SACW | 29 March 2004

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire   |  29 March,  2004
via:  www.sacw.net

[1] Sri Lanka: Fictions of homogeneity  (Sankaran Krishna)
[2] How a US historian sparked calls for his arrest - in India (Scott Baldauf)
[3] India: Defeat BJP Forum Statement  | Upcoming Press Conference 
(New Delhi,  March 30)
[4] India: What Lies Behind The Black Comedy  (Barun De)
[5] Book Review: 'Orienting India By Vasudha Dalmia' (Reviewed by 
Pamela Taylor)


--------------

[1]

The Daily Times [Pakistan]
March 29, 2004
Op-Ed.

Fictions of homogeneity
by Sankaran Krishna

Since they fought the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to a 
standstill in the late 1980s, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam 
have been regarded as a monolithic and ruthlessly single-minded 
organisation that would brook no dissent. As the self-anointed 
representatives of Sri Lankan Tamils, the LTTE made it clear that 
they regard a single, combined north-eastern province in Sri Lanka as 
their traditional homeland. In their various negotiations with 
Colombo, their publications, website, memorials, and national 
celebrations, they have consistently harped on the distinctive unity 
and singularity of the Sri Lankan Tamil people.
This belies reality. Fractures within that proclaimed unity have been 
apparent to many observers. Even so, recent news about serious 
infighting that has broken out between the northern and eastern wings 
of the LTTE, and the breaking away of the latter's commander Karuna, 
has come as a shocker. A tight-knit guerrilla organisation, led by a 
ruthless commander (Prabhakaran) who had not hesitated to eliminate 
even his closest friends in the past, is not expected to suddenly 
plunge into an unseemly factional struggle.
It is like Beria turning against Stalin and demanding his own 
republic during the heyday of the Soviet Union. Coinciding as it does 
with the complete breakdown in relations between President 
Kumaratunga (of the SLFP) and Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe (of 
the UNP) under Sri Lanka's Gaullist Constitution, the factional 
fighting has meant the virtual collapse of the peace talks. The 
Norwegian mediators have packed their bags and returned home - at 
least for now.
Stepping back from the minutiae of the current impasse, the rebellion 
within the LTTE indicates the hollowness of efforts at national 
self-determination based on putative ethnic, linguistic or religious 
homogeneity. In barely two decades, the LTTE's claim to represent an 
essential Tamil identity that spans their atraditional homeland in 
the north-eastern province has been unravelled. It is clear that 
alternative, pluralist, grounds for justice, equality and 
self-determination need to be articulated; they offer a more 
progressive basis for politics within the nation-states of South Asia.
The LTTE's brand of violent and suicidal nationalism is, ironically, 
the child of Sinhalese nationalism itself. In the immediate aftermath 
of independence in 1948, the legitimate aspirations of the Tamils 
could have been easily accommodated within a moderately federal 
dispensation. The Federal Party of the Tamils, led by SJ 
Chelvanayakam, strove for nearly three decades to get the Sinhalese 
political parties (the UNP and SLFP) to recognise Sri Lanka as a 
multi-ethnic and plural society. Their efforts were met with a series 
of betrayals.
The 1971 Constitution declared Sri Lanka to be a Buddhist country and 
enjoined the state to foster and protect that faith. The politics of 
language chauvinism, forced migration and settlement, academic and 
employment preferences for the majority community, and other overt 
forms of discrimination brought home to the Tamils the futility of a 
politics of moderation. The anti-Tamil pogroms through these decades, 
culminating in the horror of July 1983, inexorably drove the Sri 
Lankan Tamils to secessionism.
Just as the Sinhalese were unable to envision a postcolonial 
political order except in terms of majoritarian nationalism, the LTTE 
has proven to be equally puritanical and intolerant of dissent and 
otherness in the regions under its control. Even as far back as the 
early 1990s, after the departure of the IPKF, the LTTE had sought to 
cleanse the northern province of Muslims. It has killed many human 
rights activists and others who have dared question its authoritarian 
ways, physically eliminating many of its adversaries among other 
Tamil militant groups.
Historical tensions between the Jaffna Tamils and the Tamils of the 
