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Conclusion: Gandhi on the Gītā

Characteristic concepts and patterns of Romantic philosophy and literature are a displaced and reconstituted theology, or else a secularized form of devotional experience, that is, because we still live in what is essentially, although in derivative rather than direct manifestations, a Biblical culture, and readily mistake our hereditary ways of organizing experience for conditions of real-ity and the universal forms of thought.

M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism

Even where it is spoken by a handful, by the harried remnants of destroyed communities, a lan-guage contains within itself the boundless potential of rediscovery, or re-compositions of reality, of articulate dreams, which are known to us as myths, as poetry, as metaphysical conjecture, and the discourse of law.

George Steiner, After Babel

At the end of this long and complex book, what lessons can we draw from the diremption of German Indology for the humanities? As we told the story, we

necessarily focused on the emergence and institution of Indology around a few cen-tral principles (Āryan origins, anti-Brahmanism, the superiority of critical conscious-ness over the exegetic tradition). But our main aim in this book was not to tell the story of German Indology for its own sake, which in any case is only of historical interest now. As a book about how certain people in the nineteenth or the twentieth century had some strange notions about Indian texts or about the Indian people, this book would only have made a contribution to the history of ideas. Our main aim, however, has been to use Indology as an example to raise certain questions regarding the sociology of the human sciences.

Ultimately, the problems with Indology are not the well known and widely dis-cussed problems of its Orientalism, colonialism, racism, or even of its evangelism. Rather, they concern, among other things, the rise of historicism, the displacement of philosophical concerns from thinking, and the belief in the ability of a technical method to produce truth. As the paradigmatic example of a positivist science that underwent rapid expansion in the nineteenth century and declined almost as rap-idly thereafter, Indology off ers a perfect example for thinking about the humanities’ problematic entanglement in method in the past two centuries. 1

1 . Th is is not to suggest that we reject the idea of method tout court. As we have seen, the real problem with Indology was not its method but that it did not have any. Method has

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Conclusion: Gandhi on the Gītā434

Faith in the kind of narrow methodological positivism practiced by the Indologists has become unsustainable following the criticisms of scientifi c method discussed in the last chapter. Th e failure of the humanities to anticipate or guard against the humanitarian crises of the last century shows that the triumph of method over truth is not merely an academic problem. It is with the aim of raising these questions con-cerning the relationship of the human sciences to pragmatic and ethical concerns that we embarked upon this long journey.

At the end of our journey, it has become clear that so-called critical research does not off er a viable avenue for future scholarship on Indian literature, thought, or phi-losophy. Not only was the Indologists’ research not critical in the sense that it failed to evolve a suffi ciently sophisticated hermeneutics for approaching Indian texts, but it was also not critical in the sense that it was blind to its own historical presupposi-tions. From Āryan invasions to racial miscegenations and/or Brahmanic corruptions every fantasy could be entertained, provided it remained faithful to a Protestant narrative of religious degeneracy. Basic errors of reasoning could be glossed over, as long as scholars acknowledged the institutional primacy of Indology and aligned themselves with a tradition of pseudocritical research. Indeed, a careful look at the Indologists’ refl ections on method demonstrated that, for all their claims of practic-ing an esoteric technical art, their primary concern was to protect an institutional hegemony. Hence the repeated use of the epithet wissenschaftlich .

However, when we asked what made German Indologist scholarship wissen-schaftlich , we were unable to obtain an answer. As we saw in the fi rst three chap-ters, Indologists were unable to fulfi ll even basic criteria for a science, and yet they insisted that scientifi city ( Wissenschaftlichkeit ) was the hallmark of German scholar-ship on Indian texts. Indeed, when we pushed the question, we found that their ideas of “science” were gleaned from the most disparate sources. Th ese ideas were not even true of the natural sciences. Apart from nebulous ideas of positivism and empiri-cism, we found that what the Indologists meant when they claimed that their work was wissenschaftlich was that it was historicist. Here, it rapidly became clear that much of their objection to the tradition was in fact theological. Th ey thought that tradition, being ahistorical and/or metaphysical, was enmeshed in theology, yet they could not see that their allegedly historical approach itself entailed a hidden meta-physics. Likewise, their claim to be confessionally neutral turned out to be a hollow one, since with this iconoclastic, antimetaphysical project they were actually fulfi ll-ing a central aim of Lutheran theology—its destruction of the theologia gloriae of the ancients. Historical-critical research, allegedly theologically neutral, turned out to

its place in research and, where applied judiciously, is indispensable in the humanities as well (in fact, one of Weinsheimer’s criticisms of Gadamer is that the ideal of the method he imagines never existed in the natural sciences either. Gadamer’s description of the natural sciences exaggerates the contrast between the natural and the human sciences as an ele-ment of his rhetoric against the infi ltration of the humanities by ideals originally lying out-side their sphere). Our criticism here targets Indology’s claim to possessing a unique (and superior) method as an element of its rhetorical battle against the commentarial tradition.



