or Vedānta, where there is only revelation of a fact already existing and self-evident. In this right seeing, called Parā-vidyā (literally, Higher Knowledge), the burden of do’s & don’t’s have no more relevance. Without Aparā-vidyā, Parā-vidyā is impossible and without Parā-vidyā, Aparā-vidyā is incomplete. Use of the ‘faculty of choice’ (unique to man) to gain and live this vision is the highest contribution one can make to oneself and to the entire creation at a very fundamental level."

................................................................................................

"2.2 Pramāṇa-śāstra or Epistemology"

"That by which the existence of a thing is proved is called pramāṇa. In other words, any knowledge is valid only if it is born out of a pramāṇa. The deﬁnition of a pramāṇa is anadhigata-abādhita-arthāvabodhaka. Avabodhaka indicates the revealing nature of a pramāṇa. The other three words are explained thus:

"Anadhigata – in the absence of a given pramāṇa, one cannot even suspect ignorance of the corresponding object. For example, a blind person cannot even suspect his ignorance of color or form; nor does a person unexposed to the Veda suspect his ignorance of dharmādharma-vyavasthā and Brahman.

"Abādhita – one pramāṇa can neither verify nor negate the knowledge acquired from another. For example, what the eye reveals (forms and colors) can neither be veriﬁed nor negated by the ear, the nose etc. Similarly, what the Veda reveals can never be subjected to veriﬁcation by empirical sciences; the latter are based on data gathered through the ﬁve senses, or their extensions (telescope/microscope etc.), and inference based on such data. This is in contrast with modern science where a huge premium is placed on veriﬁcation.

"Arthavat – what is revealed by every pramāṇa has some utility.

"The following six pramāṇa-s are accepted in varying degrees in the different darśana-s in keeping with their disposition and reasoning (Satprakashananda 2005):

"• Pratyakṣa: Direct Perception (via the five senses)

"• Anumāna: Inference Upamāna: Example

"• Arthāpatti: Two step inference (usually of the form ‘unless-otherwise’)

"• Anupalabdhi: Non-perception

"• Śabda: Verbal testimony

"In the cognition of any object, the instrument of knowledge is called pramāṇa, the object is called prameya, the cognizer is called pramātṛ. When a prameya is not amenable to pratyakṣa, it is amenable to either parokṣa (remote) or available as aparokṣa (of the nature of pramātṛ). Parokṣa itself can be either laukika parokṣa (which can potentially become available to pratyakṣa) or nitya-parokṣa (eternally remote, can never become open to pratyakṣa) such as dharmādharma-vyavasthā, gati, other loka-s etc. (§2.1). The role of śabda-pramāṇa or the Veda is in revealing items which are nitya-parokṣa and aparokṣa.

"When a person knows a tree, he also knows that he has the knowledge of the tree. How does he know this? Advaita-vedānta says this knowledge is svataḥ-siddha (self-existent) and svataḥ-prakāśa (self-effulgent) which illumines all thoughts and objects (Satprakashananda 2005:110-112). Such a self-existent, self-effulgent reality is called ‘Brahman’ in the Upaniṣad-s – “prajñānaṁ brahma” (Aitareya Upaniṣad 3.1.3), which obtains as the Self in all and is the real pramāṇa (proof or evidence); since it alone reveals sukha and duḥkha (pleasure and pain), the states of dream, sleep etc., while the pramāṇa-s listed above are conﬁned to objects in the waking state only. Nonetheless, all the pramāṇa-s indirectly intimate the Self alone – just as the cognition of all objects in a room intimate the presence of light–without which no knowledge can arise. It is for this reason that all branches of knowledge are revered in Indian culture, and are spoken of as divine in origin. As long as a knowledge born out of pramāṇa-s does not resolve into the Self-evident, there is no end to seeking its veriﬁcation.

"The subject matter of the Upaniṣad is so subtle that the Upaniṣad itself says that neither word nor thought can reveal it (§2.4), but yet it is possible to understand (“ānandaṁ brahmaṇo vidvān”, Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.9.1). This is not a contradiction but a paradox, which the śāstra itself resolves by resorting to a unique prakriyā called adhyāropa-apavāda (superimposition-negation) to communicate that which cannot be objectiﬁed by words “adhyāropāpavādābhyāṁ niṣprapañcaṁ prapañcyate”5.

"At a superﬁcial glance, the statements belonging to the genres of adhyāropa and apavāda appear contradictory and might lead to confusion about the tātparya or vivakṣā, the intended meaning. Therefore, one has to carefully understand each statement in its context and also know the vision of the entire śāstra, hence the need for a śrotriya-guru (traditional master)."

................................................................................................

"2.3 Vision about creation"

"As the dictum of the Sāṅkhya-s viz. “bhogāpavargārthaṁ sṛṣṭiḥ”6 expounds, “creation” is for the sake of the jīva for the two-fold purpose of

"• bhoga – (in the form of or towards the end of karma-kṣaya/experiences of pain and pleasure) and

"• apavarga (emancipation).

"But at the same time, since no single jīva is responsible for the creation, there must be an Intelligence which has given rise to this magniﬁcent, enormous and orderly creation; it is posited as Īśvara – a case of cetana-kārya-vāda (since Īśvara cannot be inert) (Cf. “janmādy asya yataḥ” Brahma Sūtra 1.1.2)7. This is in stark contrast with modern science, where the purpose of creation is not known, and creation is said to have come about from inert matter.

"Secondly, just as a pot cannot be brought into manifestation by a potter unless it is potential (unmanifest) in clay; similarly creation is unmanifest alone brought to manifestation. In other words, no new object is ever created, and whatever comes into existence is that which is already in existence in an unmanifest, but potential, form. So, essentially creation is really a manifestation of names and forms, while dissolution is unmanifestation; and this cycle of creation and dissolution (manifestation and unmanifestation) proceeds according to the inviolable law of karman. This view, which is the ultimate expression of the Law of Conservation, is called Satkārya-vāda, and is held by the Sāṅkhya and Vedānta darśana-s."

................................................................................................

"2.4 Śruti-Smṛti demarcation"

"Brahman, says the Upaniṣad, cannot be objectiﬁed by word or thought “yato vāco nivartante aprāpya manasā saha ...” (Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.9.1); but is very much the reason for the functioning of the speech and mind “... manaso mano yad vāco ha vācam ...” (Kena Upaniṣad 1.2); and therefore is apauruṣeya-vastu. That śāstra which reveals this apauruṣeya-vastu is called apauruṣeya-śāstra, the same as the Śruti or the Veda in the tradition. It consists of the eternal truths discovered or “seen” by ṛṣi-s (mantra-dṛaṣṭṛ-s) about dharmādharma-vyavasthā, gati, loka etc. as discussed earlier (§2.1). Works authored by sages by applying the revelations of Śruti to contemporary society are called Smṛti-s. Smṛti-s are subservient to Śruti since every author comes with his/her own interpretations and opinions. This distinction of Śruti and Smṛti, of the separation the eternal principles and time-space dependent social norms, is unique to Hinduism; and it is this feature that enables Hinduism to constantly adapt to changing circumstances and be a living tradition continuously. Over time, unfortunately, this clarity of understanding was lost, and as a consequence, śraddhā, the sacred feeling attached to this wisdom, was also lost; and blind, mechanical ritualistic beliefs stand to represent the most exalted tradition, giving place to contradictory opinions about śāstra8."

................................................................................................

"3. Pollock’s Views"

"Professor Sheldon Pollock is a prominent American Indologist who speaks of a new outlook called ‘Political Philology’9, according to which, the sacred texts of a civilization under study are examined from a political lens, where one set of people oppress another, pretty much in line with the famous ‘class-struggle’, propounded by Karl Marx."

................................................................................................

"3.1 Pollock’s Paper on Śāstra"

"Pollock starts on the note that “śāstra is one of the most fundamental features and problems of Indian civilization in general and of Indian intellectual history in particular” (Pollock 1985:499); and goes on to say that he will examine the idea and nature of śāstra which has not been the object of sustained Indological scrutiny. Theory, he says, has been held to precede and govern practice, which is diametrically opposite to that in the West. The implication has been the idea that all knowledge is pre-existent and therefore progress consists in a regressive re-appropriation of the past. The eternality of the Veda is used to naturalize and de-historicize cultural practices – two components in a larger discourse of power (Pollock 1985:499)."

................................................................................................

"3.2 Naipaul’s complaint about Indian art"

"At the outset, Pollock observes a trend of strict śāstric codiﬁcation across the entire cultural spectrum of India leading him to concur with V. S. Naipaul’s complaint that the art of India was “limited by the civilization, by an idea of the world in which men were born only to obey the rules.” But this quote of Naipaul actually appears in his review of the book Imperial Mughal Painting by Stuart Cary Welch, in the following passage:

"“...He has chosen forty pictures to illustrate the glory, limitations, and decline of Mughal court painting. An art that developed so fast, had Persia, India, and Europe to draw on...why didn’t it do more? Why did this art, so human in the beginning, in the late sixteenth century, and so full of possibility, exhaust itself so quickly by the end of the seventeenth?

"The answer can be inferred from Imperial Mughal Painting. The art was limited by the civilization, by an idea of the world in which men were born only to obey the rules - Islam was always in the wings, waiting to resimplify and stiﬂe. The art was limited by the despotism that went with this idea, the despotism that dealt only in power and glory but could create no nation. The art was limited by the ignorance and absurd conceit of a court dazzled by its own glitter. It shows in the paintings...” (Naipaul 1979:10)

"In this case, Pollock seems to be falling into the trap he is accusing the śāstra-s of committing – ignoring historicity, cultural change and socio-political conditions; thereby quoting out of context. It is rather strange that Pollock does not ﬁnd any other observation of Naipaul worthy of quote, although Naipaul had reviewed at least four other books on Indian art in the very same article."

................................................................................................

"3.3 Cultural grammars"

"Pollock states that it is clearer to him that “everywhere civilization as a whole...is constrained by rules of varying strictness, and indeed, may be accurately described by an accounting of such rules.” (Pollock 1985:499); and goes on to compare the regulation of behavior between the Manu-smṛti and Amy Vanderbilt’s in the case of one person meeting another. He further goes on to say that while in the West, such codes of etiquette have largely remained ‘tacit’ knowledge existing on the level of practical and not discursive awareness; they were textualized in India, at an early date and had “to be learned rather than assimilated by a natural process of cultural osmosis.” (Pollock 1985:500)

"While there may be some truth in the above analysis, it has more to do with a misunderstanding of śāstra as pointed out in §2.4. The text of the Manu-smṛti consists of four major divisions —

"i. sṛṣṭi-prakriyā (origin of the world)

"ii. sources of dharma

"iii. varṇāśrama-dharma (dharma of the social classes and stages of life)

"iv. karma-niyati and mokṣa (law of karma and liberation).10

"The fourfold sources of dharma are presented by the Manu-smṛti as – Veda (or Śruti), Smṛti, sadācāra (conduct of the noble people) and ātmanas-tuṣṭi (satisfaction of one’s conscience) (Manu-smṛti 2.6 and 2.12). Pollock seems to suggest that because these dharma-śāstra-s are influenced by the paradigm deriving from strict regulation of ritual action in Vedic ceremonies, these grammars were invested with massive authority ensuring a nearly unchallengeable claim to normative control of cultural practices. In fact, the view of Manu-smṛti itself is quite the opposite; that when social conditions change, the Manu-smṛti can be and has to be given up in favor of a better smṛti. Justice M. Rama Jois states that

"“Yajnavalkya follows the same pattern as in Manu with slight modifications. On matters such as women’s rights of inheritance and right to hold property, status of Sudras, and criminal penalty, Yajnavalkya is more liberal than Manu...”

"(Jois 2004:31-32)"

"and suggests that the liberal nature of Yājñavalkya-smṛti may have been influenced by Buddhism in ancient India; and perhaps that is the reason it includes prescriptions on the organization of monasteries, land grants, execution of deeds and other matters.

"(Jois 2004:31-32)"

But Yājñavalkya was long before Buddha, he belonged to the epics era, of Mahābhārata!

"In the context of a vānaprasthin, the Manu-smṛti states that he must gradually give up all attachments and being freed from opposites, remain in his true nature (viz. Brahman) (Manu-smṛti 6.81); and ends on the note that one who sees the Self in all through understanding, attains to the highest bliss, which has always been his true nature called Brahman (Manu-smṛti 12.125) (perfectly in line with the Upaniṣad-s). Therefore, while the Manu-smṛti does prescribe detailed regulation in certain seemingly trivial matters (as Pollock presents the case of a meeting between two people); it is important to note that all the salient features of the Vedic vision are very well presented. It is a classic example, where the broad over-arching vision is kept in mind even while discussing the minutest detail."

................................................................................................

"3.4 Śāstra-s – Definition & Scope"

"Pollock states that although the word śāstra has occurred in ancient texts starting from the Ṛgveda, no comprehensive deﬁnition is offered till the medieval period! He then encounters two deﬁnitions of śāstra – “authoritative rule” and “philosophical system”. Pollock seems to ‘struggle’ to reconcile the above two deﬁnitions of śāstra, and rather hastily concludes that the aspect of “regulating” or “codifying” is found to be prominent quoting Kumārila-bhaṭṭa’s Śloka-vārtika. But this two-fold nature of śāstra of revealing the “vision” and describing the “means” to realize it is very clear in the tradition (§2.1) and is also succinctly captured in the Muṇḍakopaniṣad and Bhagavad-gītā respectively as:

"“parīkṣya lokān karmacitān brāhmaṇo nirvedam āyāt nāstyakṛtaḥ kṛtena |

"tad-vijñānārthaṁ...”

"(Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 1.2.12)

"“ārurukṣor muner yogaṁ

"karma kāraṇam ucyate |

"yogārūḍhasya tasyaiva

"śamaḥ kāraṇam ucyate ||”

"(Bhagavad Gītā 6.3)"

"Then the vidyā-sthāna-s are presented by Pollock in line with Rājaśekhara’s taxonomy, as follows —

"Apauruṣeya

"4 Vedas – Ṛg, Yajus, Sāma, Atharva

"6 Vedāṅga-s – Śikṣā, Kalpa, Vyākaraṇa, Jyautiṣa, Chandas, Nirukta

"4 Upavedas – Āyurveda, Dhanur-veda, Gāndharva-veda, Sthāpatya-veda

"Pauruṣeya

"Purāṇa and Itihāsa

"Ānvīkṣikī – logic & philosophy

"(Karma and Brahma) Mīmāṁsā Smṛti – Tantra – Dharma-śāstra-s

"Others

"Vārttā – commerce

"Daṇḍanīti – law

"Erotology, Art, Architecture"

"In spite of noting that Rājaśekhara makes a distinction between apauruṣeya and pauruṣeya śāstra-s, Pollock again refers to the Śloka-vārtika: “śāstra is that which teaches people what they should and should not do. It does this by means of eternal [words] or those made [by men]” (Pollock 1985:501) and concludes that it undermines the dichotomy between pauruṣeya and apauruṣeya and claims that Madhusūdana Sarasvatī’s Prasthāna-bheda too abandons the said distinction.

