Indology

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Indology is a humanities discipline that deals with the description and explanation of the languages, cultures and history of the Indian cultural area. The starting point of modern European Indology in the 18th century was, inspired in Germany by Romanticism , studying and translating the classical Sanskrit texts .

The field of ancient and central Indian languages ​​was expanded to include modern Indian national languages ​​and their literatures after the Second World War . In some cases, a new understanding in recent years under the term South Asian Studies has been aimed at an application-oriented auxiliary discipline.

Linguistic sources

The most important source languages ​​of ancient and pre-modern Indian culture and history are the language of Veda ( Vedic ), (classical) Sanskrit and Central Indian idioms, the so-called Prakrits , (especially Pali ) and Tamil . Using the primary methods of historical-critical philology , Indology explores systematic sub-areas of the Indian cultural area, especially Indian intellectual and cultural history, and tries to enable a universal historical assessment of India through objective data collection.

Sub-disciplines of Indology

The Indian sub- disciplines include political history , languages , literatures , philosophy , medicine , rituals , religions , art and law of the Indian subcontinent . In order to be able to understand and interpret the texts in their contemporary sense, Indology has to work intra-disciplinary, that is, to acquire the understanding and knowledge horizon of the ancient Indian authors and to familiarize itself with their sacred traditions and secular sciences. Research into modern India offers Indology the opportunity to use methods from contemporary subjects such as sociology or ethnology as auxiliary sciences. Here, the mastery and application of the numerous new Indian idioms is decisive, the teaching and study of which aroused great interest, especially in the second half of the 20th century. The performing arts, such as classical Indian dance , are also taken into account by the more contemporary Indology.

The beginning of European Sanskrit studies

Sir William Jones

Modern, scientific Indological research began in the late 18th century with the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1784) in Calcutta by William Jones (1746–1794). Charles Wilkins (1750–1833) and Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765–1837) also had a great impact on the subject, who also relied on original sources in Sanskrit and no longer used Persian as an indirect medium of communication. This was only possible because of the colonial presence of the British in the East Indies.

History of German Indology

Heinrich Roth

The first German Sanskrit scholar was the Jesuit and missionary Heinrich Roth (1620–1668). During an extended stay in India he learned the ancient Indian language and even wrote a grammar, which however was never printed because Roth did not find the time to oversee the printing work. It is reported that he was not only fluent in the Sanskrit language, but also had a good knowledge of Sanskrit literature and philosophy.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

The actual beginning of Sanskrit studies in Germany did not take place until the beginning of the 19th century. Some of the scholars of the time were famous personalities in German cultural life such as Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). He had learned Sanskrit from the Mainz-born Berlin linguist Franz Bopp (1791–1867) and published a. a. an essay on the Bhagavad Gita , to which Hegel responded in a critical review. Humboldt also undertook some significant studies in comparative linguistics .

Schlegel brothers

Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), the versatile author, critic and co-founder of the romantic movement, learned Sanskrit from the British naval officer Alexander Hamilton , who was trapped in Paris as a prisoner of the Napoleonic wars and was the only one in the city to have Sanskrit knowledge. In 1808 Schlegel wrote his famous treatise On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians , which gave important impulses for later Indian research. But Friedrich Schlegel also had many other interests, and so it was not he but his brother August Wilhelm (1767–1845), best known as a Shakespeare translator, who became the first German professor of Indology in Bonn in 1818. Using the methods of Classical Philology , he created critical editions and historical-critical translations of Sanskrit literature. He had Devanagari typefaces made in Paris and in 1823 published the original Bhagavad Gita , accompanied by its translation into Latin.

Friedrich Rückert

The poet and orientalist Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) was originally a professor of Arabic and Persian studied, but later also the Sanskrit language and wrote masterful translations of Indian fine literature, including the episode Nala and Damayanti from the Mahabharata and the Gita Govinda , a Lyric poem from the 12th century, which is about Krishna's youth as a shepherd boy and his love affair with the shepherd girl Radha .

It was a time of great burgeoning enthusiasm for India, and due to the reception of Indian works by other German poets and thinkers such as Goethe , Herder , Schopenhauer and Nietzsche , over time there was a diffusion of Indian ideas into the educated bourgeoisie, although initially often through secondary German ones Translations, as there were no or few direct transmissions from Sanskrit.

