Cracow Indological Studies

vol. X (2008)

Greg Bailey
(La Trobe University, Melbourne)

The fundamental problems

of contemporary Indology

The fundamental problem addressed by this paper can be summarized

easily. As Indologists we have a mass of textual data at our disposal
for the reconstruction of ancient and medieval Indian culture but very
little knowledge of what Indian life was like on the ground until about
the end of the eighteenth century. Putting the problem in this way
facilitates its subdivision in terms of two specific concerns: the status
of the sources of our knowledge of ancient and medieval India, on the
one hand, and the use to which we put this knowledge, on the other
hand. Though covering seemingly different domains, these concerns
are related because of the reading practice Indologists have tradi-
tionally adopted in respect of the literary sources they employ. The
content and internal structure of the literary texts will determine what
scholars will seek to derive from them, that is, how they will use
them. In this respect it is the texts which have a determinative influ-
ence on their own interpretation. But the relationship between the
contents of the texts and the use made of these contents is necessarily
an arbitrary one which can and has been determined by factors
sometimes having little relation to the objects of investigation
themselves. In the case of Indology it is Philology which has been the
principal causal factor in the development of this relationship.
48 GREG BAILEY

This paper revolves around two different problems, different

as much because of their content as because of the analytical levels
upon which they reside. Even so, in spite of their apparent differences
these problems will have to be reconciled if the full benefits of the
methodological advances their resolution will bring are to be
achieved. The first problem derives from what appears to be the
assumed absence of non-textual evidence for the study of ancient
India. I am deliberately being circumspect here. Every Indologist is
aware of non-literary sources pertaining to the study of ancient India,
but the great majority choose not to use them, hence their assumed
absence for scholarly purposes. I am using text here in the narrow
sense of literate texts which, though originally oral, have come down
to us in manuscript form as written texts. Of course, with the new
methods of text analysis made available to us under the general title
of Semiotics, archaeological material can also be read as text, as can
village layouts, clothing styles etc. However, Indological research has
continued over most of this century with the presumption of an al-
most assumed absence of sources other than literature and, occa-
sionally, inscriptions. To place these observations in the form of a
question I would ask: what effect does the perceived (and probably
actual) disjunction between the huge mass of textual material and the
considerably more restricted amount of archaeological and epi-
graphical evidence have on the conceptualization of the task of re-
constructing Indian culture? I repeat: it is not that the other material is
unavailable, just that literary texts have been used in preference to it.

1. Textuality and the dominance of literary order

Since its inception Indology has been dominated by the reproduction

of texts – primarily through the establishment of critical and other
kinds of editions and translations – and the analysis of the language in
which they are composed. I say re-production because in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century when Indology was in its
infancy as an area of study there did already exist an enormous range
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY INDOLOGY 49

of literature (in both manuscript and oral form) which was in use by
brahmins and pa its. It was not, however, edited in the way Euro-
pean and contemporary Indian Indologists would understand that
process and was being used mainly for religious and social purposes.
In other words its indigenous use was quite different from that of the
nineteenth century Indologists who sought initially to discover Indian
legal texts and, subsequently, to produce a detailed portrait of ancient
Indian history on the basis of these and other literature. Two problems
of textual analysis quickly emerged which were of major concern and
still have an important influence in the kinds of questions asked of the
literature. These were the dating of the texts and the lack of realism in
their contents1. Perhaps the latter was a source of their attractiveness
to begin with (although compare the early reaction to the Brāh-
ma a-s), but as it has turned out, it has posed an hermeneutical
problem which has still not been resolved. Texts such as the two
Sanskrit epics and the Purā a-s which might have seemed to be
inexhaustible mines for historical reconstruction were utilized quite
early for political and social history, but no attempt was made to
study them within the context of their indigenous purpose. A con-
tinual block in their analysis was the tendency to exaggeration which
European scholars so often found in them, a perceived problem which
for these scholars severely mitigated the historical values of the epics
in particular. The same perception was held about the Purā a-s2.
In the study of all this narrative literature, and for that matter,
most other literature in ancient Indian languages, one reaction to the
first problem concerning the dating of the texts has been to produce
textual histories3. These involve the production of a text which treats
1
On a related hermeneutical problem in respect of the Aranyaka-
kā a of the Rāmāya a, cf. S. Pollock, The Rāmāya a of Valmiki. An Epic of
Ancient India. Volume III. Aranyakakā a, Princeton 1991, p. 69-71.
2
See L. Rocher, The Purā as, Wiesbaden 1986, p. 8, 116-117.
3
Cf. the following statement of Frits Stall which marks in a very
general way the tendency towards reliance on literary texts in the study of
ancient India and the hermeneutical implication it has for the situation of
50 GREG BAILEY

