My first dialogue is an erudite and provocative exchange on the Classics between two friends: Amit Majmudar, one of America’s foremost poets and author of the forthcoming, The Map and the Scissors, and a rising public intellectual whom he introduces to you below!
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Vikram and I have a common friend in Vishal Ganesan, the curator of a popular Twitter account called Hindoo History (@hindoohistory), which searches 19th and 20th-century newspapers for references to Hinduism. He tracks the ways Americans of the time saw a foreign civilization—our ancestral one—through their own fears, hatreds, fixations, and insecurities.
Recently I thought of Vishal as I encountered article after article, thinkpiece after thinkpiece decrying the “Whiteness” of the Greek and Roman classics. This was not just because I saw the projection of our country’s obsessions onto a past that resists that framing. I also know Vishal, like me, loves the classical culture of the West—even though its authors aren’t genetic matches with us, and probably had less melanin in their skins; and even though the British Empire, which ruled and exploited India for decades, taught the same Classics in the elite schools that produced Viceroys, imperial propagandists, and military officers.
We have decided to go as deep as we can go on this subject, breaking the form and scope of the thinkpiece or magazine article. We would like to thank Vikram for hosting our intellectual peregrinations on his new Substack. Vishal and I have agreed to speak openly and at length, as we do in our private conversations. Unlike scholars in the heavily policed and inherently conformist world of academia, we are not professionals with tenure and reputation and good standing with other classicists to worry about. He and I, a lawyer and a radiologist, are free to speak our minds honestly and, where necessary, to attack bad ideas that deserve to be attacked. Honesty is the sole rule we have set ourselves in this exchange, which takes place, of course, in the Classical form of the dialogue.
Here it is.
AMIT MAJMUDAR: First of all, Vishal, thanks for taking the time to explore this with me. I want to phrase our central question as broadly as possible—the title of Calvino’s essay, “Why Read the Classics?”, comes to mind—but to be honest, I don’t feel the need, not yet at least, to center us on a specific question. I am far more interested in your encounter. Let’s hold off on any polemicism for now—there will be time and space for that, if we wish. You, too, love the ancient Greeks and Romans. Tell me how, why, when you fell in love.
VISHAL GANESAN: Thank you, Amit, for inviting me for this conversation. The classics have been such an important part of my adult life, so it’s a bit strange to think about how serendipitous my journey into this world really was.
When I arrived at college I really didn’t have any idea what I wanted to study. I was a product of public schools so had a fairly conventional primary education. Bucking the stereotype, my parents were pretty hands-off when it came to choosing a major so I went in with open eyes, joining the ranks of “undecided” freshmen. The uncertainty didn’t last long. I had a suitemate who had attended boarding school and arrived with several years of Latin and Greek under his belt. I vividly remember walking into his room after classes one day and seeing him on the futon with a Greek dictionary on one knee (colloquially known as the “Middle Lidell”) and one of the iconic green Loebs on the other knee. He was doing his homework for one of his 300-level Greek courses. I was immediately intrigued. I watched him flip through the dictionary and mark up the Greek text like a diagram, and I was totally entranced. I just found the physical act of translation (or parsing, as they call it) so appealing: The big, old books, the typography of the Loeb, how analog it all was. So much more interesting than reviewing PowerPoint slides!
So that’s how it started. On my friend’s advice, I enrolled in Latin 101, thinking that if it was a good fit I could always enroll in Greek the following year. Spoiler alert: it was. Learning Latin and Greek was immensely satisfying. I spent my college years with pockets filled with big stacks of index cards filled with declensions, conjugations, principal parts, etc. I must have looked like an insane person, flipping through cards on my way to class, on the bus, trying to memorize the latest battery of verbs.
I’m sure we’ll talk about this more, but I think what’s noteworthy about my journey to the classics it was the language itself that was the gateway. Prior to college, I had maybe read a handful of Socratic dialogues and the Homeric epics in translation, but it wasn't until I learned the languages that I fell under their spell. It was only then that the world of the classics blossomed for me.
