Is the term Dharma untranslatable?

(in Saradindu Mukherji, ed.: Prabodhan 2, Delhi 2018) 

Introduction

Does the central Sanskrit term dharma have an exact equivalent in English or other languages? Rajiv Malhotra recommends to use the word dharma in English untranslated. At first sight, we must admit that no English word does justice to the range of meanings of dharma. But the dharma translators should not go down without a fight: we are at least going to give it a try.

The question presupposes another one: what does dharma mean? Once we agree on an answer, we are free to spot equivalents in other languages, if we can find them. Whether we will be able to do so, we can only say at the end.

The Vedic concept ṛta

Before focusing on the Hindu concept of dharma, it is common to study the Ṛg-Vedic concept of ṛta, “the going”, “pattern of motion”, “sequence”, “cosmic order”, “natural law”. It is represented by the night sky and thus the sequence and orderly motion of the stars; as well as by the orderly sequence of the seasons (ṛtu). Its natural visual glyph is the svastika, embodiment of the archetypal cycle with distinct phases. Its antonym is anṛta, “disorder”. 

The parts together form a whole, the seasons form the year or the “seasons’ cycle” (ṛtucakra); but each of them is different. A cycle of different phases connected with the seasonal cycle and the nightly cycles, that is what we know as a zodiac. We are not specifying here which division our zodiac uses, into how many phases per revolution: 2 (northern & southern half, dark & light, elsewhere yin & yang), 4, 6, 12 (later called rāśicakra), 24, 27 or 28 (Vedic nakṣatracakra), 360. Nor by which name or symbol, if any, these parts of the whole are characterized; we merely mean any cycle within which distinct phases are discernible.

In some contexts, ṛta is treated as more or less synonymous with satya, with both translated as “truth”. Its antonym anṛta is therefore also translated as “untruth”. Classic example is the maxim from the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad, now India’s national motto: Satyam eva jayate na anṛta, “Truth truly prevails, not untruth.” While “order” and “truth” may be related concepts, they are nonetheless distinct. In what context are they brought so closely together that they can be summed up in a single word, ṛta?

Imagine that an adolescent son is announcing to his father that he plans to do one of the foolish things that young lads happen to do. His father warns him that this will lead to sorry consequences. The son, headstrong, proceeds anyway, and feels very brave and independent. But all too soon, unfortunate things happen as a consequence, and he comes to regret his initiative. He returns home to his father, who (perhaps, like in the Gospel, forgives the Prodigal Son, but nonetheless first) says: “I told you so!” Being a father myself, and having been a headstrong son myself, I know from experience that fathers do say this. This does not come from some shady oracular knowledge of the future but from life experience, i.e. from having lived through (or having seen) sequences of events in reality where one type of action typically leads to a corresponding type of reaction.

Some actions invariably lead to the same consequences. When you see clouds gathering, you can predict that it is going to rain. Then, once it does start raining, you can say: “I told you so.” Prediction is based on the knowledge of sequences, at some point further explained as “cause and effect”, which later becomes a central theme in Indian philosophy. “Orderly sequence”, “sequence following an established law”, is thus intimately connected with “true prediction”, and hence with “speaking truth”.

There is also a more direct link between “cosmic cycle” or “cosmos”, and “truth”. Anyone with a bit of experience of reality knows that certain statements which cannot be shown to be mistaken, nevertheless make no sense when put in context; or that a conduct that is defensible in itself, becomes less advisable when seen against the background of the whole. One has to consider the further ramifications before taking a decision on a course of action, or to check with the larger framework before making a truth claim. As GWF Hegel, the German philosopher best known in India for his hostile commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, said: Das Wahre ist das Ganze, “the true is the whole”.

A similar Chinese concept

Among the Chinese, a narrowly corresponding term for ṛta is 道 dao, “path”, “way”, and more precisely 天道 tiandao, “way of heaven”. Its visible embodiment was the daily (seeming) course of the stars around the earth, the orderly movement of constellations, the day cycle and year cycle.

This character does not, however, have the meaning “truth”. No translatable of  ṛta there. For this second meaning, we need a different character: 真 zhen, “true”. Well, at least, that is its modern meaning. But the word has a history that illustrates well how “sequence” may have shaded over into “truth”.

The character 真 is used in the oracular Book of Changes (易經 Yijing, -11^th century), especially in the frequent expression 利真 li zhen. 利 li means “auspicious”, and the expression is often translated as “fixity/constancy is auspicious”. But that is the modern meaning, “modern” here meaning younger than Confucius, who lived around -500. From then on, the old text is given moralistic meanings, but the ancient meaning was another one, purely divinatory: “auspicious oracle”. Indeed, 真 nowadays means “true”, and has also carried extended meanings like “reliable”, “constant”, but few modern people would think of the meaning “prediction, oracle”. Yet, that was the meaning in the Book of Changes, the most influential text in Chinese civilization.

The semantic span from “prediction” to “truth” in the Chinese word 真 zhen echoes the span from “heavenly cycle” to “truth” in the Sanskrit word ṛta. The basis of prediction is in either case the knowledge of patterns and sequences.

Varuṇa

The personification of ṛta among the Vedic gods is Varuṇa, lord (Asura) of heavenly hosts, the star-studded night sky, the oceanic expanse above us. His counterpart Mitra represents the day sky, monopolized by the sun. In the Iranian tradition and its derived Mithraic cult among the Romans, Mithra c.q. Mithras is simply the sun.

In another dimension, his counterpart is Indra. Foremost among the Gods are Indra and Varuṇa: “One kills Vṛtra etc. in battle, the other protects religious observances.” (RV 7:83:9) Whereas Indra is the God of strong vs. weak, of vigour and power, Varuṇa is the God of good vs. evil, of law-compliant vs. law-defiant, of norms and morality. In the war between Iranians and Vedic Indians, the former will veer towards Varuṇa, the latter towards Indra, but originally both gods were worshipped by both peoples.  

Varuṇa is the first one of the twelve Ādityas, “suns”, also named the “charioteers of ṛta”. He is iconographically depicted as sitting on a makara, a sea monster that in different contexts may be a dolphin or a crocodile. Makara happens to signify Capricorn in the Hellenistic zodiac (rāśicakra), meaning the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, when the sun’s northward course (uttarāyaṇa) sets in, the Hindu equivalent of the Yuletide. Prehistorical woodhenges and stone circles with astronomical alignments teach us that it was the principal feast of the year worldwide.

He disciplines sinners, but also confers mercy: “Have mercy, spare me, Varuṇa.” (RV 7:89:1) Or: “Free us from sins committed by our fathers… Not our own will betrayed us, but seduction, thoughtlessness, oh Varuṇa, wine, dice, or anger.” (7:86:5-6) He makes his devotee medhira, “wise” (RV 7:87:4), meaning that he has and confers medhā, “wisdom”, the Sanskrit equivalent of Iranian mazdā.

