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Sheldon Pollock Quotes

born 1948 United States

Sheldon I. Pollock (born February 16 1948) is a scholar of Sanskrit, the intellectual and literary history of India, and comparative intellectual history.

United States
Academics
Linguists
Translators

Random Sheldon Pollock quote

6 quotes

There is nothing remarkable about the people in premodern South Asia having a clear and accurate conception of the spatial organization of their world.

The Veda, the transcendent śāstra, subsumes all knowledge.

“How, concretely, does one do Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz in a world of pretty well tattered scholarly paradigms?”

‘Such voices … in any case are pretty much in the minority. The dominant ideology is that which ascribes clear priority and absolute competence to shastric codification.’

“Moving beyond orientalism finally presupposes moving beyond the culture of domination and the politics of coercion that have nurtured orientalism in all its varieties, and been nurtured by it in turn.”

“An example of this more sophisticated orientalism is the work of Paul Thieme”... esp. his “analysis of the Sanskrit word ārya, where at the end he adverts to the main point of his research: to go beyond India in order to catch the ‘distant echo of Indo-germanic customs’.”

Elst, Koenraad (2018)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Sheldon Pollock (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.