Word: indianizing
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...NCAA ruled last week that Florida State University can keep using its Seminole mascot, decreeing that Chief Osceola is not "hostile and abusive" after all and thus may continue cheerleading in the postseason. The decision has given a boost to some of 17 other schools whose American Indian nicknames the NCAA has barred from play-off games. Central Michigan University (the Chippewas) and the University of Utah (the Utes) are also appealing the ban and, as Florida State did so successfully, are lining up local tribes to attest to their "long-standing relationships...
Actually, the patriotic thing to do? as Sen himself asserts in his new book?would have been to walk out. In The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity Sen insists that the love of debate and dissent is as deeply entrenched in Indian culture as the love of religion and mysticism. Understanding this little-known fact, he says, is one of the keys to unlocking the puzzle that still baffles so many Western political scientists: how an impoverished and unruly country like India has turned into one of the world's most successful democracies...
...directs his iconoclastic zeal on the perception of India?held by many abroad, and also within the country?as a place with only one kind of culture, which is spiritual and otherworldly, and one kind of society, which is rigidly hierarchical and patriarchal. Sen points out that if Indians have historically been the world's most religious people, they have also been, paradoxically, its most skeptical. Many of India's most influential thinkers, like the Buddha, were agnostics?or outright atheists. "Indeed, Sanskrit not only has a bigger body of religious literature than exists in any other classical language...
Among Sen's targets are the Hindu fundamentalists, who permit no scope for diversity in their interpretation of India's history; so are those who insist that tolerance and dissent are uniquely Western concepts. Not so, he counters: they are as Indian as yoga and hot curry. He also takes a swipe at the "Asian values" theory, which was popular in the 1990s and emphasized a supposed dichotomy between "Western" values of individuality and democracy and "Asian" values of conformity, discipline and reverence for tradition. The dichotomy is fake. One of the basic requirements of a democratic political culture...
...Indian to dissent, I have to point out that the book has its problems. Sen gives too much weight to historical anomalies and aberrations to make his case. He loves to cite the Mughal Emperor Akbar as an illustration of how open-minded and inquisitive Indian monarchs could be. Yet Akbar was a one-off?none of his successors was as ecumenical, and a few were outright bigots. The might of orthodoxy and narrow-mindedness in Indian history is greater than Sen allows it to be, while acquired Western political traditions probably play a greater part in creating contemporary Indian...