Asad Q Ahmed & Sheldon Pollock's Bollocks

Asar Q Ahmed is a young Professor of Arabic at Berkeley. Though his first degree was from Yale, the bastard speaks Urdu with a correct accent. I find this very shocking and totally unacceptable. What is the point of sending our young people to elite institutions abroad if they can't even mispronounce their own names- let alone weird Dravidian cognomens like 'Raghunathananananaan'?
Okay, maybe the fellow was born in the States. Still, he should show some basic respect for Indian culture innit?
On the other hand, his views are as stupid as any of our own JNU jholawallah types as is evidenced by this article in which, apropos of the decline of Islamic Science, he says-

 In my own work, I have discovered that a number of factors played a role in bringing about a collapse of disciplines like philosophy, astronomy, and medicine.  I mention only a few of them here; the more complete picture must await further research. 

For example, the religious scholars, who were trained in a curriculum with a high dose of rationalism, faced an entirely transformed and impoverished system of princely patronage, staring at them in the middle of the nineteenth century.  Many of the rationalist scholars belonged to the establishment; they not only sat as judges in the courts or passed fatwas, but they also served as court poets, tax collectors, diplomats, personal physicians, and cartographers.  With the rise of the British Raj and the collapse of the institutions that sustained them, many of these scholars became disenfranchised and the vacuum was increasingly filled by a class of popular preachers, trained in a very different curriculum and connected with an emergent trans-regional reformist network of scholars. 

Then at least in the context of South Asia, another factor for the decline in the rationalist disciplines was the growth of Urdu as the primary literary language among Muslims.  Prior to this period, practically every single text in the rationalist sciences was written in Arabic (and sometimes in Persian).  These two languages contained within them an advanced technical vocabulary that had developed over the longue duree of rationalist disciplines.  With the loss of languages and the lack of systematic investment in translations into Urdu, the rigor of the rationalist disciplines was also compromised, since the technical baggage of the disciplines was lost with the language that carried it. 

Finally, one may mention that, though counterintuitive, the introduction and growth of print technology had a negative impact on rationalism as well. Prior to the growth of this technology, Muslim scholars regularly wrote commentaries and glosses on various texts of the rationalist disciplines by hand and in the margins of manuscripts.  This produced a diachronic and synchronic tradition of an internal dialectic with texts that was directly responsible for progress within a discipline.  The introduction of print technology fundamentally changed the way one did scholarship in the context of the madrasa.  There were no manuscripts and margins, no reproduction and living engagement with a tradition of argumentation.

Ahmed is making 3 mistakes
1) The British Raj expanded opportunities for Arabic and Persian scholars. The collapse of the Mughal Empire and successive invasions and periods of anarchy did adversely affect Islamic scholarship but the British Raj was a stabilizing factor. The Mutiny, no doubt, was a catastrophe but the British continued to patronize Islamic scholarship. In any case, Hyderabad was able to absorb many refugees from Delhi.

The real cause of the relative decline in Islamic Rationalism was that Religion was not divorced from Law. The autonomy of Secular lawyers in the West set the pattern for autonomous Science scholarship. The fact that the learned man in Islam combined various different functions- writing poetry, casting horoscopes, giving medical advice, acting as judge/tax collector- is what weakened Islamic rational scholarship. Specialization is the key to the pursuit of excellence in any empirico-rational discipline. One may say this militates against 'Wisdom' as opposed to 'Knowledge' or that it inculcates 'Materialism' but it is the only path to progress. We may admire Goethe's (or Schopenhauer's) Scientific interests but we must also admit they were shite. Strindberg, who learnt Chinese and Sanskrit, also believed in his own alchemical theories. Great dramatist, shite scientist.
The reason traditional Qazis and Muftis and Unani doctors fell behind was not because the curriculum at the Madrasas changed but because everybody had come to realize that they were shite. Smart kids didn't want to study that shite. BECAUSE IT WAS SHITE. Nothing to do with 'Orientalism' or some fucking false binary. Unani medicine, like Ayurvedic medicine, made you ill. The fatwas of the Qazis and Muftis contradicted each other and themselves. Everybody resorted to declaring their opponent an apostate more especially because the idiocy of Muhammadiya ideology created status competition between scholarly families- like that of Khwaja Mir Dard.  Everyone wanted to prove that they were descended from a purer and holier lineage and thus themselves represented the best chance for Islam to heal itself and regain its lost glory.
Maulana Azad had a traditional education. He was a massive fuckwit. Kasturba Gandhi ended up cooking mutton chops for him. In his last years he was drunk off his head.
2) The development of Urdu- as with any other mother tongue language- was good for raising Educational standards and spreading empirico-critical thinking. It began before the British came and it continued after they left. The British insisted that students also study a Classical language. They invested a lot in translating Classical works into the mother tongue- thus enriching the vocabulary. Muslims, in any case, would learn Arabic to read the Quran Sharif. There is no evidence that they stopped doing so and started reciting prayers in Urdu. Even Hindu lawyers and administrators learnt Arabic so as to apply Muslim law.
Consider the case of Iqbal. He studied in British Schools and Colleges. He wrote in Persian even though he did not have an idiomatic command of it.
Prof. Ahmed must be completely mad to say that mother tongue literacy and instruction could adversely impact Science amongst Muslims. If traditional medicine and astronomy and so on declined it was because the Western product was greatly superior. Nothing to do with 'Orientalism' or evil White people or deluded darkies at all.
3) Ahmed says printing books was bad for Islamic Science. This is batshit crazy. Printed books are much cheaper than hand-written books. Still, they were expensive. Teachers gave lectures and students took notes. In the process, all the comments and comments on comments and comments on comments on comments got recorded.
Why is Ahmed saying such stupid things? The answer is that he's done a bit of research during the course of which he noticed that some old scholar wrote something in the margin of the manuscript of another old scholar. Aha! says Ahmed. How interesting! This doesn't happen on my Amazon Kindle! It's like the scholars could email each other across the centuries! Cool!
But it isn't really cool at all, but a common practice. When I was young, the books at the library had the sort of comments and comments on comments that Ahmed is talking about. The reason was that books were expensive. Indian libraries couldn't afford to get the latest editions of foreign texts. So people updated these precious volumes by hand. Printing made it easier to do this sort of thing because printed books had wider margins (at least in those days) and bigger typefaces. Kids like me weren't allowed to write on a book- but learned people were encouraged to do so.

Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy is an actual scientist who lives in Pakistan. He was a friend of the late Nobel laureate Abdus Salam. Hoodbhoy mocks Ghazalli's 'Tahafut' and says that the Occassionalist ideology it promotes discourages Scientific inquiry. Hoodbhoy is right.  Leibnizian occassionalist casuistry added nothing to Scientific Research and Voltaire laughed it out of the Academy. Nobody laughed Ghazalli's Tahafut out of Islam. Poor old Averroes wasn't smart enough and, crucially, his weapon wasn't laughter. Ahmed says, 'look, Ghazalli's Occassionalism can be neutral w.r.t Science. But, it wasn't. That's a historical fact. Ahmed is supposed to be a historian. Let us look at his justification for rejecting 'the false binary of a Golden Age in Islamic Science'.
'The world that came after al-Ghazali, this same attitude towards reason continued to flourish - authors such as Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274), Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (d. 1311), Adud al-Din al-Iji (d. 1355) , al-Sayyid al-Sharif al-Jurjani (d. 1413), and Muhibballah al-Bihari(d. 1707) are a few among an innumerable host that come to mind.  In fields ranging from astronomy to metaphysics and well into the early twentieth century, Muslim scholars generally took the attitude that reason provided scientific models for understanding the universe and that these models were conceptually and mathematically real, though one could not necessarily prove the validity of one over another.  In other words, they adopted precisely the kind of attitude toward the scientific enterprise that has been embraced and consistently modified in the western tradition since David Hume (d. 1776), who, incidentally, also raised important questions about the metaphysical commitments in one’s assumption of causality and in one’s adherence to methods of induction.  A rather large number of works from the period after al-Ghazali explicitly state that scientific investigations do no harm to one’s creed.'

Why does Ahmed mention al Bihari? He did no original scientific work but was just  a jurist. What about al Jurjani? He wanted to do original work but couldn't because the teachers were too old or too far away. Why? Well the real reason for the end of 'Islam's golden age' was that the Mongols and Turks had taken power. Some Muslim cities never recovered. Tusi, famous now not as a Scientist but for his work on Ethics, is also infamous for his role in the the Mongol debacle. Al-Ijji is still quoted for his attacks on the 'hashish eating' Ibn Arabi. What was his great scientific accomplishment? Al Nafisi might be more to the point but he was a bigoted defender of the doctrine of bodily resurrection, so Ahmed doesn't mention him. Tusi and Shirazi could have worked with the Mongols to create an autonomous Scientific tradition totally separated from Religion. They chose not to do so. Shirazi, like many others, took the disorders of his age as evidence that Truth was to be found in devotional piety of the sort espoused by Rumi. There is no shame in that. What is bizarre is for a Western historian to quote Tusi and Shirazi and Jurjani as continuing a Scientific tradition when the truth is they and their followers retreated from it. Yes they conserved what was already seen as the fruits of a vanished golden age. But this was not some Orientalist fable of Nineteenth Century invention- it was their own empirical finding, or existential choice. The same thing happened in other traditions.which lost confidence by reason of invasion and foreign domination.
In Medicine, Islam currently allows the dissection of cadavers for Scientific research. However, not one single one of the people Ahmed mentions, despite being jurists, ever licensed this by their own fatwas. They conserved the work of their saintly forbears as a religious duty. They wouldn't chance their own salvation by procuring corpses to cut up to further their researches.Why? They didn't feel Science was truly autonomous in the way that Military technology was accepted to be. It's a bad thing for Science if stupid priests learn a little medieval Astronomy or Medicine in their seminaries. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or quit the Pierian spring.

Ahmed isn't a bad guy. He speaks up for the Ahmadiyas at a time when it is dangerous to do so- even in India. Why is he writing shit? The answer, of course, is that he's been reading Sheldon Pollock's bollocks.

'Let me end this essay with a statement about why the Golden Age vs. Dark Age narrative came to exist in the first place, without the analysis of the vast body of literature from the so-called Dark Ages; and let me also supply a statement about why the narrative still persists and will likely survive in the future, despite what we academics share with the world. 

Here my own words cannot match the eloquence and directness of Sheldon Pollock, the Arvindh Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University.  In an essay on Indian intellectual history, “Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia,” he writes:

“With respect to science and scholarship, however, especially during this critical early modern period, in-depth research in most disciplines is virtually non-existent…  whole libraries of manuscripts… remain unread today.  The factors contributing to this indifference would be worth weighing with care.  One is certainly the diminished capacity of scholars today to actually read these materials, one of the most disturbing, if little-remarked legacies of colonialism and modernization.  But there are other factors.  These include the old Orientalist-Romantic credo that the importance of any Indian artifact or text or form of thought is directly proportional to its antiquity…  Equally important is the colonial-era narrative of Indian decline and fall before 1800, so central to the ideology of British imperialism and its civilizing, modernizing mission… one salient example… is the disdain with which the remarkable achievements of Hindi literature and literary science…  were dismissed by colonized Indian intellectuals no less than by their colonial masters” (emphasis mine).

The narrative began as colonial Orientalist lore and has taken hold as a kind of neo-Orientalism among individuals who have lost access to their past.  Given this, I am afraid that Muslims really have one of two choices:  they may continue to perpetuate a hackneyed and essentialist Orientalist narrative, misdiagnose the problem, and even enable all kinds of extremists with the power of a fanciful story. 