Franz Bopp

Franz Bopp (1791–1867) was a multi-talented linguist who was the first to undertake comparative studies of the grammar of Indo-European languages ​​and, in 1816, to prove that Sanskrit was related to the ancient, Iranian and Germanic languages ​​and to provide comparative linguistics ( Indo-European studies ) as an independent science reasoned. He translated u. a. the Nala episode from the epic Mahabharata in the Latin language and in 1825 became professor of Sanskrit in Berlin with the support of Humboldt.

Adolf Friedrich Stenzler

Adolf Friedrich Stenzler (1807–1887) was a professor of Indology in Breslau and published many important text editions and translations of Sanskrit texts, including the epic Raghuvamsha by the famous Indian poet Kalidasa . His elementary book of the Sanskrit language , the "Stenzler", is the best-known textbook in German Indology and has been used by countless generations of students since its publication in 1869.

Stenzler's work is both a grammar and a study book, which has been revised and supplemented many times by various scholars. The 18th edition was extensively revised and expanded by the Hamburg-based Indologist Albrecht Wezler, with numerous printing errors in the text due to a technical mistake. The current 19th edition (2002) has been rewritten and further modified by Wezler taking into account suggestions from other scholars. The book contains a clear grammar in Indian Devanagari script, exercise examples and readings from Sanskrit literature for translation as well as a dictionary for these texts. The “Stenzler” is usually not suitable for self-study of Sanskrit, but it is very helpful as a supplement to other textbooks or as an exercise book for beginners with good previous knowledge.

Otto von Böhtlingk

One of the most important German Indologists of the 19th century was Otto von Böhtlingk (1815–1904), who together with Rudolf von Roth edited the Great Petersburg Dictionary (1852–75). While von Roth looked after the Vedic literature, von Böhtlingk took over the classical Sanskrit literature and contributed about 9/10 of the text to the dictionary, which became the most extensive worldwide and has also been translated into English. Böhtlingk made many other valuable contributions to Indology, including outstanding text editions and translations as well as a work on Panini's grammar, in which the extremely difficult original text was made accessible to Western scholars for the first time.

Friedrich Max Muller

The German Indologist Max Müller (1823–1900), after whom some Goethe Institutes in India are still named (Max Mueller Bhavan) , became known worldwide . He was an exceptionally talented philologist and studied Vedic Sanskrit in addition to classical. In 1846 he moved to England and published the full text of the Rigveda - the oldest linguistic document in the Indian cultural area - together with a commentary by Sayana , an important Indian scholar of the 14th century. Other works such as a Sanskrit literary history followed, later 50 volumes of Sacred Books of the East , which he edited and to which he contributed many of his own translations, such as those of the most important Upanishads . His last major work, The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, was the first comprehensive account of all Indian philosophical systems in one book.

Albrecht Weber

Albrecht Weber (1825–1901) was one of the great scholars of the second half of the 19th century, he advanced Indology through his tireless research in many fields. From 1867 he taught as a full professor in Berlin, where he was also a member of the Academy of Sciences.

Weber dealt intensively with the ancient Vedic literature and for the first time published some important, extensive Sanskrit texts such as the White Yajurveda in carefully prepared and commented editions. In 1853 he published his most important work, Academic Lectures on Indian Literary History , in which he dealt with the Vedic literature in great detail and organized it by subject. In addition to the epics and Puranas, he explained the ancient Indian grammar, medicine as well as music and arts and the Sanskrit literature of Buddhism. Moriz Winternitz , himself a prominent author of a Sanskrit literary history, called Weber's work “a milestone in the history of Indology”.

In 1849 Weber founded the journal Indian Studies and published numerous articles of his own on his research. His translation of Kalidasa's drama Mālavikāgnimitra , which describes the love story of King Agnimitra and the maid Mālavikā, who - as it turns out in the course of the event - is actually a princess, is considered to be trend-setting .

Johann Georg Bühler

Johann Georg Bühler (1837–1898) was one of the most important Indologists of the 19th century. He spent almost half of his time as a scholar in India, where he became Professor of Oriental Languages ​​in 1863. Similar to Paul Deussen , Bühler was able to speak fluent Sanskrit, which helped him gain the trust of Indian scholars when he researched rare ancient manuscripts. He collected many valuable texts, translated inscriptions and wrote standard works on Indian law. To this day he is best known for his Sanskrit textbook, the guide to the elementary Sanskrit course , which was published in 1883.

