Sense-Making and the De-Colonization of Vedic Texts
Peter Jackson

If there is anything colonial about the way in which Vedic texts have been approached by Western scholars during the last centuries, it is the assumption that a methodology of intelligible reading always must come from the outside (colonizing the texts as it were, introducing a new infrastructure), as if the Vedic poets were themselves unable to develop an efficient methodology of their own, on which contemporary philologist could rely in their own readings of Vedic texts. This is something which is being done more or less consciously in contemporary indological research (S. Jamison, G. Thompson), but the relationship between this new trend and the earliest indigenous Vedic hermeneutics still seems somewhat fuzzy. The methodology incites us to pay more initial attention to recurrent linguistic and stylistic peculiarities between texts than to their narrative contiguity. By means of this procedure, apparently unrelated passages may interact and shed light upon each other without any arbitrary interference on the scholar's part. The paper aims at discussing this procedure from the point of view of intellectual history as well as giving some new examples of its execution. The interrogation of textuality as it relates to Vedic texts has a direct bearing on how texts are decodes in postcolonial academic and pedagogical contexts.