Books by Joydeep Bagchee
DUNS SCOTUS'S DOCTRINE OF CATEGORIES AND MEANING, 2022
German Jews and the University, 1678–1848, 2022
Copyright-protected material. Do not post or send to any other person, institution, social media,... more Copyright-protected material. Do not post or send to any other person, institution, social media, or website. the proFeSSional experience oF JewiSh univerSity graduateS 181 7 Vollständige Verhandlungen des Ersten Vereinigten Preußischen Landtags, 102. 8 Ibid., 225. 9 Michaelis, ed., Die Rechtsverhältnisse der Juden in Preußen, 75. On the discussion in the Prussian parliament and the subsequent votes of the Prussian full professors see Kalisch, Die Judenfrage in ihrer wahren Bedeutung für Preußen, 27-232 (source documents). 10 Jews were first appointed as judges and Gymnasium teachers in Prussia in a few isolated cases after 1870, but they remained largely restricted to privatdozents or secondary professors in the academic career track.
German Jews and the University, 1678–1848, 2022
My real university was Auschwitz.-Joseph Wulf M onika richarz requireS little introduction. She i... more My real university was Auschwitz.-Joseph Wulf M onika richarz requireS little introduction. She is one of the most important historiographers of German-Jewish history, and a recognized authority on Jewish social life in Germany before the Holocaust. Her three-volume work Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte, 1 based on materials collected from the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute New York, during her time as a researcher there, is a standard reference work familiar to all students of the field. But it is her pioneering role in advancing the debate on German anti-Semitism that will particularly stand out in memory. As Christhard Hoffmann notes in his review of German-Jewish historiography, following the revelations about the extent of German involvement in the Holocaust in the early years of the Federal Republic (the Ulm trial in 1958, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial from 1963 to 1965), it was not the "historical establishment," but "individuals from the generation of assistants and students, such as Werner Jochmann, Reinhard Rürup, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, Monika Richarz and Arno Herzig, who followed these impulses and addressed questions of Jewish history and especially antisemitism." 2 But despite Richarz's international prominence, a significant part of her work, her doctoral dissertation, has not received the attention it deserves outside of Germany. The dissertation was originally published in 1973 by the Leo Baeck Institute, London, with the title Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademischen Berufe: Jüdische Studenten und Akademiker
Modernity and Plato, 2012
Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mahābhārata Textual Criticism, 2018
xxi i i PROLOGUE saṃ gacchadhvaṃ saṃ vadadhvaṃ saṃ vo manaṃ si janatam | devā bhaḡaṃ yath... more xxi i i PROLOGUE saṃ gacchadhvaṃ saṃ vadadhvaṃ saṃ vo manaṃ si janatam | devā bhaḡaṃ yathā purve saṃ jananā upasate || -Ṛ g Veda 1.191.2 Czech artist František Kupka (1871-1957) 1 painted Le Premier Pas or The First
Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mahābhārata Textual Criticism, 2018
Philology and Criticism contrasts the Mahābhārata’s preservation and transmission within the Indi... more Philology and Criticism contrasts the Mahābhārata’s preservation and transmission within the Indian scribal and commentarial traditions with Sanskrit philology after 1900, as German Indologists proposed a critical edition of the Mahābhārata to validate their racial and nationalist views. Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee show how, in contrast to the Indologists’ unscientific theories, V. S. Sukthankar assimilated the principles of neo-Lachmannian textual criticism to defend the transmitted text and its traditional reception as a work of law, philosophy and salvation. The authors demonstrate why, after the edition’s completion, no justification exists for claiming that an earlier heroic epic existed, that the Brahmans redacted the heroic epic to produce the Mahābhārata or that they interpolated “sectarian” gods such as Vis.n.u and Śiva into the work. By demonstrating how the Indologists committed technical errors, cited flawed and biased scholarship and used circular argumentation to validate their racist and anti-Semitic theories, Philology and Criticism frees readers to approach the Mahābhārata as “the principal monument of bhakti” (Madeleine Biardeau). The authoritative guide to the critical edition’s correct use and interpretation, Philology and Criticism urges South Asianists to view Hinduism as a complex debate about ontology and ethics rather than through the lenses of “Brahmanism” and “sectarianism.” It launches a new world philology—one that is plural and self-reflexive rather than Eurocentric and ahistorical.
An evaluation of German Indology's epistemic and institutional features, and a restatement of The... more An evaluation of German Indology's epistemic and institutional features, and a restatement of The Nay Science's thesis in response to Eli Franco's review.