a district manuscript or printed edition in a wholly diachronic manner,

focussing on the development of particular layers which are seen as
chronologically distinct in the overall production of what ends up
being a synoptic text. Whilst excellent results have been gained from
this, such a method of analysis is primarily positivistic and rests on a
profoundly historicist vision of text production. Not that the historical
dimension in text production should be denied, but this tendency to
over-emphasize it bespeaks in turn a difficulty in coming to terms
with the manner in which oral tradition operates. The assumption in
such reconstructions is that oral reciters work in quite predictable
ways, almost as though they were literary mechanics, and that the
changes in the composition of the text are primarily incremental.
Whilst the text-geschichtliche (as it is usually called) method
of text analysis on philosophical and Purā ic texts has produced
precise results in terms of the goals it sets itself, and whilst it has
given rise to the development of some extremely rigorous forms of
textual analysis, it does not take into consideration the pragmatic
aspects of text production and text use. It is true that the deservedly
celebrated works of Paul Hacker and his followers do seek to dem-
onstrate specific motivations behind the changes they determine in
the different historical layering of the texts they choose to study.
But these demonstrations are necessarily deductions, not
re-flections of what might have happened in an actual recitation
situation and usually they are only situated in large time periods like a

religion in relation to the Semitic religions (the so-called “religions of the

book”). In discussing the disciplines (as he calls them) of Philology, Ori-
entalism, Linguistics and Anthropology, he writes, “Above all the first two
have a historical and diachronic orientation, whilst the latter two have a
synchronic orientation. In addition the first two show a very marked
ten-dency to concentrate on texts. The Orientalists have had a tendency to
exaggerate the importance of books and to insist upon the fact that Asiatic
civilizations are civilizations of the book and that the religions of Asia were
formed around sacred books”. F. Stall, Jouer avec le feu. Pratique et théorie
du rituel védique, Paris 1990, p. 9.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY INDOLOGY 51

century, not in a much more restricted period which could be tied

down to a particular historical event. In this kind of analysis textual
change assumes a much greater significance than textual use. Recent
work by anthropologists4 has been very effective in offering schol-
arly assessments of the pragmatic usage of texts, but the implications
of this work have not yet sunk into the analytic discourse which
shapes so much of ancient Indian studies.
One can only admire the rigour with which the diachronic
analyses are undertaken by the exponents of the text-historical
method and the very easily demonstrable results they produce. Pro-
duction of results is certainly one of the principal fruits of this
method. The central characteristic of such results is that they are
clearly identifiable and are almost scientific in their precision and
potential verifiability. Usually in the analysis of literary texts one
reaches conclusions rather than results. A conclusion differs from a
result in that it is much more open-ended and leaves open the possi-
bility for considerable ambiguity. No such ambiguity appears to exist
in respect of results, because they are either right or wrong, either
because a miscalculation has occurred or because there is a fault in
the method from which the results have been derived. In saying this I
do not want to underrate the richness of the analysis contained in the
works of Paul Hacker5 and A. Bock6, just to name a few exponents of
this method of analysis.

4
See e.g. W. Sax, Ritual and Performance in the Pā avalāla of
Garhwal, [in:] A. Sharma (ed.), Essays on the Mahābhārata, Leiden 1990,
p. 274-295, esp. the bibliography on p. 295; J. Leavitt, Himalayan Varia-
tions on an Epic Theme, [in:] ibid., p. 444-474; J. B. Flueckiger and L. J.
Sear, Boundaries of the Text. Epic Performances in South and Southeast
Asia, Ann Arbor 1991.
5
In for example Prahlāda, Werden und Wandlungen einer Idealge-
stalt, Wiesbaden 1959.
6
Der Sāgara-Ga gāvatara a-Mythus in der Episch-Purā ischen
Literatur, Stuttgart 1984.
52 GREG BAILEY

Rather, in a probably totally unrelated way they almost fulfil

the Derridean dictum that il n’y a pas de texte. That is, the method of
Mehrfachüberlieferung focuses on intertextuality, though not in the
way of the deconstructionist who would look for intertextual7 codes
and subtle traces from other textual sources in order to use these as an
argument against any centralized authorship existing behind the text.
The exponents of the development of text-histories attempt to estab-
lish a clear diachronic development of text-stücke for the purpose of
demonstrating precise motivations in changes of the individual
components of the specific text-historical sequences which are cre-
ated as the dominant exemplar of this method. It may well be im-
possible to establish authorial unity for the supposed original and
later versions which collectively make up the diachronic sequence
(Hacker, in particular points out the folly of locating such an entity).
Yet the assertion that the revisions made by a Bearbeiter – the iden-
tification of which revisions is the basis of the text-historical method
– are clearly motivated to fulfil a particular aim is a view which can
easily be seen as an attempt to define authorial identity with respect to
a particular component within the diachronic sequence.
Clearly there are interpretative problems attendant upon this
intense focus on the diachronic axis of a text. The first of this is that it
results in the excision of a unified text – unified at least in the re-
ceived version as it exists at any given historical moment – into
arbitrary forms determined by the analyst who sees unity in treat-
ments of particular subjects, but does not focus on the poetics of
juxtaposition which is such a prominent generic feature of Saskrit
narrative literature. Arbitrariness in the choice of texte-stücke is
illustrative of this problem because none of them have been found as
independent texts and they do not necessarily correspond to indige-

