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Reclaiming Sanskrit Studies - 5
SWADESHI CRITIQUE OF VIDESHI MĪMĀṀSĀ
(Proceedings of the Swadeshi Indology Conference Series)
Selected Papers from the Conferences
(held in July 2016 (Chennai) & February 2017 (Delhi))
Edited by:
Dr. K.S. Kannan, Chair Professor, IIT-Madras, Chennai. and
Dr. H.R. Meera.
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Most of the work, except the last paper attacking science and mathematics, are good.
These two authors of that paper, and another author who similarly attacked mathematics in another Swadeshi Indology Conference, are misguided heavily.
"“One of the projects which Feyerabend worked on for a long time, but never really brought to completion, went under the name “The Rise of Western Rationalism”. Under this umbrella he hoped to show that Reason (with a capital “R”) and Science had displaced the binding principles of previous world-views not as the result of having won an argument, but as the result of power-play. Even nowadays, indigenous cultures and counter-cultural practices provide alternatives to Reason and that nasty Western science."
"(Preston 2016) (italics ours)"
Do the authors realise that Preston is probably pro-flatearth and pro-creationism, even possibly sponsored by church?
Science won, not against India, but against church. As for India, science has been win-win - apart from liberating India's aspiring minds, it also validated at least two large pieces of ancient knowledge possessed by India.
India knew about evolution - think Dashaavatara, think various species coexisting and conversing in Ramayana. And India knew about Himalayan ranges rising from the ocean .
There was nothing binding world views before logic and reason prevailed in Renaissance and science flourished.
Authors, in seeking to portray a duel between science, logic, mind, reason versus India, are completely wrong.
"The Science of Śāstra
"We shall in brief attempt to understand the science of śāstra. Science as defined in the West requires foundational concepts that can be observed, measured and related with each other (for example, mass, gravity etc.). It requires theories that explain and predict interactions between these foundational concepts. ... "
So far, so good. But -
" ... Empiricism plays the fringe role of validating these theories via experimentation."
Completely incorrect.
This is so atrocious incorrect, one wishes authors had a member of IISC or TIFR read and correct this paper before publication, to avoid West ridicule India by inducing that this garbage is what India believes.
What authors forget is the following.
Outside India it's a caste system that (unlike Indian caste system), puts power and wealth at the top, regardless of means of achievement thereof, not intellectual superiority or learning, much less that of spiritual realm.
So none of these arguments attempting to justify Indian thought are going to have any response other than ridicule, if any notice is taken at all, and disdain on the whole, unless and until India regains her wealth and has power to protect it over time in future, sustained over time and seen as such.
Authors could compare treatment meted to China versus that to India, or treatment of Muslims versus Hindus by West, and realise that, while there are other components such as racism and affinity of Abrahamic-II with Abrahamic-III, first and foremost it's about power.
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"“I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts.”
"– Virgil"
"“That meddling in other people’s affairs... is now openly advocated under the name of intervention”
"– T S Eliot"
"“Civilised men arrive in the Pacific armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible.”"
"– Havelock Ellis"
“O What a tangled web we weave
"When first we practise to deceive!
"But when we’ve practised for a while
"How vastly we improve our style!!”
"– Walter Scott"
"“But Lord! To see the absurd nature of Englishmen that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange.”
"- Samuel Pepys"
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"The Logic of Science
"Scientific Reasoning in the 17th century was powered by the evolution of Empiricism and more importantly Logical empiricism as science and math co-evolved. As indicated earlier, theory development was given precedence (involving the use of proofs) followed by possible experimental validation, which is what is practised to date. As theory building became more important, it was important to bound the theory development using proof-based logical systems. Proof-based mathematics and its use in understanding the empirical world has led to a number of conceptual bottlenecks which are still being resolved."
Much of that is confused, but here's a fact. Experiments matter as evidence or proof, in sciences; in mathematics, which is science of concepts, examples merely serve to help comprehend but that's all. One could compute for a million years and a proposed theorem may fail at the next example, which is no good.
What's wrong with this attack against science is that it's not only on false grounds but completely unnecessary. India is doing well in science and mathematics, despite racism of West. More to the point, Pollock using name of science fraudulently is just that, fraud. And authors needed to see where his attacks against India originate. It's not science.
"So, how did this flawed understanding of logic actually come about and how did it assume the status of (hegemonic?) Universal “truth”? Again, we see a similar pattern of events – Greek beginnings, church modulates and post-renaissance – it becomes hegemony."
Again, nonsense.
British did not "impose" science or mathematics, and church related school curriculum lags behind in those areas. Observe what Arnav Goswamy calls 'Lutyens' society; humanities predominate, as they do at JNU and power corridors. Macaulay did not promote, much less impose, science and mathematics; they i tended making brown copies of the rulers for lower rungs of administration. Eventually those copies aspired to higher rungs.
Indians who took to mathematics and science and schools that taught them were Desi and remained so. Think Basu, Ramanujan, C.V.Raman, or any of the great scientists. No one from Doon school or close, rare examples from convents only because their deeply traditional Hindu homes helped them survive the schools.
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"Sheldon Pollock’s contribution to this volume was a paper (“Deep Orientalism”) in which he demonstrates the newly minted version of his philology. Using creative techniques and spectacularly speculative theories based on philological readings of Sanskrit texts, Pollock was able to (supposedly) reason that the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis to the pre-existing deep hatred and divisiveness present in Sanskrit (as a language). The thesis is that the study of Sanskrit by German Indologists affected their deep subconscious, creating ideas of Aryanism and justification for a sense of superiority."
He's lying, of course.
One, nazis were, like all West and all followers of later Abrahamic religions, antisemitism was institutionalised for nearly two millennia after the Roman occupation and subjection of Jewish lands and people, with propaganda of hatred carried out from pulpits definitely every year, if not every week; this agenda of hatred has now been extended (rather than transferred), to India, to Hinduism and to Brahmins, and to Sanskrit, for the same reasons it existed in years first place - an intense intolerance by later Abrahamic religions of any independent thinking, exceeded only by a viciousness towards knowledge and superior learnings. This is what is reflected in every argument by Pollock and Co against Hinduism and India.
Two, if someone is incapable of reading ancient history truthfully, they could reflect on the fact that the first resolution that was passed by the Knesset of Israel was to thank India for never persecuting Jewish refugees in India, for the two millennia when Rome had enforced their exodus from their homeland; India was the only ancient culture to have allowed Jewish people to have lived like others in India, while retaining their separate identity of faith.
So Pollock is lying, deeply. He might as well claim it was Pythagoras theorem that influenced nazis, because it's equally false, as blame Sanskrit or India or Hinduism.
As for castes, Europe had them as did every other society including Arabia, and they were ironcast, far worse than India, and equating India with caste system is another lie. The only difference is that castes elsewhere were based on race, tribe, gender, power and landed property, manifesting in titles from royalty down to peasantry; in India, it was differently structured, with power and wealth not only separated but also not at top.
"Pollock thus uses his critical philological study of Sanskrit and Indian texts as a response to Said’s critique in Orientalism - by characterizing Sanskrit itself as a carrier of the deep seeds of racism, hatred and power, and calling it “Deep Orientalism”. Sheldon Pollock’s philology is characterized (as seen earlier in the history of philology, this is nothing new) by political readings and fairly imaginative speculation, keeping alive the hegemonic discourse of Orientalism in the post-colonial era. H.H Devamrita Swami of the ISKCON notes in his review of Malhotra (2016)"
Next he'd claim that crucifixion wasn't European racism against Asians who were neighbour's, but only because Pontius Pilate was a fan of Sanskrit Grammer.
Pollock is just THAT ridiculous a lier.
"“A salient point this book offers us is that the Western approach to Sanskrit is often weighed down by “political philology”—cultural biases, hegemonic filters.”
"(Malhotra 2016:Review page)"
"Sheldon Pollock’s wide-ranging work on Sanskrit and Indian civilizational history over the past 30 years has been characterized by deep political readings into India’s past and of its cultural artifacts - primarily the language of the Sanskrit and the associated texts of sanātana dharma. His own understanding of traditional Sanskrit text scholarship is colored, and according to him Sanskrit philology was mostly tied to practices of power. See Malhotra (2016:232) for details."
Actually Pollock seems to take every horrible thing perpetrated by US, West, Rome et al, and twisted it to impose it on ancient India, not caring about reason, logic or facts in the process - just as church did in propagating antisemitism.
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"This volume, being the fifth in the Proceedings of the Swadeshi Indology Conference Series, deals with various issues. This is somewhat in contrast with the previous volumes which had major single issues. Issues pertaining to Mīmāṁsā and desacralisation form the bulk here. While four papers pertain to the discipline of Mīmāṁsā, two pertain to the problem of desacralisation. Three miscellaneous papers — on Philology, the Rāmāyaṇa, and the śāstra-s also figure here. Over half a dozen authors, ranging from the very old to the very young, have contributed the papers. One of the papers is in Sanskrit (as in the previous volume), and one in Hindi. An overview of the papers is desirable in this prefatory portion. (For the Hindi and Sanskrit papers, brief overviews are provided in Hindi and Sanskrit respectively as well)."
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"Influences on Pollockian Philology
"In his 2009 paper, Pollock speculates on the future of philology. He offers his own definition/s of what philology is and what it should be
"“Most people today, including some I cite in what follows, think of philology either as close reading (the literary critics) or historical-grammatical and textual criticism (the self-described philologists).
"What I offer instead as a rough-and-ready working definition at the same time embodies a kind of program, even a challenge: philology is, or should be, the discipline of making sense of texts. 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) (italics ours)"
In short, it's Pollockian nazi tool of twisting anything to blame it on anyone.
"Opening the doors for free-for-all speculative academic scholarship based on this application of Vico’s categories to Sanskrit terminologies (glaringly out-of-context), Pollock adds
"“… the philologist’s truth, balancing in a critical consilience the historicity of the text and its reception, adds the crucial dimension of the philologist’s own historicity.”
"(Pollock 2009:951)
In other words, Pollock declared thereby his intentions to lie his head off accusing India of anything he either, as long as he stayed verbose most of the time.
"Neo-Orientalists led by Pollock have invented newer versions such as Political Philology and Liberation Philology. After Edward Said’s critique on Western anthropological and social science scholarship, the study of the East had to be reinvented with new methods, and Pollock came out with a new mint of Philology, based on spectacularly speculative theories: it was the study of Sanskrit that affected the subconscious of German Indologists, and the Holocaust can in fine be traced to the divisiveness and hatred that Sanskrit spells, which he labels “Deep Orientalism”, laden with his own cultural biases and hegemonic filters. The roots of Pollock’s Philology can be seen in Giambattista Vico, the father of modern social science, for whom human truth is like a painting, which can persuade us through the most evident falsehoods that she is pure Truth."
"Westerners regularly used Buddhism as a wedge against Hinduism, and the neo-Orientalists use the Mughals as a wedge against Hinduism, so as ultimately to lead to an admiration of the Greek – exactly as per the essentially Euro-centric agenda of the West. The Pollockian programme of linking Sanskrit or Mīmāṁsā to Nazism is only to pave the way in effect for tracing all ills of the West to some definite or indefinite Indic roots."
" ... Pollockian grasp or interpretation of the Rāmāyaṇa is utterly inapposite. The Rāmāyaṇa continues to be a source of inspiration to Indians, and many others, to this day: we have television serials and cinemas, music and dance performances, present continuous, on Rāmāyaṇa themes. Rām-līlā continues to spellbind massive audiences. As Edward Said says well, in effect, a European or American studying the Orient is a European or American first, an individual next.
"In neither role he, as an outsider, would understand, much less feel, what a Hindu understands or feels when the name of Lord Rāma is uttered, when Rām-līlā is enacted; or even what happens prior to Rām-līlā, or after it.
"For Pollock, the Rāmāyaṇa demonises non-Hindus in its language, story, and characterisation, and its revival results in violence (what else), against Muslims in particular (oh who else!). The plot of the Rāmāyaṇa is linked to power structures (what is not to him linked to that, by the way?). This degenerate desacralisation, a major flaw in Pollock’s methodology, stands out as horror unadulterated."
Has he been known to protest against antisemitism by church practised for most of two millennia, definitely since after Nicea? How, exactly? Did he publish a denunciation? Demand church cease in racism in general and antisemitism in particular? Has he tried hunger strike until they apologise?
Just saying.
He could have tried known facts instead of spinning lies about the only culture that did not persecute Jewish refugees, who survived and flourishing for centuries in India. It was the first resolution that the Knesset of Israel passed, to thank India.
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"Indologists routinely invoke one or more of the six traditionally recognized darśana-s in their quest to discover factors that positively or negatively influenced the ancient Indians in their attitudes towards life, their psyche, and socio-cultural ethos. Pollock selected the Pūrva Mīmāṁsā darśana, which he describes as ‘a pedagogically and thus culturally normative discipline of Brahmanical learning’ as a tool to gain insights into the status of history in ancient India (Pollock 1989:607). The burden of his thesis is that the Pūrva Mīmāṁsā darśana (hereafter Mīmāṁsā) successfully mediated the transformation of the ritual discourse into a discourse of social power to sustain the relations of domination constitutive of traditional Indian society, which are characterized by the systematic exclusion from property, power, and status of three-quarters of the population for more than two millennia (Pollock 1990:316).?
But do they deliberately forget, never noticed, that for most part, Brahmins were poor? Or are they all merely lying, as a necessary part of following Macaulay policy of breaking the spirit and the spine of India?
"Pollock’s next logical step is to hold the Mīmāṁsā system responsible for emptying the Vedic canon of all historical consciousness as well as historical referential intention in India. The result was all other sorts of Sanskrit intellectual practices seeking to validate their truth-claims by their affinity to the Veda had perforce to conform to this new, special model of what counts as knowledge, and so to suppress or deny the evidence of their own historical existence. Such suppression took place even in the case of the discipline of Itihāsa, ‘history’ (Pollock 1989:609). Subsequently, virtually all Brahmanical learning in classical and medieval India came to view itself in one way or another as genetically linked to the Veda - a process, which Pollock calls ‘vedicization’ (Pollock 1989:609).2"
Pollock is imposing European, specifically church of Rome, model on India. He's a cad in his choice of a harassed, targeted and victimised over more than a millennium, selfless community that kept the rich knowledge of ancient India alive, while he's not lifted a finger to point at the barbarian invaders who committed genocides for the centuries over the last more than a millennium, plundered treasures, burned libraries, massacred scholars by thousands at universities and took people into delivery by hundreds of thousands, so they died as they were forced to march across passes leading out of India, thus changing name of Hindu Koh to Hindu Kush.
"History, concludes Pollock, is not simply absent from or unknown to Sanskritic culture; it is denied in favor of a model of truth that accorded history no epistemological value or social significance. Sanskritic culture lacks historical referentiality. There is not even a single passing reference to a historical person, place, or event. There is nothing in the ancient Sanskrit texts that, historically-s!lack of historicality} speaking matters, declares Pollock brazenly (Pollock 1989:606).3"
If he were man enough to swear it on bible, against his earnings, positions and reputation, and prosperity of all those against India including West, that could be considered honest opinion, however wrong.
"Standing on Pollock’s shoulders another scholar goes one up on him:
"“Mīmāṁsā scholarship [is] utterly irresponsible by any post-structuralist standards of cultural sensitivity, and could well be impeached as an epistemically violent enterprise, in that it effectively erases the worldview of the Vedic and Brahminical literature by reinscribing on it the presuppositions of classical sastric discourse. Mimamsa is not a hermeneutical enterprise, as scholars such as Othmar Gätcher [Hermeneutics and Language in Pūrva Mīmāṁsā: A Study in Śābara Bhāṣya. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983] would have it… No responsible historian could claim that Kumarila understood the Vedas any better than Friedrich Max Muller who valorized the poetic essence of the Rg Veda while infamously denouncing its mythological excursions as a “disease of language."
"(Fisher 2008:8-9)"
Fischer would be equally valid proposing that all children should be auctioned at birth, since no claims of DNA were of any relevance in matters of bringing up. Would he dare you propose this? No, his voltage is limited to that of a hyena, taking bites out of a wounded target attempting to get up with a bit of a respite.
"Uttarapakṣa
"In his The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India Pollock acknowledges that there is a natural tendency in social and cultural theory to generalize Western experience and familiar forms of life and experience as scientific descriptions, and as modes of understanding life tendencies across cultures (Pollock 2006:259; 19). Elsewhere in the same book he grants that one of the most serious conceptual impediments in understanding South Asian culture comes from the fact that tools deployed to understand it are shaped by ‘Western exemplars’ (Pollock 2006:274). A closer examination of Pollock’s various writings on history and culture in India, however, suggests that wittingly or unwittingly he reproduces in his writings some of the very same Eurocentric formulations of the writing of history and modernity that he claims are not applicable to the situation in India.4"
And there's proof that Fischer is wrong.
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"The perspectives that are allowed by the introduction of the construct of a configuration of learning are exceedingly illuminating. Any society governed by the book requires theorization as essential basis for any sort of knowledge. The “written” has supremacy over experience and empirical proof. Western science at its core is a religion. Most of the “fundamental” learning is theoretical; all of mathematics is theoretical and axiomatically biased (assumptions of the nature of logic and inference are peculiar to the West). The theories of science too are of similar nature. Technology, driven by the materialistic and consumptive nature of capitalism, ignores most of the “biased basics” which govern science and mathematics. Its role is of an “applied” nature, limited to manipulating in the best possible manner (profit motives of capitalism) some principles (however incorrect) derived from theoretical science. Technology does not promise or guarantee perfection or universal correctness, but performs within well-defined limits. The relentless cycles of consumption and waste that drive capitalism also drive the ever improving (but forever imperfect) cycles of technology.
Most of that is true except about mathematics, and for that matter, about theoretical sciences. None of those are top down, they are merely taught that way, chiefly in what's called third world, including India. Feynman saw it in Brazil.
"The dhārmic nature of knowledge and learning is of a fundamentally different nature. How? It is about understanding and acknowledging the complete nature of reality (and the limited nature of human senses). Techniques and practices developed by Vedic masters over millennia to help understand the dimensions of reality (in the dhārmic systems, consciousness is the fundamental reality, not materialism) require, as a result, a learning culture that is experiential having a practical — not theoretical — basis."
If only this and other authors of Swadeshi Indology Conference realise it, what he describes above isn't different from science, particularly mathematics. Learning of theory is merely cutting short a journey of the few centuries by hundreds of others, but one certainly can in science have a choice of going through it all. In yoga, too, one may read, or experience, or both. But the latter is necessary while former helps. And as for consciousness, mathematics is science thereof on plane of mind.
"Implications
"From a dhārmic perspective, the essential nature of the human as conceived by the West is very limited. The understanding of the complete nature of reality is also limited. The structure of learning that underlies the West is theoretical in its essential nature. The peculiarity of the (Western, Christian) assumptions that underlie Western Mathematics and Science is well known. ... :
It's unclear exactly where the author faults science, which is building knowledge from lowest level of sensory experiences up via reason and logic, so anyone can access it, while the knowledge of inner and universal nature from Dharma is received, albeit via possibly yogic practices but not inevitably do, from above.
The connection of science with religion of West is more in attitudes and mindsets of West that, generally brought up in church teachings, is unable to get rid of the early bringing up, no matter how much taught and learned in reason or logic. This does not underpin the structure of science and mathematics as much so sticking to frames of history rooted in bible, or inability to get over biblical misogyny and see it got what it really represents, which is no more than justification of colonisations and slavery that was once assumed.
