The Groan-I: Loss of Scholarship and High Drama in 'South Asian' Studies

The Groan-I: Loss of Scholarship and High Drama in 'South Asian' Studies
Yvette C. Rosser

Part I

Why are mayhem, genocide, pogroms, and cultural assault in a certain area and era a fascinating academic research topic, whereas cultural assaults, genocide, and mayhem in another locale and time, are politically incorrect historical subject matters shunned by scholars?

Among academicians in American universities who are specialists in South Asian Studies and also in History departments in many institutes of higher learning in India, there is a tendency, perhaps an unwritten rule, a consensually agreed upon approach that systematically discourages objective discussions of the early years of the Islamic interface in the Indian Subcontinent. Academia has for decades sidetracked and stonewalled research projects or in-depth discussions that focus too closely on the destruction and dislocation associated with the many incursions led and organized by medieval Central Asian invaders who entered into the Indian Subcontinent over the course of five or six centuries. Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and later Sikhs endured hundreds of years of what could be called "medieval imperialism" initially characterized by a tremendous amount of religious intolerance and iconoclasm. Military adventurism inspired by Islam, brought serious pressures on indigenous religious, cultural, and political institutions. These indigenous Indian communities were able to sustain and continually reassert themselves. Strangely, their resistance, resilience, and cultural tenacity are not topics found in most treatments of Indian history. It is a period almost devoid of indigenous Indian voices.

Researching various communities in the Subcontinent that passively resisted Islamization is an area that could generate fascinating biographies and ethno-anthropological studies. Much research waits to be explored that could unlock the mysteries of why India, among all nations subjected to centuries of Islamic imperialism, resisted mass conversion. Undoubtedly such research would uncover multiple explanations, correlated to specific communities and geographical locations. Theories from various disciplines could help modern researchers understand the agility and dexterity of indigenous Indians who maintained their cultural identities under tremendous pressures. However, these fields of research are rarely applied to the study of this aspect of that era.

Far too little is known about the responses of indigenous groups to those pressures brought to India by in-feuding Islamic invaders who vied with each other as well as with Hindu rulers for military supremacy while drawing funds from the local inhabitants. How did the locals resist or accommodate this political, cultural and economic exploitation? What techniques did they devise to survive the coercion brought on by years of warfare and the tumultuous turnovers in rulers and their changing laws and policies, rules that were often based on codes and canons alien and invasive to the local policies and practices?

Why are there so few narratives of the indigenous responses to the centuries of repression during which these peoples, underrepresented in standard histories, were able to retain their cultural traditions and withstand tremendous military and economic pressures? History textbooks often represent the locals as toiling away in their fields unconcerned, paying their taxes, as various dynasties and armies battled in adjacent pastures. This image of the changeless, de-politicized, unconcerned peasant is usually the only agreed upon representation of indigenous Indians during the medieval period. There is a rich alternative history waiting to be explored.

In an extended era of political uncertainty, with changes in governments brought on by military adventurism and draconian taxation and intermittent warfare, how did groups such as Jain merchants or Hindu traders and farmers maintain their traditions? What methods did these under-represented indigenous peoples employ to maintain their cultural cohesiveness while cohabitating as unequals in a system designed to discriminate against their community, in particular when their religious leaders and spiritual institutions were often targeted for extermination? If a scholar asks such questions it inherently implies that there were gravely disruptive pressures acting upon the community. But, describing these pressures, the destruction of places of worship, the confiscation of properties and the banning of celebrations by a series of Sultans and other Islamic rulers who participated in the extermination and dislocation of large numbers of indigenous peoples of "Dharmic" traditions -- these are not acceptable topics of study.

It is therefore almost impossible to address related subject areas such as the tenacity of many Hindu and Jain (aka Dharmic) communities that retained their customs under considerable duress for centuries. Who were these peoples, the middle class entrepreneurs, the higher castes who continued their traditions privately when under constraint, in their kitchens so to speak? Importantly, and especially, how did the Hinduized Adivasi and Tribal communities resist Islamization passively? What were the majority of the inhabitants of the Subcontinent doing during the medieval period and why have their stories been excluded from history books?

Brahmins and Kshatriyas were often targeted by the invaders for being the holders of tradition and the traditional defenders of the faith. There are many tales of Brahmins being singled out by Islamic warriors for special humiliation, splattered with the blood of beef and other polluting disgraces, and Kshatriyas committing mass suicide rather than submit to defeat. Given these dramatic levels of violence, the vast majority of the inhabitants of India don't have their narratives included in standard history textbooks. Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and other communities with beliefs characterized by qualities associated with Sanatana Dharma, though subjected to intense pressures for half a millennium, were somehow able to continue their traditions. These Dharmic traditions did not disappear, unlike their non-Abrahamic "Pagan" counterparts in other parts of the world that experienced the same pressures and slowly ceased to exist. After a few hundred years, most cultural areas invaded and governed by Islamic rulers almost became completely Islamized. The core of India, even after more than five hundred years remained Dharmic.