7
We should note that the śastric, itihāsa and Purā ic texts are satu-
rated with intertextuality, a phenomenon itself which must be studied as a
generic code, not simply utilized as a mode of demonstrating awareness of
historical development across a given theme and/or historical borrowing.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY INDOLOGY 53

nous generic categories. Secondly, the construction of a precise dia-

chronic sequence is a template for the ordering of the way in which
specific subjects are treated in narrative literature. The artificiality of
such a template is surely obvious, though the changes apparent in the
individual components of the diachronic sequence, may be the re-
flection in literary form of historical innovations8. Even if we accept
the deduction that regional variation and changes in religious atti-
tudes and practices may have motivated the changes in the individual
components of the diachronic sequence, we have no way of verifying
this because the only evidence of the genuine nature of the motiva-
tions are the changes themselves.
The great value of the text-historical approach, in conjunction
with the rigour brought to bear by the application of a precise phi-
lological investigative technique, is the potentiality it offers for the
cataloguing of the kinds of changes which have been manifested in
Sanskrit narrative literature over a very long period of time. (Are
these, however, anything other than literary?) What it has also pro-
duced is an intense focus on literary sources in such a way that ren-
ders the texts into artificial creations which seem to owe more to
Western notions of order than to indigenous models of what a text
should be. Given the developments in European cultural and literary
theory during the past twenty-five years, the constructed nature of all
kinds of texts, literary or not, would not be disputed by anyone.
Similar conclusions about kāvya and subhā ita would also be reached
by reading the treatises on Sanskrit poetics. In saying this I do not
want to accuse Indologists of adopting a purely mimetic reading of
Sanskrit and Pali texts, although this has certainly happened at times9.
8
Alternatively, they may simply represent possible choices within a
framework of changes allowable in a particular genre.
9
Cf. W. Rau, Zur vedischen Altertumskunde, Wiesbaden 1983, p. 20:
“Of course the world of the celestials can only ever be considered as an
idealised image of worldly conditions. Men who, for example, present their
gods as flying through the air on war chariots, must have seen war chariots
which travel on the Earth”. This is not exactly mimesis, but the interpretative
54 GREG BAILEY

Rather I am saying that Indologists have tradition-ally become her-

meneutically trapped in the texts they have studied and have treated
the text in such a way that it becomes the sole referent for its own
study. This may sound tautologous. At its most superficial it means
the text is not accorded any cultural referent outside of itself or that
the referent is an artificial creation employed to buttress a view ap-
propriated for uses other that the analysis of the social referent of the
text itself.
Study of the internal organization of the text, or more likely
of the language in which it is composed, becomes a much more sig-
nificant component than the referential base of the contents being
expressed through it or of the generic structure which shapes these
contents in their literary form. The two former tasks are absolutely
essential for a complete understanding of the text, but in Indology the
literary text has assumed an imperialist stance as an object of inves-
tigation and has virtually been allowed to be disengaged from any
kind of anchor point it might have in historical circumstance. Indian
culture becomes entirely constructed through the text as object of
investigation rather than the text from the vantage point of the culture
as the object of investigation. Texts thus become reified entities, their
author almost a fiction and the cultural backdrop against which they
are implicitly set is also present only as a timeless fictional artefact of
the investigator’s imagination.

problems involved in deriving information about realia from mythic narra-

tives have scarcely been developed. Can we simply extract any references to
realia from these narratives without assessing their role in creating the
meaning of the myth? That is, are we entitled to translate directly from one
form of narrative (myth) into another which I would call analytic discourse
without having an awareness of the fundamental difference between the two.
Here the key words in Rau’s statement are ‘idealised image’. Is this identical
to mimesis both for the Vedic Indians and for scholars who seek to interpret
their poems?
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY INDOLOGY 55

2. The problem of studying realia and the minutiae of daily life

The great majority of published work falling under the rubric of

Classical Indology lies in the areas of religion and language, with text
criticism (in the specific sense of the establishment and verification of
particular textual readings) and history perhaps coming third and
forth. That religion should be so important is not surprising given the
explicit content of so many of the texts which are studied and because
of the implicit religious foundations of dharma which pervades so
much of the contents of these texts. Nonetheless, it is likely that
Indologists have concentrated too much on religion and have unwit-
tingly or not created an impression that Indian culture is above all
dominated by a religious sensibility as the defining characteristic of
the culture.
Further, there is a danger that in focusing on the “super-
structure”, to use Marxist terminology, we are omitting from our
analysis those aspects of life which, whilst they might be quite un-
spectacular, are nevertheless that with which we are in contact most
of the time. In this regard the words of the American political com-
mentator Daniel Bell are pivotal:

