Monday, June 30, 2008
A salute to early British orientalists who opened up riches of Sanskrit
Setting foot on the moon, in 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong described his step as " one small step for (a) man, a giant leap for mankind."
A dozen men have walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972. Such flights were discontinued after 1972, as they served no scientific, strategic or economic purpose. The surface of earth's closest space neighbor was barren and had no treasures to yield.
How much more meaningful to the West has been in the long run its discovery of Sanskrit!
One of the first to study it, and notice its kinship to the classical languages of Europe was Sir William Jones, who famously remarked, at the third annual meeting of the Asiatic Society he founded in Calcutta in 1784, "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure,more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."
Jones was not alone in admiring the riches Sanskrit opened up before him.
The contempt for India and Indology -- best illustrated by the remark of Thomas Babington Macaulay -- ""a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia"-- had not yet become habitual with the British in India.
Indeed the reverse was true of Lord Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India.
Hastings encouraged the study of Sanskrit, he was the patron of Charles Wilkins, who made the first direct translation of a Sanskrit work into a European language -- the Bhagavad Gita.
The avowed motive of Hastings was that a knowledge of Indian literature was necessary for a handful of Britons to rule India, but he recognized that the classics of Indian literature would remain long after the Raj faded from memory.
He was clear-headed. He recognized that Britain's dominion was based on ‘the right of conquest,' and that it weighed on Indians as ‘chains.' But unlike Macaulay, he recognized the timeless worth of the treasures being revealed by the new scholarship.
"Every application of knowledge and especially such as is obtained in social communication with people, over whom we exercise dominion, founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state … It attracts and conciliates distant affections, it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection and it imprints on the hearts of our countrymen the sense of obligation and benevolence… Every instance which brings their real character will impress us with more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own…
"But such instances can only be gained in their writings; and these will survive when British domination in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance"
It is fashionable nowadays to question the motives of the early Indologists, but it will be rank ingratitude not to pay homage to the scholars of the class of 1780s, to Sir Wilson Jones, to Sir Charles Wilkins, or to the Serampore missionaries, who were never in the employ of the East India Company.
William Carey, John Clark Marshman, and William Ward, -- later known as the Serampore Trio, -- created a center of oriental learning at Serampore, just outside the East India Company's limits. Although not connected in any way with John Company's commercial and political activities, Carey was intimately connected with the training of its officials. Carey was appointed to the world's first Chair for Modern Indian Languages at the Fort William College . We will describe the wonderful work of the Serampore Trio and that of the next generation of orientalists in a subsequent article, but, for the moment, let us focus on the pioneers.
Wilkins was not only the first translator of the Gita into English, but was also the creator of the first Devanagari and Bengali type face.
To read the full article, click here...
To read the ePaper, visit: http://www.newsindia-times.com
A dozen men have walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972. Such flights were discontinued after 1972, as they served no scientific, strategic or economic purpose. The surface of earth's closest space neighbor was barren and had no treasures to yield.
How much more meaningful to the West has been in the long run its discovery of Sanskrit!
One of the first to study it, and notice its kinship to the classical languages of Europe was Sir William Jones, who famously remarked, at the third annual meeting of the Asiatic Society he founded in Calcutta in 1784, "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure,more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."
Jones was not alone in admiring the riches Sanskrit opened up before him.
The contempt for India and Indology -- best illustrated by the remark of Thomas Babington Macaulay -- ""a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia"-- had not yet become habitual with the British in India.
Indeed the reverse was true of Lord Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India.
Hastings encouraged the study of Sanskrit, he was the patron of Charles Wilkins, who made the first direct translation of a Sanskrit work into a European language -- the Bhagavad Gita.
The avowed motive of Hastings was that a knowledge of Indian literature was necessary for a handful of Britons to rule India, but he recognized that the classics of Indian literature would remain long after the Raj faded from memory.
He was clear-headed. He recognized that Britain's dominion was based on ‘the right of conquest,' and that it weighed on Indians as ‘chains.' But unlike Macaulay, he recognized the timeless worth of the treasures being revealed by the new scholarship.
"Every application of knowledge and especially such as is obtained in social communication with people, over whom we exercise dominion, founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state … It attracts and conciliates distant affections, it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection and it imprints on the hearts of our countrymen the sense of obligation and benevolence… Every instance which brings their real character will impress us with more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own…
"But such instances can only be gained in their writings; and these will survive when British domination in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance"
It is fashionable nowadays to question the motives of the early Indologists, but it will be rank ingratitude not to pay homage to the scholars of the class of 1780s, to Sir Wilson Jones, to Sir Charles Wilkins, or to the Serampore missionaries, who were never in the employ of the East India Company.
William Carey, John Clark Marshman, and William Ward, -- later known as the Serampore Trio, -- created a center of oriental learning at Serampore, just outside the East India Company's limits. Although not connected in any way with John Company's commercial and political activities, Carey was intimately connected with the training of its officials. Carey was appointed to the world's first Chair for Modern Indian Languages at the Fort William College . We will describe the wonderful work of the Serampore Trio and that of the next generation of orientalists in a subsequent article, but, for the moment, let us focus on the pioneers.
Wilkins was not only the first translator of the Gita into English, but was also the creator of the first Devanagari and Bengali type face.
To read the full article, click here...
To read the ePaper, visit: http://www.newsindia-times.com
Labels: Bhagavad Gita, British orientalists, Calcutta, Charles Wilkins, East India Company, Europe, European language, india, Indologists, Moon, Neil Armstrong, patron, Sanskrit
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