Some Points on Research

By Dr. Subhasis Chattopadhyay

One researches because one has found a problem to address in the first place. If one does not find a problem worthy of re-searching then there is no point in writing a dissertation. Research problems cannot concern themselves with whether Martin Heidegger was a greater philosopher than Edith Stein or whether Adi Shankaracharya was a more nuanced aesthete than Sri Avinavagupta. In the first case, Martin Heidegger was not interested in the Problem of Empathy as Stein was, and further Heidegger was more interested in the human person within the tradition of existential phenomenology. Stein, on the other hand, was concerned more with man’s relation with God in a way akin to the ethical positions of cloistered Catholic Christian mystics. What might constitute a research problem is to find out the exact location of the divergence of Stein from Heidegger’s thoughts. In the second case, Adi Shankaracharya was reacting to powerful Buddhist exegetes and, while he wrote beautiful verse, he focussed on proving that the world was real to the extent that Brahman qua God was real. Buddhist scholars had proven through their logic that the world was simply non-existent since the Madhyamaka (Madhyamika) way posited sunyata (‘voidness’) and dependent origination. Sri Avinavagupta, on the other hand, was a consummate aesthete who centuries before both  St. John of the Cross and Hildegard of Bingen created an entire system of aesthetic reception rooted in scala spirituality within the Kashmiri Trika system. So a more fruitful research problem may lead one to compare the conception of God by Adi Shankaracharya with that of either the conception of God by the Church Fathers or a study between Advaita Vedanta alongside the Madhyamika way. It is unlikely that much will now be gained by studying Adi Shankaracharya’s conception of poetic metres which he often derived and revised from the Vedas. The point here is that the research problem has to be clearly identified and then addressed. And, it is not easy to identify research problems. A few more examples will prove this point.

When one studies Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry one might get stuck at his use of sprung rhythm. The roots of Father Hopkins’ poetic metre has been studied extensively, for example by G. B. Sural in his published doctoral dissertation, but what might need further interrogation is Hopkins’ theology. It is not sufficient to state that one needs to study Father Hopkins’ theology. Are we speaking here of apophatic theology, or are we speaking here of a fallibilist theology or, are we speaking here of Meister Eckhart’s influence on Father Hopkins or about none of these theologies but of the theology of the Jesuit scholars who shaped Father Hopkins’ spiritual life? This last line of thought takes for granted that just since Father Hopkins was a Jesuit his intellectual formation was not say, Thomist in nature. Once one decides to read Hopkins as a theologian one has to search for the roots of his thoughts and that is another very difficult process. The more we go back in time, it becomes harder for us to find the exact sources that went into the formation of certain thought systems. Unless one has access to archival records or Hopkins’ letters, marginalia or class notes taken by him while he was at seminary, one cannot comment to what extent he was influenced by Patristics, Scholasticism or the spirituality of his fellow Jesuits. Without evidence, everything is conjecture, and conjectures do not lead to sound research. Now, this brings us to the need for accessing credible sources while conducting our research.

Just because an article is found online, even if it is on JSTOR, it does not establish the article’s or author’s credibility. Who is the author of this article; can the author be relied upon, to be honest in her understanding of the topic dealt with? This is crucial. There is no point in selecting Jane Doe as a reliable source of information just because Jane Doe is a prolific writer. If I have to know about the late Jesuit aspirant and later, transcreator of the Mahabharata, I for one will go by what the Sahitya Akademi winner Chinmoy Guha has written on the late P. Lal. Guha is a reliable source since his other credentials are impeccable. Not for nothing did he get Knighted twice by the French Government; not for nothing did his book on Tagore get worldwide acclaim, and he was taught by Lal himself when Guha was a student at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. His article is indexed by JSTOR but published by the Sahitya Akademi and Guha’s dissertation on Eliot shows a rigour about Eliot’s Christianity not found in other sources of Indian scholarship on Eliot. They secularise Eliot while Guha maintains that Eliot is not ahistorical or less than a committed Christian. So Guha’s essay on Lal can be accepted as genuine and worthy of academic reference since through other academic sources we are certain about Guha’s academic integrity. It is another matter altogether that Guha’s style in this article is strikingly beautiful, reminding us of Walter Pater’s soaring prose. This point about literary style is another key element in any research and also within the sources of that research. Obscurantism does not make for good research or good research sources. What cannot be expressed in simple language may not be worth communicating at all.  Very rarely one needs to use difficult language to understand difficult topics. In this context, one should mention a book on dramaturgy by Siddhartha Biswas which is clear in its presentation of this difficult and vast topic without using any bombast. These are the types of works that one ought to refer to, in her or his research. Within the context of Biblical studies, if one were to re-search the Johannine corpus, one is struck by the simplicity of Father Raymond Brown’s understanding of the non-synoptic Gospel of John. If one were to study the poetry of W. B. Yeats even now; we wonder how A.G. Stock could write on Yeats in such simple and yet elegant English? To research, for instance, the Upanishads, Swami Gambhirananda’s glossing of Adi Shankaracharya’s exegesis of the major Upanishads remains the gold standard in Indology. This now leads us to the editions of texts to be used to consult in a dissertation.

