Purvapaksha: Has Shatavadhani Ganesh Really Understood Pollock?

Shatavadhani Ganesh is one of Indias most famous traditional scholars, commanding great mastery over a massive
corpus of texts. In this part of the article, I will point out that even such a great mind has serious blind spots when it comes
to understanding Pollock. But more troubling than a mere lack of knowledge is the fact that Shri Ganeshs over-confidence
makes him unaware of his limitations. He seems to trivialize the purva-paksha methods I have described in the prior
section, and he adopts an accusatory posture towards my work.
The recent review of TBFS by Shri Ganesh has numerous errors in basic understanding, both of my book and Sheldon
Pollocks works. I will examine his specific errors in subsequent articles. However, in the following pages, I will focus on
showing that Shri Ganesh has not adequately understood the fundamental building blocks used by Pollock. It appears
that Ganesh uses my book for providing him secondary access to the writings of Pollock (even though, ironically, he
criticizes me for relying upon secondary works on Sanskrit texts.) He wrongly assumes that Pollock says the same things
as any other Western Indologist; therefore, Ganesh tends to apply a generic and simplistic understanding of Orientalism
to see Pollocks works.
Ganesh does lip service to the focus I place on Pollock, and writes: Sheldon Pollock is arguably the most influential and
well-connected Indologist in the world today. This statement is taken directly from TBFS. But if he takes Pollock seriously,
he cannot simply ignore what is new and distinct about Pollock compared to prior Indologists.

Now I will examine a few major statements made by Ganesh in his review of TBFS.
Ganeshs complaint that I did not mention past masters
Ganesh writes:

He [i.e. Malhotra] fails to mention (or seems to be ignorant of) the luminaries who have categorically rubbished such
attempts A C Bose, A C Das, Arun Shourie, Baldev Upadhyaya, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Chidananda Murthy,
D V Gundappa, David Frawley, Dayananda Saraswati, G N Chakravarti, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, K S
Narayanacharya, Koenraad Elst, Krishna Chaitanya, Kuppuswami Sastri, M Hiriyanna, Michel Danino, iNagendra,
Navaratna S Rajaram, Padekallu Narasimha Bhat, Padma Subrahmanyam, Pullela Sriramachandrudu, R C Dwivedi,
Ram Swarup, Ranganath Sharma, Rewa Prasad Dwivedi, S K Ramachandra Rao, S L Bhyarappa, S N
Balagangadhara, S R Ramaswamy, S Srikanta Sastri, Shrikant Talageri, Sita Ram Goel, Sri Aurobindo, Sushil
Kumar Dey, Swami Vivekananda, V S Sukhthanker, Vasudev Sharan Agarwal, Yudhishthira Mimamsaka the list is
endless. And the few scholars he refers to like A K Coomaraswamy, Dharampal, G C Pande, K Krishnamoorthy,
Kapila Vatsyayan, P V Kane, and V Raghavan are only in passing.

This is a very amateurish thing to say, for the following reasons:

The individuals named above belong to all sorts of categories of experts. It is a list Ganesh has randomly picked out of
hundreds of good Indian scholars. Would Ganesh care to explain the criteria for his selection of past masters, and how a
lot of other Indian scholars got left out? This looks more like the reading list that some junior student of his put together.
I hope Ganesh is aware that many of these individuals are living contemporaries, and hence not past.
I happen to personally know and work with several of these individuals, and that too for many years. So its not as if I
dont know their areas of work.
Ganesh should take a look at the extensive bibliographies cited in all my books. The difference is that I cite writers that
are relevant to a given topic, and not for the sake of name-dropping. None of these individuals he names has (to the best
of my knowledge) published any extensive purva-paksha of Pollocks school of Indology, which is the focus of my work.
Imagine if someone is doing very original and extensive research on a specific solar system that has not been studied in
depth before. The references used would be those relevant to argue the specific thesis, and not a random assortment of
quotes from astronomers just for the sake of impressing people with ones general knowledge.
Most of the writers named above do not bother to mention each other in their writings, precisely because of the
specialized nature of their work. For instance, I doubt Shourie, Frawley, Balagangadhara, Bhyarappa, Talageri, etc. cite all
the above named writers. It would be ridiculous and irrelevant for them to do so. By Ganeshs own criteria, this should

