On Monday 16 Jul 2007 6:23 pm, Ramakrishnan Sundaram wrote: > > So if you are tired of the iyengarval, you can see what the sastrigal > > has to say .. > > But our representative sastrigal has gone silent...
Heck - I briefly became so enthusiastic about a Hindu narrative that I set off a kind of explosion of interest "in certain circles" I have views that are probably not controversial - they are just views, but I have said them so often (in conversations) and in list/forum discussions that i am loath to repeat them. Basically Indians do not document anything. Everything is handed down as a verbal anecdote. For that reason you can rarely get any serious information and the little that you get is so badly written that it becomes easy to trash it. A lot is lost in seriously bad translation, and I believe that the wholesale shift of elite educated Indians from regional languages to English has created people whose minds are a curious mixture of traditional beliefs and Western rationality and skepticism. Very few narratives exist, but among my own favorites is an autobiographical book written by one of my wife's ancestors (in English) that is a remarkable description of Karnataka Madhwa Brahmin life around the late 1800 and early 1900s. The book has not been published - but I may have a pdf somewhere. Long before I wrote by brief book on Pakistan, my intention (and consuming interest) was to write about Indian society. But Pakland became more urgent. There is much that needs to be written about India and basically I have been urging people to write their own narratives that serve as a description of society as viewed by their parents and grandparents that serve as narratives that can help researchers at some future date. There is not much of that either. Indians are no good at studying or recording their own society. Unfortunately nobody else can really describe some things and unless Indians do at least some documentation we get GIGO. There's a billion people and a billion narratives out there - but what do Indians have to show for that? A few authors that someone or the other thinks is an idiot. There is plenty of work to be done. shiv
