http://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2012/03/confessions-of-a-western-universalist/
Western Universalist (Rev. Carl Gregg) pulls out of debate after samvada with Malhotra and folks.
Gregg started quoting Martha Nussbaum, Wendy Doniger and Jeffrey Kripal, all of who have retreated to their glass houses of American Hinduism studies (sex crazed defamation in the words of Nussbaum herself).
Reminds me of the times when Gandhi stood up to the mighty British Empire.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
John the (Closet) Hindu says:
March 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
Carl, wait a minute! Just when I was starting to feel that you made some valid points, albeit filled with unconscious supremacy in places, you now bring up this Martha Nussbaum excerpt that is irrelevant to the thesis of this book.
What this shows is the western penchant to quote each other and build legitimacy when the fact and reason based arguments run out of steam.
For one thing, Nussbaum has been soundly thrashed since she wrote that piece. But you are being selective in what you quote from her.
Below is what Malhotra’s “Breaking India” book said about Nussbaum, in a section named after her:
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and is widely seen as a powerful voice of American liberalism. But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. For example, she stated that a Hindu nation is not ‘a benign establishment like the Lutheran Church of Finland’ but something that would treat Muslims as second-class citizens. (An entire section in Chapter 17 and also Appendix H are devoted to examining the role of the Lutheran Church in India.) Her interest in India started while working for Amartya Sen in an intimate relationship that she has bragged about.
After some foreign academics were found to be linked with secessionist movements, the Indian government wanted foreign participants to get permission to come to conferences. Nussbaum threatened, ‘We’ll see how bad publicity (which I intend to give them, here and elsewhere) may bring pressure to bear against them . . . .’ At a Yale seminar on anti-Semitism, her focus was to link Hinduism with fascism, as reflected in the notes that she distributed to the participants:
“In India the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special instance of Kashmir), but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European antisemitism of the 1930′s.
She further informed them that the Hindu political ideology was derived from ‘European romantic nationalism and its darker aspirations to ethnic purity.’ While her academic specialty is the philosophy of Aristotle, Nussbaum has written extensively to condemn Indian civilization. Her book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, is a recent example. Here she supported the divisive position that the Indus Valley Civilization was Dravidianist before the Sanskrit-speakers moved in. She wrote:
The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.
She not only presents a controversial speculation as a historical fact, but extrapolates it into the present Indian political discourse. She equates the modern Hindus with ‘Sanskrit-speakers who migrated into the subcontinent’ and excluded Dravidian speakers. This is very similar to the world view of Risley in colonial times, and of Dravidian separatists today. In explaining the Aryan ‘invasion’ scenario, she simply omits that it has been rejected by archeologists universally, and while grudgingly distancing herself from the invasion scenario, she supports the ‘Aryan migration’ scenario which amounts to the same thing. Those Indian scholars who are outside the supervision of the Western academy and funding agencies, and who critically examine the western interpretation of ancient Indian history, are branded as part of the Hindu Right.
Nussbaum disregards that the foreign Aryan model was vehemently rejected by Ambedkar and many others unrelated to any Hindu Right. She ignores that the model had been highly popularized by the British soldier-turned-archeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who declared pompously that the Vedic deity Indra stands accused of committing massacre in Mohenjo-Daro. This was not a ‘casual’ mistake of hypothesis, as Nussbaum wants her readers to believe. Edmund Leach, the famous British anthropologist, notes:
Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archaeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.
Without the required qualifications or training to speak with authority on the subject, Nussbaum proceeds to pontificate on the date of the Vedas, concluding that any claim of Vedic antiquity before 1200 BCE or claims of cultural continuity of the Harappan culture to the present day brand a person as belonging to the Hindu Right. Fig. 14.2 compares a few of Nussbaum’s positions on Indology with those of secular scholars of various backgrounds.
1. Claims by Nussbaum: Older dates to Rig Veda that place it as early as 3000 BCE are a ploy by the Hindu Right to establish Vedic-Harappan identity. (Nussbaum 2007, 219)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Upinder Singh, a historian, points out that scholars using astronomical references have dated Vedas variedly: ‘Dates falling within the late 3rd millennium BCE or the early 2nd millennium BCE (calculated on the grounds of philology and/or astronomical references) cannot be ruled out. The date of the Rig Veda remains a problematic issue.’ (Singh 2009, 185) Prof Nussbaum cannot label Upinder Singh as historian of Hindu Right as Upinder Singh is the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a historian by her own merit.
2. Claims by Nussbaum: Criss-cross pattern of ploughing noticed in Harappa can be noticed in the Haryana farms today. Martha Nussbaum rejects this continuity of civilization as ‘hardly remarkable.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: The veteran Indian archeologist, B.K. Thappar, who headed the archeological exploration of the Harppan site at Kalibangan, stated that the pattern of pre-Harappan ploughed field showed ‘remarkable similarity to modern ploughing in that area.’ (Thapar.B.K and Shaffer.J.G 1999, 278)
3.Claims by Nussbaum: Identification of red pigment by archeologists at the parting of hair seen in the terracotta figurines of Harappa is dismissed by Nussbaum with these words: ‘The paint on the terra cotta figure is so badly worn that it is hard to tell what was red and what wasn’t . . . the style is not like of any Indian woman known to me.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Jonathan M. Kenoyer, archeologist from University of Wisconsin (Madison), mentions female figurines dated 2600 BCE with traces of red pigment at the parting of the hair, as a significant indicator of the continuity of traditions. (Kenoyer 1998, 44-5)
[Fig. 14.2: A Comparison of Claims by Martha Nussbaum and Secular Scholars Regarding Ancient India ]
Clearly, Nussbaum promotes her political ideology over the other alternatives that fit the hard facts of archeological excavations. Though she is a non-specialist with regard to archeology, or linguistics, or culture, and her exposure to India is limited to contemporary politics, she dismisses the entire Indian archeological academic establishment as belonging to the ‘Hindu Right.’ She dismisses the cultural continuity of Indian civilization from Harappan times as ‘suppositions and not serious scholarly claims.’ This is proven false by archeologists Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein who, in the context of the relation between the Harappan and post-Harappan in India, state that ‘available data indicate that South Asian cultural history must be studied within a context of indigenous cultural continuity, not intrusion and discontinuity.’
Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history. Her account of Indian history begins with the invasion of/migration to India by the Aryan Hindus, who are different from the Dravidian natives of India; any Indian scholarship that questions this is considered a Hindu right-wing conspiracy. Where the western bias becomes too extreme to be deniable, she considers the errors as unintentional, but Indian scholarship, regardless of its merits, is said to have political motivations.
She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing,’ which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment.’ After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States has made it easier for them to use this ploy.’
She accuses the Indian government of using al Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy:
“What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of so many Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance.
Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.
Nussbaum diluted the attempts to deal with the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, stating that ‘it’s important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context. Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims.’ In discussions on the Mumbai attacks of 2008, she quickly diverts the discussion away from Islamic terror by citing the 2002 violence in Gujarat and the 2008 Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, without giving the full context of either. By manipulating the contexts, she equates local communal incidents with terrorism: ‘All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn’t reach the world’s front pages.’ In this manner she has been effective in removing attention away from anti-India terrorism.
Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics. What many uninformed readers of Nussbaum do not realize is the fascist origins of many of the ideas she spreads concerning the nature of ancient India, the so-called ‘Aryans,’ and the origin of Vedas and Hinduism. The old Race Science ideas explained in the fifth chapter of this book are alive and well in a cabal of scholars, even though only some of them operate explicitly as white supremacists, while others write similar things using liberal frameworks. For instance, it is interesting to compare Nussbaum’s intellectual positions on ancient India with those of notorious white supremacists such as Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist and former colonial officer in the British army in India.
Bottom line: Gregg has lowered himself with a cheap shot, one that is irrelevant to the discussions.
Also, his selective quoting of one side only in fact proves the point of the book.
westerners are unable to deal with reversal of the gaze. In this case the gaze reversal shows Gregg not being fair.John the (Closet) Hindu says:
March 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
Carl, wait a minute! Just when I was starting to feel that you made some valid points, albeit filled with unconscious supremacy in places, you now bring up this Martha Nussbaum excerpt that is irrelevant to the thesis of this book.
What this shows is the western penchant to quote each other and build legitimacy when the fact and reason based arguments run out of steam.
For one thing, Nussbaum has been soundly thrashed since she wrote that piece. But you are being selective in what you quote from her.
Below is what Malhotra’s “Breaking India” book said about Nussbaum, in a section named after her:
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and is widely seen as a powerful voice of American liberalism. But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. For example, she stated that a Hindu nation is not ‘a benign establishment like the Lutheran Church of Finland’ but something that would treat Muslims as second-class citizens. (An entire section in Chapter 17 and also Appendix H are devoted to examining the role of the Lutheran Church in India.) Her interest in India started while working for Amartya Sen in an intimate relationship that she has bragged about.
After some foreign academics were found to be linked with secessionist movements, the Indian government wanted foreign participants to get permission to come to conferences. Nussbaum threatened, ‘We’ll see how bad publicity (which I intend to give them, here and elsewhere) may bring pressure to bear against them . . . .’ At a Yale seminar on anti-Semitism, her focus was to link Hinduism with fascism, as reflected in the notes that she distributed to the participants:
“In India the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special instance of Kashmir), but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European antisemitism of the 1930′s.
She further informed them that the Hindu political ideology was derived from ‘European romantic nationalism and its darker aspirations to ethnic purity.’ While her academic specialty is the philosophy of Aristotle, Nussbaum has written extensively to condemn Indian civilization. Her book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, is a recent example. Here she supported the divisive position that the Indus Valley Civilization was Dravidianist before the Sanskrit-speakers moved in. She wrote:
The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.
She not only presents a controversial speculation as a historical fact, but extrapolates it into the present Indian political discourse. She equates the modern Hindus with ‘Sanskrit-speakers who migrated into the subcontinent’ and excluded Dravidian speakers. This is very similar to the world view of Risley in colonial times, and of Dravidian separatists today. In explaining the Aryan ‘invasion’ scenario, she simply omits that it has been rejected by archeologists universally, and while grudgingly distancing herself from the invasion scenario, she supports the ‘Aryan migration’ scenario which amounts to the same thing. Those Indian scholars who are outside the supervision of the Western academy and funding agencies, and who critically examine the western interpretation of ancient Indian history, are branded as part of the Hindu Right.
