South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

ISSN: 0085-6401 (Print) 1479-0270 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20

The Nay Science. A History of German Indology, by

Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee
Eli Franco
To cite this article: Eli Franco (2016): The Nay Science. A History of German Indology,
by Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00856401.2016.1207281
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2016.1207281

Published online: 12 Jul 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csas20
Download by: [86.32.113.71]

Date: 13 July 2016, At: 02:36

SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES, 2016

BOOK REVIEW

Downloaded by [86.32.113.71] at 02:36 13 July 2016

The Nay Science. A History of German Indology, by Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep
Bagchee, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, 512 pp., 27.99 (paperback), ISBN
9780199931361
If one thing is truly clear after reading this distorting and tendentious book, it is that this is anything but a history of German Indology. The tome begins with a critical survey of the earliest
German publications on the Mahabharata (basically dealing with only two scholars, Christian
Lassen and Adolf Holzmann), and then moves on to examine the work of some half a dozen
scholars on the Bhagavadgta from the late nineteenth to the rst half of the twentieth century,
which forms the bulk of the book. The whole thing has then been packaged (and successfully
sold) as a history of German Indology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But how
can a work of such limited scope claim to be a history of a rather vast academic discipline? It is
the method, the authors say (p. 1 and passim); by describing the method, they claim to give us
the essence of German Indology. This is all very convenient: we no longer have to bother reading thousands upon thousands of tiresome pages to grasp the history of German Indology
(whatever that may be, see below), the method will disclose its dark secrets to us. However, there
is a tiny problem here: IndologyGerman Indology includeddoes not have a method, or
rather, it does not have a single method, as inexplicably assumed by the authors.
To understand the absurdity of their claim, imagine that a selective review of scholarly
studies of Hamlet in Germany was presented as a history of the studies in that country of
English language, literature, history and culture as a whole, including English grammar, lexicography and dialects, manuscripts, inscriptions and paleography, epic and court poetry, novels and theatre, philosophy, religion and ritual, history, numismatics, architecture, art history,
and so forth. It is hard to imagine that such a bizarre assertion would pass muster with even
the most indulgent of referees, let alone be published by a reputable publisher like Oxford
University Press, but nowadays anything seems possible in South Asian Studies. It is surprising that a respected scholar like Alf Hiltebeitel, who evidently has very little rsthand knowledge of German Indology, endorses and praises this book on its back cover (and perhaps,
signicantly, no one else). Incidentally, the authors of the book, Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep
Bagchee, recently edited two volumes of his papers.
Now, what is this method practised by German Indologists? Before we answer this question, perhaps we should rst ask who those German Indologists are, a question which the
authors never bother to address. In fact, German Indology is nothing more than a fuzzy construct (see Hanneder, 2011).1 German Indologists cannot simply be dened as German
nationals working in the eld of Indology, because Lassen, for instance, one of the main villains guring in this book, was a Norwegian who established his academic career in Bonn, at a
time when it was governed by Prussia (would that make him a Prussian Indologist?). Should
we regard German nationals who spent most of their working lives in Great Britain, as for
instance Max M
uller, as German Indologists? Or should one say rather that German Indologists are scholars of Indology employed at institutions located within the borders of the German state? But since there was no German state before national unication in 1871, to which
political borders should we conne German Indology? Do we also want to include scholars
1. J
urgen Hanneder, Pretence and Prejudice, in Indologica Taurinensia, Vol. 37 (2011), pp. 130 1.

