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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Hinduism
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The Nay Science - A History of German Indology (Hardcover)
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The Nay Science - A History of German Indology (Hardcover)
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Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee undertake a careful and rigorous
hermeneutical approach to nearly two centuries of German
philological scholarship on the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita.
Analyzing the intellectual contexts of this scholarship, beginning
with theological debates that centered on Martin Luther's
solefidian doctrine and proceeding to scientific positivism via
analyses of disenchantment (Entzauberung), German Romanticism,
pantheism (Pantheismusstreit), and historicism, they show how each
of these movements progressively shaped German philology's
encounter with the Indian epic. They demonstrate that, from the
mid-nineteenth century on, this scholarship contributed to the
construction of a supposed "Indo-Germanic" past, which Germans
shared racially with the Mahabharata's warriors. Building on
nationalist yearnings and ongoing Counter-Reformation anxieties,
scholars developed the premise of Aryan continuity and supported it
by a "Brahmanical hypothesis," according to which supposedly later
strata of the text represented the corrupting work of scheming
Brahmin priests. Adluri and Bagchee focus on the work of four
Mahabharata scholars and eight scholars of the Bhagavad Gita, all
of whom were invested in the idea that the text-critical task of
philology as a scientific method was to identify a text's strata
and interpolations so that, by displaying what had accumulated over
time, one could recover what remained of an original or authentic
core. The authors show that the construction of pseudo-histories
for the stages through which the Mahabharata had supposedly passed
provided German scholars with models for two things: 1) a
convenient pseudo-history of Hinduism and Indian religions more
generally; and 2) a platform from which to say whatever they wanted
to about the origins, development, and corruption of the
Mahabharata text. The book thus challenges contemporary scholars to
recognize that the ''Brahmanic hypothesis'' (the thesis that
Brahmanic religion corrupted an original, pure and heroic Aryan
ethical and epical worldview), an unacknowledged tenet of much
Western scholarship to this day, was not and probably no longer can
be an innocuous thesis. The ''corrupting'' impact of Brahmanical
''priestcraft,'' the authors show, served German Indology as a
cover under which to disparage Catholics, Jews, and other
''Semites.''
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