"It is quite well known in the tradition that Pūrva-mīmāṁsā gives importance to Vedic ceremonies. As Jaimini puts it, “āmnāyasya kriyārthatvād ānarthakyam atadarthanām” (Jaiminī Sūtra 1.2.1) (“The purpose of the Veda being in the enjoining of actions, those parts of the Veda which do not serve that purpose are useless” (Jha 1933:51)). It is therefore very clear that Śloka-vārtika would not pay much heed to the “vision” aspect of śāstra since there is no place for injunctions there. It has been shown how these injunctions too are not really commandments, but a revelation of means for satisfying one’s desires (§2.1). While it is true that Prasthāna-bheda does not explicitly mention pauruṣeya and apauruṣeya, a clear distinction is made between śāstra-s which are authored and those which are not; with a list of authors and śāstra-s composed by them.

"This is in stark contrast with the Semitic idea of a transcendent God completely removed from the world (§2.2, §2.4).

"Returning to the deﬁnition of śāstra as “philosophical system”, Pollock observes that there must be a possibility of ‘false śāstra-s’ or “asac-chāstra-s” and complains that while Manu-smṛti talks about it, Rājaśekhara’s system cannot accommodate it. In addition, he says Mīmāṁsā too supports Rājaśekhara’s system and invests śāstra-s with inerrancy and paramount authority. (Pollock 1985:503)

"The above statement of Mīmāṁsā supporting inerrancy of śāstra is unfounded since Kumārila-bhaṭṭa’s view on verbal (scriptural) cognition is presented thus –

"“...the Vedas are not the work of a Personal Author; and being thus free from any defects due to such authorship, the Vedas must be regarded as the only source of knowledge (relating to Dharma), which is infallible in its Self-Sufficient Validity.”

"(Jha 1964:153)"

"Moreover, Rājaśekhara does not claim to propound a philosophical system; his intention is to present an analysis of literature; and drawing far-reaching conclusions based on his taxonomy is tantamount to putting words in his mouth. Therefore, the further claim that all śāstra-s enjoy the unique qualities of inerrancy and paramount authority does not hold water."

................................................................................................

"3.4.1 Change in character of Śāstra from description to prescription"

"Pollock observes that the oldest śāstra-s, namely the Vedāṅga-s; especially Chandas (prosody), Vyākaraṇa (grammar) and Śikṣā (phonetics), started out as descriptive in character in helping to understand and assimilate the Vedic mantras. But, somehow over time, they changed their character to becoming prescriptive where future use of the language came to be governed by the above three śāstra-s.

"While it is not completely untrue that composers in Sanskrit adhered to Chandas, Vyākaraṇa and Śikṣā; it was largely because of the Sanskrit language being rich in vocabulary with hundreds of synonyms even for water, ﬁre etc. and a multitude of meters to choose from. Although it is argued that strict adherence to vyākaraṇa prevented the language from evolving freely, on the other hand Sanskrit works composed from the time of Pāṇini onward are perfectly intelligible today; unlike the vernaculars where, study of works about a thousand years old is not straightforward. In addition, grammar ﬁxed the framework of Sanskrit, but also provided for the creation of new words. There are examples of Sanskrit words (gṛha) that got into Prakrit (geha) and were borrowed back into Sanskrit (Deshpande 1993:74). In pre-modern India, since a majority of compositions were committed to memory, they were either in the form of cryptic pithy statements called sūtra-s, or metrical in nature called śloka-s; and since knowledge was transferred from guru to śiṣya, any possible misunderstanding would be taken care of."

................................................................................................

"3.5 Generalizing that theory is superior to practice"

"Pollock quotes the statement of the Upaniṣad (“yad eva vidyayā karoti śraddhayā upaniṣadā tad eva vīryavattaraṁ bhavati” Chāndogya Upaniṣad 1.1.10) that practice with vidyā (knowledge of Om), śraddhā (faith) and upaniṣad (meditation) is more efficacious than mere practice without knowledge; and goes on to generalize that the intention of the śāstra-s is to say that theory is superior to practice, citing examples from Vyākaraṇa, Āyurveda, Arthaśāstra and Kāmasūtra.

"The commentary on this mantra by Śaṅkarācārya goes thus –

"“The Knowledge of the syllable ‘Om’ being the essence of the ‘Essences’, its being endowed with the qualities of fulﬁllment and prosperity does not consist merely in Knowledge of that syllable being a factor of the sacriﬁce: it is much more than that ... In ordinary life also, it is found that when a merchant and a forester sell pieces of ruby and other gems, the former (who knows the real character of the gems) always obtains a higher price than the latter (who is ignorant); and this is due to the superior Knowledge possessed by the merchant... The assertion that the Act of the man with Knowledge is ‘more effective’ than that of the ignorant man means that even when done by the ignorant person, the act is effective; so that it does not mean that the ignorant man is not ﬁt to perform the act. In fact in the section dealing with Uṣasti (later on) it is described that even ignorant persons have performed the priestly functions.

"The act of meditating upon ‘Om’ as the ‘essence of essences’, as ‘fulfillment’ and as ‘prosperity’ forms a single act of ‘meditation’ (and worship); as there are no efforts intervening in between these...”

"(Jha 1942:14-15)"

"The last statement forms the basis of the inclusiveness of ‘Hinduism’, where all people are accepted as they are and an appropriate upāya or sādhana is presented for their gradual evolution. In a related context, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad states even more explicitly –

"“atha trayo vāva lokā - manuṣya-lokaḥ pitṛ-loko deva-loka iti... karmaṇā pitṛ-loko, vidyayā deva-loko, deva-loko vai lokānāṁ śreṣṭhas - tasmād vidyāṁ praśaṁsanti.”

"(Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.5.16)"

"that the three loka-s viz. manuṣya-loka, pitṛ-loka, and deva-loka–are gained by putra (begetting and taking care of progeny), karma (ritualistic action) and vidyā (meditation) respectively; and since deva-loka is the highest among the three, the means of attaining it viz. vidyā is praised. The meaning of the word vidyā in this context is, therefore, to be taken as upāsanā or meditation, since mere knowledge cannot produce attainment of a loka as its result.

"Talking about the dialectical orientation prevalent in the medical tradition, Pollock says

"“... As is well known, the Suśrutasaṁhitā urges the student to examine cadavers carefully and subject them to anatomical scrutiny, “For it is only by combining both direct observation and the information of the śāstra that thorough knowledge is obtained.” The Carakasaṁhita conﬁrms this view, ... proclaiming that “The wise understand that their best teacher is the very world around them.”

"Such voices ... may with some justice be viewed as oppositional, and in any case are pretty much in the minority. The dominant ideology is that which ascribes clear priority and absolute competence to shastric codiﬁcation...”

"(Pollock 1985:510)"

Was he expecting three hundred million signatures before he'd desist attacking with such false accusations? Did Grey's Agatha even them? Do medical curriculums across US follow routines of consulting moms, and do surgeons stop in midst of surgery before a vote in congress lets them proceed?

"All darśana-s accept pratyakṣa as a valid pramāṇa, and hence saying that validity given to “directly observed evidence” is a minority or oppositional view is totally wrong. In fact, it would be very interesting to examine the Buddhist and Jaina śāstra-s since they do not accept śabda as pramāṇa; but this is conspicuously absent from this paper.

"The word ‘theory’ is etymologically derived from theōros (Greek), meaning spectator; but in English, it has acquired the meaning of ‘a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something’. But, śāstra, as discussed in §2.1, has a two-fold meaning – one, revealing facts as they are; and the other, a manual for practical application. In other words, one part of śāstra reveals the nature of existence as it is; and another part reveals the connection between a known action and a desired result11. Based on the etymological derivation viz. “śāsanāt śāstram”, śāstra is said to be closer in meaning to ‘applied science’12. Therefore, the usage of the words ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ in the context of śāstra is too simplistic and in most occasions horribly wrong.

"In summary, the thesis that “theory is superior to practice” rests on lack of clarity in the meanings of words used, such as vidyā, śāstra, theory etc. (or is quoted out of context); and the omission of a discussion on epistemology (the very basis for validity of śāstra)."

................................................................................................

"3.6 Extrapolation of texts by Śiṣṭa-s"

"In the case of Dharma-śāstra-s, in a situation when the śruti and smṛti do not provide an explicit conclusion, one must look to śiṣṭācāra. Baudhāyana-dharmasūtra deﬁnes the śiṣṭa-s as devoid of jealousy, ego and other vices; and as those well-versed in dharma who can extrapolate śāstra to matters it does not explicitly cover13. Based on Śābara-bhāṣya on the Jaimini-sūtra-s – “dharmasya śabda-mūlatvād aśabdam anapekṣaṁ syāt” and “api vā kartṛ-sāmānyāt pramāṇam anumānaṁ syāt” (Jaiminī Sūtra 1.3.1-2), Pollock states that —

"“... the “learned” do not creatively reason from and extend śāstra to illuminate obscure areas of social or moral conduct; on the contrary, their behavior derives directly from and fully conforms with the texts as codiﬁed, but these texts are ones to which we no longer have access.”

"(Pollock 1985:506)"

"But the Sūtra and Śābara-bhāṣya actually state –

"[Sūtra 1.3.1]: (Pūrvapakṣa) “Inasmuch as dharma is based upon the Veda, what is not Veda should be disregarded.” (Jha 1933:87)

"[Sūtra 1.3.2]: (Siddhānta) “But (Smṛti) is trustworthy, as there would be inference (assumption, of the basis in the Veda) from the fact of the agent being the same.”

"[Bhāṣya]: “Even if they do not actually find it (a Vedic text as basis for the Smṛti in question), they would infer it. It is quite possible also that the text upon which the Smṛti is based was actually known to the Smṛti-writer, but has since been forgotten.” (Jha 1933:89)

"The response given in this sūtra and bhāṣya to the objection presented in the previous sūtra - that ‘no non-Vedic text (smṛti) is valid,’ - is more in support of inference – in line with what Bodhāyana has said—than what is suggested by Pollock here."

................................................................................................

"3.7 Role of reasoning being condemned in Śāstra"

"Pollock quotes from the Bhagavadgītā and Abhinavagupta’s saṅgraha-śloka as —

"“Whoever abandons the injunctive rules of śāstra and proceeds according to his own will never achieve success, or happiness, or ﬁnal beatitude...”

"(Pollock 1985:510)"

"“...one must never contemplate action according to one’s own lights, but must instead follow shastric injunction...”

"(Pollock 1985:510)"

"with the original śloka-s being —

"“yaḥ śāstra-vidhim utsṛjya

"vartate kāma-kārataḥ |

"na sa siddhim avāpnoti

"na sukhaṁ na parāṁ gatim ||

"tasmāc chāstraṁ pramāṇaṁ te

"kāryākārya-vyavasthitau |”

"(Bhagavad Gītā 16.23-24)"

“abodhe svātma-buddhyaiva

"kāryaṁ naiva vicārayet |

"kintu śāstrokta-vidhinā

"śāstraṁ bodha-vivardhanam ||”

"(Raina 1933:162)"

"The above Gītā śloka is said in this context: under the spell of ignorance, when one is overcome by kāma (passion), krodha (anger) and lobha (greed) – beautifully summed up by Abhinavagupta in one word, abodha (non-understanding) – śāstra must be the guiding light in determining what to do and what not to do.

"Here is a case of quoting out of context by Pollock to suit his ‘theory’."

................................................................................................

"3.8 Implications of Pre-existence of Theory"

"3.8.1 Creation of knowledge as divine activity"

"Having “established” that theory pre-exists practice in pre-modern India, Pollock goes on to talk about the implications of such an idea. Pollock states that practically all śāstra-s, starting from the Kāma-sūtra to Purāṇa to Māna-sāra (an early text on architecture and town-planning) to Āyurveda - all trace their origins to either Śiva, Viṣṇu or Brahmā. Thus, the origin of knowledge is traced through an unbroken succession of teachers, guru-śiṣya-paramparā, as an unabridged, complete transmission of the divine prototype – or by sudden revelation. Based on these observations, Pollock concludes that —

"“... First, the “creation” of knowledge is presented as an exclusively divine activity, and occupies a structural cosmological position suggestive of the creation of the material universe as a whole ... knowledge ... is frozen for all time in a given set of texts that are continually made available to human beings ... If any sort of amelioration is to occur, this can only be in the form of a “regress,” a backward movement aiming at a closer and more faithful approximation to the divine pattern ... According to his own self-representation, there can be for the thinker no originality of thought, no brand-new insights, notions, perceptions, but only the attempt better and more clearly to grasp and explain the antecedent, always already formulated truth. All Indian learning, accordingly, perceives itself and indeed presents itself largely as commentary on the primordial śāstra-s.”

"(Pollock 1985:515)"

"Although Pollock is right in pointing out that virtually all śāstra-s present themselves as of divine origin; he does not state that the activities pertaining to sculpture, dance, music, architecture, astronomy and even metallurgy were ultimately God-centered.

"Dance and music are ﬁlled with themes concerned with the divine. Sculpture and architecture were used in the building of huge temple complexes with intricate carvings and construction of complicated yajña-vedi-s. Astronomy was predominantly used for ﬁxing the calendar in order to determine the auspicious muhūrta for certain ceremonies, besides agriculture and sea-voyage; and one of the greatest achievements of metallurgy being the rust-free Iron pillars at Delhi and Koḍacādri (near Kollur) are located in temple complexes at Mehrauli and Mūla-Mūkāmbikā temple respectively14.

"The reason for the reverential attitude towards knowledge and the transcendence and immanence of “God” who is jñāna-svarūpa is pointed out in §2.2."

................................................................................................

"3.8.2 Denial of Discovery & Innovation"

"Pollock quotes Matilal’s translation of Jayantabhaṭṭa’s Nyāyamañjarī as

"“How can we discover any new fact or truth? One should consider novelty only in rephrasing the older truths of the ancients in modern terminology.”

"(Pollock 1985:515) (italics ours)"

"But Matilal’s actual translation of the same is

"“How can we discuss any new fact or truth? One should consider novelty only in rephrasing the older truths of the ancient in modern terminology.”

"(Matilal 1977:93) (italics ours)"

"This is an error in quotation and not even in translation. And based on this, Pollock goes on to say —

"“... if in certain areas the shastric paradigm did encourage or enforce a certain stasis (as in language and literature), elsewhere Indian cultural history in the classical and medieval period is crowded with exciting discovery and innovation (as in mathematics and architecture). These are not, however, perceived to be such; they are instead viewed, through the inverting lens of ideology, as renovation and recovery...”

"(Pollock 1985:515)"

But isn't that how Michelangelo saw his sculptures, and how world of mathematicians see their discoveries of truths of mathematics? Just because some things aren't stamped with biblical names they are automatically wrong by Pollock?

"Prasthāna-bheda of Madhusūdana Saravatī refers to the preeminent composers of the texts of Vyākaraṇa, Nirukta, etc. as Bhagavān Pāṇini, Bhagavān Yāska etc. respectively. If indeed the insiders viewed contributions to various ﬁelds of knowledge as mere recovery, how can one explain the high pedestal on which the above contributors are placed.

"In fact, Matilal mentions the humility of Jayanta-bhaṭṭa in the face of an important and novel contribution as the Nyāya-mañjarī. Similarly, it is very interesting to note in this context that Āryabhaṭa in his Āryabhaṭīya states that the Earth is a sphere (Āryabhaṭīya 4.6 bhūgolaḥ sarvato vṛttaḥ) and that the Earth goes round the Sun, rather casually, without any trace of claiming that he has discovered a great truth; but when the heliocentric theory is proposed by Copernicus a thousand years later, it is Copernicus that claims it as a very important truth newly discovered by him.

