[INDOLOGY] Eli Franco and the Fate of Indology

Sun Jan 15 12:14:55 UTC 2017

Dear friends and colleagues,
I enclose here my response to A&B's Theses on Indology.
With best wishes,
Eli Franco

Zitat von Joydeep <jbagchee at gmail.com>:

> 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
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> INDOLOGY mailing list
>>> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
>>> indology-owner at list.indology.info (messages to the list's managing
>>> committee)
>>> http://listinfo.indology.info (where you can change your list options or
>>> unsubscribe)
>>>
>>
>>

-- 
Prof. Dr. Eli Franco
Institut für Indologie und Zentralasienwissenschaften
Schillerstr. 6
04109 Leipzig

Ph. +49 341 9737 121, 9737 120 (dept. office)
Fax +49 341 9737 148

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