Ṛta international

Varuṇa is even more present in the Iranian tradition, though known by his form of address Ahura Mazdā (corresponding to Sanskrit Asura Medhā), “Lord Wisdom”. There too, he is the personification of cosmic order and truth, aša or arta, best known as a prefix in proper names, such as of the several Achaemenid emperors called Artaxerxes.

(It is even thought that British king Arthur, folk-etymologically derived from Welsh artus, “bear”, actually refers to a Roman officer of Iranian provenance, because after the withdrawal of the Roman army in the 5^th century, the Roman veterans settled in Britain were the only ones capable of organizing a defence against the Saxon invaders; namely to one Artorius, who had been recruited at the empire’s Hungarian border, where Iranian Sarmatians had settled.)

That Ahura Mazdā is the equivalent of Varuṇa helps explain why the polarity good/evil becomes so central in Mazdeism. Friedrich Nietzsche considered this god’s prophet Zarathustra as the pioneer of moralism, of an exaggerated sense of good and evil, which is why his book on his vision of a post-moralistic world order (in which the prophet is cured from his moralistic “folly”), was called Also sprach Zarathustra, “thus spake Zarathustra”.

It is possible, though not obvious from the Vedic text, that Varuṇa’s identity with the Iranian enemies’ god Ahura Mazdā had something to do with his decline and gradual disappearance from the later Ṛg-Vedic horizon. Book X has no hymn for him anymore, and later Hinduism forgot him. He declines both in power and in moral stature, so that the Yajur-Veda treats him with wariness. Likewise, the Varuṇa-related concept of ṛta, “righteousness”, “world order”, “normative succession of phases in a cycle”, “truth”, dwindles and vanishes. It is more or less replaced by Dharma.

Dharma

The term dharma , which for now we will leave untranslated, comes from the root *dhṛ, “bear, support, sustain, keep”. It is related to Latin firmus, “firm, closely-knit”, and Old English darian, “lie motionless, lurk”; its reconstructed Indo-European root connotes fixity, keeping motionless. Within Sanskrit, it is distantly related to dhruva, “pole star”, “earth axis”, and more closely to the suffix -dhara/-dhāra, “carrying” (as in vasun-dharā, “goods-bearer, earth”); and dhṛti, “steadiness”. In the body, it may be likened to the hard part, the skeleton with the backbone, which gives structure to the whole. Dharma is symbolized by a bull standing firm.

Dharma may imply firmness, but in Hindu belief it is not always evenly firm. In the Golden Age (Kṛta Yuga) the dharma-bull is standing on all fours, in the Silver Age (Tretā Yuga) on three feet, in the Bronze Age (Dvāpara Yuga) on two, and in the Iron Age (Kali Yuga) on just one foot. This differentiation in time is the basis of a division between eternal sanātana dharma, which is always valid, and yuga dharma, the norms specific for a particular age. It is a typically Vaiṣṇava belief that whenever dharma risks getting defeated, it is restored by divine intervention, especially by Viṣṇu’s incarnations such as Rāma and Kṛṣṇa. Though very widespread, however, such beliefs postdate the first use of the term dharma and are not part of its definition, so here we need not consider them further.

In the Ṛg-Veda, the term dharma already appears dozens of times, often connected with ṛta. It takes centre-stage in the Mahābhārata, a story illustrating the decline of dharma and the effort to uphold it through a dharmayuddha (usually translated as a “war of righteousness” or “just war”; definitely not “war of religion”), with the formal though bitter victory being scored by the dharmarāja or “king of righteousness”, Yudhiṣṭira, whose biological father is called Dharma.

But it also continues the meaning “truth” from the older term ṛta. As the Bṛhadāraṇya Upaniṣad (1:4:14) says: “Nothing is higher than dharma. Thenceforth even a weak man rules a stronger with the help of dharma, as with the help of a king. Truly that dharma is the truth (satya); therefore, when a man speaks the truth, they say, ‘He speaks the dharma’; and if he speaks dharma, they say, ‘He speaks the truth.’ For both are the same.”

The concrete details of the application of Dharma are elaborated in the Dharmaśāstras, usually rendered as “Law Codes”. The most famous is the Mānavadharmaśāstra, attributed to the patriarch Manu. Some forty times, the Ṛg-Veda mentions him: as an ancestor, as the Father of Mankind, and implicitly as a law-giver. The extant text of his Mānavadharmaśāstra hardly predates the Christian age, but the idea of a normative system established anciently by Manu, though its details must have evolved, was already present in the Veda.

Dharma itself is the word used by Hindus for what we translate as “Hinduism”. An expression attested only in the last centuries, and that modern Hindus will use when asked for the self-designation of Hinduism, is Sanātana Dharma, “eternal dharma”. Though probably recent, this usage is based on the ancient assertion, both in the Mahābhārata and by the Buddha, that “this Dharma is Sanātana”, eternal. Normally the term dharma by itself is enough to designate Hinduism in the large sense, i.e. including Jainism, Buddhism, Veerashaivism, Sikhism, the Ramakrishna Mission and other sects whose belonging to the Hindu fold has been rendered controversial.

Dimensions of dharma

From the actual usage of the word by Hindus, we gather that there are two dimensions to dharma. One is vertical and concerns the relation with the divine, including the required rites, observances, pilgrimages and celebrations (yes, it can be a duty to celebrate). Here it approaches the English word religion in meaning. The Constitutional term secularism, in the sense of “religious neutrality”, is therefore often translated in Sanskritized Hindi as dharma-nirpekṣatā.

However, serious Hindus reject this choice of translation because to their minds, dharma is an entirely positive concept, so you don’t need to keep it at arms’ length the way Western secularism was meant to keep the Churches away from state power. For them, Nehruvian secularists only express their ignorance by treating dharma as a synonym for “religious denomination”. Rather, it approaches “religiosity”, not the series of denominations such as Shiism, Sunnism or the Christian Churches. They prefer pantha-nirpekṣatā., “sect neutrality”, in the more precise sense of impartiality vis-à-vis all religious denominations. 

The second meaning is horizontal and concerns the relation with your fellow creatures, human and other. Here, it comes to mean “righteousness”, “ethics”, “deontology”, “law”, “justice”, “responsibility”, “rules of conduct: duties and prohibitions”. As they say in Hindi: Yeh merā dharm hai, “this is my duty”.

To sum up: dharma has two dimensions. One is the correct relation of the part to the whole, of the lower-order entity to the higher-order entity: religion. The other is the correct relation of the part to the other parts: ethics, duty.