Bühler used his excellent command of Sanskrit in his textbook and wrote demanding sentences in the exercise texts that convey something of Indian culture and philosophy. In didactics, he followed the tried and tested pattern of textbooks in Latin or Greek with an introductory grammar lesson, vocabulary and an exercise text. The Devanagari script is being introduced step by step and is accompanied by a transcription in the first few lessons.

Bühler's textbook appeared in numerous reprints and was in circulation until the end of the 20th century. The English edition (ED Perry, A Sanskrit Primer ) is still on sale and has some improvements compared to the original text. It speaks for Bühler's genius that to this day no German-speaking author has been able to replace his textbook with a better one of the same kind. This was only achieved by the American Indologist Walter Harding Maurer with his title The Sanskrit Language (revised edition 2001), which also contains high-quality Sanskrit exercise sentences and is many times more extensive than Bühler's work.

Paul Deussen

Paul Deussen (1845–1919) was not only an important philologist, but also a historian of philosophy. He met Friedrich Nietzsche in Schulpforta and was his lifelong friend. Deussen wrote a number of important books on different epochs of Indian philosophy, particularly on the Veda and the Upanishads. His translation of the Sixty Upanishads of the Veda (1897) made valuable source material available to researchers in other disciplines as well. In his work General History of Philosophy , he devoted the first three volumes to Indian philosophy and the last three to Western traditions. His translation of the Brahma Sutras was the first complete translation into a European language.

Heinrich Zimmer

Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943) was an outsider in the world of Indology. His approach differs in part significantly from that of his specialist colleagues, who mostly feel obliged to a strictly philological interpretation of the text and maintain a certain distance from the texts. Zimmer, on the other hand, was deeply involved in the content of the sources he researched and presented his own psychological interpretations that made such a lasting impression on Carl Gustav Jung among others that he became friends with the German Indologist.

Zimmer had initially worked as a lecturer in Indology in Greifswald and Heidelberg and taught Indian philosophy, but had to leave Germany in 1939 because he was married to Christiane von Hofmannsthal, daughter of the Jewish poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal . He first went to England and a few years later emigrated to the USA, where he took a visiting professorship at Columbia University. Joseph Campbell , one of his students, later brought out some of Zimmer's unpublished texts, some of which were written in English.

Zimmer's book Philosophy and Religion of India is still a classic of Indian literature, published in Germany by Suhrkamp since 1961. The author deals with topics such as Hinduism , Jainism , Buddhism , Sankhya and Yoga and explains the relationship between Eastern philosophy and Western philosophy. His title Der Weg zum Selbst (1944) was the first German biography of Ramana Maharshi , the sage of Tiruvannamalai, who became famous through a report by the English writer Paul Brunton . Other important titles are Indian myths and symbols as well as art form and yoga in the Indian cult image .

Zimmer was the first German Indologist who dealt intensively with yoga and tantra, where he was influenced by the work of the British researcher Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon). But although Zimmer recognized the high value of yoga in itself, he had doubts whether this path would be suitable for Westerners. Zimmer also did a lot of research on Buddhism and translated some source texts.

Helmuth von Glasenapp

Helmuth von Glasenapp (1891–1963) was an Indologist who not only did outstanding research, but also had the ability to communicate his research results to the public in easily readable books. His book titles The Philosophy of the Indians and The Literatures of India were important standard works, and in his title Das Indiabild deutscher Denker he knowledgeably explained the attitude of prominent German intellectuals such as Kant, Herder or Spengler towards India and Indian philosophy. He was also an expert in the religions of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism and wrote an article on The Non-Christian Religions for a large encyclopedia.

Paul Thieme

Paul Thieme (1905–2001) was one of the great universal scholars of Indology in the 20th century. With a lot of meticulousness and philological expertise he fathomed even the most difficult texts and dealt with the Vedas and Upanishads, Sanskrit poetry, science and grammar of ancient India. He was fluent in Sanskrit and is reported to have freely given his acceptance speech in Sanskrit on the occasion of Banaras Hindu University's honorary doctorate in 1981.

