Business Standard will do well to set ethical writing standards for contributors/columnists to the paper and enforce the standards.
BS Editor should not allow drivel to be passed on to the readers as was done with Mihir S. Sharma's column of July 14, 2015.
S. Kalyanaraman
In his article “The Rajiv Malhotra issue is a cautionary tale for publishers”, Mihir S. Sharma finds it necessary to close with the following statement: “The Shrikant Talageris and the Michael Daninos of the world, like the Rajiv Malhotras, are online heroes rather than respected historians or linguists because their work just doesn't match up. The endless ways in which the "new Hindu right" uncovers ways in which caste and external migrations were invented but the Saraswati was not are not being suppressed because of a giant Western conspiracy; they simply don't meet the academic standards required to conclude that they're not just a bunch of crackpot theories dreamed up by nativist bigots.”
While Mihir Sharma is welcome to his opinions, he has no right to misrepresent, abuse and demonize people whose work he is completely ignorant of. I will not speak for Rajiv Malhotra or Shrikant Talageri, but I protest against his statement concerning me. I am by no means an “online hero”, maintaining neither a website nor a blog nor a Facebook account. My work on ancient India has spread through my books and papers, which have been published by reputed publishers and journals of Indology and archaeology in India and abroad. I have also contributed chapters to over twenty scholarly volumes. I am sure Mihir Sharma has read none of my work; indeed, he cannot even spell my name correctly.
Thus he implies that the Sarasvati River is “invented”, which means he has not read my The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati published by Penguin India in 2010 and warmly reviewed by many national newspapers (including Business Standard: see here and here) as well as Current Science and reputed journals of archaeology such as Man and Environment and Puratattva. Had he read it, he would have known that the vanished Vedic river was identified with the now dry Ghaggar-Hakra of Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Cholistan, not by a few “nativist bigots”, but in 1855 by the French geographer Louis Vivien de Saint-Martin. In the next few decades, nearly all European Indologists, from H.H. Wilson and F. Max Müller to M. Monier-Williams, A.A. Macdonell, A.B. Keith or F.E. Pargiter, and more recently L. Renou, A.L. Basham or Jan Gonda, accepted Vivien de Saint-Martin’s thesis. Geologists such as the British R.D. Oldham (1886) joined in, followed by geographers such as the Indian Shamsul Islam Siddiqi (1944) or the German Herbert Wilhelmy (1969). Alexander Cunningham, founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, was one among many who, in the 19thcentury, published maps clearly naming the Sarasvati as a tributary to the Ghaggar. The celebrated British archaeologist and explorer Marc Aurel Stein was the first to discover Harappan sites along the bed of the dry river and published his findings in a 1942 report entitled “A Survey of Ancient Sites along the ‘Lost’ Sarasvati River.” The late British archaeologist Raymond Allchin fully accepted the river’s identification, as did his U.S. colleagues the late Gregory L. Possehl or J.M. Kenoyer, among others. I could line up many more non-“nativist” names. If there was a “Western conspiracy”, to use Sharma’s name, it was to conclude that the Sarasvati had been a very real river — like all others listed in the Rig-Veda — and could be precisely placed on the map. While there are still important geological issues to be resolved, my book has brought together literary, cultural, archaeological and geological evidence in an objective and open-ended manner.
Lastly, while classical India refined and practised the art of debating, Mihir Sharma’s vituperative but crassly ignorant language is fairly typical of a trend to demonize what one does not agree with — a trend that has taken the place of academic debates in much of India’s intellectual life. It does spare one the trouble of having to study, carefully weigh arguments and evidence, and engage other viewpoints in a civilized manner.
Michel Danino
Guest professor, IIT Gandhinagar
Convener, International Forum for India’s HeritageMember, Indian Council of Historical Research
http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/mihir-s-sharma-the-publishers-and-the-crackpots-115071401453_1.html