AM: Ah yes, those Loebs, green and red—just the sight of them makes me happy, like Christmas colors in the mind. I didn’t go through the languages; I pursued French and Sanskrit, though translating the Gita gave me an insight into the unity of these languages. “Proto-Indo-European” was the prolific Aditi of mother tongues. They really were all one once. You find the same uncanny harmonics in the languages as you do in the ancient religions they gave rise to: The two Ashvins, Castor and Pollux, the two Lithuanian horse Gods... I love those hidden genetic unities.
But I started very early, in my early teens really, reading multiple translations of the Greeks and Romans. With the Latin writers, I would try to follow along and match up root words. Just bookish ways to fill my free time because my parents wouldn’t buy me a Nintendo.
The draw was twofold. First, these were cool stories. I didn’t quite “get” that this was complicated, deep, “High Culture” stuff. A teenager can read Ovid in translation at a very superficial level, just for the stories, and get a lot of pleasure out of it. You don’t overshadow the text with portentous commentary and an air of grandeur. I was unintimidated by the classics. I was reading them in near-total isolation. I was also free to hate writers, incidentally, because nothing was “required reading”; I despised and refused to read Milton in my teens, then got into him years later. Same with James Joyce.
The reason for those changes of heart, of course, was that I had read more. I had gotten a handle on the source code. In fact, accessing the source code was the other big reason I went to the classics. The first “classic” author I encountered on my own, by accident, because my sister (a senior in high school then) had been assigned it and it was lying on the table, was Dante. I realized there was a whole universe behind this stuff. Dante was my gateway to the joint Classical and Biblical past. I read all those books to equip myself to read him, I guess. Which is ironic because Dante came at the end of Europe’s self-purge of learning. Dante had no access to Homer (except through Virgil) or the Greek tragedians and historians. Even if I had known that, of course, I would have still pursued the classics on my own time, simply because they were so interesting, and because they gave me the knowledge to decipher so much written after them, in their lineage. And there were, of course, those harmonics. It was always mirroring my other self-study, the Indian classics, our Dharma.
VG: You were a much more erudite teenager than I was. Then again, I did have a Nintendo. I totally hear you on the “source code” point though, and I had an identical experience. In fact, I tried reading Dante in high school and I just couldn’t get into it. It was only after I read Virgil that I was really able to appreciate Dante. In that sense, reading the classics makes me really feel like I was in dialogue with the culture, rather than just dropping into the conversation in media res. There is a sense of communion you feel when you contemplate the fact that so many cultural luminaries read and were responding to the same texts. To read the classics is to join a global conversation that has spanned thousands of years.
I’m also glad that you brought up our own dharmic tradition, as this was another key aspect of my relationship with the classics. I'd characterize my relationship with Hinduism prior to college as primarily “cultural.” We’d attend pujas and other religious functions at temples and the homes of family friends, but I never really developed a deeper appreciation for what it meant; other kids grew up going to church, and I grew up going to the temple and occasional puja. This all changed when I began studying the Classics. Studying Greek in particular felt like a homecoming to me. Reading about grand temples, priests propitiating gods and goddesses through sacrifice, and—more importantly—seeing the world in which these gods operated was eye-opening for me. Growing up Hindu in America, I often felt that there was a strict delineation between my own worlds. The Gods were alive in the temple, but the minute we got in the car and left, it was back to the “real” world. Being immersed in a world in which the Gods were very much alive kindled anew a curiosity and appreciation for my own heritage, which I realized also belonged to an integrated whole once upon a time. The classics in this way helped spur me to bridge the gap between these two parts of my life, a journey that continues today. On the other hand, I also believe that my Hindu background enriched my own appreciation for the Classics. Socrates was not just a gadfly who died for Athenian democracy, but a sage in the mould of the Upanishadic Yājñavalkya, teaching mortals how to live and how to die; Heraclitus was not a “pre-socratic philosopher” (such a dry term!) but a Ṛṣi, a seer blessed with cosmic vision. The connections were boundless.
