Decolonizing Indian Studies

By Arvind Sharma

The present Indian academic self-understanding of its history and culture is largely Western in origin. This Western intellectual enterprise, however, went hand in hand with a Western political enterprise, i.e. the colonization of India. This raises the question: To what extent, if any, did the two developments influence each other? It also raises another question: To what extent did West’s cultural presuppositions influence its understanding of Indian civilization?
The central epistemological issue which these questions raise is the following: What significance does the fact that the self-understanding of a culture is mediated by that of another culture, over which it was culturally and politically dominant, possess for the votaries of the culture whose self-understanding has thus been mediated in this fashion?
This question is not merely of historical but also of contemporary interest, for in an increasingly globalizing world, in which power is unevenly distributed at various levels, the self-understanding of all cultures is likely to be influenced by how they are being presented by other cultures. Furthermore, in such a world, shifting political alliances may generate new intellectual configurations, whose legitimacy may require constant examination. The essays in this book address these and similar issues.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: D.K. Printworld
• Release date: Mar 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9788124611951

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Decolonizing Indian Studies

Decolonizing Indian Studies

Edited by

Arvind Sharma

Cataloging in Publication Data — DK

[Courtesy: D.K. Agencies (P) Ltd. ]

Decolonizing Indian Studies (Conference) (2010 :

Denver, Colorado)

Decolonizing Indian studies / edited by Arvind Sharma.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9788124608326

1. India – Study and teaching – Congresses. 2. India –

Colonial influence – Congresses. I. Sharma, Arvind,

editor. II. Title.

DDC 954 23

ISBN 978-81-246-1195-1 (E-Book)

ISBN 978-81-246-0832-6 (HB)

First published in India, 2015

© Individual Authors

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Preface

T

here

is a striking fact about the present self-understanding of the Indians regarding their history and culture, which they only discover in due course. It is the fact that this self-understanding, to the extent that it relies on the reconstruction of India’s history and culture over the past few centuries, is largely the work of foreigners and not Indians. This historical fact is echoed rhetorically in the statement attributed to V.S. Naipaul, that India is the only country in the world whose history has been written by foreigners.

There is another fact, which goes hand in hand with this one: that such reconstruction of India’s history and culture was carried out during a period for most of which India was either being colonized, or was a colony of Great Britain.

This raises the question: What implication does this political fact have for the narrative about Indian history and culture which emerged during this period?

The papers in this book address this issue and were delivered at a conference which met from 8-10 October 2010. This conference, whose proceedings constitute the book, was organized under the auspices of the Uberoi Foundation, Denver, Colorado, USA, for which the editor and the contributors remain grateful.

Some of the actions taken by the new Government of India, after it came to power in 2014, have rendered this book even more relevant. We hope it will be welcomed by all interested in those matters.

Arvind Sharma

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgement

Introduction

1. Indigenous, Non-Western Feminisms in Early Buddhist Literature

- Rita M. Gross

2. Conflicting Narratives of Indian Science

- Subhash Kak

3. Revisiting the Astronomy of Vedic Times with Planetarium Software

- B.N. Narahari Achar

4. Understanding Gandhi’s Brahmacarya: Hermeneutical Challenges

- Veena Rani Howard

5. Deorientalizing Dr. Ambedkar

- Shrinivas Tilak

6. Female Infanticide: A High-Caste Hindu Practice?

- Veena Talwar Oldenburg

7. Hindu Theology and the Decolonization of Indian Studies: Addressing Three Common Objections

- Jeffery D. Long

8. Lost in Transmission? The Perils and Promise of Vedic Dharma in the West

- Rita D. Sherma

9. Orientalism and the Religion of the R̥g-Veda

- Arvind Sharma

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgement

The conference, whose proceedings constitute this book, was organized under the auspices of the Uberoi Foundation, Denver, Colorado, USA.