eastern province, and with the sizable community of Sri Lankan Tamils 
in Colombo (not to mention the Estate Tamils of more recent Indian 
origin) are well known. The Eastern province has been home to a 
Tamil-speaking Muslim community for centuries and the latter's 
allegiance to the cause of Eelam has never been very strong. Decades 
of state-sponsored settlement schemes have changed the demographics 
of the province further, which now has a sizable population of 
Sinhalese as well. The violent efforts of the LTTE to present a 
monolithic front of Sri Lankan Tamils all across a unified 
north-eastern province has run aground because of this complex 
history.
The current deadlock in negotiations between the Sri Lankan state and 
the Tamils is all the more tragic when viewed against developments in 
the last decade. When Chandrika Kumaratunga assumed the presidency 
back in the mid 1990s, she came up with what seemed like a genuinely 
federalist and viable solution to the ethnic conflict. She went 
farther down the road in re-imagining Sri Lanka as a multiethnic and 
plural society than any previous regime, and seemed to have had the 
commitment to pull it off. At that time, her efforts failed in large 
part due to the inability of the LTTE to respond in kind, the 
opposition of the Buddhist clergy, and opponents in the UNP and even 
within her own party.
The Sinhalese majority seemed incapable of accepting the pluralist 
vision that President Kumaratunga offered. After another round of 
wars with the LTTE in the late 1990s, with resounding victories and 
defeats for both parties at various points, the latest peace talks 
brokered by the Norwegians seemed to offer some hope. For the first 
time since its inception, the LTTE seemed to back away from a 
separate nation-state of Eelam as a non-negotiable goal.
But with Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe making substantial 
headway in negotiations with the LTTE, this time President 
Kumaratunga, feeling cut out of the action, decided to throw a 
spanner in the works. As ever with Sri Lanka, the effort of one major 
party from the majority community to settle the ethnic question was 
invariably derailed by the other. Political scientists who preach the 
virtues of stability in a two-party dominant political system ought 
to look at Sri Lanka for an important corrective - it can work 
equally well to paralyse efforts at ethnic reconciliation. With 
elections to the dissolved parliament looming large, President 
Kumaratunga's SLFP has entered into an alliance with the Sinhala 
chauvinist hardliners of the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP). 
Generally, political leaders are supposed to mature and become less 
intransigent as the years go by. In Kumaratunga's case at least one 
can discern precisely the opposite trajectory.
Animating the ideologies of the UNP, SLFP, LTTE, JVP and various 
others in Sri Lanka is an underlying belief that every territorial 
unit is ideally occupied by a singular identity. Where there is more 
than one such identity, the majority group calls the shots with the 
rest accepting a permanent second-class status. Such beliefs run 
contrary to the entire history of movement, immigration, 
miscegenation, hybridity, inter-marriage, religious conversions, and 
multiple ways of being in the region of South Asia.
Indeed, sizable numbers here even identify themselves as having more 
than one faith. In India, for example, somewhere in excess of four 
hundred communities profess to be of both Islamic and Hindu faiths. 
And yet, the reigning fiction of so many political movements is one 
of desired homogeneity - of making territory and a singular identity 
coincide. As seen with the LTTE, even movements that ostensibly 
resist majoritarian nationalism of others find themselves replicating 
the same logic when it comes to their own imagined homeland. 
'Amajority' and 'aminority' are thus locked in a deadly embrace and 
the conclusion could lead to the untenable situation of proliferation 
of ever-smaller and ever more unviable nation-states.
The writer is professor of Political Science at University of Hawai'i at Manoa


_____


[2]

The Christian Science Monitor  [USA]
March 29, 2004

How a US historian sparked calls for his arrest - in India
By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

NEW DELHI - In India, the world's largest democracy, the freedom to 
express one's views is enshrined in the Constitution.

Except for jokes. Those can lead to violence.

