S.N. Balagangadhara, better known as Balu, is
Professor of Comparative Culture Studies in Ghent University, Belgium. Balu is
a Kannadiga Brahmin by birth, a former Marxist, and his discourse has a very
in-your-face quality. In his latest book, Reconceptualizing
India Studies (Oxford University Press 2012), the attentive reader will see
a critique of the Indological establishment in the West and the political and
cultural establishment in India. Like Rajiv Malhotra’s recent works, it questions
their legitimacy. The reigning Indologists and India-watchers would do well to
read it.
Orientalism
Two of the eight papers that make up the book deal
with Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism
(1977). Although Balu was very critical of Said in an article reacting to his
uncritical obituaries, here he is quite generous with his praise: “He has
provided us with the ‘Archimedean point’ to move the world.” (p.48) Not a word
about the books refuting Said on numerous points of fact and on his
interpretative framework, which has the character of a conspiracy theory: all
those scholars were only pretending their many viewpoints (often identifying
with the culture studied) and were in fact agents of colonialism.
Anyway, to the extent that Said is right, and
that the colonial-age Orientalists were being unfair to Asia, we must see the
mental constraints on all scholars of that period. The Orientalists were determined
by the thinking of their societies: “Consider the possibility of Albert
Einstein’s being born as a contemporary of Thomas Aquinas’s. Would he have been
able to formulate the theory of relativity? Given what we know about human
knowledge today, our answer can only be in the negative: he would not have had
access to the experimental data and the theoretical concepts required to frame
his theories. In this sense, even a genius is limited by his time.” (p.46)
Orientalism is a useful notion at least in
analyzing Western attitudes to India and Indians in the present. Analyzing the
examples of Jeffrey Kripal’s and Paul Courtright’s writings on the Hindu saint Ramakrishna
and on the Hindu deity Ganesha, he shows how Western scholarship is marked by
fundamental logical and conceptual flaws (such as circular reasoning, proving
what has first been assumed) and by the tendency to talk about rather than with
Indians. Their trivializing theses are characterized as “violence” (p.135) and “blind”
(p.139). Scholarship should advance knowledge, but these academics are only
fostering colonial-originated prejudices.
The concept of Orientalism has two roots, one
of which was important to understand Said’s personal stake in it, the other to
appreciate the concept’s enormous popularity. Like all Middle-Eastern
Christians, he was wary of the imperialist designs of Latin Christianity, which
he saw as the origin of its secularized expression, the science of Orientalism
(which did indeed start with the late-medieval outreach of Rome to the
Middle-Eastern Christians). At the same time, his strongly pro-Muslim sympathy,
which took the form of culpabilizing any scholarly critique of Islam as a
Western imperialist project, was due to the Christians’ centuries of living as Dhimmi-s (“charter people”, protected
ones), used to bending before and singing the praises of Islam. Said’s defence
of Islam, over 90% of his book and the topic of several other publications of
his, together with his sowing suspicions against Western scholarship, were
exactly what trendy Western and westernized intellectuals needed, and what the
Islamic world has gainfully instrumentalized since.
Balu does not go into the
autonomous precolonial imperialism of Islam, a factor of religious riots in
South Asia quite independent of colonial rule and its heir, the secular state.
But in several other chapters, he identifies a more contemporary factor of communal violence: the
worldview underlying that same “secular” state.
Secularism
Look at the secularists, who for decades now
have gone gaga over Said’s concept of Orientalism: “Orientalism is reproduced in the name of a critique of Orientalism.
It is completely irrelevant whether one uses a Marx, a Weber or a Max Müller to
do so. (…) the result is the same: uninteresting trivia, as far as the growth
of human knowledge is concerned; but pernicious in its effect as far as Indian
intellectuals are concerned.” (p.47) India has produced intellectual giants
like (limiting ourselves to the 20th century:) R.C. Majumdar, P.V.
Kane or A.K. Coomaraswamy, but the Indian secularists are intellectually very
poor copies of their Western role models.
The most acute case of “Orientalism” in the
Saidian sense in precisely Nehruvian secularism, the consensus viewpoint shared
by most established academics and media. Thus, about caste, “Nehru used
Orientalist descriptions of the Indian society of his day and made their facts
his own.” (p.74) Citing as example a Western India-watcher, Balu notes that the
latter “is not accounting for the Indian caste system by using the notion of
fossilized coalitions in India; he is trying to establish the truth of Nehru’s
observations (that is, the truth of the Orientalist descriptions of India)”,
because the social sciences “where uncontested, (…) presuppose the truth of the
Orientalist descriptions of non-Western cultures.” (p.74) That is the problem
of the existing “South Asia Studies” in a nutshell. It underscores the need for
more serious comparative studies, a field in which Balu has been a pioneer.
This critique applies especially to the
dominant treatment of India’s “communal” problem: “When Indian intellectuals
use existing theories about religion and its history – for example, to analyse
‘Hindu-Muslim’ strife – they reproduce, both directly and indirectly, what the
West has been saying so far. (…) the ‘secularist’ discourse about this issue
can hardly be distinguished – both in terms of the contents or the vocabulary –
from Orientalist writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” (p.47) Secularism
is the direct heir of the colonial dispensation.
Balu’s explanation of intercommunal relations
in India and the state’s role therein is original and clear. In his opinion, the
secular state is not there to curb religious violence, but is in fact the cause
of this violence. He focuses on its position in the question of religious
conversion, which is forbidden in some neighbouring countries and demanded to
be forbidden by many Hindus (both Mahatma Gandhi and the Hindu nationalists).
But it is upheld as a right by the Muslims and especially by the Christian
missionaries -- and by the “secular” state. The latter clearly takes a partisan
stand in doing so; and it would also be partisan if it did the opposite. It is
impossible to be impartisan.
The whole “secular” discourse on
“religion” and intercommunal relations is borrowed from Christianity. The basic
framework to think about religion is informed by Western experiences and fails
to see the radical difference between these and the native traditions: “the
secular state assumes that the Semitic religions and the Hindu traditions are
instances of the same kind” (p.203). In realities, Hindus and Parsis don’t
missionize and refrain from basing their religions on a defining truth claim.
By contrast, Christianity and Islam believe they offer the truth, and
consequently want everyone to accept it.
Secularists decry as cheap Hindu propaganda the
assertion that Hinduism is naturally pluralistic and innocent of religious
strife and exclusivism, which is considered to be typical of the converting
religions. But in fact, Christian missionaries and Muslim observers noted the
absence of sectarian violence among the Hindus: “The famous Muslim traveler to
India, Alberuni, also noted the absence of religious rivalry among the Hindus”.
(p.205) This Hindu phenomenon even affects Alberuni’s own community: there is
much more violence between rivaling Muslim sects in Islamic Pakistan than in
Hindu-populated India. If the secularists want to promote religious harmony, as
they claim, they had better promote traditional Indian values rather than side
with Christianity and Islam.
Conclusion
Balu’s theses are uncomfortable and sure to
provoke debate. So far, the attitude of the India-watching class and of the
elites in India has been to ignore any criticism of their worldview. But this
man’s stature as a leading professor who heads a very active research
department in a major secularist university in the West will make many of them
sit up and notice.
On the whole, Balu’s thesis is optimistic. He
offers solutions to the problems he analyzes, mostly solutions that he himself
has already worked out or has been practising for years. It is not as if any fate
condemns Indian policy and academic India-watching to their present prejudices.
He also believes in the promise of the age of globalization, and thinks Indians
and Europeans genuinely have something to offer each other.
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