Socrates was not just a gadfly who died for Athenian democracy, but a sage in the mould of the Upanishadic Yājñavalkya, teaching mortals how to live and how to die…
AM: I was also devouring Sanskrit drama and poetry in my teens, as well as the Upanishads (in translation), and I do remember noticing similarities and connections, though not as deeply as you did. My only instant, spontaneous conviction that “This is Hindu” came when I read Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana. That guy was definitely a swami of some sort—or, as Gibbon would have it, “a sage, an imposter, or a fanatic.” An understanding of the similarity, or even unity, of classical paganism and our Dharma has come late to me, most strikingly through Thomas McEvilley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought (Vikram’s recommendation!) and a rapprochement with Plato that has taken me away from his rational, political sides to his mystical, metaphysical sides. McEvilley illuminates how what we call “Ancient Greece” was really part of a network that encompassed the Indians, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and the Mediterranean region. We just happen to have a lot of literary documents in Greek that map this motley churn and crosstalk of ideas and images and stories. Kama and Eros are both winged boys; the Orphics, too, speak of the Wheel. So to attack the Classics is, in a sense, to attack us all, to hack at a tangled common root-tradition whose main and most lasting flowerings occurred both in Europe—and outside of Europe.
I want to highlight one underlying element of your experience here, which is identity. Because what you experienced as affirmation, as an alternative homecoming, a parallel ingroup, a lot of people today experience as the opposite: as threat, as outgroup, as the bigot’s own personal library. Admittedly, these books were the cultural DNA of the British empire-builders who impoverished India and warped its self-image. I remember my wife’s late grandfather reciting, with a deep Gujarati accent and unmitigated delight, the poem “Horatius” by Thomas Babington Macaulay—who is also the author of that infamous “Minute on Indian Education,” which I’m sure you’re familiar with. Here’s Macaulay opining, in 1835, on the classics of Sanskrit and Arabic:
I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.
Western classicists have come a long way from this position, haven’t they? The pendulum seems to have swung the other way as Greek and Roman classics are increasingly coded as “White” (a term that didn’t exist in Ovid’s day) by classicists like Dan-El Padilla and Donna Zuckerberg. The former was the subject of a full-length profile in the New York Times; the latter was the editor of Eidolon and is the sister of Facebook’s founder (himself, I understand, a big fan of Augustus). These are influential outlets and individuals. Classics Twitter is, admittedly, an ideologically policed area and hence unrepresentative of true preferences, but classicists there do tend to self-excoriate on the field’s “Whiteness.” Did you experience the Classics as “white”? Or as European or imperial, and hence “other”? I know it was a different era—I think we were reading these things in the 1990s and early 2000s?—but why do you think the self-other, oppressed-oppressor distinction didn’t kick in for you?
VG: I really dove in in the early 2010s, and even then the Classics department (at least at my humble state university) was still largely insulated from the identitarian impulse that was already ubiquitous in the English department, for example. So it was only after I left school that I began to see the field change in the manner you describe. I never experienced the Classics as “white.” Perhaps this goes back to the dharmic connection we just discussed, but if anything I connected personally far more to the Greeks than to the Victorian writers that populated my high school reading syllabus. So perhaps it’s no surprise that my first reaction when I saw the emergence of this narrative pushed by Eidolon et al was one of resentment because I felt like a field that I loved was being distorted to serve a rather parochial agenda grounded in contemporary cultural hangups.
As is the case with so much of the recent preoccupation with “whiteness,” the contrition is often inextricably linked with remarkable hubris, for inherent in the atonement for alleged historical sins is an implicit suggestion that it is only the “whites” who have historical agency, and as a result,
have a special relationship with the Greeks and the Romans that is denied to the rest of us. As a result, it is incumbent upon “the whites” in particular to censure certain classical figures or problematize aspects of ancient history to atone for these contemporary sins. I reject this premise wholeheartedly as anachronistic and reductive. One of the greatest blessings of studying the Classics is the perspective it gives you; it helps you evaluate contemporary moral preoccupations from a historically informed vantage point, with the understanding that however strong the moral fervor of the moment, it is ultimately contingent on a particular set of social and cultural conditions that future generations will likely see as foreign. So to project a particular set of values onto the Classics, to see the Greeks or the Romans as integral to some grand project of white supremacy or oppression, is myopic, and will deprive future generations of a great wellspring of beauty and wisdom that is our collective inheritance.
