UNITED STATES, September 4, 2015 (Open by Murali Balaji): In 1855, German Indologist Albrecht Weber wrote to the Prussian minister of culture on the benefits of continued investment in the study of classical Indian traditions, arguing that only he and his brethren could shed light on what was previously “dark” to the rest of the world. By studying the Vedas, Weber argued, Germans could help liberate Indians from their uncivilized way of being. He wrote: “The entire weight of the religious and cultural structure of contemporary India appears to rest on the Vedas. As soon as they are unveiled from the mysterious darkness surrounding them till now, and made accessible to all, all the untruths shall be automatically revealed, and this shall, in time, put an end to the sorry plight of religious decadence in India.”
Beyond the hostility towards Indian ways of thinking and their inherent presumption that Indian classical texts were wrongs that could only be righted by them, the German Indologists of the 19th and early 20th century defined Indian philosophy as simply incapable of being viewed as living traditions. To Weber, Adolph Holtzmann Jr. and many like them, Indian–primarily Hindu–philosophy was to be treated as a (corrupted) relic of the past, devoid of its humanistic value and stripped of its praxis in daily life, and only they–not Indians–could authenticate it. As Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee argue, “German Indologists… had accomplished something Jesuit missionaries over generations had struggled to do: they had found a way to make Hindu theology–at least from the perspective of those who were always already saved–redundant.”
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