History

I I am not sure what the discussions are about. Here are some of the problems that have surfaced. Do (did) people in India believe that Ramayana is (was) a narration of ‘what really happened’? Even without specifying the ‘when’ and the ‘where’, the answer is obvious: some (did) do; some (did) do not; some are agnostic. The question, however, is: What is the question about? What problem is it meant …

The western intellectual tradition has bemoaned the fact that the Indians never indulged in history-writing (or historiography). In this tradition, there is an obsessive need for collecting “facts” about the past. This is partly the result of how Judaism, Christianity and Islam (the three Semitic religions) look at themselves and their own past: everything they claim about their past (the Flood, …

Let me begin with the following dialogue between a Swiss-German and a young Balinese (from Bichsel, Peter, Der Leser, Das Erzählen: Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen, 1982, Darmstadt und Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag. Pp. 13-14, my translation and italics): When I discovered, or when it was explained to me, that Hinduism is a pedagogical religion, namely, that in so far as the best “good deed” …

Why understanding bullshit is important? Three reasons: (a) there is a very frequent use of the word ‘bullshit’ (mostly in my posts); (b) bullshit has been tied directly to truth in the literature on the subject, (c) far more important is the fact that it is much more connected to knowledge than has so far been acknowledged. In this post, the focus is on the third reason. I First, an …

The discussion about re-accessing the vibrancy of the Indian culture and the question whether or not to legislate against conversion, are best treated separately. An answer to the latter does not necessarily count as an answer to the first. In fact, the tendency to counter the proselytising drive of Christianity and Islam by voting laws against conversion is itself an indication of India’s …

One of the questions that has come up in this discussion is the following: are we logically forced to assume the ’existence’ of, say, Rama or Krishna, when we ‘believe’ in them? This question has partly been responsible for the discussion about the ‘historicity’ of Ramayana. Here is my answer as I see the situation today. In some sense, we all work with some notions (however vague they might be) …

One of the debates in the Indian traditions is about the kind of creatures that exist in the world and about the reality of what exists. The Jains, for instance, disagreed that the “deva’s” of other traditions (with the properties they were supposed to possess) existed in this world or were real. (Their so-called ‘atheism’ is a result of this debate.) Consequently, when they call Valmiki Ramayana …

Today, both in India and abroad, we see the emergence of a new intellectual trend: based on painstaking research, to write an accurate history of India. What is new about this approach? In one sense, as I shall explain in this article, this attempt is not novel; in another sense, which too shall be explained, there is something very new in it. I shall talk about both in the course of answering the …

What is history? In the first place, it is the subject matter of historiography, which is what historians write. What does historiography talk about? The human past. In other words, there is a distinction to be made between ’the past’ and ways of talking about this past. If this distinction (between ’the past’ and ‘ways of talking about it’) is accepted, then we can answer the question about what …