New Perspectives on the History of Indian Studies in Continental Europe (Report‪)‬

There has been of late a spate of works from France which focus on the development of Indian studies on the continent of Europe. They are not primarily concerned with the accretion of European knowledge and understanding of India, as was Ernst Windisch's Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie und Indischen Altertumskunde (1917-20), or with the effect it had on European literature and culture, as was Raymond Schwab's Renaissance Orientale (1950), or with constructing it as an essentializing, hegemonic discourse, as was Ronald Inden's Imagining India (1999). They aim to study the social milieus and institutional settings in which the study of India evolved on the European continent. Several works by the sociologist Roland Lardinois, alone or with colleagues, span the polar figures of Indologist and Buddhologist Sylvain Levi (1863-1935) and the anthropologist Louis Dumont (1911-98). First came in 2002 the Correspondances orientalistes entre Paris et Saint-Petersbourg, which testifies to close exchanges between French and Russian scholars, primarily Levi and Sergej F. Ol'denburg, between 1887 and 1935, which were renewed in the joint support by the French Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique with the Russian Academy of Sciences for this edition under the co-editorship of Lardinois with Gregorij M. Bongard-Levin and Aleksej A. Vigasin. All letters were written in French, but, since the repository in which most have been preserved is the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, they overwhelmingly represent the writings of French scholars (54 to 1 for the Levi-Ol'denburg correspondence). Exemplarily edited and contextualized, and handsomely illustrated, the Correspondances throw welcome light on the collegial assistance and friendship that developed between Levi and Ol'denburg, and, in a minor register, with and between other scholars, Alfred Foucher, Emile Senart, and Paul Pelliot, and Fedor I. Scerbatskoj, Vasilij M. Alekseev, "Basilij V. Radlov, and Fridrih A. Rozenberg.