harvard
Academia as battleground
Foreign academic invasion into our sacred academic portals has been made possible by the active collaboration of our own scholars.







Yesterday’s editorial in the Hindu, agenda-driven as it is, should come as no surprise to anyone. It is just the latest in a long line of similar pieces that were written slamming the Narendra Modi-led Government’s shake up of the History establishment including the ICHR. Titled History as mythology?, it continues the well-established Marxist tradition of deriding everything noble and positive in Hindu history by consigning them to the handy basket of “mythology.”
And so, it is only in order to lay a few hard facts on the table.
francisMichael Witzel and Francis Clooney come and go and their conferences, lectures and discussion meetings in India have exposed Indian academe’s vanities and follies. Their visits have their uses only because they pitilessly expose the limitations of the average Indian/Hindu intellectuals to comprehend the end objective of the so-called Indic studies undertaken by the likes of Witzel, Clooney, Doniger and Nussbaum.
Like all invasions, foreign academic invasion into our sacred academic portals has been made possible by the active collaboration of our own scholars who are either partners or beneficiaries of their foreign patrons or just plain ignorant of their larger designs. Tamil and Sanskrit scholars, scholars of epigraphy and linguistics, scholars of Srivaishnavism and Saiva-Siddhanta and big and small historians have all been wined, dined and flattered by white academe with dubious intent.
Western universities and their political cousins, the strategic affairs think-tanks have been transformed into battlegrounds where issues of nationhood and nationalism of former colonies of White Christendom are raised, discussed and disposed of ex-parte. This is yet to be understood by Indian scholars who continue to live and cogitate within sequestered campuses.For those that do step out, a beguiling foreign finger to hold on to is ready and waiting. Soon after they step out, the enticing finger puts a ring around their noses but by then, it is too late for any kind of intellectual independence.
Ideas of our nation, nationhood and nationalism are being settled by foreigners.Indeed,such an academic discourse constitutes the basis not only for the systematic de-Hinduising of our nation by the Nehruvian-secular polity but also for all separatist or insurgent movements inside our country. Some knowledge of the forces influencing geo-political trends is as mandatory for scholars as computer literacy, if only to train them to see the minefields and pitfalls of contemporary academe.

Compulsions of western academe

The end of colonialism marked the end of one significant phase in world history just as post-colonial assertion of old national identities marked the beginning of another phase which is still unfolding and evolving. Such an assertion threatened to cement caste, clan and tribal identities which had suffered erosion under colonial scholarship, academe and education system. This threat caused western academe’s transformation from making brazen interventions through motivated scholarship to manipulate the Indian mind into bulldozing their way into the sacred portals of Hindu religion and its institutions.
maxRoberto di Nobili, GU Pope, Max Mueller, Macaulay, Eugene Irschick, Michael Witzel, Francis Clooney and several others – scholars all, whose scholarship has provided grist for the profitable mill of subaltern studies, sub-national identities, separatism and de-HinduisingIndian polity. The success of their mission to subvert the nationhood of this Hindu nation through bogus scholarship was hinged to the greed, self-interest and downright villainy of their Indian collaborators.
At the core of western academe’s agenda for India is the intent to delink the basis of nationhood of India’s majority populace from the territory of the nation. This they have attempted to do through an elaborate intellectual charade which has sought refuge in the motivated campaign that there is a multi-disciplinary approach now to history writing. The end result of the collective efforts of western academe and its Indian minions has been to make the following astounding claims –
  • We know that Hindus cite the Rg Veda as the fountainhead of their religion/dharma/way of life; we assert that the Rg Veda was not born on this soil.
  • We know that in historic times, Brahmins were the repositories of all Vedic knowledge but we contend that the Brahmins are the nomads from Central Asia who brought the Rg Veda into this country. Brahmins are the Aryans who invaded/migrated into this country from Central Asia; the corollary is that the non-Brahmin Tamils are the Dravidians on whom this Brahminical religion was imposed.
  • It is our contention that just as the roots of the Muslim religion lie outside this country’s borders, just as the roots of the Christian religion lie outside this country’s borders, so do the roots of the Hindu religion lie outside the country’s borders.