Introduction

Arvind Sharma

I

C

entral

to the present work is the realization that India’s past, as we know it today, was reconstructed by Western Indology. This fact is freely accepted by both Western and Indian scholars. One Indian scholar, the historian K.M. Panikkar, offers the following glowing tribute to Western Indologists while recognizing this fact:

All this reconstruction of India’s past and the translation and popularization of great Indian philosophical and religious classics was the work almost exclusively of European scholars: English, German, French, Swedish, Russian, in fact scholars from every part of Europe. It was only in the last decades of the nineteenth century that Indian scholarship began to participate effectively in this work. The foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal by Sir William Jones, poet, scholar and judge, the decipherment of the Asokan inscriptions, opening up the vista of ancient history from records preserved in stone, metals, and coins, the discovery of Ankor Vat in the overgrown jungles of Cambodia, the exploration of Central Asian caves by Stein, Pelliot and others, and finally the excavation at Mohenjodaro – these are but the most sensational events of a truly thrilling story of the rediscovery of a lost intellectual world through the disinterested work of foreign scholars. Nor should one forget to mention the massive achievements of men in the different Universities of Europe and later of America – Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Heidelberg, Leyden, Harvard – who through love of learning translated, interpreted and published the vast literature which lay buried in Sanskrit and Pali, thereby opening up not only to the West but to the new middle class in India itself an immense and almost unknown realm of religious thought and artistic achievement.¹

He then goes on to point out that this historical debt may possess a political component as well:

The question may legitimately be asked whether there would have been an Indian nationalism if this recovery of India’s past and the consequent creation of an Indian national image had not been achieved through the work of European scholars. The answer to this question is clear. There would undoubtedly have developed national movements in India, but not on the basis of only two nations dominantly Hindu and Muslim but of many regional states, the Marathas, the Andhras, the Bengalis and others. Without a Hindu ideology, picturing the Hindu people as one, which Western scholarship and historiography enabled Hindus to create and develop, the alternative would have been the growth of regional nationalism based on recent and still remembered histories. India in fact would have been balkanized into numerous states each cherishing a nationalism of its own and not recognizing the common nationhood.²

II

This fact, that reconstruction of India’s past was basically the work of Western Indologists, is of crucial significance for the contemporary Indian. The contemporary global reality is marked by the presence of difference civilizations in different parts of the globe, as exemplified by the Japanese and Chinese civilizations in the East, the Islamic in the Middle-East and elsewhere, the Western in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and so on. The Indic civilization belongs to this club as well.

One salient fact, however, distinguishes the Indic civilization from these. The present self-understanding of each of these major civilizations is based, by and large, on the work of scholars who belonged to these civilizations, but such self-understanding as the Indic civilization possesses today is largely the work, not of its own scholars but the result of the work of Western scholars. This fact sets Indic civilization apart from other civilizations.

If the self-understanding of one civilization is thus mediated through another civilization, then the question naturally arises: to what extent does the work of the scholars belonging to another civilization correctly reflect the assumptions of the civilization they are writing about? For instance, non-Muslims writing about Islam may not accept the Qur’ān as the word of God, which is a foundational Islamic belief. To the extent they do not do so, their presentation of the civilization, of which it is a central text, will reflect their own views about Islamic civilization, rather than the civilization’s own view about itself. If, therefore, future members of Islamic civilization relied on the work of non-Muslims for their own understanding of Islamic civilization, their self-understanding of their own civilization will have deviated from what it would have been had it not been mediated in this manner.

So a unique question now arises in the case of Indic civilization – in a way it does not arise, to that extent, in the context of other civilizations: to what extent has its foundational self-understanding been affected by the intellectual intervention of another civilization? If Indic civilization wants to form a concept of its true identity, there is no escaping this question.

The purpose of this book is to carry out such an exercise and to determine where and when the Western presentation of Indic civilization does not seem to conform to the civilization’s own understanding of itself, based on its own sources and resources. There is no assumption here that Western scholarship in general necessarily misrepresents Indic civilization; there is the assumption, however, that this could have happened in some and even many cases. If it has, then the purpose of the book is to identify where this has happened and to try to figure out why it might have happened. For it is only at the end of such an exercise that the members of Indic civilization can place due confidence in the scholarly representation of their identity.

III

Now when we react to this fact – that India’s past was essentially reconstructed by Western scholars – and question some parts of this reconstruction, as happens in this book, then we discover that there is word for the place where we stand in doing so. That place is called the response threshold.

