Dilip Kumar Chakrabarti Quotes

...without bothering to find out if.. such blind fetishism did not sometimes lead to a theoretical position undermining the Indian national identity.

First, this hypothesis of a population movement from Iran and elsewhere to Peninsular India does not conform to the geographic framework suggested earlier in the present paper on the basis of documented political and economic records .... Second, almost all the suggested analogies are too general to be of any use in a valid and meaningful archaeological comparison .... Third, some of the analogies cited are positively misleading .... Fourth, the suggested West Asiatic analogies do not belong to any single cultural assemblage or even different assemblages of any specific period .... Finally, it should be pointed out that not a single demonstrably West Asiatic type fossil occurs in the cited Indian assemblages. . . . Moreover, the basic character of these Indian assemblages is very different from that of their supposedly parent [in Sankalia's hypothesis they are parent sites] West Asiatic sites, a difference which should be obvious to anybody who studies these assemblages without primarily looking for similarities.

If one goes through the archeological literature on Egypt and Mesopotamia, [especially] the areas where Western scholarship has been paramount since the beginning of archeological research in those areas, one notes that the contribution made by the native Egyptian and Iraqi archeologists is completely ignored in that literature. The Bronze Age past of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the intervening region are completely appropriated by the Western scholarship. Also, when Western archeologists write on Pakistani archeology, they seldom mention the contribution made by the Pakistani archeologists themselves. There are exceptions, but they are very rare. After Independence, the Archeological Survey of India pursued a policy of relative isolation, which enabled archeology as a subject to develop in the country and helped Indian archeologists to find their feet. The policy seems to be changing now. . . . There is a great deal of arrogance and sense of superiority in that segment of the first world archeology, which specializes in the third world. Unless this segment of the first world archeology changes its way and attitude, it should be treated with a great deal of caution in the third world.

Indians would certainly try to understand the fact that for more than a hundred years in the late fourth, third and early second centuries BC, there was a state which controlled the entire natural geographical domain of south Asia. Not even the British controlled such a large area for such a long period. This fact should in any case be one of the answers to the notion that there have only been divisive tendencies in the political history of India.

Thus, anti-Aryan invasionist scholarship, in its turn, is stereotyped as being subser- vient to secular, Marxist ideology. The most maligned figureheads are precisely those who have most publicly opposed the Indigenous Aryan position, particularly R. S. Sharma, "a 'Marxist' historian of Indian variety who became a pillar of the historical establishment in his country," and Romila Thapar, "another 'mainstream' historian who harangued us on the importance of looking at ancient Indian history and archaeology through the prism of anthropological and sociological ideas, without telling us if such exercises by themselves would lead to a better historical understanding of ancient In- dia" (Chakrabarti 1997, 164).

After Independence . . . [Indians]—especially those from the ‘‘established’’ families—were no longer apprehensive of choosing History as an academic career . . . To join the mainstream, the historians could do a number of things: expound the ruling political philosophy of the day, develop the art of sycophancy to near- perfection or develop contacts with the elite in bureaucracy, army, politics and business. If one had already belonged to this elite by virtue of birth, so much the better. For the truly successful in this endeavor, the rewards were many, one of them being the easy availability of ‘foreign’ scholarships/fellowships, grants, etc. not merely for themselves but also for their protégés and the progeny. On the other hand, with the emergence of some specialist centers in the field of South Asian social sciences in the ‘foreign’ universities, there was no lack of people with different kinds of academic and not-so-academic interest in South Asian history in those places too, and the more clever and successful of them soon developed a tacit patron-client relationship with their Indian counterparts, at least in the major Indian universities and other centers of learning. In some cases, ‘institutes’ or ‘cultural centers’ of foreign agencies were set up in Indian metropolises themselves, drawing a large crowd of Indians in search of short-term grants or fellowships, invitations to conferences, or even plain free drinks.