"Similarly, Sāyaṇācārya simply states, addressing the Sun - it is well known that you travel at the speed of so many yojana-s per nimeṣa (Sāyaṇa-bhāṣya on Ṛgveda 1.9.50.4). But the discovery of the speed of light was given great importance in the West as starting from the days of Galileo.

"This difference needs to be examined more carefully rather than merely being written off as renovation or recovery of knowledge.

"It seems that in the light of śāstra - which brings the attention of the human mind towards the most intimate and immediate reality (aparokṣa), which is timeless and of the nature of knowledge – such humility is but a natural consequence."

................................................................................................

"3.8.3 Śāstra – Practical Discourse of Power"

"Pollock says

"“... all contradiction between the model of cultural knowledge and actual cultural change is thereby at once transmuted and denied; creation is really re-creation, as the future is, in a sense, the past. Second, the living, social, historical, contingent tradition is naturalized, becoming as much a part of the order of things as the laws of nature themselves... And ﬁnally, through such denial of contradiction and reiﬁcation of tradition, the sectional interests of pre-modern India are universalized and valorized. The theoretical discourse of śāstra becomes in essence a practical discourse of power. ...”

"(Pollock 1985:516)"

"Any close observer of Indian history will note how the practices of ﬁre rituals, symbolism, temples, pīṭha-s and maṭha-s, etc. have evolved and are continuing to evolve; and in many cases one has given way, largely, to the succeeding. India has always been known as a land of diverse customs, traditions etc.; and hence the statement that sectional interests were universalized does not hold water.

"Furthermore, Indian society has always been constantly churning with activity – whenever an intellectual challenged/criticized the Veda, another intellectual would stand up to defend the Vedic vision. For example, when Buddhism and Jainism challenged the Veda, Vaiśeṣika-s, Pūrvamīmāṁsaka-s and Vedantin-s responded; and later the Bhakti movement ﬂourished, and various socio-religious reform movements happened, during and after the British era.

"The idea that ‘knowledge is power’ gives a status to the ego, whereas the tradition has always deﬁned “knowledge” as that which liberates (“sā vidyā yā vimuktaye” Viṣṇu Purāṇa.1.19.41) i.e. it frees one from a sense of inadequacy, helps one to be simple, and hold a reverential outlook towards life. In the understanding that śāstra is a revealer, meant for the ultimate well-being of the jīva - who has been empowered in the sense in which Pollock speaks of it? On the other hand, it is the one who works towards gaining the vision and lives the vision is truly “empowered” i.e., fulﬁlled (kṛtārtha)."

................................................................................................

"3.9 The Critical Presupposition"

"In the last section of the paper, Pollock sets out to ﬁnd a justiﬁcation for the “priority of śāstra to all and every practical application and activity”. He quotes Chattopadhyaya’s translation of the Caraka-saṁhitā (see Chattopadhyaya 2014:78, a later reprint) —

"“Of these three ways of knowing, the starting point is the knowledge derived from authoritative instruction. At the next step, it has to be critically examined by perception and inference. Without there being some knowledge obtained from authoritative instruction, what is there for one to examine critically by perception and inference?”

"(Pollock 1985:516-7)"

"This is again a case of selective quotation, while the actual text from the same page under the topic of “The extension of sense-knowledge: Diagnosis” says

"“...The ancient doctors are not running after empty metaphysical postulates. Their main theoretical drive is determined by imposing amount of empirical data.

"Such data, it is true, are compiled mainly by unaided sense-organs. But this again is not to be misunderstood. In spite of being inevitably dependent on unaided sense-organs, the physicians also feel the need of extending their knowledge beyond the limits of bare sense-perceptions.

"...The diagnosis of a disease is faultless only after the disease has been fully examined in all its aspects with the help of these three ways of knowing. The full knowledge of an object cannot be obtained by only one of these ways of knowing.

"...For the learned, therefore, there are two modes of critical examination, viz. perception and inference. Or, if authoritative instruction also is included, the modes of critical examination are three....”

"(Chattopadhyaya 2014:77-8)"

"This places placing more importance on direct perception and inference than what Pollock suggests. He further quotes Chattopadhyaya (Chattopadhyaya 2014:160, a later reprint) selectively again:

"“Ayurveda is called eternal, because it is without beginning, because it is nothing but the laws inherent in nature and because the natural properties of the real substances are unalterable... Apart from the restricted sense of acquiring this knowledge and of spreading it, there is no meaning in saying that medical science came into being having been non-existent before.”

"(Pollock 1985:517)"

"It has however been made clear on the same page that the intended meaning is “...Āyurveda–in the sense of a body of natural laws – is beginningless... Medical science can be said to have a beginning only from the standpoint of acquiring the knowledge of these laws or of spreading the knowledge...Diseases are cured not by any artiﬁcial technique of which the doctors are the inventors. These are cured by the laws inherent in nature, which the doctors can only know and rightly apply...”

"(Chattopadhyaya 2014:160)"

"The intended meaning of Āyurveda is a body of laws, whereas Pollock takes it as a text; and further uses it as a brick to construct his thesis.

"Pollock then restates the following Western philosophical arguments:

"a. Meno’s paradox “A man cannot inquire either about that which he knows (no need), or about that which he does not know (not possible)”.

"b. Socratic merging of mathesis-anamnesis where the source of knowledge is the psyche itself (and not text) since the soul is immortal and takes multiple births in different worlds and therefore “all learning is really recollection”.

"c. Popper’s neopositivism “All acquired knowledge, all learning, consists of the modiﬁcation (possibly the rejection) of some form of knowledge, or disposition, which was there previously...”

"Pollock continues:

"“Whatever the cogency of these more philosophical explanations for the special character attributed to śāstra, a historical-cultural consideration seems to me somewhat more persuasive ... the peculiar traits śāstra is invested with in the classical period are easily related to ... widespread belief in the transcendent character of ... the Vedas.”

"(Pollock 1985:518)"

"In fact, all the above philosophical arguments have been accounted for in the śāstra-s themselves, respectively as—

"a. knowledge arises as the connection between the known and the (knowable) unknown. For example, attainment of svarga by offering milk in ﬁre (jyotiṣṭoma).

"b. saṁskāra-s of jīva-s are preserved across janman-s (births), and manifest themselves when suitable situations arise in accordance with karma-niyati

"c. error, presented as adhyāsa (wrong super-imposition) in Yoga-sūtra and Adhyāsa-bhāṣya

"Pollock does not seem interested in examining the cogency of these arguments. He mentions only (a) in a footnote; and wants to use the “transcendent” character attributed to the Veda to further his “theory–practice” thesis with the Veda itself as ‘theory’ and “cosmic creation” as ‘practice’ which proceeds according to Veda. Again, the Veda is looked upon as a text, and hence his wrong conclusions. In this context of creation proceeding from [the Vedic] word, there is a huge discussion considering the following contrary statements from within the Veda itself —

"“that, from which beings originate, through which they live, and in which they re-enter after death, explore that [because] that is Brahman” (Deussen 1986:241-6)

"“Whence all creation had its origin; he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not;

"he, who surveys it all from highest heaven;

"he knows - or maybe even he does not know.” (Basham 1954:250)

"However, Pollock seems to be content with selectively quoting those portions which suit his thesis. Finally, Pollock concludes his paper quoting Manu’s position about the status given to the Veda - to suit his own position —

"“Secular śāstra in general, consequently, as a portion of this (Vedic) corpus (and were it not, it would be “worthless and false,” as Manu says, “being of modern date”), comes to share the Veda’s transcendent attributes. Just like the Veda, too, it thereby establishes itself as an essential a priori of every dimension of practical activity ...”

"(Pollock 1985:519)"

"It is important to note that the Veda does not talk of a sacred-secular divide; and Manu-smṛti is only pointing out that those doctrines contrary to the vision of the Veda are ‘worthless and false’. No other śāstra – secular or otherwise – gets a status like the Veda. Hence, the last statement of Pollock is unfounded and wrong.

................................................................................................

"Conclusion"

"This paper starts with the motivation to understand the history of Indian civilization in the face of new evidence, and having to explain the relative decline in the recent past. The views expressed by Pollock on śāstra-s are shown to rely on wrong quotations, quotations out of context, carefully cherry-picking statements in śāstra, over-generalizing to suit his materialistic insinuations and glaring omissions such as discussions on the Ṛṅ-mantra “ā no bhadrāḥ kratavo yāntu viśvataḥ”, and the Buddhist and the Jaina śāstra-s, for example.

"Pollock tries to collapse —

"“vision” and “regulation” meanings of “śāstra”, to just “regulation”,

"“pauruṣeya” and “apauruṣeya” śāstra-s into one category,

"Veda and non-Vedic texts to same “level” of “authority”.

"— All this in an effort to portray ancient Indian culture as relying on pre-existing authoritative injunctions, thereby denying creativity and progress!

"While Pollock accepts all narratives as equally valid; such narratives are to be rejected outright which do not care to take into account the contextual meanings and the overall vision of the scriptures under examination; and further, contain the errors pointed out above. If an eye develops cataract, nobody seeks to use ears or nose to see forms and colors, but get the eye operated upon; similarly a misunderstanding of śāstra has to be cleared by right understanding of the same using the tools of textual analysis in an objective manner; and not seek to replace it.

"Under the sway of Western universalism in science education, the scientist heroes of yore of various non-Western cultures have faded away from memory (Joseph 2001:1-24).

"In order to prevent further damage to indigenous cultures and overall loss of knowledge and diversity to humanity, the insiders’ view must be encouraged to be studied, preserved and propagated in all cultures."

................................................................................................

"Footnotes"

"[ 14 ] Another colossal rust-free Iron pillar can be found today in the premises of Lāṭ Masjid at Dhar (Madhya Pradesh); the masjid is said to have been a temple earlier."

................................................................................................

................................................

March 01, 2022 - March 02, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Chapter 6"

"The Science and Nescience of Śāstra*"

"–T. N. Sudarshan"

................................................................................................

"Abstract"

"The interpretations of śāstra as done by Professor Sheldon Pollock (hereafter Pollock) are critically appraised in this paper, with a firm grounding in the traditional perspectives and vocabularies of the vidyā-s (poorly translated by Pollock as theory) - as practiced (śāstra) by actual practitioners of the Vedic tradition. The foundational perspectives and motivations that have driven the theorization of the grammars and metaphors of Indian Knowledge Systems, and the practices derived thereof are examined. It is proposed that the current Western theses on śāstra derive from a deep ignorance – a veritable nescience. The primacy, undilutability, and non-negotiable nature of a sacred perspective (saṁskāra) whilst interpreting Sanskrit texts on Indic knowledge systems are established. The flawed and incorrect use of philology by Pollock and its overall nebulous nature is explicated. The limitation of the scientific method in interpreting śāstra is discussed. The non-empirical, non-verifiable and unscientific nature of the methods used by Pollock to make his claims, are highlighted. The aim, purpose and science of any śāstra is to lead the practitioner on the path to a holistically (nature included) harmonious existence. The scope and role of śāstra is beyond that of Science or Religion (as the West currently knows/interprets the two words). Unless this universality of aim is acknowledged and more importantly reinforced and realized by its practice - Western scholarship will continue to provide nebulous and incorrect etic1 interpretations of Indic knowledge systems driven by nescience.

................................................................................................

"Introduction"

"This paper aims to highlight fundamental issues in the method chosen, and the fallacy of the assumptions made, in Pollock’s paper entitled “The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory in Indian Intellectual History” (Pollock 1985) on Indian śāstra. Even after thirty years of the publication of the said paper, there has been no rigorous examination of the interpretation/theses made on this paper. That the basis of Western Indology in general and of Pollock’s American school of Orientalism/Indology in particular, is ignorant of the methods of Indian (śāstra) science (knowledge systems), and is based on a flawed understanding (a veritable nescience) needs to be called out. It is posited here that the entire edifice of the Pollock school is built on questionable claims, is driven by deep underlying institutionalized biases, and is manufactured by insidious methods of philology.

"There have been numerous erudite discussions, deep analyses and critical perspectives post-Said, i.e. after Said addressed Western scholarship directed toward the East (1979), in the general spirit of inquiry, and in the larger context of the problems of Western Indology. As indicated earlier, we examine in the spirit of the traditional Indian argumentative method of pūrva-pakṣa, the work of Pollock, his methods, and his specific theses on Indian śāstra."

................................................................................................

"Preliminaries"

"Western social sciences freely use and refer to the methods and theories of modern mathematics and science, and follow their evolution in an implicit manner. By themselves, Western social sciences, unlike the (Western) natural sciences, do not have any foundational scientific construct on which their reasoning can be based. We briefly discuss epistemology in Indian Knowledge Systems, and attempt to describe Western Indology in its theory and practice in terms of Indian categories."

................................................................................................

"Traditional Indian Epistemology"

"Tattva-s - Principles of Reality"

"Epistemology, Matilal argues, is the key philosophical discipline in the Indian debate, not metaphysics, a claim that does not preclude the discussion of metaphysical questions, but sees their resolution as lying in an analysis of the structures of knowledge and language.

"(Ganeri 2005:x)"

"Darśana-s often describe their epistemology, based on their unique interpretation of the aforementioned common “basis”; and almost all of them refer to the categories from the Sāṅkhya school, or base their variations upon it. Both the āstika (orthodox) and nāstika (heterodox) darśana-s interpret the basic framework of the Sāṅkhya. Its influence on other schools like Tantra-based Kashmir Śaivism and the various other schools of Śaivism is known.

"The well-known Nāsadīya Sūkta (Ṛg Veda 10.129) is considered as the origin for the later development of the Sāṅkhya as a distinct darśana. The oft-quoted verse from the Śānti Parvan of the Mahābhārata on the Sāṅkhya

"There is no knowledge that is equal to this. The knowledge, which is described in the system of the Sāṅkhya, is regarded as the highest.

"(Mahābhārata 12.301.100-101)"

"In the epistemology in the Bhagavad Gītā, Lord Kṛṣṇa uses Sāṅkhya as the basis, and uses it to reason about concepts and causalities in and across the categories. The second chapter (adhyāya) which summarises the entirety of the text, is sometimes referred to as the Sāṅkhya Yoga or the Yoga of Knowledge."

"The Sāṅkhya ontology explicitly acknowledges the existence of the Puruṣa or a Supreme Consciousness and the manifestation of material existence as the Prakṛti. Such an existence of a “supreme” is acknowledged in almost all schools of Indian thought excepting a few categorised as the materialist schools. The Supreme Good is mokṣa which consists in the permanent impossibility of the incidence of pain and in the realisation of the Self as Self pure and simple."

................................................................................................

"Pramāṇa – “Means to acquire knowledge”"

" ... For purposes of interpreting Indian texts that deal with the primary texts and commentaries of the vidyā-s and śāstra-s, unless there is a rootedness, an awareness of the sacred, the interpretive exercise and the inferences drawn thereby can be considered to be done from a position of nescience. The sacred position could thence be considered scientific."

