Indology

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Indology, also known as South Asian studies, is the academic study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent, and as such is a subset of Asian studies. [1]

Contents

The term Indology (in German, Indologie) is often associated with German scholarship, and is used more commonly in departmental titles in German and continental European universities than in the anglophone academy. In the Netherlands, the term Indologie was used to designate the study of Indian history and culture in preparation for colonial service in the Dutch East Indies.

Classical Indology majorly includes the linguistic studies of Sanskrit literature, Pāli and Tamil literature, as well as study of Dharmic religions (like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.). Some of the regional specializations under South Asian studies include:

Some scholars distinguish Classical Indology from Modern Indology, the former more focussed on Sanskrit, Tamil and other ancient language sources, the latter on contemporary India, its politics and sociology.

History

Precursors

The beginnings of the study of India by travellers from outside the subcontinent date back at least to Megasthenes (c. 350–290 BC), a Greek ambassador of the Seleucids to the court of Chandragupta (ruled 322-298 BC), founder of the Mauryan Empire. [2] Based on his life in India Megasthenes composed a four-volume Indica, fragments of which still exist, and which influenced the classical geographers Arrian, Diodor and Strabo. [2]

Islamic Golden Age scholar Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Al-Biruni (973–1048) in Tarikh Al-Hind (Researches on India) recorded the political and military history of India and covered India's cultural, scientific, social and religious history in detail. [3] He studied the anthropology of India, engaging in extensive participant observation with various Indian groups, learning their languages and studying their primary texts, and presenting his findings with objectivity and neutrality using cross-cultural comparisons. [4]

Academic discipline

Indology as generally understood by its practitioners [5] began in the later Early Modern period and incorporates essential features of modernity, including critical self-reflexivity, disembedding mechanisms and globalization, and the reflexive appropriation of knowledge. [6] An important feature of Indology since its beginnings in the late eighteenth century has been the development of networks of academic communication and trust [7] through the creation of learned societies like the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and the creation of learned journals like the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.

One of the defining features of Indology is the application of scholarly methodologies developed in European Classical Studies or "Classics" to the languages, literatures and cultures of South Asia.

In the wake of eighteenth century pioneers like William Jones, Henry Thomas Colebrooke, Gerasim Lebedev or August Wilhelm Schlegel, Indology as an academic subject emerged in the nineteenth century, in the context of British India, together with Asian studies in general affected by the romantic Orientalism of the time. The Asiatic Society was founded in Calcutta in 1784, Société Asiatique founded in 1822, the Royal Asiatic Society in 1824, the American Oriental Society in 1842, and the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft) in 1845, the Japanese Association of Indian and Buddhist Studies [8] in 1949.

Sanskrit literature included many pre-modern dictionaries, especially the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana of Amarasiṃha, but a milestone in the Indological study of Sanskrit literature was publication of the St. Petersburg Sanskrit-Wörterbuch during the 1850s to 1870s. Translations of major Hindu texts in the Sacred Books of the East began in 1879. Otto von Böhtlingk's edition of Pāṇini's grammar appeared in 1887. Max Müller's edition of the Rigveda appeared in 1849–1875. Albrecht Weber commenced publishing his pathbreaking journal Indologische Studien in 1849, and in 1897 Sergey Oldenburg launched a systematic edition of key Sanskrit texts, "Bibliotheca Buddhica".

Professional literature and associations

Indologists typically attend conferences such as the American Association of Asian Studies, the American Oriental Society annual conference, the World Sanskrit Conference, and national-level meetings in the UK, Germany, India, Japan, France and elsewhere.

They may routinely read and write in journals such as Indo-Iranian Journal , [9] Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , [10] Journal of the American Oriental Society , [11] Journal asiatique , [12] the Journal of the German Oriental Society (ZDMG), [13] Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens , [14] Journal of Indian Philosophy , [15] Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute , Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies (Indogaku Bukkyogaku Kenkyu), Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême Orient , [16] and others.

They may be members of such professional bodies as the American Oriental Society, the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, the Société Asiatique, the Deutsche Morgenlāndische Gesellschaft and others.

List of indologists

The following is a list of prominent academically qualified Indologists.

