Recent decades have seen a growing genre in academia: the book or article that attempts to 'rethink' or 're-evaluate' a particular field. This is part of a growing movement of re-evaluation within the university in general, mostly but not exclusively by those within the fields themselves. Much of this comes from a growing unease with the state of the disciplines as they react (or do not react) to broadening critique from literary theorists and philosophers. Talk about one's discipline, therefore, has become almost as common as talk in one's discipline. There are those who find this change a welcome one (including this writer), as well as those who find it a distracting complication. To the latter, the critique often appears as a jeremiad, that 're-invent' often means 're-pent', and the message is simply one that points to the sins of the fathers (there are no mothers in this lineage), merely enjoining us to avoid the mistakes of the past. In fact, however, that critique has little if anything to do with blame or guilt, of good versus bad, of bias versus unbiased, as these terms are commonly used.
There are at least two other reactions that I have observed. The first is one that simply points out the virtues of the fathers, and enjoins us to follow in their footsteps. We are told that it is, after all, the Indologist who discovered Ashoka, described the glories of the Gupta Age and, out of the infinite chaos of the Hindu past, put Indian history in order. Why gratuitously question these accomplishments? The second reaction is that the attention to Indology – the study of the ancient cultures of the Subcontinent – distracts from the 'real' work: Would one rather not make a contribution to the history of Ashoka's reign or edit some new text, rather than deal with the long line of minor, almost forgotten, characters that formed a discipline such as Indology? What is more interesting, the history of India or the history of Indology?
The notion of 'real' work and the question that follows it, as well as the defence of the virtue of the fathers, reveal what seem to be some fundamental misunderstandings. For as noted, the critique is not about sins or virtues, nor is it about two rival antiquarian interests, one about India, the other about 'Indianists'. Indeed, these reactions mistake the very point of the critique: that in the formation of any scholarly, humanistic activity, choices are made, often in the past, that affect what academics do and how they write and teach. These choices, and the assumptions and values that led to them, should be critically examined by today's academics – if only because we now harbour at least the suspicion that many of the choices and conceptions formed before may no longer be acceptable to us. It is, therefore, not a question of 'real' work in the field as opposed to 'unreal' or 'less valuable' work about the field; nor is it a question of the history of India as opposed to the history of Indology. Rather, it is the relation between the two that is important, and today's academics must exist and write fully aware of the tension between them – if indeed they can be separated at all.
Discovering Sanskrit
Exploring this tension necessarily entails an examination of Indology. And here the term refers to classical Indology, or the study of the written records of Indian culture that are ordinarily associated with the methodology of the broader discipline of which it is a part: philology, or the study of the history of language. This Indology evolved, because of its historical primacy from its beginnings in the 19th century to the present day, a discourse that has influenced much of the subsequent writing about India. This influence continues today, and other disciplines concerned with the Subcontinent – notably history, art history, religion and anthropology – have at times been dependent on Indology and philology, with many of their basic assumptions about India having been dependent on the discourse of Indologists. The longevity of Indology has meant also that its ideas, like those of all of academia, have in part passed into mass culture. Indology is therefore an authoritative discourse that legitimates a number of activities at various levels of society, including in India itself. There is then a 'high culture' Indology and a 'mass culture' Indology, both of them now international in scope.