Abstract
Indianists must stop defining themselves solely by reference to India, and think of themselves in terms of disciplines: Indianism is merely the application of the human sciences to a specific region of the world. To be a historian of ancient India, however, knowledge of Sanskrit remains fundamental : without it, there can be no intimate contact with the culture of this immense country, and no reading of documents in their original language. But Sanskrit is not the whole of India. India is a whole. The historian who publishes a study on the outcasts, the Christians of Goa or the Parsis is no less an Indianist than the one who devotes himself to the Brahmans and the rājas. Indian is any event that took place within the natural boundaries of the subcontinent, regardless of current national borders, all recent and contested, or the ethnic, social, cultural or religious milieu in which it occurred.
The electronic edition of the opening lecture includes the original text plus an afterword added by Gérard Fussman (2014).
