264 agathe keller
Th us there was a discrepancy between Th ibaut’s statements concerning his
methodology and his philological practice.
Th ibaut’s conception of the Sanskrit scholarly tradition and texts is also
contradictory. He alternates between a vision of a homogeneous and a
historical Indian society and culture and the subtleties demanded by the
philological study of Sanskrit texts.
In 1884, as Principal of Benares Sanskrit College (a position to which he
had been appointed in 1879), Th ibaut entered a heated debate with Bapu
Pramadadas Mitra, one of the Sanskrit tutors of the college, on the ques-
tion of the methodology of scholarly Sanskrit pandits. Always respectful to
the pandits who helped him in his work, Th ibaut always mentioned their
contributions in his publications. Nonetheless, Th ibaut openly advocated a
‘Europeanization’ of Sanskrit studies in Benares and sparked a controversy
about the need for pandits to learn English and the history of linguistics
and literature. Th ibaut despaired of an absence of historical perspective in
pandits’ reasonings – an absence which led them oft en to be too reverent
towards the past. 22 I n d e e d , h e o ft en criticized commentators for reading
their own methods and practices into the text, regardless of the treatises’
original intentions. His concern for history then ought to have led him to
consider the different mathematical and astronomical texts as evidence of
an evolution.
However, although he was a promoter of history, this did not prevent him
from making his own sweeping generalizations on all the texts of the Hindu
tradition in astronomy and mathematics. He writes in the introduction of
the Pañcasiddhānta :
these works [astronomical treatises by Brahmagupta and Bhāskarācarya] claim
for themselves direct or derived infallibility, propound their doctrines in a calmly
dogmatic tone, and either pay no attention whatever to views diverging from their
own or else refer to such only occasionally, and mostly in the tone of contemptuous
depreciation.^23
Th rough his belief in a contemptuous arrogance on the part of the
writers, Th ibaut implicitly denies the treatises any claim for reasonable
mathematical justifi cations, as we will see later. Th ibaut attributed part of
the clumsiness which he criticized to their old age:22 See Dalmia 1996 : 328–30.
23 Th ibaut 1888 : vii. I am setting aside here the fact that he argues in this introduction for a Greek
origin of Indian astronomy. Th e square brackets indicate the present author’s addenda for the
sake of clarity.