The Pseudoscience Of Indology: An Interview With Joydeep Bagchee

by Indic Today

- Feb 14, 2019, 3:53 pm

Snapshot
 Dr Joydeep Bagchee says how he and his teacher, Professor
Vishwa Adluri, became interested in Indology, and why they
undertook a deconstruction of Western interpretations of the
Mahabharata.

With The Nay Science: A History of German Indology, Professor Vishwa

Adluri emerged as one of the most powerful critics of Indology, the
nineteenth-century field established to study India. Professor Adluri has
called Indology “scientized racism”, a “club” and a “court”. He has been
interviewed by Open, Swarajya, News18, Social Research, and IndiaFacts.
Mukunda Raghavan of Meru.Media interviewed Professor Adluri’s student
Dr Joydeep Bagchee on the occasion of the completion of their second
book, Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mahabharata Textual Criticism.

Dr Bagchee spoke on behalf of his teacher, and explained how they became
interested in Indology and why historicising the Mahabharata was crucial
to colonising India intellectually. The following transcript was edited for
clarity and length. The complete interview will appear soon as a podcast
and a video from Meru.Media.

MR: What are your backstories?

I have a PhD in philosophy from the NSSR, New York. It is one the most
prestigious schools for continental philosophy in the US. Hannah Arendt
and Reiner Schurmann taught there. I met my teacher Vish there. I

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learned nearly everything from him. He provided me a strong reading of
the history of Western thought and its relationship with Christianity.
Through him, I inherited Reiner’s philosophical legacy. The Nay
Science was our first major collaboration. But everything I write flows from
Vish: he inspires me.

MR: How did you get involved with studying both Western and Indian
thought?

As outsiders, we never felt these boundaries existed. We had already

transcended political and national identities. We wanted to learn from
different philosophers. Orientalists and comparativists obsess over
differences between the Eastern and Western mind. But no such mind
exists. Thought ranges freely across cultures. Many gratuitously belabour
the idea of method, disciplinarity, slow reading, traditionalism versus
presentism. These ideas appeal to the sophist rather than the philosopher.
The philosopher is at home in the entire cosmos.

MR: What would you consider your areas of interest and expertise?

We have PhDs in Western philosophy. Vish’s specialisation is ancient

Greek philosophy. Mine is Heidegger and twentieth-century continental
philosophy. We also studied Indian philosophy. I studied Indian
philosophy as an undergraduate in India. Vish
studied Mimamsa and Vedanta under Swami Prabhudananda Sarasvati,
who is from the Sringeri Matha. Over the past 10 years, we explored how
debates internal to Christianity and Europe shaped the reception of Indian
texts. We are now working on a book on the connection between race and
history.

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MR: What do we know about the Mahabharata, its author or authors?

We don’t know the identity of the historical author(s). We know it was

carefully copied and transmitted over centuries. There were conscious
efforts to organise and seal the canon (eg, colophons, parvan lists, etc).
The Mahabharata was revered as smrti and as pancamaveda. It is thus
living, continuing revelation. The Mahabharata was thought to contain the
essence of the Upanisads (the Bhagavad Gita). It was considered an
egalitarian text: a stri-sudra-veda that brought the vedic revelation to all
classes.

Once we grasp its philosophical and pedagogical intent, it is obvious that

it has the brilliance of genius behind it: the literary figure called Vyasa.
The Vyasa question differs from the Homeric question: nowhere in Homer
is the author a character in the narrative. The Mahabharata unsettles our
notions of authorship and author. Vyasa proved a stumbling block for
Western scholars. To them, he was a legend: evidence of a “Brahmanic”
takeover of an earlier heroic epic. They interpreted this to mean: no
conscious authorship exists behind the Mahabharata. The stories they
created are simply wrong — manuscript evidence proves this.

MR: What are its main themes?

Most people would say “war” or “family conflict”. Scholars insist the war is
central (most recently, Jim Fitzgerald). But this is reductive. The text says
this is no ordinary war. The war is not a purely human conflict. It is
another stage of the devasurayuddha. It is divinely foreordained.
Heraclitus says war is the father of all. We must approach
the Mahabharata similarly. It reveals the distinction between changing

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empirical reality, which is subject to karma, and Brahman, which
transcends time, space, and causality.