The structures of power may change quickly… Yet such dramatic

overturns are largely a circulation of elites. Societal structures
change much more slowly, especially habits, customs, and estab-
lished traditional ways. Our fascination with the apocalypse blinds
us to the mundane: the relations of exchange, economic and social:
the character of work and occupations; the nature of family life; and
the traditional modes of conduct which regulate everyday life… If
the intention of any science is to show us the structures of reality
underlying appearances, then we have to understand that the
time-dimensions of social change are much slower, and the proc-
56 GREG BAILEY

esses more complex than the dramaturgic mode of the apocalyptic

vision, religious or revolutionary, would have us believe.10

Indologists have tended to study the spectacular (the śrauta sacrifice,

the most sophisticated Buddhist and Vedantic metaphysics) or the
most ancient (the Veda-s, especially gveda), whilst leaving aside the
mundane either as beyond definition, self-explanatory or too difficult
to locate. Even before one begins an analysis of primary sources for
what they might reveal about daily life, there is a problem in deter-
mining the nature of the precise entity to which the words “daily life”
refer. Certainly it cannot be assumed that the nature of such a cate-
gory is at all self evident. More so, the difficulty of dealing with a
concept like “daily life” is that it is around us all the time. It is the
normal, the routine, the customary, the insipid, the flat. It is so close
to us that we simply assume its presence as a given – but also as an
implicit hermeneutic – so that we ignore it in studying cultures other
than our own and including our own. Does this mean that the subjects
of other cultures we study also saw daily life in the same way? Did
they seek to express in literature that which was abnormal and sen-
sational to them, whatever attracted interest and would not be over-
looked because it embodied all that will be familiar and accepted as
the given of life? If so, it will be extremely difficult to reconstruct
daily life both as an object of investigation and the natives’ concep-
tualizations of it. Similar words have been written in respect of an-
other equally important notion, that of “common sense”, which, like
daily life, is also a culturally constructed phenomenon for those
analysts who would seek to uncover it as just another cultural layer
making up a composite picture of culture. Clifford Geertz is very
insightful here:

10
D. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, London 1976,
p. 8.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY INDOLOGY 57

There are a number of reasons why treating common sense as a

relatively organized body of considered thought, rather than just
what anyone clothed and in his right mind knows, should lead on to
some useful conclusions: but perhaps the most important is that it is
an inherent characteristic of common-sense thought precisely to
deny this and to affirm that its tenets are immediate experiences of
deliverance, not deliberate reflections upon it… Religion rests its
case on revelation, science on method, ideology on moral passion;
but common sense rests its on the assertion that it is not a case at all,
just life in a nutshell. The world is its authority.11

Common sense and daily life can both be conceptualized as objects of

scholarly study and whilst the referents of what these terms designate
are present in all cultures, they may not be conceptualized as such. As
objects of scholarly study the former is certainly more conducive to
comprehension as an intellectual entity than the latter, but neither are
easy to demarcate in an analytical manner which would easily fa-
cilitate their study.
As one illustration of the problem of dealing with this subject
I would like to cite a short article by R. Salomon12. When investi-
gating “daily life” in Mathurā, he categorizes the treatment of his
material in terms of “dress and ornaments”, “vocations”, “buildings
and houses”, “food and drink”, “sports, games and entertainments”,
“utensils and furniture” and “transportation”. No definition of “daily
life” is given, but the content of what this might be is implight in the
categories he uses to classify the material which he has extracted
from the primary sources. The immediate question one might ask
about this classification concerns what it excludes from its ambit. We
see very little about religion, bureaucracy, politics, the military, Law,
education or anything much to do with intellectual life. Daily life is

11
C. Geertz, Common Sense as a Cultural System, [in:] Knowledge,
New York 1983, p. 75.
12
R. Salomon, Daily Life in Ancient Mathurā, [in:] M. Srinivasan
(ed.), Mathurā. The Cultural Heritage, Delhi 1989, p. 38-45.
58 GREG BAILEY

then implicitly defined as constituting material things, anything by

which a person defines himself/herself externally. It can include the
long term interests of a person or community to the extent that it
encompasses the kinds of occupations listed as those performed by
the inhabitants of Mathurā. Yet there remains a yawning gap between
this materiality of the town and the individual meanings which its
inhabitants attached to these material objects. The latter is seemingly
permanently lost to us.
Salomon himself does seem to be aware of the inconsistency
between an arbitrary division into the duality I suggested in the pre-
vious words, though this awareness remains largely implicit. In the
conclusion of his article he writes:

On the one hand, religious concerns clearly predominate in the

sculptural and epigraphic remains, and an air of spirituality and
piety pervades these relics; on the other hand, there is, simultane-
ously, a sense of worldly, sensual delight in life which somehow
co-exists harmoniously with the supposedly austere Buddha and
Jaina faiths. The people of ancient Mathura led a prosperous,
cosmopolitan, and sophisticated existence, while at the same time
keeping in mind the higher values of the spiritual life… The
seeming contradiction posed by this juxtaposition has puzzled and
disturbed some scholars; but perhaps it should be taken, not as a
contradiction, but rather as the expression of a culture which was
able to reconcile and harmonize all the different phases and styles
of human life.13

These very measured words are an accurate description of the cate-

gories into which pluralistic cultures over most of the world can be
divided from one particular perspective. Yet the bifurcation into
physical/spiritual, lower/higher values and material/intellectual which
they imply is too clear cut and precise to define the richness of the
cultural system of any society. Assertion of discrete levels such as