This remarkable resilience of cultural tenacity, a dramatic example of civilizational continuity is not part of the world's most well known and fascinating lines of research. The lost centuries of Indian history are due to the contemporary road blocks constructed to prevent a dispassionate discussion of the traumas brought to India by the early Islamic invasions. If scholars are repeatedly chided and labeled pejoratively for investigating the details of these invasions, such discouragement naturally precludes serious study of the controversial topic and ultimately denies students access to the information. In this environment, the lack of scholarly research prohibits a deeper understanding of the impact and correlative indigenous responses of the peoples inhabiting the subcontinent during this dramatic and draconian historical period. This unwritten prohibition of historical negationism prevents inquiries not only into valuable areas of research that could enhance our understanding of the history of the world, but also dismisses an opportunity to better understand human nature.

There are often discussions among scholars that India is not really a nation, as we think of modern nation-states. Yet there are others who argue that for millennia India has exuded a civilizational recognition between its far-flung geographical parts -- rather a proto-nationhood, or rastriya, that has a geographically distinct antecedent reflected in ancient literature, core beliefs, and common traditions. Most modern Indians think of their country in these terms -- a modern nation with ancient connections. Today's India has developed a national identity based on a perceived political or national unity shared by its diverse peoples, whose shared histories long predate the incorporation of independent India in 1947. Many contributions to the development of this Indian identity have come from lesser-known communities, whose stories are usually left out of the approved historical narrative of the nation. There are obvious gaps in the standard retelling of the story of India as told in history textbooks, gaps from the ancient period to the modern. Gaps in our knowledge of the past have been created by an over concern regarding the possible ideological consequences of historical narratives. Voices of the past have been caught and held captive by a contorted epistemology of twisted representations, without which, their stories could be told, in a fuller telling, a multi-nuanced treatment.

Communities such as the Jats, who resisted Islamization in a more aggressive manner but just as effectively as the Jain merchants, would be a fascinating area of historical interest. Unfortunately, most scholars consider this topic to be politically incorrect and often the Jats are depicted as rebels plundering Aurangzeb's empire -- which is represented as the official government of the time, rebellion equivalent to treason. The subaltern responses to official Islamic imperial power are not part of the tale of the Indian nation. In depth research of subaltern Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Rajputs, peasants, farmers, women, a multitude of communities, who in various overt and covert ways resisted Islamization during the sustained violence and instability of the medieval period is a field of research that has been only vaguely investigated.

In recent decades the continuing sophistication and development of the discipline of historiography has not led to any investigations into the indigenous peoples who lived in India between 900 CE and the Mughal empire. What little has been written from an indigenous perspective does not get included in syllabi or recommended reading lists for courses on Indian history. Academic research attempting to piece together the lives and activities and understand the experiences of the indigenous communities in medieval India remains a virtually untapped and tremendously interesting potential area of study.

What were their allegiances and identities? What were the inter-relationships among different groups? Did they work together across cultural and caste differences to resist the invaders? Were there migrations of communities in the wake of the invaders' arrivals? How did caste operate -- did it act to preserve identities or to divide communities? Or both? Importantly, why are the feelings and reactions of these subaltern cultural groups and socio-religious communities not part of the broader retelling of the history of the medieval period of Indian history? Why have subalterns who resisted British imperialism been lauded in history as freedom fighters, dedicated to the nation of India, yet, those same commoners who resisted Islamic imperialism are decried as communalists and anti-Indian? Shivaji is perhaps the only exception, who by virtue of his high profile found his way into most history books, yet even so, in many tellings, he is considered to be a communal figure -- opposing the empire!

Modern Muslims living in modern India have no connections with those hoards of early invaders. In fact, many Muslim groups who settled in India also were victims of other groups of invaders and often Hindus and Muslims fought together against attacking armies. The story is far more complex than communal conflicts, though much of the violence was perpetrated by armies led by Islamic generals against indigenous non-Islamic peoples. However, there are many reasons and examples why this history of this period cannot be simplified on communal grounds.

Importantly, the story is not engraved on the present. If the tale of Medieval India were told without the concealment of the violence and with a non-sensationalist factuality, dealing with the ground realities as they can be reconstructed, it would lessen rather than increase inter-community tensions. As years pass, all nations and peoples who live together have to own up to their pasts so to speak. American textbooks finally talk fairly freely about the evils and terrors of slavery, they lament the heartless genocide of the indigenous population of the Americas. US textbooks have their share of triumphalism, but they nonetheless take responsibility for discussing the more terrible things upon which the country was founded, not just the good parts. These discussions in US textbooks became more graphic and realistic after the Civil Rights movement, written with a somewhat more nuanced and sensitive inclusion of African Americans and other minorities in the historical narrative. In part, such multicultural approaches are attempts to help people face the past so as to learn from mistakes and try to avoid racism and other destructive forces in the future.

US textbooks will one day undoubtedly have to deal with the folly of the Cold War and Vietnam, in a realistic manner, and consumerism and other massive wastes of resources. Undoubtedly, one day, when the history of the World Bank is honestly written, textbooks will have to address the failure of the IMF and WB, and its reverse flow of capital from poor to wealthy nations. From decade to decade, textbooks must be altered, facts are reinterpreted. New ideas and information change the way we understand the past. German textbooks do the same, they carefully explain the sins of the Nazi past in an effort to prevent their recurrence. Japan has also done soul searching in the course of writing school textbooks. How many sins of the past should be aired? This type of debate among historians goes on in all nations.

