Under the aegis of the École française d'Extrême Orient, Émilie Aussant and Gérard Colas edited in 2020 a remarkable volume of collected essays by several leading scholars of South Asian studies (N. Balbir, P. Granoff and P. Olivelle, to name just a few), focusing mostly on the pre-colonial Sanskritic cultures of the subcontinent. Its title admirably reflects the multi-faceted purpose of this enterprise: “Les scolastiques indiennes. Genèses, développements, interactions”.

After the theoretically rich introduction by the editors, the book contains 13 articles, organized in four elegantly christened sections: 1) “De la pratique scholastique à l’émergence de scholastiques” (4 essays); 2) “Apories, crises, échanges” (4 essays); 3) “Écarts” (2 essays); 4) “Des discours et des pratiques” (3 essays). The volume is rounded off by an accurate bibliography, a carefully penned index, a section of abstracts in both French and English as well as a section of short author biographies, also in both languages. The proudly bilingual nature of the volume is also attested by the presence of six essays in French, including, of course, the introduction. In this respect, I hope not to over-interpret the intention of the editors by highlighting their laudable choice to preserve and foster the multilingual nature of contemporary scholarship against the potentially impoverishing hegemony of the English language. The editorial care, the accurate layout, the choice of font and paper have all contributed to the production of an all-round high-quality publication, which is a synesthetic pleasure to page through.

The introductory essay traces several epistemological attitudes in Indian studies towards textualized South Asian scholarly disciplines and learned practices. For instance, what one might call an “emic approach” takes seriously the Sanskrit concept of śāstra (knowledge system or, simply, branch of knowledge) and organizes research along the lines drawn by the traditional framework. This method is beset with issues such as lack of historicity and an essentializing tendency, but it does minimize the dangers of superimposing Western concepts onto the South Asian archive. By contrast, close to the other end of the spectrum, what we might call the “cherry-picking approach” carries out readerly raids through highly praised South Asian texts in search of what is established as universal, human constants such as “reason” or “religion”. This well-meaning form of “epistemology” is, nevertheless, plagued with a lack of historical awareness about its own conceptual toolkit, and it risks misinterpreting much of the primary source material owing to insufficient contextualization. Trying to move beyond these and other similarly problematic epistemic perspectives, the editors propose an “experimental and critical attitude, away from the arbitrary and dogmatic application of Western taxonomies” by employing the term “scholasticisms” (scholastiques) as a flexible and dynamic concept that needs no strict definition, as it does not aim at delimiting and normalizing research, but at disclosing and orienting it. To quote a famous line by Wilhelm Halbfass, arguably one of the luminaries of the hermeneutical project carried out by this book, “the dialogic situation is still open”.

No single essay is below the standards of international scholarship or undeserving of a thorough analysis, but lack of space forces me to focus on the two papers that are closest to my research interests.

Y. Bronner's contribution, “In search of scholasticism: Sanskrit poetics and its long path to Śāstrahood”, is a vibrant read that highlights how the history of Sanskrit poetics is nothing but a millennium-long search for the creation of a full-fledged scholarly discipline, “a long journey full of twists and turns, false starts, and dead ends” (p. 99). This historical characterization renders the discipline of Alaṃkāraśāstra – with its constant Streben towards an ideal of “Scholasticism” represented by other disciplines such as Grammar or Vedic Exegesis – the ideal, theoretical foil to gauge the contours of what a scholastique is supposed to be in pre-modern South Asia. Moreover, I might add, the history of Sanskrit poetics mirrors, so to speak, the history of Euro-American philosophy after the decline of the scholastic tradition, i.e. a succession of incessantly opposing views and new attempts at the creation of the ultimate theoretical edifice of Knowledge that constantly lies out of sight and falls short of the acceptance of every new generation of thinkers.

H. David's article on the birth and early development of Advaita Vedānta as an exegetical tradition is a staggeringly learned and state-of-the-art contribution that spans the formative centuries of the most known and sometimes least understood philosophical system of South Asia. The clear formulation of a separate exegetical category for Upaniṣadic statements is traced to an innovative move in Maṇḍana Miśra's Vidhiviveka, the culmination of centuries of fuzzier recourse to, and problematic categorization of, Upaniṣadic materials in earlier authors such as Gauḍapāda and Bhartṛhari. The philological care is exemplary, especially while handling arduous and textually fraught works such as the Vākyapadīyasvavṛtti and the Vidhiviveka itself.

Knowing well that no book can aim at exhaustiveness and that scholarly lacunae are never to be blamed, but to be filled with further research, I would have loved to have seen an article on Sanskrit dramaturgy, which would have permitted a deeper investigation into the relationship between “scholastic” discourse and concrete practices, which is only tackled in the last section of the volume. In this regard, one should refer, most prominently, to the article by C. Zotter, who focuses on “the dynamics of actual ritual practice in a specific local and social context” (p. 240) in Nepal, with an approach that merges the historically informed textual study of numerous ritual texts from a plurality of genres with hands-on anthropological fieldwork in the Kathmandu Valley.

To conclude, Les scolastiques indiennes is an extremely valuable contribution to contemporary scholarship in South Asian studies, whose strongest suits are the presence of several outstanding papers and the open-ended, overarching vision of the enterprise that gives rhythm to this collective volume without stifling it in any predetermined conceptual scaffold.