CONCLUSION: G A NDHI ON T HE G ĪTĀ 435

have a major role to play in the delegitimization of all alternative sources of intellec-tual authority—Jewish, Catholic, Greek or Indian. 2

Even a brief glance at European history suffi ced to expose those claims. A geneal-ogy of method in Indology demonstrated that the German scholars’ origins were not philosophical or scientifi c, but rather, theological . Indeed, as the turn to Gadamer in the concluding sections of the last chapter demonstrated, their equation of tradition with dogmatism was a false one, itself rooted in the Enlightenment prejudice against all prejudices. Th e “yawning chasm” thus is not—as Myers has it—between history and faith but between faith and faith . 3 On the one hand, there is the scholar’s faith in his (historical-critical) method, especially its capacity to disclose a more original meaning to the text (even if it be as banal a one as that priests conjured up the idea of the afterlife to control the populace). On the other, there is faith of a more modest and critical kind, the sense that because individuals are fallible, we should place our trust in tradition rather than the expert.

Th us, at the end we return to the question we started out with: what does it mean to read a myth or a text philologically ? As we have told the story, we have consistently highlighted the Rezeptionsgeschichte of texts as an essential element of their mean-ing. Our central contention was that in ignoring this history, German Indologists went astray—as self-taught amateurs are likely to do. In advocating a return to tra-dition, however, we do not mean to suggest that we should return to it uncritically. Rather, as Gadamer has shown, the fundamental hermeneutic problem concerns the problem of application . Here, a look at Gandhi’s reading of the Bhagavadgītā can help us understand how it is possible to negotiate the various demands of reading a text meaningfully, of taking into consideration its reception, and of making it hermeneu-tically productive for one’s present.

Gandhi, who combines ultimate concern with historical and pragmatic concerns, off ers the clearest indication that to read a text philologically ultimately means to read it thoughtfully. He addresses the task of interpretation explicitly in his com-mentary on verse 3.9 of the Gītā, which he translates as follows: “Th is world of

2 . Historically, the emergence of the critical method coincided with the displacement of the Hebrew Bible from the central position it had held for Western civilization for cen-turies. Th is development was not without consequence for the perception of Judaism. As Sheehan remarks, “the German eff ort to weld together culture and religion was performed on the back of the religious group who, it was thought, evidenced an anthropologically cohesive culture that consistently failed to live up to the normative expectations of cul-ture more generally. Just as the cultural Bible implied that the Hebrew Bible had become what Schleiermacher called a ‘mausoleum’—a monument for a dead people—so too was it already clear to Christian scholars that no community was more rigorously excluded from this new cultural ideal of religion than those most slavishly dedicated to this monument, the Jews.” Sheehan, Th e Enlightenment Bible , 234. See also ibid., 236–40 for the attempt to defi ne Judaism as a distinct, autonomous culture (one closer to the cultures of the Orient than to classical Greek, “western” civilization), a development that occurred hand-in-glove with the establishment of a science of Jewish cultural identity. An argument could thus be made that German anti-Semitism was part of the wider movement to set apart German culture from all others known as “Orientalism.”

3 . Myers, Resisting History , 4.




men suff ers bondage from all action save that which is done for the sake of sacrifi ce [ yajña ]. To this end, O Kaunteya, perform action without attachment.” 4 In his com-mentary on this verse, Gandhi then takes up the question of interpretation as it arises in relation to the term yajña . He reads yajña in a way that includes his struggle for India’s freedom. Yajña , for him, thus does not mean only ritual action in the nar-row (traditional) sense, but any just political action. Stietencron and, following him, Malinar have accused Indian commentators of reading their own political and reli-gious ideology into the text. Stietencron, as we have seen, argues that “the analyti-cal thinking of Western scholars trained in historical and philological methodology stood in contrast to the traditional Indian commentators. Th e latter not only gener-ously harmonized all the disjunctions in the text [i.e., the Bhagavadgītā] but, above all, attempted to recognise in particular passages of the text their own philosophical and theological concepts. Th is was done in order to secure for themselves the divine authority of K r s n a. In this manner, several philosophical schools developed Gītā interpretations of their own—a spectrum that has been further expanded through politically motivated, modern interpretations since the beginning of the Indian inde-pendence struggle.” 5 Stietencron thus includes not only the tradition, but also and explicitly the Indian independence struggle in the purview of his criticism of Indian readings. Implicitly, Gandhi also comes in for his share of criticism for contributing to the “politically motivated . . . interpretions” of modernity.