This combination promises to militate heavily against the translatableness of the term dharma. It is not equal to “righteousness”: at least its religious meanings fall outside of this domain. Conversely, dharma is not equal to “religion”: the latter term would exclude the purely ethical dimension, even when “religion” has its most uncontroversial sense of “awe for the sacred”. Moreover, there is also a specific contrast with the typically Christian overlay of the originally more general term “religion”.

Religion

English has been taught to Indians mostly through mission schools, and has even more outspoken Christian connotations than it would already have acquired by a thousand years of Christian dominance in England. The result is that Indians entirely conceive of “religion” as a Christian term: a box-type system, to which you either belong or not, and of which you have to unquestioningly accept the items of belief, regardless of what science would say about them. It is a system to which you can convert, viz. by “burning what you used to pray to, and praying to what you used to burn” (as Clovis was told by his baptizer, 496). That is about as far away from dharma, in any attested sense, as you can get.

But religion has a pre-Christian meaning which would bring it already much closer to dharma. In Latin, religio originally had a meaning still enunciated by Cicero. It came from a verb religere, “to reread”, “to verify”, “to do something with utmost care” (just like in Hindi dhyān se), “to pay full attention”; exactly the way the word regio, “administrative zone”, “province”, is derived from the verb regere, “to administer”. So, religio meant “scrupulousness”, “full attention”, and in fact it sometimes still has that sense in modern English: to do something “religiously” means doing it very carefully, with utmost attention.

But with Christianization, religion became “belief system”, or “set of truth claims about the divine”. The Church father Lactantius wrongly analysed religio as a derivative from religare, “to bind anew”, “to reunite”. This perfectly fit Christian theology, which saw man as severed from his original closeness to God in the Garden of Eden through original sin, suffering from his separation from Him in this vale of tears, but now brought back closer to God by Jesus. (In India, there is a parallel dispute about the word yoga: pious types say it means “union” with the divine, sceptics that it merely refers to “yoking” the thoughts and “disciplining” the mind into focusing and becoming still.) At any rate, it is only after this Christian reading of religion has been pin-pricked that an approximation with dharma can even be considered.

Law

In Chinese, the Buddhist term dharma in the sense of “the Buddhist system” (a combination of liberation-orientedness and a daily morality of compassion and virtue) is translated as fa 法, “law”. It carries through the Indian meaning of “the Buddhist way”, but has not been chosen at random. It was selected for its already ancient meaning of “law”, “method”. And indeed, when you look at Buddhism from the outside, what you get to see is not so much the Buddhist doctrine but mostly the observance of the Buddhists injunctions. A very large part of the Buddhist canon is made up of prescribing a set of rules, a way of life deemed conducive to meditation and ultimately to liberation.

The translation of Dharma Śāstra as “law book” is only approximative. It has excursions into cosmology and the religious sphere, and when dealing with human conduct, it is partly descriptive before being prescriptive. In turn, its prescriptions are partly a matter of general moral norms and only partly specific enforceable laws. These are moreover limited in reach, because the final word of pañcāyat (village or caste council) decisions is also admitted, as well as the right of competent specialists in council to introduce changes in the letter of the prescribed law all while maintaining its spirit. But the translation does have a basis in reality.

The Mānava Dharma Śāstra distinguishes between different levels of dharma. Sāmānya or sādhāraṇa dharma consists of “universal” do’s and don’ts, paralleled in the religious sphere by some festivals and forms of worship in which everyone participates. The following ten prescriptions given by Manu have universal application: dhṛti, “steadiness”; kṣamā, “forgiveness”; damā, “discipline”; asteya, “non-stealing”; śauca, “cleanliness”; indriya-nigraḥ, “sense control”; dhī, “mindfulness” ; vidyā, “knowledge”; satya, “truthfulness”; akrodha, “non-anger”.

People with a Christian frame of reference, such as India’s Nehruvian secularists, often make the comparison with the Ten Commandments, but this is superficial. The Ten Commandments are given on two stone tables. The second one contains practical injunctions: “Thou shalt not kill”, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife”, etc. These do correspond to similar injunctions in the Dharma Śāstras and have a similar intention, viz. guaranteeing a harmonious life in society. Moralists in both the Biblical and the Dharmic traditions might add that they also make for harmony with yourself since, in Baruch de Spinoza’s words, “virtue is its own reward”. They stem from the experience of the earlier generations: a society is successful (and an individual is more contented) if it abides by these rules, but falls apart if it does not. By contrast, the first stone table contains something unrelated: a brand-new theology, featuring monotheism, rejection of icons, and a taboo on uttering the Yahweh’s name. Apparently Moses tried to give more credibility and authority to his new-fangled theology by linking it with an old and widely respected morality, as if the latter logically followed from the former.

Other “lawgivers” propose variations on Manu’s list, with synonymous or different virtues, but we get the idea. In fact, one of the possible translation of dharma is a generalization of these separate virtues as “virtue”. The several virtues are synthesized in the Golden Rule, e.g. in the Mahābhārata (Śānti-Parva 167:9), adviser Vidura recommends to king Yudhiṣṭhira: “Study of the scriptures, austerity, sacrifice, generosity, social welfare, forgiveness, purity of intent, compassion, truth and self-control — these are the ten treasures of character. (…) Therefore, one should live with self-restraint and by making dharma the main focus, one should treat others as one treats oneself.” This Golden Rule is found back also in the Tirukkural (316), the Padma Purāṇa (19:358), and elsewhere.

Next to these general ethical rules, Manu acknowledges a viśeṣa dharma, “special dharma”, or svadharma, “own dharma”: specific duties and taboos for every age group and class, paralleled in religion by specific festivals and forms of worship for every community.

Svadharma is rarely conceived as individualistic, the way Westerners would understand the term. It reminds them of Friedrich Nietzsche’s maxim: “There is only one way in the world that no one can go except you. Don’t ask where it leads. Follow it!” When Kṛṣṇa advises Arjuna to take up his svadharma, he doesn’t mean some hyper-individual duty but the duty of his entire warrior caste, viz. to accept the challenge of battle.

Yet, Hinduism does have some very individual path stipulated for you. You and your siblings come from the same gene pool, had the same types of food, the same education etc., and yet your destinies can be very different. Ever since the Chāndogya Upaniṣad introduced the notion of reincarnation, on which the doctrine of karma (roughly, ethical causality between incarnations) was superimposed, most Hindus will say that these individual destinies are the result of each brother’s very individual itinerary through successive incarnations. So the weight of all your past incarnations with their unfinished agendas, their action-at-a-distance (karma) into the present, imposes a unique life-duty on you.

This may well be true, but is not what we mean by dharma, a notion that predates the doctrine of karma in its reincarnationist sense. Whether one believes or not in reincarnation, in an afterlife, or in God: the notion of dharma always applies. Indeed, dharma is secular par excellence: it is a common ground, a meeting-place between people of all persuasions.

A Greek equivalent?