" ... The material artifacts that signify the superiority of the Western worldview in recent centuries (mostly driven by need for conquest and plunder) is the primary reason that the dominant discourse today is Western in nature. ... "
It's completely unclear what's meant by that; is it cars and airplanes and other modern life articles of usage, which usually aren't referred to as artifacts, or does the author here refer to artifacts such as temple drives and Egyptian mummies, acquired due to colonisations, and kept in museums?
" ... The academic structures of the West lie at the forefront of this conquest. The role of the neo-Orientalists is critical for continuing the Western-universalist world-view. ... "
Now it's completely unclear which conquest is meant here - if colonial conquest, then academic structures had nothing to do with it; and if author means dominance in academia and world-wide discussions, then yes, colonial conquests were responsible for cultural dominance by invaders, and attempts to wipe out existing vultures, including their academia and faiths.
" ... India's core dhārmic structure has been under theoretical onslaught since the inception of Indology. Even after centuries of European colonization, the dhārmic structures have not succumbed to these frontal attacks. ... "
This was unique in world history, compared to other cultures that fell before onslaughts of Abrahamic-II, Abrahamic-III and Abrahamic-IV in less than a century, while India not only survived for well over twelve centuries of attempts that combined horror of burnings of libraries, destruction of temples, and enslavement of hundreds of thousands, but a sustained genocidal Holocaust over twelve centuries, denied by the said onslaughts of Abrahamic-II and Abrahamic-III; Abrahamic-IV has now joined the other Teo in denial of Indian culture in an attempt to finally wipe it off, so Indian treasures join those of Egypt and Persia, Peru and Mexico.
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" ... As Sri Aurobindo writes (Sri Aurobindo 1997:56),
"“India’s central conception is that of the Eternal, the Spirit here incased in matter, involved and immanent in it and evolving on the material plane by rebirth of the individual up the scale of being till in mental man it enters the world of ideas and realm of conscious morality, dharma. This achievement, this victory over unconscious matter develops its lines, enlarges its scope, elevates its levels until the increasing manifestation of the sattwic or spiritual portion of the vehicle of mind enables the individual mental being in man to identify himself with the pure spiritual consciousness beyond Mind. India’s social system is built upon this conception; her philosophy formulates it; her religion is an aspiration to the spiritual consciousness and its fruits; her art and literature have the same upward look; her whole dharma or law of being is founded upon it.”"
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"If Pollock’s predecessors sought to Europeanise and thoroughly colonise the very character of India, Pollock himself seems determined to give us a version of our story that is cleansed of native, formative elements, separated as far away as possible from intuitive, instinctive features of our distinct culture and is replete with influences of the ‘good’ Outsider. One wonders if his learning of Sanskrit has no other purpose except to facilitate this irresponsible theorization."
Well, he probably thought it was an easy route to career and position, fame and more, imagining a "native", "Indian" language to offer an easy conquest - and not bring intelligent enough to do science, failed at grasping Sanskrit, obviously, so is taking his frustration out by invective pejorative dressed up in verbosity.
"In his 2006 book The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, Pollock presents a picture of contrast between the use of Sanskrit in ancient India before and after the Common Era, separated by events purported to have occurred around the onset of the new millennium. His portrayal of ancient India is one that is boilerplate, charged with Brahmanical oppression and ritualization. He is determined in depicting Sanskrit as a language which had no worldly use apart from the sacerdotal, an especially absurd and unbelievable charge, considering the sheer range of work that exists in matters apart from sacred material from the period.
"“Sanskrit probably never functioned as an everyday medium of communication anywhere in the cosmopolis — not in South Asia itself, let alone Southeast Asia — nor was it ever used (except among the literati) as a bridge- or link- or trade language like other cosmopolitan codes such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Chinese. And aside from the inscriptions, which have larger purposes, there is little evidence that it was ever used as the language of practical rule; tasks such as chancery communication or revenue accounting seem to have been accomplished,”
"(Pollock 2006:14)."
He's clearly taking his own frustration due to failure, at everything including Sanskrit, out with venomous verbose attempt to butcher India, with lies, as per Macaulay policy.
"Insisting that grammar was a tool of this hegemony, Pollock is very clear in establishing a temporal gulf between the use of Sanskrit for sacerdotal elements alone during BCE and for worldly affairs during the advent of the first millennium CE, even as he implicitly locates its origins outside India. The conception of a unity and ancient India’s philosophy, religion, arts and sciences and aspects of Life emerging from her chief pursuit of the Spirit is not even given a passing thought and thusly, Pollock creates a very bizarre picture of India’s past, where her chief pursuits for millennia seem to be exclusively limited to the religious and ritualistic. ... "
This is unbelievably bizarre, until one recalls Ignatius Donnelly and his worjs on Atlantis and Ragnarok, where he repeatedly avows impossibility of Arkansas yo have lived in, much essential originated in, India, which he describes as hot and impossible to think in; in particular he asserts that therefore, a perfect language that Sanskrit is, couldn't possibly have originated in India.
Sydney Pollock could be his own grandson, the way writes his bizarre declarations about Sanskrit, and must have inherited the sane racist worldview whereby the so-called "white" males are ascribed with every virtue without any evidence except that of ability to invade and steal as a race. So he declares Sanskrit as couldn't be of use, etc, because he can't.
And that bit about origin outside India is clearly an effort to reestablish Aryan invasion theory, which was about justification of invaders looting India, by a lie about Arya having invaded.
But Pollock's theory is clearly modelled on the history of Europeans invading and colonising other continents including India, and missionaries collaboration in forcing English language while they wipe out other faiths and teach natives to disregard their local knowledge and become copies of the missionaries; Pollock is doing a copybook fill in colors where the original model of European invaders is repainted with India and Sanskrit substituted for Europe and languages of Europe.
And, needless to say, it's as much a whopper as the original, the Aryan invasion theory.
" ... This intentional colouring with the sacred alone of India in BCE goes in tandem with Brahmanical oppression and excessive ritualization and its significance becomes apparent when Pollock uses this backdrop to focus on the non-sacred, liberating role of kāvya during the CE. Thus, in Pollock’s work, it is never the co-existence of both, and percase sway of one over the other, but a clear absence of kāvya in the earlier parts of BCE."
Here Pollock is copying the other model, that of rebellion against church post centuries of inquisition enforced repression, during and after Renaissance.
Pollock is too lazy to look for reality and understand it, and instead prefers to cast a Do Bigha Zamin as a How The West Was Won, and repaint a Vivekananda as a Custer. He's that ridiculous.
"As one wonders how such a divide is possible in light of the composition of the epics and other luminous material including various śāstra-s composed during the BCE period, Pollock renders a story where he considers the pāramārthika sat and vyāvahārika sat, chooses to focus – on the latter with a near complete disconnect between the two to the point of not admitting any influence of the former on the latter, while comparing them to Vico’s concepts (Pollock 2006:2). With his interpretation that literature and non-literature were acutely separated from each other, Pollock mounts a case for treating literature and kāvya as that which represented a clear break from the older order and heralded the beginning of the use of Sanskrit for worldly matters (Pollock 2006:5)"
And, presumably, he sees only spiritual aspects in the great epics?
"“A sharp distinction between literature and non-literature was both discursively and practically constructed by those who made, heard, and read texts in premodern South Asia, and it is with that construction — out of a methodological commitment to vyāvahārika sat, to taking seriously what they took seriously — that a history of their culture and power must begin.”
As complete and verbose a piece of nonsensical a lie as it could possibly get.
"Not only is this idea manifestly ill-founded and wrong but, in Pollock’s work, sets the ball rolling for ascribing to kāvya!and praśasti, features that enabled to exaggeratedly desacralize Sanskrit during the last centuries of BCE, and give him the platform to propound the Cosmopolis theory. His theorization is based on flimsy grounds as kāvya is not as divorced from Veda-s} as Pollock would have one believe, though his peremptory tone is ever present (Pollock 2006:81)
"“Inscriptions, testimonia, citations in literature, philology, the history of literary theory—every piece of evidence hard and soft thus requires locating the origins of kāvya in the very last centuries B.C.E., perhaps as much as a millennium after the Sanskrit language is believed to have first appeared in the subcontinent. Only an ideology of antiquity and the cultural distinction conferred by sheer age have induced scholars to move them back appreciably before this date—a move that requires conjecture every step of the way and the most fragile gossamer of relative dating.”"
What drivel! A millennium after Sanskrit first appeared in India, India witnessed an ocean to the northeast and north vanish as Himalayan ranges began to rise out of the vanishing ocean, unless it was several millennia after Sanskrit appeared in India - but not from elsewhere!
He mentions, however, not about when Sanskrit appeared in India, but "a millennium after the Sanskrit language is believed to have first appeared in the subcontinent", taking care to not say India, and using the bit about believed to cover up the lie that Aryan migration is.
Well, people who believe in a mother being a virgin immediately aftera natural childbirth with "virgo intacta" as proven by examination conducted by several shepherd wives, will believe any lie told by authorities.
"“The very act of permitting Sanskrit to speak openly in the everyday world was itself a decision (on the part of the Śakas among others) made against the backdrop of centuries of its public silence.”
"(Pollock 2006:499)"
Drivel.
Why couldn't he limit himself to history of slavery in US and any parts his family played therein?
"“Even as poets eventually decided to shatter this seclusion and produce expressive and other non-sacral texts in Sanskrit and, equally important, to commit them to writing, participants in many other areas of Sanskrit culture reasserted archaic practices of orality and exclusivity. It is especially when juxtaposed to such conceptions, moreover, that the first public inscription of political poetry in Sanskrit recovers the element of audacity, even scandalousness that made history. The cultural political act of the Śaka prince Rudradāman in the middle of the second century — which, if not actually inaugurating a new communications model, at the very least affirmed its acceptability and perceived efficacy in dramatic fashion — must accordingly be seen, like all the others, as a choice.”
"(Pollock 2006:500)"
Doesn't occur to the idiot that he's inventing the said exclusivity, or foes he knew he's lying?
Valmiki must have had the ability to write dialogues of various characters, from Kaikeyi to Shabarie to Vanaras to Ravana, in at least another dialect if not the several others employed, if that were the case? He, after all, wasn't a born and brought up Sanskrit pandit, unless everyone did those days speak Sanskrit. And his work certainly does not lack colour, of characters, geography, politics, even more!
No, Pollock is modelling india on his experience in his own time and space, US where speakers of other languages form a substrata of first generation immigrants and such, and he's turning that only delighted inside out - from everyone forced in US now to use only English in public, to his imagination where only elite were once allowed to speak Sanskrit!
"It is incredible that the writer is so self-assured that he’s able to remark upon the Śaka-s' “decision” of “permitting Sanskrit” to be spoken openly, against false claims of “centuries of its public silence,” and it becoming a representation of “the first public inscription of political poetry in Sanskrit recovers the element of audacity, even scandalousness, that made history,” all remarks that have such a strong tone to them, which is characteristically absent when Pollock adopts a language replete with “perhaps" and “maybe" and “suppose" while defining his data set. One can look hard in Pollock’s labyrinthine work trying to find solid, unassailable facts that can naturally lead one to his conclusions but come up with almost nothing."
Here's one - if stone inscriptions including tombstones are the only proof of historicity, and manuscripts the only evidences, what does it say about church and their claims about the king of Jews whom they have enforced exclusive worship of, and about the mother they vlaim was a virgin immediately after childbirth as proven by examination by shepherds' wives, that there are no such inscriptions in stone to be found nor tombstones of either, nor manuscripts that confirm the church version, but only other gospels preserved despite suppression by church - then and now - which completely contradict the story concocted by church, and these gospels aren't even contemporary of those people but only of other gospels, written decades if not a couple of centuries post the events?
And yet Pollock dare not question lies by church, but proceeds to copy and lie about India’s history instead, which is cowardly, not manly.
"Several Western Indologists have certainly held Sanskrit to be the chief vehicle for sacred purposes in the ancient past, but, there has been study of the use of the language for several vyāvahārika disciplines as well, including the arts and sciences. But, none of this feature in Pollock’s scheme as non-sacral fields except the kāvya, to which Pollock attributes the role of a great liberator. In trying to explain his dismissal of existing theories in favour of his incongruous models, Pollock casts aside ideas from modern social theories, legitimation and functionalism, all the while betraying his clear motive and intent to globalize Sanskrit."
How haven't these people grasped the safest bet, which is, Pollock isn't good at Sanskrit, his reading is limited, and therefore his assertions aren't wide based naturally? He's universaliding his own limitations, much like a blind person claiming that an elephant is like a snake and nothing else.
"In trying to justify his ictus on writing as characterizing the non-sacral nature of Sanskrit while he holds oral transmission as typical of the sacred old order, Pollock brings in the ideas of Niklas Luhmann to see how “cultural change and ideational change” is steered by technology, such as printing for instance. Pollock considers writing and the manuscript culture in context of ‘communication dissemination’ and sees it as propelling the spread of kāvya, (Pollock 2006:498) “While admittedly remaining a cultural form that was fully realized only in public performance, kāvya was created through the power of writing,” dismissing any connection between the oral tradition and kāvya."
Well, the great epics certainly must have been written, Mahabharata certainly was, and one can't imagine Ramayana being coached orally to more than the Teo princes who were told about their own father, so it must have been written around the time it was composed. That takes written language in India - and universal literacy not limited to court, or elite - several millennia in past, well before to when Vega was Pole Star, at least the first time.
"Such statements from Pollock, the Sanskritist, draw attention to the motives behind his wilful and explicit rejection of defining elements from the tradition while he tries to cover in ornate language and diffuse style of writing the absence of any substantial basis for his claims."
Why IS the moron called sanskritist? If he weren't a Western male of skin clour of uncooked flesh, if he were from India, eoukd thus writing get him anywhere, much less be called Sanskritist? No.
" ... Using multilinguality and language plurality as evidence for the lack of a single ‘mother tongue’ for an individual in India, Pollock maintains that linguism was not native to pre-modern South Asia."
That fraudulent nomenclature again, when it only means India!
"Even as one can give his theory credit to be able to hold some water in perhaps the second millennium of CE, one finds that it does not at all address the issues he speaks about in BCE as well as the first millennium of CE, a remarkably long period during which Sanskrit did function as the primary vehicle of thought and expression of an entire culture across a sub-continent. ... "
Add a few millennia more in the past, say at least as far back as Rāmāyaṇa, which was no later than 11,000 BCE but could very well have been n×26,000 years ago before that for n>1, and authors would be closer to facts. Rāmāyaṇa was, after all, written in Sanskrit, and is dated when the pole star was brilliant.
" ... This methodology of Pollock, where he dismisses conflicting models even from European domains as those which are not native to Indian context and adeptly shifts the debate spatially and temporally to points of his own choosing in the grand narrative while seemingly trying to justify his positions is present across his work, making one wonder if it is wilful obfuscation."
When faced with a Khilji demanding that you hand over your wife to him, don't pause to consider his possible innocence! Pollock’s career isn't built on truthful interpretations of facts. Else he'd have been a known big shot in mainstream US life in arenas where a career is woukd go by choice, not a poor wretch shunted off to colonies to make a living.
................................................................................................
"In further considering theories from communication, socialization and legitimation, Pollock maintains,
"“Unwarranted generalizations based on European particulars pertain not only to the sociality of language but also to the place of culture as such in relation to power.”
"(Pollock 2006:511)"
Authors describe Pollock’s conduct next without recognition thereof as a typical missionary position.
"With no convincing explanation, Pollock dismisses with a casual mention the idea that Sanskrit could have been used for vyāvahārika purposes and spread across the Indian sub-continent, calling the spread as a real ‘enigma’,
"“The weakest argument, and the most quickly dismissed, explains the role of Sanskrit across much of the cosmopolis but especially in Southeast Asia as driven by practical interregional communication needs. Unfortunately, there is no direct evidence that Sanskrit was ever used to fulfill these needs outside of certain scholastic and liturgical environments. There are undoubtedly some real enigmas here, such as Sanskrit’s massive invasion of the Javanese lexicon (upward of 40 percent, and penetrating to the most quotidian level), but these enigmas may be open to other kinds of solutions.”
"(Pollock 2006:512)"
If he really cannot explain it, if he really believes that Sanskrit wasn't useful as a language normally is and was never used, if he's honest about any of it, he is logically forced to conclude - in all honesty if he has ever had any - that Rāmāyaṇa must have been, must be, so powerful a piece of literature as to have spread Sanskrit singlehandedly across much of Asia.
For Indonesia has enactments galore thereof and routinely, regularly so, too, despite enforced spread of Abrahamic-III and its tenets forbidding anything not of Arabic origin.
"As highlighted earlier in context of his methodology, Pollock wonders why the kings of Khmer or people of Pagan wanted to adopt Sanskrit and having eschewed reasonable explanations, he bizarrely suggests the following,
"“Yet isn’t it possible that people conceive of political and moral needs in the first place through such visions as Brahmanism and Buddhism, that these are not instruments for filling needs but might in fact create them, and that their appearance in one place and not in another is a consequence of entirely contingent factors, such as the presence or absence of certain itinerant religious professionals?”
"(Pollock 2016:515)"
That is a typical - and typically, disgustingly racist - fraudent missionary position of an Abrahamic-III, towards every other culture, before and after robbing them.
"Carrying forward his design for the case of a globalized, secularized Sanskrit, Pollock maintains that (Pollock 2006:532) “The foreign does not become such until civilizationalist thinking makes it so. Prior to that, the “foreign” is simply a cultural element circulating in the vast world, its origins undecidable and very likely irrelevant to the people who proceeded to make use of it,” sounding more like a line from a book that justifies intellectually imperialism and colonization. Further dismissing indigenism as a viable theory, Pollock remarks,
"“What the history of transculturation at work in the Sanskrit cosmopolis demonstrates every step of the way, however, is that all culture is really transculture. Indigenism is to the history of culture what creationism is to the history of the cosmos.”
"(Pollock 2006:533)"
Was he too stupid to notice that Evolution couldn't be a surprise to a culture that had not only Dashāvatāra, but also Rāmāyaṇa, in its nurturing literature? Unlike West which was shocked at Darwin, India merely found a justification of yet another bit of immense treasure of knowledge of ancient India, written off by West as myth but subsequently found evidence of by science.
................................................................................................
"Even as Pollock presents a considerable body of work that has been undertaken in civilizational studies until current times, his own arguments for dismissing the theory, especially in the case of Oriental nations such as the Indian, replete with distinctive nature, are flimsy. His very questions, for instance, (Pollock 2006:534) “What possible “conception of the world as a whole” could be said to characterize “Indian civilization,” which has witnessed struggles over conceptions of the world of the most incommensurable and irreconcilable sort for three millennia?” are incredulous, especially considering his caliber as a critic! Anybody with even a passable familiarity of Indic systems will recognize the uniqueness of its paradigms and templates with which it approaches matters, be it spiritual or worldly.
"His declarations make more transparent his aims to globalize and secularise the language,
"“Indeed, a stable singularity called “Indian culture,” so often conjured up by Southeast Asian indigenists, never existed. What did exist was only a range of cultural and political codes and acts, many recently developed (Sanskrit kāvya, public inscriptions, free-standing temple building, quasi-universalist political imagery, land-grants to Brahmanical communities, and so on) and undoubtedly generated out of various local practices,”
"(Pollock 2006:535)"
"“Only gradually did all these practices coalesce into something like a cosmopolitan unity, one that was both “at home” and “abroad across this entire space. Not only is “Indianization” something of a empty signifier, since no unitary force ever existed to produce the process except in the trivial sense that the subcontinent provided one important source of new cultural flows to southern and eastern Asia; not only is it a crude sort of teleology, erroneously presupposing as cause what was only produced as effect; but equally remarkable, and almost always overlooked, is the fact that the Indianization of Southeast Asia was concurrent with, and no different from, the Indianization of India itself,” “From the processual perspective, “culture” or “civilization” (as in “Indian Civilization 101”) becomes nothing but an arbitrary moment illegitimately generalized, a freeze frame in a film taken for the whole story,”
"(Pollock 2006:539)"
Is there a direct relationship of DNA that Pollock shares with Hitler? Pollock does seem to believe in outrageous lies repeated and with an exponential quotient of what Jon Stewart (born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz; November 28, 1962) said of why he left television.