The Mahabharata shows us how, caught in the web of time, humans

struggle to master fate. By cleaving to dharma they take the upward path.
The text analyses mundane reality (jagat) and the soul (jiva) in the literal
sense of taking them apart. They are revealed as epiphenomena of
Brahman. The political drama at Hastinapura and the genocidal conflict
of Kurukshetra are set amidst this. They remind us that the cosmos is
inherently violent, an endless conflagration.

MR: What is its major overarching philosophy (and secondary

philosophies, if any)?

Dharma is the central teaching of the Mahabharata. It is not just one

theme among others, but a matrix that organises the narrative and
debates on action. But dharma itself is grounded in a philosophy of being:
an ontology or brahmavada. Without hyperbole or anachronism,
the Mahabharata’s overarching philosophy is Vedantic. The text also refers
to Samkhya, Yoga, Vaisesika, etc. But if we look at these terms as positions
in an intellectual debate rather than as schools or doctrines,
the Mahabharata is clearly committed to establishing the unity of being
and presenting Brahman theistically as Narayaṇa. It undertakes a
systematic effort to mediate between different standpoints. The
overarching aim is liberation as the final aim of all human effort.

MR: What is so important about the concept of ahimsa? How does it

differ from Buddhist or Jain ideas of ahimsa?

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Vish recently published an article on ahimsa in the Mahabharata. It shows
how ahimsa paramo dharma applies in a twofold perspective. As a
value, ahimsa is the highest dharma. We are enjoined to minimise
violence. However, violence does not proceed solely from man. Neither is it
entirely at his disposal. Enlightenment ethics failed on this count.
Strategies for minimising violence must be combined with a transformative
ontology. The universe is a violent place.

Ultimately, ahimsa can be fully achieved only by realising one’s identity

with Brahman, which transcends time and becoming. This is the real
sense in which ahimsa is paramo dharma. Hinduism thus avoids
utopianism, while recommending a practice of thoughtful living.

MR: When did the West first interact with the Mahabharata?

The earliest encounters were excerpts/retellings (Nala and Damayanti,

Sakuntala). This piecemeal approach did not translate into a cohesive
interpretive strategy. Only after Christian Lassen presented his “historical”
reading of the Mahabharata did the text acquire unity in the Western
imagination. The principles of this reading are well known.

The Mahabharata encompasses an earlier heroic core

and Brahmanicinterpolations. The core relates a racial conflict between
white Aryans and black natives. The epic was originally composed for the
king’s court. It glorified brave knights. Brahmans could not accept such a
recollection of heroic deeds. They wished to reeducate and enslave the
warriors. The Brahmans rewrote the epic to show that success depended
on their favour. They added cosmology and new gods to the epic. They
introduced offensive ideas such as Vyasa’s niyoga. Other scholars also

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took up these ridiculous and patently self-serving hypotheses. Of course,
the Gita had its own history of reception.

MR: How did Western scholars view and interpret the Mahabharata?

Lassen decisively shaped all Western scholarship. Every idea in Western

scholarship can be traced to his 1837 article. If there is one work on
the Mahabharata Indians should read, it is this article (large parts are
translated in The Nay Science). Lassen’s interpretation was congenial for
Westerners. It accorded with the prejudice against Hinduism. Lassen had
explained the mechanism of degeneracy: why India did not develop as the
West had. It accorded with anti-Brahmanic prejudices.

Lassen blamed Brahmans for India’s backwardness. He provided a

historical narrative that, replacing indigenous ideas of history, integrated
Indian civilisation into world history. He anchored the biracial theory (the
view that Indian civilisation comprises two races, civilising white Aryans
and primitive black natives) in history. Lassen’s interpretation reified the
concept of race and legitimised racial conquest as historical and natural
fact. By claiming Brahmans invented rituals for money, Lassen
undermined the soteriological and epistemic praxis of Hinduism.