Or they may rediscover their lost languages, produce historians who would penetrate the sources, and cultivate philosophers who would go beyond simple binaries and take control of the discourse in a sincere and sophisticated manner.  Then perhaps they may be able to revise their received histories and find some real solutions to a complex situation.

Either Islam is the same as Hinduism or it is different. If it is different, how can it suffer from the same malady as Hinduism? Colonialism? But, under the Brits, the Hindus shook off their (far worse) inherited stupidity and embraced Science. Amazingly, even the stupidest and most worthless amongst them- I refer of course to people of my own Brahmin caste- overtook the Muslims in education and the professions. Being terrible hypocrites, no doubt they pretend that their ancestors were all Scientists or Math or Computing mavens but that's only because they don't drink enough whiskey to get properly beaten up by their wives or girl friends. Interestingly, Hindu Schools- like the D.A.V or Ramakrishna Mission Schools- at one time could have gone down an anti-Science route. However, parents wanted Science subjects to gain prominence and Sanskrit type shite to be confined to Middle School. Pollock thinks this a bad thing. He is wrong. Sanskrit is easy. Middle aged people are going to rediscover it anyway. The problem Pollock mentions- viz. untranslated manuscripts- only exists because Indian Liberal Arts professors are a bunch of illiterate hoodlums who are bound to try to eat or smoke or wipe their arses on sacred palm leaf manuscripts. Everyone else can read that shite but has the good sense to see that it's mainly shite.

 Ahmed quotes Pollock though he is a crypto-Hindutva nutjob for whom Hinduism's 'dark ages' coincide with Turkish rule. But Turks turned Muslim. They were smart. They were powerful- so what happened? Well, Timur Kuran, a Turkish economist, gives us part of the answer but Ahmed isn't interested in Kuran because the academic availability cascade from which he can personally most profit is of the Pollock Bollocks type.

Gandhi was a nut-job. He wanted to believe in Ayurveda- which prescribes Arsenic and Mercury but bans milk- and so he tried Ayurveda till it made him very very sick. Then he stopped. That's also the story about Islamic science and Hindu science and Japanese science and Taoist science and Mayan science and Voodoo Science and so on. People switch from stuff which is worthless to stuff which is slightly less worthless. They may talk shite- and shite is always talked- but it's just 'preference falsification' and munafiqat is all it is.

Ahmed is worried about 'narratives'. Why? We all know that people tell stupid stories. We also know that Science is about laboratories and maths and complicated stuff of that sort. A conquered or deeply corrupt country isn't going to have a lot of laboratories or Professors who can actually do Math or understand complicated stuff. It is going to have people like Ahmed whose vaunted scholarship has only had the effect of robbing him of his common sense and turning him into a whining little gobshite who thinks some Dead White Males, a hundred and fifty years ago, told a story which by some strange magic continues to keep his people stupid and backward even now.

What's next Ahmed? Will you be the Vishva Adluri of Islam?

Edward Said & the Zahirites

 A lover more in love with Love than any actual fair one found, as all such lovers must, that love was in the words of Love, its gestures, its language but those words, those gestures, that language were as a veil on both sides of which stood vanity and feigning.

   But what if that veil was the Koran? God might feign from behind that veil but God's feigning yet is Man's Law. Thus was born in this lover, now out of love with Love, a zeal for the Zahiri School of Jurisprudence which, from love-of-the-Veil, postulated that God might lie and, to keep open that possibility, permitted no imperative avenue of closer approach, thus banishing both analogical qiyas reasoning and esoteric batini  hermeneutics as a blasphemous availing against that Veil.

   In an incoherent chapter of an incoherent book, Edward Said abruptly declares a fascination with Ibn Hamz, this Zahirite. Why? Violence appeared suddenly as that Veil truer than Literature's Love for one whose motherland was- like Ibn Hamz's Andalus at the time of the Arab Berber wars- now ruled by the wrong bunch of Semites.

   In the end the great Professor ended up throwing stones like a barefoot gamin.

 Better, the Batini say, the street urchins throw stones at us, for it is Majnun's nakedness alone which veils Lailah from him and ever of such weaving is the tapestry of true Zahiriyat- an Emergence which never Emerges- such that tears are but tears and that tearing up of what is inward all Violence as aught avails.

The riddle of Rushdie- revenge of the Anima

Salman Rushdie, from childhood, stood out in three respects
1)  verbal dexterity and linguistic prowess
2) outstanding logico-analytical left-brain skills  making him a good scholar marked for success in our ‘enlightenment’ day-time culture.
3)  Rushdie had a powerful anima, in other words a strong right brain, and ability to process information in this non-linear, visual /symbol dominated hemisphere. 

This meant that his transition from childhood heteronomy to autonomy happened at both the level of submission/internalisation of the law (Kantian autonomy)- thus qualifying him to be a spokesman of the ‘Enlightenment’- as well as the level of the anima, the unconscious.
 My guess is that Phantasms of early infancy were what he mapped the powerful but unpredictable beings and forces around him onto. (His father, bitter at being denied 'Heaven Born' I.C.S status by reason of a trifling technicality, developed problems with alcohol and had a chip on his shoulder against the son he himself had insisted on Anglicizing).

Thus following the non-linear, ‘magical’, adventures of these phantasms enabled Rushdie to achieve autonomy- not in the complete sense of having a fully predictive model of his milieu inside his own head- but a feeling of familiarity, a sufficient sense of security to be able to follow the adventures of those phantasms in the knowledge that ultimately wisdom would be gained, everything explained.
In other words by putting himself in the hand of his anima- like a foreshadowning of Al Khidr in a Sufi dastaan- Rushdie would gain a intuitive type of wisdom.

