Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedanta.

• Author: Gaeffke, Peter

While the voice of Paul Hacker (1913-78) was barely noticed during his lifetime due to his personality and his confrontational interactions with his colleagues and contemporaries, after his death in 1978, first in small circles in Germany and more recently also abroad, some of his ideas found their ways into others' discussions and writings. However, it was frustrating for those who knew the fecundity of his ideas to see the Orientalism debate proceed and other recent developments in comparative religion and cultural studies go on as if Hacker never existed.

But now a first attempt has been made to cross at least the linguistic barrier by publishing in the English language a collection of his articles stretching from 1947 until 1978. According to the interests of the editor, these articles deal with questions of Vedanta in its classical and modern forms. As the editor declares very rightly, this is only a fraction of Hacker's published work. More can be found in his seminal study on the Prahlada myth - which book should not even rhetorically be characterized as an extension of Willibald Kirfel's (1885-1964) purana studies (p. 7), for it contains a detailed relative chronology of the puranas and is, in fact, a history of Hindu religion from the asceticism of the Visnupurana to the most emotional expressions of bhakti. This, and also his book on auxiliary verbs in Hindi, are still available only in their original German. So much must suffice here to adumbrate the breadth and richness of Hacker's writings in their entirety.

Hacker entered the field of Indology at a crucial moment in its history: after the disturbing experiences of Nazism and the second World War, German Indology emerged in much the same form as it had been in the beginning of the twentieth century, when it celebrated the victory of textual scholarship and boasted of a nearly endless series of masterly publications. In 1946, the philological text-critical method was not impaired by the political situation, although some Indologists had undergone various forms of deprivation, persecution, moral debasement, etc. But when the German universities opened their doors again, Indologists continued the textual studies of earlier times. Names such as Walter Schubring (1881-1969), Ludwig Alsdorf (1904-78), Heinrich Luders (1869-1943), Paul Thieme (1905-) may stand here for many others.

Paul Hacker, who had a degree in Slavic languages, was different from the other Indologists and his...