Notes
Notes INTRODUCTION 1. In the Brahmanical age, when the chief philosophical schools developed, the use of the Sam ˙ hitās (or hymn portions) were limited to the ritual context. In the medieval period, bhakti (or devotional) texts gained prominence. Some of these affirm explicitly that Vedic religion was no longer appropriate to the present degenerate age (Llewellyn 1993: 95). 2. The term “Veda” is often used in a metaphorical sense to refer to the “end of the Veda,” namely the Vedānta, most often the Upanishads. 3. The Aryans are often conceived of as having been ruled by a moral ethos that is chronologically much later encapsulated in the Mānava Dharma Shāstra, hereafter The Laws of Manu. 4. The primary level of textual retrieval necessary is of the original semantic denotations and connotations. The second necessary step involves the restoration of the extralinguistic context, which includes the retrieving of allusions to sociocultural references and an understanding of the literary tradition in which the activity of the writer and the comprehension of his audience took place. 5. A comparatist is not limited to a particular literature or set of literatures as the exclusive source of standards on which to base truth claims. In fact, comparative literature scholars legitimately situate literary works in relation to significant movements of elements in the repertory of any literature (Remak 1960: 20–22). Each literature offers internal traditions of hermeneutic guidance, and the general systems approach recognizes these hermeneutic principles as cultural facts in specific historical flows. The juxtaposition of phenomena in which cultural interferences play a prominent part can be realized without the necessity of presuming the superiority of either the nature or the initially foreign repertorial elements as a basis for formulating truth-claims. Comparative Literature views ideational contents as repertorial facts (Gillespie 1997: 5–6). 6. I do not offer anything close to the orthodox reading that these authors customarily experience from scholars of philosophy, history of religions, Indology, Germanistik, or French literature. 165 7. Similarly, the authors treated in this study are not usually subjected to comparative or literary analysis. A general systems approach justifies what may appear to some readers as rather insolites juxtapositions. Some readers may be shocked by the juxtaposition of the Indian nationalist articulation of the Aryan myth with that of Germany. I justify the appearance of individuals whom many Indians today revere as national heroes alongside individuals whom most Europeans revile on the grounds that both groups, by identifying the Aryan, designated a non-Aryan Other and sought to challenge its secular power. The European binary between the Aryan and Semite parallelled the Indian binary that was established between the Aryan and the non-Aryan or Aryan and Dravidian. Both India and Germany have sought authenticity in nonscholarly interpretations of history and prehistory (Hock 1996: 3). In this analysis, I deal with European (colonialist and non-colonialist) as well as Indian authors. The decision to read Orientalists does not make me an accomplice in some “diabolically clever cultural imperialism” (Gillespie 1997: 6). I believe that even Orientalists can exist as agents. Their relationship to India and the knowledge that they derived from the power situation by which they were authorized was produced; it was not the product of their interventions (Clark 1996: 27). Another critical stance bears mentioning , since a central concern of this volume deals with who is conceived as the appropriate reader or, in some cases, who is even allowed to read the texts in question . This author does not ascribe to the belief that critics either through race or gender possess some “intuitive or existential positional knowledge” (Clark 1996: 31). If such were the case, this reader could not/should not read Indian pundits or nineteenth -century German males. 8. Others championed the fundamental unity of ancient Aryan culture in India and beyond. In 1936, the Mahasabhā proclaimed that non-Hindus must be made to understand that Hinduism is primarily for the Hindus and that the Hindus live for the preservation and development of the Aryan culture and the Hindu dharma, which are bound to prove beneficial for all. This trajectory has enabled the Aryan past to be presently used to legitimate Hindu communal ideology. The fluidity of Hinduism has allowed thinkers to draw on a supposed religious identity and use it as a basis of ideology . In Savarkar’s terms, one becomes Aryan (Savarkar 1923: 38–39). The constructed identity of the Aryan seeks to neutralize diversity. If conformity can be...
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