1. Dealing with the classics of a community which has living practitioners of various aspects of culture such as the religion contained in those classics, is different from dealing with the classics of a community which no longer has living practitioners of the religion and other such aspects in those classics. Availability of these living practitioners is both a problem and an opportunity. Problem because the practitioners react/respond to what has been said about what they live, in the study of the classics that contain the aspects that they put in practice; opportunity because the student of the classics can take the help of study of the practice in understanding the classics.
2. What Prof. Ingalls did to Sanskrit studies, in the form of exposing, criticizing and countering the “monstrous” (-not my word-) Eurocentric study of Sanskrit material, was very much similar to what cultural relativists did to the study of various world cultures. He made Sanskritists aware of the cultural sensitivity keeping in view the sensibilities of the culture insiders.
Cultural relativists evaluate the validity of their study by taking back their study to the studied people and testing it for cultural sensitivity.
3. Deromanticization, i.e., undoing of the romanticized presentation of the ‘positive’ of a culture studied need not necessarily be in the form of the other extreme, the romanticized presentation of the ‘negative’ of the studied culture.
When I go to fieldwork in Indian villages, the villagers keep asking me, “Are you going to present the same old feudal time picture of our villages that the movie guys present, a cruel landlord replacing the bullocks of a cart with the agricultural laborers and whipping them to bleed and so on?”
It is heartening to see that there are still a very big number of Sanskrit scholars in US, who still live the sensitivity encouraged by likes of Prof. Ingalls. Though uneventful journeys do not get reported as news, they are the ones passengers love!
Thanks and regards,
-N