Top 15 Dilip Kumar Chakrabarti Quotes

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.

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

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.

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...

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

To join the main stream 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.

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.

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.

This book explores some underlying theoretical premises of the Western study of ancient India, These premises developed in response to the colonial need to manipulate the Indians’ perception of their past. The need was felt most strongly from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, and an elaborate racist frame work, in which the interrelationship between race, language and culture was a key element, slowly emerged as an explanation of the ancient Indian historical universe. The measure of its success is obvious from the fact that the Indian nationalist historians left this framework unchallenged, preferring to dispute it only in some comparatively minor matters of detail, This book argues that this framework is still in place, and implicitly accepted not merely by Western Indologists but also by their Indian counterparts. The image of the ancient Indian past remains the same. The persistence of the old image is reflective of India’s relationship as a part of the Third World with the West and Western historical scholarship,

Mill’s contempt for ancient India extends to the other Asian civilizations as well and . . . 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.

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).

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).

Dilip Chakrabarti's comments (1986) are of relevance here: "Archaeology must take the entire basic framework of the Aryan model into consideration. It should not be a question of underlining a particular set of archaeological data and arguing that these data conform to a particular section of the Vedic literary corpus without at all trying to determine how this hypothesis will affect the other sets of the contemporary archaeological data and the other sections of the Vedic literary corpus" (74).

Regarding the pastoral nature of the Indo-Aryans, Chakrabarti (1986) adds a further observation that "the inconvenient references to agriculture in the Rigveda are treated as later additions. The scholars who do this forget that effective agriculture is very old in the subcontinent, and surely no text supposedly dating from 1500 B.C. could depict a predominantly pastoral society anywhere in the subcontinent. Something must be wrong with the general understanding of this text" (Chakrabarti 1986, 76). In other words, if the Indo-Aryans were pastoralists, they must have always coexisted with agriculturists in India since agriculture predates the assumed date for their arrival by millennia. There could never have been a purely pastoral economic culture.

Chakrabarti (1997) comments: Rumblings against some of the premises of Western Indology have been heard from time to time, but such rumblings have generally emerged in uninfluential quarters, and in the context of Indian historical studies this would mean people without control of the major national historical organizations, i.e., people who can easily be fobbed off as "fundamen- talists" of some kind, mere dhotiwalas of no intellectual consequence. (3)