“Language Hegemony and the Construction of Identity” – Excerpts

Excerpts from an intensely thought-provoking essay written by Rajiv Malhotra more than 8 years ago but still fresh in its relevance to the present context.

*** Excerpts from “Language Hegemony and the Construction of Identity” ***

The Importance of Marketing:

For most industries, packaging and distribution are more critical than production, and those in control of distribution often end up controlling production as well….A dominant distributor eventually uses its power to also control development and production. This pattern has also been true of Indian ideas and heritage that went into Western civilization via the Arabs, Persians, and Greek. This non-involvement attitude towards the distribution of ideas was viable in the old days when the guru could wait for the right student to arrive, and any move to ‘promote’ knowledge was below his dignity. But in today’s competing worldviews, this attitude is not viable and is often the mark of arrogance, psychological complexes, and an introverted mentality.

…Language is the vehicle through which this packaging and distribution is accomplished. Hegemony of language is therefore comparable to control of ideas by controlling their distribution.

…

Language as Lens:

Skillful use of cultural language can and is used routinely to define a belief, subtly denigrate a community, appropriate another’s ideas by clever renaming and re-mapping, and assert cultural hegemony over others.

…For example, by defining a topic of study as the ‘caste’ structure of India, the choice of language positions the western scholar on a pedestal with Indian culture under the microscope on the defensive. But suppose textbooks were rewritten to discuss ‘social’ structures in society. Then the west’s own social stratification would have to be compared. Choice of words defines the context.

…

American schools teach the history of slavery, the Jewish holocaust, and the genocide of the Native Americans, in a neutral and factual manner. Similarly, there is now a rapidly increasing trend to teach world religions in schools and colleges….the implementation of this ideal falls short in case of Hinduism, since most teachers are ignorant and most authors are non-Hindus (which I have argued is the fault of Hindus for ignoring the academic scholarship of their own heritage).

By contrast, the operative term in India’s education is not ‘pluralism’ but ‘secularism’, which has the opposite effect.

…

European Nationalism and the Language Game of Aryanization:

…The term Aryan ‘race’ came mostly after 1870, and mostly in Britain. It was first applied to the Indo-Europeans mostly as a British fashion persisting well into the 20th c. In the second half of the 19th century, India was not seen so positively when the home of the Indo-Europeans (by then considered as “Aryans”) was sought outside India, from the Caspian Sea to the Baltic.

…Western Indology, he (Prof Subhash Kak) feels, has imposed a Eurocentric view of India via a dogma called the ‘Aryan Invasion’, now amended as ‘migration’ but still insisting on the non-Indian origin of Vedic Civilization. The Aryan Invasion is a direct offshoot of the White Man’s Burden presented in linguistic terms. Like all dogmas, it is immune to evidence. While defended fiercely, its current remaining proponents avoid providing evidence in its support, claiming that having been in place for 150 years gives it enough aging to be valid, and those who question too deeply are labeled as ‘fundamentalists’.

…When it was found that the languages of India and Europe were related in structure and vocabulary, with Sanskrit being far richer than any Western language, the scholars responded with myths….Indian texts do not use the term Arya or Aryan as a race, only as a culture of nobility. There is reference in the Manu Smriti where even the Chinese are termed Aryas, proving that it was not a race. South Indian kings called themselves Aryas as did South Indian travelers who took Indian civilization to Southeast Asia. But European scholars invented the mythical Aryan ‘race’, and established the disciplines of Semitic and Indo-European studies. …Although ‘Arya’ never had a racial connotation in the texts, these scholars insisted on that interpretation. It was further assumed that Aryan meant the European race, allowing Europe to claim for itself all of the “Aryan” civilization as its own heritage. Europe combined the civilization of the mythic Aryan and the monotheism of the Hebrew as its own. This dual inheritance was seen as the mark of its imperial destiny.

