Clergyman's

The Veda, the transcendent śāstra, subsumes all knowledge.
- Sheldon Pollock

There is nothing remarkable about the people in premodern South Asia having a clear and accurate conception of the spatial organization of their world.
- Sheldon Pollock

“From among the complexities of NS analysis of the Urheimat question it is worth calling attention to the way the nineteenth-century view expressed by Schlegel was reversed: the original Indo-Europeans were now variously relocated in regions of the Greater German Reich; German thereby became the language of the core , whereas Sanskrit was transformed into one of its peripheral, ‘colonial’ forms.
- Sheldon Pollock

For one thing, Sanskrit literary culture was never affected by communicative incompetence, which began to enfeeble Latin from at least the ninth century. The process of vernacularization in India, in so many ways comparable to the European case, was nowhere a consequence of growing Sanskrit ignorance.
- Sheldon Pollock

We may in fact characterize the ideological effects of the shastric paradigm more broadly as follows: First, all contradiction between the model of cultural knowledge and actual cultural change is thereby at once transmuted and denied; creation is really re-creation, as the future is, in a sense, the past. Second, the living, social, historical, contingent tradition is naturalized, becoming as much a part of the order of things as the laws of nature themselves: Just as the social, historical phenomenon of language is viewed by Mīmāṃsā as natural and eternal, so the social dimension and historicality of all cultural practices are eliminated in the shastric paradigm. And finally, through such denial of contradiction and reification of tradition, the sectional interests of pre-modern India are universalized and valorized. The theoretical discourse of śāstra becomes in essence a practical discourse of power.
- Sheldon Pollock

“Moving beyond orientalism finally presupposes moving beyond the culture of domination and the politics of coercion that have nurtured orientalism in all its varieties, and been nurtured by it in turn.
- Sheldon Pollock

“Moving beyond orientalism finally presupposes moving beyond the culture of domination and the politics of coercion that have nurtured orientalism in all its varieties, and been nurtured by it in turn.
- Sheldon Pollock

‘Such voices … in any case are pretty much in the minority. The dominant ideology is that which ascribes clear priority and absolute competence to shastric codification.’
- Sheldon Pollock

‘Such voices … in any case are pretty much in the minority. The dominant ideology is that which ascribes clear priority and absolute competence to shastric codification.’
- Sheldon Pollock

“The Ŗg-Veda as an Aryan text ‘free of any taint of Semitic contact’; the ‘almost Nordic zeal’ that lies in the Buddhist conception of the marga ; the ‘Indo-Germanic religion-force’ of yoga; the sense of race and the ‘conscious desire for racial protection’; the ‘volksnahe kingship’ such is the meaning of the Indo-Aryan past for the National Socialist present, a present that, for Wüst, could not be understood without this past.
- Sheldon Pollock