Suchergebnisse

"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

Lectures on Arthaśāstra of Kauṭalya, work on ancient Hindu polity and statecraft