MY THOUGHTS ON YALE RELIGIOUS STUDIES PROFESSOR SUPRIYA GANDHI'S TALK (CONCLUDED MINUTES AGO) ON PERSIAN INFLUENCE ON THE MODERNIZATION OF HINDUISM
Just minutes ago Supriya Gandhi finished her online talk on 'Persian and the modernization of Hinduism.' The lecture was a huge disappointment for me. I expected her to show how Persian helped Hinduism modernize, i.e. become a religion that asked questions of truth, investigated them employing rational devices, and reached rational conclusions on them.
Instead it turned out to be a session for Supriya Gandhi to peddle casteist Hinduism's supposed intellectual supremacy. Gandhi put together snippets of thought from a hotch-potch of Brahmin and nonBrahmin individuals chiefly from the 19th century who engaged with peripheral Persian thought in arriving at universal notions of the divine akin to Vedantic philosophy.
Her work failed to do a balanced, incisive, and objective critique of the modernization of Hinduism through Hinduism's contact with Persian literature and art forms. Did Hinduism 'modernize' at all? How did it modernize? What pre-modern or archaic forms did Hinduism exit for its modernization? Did modernization make Hinduism more rational, humane, equal, open, and liberating? Questions such as these which would have been essential to her paper found no mention and no effort to answer whatsoever.
I left the meet with the glib feeling that Brahminism and caste dominance, which Islamic rule and European colonialism together restrained for over a thousand years in India, was making a spirited return. For me it is a matter of concern as it was for the incoming Muslims and Europeans of a bygone time who quickly observed serious inhumanities within the Indian context inspired by religious supremacy and inequalities. That sense of superiority, cultural rootedness, and inherent inequality now reveals itself in rather frequent persecution of Muslims and Christians in India who are considered by Hindu fundamentalists to be sold out to outside allegiances.
It disappoints me to observe that the West allows such supremacist ideas to flourish on its soil without being hindered and challenged - ideas and their patrons who ruthlessly dominated societies from which westerners were driven out on the pretext of being foreigners and invaders.
I see the ignoring of the permeation of people categories with supremacist cultural imbedding and privilege in western society as a potential cause for the weakening of the West and western culture in the future that will make the West incapable of resisting those poised to be hostile to it.
I also see in this that the West is going away from its values of being a refuge for the weak and helpless and is now instead teaming up with the privileged classes from afar who have risen to positions of privilege, power, and prosperity through oppressive and subversive means. In doing this the West is losing its difference, and is becoming like them.
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