"The principal means (pramāṇa), recognized across most Indian schools of thought are Perception (Pratyakṣa), Inference (Anumāna), Analogy (Upamāna), Postulation (Arthāpatti), Cognitive Proof (Anupalabdhi) and Testimony (Śabda). For purposes of the current discussion (evaluating the validity of the claims made by Western Indology), it will suffice to know that most of Western Indology is based on the West’s own internal Śabda and Western siddhānta and use of the (traditional) sources of knowledge in a dissonant manner, primarily with a non-sacred saṁskāra. The pramāṇa need to be constrained by the appropriate saṁskāra."

................................................................................................

"Mīmāṁsā - Methods of Investigation"

"Though Mīmāṁsā is considered to be a darśana (school of philosophy) in its own right, it is critical to note that it lays down the rules of interpretation of Sanskrit sentences and the derivation of context. It involves a deep understanding of the techniques of grammar (Vyākaraṇa), prosody (Chandas), and etymology (Nirukta). The Pūrva-mīmāṁsā describes rules of interpretation, causality, pramāṇa-s in the context of the karma-śāstra of yajña-s. This framework has in general been extended to other contexts too such as the mokṣa-śāstra of Vedānta."

"The range and scope of Mīmāṁsā is immense and there is no such coherent equivalent discipline in the Western system of knowledge. Given this, we note that when it comes to interpretation of Sanskrit texts, unless based on a solid ground of the mīmāṁsā-adhikaraṇa-s, any interpretation of Sanskrit text is decidedly incomplete (even if partially correct), incorrect at best, and at worst irrelevant. Pandurangi writes,

"The semantics, considering the language, autonomy at word and meaning level and sentence level is an important contribution of Pūrva-mīmāṁsā. The two theories of sentence meaning: Abhihitānvaya-vāda (Kumārila’s independent meaning) and Anvitābhidhāna-vāda (Prabhākara’s dependent meaning) is another contribution. All systems of Indian philosophy have adopted these two theories with some modifications. There are more than a hundred maxims crystallising the guidelines for interpretation.

"(Pandurangi 2013:57-58)"

"Western Indology, with its large body of literature and academic work, is mostly in non-Sanskrit and non-Indian languages and can be summarily dismissed as irrelevant if one were to take the orthodox Mīmāṁsaka view. ‘Readings’ of Sanskrit are currently being done with ‘free-style’ techniques like Pollockian philology. For such “readings” to be acknowledged as valid by any serious traditionalist/Swadeshi/emic Indologist, they should at least be justified in the Mīmāṁsā (however rudimentary) interpretive framework."

................................................................................................

"Epistemology of Western Indologists"

"Methods, techniques, assumptions, worldviews of the etic (outsider/ Western) interpreters do not easily conform to the Indian/Vedic epistemologies. The principles of reality, the sources of knowledge, and the techniques of interpretation do not have much commonality. Most of Western Indology scholarship can be categorised as materialist and anthropocentric. They acknowledge only the gross realities of the world and their relation to man. The approach is closest to the Indian School of Cārvāka or Lokāyata. Categorised interestingly as Cārvāka 2.0 in (Malhotra 2016:90-91), they do not acknowledge the existence of the sacred, and are sophisticated materialists.

"In summary, the tattva-s and pramāṇa-s (see section on scientific nature of śāstra for further discussion) of Indian systems do not have parallels in Western methods. The inapplicability of the techniques of Mīmāṁsā and the limited logics of the Western interpretive framework make it difficult to view the repository of Western Indological scholarship in serious light. Furthermore, we discuss the limitations of the “Western scientific method” on its own and in the context of Western social sciences in the ensuing section."

................................................................................................

"Pūrva-pakṣa of the Western Methods"

"As the needs and goals of Western Indology have kept changing, the methods have also evolved and the resulting commentary on India via Indological methods has also been continually changing. American Orientalism, the latest avatar, has been influenced by the policies of dual-use anthropology, and is highlighted in a recent book entitled Cold War Anthropology (Price 2016). Much of the topics of study and overall direction of research is guided by American policy needs and requirements of the military-industrial complex and aided by the military-politico-academic nexus. Data and fact collections are made to fit the conclusions and inferences that have already been made so as to conform to existing, or new, policy decisions. There has been no consistent set of axiomatic assumptions or canonical methods which may be (characterised as ‘Western’) in use over the entire period of Western Indology. In the post-Said, postmodernism-influenced Pollock school, the overarching consistency has been in the presence of the “political” sensibility in the style of ‘readings’ and the sordid manufacture of ‘political literarization’ from historical text."

................................................................................................

"A Brief History of the Western method of ‘Science’"

" ... Most modern scientific methods have abandoned the classical methods and logical empiricism, and depend more on hypothesis-formation and its experimental verification (“reproducibility”). The Popperian principle of falsifiability holds sway, wherein every theory is subject to verifiability (Popper 1968): No theory can be proven to be true; it can only proven to be not false - yet. Another key principle (via Kuhn 1996) is commensurability, wherein, almost always, rival theories are incommensurable. It is not possible to understand one theory in terms of the other leading to relativism and irrationality of theories. To defend this viewpoint and provide a framework to validate theories, Kuhn cited five criteria - accuracy, consistency, broadness, simplicity, fruitfulness - that determine choice of theory. ... "

"That Western science is not far off from the influence of the saṁskāra (values/mental disposition) of the scientist is something that is to be internalised. Populist accounts of the supposed rationalism and objectivity of science gloss over this. Given the variance in the methods of scientific inquiry, there are some basic components of method that the community agrees upon (for natural sciences but not for social sciences). The four essential elements are observations, hypotheses, predictions and experiments. The repeated cycle of these four elements when subject to peer review comprise the scientific method (in current practice).

"In general, the social sciences use much more subjective and fundamentally unverifiable methods. The misuse and misunderstanding of quantitative analysis/statistics and the lack of statistical rigor in ill-defined “experiments” (which only add a veneer of formality) in the social sciences to convince the lay person of its “scientific” nature deserves mention."

................................................................................................

"The Scientific Nature of śāstra"

"At this juncture, it is essential to understand the deeply scientific nature of śāstra. One must closely observe that there is no dichotomy of natural-sciences vs social-sciences in the Indian traditional knowledge systems (See Kapoor and Singh 2005). Much of the Indian śāstra-s have their origins in the experimental verification (first person empiricism) of the methods by the seers (ṛṣi-s). The ṛṣi-s could achieve higher states of consciousness by various inner methods of dhyāna (conferring divya-dṛṣṭi) and experience the realities of the śāstra-s first-hand. The śāstra-s are not the result of arbitrary theorising and hypothesising. Scientific empiricism by contrast is predominantly third-person and only examines phenomena and its inherent “causalities” as an observer, never as a subject."

" ... On closer examination, one can very well claim that in their genesis, methodology and evolution, the methods that exemplify Indian śāstra are closer to “science” in a deeper sense than actual Western science itself - they do not have the intermediate third-party steps of hypothesis and theory-building. The phenomenologies are directly derived from experience (experimental verification) of the actual nature of reality. Though the practice of śāstra is traditionally aligned with the overall sacred perspective, it is possible to abstract the inferences and models (as in Yoga and Āyurveda, which can be considered to align with the “natural sciences”), ... "

" ... To illustrate - a sacred saṁskāra cannot be faked, meditative states cannot be assumed, cakra influences cannot be chemically induced etc. There are also other limitations imposed by the (third person empiricism) scientific method, when it comes to the application of abstracted/lifted models of Indian śāstra into Western social sciences. The need for an observer, an external reviewer, and also the Western model of peer-review and “published” scholarship do not allow for “primacy” of individual experience. Western social sciences is mostly a “social” and theoretical activity which then supposedly percolates to/affects the individual via the State, unlike the underlying assumptions of the Indian anthropological models, which seamlessly traverse between the individual and society in both directions (see Gurumurthy (2014))."

................................................................................................

"A Brief History of Western Humanities"

"Western humanities is deeply rooted in the manufactured history of the West, and the attempts to understand the present in terms of this past."

"In his blog, Think Again in the New York Times, Stanley Fish delivers a devastating critique on the humanities and its overall relevance to modern society. He attempts to place it in perspective and has much to say about its overall utility in general – Humanities can be justified neither by its benefits to society or even by its effects on the moral fabric (ennobling qualities as he calls it) of the individual. It does not offer recipes for wisdom nor does it offer an understanding of prejudice. These are, he says, impossible goals for humanities to deliver on.

"Fish concludes

"To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good.

"(Fish 2008)"

................................................................................................

"Studies of Text-Critical Theory"

"Scholarship in the Western Humanities use techniques from various schools of Critical Theory to develop arguments and examine a subject in a supposedly unbiased and objective manner (a diluted version of scientific methods that depend on the critic). Critical Theorists including Hegel rejected the “objective”, scientific approach. They sought to frame theories within ideologies of human freedom. Most humanities (and Indology can be seen to be using techniques that originate from both sociology and literary criticism) scholarship can be classified by “method” to be using some combination of the methods listed here.

"According to Bohman “Critical Theory” as a “method” derives from the works of several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt school. It supposedly is “critical” as it has specific practical purpose: – goals like human “emancipation from slavery”, and its ability to act as a “liberating influence”. (Bohman 2015)"

"The hoary aim of the methods of the Critical Theory is to “emancipate”, in a Western sense that is, the societies and systems under study. Implicit in the definition is that it is only the “West” that gets to comment and critique, based on methods created by the West. In the specific case of Indology - most of the Indologists are not practising adherents of Indic lifestyles, and do not adhere to or live by dhārmic notions of the world, and do not have world views which originate from these alternative (non-Western and dhārmic) epistemologies. Is not such a social inquiry made via these methods poisoned by existing biases?"

................................................................................................

"Other Methods (deriving from Marx)"

"Variations of the Marxist theories influenced by the Russian dialectics of Lenin, and Stalin, Marxist Critical Theory of the Frankfurt school are generally the most widespread versions used as the basis in Western (social science) academia. There exist world-wide variations as in China’s Marxism influenced by Mao, the Guevara influenced Latin-American version, North Korean (Juche) not to mention the various regional Indian versions.

"Pollock’s socio-economic analysis of historical India can be seen to be primarily subscribing to a Marxist-driven framework. ... "

................................................................................................

"Post-modernism"

"As a movement Post-modernism is a reaction to the assumptions and values of the Modern West (16th-20th century), and many of its characteristics derive from the denial of the enlightenment values and principles. There is no objective natural reality, there is nothing like the truth, and no faith in science and technology as instruments of human progress; add to this the relativism of logic and reason and, importantly, the view that language is freely interpretable (via deconstruction)."

"Pollock derives the “power” of his philology from the Post-modern views of language. The ‘power discourse’ that he attempts to ‘see’ in historical text, is also influenced by these Post-modern perspectives."

................................................................................................

"Philology - Method to the Mischief"

"The overall framework and argumentative methods of Critical Theory (described in brief in the previous section) along with the tools and techniques provided by Philology, largely contribute to the bodies of scholarship created by Pollock and others in this new modern school of American Orientalism. Philology is generally considered to be the study of language from historical text sources. Interpretation of text, establishment of authority and authenticity also come under its purview.

"With his background of training in the Greek classics, Pollock considers the use of Philology and its methods (according to his definitions) as being critical to understanding the meaning (hidden or otherwise) of texts.

"He says

"...philology is, or should be, the discipline of making sense of texts.

"(Pollock 2009:934)"

"He is vehement in that it must have nothing to do with meaning or truth, as those do not comprise its working definition but one should view it as follows

"It is not the theory of language - that’s linguistics - or the theory of meaning or truth - that’s philosophy - but the theory of textuality as well as the history of textualized meaning.

"(Pollock 2009:934)"

"Additionally he opines that

"...if mathematics is the language of the book of nature, as Galileo taught, philology is the language of the book of humanity. "

"(Pollock 2009:934)"

"His “working” definition of Philology reaches a climax with this rather breathless conclusion

:Thus, both in theory and in practice across time and space, philology merits the same centrality among the disciplines as philosophy or mathematics.

"(Pollock 2009:934)"

"This begs the question - when will the West have a Nobel for philology? No prizes for guessing its first recipient."

That's when Nobel will cease to be respected as award, and peoplewill be reluctant to be seen in company of such recipients.

"On textual meaning, he says

"People often lie,.... and so do texts. It may not be very fashionable to say so these days, but the lies and truths of texts must remain a prime object of any future philology.....

"We should not throw out the baby of textual truth, however, with the bathwater of Orientalism past or present.

"(Pollock 2009:951-952)"

"Pollock thus opens the Pandora’s box of “free” interpretation that can be assigned to any text, to mean anything independent of context - by ascribing it to some sort of hidden intent by the author."

"Again, strangely, he introduces the method of adding agents into the frame of text, other than the author, to whom the actual text can supposedly refer to. This gives the “interpreter” additional degrees of freedom to build context around any text."

"The act of interpreting a text to make it mean what we want it to mean based on some pre-existing ideology, personal affiliation can somehow be elevated as historical truth."

"So now, any kind of meaning that the interpreter (Philologist) wants to see or ascribe, based on personal prejudice or understanding of the subject matter becomes possible. Present day context can be reflected back to historical events. Examples include theories such as - the Rāmāyaṇa being used as a rabble-rousing political text; then, applying it to the events in Ayodhya, the conclusions of Deep Orientalism; then linking Sanskrit to the rise of the Nazis etc. (See (Pollock 2014), section on Reading the Sanskrit Tradition for proof of this method in action).

"The most intriguing part, however, is the conclusion:

"There is, thus, no inherent contradiction between historical truth and application... It’s time we got clear on two things. Historical knowledge does not stand in some sort of fundamental contradiction with truth. Nor does it demand our impartiality; objectivity does not entail neutrality.

"(Pollock 2009:958)"

"These methods (diagnostic political philology and prescriptive liberation philology) of Pollock are going global and are being used rather “freely” to interpret in what could only be called an anything-goes style. For more on the growing global footprint of these rather questionable methods, see Pollock et al. (2015). For a discussion of similar critical methods used in the earlier German school refer to Adluri and Bagchee (2013)."

Indeed - so much so, schoolgirls on Shelfari were asking whether - in context of when Jane Austen's most beloved heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, rejected her first suitor the silly cousin, and her friend subsequently accepted him - whether the guy was gay, or deficient physically, in the sense sexually.

Jane Austen's readers would be as aghast as she in her grave.

But this discussion above tells one that those girls were being taught by students graduating under likes of Pollock.

................................................................................................

"Pūrva-pakṣa"

" ... We now examine his methods and work using the lenses of Western methods on the one hand and those of traditional Indian perspectives on the other. We use this new understanding to throw light on Pollock’s views on Indian śāstra (Pollock 1985)."

"The next three sections mirror the appropriately titled sections in Pollock’s paper. By his own admission, it is only the first section that is dealt with in detail wherein he makes some logically valid claims and the remaining two are dealt with cursorily and speculatively."

................................................................................................