If only matters were so simple. Textual interpretation cannot be pure caprice. Nor can it be rigorously scientifi c and precisely unearth an original meaning. Let us see how Gandhi’s sensibility not only defeats the naïve, generic, and simplistic criticisms of German Indologists but also actually tells us what it means to read a text. For Gandhi, reading a text never occurs in a vacuum and is never divorced from politics, and the correctness of reading is possible from the intellectual, existential, and—most important—ethical struggles of the reader:

We accept a broad defi nition of yajna. Yajna means any activity for the good of oth-ers. A man works for the good of others when he spends his body in their service. Th is should be done in a spirit of dedication to God. Th e word yajna comes from the root yaj , which means “to worship,” and we please God by worshipping Him through physical labor. Laborare est orare —work is worship. 6

Although it appears simple, Gandhi’s understanding reveals the issues involved in interpretation and a keen awareness of the situatedness of every interpretation. With a Latin quotation as a segue, Gandhi contextualizes himself and his reader in a dialectical relationship. Th is relationship involves an exchange (man works for the good of others), but it is important to note that this exchange is not simply material in nature. Work, according to Gandhi, has an ethical component and it is this aspect,

4 . Mahadev Desai, trans., Th e Bhagavadgītā According to Gandhi (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009), 39.

5 . Stietencron, “Editor’s Introduction,” 6–7. 6 . Mahadev Desai, trans., Th e Bhagavadgītā According to Gandhi , 39.




above all, that he is interested in. Th e exchange is thus not of work for possessions, but of meanings . Th rough work, one endows others’ lives with meaning and also one-self acquires meaning.

Related to this is the point of control. As Derrida has shown, no author can fully control that which is written. In the play of signifi ers that is the text, the authority of writing exceeds the authority of the author. But neither is just any interpreta-tion possible. Th ose who think that one can capriciously and manipulatively read anything into any text are naïve. Th e author, the text, and the interpreter are linked as wood, fi re, and smoke. Th us, control of the interpretation is not so much domina-tion over the author’s lexical and semantic domain, or over the text in its historical primitivity, but a matter of the self-control of the interpreter.

To be sure, German Indologists did understand this, albeit vaguely. Th ey misun-derstood self-control not as an active service, but as self-abnegation in the face of the text. A Puritanical spirit underlay their desire to prevent themselves as interpret-ers from contaminating the text. But this is not enough, as it were. Self-abnegation only suppresses rather than controls a person. Th ere is a kind of negative self-denial going on in the face of the text but not a positive self-mastery. Gandhi highlights his keen awareness of the fact that control primarily means self -control and not author-ity over a populace, whether the readers of a text or the recipients of political doc-trine. Concerning the relationship between the author and interpreter, he writes: “As man’s beliefs become more enlightened, the meanings which people attach to certain words also become more enlightened. Even if Vyasa had defi ned the words which he used, we would ask why we should accept the meanings given by him.” 7 At this point, the Indologists would probably like to protest: “but then anything is possible!” But Gandhi is far ahead of the Indologists. He cleverly ties his interpretive strategy fi rmly to just political action. Noting that “non-cooperation has come to mean much more than we at fi rst intended it to mean,” 8 he allows that there can be continuous infl ation in the use of words and yet their essential meaning is preserved . He displays a keen awareness of meanings not only as extended over a range of semantic connota-tions but also as evolving over time. With the example of noncooperation, he gives the example of a word whose meaning changed even within his own time. What then can we say about the fate of the words intended by Vyāsa? Philology ought to set for itself a goal higher than fi nding Vyāsa’s dictionary. Such a dictionary is, as Gandhi seems to say, (1) impossible, (2) useless, and (3) unjust. On the issue of the injustice of not granting the vitally evolving meaning of words, he writes: “Th ere is no harm in enlarging the meaning of the word yajna , even if the new meaning we attach to the term was never in Vyasa’s mind. We shall do no injustice to Vyasa’s words by expand-ing their meaning. Sons should enlarge the legacy of their fathers.” 9

Th e vital process of communication of meaning between an author and a reader is thus neither as rigid as Derrida claims is the case in orality (which he sees as mod-eled on the commandment of the father to the son) nor as endless as he claims is

7 . Ibid. 8 . Ibid. 9 . Ibid., 39–40.




the case in writing. It is, rather, a matter of inheritance and its enrichment. Just as a son who obtains a thousand dollars from his father cannot multiply this amount infi nitely, but only grow it according to circumstance and possibility, so also with the inheritance and enrichment of meaning. Against the German Indologists’ practice of treating texts as dead manipulable objects (which now, qua being quantifi able, enable a “scientifi c” dealing with them), texts are living entities. It is this life of the Gītā and India’s textual tradition that Gandhi opposes to the technologized world of the industrial revolution and its domination of India, when he asks: “Why should we object if anyone regarded the spinning wheel with sentiments other than what we seek to create in the people about it?” 10 Th e example is carefully chosen, for the spin-ning wheel, of course, is the emblem of Gandhi’s resistance to the technologization and mechanistic domination of the industrial revolution in which India was reduced to mere labor. To be sure, the example is not the one a philologist might have chosen, for whom it is more important to go searching for historical meanings. But by choos-ing a current example, Gandhi frustrates the philologist’s search for origins: at most, he can go look for the origins of the spinning wheel, but this origin will not give the true import of the semantic function of the spinning wheel in this situation, which is what is decisive here .

