Dr. K.S Kannan - WESTERN INDOLOGY & ITS QUEST FOR POWER: Proceedings of the Swadeshi Indology Conference Series (Reclaiming Sanskrit Studies Book 1)

Reclaiming Sanskrit Studies

Western Indology
&
Its Quest For Power

Proceedings of Swadeshi Indology Conference Series

(Ed.) Dr. K.S. Kannan

Infinity Foundation India

2017

Reclaiming Sanskrit Studies
WESTERN INDOLOGY & ITS QUEST FOR POWER
(Proceedings of the Swadeshi Indology Conference Series)
Selected Papers from two Conferences
(held in July 2016 (Chennai) & February 2017(Delhi))
Edited by: Dr. K.S. Kannan, Visiting Professor,
Jain University, Bangalore - 560078.

Pages: 277
Year of Publication: 2017
ISBN: 978-81-934486-1-8
Price in India: 100/

Infinity Foundation India
7 MGR Road, Kalakshetra Colony,
Besant Nagar, Chennai - 600 090
email: swadeshindology@gmail.com
website: www.swadeshiindology.com

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The deva-s love the performer of yaja,
not the one who slumbers gveda 8.2.18

Infinity Foundation (IF), USA, has a 25-year track record of mapping the Kurukshetra in the field of Indology, and producing game-changing original research using the Indian lens to study India and the world.

One of the goals of Infinity Foundation India (IFI), an offspring of IF, in organising Swadeshi Indology Conference Series is to develop, fund, and groom scholars who can methodically respond to the Western worldview of Indology.

We are proud to say that within one year of the birth of the Swadeshi Indology Conference Series, we have conducted two high impact conferences with quality output for publications, as well as two impressive monographs. These monographs will be published and distributed in academia worldwide. They will be used in platforms for academic debate by our scholars.

We have begun to build a team of young scholars with swadeshi drishti. Our mission is to build a home team of 108 scholars who will form the basis for developing a civilizational grand narrative of India.

The organisers of the conference are indebted to the various~institutions and individuals for the invaluable help rendered by them, without which this work would just not have been possible. It is a pleasure to thank them heartily for the same.

We are indebted to our individual and institutional sponsors: Sri Mohandas Pai and Foundation for Indian Civilization Studies, Sri MV Subbiah and Vellayan Chettiar Trust, Sri J K Jhaver, Sri Kiron Shah, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), Sri Rakesh Bhandari, and Sri Nagesh Bhandari and Indus University. Without all their financial support and help we would not have been able to attract the high level of scholarship that has contributed to this volume.

We are grateful to IIT-Madras and IGNCA, New Delhi for organizing the Swadeshi Indology Conferences 1 and 2 respectively. In particular, we are thankful to Prof. Devendra Jalihal and his colleagues at IITM, Sri Ram Bahadur Rai, Chairman IGNCA, Sri Sachchidanand Joshi, Member Secretary IGNCA, Sri Aravinda Rao, Smt. Sonal Mansingh and their team at IGNCA. The teams at these institutions put in enormous efforts to make the conferences a success and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude for the same.

It is a tragedy that many among even the conscientious Hindu scholars of Sanskrit and Hinduism still harp on Macaulay, and ignore others while accounting for the ills of the current Indian education system, and the consequent erosion of Hindu values in the Indian psyche. Of course, the machinating Macaulay brazenly declared that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India, and sought accordingly to create a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect by means of his education system - which the system did achieve.

An important example of what is being ignored by most Indian scholars is the current American Orientalism. They have failed to counter it on any significant scale.

It was Edward Said (1935-2003) an American professor at Columbia University who called the bluff of the European interest in studying Eastern culture and civilization (in his book Orientalism (1978)) by showing it to be an inherently political interest; he laid bare the subtile, hence virulent, Eurocentric prejudice aimed at twin ends one, justifying the European colonial aspirations and two, insidiously endeavouring to distort and delude the intellectual objectivity of even those who could be deemed to be culturally considerate towards other civilisations. Much earlier, Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy (18771947) had shown the resounding hollowness of the leitmotif of the White Mans Burden.

But it was given to Rajiv Malhotra, a leading public intellectual in America, to expose the Western conspiracy on an unprecedented scale, unearthing the modus operandi behind the unrelenting and unhindered program for nearly two centuries now of the sabotage of our ancient civilisation yet with hardly any note of compunction. One has only to look into Malhotras seminal writings - Breaking India (2011), Being Different (2011), Indras Net (2014), The Battle for Sanskrit (2016), and The Academic Hinduphobia (2016) - for fuller details.

This pentad - preceded by Invading the Sacred (2007) behind which, too, he was the main driving force - goes to show the intellectual penetration of the West, into even the remotest corners (spatial/temporal/thematic) of our hoary heritage. There is a mixed motive in the latest Occidental enterprise, ostensibly being carried out with pure academic concerns. For the American Orientalist doing his South Asian Studies (his new term for Indology Studies), Sanskrit is inherently oppressive - especially of Dalits, Muslims and women. And as an antidote, therefore, the goal of Sanskrit studies henceforth should be, according to him, to exhume and exorcise the barbarism of social hierarchies and oppression of women happening ever since the inception of Sanskrit - which language itself came, rather, from outside India. Another important agenda is to infuse/intensify animosities between/among votaries of Sanskrit and votaries of vernacular languages in india. A significant instrument towards this end is to influence mainstream media so that the populace is constantly fed ideas inimical to the Hindu heritage. The tools being deployed for this are the trained army of intellectuals - of leftist leanings and secular credentials.