By claiming Indians were duped by Brahmans and did not know their
texts, he deprived them of intellectual authority. Henceforth, what a
practising Hindu said had less value than what the historically and
critically-trained scholar had to tell him. Most important, Lassen replaced
the Mahabharata’s own concept of itihasa purana with a meta-narrative of
history, in which Indians themselves would participate (eg, when they
prove the Mahabharata War “really” happened, ie, happened in history). At
this point, Hinduism ceased to exist as an independent tradition. It was

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subsumed into Christian supersessionism and its modern, secular
analogue: world history.

MR: Who were the major players?

Besides Lassen, Adolf Holtzmann Sr and Jr, Theodor Goldstucker,

Hermann Oldenberg, Richard Garbe, and Edward W Hopkins played a
major role. For instance, the most widespread statistic about
the Mahabharata is that it was composed between 400 BC and 400 AD.
This statistic is completely false. It is pure conjecture. Sukthankar
demolished Hopkins’s dates. Yet Hans van Buitenen, Romila Thapar, and
others still quote them as established fact. Hopkins himself drew most of
his ideas about the Mahabharata from Holtzmann Jr. He wanted to
provide a more nuanced chronology than Holtzmann, but he accepted his
basic ideas.

These ideas also percolated to others such as Oldenberg and Garbe.

Holtzmann merely embellished the basic interpretive scheme that Lassen
had already provided. He and his uncle developed the idea of Brahmanic
mischief in the context of German nationalism: they saw
the Mahabharata as a prototype for the reformation and Bismarck’s
Kulturkampf. Unfortunately, in the Indian case, the Catholic side, that is,
the Brahman priests, won. They thus argued that critics should recover
the original epic before its Brahmanic revision, thereby undoing the
triumph of Brahmanism.

MR: What historical reality influenced their criticism and how did it
do so?

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Frantz Fanon deeply influenced The Nay Science. Let me, therefore,
respond as I think he would. The most important feature is that it was an
era of condescension. The ‘Negro’ (Fanon uses this word consciously) is
incapable of articulate speech. His representations are by definition
primitive. He must be shown ‘reality’. He must be taught what he ‘really’
means when he uses language (eg, that he worships natural forces out of
fear because he has not learned to control them as Western man has). This
condescension survives today. Indology is the last field where racial
prejudices can be lived. The second feature is a missionary agenda.

Many Indologists participated directly in missionary activity (eg, with the

Halle and Basel missions). Nearly all saw their work as contributing to
Christianity’s triumph. Albrecht Weber, Max Muller and Paul Hacker
explicitly affirm this. “Orientalistik (Oriental languages)” and “Hebraisitik
(Hebrew studies)” developed as subdisciplines of Christian apologetics and
its OT concerns. Likewise, the purpose of uncovering and translating
Hindu scriptures was to provide foundations for evangelism. The third
feature, especially in German Protestantism, was anti-Judaic and anti-
clerical tropes, which were projected on Brahmans. There has been a
sustained attack on Hinduism as a Brahmanic system of thought.
Indologists benefited personally as traditional teaching was eliminated.

MR: What are the major flaws?

Obviously, if we approach any text with this many prejudices, dialogue is

impossible. What we have seen for 200 years is a Western monologue.
Western scholars assured themselves of their cultural superiority: they
had ‘discovered’ science and rationality. They felt divinely vindicated: the
‘elect’, who were called upon to understand the dark half of humanity.
Many still join this dying discipline to participate in a racial experience. A

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degree in Indology teaches less about Indian texts, philosophy, literature,
or culture than a traditional education. It also does not teach textual
criticism, as Philology and Criticism demonstrated. What is Indology’s
appeal?

Here, Fanon’s concept of ‘lactification’ can help us. Fanon says a black
woman undergoes ‘lactification’ when she dates a white man. (I should
add: Fanon isn’t talking about a relationship based on love, but one where
whiteness itself is the appeal.) In other words, she becomes more white: in
self-understanding, mannerisms, social status, etc. Applying Fanon’s
insight to Indian intellectuals, we can identify a similar need to present as
white — if not racially then at least intellectually, culturally and socially.
This takes the form of an unrelenting critique of Indian traditions, customs
and conditions.