From a certain perspective, namely, that of the industrial revolution, the spin-ning wheel appears a symbol of all that is backward and resists progress. From the point of view of Gandhi’s adoption of the spinning wheel, however, it is a symbol of liberation and the triumph of life over machine. We therefore ought not underesti-mate the signifi cance of Gandhi’s unusual choice of a spinning wheel as an example in this context. He is interpreting yajña in the most semantically fulfi lled manner possible by linking it to the spinning wheel. K r s n a’s private exhortation to Arjuna to act (Bhagavadgītā 2.37–38), never private even within the context of the text, is now brought into maximal understanding whereby the modern oppressed Indian realizes the text. 11 Th rough Gandhi’s interpretation, he hears the text ( Hören, akouō ) and listens to the text ( Horchen, hupakouō ). In a strange way, “Vyāsa” fi nds his tongue thanks to Gandhi’s metaphor. Gandhi is fully conscious of what he is doing here, for he says:

It is quite possible that in the future people may see harm in the spinning wheel, may come to think that no one should wear cotton clothes at all, because they do harm. Th ey may, for instance, believe that clothes should be made from fi bres extracted from banana leaves. 12

But this is not a problem. Across the fashions and fads of referents ( Bedeutung ), sense ( Sinn ) survives translation across languages and time. It is only in the short distance

10 . Ibid., 40. 11 . K r s n a’s exhortation to Arjuna is heard (and successively conveyed) by a series of

people: Sa m jaya (who narrates it to Dh r tarā s t ra), Vaiśampāyana (who has heard the entire exchange between Sa m jaya and Dh r tarā s t ra from his omniscient teacher Vyāsa), and Janamejaya (who hears the entire story of the epic from Vaiśampāyana).

12 . Mahadev Desai, trans. Th e Bhagavadgītā According to Gandhi , 40.




between India and Germany that the vital force of authorial speaking and heedful listening is broken. Gandhi concludes emphatically by drawing together his herme-neutic principles into one telling passage:

If people should come to feel that way, anyone who still clings to the spinning wheel would be looked upon as a fool. A wise man, however, will mean by the spinning wheel not an article made of work but any type of work that provides employment to all people. Th at is also the case with regard to the meaning of the term yajna . Th us, we may—and should—attach to it a meaning not intended by Vyasa. 13

Nothing could be more diametrically opposed to the German Indologists’ insistence that no meaning be attached to archaic words in a naïvely apolitical and ahistorical search for the history of meanings of terms. It is precisely by not attaching meanings that the Indologist loses all meaning. (Paradoxically, in this attempt to not attach mean-ings, he nonetheless ends up attaching meanings of the most disparate and random nature: Āryan incursions, heroic blood-drinking warriors, Ur-Gītās tailored to the “epic situation,” and a call to the German people to not lose their “sensitivity for the desires of the nature that creates dispositions and functions.” 14 ) Here, the term yajña , in Gandhi’s interpretation, carries with it the full vitality of the ra n ayajña K r s n a enjoins Arjuna to perform. Th rough a familial hermeneutic, the interpreter-son serves the author-father and, if we may be allowed to note the irony, also the motherland. Th is family, of course, is Vyāsa, Gandhi, India.

Gandhi does grant that “because a poet puts a particular truth before the world, it does not necessarily follow that he has known or worked out all its great consequences or that having done so, he is able always to express them fully.” 15 But this is not cause for dismay. “In this perhaps lies the greatness of the poem and the poet. A poet’s meaning is limitless.” 16 Th e limitlessness Gandhi has in mind, however, is utterly un-Derridean. Gandhi continues to insist on the vital resonance between man and text:

Like man, the meaning of great writings suff ers evolution. On examining the his-tory of languages, we notice that the meaning of important words has changed or expanded. Th is is true of the Gita. Th e author has himself extended the meanings of some current words. We are able to discover this even on a superfi cial examination. 17

Th us, in the struggle for independence, Gandhi brings his audience closer to the original text of the Gītā by translating it into the modern idiom. Th e Gītā in Gandhi’s hands becomes an effi cacious text designed to pull the distant audience out of pedan-tic and political dilemmas, even as K r s n a pulls the warrior Arjuna out of his paralysis.

