Indology: Concluding Thoughts

Read Parts 1 and 2

I condemned the study-Hinduism-sympathetically plea in my previous post on this subject. This is akin, in my view, to appeasement, begging. Instead of asking people to study it, it is the responsibility of every thinking Hindu to draw people to study it: Swami Vivekananda did this with amazing success. Zillions of Islamic scholars and institutions are doing it everyday in non-Islamic–primarily, Western–nations. I do not mean this in a missionary/proselytizing sense. Far from it. My purpose is merely to echo and share the global concern over the way Indology is being taught.

Approach

Among many others, the near-total and wilful negligence of Sanatana Dharma in the land of its birth is one of the main causes of this pathetic state of affairs. In another age, where works of “scholars” like Wendy Doniger, et al would be dismissed without a thought, in our own we waste reams to write elaborate refutations of the same. Which brings us to a crucial question.

The blurb for one of her books says something on the lines of Wendy Doniger throwing new light on some aspect of Hinduism (I forget which) using “psychoanalysis” or some such psychology-related principles. What gives her the right to examine Hindu texts from that prism, especially when the texts themselves give us pointers on how to interpret them? Further, almost all core Hindu scriptures have elaborate commentaries written by scholars who’ve spent entire lifetimes studying them. Did scholars like Doniger deliberately ignore them? We can pose these same, or similar questions about other scholars such as Paul Courtright.

These point to the crucial question of the approach to studying Sanatana Dharma.

Some Key Differences

Unlike the West, Philosophy was never an idle pursuit in India. It was lived, and applied to “practical life,” in the words of Ananda Coomaraswamy. Western philosophy on the other hand, can be (simplistically speaking) termed as successive exercises in logic.

Indian philosophy is experiential, and this has continued to pose problems to Westerners who try to understand it. Experience is something one cannot prove using logic.

If you’re the greatest Sanskritist in the world, it doesn’t automatically mean you’ve understood Indian philosophy. The only way to study and learn Indian philosophy is to live it–or at least try to.

However, the modern approach seems to be to treat it as just another academic subject, with a snubby professor’s air, as if it is something to be written about, commented upon, and then given a stamp of academic approval. For example, if you need to understand say, the concept of Dharma, it is not enough to read up all that’s written about it. You need to feel Dharma: I kid you not. If you don’t, you end up with absurdities such as branding Rama as evil because he killed Vali deceitfully, or that he “abandoned” Sita. Because by definition, Dharma differs from time, place, society, and such other fluidities. If Homosexuality was illegal during Rama’s time, can we conclude that the society he lived in was primitive, and that all people at that time were miserable? But that’s pretty much how Indian philosophy is being interpreted. Another example is Yoga, which at least in the West–and increasingly in urban India–is little more than just its “asana” aspect. Yoga has sadly been reduced to physical exercise. This is dangerously false. False because it doesn’t do justice to Yoga a spiritual discipline, and dangerous because the extent of its commercialization is appalling. We now have ugly “patent” wars in Yoga. Isn’t it really worthwhile to ponder why Patanjali, its originator, didn’t think it advisable to patent Yoga? Dangerous also, because Yoga will come to mean only this for posterity.

There’s another, deep-rooted and long-standing bias among Westerners with any interest in Indology: the “exotic India/East” factor, which obstructs them from really understanding it. This exotic factor is based on mentally conjured images–no doubt the result of all those 19th and early 20th century books on India–of Indians climbing ropes, sleeping on nails, and performing supernatural feats. Again, this “exotic” factor itself is in some cases a mixture of idle curiosity, and derision at the an extreme end. In other words, this category is not really interested to learn Indian philosophy as it is, but wants to explore it as a new “fad” or for whatever other reason.

Concluding Thoughts

One can only conclude from all this, that the Western approach of studying Indian philosophy is inherently flawed if not politically motivated as in the case of Doniger, Witzel, and others.

The time-honoured and traditional system of studying Indian philosophy consisted of sitting at the Guru’s feet and mastering the source texts, commentaries (bhashyas) and other literature, as well as being initiated into spiritual experiences as a method of verifying these texts. An excellent illustration is the life of Abhinavagupta who learnt under several masters but found his own way based on his spiritual experience. Which is what enabled him to produce the unparalleled Dhvanyaloka. This system of learning Indian philosophy is still in vogue, but fast fading away.

But it certainly looks as one of the methods to lift Indology from the current mess it is in.