If it is the case that left brain logic operates in a binary manner- good/bad, boy/girl/ etc- whereas the spandrels of the anima permit a more complex, multi dimensional ranking of judgements then it follows that Rushdie’s strong anima would give him superior tolerance, by making him less judgemental and moreover have further boosted his powers of observation by reducing cognitive dissonance. In other words, he, Rushdie, gets a comparative advantage as actor or novelist.

However there is a price to being anima ridden. The anima rebels strongly against changes in its milieu which cause the left hand side to impose a new ‘Universal Law’ to regulate cognition and therefore behaviour. The anima’s night time rebellion forces the individual into a manic protestation of ego-unassailability  against an abrupt and abject reversion to infantile heteronomy,which takes the shape of attitudinising, posturing, in other words turning into a prancing ninny. Now elite coteries have a soft spot for  prancing ninnies- they consider ninnydom a hallmark of authenticity, while prancing is a ticket to the inner circle . Indeed the Cambridge Apostles cult of Nous rapidly degenerated (or, if you actually went to Cambridge) achieved apotheosis as the cult of the prancing ninny.
Now the psychology of migration is actually (for most people) about a strenghtening of left brain autonomy- i.e. the emergence from the thymotic to the legalistic and contractual. Thus, though elite sub-cultures may encourage their ethnic college chums to represent the migrant as prancing ninny and ludicrously celebrate this as a reclaiming of authenticity, no actual migrant (i.e. a guy who moved for a better life) does this. Rather you see migrants focusing on legal and institutional matters. Nostalgia is a different kettle of fish- it brings on poetic or mystic reveries but, clearly, it is not of such stuff that prancing ninnies are made.

If Rushdie was to achieve ego-integration he would have needed to compartmentalise his life- the enlightenment part of himself working with others in a rational Weberian organisation, the prancing ninny- who at any moment (by the clemency of the anima) might turn into a real mime- like that Memphis who could communicate the whole of the Pythagorean philosophy with a twitch of his butt cheeks- the prancing ninny part of Rushdie could have been employed in experimental theatre or lunatic fringe politics or cult religion or something like that- while the anima ridden part of Rushdie could have had a night-time career as a fantasy novelist. In other words Rushdie could have followed his phantasms wherever they led and thus furnished the world with a topography of a lost continent of our own unconsciousness.

Rushdie, who I believe had a Jungian theory of himself coz that was the zeitgeist of the time, refused however to so compartmentalise himself. That was the way the pre-independence provincials had played things, greatly to the benefit of their vernaculars, but Rushdie was determined to be different. He felt he owed it to the spirit of the times to use all three parts of himself in his next book-Midnight's Children- his big gamble. He almost pulled it of. He actually had all three qualities needed. All the information was available to him. Yet he failed. Why? His anima rebelled. It wouldn’t work to order. So powerful were the villains he conjured up, his power to make balanced judgements deserted him. He reverted to prancing ninnydom & thus made his name & sealed his fate. Ultimately he was the prancing ninny chased off the stage by the pantomime horrors he had himself cut out of garish coloured cardboard. Rushdie’s life became more fantastic than his books.

But was this inevitable? Not at all. Let us look at the concept for his Midnight’s children. It is based on Attar’s parliament of the birds. Now Attar shows how Spirituality and Social Reconstruction on the basis of equality of outcome are mirror images, two sides to the same coin. Thus, the book Rushdie is really writing exactly parallels  the Gandhian novels of Social Reconstruction of the late 20's and early ’30’s- or the Marxist novels of the succeeding generation. Rushdie could have been doing something similar except in a New Age idiom which would provide a template for individual metanoia going hand in hand with mutuality and Social Reconstruction. Rushdie’s left brain was on the side of the angels. Yet his anima subverted the project, brought the roof down on him and condemned a whole generation or his sedulous apes to prancing ninnydom. Why? He had tried to force her and she will not be forced.Rushdie, as prancing ninny has to depict authority figures as Pantomime villains. That strain of vulgarity in Rushdie we would like to mistake for the joi de vivre of a Mumbaikar untraumatised by Partition and unashamed of his ‘post-colonial’ status is actually nothing of the sort. Rather it  is the uttering of obscenities by a priggish child who is so terrified of the bogey man under his bed, he is trying to prove to the grown ups that he is actually a tough little street-urchin.

Now, Rushdie as prancing ninny, becoming the Solzhenitsyn of Islam is exactly what the doctor ordered as far as his Cambridge was concerned. But, how does it help us Indians? Prancing ninnies from Cambridge fucked up the economy, the polity, the legal system- and were richly rewarded for their pains. Even where their own Frankensteins rose up to strike them down- think Bhutto, Bandarnaike, Indira, Rajiv, Benazir- it was only so they could become immortal and fuck us all up for all eternity. In this context, why people  call Rushdie a great author is totally beyond me. In every book, he attempts something interesting and then totally fucks it up to incarnate the apotheosis of the prancing ninny. If Rushdie were serving himself (his real self, the object of his literary metanoia) fine. Praise him. A guy who is doing well for himself should be celebrated so that there is a template for others to follow. But if he’s fucking himself up- what’s the point? The only answer is in terms of the crudest sort of Girardian mimetic desire. 
The real tragedy is that the anima had actually given Rushdie a degree of prescience- like a great actor whose skills verge spookily on that of the Spiritualist Medium- except, like most Mediums, once attuned he channeled increasing silliness- still, that's something no one else had. Take his novel 'Fury' - read the first few pages and you think 'this was written just before 9/11- WOW!"- except it soon disintegrates into utter silliness.
So where's the tragedy? Well it has to do with the Kashmir 'intifada' which- coz of the Gandhi-Abdullah poll fixing pact- started shortly after, the M.P, Syed Shahabuddin had written his infamous letter demanding the banning of Satanic Verses. 
We all thought Rushdie, being a Cambridge man, only wrote shite coz, being a Cambridge man, he knew we could digest nothing better. However, now his life was being threatened, he'd turn into the ultimate street-fighter and kick Shahabuddin in the goolies.
This was easy for him to do. Rushdie just needed to pick up the phone and talk to any Indian journalist here in London. He'd have found out that Shahabuddin was a former diplomat,  inducted into Politics by the B.J.P., who had visited , the previous year, the Sankaracharya of Kanchi (a sort of Hindu Pope) in company with, his friend, the infamous pro-Zionist, Dr. Subramaniyam Swamy (whom Harvard has sacked for his rabidly anti-Muslim views).

