Superior scholarship can displace hegemonic frameworks without direct polemic against them
Evidence
For Kosambi was able to produce in a single sweep both a narrative of the empirical facts of Ancient India and the theoretical position, the very organic principle of narrativization, from which that narrative was to be assembled. … He never ranted against Orientalism, for example, even acknowledged the debts that deserved acknowledgement, but the knowledge he himself produced was so radically different, so sufficient for part of the same terrain, that he simply displaced those Orientalist ways of knowing our own ancient past. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 544
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s wider interest in how decolonizing knowledge proceeds through production rather than critique alone—echoes of Milgrom on institutional substitution.
- SEED: Article angle: ‘displacement as method’—how scholars can replace a dominant paradigm by being simply more adequate to the evidence, rather than by attacking it head-on.