Of Epigrammatology (2)

#21, November 29, 2003

War and the Intellectuals

The many wars that have been fought in Europe since 1855, and are likely to be fought during the next twenty years, have or will have for one of their causes the discovery of Sanskrit. Though in itself this is by no means a very gratifying result, still I allude to it to simply show how deeply the Europeans have been influenced by the new ideas.

– R.G. Bhandarkar, “The Critical, Comparative and Historical Method of Inquiry,” 1888[1]

This epigram is really quite staggering, in my opinion. The comment is just one of many made by a relatively little known (outside of India) Sanskritist and Brahman intellectual who lived in Poona in the latter part of the 19^th century. One weekend, I happened to be browsing through the several volumes of R.G. Bhandarkar’s work owned by my father-in-law, and the title of the piece from which the comment came jumped out at me. I consider myself a comparativist so I was immediately curious to see what an Indian intellectual had been writing about comparative history over one hundred years ago. It is worth remembering that the discipline of history was in its infancy as a profession at this time in both Europe and America, and, while many were implicitly undertaking comparative analysis (particularly comparing the United States and Europe), few would have talked of a comparative method or decribed themselves as comparativists. So I felt an immediate dislocation in finding someone whom one would have expected to be behind his European counterparts in this regard actually several steps ahead of them.

But this is not the only displacement that is evident here. After making a pretty outrageous statement (to which I will return), Bhandarkar ends by indicating that the Europeans are finally catching up. The Europeans have been “deeply…influenced” by the new ideas. About a hundred years before historians and literary theorists began to argue that the empire struck back, that western intellectuals gained many of their ideas from the colonized, and that the transmission of ideas and culture was not a one-way street (with Europeans imposing themselves on or “uplifting” the natives), Bhandarkar was saying very much the same thing.

And look at the statement itself: One of the causes of European wars has been and will be the discovery of Sanskrit! How can this possibly be? Who else has ever suggested this? Where do we find examples of our comparative historians ever using their comparative method to so radically alter perceived historical truth? And what if Bhandarkar is right? Certainly anyone who has ever read about the Paris negotiations following World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s obsession with linguistic communities, anyone who has analyzed Nazi obsessions with liebensraum for Germans (whoever they might be), and anyone observing the kind of break-up that occurred in Europe following the demise of the Soviet Union, would recognize that there may be a kernel of truth in Bhandarkar’s comment. And yet, who would pursue this line of reasoning further?

The epigram seemed to me to be perfect for an essay that was endeavoring to challenge the way that we undertake comparative history of the United States and the way in which so many Americanists have heard the sirens’ call of exceptionalism.[2] But are we surprised that the sirens’ call is heeded so frequently when so few Americanists have read Bhandarkar?