In the case of Greek, Indians themselves have chosen a term translating dharma. Translation of Hindu terminology is not some colonial ploy, as many Indian chauvinists think. In one of Aśoka’s rock edicts (-258 BC) in Afghanistan, the Prakrit text comes with a translation in Aramaic and Greek. There, dharma is translated as eusebeia.

Eusebeia is derived from eu, “good”, “in harmony with”, “tending towards”; and sebomai, “to revere”. Thus it means “awe for the sacred”, “piety”, a reverential attitude: the defining core of religion, even more fundamental than venerating gods. By extension, it also means “conduct pleasing to the gods”, or to others above you, as in “filial piety”; and “spiritual maturity”. Its opposite is dyssebeia, “mindlessness”, “irreverence”.

In certain contexts, however, is can also mean “right conduct towards others”, both relatives and strangers; “public-spiritedness”. It is then personified as wife of nomos, “law” in the strict juridical sense. So, it is both religion and ethics, like dharma.

A Semitic equivalent?

One of the best semantic approximations of dharma is the Semitic root D-I-N. In Arabic, دين dīn means “debt”, “obligation” (Sankrit ṛṇa), “duty”, “system of duties”, “law”; but also “religion”.  Thus, Arabian Paganism is called the dīn al-abā’ikā, “the ancestors’ dharma”. When Moghul emperor Akbar launched a newly minted religion, he called it dīn-i-Ilāhī, “divine religion”, symbolized by his newly built city Ilāhābād, “divine city” (called Allahabad by the British), on the confluence of the Gaṅgā and the Yamunā, symbolizing the synthesis of Hinduism and Islam.

The related Hebrew, however, has developed the term more exclusively towards the sphere of “right relation to others”, “law”. Thus, dīn, “to judge”; dīnah, “judgment”; dayān, “judge”.

Like with Christianity appropriating the term religio, Islam has appropriated the term dīn, as witnessed in names like Saifu’l-dīn (Saifuddin), “sword of islam”. But as is well-known, Islam is both a doctrine-cum-worship and a political-juridical system. Thereby, and in spite of the ideological reorientation that Islam brought, it continues the combination of both dimensions that inhered already in the pre-Islamic term dīn.

A Germanic equivalent?

The same shading-over between devotion and a way of life is found in Scandinavian trú (Dutch trouw), as in Asatrú, “loyalty to the Aesir/gods”, Vanatrú, “loyalty to the Vanir” (another class of gods, like in the early Ṛg-Veda the Asuras next to the Devas), Vortrú, “loyalty to the early (customs)”. These are names modern neo-Heathens give their own religion. It contains a certain worship of the ancient Germanic gods but also a code of conduct, largely of modern coinage, such as the list of “the nine virtues”, another variation on the list of virtues given by Manu.  

In Britain, similar movements exist, also harking back to the ancestors’ pre-Christian religion to the extent it can be reconstructed. They speak of truth, one of the meanings of ṛta and dharma, or rather its more romantic-sounding variation, troth (as in the Rolling Stones song: “I pledge my troth to / Lady Jane”). “The Troth” is how many neo-Pagans refer to their own religion. It mainly means “to be true”, e.g. to one’s give word, “loyalty”, “being faithful”, “solidity”.

This word trú/true/trouw is related to trust, but ultimately derives from the same root as tree: Indo-European *deru, whence Sanskrit daru. As an icon of robustness and solidity, the tree has come to be used figuratively. Semantically, this corresponds neatly with the term dharma’s connotation of “sustaining”, “conferring a backbone”. Nevertheless, its range of meanings does not entirely match that of dharma.

Conclusion

After examining a few foreign candidate-equivalents to the concept of dharma, we find that at least pre-Christian Greek and pre-Islamic Arabic approximate it very well, though still not perfectly, with Chinese and pre-Christian Germanic not far behind. Nevertheless, a perfect translation that could be introduced to simply replace the term dharma, remains elusive. For now, the best thing to do is simply to leave the word dharma untranslated.

We hope, nonetheless, that this failed attempt to find a perfect equivalent outside Sanskrit has had is uses. In particular, it should stimulate a rethinking of the distinction, but also the relatedness, between the religious and the ethical dimensions of human life. The one does not need the other, but man needs both.

Read more!

Academic bullies

 (Pragyata, 30 November 2016)

Audrey Truschke is a Professor of Religious Studies in Stanford, California, and has gained some fame with her work on the patronage of Sanskrit by the Moghuls. In order to get that far, she had to toe the ideologically mandatory line: neither in America nor in India does the Hindu-baiting establishment allow a dissident to get seriously established in the academic world. Predictably, we see her elaborating the same positions already taken by an earlier generation of academics, such as whitewashing Aurangzeb. Not that this was a hard job for her: one gets the impression that she is a true believer and really means what she says. Then again, she may have done an excellent job of creating the desired impression all while secretly knowing better.

Bullying

Her position in the article “The Right’s problem with history” (DNA, 26 Oct. 2016) is summed up as: “Unable to defend a fabricated history of India on scholarly grounds, many foot soldiers of the Hindu Right have turned to another response: bullying.” It would be normal to compare secularist historians and their Western dupes with people of the same rank, namely different-minded historians, in this case belonging to the “Hindu Right”. These are not exactly numerous, having been blocked systematically from academe by the single permitted opinion in both India and America, but they exist. Yet, they and their output are absent from her paper. From a street bully, I would expect a denunciation of street bullies, and from an academic a polemic against her own peers.

The photograph accompanying the article tells it all. If it had been about her own school of history, the picture would have shown established historians involved in this debate, such as Wendy Doniger or Sheldon Pollock. But now that the opposition is at issue, it shows a group of non-historians, not in an airconditioned college hall but in a street demonstration exercising their freedom of expression. The reader is expected to recognize them as representatives of the “Hindu Right”, and as “bullies”.

She testifies to verbal attacks she herself has endured “from members of the Hindu Right”, and which she evaluates as “vicious personal attacks on the basis of my perceived religion, gender and race”. Correction: she could have maintained the very same religion, gender and race and yet never be attacked by those same Hindus (indeed, most Jewish female whites have never experienced such attacks), if she had not belonged to the “scholars who work on South Asia” and who have earned a reputation as Hindu-baiters. She has been attacked on the basis of what she has written, nothing else.

But it is true, and deplorable, that an uncouth but vocal class of people clothe their denunciations of an ideological position in foul personal attacks. It so happens that I know her plight very well, for me too, I receive my share of what some would call “hate mail” when I express skepticism of beliefs dear to Hindu traditionalists (e.g. the eternity of Sanskrit, the supernatural origins of the Vedas, the Rama Setu, or the Krishna Bhakti verses in the Gita). And also when going against the dogmas of her own school, such as that Muslim rule in India was benign, or that Sanskrit has an origin of white invaders oppressing black natives. Nothing dangerous, though, and I doubt her claim of “physical attacks” on Indologists, unless she means the egg thrown at Wendy Doniger in London.

