Sheldon Pollock Quotes

“After citing his impressive list of publications and awards, he turned to me and asked: ‘How could you think I hate Hinduism when I have spent my entire life studying the Sanskrit tradition? How could someone possibly hate the tradition that he has devoted his life to studying? Only a person in love with the tradition could work so hard to understand it.’ This logic would certainly have impressed the vast majority of Indians he deals with. The mere fact that a famous westerner is working so hard to study our tradition is enough to bring awe into the minds of many Indians.


However, my response was different from what he might have anticipated. I told him he must have heard of certain American academicians who are considered Islamophobic (a well-known term referring to those who hate Islam). He replied, ‘Of course there are those scholars.’ Then I pointed out that Islamophobic scholars spend their entire lives studying Islam. By Pollock’s logic, their long-term investment in Islamic studies ought to make them lovers of Islam. Nevertheless, they hate Islam and they study it diligently for that very reason. Their careers are made by studying a tradition with the intention of demolishing it and exposing its weaknesses. Similarly, I said, there are scholars in many disciplines who study some phenomenon for the purpose of undermining it, not because they love it. People study crime in order to fight it. There are experts on corruption who want to expose it, not because they love corruption. There are public health specialists who study a disease with the intention of being able to defeat it. Therefore, I argued, it was fallacious to assume that merely studying Sanskrit made him a lover of sanskriti (the Indian civilization based on Sanskrit).”
― Rajiv Malhotra, The Battle for Sanskrit: Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred, Oppressive or Liberating, Dead or Alive?