"“India, for its part, is hardly immune now to bad choices. The worst at present is the choice between a vernacularity mobilized along the most fragile fault lines of region, religion, and caste, and the grotesque mutation of the toxins of postcolonial ressentiment and modernity known as Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism. The very names of the groups that make up the institutional complex of Hindutva—including the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party) and its ideological wing, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council)—bespeak what had never been spoken before, postulating in the one case a single Indian “peoplehood” ( janata), in the other, Hinduism as an aggressive universalism. What is immediately clear from the history we have followed in the course of this book is that Hindutva is a perversion of India’s great cosmopolitan past, while the many new subnational movements (as in Assam and elsewhere) represent an entirely new, militant vernacularism, indeed, a kind of Heideggerization of Indian life,”
"(Pollock 2006:575)"
He's the spirit behind all those openly proclaiming intentions of breaking up India?
................................................................................................
"It is true that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s involvement as a human being in his own circumstances, then it must be true that for a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of this actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, and as an individual second.
"Edward Said in Orientalism"
"Hinduism is not just a faith. It is the union of reason and intuition that cannot be defined but is only to be experienced. Evil and error are not ultimate. There is no Hell, for that means there is a place where God is not, and there are sins, which exceed his love.
"Dr. Radhakrishnan"
"Celebrating civilization perfection is nothing more than a blind abdication of self-criticism.
"(Pollock, as cited in Gould, 2008:533)"
The first two quotes are pretty true.
The third proves the first two, and tells not so much that the guy had a mind, as that he'd been brought up to feel that, to not feel guilty was sinful, and to be abjectly ashamed of his own existence was the only pose for virtuous.
He's imposing that on India, just changing words.
................................................................................................
"While myth is often implied to mean a lie, a fiction, or something untrue, as its derived meaning from the Greek word mythos, scholars have contested that meaning in the context of the Sanskrit word ‘mithyā’ which implies a reality in between truth (history) and untruth (myth), and points towards a reality beyond our worldly understanding. Joseph Campbell, the world-renowned mythologist considers myths as clues, which ‘direct us towards the experiencing the spiritual potentialities of the human life’ (Moyers 1990:5) for myth is a metaphor that is indicative of spiritual powers that lie within us (Maher & Briggs 1990)."
What that amounts to is simply this - colonizers used this word for most of literary tresure that belonged to the subjugated, and later, especially post Renaissance, when intelligentsia realised it was equally applicable to lores and legends of the conquistadores, they attempted to soften it.
"Myths are narratives with multiple meanings that hold sacred value for the respective cultures and are carried out through their rituals. Therefore, these narratives are considered to be true from within the respective faith systems, and when regarded in context, lend themselves to expressing respective systems of thought and values. Although it is important to recognize that myths are usually regarded metaphorically and not literally, ... "
Is that always true, or is that a self justification by colonisers, who don't explicitly declare their own myths as myths? European and generally Western church hasn't declared either virgin birth or immaculate conception a myth, or resurrection and thereafter account, for that matter.
" ... so myths can be both rooted in history and be fictitious (Carpentier’s Lectures on the Website, accessed May 15, 2016) e.g. Sun worship is not about worshiping the heavenly body as much as an acknowledgement of its life-giving quality to the entire planet. Which, it must be emphasized, has not changed since time immemorial. Therefore an ancient ritual of Sun worship is also an indication of ancient humans’ knowledge, however subconscious, of the influence of the Sun on our planet. Similarly Rāma and Rāvaṇa are qualities that bring us close to or distance us from the divine."
It's not different from human treatment of other humans, in that respect, since it's not identical to treatment of the departed; so recognition of physical bodies as only one aspect of, whether humans, or the forces of which divine quality is recognised in according them identity of a God, is all of a piece.
"Myth, in the West, is used as the diametric opposite of history. But Rajiv Malhotra emphasizes, in his path-breaking book, Being Different (Malhotra 2013), that myth ‘uses fiction (story7) to convey truth’ (Kindle Edition, Location 1138), and can be enacted out via a ritual (Myers 1990). In addition, to contrast it with the frozen idea of history, as in the West, the Indian word for history ‘itihāsa’, sometimes translated as myth by those studying Indian texts, comprises both history and myth (Malhotra 2013). ... "
This false translation of the word is typical of the fraud perpetrated by colonisers, and their cousins across the pond, against firmer colonial subjects, in perpetuity. Literal meaning of ‘itihāsa’ is "this happened", and has no connotations of the sort suggested by "those studying Indian texts", and "‘itihāsa’" has nothing to do with what's labelled myth; but the word 'history' is, on the other hand, questionable as supposedly a factual account of all that happened in past, since history - especially as written in West - is not only what suits the conquerors, and is thereby highly questionable as all truth, it also literally "his story".
" ... But the schism in the way the West sees others and itself is exemplified in Being Different, where Malhotra shares a story about a Journalism professor’s struggle to include myths of Western civilizations in a class on ‘World Mythology’."
“Western scholars unable to deal with the multiple renditions of itihāsa, tend to categorize it all as myth, and myth alone...their own myths are recounted as history. Indian spiritual texts are subject to interpretive methods, which are entirely different from those used to study the tales of Jewish and Christian religions. For example, the West is studied using sociological methods and tools, whereas so-called primitive societies through anthropology and folklore; European and American social units are always described as communities, never tribes.”
"Malhotra (2013:L1139)"
How true!
"While Pollock acknowledges the power of myth, he interprets the way he chooses to (Pollock 1984:508)8. In that context, Pollock starts on a wrong note, when he limits his understanding of Rāma and Rāvaṇa merely as good and evil, divine and demonic. In fact, he attributes harmful intentions in upholding Rāma as the model King, an ideal man, when he suggests that the Rāmāyaṇa’s sole purpose has been in creating and demonizing the ‘other.’ (Pollock 1984; Pollock 1993). Furthermore, Pollock demonstrates his inability to grasp the concept of itihāsa as he uses the word Euhemerization9(ascribing historical basis to mythology) for the divinity of Rāma (Pollock 1984: 506). The Rāmāyaṇa, for Hindu society, is a metaphor, although Pollock treats it like a mystery, which he has attempted to uncover through his writings. If there is a mystery to the Rāmāyaṇa, as a practitioner, the author can state, that it is this, that taking the example of Rāvaṇa, we can understand that most venerated of scholars can be proven wrong about the use of knowledge, and yet in academia today, scholars hold mind over heart and sometimes ethics, in the pursuit of understanding a system."
Pollock as Dusshasana fits even better than Pollock as Rāvaṇa, since Rāvaṇa was truly an accomplished man of learning acquired via his own efforts, and Pollock merely sought to acquire positions and career, the whole shebang, via what what he thought was an easy route, leading to immense frustration for an arrogant and lazy racist who has ever since used venomous butchering of a superior culture to achieve his aims.
" ... Pollock’s absolute contempt, as evident in the following comment, for the tradition, that attributes divinity to all beings:
"“Much of the argument against the divinity of Rāma, furthermore, is based on a sense of the “divine" that conceals an embarrassingly narrow and un-selfreflective ethnocentricity, and on the use of an inapplicable set of critical canons.”
"(Pollock 1984:508)"
"Pollock’s absolute contempt, as evident in the following comment, for the tradition, that attributes divinity to all beings" - as author terms it - is not surprising, when one seeks answers in his background where a universal guilt is absolutely and doctrinally imposed on everyone, and anything which is not sanctified by the institution claiming sole agency of all possible approach to God (as defined by the said institution), is declared consigned to hell; Pollock is steeped in missionary ethos and, of hours, seeks to vilify everything sacred to the culture he seeks to wipe out, as a preparation for conversion of India.
"Desacralizing-Decontextualization: Pollock’s strategy of forwarding this theory of ‘aestheticisation of power’ is to first desacralize the texts that he studies (Malhotra 2016a:L3462). In desacralizing the texts, Pollock commits academic blasphemy by divorcing the object of his study from its context as he tries to understand its impact. It is akin to the Californian version of understanding karman without a belief in reincarnation. Any qualitative research, especially one that deals with the understanding of systems, cultures and texts of cultures that one does not practice, or live with, has to be grounded in a research methodology that is appropriate for the topic and attempt to study its object being as close to its lived reality."
Or else, anyone writing a research paper or book about church history is completely justified in asserting that Rome murdered the king of Jews and church, when it forsake Jews and did a treaty with Rome for survival, divested her object of worship of all semblance of manhood and presented a lie of a theological discourse about an exclusive and unique divine sacrificing willingly for guilt of all humanity, thereby not only simultaneously imposing universal guilt on all humanity but also paving the way for holocaust via centuries of fraudulent propaganda against his relatives.
................................................................................................
"However, Christians and Carey (1989) argue against some of the ways of viewing the subject matter as suggested by Vico and those influenced by him (p. 355), and call for a more comprehensive approach. They question the ‘natural science model of the social sciences’, (p. 355) and argue against the idea that social sciences, like natural sciences are said to “…develop laws that hold irrespective of time and place, to explain phenomenon through causal and functional models, to describe relationships among phenomena in essentially statistical and probabilistic terms” (p. 354). Instead, placing a higher value on symbols and context, Christians and Carey provide four criteria that make for a valid and a thorough consideration of the topic of study: naturalistic observation, contextualization, maximized comparisons, and sensitized concepts (Christians and Carey 1989)."
One, it's hubris to imagine that one's own background regardless, one can be objective about another human, much less about another culture, to treat the said other human or other culture as a scientist treats an object of study; a good test would be a mirroring, reflecting on how one would feel or react if the situation were exactly reversed.
Two, there's no reason humanities should ape or aspire to emulate natural science, any more than paintings should be done by coloring dot books.
"While Pollock implies that widespread use of the Rāmāyaṇa can be owed to its use as a political tool, his analysis does not consider the idea that, in the Indian context, the rise and decline in worship of various avatāra-s, according to the yuga-s has been common. When he suggests that characters of the Rāmāyaṇa behave as puppets as though without any will, he is implying that the followers of epic might be driven in the same robot-like manner to demonize non-Hindus and those of lower castes. But he conveniently ignores characters such as Khevaṭ and Śabarī who are not only from the lower strata, but who Rāma expresses gratitude to, for helping him in his journey. In addition, Pollock overlooks factors such as Rāvaṇa himself being a learned Brahmin, whose father was the venerated Sage Viśravas12. Why does the Rāmāyaṇa create the other of a brahmin? Especially when Pollock implies that it was with the collaboration of the brahmins that the kings/rulers demonized the outsiders. Also overlooked is the fact that the author Vālmīki himself is supposed to be not of a higher caste, and Rāvaṇa a revered, learned one of a higher caste and a king, the very people Pollock suggests oppressed the ‘lower castes’?"
Haven't the Swadeshi Indology Conference Series authors discovered yet how much church and missionaries are ever ready to lie in order to gain power, and even more so to harvest conversions, and that Pollock, despite perhaps not bring officially a missionary, belongs to the same tribe, as did Ignatius Donnelly and Macaulay in spirit if not in institutional status?
" ... Pollock approaches the text with an ‘attitude of criticism and not with curiosity’ because he analyzes the text with a preconceived theory that he wants to map out combining some past evidence from history (“when Ram temples came into existence”) and the Rāmāyaṇa’s plot (“demonization of Rāvaṇa”). Despite his experience with Hindu texts, he fails to acknowledge that in Indian system, beings are divine by nature and everyone is a God in the making, and that deva-s and asura-s are relative and not absolute."
Why is the term “demonization of Rāvaṇa” used by Pollock at all? Isn't there residence galore of wrongdoings by the demon, whose conduct bilateral first requirements of propriety in kidnapping a woman against her will, without her consent? Fortunately she had a husband who voted rescue her, but the conduct of the abductor subsequent to kidnapping does not recommend him in any way as even someone crazy in love, only as a man arrogant enough to demand a compliance from every woman he might have previously abducted without her consent. He is blinded by his power and wealth, and his ego does not permit him to admit he's grievously wrong.
Is “demonization of Rāvaṇa” really necessary? Valmiki only states his actions.
But Pollock calls it “demonization of Rāvaṇa”, gor reasons of his own background of ancestry from Europe. Not only Europe considered plunder of other lands legal - UK still refuses to return plunder from Greece, or even consider the question of doing so about loot from India - but for more.
Pollock's ancestry is of lands where droit de seigneur was law, whereby a landlord had rights to first night of every bride of every person resident or earner on lands he owned. (Hence, too, the racial integration!).
So, being from lands where a Rāvaṇa and a Khilji are considered only natural and rightful in demanding compliance from every woman, married or not, willing or not, Pollock’s characterisation of Rāmāyaṇa as “demonization of Rāvaṇa” is only natural, however surprising it be to the civilisation that did not allow such behavior.
After all, Pollock must have cousins galore he'd call black - or, if he's being politically correct, 'African-American', who aren't admitted to the so-called 'white' part of the clan, due to having an African ancestor, an unwilling slave forced as much into master's bed as into slavery in the first place.
Pollock wouldn't dream of lifting a finger, ever, to “demonization of Rāvaṇa” - or his own ancestor, for that matter.
Would he call Obama black? Safe bet. White? No, again a safe bet. But Obama has DNA equal of the two races, and with no unwilling partner between the couple.
................................................................................................
"Greek Origins of Western Philosophy and Science
"The discourse on the origins of science (and mathematics) has been controlled by the West till recently. As is the case with most such historiographies of the West, Greece is the undisputed source of all things Western (another hegemonic idea). Is this really true? Very little documented evidence that suggests the contrary is available. Consider the following remark on the book Stolen Legacy (James 2001),
"In this work Professor James dares to contend and labor to prove, among others, that the Greeks were not the authors of Greek philosophy, that so-called Greek philosophy was based in the main upon ideas and concepts which were borrowed without acknowledgement — indeed stolen — by a few wayward and dishonest Greeks from the ancient Egyptians.
"(Hansberry 1955:127) (italics ours)"
Why they are called wayward or dishonest isn't clear, but yes, it's known about knowledge of Egypt being inherited by Greek and Judaic cultures - latter being the less obvious knowledge kept safe by Jewish traditions through millennia of persecution and exoduses, pogroms and holocaust, probably responsible for drawing wrath of jealous lesser cultures.
"Why is this narrative not mainstream knowledge? ... "
One could say the same about the fact of Columbus not having 'discovered' the continent across Atlantic, even as far as Europe went - the fact of Vikings having known the land, having not only sailed there but settled and having trading posts, for centuries, long before Columbus, is not only known; there's even a Vikings tower at Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts, with very informative boards informing any visitor about their trading posts having been as far South along East coast as Watertown, Massachusetts.
But a far more obvious example is about the fact that, while Columbus having lied about calling natives of lands across Atlantic 'Indian' may not be universally known, the fact that the said natives of the continent having nothing to do with India is very well known now for several centuries.
Nevertheless they are called Indian, in a deliberately racist and arrogant attitude that implies that both groups of 'natives' - another term used pejoratively - were conquered, subjugated, looked of their tights and lands, and are therefore of no consequence whatsoever.
A similar 'mistake' by anyone calling Chinese 'Japanese', or US citizens 'Russian', or worse, 'nazi', won't be taken lightly.
" ... If one needed a vivid example of institutionalized hegemony – this could be it. Published in 1954, the book has not been popularized nor reprinted until recently by Moefi Asante, an African-American scholar. The lack of institutional blessing to these views, dangerous as they are to the Western narrative and the hegemony of history is apparent. The author of the book (Dr. George James) has been literally erased from academic history.
"Was there such a thing called Greek philosophy? Dr. James is vehement that there isn’t really any such! Almost all of what is now considered “Greek” is actually (black) Egyptian in origin."
Would it be justified applying the epithet to Egypt?
"“The term Greek philosophy, to begin with is a misnomer, for there is no such philosophy in existence. The ancient Egyptians had developed a very complex religious system, called the Mysteries, which was also the first system of salvation.”
"(James 2009:7)"
Occult was inherited by Jewish, not by Greek; the latter got architecture and geometry, possibly philosophy.
"After the Persian invasion, from 60 BCE up to Alexander’s conquest, the Greeks learnt most of all they could directly from the Egyptian priests. The plunder of books and entire libraries from Egypt and ascribing Greek origins to them (ex: a huge amount of books being attributed to Aristotle) is well known."
"How many of us are aware that today’s math and science is deeply is influenced by Christian Theology? This can be seen even today. Pure Mathematics is that which is practiced in a theologically correct way i.e., the axiomatic basis on which “proofs” are constructed without any means of calculating or verifying the claims."
This is nonsense. When something is proved, it can, of course, be verified; but the opposite would never be true. Try proving Pythagoras theorem computationally! Or even something as simple as prime numbers being infinite in number. It's not possible without reason, logic, and airtight arguments.
But why sell India short by assuming India cannot do science, reason, logic, and theory? That's nonsense too. Thousands of scientists if Indian origin are doing quite well, including in mathematics, despite all racism of West.
................................................................................................
"Yuga: the temporal principle of itihāsa (apauruṣeya and pauruṣeya)
"A sūkta from the Ṛgveda affirms that the world issues forth periodically by the will of Vidhātā (Ordainer) as creation (sarga) just as it did previously (dhātā yathāpūrvam akalpayat; Ṛgveda 10.190.3). The concept of ‘period’ is elaborated in the Manusmṛti in terms of yuga: worlds arise and dissolve and arise again and again through the four yuga-s. Yuga also configures the relation of time and ultimate truth and reality (brahman) that is deemed to be invariable (nitya). Duration of each of the yuga-s is a decreasing number of human years in thousands: Kṛta 1,728,000 human years, Tretā 1,296,000, Dvāpara 864,000, and Kali 4,320,000 human years. The twelve thousand divine years (which are the total of four human ages) make one age of the gods, a mahā-yuga (‘great age’). One thousand of these ages of the gods make a day of Brahmā the Creator, whose night is also of equal length. Known as Kalpa, this period comes to twelve million years of the gods, or 4.32 thousand million human years. Waking at the end of his day-and-night, Brahmā creates [his] mind, which brings forth creation by modifying itself, impelled by Brahma’s creative desire (Manusmṛti 1:68–80).
................................................................................................
"In this way, by the end of the thirty-six ten-day periods, the king became vested in different categories of lordships and ‘knowledges’ over differing domains and subjects. It is important to remember that the king and his subjects received such ‘knowledges’ in different domains through Itihāsa and Purāṇa. Given that this happened thirty-six times the amount of information received by the audience must have been fairly extensive. Over time, the recitation of Itihāsa and Purāṇa came to be vested in the Sūta-s, a class of skilled bards, who, despite belonging to the ‘lower varṇa [class],’ were highly respected for their knowledge. Their dissemination of Itihāsa and Purāṇa to the public at large has indeed remained a critical component of Hindu dharma; one that enables all and sundry Hindus to remain connected to their rich heritage (Srestha 2017). As a collective term Itihāsa is often mentioned as distinct from the Purāṇa and yet is also treated much the same as the Purāṇa. Thus the Vāyupurāṇa calls itself both a Purāṇa and an Itihāsa as does the Brahmāṇḍapurāṇa. The Brahmapurāṇa calls itself both a Purāṇa and Ākhyāna, while the Mahābhārata calls itself by all these terms (Pargiter 1962:35).