That being said, I will say that while I did not see the Classics through the lens of the “oppressed-oppressor” distinction, one thing I did notice—and perhaps this is due to our shared spiritual background—is the distinctly Christian manner in which we approached the classics, particularly in philosophy. While my focus was philology, I did take a number of philosophy courses, and it always seemed strange to me that we never took the polytheism of the ancients seriously. To use a simple example, in a class about the Pre-Socratics, we studied Parmenides, who composed a brilliant proem detailing his encounter with an unnamed goddess where she discusses the path of true knowledge. In the analytic tradition that dominates the American academy, it is taken as a given that this encounter is figurative, that the goddess is some elaborate metaphor. Implicit in this reading is the assumption that philosophers whom we look to today as paragons of reason could not have harbored such irrational beliefs. Gods and goddesses don’t exist as real beings worthy of reverence, but simply as elaborate symbols hiding some deeper philosophical meaning to be logically unwound. That’s just one example, but I can recall countless others.
To summarize, if the argument is that prevailing narratives about the Greeks and the Romans have been overtly influenced by a set of particular cultural values, and that we should be cognizant of those values in our readings and—even further—actively seek to expand the range of perspectives in the Classics, then I am on board 100%. But when I see people try to problematize the Classics, or to condemn a civilization in toto because of its alleged links to a modern political crusade, then my hackles go up. I think it is true that the ancient world is much weirder than what the average person might believe, but this is an argument in favor of exposing more people to the history, to the languages, to the texts, not to chase people away. Howard University recently decided to eliminate its classics program, and Dr. Cornel West called it a “spiritual catastrophe.” I agree, and I hope that others come around to the same view. To quote Terence, “I am human, and nothing of man is alien to me.”
So to attack the Classics is, in a sense, to attack us all, to hack at a tangled common root-tradition whose main and most lasting flowerings occurred both in Europe—and outside of Europe.
AM: I agree with most of what you said. The “whites” need a sense of exceptionalism. The West must be either uniquely great or uniquely evil; either the only scientific and ethical civilization, or the only one that ever took slaves and engaged in imperialism. The Right exalts what the Left demonizes, but exceptionalism is the common theme. They can’t just let their heritage be e pluribus unum among the great human civilizations. That is, perhaps, a hard thing for people with an intense race-feeling: to acknowledge greatness is multipolar and multifarious. You and I, at least partially deracinated by our upbringing and cultural multiplicity (though less than most Indian-Americans; compared to them we bleed saffron)—maybe we have less of this tendency, or can see it for what it is.
The perspective that regards Greek philosophy’s overtly polytheistic passages as symbolic of some deeper rational element is probably best described as “post-Christian,” in my opinion—simply because the truly Christian approach to such things was witnessed in the first millennium after Christ, when the Christians fought to destroy, suppress, or Christianize the pagan inheritances of Europe, both Celtic and Mediterranean. The early Church Fathers were the first to “cancel” the Classics, although they permitted Virgil because of his Messianic Fourth Eclogue to pass in good standing into the future. Palimpsests involved scrubbing and overwriting. The sole manuscript of Catullus was discovered plugging a hole in a wine barrel in a monastery. Petrarch, fourteen hundred years later, was hard-pressed to find a single person in Italy to teach him Greek; Dante, a little before him, never read Homer for that reason. This learning was lost for a reason. Monotheism travels with iconoclasm and a control-alt-delete of the past, as we Hindus know all too well. The same impulse that burned Nalanda, burned the Library of Alexandria—because, as the Caliph Omar reportedly said, the books there either agreed with the One Book, and were redundant; or didn’t, and deserved the torch.