Just ask James W. Laine, an American professor of religious studies. 
In his book about a 17th-century Indian warrior king, Chhatrapati 
Shivaji, Mr. Laine included a few "naughty jokes" told to him by 
Indians about Shivaji's parentage. The jokes fell flat among Indians 
who idolize Shivaji as the only Hindu general capable of halting the 
advance of the invading Muslim Mughal empire.

The book has been banned. Thugs ransacked the Indian institute where 
Laine did his research, and others attacked one of his former 
colleagues. Now, a state government in India has asked Interpol to 
help arrest Laine.

Laine is only the latest in a long string of authors - including 
Jawaharlal Nehru, Salman Rushdie, Khushwant Singh, and Taslima 
Nasreen - who have met the violent face of political correctness in a 
country that takes its heroes quite seriously. While Laine has 
apologized for any offense to Shivaji's supporters, the controversy 
has now taken on its own election year momentum.

"This is a kind of resurgence of intolerance taking place in all 
aspects of Indian life," says Khushwant Singh, a prominent Indian 
novelist in New Delhi. He notes that Hindu fundamentalists have 
smashed cameras used by film crews working for Mira Nair, director of 
Monsoon Wedding. They have also vandalized the work of M.F. Hussein, 
an Indian painter. "They [even] stopped the selling of Valentine's 
Day cards - it's a silly holiday, but people should be allowed to do 
silly things."

"The spirit of intolerance is on the upswing, and if you raise your 
voice against it, you're condemned, too," he adds.

But in an election year, few public figures are raising their voice 
in support of Laine. Indeed, every party seems to be getting into the 
thuggish act. Shiv Sena, a party based on the pro-Hindu nationalist 
image of Shivaji, attacked a leading Shivaji scholar who assisted 
Laine and blackened his face as a sign of shame. Another group 
ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) in Pune, 
where Laine worked. And now, it is the left- leaning secularist 
Congress Party that is calling for Laine's arrest and extradition. In 
an election year, it's hip to be hard-line.

To be sure, Laine's book is deliberately provocative, including the 
title: "Shivaji: a Hindu King in Islamic India." India, many retort, 
was never Islamic. Though it was ruled by Muslim conquerors for more 
than 500 years, most of the population remained Hindu. And in any 
case, Shivaji was the one man who resisted the Mughals, showing 
Indians that they could and should rule themselves.

The uproar echoes the Muslim mobs that rampaged in Delhi and Bombay 
over Salman Rushdie's 1988 book "Satanic Verses."

For this reason, Indian politicians are citing a few British-era 
measures for crowd control, called Sections 153 and 153A. These laws 
call for the arrest of someone who is "wantonly giving provocation 
with intent to cause riot," and "promoting enmity between different 
groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, 
language, etc. and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony."

These laws apparently apply to Laine's jokes that Shivaji's busy 
warrior dad may not have been his biological father. The laws haven't 
been applied, however, to the mob members who ransacked the BORI 
institute, nor to the Shambhaji Brigade spokesman, Shrimant Kokate, 
who threatened to hang BORI's elderly intellectuals.

Shiv Sena parliamentarian Sanjay Nirupam decries the violence against 
BORI, but says Laine should be "brought to justice."

"It is an attempt to defame our national hero," says Mr. Nirupam, in 
a phone interview from Bombay. "When the Mughal King Aurangzeb was 
leading his army to victory from north to south, Shivaji was the only 
Hindu leader who stopped him in western India - and not only stopped 
him but established a Hindu kingdom."

Nirupam describes the Shivaji philosophy as that of a benevolent 
dictator. "He really lived to help the poor people, the downtrodden. 
In his army, there were lots of Muslims fighting. So this is not a 
religious thing. Whoever loves India is ours. Whoever is against 
India is against us."

For his part, Laine has told the press that he is not against India. 
Reached by the Monitor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., 
Laine said he would not be able to talk, on the advice of his 
lawyers. But in previous interviews, Laine has apologized and said he 
had "foolishly misread the situation in India and figured the book 
would receive scholarly criticism, not censorship and condemnation."

