Ananya Vajpayei proves Sanskrit studies is shite.

Edited- an anonymous commentator has pointed out that I've completely missed 'the meat of the joke' (no doubt because my humorless Tambram genes are allergic to meat). Also Ananya lives in India, not Amerika as I enviously suggested.

Natural languages are interesting because their pragmatics solve a co-ordination problem, whereas their semantics do the opposite.  Classical Sanskrit is particularly interesting because, ab ovo, this was self-conscious and reflexive. Because of its syntheticity, Sanskrit, and Sanskrit influenced Riti type poetry, can always be viewed as a constrained optimization problem- i.e. there is a set of avadhanam questions which is the dual of the text. The hermeneutic method proper to Sanskrit- though far from forgetful of texts- is thus the reverse of historicist. It could be Gadamerian if  potential rasikas trained as Avadhanis- instead of holing up in Libraries to write worthless apple polishing dissertations, accessing only textual availability cascades, and accumulate Corrupt Academic Credentials from a vast Globalized Careerist Ponzi scheme- all the while, pretending to spearhead some vast subaltern revolt of the surd and silent Masses with which Revolt, however, those same Masses will have no truck- and all this at a time when there is a crisis in Student Loan Finance in the West- people realize their PhD in Telugu Tribadism won't even get them a job at McDonalds- so the whole swindle is already on its last legs and even the Pentagon won't come to the rescue because 'Regime Change' has proved a pipe dream.

Bearing this in mind let us look at this cri de couer from one of Sheldon Pollock's students- Ananya Vajpayei. My comments are in bold.

Sanskrit must be taken back (taking something back, means it was once yours and then someone took it from you. My Brahmin ancestors had Sanskrit- they were its leading exponents- then European and American Professors took this from me-so I should take it back from them by beating them or killing them. Is that what you mean Ananya?)  from the clutches of Hindu supremacists, bigots, believers in brahmin exclusivity, misogynists, Islamophobes and a variety of other wrong-headed characters on the right(as opposed to the Left, because we all know those guys are just sweethearts) whose colossal ambition to control India’s vast intellectual legacy (actually, it is Pollock who says only America can now do Indology)  is only matched by their abysmal ignorance (which you amply demonstrates in what follows) of what it means and how it works

An article in this paper on July 30 revealed that Dina Nath Batra,  head of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, had formed a “Non-Governmental Education Commission” (NGEC) to recommend ways to “Indianise” education. I had encountered Mr. Batra’s notions about education during a campaign I was involved with in February (which failed miserably in everything except getting you some publicity)  and March this year, to keep the American scholar Wendy Doniger’s books about Hindus and Hinduism in print. His litigious threats ( litigious threats? You mean he said Penguin was breaking the Law and Penguin agreed without taking the matter to Court?) had forced Penguin India to withdraw and destroy a volume by Prof. Doniger, and this was even before the national election installed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the ruling party in Delhi. In other words, Penguin was breaking the Law. Not some new law put in by the new Govt. but, simply, the law of the land. They decided to stop breaking the law and Ananya is unhappy about this because she wants other people to break the law but prefers not to do it herself. Very brave of her, I'm sure.

Ever since Mr. Narendra Modi’s government has come to power, Mr. Batra has become more active, (you mean effective. He was probably even more active when he was younger.) zealous and confrontational in stating his views about Indian history, Hindu religion, and what ought to qualify as appropriate content in schoolbooks and syllabi not only in his native Gujarat but in educational institutions all over the country.  Nonsense. People like him start out more confrontational so as to gain salience within their own camp. He is backed up by a vast governmental machinery by the fact that Mr. Modi himself has penned prefatory materials to his various books, and of course by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), of which he has been a member and an ideologue for over several decades. Oh I see. Mayawati wrote something. Once Chief Minister, U.P 's 'vast machinery of Govt.' totally destroyed Untouchability- didn't it? Nehru wrote something- immediately he was elected, India became a Socialist State without any Princely purses because 'vast machinery of Govt. was behind Nehru. How stupid are you Ananya?

Anything but ordinary

It’s unclear what the status or authority of Mr. Batra’s proposed NGEC is to be, (NO, IT ISN'T. It's a non Government body. Anyone can set one up. It has no statutory force and thus can only have persuasive powers- you know this but pretend not to because like maybe Modi is Hitler and Batra is Goebbels and please gimme tenure already coz I'm such a brave anti-Fascist- like, dunno, Anne Frank or something) but I was struck by the mention of one of my former teachers as a potential member of this commission. Seeing the name of Prof. Kapil Kapoor took me back to my days as an M.A. student in English and Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Prof. Kapoor first introduced me and my classmates to traditions of literature, language philosophy, literary analysis, poetics, semiotics, grammar and aesthetics in Sanskrit. Many of us went on to write doctoral dissertations about these subjects, deviating from British, American and postcolonial literature, and the European literary and critical theory that constituted the bulk of our coursework.

Prof. Kapoor ended up becoming dean and rector, and later, during the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime, setting up the Centre for Sanskrit Studies at JNU. He and I lost touch, partly because I went away overseas and partly because of our political disagreements that were becoming increasingly apparent. But encounters with other scholars like the philosopher Arindam Chakrabarti, the Pa¯n˛ini expert George Cardona, and the Sanskritist, and eventually my doctoral supervisor, Sheldon Pollock made me decide to pursue more seriously the path that I had glimpsed in Prof. Kapoor’s classroom: I took up the study of Sanskrit for real. Okay this tells us two things. You didn't study Sanskrit 'for real' while you were in India. You have no passion or aptitude for it. Only after you went abroad- where opportunities to learn Sanskrit are very limited- and only after you got yourself a heavy-weight mentor like Pollock who could get you tenure track, only then did you start studying Sanskrit 'for real'. No wonder you failed. You may have built yourself a Career but you are a petty bureaucrat of a pedant. and will never be a savant.

