Sheldon Pollock's Scare mongering about "Crisis in the Classics"
Sheldon Pollock has written a scare mongering piece here: http://www.museindia.com/focuscontent.asp?issid=43&id=3330 The following is a humble attempt to rebut the article: "“India is confronting a calamitous endangerment of its classic knowledge, and India today may have reached the point the rest of the world will reach tomorrow. This form of knowledge, under the sign of a critical classicism, must be recovered and strengthened not for the mere satisfaction of those outside of India who cultivate the study of its past but for the good of the people of India themselves.” The article starts with Sheldon Pollock (SP) saying that what he says in the article is not backed by statistics but out of personal experience and anecdotes. The above said, let us analyze the alarm! 1. "Calamitous endangerment of its classic knowledge." : According to SP, classic knowledge is knowledge "about" classics and not knowledge of the classics. Knowl