Indology

Indology is the academic study of the languages, literatures, religions and history of the Indian subcontinent, drawing together Sanskrit and other South Asian philology with the archaeology and epigraphy of the region. Its founding institution is the Asiatic Society of Bengal, established in Calcutta in 1784 by Sir William Jones, a British judge and philologist whose systematic study of Sanskrit led him, two years later, to propose its historical kinship with Greek and Latin, an observation that reshaped the study of language generally and gave the new field of Indology its first working method, comparative philology applied to Sanskrit's enormous textual corpus.

The discipline covers the primary textual foundation for Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh traditions alike, the Vedas, epics, philosophical commentaries and dated inscriptions that let historians establish when a doctrine, practice or textual layer actually entered the tradition's record. Where a living tradition presents a teaching as eternally given, Indological philology and epigraphy frequently supply a datable textual history for the same teaching, and the atlas records both, the tradition's own account and the documented textual chronology, distinguishing one from the other.