One of the reasons this did not seem outlandish to me was because my father is a poet and writer in Hindi, and I had been exposed to Indian literary and intellectual traditions at home from a very young age.  You were living in India. Your parents are Indian. How fucking deracinated is the class to which you belong that you need to say- Dad is a Hindi writer, that's how come I can understand that dehati lingo?Along the way I had studied Romance languages as well, so that adding Sanskrit to the repertoire did not feel at all counter-intuitive. This is crazy. There is no connection at all between Romance languages and Sanskrit.  At Oxford, I wrote an M.Phil thesis about how the study of Sanskrit had shaped the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure OMG, that old chestnut! Are you sure you're not related to Rajiv Malhotra? the father of modern linguistics in Europe. But after that, when I entered the South Asian Languages and Civilizations doctoral program at the University of Chicago, I did not properly realise what I had signed up for. You had no interest in philology and are obviously too stupid to understand computational linguistics but got by playing the posh brown totty card- which in England means you can get away with laziness and stupidity. Chicago, however, expects Asians to be workaholic geeks able to put in long hours of brainless drudgery.

Learning philology and Indology at Chicago was intensely challenging, yet also proportionately gratifying. We had the best scholars of South Asian studies in the world for our teachers. No you didn't. You had stupid narcissists.  Along with a small group of classmates, most of whom are professors now in America’s top universities but in shite Departments, I spent hundreds if not thousands of hours at the Regenstein Library, painstakingly unpacking sutras, verses, commentaries and arguments in a range of Sanskrit texts, increasingly difficult as we moved to more advanced levels. So you were doing stuff, in your late Twenties, which smart 12 year old kids have been doing effortlessly in Gurukuls all over India, not to mention Monasteries in China and Japan- for thousands of years! Bravo! Except, not bravo at all, by the age of fifteen those kids could make a logical argument. You can't. Nor can Pollock.

Encountering prejudice

It’s hard to describe the peculiar pain and pleasure of this language, so strict are its formal rules, so complex the ideas it allows one to formulate, express and analyse. Yet you can't express a complex idea. You are too stupid. Sanskrit enables thought at a level distinct from ordinary thinking in the languages of everyday life. Rubbish!  This is not to say that one cannot have a perfectly ordinary conversation in spoken Sanskrit: one can, of course, and in Sanskrit pedagogical environments, this is normal. But most of the vast literature available in this amazing language is specialised, technical and anything but ordinary. However, all of that vast literature can and, in general, has been put in to other languages- scholastic Tibetan or Telugu aren't inferior to Sanskrit, in any sense, though, I suppose, Sanskrit is compositionally easier. D. Venkat Rao estimates that some 30 million texts in various forms exist in Sanskrit at this time, the largest textual corpus of any extant human language. English is an extant human language. About 300 million texts that we know about are added to its corpus every year. 

Half of my long years as a doctoral student were spent away from Chicago, in India. For my dissertation, I read a small body of late medieval Sanskrit dharmashastra works. Why? Were you genuinely interested in the subject or was it because you had already made up your mind about their content and it was the least cognitively challenging type of drudgery you were capable of? These were texts of a legal and normative nature that were specifically about shudra-dharma: the rituals, duties and constraints associated with shudras, the social category that constitutes the fourth stratum of the orthodox brahminical fourfold varna-vyavastha, what we now normally designate as the “caste system.” I read with pandits and professors, at mathas, Sanskrit colleges, Oriental institutes and Sanskrit departments within regular universities, in places like Mysore, Bangalore and Pune. I even studied Kannada and Marathi to ease my passage. Poor thing- having to learn Kannada and Marathi just to talk to some beastly natives! Clearly knowing Kannada and Marathi can't help one to grasp Sanskrit better. Perish the thought! Everything you need to know about Sanskrit is in the library in Chicago.

Nothing in my experience or education up to that time had prepared me for the sheer wall of prejudice that blocked the access of someone like me to the particular aspects of the history, ideology and politics of Sanskrit that I was interested in. Here I was — female, a north Indian in south India, a student enrolled at a foreign university, a Hindi-speaker, and only tenuously and dubiously of a caste that pandits considered acceptable (why? Vajayei is considered a Brahmin or Kayastha name) . My teachers and I struggled to communicate, but in the end, most things were lost in translation. (Whose fault was that? An IAS officer posted in Maharashtra learns Marathi- even if they haven't studied Linguistics and Sanskrit. But our little darling 'struggled to communicate!' OMG, these evil Pundits are discriminating against me coz they don't speak Amerikan! A well-known Sanskrit professor in Maharashtra told me that only “perverted women” became scholars, a pronouncement that brought several months of our readings to an abrupt close one afternoon, and ensured I never again returned to meet him. Only a perverted scholar would deliberately chose a subject they find distasteful. Why? It is a waste of resources to study something you already know to be Evil- if the Government has already ruled that it is Evil. You are simply trying to grab publicity for yourself.

The caste hierarchy and sexism, the inequality and misogyny that the social worlds of Sanskrit engender and proliferate are shocking to a modern sensibility. So Sanskrit is shit and people who boast of their credentials in its study are worthless smegheads. No argument from me. However the 'social worlds of Sanskrit' don't 'engender and proliferate' anything. Otherwise you wouldn't have needed to learn a bit of Kannada and Marathi. Clearly, either you are not part of Sanskrit's 'social world' or the people you complain of weren't or else neither you nor they were part of that 'social world' because it doesn't exist. What doesn't exist can't engender and proliferate anything. As for this 'modern sensibility' you speak of- either it is rational or it is what you have which, I'm sorry to say, passed its sell by date in the mid Nineties.

 For a decade, my teachers in India and abroad had taught, tended, scolded and moulded me like their own child. Now I was confronted with a shrinking community of Sanskrit scholars left in a few places in India. They felt embattled inside collapsing institutions that had no space for their learning, demeaned by democratic politics and secular public life that stigmatised their orthodox beliefs, threatened by gender equality that resisted the patriarchy inherent in their practices, and humiliated by their sheer marginality in the economy of new knowledge systems, communication technologies and political common sense. They were bitter and resentful, and the occasional interloper like me — that too someone with an obviously critical agenda — had to face the brunt of their frustration.

