ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with a major aspect of language-based identity claims: philology and the refashioning of language. Present-day scholarship sees European philology as an accomplice in forging the nationalist idea of a unified triad of language, territory, and nation. Contemporary critiques of philology have shown that new and emergent ideas about language fuelled the nationalist project by reconstructing in secular garb a dubious Biblical theory of the monogenesis of language and the peopling of the world by a common stock. The chapter argues that instead of belabouring a superficial point about the Biblical roots of European philology, one must search for a continuity of experiential structures across different historical contexts in European culture - a common community experience as the root of such continuity. Finally, this chapter tries to posit a link between philology, nation, and community within the framework of the doxastic nature of community experience and the critical differences between this history and the history of the Indian investment in language. Without belittling the great intellectual feats of European philology, especially in the Indian context, we should be able to trace the concept of philology back to the dynamic of a doxastic community.