ABSTRACT
Criticizing the Euro-centricism that left a stain on Orientalist scholarship, Louis Dumont claimed a sociological concern regarding the agent’s ways of behaving and thinking, which he borrowed from Marcel Mauss. 1 Historically yet, this kind of criticism was expressed in three different ways. First, the Catholic and reactionary currents hostile to the French Revolution, until the 1930s, defended a sacred vision of man and the cosmos that they attributed to pre-modern societies, constructing India as embodiment of a pure hierarchical order still preserved in the East—an order which the Revolution had done away with in France. Second, the sociology of religions initiated by Durkheim and Mauss, while excluding any appeal to a transcendent principle situated outside the social world, also contributed to the legitimisation of non-European cultures in considering them as part of its area of research. Lastly, the elite of the colonised countries who were fighting for their national independence—at the forefront of whom were the Indian elite educated in a colonial academic system—criticised Western 390science which was justifiably perceived as legitimising colonial domination. In the 1920s-1930s, the supporters of these different viewpoints independently developed a criticism of western reason and its universal pretension. Some favoured the idea that one should return to a pre-modern and thus, pre-critical state of reason which could reconcile science and religion, sometimes modulating their discourses with anti-colonial accents, like Guénon; others questioned the cultural determinations of western reason qualified as colonial, and soon, post-colonial, in opposition to which the most radical proposed a return to mythical thought and the cognitive frameworks inherited from their traditional learned cultures. In both cases, social sciences, perceived as supporting the process of desecration of the world, constituted the core of these debates. Louis Dumont’s work, which was characterised both by a valorisation of Brahmanical knowledge and the criticism of modern scientific reason, could thus only be understood in terms of the historical genesis of the field of scholarship on India in France.
