1994 GONDA LECTURE BY RICHARD W. LARIVIERE

PROTESTANTS, ORIENTALISTS, AND BRAHMANAS: RECONSTRUCTING
INDIAN SOCIAL HISTORY

Indologists have strayed from the hard-core, philological work
necessary to reconstruct what ancient Indian society must have
been like. This was the main argument in the second Gonda
Lecture, held on November 4, 1994, by Richard W. Lariviere,
Ralph B. Thomas Regents Professor of Asian Studies at
University of Texas at Austin.

By G.W. Muller 

Recently severe criticisms have been levelled to philologists
who have chosen to study India. Western indologists have been
accused of having 'created' to some extent the India that they
study. There is no doubt that this 'created India' has no
basis in reality and has been formed to serve a constellation
of interests, all of which benefit Westerners and are inimical
to the Indians. A second reproach is that they have created
'essences' of India and Indian society. In doing so, they have
again denied the reality of what India was and is, and have
developed a manageable but grossly distorted view of India.
Finally Western indologists are supposed to have warped ideas
found in Indian culture and have used them with nefarious
intent elsewhere.
Lariviere argues that each of these three types of criticism
-- the orientalist, the essentialist, and the distortionist
criticism - has some degree of merit. And in his view there is
a fairly straightforward answer to them: in most cases where
there is merit in the criticisms, it is due to the fact that
indologists have strayed from the sort of hard-core,
philological work that is necessary to reconstruct what
ancient Indian society must have been like.

In Lariviere's view, for instance, for far too long scholars
have been attempting to reconstruct Indian social history
using dharmaþþstras (handbooks of law and custom) without
having edited the texts critically. A clear example of this
situation is the Manusmrti, the most important of the metrical
smrtis because of its wide acceptance both geographically and
chronologically (smrti is another name of s'þstra). This text
has never been properly edited. Every edition is based either
on a single manuscript or on a random collection of
manuscripts corrected by an 'editor'. Yet it has been
translated into many languages.

Of course, it is valid to ask what we might learn from editing
such texts as the Manusmrti critically. First and foremost, it
is the only hope we have of ever being able to establish
anything like a reliable chronology of these texts. Chronology
is the first step in giving back these texts a context.
Without knowing the context we can never use the texts in
order to find evidence about the evolution of society and
social concerns in classical India.

It could be argued that to rely on these texts for evidence of
Indian social norms is to acquiesce to brahminical distortion
and deliberate deception. Lariviere's response to these
criticisms is that the sort of scientific, detailed
philological study necessary to prepare critical editions is
just the sort of work that is required to find the voice of
subordinates, i.e. those elements of society who were not able
to preserve their concerns and values as well as the brahmanas
did.

G.W. Muller is the secretary of the J. Gonda Foundation