  • We contend therefore that Hindus cannot claim this territory to be their own. Hinduism is as alien to this soil as Islam and Christianity.
  • Hindus cannot claim that the Indus civilization was Vedic civilization because we do not know if the Indus script is Sanskrit; we will never accept any decoding of the script by Hindu scholars which even remotely implies that the people of the Indus civilization were Vedic Hindus; and we will continue to mock and disparage all attempts to hyphenate Saraswati to Indus.
  • We know that Rg.Vedic Sanskrit is different from Kalidasa’s Sanskrit; but we will never allow any Hindu to even think that perhaps the Indus script may well be either an even earlier Sanskrit or the earliest script of Rg. Vedic Sanskrit
  • We haven’t conclusively decoded the script but considering the fact that the Rg Veda was brought into this country by wandering nomads, we are certain that the script can at best speak only of mundane, commonplace things – maybe of goats and wives.
  • And to nail any nascent lie that the Indus-Saraswati civilization was Vedic, let us tell you that no horse bone has been excavated from the sites and what you show us as horse bones are actually donkey bones. Until the nomadic Aryans from Central Asia brought the horse, Sanskrit and Rg Veda with them when they invaded India, you had no horses, only donkeys. The Rg Veda speaks of horses and so we declare that the people of the Indus-Saraswati civilization, which had no horses, only donkeys, and which we pre-date to the Rg. Veda, preceded the Hindus.
  • Ergo, Indus-Saraswati sites which belong to this soil are not Vedic, their language is not Sanskrit and the language certainly cannot speak of high philosophy, high astronomy or high mathematics.
  • They cannot speak of exalted things associated with advanced civilizations because we at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard have settled it as a given that only settled societies practicing agriculture, not wandering nomads, can have civilization. It is completely beside the point that today we refer to settled societies doing agriculture, derogatorily as the Third World
  • Hindus take unjustifiable pride for the wealth of exalted knowledge contained in the Rg. Veda. The truth is these Aryan nomads, the later-day Brahmins of settled Hindu society actually picked up all astronomy, mathematics and philosophy along the way as they were nomading across Egypt, Greece, Arabia and the middle and far-east before they thundered into India on horses they bought through barter in Arabia.
  • Therefore there were perhaps one, two or more civilizations on this soil before the nomads decided to settle down and found the Hindu Indus-Saraswati civilization. 
  • Speaking of the different books of the Rg. Veda, we declare the chronology to be all wrong. We so declare from the manner by which the Central Asian nomads evolved from possessing just one monosyllable to invoke the divine, to call the wife and also the goat, to coining one word per object. We can therefore tell you that Book 1 of the Rg Veda comes towards the end of the Vedic age (the Hindus had three words by then for the divine, the wife and the goat) while it is actually Book 8 which is the early stage (because the Hindus used ‘om’ for the divine, goat and wife) and Book 32 is actually the middle-stage (because by then while ‘om’ meant only the divine, the Hindus still used the same word for wife and goat)
  • We are using anthropology, archaeology, epigraphy, subaltern history and philology to prove that Veda Vyasa didn’t know how to count and did not know chronology when he decided to give up horse-riding and nomading to sit down to redact the Rg. Veda. Besides, Veda Vyasa had no sense of history because what he wrote, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford cannot accept to be history. We are also using social and political science to prove that because Rg. Vedic women sang off-key their men did not permit them to sing the Vedas. They even refused to teach them the Vedas so that Hindu women could never chant them even when feminists tempted them and goaded them to sing the vedas. Modern-day male chauvinism was undoubtedly inspired by Rg. Vedic Brahmins.

History as Myth – Western Academe’s self-preserving industry

Western academe has to confront the truth that what goes by the name of white civilization today is a derivative of the white church; if only because after the Christianization of the whole of Europe, the White Church diminished all Anglo-Saxon, Nordic/Scandinavian and Continental pre-Christian religion, Gods, culture and history to merely legends, myth and folklore heroes. The pre-Christian past was denied reality and historicity (as White Christians define history) and was retained as a romantic and nostalgic mythical component of their White identity.