"In light of the above, it is understandable why, by the time of Kauṭilya, Itihāsa acquired a far wider connotation to embrace all areas of human interest from the mundane to the spiritual. For Kauṭilya the Atharvaveda and the Itihāsa ‘veda’ fell within the ambit of the Veda-s for which reason he put both on the same footing. Elsewhere in the Arthaśāstra, while discussing the training an ideal king should undergo, he talks of Itihāsa and includes under its rubric the Purāṇa, Itivṛtta (past record), Ākhyāyikā (tale), Udāharaṇa (illustrative story), and even the Dharmaśāstra-s (Shamasastri n.d.:14). It is in this broader sense that the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mahābhārata, and the Purāṇa-s are included under the category of Itihāsa — record of exploits of heroes who could be king, poet, or priest according to the kind of varṇa [class] or world a hero was born into. Their exploits were kept alive as narratives to be told to successive generations. The reading of relevant texts of Itihāsa was ordained for the kings and the administrators. Shivaji (1630-1680), the legendary king of the Marathas, was a product of this practice (Sathe n.d.). This understanding of itihāsa was in vogue till the end of the 18th century when Sir William Jones, a pioneer among the British scholars, advised colonial authorities to restrict study of ancient Indian history based on the Purāṇa-s in the schools established and operated by the East India Company."
Wasn't this before Macaulay and his policy was set? What if any was the relationship between the two? Or was this attitude generally prevailing, due chiefly to character of later Abrahamic religions (Abrahamic-II , Abrahamic-III and Abrahamic-IV), attempting deliberately to wipe out every other culture, every other system of knowledge of every other race, when not perpetrating actual genocides wiping out the very people.
"Subsequently, Manu and the other Smṛti-s began to treat dharma both as kratvartha, that is, regular performance of such yajña-s as the Agnihotra and other rites/obligations, as well as formal study of the Veda; and as puruṣārtha, that is, performance of the whole range of duties prescribed for the four varṇa-s and four āśrama-s (Endnote # 22; Pollock 1990:323). It does not occur to Pollock that he is describing here vedopabṛṁhaṇa, a process (sponsored by the Mīmāṁsā system) of expanding the Vedic teachings by bringing Itihāsa into service to spread the puruṣārtha component of dharma among those who did not have direct access to its kratvartha component—women and śūdra-s (see below). Vedopabṛṁhaṇa thus invalidates the process of Vedicization, the cornerstone of Pollock’s thesis of the Mīmāṁsā denial and suppression of ‘history’ in ancient India!"
Perhaps his brain couldn't grasp it.
................................................................................................
"Mantra-rāmāyaṇa of Nīlakaṇṭha
"The mediating role of Itihāsa in the fulfilment of dharma can be illustrated with particular reference to the Mantra-rāmāyaṇa of Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara, a Marathi-speaking Brahmin who flourished in the second half of the seventeenth century in a family established in Karpuragrāma (modern Kopargaon); a town on the banks of the River Godāvarī in what is now the state of Maharashtra. Nīlakaṇṭha moved to Vārāṇasī where he undertook the study of Veda and Vedāṅga, Mīmāṁsā, and Advaita Vedānta in the era when Aurangzeb was the emperor (1658-1707). Nīlakaṇṭha is better known for his commentary on the Mahābhārata (Bhāratabhāvadīpa), which is now recognized as a necessary companion volume to read and understand the Mahābhārata. He also wrote two other popular works for the purpose of illuminating the hidden meaning of Vedic mantra-s: the Mantra-rāmāyaṇa (MR) and the Mantra-bhāgavata by arranging the select mantra-s drawn from the Ṛgveda in such a way that they reveal the story centered on Rāma or Kṛṣṇa and the teaching of dharma - the Rāmāyaṇa and the Bhāgavata respectively.15
"The sūkta entitled ‘Vamro Vaikhānasaḥ’ (Ṛgveda 10.99) is traditionally attributed to a sage named Vamra Vaikhānasa. Nīlakaṇṭha stipulates that Vamra is none other than Vālmīki. Then, by clever use of the principles of liṅga and prakaraṇa, he posits that the first five verses of this sūkta are by Vamra/Ādikavi Vālmīki and that they encapsulate the Rāma story. The Mantra-rāmāyaṇa accordingly begins with a reading of these five verses as a telling of the whole Rāmakathā in a seed/root form. He then offers their rereading from the ādhyātmika perspective suggesting that the rest of the work will proceed in the like manner (See Dwivedi 1998; MR verses # 15, 19).
................................................................................................
"From the Greek obsession with saying something different, to the middle-ages when one encounters the importance given to creational context - what is revealed is the Western obsession with treating text as something that manipulates and that (as a consequence) which needs to be manipulated in order to understand it. The reaction to the influence of the Abrahamic theologies (the obsession with a unique final text and final interpretation) is very apparent in the evolution of hermeneutics as a Western academic tool/discipline. The close linkages with biblical philology - a theological text-analysis tool of power wielded by the church - which was used to interpret the word-of-god, though not acknowledged as such explicitly, are also discernible."
EXACTLY!
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"Western Understanding of Mīmāṁsā
"The Western interpretations of Mīmāṁsā began with the efforts of Sir William Jones to interpret the dharmaśāstra-s. The dharmaśāstra-s could not in any way be interpreted without the aid of the Mīmāṁsā-sūtra-s. This was the standard procedure. The attention to syllabic detail and injunction supposedly drove William Jones to translate the Mānava-dharma-śāstra (Murray 1998).
"The analytical approach followed by subsequent Western Indologists was to remove Mīmāṁsā-sūtra-s from the context of practice and the larger play of the continual exegesis as is the wont of the Indian tradition. Attempts were made to freeze text and place the content in an independent context. The requirement of the Western hermeneutic approach to discover a “fixed” subjective motive to text produced various hypotheses on the notion of Mīmāṁsā and its role in the Indian civilizational praxis. Generally speaking, Mīmāṁsā has been variously characterized as non-godly, ungodly, atheistic, oppressive, ritualistic, segregative, socially divisive (Pollock 1989), racial, ahistoric - a few choice descriptors used over the centuries by Western Indologists. There was no attempt (howsoever sincere) to understand the core principles (which have no Western counterpart) of karman and dharma - the motivations behind the Mīmāṁsā exegesis of text. The underlying framework of Indian epistemology and its reality in the lived lives of the sanatanic practitioner is for all practical purposes completely and utterly disregarded. This genre of hubris is routine in Western socio-anthropological approaches to “othering” and is considered normal Western scholarship."
Yes.
"Concepts (alien to Western civilisation) of puṇya, pāpa, apūrva, punarjanman, ātman, phala and many others which govern the karma-siddhānta (again totally alien to Western civilization) which influence the dharma-jijñāsā (the primary prameya and prayojana of Mīmāṁsā) are blatantly ignored and are not considered in the analytic framework of the Western approaches. The free-for-all, “anything goes” (large degrees of interpretive freedom) nature of analysis allowed by the Western constructs of hermeneutics and philology delivered from institutions of power and prestige have taken center stage in the recent (two centuries) interpretations of Mīmāṁsā. From a traditional perspective, such an approach could be characterized as a manodharma-jijñāsā (pursuit of the fanciful and imaginative) at best or possibly adharma-jijñāsā (wanton pursuit of falsehoods and the unethical) at worst"
"Pollock takes aim at the Veda and Mīmāṁsā ascribing to them the fundamental ills (as he sees it) of Indian civilization. He builds an elaborate thesis on the existence of asymmetrical relations of power. A response to these claims is given in the next section. We highlight pertinent sections as Pollock proceeds to build his arguments based on his own (imagination) manodharma mechanisms."
Missionary in disguise, is Sheldon Pollock.
"Malhotra throws light on how Pollock uses these claims to further his “Buddhism vs Hinduism” political thesis.
"“He believes that the Mīmāṁsaka thinkers considered the eternal nature of the Veda to be dependent on the eternal, uncreated nature of Sanskrit. Hence, the Buddhist rejection of the uncreated nature of Sanskrit led to their rejection of the Vedas. He says Buddhists invented Pali as their language for writing and alleges that there was a similar rejection of Sanskrit by the Jains, who adopted Ardha-magadhi as their language. He says that Vedic thinkers criticized these new languages because they undermined the doctrinal authority of Sanskrit.”
"(Malhotra 2016:385)"
Does Pollock then define Hochdeutsch as protestant, English as Anglican, Episcopalian and Presbyterian, and French as catholic? Russian must be Orthdox along with Greek.
"Continuing in the same vein, Pollock theorizes that all śāstra is influenced by this Mīmāṁsā notion of timelessness and is the root-cause of the deliberate (systematic and by design) denial of the past.
"“Mīmāṁsā makes the authority of the Veda dependent on its timelessness, and thus must empty the Veda of its historical referentiality. Since learned discourse (śāstra) in general is subject to a process of “vedicization," it adopts the Veda's putative ahistoricality; and the same set of concerns comes to inform the understanding of the genre itihāsa (“history") and the interpretation of itihāsa texts. History, consequently, seems not so much to be unknown in Sanskritic India as to be denied.”
"(Pollock 1989:603)"
He might as well say exactly the same of all scientific literature in every language of West during 20th century; none would have a word about racism, Holocaust, women's rights or even about slavery.
"Pollock very glibly concludes that the pursuit of dharma has nothing to do with the pursuit of brahman – as, according to his understanding, since brahman has been repudiated the means of attaining it also stands repudiated."
Who, when, exactly did this repudiation? Why lie so brazenly?
Expecting to be believed due to a look of a rare or uncooked steak?
"The rhetorical/theoretical mechanization of secularization and de-sacralisation of the Indian Vedic systems is thus completed in Pollock’s thesis. The hermeneutics of derision is seen in action. In conclusion, the Veda-s are not about brahman. They are non-sacred. As the associated sacred practices have also been repudiated, there is nothing like a (sacred) notion of dharma.
"This is a foundational claim1 aimed to deconstruct (break and falsify) the primary edifice of the sanātanic system. Based on the reactions (from practicing Sanatanists) to these interpretations, these theses do not read like those of a decorated academic scholar but are indicative of a deeply disturbed mind. Dharma, Brahman and Puruṣārtha - the basic constructs of the civilizational epistemology - are claimed to be fabrications of Mīmāṁsā."
................................................................................................
"The History of History
"History as discussed by Pollock and by academia (the prevailing dominant global discourse is Western) is originally a European construct. The framing of the problem space, the description of the problems, all of its aims, the elucidation of the goals and methods employed therein — are all West-centric. The continual (academic and otherwise) discourse on the nature and role of history, as a European creation and then later on as an Anglo-American exercise, is pretty much closely tied to the colonial and expansionist urges of the Anglo-Saxon (Judeo-Christian) collective conscious.
"In a general summary on “history” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry (Little 2016), Little says that for historians, their explanations need to be grounded on available records. The historian then hypothesizes and provides interpretations and explanations for the “records” giving them social and cultural meaning. ... "
Whereas, the impression given, even from the defining nomenclature calling them historians (instead of - say - analytic interpreters of recorded history, which would be truthful), is that they actually write histories, which is no longer true at all, even if it once was.
Come to think of it, William Shirer wrote history when he wrote his most famous work, about third Reich - Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich - and his contemporary historians were all incensed because he did not reference work by any academically qualified historian, but did what journalists do, in referring to actual documents of the said third Reich.
" ... There are two fundamental issues in this whole process in regard to the relationship between actors and causes. Is history really as the historian makes it out to be? ... "
To begin with. Further,
" ... Was the causality in actual reality as suggested by the historian? The other very important issue is the issue of “scale”. What are their interrelationships among perspectives of the nature of the historical processes at work and their actual dimensionality? How are these different relationships (the micro, meso and macro) and perspectives reconciled — if at all?"
And, as if that's not enough, try Arun Shourie's Eminent Historians.
"Is history a universal human concern or nature? This is as yet unanswered. There are many competing views on this. Pollock’s thought model is influenced and inspired by Vico – as acknowledged by himself. So what does one make of Vico’s theories on history? According to Little: Vico simplified and homogenized the explanation of historical actions and processes. Everything everywhere had to happen the way it supposedly happened in Europe. In his words - The common features of human nature give rise to a fixed series of stages of development of civil society, law, commerce and government: universal human beings, faced with recurring civilizational challenges, produce the same set of responses over time."
That's just generalisation from Europe, thereby faulting all others, as Ignatius Donnelly does about racial differences in his works on Atlantis and Ragnarok.
"Herder, Hegel and Nietzsche had different views on this supposed universality. Herder argued for historical contextuality. According to Herder, human-beings act differently in different periods of development. Hegel's approach to history is well-acknowledged to be one of the most developed (though as we can see below still pretty limited and biased).
"“Hegel regards history as an intelligible process moving towards a specific condition—the realization of human freedom. Hegel constructs world history into a narrative of stages of human freedom, from the public freedom of the polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the individual freedom of the Protestant Reformation, to the civic freedom of the modern state. He attempts to incorporate the civilizations of India and China into his understanding of world history, though he regards those civilizations as static and therefore pre-historical."
"(O'Brien cited in Little 2016) (italics ours)"
To begin with, he's good upto a point, where he states aim being " realization of human freedom"; this is, of course, modelled on an infant growing up. But he's looking at, metaphorically speaking, teenagers, i.e., the West, as the model!
India on the other hand is a very, very ancient civilisation, Her toddler era over long before any records, and Vedas, the most ancient of any human literature, a discourse on soul's relationships with Universal Soul, so to speak.
Hegel is comparing a fir tree at an early stage of growth with a Himalayan range of peaks he's unable to see, standing close to the tree, and instead of attempting to climb, is content comparing it to shrubs in his own vicinity, the said peaks being in distances he's unable to appreciate.
"What has to be appreciated here is that even in the Western views of history - there is no harmony or universality of purpose. It is well known that there are no well-known laws of history in a scientific sense. History is well-known to be a non-scientific pursuit (See (Donagan 1964) for the non-scientific nature of history). As to the matter of objectivity it is well known that history by its very nature isn’t so. See (Donagan 1964) for a treatment of the issues with “historical explanation”.
"The most scathing critique on history is provided in The Poverty of Historicism of Popper (1964). Popper seeks to persuade the reader of both the danger and the bankruptcy of the idea of historicism. It was dedicated to the victims of “history”.
"“In memory of the countless men and women of all creeds or nations or races who fell victim to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.”
"(Popper 1964:v)"
Funny, Oak quotes Popper everywhere, but couldn't find anything other than average, nothing so appropriate or impressive.
"Popper in his inimitable style illustrates the limited nature of “history” as a tool to understand the human condition. This should put in perspective Pollock’s claims of India being ahistorical and many similar claims made by Western scholars. Popper exposes and explicates fundamental issues in the theory of historicism. Historicism of any sort is limiting as it deals with finite perspectives of infinite realities. Knowledge of the past need not help to know the future – there is no physics or physical principles at work here. The considerable variety of human nature and human psychology cannot lead to anything predictable or anything else principle-wise - which can be claimed to be universally valid across even one culture - leave alone all cultures. It is also logically impossible to know the future course of history as that course critically depends on the course of scientific knowledge (which is unknowable by definition a priori)."
Apart from a Ragnarok, that is, that can wipe out civilisations. India seems to have survived it, unlike West.
"Historians, historicists and the history-based narratives that pervades almost all disciplines that comprise the humanities have serious flaws and these are just glossed over – simply because of the relationship of history to those in power. History’s ability to manufacture and control power is its most critical value: that is undeniable. History has served the purposes of the state and for the purpose of enabling power - its use for the well-known othering and genocide of cultures is widely known. It is also well acknowledged that it hardly has been used without any manipulative motives of history."
Just take two examples, Holocaust as logical result of seventeen centuries of propaganda by church; and the vitriolic venom spewed against Hinduism and India by West and by Abrahamic-II, Abrahamic-III and Abrahamic-IV, after centuries of barbarian invaders of Abrahamic-II and subsequent others who destroyed all existing records, monuments and more, only to rewrite history with their lies supporting the invaders and their barbaric destructions, genocides and worse.
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"The Nature of Itihāsa
"The traditional Indian genre of itihāsa (that which happened) is closest to the Western notion of a narrative of past events, peoples and places. The focus of itihāsa is to record events from the past and weave them around the core principles of sanātanic living and present the narratives as exemplars. This is markedly different from the Western notions of re-creating history driven by the present needs or requirement. The recording of events, records of dynasties are present in various forms via edicts, texts of lineages - though in disparate forms. The Western notion of motives of history as a hegemonic narrative builder has never been the Indian (sanātana) way. Monarchy was never absolute, no one or no institution ever was - unlike the European / Western experience of absolute excesses. The genocidal pre-occupation of Europe driven by the exhortations of the Abrahamic religions, political desires of monarchy comprise the primary strand of history - a documentation of power and conquest.
"The itihāsa - the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata for example - weave historical events around the core notions of āśrama, dharma, varṇa, puruṣārtha and the like. The itihāsa-s serve as an interpretive framework/dialectic for the core principles. The characters and events are embellished in no uncertain manner for their primary purpose - the education and elucidation of dharma for differing levels of intellect. The itihāsa-s are deep carriers of foundational principles of cultural and civilizational ethos (unlike Western history which is primarily a hermeneutic, political (power-brokering) exercise).
"The Purāṇa genre combines narratives from the oral tradition with contextual embellishments and also serves as a guide to sanātanic living. Events in the purāṇa-s because of the fantastic nature are generally not considered to have actually happened – are to considered to be metaphorically recreated or extrapolated from events of actual occurrence. ... "
That thinking is mistaken, based as it is on a supposition that anything that anyone else may have done can be recreated by anyone else. This obviously is a mistake, even looking at a plethora of events that are either believed via secondary evidence such as reportage, or disbelieved and vociferously, for example Holocaust denial by various antisemitic people and even one state.
" ... The key to unlocking the riches of the purāṇa-s is to understand to decode the multiple levels of deep symbolisms attached to the various representations and characterizations. The multi-layered encoding and possible readings that the Sanskrit language provides is also an additional dimension that is to be appreciated. Much of Purāṇic and itihāsa (not to mention the Vedic sūkta) text have masses of hidden meanings, much of which are still being uncovered."
................................................................................................"The Science of Mīmāṁsā
"We now briefly discuss what Mīmāṁsā actually means in a traditional sense. Without delving too deep into the technical details and meta-analysis of history and evolution of Mīmāṁsā, we will take an objective look at the focus of Mīmāṁsā. All the branches of traditional learning have Vedic texts as their foundation (Ramanujan 1993). Knowledge relating to the four-fold objectives (puruṣārtha) of morality, material gain, worldly desire and spiritual liberation is contained in all of Vedic literature. These Veda-s were propagated along with a detailed set of śāstra-s to aid in their understanding. The Vedic texts are in poetic, prose and mixed forms in different sections like the Saṁhitā, Brāhmaṇa, Āraṇyaka and Upaniṣad. The branch of Mīmāṁsā is meant to devise a means of analysing and interpreting Vedic texts/passages with a view to ascertain their tenets viz. dharma. The word Mīmāṁsā literally means ‘sacred discussion’.