disqualify all of them from the category of worthy masters because they are guilty of ignoring Ganeshs list of past
masters the same way I am being accused.
Many of the scholars on his list are not Sanskrit scholars another disqualifier if one were to use Ganeshs criteria.
In summary, he is making an irrelevant and pedantic point here.
Let us face the fact that since the early 1970s, numerous powerful and elitist educational institutions in India, especially in
the areas of social sciences, history, literature and arts, have been captured by the Marxists. They ensure who gets
scholarships within India, research grants to go abroad and worse still, who gets published by the prestigious publishing
houses like Oxford University Press, and whose works get translated into several languages. Scholars like Sheldon
Pollock, Romila Thapar, R S Sharma and D N Jha have sucked up so much oxygen out of the ecosystem of knowledge
production.

Can Ganesh tell us: From the living scholars in his list of masters, which ones command the clout to head a prestigious
institution recognized globally? Which one of them, despite their impeccable scholarship, can get their research published
by an academic press on a continuous basis? How much of the reading materials prescribed academically today is written
by them, as compared to Western writers and Indian leftists I am referring to university curricula outside India as well as
in many elite Indian universities?

I am trying to highlight the problem and injustice we face. Traditional scholars have been sidelined and are being
impoverished progressively. For instance, Pandit Yudhishthir Mimansak was one of the greatest scholars of Sanskrit
grammar in the 20th century. His writings were largely printed by small-scale regional publishing houses, and he lived in
poverty and suffered greatly from illness during his last years. If he were alive today, his writings would be accused as
being those of a Hindu Nationalist, just as many of the living scholars in Ganeshs list are unfairly branded. I knew the late
Dharampal personally during the final years of his life, and he shared details of his meager existence of neglect by the
establishment, and even by most traditionalists. Both he and Kapila Vatsyayan received Infinity Foundations Lifetime
Achievement Awards, and they mentored me personally in important ways. Kapila ji also explained to me the price she
paid for her refusal to sell out to the academic establishment. When I visited her to congratulate her for the Padma
Vibhushan Award some years back, she told me: there are no institutional mechanisms by which the knowledge of the
scholar being recognized in the Padma awards gets disseminated, and developed further by the next generation. She felt
I was one of the few at that time working so diligently to argue for swadeshi scholarship. Yet, Ganesh concludes that he
cannot absolve Malhotra of his blatant disregard to the past masters.

If Ganesh wants to have a competition of who did more for the cause of traditional India studies, I welcome him to debate
my record over the past 25 years alongside his own record on this matter.
Ganesh then quotes a few specific examples of works by Indians who criticized Western Indology. He feels these
criticisms are somehow the same work I am doing. If that had been the case, I would not even be wasting so much time
writing TBFS, for I am not interested in regurgitating what others already did. I wish to open new doors through my work,
rather than rehash old knowledge that others (better qualified than me) are already pursuing. What Ganesh is doing is
analogous to someone citing astronomy writings by past masters that have little to do with the specific newly discovered
solar system someone is studying in very great detail.
My focus in TBFS is on Pollocks school per se. My book explains how he is a completely new and different kind of thinker
than the old guard Ganesh mentions (like Max Mueller, etc.) In fact, Pollock himself criticizes and rejects all those he
thinks of as old school Orientalists. Pollock is not vulnerable to the old criticisms against the old guard of Western
Indologists. This is why I wish Ganesh had read Pollock first, and realized that we must properly understand him, and not
try to be reductionist and think of all Westerner Indologists as the same. The major part of TBFS is intended to educate
and explain to our traditionalists that which is new and different in Pollock compared to prior Western Indologists.

Convinced that he has dealt a devastating blow to my credibility, Ganesh then alleges that Malhotra directly accuses
Indian scholars of either being unwillingly complicit with the enemies (p. 68), or being irresponsible (p. 15), or being
uninterested (p. 44), or being unaware of Western scholarship (p. 1). He lacks empathy for the numerous scholars who
are deeply involved in their own research.