But in modern Indian politics, Shivaji has become a hero who defends 
and defines his nation as a land led by Hindus and fed by Hindu 
values. At the time, however, many of his contemporaries viewed him 
as just another thug.

"He was a kind of brigand chief, who marauded other states from 
Gujarat to Bengal," says Ashish Nandy, a social historian at the 
Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi.

For Mr. Nandy, the Shivaji controversy has nothing to do with 
nationalism or even Hindu values. Instead, he says, it is wrapped up 
in the complex power struggle of different castes, which is now 
India's main political driving force.

"Shivaji was a Mahratta, and Mahrattas were not Brahmins, they were 
not the elite," says Nandy. "So all the disparagement of Shivaji is 
seen by [Shivaji's supporters] today as a kind of Brahminic 
conspiracy against the lower castes." Many of the BORI institute 
scholars, he notes, come from the elite Brahmin caste.


_____


[3]

This appeal with signatures given below was sent to all secular 
political parties as decided on 23rd March meeting of the DEFEAT BJP 
FORUM. Next step is the


PRESS CONFERENCE, 30TH MARCH 2004, 12 NOON, PRESS CLUB OF INDIA

PLEASE MAKE IT A POINT TO COME AND ASK/ BRING ALONG LIKE-MINDED 
FRIENDS. THE NUMBERS COUNT


BJP Harao Manch

DEFEAT BJP FORUM
38/2 Probyn Road,University of Delhi
New Delhi-110007
Telephone- 27666253/26691162
somanshu at bol.net.in/
madhuchopra at hotmail.com


26.3.2004

Dear

We are a group of citizens who have come together with a single goal: 
to be part of the struggle to defeat the BJP in the forthcoming 
general elections and therefore save the country from the pernicious 
ideology and practice of the RSS.

This is the most crucial election since Independence. At stake is the 
survival of India's republican constitution and the plural, 
democratic conception of society on which it is based and which it 
defends. Since the 1920's this has been opposed by the Rashtriya 
Swayamsewak Sangh and the proliferating fronts that form its parivar.

Today, the democratic process is being used to threaten the future of 
democracy itself in the country. The RSS which is accountable to 
no-one is exerting a dangerous extra-constitutional authority. 
Assaults on the minorities and other vulnerable sections, and in the 
sphere of education and culture, are becoming more and more audacious 
as the BJP, the political arm of the RSS, is strengthening its hold 
over the apparatus of the state. No action is taken against the 
lawless conduct of the sangh parivar even when they maim and kill. On 
the other hand BJP leaders, including the Prime Minister, reproach 
the victims for not accommodating their tormentors.

Unfortunately the BJP has been able to significantly increase its 
electoral strength largely because the substantial secular vote is 
divided among different political parties. We therefore appeal to 
you, as leaders of parties in whom the people have reposed their 
trust, to do whatever is possible to prevent such a division from 
benefiting the BJP in the coming election.

It is our earnest hope that your mature and responsible leadership 
will not allow partisan interests to gain priority over the present 
imperative necessity of defending constitutional  governance and the 
democratic system itself.