"The notion of the sacred is critical to the entire discourse. Western academia in general, especially scholars like Pollock, Bronkhorst and many others are scholars of the non-practicing variety. Based on the generally outlandish nature of their theses, they seem to simply have no clue as to how to approach these texts. The ``sacred” approach cannot be hand-waved away nor can it be faked as is being done currently by majority of Western Indologists. These types of non-practicing scholars have fundamentally no adhikāra to discuss these texts. The only valid objective scientific approach to understand these texts is the ``sacred” disposition - nothing less. What the Western Indologists (Pollock for example) are attempting, using their non-sacred approach can be compared to someone trying to critique quantum theory without acknowledging the basic axioms of mathematics and logic."
A better comparison is that of a mother being dissected to discover source of the magic that she's to the child, the magic subsequently denied by dissecting brute who cannot find it.
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"इससे यह प्रतीत होता है कि यज्ञ प्रारम्भ से ही हमारी संस्कृति में समाहित है। मीमांसा के अनुसार धर्म यानी यज्ञ है अर्थात् लौकिक एवं पारलौकिक अभ्युदय का हेतु एकमात्र धर्म है। अतः सूत्रकार भगवान् जैमिनि ने मीमांसा शास्त्र का प्रमेय वस्तु निर्धारित करते हुये कहते है “अथातो धर्मजिज्ञासा”, वेदाध्ययन के अनन्तर, वेदाध्ययन समाप्त करने के कारण धर्म-विषयक विचार करना चाहिए।
"मीमांसासूत्र के प्रथमपाद यानी तर्कपाद में सम्यक्तया धर्म का विश्लेषण किया गया है तथापि शेल्डन पॉलॉक इन बातो से संतुष्ट नही है। निराधार ही मीमांसको ने धर्म का प्रयास अलौकिक बताये हैं यह उनका अभिप्राय है।
"“First - this is where we encounter the essential a priori of Mimamsa - dharma is stipulatively defined, or rather posited without argument, as a transcendent entity, and so is unknowable by any form of knowledge not itself transcendent”
"Pollock (1989:607)"
Of course, Sheldon Pollock’s own faith terms genocidal massacres of millions "Holocaust", sacred!
"अतः शेल्डन पॉलॉक की इन विचारों को सदोष दर्शाने के लिये सर्वप्रथम हम धर्म के लक्षण तथा धर्म की प्रमाण को प्रस्तुत करेंगे।"
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"शेल्डन पॉलॉक यह कहता है कि मीमांसको ने जिस प्रकार वेद की अपौरुषेयता को सिद्ध किया है, वह समीचीन नही है।
"“It is... argued that the Vedas are transcendent by reason of their anonymity. Had they been composed by men, albeit long ago, there is no reason why the memory of these composers should not have been preserved to us. Those men who are named in association with particular recessions, books, hymns of the Vedas-Kaṭhaka, for example, or Paippalādaka are not to be regarded as the authors but simply as scholars specializing in the transmission or exposition of the texts in question. Texts for which no authors can be identified have no authors, and this applies to the Vedas and to the Vedas alone”.
"Pollock (1989:608)"
Is Pollock known to have published, in Confederate South, a denial of their God writing their Bible, and facing their wrath?
"“If the Veda is eternal, it cannot communicate information about non-eternal things; nor can it do so even if it is not eternal, for then no absolute authority (would attach to any of its communications?)”
"Pollock (1989:608)"
Isn't that last bit applicable far more to his Bible? He lives close enough to the Bible belt to go preaching across, even if only weekends. Not man enough?
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"बुद्ध के पूर्ववर्ती जैमिनि मुनि
"जैमिनिसूत्रों की रचना का काल निर्णय करने में पाश्चात्य विद्वानों ने अपनी बुद्धि का अपव्यय ही किया है। डा. कीथ (Keith) तथा डा. दास गुप्ता (Das Gupta) ने इन सूत्रों का रचनाकाल ईसा पूर्व 200 वर्ष बताया है। डा. राधाकृष्णन् (Radhakrishnan) ने इन सूत्रों की रचना के काल की कल्पना ई.र्पू.400 शताब्दी तक की है, इसके आगे नही बढ़ पाये है। इसी प्रकार अनेक ऐतिहासिको ने अनिश्चित आधार पर भिन्न - भिन्न कल्पनाओं को जनता के सामने उपस्थित किया है। उसका परिणाम यह हुआ कि सर्वसाधारण जनता के मस्तिष्क में भ्रम उत्पन्न हो गया, क्योंकि इन काल्पनिकों की कल्पनाओं में ऐक्य नहीं है। अतएव मैक्डानल (Macdonell) नामक पाश्चात्य विद्वान् का कहना है कि भारतीय ऋषि-महर्षियों के अथवा उनकी रचनाओं के काल का निर्णय करना आकाशपुष्पों को तोड़ने के समान है। इस प्रकार के काल्पनिक कालनिर्णय में मैक्डानल का किंचिन्मात्र भी विश्वास नहीं है। इस तथ्य की जानकारी भारतीय विद्वानों को पहले से ही था। अतएव भारतीय शिक्षा-दीक्षित विद्वानों में से किसी ने भी ऐसी निराधार अटकले बांधने में अपनी बुद्धि का अपव्यय नहीं किया है।"
"महाभाष्य में ‘मीमांसक' शब्द का उल्लेख बार-बार किया गया है, जिसे दर्शाते है ‘अथेह कस्मान्न भवति यात्रिकश्चायम् वैयाकरणश्च कठश्चायं बड्वृचश्च औक्थिकश्चायं मीमांसकश्च' (महाभाष्य 2.2.29) इन उल्लेखो से स्पष्ट होता है कि पतञ्जलि के समय मीमांसा का प्रचार पर्याप्त हो चुका था। अतः सहज अनुमान होता है कि मीमांसा सम्प्रदाय के प्रथम सूत्रकार जैमिनि का अस्तित्व भगवान् पतञ्जलि के पूर्व ही था।
"‘अथ गौरित्यत्र कः शब्दः? गकार-औकारविसर्जनीया इति भगवान् उपवर्षः (शाबर भाष्य प्रथम भाग) शबरस्वामी के इस लेख से अवगत होता है कि जैमिनीय मीमांसा सूत्रों के वृत्तिकार उपवर्ष थे। अतः कथासरित्सागर के अनुसार पाणिनी के सूत्रों पर ‘वार्तिक' की रचना करने वाले कात्यायन के समकालिक ‘उपवर्ष' को मानना होगा। तब व्याख्याकार की अपेक्षा मूल ग्रन्थाकार को पूर्ववर्ती कहना होगा। इसलिये उपवर्ष के पूर्व ही जैमिनि को मानना होगा और उपवर्ष के समकालिक वार्तिककार से भी प्राचीन ‘जैमिनि' को कहना चाहिए। इतना ही नही व्याकरण सूत्रकार पाणिनि भी क्रमादिगण में ‘मीमांसा' का पाठ कर स्वयं अपने को जैमिनि का पश्चाद्वर्ती होना बताया है।"
"यास्क तथा जैमिनि के सिद्धान्त समरूप है, यदि जैमिनि यास्क के परवर्ती होते तो निश्चित रूप से उनके सिद्धान्तों का अध्ययन किया होता, तथा उनका उल्लेख मीमांसासूत्रों में दिखाई पड़ता, परन्तु न यास्क का उल्लेख करते है न यास्क जैमिनि का। इससे यह ज्ञात होता है कि दोनो प्रायः समकालीन थे। सभी विद्वानों ने एकमत से स्वीकारा है कि यास्क बुद्ध के पूर्ववर्ती थे लगभग 500 ईसा पूर्व अतः जैमिनि भी यास्क के समकालीन होने से बुद्ध के पूर्ववर्ती सिद्ध होते है। निष्कर्ष यह है पॉलॉक के आक्षेपो का कोई आधार नहीं है।"
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"“History is a category which has no demonstrable place within any South Asian ‘indigenous conceptual system’ (at least prior to the middle of the nineteenth century)... South Asians themselves seldom if ever used [a historical] explanation... In a South Asian environment, historical interpretation is no interpretation. It is a zero-category”.
"Larson (1980) cited in Pollock (1989:603)"
First and foremost, that term is a lie invented to wipe out the name of India and the very term Indian Subcontinent. South Asia is nothing but India as known for through all of history to the world outside India, until British divided India in 1947 for a dual purpose of a convenience of wedt - one, India thereby could, as they thought and expected, never got over the other part fighting it, and would be forever bogged fown in wars, terrorism and poverty, as UK had done to Ireland beforeit was done to India; and two, West thereby had free use of military bases for usage against USSR, which a government of India would not allow. West of course never expected their Rottweiler to take bites out of their own selves, after the Rottweiler had enjoyed being used in breaking up USSR.
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"“Early India wrote no history because it never made any”
"(Macdonell (1900) cited in Pollock (1989:607))!"
Racism, thy name seems to have been Macdonell. Hitler merely inherited from forefathers.
"सिद्धान्ततया चोपस्थापितमेतन्मेक्डोनेल्लेन! कुल्के (Kulke) नामापरः पुनः पाश्चात्त्यो हेतुमत्रेत्थमूहाञ्चक्रे यद्ब्राह्मणकायस्थयोर्यो विभागस्समजनि सामाजिकस्स एवेति। तद्यथा ब्राह्मणैर्बौद्धिकानि साधनान्यात्मसात्कृतानि, कायस्थैस्तावल्लेखभण्डारस्य (archives) साधनानि वशीकृतानि (Pollock 1989:607) । एवमेव लेफेब्र् (Lefebvre) नाम्नोऽपरस्य मतमप्यसावुपस्थापयति यज्जगतो महत्याश्चाक्रिक्या वृत्तेर्मात्रस्य सर्वदाकलनमित्येतद्धेतुक एवेदृक्षस्य व्यतिकरस्य यदन्वेवेतिहासस्य समग्रस्यापि पौराणिककथास्वेवान्तर्भाव इत्यपि च (Pollock 1989:607) । प्रचुरोऽप्ययमभिप्रायो न तावांस्तृप्तिकर – इति पुनःप्रब्रुवाणःपोल्लाकस्स्वकीयमौदार्यमप्युपस्थापयन्निव लक्ष्यते। अपरमपीदृशमेवौदार्यमस्याधिभारतान् यन्नाम नीट्शे (Neitszche) नाम्नश्चिन्तकस्य लपितस्योपन्यसनं यच्च तावज्जीवन्ति नाम पशव इतिहासपराङ्मुखाः, मनुष्य एव खलु पराकुर्यात्प्रतिक्षणमभिवर्धमानं प्राचीनकालीनं भारमिति (Pollock 1989:603) । अर्थाच्चित्रमत्राक्षिप्यते यन्नात्यन्तम्भिन्ना भारतीयाश्चतुष्पाद्भ्य इति!।"
As did these other siblings, such as Pollock.
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"“We know nothing of the personal lives of Sanskrit poets, just as they tell us nothing of the personal lives of their patron. The persons here have melted into the types of poet and king.”
"Ingalls (1965:24)"
Do we really know about personal life of the king of Jews? No, lies made up by church as his story have nothing but a fishnet of tenuous strands held by glue fear and more via inquisition by church.
"मार्क्स (Marx) वादानुयायी पोल्लाको मार्क्सवादाभिघातकमभिप्रायमेवमभिलपतीत्यपि विस्मयस्यैव विषयः। “यद्धि नाम तार्किकं तद्धि स्वस्मिन्नेवैतिहासिकमन्तर्भावयति (The logical contains within itself the historical) इति बत मार्क्सवादिनां सूत्रम् (Frolov 1984:174) । इत्युक्ते मार्क्सवादिनामयमाग्रहो यन्मार्क्सवाद एव वस्तुतो वस्तुतत्त्वानुसारी। आतश्चेतिहासस्सर्वोऽपि मार्क्स्वादिनां नयमेवानुसृत्य घटिष्यत इति। मार्क्स्वादसिद्धान्तानुसारमेव खलु जगति सर्वं सर्वदा प्रसिद्ध्यतीति! मार्क्स्तर्कस्य महिमाऽयं यद्राज्यं समाज इत्यादिकं सर्वमपि मार्क्स्तर्कमेवानुरुणद्धीति। पश्चात्काले तु धनिकाराधनरूपः (capitalism) सिद्धान्तो नङ्क्ष्यति समाजवादश्च विराराजत इत्यादिकं सर्वं मार्क्स्वादादेव सेत्स्यतीत्याह फ्रोलोव् (Frolov) नामकः। वस्तुतस्तु तत्सर्वं नैव जगति जघट इति पामरैरपि परिज्ञातमेव।"
But if Pollock is Marxist, how's he allowed to survive in US? No, that leftism is an academic pose, as fraudulent as rest of his career.
"“Hindus did not preserve records as diligently as the Chinese did, “what the Hindus felt worth preserving was the meaning of events, not a record of when events took place.””
"Organ (1970:30-31)"
Aren't they all forgetting millions of manuscripts Burnet in well over half a dozen universities of India and in temples destroyed, by barbarian invaders who massacred hundreds of thousands of civilians, including thousands of scholars? For several centuries, well over a millennium?
Or is this deliberate infliction of double the assault against India, by not recognising the destruction wrought by invaders, West hoping thereby that the Rottweiler will turn around on the bleeding target rather than seek the fresh one in West?
"“Indifference to chronology is seen everywhere in India, and must be definitely connected, in the ultimate issue, with the quite secondary character ascribed to time by philosophies.”
"(Keith 1920:146-147)"
Not true, looking at long genealogies in even the two great epics.
"इतिहासविषये पाश्चात्त्यानामाग्रहविशेषो लक्ष्यते यदनुसारं च ते महाभारतमूलकथा नामाहवमात्रिकेति प्रतिपिपादयिषन्ति। परन्तु नहि पाश्चात्त्यानां मानदण्डा एव मानार्हतयाभ्युपेयाः। यथाह हीहसाख्यो विद्वान्।
"“Europe’s literary criteria were not applicable to India. Albrecht Weber’s idea that the original Mahābhārata consisted only of the battle chapters was a case of ‘arguing from Homer’.”
"(Heehs 2003:177-178)"
पाश्चात्त्यानामैकदेशिक्यः प्रतीतयस्सार्वदेशिकतया न निभालनीया इति, स्वानुकूलानिर्वर्तकत्वेन परिकल्पितानां क्रमाणां नहि सर्वान्वयित्वमित्यप्याह घोषाख्यो विपश्चित्।2 भारतीयाश्चिन्तनप्रणाल्यः परेषां प्रक्रिया अवश्यमतिशेरत इत्येव घण्टाघोषं घोषयति घोषः।
"“Compared to other civiliations that view history in term of thousands of years, the Indians – Buddhists, Jains and Hindus – narrated it in terms of billions of years...”
"(Ghosh 2007:213-4)"
[ 2 ] “To categorzie the Indian concept of history as prehistory within Hegelian principles or strategic British historiographic imperialist schemes is cutting down the richness of possibility as “historicality shrinks in scope to enable a narrowly constructed historiography to speak for all of history.”
"(Ghosh 2007:216)"
"अपि च नैतिहासिकत्वमेव गरीयस्तत्त्वं, विशिष्टातिरेकि हि सामान्यमित्यादिकमपि तस्यैव भणितिः।3
"नीट्शेप्रोक्तपशुमानवभिदायाः प्रतीपत्वमेव प्रतीयत उक्तावस्याम्। “नृपशुरथवा पशुपतिः” “स योगी ह्यथवा पशुः” इत्याद्युक्तिवदत्रापि बहीरूपसाम्यमवालोक्यते। (अधुन्वन् मूर्धानं नृपशुरथवा पशुपतिरिति जगन्नाथोक्तिः; सुभाषितेन गीतेन युवतीनां च लीलया। मनो न भिद्यते यस्य स योगी ह्यथवा पशुः ॥ इत्येवंरूपके सुभाषिते चात्रोल्लेख्ये।)
"इतिहासप्रज्ञा हिन्दुषु किं नासीदेव? इति प्रश्नमेव स्वलेखस्य शीर्षिकात्वेन प्रतिपद्यमानोऽरविन्दशर्मा (Arvind Sharma) तावद् भारतीयानां रुचिविषये सामर्थ्यविषये च नैकानि सत्यान्यधीतिहासं प्राचीकटत्। तत्रत्याः केचनांशा अवश्योल्लेख्या अत्र। शिलाशासनानां प्रामुख्यं भारतेतिहासे विशदीकुर्वन्कांश्चन मुख्यानंशानेवं स द्योतयति।
"यद्यपि सन्ति नानाप्रकारा इतिहासविलेखने, शिलाशासनानि ताम्रपत्राणि च परं भागं गृह्णन्ति भारतीयेतिहाससन्दर्भे। कियन्त्यासञ्छिलाशासनानि कुत्र च कुतश्चेति विवेच्यमेव। दक्षिणभारते नवतिसहस्रं शिलाशासनानां लभ्यत इति विलिखति सर्कारः (Sircar) इति तन्मतमादावाविष्करोति।
"“The favoured medium in which the rulers of India left behind their records are inscriptions. About 90,000 inscriptions have so far been discovered in different parts of India...Many of these inscriptions have not yet been published. Every year new inscriptions are being discovered.”
"(Sircar 1977:91)"
"शकवर्षगणन उपयुज्यमानैः प्रकारैरपि भारतीयानामितिहासप्रज्ञा स्पष्टीभवति। त्रयोदशगणनाप्रकारानुल्लिखति बाषम् (Basham) । बाषमस्य पट्टिकैवम्प्रकारिका – (अल्बिरूनी(Al Biruni) चापि किञ्चिद्भिन्नांश्चतुर्दशप्रकारान्निर्दिशति।)
"“A. L. Basham lists [these eras]
"1. Era of the Kaliyuga (3102 BC);
"2. Śrī Lankan Buddha Era (544 BC);
"3. Era of Mahāvīra (528 BC);
"4. Vikrama Era (58 BC);
"5. Śaka Era (78 AD);
"6. Licchavi Era (110 AD);
"7. Kalacūrī Era (248 AD);
"8. Gupta Era (320 AD);
"9. Harṣa Era (606 AD);
"10. Kollam Era of Malabār (825 AD);
"11. Nevār Era (878 AD);
"12. Era of Vikramāditya VI Cālukya (1075 AD); and
"13. Lakṣmaṇa Era of Bengal (1119 AD).”
"(Sharma 2003:208 fn)"
"“To transmit the royal decrees a corps of secretaries and clerks was maintained, and remarkable precautions were taken to prevent error. Under the Coḷas, for instance, orders were first written by scribes at the king’s dictation, and the accuracy of the drafts was attested by competent witnesses. Before being sent to their recipients they were carefully transcribed, and a number of witnesses, sometimes amounting to as many as thirteen, again attested them. In the case of grants of land and previleges an important court official was generally deputed to ensure that the royal decress were put into effect. Thus records were kept with great care, and nothing was left to chance; the royal scribes themselves were often important personages.”
"(Basham 1999:100)"
"चीनदेशीययात्रिकेन जुयन् जाङ्गेन (Zuanzang = Hiuen Tsang) पुनः - प्रतिपुरं (every district) लेख्यराशेरुल्लेखः कृत - इति वदति बीलाख्य इतिहासवित्। (Beal 1969:78) । परन्त्वधुना तानि लेख्यानि नैव लभ्यन्ते! साधारण्येन जुयन् जाङ्गेन दत्तेषु ह्युल्लेखेषु प्रत्ययः महत्तरः वर्ततेऽन्यदत्तोल्लेखापेक्षया।"
Was he the one who saw islamic barbarian invaders massacring tens of thousands of scholars at a university in India that he was a visitor at, and was accidentally saved, having witnessed the destruction too of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts by the hordes?
