Persecutors Won't Read The Classics

• A petition seeks the removal of Sheldon Pollock as editor of the Murty Classical Library

• Academics behind it say Pollock disrespects India, his writings distort Indian thoughts and ideals

***

For nearly six years, the prestigious Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI) has been persevering on its ambitious goal of translating classic Indic texts which it hopes will reach a new generat­ion of readers. But does it fit—or even aspire to do so—into the Make in India ‘ethos’? Apparently not, bizarre though the question may seem.  A move to sack renowned Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock of Columbia University, who heads the translation project created by Rohan Murty, son of Infosys foun­der N.R. Narayana Murthy, emerged last week in an online petition on the portal change.org. Signed by 132 Indian academics, it sought the removal of Pollock as the chief editor of MCLI because of his views which, they alleged, echoed those of “Macaulay and Max Weber”. His previous writings were ‘deeply flawed’, and ‘misrepresented’ Indian cultural heritage, the petition went.

To many academics who had worked with the very erudite Pollock, besides the incredulity it evoked, it was the timing of the demand that seemed dubious. For, the call for his removal came weeks after Pollock supported a statement issued by several US academics (Noam Chomsky among them) criticising the BJP government for handling of events on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus last month and for generating “a culture of authoritarian menace”. This is how the petitioners put it to Rohan Murty. “We do not find him petitioning against his own US government’s authoritative policies within its borders and around the world. Thus, it is crystal clear that Pollock has shown disrespect for the unity and integrity of India. We submit that such an individual cannot be considered objective and neutral enough to be in charge of your historic translation project.” The political line there being obvious enough.

Many would argue that personal attacks on Pollock weren’t anything new (for exa­mple, when he was awarded the Padmashri, or when he headed previous avatar, the Clay Sanskrit library). But here were a litany of academics, many from reputed institutions, though not all Sanskrit scholars by a long stretch. There were tell-tale signs of their less-than-complete grasp of the iss­ues involved—nay, of even the basics. The petition initially carried extracts from Pollock’s 2012 talk at Heidelberg University, which ran contrary to the complaints aga­inst him. This part was later dropped in a revised version of the petition when the fallacious argument was pointed out!

“Either through poor comprehension, or for mischievous reasons, the writers of the petition have misunderstood Prof Pollock’s articles by 180 degrees. Prof Pollock cited Macaulay and Weber precisely as examples of the point of view he is against, i.e., people who fail to see the value of the shastras and India’s ancient intellectual systems,” says Prof Dominik Wujastyk, Singhmar Chair in classical Indian society and polity at the University of Alberta, Canada. He isn’t alone; many in international academia are stunned by this attack on Pollock. Says Matthew Kapstein, visiting professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Chi­cago: “No scholar I know has greater regard for the achievements of classical Sanskrit learning than does Prof Pollock. Any accusation to the contrary is based either on ign­orance or wilful distortion of facts.” Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi, a professor of history at the Karnataka State Open Uni­versity, who was Pollock’s student between 1995-2005, says he found it interesting that only a few signatories of the pet­­ition were language professors, linguists or historians; many were mathematicians and scientists. There’s even a Sanskrit new­s­­reader and an ISKCON man in the mix.

The gripe about Pollock from the opposite camp is that he doesn’t have a ‘rigorous understanding’ of Sanskrit which, they claim, shows in his earlier writings that ‘distort’ Indian thoughts and ideals. They allege his writings shows Hindu culture and mythology in poor light—for instance, many found his writing on the Ramayana unacceptable. The big complaint, of course,  is that he has completely dissociated Sanskrit from ‘sanskriti’. “He traced Sans­krit literature to the 4th century, disregarding the earlier oral tradition in the language, and refused to call it literature. It is not just Pollock but the entire group that disregards ‘Bharatiya’ traditions and history. They have written extensively on it and have only condemned it,” says Prof Ramesh C. Bhardwaj, who heads the department of Sanskrit at Delhi University. “And the problem is, just bec­ause it will be a product of Harvard, most learned people are likely to refer to it and form their own distorted image of Indian culture, traditions and history. We want that Indians, and not American scholars, people who truly know and believe in the translations, come on board,” he says. “Pollock is a scholar no doubt, but he doesn’t have a holistic understanding of Indian thought,” he adds.

“We are concerned about the mindset he carries into the (MCLI) translations. It will be difficult for us to dissociate them from what he has written before unless he diso­wns the thesis he has built, starting from 1985,” says Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan, a computer science professor at IIT Bombay who initiated the petition. “We talked to several Sanskrit scholars, so there was a lot of unrest already brewing. The JNU incident further acted as a catalyst,” he says.

Curiously, nobody so far has had any complaints with MCLI’s work. It has released nine classics since 2015. Nor has there been any correspondence with the library over Pollock’s work in the last six years. As one person associated with the project, who thinks the petition is all about publicity and Pollock’s opposition to the Hindutva brigade, obs­e­rved, “The thing we find rich is that this series was announced in 2009. For six years, not a single person on this list who has sig­ned the petition has bothered to get in touch with us, offered to help or engage con­­structively. Sud­de­nly, they want to claim ownership.” Apart from rejigging the editorial board, starting with getting rid of Pollock, the petitioners have asked for fair representation of the “lineages and traditional groups” that teach and practise the ‘traditions’ described in the texts being tra­nslated (a strong whiff of Brahminism there); that the project must be part of the “Make in India ethos and not outsourced wholesale to American Ivy Leagues”; and that there must be a written set of standards and policies for the entire project.

Rohan Murty declined to comment whe­ther the MCIL would succumb to this dem­and to remove Pollock. But he did tell Outlook how important the library project is. “The root problem is we are fast losing and have lost and are not quickly enough replacing a generation of great scholars. I’m more worried about that and that’s not going to be only created in India. It’ll have to be created across the globe. That’s why we need many efforts of different kinds and this is just one effort. And, people should start other efforts too,” says Murty. The MCLI was started by Murty with a gift of $5.2 million while he was a computer science doctoral student at Harvard.

“Their argument is not that he is unworthy of being the editor of the Murty library on the grounds of being a weak scholar. They rest their case on their dislike of his attitude, not realising that to venerate tradition is not to sacrifice one’s analytical and critical capacities at its altar,” says Dipesh Cha­k­rabarty of the University of Chicago, a col­league of Pollock’s and a co-editor (with Sanjay Subrahma­nyam) of South Asia Across the Disciplines. Another student of Pollock’s, Yigal Bronner, associate professor, Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says the professor taught him that the study of a language required the study of the culture of the place where it was born and practised, without exposing it to world views. “Act­ually, Pollock does everything the signatories claim he isn’t doing. And after reading this petition, I only want to ask for freedom of academic and political thinking,” he says.

Many of the petitioners, some of them from India’s top colleges and universities, refused to comment on the issue or eng­age in a debate. Could it be that delving a little deep into this controversy will expose the infirmities of their own scholarship?

By Ajay Sukumaran and Stuti Agarwal