A study of the medieval period in Indian history should be written with an effort to understand the lives of the indigenous people of that time. If written by historians with no ulterior motives to stir up ancient resentments. If written in non sensationalist prose, dispassionately employing the art form of the historian, looking for interconnections between peoples and their responses -- such a history would be a long overdue treatment of a dynamic historical era from a much neglected perspective. Why no one has looked at this topic is because there has been an intellectual cartel that has intimidated and opined until such an approach is almost inconceivable.

The Blind Spot

A well-known group of "Marxist/Leftist/Progressive" Indian intellectuals, who refer to themselves as "The Delhi Historians' Group" have during the past three decades created an academic blockade that has been very effective and nearly impossible to transcend. The strident efforts of this group of Indian scholars have helped to institutionalize the widely accepted taboo against teaching about the topic of medieval terrorism and Islamic imperialism. In academic institutions in many countries in the west and in India -- in departments of South Asian Studies -- there is a prejudice against this studying of indigenous resistance. The indigenous response that resisted the pressures to Islamize created by centuries of the political and military presence of Islamic ruled states, kingdoms and fiefdoms is a taboo topic. At present, there is no room in the academic world for such research, which by inference must have referents to the violence which characterized that period of military aggression, violence brought on by invasions, circa 1000 CE onwards.

The first five hundred years of the interface of Islam in Indian history can be said, at the very least, to have been architecturally harmful on a fairly vast scale. There were hundreds of architectural sites -- Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain -- located across broad areas of the pre-Islamic Subcontinent that were destroyed or desecrated. This is not a secret, the remains of these centuries of vandalism are littered here and there and everywhere, across the foothills of the Himalayas to Orissa, down both coasts and into South India and of course in what has come to be called the "cow belt" in central India.

Without having to explain too explicitly or investigate very deeply it is generally understood that these invaders, who moved in and out and settled down here and there in various locations across the Subcontinent over the course of several centuries, had a disruptive impact on at least those indigenous places of worship and learning that they razed to the ground to make a political point or to pillage. There are also records indicating that, incidentally, they put a good number of the local inhabitants to the sword. Somehow the academic exercise of investigating the points of view of the victims, in this case, the lives of the non-Islamic Indians in the Subcontinent during this era, is taboo, politically incorrect.

In contrast to victims of other such cultural onslaughts in the history of mankind, these indigenous Indic peoples survived, and maintained their culture. But, this topic is a subject of study that is discouraged and disallowed in politically correct departments and esteemed academic journals. Research proposals looking at the impact that early Islamic armies had on indigenous faiths are looked down upon as theoretically inferior and with little academic value. Since there is a blind spot to the violence of that period, there can be no valid research into the responses of the victims. If rape is dismissed as quasi-acceptable, not really a crime, there is no voice for the raped.

Soon after the death of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), armies of Islamic generals captured territory from Spain to Sindh, and within a few centuries troops and cavalries were garrisoned in Afghanistan. Archers and swordsmen and battle hardened tribal warriors from Turkmenistan, Iran and other Central Asian areas began coming into India for gold and glory, justifying their plunder in the name of their god, Allah. Once the Hindus and Buddhists had been subdued or displaced in the land of the five rivers, these invaders later settled down in Panjab and Delhi. They moved beyond the Doab, eventually battling each other as well as an assortment of Hindu Rajas as various rulers and warriors went east and south and ruled from urban centers scattered across Hindustan.

Indian history as it is written is the story of those invaders, not the indigenous responses. The irony of such a one-sided history is that though Islamic dynasties moved across India for seven hundred years, ruling in different manners in various locations, fewer than fifteen percent of the local inhabitants became Muslim, except on the far east and west fringes. The story of that resistance and resilience remains inadequately researched.

Certainly, many of the later Islamic rulers, such as Akbar, were less iconoclastic and more appreciative of Indian aesthetics and they helped to create what has come to be called India's composite culture. However, quite a few of the early Central Asian invaders and rulers systematically destroyed hundreds of temples and shrines, the remains of which are archaeologically attested. Regardless of the differences between the early and the later Muslim rulers, it can be said without a doubt that the centuries of invasions, conquest, and Islamic political domination could not but have had a disruptive effect on the construction of Indian holy sites and by extension, a retarding impact on the practice and propagation, much less the scriptural development of indigenous traditions. When armies go marching through, grabbing live stock, slaves and loot, destroying places of worship and burning down scholarly institutions, those involved with teaching, and learning, and theorizing about the meaning of life, would obviously be forced to run away, go into hiding, cloister in secrecy, be killed, or perhaps to save themselves, become co-opted and de-acculturated.

There can be no question that centuries of such pressures would put stress on the tradition under siege and play out in an introverting and potentially arresting way. Such destructive and constrictive pressures can stunt progressive innovative processes and cause people to hark back to moribund traditions in order to stave off the threats against the status quo and ensure the survival of the community under attack. Contraction and retreat to orthodoxy are common self-preservation techniques, stimulated by fear or loss, symptomatic of societies under extreme pressures that warp normal development and often bring in degenerate or exclusivist practices. Centuries of violent disruption and coercion and selective genocide, such as slaves transported from Africa to the Western Hemisphere -- or the destruction of Native American traditions, pogroms and genocides in Russia, Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia, as well as the multiple invasions of the Subcontinent -- leave very little space for the preservation and development of "native" philosophical literature and the furthering of indigenous educational traditions. Under such consistent constraints, institutions and social connections more often than not atrophy and/or unravel.