13 . Ibid. 14 . Hauer, Eine indo-arische Metaphysik , 63. 15 . Mahadev Desai, trans. Th e Bhagavadgītā According to Gandhi , xxiii. 16 . Ibid. 17 . Ibid.




What does all this have to do with our central problem here, which concerns the interpretation of texts? We seem to have strayed far afi eld of philology into the fi elds of politics, ethics, and national redemption. But as Gandhi points out twice in the introduction, textual interpretation is inseparable from the interpreter’s ability to maintain self-control in a political milieu. 18 Th e task of interpretation, then, is not one of mere academic cleverness, but the responsibility of a life lived. Only when the text evaluates the interpreter, only when the interpreter risks herself in the interpre-tation is the interpretation just and complete.

Gandhi is not unaware of the opposition between translation and interpretation, but he is fully able to account for it within his hermeneutics. He distances himself from the task of philology and the renderings of other scholars. “Th ey have their own place. But I am not aware of the claim made by the translators for enforcing their meaning of the Gita in their own lives.” 19 And yet, Gandhi is qualifi ed: “At the back of my reading there is the claim of an endeavor to enforce the meaning in my own conduct for an unbroken period of forty years.” 20 Gandhi demands of the interpreter not only lexical knowledge but also a lived experience and an existential verifi cation. He readily acknowledges the limits of his knowledge of Sanskrit. “My knowledge of Sanskrit being very limited, I should not have full confi dence in my literal transla-tion. To that extent, therefore, the translation has passed before the eyes of Vinoba, Kaka Kalelkar, Mahadev Desai and Kishorlal Mashruvala.” 21 Th is insistence on lived experience and practical verifi cation is not an external prejudice Gandhi imports into the text. He quotes the Gītā itself, in which K r s n a says, “Do not entrust this treasure [i.e., the Gītā] to him who is without sacrifi ce, without devotion, without the desire for this teaching and who denies Me. On the other hand, those who will give this pre-cious treasure to My devotees will, by the fact of this service, assuredly reach Me. And those who, being free from malice, will with faith absorb this teaching, shall, having attained freedom, live where people of true merit go after death.” 22

Preparedness to translate and interpret belong to the man, not to the dictionary alone. Gandhi’s interpretive translation is accurate to the spirit and the letter of the Gītā, and, where there is doubt, Gandhi prefers the platform of self-verifi cation over conjecture about irretrievable meanings. It is hard for us to imagine that the philolo-gist be trained in malice-free service and be able to absorb the teaching contained in a text and attain freedom. Here, however, the pretensions of philology to scientifi c objectivity break down. Truth is never merely fact; whereas the natural scientist, for example, can try to see facts as value-neutral by trying to bracket off subjectiv-ity, the philologist can aff ord no such luxury. Especially in the case of religious and

18 . “Th is desire does not mean any disrespect to the other renderings, they have their own place. But I am not aware of the claim made by the translators of enforcing their reading of the Gita in their own lives. At the back of my reading there is the claim of an endeavor to enforce the meaning in my own conduct for an unbroken period of forty years.” Mahadev Desai, trans. Th e Bhagavadgītā According to Gandhi , xvi.

19 . Ibid., xvi. 20 . Ibid., xvii. 21 . Ibid. 22 . Ibid., xxiv.




philosophical texts, the righteousness of asserting the word over the spirit can go fearfully astray. Th us Gandhi’s forty years of struggle to master the short Gītā text. With these considerations in view, he nevertheless off ers his interpretation in the form of a translation. He says that “this rendering is designed for women, the com-mercial class, the so-called Sudras, and the like, who have little or no literary equip-ment, who have neither desire to read the Gita in the original, and yet who stand in need of its support.” 23 For Gandhi, philological skill stands or falls on ethical praxis, primarily oriented in the form of pedagogical philanthropy. Th is is not a bizarre twist at all: as we pointed out at the very outset of this book, in its fi rst formulation in Western thought, philologia stands in direct contrast to misology and misanthropy in Plato’s Phaedo . Gandhi does not naïvely think that it is possible to arrive at an original meaning of the text without any prejudice. Rather, Gandhi’s sophistication lies in the self-consciousness of his interpretive stance and his clarifi cation of it to the reader. He tells us what he is doing and why. And the what and why are subject to ethical introspection and practice.

