Fwd: Fwd: details of book (D.N. Jha, Cow)

[Guest guest]

Bharat Gupt <abhinav

vishalsagarwal <vishalagarwal

Re: Fwd: Re: details of book (D.N. Jha, Cow)

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 12:44:08 +0530

 

Dear Vishal,

 

Thanks for forwarding me this mail from Indology list from which

I have not received any mail for quite some time. May be the list

is not active or they may have d me on their own.

[Moderator's note: Dr. Gupt has apparently forgotten that he set his

INDOLOGY preferences to "no mail." They have now been changed

to suit his expressed desire to receive postings again by email.]

Anyway, as Dr. Witzel has been so anxious to verify things from Dr.Jha,

I feel the need to put the record straight.

 

I am amused that Dr.Jha considers me a "great man" without having

met me as per his memory. However the truth is that Dr.RS Sharma

was invited to deliver a talk at my college and Dr.Jha accompanied

him. In the discussion following the talk, some questions were put to

Dr.Sharma by me about the state of Indian music in medieval period.

I was interested in his understanding as I was those days reading

the medieval histories for musicological research under the guidance

of the famous musicologist Acharya KC Brihaspati. To my disappointment

and to that of some other history faculty, Dr. Sharma dismissed the

whole subject of patronage to musicians as a "feudal preoccupation".

In the ensuing discussion, Dr. Jha commented that he listened to

music becasue his idols Marx and Lenin loved music to which I retorted

that he should listen to music for its own sake.

 

As the proceedings of this lecture, delivered to the faculty

of my College, were never published in print, Dr. Jha is free to

deny or forget, whatever he said. Now after all these years,

it is just one person's word against another, or shall we say of

an 'eminent historian's' against that of a "great man".

There is nothing to it more than that.

 

I recall things becasue I had invited Sharma and Jha and arranged

for the lecture, something slightly more than the usual academic

routine.

 

But what is still so amusing is that having no memory of having

met me or the dialogue at the talk, Dr. Jha has concluded that I

am fabricting lies. And even more than that, Dr. Witzel

has called my mention of the dialogue at the lecture as baseless

rumour, when we have amnesia on Dr.Jha's part and proper academic

recollection on my side as I was anxious to hear about the subject

from historians.

 

Dr.Jha and many other historians perhaps have no interest

in the history of music otherwise they might have condescended to

attend many of my lectures in town and the univs over the last ten

years.

 

As for Dr.Jha's mission of spreading the word about beef eating

in ancient India, I do recall how at the age of 16 I enjoyed shocking my

grandmother by showing her the lines from Valmiki on how

Rama killed a deer and served the roasted flesh to Sita.

I have long grown out of that adolescent use of texts.

 

But the Marxists are playing that adolscent politics for imagined

political gains. They do not recognise and appreciate the rise of ahimsa

as a moral and intellectual doctrine but paint it as a eco-political

conflict

between Brahminical meat guzzlers/livestock looters

and the exploited cattle owning vaishyas

who turned to Budhism/Jainism for respite.

By showing the war of religious communities

they wish to deconstruct religion itself.

 

They highlight or suppress historical data selectively.

They insist on blowing up the minor plunders by Jats and Sikhs but

preach total suppression of the vast millennium long Islamic plunders (see

my

rebuttal to Harbans Mukhia, IExpress, no verbal report this time).

 

In his mission, Dr.Jha is neither alone nor contrained,

he has the vast backing of a major a political force.

 

Should it be necessary, feel free to post this mail to any email group.

regards,

 

Bharat Gupt

Associate Professor, Delhi University,

PO Box 8518, Ashok Vihar, Delhi 110052 INDIA.

mobile:9810077914

home phones 91+11+724 1490, fax/TEL 741-5658,

email: bharatgupt

homepage: http://personal.vsnl.com/bharatgupt

 

 

 

 

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