…By appropriating the origins, the Europeans also appropriated the oldest literature of the world from India. Without a past how could the nations of the empire ever aspire to equal the West? Indian literature was seen to belong to two distinct layers. At the core were the Vedas that represented the property of the pure Aryans. At the next level, weakened by mixture with the indigenous tribes, the literature was shown to come from irrational rituals.

…

Westism and its Portrayal of ‘World Negating’ Indians:

There are four western trains of thought that require separate analysis beyond this essay:

• The British had their hegemonic agenda of economics. Their love affair of India lasted while it was their ‘property’ and reversed as Indian nationalism started to assert. The East India Trading Company’s share of the global economy was larger than today’s combined share of the top 50 companies of the entire world. But history textbooks of Britain’s industrial revolution fail to examine the role of India as supplier of virtually all the capital, much of the raw material, and the major market for the finished goods. Nor does it mention how the arson of India’s indigenous civilization made European development possible.
• The Germans had a need to find their roots of superiority, to build a national identity for their feudal tribes. Devoid of ancient archaeology or history, Germany’s identity was formulated based on its discoveries of a superior civilization in India with linguistic similarities to theirs. German thinkers first glorified India as their cradle. Later, the need for indigenous German roots meant that “Aryans” were declared to be Germans and Indians as less pure relatives. Their interpretation and condemnation of a ‘world negating’, inferior and poor Indian society caused many scholars’ U-Turn to Christian exclusiveness, and to assert German nationalism. It is amazing to see so much German study of India from 1700 till 1950, including many writings by some of the most famous German thinker of their time, and yet India’s influence is barely mentioned in today’s textbooks on European History. They teach Nazism, but without explaining the appropriation of Indian civilization by German nationalists, although that was the intellectual foundation for the rise of Nazism. Few westerners understand that India’s swastika was the symbol of this appropriation, the result of a made-up race theory to intimidate and suppress Jews in Europe and Indians in Asia.
• In the teaching of American history today, it is barely a footnote that the expeditions by Columbus and others were not for any romantic spirit of discovery by the western mind. Rather, the Queen of Spain was at that time the world’s largest and richest venture capitalist, and the discovery of new trade routes to India, with maps, navigational secrets, and colonial hubs along the way, was as commercially rewarding as control over operating system software would be today. It was the core proprietary know how of that time.
• The American transcendentalists, including Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, Eliot, Huxley, were heavily inspired by the Upanishads, Bhagvad Gita and other Vedanta sources, and wrote profusely about them. But later historians downplayed the Indic influence upon their thought. Students of these literary giants seldom touch the subject of Indic influences that were behind so many of their great works.

…

Many western thinkers have gone through four stages of scholarship: (1) Learn, respect and appropriate from India; (2) Distance from the Indic source to ‘clean up the know how’; (3) Rename it as Western and/or Christian; (4) Trash the source as world negating, primitive and backward in comparison to the ‘scientific and progressive’ west, thereby justifying the appropriation. I have termed this final stage ‘academic arson’, for it is like an arsonist burning a place after robbing it.

Some scholars never went past stage (1) or (2), but successors repositioned the ideas into subsequent stages. Jung reached stage (4) but did not mask his Indic sources, whereas his successors deny the Indic roots of his ideas. Teilhard de Chardin wrote notes about his own stage (1) but these are unknown to his followers. Schrodinger’s quantum physics was done in stage (1) and he openly defined himself as a Vedantin till he died, but today’s quantum physicists and historians emphatically hide this philosophical link. They have invented new language, to explain it as Kantian and/or neo-Platonic if they are secular, or else as Christian theology if they are spiritual, in either case avoiding being linked to the taboo of India.

