Founding
The INDOLOGY LISTSERV forum was launched in November 1990 by Dominik Wujastyk. This was the first message:
Date: Fri, 23 Nov 90 09:47:58 +0000
From: Dominik Wujastyk <ucgadkwatUK.AC.UCL>
Subject: Welcome to the new INDOLOGY list.
This is -- I believe -- the first message of human origin to be posted
to the new INDOLOGY discussion list. (You will have received a
standard, introductory message, explaining some of the technical
workings of this system; it is very straightforward in normal use.)
So may I welcome you warmly to this new forum, and encourage you to
contribute your thoughts, queries, answers, observations, and
announcements relating to Indology.
A very useful theme might be for members to issue notices of texts that
they have in machine readable form. In order to make it easy to find
such notices amongst the other INDOLOGY messages, as they begin to
accumulate, may I suggest that we use a standard phrase such as
"Machine readable text: ..." in the "Subject:" field of such messages?
Best wishes,
Dominik
Since then, membership has grown to about 850 members (Spring 2023). Over the thirty+ years of its existence, members have exchanged approximately sixty thousand messages about the academic study of early India.
The forum has a website at http://indology.info (also redirected from http://indology.net) that supports the online forum with information and assistance with joining. The forum is managed by a volunteer management committee.
Early development
From its foundation in 1990, the forum was generously hosted at no cost by colleagues at the University of Liverpool, on their LISTSERV server. From about 1999 the forum was also supported by a website, first out of the personal account of Dominik at UCL (http://ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/indology.html).
Trouble at t’mill
For it’s first decade, 1990-2001, the forum was supported solely by Dominik Wujastyk. Membership was open to all. In April 2001, the forum was closed due to ongoing disputes between irreconcilable parties. It was reopened in July 2001 under a new management scheme involving a management committee, explicit guidelines and membership criteria and a membership application process that included submitting a short CV. Since those changes, the forum has been a relatively calm and pleasant place for scholarly communications.
The evolving website
During 2005-2009, the site was redesigned and updated thanks to some financial support from The British Association for South Asian Studies and with design and webmaster support from Richard Mahoney (2004-2010). Since then, Patrick Mc Allister & Vitus Angermeier (2010-present) have offered webmaster support on independent web server account at http://indology.info, where the content is still written by me.
A new mail server, and then another
After many years of deeply-appreciated support from Liverpool University’s computing department, and in particular Alan Thew and Chris Wooff, the forum migrated in February 2013 to a new server based on the Mailman software with the company EMWD.com in the USA. A minor dispute arose in early 2021 that led to the end of our association with EMWD. The forum migrated to a new Mailman host headquartered in Australia, https://www.mailmanlists.net/, where it is satisfactorily hosted to the present day (March 2023).
