Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee. The Nay Science

In The Nay Science: A History of German Indology, Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee argue that German Indology, as it emerged as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, was grounded in the tradition of Protestant biblical criticism that traced its roots back to Martin Luther. Despite the claims of its practitioners to an objective, universal, secularized, scientific method, the authors identify and examine the persistence of an evangelical ideology that emphasized an Enlightenment ideal of the progress of reason and demonized the priestly Brahmin caste (a proxy for their Catholic European counterparts) as agents of corruption and decay. Adluri and Bagchee direct their attention to one particular tradition of textual criticism, which focuses on the epic Māhabhārata and its most famous and revered episode, the Bhagavadgītā. They make this choice for several reasons, including their own admission that studies of the other great Indian epic, the Rāmāyana, are not plagued by the kinds of problems with which they are concerned. Yet, they feel confident “assuming [that] German Gītā scholarship is a fair representative of the wider tradition” (p. 303). This assumption is never put to the test by means of comparisons with other Indological textual discourses, and some important figures in the history of German Indological studies such as Franz Bopp, Friedrich Max Müller, and Paul Deussen, whose views on Indian culture were more positive, receive almost no attention.

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