We owe this expression to Eric J. Sharpe. He writes:

A response threshold is crossed when it becomes possible for the believer to advance his or her own interpretation against that of the scholar. In classical comparative religion this was hardly a problem, since most of the scholar’s time was spent investigating the religions of the past and often of the very remote past. Interpretations might be challenged, but only by other specialists working according to Western canons and conventions. Today, by contrast, a greater proportion of study is devoted to contemporary or at least recent, forms of living in which the views of both partners are (at least in theory) equally important. The response threshold implies the right of the present-day devotee to advance a distinctive interpretation of his or her own tradition – often at variance with that of Western scholarship – and to be taken entirely seriously in so doing.³

IV

A conference, organized at Denver from 8-10 October 2010, was an exercise from this response threshold. It brought together scholars to respond to some aspects of Western Indology under the title: Decolonizing Indian Studies, for the period in which India’s past was reconstructed, also represented the period in which India was a colony of the West.

This book is the outcome of that conference.

The basic idea underlying the conference, which constituted its thematic unity, was to examine the thesis that certain aspects of Indian reality – be they political, religious, social, philosophical, and so on – which have been identified as Indian, may not be so much Indian as the product or outcome of colonial rule over India, which have then been uncritically identified as inherent features of the Indian reality, disregarding their historically contingent (in this case colonial) nature or origin.

The following example might help clarify the point. Observers of the Indian scene sometimes remark on the absence of social conscience in India, in the sense that temples might seem more concerned with observing ritual punctilio than providing humanitarian services. There is some evidence which suggests⁴ that when East India Company took over the rule of Indian principalities which contained temples run by the rulers, it cut out such services in order to maximize its profits as a trading company, allowing only the ritual services to be conducted. One can now see how Hindu temples (or Hindus, or Hinduism) would then come to characterized as ritualistic and not ameliorative in their orientation in the eyes of outside observers. This would appear to be the case, however, not because Hinduism lacks this impulse but because of what the colonial presence did to the Hindu institutions. More historical research is required to document the truth of this suggestion and establish its scale, if true. It, however, provides a useful example of the kind of evidence this conference aimed at identifying and documenting in the course of its deliberations.

Should the example be considered too specific, a broad range of themes on which the participants could draw upon are listed and serve to illustrate the ambit of the conference:

1. The colonial dismantling of the civilizational infrastructure of Indian – specially educational, ecclesiastical, and economic – and the distorted impression this generates;

2. the misreading of scientific and social-scientific data, leading to mistaken conclusions about the civilization, especially in astronomy, mathematics, and archaeology;

3. the effects of foisting a Western conception of religion on the Indian reality, specially as leading to the potential fragmentation of the dharma tradition and compromising its cross-fertilization through the centuries;

4. the problem of the transmission of the Indian spiritual and cultural tradition such as Yoga, Āyur-Veda, Prāṇāyāma, Philosophy, and Metaphysics to the West and its maladaption, misappropriation, and misrepresentation;

5. the problems and pitfalls which beset the academic study of Indic religious traditions, such as the neglect of the emic perspective, the further neglect of the hermeneutical method in favour of the historical; the overuse of the anthropological method; and the underutilization of the ‘philosophy of religion’ approach to the study of these religions;

6. an examination of whether the Saidian Orientalist critique also applies to Indian Studies; and

7. a critical review of the contribution of the pioneering Indologists in constructing the contours of contemporary Indian studies.⁵

The readers of this book are encouraged to pursue their own researches along these lines.

---

¹ Panikkar, M., The Foundations of New India, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968, p. 168.

² Ibid., pp. 168-69.

³ Sharpe, Eric J., Study of Religion: Methodological Issues, in Mircea Eliade, editor-in-chief, The Encyclopedia of Religion, New York: Macmillan, 1987, vol. 14, p. 25.

⁴ See Bajaj, Jiotendra, and M.D. Srinivas, Annam Bahu Kurvita, Madras: Centre for Policy Studies, 1996, Epilogue II, pp. 191-200.

⁵ I am indebted for these formulations to Dr. Rita Sherma.

1

Indigenous, Non-Western Feminisms in Early Buddhist Literature

Rita M. Gross

I

n

discussions about colonialism and post-colonialism, women are frequently the subject of contention. Defenders of the indigenous, whether indigenous themselves or Western commentators, often claim that (Western) colonialists interfere (inappropriately, of course) with indigenous views and practices regarding women. I am struck by how often indigenous women are burdened with retaining traditional perspectives, frequently expressed by their dress and subservient behavior, while men are free to take on foreign, often Western perspectives, whether of dress or ideology.