13
R. Salomon, op. cit., p. 44.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY INDOLOGY 59

this is often quite arbitrary as most cultural agents can easily shift
from one to the other without, for all that, recognizing a change in
levels. More significantly it may reflect both a Western (and, sub-
sequently, an attitude adopted by neo-Hindu swamis in the twentieth
century) distinction between the secular and the sacred and an In-
dologically constructed hermeneutic which assigns intellectual and
spiritual matters to texts and material and daily concerns to ar-
chaeological and inscriptional data. The massive intellectual systems
which Indologists have reconstructed from the literary sources seem
to defy correlation with the very fragmentary portrayals which derive
from those studies concerned with daily life. De-spite our abundance
of knowledge about the intellectual life of the ancient Indians14, can
we yet say anything about a concept so fundamental for their daily
life and their day to day behaviour as a concept of common sense15?
Cultural history, which here means history of the changes in
both material and intellectual culture, is only a scholarly development

14
But can we be at all confident about our knowledge of intellectual
life as opposed to intellectual speculations and expositions of intellectual
subjects if we know so little about the people in whom this intellectual
material was established and what part it played in their daily life. For
example, the Upani ads have assumed a very considerable significance both
in the West and India as documents having a strong intellectual content, but
did they ever have any bearing on what a person did from day to day in the
pragmatic areas of life? These are the kinds of problems we are going to
have to be able to resolve if we are ever to achieve a comprehensive
knowledge of ancient Indian life.
15
This may not be a good example, for although common sense as an
abstract element existing as part of the common intellectual stock of any
culture is fundamental to the way people behave in their daily lives, it is
notoriously difficult to pin down even in contemporary Western cultures
where is such a surfeit of data about these things. A more prosaic example
might be the attitudes ancient Indians held towards work, how they
con-ducted themselves at meals or what kind of conversations they had
during the day, i.e. what was the nature of their daily discourse?
60 GREG BAILEY

of the last century. Like so many of the modern academic disciplines,

it is simply a way of giving coherence to data deriving from events
which we have not directly witnessed. Even today in newspapers and
on television, most of the cultural history data only appears inciden-
tally to other material. The difference now is that we are flooded with
so much material, including scientific reports on material culture, that
availability of knowledge about it is much freer than it was in the
classical civilizations.

3. Conclusion

Indology has reached a point in terms both of its achievement of

theoretical development and the production of raw data at which
fundamental stock taking has to be undertaken. It is true that the raw
data which has been produced over the last two hundred years is but a
small portion of the mass of ever expanding data which will have to
be comprehended if the richness of ancient and medieval Indian
culture at all levels is to be fully appreciated. Of course, no culture
can ever be fully comprehended, if only because culture as an object
of investigation in the Humanities and Social Sciences has no limits
other than the arbitrary ones set by scholars in order to provide a
framework for their scholarly investigation. Any culture goes beyond
the artefacts through which it manifests itself and which it simulta-
neously shapes. However, when the artefacts, such as texts of all
kind, become disengaged from the culture and when their referent
almost becomes an imaginary thing, an important dimension of
analysis of both the text itself and the culture is in danger of being
lost. The intense immersion of so many Indological scholars in liter-
ary texts runs the risk of producing a substantial body of scholarly
work in which the cultural dimension of the text may be lost. Texts
are cultural products and if we are fully to understand them we must
do so in the context of the shifting forces of cultural life in which they
are produced. Not only does this require us to focus on the intellectual
levels of culture, of which we have such an abundance in ancient
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY INDOLOGY 61

India, it also compels us to tap into the rich fabric of daily life because
traces of this will always be left within the texts which are so crucial
to the reconstruction of the culture from which they have originally
come.

***
The text was published in Cracow Indological Studies 1995, vol. 1, ed. by
C. Galewicz, Kraków.
Cracow Indological Studies
vol. X (2008)

Greg Bailey
(La Trobe University, Melbourne)

The fundamental problems

of contemporary Indology
Addenda

It is no longer appropriate to submit the two basic theses of my

original article of 1995 as a valid assessment of the fundamental
problems still facing Indology. Whilst the problems canvassed there
had begun to be addressed even at the time that article was originally
written I did not realize the extent to which the changes in the nature
of higher education and the production of intellectual culture that had
developed so quickly in the Anglo-Saxon world since the early
eighties would move equally rapidly into Europe. These changes
have proven to be inimical to the retention of every area of classical
scholarship. And whilst I stand by what I said in the original article, it
is these changes to the larger context that will require us as scholars,
deeply committed to traditional Indology as an academic practice, to
find strategies for continuing the vibrancy of the field1. Thus what
follows relates (1) to the changes in the way educational institutions
now function; and (2) to specific suggestions about how a philol-
ogical enterprise should conduct itself within the limits of its disci-
plinary practices established over the past two centuries and in the

