The lost honour of India studies

S.N. Balagangadhara, better known as Balu, is Professor of

Comparative Culture Studies in Ghent University, Belgium. Balu is a
Kannadiga Brahmin by birth, a former Marxist, and his discourse has a
very in-your-face quality. In his latest book, Reconceptualizing India
Studies (Oxford University Press 2012), the attentive reader will see a
critique of the Indological establishment in the West and the political and
cultural establishment in India. Like Rajiv Malhotras recent works, it
questions their legitimacy. The reigning Indologists and India-watchers
would do well to read it.
Orientalism
Two of the eight papers that make up the book deal with Edward
Saids influential book Orientalism (1977). Although Balu was very critical
of Said in an article reacting to his uncritical obituaries, here he is quite
generous with his praise: He has provided us with the Archimedean
point to move the world. (p.48) Not a word about the books refuting Said
on numerous points of fact and on his interpretative framework, which has
the character of a conspiracy theory: all those scholars were only
pretending their many viewpoints (often identifying with the culture
studied) and were in fact agents of colonialism.
Anyway, to the extent that Said is right, and that the colonial-age
Orientalists were being unfair to Asia, we must see the mental constraints
on all scholars of that period. The Orientalists were determined by the
thinking of their societies: Consider the possibility of Albert Einsteins
being born as a contemporary of Thomas Aquinass. Would he have been
able to formulate the theory of relativity? Given what we know about
human knowledge today, our answer can only be in the negative: he
would not have had access to the experimental data and the theoretical
concepts required to frame his theories. In this sense, even a genius is
limited by his time. (p.46)
Orientalism is a useful notion at least in analyzing Western attitudes to India and
Indians in the present. Analyzing the examples of Jeffrey Kripals and Paul Courtrights
writings on the Hindu saint Ramakrishna and on the Hindu deity Ganesha, he shows how
Western scholarship is marked by fundamental logical and conceptual flaws (such as circular
reasoning, proving what has first been assumed) and by the tendency to talk about rather than
with Indians. Their trivializing theses are characterized as violence (p.135) and blind
(p.139). Scholarship should advance knowledge, but these academics are only fostering
colonial-originated prejudices.
The concept of Orientalism has two roots, one of which was
important to understand Saids personal stake in it, the other to appreciate
the concepts enormous popularity. Like all Middle-Eastern Christians, he
was wary of the imperialist designs of Latin Christianity, which he saw as
the origin of its secularized expression, the science of Orientalism (which
did indeed start with the late-medieval outreach of Rome to the MiddleEastern Christians). At the same time, his strongly pro-Muslim sympathy,
which took the form of culpabilizing any scholarly critique of Islam as a
Western imperialist project, was due to the Christians centuries of living
as Dhimmi-s (charter people, protected ones), used to bending before

and singing the praises of Islam. Saids defence of Islam, over 90% of his
book and the topic of several other publications of his, together with his
sowing suspicions against Western scholarship, were exactly what trendy
Western and westernized intellectuals needed, and what the Islamic world
has gainfully instrumentalized since.
Balu does not go into the autonomous precolonial imperialism of
Islam, a factor of religious riots in South Asia quite independent of colonial
rule and its heir, the secular state. But in several other chapters, he
identifies a more contemporary factor of communal violence: the
worldview underlying that same secular state.
Secularism
Look at the secularists, who for decades now have gone gaga over
Saids concept of Orientalism: Orientalism is reproduced in the name of a
critique of Orientalism. It is completely irrelevant whether one uses a
Marx, a Weber or a Max Mller to do so. () the result is the same:
uninteresting trivia, as far as the growth of human knowledge is
concerned; but pernicious in its effect as far as Indian intellectuals are
concerned. (p.47) India has produced intellectual giants like (limiting
ourselves to the 20th century:) R.C. Majumdar, P.V. Kane or A.K.
Coomaraswamy, but the Indian secularists are intellectually very poor
copies of their Western role models.
The most acute case of Orientalism in the Saidian sense in
precisely Nehruvian secularism, the consensus viewpoint shared by most
established academics and media. Thus, about caste, Nehru used
Orientalist descriptions of the Indian society of his day and made their
facts his own. (p.74) Citing as example a Western India-watcher, Balu
notes that the latter is not accounting for the Indian caste system by
using the notion of fossilized coalitions in India; he is trying to establish
the truth of Nehrus observations (that is, the truth of the Orientalist
descriptions of India), because the social sciences where uncontested,
() presuppose the truth of the Orientalist descriptions of non-Western
cultures. (p.74) That is the problem of the existing South Asia Studies in
a nutshell. It underscores the need for more serious comparative studies, a
field in which Balu has been a pioneer.
This critique applies especially to the dominant treatment of Indias
communal problem: When Indian intellectuals use existing theories
about religion and its history for example, to analyse Hindu-Muslim
strife they reproduce, both directly and indirectly, what the West has
been saying so far. () the secularist discourse about this issue can
hardly be distinguished both in terms of the contents or the vocabulary
from Orientalist writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (p.47)
Secularism is the direct heir of the colonial dispensation.
Balus explanation of intercommunal relations in India and the
states role therein is original and clear. In his opinion, the secular state is
not there to curb religious violence, but is in fact the cause of this
violence. He focuses on its position in the question of religious conversion,
which is forbidden in some neighbouring countries and demanded to be
forbidden by many Hindus (both Mahatma Gandhi and the Hindu
nationalists). But it is upheld as a right by the Muslims and especially by

the Christian missionaries -- and by the secular state. The latter clearly
takes a partisan stand in doing so; and it would also be partisan if it did
the opposite. It is impossible to be impartisan.
The whole secular discourse on religion and intercommunal
relations is borrowed from Christianity. The basic framework to think about
religion is informed by Western experiences and fails to see the radical
difference between these and the native traditions: the secular state
assumes that the Semitic religions and the Hindu traditions are instances
of the same kind (p.203). In realities, Hindus and Parsis dont missionize
and refrain from basing their religions on a defining truth claim. By
contrast, Christianity and Islam believe they offer the truth, and
consequently want everyone to accept it.
Secularists decry as cheap Hindu propaganda the assertion that
Hinduism is naturally pluralistic and innocent of religious strife and
exclusivism, which is considered to be typical of the converting religions.
But in fact, Christian missionaries and Muslim observers noted the
absence of sectarian violence among the Hindus: The famous Muslim
traveler to India, Alberuni, also noted the absence of religious rivalry
among the Hindus. (p.205) This Hindu phenomenon even affects
Alberunis own community: there is much more violence between rivaling
Muslim sects in Islamic Pakistan than in Hindu-populated India. If the
secularists want to promote religious harmony, as they claim, they had
better promote traditional Indian values rather than side with Christianity
and Islam.
Conclusion
Balus theses are uncomfortable and sure to provoke debate. So far,
the attitude of the India-watching class and of the elites in India has been
to ignore any criticism of their worldview. But this mans stature as a
leading professor who heads a very active research department in a major
secularist university in the West will make many of them sit up and notice.
On the whole, Balus thesis is optimistic. He offers solutions to the
problems he analyzes, mostly solutions that he himself has already worked
out or has been practising for years. It is not as if any fate condemns
Indian policy and academic India-watching to their present prejudices. He
also believes in the promise of the age of globalization, and thinks Indians
and Europeans genuinely have something to offer each other.