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Arts » Magazine
Influential Indologist
ROLAND LARDINOIS
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The Hindu : Arts / Magazine : Influential Indologist 20/11/10 10.28
Associates
Her own interpretation of Hinduism is close to the view expressed by Louis Dumont in his Homo Hierachicus (1966 for the French edition), which remains the
most impressive understanding ever published on the caste system. This intellectual association of a Sanskrit scholar and of an anthropologist who both did
fieldwork (mainly in South India), was long considered as typical of the French scholarship on India, although this blending of skills was not at all uncommon
among Indian scholars since the very beginning of the 20th century. Yet the intellectual framework which underlines both Madeleine Biardeau's and Louis
Dumont's understanding of Hinduism has been, and still is, debated among scholars of India who questioned the unilateral Brahmanical grounding of their
scholarly approaches. Madeleine Biardeau was Directeur d'études at the fifth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at Paris, the stronghold of
Indologists since the end of the 19th century, and in 1969 she succeeded Louis Dumont as head of the Centre for Indian and South Asian Studies at the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her death marks almost the complete disappearance of a whole generation of French scholars who profoundly redefined the
intellectual understanding of (classical Hindu) India in the second half of the 20th century.
Roland Lardinois is a Sociologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, is affiliated with the Centre d'Etudes de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud
(EHESS, Paris). He is currently at the Centre for Human Sciences at Delhi
.
Keywords: Madeleine Biardeau, translator, Ramayana, Indologist
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