User talk:108.46.79.70

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Happy editing! -BigDwikitalk 21:16, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Neutrality in Asana and other articles on India
Hi, I saw your edit and your justification for it. That is clearly a partisan position contrary to policy (see WP:NPOV). I've therefore substituted a strictly neutral alphabetical order. On the Indus Valley figure issue, scholars do not now believe that Shiva was represented in that civilisation; the matter is mentioned and cited already in the article. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:26, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Neutrality in Mohenjodaro article RE: seal
I think you [see item of 14 April 2021 above] should check your research. There's a very good reason that most scholars, both Indian and non-Indian, refer to the seal as the 'Pashupati' seal. Being that Pashupati ("Lord of the Beasts/Animals") is an incarnation of Shiva, it is very much a proto-Shiva seal. To pretend that diachronic relationship is meaningless because the pairing is not concurrent, that the Pashupati seal, which clearly depicts a "human" figure, a lord with horned helmet, seated in the company of animals, the pashu or "beasts", is a ridiculous stand to take. Your reversal of the edit without even engaging in discussion, as if you are some authority on the subject, without even trading evidence or attempts at explanation, is presunmptuous and contrary to the implicit goal of editing an encyclopedia, which is to publish as much information as possible on various topics as understood today. Can you definitively conclude that Marshall, and dozens of scholars following him, were (and are) wrong in calling that Mohenjodaro seated figure a pro-Shiva, certain a deity with reminiscent characteristics? What is YOUR proof that entitles you to remove a statement that is backed, certainly, by many more pages of research than your one? --108.46.79.70 (talk) 19:42, 4 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Dear IP editor 108.46.79.70, I'm replying here to avoid splitting the discussion across two or more pages, and because there are issues here that in my view concern you specifically.


 * Firstly, I have not, I believe, ever edited Mohenjodaro. However the item of 14 April 2021 above concerning a revert to Asana was indeed mine, so on the assumption that this is the edit you intend, I'm happy to explain the reason for it in more detail (see below).


 * Secondly, there are multiple examples in your paragraph above of inappropriate language directed at an editor rather than at the topic under discussion. Wikipedia has a strict policy of No Personal Attacks, WP:NPA. Editors - including you - are not allowed to launch attacks of any kind on other editors at any time, still less when one has politely explained the reason for an edit already: the conduct is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.


 * Thirdly, you are factually incorrect about the article; I provided evidence in the form of a citation to a recent reliable source, WP:RS. Recent reliable scholarship may supersede older scholarship when it provides arguments against the validity of the earlier scholarship, as is the case here.


 * Fourthly, you are wrong to suppose that the encyclopedia's goal is to "publish as much information as possible"; it isn't. The goal is to publish a truthful and neutral report on each topic, as briefly as possible; that may require articles to refute wrong ideas, no matter how forcefully promulgated and no matter by how many people, with reliable evidence.


 * Fifthly, it is the case that the seal was (in the 20th century) given the name "Pashupati seal", but that presupposes what you seem to be trying to prove, namely that there is an organic connection from Indus Valley source to Hindu Shiva figures, in other words a circular argument with no validity.


 * Sixthly, the evidence. The scholar Wendy Doniger sums it up like this:


 * "Sir John Marshall began it all. In 1931 ... Seal 420: There appears at Mohenjo-daro a male god, who is recognizable at once as a prototype of the historic Siva ...' ... Marshall's suggestion was taken up by several generations of scholars, who made much of this tiny bit of soapstone; ... And there is [her emphasis] a general resemblance between this image and later Hindu images of Shiva. The Indus people may well have created a symbolism of the divine phallus. But even if this is so, and we cannot know it, it does not mean that the Indus images are the source of the Hindu images, or that they had the same meaning." (Wendy Doniger, 2011)


 * Notice that Doniger's statement means that there are three groups of scholars, separated in time:
 * a) Marshall in 1931, making his claim;
 * b) "several generations of scholars" from the 1930s onwards, repeating and perhaps amplifying Marshall's claim;
 * c) recent scholars, such as Doniger in 2011, who believe that it is impossible to know whether the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) had an organic connection, "are the source of ..., or had the same meaning [as the Hindu images of Shiva]".


