Acknowledgement: This essay was written by Purushottama Bilimoria, Center for Dharma Studies, Graduate Theological Union and Institute of South Asia Studies, UC Berkeley.

In this archival study (Adluri and Bagchee 2014), Indology is characterized as having been constructed out of three basic ingredients: scientific positivism, historicism, and philology.

In the Introduction and Chapter Four, “The Search for Universal Method,” I was struck both by the details with which this story is told and how well it overlaps with my own study that I conducted a decade back and published in 2009 as “A Report on Indologism” (Bilimoria 2009). Shortly, I shall draw some contrast and where I think we not so much differ as how further expansion can be attempted of the story of Indology as an ideology; hence “Indologism” on a par with and as an extension of “Orientalism” (which was the title of another paper: “Post-Orientalism: Indology at Cross-roads,” delivered at the World Sanskrit Conference in Melbourne 1994). This might embellish and present a more robust account; indeed, the two papers were born out the deep “hermeneutic of suspicion” in regards to the achievements of European Indology.

At the heart of the book is the thesis that whatever else Indology is and whatever storyline the Germans themselves and their own historians such as Ernst Windisch (whose 1920 work my team in Melbourne translated in large part) recounted, Indology reeks of an ill-conceived theology, albeit German academic theology, through and through. It is this thrust that gives it the privileged stake or veneer of having its historical roots in the method of philology. But really both the “objectivity” (that sets aside subjectivity and prejudices of the ages) made possible through the Wissenschaft of science, in a rather crudely positivist-empiricalist-Newtonian form as science was then understood (before the philosophers of science and certain radically-minded scientists closer to the Second World War disrupted the self-confidence and undermined its excessive methodological claims). Philology was touted as the science of language through which texts were to be read in a certain mode, and this paradigm was not to be doubted or even confused with philosophy or old-style biblical criticism. This was a truly rational, enlightened, secular method that had gained much ground already in the careful sifting and study of Semitic and Judeo-Christian texts. And indeed, the theology hidden beneath the veneer of rationalism was thoroughly Protestant theology with a few exceptions where someone (Jacobi) is a Catholic and another who worked in a Lutheran seminary, or another a missionary (Hauer) who spent four years in India possibly entrenching the colonizing logic rife in those times.

As philology gave way to the new science of linguistics in the twentieth century, Indologists took up the new tools of historical linguistics, structural linguistics, semantics, semiotics, etc., without however moving far from the basic intellectual values associated with philology itself. The fact that Sanskrit played its part in the development of linguistics, via the role of comparative Indo-European linguistics, meant that Sanskritists and Indologists would always feel a close kinship with and attachment to linguistic-based methods of research (see Figueira 1994).

I am not unpersuaded, as I have said something similar in respect of the role of religion/theology in this enterprise (I will cite myself shortly), and indeed by the mid-twentieth century the suspicion of the role of theology in Religionwissenschaft grew so viral that scholars of comparative religion like Eric J. Sharpe and Gerard van der Leeuw argued to extricate all theological undercurrents from religious studies or the study of religions proper, especially in the comparative modality. Only that this probably never came under question in Indology as the theological thrust after a while died away with the supposed secularization and Anglo-Americanization or globalization of Indology. But one cannot say for sure that, for example, Johaness Bronkhorst (mentioned as a modern-day Indologist) or James Fitzgerald or Patrick Olivelle or Greg Bailey, to name just four, continue the theological motivations of eighteenth/nineteenth or early twentieth-century German or American Indologists such as E. W. Hopkins and Dwight Whitney. Nor can one say that their prejudices (as all scholars come with some of this ingredient) are still rooted somewhere else in the Pandora’s box: say, for instance, in an excess of non-self-reflexive reliance on philology? Oblivious to the fact that their practice of translation and commentarial annotation is rooted in a historical tradition with assumptions that are difficult to extricate and set aside, reflected in the rather honest confessional statement Olivelle once made in response to my critique of Indologism: “I simply translate; I know there are historical predecessors I am not far from, and there are limitations I am too well-aware of, biases and so forth; maybe in fifty years time scholars will look at my work and think of the same way we today think of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Indologists: we just have to live it and do our job as best as we can; we at least have more resources and self-awareness than those others did.”Footnote 21 He says something along these lines in more nuanced way in his Introduction to the translation of the Upaniṣads at least also, and does, albeit guarded, justice to the issues I had raised.