Yours sincerely,

Nirmalangshu Mukherji, Delhi University

Madhu Prasad, Delhi University

Priyedarshi Jetli, Philosophy, Delhi University

Tista Bagchi, Linguistics, Delhi University

Uday Kumar, English, Delhi University

Saswati Mazumdar, German & Slavic, Delhi University

Rimli Bhattacharya, English, Delhi University

Gautam Chakravarty, English, Delhi University

Sambuddha Sen, English, Delhi University

Tanika Sarkar, History, JNU

Sumit Sarkar, History, Delhi University

Rachna Nagpal, Psychology, Delhi University

Ashok Nagpal, Psychology, Delhi University

Anand Chakravarty, Sociology, Delhi University

Uma Chakravarty, History, Delhi University

Javed Malik, English, Delhi University

Neeraj Malik, English, Delhi University

Monoranjan Mohanty, Political Science, Delhi

University

Honey Oberoi, Psychology, Delhi University

O.K.Yadav,Samajik Nyaya Morcha

D. Prempati, Bahujan Vam Shakti

Dileep Swamy, Retd., Delhi University

Kamal Nain Kabra ,Retd., Delhi University

Murtaza Husain, Delhi High Court

R.S.Adil ,Delhi High Court

A.K.Arun, Yuva Morcha

Raja Ram, Retd CMO, Agra

Vilas Sonawane, All India Social Justice Front

Mastram Kapoor

Tripurari Sharma, Sarvodya Leader

Sushiela Sahai, Former Minister, Bihar

Bipin Bihari Sinha, Gandhi Nidhi, Bihar

Suresh Bhatt, PUCL, Patna

Prabhat Sandil, Journalist, Gaya

Dhan Singh Josh, Satya Shodhak Samaj, Delhi

Harivansh, Editor, Prabhat Khabbar

Prakash Mankotia, Bahujan Vam Shakti

Surya Dev Yadav, Advocate, Patna

Ganpath Rai, Social Justice Front

D. Prakash Louis, Director, Insian Social Institute

Leni Thomas, Bahujan Vam Shakti,Calcutta

Bhupendra Yadav,M.D.University

Amir Arifi, Delhi University

Tripta vahi, Delhi University

Vijay Singh, Delhi University

Zahoor Siddiqui, Delhi University

Nishat Siddiqui

Khalid Alvi, Delhi University

B.P.Sharma, Delhi University

Shashi Sharma

T.M.Thomas, Delhi University

Anil Nauria, Supreme Court

M.A.Jawed, Delhi University

Shagufta Jamal, Jamia Millia Islamia

Nasreen Hashmi, Teacher, Social Activist

Arjun Dev, Historian

Indira Arjun Dev, Historian

Asad Ali, Jamia Millia Islamia

Jawed Naqvi, Journalist

Sudhir Chauhan, Delhi University

A.N.Roy, Delhi University

V.P.Sharma

Nandita Narain. Delhi University

V.K.Tripathi, IIT, Delhi

S.R.Kidwai, JNU

Lima Kanungo, Delhi University

Shamim Hanfi, Writer

Badri Raina, Delhi University

K.P.Shankaran, Delhi University

Vinod Chauhan

Amar Singh , Delhi University

Girish Mishra, Academician and Journalist

Harbans Mukhia, JNU

Ali Javed, Delhi University

Amresh Ganguly, Delhi University


_____


[4]

The Telegraph [India]
  March 29, 2004

WHAT LIES BEHIND THE BLACK COMEDY

Barun De wonders why smaller parties are unconcerned about the 
assault on democracy, autonomy and freedom of opinion - to which the 
NDA is an accessory

Ominous portents
Election preparations are in their dog days: even filmi personalities 
lined up for media headlines have lost their shine and act as fillers 
for empty space. Political news is now at the level of low comedy, 
but has ominous portents. Yet the contest for the Indian mind is not 
far from the efforts of the sangh parivar to retain power. The 
elements of farce were introduced with the ridiculous goings-on in 
Mumbai. A book by an American scholar unknown in professional 
Indological studies, James S. Laine, about the social imagery and 
parentage of Shivaji, the Indian guerrilla-resistance fighter against 
northern imperialist penetration into the Maratha desh, and a library 
in Pune, where it was displayed, were vandalized by a chauvinist mob. 
The book is surely no better or no worse than the sociological 
rehashes of Indian history in the pre- and post-colonial periods, 
elevated to the status of "cultural studies" or "identity studies" by 
the imprimatur of Chicago or Harvard. It perhaps noted the Hindu 
national icon, with some warts in his personality or imagery of 
power. The excuse given by the state home minister of the ruling 
Congress-Nationalist Congress Party coalition when he banned 
distribution of the book was that it was exciting violent sentiments 
by besmirching a national hero.

