He has presented more than a dozen papers at academic conferences in North America, Europe, and South Asia, including Harvard University, Humboldt University, Heidelberg University's South Asia Institute, and the Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi, India.

Drawing on new sources, this book evaluates the importance of Henry Thomas Colebrooke, an East India Company civil servant who became the father of modern Indology. Written by renowned academics in the field of Indology, and drawing on new sources, this book shows how he embodies the significant passage from eighteenth century colonial expansion, to the professional, transnational ethos of nineteenth century intellectual life and scholarly enquiry.

Can Indian civilization be compared to a thousand-branched tree? What have been its outstanding achievements and its impact on the world? These are some of the questions this book asks. But it also deals with issues confronting more and more Indians caught in an identity crisis: What does it mean to be Indian? What is specific to the worldview developed by Indian culture? How has it dialogued with other cultures? Is it built on durable foundations, or is it little more than colourful religiosity and quaint but outdated customs? And what are the meaning and application of secularism and tolerance in the Indian context? The French-born author, who has been living in India for 33 years, argues that Indian culture is not some exotic relic of the past, but a dynamic force that still has a role to play in defining India's identity and cohesion, and in proposing solutions to today's global challenges. Written in a crisp and engaging style, this thought-provoking volume challenges received ideas on India's culture and invites us to think afresh. Can Indian civilization be compared to a thousand-branched tree? What have been its outstanding achievements and its impact on the world? These are some of the questions this book asks. But it also deals with issues confronting more and more Indians caught in an identity crisis: What does it mean to be Indian? What is specific to the worldview developed by Indian culture? How has it dialogued with other cultures? Is it built on durable foundations, or is it little more than colourful religiosity and quaint but outdated customs? And what are the meaning and application of secularism and tolerance in the Indian context? The French-born author, who has been living in India for 33 years, argues that Indian culture is not some exotic relic of the past, but a dynamic force that still has a role to play in defining India's identity and cohesion, and in proposing solutions to today's global challenges. Written in a crisp and engaging style, this thought-provoking volume challenges received ideas on India's culture and invites us to think afresh. -- Provided by publisher.

Some postcolonial theorists argue that the idea of a single system of belief known as "Hinduism" is a creation of nineteenth-century British imperialists. Andrew J. Nicholson introduces another perspective: although a unified Hindu identity is not as ancient as some Hindus claim, it has its roots in innovations within South Asian philosophy from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. During this time, thinkers treated the philosophies of Vedanta, Samkhya, and Yoga, along with the worshippers of Visnu, Siva, and Sakti, as belonging to a single system of belief and practice. Instead of seeing such groups as separate and contradictory, they re-envisioned them as separate rivers leading to the ocean of Brahman, the ultimate reality. Drawing on the writings of philosophers from late medieval and early modern traditions, including Vijnanabhiksu, Madhava, and Madhusudana Sarasvati, Nicholson shows how influential thinkers portrayed Vedanta philosophy as the ultimate unifier of diverse belief systems. This project paved the way for the work of later Hindu reformers, such as Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, and Gandhi, whose teachings promoted the notion that all world religions belong to a single spiritual unity. In his study, Nicholson also critiques the way in which Eurocentric concepts—like monism and dualism, idealism and realism, theism and atheism, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy—have come to dominate modern discourses on Indian philosophy.

The Nay Science offers a new perspective on the problem of scientific method in the human sciences. Taking German Indological scholarship on the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita as their example, Adluri and Bagchee develop a critique of the modern valorization of method over truth in the humanities. The authors show how, from its origins in eighteenth-century Neo-Protestantism onwards, the critical method was used as a way of making theological claims against rival philosophical and/or religious traditions. Via discussions of German Romanticism, the pantheism controversy, scientific positivism, and empiricism, they show how theological concerns dominated German scholarship on the Indian texts. Indology functions as a test case for wider concerns: the rise of historicism, the displacement of philosophical concerns from thinking, and the belief in the ability of a technical method to produce truth. Based on the historical evidence of the first part of the book, Adluri and Bagchee make a case in the second part for going beyond both the critical pretensions of modern academic scholarship and the objections of its post-structuralist or post-Orientalist critics. By contrasting German Indology with Plato's concern for virtue and Gandhi's focus on praxis, the authors argue for a conception of the humanities as a dialogue between the ancients and moderns and between eastern and western cultures.