Coming back to The Nay Science, I am heartened to see a clear and precise definition of philology (Adluri and Bagchee 2014, 11), where the focus is on criticism/critique. But wasn’t there more than that: a good dose of linguistics, comparative mythology, etymological and semantic concordance side with a hard-nosed structuralist approach (even before structuralism was founded by social scientists)? In some ways this erstwhile exercise had nothing to do with theology or biblical criticism, but was seen very much to be a linguistic-scientific project (the sort of thing you see younger scholars doing on philosophical texts from Japan and Europe at the Oriental Studies Conference and increasingly also at the World Sanskrit Conference). The authors are right: anyone can do this regardless of any personal connection with the texts, the region it has come from, or its connection with the people who might have made the text part of the repertoire of their cultural Lebenswelt. This is the description given for Indology in general, but it is closely related to how philology is performed.

But I want to focus a bit on the Romantic roots of German Indology. This is important as the larger tapestry within which to understand and appraise the kind of Indology practiced by the select few Indologists treated here, especially in their handling of the Mahābhārata and the Bhagavadgītā. That bigger canvas I have called Indologism (as I said I am not sure who first used this neologism, but it is not unconnected with Pollock’s use with a rhetorical question mark in “Deep Orientalism?” (Pollock 1993)). In this way, we could open the analyses to many figures beyond the Holtzmanns, Hauer, Humboldt, Windisch, and so forth. Recall that Hegel (1770–1831) wrote a treatise on Humboldt’s German translation of the Bhagavadgītā, which he came to know about from Colebrook (see Adluri and Joydeep, p35 and n21). Little wonder that Gayatri Spivak relies almost entirely on Hegel’s work on the Gītā in her “Epics and Ethics” project, not because this is representative of Indology but because of the teleological and historicist excesses that Hegel weaves into his account of the Philosophy of History (and the History and the Philosophy of Religion). Hegel locates India and China in the epistemographic diagram he sketches in respect of the progress of Vernunft or Reason stretched out in the hammock of history on which reclines the concealed Geist (for Adluri and Bagchee’s critique of Hegel, see Adluri and Bagchee 2014, 157). While it is noted to be there in Baur’s conception of intellectual history, the authors have tended to play down the role of teleology (16 and passim) which does not seem to sit well with more of the emphasis on Semler’s idea of perfectibility and Baur’s historical-critical method (8). Herder is mentioned in the context of translation of the Bhagavadgītā alongside those by Schlegel and Humboldt (31), but he is important in the larger drive towards the historicization of Indic texts and culture.

A word on historicization is apposite at this point, if I may add some of my own observations (from another work—Bilimoria 2015). The genesis of historicism as a grand philosophical trope goes all the way back via Novalis and Herder to the twelfth-century visionary, Joachim of Fiore, who had proposed that history moves through three phases or epochs (not unlike Hindu yugas, only in reverse), namely the Age of the Father (or of Law, identified with the Old Testament), the Age of the Son (or of Grace, exemplified in the New Testament) and the Age of the Spirit (ecclesia Spiritualis), the “Third Age,” which would usher in the Age of John, the Evangelist, outstripping the church. There is a higher order of ascendancy as each Age passes into the next, the last of which escorts history into its apotheosis. Joachim’s ideas on the inexorable movement of history continued to be influential from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century and even after. Spectacularly, the night before the Holy Roman Empire fell to Napoleon’s thumping wellingtons (boots) at Jena in September 1806, Hegel completed his Phenomenology of the Spirit. The massive tome ends, appropriately, with an ontotheological schema reminiscent of Joachim of Fiore’s announcement of a New Age of the Spirit to complete the Ages of the Father and the Son. And like Goethe, Hegel concluded that the irreversible event signaled the end of the Middle Ages (see Lichtheim’s introduction to The Phenomenology of Mind [Hegel 1967, xx]).

Hegel would take over this idea and present it as the central doctrine of the Incarnation, which portends, in John Burbidge’s rewording, “the divine initiative as passing through three stages that reproduce the first, the second, and the third negation. In the first, God limits himself and becomes finite—an individual man specifically located in space and time. In the second, this individual dies; his finitude is cancelled. In the third, the negative force of his death is dissolved, and he becomes universally present as the resurrected Christ” (Burbidge 1992, 126).Footnote 22 History has an inner determination that moves it dialectically through certain necessary phases; in history, Hegel discerns a deeper spiritual regularity underlying various national and folk cultures. Hegel turned to provide a detailed account of the location and status of other people and their cultures in his schema of past and future movement of history. Why? Because Hegel was moved by a universal teleology. For this, Hegel owed a debt to Herder. Herder’s interest in the learnings of other cultures, especially of the ancients, among whom he valued most the bygone heritage of the Indo-Europeans, implied that temporal cultures are not necessarily marginal to the present; they may even be central to it; it is only that their memory has receded from sight, along possibly with all its artifacts.