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"“[That inscriptions] relatively abound in those areas where Islamic rule took longest to penetrate, invites the proposition that they may also have suffered iconoclastic destruction, in keeping with the pattern of the relative paucity of such evidence from the Hindu period available from areas under prolonged Islamic rule”
"(Spear (1994) cited in Sharma 2003:13)"
"तुरुष्कैः परधर्षणतत्परैर्विनाशकार्यमतितरां विततमिति सूचयति विट्जेलपि। स आह -
"“In Nepal the temperate climate and the almost complete absence of Muslim incursions worked together to preserve these old mss.”
"(Witzel 1990:9) (italics ours)"
"विट्ज़ेलवाक्यमनुमोदमानश्चारविन्दशर्मा तुरुष्कविहितध्वंसकार्यैकान्तिक्यं सुष्ठु स्फुटयति।
"“An extreme case of the conspiracy of negative forces in relation to the manuscript tradition is provided by Kashmir, where ‘no mss. older than c. 1500 AD remain. Local Hindu and Muslim chroniclers agree in blaming the Sultans Sikander and Ali (1389-1419/20) for their wholesale destruction by burning and dumping them in the Dal Lake’.”
"(Sharma 2003:212)"
"दौर्जन्यैकनिलयैस्तैस्तथाविहितं तुरुष्कैरिति तुरुष्कैतिहासिकैरपि प्रतिपन्नमिति चात्र स स्पष्टं सूचयति।
"भारतीयं विज्ञानं तैरेव नाशितमिति अल्बिरूनीनामकेनैतिहासिकेन स्वतः प्रोक्तमिति सचौमतमुदाहरत्यरविन्दशर्मा।
"“As a result of Maḥmūd’s devastating raids ‘Hindu sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country conquered by us, and have fled to places where our hand cannot yet reach, to Kashmir, Benares, and other places.’”
"(Sachau cited in Sharma 2003:212)"
"यथा देवालयास्तथैव भारतीयकलाकृतयोऽपि तुरुष्कैर्नाशिताः इति विट्जेलप्यङ्गीकरोति
"“...Hindu historiography suffered serious obscuration during the period of Islamic occupation, as this period also involved the destruction of holy images and temples which were one form of material in which such history was preserved.”
"(Sharma 2003:220)"
"अत्र श्रीवरस्य राजतरङ्गिण्यां विद्यमानमेतद्वचनमुल्लेखार्हं यत्र ग्रन्थालयानामेवाग्निसात्करणं नीचैस्तुरुष्कैर्विहितमिति स्पष्टमुट्टङ्कितम् –
"सेकन्धरधरानाथो यवनैः प्रेरितः पुरा।
"पुस्तकानि च सर्वाणि तृणान्यग्निरिवादहत् ॥"
"(१.५.७५)"
"उपसमाप्ति लिखत्यरविन्दशर्मा स्वलेखे सम्पूर्णध्वंसकार्यस्य तुरुष्कनिष्पादितस्य स्वरूपं निरूपयन् यत्तद्द्धि पूर्णत्वं ध्वंसविजृम्भितस्य यद्ध्वंसकार्यं सञ्जातमित्यपि सूचिकाः नावशेष्यन्ते। अर्थादीदृग्विधनिःशेषप्रमार्जनपटवस्तुरुष्का इति।
"“The perfect genocide is one which never occurred, because no one was left behind to tell the story. The point to be made is that the scale of destruction can be such as destroys the very evidence of that destruction. One then faces what might be called an evidentiary “black hole.”
"(Sharma 2003:220)"
Khatyn, only millionfold.
"तक्षशिलानालन्दाख्यविश्वविद्यालयद्वयविध्वंसनं विहितं खलु तुलुुष्कैः। तादृक्षाधुनिकविश्वविद्यालयस्य आक्स्फ़र्ड्-केम्ब्रिड्जाख्यस्य सग्रन्थालयस्य विध्वंसनं यद्यद्य विधीयते का तर्हि कथा स्यादाङ्ग्लेतिहासनिर्मितिशास्त्रस्येति प्रष्टव्यं भवति।
"“By the end of the 12th century the two major universities of ancient India, those of Takṣaśilā and Nālandā had disaapeared...What prospect would we hold out for British historiography in the future, if the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were utterly destroyed today along with all the libraries.”
"(Sharma 2003:222)"
"एतादृशमहत्तरग्रन्थराशिविनाशनोत्तरकालेऽप्यद्यापि कोटित्रयाधिकहस्तप्रतयः प्राधान्येन संस्कृतभाषया लभ्यन्त इत्युक्ते (गोयलप्रभृतयः Goyal et al (2012)) कियान् पर्वताकारो ग्रन्थस्तोमः भारतैर्विरचितस्स्यादित्यूहनैकविषयः।
"स्वेतरसर्वसंस्कृतिविद्वेषिभिर्मुस्लिमैरेतादृक्कुत्सितधिक्करणीयकृत्येषु नित्यमुद्वृत्तं प्रवृत्तैः पाश्चात्त्यग्रन्थालया न पश्चात्काले नाशयिष्यन्त इति के नामाशंसीरन्प्रेक्षावन्तस्सप्रत्ययम्?"
................................................................................................
"“It is not, of course, intended to deny that there is a linguistic development in the Upaniṣads, when we compare them with Ṛgveda, which denial would be absurd...”
"(Coomaraswamy 1935a:411)"
Which amounts at the very least to Upaniṣad-s being much later, and perhaps also is testatory to Veda-s being received.
................................................................................................
"A critical discursive dimension of the desacralisation narrative is to focus on the social ills of society and attribute them to the core tenets of the dhārmic society. The manufacture of causation attributable to the core structures is a standard academic trope. Poverty, illness, colonization, social stratification etc. — all of these are generally attributed to the nature of dharma. This discourse normally entails that dharma and its sense of the sacred make society weak. The stronger way for a society is violence and conquest – the recommended Western way. The philological methods of Sheldon Pollock aim at excavating (via political philology) sociological ills through creative analysis of texts. A prescriptive application (via Liberation Philology) of Western sociological constructs is presented as “solution” to these ills. This in short - is the essence of the neo-Orientalist discourse."
Wonder why they don't apply this to their own societies - preaching "go shopping Sunday mornings for rest of the day at a bars, pubs, disco... day", for instance. Well, it does describe the life and more of West, all but the Sunday morning bit. Why not scrape off that bit, explicitly, and see if social ills vanish and see wellness stabilise? No more poor, no more broken families, no more drugs, ... must be the easiest solution possible. Why not apply it and make West perfect?
"Programs of “liberation” (The White Man's Burden) have been the standard colonial socio-experimentation used by the colonial powers of Europe to justify the excesses of primitive violence and greed. During the past two millennia, similar “programs” were used to justify slavery, the crusades, native-American genocide and various other violent enterprises sponsored by the Church and the West in its various forms – and forms of it are seen today in its (that of West) interferences across the world (in the guise of world peace, human-rights etc.). Aurobindo's essay on Social Reform is one of the earliest and is possibly one of the more coherent responses to the Westernization discourse.
"“Reform is not an excellent thing in itself as many Europeanized intellects imagine; neither is it always safe and good to stand unmoved in the ancient paths as the orthodox obstinately believe. Reform is sometimes the first step to the abyss, but immobility is the most perfect way to stagnate and to putrefy. Neither is moderation always the wisest counsel: the mean is not always golden. It is often a euphemism for purblindness, for a tepid indifference or for a cowardly inefficiency.”
"(Aurobindo 1890-1910:Social Reform) (italics ours)"
Does the author referring to Sri Aurobindo here?
"This (in my opinion) is to be acknowledged as Aurobindo's prescient response to the exercise of Liberation Philology - which prescribes the import of Western societal constructs as solutions to ills of dhārmic society. Solutions need to be wrought using internal mechanisms, not imported.
"“Neither antiquity nor modernity can be the test of truth or the test of usefulness. All the Rishis do not belong to the past; the Avatars still come; revelation still continues.”
"(Aurobindo 1890-1910:Social Reform)"
"Manu has been the primary target of this “liberation” discourse - the principal target of the subalterns, the postmodernists and the favorite whipping boy of the dalit-studies programs. Smṛti-s need to be rewritten contextually – there definitely is a need to recalibrate “details” of practice in cognizance of changes in society. The role of specific customs also need to be questioned and if possible re-contextualized without losing sight of the underlying motivation and intent. Aurobindo gives a veritable prescription to address societal ills in the Indian context via Indian sociological frameworks. Does blind following of customs constitute dharma or is the opposition to all of it dharma? What is the balance? How do we seek evolutionary harmony? What then, is the direction of social reform? Aurobindo has sagely advice.
"“Men have long been troubling themselves about social reform and blameless orthodoxy, and orthodoxy has crumbled without social reform being effected. But all the time God has been going about India getting His work done in spite of the talking. Unknown to men the social revolution prepares itself, and it is not in the direction they think.”
"(Aurobindo 1890-1910:Social Reform) (italics ours)"
................................................................................................
"The perspectives that are allowed by the introduction of the construct of a configuration of learning are exceedingly illuminating. Any society governed by the book requires theorization as essential basis for any sort of knowledge. The “written” has supremacy over experience and empirical proof. Western science at its core is a religion. Most of the “fundamental” learning is theoretical; all of mathematics is theoretical and axiomatically biased (assumptions of the nature of logic and inference are peculiar to the West). The theories of science too are of similar nature. Technology, driven by the materialistic and consumptive nature of capitalism, ignores most of the “biased basics” which govern science and mathematics. Its role is of an “applied” nature, limited to manipulating in the best possible manner (profit motives of capitalism) some principles (however incorrect) derived from theoretical science. Technology does not promise or guarantee perfection or universal correctness, but performs within well-defined limits. The relentless cycles of consumption and waste that drive capitalism also drive the ever improving (but forever imperfect) cycles of technology.
Most of that is true except about mathematics, and for that matter, about theoretical sciences. None of those are top down, they are merely taught that way, chiefly in what's called third world, including India. Feynman saw it in Brazil.
"The dhārmic nature of knowledge and learning is of a fundamentally different nature. How? It is about understanding and acknowledging the complete nature of reality (and the limited nature of human senses). Techniques and practices developed by Vedic masters over millennia to help understand the dimensions of reality (in the dhārmic systems, consciousness is the fundamental reality, not materialism) require, as a result, a learning culture that is experiential having a practical — not theoretical — basis."
If only this and other authors of Swadeshi Indology Conference realise it, what he describes above isn't different from science, particularly mathematics. Learning of theory is merely cutting short a journey of the few centuries by hundreds of others, but one certainly can in science have a choice of going through it all. In yoga, too, one may read, or experience, or both. But the latter is necessary while former helps. And as for consciousness, mathematics is science thereof on plane of mind.
"Traditional learning is achieved through a personal guru (gurukula-s), wherein the teacher imparts knowledge that is contextual to the learner and is primarily on the experiential plane. As Indian learning is mostly around the planes of practice (including those activities which involve the transcending of the physically apparent dimensions), it depends on ritual as its primary carrier. The notion of ritual is central to the Indian “learning” experience. The notion of the sacred thus becomes much more important to a practical culture than to a theoretical culture.
"In the Western system of Religion, control is centralized and the notions of knowledge and identifications of the sacred are by “consensus & decree”. Similar underlying structures and phenomena can be seen in the praxis of Science (academic journals, the Nobel Prize etc.) too. The dhārmic notion of sacred is essential for “practice” and underlies all human action. Without it, the learning (practice) culture will not have survived. Oral tradition is one among multiple modes of knowledge transmission (textual, oral and other modes (the śaktipāt). The sacred underlies all of these transmission modes. The configuration of learning and practice is a fundamental structural difference. Once one grasps this, it becomes all the more obvious why the notion of the sacred is essential in dhārmic societies.
"The neo-Orientalists are (as should be apparent by now) only continuing the theoretical exercises driven by the religion-centric root model of order governing the West. The desacralisation that has happened in the West via Science has only succeeded in transferring the “theoretical sacred” notions from religion to the edifice of Science. The deeper structures – learning configuration and root models of order – are essentially the same. The need to desacralize is important in theoretical cultures, and especially so when there is any encounter with an “other religion”. Orientalism of the preceding centuries was precisely this reaction. Indology and its school under discussion (neo-Orientalism) are only continuing this exercise. Academic discourse is the “intellectual” mechanism provided by Western structure to enable systematic engagement with the other. The framework needed to assert control and co-opt (digest) the dhārmic other into the prevalent Western universalist discourse is thus made possible. In the light of this new understanding, Indology can be seen to be a peculiar form of (structural) anthropology – to explain a distributed, practice-oriented learning culture in terms of a centralized theoretical learning culture."
This is true, all but the science part; there, it's only true that a teacher as in India is replaced with - supposedly - an impersonal committe of peers, at levels such as publications and awards. It works only as well as human nature, and consequent human actions, allow.
................................................................................................
"Implications
"From a dhārmic perspective, the essential nature of the human as conceived by the West is very limited. The understanding of the complete nature of reality is also limited. The structure of learning that underlies the West is theoretical in its essential nature. The peculiarity of the (Western, Christian) assumptions that underlie Western Mathematics and Science is well known. ... :
It's unclear exactly where the author faults science, which is building knowledge from lowest level of sensory experiences up via reason and logic, so anyone can access it, while the knowledge of inner and universal nature from Dharma is received, albeit via possibly yogic practices but not inevitably do, from above.
The connection of science with religion of West is more in attitudes and mindsets of West that, generally brought up in church teachings, is unable to get rid of the early bringing up, no matter how much taught and learned in reason or logic. This does not underpin the structure of science and mathematics as much so sticking to frames of history rooted in bible, or inability to get over biblical misogyny and see it got what it really represents, which is no more than justification of colonisations and slavery that was once assumed.
" ... The material artifacts that signify the superiority of the Western worldview in recent centuries (mostly driven by need for conquest and plunder) is the primary reason that the dominant discourse today is Western in nature. ... "
It's completely unclear what's meant by that; is it cars and airplanes and other modern life articles of usage, which usually aren't referred to as artifacts, or does the author here refer to artifacts such as temple drives and Egyptian mummies, acquired due to colonisations, and kept in museums?
" ... The academic structures of the West lie at the forefront of this conquest. The role of the neo-Orientalists is critical for continuing the Western-universalist world-view. ... "
Now it's completely unclear which conquest is meant here - if colonial conquest, then academic structures had nothing to do with it; and if author means dominance in academia and world-wide discussions, then yes, colonial conquests were responsible for cultural dominance by invaders, and attempts to wipe out existing vultures, including their academia and faiths.
" ... India's core dhārmic structure has been under theoretical onslaught since the inception of Indology. Even after centuries of European colonization, the dhārmic structures have not succumbed to these frontal attacks. ... "
This was unique in world history, compared to other cultures that fell before onslaughts of Abrahamic-II, Abrahamic-III and Abrahamic-IV in less than a century, while India not only survived for well over twelve centuries of attempts that combined horror of burnings of libraries, destruction of temples, and enslavement of hundreds of thousands, but a sustained genocidal Holocaust over twelve centuries, denied by the said onslaughts of Abrahamic-II and Abrahamic-III; Abrahamic-IV has now joined the other Teo in denial of Indian culture in an attempt to finally wipe it off, so Indian treasures join those of Egypt and Persia, Peru and Mexico.
................................................................................................
"If Pollock’s predecessors sought to Europeanise and thoroughly colonise the very character of India, Pollock himself seems determined to give us a version of our story that is cleansed of native, formative elements, separated as far away as possible from intuitive, instinctive features of our distinct culture and is replete with influences of the ‘good’ Outsider. One wonders if his learning of Sanskrit has no other purpose except to facilitate this irresponsible theorization."
Well, he probably thought it was an easy route to career and position, fame and more, imagining a "native", "Indian" language to offer an easy conquest - and not bring intelligent enough to do science, failed at grasping Sanskrit, obviously, so is taking his frustration out by invective pejorative dressed up in verbosity.
................................................................................................
"In his 2006 book The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, Pollock presents a picture of contrast between the use of Sanskrit in ancient India before and after the Common Era, separated by events purported to have occurred around the onset of the new millennium. His portrayal of ancient India is one that is boilerplate, charged with Brahmanical oppression and ritualization. He is determined in depicting Sanskrit as a language which had no worldly use apart from the sacerdotal, an especially absurd and unbelievable charge, considering the sheer range of work that exists in matters apart from sacred material from the period.
"“Sanskrit probably never functioned as an everyday medium of communication anywhere in the cosmopolis — not in South Asia itself, let alone Southeast Asia — nor was it ever used (except among the literati) as a bridge- or link- or trade language like other cosmopolitan codes such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Chinese. And aside from the inscriptions, which have larger purposes, there is little evidence that it was ever used as the language of practical rule; tasks such as chancery communication or revenue accounting seem to have been accomplished,”
"(Pollock 2006:14)."
He's clearly taking his own frustration due to failure, at everything including Sanskrit, out with venomous verbose attempt to butcher India, with lies, as per Macaulay policy.
"Insisting that grammar was a tool of this hegemony, Pollock is very clear in establishing a temporal gulf between the use of Sanskrit for sacerdotal elements alone during BCE and for worldly affairs during the advent of the first millennium CE, even as he implicitly locates its origins outside India. The conception of a unity and ancient India’s philosophy, religion, arts and sciences and aspects of Life emerging from her chief pursuit of the Spirit is not even given a passing thought and thusly, Pollock creates a very bizarre picture of India’s past, where her chief pursuits for millennia seem to be exclusively limited to the religious and ritualistic. ... "
This is unbelievably bizarre, until one recalls Ignatius Donnelly and his worjs on Atlantis and Ragnarok, where he repeatedly avows impossibility of Arkansas yo have lived in, much essential originated in, India, which he describes as hot and impossible to think in; in particular he asserts that therefore, a perfect language that Sanskrit is, couldn't possibly have originated in India.
Sydney Pollock could be his own grandson, the way writes his bizarre declarations about Sanskrit, and must have inherited the sane racist worldview whereby the so-called "white" males are ascribed with every virtue without any evidence except that of ability to invade and steal as a race. So he declares Sanskrit as couldn't be of use, etc, because he can't.
And that bit about origin outside India is clearly an effort to reestablish Aryan invasion theory, which was about justification of invaders looting India, by a lie about Arya having invaded.
But Pollock's theory is clearly modelled on the history of Europeans invading and colonising other continents including India, and missionaries collaboration in forcing English language while they wipe out other faiths and teach natives to disregard their local knowledge and become copies of the missionaries; Pollock is doing a copybook fill in colors where the original model of European invaders is repainted with India and Sanskrit substituted for Europe and languages of Europe.
And, needless to say, it's as much a whopper as the original, the Aryan invasion theory.
" ... This intentional colouring with the sacred alone of India in BCE goes in tandem with Brahmanical oppression and excessive ritualization and its significance becomes apparent when Pollock uses this backdrop to focus on the non-sacred, liberating role of kāvya during the CE. Thus, in Pollock’s work, it is never the co-existence of both, and percase sway of one over the other, but a clear absence of kāvya in the earlier parts of BCE."
Here Pollock is copying the other model, that of rebellion against church post centuries of inquisition enforced repression, during and after Renaissance.
Pollock is too lazy to look for reality and understand it, and instead prefers to cast a Do Bigha Zamin as a How The West Was Won, and repaint a Vivekananda as a Custer. He's that ridiculous.
