[INDOLOGY] Eli Franco and the Fate of Indology

Sat Dec 24 12:04:36 UTC 2016

Dear Jan,

Let me address your points one by one:

1. Rhetoric: We kept our rhetoric mild compared with Eli Franco’s *ad
hominems*. We merely corrected him on several embarrassing factual and
philological errors. He, not we, would benefit from a lesson on how to
write.

2. Definition: Your argument that Bronkhorst is Dutch is like saying that a
chef of Chinese cuisine must be Chinese.* The Nay Science* and the *Theses*
evaluated an episteme and a method. Bronkhorst shares this episteme and
method, not least its problematic anti-Brahmanism.

3. Violence: We used Marxism as an analytic tool and not because we
recommend Marxism or a Marxist revolution. In any case, “Marxist moral high
ground” refers not to us, but to the *Indologists*. You appear to have
misread the sentence in haste.

Please do read these works closely; otherwise our discussion will suffer
from the defect of *argumentum ad lapidem*. Sorry for this brief response,
I returned exhausted from several workshops on Indology in Delhi and Pune,
and Vish and I have two end-of-year books to complete. Let’s talk more when
we meet, or let’s raise this to the level of some academic pieces. Vish and
I are working on an edited volume of responses to *The Nay Science*, you
could contribute there. As you know, I find opining back-and-forth on an
online list demeans us as scholars, and these issues are far too important
for reflex responses. :)

Joy

Dr. Joydeep Bagchee
Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship
<http://www.forum-transregionale-studien.de/en/revisiting-the-canons-of-textual-scholarship/fellows/detail/article/joydeep-bagchee.html>
Academia.edu Homepage <https://fu-berlin.academia.edu/JoydeepBagchee>
Oxford Bibliographies Online: Hinduism
<http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/hinduism>

The Nay Science
<http://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-nay-science-9780199931361;jsessionid=94DFF6B197750DBE7C7E64A4FB8B28D2?cc=de&lang=en&>
Argument and Design
<http://www.brill.com/products/book/argument-and-design-unity-mahabharata>
Reading the Fifth Veda <http://www.brill.com/reading-fifth-veda>
When the Goddess Was a Woman <http://www.brill.com/when-goddess-was-woman>
Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India
<http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415844697/>
German Indology on OBO Hinduism
<http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195399318/obo-9780195399318-0147.xml>
___________________
What, then, is Philosophy?
Philosophy is the supremely precious.

Plotinus, Enneads I.III.5

On Sat, Dec 24, 2016 at 4:13 AM, Jan E.M. Houben <jemhouben at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear Joydeep,
> This is a remarkable and stimulating essay. Here and there your rhetorics
> needs rethinking and revision: "that a critical philology must" cannot be a
> "fact". If you and your co-author Vishwa Adluri want to analyse indology
> according to its methodological roots I suggest you base yourself first on
> a sufficiently wide historical exploration of indology and
> "proto-indology". You seem not aware that early "German" indologists were
> in fact publishing in either French or Latin. However, if we dig further it
> will then be seen that indology is neither German nor French but, for
> better or for worse, DUTCH, both according to its ethnographic method
> (Abraham Rogerius), linguistic method (Johannes Becanus, Schola
> Hemsterhusiana -- with regard to whom the "neo-grammarians" were trying to
> be, methodologically, "neo") and institutional production of knowledge (the
> first Asiatic Society was Dutch: the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences:
> see also my conference report of the 1995 DMG meeting in Leipzig at
> www.academia.edu/7378413/Promising_continuity_with_a_discontinuous_past_a_
> conference_report_). One of the factual mistakes in your essay is in fact
> already pointing in this direction: Johannes Bronkhorst, whom you consider
> representative of your reified category of the "German indologist"
> apparently on the basis of the sole criterion that he publishes much, is in
> fact Dutch. As for the "moral high grounds of marxism" on which you try to
> formulate your criticism, it is regrettable that you are entirely,
> provincially, "occidental" and "nineteenth century" here, as you did not
> take into account the reception and further development of marxism in Asia,
> nor in India where it resonates with earlier knowledge systems in (see
> Padma Sastri's sanskrit summary of marxist doctrine in Leninamrtam,
> Hoshiarpur 1973). Claiming to represent "moral high grounds" you seem not
> to have addressed the problem of the glorification of violence in early
> marxism (see introduction, by Karel van Kooij and me, to the Violence
> denied volume, Leiden 1999), more generally in socialist thought after
> Saint-Simon's "utopian" socialism (formulated partly out of deception with
> directly witnessed violence in the French revolution), and prior to the
> Kautsky controversy.
> Best, Jan
>
>
>
> *Jan E.M. HOUBEN*
>
> Directeur d’Études
>
> Sources et histoire de la tradition sanskrite
>
> *École Pratique des Hautes Études*
>
> *Sciences historiques et philologiques *
>
> 54, rue Saint-Jacques
>
> CS 20525 – 75005 Paris
>
> johannes.houben at ephe.sorbonne.fr
>
> https://ephe-sorbonne.academia.edu/JanEMHouben
>
> www.ephe.fr
>
>
> On 23 December 2016 at 10:17, Joydeep <jbagchee at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear fellow Indologists,
>>
>>
>> On July 13, 2016 at 5:40 EDT, Eli Franco posted a review of our book, *The
>> Nay Science: A History of German Indology*, to the list. He posted the
>> review to the list a second time at 9:00 EDT. In the interests of science,
>> we have provided a response here: https://www.academia.edu/30584
>> 042/Theses_on_Indology
>>
>>
>> Thank you,
>>
>> Joydeep Bagchee
>>
>>
>> Dr. Joydeep Bagchee
>> Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship
>> <http://www.forum-transregionale-studien.de/en/revisiting-the-canons-of-textual-scholarship/fellows/detail/article/joydeep-bagchee.html>
>> Academia.edu Homepage <https://fu-berlin.academia.edu/JoydeepBagchee>
>> Oxford Bibliographies Online: Hinduism
>> <http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/hinduism>
>>
>> The Nay Science
>> <http://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-nay-science-9780199931361;jsessionid=94DFF6B197750DBE7C7E64A4FB8B28D2?cc=de&lang=en&>
>> Argument and Design
>> <http://www.brill.com/products/book/argument-and-design-unity-mahabharata>
>> Reading the Fifth Veda <http://www.brill.com/reading-fifth-veda>
>> When the Goddess Was a Woman
>> <http://www.brill.com/when-goddess-was-woman>
>> Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India
>> <http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415844697/>
>> German Indology on OBO Hinduism
>> <http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195399318/obo-9780195399318-0147.xml>
>> ___________________
>> What, then, is Philosophy?
>> Philosophy is the supremely precious.
>>
>> Plotinus, Enneads I.III.5
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>
>

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