This is a generally understood analysis, any society that for centuries, or even decades, is subjected to continuous or sporadic political, economic, and religious discrimination and warfare will naturally incur some disconnecting repercussions and often lose their ancestral identity in part or entirely. Hindus and other indigenous groups in India, though subjected to tremendous pressures, were able to retain their traditions and beliefs and preserve vast amounts of ancient literature and keep thousand years old ideas and philosophies alive. In comparison to the rest of the world, this is quite remarkable. Such a uniquely sustained historical variable offers an area of research that would prove fruitful for understanding resilience from sociological, anthropological, theological, and psychological points of view.

Much research needs to be done investigating the resilience capacity of India's Hindu/Vedic/Dharmic traditions. Many communities living in India's neighboring cultural areas, where non-Vedic religions such as Buddhism and Zoroastrianism were practiced, lost their connections to their ancient or ancestral pasts, succumbing to similar civilizational onslaughts and pressures that somehow the core Hindu areas of North and South and central India were able to withstand. Why aren't the stories of those who retained and preserved their Indic traditions central to the narrative of the Indian nation? Central to the narrative of the history of the world?

In the Subcontinent, over the centuries, large pockets of peoples previously associated with Dharmic faiths gradually became Islamized, in some cases the conversions were rapid and rather violent. Yet, for many still unexplained and certainly complex reasons, the core areas of Hindustan or Bharat, near Delhi and Lucknow, along both coasts in Gujarat and Orissa, in the tribal heartland and into the deep south, the vast majority of the Subcontinent remained Hindu -- even when under the rulership of often arbitrarily ruthless Islamic regimes. In spite of resisting what was at times quite a violent interface sustained by palace intrigue and frequent warfare, this cultural resilience is usually ignored by post-modern and post-colonial historians. Though latter-day subalterns who fought the British are championed and exalted by eminent historians as representing a proletarian engagement with imperialism, their medieval counterparts are denied a voice.

Many of the same scholars who have advocated reading between the texts, studying official colonial documents in reverse, are adverse to using the medieval chronicles to learn more about these medieval subalterns. Ground-breaking usage of materials distinguished the subaltern scholars. It has been suggested that the records of the medieval period could be similarly deconstructed to lead to investigations into the response of the people -- reading the hagiographies and tales of conquest commissioned and written by Islamic invaders, backwards, so to speak.

A valid use of such materials could lead the researcher to understand what the common man and woman were doing in response to decrees and other chronicled descriptions of the actions of medieval Islamic rulers. This method of studying the subaltern by turning the records left by the rulers on their heads to understand the underside is a valuable technique. Unfortunately, many scholars do not consider the common people of Hindustan who withstood centuries of Islamic imperialism to be a proper topic of study, unlike anti-British subalterns. Perhaps it is the type of literature available -- chronicles that might cast the invaders in too negative a light. Or perhaps the whole subaltern project has been co-opted and cannot take up topics that are considered politically incorrect by their peers. Peers who are in part made up of that coterie of academic gatekeepers known as the Delhi Historians' group. These icons of Indian secular socialist school of scholars are near and dear in Departments of Asian Studies in American. For several decades there have been close associations between a select group of Indian social scientists and American academicians, many of whom belong to internet discussion groups such as RISA-L (Religions in South Asia), which will be discussed at length in the second part of this essay.

Anyone in India who has read a newspaper in the past few years, and certainly scholars in departments of South Asian Studies, as well as members of the RISA academic discussion group, will be aware of the "history wars" being waged by a group of leftist historians who have fashioned themselves as the guardians of secular historiography. This verbose group of progressive historians, (these scholars previously referred to themselves as "Marxist" or "leftist", but since the fall of the Soviet Union prefer the term "progressive") have been vigilantly guarding the gates of academia to keep out research about medieval subalterns -- communities who retained their identities, the farmers, peasants, and common men and women who withstood centuries of Islamic invasions, taxation, conscription, and other problems associated with medieval imperialism.

The stories of these indigenous peoples are elided and eclipsed in the generally accepted and government sponsored history of the nation. Yet, these sentient beings who inhabited the Indian Subcontinent between 900 CE and the early modern European interface, had lives. Somehow, only Al Burundi and K.S. Lal seemed to have noticed. There has been no theoretically based implementation of the subaltern analyses deconstructing the innumerable Muslim chronicles to uncover the experiences of the oppressed from the records left by the dominant group. Selective history has dominated the field. It is a field of study still ruled by the rulers.

The subalterns in the Middle Ages who rose in revolt or continued their traditions in covertly antagonistic submission, are not part of the politically correct historical tale as depicted in standard narratives. These brave resistors to Islamic aggression are rarely studied, the Jats, the Sikhs, the Rajputs. Their stories are considered communal and tangential to the mighty Mughals to whom they, being weak Hindus, gladly, according to the writers of history, married off their daughters. Indigenous resistance to medieval imperialism is a largely untapped area for social science research. There is an unspoken and ubiquitous obstacle, a contemporary academic resistance, obstructing the telling of such historical tales of indigenous resistance to Islamic imperialism. Even to call it Islamic imperialism is traitorous to the code of silence and whitewashing that characterizes the historiography of this period.

The arguments and evidences that could describe such a research design are easily substantiated, validated by vast amounts of historical, archaeological, architectural, ethnographical, epigraphical, and anthropological data. However, there is a trend, which as far as I have been able to discern is a ubiquitous tendency, practiced in the vast majority of universities in the USA and in India and perhaps in universities in other countries, to deny the violence and its corollary resistance of what is usually referred to as the medieval period in Indian history.

