Why a professor from Belgium was branded ‘anti-India’ after Delhi lecture on 18th-century Dutch text

Imagine: you are invited to a foreign university to teach about Nazi representations of the Jews. In a workshop, you analyse a pamphlet from 1933. You show that, while we are appalled at its contents today, similar stereotypes about Jews live on, so we must examine their hold on some people’s minds.

The next day a group of local professors accuse you of antisemitism. Acting as though the excerpts you quoted are your own words, they launch a campaign to brand you as “anti-Jewish”. You are banned from lecturing, investigated for antisemitism and denounced as an “anti-Jew”.

This is more or less what just happened to me. The institution was Delhi University, about a week ago. The workshop focused on European representations of India. The text was a Dutch children’s magazine from 1799 and I was cancelled for being “anti-India”.

How did I get here?

A quarter century ago I began studying under Professor SN Balagangadhara, who was developing a new research programme at Ghent University in Belgium. As a teacher, he introduced us to radical insights into our own European culture as also Indian culture. We learned how Europe’s accounts of India tell us more about Europe than they do about India. Standard stories about Hinduism and caste reveal how Europeans have experienced and described a culture they failed to understand.

Yet, these are sold as truths not just in Europe but also in India.

When I was recently invited to lead workshops at Delhi University’s Department of English, within the framework of a government of India-funded project titled “Indian-European Entanglements”, I decided to focus on this deceptively simple insight. The aim was to show students that European representations of India reflect how one culture has experienced another and thus teach them about the nature of European culture itself.

But the first challenge lay elsewhere: making them realise that some of their own cherished ideas about India reproduce centuries-old European clichés.

This is where the Dutch text from 1799 came in. During a workshop on August 24, we first studied its claims about the “Celtic branch” of the “Caucasian stem” of humanity – namely, the nations of Europe, whom the author calls “superior in body and soul” and “the protagonists of history”.

The Hindus, he goes on to suggest, stand much lower on “the ladder of civilisation and enlightenment” and have had no role to play in history.

While offensive, these claims are also puzzling: how could Europeans think that all human nations can be traced to racial branches originating in three men? Why did they assign all peoples to “civilisational rungs” within European history, thus ignoring that each had its own past? How could such ideas appear plausible to Dutch kids in 1799?

These children, I noted, had imbibed the Bible from a very young age, and the ideas in this children’s magazine built on Christian assumptions that present a biblical story about the past of the Jewish people as the universal history of humanity.

The next quotations were meant to cause confusion. The 18th-century author goes on to produce bromides about India that are still given currency: “Everywhere human beings are divided into ranks or classes, but these classes approach and mingle with each other from time to time, and those belonging to the lowest ranks at least have some hope to improve their condition over time; but in Hindustan this hope has been cut off completely.”

In 1799, scarcely any research had been done on India, barring reports by European missionaries and travellers and a handful of translations. How then could this author, ignorant about India, know what many see as a fact about caste today?

The students in my class got disturbed and some began to defend the statement as a truth about their own society. But, I emphasised, this text exemplifies ignorance about India and a biblical story about humankind. “Was this 18th-century Dutchman clairvoyant then?” I asked ironically and told them to reflect on the problem, which would be tackled in a later workshop.

That workshop never took place. On August 28, the head of the department, Anil Kumar Aneja, told me that a lecture he had invited me to give the next week was cancelled because “no venue was available”. That evening, the colleague who had invited me to Delhi University told me the real reason: some people, including members of the executive council of Delhi University’s Teachers Association, were going around telling people that I had depicted India in a bad light.

Ascribing claims from the 1799 text to me, messages were being sent around accusing me of being “anti-India”, I was told.

The next day, the colleague told me that the university administration had phoned him to requisition the workshop recordings for an investigation into my “anti-India” activities. He said he had been instructed by the administration and his head of department to monitor my teaching in the remaining workshops; they simply prohibited me from talking about representations of India. Otherwise, there might be sanctions and protest marches against my presence on campus, he feared.

Here I was, facing a bunch of academics who could not distinguish between quoting a text (to analyse or criticise it) and endorsing a text, between claims cited and claims made by a speaker. They went ballistic about statements from 1799, even though these continue to be the stock-in-trade of contemporary western writings about India and of many modern Indian authors: of the country as a hotbed of caste discrimination, superstition, rape, persecution, rampant poverty, with a sprinkling of spirituality and some economic growth on top.

Unfortunately, things are no better in 2024 than they were in 1799. If you want to change these ideas and show what is wrong with current thinking about India – a task to which I have contributed for decades – you must systematically examine them, understand their tenacious hold on minds in the West and India, and interrogate your own beliefs. Throwing tantrums about people being “anti-India” won’t do the job.

None of the people campaigning against me ever confronted me. The people who had invited me to Delhi University succumbed to pressure and allowed me to be censored.

Academics who silence other academics in this way cannot be intellectuals, let alone researchers; they can perhaps serve as sycophants for the powers that be. Yet, they are teachers at one of India’s premier universities, expected to shape its brightest young minds. At best, their students will end up woefully unprepared for today’s world, unable to tackle the harmful claims about India they are going to confront everywhere.

The university professors and administrators who censored my teaching and “cancelled” me effectively prevented their students from learning, exploring new ideas and thinking together. They casually acted against the pursuit of knowledge. That is ironic. Indian culture has always been deeply concerned about this pursuit. Its traditions of learning place knowledge above anything else. The goddess of knowledge is revered far and wide in India.

But at Delhi University today, some professors are actively undermining Indian culture’s most profound concern. They are anti-knowledge. That is unforgivable.

Jakob De Roover is professor of India studies and Comparative Science of Cultures at Ghent University, Belgium. He studies European culture through its representations of India.