Indian Literature and the politics of the Vernacular: Early Soviet Indology, semantic palaeontology and the ideology critique of Brahmanism

The history and significance of early Soviet Indology needs to be reconsidered. From the time of Stalin’s 1950 denunciation of the ideas of Nikolai Marr (1865–1934), a deep nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary scholarship about India that has overshadowed consideration of other important factors arose and still persists. Scholars have focused on the considerable achievements of the St. Petersburg-Leningrad School of Buddhology, led by Academicians Sergei Ol’denburg (1863–1934) and Fedor Shcherbatskoi (aka Theodor Stcherbatsky, 1866–1942), and the parlous consequences of the purges in bringing its work to an end. The rise to prominence of the new “modern Indian philology” led by Aleksei Petro- vich Barannikov (1890–1952) in the mid-1930s, which stressed the need to study areas that had only weakly been developed in pre-revolutionary oriental studies, has been examined predominantly as a one-sided and dogmatic negation of the achievements of the earlier scholarship. The rise of the “new philology” in conditions of the Stalinist repression of “old” philologists has tended to obscure the former’s intellectual significance, and its importance for contemporary scholarship about the literatures and cultures of India and of the East more generally. The current article questions this framework and aims critically to consider the achievements and limitations of both forms of Indology in the light of current scholarship, with the hope that in doing so the relevance of this work to current debates around the limitations of current postcolonial theory becomes clear.