Nussbaum disregards that the foreign Aryan model was vehemently rejected by Ambedkar and many others unrelated to any Hindu Right. She ignores that the model had been highly popularized by the British soldier-turned-archeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who declared pompously that the Vedic deity Indra stands accused of committing massacre in Mohenjo-Daro. This was not a ‘casual’ mistake of hypothesis, as Nussbaum wants her readers to believe. Edmund Leach, the famous British anthropologist, notes:
Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archaeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.
Without the required qualifications or training to speak with authority on the subject, Nussbaum proceeds to pontificate on the date of the Vedas, concluding that any claim of Vedic antiquity before 1200 BCE or claims of cultural continuity of the Harappan culture to the present day brand a person as belonging to the Hindu Right. Fig. 14.2 compares a few of Nussbaum’s positions on Indology with those of secular scholars of various backgrounds.
1. Claims by Nussbaum: Older dates to Rig Veda that place it as early as 3000 BCE are a ploy by the Hindu Right to establish Vedic-Harappan identity. (Nussbaum 2007, 219)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Upinder Singh, a historian, points out that scholars using astronomical references have dated Vedas variedly: ‘Dates falling within the late 3rd millennium BCE or the early 2nd millennium BCE (calculated on the grounds of philology and/or astronomical references) cannot be ruled out. The date of the Rig Veda remains a problematic issue.’ (Singh 2009, 185) Prof Nussbaum cannot label Upinder Singh as historian of Hindu Right as Upinder Singh is the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a historian by her own merit.
2. Claims by Nussbaum: Criss-cross pattern of ploughing noticed in Harappa can be noticed in the Haryana farms today. Martha Nussbaum rejects this continuity of civilization as ‘hardly remarkable.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: The veteran Indian archeologist, B.K. Thappar, who headed the archeological exploration of the Harppan site at Kalibangan, stated that the pattern of pre-Harappan ploughed field showed ‘remarkable similarity to modern ploughing in that area.’ (Thapar.B.K and Shaffer.J.G 1999, 278)
3.Claims by Nussbaum: Identification of red pigment by archeologists at the parting of hair seen in the terracotta figurines of Harappa is dismissed by Nussbaum with these words: ‘The paint on the terra cotta figure is so badly worn that it is hard to tell what was red and what wasn’t . . . the style is not like of any Indian woman known to me.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Jonathan M. Kenoyer, archeologist from University of Wisconsin (Madison), mentions female figurines dated 2600 BCE with traces of red pigment at the parting of the hair, as a significant indicator of the continuity of traditions. (Kenoyer 1998, 44-5)
[Fig. 14.2: A Comparison of Claims by Martha Nussbaum and Secular Scholars Regarding Ancient India ]
Clearly, Nussbaum promotes her political ideology over the other alternatives that fit the hard facts of archeological excavations. Though she is a non-specialist with regard to archeology, or linguistics, or culture, and her exposure to India is limited to contemporary politics, she dismisses the entire Indian archeological academic establishment as belonging to the ‘Hindu Right.’ She dismisses the cultural continuity of Indian civilization from Harappan times as ‘suppositions and not serious scholarly claims.’ This is proven false by archeologists Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein who, in the context of the relation between the Harappan and post-Harappan in India, state that ‘available data indicate that South Asian cultural history must be studied within a context of indigenous cultural continuity, not intrusion and discontinuity.’
Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history. Her account of Indian history begins with the invasion of/migration to India by the Aryan Hindus, who are different from the Dravidian natives of India; any Indian scholarship that questions this is considered a Hindu right-wing conspiracy. Where the western bias becomes too extreme to be deniable, she considers the errors as unintentional, but Indian scholarship, regardless of its merits, is said to have political motivations.
She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing,’ which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment.’ After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States has made it easier for them to use this ploy.’
She accuses the Indian government of using al Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy:
“What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of so many Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance.
Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.
Nussbaum diluted the attempts to deal with the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, stating that ‘it’s important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context. Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims.’ In discussions on the Mumbai attacks of 2008, she quickly diverts the discussion away from Islamic terror by citing the 2002 violence in Gujarat and the 2008 Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, without giving the full context of either. By manipulating the contexts, she equates local communal incidents with terrorism: ‘All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn’t reach the world’s front pages.’ In this manner she has been effective in removing attention away from anti-India terrorism.
Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics. What many uninformed readers of Nussbaum do not realize is the fascist origins of many of the ideas she spreads concerning the nature of ancient India, the so-called ‘Aryans,’ and the origin of Vedas and Hinduism. The old Race Science ideas explained in the fifth chapter of this book are alive and well in a cabal of scholars, even though only some of them operate explicitly as white supremacists, while others write similar things using liberal frameworks. For instance, it is interesting to compare Nussbaum’s intellectual positions on ancient India with those of notorious white supremacists such as Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist and former colonial officer in the British army in India.
Bottom line: Gregg has lowered himself with a cheap shot, one that is irrelevant to the discussions.
Also, his selective quoting of one side only in fact proves the point of the book.
westerners are unable to deal with reversal of the gaze. In this case the gaze reversal shows Gregg not being fair.John the (Closet) Hindu says:
March 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
Carl, wait a minute! Just when I was starting to feel that you made some valid points, albeit filled with unconscious supremacy in places, you now bring up this Martha Nussbaum excerpt that is irrelevant to the thesis of this book.
What this shows is the western penchant to quote each other and build legitimacy when the fact and reason based arguments run out of steam.
For one thing, Nussbaum has been soundly thrashed since she wrote that piece. But you are being selective in what you quote from her.
Below is what Malhotra’s “Breaking India” book said about Nussbaum, in a section named after her:
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and is widely seen as a powerful voice of American liberalism. But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. For example, she stated that a Hindu nation is not ‘a benign establishment like the Lutheran Church of Finland’ but something that would treat Muslims as second-class citizens. (An entire section in Chapter 17 and also Appendix H are devoted to examining the role of the Lutheran Church in India.) Her interest in India started while working for Amartya Sen in an intimate relationship that she has bragged about.
After some foreign academics were found to be linked with secessionist movements, the Indian government wanted foreign participants to get permission to come to conferences. Nussbaum threatened, ‘We’ll see how bad publicity (which I intend to give them, here and elsewhere) may bring pressure to bear against them . . . .’ At a Yale seminar on anti-Semitism, her focus was to link Hinduism with fascism, as reflected in the notes that she distributed to the participants:
“In India the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special instance of Kashmir), but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European antisemitism of the 1930′s.
She further informed them that the Hindu political ideology was derived from ‘European romantic nationalism and its darker aspirations to ethnic purity.’ While her academic specialty is the philosophy of Aristotle, Nussbaum has written extensively to condemn Indian civilization. Her book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, is a recent example. Here she supported the divisive position that the Indus Valley Civilization was Dravidianist before the Sanskrit-speakers moved in. She wrote:
The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.
She not only presents a controversial speculation as a historical fact, but extrapolates it into the present Indian political discourse. She equates the modern Hindus with ‘Sanskrit-speakers who migrated into the subcontinent’ and excluded Dravidian speakers. This is very similar to the world view of Risley in colonial times, and of Dravidian separatists today. In explaining the Aryan ‘invasion’ scenario, she simply omits that it has been rejected by archeologists universally, and while grudgingly distancing herself from the invasion scenario, she supports the ‘Aryan migration’ scenario which amounts to the same thing. Those Indian scholars who are outside the supervision of the Western academy and funding agencies, and who critically examine the western interpretation of ancient Indian history, are branded as part of the Hindu Right.
Nussbaum disregards that the foreign Aryan model was vehemently rejected by Ambedkar and many others unrelated to any Hindu Right. She ignores that the model had been highly popularized by the British soldier-turned-archeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who declared pompously that the Vedic deity Indra stands accused of committing massacre in Mohenjo-Daro. This was not a ‘casual’ mistake of hypothesis, as Nussbaum wants her readers to believe. Edmund Leach, the famous British anthropologist, notes:
Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archaeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.
Without the required qualifications or training to speak with authority on the subject, Nussbaum proceeds to pontificate on the date of the Vedas, concluding that any claim of Vedic antiquity before 1200 BCE or claims of cultural continuity of the Harappan culture to the present day brand a person as belonging to the Hindu Right. Fig. 14.2 compares a few of Nussbaum’s positions on Indology with those of secular scholars of various backgrounds.
1. Claims by Nussbaum: Older dates to Rig Veda that place it as early as 3000 BCE are a ploy by the Hindu Right to establish Vedic-Harappan identity. (Nussbaum 2007, 219)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Upinder Singh, a historian, points out that scholars using astronomical references have dated Vedas variedly: ‘Dates falling within the late 3rd millennium BCE or the early 2nd millennium BCE (calculated on the grounds of philology and/or astronomical references) cannot be ruled out. The date of the Rig Veda remains a problematic issue.’ (Singh 2009, 185) Prof Nussbaum cannot label Upinder Singh as historian of Hindu Right as Upinder Singh is the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a historian by her own merit.
2. Claims by Nussbaum: Criss-cross pattern of ploughing noticed in Harappa can be noticed in the Haryana farms today. Martha Nussbaum rejects this continuity of civilization as ‘hardly remarkable.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: The veteran Indian archeologist, B.K. Thappar, who headed the archeological exploration of the Harppan site at Kalibangan, stated that the pattern of pre-Harappan ploughed field showed ‘remarkable similarity to modern ploughing in that area.’ (Thapar.B.K and Shaffer.J.G 1999, 278)
3.Claims by Nussbaum: Identification of red pigment by archeologists at the parting of hair seen in the terracotta figurines of Harappa is dismissed by Nussbaum with these words: ‘The paint on the terra cotta figure is so badly worn that it is hard to tell what was red and what wasn’t . . . the style is not like of any Indian woman known to me.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Jonathan M. Kenoyer, archeologist from University of Wisconsin (Madison), mentions female figurines dated 2600 BCE with traces of red pigment at the parting of the hair, as a significant indicator of the continuity of traditions. (Kenoyer 1998, 44-5)
[Fig. 14.2: A Comparison of Claims by Martha Nussbaum and Secular Scholars Regarding Ancient India ]
Clearly, Nussbaum promotes her political ideology over the other alternatives that fit the hard facts of archeological excavations. Though she is a non-specialist with regard to archeology, or linguistics, or culture, and her exposure to India is limited to contemporary politics, she dismisses the entire Indian archeological academic establishment as belonging to the ‘Hindu Right.’ She dismisses the cultural continuity of Indian civilization from Harappan times as ‘suppositions and not serious scholarly claims.’ This is proven false by archeologists Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein who, in the context of the relation between the Harappan and post-Harappan in India, state that ‘available data indicate that South Asian cultural history must be studied within a context of indigenous cultural continuity, not intrusion and discontinuity.’
Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history. Her account of Indian history begins with the invasion of/migration to India by the Aryan Hindus, who are different from the Dravidian natives of India; any Indian scholarship that questions this is considered a Hindu right-wing conspiracy. Where the western bias becomes too extreme to be deniable, she considers the errors as unintentional, but Indian scholarship, regardless of its merits, is said to have political motivations.
She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing,’ which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment.’ After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States has made it easier for them to use this ploy.’
She accuses the Indian government of using al Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy:
“What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of so many Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance.
Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.
Nussbaum diluted the attempts to deal with the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, stating that ‘it’s important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context. Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims.’ In discussions on the Mumbai attacks of 2008, she quickly diverts the discussion away from Islamic terror by citing the 2002 violence in Gujarat and the 2008 Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, without giving the full context of either. By manipulating the contexts, she equates local communal incidents with terrorism: ‘All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn’t reach the world’s front pages.’ In this manner she has been effective in removing attention away from anti-India terrorism.
Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics. What many uninformed readers of Nussbaum do not realize is the fascist origins of many of the ideas she spreads concerning the nature of ancient India, the so-called ‘Aryans,’ and the origin of Vedas and Hinduism. The old Race Science ideas explained in the fifth chapter of this book are alive and well in a cabal of scholars, even though only some of them operate explicitly as white supremacists, while others write similar things using liberal frameworks. For instance, it is interesting to compare Nussbaum’s intellectual positions on ancient India with those of notorious white supremacists such as Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist and former colonial officer in the British army in India.
Bottom line: Gregg has lowered himself with a cheap shot, one that is irrelevant to the discussions.
Also, his selective quoting of one side only in fact proves the point of the book.
westerners are unable to deal with reversal of the gaze. In this case the gaze reversal shows Gregg not being fair.John the (Closet) Hindu says:
March 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
Carl, wait a minute! Just when I was starting to feel that you made some valid points, albeit filled with unconscious supremacy in places, you now bring up this Martha Nussbaum excerpt that is irrelevant to the thesis of this book.
What this shows is the western penchant to quote each other and build legitimacy when the fact and reason based arguments run out of steam.
For one thing, Nussbaum has been soundly thrashed since she wrote that piece. But you are being selective in what you quote from her.
Below is what Malhotra’s “Breaking India” book said about Nussbaum, in a section named after her:
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and is widely seen as a powerful voice of American liberalism. But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. For example, she stated that a Hindu nation is not ‘a benign establishment like the Lutheran Church of Finland’ but something that would treat Muslims as second-class citizens. (An entire section in Chapter 17 and also Appendix H are devoted to examining the role of the Lutheran Church in India.) Her interest in India started while working for Amartya Sen in an intimate relationship that she has bragged about.
After some foreign academics were found to be linked with secessionist movements, the Indian government wanted foreign participants to get permission to come to conferences. Nussbaum threatened, ‘We’ll see how bad publicity (which I intend to give them, here and elsewhere) may bring pressure to bear against them . . . .’ At a Yale seminar on anti-Semitism, her focus was to link Hinduism with fascism, as reflected in the notes that she distributed to the participants:
“In India the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special instance of Kashmir), but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European antisemitism of the 1930′s.
She further informed them that the Hindu political ideology was derived from ‘European romantic nationalism and its darker aspirations to ethnic purity.’ While her academic specialty is the philosophy of Aristotle, Nussbaum has written extensively to condemn Indian civilization. Her book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, is a recent example. Here she supported the divisive position that the Indus Valley Civilization was Dravidianist before the Sanskrit-speakers moved in. She wrote:
The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.
She not only presents a controversial speculation as a historical fact, but extrapolates it into the present Indian political discourse. She equates the modern Hindus with ‘Sanskrit-speakers who migrated into the subcontinent’ and excluded Dravidian speakers. This is very similar to the world view of Risley in colonial times, and of Dravidian separatists today. In explaining the Aryan ‘invasion’ scenario, she simply omits that it has been rejected by archeologists universally, and while grudgingly distancing herself from the invasion scenario, she supports the ‘Aryan migration’ scenario which amounts to the same thing. Those Indian scholars who are outside the supervision of the Western academy and funding agencies, and who critically examine the western interpretation of ancient Indian history, are branded as part of the Hindu Right.
Nussbaum disregards that the foreign Aryan model was vehemently rejected by Ambedkar and many others unrelated to any Hindu Right. She ignores that the model had been highly popularized by the British soldier-turned-archeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who declared pompously that the Vedic deity Indra stands accused of committing massacre in Mohenjo-Daro. This was not a ‘casual’ mistake of hypothesis, as Nussbaum wants her readers to believe. Edmund Leach, the famous British anthropologist, notes:
Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archaeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.
Without the required qualifications or training to speak with authority on the subject, Nussbaum proceeds to pontificate on the date of the Vedas, concluding that any claim of Vedic antiquity before 1200 BCE or claims of cultural continuity of the Harappan culture to the present day brand a person as belonging to the Hindu Right. Fig. 14.2 compares a few of Nussbaum’s positions on Indology with those of secular scholars of various backgrounds.
1. Claims by Nussbaum: Older dates to Rig Veda that place it as early as 3000 BCE are a ploy by the Hindu Right to establish Vedic-Harappan identity. (Nussbaum 2007, 219)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Upinder Singh, a historian, points out that scholars using astronomical references have dated Vedas variedly: ‘Dates falling within the late 3rd millennium BCE or the early 2nd millennium BCE (calculated on the grounds of philology and/or astronomical references) cannot be ruled out. The date of the Rig Veda remains a problematic issue.’ (Singh 2009, 185) Prof Nussbaum cannot label Upinder Singh as historian of Hindu Right as Upinder Singh is the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a historian by her own merit.
2. Claims by Nussbaum: Criss-cross pattern of ploughing noticed in Harappa can be noticed in the Haryana farms today. Martha Nussbaum rejects this continuity of civilization as ‘hardly remarkable.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: The veteran Indian archeologist, B.K. Thappar, who headed the archeological exploration of the Harppan site at Kalibangan, stated that the pattern of pre-Harappan ploughed field showed ‘remarkable similarity to modern ploughing in that area.’ (Thapar.B.K and Shaffer.J.G 1999, 278)
3.Claims by Nussbaum: Identification of red pigment by archeologists at the parting of hair seen in the terracotta figurines of Harappa is dismissed by Nussbaum with these words: ‘The paint on the terra cotta figure is so badly worn that it is hard to tell what was red and what wasn’t . . . the style is not like of any Indian woman known to me.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Jonathan M. Kenoyer, archeologist from University of Wisconsin (Madison), mentions female figurines dated 2600 BCE with traces of red pigment at the parting of the hair, as a significant indicator of the continuity of traditions. (Kenoyer 1998, 44-5)
[Fig. 14.2: A Comparison of Claims by Martha Nussbaum and Secular Scholars Regarding Ancient India ]
Clearly, Nussbaum promotes her political ideology over the other alternatives that fit the hard facts of archeological excavations. Though she is a non-specialist with regard to archeology, or linguistics, or culture, and her exposure to India is limited to contemporary politics, she dismisses the entire Indian archeological academic establishment as belonging to the ‘Hindu Right.’ She dismisses the cultural continuity of Indian civilization from Harappan times as ‘suppositions and not serious scholarly claims.’ This is proven false by archeologists Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein who, in the context of the relation between the Harappan and post-Harappan in India, state that ‘available data indicate that South Asian cultural history must be studied within a context of indigenous cultural continuity, not intrusion and discontinuity.’
Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history. Her account of Indian history begins with the invasion of/migration to India by the Aryan Hindus, who are different from the Dravidian natives of India; any Indian scholarship that questions this is considered a Hindu right-wing conspiracy. Where the western bias becomes too extreme to be deniable, she considers the errors as unintentional, but Indian scholarship, regardless of its merits, is said to have political motivations.
She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing,’ which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment.’ After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States has made it easier for them to use this ploy.’
She accuses the Indian government of using al Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy:
“What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of so many Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance.
Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.
Nussbaum diluted the attempts to deal with the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, stating that ‘it’s important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context. Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims.’ In discussions on the Mumbai attacks of 2008, she quickly diverts the discussion away from Islamic terror by citing the 2002 violence in Gujarat and the 2008 Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, without giving the full context of either. By manipulating the contexts, she equates local communal incidents with terrorism: ‘All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn’t reach the world’s front pages.’ In this manner she has been effective in removing attention away from anti-India terrorism.
Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics. What many uninformed readers of Nussbaum do not realize is the fascist origins of many of the ideas she spreads concerning the nature of ancient India, the so-called ‘Aryans,’ and the origin of Vedas and Hinduism. The old Race Science ideas explained in the fifth chapter of this book are alive and well in a cabal of scholars, even though only some of them operate explicitly as white supremacists, while others write similar things using liberal frameworks. For instance, it is interesting to compare Nussbaum’s intellectual positions on ancient India with those of notorious white supremacists such as Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist and former colonial officer in the British army in India.
Bottom line: Gregg has lowered himself with a cheap shot, one that is irrelevant to the discussions.
Also, his selective quoting of one side only in fact proves the point of the book.
westerners are unable to deal with reversal of the gaze. In this case the gaze reversal shows Gregg not being fair.John the (Closet) Hindu says:
March 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
Carl, wait a minute! Just when I was starting to feel that you made some valid points, albeit filled with unconscious supremacy in places, you now bring up this Martha Nussbaum excerpt that is irrelevant to the thesis of this book.
What this shows is the western penchant to quote each other and build legitimacy when the fact and reason based arguments run out of steam.
For one thing, Nussbaum has been soundly thrashed since she wrote that piece. But you are being selective in what you quote from her.
Below is what Malhotra’s “Breaking India” book said about Nussbaum, in a section named after her:
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and is widely seen as a powerful voice of American liberalism. But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. For example, she stated that a Hindu nation is not ‘a benign establishment like the Lutheran Church of Finland’ but something that would treat Muslims as second-class citizens. (An entire section in Chapter 17 and also Appendix H are devoted to examining the role of the Lutheran Church in India.) Her interest in India started while working for Amartya Sen in an intimate relationship that she has bragged about.
