Dear Colleagues,

Vishwa and I have composed a brief response to Fitzgerald’s “Brahmanic redaction of earlier oral epic materials” hypothesis, presented at the recent Leiden conference organized by Peter Bisschop and Elizabeth Cecil (Asia Beyond Boundaries: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Primary Sources in the Premodern World, August 27–31). 

At this venue, Fitzgerald repeated, despite extensive evidence against this thesis in print, his view that the Mahābhārata is presently a “Brahmanic redaction of earlier oral epic materials.” Attributing Gupta-era origins to the text, he stated that the current text reflects an attempt by Brahmans to exert political and social influence following the Mauryas, an attempt he called “largely successful.” 

We have already discussed the misconception that the Mahābhārata Critical Edition reconstructs a Brahmanic/normative/final redaction of the text in Philology and Criticism. We have also shown that the idea of an earlier, shorter, and more “epic” “Bhārata,” which preceded the Mahābhārata, is a myth. This myth, as we showed in The Nay Science, originated in the German Indologists’ nationalist, anti-Semitic, and racist longings, and was closely bound up with the idea of an Indo-Germanic or Aryan race. The search for the so-called Urepos has been one of the most spectacular misadventures in the humanities. Scholars have neither evolved objective criteria nor provided non-circular, non-question-begging conclusions. The idea that the Pāṇḍavas were a non-Aryan, Brahmanic tribe that was “grafted” into the Mahābhārata has racist antecedents, as we showed in The Nay Science. No evidence exists for an earlier Heldengedicht without the alleged Brahmanic and bhakti “interpolations,” an idea that we showed was Christian Lassen’s fantasy. Removing passages from the transmitted text neither establishes the existence of a “pre-Brahmanic” Mahābhārata nor does it prove Brahmanic mischief, however much scholars may desire it. Fitzgerald’s conference paper uncritically repeated these tropes of an ideological Brahmanic takeover without either argument or evidence. Finally, the suggestion that the Mahābhārata is a Gupta-era text suffers from the fallacy of cum hoc ergo propter hoc: from the fact that we find material correlates (inscriptions, coinage, temple ruins) of the Mahābhārata’s theological and iconographic descriptions in the Gupta period we must not conclude that the work was authored or “redacted” at this time. These descriptions could antedate their correlates by several centuries. Even if the Critical Edition has features that we think a text in the Gupta period would also have had, it does not follow that the text was “redacted” to include them, for the simple reason that no one could have known that they had to redact this exemplar rather than any other, as it, rather than any other, would produce descendants that survived. Fitzgerald has not clarified which text he intends—do his comments pertain to the constituted text of the Critical Edition, the vulgate, or some earlier version? Moreover, which of the several manuscripts in existence are Fitzgerald’s “Brahmans” supposed to have redacted?

We have followed with interest the discussion on this list about opening up conferences to critical voices and minorities. The intent is laudable. But we will succeed only to the extent that we ourselves exercise absolute probity. Not hosting an open call for papers, using ERC funding without a transparent selection process, announcing conferences four days before they occur, inviting scholars connected by personal ties to the organizers; providing a platform for scholars whose tendentious and speculative views have been refuted, and not permitting competing views—are guaranteed to bring our discipline into disrepute. As Vishwa and I have repeatedly urged, let us first get our own house in order. To this day the German Oriental Society relies on an opaque and feudal system of Empfehlungsschreiben that bars critics from membership (see “Theses on Indology,” nn. 13 and 55 and “Jews and Hindus in Indology,” n. 178). To this day it has prevented discussion of its Nazi connections. The threatened exit of German Indologists from the IASS raises hopes that we can at last have a free and fair discussion about racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Brahmanism, Nazism, Christian evangelism, Protestant fundamentalism, caste discrimination, and the treatment of Jewish, minority, Asian, and women scholars in Indology. Instead of using the rhetoric of “Wissenschaft” and “expertise” (Philology and Criticism, pp. 269–74) to cover up a system of reciprocal favors, we should be using the conference system to foster excellence.

Sincerely,

Joydeep