New Book Re:Vedic Influence on 19th America

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 -

 

 

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b..

Abhinavagupta

 

c.. Terms of

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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 ---