The Nay Science is more than a history of German Indology. Besides offering a highly nuanced critique of scientific positivism and historicism, it makes important interventions in broader debates on the development of the social and human sciences in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, and has much to say regarding the role of race and religion in the formation of German national identity. Last but not least, The Nay Science contributes greatly to our understanding of the origins, nature, and consequences of German orientalism. While the non specialist reader might find this ambitious work daunting in its depth, breadth, and complexity, the authors have produced a remarkable work of scholarship.

The book opens with a helpful introduction that provides a brief history of German Indology and the so-called “historical-critical method” (1) that has ostensibly dominated the field of German Indology until recently. The first three chapters proceed chronologically, following first the development of German Indology, beginning with early nineteenth-century analyses of the Mahābhārata—the Sanskrit epic that includes the famous 700-verse Bhagavgad Gita—that were informed by Protestant theology.The book then moves through the efflorescence of putatively “scientific” Indology in the late-nineteenth century to the institutionalization of a pseudo-historical narrative of Indo-Germanic continuity and Brahmanic “corruption” in the twentieth. The final two chapters turn from a critical history of German Indology to a synchronic analysis of the field's problematic methods and interpretations.

The first chapter does a superb job of showing how the historical-critical method, borrowed from Protestant theologians, produced a reading of the Mahābhārata that says more about German ethnoreligious preoccupations than it does about Brahmin philosophy or Hindu theology. By the end of the nineteenth century, the first generation of professional German Indologists, including Adolf Holtzmann, Sr. and his nephew, Adolf Holtzmann, Jr., were projecting fantasies of a heroic, “Indo-Germanic Epic” (Ur-epos) that were largely detached from the textual and philological evidence for the Mahābhārata and the Gita. By comparing the Mahābhārata to the Nordic Nibelungenlied and ancient India to pre-Christian Germanic civilization, these scholars nevertheless developed a powerful narrative claiming that the Gita had been “a pantheistic text reflective of Indo-Germanic views of heroism” (72)—the “Aryan Indo-Germanic phase” (26)—“before it underwent revision at the hands of Brahmans” (72), i.e., the “Brahmanic-Hindu” phase (26).

The second chapter analyzes the development of Adolf Holtzmann, Jr.'s influential Mahābhārata interpretation. The elder Holtzmann was critical of Brahminism—a proxy for Catholicism, in his Protestant reading of the text—for corrupting the Mahābhārata and, with it, the ancient epic culture of the Germans. But Holtzmann, Jr. went further than his uncle's “Brahmanical” hypothesis, postulating the erstwhile existence of an “original Indo-Germanic epic on the basis of (imaginary) points of contact between the Mahābhārata and the Nibelungen” (119). In carrying out this project, Holtzmann, Jr. created a template for later interpretations of the Mahābhārata that drew attention to its epic composition, endemic religious conflict, putative textual corruption, and inherent historical distortion (by Brahmins)—as well as themes of enlightened religion, religious persecution, and elements of racial contamination.

The third chapter traces the maturation of German Indology as a profession during the first three decades of the twentieth century, paralleling the turn from Mahābhārata studies in general to the Gita in particular. This exceptionally detailed chapter includes eighteen sections focusing on “six Indological Gitas”: the “pantheistic Gita” of Adolf Holzmann, Jr., the “theistic Gita” of Richard Garbe, the “epic Gita” of Hermann Jacobi, the “Krishna Gita” of Hermann Oldenberg, the “trinitarian Gita” of Rudolf Otto, and, finally, the “Aryan Gita” of the Nazi Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. Hauer's reading of the Gita was the most clearly instrumentalist, but it is important to remember that his scholarship was little different from “all other [German] Indologists” in being “placed entirely in the service of religious, nationalist or ethnocentric needs … because [Hauer] was drawing on a broad continuity in German Gita scholarship…” His work was “essentially an amalgam of Jacobi's and Otto's views” (277).

The fourth chapter ruminates on the methodological assumptions underlying these Aryan continuities in readings of the Mahābhārata. It reminds us that the so-called critical method was largely a “scientized” (492) and “secularized” (317) version of a German Protestant theological (and national) tradition. The fifth and final chapter provides a thoughtful and systematic critique of “Scientific Indology” in general. Employing a diverse array of thinkers—from Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill to Immanuel Kant and Hans-Georg Gadamer—the authors build a convincing case against Indology's claims to being a “positivistic notion of truth” (403), which served merely to buttress a fundamentally racist, antisemitic, anti-Catholic interpretation of the Mahābhārata. The book concludes with Mahatma Gandhi's ruminations on the Gita, which, the authors argue, helped reopen the work to a more sensitive, post-national interpretation that reintroduced “qualities such as patience, sympathy, maturity, and intellectual and personal humility” (444).

The authors undoubtedly succeed in making their argument that German Indology's emphasis on historical-critical method masked an underlying Protestant theological and chauvinist agenda. But because the methods and interpretations that the authors set up and then dismantle were influential primarily before 1945, one might argue that their analysis is based on something of a straw man: it is doubtful that any prominent pre-1945 field of the humanities, in Germany or elsewhere, could stand up to the kind of methodological scrutiny the authors deploy. Conversely, textual scholars, in German studies and elsewhere, have long since moved away from the notion of recovering an “uncorrupted” Ur-text, making the authors’ central critique appear anachronistic. The overdetermined nature of the critique does little to undermine Adluri's and Bagchee's rich, well-informed, and consistently penetrating analysis. Moreover, in directing our gaze beyond the methods of orientalists and poststructuralists alike, the authors suggest an approach to German Indology that better negotiates the tensions between metaphysical and scientific, modern and traditional, East and West.