''Indians are ashamed of their texts—the more so the less they know their contents. They can only accept what Indologists have sanitized and sanctified and offered to them. Indologists are treated like godmen in India—a sign of internalized colonization.''
''Lassen's interpretation was congenial for Westerners. It accorded with the prejudice against Hinduism. Lassen had explained the "mechanism" of degeneracy: why India did not develop as the West had. It accorded with anti-Brahmanic prejudices. Lassen blamed Brahmans for India's backwardness. He provided a historical narrative that, replacing indigenous ideas of history, integrated Indian civilization into world history. He anchored the "biracial theory" (the view that Indian civilization comprises two races, civilizing "white Aryans" and primitive "black natives") in "history." Lassen's interpretation reified the concept of race and legitimized racial conquest as historical and natural fact. By claiming Brahmans invented rituals for money, Lassen undermined the soteriological and epistemic praxis of Hinduism. By claiming Indians were duped by Brahmans and did not know their texts, he deprived them of intellectual authority. Henceforth what a practicing Hindu said had less value than what the "historically and critically" trained scholar had to tell him. Most important, Lassen replaced the Mahābhārata's own concept of itihāsa purāṇa with a meta-narrative of history, in which Indians themselves would participate (e.g., when they prove the Mahābhārata War "really" happened, i.e., happened in history). At this point, Hinduism ceased to exist as an independent tradition. It was subsumed into Christian supersessionism and its modern, secular analogue: world history.''
[The Pseudoscience of Indology: An Interview with Joydeep Bagchee]