However the White race will not suffer the pangs of crisis of identity, if this component of their past did not survive even as a museum or literary artefact. The White Church has effectively reduced European pre-Christian history to myth and this diminishing has everything to do with national territory and the human soul’s inextricable link with the soil and the sense of belonging to a nation’s soil.
Thus White civilization today is congruent with White Christianity. Their Buckingham Palace, Statue of Liberty, their Da Vinci and Picasso, Descartes and Voltaire, their Smithsonian and World Trade Centre, Albert Hall and Eiffel Tower, Shakespeare, Whitman and Strauss cannot wash away or even hide the ugly history of the march and expansion of the white church across continents, leaving behind it a bloody trail of genocide, slavery, colonialism, rape, plunder, disease, and mindless destruction of everything that was grander and nobler than itself.
“Columbus stands, by this definition, not as Italian, Spaniard, Portuguese or Jew but as the penultimate European of his age, the emblematic personality of all that Europe was, had been and would become in the course of its subsequent expansion across the face of the earth.
As a symbol then, Christopher Columbus vastly transcends himself. He stands before the bar of history and humanity, culpable not only for his deeds on Espanola, but, in spirit at least, for the carnage and cultural obliteration which attended the conquests of Mexico and Peru during the 1500s.
And the ghost of Columbus stood with the British in their wars against the Zulus and various Arab nations, with the United States against the ‘Moros’ of the Philippines, with the French against the peoples of Algeria and Indochina, the Belgians in the Congo, the Dutch in Indonesia. He was there for the Opium Wars and the “secret” bombing of Cambodia, for the systematic slaughter of the indigenous peoples of California during the nineteenth century and of the Mayans in Guatemala during the 1980s. And yes, he was very much present in the corridors of Nazi power.
The Third Reich was, after all, never so much a deviation from as it was a crystallization of the dominant themes – racial supremacism, conquest and genocide – of the European culture Columbus so ably exemplifies.
Nazism was never unique: it was instead only one of an endless succession of “New World Orders” set in motion by the Discovery. It was neither more nor less detestable than the order imposed by Christopher Columbus upon Espanola; 1493 or 1943, they were part of the same irreducible whole.” (A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present by Ward Churchill, City Light Books, San Francisco, 1997, p 92)
wardWard Churchill a Native American, along with Vine Deloria Jr. exemplifies a new genre of American scholarship that is beginning to challenge White Christian academe on its own turf. The white church had no native land, no janmabhumi. White Christians therefore cannot claim any land as being their own, on which their religion was born.
Europe was white before it was Christian; America, Africa, Asia and Australia were neither white nor Christian. White became White Christian through a marriage of mutual convenience between the White race and the folklore of Jesus Christ whose reality and historicity is being increasingly questioned in the White world. Not that Jesus’ historicity is of any relevance to the intellectual counter-challenge except to give White Christians a dose of their own medicine of denying historicity to non-Christian religions and their Gods.
The consummation of this marriage produced the White Church which conferred upon White Christians the dubious distinction of being genocidal invaders, occupiers and settlers around the world on territories not theirs.
Nationalism is the umbilical cord of a people binding them in a blood-tie to the soil of their religion. This was the truth that White Church and State-driven western academe had to negate and eventually subvert.
There was no culture that did not derive from the religion of the people and no religion that did not belong to the soil. Which means, all pre-Christian, pre-Islamic and non-Semitic religions understood the limitations of the human brain and worked out the relationship between human beings and the power that created this planet. Some religions called it God, some called it Truth, some called it Consciousness or Supreme Intelligence while yet others called it Spirit. Some religions, like Hinduism went beyond the planet and articulated a breath-taking description of all Creation and the intelligence behind Creation. While Hinduism described Time in terms of ‘yugas’, Hindus also understood and articulated timelessness just as they understood and articulated the still and pregnant state beyond Creation.
The history of European/White civilization is thus congruent with the history of the White Church. Western history and western account of world history is a sordid record of the journeys and wars by which the White Church expanded across continents. As ward Churchill writes, Christopher Columbus is emblematic of the genocidal White Church. Hindus would add Vasco da Gama, Francis Xavier, Alfonso De Albuquerque, Robert Clive and Queen Victoria to the list.