Yes, Sanskrit Profs weren't well paid and, in any case, caste politics and scyophancy and so on took its toll- but smart people do Sanskrit for fun- not to get tenure. They make money in their day time job, and practice Avadhanam as a recreation. But this has always been true. Pedants have shit for brains. Which is why you chose that profession.

Another journey

After about three years of fighting a losing battle, I decided to make what I could of the dharmashastramaterials on my own. The dissertation got completed, and later, when I was writing my first book on an unrelated subject, I returned with joy and pleasure to the classics of Sanskrit literature, like Ka¯lida¯sa’s long poem, the “Meghadu¯ta,” sections of the epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavad Gita. This is crazy. Every other 'upper middle' Indian I know- including Muslims- likes relaxing by turning over the leaves of favorite Sanskrit and Persian texts. Why? Indians like Indian Literature. Most of us are guilty of writing metaphysical poetry. Some do it with a drink in hand, others after correcting their kids' homework or telling them a bed time story. In the safe cocoon of another great American institution, this time Harvard University’s Widener Library, I could bracket for a few years the dark side of Sanskrit, its complicity with the power dynamics of caste and gender that make modern India the most confounding contradiction of on-paper political equality and lived social inequality. If Sanskrit has a dark side so has Persian and Arabic and every other language in the world. America has on-paper political equality- does Ananya think it has no lived social inequality? Look at China. There has been no great linguistic break but there certainly has been a change in Social inequality. Language- especially a dead classical language- has zero explanatory power in this context. Why pretend otherwise? People will only be confirmed in their low opinion of your subject, Ananya. You really aren't accomplishing some tremendous David vs Goliath triumph by writing this stupid article. You are just a stupid Careerist pushing an out-dated agenda.

But now that India is ruled by the Hindu nationalist government of Mr. Modi, with grandiose and historically baseless announcements being made all the time by the likes of Mr. Batra, it seems the time has come to deal with everything that is wrong with Sanskrit, yet again. Why? Batra is a retired school teacher. Did he teach Sanskrit? No. He taught English and Hindi. Is he using Sanskrit to mobilize support? No. He is using Hindia and English. Why, yet again, deal with everything that is wrong with Sanskrit? When was the last time you dealt with everything wrong with Sanskrit? Did it do any good? If not, what the fuck is your major malfunction you worthless cretin? A language is only a means to an end. Sanskrit is a powerful tool, but whether its uses are salutary or destructive depends on whose hands it happens to fall into. Its rigour and beauty are undeniable; so are its rigidity and elitism, in certain circumstances. Towards what great end have your written this shite, Ananya? To attack Batra? Surely, you need to do that in Hindi or Sanskrit- not English so atrocious that even that former School Teacher from the boondocks will feel only contempt for you?

My former professor, Kapil Kapoor, was knowledgeable and passionate about Sanskrit, which is what made him such a memorable teacher. I cannot believe that he would endorse the ridiculous claims made by some Hindutva spokespersons that there were airplanes and cars in ancient India, and that the Vedic culture invented stem cell research. But, Ananya, he hasn't endorsed those ridiculous claims, has he? Look at the Encyclopaedia of Hinduism he has just edited. Is there one single article there which 'endorses ridiculous claims'? There isn't is there?  So why bring it up? Isn't it because there is not one iota of evidence for your thesis- viz. Sanskrit has a 'Dark Side' and it is threatening to take over India- and Dinanath Batra is like the kid in Omen, except now he has got Super-Powers and OMG, Modi used a Sanskrit phrase on TV....here come the Storm Troopers! One of the things I remember about him most vividly was his earthy sense of humour. “If Pa¯n˛ini was at Takshila,” he often joked, “that probably means he was a Punjabi, like me.” We would all laugh,  Would you ALL laugh? Why? Panini came from Punjab. So did your Professor. OMG that is so-ooo funny because like...urm... Punjabis only know agriculture isn't it? You fuckwit racist retard, do you really think your Hindi speaking ancestors were smarter than Punjabis or Marathas? transported for a moment to the vanished classrooms of remote antiquity, when one of the most astonishing works of systematic knowledge of all-time, Pa¯n˛ini’s Sanskrit grammar, the Ashtadhyayi, was probably composed somewhere on the plains of north-western Punjab. Panini work may astonish you- but then you are a very very stupid person- but it isn't 'one of the most astonishing works of systematic knowledge of all time'. How could it be? Other Classical Languages with equal or greater geographical reach got along perfectly well without it and, in any case, Linguistics just isn't very interesting because we're hardwired for it. If you think the device on which you are reading this is less astonishing than the Panini's achievement you are wrong. Patanjali himself would find your smartphone more astonishing.

It’s up to liberal, secular, egalitarian, enlightened and progressive sections of our society who happen to live in America to preserve and protect this unique civilisational resource. But you are too stupid to do it.  Ask Sheldon Pollock. Kapil Kapoor opened a window for his students, from where they could see a breathtaking vista of India’s past, filled with traditions of philosophy, religion and literature unparalleled in almost any other language. Horseshit. Greek has Sanskrit beat for prose, Chinese and Persian are better for poetry, Arabic is very much alive, Hebrew has revived. Sanskrit is a hereditary hobby that Avadhanis and Acharyas, but also drunken shitheads like me, cultivate gratuitously. What Chicago calls Sanskrit is a coprolite extracted from the rectum of Teutonic dinosaurs who once ravaged Philology Depts across the Continent in pre-Darwinian times.

Scholarship like that of Sheldon Pollock and his colleagues helps us to understand the history, the power, the circulation and the importance of Sanskrit knowledge systems in the pre-modern world, not just in India but across Asia. Rubbish. Pollock Bollocks is shite. We learn to really read texts, to carefully unpack their meaning in complex historical contexts of production and reception, rather than merely brandish them as false tokens of identity and imagined superiority in our own times. Sanskrit, for you, was just a Credentialist passport to tenure- but then, you are stupid and ignorant, so being a pedant is the best thing for you. To revive Sanskrit, we must first shoot the Professors.

(Ananya Vajpeyi is the author of Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India,HUP, 2012. E-mail: vajpeyi@csds.in)

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?