So it is a little ironic that, today, conservative Christians are more likely than not to be staunch defenders of the Classical tradition—or their own version of it, rationalized, with the Goddess-worship (and Socratic pederasty) memory-holed. Our opinion rejecting the “Whiteness” of the Classics is shared by that segment of the intellectual culture, the side that lost the late 20th-century culture wars and lost the academic humanities. Accusations against the Classics today come from the side that won: to use political shorthand, the Left. So if you find any pushback on the characterization of the Classics as “white,” you find it in conservative outlets. Probably the longest one I’ve read so far was by Victor Davis Hanson—in an openly conservative magazine, The New Criterion.
The conservatives who defend the Classics worry that the Classics will become a minor field, with minuscule enrollment, or cease to be offered at all. I wonder if they realize that is the second-worst outcome. The worst outcome is that it becomes a field like modern-day “South Asian Studies”: A field that is overtly motivated by the hatred of an ancient tradition, unembarrassed in its bigotry, aggressively ignorant, everything warped, politicized, and weaponized. What South Asian Studies “scholars” do to the Hindu tradition, Classicists may do (in some instances, are already doing) to the classical pagan tradition. Consider the way South Asian Studies professors—when they rehabilitate a genocidal Mughal’s reputation, say, or pursue manifestly false ideas, like how Hinduism isn’t Indian—imagine they’re striking a blow against “Hindutva,” or “Hindu-ness.” Classicists here in America imagine they’re striking a blow against “White Supremacy” or misogyny when they savage Ovid for wrongthink. For Classics to become the equivalent of South Asian Studies—for the former to teach hatred of the bygone polytheists, as the latter teaches hatred of present-day ones—is the worst possible outcome. Not the extinction of the field; its persistence as a place of indoctrination, where students are taught that the classical pagans were “White,” where the multifarious past is force-fitted to the present-day White/POC racial binary, and that whole inheritance is tagged as “outgroup.”
These are the obsessions of the political Left in the West, at least in the Anglophone world, where the economic Left has died and been reborn as an identitarian enterprise seeking to divide spoils at the elite level along tribal lines. So they’re way more concerned with ensuring racial diversity in corporate boardrooms (and in Classics departments) than with the proletariat in tent cities. It’s the Left that has turned its cannons on the Classical heritage, much as the Taliban turned its cannons on the Bamiyan Buddhas. Maoism, too, went after the “Four Olds” in China during the Cultural Revolution.
Now I’m going to pivot toward Indian politics and historiography, which I know you know far more than me about. (It may seem to come out of nowhere, but it’s in the service of this issue about the Left.) India’s current governing party—which has, incidentally, openly socialist and “affirmative action”-type policies—gained its current strength in part from positioning itself as a revivalist party. Unabashedly it claims to be the defender of India’s 3000-year-old past, with its imagery of the lotus and Rama and so on. There, too, in seemingly mimetic behavior, India’s Anglophone, academic Left has attacked and undermined India’s classical heritage. Has it done so purely as a reaction to the modern-day BJP? Or does it have a history of doing so, even before the rise of Modi and the BJP? Is it correcting course? (I’m thinking of Shashi Tharoor’s book on being a Hindu, and Rajiv Gandhi sporting the tilak.) I want to pick your brain on this so we can get a handle on whether demonizing the majority’s tradition is simply thedefault mode of the intellectual Left, wherever we find it relying on coalition-building among minority groups. Or is this unique to the American cultural moment, and mirrored by Indian elites?
VG: Yes, post-Christian is a better term. And you make a good point. I think we often forget that the great humanists of the renaissance were for the most part strident Christians, beginning with Petrarch himself, who attacked the followers of the Muslim philosopher and theologian (and ardent) Aristotlean) Averroes as infidels. That later authors like Milton could refer to Socrates in such reverential terms without worrying about being labeled a heretic or an atheist reflects the complete assimilation of the pagan Greeks into the (Christian) literary world. Once this victory was complete, even Plato could be embraced as a “pseudo-Christian” whose only mistake was living prior to Revelation.