"1. The Relationship of Śāstra to its Object"

"We are informed further by Patañjali that “śāstra is that from which there derives regulation [definite constraints on usage]” (śāstrato hi nāma vyavasthā). ’Outside the grammatical tradition, the term embraced more broadly the notion of “system of ideas,” (Pollock 1985:501)

:To establish that śāstra is a set of rules, Pāṇini and Patañjali are quoted selectively - śāstrārtha-sampratyaya (intention of a rule), śāstrato hi nāma vyavasthā (usage constraints) respectively (Pollock 1985:501). That their domain is vyākaraṇa or grammar, which is an encapsulation of language understanding in terms of (sūtra-s) rules is conveniently ignored: What does one have in grammar if not rules?"

How should Pollock know, he never saw one until he thought he could make easy fame via Sanskrit and was dismayed at having to work an unused organ.

"Pollock very correctly identifies the Mīmāṁsā interpretation of śāstra vis-à-vis śruti - the Veda and also of the relationship to the upaveda-s, vedāṅga-s and vidyā-sthāna-s. He exhaustively lists multiple catalogues of śāstra and their evolution.

"That śāstra is the original source of knowledge is acknowledged but then he digresses on some supposed bivalency between rules and revelation. It appears that this is due to Pollock’s misunderstanding of revelation of śruti being similar to revelation akin to Abrahamic books.

"After this point, inexplicably, Pollock assumes that śāstra means theory, which is incorrect. The śāstra-s have been derived and codified based on actual experience, and are encoded experiences driven by practice, and not some arbitrary theory (like scientific theories) based on guesswork, the principles of falsifiability and third person empiricism.

"We need to internalize Aurobindo’s idea here. Paraphrasing his words: Śāstra is not some blind uncritical following of customs, (however good or bad). It essentially is the knowledge and teaching laid down by millennia of intuition, experience and wisdom, some of the best standards available to humanity. (Aurobindo 1997:229)

"Pollock then makes a rather dubious claim that the Indian intellectual history somehow assumes a ‘finite set of topics of knowledge’. No such claims were made by Rājaśekhara whom he quotes as an authority (cataloging the types of śāstra)."

"He then goes on to examine specific cases and cites selective examples from Vyākaraṇa, Dharmaśāstra, and Kāmasūtra which supposedly exhort the practitioner to abide strictly by injunction and rules. He implies that any sort of failure experienced by the practitioner is exclusively “his” and not of the śāstra.

"He then proceeds to make cryptic statements such as

"All knowledge derives from śāstra; success in astrology or in the training of horses and elephants, no less than in language use and social intercourse, is achieved only because the rules governing these practices have percolated down to the practitioners - not because they were discovered independently through the creative power of practical consciousness - “however far removed” from the practitioners the śāstra may be.

"(Pollock 1985:507)"

"The point being made is not clear at all - Does Pollock expect every individual to write his/her own śāstra? Every civilisation has rules which encode its cultural goals and orients its practitioners to them. In the dharmic way of living, human progress via pursuit of puruṣārtha-s (the goals of existence) toward possibly a final mokṣa (liberation) is the overarching goal of all śāstra-s. The kārmic-dhārmic worldview which includes causal chains across multiple births is fundamental to Vedic cosmology without which, any reading of any śāstra will be flawed. The deliberate sidelining of this perspective - which is possibly beyond the scope of Pollock’s gaze - seems to be one of the principal causes of the nescience."

"The fact that theory and practice are a feedback-driven continuum over multiple generations in dhārmic traditions, encoding newer experiences into śāstra-s which are rewritten according to the times, is something that Pollock has unfortunately ignored. ... "

"By this sleight of hand, Pollock with some philological magic and invocation of Kant has transformed śāstra-s to become objects of political control. So now śāstra, somehow because of their supposed regulative nature, make it possible for human social and sexual intercourse to become amenable to codified legislative control."

................................................................................................

"2. The Implications of Priority of Theory"

"Having somehow “established” the fact that śāstra is theory bereft of actual practice (via Pollockian logic), the intent of Pollock in the second section is to show the effects of prioritizing theory over practice. (Ref. Pollock 1985:512-516)

"Śāstra-s ascribe their own origins to seers and ṛṣi-s of the past, individuals with a higher consciousness, those who could access and experience and verify by practice such knowledge; and the śāstra-s are now categorised as myth!

"Myth in the Judeo-Christian (and post-modern) discourse refers to any text/work, that does not have official sanction and that which is not considered true or factual by some central authority or history - controlling “religious” body e.g. Church, Rabbinic Council etc. Non-Abrahamic traditions (especially dhārmic ones) are not “centrally” controlled nor are they history-centric nor do they have centralised institutions. By labeling Indian śāstra as myths, the credibility of these “so-labelled” works are automatically questioned. For a more comprehensive discussion of this label - “myth” - and for more on the current normative on the “scientific” view of myth in Western scholarship see Jung and Kerenyi (1963).

"The modus is generally something like this –

"1. A people P (non-West) refer to X (a body of knowledge unknown to the West) as a guideline/reference

"2. Call X a myth

"3. Imply that X is probably untrue

"4. People P who refer to X are primitive and regressive

"5. The West (which does not use/refer to X) is superior to P

"6. In case there is an inkling of something good/monetizable, appropriate X, rename X, call X a Western invention"

"(The last step is a phenomenon called digestion and is part of a larger phenomenon of a cultural U-turn. See Malhotra (2011) for definitions and discussion).

"This method has been repeatedly used in Indological studies and is also seen as a general phenomenon in the appropriation of traditional knowledge and intellectual property of non-Western civilisations into the larger capitalist Western universal narrative called Science. This is nothing new in the history of the encounter of the West with the non-West. See Raju (2009) for a discussion. The deconstructive reader should be aware that such a mental disposition is in most cases the primary saṁskāra of the Western academic/intellectual.

"The Purāṇa-s encapsulate enormous amount of secular knowledge, which Pollock acknowledges.

"On the Agni Purāṇa, he says

"What Agni goes on to reveal is an encyclopedic synthesis of human knowledge, including what is in fact a vast array of discrete śāstra-s on topics as diverse as dharma, architecture and iconology, astronomy, divination, the lapidary’s art, the science of weapons, arboriculture, veterinary medicine, metrics, phonetics, grammar, and rhetoric."

"(Pollock 1985:514)"

"Using selective quoting, the Mahābhārata, Nāradasmṛti, the dharmaśāstra texts, Kāvyamīmāṁsā (poetics), Kāmasūtra, Matsyapurāṇa, Carakasaṁhitā (Āyurveda/medicine), Suśrutasaṁhitā (surgery/medicine), Agnipurāṇa, Bharata-Nāṭyaśāstra (dance, performing art), the Dhanurveda texts (archery), Pākadarpaṇa (cooking) – have all been labelled as myth."

"Numerous individual śāstras adopt this mythological self-understanding and represent themselves as the outcome of a similar process of abridgement."

"(Pollock 1985:512)"

This - from someone brought up on virginity of a mother being intact on examination by women, after a natural birth of the child who's subsequently executed by Rome for his identity, and then used for centuries to terrorise and burn people at stake - is rich.

"The conclusions he draws are not surprising:

"A final consequence is one I suggested earlier. From the conception of an a priori śāstra it logically follows - and Indian intellectual history demonstrates that this conclusion was clearly drawn - that there can be no conception of progress, of the forward “movement from worse to better,” on the basis of innovations in practice.

"(Pollock 1985:515)

"The West provides a big contrast, he says: Undoubtedly the idea of progress in the West germinated in a soil made fertile by a peculiar constellation of representations, about time, history, and eschatology. Whatever may be the possibility of the idea’s growth in the absence of these concepts, it is clear that in traditional India there were at all events ideological hindrances in its way.

"(Pollock 1985:515)"

"Expanding the scope of the pūrva-pakṣa to address these claims, pointers to alternate viewpoints are presented and the reader is encouraged to examine the claims of Western growth and superiority of Western lifestyles."

If "Western growth and superiority of Western lifestyles" is the argument, shouldn't Pollock and his nation be kowtowing as Dave's to those who produced Mercedes, Champagne, Rolls-Royce or Bentley?

Well, China has bought them after Arabs fid, so ...

"Driving the final set of nails into the proverbial coffin, Pollock posits that any expectation of progress using Indian methods is not possible, because

"If any sort of amelioration is to occur, this can only be in the form of a “regress,” a backward movement aiming at a closer and more faithful approximation to the divine pattern.

"(Pollock 1985:515)"

"His attacks on the ‘sanātana’ nature of Indian knowledge (timeless truths that are valid for all time) reach a climax in this section:

"First, all contradiction between the model of cultural knowledge and actual cultural change is thereby at once transmuted and denied; creation is really re-creation, as the future is, in a sense, the past. Second, the living, social, historical, contingent tradition is naturalized, becoming as much a part of the order of things as the laws of nature themselves. Just as the social, historical phenomenon of language is viewed by Mīmāṁsā as natural and eternal, so the social dimension and historicality of all cultural practices are eliminated in the shastric paradigm. And finally, through such denial of contradiction and reification of tradition, the sectional interests of pre-modern India are universalized and valorized. The theoretical discourse of śāstra becomes in essence a practical discourse of power.

"(Pollock 1985:516)"

Good at spouting meaningless nonsense and lies isn't he!

................................................................................................

"Discussion"

"Pollock’s denial of Indian cosmological precepts and the lack of any discussion of the background basis or saṁskāra (in a Mīmāṁsā sense3) is apparent here. Pollock’s saṁskāra denies the existence of such a cosmology and sidesteps the issue either out of arrogance or ignorance."

Both, obviously.

"Denying this sacred cosmology, or viewing humans as fallen (sinners) or the nihilism of Western liberalism/secularism – these are not the śāstraic way, which conceives of humanity as divine in essence. There have been materialist viewpoints and lifestyles in India, and they have had their following. What is important is what lasts and what is preserved by practice. Despite all its material poverty in recent times (forced by centuries of slavery and colonialism) modern India is a living testimony to the sanātanic nature of Indian living. The long timescales4 of a stable Indic civilisation have led to such a sense of sanātana and the observance of existence of imperishable truths."

Author forgets humongous loot by successive colonial regimes and invaders.

"This has been something Western intellectualism finds difficult to internalise. Pursuit of lifestyles that conform to a Vedic cosmology (=beliefs in karman, dharma, punar-janman (rebirth) etc.) require stable societies: stability in time, place for humans to evolve spiritually, become aware of higher planes of consciousness, and practice life (as per śāstraic guidelines) so that the traversal across the puruṣārtha-s (goals and aims of life) is as it ought to be, leading to possible transcendence in the current life and possibly lead to a final mokṣa (liberation / escape from the cycles of rebirth and the attainment of a higher consciousness).

"In terms of guṇa (behaviors) such societies had to inculcate and encourage a sāttvic orientation (purity) to create the proper saṁskāra - unlike the mostly āsuric (demonic) materialist/egoistic motivations of anthropocentric societies. For a much deeper elaboration of this perspective - see Deva and Asura in Aurobindo (1997:475) – where Aurobindo describes the essential nature of the structure of śāstra as being built upon a number of preparatory conditions or dharma-s - it is a means to an end (that of freedom and the discovery of the divine nature in man) – not an end in itself.

"The land we currently know as India has been a place on this planet which has allowed this to transpire for a long, long time. India has borne the brunt of the deep Western desire to “conquer” - militarily and politically during the colonial era, as is borne out by W. Durant:

"The more I read the more I was filled with astonishment and indignation at the apparently conscious and deliberate bleeding of India by England throughout a hundred and fifty years. I began to feel that I had come upon the greatest crime in all of history.

"(Durant 1930:x)"

"The same is being done intellectually through the weapon of Western Indology today. The West has the tendency to frame every encounter with the ‘other’, as some sort of ‘clash’ of civilizations, so that the discourse forever remains a ‘discourse of power’. It is time that the deeper reality is acknowledged : it is a clash between the nescience of the West and the science of the śāstra - a clash of evil saṁskāra (mental disposition) and jñāna (knowledge)."

................................................................................................

"3. The Critical Presupposition:"

"The transcendence of Śāstra"

:In the final section of his paper, Pollock makes serious charges against the very nature of the Veda, its primacy and its primordial origins and thereby of all śāstra-s. He quotes Caraka-saṁhitā -

"“Apart from the restricted sense of acquiring this knowledge and of spreading it, there is no meaning in saying that medical science came into being having been non-existent before”.

"(Pollock 1985:517)"

"Pollock posits that there is a serious epistemological issue, and that this leads to a greater problem of causality. He says:

"This is the notion of satkārya-vāda: As a pot, for example, must pre-exist in the clay (since otherwise it could never be brought into existence or could be brought into existence from some other material, e.g., threads), so knowledge must pre-exist in something in order that we may derive it thence (thus in part the postulates of the a priori and finally transcendent śāstra); like the clay, which ex hypothesi must in some form exist eternally, that from which our knowledge comes must be eternal; and like the potter, we ourselves do not “create” knowledge, but merely bring it to manifestation from the (textual) materials in which it lies concealed from us."

"(Pollock 1985:517)"

But this was exactly what Michaelangelo thought of his sculptures, exactly what mathematics scholars' position is about truths of mathematics of which they consider their work is discovery of, and so on.

"He uses the Sāṅkhya notion of satkārya-vāda and extends it to all philosophical literature. He uses this to claim that all the efforts of traditional scholarship have been only to rediscover what has previously existed. This sense of mere ‘rediscovery’ (read “lack of innovation”) is also attributed to the śāstra-s."

"As this is the presupposition, it implicates śāstra as a whole and lends support to the arguments and the inferences of the earlier two sections. Indian intellectual history has shown no “newness”, because by its very nature, its dependence on theory (śāstra), depends on transcendence of Vedas. Since the Vedas and śāstra-s are infallible and not of recent origin, Indian intellectual history has only been rediscovering what has been stated in the Veda-s, there has been no innovation in Indian intellectual history and by implication Indian civilisation!"

And yet it was Indian scholars and sages who stated eith certainty that solar system was heliocentric and earth was spherical not flat, apart from first writing of concept of differentiation. And that's only a few things in science and mathematics - apart from the numerals, decimal system and zero.

So Indian system worked, far better than West, until onslaught of barbarian invaders for several centuries massacred scholars by thousands and burnt libraries at universities of India, after they had finished doing it to Egypt and Persia.

................................................................................................

"The Implications of Pūrva-pakṣa"

"(Summary of Pollockian methods and scholarship)"

"On a deep reading of Pollock’s other works, we find that he makes various foundational claims similar to the ones in this paper on śāstra and practice of theory, viz. in (Pollock 2004) on Dharma and Mīmāṁsā, (Pollock 1989) on Mīmāṁsā and the problem of history – where we see similar methods and techniques, and a need to frame interpretations into a “discourse of power”.

"The degrees of freedom in his philological style (the method to his mischief), gives the ability to ascribe any motive to the writer of a historical text, freely place other agents in the frame of text - preferably to illustrate victimhood, and then the third plane is whatever else Pollock wants to add as the philologist’s meaning - context/meanings that he wants to project backwards onto historical text (Nazism, events of Ayodhya etc.). This free-style context building, incoherent and incomplete chains of reasoning, a marked lack of sāttvic saṁskāra - are hallmarks of this style.

"In summary, this pūrvapakṣa is a non-trivial examination of the methods used by Pollock in manufacturing his theses5 on Indian śāstra. The conclusions drawn are -

"1. Pollock’s approach is not based on the methods of science (the scientific method).