Should I use the Jerusalem Bible while referring to Biblical passages or, should I use the New International Version of the Bible while researching Christian theology? Well, if I am a Catholic writing for other Catholics, I would refer to the first edition of the Bible. Yet this is not sufficient reason to use the Jerusalem Bible. What are my standpoints on the Apocrypha? What I consider as canonical Biblical books will determine my choice. Similarly, when I write on the Bhagavad Gita, do I quote Swami Swarupananda’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, or should I quote from Georg Feuerstein’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita? Or, like James Strachey translating Freud, simply do not translate certain German words and stick to the original? These are difficult questions and need to be thought out at length by the researcher not based on subjective criteria but based on the methodology she wants to apply to a particular topic. Being an Indian still means to be an erstwhile colonial subject and a neo-colonial, non-cosmopolitan tech-coolie. Does it then suit us to quote Walter Brueggemann while writing on the Exodus event or should we quote the Indian Exodus scholar, George Edayadiyil? This filtering of sources has to be informed by the researcher’s methodology. If one thinks that what the white man says is more important than what my countryman says, then one can go ahead and quote Brueggemann. A more fruitful approach is to register the points of difference between Brueggemann and Edayadiyil and then give reasons why both are needed or only one of them is required to study the Exodus event. Finally, due to the limited scope of this blog post, we arrive at the issue of plagiarism.

I have written an entire post on plagiarism and I would draw the researcher’s attention to this heinous crime. And research that pretends to be sui generis is simply not research.

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Dr. Chattopadhyay’s doctoral dissertation studies the problems of evil and empathy, leading to a discussion on God through logical positivism or, the failure of logical positivism in this case, and through fallibilist Christian theology coupled with Patristics he studies the American Western and the American thriller with special references to Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King.

Dr Chattopadhyay started his teaching career at St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, then affiliated to the University of Calcutta. He was interviewed by The Statesman about his record scores during his BA in English. He went on to earn a First Masters in English from the University of Calcutta where later he researched on the relationship between theodicy and the works of Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King read synoptically. His reviews from 2010- to date in the Ramakrishna Mission’s mouthpiece, the century old Prabuddha Bharata have won him many accolades. He is not associated with the Ramakrishna Mission in any way and hence, there is no question of any conflict of interest. Most of his reviews have been showcased by Ivy League Presses. He earned his Biblical Studies and separately, Formative Spirituality qualifications through flawless research from the Pontifical Athenaeum, Bengaluru. His studies in Hinduism from the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies were done summa cum laude. He also earned further qualifications in the behavorial sciences. He now reviews books for this website and annotates the Bible here. His blogging career began with Instamedia run from Shimla. For three consecutive years, nearly every week he contributed to The Herald, published from Calcutta. The Herald is the mouthpiece of the Archdiocese of Calcutta. In 2017 he was one of the chief judges at an international literary festival held in the Himalayas. He is now writing his own books apart from teaching at the PG and UG department of English at a non-community college affiliated to the University of Calcutta. He is a recluse and a bibliophile.