No ideology is more condemned, both by indigenous commentators and some Western observers, than feminism, whatever might be meant by that term. A frequent line of argument claims that indigenous women (and men) would never question or be upset by male dominance, which, it would be hard to contest, is the norm in most, if not all, Asian cultures, were it not for the foreign comments of Western feminists. Thus, (Western) feminists are cast in the role of interferers and interlopers into an otherwise peaceful acceptance of male dominance as the norm and as normal. The usual assumption is that feminism is foreign to indigenous cultures, that ideas about gender equality and gender neutrality or dissatisfaction with male dominance, could only come from foreign, outside sources. This claim is put forward by some indigenous commentators, but it has also been put forward by some Western, often self-proclaimed feminist commentators who like to criticize their Western colleagues who identify more personally with certain Asian, usually Buddhist, perspectives.

These Western adherents to Asian perspective often do take a feminist stance towards the Asian spiritual perspective they have made their life orientation, but the source of our feminism is highly questionable. While, to Western outsiders to Asian traditions, the feminism of Western adherents to Asian traditions such as Buddhism might seem to be derived from the Western side of their heritages, to those of us who have nearly lifelong allegiance to an ostensibly Asian tradition, our feminisms regarding those perspectives are more subtle. Most often we see our feminism strongly represented in the traditions in which we now live.

In the paper, I will illustrate how commentators, both Western and Asian, regard the current attempts to reintroduce bhikṣuṇī¹ ordination into the Theravādin and Tibetan streams of Buddhism as somehow the result of the foreign influence of Western feminism.² Then I will challenge the assumption that any feminist-like innovations proposed for contemporary Buddhism must be the result of Western influence by demonstrating that similar feminist moves to improve the status and image of women took place centuries ago in late canonical and post-canonical Theravāda literature. These feminist innovations involve additions made to the stories of women important to the life of the Buddha, especially his foster mother Prājapati and his wife Yaśodharā. Thus, what we now call feminism may well be indigenous to Buddhism, though not by that name.

The Battle against Bhikṣuṇī Ordination

As is well known, Buddhism originally consisted of a fourfold saṅgha – monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen – which is how the Buddha most often referred to the religious institution he had set up. As is also well known, the procedures for fully ordaining nuns died out in or were never transmitted to Theravādin and Tibetan forms of Buddhism, though this procedure is flourishing in many forms of East-Asian Buddhism, particularly in China and Korea. However, even in those forms of Buddhism that currently do not have bhikṣuṇī ordination, less prestigious forms of female renunciation did and do exist. Finally, as is also well known, introducing or re-introducing bhikṣuṇī ordination has become an important project for some Buddhist leaders and the movement has met with mixed success. Bhikṣuṇī ordination has been successfully, if sporadically, re-introduced into Theravāda Buddhism. In the two most commented on cases, there are now communities of fully ordained nuns in Sri Lanka who are accepted as such by some monks and laity. In Thailand, the situation is much more complicated. There are Thai women who are fully ordained nuns but the Thai monastic saṅgha is quite opposed to them and their movement and will not recognize them as legitimate monastics. In the Tibetan case, despite the Dalai Lama’s claim that if a Buddha were present today, he would surely permit bhikṣuṇī ordination, he will not go against the wishes of senior monks of his order who are against allowing the bhikṣuṇī ordination.³ At present, women practicing in the Tibetan tradition who are determined to be fully ordained can take ordination in the Chinese Dharmagupta lineage while continuing to wear Tibetan style robes and practicing in that tradition. They will be accepted as nuns by most Tibetans. However this solution is not attractive to many Tibetan women who wear robes and live as perpetual novice nuns. Speculation and hope are widespread that the much younger seventeenth Karmapa⁴ will soon ordain nuns, so that in at least some instances, full bhikṣuṇī ordination would be available in all three major Buddhist traditions.