"2. The hypotheses and claims he makes are not based on established methods of Western social sciences, even which we claim as being questionable in their rigor.

"3. The claims do not have any empirical (factual) grounding.

"4. They are not based on methods of Indian knowledge traditions.

"5. The assumptions and theses are driven by historically institutionalised biases and deplorable “free-style” methods (philology) of interpreting text."

................................................................................................

"Refutations - Classes of Uttara-pakṣa"

"The pūrva-pakṣa we have made has highlighted some peculiarities of Pollock’s style and method. Based on the causal chains of reasoning in Pollock’s logic, certain arguments have been built, and guidelines have been presented which could be used as a basis for future uttara-pakṣa/responses. A cogent response to the claims made by Pollock can possibly be constructed using some combination of these methods. It is to be noted that the list below is only indicative and by no means exhaustive.

"1. Basic logical flaws in causal chains of reasoning - Through the use of the scientific method of falsifiability, researchers can provide counter-examples to Pollock’s claims. But given the fact that social sciences and humanities are often pseudo-scientific and pseudo-analytic this method might need to backed up with other lines of argumentation as well.

"2. Flawed use of Critical Theory - The methods and lines of argumentation used in free-style Pollockian deconstruction via philology, are deeply flawed as a method. A detailed case expanding the section ‘Method to the mischief’ can be made.

"3. Flawed use of Philology - Similar to the above, scholars can construct arguments on the flawed uses of Philology, Deconstruction and the “Three Dimensions” in Pollock’s approach.

"4. Data-centric Analysis (Empirical methods) - By interacting with actual practitioners of śāstra, insiders to the Indian tradition and intellectual practice may bring out via a sufficiently detailed questionnaire, with both objective and subjective focus6 (see Note on digital humanities), the dissonance between the claims made by Pollock and actual real-world realities.

"5. Use of techniques like Discourse Representation Theory which are not used in Western Critical Theory per se - but which are used in semantic analysis and for encoding of knowledge (see Geurts et al (2015)). Diagrammatic representations used in this framework can be used as part of relatively easier pedagogical methods - making arguments and criticism “visible” and accessible to non-experts too.

"The methods listed below would rely on the traditional Indian frameworks as basis

"6. Epistemological dissonance (Pramāṇa) - The sources of knowledge and the meanings ascribed by the West to Sanskrit non-translatables can be discussed and arguments can be made based on his incomplete understanding of the semantics.

"a. Testimonial (Śabda) dissonance and documented views from centuries of commentaries - Pollock’s claims are simply different from those based on the commentaries on the śāstra-s.

"b. Use of Indian theories of error (khyāti-vāda) must be brought to bear upon the lines of his reasoning and argument.

"7. Ontological dissonance (Tattva) - Western secular worldview does not believe in ātman, the manas, the guṇa-s and other Indian principles of reality. There are no equivalent categories in science. They have been at best ignored or at worst collapsed into other categories. Arguments can be built on the basis of this dissonance.

"8. Interpretive dissonance (Mīmāṁsā) - The disposition of the interpreter of a text (saṁskāra) is a key factor in the outsider-insider framework of anthropology and Western social sciences. Pollock is an outsider, and as an outsider he will make such claims. Arguments can be built on the basis of this dissonance. The resulting subjectivity and lack of objectivity of this method can be argued out.

"9. Philosophical dissonance (Darśana) - This would be a class of heavyweight methods of refutation. All the above three dissonances, ontological, epistemological and interpretive - from the perspective of a specific vedantic darśana, for example: a Dvaita perspective of śāstra or an Advaita perspective, can be brought to bear on the claims made in the paper. As each darśana is complete in itself in term of its methods of arguments, its pramāṇa-s and śāstra, and have their own massive repositories of vāda-s (arguments), each such refutation would be complete in itself. Other perspectives like those from Jaina and Bauddha darśana can also be brought to bear independently.

"10. Reflective methods - The selfsame methods used by Pollock can be used as basis of argumentation. As suggested in Malhotra (2016:354), we can use Pollockian methods of philology on his work and also use his thesis of the aestheticization of power. Pollock and Western academia (the first world) uses English (language of power) to interpret native bodies of knowledge. Arguments can be built based on such a narrative."

Author misses out the most important one, that of looking at Pollock’s own background and seeing the psychological roots of his assaults against India - lack of expectations regarding rigorous use of English grammar in US, repressive nature of church through centuries until Renaissance, need of thinkers of West to refute church and its dogma, terror of inquisition, need to deal with guilt imposed by sin theory of church, mindfulness of West used to dealing with a closed institution averse to freedom of thought, ..... and perhaps his need of an easy route to a career.

................................................................................................

"Concluding Remarks"

"We have critically appraised Pollock’s theses on śāstra using traditional Indian perspectives and some Western methods. The claims made in the original paper and the methods used therein have impacted the individual and collective psyche of the followers of dharma via its influence through decades on academics and intellectuals. The sophisticated Western training and colonized saṁskāra of many Indian-born academics and intellectuals influence not only the global but also the domestic discourse in India. It has had secondary and tertiary effects through popular culture and dissemination of its interpretations through the leftist control of the official Indian narrative through activities like preparation of textbooks and history-writing. As a direct follow-up based on approaches used in this paper a formalized dialectic tool, a Pollock Anti-Reader (diagnostic guidelines) is suggested. This can take the form of a book or a digital tool driven by topic-models based on the writings of Pollock.

"The Indian self-narrative academic social sciences as practised in India in English, traditional critical scholarship in Sanskrit and the regional languages - these have not been able to shake off the influences of the Western models; or are able to even interpret or adapt them to the traditional perspectives - so much so that the very idea of “traditional” is being redefined.

"This existing narrative needs to be challenged in many more ways and a sustained response mounted via new hybrid interpretive techniques based on the traditional Indian approaches."

................................................................................................

"Footnotes"

[ 1 ] Etic vs Emic - The terms were coined in 1954 by linguist Kenneth Pike, who argued that the tools developed for describing linguistic behaviors could be adapted to the description of any human social behavior. Emic and etic are derived from the linguistic terms phonemic and phonetic respectively, which are in turn derived from Greek roots. The possibility of a truly objective description was discounted by Pike himself in his original work; he proposed the emic/etic dichotomy in anthropology as a way around philosophic issues about the very nature of objectivity. See Pike(1967). In Malhotra(2016), the description of traits of the “insider” and “outsider” vis-a-vis Indology are explicitly stated and is the definition applicable in this paper. Pollock is an outsider.

"[ 2 ] A Hail Mary Pass is a very long forward pass in American football, made in desperation with only a small chance of success.

"[ 4 ] There is no finality of actual numbers arrived at by various modern methods - genetics, archaeo-astronomy, radiocarbon-dating etc. (It is to be noted that traditional dates, measures of time, calendars have spectacular time-scales beyond the conception of modern science). We can safely say that it is at least more than 10 millennia old.

"[ 5 ] Pollock’s claims summarised (from Swadeshi Indology Conference – Call for Papers) The relationship between śāstra and prayoga (theory and practical activity) is one which is diametrically opposed to what it is in the West. In the West there is progress because new experience and practical considerations inform the thinkers who can change and develop new thought based on such empirical evidence. On the other hand, the Veda-s are deemed as śāstra par excellence, and as already containing all the knowledge. The Veda-s are thus opposed to all progress. śāstra-s are frozen in time; hence they hinder creativity, and are inherently regressive. Added to this, śāstra-s engender authoritarianism and inspire social oppression. In contrast, Western civilisation is based on freedom. As a result, śāstra-s are to be seen as a major cause - of Indian lack of creativity and freedom, and for the existence of oppression."

................................................................................................

................................................

March 02, 2022 - March 03, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Chapter 7"

"Indian Renaissance — a Birth & a Death*"

" –Manjushree Hegde"

................................................................................................

"Abstract"

"Professor Sheldon Pollock’s international collaborative project viz. Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism (SKSEC) aspires to trace the intellectual history of pre-modern India in order to gather a “clearer picture” of the professed death of Sanskrit “in the face of European modernity”. Superficially, SKSEC demonstrates a spirit of openness towards the multiplicity of possible answers to the complex questions it raises. Yet, a closer reading shows that SKSEC works within a fixed framework of predetermined conjectures & conclusions, and it is to these that I wish to draw the readers’ attention.

"Firstly, it does not appear to be a strictly construed “intellectual history” that Pollock commits to chart — it appears he is simply enamored by the catch-phrase “navya” that was in vogue during the period under examination, and merely wishes to understand what of the navya-movement was, in fact, “new”. For Pollock, this word, “navya”, is a precious discovery; what he wishes to do with it is to tune the Indian intellectual trajectory into perfect symphony with the European Renaissance — in other words, to equate “navya” with “rebirth”/“renaissance”. Further, if Europe embraced/encouraged the Renaissance, Pollock writes that India largely repudiated the navya impulse. Therefore, to Pollock, it was the presence of “something internal, not external, to the Sanskrit intellectual formation… that arrested the capacity for development by cordoning off the kind of critique that had once supplied that formation’s very life force.” It is rather clear, then, that SKSEC works on a few presumptions—

"a. that the seventeenth-century Indian intellectual tradition was characterized by certain peculiarities that were comparable to the European Renaissance;

"b. that they proved completely powerless in the face of their European counterparts, and the millennia-old systems of thought were finally, irrevocably, replaced by the latter;

"c. and that an intimate relationship is deducible between Muslim rule and the avowed “creative upsurge” of seventeenth-century Indian science.

"It is a shockingly mischievous endeavor, and I wish to explore the perils of the same. In the present paper, I examine carefully Pollock’s idea of the “new” in seventeenth-century Indian knowledge systems, their colonial encounter, and the dubious inferences they lead to."

................................................................................................

"Introduction"

"Sheldon Pollock’s international collaborative project, Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism (SKSEC), is a rather ambitious undertaking. It aspires to trace the intellectual history of pre-modern India in order to gather a “clearer picture” of the professed death of Sanskrit “in the face of European modernity”.

"Intellectual history is an uncharted territory in Indology — to be sure, it is relatively new even to European studies. In general, intellectual history is defined as the study of ideas and intellectual patterns over time, not to be confused with ‘history of ideas’. Peter Gordon, an intellectual historian, writes,

"“One thing to note right off is the distinction between “intellectual history” and “the history of ideas”… “history of ideas” is a discipline which looks at large-scale concepts as they appear and transform over the course of history. An historian of ideas will tend to organize the historical narrative around one major idea and will then follow the development or metamorphosis of that idea as it manifests itself in different contexts and times, rather as a musicologist might trace a theme and all of its variations throughout the length of a symphony.” Gordon (2012:1).

"Intellectual history, on the other hand, starts out with the a priori that ideas are “historically conditioned features of the world which are best understood within some larger context” (Gordon 2012:1). Consequently, it attempts to study ideas in relation to the prevailing social/political/institutional changes of their time.

"Pollock conceived of SKSEC to sketch the ebb and flow of ideas in pre-modern India — because, in his words, “we cannot know how colonialism changed South Asia if we do not know what was there to be changed” (Pollock 2004:i). Superficially, SKSEC demonstrates a spirit of openness towards the multiplicity of possible answers to the complex questions it raises; Pollock states - in fact, explicitly and repeatedly so - that he only wants to “open up a conversation” on the issue. Yet, a closer reading shows that SKSEC works within a fixed framework of predetermined conjectures and conclusions, and to these, I wish to draw the readers’ attention.

"Firstly, it does not appear to be a strictly construed “intellectual history” that Pollock commits to chart — it is as though he is simply enamored by the catch-phrase “navya” that was in vogue during the period under examination (viz. 1550-1750 C.E), and merely wishes to understand what of the Navya-movement was, in fact, “navya” or “new”. For Pollock, this word, “navya”, is a precious discovery; what he wishes to do with it is to tune the Indian intellectual trajectory into perfect symphony with European Renaissance — in other words, to equate “navya” with “rebirth”/“renaissance” (Pollock 2000:3)1. So, this undertaking tries to identify the characteristics that defined European Renaissance — subjectivity/individuality, historical awareness, renewed interest in classical texts, etc — in the Indian intellectual landscape of the period 1550-1750. Moreover, he aims to attribute this general atmosphere of intellectual dynamism to the consolidation of Muslim rule in India (Pollock 2007:8).

"Furthermore, if Europe embraced/encouraged the Renaissance, Pollock writes, India largely repudiated the navya impulse. A comparison between the two traditions, he notes, would show “how differently India and Europe responded to similar conceptual challenges – and how radically, after centuries of homomorphism, their intellectual histories diverged” (Pollock 2007:8). So, according to him, the two traditions — European and Indian — finally differed in how they reacted to this impulse of “newness” and in it lay their respective triumph and downfall (Pollock 2007:8). Therefore, to Pollock, it was the presence of “something internal, not external, to the Sanskrit intellectual formation… that arrested the capacity for development by cordoning off the kind of critique that had once supplied that formation’s very life force” (Pollock 2007:8). It is no wonder, to Pollock, then, that “before the uncompromising modernity that developed in Europe and was disseminated by colonialism, Sanskrit intellectual formation melted like so much snow in the light of a brilliant, pitiless sun.” (Pollock 2000:20)

"It is rather clear, then, that SKSEC works on a few presumptions— that,

"a. seventeenth-century Indian intellectual tradition was characterized by certain peculiarities that were comparable to the European Renaissance;

"b. they proved completely powerless in the face of their European counterparts, and the millennia-old systems of thought were finally, irrevocably, replaced by the latter; and

"c. an intimate relationship is deducible between Muslim rule and the avowed “creative upsurge” of seventeenth-century Indian science (Pollock 2007:8).

"In the present paper, I examine carefully Pollock’s idea of the “new” in seventeenth-century Indian knowledge systems, their colonial encounter, and the dubious inferences they allude to."

................................................................................................

"1. Indian Intellectual Tradition in the Seventeenth Century"

"If Pollock wishes to study the seventeenth-century Indian intellectual tradition against the background of the European Renaissance, it would be useful to understand better the latter first.

"Commonly, the Renaissance is understood as a profound transformation of European culture, politics, art and society in the years 1400 C.E – 1600 C.E. It describes both a period in history and a more general ideal of cultural renewal. ‘Renaissance’, in French, literally means “rebirth”. To Jules Michelet, the first person to use this term (in the 19th century), the word meant, “…the discovery of the world and the discovery of man..” (Brotton 2006:10)

"Michelet was the first to define the Renaissance as a definitive historical moment that disassociated itself from the Middle Ages; furthermore, he was the first to promote it as a particular “spirit” or “attitude”, rather than simply a specific historical period. For him, this period, in general, represented a progressive, democratic worldview that celebrated the virtues he valued— Reason, Truth, Art, and Beauty. According to Michelet, the Renaissance “recognized itself as identical at heart with the modern age” (Brotton 2006:10).