"As one wonders how such a divide is possible in light of the composition of the epics and other luminous material including various śāstra-s composed during the BCE period, Pollock renders a story where he considers the pāramārthika sat and vyāvahārika sat, chooses to focus – on the latter with a near complete disconnect between the two to the point of not admitting any influence of the former on the latter, while comparing them to Vico’s concepts (Pollock 2006:2). With his interpretation that literature and non-literature were acutely separated from each other, Pollock mounts a case for treating literature and kāvya as that which represented a clear break from the older order and heralded the beginning of the use of Sanskrit for worldly matters (Pollock 2006:5)"
And, presumably, he sees only spiritual aspects in the great epics?
"“A sharp distinction between literature and non-literature was both discursively and practically constructed by those who made, heard, and read texts in premodern South Asia, and it is with that construction — out of a methodological commitment to vyāvahārika sat, to taking seriously what they took seriously — that a history of their culture and power must begin.”
As complete and verbose a piece of nonsensical a lie as it could possibly get.
"Not only is this idea manifestly ill-founded and wrong but, in Pollock’s work, sets the ball rolling for ascribing to kāvya!and praśasti, features that enabled to exaggeratedly desacralize Sanskrit during the last centuries of BCE, and give him the platform to propound the Cosmopolis theory. His theorization is based on flimsy grounds as kāvya is not as divorced from Veda-s} as Pollock would have one believe, though his peremptory tone is ever present (Pollock 2006:81)
"“Inscriptions, testimonia, citations in literature, philology, the history of literary theory—every piece of evidence hard and soft thus requires locating the origins of kāvya in the very last centuries B.C.E., perhaps as much as a millennium after the Sanskrit language is believed to have first appeared in the subcontinent. Only an ideology of antiquity and the cultural distinction conferred by sheer age have induced scholars to move them back appreciably before this date—a move that requires conjecture every step of the way and the most fragile gossamer of relative dating.”"
What drivel! A millennium after Sanskrit first appeared in India, India witnessed an ocean to the northeast and north vanish as Himalayan ranges began to rise out of the vanishing ocean, unless it was several millennia after Sanskrit appeared in India - but not from elsewhere!
He mentions, however, not about when Sanskrit appeared in India, but "a millennium after the Sanskrit language is believed to have first appeared in the subcontinent", taking care to not say India, and using the bit about believed to cover up the lie that Aryan migration is.
Well, people who believe in a mother being a virgin immediately aftera natural childbirth with "virgo intacta" as proven by examination conducted by several shepherd wives, will believe any lie told by authorities.
................................................................................................
"4 Desacralisation to Globalisation of Sanskrit
"Pollock’s tangled writing is rich in bold, sweeping generalisations with far reaching implications for several centuries of history, but what is more audacious is his confident assertions that he uses as starting points for his theories instead of established facts. There are lakhs of thousands of manuscripts, apart from the several thousand ones that were hauled away by the colonisers, that are yet to be collated and studied across the country to know more about the conditions in the past millennia, especially that of BCE. Any unbiased scholar would readily admit how one is short of material to make aberrant theorisations of the sort Pollock makes in considering the period of India over the last 2500 years. Pollock’s presumptuous statements include
"“The very act of permitting Sanskrit to speak openly in the everyday world was itself a decision (on the part of the Śakas among others) made against the backdrop of centuries of its public silence.”
"(Pollock 2006:499)"
Drivel.
Why couldn't he limit himself to history of slavery in US and any parts his family played therein?
"“Even as poets eventually decided to shatter this seclusion and produce expressive and other non-sacral texts in Sanskrit and, equally important, to commit them to writing, participants in many other areas of Sanskrit culture reasserted archaic practices of orality and exclusivity. It is especially when juxtaposed to such conceptions, moreover, that the first public inscription of political poetry in Sanskrit recovers the element of audacity, even scandalousness that made history. The cultural political act of the Śaka prince Rudradāman in the middle of the second century — which, if not actually inaugurating a new communications model, at the very least affirmed its acceptability and perceived efficacy in dramatic fashion — must accordingly be seen, like all the others, as a choice.”
"(Pollock 2006:500)"
Doesn't occur to the idiot that he's inventing the said exclusivity, or foes he knew he's lying?
Valmiki must have had the ability to write dialogues of various characters, from Kaikeyi to Shabarie to Vanaras to Ravana, in at least another dialect if not the several others employed, if that were the case? He, after all, wasn't a born and brought up Sanskrit pandit, unless everyone did those days speak Sanskrit. And his work certainly does not lack colour, of characters, geography, politics, even more!
No, Pollock is modelling india on his experience in his own time and space, US where speakers of other languages form a substrata of first generation immigrants and such, and he's turning that only delighted inside out - from everyone forced in US now to use only English in public, to his imagination where only elite were once allowed to speak Sanskrit!
"It is incredible that the writer is so self-assured that he’s able to remark upon the Śaka-s' “decision” of “permitting Sanskrit” to be spoken openly, against false claims of “centuries of its public silence,” and it becoming a representation of “the first public inscription of political poetry in Sanskrit recovers the element of audacity, even scandalousness, that made history,” all remarks that have such a strong tone to them, which is characteristically absent when Pollock adopts a language replete with “perhaps" and “maybe" and “suppose" while defining his data set. One can look hard in Pollock’s labyrinthine work trying to find solid, unassailable facts that can naturally lead one to his conclusions but come up with almost nothing."
Here's one - if stone inscriptions including tombstones are the only proof of historicity, and manuscripts the only evidences, what does it say about church and their claims about the king of Jews whom they have enforced exclusive worship of, and about the mother they vlaim was a virgin immediately after childbirth as proven by examination by shepherds' wives, that there are no such inscriptions in stone to be found nor tombstones of either, nor manuscripts that confirm the church version, but only other gospels preserved despite suppression by church - then and now - which completely contradict the story concocted by church, and these gospels aren't even contemporary of those people but only of other gospels, written decades if not a couple of centuries post the events?
And yet Pollock dare not question lies by church, but proceeds to copy and lie about India’s history instead, which is cowardly, not manly.
"Several Western Indologists have certainly held Sanskrit to be the chief vehicle for sacred purposes in the ancient past, but, there has been study of the use of the language for several vyāvahārika disciplines as well, including the arts and sciences. But, none of this feature in Pollock’s scheme as non-sacral fields except the kāvya, to which Pollock attributes the role of a great liberator. In trying to explain his dismissal of existing theories in favour of his incongruous models, Pollock casts aside ideas from modern social theories, legitimation and functionalism, all the while betraying his clear motive and intent to globalize Sanskrit."
How haven't these people grasped the safest bet, which is, Pollock isn't good at Sanskrit, his reading is limited, and therefore his assertions aren't wide based naturally? He's universaliding his own limitations, much like a blind person claiming that an elephant is like a snake and nothing else.
"In trying to justify his ictus on writing as characterizing the non-sacral nature of Sanskrit while he holds oral transmission as typical of the sacred old order, Pollock brings in the ideas of Niklas Luhmann to see how “cultural change and ideational change” is steered by technology, such as printing for instance. Pollock considers writing and the manuscript culture in context of ‘communication dissemination’ and sees it as propelling the spread of kāvya, (Pollock 2006:498) “While admittedly remaining a cultural form that was fully realized only in public performance, kāvya was created through the power of writing,” dismissing any connection between the oral tradition and kāvya."
Well, the great epics certainly must have been written, Mahabharata certainly was, and one can't imagine Ramayana being coached orally to more than the Teo princes who were told about their own father, so it must have been written around the time it was composed. That takes written language in India - and universal literacy not limited to court, or elite - several millennia in past, well before to when Vega was Pole Star, at least the first time.
"Such statements from Pollock, the Sanskritist, draw attention to the motives behind his wilful and explicit rejection of defining elements from the tradition while he tries to cover in ornate language and diffuse style of writing the absence of any substantial basis for his claims."
Why IS the moron called sanskritist? If he weren't a Western male of skin clour of uncooked flesh, if he were from India, eoukd thus writing get him anywhere, much less be called Sanskritist? No.
" ... Using multilinguality and language plurality as evidence for the lack of a single ‘mother tongue’ for an individual in India, Pollock maintains that linguism was not native to pre-modern South Asia."
That fraudulent nomenclature again, when it only means India!
"Even as one can give his theory credit to be able to hold some water in perhaps the second millennium of CE, one finds that it does not at all address the issues he speaks about in BCE as well as the first millennium of CE, a remarkably long period during which Sanskrit did function as the primary vehicle of thought and expression of an entire culture across a sub-continent. ... "
Add a few millennia more in the past, say at least as far back as Rāmāyaṇa, which was no later than 11,000 BCE but could very well have been n×26,000 years ago before that for n>1, and authors would be closer to facts. Rāmāyaṇa was, after all, written in Sanskrit, and is dated when the pole star was brilliant.
" ... This methodology of Pollock, where he dismisses conflicting models even from European domains as those which are not native to Indian context and adeptly shifts the debate spatially and temporally to points of his own choosing in the grand narrative while seemingly trying to justify his positions is present across his work, making one wonder if it is wilful obfuscation."
When faced with a Khilji demanding that you hand over your wife to him, don't pause to consider his possible innocence! Pollock’s career isn't built on truthful interpretations of facts. Else he'd have been a kniwn big shot in mainstream US life in arenas where a career is woukd go by choice, not a poor wretch shunted off yo colonies to make a living.
................................................................................................
"In further considering theories from communication, socialization and legitimation, Pollock maintains,
"“Unwarranted generalizations based on European particulars pertain not only to the sociality of language but also to the place of culture as such in relation to power.”
"(Pollock 2006:511)"
Authors describe Pollock’s conduct next without recognition thereof as a typical missionary position.
"With no convincing explanation, Pollock dismisses with a casual mention the idea that Sanskrit could have been used for vyāvahārika purposes and spread across the Indian sub-continent, calling the spread as a real ‘enigma’,
"“The weakest argument, and the most quickly dismissed, explains the role of Sanskrit across much of the cosmopolis but especially in Southeast Asia as driven by practical interregional communication needs. Unfortunately, there is no direct evidence that Sanskrit was ever used to fulfill these needs outside of certain scholastic and liturgical environments. There are undoubtedly some real enigmas here, such as Sanskrit’s massive invasion of the Javanese lexicon (upward of 40 percent, and penetrating to the most quotidian level), but these enigmas may be open to other kinds of solutions.”
"(Pollock 2006:512)"
If he really cannot explain it, if he really believes that Sanskrit wasn't useful as a language normally is and was never used, if he's honest about any of it, he is logically forced to conclude - in all honesty if he has ever had any - that Rāmāyaṇa must have been, must be, so powerful a piece of literature as to have spread Sanskrit singlehandedly across much of Asia.
For Indonesia has enactments galore thereof and routinely, regularly so, too, despite enforced spread of Abrahamic-III and its tenets forbidding anything not of Arabic origin.
"As highlighted earlier in context of his methodology, Pollock wonders why the kings of Khmer or people of Pagan wanted to adopt Sanskrit and having eschewed reasonable explanations, he bizarrely suggests the following,
"“Yet isn’t it possible that people conceive of political and moral needs in the first place through such visions as Brahmanism and Buddhism, that these are not instruments for filling needs but might in fact create them, and that their appearance in one place and not in another is a consequence of entirely contingent factors, such as the presence or absence of certain itinerant religious professionals?”
"(Pollock 2016:515)"
That is a typical - and typically, disgustingly racist - fraudent missionary position of an Abrahamic-III, towards every other culture, before and after robbing them.
................................................................................................
"Carrying forward his design for the case of a globalized, secularized Sanskrit, Pollock maintains that (Pollock 2006:532) “The foreign does not become such until civilizationalist thinking makes it so. Prior to that, the “foreign” is simply a cultural element circulating in the vast world, its origins undecidable and very likely irrelevant to the people who proceeded to make use of it,” sounding more like a line from a book that justifies intellectually imperialism and colonization. Further dismissing indigenism as a viable theory, Pollock remarks,
"“What the history of transculturation at work in the Sanskrit cosmopolis demonstrates every step of the way, however, is that all culture is really transculture. Indigenism is to the history of culture what creationism is to the history of the cosmos.”
"(Pollock 2006:533)"
Was he too stupid to notice that Evolution couldn't be a surprise to a culture that had not only Dashāvatāra, but also Rāmāyaṇa, in its nurturing literature? Unlike West which was shocked at Darwin, India merely found a justification of yet another bit of immense treasure of knowledge of ancient India, written off by West as myth but subsequently found evidence of by science.
................................................................................................
"Even as Pollock presents a considerable body of work that has been undertaken in civilizational studies until current times, his own arguments for dismissing the theory, especially in the case of Oriental nations such as the Indian, replete with distinctive nature, are flimsy. His very questions, for instance, (Pollock 2006:534) “What possible “conception of the world as a whole” could be said to characterize “Indian civilization,” which has witnessed struggles over conceptions of the world of the most incommensurable and irreconcilable sort for three millennia?” are incredulous, especially considering his caliber as a critic! Anybody with even a passable familiarity of Indic systems will recognize the uniqueness of its paradigms and templates with which it approaches matters, be it spiritual or worldly.
"His declarations make more transparent his aims to globalize and secularise the language,
"“Indeed, a stable singularity called “Indian culture,” so often conjured up by Southeast Asian indigenists, never existed. What did exist was only a range of cultural and political codes and acts, many recently developed (Sanskrit kāvya, public inscriptions, free-standing temple building, quasi-universalist political imagery, land-grants to Brahmanical communities, and so on) and undoubtedly generated out of various local practices,”
"(Pollock 2006:535)"
"“Only gradually did all these practices coalesce into something like a cosmopolitan unity, one that was both “at home” and “abroad across this entire space. Not only is “Indianization” something of a empty signifier, since no unitary force ever existed to produce the process except in the trivial sense that the subcontinent provided one important source of new cultural flows to southern and eastern Asia; not only is it a crude sort of teleology, erroneously presupposing as cause what was only produced as effect; but equally remarkable, and almost always overlooked, is the fact that the Indianization of Southeast Asia was concurrent with, and no different from, the Indianization of India itself,” “From the processual perspective, “culture” or “civilization” (as in “Indian Civilization 101”) becomes nothing but an arbitrary moment illegitimately generalized, a freeze frame in a film taken for the whole story,”
"(Pollock 2006:539)"
Is there a direct relationship of DNA that Pollock shares with Hitler? Pollock does seem to believe in outrageous lies repeated and with an exponential quotient of what Jon Stewart (born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz; November 28, 1962) said of why he left television.
"“India, for its part, is hardly immune now to bad choices. The worst at present is the choice between a vernacularity mobilized along the most fragile fault lines of region, religion, and caste, and the grotesque mutation of the toxins of postcolonial ressentiment and modernity known as Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism. The very names of the groups that make up the institutional complex of Hindutva—including the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party) and its ideological wing, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council)—bespeak what had never been spoken before, postulating in the one case a single Indian “peoplehood” ( janata), in the other, Hinduism as an aggressive universalism. What is immediately clear from the history we have followed in the course of this book is that Hindutva is a perversion of India’s great cosmopolitan past, while the many new subnational movements (as in Assam and elsewhere) represent an entirely new, militant vernacularism, indeed, a kind of Heideggerization of Indian life,”
"(Pollock 2006:575)"
He's the spirit behind all those openly proclaiming intentions of breaking up India?
................................................................................................
"Western Philology
"As most of these “narratives” go, the origins of philology (not surprisingly) go to the Greeks. Along with their supposed speculations and achievements on language and its origins, what also arose in parallel was, “debate” or rhetoric and the ability to argue skillfully in public. ... "
But debates, Vaada-Vivaada, were one of the chief occupations and skills of learned in India, even upto time of Kalidasa, in Sanskrit; thereafter it continued in other languages as well, and debates in Marathi between famous personae were not only famous but an engrossing occupation for an intellectual city of Pune ass lare as in twentieth century, vying with theater which was a strong tradition.
................................................................................................
"Sheldon Pollock’s contribution to this volume was a paper (“Deep Orientalism”) in which he demonstrates the newly minted version of his philology. Using creative techniques and spectacularly speculative theories based on philological readings of Sanskrit texts, Pollock was able to (supposedly) reason that the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis to the pre-existing deep hatred and divisiveness present in Sanskrit (as a language). The thesis is that the study of Sanskrit by German Indologists affected their deep subconscious, creating ideas of Aryanism and justification for a sense of superiority."
He's lying, of course.
One, nazis were, like all West and all followers of later Abrahamic religions, antisemitism was institutionalised for nearly two millennia after the Roman occupation and subjection of Jewish lands and people, with propaganda of hatred carried out from pulpits definitely every year, if not every week; this agenda of hatred has now been extended (rather than transferred), to India, to Hinduism and to Brahmins, and to Sanskrit, for the same reasons it existed in years first place - an intense intolerance by later Abrahamic religions of any independent thinking, exceeded only by a viciousness towards knowledge and superior learnings. This is what is reflected in every argument by Pollock and Co against Hinduism and India.
Two, if someone is incapable of reading ancient history truthfully, they could reflect on the fact that the first resolution that was passed by the Knesset of Israel was to thank India for never persecuting Jewish refugees in India, for the two millennia when Rome had enforced their exodus from their homeland; India was the only ancient culture to have allowed Jewish people to have lived like others in India, while retaining their separate identity of faith.
So Pollock is lying, deeply. He might as well claim it was Pythagoras theorem that influenced nazis, because it's equally false, as blame Sanskrit or India or Hinduism.
As for castes, Europe had them as did every other society including Arabia, and they were ironcast, far worse than India, and equating India with caste system is another lie. The only difference is that castes elsewhere were based on race, tribe, gender, power and landed property, manifesting in titles from royalty down to peasantry; in India, it was differently structured, with power and wealth not only separated but also not at top.
"Pollock thus uses his critical philological study of Sanskrit and Indian texts as a response to Said’s critique in Orientalism - by characterizing Sanskrit itself as a carrier of the deep seeds of racism, hatred and power, and calling it “Deep Orientalism”. Sheldon Pollock’s philology is characterized (as seen earlier in the history of philology, this is nothing new) by political readings and fairly imaginative speculation, keeping alive the hegemonic discourse of Orientalism in the post-colonial era. H.H Devamrita Swami of the ISKCON notes in his review of Malhotra (2016)"
Next he'd claim that crucifixion wasn't European racism against Asians who were neighbour's, but only because Pontius Pilate was a fan of Sanskrit Grammer.
Pollock is just THAT ridiculous a lier.
"“A salient point this book offers us is that the Western approach to Sanskrit is often weighed down by “political philology”—cultural biases, hegemonic filters.”
"(Malhotra 2016:Review page)"
"Sheldon Pollock’s wide-ranging work on Sanskrit and Indian civilizational history over the past 30 years has been characterized by deep political readings into India’s past and of its cultural artifacts - primarily the language of the Sanskrit and the associated texts of sanātana dharma. His own understanding of traditional Sanskrit text scholarship is colored, and according to him Sanskrit philology was mostly tied to practices of power. See Malhotra (2016:232) for details."
Actually Pollock seems to take every horrible thing perpetrated by US, West, Rome et al, and twisted it to impose it on ancient India, not caring about reason, logic or facts in the process - just as church did in propagating antisemitism.
"“A salient point this book offers us is that the Western approach to Sanskrit is often weighed down by “political philology”—cultural biases, hegemonic filters.”