From my experience, most professors at universities shy away from any discussion of the severity of the violence of the medieval period. Many scholars nurture passionately held personal and political agendas and seem to have pre-scripted attacks designed to deny voice to anyone who discusses the less savory aspects of the early Indo-Islamic interface. Those who ask controversial and politically incorrect questions are branded as fostering communal disharmony and lending their research to the promotion of religious intolerance and violent cultural hegemony.

It is reasoned by many esteemed historians that serious scholarship dealing with the destruction of temples and Islamic attacks against indigenous Indian settlements is an area of research that is tainted by Hindu nationalism. Some of India's greatest historians of the early twentieth century including R.C. Majumdar, Jadunath Sarkar, and others have been evicted from the standard reading list and replaced by R.S. Sharma and Romila Thapar, Bipin Chandra, Satish Chandra, K.N. Panikkar and a few prominent others. Funds from academic bodies, such as the ICHR, made sure that several books by each of the above progressive scholars were translated into numerous Indian languages, even after the books were already several decades old. Ironically the collected writing and speeches of some of India's greatest freedom fighters have not been made available as widely as the historical narratives created by the Delhi coterie, guarding the gates of scholarship.

For decades the field was effectively closed to those not aligned with the ideology of R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib, and variations on their particular non-nationalist view of Indian history. Some who broke with the mold, such as the world famous archaeologist B.B. Lal, were ignobly ejected from the world of "real scholarship" and subsequently ridiculed in the press and in professional papers as politically incorrect, and supporting fascism -- which of course, he does not. Even to use the phrase "Sindhu/Sarasvati Civilization" coined several decades ago, instead of the now dated name "Indus Valley Civilization" is a red flag, or should I say saffron flag, that immediately shuts down the mental faculties of many faculty members of departments of South Asian Studies. This attachment to terminology and theory is astonishing and often gets very bitter.

The mere suggestion that statistics could be complied to analyze the economic and human impact of invaders such as Mahmud of Ghazni, Mohammad Ghori, Bakhtiar Khalji, Babar, Nadir Shah, and even native born Islamic dynastic figures such as Aurganzeb raises those same flags among many scholars. There can be little doubt that, over the centuries there were massive displacements and traumas felt by the local populations who withstood pillage and then sustained decade after decade of wars of succession and exploitative governmental systems. In military campaigns, the killing of the native population was often of genocidal proportions in Punjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bihar, and many other places. Yet, we know very little about such massive displacements. Many people fled their lands, never to return. Where did they go? How did their identities change? Why don't more mainstream scholars care about such a vast field of relatively untapped history?

In India certain areas of historical research are considered dangerous -- though research into genocide is a topic that is usually of great interest to historians, for example the Native Americans, the Jewish Holocaust or Rwanda or Serbia. But in the study of South Asia, many politically correct scholars promote what their critics call "negationism" regarding the reticence to study the medieval period. These dichotomies point to the relative, shifting nature of definitions of genocide. This leads us to ask why the scholarly community considers some instances of genocide to be politically correct while other genocidal studies, for whatever reasons, are impeded by accusations of cultural nationalism, racism, or worse.

One example that helps to unpack this problem of political correctness can be found in discussions of the destructions of the Buddhist universities at Taxila and Nalanda. These two events are often cited as examples of the negative impact the Islamic invasions had on India's sciences and education. Prior to its destruction, Nalanda University had tens of thousands of students and provided "free education and residence for ten years or more" and "accepted students of other faiths [besides Buddhism] and instructed all in the Vedas, Philosophy, Grammar, Rhetoric, Composition, Mathematics, and Medicine in addition to Buddhist doctrines. It attracted students from different parts of India, China, and Southeast Asia." (From Historical Dictionary of India, Surjit Mansingh, First Vision Books, New Delhi, 1998, pg. 276.)

Such discussions are not considered controversial, until it is mentioned that Nalanda was completely destroyed by Ikhtiaruddin Bakhtiar Khalji, circa 1198. There is a theory of historiography which stresses that mentioning such things unnecessarily "communalizes history". Regarding the demise of Nalanda University, it is additionally claimed, as a sort of justification or distraction, that "the Muslims only put the finishing touches on the end of Buddhism in India." Scholars who take this tack point out that by the time Khalji arrived and burned the libraries, monks' quarters, and classrooms to the ground, Buddhism had been corrupted by Tantrism and was on its way out of India anyway. The demise of Buddhism is blamed on the Brahmans (or the Brahmanism trope) which, it is claimed, had already destroyed most of the Buddhist viharas before Islamic invaders arrived.

However, facts do not uphold this theory. Up until the time of its destruction, epigraphical evidence shows that Nalanda and other primarily Buddhist institutions enjoyed patronage from both Hindu and Buddhist benefactors and royalty. Hindus and Buddhists studied together at Nalanda, where they taught both Buddhist texts and the Vedic traditions, in Prakrits and Sanskrit, where Hindus and Buddhists were teaching and learning side by side -- a long list of practices which indicate that the communities co-existed for centuries. Ironically, if scholars point this out, they are often called cultural romantics, trying to "prop up a Golden Age of Indian history that never existed except in the fantasy of Orientalists and Hindu Nationalists".

