Talk:Reconceptualizing India Studies

Contested deletion

This page should not be speedily deleted because... (1. It is about a book which is in the public domain. Wikipedia supports such pages. 2. The objectionable content has been changed. ) --78.128.154.63 (talk) 09:00, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Contested deletion

This page should not be speedily deleted because... (this article does not advertise any company. it refers to the oxford publisher's site in order to acknowledge that a line or two has been legally taken from their webpage) --Rathkirani (talk) 09:08, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Ghent School, Circular Referencing, and our "reviews"

A small but coherent lobby of political scholarship [ ] has emerged from a lineage of research supervision which centers on the charisma and ideas of S. N. Balagangadhara, a philosopher from the Centre for the Comparative Science of Cultures (Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap) at the University of Ghent ... This scholarship — characterised by circular reasoning, self-referencing and a poverty of rigour — has established a modest, if contentious and poorly reviewed, presence in academic spheres of dissemination.
— Sutton, Deborah Ruth (2018-07-03). "'So called caste': S. N. Balagangadhara, the Ghent School and the Politics of grievance". Contemporary South Asia. 26 (3): 336–349. ISSN 0958-4935.

Sutton's passage (from a longer profile) is an accurate description of the sources which were cited as reviews in our article:

• An inaccessible PPT (!) by Prakash Shah, a Professor of Law at Queen Mary University of London.

• Shah was a colleague of Balagangadhara for a short while and he is seen by scholars as a member of the (fringe) Ghent School. Consult Sutton (2018) or footnote 72 in Capturing Caste in Law: The Legal Regulation of Caste Discrimination, Waughray A., Routledge 2022.

• A Wordpress blog by the same Shah, which has since gone private (and hence, inaccessible).
• A talk given by Jakob De Roover, a Professor at the Ghent University, on occasion of the book-release.

• Roover was a student of Balagangadhara and is perceived by scholars as a member of the (fringe) Ghent School. Consult Sutton (2018).

• An article by Koenraad Elst over a fringe far-right blog.

• Scholars are unanimous about three things for Elst: (1) his ignorance of historical-critical methods, (2) his Islamophobic bent of works, and (3) alignment with Hindutva.

• That said, it is prudent to mention that scholars are now identifying the Ghent School as an expression of neo-Hindutva/Hindu Nationalism in the academia. Consult Anderson, Edward; Longkumer, Arkotong (2018-10-02). "'Neo-Hindutva': evolving forms, spaces, and expressions of Hindu nationalism". Contemporary South Asia. 26 (4): 371–377. ISSN 0958-4935. or Natrajan, Balmurli (2022-01-25). "Racialization and ethnicization: Hindutva hegemony and caste". Ethnic and Racial Studies. 45 (2): 298–318. ISSN 0141-9870.

• A review over The Hindu by Dunkin Jalki.

• This is the only source which can claim to be a review. However, quite unsurprisingly, Jalki was a student of Balagangadhara. Consult Sutton (2018). It might be of interest that the article-creator's username is "Dunkinjalki".

All the current sources being discounted, I did a WP:BEFORE but came across a solitary review by the same Shah over the International Journal of Hindu Studies. As such, WP:NBOOK is not met with and this is a fit case for being redirected to S. N. Balagangadhara. TrangaBellam (talk) 10:07, 15 July 2022 (UTC)