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1 of 27 8/16/17, 1:02 PM
Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
James Mill famously began the section titled “On the Hindus” of his History of
British India thus:
2 of 27 8/16/17, 1:02 PM
Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
On the left, many advocate a revolution that will finally overthrow the power
of a reactionary “Brahmanism” and usher in the promised utopia of a secular,
materialist society. Many in the right likewise hold out the promise of a
fulfillment of history— after the travails of conquest and colonization, the
idea of national progress requires all Indians to work towards realizing a
vision of the ideal society drawn from the past.
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Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
Overcoming this narrative, which has seeped into the entire Indian
intellectual establishment and forms the bedrock of the Indian social
sciences, takes years of work and dedicated study of the German-language
sources. A new way of looking at history is needed, one that emphasizes the
fate of the individual and teaches us to become suspicious of grand narratives,
and which overcomes the left-right dichotomy and the violence it generates.
Among the new generation of scholars that has risen to this challenge,
Professor Vishwa Adluri of Hunter College, New York has emerged as one of
the foremost critics of historicism.
Later, Dr. Adluri applied the same insights to the study of Indian thought.
Arguing that the crisis of Indology reflects a deeper crisis in the humanities,
he showed how Orientalism both presupposes the narrative of progress from a
state of darkness to a state of light and simultaneously contributes to this
narrative. Dr. Adluri showed how this narrative had been imposed on the
Indians, forcing them to turn away from their own traditions and share,
4 of 27 8/16/17, 1:02 PM
Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
On behalf of Swarajya, I had the pleasure of asking them about their path-
breaking new book The Nay Science: A History of German Indology.
5 of 27 8/16/17, 1:02 PM
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Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
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Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
least of all is it a method. It is, rather, a way of making predictions about the
text—predictions that, if unchallenged, will appear true because they are self-
confirming. For example, without the supposition that the Brahmans
corrupted the “original” texts, the method cannot be applied to Indian texts.
Thus whoever applied the method and howsoever they did so, they would end
up confirming the narrative of Brahmanic “corruption.” Herein lies the
method’s brilliance: its prejudices are built in.
Authors: The Mahābhārata and the Bhagavad Gītā offered a privileged locus
to study the application of the historical-critical method for several reasons.
But in principle our analysis is applicable to almost all contemporary
Indologists insofar as they rely on the historical-critical method and share the
discipline’s anti-traditional, iconoclastic stance.
Authors: There was a lot of indignation. But beyond ad hominem attacks and
calls to not publish the book, there were no substantive criticisms. The
Indologists could not defend Christian Lassen, Adolf Holtzmann Jr., and
Richard Garbe. They could not create new criteria for identifying “layers” in
the Bhagavad Gītā. Their work is basically speculative: attributing motivations
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Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
9 of 27 8/16/17, 1:02 PM
Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
it could be said to have attained real albeit limited results, and Indology. Even
prior to our critique, Indology was an ersatz tradition that tried to model itself
on philology, both classical and biblical. It failed spectacularly. Indologists
can continue producing more literature using this pseudo-scientific method
but history itself has moved on.
10 of 27 8/16/17, 1:02 PM
Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
SU: Critics of The Nay Science claim there is no single method used by
German Indologists. In your 2016 article “How We Should Approach the
Phenomenon of Studying Hinduism” in Swarajya, you asserted
something similar to deny existence of a peculiarly American Indology.
Wendy Doniger, however, notes in the preface to the edited volume
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Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
Authority, Anxiety and Canon (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994): “A fight
has been raging over the ownership of the sacred relic of the body of the
Ṛg-Veda (and over the question of whether it is, in fact, a corpse) for
over a century. There have been two main warring camps […]: on this
side, German (and British) philologists, in their obsessively neat ranks
of scholarship, and on that side, Brahmins, in their equally (but
separately) obsessive ranks of ritual. […] But now a third party has
entered the ranks, academicus ex machina, to rescue the Veda from the
depth of the Ocean of Obfuscation to which those twin demons,
European and Brahminical, had abducted it. Now it appears that […] the
Veda belongs neither to the anal-retentive nor to the sanctimonious,
but to the methodological. More precisely, the Veda has attracted the
attention of a group of historians of religions in North America […],”
(vii, emphasis added). Is not Doniger positing an American Indology
based on a method? What “method” is being referred to here when the
word “methodological” is used?