Thiemes teaching activity in the field of Indology and Indo-European Studies took him to Breslau, Halle, Frankfurt and to Yale University in New Haven, where he took on a renowned professorship in 1954. In 1960 he returned to Germany and trained a number of students in Tübingen who later became respected Indologists. Thieme did not leave behind a large standard work in his field, but did leave behind numerous individual studies in German and English that were important for experts. The widely read titles Upanishads and poems from the Rig-Veda with excerpts from the ancient Indian texts are available in bookshops .

Klaus Mylius

Klaus Mylius (born 1930 in Berlin) first studied geography before turning to Indology. In 1976 he became professor of Sanskrit and Indian antiquity at the University of Leipzig. His more than 250 publications include standard works of Indology such as the Sanskrit-German / German-Sanskrit dictionary (1975–1988), a chrestomathy of Sanskrit literature (1978) and the history of ancient Indian literature - the 3000 year development of religious-philosophical, fiction and scientific literature of India from the Vedas to the establishment of Islam (3rd revised edition Wiesbaden 2003).

Mylius' Sanskrit literary history is written on a high academic level and uses, as is customary in specialist journals, all diacritical marks for Sanskrit terms and proper names, but the book is also accessible to interested laypeople and was published in the second edition in a large one Public publishing house . Particularly valuable for students of Indology are the notes at the end of each chapter with countless useful references to the most important titles in international specialist literature in German and English.

Mylius' dictionary contains in the current edition (Wiesbaden 2005) the original two parts Sanskrit-German and German-Sanskrit in one volume. The first part contains 70,000 Sanskrit keywords, the second 26,000 German. The Sanskrit words are printed in Latin transcription with diacritical marks so that the dictionary can also be used by anyone interested in linguistics in general. Compared to English titles such as "Monier-Williams" (which contains more than twice as many entries) the scope of the dictionary is relatively limited, but it is sufficient for reading many important works of Sanskrit literature and enables beginners to do something much easier Look up.

Other well-known scholars

German Indology has produced numerous other important scholars. The following overview lists some well-known names and their most important fields of activity and research areas.

International Indology

Austria

Moriz Winternitz

Moriz Winternitz (1863-1937) was an Austrian scholar who first studied classical philology and philosophy, but then turned to Indology. In 1911 he became professor of Indology in Prague and published countless valuable studies in the field of religion, epics and Sanskrit literature. A bibliography compiled by Otto Stein and Wilhelm Gampert names no fewer than 452 titles.

The main work of Winternitz was his “History of Indian Literature” in three volumes, which appeared from 1905 to 1922 and were later translated into English. In the first volume, Winternitz dealt with the Vedic literature, the epics and the Puranas. Buddhist and Jain literature followed in the second, and poetry and science in the third. In later years Winternitz specialized even further in Buddhism and researched some source texts.

Another important field of study for him was the epic Mahabharata . In 1901 he suggested the production of a critical edition on the basis of the numerous manuscripts, some of which exist in different versions. But it was only after the First World War that these plans could be taken up and finally implemented by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Poona (Pune), which, after decades of work, completed the creation of the "Critical Edition of the Mahabharata" in 1966, which has since been considered the authoritative edition of the epic and whose main text ("Constituted Text") comprises almost 80,000 verses. Although the actual philological work was done by other scholars, it is Winternitz's great merit to have initiated this project - one of the most complex in the history of Indology - and to have supported it for a long time as a member of the editorial board.

Erich Frauwallner

Indian philosophy, which is as highly developed as ancient Greek or German, was the preferred field of study of the Viennese scholar Erich Frauwallner (1898–1974). He also studied Buddhist texts extensively and studied Tibetan and Chinese in order to gain access to sources whose Sanskrit originals had been lost.

Frauwallner became known through his "History of Indian Philosophy", the first volume of which appeared in 1953 and dealt with the Vedas, Upanishads, epics, Buddha and Mahavira (the founder of Jainism) as well as Samkhya and the classical yoga system. The second volume appeared three years later, dealing primarily with the Vaisheshika system. An English translation was published in 1973 in Delhi.

Frauwallner was one of the many Indologists, past and present, who specialize in Buddhology and who advance this subject with often exceptional language skills. At a later stage in life he even learned Japanese in order to be able to study the technical papers of his Japanese colleagues. One result of his research in this area was the book "Philosophy of Buddhism" with excerpts from the works of Buddhist thinkers up to the 6th century.

