Les scolastiques indiennes: Geneses, developpements, interactions.

• Author: Cort, John E.

Les scolastiques indiennes: Geneses, developpements, interactions. Edited by EMILIE AUSSANT and GERARD COLAS. Etudes thematiques, vol. 32. Paris: ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT, 2020. Pp. 322. [euro]40.

At the heart of this volume, as the editors discuss in the introduction, is a fundamental epistemological and hermeneutical problem that we face in any attempt to make meaningful intellectual comparisons across culture and time: what concepts and categories can we find that transcend the specifics of both traditions being compared, so that the presuppositions of either one of them do not taint the attempt before it even begins? In this case, the editors and the eleven other scholars (all based in Europe and North America) who join them in this venture tackle traditional Indian intellectual and textual disciplines and practices. In their introduction the editors review how the disciplines of the Western academy such as philology, philosophy, linguistics, and Indology are all so deeply embedded in Western epistemology that they fail at the task of serving as more general comparative categories. Simply broadening the scholarly gaze to include Indian materials in the curriculum of a Western discipline is insufficient, as the Indian intellectual tradition is then forced into categories that inevitably fail to do it justice. Taking an emic approach, and adopting Indian categories, is equally fraught. The editors investigate the problems inherent in trying to promote sastra as an emic alternative, given the ways that the practitioners and promoters of sastra have tended to be Brahmans for whom no intellectual work was conceivable if not in Sanskrit. (An analysis that included gender, caste, and race would amplify this argument.) In response, and in part inspired by intellectual interactions between Indians and Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they resurrect and promote the term "scolastique / scholasticism" as an alternative, because medieval European scholasticism stressed an intellectual approach that transcended the limitations and divisions of what later became the current academic disciplines. They say that scholasticism as a concept is both supple and dynamic, and is of sufficiently common usage that they need not hamstring its use by insisting on a narrow definition. I suspect that not all readers will be convinced of the editors' choice of scolastique as a comparative term. To call a person a scholastic, in English at least, is far from a...