From the start, Truschke tries to capture the moral high ground by citing one of her lambasters as tweeting: “Gas this Jew.” In America, such reference to the Holocaust is absolutely not done, and Indian secularist circles adopt the same sensitivities once they see these as valid for the trend-setting West. To the Hindu mainstream, this hyperfocus on anything associated with the WW2 is not there, and they had no history with Antisemitism; but still this quote would be unacceptable there, for regardless of what Jews exactly believe, Hindus tend to respect other faiths.

However, her claim might be correct (not sure there), for there are indeed some Hindu hotheads who have adopted this kind of rhetoric. In pre-internet days, they would brew their own conspiracy theories, but now the access to websites carrying elaborate Western conspiracy theories, starring the Zionist World Conspiracy, entices them into using this kind of language. Certainly deplorable, but not at all representative for the “Hindu Right”: hardly even for its bullies, not for its leaders (both VD Savarkar and MS Golwalkar described the Jews as role models for loyalty to one’s own roots) and not at all for the “Hindu Right” scholars whom she is carefully ignoring.

Academic bullying   

This “bullying” had best been compared to the “bullying” on the other side. Like, for instance, the two attempts by Leftist students to silence me, as a twice scheduled speaker, at the Madison WI South Asia Conference in 1996 and a private event preceding it, hosted by Prof. Andrew Sihler. Or the successful protests against the Dharma Civilization Foundation’s offer to fund a chair at UC Irvine, when so many US chairs are comfortably being funded by the Saudis.

But on Truschke’s own side, the dividing line between bullies and academics is not so neat. Why stoop to street bullying if you have tenure? It is far more effective, then, to resort to academic bullying. Thus, in their intervention in the California Textbook Affair, where Hindu parents had sought to edit blatantly anti-Hindu passages, the explicitly partisan intervening professors even managed to get themselves recognized as arbiters in the matter. This would have been unthinkable if those bullies had not been established academics. (And this I can say eventhough my criticism of the Hindu parents’ positions exists in cold print.) Her focus on street bullies has the effect of misdirecting the reader’s attention, away from the more consequential phenomenon of academic bullying.

I myself have been barred from several Indologist forums by active intervention or passive complicity of the same Professors who otherwise clamour “censorship!” when anything at all happens to a book they favour. Thus, they are so very sensitive that they dramatically talked of “threats to freedom of speech” when AK Ramanujan's 300 Ramayanas, a book belittling a Hindu scripture, was not selected as required reading in Delhi University, though otherwise it remained freely available. They claim to champion “freedom of speech!” when Wendy Doniger’s error-ridden book Hinduism was withdrawn from circulation, though it was never legally banned but was left available for another publisher; who did indeed come forward, so that the book is again lawfully omnipresent. But when I appealed to them to intervene for annulling my banning from the Religion in South Asia (RISA) list, which had been done in violation of its own charter, they all looked the other way. 

A recent example. In 2014, I read a paper on the Rg-Vedic seer Vasishtha and his relative divinization in a panel on “divinization” at the European Conference for South Asia Studies in Zürich. My paper was enthusiastically received, also by the panel’s organizers when I sent in the final version for publication. First they accepted it, but then, I received an embarrassed e-mail from the organizers stating that they could not include my paper, without any reason given. Upon my enquiring, the half-line reply said that it did not fit their project. In all its insignificance, this still managed to be a blatant lie, and their earlier acceptance confirmed that this could not have been the reason. But some higher up had warned them that I am to be treated as excluded, just like on many other occasions.

Far more seriously, both in America and in India, scholars suspected of pro-Hindu sympathies are blocked in their access to academe, and their work gets studiously ignored. For India, a tip of the blanket over this hushed-up phenomenon was lifted by Dr. A. Devahuti: Bias in Indian Historiography (1980). It is seriously in need of an update, but I am given to understand that one is forthcoming. For America, a start was made by Rajiv Malhotra with his books Invading the Sacred (2007) and Academic Hinduphobia (2016).

Hinduphobia

Coming to contents, Truschke accuses “Hindu Right-wingers” of attacks on “academics”. I would have expected them to attack “anti-Hindu Left-wingers”, and indeed I learn that this is exactly how they see it,-- and how they see her. If she doesn’t like being characterized this way, she is herewith invited to stop calling her adversaries similar names. The binary Left/Right is at least problematic here, yet for a quarter century I have seen this scheme used to explain matters. Except that the Left doesn’t call itself Left: it treats itself as the natural centre, and anything to its right is deemed politically coloured: “Right” or very easily “extreme Right”.

Anyway, she calls “alleged Hinduphobia” nothing more than “a strawman stand-in for any idea that undercuts Hindutva ideology”. The term was made popular by Rajiv Malhotra, whom I have never known to swear by “Hindutva”, a specific term literally translated as “Hindu-ness” but now effectively meaning “the RSS tradition of Hindu Nationalism”. At any rate, one does not have to follow Hindutva, or even be a Hindu or an Indian, to observe that American India-watchers utter a strong anti-Hindu prejudice in their publications. Not to look too far, I can find an example in myself: I have written a number of publications criticizing both Hindutva as an ideology and the Hindutva organizations, yet I can off-hand enumerate dozens of illustrations of Hindu-baiting by supposed India experts in the West as well as by their Indian counterparts. 

At most, one can critize the term “Hinduphobia” for being etymologically less than exact. Words in -phobia normally indicate an irrational fear, and fear is not the attitude in which Hinduism is approached. The term was coined on the model of Islamophobia, a weaponized word meant to provoke hatred, yet now a thoroughly accepted and integrated term among progressive academics. A -phobia is normally a psychiatric term and its use to denote political adversaries is of a kind with the Soviet custom of locking up dissidents in mental hospitals. And indeed, people shielding Islam from proper enquiry do treat their opponents as mentally warped marginals. But the core of truth in the reprehensible term “Islamophobia” is at least that it points to “fear of Islam”, a religion which its critics do indeed diagnose as fearsome. Hinduism, by contrast, has been criticized as cruel, evil, superstitious, ridiculous, but not as a threat. It is only Hindus who flatter themselves that the “Abrahamics” want to destroy Hinduism because they fear it as being superior and more attractive.

The use of the term Hinduphobia is predicated upon the already existing acceptance and use of the term Islamophobia. If the UN, the governments of the US and EU etc., and the pan-Islamic pressure group OIC, were to give up this ugly and vicious term, then the Hinduphobia term so disliked by Truschke would lapse with it and get replaced again by the older and more accurate term Hindu-baiting. But until then, it throws the Islamophile and Hindu-baiting scholars of Truschke’s persuasion back on the bare fact that they themselves have and display the kind of prejudice against Hinduism of which they accuse the Islam critics.

