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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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Thus, even though it is only recently that the Aryan debate has become a large, noisy public debate, it has been with us for a long time at a lower level of intensity and public participation, and the issues remain unsettled. But times have changed, and today the civility with which these things used to be debated-the respect participants showed to the view of the opposing side, so noticeable in Majumdar's volume on the Vedic age-has gone out the window, unfortunately.
This uncompromising judgment falls especially upon those Indians who are under British rule, the Bengalis, and among them especially the Hindus, and the content of their moral depravity (which Grant descants upon at length) is that they are lacking in truth, honesty, and good faith to a degree not found in European society. Grant is blunt in the interest not of condemning the Indians but of determining "their true place in the moral scale," ... What he insists upon is the universality of this great depravity in Hindu society, giving it a general moral hue, "between which and the European moral complexion there is a difference analogous to the difference of the natural colour of the two races" (1796:25). But the purpose is neither condemnation for its own sake nor to assert the permanent inferiority of another race.
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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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