The range of interpretative narratives are limited within nations. Available or acceptable models predetermine the interpretations that can be employed. Limitations and restrictions on historical imagination effectively control the range of possibilities within the historical field and shape the narratives -- with important implications for the choice of events deemed relevant or politically correct. Such culturally constrained habits or hang-ups of historiography create blind spots and methodological blinders. In an unpublished paper, Christian K. Wedemeyer from the University of Copenhagen, quoted Hayden White, who wrote in, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973),

[T]he best grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately asthetic or moral rather than epistemological.

The Ghoris and the rest of the Turko-Afghanis traveling on horseback, who followed Ghaznavi into India for a few centuries, were obviously not all that sympathetic to certain Hindu institutions. The hesitance or complete rejection on the part of modern scholars to mention or even admit this obvious fact is an astonishing blind spot. Without a doubt, maths or piths where students studied various paths of yoga, the Vedas, the Tripitakas, astronomy/jyotish and certainly a subject as unIslamic as the Kama Sutra, would have been anathema to the moral sensibilities of the invading Central Asians, even those such as Babar who are attributed with having a poetic bent. It is well known that Babar had little sympathy for Indic aesthetics. Strangely, even to mention this lack of sympathy and its impact on indigenous learning and architecture is politically incorrect. Discussions of the destructive nature of this early Indo-Islamic interface are simply taboo, and those who broach the topic are booed into academic oblivion along with the requisite accusations of triumphalism and communalism.

An interesting and telling example of this accepted and collective response to what is considered politically incorrect scholarship happened at a lecture I attended in the Spring of 2002 at The University of Texas at Austin. It was an interesting talk delivered by Professor Wendy Doniger, based on her recent retranslation and reinterpretation of the Kama Sutra. Dr. Doniger has a bit of a controversial reputation for spicing up Hindu treatises and iconography with a touch of the lewd, but then again, I am no prude and was most intrigued to know more about a post-Victorian interpretation of the Kama Sutra.

I arrived at the lecture a few minutes early and chatted with my friend Professor George Sudarshan over a cup of tea. Professor Doniger was sitting on the couch in the reception room. She seemed like a very sweet person, and as I stood near by she complimented me on my dress. I likewise liked her jacket. She walked with a cane and appeared to be very approachable and friendly. Her lecture was lively and I appreciated her upbeat attitude. She was entertaining and unconventional, and importantly from my point of view, this particular lecture was not at all "disrespectful to the tradition". Mostly arguing against assumptions and translations in Richard Burton's and other earlier texts, she explained her work on this ancient treatise of love and sex, showing that it was far richer and more feminist that earlier male translators had allowed. That resonated with my sensibilities.

Professor Doniger commented that "the British had looked down upon Hindu erotica and that had contributed to the present-day embarrassment about it in India". As an aside, regarding views of many Indians as to what happened to their ancient traditions such as the Kama Sutra, she read a passage from Nobel Laurite, V. S. Naipaul,

[I]in our culture there is no seduction. Our marriages are arranged. There is no art of sex. Some of the boys here talk to me of the Kama Sutra. Nobody talked about that at home. It was an upper-caste text, but I don't believe my poor father, brahmin though he is, ever looked at a copy. That philosophical-practical way of dealing with sex belongs to our past, and that world was ravaged and destroyed by the Muslims. -- V. S. Naipaul (Half A Life, New York: Vintage Books, 2002, p. 110)

When Professor Doniger read this passage, which was really incidental to her talk, something strange happened in the audience. On the side of the room where numerous graduate students were seated, just as she finished reading the words, "ravaged and destroyed by the Muslims", there came a spontaneous and collective groan, just audible, simultaneous a distinct if subtle groan. I was sitting near by. As the collective groan rippled noticeably across the side of the room, I heard several graduate students mutter remarks under their breath about Hindu chauvinism, or something of the sort -- Naipaul's perspectives were obviously not very popular among Wendy's sophisticated and politically correct fans. The moment was over that instant. Professor Doniger, at the front of the room had not noticed the rippling groan her Naipaul quote had caused. But the collective and spontaneous groan and disapproving murmurs caught my attention.

At the first sound of the groan, I glanced at the students, young with bright faces, some seemed to be from the Subcontinent. I stared at them for a few seconds as several shook their heads in disapproval of Naipaul's words, with a few side-ways glances at one another. For whatever reasons, this group of students found the claim that the Kama Sutra and other indigenous Indian traditions were "ravaged and destroyed by the Muslims" to be an offensive statement, hence the spontaneous and collective groan. I was not the only scholar who noticed this instantaneous groan in response to what is undoubtedly a fairly verifiable bit of history. During the groan I caught the eyes of Professor George Sudarshan and after the lecture we marveled for a moment at such an instantaneously condemnatory and negative response to that comment from Naipaul, which had only stated the obvious.

One would have to assume, that the early Islamic invaders, being a bit puritanical, in all likelihood did not patronize institutions associated with such traditions as the Kama Sutra, and that they took it upon themselves to destroy such decadent enclaves and disperse the practitioners of such prurient pagan centers. Several years later, Mughal rulers more familiar with Indian traditions than these early invaders, studied the Kama Sutra, and commissioned translations of it into Persian, and produced illustrated copies. Certainly most of the Mughal rulers, except perhaps Aurangzeb, were not very austere and works like The Perfumed Garden were inspired by Indian texts such as the Kama Sutra.

