Note on non-attribution and other accusations

My article “The Architecture of Hinduism” was posted on Swarajya a couple of days ago. It has since attracted some criticism that it does not include any reference or attribution to the works of Rajiv Malhotra.

Let me at the outset clarify that the informal blog was meant as a preview of a larger set of essays being published for the World Hindu Congress (this is stated clearly). It does not specifically leave out Rajiv as it does not have any references at all. The actual book will contain references, which include Rajiv Malhotra and several others, as well as some of my own work that pre-dates Rajiv’s books. As the book is meant for an event to be held very soon, the book has already been edited and is with the printers.

Now let me turn to the accusations, including that of plagiarism, that have been posted in the Comments section below. I would like to clarify that this note is not directed at any person but is an attempt to clear my name against some very unfair charges. For a comprehensive list of the accusations, look at the “10 points” posted by DesiBhai that I now rebut.

Let me first take on the more absurd allegations. He starts by suggesting that Rajiv was the first one to point out that there was a problem with defining Hinduism as a “way of life”. The issue of defining Hinduism is an old one and this particular formulation was put forward, I believe, by Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan in the 1920s. It has since been much debated and criticized even up to the level of the Supreme Court. I am not the first person to object to the “way of life” definition nor is Rajiv.

DesiBhai next says I have copied Rajiv’s formulation that Hinduism is not a religion at all. This is deliberate misrepresentation. At the very beginning of my article, I make the distinction between religion and faith/belief. I then state that I consider Hinduism a religion. In other words, this is not plagiarism but disagreement. Similarly it is absurd to say that I discovered the difference between Shruti and Smriti because of Rajiv’s work. This is so elementary that anyone studying Hinduism will learn at the very onset.

Now let me move on to the more serious accusations. DesiBhai alleges that I have plagiarized my use of terms like “complex adaptive systems” and the definition of “organic, evolving ecosystem of interrelated and interdependent elements that are constantly interacting with each other”. The study of chaos and complex adaptive systems (CAS) is a very large and well-established framework that is applied in many fields ranging from physics, systems dynamics, evolutionary biology, to urban design, economics and finance, to name just a few. The definition that I have given is a simplified version of the standard textbook definition. Versions of it can be found all over the CAS literature and even on Wikipedia. Here is just one link to a business dictionary.

Furthermore, the various CAS characteristics that I list are also well known in the literature – history- or path-dependence, irreversibility, non-equilibrium, not-sum-of-parts. I am sure Rajiv Malhotra does not claim to have discovered any of these CAS characteristics. Moreover, note that I am not new to the CAS framework and have been applying it for many years to a variety of issues ranging from urban systems, economics, finance and even to civilizational evolution. Let  me give some examples.

Here is a link to paper I wrote on Singapore’s urban dynamics in 2006 and published in January 2007 (Singapore: The Art of Building a Global City, Sanjeev Sanyal, IPS Working Papers, January 2007). It clearly applies CAS, discusses the benefits of adaptability, and also refers to even earlier papers dating back to 2003. I have written numerous other papers using the CAS framework but highlight this one as it uses the terms “organic evolution” and “architecture”,  which DesiBhai accuses me of stealing from Rajiv Malhotra.

Let it be clear that the term “open architecture” was not invented by Rajiv Malhotra and has been in use for perhaps half a century. Also, readers should know that I am not pulling out obscure papers from the trashcan to make my case. My writings on Singapore were a part of heated public debate in the mid-2000s and some of these articles were published as full-page op-eds in The Straits Times, the largest newspaper in the city.

In any case, I hope I have established that I was using such terms long before Rajiv Malhotra’s work became widely known (As per Amazon, his first book Breaking India was published in April 2011. The books related to CAS that DesiBhai mentions are even more recent: Being Different was published in September 2013 and Indra’s Net in March 2014. In other words, Rajiv’s works are brand new).

