Response to Adluri Bagchee Nay Science

If one thing is truly clear after reading this distorting and tendentious book, it is that this is anything but a history of German Indology. The tome begins with a critical survey of the earliest German publications on the Mahabharata (basically dealing with only two scholars, Christian Lassen and Adolf Holzmann), and then moves on to examine the work of some half a dozen scholars on the Bhagavadgıta from the late nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century, which forms the bulk of the book. The whole thing has then been packaged (and successfully sold) as a history of German Indology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But how can a work of such limited scope claim to be a history of a rather vast academic discipline? It is the method, the authors say (p. 1 and passim); by describing the method, they claim to give us the essence of German Indology. This is all very convenient: we no longer have to bother reading thousands upon thousands of tiresome pages to grasp the history of German Indology (whatever that may be, see below), the method will disclose its dark secrets to us. However, there is a tiny problem here: Indology-German Indology included-does not have a method, or rather, it does not have a single method, as inexplicably assumed by the authors.

IndiaFacts, 2018

IndiaFacts.org, 2018

Religions of South Asia, 2016

2014