Prof. Subhash Kak writes about Western Indologists’ superficial treatment of ancient India. According to him, “…Almost all you have in academic textbooks about ancient India is either superficial, banal, half-truths or plain wrong. The understanding of earliest India offered by the Indology community is based on flimsy philosophical and methodological foundations and a deep misunderstanding of the texts.”
…Worse, it is a racist enterprise in which the stated objective is to teach Indians what their books mean. Its premise is that Indians are culturally backward, and they never developed scientific or critical thinking, and so they lack access to the “true” meaning of their texts.
…In private conversations with academics who work on India, there is acknowledgement that there is a cabal that consists of racists, European supremacists, leftists and others who might be sincere but so marinated in an obviously wrong paradigm that they don’t even know they are wrong. And then, of course, there are the thick-headed ones who just don’t get it; one of those once wrote me an email saying that only “philologists have the authority to interpret ancient India.
