The research I'm currently conducting for my bachelor's thesis has probably been the place where I am confronted with my own situatedness, and that of Western philosophers in general, most acutely and most consistently.

My subject is the Dutch fin-de-siècle poet, classicist, philosopher and Sanskritist J.A. dèr Mouw, in particular the relation of his philosopy to the classical Indian thinkers he studied.

Though Dèr Mouw is long dead, and more or less all his philosophical books languish in obscurity, the excercise of reading him, his Indian sources and their respective commentators, has turned my attention to how the legacy of colonialism dit not end with the nineteent century, but still informs the Indological tradition I myself am part of as well.

In the language education itself this becomes apparent to anyone who ventures even briefly into the appendices of the classical Western grammars. For the past 2,5 years I have been studying Sanskrit in Leiden, at the university that has monopolised Oriental studies in the Netherlands since its inception. The reader I, as well as generations of students before and after me, read our first Sanskrit verse from was last amended in 1876. With the rest of our books this is much the same, none of the reference works and anthologies being written after the 1890's. Though testament to some solid philological scholarship, they lead one to encounter, between discussions on the gerund or metre in epic poetry, almost quantly imperialist observations like these;

For some reason Hotglue doesn't let me upload the scans I made from passages to amusingly illustrate how racist nineteenth-century Oriental scholars were. As of yet this zine remains incomplete. I hope to have amended this before anyone reviews me.

Why Sanskrit though? Scholarship in Sanskrit studies and related studies is vibrant and diverse, yet the didactics of the language are ossified in Victorian methods. Is it the consistently small number of students that kept change at bay, or is there something else?