Given that all these moves to introduce bhikṣuṇī ordination occurred at the same time as a major worldwide feminist movement, which most see as Western in its origins, it is not surprising that cause and effect relationships between these two movements have been posited. I find it quite interesting that, as a generalization, proponents of the bhikṣuṇī ordination movement downplay or minimize their involvement with feminism, while those who oppose the movement take great pains to try to link the desire for bhikṣuṇī ordination with feminism and to label the resulting concoction Western. It is thus obvious that both proponents of and adversaries to the bhikṣuṇī ordination movement feel that linking the movement with feminism discredits it. I will illustrate with a few stories taken from published and non-published anonymous sources.

Recently I did a pre-publication review of an article on the subjectivities of Thai mae chi, the white-robed female renunciates who keep eight precepts but have neither monastic nor lay status in Thai Buddhism. In fact, it can easily be claimed that they are not accorded the privileges given to either monastics or laity. They wear robes but receive none of the attendant privileges, such as free medical care, education, and transportation accorded to monks because, technically, they are laywomen. But because they wear robes, they are treated like monastics when it comes to certain privileges of citizenship, such as the right to vote and engage in politics. In other words, they have none of the privileges normally accorded to monastics but nevertheless share in the liabilities of monastics. The article contained many fine interviews in which mae chi expressed their views of why they do not usually seek ordinations as bhikkhunis, even though that possibility is now open on a very limited basis to Thai women. So far, so good. It is not to be expected that large numbers of women would seek a new option that is routinely vilified in Thai press and by the Thai (male) saṅgha. But in the surrounding commentary, the author, who appears to be Western and non-Buddhist, discusses only one explanation of and motivation for those preferring the option of pursuing bhikkhunī ordination – Western feminism. She quotes many mae chi who claim that seeking bhikkhunī ordination would be merely copying Western feminism and who claim that it is improper for Buddhists to fight for individual rights or bhikkhunī status, that such attitudes mimic Western feminism. Thus, these materials are analyzed in terms of only two polar opposites – accepting at face value one indigenous interpretation that justifies traditional norms regarding gender arrangements or analyzing its alternative, seeking bhikkhunī ordination, as akin to liberal, secular, Western feminism. A third possibility, that those who seek bhikkhunī ordination rather than the status of mae chi are doing so out of genuinely Buddhist concerns and motivations, which might resemble rather being the result of Western feminism, is completely ignored. That possibility did not seem to occur to the author of the article. Such an approach is common to Western feminist but non-Buddhist scholars who frequently criticize feminism as inappropriate for Asian religious contexts without ever considering that, just as there are indigenous traditions that are quite conservative about reforming gender arrangements, there are indigenous⁵ perspectives promoting and restoring bhikṣuṇī ordinations.

At about the same time, I was also asked to do a pre-publication review of an article on issues pertaining to bhikṣuṇī ordination in the Tibetan context. This article was mainly about the famous international conference on bhikkhunī/bhikṣuṇī ordination held at Hamburg in 2007 as the culmination of many years of studying the issue. The conference also resulted in a book publishing many of the papers presented at the conference, as well as an overall report about the conference.⁶ The two reports differ considerably with each other, with the unpublished report going into great detail about differences in perspective that became palpable between Western Tibetan nuns and indigenous Tibetan (novice) nuns. These differences are also reported in the book that resulted from the conference, and, indeed, while I did not attend that conference, I have heard numerous eyewitness accounts of the tensions that developed. The unpublished paper goes into great depth and detail analysing various power dynamics between the two groups of women that probably did contribute greatly to the tensions that arose at the conference. Where I faulted the paper is that, like the previously discussed paper, this author also attributes 100 per cent of the motivation of the Western Tibetan nuns to seek bhikṣuṇī ordination to their Western values, thus totally discounting their Buddhist values. Furthermore, this author seems to delight in the fact that the Western nuns were unsuccessful in their attempt to obtain approval from Tibetan ecclesiastical authorities for the bhikṣuṇī ordinations. In my evaluation of the paper, I wrote something to the effect that "these Western women seek bhikṣuṇī ordination not because they are Westerners but because they are Buddhists. A non-Buddhist Westerner would not devote so much of her life energy to restoring bhikṣuṇī ordination. In fact, such a cause would be irrelevant to her."

Both the published and the unpublished accounts of the Hamburg Conference emphasize that the indigenous Tibetan women who did not support the agenda of introducing bhikṣuṇī ordination into Tibetan Buddhism did so not especially because of demerits in the project itself