Intellectual Trends of a Westerner's Indian-historical Perspective

Wow.  So it's been a few days, I guess.  My schedule is filling up and I am adjusting to new obligations, I suppose.  This has thrown my blogging off a bit.
I've joined a nice gym here in Mysore.  It's name is Core Power, and the staff and fellow gym-goers are really kind.  It's so refreshing to go daily into a community of people that knows I am trying to learn the local language.  People really appreciate it.  Indian people, as a whole, are the sweetest people around whom to struggle in acquiring a new language.  That is, once they get over the shock that a white-assed dude gives a damn.  I get a lot of help with my numbers, obviously, as the staff tells me "eenedu asari madari," do this fifteen times, twice; and buff locals laugh with me as I struggle through a challenging workout--both in terms of understanding the directives in a foreign language, and physical exertion.  It's a workout for body and mind.
Language practice continues after the workout when I go for fresh-made grape juice from Ananta Rao's Savories and Grape Juice Shop.  He speaks to me in a mixture of Kannada and Hindi, and asks that I speak to him in Sanskrit because he wants to learn.
I am walking, writing, and thinking a lot every day.  I walk from home to school, and then from school to the Oriental Research Institute, and from there a walk back to my home for an afternoon coffee/Kannada study.  All this walking and exercising makes productive synergy of my emotional, intellectual, and creative physical juices just in time for an evening jaunt to gym.
Lately I've been really lazy about sleeping in-- I don't wake up until 7:30 or 8:00, which is very unusual for me.  I don't yet know how I feel about it.  I think I need to get settled into a place that is more conducive to me somehow...  That will happen this Sunday, thankfully.
I am planning to move into the home of the owner of the Dhvanyaloka Institute here in Mysore.  I'll post pictures of the area I'll be living in once I settle there.  It's about the same distance from The Central Institute of Indian languages where I am studying Kannada, but a distance farther from my Sanskrit teacher's home.  My new hostmother, however, is looking into a used bicycle for me.  That will eliminate all my troubles, and save me a lot of time in the day!  And she is also a really, really cool lady.  More to come on Shrimati Jay Shree in the coming posts, for sure.

These days, I am thinking to write a scholarly article about my experience over the past two years living throughout India, and reading all this really old literature.  I've become somewhat critical lately of the attitude many Indians adopt toward the study of the ancient and medieval past.  To begin with, the study is usually engaged while accompanied by some sort of ideological motivation.  The ideological motivation (usually conservative Hindu, or Hindutva) is problematic in a number of ways.  Firstly--and this list is not exhaustive of those ways--this particular ideological discourse makes sweeping claims concerning a past about which we know, in all truth, a pitiful dearth considering the surfeit of textual material that exists to substantiate scholarly inquiry.
The utter difficulty of the languages doesn't make this an easy task, however; and the ability to see why the difficulty might pay off in the long run--that is, historically--comes from quality, sound education.  Those resources, these days in India, go to the engineers and doctors... Basically, there's nothing simple about the situation, and the only simple thing we could do--if we were to be simpletons--would be to blame British colonialism as a lot of post-colonial theory has done, simply.  And I, too, now engage in similar sweeping claims as I critique current scholarship and contemporary political/economic realities here in India.  Thus the need for structure and logical argument.
Returning to the ideological motivations I see underpinning Sanskrit studies in India.  Secondly, the ideology of Hindutva, literally "Hinduness," stems largely from a colonial encounter.  So, for instance, there's this claim of sanatana dharma, "eternal religion."  But Sanatana dharma is literally no more eternal than the 20th century.  No such conception can be found prior to this time.  I suspect, though I admittedly don't know, that this concept originated in the North of India at a time around Independence.  Why in the North and not, say, the South like Karnataka?  Well, the caste structure of society--a structure I doubt I'll ever really understand in a way similar to a socialized Indian-- was not always so impermeable as it has become: Brahman, Kshatria, Vaishya, Shudra and never the twixt shall breed.  That is, today.  There's clear mention of intercaste marriage, albeit according to specific formulae, in texts like the Dharmashastra among others.  North Indians seem to me to have had a more severe reaction against the colonial encounter than, say, a Kannadiga (thank you, Sudhesh ; ).  In the North, that reaction has taken the shape of severe and rigid caste boundaries that are practically worn on the cuff or kameez of the boreals.  It happens here in the South, I would have to imagine, as well; but so far, it happens in a way I haven't discerned.  Now, for instance, I am sure the trash collectors here in my neighborhood, or the city-employees who sweep dust into the air from the street every day are not brahmans, or kshatriyas, or vaishyas for that matter.  But I am rambling now a bit.  Basic point: The caste distinctions are weaker-- or more meager-- here in the South.  Southern cultures have insulated themselves somehow from the more caustic reaction that typifies Northern cultures.
Now, back to historical perspectives for a moment, and the lack of (unbiased) motivation to study Sanskrit literature in India and its effects.  In the West we have highly developed theories of political processes: How we become subjects of political rule, ityadi, etc., etc.  Thinkers have developed these theories because there exists a historical frame within which to speak to such important issues and thereby propel society forward.  No such elaborate historical understanding of any sort exists for most textual traditions of India.  Whereas in the West we can trace historically from ancient Greece through Roman imperial expansion, into medieval Europe, Renaissance, etc.  It simply doesn't exist here (and there is, again, a larger question of historiography here).  Thinkers, then, that are producing theory in the Academies of the West are able to do this because of a type of (well-imagined, basically) historical continuity that exists for those intellectual traditions.  However, these very same intellectual traditions are largely responsible for the denigration of Indian language materials from premodern times.  Western philosophical traditions claim as possible only a single, albeit potentially multifarious universal.  This is not the case in Indian thought.  There can simultaneously (and paradoxically to the Western mind) exist numerous universals.  It was the goal of colonial occupation to squelch these autochthonous forms of intelligence in order to advance foreign discourses of power aimed at domination and economic control.  Effects of these discourses largely funded the Industrial revolution of Europe, and the subsequent rise to dominance of the West.  Their effects are still playing out in India to the sensitive eye, however "post-colonial theory," for what it's worth, isn't doing much in the way of helping us to understand that because it hasn't yet done the "dredge work," as it were, of digging into textual materials from a philological/historical perspective.  And that's basically the point I want to make without rambling in an article I hope to author over the coming months...
I am trying to design my long-term intellectual work to address such issues with an eye toward developing theory from a Westerner's Indian-historical perspective.