In contrast to Gandhi’s lucid and self-aware hermeneutics, the Indologists’ insistence that the Gītā was interpolated into a war epic turned out to be an external idea imported into the Gītā either through an unwarranted extrapo-lation from context or through prejudice. As a group, German Indologists all took the war metaphor literally. A text capable of imagining a viśvarūpa (K r s n a’s divine, universal form), a supervalent image for phenomenality, was denied by the Indologists freedom to invoke war as a metaphor for the conflictual nature of being in the world. In contrast, Gandhi never wavers from reading the text as a work of art; he refuses to take the war merely as reportage. That this hermeneu-tic principle was firm in Gandhi’s mind is evident:

A study of the Mahabharata gave it added confi rmation. I do not regard the Mahabharata as a historical work in the accepted sense. By ascribing to the chief actors superhuman or subhuman origins, the great Vyasa made short work of the history of kings and their peoples. Th e persons therein described may be historical but the author of the Mahabharata has used them merely to drive home his religious theme. 24

In addition to a naïvely historical approach, a prejudice against theology (which itself turned out to have theological roots) skewed German philology from its outset. It was important for Indologists such as Stietencron, Malinar, and Hanneder to oppose the secular aspects of their praxis to the religious, spiritual, or ethical interests of the Indians. As Hanneder notes in his review of Michael Brück’s translation of the Gītā, 25

23 . Ibid., xvi. 24 . Ibid., xvii. 25 . Th is more popular edition appeared in the Verlag der Weltreligionen (Library of

World Religions) series of a German publisher rather than in an Indological series and was translated by a professor of religious studies (Michael von Brück, chair of religious studies at Ludwigs-Maximilian University, Munich), both of which triggered Hanneder’s ire.




Th e fact that Indian religions in the book-trade have wandered out of the scientifi c domain into that of esoterica is problematic in many respects for the human sci-ences that are concerned with them. For, it means that there where Indian religions are to be found, science, by nature, no longer has any place. Th ereby the human science can no longer fulfi ll its most visible function, namely, to make available fac-tually supported information and appears socially to be no longer relevant. Th e con-sequence is the elimination of [academic] positions [in Indology], through which, however, the imbalance is further strengthened. 26

But the counterexample of Gandhi shows that there is a way to read texts meaning-fully and purposefully without succumbing either to a pseudoscientifi c prejudice or opening oneself to the infi nity of literary criticism. Unlike the German Indologists, Gandhi does not feel the need to distance himself from the Gītā. He avoids both the pitfall of a narrow caste-based reading 27 as well as that of a chauvinistic nationalistic reading. 28 Gandhi does not see the Gītā as belonging exclusively to any one group; indeed, it does not belong to any individual in virtue of his or her national, political, or social identity (German, enlightened, Indologist), but in virtue of whether he or she has made an eff ort to live his or her life in accordance with it.

Th is does not mean he is uncritical: he criticizes many aspects of Indian society and tries to bring it in line with what he sees as its enduring and true principles—principles that are contained precisely in its canonical literary and philosophi-cal texts such as the Bhagavadgītā. Criticism, however, does not mean a return to antiquity: Gandhi is far from advocating a return to India’s Āryan past, as German Indologists did. His views of the Mahābhārata’s war images, too, are more sophisti-cated in that they allow us to understand the Mahābhārata in greater totality than the so-called scientifi c approach does. “Th e author of the Mahabharata has not estab-lished the necessity of physical warfare, on the contrary, he has proved its futility. He has made the victors shed tears of sorrow and repentance and left them nothing but

26 . Hanneder, Review of Bhagavad Gita. Der Gesang des Erhabenen , edited and translated by Michael von Brück.

27 . “To the unbiased reader, who here supposes, that around the turn of the century in India some problems of the modern world were already resolved, the sober philologist can unfortunately only oppose that according to the historical context the basic confl ict of the Bhagavadgita is a special problem of a member of the Indian warrior-caste. For members of the military order, the use of violence in battle belongs to their social and therewith ulti-mately religious duty and the Bhagavadgita is according to the context a detailed justifi ca-tion for this divine social order. Th e potential deserter is brought with the best arguments to follow his mission pregiven through birth. Only when one removes the episode of the gigantic epic from its military context, do other elements let themselves be emphasized more strongly.” Ibid.

28 . “What will perhaps not be so clear to the reader is that the Bhagavadgita originally attains its present stature at the [same] moment in time as it is received in the West. Th e German reader should therefore not see himself as an ethnologist, who, in amazement, encounters another country and its religion for the fi rst time; rather, he holds here in his hands the result of long discussions and interactions between his own [culture] and Indian culture.” Ibid.




a legacy of miseries.” 29 With this statement, the so-called dogmatic and philosophical interpolations, which provide a commentary and a justifi cation for the war and seek to elaborate on the essentially confl ictual nature of all Becoming, become necessary and even primary concerns of the epic rather than later additions.

