Description

Amidst the challenges of diminishing funding and folding departments, the study of India’s classical languages and cultures has been enjoying an unexpected period of excitement and development. Indology is alive, dynamic, and full of new ideas that make major differences to how we think about India’s past. Examples of ideas where old certainties are being challenged include the dating and relationships of early yoga literature, the Greater Magadha hypothesis, the date of the Arthaśāstra, the Buddhist origins of ayurveda and yoga, the Tibetan Buddhist tantric origins of Hatha Yoga, and the origins of Dharmaśāstra. Ideas from Olivelle, Bronkhorst, Zysk, Maas, Pollock, Mallinson, Singleton and others are transforming Indian studies in major ways. Not all these new hypotheses will survive longer scrutiny. But many will, and tomorrow’s Indology may be a renewed and markedly different field of scholarship.

Dominik Wujastyk is the Saroj and Prem Singhmar Chair of Classical Indian Society and Polity at the University of Alberta, a post he has held since 2015. He was educated at Oxford University, and later worked as a curator of Sanskrit manuscripts at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. From 2002 to 2009 he held a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship at University College London, and from 2009 to 2014 he worked on the project “Philosophy and Medicine in Early Classical India” at the University of Vienna. His monograph publications include Metarule of Paninian Grammar (1992) and The Roots of Ayurveda (3rd ed. 2003), and he is currently working with Prof. Philipp Maas (Leipzig) on a book about the earliest history of Indian yoga postures.