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Introduction
The sad fact is that after nearly two hundred years Western Indology has still failed to understand India, her culture, her soul or her history. It has progressed little beyond Eurocentric and missionary stereotypes, only adding Marxist, Freudian and other modern stereotypes to these, naively believing that these western ideologies are somehow dramatically enlightening to India and its profound spiritual culture, when they are usually irrelevant or inferior and have already failed in the West. Meanwhile it has discovered little more in the vast treasures of Vedic culture than any primitive culture.
Western Indology does not understand the philosophy of India, its emphasis on dharma and karma, liberation and enlightenment, or its great traditions of Yoga and meditation. It does not acknowledge the value of its rishi/yogi culture and its Vedic origin. Nor does it recognize any such higher yogic spiritual tradition as behind any ancient civilizations or behind humanity as a whole. From its perspective, Indian spirituality is a self-serving fantasy hiding what is unscientific, inhumane or archaic.
Yet even more sadly Western Indology does not want to recognize that India as a unique civilization really exists. It fails to see any real identity to Indic civilization prior to British rule or any real continuity to it from ancient times. Rather it views India as a melting pot of invading cultures with no overriding political or cultural background or unity. It was Karl Marx who said that India has no history, and what is called history "is the record of successive intruders." This is the position still taken by Western Indologists and their counterparts in India, particularly Indian leftists who treat the words of Marx almost like a scripture. They fiercely resist the suggestion of any advanced indigenous civilization in India.
Western thought reads the same type of political and psychological motives into the Indic school of thought that it does for the history of Europe. It tries to understand the Indic tradition according to Marxism, Freud, Deconstructionism, or whatever may be the latest trend in western thought, as if these characteristic preoccupations of the outward looking western mind could unlock the keys to a very different yogic culture. In fact, these usually tell us more about the western mind than about India’s traditions. Generally, the current western scholarship about India or about the ancient world as a whole naively follows the shifts of political and social correctness in western thought, as if all of history was to change retrospectively along with the fluctuations of ideology in the West! In short, the West has not adequately questioned its approach for understanding Indic civilization or created a consistent model for viewing it at a spiritual or philosophical level. Not surprisingly, Indic civilization remains a mystery and the West does not appreciate the riches of the higher mind behind it.
Western intellectual culture is quite critical of the Indic tradition and rejects most of it as unscientific or erroneous. It styles Indic thought as mystical, irrational, superstitious or even absurd. We could, therefore, easily describe the main approach of Western Indology as one of negationism, denying something outright in order dispose of it altogether. This failure of Western Indology is nowhere more evident as in its treatment of the Vedas. The monumental literature of the Vedas - the largest of the ancient world and given a spiritual and cultural reverence throughout India throughout its history - is reduced to the record of illiterate invading hordes or pastoral nomads which really didn’t deserve to be preserved. Vedic literature is not examined in depth but simply explained away by such negationist theories, as something of no consequence that need not be taken seriously.
Author - David Frawley
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