Finally, Gandhi also has a suitably sophisticated way of accounting for the worldly-metaphysical divide that has proven such a source of irritation to the Indologists. German Indologists, notwithstanding their Protestant background and calling, like to think of themselves as the champions of a worldly, secular, and rationalistic outlook. As we have seen, a basic presupposition for their research was the ability to distinguish between an original warrior epic and a later bhakti -colored Brahmanic text in the Mahābhārata. In the case of the Gītā, that color was practi-cally a stain, and they tried several tactics to purge the stain and thus purify the text. Th us, layers were made, archaeological evidence of K r s n a or Vāsudeva worship was brought in and, when all else failed, the most imaginative of Indologists was prepared to excise the entire Gītā from the epic, including for good measure several chapters along with it. 30 However, Gandhi’s interpretation is immune to this criticism of the Indological equivocation of faith and error. He sets aside the question of K r s n a’s divinity. “Krishna of the Gita is perfection and right knowledge personifi ed; but the picture is imaginary. Th at does not mean that Krishna, adored of his people, never lived. But perfection is imagined. Th e idea of perfect incarnation is an aftergrowth.” 31 Th is statement is quite radical. Yet, whatever the theogony of the god mythically and historically, the Gītā itself provides such an interpretive course. K r s n a says that the fool thinks he is another being; he repeats that he is the ātman (Self) of all beings. 32 A case could be made for K r s n a as the perfection not only of knowledge but also that of a human or a god. Gandhi prefers to remain on the human level and bring incarna-tion into a surprising relationship with service. “In Hinduism, incarnation is ascribed to one who has performed some extraordinary service of mankind.” 33 Service, once more, guides Gandhi’s philology: from the human to the divine, service informs the truth of all worldly existence. 34 He is clearly aware that the devotional aspects of the Gītā merely buttress the philosophical and ethical knowledge contained therein, for he notes: “In order that knowledge may not run riot, the author of the Gita has insisted on devotion accompanying it and has given it fi rst place. . . . Th e Gita’s assess-ment of the devotee’s qualities is similar to that of the sage’s.” 35

29 . Mahadev Desai, trans. Th e Bhagavadgītā According to Gandhi , xvii. 30 . See Simson, “Die Einschaltung der Bhagavadgītā im Bhī s maparvan des Mahābhārata ,”

159–74. 31 . Mahadev Desai, trans., Th e Bhagavadgītā According to Gandhi , xviii. 32 . avyakta m vyaktim āpanna m manyante mām abuddhaya h | para m bhāvam ajānanto

mamāvyayam anuttamam ||; Bhagavadgītā 7.24; see also Bhagavadgītā 7.25: nāha m prakāśa h sarvasya yogamāyāsamāv r ta h | mū d ho ‘ya m nābhijānāti loko mām ajam avyayam ||.

33 . Mahadev Desai, trans., Th e Bhagavadgītā According to Gandhi , xviii. 34 . sa m niyamyendriyagrāma m sarvatra samabuddhaya h | te prāpnuvanti mām eva

sarvabhūtahite ratā h ||; Bhagavadgītā 12.4; see also Bhagavadgītā 4.7: yadā yadā hi dhar-masya glānir bhavati bhārata | abhyutthānam adharmasya tadātmāna m s r jāmy aham ||.

35 . Mahadev Desai, trans., Th e Bhagavadgītā According to Gandhi , xix.




A look at philology as it was practiced in the history of Indology shows that German Indologists were far from understanding these principles. Th ey placed their faith in a narrow concept of scientifi c method, which they thought would automati-cally endow them with the ability to make sense of the text. But the task of inter-pretation is much more complex. It requires qualities such as patience, sympathy, maturity, and intellectual and personal humility. In contrast, so-called “layers anal-ysis” ( Schichtenanalyse or, as it is also called, Textenschichtung 36 ) takes only a little sophomoric skill. And thus a generation of Indologists from Holtzmann to Malinar undertook their dissections of the text, knowing neither what the text said nor what it actually took to interpret it.

To be sure, this concluding look at Gandhi is not meant to solve all textual problems. Rather, our aim is to outline an alternative to the scientism of Indology. In contrast to the Indologists, who valorize their scientifi c status even at the expense of humanity, 37 we fi nd that reading texts is ultimately a matter of responsibility. It is a matter of that

36 . Th e classic statement of the principles of this method is considered, among Indologists, to be Paul Hacker’s address to the 1961 Deutscher Orientalistentag (Congress of German Orientalists); the key passage from this address reads as follows: “From such changes (I mean: inversions of the text, expansions, interpolations and even individual word variants) one can at times practically read off intellectual-historical [geistesgeschich-tliche] processes. And since we for the most part lack direct historical [geschichtliche] evi-dence, textual history [Textgeschichte] or, speaking more generally, the method of comparing the multiple transmissions , is often the sole scientifi c [wissenschaftliche] means of knowl-edge for [understanding? reconstructing?] the historical [geschichtliche] processes. Th e history of religion [Religionsgeschichte] of Hinduism in its diff erent branches—history of myths, of cult, of religious ethics and laws, of piety—but also the history of philosophy [Philosophiegeschichte] in some of its branches can no longer be carried out scientifi -cally [wissenschaftlich] without the use of this method. . . . At the outset, I had posed the question: how does one extrapolate the historical one-after-the-other [geschichtlichen Nacheinander] from out of the seeming one-alongside-the-other [Nebeneinander] of the compiled texts? Th e part of the answer that I have given so far can be briefl y summarized thus: at fi rst, one contemplates the transmitted works not as a whole, but rather dissects them in pieces that are coherent in terms of their content [inhaltliche Zusammenhängende Stücke] and looks for pieces that correspond partially, whether literally or in terms of their content, either in other works or in other contexts of the [same] text; one compares these and then develops the procedure of comparison each time individually from the realities [Gegebenheiten] of the text. Th is is the method of comparing multiple transmissions .” Paul Hacker, “Zur Methode der geschichtlichen Erforschung der anonymen Sanskritliteratur des Hinduismus. Vortrag gehalten auf dem XV. Deutschen Orientalistentag Göttingen 1961,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 111, no.2 (1961): 489.