Western academe, originally the offspring of the Church was confronted by the humbling truth that the religion, knowledge, science and technology of White Christians did not yield convincing answers to any fundamental question plaguing humankind nor did they permit the White race to live in peace with other humans and non-human Creation. Even more humbling was the truth that the non-Christian, non-Muslim cultures, religions and peoples they laid waste were far superior in terms of refined religious understanding and scientific and civilisational achievements. The third humbling truth that the white supremacist civilization had to confront was that White Christians had no nation. A nation-less religion was like a man without a home.
The White Church employed three devises to expand, conquer and occupy continents not its own – genocide, slavery and colonialism. When the British colonised India they were confronted by a civilization and a religion that had created wealth beyond belief, its achievements in literature, both sacred and secular, and the arts were magnificent and beyond compare, its people were contented, there was no poverty, no hunger and the most striking thing was the Hindu adherence to a voluntary code of conduct called dharma which governed every aspect of a Hindu’s life.
India’s Hindus posed and continue to pose the biggest doctrinal and empirical challenge to the White Church and its state power. Hindus had a nation, they continued to live in that nation and Hindus had demonstrated their determination to protect their nation from religious invaders and marauders.
White Christians were faced by a people whose innate refinement showed up the White civilization’s immorality, injustice and greed in unpitying light. It was driven home to them that the Hindus were contented to live on their janmabhumi which they held to be punyabhumi and their karmabhumi. Hindus and Hinduism had no desire to conquer and occupy alien nations; Hindus had never conquered territory from greed of wealth or natural resources, never conceived of decimating people with different worldviews and had no use for colonizing territories and nations belonging to other peoples.
Thus, White academe had its work cut out for it. English education and western scholarship on Hindu religion, society and culture had to –
  • Sow discord among the different communities of Hindus
  • Peddle academic theories equalizing Hindus with their invaders on their homeland
  • Inject the poison of discontent
  • Rupture the fabric of social harmony resting on dharma
  • Confine Hindu dharma/religion within the idiom of mono and polytheism
  • Promote monotheism as the supreme virtue and accuse Hindus of polytheism
  • Diminish Hindu history as myth and tell the Hindus that they have no history
  • Peddle the theory that the roots of the Hindu religion lie outside India
  • Thus deny Hindus the comfort of belonging to a timeless nation
  • Render Hindus as nation-less as White Christianity and Islam
Gandhi exemplified the success of western academe’s diabolic intentions. At the peak of his political activism in South Africa, Gandhi admits to the innate nobility of colonialism when he speaks of the purpose of colonialism as being to civilize and lift up the victim nation and its natives from a state of barbarity, ignorance and superstition.
Gandhi also denied historicity to our ithihasas. Thus, the Mahabharata war was not a mega war fought among the Kings of Dwaparayugafor upholding dharma, but an allegory to describe the war between the forces of good and evil inside a person’s mind.
gandhiGandhi, like Columbus was emblematic. By conceding that the British government always raised the status of its conquered and enslaved subjects, and by diminishing the history of the Hindu people to the status of myths and legends, Gandhi became the living proof of the successful intent of western academe. Indeed, getting Gandhi to stand by in helplessness as the nation was vivisected was one of the most stunning victories of western academe. Gandhi was emblematic of the unthinking Hindu who continues to regurgitate western academe’s biased discourse against Hinduism.
Harvard’s Scholarship on the Rg Veda
Harvard is a good example of western academe being a creature of the White Church. Glimpses of Christian History narrates the birth of Harvard University, crediting medieval Christendom for the birth of the concept of universities; the narrative, at the very end implies piously that Harvard was pre-ordained by God. Corollary? The Christian God works through history and establishing universities is integral to God’s bigger plan.
“Universities sprang up in Medieval Christendom. Nothing like them had been seen in history, for not only did they concentrate teachers, they embraced the idea of set coursework whose requirements must be fulfilled before a specific degree was awarded. Students were periodically tested before being certified in their chosen subjects. Universities were modelled on guilds which trained and rated apprentices and journeymen and gathered members for mutual protection. The Christian ideal often tends to clump people together for mutual support in a body.