Sanskrit, Globalization & Sheldon Pollock Bollocks

'What began when Sanskrit escaped the domain of the sacred was literature'
Is there any possible world where Prof. Sheldon Pollock's dictum, quoted above, is not arrant nonsense?
Certainly there is.
A close reading of Continental theory- or just watching a lot of Horror films and TV serials, which cashes out as the same thing- suggests a possible route to rescue Pollock Bollocks for the aspirant  or academic Indologist's sacred duty of 'tatte uttana'- i.e. the reverential lifting of the unwieldy and infeasibly bloated testicles of influential Professors.
Sanskrit might be a ghost or an angel or demon of some sort which some Superior Being had penned up in a cage called 'the sacred', but then it suddenly escaped and what it did after that was what we call literature.
However, this ghost or angel or demon, called Sanskrit, would not be the sort of thing human beings can see or talk sensibly about. Thus for a human being to make a statement of this sort is to mark him out as a man talking nonsense, at least so far as the rest of humanity is concerned.
But, wait, what about the following hypothesis?
 Human beings may from time to time become possessed by a Supernatural entity and say or write certain things which other human beings recognize as language. However, those human possessed by that 'language' are not responsible for their own speech acts nor have any real insight into how or why they came about. Instead, being wholly heteronomous, they might serve as a sort of hive mind for the disembodied 'language' which possesses them.
It so happens that there is some other disembodied plane or invisible dimension where this 'language' can  find itself suddenly captured and confined to a cage of some sort. 'The sacred' is one such cage. However,  nil desperandum auspice deo, 'language' has some providential means of escaping this cage and when it does some sub-set of the humans whom it possesses and controls start doing something other human beings can recognize to be 'literature'.
Anyway, that's what happened to Sanskrit.
What is wrong with the story outlined above? It's perfectly reasonable isn't it? Far from being 'nonsense', it is highly scientific and utilitarian. It may inspire us to find a way to pen up Sanskrit once again in a cage- not 'the sacred' because we have more than enough crap of that sort- but, I know, tell you what, lets pen it up in a cage called 'Superstring Theory' so that what it henceforth does is yield us a nice Theory of Everything! That would be way cool.
However, there is nothing cool at all about what Prof. Sheldon Pollock suggests we do with his great discovery- which is to shove it up the arse of that sinister 'coercive globalization' which all right thinking academics are up in arms against.

But is this really a good way for Sanskrit to end its not entirely undistinguished career? I mean, it was smart enough to escape from the domain of the sacred and start doing literature. Seems a shame for it to end up as a suicide bomb suppository.
Still, what is the alternative?
Nothing else is possible for Sanskrit- at least, if  there is any truth to the arguments Pollock advances in his magnum opus- viz.
1) Sanskrit was a sacred language restricted to religious practice before the Common Era.
If this statement is true, then Sanskrit was never a language like any other and thus never had any secular application nor any lineal descendants used for secular purposes before some dramatic change occurred 2000 years ago. This begs the question- how could it have had the appearance of language to human beings? Well, it must have possessed and captured the minds and bodies and wills of some set of human beings during a long period when it, itself, was caged up 'in the domain of the sacred'. The alternative explanation, viz. that some bunch of guys invented it and ring-fenced it for purely sacred purposes, fails because no such bunch of guys ever had enough power, esprit de corps, and unanimity, to enforce that ring-fencing at any time or across any great geographical space. Ah! But what if they had supernatural help? Well, supernatural things, by their nature are beyond our ken. We have no way of distinguishing between Supernatural aid and Supernatural possession. Both propositions have equal though contrary truth value and thus we must term both as nonsense until such time as some guy chants a mantra and suddenly a whole bunch of smart people start talking Sanskrit and produce a theory of Everything or design a self delivering pizza to any point in the past when you really could have relished noshing down on a slice but it was like 2 A.M and so you just went to the kitchen and ate a shit-load of cereal straight out of the box.
2) It was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression after the Common Era begins.
What? The Rg Veda and the Brhamanas and the Upanishads and the Itihasas also encode 'literary and political' expression? Nonsense! Veda is uncreated. What are you a Mlecha or a Nastik or Shudra? Kindly fuck off. It is unseemly that an untouchable barbarian like you is reading these sacred words.
You bastard! Yes I know you can read Skt epigraphs on public monuments. But those were only written after Sanskrit conducted her daring escape from the Stalag of the Sacred.
This is clearly shown by the epigraphic evidence. What? Nonsense! Epigraphy was never the monopoly of a highly skilled craft guild or sub-caste, certainly not, carving stuff on granite or iron or copper plate doesn't take any special skill at all, a child could do it! Well, okay, maybe not an ordinary child, but one possessed by Sanskrit. You know what kids are like. They like scribbling on walls and caves and other such unlikely places. Okay, maybe the non-Sanskrit inscriptions were done by expert craftsmen, but later on even they were possessed or partially possessed by Sanskrit. That explains why the earliest Junagadh and Mathura inscriptions aren't pure Sanskrit- I mean it, it takes Sanskrit some time to possess non-Brahmins, several generations in fact. Kindly watch 'Supernatural- Season 2' to understand the mechanism of inter-generational possession.

3) At the end of the first millennium, local speech forms were newly dignified as literary languages and began to challenge Sanskrit for both 'the work of poetry and power'.
Local speech forms used to be very simple creatures. They too possessed people but were caged in the domain, not of the sacred (even after Sanskrit escaped) but somewhere else. Anyway, a thousand years ago, they suddenly got all dignified- don't ask me how- and then they challenged Skt. to a dance off or a showdown at the OK corral or something of that sort. What's implausible about that? Stuff like that goes down all the time.  You may not be a trained Philologist but don't tell me you are naive enough to believe that Languages are all like pure and innocent and all just wanting to get along with each other. Take a look at your bookshelf. Fuck, is that my Monier Williams trying to sodomize the Thesaurus? Better believe it buddy. It's a brutal world out there in Philology phase space.
4) At the dawn of the third millennium 'coercive globalism' is causing vernaculars to mutate if not die out completely.
Indeed, it is that very same 'coercive globalism' responsible for the meme of suicide bombers getting a fatwa to license sodomy so as to enlarge their rectums for the insertion of larger payloads. Sanskrit, verily, is highly qualified (at least from the account Pollock gives us of it) to contribute shrapnel to that payload but it is only our great Professor's logic which is wholly explosive of any Universalist Logos.