So, is it the case that Rajiv Malhotra is the first person to think of adaptability, innovation and flexibility in the context of religion or civilization? This too is not at all true. The idea of civilizational flexibility is very old and much discussed in the context of the European Renaissance and more recently in the context of the collapse in the Soviet Union. It has also been specifically used in the context of Hinduism on many occasions. One easily readable example is The Origins and Development of Classical Hinduism by A.L. Basham, published by OUP in 1989 which says: “Hinduism in the modern age is characterized by its adaptability…This flexibility and openness, which follows the age old traditions and teachings of the sages, will permit Hinduism to remain one of the major religions forces in the future” (Page 115) There is also the explicit use of CAS to study the phenomenon of religions by Mark C. Taylor.

Even if others were saying this for a long time, can it still be said that I got the idea of civilizational flexibility from Rajiv Malhotra? Far from it, this issue of civilizational adaptation and cultural/intellectual openness is the subject of my book The Indian Renaissance: The Rise of India after a Thousand Years of Decline published by Penguin in 2008. Just as I used the English language to illustrate the point in my latest article, I had used the evolution of Sanskrit in that book to make my point about fossilization versus adaptation.

I had then proceeded to give several examples of the benefits of complex adaptive systems in the book – including a comparison between common-law legal systems and civil law systems, and how the former endogenously initiate change because precedents effectively update laws on an on-going basis. At the end of the book I have then applied this lens to modern Kolkata, the city of my birth, to show how cultural and intellectual fossilization is at the root of the city’s decline. (The Indian edition of this book is currently out of print pending an update but it is available internationally. In any case, the book has sold well and there are thousands of copies in circulation).

Ok, so I have demonstrated that I knew about CAS, used all those terms and even applied this thinking to Indian civilization before Rajiv Malhotra’s books were published. But, the examples above are from the previous decade. Perhaps my current interest in CAS was due to his work. Let me bury this thought as well. I have a well-established reputation for my applications of CAS frameworks to economic issues. Here is just one recent example: “The Age of Chinese Capital”, Sanjeev Sanyal, The Wide Angle series, DB Research, October 2014. In particular, look at page 9 where I describe the Economics of Perpetual Imbalance and argue that economists need to accept global imbalances as the natural state of being.

Readers who find finance and economics boring have the option of reading my frequent columns on urban issues that also use the CAS framework. I am just including a few of those that I written in the last 12 months. There is one about how the complex urban design of Varanasi is not the problem, and that it has a management problem (“Reviving Varanasi for the 21st Century”, Business Standard, May 6th, 2014 ). There is another one on the ideological basis of cities (“The Ideology of Cities”, Business Standard, Dec 31st, 2013). Here is one about how one should think of slums as evolving ecosystems (“India Needs to Slum It Out”, India Today, Sept 12, 2014 ). I have minimized use of the CAS terminology in these articles as they are meant for the general public, but no one will have a problem recognizing the underlying framework. And it should be clear to everyone that the CAS framework is my daily bread-and-butter.

When I started writing this article, I was somewhat sad and irritated. However, I must admit I am rather enjoying myself now. I have often been asked what links my writings in seemingly unconnected fields like economics, finance, cities, environment, civilization and geographical history. While I have verbally explained it to people before, this is the first time that I have explicitly put it down on paper and shown people the linkages.

I hope that I have adequately addressed the long list of accusations made by DesiBhai. I clearly have been using the CAS framework for a long time, I have applied it specifically to Indian civilization and I continue to use it on a daily basis today. So how did Rajiv and I end up using similar terms? Since I do not think that he was secretly plagiarizing my work, the likely reason is rather mundane. We both applied the same framework to the same issue. It is like how Marxists end up constantly using terms like “historical materialism”, “dialectics” etc. For the same reason, we also came to some similar, albeit not identical, conclusions.

Having said all this this, I have read Indra’s Net and have met and had a face-to-face chat with Rajiv Malhotra. I do not consider him a competitor but as a fellow traveller – and I found our discussion enriching (this is why I put him in the references in the formally published collection of essays). However, let it be clear that he is not a dominant influence on my thinking and he did not launch me into this CAS space. There are many influences on my thinking such as urban theorist Jane Jacobs and the Austrian school of economists. However, the ultimate source of inspiration for this line of thinking remains the Rig Veda.

Appendix

A record of the accusations made by DesiBhai in the comments section (in case, anyone is tempted to delete or change the comments):

1) Sanyal starts by saying that defining Hinduism as “a way of life” is a problem. This is copied from page 18 of Indra’s Net.

