Sri Ram Swarup on Occidentalists
chandra_singh
Beginning from the beginning and tracing the tradition of Indian
Xenology, Professor Halbfass quotes P. Thieme to show that "while in
Greece the word for foreigner (xenos) becomes the words for 'guest' or
'host' the corresponding word in India [ari] becomes a term for the
enemy" (p. 175). Well, we do not know whether the word ari in the
Vedic lore ever meant a stranger which in time began to mean an enemy,
but such things are possible and words do change their meanings in
response to many factors (for fuller discussion, see our The Word As
Revelation: Names of Gods, Voice of India, New Delhi). A word of a
living language responds, among other things, to the collective
experience of its speakers. A stranger is not always a friend and
sometimes he comes as a guest but stays back as the master as the
experience of native American-Indians proves and the word has to
incorporate and convey such new meanings too.
But turning away from these larger speculations, let us turn to the
concrete case in hand. We are not sure whether such a change of
meanings as suggested by Thieme took place in India but it did take
place in Europe. If Professor Halbfass had carried his etymological
investigation a little further, he would have found that the Greek
word xenos, a stranger, is akin to Latin hostis, a stranger, a guest,
an enemy, acquiring in Medieval Latin the sense of 'army' (from the
plural hostes, enemies) giving us the word 'hostile' in English; it is
also the parent of the word 'hostage', a person kept in pledge. Akin
to this was also the Latin hostia, an expiatory victim offered to a
deity, a sacrifice. The sense is still actively retained in the
Church's most important rite, the eucharist, in which they eat
(substantially, Christian theologians insist) the flesh of the
sacrificed victim, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Perhaps the word
retains the memory of the days when they sacrificed their first-born
to their God, perhaps later replaced by a stranger, then by a living
animal and then by a consecrated bread or wafer, the host. The word
reveals the steps in European Xenology and its etymology helps in
constructing European history. Or, this would if India has its
Occidentalists and they were as bright as Europe's Orientalists."