So all Rushdie has to do is play the Kashmir card.  He had good credentials. "Midnight's children' had attacked Mrs. Gandhi. He'd written his anti-American book about Nicaragua. 'Shame' had won a prize in Iran. Khomeini and Khatami were totally on side re. Kashmir- they had a history of allying with 'secular' lefties for strategic purposes. The Pak I.S.I would have got the Mirpuris in Bradford to demonstrate outside India House in favor of Rushdie- how dare an Uncle Tom Muslim M.P call the Religious faith of one of their own into question? They take our land, they humiliate and torture us- but now the Hindus have gone too far! They use one of their 'token' Muslim M.P's- to utter a libel upon a true son of Kashmir, such that he may appear a blasphemer and an apostate! Take my life, spit on me, humiliate me, but do not impugn my faith! Just see, the cunning of the tyrannical Pandits  has overstepped all bounds! The want to continue humiliating and denigrating an innocent Muslim Kashmiri- even after he has escaped, even after he has got British Citizenship- why? What is his crime? Hubb al watan min al Iman. Love of country is part of Faith. But love of Kashmir is the crime for which this Muslim is being denounced as an apostate! But by whom? Nimrod! The tyrant, the idolator! How long shall we keep silent? 

In any case, plenty of academics would have come forward to show Rushdie had written a satire on Saidian 'Orientalism'. 
Once Rushdie played the Kashmir card, he would have humbled Rajiv and emerged as the Edward Said or Noam Chomsky of the sub-continent. The Indian intelligentsia- once Rushdie had cleared himself of having written a 'Rangeela Rusool' type porn novel- would have fallen on their knees to Rushdie. Nobel Prizes rather than Bookers would have rained down on him.
Deservedly so. If Rushdie had been on Kashmir watch, the Centre would scarcely have sent Jagmohan there. Frankly, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved. South Asian history might have developed very differently.
But, no. 
Rushdie was and is a prancing ninny and greatly honored for being a prancing ninny coz of where he comes from. Supply and Demand, I'm afraid. The Market knows best.

Vishva Adluri, Sheldon Pollock & 'Deep Orientalism'.

Sheldon Pollock was just a naive young shiksa playing the Barbara Streisland role in Summer Stock revivals of Funny Girl and Schindler's List when Edward Said wrote a very silly book called 'Orientalism' which was about how like there were these European professors and they said some awfully mean  things about A-rabs, okay?- and then coz like Foucault said Knowledge is like about Power, okay? and like them mean old Europeans had some power, okay? and like many Arabs didn't have as much, y'know? and that's like real important, dude, coz it's like 'Orientalism'? And that's bad okay?
The problem with Said's thesis is that the Europeans who had power didn't care about the stupid prejudices of European professors because in Europe and America and everywhere else, Professors have no power and are widely regarded as shitheads. Moreover, people with or without power are perfectly capable of making stupid, ignorant and prejudiced comments about any topic under the sun and so they didn't need Professors egging them on to treat some Arabs, who didn't have much power, badly because that's what  evil bastards do in the ordinary course of things.

Anyway, Said's book was a best-seller and so Sheldon Pollock wanted to write something even sillier because that's how Professors compete with each other. Amazingly enough, in 1993, he actually managed to write a paper even stupider than Said's book. In this paper he claimed that German Indologists- an industrious but low I.Q bunch of pedants who produced dictionaries and grammars and translations- i.e. who did some donkey work- were in fact so influential that they managed to get the German people to sign up for Nazism and Genocide because unlike English or French Orientalism 'which were directed outward at conquering and subduing foreign races', German Indology was 'potentially directed inwards towards the domination of Europe itself'.
German scholars protested that this was nonsense. The German people, like German politicians, cared nothing for German Indology. Latin was of interest to Catholics, Hebrew and Greek were important for Protestants- the Germans are a Christian nation- but Sanskrit did not matter, Pali did not matter, the religious observances of the Hindus or Buddhists or whatever was a matter of profound indifference to them. True there were all sorts of silly mystical ideas floating around. But these would have existed even if India had never existed. The India of the Aryans was on a par with the lost continent of Atlantis or the Tellurian civilization which survives under the Earth or the flying monkeys of Oz or the talking Triangles of Flatland.

No doubt some Indologists showed some marks of 'scientific method' in their donkey work. Indubitably, some Indologists, like every other type of Scholar, jumped on the Nazi bandwagon or provided material for Nazi ideologues, but Indology was no more complicit in the burgeoning of Nazism than Meiji era pornography or Mayan numerology.

