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Moreover, what used to be a debate among scholars has boiled up and spilled over into the public arena, and the sober works of academics are now swam… - Thomas Trautmann
" "Moreover, what used to be a debate among scholars has boiled up and spilled over into the public arena, and the sober works of academics are now swamped by the often overheated writings and websites of those who are not scholars trained in the history, linguistics, and archaeology of ancient India. Partisan politics have entered into the debate. What used to be a polite disagreement among scholars has become a strident public shouting match in which personal insults are all too freely thrown about. Scholarship, of course, always involves disagreement and debate, and indeed we must have disagreement and debate so that interpretations of history are rigorously tested, for without them there is no hope of progress in historical knowledge. But when the debate becomes too heated and polemical, such that writers attack one another with ferocity, as has been the case of the Aryan debate in recent years, it becomes more difficult to determine the truth of the matter, and easier to be thrown off the track of historical truth in favour of political or religious objectives.
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About Thomas Trautmann
Thomas Roger Trautmann (born May 27, 1940) is an American historian, cultural anthropologist, and Professor Emeritus of History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
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Additional quotes by Thomas Trautmann
The paradox of these developments is that in spite of the growing distrust between Sanskritists and race science, the two sides of an often noisy dispute nevertheless collaborated, without really meaning to, in the creation of an enduring synthesis, what I call the racial theory of Indian civilization. By this I mean the theory, which by century's end had become a settled fact, that the constitutive event for Indian civilization, the Big Bang through which it came into being, was the clash between invading, fair-skinned, civilized Sanskrit-speaking Aryans and dark-skinned, barbarous aborigines. It was a local application of the double binary that guided all nineteenth-century European ethnologies, the double binary of the fair and the dark, the civilized and the savage.
The argument I should like to make, then, is not that the racial theory of Indian civilization is a fabrication, a tissue of lies, or that the Veda has nothing useful to say (or nothing that we can reasonably draw from it) about the ethnological situation of its time. What I want to show is that the Vedic evidence that has been brought forward has been subjected to a consistent overreading in favor of a racializing interpretation, and that the image of the "dark-skinned savage" is only imposed on the Vedic evidence with a considerable amount of text-torturing, both "substantive" and "adjectival" in character.
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The Boden Professorship had been privately endowed for the purpose of promoting the spread of Christianity by the translation of the Bible into Sanskrit. It was awarded to Monier-Williams by vote of convocation following a period of heavy lobbying, in which Max Muller's broad religious views and foreign birth worked against him even though he was much the better Sanskritist. It was a bitter defeat for him...
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