Book-banning is an authoritarian way of brushing contestations over 
social ideology under the carpet. Rajiv Gandhi's Congress used it as 
a shield to deflect the Shia interdiction of Salman Rushdie's 
irreverence about much that is sacred in the Quran, so that Muslim 
tensions after the Shah Bano affair could be defused.

Many people who were disturbed that the state was intervening in 
matters of the freedom of the mind remained silent, hoping that in 
the interests of "communal amity", no serious harm would be done to 
the liberty of thought. This expediency bedevils much of the less 
serious peripheries of secularist thought. It bore bitter fruit when 
the government of West Bengal, over-reacting to journalistic gossip 
about which crony was being singed by Taslima Nasreen's tell-all 
serial memoirs, stopped publication of one of the volumes; giving the 
reason that it might cause Hindu-Muslim tension. This argument had 
not been previously used about her even more forthright statements in 
the past about Muslim men.

We still kept our eyes and ears covered.

A breach was opened for those who never hid their view that critics 
of the sangh parivar and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's 
communalist rewriting of Indian history are "pseudo-secularists". It 
came to the gaze of no less an eagle eye than that of the Great 
Trimmer, A.B. Vajpayee. Consonant with the parivar's "good 
governance" strategy of elders talking moderation and trimming their 
sails to winds blowing from the four quarters, leaving the urchins of 
the extended family, such as the Katiyars, Singhals, or Dalmiyas, to 
break windows with their wild swipes to maintain a reputation for a 
truculent movement whenever sweet words failed, the prime minister 
wanted book-banning to be dropped as policy, thus shifting the onus 
of liberalism on critics of his own illiberal party.

An interesting extension of this political ping-pong, of carrying a 
war of words into the opponent's lines on the latter's terms, was the 
use by the Bharatiya Janata Party leader of the opposition in the 
Maharashtra state assembly and the previous BJP deputy chief 
minister, Gopinath Munde, of the same tactic of insinuation and 
sneer. In a rowdy session in the assembly at which the home minister, 
R.R. Patil, defended the ban on Laine as being in the national public 
interest, he said that on the same grounds, Rajiv Gandhi's 1986 
edition of the Discovery of India of Jawaharlal Nehru should be also 
banned; it had derogatory comments on Shivaji, comments which he said 
were to be found in the first edition published in 1946, but deleted 
in subsequent editions.

Consider the implication. If pushed subsequently, Munde could aver 
that he had not said that Discovery of India should be banned, but 
that it could be banned if Laine's book was. If newshounds sniffed a 
potential story about "the BJP banning Discovery of India", it would 
be treated as a mere black joke. Then it would not be the sangh 
parivar which would be the loser, since the latter was already 
attacking Nehruvian ideas. Its anonymous foot soldiers had wasted no 
time, when the elections were announced, in spreading among Indians 
in the Americas and Africa, a virus-type email salaciously detailing 
every filthy story about peccadilloes in the Nehru lineage, which his 
secretary, Mathai, had conjured up.

Another issue hovers in the background, the assault on academic 
autonomy by Joshi's human resource development ministry with regard 
to the Indian Institutes of Management. When it began, senior 
managers complacently thought that this assault on market freedom for 
admission fees would lead to the captains of industry toppling Joshi. 
The captains of industry may still be biding their time. But then, so 
are the all non-committed voters who still say Vajpayeeka vikalp 
nahi. Large chunks of the Indian population may feel that they will 
not be scorched when the furnaces blow against the Congress and the 
left. Do the small parties that appear unconcerned about the assault 
on democracy, autonomy and freedom of opinion, which the NDA is 
accessory to, not even think of who it is that they are clinging to 
in their uncontrollable desire for petty positions and pelf?


