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



On Sat, Dec 24, 2016 at 4:13 AM, Jan E.M. Houben <jemhouben@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@ephe.sorbonne.fr

https://ephe-sorbonne.academia.edu/JanEMHouben

www.ephe.fr


On 23 December 2016 at 10:17, Joydeep <jbagchee@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/30584042/Theses_on_Indology


Thank you,

Joydeep Bagchee



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