And no, before you ask, I don't care how many fatwas you have, I will not enlarge your rectum.

Mind it kindly.

Rebecca Gould & Sheldon Pollock's Bollocks

What does this sentence mean?

This oeuvre further demonstrates that it is possible to attain seemingly unattainable depth by virtue of those very same engagements that run the strongest risk of superficiality: i.e. saying silly, superficial things, can help other people feel they have attained 'unattainable depths'. One way of being sure to say silly, superficial things, is to be stupid and have a reckless disregard for the truth. Someone or other reading you will feel they have 'attained seemingly unattainable depths'. But, the question arises, how does one make a living out of telling stupid lies? The answer is to pose as a Professor of something nobody is interested in. If you only report valid results your readership will be tiny and, in any case, you will find you are wrong 90 per cent of the time. The other way to go is to just strategically pile up bad translations of source material and pad it out with seemingly politically correct tendentious logorrhoea. Nobody is going to point out your stupidity because you are a Professor of something stupid by definition. But, your stupidity productively enables stupidity in others so suddenly you have a readership outside your own shitty little lavatory stall.

In drawing attention to Dr. Rebecca Gould's seminal study of the methodology of Prof. Sheldon Pollock, I seek to celebrate my own unprecedented discovery that words sometimes mean something and it is entirely as a logical consequence of this extraordinary insight of mine that a sentence like the following almost becomes meaningful- 'Pollock's unprecedented discovery is not just that texts encode a political relationship to the world, but that literary languages themselves are instruments of power; Latin and Sanskrit helped to shape rather than merely reflect the realities that the scholar of premodernity reconstructs.'
Latin is a different language from Sanskrit. It has a different history. It therefore follows that Western hegemony is somehow preordained because-
'Causality is a questionable category of analysis in any philosophically aware literary history, and it would be inaccurate to imagine that there could ever be a single reason for the dominance of the Western world in modernity. It is nonetheless necessary to juxtapose the historical fact of European hegemony with the world that Pollock describes with unparalleled detail and sophistication. In the Latin cosmopolis, by Pollock’s account, language mastered space, while in the latter case, the “language of the gods” (the Sanskritic term for Sanskrit) saw itself as transcending the coordinates of space and time. '
Gould's argument goes as follows- Pollock says Latin 'knew' the limits of its Empire. Sanskrit didn't. So Latin remained connected to History and Reality while Sanskrit migrated away to some transcendent realm.
The problem here is that there are some Latin writers who don't know the limits of Latin obtaining at their time of writing and some Sanskrit writers who do know the geographic limits of Sanskrit at their time of writing. Yes, England was a hegemonic power in India and the Latins had once colonized England but that still does not justify this line of reasoning. Latin didn't master space. Irigenia wrote in Latin, did that enable him to 'master space?'. Carvaka wrote in Sanskrit, did that enable him to migrate to the realms of the Gods?

Gould and Pollock are making a very simple methodological error- viz. thinking words are actually people who can have projects and ambitions and super-powers from being bitten by radio-active spiders. Thus if some guy says in Latin' Latin has a center' then suddenly Latin gets that magic power.  If someone says in Sanskrit 'verily this language is divine' then right away that Language gains the super-power of being free from Time and Space. What if I were to say 'Hindi tera gand marta hai'? Well, if Gould is right, then Hindi would immediately be guilty of sodomizing you and so Urdu would get all jealous and there'd probably be a Nuclear War.

Gould finds much to marvel at in Pollock-  like this 'His masterly analysis of a fifth-century inscription from Karnataka ably reveals the limitations of former scholarship that dismissed prasasti texts as mere documentary records. “If as a genre prasasti can be said to be about anything,” Pollock concludes, “it is as much about exploring the capacities of the Sanskrit language for the production of praise as the content of praise itself” (137). From here, we are initiated into a social world that privileges the aesthetic priorities of literature. This world—and here is the shocking part—is entirely new, in spite of the fact that it is situated in medieval South Asia. The most important lesson to be drawn from the pra´sasti readings is that literature was the location as well as the form of a political articulation of power. After reading about a world wherein literature can write politics, the student of literature and theory is led to ask, what implications does this have for the meaning of the political in the world we inhabit now?'
The odd thing here is that Gould is a native English speaker. She must have graduated High School. So she must have been taught about euphuism in Elizabethan England. Furthermore, she is a Persian scholar. She must have read thousands of euphuistic chronograms. So why does she find it so startling that medieval India had a euphuistic genre or panegyric which was as interested in 'exploring the capacity of the language for the production of praise as the content of praise itself?'.  The truth is Literature has always and everywhere been both 'the location as well a form of the political articulation of power'. So has Architecture. So has cooking. So has hair dressing. However, if Gould thinks it Literature was the only form of the political articulation of power in medieval India she is simply mad. Or, is it really the case that there are 'scholars' out there who believe that some genre of writing exists which has magic properties? You put up an inscription in this type of language and suddenly everybody treats you like an absolute monarch. But even if Gould believes that this happened sometime in the past, how can she believe that something like that is available today, in our modern world? Look at the question she asks-
'After reading about a world wherein literature can write politics, the student of literature and theory is led to ask, what implications does this have for the meaning of the political in the world we inhabit now?'
So, according to Gould, what should students of literature and theory do right now? Oughtn't they to continually experiment with different languages and genres- maybe write a computer program to make things quicker- till they hit upon a formula which has this magical property of creating political power? After all, Dr. Faustus could keep the plague out of a City by just writing some Latin on a poster. So the Faustian, Eurocentric, Dr. Gould must be doing the same thing, mustn't she? Except, I don't believe she is. She isn't really mad, it's just that she's writing a praise poem to Pollock for some reason of academic politics and so she doesn't have to bother with logic or facts or even the pretense of basic intelligence.