De-Negating Indian Civilization’s Portrayal:

Given the deeply rooted archetype of Indian civilization as being primitive, exotic but irrational, and in some views even religiously ‘condemned’, it is most important to confront this head on. While the detailed process of this deconstruction is complex and beyond the scope of this essay, the methodology I am using can be summarized below:

1. The first question to address is whether India was always poor and less developed than the west in its long history; for so, then it would add credence to the stereotype claim. On the other hand, if it enjoyed success in the intellectual and materialistic realms, that would make the world negating notion untenable. There are two parts to this question:
   a. Did India make important contributions to the world’s civilization,
   (i) in ancient times and/or (ii) in modern times?
   b. What was India’s economic condition until the 19th century,
   (i) as per various records of visiting and domestic historians of the relevant periods, and
   (ii) based on physical evidence that survives from archaeological and other materials.
2. Since answers to (1) decisively prove an advanced civilization in India including in matters of the intellect and worldly progress, it is natural for a skeptic to wonder what happened to it, and this mental block must also be dealt with head on. My methodology here has two parts:
   a. The Islamic period’s massive genocide, plunder, and destruction of civilization was well documented by Islam’s own scholars because it was considered pious for the invaders to commit such acts in the name of Allah. Will Durant has written: “The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading…” Indians have been afraid to face this history.
   b. To summarize the British colonial impact, Samuel Huntington writes in his recent ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ that in 1750 India accounted for 24.5% of the world’s manufacturing output, and the West (Europe and America combined) for less than 19%. But in 1913, India’s share of the world output had gone down to less than 2% and the West’s share had increased to 81%. He explains, “The industrialization of the West led to the de-industrialization of the rest of the world.”
3. To understand what has led to the current portrayal of India, one has to examine and expose various intellectual agendas, which are a grim reminder not to abandon the field of the humanities to others:
   a. German nationalism was based on the Aryanization of its identity, by combining
   (i) the appropriation of India’s civilization and (ii) the rejection of Indians as inferior.
   b. Britain’s agenda to control a population one thousand times more than its own men based in India was through mental subjugation – the well-known Macaulay plan.
   c. India’s own post-independence intellectuals turned to the leftist model, partly out of the Macaulay success of inferiority complex in their own heritage, thereby worsening this self-image. From copying the colonial West it became copying Soviet and Chinese socialist models, in each case at the expense of indigenous heritage.
   d. The most recent portrayal is through the language of Evangelists. This language consists of radical constructs such as ‘sinners’, ‘condemned’, ‘heathen’, ‘pagan’, ‘polytheists’, and ‘hell’. It is ironical that those who portray Indians as being world negating explicitly tout the negative language of hatred! Secular westerners consider it their burden to ‘save’ Indians from backwardness and irrationality. Religious ones consider it God’s command to ‘save’ Indians from ‘damnation’.
4. Indian texts need to be properly interpreted against the charge of being world negating and lacking in social values. Sri Aurobindo was a champion in this endeavor, basing his seminal work “The Life Divine” upon his large commentaries on the Vedas, Upanishads, Yoga, and Gita. That he was not promoting a ‘western progression’ idea against a world negating Indian civilization is evident from his and the Mother’s very explicit and voluminous works on the central importance of India’s civilization to the future evolution of human consciousness.

Each of the four parts above must be taken in the context of the overall mission. Taken in isolation, each has been criticized by some who even support the overall purpose. For instance, many have commented that (1) is useless because we should think of the future scientific progress rather than the past, which is a view that ignores the role of heritage and self-esteem in progress. Those looking at (2) in isolation have commented that this re-examination of historical atrocities would create negative vibrations and serve no purpose, which is a view of accepting the world negation stereotype as a given and living under the glass ceiling of the ‘rational’ West. Part (3) has not even been discussed much, as it calls for rediscovery of European history which is well beyond a simple call to reopen Indian history. Part (4) is the intellectual challenge started by Sri Aurobindo more daringly than anyone else and deserves to be continued. Each of these four threads is large enough to deserve a dedicated world conference, books of essay collections, and source books of previously published materials. This would entail finding, motivating and coordinating a multi-disciplinary team of scholars from history, religion, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology – in fact, the entire humanities. When completed, I am convinced that it will have a greater paradigm shifting impact than even Edward Said’s “Orientalism”.

*** End of Excerpts ***

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