Find inter-school rivalries
“What do we understand by contextualizing the texts? Lineal conflicts and personal attacks that developed into prolonged clashes between the gurukulas, for instance. And the scribal errors purported to be as such but purposely employed devices to alter meaning or variants resulting from the popularity of the text in vernacular traditions. Even beneath an ostentatious eulogy, we may decipher a lamentation if carefully gone against the grain by following the paronomastic hints or “slesharthas“. Some Indian pundits in early modern India, as we get to know now, produced perverted commentaries of Sanskrit texts in order to elude harsh polemics, win patronage, or take revenge on the gurukula such texts belonged to. " (<— What is he talking about in each sentence here? Of course, mAdhva-Appayya rivalry is an example of the first. But the rest? One also wonders if this “gutter inspector” role is something to be celebrated.)
Political philology
- the scholar tries to imagine the historical and social context prevelant at the time of composition of a text [YT17]
- rAjIva malhotra says that sheldon pollock and co have invented “political philology” - “A central argument he advocates with evangelical zeal is that Indian texts must be studied not for legitimate spiritual/sacred content, but for the purpose of finding the social exploitation and political domination contained in them. Before he can show the texts to be political, he has to devalue (and debunk) the legitimacy of the sacred dimension; then he can substitute the political motive as the reason for the successful spread of Sanskrit. … If one side of the coin of Pollock’s interpretation is political philology, the other side is liberation philology. … While political philology is used to diagnose, liberation philology is used to liberate the Indian masses from the diseases being carried in their sanskriti for thousands of years.”