"It is worth quoting the long passage of Brotton:

"“Michelet’s Renaissance does not happen in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, as we have come to expect. Instead, his Renaissance takes place in the 16th century. As a French nationalist, Michelet was eager to claim the Renaissance as a French phenomenon. As a republican, he also rejected what he saw as 14th-century Italy’s admiration for church and political tyranny as deeply undemocratic, and hence not part of the spirit of the Renaissance. Michelet’s story of the Renaissance was shaped decisively by his own 19th-century circumstances. In fact, the values of Michelet’s Renaissance sound strikingly close to those of his cherished French Revolution: espousing the values of freedom, reason, and democracy, rejecting political and religious tyranny, and enshrining the spirit of freedom and the dignity of ‘man’. Disappointed in the failure of these values in his own time, Michelet went in search of a historical moment where the values of liberty and egalitarianism triumphed and promised a modern world free of tyranny.”

"Brotton (2006:11)"

"If Michelet fashioned the idea of Renaissance, it was Jacob Burckhardt who defined it as a 15th-century Italian (not French) phenomenon. In 1860, Burckhardt published his work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. In it, he argued that it was the peculiarities of political life in late 15th century Italy that led to the creation of a “recognizably modern individuality”. Accordingly, the revival of classical antiquity, the discovery of the wider world, and the growing unease with organized religion meant that “man became a spiritual individual.” Burckhardt contrasted this with the lack of individual awareness that for him defined the Middle Ages— “…(in the middle ages) man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation” (Brotton 2006:11). Brotton writes,

"“Burckhardt says very little about Renaissance art or economic changes, and overestimates what he sees as the skeptical, even ‘pagan’ approach to religion of the day. His focus is exclusively on Italy; he makes no attempt to see the Renaissance in relation to other cultures. His understanding of the terms ‘individuality’ and ‘modern’ also remain extremely vague. Like Michelet, Burckhardt’s vision of the Renaissance reads like a version of his own personal circumstances.”

"Brotton (2006:12)"

But India always had an individual's freedoms, identity and rights! Conflicts were with other individuals, as individuals or groups, but not the institutional imposition that Europe was repressed under and terrorised by, for centuries.

"Michelet and Burckhardt’s celebrations of art and individuality found their logical conclusion in Walter Pater’s work, The Renaissance. Rejecting the political, scientific, and economic aspects of the Renaissance, Pater saw only “a spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral and religious ideas of the time” in the art of 15th century works, and therefore, wrote of “the love of art for its own sake”. It was a hedonistic celebration of what Pater called “the pleasures of the senses and the imagination”.

"So it was that Michelet, Burckhardt, and Pater created an idea of the “spirit of Renaissance”. It is not an accurate historical account of what took place in 15th century Europe — it simply captures an ideal of the later society.

"If the Renaissance did not occur even in Europe in the way it is imagined, and showcased to be, it seems rather pointless to demonstrate an “Indian Renaissance”, and draw parallels between the two “movements”. Yet, that is precisely what Pollock sets out to do.

"In his project SKSEC, he starts with a questionable a priori that the two centuries (1550-1750) – just prior to the colonial encounter – witnessed an unprecedented “flowering of intellectual life” in India — remarkably comparable with European Renaissance. A significant number of SKSEC’s working-papers are, in fact, committed to finding the same novelty in seventeenth-century Indian intellectual traditions. Let us, then, examine the “newness”/distinguishing characteristics of seventeenth-century Indian knowledge systems as purported by Sheldon Pollock."

................................................................................................

"1.1. Upsurge in Writing"

"One of the characteristic features of pre-colonial Indian science, according to Pollock, is the “explosion of scholarly production” beginning in the 16th century. According to him, an extraordinary upsurge in writing — previously unmatched — occurred across intellectual disciplines in this period. It is comparable, he says, to the renewed interest in the classical disciplines of the Renaissance.

"It must be noted here that Pollock chooses to examine only those disciplines where he is likely to find the said “upsurge in writing”; and in those where he sees no such trend, he chooses to reject them in favor of the others.

"Furthermore, for Pollock, this trend is no mere artefact of preservation. According to him, there is absolutely no evidence to show that anything substantial was lost in the preceding period. He cites the example of Caṇḍeśvara’s work in political theory to validate his point — Caṇḍeśvara, apparently, refers to only one text from the entire preceding two centuries, and therefore, Pollock concludes, “the upsurge we see is real” Pollock (2007:8)."

Hegde provides statistics of the time supported by sources.

" ... statistical analysis of all the available works (of three disciplines viz. Pūrvamīmāṁsā, Vedānta and Nyāya) through the centuries. It is based on Karl. H. Potter’s (2009-2015) encyclopedia of Indian philosophical systems, and approaches near accuracy. ... If proliferation of texts — or their availability, discounting any loss of material — is a measure of a knowledge-system’s status, ... safely conclude that Pūrvamīmāṁsā is vigorously alive — in fact, almost at its zenith — today ... "

"If, on the other hand, we ignore the minor works, and make a list of only the prominent writers of a discipline, we find a table of a different sort ... "

"Neither the Figure nor the Table, supports as we can see, Pollock’s flavor of argument in respect of either peaks or troughs."

................................................................................................

"1.2 Newness of Form"

"Pollock writes that a significant innovation of style is observable in the works of this period – an adoption of the new philosophical meta-language characterized by the excessive employment of the highly refined terminologies of Navya-nyāya. This, of course, is true. But it is important to note that this trend was initiated in the thirteenth century itself by Gaṅgeśa in Mithilā. Gaṅgeśa developed the technique of subtle argumentation in his magnum opus viz. Tattva-cintāmaṇi. The tradition was carried forward by Vardhamāna (fourteenth century), Yajñapati Upādhyāya (fifteenth century), and Pakṣadhara Miśra (fifteenth century), among others. From Mithilā, Navya-nyāya travelled to Navadvīpa in Bengal. Raghunātha Śiromaṇi (sixteenth-century) of Navadvīpa wrote a commentary on Tattva-cintāmaṇi entitled Dīdhiti in which he introduced a few changes in Navya-nyāya metaphysics and epistemology. Subsequent proponents of Navya-nyāya in Bengal — including Bhavānanda Siddhāntavāgīśa, Mathurānātha Tarkavāgīśa, Jagadīśa Tarkālaṅkāra and Gadādhara Bhaṭṭācārya — wrote commentaries on Dīdhiti which contributed to the fullest development of Gaṅgeśa’s technique of reasoning.

"The fame of Navadvīpa naiyāyika-s spread all over India, and scholars from other schools adopted the Navya-nyāya language. Irrespective of the ontological, epistemological, and moral commitments of the discussants, this highly technical language became the medium for all serious philosophical discussion by the sixteenth century — primarily because of its ontological neutrality. Navya-nyāya style, it may be conjectured, is not intended for the purpose of communicating more easily, any more than the mathematicians’ is; it is intended rather to provide an accurate framework for the presentation of the world as it really is. If seventeenth-century India saw an extraordinary spread of the use of Navya-nyāya language, it can only be said to be a natural development of the seeds sown in the thirteenth century. And to attribute this use of Navya-nyāya to Persian-interactions of the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries is a no less than a fanciful stretch of imagination – supported by not a shred of proof."

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"1.3 Multidisciplinary pursuits"

"According to Pollock, the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries saw the rise of interdisciplinary pursuits. “There is, for one thing, a new multidisciplinarity on the part of scholars. Earlier hermeneutists never wrote juridical treatises (or scholars of jurisprudence hermeneutics), let alone aesthetics; it now became common”

"Pollock (2007:8)."

"This is a rather sweeping generalization to make — Indian tradition has seen its share of polymaths throughout its history:"

Hegde provides several examples.

"Again, if availability of texts, discounting any loss of material, is to be used as a yardstick of the intellectual climate of India, a claim of a sharp rise of multidisciplinary pursuits in exactly the period under examination (viz. 100 CE - 1900 CE) remains an unsubstantiated conjecture."

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"1.4 Subjectivity"

"According to Pollock, the “new cross-cultural interactions…that began to take place from the beginning of the Mughal period were without parallel for the conceptual and social distances being bridged, especially among Sanskrit and Persianate intellectuals at the Mughal court” (Pollock 2000:17).

"It must be noted here that Pollock reasserts, in the same breath, that we have only the vaguest notions about the material conditions of life of seventeenth-century Sanskrit intellectuals, their sources of patronage and relations with courtly power, their networks of intellectual exchange and circulation, about their modes of association or the institutional structures in which they worked, etc.

"For most of the key thinkers in question, he writes, “we are confronted by an absence of contextuality that is almost absolute” (Pollock 2000:4). How he makes the outlandish associations, then, is a matter known only to him.

"He continues: inseparable from the new social circumstances of these scholars was the presence of a “striking new subjectivity” in their literary works (Pollock 2001a:20).

"“Never before in Sanskrit literature had a writer constructed a self quite so vividly present as Siddhichandra does in his autobiography. The work itself, embedded in the biography of his teacher, almost objectifies the tension between a very old conception of heteronomy and a very new self-fashioning that the text treatises throughout. Jagannātha composed verses on the death of his wife that are unprecedented in earlier Sanskrit poetry, and his lyrics on a Yavanī woman he named Lāvaṅgī (sic)3 (who almost certainly had become his wife) are probably an appropriation of the Persian motif of the mahbūb, the ever-unattainable beloved whose unattainability is typically exaggerated by the code of the otherness…”

"Pollock (2001a:20)"

"In every paper on this topic4, Pollock has just these two examples to furnish to substantiate his claim — that of Siddhicandra and Jagannātha Paṇḍita. To be sure, there are a number of anecdotes about Jagannātha Paṇḍita. Of them P.V. Kane writes, “The story about Jagannātha’s liaison with a Yavana damsel called Lavaṅgī (in such verses as yavanī navanīta, etc) appears to be a myth spread by those who were offended by the biting tongue (rather pen) of Jagannātha.” (Kane 1961:324)

"The said verse (that speaks of the loss of a great love) occurs in Jagannātha’s collection of muktaka-s (independent verses), entitled Bhāminī-vilāsa, and is also analyzed in his Rasa-gaṅgādhara.

"This same verse — that to Pollock are the outpourings of a grief-stricken mind — are analyzed in the Rasa-gaṅgādhara — by the same author — in an attitude of clinical detachment. When discussing the poem cited above, Jagannātha offers, to cite Pollock’s own words, two possible explanations:

"“This may be spoken by someone absent from home, perhaps a young man who has fallen in love with the beautiful daughter of his teacher while in school, or someone else thinking back on an illicit sexual relationship he has had”

"(Pollock 2001b: 411)"

"Similarly, the other poem found in Karuṇā-vilāsa — which, according to Pollock, is Jagannātha’s lamentation of the death of his son — is analyzed clinically by Jagannātha in the Rasa-gaṅgādhara.

"Most easily, the issue is resolved if the muktaka-s are not considered as an account of Jagannātha’s life. Yet, it must be remembered that “individuality” was not absolutely absent in earlier works. Indian intellectual landscape is dotted with a healthy dose of chronicles of historical figures —

"Daṇḍin’s Avantisundarī-kathā,

"Bāṇabhaṭṭa’s Harṣa-carita,

"Bhavabhūti’s works,

"Kalhaṇa’s Rāja-taraṅginī,

"Vākpati’s Gauḍa-vāho,

"Chand Bardai’s Prithivīrāj Raso,

"Bilhaṇa’s Vikramāṅkadeva-carita,

"Jayāṅka’s Pṛthvīrāja-vijaya,

"Vidyācakravartin’s Gadya-karṇāmṛta,

"Gaṅgādevī’s Madhurā-vijaya,

"Jayasiṁha’s Kumārapāla-carita,

"Hemacandra’s Hammīra-mada-mardana,

"Ballāla’s Bhojaprabandha,

"– to name a few.

"In fact, in Sanskrit poetics, there exists a genre called ākhyāyikā that demands the chronicles of factual events. The oldest writer on Poetics who dealt with this matter was Bhāmaha who drew a rigid distinction between the ākhyāyikā and the kathā (imaginative fiction). Laying down the definition of an ākhyāyikā, Bhāmaha wrote that the former must be a literary composition in which “an account of his own deeds is given by the hero himself”—

"vṛttam ākhyāyate tasyām nāyakena sva-ceṣṭitam

"(Kāvyālaṅkara 25-9)"

"Here, the word vṛtta in connection with sva-ceṣṭita indicates “actual history” or “facts of experience” as opposed to “invented fiction”(cf. the famous definition kathā kalpita-vṛttāntā, vṛttārthākhyāyikā matā). Also, we should note the admittedly a posteriori nature of this early work on Alaṁkāra — the conclusions were most probably based upon the observance of prevalent works — so, Jagannātha was by no means the first poet to write an account of his own life — if it is admittedly that.

"If Pollock wishes to attribute — this as a characteristic feature of the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, and also to attribute it to Mughal interactions, he must ground his arguments on more solid facts. Funnily, analyzing the works of two other poets of the period, Pollock contradicts his own words, “… that a radical alteration in social environment can fail to produce a commensurate transformation of cultural vision is even more patent in the life of Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī (ca. 1600–75).”

"(Pollock 2001a:25)"

"It would make his case stronger/clearer if only Pollock would decide if or not the “radical alteration in social environment” made a radical transformation of traditional minds!"

Perhaps he never expected any serious readership?

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"1.5 Historicity"

"Yet another distinguishing feature of this period, according to Pollock, is a historical, “perhaps even historicist”, conceptual framework for understanding the development of knowledge systems. With continued regularity, Pollock has but a single example to substantiate his claim in all his papers on the subject5 — that of Mahādeva’s Nyāya-kaustubha.

"Pollock admits that it is unfair to infer from this evidence and his arguments based on it that prior to this period, chronological thinking as such was never attested, that earlier knowledge was never described as earlier in scholarly discourse. It is, after all, a well-known fact that polymaths like Abhinavagupta, Vācaspati Miśra, etc. followed a similar chronological method of argument. In fact, Vācaspati Miśra (960 C.E) had specifically divided the followers of Prabhākara Miśra into “Jarat-Prābhākara-s”, and “Navya-Prābhākara-s”.

"“Such is certainly not the case … but what I do wish to suggest is that in the seventeenth century, for the first time, knowledge was believed to be better not just because it might objectively be better — endowed with greater coherence, economy, explanatory power — but also in part because it was new.”

"Pollock (2001a:11)"

"Pollock is incorrect. For most later scholars, too, ‘new’ signified ‘anti-traditional’, and it was usually employed as a term of reproach: Jagannātha, too, for that matter, did not intend to break with the past history of his discipline; we see that he employed his rigorous approach most energetically when combating what he saw as threats to the traditional approaches of poets.

"We see here that Sheldon Pollock starts from an a priori that Indian intellectual tradition considered “knowledge of every variety … fixed in its dimensions … [and] does not change or grow, but is frozen” and hence “there can be no conception of progress”. Innovations are thus “viewed, through the inverting lens of ideology, as renovation and recovery” of knowledge permanently fixed (Pollock 1985:515).

"But it must be understood that tradition in India, in Coomaraswamy’s words, “has nothing to do with any “ages”, whether “dark”, “primeval”, or otherwise... Tradition represents doctrines about first principles, which do not change; and traditional institutions represent the application of these principles in particular environments… metaphysics is not a system, but a consistent doctrine; it is not merely concerned with conditioned and quantitative experience, but with universal possibility…” (Lipsey 1987:37). Furthermore, it is unreasonable to view the absence of the idea of new as “progress” in India, as a sign of stagnation; after all, not always is success (as in modernity) the capacity to expand; success is also the capacity to endure. There is no law of chronic deficiency in human affairs mandating that societies, like cities, must always be under construction and never complete, that understandings of literary art, the structure of the moral order, or the organization of power can never achieve something like adequacy or even perfection for the social world concerned, but must be constantly rejected for something newer and better - the very slogan of modernity.

