Guest guest Posted January 27, 2005 Report Share Posted January 27, 2005 indicjournalists, "Gautam Sen" <sengautam01> wrote: "This book is especially important because it has become fashionable for people to say that Gandhi was influenced by Thoreau, which is true, but as this book shows, Thoreau's thought was deeply rooted in his study of classical Indian thought. So a U-Turn of Indic thought via American transcendentalists came back to India via Gandhi - an important link that should not be lost. K.G. Srivastava's, "Bhagavad-Gita and the English Romantic Movement," Macmillan India, 2002, is a good start on the parallel 19th century appropriations in UK." from Gautam Sen T. S. ELIOT AND INDIC TRADITIONS - A Study in Poetry and Belief (by Cleo McNelly Kearns) Inbox rajivmalhotra2001 <rajiv.malhotra@w...> to Abhinavagupta Show options Jan 26 (12 hours ago) ---------------- The story behind the republishing of this book on Eliot: Several years ago, while critiquing the U-Turns by many ex-Hindus such as Sri Aurobindo followers who converted into Ken Wilber's group, I met Dr. Cleo Kearns who lives near my house, and found her to be a very well informed academic scholar about Hinduism who practiced yoga/meditation seriously. BUT she did not consider herself a Hindu by any stretch of imagination. Our discussions centered on how/why many westerners had U-Turned back to their native traditions. (Cleo now regards herself as a very serious Christian after several years of having had a Hindu guru.) I discovered through her that TS Eliot had also gone through a similar crisis of identity while pursuing Hinduism studies at Harvard, and had reclaimed his Protestant identity in a public reconversion. Her book was 10 years old, the product of her PhD at Cambridge, but was not widely read or known. After thoroughly enjoying reading her book, I brought the Eliot- Hinduism relationship to the attention to many Indians who are well placed in English Departments. I received a variety of responses as to why this link was unimportant "even if it was true." Indian English authors/scholars told me that reading texts through the authors' lens was made obsolete by postmodernist theories. Some felt that Eliot's personal experiences behind his famous poems was irrelevant - even though it is normal while studying thinkers to bring in their personal experiences as background and context. Others felt that linking Eliot with Hinduism would be dangerous as it would encourage "chauvinism" and "fascism." Finally, there were those who were outright embarassed that their favorite author was less than pure western and especially that much of his inspiration came from Hinduism which these desis had internalized as a scourge to disassociate from. This feedback about desi embarassment surprised Cleo when I explained it to her, and I was able to convince her to work on a project to bring her writing into greater prominence with Indians in English Departments. Her attending the Indic Colloquium organized by The Infinity Foundation (also attended by Sunthar among 40+ top scholars) was one step towards this. (See: http://www.infinityfoundation.com/indic_colloq/colloq_home.htm ) Subsequently, Cleo and I agreed that one barrier to greater awareness of her book was that its price (around $70) was prohibitive for India, and also that it had not been well promoted by the western presses. So the idea of an Indian edition was born. Infinity Foundation selected Prof. Paranjape's Samvad Foundation in Delhi to publish a new Indian edition; Cambridge University Press agreed to sell us the rights (for a nominal fee) to do such an edition, and the result of two years of hard work by Cleo and Makarand Paranjape was this new edition. I was present in Delhi when Makarand officially released the new book. Thanks to Cleo's great work, an important milestone was reached. However, reactions to this book among India's English-wallahs have been mixed. The untainted youth entering English Honors find this history behind America's greatest poet of the 20th century fascinating. But my discussion with second year students from Delhi University showed that even by their second year they are polluted by the politics of their faculty: these English students said that they were more interested in studying the "theories" of postmodernist westerners, and what these "theories" said of Eliot, rather than reading Eliot for themselves. (This is like saying that reading the movie review by a famous movie critic should replace seeing the movie itself!) Among third year and later students the trend was their interest in what is being called the "Indian English canon," i.e. a selection of works by writers like Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, etc. etc. These folks have positioned themselves as the proxy voices of a billion people of India. This middleman status is achoeved and maintained by dishing out the