This is related to your subsequent point, but in my bleaker moments, I sometimes wonder what the world’s attitude towards our own heritage would be were Hindu India an artifact of the past. Would the renaissance that Schopenhauer famously predicted be more likely in such a case? Would scholars from all over the world be flocking to India to preserve, digitize, and translate the millions of manuscripts rotting in temples and dilapidated archives? This is the thing that disappoints me most about these departments. There’s an entire universe of knowledge out there that remains hidden from public view, and yet the so-called scholars of “South Asia” appear more interested in engaging in the politicized diatribe that you describe. It’s just boring, frankly. If Classics ends up going the same way, we’ll at least have libraries full of faithful translations (not to mention wonderful online resources like the Perseus Project) that we can rely on to satisfy our own intellectual curiosity. My biggest fear is that so much of our heritage will simply disappear due to neglect.
With regards to your question about India, I think this tendency pre-dates Modi’s electoral victory in 2014, though it certainly seems to have attained a new level of urgency in recent years. At a fundamental level, I think the “Anglophone Left” that you refer to isn’t really “left” in any meaningful sense. As you’ve suggested, the right-left distinction does not really transfer over to India cleanly, and often ends up obfuscating more than it illuminates. I think the real cleavage is in how this class makes sense of the world vis-a-vis average Indians. Many of the so-called Anglophone Left were educated in convent schools that were specifically established during the Raj in order to create a class of English-speaking intermediaries who could act as a bridge between the British and the natives. As Macaulay put in his famous speech, they wanted to create “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” The British by and large succeeded in this project, though of course in doing so they also planted the seed of their own defeat. It was this same class of English-educated intermediaries who would form the core of the early Indian National Congress party and would fight for India’s independence. The Marxist political scientist Sudipta Kaviraj articulates this situation lucidly in this essay “The Imaginary Institution of India.” He argues that during the colonial period we saw the emergence of two divisions in Indian society: First there was the division between nationalism and colonialism, but then there was an internal division between those who inhabited a world made intelligible by modernist discourse, and those did not, a division that formed a clear break between the elite and the masses. Kaviraj then describes the current inflection point in Indian politics (he wrote this in 1991, when India’s economy was liberalized) as a conflict over “intelligibility” that is pre-ideological in nature. The modernist elite who took the reins of the state post-independence was—by design—alienated from the masses to a degree, though they ended up creating the conditions for the subaltern masses to rise and assert their own political identity. Unfortunately for the modernist elite, it turns out that the masses draw on Hindu ideas, iconography, mythology, and stories in formulating their political and cultural values. This is perfectly embodied by the controversy surrounding the Ram temple in Ayodhya.
This has been a bit of a long digression, but the point is not to say that the Anglophone Left is right or wrong (though I certainly have my own view), but simply that they are disconnected from the broader electorate in a fundamental way. Given that context, it makes sense that they’d attack the idea of Hindu civilization and culture, since this is the fount from which the emergent political order increasingly draws its strength and legitimacy. I personally think that this is a doomed enterprise on their part, but it does appear to be the path they have chosen.
One other point I’d make about the Indian “Left” is that I’ve been quite surprised at just how indebted they are to the missionary critiques of India and Hinduism we see in the 19th century. In my research for Hindoo History I regularly come across clips that could just as easily be found in the English-language press (whether in India or America/England) today. To just give one example, we saw during the delta wave in India a deluge of press coverage featuring pictures of burning corpses in cremation grounds, which most Indians saw as grossly disrespectful and a violation of basic decency. The Indian Left of course justified these reports on the grounds that it was necessary to hold the political authorities accountable for their failure to manage the crisis, but there was a certain perverse voyeurism undergirding these reports that I’ve seen in 19th-century clips as well. Early missionaries were fascinated by cremation, and they spoke in vivid, often grotesque terms of the burning bodies on the banks of the Ganges. The view of cremation was also often linked with a broader stereotype of India as a diseased country. This is just one example, but there are many others.
