Inden’s polemic leads him to distort Renou’s statements. When Renou speaks
of the Indian mind, he means the Indian mind as expressed in Vedic texts, a con-
tinuous and highly specific tradition to which certain general characteristics
might fairly be attributed. Renou goes on to say that there is a tendency in the
ritual texts to build up complex structures from simpler elements, that they are
sometimes intellectual exercises – “we must not regard them as consisting
entirely of accounts of actual religious practice” (Renou 1968: 30). Renou’s
account of Vedism to my mind is sympathetic and luminous. As Renou says, “Of
religious feeling and community life in the Vedic period we can know virtually
nothing” (Renou 1968: 44). But he gives us a description of a present-day per-
formance of a Vedic sacrifice, ending with the following comment on ancient
times: “In those distant days India had a feeling for liturgy comparable to that
of the Roman Church” (Renou 1968: 35). We might also note Renou’s remark
that “the prose-style of the S ́atapatha [the largest of the sacrificial texts] is a
model of skilful articulation, and in its severe purity reminds us of Plato” (Renou
1968: 45). In another essay on Vedic studies Renou notes that “Indian scholars
have come relatively late to these studies. It may be that an excess of attachment
(very respectable in itself) to the tradition has prevented them from considering
the Veda with eyes sufficiently objective, with the same ‘indifference’ with which
a naturalist studies a plant” (Renou 1950: 46).^1
Not only did Renou devote his life to the objective study of Sanskrit and the
Veda, more than most Sanskritists he took the large view, giving an accurate
account of the whole scope of classical Indian civilization in the two volumes of
L’Inde Classiquewhich he edited with Jean Filliozat, writing much of it himself.
To say that Renou attributed “dreaming irrationality” to the Indian mind is false.
As his pupil Malamoud wrote in the preface to a posthumous collection of
Renou’s essays, L’Inde Fondamentale, Renou described an India that was rigorous
and cheerful, animated by a powerful ardor for speculation, directed to the intre-
pid analysis of language rather than to rumination on the ineffable (Malamoud
1978: 1).
Renou had no conceivable imperial designs on India. Nor did Georg Bühler
(1837–98), the Sanskritist’s Sanskritist of the second half of the nineteenth
century, who worked for the Raj’s Bombay Presidency. This Austrian scholar had
the reputation of having read everything extant in Sanskrit; and conceived and
edited the Encyclopedia of Indo-Aryan Research, contributed to by Indologists from
all over the world. Renou and Bühler are prime examples of the mastery sought
by all scholars, the lordship of understanding that is as complete as possible.
British Orientalists had the same ambitions, of understanding through firsthand
knowledge. Mill and Hegel, on the other hand, claimed universal dominion for
their ideas without any firsthand knowledge of India or Indian languages – this
is the difference between scholars and philosophers.
On the other hand, it is certainly true that the understanding of many
Sanskritists was limited to their particular texts, and that some had little or no
sympathy for modern India. Thus for Garbe, who visited India in 1885/6, the
worship of the common Hindu was a worthless fetishism, and he confessed to
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