Keywords: German Indology, contemporary debates, philology, The Nay Science, Eli Franco
Vishwa Adluri, ed., Ways and Reasons for Thinking about the Mahābhārata as a Whole (Pune: Bhandar... more Vishwa Adluri, ed., Ways and Reasons for Thinking about the Mahābhārata as a Whole (Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Institute, 2013).
Argument and Design features fifteen essays by leading scholars of the Sanskrit epics, the Mahābh... more Argument and Design features fifteen essays by leading scholars of the Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, discussing the Mahābhārata’s upākhyānas, subtales that branch off from the central storyline and provide vantage points for reflecting on it.
Contributors include: Vishwa Adluri, Joydeep Bagchee, Greg Bailey, Adam Bowles, Simon Brodbeck, Nicolas Dejenne, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Robert P. Goldman, Alf Hiltebeitel, Thennilapuram Mahadevan, Adheesh Sathaye, Bruce M. Sullivan, and Fernando Wulff Alonso.
A table from our forthcoming book Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mahābhārata Textual Critici... more A table from our forthcoming book Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mahābhārata Textual Criticism.
The Nay Science offers a new perspective on the problem of scientific method in the human science... more The Nay Science offers a new perspective on the problem of scientific method in the human sciences. Taking German Indological scholarship on the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita as their example, Adluri and Bagchee develop a critique of the modern valorization of method over truth in the humanities.
The authors show how, from its origins in eighteenth-century Neo-Protestantism onwards, the critical method was used as a way of making theological claims against rival philosophical and/or religious traditions. Via discussions of German Romanticism, the pantheism controversy, scientific positivism, and empiricism, they show how theological concerns dominated German scholarship on the Indian texts. Indology functions as a test case for wider concerns: the rise of historicism, the displacement of philosophical concerns from thinking, and the belief in the ability of a technical method to produce truth.
Based on the historical evidence of the first part of the book, Adluri and Bagchee make a case in the second part for going beyond both the critical pretensions of modern academic scholarship and and the objections of its post-structuralist or post-Orientalist critics. By contrasting German Indology with Plato's concern for virtue and Gandhi's focus on praxis, the authors argue for a conception of the humanities as a dialogue between the ancients and moderns and between eastern and western cultures.
Characteristic concepts and patterns of Romantic philosophy and literature are a displaced and re... more 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 reality and the universal forms of thought.
Explicitly acknowledging its status as a strī-śūdra-veda (a Veda for women and the downtrodden), ... more Explicitly acknowledging its status as a strī-śūdra-veda (a Veda for women and the downtrodden), the Mahābhārata articulates a promise to bring knowledge of right conduct, fundamental ethical, philosophical, and soteriological teachings, and its own grand narrative to all classes of people and all beings. Hiltebeitel shows how the Mahābhārata has more than lived up to this promise at least on the ground in Indian folk traditions. In this three-part volume, he journeys over the overlapping terrains of the south Indian cults of Draupadī (part I) and Kūttāṇṭavar (part II), to explore how the Mahābhārata continues to be such a vital source of meaning, and, in part III, then connects this vital tradition to wider reflections on prehistory, sacrifice, myth, oral epic, and modern theatre.
Papers by Joydeep Bagchee
Paper presented at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies
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Books by Joydeep Bagchee
Keywords: German Indology, contemporary debates, philology, The Nay Science, Eli Franco
Contributors include: Vishwa Adluri, Joydeep Bagchee, Greg Bailey, Adam Bowles, Simon Brodbeck, Nicolas Dejenne, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Robert P. Goldman, Alf Hiltebeitel, Thennilapuram Mahadevan, Adheesh Sathaye, Bruce M. Sullivan, and Fernando Wulff Alonso.
The authors show how, from its origins in eighteenth-century Neo-Protestantism onwards, the critical method was used as a way of making theological claims against rival philosophical and/or religious traditions. Via discussions of German Romanticism, the pantheism controversy, scientific positivism, and empiricism, they show how theological concerns dominated German scholarship on the Indian texts. Indology functions as a test case for wider concerns: the rise of historicism, the displacement of philosophical concerns from thinking, and the belief in the ability of a technical method to produce truth.
Based on the historical evidence of the first part of the book, Adluri and Bagchee make a case in the second part for going beyond both the critical pretensions of modern academic scholarship and and the objections of its post-structuralist or post-Orientalist critics. By contrasting German Indology with Plato's concern for virtue and Gandhi's focus on praxis, the authors argue for a conception of the humanities as a dialogue between the ancients and moderns and between eastern and western cultures.
Papers by Joydeep Bagchee