After my return to Denmark in 1970, I enrolled as a student in the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Hitherto, this budding discipline had attracted only a handful of students, who used to meet at the National Museum. My batch, however, consisted of around a hundred students, equally divided between men and women.
In those years, the university went through a leftist phase. Outspoken students – mostly men – tried to steer their fellow students, the embattled faculty, and the world at large in a Marxist direction. They did not, however, exert a full hegemony. Some students of anthropology were drawn towards French structuralism, which was not necessarily Marxian. Moreover, all students at the time had to be acquainted with British functionalism which for decades had cultivated kinship studies in faraway places.
Though most of us had little experience of academia prior to entering university, it took us only a short time to learn what a “curriculum” and a “compendium” was. It was more challenging to learn how to use, and understand, the meaning of the term “structure”, which was a key concept across competing schools. The concept of “culture” was inescapable within cultural anthropology, but culture was difficult to define.
Unlike in the case of “structure”, this proved to be a weakness, rather than its strength. In the years to come, anthropology was emptied of its cultural content. Everything was to be “contested”. There was to be no cultural “essence”. To claim otherwise would make the hapless student guilty of “othering”, a faux pasexcept in special cases defined by the sultans or divas of the discipline.
In this Danish academic milieu, India did appear from time to time. In Marxism, a wide-ranging debate on “the mode of production” focussed on whether Indian history should be considered “feudal”, or whether India’s past constituted an “Asian mode of production”. Similarly, contemporary India had to properly pigeonholed as “semi-feudal”, capitalist, or otherwise.
In an article entitled “The Bear and the Barber” the structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss attempted to differentiate between caste societies, where occupation defined the group, and totemistic societies, where an animal could signify a group. Though intellectually challenging, Lévi-Strauss’ article did not appeal to me.
My first attempt at writing anthropology was to review the literature on the definition of caste, but my solution was not an abstract comparison of caste to totemism. Nor did I try to define caste out of existence by arguing that caste was not an Indian institution, but the invention of British colonialism. In the 1970s, BS Cohn and other social historians were to give currency to the argument that the census operations under the Raj virtually created caste.
In an issue of the Danish journal called Folk, which I co-edited, Cohn made this argument, but I harboured some doubt. Much later my doubts were confirmed by a study by Norbert Peabody, which showed that caste-based census operations actually took place BEFORE the arrival of the British.
India emerged in quite a different form within the humanities. Here, the university offered courses in classical Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan as well as Pahari, Hindi, and Urdu. Most students of Tibetan were followers of Tibetan Buddhism, while those who studied Indic languages had more mixed motivations. However, for all of them their entry point was the language and the literature.
There was one institution offering an interdisciplinary mix of the humanities and the social science. It was known as CINA, which may be translated as the Central Institute of Nordic Asia-studies. The acronym clearly signalled China (“Kina” in Danish), and the director was a Sinologist. The faculty numbered a Swedish historian of South Asia, Karl Reinholdt Haellquist, but otherwise South Asia was overshadowed by East and Southeast Asia.
I have retained an affiliation with CINA – now known as NIAS-Nordic Institute of Asian Studies – and can safely say that China has continued to exert pride of place vis-à-vis India in Nordic area studies. With the increasing tension between Europe and China in the last few years, the prerogative of China to attract funds, attention, and admiration over and above India may become a thing of the past, but that would signal a major re-orientation.
I am not sure exactly what has made China able to maintain its position for so long. Being a partly Northern country, China is more like the Nordic countries in some respects. More importantly, area specialists working on China have a much better grip on the Chinese language than what non-Indian scholars can muster with respect to Indian languages.
Since we can make do with English to study modern India, we typically fail to master any Indian language. For that sin of omission, we do deserve some of the lack of respect, which Indian area studies have been accorded.
Outside the university, the India that I knew was mainly the India of yoga and meditation. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Indian gurus with a foothold in Denmark included Rajneesh, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Swami Satyananda Saraswati, AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Dada Lekhraj and the Brahma Kumaris, Guru Maharaj, and Sai Baba. Among these, I moved in at the ashram of Swami Janakananda, a Danish student of Swami Satyananda Saraswati.
