Take a look at this alarming claim right at the beginning of
an article entitled “The Religious War against American Scholars of India”
recently published in Inside Higher Education:
Highly respected professors face intimidation, threats and
smear campaigns for deviating from the views of the Hindu right.
A cultural and religious war is raging in which Western
academics are the enemy.
...
And now at the K-12 level, the struggle over how Hinduism is
taught in California public schools has been renewed. A new online petition
that has received more than 23,000 signatures accuses a group of South Asian
studies faculty who proposed changes to social studies curriculum documents of
seeking “to erase India and Hinduism from California’s schools.” The Hindu
American Foundation has even launched a #DontEraseIndia campaign. At issue are
questions of whether it’s historically accurate to use the word “Hinduism” to
describe the religion of ancient India — the members of the faculty group argue
that it isn’t — and the faculty group’s suggestions that certain references to
“India” be replaced with “South Asia” or “Indian subcontinent.”
I am the main author of the online petition with over 23,000
signatures noted in the last paragraph. I am a professor and a writer. I have
taken a clear but civil, respectful, and reasonable stand against what I
believe is a systemic distortion in a part of the academy’s reading of Hindu
and Indian history. I have never thought of myself as a “cultural” or
“religious” “warrior,” nor do I condone intimidations, threats and smears. Nor
have I ever identified, however debatable that term might be, with the “Hindu
Right.”
And most importantly, the petition at hand (which is
independent of and preceded the Hindu American Foundation’s subsequent hashtag
campaign mentioned above) is hardly an empty “accusation.” The facts about the
sweeping and brazenly delusional (in some places) expurgations to the
California History Social Science Frameworks are a matter of public record. The
South Asian Studies faculty referred to here have clearly stated that they
recommend changing most references to India before 1947 to South Asia and
Hinduism to “ancient Indian religion” (read their November letter here). They
have modified the word “India” in key places in the curriculum so that
sentences such as the conquest by Central Asian tribes of “Northern Indian
states” now reads as a mere expansion of territory by them across the Indus
river into “Northern Indian plains.” They have deleted the word “India” from a
line about “India and the Muslim world” to subsume it with a phrase about the
“Islamic civilization stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.”
All of these facts are in plain view.
And yet, the Inside Higher Ed’s reporter chooses to smear by
association my campaign and the scholars supporting it by saying there’s a
religious and cultural war on scholars by the Hindu Right (I will note though
that I am acknowledged as the author of the petition, later, almost at the very
end of the article, and as a professor of Media and Asian studies, well after
my petition has been framed implicitly as one more part of this alleged Hindu
“religious war”).
Given the unfortunate framing of a position of academic
dissent against a wholesale denial of India’s existence in history books as a
“religious war,” I have to ask some specific questions. Is it a “religious war”
if you point out that it is historically inaccurate to subsume “India” under
the phrase “Islamic civilization”? Or contest the white-washing of history and
evisceration of human agency through phrases like “expanding territory into
Northern Indian plains”?
In a way, all of this is not surprising given the blatant
disregard for facts that has marked some of the media reporting on the
California textbooks issue (read my response to the LA Times here).
Between the dogmatic refusal by some academicians to respond
directly and civilly to the concerns of fellow scholars about their publicly
stated positions, and the seeming eagerness of some community organizations to
be co-opted into a media narrative that grants them visibility as vocal
opponents to academia (even if that visibility is incredibly “filtered”), the
truth, which is what scholars and journalists ought to care about, is left to
rot somewhere on the sidelines.
What then is the core issue here? “These disputes,” writes
the author, referring presumably to our petition as well as other issues she
lists prior to it such as the controversy over the Murty Classical Library,
“have frequently pitted Hindu believers against non-Hindu scholars... They have
tapped into postcolonial anxieties and puritanical attitudes towards sex.” Now,
arguably, some of these concerns may apply to some of the criticism that has
been made by one of several Hindu groups or individuals over the years against
some of the non-Hindu scholars of Hinduism whose work they find offensive. But
the issue quite clearly is a lot more than simply one of believers fighting
scholars (after all, it would be quite absurd to dismiss a case nor not
deleting “India” as a matter of mere “Hindu belief,” I would imagine!). The
real problem is something I described in my 2012 review essay “Hinduism and itsCulture Wars“ as follows:
There is however
one truly strange thing about the supposedly liberal vision of Hinduism that
has been offered by writers crusading against the Hindu right (such as Wendy
Doniger, Martha Nussbaum and others). Their worldview seems to have little
respect, if not consideration, for how Hindus themselves see their religion in
the first place. Consequently, a whole contemporary era of writing about South
Asia has come to answer the Hindu right’s distortions of myth and history not
by engaging with Hinduism as it is lived and understood by Hindus (which would
mean acknowledging at least some grievances felt by them), but by a narrow and
selective promotion of its own normative fantasy about what liberal, secular
Hindus ought to believe.