1
The International Association of Sanskrit Studies has already
committed itself to doing this in other ways.
64 GREG BAILEY

face of on-going critiques of the relevance of these practices in a

widely transformed system of higher education giving rise to new
paradigms in the study of Asian cultures.
There are, therefore, two contrasting concerns here: firstly, an
explanation of the conditions that will enable the survival of Indology
into the future; secondly, what the intellectual/scholarly tasks of
Indology, as a philological discipline, should be now? Given this
perspective, responding to the second question is dependent upon an
answer to the first, because Indology’s survival is dependent upon its
practitioners recognizing the new intellectual conditions pervading
the academy and the changes required for the relevance of all disci-
plines dealing with classical and pre-modern civilizations. It is true
that certain universities will maintain positions in Sanskrit as a kind
of luxury and as a sign that they take seriously the cultural depth
associated with classical studies in general, but most will not and
have not.
I want to stress four points as factors influencing the way
Indology will be treated as an area of academic relevance in the
institutional environment that has emerged in the eighties and be-
yond.
1) The desire of governments in first world, especially An-
glo-Saxon, cultures to redefine tertiary education simply as an in-
strument for the advancement of the economy, with the tacit under-
standing that the economy now encompasses society, government
and culture. Consequent upon this is the expectation that studies of
‘alien’ cultures must produce results that can be quantifiable, inno-
vative and marketable. Knowledge, really now just data and infor-
mation, must be available to be packaged so that whatever its source
it can be applied to contemporary economic problems. A justification
that the study of the past is sufficient because of what it tells us about
the past or because it can be considered a mirror of the present and
may prevent us from making past mistakes is no longer sufficient.
Now the past is relevant only to the extent of being a commodity that
can be consumed by tourists or those directly curious about exotic
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY INDOLOGY. ADDENDA 65

worlds and who are prepared to pay to learn about these if they are
packaged in the right way.
From the early to the mid-nineteenth century the British,
French and Dutch seem initially to have been interested in Indian
Studies because of the strong colonial links they had with India and
other Indianized cultures of South-East Asia. Given that they had
colonized these countries before modernization had crystallized into
an ideology, they took seriously the traditional cultural basis of these
countries, especially since the elites, with whom they were required
to deal, still appeared to operate within traditional values and because
in situations of political importance they surrounded themselves with
traditional symbols everywhere. When decolonisation occurred in the
mid-forties and beyond and symbols of modernization were super-
imposed upon those of traditionality, the prime reason to study the
traditional cultures was no longer relevant as this was no longer
deemed to be of economic or political value as it had been before.
In the present environment of changed economic relations
between first and third world countries all that is deemed worthy of
study is the contemporary cultural environment of alien cultures and
that conviction forms the new foundation for dealing with India and
other de-colonized states. Certainly this could not be said to be a
relationship of equals, but it is one of greater autonomy between the
colonizing state and the contemporary post-colonial state, even where
the hangover of colonialism would still be strongly present. Even
with this changed dispensation trade is still fundamental. Previously
the colonized country was the supplier of raw materials and the re-
cipient of them when processed. Now it is the supplier of processed
goods at a cheap price for the colonized country and a site for the
‘exoticism’ Western culture lacked in consequence of the artificial
rationalism being imposed upon it by the exponents of the free market
economy and the bureaucratic base, involving consultants and fi-
nancial specialists, this has spawned.
Language expertise had always been the foundation of In-
dological studies, but where focus is placed only on the modern
66 GREG BAILEY

culture, and that only for its utilitarian value, language tends to be
down-graded, and then tolerated only if it has a realisable financial
value. If employers want to deal with vernacular sources, it is cheaper
for them to employ a bi-lingual native speaker than to wait for a
graduate who has spent years studying the language as an alien lan-
guage. Sanskrit or classical Tamil has no value in this regard as nei-
ther is a vernacular and cannot, therefore, be used for communicative
purposes.
2) The perceived rise of India as a powerhouse economy.
Since the liberalization of the Indian economy in the early nineties its
growth rate has become comparable with China’s and this has been
widely publicized. Additionally, the Indian economy has become
highly visible as a consequence of globalization, with many Indian
nationals occupying prominent positions in European and American
merchant banks and IT companies, and the consequent importance of
Bangalore as a centre for IT research and international call centres.
Investors have suddenly become attracted to India just as they
were to China in the early seventies and this has led to increasing
exposure of South Asia in the popular media, especially since 2000.
To this one can add the interest that new forms of cricket popularised
in India, the ongoing spread of Bollywood outside of India and, now,
the increasing attention being given to terrorist acts in India and
Pakistan. What has resulted is a new and simplified image of India
being taken up in the West, despite the attempts of Western aca-
demics to argue a case for a more complex and culturally rich image.
This is an image that has not exactly been discouraged by the Indian
government and Indian media outlets as they have increasingly
sought to project their desire for India to be seen as a new emerging
world power.
3) The influence of diaspora Indians in endowing new chairs
and therefore in determining the direction of Indian studies. This has
gone hand in hand with many diaspora Indians in North America
actively studying traditional India and Hinduism. It is a trend that has
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY INDOLOGY. ADDENDA 67