Downloaded by [86.32.113.71] at 02:36 13 July 2016

BOOK REVIEW

living in the Habsburg Empire? But that would include almost all of Eastern Europe! Or
should we say that Indologists writing in the German language are German Indologists? However, this would include not only Swiss, (modern) Austrian and Czech scholars, but also Dutch
and Scandinavian, and even some Hungarian, Russian, Lithuanian, Polish and Ukrainian
scholars, depending on their time of life.
So much for German; what about Indology? It is obvious that the authors use of the term
is a bit anachronistic and even more erroneous. The term Indologie, and its English counterpart Indology, seems to have been coined in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; the
word does not appear in the I volume of the Grimm dictionary of 1876, and its earliest source
in the OED dates from 1882. The term only came into wider use in Germany after World War
II. Prior to that, during the period treated in this book, the terms Sanskrit-Philologie and
Indische Philologie were far more common. It is not by accident that the best and most
renowned history of the discipline, by Ernst Windisch, which the authors blissfully ignore, is
titled Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie und Indischen Altertumskunde (1917). As far as I can
see, none of the scholars discussed in the book actually held a chair of Indologie or was
employed at a department or institute of Indologie. The term became more prevalent after the
war precisely in order to emphasise that the study of (mainly pre-modern) South Asia was (and
had been) broader in scope than mere Sanskrit philology. But no matter whether one uses
Sanskrit-Philology or Indology or Study of Indian Antiquity, the discipline under discussion
never largely dened itself in terms of a specic method (the historical-critical method or the
text-historical method) (p. 1). This is a pure fabrication on the part of the authors.
Assuming that German Indology can nevertheless be understood as a meaningful and
appropriate term, what about the method? It is obvious that the method described by the
authors simply refers to textual stratication aimed at retrieving an earlier, if possible original,
form of a given work. As such, it was already practised by the Alexandrine scholars as early as
the third century BCE and was already applied to the Old Testament by Origen, if not before.
In its modern form it was practised in Europe after the Renaissance not only by Germans,
but also by French, Italian, British, American, Russian, Japanese andto the authors chagrineven some Indian scholars who were infected by the bug of German Indology. There is
nothing particularly German about this method, except perhaps that when it comes to classical South Asian Studies in Europe there were more scholars writing in German than in any
other language, and the output in this language was consequently larger. McGetchin counts
47 professors of Sanskrit or Aryan studies that included Indology as a major component in
Germany alone in 1903, not including those in other German-speaking countries or Scandinavian or Dutch scholars writing in German.2 While the stratication of the Indian epic into earlier and later phases, the issue at the core of this book, is not a current concern of any
particular German scholar, in the case of the Ramayan a it is currently undergoing the most
vigorous examination by, for instance, John Brockington, emeritus of the University of Edinburgh, and arguably the greatest living scholar on Indian epic literature.
Now, turning to the stratication of the Mahabharata, the vast majority of scholars, not just
the German ones, assume that the text has gradually grown to its present size (seven times
that of the Iliad and Odyssey together, as the cliche goes) in a process that took several hundred
years. One can sympathise with the authors claim that the various attempts to stratify the text,
and more specically the Bhagavadgta, tell us more about the stratiers than about the stratied. However, the fact that we cannot untie the knot does not mean that there is no knot. In
their blanket rejection of all attempts to come to grips with the different strata of the text, the

2. Douglas T. McGetchin, Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient Indias Rebirth in Modern Germany (Madison, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), p. 17.

Downloaded by [86.32.113.71] at 02:36 13 July 2016

SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES

authors have chosen against all probability to endorse the position of Madeleine Biardeau, who
largely incurred amused reactions to her claim that the text had been composed by a single person. (The only person I know who tries to defend Biardeaus opinion is Alf Hiltebeitel.) Biardeaus claim is highly implausible, not only because of the daunting size of the composition and
its lack of coherence on many levels, but also because of such tries as the inclusion of two considerably different parvan lists, i.e., lists that serve as tables of contents (there are actually three
of them, the third one being fragmentary).3 Should we assume that the single author of the
Mahabharata forgot that he had already written a parvan list and so wrote another one? Apart
from this, neither Biardeau nor the authors tell us which Mahabharata was written by a single
author. Was it the Mahabharata of the Northeastern, Northwestern or the Southern recension?
Or might it possibly be the one reconstructed in the critical edition (which employs to a considerable extent the methodeven though our authors seem unaware of this)?
The problems of the coherence of the Mahabharata are present in a nutshell in the
Bhagavadgta. Looking alone at the divine gure of Krishna, we can discern at least three different theological positions: theism, pantheism, and panentheism (the world being inside
God). Many scholars have assumed, therefore, that the text is composed of chronologically different layers and tried to disentangle them in order to retrieve the original form and theological doctrine at the core of this text. Some have considered the theistic doctrine to be the core,
others the pantheistic one, and still others hold that the entire theological perspective is a late
addition and that Krishna was originally an epical human hero; still others read their racist
theories of Aryan supremacy into the text, as into the Mahabharata in general. In hindsight, it
is easy to point to the weaknesses and prejudices of these pioneering, often over-condent
studies. However, it may be presumed that they were not all as wrong as the authors assume.
It is quite probable that computer-based analyses of metrical patterns and other statistical features will be able to reveal structures that will provide a more robust basis for future attempts
at stratication. A recent preliminary study indicates that the Bhagavadgta belongs to the
same strata as the philosophical sections of the Mahabharata, which is to say, the philosophical treatises of Moks aparvan towards the end of the epic.
Viewed as a whole, this is a sad book; and it is sad that many readers may be misled into
thinking they are holding a scholarly book about German Indology in their hands. Actually,
the book is simply a clumsy attempt to avenge an insult. One of the two authors, Vishwa
Adluri, is a failed PhD student of the late German Indologist Michael Hahn, who Adluri
promptly accused of standing in the tradition of Nazi scholarship (incidentally, it may be
mentioned that Hahn, who died in 2014, was of Jewish extraction). This explains, I think, the
nasty and indignant tone that runs throughout the book, which may be seen as a personal vendetta against German Indology. It might also be worth mentioning that as a result of his complaint, Adluri was awarded a PhD in (German?) Indology from the University of Marburg
without any German Indologist evaluating his work (see Hahn, 2011).4
Looking for the origins of German Indology, the authors proceed like the famous drunkard in reverse. The coin is under the streetlamp, but they go looking for it in the dark alleys of
Protestantism and biblical philology. The nature and origin of Indology were already clearly