37 . Th e attempt by Ernst Steinkellner, a student of the Nazi Erich Frauwallner, to rehabil-itate his master’s work appears to us to be paradigmatic of this tendency. “To what extent has his [i.e., Frauwallner’s] ‘Aryan approach’ infl uenced his world-famous two volume albeit incomplete overview of Indian philosophy so much that one cannot deny its value as a scientifi c conception [wissenschaftlichen Konzeption] drawn from source texts of the development of philosophical thought in India? . . . How can one today engage Frauwallner’s scientifi c work [Wissen] in light of this knowledge [of his Nazi involvement]? . . . We are essentially confronted with two types of products of Frauwallner’s scientifi c activity [wis-senschaftlicher Leistung]. On the one hand, with the editions, translations, analyses, interpretations, and hypotheses. . . . It is these products of his work that . . . have become indispensable for any further work and against which any further progress in understand-ing . . . must be measured. Th ey must be seen as the knowledge gained through Frauwallner’s




responsibility which Levinas fi nds is already implicit in the very being of language and which he links to the imperative to respond to the other. Th e historical-critical method is to be critiqued because more is at stake here than just the justifi cation of a method. When truth is traded in for mere empirical correspondence, when ideas are traded in for an assemblage of facts, when minimalism is applauded in the face of global problems, when dialogue is suppressed for the sake of a monologue of methodological control, the historical method must be critiqued. Th is critique is even more urgent and neces-sary than we have made the case for here. In his book Human Understanding , Stephen Toulmin argues that there are two ways in which one can think of a science: “we can think of it as a discipline, comprising a communal tradition of procedures and tech-niques for dealing with theoretical or practical problems; or we can think of it as a pro-fession, comprising the organized set of institutions, roles, and men whose task it is to apply or improve those procedures and techniques.” 38 In the case of Indology, the institutional and hegemonic aspects have so dominated the disciplinary aspects that we can no longer ask the most elementary questions of science: for whom and for what good? Since this science no longer has a positive motivation such as the reappropriation of tradition or the upholding of ethical values, its eff ects are negative and nugatory. In Carne-Ross’s memorable words, “if the humanities failed to humanize us,” it is “because we deprived them of their humanity by alternately aestheticizing them and handing them over to scholarship.” 39 In this sense, German Indology is truly worthy of the epi-thet “the nay science.”

philological-critical studies, which has a certain permanence and on which one can fur-ther build. On the other hand, we are confronted with this complex of Frauwallner’s ideas about periodization [of Indian history], which is scientifi cally untenable [wissen-schaftlich unhaltbar] because of its racist foundations. Th ese ideas about periodization, however, . . . are not only largely unusable, but can also be clearly distinguished from his genuine philosophical-historical work, which is based on sources, and hence can be easily separated from his work. . . . Just as the natural sciences cannot do without the knowledge they have acquired and build on this [knowledge] without taking into consideration the individual character or the fate of the person who acquired this knowledge, so also, it holds for the knowledge acquired in the human sciences: whatever demonstrates itself as usable, what one can extend, what one can improve, one cannot relinquish in further research. However, this is precisely the case with regard to Frauwallner’s achievements, on which we can and must build today, if we do not want to regress. When we remove the ideologically conditioned ideas of periodization of Indian thought and Indian culture from his work, and this means what is actually and in essence ‘only’ his historical writing, what remains is an impressive work of great clarity and consistency.” Ernst Steinkellner, “Vorbemerkungen zu Jakob Stuchlik, Der arische Ansatz. Erich Frauwallner und der Nationalsozialismus ,” 1–2, 3, 4; ikga.oeaw.ac.at/Mat/steinkellner_vorwort_stuchlik_2009.pdf.

38 . Toulmin, Human Understanding , 142. 39 . D. S. Carne-Ross, “Scenario for a New Year,” Arion 8, no.2 (1969): 202.



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