I also became a follower of the Tibetan tulku and teacher Akong Rinpoche, who was in-charge of a beautiful monastery in Samye Ling in rural Scotland. The Tibetans brought with them the remnants of the ecclesiastical state that had ruled Tibet for centuries, but at Samye Ling Akong also allowed a French teacher, Hénri, to teach the Chinese system of Tai Chi.
The Indian gurus were more like individual entrepreneurs commanding a changeable set of followers while overseeing their self-made institutional network.
Did they all share a common religious insight? Having read Aldous Huxley’s book, The Perennial Philosophy in a Danish translation from 1950, I did, indeed, expect and sense a deeper commonality. Huxley found this unity across all world religions, and in “the traditional lore of primitive peoples” as well.
The experience of mystics was perennial and universal but, as Jules Evans has argued in a recent essay, Huxley was not always on solid ground (https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-we-learn-from-the-perennial-philosophy-of-aldous-huxley). If mysticism was universal, why did Huxley end up quoting mainly Hindus and Buddhists allocating Jesus only one quote, the Quran none, and women mystics very few?
Huxley explored his thesis by taking consciousness-altering drugs such as mescaline, concluding that drugs could open “the doors of perception” to the world of the mystics. Huxley was a forerunner on a perilous path subsequently trekked by many others.
In 2023, the state of Oregon in the United States has legalized another psychedelic drug, psilocybin mushrooms, for therapeutic use in “psilocybin service centres”. Apparently, magic mushrooms are mainstreaming mysticism. However, the religious leaders I turned to did not consider drugs as compatible substitutes to meditative practice.
After four years as a student in Denmark, I decided to return to India, not as a “banjara”, but as a student of sociology. My Hindi teacher, the comparative philologist Finn Thiesen, advised me not to seek admission in one of the metropolitan universities, where most people would speak English most of the time. Instead, he nudged me to seek admission in a place where my Hindi would be improved.
At the Indian embassy in Copenhagen, I acquired a booklet called “Studying in India – A Handbook for Overseas Students” published by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. I wrote to a handful of the universities listed in the book. Some had no course in sociology, but Meerut University answered positively.
Further, the Government of India offered Danish students a scholarship under the Reciprocal Scholarship Scheme. The competition for this scholarship was minimal, and I decided to set out for India even before the scholarship was granted. Thus, in 1974 I flew from Denmark to Egypt, travelled along the Nile to southern Sudan by rail, ferry, and river boat, and flew from Juba to Idi Amin’s Uganda.
The embassy of Uganda in London had granted me a three-day visa to the country. I visited the Kampala city centre where Indians had once dominated trade. Every signboard of every shop in the area still bore an Indian name, even after the community had been forced out of the country.
The atmosphere in the city was generally tense even in the cinema hall where I spent a few hours, and I chose to take a night bus to Kenya. In Mombasa, I stayed with a Shia Ismaili family known to an uncle of mine who had helped several Indians move their assets in times of political crises.
I booked a ticket on a huge Pakistani ship used to ferry pilgrims to Mecca. The ship had been docked for repair, and when I travelled on it, we were only a handful of passengers, including a group of Pakistani Ahmadiyya missionaries. The Ahmadiyya sect was about to be declared non-Muslim in Pakistan by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, but when I encountered the group, they were still able to proselytize in Africa.
From Karachi, I travelled to India, reaching Meerut in time for the start of the semester. When I presented myself to Professor Brij Raj Chauhan at his office, he searched his drawers for a while before producing the letter I had sent to the department from Denmark. Yes, he was aware of my intention to study in Meerut. A lot of formalities had yet to be completed, but I was provisionally admitted as a regular graduate student.
Meerut was a city known for its cantonment where the uprising in 1857 started, its brass instruments and scissors makers, its handloom and sports goods, and for its rusticity, rowdiness, and riots. The style of communication was often forthright and even irreverent. What the city was NOT known for was the mysticism that Huxley wrote about.
To put all of this in Marxist-Hegelian terms: The contradiction between the thesis of oriental mysticism and the antithesis of Western social science was temporarily resolved by the synthesis of studying sociology in the Orient.