To come back to your question, in a way perhaps the Indians actually set the template for the contemporary American left, in a stunning reversal of the usual arrangement. I don't think it’s farfetched to posit that a similar dynamic has emerged among the American left today, namely in that they too “make sense of the world” in a very different way than the average American. Like the Indian left, they exercise influence through institutions, but their ideas appear to be increasingly out of touch. Like the Indian “Left,” they too are making the error of shrinking and mutilating the past to fit their parochial ideological aims.
AM: To your point about the fate of our cultural legacy, if our religion were a dead one: I am not so optimistic. It’s important to remember that the museum- and archive-oriented treasuring-up of Mediterranean antiquity is the result of two or three historical accidents. First, the climate of Europe is a bit more forgiving than India’s when it comes to the simple, physical preservation of antiquity. Second, it so happened that the Arab Muslim caliphate, during the medieval era, was interested in preserving Greco-Roman scientific and philosophical heritage as a path to increase its power and knowledge. (That is why they sought out and translated Aristotle and Euclid and treatises on logic, not Sappho and Ovid and compendiums of mythology; there were also treatises that reconciled Plotinus with the Qur’an.) When it came to the polytheistic pre-Islamic culture of Arabia, only a few poems have been preserved and cherished, the Bedouin qasidas or Odes that have bequeathed the bone structure of the ghazal. The rest was Jahiliyya, the Time of Ignorance, and purged; we scarcely have any idea what the murtis housed in the Ka’aba looked like, or the details of their philosophy.
The third and to me most interesting anomaly was a weakening of Christian zealotry among Europeans as its second millennium progressed. This is what’s commonly considered the transition out of the “Dark Ages,” but there were plenty of brilliant minds at work in monasteries then, they were just fixated on Christology and Biblical studies. That mindset persisted among missionaries and more purely religious thinkers, and does so to this day; this is a universal feature of large groups, a type of human mind, really. But generations of poets and philosophers and painters began to grow estranged from that religion, at least creatively. So Christian-majority Europe, with the Renaissance, began producing massive amounts of overtly pagan art. That was the artistic locus of fantasy and the miraculous, much as Marvel comics are the artistic locus of fantasy and the miraculous in Christian-majority America today. If there were some ancient crumbled civilization that contained artifacts related to Iron Man and Thanos, modern-day universities would be digging it all up. But unless a hypothetically-defunct Hindu mythos survived the weather conditions, and whatever religion (presumably Islam or Christianity) effaced and overwrote its “heathen ignorance,” and somehow took over the Western cultural imagination, Euro-American money would be unlikely to direct itself to India.
Which is to say—forgive that knotty sentence—Hindus have no one to look to when it comes to preserving and translating India’s rotting Libraries of Alexandria. According to the prolific translator from the Sanskrit, Bibek Debroy, and India’s National Mission for Manuscripts (NAMAMI, set up in 2003), there are 40 million untranslated manuscripts scattered throughout India. 66% of them are in Sanskrit, 95% untranslated as of 2018. Imagine an Amazon rainforest, hiding perhaps a perfectly natural cure for cancer, but time is deforesting it in slow-motion.
I’m thrilled you took the time to parse India’s internal divide, so similar to our own. That’s a topic that there’s more to said about, for sure. In a way, it brings us back to the critique of the Classics as White. India’s “subaltern” classes love the ancient myths. In the West, sectors that link up with popular tastes have fewer scruples about the Classics. Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman has her origins on a Greek island, Brad Pitt played Achilles, and the retellings of Madeleine Miller, like Circe, occupy bestseller lists. It’s true that Classics as an academic field does consist mostly of people of European descent. But students of South Asian origin seem drawn to South Asian Studies, students of African origin to African Studies—none of this seems a surprise or an injustice to me. It seems natural, predictable, human; people like to learn about their ancestors. Ancestor-worship is one of the forms the religious impulse happens to take. We see it manifesting there.
