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Indology in Marburg
Indology is a collective term for various forms of academic study of the Indian cultural area, which extends beyond the geographical area of the Indian subcontinent (South Asia). This explains why Indology also deals with the study of Buddhism and its spread to Central, East and Southeast Asia, the cultural relations between India and Europe etc.
Indology is characterised by its approach via language. Although many topics of the colonial period can also be studied on the basis of English-language sources, access to the indigenous culture can only be gained by studying one or, even better, several Indian languages. A combination of the most important ancient language, Sanskrit, which is particularly useful for religious, historical and cultural studies, with a modern language, such as Hindi or Nepali, is advisable. In Marburg, it is also possible to combine Sanskrit with Tibetan. Unique in Europe is the offer for advanced students to acquire classical Newar, a central source language for the cultural history of Nepal.
In Indology, the philological approach means that students always work from primary texts, not on the basis of translations - a peculiarity that characterises university teaching practice. The reason for this is that the small selection of Indian sources that have been translated to date, and and, above all, the even smaller selection of reliably translated sources, do not provide a not a viable basis for research. Very good language skills are therefore an indispensable key. In Marburg, especially in the M.A. Indology programme, this includes training in Indological editing. One of the attractions of research is that that you may be the first editor of a ‘new’ text in your final thesis, i.e. a text that has never been text, i.e. a work that has never been printed before and has only survived in manuscript archives.
In the words of the founder of the discipline, A.W. Schlegel, philology means trying to understand the texts the texts as an Indian contemporary of the author would probably have understood them, but would have understood them, but one must also view them with a critical scientific and historical eye. view. Depending on the object of study, other methods are then added.
For methodological reasons, one focus of the programme is on classical India - as an intellectual basis, from which other subjects can be chosen. The actual subjects studied are as diverse as the students' language skills and interests. Typical thematic focuses are narrative literature and poetry literature and poetry as well as the religious literature of Hinduism and Buddhism. But in fact in recent years Marburg academics have specialised in subjects ranging from architecture and Ayurveda, metallurgy, Indo-Persian political poetry of the 19th century to Yoga.
Experience has shown that training in an ancient language, in translation techniques and other text-related skills forms a basic philological education which - similar to Latin - provides a solid solid basis for further, interdisciplinary studies and can gradually help to open up larger academic areas. The small groups allow for intensive individual supervision, and the presence of several research projects on site links teaching to current research. The Institute maintains a regular exchange with departments in Toronto, Pune and Oxford.