The question facing Indian intellectuals is whether they can write something even stupider than Edward Said or sillier than Sheldon Pollock. Sadly, the answer is no, not yet. But Prof Visva Adluri comes close. Defending |Pollock's 'Deep Orientalism',  from a German critic he writes-

In other words, Pollock is saying, German Indologists were compiling their dictionaries and getting on with other such donkey work in a rational and methodical manner- let's call that 'scientific method'. True, they occasionally expressed some ideas of their own which were utterly stupid. let us term that stupidity- ideology. Adluri now makes his stunning argument. Since something German Indologists did was 'scientific' rather than 'ideological', and since like all other branches of Scholarship, Indology too jumped on the Nazi bandwagon, it therefore follows that it was the 'uncritical acceptance of the rhetoric of Science' which made German Indology unusually susceptible to being harnesssed to the most diverse and inhuman of ends.' 
Schrodinger knew a lot about both Science and Indology. He wasn't susceptible to being 'harnessed to the most diverse and inhuman of ends'. Andre Weil knew a lot about both Science and Sanskrit- he decided not to fight in the Second World War because that's how he interpreted the message of the Gita. Why was he not susceptible to 'being harnessed to the most diverse and inhuman of ends?' Clearly there were a lot of people in Europe who were extremely susceptible to being harnessed to the most diverse and inhuman of ends. But many if not most of them did not display an 'uncritical acceptance of the rhetoric of Science'. They did display an uncritical acceptance of the rhetoric of Hitler- but Hitler's ranting wasn't Science.

Adluri defense of Pollock, he tells us, is not based on showing that some Indologists were Nazis but that 'scientific' German Indology, by reason of its uncritical attachment to the rhetoric of Science, was somehow bound to express itself as a drive to dominate Europe. He quotes the example of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer-

Is Adluri right? Was Hauer a 'scientific Indologists' or just an 'ideologue'? Let us look at the facts. Hauer was humbly born and went to India as a Missionary. He learnt a bit of Sanskrit and, like the ultra-lovable American Missionary Samuel Stokes- Himachal's Johhny Appleseed-  abandoned Christianity under the influence of the Gita. He came back to Germany and after some further studies managed to get a teaching post. He also started up a new Religion of his own.
 So- what's your verdict? Was this guy a 'scientific linguist', like Saussure, or was he an 'ideologue' like Savitri Devi?
Recall, British India would have interned Hauer had he been in India in 1914.  Conditions in the Camps weren't always good. Tiny Rowland's parents were interned in India and it turned him against Britain permanently.
Savitri Devi too turned against the Brits because she was half Greek and (why?) misinterpreted British policy as a 'betrayal' of her nation (Eugenides shows that the Greek tragedy in Smyrna was 'self-inflicted' by a worthless windbag of a drug addled Athenian self proclaimed Alciabiades.)
People, even seemingly intelligent people, do stupid things. So what? How does a selective doxography of stupidity advance any Research Program?

Vishava Adluri teaches Philosophy- yet this is the argument he makes-

 Grunendahl says- look these guys didn't become Nazis because they were doing 'scientific' Indology- there were other reasons, for example that they were just predisposed to be Nazi type shitheads. Adluri says- sorry, Grunendahl, nice try but no cigar. Your argument might be persuasive if you guys (that is German Indologists) had distanced yourself from them.
Adluri's argument is simply mad. If German Indology really is conceives of itself as 'scientific'- or as Wissenschaft- then it thinks of itself as being like Chemistry or Maths. The fact that a guy is a Commie or Nazi or whatever does not change the Science he does. He still gets credit for his Scientific discoveries. At least that's what happens in Liberal Democracies. Adluri teaches in America but he does not know this. So why is he making such a ridiculous argument? The answer is that he thinks the fact that there was even a little bit of 'science' in Hauer means that Pollock is right; it was that bit of Science which turned Hauer Nazi. But here is the problem. Hauer was a stupid man. He loved the Gita. So he read whatever he wanted into it and said everything else was an interpolation. This isn't doing 'science' at all. Scientists have to be disinterested. Hauer wasn't. It doesn't matter what contemporary German Indologists think, unless you can show they are not morons but Adluri provides evidence that they are all worthless shitheads.
Adluri's inability to reason matches that of the German Indologists. All he has proved is the common sense view that Professors are stupid donkeys. That's one reason why they have no influence or power. They may be good at arse-licking but so are a lot of equally worthless sociopaths who don't got from education.
Adluri quite correctly shows the worthlessness of German Indology- which refuses to actually learn from India- but what Pollock or he himself is doing is exactly the same thing.

In other words, Pollock's 'Deep Orientalism' is right because German Indologists were stupid donkeys who, unfortunately, were German and hence suffered from Germanism. But what is this 'Germanism'?
Adluri evokes, in the second sentence of the passage quoted above, Hegel's struggle for Recognition as well as the notion of alterity. Is he suggesting that these concepts only have relevance to German people? Why? Is it in their D.N.A? Perhaps it has to do with their potty training? Surely, instead of talking about Indology, Adluri should talk about Germany and why it creates these savants who 'by reason of an uncritical acceptance of the rhetoric of Science' end up 'harnessed to diverse inhuman ends'. Or is Adluri saying that Indology somehow worsened Germanism, that it made that disease more virulent? Yet there were Scholars of all sorts of other things, besides Indology, who were attracted to Nazism.
The answer to this question is that, yes, Adluri really does have a theory of 'Germanism'.  What is it? Let us see how a German Indologist, Grunendahl, summarizes and responds to Adluri's astonishing discovery.
'Thanks to Adluri’s “own research” we now see what this agenda (i.e. German Indology as being complicit in Nazi ideology) is about, namely, “that German Indology was always far more preoccupied with the rivalry with its European peers than with legitimizing colonization” (which colonization this might have been is not specified, and probably awaits further research); in fact, “one can notice a preoccupation throughout its history with claiming a ‘European’ identity for itself,” an outrageous claim indeed, it must be said, “albeit one that also takes into consideration its unique place among other European nations” (2011: 266). One stands in awe at the profundity of these insights, and realizes only too clearly that common sense is indeed an urgent desideratum here, to say nothing of evidence-based research.' 