After some foreign academics were found to be linked with secessionist movements, the Indian government wanted foreign participants to get permission to come to conferences. Nussbaum threatened, ‘We’ll see how bad publicity (which I intend to give them, here and elsewhere) may bring pressure to bear against them . . . .’ At a Yale seminar on anti-Semitism, her focus was to link Hinduism with fascism, as reflected in the notes that she distributed to the participants:
“In India the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special instance of Kashmir), but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European antisemitism of the 1930′s.
She further informed them that the Hindu political ideology was derived from ‘European romantic nationalism and its darker aspirations to ethnic purity.’ While her academic specialty is the philosophy of Aristotle, Nussbaum has written extensively to condemn Indian civilization. Her book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, is a recent example. Here she supported the divisive position that the Indus Valley Civilization was Dravidianist before the Sanskrit-speakers moved in. She wrote:
The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.
She not only presents a controversial speculation as a historical fact, but extrapolates it into the present Indian political discourse. She equates the modern Hindus with ‘Sanskrit-speakers who migrated into the subcontinent’ and excluded Dravidian speakers. This is very similar to the world view of Risley in colonial times, and of Dravidian separatists today. In explaining the Aryan ‘invasion’ scenario, she simply omits that it has been rejected by archeologists universally, and while grudgingly distancing herself from the invasion scenario, she supports the ‘Aryan migration’ scenario which amounts to the same thing. Those Indian scholars who are outside the supervision of the Western academy and funding agencies, and who critically examine the western interpretation of ancient Indian history, are branded as part of the Hindu Right.
Nussbaum disregards that the foreign Aryan model was vehemently rejected by Ambedkar and many others unrelated to any Hindu Right. She ignores that the model had been highly popularized by the British soldier-turned-archeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who declared pompously that the Vedic deity Indra stands accused of committing massacre in Mohenjo-Daro. This was not a ‘casual’ mistake of hypothesis, as Nussbaum wants her readers to believe. Edmund Leach, the famous British anthropologist, notes:
Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archaeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.
Without the required qualifications or training to speak with authority on the subject, Nussbaum proceeds to pontificate on the date of the Vedas, concluding that any claim of Vedic antiquity before 1200 BCE or claims of cultural continuity of the Harappan culture to the present day brand a person as belonging to the Hindu Right. Fig. 14.2 compares a few of Nussbaum’s positions on Indology with those of secular scholars of various backgrounds.
1. Claims by Nussbaum: Older dates to Rig Veda that place it as early as 3000 BCE are a ploy by the Hindu Right to establish Vedic-Harappan identity. (Nussbaum 2007, 219)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Upinder Singh, a historian, points out that scholars using astronomical references have dated Vedas variedly: ‘Dates falling within the late 3rd millennium BCE or the early 2nd millennium BCE (calculated on the grounds of philology and/or astronomical references) cannot be ruled out. The date of the Rig Veda remains a problematic issue.’ (Singh 2009, 185) Prof Nussbaum cannot label Upinder Singh as historian of Hindu Right as Upinder Singh is the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a historian by her own merit.
2. Claims by Nussbaum: Criss-cross pattern of ploughing noticed in Harappa can be noticed in the Haryana farms today. Martha Nussbaum rejects this continuity of civilization as ‘hardly remarkable.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: The veteran Indian archeologist, B.K. Thappar, who headed the archeological exploration of the Harppan site at Kalibangan, stated that the pattern of pre-Harappan ploughed field showed ‘remarkable similarity to modern ploughing in that area.’ (Thapar.B.K and Shaffer.J.G 1999, 278)
3.Claims by Nussbaum: Identification of red pigment by archeologists at the parting of hair seen in the terracotta figurines of Harappa is dismissed by Nussbaum with these words: ‘The paint on the terra cotta figure is so badly worn that it is hard to tell what was red and what wasn’t . . . the style is not like of any Indian woman known to me.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Jonathan M. Kenoyer, archeologist from University of Wisconsin (Madison), mentions female figurines dated 2600 BCE with traces of red pigment at the parting of the hair, as a significant indicator of the continuity of traditions. (Kenoyer 1998, 44-5)
[Fig. 14.2: A Comparison of Claims by Martha Nussbaum and Secular Scholars Regarding Ancient India ]
Clearly, Nussbaum promotes her political ideology over the other alternatives that fit the hard facts of archeological excavations. Though she is a non-specialist with regard to archeology, or linguistics, or culture, and her exposure to India is limited to contemporary politics, she dismisses the entire Indian archeological academic establishment as belonging to the ‘Hindu Right.’ She dismisses the cultural continuity of Indian civilization from Harappan times as ‘suppositions and not serious scholarly claims.’ This is proven false by archeologists Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein who, in the context of the relation between the Harappan and post-Harappan in India, state that ‘available data indicate that South Asian cultural history must be studied within a context of indigenous cultural continuity, not intrusion and discontinuity.’
Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history. Her account of Indian history begins with the invasion of/migration to India by the Aryan Hindus, who are different from the Dravidian natives of India; any Indian scholarship that questions this is considered a Hindu right-wing conspiracy. Where the western bias becomes too extreme to be deniable, she considers the errors as unintentional, but Indian scholarship, regardless of its merits, is said to have political motivations.
She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing,’ which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment.’ After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States has made it easier for them to use this ploy.’
She accuses the Indian government of using al Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy:
“What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of so many Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance.
Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.
Nussbaum diluted the attempts to deal with the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, stating that ‘it’s important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context. Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims.’ In discussions on the Mumbai attacks of 2008, she quickly diverts the discussion away from Islamic terror by citing the 2002 violence in Gujarat and the 2008 Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, without giving the full context of either. By manipulating the contexts, she equates local communal incidents with terrorism: ‘All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn’t reach the world’s front pages.’ In this manner she has been effective in removing attention away from anti-India terrorism.
Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics. What many uninformed readers of Nussbaum do not realize is the fascist origins of many of the ideas she spreads concerning the nature of ancient India, the so-called ‘Aryans,’ and the origin of Vedas and Hinduism. The old Race Science ideas explained in the fifth chapter of this book are alive and well in a cabal of scholars, even though only some of them operate explicitly as white supremacists, while others write similar things using liberal frameworks. For instance, it is interesting to compare Nussbaum’s intellectual positions on ancient India with those of notorious white supremacists such as Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist and former colonial officer in the British army in India.
Bottom line: Gregg has lowered himself with a cheap shot, one that is irrelevant to the discussions.
Also, his selective quoting of one side only in fact proves the point of the book.
westerners are unable to deal with reversal of the gaze. In this case the gaze reversal shows Gregg not being fair.John the (Closet) Hindu says:
March 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
Carl, wait a minute! Just when I was starting to feel that you made some valid points, albeit filled with unconscious supremacy in places, you now bring up this Martha Nussbaum excerpt that is irrelevant to the thesis of this book.
What this shows is the western penchant to quote each other and build legitimacy when the fact and reason based arguments run out of steam.
For one thing, Nussbaum has been soundly thrashed since she wrote that piece. But you are being selective in what you quote from her.
Below is what Malhotra’s “Breaking India” book said about Nussbaum, in a section named after her:
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and is widely seen as a powerful voice of American liberalism. But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. For example, she stated that a Hindu nation is not ‘a benign establishment like the Lutheran Church of Finland’ but something that would treat Muslims as second-class citizens. (An entire section in Chapter 17 and also Appendix H are devoted to examining the role of the Lutheran Church in India.) Her interest in India started while working for Amartya Sen in an intimate relationship that she has bragged about.
After some foreign academics were found to be linked with secessionist movements, the Indian government wanted foreign participants to get permission to come to conferences. Nussbaum threatened, ‘We’ll see how bad publicity (which I intend to give them, here and elsewhere) may bring pressure to bear against them . . . .’ At a Yale seminar on anti-Semitism, her focus was to link Hinduism with fascism, as reflected in the notes that she distributed to the participants:
“In India the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special instance of Kashmir), but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European antisemitism of the 1930′s.
She further informed them that the Hindu political ideology was derived from ‘European romantic nationalism and its darker aspirations to ethnic purity.’ While her academic specialty is the philosophy of Aristotle, Nussbaum has written extensively to condemn Indian civilization. Her book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, is a recent example. Here she supported the divisive position that the Indus Valley Civilization was Dravidianist before the Sanskrit-speakers moved in. She wrote:
The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.
She not only presents a controversial speculation as a historical fact, but extrapolates it into the present Indian political discourse. She equates the modern Hindus with ‘Sanskrit-speakers who migrated into the subcontinent’ and excluded Dravidian speakers. This is very similar to the world view of Risley in colonial times, and of Dravidian separatists today. In explaining the Aryan ‘invasion’ scenario, she simply omits that it has been rejected by archeologists universally, and while grudgingly distancing herself from the invasion scenario, she supports the ‘Aryan migration’ scenario which amounts to the same thing. Those Indian scholars who are outside the supervision of the Western academy and funding agencies, and who critically examine the western interpretation of ancient Indian history, are branded as part of the Hindu Right.
Nussbaum disregards that the foreign Aryan model was vehemently rejected by Ambedkar and many others unrelated to any Hindu Right. She ignores that the model had been highly popularized by the British soldier-turned-archeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who declared pompously that the Vedic deity Indra stands accused of committing massacre in Mohenjo-Daro. This was not a ‘casual’ mistake of hypothesis, as Nussbaum wants her readers to believe. Edmund Leach, the famous British anthropologist, notes:
Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archaeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.
Without the required qualifications or training to speak with authority on the subject, Nussbaum proceeds to pontificate on the date of the Vedas, concluding that any claim of Vedic antiquity before 1200 BCE or claims of cultural continuity of the Harappan culture to the present day brand a person as belonging to the Hindu Right. Fig. 14.2 compares a few of Nussbaum’s positions on Indology with those of secular scholars of various backgrounds.