"If it were not for the commitment to finding differences, Pollock would see that it is far easier to see the continuity of the tradition than its divergence. In Coomaraswamy’s words, “The passionless reason of its “objective” scholarship, applied to the study of “what men have believed” is only a sort of frivolity, in which the real problem, that of knowing what should be believed, is evaded” (Coomaraswamy 1943:6). In practice, Indian knowledge systems’ capacity to assimilate variation is, in fact, its most salient feature. Broadly viewed, the tradition has retained, right up to modern times, a kind of non-coercive elasticity and expressive virtuosity that have been there all along — in a way, it is precisely this elegant mechanism of continuous cultural self-invention that has allowed it to stay strong in the face of the cultural invasion."

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"1.6 Newness of Intellect, Oldness of Will"

"In his defense, Pollock does, in fact, recognize the continuity of the tradition; only, he chooses to derogatorily call it an “oldness of will”. ... "

"In reaction to Pollock’s conjectures, Brian Hatcher asks aptly, “… in a rather unfortunate bit of metaphorics, Pollock evoked “newness of intellect constrained by an oldness of the will” – as if the appeal to a quasi-Augustinian anthropology could do justice to the complexity of the changes he was interested in highlighting… is there a theory here or just flip phraseology?” (Hatcher 2007:340)

"A more correct explanation of the phenomenon would be that, during the 14th-16th century C.E, the original sūtra-s and scholia had receded into the background — later texts had become a center for a mass of commentarial literature, a web of complicated meta-linguistic innovations in the search for ever greater precision and sophistication of definition and analysis. ... "

"A kind of reaction against the excesses of this scholasticism seems to have led the writers of the seventeenth century to seek fresher insights from the founts of the early sūtra literature. Another sign of this reaction was the production of manuals adapted to the understanding of the beginners – the Bhāṣā-pariccheda, Vedānta-paribhāṣā, etc are instances of this class of books which must have come as a relief to those students who were hitherto lost in the mazes of Pañca-lakṣaṇī and Advaita-siddhi.

"Now, if Pūrvamīmāṁsā teaches anything, it is to choose, in Śabara-svāmin’s words, the saṁnikṛṣṭārtha (nearer meaning) over the viprakṛṣṭārtha (remote meaning) in the interpretation of texts; and logically, this is the simplest and most reasonable explanation for the “increase in the production of independent treatises and of works that directly comment on ancient foundational (sūtra) texts while summarizing the entire earlier history of interpretation, and in the concomitant decrease in ever more deeply nested commentaries on commentaries on canonical works that had been a hallmark of the earlier schoolmen” (Pollock 2000:11).

"Furthermore, according to Pollock, Europe embraced the “newness” that emerged— this resulted in its modernity/progress; India, on the other hand, remained prude, and the “tension” between the old and the new eventually played the key role in Sanskrit’s downfall.

"It must be understood here that the production of Western modernity was a response to a set of very peculiar historical circumstances and institutions — none of which were known in India. There was no church to produce heresy, ex-communication and censorship or to provoke Reformation, Counter-Reformation and religious wars. There was no regime of conquest to promote foreign colonization, and no absolutist state to construct a repressive security apparatus. On the other hand, Sanskrit intellectuals were radically free.

"Writing about secularism, Michel Danino remarks,

"“Secularism was born to challenge theocracy in the Christian and Islamic worlds. In medieval Europe, political power was in almost every country held or at least controlled by one Church or another. It took nearly two centuries, the eighteenth and nineteenth, to curtail that power and establish a complete separation between Church and State—which is what secularism has meant in the West, as any good dictionary will tell us. In France, for instance, the Roman Catholic Church was virtually all-powerful until the French Revolution, and only a century later did it finally lose its control over education. Secularism meant keeping the Church away from political power and from education, it meant a polity free from Christian affiliation. Likewise, when Mustapha Kemal threw out the Sultan in Turkey and established a “secular republic” in 1923, it was because he had abolished the office of the Caliph of the Islamic world; “secularism” to him meant keeping Islam away from political power. This notion of secularism has no application in India, where theocracy never existed; how could it, in the absence of an organized Church or clergy? Even so conformist a historian as Vincent Smith noted that: “Hindooism has never produced an exclusive, dominant, orthodox sect, with a formula of faith to be professed or rejected under pain of damnation.”

"Danino (2005)"

"In short, it was the absence in India of the miseries of Europe’s peculiar circumstances and institutions that entailed the absence of Europe’s peculiar modernity. If the latter was a mark of freedom, of protest against medieval asceticism and ecclesiastical restraint, if it heralded an intellectual revitalization and thus stirred the universal mind and heart of Europe, in India, this song played not— simply because it was unnecessary. On the other hand, India always was what Europe has somewhat been since Renaissance – with no censorship, no excommunication, and no ecclesiastical restraint."

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"1.7 Vernacularisation"

"Sheldon Pollock has always expressed a keen interest in the problem of power — more specifically, “in the intermeshing of cultural (literary, scientific, ideological) production with the political domain” (Bronner & Shulman 2006:13). In his important work, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, he has written exhaustively on the process of “vernacularization” that, according to him, occurred between ca.1000 and 1500 CE.

"One must note here that on the one hand, Pollock insists that in the seventeenth century, an un-mendable cultural split (between Sanskrit and vernacular intellectual worlds) was already in place; yet, on the other hand, he writes that the Sanskrit world crumbled because it did not embrace the vernacularization.

"If he is to be believed, Sanskrit simply withered on the branch when “court intellectuals” decided to abandon the global language of Sanskrit and speak locally in their literary and political texts. Here, Shulman & Bronner’s work, A Cloud Turned Goose: Sanskrit in the Vernacular Millennium, is an interesting reference to observe — with the example of Vedānta Deśika’s Haṁsa Sandeśa, they argue that Sanskrit poetry played a critical — and highly original — role in the elaboration of regional cultural identities. Accordingly, Sanskrit, “serving as an available and localized medium in each and every region separately, participated along with the vernaculars in the project of inventing and elaborating distinctive regional cultures and identities. Far from occluding such regional distinctiveness or uniqueness, Sanskrit was now employed precisely to articulate it” (Bronner & Shulman 2006:6). In their words,

:“… Sanskrit still allows a poet to transcend his or her parochial context and reach out to a space shaped by a wider, inherited discourse. At the same time, Sanskrit enables a skilled poet to condense into the space of a single work— even a single verse — an entire world of specific associations, contents and meaning… It is clear, at least to me, that Sanskrit did not share Latin’s fate. Intense regionalization in the literary realm tended to go hand in hand with highly innovative “Sanskritization”, to use an old term— that is, continuous experimentation with both new forms of Sanskrit literary production and the canonical terms, categories and modes of Sanskrit-informed culture and theory more generally. There were, of course, tensions, rivalries, and all kinds of exotic combinations, many of them internal to the emerging vernaculars themselves; but far from contributing to the demise of Sanskrit as a powerful imaginative vehicle, these very tensions provide acute evidence of its continuous cultural vitality.”

"(Bronner & Shulman 2006:9)"

"In short, Bronner and Shulman dismiss the rumors of the death of Sanskrit after 1000 A.D. as “greatly exaggerated”. If Pollock would only write decisively — did or did not the vernaculars “replace” Sanskrit? — it would be easy to frame an argument, but as things stand, it is difficult to position him on exact co-ordinates."

................................................................................................

"Indian intellectual Traditions and the Colonial Encounter"

"For a decade now, Pollock has been writing on the theme of Sanskrit’s life and purported “death”, of one world “replacing” the other. Such dichotomized views, Brian Hatcher points out, are misleading and unhelpful: “Such language makes it sound as if what went on was a mechanical substitution than a complex convergence of norms and practices.” (Hatcher 2007:348). On the other hand, historians such as Hatcher or Bayly, approach the situation with “a question of cultural synthesis and transvaluation, than as the supplanting of one world by another”. Can we not, Hatcher asks, imagine the creation of a future scholarly study of India that might carry the title, “The Life of Sanskrit?”

"Interestingly, if Brian Hatcher chose the example of Īśvaracandra Vidyāsāgara to show a process of convergence of cultures, Pollock used the same example to substantiate his theory of divergence. Of Vidyāsāgara, Pollock wrote, “When he had something satirical, contemporary, critical to say as in his anti-colonial pamphlets, he said it not in Sanskrit but in Bengal.” (Pollock 2001a:22) This seems to presume an overly simplistic equation of intellectual life with the medium of expression. If anything, as Hatcher remarks, Vidyāsāgar’s pamphleteering (as indeed, all of his work), should caution us from rigid dichotomising.

"Sheldon Pollock is, unfortunately, committed with almost a scary fervor, to his theories — of an Indian Renaissance and its demise. Not surprisingly, then, it is difficult for him to recognize the contours of a tradition committed to continuity. If fabrication — the falsification/misrepresentation of data/information — in formal academic exercises is academic dishonesty, Sheldon Pollock, in his zeal, is guilty of several —

"1. Over-romanticism of the catch-phrase “navya”.

"2. Cherry-picking data to fit a theory, blatantly ignoring contradictory data (See “Upsurge in writing”, “Subjectivity”, Historicity”).

"3. Framework of disputable presumptives (See “Historicity”).

"4. Framework of foregone conclusions.

"5. Vacillating world-views according to suitablity (See “Vernacularity”, “Subjectivity”).

................................................................................................

"6. Conclusions without evidence6."

"A few questions automatically spring to mind: What does Sheldon Pollock hope to gain from this exercise? Does he wish to imply, through an idea of Indian Renaissance, a mental lethargy in its preceding centuries? Does he wish to demonstrate a “dark-middle-ages” in India? Also, does he wish to paint Muslim rule in India in bright fluorescent colors? If so, why? His intentions, insidious or otherwise, remain, at best, unclear."

Not at all. It's continuance of Macaulay policy of destroying India’s spirit and missionary efforts joining those of other conversionists to wipe out India’s own culture, replacing it with theirs, as was done to most of the ancient cultures of the world from Persia to Peru.

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"Footnotes"

"[ 2 ] The tradition that the same Patañjali wrote treatises on grammar, medicine and yoga is memorialized in a verse by Bhoja in his commentary on the Yoga-sūtra-s. Bhoja was perhaps influenced by a verse by Bhartṛhari that speaks of the genesis of the three śāstra-s in order to rid one of impurities at the levels of the body, the speech, and the mind viz. cikitsā (medicine), lakṣaṇa (grammar), and adhyātma (spirituality). (Vākyapadīya 1.146). Bhoja’s verse reads thus:

"yogena cittasya padena vācāṁ

"malaṁ śarīrasya ca vaidyakena |

"yo’pākarot taṁ pravaraṁ munīnāṁ

"patañjaliṁ prāñjalir ānato’smi ||

"[ 6 ] Nowhere, for example, is an iota of proof given to substantiate the relation between Muslim rule and Sanskrit “rejuvenation”.

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March 03, 2022 - March 03, 2022.

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"Our Contributors"

(in alphabetical order of last names)

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"Vrinda Acharya"

"Vrinda Acharya is an M.Com degree holder, an M.A. in Sanskrit and has completed Vidwat in Carnatic Classical Music. She is a full time professional Carnatic vocalist and musicologist of repute, and has received several awards, and performed across India and abroad. She has presented papers in national and international conferences on music and the Vedic heritage. She has given lectures on Indian Music in some universities in the US and is a recipient of research fellowship from Karnataka State Government. She has worked earlier for several years as a commerce faculty in reputed colleges and business schools in Bangalore.

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"Manjushree Hegde"

"Manjushree Hegde is a researcher of Indology with a swadeshi perspective. She is currently employed as Assistant Professor at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham in Coimbatore. She has completed her M.A. in Sanskrit from KSOU, Mysuru. She is a Mechanical Engineer from PESIT, Bengaluru by training, but finds herself more at home working with Sanskrit texts. She has studied Vyākaraṇa under Dr. Pushpa Dixit in Bilaspur, Chattisgarh, and has pursued Vedānta studies under Vidwan Ashwathnarayana Avadhani at Mattur, Karnataka. She has also been designated as Infinity Foundation India Research Fellow subsequent to her presentation at the first edition of the Swadeshi Indology Conference Series in July 2016.

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"Sowmya Krishnapur"

"Dr. Sowmya Krishnapur was a UGC Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Sanskrit, University of Madras. She has a PhD in the area of Sanskrit Grammar. After acquiring an M.S. in Biochemistry from Central College, Bengaluru, she did the Acharya (M.A.) degree at Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, Sringeri. She has worked as Senior Computational Linguist and Subject Matter Expert at Vyoma Linguistic Labs Foundation, Bengaluru, for the production of several multimedia resources for Sanskrit learning. She has also presented and published several papers, notably one on Vyakarana at the 16th World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok in 2015.

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"Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay"

"Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay is an independent management consultant associated with education and agriculture sector, with a keen interest in Indian history from a civilizational perspective, Hindu science and technology, and also Tantra Śāstra. He is an MBA in Finance with a B.Tech in Computer Engineering. He is currently pursuing an Advanced Sanskrit course from Ramakrishna Mission, Kolkata, and is presently developing a rule-based Bengali to Sanskrit translation software, which could potentially speed up translation projects and contribute to the production of new Sanskrit works.

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"T. N. Sudarshan"

"Therani Nadathur Sudarshan is a computer scientist, programmer and hands-on technologist / engineer, startup founder, entrepreneur and technology consultant. He is deeply interested in discovering the immense “practicality” of the Indian Knowledge Systems. His primary research interests lie in Symbol Systems for representation and intelligence-spanning man-made material systems (AI), naturally occurring systems (biological) and the Indic symbol systems. Sampradāya studies (viśisṭādvaita) and practices are part of his upbringing, and immensely influence all his activities. He is also an active participant in the vibrant temple culture /events at many Vishnu temples in Tamil Nadu.

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"K. Surya"

"Surya completed his B.Tech from IIT Madras, and his graduate studies in the US. He is currently settled in the US in a professional career. He is a member of Indian History Awareness & Research (IHAR), an initiative of Arsha Vidya Satsanga. He also volunteers for North South Foundation (NSF) to raise money for scholarships for poor students in India.

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"Rajath Vasudevamurthy"

"Dr. Rajath Vasudevamurthy is an Assistant Professor at Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Bengaluru campus, in the ECE department. He has a PhD from the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, IISc (Indian Institute of Science), Bengaluru, and is a Post Doc from The Pennsylvania State University, State College, USA. He is a keen student of Saṁskṛta and Vedānta, and actively involves himself in related learning and propagation activities."

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March 03, 2022 - March 03, 2022.

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Reviews - Books I Read - DRJG

Thursday, March 3, 2022

ŚĀSTRA-S THROUGH THE LENS OF WESTERN INDOLOGY: A Response (Reclaiming Sanskrit Studies Book 2) by K.S. Kannan, Sowmya Krishnapur, Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay, Surya K, Vrinda Acharya K, Rajath Vasudevamurthy, Sudarshan T N, Manjushree Hegde.

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