Said's 'Orientalism' passed muster as a sort of protest against racial stereotypes and 'essentialism'. Pollock's Deep Orientalism- on the evidence of Adluri's essay- is not interested in rejecting racial stereotypes but in reinforcing them with the stupidest, most parochial reasoning possible.
Why is he doing it? Everybody knows the Germans were deeply provincial pedants and shitheads.True they were industrious in a mindless sort of way. That's why they were good at the philological donkey work in their PhD factories. Yes, like all deeply provincial pedants incapable of reasoning they had a great opinion of themselves. American Indologists aren't any better. But whereas the Germans tried to conquer Europe and failed and were conquered instead, America hasn't been conquered. But that's scarcely Pollock's fault.
Returning to Adlui's theory of Germanism, the authentically German, Grunendahl writes- 'In this endeavour, too, Adluri merely echoes Pollock, who “had set the stage for radically rethinking…[the] scholarly dogmas on India” (257) by declaring that “in a post-colonial and post-Holocaust world,…these traditional foundations and uses of Indology have disappeared,…crumbled” and led to a feeling of “impotence” and “loss of purpose” (Pollock 1993: 111, 113); in short, Indologists “no longer know why they are doing what they do” (88). Consequently, we can only expect an “Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz” (114) from “self-consciously responsible scholarship in late twentieth-century America” 
"As Pollock’s post-Orientalist messianism would have us believe, only late twentieth-century (and now twenty-first-century) America is intellectually equipped to reject and finally overcome Eurocentrism” and “European epistemological hegemony,” that is, “a pre-emptive European conceptual framework of analysis [that] has disabled us from probing central features of South Asian life, from pre-western forms of ‘national’ (or feminist, or communalist, or ethnic) identity or consciousness, pre-modern forms of cultural ‘modernism,’ pre-colonial forms of colonialism”

So now you know.

Personally, I blame David Cameron.

That boy aint right.

Andrew Nicholson's 'Unifying Hinduism'- a Nikal Seyni critique.

As a devout Nikal Seyni faqir, I feel it my duty to point out, right at the outset of my review of 'Unifying Hinduism', that Prof. Andrew J Nicholson is not the current avatar of Brigadier John Nicholson, avenger of the Mutiny, and so though this young Professor chastises the Subaltern or Sepoy or plain Silly Scholars who claimed that the Brits invented Hinduism a couple of Centuries ago, he does not do it by strapping those beggarly rebels against sweet Reason to the mouths of canons and blowing them to pieces- surely the kindest way of dealing with them- instead, he puts forward the equally ludicrous notion that actually some medieval Pandit accidentally unified Hinduism while compiling  a doxology or practising dialectics or ticking off his dhobi or some other such routine activity, and this happened a couple of centuries before British rule got off the ground. Why does Nicholson have to make this absurd claim? Well, if he admitted that the Gita already shows Samkhya and Yoga darshanas as being viewed as close to or complementary with Advaita then he pretty much admits the Hindutva 'Sanaatan Dharma' case. Indeed, since Buddhism and Jainism aren't really nastika in that both, from the earliest times, affirmed a relationship with the Rg Veda and moreover attracted a large number of Brahmin converts right from the outset, Nicholson's entire argument falls apart. Indeed, the material he presents supports only the common sense Hindutva view- viz. intellect applied to sectarian polemics is using one's brain as a bedpan- insanitary but not obligatory,
Nicholson's hero, Vijnanabhikshu, maintains a demarcation between Hinduism as against Buddhism and Jainism- but this could be because, under Muslim rule, Buddhism had disappeared and popular Jain religion was scarcely flourishing in his part of India. Prior to Muslim rule there had been many occasions, as is attested by Sanskrit and Tamil and Kannada literature, when Hindutva type Hinduism was the rule- i.e. it was a big tent affair- and sectarian polemics was a sort of hilarious joke or onerous chore Society imposed upon Soteriology so as to enliven its Saturnalia.
Nicholson tells us that prior to the 12th Century, many 'Hindu' savants devoted themselves to controverting the doctrines of rival sects. He does not tell us that this was considered very very funny and that in so far as the thing had a political dimension, or actual Sociological impact, the real question was which shrine or Saint had greater magical power or which dynasty was on the rise and which entering decline.
If it were really true that, prior to the 12th Century, there was no understanding that 'Hindu' thinkers shared a common orthodoxy, or at least had commonalities sufficient to differentiate themselves from non Hindus, then -clearly- it is only the Muslim invasion which is being remarked on (but only by implication coz otherwise one might be labelled a vulgar Islamophobe) because Jainism and Buddhism and Ajivika religion permitted dual loyalty- one could be an orthodox Brahmin or whatever and also a Jain shravak or a Buddhist lay disciple or whatever.  In other words, we can have confidence in advance that Nicholson is going to have to stack the deck in order to get the result he wants- viz. that something happened in 'intellectual history' which had nothing to do with Muslims but which 'unified Hinduism' anyway. Furthermore, we can predict how Nicholson will stack the deck based on our knowledge of the academic availability cascades of the last twenty or thirty years. To start off with, some pretty flakey whackjobs- like Paul Hacker, whom I personally drove out of Bonn in 1963 by reason of my ultra Hindu 'inclusivist' zeal to shit and piss on every resident of that small town- will get air-time simply so as to erect a straw-man purvapaksha- then, aberrant scholastics like Kumarila are going to have their importance totally overstated. For sure, foolish memes about Mimamsa and Nyaya- especially navya nyaya- are going to be repeated, as if that shite meant anything even to its own practitioners; the mainstream Jaina tradition will be ignored in favour of one or two tendentious Sanskrit belles lettrists; Sheldon Pollock's bollocks will be genuflected to- tatte utana we say in Hindi- and some perhaps sound enough PhD research is going to be stretched out into a real sketchy appearance of paradigm busting by means of a sort of self-willed cultural blindness that mimics but can't compete with that of asli head-up-one's-own arse tradition of authentic Indian scholarship.
Thus Nicholson, naively, will tell us that that he has discovered that at some point in time every sect has reckoned members of every other sect will burn in hell fire unless they convert immediately according to some complicated ritual. This is supposed to prove Hinduism wasn't unified. The trouble is the Indians already had the notion that everybody spends at least a few eternities in various Hells and Heavens not to mention countless births as bigoted upholders of the rival creed etc, etc. But karma working over infinite Time means that apparently conflicting ontologies- such as that of Umasvati, Nagarjuna and Sankara- cash out as the same thing because it turns out that all the eternities in Hell, Heaven and so on last less than a blink of an eye compared to the truly eternal eternity of kevalya/nirvana/mukti.
Nicholson, bless his cotton socks, plays the ingenue biting the finger of amazement that his hero found commonalities between totally distinct systems. But these systems were only distinct to scholars- i.e. people Indians have always recognized as utter imbeciles. This is not to say Vijnanabhikshu isn't interesting or rewarding to read. He is, but as a means of enriching our reading of contemporary riti poets and vice versa coz that kinda thing sure feeds bhakti and bhakti verily is bliss- well at least the kind of bliss that don't fast track you to type 2 diabetes.
One thing that always puzzled me was the claimed rediscovery of a living Samkhya tradition in Bengal back in the 1920's (if I recall correctly). I've got a Hindi book purporting to be from that Ashram on my shelf and always wondered whether maybe this Samkhya school is actually descended- or fabricated-  from Vijnanbhikshu, some of whose works were published in the Nineteenth Century.
Anyroad, nothing greatly wrong with the content of Nicholson's book that I could see. My feeling is that its faux naive problematization is just the two drink, intellectual dishonesty, minimum for getting into Academic Publishing's Comedy Club these days. This is Nicholson's first book- so there's hope yet is what I'm saying. Or perhaps that's just my own naive faith in the Nikal Seyni eschaton in which young Andrew is transfigured into the avenging Angel who finally puts the smackdown on, if not Michael Witzel or Sheldon Pollock, then at least Jeffry Kripal or  Purushottam Billimoria. Wendy O'Doniger, however, is off limits. But for her warning that the South Indian Brahmin female bites off the penis of her consort before beheading him, I might have had an arranged marriage myself. Not that Iyer parents are too niggardly to hire a nice electron microscope for my bride to detect my penis on the honeymoon night- it's just I don't believe in dowry system- that's all.