History

According to Truschke, “a toxic combination of two realities fuel the Hindu Right’s onslaught against scholars of South Asia: Hindu nationalist ideology rests heavily on a specific vision of Indian history, and that version of history is transparently false.”

Now it gets interesting, with two competing views of Indian history, one true and one false: “Hindu nationalists claim that India’s past featured the glorious flourishing of a narrowly defined Hinduism that was savagely interrupted by anybody non-Hindu, especially Muslims. However, the real story of Indian history is much more complicated and interesting.”

A “narrowly defined Hinduism” is only projected into the Hindu past by semi-literate non-historians who do indeed man the middle ranks of the uniformed RSS. No serious Hindu historian, not the lamented Jadunath Sarkar, RC Majumdar, Harsh Narain or KS Lal, nor contempory scholars like Bharat Gupt or Meenakshi Jain, would be foolish enough to simply deny the “diversity and syncretism” that Truschke sees in India’s past. But here again, we see how Truschke has chosen not to address the scholars of a competing persuasion, but the village bumpkins.

In one sense, however, even the most sophisticated historians will affirm that India’s past was indeed “glorious”. And it was not at all “complicated”: India was simply independent. Yes, ancient India had its problems too, it had local wars, it was not paradise on earth, but in one decisive respect, Indians under Muslim or British occupation correctly remembered it as “glorious”: it ruled itself. When the British told Mahatma Gandhi that his hoped-for independence would only throw India back into its headaches of casteism, communalism and the rest, he aswered that India would of course have its problems, “but they will be our own”. Compared to being under foreign tutelage, such self-rule is nothing less than glorious.

This brings us to Truschke’s own field of research: “Especially problematic for Hindu nationalists is current scholarship on Indo-Islamic rule, a fertile period for cross-cultural contacts and interreligious exchanges. This vibrant past is rightly a source of pride and inspiration for many Indians, but the Hindu Right sees only an inconvenient challenge to their monolithic narrative of Hindu civilisation under Islamic siege.”

Note how two issues are artfully mixed up here: the questionable monolithic view of Hinduism and the very correct view of a Hindu civilization besieged and raped by Islam. It is true that non-historian “Hindu nationalists” are rather inaccurate in their “monolithic narrative of Hindu civilisation”; but it is not true that the period of “Indo-Islamic rule” is a “source of pride and inspiration”, nor that it is contested only by “Hindu nationalists”. Her notion of “current scholarship” is of course limited to her own school of thought, heavily overrepresented in academe, partly due to its aggressive policy of exclusion vis-à-vis others.

There are admittedly those who identify with foreign colonizers: many Indian Muslims identify with Mohammed bin Qasim and with the Moghuls (whom Pakistan considers as the real founders of their Indo-Islamic state), and many Nehruvian secularists share and continue the British opinions about India and Hinduism. But those who identify with India, even if they admit some good aspects of these colonizations, do not take any pride at all in having been subjugated. Yes, there were instances of collaboration with the colonizers, such as the hundreds of thousands of Indians whose sweat made the “British” railway network possible, or the Rajputs whose daughters filled the Moghul harems in exchange for their fathers’ careers in the Moghul army. But those instances are at most understandable, a lesser evil in difficult circumstances, but not a source of “pride and inspiration”.

A few episodes of Muslim occupation were indeed “vibrant”, viz. after Akbar’s realistic appreciations of the existing power equations persuaded him to rule with rather than against his Hindu subjects. Then, as everybody already knew, Hindus did indeed give their cultural best, rebuilding the temples which the Sultanate has demolished (and which would again be demolished by Aurangzeb),-- a tribute to the vitality of Hindu civilization even under adverse circumstances. And some Muslims did indeed engage in “interreligious exchanges”, such as Dara Shikoh translating the Upanishads into Persian; later, he was beheaded for apostasy.

But even then, academics had better use their critical sense when interpreting these episodes, rather than piously taking them at face value. In the Zürich conference already mentioned, I heard an “academic” describe how contemporary Hindi writers praised Aurangzeb, the dispenser of their destinies. Well, many eulogies of Stalin can also be cited, including by comrades fallen from grace and praising Stalin even during their acceptance speeches of the death penalty; but it would be a very bad historian, even if sporting academic titles, who flatly deduces therefrom that Stalin a benign ruler. Govind Singh’s “Victory Letter” to Emperor Aurangzeb was, in all seriousness, included among the sources of praise, leaving unmentioned that Aurangzeb had murdered Govind’s father and four sons. Every village bumpkin can deduce that Govind hated Aurangezb more than any other person in the world, and that he was only being diplomatic in his writing because of the power equation. Academics laugh at kooks who believe in aliens, but it took an academic, no less, to discover an alien who actually admired the murderer of his father and sons.

According to Truschke’s admission, a lot of Hindus are “happy to underscore the violence and bloodshed unleashed by many Indo-Islamic rulers”, but she wrongly identifies them as “Hindu Right”. It doesn’t require a specific ideological commitment nor even any religious identity to observe well-documented historical facts. Mostly documented by the Muslim perpetrators themselves, that is. Thus, like Truschke herself, I am neither Hindu nor Indian, yet I can read for myself with what explicit glee the Muslim chroniclers described temple destructions and massacres of Unbelievers.

The mistake of plagiarism

“In contrast to the detailed work of academics, the Hindu nationalist vision of India’s past stands on precarious to non-existent historical evidence. As a result, the Hindu Right cannot engage with Indologists on scholarly grounds. Indeed, the few Hindutva ideologues who have attempted to produce scholarship are typically tripped up by rookie mistakes—such as misusing evidence, plagiarism, and overly broad arguments—and so find themselves ignored by the academic community.”

The inclusion of “plagiarism” among her list of “rookie mistakes” gives away that she is fulminating specifically against the work of Rajiv Malhotra, whom she is careful not to mention by name. For his book Indra’s Net, he was famously accused of plagiarism (by a mission mentor), for he quotes the American scholar Andrew Nicholson’s book Unifying Hinduism, in which he concurs with the same position that Hinduism had elaborated its common doctrinal backbone long before the Orientalists “invented Hinduism”. In fact, he only used Nicholson as a source to prove that Westerners too could acquire this insight, there was nothing “Hindu nationalist” about it. And he amply quoted him in so many words, though a few times, for the flow of the narrative, he merely rephrased the theses of this much-quoted author. By that standard, most papers contain plagiarism; but what passes unnoticed elsewhere becomes a scandal when done by a self-identifying Hindu.