John Harvard was a wealthy member of the English middle class. The death of most of his family from plague had left him holding the entire Harvard estate. John came to the New World in 1637, apparently to practice his faith in a simpler and more pure style than he felt he could enjoy in the established Church of England. The following year he died of a protracted disease. He willed half his estate and his entire library for the establishment of a college. The prospective school may have received £850, a very large sum by New England standards. God concentrates wealth for a purpose.”
Amen.
Nothing like that had been seen in history” is typical of the scholarship and reportage about Christendom and by extension, about Hindu India’s history that Harvard supports and propagates; and “John came to the New World in 1637” is polite for the wave after wave of genocides that European Christians perpetrated in North America. A quick look at the list of publications from Harvard University Press informs us of Harvard’s White Christian geo-political predilections.
This is how HUP describes Martha Nussbaum’s book on Hindu nationalism –
“While America is focused on religious militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege from religious extremism in another critical part of the world. As Nussbaum reveals in this penetrating look at India today, the forces of the Hindu right pose a disturbing threat to its democratic traditions and secular state. Nussbaum’s long-standing professional relationship with India makes her an excellent guide to its recent history”.
This is routine western academic “discourse” about Hindu nationalism and therefore doesn’t merit further commentary except to take note of the mirthful Martha’s “professional relationship with India.”
Edited and translated by Karl Friedrich Geldner, the Rigveda is the oldest Indian and one of the oldest Indo-European texts. It is a collection of 1,028 hymns addressed to the gods, composed in highly poetic and notoriously difficult Archaic Sanskrit. Medieval Indian commentaries and especially the modern Western scholarship of the past 150 years have increasingly shed more light on its poetry, religion, and ritual as well as on its contemporary meaning. The Rigveda has been translated in scholarly fashion only once during the twentieth century, and that was into German in 1951 by K. F. Geldner. Geldner’s volumes have long been out of print; they are reprinted here in one useful reference volume”.
Harvard has gone to great and painstaking lengths not to mention the word ‘Hindu’ even once in this descriptive paragraph about the Rg Veda. It is doubtful if a similar description of the Torah, the Bible or the Koran, by a non-believer without once mentioning the name of the people for whom these scriptures are sacred, could have been possible. Every word in the description above signals intent.
  • The RgVeda is an Indo-European ‘text’
  • Western scholars of the Rg Veda are modern while Indian commentaries are medieval. “Medieval” comes with a Christian academic baggage because Hindu scholars do not speak of our tradition and heritage in terms of ancient past, medieval times and modern.
  • Harvard is not saying the Rg Veda has several layers of meaning; Harvard is saying it has an ancient meaning, a medieval meaning and contemporary meaning.The meaning of the Rg Veda for horse-riding Central Asian invaders/composers is different from the meaning that our Bhashyakaras put on it and the meaning that modern western scholars like Max Mueller, Geldner and Witzel put on it.
  • Only one worthwhile, scholarly translation of the Rg Veda has been undertaken in the 20th century and that is by a German. Harvard publishes the translation again and passes the baton of western scholarship of the Rg Veda to another German, Michael Witzel.
  • Needless to say, Geldner was the son of a Protestant clergyman
All western academic activity is arranged around the fact that White Christians are a nationless people. America and the Europe cannot live down the brutal history of the White Church. Staring them in the face is the genocide of Native Americans and the contrast presented by the Hindus of India who have lived contentedly in their janmabhumi.

Discourse on Native Americans

We shall proceed to see the diabolic intentions of the US academe on all issues concerning Native Americans. Readers will see the pattern of motivated scholarship that emerges; scholarship intended to propagate the White Christian worldview and world order.
The Puritans had to peddle Euro-American nation building as a noble enterprise, sweeping the invasion and occupation of another nation and the genocide of Native Americans away from sight. This they did by two elaborate charades—scholarly fairy-tale accounts of the numbers of Native Americans in North America prior to Puritan invasion—you Native Americans are not of this soil, you too are from elsewhere.