Gora vs. Kim- Tagore vs. Kipling

Two Noble laureates born in the same decade, in the same part of the world, write novels, in the same decade, set in the same part of the world, focusing on a young lad who is actually ethnically British but who grows up thinking he is Indian. Kipling's Kim and Tagore's Gora are both about a quest for identity and have features of the classic bildungsroman.

Kipling's novel has been successfully adapted by Hollywood and, for all I know, perhaps Gora, too, has made it to the screen.
What are the differences between the two books?
Kim is exciting, full of strong memorable characters- no 'native', 'woman', or 'lower class' person is shown to be pallid, impotent or wholly heteronomous- and it has apoorvata in connection with Vedic spirituality. This follows from Kim ('who am I?') being identified with Visvamitra (friend-of-all-the world), who taught Lord Buddha the Vedas and who, in the Rg Veda, is depicted as having special powers over Rivers. Hence, Kim gets to guide the Lama to the river he seeks. No doubt, a thorough researcher will be able to point out that some Theosophist or other had written an article about Visvamitra and Vamadeva or something and that Kipling took the idea from there. Still, theosophists published all sorts of nonsense. It took Kipling's genius to fasten on something which
a) shows Veda is relevant to present day
b) adds apoorvata to our scripture reading
such that the Indian reader can say 'Bravo! A story for both children and adults- meaningful in every age!"
Now look at Gora.
1) It was already thirty years out of date at the time it was published- a major drawback given that Young Bengal was changing extremely fast and, in any case, unlike Turgenyev 's generation, Tagore's had no special importance.  By contrast, the Jugantar revolutionaries led extremely exciting lives. They had broad horizons. They were not mired in the madhouse of caste. What Thomas Mann said about Tagore's son- viz.  'he is brown and muscular- i.e masculine'- was even more true of the revolutionaries and the poetry of Kazi Nazrul, whereas Mann's criticism of Tagore- 'pallid... a nice old English lady..."- can be applied equally to the fastidious Brahmo's neo-Brahminical aesthetic.
Tagore, after a notable false start, simply fails to reflect the muscularity and broad horizons of the new generation. I'm not speaking of Aurobindo and Vivekananda but Bagha Jatin, M.N. Roy etc- in ardour and aspiration they were not exceptions, but, in fact, set the trend. I have read that Tagore himself was involved in their plot but also that the Ghaddaar's tried to assassinate him- surely a grand theme for a play- but, no, Tagore gave us Red Oleanders instead. Since Tagore himself wasn't a particularly wishy washy fellow why do we get stuck with this idea that Bengali men are all "Mamma's boys"- so good, so polite, never gets into fights, talks nonsense at such a rate that even the police spy will certify that he is 'good character- i.e. no testicles'."
2) Kim shows the Hindu Bengali and the Muslim Afghan working together to resist Russian encroachment in Afghanistan. In 1979, India should have been the first country to come forward to work with Pak to get Soviets out of that country. India shares responsibility for the terrible legacy of that aggression. What does Gora show? Sympathy for the poor and a sort of backhanded admiration for Islam. But the novel is essentially a silly and meaningless debate within high caste, comprador,  Hinduism that was of no interest to anybody under 50 years of age even at the time of publication.

Kim illustrates Kipling's belief that 'children, in India, have no caste' (Todd's amendment) and consequently they alone know India and should have a say in how to rule it. Gora illustrates Tagore's belief that Bengalis have no testicles and talk incessant shite.
Gora is venerated in India as a great work of art. Kim, however, has been vomited on by Edward Said. The vomit will, in time, be wiped off. Veneration for Gora, however, serves no useful end.