The battle over ideas
[Photo: The Hindu]
Not just a protest It’s an attack on scholarship SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY
The current political climate makes serious scholarship of Indian texts impossible
In the opening chapter of his Sanskrit masterpiece, the Vikramankadevacharita, Bilhana, a Kashmiri poet living in 12th century Karnataka, writes:
Where is the fame of those kings who do not have eminent poets on either side?
How many kings have come and gone from the earth?
Nobody even knows their names!
The fame of Ravana, the king of Lanka, is now diminished,
while Rama, the son of King Raghu, is a vessel of glory.
All this fame is only owing to Valmiki, that first poet.
Kings should not upset their poets!
(1.25-27)
Bilhana’s point is clear: even Rama, the most honored of Indian kings,
could have been portrayed differently by a different poet. He imagines
an alternative version of history in which Rama may not have been the
greatest king of all, but simply had the greatest poet, which suggests
that our vision of the past is distorted by the historical circumstances
that surrounded its events.
Even (or rather especially) the deeds of the greatest king of all time can (or rather must) be questioned.
The Vikramankadevacharita is not an aberration. It is a beautiful and widely respected work. Indeed, Appayyadikshita quotes its verses in the Kuvalayananda, portraying it literally as the textbook example of specific Sanskrit poetic elements.
And yet, if Bilhana were living today, there is a very real possibility that he would not be able to publish his work in India.
Pulping scholarship
On Tuesday, February 11, Penguin India announced that after four years of legal battles, it would be caving to right wing demands and withdrawing the publication of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History and “pulping” their remaining stock. The lawsuit against the book reads: 21. That YOU NOTICEEs has hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus by declaring that Ramayana is a fiction.
On Tuesday, February 11, Penguin India announced that after four years of legal battles, it would be caving to right wing demands and withdrawing the publication of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History and “pulping” their remaining stock. The lawsuit against the book reads: 21. That YOU NOTICEEs has hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus by declaring that Ramayana is a fiction.
“Placing the Ramayan in its historical contexts demonstrates that it is a
work of fiction, created by human authors, who lived at various
times...” (P.662)
This breaches section 295A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). That is the
law that Penguin India cited in its decision to cease publication of the
book, saying, “We believe, however, that the Indian Penal Code, and in
particular section 295A of that code, will make it increasingly
difficult for any Indian publisher to uphold international standards of
free expression without deliberately placing itself outside the law.”
In India’s current political climate, the law makes serious scholarship of Indian texts virtually impossible.
Missing the context
Do not be fooled by the noise — this is not an attack on Wendy Doniger. This is not an attack on her book The Hindus.
Do not be fooled by the noise — this is not an attack on Wendy Doniger. This is not an attack on her book The Hindus.
This is an attack on all scholarship about India that attempts to take a
so-called critical stance. It is an attack on any scholarship
attempting to address texts in their own contexts and examine their
ideologies.
It is not an attack on an over-sexualized view of Hinduism as it claims
to be. It is a continuation of the attack that began with protests over
AK Ramanujan’s 300 Ramayanas and Paula Richman’s Many Ramayanas.
But this is exactly the type of scholarship that is so sorely needed in
India today. Vast swaths of the Sanskrit literary world remain
untranslated, under-analyzed, and inaccessible to most people.
And the few parts of the Sanskrit world that are somewhat accessible are
often used as political rallying points. Those who have some access to
the vast corpus of ancient Indian literature (or at least claim to have
access) wield it over those who do not.
Since Penguin India’s announcement, the right wing intelligentsia and
internet army have been gleefully celebrating the suppression of a
scholar’s words.
One point made repeatedly is that this is not a violation of free
speech. “It was Penguin’s decision to voluntarily withdraw the book in
an out-of-court settlement for reasons best known to it.
Therefore, raising the din that freedom of expression is under threat by Hindutva forces is off the mark.”
So the argument goes. But the battle over free speech does not require
official state sanctioning. The lawsuit brought against Penguin India is
a criminal suit that carries with it the possibility of jail time for
the publishers.
The prosecutors only face fines, but the defense faces both fines and
imprisonment. When the freedom of publishers is weighed so unfairly
against the words they publish, free speech ceases to exist.
Those who defend the lawsuit proudly claim that they used the legal
system rather than violence to carry out their agenda. But the threat of
violence always remains.
They declare: 42. That YOU NOTICEEs have wantonly indulged in unlawful
act by showing photograph of Hindu God sitting on the lap of a naked
woman & surrounded by naked women and thereby have tried to provoke
people intending and knowing that it is likely to cause the offense of
rioting.
The implication is clear. If we riot, it is your fault. This is not an
empty threat — the past 15 years have left a trail of battered academics
and vandalised libraries throughout India. These are the people who
would rather see irreplaceable manuscripts of the Rg Veda or the Mahabharata destroyed
than be housed in an institution such as the Bhandarkar Oriental
Research Institute, an establishment friendly toward western academics,
in Pune.
But, of course, this time around, all of this is very civilly carried out in the courts.
Love and hate
In her book, Other People’s Myths, Doniger outlines the interpretative method she would come to use in The Hindus. (The method is further elaborated in her book The Implied Spider.)
In her book, Other People’s Myths, Doniger outlines the interpretative method she would come to use in The Hindus. (The method is further elaborated in her book The Implied Spider.)
She discusses the possibility of using dvesha-bhakti, a Sanskrit
term meaning hate-love, in one’s scholarship. Perhaps, we can approach
religion using both hatred and love of the object we study to gain an
impartial view.
In the end though, she rejects this approach, hate kills, and as she
says, “the enterprise of killing is ultimately boring” (pg. 17).
Unfortunately, this is not a message her critics have understood.
By hating and silencing Doniger and her scholarship, her critics render
themselves into the most painful of all categories: the boring.
The battle over ideas is not over. Doniger has a new publisher and a new
book out in India that she considers the summation of her life’s work.
It is about to be targeted, and elections are just around the corner.
The writer is a New York Jew currently living in Mysore with Catholic monks and studying Sanskrit texts with Hindu pandits.
A version was first published on www.asymptotejournal.com
(This article was published on March 23, 2014)