______


[5]

Dawn [Pakistan]
28 March 2004

REVIEW: The imperial versus the local
Reviewed by Pamela Taylor

Three Essays Collective is producing an unusual and valuable series. 
Each book reprints three essays by a distinguished author - essays 
produced over time but examining different aspects of a single and 
topically relevant theme. Vasudha Dalmia's trio are "Friedrich Max 
Mueller: Appropriation of the Vedic past" (1987); "Sanskrit scholars 
and Pandits of the old school: The Benares Sanskrit College and the 
constitution of authority in the late nineteenth century" (1996); and 
"Sati in the mirror of post-Enlightenment discourse: Parliamentary 
papers on widow immolation, 1821-30" (1990). The strong continuing 
relevance, of course, lies neither in the Vedic past per se nor in 
its discovery by Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries, but in the European interpretation and appropriation of 
these discoveries.
It is a key modern understanding - though self-interest naturally 
prevents its universal acceptance - that no scholarship is ever 
entirely objective and disinterested, and in post-Enlightenment 
Europe the acquisition of genuine knowledge about other continents 
was inevitably conditioned and contaminated by contemporary European 
concerns, most obviously the legitimization of imperialism. Ever 
since Edward Said's seminal Orientalism, published in 1978, awareness 
of these distortions and their continuing legacies has been widening 
and deepening.
Vasudha Dalmia, who studied in Germany and is currently Professor of 
Hindi at Berkeley, is admirably placed to understand both sides of 
the coin. Each essay provides a fascinating case study, particular 
instances that strengthen the general case for the prosecution but 
are all the more telling for the absence of generalized tub-thumping. 
She also demonstrates that imperialism was far from the only 
distorting concern.
Max Mueller (1823-1900) is still rightly famed for producing the 
first scholarly edition of the Rigveda, and since he was German he 
had no direct imperial axe to grind. But the embryonic German nation 
state (only achieved in 1871) needed its origin myths, and the Aryan 
language-speakers of the Vedas became in his interpretation part of 
the single Aryan race. These original Aryans were also naturally 
monotheistic, thus wresting a key part of religious history from 
Semitic control, while their subsequent, priest-ridden and 
polytheistic decline - an argument buttressed by some textual datings 
that were very soon disproved - neatly legitimated later European 
domination. .
The British interpretations examined in the other two essays were 
more predictable, and perhaps - although I too of course am biased- 
less dangerous. The British founded the Benares Sanskrit College in 
1791, mainly from a genuine concern to preserve the traditional 
wisdom of the Brahmins in this 'Athens of India'; but inevitable 
cross-cultural misunderstandings, increasingly direct Christian 
pressure, and the presumed superiority of western methodologies all 
soon united to undermine the authority of the Pandits and of the 
knowledge they represented.
In the final essay Dalmia cleverly demonstrates the importance of the 
Parliamentary papers in revealing the tensions in the imperial 
response to sati. The British were inevitably creating, and changing, 
rules about the degree of their involvement in local religious and 
legal practice, and in the case of sati, which like so much else 
spanned this often problematic distinction, these rules were 
sometimes in mutual conflict. Sincere dismay at the custom was also 
underpinned by the usual prejudices: the women could never give true 
consent because they were uneducated and culturally brainwashed (if 
only life were so simple), while the brain washers were the 
fee-seeking Brahmins.
Orienting India is an important addition to academic knowledge, but 
it is also something more, giving any reader the chance to make 
stimulating wider connections. The consequences of imperial 
devaluation of local cultures are still unresolved, but so too are 
various indigenous tensions. Substitute Karo-kari for sati, for 
example, and you see similar difficulties in imposing national law 
over local law, and in changing cultural practices that claim 
religious sanction. Dalmia herself is naturally particularly aware of 
the recent rise of Hindutva in India, with its renewed stress on 
Aryan purity and its extreme pressure on dissenting historians. As 
she rightly says, "it may be more than an academic exercise to 
analyze how belief and bias influence scholarship".

Orienting India: European knowledge formation in the Eighteenth and 
Nineteenth Centuries
By Vasudha Dalmia
Three Essays Collective, 57-C, LIG, Motia Khan, New Delhi 110 055
Tel: 9810991412, 9868126587
Email: info at threeessays.com
Website: www.threeessays.com
ISBN 81 88789 00 3
81pp. Indian Rs100 (pb)


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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.

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