The Romantics, and here we speak of Herder in particular, were impressed by the worthy contribution of Indo-European to the whole history of human thought. For Hegel, this demonstrated that the relative stage of development of the Spirit through the machinations of Reason in each culture, as collective of individuals in a given environ, is reflected inexorably in their respective productions, that is, their thinking, literature, religion, magical practices, social institutions, and the maturity or lack thereof of the apparatus enabling self-determination or freedom in political and civil life. Now this is very important for the architectonic movement, as Hegel effected most if not all of the key changes in European thinking from the 1790s to the 1820s, including in the philosophy of religion. His most sustained engagement in this area appeared in his posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, wherein he provides an ontotheological schema that overrides the stereotypical versions of religions emerging in the science of religions or Religionswissenschaft.

From the late seventeenth century onwards, philologists and linguists had begun to discover the Indo-European family of languages, which rivaled the Semitic lingua in its dating or antiquity, inclusiveness, range of dialects, literary output, and affinities with European speech. Sanskrit drew the greatest attention, in view of its historical links with Ancient Greek, Latin, Old German, Old Lithuanian, and even English.

Extensive study of Hegel and also of Schopenhauer’s transcreations of Asian cultures in this context has pointed to the extent to which key European scholars in the nineteenth century had been deeply influenced by this abstract historicist project. But, unlike Joachim of Fiore, they looked for the roots and promises in the Aryanization of history itself, right across the board as it were. Such was the impact of “German romanticism-Wissenschaft” (Pollock 1993, 80)Footnote 23 through their forays into Sanskrit learning and philological discoveries, and impacted in the Schlegels, Franz Bopp, et al., all of whom have been discussed in the context of their work on the Mahābhārata or the Bhagavadgītā. Nietzsche, no insignificant philologist himself, who seemed unaware of the hullabaloo around the Mahābhārata and the Bhagavadgītā, dealt a severe blow to this Romantic tendency, and especially targeted Schopenhauer, remaining skeptical about the possibilities further East, and denigrating the historical Buddha or for that matter Kṛṣṇa [of the Bhagavadgītā] for their enervating excesses. Although this did not stop the last metaphysician from transcreating his own version of the Buddha: instead, declaring himself “Europe’s Buddha” (see Bilimoria 2008). Nevertheless, it is all grist to the “comparative science of religion/comparative theology” misty mill. Such platitudes reinforced the Indian attraction to the idealism of neo-Hegelians like T. H. Green and of F. H. Bradley in due course. Of course, I was heartened to hear that The Nay Science’s “direct inspiration [was] ultimately the radical philology of Nietzsche (articulated, among other works, in his The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music)” (Adluri and Bagchee 2014, 5, n. 16). I would have liked hear more about this Nietzschean connection.

Voltaire is also interesting in this context. Figueira in her studies examines the work of Voltaire and his quest for an Aryan Ur-text in the Ezour Vedam (Figueira 2002; 2015). Voltaire sought in India a sophisticated culture as far removed as possible from that of the ancient Hebrews. In this respect, ancient India provided him with an alibi in the true sense of the term, an elsewhere upon which he could superimpose his critique of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Quickly and finally, I wish to move on to a couple of other comments. Other times, some of the Indologists moved around in India; among them mentioned are: Hoernle, Growse, Roer, Brothers Schelling, Grimm, Schrader, Woolner, the French Dupperron whose translation of the Upaniṣads Hegel read, side by side with Paul Deussen’s translation. In response to the intriguing disclaimer, the focus of the present book under review is on two relatively minor German Orientalists: Adolf Holtzmann Sr. and Adolf Holtzmann Jr, with this added rider: “And yet, it is our claim that it is precisely in the work of these and other writers, neglected as marginal and at odds with the image of itself German Indology sought to project (enlightened, rational, posttheological, and postconfessional), that we find the greatest clues to Indology’s textual project” (Adluri and Bagchee 2014, 5). It might work for the Mahābhārata in Germany or the German reception of the Mahābhārata.

In terms of the questions “how did they [the German Indologists] view their discipline? In what way did they see themselves as contributing to the task of translating or clarifying Indian literature to European audiences? What were the means, the arguments, or the strategies used to justify their role as official purveyors of Indian culture to these audiences” (3), and so on, I found the studies of latter-day (i.e., twentieth-century) Indologists quite helpful—both for what they say and what they do not say.