Philological and Other Methodological Issues
This book does not wish to make assertions about a unified Hinduism stretching
into the ancient past; the general thrust of scholarship goes against this. But it
does, in its structure, make implicit claims about the centrality and importance
of textual traditions and their exegesis that have led to the modern religion,
along with the importance of fieldwork. Although some theologians might
argue that texts are self-generating and contain their own developmental logic
- and it is true that we can trace a meaningful history through texts – they are
nevertheless social documents and indices of the communities who produced
them. The historian of South Asian religion or Indologist is sometimes able to
relate religious texts to other historical documents such as epigraphs, but so
often in the Indian context all we have are the texts themselves of uncertain date,
although we can often establish a chronology of texts. The study of textual tra-
ditions, however, is not straightforward and is inevitably embroiled in a politics
of translation.
Comparative philology and its offshoot Indology, the philological study of
South Asian languages, notably Sanskrit, developed in the nineteenth century
and was strongly advocated as a science akin to the natural sciences by Max
Müller. It claims that the philological method discovers an objective order that
is not constructed (Inden 1990: 14). In recent years this proclaimed objectivity
of philology has come under scrutiny and postcolonial critiques have argued
that it is strongly implicated in colonization, as a European colonization of
India’s languages. Linguistic typologies identified languages with different stages
of cultural development and so were able “to inferiorize the languages (and
by implication the cultures) of the Other” (Inden 1990: 60). But if we take
philology to be the “study of civilization based on its texts” (Witzel 1997: v) then
clearly philology is indispensable in any intellectual inquiry into the past. While
philology has no doubt been put to different uses, sometimes morally dubious
uses, the enterprise itself subject to constant correction, forms the basis of
inquiry. In some sense philology is a temporary suspension of subjectivity in
highlighting grammar, or perhaps a better way of putting this is to say that sub-
jective (or indeed collective) understandings are constrained by the system of
grammar.
There are deeply interesting problems here that go beyond the scope of this
introduction, but let us briefly look at a cluster of issues as they relate to the
enterprise of this book, as so many of these essays assume the philological
method which is used to establish historical sequence (for example, Colas,
Olivelle, Witzel) and as the basis of theological inquiry (Clooney). One of the
central activities of philology is the establishing of the critical edition through
critical emendation and establishing the stemma as the foundation upon which
other kinds of investigation can take place. But the establishing of the text
inevitably raises questions about authenticity – is the oldest version necessarily
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