Apart from this novel theory of language, Gould also has some great insights into Eurocentrism.
 Is there any possible world, not actually run by Nazi robots from the 28th Century, where the following sentence is not nonsense?
'Eurocentrism is the conditioning possibility for contemporary knowledge, and Pollock’s work more than any other helps us to make sense of this predicament as well as how to move beyond it.'
 Suppose I want to know about Urdu poetry- specifically that of Ghalib. Is Eurocentrism a conditioning possibility for my knowledge? No. Eurocentrism can only mislead me and impoverish my reception of Ghalib. Islamocentrism, on the other hand, redeems every line Ghalib writes and makes it poignant and philosophically interesting. But maybe my knowing stuff about Ghalib isn't 'contemporary knowledge'.

What about Sanskrit literature- what if I want to know about the Ramayana? Can Sheldon Pollock help me learn about the Ramayana? No. He says that we can't know what any character in the Ramayana feels or why they decide to do something. According to him, no one in the Ramayana believes himself or herself to have any freedom of action. This would be fine if Pollock had some Eurocentric theory to explain things. Suppose he says, Rama says x because he believes that he has no freedom of action and thus has to say whatever the Deity of the Ramayana wants him to say. It so happens that Deity is some dead European guy. So, I can now tell you what happens in the Ramayana on the basis of my having read that dead White European guy. For e.g., when Rama says 'Hi hi, holy Rishi dudes, can I protect you from some demons?'- what is actually happening is that the sciatica of the Aryan Weltshmerz is treating itself to a hypolkeimenon spa because...urm...anything else would be decadence and anyway read your Hegel why don't you?

The problem with Pollock is that he isn't offering anything to replace the traditional Indian reading of the Ramayana. He simply says- this reading is wrong. There isn't a Freudian or a Marxist or David Ickean reading to replace it. The Ramayana is meaningless simply. This is certainly a novel point of view. Perhaps that's what makes it 'contemporary'. But why drag Eurocentrism into it? There are many people with various sorts of cognitive impairments who will find not just the Ramayana but any book or film or play utterly meaningless. We may congratulate Pollock at arriving at the same conclusion by himself but where is the proof he isn't simply mentally impaired?
Rebecca Gould isn't an Indologist. She herself points out Pollock's contradictory assertions in the first page of her essay but does not draw the obvious conclusion- viz. Pollock talks bollocks.  A guy who says 'x is true' and then 'x is not true' is not smart- he's stupid. He has lost the ability to reason. That is not merely a Eurocentric view, it is an Indocentric, a Sinocentric an anywhere-centric view.
Gould concentrates on the question 'how does newness enter the world?' The answer is the same whether you are European or Zulu. Newness, apoorvata, enters the world either
1) when a cause and effect relationship previously unknown gains currency. Something new came into my life when I bought a laptop. True, initially, I just wrote on its surface, but when someone showed me how to turn it on and use the keyboard I evolved into a great Hindutva blogger.
2) when a lag occurs between cause and effect- this is Mimamsa 'apoorvata' 'novelty or meaningfulness'  obtains in the gap between the cause and its as yet unfructified, apurva, effect. A type of literary theory exists which can look at hysteresis effects of this sort. Indeed, such theory might even be said to an advance on that of Gramsci in that it is based on more up to date Economics. But Pollock is entirely innocent of any such thinking.
You may argue- granted, Economics is a science which studies both the types of 'newness' listed above. But isn't it Eurocentric? The answer is no. Europe just isn't particularly interesting for Econ and hasn't had any paradigmatic 'newness' for about a hundred years now. So, Economics is not Eurocentric nor is Physics nor is Literature nor is Philosophy.
But even if all these disciplines were Eurocentric, it still would not license self-contradiction as a mark of some great intellectual depth. There have been some very stupid Europeans but, as a whole, Europeans have never considered the inability to make a logical argument a proof of anything but stupidity.
Even if Europe has traditionally used Indology as a dumping ground for its imbeciles, Pollock isn't European so there is no good reason for his Indology to be so stupid. After all, many Americans look up difficult words before using them in sentences to ensure that what they write isn't utterly stupid. Why can't Pollock do the same thing?

Gould asks ': How is literature born from the nonliterary and textuality from the oral? How does modernity emerge from the past? How does vernacular consciousness arise in contexts where it did not exist before? '
Surely, there is no great mystery here. The 'literary' is collocational and literary effort is a collocational tatonnement which is going to exhibit the same dynamic properties as other Social processes. The question of 'vernacular consciousness' is a non-question at least for Europe. Kids learned their mother tongue from their Mommy. Then some of them went to School. But they could still talk to their Mummies and the other kids who didn't go to School. During some periods this mother tongue came closer and closer to the scholarly language, during others it moved away from it. The thing can be modeled as collocational availability cascades.
What has Pollock to say that is at all interesting in this regard?
Okay, from time to time, someone might say 'this is a sacred language' or some group of people, like the Magians, may say 'common people mustn't be allowed to read our hieratic Pehlevi' and there might be a Socio-Economic or Theological motive for this. But, this isn't particularly interesting and addresses no broad epistemological  curiosity or other Research Program we might have.
Gould asks the question-  'How is the desacralizing process Pollock deems central to the shift within ancient Indian history from the Sanskritic culture of the Vedas into the Sanskrit of kavya (implicitly, Pollock seems to argue, a secular institution) marked historically? How do worlds come into being without antecedents? How can we describe and discern what has never been said before? How, in short, is newness born?'