Meanwhile, Western scholars who not only teach but dignify and
encourage this behaviour are revered as prophets. They offer suitably
secular redemption in the form of the belief “I too can become white”.
Indology departments’ real appeal is that they offer Indians degrees in
lactification. They teach them to speak about their traditions as though
outsiders, with faint distaste. They teach them to disparage texts they
don’t understand. They learn to say: “we don’t believe in these gods and
ceremonies”. Rammohan Roy was the first thoroughly lactified Hindu.

MR: What has been the response to your work in academia both in the
West and India?

Except the Indologists, everyone loved our books. Many Western

academics appreciated our critique. They saw it as original and path-
breaking. The Nay Science was compared with Nietzsche’s Birth of

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Tragedy, its great predecessor. Indologists had problems with our work.
Remember what we are doing is unprecedented: two Indians critiquing
Western scholarship and turning a critical lens on Indology.

A well-bred Indian should be grateful to Western scholars for ‘critically’

expounding Indian texts. He ought to acknowledge he is ‘religious and
confessionally bound’ and bear a heavy cross for caste. Instead, we were
using our knowledge of intellectual history to question Indologists’ claims
of scientificity and universality. Indologists experienced anger and shame
at being caught out in this racial game. They tried to reinstate racial
categories (eg, by accusing us of ‘Hindutva’). They knew it would never
stick, but they desperately clung to the old game of racial oversight. It
cannot be resurrected. Indologists’ authority — scholarly, epistemological,
methodological, intellectual, and public — has crumbled.

MR: What is the status of these kinds of studies in India?

Unfortunately, a generation behind the West. Indians quickly assimilated

the natural sciences and technology, but they lag behind in the
humanities. Whereas global philosophy and race theory are current here,
Indian universities teach a curriculum of dead European philosophers.
People chant slogans such as right and left, but who reads Hegel critically?
The reception of Sanskrit texts is filtered through orientalists such as
Friedrich Schlegel, Max Muller, etc.

Many people know old chestnuts such as Schlegel’s remark, “everything,

absolutely everything comes from India”, or Muller’s “If I were asked under
what sky the human mind has most fully developed […] I should point to
India”. The fact that Schlegel made this statement while excluding black
Africa from rationality, articulate speech, and humanity goes

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unmentioned. Irrespective of the ruling party, veneration of Europeans
continues. Government conferences obligatorily feature a Sanskritist from
every European nation, while ignoring Africa and Asia. I won’t speak of
Indians who break out in hives when someone mentions the Ramayaṇa.
Indians are ashamed of their texts — the more so the less they know their
contents. They can only accept what Indologists have sanitised and
sanctified and offered to them. Indologists are treated like godmen in India
— a clear sign of internalised colonisation.

MR: How does this impact our current understanding and engagement
with the Mahabharata?

Returning to the Mahabharata requires a deconstruction of canons of

knowledge and method created in nineteenth-century Europe. This is why,
before embarking on positive interpretations, we wrote The Nay Science. It
traced the history of Western misinterpretations of the Mahabharata. We
showed how prevailing dogmas about the Mahabharata originated with
Lassen’s racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Brahmanic views. In Philology and
Criticism we showed how these views survive in barely veiled form in the
work of contemporary scholars. Two hundred years of so-called
critical Mahabharata studies were a waste.

Western scholars neither understood the work nor contributed to textual

criticism. We should be very suspicious when scholars use ‘critical’, ‘text-
historical method’, or ‘textual history’ in relation to the Mahabharata. They
ignored the actual text for a fantasy, coining silly terms such as ‘oral bardic
epic’, ‘Ksatriya epic’, ‘Brahmanic takeover’, ‘normative redaction’, ‘textual
makeover’” etc. Every time Indologists second-guessed Sukthankar, they
erred. He is the greatest Mahabharata scholar after Nilakaṇṭha. I think of
Vish as the greatest Mahabharata commentator of our time, but he stands

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with me in acknowledging Sukthankar as the genius who appreciated what
the Mahabharata is. The final prejudice we must overcome is history
equals the real. Once these layers of misinterpretation are removed, the
text can shine forth again as an intellectual creation and a work of art.