been especially prominent amongst the second generation of Indian

students in contrast to the first generation who tend to study in areas
such as medicine and business related areas that will attract large
incomes. Although some of these second generation Indians have
opted to study Indology in its classical mode, most have found their
place in English and History departments and have turned their ef-
forts to interrogating the ‘scholarly discourses’ applied by Indologists
and colonial scholars to the shaping of images of Indian culture that
were communicated both in India and Europe. These efforts have
been designed to fashion an image of contemporary India (since
about 1850) separated from the imposition of a colonial epistemo-
logical framework, an image that is seen as being a counter view of
what has been produced from a study of Sanskrit sources. Sub-
alternists and post-colonialists 2 , working from the same scholarly
paradigm, have not applied their methodologies to pre-1800 India,
but the effect of their influence and net-working has been to focus
resources on colonial/modern India to the detriment of pre-modern
India.
This has fed into the educational agenda of Hindu nationalists
in North America and India who have sought to create the conditions
in Western universities for the advancement of a view of Hindu
culture purged of all the distortions resulting from epistemological
paradigms associated with Western and Sanskritic scholarship. Evi-
dence of this need not be listed here but the debates raged on the
Indology net up until April 2001 when it became a moderated list, in
the California text book controversy, in the rapid development of the
Hindu Students‘ Council in American universities, and in India since
1990 with the attacks on scholars who taught ancient Indian culture
from the traditional Indological perspective. Hinduism had to be

2
For an excellent exposure of the ideological biases of these ap-
proaches to Indian Studies see David White, “Digging Wells While Houses
Burn? Writing Histories of Hinduism in a Time of Identity Politics”, History
and Theory, Theme Issue 45, 45/4 (2006), p. 104-31.
68 GREG BAILEY

taught from a Hindu perspective, some form of neo-Vedanta, to the

neglect of other non-religious aspects of the culture(s).
4) The adoption of the values of the market in this manner has
led directly to the loss of many positions in classical Indology, by
which I mean positions entailing a high degree of language compe-
tence and training in text-critical methodologies. Often when these
positions have been lost they have either been frozen completely or
replaced by posts where the focus is on some area of modern India.
Reflecting a tendency to downgrade philology as a form of reading
and replacing this with various post-modern techniques where the
foundations of different reading techniques are constantly being
interrogated without the primary sources themselves being studied,
Indology with its emphasis on text production is regarded as an ar-
chaic dinosaur.
Apart from those positions that do survive in the larger pri-
vate universities or endowed chairs, it is a salutary fact that students
trained in the traditional form of Indology continue to find jobs in
Religious Studies. This is certainly a welcome development, but it is
not entirely without cost, given that these posts focus more on the
teaching of religion within Indian culture than they do on other as-
pects of Indian culture. In the face of this emphasis, those who teach
in them can really only be part-time Indologists on the assumption
that language teaching and the imparting of methods to read texts will
come only after instruction in the teaching of religion. Apart from the
diminution of language study, a serious consequence of this will be
the continued over-emphasis on religion in the study of traditional
India3.

3
See my short notice, “The Exaggeration of Religion in the Study of
Ancient India”, Review, Asian Studies Association of Australia, 19/3 (April,
1996), p. 62-65.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY INDOLOGY. ADDENDA 69

Improvements

Since this article was first published in 1995, the problems I outlined
there about the fossilization of texts and the need to focus on daily life
have begun to be addressed. Indologists are now more aware of the
benefits ethnographic fieldwork can bring to their own predominantly
textual work as well as to what can be derived from the application of
results drawn from ethnographic history. Of course, the textual
sources at our disposal are often highly opaque in this regard and will
always have to be read within the context of the increasing amount of
data being made available by archaeologists. This is not to say that we
should use archaeology and texts to confirm each others’ results, but
that both can be seen as offering different forms of contextualization
to similar kinds of data.
The inspiring work of Gregory Schopen on Buddhist mo-
nasticism and the more pragmatic aspects of Buddhist monkish and
institutional (monastic) practice is certainly an example of what can
be achieved here. Though there is considerable use made of inscrip-
tions in his work, his articles are still fundamentally concerned with
texts, especially the Vinaya of the Mūlasarvāstivādins4 . His work
definitely shows that religious texts can be used to derive information
about social, economic and political history in a manner that goes
beyond a simple listing of references to aspects of culture sometimes
arbitrarily defined in these terms. Equally important are the implica-
tions deriving from the ground-breaking archaeological work of Julia
Shaw on Sanchi, as important for what they tell us about the local-
ization5 and dramatic expansion of the sa gha as well as for its suc-
4
Gregory Schopen, Bones, stones and Buddhist monks: collected
papers on the archaeology, epigraphy, and texts of monastic Buddhism in
India, Honolulu 1997; Buddhist monks and business matters: still more
papers on monastic Buddhism in India, Honolulu 2004.
5
Julia Shaw and John Sutcliffe, “Ancient Dams and Buddhist
Landscapes in the Sanchi area: New evidence on Irrigation, Land use and
Monasticism in Central India”, South Asian Studies, 21 (2005), p. 1-24. Julia
70 GREG BAILEY