Historical scholars


Contemporary scholars with university posts

Other indologists

Indology organisations

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wendy Doniger</span> American Indologist (born 1940)

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include The Hindus: An Alternative History; Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978. She served as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1998.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pandurang Vaman Kane</span> Indian Indologist and Sanskrit scholar

Pandurang Vaman Kane was an Indian academic, historian, lawyer, Indologist, and Sanskrit scholar. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award in 1963.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">R. C. Majumdar</span> Indian historian and academic (1888–1980)

Ramesh Chandra Majumdar was an Indian historian and professor. He principally studied the history of India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moriz Winternitz</span> Austrian Indologist (1863–1937)

Moriz Winternitz was a scholar from Austria who began his Indology contributions working with Max Müller at the Oxford University. An eminent Sanskrit scholar, he worked as a professor in Prague in the German part of Charles-Ferdinand University after 1902, for nearly thirty years. His Geschichte der indischen Literatur, published 1908–1922, offered a comprehensive literary history of Sanskrit texts. The contributions on a wide range of Sanskrit texts by Winternitz have been an influential resource for modern era studies on Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

Robert J. Zydenbos is a Dutch-Canadian scholar who has doctorate degrees in Indian philosophy and Dravidian studies. He also has a doctorate of literature from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Zydenbos also studied Indian religions and languages at the South Asia Institute and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He taught Sanskrit at the University of Heidelberg and later taught Jain philosophy at the University of Madras in India. Zydenbos later taught Sanskrit, Buddhism, and South Asian religions at the University of Toronto in Canada. He was the first western scholar to write a doctoral thesis on contemporary Kannada fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sheldon Pollock</span> American scholar of Sanskrit

Sheldon I. Pollock is an American scholar of Sanskrit, the intellectual and literary history of India, and comparative intellectual history. He is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University. He was the general editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library and the founding editor of the Murty Classical Library of India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute</span> Post-graduate institute in India

Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, also referred to as Deccan College, is a post-graduate institute of Archeology, Linguistics and Sanskrit & Lexicography in Pune, India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A. K. Narain</span> Indian historian, numismatist and archaeologist (1925-2013)

Awadh Kishore Narain was an Indian historian, numismatist and archaeologist, who published and lectured extensively on the subjects related to South and Central Asia. He was well known for his book, The Indo-Greeks, published by Clarendon Press in 1957, in which he discussed the thesis of British historian Sir William Woodthorpe Tarn.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernest Bender</span> American Indologist (1919–1996)

Ernest Bender was a Professor of Indo-Aryan languages and literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hermann Kulke is a German historian and Indologist, who was professor of South and Southeast Asian history at the Department of History, Kiel University (1988–2003). After receiving his PhD in Indology from Freiburg University in 1967, he taught for 21 years at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University (SAI).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rajiv Malhotra</span> Indian-American author (born 1950)

Rajiv Malhotra is an Indian-born American Hindu nationalist ideologue, author and the founder of Infinity Foundation, which focuses on Indic studies, and also funds projects such as Columbia University's project to translate the Tibetan Buddhist Tengyur.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rudolf von Roth</span> German Indologist (1821–1895)

Rudolf von Roth was a German Indologist, founder of the Vedic philology. His chief work is a monumental Sanskrit dictionary, compiled in collaboration with Otto von Böhtlingk.

Ramchandra Narayan Dandekar (1909–2001) was an Indologist and Vedic scholar from Maharashtra, India. He was born in Satara on 17 March 1909 and died in Pune on 11 December 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bibliography of India</span>

This is a bibliography of notable works about the historical Indian subcontinent as well as the modern-day Republic of India.

David Neal Lorenzen is a British-American historian, scholar of Religious studies, essayist, and emeritus professor of South Asian history at the Centre for Asian and African studies, El Colegio de México in Mexico City.

Ludo Rocher (1926–2016) was an eminent Sanskrit scholar, and the W. Norman Brown Professor Emeritus of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Alfred John Hiltebeitel was Columbian Professor of Religion, History, and Human Sciences at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., US. His academic specialism was in ancient Sanskrit epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana, together with Indian religious tradition and folklore.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Historiography of India</span>

Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. Historiography is defined as "the study of the way history has been and is written – the history of historical writing", which means that, "When you study 'historiography' you do not study the events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of individual historians."

Vishwa Adluri specializes in Indian philosophy. He is a strong critic of the academic discipline of Indology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Karl von Garbe</span> German Indologist (1857–1927)

Richard Karl von Garbe was a German professor of philosophy, who made significant contributions to documenting and studying Indian philosophical texts and concepts.

