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The Nay Science. A History of German Indology, by Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee

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 Bhagavadgıta from the late nineteenth to the first 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: Indology—German Indology included—does 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 firsthand knowledge of German Indology, endorses and praises this book on its back cover (and perhaps, significantly, 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 first 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). German Indologists cannot simply be defined as German nationals working in the field of Indology, because Lassen, for instance, one of the main villains figuring 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 unification in 1871, to which political borders should we confine ‘German Indology’? Do we also want to include scholars