Norway

Christian Lassen

Christian Lassen (1800–1876) grew up in Norway, but his mother moved to Hamburg when he was 18 years old. He studied at various European universities and in 1840 became professor for ancient Indian languages ​​and literature in Bonn, where he stayed all his life and succeeded August Wilhelm von Schlegel in Indology.

Lassen took over a number of text editions and was one of the first Western scholars to study Prakrit and Pali. In 1832 he translated the Sānkhya-Kārikā, the most important basic work of the Sankhya philosophy. A few years later he made the decisive contribution to the deciphering of the ancient Persian cuneiform inscriptions and in 1837 founded the “Zeitschrift für diekunde des Morgenlandes”, in which he published many of his own articles.

Lassen's great literary work was the “Indian Antiquity”, which appeared in four volumes from 1847–1861 with very extensive and detailed explanations of Indian history and geography.

Holland

Willem Caland (1859–1932) is the best-known scholar of Dutch Indology. He did research mainly in the field of the Vedic sacrificial ritual and translated some texts such as the Jaiminīya-Brāhmana and the Apastamba-Shrautasūtra, which are considered extremely difficult. He also wrote a large number of exegetical works.

His compatriot Jan Gonda (1905-1991) was a renowned orientalist and religious scholar who - apart from countless articles - published several books on Veda and Hinduism. He was co-editor of a handbook of oriental studies.

Another great personality in Dutch Indology was FBJ Kuiper (1907-2003). He has written countless authoritative articles on topics of Indo-Iranian philology, linguistics and mythology as well as on Dravidian and Munda languages .

France

As early as 1801, the French orientalist and Awesta researcher Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) published a Latin translation of 50 Upanishads, based on a Persian model. The first complete (although still quite inadequate) French translation of the Rig-Veda was brought out by Alexandre Langlois (1788-1854). The Indologist Eugène Burnouf (1801-1852), who together with Christian Lassen was one of the first to research the Pali, became prominent . He later translated the Bhagavatapurana from Sanskrit and published an important standard work on the history of Indian Buddhism.

Some other well-known French Indologists were:

  • Louis Renou (1896–1966): Veda, grammar
  • Jean Filliozat (1906–1982): medical literature
  • Alain Daniélou (1907–1994): Hinduism, music
  • Jean Varenne (1926–1997): Hinduism, Yoga, Tantra.

Great Britain

British Indology has produced many great scholars, only a few of whom are mentioned here.

The judge William Jones (1746–1794), President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal , published Kalidasa's masterpiece Shakuntala as early as 1789 , later the Gita Govinda and the Manava-Dharmashastra code . Jones also showed the relationship between Sanskrit and European languages ​​such as Greek, Latin and Gothic and was the first to develop a Latin transcription for the Devanagari.

Charles Wilkins (1750–1833) translated the Bhagavad Gita and Hitopadesha as early as the end of the 18th century . However, Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837), who in 1801 became professor of Sanskrit at Fort William College, is considered the actual founder of Sanskrit philology . He wrote about Panini's grammar and published his own grammar in 1805. Studies of the Vedas , Jainism , astronomy, algebra, metrics and Indian philosophy followed .

Horace Haymann Wilson (1786-1860) became a Sanskrit professor in Oxford in 1832. Among other things, he translated Kalidasa's work Meghaduta and the Vishnu-Purana, and in 1819 published a Sanskrit-English dictionary.

Sir Monier Monier-Williams (1819–1899) became widely known for his voluminous Sanskrit-English dictionary, which is used by countless students and scholars around the world. From the 2nd edition in 1899 it contains around 180,000 Sanskrit words and is still being reprinted to this day.

After the dictionary's copyright expired some time ago, a digital version was created under the direction of Thomas Malten, Institute for Indology and Tamil Studies at the University of Cologne, which is freely available on the Internet as "Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon". Since the words are entered in Latin letters according to a specific code ("Harvard-Kyoto"), the experienced user can look up even the most difficult and longest words in seconds. The newer version "Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary (2008 revision)" offers some valuable additional options such as browsing the original text of the dictionary and displaying words in Devanagari.

