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

— Sheldon Pollock

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More quotes by Sheldon Pollock

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.

‘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)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Sheldon Pollock (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.