1. Claims by Nussbaum: Older dates to Rig Veda that place it as early as 3000 BCE are a ploy by the Hindu Right to establish Vedic-Harappan identity. (Nussbaum 2007, 219)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Upinder Singh, a historian, points out that scholars using astronomical references have dated Vedas variedly: ‘Dates falling within the late 3rd millennium BCE or the early 2nd millennium BCE (calculated on the grounds of philology and/or astronomical references) cannot be ruled out. The date of the Rig Veda remains a problematic issue.’ (Singh 2009, 185) Prof Nussbaum cannot label Upinder Singh as historian of Hindu Right as Upinder Singh is the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a historian by her own merit.
2. Claims by Nussbaum: Criss-cross pattern of ploughing noticed in Harappa can be noticed in the Haryana farms today. Martha Nussbaum rejects this continuity of civilization as ‘hardly remarkable.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: The veteran Indian archeologist, B.K. Thappar, who headed the archeological exploration of the Harppan site at Kalibangan, stated that the pattern of pre-Harappan ploughed field showed ‘remarkable similarity to modern ploughing in that area.’ (Thapar.B.K and Shaffer.J.G 1999, 278)
3.Claims by Nussbaum: Identification of red pigment by archeologists at the parting of hair seen in the terracotta figurines of Harappa is dismissed by Nussbaum with these words: ‘The paint on the terra cotta figure is so badly worn that it is hard to tell what was red and what wasn’t . . . the style is not like of any Indian woman known to me.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Jonathan M. Kenoyer, archeologist from University of Wisconsin (Madison), mentions female figurines dated 2600 BCE with traces of red pigment at the parting of the hair, as a significant indicator of the continuity of traditions. (Kenoyer 1998, 44-5)
[Fig. 14.2: A Comparison of Claims by Martha Nussbaum and Secular Scholars Regarding Ancient India ]
Clearly, Nussbaum promotes her political ideology over the other alternatives that fit the hard facts of archeological excavations. Though she is a non-specialist with regard to archeology, or linguistics, or culture, and her exposure to India is limited to contemporary politics, she dismisses the entire Indian archeological academic establishment as belonging to the ‘Hindu Right.’ She dismisses the cultural continuity of Indian civilization from Harappan times as ‘suppositions and not serious scholarly claims.’ This is proven false by archeologists Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein who, in the context of the relation between the Harappan and post-Harappan in India, state that ‘available data indicate that South Asian cultural history must be studied within a context of indigenous cultural continuity, not intrusion and discontinuity.’
Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history. Her account of Indian history begins with the invasion of/migration to India by the Aryan Hindus, who are different from the Dravidian natives of India; any Indian scholarship that questions this is considered a Hindu right-wing conspiracy. Where the western bias becomes too extreme to be deniable, she considers the errors as unintentional, but Indian scholarship, regardless of its merits, is said to have political motivations.
She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing,’ which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment.’ After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States has made it easier for them to use this ploy.’
She accuses the Indian government of using al Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy:
“What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of so many Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance.
Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.
Nussbaum diluted the attempts to deal with the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, stating that ‘it’s important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context. Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims.’ In discussions on the Mumbai attacks of 2008, she quickly diverts the discussion away from Islamic terror by citing the 2002 violence in Gujarat and the 2008 Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, without giving the full context of either. By manipulating the contexts, she equates local communal incidents with terrorism: ‘All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn’t reach the world’s front pages.’ In this manner she has been effective in removing attention away from anti-India terrorism.
Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics. What many uninformed readers of Nussbaum do not realize is the fascist origins of many of the ideas she spreads concerning the nature of ancient India, the so-called ‘Aryans,’ and the origin of Vedas and Hinduism. The old Race Science ideas explained in the fifth chapter of this book are alive and well in a cabal of scholars, even though only some of them operate explicitly as white supremacists, while others write similar things using liberal frameworks. For instance, it is interesting to compare Nussbaum’s intellectual positions on ancient India with those of notorious white supremacists such as Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist and former colonial officer in the British army in India.
Bottom line: Gregg has lowered himself with a cheap shot, one that is irrelevant to the discussions.
Also, his selective quoting of one side only in fact proves the point of the book.
westerners are unable to deal with reversal of the gaze. In this case the gaze reversal shows Gregg not being fair.John the (Closet) Hindu says:
March 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
Carl, wait a minute! Just when I was starting to feel that you made some valid points, albeit filled with unconscious supremacy in places, you now bring up this Martha Nussbaum excerpt that is irrelevant to the thesis of this book.
What this shows is the western penchant to quote each other and build legitimacy when the fact and reason based arguments run out of steam.
For one thing, Nussbaum has been soundly thrashed since she wrote that piece. But you are being selective in what you quote from her.
Below is what Malhotra’s “Breaking India” book said about Nussbaum, in a section named after her:
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and is widely seen as a powerful voice of American liberalism. But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. For example, she stated that a Hindu nation is not ‘a benign establishment like the Lutheran Church of Finland’ but something that would treat Muslims as second-class citizens. (An entire section in Chapter 17 and also Appendix H are devoted to examining the role of the Lutheran Church in India.) Her interest in India started while working for Amartya Sen in an intimate relationship that she has bragged about.
After some foreign academics were found to be linked with secessionist movements, the Indian government wanted foreign participants to get permission to come to conferences. Nussbaum threatened, ‘We’ll see how bad publicity (which I intend to give them, here and elsewhere) may bring pressure to bear against them . . . .’ At a Yale seminar on anti-Semitism, her focus was to link Hinduism with fascism, as reflected in the notes that she distributed to the participants:
“In India the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special instance of Kashmir), but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European antisemitism of the 1930′s.
She further informed them that the Hindu political ideology was derived from ‘European romantic nationalism and its darker aspirations to ethnic purity.’ While her academic specialty is the philosophy of Aristotle, Nussbaum has written extensively to condemn Indian civilization. Her book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, is a recent example. Here she supported the divisive position that the Indus Valley Civilization was Dravidianist before the Sanskrit-speakers moved in. She wrote:
The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.
She not only presents a controversial speculation as a historical fact, but extrapolates it into the present Indian political discourse. She equates the modern Hindus with ‘Sanskrit-speakers who migrated into the subcontinent’ and excluded Dravidian speakers. This is very similar to the world view of Risley in colonial times, and of Dravidian separatists today. In explaining the Aryan ‘invasion’ scenario, she simply omits that it has been rejected by archeologists universally, and while grudgingly distancing herself from the invasion scenario, she supports the ‘Aryan migration’ scenario which amounts to the same thing. Those Indian scholars who are outside the supervision of the Western academy and funding agencies, and who critically examine the western interpretation of ancient Indian history, are branded as part of the Hindu Right.
Nussbaum disregards that the foreign Aryan model was vehemently rejected by Ambedkar and many others unrelated to any Hindu Right. She ignores that the model had been highly popularized by the British soldier-turned-archeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who declared pompously that the Vedic deity Indra stands accused of committing massacre in Mohenjo-Daro. This was not a ‘casual’ mistake of hypothesis, as Nussbaum wants her readers to believe. Edmund Leach, the famous British anthropologist, notes:
Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archaeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.
Without the required qualifications or training to speak with authority on the subject, Nussbaum proceeds to pontificate on the date of the Vedas, concluding that any claim of Vedic antiquity before 1200 BCE or claims of cultural continuity of the Harappan culture to the present day brand a person as belonging to the Hindu Right. Fig. 14.2 compares a few of Nussbaum’s positions on Indology with those of secular scholars of various backgrounds.
1. Claims by Nussbaum: Older dates to Rig Veda that place it as early as 3000 BCE are a ploy by the Hindu Right to establish Vedic-Harappan identity. (Nussbaum 2007, 219)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Upinder Singh, a historian, points out that scholars using astronomical references have dated Vedas variedly: ‘Dates falling within the late 3rd millennium BCE or the early 2nd millennium BCE (calculated on the grounds of philology and/or astronomical references) cannot be ruled out. The date of the Rig Veda remains a problematic issue.’ (Singh 2009, 185) Prof Nussbaum cannot label Upinder Singh as historian of Hindu Right as Upinder Singh is the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a historian by her own merit.
2. Claims by Nussbaum: Criss-cross pattern of ploughing noticed in Harappa can be noticed in the Haryana farms today. Martha Nussbaum rejects this continuity of civilization as ‘hardly remarkable.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: The veteran Indian archeologist, B.K. Thappar, who headed the archeological exploration of the Harppan site at Kalibangan, stated that the pattern of pre-Harappan ploughed field showed ‘remarkable similarity to modern ploughing in that area.’ (Thapar.B.K and Shaffer.J.G 1999, 278)
3.Claims by Nussbaum: Identification of red pigment by archeologists at the parting of hair seen in the terracotta figurines of Harappa is dismissed by Nussbaum with these words: ‘The paint on the terra cotta figure is so badly worn that it is hard to tell what was red and what wasn’t . . . the style is not like of any Indian woman known to me.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Jonathan M. Kenoyer, archeologist from University of Wisconsin (Madison), mentions female figurines dated 2600 BCE with traces of red pigment at the parting of the hair, as a significant indicator of the continuity of traditions. (Kenoyer 1998, 44-5)
[Fig. 14.2: A Comparison of Claims by Martha Nussbaum and Secular Scholars Regarding Ancient India ]
Clearly, Nussbaum promotes her political ideology over the other alternatives that fit the hard facts of archeological excavations. Though she is a non-specialist with regard to archeology, or linguistics, or culture, and her exposure to India is limited to contemporary politics, she dismisses the entire Indian archeological academic establishment as belonging to the ‘Hindu Right.’ She dismisses the cultural continuity of Indian civilization from Harappan times as ‘suppositions and not serious scholarly claims.’ This is proven false by archeologists Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein who, in the context of the relation between the Harappan and post-Harappan in India, state that ‘available data indicate that South Asian cultural history must be studied within a context of indigenous cultural continuity, not intrusion and discontinuity.’
Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history. Her account of Indian history begins with the invasion of/migration to India by the Aryan Hindus, who are different from the Dravidian natives of India; any Indian scholarship that questions this is considered a Hindu right-wing conspiracy. Where the western bias becomes too extreme to be deniable, she considers the errors as unintentional, but Indian scholarship, regardless of its merits, is said to have political motivations.
She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing,’ which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment.’ After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States has made it easier for them to use this ploy.’
She accuses the Indian government of using al Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy:
“What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of so many Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance.
Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.
