A generic purva-paksha of a diverse group is not sufficient

Imagine there’s a person who assumes that his knowledge of purva-paksha of one specific school of Vedanta is enough to critique all of Vedanta. The superficiality of his study might impress someone who is ignorant of Indian thought. But to any Vedantin, such a purva-paksha would be considered shallow and inadequate to address the numerous schools and commentators of our vast traditions.

Likewise, to do purva-paksha of a towering Western Indologist like Sheldon Pollock, one must develop an appreciation of what is new, unique and challenging about his works. Just as Indian knowledge advances and evolves with new schools and commentaries, so also western thought systems are very diverse, complex and evolving with time. In fact, aspects of Pollock’s ideas that align with other westerners are less important to critique, because they are repetitious.

The check and balance system that makes America is coming into play. One institution checks the errors of the others and between the two of them, truth wins out. Indian history has taken on an American color. Jewish American Sheldon Pollock and Indian American Rajiv Malhotra are churning the ocean of Indian history from opposite ends. Sheldon Pollock, the academician-cum-activist who was at the helm of supporting the likes of Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid, is back in news. He is being projected as a victim in the Indian media. Pollock was exposed threadbare by Rajiv Malhotra in his book The Battle for Sanskrit. The book portrayed Pollock’s views that are marked by extreme Hinduphobia.

Our purva-paksha tradition requires that we critically study each of our main opponents to understand their assumptions, lenses, doctrinal beliefs, and ensuing arguments. We cannot simply apply some generic knowledge we have for a group of persons with similar views (in this case, Orientalists in general).

Follow Rajiv Malhotra's official page on facebook. Those who are reading or about to read my new book, The Battle for Sanskrit, will be aware that I focus much of my attention on the prominent American Indologist Sheldon Pollock, who is the most high-profile and influential exponent of what I have called American Orientalism.
Follow Rajiv Malhotra's official page on facebook. Those who are reading or about to read my new book, The Battle for Sanskrit, will be aware that I focus much of my attention on the prominent American Indologist Sheldon Pollock, who is the most high-profile.

Sheldon Pollock Rajiv Malhotra Kapoor

One of the most revealing statements by Pollock is cited below, in which he asserts that to defeat a tradition one must go through it and not around it. This is the strategy he is fructifying, when he tells his students to first go through the study of Indian sanskriti. He considers Vedic culture to be dominant over shudras and women, and he wants to help the masses overcome its inequality. Only by mastering it (through study) could his team of liberators “overmaster” (i.e. outsmart) it. He writes in this regard:

… you transcend inequality by mastering and overmastering those discourses through study and critique. You cannot simply go around a tradition to overcome it, if that is what you wish to do; you must go through it. You only transform a dominant culture by outsmarting it. That, I believe, is precisely what some of India’s most disruptive thinkers, such as Dr Ambedkar, sought to do, though they were not as successful as they might have been had they had access to all the tools of a critical philology necessary to the task. (Pollock, Sheldon. ‘Crisis in the Classics.’ Journal of Social Research, 78 (1). Page 39. Italics mine)

Pollock considers Ambedkar’s success inadequate in disrupting Indian sanskriti because Ambedkar did not learn “all the tools of a critical philology necessary to the task”. Pollock is referring here to the tools that he (Pollock) has developed for the critical analysis of Indian traditions.

We must do the same thing in the reverse direction: Before we can respond to Pollock’s conclusions, we must first understand his critical analysis. But even before being able to understand his critical analysis, we have to study the assumptions and lenses he uses to view our traditions. This requires us to study his writings critically. There are no shortcuts. As Pollock says in the above quote, “one simply cannot go around” the opponent’s work, and one must go “through” it.

Our purva-paksha tradition demands such a critical study to arrive at a deeper understanding of an opponent’s arguments. Given that Pollock is unlike the Orientalists who came before him, the lazy approach of relying upon one’s preconceived “opinions” of previous Orientalists leads to wrong conclusions. My book, The Battle For Sanskrit (TBFS) highlights his major tools, ideological beliefs and biases, thus paving the path for a comprehensive purva-paksha of his works.

Interestingly, Pollock’s former colleague at University of Chicago, Richard Schweder, is well-known for championing the approach now called “thinking through cultures”. This was based on Schweder’s anthropology research studying Hindu sacred sites and activities in India. The strategy being promoted by him and Pollock is for westerner scholars to first immerse themselves in a foreign culture in order to develop a psychological map of how they think. Only after they have mapped it in their own western framework can they succeed in “outsmarting it”.

There is also an interesting parallel with Al Biruni whose writings on India, Indians, and their manners and customs were in the form of a purva-paksha that he had carried out for his master—Mahmud of Gazni. Yet, many Indian scholars love Al Biruni because he, like Pollock, praised certain aspects of our culture.

Some novel and key ingredients of Pollock’s lens

TBFS explains some of the signature theories of Pollock that must be understood before any purva-paksha is attempted on him. These theories and interpretations include the following:

1. His interpretation of paramarthika and vyavaharika: Pollock builds on the foundation of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), an Italian thinker who influenced many great westerners including Karl Marx. Pollock translates ‘paramarthika sat’ as Vico’s idea of ‘verum’. He translates ‘vyavaharika sat’ as Vico’s ‘certum’. I was unable to find any publication (certainly not by any Indian traditional scholar) that pointed out the consequence of these deliberate mappings of Indian thought onto Western notions, leave alone identifying serious misinterpretations which follow from such mappings. From this mapping follow many of Pollock’s sweeping conclusions about the nature of transcendence in Indian systems. (See TBFS, pages 102-105, for my analysis.)

2. Literarization: This is one of Pollock’s novel ideas which he uses as a key building block for his theories. The term has an extra ‘ar’ in the middle, and is not to be confused with ‘literization’. Literization (without the extra ‘ar’) is a well-known term that refers to a language being written down, i.e. its users are literate. But Pollock’s signature contribution is his theory that after Sanskrit starts to be written, it passes through a subsequent stage of development called literarization (with extra ‘ar’). This is when Sanskrit gets endowed with certain structures that make it an elite language of power over the masses. Predictably, he finds the Vedas as the source of such structures, and it is this literarization according to him that allows the social oppression of Dalits/women. Only by understanding his view on what these ‘toxic’ structures are can one begin to see what he is up to. (TBFS, pages 213-14)

3. Theory of the aestheticization of power: Pollock borrows an influential theory developed by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and the Frankfurt School of Marxism. Its original intended purpose was to interpret the role played by aesthetics in the rise of the Nazis: How could Nazis dupe so many people to vote for them and support them? This theory became an important extension of the original doctrine of Marxism. Pollock makes academic history among his western Marxist peers by applying it to develop his original theory on the oppressiveness of our sanskriti. He uses this