This statement by Ganesh is a gross misrepresentation of my life commitment and of TBFS. It is a typical example of
manipulating something by taking it out of context. Is he trying to create bheda between me and the traditionalists?
Wouldnt that attempt be against the interests of the traditionalists? Of course, I do want to expose those specific Indians
who have switched sides to serve the colonial system, those who are complicit and sitting on the sidelines, and those who

vacillate opportunistically. Nobody who has read my work would doubt the sincerity with which I have championed what I
call Swadeshi Indology.

Yet he goes on repeating his allegation, writing that Malhotra looks down upon traditionalist scholars. I certainly want
their output raised to be on par with Western Indology and then supersede it. For instance, we must have more and better
quality assets controlled by the traditionalists, such as: Indology journals, libraries and conferences in India, and research
publishing with high impact. A good role model for our scholars is Shankar Rajaraman who, along with some others, is
busy highlighting the errors of Pollock; he shows that these Westerners dont know how to use our idiom and methods for
the interpretation of our texts.

Any system that is to be improved needs periodic assessments and shake ups. The worst thing for traditionalists to do is
to promote vyakti-puja (idolatry) of any scholar by making him too big to be criticized. Ganesh is great, no doubt, but his
limitations concerning Western Indology must be discussed in a constructive manner.

Ganesh raises another irrelevant issue and writes: And it is strange he [i.e. Malhotra] has not quoted any regional
language scholar. However, can Ganesh please cite the specific regional language scholars who have critiqued Pollock
and his school? Pollock is the focus of TBFS, and not a generic high level critique of Western Indology. Ganeshs
complaint is as ridiculous as saying that the astronomer who has discovered previously unknown data about a solar
system ought to be rejected because he has failed to cite regional language astronomers. Ganesh appears to lack a
sense of what is relevant in a given context.
Misrepresenting my movement for a competitive home team
Ganesh writes: Malhotra writes in several places that he is the first person to undertake such a task (see pp. 27, 44, or
379, for example), which as we know is false. But no such claim is being made by me in the pages listed by him, or
elsewhere. What I say is entirely different than his characterization. I shall elaborate.

First of all, TBFSs purpose is not to do yet another generic critique of western Indology, but a specific one about the new
school led by Pollock. If Ganesh is aware of any similar analysis of Pollocks school, he ought to give us the references. In
fact, I asked Pollock in a personal meeting about the lack of critical examination of his works by Indians operating within a
Hindu framework; he was completely unaware of anyone having done this.

Furthermore, a home team is a lot different than isolated writings by some individuals. Such a team would have to match
the opposing (Pollocks) team in output, team cooperation, intensity and focus. It would have to match the opponents in
influencing media and mainstream intellectual discourse both in India and overseas. I have spent the past two decades
trying many ways to create such a home team, but it is not easy. To the best of my knowledge, Ganesh has not
undertaken such a project to launch a movement, and is expressing opinions not based on experience.
Ganesh also writes: This is not a new battle. It has been fought before, and won before. Such a statement suggests lack
of awareness of major new developments in Western thought or their level of complexity. Earlier in this article I listed
some such developments by Pollock that are powerful and new, and that demand fresh critiques by us.
Ganesh says that The battle for Sanskrit and Sanskriti is not a new one. Sanatana dharma has survived years of
onslaught from many quarters in many guises. However, he does not seem to appreciate that the past battles were
against the past attacks. Each encounter has required its own fresh purva-paksha. Adi Shankara did not find earlier
purva-paksha that was against earlier opponents to be sufficient for his own time and context. Because he faced new
opponents, he therefore had to do new purva-paksha. Shankara also developed new paradigms and methodologies for
this purpose and did not merely regurgitate old ones.
This is why I introduced the term Charvaka 2.0 and explained how the Pollock school is more evolved than the prior
materialists. It is easy for someone who did not read Pollock to naively assume it is more of the same thing. Ganesh
simplifies his characterization of Western Orientalists and Indian Leftists by referring to all of them with the same brush as
crass materialists, without delving into details on how such materialists today differ in substantial ways from the earlier
Charvakas.