MR: What is our take away?

Colonisation leaves scars. Nothing is more dehumanising than living in

the gaze of the other. As Vishwa says, the only possibility for dialogue is
to become historically self-aware, ethical and thoughtful. Many Indologists
think they can make a career by baiting Indians, hoping for a fatwa of
some kind. Scholars need to see that such behaviour is damaging for them
collectively. Particular individuals may gain notoriety by flaming. But the
discipline as a whole suffers.

Ultimately, we have to decide whether Indology is a discipline in the

humanities or a social science with interventionist concerns. This also
applies to Indians: for example, D D Kosambi. What is Kosambi’s original
contribution to Marxism? He adopted a crude understanding of Marxist
ideology, applied it reductively, and then tore up texts according to
categories he had absorbed uncritically. This is not reading. It is vandalism
masquerading as intellectualism.

MR: How do you recommend we address and engage with the text
now?

We must remember two points. First, ancient texts are distant from us.
Broken frameworks of reception, conquest and colonisation, Western
education, historicism, etc, make it impossible to read them
straightforwardly. When we try, we project contemporary social and

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political realities on them. We impose our language and idiom on them.
What results is a hybrid understanding. For instance, vahanas are
airplanes, astras are nuclear missiles, etc. We give calendric dates for
Bhisma’s death or Krishna’s avatara.

Orientalists mock Indians for this, but who took away their interpretive
frameworks? Who destroyed the language — I mean the semantic system
of meanings — they spoke? Isn’t the real problem that Indians have to
transpose concepts that make perfect sense within their episteme into an
alien episteme? Why must they explain their views to strangers, who
anyway consider the Western worldview the sole normative one? This is
why in The Nay Science we first undertook a deconstruction of Western
interpretations of the Mahabharata. We cannot understand a text
traditionally unless we first bracket our contemporary episteme.

The second point we must remember is: despite all historical distance,
ancient texts still make a claim on us. They are the reason we have
scholarship in the humanities, and not vice versa. Sukthankar once said,
“what is the secret of this book of which India feels after nearly two
thousand years that she has not yet had enough? It would be a rather
hazardous conjecture to suppose that such a thing might perchance
happen also to the works of the critics of the Mahabharata.”

Not only does the text make a claim on us; it also remains close to us,
closer than we are to ourselves. Sukthankar again: “we must therefore
grasp this great book with both hands and face it squarely. Then we shall
recognise that it is our past which has prolonged itself into the present.
We are it: I mean the real WE!” Scholarship on the Mahabharata is worth
less than the retellings published today. Through them, the text is making
its claim felt and inviting us to rediscover ourselves. Vishwa keeps

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emphasising the notion of continuing revelation in Hinduism. Texts
approach us. We only need remain open for them.

MR: Any final words? What is your next book?

Indologists claim their work is critical and scientific, it is philology, and it

provides a history of India. We already examined the first two claims in The
Nay Science and Philology and Criticism. We showed how their work was
neither scientific nor objective. Their philology hardly deserved the name:
we established this vis-a-vis Lassen, Holtzmann Jr, Garbe, Jacobi, and
Oldenberg in The Nay Science. In Philology and Criticism, we show how
Andreas Bigger, Reinhold Grunendahl, Walter Slaje, Michael Witzel, Oskar
von Hinuber, James L Fitzgerald, John Brockington, etc, committed
elementary philological errors. They had not understood basic concepts in
textual criticism.

Eli Franco (in his review of The Nay Science) states, “the nature and origin
of ‘Indology’ [as Indian philology] were already clearly stated in A W
Schlegel’s founding essay”. He also says, “premodern India was not in
possession of its history”, and implies that Indians ought to be grateful to
Indologists for providing them with a history. This is the final task: to show
that the history of India Indologists provided is a racial history: a story
about how civilising white Aryans invaded India and brought culture to
the aborigines. Once we show this in our next book, all three pillars of
Indology — science, philology, history — will fall.

This interview was first published on Indictoday and has been

republished here with permission.

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