One reason asking questions is normally a good thing is because you can rule out various sorts of response in advance. My question, 'where is the toilet?' is framed such that I can rule out as irrelevant or nonsensical every politically correct or Eurocentric response.  You may say that my desire to defecate is an example of 'something new entering the world' and therefore that Pollock is relevant. However, my view is that, he is not an appropriate toilet except maybe for handicapped people.
There is no evidence that Vedic Sanskrit was ever sacred- in the sense of not being used for ordinary purposes- and thus there is no question of any desacralizing every happening. I suppose it is possible to argue that some Non Indo Aryan speaking communities preserved Sanskrit as a purely sacred language. That is why no Sanksrit words are to be found in the dialects of their priestly castes. What? There are thousands of Sanskrit words in their dialects? Books on Medicine and Geography and Maths were composed in Skt? Oh! Well I guess Skt never was sacred at all. What about the epigraphic evidence? Is it not the case that people used vernaculars because Skt was too sacred? Nope. Sorry. Not true. Okay, but hang on, is everything Pollock writes total Bollocks? 'Fraid so.
The Sraman religions adopt Skt because they wanted to avoid confusing Commentary with Scripture- but their Scripture was in Prakrit. There is no division between 'sacred' and non-sacred languages. The Family Purohit to the Thai Royal family chants both Old Tamil and Skt. verses. MS Subbalaxmi or Yesudas sang both Skt and Vernacular language Sacred compositions. Sikh Savants used Braj Bhasha, Tamils preferred Telugu.
Gould asks the right question- how does newness enter the world- but doesn't draw the obvious conclusion. Sacrality itself is something new. Where does Pollock import it from?
Is it really reasonable that a language can somehow just up sticks and migrate out of Historicity into some Transcendental realm?
Of course it is Vivek. OMG you are so ignorant.There are many examples of this happening. Remember, I told you not to bother learning Swahili when you were 7?  That was because Swahili itself had said 'don't bother learning me.' You said 'if I don't learn you, Swahili Madam,  Mrs. Mwanga will slap me so hard my teeth will rattle'. 'Don't worry, Swahili replied, you just tell Mrs. Mwanga that Swahili has recently decided to 'separate itself from daily life to define for itself a universal sphere which is transregional and outside time'.
Guess what? Swahili was lying. It just liked getting you into trouble with Mrs. Mwanga is all.
But don't blame Swahili too much. The fact is Mrs. Mwanga did not realize that 'Eurocentrism is the conditioning possibility for contemporary knowledge, and Pollock’s work more than any other helps us to make sense of this predicament as well as how to move beyond it.' That's why she slapped you.

Still, gotta say, kids, don't try this at home.

Gould writes 'The distinction made in Sanskrit texts between worldliness (laukika) and the this-worldly (alaukika) is one of the central taxonomies informing Pollock’s own investigation. Though kavya denied its worldliness during the early epoch of flourishing (the third century BCE to the first century CE), Pollock’s operative presumption is that literature is always related to power, that in fact it creates and even constitutes forms of political life, as well as being inflected by these forms. “Poetic images,” he notes elsewhere, “are, in a non-trivial sense, historical facts.” His historical phenomenology of the premodern South Asian aesthetic enables us to perceive the intrinsically political content of literature for the South Asian world, and for others as well.'
What on earth can Gould possibly mean? People talk. Power is about people who talk. So, sure Literature like tailoring and plumbing and cooking and everything else has some relationship to Power and its lack.  Pollock himself sees a 'hieratic conception of Hindu Kingship' in the Ramayana and some 'othering/brothering' nonsense in the Mahabharata. So, Pollock in a non-trivial sense is talking bollocks.
But Gould is a happy camper. She now gets to talk about how Reality is actually constructed, not by what really happened or could possibly happen, but by stupid Professors saying foolish, self contradictory things.

Thus she writes-

 'The argument that art “shows us that representation can sometimes be the only way the real and the true come to be known” is the dominant keynote of his oeuvre. Fine, but Pollock also believes that Literary Representations, like the Ramayana, can't tell us anything about what characters feel or what their true motivation is.
 As an ontology of representation the insight is a valuable one, (how is it valuable? to whom is it valuable?) but even more important is the complex consistency (consistency? Gould keeps pointing out Pollock's self-contradiction, how has he suddenly become complexly consistent?) with which the theory unfolds in his work; at a certain point, the insight ceases to be theoretical. Much like poetry, it becomes not just a statement about reality but a tool in its construction. (but, if it poetic, rather than part of a Research Program, then its author must be regarded as what Bourdieu calls a 'Prophet' or 'total intellectual'- i.e. Pollock would be the Satre or Heidegger of Indology. In other words, there would be every reason to take Pollock to task, especially in view of the Institutional Power he wields, rather than pen his praises.)
'Drawing inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of social power and domination, Pollock’s interest lies in the forms of concealment and embodiment that the interaction between text and context takes, in literature as
well as history. Pollock does not know the context, nobody does, and is shaky on the text because he is stupid and is missing some vital gene for empathy This relation between text and context describes Pollock’s understanding of the relationship of literature to the world generally and stands in contrast to more familiar approaches of treating texts as reflections moving in one direction, from the real to the unreal. Nonsense. Nobody treats 'texts as reflections moving in one direction, from the real to the unreal'. Instead they treat texts as having some factual matter and some imaginative material.' The latter view gives us binaries between texts and the world that have resulted in the implicit degradation of literature as a mode of engaging with reality.The implicit degradation of literature is what happens when worthless PhD shitheads like you vomit on texts.  In the readings we encounter in Pollock’s work, texts both reflect and create worlds, and the indeterminacy of that encounter is appreciated with a depth that alters the way in which both are perceived.' Sheer fantasy. What worlds has Pollock created?  He doesn't have the imagination, the empathic faculty, to do any such thing. His books are dreary nonsense.

Gould does not know Pollock's subject. She may be forgiven for taking his 'great discoveries' at face value. What is unforgivable is her phrasing the right questions and then giving Pollock a pass on them. The result is she has to write something as entirely vacuous as the paragraph quoted above.
Pollock's insight, she tells us is that 'Theory does not explain the world'- nonsense, good theory does, bad theory doesn't- 'it provides an entry into it'- no, Life provides an entry to the World.

