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| Sheldon Pollock (right) with Rohan Murty |
A group of right-wing intellectual-supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi are on a unique mission: They want to “protect” Indian culture from western “takeover” through a petition. And, how they want to go about doing it? By seeking the ouster top Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock as chief editor of the Murty Classical Library of India.
A private project floated by IT giant and Infosys founder NR Narayana Murty and his son Rohan Murty, his son, costing $5.2 million, the aim of the project is translate 500 volumes of traditional Indian literature into English.Brain behind the petition is an American businessman-turned-scholar campaigning for revival of Sanskrit as the primary source of Indian culture, Rajiv Malhotra, who has called upon everyone to support what he calls the “powerful petition … to protect Sanskriti from Western takeover.”
Malhotra is known to be have been hailed by Modi for “glorifying our priceless heritage.” Floated by Prof K Ramasubramanian, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, among its biggest supporters is former chief election commssioner, N Gopalaswami, who currently heads the Union human resources development ministry’s committee on Sanskrit promotion.
Pollock is a Padma Bhushan awardee and, quite in line with Ambedkarites in India, believes the old "Brahamanical Sanskrit" is long dead, even as stressing on the revival of what he calls the "real" Sanskrit that belongs to subalterns like Dalits, tribals, women, etc., whose voices have been oppressed.
Pollock has given the name of the “Sanskrit cosmopolis” to the cultural-political order in which Sanskrit did the work of “articulating a form of political consciousness and culture, politics as ... celebration of aesthetic power.”
Well-known Mori protégé, Minhas Merchant, has accused Indian scholars in Sanskrit for failing to “translate into English the large repertoire of literature in regional Indian languages, as well as in Sanskrit, which is currently inaccessible to a wider world.”
He adds, “Indian scholars need to come up with their own translated works of ancient Indian authors going back 2,000 years and render their own interpretations of these works, some in Sanskrit, some in Pali, some in Persian. If they don’t, someone else – like Pollock – will.”
Addressed to Narayana Murthy and Rohan Murty, the petition, signed by 11,000 persons, and awaiting support of at least 15,000 persons, says that the Murty Classical Library should “deeply rooted and steeped in the intellectual traditions of India”, hence it should not be handed over to Pollock, who has “deep antipathy towards many of the ideals and values cherished and practiced in our civilization.”
Already termed a "Leftist", the petitioners, ironically, say that Pollock echoes "the views of Macaulay and Max Weber that the shastras generated in India serve no contemporary purpose except for the study of how Indians express themselves.”
Claiming that Pollock is not “politically neutral”, the petitioners say, “In recent years, Pollock has been a prominent signatory of several statements which are of a purely political nature and devoid of any academic merit; those statements have condemned various policies and actions of the Government of India.”
One of the main accusations against Pollock is, he is a “prominent signatory of two recent statements released by US academicians condemning the actions of the Jawaharlal Nehru University authorities and the Government of India against separatist groups who are calling for the independence of Kashmir, and for India’s breakup.”
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