Dear Colleagues,

Many thanks for the many responses on my enquiry about the applicability of historical critical methods in general and by Germans scholars in particular, from which I understood that many colleagues would subscribe to the following views:

Although critical scholarship is necessary and methods may be refined, historical critical methods are indispensable.

Bad scholarship must be bared. However, publishers and reviewers are responsible to reduce its spread to a minimum.

Scholarly defamation and nationalistic discrimination (of which “The Nay Science” is an example) are not acceptable.

Besides this, one colleague argued that the book is a good teaching material, because it provides so many German text passages in translation. Well, I am not entirely convinced by this argument.

With regard to “The Nay Science” I would like to draw attention to the article by Hanneder from 2011 (!), posted to Indology by Prof. Slaje in response to my question, in which Hanneder argues in factual terms that already Adluri’s earlier research on German scholarship was flawed and formulated in an ethically objectionable rhetoric.

Oxford University Press and their peer-reviewers could have been informed. However, OUP provided Bagchee a platform for presenting his research not only by publishing “The Nay Science”, but also by depicting it as the state of the art of contemporary scholarship in their Oxford Bibliography on Hinduism, s.v. “German Indology.”

I fully agree with Prof. Wujasty, who wrote in his response to my question that the matter “deserves a more serious response, but I'm not interested personally.” For me, this is partly the case because as an owner of a German passport I might appear to some who are sympathetic with the theses of Adluri and Bagchee simply as a usual suspect (“Any defence can rhetorically be turned into a proof of the allegation” Hanneder, op.cit., p. 131).

With best wishes,

Philipp Maas