The content of a recent judgment by the Allahabad HC is just another instance of how a lot of "proud" Hindus lack critical thinking skills, or what we call logic and commonsense in ordinary parlance. This lack of logic is not new, and resistance to it also is not new.
https://twitter.com/t_d_h_nair/status/1433385582227451909
One influential Indian who rallied against such juvenile, ignorant ways of thinking prevalent among grown-up Hindus, especially when it comes to history, was Ramkrishna Bhandarkar.
He was a towering scholar who has left behind a huge corpus of work in Sanskrit studies, and in the history and culture of India. Pune’s prestigious Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute was founded as a tribute to him in 1917 on his 80th birthday.
B held that it was the duty of the “true patriot” to “fearlessly expose” the “faults in the character of his people.” One such fault he wished Indians would get rid of was the absence of a “critical and comparative method of inquiry” in historical research.
In a 1918 speech, given at age 81, he said that he was woefully unimpressed by what he called “the temptations of an Indian scholar – he is prone to see good in everything old.”
“I have already tried to impress on our students the importance of the pursuit of a critical and comparative method of inquiry, but these lectures do not seem to have produced a very wide effect.”
In one of those speeches, given in 1888, Bhandarkar said:
(Find the speech here: archive.org/details/critic…)
(Find the speech here: archive.org/details/critic…)
"Before admitting a narrative as historical, one ought to ask [one]self if the object of the author was to please the reader and excite the feeling of wonder, or to record events as they occurred."
(In the contemporary context of Whatsapp Univ, Godi media and IT cells, it is imp to add some more qualifiers here: ".. excite the feeling of wonder, FEAR, OR HATE.")
Having been a lifelong advocate of critical thinking for understanding Indian history, the veteran scholar seems to have been pretty frustrated towards the end of his life.
In the 1918 speech, eg, Bhandarkar expressed exasperation over “persons who find in the Rgveda allusions to X-rays, railways and what not.”
[These were, at that time, important instances of popular modern scientific inventions.]
[These were, at that time, important instances of popular modern scientific inventions.]
This absurd tendency to appropriate every modern scientific advancement to an ancient "Hindu" India is, acc to B, the “natural failing of the Indian scholar.”
While Bhandarkar urged us not to consider the great epics and the puranas etc. as strict historical (ie, "real") accounts, he said they still have historical significance in that “one can gather from them information as to what men and women did and thought in those days.”
One amazing instance in which such an attitude towards premodern Southasian literature is displayed is this marvelous commentary on the "historical" Mahabharat by Audrey Truschke: aeon.co/essays/the-ind…
Despite its continued relevance, Bhandarkar's work leaves little space for the internal diversity within Hindu and Southasian understandings of history and science. For that we have to thank Dalit and Bahujan critical thinkers like Kancha Iliah Shepherd. amazon.in/Post-Hindu-Ind…
Bhandarkar's 1918 speech can be found here: jstor.org/stable/4170225…
I wrote about him more than four years ago for @thewire. It is disappointing that as a nation we continue to think of history and science in highly immature ways, & are reluctant to embrace critical thinking. thewire.in/history/grand-…
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