stated in A.W. Schlegels founding essay, Uber

den gegenwartigen Zustand der Indischen Philologie, which marks the beginning of German Indology as an academic discipline: If the
study of Indian literature is to thrive, the principles of classical philology have to be thoroughly applied to it, and that with the most scientic rigor. (Soll das Studium der indischen
3. John Brockington, The Spitzer Manuscript and the Mahabharata, in Eli Franco and Monika Zin (eds), From Turfan to
Ajanta (Bhairahawa, Rupandehi: Lumbini International Research Institute, 2010), pp. 75 88.
4. Supplement by Michael Hahn, in Jurgen Hanneder, Pretence and Prejudice, in Indologica Taurinensia, Vol. 37 (2011),
pp. 136 7.

Downloaded by [86.32.113.71] at 02:36 13 July 2016

BOOK REVIEW

Literatur gedeihen, so m
ussen durchaus die Grundsatze der classischen Philologie, und zwar
mit der wissenschaftlichsten Scharfe, darauf angewandt werden.) This opinion was still widespread and taken for granted when I rst came to Germany in the early 1980s. It lasted as
long as classical philology itself was able to maintain its prestige, until the repeated waves of
neo-liberalism, secondary school and university reform, and the cultural turn in the humanities marginalised it, and with that Indology as well. In other words, German Indology is not,
at its core, a nay science; rather, German Indologists wanted to accomplish for India what
their fellow philologists had accomplished for Ancient Greece and Romeand presumably,
some of them still have this aim. Looking back at what they have accomplished over the last
200 years, they have not done such a poor job.
The great French Indologist Sylvain Levi famously said that India has no history (lInde
na pas dhistoire). By this, he did not mean of course, as he was often misinterpreted as saying, that things always remain the same in India, but rather that premodern India was not in
possession of its own history. It created neither a historiography (though one might insist on
a few exceptions), nor archives, nor archeology, nor other means to preserve and remember
its own history. Consider how much the most learned Indian intellectuals, the pandits,
acaryas, etc., knew around the year 1800 about Indian history and civilisation, and how much
we know now. The difference is due to Indology, obviously not only German, although the
German contribution has been decisive. The Bhagavadgta itself is a good example. It was
largely unknown in India in the nineteenth century except in Vedanta circles, and its current
popularity is rightly considered to be a case of the pizza effect (pizza became popular in Italy
only after and as a result of becoming popular abroad); it was barely known even in Vaishnava
circles (imagine the Hare Krishnas without the Gta!). Gandhi, for instance, who contributed
greatly to its current popularity and the image of its sanctity, rst heard about it when he was
in England, and rst read it in an English translation.
So what is the nay science in all of the above? Surprisingly, the authors fail to make it
entirely clear what exactly the title of their book refers to. If I understand them correctly, they
use the label to characterise a lack of respect for the traditional and/or indigenous way(s) of
reading Sanskrit texts. This would include both the indigenous pan d itya readings as well as
personally committed religious and political readings, like Gandhis reading of the Gta, which
the authors specically endorse. In other words, anything goes when one instrumentalises the
text, that is, anything except a careful and critical scholarly reading of it. This tendency has
become more pronounced with the post-colonial turn, which endorses defensive, indigenist
readings of such texts. I am not sure whether the authors realise that what they recommend
amounts to an open invitation for reading and using a text like the Gta as a justication of
the abominable concepts and practices of caste distinction, Hindu nationalism, Brahmin
supremacy, Right-wing militarism and fascism, to mention but a few possibilities.
Under such circumstances, we as German and other Indologists may gladly accept the epithet nay science for our discipline; we gladly say no to this promotion of ignorance, shallowness, arbitrariness, prejudice and eccentricity by the authors, and say yes to serious,
methodically sound and sober scholarship free of allegedly traditional and political constraints by Hindutva ideology and the like.
Eli Franco
University of Leipzig, Germany
[email protected]
2016 Eli Franco
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2016.1207281