We must be careful not to believe things simply because we want them to be true. No one can fool you as easily as you can fool yourself!
Category Archives: methodology
Teaching religious texts in a respectful way?
A colleague working in an area with a strong Indian minority sent me the following question:
Some of our Indian students have difficulty with how certain Sanskrit texts are taught. They are frustrated that we treat, e.g., the Rāmayāṇa as literature, and the Bhagavad Gītā as philosophy, and feel that this does not show respect to the texts. Our instructors have tried to challenge everyone to consider their definitions of what texts count as religious, whether from ancient Greece, China, or India, but some students still find these approaches to be disrespectful. I wonder if you have any thoughts about how to engage with students coming from (I’m guessing) relatively conservative Hindu contexts who are being taught their favorite religious texts in a non-religious way. Do you have any strategies for helping them feel less alienated? Or for demonstrating respect for the texts even while applying critical reading strategies?
How to organise translations or editions of the same text in a bibliography?
Suppose you want to refer to n-translations or editions of the Rāmāyaṇa or of the Vigrahavyāvartanī, what would you do? I can think of two solutions
- You refer to only a couple of translations among the many texts you refer to. In these cases, I would order them (just like I do for all texts) according to the name of the editor–translator.
- You write a study specifically on a given text and need to quote many translations or editions. In these cases, I would suggest having a separate section of your bibliography dedicated to just that. Within the separate section, I would again order editions and translations according to the name of the editon, but one could also use the name of the author, if he is a historical person. I would strongly discourage from using the name of authors like Vyāsa for the alphabetical order.
What do readers do?
How to address an academic
short promemoria for younger colleagues
It happens time and again that a male colleague or student I never met writes me addressing me as “Madam” (or any other form of it). This is not a crime, but I wonder whether they are aware of what they are implicitly communicating by doing it, namely that they consider the fact of being a woman more relevant than the fact of being a scholar. Fine, if you are inviting someone to the opera, but somehow weird if you are asking them to review a book, write an article or participate in a conference…
The ultimate level of interpretation
Suppose you are a devout Christian and you think that the Bible has been inspired by God. Would this mean that you cannot discuss the historical layers of the Bible? Or would you continue to investigate them, thinking of them as the way in which God assumed a historical form and communicated with human beings? In other words, does not faith regard only the ultimate level, leaving all the others unchanged?
How should we call half-baked editions?
After my last post on critical and diplomatic editions, a colleague wrote me inviting me to consider the case of half-baked editions. How should we call them?
Collations, critical and diplomatic editions
Is any text which reports variant readings from other manuscripts a “critical edition”? And what is a diplomatic edition?
A text which reports all variant readings from various manuscripts without selecting a preferred one is a collation. In a collation, one typically reproduces also variant readings which are clearly wrong and will later be eliminated. Some of these details are irrelevant for the sake of the constitution of the critical text, but can be relevant for the history of the transmission. For instance, a manuscript often writing śa or ṣa instead of sa might be an evidence of the fact that the text was transmitted (at a certain point of its history) within an environment in which the dental sibilant was not distinguished, e.g., in Bengal. The same could be repeated, mutatis mutandis, about the use of retroflex ḷ for non Vedic words, the confusion between sounded and unsounded occlusives and so on.
“Do you know of any recent literature on X?”
This post is part of my series of suggestions for younger colleagues and students. I put here all the pieces of good advice I would have loved to hear while I was in their position…
Thinking in Sanskrit in order to understand texts?
A student recently asked me how to think in Sanskrit. Her point was that thinking in English or in any other foreign language immensely helps one in translating a text, so that this should be desirable also in the case of Sanskrit.
Dividing words in transcription
I am often busy correcting my students’ essays and I often notice, when they decide to transcribe Sanskrit texts, that they have no idea about where to introduce white spaces. Hence, I thought of explaining it here, in case other students may need help with that.
- Be clear about what you are doing: You are transcribing a text from one writing system to another. It does not make sense to retain in the new writing systems peculiarities which only make sense in the original one.
- Therefore, you don’t need to reproduce in Roman alphabet the white spaces of the Devanagari (or of any other South Asian alphabet). For instance, mām eva, not māmeva, although the Devanagari would have मामेव.
- Just use spaces between words.
- What is a word? Use the Grammarians’ definition “whatever has a verbal or nominal ending” and add that the ending has to be visible (no lopa admitted).
- Accordingly, you don’t need a white space within the elements of a compound. For instance, kṛṣṇacaraṇāravindayugalaṃ vande and not kṛṣṇa caraṇa aravinda yugalaṃ vande.
- What about en-dashes, you might ask? You can use among elements of compounds, in order to make the life of your audience easier, especially in the case of longer compounds. Just be consistent and remember that the actual ending of the members of a compound are not visible. For instance, śrī anavadhikānantaprītisahitā can be transcribed as anavadhika-ananta-prīti-sahitā, but NOT as anavadhikā-ananta-prīti-sahitā.
- Some authors use conventions to show that a sandhi has taken place. For instance, anavadhikânanta, meaning that there has been a sandhi of a+a.
Good luck with your essays and transcriptions!