Authors: For specific historical reasons (its innate diversity, its educational
structures, its lack of a single government ministry, its plurality of
confessions, etc.), the United States never developed a single state-sponsored
Indology pursuing a consistent project (like Christian or Protestant
exceptionalism) as in Germany. In fact, insofar as American Indology has
recognizable principles, these are borrowed from German Indology, as we
pointed out in The Nay Science. The discipline of history of religions or
comparative religion is itself indebted to German Indologists like Rudolf von
Roth, Max Müller, and Rudolf Otto. Mircea Eliade worked in the intersection
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between the two disciplines. At institutional and intellectual levels, history of
religions is unthinkable without Indian or, as they are now called, “South
Asian” religions. Methodologically, it shares Indology’s concerns and aims.
Historically, Indologists provided much of the textual basis and “historical”
data for the comparative religionists. Chapter four of The Nay Science clarified
the link between Indology and history of religions. It showed how the
discipline we call history of religions originated with the Indologist Rudolf
von Roth. J. Z. Smith observes that the entire study of religion in American
academia is grounded in the conceptual language of the German Protestant
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Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
theologian Paul Tillich. The Nay Science went further by showing how,
mediated via the evangelical theologian Heinrich Ewald and his student Roth,
Protestant biases informed history of religions from the start. Insofar as
American Indology shares these biases, especially the focus on history,
teleological conceptions of religion, and anti-Brahmanism, it remains
embedded in German Indology. If American scholars cannot develop a new
paradigm that addresses historical criticism’s errors and overcomes its
religious and cultural biases, their work remains vulnerable to The Nay
Science’s criticisms. Ataḥ pradhānamallanibarhaṇanyāyenātidiśati. A separate
criticism is unnecessary.
SU: In the fascinating and most important chapter of The Nay Science,
“Problems with the Critical Method,” you dwell on the philosophical
presuppositions of the critical method, trace its genealogy to Comte’s
historicism, and analyze it using Gadamer’s critique of the
Enlightenment. You show that German Indology’s theoretical
foundations were completely eroded, and that it was out of step with
philosophical currents in Europe, which culminated in a severe criticism
of the Enlightenment, and how the Indologists are unaware of this and
proudly declare alignment with the Enlightenment based on their
scientism. But is Indology not like all other humanities in this respect,
which model themselves after the physical sciences? What is your
specific philosophical criticism of German Indology?
Authors: You are absolutely right. Indeed, one way to look at The Nay Science
is that the discussion of Indology leads to a critique of the contemporary
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humanities. German Indology presented a useful case study for understanding
what happens to the humanities once they forget their essential nature and
start imitating or, rather, aping the natural sciences. That said, there are
specific problems with German Indology—for example, its racism,
antisemitism, colonialism, and Orientalism—that are not applicable to other
disciplines.
SU: In your recent lecture at IIC, New Delhi in December 2016, talking
about the rise of historiography in the West, you said: “it is only in 19th
13 of 27 8/16/17, 1:02 PM
Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
century Germany that history displaces all other subjects from the
humanities ... And there is nothing that transcends history ... What
explains the rise of history to occlude all other human concerns?” Can
you please explain to our readers your analysis of this phenomenon?
Authors: The fact that everything transpires in history and can therefore be
arranged temporally is a relatively banal insight. As a taxonomic principle it is
no more compelling than those Foucault discovered on reading Borges in The
Order of Things. So the distinguishing feature of the contemporary view is
neither the insight into the historical nature of all existence (a discovery
variously attributed to Vico, Herder, Humboldt, Hegel, and Ranke) nor the
relating of events and discoveries to historical time. Rather, what is
distinctive about historicism is the significance attached to history—a
significance that, as Löwith rightly notes, originates with the Jewish and
Christian experience of awaiting the Messiah. The Greek concept of time is
cyclical: historical narratives exist but history itself insofar as it is chance and
accidental cannot be the subject of an episteme (science). The proper object of
knowledge is the eternal laws and customs that uphold the cosmos and ensure
its orderly functioning. As Löwith notes, “In this intellectual climate,
dominated by the rationality of the natural cosmos, there was no room for the
universal significance of a unique, incomparable historical event.” Contrast
this with the Jewish and Christian experience, for which “history was
primarily a history of salvation and, as such, the proper concern of prophets,
preachers, and philosophers.” There is now a tremendous interest in studying
history. As the sphere where man’s salvation plays itself out, history acquires
a new significance. To the extent that they regard themselves as
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Geschichtswissenschaften (historical sciences), the contemporary humanities
also stand in this tradition. They have replaced philosophical understanding
and ethical self-cultivation with reading the historical tea-leaves.
