Gentoo studies

[Robert Zydenbos]

> Date:          Tue, 4 May 1999 18:33:58 -0500
> From:          Shrisha Rao <shrao at IA.NET>

> On Tue, 4 May 1999, Lars Martin Fosse wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> [...]
>
> Then, too, there certainly is more than a slight tendency among
> proponents of "Western scholarship" to rely excessively on each
> other's secondary sources and form incestuous intellectual cliques
> with little outside input.  It used to be said that in the days of the
> British Raj, Western writers who pictured India would primarily deal
> with the few Europeans there, and the "natives" would rarely figure,
> except perhaps as servants, villains, or the occasional Maharaja.  The
> very same trend is certainly present to a large degree in recent
> Indological scholarship (such as with the late Jan Gonda, who had
> never been to India, but was perfectly content to theorize about it
> extensively from his armchair).

I do not know how many writings of Gonda you have read, but he was
precisely one of those researchers who did not deal with sundry
Englishmen and other Europeans, nor maharajas and 'native villains'. He
went straight to the Vedas and all the other texts he worked on. He
also had a firm grounding in Greek, Latin and Avestan, which made him
well equipped to make pronouncements on, e.g., 'Aryan' matters.

[As an aside: I wonder whether those notorious proponents of the
'Indic paradigms of knowledge and scholarship', whose names keep
popping up in messages on this list (and are they not an 'incestuous
intellectual clique'?), are anywhere nearly as qualified as Gonda was.
His qualifications may not be an absolute guarantee against errors --for
what could be an absolute one?--, but they are very significant.]

As for the armchair: when one works on philological material from the
farthest edge of history, or even from the middle ages, why not sit
comfortably? :-) Does it matter whether the armchair is in Utrecht,
Poona, or anywhere else? I am afraid that I do not understand this
criticism of Gonda.

Regards,

RZ

> Shrisha Rao