Yet, numerous Indologists started a holier-than-thou tirade against the “plagiarism”, a comical drama to watch. Malhotra then walked the extra mile writing Nicholson out of his narrative and quoting original sources instead (thereby incidentally showing the amount of plagiarism that Nicholson himself had committed, though no Indologist ever remarked on that). But this inconvenient development was given the silent treatment, and Truschke still presupposes that there ever was a substantive “plagiarism” case against Malhotra, and by extension against the whole “Hindu Right”.

Malhotra has indeed been “ignored by the academic community”—until he found the way to make his critique non-ignorable. That indeed shows a lot of skill in dealing with the way of the world, for until then, Hindus had only painstakingly proven themselves right and the “academics” wrong, but had had no impact at all. By contrast, Malhotra, by personalizing his argument into specific dissections of the work of leading scholars such as Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock or Anantanand Rambachan, has earned a session at the annual conference of the trend-setting American Academy of Religion. On Indological discussion forums, his input is frequently mentioned, though the academics mostly keep up their airs of pooh-poohing that interloper, in a bid to justify their ignoring his actual critique of their own work.

By the way, notice my term: a “self-identifying Hindu”. As the case of Malhotra has amply exemplified, it suffices to stand up as a Hindu, or to own up Hinduism, in order to be dubbed “Hindu Rightist”, “Hindutva ideologue”, as well as “fanatic”. “rookie” and all the fair names Hindus have been called by Prof. Truschke’s august school of thought. To them, the acceptable Hindu, or what Malhotra calls a “sepoy”, is one who never identifies as a Hindu, but rather as “Indian” (or better, “Bengali”, “Malayali” etc.), “low-caste”, and ideologically “secularist”. The exception is when countering criticism from self-identified Hindus, for then, he is expected to say: “But me too, I am a Hindu!” That way, he can fulfil his main task: as long as there are Hindus, he must deny them the right to speak on behalf of Hinduism and to give it a presence at the conversation between worldviews.

History debates

Most Hindu scholars had or have not found the way to impose their viewpoint on the sphere of discourse yet. In the case of objective scholars among non-Hindus, this would not have mattered. It is, after all, their own job to trace any material relevant to their field of research, including obscure works by other scholars, even adversaries. But in this case, there are some cornerstones of the Indological worldview which tolerate no criticism nor alternatives, so these are to be carefully ignored.

Thus, Shrikant Talageri’s case against the Aryan Invasion Theory, the bedrock of the “academic” view of ancient Hindu history, is painstaking, detailed, voluminous, factual and well-formulated, yet Truschke’s own entire tribe of “academics” simply goes on ignoring his case without bothering to refute it. (Well, there are two articles talking down to him, but we mean actual refutations, not mere denials.) If academics were to live up to the reputation they have among laymen, they would have set aside their current business to deal with this fundamental challenge to their worldview.

Or take A Secular Agenda by Arun Shourie, PhD from Syracure NY and stunningly successful Disinvestment Minister in the AB Vajpayee Government, when India scored its highest economic growth figures. It was a very important book, and it left no stone standing of the common assumption among so-called experts that India (with its religion-based civil codes and its discriminatory laws against Hinduism) is a secular state, i.e. a state in which all citizens are equal before the law, regardless of their religion. Though the book deconstructs the bedrock on which the “experts” have built their view of modern India, they have never formulated a refutation. Instead, they just keep on repeating their own deluded assumption, as in: “The BJP threatens India’s structure as a secular state.” (Actually, the BJP does not, and India is not.) They can do so because they are secure in the knowledge that, among the audiences that matter, their camp controls the sphere of discourse. Concerning the interface between religion and modern politics, the established “academic” view is not just defective, it is an outrageous failure.

Or consider historian Prof. KS Lal’s works on caste and religion, refuting with primary data the seeming truism, launched by the Communist Party ideologue MN Roy and now omnipresent in the textbooks, that the lowest castes converted en masse to Islam because of its claimed message of equality. Islam mainly won over the urban middle castes (and not because of eguality, a value rejected as ingratitude towards the Dispenser of destinies in the Quran, but because of the privileges vis-à-vis non-Muslims), not the Untouchables. Again, the silent treatment has been the only response the “experts” could muster.

The Ayodhya affair

It is uncommon for Audrey Truschke and the opposite school to have any kind of direct debate at all. In the US this was, until Rajiv Malhotra, unthinkable for lack of any pro-Hindu school willing and able to stand up to the overwhelming anti-Hindu bias among those Indologists willing to wade into any controversial subject. But in India, there have been a few such confrontations. And on those occasions, the “academics” did not cover themselves with glory.

One consequential instance in India was the Ayodhya scholars’ debate in the winter of 1990-1991, organized by the Janata (Left-populist) government headed by Chandra Shekhar. This was won hands down by the scholars affirming the existence of a Hindu temple underneath the Babri Masjid, first against a delegation of Muslim leaders unfamiliar with historical methodology, selected by the Babri Masjid Action Committee, then against a group of Marxist academics called in by that same Committee for saving the day. The latter’s position was but an elaboration of the official orthodoxy created by a group of academics from JNU when they issued a statement, The Political Abuse of History (1989), denying the existence of temple remains underneath the Babri Masjid. It had been taken over as Gospel truth by most of the academic and journalistic India-watchers in the West, including Truschke’s mentors. They kept the lid on the debate’s outcome.

More detail about the controversy can be found in my paper The Three Ayodhya Debates (2011). But since I do not hold an academic chair, she might not take me serious, so let that pass. Instead, I may refer her to the excellent book Rama’s Ayodhya (2013) by Prof. Meenakshi Jain of DU. No Indian or Western academic has refuted it or even formally taken cognizance of it. After Court-ordered excavations in 2003 had definitively confirmed the existence of the temple, acknowledged in the Court verdict of 2010, they have all turned conspicuously silent on Ayodhya.

Indeed, what insiders knew all along, has now become official: the stance of the “academics”, both Indian and Western, has been an outrageous failure. It relied entirely on the authority of a few “experts” already known for their anti-Hindu positions. Their “expertise” fell through completely once they were cross-examined on the witness stand, as amply documented by  Prof. Jain.

That those “experts” didn’t manage to uphold their case against the temple was a surprise only to their dupes, including the American India-watchers. At least, I assume these were dupes and had genuinely swallowed the no-temple claim (“concocted by the wily Hindu fundamentalists”). The alternative is that they were deliberate accomplices in the Ayodhya deception, an artificial controversy that killed thousands and brought down several governments. I would prefer not to think such things about scholars like Audrey Truschke and her mentors. 

A remarkable aspect of the experts’ fall from grace was the smugness with which they took the witness stand. They had not deemed it necessary to brush up their knowledge of Ayodhya, or to give their ill-founded statements of opinion a more solid basis at least after the fact. They had for so long publicly pretended, as Truschke now does, that the Hindu side merely consisted of a bunch of deplorables, that they didn’t see the need to gear up for the confrontation.  