However, no one can deny that Babar detested the Hindus and certainly didn't patronize the study of the Kama Sutra... and of course Ghaznavi wasn't exactly going around the Punjab and Gujarat endowing maths and piths! The initial impact of the Islamic invasions dealt a death blow to many of the indigenous traditions, and universities such as Nalanda were destroyed never to be rebuilt and scholars involved with writing commentaries on textual traditions such as the Kama Sutra and other sutras and shastras must have found their patronage diminished in the ensuing mayhem of the centuries of attacks against temples and scholarly institutions by invaders who did not have an appreciation of Indian aesthetics.

However pedestrian and obvious or contested and controversial these above observations about infamous historical personalities, the violence of that period and the lack of investigations into the local inhabitants are all verifiable. The point is that scholars will not discuss it in that fashion, this negationism is ingrained, hence the well-trained graduate students' groans. In this discussion, the historical events themselves are secondary to that 'collective and spontaneous groan'. That groan was a response to what is considered to be a politically incorrect discourse about the Islamic invasions of India. The groans and the under-the-breath mutters were not to heckle Professor Doniger, that's for certain, she was much beloved by the audience, but it was in response to that very short quote she read from Naipaul. The simultaneous, unplanned groan among graduate students in an American South Asian Studies Departments to a simple statement that implicated the "Islamic invasions" as destructive to Hindu traditions such as the Kama Sutra was an indicator of the tremendous power of the blind spot, the methodological blinders.

These students groaned because Naipaul dared to say that the loss of practical applications of Indian philosophy were "destroyed by the Muslims". Instead of groaning under the burden of political correctness, perhaps the students could be encouraged to investigate what occurred when most of these traditions, within a few centuries had "headed to the jungles". With the teachers dead or in Tibet, or working as cobblers, what happened to the "philosophical-practical way of dealing with" not only "sex exemplified by the Kama Sutra" but other cultural and artistic traditions? Needless to say, the teachers, philosophers, gurus, and sages of the era must have found little room for practice or experimentation or sustained peaceful periods of patronage to add commentaries to the commentaries in an environment punctuated with violent and hostile yearly raids and invasions. Wouldn't a little simple research and clear reasoning verify that many Hindu practices were "destroyed by the Muslims"? Why the groan? Why the blind spot? Why the methodological blinders?

One famous quote by Al Burundi, perhaps the most sympathetic of the medieval chroniclers, who learned Sanskrit and greatly valued science and languages, described the results of Mahmud of Ghazni's activities in India. He wrote that Ghazni "utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed wonderful exploits by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all direction... This is the reason, too, why Hindu sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country conquered by us and have fled to places which our hands cannot yet reach...." It would be a relevant, if politically incorrect area of study for someone to look into where did the Kama Sutra go when, as Naipaul and Al Burundi said, it was scattered by the historical facts now protected in contemporary historiography by a ubiquitous groan?

The topic of Islamic iconoclasm in India is considered taboo, politically incorrect. Those who present data concerning these cultural and economic pressures on Indic traditions and the changes and accommodations made by locals to keep their traditions alive are considered communal and, again, politically incorrect. Scholars approaching the material in that manner are mocked and of course, there is the groan that disapproves of such communally sensitive research. If a scholar studies the Kama Sutra that is a safe area, but if he or she asks what happened to traditions such as the Kama Sutra, or the curriculum taught at Nalanda, when they "ran to the jungles" after the turn of the millennium, well those who question are groaned out of academia.

Many scholars simply don't want to talk about what happened to Hindu traditions, because they would have to explain why it happened and that is taboo. Why and how Hindu traditions and practices contracted, constricted, and in some cases fled to foreign countries (Tibet, SE Asia) and were adapted and acculturated outside of India is a delicate area of study, It is taboo because these saints and scholars were forced to flee from their maths and piths by those unnamed well-armed horsemen who came in to the Subcontinent over the Khyber Pass beginning c. 1000 BCE. Be that as it may, such displacements and dramatic historical events in other parts of the world are considered worthy areas of study and are not shunned as politically incorrect. Dharmic resilience is a cultural variable that has been ignored in spite of the fact that it stands as unique and multifaceted, and waits scholarly investigation and further explanation.

After attending the lecture by Professor Doniger, that groan returned to me several times as a symbol of the ingrained political correctness that has worked to bring research of the subalterns in the Subcontinent during the medieval period in to scholarly disrepute. During the lecture I hadn't made a notation of the quotation read by Professor Doniger. I had been taken aback by the spontaneity of that "groan" in response to the passage that blamed Islamic invasions for negatively impacting indigenous traditions such as the Kama Sutra. Hoping to get the full quote that she had read at her lecture, I emailed Professor Doniger.

At first when I explained why I wanted the quote, she misunderstood and thought that the students had groaned at something she had said. I assured her that was not the case, and relieved, she supplied the Naipaul quote. However, because of my explanation and my interest in the groan, she wrote, "someone with political concerns like your own [is usually of] a relentless and humorless political bent." Strangely, my interest in the groan immediately made her associate me with certain less savory right wing politics. The polarization is inherent and automatic. If I was interested in "the groan" it must mean that I am somehow politically tainted. Otherwise I would have groaned along with them right?