' It follows that contemporary theory is inadequate even for understanding modernity, insofar as an object is best understood by taking into account realities external to it. No, Dr. Gould, what follows is that you and your ilk use the word theory for ignorant nonsense which is inadequate even for understanding how to make a logically coherent argument, let alone write meaningfully about a topic you know nothing about.Theory that arises from the modern condition shares many modern limitations, including, most damagingly, colonialism, a structure that has acquired new life in much post- and presumably anticolonial theory. Post Colonialism is a Credentialized Ponzi scheme based on a failed Research Program. Pollock Bollocks aint a way forward but a bandwagon to be jumped on to by careerist academics who have nothing interesting to say. When engaged deeply, theory has the capacity to bring about change; indeed, theory might be defined as a conceptual stance that enables one to generalize from the particular and thereby to, as Nietzsche puts it, reshape the universal into what has never been heard before. Nonsense.  Maths changes the World. Neitzche was bundled off to the madhouse. Maths defeated Hitler. Nietzche could not save him. No change in the meaning of culture, power, identity, and selfhood can ever come about that is not theoretical; newness does not enter the world except via a philosophical transformation. A vanishingly small number of people, throughout World History, have known about Philosophy. Of those who knew about it, virtually everybody thought it crap.  Historical changes necessarily bear a relation to material conditions, but the lessons they have to offer cannot be reduced to the empirical realm. History doesn't offer lessons, it provides data sets. Positions are altered and beliefs are transformed according to what is perceived as being right or wrong with the world, in other words, according to the theory one engages and the ideologies one perceives as bearing the deepest relationship to truth. Nonsense. Ideologies are shite. The very word ideologue means 'worthless shithead' in English. Work that engages most deeply with European theory alone will never be more than that, regardless of the critique it may assume. Because European Theory is worthless shit and virtually all Europeans know it. If the work of provincializing Europe can only take place through an engagement with European intellectual history, it is equally true that this provinicialization can only be fully attained by an engagement with premodern, pre-European realities. Rubbish, watching American cop dramas is quicker and more painless. The advantage of premodern and pre-European as cognitive categories is that they have actual, historically documentable, existences (Not so, premodern is meaningless. Why not just says 'days of yore' and be done with it? Modernity is a failed Research Program like Racial Science or Marxism.  Pre-European too is problematic. English history tell us some Englishmen came to Tamil Nadu at the time of Alfred the Great. How do we know they didn't change something fundamental? English history also tells us some Alans (from a part of the world Gould studies) came to London 2000 years ago and then went back home. The truth is, 'Europe' is a term with zero explanatory value.) whereas post-European and postmodern exist much more on the level of hypothetical realties. We have not yet entered the “post” stage of world history. Wow! Guess what guys? The World hasn't been blown up. We haven't entered the 'post' stage of World History. Little Becky Gould sure must be smart to have worked that out for herself. Except she didn't Sheldon Pollock helped her with her homework.

Europe was 'provincialized' by Science, by Technology, by people voting with their feet for stuff they thought made them look cool or stuff they thought tasted nice. Post-Europeanism is Big Macs and Sushi and Computer games and a lot of kids with PhD's in Post Modern this or that waiting tables and praying for a Green Card.

Oh dear. I can't believe it took so long for me to get Dr. Gould's point.  Pollock is McEuropeanism, McTheory, McOrientalism.  And Gould is right, Pollock Bollocks will drive the genuine article out of the market.

Is Indology part of the Humanities or the sub-Humanities?

Prof. Sheldon Pollock holds that the reader of the Ramayana has no means of knowing what Rama feels or whether he feels and, furthermore,  'Rama's 'true feelings' will remain secret, properly so, for they are quite irrelevant to the poem's purposes.' 

In his essay on Bhatta Nayaka, we get a clue as to why Pollock might maintain so grotesque a view

If it makes no difference whether 'rasa is engendered, inferred or manifested in the character' then why do Porn movies have a sound-track of groans and moans? Why does Jackie Chan take the trouble to do his own stunts and tell us about it? Why do we feel Amy Winehouse's singing is in a different class to Kylie Minogue's? No doubt, there are people who make no such distinction. They will beat their meat even if the porn actors show no enthusiasm for their joyless labor. The existence of this class of people enables bad Art to survive. But, theirs is a damaged subjectivity. If everybody was like that Society would be dysfunctional. The Evolutionary Stable Strategy is that they remain a minority.
Now the Mimamsa ritualists had a certain axe to grind, a fact Pollock very well knows, yet he himself, without himself practicing those rituals or even coveting the ends that those rituals purport to attain, affirms precisely the same view-point.
Why?
The answer, I suppose, is that there's something missing in his make-up. The reason people like the Ramayana is because they feel for the characters. The characters suffer and the reader feels empathy. Human Society, for reasons that Evolutionary Psychology explains, contains a majority which has this quality and seeks to further develop it. If the minority, who lack this quality, got dictatorial power and  re-wrote every book according to their own taste- the vast majority of people would stop reading because there would be no good books. Literature would be produced by the sort of Computers Orwell describes in 1984.
What, I wonder, is the 'unique kind of experience and knowledge' one can gain from the Ramayana if its characters are considered not to have any feelings? Well, one invaluable nugget is driving instructions for flying cars and another is how to build a bridge to Sri Lanka and a third is Pollock's hieratic model of Hindu Kingship.
I suppose, there were and perhaps still are some people who believe in the flying car and the bridge to Sri Lanka and so on. But we know them to be idiots. When Subramaniyam Swamy mentions the Ram Setu, we know he is being hypocritical and that his assertions in this matter are wholly strategic and not at all alethic.

Initially, I gave Pollock the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps his writing on the Ramayana was a politically correct response to the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. But, his essay on Bhatta Nayaka suggests a more alarming possibility. He just isn't hard-wired to 'get' Literature. Had he stuck to Latin and Greek, he'd have been found out. Indology, on the other hand, comes under the rubric of, not the Humanities, but the sub-Humanities. Good thing too. If they just lower the bar a little further- us Economists can take over. Amartya Sen is already half way there. Come to think of it Subramaniyam Swamy was once an Economist. OMG it's already happening! AAAAARGH! This is like the time I watched all the Planet of the Apes films back to back while high on cough syrup. No, Helena Bonham Carter, I don't want a hummer. Never thought I'd say it- but there it is.

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.