Iconoclasm

The Ayodhya controversy was part of a larger issue, viz. Islamic iconoclasm, which victimized many thousands of places of worship in India and abroad, starting with Arabia. Or at least, that is how historians like Sita Ram Goel and Profs. Harsh Narain, KS Lal, Saradindu Mukherji saw it: turn this one controversy into an occasion for educating the public about the ideological causes of the iconoclasm that hit Hindu society so hard and so consistently for over a millennium. But the RSS-BJP preferred to put the entire focus on their one toy in Ayodhya, and obscure or even deny the Islamic motive behind it. (The ideological impotence and non-interest on their part provides yet another contrast with the academics’ imaginary construction of a wily, resourceful and highly motivated Hindu movement.)

As part of his effort, Goel published a two-volume book giving a list of two thousand purposely demolished temples, mostly replaced by mosques. The part on the theology of iconoclasm proved irrefutable, and has never even been gainsaid on any of its specifics. The list of two thousand temples equally stands entirely unshaken, as so many challenges to the reigning school that tries to downplay the tradition of iconoclasm pioneered by the Prophet. Ever since, the dominant policy has been to disregard Goel’s work and carry on whitewashing the record of Islam regardless.

Since stray new proofs of Muslim temple destruction keep popping up, that school has developed an alternative discursive strategy to prevent such cases from suggesting their own logical conclusion. It now preaches that a few temple destructions have indeed taken place, but channels this admission towards a counterintuitive explanation: that Hinduism is to be blamed for these, not Islam. The core of truth is that a handful of cases have been documented of ancient Hindu kings abducting prestigious idols from their adversaries’ main temples, just as happened in Mesopotamia and other Pagan cultures. These are then presented as the source of inspiration for Aurangzeb’s wholesale destruction (documented in his own court chronicles) of thousands of temples and many more idols.

Not that any of the many Muslim iconoclasts ever testified that such was his inspiration. Their motivation, whenever explicitly stated, and whether inside or outside of India, is invariably purely Islamic. Since the negationist school is unable to document its thesis, let me show them by example how to do it.

Kashinath Pandit’s book A Muslim Missionary in Mediaeval Kashmir (Delhi 2009) contains a translation of the Tohfatu’l Ahbab, the biography of the 15th-century Islamic missionary Shamsu’d-Din Araki by his younger contemporary Muhammad Ali Kashmiri. After describing the many temple demolitions Araki wrought or triggered in thinly populated Kashmir (many more than the “eighty” which the secularists are willing to concede on Richard Eaton’s authority for all of India during the whole Muslim period), the biographer gives Araki’s motivation in practising all this iconoclasm.

Does he say: “Araki then recalled the story how a Hindu king ran off with an idol and thereby felt an urge to do something entirely different: destroy all the idols and their idol-houses with it”? No, he recounts the standard Islamic narrative of the Kaaba: it was built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham for monotheistic worship (thus yielding a far more authoritave precedent than idol theft by an Infidel king), until unbelievers made it “a place for the idols and a house for the statues. Some Quraish chieftains (…) turned this House of God into the abode of devilish and satanic people. For innumerable years, this house of divine light and bliss became the worshiping place for sorcerers and depraved people and the centre of worshippers of idols (made of stones).”

Fortunately, this injustice didn’t last, neither in Mecca nor in Kashmir: “When the last of the prophets (Muhammad) saw this situation, he lifted Imam ‘Ali Murtaza on his shoulders so that defiled and impure idols and images were struck down in the House of God. (…) In the same manner, Kashmir was a den of wicked people, the source of infidelity and a mine of corruption and aberration.” (p.258)

And then the enumeration of Hindu sacred places levelled and mosques built in their stead resumes. An extra detail of interest for all those who idealize Sufis is that the text lists many occasions when “Sufis” and “Derwishes” participated in massacres and temple demolitions.

At any rate, that is what a Muslim testimony of the motive for temple destructions looks like. At least in the real world, not in the make-believe world of our “academics”. I had already challenged Richard Eaton (the originator of this thesis, a self-described Marxist) and his followers to come up with such evidence in 1999, but nothing has ever materialized. Come on, Prof. Truschke, you can make an excellent career move by producing this proof.

To sum up: on the one hand, we have Islamic icononoclasts and their contemporary supporters saying in so many words that Islam made them do it. Moderns who highlight this evidence are, in Truschke’s estimation, “bullies”. On the other, we have no evidence at all for the claim that the Islamic iconoclasts, intent on destroying Hinduism itself through its icons, took inspiration from Hindu icon-stealers, who installed the icon in their own temple for continued worship (as if abduction, wanting to have something close to you, were the same thing as murder, i.e. wanting something to disappear from this world). This claim is nothing more than special pleading. Yet, people who propagate it are, in Truschke’s description, “academics”.

Conclusion

The bourgeoisie sets great store by status. Scholars go by a different criterion: knowledge. They know, through learning or personal experience, that for some of the great insights and discoveries we are indebted to outsiders and amateurs; and that quite a few of their colleagues have big titles and positions not corresponding to their actual knowledge. They also know that holding (or at least uttering) the required opinions can make or break an academic career: either formally, as when a non-Anglican could not get admission to Oxford University, or informally, as under the reign of progressivist conformism today.

To think highly of the academic world presupposes a link between scientific achievement and academic rank, and this largely makes sense in the exact sciences. In the humanities, especially in the social “science” and literature departments, this link is also deduced, but only as a parasitical extension of the conventions in the exact sciences. Much of what passes for scholarship these days is only ideology wrapped into jargon. Some sophomores take it seriously: having just gained entry into the academic world, they idealize it and are proud of their belonging to a higher world distinct from lay society. And most laymen believe it: over-awed by status, they assume that academic status presupposes both knowledge and objectivity, the basis of academic authority.

There exists a test for objective knowledge: a good theory predicts. Physicists who know the relevant parameters of an object in motion, can predict its location at future times. Well, how about the predictions by the academic India-watchers? In the mid-1990s, when the BJP’s imminent coming to power was a much-discussed probability, top academics predicted that a BJP government would turn India into a Vedic dictatorship, whatever that may be. They were put in the wrong even swifter than expected: in 1996, BJP leader AB Vajpayee was Prime Minister for 13 days, then lost the vote of confidence, and instead of seizing power for good, he meekly stepped down. Academics predicted the victimization of Dalits and women, gas chambers, “all the Indian Muslims thrown into the Indian Ocean”, and what not. Well, the BJP has been in power from 1998 till 2004, and since 2014: where are those gas chambers? 

Scholars of modern India, as well as historians of fields relevant for contemporary political debates, have a lot to be modest about. They may have academic positions, but their record is not such that they are in a position to talk down to outsiders, the way Audrey Truschke now does.

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