Indological approach, advocated by G. S. Ghurye, focuses on the study of Indian society through Indian texts. How can Indological approach be useful in the study of other society? Comment in detail. (Answer in 350 words)

- Indological approach, advocated by G. S. Ghurye, focuses on the study of Indian society through Indian texts. How can Indological approach be useful in the study of other society? Comment in detail. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
Ghurye's method was to enter a society through the texts it had written about itself. The question is whether that method travels.
Body
1. What the approach does: Indology reads a society through its own classical texts and the categories they supply, treating the present as the working out of a long civilisational past. Ghurye's Caste and Race in India argues from Vedic and Dharmashastra material; his Indian Sadhus treats renunciation as an institution of that civilisation.
2. How it could be carried to other societies: Wherever a society holds a canon its members treat as authoritative, the same move is available. Islamic societies can be read through the Qur'an, the hadith and the schools of fiqh; China through the Confucian classics and the ritual codes built on them; Jewish communities through Talmudic law; medieval Europe through canon law. Weber's studies of ancient Judaism and of Chinese religion worked in essentially this way, moving from texts to the ethic they carried. The approach offers three things no survey can. It supplies the categories a society uses about itself instead of those imported to describe it. It reaches depth in time, where there is no one left to interview. And it recovers the normative order people invoke when they justify what they do.
3. Where it would fail there: Texts are written by literate minorities, usually male and priestly, so what is recovered is an elite's account of the order it wanted. Srinivas's objection to the book view — that Rampura did not behave as the Dharmashastra said it should — applies wherever scripture is taken for practice. Societies without a canon, which includes most oral and tribal societies, are simply out of reach. The method also assumes continuity, turning a society into an unchanging essence and hiding conquest, class and conflict, which is Desai's materialist objection to it. And as Said argued of Orientalism, reading the East through its scriptures was itself a colonial habit; repeating it elsewhere repeats the error.
4. A verdict on its usefulness elsewhere: Useful as one source among several, not as a method on its own. Paired with fieldwork, archives and survey data, it gives the normative order that behaviour can then be checked against, and for the deep past it is the only evidence there is. Used alone, it will describe a civilisation that nobody actually lives in.
Conclusion
Texts tell you what a society says it is, which is worth knowing precisely because it is not what the society does.