References

  1. ↑ "Indology | Definition of Indology by Lexico". Lexico Dictionaries | English. Archived from the original on 30 August 2019.
  2. 1 2 Bosworth, A. B. (April 1996). "The Historical Setting of Megasthenes' Indica". Classical Philology . 91 (2). The University of Chicago Press: 113–127. doi:10.1086/367502. JSTOR   270500. S2CID   162475029.
  3. ↑ Khan, M. S. (1976). "al-Biruni and the Political History of India". Oriens. 25/26. Brill: 86–115. doi:10.2307/1580658. JSTOR   1580658.
  4. ↑ Ahmed, Akbar S. (February 1984). "Al-Beruni: The First Anthropologist". RAIN. 60 (60). Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland: 9–10. doi:10.2307/3033407. JSTOR   3033407.
  5. ↑ Bechert, Heinz; Simson, Georg von; Bachmann, Peter (1993). Einführung in die Indologie: Stand, Methoden, Aufgaben (in German). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. ISBN   3534054660. OCLC   33429713.
  6. ↑ Giddens, Anthony (1991). The consequences of modernity. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press. OCLC   874200328.
  7. ↑ Polanyi, Michael; Nye, Mary Jo (2015). Personal knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy. ISBN   9780226232621. OCLC   880960082.
  8. ↑ "The Japanese Association of Indian and Buddhist Studies". Jaibs.jp. Archived from the original on 15 September 2009. Retrieved 20 November 2011.
  9. ↑ description&changeHeader=true&SHORTCUT=www.springer.com/journal/10783/about International Publisher Science, Technology, Medicine. Springer. Retrieved on 20 November 2011.
  10. ↑ R A S – Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland Archived 22 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine . Royalasiaticsociety.org. Retrieved on 20 November 2011.
  11. ↑ JAOS Front Matter Archived 7 February 2007 at the Wayback Machine . Umich.edu. Retrieved on 20 November 2011.
  12. ↑ (in Dutch) Journal Asiatique. Poj.peeters-leuven.be. Retrieved on 20 November 2011.
  13. ↑ "Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (ZDMG)". Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (DMG).
  14. ↑ Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens (WZKS) Vienna Journal for Indian Studies. Epub.oeaw.ac.at. Retrieved on 20 November 2011.
  15. ↑ Journal of Indian Philosophy Archived 25 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine . Springer.com. Retrieved on 20 November 2011.
  16. ↑ Bulletin de l'EFEO. Maisonneuve-adrien.com. Retrieved on 20 November 2011.
  17. ↑ "Patrick Olivelle". Encyclopædia Britannica.
  18. ↑ "Ronald Inden". Department of History: University of Chicago.
  19. ↑ Karnam, Mayukha (2016). "Redefining the Classics at Harvard". The Harvard Crimson.
  20. ↑ "Professor Stephanie Jamison FBA". British Academy.
  21. ↑ "Professor Alexis Sanderson". All Souls College, University of Oxford.
  22. ↑ Hawley, John Stratton; Wulff, Donna Marie, eds. (1982). The Divine Consort: Rādhā and the Goddesses of India. Berkeley religious studies series, 3. Berkeley, Ca: Graduate Theological Union. p. 406. ISBN   0-89581-102-2.
  23. ↑ Pande Daniel, Vaihayasi. "The Sarasvati was more sacred than Ganga". Rediff.com . Retrieved 8 August 2011. Technically, I am not a 'foreigner': I adopted Indian citizenship some years ago.
  24. ↑ Guha, Sudeshna (2005). "Negotiating Evidence: History, Archaeology and the Indus Civilisation". Modern Asian Studies. 39 (2): 399–426. doi:10.1017/S0026749X04001611. ISSN   0026-749X. JSTOR   3876625. S2CID   145463239.
  25. ↑ Chadha, Ashish (1 February 2011). "Conjuring a river, imagining civilisation: Saraswati, archaeology and science in India". Contributions to Indian Sociology. 45 (1): 55–83. doi:10.1177/006996671004500103. ISSN   0069-9667. S2CID   144701033.
  26. ↑ Bhatt, Chetan (1 January 2000). "Dharmo rakshati rakshitah : Hindutva movements in the UK". Ethnic and Racial Studies. 23 (3): 559–593. doi:10.1080/014198700328999. ISSN   0141-9870. S2CID   144085595.
  27. ↑ Chetan Bhatt (2000). "Hindu Nationalism and Indigenous 'Neo-racism'". In Back, Les; Solomos, John (eds.). Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader. Psychology Press. pp. 590–591. ISBN   9780415156714 . Retrieved 22 March 2019. It is important to note the marriage between far-right-wing Hindutva ideology and western New Ageism in the works of writers like David Frawley (1994, 1995a, 1995b) who is both a key apologist for the Hindutva movement and the author of various New Age books on Vedic astrology, oracles and yoga
  28. ↑ "Rajiv Malhotra, Swapan Dasgupta appointed as JNU honorary professors". Business Standard. India. 30 October 2018. Retrieved 1 January 2021.
  29. ↑ Shoaib Daniyal (2015), Plagiarism row: How Rajiv Malhotra became the Ayn Rand of Internet Hindutva, Scroll.in
  30. ↑ Bryant, Edwin (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Oxford University Press. p. 344. ISBN   0-19-513777-9.
  31. ↑ Talageri, Shrikant G. (2000). The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. ISBN   81-7742-010-0. Archived from the original on 30 September 2007. Retrieved 1 May 2007.

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