cessful immersion into daily life-supplying of irrigation dams and

channels, the sa gha as an employer and a source of demand for food
and other services produced by lay and non-Buddhists. This kind of
work inspires us to think about the likely implications this activity
would have for some groups of brahmanical elites who saw it as a
threat. Even if the archaeological work focuses on very specific areas,
on the one hand, and much of the literature is explicitly univer-
sal/pan-Indian in its outlook, on the other hand, the micro-context can
compel us to look for localized aspects of the texts operating within a
pan-Indian frame.
One of the lessons that the work of Gregory Schopen and
archaeologists such as Julia Shaw has taught us is that the study of
non-literary religious texts such as vihāra-s, stūpa-s and the inscrip-
tions associated with these, as well as literary texts most favoured by
Indologists, can teach us much about social, economic and political
history. We are able to use what might superficially appear primarily
to be religious sources to go far beyond this into other areas of the
culture(s).
From a different perspective, the advances in contextualizing
the two Sanskrit epics have been highly positive in taking them be-
yond the level where they were primarily regarded as texts locked
into a particular time frame and disengaged from their greater con-
text. It is not by chance that the production of critical editions of both
epics has resulted in them being moved far beyond the status of
archaic mirrors of past cultures whose influence is now definitively
completed, to be regarded as dynamic texts whose contribution con-
tinues into the rich manuscript traditions to which they have given
rise and the oral traditions associated with these. Here I refer espe-

Shaw, The Archeological Setting of Buddhist Monasteries in Central India:

a Summary of Multi-Phase Survey in the Sanchi Area, 1998-2000, [in:] C.
Jarrige and V. Lefevre, South Asian Archeology 2001, Paris 2005, vol. 2, p.
666-676. Also important here is Lars Fogelin, Archeology of Early Bud-
dhism, Lanham 2006.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY INDOLOGY. ADDENDA 71

cially to the introductions to the translations of the Princeton Rāmā-

ya a, produced since 1984 under the general editorship of Robert
Goldman, and the extensive use of the medieval commentators in
these translations, showing how much alive the text continued to be in
the Sanskrit scholastic tradition long after its initial composition.
Equally Jim Fitzgerald‘s important introduction to his translation of
the first part of the twelfth book of the Mahabharata is a landmark in
attempting to tie the text down into a quite specific historical period
(2nd BC until the beginning of the common era), and especially in
placing it within the context of a set of new ‘civic’ discourses about
the meaning of dharma and the ownership of it as a centralizing
concept in a newly emerging Hindu culture encompassing, theoreti-
cally at least, all other spheres of culture6.
Finally, two general sources for the study of Hinduism go a
considerable way towards bringing about a reconciliation between
ethnography and the philological reading of texts. The Hindu World7
contains a selection of articles that relies on Sanskrit sources and
historical ethnography, enabling the literary texts to be cast into a
much wider ambit than they have been in the past. The same can also
be said for The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism8.

Conclusion

When one is in the midst of a stream of rapid institutional and cultural

changes, many of them considered negative, one always hopes to
have reached the nadir. This implies there will be an upside, though to
place a timeline on this is difficult in the extreme. Assuming this, two
questions may be put: Will Indology survive in its present form; and,

6
J. L. Fitzgerald, The Mahābhārata. 11. The Book of the Women, 12.
The Book of Peace, Part One, Chicago 2004, p. 79-164.
7
S. Mittal and G. Thursby (eds.), The Hindu World, London 2004.
8
G. Flood (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, Oxford
2003.
72 GREG BAILEY

is there something to be done about the way the practitioners of this

field of study see what they are doing now and should do soon? In
short can Indologists be sufficiently adaptive to the new environment
to ensure the survival of their field of expertise? From an institutional
perspective Indology has already begun to do this by hitching itself to
Religious Studies. Not that this is absolutely satisfactory, but it is one
survival technique. Another possibility is for classically trained
scholars to learn a modern language sufficiently well to enable them
to teach modern Indian history, politics or political/economy, whilst
still focussing their research interests on Sanskrit/Tamil sources.
The other side of the Hindu Nationalist emphasis on resur-
recting the past from their ideological perspective is, at least, within
India itself a revived interest in traditional India. I have no doubt this
will fulfil a desire in one section of the Indian population who see the
strength of their traditional culture as a bulwark against the onset of
globalization in the economy, at least as this applies to the emerging
elite who have benefited from the growth of the Indian economy. In
most countries globalization has directly benefited a new class of
managers/technologists/consultants, but politically and culturally it
has also buttressed new forms of nationalism arising in the eighties on
the basis of earlier movements. Witness the success of the Durdar-
shan versions of the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāya a in the late
eighties and the widespread use of the electronic medium as a means
of propagating traditional religious values. A danger here will be that
such research will be ideologically motivated to meet the require-
ments of nationalists agendas, where archaeology could be used to
prove the truth of ‘traditional histories’ and philosophy to demon-
strate the closeness between Hindu philosophical thought and modern
science. Neither fits the goals of Indology as we know them.
What this means is that the interest in traditional India, the
principal area of classical Indology, still attracts interests in certain
constituencies: Indian nationals in India, diaspora Indians, sections of
populations where Buddhism is one of the major religions, and
amongst small sections of Westerner still attracted to the exotic as-
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY INDOLOGY. ADDENDA 73

pects of Indian religion (and especially of Tibetan Buddhism). In-

dologists can feed this interest and offer answers to the questions such
constituencies might ask, and they can do this without violating their
main sources of methodological and philological rigour. How this
will feed into the maintenance in present positions and the develop-
ment of new positions in universities, I cannot say. At least, however,
it provides a basis for future development.