Nussbaum diluted the attempts to deal with the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, stating that ‘it’s important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context. Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims.’ In discussions on the Mumbai attacks of 2008, she quickly diverts the discussion away from Islamic terror by citing the 2002 violence in Gujarat and the 2008 Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, without giving the full context of either. By manipulating the contexts, she equates local communal incidents with terrorism: ‘All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn’t reach the world’s front pages.’ In this manner she has been effective in removing attention away from anti-India terrorism.
Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics. What many uninformed readers of Nussbaum do not realize is the fascist origins of many of the ideas she spreads concerning the nature of ancient India, the so-called ‘Aryans,’ and the origin of Vedas and Hinduism. The old Race Science ideas explained in the fifth chapter of this book are alive and well in a cabal of scholars, even though only some of them operate explicitly as white supremacists, while others write similar things using liberal frameworks. For instance, it is interesting to compare Nussbaum’s intellectual positions on ancient India with those of notorious white supremacists such as Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist and former colonial officer in the British army in India.
Bottom line: Gregg has lowered himself with a cheap shot, one that is irrelevant to the discussions.
Also, his selective quoting of one side only in fact proves the point of the book.
westerners are unable to deal with reversal of the gaze. In this case the gaze reversal shows Gregg not being fair.John the (Closet) Hindu says:
March 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
Carl, wait a minute! Just when I was starting to feel that you made some valid points, albeit filled with unconscious supremacy in places, you now bring up this Martha Nussbaum excerpt that is irrelevant to the thesis of this book.
What this shows is the western penchant to quote each other and build legitimacy when the fact and reason based arguments run out of steam.
For one thing, Nussbaum has been soundly thrashed since she wrote that piece. But you are being selective in what you quote from her.
Below is what Malhotra’s “Breaking India” book said about Nussbaum, in a section named after her:
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and is widely seen as a powerful voice of American liberalism. But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. For example, she stated that a Hindu nation is not ‘a benign establishment like the Lutheran Church of Finland’ but something that would treat Muslims as second-class citizens. (An entire section in Chapter 17 and also Appendix H are devoted to examining the role of the Lutheran Church in India.) Her interest in India started while working for Amartya Sen in an intimate relationship that she has bragged about.
After some foreign academics were found to be linked with secessionist movements, the Indian government wanted foreign participants to get permission to come to conferences. Nussbaum threatened, ‘We’ll see how bad publicity (which I intend to give them, here and elsewhere) may bring pressure to bear against them . . . .’ At a Yale seminar on anti-Semitism, her focus was to link Hinduism with fascism, as reflected in the notes that she distributed to the participants:
“In India the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special instance of Kashmir), but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European antisemitism of the 1930′s.
She further informed them that the Hindu political ideology was derived from ‘European romantic nationalism and its darker aspirations to ethnic purity.’ While her academic specialty is the philosophy of Aristotle, Nussbaum has written extensively to condemn Indian civilization. Her book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, is a recent example. Here she supported the divisive position that the Indus Valley Civilization was Dravidianist before the Sanskrit-speakers moved in. She wrote:
The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.
She not only presents a controversial speculation as a historical fact, but extrapolates it into the present Indian political discourse. She equates the modern Hindus with ‘Sanskrit-speakers who migrated into the subcontinent’ and excluded Dravidian speakers. This is very similar to the world view of Risley in colonial times, and of Dravidian separatists today. In explaining the Aryan ‘invasion’ scenario, she simply omits that it has been rejected by archeologists universally, and while grudgingly distancing herself from the invasion scenario, she supports the ‘Aryan migration’ scenario which amounts to the same thing. Those Indian scholars who are outside the supervision of the Western academy and funding agencies, and who critically examine the western interpretation of ancient Indian history, are branded as part of the Hindu Right.
Nussbaum disregards that the foreign Aryan model was vehemently rejected by Ambedkar and many others unrelated to any Hindu Right. She ignores that the model had been highly popularized by the British soldier-turned-archeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who declared pompously that the Vedic deity Indra stands accused of committing massacre in Mohenjo-Daro. This was not a ‘casual’ mistake of hypothesis, as Nussbaum wants her readers to believe. Edmund Leach, the famous British anthropologist, notes:
Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archaeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.
Without the required qualifications or training to speak with authority on the subject, Nussbaum proceeds to pontificate on the date of the Vedas, concluding that any claim of Vedic antiquity before 1200 BCE or claims of cultural continuity of the Harappan culture to the present day brand a person as belonging to the Hindu Right. Fig. 14.2 compares a few of Nussbaum’s positions on Indology with those of secular scholars of various backgrounds.
1. Claims by Nussbaum: Older dates to Rig Veda that place it as early as 3000 BCE are a ploy by the Hindu Right to establish Vedic-Harappan identity. (Nussbaum 2007, 219)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Upinder Singh, a historian, points out that scholars using astronomical references have dated Vedas variedly: ‘Dates falling within the late 3rd millennium BCE or the early 2nd millennium BCE (calculated on the grounds of philology and/or astronomical references) cannot be ruled out. The date of the Rig Veda remains a problematic issue.’ (Singh 2009, 185) Prof Nussbaum cannot label Upinder Singh as historian of Hindu Right as Upinder Singh is the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a historian by her own merit.
2. Claims by Nussbaum: Criss-cross pattern of ploughing noticed in Harappa can be noticed in the Haryana farms today. Martha Nussbaum rejects this continuity of civilization as ‘hardly remarkable.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: The veteran Indian archeologist, B.K. Thappar, who headed the archeological exploration of the Harppan site at Kalibangan, stated that the pattern of pre-Harappan ploughed field showed ‘remarkable similarity to modern ploughing in that area.’ (Thapar.B.K and Shaffer.J.G 1999, 278)
3.Claims by Nussbaum: Identification of red pigment by archeologists at the parting of hair seen in the terracotta figurines of Harappa is dismissed by Nussbaum with these words: ‘The paint on the terra cotta figure is so badly worn that it is hard to tell what was red and what wasn’t . . . the style is not like of any Indian woman known to me.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Jonathan M. Kenoyer, archeologist from University of Wisconsin (Madison), mentions female figurines dated 2600 BCE with traces of red pigment at the parting of the hair, as a significant indicator of the continuity of traditions. (Kenoyer 1998, 44-5)
[Fig. 14.2: A Comparison of Claims by Martha Nussbaum and Secular Scholars Regarding Ancient India ]
Clearly, Nussbaum promotes her political ideology over the other alternatives that fit the hard facts of archeological excavations. Though she is a non-specialist with regard to archeology, or linguistics, or culture, and her exposure to India is limited to contemporary politics, she dismisses the entire Indian archeological academic establishment as belonging to the ‘Hindu Right.’ She dismisses the cultural continuity of Indian civilization from Harappan times as ‘suppositions and not serious scholarly claims.’ This is proven false by archeologists Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein who, in the context of the relation between the Harappan and post-Harappan in India, state that ‘available data indicate that South Asian cultural history must be studied within a context of indigenous cultural continuity, not intrusion and discontinuity.’
Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history. Her account of Indian history begins with the invasion of/migration to India by the Aryan Hindus, who are different from the Dravidian natives of India; any Indian scholarship that questions this is considered a Hindu right-wing conspiracy. Where the western bias becomes too extreme to be deniable, she considers the errors as unintentional, but Indian scholarship, regardless of its merits, is said to have political motivations.
She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing,’ which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment.’ After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States has made it easier for them to use this ploy.’
She accuses the Indian government of using al Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy:
“What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of so many Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance.
Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.
Nussbaum diluted the attempts to deal with the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, stating that ‘it’s important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context. Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims.’ In discussions on the Mumbai attacks of 2008, she quickly diverts the discussion away from Islamic terror by citing the 2002 violence in Gujarat and the 2008 Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, without giving the full context of either. By manipulating the contexts, she equates local communal incidents with terrorism: ‘All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn’t reach the world’s front pages.’ In this manner she has been effective in removing attention away from anti-India terrorism.
Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics. What many uninformed readers of Nussbaum do not realize is the fascist origins of many of the ideas she spreads concerning the nature of ancient India, the so-called ‘Aryans,’ and the origin of Vedas and Hinduism. The old Race Science ideas explained in the fifth chapter of this book are alive and well in a cabal of scholars, even though only some of them operate explicitly as white supremacists, while others write similar things using liberal frameworks. For instance, it is interesting to compare Nussbaum’s intellectual positions on ancient India with those of notorious white supremacists such as Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist and former colonial officer in the British army in India.
Bottom line: Gregg has lowered himself with a cheap shot, one that is irrelevant to the discussions.
Also, his selective quoting of one side only in fact proves the point of the book.
westerners are unable to deal with reversal of the gaze. In this case the gaze reversal shows Gregg not being fair.John the (Closet) Hindu says:
March 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
Carl, wait a minute! Just when I was starting to feel that you made some valid points, albeit filled with unconscious supremacy in places, you now bring up this Martha Nussbaum excerpt that is irrelevant to the thesis of this book.
What this shows is the western penchant to quote each other and build legitimacy when the fact and reason based arguments run out of steam.
For one thing, Nussbaum has been soundly thrashed since she wrote that piece. But you are being selective in what you quote from her.
Below is what Malhotra’s “Breaking India” book said about Nussbaum, in a section named after her:
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and is widely seen as a powerful voice of American liberalism. But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. For example, she stated that a Hindu nation is not ‘a benign establishment like the Lutheran Church of Finland’ but something that would treat Muslims as second-class citizens. (An entire section in Chapter 17 and also Appendix H are devoted to examining the role of the Lutheran Church in India.) Her interest in India started while working for Amartya Sen in an intimate relationship that she has bragged about.
After some foreign academics were found to be linked with secessionist movements, the Indian government wanted foreign participants to get permission to come to conferences. Nussbaum threatened, ‘We’ll see how bad publicity (which I intend to give them, here and elsewhere) may bring pressure to bear against them . . . .’ At a Yale seminar on anti-Semitism, her focus was to link Hinduism with fascism, as reflected in the notes that she distributed to the participants:
“In India the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special instance of Kashmir), but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European antisemitism of the 1930′s.
She further informed them that the Hindu political ideology was derived from ‘European romantic nationalism and its darker aspirations to ethnic purity.’ While her academic specialty is the philosophy of Aristotle, Nussbaum has written extensively to condemn Indian civilization. Her book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, is a recent example. Here she supported the divisive position that the Indus Valley Civilization was Dravidianist before the Sanskrit-speakers moved in. She wrote:
The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.