Some other well-known British Indologists and their main fields of work and publications:

  • Ralph TH Griffith (1826–1906): Rigveda translation, Ramayana translation
  • Arthur Anthony Macdonell (1854–1930): Grammar of Vedic and Classical Sanskrit, Sanskrit literary history
  • Arthur Berriedale Keith (1879–1944): Vedic and Classical Sanskrit
  • Arthur Llewellyn Basham (1914–1986): world-famous standard work "The Wonder that was India"

United States

The best known name in American Indology is William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894). He had studied oriental languages ​​and especially Sanskrit in Germany under Albrecht Weber and Rudolf von Roth , and in 1856 he and Roth edited the text of the Atharva Samhitā, which he later translated. In 1879 he published a Sanskrit grammar that became a standard work and has been reissued over and over again. A few years later a supplement followed with a list of all Sanskrit roots and verb forms, which is still of great use today. Whitney published many other studies on the Vedas and on linguistics, as well as several language textbooks.

India

Already in the Vedic period there were scholars in India who reflected on the language, analyzed it and discovered rules and laws. The outstanding personality among the grammarians of the old days is Panini , whose ingenious work Ashtadhyayi is researched by linguists around the world to this day. In his text he refers to a total of ten grammarians who worked before him, but of whom we know nothing. It is not known exactly when he lived, but on the basis of various indications the 5th century BC appears. As very likely.

Panini developed a kind of formula language with which he was able to summarize the complex rules of Sanskrit grammar in 3981 sutras of great brevity, with the German translation being many times longer. Grammatical rules, accent and phonetic rules, etc. are presented in eight sections. In the course of time many commentaries arose on Panini's work, the most important of which is the Mahabhashya of Patanjali . A complete word-for-word translation of Panini's grammar can be found under “Sanskrit Language Resources” on the Internet on a website of the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University.

While there was such a traditional Indian scholarship with its own themes and approaches, individual researchers began to acquire the methods of Western Indology from the 19th century onwards. The Sanskrit professor Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar (1837–1925), who worked in Bombay and later Poona ( Pune ), achieved great fame and researched Panini, the development of Indian languages, Indian religious sects and the ancient history of India. The renowned Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute was named after him, and it took decades of work to create the critical edition of the Mahabharata .

Kashinath Trimbak Telang (1850-1893), who was mainly active in the history of literature, received much recognition for his translation and explanation of the Bhagavad Gita in the "Sacred Books of the East". Some other important names are Raghu Vira , Vishva Bandhu, RN Dandekar and Pandurang Vaman Kane (1880–1972).

Numerous Sanskrit texts have been translated by Indian scholars into regional languages ​​and into English, such as the voluminous Mahabharata and others. a. into Bengali, Hindi and English. Some of these translations meet Indological standards, but often also pursue other goals and are intended as free, popular translations for a wide audience, in which personal explanations and interpretations of the translator are incorporated in order to make the texts more accessible or a specific religious or spiritual one Reaffirm position.

The largest project in the history of Indology is currently being carried out at the Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute in Pune. It is the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Sanskrit on Historical Principles , which will replace the Petersburg dictionary by Böhthlingk as the largest Sanskrit reference work. In the course of a 25-year collection of material, 1000 works were consulted and an index of 1 million cards was created. Writing began in 1978, and so far 5 volumes (1998-2003) have been published which contain words beginning with the letter "a". The general editor of the volumes was the renowned Indologist AM Ghatage (1913–2003). The aim of this historical dictionary is not only to give the many meanings of Sanskrit words, but also to show how the meanings developed over time in different fields and literatures.

Classical and modern Indology

The focus of classical Indology has been Sanskrit philology from its very beginning, and studies of the Middle Indian languages ​​(Pali and Prakrit dialects) were added as early as the first half of the 19th century. Many of the translations or specialist articles produced by classical Indology enriched other sciences such as comparative linguistics, religious studies or archeology. There are still numerous tasks to be done in the future, such as the German translation of important Sanskrit texts, which so far have only been available in - often imperfect - English translation.

Since the 1960s, Indology has also increasingly devoted itself to the study of the New Indian languages, in particular the North Indian languages ​​Hindi and Bengali as well as the South Indian Tamil and Kannada. As early as 1961, Helmuth von Glasenapp presented the literature of this and other languages ​​in his standard work "The Literatures of India".

