History, time and knowledge in ancient India

I couldn’t find any single quote i wanted to respond to, so i’m just addressing the article as a whole.

The main gripe i have with this article, aside from the author’s numerous errors, and his seeming inability to let go of the same western methods of thought he seems to be so conscious about in his framing, is its incompleteness. While the author seems quite convinced about this difference in the “conception of knowledge” being the sole, or main, reason for India’s apparent ahistoricity, it still seems merely to skim the surface of the actual reasons, and seems too much like a quick cop-out, one typical of a very Western empirical way of thinking, where there is often assumed to be an immediate solution to questions. Though i can’t really claim to know nearly as much about this subject, i still feel as if the explanation uses merely a short excerpt from the larger picture of the prevailing “Indian” philosophy (another fact that makes me cringe-what’s the India he keeps referring to? It was never a whole country then). His use of words, his usage of excessively simplifying categorical tools all seem to amplify this. A lot for him still seems to come down to apparent diametric opposites (“Indian” and “western”, representative and presentative, historicity and ahistoricity, fantasy and reality) between these cultures....so much so that the whole article seems to be a study in attempting to further the apparent romanticising of the “eastern” mind as being a polar opposite, and an ideal. In short, the author himself is approaching this with a conditioned mindset which he is trying to explain.

There are arguably a number of advantages to the “Western mode of thought” (sorry, that’s just a convenient way of summing it up, however general), and I’m in no way saying that these methods are largely incorrect....it just seems very limiting that it is the only way that we allow ourselves to look at things. But then, that’s one of its features....branding itself as the absolute.

This article got me thinking...what would it look like, if a culture actually did have no history? Is it even possible? Is a notion of history just a feature of a linear conception of time? How does a non-linear representation of time even look? Is it possible to know in our universe?