Dear Jeyamohan
You explained beautifully how Western Indologists rediscovered and explained Indian religious texts and what advantages they have to do so. I understand it; they can easily obtain all texts, whereas Indian scholars can’t learn materials that belong to other schools. For example, a Vedic scholar who belongs to Krishna Yajurveda will not be allowed to learn Rigveda.
(I heard my great-grandfather was expelled from his community because he traveled all the way to Kashi to learn it; he never returned.)
But my question is this: What are the misunderstandings and confusions created by the foreigners who recovered and interpreted Hindu texts? Because they were total strangers to these cultures and the majority of them had no religious or spiritual approach, they might have missed a lot of nuances and details.
Sredhar Madhav
Dear Sredhar,
I can put the total scenario like this.
Before the arrival of western indologists, no one learned the Vedas for their meaning. Apart from a few Vedantic schools, there was no way to get a complete picture of the Hindu way of spiritual thought. Scholars across India dispersed the original texts among themselves. There is no standard way to comprehend them.
Western indologists rediscovered the Vedas and translated them into English. They created dictionaries to understand those texts. Thus they started a new era, which in fact created philosophical schools like Neo-Vedanta.
Yes, they made a lot of mistakes and misinterpreted many texts. It is quite natural because every school of Hinduism did the same for centuries. There is no one “single and correct” interpretation of these texts. Every scholar and school of thought has its own viewpoint.
The western approach is basically twofold. One is the ‘textual study.’ They tried to recover the ‘pure’ texts using their age-old devices of textual studies. Thus, they created an open discussion, and through it, they rebuilt the most likely correct version of these texts. These researches and discussions are crucial even now. We are relying on them for all research.
Their second approach is a historical and sociological analysis of Indian philosophy. They led to numerous studies on these texts, a trend that persists to this day. From M.N. Roy and Ambedkar to D.D. Kosambi, there is an array of scholars in this lore. They are challenging each other and creating new perspectives.
The retrieval of old texts and translation of them into a common language like English created a new wave of Indian studies in India. Scholars with spiritual and aesthetic perspectives, such as Arabindo and Nataraja Guru, confront these simple historical and sociopolitical viewpoints, starting with westerners. There are numerous masters from various schools of Hinduism who have Western education as well as their own Indian Gurukula education, like Nataraja Guru. They opened a balanced and comprehensive way to learn these texts.
Within a century, thousands of books have been published commenting on and explaining these ancient texts, and it is actually the biggest intellectual movement that has ever happened in India. They are arguing among themselves and progressing toward a collective meaning. Intellectual and spiritual movements consistently operate via multilevel dialectics. Indeed, western Indologists initiated this massive movement.
Jeyamohan