The most heartening thing in all this is that western academe’s intent to de-nationalise the Hindus and Native Americans is being challenged more and more by native scholars—Ward Churchill and Vine Deloria Jr.,ShrikantTalageri and S Kalyanaraman among many others.
“The choice ultimately is ours. If we elect, sheep-like, to accept the definitions of entities like Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, and Newsweek as to what comprises “proper” or “appropriate” recountings of historical fact and meaning, we will merely have consigned ourselves to more of what has already transpired. If, on the other hand, we move to embrace, absorb and extend the kind of work pioneered by Deloria, Grinde, Williams Stannard and Sale, we equip ourselves to change it in a profoundly positive fashion”. (Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, p 121)
The “federally-established and maintained” Smithsonian and other ‘entities” as Churchill puts it, disparagingly placed the numbers of Native American peoples in 1492 when Christopher Columbus entered the continent, at one million.
nativeLater, admitting to a “little” error and underestimation by a factor of 100, the Smithsonian upped the number to twomillion. This gross diminishing of the numbers was necessary to transform the horror and immorality of the annihilation of the Native Americans by White Christians into a matter of a “little” genocide.
The bulk died of disease which the White Christians beginning with Christopher Columbus, “inadvertently” passed on to Native Americans who had no immunity from European pathogens. Cotton Mather, the illustrious son of Increase Mather, a Puritan priest and theologian and President Harvard College, gloated, piously of course, over the death by disease of the Native Americans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
“In describing the consequences of indigenous peoples’ “quarrelsome” attitude about being pushed out of their territory around the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631, Puritan leader Cotton Mather rejoiced that “God ended the controversy by sending the smallpox among the Indians…who were before that time exceedingly numerous”.(Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, p 139) Cotton Mather was the son of Boston’s First Family and a leading intellectual, theologian and academician of the times.
Closely related to this “little” genocide and God-ordained death-by-disease are the attendant academic falsehoods –
  • Much of the continent was uninhabited, which the White Christians occupied, obedient to the will of God, tamed, and put to productive use.
  • Because it was uninhabited and the land was vacant anyway, there is no wrong attached to occupying it.
  • The Native Americans were a barbaric lot given to cannibalism and human sacrifice.
  • White Christians, after diminishing them to convenient and manageable numbers, converted the remaining to Christianity to civilize them and teach them to do an honest day’s work.
  • Until the civilizing influence of White Christianity, Native Americans lived by hunting and “jump-killing” the mastodons and mammoths.
  • So if we are responsible for genocide, well,native Americans are responsible for rendering extinct the precious fauna of North America.
Lest readers think that serious academia is incapable of such incredible research, they must only bring to mind the kind of scholarly research that has gone into the Aryan Invasion Theory, the language of the Rg Veda and the language of the Indus-Saraswati seals.
In what this writer saw as a startling repetition of the Aryan Invasion Theory by which White Christians placed the Brahmins, the Rg Veda and Sanskrit outside national borders, the Smithsonian and other Churchillian entities invented the Bering Strait Theory which put the Native American people outside their national borders to make the point.
“Thus people accepting the idea that outmoded explanations of human evolution have been modified substantially will continue to hold with the Bering Strait Theory even though to do so is a great inconsistency. But another point must be made which requires a chapter of discussion – and that is whether or not the Bering Strait is simply shorthand scientific language for ‘I don’t know, but it sounds good and no one will check’.
Coupled with this belief is the idea that American Indians (‘Native Americans’ because today the name ‘American Indians’ means Americans of Indian origin or PIOs) were not original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere but latecomers who had barely unpacked before Columbus came knocking on the door. If Indians had arrived only a few centuries earlier, they had no real claim to land that could not be swept away by European discovery. Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian devoted his life to discrediting of any early occupancy of North America and a whole generation of scholars, fearfully following the Master, rejected the claims of their peers rather than offend this powerful scholar”. (Vine Deloria Jr. Red Earth White Lies, Chapter 4, Low Bridge – Everybody Cross, p 68, Fulcrum Publishing Golden, Colorado, 1997)
The Bering Strait is an inter-continental bridge connecting Asia to America. As Deloria puts it scathingly, Native Americans, according to this school of scholarship, waited for low tide and then hopped to America from Asia via this bridge. Now this “bridge” is a land mass the size of a subcontinent which has since the days of the crossing-over, conveniently disappeared under the sea.