SU: The “historiography epidemic” has hit India too. Hindus have
started historicizing the Itihāsas in reaction to the Western
characterization of them as “myths.” S. N. Balagangadhara says,
“Instead of asking questions about the nature of ‘historical truth’;
instead of studying the religious culture where such questions originate
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Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
want to excise its frames and narrations and arrive at the “truth,” the “real”
history of a racial conflict between white Aryans and black aboriginals that
the antisemite Christian Lassen first posited! The Mahābhārata is too clever
for them. It knows every telling is motivated. The “history” the Indologists
tell also serves their desire for power and profit. Itihāsa is thus not simply
“history.” It is a special narrative that neither negates the empirical validity of
perception (or documentation) nor affirms it absolutely and uncritically.
Rather, itihāsa represents the empirical world aesthetically to problematize
both being-in-the-world and the relationship of ontology, text, and the world.
In other words, itihāsa is history that has overcome historicism: history that
has become critical and self-consciousness.
16 of 27 8/16/17, 1:02 PM
Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
thought. For example, if we remove the cyclical structure from Heraclitus, his
thought becomes incomprehensible. As Kahn notes, Heraclitus is explicitly an
“antithetical” thinker, struggling to hold together opposites in his thought.
Plato continues in this tradition: Theaetetus 152e (generation and flux),
Phaedrus 249a–b (cycle of lives). In the Republic (620–21), the soul’s
reincarnation is linked to the universe’s macrocosmic revolutions.
Christianity struggles with cyclical time because it has only ever imperfectly
assimilated Greek ontology. While there are certain Christian thinkers (for
example, St. Augustine), who understand God as absolutely outside all time
rather than as perduring in time, on the whole Christianity opted for a linear
understanding of time, with salvation as a future, albeit predestined, event.
This constitutes the experience of awaiting the parousia (Christ’s second
coming), and we see it in secularized or semi-secularized form even in
twentieth-century thinkers like Heidegger, Camus, and Agamben. Derrida is a
special case: he has the anticipation but wishes to defer the event of arrival
infinitely. What is the significance of all this? First, this sense of recursivity
and repetition in the universe makes up the proper content of ancient thought.
Heraclitus criticizes those who do not see this cyclical structure. In
Empedocles also, the ability to see these exchanges distinguishes the wise
man from the general run. Second, this cyclicality exists in Indian thought
also, where it is linked to cosmology, epistemology, and ethics. There are
numerous examples, like Bhagavad Gītā 4.8. If we remove this cyclical
structure, all of the Mahābhārata’s theological and soteriological concepts
—dharma, avataraṇa, bhārāvataraṇa, and so on—become incomprehensible.
Thus the desire to evaluate the Mahābhārata within a linear temporal
perspective is not an innocent choice. As the article “Hindu Studies in a
Christian, Secular Academy” showed, even an AAR award-winning book like
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Emily Hudson’s Disorienting Dharma fell into the trap of evaluating the
Mahābhārata by a Christian yardstick: do the saved attain heaven and the
damned attain hell? If not, the only conclusion is antinomianism (the law is
powerless to save) and “existentialism.” We are not against historical
investigations but we need to raise three questions: (1) Is the historical
framework sufficient to understand the Mahābhārata?; (2) Is it not a
prejudicial choice, which prevents the epic from unfolding its effects?; and (3)
If we really wish to be historical, should we not also subject our decision to
17 of 27 8/16/17, 1:02 PM
Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
SU: Dr. Adluri, I recently read your brilliant paper “Heidegger, Luther,
and Aristotle: A Theological Deconstruction of Metaphysics,” in which
you uncover what is unsaid in Heidegger’s works—infiltration of a
Lutheran theology in his philosophy through his attempt to recover
time as experienced in early Christianity: “Heidegger focuses on
Aristotle because Aristotle, in rejecting Plato’s doctrine of
transmigration, prepares the way for a different kind of eschatology by
defining time as linear [...] Aristotle’s interpretation of the soul would
disallow the possibility of an immortal, transmigrating, or cyclically
reincarnating soul.” You also published a book on Greek soteriological
ideas—Parmenides, Plato and Mortal Philosophy: Return from
Transcendence (London: Continuum, 2010). Can you tell us about your
journeys into the world of Greeks, and the importance of Aristotle for
Christianity?