caste, cows, dowry, sati, dalit, etc. stereotypes which the western market and the whitened desis expect this genre to consist of. It is in this context that the new book I mentioned in my post #2710 should be taken seriously, as it explains the economics and politics behind such "official canons" of third world cultures, and how certain "voices" are brand managed as being "authentic". This is no simple intellectual tidal wave to deal with. The epicenter of anti-Indic rhetorec has shifted from Religion Departments and History Departments because their "final" conclusions are "closed," and merely need to be quoted by other disciplines authoritatively. The widespread distribution of these ideas is now in the hands of English Departments and film/journalism, the unofficial (and largely unconscious) organs of the New Imperialism of today. Against such odds, I started in my own humble and small scale way a project to facilitate yet another book, this one on Ralph Emerson's deep study/practice of Hinduism which launched the Transcendentalism literary movement in America in the 19th century. Prof. Robert Gordon has just finished his manuscript on this, sponsored by a grant from The Infinity Foundation. It is titled, "Emerson and the Light of India," and gives a detailed historical and intellectual account of the transcendentalist movement's unacknowledged debt to Indic thought. We are discussing with publishers to ensure an inexpensive Indian edition. But there already exists a corpus of works to help a serious student understand the Indian roots of considerable "western" thought. "The Roots of Whitman's Grass," by T.R. Rajasekharaiah, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970, is out of print and is about another great American author's unacknowledged debt to India. "Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness, " by Alan Hodder, Yale U Press, 2001, is another eye-opener on this matter and is of recent avaliability, but it is priced out of range for India. This book is especially important because it has become fashionable for people to say that Gandhi was influenced by Thoreau, which is true, but as this book shows, Thoreau's thought was deeply rooted in his study of classical Indian thought. So a U-Turn of Indic thought via American transcendentalists came back to India via Gandhi - an important link that should not be lost. K.G. Srivastava's, "Bhagavad-Gita and the English Romantic Movement," Macmillan India, 2002, is a good start on the parallel 19th century appropriations in UK. These western appropriations of Indic thought later mutated into Huxley's "sameness" perennialism which we are living with today, and whose Indian roots are being erased. Besides literature, there were other parallel western conduits as well. Carl Jung played a key role - see Harold Coward's two excellent books from SUNY Press, one on Jung's appropriations and the later one on Yoga and Psychology in general. Liberal Christianity, expecially Catholicism, has been appropriating since early times (as described in Thomas McEvilley's, "The Shape of Ancient Thought," Allsworth Press, 2002). But bootlegging Hinduism to enhance Christianity got a boost when Teilhard de Chardin, arguably the most important Catholic theologian of the 20th c., appropriated Ramanuja's Vedanta - see Anne Hunt Overzee's, "The Body Divine," Cambridge U Press, 1992. Adding to this reading list, J.J. Clarke's, "Oriental Enlightenment," Routledge, 1997, is a good compilation of such influences. Harvard's Eugene Taylor has written about Indian influences on modern "western" psychology - again largely sidelined by the desis today. Since "theory" has replaced "text" in the desi English bandwagon now, it is important to mention Indic influences on "western" postmodern thought, and parallels/differences between them. "Derrida and Indian Philosophy," by Harold Coward, SUNY 1990, and the more recent Carl Olson's, "Indian Philosophers and Postmodern Thinkers," OUP India, 2002, are a good start, but this genre of research is slim and is often being discouraged by self-flagellating Indians. Here is the deeper matter: The core of postmodernism, i.e. post- structuralism, emerged out of structuralusm; but its debt to Indic thought has yet to be published. Ferdninand de Saussure is the key missing link to study for this. He is credited for launching this new wave of "western" thought. But what is sidelined is his own intellectuals history: Saussure's PhD was in Pannini's grammar, and he taught Sanskrit at the presitgeous Sorbonne in paris for most of his career. After his death, his students edited his class notes and that became the famous "starting point" of structuralism. But this edited set of notes REMOVED SANSKRIT references and made it look like a new/original work. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure ) Yet the core principles it contained are well-known to sanskrit grammarians since ages. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has attempted much serious research on this missing India-to-West link, except JNU's Sanskrit Prof. Kapur in a relatively unknown book on Sanskrit literary theory. The Sanskrit-to-Saussure-to-Structuralism intellectual development needs considerable more work. The point of all of the above is NOT to encourage going BACK, but just the opposite. The point is to put the Indian and western traditions into healthy intellectual engagement, for MUTUAL benefit. The above set of works would put Indian thought into relevance TODAY, at a much higher level of intellectualism than the stereotypes being used to introduce Indian culture in the academy and media. So why is this not being done? Why are there no Harvard South Asia forums, courses, seminars on such topics? My thesis is straightforward: A political movement today is to dismember India and its integrity as a nation, as a civilization, and as an identity. This is why Jack Hawley activists are busy promoting "Hinduism is illegitimate" and breeding young desi PhDs to be the next generation sepoys. This is why Sugata Bose's Harvard program is busy with forums on sati, incest, dowry, nuclear threats, etc. when framing India for the students and governmental think tanks. IF THEY LET IT BE WIDELY APPRECIATED THAT THE VERY SAME INDIAN CIVILIZATION THAT IS BEING DEMONIZED HAS BEEN THE ROOT OF SO MUCH OF TODAY'S "WESTERN" THOUGHT, WOULD IT NOT UNDERMINE THESE POLITICAL PROJECTS? Therefore, my efforts are no more than the proverbial butterfly flapping to try to shake the universe. regards, rajiv [Response to Sunthar's post at Abhinavagupta/message/2737] -- Abhinavagupta/ b.. Abhinavagupta c.. Terms of Service. ReplyForwardInvite rajivmalhotra2001 to Gmail Jack Hill <jackhill2@e...> to Abhinavagupta Show options 12:27am (8 hours ago) Rajiv... Your very interesting post on the Eliot book enlightened me on a few issues that had apparently been lurking around in remote corners of my consciousness. I've read some of the books that you refer to, and it always seems to me that most Westerners who have written on Hindu thought (I'm not even sure what "Hindu" really means, actually) don't really "get it." They always want to explain things, to gain an understanding through the discursive mind, which to me seems, while enjoyable enough as a pastime, will never lead to a revelation of the Truth on a deeper level. (Sorry if I'm not making much sense.) On the other hand, I do recall reading that Schopenhauer -- although he didn't have much access to Sanskrit scriptures, he was a pretty smart guy -- at least suggested that Hinduism was "the true religion." But please, Rajiv, if you don't mind, one query: What do you mean by "whitened desis"? And "the desi English bandwagon"? ==Shatrajit [Response to Rajiv's post at Abhinavagupta/message/2740] - Show quoted text - -- Abhinavagupta/ b.. Abhinavagupta c.. Terms of Service. ReplyForwardInvite Jack to Gmail Your message has been sent. Gautam Sen to Abhinavagupta Show options 9:20am (0 minutes ago) I am not sure if it is Rajiv's perceptive post below that is being referred to by Sunthar, but let me contribute some reflexive comments. I agree with Rajiv's analysis that the deeply flawed historical/religious canon on Indica is spreading to English literature departments (and elsewhere) as obiter dicta. I also accept that the Hindu fascist tag dogs attempts to revisit and revive scholarly understanding of Indic traditions in many well-established institutions, especially since the late 1990s. I immediately recognise as well the inverted racism of Westernised Indians, who find distasteful being touched by their own traditions. However, after more than than three decades of constant reflection on this issue I don't have a confident understanding why this is so, even though the obvious explanations do have something relevant to say. If Hindus are embarrassed by their antecedents why are not the Chinese and Muslims? The latter have a deservedly skeptical public reception in the West, but don't take it lying down. Even Muslims who are professionally successful and educated in West (and in the humanities) are prepared to engage you in defending some of the most problematic Koranic injunctions, say, on women: arguing it means something different or that is not how it was under the first four caliphs, etc. etc. On banal reason is that both these world communities (and the Japanese too) are insulated from exposure to the 'shock and awe' of the imperialistic virus emanating from Anglo-Saxon cultures through language. This is changing and some aspects of it clearly affect them too, as in the case of Japanese racism, which entails insecurity vis-a-vis Europeans and grim disdain for others. By contrast, educated Indians are exposed to the world of English culture pretty much when they open their eyes and suck their mother's milk. And its message is clear, without