Indic Intellectual Tradition.

I will be giving a talk on The Indic Intellectual tradition at the 17th biannual TANA convention at the Rosemont convention center in Chicago during July 2 to July 4. Sheldon Pollock of Columbia University had written a paper on the History of Indic Intellectual Ideas titled " "Is there an Indian Intellectual History?" Journal of Indian Philosophy (in press) (download) . The content of the paper was relatively unremarkable, but the title was intriguing. I was astonished that the civilization with the largest literary output in the ancient era should be confronted with such a question.

In this power point presentation i will try to address the contributions of the Indics in specific areas such as The Indic Weltanschuung (Darshanas), Astronomy, and History . Th choice of the areas is restricted to those in which i have some competence to speak. I do not imply that the Indic contribution was restricted to these fields .
There are many distortions in the current version of Indic History. Nehru was only right partially when he said that the History of India is , "an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously." (Nehru, Discovery of India, 1946, 38-39). Where he was wrong was that for the most part the history of the Indic peoples has been a continuous evolution. For example, the Buddhists never attempted to erase what was there before them and the notion of exclusive allegience to a religious dogma is entirely an Abrahamic construct that was certainly not practiced in India before India was colonized. Due to exigencies of time I will be able to address only a few of the distortions in indic History.

If you, the reader, happen to attend the convention, I will be happy to meet with you. A downlevel version of the presentation is available at scribd.com.Itis also available at Lulu.com

The Indic Intellectual Tradition (ID #7334508): http://www.lulu.com/content/hardcover-book/the-indic-intellectual-tradition/7334508, both as a download and as a hard bound book