Shri Ganesh is silent on TBFSs purpose which is stated in its Introduction chapter. He completely ignores the urgent
matter of Sringeri mattha becoming almost hijacked by Pollock, even though I clearly explained that incident as my reason
for writing the book. The recent case of Rohan Murty handing over to Pollock the responsibility of translating 500 Indian

texts has also failed to alarm him. He ignores the list of 18 debates given in the final chapter of TBFS, which the book
says it wishes to spark. Shri Ganesh ignores all the intentions, context and strategy of the book he tries to review.

In the Hindu tradition, a significant commentary ought to go beyond the words and sentences and get at the essential
thought, teaching and philosophy of the root text. Only such a commentator is referred to as a pada-vakya-pramanajna
(to allude to the opening verses in Shankaracharyas Bhashya on the Taittiriya Upanishad). Alas, this eminent mans
review of TBFS has not gone beyond the pada-vakya.

Shri Ganesh gives his sweeping uttara to my work, but without having first done a proper purva-paksha of either my book
or Pollocks work. I find this error common among people who do not listen well before starting to articulate a lot. He
betrays a lack of understanding of TBFS by branding it as Malhotras pseudo-logic. His review of TBFS is more a
personal criticism of me than an analysis of the books thesis.

Sri Krishna advises us that one must do his own svadharma (even poorly) rather than imitate someone elses svadharma.
If Ganesh does this introspection, he would understand that we are both on the same side.
Need to advance beyond data accumulation towards knowledge and wisdom
There is a broader issue that many of our scholars face. The Indian education systems obsession with exams based on
memorized information has led to a focus on accumulating large quantities of factual information. But this does not
constitute knowledge, because knowledge also requires critical thinking. And even knowledge is not the same thing as
wisdom, because wisdom requires appreciation for the contexts and the big picture in which a discourse is situated.

Data by itself can be cluttered and requires the clarity of wisdom to be useful. Even those with a mental search engine
that allows them to quickly retrieve some quote from a text are often unable to apply it to solve the problem at hand. We
must upgrade our traditional scholars to be capable of analysis, problem-solving, critical thinking and debate with
opponents.

To some extent, computer tools can help alleviate the mundane tasks of memorizing, and thus help free up human
resources to undertake higher level intellectual challenges. The Abrahamic religions have invested heavily in computer
searchable databases of all their literature, including primary texts, commentaries, historical works, etc. I have seen very
impressive analytical tools for Christianity that apply artificial intelligence methods. For this reason, it is not considered
important for Christian scholars to have memorized a lot, because such factual knowledge is readily accessible from any
smart phone. I hope the 10-year plan of the Indian government to revive Sanskrit and its studies will include the
development of such computer tools for scholars. This would allow the emphasis of Sanskrit education to shift beyond
heavy memorization and towards higher levels of analytical thinking and the wisdom of global contexts.

I conclude by reaching out to Shri Ganesh to discuss our disagreements with mutual respect, and with the commitment to
defeat the common enemy we both recognize. The battles are many and cannot be won in an elitist way by excluding
insider voices that have done their share of tapasya to the cause. I respect Shri Ganeshs work and expertise. I hope he is
also able to see that my goal is to make traditional scholars aware of these latest threats that we face. We each bring
different dimensions of expertise, and the movement for dharma will be stronger by working together.
The problem of tunnel vision is brought out in Satyajit Rays movie, Shatranj ke khilaadi, based on the story by
Premchand. It shows two elite Indian men playing chess and constantly engaged in petty and pedantic arguments. They
are unconcerned that all around them are political and military activities by the East India Company, heading towards the
annexation of the Indian state of Awadh. Living in a cocoon and disengaged from the real world, these men abrogated
their responsibility as community leaders. They made light of the gradual surrender to the British, full of arrogance and
self-importance. I wrote this book because I do not treat the survival of my tradition as a leisurely game of chess.