She not only presents a controversial speculation as a historical fact, but extrapolates it into the present Indian political discourse. She equates the modern Hindus with ‘Sanskrit-speakers who migrated into the subcontinent’ and excluded Dravidian speakers. This is very similar to the world view of Risley in colonial times, and of Dravidian separatists today. In explaining the Aryan ‘invasion’ scenario, she simply omits that it has been rejected by archeologists universally, and while grudgingly distancing herself from the invasion scenario, she supports the ‘Aryan migration’ scenario which amounts to the same thing. Those Indian scholars who are outside the supervision of the Western academy and funding agencies, and who critically examine the western interpretation of ancient Indian history, are branded as part of the Hindu Right.
Nussbaum disregards that the foreign Aryan model was vehemently rejected by Ambedkar and many others unrelated to any Hindu Right. She ignores that the model had been highly popularized by the British soldier-turned-archeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who declared pompously that the Vedic deity Indra stands accused of committing massacre in Mohenjo-Daro. This was not a ‘casual’ mistake of hypothesis, as Nussbaum wants her readers to believe. Edmund Leach, the famous British anthropologist, notes:
Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archaeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.
Without the required qualifications or training to speak with authority on the subject, Nussbaum proceeds to pontificate on the date of the Vedas, concluding that any claim of Vedic antiquity before 1200 BCE or claims of cultural continuity of the Harappan culture to the present day brand a person as belonging to the Hindu Right. Fig. 14.2 compares a few of Nussbaum’s positions on Indology with those of secular scholars of various backgrounds.
1. Claims by Nussbaum: Older dates to Rig Veda that place it as early as 3000 BCE are a ploy by the Hindu Right to establish Vedic-Harappan identity. (Nussbaum 2007, 219)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Upinder Singh, a historian, points out that scholars using astronomical references have dated Vedas variedly: ‘Dates falling within the late 3rd millennium BCE or the early 2nd millennium BCE (calculated on the grounds of philology and/or astronomical references) cannot be ruled out. The date of the Rig Veda remains a problematic issue.’ (Singh 2009, 185) Prof Nussbaum cannot label Upinder Singh as historian of Hindu Right as Upinder Singh is the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a historian by her own merit.
2. Claims by Nussbaum: Criss-cross pattern of ploughing noticed in Harappa can be noticed in the Haryana farms today. Martha Nussbaum rejects this continuity of civilization as ‘hardly remarkable.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: The veteran Indian archeologist, B.K. Thappar, who headed the archeological exploration of the Harppan site at Kalibangan, stated that the pattern of pre-Harappan ploughed field showed ‘remarkable similarity to modern ploughing in that area.’ (Thapar.B.K and Shaffer.J.G 1999, 278)
3.Claims by Nussbaum: Identification of red pigment by archeologists at the parting of hair seen in the terracotta figurines of Harappa is dismissed by Nussbaum with these words: ‘The paint on the terra cotta figure is so badly worn that it is hard to tell what was red and what wasn’t . . . the style is not like of any Indian woman known to me.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Jonathan M. Kenoyer, archeologist from University of Wisconsin (Madison), mentions female figurines dated 2600 BCE with traces of red pigment at the parting of the hair, as a significant indicator of the continuity of traditions. (Kenoyer 1998, 44-5)
[Fig. 14.2: A Comparison of Claims by Martha Nussbaum and Secular Scholars Regarding Ancient India ]
Clearly, Nussbaum promotes her political ideology over the other alternatives that fit the hard facts of archeological excavations. Though she is a non-specialist with regard to archeology, or linguistics, or culture, and her exposure to India is limited to contemporary politics, she dismisses the entire Indian archeological academic establishment as belonging to the ‘Hindu Right.’ She dismisses the cultural continuity of Indian civilization from Harappan times as ‘suppositions and not serious scholarly claims.’ This is proven false by archeologists Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein who, in the context of the relation between the Harappan and post-Harappan in India, state that ‘available data indicate that South Asian cultural history must be studied within a context of indigenous cultural continuity, not intrusion and discontinuity.’
Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history. Her account of Indian history begins with the invasion of/migration to India by the Aryan Hindus, who are different from the Dravidian natives of India; any Indian scholarship that questions this is considered a Hindu right-wing conspiracy. Where the western bias becomes too extreme to be deniable, she considers the errors as unintentional, but Indian scholarship, regardless of its merits, is said to have political motivations.
She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing,’ which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment.’ After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States has made it easier for them to use this ploy.’
She accuses the Indian government of using al Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy:
“What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of so many Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance.
Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.
Nussbaum diluted the attempts to deal with the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, stating that ‘it’s important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context. Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims.’ In discussions on the Mumbai attacks of 2008, she quickly diverts the discussion away from Islamic terror by citing the 2002 violence in Gujarat and the 2008 Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, without giving the full context of either. By manipulating the contexts, she equates local communal incidents with terrorism: ‘All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn’t reach the world’s front pages.’ In this manner she has been effective in removing attention away from anti-India terrorism.
Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics. What many uninformed readers of Nussbaum do not realize is the fascist origins of many of the ideas she spreads concerning the nature of ancient India, the so-called ‘Aryans,’ and the origin of Vedas and Hinduism. The old Race Science ideas explained in the fifth chapter of this book are alive and well in a cabal of scholars, even though only some of them operate explicitly as white supremacists, while others write similar things using liberal frameworks. For instance, it is interesting to compare Nussbaum’s intellectual positions on ancient India with those of notorious white supremacists such as Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist and former colonial officer in the British army in India.
Bottom line: Gregg has lowered himself with a cheap shot, one that is irrelevant to the discussions.
Also, his selective quoting of one side only in fact proves the point of the book.
westerners are unable to deal with reversal of the gaze. In this case the gaze reversal shows Gregg not being fair.John the (Closet) Hindu says:
March 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
Carl, wait a minute! Just when I was starting to feel that you made some valid points, albeit filled with unconscious supremacy in places, you now bring up this Martha Nussbaum excerpt that is irrelevant to the thesis of this book.
What this shows is the western penchant to quote each other and build legitimacy when the fact and reason based arguments run out of steam.
For one thing, Nussbaum has been soundly thrashed since she wrote that piece. But you are being selective in what you quote from her.
Below is what Malhotra’s “Breaking India” book said about Nussbaum, in a section named after her:
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and is widely seen as a powerful voice of American liberalism. But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. For example, she stated that a Hindu nation is not ‘a benign establishment like the Lutheran Church of Finland’ but something that would treat Muslims as second-class citizens. (An entire section in Chapter 17 and also Appendix H are devoted to examining the role of the Lutheran Church in India.) Her interest in India started while working for Amartya Sen in an intimate relationship that she has bragged about.
After some foreign academics were found to be linked with secessionist movements, the Indian government wanted foreign participants to get permission to come to conferences. Nussbaum threatened, ‘We’ll see how bad publicity (which I intend to give them, here and elsewhere) may bring pressure to bear against them . . . .’ At a Yale seminar on anti-Semitism, her focus was to link Hinduism with fascism, as reflected in the notes that she distributed to the participants:
“In India the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special instance of Kashmir), but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European antisemitism of the 1930′s.
She further informed them that the Hindu political ideology was derived from ‘European romantic nationalism and its darker aspirations to ethnic purity.’ While her academic specialty is the philosophy of Aristotle, Nussbaum has written extensively to condemn Indian civilization. Her book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, is a recent example. Here she supported the divisive position that the Indus Valley Civilization was Dravidianist before the Sanskrit-speakers moved in. She wrote:
The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.
She not only presents a controversial speculation as a historical fact, but extrapolates it into the present Indian political discourse. She equates the modern Hindus with ‘Sanskrit-speakers who migrated into the subcontinent’ and excluded Dravidian speakers. This is very similar to the world view of Risley in colonial times, and of Dravidian separatists today. In explaining the Aryan ‘invasion’ scenario, she simply omits that it has been rejected by archeologists universally, and while grudgingly distancing herself from the invasion scenario, she supports the ‘Aryan migration’ scenario which amounts to the same thing. Those Indian scholars who are outside the supervision of the Western academy and funding agencies, and who critically examine the western interpretation of ancient Indian history, are branded as part of the Hindu Right.
Nussbaum disregards that the foreign Aryan model was vehemently rejected by Ambedkar and many others unrelated to any Hindu Right. She ignores that the model had been highly popularized by the British soldier-turned-archeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who declared pompously that the Vedic deity Indra stands accused of committing massacre in Mohenjo-Daro. This was not a ‘casual’ mistake of hypothesis, as Nussbaum wants her readers to believe. Edmund Leach, the famous British anthropologist, notes:
Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archaeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.
Without the required qualifications or training to speak with authority on the subject, Nussbaum proceeds to pontificate on the date of the Vedas, concluding that any claim of Vedic antiquity before 1200 BCE or claims of cultural continuity of the Harappan culture to the present day brand a person as belonging to the Hindu Right. Fig. 14.2 compares a few of Nussbaum’s positions on Indology with those of secular scholars of various backgrounds.
1. Claims by Nussbaum: Older dates to Rig Veda that place it as early as 3000 BCE are a ploy by the Hindu Right to establish Vedic-Harappan identity. (Nussbaum 2007, 219)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Upinder Singh, a historian, points out that scholars using astronomical references have dated Vedas variedly: ‘Dates falling within the late 3rd millennium BCE or the early 2nd millennium BCE (calculated on the grounds of philology and/or astronomical references) cannot be ruled out. The date of the Rig Veda remains a problematic issue.’ (Singh 2009, 185) Prof Nussbaum cannot label Upinder Singh as historian of Hindu Right as Upinder Singh is the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a historian by her own merit.