"(Malhotra 2016:Review page)"
"Sheldon Pollock’s wide-ranging work on Sanskrit and Indian civilizational history over the past 30 years has been characterized by deep political readings into India’s past and of its cultural artifacts - primarily the language of the Sanskrit and the associated texts of sanātana dharma. His own understanding of traditional Sanskrit text scholarship is colored, and according to him Sanskrit philology was mostly tied to practices of power. See Malhotra (2016:232) for details."
Actually Pollock seems to take every horrible thing perpetrated by US, West, Rome et al, and twisted it to impose it on ancient India, not caring about reason, logic or facts in the process - just as church did in propagating antisemitism.
................................................................................................
"Influences on Pollockian Philology
"In his 2009 paper, Pollock speculates on the future of philology. He offers his own definition/s of what philology is and what it should be
"“Most people today, including some I cite in what follows, think of philology either as close reading (the literary critics) or historical-grammatical and textual criticism (the self-described philologists).
"What I offer instead as a rough-and-ready working definition at the same time embodies a kind of program, even a challenge: philology is, or should be, the discipline of making sense of texts. 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) (italics ours)"
In short, it's Pollockian nazi tool of twisting anything to blame it on anyone.
"Opening the doors for free-for-all speculative academic scholarship based on this application of Vico’s categories to Sanskrit terminologies (glaringly out-of-context), Pollock adds
"“… the philologist’s truth, balancing in a critical consilience the historicity of the text and its reception, adds the crucial dimension of the philologist’s own historicity.”
"(Pollock 2009:951)
In other words, Pollock declared thereby his intentions to lie his head off accusing India of anything he either, as long as he stayed verbose most of the time.
................................................................................................
"It is true that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s involvement as a human being in his own circumstances, then it must be true that for a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of this actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, and as an individual second.
"Edward Said in Orientalism"
"Hinduism is not just a faith. It is the union of reason and intuition that cannot be defined but is only to be experienced. Evil and error are not ultimate. There is no Hell, for that means there is a place where God is not, and there are sins, which exceed his love.
"Dr. Radhakrishnan"
"Celebrating civilization perfection is nothing more than a blind abdication of self-criticism.
"(Pollock, as cited in Gould, 2008:533)"
The first two quotes are pretty true.
The third proves the first two, and tells not so much that the guy had a mind, as that he'd been brought up to feel that, to not feel guilty was sinful, and to be abjectly ashamed of his own existence was the only pose for virtuous.
He's imposing that on India, just changing words.
................................................................................................
"While myth is often implied to mean a lie, a fiction, or something untrue, as its derived meaning from the Greek word mythos, scholars have contested that meaning in the context of the Sanskrit word ‘mithyā’ which implies a reality in between truth (history) and untruth (myth), and points towards a reality beyond our worldly understanding. Joseph Campbell, the world-renowned mythologist considers myths as clues, which ‘direct us towards the experiencing the spiritual potentialities of the human life’ (Moyers 1990:5) for myth is a metaphor that is indicative of spiritual powers that lie within us (Maher & Briggs 1990)."
What that amounts to is simply this - colonizers used this word for most of literary tresure that belonged to the subjugated, and later, especially post Renaissance, when intelligentsia realised it was equally applicable to lores and legends of the conquistadores, they attempted to soften it.
"Myths are narratives with multiple meanings that hold sacred value for the respective cultures and are carried out through their rituals. Therefore, these narratives are considered to be true from within the respective faith systems, and when regarded in context, lend themselves to expressing respective systems of thought and values. Although it is important to recognize that myths are usually regarded metaphorically and not literally, ... "
Is that always true, or is that a self justification by colonisers, who don't explicitly declare their own myths as myths? European and generally Western church hasn't declared either virgin birth or immaculate conception a myth, or resurrection and thereafter account, for that matter.
" ... so myths can be both rooted in history and be fictitious (Carpentier’s Lectures on the Website, accessed May 15, 2016) e.g. Sun worship is not about worshiping the heavenly body as much as an acknowledgement of its life-giving quality to the entire planet. Which, it must be emphasized, has not changed since time immemorial. Therefore an ancient ritual of Sun worship is also an indication of ancient humans’ knowledge, however subconscious, of the influence of the Sun on our planet. Similarly Rāma and Rāvaṇa are qualities that bring us close to or distance us from the divine."
It's not different from human treatment of other humans, in that respect, since it's not identical to treatment of the departed; so recognition of physical bodies as only one aspect of, whether humans, or the forces of which divine quality is recognised in according them identity of a God, is all of a piece.
"Myth, in the West, is used as the diametric opposite of history. But Rajiv Malhotra emphasizes, in his path-breaking book, Being Different (Malhotra 2013), that myth ‘uses fiction (story7) to convey truth’ (Kindle Edition, Location 1138), and can be enacted out via a ritual (Myers 1990). In addition, to contrast it with the frozen idea of history, as in the West, the Indian word for history ‘itihāsa’, sometimes translated as myth by those studying Indian texts, comprises both history and myth (Malhotra 2013). ... "
This false translation of the word is typical of the fraud perpetrated by colonisers, and their cousins across the pond, against former colonial subjects, in perpetuity. Literal meaning of ‘itihāsa’ is "this happened", and has no connotations of the sort suggested by "those studying Indian texts", and "‘itihāsa’" has nothing to do with what's labelled myth; but the word 'history' is, on the other hand, questionable as supposedly a factual account of all that happened in past, since history - especially as written in West - is not only what suits the conquerors, and is thereby highly questionable as all truth, it also literally "his story".
" ... But the schism in the way the West sees others and itself is exemplified in Being Different, where Malhotra shares a story about a Journalism professor’s struggle to include myths of Western civilizations in a class on ‘World Mythology’."
“Western scholars unable to deal with the multiple renditions of itihāsa, tend to categorize it all as myth, and myth alone...their own myths are recounted as history. Indian spiritual texts are subject to interpretive methods, which are entirely different from those used to study the tales of Jewish and Christian religions. For example, the West is studied using sociological methods and tools, whereas so-called primitive societies through anthropology and folklore; European and American social units are always described as communities, never tribes.”
"Malhotra (2013:L1139)"
How true!
"Since the West’s own myths are taught as history, and the West does not have a category similar to itihāsa, Malhotra (2013) argues that Indologists are prone to misinterpretations when they use a Western lens to study itihāsa, which is more concerned with truth rather than history, and can be told through multiple perspectives - hence it is that we have myriads of Rāmāyaṇa-s.
"“Parables abound in dharmic scriptures, too, but these inspire by the lessons they teach and not by claims of being the exact records of historical events. Hindus participating in rituals in temples do, for the most part, follow a received and codified tradition, and a minority might believe in the narratives they celebrate as literally having happened. Most Hindus tend to view the historical events in a fluid manner.”
"Malhotra (2013:L1110)"
Which is to say, clearly, that majority of India isn't required by tenets of their faith to put reasoning away when entering a place of worship, in direct contrast with Abrahamic-II and Abrahamic-III- creeds brought and enforced by invading conquistadores.
It's not that India is asked to strictly believe everything as for example by church, but that people know that any account of past rendered by anyone is just that, an account rendered by someone; and they believe for most part the kernel of truth which can distinguish, unlike outsiders who are intent on destroying everyone else's culture, as enforced by their own faiths, at pain of hell.
"While Pollock acknowledges the power of myth, he interprets the way he chooses to (Pollock 1984:508)8. In that context, Pollock starts on a wrong note, when he limits his understanding of Rāma and Rāvaṇa merely as good and evil, divine and demonic. In fact, he attributes harmful intentions in upholding Rāma as the model King, an ideal man, when he suggests that the Rāmāyaṇa’s sole purpose has been in creating and demonizing the ‘other.’ (Pollock 1984; Pollock 1993). Furthermore, Pollock demonstrates his inability to grasp the concept of itihāsa as he uses the word Euhemerization9(ascribing historical basis to mythology) for the divinity of Rāma (Pollock 1984: 506). The Rāmāyaṇa, for Hindu society, is a metaphor, although Pollock treats it like a mystery, which he has attempted to uncover through his writings. If there is a mystery to the Rāmāyaṇa, as a practitioner, the author can state, that it is this, that taking the example of Rāvaṇa, we can understand that most venerated of scholars can be proven wrong about the use of knowledge, and yet in academia today, scholars hold mind over heart and sometimes ethics, in the pursuit of understanding a system."
Pollock as Dusshasana fits even better than Pollock as Rāvaṇa, since Rāvaṇa was truly an accomplished man of learning acquired via his own efforts, and Pollock merely sought to acquire positions and career, the whole shebang, via what what he thought was an easy route, leading to immense frustration for an arrogant and lazy racist who has ever since used venomous butchering of a superior culture to achieve his aims.
" ... Pollock’s absolute contempt, as evident in the following comment, for the tradition, that attributes divinity to all beings:
"“Much of the argument against the divinity of Rāma, furthermore, is based on a sense of the “divine" that conceals an embarrassingly narrow and un-selfreflective ethnocentricity, and on the use of an inapplicable set of critical canons.”
"(Pollock 1984:508)"
"Pollock’s absolute contempt, as evident in the following comment, for the tradition, that attributes divinity to all beings" - as author terms it - is not surprising, when one seeks answers in his background where a universal guilt is absolutely and doctrinally imposed on everyone, and anything which is not sanctified by the institution claiming sole agency of all possible approach to God (as defined by the said institution), is declared consigned to hell; Pollock is steeped in missionary ethos and, of hours, seeks to vilify everything sacred to the culture he seeks to wipe out, as a preparation for conversion of India.
"Desacralizing-Decontextualization: Pollock’s strategy of forwarding this theory of ‘aestheticisation of power’ is to first desacralize the texts that he studies (Malhotra 2016a:L3462). In desacralizing the texts, Pollock commits academic blasphemy by divorcing the object of his study from its context as he tries to understand its impact. It is akin to the Californian version of understanding karman without a belief in reincarnation. Any qualitative research, especially one that deals with the understanding of systems, cultures and texts of cultures that one does not practice, or live with, has to be grounded in a research methodology that is appropriate for the topic and attempt to study its object being as close to its lived reality."
Or else, anyone writing a research paper or book about church history is completely justified in asserting that Rome murdered the king of Jews and church, when it forsake Jews and did a treaty with Rome for survival, divested her object of worship of all semblance of manhood and presented a lie of a theological discourse about an exclusive and unique divine sacrificing willingly for guilt of all humanity, thereby not only simultaneously imposing universal guilt on all humanity but also paving the way for holocaust via centuries of fraudulent propaganda against his relatives.
................................................................................................
"However, Christians and Carey (1989) argue against some of the ways of viewing the subject matter as suggested by Vico and those influenced by him (p. 355), and call for a more comprehensive approach. They question the ‘natural science model of the social sciences’, (p. 355) and argue against the idea that social sciences, like natural sciences are said to “…develop laws that hold irrespective of time and place, to explain phenomenon through causal and functional models, to describe relationships among phenomena in essentially statistical and probabilistic terms” (p. 354). Instead, placing a higher value on symbols and context, Christians and Carey provide four criteria that make for a valid and a thorough consideration of the topic of study: naturalistic observation, contextualization, maximized comparisons, and sensitized concepts (Christians and Carey 1989)."
One, it's hubris to imagine that one's own background regardless, one can be objective about another human, much less about another culture, to treat the said other human or other culture as a scientist treats an object of study; a good test would be a mirroring, reflecting on how one would feel or react if the situation were exactly reversed.
Two, there's no reason humanities should ape or aspire to emulate natural science, any more than paintings should be done by coloring dot books.
"While Pollock implies that widespread use of the Rāmāyaṇa can be owed to its use as a political tool, his analysis does not consider the idea that, in the Indian context, the rise and decline in worship of various avatāra-s, according to the yuga-s has been common. When he suggests that characters of the Rāmāyaṇa behave as puppets as though without any will, he is implying that the followers of epic might be driven in the same robot-like manner to demonize non-Hindus and those of lower castes. But he conveniently ignores characters such as Khevaṭ and Śabarī who are not only from the lower strata, but who Rāma expresses gratitude to, for helping him in his journey. In addition, Pollock overlooks factors such as Rāvaṇa himself being a learned Brahmin, whose father was the venerated Sage Viśravas12. Why does the Rāmāyaṇa create the other of a brahmin? Especially when Pollock implies that it was with the collaboration of the brahmins that the kings/rulers demonized the outsiders. Also overlooked is the fact that the author Vālmīki himself is supposed to be not of a higher caste, and Rāvaṇa a revered, learned one of a higher caste and a king, the very people Pollock suggests oppressed the ‘lower castes’?"
Haven't the Swadeshi Indology Conference Series authors discovered yet how much church and missionaries are ever ready to lie in order to gain power, and even more so to harvest conversions, and that Pollock, despite perhaps not bring officially a missionary, belongs to the same tribe, as did Ignatius Donnelly and Macaulay in spirit if not in institutional status?
................................................................................................
" ... Pollock approaches the text with an ‘attitude of criticism and not with curiosity’ because he analyzes the text with a preconceived theory that he wants to map out combining some past evidence from history (“when Ram temples came into existence”) and the Rāmāyaṇa’s plot (“demonization of Rāvaṇa”). Despite his experience with Hindu texts, he fails to acknowledge that in Indian system, beings are divine by nature and everyone is a God in the making, and that deva-s and asura-s are relative and not absolute."
Why is the term “demonization of Rāvaṇa” used by Pollock at all? Isn't there residence galore of wrongdoings by the demon, whose conduct bilateral first requirements of propriety in kidnapping a woman against her will, without her consent? Fortunately she had a husband who voted rescue her, but the conduct of the abductor subsequent to kidnapping does not recommend him in any way as even someone crazy in love, only as a man arrogant enough to demand a compliance from every woman he might have previously abducted without her consent. He is blinded by his power and wealth, and his ego does not permit him to admit he's grievously wrong.
Is “demonization of Rāvaṇa” really necessary? Valmiki only states his actions.
But Pollock calls it “demonization of Rāvaṇa”, gor reasons of his own background of ancestry from Europe. Not only Europe considered plunder of other lands legal - UK still refuses to return plunder from Greece, or even consider the question of doing so about loot from India - but for more.
Pollock's ancestry is of lands where droit de seigneur was law, whereby a landlord had rights to first night of every bride of every person resident or earner on lands he owned. (Hence, too, the racial integration!).
So, being from lands where a Rāvaṇa and a Khilji are considered only natural and rightful in demanding compliance from every woman, married or not, willing or not, Pollock’s characterisation of Rāmāyaṇa as “demonization of Rāvaṇa” is only natural, however surprising it be to the civilisation that did not allow such behavior.
After all, Pollock must have cousins galore he'd call black - or, if he's being politically correct, 'African-American', who aren't admitted to the so-called 'white' part of the clan, due to having an African ancestor, an unwilling slave forced as much into master's bed as into slavery in the first place.
Pollock wouldn't dream of lifting a finger, ever, to “demonization of Rāvaṇa” - or his own ancestor, for that matter.
Would he call Obama black? Safe bet. White? No, again a safe bet. But Obama has DNA equal of the two races, and with no unwilling partner between the couple.
................................................................................................
"Greek Origins of Western Philosophy and Science
"The discourse on the origins of science (and mathematics) has been controlled by the West till recently. As is the case with most such historiographies of the West, Greece is the undisputed source of all things Western (another hegemonic idea). Is this really true? Very little documented evidence that suggests the contrary is available. Consider the following remark on the book Stolen Legacy (James 2001),
"In this work Professor James dares to contend and labor to prove, among others, that the Greeks were not the authors of Greek philosophy, that so-called Greek philosophy was based in the main upon ideas and concepts which were borrowed without acknowledgement — indeed stolen — by a few wayward and dishonest Greeks from the ancient Egyptians.
"(Hansberry 1955:127) (italics ours)"
Why they are called wayward or dishonest isn't clear, but yes, it's known about knowledge of Egypt being inherited by Greek and Judaic cultures - latter being the less obvious knowledge kept safe by Jewish traditions through millennia of persecution and exoduses, pogroms and holocaust, probably responsible for drawing wrath of jealous lesser cultures.
"Why is this narrative not mainstream knowledge? ... "
One could say the same about the fact of Columbus not having 'discovered' the continent across Atlantic, even as far as Europe went - the fact of Vikings having known the land, having not only sailed there but settled and having trading posts, for centuries, long before Columbus, is not only known; there's even a Vikings tower at Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts, with very informative boards informing any visitor about their trading posts having been as far South along East coast as Watertown, Massachusetts.
But a far more obvious example is about the fact that, while Columbus having lied about calling natives of lands across Atlantic 'Indian' may not be universally known, the fact that the said natives of the continent having nothing to do with India is very well known now for several centuries.
Nevertheless they are called Indian, in a deliberately racist and arrogant attitude that implies that both groups of 'natives' - another term used pejoratively - were conquered, subjugated, looked of their tights and lands, and are therefore of no consequence whatsoever.
A similar 'mistake' by anyone calling Chinese 'Japanese', or US citizens 'Russian', or worse, 'nazi', won't be taken lightly.
" ... If one needed a vivid example of institutionalized hegemony – this could be it. Published in 1954, the book has not been popularized nor reprinted until recently by Moefi Asante, an African-American scholar. The lack of institutional blessing to these views, dangerous as they are to the Western narrative and the hegemony of history is apparent. The author of the book (Dr. George James) has been literally erased from academic history.
"Was there such a thing called Greek philosophy? Dr. James is vehement that there isn’t really any such! Almost all of what is now considered “Greek” is actually (black) Egyptian in origin."
Would it be justified applying the epithet to Egypt?
"“The term Greek philosophy, to begin with is a misnomer, for there is no such philosophy in existence. The ancient Egyptians had developed a very complex religious system, called the Mysteries, which was also the first system of salvation.”
"(James 2009:7)"
Occult was inherited by Jewish, not by Greek; the latter got architecture and geometry, possibly philosophy.
"After the Persian invasion, from 60 BCE up to Alexander’s conquest, the Greeks learnt most of all they could directly from the Egyptian priests. The plunder of books and entire libraries from Egypt and ascribing Greek origins to them (ex: a huge amount of books being attributed to Aristotle) is well known."
"How many of us are aware that today’s math and science is deeply is influenced by Christian Theology? This can be seen even today. Pure Mathematics is that which is practiced in a theologically correct way i.e., the axiomatic basis on which “proofs” are constructed without any means of calculating or verifying the claims."
This is nonsense. When something is proved, it can, of course, be verified; but the opposite would never be true. Try proving Pythagoras theorem computationally! Or even something as simple as prime numbers being infinite in number. It's not possible without reason, logic, and airtight arguments.
But why sell India short by assuming India cannot do science, reason, logic, and theory? That's nonsense too. Thousands of scientists if Indian origin are doing quite well, including in mathematics, despite all racism of West.
................................................................................................
"The Logic of Science
"Scientific Reasoning in the 17th century was powered by the evolution of Empiricism and more importantly Logical empiricism as science and math co-evolved. As indicated earlier, theory development was given precedence (involving the use of proofs) followed by possible experimental validation, which is what is practised to date. As theory building became more important, it was important to bound the theory development using proof-based logical systems. Proof-based mathematics and its use in understanding the empirical world has led to a number of conceptual bottlenecks which are still being resolved."
Much of that is confused, but here's a fact. Experiments matter as evidence or proof, in sciences; in mathematics, which is science of concepts, examples merely serve to help comprehend but that's all. One could compute for a million years and a proposed theorem may fail at the next example, which is no good.
What's wrong with this attack against science is that it's not only on false grounds but completely unnecessary. India is doing well in science and mathematics, despite racism of West. More to the point, Pollock using name of science fraudulently is just that, fraud. And authors needed to see where his attacks against India originate. It's not science.