Still, internal critique, the spirit of reform, the wish to self-improve—I regard these as healthy impulses, both within a religion and within a knowledge discipline. I just feel, and I think you agree, that associating the Classics with American Whiteness discourse is unproductive or even counterproductive. If you or I had a magic wand, that is not the wish we would wish.
But if you did have a magic wand? What is the way forward? As someone who has gone through a formal Classical curriculum, what do you think an “equitable” present-day Classics curriculum would look like? What would you change, preserve, add, delete, reframe, if you could guide how American universities teach the Classics today?
VG: As much as I resent the conflation of classics with “whiteness,” there are elements of the broader critique of the discipline that I do actually agree with. As you say, internal reform is important. The critical distinction, I think, is between perspective and projection. To illustrate the value of the former, consider the shift in how we conceive of the ancient world now that we know that Ancient Greek statuary was polychromatic. This is something we've known for years, but I had the privilege of seeing the “Gods in Color” exhibit a couple of years back and seeing—to take one example—a statue of a Trojan archer from ~500 B.C. in brightly colored harlequin pants is paradigm-shifting. Indeed, when I saw the exhibit, my dominant impression was wonder at how much the polychromatic statuary resembled the murtis we see in Hindu temples, which are typically painted and dressed in brightly colored clothing. Envisioning the Greco-Roman world in this way is an effective rebuttal against the 20th-century racists and eugenicists who projected their own reprehensible ideology of “white” racial supremacy back on to the ancient world. In this sense, I am in agreement with the contemporary critics, but unfortunately, they too fall victim to the same category of error made by their opponents, namely projecting their own ideology onto the ancients. It’s here where I depart.
If I had a program for enriching the Classics and ensuring that they remain relevant for the modern day, I’d say that we must make a conscious attempt to expand our perspective (which, by the way, should include more comparative work between the Sanskrit and Greek traditions in particular) while avoiding projection. One way to do this is to ensure that the Classics retain a strong emphasis on the study of Latin and Ancient Greek. In an effort to bolster enrollment and stem high attrition rates, Classics programs have been relaxing language requirements. Whatever the short-term benefits from an enrollment perspective, I think this will be a disaster in the long run. There is simply no substitute for struggling through the text in its original language. Understanding the craft of translation—even at a rudimentary level—I think inculcates a healthy appreciation for the richness of the texts and a skepticism of modern commentators who are quick to draw parallels based on spurious renderings.
AM: Illuminating as ever, Vishal—thanks for taking the time to share your insights.
Both you and I owe a debt of gratitude to Vikram Masson for hosting our dialogue here. I think I speak for both of us when I encourage everyone who’s made it this far to subscribe to his Substack below. Vikram is one of the most broadly read people we know on matters historical and theological alike, and his wisdom is needed in today’s discourse. It promises to be a force to counteract propaganda, bigotry, and historical amnesia—Vikram, we wish you the best in this endeavor.
The Hindoo History substack: hindoohistory.substack.com
"To read the classics is to join a global conversation that has spanned thousands of years. " To muse and ponder over the same epics and characters as our ancestors makes the past feel closer. Wonderful read!
What a brilliant conversation. Both of you may like to read my book DRAMATIC CONCEPTS GREEK AND INDIAN (1994 reprinted six times). I have challenged the European notion that Greeks are "Western ". They were polytheistic people sharing too many fundamental notions about the Cosmos with ancient Hindu Indians.
So this enterprise of associating ancient Greeks with Whiteness is bullshit.
"To read the classics is to join a global conversation that has spanned thousands of years. " To muse and ponder over the same epics and characters as our ancestors makes the past feel closer. Wonderful read!
What a brilliant conversation. Both of you may like to read my book DRAMATIC CONCEPTS GREEK AND INDIAN (1994 reprinted six times). I have challenged the European notion that Greeks are "Western ". They were polytheistic people sharing too many fundamental notions about the Cosmos with ancient Hindu Indians.
So this enterprise of associating ancient Greeks with Whiteness is bullshit.
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