 * Such recent, group (c) scholars, whose views may modify, supercede, or refute earlier scholarship, include Mark Singleton (2010), already cited; Doniger (2011), now added to the article; and others including Geoffrey Samuel (2008, in his The Origins of Yoga and Tantra) and Alistair Shearer (2020). All of these concur with Doniger that "we cannot know", i.e. it is pure conjecture that the Hindu images derive from the IVC images. It is therefore entirely appropriate for Wikipedia to report on that opinion; and concomitantly, it would be entirely wrong and unsafe to ignore the scholarly opinion by asserting as a fact that Hindu equals IVC, when there is no such simple equation. Shearer writes, for instance, that


 * "Marshall's theory that the seal's little figure was a 'proto-Shiva' advocating yoga was accepted uncritically for over half a century, but modern scholars have rejected it, some preferring to see the figure as a sort of shaman rather than an original practitioner of postural yoga." (The Story of Yoga, p. 18)


 * Samuel writes


 * "Other attempts to make positive assertions about Indus Valley religion strike me as equally conjectural (e.g. Jairazbhoy 1994). I am in no position to say that any of these interpretations are incorrect, but they certainly cannot all be right. Since there is no obvious way to choose between them, they do not actually take us very far. At the end of the day, we know quite a lot about the daily life of the Indus Valley urban civilisation, but little or nothing for certain about their religious practices. In particular, it seems to me that the evidence for the yogic or 'Tantric' practices is so dependent on reading later practices into the material that it is of little or no use for constructing any kind of history of practices." (The Origins of Yoga and Tantra, p. 8)


 * Given all this, the summary in the Asana article that there is "no proof" that IVC is the source of Hindu imagery seems to me entirely in order. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:29, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Pashupati
Listen, man... After today I'm not going to go much deeper into any of this (fateful last words?) because I've little interest in getting into the weeds on the passing fancies of Wiki keyboard wars. The bottom line (yes, the bottom line) is that Wendy Doniger is a sensationalist hack who used her many years of deep study to force the most vulgar and ill-founded interpretations of anything she came upon in Indian religio-spiritual history. Some of the sensationalist, over-sexualized garbage she's foisted on the mainstream of the religion she's taken as he study subject reeks of exploitation, particularly when the preponderance of her claims are adventitious and, where she may find a reading that backs her up, her indiscriminate universalizing is monstrously irresponsible. Her "scholarship" discredits her scholarship, so to say.

Because you likely have the tenacity to peer more intently and for longer at your computer screen than I do, you and your ilk will surely prevail in your little conflict trying to undo the 'Pashupati' reading of the seal (note, by the way, that I never poo-pooed your 'latest findings' (they're not findings... they're hypotheses); I simply said it was too soon to toss the 'Pashupati' label out. Call it what it is known as and surely note right there that this appellation is contested by some scholars in the field; cite 'em next to the more generally accepted explanation <the vast majority of scholars, students, and people across the world have not changed their opinions on the seal, including a great many who have come across the new theories).

Your excessive zeal in trying to use some noise contesting an explanation as good as any other we have regarding the seal is telling. Perhaps you can reorient your efforts towards questioning and then upheaving the noxious 'Hindu' and 'Hinduism' name given to India's Vedic-derived religion, given that British colonialists applied the Arabo-Persian-based name to the captive populations of India when trying to do a census of the subjugated population in the late 18th or 19th centuries (who cares which one? it was under noxious and rapacious British rule). Recall that the weak and disingenuous assertion that the British had no other name to call the majority people of India when going by religious belief, in particular an indigenous one, is an idea that reeks of condescension and lack of class and even scholarly authenticity. To end this, Vedic religionists, even with their denominations (like Vaishnavs, Shivaites, Shaaktas, Tantrics, etc.) regularly called their collective faith Veda Dharma and just as often Sanatana Dharma. What could the eminently civilized and cosmopolitan British have called them Vedists or Sanatanists?

The point is, you are so interested in contesting and legislating a naming whose certainty is still under dispute (there is ZERO consensus on the Pashupati seal) and there are far more fruitful battles at which you'd do better to throw your wilting logics (like, as I've ostended to, the incontestable weak sauce of naming conventions established by prejudiced and willfully ignorant tyrants; go pick some meaningful Wiki battles, son.) --108.46.79.70 (talk) 15:46, 12 May 2021 (UTC)


 * I'm glad you intend to drop the stick now. If not, I'd be giving you a formal warning for repeating your personal attacks. As it is, I'll forget about it. Curiously, we actually agree that there is no consensus; which is exactly why articles must not say that the seal is connected to yoga, as that conclusion would require a consensus, so it's your logic that's wilting. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:09, 12 May 2021 (UTC)