My Letter to WSJ Editor (not published)
My Letter to WSJ Editor (not published)
Regarding Sadanand Dhume’s “Is Greta Thunberg Conspiring Against India’s Tea” (East is East, Feb. 18): It seems that the only authors and columnists who get to write about India and Hinduism in the Western press are the Orientalists, Indologists, Marxists, and colonized academics. It shows as the discourse lacks a native-indigenous perspective.
During India’s colonial times, non-native Western scholars started sharing information regarding India and Hinduism with other non-native scholars. They were sharing their perspective of India, Indian culture, Indian texts, etc. Over time, the West, however, “began to control the intellectual discourse in its colonies…and the insiders to these traditions began to be profoundly affected, even in their self-understanding of their religious traditions, by Western accounts,” writes Arvind Sharma in Dharma and the Academy: A Hindu Academic’s View. Sharma is the Berks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University. This altering of the self-understanding, according to Sharma, was due to the “outsider to insider” channel.
Hindu Nationalism is neither theocratic nor anthropocentric borderless laissez-faire. Those who consider Hindu Nationalism a mere intellectual conviction and materialistic construct look at it from a purely Western perspective. Hindu Nationalism is divine. Hindu Nationalism is Dharma with freedom of mind, body, spirit, and ‘self’ realization as its core principle. As the great revolutionary freedom fighter, philosopher, and ascetic Sri Aurobindo said: “This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma… The Sanatan Dharma, that is nationalism.” (Uttarpara Speech, May 30, 1909)
Indians and the Hindu faith community members’ current effort must be seen as an attempt to reclaim the agency in representing and defining India, its culture, traditions, texts, and faiths. At the very least, non-native agents cannot be the sole arbitrators of the native traditions.