It is an amazing example of intellectual inertia (it would
be impolite and un-collegial perhaps to call it anything worse so I won’t),
that the same sort of clichés and evasions that I pointed out several years ago
reappear even now. For example, the Inside Higher Education article then goes
on to quote Martha Nussbaum:
“For about 20
years at least, members of the Hindu community in the U.S. have been carrying
on a well-funded campaign to substitute an ideological Hindu-right version of
Indian history for serious historical scholarship.” Nussbaum said that this
version of history, propagated by the Hindu right since the 1920s, overstates
the age of the Vedas by at least 1,500 years and makes false claims for Hindu
indigeneity to the Indian subcontinent (where, as Nussbaum summarized the
narrative, they lived “peacefully, with no conflict or strife, until Muslims
arrived to create strife and try to dominate Hindus” — and until the British
Christians arrived to participate in the oppression of Hindus after that). This
version of history also holds — again falsely, Nussbaum said — that
“traditional Hinduism was highly puritanical about sexual matters, and the
sexual element has been introduced by leftist and Western scholars.”
It is clear from this quote that what Nussbaum thinks of as
an “ideological Hindu-right version of Indian history” contains some seriously
debatable assumptions. At the heart of the battle between ideological
Hinduphobia in the academy, and the much more complex, diverse, and
disorganized (and hardly well-funded in my view) campaign in the Hindu
community, is essentially the assertion by Nussbaum about “false claims for
Hindu indigeneity to the Indian subcontinent.” All the rest is a sideshow
frankly, a mere distraction meant to conceal the fact that much of this
supposed “critique” of the Hindu Right from some academics lacks real insight
into Hinduism or Hindutva and is a mere cut-and-paste of criticisms more apt to
their traditions than Hinduism or India (after all, has any Hindu organization
involved with the California textbooks made any assertion about ‘traditional
Hinduism’ being ‘highly puritanical about sexual matters’?)
The most important issue in this needlessly prolonged
conflict is the question of whether the diverse traditions that Hindus today
broadly refer to as “Hinduism” ought to be recognized as an integral part of
India or whether Hinduism is really nothing more than a Nazi-like ideology
imposed by the mythical invading Aryan race in 1500 BCE. Although several South
Asia Studies scholars today say that they do not subscribe to this now
discredited pseudo-scientific and racist theory concocted during colonial
times, we still find eminent voices among them dismissing contrary views as
“false claims” by the “Hindu Right.” As I wrote a few weeks ago in HuffPost, it
seems increasingly clear that the widely spread canard about Hindu extremism
and nationalism in the California textbooks controversy may well be a part of
the same mythology among some scholars. They pretty much seem to equate any
position that respects Hinduism’s deep rootedness in India as Hindu
nationalism. One wonders what will happen the day academia realizes that all
this shadow-boxing has been an utter distraction from our duty to the world as
scholars and public intellectuals.
It is indeed a pity that despite extensive
reporting that included several voices from inside and outside academia, Inside
Higher Education’s article chose to privilege some opinions over facts and
skewed the overall tone in several grossly inaccurate ways. Is “The Religious
War against American Scholars of India” a fair and objective headline for a
debate that very clearly has a lot more to do with issues of identity,
representation and decolonization rather than issues of belief, mythology, or
religious ideology? Where does that leave several scholars in American academia
who disagree with the currently prevalent dogma in academia that calls “claims
for Hinduism’s indigeneity to the Indian subcontinent” as being “Hindu Right”?
As someone who believes that academia is not above self-critique and growth, I
can only keep hoping that some day all this shadow-boxing will stop, and
academia will stop treating Hindus and Hindu Americans like some unrepentant
World War 2 German militia that got even meaner with some “false religion” and
a tan.
By Vamsi
USF professor;
author, ‘Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian
Intelligence’
Courtesy: TheHuffingtonPost.com
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