2) Sanyal wants to define Hinduism in contrast with the Abrahamic religions, and says that Hinduism by contrast is not a religion. This is a focus of RM that is emphasized throughout his works.

3) Hinduism, Sanyal says, is an “organic, evolving ecosystem of interrelated and interdependent elements that are constantly interacting with each other (and with the outside world)”. He fails to cite that this is how the term ‘Indra’s Net’ is defined in RM’s book, and used by RMto characterize the fundamental nature of Hinduism.

4) Hinduism differs from systems that are the sum of their parts, i.e. different from “a mechanical system like a car is the sum total of all its parts …. Moreover, the evolving and mutating nature of complex, adaptive systems implies that even the most detailed description is not just insufficient but fundamentally wrong over time.” This is a central principle that is elaborated in considerable detail in BEING DIFFERENT; it is explained as integral unity versus synthetic unity by RM.

5) Hinduism’s relationship with its history differs than in the case of Abrahamic religions. “It is necessarily about constantly evolving and moving forward even as it draws inspiration and ideas from its past. The holy books, traditions, customs and tenets of Hinduism should not be seen as a path to an ideal “Kingdom of God” or “Caliphate” to which everyone must revert.” This is a simplified version of saying ‘history-centrism’, which is a key idea in BEING DIFFERENT.

6) Sanyal writes: “Hinduism does not have a centralized leadership,” and it is a “complex adaptive system”. This has “many implications for how Hindus think about their religion and manage its future. For instance, they suggest that Hindu leaders refrain from being too prescriptive of where Hinduism should go in the long run. Much better that they focus on continuously updating and reforming the system on an ongoing basis while taking care to maintain internal diversity.” Another direct plagiarism. Hinduism’s complexity and adaptability are key features emphasized in BEING DIFFERENT as well as India’s Net.

7) Sanyal re-articulates BEING DIFFERENT’S analysis of Western vulnerability to disintegrate because it is synthetic: “Indeed, inflexible systems can sometime disintegrate very suddenly even if they look outwardly strong. … Indeed, the religion has survived for so long because it was able to continuously evolve though internal reform, innovation and absorption.”

8) Sanyal re-articulates one of the staple ideas of RM – the separation of shruti and smriti that differentiates Hinduism from Abrahamic religions where these are collapsed into “one book”. He writes: “Interestingly, Hinduism’s flexible, adaptive architecture may not have appeared entirely by chance but may have been deliberately set up by the ancient Rishis. Thus, Hindu scriptures are divided into Shruti and Smriti. The former are said to have been “heard” from the gods and consequently are canonical. Strictly speaking, only the first three Vedas – Rig, Sama, Yajur – are considered Shruti (although many would also include the Atharva Veda). All other sacred texts, including the much revered Bhagwata Gita, are considered Smriti. The Smriti are “remembered’ and therefore considered of human origin – the works of great thinkers, compilations of traditions, and so on. … This architecture has had important implications for Hinduism. The Shruti texts may be canonical and provide general principles but they are wonderfully open-ended …, whereas the Smriti texts are more specific but not canonical. This means that one can keep adding new texts and ideas forever, including texts that contradict previous Smriti texts. The much criticized Manu Smriti, by definition, can simply be replaced or revised if Hindus so wish.”

9) Sanyal drops the word “open” from RM’s “open architecture” explained in Indra’s Net, but the idea is the exact same thing: “To conclude, analyzing Hinduism as a complex adaptive system provides many important insights into the functional architecture of Sanatan Dharma. It shows that the key strength of Hinduism has been its ability to evolve, adapt and innovate. This ability needs to be actively enhanced and strategically deployed in order to keep Hinduism healthy. For instance, it may be time to revive the tradition of writing new Smriti texts, a practice that went into decline in medieval times.”

10) Sanyal’s worst arrogance comes at the very end when Sanyal takes full credit for originality. He calls his article “an attempt to initiate a new way of thinking about Sanatan Dharma. The author hopes that others will build on it.” At the very least he could have acknowledged RM as the source of this “new way of thinking about Sanatan Dharma”. He is the one trying (howsoever feebly) to “build on it”; but he arrogantly claims to have originated a new foundational way of thinking.