Roland Lardinois, L’invention de l’Inde: Entre ésotérisme et science

L’Invention de l’Inde (‘The Invention of India’) provides a history of India studies in France in the 19th and 20th centuries, from the creation of modern scientific institutions in the decades following the French Revolution to the controversies raised by Louis Dumont’s magnum opus, Homo hierarchicus, first published in 1966. The author emphasises the life histories of the scholars who contributed to the field and their interactions with both academia and wider intellectual, literary and soc...