being a conspiracy, and we know what the message is: primordial denigration of Indica, arising from an unquestioning and unspoken assertion of Western superiority. As a result, Indians internalise and overdose massively on a sense of their own nothingness and the awful backwardness of their culture. Oddly, this conceptualisation simultaneously offers them an escape by creating a marginal place for Indica as the exotic, which is a necessary aspect of its substantive rejection. I vividly recall a brilliant English-medium educated cousin, now a IIM college professor, mouthing John Kennedy and Voltaire in the same breath as an eight year-old. Those of us who went to English-medium schools (wrongly always praised as necessarily providing a solid education - which I certainly did not receive!) were woefully ignorant about most things India. We knew very little about Indian traditions and despite growing up in Calcutta hardly ever read Tagore or heard the name of Vivekananda, leave alone someone less routinely recognised like Aurobindo. As far for Dayanand Saraswati, referred to as the Martin Luther of Hinduism, I became familiar with his name well past my mid-twenties! This educational absurdity, a product of India's misguided attempt to be secular, prevented English-educated Indians from gaining enough knowledge to even question some of the shoddy scholarship on Hindu traditions one often comes across. It also pre-empted acculturation in one's own traditions, something a very high proportion of Muslims get routinely as part of their religious education. Its immense resilience stems from being a community activity, a shared reflection that defines the core of their identity. An outstanding Muslim intellectual - the co-author for my current project - provides an excellent example of loyalty to his community even while arguing their conduct is stupidly counter-productive and their knowledge of the key texts (including the hadiths) quite appalling. But he would die with them rather than betray them as a community. Educated Hindus and Hindu Marxists, by contrast, don't even ponder this question and cosmopolitanism is the bedrock of their identity, which means, at the very least, an implied (and in practice substantive too) critique of their own antecedents. Of course they are in fact effectively joining and celebrating someone else's particularism in the process of perpetrating this fraud on themselves and others! To this one must add the political environment and financial inducements that facilitate and reinforce the pre-existing prejudices of this Hindu intelligentsia, which I have written about. The head of the DU English Department once revealingly confided,, in a moment of indiscretion, that she could not marry someone who did not speak 'good English' and an English man would be just fine. She complained bitterly soon after of the racial overtones during her Cambridge Ph.D viva. She remains unmarried in her 60s today because she could not meet anyone who knew T.S. Eliot and the modern poets as well as she did! She actually wrote on the influences on the early Eliot! One final point. I understand why Rajiv wants to illuminate the contrast between history-centric semitic religions and Hinduism, but there is a danger that the more immediately apprehensible issue of their importance as political ideologies is in danger of being obscured as a consequence. On this subject, Charles Freeman's, The Closing of the Western Mind (William Heinemann, London 2002) which contrasts the openness and tolerance of pagans/polytheists with Christianity is excellent.. Gautam Sen - Hide quoted text - On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:57:38 -0800, Jack Hill <jackhill2@e...> wrote: > > Rajiv... > > Your very interesting post on the Eliot book enlightened me on a few issues > that had apparently been lurking around in remote corners of my > consciousness. I've read some of the books that you refer to, and it > always seems to me that most Westerners who have written on Hindu thought > (I'm not even sure what "Hindu" really means, actually) don't really "get > it." They always want to explain things, to gain an understanding through > the discursive mind, which to me seems, while enjoyable enough as a > pastime, will never lead to a revelation of the Truth on a deeper level. > (Sorry if I'm not making much sense.) > > On the other hand, I do recall reading that Schopenhauer -- although he > didn't have much access to Sanskrit scriptures, he was a pretty smart guy > -- at least suggested that Hinduism was "the true religion." > > But please, Rajiv, if you don't mind, one query: > What do you mean by "whitened desis"? > And "the desi English bandwagon"? > > ==Shatrajit > > [Response to Rajiv's post at > > Abhinavagupta/message/2740] > --- End forwarded message --- Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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