Suchergebnisse

This article focuses on the Chouf-born poet, lawyer and translator Wadiʿ al-Bustani (1888–1954), who called himself a "Lebanese Palestinian," as he moves from Beirut, to Cairo, Hudaydah, Bombay, Transvaal, and finally Haifa. The first to translate Tagore into Arabic after a visit to his Santiniketan in 1916, Bustani spent his life annotating and translating into Arabic the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and Kalidasa's Shakuntala . Alongside his self-professed and self-funded philological project, Bustani was one of the most important poets and lawyers in British Mandate Palestine, inspiring protest with his verse and litigating against colonial land policies. By focusing on Bustani's relation to British imperial culture, his political commitments in Palestine, and the contours of his indological project, this article uncovers a new history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame, long hidden in the many narrations of orientalism's travel and Palestine's colonization.

"Dhār, Bhoja and Sarasvatī: From Indology to Political Mythology and Back," first published JRAS 2012, this the corrected version published online 2018.

At the beginning of the 17th century, the Danish East India Company (Dansk Østindisk Kompagni) was established in Europe. The stronghold of the Danes in India was the city of Tranquebar (Dansborg fortress). At the beginning of the 18th century, the first Lutheran missionaries landed on the Coromandel Coast. They came to India from the German city of Halle. The University of Halle at this time was a center of pietism closely associated with the "Danish Royal mission" in Southern India. This mission was funded by king Frederick IV, but from the very beginning of its existence was staffed mainly by Germans. One of the first missionaries in Tranquebar was Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg. He lived in India from 1706 to 1719. His name is well known to modern orientalists, as he was among the first Europeans to study Indian languages and Indian culture. All the years of his life in Tranquebar, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg was engaged in translating Christian literature into Tamil, and he also compiled the first grammatical reference of this language. A large number of the pastor's letters to his friends and colleagues have been preserved. Most of these letters have been published for today. But part of it is still stored in the archives. Mainly in his letters, the pastor talks about the work of the mission: converting local residents to Christianity, creating a printing house and publishing Christian literature, opening a school for children in Tranquebar and working in it. Only a small part of the letters contains detailed stories about Tranquebar, local traditions, religious views of the natives, etc. This publication provides a translation of one of Ziegenbalg's letters, which includes answers to questions about India that the pastor's friends asked in their messages.

In this article, I aim to show how Louis Dumont's famous claim that 'the condition for a sound development of Sociology of India is found in the establishment of the proper relation between it and classical Indology' has become obsolete and was from the beginning a problematic postulate. I first develop the historical background of the denigration of anthropological approaches in India against the rise of an idealising Indology as a philological discipline. Then I discuss the structural, methodological and ideological problems that made it difficult to follow Dumont's advice to search for the point of confluence of sociology and Indology. Finally, I place Dumont's holistic approach in relation to the holistic structure of academic disciplines that emerged in the 19th century on the basis of the nation-state model and argue that it is misleading and reductive to think that 'the construction of an Indian Sociology rests in part upon the existence of Indology'.

"For thirty years in India at the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Henry Thomas Colebrooke was an administrator and scholar with the East India Company. This book explains and evaluates Colebrooke's position as the founder of modern Indology. The book discusses how Colebrooke embodies the significant passage from the speculative yearnings attendant on eighteenth century colonial expansion, to the professional, transnational ethos of nineteenth century intellectual life and scholarly enquiry. It covers his early career at the East India Company, and his role in the supreme council and as theorist of the Bengal government. The book highlights how his unprecedented familiarity with a broad range of literature established him as a leading scholar of Sanskrit and president of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. Colebrooke went on to found the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and has set the standards for the study of western Indology. Written by renowned academics in the field of Indology, and drawing on new sources, this biography is a useful contribution to the reassessment of Oriental studies that is currently taking place"--

The Nay Science: A History of German Indology, by Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xvi + 494 pp., $105.00 (hb); $41.95 (pb). ISBN 978-0-199-93134-7 (hb), 978-0-199-93136-1 (pb).

Whether or not Indology contributed to Nazism and the Shoah from the eighteenth century onward should be a straightforward empirical question examined with historical methods based on archival documents,1 original publications, insights, judgments of truth, and awareness of moral or existential bias of both the researcher and the researched. In the "Indologiestreit" between Vishwa P. Adluri (2011) and Reinhold Grünendahl (2012) published in this Journal, however, the question about the Nazification of Indology is overshadowed by Edward W. Said's political-literary narrative.2 Why? What is Said's mesmeric reproach of British and French depictions of the "Orient" all about? And why does it haunt the arguments of Adluri and Grünendahl? More curiously, why does Said omit German Indologists from his indictment of Western imperial power, sexual, and biblical fantasies of the "Orient"?3