Is There an Indian Intellectual History? Introduction to ‘‘Theory and Method in Indian Intellectual History’’

playful and profound in a way unique to him, entitled ‘‘Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?’’ According to the possible emphases, this sentence could express at least four different questions (‘‘Is,’’ present/past; ‘‘an,’’ singular/plural; ‘‘Indian,’’ local/general; ‘‘thinking,’’ familiar/alien), to which Ramanujan supplies at least eight equally reasonable answers. In the end, he seems to have come down on the side that there is and indeed had long been a particular and in many ways specifically though not exclusively Indian way of doing what most rational beings would recognize as thinking (something he sought to characterize as context-sensitive rulemaking). In the same spirit of openness toward the multiplicity of possible answers to a complex question, the contributors to this special number of the Journal of Indian Philosophy hope to inaugurate a discussion about Indian intellectual history as a challenge in respect to problems both of method and of theory. Is there now, or has there ever been, an intellectual history of India? If yes, is it Indian in any particular way, shaped by and specific to the realities of India? What does intellectual here mean and how is intellectual history to be differentiated from other kinds of history—of philosophy, ideas, science, literature, culture, or whatever those forms of knowledge might be named in India? And what in fact is history, or better put, what is the pertinence of that category to a world that Europe, self-proclaimed homeland of history, constructed as its conceptual counterpositive in order to define itself? The very idea of intellectual history, as the contributors to this collection generally conceive of the practice, seems to be new to Indology (to be sure, one