Indian embassy in Washington DC kick started their Third International Yoga Day (2017) celebration with the below lecture by Rajiv Malhotra. The main theme of the talk was appropriation and digestion of Indian ideas and techniques by the west. It charted the developments in Mind Sciences in the West since Swami Vivekananda’s trip to the west. In one-hour Rajiv Malhotra mentioned all the people (in yellow), institutions (in red) and techniques/ideas (in blue) in the image above! That should be reason enough to watch the lecture!
Every time I hear RM speak on this topic, I realize something that I was overlooking earlier. Digestion clearly violates the ethics of academic and scientific research since the references are not properly cited and acknowledged. By weakening Indian culture and tradition, digestion also facilitates various Breaking India forces. I appreciated all this earlier.
However, all that is a problem for the Indian government and Swadeshi scholars. Should the aam aadmi care? How does it matter whether one gets the authentic version of a technique or the digested one? In other words, should it matter whether you learn Vipassana or it’s digested version of mindfulness; yog nidra vs lucid dreaming, Transcendental meditation vs relaxation-response? Rajiv Malhotra argues that it does matter because the digested versions are usually just a small subset of the source body of knowledge, and often are also substandard. He mentions that authentic Vipassana is much more advanced than mindfulness, yet mindfulness is projected as the “new and improved” version and is all over the town today. In a few generations, people may not even know that something called Vipassana even existed. I can easily imagine this. Indian scriptures and rituals can be very complex with many layers of meanings and symbolism. Same idea can often be interpreted and implemented in many different ways and combined with other ideas in numerous different ways. Once the source has been reduced to one or two digested forms, such experiments will no longer be possible. Paraphrasing from the talk:
digestion effectively plucks the fruit on a tree and leaves the tree behind to atrophy thereby eliminating the possibility of future harvests.
Another thing I realized is the difference between the way rest of Asia treated knowledge from India and how the west did it and is still at it. Buddhism spread to China, Japan and south-east Asia over millennia and steadily became less prevalent in India. Yet, Buddhist scholars and practitioners in those countries even today respectfully acknowledge their Indian roots. Western appropriators, on the other hand, go out of their way to avoid crediting India. RM gives a powerful analogy to illustrate this point:
it is like you run 100m faster than any one before and the credit goes to the guy with the clock who timed you and reported it to the world!
RM mentioned that he is writing seven books based on this talk. I can’t wait for it!
This is Not Right Wing! 
Thinking about the different approaches taken by asian countries and west in terms of providing appropriate acknowledgement, I can’t help but wonder if it is because asian countries don’t suffer from the inferiority complex of having no illustrious history to bank on. For west, all they have is the post renaissance scientific discoveries (for europe) and post independence or even post world war II industrial revolution (for US). That is by no means a small feat. In fact, I would venture to say that what US has achieved in last century is truly unprecedented in the history of man kind. However, that also creates a deep / obsessive need to portray everything as new, recent and of western origin.
At present,this thought is just a conjecture but something that I would like to discuss/ develop further.
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