HPI
CALIFORNIA, February 6, 2006: The California textbook controversy continues to generate new articles. Rajeev Srinivasan writes, “I was once looking through the ‘Great Books’ series from Harvard University: this is widely used as reading material in college. In the introduction to the Bhagavad Gita, the compiler of the volumes says something — I paraphrase — to the effect that ‘to Western ears, this sounds primitive.’ I was startled at the prejudice, for, to my eastern ears, the Christian Bible sounds like much blood and violence and God casually smiting people dead and full of implausible contradictions, but I would never say so lest it hurt people’s sentiments. No such consideration, obviously, for Hindu sentiments from the ‘Great Books’ editor.” For the rest of Rajeev’s insightful article, click here.
Vishal Agarwal presents an analysis of the several school texts under consideration: Textbook I: The Oxford University Press text titled ‘The Ancient South Asian World’ authored by two scholars including the renowned Harappan archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer has the following gems: Page 81: “The Vedic peoples discriminated against the Dasa, a group of people who spoke a different language that did not sound at all like Sanskrit. The Brahmins sometimes made fun of the Dasa and said that they spoke as if they had no noses. (Pinch your nose and see what you would sound like.) The Dasa had wide flat noses and long curly black hair, and the Brahmins claimed that they had darker skin and called them uncivilized barbarians, who didn’t know how to behave.” COMMENT: Though the authors reject the Aryan Invasion Theory in the earlier pages, they seem to hold on to part of it–the so-called “Aryan” or “Indo-Aryan” people and their language, Sanskrit without providing any rationale for it. From chapter 11, some of the South Asians are referred to as Indo-Aryans to set them apart from the native inhabitants of ancient India who are identified as Dasa. There is no conclusive evidence proving that the Aryans and Dasa were racially distinct. The invitation to students to imitate the alleged speech pattern of the Dasa is uncalled for. The statement “Pinch your noses…” is frivolous. The statement that Dasas were insulted by Brahmins as dark skinned etc. is based on 19th century racist and colonial interpretations of the Hindu texts, something that even Indologists and Indo-European linguists dismiss today. Regarding the description ‘flat nosed’ which presumably refers to the word ‘anas’ in Vedic texts, numerous scholarly publications that explains the word in a different way. In short, the authors have reproduced 19th century prejudiced Eurocentric scholarship of colonial historians. For the rest of Vishal’s article, click here.
For those interested in a decade-old dispute involving Harvard’s Sanskrit Department and Professor Michael Witzel, click here and here for articles from Harvard’s student newspaper, The Crimson.