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.