Gentoo Studies

[Lars Martin Fosse]

Swaminathan Madhuresan wrote:

> --- Lars Martin Fosse <lmfosse at ONLINE.NO> schrieb:
> > That is an important prerequisite for their scholarship, and they are
> > proud of it. They have no faith in Western scholarship such as
> > philology, linguistics etc, and they prefer to construct their own
> > version of scholarship.
>
> Is it euphemistically called `Indic paradigms of knowledge
> and scholarship'?
>

I can't say that I have that particular expression, but here is a quote
from Rajaram, published some time ago in a letter to the Organiser:

Western Indology treated Vedic India as a dead civilization such as Egypt
and Babylon, and tried to reconstruct the whole thing from scratch. This
ignored a large body of existing literary and cultural traditions
continuing to the present. The result of this fallacious approach was
fantasies like the Aryan Invasion Theory and the idea that the Harappan
language and script were 'proto-Dravidian', an imaginary language. The
correct approach is to relate archaeological discoveries to Indian
literature and tradition. This gives an alternative approach, combining
Indian tradition and modern science, which several of us including Dr. Jha,
David Frawley, K. D. Sethna ad others have been pursuing. The
'establishment' scholars, however, seem stuck in the old groove following
Western Indology, which is a colonial-missionary construct with no
scientific or historical basis.

As we see, he here gives a prescription for "correct" scholarly work in the
field. It excludes comparative material from other languages and cultures
of Antiquity and concentrates upon what you can dig out of Indian earth and
ancient scripture.

Best regards,

Lars Martin Fosse