Readers must recollect the lost continent of Lemuria which too is an intercontinental landmass, which if it had existed, would have proved yet another of western academe’s de-nationalising-the-Hindus scholarly research.
The sense of rootedness to the soil is a primordial urge and once the White Church expanded God’s domain through genocide, slavery and colonialism, the Church’s flock became a nationless people. The driving objective of western academe is “What is not for me will also not be for you”.

Objective of Western Academe

Today, the Hindus of India and the non-Christian and non-Muslim peoples of Asia alone continue to live on their nation. Citizenship of a non-national country is not the same as nationhood. It is at best living in a rented house or living in a house that has been seized after killing the owner. Western academe has two objectives: to justify the predatory expansion of the White Church and to delegitimize the claim of the indigenous peoples to their national territory and sense of nationhood.
Native American scholars are not only turning the ignoble and blatantly manufactured theses emanating from these portals but are also exposing the politics behind this kind of scholarship.
Scholars like Kalyanaraman and Talageri are undertaking corrective scholarly studies but have not ventured to expose the politics of western academe and their Indian stooges. It may be left to others to strip western academe of its veneer of exalted academic standards to reveal the naked Christian agenda of its research and researchers.
The bulk of academic studies tampering with the sense of Hindu nationhood must be evicted from our own academia. Nation and nationalism, rootedness to the soil and its religion, society and polity deriving from the culture which in turn derives from the religion rooted to the soil are emerging as central concerns in countries threatened by the brazen intrusion of the White Church into their nations and the serious threat posed to Hindus by jihadi Islam.
“At this juncture, the whole planet is locked, figuratively, in a room with the socio-cultural (I would add western academic) equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. An individual of consummate taste and refinement, imbued with indelible grace and charm, he distracts his victims with the brilliance of his intellect, even while honing his blade. He is thus able to dine alone upon their livers, his feast invariably candlelit, accompanied by lofty music and a fine wine. Over and over the ritual is repeated, always hidden, always denied in order that it may be continued. So perfect is Lecter’s pathology that, from the depths of his scorn for the inferiors upon whom he feeds, he advances himself as their sage and therapist, he who is incomparably endowed with the ability to explain their innermost meanings, he professes to be their savior. His success depends upon being embraced and exalted by those upon whom he preys. Ultimately, so long as Lecter is able to retain his mask of omnipotent gentility, he can never be stopped. The spirit of Hannibal Lecter is thus at the core of an expansionist European “civilization” which has reached out to engulf the planet. (Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, p 93)
The only way to halt the march of European Civilization is for the natives of every nation to start the process of reclaiming their nations from the Abrahamic religions.
In India, Hindus must begin to not only question motivated west-driven scholarship but also expose the geopolitics behind such scholarship. Iravatham Mahadevan, Pollachi Mahalingam, the University of Madras Departments of Sanskrit and Vaishnavism, Sri Vaishnava scholars, our epigraphists, historians and linguists and those who think the likes of Witzel and Clooney, Doniger and Nussbaum must be defeated in polite academic exchange, must see themselves described by Ward Churchill.
Churchill calls these willing and unwitting allies and useful idiots, the “sympathetic biographer” who attempts to explain Lecter in academic and sublime literary terms. “The biographer thus reveals not only a willing complicity in the subject’s crimes, but a virulent pathology of his or her own. Such is and has always been the relationship of “responsible scholarship” to expansionist Europe and its derivative societies”. (Ward Churchill)
Hindu nationalists and Hindu scholars can learn a thing or two from Ward Churchill, Vine Deloria Jr. and David Stannard about how to conduct ourselves on the cleverly formulated White academic battleground.
radha@jjamm.net'
Radha Rajan is a Chennai-based political analyst. She is also author and animal activist.