2. Claims by Nussbaum: Criss-cross pattern of ploughing noticed in Harappa can be noticed in the Haryana farms today. Martha Nussbaum rejects this continuity of civilization as ‘hardly remarkable.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: The veteran Indian archeologist, B.K. Thappar, who headed the archeological exploration of the Harppan site at Kalibangan, stated that the pattern of pre-Harappan ploughed field showed ‘remarkable similarity to modern ploughing in that area.’ (Thapar.B.K and Shaffer.J.G 1999, 278)
3.Claims by Nussbaum: Identification of red pigment by archeologists at the parting of hair seen in the terracotta figurines of Harappa is dismissed by Nussbaum with these words: ‘The paint on the terra cotta figure is so badly worn that it is hard to tell what was red and what wasn’t . . . the style is not like of any Indian woman known to me.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Jonathan M. Kenoyer, archeologist from University of Wisconsin (Madison), mentions female figurines dated 2600 BCE with traces of red pigment at the parting of the hair, as a significant indicator of the continuity of traditions. (Kenoyer 1998, 44-5)
[Fig. 14.2: A Comparison of Claims by Martha Nussbaum and Secular Scholars Regarding Ancient India ]
Clearly, Nussbaum promotes her political ideology over the other alternatives that fit the hard facts of archeological excavations. Though she is a non-specialist with regard to archeology, or linguistics, or culture, and her exposure to India is limited to contemporary politics, she dismisses the entire Indian archeological academic establishment as belonging to the ‘Hindu Right.’ She dismisses the cultural continuity of Indian civilization from Harappan times as ‘suppositions and not serious scholarly claims.’ This is proven false by archeologists Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein who, in the context of the relation between the Harappan and post-Harappan in India, state that ‘available data indicate that South Asian cultural history must be studied within a context of indigenous cultural continuity, not intrusion and discontinuity.’
Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history. Her account of Indian history begins with the invasion of/migration to India by the Aryan Hindus, who are different from the Dravidian natives of India; any Indian scholarship that questions this is considered a Hindu right-wing conspiracy. Where the western bias becomes too extreme to be deniable, she considers the errors as unintentional, but Indian scholarship, regardless of its merits, is said to have political motivations.
She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing,’ which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment.’ After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States has made it easier for them to use this ploy.’
She accuses the Indian government of using al Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy:
“What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of so many Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance.
Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.
Nussbaum diluted the attempts to deal with the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, stating that ‘it’s important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context. Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims.’ In discussions on the Mumbai attacks of 2008, she quickly diverts the discussion away from Islamic terror by citing the 2002 violence in Gujarat and the 2008 Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, without giving the full context of either. By manipulating the contexts, she equates local communal incidents with terrorism: ‘All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn’t reach the world’s front pages.’ In this manner she has been effective in removing attention away from anti-India terrorism.
Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics. What many uninformed readers of Nussbaum do not realize is the fascist origins of many of the ideas she spreads concerning the nature of ancient India, the so-called ‘Aryans,’ and the origin of Vedas and Hinduism. The old Race Science ideas explained in the fifth chapter of this book are alive and well in a cabal of scholars, even though only some of them operate explicitly as white supremacists, while others write similar things using liberal frameworks. For instance, it is interesting to compare Nussbaum’s intellectual positions on ancient India with those of notorious white supremacists such as Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist and former colonial officer in the British army in India.
Bottom line: Gregg has lowered himself with a cheap shot, one that is irrelevant to the discussions.
Also, his selective quoting of one side only in fact proves the point of the book.
westerners are unable to deal with reversal of the gaze. In this case the gaze reversal shows Gregg not being fair.John the (Closet) Hindu says:
March 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
Carl, wait a minute! Just when I was starting to feel that you made some valid points, albeit filled with unconscious supremacy in places, you now bring up this Martha Nussbaum excerpt that is irrelevant to the thesis of this book.
What this shows is the western penchant to quote each other and build legitimacy when the fact and reason based arguments run out of steam.
For one thing, Nussbaum has been soundly thrashed since she wrote that piece. But you are being selective in what you quote from her.
Below is what Malhotra’s “Breaking India” book said about Nussbaum, in a section named after her:
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and is widely seen as a powerful voice of American liberalism. But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. For example, she stated that a Hindu nation is not ‘a benign establishment like the Lutheran Church of Finland’ but something that would treat Muslims as second-class citizens. (An entire section in Chapter 17 and also Appendix H are devoted to examining the role of the Lutheran Church in India.) Her interest in India started while working for Amartya Sen in an intimate relationship that she has bragged about.
After some foreign academics were found to be linked with secessionist movements, the Indian government wanted foreign participants to get permission to come to conferences. Nussbaum threatened, ‘We’ll see how bad publicity (which I intend to give them, here and elsewhere) may bring pressure to bear against them . . . .’ At a Yale seminar on anti-Semitism, her focus was to link Hinduism with fascism, as reflected in the notes that she distributed to the participants:
“In India the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special instance of Kashmir), but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European antisemitism of the 1930′s.
She further informed them that the Hindu political ideology was derived from ‘European romantic nationalism and its darker aspirations to ethnic purity.’ While her academic specialty is the philosophy of Aristotle, Nussbaum has written extensively to condemn Indian civilization. Her book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, is a recent example. Here she supported the divisive position that the Indus Valley Civilization was Dravidianist before the Sanskrit-speakers moved in. She wrote:
The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.
She not only presents a controversial speculation as a historical fact, but extrapolates it into the present Indian political discourse. She equates the modern Hindus with ‘Sanskrit-speakers who migrated into the subcontinent’ and excluded Dravidian speakers. This is very similar to the world view of Risley in colonial times, and of Dravidian separatists today. In explaining the Aryan ‘invasion’ scenario, she simply omits that it has been rejected by archeologists universally, and while grudgingly distancing herself from the invasion scenario, she supports the ‘Aryan migration’ scenario which amounts to the same thing. Those Indian scholars who are outside the supervision of the Western academy and funding agencies, and who critically examine the western interpretation of ancient Indian history, are branded as part of the Hindu Right.
Nussbaum disregards that the foreign Aryan model was vehemently rejected by Ambedkar and many others unrelated to any Hindu Right. She ignores that the model had been highly popularized by the British soldier-turned-archeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who declared pompously that the Vedic deity Indra stands accused of committing massacre in Mohenjo-Daro. This was not a ‘casual’ mistake of hypothesis, as Nussbaum wants her readers to believe. Edmund Leach, the famous British anthropologist, notes:
Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archaeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.
Without the required qualifications or training to speak with authority on the subject, Nussbaum proceeds to pontificate on the date of the Vedas, concluding that any claim of Vedic antiquity before 1200 BCE or claims of cultural continuity of the Harappan culture to the present day brand a person as belonging to the Hindu Right. Fig. 14.2 compares a few of Nussbaum’s positions on Indology with those of secular scholars of various backgrounds.
1. Claims by Nussbaum: Older dates to Rig Veda that place it as early as 3000 BCE are a ploy by the Hindu Right to establish Vedic-Harappan identity. (Nussbaum 2007, 219)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Upinder Singh, a historian, points out that scholars using astronomical references have dated Vedas variedly: ‘Dates falling within the late 3rd millennium BCE or the early 2nd millennium BCE (calculated on the grounds of philology and/or astronomical references) cannot be ruled out. The date of the Rig Veda remains a problematic issue.’ (Singh 2009, 185) Prof Nussbaum cannot label Upinder Singh as historian of Hindu Right as Upinder Singh is the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a historian by her own merit.
2. Claims by Nussbaum: Criss-cross pattern of ploughing noticed in Harappa can be noticed in the Haryana farms today. Martha Nussbaum rejects this continuity of civilization as ‘hardly remarkable.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: The veteran Indian archeologist, B.K. Thappar, who headed the archeological exploration of the Harppan site at Kalibangan, stated that the pattern of pre-Harappan ploughed field showed ‘remarkable similarity to modern ploughing in that area.’ (Thapar.B.K and Shaffer.J.G 1999, 278)
3.Claims by Nussbaum: Identification of red pigment by archeologists at the parting of hair seen in the terracotta figurines of Harappa is dismissed by Nussbaum with these words: ‘The paint on the terra cotta figure is so badly worn that it is hard to tell what was red and what wasn’t . . . the style is not like of any Indian woman known to me.’ (Nussbaum 2007, 221)
Claims by Secular Scholars: Jonathan M. Kenoyer, archeologist from University of Wisconsin (Madison), mentions female figurines dated 2600 BCE with traces of red pigment at the parting of the hair, as a significant indicator of the continuity of traditions. (Kenoyer 1998, 44-5)
[Fig. 14.2: A Comparison of Claims by Martha Nussbaum and Secular Scholars Regarding Ancient India ]
Clearly, Nussbaum promotes her political ideology over the other alternatives that fit the hard facts of archeological excavations. Though she is a non-specialist with regard to archeology, or linguistics, or culture, and her exposure to India is limited to contemporary politics, she dismisses the entire Indian archeological academic establishment as belonging to the ‘Hindu Right.’ She dismisses the cultural continuity of Indian civilization from Harappan times as ‘suppositions and not serious scholarly claims.’ This is proven false by archeologists Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein who, in the context of the relation between the Harappan and post-Harappan in India, state that ‘available data indicate that South Asian cultural history must be studied within a context of indigenous cultural continuity, not intrusion and discontinuity.’
Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history. Her account of Indian history begins with the invasion of/migration to India by the Aryan Hindus, who are different from the Dravidian natives of India; any Indian scholarship that questions this is considered a Hindu right-wing conspiracy. Where the western bias becomes too extreme to be deniable, she considers the errors as unintentional, but Indian scholarship, regardless of its merits, is said to have political motivations.
She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing,’ which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment.’ After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States has made it easier for them to use this ploy.’
She accuses the Indian government of using al Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy:
“What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of so many Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance.
Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.
Nussbaum diluted the attempts to deal with the Mumbai terror attack of 2008, stating that ‘it’s important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context. Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims.’ In discussions on the Mumbai attacks of 2008, she quickly diverts the discussion away from Islamic terror by citing the 2002 violence in Gujarat and the 2008 Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, without giving the full context of either. By manipulating the contexts, she equates local communal incidents with terrorism: ‘All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn’t reach the world’s front pages.’ In this manner she has been effective in removing attention away from anti-India terrorism.
Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics. What many uninformed readers of Nussbaum do not realize is the fascist origins of many of the ideas she spreads concerning the nature of ancient India, the so-called ‘Aryans,’ and the origin of Vedas and Hinduism. The old Race Science ideas explained in the fifth chapter of this book are alive and well in a cabal of scholars, even though only some of them operate explicitly as white supremacists, while others write similar things using liberal frameworks. For instance, it is interesting to compare Nussbaum’s intellectual positions on ancient India with those of notorious white supremacists such as Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist and former colonial officer in the British army in India.
Bottom line: Gregg has lowered himself with a cheap shot, one that is irrelevant to the discussions.
Also, his selective quoting of one side only in fact proves the point of the book.
westerners are unable to deal with reversal of the gaze. In this case the gaze reversal shows Gregg not being fair.
