Welcome to Eternal Path Musings, a weekly newsletter for the modern and curious Hindu, featuring highlights around: religious texts, practice, history, politics, people, and ways to better our engagement and personal progress.
This issue features highlights, a discussion of orientalism, and an aesthetic!
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Highlights: Short Reads for this Week
The Hindu Revival in Indonesia - Goes through the history of Indonesia post-independence from the Dutch and how Hindus organized there
What Mantras really are - A fantastic thread on the idea of a mantra in Hinduism, informed by the Shaiva Siddhanta sect, but broadly applicable. (via GhorAngirasa)
Lausanne Network - Take a look at this site to understand how Christians are trying to convert Hindus. Important to be able to identify these methods in practice
Philosophical Highlight: Orientalism
The book Orientalism (الاستشراق) by Edward Said is one of the foremost critiques of the Western academic lens towards Eastern cultures. While focused on Arabia in general, and Islam in particular, the term “Orientalism” functions today as a useful term to encapsulate how Westerners distort the cultures and histories of the east to cement their own primacy and to subjugate the East intellectually and materially.
Many of our readers are likely well-read in Indian history, and will know of Lord Macaulay, who remarked that the British rulers should aspire to develop in India:
”We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”
The application of the Western Gaze on India has had widespread effects in India, where teaching on Hinduism and Indian history has been largely done under a Marxist lens (see Dharma Dispatch article). The histories of India developed by the British are still magically used today, but the publishers are now brown-skinned rather than white-skinned. The impact on the diaspora is more dire, as Orientalist professors browbeat Hindus in debates over content of textbooks or in smearing Hindu critiques of academia.
Two Hindu thinkers have been active in identifying and deconstructing Orientalism, with regards to Hinduism: Rajiv Malhotra and S. N. Balagangadhara.
Rajiv Malhotra’s book “The Battle for Sanskrit” is a must-read, it outlines how Westerners try to delink Hinduism from Sanskrit, Yoga, and other “good” elements of Hindu culture in a sneaky “academic” fashion (see Summary here).
S. N. Balagangadhara on the other hand deals with the topic in philosophical terms. In his book “The Heathen in His Blindness” he identifies a “colonial consciousness” among historians both Western and Indian, who are unfriendly to Dharmic/Indic perspectives. In later works, he called for making sure that academic understanding of India and Hinduism needs to also be informed by the emic perspective; that is, from the perspective of the people participating in those traditions/society themselves.
Aesthetic: Maharana Pratap