In our brief correspondence, Professor Doniger apologized for "over reacting" regarding my query about the groan, when she understood the students had groaned at Naipaul not her. In any case, though I asked her to comment, she found no interest in "the groan" or why her choice of Naipaul's comments elicited such a response. It seems that she should have known that this direct statement, classic of Naipaul's treatment of the Islamic interface in South Asia would have been controversial. Her being nonplussed by the groan does seem to be within the school of thought that many of her colleagues represent -- often groaning under the weight of exposing the lurid in Hinduism and disguising the violence in Islam.

Where, I asked Professor Doniger, did the Kama Sutra go when its traditional seats of academic study were scattered like atoms of dust? There was no interest in this direction of inquiry. All that happened in my few emails to Professor Doniger is that she confirmed that she hadn't heard the groan. But, as mentioned, another professor and I were sitting near the back of the room and we clearly heard the groan and the muttered if muted tsk-tsks the moment after she read the passage about the negative impact of the Islamic invaders on the study and practice of the Kama Sutra. PC positions are certainly interesting but they seem to be stifling freedom of speech and dispassionate research at least into the medieval period of Indian history. If a scholar were to ask such tainted questions in a public forum, the audience would groan, loudly. Groans and boos. The offending scholar might be hissed off the panel, or kicked off the discussion list.

Mahishasuramardini & RISA: Bias on the Internet

In 1993, when I began graduate school as a student of South Asian Studies, I noticed a bias. This bias was seemingly addressed and partially engaged by a number of thoughtful scholars spurred on in the eighties by Edward Said's Orientalism movement and in the nineties by Ron Inden's novel approach to Indic studies. However, as the bias spun on the many analyses in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, it took on the proportions of a typhoon. The Hindus were all somehow thrown together with fascists and Hinduism was blown into fragments so it was not even a religion at all, just a collection of cults. Even Sanskrit studies had to erect a facade to protect its pundit purity from association with actual Hinduism and practicing Hindus. Indology became a socio-economic area of concern or a playground for Freudian analysis. Hindutva in many ways became synonymous with Hinduism. In a field that has become guided by a quest for the exotic and/or focused on the negative, there seemed to be very little room for the personal appreciation and respect that I felt for the traditions of India.

During the nineties, the Internet became a useful tool for scholars to communicate and several discussion groups were established. RISA-l (Religions in South Asia List) is a discussion group sponsored by the American Academy of Religion. I was a member of RISA for over a year during which time I was expelled twice because I openly and repeatedly criticized some of the discussion threads that were particularly prejudicial against Hinduism and practicing Hindus.

Ultimately, I was "kicked off the RISA list" by the moderator for what the he called "cross-positing" and other infractions of the RISA rules, though I had cross-posted less than many members. Whatever the excuse given by the moderator, the real reason that I was unsubscribed was that I was very emphatic and consistent about pointing out the anti-Hindu bias that paraded as fact on RISA. My pointed posts often stirred up a storm. This bias was ubiquitous, both unconsciously and consciously operative on this scholarly discussion e-group. Though my email efforts were intended to urge scholars to see how such attitudes were destructive to dialogue and scholarly debates, instead, I was expelled. Examples of these scholarly and really, rather unscholarly interactions are described below. The RISA script, drawn from fact, not fiction, often reads more like a soap opera than what would seem appropriate for a forum created for rather ordinary intellectual exchanges among concerned and informed intellectuals. There appears at times a near hysteria, disproportionate to the issues.

Several interactions with prominent scholars on these high-profile academic discussion groups are indicative of the anti-Hindu bias that this description seeks to highlight. The majority of the members on RISA-l are faculty in departments of Asian Studies. As such, these scholarly internet groups are a good indicator of the trends and interests of the professionals who teach about India and Hinduism in American (and Western) universities. Though in this group there are only a few dozen regular contributors, there are hundreds of members who received the daily messages but seldom add comments to the discussions. These professionals could be called lurkers on the list, though they read the various threads, they rarely respond. The point is that these messages reach several hundreds of practicing professors and specialists in the field -- few of whom venture forth to take issue with some of the more obvious biases.

Several times on RISA, when certain types of controversial issues were brought to the attention of the members of the group, the person who submitted the message was roundly shouted down. I will only use a few of the examples, which I saved from too much correspondence, messages that were both a great distraction, taking time from other pursuits, and a source of data, to document the "bias". I saved these controversial messages because they serve as an archive to prove the point that some of the most respected and well-paid professors of Indian studies seem to have a deep aversion to Hindus, particularly an aversion to Hindus practicing modern Hinduism. There are several specific instances that I will draw from the many examples to be found on these official list-serves where the esteemed scholars of South Asian Studies were, according to my sensibilities, unduly unprofessional and with no thought of repercussions or reprisals, unabashedly and readily revealed their inherent biases.

The final discussion on RISA for which I was unceremoniously expelled from the list concerned my responses to a barrage of emails from eminent scholars claiming that most practicing Hindus, especially those living in the USA (NRI or Non-resident Indians) were fascists and knew very little about Hinduism. This was my last e-altercation on RISA, when I came to the defense of scholars who had participated in two conferences held during the summer of 2002 in the USA. But it wasn't the first time that I had been castigated by the scholars on RISA for writing emails that begged for more dispassion and objectivity.

To be continued...

Part 2