What China and India Once were: The Pasts that May Shape the Global Future A Review

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

What China and India Once Were: The Pasts the May Shape the Global Future
Ed, Sheldon Pollock and Benjamin Elman
New York: Columbia University Press
2018.

Add caption

Sheldon Pollock has waded into far too many controversies in India, and I must say that his interventions have served no purpose whatsoever except to distract people from the seminal contribution he made to the study of Indian Literary Culture and History in his Language of the Gods in the World of Men. Unfortunately, Sheldon Pollock has become a highly divisive public figure and his broadsides against India and its politics are not his primary call for attention. He is a distinguished scholar and the book edited by him and Benjamin Elman are important interventions in the study of the histories and pasts of China and India.

China and India share a common historical trajectory. Both were highly sophisticated civilizations with a long tradition of scholarship: Mandarin in the case of China and Sanskrit in the case of India. Both were victims of foreign conquest and both civilizations had to deal with questions of political legitimacy, administrative control, protecting the frontiers. While China realized quite early that the Steppes of Central Asia posed a considerable challenge to the stability of the Middle Kingdom and constructed the Great Wall as a physical barrier against invasion, Indian rulers unfortunately had no such wisdom. India was easy to invade as the path to the Gangetic Plain was open to any invader who crossed the Hindu Kush Mountains. China dealt with its perennial problem of devastating floods by constructing the Grand Canal which connected the Yellow River with the Yangtze River, running across China for a length of more than 1800 kilometers. Remarkably this waterway was completed as early as the Tang Period , in the 9th century. Significantly, the new capital Beijing was now accessible to the grain growing areas of southern and central China. Indian dynasties hardly encouraged any construction of comparable social utility and value. The Mughals the contemporaries of the Ching and earlier the Ming were content building tombs and the Timurid rulers though blessed with both curiosity and insight did not attempt anything quite so spectacular. Obviously, there are historical reasons for the difference.

The book reviewed herein looks at a variety of cultural practices from a comparative perspective. Flora and Fauna and its social value in China and India form an interesting part of the first chapter. The elephant became extinct in China fairly early in its history. whereas in India it flourishes until this day. Though none of the rulers seem to have had a conscious conservation policy, India attitudes towards nature was far more reverential than in China. Long distance trade was encouraged at least till the end of the Ming Era. In India, the long coast line spawned a range of communities which specialized in long distance trade: the Kutchi merchants and the Chettiyars come to ones mind immediately.

The advent of modernity both in India and China are beset with both conceptual and historiographical issues. The periodization derived from western perceptions defy smooth transition both in the case of India and China. It is now recognized that both these Asian giants are now re-entering the Global Economy and if Sheldon Pollock is to be believed on their own terms. China has completely transformed its economy while India still struggles with the age old issues of caste hierarchies social problems and of course poverty. China has succeeded in areas in which India has failed miserably. The One Party system seems to have helped China and India's raucous rowdy democracy has been a drag on the energies of the nation. Perhaps the time has come to rethink the developmental paradifms embraced by these two Nations.

One point on which the book is extremely insightful is the History and its uses in both these countries. China developed a strong tradition of writing Local and Dynastic History from the early Han Dynasty. In India, Historiography did not make much headway until the arrival of the Turks who brought with them their own models of Historical texts. Perhaps the lack of critical thought except in the speculative areas of Linguistics and Philosophy may have inhibited the development of Historical ideas in India.

This is a good book and policy makers interested in India and China must read it.

From Orientalism to Academic Hinduphobia: The strange career of the American Approach to Indian Studies

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books American scholars are an intense serious lot. They take their state, their Government, their politics and their society far more seriously than the average Indian scholar. While I disagree with many of them,I retain a lurking sense of admiration for the integrity that they display in their research. I graduated with a Ph D in History from one of the leading Public/State Universities in the US and had the good fortune to be trained by a Historian who is rated as one of the leading scholars of the last century. Having said this, I must reflect on the recent controversy stirred by by Rajiv Malhotra in his various publications particularly his highly polemical book, The Battle for Sanskrit. An attack on Sheldon Pollock for his rather asinine political views is one thing, but a concerted attempt at delegitimizing his valuable contribution to early Indian History is an entirely different issue. I too find the collective petitions by YS based academics on the Hon'ble Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi extremely patronizing and an affront to Indias dignity. The political process in India is of concern only to Indians and the American scholars like Martha Nussbaum, Wendy Diniger, Sheldon Pollock and a host of Jewish American scholars are all quiet when it comes to US crimes in different parts of the world. I have not come across the same sort of rant by these scholars on Israels attack on Palestinians, on the illegal War in Iraq and Syria, the large scale use of drone in slaughtering non white non combatants all over the world. My litany can go one. I am putting these facts across only to draw attention to the fact that US academics are often servitors of power and are quite willing to extend their expertise into sensitive areas of national security and espionage. The posture of moral outage adopted by these scholars is misplaced and we will find it more convincing if the Marthas, the Wendys and others direct their ire at US racialist policies in different parts of the world. Having said this I would like to highlight the contribution of one scholar who is the subject of Rajiv Malhotra's attack, Sheldon Pollock. In the Battle for Sanskrit Rajiv Malhotra, an NRI settled in USA has thundered against Sheldon Pollock and has tried to link Language of the Gods in the World of Men to a whole host of poltically sensitive questions. He accuses Pollock of arguing that India is the spiritual home of Nazism. This is quite absurd and nowhere does Pollock make that claim except to suggest that the notion of Aryan was introduced into Europe through the Western Indological scholarship. Pollock is too sophisticated a historian to make such a crude argument: Arya on well born is not the same as Aryan and therefore India is in no way responsible for the horrors of the Holocaust. By making this sort of claim, Malhotra undermines his otherwise well researched work. If his argument is that US academics are uncomfortable with the idea of a strong, vibrant India then he is not wrong. And that has to do with US strategic and geo political interests. Is Pollock saying that Sanskrit is irredeemably a language of oppression and exclusion. The answer to this question is far more nuanced than what Malhotra admits. True, like Latin, Sanskrit too was associated with a courtly culture marinated in oppression, caste purity, rituals of power etc. A language is only an instrument and does not carry the burden of sin associated with the speakers of the language. English is the language of slave traders, conquerors and the like but that does not make us reluctant to use it. Nowhere does Pollock make an explicit link between language and social structure. However, a profound question lies at the heart of the book under discussion. Why did Sanskrit reemerge in the sixth century as the language of prasastis, public eulogies and courtly literature at the same moment in time when vernacular cultures became more assertive. This question is important and an analysis of the mutual relationship between marga and desi is an interesting exercise. Now is raising critical questions a form of Hinduphobia. I have left out Wendy Doniger from my discussion as I find her work stupid and trashy. Her publishers rightly decided to pulp her work. However even she has a piece of research that is actually quite good, a study of the problem of evil in Indian thought. If we reject her approach we are left only with David Shulman and his work. I personally feel that while US scholars are rather politically motivated in the way they, at the instigation of Indian Left Liberals started bad mouthing the Hon ble Prime Minister of India, it would be wrong to throw the baby with the bath water. American scholarship is awe inspiring in many significant ways and if US scholars need to retain their legitimacy, it would behove them not to fall victim to the political machinations of third rate Indian scholars in Universities such as Delhi, JNU and others.