Abstract
Imagine a world where India were never subjected to colonial rule by the British; an India spotted by a certain Christopher Columbus in his yearning for discovering a new world; or, still, an India chanced upon by Alexander von Humboldt on a distant, impassioned voyage in his urge for an enchanted glory of Mother Earth. Would we still look at India in the way the world, particularly Europe, has come to view it? Perhaps not! One reason for this rather clichéd answer could be that India was already known as an ancient civilization, a land not only of philosophical and spiritual mysteries but also an enormous economic warehouse. Humboldt’s namesake, Alexander the Great had already reached this country and established economic and philosophical contacts, even affinity, with India; later, Chinese and other European visitors had popularized their experiences during travels through exotic and spiritual India.
While economic and trade credentials of India were well established, what caught the attention of European travelers and colonizers most, was India’s spirituality or what may be called the ‘soft power’ of India.
In their quest to understanding and absorbing Indian culture and customs—to facilitate their empirical hold over India—the British rulers enlisted Christian missionaries who would consult scholars known also as Pandits. The latter, mostly drawn from the top of the Indian class and caste hierarchy knew Sanskrit, the sacred language of the Hindu scriptures. The study and interpretation of these scriptural texts by British missionaries and the officials of the Empire came to be known as Indology. While India did have its own systems of economics, politics, ethics and philosophy, the term Indology was to acquire a wide interpretation. India and the world may have moved on from that caricature of the country’s knowledge systems; however, the charm of Indology remains amongst many European and Indians alike, even today. The present volume is the result of a conscious and honest exercise in understanding India through the prism of Indology. This volume is the outcome of a meeting of scholars and experts on India—sponsored by the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR), held in Prague from 17–19 June in 2010.
One could ask why these scholars chose to focus only on the study of Indology through Sanskrit, rather than including the vast pool of Arabic and Persian sources. However, one notices a departure from this practice, by inclusion of studies both on Indian vernaculars and the Indo-Persian understanding of India. The contributions to the volume by Harbans Mukhia, a renowned scholar of medieval Indian history, and Aloka Parasher-Sen, a prominent historian of ancient and early medieval India, frustrate any argument against a traditional understanding of Indology. As a student of ancient Indian languages and literature I was thrilled to read their gentle, succinct analyses of Indological studies in the last couple of centuries; their essays have pitched the volume’s thrust to a highly balanced and analytical standard.
The editors of the volume acknowledge both that the term ‘Indology’ is burdened with ‘unedifying colonial baggage’ and still stands in for ‘the virtual equivalent of Indian studies’ (p. 9). With this dilemma in the foreground, the contributors have worked towards drawing contours of ‘Indological Identities’ in their ‘attempt at understanding India’ (p. 10), its past, present and even future. The volume is divided into two parts: Section 1 deals with the definition(s) and prospects of Indology as a discipline, and also highlights the problems related with its meaning and references in modern Indian discourse of India’s past. Aloka Parasher-Sen’s paper poses questions which have dominated Indian academic concerns, in the last few decades, in constructing, reconstructing, and perhaps deconstructing, India’s cultural, historical, linguistic, literary and social past through our understanding of what is known as ‘deep philology’. She wonders whether modern Indian Humanities and Social Sciences should not look for ways to retrieve ‘dynamically interacting’ textures of history which were marginalized, even ignored, in our long walk to understanding India. This has been made possible, inevitably, by a modern critique of Indological discourses, by using Indian philosophical analogy of the parts and the whole; by acknowledging identities of the parts through which the whole is perceived and understood; alternatively, by isolating, perceiving the whole in the parts, and by constructing ‘the Whole’ through ‘the fragments’. Parasher-Sen also charts a brief journey of decoding Indology by chiefly dividing it into three modes or, what she prefers to call, ‘markers’, viz. ‘Orientalist’ mode (Edward Said), ‘Essentialist’ mode (Ronald Inden) and finally ‘Distortionist’ mode (Sheldon Pollock), and suggests that even these modern critiques have failed to settle the fudgy nature of Indological predicaments.
This view has been reinforced by Harbans Mukhia’s ‘Filling-in Some Voids’, where he questions the entire method of entering the soul of India’s past through an elitist, Brahminical route, gifted to us through the nineteenth century European imagination of Indology. Mukhia gives a sympathetic hearing to European thinkers, for whom Sanskrit and the system of thought it espoused, Hinduism, were fresh attractions—and perhaps, the seeds of making all things Indian ‘exotic’ were also sown through the very novelty of Hinduism— and in the process was crafted into a fascinating image of understanding India. In their pursuit of the ‘frozen images’ of India retrieved through Sanskritic literary culture, the European Indologists and their proponents left behind ‘vast reaches and diversities of cultural patterns … the constantly evolving nature of all these cultural zones’, which had been preserving and producing a rich memory of India’s past through regional, vernacular, and folk traditions. Still, these later modes of understanding India may still elude us and not yet lead us to a satisfactory conclusion (pp. 39–41). Several other papers of this section, underline the problems faced by the discipline of Indology, particularly in the later part of the twentieth century.
Section 2 of the volume engages with the challenges faced by Indological studies in modern European institutions. The various Indological centres of excellence in Europe today are grappling with the predicament of accommodating the traditional discipline of Indology with the requirements of modern Indian studies. Most of the chapters in this section therefore highlight the research and studies in countries like the Czech Republic (Prague), Croatia, Poland (Cracow) and also in Germany, and suggest ways in which Indological studies are kept relevant by expanding their scope: first through research in regional and vernacular languages; second by incorporating newer disciplines such as folk history and literature, history of marginal groups, oral histories and women’s studies. Svetislav Kostic and Dagmar Markova in their respective chapters present a lucid summary of how the Czech Republic has in recent decades been promoting Hindi language and its literary culture. Cracow (Poland) is traditionally a very strong centre for Indological research. Marzenna Czerniak-Drozdzowicz’s chapter narrates the tale of Cracow’s commitment to Indological studies during the last century and a half; it also highlights the perils the discipline there now faces.
The concluding chapter by Jaroslva Vacek, puts the aims and objectives of the volume in its proper perspective: it provides the history of Indological studies in Prague and informs us how the subject was kept relevant there by constantly incorporating other Indian languages and disciplines of India, and tying them with the studies of Sanskrit within their research curricula. This exercise also underlines the complex nature of Indology in both Europe and India. The volume will be of help to those who wish to learn about the origin and history of Indology, its relevance, and its contribution in situating Indian studies in the last two centuries. The reader will not be disappointed with this critical publication by Charles University in Prague.