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Sheldon Pollock

12 quotes

“There is nothing remarkable about the people in premodern South Asia having a clear and accurate conception of the spatial organization of their world.”
Sheldon Pollock (born 1948) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2006, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, pp. 194-196; also in S. Kaul, "The Empire Strikes Back: Ad Hominem as History".
“How, concretely, does one do Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz in a world of pretty well tattered scholarly paradigms?”
Sheldon Pollock (born 1948) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (Pollock 1993:114), quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.
“An example of this more sophisticated orientalism is the work of Paul Thieme”... esp. his “analysis of the Sanskrit word ārya, where at the end he adverts to the main point of his research: to go beyond India in order to catch the ‘distant echo of Indo-germanic customs’.”
Sheldon Pollock (born 1948) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: S. Pollock 1993:91 , quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.
“Moving beyond orientalism finally presupposes moving beyond the culture of domination and the politics of coercion that have nurtured orientalism in all its varieties, and been nurtured by it in turn.”
Sheldon Pollock (born 1948) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (Pollock 1993:117), quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.
“In German Indology of the NS era, a largely nonscholarly mystical nativism deriving ultimately from a mixture of romanticism and protonationalism merged with that objectivism of Wissenschaft earlier described, and together they fostered the ultimate ‘orientalist’ project, the legitimation of genocide.”
Sheldon Pollock (born 1948) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (Pollock 1993:96), quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.
“The Ŗg-Veda as an Aryan text ‘free of any taint of Semitic contact’; the ‘almost Nordic zeal’ that lies in the Buddhist conception of the marga [way]; the ‘Indo-Germanic religion-force’ of yoga; the sense of race and the ‘conscious desire for racial protection’; the ‘volksnahe kingship’ such is the meaning of the Indo-Aryan past for the National Socialist present, a present that, for Wüst, could not be understood without this past.”
Sheldon Pollock (born 1948) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (Pollock 1993:89) quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.
“From among the complexities of NS analysis of the Urheimat question it is worth calling attention to the way the nineteenth-century view expressed by Schlegel was reversed: the original Indo-Europeans were now variously relocated in regions of the Greater German Reich; German thereby became the language of the core (Binnensprache), whereas Sanskrit was transformed into one of its peripheral, ‘colonial’ forms.”
Sheldon Pollock (born 1948) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (Pollock 1993: 91-92), quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.
“For one thing, Sanskrit literary culture was never affected by communicative incompetence, which began to enfeeble Latin from at least the ninth century. The process of vernacularization in India, in so many ways comparable to the European case, was nowhere a consequence of growing Sanskrit ignorance.”
Sheldon Pollock (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Veda, the transcendent śāstra, subsumes all knowledge.”
Sheldon Pollock (born 1948) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted from Rajiv Malhotra, The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)
“‘Such voices … in any case are pretty much in the minority. The dominant ideology is that which ascribes clear priority and absolute competence to shastric codification.’”
Sheldon Pollock (born 1948) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted from Rajiv Malhotra, The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)
“... there exist no good accounts or theorizations of the end of the cultural order that for two millennia exerted a trans-regional influence across Asia-South, Southeast, Inner, and even East Asia- that was unparalleled until the rise of Americanism and global English. We have no clear understanding of whether, and if so, when, Sanskrit culture ceased to make history; whether, and if so, why, it proved incapable of preserving into the present the creative vitality it displayed in earlier epochs, and what this loss of affectivity might reveal about those factors within the wider world of society and polity that had kept it vital.”
Sheldon Pollock (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We may in fact characterize the ideological effects of the shastric paradigm more broadly as follows: First, all contradiction between the model of cultural knowledge and actual cultural change is thereby at once transmuted and denied; creation is really re-creation, as the future is, in a sense, the past. Second, the living, social, historical, contingent tradition is naturalized, becoming as much a part of the order of things as the laws of nature themselves: Just as the social, historical phenomenon of language is viewed by Mīmāṃsā as natural and eternal, so the social dimension and historicality of all cultural practices are eliminated in the shastric paradigm. And finally, through such denial of contradiction and reification of tradition, the sectional interests of pre-modern India are universalized and valorized. The theoretical discourse of śāstra becomes in essence a practical discourse of power.”
Sheldon Pollock (born 1948) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted from Rajiv Malhotra, The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)