With a growing perception of today's India, its politics and economy, which are becoming increasingly important in a global context, as well as the diverse culture in the field of literature, dance or music, Indology has reoriented itself in some places in order to do justice to these developments. In parallel to classical Indology, a modern Indology is offered, which sets different priorities and ultimately also leads to other qualifications of the students, whereby a basic study of Sanskrit remains compulsory.

This reorientation offers additional opportunities for Indologists, who so far often only had very limited career prospects, i.e. especially in the academic field or in the oriental departments of libraries etc. The University of Würzburg mentions new professional fields for students of modern Indology / South Asian studies such as entry into the Diplomatic service, work in the Goethe Institutes, in the numerous commercial enterprises involved in India or in the field of cultural management and intercultural training. In preparation for these activities, intensive courses in Hindi as well as study visits and internships in India are offered.

In 2012, there were still 18 Indology professorships in Germany; five professorships have been cut since 1997.

literature

  • Heinz Bechert , Georg von Simson, Peter Bachman (eds.): Introduction to Indology. Status, methods, tasks . 2. through., Add. And exp. Ed., Darmstadt 1993, ISBN 3-534-05466-0 .
  • Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya: Indian religious historiography . New Delhi 1996, ISBN 81-215-0637-9 .
  • Thomas Burrow: Sanskrit . In: Current trends in linguistics. Vol. 5: Linguistics in South Asia. Ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok. The Hague 1969, pp. 3-35 (research report).
  • Douglas T. McGetchin, Peter KJ Park, Damodar SarDesai: Sanskrit and 'Orientalism'. Indology and comparative linguistics in Germany, 1750–1958. New Delhi 2004, ISBN 81-7304-557-7 .
  • Jan Willem de Jong : A brief history of Buddhist studies in Europe and America . Varanasi 1976.
  • Willibald Kirfel : August Wilhelm von Schlegel and the Bonn Indological School . In: Small Fonts . Edited by Robert Birwe. Wiesbaden 1976, pp. 1-18.
  • Hermann Oldenberg : Veda research . Stuttgart, Berlin 1905 ( Djvu ).
  • Hans-Wolfgang Schumann: Buddhism and Buddhist studies in Germany . Bonn 1972 (pp. 9-28: German research in Buddhism).
  • Wilhelm Rau : Images 135 German Indologists . Wiesbaden 1982 (Glasenapp Foundation 23), ISBN 3-515-03864-7 .
  • Hans-Wilm Schütte: The Asian Studies in Germany. History, status and perspectives . Hamburg 2004 (Communications from the Institute for Asian Studies 380) [1.2: History of Indology in Germany, 2.2.4.1: Main focus of Indology, Buddhology, Turfan research], ISBN 3-88910-307-3 .
  • Indra Sengupta: From salon to discipline. State, University and Indology in Germany 1821-1914 . Heidelberg 2005 (Contributions to South Asian Studies 198), ISBN 3-89913-454-0 .
  • Walter Slaje : What is and what purpose does Indology serve? In: Journal of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft 153.2 (2003), pp. 311–331 ( PDF )
  • Valentina Stache-Rosen: German indologists. Biographies of scholars in Indian studies writing in German. 2nd edition New Delhi 1990, ISBN 81-85054-97-5 .
  • Albert Thumb: Manual of Sanskrit. I, 1: Introduction and phonology . 3rd edition Heidelberg 1958 [§41: The study of Sanskrit in Europe].
  • Christian Wagner: The importance of South Asia in the research and university landscape of the Federal Republic of Germany. An inventory . Hamburg 2001 (communications from the Institute for Asian Studies 335), ISBN 3-88910-252-2 .
  • Albrecht Wezler: Towards a reconstruction of Indian cultural history: Observations and reflections on 18th and 19th century Indology . In: Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 18 (1993), pp. 305–329.
  • Ernst Windisch: History of Sanskrit Philology and Indian Classical Studies. 1st, 2nd part as well as postponed chapters of the 3rd part . Berlin, New York 1992, ISBN 3-11-013013-0 .

Web links

Commons : Indology  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Festschrift Moriz Winternitz: 1863 - 23 Dec. - 1933 . Edited by Otto Stein and Wilhelm Gampert. Harrassowitz, Leipzig 1933
  2. ↑ Where can you get that? Indology. Zeit Online (accessed January 6, 2012)