Study of Hinduism as a disciplinary issue

After World War I, the field of scholarship on India can be considered as a multi-disciplinary space within which philology was the eminent discipline that all agents, implicitly or explicitly, referred to in their practices. Philology, in the modern sense of the term, ¹ owed its position to the rupture which was introduced by the paradigm of comparative grammar. This discipline that subjected facts of language to a comparative historical analysis, imposed itself in the human sciences (history, sociology and literature) at the end of the 19^th century within the innovative sector of the university, as the historian Ernest Lavisse expressed it in 1881 when he declared: ‘The true historian is a philologist’. ²