Malhotra on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“But it was Hegel, among all German thinkers, who had the deepest and most enduring impact on Western thought and identity. It is often forgotten that his work was a reaction against the Romantics' passion for India's past. He borrowed Indian ideas (such as monism) while debating Indologists to argue against the value of Indian civilization. He posited that the West, and only the West, was the agent of history and teleology. India was the 'frozen other', which he used as a foil to define the West.... Hegel has a peculiarly phobic and blind reaction to Asia in general and India in particular. He laboriously criticizes Sanskrit and Indian civilization, arguing with European Indologists with the aim of assimilating some ideas (such as absolute idealism) into his own philosophy while postulating India as the inferior other in order to construct his theory of the West. Asia's place in history is as an infant, whereas the West is mature and everyone's eventual destination.”

“The legacy of Hegel is that he blinded the West to the parochialism of its supposed 'universals' and hence consolidated the discourse on what was wrong about India. Hegel captures all cultures in his boxed-in categories of past/present, high/low, great/small. This is Reason's march forward to the realization of the Absolute in the temporal state. The degree to which Western scholarship has been influenced by his linear theory of history (including many Marxist and humanist accounts of history and the various philosophies built on such accounts) is truly amazing. His views found wide acceptance across the West and reshaped attitudes towards India. Hegel's theory of history has led to liberal Western supremacy, which hides behind the notion of providing the 'universals'. These European Enlightenment presuppositions became incorporated in the confluence of academic philosophy, philology, social theories and 'scientific' methodologies – all of which were driven by various imperial and colonial values alongside Christian theology. These influences, then, informed Indology, and they haunt South Asian Studies today.”