The academic scope of the present volume may be clearly stated at the outset, It begins by arguing that one of the underlying assump- tions of Western Indology is a feeling of superiority in relation to India, especially modern India and Indians. This feeling of superi- ority is expressed in various ways. On one level, there are recurrent attempts to link all fundamental changes in Indian society and history to Western intervention in some form. The image of ancient India which was foisted on Indians through hegemonic texts emanating from Western schools of Indology had in mind an India that was steeped in philosophical, religious and literary lores and unable to change herself without external influence, be it in the form of Alexander the Great, Roman ships carrying gold or the Governor-Generals of the British East India Company. On a different level, expressions of Western superiority can be more direct and encompass a wide range of forms: patronizing and/ or contemptuous reviews of Indian publications, allusions to per- sonal hardships while working in India, refusal to acknowledge Indians as “agents of knowledge”, or even blatant arrogance which makes one wonder if the civilized values of Western academia have not left its Indology mostly untouched.

Chakrabarti (1997b) believes such constraints have severely crippled the visualization of "protohistoric growth in inner India in its own terms, without any reference to the supposed multiple waves of people pouring in from the West" (35).

In several Indian universities that I can think of – Delhi University, for instance -- students were positively discouraged to read those ‘nationalist’ writings

Chakrabarti (1977b) finds that they "may more satisfactorily be explained as nothing more than what they apparently are: isolated objects finding their way in through trade or some other medium of contact, not necessarily any population movement of historic magnitude" (31). He notes that prior to die artificial boundaries demarcated by the British, the southern part of the Oxus, eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and the Northwest of the subcontinent all constituted an area with significant economic and political interaction throughout the ages—a sphere of activity distinct from the Iranian heartland to the west and Gangetic India to the east. In such an economic and geopolitical zone, "any new significant cultural innovation in any one area between the Oxus and the Indus is likely to spread rapidly to the rest of this total area" (31). As far as he is concerned, "the archaeological data from the Indus system and the area to its west . . . which have been interpreted as different types of diffusion from a vague and undefined West Asia are no more than the indications of mutual contact between the geographical components of this interaction sphere" (35).

We need not follow Spooner further in his exploration of the bylanes of Indology where anything goes.

The communists had a free run so far, their opponents being no match in the psychological warfare launched by the communists. These opponents have had the control of the ICHR uninterruptedly since 2014 but they have basically been unable to neutralize the communist lobby in Indian historical studies. They are not motivated enough and focused enough. They regrettably are not even professional enough to realize where the communists have to be hurt to their disadvantage.

Historically, this should hardly cause any surprise. After all, Western Indology is an essential by-product of the process of the establishment of Western dominance in India. Racism—in this case a generic feeling of superiority in relation to the natives—was, quite logically, one of the major theoretical underpinnings of this process. Itis but natural that Western Indology should carry within it a lot of this feeling of superiority. We are not surprised by this.

To us, this is the first major racist elaboration of the ancient Indian history and culture in Western Indology, and all that we note here is that Mill’s contempt for ancient India extends to the other Asian civilizations as well and that much of Mill’s framework has survived in the colonial and post-colonial Indology. For instance, his idea that the history of ancient India, like the history of other barbarous nations, has been the history of mutually warring small states, only occasionally relieved by some larger political entities established by the will of some particularly ambitious and competent individuals has remained with us in various forms till today. His ideas that the Indian civilization never prospered except under foreign domination and that it was no doubt inferior to the Greek and Roman civilizations have been accepted almost as axioms by Western and neo-colonial Indian Indology...

The way in which the evidence of pre-Sargonic contact of the Indus civilization with Mesopotamia has been pushed into the background while making its chronological assessment and the way in which the sporadic material from the Bactria-Margiana complex ... has been dated to make that related to the end-phase of this civilization may be considered singularly interesting and indicative of a great mental block suffered by some archaeologists to accept the obvious and admit of the possibility of a considerably earlier beginning of the Indus civilization and its much larger duration.