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Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
Authors: Today we are far from appreciating what “Vyāsa” represents. The
standard view is that the Mahābhārata is traditionally attributed to a single
author, the legendary Sage Vyāsa, but “of course” we know this cannot be
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true. But before we create such stereotypes of the “critical” scholar and the
simple-minded natives, let us first ask: What is historical reality? What is
narrative? What does it mean to say someone is the author? What does it
mean to create anything? The Mahābhārata, as I read it, is the first self-
consciously mimetic work, which creates a textual universe precisely to reveal
the narrative nature of our experience of the universe. In The Birth of Tragedy
from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche laid the foundation for appreciating such a
work. He made art central to philosophy. In the case of the Mahābhārata, we
have not yet made the turn to evaluating the entire “Vyāsa project” as a work
19 of 27 8/16/17, 1:02 PM
Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
SU: In your lecture on the Mahābhārata at IIC, New Delhi, you said
something intriguing: “We should not be asking if the Mahābhārata is
relevant today. What we should be asking is whether we still have the
intellectual courage, after nineteenth-century philology, to still read the
Mahābhārata. Now, do we have that intellectual power still or not—
that’s the question.” What did you mean?
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SU: Is a revival of socio-political thinking based on Indian thought still
possible? Can we build a new humanities that answers questions
specific to India, and furthers the peculiarly Indian line of questioning?
Can a revival of Indian thought reinvigorate humanities worldwide?
How can Indians overcome “self-alienation, self-policing, and loss of
social cohesion”?
Authors: The danger is that, turned off by the Indologists, Indians will turn
away from Western thought itself. We must remember, however, that the
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Indian Studies After Indology: An Interview With Vishwa Adlur... https://swarajyamag.com/culture/indian-studies-after-indology-a...
Indologists never rose above obscurity even at the German university. They
were parasitic on a few developments in Western thought—developments
they neither authored nor understood. They presented themselves to Indians
as the face of Western rationality but Western thought is so much more: it is
Foucault and Nietzsche; it is Plato, Kant, Arendt, and Schürmann. It would be
a shame if Indians turned away from this richness. The only reason for
critiquing the Indologists was that they stood in the way of philosophical
thinking. Na hi nindā nindyaṃ nindituṃ pravartate api tu vidheyaṃ stotum. We
hope that, in the wake of Indology’s diremption, a genuine intellectual
dialogue between traditions can now unfold. As for the question how can
Indians overcome “self-alienation, self-policing, and loss of social cohesion,”
you are referring, of course, to the paper “Jews and Hindus in Indology.” The
simple answer is that all this happened in relation to, under the hegemony of a
normative referent. Western culture was posited as the norm, and measured
by this norm Indian culture could only appear deficient. Indians became
particularized under this regime as less advanced, less intelligent, less
enlightened individuals. At least some of them participated in this narrative.
You mentioned Bhandarkar’s statement from “The Critical, Comparative, and
Historical Method of Inquiry,” but in the same essay Bhandarkar also wrote:
“And here I feel myself in duty bound, even at the risk of displeasing some of
you, to make a passing allusion to the most uncritical spirit that has come
over us of praising ourselves and our ancestors indiscriminately, seeing
nothing but good in our institutions and in our ancient literature, asserting
that the ancient Hindus had made very great progress in all the sciences,
physical, moral, and social, and the arts,—greater even by far than Europe has
made hitherto—and denying even the most obvious deficiencies in our
literature, such as the absence of satisfactory historical records, and our most
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obvious defects. As long as this spirit exists in us, we can never hope to be
able to throw light on our ancient history, and on the excellences and defects
of our race, and never hope to rise.” You see how Mill’s narrative has now
entered the Indian self-consciousness, and has led to internalized racism. To
escape “self-alienation, self-policing, and loss of social cohesion,” Indians will
have to unlearn how to live under the hegemony of the norm; they must see
that the norm binds them only insofar as they think of themselves as
particulars. In sum, they will have to re-learn how to think of themselves as
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Srinivas Udumudi
22 of 27 8/16/17, 1:02 PM